Ex-voto pictures in this style are very interesting, and the votary, without any striking impropriety, makes one of the Arcadian group.  Very appropriate, too, is the marriage of St. Catherine, often treated in this poetical style.  In a picture by Titian, the family of the Virgin attend the mystical rite, and St. Anna places the hand of St. Catherine in that of the Child.

In a group by Signorelli, Christ appears as if teaching St. Catherine; he dictates, and she, the patroness of “divine philosophy,” writes down his words.

When the later painters in their great altar-pieces imitated this idyllic treatment, the graceful Venetian conception became in their hands heavy, mannered, tasteless,—­and sometimes worse.  The monastic saints or mitred dignitaries, introduced into familiar and irreverent communion with the sacred and ideal personages, in spite of the grand scenery, strike us as at once prosaic and fantastic “we marvel how they got there.”  Parmigiano, when he fled from the sack of Rome in 1527, painted at Bologna, for the nuns of Santa Margherita, an altar-piece which has been greatly celebrated.  The Madonna, holding her Child, is seated in a landscape under a tree, and turns her head to the Bishop St. Petronius, protector of Bologna.  St. Margaret, kneeling and attended by her great dragon, places one hand, with a free and easy air, on the knee of the Virgin, and with the other seems to be about to chuck the infant Christ under the chin.  In a large picture by Giacomo Francia, the Virgin, walking in a flowery meadow with the infant Christ and St. John, and attended by St. Agnes and Mary Magdalene, meets St. Francis and St. Dominick, also, apparently, taking a walk. (Berlin Gal.  No. 281.) And again;—­the Madonna and St. Elizabeth meet with their children in a landscape, while St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. Benedict stand behind in attitudes of attention and admiration.  Now, such pictures may be excellently well painted, greatly praised by connoisseurs, and held in “somma venerazione,” but they are offensive as regards the religious feeling, and, are, in point of taste, mannered, fantastic, and secular.

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Here we must end our discourse concerning the Virgin and Child as a devotional subject.  Very easily and delightfully to the writer, perhaps not painfully to the reader, we might have gone on to the end of the volume; but my object was not to exhaust the subject, to point out every interesting variety of treatment, but to lead the lover of art, wandering through a church or gallery, to new sources of pleasure; to show him what infinite shades of feeling and character may still be traced in a subject which, with all its beauty and attractiveness, might seem to have lost its significant interest, and become trite from endless repetition; to lead the mind to some perception of the intention of the artist in his work,—­under what aspect he had himself contemplated and placed before the worshipper the image of the mother of Christ,—­whether crowned and enthroned as the sovereign lady of Christendom; or exalted as the glorious empress of heaven and all the spiritual world; or bending benignly over us, the impersonation of sympathizing womanhood, the emblem of relenting love, the solace of suffering humanity, the maid and mother, dear and undefiled—­