PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
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THE MADONNA DEL GRAN DUCA — RAPHAEL 
 
THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 a Stub^ of Untcrprctation 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY VAN DYKE 
 
 Could every time-worn heart but see Thee once again 
 A happy human child among the homes of men 
 The age of doid't would pass — the vision of Thy face 
 JVoiild silently restore the childhood of the race 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 NEW YORK 
 HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
 1894 
 
Copyright, 1893, by Harper & Brothers. 
 
 Ai! rights reserved. 
 
TO 
 
 ELLEN 
 
 ON WHOSE FACE I HAVE SEEN 
 
 THE BEAUTIFUL LIGHT OF MOTHERHOOD 
 
 SHINING ABOVE THE INNOCENCE AND TRUST 
 
 OF CHILDHOOD IN HER ARMS 
 
 fi iSeTifcate ti)fs aSook 
 
 GRATEFULLY 
 
u 
 
PREFACE 
 
 If it were possible for the writer of this book to talk for a little 
 while with those who are about to read it, he would not wan- 
 der from his opportunity by trying to excuse its shortcomings. 
 His chief desire and endeavour would be simply to express the 
 spirit of what is written here in such a way that it might ap- 
 pear from the beginning in a true light, and with its own per- 
 sonal character. In effect, he would try to create an understand- 
 ing between the book and its readers, feeling quite sure that 
 they would give it fair judgment, provided only they did not 
 take it at the outset for something else than what it is meant 
 to be. 
 
 It is likely that he would wish to say something a little differ- 
 ent to each one of them. For the fault of a written Preface is 
 that it remains always the same. It has no faculty of accommo- 
 dation. To accomplish its design perfectly it should have the 
 power of change, in order to adapt itself to the delicate work of 
 opening a real communication between one mind and another. 
 The ideal book would have a separate introduction to every 
 reader. But, after all, there would probably be a good deal of the 
 same substance, though uttered with a different accent and em- 
 phasis, in each of the addresses. Certain things would always 
 need to be said as briefly and as clearly as possible. And if the 
 opportunity could come to the present writer, or — since that is 
 hardly possible in a world where we must do all our work under 
 strict limitations — if he might have the good-fortune to find gen- 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 tie readers who would be willing to take a Preface neither as an 
 advertisement nor as an apology, but simply as an elucidating 
 word, a key-note, he would desire to say, at least, something 
 like this: 
 
 The story of the birth and childhood of Jesus the Christ, told 
 with such wonderful simplicity and purity in the gospels of St. 
 Matthew and St. Luke, has made a most profound impression 
 upon the heart of the world. It has exercised a silent, potent 
 influence not only upon human thought, but also and still more 
 deeply upon human feeling and action. It has created new ideals 
 of taste and of conduct; new forms of grace and beauty; yes, 
 we may even say that it has created a new kind of love and a 
 distinct type of loveliness. For certainly, since Jesus was born 
 in Bethlehem, the world has learned a new reverence and ten- 
 derness for childhood, and in expressing these it has discov- 
 ered in the innocence and simplicity of the Child another em- 
 bodiment of the Eternal Beauty which dwells at the heart of all 
 things good and true. This was indeed a discovery of incalcu- 
 lable value, to human art as well as to human life. It has given 
 a new theme to poet and painter — a theme of which ancient art 
 and literature knew comparatively little, and showed but few and 
 faint traces. Childhood has only begun to "come to its own," 
 in the works of art as well as in the deeds of charity, since men 
 have heard and believed the story of the Christ-child. 
 
 The studies out of which this book has grown have been a 
 source of strength and joy to me for nearly twenty years. They 
 have followed, in very different ways but always with the same 
 spirit, the influence of the story of Christ's nativity and infancy 
 as it has been told and retold, again and again, among men. 
 They have led me, in the time of work, back to the original 
 archives of Christianity to consider and interpret by fresh contact 
 the inexhaustible significance of the brief, inspired record, and on 
 through the history of the Church to trace from century to cen- 
 tury the unfolding of truth in her teaching and love in her life, 
 both proceeding from Him who was laid in the manger at Beth- 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 lehem. They have led me, in the seasons of rest and recreation, 
 into some of the fairest countries and most beautiful cities on 
 earth, to see. face to face, the finest creations of Christian art, 
 imd try to understand the conditions under which they were 
 produced, and the meaning which they express. But 1 have not 
 intended to put anything more than a very small part of these 
 studies into this book — onlv the results, not the processes ; and 
 the results only in so far as they belong to interpretation rather 
 than to criticism. 
 
 Pray do not expect to find here an institute of theology or a 
 treatise on painting, a history of doctrine or a theory of art. 1 
 ■have not ventured to attempt these things. There is something 
 jess ambitious which I would far rather do. I would like to 
 trace in outline a single chapter from the chronicles of the heart 
 ■of man; to express, first, in the language of to-day and words 
 of common life, the meaning of the gospel narrative of the in- 
 fancy of Jesus; to touch next, but lightly, upon some of the le- 
 gends which have gathered about it, that we may feel how much 
 less they are worth than the primitive record; to follow, then, 
 some of the lines of beauty in which art has interpreted the truth 
 •of the story; and at last to leave the impression, which is true, 
 that the chapter is still unfinished, because neither human faith 
 nor human art has yet exhausted, or ever will exhaust, the sig- 
 nificance of the story of the Christ-child for the joy and growth 
 and uplifting of mankind. 
 
 But there are two points on which you are entitled to look for 
 a more personal utterance, here at the outset, if you are to take 
 the trouble of reading what follows in a spirit of comprehension. 
 It makes a good deal of difference, so far as understanding is 
 concerned, that you should know from what stand-point, in re- 
 gard to art and religion, the book is written. 
 
 First, then, in regard to art: I frankly confess myself an ad- 
 herent of no exclusive school ; a devotee of no particular the- 
 ory; an admirer of good work wherever and however it may be 
 done. The old masters are admirable, else they would not have 
 survived. The modern painters are admirable; they seem to us 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 to have learned some things hitherto unknown ; and if we are 
 right about this, some of them also will become old masters in 
 the course of time. Among all the manifold works of art we 
 should be looking always with clear eyes to recognize the things 
 that are well done. And by " well done " I mean, first, that they 
 must be evidently worth doing; and, second, that the artist's 
 keen sense of their worth must express itself by a thorough 
 mastery of the medium in which he has chosen to depict them, 
 by patient labour concentrated on its proper object, and resulting 
 in a luminous and significant interpretation of that object to 
 our perception. From this it follows that the things which 
 are well done in art will always have two qualities in greater or 
 less degree: they will be true to nature and really related to fact; 
 they will also be characteristic and expressive of the artist's per- 
 sonality. In other words they will have life-likeness, by virtue of 
 their correspondence to the outer world which the artist sees ; 
 and they will have life, by virtue of their relation to the inward 
 personal power with which he sees it. Two artists, equally 
 great, will never interpret the same subject in precisely the same 
 way. In the work of each there will be something individual 
 and distinguished. For the stream of art, as Sainte-Beuve says 
 of the stream of thought, "differs from a river in not being com- 
 posed of a number of similar drops. There is a distinction in 
 the quality of many of the drops." And precisely this distinction 
 is the chief element that gives value to a work of art. The 
 idealists have done well when they have succeeded in making 
 their pictures real. The realists also have done well when they 
 have had ideas. But, after all, there are as many different kinds 
 and qualities of idealism as of realism. Let us not suppose that 
 because Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, are beauti- 
 ful, there is no water to refresh us in the river Jordan. 
 
 And yet this confession of my stand-point in regard to art would 
 not be complete without the acknowledgment that I reckon the 
 sentiment and feeling of a picture to be always more precious 
 than its technical workmanship. 1 would willingly have walked 
 through a picture-gallery with Coleridge, of whom it is told that 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 he would sometimes say, after looking at a painting, "There's no 
 use in stopping at this, for I see the painter had no idea. It is mere 
 mechanical drawing. Come on ; here the artist meant something 
 for the mind." Coleridge might have made a mistake in any 
 particular case, for the idea of a picture does not always stand out 
 upon the surface. But in general, it seems to me, his principle 
 was sound and deep. For with the greatest possible respect and 
 admiration for technical skill of every kind, I yet hold, with the 
 latest and one of the best of the critics who have written of 
 "Art for Art's Sake," that without the emotion, feeling, thought, 
 or idea, "one may produce art admirable by virtue of novelty, 
 colour, form, skill of hand — the verve of the artist ; with it one 
 may produce a higher art, speak a nobler language, serve a 
 loftier purpose." 
 
 In regard to my religious stand-point a word will suffice. 1 see 
 very clearly that all who have approached the story of the Christ- 
 child with sincerity and humility, whatever their formal creeds, 
 have felt its beauty and its power. The shepherds in their rus- 
 tic ignorance, the star-led Magi emerging from the misty super- 
 stitions of the hoary East, the prophet Simeon devoutly waiting 
 for the consolation of Israel — for all of these there was light and 
 blessing in the presence of the Holy Babe. But at the same time 
 1 see still more clearly that the brightest light and the richest 
 blessing, the best treasures of art and the most abundant works 
 of love, have come where the birth of Jesus has been interpreted 
 in the faith of the Christian Church as the personal entrance of 
 God into the life of man. Therefore I hold that this interpreta- 
 tion is true, and 1 accept it with all my heart. 
 
 A year ago I stood in the chapel of the Hospital of the Inno- 
 cents, at Florence. There, in the dim light, hung Ghirlandajo's 
 fine painting of the Adoration of the Magi. The kings of Orient, 
 with their splendid cortege, knelt before the young child Jesus. 
 In the foreground were two lovely figures of children, clad in 
 diaphanous and fleecy robes of white, kneeling with folded 
 hands and happy faces. As I looked at them more closely I saw 
 by the little drops of crimson, like necklaces of rubies around 
 
X PREFACE 
 
 their necks, that the old painter had meant them to represent 
 two of the martyred innocents of Bethlehem, and that he had put 
 them into his picture in order that they might silently utter the 
 thought of his heart concerning the comfort and help and salva- 
 tion which were brought to the helpless and suffering children 
 of earth by the inflint Saviour. Then, while this sweet thought 
 was moving within my mind, 1 left the chapel and passed through 
 the wide court-yard, blazing in the heat of the summer sun. 
 There 1 saw the painter's prophecy fulfilled in the flesh ; for there 
 was a little outcast child of the city being carried in tenderly to 
 the cool chambers of the hospital to receive the best care and 
 nursing that the healing art of to-day can give. And it seemed 
 to me that the hospital interpreted the picture, and the picture 
 interpreted the hospital. Then I remembered how that great 
 building, with its admirable proportions designed by Brunellesco, 
 its facade adorned with the exquisite reliefs of Andrea della Rob- 
 bia, and its chapel enshrining one of Ghirlandajo's noblest paint- 
 ings, had risen in all its loveliness from the Christian f^iith and 
 compassion of the silk merchants of Florence, who built it four 
 hundred years ago to be a refuge for deserted and defenceless lit- 
 tle ones in the name and for the sake of Jesus Christ the Lord. 
 The artist's vision of beauty had found its right place in the home 
 of charity, because both were created by the same impulse of de- 
 votion to the Divine Christ-child. Surely both expressions of that 
 impulse were true, and their union makes a perfect harmony ; and 
 surely it will be a good day for the world when that harmony is 
 renewed. Modern art, splendidly equipped and full of skill, 
 waits for an inspiration to use its powers nobly. Modern bene- 
 ficence, practical and energetic, lacks too often the ideal touch, 
 the sense of beauty. Both these priceless gifts, and who can tell 
 how many more, may be received again when the heart of our 
 doubting age, still cherishing a deep love of fliith and a strong 
 belief in love, comes back to kneel at the manger-cradle where a 
 little Babe reveals the philanthropy of God. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE ANNUNCIATION , . . . . i 
 
 THE NATIVITY 45 
 
 THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI = iii 
 
 THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT 147 
 
 THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS 187 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 THE ANNUNCIATION 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE MADONNA DEL GRAN' DUCA RAPHAEL Frontispiece 
 
 THE ANNUNCIATION FRA FILIPPO LIPPI 3 
 
 THE ANNUNCIATION — LORENZO GHIBERTI , . 5 
 
 THE ANNUNCIATION — DONATELLO g 
 
 MOSAIC OF THE ANNUNCIATION — FIFTH CENTURY I4 
 
 THE ALLEGORY OF THE UNICORN 1 7 
 
 THE ANNUNCIATION FRA ANGELICO ig 
 
 THE ANNUNCIATION SANDRO BOTTICELLI 25 
 
 THE ANNUNCIATION— FRANCESCO FRANCIA 2g 
 
 THE ANGELIC GREETING ROGER VAN DER WEYDEN T^T^ 
 
 THE ANNUNCIATION ANDREA DEL SARTO 37 
 
 ECCE ANCILLA DOMINI DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI ..... 41 
 
 THE NATIVITY 
 
 IL PRESEPIO — GIOTTO . 4g 
 
 THE VIRGIN IN A WOOD FILIPPO LIPPI • • 55 
 
 THE NATIVITY ANDREA DELLA ROBBIA 5g 
 
 THE NATIVITY ROGER VAN DER WEYDEN 65 
 
 THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS DOMENICO GHIRLANDAJO 69 
 
 FROM SARCOPHAGUS OF FOURTH CENTURY 72 
 
xiv ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE MOTHER ADORING HER CHILD 75 
 
 THE NATIVITY — BERNARDINO LUINI 8 1 
 
 LA NOTTE— CORREGGIO 85 
 
 THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS — MURILLO ..... 9 I 
 
 THE HOLY NIGHT FRITZ VON UHDE 97 
 
 MADONNA IN VLADIMIR CATHEDRAL, KIEFF — V. M. VASNETZOFF IO3 
 
 THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 
 
 MOSAIC FROM THE CHURCH OF S. APOLLINARE NUOVO, RAVENNA ' II3 
 
 THE WISE MEN AND THE STAR ROGER VAN DER WEYDEN . II5 
 
 FRESCO FROM THE CATACOMBS I20 
 
 SHRINE OF THE THREE KINGS, IN THE COLOGNE CATHEDRAL . 123 
 
 ONE OF THE MAGI — BENOZZO GOZZOLI 127 
 
 THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI — RUBENS 131 
 
 THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI — BOUGUEREAU ...... 135 
 
 THE ARRIVAL OF THE MAGI AT BETHLEHEM JOHN LA FAROE 139 
 
 tFirst half of the painting in the Church of the Incarnation, New York) 
 
 THE ARRIVAL OF THE MAGI AT BETHLEHEM — JOHN LA FAROE 1 43 
 
 (Second half of the painting in the Church of the Incarnation, New York) 
 
 THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT 
 
 THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT — GIOTTO 151 
 
 FRESCO NOTRE-DAME d'aBONDANCE — THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT I 55 
 
 THE REPOSE IN EGYPT ALBRECHT ALTDORFER 1 57 
 
 THE REPOSE — LUCAS CRANACH 161 
 
 THE HOME IN EGYPT— ALBRECHT DURER 1 65 
 
 THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT — MURILLO 1 69 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS xv 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT PIERRE LAGARDE 173 
 
 IN THE SHADOW OF ISIS — LUC OLIVIER MERSON 1 77 
 
 THE TRIUMPH OF THE INNOCENTS W. HOLMAN HUNT . . . l8l 
 
 THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS 
 
 THE ORLEANS MADONNA RAPHAEL igi 
 
 THE CHILD JESUS IN THE FIELDS ALFRED BRAMTOT . . . 197 
 
 LA BELLE JARDINIERE — RAPHAEL 20I 
 
 THE VIRGIN AND CHILD WITH ST. JOHN — BOTTICELLI . . . 205 
 
 THE HOLY FAMILY PINTURICCHIO 209 
 
 THE HOLY FAMILY — FRANZ DEFREGGER 213 
 
 THE CHILD JESUS TAUGHT BY HIS MOTHER — LUC OLIVIER MERSON 219 
 
 THE HOLY FAMILY — MURILLO 223 
 
 CHRIST AMONG THE DOCTORS — DUCCIO 229 
 
 THE BOY JESUS IN THE TEMPLE — HOFMANN ....... 233 
 
THE ANNUNCIATION 
 
 There is a vision in the heart of each 
 
 Of justice, mercjy, wisdom, tenderness 
 
 To wrong and pain, and knowledge of their cure ; 
 
 y4nd these embodied in a woman's form 
 
 That best transmits them pure as first received 
 
 From God above her to mankind below. 
 
 Robert Browning. 
 
^nti in tlft Btjrtf) montl^ t\)t ansrl (Gabriel toas sent from 
 (3o'ii unto a dtp of Saltier, namrli ItJa^arrtl), 
 
 Co a ijtrcfin rspouocti to a man tubocr name toas 3^o= 
 6cp5, of tf)r JjouBf of 2)aDiti ; ani tf)c Jjtrcrin'e namr toas 
 iJlarp. 
 
 Snli t{)r antfrl came in unto ^rr, anl eaili, |)ail, tI)ou tbat 
 art l)ig:l)lp fauourrti, t()c lor5 is totti) t{)fr: tlrscrii art tl)0tt 
 among: tuomrn. 
 
 3nti tDl)fn c|)r sato I)im, 6!)r teas troublrti at fjia cap- 
 ing:, anti ract in l&cr mini tul)at manner of salutation tj)is 
 6l)oultJ ijr. 
 
 3[nti tl)c ang:rl saiti unto ))tv, ifrar not, JHarp : for t|)ou 
 {)ast founU fauour miti) (0oli. 
 
 9[nB, br|)olti, tI)ou ebalt roncciDc in tl)p toomb, antJ bring: 
 fortf) a son, aut) sbalt rail J)ts namr JESUS. 
 
 |)r sf)all br g:rrat, anti cball br rallrli tl)r §on of tj)r 
 |)ig:I)rst; ani t^r ilorJ (3oti st)all g:iijr unto l)im t|)r t^ronr 
 of bis fatl)rr DaUiU : 
 
 SinlJ !)r sl)all rrig:n otirr tl)r Ijousr of ^facob for rljrr; anlJ 
 of I)i6 feing:tiom tbrrr sball br no ml. 
 
 CI)rn saili ;Plarp unto t\)c ang:rl, |)oto sljall tl)is br, src- 
 ing: 3f fenotu not a man ? 
 
 9[n5 tl)r ang:rl ansturrrli anil saiii unto ^rr, STfjr |)olp 
 0l)OBt B^all comr upon tbrr, an5 tl^r pottirr of t{)r |)ig:()r6t 
 gl)all otirrsbaiiom tf)rr: tbrrrforr also tf)at l^olp tbing: mbirl^ 
 sball br born of tbrr sball br rallrli tf)r ^on of (Bo'Q, 
 
 Snii, brboli, tbp rousin ^lisabrtl), sbr I)<it() also conrriiirtJ 
 a son in I)cr olti ag:r ; anU tl)is is tj)r st^tl) monti) mitb l)fr, 
 tuI)o toas rallrii barrrn. 
 
 jFor tuitb (Boi nothing: sball br impossiblr. 
 
 9[nlJ ilflarp sail), ■Srftolti tl)r I)an5maili of tl)r lorti ; br it 
 unto mr acrorliing' to tl)v morti. Stni t|)r ang:rl Irparteti 
 from ^cv, — St. Luke, i. 26-38. 
 
THE ANNUNCIATION — FRA FILIPPO LIPPI 
 From a Painting in the National Gallery, London 
 
 I 
 
 f^^^L^^ HE Annunciation is the prelude of the birth 
 y^fii ~^K ^^ Christ. It is the slender song in a maid- 
 ^^[^^) en's heart which gives the keynote and the 
 motive for all the splendid symphonies, celestial and 
 terrestrial, which have been woven about the name of 
 Jesus. To us who listen across the centuries it seems 
 as if this earlier prophetic melody in the cottage at 
 Nazareth rose immediately into the chorus of angels 
 which the shepherds heard upon the hills of Bethle- 
 hem. The interval of long and weary months disap- 
 pears in our thought. The Annunciation becomes the 
 beginning of the Nativity. We hear in Gabriel's mes- 
 sage and Mary's answer simply the first words of "the 
 glad tidings of the Holy Child Jesus." 
 
4 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 Surely it is not unnatural that there should be such 
 a prelude to such an event. Nothing in nature arrives 
 unheralded. The dawn foretells the day-spring. The 
 bud prophesies the flower. This is the way of God in 
 His world. And it would be strange indeed — stranger 
 than any miracle — if there should be no announce- 
 ment of the birth of that well - beloved Son, in whose 
 perfect life the fulness of the Godhood is to be revealed 
 in manhood. 
 
 But after what fashion should this annunciation be 
 made ? With signs and wonders in heaven and earth ? 
 With blasts of celestial trumpets and mighty voices 
 echoing over land and sea.'' It might have been so 
 in a myth or a fable, but not in the history of a real 
 religion. Turn back to the record of the event which 
 is given by the evangelist Luke, and see the beautiful 
 difference between a true and a false revelation. Read 
 again the strangely simple and moving words in which 
 the story is told. How quiet and serene is the nar- 
 rative of what befell the lonely maiden of Nazareth. 
 How little there is to strike the eye and how much 
 to touch the heart. How direct and delicate is the 
 phrase. Nowhere else could this story have been 
 preserved, save in the memory of the virgin who was 
 so pure and gentle that angels might gladly do her 
 reverence. And it seems most natural to suppose that 
 St. Luke, in his early discipleship, heard the narrative 
 from Mary's own lips, and wrote down in her own 
 words this sacred poem of the Annunciation. 
 
 But what is its inward meaning ? What significance 
 has it for the soul of man ? 
 
Tilt: ANNUxriA riox — lorenzo ghibi:rti 
 
 From the Baptistery Gates, Florence 
 
THE ANNUNCIATION 7 
 
 It seems to me that it is the embodiment and ex- 
 pression of a twofold mystery. It expresses, first of 
 all, the mystery of a divine revelation, a flash of that 
 secret spiritual light which is ever breaking through 
 from the realm of the invisible into the realm of the 
 visible. But it expresses also, and no less truly, the 
 mystery of a human faith, that secret spiritual capac- 
 ity for receiving enlightenment, which waits and longs 
 for the divine illumination, and is quickened by it into 
 a heavenly fruitfulness. This quiet and obscure event 
 at Nazareth is the point at which the divine light in 
 perfect clearness meets the human faith in perfect re- 
 ceptiveness, and they mingle in a new life. 
 
 All through the history of Israel the prophecy of 
 the coming Christ had been gleaming with a vague 
 and diffused radiance, like sunlight playing from be- 
 hind the clouds on distant waters. Now it is gathered 
 into a single ray, slender, distinct, and vivid with per- 
 sonality. For many centuries Hebrew motherhood had 
 been ennobled and glorified by the great expectancy 
 of the Messiah who should redeem His people. Now 
 the Divine Hope descends dove-like into a virgin's 
 breast and is conceived, and thus begins a human life, 
 borne tenderly and secretly beneath the heart of her 
 who, among all the maidens of Israel, has found favour 
 with God. 
 
 How else shall the story be told than in the words 
 of the Sacred Scripture ? Could any other form come 
 closer to the reality, or image it more clearly ,? I have 
 been reading the disquisitions and explanations of the 
 early theologians, but they seem dry and tedious ; they 
 
8 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 add nothing to knowledge, and they take much from 
 reverence. Curious inquiries into the mystery of phys- 
 ical birth, they are worthless as science, and worse 
 than worthless as reliQ:ion, I have been readino; also 
 the pagan myths of the birth of demi-gods — of Per- 
 seus, whom Danae bore, and of Castor and Pollux, the 
 sons of Leda ; but they seem gross and sensual ; the 
 heaviness of falsehood clings to them and weighs them 
 down. I have been reading also the tales of Messiah's 
 coming which are told in the Talmud, and which rep- 
 resent the expectations of the great mass of the Jewish 
 people in the time of Christ ; but they are full of 
 caprice and fantasy, incoherent and grandiose ; they 
 abound in strange portents ; they are noisy with the 
 wars of Gog and Magog ; they predict the arrival of a 
 monarch whose chief glory is to be the rebuilding of Je- 
 rusalem with gold and jewels and costly woods, and the 
 bringing of all other nations to pay tribute to the Jews. 
 
 When one turns from all this literature of fancy 
 debased by avarice and perturbed by sensuality, of 
 curiosity pushed beyond the mark, and of realism 
 which becomes untrue because it tries so hard to be 
 exact — when one turns back from all this to St. Luke's 
 narrative of the Annunciation, it is like passing from 
 the glare and turmoil of a masquerade in an artificial 
 park, into the soft fresh air of a real garden, where the 
 dews are falling and the fragrance of unseen flowers 
 comes throuoh the tvvilioht. 
 
 How little is defined and yet how much is clear in 
 this atmosphere of inspired verity ! Gabriel, " the 
 strength of God," is the name given to the angelic 
 
THE ANNUNCIATION — DONATELLO 
 From a bass-relief in stone in the Church of S. Croce, Florence 
 
THE ANNUNCIATION II 
 
 messenger. Mary, " the handmaid of the Lord," is the 
 favoured one of the chosen race — chosen to this spe- 
 cial honour, doubtless, for no other reason than be- 
 cause it had cherished the purity and dignity of wom- 
 anhood more perfectly than any other race of the 
 ancient world. We are not to think of the Hebrew 
 woman of that age as ignorant and degraded. There 
 is nothing at all unnatural or incredible in finding 
 such a character as Mary, so chaste, so meek, so 
 noble, in a quiet home of Nazareth. She is aston- 
 ished at the gracious and joyful salutation that comes 
 to her ; and that also is not unnatural, for it is a greet- 
 ing hitherto unknown. There is a moment of won- 
 der and surprise ; a tremour of maiden fear ; a bending 
 of simple faith to receive the heavenly thought ; an 
 overshadowing Spirit of power ; a new conception of 
 God in humanity. The miracle has come unseen. A 
 woman, blessed among all her sisters, believes that her 
 child is to be the Son of the Highest, and will call 
 His name Jesus, because He shall be the Saviour. 
 
 That is the essence of the Annunciation. But what 
 of the accidents — what of the details of form and time 
 and place ? All these are veiled. We do not know 
 what was the nature and appearance of the angel ; nor 
 whether Mary was waking when the message came, or 
 sleeping and dreaming, as Joseph was when he re- 
 ceived his warning. We are not told whether she was 
 reading or spinning in her room, or praying in the 
 Temple, or resting on the house-top, after the manner 
 of the Orient. The hour is not set at morning or 
 noon or evening or midnight. The story leaves these 
 
12 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 things, as so much in the Gospel is left, to that rever- 
 ent Ima2:ination which is " the true sister of Faith." 
 And what I desire to do here is to touch briefly upon 
 some of the forms in which that Imagination has ex- 
 pressed itself in art, and interpret them, if I can, in the 
 spirit of the truth which they embody. 
 
 II 
 
 We must recall, at the beginning, some of the le- 
 gends of the Annunciation which are found in the 
 apocryphal gospels and in the poems and romances 
 of the Middle Ages. These are, indeed, the first and 
 most childish efforts of art, and the imagery which 
 the poets and story-tellers use in their narratives is 
 often repeated by the painters and sculptors in their 
 works. 
 
 The unknown writer whose fragment of the his- 
 tory of JMary is preserved for us by St. Jerome adds 
 only a single touch to the story of the Annunciation, 
 but it is a very graphic one. He says that the angel, 
 coming in, " filled the room where Mary was with a 
 great light." The author of the book called the Prote- 
 vangelmm of St. James gives a much fuller narrative. 
 He tells us that Mary had been chosen by lot from 
 among seven maidens of Nazareth to spin the royal 
 purple for a new curtain in the Temple. One day, as 
 she was returning with her pitcher of water from the 
 fountain, she heard a voice saying, " Hail, thou who art 
 
THE ANNUNCIATION 13 
 
 full of grace !" She looked to the right and to the left 
 to see whence the voice came, and then, trembling, 
 went into her house, and, putting aside the pitcher, 
 took up the purple, and sat down to spin it. And be- 
 hold, the angel of the Lord stood by her, and said, 
 "Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favour in the 
 sight of God." 
 
 In the mediaeval poems of Germany, Mary is de- 
 scribed as crossing the court-yard to wash her hands 
 at the fountain when the angel first appeared, and 
 as sitting among her companions, who were working 
 discontentedly at the coarser linen of the Temple veil, 
 when he came again to complete his message. These 
 details are often repeated in the early works of art. 
 If it is the first appearance of the angel that the artist 
 has chosen to depict, he shows us the fountain and the 
 pitcher, or the walls and pillars of the court through 
 which Mary is passing. If he has chosen the second 
 appearance, the scene is laid within-doors, and we are 
 reminded by some naive and obvious token of the 
 work in which Mary was engaged. There is an abun- 
 dance of such representation of the Annunciation 
 among the ancient mosaics and carvings in ivory and 
 wood and stone. Rohault de Fleury, in his splendid 
 volumes, has described a number of them. 
 
