mio cordialissimo, sei tu veramente il mio Gesu, o pur m’inganna l’affetto!’ ‘Io sono il tuo figliuolo, madre mia, dolcissima,’ disse il Signore:  ’cessino hormai le tue lagrime, non fare ch’io ti veda piu di mala voglia, Gia son finiti li tuoi e li miei travagli e dolori insieme!’ Erano rimase alcune lagrime negli occhi della Vergine.... e per la grande allegrezza non poteva proferire parola alcuna ... ma quando al fine pote parlare, lo ringrazio per parte di tutto il genere humano, per la redenzione, operata e fatta, per tutto generalmente.”—­v.  Il Perfetto Legendario]

The pathetic sentiment, and all the supernatural and mystical accompaniments of this beautiful myth of the early ages, have been very inadequately rendered by the artists.  It is always treated as a plain matter-of-fact scene.  The Virgin kneels; the Saviour, bearing his standard, stands before her; and where the delivered patriarchs are introduced, they are generally either Adam and Eve, the authors of the fall or Abraham and David, the progenitors of Christ and the Virgin.  The patriarchs are omitted in the earliest instance I can refer to, one of the carved panels of the stalls in the Cathedral of Amiens:  also in the composition by Albert Durer, not included in his life of the Virgin, but forming one of the series of the Passion.  Guido has represented the scene in a very fine picture, wherein an angel bears the standard of victory, and behind our Saviour are Adam and Eve. (Dresden Gal.)

Another example, by Guercino (Cathedral, Cento), is cited by Goethe as an instance of that excellence in the expression of the natural and domestic affections which characterized the painter.  Mary kneels before her Son, looking up in his face with unutterable affection; he regards her with a calm, sad look, “as if within his noble soul there still remained the recollection of his sufferings and hers, outliving the pang of death, the descent into the grave, and which the resurrection had not yet dispelled.”  This, however, is not the sentiment, at once affectionate and joyously triumphant, of the old legend.  I was pleased with a little picture in the Lichtenstein Gallery at Vienna, where the risen Saviour, standing before his Mother, points to the page of the book before her, as if he said, “See you not that thus it is written?” (Luke xxiv. 46.) Behind Jesus is St. John the Evangelist bearing the cup and the cross, as the cup of sorrow and the cross of pain, not the mere emblems.  There is another example, by one of the Caracci, in the Fitzwilliam Collection at Cambridge.

A picture by Albano of this subject, in which Christ comes flying or floating on the air, like an incorporeal being, surrounded by little fluttering cherubim, very much like Cupids, is an example of all that is most false and objectionable in feeling and treatment. (Florence, Pitti Pal.)

The popularity of this scene in the Bologna school of art arose, I think, from its being adopted as one of the subjects from the Rosary, the first of “the five Glorious Mysteries;” therefore especially affected by the Dominicans, the great patrons of the Caracci at that time.