to the last. For instance, if the Virgin, watching
her sleeping Child, puts her finger on her lip to silence the little
St. John; there is here no relation between the spectator and the
persons represented, except that of unbidden sympathy: it is a
family group; a domestic scene. But if St. John, looking out of the
picture, points to the Infant, "Behold the Lamb of God!" then the
whole representation changes its significance; St. John assumes the
character of precursor, and we, the spectators, are directly addressed
and called upon to acknowledge the "Son of God, the Saviour of
mankind."

If St. Joseph, kneeling, presents flowers to the Infant Christ, while
Mary looks on tenderly (as in a group by Raphael), it is an act of
homage which expresses the mutual relation of the three personages; it
is a Holy Family: whereas, in the picture by Murillo, in our National
Gallery, where Joseph and Mary present the young Redeemer to the
homage of the spectator, while the form of the PADRE ETERNO, and
the Holy Spirit, with attendant angels, are floating above, we have
a devotional group, a "_Sacra Conversazione_:"--it is, in fact a
material representation of the Trinity; and the introduction of Joseph
into such immediate propinquity with the personages acknowledged
as divine is one of the characteristics of the later schools of
theological art. It could not possibly have occurred before the end
of the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century.

The introduction of persons who could not have been contemporary, as
St. Francis or St. Catherine, renders the group ideal and devotional.
On the other hand, as I have already observed, the introduction of
attendant angels does not place the subject out of the domain of the
actual; for the painters literally rendered what in the Scripture text
is distinctly set down and literally interpreted, "He shall give his
angels charge concerning thee." Wherever lived and moved the Infant
Godhead, angels were always _supposed_ to be present; therefore it lay
within the province of an art addressed especially to our senses, to
place them bodily before us, and to give to these heavenly attendants
a visible shape and bearing worthy of their blessed ministry.

The devotional groups, of which I have already treated most fully,
even while placed by the accessories quite beyond the range of actual
life, have been too often vulgarized and formalized by a trivial or
merely conventional treatment.