 The mosaic from the Church of Santa Maria Mag- 
 giore, in Rome, is interesting chiefly because it shows 
 the early date at which some of these legendary par- 
 ticulars became the common properties of art. It was 
 made in the fifth century ; and here are the skeins of 
 purple on Mary's lap, and the distaff on her arm. For 
 
14 
 
 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 the rest, the mosaic has little value as an interpretation 
 of the story. It misses the very essence of it by repre- 
 senting Mary as a proud empress on a throne, and call- 
 ing in three angels with Gabriel to witness the scene. 
 The most significant and the most enduring imag- 
 inative detail in the art of the Annunciation was intro- 
 duced by St. Bernard. He says that the Virgin was 
 reading in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, and when 
 
 MOSAIC OF THE ANNUNCIATION — FIFTH CENTURY 
 
 In S. Maria Maggiore, Rome 
 
 By permission of the J. G. Gotta'sche Buchhandlung, NacMolger 
 
 she came to the verse, " Behold, a virgin shall conceive 
 and bear a son," and was thinking in her heart 
 how gladly she would be a handmaid to serve one 
 so blessed, the angel drew near and said : " Hail, 
 Mary! Blessed art thou among women." The thought 
 is so beautiful, it is no wonder that art adopted it. 
 The Book, lying open on Mary's knee, or on a desk 
 
THE ANNUNCIATION 
 
 15 
 
 before her, or clasped against her bosom, appears in 
 the most and the best of the Annunciation pictures. 
 
 Other emblems, with a meaning more or less mys- 
 tical, were associated with the story, and came gradu- 
 ally into use among the artists, with slight variations 
 depending upon personal choice and training. The 
 lilies, which seem to us the most natural symbols of 
 virgin purity, became common in the twelfth century. 
 They are growing in a pot beside the maid Mary, or 
 carried in the angel's hand. Sometimes he bears in 
 their stead a branch of olive, the emblem of peace, or 
 a royal sceptre surmounted with a cross or a globe. 
 When we see the palings of a garden in the back- 
 ground of a picture, the artist is reminding us of the 
 verse in the Song of Solomon which says, "A garden 
 enclosed is my sister, my spouse." The fiawless mir- 
 ror is an illusion to the phrase in the Book of Wis- 
 dom, " spccuhuu sine macula^ The bush which burns 
 but is not consumed is taken from the vision of Moses. 
 The dove is the universal symbol of the Holy Spirit. 
 I have seen pictures of the Annunciation into which 
 the artist has introduced a basket of fruit and a pitcher 
 of water, to signify Mary's frugality ; or a cat, to de- 
 note, perhaps, her domesticity. Sometimes a painter 
 (following a custom which has come down from the 
 times in which every event in the Old Testament was 
 interpreted as a type of something in the New) will put 
 a little scene from the Old Testament in the distance, 
 representing Eve, because she is the mother of human- 
 ity; or Bathsheba, because the Davidic line descends 
 through her that was Uriah's wife. But the strangest 
 
l6 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 and most mystical of all the Annunciation emblems is 
 the unicorn. I have taken an illustration of it from 
 an old German painting in Weimar. The explanation 
 is found in an allegory which occurs first in the works 
 of an unknown writer of the eleventh century, called 
 Physiologus, and became, somewhat later, one of the 
 favourite themes of mediaeval poetry. It runs, briefly, 
 in this wise : 
 
 " The unicorn is an animal of such wondrous wis- 
 dom and strength that no hunter can take him, and 
 of such gracious quality that his horn wounds only to 
 heal. This represents the Saviour. He is pursued 
 by a heavenly huntsman, who is God the Father, and 
 four hounds, which are named Truth, Peace, Mercy, 
 and Justice. Coming to a pure virgin, he takes refuge 
 in her bosom, lays aside all his wildness, and is capt- 
 ured at last." 
 
 It was a strange and confused theolosfv which could 
 evolve such a legend out of its inner' consciousness ; 
 but, such as it was, the Middle Ages delighted in 
 it ; and here you see it all drawn out and carefully 
 labelled, according to the old German poem, which 
 says: 
 
 " Der einhurn hiit gevangen ist, 
 
 in miigden schos mit grossem list ; 
 
 der ist gewesen, ihesus crist, 
 
 die maget du, maria bist." 
 
THE ANNUNCIATION 
 
 17 
 
 III 
 
 Out of this unreal and allegorical region of the 
 early legends we may turn with gladness to the freer 
 and fairer realm of pure art, and see how the real 
 thought of the Annunciation has been clothed with 
 forms of beauty. 
 
 It is not one of those subjects which test the force 
 of an artist's genius or the fertility of his invention. 
 It does not demand mighty strength in the expression 
 of emotions, or a broad range of comprehensive in- 
 telli2:ence in the 
 study of contrast- 
 ed characters, or 
 even a profound 
 knowledge of his- 
 tory and archeol- 
 ogy. It appeals 
 rather to a certain 
 delicacy of senti- 
 ment, a fine feel- 
 ing for the beauty 
 which exists in the 
 simplest things, a 
 power to appreci- 
 ate truths which 
 
 evade definition, and to suggest those inward expe- 
 riences of the soul which are so profound and yet so 
 evanescent that they can hardly be expressed in words. 
 
 Perhaps it is due to this quality of the subject that 
 
 THE ALLEGORY OF THE UNICORN 
 By permission of Messrs. Wiegandt and Grieben, Berlin 
 
i8 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 there are no world-famous pictures of the Annunci- 
 ation. The greatest artists seem to have passed it by; 
 or if they touched it they did not put their highest 
 powers into the painting, and it remains comparatively 
 unnoticed among their more celebrated works. Thus 
 it comes to pass that one who is studying the pictures 
 of the Annunciation will often find the most charming 
 ones in out-of-the-way places. There is one, I remem- 
 ber, in the little city of Arezzo, over an outer door- 
 way in the neglected church of S. Annunziata. The 
 sacristan brought a long ladder and climbed up to open 
 the crumbling wooden shutters which only half pro- 
 tected it from the weather. It was a fresco by Spi- 
 nello Aretino ; the angel, in his white robe sown with 
 stars and his diadem crowned with the tongue of fire, 
 was kneeling, with his palm-branch, before the fair and 
 humble virgin, and from the Father's out-spread arms 
 above, the heavenly babe came floating down on a ray 
 of light, borne up by two roseate cherubs. An ineffa- 
 ble air of peace breathed from the picture, and it was 
 most lovely even in its decay. Another, of equal 
 though very different charrri, I found in the Pinacoteca 
 Vannucci, at Perugia. It was the top of a triptych by 
 Fiero degli Franceschi ; the virgin walked beneath a 
 marble colonnade beside a secluded garden ; the angel 
 who met her had no need of lilies or palm -branch to 
 attest his origin, for his aspect was so noble that, as 
 Vasari says of him, " he was fit to come from heaven." 
 In many unvisited churches and obscure galleries I 
 found pictures of the Annunciation which pleased me 
 with the charm of sincerity and sweetness and purity ; 
 
THE ANNUNCIATION — FRA ANGELICO 
 Frctni a painting in the Baptistery, Cortona 
 
THE ANNUNCIATION 21 
 
 and the best of all was in the convent of La Verna, 
 high above the sources of the Arno, where the loveliest 
 works of Andrea della Robbia are hidden away in 
 mountain solitude. 
 
 But the illustrations for this study I have preferred 
 to take from more accessible places and from artists 
 whose names are more familiar. They are not, indeed, 
 men of the very highest rank. But they are men of 
 distinctive quality in the second rank. They have the 
 individuality of genius, the power of giving a peculiar 
 and personal pleasure in their work which we cannot 
 fail to recognize as theirs and theirs alone. I think we 
 should not forget or underrate the place which these 
 secondary artists have in the ministry of every art. 
 Dante and Shakespeare and Goethe are great names ; 
 but the sonnets of Petrarch and the lyrics of Shelley 
 and the songs of Heine are perfect of their kind. And 
 so I think that each of these nine artists, whose con- 
 ceptions of the Annunciation we are to study here, 
 has his own value, and has added something to the 
 interpretation of this sweet and simple theme. 
 
 Look, first of all, at the relief by Lorenzo Ghiberti. 
 It is a panel in one of the northern doors of the Bap- 
 tistery in Florence. They were made before the fa- 
 mous " Gates of Paradise " on the eastern side, and are 
 far less rich and elaborate than those unrivalled por- 
 tals. But what they lack in finish, in picturesqueness, 
 in abundance of detail and wealth of imagination, they 
 gain in simplicity, in directness, and in nobility. These 
 northern doors, in fact, were made before Ghiberti be- 
 gan to be "a painter in bronze," and the twenty-one 
 
22 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 years of labour that he spent upon them were confined 
 to efforts which belong properly and strictly within the 
 limits of sculpture in relief. This representation of 
 the Annunciation is one of the simplest and noblest 
 of the panels. The distinct and unmistakable note in 
 it is the swiftness of a joyful surprise. The angel 
 sweeps forward with a buoyant motion, his garment 
 lifted by the wind of his flight. The holy dove flies 
 like an arrow towards the Virgin's breast. Her slen- 
 der figure shrinks and sways with wonder as she lifts 
 her hand, half to ward, and half to welcome, the mes- 
 sage. Timidity and joy blend in her aspect. The 
 event is isolated from all surroundings. It might be 
 anywhere. It is womanhood visited by God. 
 
 Turn from this to Donatello's sculpture in the 
 Church of S. Croce, and see how the difference of 
 individual character comes out in the work of two men 
 dealing with the same subject, in the same age, and 
 under the same influences. Donatello's" relief is cut in 
 a fine gray sandstone which is called pietra serena, and 
 stands in a beautiful tabernacle against the southern 
 wall of the church. The ornamentation of the back- 
 ground, the hair of the Virgin and the angels, and 
 the borders of their robes are gilded. This gives a 
 strange impression of life -likeness to the figures which 
 I know not how to explain. Moreover, the artist has 
 breathed the very spirit of the Renaissance into his 
 work — that subtle expressiveness which seems to catch 
 the shadow of a thought as it passes over the face, 
 and to suggest the intensity of a feeling in a turn of 
 the neck, in the bending of an arm. Donatello's con- 
 
THE ANNUNCIATION 23 
 
 ception of the theme has gone on beyond Ghiberti's. 
 It is not so much the dramatic surprise of the an- 
 gel's visit that impresses him ; it is rather the won- 
 derful nature of the interview between Mary and the 
 angel that he wishes to depict. To each figure he 
 would give the true, the characteristic emotion, yet 
 without fixing it in hard outline, so that it would 
 seem exaggerated and theatrical, but in delicate, sink- 
 ing lines which appear to be caught almost as they are 
 vanishing. He has thought of the angel's admiration 
 for her to whom he brings such a message. It is ex- 
 pressed in the very curve of Gabriel's body, in the 
 upward glance of his face, in the arms held back as 
 if he did not dare to touch her whom he so reveres 
 and loves. And Mary's face and attitude, with all the 
 beauty of antique sculpture, are tinged also with a 
 sentiment of responsiveness, of gentle courtesy, a spirit 
 lowly and grateful, yet not afraid, which belongs only 
 to the Christian ideal. She has risen from the seat 
 where she was reading, and turns to hear the angel's 
 message. There are none of the usual mystical sym- 
 bols of the Annunciation, not even the dove. Nothing 
 distracts our attention from the conversation between 
 Gabriel and Mary. It is a lyric with two parts in it, 
 in which the one answers to the other perfectly, and 
 the rhythm would be lost if either were omitted. 
 
 Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, surnamed Angelico, found 
 in the Annunciation a favourite theme, suited to the 
 unsullied purity of his spirit ; and he has painted it 
 many times with perfect delicacy and ideal truth. One 
 of the best of these paintings is in the Baptistery at 
 
24 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 Cortona. Turning from the bare grass -grown piazza 
 of the cathedral, with its splendid view over the Val 
 di Chiama, into the dingy little building, you see this 
 exquisite panel hanging above a tawdry altar on the 
 right hand wall. The Virgin is seated beneath a porch 
 of white marble. Her dress is simple in its form ; but 
 the clear, bright colours of the red gown, and the blue 
 robe with its green lining set off the fairness of her 
 face, her hair of red gold, and her hazel eyes. A book 
 lies open on her knees to show that she has been read- 
 ing. There is a gold ring on the third finger of her 
 left hand to show that she is espoused. She bends 
 forward, with hands folded across her breast, to greet 
 the angel — an image of meekness, of quiet happiness, 
 of maidenly purity. Gabriel is clothed in a garment 
 of heliotrope lavishly adorned with gold, and embroid- 
 ered with many colored jewels. His hair is like the 
 hue of ripe wheat when the sun shines through it, 
 and his long golden wings are tipped with red, and 
 covered with many eyes. A tongue of fire plays above 
 his forehead. He runs swiftly beneath the porch, shin- 
 ing with delight so great that little rays of splendour 
 dazzle from his whole body. He bears no wand, nor 
 branch of lilies. It seems as if he had come in too 
 great haste to stay for them. There is a childlike 
 eagerness in his face, and in the gesture of his hands, 
 the right pointing to Mary, and the left directed up- 
 ward. Behind him lies a slope of greensward sprinkled 
 with flowers, and at the top of it we see, as in a vision, 
 the fiery-sworded angel driving Adam and Eve from 
 the lost Paradise. How different is Gabriel's mission 
 
THE ANNUiN'CIATION — SANDRO BOTTICELLI 
 From a painting in the Uffizi, Florence 
 
THE ANNUNCIATION 27 
 
 now — to announce a Paradise regained ! This is the 
 thought that Fra Angelico has felt and expressed in his 
 picture — the thought of a great and innocent happi- 
 ness. The Annunciation was a message so joyful that 
 the most resplendent of all the archangels might well 
 be glad and make haste eagerly to carry it to the lowly 
 maid of Nazareth. 
 
 The naivete of this picture is altogether charming. 
 But when we turn from it to look at the small tab- 
 leau by Fra Filippo Lippi, which hangs in the Nation- 
 al Gallery at London, we feel that the childlike spirit 
 of the Angelican school has lost something of its first 
 freshness and naturalness. It has now a touch of con- 
 scious artifice. Fra Filippo was the painter of sacred 
 genre; and he has translated the story of the Annun- 
 ciation into language so light and easy that it seems 
 almost playful. There is an irresponsible air about 
 this young angel, in his white dress, with collar and 
 wristband, and breastplate of dark blue, who has step- 
 ped aside from the garden path to kneel on the grass, 
 with the branch of lilies over his shoulder. There is a 
 gleam of roguishness in his demure eyes ; he is not 
 unlike a celestial choir -boy. The Virgin is seated on 
 a terrace in front of her bedchamber which opens to 
 the garden. Through the doorway you see the bed 
 with its damask coverlet ; and in a vase, in front of 
 her, a bunch of lilies is growing. Her dress is of pale 
 pink and blue ; her features are small and inexpress- 
 ive. She is looking down at the dove which flies tow- 
 ards her lap, leaving behind it a succession of rings 
 of vanishing fire, like circles in the water, growing 
 
28 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 larger and fainter, until they almost reach the hand 
 at the top of the picture — as if each pulsation of the 
 heavenly wings sent a halo of light quivering through 
 the air. This fancy is not without beauty. For the 
 rest, the picture has a certain grace, but it is all the 
 grace of this world, and the figures bear too clearly the 
 impress of the models from whom they were drawn. 
 
 In Sandro Botticelli we have a painter of the same 
 age and race, but of a very different temperament. It 
 is said that he was the pupil of Fra Filippo Lippi ; if 
 so, he learned some things that his master could never 
 have taught him. He was a student of psychological 
 problems, of conflicting emotions and strange thoughts, 
 divided between heaven and earth. Familiar with the 
 classic beauty of pagan art, and feeling it profoundly, 
 he was yet most unclassical in all his work. For in 
 his pictures nothing is fixed and quiet. A mystical 
 air stirs in his draperies ; a mystical passion breathes 
 from his faces. He has caught them" in a moment 
 of transition, while the past fades and the future still 
 is dim. Yet all this movement and flow and conflict 
 of his art is without violence ; it is quiet, inward, inev- 
 itable. There is far more of yielding in it than of 
 struggle. With him love is often weary and joy often 
 sorrowful. I think his picture of the Annunciation is 
 very characteristic and deep. 
 
 The strong squares of red and white in the marble 
 floor, and the formal landscape seen through the open 
 doorway, suggest the fixity, the indifference of the 
 outward world. It is one of those silent, sultry noons 
 when nature seems to be absolutely motionless in the 
 
THE ANNUNCIATION — FRANCESCO FRANCIA 
 From a painting in the Brera, Milan 
 
THE ANNUNCIATION 31 
 
 heat. The angel has come down unnoticed ; his crim- 
 son robe, girded up about him as if for a journey, still 
 flutters a little as he kneels, almost crouches, upon the 
 pavement. His eyes are full of reverence ; his mouth 
 is sad; it seems to tremble with pity. The Virgin 
 turns from the desk at which she has been reading ; 
 she is perturbed and overwhelmed by the mysterious 
 tidings. Her face is plaintive and her heavy- lidded 
 eyes are downcast. She seems to be near fainting as 
 she bends towards the angel with out-stretched arms, 
 the hands bending backward from the wrists, as if 
 beseeching him to depart from her. The picture is 
 full of profound emotion ; it tells us at least one truth 
 in regard to the Annunciation which many of the 
 painters have forgotten ; it reminds us that Gabriel had 
 need to comfort the Virgin with the words " Fear not !" 
 In Francesco Francia's picture, in the Brera at 
 Milan, there is none of this intense emotional realism. 
 The scene is laid apparently in the porch of the 
 Temple. The atmosphere is cool, clear, tranquil; it is 
 evidently the hour of evening twilight, in which the bell 
 called the Angelus still rings in memory of Gabriel's 
 visit. The landscape is harmonized with the painter's 
 mood ; so still is it that the little lake in the distance 
 reflects the encircling trees as a mirror. The angel, 
 in glistering white, bearing a branch with three lilies, 
 has come gently; and without effort he calls. Mary 
 half turns from the Temple door to listen. I do not 
 know whether she sees him. But surely she hears 
 with quiet and peaceful awe, and her attitude, with 
 that slight drooping of the head which Perugino gives 
 
32 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 to his saints, is maidenly and gracious. It is an idyllic 
 Annunciation. The words of an English poet seem 
 to be addressed to such a virgin : 
 
 " Mind'st thou not (when June's heavy breath 
 Warmed the long days in Nazareth) 
 That eve thou did'st go forth to give 
 Thy flowers some drink, that they might Hve 
 One faint night more amid the sands ? 
 Far off the trees were as pale wands 
 Against the fervid sky ; the sea 
 Sighed farther off eternally, 
 As human sorrow sighs in sleep. 
 Then suddenly the awe grew deep, 
 As of a da}^ to which all days 
 Were footsteps in God's secret ways ; 
 Until a folding sense, like prayer, 
 Which is, as God is, everywhere. 
 Gathered about thee ; and a voice 
 Spake to thee without any noise. 
 Being of the silence : — ' Hail,' it said, 
 ' Thou that art highly favoured ; 
 The Lord is with thee here and now; 
 Blessed among all women thou.' " 
 
 It is not another spirit, but only another mode of 
 expressing the same spirit, which characterizes the 
 quaint Flemish Annunciation assigned to Roger van 
 der Weyden, though I know not whether he painted 
 it. It makes little difference ; a dozen men of the same 
 school could, and would, have given it the same mean- 
 ing. The note of distinction here, as in Francia's 
 picture, is serenity. But now it is serenity of a more 
 homely type. Mary is grave and sedate, a thought- 
 
THK 
 
 ANGELIC 
 
 GREETING 
 
 f^ Roger 
 m Vander 
 H Weyden 
 
 % 
 
THE ANNUNCIATION 35 
 
 ful maiden, reading and praying in her bedchamber. 
 It is early morning, and the soft Hght streams through 
 the open window across the bed with its smooth cover- 
 let and neatly gathered curtains. A lily is growing in 
 a pitcher, and has pushed open the lid. Gabriel, dis- 
 creetly robed in white, stands behind the Virgin and 
 speaks to her. He looks somewhat heavy, as if flight 
 might be difficult to him, but his aspect is very benig- 
 nant. He is such an angel as such a virgin would 
 have liked to see. There is no fear on her face as 
 she listens, only the faint suggestion of a smile about 
 her lips. It is a placid picture, full of the peace of 
 home and the delight of meditation. 
 
 Andrea del Sarto, called "the faultless painter," rep- 
 resents the golden age of Italian art. As a craftsman 
 he stood in the first rank. In sure and skilful drawing, 
 in symmetrical composition, in the smooth harmony 
 of colour, he was a master. But Andrea always lacked 
 a certain fibre of complete and essential greatness. He 
 could execute with perfection, but he could not con- 
 ceive with sublimity. His style was finer than his 
 thought. I think we feel this in his picture of the 
 Annunciation, which is in the Pitti Palace at Florence. 
 It is technically a beautiful piece of work. Nothing 
 could be better than the poise of the figures, the speak- 
 ing grace of the angel's face and hand, the delicate 
 design of the reading-desk in the centre and the lofty 
 portico in the distance. But there is a sensation of 
 discord when we see David bending from the portico 
 to look at Bathsheba. That which completes the back- 
 ground spoils the subject. Nor does the Madonna 
 
36 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 satisfy us ; she is too evidently that Lucrezia Buti, 
 whose fair face was but the mask for a sordid spirit. 
 The one thing that redeems the picture is the love- 
 liness of Gabriel, a shape of immortal youth. It is like 
 that sculpture which Dante saw in the Purgatorio: 
 
 " L' Angel, che venne in terra col decreto 
 Delia molt' anni lagrimata pace, 
 Ch'aperse il Ciel dal sue lungo divieto, 
 Dinanzi a noi pareva si verace 
 Quivi intagliato in un atto soave, 
 Che non sembiava imagine che tace. 
 Giurato si saria ch'ei dicess' At'e.'" 
 
 Of modern pictures of the Annunciation there are 
 but few. Bouguereau's painting in the Church of St. 
 Vincent de Paul, in Paris, has a superficial prettiness, 
 but it is utterly and irredeemably commonplace. There 
 is an Annunciation by Burne-Jones which has all the 
 charm of his subtle drawing and colour; but he has 
 made it an echo of Florence in the fifteenth century. 
 It was natural enough for the Florentines to set the 
 scene amid Renaissance architecture and give the fig- 
 ures an Italian aspect ; they did it spontaneously and 
 without reflection. But for an English painter of this 
 age to revert purposely to that type savours so much 
 of artifice that it makes his work seem unreal and 
 insincere. 
 
 I know of but one significant and noble painting of 
 the Annunciation in our century, and that is Rossetti's 
 £^cce Ancilla Domini, in the National Gallery at Lon- 
 don. The picture, as one looks at it for the first 
 
THE ANXUNXIATION — ANDREA DEL SARTO 
 From a painting in the Pitti Palace, Florence 
 
THE ANNUNCIATION 39 
 
 time, appears dreamlike in the strange beauty of its 
 colour; it is a lily of white and gold, but with infi- 
 nite gradations and shadows of light trembling through 
 the hue of purity and the hue of love. All this is 
 lost in the engraving; and yet it is still possible to 
 feel something of the penetrating sweetness of the 
 picture's conception. The poet.-painter has chosen a 
 motif which art has hitherto neglected. He thinks of 
 the Annunciation as coming, like so many other an- 
 gelic visits, in a dream. The time is the border- land 
 between sleeping and waking, the visionary hour of 
 early morning. The pale flame of the night-lamp is 
 about to expire ; the cool light of dawn shines through 
 the window. The strong Gabriel appears in the aspect 
 of one of those of whom it is written, " He maketh 
 His angels spirits. His ministers a fiame of fire," and 
 the very air kindles at his feet into aureate flames. 
 Mary is fair and delicate, pidchra ut luna, electa ut sol. 
 She has just awakened; half -rising from her virgin 
 couch, she is not looking at the angel; she does not 
 see him ; her eyes are fixed as in a dream, and she 
 whispers, wondering, " How shall this be ?" Her spir- 
 itual loveliness is best described in Rossetti's own 
 sonnet : 
 
 " This is that blessed Mary, pre-elect 
 
 God's Virgin. Gone is a great while, and she 
 
 Dwelt young in Nazareth of Galilee. 
 Unto God's will she brought devout respect. 
 Profound simplicity of intellect, 
 
 And supreme patience. From her mother's knee 
 
 Faithful and hopeful, wise in charity, 
 
40 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 Strong in grave peace, in pity circumspect. 
 So held she through her girlhood, as it were, 
 An angel-watered lily, that near God 
 Grows and is quiet. Till one dawn at home 
 She W'Oke in her \vhite bed, and had no fear 
 At all, yet wept till sunshine, and felt awed, 
 Because the fulness of the time was come.'' 
 
 IV 
 
 What thought, then, shall we bring from our study 
 of these Annunciation pictures ? They are only notes 
 in the prelude to our real theme ; but even the prelude 
 is not to be forgotten in the larger music ; its sug- 
 gestions are taken up and unfolded ; its melody is 
 woven into the larger harmony ; it colours and influ- 
 ences all that comes after it. And if our study thus 
 far has been a real interpretation, it willgive us some- 
 thing, an impression, a sentiment, a vital thought, 
 which will go onward with us into the story of Beth- 
 lehem and the scenes of Jesus's childhood. 
 
 Surely this impression can be nothing else than a 
 sense of the beauty and simplicity of the faith with 
 which Mary received the revelation that came to her 
 from on high and called her to perfect and immaculate 
 motherhood. If the angel could say " Hail !" to her, 
 and call her blessed, we may well do her reverence, 
 and love her with honour above all other daughters 
 of Eve. Could the promise of the divine birth at 
 Bethlehem ever have been fulfilled unless there had 
 
r 
 
THE ANNUNCIATION 
 
 43 
 
 been such a mother, so pure, so reverent, so conse- 
 crated to her mission, to carry the holy child beneath 
 her heart and nurse Him in her arms ? 
 
 Christmas is truly the festival of childhood ; but it 
 should also be the festival of motherhood, for the 
 child, even the holiest, is not divided from the mother. 
 We may learn to think of infancy as sacred in the 
 light that flows from the manger- cradle of Jesus. Yet 
 it seems to me we cannot receive that truth perfectly 
 unless we first learn to think of motherhood as holy 
 in the memory of her whose virginal and stainless love 
 found favour with God to receive and guard and cher- 
 ish the Son of the Highest. 
 
THE NATIVITY 
 
 O blessed day which giv'st the eternal He 
 
 To self, and sense, and all the hriite within; 
 
 Oh ! come to us amid this war of life ; 
 
 To hall and hovel come ! to all who toil 
 
 In senate, shop, or study! and to those 
 
 Ill-warned and sorely tempted — 
 
 Come to them, blest and blessing, Christmas Day! 
 
 Tell them once more the tale of Bethlehem, 
 
 The kneeling shepherds, and the Babe Divine; 
 
 And keep them men indeed, fair Christmas Day ! 
 
 Charles Kingsley. 
 
SlnlJ it cnmc to pass in tl)oe;c trnvs, tfjnt tftrrc turnt out a 
 tjcrrcf from Crsar Sutjuctue, tl)at all tijc tuorlti sI)ouHi br 
 tajrcU. 
 
 Slni tljifi tajcing: teas firet malic toljtn Cprrniuis tuac; cfoD^ 
 crnor of ;§pria. 
 
 ^xiQ all turnt to be tajrcl), rUrrp one into I)t6 otun citp. 
 
 3lnti Sosrpb also tucnt up from Saltier, out of tjjc cttp of 
 Jltia^arctl), into 3^utica, unto tl)c cttp of IDaDtti, tul)tcl) is callcH 
 I3ctl)lcf)cm (because Ije tuae of tt)v i)ouse ani lincajc of 
 ^atitti), 
 
 Co be taj:elJ toiti) illarp I)ts ecpouEcii totfe, being; jreat 
 tuitl) cbilii. 
 
 Slnii 60 it teas, t^at, toUlc tl)cp toere tl)ere, t^e tiapc tuere 
 accompliBl)cti tl)at s^e e1)0Hlli be iJcliDcreti. 
 
 9[nti fibe brouirl^t forti) |)er ftrBtborn eon, anti iurappeti l)im 
 in BtuailJling: clothes, aniJ laiti I)im in a maniier; because 
 tijrre tuas no room for tf)cm in tl)e inn. 
 
 SnlJ tbere tuere in tbe same countrp sbepbertis abitiing; in 
 i\)t ftellJ, keeping: tuatc^ ol]er tbeir florti bp ntg:l^t. 
 
 ^nii, lo, ti)c ancfcl of tbe LortJ came upon tf)em, ani tbe 
 g:lorp of t\)t lorlJ sbone rounti about tf)em ; anl) t^cp tuere 
 sore afraili. 
 
 3[nli tl)e ang:el saiti unto tl)em, jFear not : for, bebollj, "^ 
 bring; pou poll tiliing;G of g;reat iop, lul)icl) sliall be to all 
 j]eople. 
 
 jFor unto j)ou is born tl)is iap in t^e citp of ^aDiti a 
 ^aijiour, tDl)icb is Christ tl)e lorti. 
 
 Slnti tl)ts Bl)all be a Big;n unto pou ; |3e cI)aU ftnti t^e babe 
 torappeti in stuatitiling; clotI)cs, Iptng; m a mang;er. 
 
