a real scene, for the Virgin’s throne with its embroidered hanging or dossal, the canopy or baldachin above it, and the richly decorated arch which frames it in are not what you would expect to see set up in a landscape. These are features repeated, with variations, in so many Madonna pictures intended for altarpicces,
But how very real are the two bits of landscape, which are drawn, we may feel sure, from nature: a great man’s castle and a water-mill, two widely separated phases of life, suggesting, perhaps, that the Christ came to save rich and poor alike. Then, too, the introduction of the apple may be intended to remind us of the circumstances of the fall of man, which the Saviour came into the world to redress. But Memling was satisfied merely to suggest these things; and then devoted himself to rendering with characteristic truth a little scene of realism. The angel on the left is simply an older child playfully attracting the baby’s attention to an apple; the Christ-child is simply a baby, attracted by the colored, shining object, and the pretty scene is watched intently by the other angel. On the Madonna’s face, however, is an abstracted expression, as if her thoughts were far away: not in pursuit of any mystical dreams, but following that quiet, happy pathway along which a young mother’s thoughts will roam,
So we find in Memling’s picture close studies of the way in which the facts present themselves to the eye, This is seen, too, in the landscape, in the carved and embroidered ornament, in the character of the figures, and in the little story which they are enacting. As I have said, the spirit of the picture is realistic.
But turn to Botticelli’s. Here the spirit is imaginative or allegorical. He was fond of allegorical subjects. In the present case the subject is religious, but we may doubt if the Bible version of the story was in the artist’s mind. He was commissioned to paint a Madonna and Child with attendant angels, and, poet and dreamer that he was, took the familiar theme and made it the basis of a picture from his own imagination, In the figure of the Christ-child there is a grave dignity, a suggestion of authority. The only gesture of infancy is in the left arm and hand, and the mother’s face is bowed in timid meekness, and is rather sad in expression.
But beauty of face he does not give to his Madonna; she is meek and timid—oppressed with gentle sadness. In the faces of the angels, the young fair creatures who stand around the throne, what wistful and unsatisfied yearning!
The strain of sadness, indeed, is in all Botticelli’s pictures; they have the note of infinite but ineffectual longing. So that, when we understand this, we forget the ugliness of many of his faces, and find in them a spiritual meaning, which we learn to feel is a very touching and beautiful expression of the artist’s own mind, of his particular way of looking at the world of his time.
He looked at it as a poet, moved alike by the love of beauty and by the beauty of love; and out of the world’s realities he fashioned for himself dreams, and these he pictured. So his pictures, as I have said, are not records of fact, treated with a very pleasing fancifulness and reverence, as in this Madonna of Memling’s, but visions, the beauty of which is rather spiritual than material. It is almost as if he tried to paint not only the flower but also its fragrance, and it was the fragrance that to him seemed the more precious quality.
So now, perhaps, we can begin to understand the difference between his technique—that is to say, his manner of setting down in paint what he desired to express—and Memling’s. The latter, serene and happy, had all a child’s delight in the appearances of things, attracted by them as the infant in his picture is attracted by the apple, and offering them to us with the same winning grace, and certainty that they will please, as the angel in his picture exhibits. So it is the facts, clear to the senses of sight and touch, that he presents, with a loving, tender care to make them as plain to us as possible, working out to perfection even the smallest details.
You have examined the beautiful workmanship in the ornamentation of the arch and in the garlands suspended by the charming little baby forms; but have you discovered the tiny figures in the landscape? And with a reading-glass you will sec that the castle drawbridge is down, and a lady on horseback is passing over it, following a gentleman who is evidently riding forth to hunt, as a greyhound comes along be-
