When we enter that strange period of history known as the Dark Ages, we find the art products few and uninteresting; but even then the Christ-child is not forgotten, and again and again he appears sculptured in marble over the portals of cathedrals, or painted in stiff Byzantine style over their altars.
Thus it was that in the new birth of art in Italy, when Niccolò Pisano in sculpture, and Cimabue in painting, awakened the sleeping world to a love of beauty, the Madonna, with her heaven-born Babe, was the first subject to arouse enthusiasm; and it was for a picture of this sort that all Florence went mad with joy, as it was borne along The Street of Rejoicing.
In early representations, both in mosaics and paintings, the Child is dressed in a tunic, white, red, or blue, often very richly ornamented with gold embroidery. This method obtained as late as the fourteenth century, when Fra Angelico still painted the Babe in the elaborate royal garments of a king. But art at last returned to nature, and from the fifteenth century the Holy Child was painted partially and sometimes wholly undraped, with beautiful rounded limbs and soft pink baby flesh.
It was then that Italy was transformed into a paradise of art, and all the important cities were full of great painters whose hearts were aglow with the sacred fire of genius. In the host of beautiful works which were produced in the next three centuries, every type of treatment was exemplified, varying from the most simple naturalism to the loftiest idealism. The naïve realism of Filippino Lippi's chubby baby, placidly sucking his thumb as he looks out of the picture, is matched in the frolicsome boys of Andrea del Sarto's many paintings, smiling mischievously from the Madonna's arms. At the other extreme is the strangely precocious looking child of Botticelli, raising his eyes heavenward, with a mystic smile on his serious face.
And when it would seem that every conceivable type of infancy, and every imaginable situation had already been realized on the canvas, Raphael[21] arose to create an entirely new ideal. His life was so short, his work so surpassingly brilliant, that it was as if a splendid meteor suddenly flashed across the starry firmament of the Cinque-Cento. Perugino, his master; Pinturicchio, his employer; Fra Bartolommeo, his friend; Andrea del Sarto, "the faultless painter," all paled before his rapidly increasing glory. When he laid down his brush at the age of thirty-seven, he had finished a career which is one of the miracles of history. His work is a complete epitome of religious art, including all the great themes, and enveloping each with an atmosphere of pure spirituality, indescribably elevating to mind and soul.