 'ilnti sutJtJcnlp tl)ere tuas tutti) tf)e ang;el a multitutie of 
 tf)f bcaPenlp bost praising; tBotJ, anti saping;, 
 
 ©iorp to (5ati in tl)e I)tg;l)rBt, anii on earti) peace, poll 
 tuill totuarti men. 
 
 ^xiH it came to pass, as tbe anpls tuere pne atuap from 
 t{)em into bcaUen, tt)e sIjcpbcrliB saiti one to anotljer, let us 
 notu g;o ePen unto -iSetblebem, anl] see tbts tbing; tubicl) is 
 come to pass, ti3f)icl) tlje lorli batb malie fenotun unto us. 
 
 2lnlJ t()ep came tuttI) baste, anli founli ^Barp anb S'osepJ), 
 anlJ tl)e babe Iping; in a manpr. — St. Luke, ii. 1-16. 
 
I 
 
 f^^^ HE birth of lesus is the sunrise of the Bible. 
 
 4ra^3f 1 • • . . 
 
 vtiiu' Mw Towards this point the aspirations of the 
 ^^^^ prophets and the poems of the psalmists 
 were directed as the heads of flowers are turned tow- 
 ards the dawn. From this point a new day began to 
 flow very silently over the world — a day of faith and 
 freedom, a day of hope and love. When we remember 
 the high meaning that has come into human life and 
 the clear light that has flooded softly down from the 
 manger- cradle in Bethlehem of Judea, we do not won- 
 der that mankind has learned to reckon history from 
 the birthday of Jesus, and to date all events by the 
 years before or after the Nativity of Christ. 
 
 But it is a strange thing, and one which seems at 
 first almost incredible, that the unconscious evidence 
 of art does not reveal a very profound impression of 
 the Nativity upon the mind of the early Church. Many 
 careless writers, whose sentiment of what ought to be 
 is stronger than their knowledge of what really is, have 
 
48 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 spoken of it as the first and favourite theme of Chris- 
 tian art. But in fact it does not appear in any form 
 until the fourth century ; it is represented less fre- 
 quently than many other subjects from the Old and 
 New Testaments; and it does not really assume a prom- 
 inent and central place in art until the thirteenth 
 century. 
 
 What are the reasons of this? — for reasons there 
 must be. An individual may suppress or divert the 
 play of his feelings according to rule or whim. He 
 may exalt or depress an event in his imagination, he 
 may choose or refuse to picture it with his mind or 
 his hand, for purposes which are artificial and pre- 
 meditated. But a community, a generation of men, is 
 more natural and naive. Its legends, its literature, and, 
 above all, its art, inevitably betray its inmost thought 
 and feeling. If the Nativity is pictured but rarely in 
 early Christian art, it is simply because the early Chris- 
 tians did not at first fully realize the great and beauti- 
 ful meaning of the Nativity in its relation to the whole 
 life of Christ, and, indeed, to all human lives. 
 
 I do not imagine for a moment that there was any- 
 thing defective in the faith of the primitive Church, or 
 that she ever doubted or denied the truth concerning 
 the birth of Jesus. From the beginning she was in 
 possession of the whole truth, but it unfolded slowly in 
 her consciousness, and the true significance of it was 
 gradually made plain. This is the way of God in His 
 world. Christianity is perfect and complete, and has 
 been so ever since it was embodied in the life of Christ. 
 Every one who has Christ in his heart has the whole of 
 
IL TRESEI'IO — GIOTTO 
 From a fresco in the Chapel of the Arena, Padua 
 
THE NATIVITY 51 
 
 it; nothing can be added, nothing can be taken away. 
 But the understanding of it, the living sense of what it 
 means, comes only by degrees, to different men and to 
 different ages. Even yet, as we gladly believe, the 
 Church has much undiscovered country and many hid- 
 den treasures in that territory of truth which she has 
 possessed from the beginning. And in the first centu- 
 ries it is not difficult to see, if we will take the pains to 
 think about it, how and why the Nativity did not re- 
 ceive as profound attention as other events in the his- 
 tory of Jesus. 
 
 Probably the first reason was the predominant influ- 
 ence of the resurrection on the thought of the early 
 Christians. It dimmed, for a time, all other facts in the 
 dazzling blaze of its glory. This was for them incom- 
 parably the greatest event in the history of Christ, 
 because it was the pledge and proof not only of his 
 Messiahship, but also of their own immortality. His 
 crucifixion was inseparably connected with it, as the 
 consummation of his redeeming work. The entire 
 history of salvation was summed up for them in the 
 words " He died for our sins and rose again for our 
 justification." They did not feel any pressing need of 
 looking beyond this to inquire how Christ came into 
 the world, or what connection there was between his 
 birth and his atoning death. It was enough for them 
 that He was there, that He had been crucified and 
 raised again for the world's redemption ; and there- 
 fore they were content to centre their thought and 
 feeling upon the festival of Easter, in which these 
 two great events were commemorated. 
 
52 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 Possibly another cause which may have overshad- 
 owed, at first, the gentle radiance of the Nativity was the 
 fact that all of the apostles, and many of the other disci- 
 ples, had seen Christ in his resurrection glory; but none 
 of them had looked upon Him as a helpless babe in the 
 cradle. Especially the controlling mind of St. Paul was 
 filled with the memory of the form in which he had seen 
 the Christ — that form of splendour shining above the 
 brightness of the Syrian noon — and dwelt naturally 
 upon the vision of divine majesty rather than upon 
 the lowly picture of human infancy. The epistles were 
 written before the gospels ; and of the gospels only 
 one lingers with tender emotion upon the details of 
 the birth in Bethlehem. The thoughts of the early 
 Christians were engaged more constantly with the ce- 
 lestial glory of their Lord than with his earthly humili- 
 ation. They found their strength and comfort amid 
 the trials of life in thinking of his Divinity, of his ex- 
 alted state, of his sovereign power, and of his second 
 coming in majesty, which they expected soon. Com- 
 pared with these ideas the thought of his humanity 
 may perhaps have seemed less precious, less important 
 to them. It is impossible to make any positive or defi- 
 nite statement on a subject so vague, and so much en- 
 veloped in uncertainty. But one thing at least is very 
 siofnificant : the earliest form of error that arose in the 
 Church denied Christ's true manhood, and taught that 
 his outward form was an illusion — a mask of humanity 
 in which the Son of God was disguised. 
 
 This was not unnatural, for we must remember that 
 humanity was not very humane to the early Christians. 
 
THE NATIVITY 53 
 
 This world was a hard home to them. Indeed, it was 
 not a home at all ; they did not regard it as one. They 
 were oppressed and persecuted and martyred, alike by 
 Jews and by pagans. It was no benefit to them to be 
 born. To die was their true escape and felicity. And 
 so it came to pass naturally that they lived much in 
 the heavenly future, despising the present life, and 
 celebrating the martyrs' death -days as their true birth- 
 days. Thus the great Origen, in a homily on Le- 
 viticus, xii. 2, assured his hearers that " none of the 
 saints can be found who ever held a feast or a ban- 
 quet upon his birthday, or rejoiced on the day when 
 his son or his daughter was born. But sinners rejoice 
 and make merry on such days. For we find in the Old 
 Testament that Pharaoh, King of Egypt, celebrated his 
 birthday with a feast, and that Herod, in the New Tes- 
 tament, did the same. But the saints not only neglect 
 to mark the day of their birth with festivity, but also, 
 filled with the Holy Ghost, they curse this day, after 
 the example of Job and Jeremiah and David." While 
 the leading teacher of the Church was preaching after 
 this wise, we can hardly expect to find the Christians 
 thinking much about the Nativity, or dreaming of a 
 celebration of Christmas. 
 
 I do not mean to assert that this was the universal 
 and unbroken condition of thought and feeling in the 
 Church during the first three centuries. There were 
 some men, in advance of their age, who had learned to 
 think of the whole life of Christ in its unity as a life 
 for and with man. Irenasus, in particular, is worthy of 
 special mention and enduring honour as the first of the 
 
54 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 fathers to bring out the unfolding of all the stages of 
 human life in Jesus Christ; and even though he had 
 never written another word than this, he deserves to be 
 immortal in the memory of the Church for having said, 
 " He therefore passed through every age, becoming an 
 infant for infants, thus sanctifying infants ; a child for 
 children, thus sanctifying those who are of this age, 
 being at the same time made to them an example of 
 piety, righteousness, and submission." 
 
 This sentence holds the heart of Christmas. But it 
 was not until long after it was uttered, it was not until 
 the latter half of the fourth century, that the Church at 
 large began to feel and to develop its meaning. Then 
 it was that she emerged from the storm of persecution 
 into the sunshine of imperial favour. Then she real- 
 ized that patient suffering and faithful death were not 
 the only duties of the Christian, but that, following 
 God in love, it was possible to begin in this world 
 the purity and peace of heaven. Then she began to 
 feel the wondrous significance of the living entrance of 
 the Son of God into the life of man, and his perfect 
 pattern of holiness in every human relation. Then she 
 passed from the lower conception of a Church saved 
 out of the world, to the higher conception of a world 
 to be saved through the ministry of the Church, a nat- 
 ural year to be transformed by reverent devotion and 
 wholesome piety into the Christian year, a redeeming 
 life as well as an atoning death of Christ, to be pre- 
 served in living remembrance by the perpetual com- 
 memoration of its chief events. Then it was that, 
 opening her heart to the humanity of religion, she be- 
 
THE VIRGIN IN A WOOD — FILIPPO LIPPI 
 From a painting in the Berlin Museum 
 
THE NATIVITY 57 
 
 gan to draw near to the humanity of Jesus, and to seek 
 with eager interest for the day of his birth that she 
 might make it holy. 
 
 But what clew was there to direct the search? What 
 reason could be given for choosing one day rather than 
 another for the Christmas festival ? The gospels, al- 
 ways meagre in dates, were quite silent here. They 
 gave no hint of the day or month of the Nativity. 
 Oral tradition, we may be sure, was equally reticent or 
 indifferent. There were, indeed, a few scattered sug- 
 gestions of the date of Christ's birth floating here 
 and there among the writings of the fathers ; but these 
 were all of late origin, manifestly unhistorical, and, 
 above all, quite contradictory. Clement of Alexandria 
 said that many Christians regarded the 20th of May 
 as the day of the Nativity, others preferred the 20th of 
 April, but he favored the 19th of November. In the 
 Eastern Church the 5th or 6th of January was cele- 
 brated as the date of Christ's baptism, and the Nativity 
 was joined with this. Others again fixed upon the 21st 
 of March as the day of Christ's birth. Between such 
 varying and slightly supported assumptions there was 
 little to choose. A historical date was clearly out of 
 the question. Nothing was left for the Church to do 
 but to select some day on grounds of convenience and 
 symbolic significance, and celebrate it by common con- 
 sent as Christmas Day. 
 
 It would take too long to trace the many reasons 
 which probably led to the choice of the 25th of De- 
 cember. It was doubtless connected with the day 
 which had already been generally accepted as the date 
 
58 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 of the Annunciation and of the creation of the world. 
 Assuming that the world was made in the spring, be- 
 cause it was commanded to bring forth grass and herbs, 
 and that it was made when the day and night were of 
 equal length, because " the evening and the morning 
 were the first day," it was natural, though somewhat 
 nai've, to fix upon the vernal equinox (according to the 
 Julian calendar, March 25th) as the exact date of the 
 creation. And once having discovered by this easy 
 method the very day on which the world came into 
 being, and the glorious light sprang out of darkness, 
 what more simple than to assume that it was the same 
 day on which the power of the Almighty overshad- 
 owed Mary, and the " Day-spring from on high " began 
 his entrance into the world ? Nothing could be plain- 
 er. Even the least imaginative of chronographers could 
 reckon forward from this fixed point of the Annuncia- 
 tion nine months, and arrive at December 25th as the 
 day of the Nativity. And here another wonderful coin- 
 cidence meets him. This is the day of the winter 
 solstice, the day when the world's darkness begins to 
 lessen, and the world's light to grow ; the day which 
 the ancient world had long celebrated as the birthday 
 of the sun — dies natalis soils Invlctl ; what more appro- 
 priate day could be found for the birth of the " Sun of 
 Righteousness?" St. Augustine points out an instance 
 of the wondrous fulfilment of Scripture in the fact 
 that St. John the Baptist was born on June 25th, the 
 summer solstice, when the sun begins to decline ; but 
 the Lord Jesus was born on December 25th, the winter 
 solstice, when the sun begins to ascend. And in this 
 
THE NATIVITY — ANDREA DELLA ROBBIA 
 From a bass-relief in the Convent of La Verna 
 
THE NATIVITY 6i 
 
 is fulfilled the saying, " He must increase, but I must 
 decrease." 
 
 Let us not hesitate to admit that these calculations 
 have very small historical value. At least they have 
 real poetic feeling. I do not suppose that the early 
 Christians intended to fix the exact day of Christ's 
 birth as a matter of infallible chronology. All that 
 they meant to do was to bind their devotions into har- 
 mony with the year of nature, and utter their profound 
 belief in the vital unity of the life of Christ with the 
 life of the world. Creation and redemption, resurrec- 
 tion and daybreak, nativity and the returning of the 
 unconquered sun — these are united in the thought of 
 God, and in the gratitude of man. And though the 
 shepherds of Bethlehem may not have watched in the 
 fields by night amid the rigours of midwinter, though 
 the tax registration of Publius Sulpicius Ouirinus may 
 not have taken place in December, every heart that 
 feels the simplicity and beauty of the Christian faith 
 can join in the gladness of that Christmas Day which 
 has been consecrated by centuries of holy joy, and 
 which celebrates the emers^ence of a new li^ht from 
 the darkest and longest of the nights of earth. 
 
 The earliest mention of the 25th of December as 
 Christmas Day is found in an ancient catalogue of 
 Church festivals about a.d. 354. And it is surprising 
 to see with what alacrity the date was received and the 
 Nativity celebrated throughout Christendom. It seems 
 as if the world had been waiting for this festival of 
 divine and human childhood, and was ready to welcome 
 it at once with songs of joy. In the year 360 it was 
 
62 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 already celebrated in Rome by vast multitudes throng- 
 ing the churches. Twenty years later, Antioch had 
 taken it up with great popular enthusiasm. And in 
 little more than fifty years from its earliest suggestion, 
 the observance of December 25th as the day of the 
 Nativity had become the universal practice of Chris- 
 tians. 
 
 II 
 
 It is about this time, the latter part of the fourth 
 century, that we find the legends with which the his- 
 tory of the birth and childhood of Jesus was embroid- 
 ered, beginning to take a definite shape, and to follow 
 fixed, conventional patterns. The so-called Gospel of 
 the pseiido- Matthew was probably written at the com- 
 mencement of the fifth century. The Protcvangelium 
 of fames and the Gospel of Thomas were of earlier 
 origin, but the first clear evidence of their currency in 
 their present form comes from the end of the fourth 
 century. These legendary books came into existence 
 in a very simple and natural way. The}^ were the out- 
 growth of that native trait of the human mind, famil- 
 iar to every one who has tried to tell a true story to 
 children — the craving for picturesque detail. A child is 
 never satisfied with the bare statement that a thing 
 happened; he always wants to know how it happened; 
 he demands local colour and dramatic incident. The 
 childish mind of the primitive Christians approached 
 the brief authentic records of Christ's nativity and in- 
 
THE NATIVITY 63 
 
 fancy with precisely this demand, and the apocryphal 
 gospels are simply collections of the traditions, inven- 
 tions, and myths with which it was answered. Inno- 
 cent and naive plays of fancy, they floated lightly and 
 vaguely through the popular mind for two or three 
 centuries, until at last some one brought them together 
 in the little books where they are now found, and tried 
 to give them dignity and authority by attaching to 
 them the name of one of the apostles. Sometimes 
 these books were employed by the sects who found 
 them favourable to their particular heresies; but they 
 were never accepted by the Church at large, nor was 
 there ever any thought among her recognized teachers 
 that they could be considered in the same rank with 
 the authoritative Scriptures. The contrast was too im- 
 mense and striking; and this contrast has always been 
 regarded as one of the strong practical arguments for 
 the early date and the inspired character of the genuine 
 gospels. 
 
 At the point of the Nativity the accumulation of 
 legends is not so great as at other points, earlier and 
 later in the narrative. But it began sooner, and it was 
 oftener touched by poetic feeling and sometimes even 
 by the air of truth. For instance, the first of these 
 legendary details (mentioned by Justin Martyr about 
 the year 150) was a really not improbable answer 
 to a very natural question. For what could be more 
 natural to one reading for the first time St. Luke's ac- 
 count of the Nativity than to wonder and ask in what 
 sort of a place " the manger," in which the infant Christ 
 was laid, may have stood.'' And certainly there is noth- 
 
64 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 ing improbable in the statement of Justin (who was a 
 native of Palestine, and well acquainted with the cus- 
 tom, which still prevails in that country, of using grot- 
 tos or caves in the rock as stables and shelters for cat- 
 tle), that the manger was in a cave. The tradition has 
 been generally accepted. But the artists have not al- 
 ways found it easy to adapt it to the conditions of their 
 art. The sculptors have followed it most frequently ; to 
 cut a cave in the rock was quite in their line of work. 
 A few of the painters have kept closely to the idea of the 
 grotto — for example, Mantegna, in his " Nativity," and 
 Lionardo, in his " Virgin of the Rocks." But more 
 commonly they have modified it ; at first, as Giotto has 
 done, by placing a slight shed over what seems to be 
 the mouth of a grotto ; then by changing the grotto 
 into a ruined building with a thatched roof over it, as 
 Roger van der Weyden and Ghirlandajo have done ; 
 then by entirely losing the idea of the cave in the idea 
 of the stable, as Luini has done ; and then by envelop- 
 ing the event with shadows, as Murillo has done, so 
 that one cannot tell whether the place is a stable or a 
 cave. 
 
 One of the most beautiful legends of the Nativity is 
 that which is given in the Protevangeliiim in regard to 
 the miraculous calm and silence of the Holy Night. 
 Joseph, having left the Virgin Mary in the cave, goes 
 out to seek a nurse. " And I," says he, " was walking 
 and was not walking ; and I looked up into the sky and 
 saw the sky astonished ; and I looked up to the pole of 
 the heavens and saw it standing, and the birds of the 
 air keeping still. And I looked down upon the earth. 
 
THE NATIVITY — ROGER VAN DER WEVDEN 
 From a triptych in the Berlin Museum 
 
THE NATIVITY 67 
 
 and saw a trough lying and work-people reclining, and 
 their hands were in the trough. And those that were 
 eating did not eat, and those that were rising did not 
 rise, and those that were carrying anything to their 
 mouths did not carry it; but the faces of all were look- 
 ing upwards. And I saw the sheep walking and the 
 sheep stood still ; and the shepherd raised his hand to 
 strike them, and his hand remained up. And I looked 
 on the current of the river, and I saw the mouths of the 
 kids resting on the water and not drinking, and all 
 things in a moment were driven from their course." 
 This is an idea which neither painting nor sculpture 
 can express ; for though, strangely enough, it is only a 
 description of what one sees in every statue and in 
 every picture — a momentary action fixed in a beauti- 
 ful rest — yet neither picture nor statue can tell us that 
 the rest continues ; their natural interpretation is that 
 it is only an immeasurably brief instant in that ever- 
 changing current of life which flows through all things. 
 But poetry can do that which lies beyond the power of 
 the other arts ; and we find this idea of immobility and 
 profound quietude, of the heavens at least, expressed in 
 Milton's "Ode to the Nativity:" 
 
 " The stars with deep amaze 
 Stand fixed in steadfast gaze, 
 
 Bending one way their precious influence] 
 And will not take their flight 
 For all the morning light, 
 
 Or Lucifer, that often, warn'd them thence." 
 
 There are two other noteworthy legends in regard to 
 the Nativity. One, which is common to several of the 
 
68 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 apocryphal books, describes the dazzling supernatural 
 light which filled the cave with glory. The other is 
 narrated in the book which is called by the name of 
 Matthew: " And on the third day after the birth of our 
 Lord Jesus Christ, the most blessed Mary went forth 
 out of the cave, and entering a stable, placed the child 
 in the stall, and the ox and the ass adored him. Then 
 was fulfilled that which was said by Isaiah the prophet, 
 saying : The ox knoweth his owner and the ass his mas- 
 ter's crib." Both of these legends have been freely ac- 
 cepted by the artists. There is hardly one of them w^io 
 does not introduce the ox and the ass ; and sometimes 
 the latter animal is represented with open mouth, lifting 
 up his voice in audible adoration. The miraculous 
 radiance has been employed by some of the painters to 
 produce wonderful effects of light and shade. A fa- 
 mous example of this is Correggio's picture in the gal- 
 lery at Dresden. 
 
 There are also certain symbols or mystical emblems 
 which are frequently introduced into pictures of the 
 Nativity. The cross is placed in the hand of an angel 
 or of the little St. John to remind us of the future of 
 the Holy Child. The lamb is the type of his purity; 
 and when it is bound with cords it represents his sac- 
 rifice. The dove is the emblem of the Holy Spirit; it 
 also speaks of meekness and innocence. The gold- 
 finch, because of the red spot on its head, is connected 
 with the memory of Christ's death. A sheaf of wheat 
 is often used as a pillow for the infant Jesus, or a few 
 ears of it are placed in his hand, as a symbol of the 
 bread of life. When He has his finger laid upon his 
 
THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS — DOMENICO GHIRLANDAJO 
 From a painting in the Academy, Florence 
 
J 
 
THE NATIVITY 71 
 
 lips it is to remind us that He is the Word of God. 
 The palm is the symbol of martyrdom and glory ; the 
 olive is the emblem of peace ; the globe represents his 
 kingly authority. Thus in the silent language of signs 
 the artists have expressed the thoughts of wonder and 
 worship which have gathered through the ages about 
 the cradle of Christ. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The works of art which have been inspired by the 
 Nativity may be arranged in several groups. First of 
 all there are the pictures and carvings which deal with 
 the subject in its simplest form. These again are of 
 two kinds : the older artists usually represent the Vir- 
 gin Mary reclining on a couch and the Child wrapped 
 in swaddling-bands in the manger beside her ; the later 
 artists show us Mary and Joseph kneeling before the 
 Child, who lies on a pillow or on a corner of his moth- 
 er's robe. Then there is a very large class of pictures 
 which represent the adoration of the shepherds, the 
 Child lying on his mother's lap, or in the manger, while 
 Joseph stands in the background. Another group of 
 pictures which belong properly to the Nativity are 
 those in which the mother is worshipping her child in 
 solitude. This mode of treating the subject was very 
 frequent among the Italian artists of the fifteenth and 
 sixteenth centuries. It expresses with tender felicity 
 the thought of the Nativity which must have been in 
 
72 
 
 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 the heart of Mary. Yet one more class of pictures 
 seems to me to be rightly included in the spirit of this 
 theme : the pictures of the Madonna and Child in 
 which there is no attempt to enthrone them or to sur- 
 round them with celestial splendours and attendant 
 saints, but the artist shows us simply the mother with 
 her Divine Babe folded in her arms. This is what 
 Mrs. Jameson has well called the Mater Amabilis. 
 But I am sure that the subject belongs more truly to 
 the life of Christ than to the " Legends of the Madon- 
 na," for the central thought of it is that wondrous birth 
 in which the Son of God trusted himself to a mother's 
 care and rested on a mother's breast. Of each of these 
 ways of depicting the Nativity I have chosen two or 
 more illustrations ; but it will be more convenient to 
 describe and interpret them, not in separate classes, but 
 in the order of their age. 
 
 The little carving from a stone 
 sarcophagus in the Church of St. 
 Celsus at Milan was probably 
 made in the latter part of the 
 fourth century, and is one of the 
 oldest known representations of 
 the subject. It is a rude and sim- 
 ple bit of work, done by an un- 
 known hand of no great skill, and 
 conceived in that purely symbol- 
 ical spirit which was character- 
 istic of early art ; for it is evident 
 that there is here no effort to depict an historical 
 event. It is simply a hint, a mystic sign of a story 
 
 FROM SARCOPHAGUS OF 
 FOURTH CENTURY 
 
 In the Church of St. Celsus, 
 Milan 
 
THE NATIVITY 73 
 
 already well known. And yet the old stone-cutter's 
 work is not without its charm, for it shows us how 
 truthfully and how reverently he has thought of his 
 theme. The thatched roof over the entrance of the 
 grotto, the manger, the ox and the ass, the Child 
 wrapped in swaddling-clothes and lying alone, suggest 
 the lowliness of Christ's birth. The ans^el with the 
 cross, lifting up his hand in wonder, is the primitive 
 artist's way of assuring us that he believed this lowly 
 birth had a Divine glory and significance. 
 
 For nearly nine centuries after this, art made very 
 little advance, gained very little power to represent the 
 scenes of the gospel history as real events. Indeed, it 
 almost seems as if it lost power under the deadening 
 influence of the Byzantine traditions ; and the gorgeous 
 mosaics of San Marco in Venice are far less animated 
 than the early paintings in the catacombs and carvings 
 on the sarcophagi. But one needs to be familiar with 
 the dreariness and deadness of art in these dark ages 
 in order to appreciate at its full value the revival which 
 came to pass at the end of the thirteenth century. It 
 was Giotto, master of the seven liberal arts and friend 
 of Dante, who brought this new life to its fullest and 
 most perfect expression. A poet, a sculptor, a daring 
 architect, he was, above all, the man who raised the art 
 of painting from the grave. In 1305 he went down 
 from Florence to decorate the walls of the little Chapel 
 of the Arena at Padua, which still remains, in spite of 
 the ruins of time and the labours of the restorer, one of 
 the most precious shrines of art. If you approach these 
 frescos with a demand for perfection of technique as 
 
74 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 the one thing indispensable in painting ; if you come to 
 them with an eye habituated to superficial prettiness 
 and clever rendering of insignificant subjects, you will 
 be disappointed. Giotto knew little of perspective as 
 we understand it. He was ignorant of anatomy. 
 When he wished to represent a man lying down he 
 simply tipped the figure over on its side. His animals 
 look as if they were made of wood, and his mountains 
 are impossible. Even his lovely colours, which were the 
 wonder of his own age, have lost a great deal of their 
 pristine purity and brilliance. 
 
 But you will forget all this if you come into the little 
 Chapel of the Arena directly from the desert of Byzan- 
 tine art. It will seem to you like an oasis of sincerity 
 and beauty. Giotto dared to conceive and depict the 
 gospel story not because the Church told him, not as 
 the Church told him, but because he was filled with a 
 living sense of its reality and worth ; because he felt 
 that to make these scenes visible again to men would 
 help them to live nobler lives. And so he cast away 
 the restraints of formalism, and reaching deep down 
 into human nature, covered the walls with the finest 
 and most living figures that he could paint. He went 
 straight to the heart of every event. He spent no time 
 on the embroidery of a robe or the jewels of a throne ; 
 what he wanted to do was to make other men see and 
 feel, as he had seen and felt, the reality of the story and 
 the profound emotion of those who were engaged in it. 
 This is what he has done in his picture of the Nativity. 
 The landscape is extraordinary, the sheep are ligneous, 
 and the sfoat resembles a unicorn. But the sentiment 
 
THE MOTHER ADORING HER CHILD 
 From a painting ascribed to Giovanni Bellini, in the Church of II Redentore, Venice 
 
THE NATIVITY ^^ 
 
 of the picture is perfect, and it is expressed with the 
 simplicity of genius. The young mother is reaching 
 out her arms to lay her new-born babe for the first time 
 in his strange cradle. There is a tenderness of love, a 
 wondering solicitude in her face and in her touch that 
 none but a poet could have ever conceived. Three of 
 the angels above the stable are lifting up their hands in 
 adoration — "Glory to God in the highest" — one of 
 them is stooping to tell the shepherds his glad tidings 
 of "good-will to men," but the fifth angel bends with 
 folded hands of silent reverence above the holy place 
 of the Nativity, and we feel that here indeed is " peace 
 on earth," a peace of which every mother's heart knows 
 something when she looks on the face of her first-born 
 child. 
 
 But with all this directness and intensity of feeling 
 in Giotto's art, there is in it something of that spirit of 
 generality, of universal rather than of particular beauty, 
 of desire to express itself in typical forms morecthan in 
 strongly marked individual traits, which was the tend- 
 ency of antique art at its best. Giotto broke away from 
 the hard and inexpressive Byzantine type with its 
 meagre, sombre face, and narrow, fixed eyes ; but he 
 was powerfully influenced by the classic type of full 
 and nobly moulded beauty, made familiar to the artists 
 of the early Renaissance by the rediscovery and admir- 
 ing study of the works of ancient sculpture. It is true 
 that his strong dramatic sense frequently led him to ag- 
 itate these classic faces with sharp emotion, so that they 
 sometimes approach perilously near to grimaces. But 
 even this does not destroy the impression of dignity, 
 
78 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 repose, breadth, in his work; the classic air still breathes 
 from it ; in this picture of the Nativity, for example, we 
 feel that there is a real relationship to the bass-relief of 
 the same subject by Niccolo Pisano on the pulpit of the 
 Baptistery at Pisa, in which the Virgin is a copy of a 
 figure of Alcestis, and the head of Joseph is modelled 
 after an antique bust. 
 
