The way in which Botticelli treated this subject of the Nativity of Christ, is, as you see, very different from the way in which Hubert van Eyck painted the Three Maries at the Sepulchre.  We saw how the latter pictured the event as actually taking place outside Jerusalem.  To Botticelli the Nativity of Christ was emblematic of a new and happier life for people in Florence, with the Church regenerated and purified, as Christ would have wished it to be.  To him the Nativity was a symbol of purity, so he painted the picture as a commentary on the event, not as an illustration of the Biblical text.

The angels rejoice in heaven as the shepherds upon earth, the devils flee away discomfited, and Savonarola and his companions obtain peace after the tribulations of life.  Such was the message of Botticelli in the picture here reproduced.

CHAPTER VI

RAPHAEL

The original of our next picture is very small, only seven inches square, yet I hope it will instantly appeal to you.  The name of the artist, Raphael, is perhaps the most familiar of all the names of the Old Masters, mainly, it may be, because he was the painter of the Sistine Madonna, the best known and best loved of Madonnas.

When Raphael drew and painted this picture of the ‘Knight’s Dream,’ about the year 1500, he was himself like a young knight, at the outset of his short and brilliant career.  As a boy he was handsome, gifted, charming.  His nature is said to have been as lovely as his gifts were great, and he passed his short life in a triumphant progress from city to city and court to court, always working hard and always painting so beautifully that he won the admiration of artists, princes, and popes.  His father, Giovanni Santi, was a painter living in the town of Urbino, in Central Italy, but Raphael when quite young went to Perugia to study with the painter Perugino, a native of that town.

Perugia stands upon a high hill, like the hill in the background of the picture of the ‘Knight’s Dream,’ only higher, for from it you can overlook the wide Umbrian plain as far as Assisi—­the home of St. Francis—­which lies on the slope of the next mountain.  That beautiful Umbrian landscape, in which all the towns look like castles perched upon the top of steep hills, with wide undulating ground between, occurs frequently in the pictures of Perugino, and often in those of his pupil Raphael.  If you have once seen the view from Perugia for yourself, you will realize how strongly it took hold of the imagination of the young painter.  Raphael had a most impressionable mind.  It was part of his genius that, from every painter with whom he came in contact he imbibed the best, almost without knowing it.  The artists of his day, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the other great men, were each severally employed in working out once and for all some particular problem in connection