Vatican, which represents Giulia Farnese in the character of the Madonna, and Pope Alexander VI. (the infamous Borgia) kneeling at her feet in the character of a votary.  Under the influence of the Medici the churches of Florence were filled with pictures of the Virgin, in which the only thing aimed at was an alluring and even meretricious beauty.  Savonarola thundered from his pulpit in the garden of San Marco against these impieties.  He exclaimed against the profaneness of those who represented the meek mother of Christ in gorgeous apparel, with head unveiled, and under the features of women too well and publicly known.  He emphatically declared that if the painters knew as well as he did the influence of such pictures in perverting simple minds, they would hold their own works in horror and detestation.  Savonarola yielded to none in orthodox reverence for the Madonna; but he desired that she should be represented in an orthodox manner.  He perished at the stake, but not till after he had made a bonfire in the Piazza at Florence of the offensive effigies; he perished—­persecuted to death by the Borgia family.  But his influence on the greatest Florentine artists of his time is apparent in the Virgins of Botticelli, Lorenzo di Credi, and Fra Bartolomeo, all of whom had been his friends, admirers, and disciples:  and all, differing from each other, were alike in this, that, whether it be the dignified severity of Botticelli, or the chaste simplicity of Lorenzo di Credi, or the noble tenderness of Fra Bartolomeo, we feel that each of them had aimed to portray worthily the sacred character of the Mother of the Redeemer.  And to these, as I think, we might add Raphael himself, who visited Florence but a short time after the horrible execution of Savonarola, and must have learned through his friend Bartolomeo to mourn the fate and revere the memory of that remarkable man, whom he placed afterwards in the grand fresco of the “Theologia,” among the doctors and teachers of the Church. (Rome, Vatican.) Of the numerous Virgins painted by Raphael in after times, not one is supposed to have been a portrait:  he says himself, in a letter to Count Castiglione, that he painted from an idea in his own mind, “mi servo d’ una certa idea che mi viene in mente;” while in the contemporary works of Andrea del Sarto, we have the features of his handsome but vulgar wife in every Madonna he painted.[1]

[Footnote 1:  The tendency to portraiture, in early Florentine and German art, is observable from an early period.  The historical sacred subjects of Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, and Van Eyck, are crowded with portraits of living personages.  Their introduction into devotional subjects, in the character of sacred persons, is far less excusable.]