 In the work of Fra Angelico the classic influence 
 gave place to something new and very different ; a pro- 
 found and delicate spiritual impulse in the old monk's 
 heart, born of constant prayer and self-discipline and se- 
 clusion of soul, even in the midst of successful labour 
 and popular applause, created an original and ethereal 
 type of beauty, more intimately fitted than the classic 
 type to express purity and reverence and " such joys as 
 angels feel." His pictures of the Nativity, of which one 
 of the smallest (that which adorned a panel of the great 
 silver chest of the Church of the Annunziata in Flor- 
 ence) is one of the best, seem to be touched with celes- 
 tial serenity and refinement. But their spirit is still 
 general rather than particular; the faces are not individ- 
 ual, they are typical, though the type is changed. 
 
 It was not until the fifteenth century that the spirit 
 of individualism took possession of art, and the passion 
 of personality came to distinct expression. Then the 
 artists ceased to detach, to refine, to generalize, and be- 
 gan to particularize, to emphasize, to accentuate per- 
 sonal traits, so that the faces in their pictures were not 
 so much general representations of characters as they 
 were portrayals of individual men and women. Nothing 
 seemed to these artists of greater interest and impor- 
 
THE NATIVITY 
 
 79 
 
 tance than making their work life-like ; and life-likeness, 
 as they understood it, could be best attained by resem- 
 blance to particular persons. This new spirit, this prim- 
 itive realism, found utterance in Fra Filippo Lippi, a 
 monk of a very different character from Fra Angelico. 
 He was registered in the Carmelite monastery at Flor- 
 ence in 1420, but was little adapted to wear the cowl 
 with credit. Impulsive, ardent, pleasure-loving, irre- 
 sponsible. Brother Filippo was continually in debt and 
 trouble. Vasari s story that he ran away with Lucrezia 
 Buti, a nun of Prato, who had been sitting as his model 
 for a picture of the Virgin, has been denied by recent 
 critics who have too high an admiration for Filippo's 
 painting to believe anything bad of his character. But 
 though this story may be a malicious fable, there can 
 be little doubt that his life was eccentric and irregular, 
 and that he did many things that he ought not to have 
 done. And yet he did some things that he ought to 
 have done, among which we may reckon the loving care 
 and joy with which he executed his work as a painter, 
 and the delight with which he rendered the faces of 
 young children and innocent maidenhood. Somewhere 
 in his turbulent breast he must have preserved a spring 
 of pure imagination, for nothing could be more delicate 
 and lovely than his picture of the Nativity, in the Berlin 
 Museum. The Virgin is kneeling alone before her 
 Child in a nook in the forest. The scene, the locality, 
 the historical circumstances of the event are all for- 
 gotten. The Child lies smiling with his finger on his 
 lips. The Virgin's face is very human and girlish, 
 with its rounded cheeks, small mouth, pointed chin, 
 
8o THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 and nose which ahnost seems to turn a httle upward. 
 She is one of those young maidens, gentle and pure 
 and shy, who remind us of spring fiowers. Her hands 
 are folded and her head is bent above her babe. She 
 is not the Queen of Heaven, but the mater pia of the 
 human heart. Every mother thinks her child won- 
 derful, but more than all this mother, who beholds the 
 Light of the World lying in her cradle. As Jeremy 
 Taylor says, " She blesses Him, she worships Him, she 
 thanks Him that He would be born of her." 
 
 I remember well my first sight of this picture, 
 nearly twenty years ago. Hitherto the " old masters " 
 had seemed unattractive and dry. And this little 
 panel of green with its few spots of light — could any- 
 thing be more stupid, or less worthy of its stars in the 
 catalogue ? So I thought as I first looked at it ; but 
 as I passed it again and again, and began to linger a 
 little before it, trying to reach its secret, something in 
 the slender grace, the sweet humility, of this virgin's 
 figure, the simplicity of the Child looking up from its 
 bed of wild flowers (each one painted as carefully as if 
 the artist loved it), a breath of poetry from the dark, 
 cool shadows of the wood fascinated me more and 
 more, and at last I appreciated my first " old master." 
 
 There is a close reseniblance in subject and in spirit 
 between this picture and the bass-relief of the Nativity, 
 by one of the Delia Robbia family, which is in the Con- 
 vent of La Verna. I say by one of the family, for four 
 Sfenerations of the Delia Robbia worked in that inex- 
 pensive and beautiful material of glazed and coloured 
 clay which has become inseparably associated with their 
 
THE NATIVITY — BERNARDINO LUINI. From a painting in the Cliurch of Saronno 
 
THE NATIVITY 83 
 
 names, and it is not always possible to decide whether 
 Luca, the eldest, or Andrea, his nephew, or Giovanni, 
 the son of Andrea, or one of the three sons of Giovanni, 
 was the author of a particular relief. But the evidence 
 of style is in favour of assigning this exquisite Nativ- 
 ity to Andrea, who had, perhaps, less power than his 
 uncle Luca, but more grace and charm, and something 
 near akin to the manner of Fra Filippo in rendering 
 the half- humourous, half-pathetic beauty of infantile 
 faces. I climbed up to see this panel, from the smiling 
 vine -clad valley of the Casentino where Arno rises, 
 through the narrow streets of Bibbiena, and over miles 
 of chestnut-covered hills, to the lofty, lonely cliff where 
 the Convent of St. Francis stands among its immemo- 
 rial groves of fir and beech, rich in wild flowers, and 
 haunted by myriads of birds. The bass-relief is in the 
 main church of the convent. It is composed in celes- 
 tial blue and white, except the green sheaf of wheat on 
 which the Christ-child lies. His face is full of life and 
 loveliness, more expressive than the Child in Fra Filip- 
 po's painting. Light clouds float above his head. A 
 family of joyous angels, all alike, yet all different, as if 
 they were children of the same household, cluster about 
 the Heavenly Father, from whom the Holy Dove is 
 floating downward ; and lest we should forget that the 
 angels sang, Andrea has put the score of the Gloria in 
 Excelsis in the centre of the panel. The attitude of 
 the Virgin, with her slender neck, bent head, and long 
 fingers sensitive to the very tips with almost tremulous 
 delight, is not different from Fra Filippo's, but the face 
 is nobler, as if she understood more profoundly the 
 
34 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 meaning of her adoration. While I was lost in con- 
 templation of this most beautiful tablet, there came 
 into the quiet church a peasant woman who had toiled 
 up the long steep hill, under the blazing sun, from her 
 home somewhere among the neighbouring valleys. 
 She was clothed in poverty and bent almost into de- 
 formity by the burden of hard labour ; a black handker- 
 chief was folded about her weary, wrinkled, patient face. 
 She came as close as she could to the little altar be- 
 neath the tablet, and knelt there for a long time, pray- 
 ing in a murmur while the tears ran down her withered 
 cheeks. I know not what tale of sorrow, anxiety, or 
 loss was told in those low whispers ; but it was a 
 strangely moving sight to behold that figure of the 
 never-ceasing yet ever transient troubles and griefs of 
 suffering humanity close beside the image of immortal 
 joy in which the artist's hand had pictured the loveli- 
 ness of the Virgin Mother adoring her Divine Child. 
 Is not the artist also a minister of grace and comfort to 
 the lowly.'* It w^as a thing not to be forgotten to see 
 the look of renewed peace and patience on the poor, 
 brown face as the woman dropped her two mites into 
 the alms-box, and crept slowly out into the sunlight. 
 
 Roger van der Weyden's picture of the Nativity, in 
 the Museum at Berlin, is one of the best works by that 
 devout and thoughtful Flemish master, and represents 
 admirably the spirit of northern art in the fifteenth 
 century. Even more realistic and individual in its aim 
 than Italian art of the same period, it had another ideal 
 of beauty and independent forms of expression. Roger 
 had travelled much in Italy; he had seen the palms and 
 
LA NOTTE — CORREGGIO 
 From a painting in the Dresden Gallery 
 
THE NATIVITY 87 
 
 olives and vineyards, the splendid cities and melting 
 landscapes, the gay colours and graceful forms, the 
 great frescos and the classic works of art of the South, 
 but he came back from it all unchanged and true to his 
 own ideals. There is no touch of Italy in his work; it 
 is all of Flanders. Grave, subdued, simple, hard in out- 
 line, amazingly distinct and delicate in finish, angular 
 in drapery, cool and serene in colour, his pictures are 
 full of the pensive inwardness and self-restraint of the 
 northern spirit, and exhale through all their formality 
 an air of sincere and spiritual beauty. This Nativity 
 was painted about 1450 for Pierre Bladolin, the treas- 
 urer of the Golden Fleece, and the founder of the little 
 city of Middleburg, in Flanders, where he established 
 the coppersmiths who had been burned out of the city 
 of Dinant. An upright and industrious man, he rose by 
 his own exertions to a position of wealth and influence 
 in the court of the Duke of Burgundy, but it is said 
 that the courtiers disliked him for his gravity and econ- 
 omy. Is it not all written in his thin, thoughtful face 
 and his figure plainly clad in sober black, as Roger has 
 painted him, kneeling, in the corner of the picture ? In 
 the background we see the church and castle which 
 he built at Middleburg. The Nativity is represented 
 just as he would have thought of it: a quaint, homely 
 scene. The Virgin's face, with its full forehead, wide- 
 arched brows, and downcast eyes, speaks of purity and 
 piety and though tfulness. Joseph is a careful, toil-worn 
 old man, sheltering with one hand the flame of the lit- 
 tle taper which he holds between the fingers of the 
 other. The tiny angels with their coloured wings seem 
 
88 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 to be clad in long woollen robes as if to resist the north- 
 ern cold. The Holy Child, lying on the corner of his 
 mother's mantle, is a frail and helpless new-born infant, 
 but the illumination of the scene all flows from Him. 
 He is the Light. 
 
 Domenico Ghirlandajo brings us back again into the 
 opulent life of Italy at the close of the fifteenth century, 
 and shows the culmination of the school of Florentine 
 realism. His picture of the Nativity, in the Academy 
 at Florence, displays the strength and the limitations of 
 that school. The scene is somewhat confused and 
 overloaded. Two Corinthian pillars, evidently brought 
 from some ruined temple, support a thatched roof, be- 
 neath which the ox and the ass are sheltered. A richly 
 carved sarcophagus, with a Latin inscription, does duty 
 for the manger. The Christ-child lies on the ground 
 in front of it, and the mother worships Him. But she 
 does not quite forget herself. There is less devotion 
 and more dignity in her look than Lorenzo da Credi 
 or Andrea della Robbia would have given her. And 
 yet she is womanly and beautiful. In the foreground 
 there are two kneeling figures, and a third standing be- 
 hind them with a lamb in his arms. These represent 
 the shepherds. Vasari admired them immensely, and 
 called them cosa divina. But they are unmistakable 
 citizens of Florence — portraits (and excellent portraits 
 too), as we can see at a glance. They are shrewd, cul- 
 tivated, worldly-wise gentlemen of the Medicean type, 
 knowing about as much of sheep as the first well- 
 dressed acquaintance whom you may meet in an after- 
 noon walk on Fifth Avenue. It seems strange to us 
 
THE NATIVITY 89 
 
 to see them " assisting," as the French say, at the Na- 
 tivity. But Ghirlandajo did not think it strange, nor 
 did the Florentines lau£^h at him. Was it because 
 they had a lower idea of the sacred event, or a higher 
 idea of the dignity and worth of humanity than pre- 
 vails in the nineteenth century .f* Perhaps neither of 
 these was the true reason, but it was simply because 
 they had grown used to seeing the scenes of the gospel 
 history represented as miracle-plays, at the great Church 
 festivals, in the midst of a crowd of citizens who were 
 the friends and contemporaries of the actors, and who 
 seemed equally in place in pictures of the same scenes. 
 
 But the most noticeable feature in this picture of 
 Ghirlandajo's is the background. In a rich landscape 
 we see a distant city, a rocky hill-side where the angel 
 is appearing to the shepherds, a Roman causeway, and 
 a triumphal arch, through which a long procession is 
 rapidly approaching. Horsemen and footmen with 
 fluttering robes and rich caparisons — a royal escort for 
 the Kings of Orient — come sweeping onward to the 
 lowly shed. It seems as if the whole world were 
 hastening to give a joyful welcome to the Prince of 
 Peace. It is thus that the painter, a citizen of pros- 
 perous and luxurious Florence, has expressed his con- 
 ception of the meaning of Christmas. 
 
 In Umbria another school of artists was at work de- 
 veloping a very different ideal of the Nativity. Silence, 
 sentiment, and a mystical feeling pervade the pictures 
 of Perugino. The very atmosphere is filled with the 
 clear softness of twilight, and a tender, half- dreamy 
 look rests on all the faces. Venice cherished still an- 
 
90 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 other ideal. Stronger, richer, and more earthly in 
 their imagination, the Bellini and their disciples paint- 
 ed the Madonna with less of virginal grace and more 
 of matronly dignity. The Child lies upon her lap or 
 on a marble balustrade before her, and the mother 
 looks at Him with a face in which there is hardly 
 a trace of deep emotion. She is proud, classical, al- 
 most indifferent, and the splendid infant sleeps se- 
 renely, or listens with royal approval to the angels 
 who make music for Him with Qruitar and violin. In 
 Padua the painters were even more influenced by clas- 
 sical models and the spirit of the Renaissance than in 
 Venice. A careful study of their pictures is as good as 
 a lesson in Greek and Roman antiquities ; but, with 
 the exception of Mantegna in his simpler moods, they 
 have little to tell us about Bethlehem and the wonder- 
 ful birth. 
 
 The coincidence of Lionardo da Vinci, Michael An- 
 gela, and Raphael, in Florence, at the beginning of the 
 sixteenth century, marks the highest period of Italian 
 art. Each of these men was his own master, although 
 each of them owed much to his instructors. Michael 
 Angelo had perhaps the mightiest and most original 
 genius of the three. But he never painted the Nativ- 
 ity. Raphael, the apostle of sweetness and light, the 
 worshipper of beauty, the wonderful scholar of Peru- 
 gino, who so soon surpassed his teacher, left no picture 
 of the event of the Nativity. The Adoration of the 
 Shepherds, in the Loggie of the Vatican, is the work 
 of his pupil, Perino del Vaga. 
 
 But Raphael's Madonna del Gran' Duca is in 
 
1 
 
 THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS — MURILLO 
 From a painting in the Prado, at Madrid 
 
THE NATIVITY 93 
 
 many respects the most perfect and lovable of those 
 pictures which express the sentiment and significance 
 of the Nativity by simply showing us the Virgin with 
 her Divine Babe. This little panel, which hangs now 
 among a crowd of large and splendid paintings in one 
 of the richly decorated rooms of the Pitti Palace, is 
 simple to the verge of austerity, yet it has a soul- 
 winning charm which draws one back to it again and 
 again to be soothed and refreshed. We do not wonder 
 that the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who bought it in 
 1799, and from whom it takes its name, became so fond 
 of it that he carried it about with him wherever he 
 went, even into exile, and believed that it was a source 
 of blessing to his life. The ground of the picture is a 
 very dark green ; against this the half-length figure of 
 the Virgin is in soft relief. Her robe is deep blue, her 
 gown red with a black border, without ornaments or 
 jewels, and of that indistinguishable material which 
 Raphael used for his most sacred personages. It was 
 not that he did not understand the painting of brocade 
 and velvet ; his portraits, and often his pictures of the 
 saints, show a complete mastery of the secrets of texture ; 
 but he felt, with the instinct of a supreme artist, that 
 there was a dignity so high and a beauty so divine that 
 it had no need of artificial adornment; the best rever- 
 ence that he could show would be to make the dress 
 forgotten. Mary's face is pensive, virginal, exquisite, 
 touched with the modest beauty of pure motherhood. 
 A light veil protects but does not conceal her smooth 
 brown hair ; her soft hazel eyes are bent with a con- 
 tented gaze upon her Child ; her upper lip is slightly 
 
94 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 pressed upon the lower and turned upward at the cor- 
 ners, as if a sweet thought were passing through her 
 mind and would soon break into a tender smile. The 
 Holy Child sits lightly upon her hand, pressing his 
 right cheek lovingly against her shoulder, and turning 
 to look out with a gentle, almost sad gaze upon the 
 world which He came to save. There is a mystery of 
 unfathomable thoughtfulness in his eyes, full of grace 
 and truth. Yet He clings to his mother most natur- 
 ally ; the mystery does not divide them nor destroy the 
 soft harmony of the twofold devotion. We feel, in the 
 presence of this picture, the power of the noblest im- 
 agination to help faith, and realize that Divinity is so 
 near to humanity that the Son of God could be born of 
 a woman and rest in the shelter of mother-love. 
 
 Lionardo's influence upon Raphael was distinct, and 
 it went far deeper than the surface, as we can see in 
 this picture, with its inward and inexplicable refinement 
 of charm. But Lionardo, with all his -varied powers, 
 perhaps because they were so varied, left no picture of 
 his own which seems fully adequate to the expression 
 of his genius, unless it was the " Last Supper," which 
 has faded to a spectral image of its original grandeur. 
 Among the Milanese painters who were fascinated by 
 his subtle manner and owned him as their master, 
 the noblest was Bernardino Luini. His conception 
 of the Nativity has nothing extraordinary or strik- 
 ing about it, but it is very graceful and attractive. 
 The pilgrim's flask and bag tell the story of the long 
 journey to Bethlehem. The lovely angels bring the air 
 of heaven into the rude stable. The Virgin's figure is 
 
THE NATIVITY 95 
 
 sweet and pure. And Joseph is worthy to kneel beside 
 her. For this last grace especially we thank Luini. 
 Many of the artists have treated Joseph with scant re- 
 spect. They have represented him as an ugly and de- 
 crepit old man. They have shoved him away into a 
 corner, or propped him up against the wall, ridiculously 
 fast asleep. They have almost used him as a comic 
 figure in the scene. The ox and the ass are often more 
 venerable. But Luini, with better authority in the gos- 
 pel narrative and the earliest traditions of Christian art, 
 has given us a noble and manly Joseph, with a face 
 which corresponds to the dignity and generosity of his 
 conduct. I do not know a more serene and reverent 
 picture of the Nativity than this ; and it loses none of 
 its simplicity and sincerity by the touch of intellectual 
 beauty in the Virgin's face, which Luini could only 
 have learned from Lionardo. 
 
 But, it may be asked, is such a picture as this true 
 to nature and history ? Have we any right to imagine 
 so much beauty and grace in the mother of Jesus ? 
 Was not the stable at Bethlehem a dark, mean place, 
 and the Nativity, like every birth, a scene of anguish 
 and confusion ? Is there not a touch of falsehood in 
 thus idealizing it and turning it into poetry? If the 
 painter is strictly accurate and literally truthful, will 
 he not feel bound to paint a common girl of the He- 
 brew people for the Virgin, a carpenter of Palestine 
 for Joseph, an ordinary Eastern cattle shed for the 
 stable, and an uncomely infant for the Christ-child.'^ 
 
 But certainly it would be a strange and unreal thing 
 to exclude all poetry from the treatment of the Nativity. 
 
96 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 The very heart and life of it is poetry — not poetic fic- 
 tion, but poetic fact. Read again the opening chapters 
 of St. Luke's gospel, and see if they are not overflowing 
 with the poetry of the Nativity. The heavenly nies- 
 sengers who announce Christ's coming, the old priest 
 Zacharias and his wife Elizabeth, the venerable Anna 
 and Simeon waiting in the temple, Mary herself in her 
 maidenly simplicity, all speak in poetry by a sponta- 
 neous impulse. A new star blossoms in the celestial 
 fields, a new music rings through the vault of night, a 
 new worship calls the shepherds from their flocks into 
 the secret shrine of incarnate Divinity. And all this, 
 so far from seeming strange and untruthful to us, must 
 appear only natural, and the strongest confirmation of 
 the truth of the narrative. For if the Nativity is any- 
 thing at all, if there is any reality in it, it is surely the 
 one supreme event of the world, and not otherwise 
 could the story of it be told. As Horace Bushnell has 
 said : " Having wings in the spiritual outfit of our nat- 
 ure, it would be a kind of celestial impropriety if God's 
 spirit did not spread them here. Why, the very ground 
 ought to let forth its reverberated music, and all the 
 choirs and lyres and ringing cymbals of the creation, 
 between the two horizons and above, ought to be dis- 
 coursing hymns, and pouring down their joy, even as 
 the stars do light." 
 
 I think, therefore, that the artist is true to the spirit 
 of the Nativity when he rises above the limitations of a 
 hard literalism and enters into the ideal mystery and 
 beauty of the Holy Night. 
 
 What shall we say, then, of Correggio's " La Notte," 
 
THE HOLY NIGHT 
 From a painting by Fritz von Uhde 
 
THE NATIVITY 99 
 
 that third treasure of the Dresden Gallery, and most 
 popular of all pictures of the Nativity ? There is no 
 crude realism here. It is an indubitable poem on can- 
 vas. But we may still question a little whether the 
 poetry is exactly of the right kind. The movement is 
 overstrained ; it lacks repose and delicacy of rhythm. 
 This big shepherd, with his violent gesture of wonder, 
 this woman with contracted brows and hand lifted to 
 shade the dazzle of light, these wonderfully agile celes- 
 tial limbs vibrating in ecstasy — a man who truly be- 
 lieved in the Nativity, and felt it most profoundly, would 
 have left these out. But Correggio was too excitable, 
 too sensuous, too fond of showing his skill in fore- 
 shortening and contrast of light and shade. He was a 
 wonderful artist, but his genius was not pure, sincere, 
 reverent, and therefore there is a touch of affectation in 
 his work. He is like a preacher who tries to say witty 
 or pretty things in a sermon on the life of Christ. We 
 detect the false note, and it spoils our devotion. 
 
 But, for all that, the heart of this picture — the 
 mother embracing her Child — remains a marvel of 
 beauty, and the world has a right to love it. It was no 
 new or orio^inal idea to make all the liQ:ht of the stable 
 come from the Divine Babe. But no one else has done 
 it so beautifully as Correggio. The glory that streams 
 from the infant is a white, brilliant, supernatural radi- 
 ance, manifestly of heaven; and away behind the hills 
 the dawning of the earth-light looks cold and gray. 
 
 The decline of Italian art into superficiality and ex- 
 aggeration, in the latter part of the sixteenth and in 
 the seventeenth centuries, was followed by a remark- 
 
loo THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 able development of genius in Holland and Flanders, 
 represented by Rubens, Van Dyck, and Rembrandt. 
 But it was not at its best in dealinor with reliQ:ious sub- 
 jects, although the etching- needle of Rembrandt has 
 wondrously illuminated some of the scenes from the 
 ministry of Christ. In Spain, during the seventeenth 
 century, there was a glorious after-bloom of art repre- 
 sented by Velasquez and Murillo. Of these two Velas- 
 quez was the greater painter, but Murillo had a far 
 more profoundly and sensitively religious soul. The 
 record of his eventful life is beautified by the spirit of 
 cheerful piety, and active benevolence, and unfailing, 
 fertile joy in labour. He was a child of the people, and 
 a painter for the people of all time. His pictures are 
 known throughout the world, and have been more 
 highly valued than those of any other man except 
 Raphael. He could paint the ragged children of Se- 
 ville, and the devout monks who were his companions in 
 works of charity, and the glad angels who thronged the 
 heaven of his holy thoughts, with an equal skill. He 
 was humble, reverent, humane, believing, living well up 
 to the light that was given him, loving his art only less 
 than he loved his faith and his fellow- men, doing his 
 duty as well as he could, and dying in honourable pov- 
 erty. 
 
 This was the man who touched the Nativity once 
 more with the hand of faith and love, as the earliest 
 artists touched it. His picture of the Adoration of 
 the Shepherds, from the Prado at Madrid, is painted 
 in his middle manner, which is called calido, from its 
 warmth of colour. No engraver, however skilful and 
 
THE NATIVITY loi 
 
 patient, can hope to render anything more than the 
 cold shadow and suggestion of its wonderful effect. It 
 is a miracle of painting — warm, rich, full of a soft and 
 mellow charm, satisfying the eye with its depth of light 
 and colour — and at the same time it overflows with the 
 purest and most sacred feeling. See this old shepherd, 
 with his toil-hardened feet and his rugged head; he 
 does not exaggerate his emotion and fling his arms 
 about like Correggio's giant, but the awe and tenderness 
 of his emotion are manifest in every line of his figure 
 as he kneels with rude, unconscious grace before the 
 new-born Prince of Peace. And how natural, how in- 
 fantile, yet how serenely divine and luminous, is the 
 Christ -child, over whom his mother bends with min- 
 gled solicitude and adoration! Surely there is some- 
 thing more in this picture than what Ruskin slightingly 
 calls a " brown gleam of gypsy Madonnahood." It is a 
 perfect illustration of the old French Noel: 
 
 " Dieu parmy les pastoreaux, 
 Sous la creche des toreaux, 
 Dans les champs a voulu naistre, 
 Et non parmy les arroys 
 Des grands princes et des roys — 
 Lui des plus grands roys le maistre." 
 
 The eighteenth century has little to offer in the way 
 of sacred art which is of any great value or significance. 
 In the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a 
 strange revival in Germany which produced the school 
 of Overbeck and his disciples. They devoted themselves 
 with a mild fanatical ardour to the service of religion 
 
I02 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 in art and art in religion, wearing their hair long and 
 dressing in quaint costume, so that they were called 
 " the Nazarites," living together in the deserted Monas- 
 tery of San Isidoro at Rome very much as the painter- 
 monks had once lived in the Convent of San Marco in 
 Florence. They went back to Fra Angelico for their 
 inspiration, and much of their work seems like a pale 
 reflection of his. But the movement was too self-con- 
 scious, too theoretical, too imitative and formal in its 
 methods. It lacked strength and originality. It be- 
 longed to a past age more than to the present. And so 
 its influence, always confined to a narrow circle, faded 
 slowly like a tender dream of youth, leaving behind it, 
 however, a few amiable and delicate pictures of the Na- 
 tivity, among which those by Carl Miiller of Dussel- 
 dorf are probably the most familiar. 
 
 In our own generation religious painting has not 
 been popular. It has been overshadowed by other in- 
 terests. The artists have devoted themselves to solving 
 the problems of light and shade, of colour, of atmos- 
 pheric perspective, of decoration, of vivid pictorial effect. 
 Some of the most celebrated reputations have been won 
 by the brilliant and daring handling of subjects in them- 
 selves trivial or unworthy. Others again have attained 
 and deserved fame by their interpretations of the beauty 
 of landscape and the sea, of the significance of ancient 
 mythology and poetry, of the pathos of peasant life, of 
 the subtle secrets of portraiture. But how few are the 
 pictures in which the new-found skill of technique has 
 been sincerely and spontaneously devoted to the service 
 of the beautiful gospel of Christ! 
 
MADONNA IN 
 VLADIMIR 
 CATHEDRAL, 
 KIEFF 
 
 From the 
 
 paintings by 
 
 V. M. Vasnetzoa 
 
THE NATIVITY I05 
 
 And yet there are signs of an awakening in many 
 lands — an awakening in which strange and diverse ele- 
 ments are at work; the crudest realism and the most 
 poetic idealism ; the national spirit which would trans- 
 late the scenes of Christ's life into the dialect of each 
 race, and the universal spirit which would create for it 
 new types of general intelligence ; the growth of his- 
 torical and scientific knowledge expressing itself in the 
 demand for accuracy of dress and surroundings, and the 
 love of pure beauty seeking chiefly the perfect har- 
 monies of form and colour ; the admiration for the 
 great work of the old masters which produces a con- 
 scious or unconscious imitation, and the spirit of inde- 
 pendence which cannot bear to follow any master — all 
 these influences are making themselves felt in the dif- 
 ferent men who are turning back to the birth and in- 
 fancy of Christ as to a rediscovered theme for art, and 
 recognizing that since it has meant so much to the 
 greatest artists and to the past ages it may mean some- 
 thing to us. 
 
 In other chapters of this book there are illustrations 
 of the work of Mr. Holman Hunt — the one among the 
 English pre-Raphaelites who has remained most true 
 to the ideals of that important school — of Bouguereau, 
 Luc Olivier Merson, and Lagarde among the French, 
 of Prof. Heinrich Hofmann among the Germans, and of 
 Mr. John La Farge among the American painters. The 
 head-piece of this chapter is from a tender and sensitive 
 little sketch by Mr. Du Mond, a young American. I 
 wish that I could speak here also of the eminently 
 thoughtful and suggestive pictures which have been 
 
io6 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 recently painted by Mr. Abbot Thayer and Mr. George 
 Hitchcock. In all of these there are signs of promise 
 for religious art. But the two pictures which have 
 been chosen from our own generation as illustrations 
 of the thought of the Nativity have each a peculiar 
 quality which makes them especially significant as inter- 
 pretations of the theme. 
 
