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THE CHRISTMAS STORY IN ART
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course, among the best known and best beloved of all. His famous "Sistine Madonna" is his most widely known painting dealing with the subject. It is said that the face of the Madonna was that of the woman he loved. It could well be true, for artists ever were prone to weave something of the heart into their works.
Raphael was one of the greatest painters of the Renaissance — perhaps its foremost master. His father was a painter and poet, and although he died when the lad was only 12 years old he must have given the boy a good beginning in art for at 17 young Raphael had outstripped all his instructors in his native city of Urbino and had gone to Florence in search of greater worlds to conquer.
Soon the gifted young painter was summoned to Rome by the Pope, and so brilliantly executed were his figures on the walls of the Camera della Signitura that the Pope dismissed all other artists and ordered their work destroyed. But the Madonnas by Raphael immortalized his name.
Titian gave the world a wonderful Christm.as painting in "The Holy Family." Tintoretto's "Adoration of the Shepherds" — a theme employed by many artists — also is a master
Fra Lippi's "The Virgin Adoring the Child" stresses the delicate beauty of Lucrezia Buti, the nun whom he abducted from a convent in Florence and who became the mother of another noted artist.
work. "The Nativity" by Rubens is second to none in spirit and execution. Murillo chose the Nativity for two outstanding works, "The Birth of the Virgin" and "The Flight Into Egypt." Also famous are "The Adoration of the Magi" by Veronese and "The Holy Night" by Correggio.
One, hov/ever, that deserves especial attention is Fra Lippo Lippi, whose madonnas were chiefly impressive because of the sweetness of the faces. It is legendary that the model for these was a young nun with whom he eloped from a convent in Florence where he was engaged in painting the chapel.
One of the noteworthy legends of the Nativity is of the dazzling supernatural light which filled the cave at Bethlehem with glory. Another is that told by Matthew, how on the third day Mary placed the Child in a stall and the ox and the ass adored him.
Hardly a painting of the Nativity fails to introduce these two humble beasts, sometimes with the ass being represented with open mouth, lifting up his voice in audible adoration — a form of worship which might be disconcerting to infant ears.
The legend of the supernatural light has been employed with remarkable effect by some of the painters. A noteworthy example of this is the "Adoration of the Shepherds" by Anton Rafael Mengs, in the Corcoran Galleries of Washington. Born in Aussig, Bohemia, in 1728, Mengs was a great admirer of Raphael and in his fourteenth year accompanied his father, who was a painter also,