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Updated: May 11, 2025
In treating the latter, his Christ-child is always in keeping with the mother, a grave little fellow who gives the blessing with almost touching dignity. Enthroned Madonnas illustrating the theme are those of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg, of the Belvedere at Vienna, and the famous Bentivoglio Madonna in S. Jacopo Maggiore at Bologna.
He was hurrying us along the narrow paths now, past the little company of grave-stones, graves that were bearing their barbaric burdens of mortuary wreaths, of beaded crosses, and the motley assemblage, common to all French graveyards, of hideous shrines encasing tin saints and madonnas in plaster.
We shall pass out of sight of long perspectives of square houses lost in fine rain and grey mist. We shall enter an enchanted land, a land of angels and aureoles; of crimson and gold, and purple raiment; of beautiful youths crowned with flowers; of fabulous blue landscape and delicate architecture. Know ye the land? Botticelli is king there, king of clasped hands and almond-eyed Madonnas.
The Madonna of the Diadem, in the Louvre, belongs to this class of pictures. Like the pastoral Madonnas of the Florentine period, it includes the figure of the little St. John, to whom, in this instance, the proud mother is showing her babe, daintily lifting the veil which covers his face.
This is supposed by the commentators of Vasari to be the altarpiece painted for Giovanni di Paolo Merciajo, but Biadi traces it through the possession of Antonio, son of Zanobi Bracci, to its present possessors. The mistake arises from Vasari often confusing the names Annunciations and Assumptions with Madonnas. A Holy Family, for Andrea Santini, which awakened great admiration in Florence.
The figure of Death in these strange religious works of Art, for they were as purely religious in their origin as the Holy Families and Madonnas of the same and a subsequent period, this figure of Death is not always a skeleton.
Then there are the people, dark, bushy-bearded men, riding about like brigands, wrapped in green-lined cloaks upon their shaggy pack-mules; or loitering about, great, brawny, low-headed youngsters, like the parti-colored bravos in Signorelli's frescoes; the beautiful boys, like so many young Raphaels, with eyes like the eyes of bullocks, and the huge women, Madonnas or St.
But their religious pictures are almost all intolerable, and their Madonnas are almost all portraits. Rubens and Albano painted their wives; Allori and Vandyck their mistresses; Domenichino his daughter.
"Please note in your little books this artist's Madonnas in San Zaccaria and Church of the Frari, and go to see them to-morrow morning if you can; they are his masterpieces. I will not talk any more now. If you wish to stay here longer, it will be well to go back and look at the very earliest pictures again, or others that you will find by Carpaccio and the Bellini brothers."
We should have had another cry of "No Popery!" and Acts of Parliament prohibiting the importation of saints and Madonnas. P. xxi. And what should we have gained by it, but more ignorance of the excuses for Popery, and, therefore, of its real dangers? If Protestantism be the truth, knowledge of whatsoever kind can only further it. We have found it so in the case of classical literature.
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