Then there is such a terrible lack of variety in their subjects. The
churchmen, their great patrons, suggested most of their themes, and
a dead mythology the rest. A quarter part, probably, of any large
collection of pictures consists of Virgins and infant Christs, repeated
over and over again in pretty much an identical spirit, and generally
with no more mixture of the Divine than just enough to spoil them as
representations of maternity and childhood, with which everybody's heart
might have something to do. Half of the other pictures are Magdalens,
Flights into Egypt, Crucifixions, Depositions from the Cross, Pietas,
Noli-me-tangeres, or the Sacrifice of Abraham, or martyrdoms of saints,
originally painted as altar-pieces, or for the shrines of chapels, and
woefully lacking the accompaniments which the artist haft in view.
The remainder of the gallery comprises mythological subjects, such as
nude Venuses, Ledas, Graces, and, in short, a general apotheosis of
nudity, once fresh and rosy perhaps, but yellow and dingy in our day,
and retaining only a traditionary charm. These impure pictures are from
the same illustrious and impious hands that adventured to call before
us the august forms of Apostles and Saints, the Blessed Mother of the
Redeemer, and her Son, at his death, and in his glory, and even the
awfulness of Him, to whom the martyrs, dead a thousand years ago, have
not yet dared to raise their eyes. They seem to take up one task or the
other w the disrobed woman whom they call Venus, or the type of highest
and tenderest womanhood in the mother of their Saviour with equal
readiness, but to achieve the former with far more satisfactory success.
If an artist sometimes produced a picture of the Virgin, possessing
warmth enough to excite devotional feelings, it was probably the object
of his earthly love to whom he thus paid the stupendous and fearful
homage of setting up her portrait to be worshipped, not figuratively as
a mortal, but by religious souls in their earnest aspirations towards
Divinity. And who can trust the religious sentiment of Raphael, or
receive any of his Virgins as heaven-descended likenesses, after seeing,
for example, the Fornarina of the Barberini Palace, and feeling how
sensual the artist must have been to paint such a brazen trollop of his
own accord, and lovingly? Would the Blessed Mary reveal herself to his
spiritual vision, and favor him with sittings alternately with that type
of glowing earthliness, the Fornarina?
But no sooner have we given expression to this irreverent criticism,
than a throng of spiritual faces look reproachfully upon us. We see
cherubs by Raphael, whose baby innocence could only have been nursed
in paradise; angels by Raphael as innocent as they, but whose serene
intelligence embraces both earthly and celestial things; madonnas by
Raphael, on whose lips he has impressed a holy and delicate reserve,
implying sanctity on earth, and into whose soft eyes he has thrown a
light which he never could have imagined except by raising his own
eyes with a pure aspiration heavenward. We remember, too, that divinest
countenance in the Transfiguration, and withdraw all that we have said.