Gaudenzio Ferrari has the same love of sheep, and these, with horses and dogs, force their way into his pictures. The Bible is an encyclopædia of themes, and even had any subject been wanting, apocrypha and sacred legend would have provided it. For his pet lambs Ferrari goes to the copious broidery on the Gospel, and his _Angels predicting the Birth of Maria_ is really a study in sheep on the background of a domed and towered Italian city. Giotto too had attempted sheep, though they are more like pigs, and dogs, though they are elongated and skinny; his camel with grotesque ears and a sun-bonnet one can forgive.
The lives of the saints supplied other opportunities for “Dutch” pictures in the shape of miracles at home. Titian himself stooped to record the miracle of putting on again the foot which the man who had kicked his mother cut off in remorse. And in the same Scuola of the Confraternity of St. Antony at Padua you may see the neglectful nurse carrying safely to its parents at table the babe she had allowed to boil.
And yet despite all these manifold opportunities, no Italian seems quite to get the veracious atmosphere of the Dutch and to achieve the dignity of Art without departing from the homeliness of Nature. No Italian has brought Christ into the street so boldly as Erasmus Quellinus in that picture in the Museo Vicenza in which a girl with a basket of live hens on her head stops to watch the fat Dutch baby sleeping in its mother’s arms. Despite the unreal presence of adoring saints in the crowd, there is here a true immanence of divinity in everyday reality. The sixteenth-century Italian Baroccio did indeed depict a Dutch peasant-feast in his _Last Supper_ in the cathedral of Urbino, with its bare-legged boy cook stooping for platters from a basket and its dog drinking at a bronze dish, but its homeliness is marred by the hovering of angels. Realism unadorned is essayed by Fogolino in his _Holy Family_ in Vicenza, with the carpenter’s shop, the rope of yarn, the hammer; with a boy Christ in a black tunic saying grace before a meal of boiled eggs, pomegranate, and grapes, washed down by a beaker of red wine; with the Madonna bending solicitously over him, her wooden spoon poised over her bowl; but, alas! the whole effect is of a cheap oleograph.