Elsewhere in Italy there prevailed weariness and decline. Good workmen. there were in abundance. The Caracci, late in the century at Bologna, full of artistic zeal, hoped to renew the golden age selecting and uniting in one style the excellences of all the schools. Their work and that of their followers, Guido Reni, 1575-1642, Domenichino and Guercino, had no little merit.

The political, social, and intellectual forces of Italy were seemingly exhausted, as its liberty and economic prosperity were destroyed. Resting in the possession of the accumulated treasures of antiquity and of the Renaissance, the following centuries were passed inglorious and unproductive. The living genius of art had flown to the northern countries or to Spain. Nevertheless, the students of art from beyond the mountains, then as now, made pilgrimages of study and reverence to those treasured wonders, from which the custodians could gain neither instruction nor inspiration. During the seventeenth century, an occasional scattered name rises to some prominence, and we recall a Sassoferrato, 1605-1685, Salvator Rosa, 1615-1673, a Carlo Dolci, 1616-1686, and in the eighteenth century, such painters as Tiepolo and Canaletto with the sculptor Canova.

Some of the elements active in the development of the brilliant period of Italian art may be briefly summarized. Among these were: the new civilization and the spirit of hope and confidence, which in the twelfth century and later led to the establishment of states and towns, the building of cathedrals and cities the revival of letters in the fourteenth century, with the inspiration of the classic literature and philosophy, which was in harmony with the reaction against the earlier ascetic theology -the rediscovery of ancient art revealing objects which gave delight, while they served as models to instruct-the growth, prosperity, and rivalry of the Italian municipalities, emulous to surpass in the adornment of their cities-a similar rivalry between the nobles, wealthy citizens, and church magnates, when art was the fashion and an intelligent good taste happily widespread the enlarged patronage of the Church, then controlled often by men fully in sympathy with the spirit of the Renaissance.

Above all, that glorious age was due to a phenomenon which no philosophy has explained, and of which no analysis has revealed the cause. That is the birth and development at that time of a number of men of unusual genius and talent, unsurpassed in their calling, noteworthy in the history of human achievement in the character of their intellectual and artistic gifts, in their technical skill, and in the results which they attained.

Hall Baker

George Hall

Madonna of the House of Orleans

Raphael Sanzio (Rä' fa-el Sän' zē-ō), 1483-1520

N our iconoclastic age not even the supremacy of Raphael as first of painters has remained undisputed.

Because some one fancies he sees in one painter a stronger colorist, in another a more virile brush treatment, or that another excels in fidelity to nature or in effects of light and shade; lesser men have been put forward as the rivals of that sublime genius, who, combining in high and sufficient degree the excellences of all, was in addition the heaven-endowed spirit, who saw in his soul, and created for humanity, visions of a purer and a sweeter beauty, a loftier philosophy and poetry than any other painter.

Velasquez, for example, was a most skillful workman and a great painter, Raphael was a sublime genius and a supreme artist.

In his age, religious art had laid aside much of the ascetic mysticism of the earlier time, and had come nearer to humanity, losing something, it may be, but gaining more.

In Raphael's madonnas, if we miss the more austere devotion and rapture of another age, he expresses rather the divine and ever present beauty of human motherhood, infinite and tender, and universal infancy, typified and glorified in the supreme example of the Virgin and her Divine Child.

This lovely little gem, named from a former owner, the Duke of Orleans, was painted in Raphael's earlier Florentine period, about 1506, and is now in the palace of Chantilly, near Paris, which in 1886, with innumerable art treasures, was bequeathed to the French nation by the Duc d'Aumale.