Legends of the Madonna as Represented in the Fine Arts Part 28

MARY.

O sister mine! full of courtesy, G.o.d of his infinite goodness reward thee for thy charity. We are come from Nazareth, and we are without a place to lay our heads, arrived in a strange land, all tired and weary with the way!

The Zingarella then offers them a resting-place, and straw and fodder for the a.s.s, which being accepted, she asks leave to tell their fortune, but begins by recounting, in about thirty stanzas, all the past history of the Virgin pilgrim; she then asks to see the Child--

Ora tu, Signora mia.

Che sei piena di cortesia, Mostramelo per favore Lo tuo Figlio Redentore!

And now, O Lady mine, that art full of courtesy, grant me to look upon thy Son, the Redeemer!

The Virgin takes him from the arms of Joseph--

Datemi, o caro sposo, Lo mio Figlio grazioso!

Quando il vide sta meschina Zingarella, che indovina!

Give me, dear husband, my lovely boy, that this poor gypsy, who is a prophetess, may look upon him.

The gypsy responds with becoming admiration and humility, praises the beauty of the Child, and then proceeds to examine his palm: which having done, she breaks forth into a prophecy of all the awful future, tells how he would be baptized, and tempted, scourged, and finally hung upon a cross--

Questo Figlio accarezzato Tu lo vedrai ammazzato Sopra d'una dura croce, Figlio bello! Figlio dolce!

but consoles the disconsolate Mother, doomed to honour for the sake of us sinners--

Sei arrivata a tanti onori Per noi altri Peccatori!

and ends by begging an alms--

Non ti vo' piu infastidire, Bella Signora; so chi hai a fare.

Dona la limosinella A sta povera Zingarella true repentance and eternal life.

Vo' una vera contrizione Per la tua intercezione, Accio st' alma dopo morte Tragga alle celesti porte!

And so the story ends.

There can be no doubt, I think, that we have here the original theme of Giorgione's picture, and perhaps of others.

In the Provencal ballad, there are three gypsies, men, not women, introduced, who tell the fortune of the Virgin and Joseph, as well as that of the Child, and end by begging alms "to wet their thirsty throats." Of this version there is a very spirited and characteristic translation by Mr. Kenyon, under the t.i.tle of "a Gypsy Carol."[1]

[Footnote 1: A Day at Tivoli, with other Verses, by John Kenyon, p.

149.]

THE RETURN FROM EGYPT.

According to some authorities, the Holy Family sojourned in Egypt during a period of seven years, but others a.s.sert that they returned to Judea at the end of two years.

In general the painters have expressed the Return from Egypt by exhibiting Jesus as no longer an infant sustained in his mother's arms, but as a boy walking at her side. In a picture by Francesco Vanni, he is a boy about two or three years old, and carries a little basket full of carpenter's tools. The occasion of the Flight and Return is indicated by three or four of the martyred Innocents, who are lying on the ground. In a picture by Domenico Feti two of the Innocents are lying dead on the roadside. In a very graceful, animated picture by Rubens, Mary and Joseph lead the young Christ between them, and the Virgin wears a large straw hat.

HISTORICAL SUBJECTS.

PART III.

THE LIFE OF THE VIRGIN MARY FROM THE SOJOURN IN EGYPT TO THE CRUCIFIXION OF OUR LORD.

1. THE HOLY FAMILY. 2. THE VIRGIN SEEKS HER SON. 3. THE DEATH OF JOSEPH. 4. THE MARRIAGE AT CANA. 5. "LO SPASIMO." 6. THE CRUCIFIXION.

7. THE DESCENT FROM THE CROSS. 8. THE ENTOMBMENT.

THE HOLY FAMILY.

When the Holy Family under divine protection, had returned safely from their sojourn in Egypt, they were about to repair to Bethlehem; but Joseph hearing that Archelaus "did reign in Judea in the room of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither; and being warned of G.o.d in a dream, he turned aside into Galilee," and came to the city of Nazareth, which was the native place and home of the Virgin Mary.

Here Joseph dwelt, following in peace his trade of a carpenter, and bringing up his reputed Son to the same craft: and here Mary nurtured her divine Child; "and he grew and waxed strong in spirit, and the grace of G.o.d was upon him." No other event is recorded until Jesus had reached his twelfth, year.

This, then, is the proper place to introduce some notice of those representations of the domestic life of the Virgin and the infancy of the Saviour, which, in all their endless variety, pa.s.s under the general t.i.tle of THE HOLY FAMILY--the beautiful t.i.tle of a beautiful subject, addressed in the loveliest and most familiar form at once to the piety and the affections of the beholder.

