s if teaching St. Catherine;
he dictates, and she, the patroness of "divine philosophy," writes
down his words.

When the later painters in their great altar-pieces imitated this
idyllic treatment, the graceful Venetian conception became in their
hands heavy, mannered, tasteless,--and sometimes worse. The monastic
saints or mitred dignitaries, introduced into familiar and irreverent
communion with the sacred and ideal personages, in spite of the
grand scenery, strike us as at once prosaic and fantastic "we marvel
how they got there." Parmigiano, when he fled from the sack of Rome
in 1527, painted at Bologna, for the nuns of Santa Margherita, an
altar-piece which has been greatly celebrated. The Madonna, holding
her Child, is seated in a landscape under a tree, and turns her head
to the Bishop St. Petronius, protector of Bologna. St. Margaret,
kneeling and attended by her great dragon, places one hand, with a
free and easy air, on the knee of the Virgin, and with the other seems
to be about to chuck the infant Christ under the chin. In a large
picture by Giacomo Francia, the Virgin, walking in a flowery meadow
with the infant Christ and St. John, and attended by St. Agnes and
Mary Magdalene, meets St. Francis and St. Dominick, also, apparently,
taking a walk. (Berlin Gal. No. 281.) And again;--the Madonna and St.
Elizabeth meet with their children in a landscape, while St. Peter,
St. Paul, and St. Benedict stand behind in attitudes of attention
and admiration. Now, such pictures may be excellently well painted,
greatly praised by connoisseurs, and held in "_somma venerazione_,"
but they are offensive as regards the religious feeling, and, are, in
point of taste, mannered, fantastic, and secular.

* * * * *

Here we must end our discourse concerning the Virgin and Child as
a devotional subject. Very easily and delightfully to the writer,
perhaps not painfully to the reader, we might have gone on to the end
of the volume; but my object was not to exhaust the subject, to point
out every interesting variety of treatment, but to lead the lover
of art, wandering through a church or gallery, to new sources of
pleasure; to show him what infinite shades of feeling and character
may still be traced in a subject which, with all its beauty and
attractiveness, might seem to have lost its significant interest,
and become trite from endless repetition; to lead the mind to some
perception of the inte