It is natural to turn from the Cupid to another work belonging to the
English nation, which has recently been ascribed to Michelangelo. I
mean the Madonna, with Christ, S. John, and four attendant male
figures, once in the possession of Mr. H. Labouchere, and now in the
National Gallery. We have no authentic tradition regarding this
tempera painting, which in my judgment is the most beautiful of the
easel pictures attributed to Michelangelo. Internal evidence from
style renders its genuineness in the highest degree probable. No one
else upon the close of the fifteenth century was capable of producing
a composition at once so complicated, so harmonious, and so clear as
the group formed by Madonna, Christ leaning on her knee to point a
finger at the book she holds, and the young S. John turned round to
combine these figures with the exquisitely blended youths behind him.
Unfortunately the two angels or genii upon the left hand are
unfinished; but had the picture been completed, we should probably
have been able to point out another magnificent episode in the
composition, determined by the transverse line carried from the hand
upon the last youth's shoulder, through the open book and the upraised
arm of Christ, down to the feet of S. John and the last genius on the
right side. Florentine painters had been wont to place attendant
angels at both sides of their enthroned Madonnas. Fine examples might
be chosen from the work of Filippino Lippi and Botticelli. But their
angels were winged and clothed like acolytes; the Madonna was seated
on a rich throne or under a canopy, with altar-candles, wreaths of
roses, flowering lilies. It is characteristic of Michelangelo to adopt
a conventional motive, and to treat it with brusque originality. In
this picture there are no accessories to the figures, and the
attendant angels are Tuscan lads half draped in succinct tunics. The
style is rather that of a flat relief in stone than of a painting; and