accompaniments of earthly
power; she is not enthroned on clouds, nor glorified and star-crowned
in heaven; she is no longer so exclusively the VERGINE DEA, nor the
VIRGO DEI GENITRIX; but she is still the ALMA MATER REDEMPTORIS, the
young, and lovely, and most pure mother of a divine Christ. She is
not sustained in mid-air by angels; she dwells lowly on earth; but
the angels leave their celestial home to wait upon her. Such effigies,
when conceived in a strictly ideal and devotional sense, I shall
designate as the MATER AMABILIS.

The first and simplest form of this beautiful and familiar subject, we
find in those innumerable half-length figures of the Madonna, holding
her Child in her arms, painted chiefly for oratories, private or
way-side chapels, and for the studies, libraries, and retired chambers
of the devout, as an excitement to religious feeling, and a memorial
of the mystery of the Incarnation, where large or grander subjects,
or more expensive pictures, would be misplaced. Though unimportant in
comparison with the comprehensive and magnificent church altar-pieces
already described, there is no class of pictures so popular and so
attractive, none on which the character of the time and the painter
is stamped more clearly and intelligibly, than on these simple
representations.

The Virgin is not here the dispenser of mercy; she is simply the
mother of the Redeemer. She is occupied only by her divine Son. She
caresses him, or she gazes on him fondly. She presents him to the
worshipper. She holds him forth with a pensive joy as the predestined
offering. If the profound religious sentiment of the early masters was
afterwards obliterated by the unbelief and conventionalism of later
art, still this favourite subject could not be so wholly profaned by
degrading sentiments and associations, as the mere portrait heads of
the Virgin alone. No matter what the model for the Madonna, might
have been,--a wife, a mistress, a _contadina_ of Frascati, a Venetian
_Zitella_, a _Madchen_ of Nuremberg, a buxom Flemish _Frau_,--for the
Child was there; the baby innocence in her arms consecrated her into
that "holiest thing alive," a mother. The theme, however inadequately
treated as regarded its religious significance, was sanctified in
itself beyond the reach of a profane thought. Miserable beyond the
reach of hope, dark below despair, that moral atmosphere which the
presence of sinless unconscious infancy cannot for a moment pur