n the representations of the Virgin, as far as
it was merely external, was good. An added dignity and grace, a more
free and correct drawing, a truer feeling for harmony of proportion
and all that constitutes elegance, were gradually infused into the
forms and attitudes. But dangerous became the craving for mere
beauty,--dangerous the study of the classical and heathen literature.
This was the commencement of that thoroughly pagan taste which in
the following century demoralized Christian art. There was now an
attempt at varying the arrangement of the sacred groups which led to
irreverence, or at best to a sort of superficial mannered grandeur;
and from this period we date the first introduction of the portrait
Virgins. An early, and most scandalous example remains to us in one
of the frescoes in the Vatican, which represents Giulia Farnese in the
character of the Madonna, and Pope Alexander VI. (the infamous Borgia)
kneeling at her feet in the character of a votary. Under the influence
of the Medici the churches of Florence were filled with pictures of
the Virgin, in which the only thing aimed at was an alluring and
even meretricious beauty. Savonarola thundered from his pulpit in the
garden of San Marco against these impieties. He exclaimed against
the profaneness of those who represented the meek mother of Christ in
gorgeous apparel, with head unveiled, and under the features of women
too well and publicly known. He emphatically declared that if the
painters knew as well as he did the influence of such pictures in
perverting simple minds, they would hold their own works in horror and
detestation. Savonarola yielded to none in orthodox reverence for the
Madonna; but he desired that she should be represented in an orthodox
manner. He perished at the stake, but not till after he had made
a bonfire in the Piazza at Florence of the offensive effigies; he
perished--persecuted to death by the Borgia family. But his influence
on the greatest Florentine artists of his time is apparent in the
Virgins of Botticelli, Lorenzo di Credi, and Fra Bartolomeo, all of
whom had been his friends, admirers, and disciples: and all, differing
from each other, were alike in this, that, whether it be the dignified
severity of Botticelli, or the chaste simplicity of Lorenzo di Credi,
or the noble tenderness of Fra Bartolomeo, we feel that each of them
had aimed to portray worthily the sacred character of the Mother of
the Redeemer. And to these