I remember reading a little Italian hymn composed for a choir of nuns, and addressed to the sleeping Christ, in which he is prayed to awake or if he will not, they threaten to pull him by his golden curls until they rouse him to listen!

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I have seen a graceful print which represents Jesus as a child standing at his mother’s knee, while she feeds him from a plate or cap held by an angel; underneath is the text, “Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good” And in a print of the same period, the mother suspends her needlework to contemplate the Child, who, standing at her side, looks down compassionately on two little birds, which flutter their wings and open their beaks expectingly; underneath is the test, “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?”

Mary employed in needlework, while her cradled Infant slumbers at her side, is a beautiful subject.  Rossini, in his Storia della Pittura, publishes a group, representing the Virgin mending or making a little coat, while Jesus, seated at her feet, without his coat, is playing with a bird; two angels are hovering above.  It appears to me that there is here some uncertainty as regards both the subject and the master.  In the time of Giottino, to whom Rossini attributes the picture, the domestic treatment of the Madonna and Child was unknown.  If it be really by him, I should suppose it to represent Hannah and her son Samuel.

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All these, and other varieties of action and sentiment connecting the Mother and her Child, are frequently accompanied by accessory figures, forming, in their combination, what is properly a Holy Family.  The personages introduced, singly or together, are the young St. John, Joseph, Anna, Joachim, Elizabeth, and Zacharias.

THREE FIGURES.

The group of three figures most commonly met with, is that of the Mother and Child, with St. John.  One of the earliest examples of the domestic treatment of this group is a quaint picture by Botticelli, in which Mary, bending down, holds forth the Child to be caressed by St. John,—­very dry in colour and faulty in drawing, but beautiful for the sentiment. (Florence, Pitti Pal.) Perhaps the most perfect example which could be cited from the whole range of art, is Raphael’s “Madonna del Cardellino” (Florence Gal.); another is his “Belle Jardiniere” (Louvre, 375); another, in which the figures are half-length, is his “Madonna del Giglio” (Lord Garvagh’s Coll.).  As I have already observed, where the Infant Christ takes the cross from St. John, or presents it to him, or where St. John points to him as the Redeemer, or is represented, not as a child, but as a youth or a man, the composition assumes a devotional significance.