These groups, so numerous, and of such perpetual recurrence, that they alone form a large proportion of the contents of picture galleries and the ornaments of churches, are, after all, a modern innovation in sacred art. What may be called the _domestic_ treatment of the history of the Virgin cannot be traced farther back than the middle of the fifteenth century. It is, indeed, common to cla.s.s all those pictures as Holy Families which include any of the relatives of Christ grouped with the Mother and her Child; but I must here recapitulate and insist upon the distinction to be drawn between the _domestic_ and the _devotional_ treatment of the subject; a distinction I have been careful to keep in view throughout the whole range of sacred art, and which, in this particular subject, depends on a difference in sentiment and intention, more easily felt than set down in words. It is, I must repeat, a _devotional_ group where the sacred personages are placed in direct relation to the worshippers, and where their supernatural character is paramount to every other. It is a _domestic_ or an _historical_ group, a Holy Family properly so called, when the personages are placed in direct relation to each other by some link of action or sentiment, which expresses the family connection between them, or by some action which has a dramatic rather than a religious significance. The Italians draw this distinction in the t.i.tle "_Sacra Conversazione_" given to the first-named subject, and that of "_Sacra Famiglia_" given to the last. For instance, if the Virgin, watching her sleeping Child, puts her finger on her lip to silence the little St. John; there is here no relation between the spectator and the persons represented, except that of unbidden sympathy: it is a family group; a domestic scene. But if St. John, looking out of the picture, points to the Infant, "Behold the Lamb of G.o.d!" then the whole representation changes its significance; St. John a.s.sumes the character of precursor, and we, the spectators, are directly addressed and called upon to acknowledge the "Son of G.o.d, the Saviour of mankind."

If St. Joseph, kneeling, presents flowers to the Infant Christ, while Mary looks on tenderly (as in a group by Raphael), it is an act of homage which expresses the mutual relation of the three personages; it is a Holy Family: whereas, in the picture by Murillo, in our National Gallery, where Joseph and Mary present the young Redeemer to the homage of the spectator, while the form of the PADRE ETERNO, and the Holy Spirit, with attendant angels, are floating above, we have a devotional group, a "_Sacra Conversazione_:"--it is, in fact a material representation of the Trinity; and the introduction of Joseph into such immediate propinquity with the personages acknowledged as divine is one of the characteristics of the later schools of theological art. It could not possibly have occurred before the end of the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century.

The introduction of persons who could not have been contemporary, as St. Francis or St. Catherine, renders the group ideal and devotional.

On the other hand, as I have already observed, the introduction of attendant angels does not place the subject out of the domain of the actual; for the painters literally rendered what in the Scripture text is distinctly set down and literally interpreted, "He shall give his angels charge concerning thee." Wherever lived and moved the Infant G.o.dhead, angels were always _supposed_ to be present; therefore it lay within the province of an art addressed especially to our senses, to place them bodily before us, and to give to these heavenly attendants a visible shape and bearing worthy of their blessed ministry.

The devotional groups, of which I have already treated most fully, even while placed by the accessories quite beyond the range of actual life, have been too often vulgarized and formalized by a trivial or merely conventional treatment.[1] In these really domestic scenes, where the painter sought unreproved his models in simple nature, and trusted for his effect to what was holiest and most immutable in our common humanity, he must have been a bungler indeed if he did not succeed in touching some responsive chord of sympathy in the bosom of the observer. This is, perhaps, the secret of the universal, and, in general, deserved popularity of these Holy Families.

[Footnote 1: See the "Mater Amabilis" and the "Pastoral Madonnas," p.

229, 239.]

TWO FIGURES.

The simplest form of the family group is confined to two figures, and expresses merely the relation between the Mother and the Child.

The _motif_ is precisely the same as in the formal, G.o.ddess-like, enthroned Madonnas of the antique time; but here quite otherwise worked out, and appealing to other sympathies. In the first instance, the intention was to a.s.sert the contested pretensions of the human mother to divine honours; here it was rather to a.s.sert the humanity of her divine Son; and we have before us, in the simplest form, the first and holiest of all the social relations.

The primal instinct, as the first duty, of the mother, is the nourishment of the life she has given. A very common subject, therefore, is Mary in the act of feeding her Child from her bosom. I have already observed that, when first adopted, this was a theological theme; an answer, _in form_, to the challenge of the Nestorians, "Shall we call him _G.o.d_, who hath sucked his mother's breast?" Then, and for at least 500 years afterwards, the simple maternal action involved a religious dogma, and was the visible exponent of a controverted article of faith. All such controversy had long ceased, and certainly there was no thought of insisting on a point of theology in the minds of those secular painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who have set forth the representation with such an affectionate and delicate grace; nor yet in the minds of those who converted the lovely group into a moral lesson. For example, we find in the works of Jeremy Taylor (one of the lights of our Protestant Church) a long homily "Of nursing children, in imitation of the blessed Virgin Mother;" and prints and pictures of the Virgin thus occupied often bear significant t.i.tles and inscriptions of the same import; such as "Le premier devoir d'une mere," &c.

I do not find this _motif_ in any known picture by Raphael: but in one of his designs, engraved by Marc Antonio, it is represented with characteristic grace and delicacy.

Goethe describes with delight a picture by Correggio, in which the attention of the Child seems divided between the bosom of his mother, and some fruit offered by an angel. He calls this subject "The Weaning of the Infant Christ." Correggio, if not the very first, is certainly among the first of the Italians who treated this _motif_ in the simple domestic style. Others of the Lombard school followed him; and I know not a more exquisite example than the maternal group by Solario, now in the Louvre, styled _La Vierge a l'Oreiller verd_, from the colour of the pillow on which the Child is lying. The subject is frequent in the contemporary German and Flemish schools of the sixteenth century.

In the next century, there are charming examples by the Bologna painters and the _Naturalisti_, Spanish, Italian, and Flemish. I would particularly point to one by Agostino Caracci (Parma), and to another by Vandyck (that engraved by Bartolozzi), as examples of elegance; while in the numerous specimens by Rubens we have merely his own wife and son, painted with all that coa.r.s.e vigorous life, and homely affectionate expression, which his own strong domestic feelings could lend them.