marvellous and ever new thing is
art. What Catholic painting has embroidered with variations upon this
theme of the Madonna, without ever exhausting it, astonishes and
confuses the imagination; but, in reflecting, we comprehend that under
the conventional type each painter conveyed secretly, at the same time,
his dream of love and the personification of his talent.

The Madonna of Albrecht Duerer in her sad and somewhat constrained
gracefulness, with her tired features, interesting rather than
beautiful, her air of a matron rather than a Virgin, her German and
_bourgeoise_ frankness, her tight garments and her symmetrically broken
folds, almost always accompanied by a rabbit, an owl, or an ape, through
some vague memory of Germanic pantheism, may she not be the woman whom
he would have loved and preferred to all others, and does she not also
exceedingly well represent the very genius of the artist? As she is his
Madonna, she might easily be his Muse.

The same resemblance exists in Raphael. The type of his Madonna, in
whom, mingled with old memories, the features of the Fornarina are
always found, sometimes suggested, sometimes copied, most frequently
idealized, is she not the most perfect symbol of his talent,--elegant,
graceful, and penetrated throughout with a chaste voluptuousness? The
Christian nourished on Plato and Greek Art, the friend of Leo X., the
dilettante Pope, the artist who died of love while painting the
_Transfiguration_, did he not live entirely in these modest Venuses
holding on their knees a child who is Love? If we wished to symbolize
the genius of every painter in an allegorical picture, would it be any
other than the angel of Urbino?

The Virgin of the _Assunta_, big, strong, highly-coloured, with her
robust and beautiful grace, her fine bearing, and her simple and natural
beauty,--is she not Titian's painting with all its qualities? We might
carry our researches still further; but we have said enough as a
suggestion.

Thanks to the dusty shroud which covered it for so long, the _Assunta_
glows with a quite youthful brilliancy; the centuries have not elapsed
for it, and we enjoy the supreme pleasure of seeing a picture of
Titian's just it came fresh from the palette.

_Voyage en Italie_ (new ed., Paris, 1884).

THE NIGHT WATCH

(_REMBRANDT_)

EUGENE FROMENTIN

We know how the _Night Watch_ is hung. It faces the _Banquet of
Arquebusiers_ by Van der Helst, and, no matter wha