It is curious that, hand in hand with this development of taste and feeling in the appreciation of natural sentiment and beauty, and this tendency to realism, we find the associations of a peculiar and specific sanctity remaining with the old Byzantine type.  This arose from the fact, always to be borne in mind, that the most ancient artistic figure of the Madonna was a purely theological symbol; apparently the moral type was too nearly allied to the human and the real to satisfy faith.  It is the ugly, dark-coloured, ancient Greek Madonnas, such as this, which had all along the credit of being miraculous; and “to this day,” says Kugler, “the Neapolitan lemonade-seller will allow no other than a formal Greek Madonna, with olive-green complexion and veiled head, to be set up in his booth.”  It is the same in Russia.  Such pictures, in which there is no attempt at representation, real or ideal, and which merely have a sort of imaginary sanctity and power, are not so much idols as they are mere Fetishes.  The most lovely Madonna by Raphael or Titian would not have the same effect.  Guido, who himself painted lovely Virgins, went every Saturday to pray before the little black Madonna della Guardia, and, as we are assured, held this old Eastern relic in devout veneration.

In the pictures of the Madonna, produced by the most eminent painters of the seventeenth century, is embodied the theology of the time.  The Virgin Mary is not, like the Madonna di San Sisto, “a single projection of the artist’s mind,” but, as far as he could put his studies together, she is “a compound of every creature’s best,” sometimes majestic, sometimes graceful, often full of sentiment, elegance, and refinement, but wanting wholly in the spiritual element.  If the Madonna did really sit to Guido in person, (see Malvasia, “Felsina Pittrice,”) we fancy she must have revealed her loveliness, but veiled her divinity.

Without doubt the finest Madonnas of the seventeenth century are those produced by the Spanish school; not because they more realize our spiritual conception of the Virgin—­quite the contrary:  for here the expression of life through sensation and emotion prevails over abstract mind, grandeur, and grace;—­but because the intensely human and sympathetic character given to the Madonna appeals most strongly to our human nature.  The appeal is to the faith through the feelings, rather than through the imagination.  Morales and Ribera excelled in the Mater Dolorosa; and who has surpassed Murilio in the tender exultation of maternity?[1] There is a freshness and a depth of feeling in the best Madonnas of the late Spanish school, which puts to shame the mannerism of the Italians, and the naturalism of the Flemish painters of the same period:  and this because the Spaniards were intense and enthusiastic believers, not mere thinkers, in art as in religion.

[Footnote 1:  See in the Handbook to the Private Galleries of Art some remarks on the tendencies of the Spanish School, p, 172.]