SECTION OF DOME.
(From Raphael’s frescoes in the Loggia
of the Vatican. )
In one compartment, the vines cluster so close as to admit but small glimpses of the sky. On the lowest bar but one of the trellis, sits a fine fierce hawk, so absorbed in his own reflections that he does not notice a monkey reaching up from below to pull his tail feathers. A parrot on the bar above is less indifferent, and looks on with mischievous amusement. Little birds flit about in the higher branches, and a squirrel is making his way to one of the finest grape-clusters.
The number of creatures that Raphael carefully studied and depicted, is wonderful. Lizard, mouse and squirrel; tiny snake and bee and snail; goldfish swimming in glass vases half-wreathed with swaying water plants; love-birds cuddling together; long-tailed rats scampering along the scroll-work; pretty voracious ducks with bulging crops; a motherly hen hovering her chicks—all these and more, may still be seen, the work of one masterly hand. Really, the painted scenes appear alive; and I do not know who can look at them without loving the artist who so well understood the happy natural life of plant and bird and beast.
DUCKS.
(From Raphael’s frescoes
in the Loggia of the Vatican. )
As Paolo Uccello loved birds, so Gottfried Mind loved cats and became their special artist. He was born near the middle of the last century, in the town of Berne. There he lived, and there, in 1814, he died. Of poor and mean appearance, crabbed to all human kind, he was keenly alive to the ways and feelings, the tricks and graces of cat-kind. Bears, too, he liked, and for a while frequented the bear pit of Berne to study them. But cats were his first and abiding love, and to them he returned. Whatever their moods, whether sulky, grave or gay; in repose or in action, at every age—he reproduced them upon paper; and with such marvelous fidelity that he seems to have given Pussy a tenth and immortal life. His favorite cat used to sit for hours together upon his knee or shoulder, while he—if such were her pleasure—would remain motionless, so as not to disturb her rest.
