ics[20] represent the Babe receiving the
gifts of the Magi,--as at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome and at Saint
Apollinare in Ravenna. In others, as at Capua, the Child shares with the
enthroned Virgin the adoration of a surrounding group of saints. Still
another of peculiar interest is at Santa Maria in Trastevere (Rome),
where the Infant is suckled at his mother's breast.

When we enter that strange period of history known as the Dark Ages,
we find the art products few and uninteresting; but even then the
Christ-child is not forgotten, and again and again he appears sculptured
in marble over the portals of cathedrals, or painted in stiff Byzantine
style over their altars.

Thus it was that in the new birth of art in Italy, when Niccolo Pisano
in sculpture, and Cimabue in painting, awakened the sleeping world to a
love of beauty, the Madonna, with her heaven-born Babe, was the first
subject to arouse enthusiasm; and it was for a picture of this sort
that all Florence went mad with joy, as it was borne along The Street
of Rejoicing.

In early representations, both in mosaics and paintings, the Child is
dressed in a tunic, white, red, or blue, often very richly ornamented
with gold embroidery. This method obtained as late as the fourteenth
century, when Fra Angelico still painted the Babe in the elaborate royal
garments of a king. But art at last returned to nature, and from the
fifteenth century the Holy Child was painted partially and sometimes
wholly undraped, with beautiful rounded limbs and soft pink baby flesh.

It was then that Italy was transformed into a paradise of art, and all
the important cities were full of great painters whose hearts were aglow
with the sacred fire of genius. In the host of beautiful works which
were produced in the next three centuries, every type of treatment was
exemplified, varying from the most simple naturalism to the loftiest
idealism. The naive realism of Filippino Lippi's chubby baby, placidly
sucking his thumb as he looks out of the picture, is matched in the
frolicsome boys of Andrea del Sarto's many paintings, smiling
mischievously from the Madonna's arms. At the other extreme is the
strangely precocious looking child of Botticelli, raising his eyes
heavenward, with a mystic smile on his serious face.

And when it would seem that every conceivable type of infancy, and
every imaginable situation had already been realized on the canvas,
Raphael[21] arose to create an entirely n