In a very famous picture by Titian. (Rome, Vatican), the Virgin and Child are seated in heavenly glory.  She has a smiling and gracious expression, and the Child holds a garland, while angels scatter flowers.  Below stand St. Sebastian, St. Nicholas, St. Catherine, St. Peter, and St. Francis.  The picture was an offering to the Virgin, after the cessation of a pestilence at Venice, and consecrated in a church of the Franciscans dedicated to St. Nicholas.[1]

[Footnote 1:  San Nicolo de’ Frari, since destroyed, and the picture has been transferred to the Vatican.]

Another celebrated votive picture against pestilence is Correggio’s “Madonna di San Sebastiano.” (Dresden Gal.) She is seated in heavenly glory, with little angels, not so much adoring as sporting and hovering round her; below are St. Sebastian and St. Roch, the latter asleep. (There would be an impropriety in exhibiting St. Roch sleeping but for the reference to the legend, that, while he slept, an angel healed him, which lends the circumstance a kind of poetical beauty.) St. Sebastian, bound, looks up on the other side.  The introduction of St. Geminiano, the patron of Modena, shows the picture to have been painted for that city, which had been desolated by pestilence in 1512.  The date of the picture is 1515.

We may then take it for granted, that wherever the Virgin and Child appear attended by St. Sebastian and St. Roch, the picture has been a votive offering against the plague; and there is something touching in the number of such memorials which exist in the Italian churches. (v.  Sacred and Legendary Art.) The brotherhoods instituted in most of the towns of Italy and Germany, for attending the sick and plague-stricken in times of public calamity, were placed under the protection of the Virgin of Mercy, St. Sebastian, and St. Roch; and many of these pictures were dedicated by such communities, or by the municipal authorities of the city or locality.  There is a memorable example in a picture by Guido, painted, by command of the Senate of Bologna, after the cessation of the plague, which desolated the city in 1830. (Acad.  Bologna.) The benign Virgin, with her Child, is seated in the skies:  the rainbow, symbol of peace and reconciliation, is under her feet.  The infant Christ, lovely and gracious, raises his right hand in the act of blessing; in the other he holds a branch of olive:  angels scatter flowers around.  Below stand the guardian saints, the “Santi Protettori” of Bologna;—­St. Petronius, St. Francis, St. Dominick; the warrior-martyrs, St. Proculus and St. Florian, in complete armour; with St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier.  Below these is seen, as if through a dark cloud and diminished, the city of Bologna, where the dead are borne away in carts and on biers.  The upper part of this famous picture is most charming for the gracious beauty of the expression, the freshness and delicacy of the colour.  The lower part is less happy, though