For her, as she wrote in her poem "When I Buy Pictures" (1921), art "must be 'lit with piercing glances into the life of things' [a phrase she excised from A.R. Gordon's
The Poets of the Old Testament, 1912]; it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it." For example, Glenway Wescott recently recalled, "she voyaged to Italy, and what did she notice in the Cathedral of Saint Pantaloon, one of the physician saints, in Ravillo? That all six of the lions guarding the pulpit were equally bowlegged but that each had a different face, and that their sexes were evenly matched, three and three." The pleasure of seeing the modest work of an anonymous sculptor with whom she felt an affinity is characteristic of Moore. The artist's comic particulars or imperfections, his respect for the individuality of the beasts even though they were conventional symbols, his democratic pairing of the sexes, and the sense of harmony within which the enlivened variations are delineated--all serve the function that art, in Moore's view, ideally served: the presentation of a moment of perception that renewed one's consciousness of the communal sacrament.
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