[Footnote 1:  See the “Mater Amabilis” and the “Pastoral Madonnas,” p. 229, 239.]

TWO FIGURES.

The simplest form of the family group is confined to two figures, and expresses merely the relation between the Mother and the Child.  The motif is precisely the same as in the formal, goddess-like, enthroned Madonnas of the antique time; but here quite otherwise worked out, and appealing to other sympathies.  In the first instance, the intention was to assert the contested pretensions of the human mother to divine honours; here it was rather to assert the humanity of her divine Son; and we have before us, in the simplest form, the first and holiest of all the social relations.

The primal instinct, as the first duty, of the mother, is the nourishment of the life she has given.  A very common subject, therefore, is Mary in the act of feeding her Child from her bosom.  I have already observed that, when first adopted, this was a theological theme; an answer, in form, to the challenge of the Nestorians, “Shall we call him God, who hath sucked his mother’s breast?” Then, and for at least 500 years afterwards, the simple maternal action involved a religious dogma, and was the visible exponent of a controverted article of faith.  All such controversy had long ceased, and certainly there was no thought of insisting on a point of theology in the minds of those secular painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who have set forth the representation with such an affectionate and delicate grace; nor yet in the minds of those who converted the lovely group into a moral lesson.  For example, we find in the works of Jeremy Taylor (one of the lights of our Protestant Church) a long homily “Of nursing children, in imitation of the blessed Virgin Mother;” and prints and pictures of the Virgin thus occupied often bear significant titles and inscriptions of the same import; such as “Le premier devoir d’une mere,” &c.

I do not find this motif in any known picture by Raphael:  but in one of his designs, engraved by Marc Antonio, it is represented with characteristic grace and delicacy.

Goethe describes with delight a picture by Correggio, in which the attention of the Child seems divided between the bosom of his mother, and some fruit offered by an angel.  He calls this subject “The Weaning of the Infant Christ.”  Correggio, if not the very first, is certainly among the first of the Italians who treated this motif in the simple domestic style.  Others of the Lombard school followed him; and I know not a more exquisite example than the maternal group by Solario, now in the Louvre, styled La Vierge a l’Oreiller verd, from the colour of the pillow on which the Child is lying.  The subject is frequent in the contemporary German and Flemish schools of the sixteenth century.  In the next century, there are charming examples by the Bologna painters and the Naturalisti, Spanish, Italian, and Flemish.  I would particularly point to one by Agostino Caracci (Parma), and to another by Vandyck (that engraved by Bartolozzi), as examples of elegance; while in the numerous specimens by Rubens we have merely his own wife and son, painted with all that coarse vigorous life, and homely affectionate expression, which his own strong domestic feelings could lend them.