 The " Holy Night," by Fritz von Uhde, represents 
 modern realism in its most emphatic form. The tech- 
 nique, if I might speak of that, the brush-work, the 
 handling of light and form, the theory of perspective, are 
 the very essence of modernity. But the conception of 
 the painting is still more striking. The picture follows 
 the antique arrangement of a triptych. There are two 
 wings, containing the approach of the shepherds on one 
 side and the choir of angels on the other, and a central 
 panel with the Nativity. But here all trace of resem- 
 blance to the antique ceases, and everything is directly 
 and literally translated into modern German. The 
 scene is a barn in Bavaria. In a rude loft a bed has 
 been hastily improvised and a man's heavy great -coat 
 is thrown over it for covering. A stable-lantern hangs 
 against the wall. Joseph is half asleep upon the steps 
 of a ladder in the background. Mary is a peasant girl 
 of the plainest type, ill-clad and weary. The light 
 from the lantern, shining through the cold, misty air, 
 seems to throw a halo about her. A great joy illumi- 
 nates her face, and her hands are clasped in a natural 
 gesture of ecstasy as she bends over the Child who is 
 curled helplessly upon her lap. Is the realism carried 
 too far? Is the accent of homeliness, of utter poverty 
 
THE NATIVITY 107 
 
 too strong, so that in time, when the impression of 
 novelty wears off, it will seem strained and false ? Time 
 alone can answer that question and determine whether 
 the picture is only an experiment or a lasting work of 
 art. But for the present we may value it as a sincere 
 protest against the unreal and faithless painting of the 
 Nativity which makes it only an insipid arrangement 
 of lay-figures, a tableau in a sacred drama, or an unbe- 
 lieving imitation of a picture by one of the old masters. 
 This work at least has the vitality of a fact in it. It 
 means to bring the gospel close to the heart of the 
 common people ; and if it helps to bring the heart of the 
 common people close to the gospel it will fulfil a noble 
 mission. It is a Folk-song of the Nativity in South 
 German dialect. And may not this also be a sacred 
 language if it conveys a word of God ? 
 
 The Russian " Madonna and Child," from the cathe- 
 dral at Kieff, belongs to the same class of pictures as 
 Raphael's Madonna del Gran' Duca; but how immense 
 is the difference in conception ! The Virgin's face, 
 true to the traditions of the Greek Church, conveys a 
 reminiscence of the old Byzantine type. But her figure, 
 conceived in the modern spirit, is simply yet majesti- 
 cally placed in a vague, dim landscape, stretching away 
 in the twilight like the faint outline of a great continent, 
 above which she towers till her head seems to be among 
 the stars. The Christ-child, pale, solemn, wide-eyed, a 
 child of Divine sorrow and hope, lifts his arms with a 
 gesture of indescribable exultation, as if He would pro- 
 claim liberty to all the inhabitants of a suffering land. 
 Is it a dream, or do we truly read here a speechless 
 
io8 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 eloquent gospel of peace that is coming to a nation at 
 strife with itself, and of emancipation that shall set the 
 prisoners free, and of rest that shall descend upon the 
 weary and heavy-laden from Him who was born a 
 peasant in a captive land, to become the Deliverer of 
 the oppressed and the world's true Leader into light 
 and liberty? 
 
 IV 
 
 In art all that is sincere and expressive and masterly 
 is valuable. There is no school that has the monopol}^ 
 of merit, no way of painting that is the only right way. 
 In religion all that is pure and reverent and spiritual is 
 precious. There is no exclusiveness in true piety or 
 virtue. The thought of God is always " larger than the 
 measure of man's mind," and each soul discerns but a 
 fragment of it. As we look back upon- the manifold 
 interpretations of the Nativity that art has given to the 
 world we may value all that are significant and genuine 
 and beautiful, feeling one fine quality in one and another 
 profound meaning in another. And yet none of them 
 may completely satisfy us. All that the past has done 
 will not sufifice for the present. For the birth of Christ 
 has a messao;e in it which is inexhaustible and needs to 
 be interpreted anew to every age, to every race. 
 
 Two great movements have taken place in our own 
 times which must have an influence upon the future. 
 One is the earnest effort to understand the historic life 
 of Christ, proceeding in part, at first, from a sceptical 
 
THE NATIVITY 109 
 
 impulse and working with an anti-Christian purpose, 
 but awakening by this very purpose the dormant ener- 
 gies of Christian scholarship, and resulting more and 
 more triumphantly with every year in a firmer concep- 
 tion of the eternal reality of the person of Jesus. The 
 other movement is the revival of popular interest in 
 art and the effort to make it minister more widely to 
 human happiness and elevation. As yet these two 
 movements have not fully interpenetrated one another, 
 although there are evidences that they are coming 
 into closer contact. When the true relation between 
 them is established ; when Christian theology has fully 
 returned to its vital centre in Christ, and its divided 
 forces are reunited, amid the hostile camps and war- 
 ring elements of modern society, in a simple and po- 
 tent ministry of deliverance and blessing to all the 
 oppressed and comfortless "In His Name;" when art 
 has felt the vivid reality and the ideal beauty of this 
 humane gospel of the personal entrance of God into 
 the life of man, and has come back to it for what art 
 needs to-day more than all else — a deep, living, spiritual 
 impulse and inspiration — then art will render a more 
 perfect service to religion, and religion will give a new 
 elevation to art. The noblest subjects will become the 
 painters' favourite themes. The marvel of the Nativity 
 will be interpreted again with new meanings of im- 
 mortal loveliness and truth. The priceless skill of the 
 greatest artists will be employed once more to paint 
 and carve upon the walls of hospitals and asylums and 
 refuges for poor and helpless children of earth the 
 vision of the Christ-child shining in his lowly cradle, 
 
no THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 sheltered and worshipped by pure mother -love. Amid 
 works of benevolence and works of art, beautiful to the 
 sense and to the soul, living faith will join hands with 
 reverent imagination at the birthplace of the Son of 
 God, who became a human child in order that the sons 
 of men might become the children of God. 
 
THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 
 
 See how from far upon the eastern road 
 The star-led wiiards haste -with odours sweet: 
 O run, prevent them with thy humble ode, 
 And Jay it lowly at his blessed feet ; 
 Have thou the honour first thy Lord to greet. 
 
 And join thy voice unto the Angel quire. 
 From out his secret altar touclfd with hallow' d fire. 
 
 John Milton. 
 
JItJoto tofjrn ^tene tnas born in -^Sct^lcbcm of SftttJca in t\)c 
 tiapfi of |)rrolJ tl)r liing:, bcljolti, t()frc came toisc men fvom 
 the caet to ^^erufialrm, 
 
 bavins, SL5ai)rrf is be tbat is born feing of tf)c 2^ctD6 ? 
 for tor I)a^)r seen Ms star in t1)t cast, anlJ arc come to toor- 
 QJ^ip |)tnu 
 
 SLSlf)rn |)rrolJ t^ feinj |)alj I)carli tl)t&t tljinsB, !)f to'is 
 troubled, anU all 2ffcu6alcm toitf) ^m. 
 
 Slnli tDl)rn I)c ()aii cfatficrclj all tl)c cl)icf priests anU scribes 
 of tl)e people tog:et})er, l)e tJemanieti of t()em to^ere Cbrist 
 sl)aiiHi be born. 
 
 9lnli tijep cati unto f)im,3fii I3etl)lel)em of 3futiea: for tl)uB 
 it is Written bp t^e pjropl^et, 
 
 9lnti tI)ou %et|)lel)eni, in t^e lanU of S^'^^\i> 'irt "ot tl)t 
 least among: tl)e princes of ^uin\) : for out of tl)ee sljall come 
 a ^otiernor, tl)at sball rule mp people 2fsrael. 
 
 Cbcn it)erol), tDl)en I)e l^aB pritiilp calleli t^c toise men, 
 inquired of tbem iilisentlp tol)at time tl)e star appeareli. 
 
 Slnli I)e sent tl)em to -JSetljlebem, ani Eaii, (3a anU eearcl) 
 5ilig:entlp for tl^e poung; c()illJ ; anlJ tol)en pe I)al)e founi bint, 
 bring; me tuorti ag:ain, t^at 2f map come aniJ tuorsbip Mm also. 
 
 SLSlbcn ttitp b^^ MariJ l^M ^ing;, tijep ieparteii ; anb, lo, 
 t\)t star, tol)if() ^M p sato in t!)e east, toent before t{)em, till it 
 came anti stooli oiier ml)ere tf)e poung: cl)illi tuas. 
 
 SISEben ti}cv satu t[)e star, tl)ep reioicei tuitj^ ejcceeiing; 
 g;rrat jop. 
 
 3lnlJ ttil)en t^p toere come into tl)e I)ouse, t^p satu tl)e 
 poung: cl)il5 tuitf) ;plarp Ms motMr, antr fell Joton, an! toor= 
 sMppf^ Mm : ani toben tf)ep Mi^ openelj t))nv treasures, tl)ep 
 presenteii unto Mnt g;ifts ; g;olii, anU frankincense, ani mprrM 
 9lnlJ being; tuarneli of (3o^ in a tiream tl)at tMp shoulU 
 not return to |)eroti, t\)t^ Ijeparteii into tMtr oton countrp 
 anotMr tuap. — St. Matthew, ii. 1-12, 
 
l/^ 
 
 
 ®^^5'^% \!/^M^M% 
 
 
 MOSAIC FROM THE CHURCH OF S. APOLLINARE NUOVO, RAVENNA 
 
 fj^^^ HE story of the Wise Men who came from 
 the East to pay their homage to the Holy 
 Child at Bethlehem has always been a fa- 
 vourite theme of Christian art and legend. It was 
 depicted everywhere : on the walls of the Catacombs ; 
 on the sculptured faces of sarcophagi; in the glitter- 
 ing mosaics of the'basilicas; in the palaces of the rich 
 and the churches of the poor ; on gilded drinking- 
 glasses, and carved doors, and marble pulpits, and 
 painted ceilings, and bronze coins, and jewelled shrines 
 — everywhere that art has left its touch we see the 
 Magi worshipping the infant Saviour. From the sec- 
 ond century the long, rich train of representations 
 runs on unbroken through the nineteenth. We may 
 safely say that there is no subject in the range of 
 history, sacred or profane, which has received more 
 splendid illustration. 
 
 Side by side with this stream of pictures and carv. 
 
 8 
 
J 14 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 ings runs the kindred current of imagination speaking 
 to the ear instead of to the eye. Traditions and fables, 
 myths and allegories, fragments of history and philoso- 
 phy, poems and plays and chronicles, gather about the 
 story in marvellous abundance. It is like a trellis 
 overgrown with vines, so luxuriant, so fertile in leaves 
 and blossoms, that the outline of the sustaining struct- 
 ure is almost lost. It would be easy for one who 
 looked at it carelessly to suppose that the whole fabric 
 was flowery and fictitious, with nothing substantial 
 about it. On the other hand, it is no less easy to mis- 
 take the growth of fancy for the framework of history, 
 and accept the later legends as if they belonged to 
 the original narrative. I suppose the hymn, 
 
 "We three kings of Orient are," 
 
 is sung in many a Protestant Sunday-school in hearty 
 unconsciousness that its first line embodies two purely 
 ecclesiastical traditions. 
 
 Our first task, then, if we would understand the 
 Adoration of the Magi, is to go back to the simple nar- 
 rative as it is given in the original records of Chris- 
 tianity. Then we must trace the growth of the legends 
 which have formed about it, and then at length we can 
 hope to comprehend and appreciate something of the 
 works of art in which it has been illustrated. Pictures 
 and sculptures tell the story of religion as veraciously 
 as the decrees of councils and the chronicles of his- 
 torians. But their meaning does not lie upon the sur- 
 face. It yields itself only to him who studies them 
 
THE WISH MEN 
 AND THE STAK- 
 KOGER 
 VAN DER 
 WEYDEN 
 
 From a painting 
 in the Berlin 
 Museum 
 
THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 117 
 
 with care and patience in the light of the age from 
 which they came. 
 
 The story of the Magi, as it is given by the evan- 
 gehst Matthew, is astonishingly brief and unadorned. 
 He tells us without preface that when Jesus was born 
 in Bethlehem certain foreigners arrived at Jerusalem. 
 He does not tell us how many they were, nor of what 
 race, nor of what station in life ; although it is fair to 
 infer from the consideration with which they were re- 
 ceived at the court of Herod, and from the fact that 
 they carried treasure boxes with them, that they were 
 persons of wealth and distinction. The most impor- 
 tant statement in regard to them is that they were 
 Magians — that is to say, disciples of Zoroaster, and 
 members of the sacred or priestly order of Persia, 
 which was then widely scattered among the Oriental 
 nations, and included men of exalted rank. They came 
 from the East, a word which to the dwellers in Pales- 
 tine could hardly have any other meaning than the 
 ancient region of Chaldea, lying beyond the Jordan 
 and the desert. Their explanation of their journey 
 to Herod was that they had seen an appearance in the 
 heavens (whether one star, or many, or a comet, they 
 did not say) which led them to believe that the King 
 of the Jews had been born, and they had come to do 
 reverence to Him. Herod was greatly troubled at hear- 
 ing this, and sent for the chief priests and scribes to in- 
 quire where the prophets had foretold that the Messiah 
 should be born. They answered at once that Bethle* 
 hem was the chosen place. Then Herod, having asked 
 the Magi how long it was since they first saw the ap- 
 
Ii8 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 pearance in the sky, sent them away to Bethlehem, 
 promising that when they had found the young Christ 
 he also would come to do reverence to Him. Havins: 
 set out on their journey, they saw once more the 
 celestial sign ; and it directed them to the place where 
 Jesus was. Coming into the house (for Joseph had 
 now found better shelter than a stable), they saw the 
 young Child with Mary his mother, and prostrated 
 themselves in worship. Opening their treasure chests, 
 they presented to Him gifts of gold and frankincense 
 and myrrh. Then being warned in a dream not to go 
 back to Herod, they took another road into their own 
 country. 
 
 It must be confessed that if we accept the tradition 
 as a part of the narrative, and suppose that what they 
 saw in the sky was a single star which moved directly 
 in front of them all through their journey, and finally 
 took its stand just over the door of the house of Joseph 
 in Bethlehem, it would be difficult to parallel the 
 story. But if we take the account as it is given by 
 the evangelist, we find a remarkable light thrown 
 upon it by the discoveries of modern astronomy. 
 The conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn 
 is one of the rarest of celestial events. It occurs 
 only once in eight hundred years. This conjunction, 
 all astronomers agree, happened no less than three 
 times in the year 747 a.u.c, shortly before the birth 
 of Christ. In the following year it took place again, 
 and now the planet Mars joined the conjunction. In 
 1604 the astronomer Kepler observed a similar con- 
 junction, and saw, between Jupiter and Saturn, a new. 
 
THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 119 
 
 brilliant, evanescent star. The astronomical tables of 
 the Chinese, which are the most ancient records of 
 the sky, mention a star of the same character, which, 
 according to the best calculations, appeared and van- 
 ished in the year 750 a.u.c. These strange things must 
 have been visible to all who observed the heavens in 
 that year. Certainly they could be seen from Jeru- 
 salem, and to one leaving that city they would appear 
 to lead in the direction of Bethlehem. It may be that 
 we have here, in this "fairy tale of science," a confir- 
 mation of this beautiful story of religion, a hint and 
 trace of 
 
 "the light that led 
 The holy elders with their gift of myrrh." 
 
 Once having entered the house and found the Child 
 whom they sought, their conduct in his presence could 
 hardly have been different from that which is described 
 by the evangelist. Their deep obeisance was a sign of 
 that religious reverence with which every Persian was 
 accustomed to regard a king. The gifts which they 
 took from their treasuries were appropriate to the 
 region from which they were brought and the person 
 to whom they were presented. It may even be that 
 the Magians attached a symbolical meaning to them, 
 for the language of the Orient is figurative ; and per- 
 haps the old Church father, Irenceus, gives us historic 
 truth as well as poetic beauty when he represents the 
 Wise Men as offering gold to the royalty, and incense 
 to the divinity, and myrrh to the humanity of the new- 
 born King. 
 
I20 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 It is no wonder that the Christians of Rome, paint- 
 ing upon the walls of their underground hiding-places 
 and cemeteries those rude but cheerful pictures, like 
 bright flowers blossoming in the darkness, which ex- 
 pressed the hope and joy of their early faith, fixed 
 upon this story as one of the first subjects of their art. 
 It spoke to them of the coming triumph of their re- 
 ligion, and of the glory and dignity which touched the 
 Christ even in his cradle. For the chapel and for the 
 grave it had a word of promise, glad, generous, and 
 exultant. In the hands of these first artists the pict- 
 ure corresponded with the simplicity of the gospel nar- 
 rative. It was little more than a sketch, a vague out- 
 
 FRESCO FROM THE CATACOMBS 
 
 line, without fixed form or curious detail. The number 
 of the Magi varied from six to two. One of the ear- 
 liest of these paintings is from the Catacomb of SS. 
 Marcellinus and Peter at Rome. Mary is seated in a 
 large chair; her brown hair is unveiled, as a sign of 
 
THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 121 
 
 her virginity, her bare feet are crossed, and her eyes 
 are downcast. She holds the Child in her arms. Two 
 Magi approach, one from either side, and present their 
 gifts in golden dishes. There is no sign of royalty 
 about them ; but their Phrygian caps, short tunics, and 
 mantles show that they come from the East. This 
 picture dates from the first half of the third century. 
 
 As we go on tracing the subject through the long 
 series of representations in the fourth and fifth and 
 sixth centuries we find its form becoming more fixed 
 and particular. New details are added : an open book, 
 to show that the Magi were familiar with the prophecy 
 of Balaam ; a star above the Child, to show the way in 
 which He was recognized ; an old man standing behind 
 the chair of Mary and pointing upward, to represent 
 Joseph, or the prophet Isaiah, or the Holy Ghost; the 
 heads of camels, to tell the story of the journey. The 
 number of the pilgrims is fixed at three, to correspond 
 with the number of their gifts, and perhaps also with 
 the three Hebrew children at the court of Nebuchad- 
 nezzar, whose story is frequently given as the compan- 
 ion piece to that of the Magi. At length the crowns 
 appear, in the great mosaic of S. Apollinare Nuovo, in 
 Ravenna (a.d. 534). Byzantine art shows us the "three 
 kings of Orient," stiff, formal, glittering with gold and 
 jewels, as they stride with equal step to present their 
 offerings to the Madonna and her Child, enthroned in 
 state and guarded by four archangels with star-tipped 
 sceptres. 
 
122 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 II 
 
 Here we find ourselves in the midst of the ereat 
 stream of legends, which takes its rise in the apocry- 
 phal gospel of St. Thomas, and flows on, through ser- 
 mons, and mysteries, and miracle-plays, and poems, and 
 chronicles, until finally there is hardly any conceivable 
 question which pious curiosity could ask about the 
 Magi for which the pious fabulist had not a ready an- 
 swer. Some of these legends are very beautiful, and 
 some of them are very grotesque. There is great 
 store of them to be found in the Legenda Aurea of 
 Jacobus de Voragine, and in the quaint old German 
 poems of Peter Suchenwirth, Konrad of Fussesbrunn, 
 Walther of Rheinau, and the clever Lady Hros- 
 witha, the " White Rose " of the cloister of Gander- 
 sheim. It would be a long task to enumerate them 
 all, and trace them to their sources. Bat let us imag- 
 ine a monk of the fifteenth century preaching at the 
 feast of Epiphany in the Cathedral of Cologne. The 
 long procession, with swinging censers, and tinkling 
 bells, and waving banners, has carried the splendid 
 golden shrine of the Magi, crusted with precious 
 stones, in its solemn circuit of the church. The music 
 dies away, and the preacher mounts the pulpit and 
 unfolds the familiar tale of wonder. 
 
 " In this casket, my children, sleep the bones of three 
 mighty kings. Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar were 
 their names, but in Greek they were called Galgalat, 
 Malgalat, and Sarithin. Now Caspar was sixty years 
 
SHRINE OF THE THREE KINGS, IN THE COLOGNE CATHEDRAL 
 From a photograph by tlie Arundel Society, London 
 
 L_. 
 
THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 125 
 
 old, and he came from Arabia ; Balthasar was forty 
 years old, and he was black, for he came from Saba; 
 Melchior was twenty years old, and his country was 
 Tarshish. These kins^s had heard the word of the 
 prophet Balaam that a star should come out of Jacob, 
 and they waited for its appearance. Moreover, certain 
 great miracles had happened to them. One of them 
 had seen an ostrich hatch an egg, out of which came 
 a lion and a lamb. Another had beheld a flower more 
 beautiful than a rose, growing on a vine, and out of it 
 flew a dove which prophesied of Christ ; and the last 
 had a child born to him which foretold the birth and 
 death of Jesus, and after thirty-three days, as the child 
 had said, it died. So these kings did use to go to- 
 gether to a mighty pleasant place, with fountains and 
 choice trees, on the side of a high mountain, called 
 Mons Victorialis, to watch for the star. And suddenly, 
 while they were praying, with hands and eyes lifted up, 
 it appeared to them in the form of a little babe, exceed- 
 ing bright and shining, so that all the other stars were 
 lost in its brightness. Then these kings were very 
 glad, and gat them in haste upon their dromedaries, 
 and followed the star day and night, without eating or 
 sleeping, till they came on the thirteenth day to Jeru- 
 salem. And some say they went so swiftly because 
 God helped them ; but it may have been, my children, 
 that the dromedaries were very fast. 
 
 " Now when they had inquired of Herod the place 
 in which the King of the Jews should be born, they 
 went on to Bethlehem ; and the star, going before 
 them, stood still over the very house where Jesus was 
 
126 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 dwelling. So they entered, and found the Holy Vir- 
 gin and the Child, and worshipped them, offering gifts. 
 And Melchior gave thirty pieces of gold, the same 
 which had been made by Terah, the father of Abra- 
 ham, and given by Joseph to the Sabeans as the price 
 of the spices with which he embalmed the body of 
 Jacob, and brought again by the Queen of Sheba when 
 she came to visit King Solomon. Nor did the three 
 kings forget the parents of our blessed Lord, for as 
 they were departing they gave to the Virgin money 
 and silken robes, and to Joseph gold and jewels. And 
 Mary gave to them one of the linen bands in which 
 the child was swaddled, which they kept as a great 
 treasure, for when it was cast into the fire the flames 
 had no power upon it, but it came out whole. 
 
 " Now an angel had spoken unto them in a dream 
 that they should not return to Herod, for he was seek- 
 ing to destroy them and the young child also. So 
 they took ship, and went around by Tarshish into their 
 own country. But after they had departed the star fell 
 into a deep well hard by the house. And in that place, 
 my children, a great wonder is seen. For those who 
 look into the well behold the star in the bowels of 
 the earth, moving from one side of the well to the 
 other, just as if it were in the sky. But when many 
 persons are looking in, the star appears only to those 
 who are wisest and most sound in mind. And this 
 doubtless is the reason why that French deacon from 
 the church of Tours who went lately to the Holy Land 
 could not see the star, though he looked long into the 
 well. 
 
ONE OF THE MAGI — BENOZZO GOZZOLI 
 From tlie fresco in the Palazzo Riccardi, Florence 
 
I 
 
THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 
 
 129 
 
 " Now many years after the three kings had returned 
 to their country the holy apostle Thomas travelled 
 thither and baptized them in the Christian faith. So 
 they went out to preach, and were slain by the bar- 
 barous Gentiles of the far East. But the holy Em- 
 press Helena of blessed memory discovered their 
 bones, and brought them to Constantinople. From 
 there they were carried to Milan, and not long after 
 the Emperor Barbarossa brought them from that place 
 unto our own city. Here at last the bones of these 
 great travellers and wise kings find their rest, and have 
 worked many great miracles, and are the glory of our 
 city, so that you, my children, must rejoice in them, 
 and give liberally of your gold that this cathedral may 
 be finished to the praise of God and the honour of the 
 three kinoes." 
 
 Something like this was the legend which the curi- 
 ous fancy of the Middle Ages evolved out of the his- 
 tory told by St. Matthew. A modern version of it, less 
 miraculous but more realistic and picturesque, is given 
 in the opening chapter of Ben-Htir, with its three cam- 
 els emerging suddenly from the unknown, and its mys- 
 tic meeting of the travellers in the lonely valley of the 
 desert. If we wish illustrations for the story, there is 
 hardly a single point of it for which we cannot find 
 some creation of art, grotesque, or quaint, or lovely, as 
 the genius of the artist and the spirit of his age and 
 country may have moulded his work. 
 
 Would you be certified of the names of the kings ? 
 Here the sculptor has carved them for you on a relief 
 over the portal of S. Andrea in Pistoia. Would you 
 
 9 
 
I30 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 know how the star appeared to them ? Taddeo Gaddi 
 will show you in the church of Santa Croce at Flor- 
 ence. Would you follow their pilgrimage ? You may 
 do so under the guidance of Andrea del Sarto in the 
 cloisters of Sta. Annunziata ; or if you prefer a modern 
 picture, Mr. Edwin A. Abbey has drawn it for you in 
 black and white. Would you behold them before 
 Herod ? You have only to look at the ceiling of the 
 cloister -church at Lambach, or the chancel arch of 
 S. Maria Maggiore at Rome. W^ould you watch their 
 adoration of the Christ -child? Meister Stephan will 
 display it to you above the high altar of Cologne, or 
 Hans Memlinc in the hospital at Bruges, or Andrea 
 Mantegna in the Uflfizi, or Domenico Ghirlandajo in 
 the chapel of the Innocents at Florence, or Francia in 
 the picture-gallery at Dresden, or Titian in the muse- 
 um at Madrid, or Niccolo Pisano on the glorious pul- 
 pits of Pisa and Sienna, or Paul Veronese in the 
 National Gallery at London, or Sodoma in the church 
 of San Agostino at Sienna. Would you know how 
 Joseph looked when he received his present.'* There 
 he is, in Fra Angelico's lovely panel in the Academy at 
 Florence. Would you see the kings warned in their 
 dream to keep away from Herod } They are sleeping 
 on the portal of the cathedral at Benevento and on Gio- 
 vanni Pisano's pulpit at Pistoia. Would you behold 
 their embarkation in the ship of Tarshish ? Benedetto 
 Bonfigli shows their return by sea in his picture at 
 Perugia, and Gentile da Fabriano has put it into the 
 background of his great painting at Florence. You have 
 only to choose what you want — devout feeling, or gor- 
 
THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI — RUBEXS 
 From a painting in the Museum at Antwerp 
 
THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 133 
 
 geous colour, or dramatic intensity, the patient realism 
 of Germany or the splendid idealism of Italy, marble 
 or wood-carving, bronze or mosaic, fresco or oil-paint- 
 ing — and you shall have it from the hand of a master. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Let us take five illustrations of the story, two from 
 the fifteenth century, one from the seventeenth, and 
 two more from the nineteenth. 
 
 The painting by Roger van der Weyden represents 
 the Appearance of the Star to the Wise Men. It is 
 one of the side-panels of the triptych in the Berlin 
 Museum, of which we have already studied the central 
 picture in the chapter on the Nativity. The other side- 
 panel depicts the legend of the vision in which the 
 Roman sibyl shows the Virgin and Child to the Em- 
 peror Augustus (a portrait of Philip the Good). It was 
 painted in 1450, and apart from its value as a work of 
 earnest and devout Flemish art, it has especial interest as 
 an evidence of the fact that some of the legendary addi- 
 tions to the story of the Magi made an earlier impression 
 upon northern than upon southern art. In the pictures 
 which the Florentines, Fra Angelico and Benozzo Goz- 
 zoli, were painting about this time we find, for example, 
 no trace of the legend that one of the kings was a black 
 man, and the ages of the three are not always distinctly 
 marked. But Van der Weyden has embodied all the 
 details of the story in his picture ; the star appears 
 
134 
 
 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 miraculously in the form of a shining babe ; one of the 
 kings is black, with thick lips and woolly hair; and, 
 unless I am mistaken, the crown of the oldest king is 
 resting upon the parchment of Balaam s prophecy, in 
 which the}^ had read of the star to come out of Jacob. 
 In a painter of to-day the attempt to imitate all this 
 quaintness of sentiment would be as false and unnat- 
 ural as the effort to reproduce the Flemish stiffness of 
 outline and rich elaboration of ornament. But in Roger 
 it was all sincere, and therefore it is beautiful in its own 
 fashion. The clear, calm light of early dawn which 
 illuminates the landscape with pensive radiance, and 
 the serene awe of devotion which is expressed in the 
 faces and figures of the Magi, are but the reflection 
 of the old painter's tranquil and believing spirit, which 
 the magic mirror of art has preserved for us through 
 three centuries of turmoil and doubt. 
 
