MAY 319 



adoration are blended in the look and attitude with 

 which she bends over her Infant ! ' 



Just as a contrast to this bald dislike of Michael 

 •Angelo, which I more or less share, I will copy, as an 

 example of modern subtle scholarly criticism, a sentence 

 on the same picture from Pater's ' Kenaissance ' — a 

 book to be read indeed : 



' When the shipload of sacred earth from the soil of 

 Jerusalem was mingled with the common clay in the 

 Campo Santo at Pisa, a new flower grew up from it, 

 unlike any flower men had seen before — the Anemone, 

 with its concentric rings of strangely blended colour, 

 still to be found by those who search long enough for it 

 in the long grass of the Maremma. Just such a strange 

 flower was that mythology of the Italian Renaissance 

 which grew up from the mixture of two traditions, two 

 sentiments — the sacred and the profane. Classical 

 story was regarded as so much imaginative material to 

 be received and assimilated. It did not come into men's 

 minds to ask curiously of science concerning the origin 

 of such story, its primary form and import, its meaning 

 for those who projected it. The thing sank into their 

 minds, to issue forth again with all the tangle about it 

 of mediaeval sentiment and ideas. 



'In the Doni Madonna in the Tribune of the Ifffizi, 

 Michael Angelo actually brings the pagan religion, and 

 with it the unveiled human form, the sleepy -looking 

 fauns of a Dionysiac revel, into the presence of the Ma- 

 donna, as simpler painters had introduced there other 

 products of the earth, birds or flowers ; while he has 

 given to that Madonna herself much of the uncouth 

 energy of the older and more primitive ' ' Mighty 

 Mother." ' 



Is it possible to see side by side more different criti- 

 cisms of the same picture ? And it is not only the dif- 



