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It was art which was the special attraction to Coley of all the many spells of old Rome. He spent much time in the galleries, and studied 'modern painters' with an earnestness that makes Ruskinism pervade his letters. At Florence, Coley wrote as usual at much length of the galleries, where the Madonna del Cardellino seems to have been what delighted him most.
Some examples of this second style of his painting are the Madonna del Cardellino, or Madonna of the Goldfinch, which you will remember in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, and La Belle Jardinière in the Louvre, Paris. But I have brought photographs of these pictures so that you may see the striking difference between them and those previously painted."
Even in his early work he showed his gifts as a composer, and some of the small pictures of his Florentine period are quite perfect in design. Nothing could be better composed within their restricted field than the "Madonna del Cardellino" or the "Belle Jardinière." Nearly at the end of the period he made his greatest failure, the "Entombment" of the Borghese Gallery.
In sculpture I should choose rather the "Knife-sharpener," and among the pictures Raphael's "Madonna del Cardellino," No. 1129. But this is not to suggest that everything is not a masterpiece, for it is.
His pupil Raphael, that most beloved name, is represented here in the Uffizi only by the Madonna del Cardellino ; for the other works attributed to him in the Tribuna are not his. The picture is in his early manner, and was painted about 1548.
I do not say that the Madonna di S. Sisto, the Madonna del Cardellino, and such others, have not had considerable religious influence on certain minds, but I say that on the mass of the people of Europe they have had none whatever, while by far the greater number of the most celebrated statues and pictures are never regarded with any other feelings than those of admiration of human beauty, or reverence for human skill.
And so we come to the two Correggios so accomplished and rich and untouching all delightful virtuosity without feeling. The favourite is, of course, No. 1134, for its adorable Baby, whose natural charm atones for its theatrical Mother. On the other side of the door is No. 1129, the perfect "Madonna del Cardellino" of Raphael, so called from the goldfinch that the little boys are caressing.
I never had such enjoyment. His birthday presents were spent on a copy of the beloved Madonna del Cardellino, of which he says: 'though it does not reach anything like the intensity of feeling of the original, is still a very excellent painting, and will always help to excite in my imagination, and I hope to convey to you, some faint image of the exceeding beauty of this most beautiful of all paintings.
Two others show a close affinity with this composition; one is the Madonna del Cardellino, in the Tribune of the Uffizi, in which S. John presents a goldfinch to the infant Christ. The other is the so-called Belle Jardinière, inscribed 1507, in the Louvre. It is interesting to observe Raphael's progress in the smaller pictures which he painted in Florence half-figures of the Madonna and Child.
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