 The most remarkable and interesting of all pictures 
 of the Magi is Benozzo Gozzoli's fresco. in the Riccardi 
 Palace at Florence. This Benozzo, if history speaks 
 the truth of him, was a most delicious man, correct in 
 his conduct, respected and beloved by his neighbours 
 for his amazing industry and exemplary piety, and at the 
 same time not in the least spoiled or priggish, but filled 
 with an ever-new passion of wonder and delight towards 
 all the creatures of God, and resolved to show as many 
 of them as possible in his pictures. His great oppor- 
 tunity came when the Medici, the Rothschilds of Flor- 
 ence, sent for him, in 1459, to decorate the walls of the 
 family chapel in their new palace. The room is only 
 about twenty-five feet square, but all the walls, except 
 
THE 
 
 ADORATION 
 OF THE 
 MAGI— 
 BOUGUEREAU 
 
 From the 
 painting 
 in the 
 Church of 
 St. Vincent 
 de Paul 
 Paris 
 
THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 137 
 
 on the side which has been cut away in modern times 
 to make room for a window, are completely covered 
 with the most gorgeous colours and life-like figures. I 
 know of no room in the world which makes such an 
 overwhelming impression of the opulence of painting. 
 The subject which Benozzo chose was the Journey of 
 the Kings of the East, and he has crowded the whole 
 chapel with it, leaving only the square recess where the 
 altar once stood for two beautiful rows of adoring angels 
 and a picture of the Nativity, which has now disap- 
 peared. It is an idle thing to say, as many of the 
 guide-books do, that the frescos were painted by lamp- 
 light because there was originally no window in the 
 chapel. Such superb colours were never mixed in arti- 
 ficial light. The little room is, in fact, only a space por- 
 tioned off within a lofty, well-lighted hall, and Gozzoli 
 must have worked there before the ceiling was put on. 
 Then his pictures were closed in, like jewels in a 
 casket. 
 
 He has represented the long procession of the Magi 
 as passing through a valley, into which they come wind- 
 ing down on the left, and out of which they go winding 
 up on the right, with prancing steeds and stately war- 
 riors, graceful pages and wrinkled councillors, spearmen 
 and huntsmen, sleek greyhounds, spotted leopards, and 
 keen-eyed hawks. Meanwhile, on the hills around, life 
 goes on as usual. Hunters follow the deer, travellers 
 pursue their journey along winding roads to the distant 
 towns, the pines stand straight and solemn upon the 
 rocks, and the palms lift their feathery heads against 
 the sky. The oldest king is a portrait of the venerable 
 
138 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 Patriarch of Constantinople, with his long snowy beard 
 and red robe, riding on a white mule. Behind him, as 
 the second king, comes the Greek emperor, John Palae- 
 ologus, dark-faced and haughty, in his rich green dress 
 and pointed crown, looking just as he did when he came 
 to the famous council at Florence in 1439, at which the 
 union of the Greek and Latin Churches was promised 
 but not accomplished. The third king is the young 
 Lorenzino de Medici, then a boy of some twelve years. 
 He is dressed in white, embroidered with gold, and 
 wears a light blue turban on the golden curls which 
 cluster round his cheeks and fall upon his neck. His 
 proud eyes look out at you serenely, as with hands 
 crossed over his gemmy bridle and spurred feet daintily 
 touching his stirrups, he bestrides his grand white 
 charger, which tosses its head as if it felt the joy of 
 carrying the flower of the Medicean house, the hope and 
 glory of Florence. He is followed by a throng of peo- 
 ple, mounted and on foot, among whom are Cosimo de 
 Medici, the aged head of the family, and his son Piero, 
 and the painter himself, in a red cap with the inscription 
 Optis Benotii on the brim. 
 
 It is a marvellous opus indeed, and one which gives 
 us great admiration for Benozzo's fertility and skill. 
 But what has all this Florentine display to do with the 
 story of the Magi } Little enough, to be sure, if we take 
 it literally; but it was the best that Benozzo knew of 
 the pomp and splendour of earth ; and if the innocent 
 old painter could only have brought it all in truth to 
 the feet of the infant Christ, Florence might have had 
 a happier history, and the dream of the Emperor False- 
 
THE ARUIVAL 
 OF THE 
 MAGI AT 
 BETHLEHEM 
 —JOHN LA 
 FAROE 
 
 First half of the 
 painting" in the 
 Church of the 
 Incarnation, 
 New York 
 
THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 141 
 
 olosfus mio^ht have been fulfilled in the union of Eastern 
 and Western Christendom. 
 
 The immense Adoration in the museum at Ant- 
 werp is one of the most triumphant works of that robus- 
 tious pagan and superb colourist, Peter Paul Rubens. 
 It is said that he finished the picture in thirteen days. 
 It was a tottr de force, yet from a painter's point of view 
 there is little to be altered. The figures are wrapped 
 in a flood of warm light, brilliant without glare, and 
 filled with harmonious tones. Types of beauty and of 
 ugliness appear side by side. The two noble princes 
 in the foreground ; the burly African in green and pea- 
 cock blue, with his thick lips and rolling eyes, looking 
 down in scornful surprise upon the babe whom he must 
 worship ; the grotesque heads of the camels ; the grin- 
 ning Nubians peering beneath the cobwebbed beams of 
 the stable ; the joyous child, leaning from the lap of his 
 mother, who smiles at his eagerness ; the curious spec- 
 tators ; the soldiers' helmets ; the Corinthian pillar in 
 the background ; the head of the ox, dashed into the 
 foreground with a few swift, sure strokes of the brush 
 — what a vigorous tableau is this ! How rich, how dra- 
 matic, how frankly heathen ! 
 
 The picture by Bouguereau in the Lady Chapel of 
 the Church of St. Vincent de Paul, at Paris, is likewise 
 one of the best that its author has painted. But here 
 we have passed from the religious atmosphere of Ant- 
 werp in the seventeenth century to that of Paris in the 
 nineteenth. The artist is learned ; he respects the tra- 
 ditions ; he is devout ; he will not lose the doctrinal 
 meaning of the scene. Yet he is, above all, a beauty 
 
142 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 worshipper. He must have graceful outlines, smooth 
 surfaces, refined colours. The Virgin is seated in front 
 of a marble house, under an awning. Her blue robe 
 covers her dress completely ; only a touch of red shows 
 at her wrist. She seems weary and oppressed. In the 
 background the white houses of the Syrian town lie 
 quivering in the heat. The child Jesus seem-S to be 
 nearly a year old. He sits on Mary's lap, leaning back, 
 with his right hand raised in benediction. It is the 
 attitude of a young prince. The three kings, two of 
 whom are dark, middle-aged men, while the third is old 
 and gray, kneel before the Child, and one of them swings 
 a censer. They are dressed in long robes of dull yel- 
 low, with diadems and large halos. Their attendants 
 carry gifts and fans of peacock's plumes. St. Joseph, 
 a dignified and protecting figure, stands beside the Vir- 
 gin, with one hand on the back of her chair and the 
 other laid on his breast. It is all very carefully com- 
 posed, solemn and stately. The impression which it 
 makes is one of elegance. But, after all, the picture 
 misses something. It is not deep enough. Its colour 
 lacks warmth, and its figures lack life. Its beauty is 
 elaborate and unreal. It says too much and too 
 little ; for a great painting must be at once frank 
 and reserved. It must express its meaning, and 
 yet have a mystery in it, something below the sur- 
 face, which leads the mind on into the secret of 
 visions. 
 
 When we come to La Farge's double picture in the 
 chancel of the Church»of the Incarnation, at New York, 
 we find these conditions met, and may justly say that 
 
THE ARRIVAL 
 OF THE 
 MAGI AT 
 BETHLEHEM 
 —JOHN LA 
 FAROE 
 
 Second half of 
 the painting in 
 the Church of 
 the Incarna- 
 tion, New 
 York 
 
THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 
 
 145 
 
 this latest work of art upon the familiar theme is also 
 one of the noblest. In drawing, the picture is not 
 faultless; there is a touch of insecurity in some of the 
 figures. In colour it is a victorious experiment " in 
 the key of blue." The painter has abandoned the tra- 
 ditions. He shows us four pilgrims, not kings, but 
 Magians of the East. One of them has dismounted, 
 and kneels, uncovered, with out-stretched, trembling 
 hands, a sincere and eloquent figure. The others, seat- 
 ed high upon their wearied horses, are still in the back- 
 ground. A shining angel, white as snow, points to the 
 couch where Mary is lying with her babe. 
 
 How significant the action with which she lifts the 
 veil from "the Light of the World!" How sublime the 
 meaning of the scene ! For now the sweet pastoral 
 seclusion of the Nativity, with its angelic songs and 
 wondering shepherds, is broken by the contact of the 
 great world. The vast stream of history, flowing down 
 from the cradle of nations in the Orient, sweeps suddenly 
 towards the cradle of Jesus. The past, with all its ven- 
 erable traditions, the scattered races of mankind, the 
 philosophy of the ages, the honour and power and wealth 
 of earthly kingdoms, come thronging dimly in the train 
 of these mysterious visitors to do homage to an infant 
 on his mother's breast. 
 
 And when our world learns this lesson ; when pride 
 bows down to meekness, and experience does homage 
 to innocence; when every child is reverenced as a royal 
 heir of heaven because it is a brother of the Christ-child 
 — then the Epiphany will come, and a great light will 
 lighten the nations. 
 
THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT 
 
 Thou wayfaring Jesus, a pilgrim and stranger, 
 
 Exiled from heaven by love at thy birth. 
 Exiled again from thy rest in the manger, 
 
 A fugitive child 'mid the perils of earth — 
 Cheer -with thy fellowship all -who are weary. 
 
 Wandering far from the land that they love ; 
 Guide every heart that is homeless and dreary 
 
 Safe to its home in thy presence above. 
 
SlnlJ to^cn tlft^ toere icpartcli, bc()olU, tl)t nng:cl of tftr 
 lort appcarctb to S^oscpb in a tJrcam, sapiiTg:, ^riec, anil 
 tafef tf)r pountj rI)iHi anli l)W motI)rr, anti flcr into (fiffppt, anU 
 be t^ou tbcvf until 2f ^nns tl)ff toorl! : for |)cro5 luill eccfe 
 t{)f poitng: cl)ilti to ticstrop bini. 
 
 5l5E()cn i)t avast, l)c toofe tl)c poung; cbiliJ ani bis motI)rr 
 i)p ni^bt, anlJ Jrpartcti into ©sppt : 
 
 91nli Uias tf)crc until tljc ticatb of |)froti : tl)at it mig;I)t be 
 fulfillfU tu|)irb tnas spofern of tl)e lori bp tli)c propl)et, sap- 
 intj, ©itt of ©sppt I)aPc ^ called mp son. 
 
 CI)cn |)croti, lubcn I)f eato tbat I)c toac mocferli of tl)c toiet 
 men, toas ncccliing: toroti), anlJ ecnt forti), anli slctu all t()c 
 cI)iHJrcn t()at tucrc in -Sc tl)lcl^f in, anil in all the coa0ts tI)crfof, 
 from ttoo pears 015 ani unlier, aeeortJintj to tl)e time tDl)irj) 
 l^e I)ati tiilttrentlp inqttireli of t^e toiee men. 
 
 ^1)en tuas fulfilled tbat tofjic^ tuae spolxen bv 3ffremp tf)e 
 propbet, caping:, 
 
 2fn Eamal) toas t()ere a tioice ^earti, lamentation, anti lueep^ 
 tntj, anU peat mourninti;, Eacl)el toeepincf for !)er c^iliiren, 
 anti tooulii not be comforteU, berause t()ep are not. 
 
 ■iSut toben |)eroti inas tieati, beljolti, an ang;el of tf)e lorti 
 appearetl) in a liream to ^fosepb in ©ffppt, 
 
 Raping:, Srise, anti tafee tbe poung: ebillJ anti bis matter, 
 anU p into tl)e lani of ^Tsrael: for tl)cv are beati ml)icb 
 BDU5!)t tl^e poung: cl^illl'6 life. — St. Matthew, ii. 13-20. 
 
I 
 
 iANY great travellers have visited Egypt, and 
 many famous fugitives have found asylum 
 there ; but none so great or so famous as 
 the little Child who was carried thither by his parents 
 in the days of Herod the king. The story of their 
 journey is told by the Evangelist Matthew, who says 
 that after the visit of the Magi, Joseph had a dream 
 in which he saw an angel warning him to save the 
 child Jesus from the envious wrath of Herod by flee- 
 ing into Egypt, and that he acted upon the warning 
 promptly, going away from Bethlehem by night, and 
 remaining in Egypt until Herod was dead. 
 
 Nothing could be more likely than that Joseph 
 should have such a dream after the Magi had de- 
 parted ; for he knew, as all the inhabitants of Judea 
 had reason to know, the black, jealous, bloody tem- 
 per of King Herod, and how quick and cruel he was 
 to put any fancied rival out of the way. His own 
 children and his favourite wife Mariamne were butch- 
 ered by his command because he was afraid of them ; 
 and such an incident as the homage of the Wise Men 
 to the child Jesus, coming to his ears, would certainly 
 have aroused his malignant fear. It was natural that 
 Joseph's sleep should be troubled with some dark pre- 
 
ISO 
 
 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 sentiment of the slaughter of the innocents at Bethle- 
 hem, and that he should be ready to heed the angel's 
 exhortation to speedy flight. Everything was in favour 
 of Egypt as the place of refuge. It was far beyond 
 the reach of Herod's treacherous hand, and yet it was 
 near enough to be easily gained. Three days would 
 be sufftcient to bring the travellers to the boundary 
 between Egypt and Palestine, and once across it they 
 would be safe. The gifts of the Magi had provided 
 them with money for the journey. In Egypt they 
 would find many colonies of Jews, among whom they 
 would be kindly received and securely hidden. So 
 they set out on their pilgrimage, this faithful Joseph 
 and the mother Mary, with their sacred Child; with 
 what company, if any, and in what manner of journey- 
 ing, we know not, save that their departure was under 
 the friendly cover of darkness ; they passed safely 
 through the mountains of Judea, and across the Phil- 
 istine plain, and reached the friendly" shelter of the 
 land of the Sphinx, while Herod's fury of jealousy 
 spent itself in vain upon the children of Bethlehem. 
 And when the murderous king was dead, they re- 
 turned from exile to their own country. That is the 
 brief and simple history of the Flight. 
 
 But the poetry of it — how deep, how wonderful, 
 how suggestive ! Let any one who believes that Jesus 
 was the Christ reflect upon the significance of this 
 story — the strange contrast between the serene, mu- 
 sical night of the Nativity, and this troubled, threaten- 
 ing night of the journey; the adoration which was 
 brought to the Child from far lands, and the perse- 
 
THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT — GIOTTO 
 From a fresco in the Chapel of the Arena, Padua 
 
THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT 
 
 153 
 
 cution which followed him in his own country ; the 
 king of Heaven fleeing from the king of Judea; the 
 utter helpless dependence of the little babe upon his 
 parents during the long and weary journey ; the mys- 
 tery of his secret sojourn among the venerable tem- 
 ples and pyramids and dusty idolatries of old Egypt 
 — surely the picture of the Holy Child would not be 
 perfect without this weird shadow of peril and this 
 experience of the hard vicissitudes of mortal life. 
 
 n 
 
 It was not possible, however, for the active imagina- 
 tion of the early Christians to rest content with St. 
 Matthew's short and plain record of the Flight. They 
 must know more about it — how the pilgrimage was 
 made, through what places the Holy Family passed, 
 what marvels and portents happened by the way, and 
 where they found a resting-place. And so the litera- 
 ture of the Flight unfolded itself in the apocryphal 
 gospels, and continued its growth through the poems 
 and chronicles of the Middle Ages. Nothing can be 
 more clear than the difference between the simple 
 statement of St. Matthew that the journey was made 
 — a statement which bears every mark of being his- 
 torical, and reads as if it were merely a transcript of 
 the Virgin Mary's remembrance of that hurried and 
 dream -like episode — and the wild, fantastic fables of 
 later times. And yet these fanciful stories, which were 
 
154 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 told SO often at the fireside, in the tent, at the rest- 
 ing-place of the reapers, and by the camp-fires of the 
 caravan, have had considerable influence upon art. 
 
 Here is one, for example, from the History of the 
 Nativity of Mary. 
 
 " And having come to a certain cave and wishing 
 to rest in it, the blessed Mary dismounted from her 
 beast, and sat down with the child Jesus in her 
 bosom. And there were with Joseph three boys and 
 with Mary a girl, going on the journey along with 
 them. And lo ! suddenly there came forth from the 
 cave many dragons, and when the children saw them 
 they cried out in great affright. Then Jesus went 
 down from the bosom of his mother, and stood on his 
 feet before the dragons; and they adored Jesus, and 
 thereafter retired. But Mary and Joseph were very 
 much afraid lest the child should be hurt by the drag- 
 ons. And Jesus said to them : Do not be afraid, and 
 do not consider me as a little child; -for I am and 
 always have been perfect, and all the beasts of the field 
 must needs be tame before me." I do not know that 
 any of the painters have ventured upon a representa- 
 tion of the dragons, but many of them, beginning with 
 Giotto, have given us the three boys and the girl who 
 had such a dreadful fright. 
 
 Another anecdote told by the same author has al- 
 ways been a favourite with the poets and painters. 
 The Holy Family are resting beneath a date-palm, 
 and Mary longs for some of the tempting fruit, 
 which hangs high above her head. Joseph declares 
 that he is too tired to clinib the smooth stem of 
 
the tree. But the child Jesus knows his mother's 
 wish, and at his command the branches bend down- 
 ward to her hand. Then he thrusts his finger into 
 the sand at the root of the tree, and a spring of 
 water bursts forth. The next morning Jesus thanks 
 the tree, saying, " This privilege I give thee, O palm- 
 tree, that one of thy branches be carried away by my 
 angels and planted in the Paradise of my Father. And 
 this blessing will I confer upon thee, that it shall be 
 said of all who conquer in any contest, You have won 
 the palm of victory." Accordingly we may see in 
 Correggio's " Madonna della Scodella," at Parma, the 
 obedient tree and the spring, from which the Virgin 
 
156 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 is dipping a bowl of water, while four charming angels 
 are flying up to heaven with the palm branch. 
 
 There is another story which touches more upon 
 the danger of the Flight. As the fugitives were de- 
 parting from Bethlehem they passed some men in a 
 field sowing corn. And the Virgin begged them to 
 answer, if any one inquired when the Son of Man 
 passed by, " When we were sowing this corn." Now 
 it came to pass that same night that the corn sprang 
 up and ripened so that on the morrow they were reap- 
 ing it. And when the soldiers of Herod came and 
 asked when the Son of Man passed by, the husband- 
 men answered, "As we were sowing this corn." So 
 the soldiers thought that they could never overtake 
 Him, and turned back from following. In a picture by 
 Hans Memlinc in the Pinakothek at Munich these 
 truthful and deceptive husbandmen appear in the back- 
 ground. There is a quaint addition to this legend, 
 current among the northern Highlands of Scotland. 
 It is said that a malicious little black beetle over- 
 heard the soldiers' question, and thrusting up his head, 
 answered, " The Son of Man passed here last night." 
 And this is the reason why the Highlanders stamp 
 on the black beetle when they see it, saying, " Beetle, 
 beetle, last night !" 
 
 The same thought of the danger of the journey 
 has given rise to the various anecdotes of encounters 
 with robbers. Sometimes it is a band of brigands 
 lying in ambush; and as the Child draws near, they 
 hear a great noise like the sound of a king approach- 
 ing with horses and chariots, so that a panic seizes 
 
THE REPOSE IN EGYPT — From a painting by Albrecht Altdorfer 
 
r 
 
THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT 159 
 
 them, and they run away without doing the harmless 
 travellers any injury. Again, the Holy Family are 
 taken prisoners by the captain of a company of brig- 
 ands; but instead of cruelty he shows them kindness, 
 carrying them to his own house, and entertaining them 
 with the best of fare in his garden of fruit-trees. His 
 good-wife helps to give the little Child a bath, and 
 prudently saves the water. Some days later, when the 
 hospitable brigand comes home from a skirmish fatally 
 wounded, the same wonderful water heals him and re- 
 stores him to life. At another time the travellers are 
 stealing quietly past a band of robbers who have fallen 
 asleep. But two of them, Titus and Dumachus, are 
 roused by the noise. Dumachus wishes to awaken his 
 comrades and capture the pilgrims ; but Titus being 
 of an amiable disposition, though a robber, bribes his 
 companion with forty pieces of money and a girdle to 
 keep still and let them escape, for which Mary blesses 
 him, and Jesus foretells that after thirty years the two 
 robbers shall be crucified with him, and Titus shall en- 
 ter into Paradise as the penitent thief. These are 
 very primitive stories, but they appear to indicate at 
 least that the early Christians recognized a difference 
 among thieves, and were willing to believe in the possi- 
 bility of goodness dormant under the crust of evil. 
 
 There is another class of legends which centre in 
 the idea of the divinity of Jesus. The Egyptian idols 
 are represented as tumbling from their pedestals at his 
 approach. A whole city of idols, whatever that may 
 mean, is changed into a sand-hill as he passes by. 
 And one very large and powerful idol, to which all the 
 
i6o THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 others were accustomed to pay homage, cries out that 
 Jesus is a greater God than any of them, and forthwith 
 falls into a thousand fragments. All this is but a 
 childish way of saying that the religion of Jesus de- 
 stroys idolatry. 
 
 But the greatest fund of marvellous stories about the 
 Flight is found in the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy, 
 which was current among the Christians of the East, 
 and was probably used by Mohammed in the compo- 
 sition of the Koran. It is an Oriental variation upon 
 a sacred theme, an Asiatic embroidery full of all kinds 
 of strange beasts, a sanctified Arabian Nights' Enter- 
 tainment. It tells of a dumb bride restored to speech 
 by taking the infant Jesus in her arms ; and a crazy 
 woman who would not wear any clothes brought to her 
 right mind by the compassionate look of the Lady 
 Mary ; and a girl with the leprosy cleansed by washing 
 in the water in which the Child had been bathed ; and 
 sundry other household miracles even more ingenuous 
 and astonishing. It describes the dwelling-place of 
 the Holy Family at Matarea, a town a little to the 
 northeast of Cairo, where any sceptical person may 
 still see the aged sycamore which sheltered them, and 
 the "fountain of Mary," in which she washed her 
 Child's coat. But the most wonderful tale of all is 
 the story of the enchanted mule, which runs on this 
 wise : 
 
 As the Holy Family were entering into a certain 
 city they saw three women coming out of a cemetery, 
 and weeping. And w^hen the Lady Mary saw them, 
 she said to the girl who accompanied her (the same 
 

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 „JS|se5' 
 
 ^-^ >A ^i:^ 
 
 ^>^^' ^ 
 
 
 
 if v* i 
 
 ^# 
 
 f 
 
 
 ^. 
 
 ^^'^. '^' 
 
 
 
 
 THE REPOSE 
 From an engraving by Lucas Cranach 
 
THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT 163 
 
 who had been cleansed of her leprosy) : " Ask them 
 what is the matter, and what calamity has befallen 
 them." But they made no reply to the girl's ques- 
 tions, asking her in their turn : " Whence are you ? 
 and whither are you going ? For the day is spent, 
 and night is coming on apace." " We are travellers," 
 said the o^irl, "and are seekino^ a house of entertain- 
 ment." They said : " Go with us, and spend the night 
 with us." Accordingly the travellers accepted the 
 courteous invitation, and were brought into a new 
 house, richly furnished. Now it was winter, and the 
 girl going into the apartment of these women, found 
 them again weeping and lamenting. Beside them 
 stood a mule, covered with housings of cloth of gold, 
 and sesame was put before him, and the women were 
 kissing him and feeding him. And the girl said : 
 " What is all this ado, my ladies, about this mule ?'' 
 They replied with tears : " This mule, which thou 
 seest, was our brother, born of the same mother with 
 ourselves. When our father died he left us great 
 wealth, and this only brother. We did our best to 
 get him married, and were preparing his nuptials after 
 the fashion of our country. But some women, moved 
 by jealousy, bewitched him, unknown to us ; and one 
 night, a little before daybreak, when the door of our 
 house was shut, we saw that this our brother had been 
 turned into a mule, as thou now beholdest him. And 
 we are sorrowful, as thou seest, having no father to 
 comfort us ; and there is no wise man or magician in 
 the world that we have omitted to send for, but noth- 
 ing has done us any good." And when the girl heard 
 
i64 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 this, she said : " Be of good courage, ladies, and weep 
 no more ; for the cure of your calamity is near ; yes, it 
 is presently in your own house. For I also was a 
 leper. But when I saw that woman, and along with 
 her that young Child, whose name is Jesus, I sprinkled 
 my body with the water wherein his mother had 
 washed him, and I was cured. I know that he can 
 deliver you from your affliction also. But arise, go to 
 Mary my mistress, bring her into your own apartment, 
 tell her your secret, and supplicate her to have pity 
 upon you." When the women had listened to the 
 girl's words they hastened to the Lady Mary and 
 brought her into their chamber, and sat down before 
 her, weeping and saying: "O our mistress. Lady 
 Mary, have pity upon thy servants, for no one older 
 than ourselves, no head of our family, is left — neither 
 father nor brother — to live with us; but this mule 
 which thou seest was our brother, whom women have 
 bewitched into this condition. We beseech thee, there- 
 fore, to have pity upon us." Then, grieving at their 
 misfortune, the Lady Mary took up the Lord Jesus 
 and put him on the mule's back, and she wept with 
 the women, and said to Jesus Christ, " Alas, my son, 
 heal this mule by thy mighty power, and make him a 
 reasonable man as he was before." And when these 
 words were spoken, the shape of the mule was changed, 
 and he became a young man of engaging appearance. 
 Whereupon there was great joy in the household, and 
 the grateful sisters immediately concluded to marry 
 their brother to the girl who had been the means of 
 bringing him so great a benefit. 
 
THE HOME IN EGYPT — ALBRECHT DURER 
 From an engraving in " The Life of the Virgin " 
 
THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT 167 
 
 All this, especially the happy marriage, is quite in 
 the style of Scheherezade. It is no more like the 
 sober records of the evangelists than a display of fire- 
 works is like the silent stars ; and the very difference 
 goes far to prove, or at least to illustrate, the histori- 
 cal character of our four gospels. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The pictorial representations of this subject divide 
 themselves into two classes. First we have the pictures 
 of the Flight itself. These may be easily recognized 
 by the presence of Joseph and Mary, evidently going 
 on a journey, with their Child, not yet two years old. 
 If Jesus is older, and able to walk by the side of 
 Joseph, the picture represents the Return. Sometimes 
 the painter puts a sketch of the massacre of the inno- 
 cents into the background, to remind us of the occa- 
 sion of the Flight. Thus it appears in Peruzzi's fresco 
 in the Church of San Onofrio at Rome. Sometimes 
 he makes an angel showing the way, as in a paint- 
 ing of the school of Domenichino at Naples. Now the 
 Holy Family are seen going through a gloomy forest, 
 as in a black little etching by Rembrandt, where one 
 can hardly distinguish anything except the lantern 
 which Joseph carries in his hand. Now they are em- 
 barking in a boat, as in a painting by Poussin ; and 
 again they are floating on the sea, fanned along by 
 angels, as in a very feeble and affected picture by a 
 
I68 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 Frenchman whose name I have forgotten (and it is of 
 no consequence). Usually Joseph is leading the ass, 
 while Mary rides upon it, with the child in her arms. 
 But sometimes the situation is reversed. There is 
 a finely finished little picture by Adrian van der Werff 
 in the Louvre, which shows Mary walking ahead car- 
 rying the child ; she is about to cross a stream on 
 stepping-stones, and turns to give her hand to Joseph, 
 who is very old, and seems almost afraid to follow, while 
 the ass, coming last of all, pulls back vigorously. In 
 the same gallery I remember having seen a charming 
 landscape by Adam Elzheimer, in which the Holy 
 Family appear to have crossed a broad, shallow stream 
 sparkling in the moonlight. Joseph carries a torch in 
 one hand, and with the other he is giving a little 
 branch to the child for a whip. On the edge of the 
 woods in the background some shepherds have kindled 
 a blazing fire, and there the travellers evidently intend 
 to seek their rest. The picture is thus illuminated 
 with three kinds of light, yet it is perfectly harmonious, 
 and suggests very picturesquely the " camping out " 
 aspect of the Flight. 
 
 The second class of pictures represent the Repose, 
 either at some halting -place by the way, or in the 
 home at Matarea. The subject came into vogue at the 
 end of the fifteenth century. But by the middle of the 
 sixteenth century this theme had become even more 
 popular than the Flight ; it was painted by Titian and 
 Paul Veronese and Correggio, by Murillo at least five 
 times, by Rubens and Van Dyck and Rembrandt and 
 Ferdinand Bol, by Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Pons- 
 
1 HE 
 
 FLIGHT 
 
 INTO 
 
 EGYPT— 
 
 MURILLt) 
 
 From a 
 [>aintingf 
 :it the 
 Hermitage, 
 St. Pelers- 
 ImriT 
 
THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT 171 
 
 sin, by Overbeck and Decamps, and among the latest 
 representations of it is the picture by Knaus in the 
 MetropoHtan Museum at New York — a painting which 
 is far from lofty in its tone, but which fascinates the 
 public with its throng of plump and merry little angels. 
 It is not always easy to recognize this subject ; some- 
 times a painter like Claude gives us simply a broad 
 landscape with a few tiny figures in one corner, and 
 calls it a Repose ; or again, as in the sad but lovely 
 picture by Decamps, we see only a group of tired peo- 
 ple with a little child, resting under the shadow of some 
 trees, in dark silhouette against the evening sky. But 
 as a rule the Repose is marked by at least one feature 
 taken from the old legends — the fountain, the palm- 
 tree, a company of angels singing and dancing to 
 amuse the Holy Child. The painter tries to make his 
 picture tell the story of rest after a weary journey. And 
 always, if he knows anything about his subject, he leaves 
 out the familiar figures which appear in other representa- 
 tions of the Holy Family. Wherever you find St. Anna, 
 or St. Elizabeth, or the little St. John, you may know 
 that the picture is not, properly speaking, a Riposo. 
 
