acknowledged art, to show my meaning more clearly, and to give direction to the criticisms which I wish to make.
The Sistine Madonna of Raphael is without doubt the best and most admired representation of "motherhood" in the whole range of art. I think the experience of most persons who have seen it, even in engravings or photographs, will justify the assertion that they are so carried away by the beauty and grace of the mother and child, that they do not at first see the host of surrounding angelic heads, nor the two "cherubs" at the bottom of the picture. I allude here only to the latter, which, in my opinion, detract from the grand effect, and introduce a disturbing and inferior element which had better been left out. The expression of their faces is innocent, angelic, if you please; the attitudes are graceful, natural, and childlike; nevertheless, they are unnecessary, impossible creatures, and are, if anything, six-limbed or hexapod vertebrates, when, as naturally formed children, they would have been just as symbolic, though quite as insignificant and useless. Though their parts, separately, exist in nature, as a combination they are impossible, and therefore, except as misplaced symbols, not artistic.
In this connection I would remark that, in my opinion, man has never imagined, and can never imagine, any symbolic form in art or poetry not suggested by his surroundings; there are ugly things enough and beautiful things enough in nature to suggest any forms represented by art; but a compound of man and bird or beast or insect could never be suggested as a whole, without a previous knowledge of the parts.
It is not a very great step from the Aphrodite and Eros of the early Greeks (not the sensual Venus and Cupid of the later Greeks and the Romans), by which they represented all that was tender and lovable in woman, to the Virgin and Child. The step is still less from Cybele or Rhea, the wife of Saturn and the mother of Jupiter or Jove, whose name was in Greek Theotokos, in Latin Deipara, meaning the "mother of God"; Jove, the king of the gods, suggests in name as well as attributes the Hebrew Jehovah. The Madonna, it seems to me, is simply an evolution from pagan mythology to Christian art.
In some old religious paintings angels are represented as winged heads, without body or limbs. Now, these artists painted better than they knew; for, according to the acknowledged principles of philosophical and comparative anatomy, the anterior limbs, whether arms, wings, legs, or fins, are appendages to the occipital or posterior vertebra of the skull; in the fish, in fact, the pectoral fins, the anterior limbs, are attached by bony connection to the back part of the skull. But, though winged heads are anatomically legitimate, physiologically we can not understand the action or the origin of any muscles sufficiently powerful to move the head, to say nothing of the other incongruities, especially of the union of human hair, face, and skin with the feathers of a bird. As pure symbols these are acceptable for the infancy of the human race, but are not therefore to be perpetuated by the moderns. Mother Goose
