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Early in the fifteenth century, the Council of Constance (A.D. 1414), and the condemnation of Huss, gave a new impulse to the worship of the Virgin.  The Hussite wars, and the sacrilegious indignity with which her sacred images had been treated in the north, filled her orthodox votaries of the south, of Europe with a consternation and horror like that excited by the Iconoclasts of the eighth century, and were followed by a similar reaction.  The Church was called upon to assert more strongly than ever its orthodox veneration for her, and, as a natural consequence, votive pictures multiplied, the works of the excelling artists of the fifteenth century testify to the zeal of the votaries, and the kindred spirit in which the painters worked.

Gerson, a celebrated French priest, and chancellor of the university of Paris, distinguished himself in the Council of Constance by the eloquence with which he pleaded for the Immaculate Conception, and the enthusiasm with which he preached in favour of instituting a festival in honour of this mystery, as well as another in honour of Joseph, the husband of the Virgin.  In both he was unsuccessful during his lifetime; but for both eventually his writings prepared the way.  He also composed a Latin poem of three thousand lines in praise of Joseph, which was among the first works published after the invention of printing.  Together with St. Joseph, the parents of the Virgin, St. Anna more particularly, became objects, of popular veneration, and all were at length exalted to the rank of patron saints, by having festivals instituted in their honour.  It is towards the end of the fifteenth century, or rather a little later, that we first meet with that charming domestic group, called the “Holy Family,” afterwards so popular, so widely diffused, and treated with such an infinite variety.

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Towards the end of this century sprung up a new influence,—­the revival of classical learning, a passionate enthusiasm for the poetry and mythology of the Greeks, and a taste for the remains of antique art.  This influence on the representations of the Virgin, as far as it was merely external, was good.  An added dignity and grace, a more free and correct drawing, a truer feeling for harmony of proportion and all that constitutes elegance, were gradually infused into the forms and attitudes.  But dangerous became the craving for mere beauty,—­dangerous the study of the classical and heathen literature.  This was the commencement of that thoroughly pagan taste which in the following century demoralized Christian art.  There was now an attempt at varying the arrangement of the sacred groups which led to irreverence, or at best to a sort of superficial mannered grandeur; and from this period we date the first introduction of the portrait Virgins.  An early, and most scandalous example remains to us in one of the frescoes in the