 And now we may turn for a moment to look more 
 closely at our illustrations of this episode in the life of 
 the child Jesus. There are nine of them — five repre- 
 sent the Flight, and four the Repose. Two of them, 
 at least, take a high rank among the pictures belong- 
 ing to the child life of Jesus; and altogether they 
 cover the history of Christian art for more than five 
 centuries, and show the different methods of fresco, oil- 
 painting, and engraving. 
 
172 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 First comes Giotto ; and rightly, for he was the first 
 man who ventured to paint the Hfe of Christ as a real- 
 ity. This fresco is one of those that make the walls of 
 the little Chapel of the Arena in Padua more precious 
 than if they were covered with gold. It has suffered 
 even more than its companions from the damp air of 
 the surrounding garden ; and much of that bright, pure 
 colour which Giotto loved has vanished from its sur- 
 face. But even in its decay it is admirable; it shows 
 us how clearly the oldest of old masters caught the 
 meaning of the history, and with what vigour and sin- 
 cerity he was able to express it. We may laugh, if we 
 will, at the impossible trees, and the wooden head of 
 the ass, and the stiff, unjointed hands of the people. 
 These were things which Giotto did not understand 
 very well, nor did he care much about them. But he 
 did understand how to tell us that the journey was 
 anxious and hurried, and altogether a very serious 
 undertaking ; that even the dumb beast was dejected 
 and weary ; that the boys and the girl who went along 
 with the Holy Family talked a good deal by the way ; 
 and that Joseph chose the boy who could see the angel 
 to lead the ass by the bridle ; and that he himself could 
 not help looking back continually to see if the mother 
 and Child were safe; and that these two, Mary and 
 Jesus, being together, were less troubled than the rest 
 of the party — all this Giotto tells us in his plain, strong 
 way. He has grasped the situation. He gives the 
 drama of the Flight. 
 
 The next picture comes from a little ruined church, 
 which is hidden away in the Alpine hamlet of Abon- 
 
t1 I' WM 
 
 lllBIBIiWiuaKiJILHIl^ 
 
THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT 175 
 
 dance, among the mountains of Chablais, on the south- 
 ern shore of Lake Geneva. The traveller who climbs 
 up the valley of the Dranse from Evian to this for- 
 saken spot will find the old abbey used as a stable, 
 and these pale frescos crumbling from the walls. No 
 one knows who painted them. Probably it was done 
 in the fifteenth century by some travelling artist who 
 went from place to place with his band of workmen to 
 execute the orders of the monks. This was certainly 
 the custom of the time, and the picture bears strong 
 marks of Italian influence in the conventional treat- 
 ment of Joseph's dream on the left, and the actual 
 Flight on the right. But the interesting thing about 
 it is its rude but graphic reproduction of the scenery 
 of upper Savoy. These are the sharp-pointed hills and 
 steep crags which rise around the village of Abon- 
 dance ; this peasant who is carrying a board covered 
 with little round cheeses up a mountain path is a na- 
 tive of the district, and may still be seen there ; this 
 boat which two men are towing against the stream 
 belonos to the river Dranse. It is still the drama of 
 
 o 
 
 the Flight, but the colouring is distinctly local, and 
 the artist has made the action subordinate to the 
 scenery. And 3^et I think, upon the whole, the old 
 master-designer gave the monks the worth of their 
 money, even though he spared himself some expense 
 by using gray instead of blue, which was the costliest 
 of pigments. 
 
 We turn now from the atmosphere of Italy to that 
 of Germany, and take three characteristic examples of 
 Teutonic art in the early part of the sixteenth century. 
 
176 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 These are all pictures of the Repose, and their manner 
 is idyllic rather than dramatic. The weakest of the 
 three is the painting by Albrecht Altdorfer, the ver- 
 satile and prosperous city architect of Ratisbon. He 
 has let his bizarre fancy run away with him, and over- 
 loaded his picture with details. Yet there is somthing 
 original and pretty in the little angel swimming to 
 meet the child Jesus, who leans from Mary's lap and 
 dips his hand in the fountain. But what a fountain ! 
 It is a nightmare of the Renaissance. 
 
 Cranach's engraving is far more satisfactory, and bet- 
 ter even than his own earlier sketch of the same sub- 
 ject. It is signed only with his crest — a dragon with 
 a ring in its mouth — but its authenticity is undoubted. 
 The Virgin is seated at the foot of a tree against which 
 Joseph is leaning. The Child stands upon his mother's 
 lap and offers her an apple. Twelve jolly cherubs are 
 dancing in a ring before them, with every sign of de- 
 light, while two other cherubs are up in the tree rob- 
 bing a nest and killing the young birds. This is a 
 strange feature in such a peaceful scene. A recent 
 writer has explained that the nest is an eagle's nest, 
 and its destruction typifies the overthrow of the king- 
 dom of Satan by Christ. But the old birds do not 
 look in the least like eagles, and I suppose the artist 
 intended the incident to be emblematic of the slaughter 
 of the innocents at Bethlehem. It is a quaint conceit, 
 but not very complimentary to the cherubic disposition. 
 
 DUrer's eno-raving, from the famous series of The 
 Life of the FzV^zVz, published in 1511, is altogether 
 lovely and lovable. Merely as an example of early 
 

 ill'' 
 
 
THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT 179 
 
 xylographic art it shows the hand of a master, strong, 
 steady, direct. But when we enter into the thought 
 and feeling of the picture we recognize even higher 
 quahties. It is the home in Egypt. True, the archi- 
 tecture has a look of Nuremberg, and the miraculous 
 fountain in the background flows through a wooden 
 spout such as may have stood in the court -yard of 
 Diirer s own house. But to the lowly heart there are 
 no anachronisms. The thought of the artist dissolves 
 the bonds of time. He will have us remember that 
 home is home, wherever it may be, and that the love 
 of Joseph and Mary could make a safe and happy 
 place for the child Jesus even in exile. So the honest 
 carpenter toils away at his trade, while the cheerful 
 cherubs bustle around to help him. Mary sits near by 
 with distaff and spindle, quietly working, and with her 
 foot rocking the cradle in which little Jesus lies asleep. 
 Even the angels do not disturb her placid soul. The 
 picture is a song in praise of industry and love ; it is 
 an idyl of the joy of home even in a far land. Blessed 
 is the child who finds such shelter amid the tumult and 
 strife of the world ! 
 
 Murillo's Flight, which is in the Hermitage at St. 
 Petersburg, is painted in a very tender spirit, and full 
 of feeling. The drawing in the lower part of the pict- 
 ure is not very secure, but the faces of Joseph and 
 Mary, bending together over the Child, are touched 
 with beautiful solicitude and deep love. They forget 
 the weariness of the journey in their delight in Jesus, 
 and the Child, pure and peaceful, as Murillo always 
 conceives him, looks up with bright wonder at the an- 
 
i8o THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 gels above his head. A soft warm air envelops the 
 group, and seems to waft them all gently onward. It 
 is a bit of sentiment, almost passing into Schw'drmerei ; 
 but, after all, it is pure and noble — a celestial reverie. 
 
 Three pictures of this subject, all produced within the 
 present generation, may be taken as illustrations of the 
 different ways in which the modern spirit deals with 
 the life of the child Jesus. 
 
 M. Pierre Lagarde's painting of the Flight is a 
 lyric set in a minor key. The thought which has 
 impressed him is the loneliness of the journey. There 
 are no angels in the sky. The wide desert shows no 
 sign of life, save this poor little household wandering 
 on through the trackless waste. The slender Virgin 
 droops like a wilted flower, Joseph's steps are heavy and 
 slow, and the Child sleeps on his mother's arm. This 
 plaintive ballade is all that the artist has found in the 
 story of the Flight. 
 
 M. Merson's striking sketch of the Repose is far 
 more suggestive. He is not, indeed, the first to intro- 
 duce distinctly Egyptian features into the landscape, 
 for I believe Poussin attempted this, in his cold, vague 
 way, several times. But M. Merson is the first to 
 do it accurately and thoughtfully. This drawing, slight 
 as it is, is worthy of the man who, when he was paint- 
 ing the encounter of " St. Francis and the Wolf of 
 Gubbio," travelled all the way from Rome to Gubbio 
 in order to get his landscape true to nature. Even 
 more noteworthy is the way in which he has touched 
 upon the dim foreshadowing of the story of Jesus in 
 the mythology of ancient Egypt. The Virgin, shel- 
 
'.S^, 
 
 rS 
 
 
THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT 183 
 
 tered in a corner of a ruined temple, and holding her 
 Child at her breast, looks up in amazement, and sees 
 upon the gray stones beside her the gigantic outline 
 of " Isis, the good mother, the faithful nurse, suck- 
 ling her son Horus." What thoughts of wonder and 
 of fear must have passed her heart! It is a miracle, a 
 marvel, this strange coincidence, but a marvel alto- 
 gether in the manner of the curious, complex nine- 
 teenth century. This picture is in fact the modern 
 version of the old story of the conquered idols. They 
 do not tumble from their places in ruinous dismay at 
 the approach of Jesus, but they stand crumbling in 
 sculptured impotence above the living Child, whose 
 divine force is to go out as light and life to the utter- 
 most parts of the earth and the end of time. And 
 if there was aught of good in their vanishing worship, 
 any conception of holy love and sacred maternity and 
 redemptive power, all this was taken up and purified 
 and consummated in the religion of Jesus. 
 
 Mr. Holman Hunt's magnificent painting of the 
 Flight is undoubtedly the greatest in the series, and 
 to my mind the most important religious picture of 
 the century. It is impossible to get any just idea of it 
 from an engraving, however faithful and painstaking, 
 nor shall I dare to describe its opulence of colour, its 
 glorious mysteries of light, the grandeur, simplicity, 
 and vigour of its style. I remember well the days that 
 I spent before it in the summer of 1886, when it was 
 exhibited in London, and again in the painter's studio 
 in 1892, when he was repainting the head of the Vir- 
 gin, and the hours were cheered with beautiful talk 
 
l84 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 about his life in Palestine, where the picture was con- 
 ceived. The rich bloom of the landscape, the gar- 
 lands of heavenly human children, the joyous radi- 
 ance of the infant Jesus, made it seem like a dream, 
 full of real forms, lucid and beautiful and bright with 
 rainbow hues, yet tremulous with mystical meaning, 
 and ready to vanish at a breath into the circumam- 
 bient night. This is the wonder of the picture ; its 
 realism is so intense and its mysticism is so deep, 
 and both are blended together in the unity of a vis- 
 ion. Nothing could be more solid and life-like than 
 the painting of Joseph, with his bronzed, muscular 
 limbs, and the basket of tools on his back. The ass, 
 intelligent and strong, has all the marks of the high- 
 bred Mecca race. The flowers are those that star the 
 plains of Palestine in early spring, each one painted 
 with such loving care that it seems to blossom forever. 
 Moon-threads — filmy beams — weave a veil of light over 
 the trees and distant hills of Judah. The wreaths of 
 children are full of natural, human grace, brighter and 
 more lovely than any of Donatello's or Luca della 
 Robbia's. Years of patient toil have been spent upon 
 the canvas to give it reality, and make it true at every 
 point where truth was possible. But beyond all this, 
 and above it — nay, breathing through every careful 
 line and glowing colour — is the soul, the spirit of the 
 picture, which irradiates it with 
 
 " The light that never was on sea or land, 
 The consecration, and the poet's dream." 
 
 The painter has expressed his meaning in the title 
 
THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT 185 
 
 of the picture. It is called " The Triumph of the In- 
 nocents. " And this is the thought which he has im- 
 mortalized. 
 
 The spirits of the murdered children of Bethlehem 
 — not a great multitude, as they are often thoughtless- 
 ly depicted, but a little band such as really played 
 in that little village — have followed after Jesus on his 
 flight. Joseph is turning back anxiously to watch the 
 signal-fires which burn upon the hills. Mary is busied 
 in readjusting the garments which had been hastily 
 thrown about her infant at the departure. But the 
 Holy Child looks round, and seeing the spirits of his 
 playmates, welcomes them with the gladness of a divine 
 sympathy. The hand which He stretches out to them 
 holds a few ears of wheat, the symbol of the bread of 
 life. These children are the first of his glorious band 
 of martyrs, and as they draw near to Him, the meaning 
 of their martyrdom flashes upon them, and their sor- 
 row is changed into joy. The last group of little 
 ones have not yet felt his presence, and the pain and 
 terror of mortality are still heavy upon them. Over 
 the head of one the halo is just descending. A little 
 farther on a circle of flower- decked boys and girls 
 are bringing the tired foal up to its mother's side. 
 One baby saint looks down, amazed to see that the 
 scar of the sw^ord has vanished from his breast. In 
 front floats a trio of perfectly happy spirits, one carry- 
 ing a censer and singing, the others casting down 
 branches of the palm and the vine. At their feet rolls 
 the river of life, breaking into golden bubbles, in which 
 the orlories of the millennium are reflected. 
 
i86 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 All mystical, symbolical, visionary ! But is it not 
 also true ? Think for a moment. It is the religion 
 of Jesus that has transfigured martyrdom and canon- 
 ized innocence. It is the religion of Jesus that tells 
 us of a heaven full of children, and a kingdom which 
 is to bring heaven down to earth. And so long as the 
 religion of Jesus lives, it will mean help and blessing 
 to the martyred innocents of our race — the children 
 who are oppressed in slavery, and neglected in want, 
 and crushed by human avarice and ambition and cru- 
 elty in the wheels of the great world — help and bless- 
 ins: to these little ones in the name and for the sake of 
 the holy child Jesus. 
 
THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS 
 
 Oh! say not, dream not, heavenlv notes 
 
 To childish ears are vain, 
 That the young mind at random floats^ 
 
 And cannot reach the strain, 
 
 IVas not our Lord a little child, 
 
 Taught hv degrees to pray. 
 By father dear and mother mild 
 
 instructed day by day ? 
 
 John Keble. 
 
Slnti tl)t c!)ilb srctu, anli toaircti strong: in spirit, ftllrli 
 tuiti) toifiiom ; anil tl)r cjracc of 0oti tuas upon l)im. 
 
 I^oto Ijifi parrntfi locnt to ^ffn'S'ilf" f^ffp I'f'ii^ '^^ t^e 
 frast of t\)c paficoUcr. 
 
 9[nii tubcn J)f toas tiucinc rears oli, t|)cp tornt iip to ^cru= 
 salcm after tl)c custom of tl)c frast. 
 
 9[nJi tobcn tl)cp l)aii fulftllcii t^c taps, as tl)cv rcturncli, 
 t^c tWa ^c&ua tarrirU brl^inti in Jerusalem ; anti 3roBxpI) anti 
 I)ts mother iknctu not of it. 
 
 ^ut t[)rp, supposing; I)im to I)apc been in tl)c companp, 
 tucnt a tap's journrp; ani t()cp soug;^t ijim among; tl)cir fein6= 
 folfe antJ acquaintance. 
 
 'xinU tuben tl)ep fonnlJ I)im not, t^cv turneli bacfe ag;ain to 
 2f^erusalem, seeding; f)tm. 
 
 Slnli it came to pass, tl)at after tf)rce iaps tl)ep founti I)im 
 in tl)e temple, sitting; in t[)e miist of t^e doctors, bot^ ^ear= 
 ing; tbem, an! asking; tl)em questions. 
 
 ^nti all tl)at ^eari t)tm iuere astonis|)eli at |)i6 unierstanti-- 
 ing; anU anstuers. 
 
 Stnli tuf)en t^ep sato ()im, t()ep tuerc ama^elJ :- ani ^is motj)- 
 er saiti unto I)im, ^on, tul)p I)ast tI)ou t()us Iiealt ttiiti) us ? 
 bel)0lli, tl)p father ani 3f b«itie soug;l)t t{)ee sorrotuing;. 
 
 ^nlJ be sail! unto tl)em, li)otu is it t()at pe soug:()t me ? 
 SMist pe not t^at 3^ must be about mp jFatf)er's business ? 
 
 Slnli tbep uniierstooli not tJ)e saping; tol)icl) {)e spake unto 
 tbem. 
 
 SlnlJ {)£• tocnt iomn \aitl) thtm, anti came to l^a^aretl), anU 
 tuas subject unto tl)em : but I)is mot()er feept all tijcse saping:6 
 in !)er bcart. 
 
 ^nti 3^C6us increaseli in tuistiom anti stature, anil in 
 faPour toitf) ^oi ant man. — Luke, ii. 40-52. 
 
I 
 
 HERE are some who find it difficult to think 
 that Jesus ever had a real and true child- 
 hood. They cannot see how one who ap- 
 peared before the world with such divine authority 
 and fulfilled his mission so sublimely could ever have 
 been 
 
 " A simple child 
 That lightly draws its breath.* 
 
 The lowly birth in the stable at Bethlehem they ac- 
 cept ; the supreme ministry of Christ among men they 
 accept ; but that there was a time between, an early 
 morning-tide of soft light and gentle dews of grace and 
 joy, when the soul of Jesus, unfolding like a flower, in- 
 creased in wisdom and beauty towards perfection — this 
 seems to them difficult to believe without endangering 
 his supreme dignity. They would rather represent 
 Him as entering life complete and perfect, equipped 
 with all knowledge and power, even as Minerva in 
 the heathen legend sprang full -armed from the brain 
 of Jove. 
 
 But the evangelist Luke, who must surely have 
 thought as reverently and devoutly of Christ's suprem- 
 acy as any man could think, does not seem to have 
 
190 
 
 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 felt this difficulty ; for he says, " And the child grew, 
 and waxed strong, becoming full of wisdom, and the 
 grace of God was upon him." 
 
 This is a very brief record to cover such an impor- 
 tant period of life as that which lies between infancy 
 and the twelfth year ; and yet, brief as it is, how clearly 
 it illuminates the vital truth. Growth is the key-word 
 of the passage. Growth is the wonder and the glory 
 of all childhood. Growth was the beautiful secret of 
 the childhood of Jesus. 
 
 It is a marvellous thing to see even a plant grow. 
 If we were watching for the first time the unfolding 
 of stalk and leaf and bloom and fruit from a tiny seed, 
 we should call it a gradual miracle. How does that 
 invisible and regnant principle in the germ draw the 
 earth and the air, the water and the light into its life 
 and mould them to its ideal form ? It is a mystery. 
 But how much more mysterious is the growth of a 
 child. The double development, physical and spirit- 
 ual ; the dawn of intelligence in the vague eyes ; the 
 motions of will in the fluttering hands; the limbs 
 rounding to symmetry and strength ; the face lighting 
 up with thought and feeling, the formation of charac- 
 ter with distinct affections and desires ; the mastery of 
 language which reveals the character to the ear, and 
 of action which reflects it to the eye; the advance in 
 knowledge, apparently so slow, yet often in reality so 
 swift below the surface, reaching out in secret, feeling 
 its way where we cannot follow it, towards the beauti- 
 ful surprise of the first manifestation of true wisdom, 
 when the child says suddenly, and as if by revelation. 
 
THE ORLEANS MADONNA RAPHAEI, 
 
 From the painting in the Art Gallery at ChantilK 
 
THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS 193 
 
 " I feel my duty, I know what I must do — " all this is 
 surely one of the most marvellously lovely and inex- 
 plicable things in the world. And it is just this that 
 the evangelist assures us came to pass in the life of 
 Jesus. 
 
 It cannot be explained in Him any more than in 
 other children. It must have been more wonderful in 
 Him than in other children by so much as the final per- 
 fection of his wisdom and power rises above all human 
 standards. But it was no less real. He did not return 
 from the flight into Egypt as a premature sage, a mir- 
 acle-working magician in the disguise of an infant, to 
 wait at Nazareth until the time came for Him to make 
 his public appearance. He was brought back by his 
 parents as a little child, to grow up in the shelter of a 
 loving home. He thought as a child, while He learned 
 his letters and began to read in the Holy Scriptures of 
 his people, standing beside his mother s knee. He felt 
 as a child, while he wandered and played with his 
 cousin, the little St. John, in the blossomy fields of 
 Galilee. He spake as a child, while He walked with 
 Mary and Joseph, or sat in the carpenter-shop helping 
 a little and hindering a little with the work, but bring- 
 ing into the daily life of the labouring man that inno- 
 cent and uplifting charm which comes from compan- 
 ionship with a gentle boy. 
 
 There does not appear to have been anything vio- 
 lent or startling in the development of his personality. 
 It went forward gradually and imperceptibly. The 
 evangelist suggests this by the solitary incident which 
 he relates of Christ's early years. 
 13 
 
194 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 When his parents had taken Him at the age of 
 twelve, according to the Jewish custom, to his first 
 Passover in Jerusalem, and had lost Him in the crowd, 
 and sought Him in vain, and found Him at last in one 
 of the little groups which used to gather in the Temple 
 courts around the teachers of the law, none were so 
 much amazed at his presence there as Mary and Joseph. 
 His answer to their gentle reproaches, " How is it that 
 ye sought me ? Wist ye not that I must be about my 
 Father's business?" suddenly disclosed to them the 
 change which had taken place in their Child so secret- 
 ly that they knew it not. He had crossed the hidden 
 threshold. He had heard the still voice which spoke 
 to Him of his place, his duty, his work in the world. 
 He had come within sight of the truth that for Him 
 the questions that have to do with religion must be 
 of chief concern, so that he could rightly forget all 
 other interests, and be lost and absorbed in the prep- 
 aration for his ministry. The self-d'enials and hard- 
 ships which must have been involved for a boy of twelve 
 in three days' absence from his parents in order to 
 listen to the teachers of religion were in fact the first 
 of that long series of self-sacrifices which culminated 
 on Calvary. He did not arrive at it magically, by a 
 leap from infancy to maturity. He grew up to it 
 through long and beautiful years of slow increase, 
 through the wonder and awe of new thoughts dawning 
 with every morning, and new affections deepening with 
 every evening, and a soul enlarging as the silent in- 
 fluence of srace filled it more and more. And it was 
 for this reason that they could not understand it, be- 
 
THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS 195 
 
 cause they were his parents, because they lived so close 
 to Him that it seemed incredible that this chanore 
 
 O 
 
 should have taken place without their knowledge, be- 
 cause the hardest of all things for parents to believe 
 is that the childhood of their child has really passed 
 away. 
 
 II 
 
 If we are right, then, in reading the authentic record 
 of the early years of Christ after this simple and nat- 
 ural fashion, what shall we make of those unauthentic 
 legends that are contained in the apocryphal books? 
 They must seem to us very absurd and barbarous, the 
 tawdry inventions of a poverty-stricken fancy, which 
 really spoil the story they are intended to adorn. 
 They are full of childish and ridiculous miracles. 
 They represent Christ as a precocious Rabbi who 
 takes the words out of his teacher's mouth and re- 
 proves those who would instruct Him. They even de- 
 scribe Him, with curiously blind irreverence, as using 
 Almighty power to ensure the success of his childish 
 games and to punish his companions when they thwart 
 or offend Him. Now and then one lights upon little 
 touches of nature among these legends, as when the 
 child Jesus is represented as bringing water for his 
 mother from the well, or going with his father to his 
 work in the city. But even these are spoiled by the 
 miraculous additions. The pitcher which Jesus is 
 carrying is broken, and He brings the water in the 
 
196 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 corner of his robe. The couch which Joseph is mak- 
 ing for a rich customer is too short, and Jesus takes 
 hold of the wood at one end and pulls it out to a 
 proper length. 
 
 Many of the pretended wonders are less innocent 
 than these. A single example, from the Greek form 
 of Thomas the Isj^aelitc Philosopher s Account of the 
 Infancy of Our Lord, will be enough to show the qual- 
 ity of this literature : 
 
 " This child Jesus, when five years old, was playing 
 in the ford of a mountain stream ; and He collected the 
 flowing waters into pools and made them clear immedi- 
 ately; and by a word alone He made them obey Him. 
 And having made some soft clay He fashioned out of 
 it twelve sparrows. And it was the Sabbath when He 
 did these things. And there were also many other chil- 
 dren playing with Him. And a certain Jew, seeing 
 what Jesus was doing, playing on the Sabbath, went off 
 immediately, and said to his father,- Joseph : Behold 
 thy son is at the stream and has taken clay, and has 
 made of it twelve birds, and has profaned the Sabbath. 
 And Joseph, coming to the place and seeing, cried out 
 to Him: Wherefore doest thou on the Sabbath what 
 it is not lawful to do } And Jesus clapped his hands, 
 and said to the sparrows : Off you go ! And the spar- 
 rows flew, and went off, crying. And the Jews seeing 
 this were amazed, and went away and reported to their 
 chief men what they had seen Jesus doing. 
 
 " And the son of Annas the scribe was standing there 
 with Joseph ; and he took a willow branch and let out 
 the waters which Jesus had collected. And Jesus see- 
 

 
 
 I ^-; -^'>S 
 
 
 ^^, 
 
 
 =:,■»> -'^- 
 
 
 i^^»&2.^,'<sS8«<^2SS 
 
 THE CHILD JESUS IN THE FIELDS — ALFRED BRAMTOT 
 
THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS 199 
 
 ing what was done was angry, and said to him : O 
 wicked, impious, and foolish ! what harm did the pools 
 or the waters do thee ? Behold even now thou shalt be 
 dried up like a tree, and thou shalt not bring forth 
 either leaves or branches or fruit. And straightway 
 that boy was quite dried up. And Jesus departed and 
 went to Joseph's house. But the parents of the boy 
 that had been dried up took him up, bewailing his 
 youth, and brought him to Joseph, and reproached him 
 because, said they, Thou hast a child doing such 
 things." 
 
 It seems incredible that any one should ever have in- 
 vented or believed such a worthless story as this. It is 
 far worse than the playful and often pretty legends 
 which the uninspired fancy of the early centuries wove 
 about the Nativity and the Adoration of the Magi ; for 
 they were harmless ; but this is distinctly immoral. It 
 is really an expression of that deeply-rooted heresy 
 which troubled the early Church and still survives in 
 other forms to-day — the falsehood which ascribes the 
 supremacy of Christ and the excellency of God to 
 unlimited power rather than to perfect love. I have 
 quoted it merely in order that we might feel more 
 sharply the contrast between a false gospel and a true 
 one, and turn back with new delight to the candour 
 and lucidity and divine naturalness of St. Luke's 
 outline of the childhood of Jesus. 
 
200 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 III 
 
 But if legend gives us no real help in filling out the 
 outline of Christ's childhood, art is all the more rich and 
 generous. No part of the gospel history has been more 
 abundantly and beautifully illustrated than this single 
 verse of St. Luke, telling us in a word how quietly 
 the life of Jesus unfolded in the home at Nazareth. 
 
 The theme, which the verse gives so clearly, is the 
 growth of a Holy Child. Around this theme a multi- 
 tude of the greatest artists have woven innumerable 
 harmonies and variations, teaching us to remember 
 how many influences must enter into the development 
 of such a child in God's world. They have wisely dis- 
 carded the use of all those miraculous tales which are 
 so foreign to the truth of the story. There are but 
 few pictures in which even the most distant allusion 
 to the apocryphal accounts of Christ's boyhood can be 
 traced, and none of them are by great masters. They 
 have not attempted to add any definite historical details 
 to the narrative. They have left it still vague and 
 free, a suggestion rather than a chronicle. But into 
 their conception of the dawning of that life which rose 
 to be the light of men, they have brought all that 
 they knew of innocent beauty, and fresh joy in birds 
 and flowers, and glad companionship of merry play- 
 mates, and sacred intimacies of home, and delight 
 of new thoughts gathered from nature and from 
 books, and sweet, satisfying devotion of mother-love. 
 They have surrounded the Christ-child with angels 
 
LA BELLE JARDINIERE — RAPHAEL 
 From the painting in the Louvre 
 
 A 
 
THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS 203 
 
 singing, or playing on lutes and viols, remembering,, 
 perhaps from the looks of their own children, that 
 
 " Beauty born of murmuring sound," 
 
 which passes into the listening face, and those secret 
 visitations of inconceivable awe which make the child- 
 ish eyes look far away, beholding the unseen. All this 
 they have put into the childhood of Jesus, unhesi- 
 tatingly and with perfect confidence, as if a voice had 
 said to them, " Look into thine own heart, and paint." 
 
 For this sacred instinct of art there is abundant 
 historical justification. I do not suppose that the 
 painters thought of seeking for it; but if they had, 
 they would have found good ground for believing that 
 the child Jesus, living in a devout Hebrew household 
 in the little town of Nazareth, must have enjoyed the 
 four great blessings of childhood: 
 
 A pure and peaceful home, ruled by love and piety. 
 
 A fresh and simple life, in close contact with nature. 
 
 A joyous fellowship with other children. 
 
 A patient and reverent education. 
 
