everent tenderness, the anxious affection,
the filial and paternal love of the Christ, who smiles as He crowns His
Mother; and She is yet more incomparable. Here the words of adulation
are too weak; the invisible is made visible by the sacramental use of
colour and line. A feeling of infinite deference, of intense but
reserved adoration, flows and spreads about this Virgin, who, with Her
arms crossed over Her bosom, bends Her little dove-like head, with
downcast eyes and a rather long nose, under a veil. She resembles the
Apostle St. John who is just behind her, and might be his daughter; and
she is enigmatic; for that soft, delicate face, which in the hands of
any other painter would be merely charming and trivial, breathes out the
purest innocence. She is not even flesh and blood; the material that
clothes Her swells softly with the breath of the fluid that shapes it.
Mary is a living but a volatilized and glorious body.

We can understand certain ideas of the Abbess of Agreda who declares
that She was exempt from the defilements inflicted on women; we see what
St. Thomas meant who asserted that Her beauty purified instead of
agitating the senses.

Her age is indeterminate; She is not a woman, yet She is no longer a
child. It is hard to say even that She is grown up, just marriageable, a
girl-child, so entirely is She refined above all humanity, beyond the
world, so exquisitely pure and for ever chaste.

She remains incomparable, unapproached in painting. By Her, other
Madonnas are vulgar; they are in every case women; She alone is the
white stem of the divine Ear of corn, the Wheat of the Eucharist. She
alone is indeed the Immaculate, the _Regina Virginum_ of the hymns; and
She is so youthful, so guileless, that the Son seems to be crowning His
Mother before She can have conceived Him.

It is in this that we see the glory of the gentle Friar's superhuman
genius. He painted as others have spoken, inspired by Grace; he painted
what he saw within him just as St. Angela of Foligno related what she
heard within her. Both one and the other were mystics absorbed into God;
thus this picture by Angelico is at the same time a picture by the Holy
Ghost, bolted through a purified sieve of art.

If we consider it, this soul is that of a female saint rather than of a
monk. Turn to his other pictures; those, for instance, in which he
strove to depict Christ's Passion; we are not looking at the stormy
scene represented by Matsy