e long
afternoons, by the children near the big stove or among the gooseberry
bushes of the garden. And they are, therefore, much more than the
Giottesque inventions, the expression of the individual artist's
ideas about the incidents of Scripture; and an expression not for the
multitude at large, fresco or mosaic that could be elaborated by a
sceptical or godless artist, but a re-explanation as from man to man
and friend: this is how the dear Lord looked, or acted--see, the words
in the Bible are so or so forth. Therefore, there enters into these
designs, which contain after all only the same sort of skill which was
rife in Italy, so much homeliness at once, and poignancy and sublimity
of imagination. The Virgin, they have discovered, is not that grandly
dressed lady, always in the very finest brocade, with the very finest
manners, and holding a divine infant that has no earthly wants, whom Van
Eyck and Memling and Meister Stephan painted. She is a good young woman,
a fairer version of their dear wife, or the woman who might have been
that; no carefully selected creature as with the Italians, no well-made
studio model, with figure unspoilt by child-bearing, but a real wife and
mother, with real milk in her breasts (the Italian virgin, save with one
or two Lombards, is never permitted to suckle)[11], which she very readily
and thoroughly gives to the child, guiding the little mouth with her
fingers. And she sits in the lonely fields by the hedges and windmills
in the fair weather; or in the neat little chamber with the walled town
visible between the pillar of the window, as in Bartholomew Beham's
exquisite design, reading, or suckling, or sewing, or soothing the
fretful baby; no angels around her, or rarely: the Scripture says
nothing about such a court of seraphs as the Italians and Flemings, the
superstitious Romanists, always placed round the mother of Christ. It
is all as it might have happened to them; they translate the Scripture
into their everyday life, they do not pick out of it the mere stately
and poetic incidents like the Giottesques. This everyday life of theirs
is crude enough, and in many cases nasty enough; they have in those
German free towns a perfect museum of loathsome ugliness, born of ill
ventilation, gluttony, starvation, or brutality: quite fearful wrinkled
harridans and unabashed fat, guzzling harlots, and men of every variety
of scrofula, and wart and belly, towards none of which (the best far