nd deer grazing;
in this place the Virgin has drawn up her ass, who browses the thistles
at his feet, while St. Joseph, his pilgrim bottle bobbing on his back,
hangs himself with all his weight to the branches of a date palm, trying
to get the fruit within reach. Meanwhile a bevy of sweet little angels
have come to the rescue; they sit among the branches, dragging them down
towards him, and even bending the whole stem at the top so that he may
get at the dates. Such a thing as this is quite lovely, particularly
after the routine of St. Joseph trudging along after the donkey, the
eternal theme of the Italians. In Altdorfer's print Christ is ascending
in a glory of sunrise clouds, banner in hand, angels and cherubs peering
with shy curiosity round the cloud edge. The sepulchre is open, guards
asleep or stretching themselves, and yawning all round; and childish
young angels look reverently into the empty grave, rearranging the
cerecloths, and trying to roll back the stone lid. One of them leans
forward, and utterly dazzles a negro watchman, stepping forward, lantern
in hand; in the distance shepherds are seen prowling about. "This," says
Altdorfer to himself, "is how it must have happened."

[Footnote 11: And the circular so-called Botticelli (now given, I
believe, to San Gallo) in the National Gallery.]

Hence, among these Germans, the dreadful seriousness and pathos of the
Passion, the violence of the mob, the brutality of the executioners,
above all, the awful sadness of Christ. There is here somewhat of the
realisation of what He must have felt in finding the world He had come
to redeem so vile and cruel. In what way, under what circumstances,
such thoughts would come to these men, is revealed to us by that
magnificent head of the suffering Saviour--a design apparently for a
carved crucifix--under which Albrecht Duerer wrote the pathetic words:
"I drew this in my sickness."

Thus much of the power of that new factor, the individual interest in
the Scriptures. All other innovations on the treatment of religious
themes were due, in the sixteenth century, but still more in the
seventeenth, to the development of some new artistic possibility, or
to the gathering together in the hands of one man of artistic powers
hitherto existing only in a dispersed condition. This is the secret
of the greatness of Raphael as a pictorial poet, that he could do all
manner of new things merely by holding all the old means in his grasp