And, lastly, we have the Mater Amabilis in a more complex, and picturesque, though still devotional, form.  The Virgin, seen at full length, reclines on a verdant bank, or is seated under a tree.  She is not alone with her Child.  Holy personages, admitted to a communion with her, attend around her, rather sympathizing than adoring.  The love of varied nature, the love of life under all its aspects, became mingled with the religious conception.  Instead of carefully avoiding whatever may remind us of her earthly relationship, the members of her family always form a part of her cortege.  This pastoral and dramatic treatment began with the Venetian and Paduan schools, and extended to the early German schools, which were allied to them in feeling, though contrasted with them in form and execution.

The perpetual introduction of St. Joseph, St. Elizabeth, and other relatives of the Virgin (always avoided in a Madonna dell Trono), would compose what is called a Holy Family, but that the presence of sainted personages whose existence and history belong to a wholly different era—­St. Catherine, St. George, St. Francis, or St. Dominick—­takes the composition out of the merely domestic and historical, and lifts it at once into the ideal and devotional line of art.  Such a group cannot well be styled a Sacra Famiglia; it is a Sacra Conversazione treated in the pastoral and lyrical rather than the lofty epic style.

In this subject the Venetians, who first introduced it, excel all other painters.  There is no example by Raphael.  The German and Flemish painters who adopted this treatment were often coarse and familiar; the later Italians became flippant and fantastic.  The Venetians alone knew how to combine the truest feeling for nature with a sort of Elysian grace.

I shall give a few examples.

1.  In a picture by Titian (Dresden Gal.), the Virgin is seated on a green bank enamelled with flowers.  She is simply dressed like a contadina, in a crimson tunic, and a white veil half shading her fair hair.  She holds in her arms her lovely Infant, who raises his little hand in benediction.  St. Catherine kneels before him on one side; on the other, St. Barbara.  St. John the Baptist, not as a child, and the contemporary of our Saviour, but in likeness of an Arcadian shepherd, kneels with his cross and his lamb—­the Ecce Agnus Dei, expressed, not in words, but in form.  St. George stands by as a guardian warrior.  And St. Joseph, leaning on his stick behind, contemplates the group with an air of dignified complacency.

2.  There is another instance also from Titian.  In a most luxuriant landscape thick with embowering trees, and the mountains of Cadore in the background, the Virgin is seated on a verdant bank; St. Catherine has thrown herself on her knees, and stretches out her arms to the divine Child in an ecstasy of adoration, in which there is nothing unseemly or familiar.  At a distance St. John the Baptist approaches with his Lamb.