In a picture by Giovanni da Udine, the subject is taken out of the region of the actual, and treated altogether as a mystery.  In the centre sits the young Redeemer, his hand raised, and surrounded by several of the Jewish doctors; while in front stand the four fathers of the Church, who flourished in the interval between the fourth and sixth centuries after Christ; and these, holding their books, point to Jesus, or look to him, as to the source of their wisdom;—­a beautiful and poetical version of the true significance of the story, which the critics of the last century would call a chronological mistake.  (Venice, Academy.)

But those representations which come under our especial consideration at present, are such as represent the moment in which Mary appears before her Son.  The earliest instance of this treatment is a group by Giotto.  Dante cites the deportment of the Virgin on this occasion, and her mild reproach, “con atto dolce di madre,” as a signal lesson of gentleness and forbearance. (Purgatorio, c. xv.) It is as if he had transferred the picture of Giotto into his Vision; for it is as a picture, not an action, that it is introduced.  Another, by Simon Memmi, in the Roscoe Collection at Liverpool, is conceived in a similar spirit.  In a picture by Garofalo, Mary does not reproach her Son, but stands listening to him with her hands folded on her bosom.  In a large and fine composition by Pinturicchio, the doctors throw down their books before him, while the Virgin and Joseph are entering on one side.  The subject is conspicuous in Albert Durer’s Life of the Virgin, where Jesus is seated on high, as one having authority, teaching from a chair like that of a professor in a university, and surrounded by the old bearded doctors; and Mary stands before her Son in an attitude of expostulation.

After the restoration of Jesus to his parents, they conducted him home; “but his mother kept all these sayings in her heart.”  The return to Nazareth, Jesus walking humbly between Joseph and Mary, was painted by Rubens for the Jesuit College at Antwerp, as a lesson to youth.  Underneath is the text, “And he was subject unto them."[1]

[Footnote 1:  It has been called by mistake “The Return from Egypt”]

THE DEATH OF JOSEPH.

Ital. La Morte di San Giuseppe. Fr. La Mort de St. Joseph Ger. Josef’s Tod.

Between the journey to Jerusalem and the public appearance of Jesus, chronologers place the death of Joseph, but the exact date is not ascertained:  some place it in the eighteenth year of the life of our Saviour, and others in his twenty-seventh year, when, as they assert, Joseph was one hundred and eleven years old.