ept already spoken of; indeed I think them
the grandest of all the faces of the Madonna and Child that I have seen
carved by the French architects. I have seen many, the faces of which I
do not like, though the drapery is always beautiful; their faces I do not
like at all events, as faces of the Virgin and Child, though as faces of
other people even if not beautiful they would be interesting. The Child
is, as in the transept, draped down to the feet; draped too, how
exquisitely I know not how to say. His right arm and hand is stretched
out across His mother's breast, His left hangs down so that His wrist as
His hand is a little curved upwards, rests upon His knee; His mother
holds Him slightly with her left arm, with her right she holds a fold of
her robe on which His feet rest. His figure is not by any means that of
an infant, for it is slim and slender, too slender for even a young boy,
yet too soft, too much rounded for a youth, and the head also is too
large; I suppose some people would object to this way of carving One who
is supposed to be an infant; yet I have no doubt that the old sculptors
were right in doing so, and to my help in this matter comes the
remembrance of Ruskin's answer to what Lord Lindsay says concerning the
inability of Giotto and his school to paint young children: for he says
that it might very well happen that Giotto could paint children, but yet
did not choose to in this instance, (the Presentation of the Virgin), for
the sake of the much greater dignity to be obtained by using the more
fully developed figure and face; {156} and surely, whatever could be said
about Giotto's paintings, no one who was at all acquainted with Early
French sculpture could doubt that the carvers of this figure here,
_could_ have carved an infant if they had thought fit so to do, men who
again and again grasped eagerly common everyday things when in any way
they would tell their story. To return to the statues themselves. The
face of the young Christ is of the same character as His figure, such a
face as Elizabeth Browning tells of, the face of One 'who never sinned or
smiled'; at least if the sculptor fell below his ideal somewhat, yet for
all that, through that face which he failed in a little, we can see when
we look, that his ideal was such an one. The Virgin's face is calm and
very sweet, full of rest,--indeed the two figures are very full of rest;
everything about them expresses it from the broad forehead