oglia, Gia son finiti li tuoi e li miei travagli e dolori
insieme!' Erano rimase alcune lagrime negli occhi della Vergine....
e per la grande allegrezza non poteva proferire parola alcuna ...
ma quando al fine pote parlare, lo ringrazio per parte di tutto
il genere humano, per la redenzione, operata e fatta, per tutto
generalmente."--v. Il Perfetto Legendario_]

The pathetic sentiment, and all the supernatural and mystical
accompaniments of this beautiful myth of the early ages, have been
very inadequately rendered by the artists. It is always treated as a
plain matter-of-fact scene. The Virgin kneels; the Saviour, bearing
his standard, stands before her; and where the delivered patriarchs
are introduced, they are generally either Adam and Eve, the authors
of the fall or Abraham and David, the progenitors of Christ and the
Virgin. The patriarchs are omitted in the earliest instance I can
refer to, one of the carved panels of the stalls in the Cathedral of
Amiens: also in the composition by Albert Durer, not included in his
life of the Virgin, but forming one of the series of the Passion.
Guido has represented the scene in a very fine picture, wherein an
angel bears the standard of victory, and behind our Saviour are Adam
and Eve. (Dresden Gal.)

Another example, by Guercino (Cathedral, Cento), is cited by Goethe
as an instance of that excellence in the expression of the natural
and domestic affections which characterized the painter. Mary kneels
before her Son, looking up in his face with unutterable affection;
he regards her with a calm, sad look, "as if within his noble soul
there still remained the recollection of his sufferings and hers,
outliving the pang of death, the descent into the grave, and which
the resurrection had not yet dispelled." This, however, is not the
sentiment, at once affectionate and joyously triumphant, of the
old legend. I was pleased with a little picture in the Lichtenstein
Gallery at Vienna, where the risen Saviour, standing before his
Mother, points to the page of the book before her, as if he said, "See
you not that thus it is written?" (Luke xxiv. 46.) Behind Jesus is
St. John the Evangelist bearing the cup and the cross, as the cup of
sorrow and the cross of pain, not the mere emblems. There is another
example, by one of the Caracci, in the Fitzwilliam Collection at
Cambridge.

A picture by Albano of this subject, in which Christ comes flying or
floating on the air, like an incorpor