stances, those mountains of rosy snow, those waters of
verdurous reflections; and again those rays of sunlight falling upon
robes of rose and yellow, mauve petticoats, blue mantles, shot-coloured
vests, and little white dogs with fiery spots. For no painter has
equalled Watteau in rendering beautifully coloured objects transfigured
by a ray of sunlight, their soft fading and that kind of diffused
blossoming of their brilliancy under the full light. Let your eyes rest
for a moment on that band of pilgrims of both sexes hurrying, beneath
the setting sun, towards the galley of Love that is about to set sail:
there is the joyousness of the most adorable colours in the world
surprised in a ray of the sun, and all that haze and tender silk in the
radiant shower involuntarily remind you of those brilliant insects that
we find dead, but with still living colours, in the golden glow of a
piece of amber.

This picture, the _Embarquement de Cythere_, is the wonder of wonders of
this master.

_L'Art du Dix-huitieme Siecle_ (3d ed., Paris, 1880).

THE SISTINE MADONNA

(_RAPHAEL_)

F.A. GRUYER

Raphael seemed to have attained perfection in the _Virgin with the
Fish_; however, four or five years later, he was to rise infinitely
higher and display something superior to art and inaccessible to
science.

It was in 1518 that the Benedictines of the monastery of St. Sixtus
ordered this picture. They had required that the Virgin and the Infant
Jesus should be in the company of St. Sixtus and St. Barbara. This is
how Raphael entered into their views.

Deep shadows were veiling from us the majesty of the skies. Suddenly
light succeeds the obscurity, and the Infant Jesus and Mary appear
surrounded by a brightness so intense that the eyes can scarcely bear
it. Between two green curtains drawn to either side of the picture, amid
an aureole of innumerable cherubin, the Virgin is seen standing upon the
clouds, with her son in her arms, showing him to the world as its
Redeemer and Sovereign Judge. Lower down, St. Sixtus and St. Barbara are
kneeling on the clouds on either side. Nothing is visible of the earth,
but it is divined by the gestures and glances of the two saints, who are
pointing to the multitude for whom they are imploring the divine mercy.
Two angels are leaning on a kind of balustrade whose horizontal line
forms a solid plane at the base of the composition. Nothing could be
more elementary than the idea of such