E MADONNA OF LOVE.

(THE MATER AMABILIS.)

Undoubtedly the most popular of all Madonna subjects--certainly the
most easily understood--is the Mater Amabilis. The mother's mood may
be read at a glance: she is showing in one of a thousand tender ways
her motherly affection for her child. She clasps him in her arms,
holding him to her breast, pressing her face to his, kissing him,
caressing him, or playing with him. Love is written in every line of
her face; love is the key-note of the picture.

The style of composition best adapted to such a theme is manifestly
the simplest. The more formal types of the enthroned and glorified
Madonnas are the least suitable for the display of maternal affection,
while the portrait Madonna, and the Madonna in landscape or domestic
scenes, are readily conceived as the Mater Amabilis. Nevertheless,
these distinctions have not by any means been rigidly regarded in art.
This is manifest in some of the illustrations in Part I., as the
Enthroned Madonna, by Quentin Massys, where the mother kisses her
child, and Angelico's Madonna in Glory, where she holds him to her
cheek.

Gathering our examples from so many methods of composition, we are in
the midst of a multitude of pictures which no man can number, and
which set forth every conceivable phase of motherliness.

Let us make Raphael our starting-point. From the same master whose
influence led him to the study of external nature, he learned also
the study of human nature. To the interpretation of mother-love he
brought all the fresh ardor of youth, and a sunny temperament which
saw only joy in the face of Nature. One after another of the series of
his Florentine pictures gives us a new glimpse of the loving relation
between mother and child.

The Belle Jardiniere gazes into her boy's face in fond absorption. The
Tempi Madonna holds him to her heart, pressing her lips to his soft
cheek. In the Orleans and Colonna pictures she smiles indulgently into
his eyes as he lies across her lap, plucking at the bosom of her
dress. Other pictures show the two eagerly reading together from the
Book of Wisdom (The Conestabile and Ansidei Madonnas).

The painter's later work evinces a growing maturity of thought. In the
Holy Family of Francis I., how strong and tender is the mother's
attitude, as she stoops to lift her child from his cradle; in the
Chair Madonna, how protecting is the capacious embrace with which she
gathers him to herself in broodi