the friar Lippi fell in love with her and she with him. Profiting by the crowd and confusion attendant on the festival of the Madonna of the Girdle, which is celebrated in Prato on the first of May, Fra Filippo carried off Lucrezia, appealed to his patron, Cosimo de’ Medici, and through the latter’s intercession received from the Pope, Pius II., a special brief, absolving both himself and the novice from their ecclesiastical vows and granting them dispensation to marry. He and Lucrezia had two children; their son, Filippino Lippi, more than rivaling his father’s fame as a painter. The Madonna that Fra Filippo painted for the convent may still be seen in Prato, and there are other pictures in which Lucrezia’s lovely face is discernible.

THE TWO WIVES OF RUBENS

PETER PAUL RUBENS, BY HIMSELF

In Windsor Castle, England.

HELENA FOURMENT, BY RUBENS

Rubens was so happy with his first wife, Isabella Brandt, who died after eighteen years of blissful married life with him, that he could not endure the loneliness of being a widower, but four years after Isabella’s death took as his second wife Helena Fourment. This marriage proved to be as happy as the first; although he was already fifty-three and she barely sixteen. Their union was blessed with five handsome children; so that his declining years found him surrounded by youth and beauty, and with a splendid young wife as comrade.

HELENA FOURMENT, BY RUBENS

A portrait of the artist’s second wife and two of their children, hanging in the Louvre, Paris.

During the eighteen years of his first marriage Isabella appeared in nearly all his large pictures. She was of a more refined type than Helena; so that, with his second marriage, when he began to introduce his second wife into his pictures, his style becomes broader and more vigorous. For Helena had a strong, fully developed figure of pronounced contour, rosy flesh tints, golden hair, and lips that seemed always partly open to show the flash of pure white teeth. These were her attractions. She was obviously more beautiful, more brilliant, than Isabella, although in her youth her development was somewhat too luxuriant,—a picture of healthy, bursting, buoyant young womanhood. Indeed, so proud does Rubens seem of having, at his age, won a woman of her pronounced and youthful charms, that in some of his pictures he expresses them too freely, as, for example, in the Helena in a fur pelisse in the Imperial Gallery, Vienna. That Rubens drew a vast amount of inspiration from his two wives, Isabella and Helena, is obvious to anyone familiar with his work; for they appear in picture after picture from his brush. His married life, first with Isabella and then with Helena, was a constant stimulus to his best work.

REMBRANDT AND SASKIA

SASKIA, BY REMBRANDT

Rembrandt, too, was married twice, and although his first wife was refined and aristocratic and his second far from it, having been a servant in his household, he was intensely happy with both and painted them many times. Saskia van Ulenburg, although not strictly speaking a beauty from the casual point of view, lent herself admirably, nevertheless, to pictorial treatment, especially that