h satisfies the artist and his public respecting the
subject of the work, and lends it a traditional association of the
supernatural; a few spikes round the head of a young man are all that
remains of the solar nature of Apollo; the little budding horns and
pointed ears of the satyr must suffice to recall that he was once a
mystic fusion of man and beast and forest; a gilded disc behind the head
is all that shows that Giotto's figures are immortals in glory; and a
pair of wings is all that explains that Perugino's St. Michael is not a
mere dainty mortal warrior; the highest mysteries of Christianity are
despatched with a triangle and an open book, to draw which Raphael might
employ his colour-grinder, while he himself drew the finely-draped
baker's daughter from Trastevere.

In all these cases the artist refused to grapple with the supernatural,
and dismissed it with a mere stereotyped symbol, not more artistic than
the names which he might have engraved beneath each figure. Religious
associations were thus awakened without the artist, whether of the time
of Pericles or of the time of Leo X., giving himself further trouble;
the diffusion of religious ideas and feeling spared art from being
religious. Let us, therefore, in order to judge fairly of what art
can or cannot do for the supernatural, seek for one of the very rare
instances in which the artist has had no symbolical abbreviations at his
disposal, and has been obliged, if he would awaken any idea in the mind
of the spectator, to do so by means of his artistic creations. The
number of such exceptional instances is extremely limited in the great
art of antiquity and the Renaissance, when artistic subjects were almost
always traditionally religious or plainly realistic, and consequently
intelligible at first sight. There is, however, an example, and that
example is a masterpiece. It is the engraving by Agostino Veneziano,
after a lost drawing by Raphael, generally called "Lo Stregozzo,"
and representing a witch going to the Sabbath. Through a swampy
country, amidst rank and barren vegetation, sweeps the triumphal
procession--strange, beautiful, and ghastly; a naked boy dashes headlong
in front, bestriding a long-haired he-goat, and blowing a horn, little
stolen children packed behind on his saddle; on he dashes, across the
tufts of marsh-lily and bulrush, across the stagnant-pools of water,
clearing the way and announcing his mistress the witch. She thrones,
old, pa