erpiece,
preserved in the National Gallery of London, represents the Virgin
seated on a throne and holding the infant Jesus in her arms. What
strikes one first when one looks at this figure is the proportion. The
body from the neck to the feet is only twice as long as the head,
so that it appears extremely short and podgy. This work is not less
remarkable for its painting than for its drawing. The great Margaritone
had but a limited number of colours in his possession, and he used
them in all their purity without ever modifying the tones. From this it
follows that his colouring has more vivacity than harmony. The cheeks
of the Virgin and those of the Child are of a bright vermilion which the
old master, from a naive preference for clear definitions, has placed on
each face in two circumferences as exact as if they had been traced out
by a pair of compasses.

A learned critic of the eighteenth century, the Abbe Lanzi, has treated
Margaritone's works with profound disdain. "They are," he says, "merely
crude daubs. In those unfortunate times people could neither draw nor
paint." Such was the common opinion of the connoisseurs of the days of
powdered wigs. But the great Margaritone and his contemporaries were
soon to be avenged for this cruel contempt. There was born in the
nineteenth century, in the biblical villages and reformed cottages of
pious England, a multitude of little Samuels and little St. Johns, with
hair curling like lambs, who, about 1840, and 1850, became spectacled
professors and founded the cult of the primitives.

That eminent theorist of Pre-Raphaelitism, Sir James Tuckett, does not
shrink from placing the Madonna of the National Gallery on a level with
the masterpieces of Christian art. "By giving to the Virgin's head,"
says Sir James Tuckett, "a third of the total height of the figure,
the old master attracts the spectator's attention and keeps it directed
towards the more sublime parts of the human figure, and in particular
the eyes, which we ordinarily describe as the spiritual organs. In this
picture, colouring and design conspire to produce an ideal and mystical
impression. The vermilion of the cheeks does not recall the natural
appearance of the skin; it rather seems as if the old master has applied
the roses of Paradise to the faces of the Mother and the Child."

We see, in such a criticism as this, a shining reflection, so to speak,
of the work which it exalts; yet MacSilly, the seraphic aesth