in the house of Pudens, who was a Roman senator and the father of two daughters, Prasside and Pudentiana. The family under his guidance soon embraced the true faith, and Pudens, dying soon after, and leaving a handsome fortune to his daughters, they devoted their lives thenceforth to piety and works of mercy, and rank now in hagiology as the original Sisters of Charity. The likeness of our Lord, to which we have just referred, is said to have been painted by St. Peter from memory at the request of these sisters. Mr. Heaphy says: "Whatever may have been the origin of the picture, it is undoubtedly of very high antiquity, since, in the beginning of the fourth century, it was held in the same estimation as now, the Empress Helena having taken extraordinary measures for its preservation."

The generally received impression in the early ages of St. Luke being a painter, seems to have originated in Greece, and was transferred thence to the West. There still exist portraits both of our Lord and the Blessed Virgin that are accredited to him. In the Church of St. John of Lateran, in Rome, there is shown a picture of the child Jesus in the Temple, which is also ascribed to St. Luke. Yet another of the primitive models, which served as a guide to the early masters, is the beautiful countenance and majestic figure of the Redeemer in the apsis of the Church of St. Cecilia. As she was martyred early in the third century, it is supposed to have been executed not very long thereafter.

*

jesty. Even the Veronica relic displays these attributes, although the deeper pathos of sorrow and suffering which must then have shadowed the brow was well calculated to mar the beauty of our Saviour's natural expression.

The importance of an elevated and suggestive type being given to these representations was sensibly felt in those ages, when the ignorant and wicked were more apt to be moved and instructed by such appealing voices, for to them they seemed real and genuine transcripts drawn from life, and their hearts were influenced according to the depth of the impression made.

In all the portraits in painting or sculpture that have been revealed of our Saviour up to the fifth century, there are revelations of corporeal beauty which exalt him above all the children of men. But about this time there arose a division in the Romano-Christian school of art upon the subject of the truthful representations in his likeness as man. There was a division even among the most illustrious Fathers of the Church, "some maintaining," says Rio, "with St. Cyril of Alexandria, that Jesus Christ was the least comely of the children of men, enforcing their argument by the authority of Tertullian and of St. Justin, who had declared that the abject form which the Redeemer had assumed only rendered the mystery of redemption more sublime." On the other side, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St. Ambrose, of the Latin Church, and St. John Chrysostom, with St. Gregory of Nyssa, of the Eastern, affirmed "that our Lord only veiled so much of his divinity as to prevent its dazzling the eyes of men." This controversy continued at intervals up to the eighth century, at which epoch Christ was described by John of Damascus, and Pope Adrian I, as a new Adam, and a model of perfection in form." This opinion, Which was sustained by the three

great Latin Fathers, settled the question, for the utterance of such men was deemed by the masses as only secondary to an apostolic dictum. This judgment was corroborated later by the oracular voice of St. Bernard, who declared that "the marvellous beauty of Christ surpasses that of the angels, and formed the joy and admiration of the celestial spirits."'*

As dissension and schism were the encroaching elements at that time in the Greek Church, they also maintained their opposition on this point, so thenceforth only the hideous productions of Byzantine art dishonored the human semblance of our Lord.

It is indeed anomalous, as Rio remarks, "that the Greeks, the descendants of those who knew so well how to conceive the beautiful, who had so vividly felt it, and so magnificently realized it in their works of art, yet it is now this very people who reject the beautiful, when raised to the highest degree, by the incarnation of the Word."

It was the Byzantine school also that first fell under the temptation of borrowing suggestions from pagan art for Christian subjects. There is a legend of a painter, "who ventured to imitate a head of Jesus Christ, had the hand which was the instrument of this profanation suddenly withered."+

The genuine Christian adumbrations of art were developed by the Italians, while the Greek school was vitiated by an adherence to pagan forms, and also disgraced their vocation by dissolute habits. Their numerous profanations in the treatment of allegorized religious subjects, and especially in their portraiture of our Saviour, induced the Council of Constantinople (A. D. 691) to rebuke and place a check upon those abuses, declaring that in all representations of our Lord "Grace must be united with Truth."

At this early period an aversion to

Poetry of Christian Art, A. F. Rio. † Ibid.

the old theogony, and every symbol associated with it, alone moved the heart of the Christian neophyte in Rome. The beauty of art lay buried for them in that effete polytheism of which those images were the oracle, though now indeed for the first time they realized their diabolical power, in the growl of the hydra as it grasped and mangled their bodies in the arena or tortured them upon the rack.

