her feet two
heavenly cherubs gaze up in adoration. In execution, as in design, this
is probably the most perfect picture in the world. It is painted
throughout by Raphael's own hand; and as no sketch or study of any part
of it was ever known to exist, and as the execution must have been, from
the thinness and delicacy of the colours, wonderfully rapid, it is
supposed that he painted it at once on the canvas--a _creation_ rather
than a picture. In the beginning of the last century the Elector of
Saxony, Augustus III., purchased this picture from the monks of the
convent for the sum of sixty thousand florins (about L6000), and it now
forms the chief boast and ornament of the Dresden Gallery'[13]

The Madonna del Cardellino (our Lady of the Goldfinch): 'The Virgin is
sitting on a rock, in a flowery meadow. Behind are the usual light and
feathery trees, growing on the bank of a stream, which passes off to the
left in a rocky bend, and is crossed by a bridge of a single arch. To
the right, the opposite bank slopes upward in a gentle glade, across
which is a village, backed by two distant mountain-peaks.

'In front of the sitting matronly figure of the Virgin are the holy
children, our Lord and the Baptist, one on either side of her right
knee. She has been reading, and the approach of St John has caused her
to look off her book (which is open in her left hand) at the new comer,
which she does with a look of holy love and gentleness, at the same
time caressingly drawing him to her with her right hand, which touches
his little body under the right arm. In both hands, which rest across
the Virgin's knee, he holds a captive goldfinch, which he has brought,
with childish glee, as an offering to the Holy Child. The infant Jesus,
standing between his mother's knees, with one foot placed on her foot,
and her hand, with the open book, close above his shoulder, regards the
Baptist with an upward look of gentle solemnity, at the same time that
he holds his bent hand over the head of the bird.

'So much for mere description. The inner feeling of the picture, the
motive which has prompted it, has surely hardly ever been surpassed. The
Blessed Virgin, in casting her arm round the infant St John, looks down
on him with a holy complacency for the testimony which he is to bear to
her Son. Notice the human boyish glee with which the Baptist presents
the captured goldfinch, and, on the other hand, the divine look, even of
majesty and creat