[Footnote 1: It is engraved in Gori's "Thesaurus," and described in
Münter's "Sinnbilder.">[
I may as well add that the Virgin, in this character of mysterious, and religious, and most pure maternity, is venerated under the title of La Madonna del Parto.[1]
[Footnote 1: Every one who has visited Naples will remember the church on the Mergellina, dedicated to the Madonna del Parto, where lies, beneath his pagan tomb, the poet Sannazzaro. Mr. Hallam, in a beautiful passage of his "History of the Literature of Europe," has pointed out the influence of the genius of Tasso on the whole school of Bolognese painters of that time. Not less striking was the influence of Sannazzaro and his famous poem on the Nativity (De Partû Virginis), on the contemporary productions of Italian art, and more particularly as regards the subject under consideration: I can trace it through all the schools of art, from Milan to Naples, during the latter half of the sixteenth century. Of Sannazzaro's poem, Mr. Hallam says, that "it would be difficult to find its equal for purity, elegance, and harmony of versification." It is not the less true, that even its greatest merits as a Latin poem exercised the most perverse influence on the religious art of that period. It was, indeed, only one of the many influences which may be said to have demoralized the artists of the sixteenth century, but it was one of the greatest.]
The Nativity of our Saviour, like the Annunciation, has been treated in two ways, as a mystery and as an event, and we must be careful to discriminate between them.
THE NATIVITY AS A MYSTERY.
In the first sense the artist has intended simply to express the advent of the Divinity on earth in the form of an Infant, and the motif is clearly taken from a text in the Office of the Virgin, Virgo quem genuit, adoravit. In the beautiful words of Jeremy Taylor, "She blessed him, she worshipped him, and she thanked him that he would be born of her;" as, indeed, many a young mother has done before and since, when she has hung in adoration over the cradle of her first-born child;—but here the child was to be a descended God; and nothing, as it seems to me, can be more graceful and more profoundly suggestive than the manner in which some of the early Italian artists have expressed this idea. When, in such pictures, the locality is marked by the poor stable, or the rough rocky cave, it becomes "a temple full of religion, full of glory, where angels are the ministers, the holy Virgin the worshipper, and Christ the Deity." Very few accessories are admitted, merely such as serve to denote that the subject is "a Nativity," properly so called, and not the "Madre Pia," as already described. The divine Infant lies in the centre of the picture, sometimes on a white napkin, sometimes with no other bed than the flowery turf; sometimes his head rests on a wheat-sheaf, always here interpreted as "the bread of life." He places his finger on his lip, which expresses the Verbum sum (or, Vere Verbum hoc est abbreviatum), "I am the word," or "I am the bread of life" (Ego sum panis ille vitæ. John vi. 48), and fixes his eyes on the heavens above, where the angels are singing the Gloria in excelsis. In one instance, I remember, an angel holds up the cross before him; in another, he grasps it in his hand; or it is a nail, or the crown of thorns, anticipative of his earthly destiny. The Virgin kneels on one side; St. Joseph, when introduced, kneels on the other; and frequently angels unite with them in the act of adoration, or sustain the new-born Child. In this poetical version of the subject, Lorenzo di Credi, Perugino, Francia, and Bellini, excelled all others[1]. Lorenzo, in particular, became quite renowned for the manner in which he treated it, and a number of beautiful compositions from his hand exist in the Florentine and other galleries.
[Footnote 1: There are also most charming examples in sculpture by Luca della Robbia, Donatello, and other masters of the Florentine school.]
There are instances in which attendant saints and votaries are introduced as beholding and adoring this great mystery. 1. For instance, in a picture by Cima, Tobit and the angel are introduced on one side, and St. Helena and St. Catherine on the other. 2. In a picture by Francia (Bologna Gal.), the Infant, reclining upon a white napkin, is adored by the kneeling Virgin, by St. Augustine, and by two angels also kneeling. The votary, Antonio Galeazzo Bentivoglio, for whom the picture was painted, kneels in the habit of a pilgrim.[1] He had lately returned from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, thus poetically expressed in the scene of the Nativity, and the picture was dedicated as an act of thanksgiving as well as of faith. St. Joseph and St. Francis stand on one side; on the other is a shepherd crowned with laurel. Francia, according to tradition, painted his own portrait as St. Francis; and his friend the poet, Girolamo Casio de' Medici, as the shepherd. 3. In a large and famous Nativity by Giulio Romano (Louvre, 293), which once belonged to our Charles I., St. John the Evangelist, and St. Longinus (who pierced our Saviour's side with his lance), are standing on each side as two witnesses to the divinity of Christ;—here strangely enough placed on a par: but we are reminded that Longinus had lately been inaugurated as patron of Mantua, (v. Sacred and Legendary Art.)
[Footnote 1: "An excellent likeness," says Vasari. It is engraved as such in Litta's Memorials of the Bentivogli. Girolamo Casio received the laurel crown from the hand of Clement VII. in 1523. A beautiful votive Madonna, dedicated by Girolamo Casio and his son Giacomo, and painted by Beltraffio, is in the Louvre.]
In a triptych by Hans Hemling (Berlin Gal.) we have in the centre the Child, adored, as usual, by the Virgin mother and attending angels, the votary also kneeling: in the compartment on the right, we find the manifestation of the Redeemer to the west exhibited in the prophecy of the sibyl to Augustus; on the left, the manifestation of the Redeemer to the east is expressed by the journey of the Magi, and the miraculous star—"we have seen his star in the east."