Raphael - Page 2

truth. The dream-women of Burne-Jones have the same haunting
and subtle spiritual wistfulness that is to be seen in the Madonnas
of Raphael. Each of these men loved a woman--and each pictured her
again and again. Whether this woman had an existence outside the
figment of the brain matters not: both painted her as they saw her--
tender, gentle and trustful.

When jealous and o'erzealous competitors made the charge against
Raphael that he was lax in his religious duties, Pope Leo the Tenth
waived the matter by saying, "Well, well, well!--he is an artistic
Christian!" As much as to say, he works his religion up into art,
and therefore we grant him absolution for failure to attend mass: he
paints and you pray--it is really all the same thing. Good work and
religion are one.

The busy and captious critics went away, but came back next day with
the startling information that Raphael's pictures were more Pagan
than Christian. Pope Leo heard the charge, and then with Lincoln-
like wit said that Raphael was doing this on his order, as the
desire of the Mother Church was to annex the Pagan art-world, in
order to Christianize it.

The charges of Paganism and Infidelity are classic accusations. The
gentle Burne-Jones was stoutly denounced by his enemies as a Pagan
Greek. I think he rather gloried in the contumely, but fifty years
earlier he might have been visited by a "lettre de cachet," instead
of a knighthood; for we can not forget how, in Eighteen Hundred
Fifteen, Parliament refused to pay for the Elgin Marbles because, as
Lord Falmouth put it, "These relics will tend to prostitute England
to the depth of unbelief that engulfed Pagan Greece." The attitude
of Parliament on the question of Paganism finds voice occasionally
even yet by Protestant England making darkness dense with the
asseveration that Catholics idolatrously worship the pictures and
statues in their churches.

The Romans tumbled the Athenian marbles from their pedestals, on the
assumption that the statues represented gods that were idolatrously
worshiped by the Greeks. And they continued their work of
destruction until a certain Roman general (who surely was from
County Cork) stopped the vandalism by issuing an order, coupled with
the dire threat that any soldier who stole or destroyed a statue
should replace it with another equally good.

Lord Elgin bankrupted himself in order to supply the British Museum
its crowning glory, and for this he achieved the honor of getting
himself poetically damned by Lord Byron. Monarchies, like republics,
are ungrateful. Lord Elgin defended himself vigorously against the
charge of Paganism, just as Raphael had done three hundred years
before. But