surpassing that of the three little ones upon the roof of the manger,
nor will you soon see a lovelier Virgin's face than hers. Botticelli
had great power of showing the expression in a face, and the movement
in a figure. Here the movements may seem overstrained, a fault which
grew upon him in his old age; the angel, with the two shepherds on
the right, has come skimming over the ground and points emphatically
at the Babe, and the angel in front embraces Savonarola with vehemence.
The artists of the early Renaissance had learnt with so much trouble
to draw figures in motion that their pleasure in their newly acquired
skill sometimes made them err by exaggeration as their predecessors
by stiffness.

The way in which Botticelli treated this subject of the Nativity of
Christ, is, as you see, very different from the way in which Hubert
van Eyck painted the Three Maries at the Sepulchre. We saw how the
latter pictured the event as actually taking place outside Jerusalem.
To Botticelli the Nativity of Christ was emblematic of a new and happier
life for people in Florence, with the Church regenerated and purified,
as Christ would have wished it to be. To him the Nativity was a symbol
of purity, so he painted the picture as a commentary on the event,
not as an illustration of the Biblical text.

The angels rejoice in heaven as the shepherds upon earth, the devils
flee away discomfited, and Savonarola and his companions obtain peace
after the tribulations of life. Such was the message of Botticelli
in the picture here reproduced.




CHAPTER VI

RAPHAEL


The original of our next picture is very small, only seven inches square,
yet I hope it will instantly appeal to you. The name of the artist,
Raphael, is perhaps the most familiar of all the names of the Old
Masters, mainly, it may be, because he was the painter of the Sistine
Madonna, the best known and best loved of Madonnas.

When Raphael drew and painted this picture of the 'Knight's Dream,'
about the year 1500, he was himself like a young knight, at the outset
of his short and brilliant career. As a boy he was handsome, gifted,
charming. His nature is said to have been as lovely as his gifts were
great, and he passed his short life in a triumphant progress from city
to city and court to court, always working hard and always painting
so beautifully that he won the admiration of artists, princes, and
popes. His father, Giovanni Santi, was a painter living in the town
of Urbino, in Central Italy, but Raphael when quite young went to
Perugia to study with the painter Perugino, a native of that town.

Perugia stands upon a high hill, like the hill in the background of
the picture of the 'Knight's Dream,' only higher, for from it you can
overlook the wide Umbrian plain as far as Assisi--the home of St.
Francis--which lies on the slope of the next mountain. That beautiful
Umbrian landscape, in which all the towns look like castles perched
upon the top of steep hills, with wide undulating ground between,
occurs frequently in the pictures of Perugino, and often in those of
his pupil Raphael. If you have once seen the view from Perugia for
yourself, you will realize how strongly it took hold of the imagination
of the young painter. Raphael had a most impressionable mind. It was
part of his genius that, from every painter with whom he came in contact
he imbibed the best, almost without knowing it. The artists of his
day, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the other great men, were
each severally employed in working out once and for all some particular
problem in connection with their art. Michelangelo, a giant in
intellect, painter, sculptor, architect, and poet, studied the human
body as it had not been studied since the days of ancient Greece. His
sculptured figures on the tombs of the Medici in Florence rank second
only to those of the greatest Greek sculptors, and his ceiling in the
Sistine Chapel is composed of a series of masterpieces of
figure-painting. He devoted himself largely in his sculpture and his
painting to the representation of the naked human body, and made it
futile in his successors to plead ignorance as an excuse for bad drawing.
As a colourist he was not pre-eminent, and his few panel pictures are
for the most part unfinished.

Leonardo da Vinci, the older contemporary of Raphael, first in Florence
and afterwards in the north of Italy, left a colossal reputation and
but few pictures, for in his search after perfection he became
dissatisfied with what he had done and is said to have destroyed one
masterpiece after another. For him the great interest in the aspect
of man and woman was not so much the form of the body as the expression
of the face. What was fantastic and weird fascinated him. At Windsor
are designs he made for the construction of an imaginary beast with
gigantic claws. He once owned a lizard, and made wings for it with
quicksilver inside them, so that they quivered when the lizard crawled.
He put a dragon's mask over its head, and the result was ghastly. The
tale gives us a side light on this extraordinary personage. When you
are led to read more about him you will feel the fascination of his
strong, yet perplexing personality. The faces in his pictures are
wonderful faces, with a fugitive mocking smile and a seeming burden
of strange thought. By mastery of the most subtle gradations of light,
his heads have an appearance of solidity new in painting, till Raphael
and some of his contemporaries learnt the secret from Leonardo.
Heretofore, Italian painters had been contented to bathe their
pictures in a flood of diffused light, but he experimented also with
effects of strong light and shade on the face. His landscape
backgrounds are an almost unearthly cold grey, and include the