 The Jewish people have always been distinguished 
 for their loving care of child-life, and for the strength 
 of their family feeling. We have an unconscious evi- 
 dence of this in the eight distinct names used in the 
 Hebrew language to mark the different periods of a 
 child's growth. All the traditions of the race were in 
 favour of the sanctities of the home, and their Holy 
 Scriptures hedged it about and hallowed it by the au- 
 thority of Jehovah himself. Whether the house of 
 Joseph and Mary was but a humble cottage, or a dwell- 
 
204 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 ing of comparative comfort (and we can argue noth- 
 ing on this point from the fact that Joseph was a car- 
 penter, for every Jewish man, rich or poor, learned a 
 trade), we may be sure that Jesus was nurtured in that 
 atmosphere of mutual affection and intimate joy which 
 is the true air of home. 
 
 Moreover, it was a happy circumstance that this 
 home was in Galilee. For although that northern 
 province was despised by the inhabitants of Jerusalem, 
 as being rude in speech and rustic in manners, life there 
 was far more free and natural than it was in Judea, 
 where the yoke of ceremonialism pressed heavily upon 
 the people, and their spirit seemed to reflect something 
 of the sombreness of the landscape. Galilee was fair 
 and smiling. The vine and the olive flourished there ; 
 the Rabbis said " it was easier to rear a forest of olive- 
 trees in Galilee than one child in Judea." There was 
 something of the same difference, I suppose, in the 
 country and the people, between Galilee and Judea, that 
 there is in Italy between Tuscany and Umbria. And 
 certainly childhood must have been happier and more 
 untrammelled in the merrier land, where the face of 
 nature, if less grand and awe-inspiring, wore a brighter 
 and more benignant aspect, and where life was less 
 closely bound by rules and restrictions. The little town 
 of Nazareth lies in a high valley. " Fifteen gently 
 rounded hills," says a modern traveller, "seem as if 
 they met to form an enclosure for this peaceful basin. 
 They rise round it like the edge of a shell to guard it 
 from intrusion. It is a rich and beautiful field abound- 
 ing in gay flowers, in fig-trees, small gardens, hedges of 
 
THE VIRGIN AND CHILD WITH ST. JOHN — BOTTICELLI 
 
 From the painting in the Louvre 
 
UL 
 
THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS 207 
 
 the prickly-pear; and the dense rich grass affords an 
 abundant pasture." The well of water which tradition 
 points out as the scene of the angel's visit to the Virgin 
 Mary still flows in the open green space at the end of 
 the town, and the women, fairer than the other daughters 
 of Palestine, come thither to draw, and the children in 
 their bright robes play around it. There can be little 
 doubt that the child Jesus found innocent joys beside 
 that fountain and in those verdant pastures. The inti- 
 macy with the world out-of-doors which his later teach- 
 ing shows, his love for birds and flowers, his close 
 observation of natural objects, the fondness with which 
 He turned for rest to the lonely hill-sides and the waters 
 of the lake, all speak of one of those deep and sincere 
 friendships with nature which can only be begun in 
 their lasting perfection by a child. 
 
 The simplicity of the Galilean life must have been 
 favourable also to those pleasures of human intercourse 
 that are tasted most perfectly by children free from 
 care. It is not likely that the parents of Jesus were 
 rich enough to impose on Him the burden of a luxu- 
 rious and artificial life, which often makes childhood so 
 unhappy. Once at least, after He was a man. He spoke 
 in a way which showed his familiarity with the childish 
 games of the market-place. The warmth and devotion 
 of his friendships reveal a heart that did not grow 
 reserved in early solitude. A natural companion of his 
 boyish pleasures would be his cousin, the child of Zach- 
 arias and Elizabeth, who afterwards became John the 
 Baptist. The painters have made no error when they 
 have so often depicted the child Jesus and the young 
 
2o8 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 St. John playing together with lambs or birds beside 
 flowing streams. 
 
 But we may be sure that the education of the Child 
 was not neglected, for on this point the Jewish law was 
 strict. Religion was the chief factor in education, and 
 doubtless it was begun by the mother, who would ex- 
 plain to her son the meaning of the many pious rites 
 and customs observed in the household, like the 
 lighting of the Sabbath lamp, and the touching, by 
 every one who passed in or out of the house, of the 
 parchment on the door-post with the Divine Name 
 written on it. The fascinating stories of the Old Tes- 
 tament would be the charms by which she would hold 
 Him listening in her arms. She would teach Him pas- 
 sages of Scripture to recite from memory. From the 
 same sacred pages He would learn his letters. When 
 He was five or six years old He would be sent to school 
 to sit on the floor with the other boys around the teach- 
 er and receive instruction, the Scriptures remaining his 
 only text - book until he was ten years old. Whether 
 there was a school in Nazareth at the time of Christ we 
 do not know, for the introduction of universal and com- 
 pulsory education throughout the land did not occur 
 until a later period. But, however that may have been, 
 it is certain that the devotion of such parents as Mary 
 and Joseph would not neglect the duties of instruction ; 
 and we may confidently say of Jesus, as St. Paul said of 
 his disciple, Timothy, that " from a child he knew the 
 Holy Scriptures." 
 
 Let us see, then, how these four golden threads of 
 home-life, and intercourse with nature, and happy com- 
 
t-s^&isM 
 
 
 THE HOLY FAMILY — PINTURICCHIO 
 From the painting in the Academy at Sienna 
 
THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS 211 
 
 panionship, and holy instruction, have been woven by 
 the artists into their thought of the childhood of Christ. 
 
 The works of art which depict the subject are almost 
 innumerable. We cannot include here those pictures 
 of the Madonna and Child in which Jesus is still a little 
 babe clinging to his mother or nursing at her breast ; 
 nor the altar-pieces in which they are enthroned be- 
 tween attendant saints, although one of these, " La 
 Sistina," contains the most glorious image of the 
 Christ -child that the world has ever seen. But all 
 those representations of the Madonna and Child in 
 which Jesus is older, and especially those in which 
 there is some significant action between Him and his 
 mother, belong to this class. Here I should place, 
 for example, the much adniired " round Madonna " of 
 Botticelli, in the Uffizi at Florence, where Mary is writ- 
 ing the words of her hymn in a book which angels 
 hold before her, while the Child looks up in her face 
 and lays his hand upon hers, as if to draw it to Himself. 
 In the same class belong the Madonnas of DUrer and 
 many other painters in which the mother is giving the 
 Child a pear or an apple to play with, and the Madonna 
 Colon na, in the Berlin Museum, where Mary is reading 
 and the Child distracts her attention by pulling at the 
 bosom of her dress. 
 
 A charming picture of this type is Raphael's small 
 Madonna of the Orleans family, in the art gallery at 
 Chantilly. It was painted at a time when Raphael's 
 manner was changing, and bears evidence of having 
 been often retouched and altered. The little shelf with 
 porcelain vessels in the background indicates that it is 
 
212 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 an in-door scene, which is an unusual thing with this 
 master. He seems to have been trying to express a 
 purely domestic sentiment in the simplest forms. But 
 unlike the German masters, who would have been sat- 
 isfied with mere homeliness, Raphael was not content 
 until he could reduce his idea to an essentially lucid 
 and graceful and symmetrical form. The Child, who 
 seems to be about a year and a half old, and has that 
 face of Divine seriousness which Raphael rendered so 
 perfectly, is trying to lift himself up to his mother's 
 breast, while she bends over Him, half tenderly and 
 half playfully, with a look of motherly denial. The 
 picture suggests very delicately the growth of the 
 Child, and the sweet cares of maternity. Other artists 
 carry the thought further on and more into detail; not 
 always with much artistic power, but often with a very 
 attractive sentiment, I remember a sunny little bit of 
 painting by Francesco Trevisiani in one of the small 
 rooms of the UfHzi, which represents. the Virgin seated 
 by her window sewing, with her hand raised drawing 
 the thread, while the Child, about five years old, comes 
 running in with a passion-flower which He gives to his 
 mother. 
 
 The introduction of the young St. John into the 
 picture brings in a new element of life. Sometimes 
 the two children are playing together, alone or sur- 
 rounded by angels. This is the theme which has been 
 so prettily treated by some of the painters of the seven- 
 teenth century: Murillo, Van Dyck, Rubens, Guide 
 Reni. But the most famous pictures of the two chil- 
 dren represent them with the Virgin Mary. In this 
 
THE HOLY FAMILY — FRANZ DEFREGGER 
 From the painting in the village church at Dolsach 
 
THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS 215 
 
 class we find five of Raphael's most exquisite Madon- 
 nas: the Madonna of the Green Fields, in the Belvi- 
 dere at Vienna ; the Madonna of the Goldfinch in the 
 Uffizi, and the Madonna of the Chair in the Pitti, at 
 Florence ; the Madonna of the Diadem, and the Ma- 
 donna called " La Belle Jardiniere," in the Louvre at 
 Paris. 
 
 The last of these pictures, which illustrates Raphael's 
 second, or Florentine manner, is said to have received 
 its name from the tradition that the painter employed a 
 flower-girl as his model for the Virgin. But whether or 
 not it has any real connection with the memory of " a 
 gardener's daughter," it suggests the thought that the 
 childhood of Jesus was like a quiet garden in which the 
 fairest flower that ever bloomed on earth was tended 
 by a daughter of the Most High. The landscape is in 
 harmony with the thought ; soft and fragile blossoms 
 star the elastic sod ; the slender trees are clad in the 
 misty foliage of spring ; a light haze rests over the vil- 
 lage, the blue mountains, and the sleeping lake in the 
 distance ; the sky, paler around the horizon, grows deep 
 blue towards the zenith ; and a few fleecy clouds are 
 floating lazily overhead. Raphael embodied in this 
 picture all that he had learned of subtle expressiveness 
 from Lionardo, and of symmetrical composition from 
 Fra Bartolommeo. The picture is suffused with the 
 mysterious air of thought ; the pyramid of the three 
 figures is perfect ; yet all this is accomplished with such 
 perfect art that the simplicity of the picture is not de- 
 stroyed. The young mother is seated on a little hil- 
 lock, dressed so modestly that one forgets to notice it. 
 
2i6 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 Even the awkward blue mantle which Ghirlandajo 
 added to the painting after Raphael had left it un- 
 finished, does not destroy the virginal grace of her fig- 
 ure. She has been reading aloud from a book, and 
 now bends her pale golden head towards her son, who 
 stands at her knee. The little St, John has come to 
 ask the child Jesus to play with him. He is half- 
 kneeling, and looking at Jesus with the greatest affec- 
 tion, not unmingled with that strange reverence of 
 which children are singularly capable in their friend- 
 ships, and which has a mystical significance in St.' 
 John's case as the foreshadowing of his subsequent tes- 
 timony to Jesus as the Messiah. But Jesus turns from 
 his playmate. He stands in an attitude of loveliest con- 
 fidence, with one of his feet resting on the bare foot of 
 the Virgin, his right hand pressed against her knee with 
 a caressing motion, his left hand stretched out to the 
 book in her lap, looking up in her face with a smile 
 of ineffable trust and love, as if He would say, " Let us 
 stay with you, dear mother, and hear you read again." 
 It is the sense of a beautiful moment that Raphael has 
 preserved for us with that sensitive and tranquil art 
 which was the true expression of his soul — a moment 
 beautiful with all that is most fresh and bright in na- 
 ture and most serene in mother-love — a moment beau- 
 tiful because it is transient, passing away as the delicate 
 charm of spring is lost in the full tide of summer, yet 
 woven forever into the character and [growth of the 
 Christ-child. 
 
 Botticelli's " Madonna and Child," in the Louvre, has 
 another sentiment and a very different attractiveness. 
 
THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS 217 
 
 Here the roses are in full bloom, and the leaves and 
 flowers are clearly outlined at the top of the dark hedge 
 against the brilliant evening sky. It is twilight also in 
 the Virgin's heart — the hour when the sweetness of the 
 present is often mingled with vague apprehensions of 
 coming sorrow — and the Virgin's face is sad and droop- 
 ing with that ineffable melancholy which Botticelli 
 understood and loved. She has been reading, perhaps, 
 in the book which now lies closed before her, the 
 prophecies that foretell suffering to the Messiah, and 
 she feels the burden of her mysterious relation to Him. 
 She is the type of all those sadly thoughtful mother- 
 hearts who know that the deepest love means the possi- 
 bilit}^ of the sharpest anguish, and tremble tenderly for 
 the future of their beloved. But the Child is her com- 
 forter, as so many a child has soothed away the silent 
 troubles and anxieties of so many a mother. He lifts 
 his face to hers and puts his hand softly in her neck, 
 with a touch which seems like the infantile beginning 
 of his great ministry of consolation to the weary and 
 heavy-laden. 
 
 The Holy Family, in which Mary and Joseph with 
 the Child form the invariable elements of the group, 
 and other figures (St. John the Baptist; St. Anna, the 
 mother of the Virgin ; St. Elizabeth, her cousin ; and 
 sometimes Zebedee and Mary Salome, the parents of 
 the Apostle John) are added according to the choice of 
 the painter or his patrons, is one of the most frequent 
 subjects in Christian Art. It has been painted in many 
 different keys of feeling, from the dreamy mysticism 
 of Perugino to the joyous naturalism of Andrea del 
 
2i8 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 Sarto and Guido Romano, in whose pictures of the 
 bathing of Jesus one can ahiiost hear the water splash 
 and the children laugh. 
 
 An illustration of a mode of treating the subject in 
 which a strong element of realism is curiously blended 
 with devotional sentiment so churchly as to make the 
 picture almost formal, is the Holy Family by Franz 
 Defregger, a painter of this century who has won great 
 fame in Austria, and indeed throughout the world, by his 
 scenes from Tyrolese peasant life. He painted this pict- 
 ure as an offering of love for the village church at, Dol-' 
 sach in the upper valley of the Drau, where he was born. 
 I climbed up to see it one summer evening after a day of 
 lonely fishing on a neighbouring stream. There was a 
 festival of some kind in progress ; the hamlet was full 
 of people in gala dress ; and there was an incessant 
 firing of guns and cannon from the shooting-range on 
 the hill. Entering the church, I found it crowded to the 
 door with the peasants, and resonant with their simple, 
 hearty singing. The picture hung before them at the 
 left of the chancel. The Virgin, dressed in dark crim- 
 son with a white scarf over her head and shoulders, was 
 a type of that serious, innocent, noble beauty which is 
 often seen among the women of Norway and the Tyrol. 
 The Child, standing on her knee and looking out with 
 dark, wondering eyes, was a village child idealized. 
 Joseph, a strong and thoughtful man, plain and toil- 
 worn, pondering over an ancient book of prophec3^ 
 represented the humble piety of a peasantry which still 
 remains devout. The painting was in fact composed 
 of native elements, and the successful artist had sent it 
 
MMpiiiiii^iiiiiiiaaiiiiiiiHiiiimaiB^^ 
 
 THE CHILD JESUS TAUGHT BY HIS MOTHER — LUC OLIVIER MERSON 
 
THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS 221 
 
 back from his prosperous life in Vienna, in a spirit of 
 beautiful loyalty, to bear his part in the worship of the 
 rustic church where he had sung and prayed as a boy. 
 
 In most of the pictures of the Holy Family we find a 
 symbolical motive introduced. When Jesus and the 
 young St. John are playing with a lamb, the allusion is 
 to St. John's later testimony, " Behold the Lamb of 
 God," and these words are often written upon a scroll 
 around the cross-handled staff which he carries. When 
 one of the children is bringing a bird to the other it 
 typifies the human soul led by St. John to Christ. The 
 bath, in which St. John pours the water upon Jesus, is 
 a symbol of the Baptism. When the Holy Family are 
 seated under a vine and grapes are offered to the Child, 
 it is a prophecy of the saying, " I am the vine." The 
 pomegranate which the Child sometimes presents to his 
 mother is the emblem of hope, and the other fruits with 
 which He plays are typical of the fruits of the spirit, 
 which are love, joy, peace. But frequently the symbol- 
 ical purpose of the picture is quite lost and forgotten 
 in the delight which the painter has found in represent- 
 ing an actual scene from the domestic life of Jesus. 
 
 A beautiful illustration of this is Pinturicchio's cir- 
 cular panel in the Academy of Fine Arts at Sienna. 
 The picture is about three feet in diameter, full of 
 elaborate detail, careful drawing, and rich colour; it is 
 a gem of the Umbrian school of art just touched with 
 a faint suggestion of that more realistic spirit which 
 distinguished Pinturicchio from his partner Perugino. 
 The Virgin, fair-haired and gracious, is seated at the left, 
 with an open book upon her knee, and her right hand 
 
222 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 lifted, beckoning. Joseph, a man of thoughtful, rugged 
 face, sits beside her, holding a roll of bread and one of 
 those little flat wine-casks which one sees so often in 
 Italy. These are intended to remind us that he was 
 what the old-fashioned New England housewives call 
 "a good provider," which is high praise for a husband. 
 But the interest of the picture centres in the two 
 charming children. St. John, in his tunic of camel's 
 hair, carries a small water-pitcher in his hand. Jesus, 
 a golden -haired boy of about four years, is dressed in 
 a robe of pure white, embroidered on the bosom with' 
 a square of deep blue, like the high -priest's breast- 
 plate, and carries a crimson book clasped in his left 
 hand. The right is thrust through the arm of St. John 
 with a joyous and natural gesture of companion- 
 ship, and we can almost hear the Child say, " Come, 
 let us run to the spring." The fountain sparkles from 
 a rock near by, and of course it is the emblem of the 
 water of life. And yet I think the real charm of the 
 picture lies in the merriment of the two children run- 
 ning so light-heartedly away from the Virgin's knee 
 across the flower-besprinkled grass, as if their expedi- 
 tion were a fine adventure. 
 
 Another very significant conception of the Holy 
 Family is that in which the education of the Child 
 is the central thought. In these pictures the Virgin 
 Mary is usually the teacher. Joseph watches them in 
 an attitude of deep reverence, as in the curiously 
 strong and thoughtful painting by Signorelli, in the 
 Uffizi at Florence, or else he is busy with his carpen- 
 ter-work in the background, as in the pensive and 
 
THE HOLY FAMILY — MURILLO 
 A part of the painting in the National Gallery, London 
 
THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS 225 
 
 graceful sketch by Luc Olivier Merson. The truth of 
 these pictures lies in their recognition of the fact that 
 a child's earliest knowledge usually comes from its 
 mother. She teaches the alphabet, not only of life, but 
 also of learning. The Talmud sa37s, "An understand- 
 ing of the law may be looked for in those who have 
 drawn it in at their mother s breast." 
 
 But have we indeed remembered all the influences 
 which entered into the childhood of Christ when we 
 have spoken of parental love and natural pleasures and 
 youthful playmates and earnest studies } I think not. 
 For surely there is something higher and holier than 
 all these which comes into the child - life silently and 
 invisibly, consecrating it, and making it breathe of 
 heaven. It is of this that Wordsworth speaks when 
 he says to a child, 
 
 " Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year, 
 And worshipp'st at the Temple's inner shrine, 
 God being with thee when we know it not." 
 
 It is this that is bestowed in special measure upon 
 the gentlest of children, so that they become 
 
 " God's apostles, day by day 
 Sent forth to preach of love, and hope, and peace." 
 
 It is this that the gospel tells us was not given unto 
 Christ by measure, but abundantly. It is this that St. 
 Luke names when he says of the Holy Child, " and the 
 grace of God was upon him." 
 
 Murillo's famous " Holy Family " in the National 
 Gallery at London realizes this thought. The picture 
 15 
 
226 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 is in his latest manner, tender, vapourous, full of dif- 
 fused radiance, like the dream of a picture, or the 
 picture of a dream. It was painted when Murillo 
 was an old man, and had gone down to Cadiz to die ; 
 but the glory of immortal youth rests upon it. The 
 Child Jesus stands upon a slight eminence. Mary and 
 Joseph kneel on each side of Him, not worshipping, but 
 with looks of reverential love which remind us that all 
 through the childhood of Christ they must have remem- 
 bered the wondrous secret of the divine promise con- 
 cerning Him. The Child looks upward with a happy 
 face, and the light flows around Him in a soft flood. 
 He is praying without words. He is seeing the in- 
 visible. But as we follow his glance, we see above 
 Him in the picture the poising wings of the sacred 
 Dove, and higher still the venerable face which paint- 
 ers use as the symbol of the Almighty. What is this, 
 then, but a formal picture of the Trinity, in which the 
 descending Spirit of all grace is the- connecting link 
 between the Father and the Son } Yes, that was the 
 old painter's theology, and it is mine. But when words 
 fail to interpret the mystery of it, and forms and colours 
 do but dimly shadow its meaning, I turn the eyes of 
 my heart towards the Christ-child, who holds fast to 
 the hands of human love and acknowledges its claim 
 upon Him, even while He feels that He came forth 
 from God and tE"e sense of union with his Heavenly 
 Father dawns within Him. Here is the solution of 
 the secret, not in words, but in a life that, though it is 
 still veiled in childish weakness, draws God down to 
 humanity and lifts humanity up towards God. 
 
THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS 227 
 
 IV 
 
 The Finding of Christ in the Temple is the culmi- 
 nation of his childhood. If our reading of the gospel 
 story thus far has been true, we must interpret this 
 incident in harmony with it. We feel, therefore, that 
 art was astray in its earlier reading of " Christ among 
 the Doctors." All the artists, from the time when they 
 first began to treat the subject, which was certainly 
 as early as the date of the mosaics in Santa Maria Mag- 
 giore at Rome, placed Jesus in an elevated position, 
 and represented Him as instructing the Rabbis. Thus 
 in Ghiberti's wonderfully spirited relief on the north- 
 ern doors of the Baptistery at Florence, the Child is 
 seated upon an actual throne, while the doctors are 
 grouped at his feet. Taddeo Gaddi, in his fresco in the 
 Lower Church at Assisi, has the doctors symmetrically 
 arranged in rows facing each other, six on each side, and 
 the Child sits in the centre, with a roll of parchment in 
 his left hand, and his right solemnly raised as if com- 
 manding silence. A painting of some power, by Do- 
 menico Passignano, in the Church of San Francesco, at 
 Borgo di San Sepolcro, shows a group of four large fig- 
 ures in the foreground; one old man leans his gray head 
 forward as if listening eagerly, a younger man with an 
 open book on his lap bends back as if surprised, while a 
 friend standing near stoops down over his shoulder and 
 points to the book, bidding him "search the Script- 
 ures." Beyond these men are quite a company of doc- 
 tors, turning over their books as if puzzled, and a con- 
 
228 THE CHRIST-CHILD IN ART 
 
 siderable number of spectators. The Child, dressed in 
 white with a blue robe, stands on a raised dai's in front 
 of a bishop's chair, and lifts his hand with the gesture 
 of an orator. 
 
 The little picture by Duccio di Boninsegna, a part of 
 the famous altar-piece in the cathedral at Sienna, illus- 
 trates the spirit in which this subject was treated by the 
 old masters. Duccio was one of the great men of the 
 thirteenth century who awakened art in Italy after its 
 long Byzantine sleep. He is worthy of a place near 
 Giotto in the history of painting, for though his works' 
 shared the limitations of his age, and his ignorance of 
 anatomy and perspective hampered his powers of expres- 
 sion, his thought was deep and his feeling sincere, and 
 he was the founder of the important Siennese school, 
 whose joyous and secluded course culminated in the 
 poetic fertility of Sodoma. This panel represents 
 the Christ -child as seated in solemn dignity on a 
 raised platform under the frescoed arches of the 
 Temple. Below Him are six doctors of the law, two 
 of whom are pulling at their gray beards in perplexity, 
 Joseph and Mary have just entered at the left, and are 
 stretching out their hands in wonder and calling to the 
 Child. It is all very reverent and unaffected and true to 
 the painter's idea; but this idea is hardly true to the 
 gospel narrative. For St. Luke makes us feel that Jesus 
 appeared in the Temple not as a teacher but as a learn- 
 er, one who was preparing for his life-work by coming 
 into close contact with the religious life of the people 
 whom He was to deliver from the yoke of the law and 
 lead into the true rest of souls. What could be more 
 
^^^^^^^..riu^;^ 
 
 ?;f'a;4:;i,i»aii3siBiB^^ 
 
 CHRIST AMONG THE DOCTORS — DUCCIO 
 From the panel in the Opera del Duomo, Sienna 
 
THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS 231 
 
 natural than that He should desire to learn what the 
 masters in Israel were teaching to the folk ? Was it 
 any derogation from the dignity of his mission that 
 He should seek them and question them eagerly con- 
 cerning their doctrine of God and righteousness and 
 the way of peace ? How could He bring new life and 
 light, a better doctrine, a purer faith, unless He had 
 sounded and proved the emptiness of those orthodox 
 traditions which had made the Divine Word of none 
 effect in Israel ? It was as a seeker, a questioner, that 
 He tarried among the doctors in the Temple precincts. 
 
 But questions from a child are often messages from 
 God. And questions from such a child as Jesus must 
 have been like illuminations piercing through the dry 
 and flimsy web of Rabbinic subtleties. It was at this 
 that the listeners wondered, not with the hostile surprise 
 which would be excited by the sight of a boy of twelve 
 teaching his elders, but with a pleasant wonder at the 
 simplicity, the directness, the searching intelligence of 
 his inquiries, and the discretion of his replies. 
 
 This conception of " Christ among the Doctors " has 
 been expressed in modern art by two most admirable 
 pictures, significant in the deepest sense of the intense 
 interest which the best minds of this century have taken 
 in the real life of Christ. One of them is Mr. Holman 
 Hunt's brilliant painting of " The Finding of the 
 Saviour in the Temple." The other is the picture by 
 Prof. Heinrich Hofmann at Dresden. It is not entirely 
 free from a touch of academic formality. One can feel 
 the sense of effort and the influence of conventional 
 types in the attempt to render the heads of a stern 
 
232 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 Pharisee, a scornful Sadducee, a keen philosopher, a 
 mild old Rabbi, and an earnest seeker after truth, in the 
 five men who are grouped around the young Jesus. 
 But the Divine Child is a supremely lovely figure. 
 Clad in a simple white tunic. He rests one hand upon 
 a reader's desk, and with the other He points to a pas- 
 sage in the open book as if asking for a solution of its 
 meaning which shall reveal its living power. He lifts 
 his dark, luminous eyes to the face of one of the doc- 
 tors with the earnest, searching look of one who al- 
 ready knows that the word of God is the food of the 
 soul. He feels that He is in his Father's House, but 
 He is there as a child, to learn his Father's will. And 
 it is in this spirit that He goes down again to the home 
 in Nazareth, and lives there in subjection to his par- 
 ents, and growing in favour with God and man. 
 
 V 
 
 There is surely a vital truth for our own lives to be 
 gathered from this interpretation of the childhood of 
 Jesus. It gives us a deeper sense of the sacredness and 
 the power of the home. 
 
 The perfect manhood of Him whom all Christendom 
 adores as the Son of God was matured and moulded in 
 the tender shelter of the home. It was there that He 
 felt the influences of truth and grace. To that source 
 we may trace some of the noblest qualities of his hu- 
 man character. And yet, if there is anything which 
 
THE CHILDHOOD OF JESUS 235 
 
 Christendom appears to be in danger of losing, it is the 
 possibiHty of such a home as that in which Jesus grew 
 to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. 
 Is it not true? 
 
 " The world is too much with us, late and soon, 
 Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." 
 
 The false and cruel conditions of industrial competi- 
 tion, and the morbid overgrowth of great cities where 
 human lives are crowded together to the point of 
 physical and moral suffocation, have raised an enor- 
 mous barrier between great masses of mankind and 
 the home which their natural instincts desire and seek. 
 The favoured classes, on the other hand, are too much 
 alienated by false standards of happiness, by the mania 
 of publicity, by the insane rivalries of wealth, to keep 
 their reverence for the pure and lovely ideals of domes- 
 tic life. A new aristocracy is formed which lives in 
 mammoth hotels, and a new democracy which exists in 
 gigantic tenements. Public amusements increase in 
 splendour and frequency, but private joys grow rare 
 and difficult, and even the capacity for them seems to 
 be withering, at least in the two extremes of human 
 society where the home wears a vanishing aspect. 
 
 And yet — so runs my simple and grateful creed — 
 this appearance is only transient and superficial. Deep 
 in the heart of humanity lies the domestic passion^ 
 which will survive the mistakes of a civilization not yet 
 fully enlightened, and prove the truth of the saying: 
 " Before the fall. Paradise was man's home ; since the 
 
236 THE CHRIST- CHILD IN ART 
 
 fall, home has been his Paradise." The great silent 
 classes of mankind who stand between the extremes, 
 not yet spoiled by luxury and just beginning to awake 
 to an active compassion for the sorrows of the homeless 
 multitude, cherish the ideal of the home, the resting- 
 place of love, the nursery of innocent childhood, the 
 seed-plot of the manly virtues, defended even in the 
 lowliest cottage against all rude intrusions and desecrat- 
 ing powers, and ruled by 
 
 " Pure religion, breathing household laws." 
 
 To be loyal to this ideal, to realize it in their own lives 
 and help to make it possible for others, is indeed the 
 noblest and the most useful service that men and 
 women can render to the age. For, after all, it is only 
 from such quiet and holy homes as that in which the 
 child Jesus lived at Nazareth that the children of the 
 future can come, who shall feel, as manhood dawns, 
 that they must be about their Father's business, and 
 follow the Christ, the King, to the serene and bloodless 
 triumph of his kingdom of childlike faith, and hope, 
 and love for all mankind. 
 
 THE END 
 
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