[1] In these really domestic scenes,
where the painter sought unreproved his models in simple nature, and
trusted for his effect to what was holiest and most immutable in our
common humanity, he must have been a bungler indeed if he did not
succeed in touching some responsive chord of sympathy in the bosom of
the observer. This is, perhaps, the secret of the universal, and, in
general, deserved popularity of these Holy Families.

[Footnote 1: See the "Mater Amabilis" and the "Pastoral Madonnas," p.
229, 239.]

TWO FIGURES.

The simplest form of the family group is confined to two figures,
and expresses merely the relation between the Mother and the Child.
The _motif_ is precisely the same as in the formal, goddess-like,
enthroned Madonnas of the antique time; but here quite otherwise
worked out, and appealing to other sympathies. In the first instance,
the intention was to assert the contested pretensions of the human
mother to divine honours; here it was rather to assert the humanity of
her divine Son; and we have before us, in the simplest form, the first
and holiest of all the social relations.

The primal instinct, as the first duty, of the mother, is the
nourishment of the life she has given. A very common subject,
therefore, is Mary in the act of feeding her Child from her bosom. I
have already observed that, when first adopted, this was a theological
theme; an answer, _in form_, to the challenge of the Nestorians,
"Shall we call him _God_, who hath sucked his mother's breast?" Then,
and for at least 500 years afterwards, the simple maternal action
involved a religious dogma, and was the visible exponent of a
controverted article of faith. All such controversy had long ceased,
and certainly there was no thought of insisting on a point of
theology in the minds of those secular painters of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, who have set forth the representation with such
an affectionate and delicate grace; nor yet in the minds of those who
converted the lovely group into a moral lesson. For example, we find
in the works of Jeremy Taylor (one of the lights of our Protestant
Church) a long homily "Of nursing children, in imitation of the
blessed Virgin Mother;" and prints and pictures of the Virgin thus
occupied often bear significant titles and inscriptions of the same
import; such as "Le premier devoir d'une mere," &c.

I do not find this _motif_ in any known picture by Raphael: but in
one of his desi