[Footnote 1: Every one who has visited Naples will remember the church on the Mergellina, dedicated to the _Madonna del Parto_, where lies, beneath his pagan tomb, the poet Sannazzaro. Mr. Hallam, in a beautiful passage of his "History of the Literature of Europe," has pointed out the influence of the genius of Tasso on the whole school of Bolognese painters of that time. Not less striking was the influence of Sannazzaro and his famous poem on the Nativity (_De Partû Virginis_), on the contemporary productions of Italian art, and more particularly as regards the subject under consideration: I can trace it through all the schools of art, from Milan to Naples, during the latter half of the sixteenth century. Of Sannazzaro's poem, Mr. Hallam says, that "it would be difficult to find its equal for purity, elegance, and harmony of versification." It is not the less true, that even its greatest merits as a Latin poem exercised the most perverse influence on the religious art of that period. It was, indeed, only _one_ of the many influences which may be said to have demoralized the artists of the sixteenth century, but it was one of the greatest.] The Nativity of our Saviour, like the Annunciation, has been treated in two ways, as a mystery and as an event, and we must be careful to discriminate between them. THE NATIVITY AS A MYSTERY. In the first sense the artist has intended simply to express the advent of the Divinity on earth in the form of an Infant, and the _motif_ is clearly taken from a text in the Office of the Virgin, _Virgo quem genuit, adoravit._ In the beautiful words of Jeremy Taylor, "She blessed him, she worshipped him, and she thanked him that he would be born of her;" as, indeed, many a young mother has done before and since, when she has hung in adoration over the cradle of her first-born child;--but _here_ the child was to be a descended God; and nothing, as it seems to me, can be more graceful and more profoundly suggestive than the manner in which some of the early Italian artists have expressed this idea. When, in such pictures, the locality is marked by the poor stable, or the rough rocky cave, it becomes "a temple full of religion, full of glory, where angels are the ministers, the holy Virgin the worshipper, and Christ the Deity." Very few accessories are admitted, merely such as serve to denote that the subject is "a Nativity," properly so called, and not the "Madre Pia," as already described. The divine Infant lies in the centre of the picture, sometimes on a white napkin, sometimes with no other bed than the flowery turf; sometimes his head rests on a wheat-sheaf, always here interpreted as "the bread of life." He places his finger on his lip, which expresses the _Verbum sum_ (or, _Vere Verbum hoc est abbreviatum_), "I am the word," or "I am the bread of life" (_Ego sum panis ille vitæ._ John vi. 48), and fixes his eyes on the heavens above, where the angels are singing the _Gloria in excelsis._ In