res by Bartolommeo, there are other
scattered instances of portrait Madonnas during the Italian
Renaissance, by men too great to be tied to the fashions of their day.
Mantegna was such a painter, and Luini another. All told, however,
their pictures of this sort make up a class too rare to deserve longer
description.

A century later, the Spanish school occasionally reverted to the same
style of treatment. A pair of notable pictures are the Madonna of
Bethlehem, by Alonzo Cano, and the Madonna of the Napkin, by Murillo.
Both are in Seville, the latter in the museum, the former still
hanging in its original place in the cathedral.

Of Cano's work, a great authority[1] on Spanish art has written, that,
"in serene, celestial beauty, it is excelled by no image of the
blessed Mary ever devised in Spain." Murillo's picture is better
known, and has a curious interest from its history. The cook in the
Capuchin monastery, where the artist had been painting, begged a
picture as a parting gift. No canvas being at hand, a napkin was
offered instead, on which the master painted a Madonna, unexcelled
among his works in brilliancy of color.

[Footnote 1: Stirling-Maxwell, in "Annals of the Artists of Spain."]

[Illustration: GABRIEL MAX.--MADONNA AND CHILD.]

As the portrait picture was the first style of Madonna known to art,
so, also, it is the last. By a leap of nearly a thousand years, we
have returned, in our own day, to the method of the tenth century. It
is strange that what was once a matter of necessity should at last
become an object of choice. In the beginning of Madonna art, the
limited resources of technique precluded any attempts to make a more
elaborate setting. Such difficulties no longer stand in the way, and
where we now see a portrait Madonna, the artist has deliberately
discarded all accessories in order better to idealize his theme.

Take, for instance, the portrait Madonnas by Gabriel Max. Here are no
details to divert the attention from motherhood, pure and simple. We
do not ask of the subject whether she is of high or of low estate, a
queen or a peasant. We have only to look into the earnest, loving face
to read that here is a mother. There are two pictures of this sort,
evidently studied from the same Bohemian models. In one, the mother
looks down at her babe; in the other, directly at the spectator, with
a singularly visionary expression. When weary with the senseless
repetition of the set compositions