nd differentiates.
The society of his saints and angels is stimulating; the element of the
unexpected enters into his work in open defiance of his pronounced
mannerism. It is possible to detect beneath the close and manifold
coverings of his ornate decoration a swift flame of imaginative impulse
such as Blake sent into the world without such covering. He would have
pleased Blake by this nervous energy and by his pure bright coloring,
despite the fact that he signed himself "Venetus." He painted in tempera
and finished his work with care and deliberation. It is remarkable that
so little of his mental fire died out in the slow process of his
execution. It is still more remarkable that in spite of his reactionary
tendencies, his archaistic use of gold and relief at a moment when all
great artists were renouncing these, he is intensely modern in his
sentiment. He seems to represent a phase of human development at which
we in America have but recently arrived; a phase in which appreciation
of ancient finished forms of beauty is united to a restless eagerness
and the impulse toward exaggerated self-expression. He is supposed to
have been born about 1440, which would make him a contemporary of the
two Bellini, of Hans Memling and of Mantegna. Had he only been able to
give his imagination a higher range--had he possessed a more controlling
spiritual ideal, had the touch of self-consciousness that rests like a
grimace on the otherwise lovely aspect of much of his painting, been
eliminated, he would have stood with these on the heights of fifteenth
century art. We are fortunate to have in America the Boston Museum
_Pieta_, which shows him in one of his most temperate moods, the _Pieta_
of Mr. Johnson's collection, which is the emphatic expression of his
least restrained moments, the _St. George_ of Mrs. Gardiner's
collection, in which his grasp of knightly character and pictorial grace
is at its best, and these two strongly contrasted types of the
Metropolitan Museum.

REMBRANDT AT THE CASSEL GALLERY

VII

REMBRANDT AT THE CASSEL GALLERY

The art gallery of Cassel is well known to connoisseurs as containing a
group of Rembrandts of the first order. The earliest example is a small
painting of a boy's head supposed to be a portrait of the artist at the
age of twenty or one and twenty; Dr. Bode considers 1628 too late rather
than too early as the probable date, and the same authority warns us
against considering