Up to the fifth century the Church, under the sagacious rule of the Papacy and clergy, had fostered and preserved both literature and art, but these were at length forced to succumb under the seething vortex of the northern barbarians. Rome, the conservatory of the arts, saw its countless gems of virtu crumble beneath the ruthless hands of the savage sons of Thor. The fearful conflicts, the sacrilegious crimes, the desolation and woe of the succeeding centuries, proved a maelstrom that ingulfed the labor and zeal of ages.

Charlemagne arose amid the gloom of this night, like a meteor of splendor, that gave promise of restoration and permanent progress. But again the clouds darken, and under the pressure of internecine revolutions, the dismemberment of kingdoms, and falling empires, the tocsin of the Norman and the blade of the Saracen at either extremity of the West, again was the continent plunged into a sea of gloom and a tempest of horrors that drowned almost every vestige of humanity in its abyss. Chaos alone threatened to bridge this chasm, over which there hovered the vultures of ignorance, infidelity, and dire woe.

But the Church, through the oracular voice of the Papacy, was the first, again, to recover strength and triumph over the horrors of this abysmal gloom, the advance-guard that sounded the signal note of a new dawn. Treasures of art, richly illuminated manuscripts of theology, science, and philosophy, supposed

to have been lost in the vortex of Goth and Vandal irruptions, now, at this magic summons, came forth from the precincts of Monte Casino and other religious tombs, wherein they had been affectionately fostered and enlarged, to illumine and fortify once inore the cause of God and humanity. During the impetus that had been given to general culture under the reign of Charlemagne, Italy had rather succumbed to the GermanoChristian school of art, but now, under the beams of this new auroral, following the lead of Guido of Sienna (thirteenth century), she reassumed her fallen mantle, and thenceforth wore her crown firm and untarnished against all competitors in the world of art. Simome Memmi and a host of others following the wake of Guido, displayed the highest conception of purity in tone and form in their illustrations of divine truths. The image of our Saviour and his Mother were themes that never failed to inspire the sublimest ideals of beauty. It is true that a few of those saintly artists were still under the influence of the vitiated and gaudy taste of the Byzantine school, but the advancement in a purer and loftier development was steady under the succeeding generations, until the example of the apostate monk Filippo Lippi led to the desecration of the former more elevating and spiritualized types, by a revival of the sensuous pagan models. Under the patronage of the Medici these innovators found numerous votaries. The most sacred and exalted sources of inspiration were hurled from their thrones, not only in the palace, but in the sanctuary, and the sursum corda of the devotee was met by the semblance of an Apollo or a Jupiter, instead of the glorified Saviour, whilst the countenance of a heathen goddess or public courtesan was clothed in the attributes of the Mother of God.

These were the sacrileges that aroused the religious zeal of the

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great reformer Savanarola, these the abuses which were combined with the corrupting influences in the education of the young (whom he so truly loved) to the exclusion of Christian models, in favor of immoral and obscene pagan authors, that won for him the persecution of the wicked, culminating in the bitter ordeal of martyrdom. But that fiery sacrifice was not alone a consuming one, for it illumined far and near the souls of men. Far away, amid the flowery plains and lofty heights of the Apennines, through the lowly Umbrian villages, the spirit of St. Francis of Assisi drew thereto the clean of heart. In the secluded cell and quiet of the monk's life, through the dim, hallowed lights of the "forest primeval," the glowing fervor of exalted souls was fast ripening into that lofty utterance which, under the name of Mystic, was destined to invigorate and restore the prestige of martyred saint and inspired prophet. Toward the realms of the Infinite soared their genius, until, like the burning coal upon the lips of the prophet, their work proclaims its celestial inspiration. Although the generally received scriptural and traditional types of our Saviour as man were well established at this period, yet each painter innovated or elaborated thereupon by transfusing some conception of his own genius to his canvas. In the sphere of adoration and love, and the tenderness of humanity, the Italian masters were supreme; this superiority was more marked when contrasted with the coarser and more material idealizations of the German school. The grand Crucifixion of Rubens, and the celebrated Ecce Homo of Rembrandt, are however among the few exceptions to this charge, for they seem like emanations of that divine afflatus which is ever the guerdon of love and praise. The English artist Fuseli, in describing the Ecce Homo, says: "We ascend to the sublime resignation of inno

cence in Christ, and, regardless of the roar below, securely repose on his countenance. The Ecce Homo of Rembrandt, even unsupported by the magic of its light and shade, or his spell of colors, would have been an assemblage of superhuman powers."

