Then the giant Peter Paul Rubens, with his facile brush, his acres of canvas, covered with the virile arabesque by which he has transmitted to us the record of a temperament so full of life that it needs no great effort of imagination, before one of his crowded canvases, to imagine the doughty Fleming back in our midst, and taking his place as Jupiter upon his painted Olympus, reawakened to life. Yet, when he in turn approaches this natal subject, his pagan brush touches the canvas lightly, and all its deftness is given to the praise of Our Lady and Our Lord. With him, as with the painters of all and differing nationalities, both Mother and Child bear the strong impress of the painter's surroundings. It is as though the miraculous birth had, by some mysterious dispensation, taken place in each of the countries of the world, the better to insure the comprehension of the message of divine love to all peoples. [Illustration: MOTHER AND CHILD. N. BARABINO, A LIVING ITALIAN PAINTER.] [Illustration: HOLY FAMILY. SIR ANTHONY VAN DYCK (FLEMISH: BORN 1599; DIED 1641).] [Illustration: MOTHER AND CHILD. CARLO DOLCI (ITALIAN: BORN 1616; DIED 1686).] [Illustration: HOLY FAMILY. BONIFAZIO (ITALIAN: BORN 1494; DIED 1563).] With Van Dyck, a little later, the Child is a young patrician; the quality of the painter's imagination, influenced by his frequentation of the princes of the earth, making him conceive the young Christ as a magnificent man-child, fit to be called later to the high places of the world, a serene and noble leader. Somewhat differently did the Italians of the great epoch of painting, Raphael, Titian, Veronese, even Bellini, who was earlier, conceive their subject. While both Mother and Child with them were merely what painters call a "bit" of painting, directly founded on close study of a living woman and child, there was always present a religious feeling, different, but almost as intense as that of the primitive Italian painters. Throughout the many Madonnas on which the fame of Raphael is founded we feel that, through a certain variety of type, the research was always the same--a desire to realize the maid-mother, and to presage, in the lineaments of the child, his future character. This sentiment, everywhere present, is approached reverently, and the too short-lived painter in his work at least utters a constant prayer. With Bellini, with Titian, and with Veronese the effort is not dissimilar, though something of the sumptuosity of Venetian life has crept in, and it is to a queen of earth as much as of heaven, and to a prince of the church temporal, that their service is rendered. [Illustration: MOTHER AND CHILD. N. BARABINO, A LIVING ITALIAN PAINTER.]