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Here, too, we find a statue, as large as life, representing Christ leaning on a pillar, executed by MICHAEL ANGELO STODTZ. I notice this statue merely to observe, that the original, from which it is taken, is to be seen at Rome, in the Chiesa della Minerva where it is held in such extraordinary veneration, that the great toe-nail of the right foot having been entirely worn away by the repeated kisses of the faithful, one of silver had been substituted.
In 1501, when Michelangelo was twenty-six and had just returned to Florence from Rome with a great reputation as a sculptor, the joint authorities of the cathedral and the Arte della Lana offered him a huge block of marble that had been in their possession for thirty-five years, having been worked upon clumsily by a sculptor named Baccellino and then set aside.
The balcony, the garden, belonging to her rooms, all were searched, but in vain; and the agonized father threw himself upon the chair Della had so often occupied, with all the terrible truth rushing across his heart. He buried his pallid face in his hands, and wept; aye, wept hot, burning tears, from those steady eyes that had never wept for another's woe, and rarely for his own.
The poem probably explains, however, what has always seemed a little difficult to comprehend, the extreme personal bitterness with which Gifford, at the close of his career, regarded Hunt, since the slayer of the Della Cruscans was not the man to tolerate being treated as though he were a Della Cruscan himself.
He was a follower of Caravaggio. He visited Italy and found favour in Rome, where he got from his night-pieces Correggio's name, 'Della Notte. Honthorst was summoned to England by Charles I., for whom he painted several pictures. He entered the service of Prince Frederick Henry of Orange, and painted also for the King of Denmark.
The infant Christ could make no use of gold or frankincense or myrrh, nor could Della and Jim make use of the combs and the chain; but the love that prompted the giving shines all the more resplendent because the gifts, humanly speaking, were egregious misfits.
Few girls, in Della's position, would have talked with a slave as she talked to Minny would ever have thought of placing matters in so strong a light before her; but Della was guileless and innocent at heart, with a child-spirit in some things, yet more than woman's strength in others.
The Madonna della Scala clasping her baby with a caress which the little child returns, S. Catherine leaning in a rapture of ecstatic love to wed the infant Christ, S. Sebastian in the bloom of almost boyish beauty, are the so-called sacred subjects to which the painter was adequate, and which he has treated with the voluptuous tenderness we find in his pictures of Leda and Danae and Io.
To persons, however, who are ready to think with me that we may be trained to art in fields and on hillsides, the essential Tuscan character of Pier della Francesca is brought home quite as strongly by the particular satisfaction with which we recognise his pictures in some unlikely place, say a Northern gallery.
This Lucrezia della Fede was the wife of a hatter who lived in Via San Gallo. Her husband dying after a short illness, Andrea del Sarto married her, and whatever were her faults, she retained his life-long love. Biadi and Reumont give the date 26th of December, 1512, as that of the death of her husband, but Signor Milanesi, from more authentic sources, proves it to have been in 1516.
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