La Belle Jardinière (lä-bel-jär-de-nē-ār)
Raphael Sanzio (rä'-fa-el sän'-zē-ō), 1483-1520

INTIL the French Revolution, the conception of a public art gallery, the property of the people and administered for them scarcely existed. The beginnings of the marvelous national collections of France, in the Louvre, as an open public gallery do not go further back than 1793. Before that time many of the choicest gems of the Louvre were hidden away in the castles and palaces of the French kings.

Francis I, who reigned from 1515 to 1547, is credited with having bought from its owner in Siena, for whom Raphael had painted it, the beautiful Madonna which all the world knows as "The Beautiful Gardener (ess)." This famous picture was made at the very height of Raphael's powers at the end of his stay in Florence, in 1507 or more likely in 1508, when the pure and limpid beauty of his early Umbrian period had been heightened and enlarged by the powerful artistic influences, with which his receptive nature had been surrounded in Florence.

In an ideally lovely landscape with distant views of hills and towns, where all breathes peace and calm, is the young Mother seated on a grassy knoll. About her spring up gentle flowers and soft grasses, every detail of which Raphael has painted with reverent fidelity.

Serene and in accordant harmony with all this smiling nature, she sits, her tender and loving eyes looking in joy down on the fairest flower of all, the Christ Child. Here is no premonitory strife of emotions, no mystery except the eternal and beautiful mysteries of placid childhood and of maternal love.

Cathedral, Speyer (spir), Germany

PEYER is a quiet little town on the upper Rhine, the capital of the Bavarian Palatinate. In the earlier days of the RomanGerman Empire, it had considerable importance, and was often the residence of the court. Conrad II founded in 1030 the cathedral as a burial place for himself and his descendants, and several emperors of the Salian race, and many related persons, were later buried there.

The structure, under the impulse of the reigning house, seems to have been pushed rapidly forward to completion. It is known that the choir with the apse and the eastern towers, as we see them in the view given, were built in the eleventh century. The façade, however, with the two western towers. and the portico, or Imperial Hall, as it is styled, of which the gable can be seen in the extreme right, were built in 1854-1858.

This cathedral is a long, rather low basilica in the Romanesque style, as it was developed along the Rhine before the rise of the Gothic. Its length is 441 feet, while the greatest breadth through the transept is 180 feet. Although adorned within by modern frescoes and a few statues, the building has little decoration, and the only relief from the long horizontal lines, which endow the structure with strength and repose, are the semicircular arches of the windows and the curve of the apse.

Complete as the building now stands, it suffered spoliation in 1689 by the French under Louis XIV, and again in 1794.

Portrait of Giuliano da San Gallo (zbö-le-ä'-nō dä-sän-gäl'-lō),

1445-1517

OSIMO ROSSELLI'S pupil Piero, called thus in the Italian manner, Cosimo's Piero, was born and until 1503, chiefly lived in Florence. Rosselli, an artist of renown, was among the painters called, about 1480, by Sixtus IV to Rome, to decorate the Sistine Chapel. Piero went with him and helped

his wily master carry out his scheme to win the Pope's premium for the work that should best please him, by covering his fresco with gold and vivid colors to suit the Pope's taste.

Piero had high merit as a painter, but much preferred mythology to sacred subjects, and was odd and fantastic in his treatment of his often unusual themes. His color is pleasing though subdued, with weird lights to suit his fanciful conceptions. Several of his panels which have come down to us were painted to ornament chests or other pieces of furniture; and this is doubtless the case with the two curious mythological hunting-pieces by him in the Metropolitan Museum.

His drawing was bold and firm and he excelled in portraits as may be seen in this strong and virile likeness, now in the Gallery at The Hague. The Florentine architect, Giuliano da San Gallo, one of two architect brothers, was eminent in his profession in Florence and elsewhere, and on the accession of Julius II, in 1503, to the papal chair, went with him to Rome, and was long active in the building projects of that Pope and his successor, Leo X. He competed with Bramante and others in the designs for the new St. Peter's, and was the associate of Raphael for three years, until his death in the supervision of that great work.