Among the innumerable representations of our Lord, one which is the most moving and suggestive is the countenance of the Redeemer in the Cenacolo, or Last Supper, of Leonardo da Vinci. It has been perpetuated in so many forms that it is almost as familiar as the Madonnas of Raphael. The grand original, however, that occupied so many years of loving toil and study, owing to a series of casualties, stupidity, and barbarisms that were tolerated even in the home of the muse, by allowing this sublime work to be the object of so many experiments at the hands of charlatans, is now so mutilated that not a trace of its original beauty is left in the fragments.

In early childhood this face dawned upon us like the revelation of an apocalyptic vision. The seraphic lineaments, the soft-reflected light of heaven that beam so benignly from the eyes, seemed ever as potent and as thrilling as a spoken word.

"The intellectual elevation, the fineness of nature, the benign Godlike dignity, suffused with the profoundest sorrow, in this divine head, surpassed all I could have conceived as possible in art; and faded as it is, the character there being stamped on it by the soul, not by the hand of the artist, will live, while a line or hue remains visible. It is a divine shadow, and until it fades into nothing, and disappears utterly, will have the lineaments of divinity."*

A cenatola also of Raphael's was discovered by accident during this century in the refectory of Sant Onofrio at Florence, which is supposed to have been painted in his twenty-third year. Like even his * Sacred and Legendary Art, Mrs. Jameson.

earliest conceptions, the face and figure of our Saviour bear the impress of divinity, which blends with the tenderness and sorrow of the manGod. But this was but as a clouded dream in comparison with the fulness of that effulgent vision that shone upon him, during his last years. of life, in the Transfiguration.

How often as we turn the sibylline leaves of life do we feel oracularly drawn to perform some deed, some work that will symbolize the fate that even then stands on the threshold of eternity awaiting us. The celestial choral chants that ravished the soul of Mozart and found expression in his Requiem, may have been but the "melody divine" of the angel of death. So, too, may we not believe that a gleam of the Lord's beatified splendor glinted from amid the shadows of Thabor's mount upon the soul of the great artist, in this his culminating work, the icy hand of death being even then upon him.

Morales, who was a disciple of Raphael, devoted his pencil exclusively to religious subjects, and multiplied so many exquisite, lifelike heads of the crucified Saviour upon wood and copper, that he acquired the appellation of El Divino.

When the miracle plays were introduced in the middle ages, as a means of instructing the ignorant, the best talent of the Church was bestowed upon their construction and performances. Indeed the first one on record is said to have been written by no less a scholar than Gregory Nazianzen. It is certainly a remarkable fact, that the man who was chosen to represent the person of our Lord, always felt himself specially favored of heaven, and prepared his soul by fasting and prayer, as if for some solemn sacramental unction. Once thus appointed, the personation of the character remained through life, unless forfeited by bad conduct; but this rarely occurred, for the sacred influence extended not

only to the moral and social life of the man, but strange to say, even lent its influence to his personal appearance, by elevating him in some degree to the lofty standard of Him whose character and life-events he was so frequently called upon to delineate. Anna Maria Howitt, in her Art Student in Munich, when describing the celebrated miracle play, that is represented every ten years in Omer Ammagan, in the Tyrol, after alluding to the solemn and impressive feelings elicited by the scene, dwells particularly upon the countenance and general bearing of the man who had personified our Saviour for many years. He belonged to the poorer class, but owing to his high moral and religious character, the seclusion in which he lived, and an indefinable likeness to our Lord, he was regarded by his neighbors as a sacred person, and treated accordingly. He seemed to be thoroughly impressed and his whole life toned to the character with which he had been so long identified.

As Matthew and James sat thoughtfully by the lake, watching their nets that bright morning of early spring, hundreds were passing to and fro, many exchanging words of greeting. Presently one man, entirely unknown

to them, poorly clad, void of any insignia of rank or wealth, approaches. Looking for a moment upon them, he speaks: "Come, follow me!" Surprised at the strange command they look into his face. Did he flash upon them a ray of the divine beauty, that these toilers should instantly, without parley, without a thought of their families, abandon their all to follow him?

Strive as we may to idealize the personnel of our Lord, yet the fruition can only be attained when we behold Him resplendent in the effulgence of Thabor, mingled with the pathos of Calvary and the glory of Olivet. Yet we might despair of recognizing Him even then, were it not for the golden link that in His loving mercy he has riveted with our humanity. But then we shall know "Who this is that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozra; this beautiful one in his robes, walking in the greatness of his strength.' (Isaias 63: 1.) Then may we unite with the angels in chanting,

Jesus, the gem of beauty,

True God and man, they sing ;
The never-failing garden,
The ever golden ring,

The door, the pledge, the husband,
The guardian of his court,

The day-star of salvation,

The porter of the port.-Medieval Hymn, "Celestial Country."