Such is the meaning of this beautiful little picture, as spiritual in idea as any of the paintings of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But while the earlier painters had striven with inadequate powers to express the religious feeling that was in them, Botticelli's skill matched his thought. His drawing of the angels in their Greek dresses is very lovely, and one scarce knows in any picture a group 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 strangest forms of rock and mountain. His investigations into several of the scientific problems connected with art led to results which affected in an important degree the work of many later artists.