silver moon dost wear."

The enskied Madonna involves many technical difficulties of
composition, and demands a high order of artistic imagination. It
could hardly be called a frequent subject in the period of greatest
artistic daring, and no modern painter has shown any adequate
understanding of the subject, though there are not lacking those who
have made the attempt. Bodenhausen, Defregger, Bouguereau, have all
followed Raphael in representing the Queen of Heaven as a full-length
figure in the sky; but their conception has not the dignity
corresponding to the style of treatment.

Impatient and dissatisfied with such modern art, we turn back to the
old masters with new appreciation of their great gifts.

CHAPTER IV.

THE PASTORAL MADONNA.

It was many centuries before art, at first devoted exclusively to
figure painting, turned to the study of natural scenery. Thus it was
that Madonna pictures, of various kinds, had long been established in
popular favor before the idea of a landscape setting was introduced.
We need not look for interesting pictures of this class before the
latter part of the fifteenth century, and it was not until the
sixteenth that the pastoral Madonna, in its highest form, was first
produced. Even then there was no great number which show a really
sympathetic love of nature.

In the ideal pastoral, the landscape entirely fills the picture, and
the figures are, as it were, an integral part of it. Such pictures are
so rare that we write in golden letters the names of the few who have
given us these treasures.

Raphael's justly comes first in the list. His earliest Madonnas show
his love of natural scenery, in the charming glimpses of Umbrian
landscape, which form the background. These are treated, as Muentz
points out, with marked "simplicity of outline and breadth of design."
They are, however, but the beginning of the great things that were to
follow. The young painter's sojourn in Florence witnessed a marvellous
development of his powers. Here he was surrounded by the greatest
artists of his time, and he was quick to absorb into himself something
of excellence from them all. His fertility of production was amazing.
In a period of four years (1504-1508), interrupted by visits to
Perugia and Urbino, he produced about twenty Madonnas, in which we
may trace the new influences affecting him.

Leonardo da Vinci was, doubtless, his greatest inspiration, and it was
from this master-stud