forms in their splendor.

Then Raphael's Virgins came into the world, and in them was such softness and gentleness, such splendor of beauty, that people bowed down before them and worshipped them as things divine. This soft, slender youth — art flowed from his fingertips, shed-ding upon the faces of the Virgins a charm, a serenity, and a meek-ness, together with a richness of color, a mastery of composition, and a skill in the distribution of shadows and lights that illumi-nates the whole of the picture, creating for it a transparent, heav-enly atmosphere and clothing it in a magical beauty, holding a poetry and a music before which poetry and music themselves fall short; and holding that thing by which masterpieces are distinguished — that thing which is not in the eyes, nor in the lips, nor in the hands, but in all these things together, in every part of the picture: in the drawing, in the composition, in the harmony of the forms and the concord of the lights and shadows, in a freshness whose source we do not know — it is in the artist's creed, in his soul, in his fingertips, in his nerves, in the depths of his being.

Raphael's Virgin is the Venus of Christianity; she is the fairest of the fair; she is the charm of motherhood, and the naïveté of holiness, and the perfume of pure femininity. In her is Raphael — all of Raphael — between his unbridled youth and the purity of Christianity, between the seductive beauty of the Fornarina and the nobility of the mother of Jesus.

An artist friend said to me that the bodies of the gods created by the Greek genius have the beauty of athletes' bodies, and a marvelous harmony among their limbs — and yet they are human bodies; but before Michelangelo's body of Christ in his mother's lap, I felt that I stood in the presence

of a god. For Michelangelo was able to carve in the marble the silent pain and the deep inward grief, together with the tranquil bearing, submissive to a higher will — the will of the Creator. As for the Virgin of the Sistine Chapel, she is the mother of the Judge: a mother, fearful, troubled, at the sight of her God judging the world, rewarding and punishing.

And despite the deep fluctu-ations whose source lies in the artists' natures and their creeds, and despite their philosophical and historical influences, the image

of the Virgin has remained, throughout this world-wide artis-tic movement that has filled the generations, a luminous mirror in which the genius of the peoples and their nature stand revealed. She is the artist's divine rapture, in all the schools and at all times, and in the loftiest and deepest of what he aspires to in his spiritual trance: he immortalizes all the poetry that is in motherhood, taking from the reality of life, from the dwellers of earth, the finest model of heavenly beauty.