No less splendid and inspired is "Repose During the Flight to Egypt," where the mother of the Lord again awakens the most fervent sensations. She is no longer the half-childlike virgin of the Conception and the Assumption; she is the mother, tenderly and rapturously gazing at the sleeping child surrounded by a halo of heavenly light. Angels crowd forward in naïve curiosity; the saintly Joseph looks with emotion on the contented infant; the thick foliage gives to the entire group shade and coolness. Even the ass looks comfortable and pious. The color and composition are entirely beyond comparison.
A painting brimful of roguishness is "Jacob's Ladder," where angels ascending and descending, making up the dreams of the sleeper, amuse themselves in most innocent fashion. Well known is the charming Christ-Child in the painting of "St. Joseph," and the charming little "John" often fondly painted by him, his arms entwined about his lambkin. Hardy peasant types are not wanting; and that the inspiration of the great Spaniard may not exceed all bounds, there are a few pictures which, with all their artistic excellence make us realize what a chasm separates us from the passionate Catholic Murillo. We believe that full artistic justice may be done to the poetry of Biblical legend without being obliged to glorify a Peter Aubry. However, other lands, other customs!
Of Velasquez's work there should be mentioned, in the first place, his paintings of Philip IV. and the Duke of Olivarez, both of striking characterization in their grotesque ugliness--the master will survive even the one-sided and exclusive cult of which he has been made the victim. We will not set our minds against Velasquez's or Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" just because they are to be found in all the exercises of enraptured modern goslings.
I will not say anything about the "Madonna Conestabile," the "St. George," and the wonderful "Madonna Alba" of Raphael, for I consider it entirely superfluous to combat the affected underestimates of the master of Urbino, which is insisted upon as a matter of party obligation by every imitator of fashion. If Herr Muther prescribes the Botticelli cult for the last years of one century, the rediscovery of the joyous Andrea del Sarto for the first years of a new century, he will, if we live to see the day, prescribe for the century noonday the return to the master of perfection, Raffaelo Sanzio, as the inevitable requirement of fashion, and his disciples will add here their solemn amen. But the eternal masters are above the gossip of salons and fashions.