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216 only to be driven back to England in 1531 by poverty and the death of his old friends.

By 1537 Holbein had come to the notice of Henry VIII, and was established as court painter, a position which he held until his death. This seems to have occurred during another visitation of the plague in 1543 for at this date knowledge of the great artist ceases. When he died or where he was buried is not known.

What a contrast between his life and Titian’s! One the favorite, and the other the sport, of fortune. For though the greatness of both was recognized by the men of their time, Titian lived a life of sumptuous ease in the beautiful surroundings of Venice, while Holbein, often straitened for money, never wealthy, experienced the rigor of poverty; forced by need and circumstances to become an alien in a strange land, dying unnoticed and unhonored.

The world to Titian was a pageant, to Holbein a scene of toil and pilgrimage.

would be hardly possible to find a greater contrast than the one presented by these two pictures—Correggio’s “Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine” and the “Jeremiah” by Michelangelo. Correggio has here taken for his subject one of the beautiful legends of the early Christian church. Catherine was a lady of Alexandria who, living about 30, dared to be a Christian and eventually died a martyr to her faith. It is one of the legends of the church of that time that she is supposed to have had a vision in which it was made known to her that she should consider herself the “bride” of Christ; and the idea of this mystic marriage was a favorite one with painters in the sixteenth century.

But how has Correggio treated this subject? Does he make you feel the sacrifice of Catherine, in being willing to die for her faith, or does he suggest to one looking at the picture anything of the religious joy and devotion with which her vision must have inspired her?

What we get from the painting as a whole is a lovely, dreamy suggestion as of very sweet people engaged in some graceful pleasantry. The Madonna is absorbed in love of the Holy Child, who is eying with an expression almost playful the hand of St. Catherine. The latter plays her part in the ceremony with little more feeling than if she, too, were a child; while St. John, with his bunched locks reminding us of ivy and vine leaves, has the look of a young Greek.

There is not a trace of religious feeling in the picture, or of mystic ecstasy—only the gentle, happy peace of innocence. There may be violence and martyrdom out in the world, but no echo of them disturbs the serenity of this little group, wrapped around in warm, melting, golden atmosphere. These beings arc no more troubled with cares or suffering than are lambs and fawns. They are the creatures of a poet’s golden dream.

Compare with them the “Jeremiah.” Here, instead of delicate gracefulness, are colossal strength, ponderous mass, profound impressiveness; a bent back that has carried the burden, hands that have labored, head bowed in vast depth of thought. And what of the thought? More than two thousand years had passed since Jeremiah uttered a prophetic dirge over Jerusalem, which had become the prey of foreign enemies. And to the mind of Michelangelo as he painted this figure, sometime between 1508 and 1512,—that is to say, between his thirty-fifth and thirty-ninth years,—there was present a similar spectacle of his own beloved Italy speeding to ruin under the weight of its own sins and the rivalries of foreign armies. And as Jeremiah lived to see the fall of Jerusalem, so Michelangelo lived to see the city of Rome sacked in 1527 by the German soldiery under the French renegade.

It is the power and depth of Michelangelo’s own thoughts that fill this figure of “Jeremiah.”

The French philosopher wrote: “There are four men in the world of art and literature so exalted above all others as to seem to belong to another race—namely, Dante, Shakspere, Beethoven, and Michelangelo.” Three, at least, of these modern giants in art, Dante, Beethoven,