ANIMAL LIFE IN ITALIAN PAINTING 



wild-duck, and falcons. One of the falcons is being fed, 

 and anyone who has kept hawks will recognise the 

 attitude as being exactly true to life. A fox in the 

 rocky background is eating a bird. A lady sits between 

 two men, each of whom holds a falcon ; a little dog 

 stands up on her knee, and she is playfully pinching 

 it under the chin. It wriggles and tries to rub her 

 hand away with its paws. The horses and mules, 

 startled at the corpses in the way, are quite as full of 

 expression as those of Pisanello in the Si. George. 



Crowe and Cavalcaselle say of the Legends of the 

 Herjnits on the south wall : " The lions in their strength 

 and elasticity are classical and seem to live, and wherever 

 animal life is depicted the painter is great. A fallen 

 mule, a camel entering a gate, exhibit his knowledge of 

 their natural forms." ^ A patient monk is angling in the 

 stream which flows across the immediate foreground ; a 

 procession of fishes passes him contemptuously by. 



Of the same school is a curious picture belonging to 

 the Earl of Crawford, Scenes from the Lives of the 

 Hermits of the Thebaid, and the Founding of the Reli- 

 gious Gliders. Here are lions, storks, cranes, choughs, 

 a peacock, a donkey, a stag, ravens picking at the re- 

 mains in a coffin, a crocodile (ridden by St. Pachonius), 

 and a remarkably thick-set camel. 



^ History of Painting in Italy , 1903, vol. iii. p. 107. 

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