or by some action which has a dramatic rather than a religious significance.  The Italians draw this distinction in the title “Sacra Conversazione” given to the first-named subject, and that of “Sacra Famiglia” given to the last.  For instance, if the Virgin, watching her sleeping Child, puts her finger on her lip to silence the little St. John; there is here no relation between the spectator and the persons represented, except that of unbidden sympathy:  it is a family group; a domestic scene.  But if St. John, looking out of the picture, points to the Infant, “Behold the Lamb of God!” then the whole representation changes its significance; St. John assumes the character of precursor, and we, the spectators, are directly addressed and called upon to acknowledge the “Son of God, the Saviour of mankind.”

If St. Joseph, kneeling, presents flowers to the Infant Christ, while Mary looks on tenderly (as in a group by Raphael), it is an act of homage which expresses the mutual relation of the three personages; it is a Holy Family:  whereas, in the picture by Murillo, in our National Gallery, where Joseph and Mary present the young Redeemer to the homage of the spectator, while the form of the PADRE ETERNO, and the Holy Spirit, with attendant angels, are floating above, we have a devotional group, a “Sacra Conversazione:”—­it is, in fact a material representation of the Trinity; and the introduction of Joseph into such immediate propinquity with the personages acknowledged as divine is one of the characteristics of the later schools of theological art.  It could not possibly have occurred before the end of the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century.

The introduction of persons who could not have been contemporary, as St. Francis or St. Catherine, renders the group ideal and devotional.  On the other hand, as I have already observed, the introduction of attendant angels does not place the subject out of the domain of the actual; for the painters literally rendered what in the Scripture text is distinctly set down and literally interpreted, “He shall give his angels charge concerning thee.”  Wherever lived and moved the Infant Godhead, angels were always supposed to be present; therefore it lay within the province of an art addressed especially to our senses, to place them bodily before us, and to give to these heavenly attendants a visible shape and bearing worthy of their blessed ministry.

The devotional groups, of which I have already treated most fully, even while placed by the accessories quite beyond the range of actual life, have been too often vulgarized and formalized by a trivial or merely conventional treatment.[1] In these really domestic scenes, where the painter sought unreproved his models in simple nature, and trusted for his effect to what was holiest and most immutable in our common humanity, he must have been a bungler indeed if he did not succeed in touching some responsive chord of sympathy in the bosom of the observer.  This is, perhaps, the secret of the universal, and, in general, deserved popularity of these Holy Families.