HOLY FAMILY. BONIFAZIO (ITALIAN: BORN 1494; DIED 1563).
MOTHER AND CHILD. N. BARABINO, A LIVING ITALIAN PAINTER.
With Van Dyck, a little later, the Child is a young patrician; the quality of the painter's imagination, influenced by his frequentation of the princes of the earth, making him conceive the young Christ as a magnificent man-child, fit to be called later to the high places of the world, a serene and noble leader.
Somewhat differently did the Italians of the great epoch of painting, Raphael, Titian, Veronese, even Bellini, who was earlier, conceive their subject. While both Mother and Child with them were merely what painters call a "bit" of painting, directly founded on close study of a living woman and child, there was always present a religious feeling, different, but almost as intense as that of the primitive Italian painters. Throughout the many Madonnas on which the fame of Raphael is founded we feel that, through a certain variety of type, the research was always the same—a desire to realize the maid-mother, and to presage, in the lineaments of the child, his future character. This sentiment, everywhere present, is approached reverently, and the too short-lived painter in his work at least utters a constant prayer. With Bellini, with Titian, and with Veronese the effort is not dissimilar, though something of the sumptuosity of Venetian life has crept in, and it is to a queen of earth as much as of heaven, and to a prince of the church temporal, that their service is rendered.
In the Spanish pictures, particularly those of earlier date than any Spanish picture reproduced here, we feel the strong impress of the Church. In the picture by Alonso Cano there looks out from the eyes of the Mother the sentiment of the cloistered nun; and though, with the Murillos, we catch a glimpse of Spain outside of the Church, even with him there is a sense of subjection from which the memories of the Inquisition are not altogether absent.
