HISTORICAL SUBJECTS.

PART III.

THE LIFE OF THE VIRGIN MARY FROM THE SOJOURN IN EGYPT TO THE CRUCIFIXION OF OUR LORD.

1.  THE HOLY FAMILY. 2.  THE VIRGIN SEEKS HER SON. 3.  THE DEATH OF JOSEPH. 4.  THE MARRIAGE AT CANA. 5.  “LO SPASIMO.” 6.  THE CRUCIFIXION. 7.  THE DESCENT FROM THE CROSS. 8.  THE ENTOMBMENT.

THE HOLY FAMILY.

When the Holy Family under divine protection, had returned safely from their sojourn in Egypt, they were about to repair to Bethlehem; but Joseph hearing that Archelaus “did reign in Judea in the room of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither; and being warned of God in a dream, he turned aside into Galilee,” and came to the city of Nazareth, which was the native place and home of the Virgin Mary.  Here Joseph dwelt, following in peace his trade of a carpenter, and bringing up his reputed Son to the same craft:  and here Mary nurtured her divine Child; “and he grew and waxed strong in spirit, and the grace of God was upon him.”  No other event is recorded until Jesus had reached his twelfth, year.

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This, then, is the proper place to introduce some notice of those representations of the domestic life of the Virgin and the infancy of the Saviour, which, in all their endless variety, pass under the general title of THE HOLY FAMILY—­the beautiful title of a beautiful subject, addressed in the loveliest and most familiar form at once to the piety and the affections of the beholder.

These groups, so numerous, and of such perpetual recurrence, that they alone form a large proportion of the contents of picture galleries and the ornaments of churches, are, after all, a modern innovation in sacred art.  What may be called the domestic treatment of the history of the Virgin cannot be traced farther back than the middle of the fifteenth century.  It is, indeed, common to class all those pictures as Holy Families which include any of the relatives of Christ grouped with the Mother and her Child; but I must here recapitulate and insist upon the distinction to be drawn between the domestic and the devotional treatment of the subject; a distinction I have been careful to keep in view throughout the whole range of sacred art, and which, in this particular subject, depends on a difference in sentiment and intention, more easily felt than set down in words.  It is, I must repeat, a devotional group where the sacred personages are placed in direct relation to the worshippers, and where their supernatural character is paramount to every other.  It is a domestic or an historical group, a Holy Family properly so called, when the personages are placed in direct relation to each other by some link of action or sentiment, which expresses the family connection between them,