[Footnote 1:  This picture, now in the possession of W. Fuller Maitland, Esq., was exhibited in the British Institution in the summer of 1852.  It is engraved in the Etruria Pittrice.]

* * * * *

THE ASSUMPTION.  The old painters distinguish between the Assumption of the soul and the Assumption of the body of the Virgin.  In the first instance, at the moment the soul is separated from the body, Christ receives it into his keeping, standing in person either beside her death-bed or above it.  But in the Assumption properly so called, we have the moment wherein the soul of the Virgin is reunited to her body, which, at the command of Christ, rises up from the tomb.  Of all the themes of sacred art there is not one more complete and beautiful than this, in what it represents, and in what it suggests.  Earth and its sorrows, death and the grave, are left below; and the pure spirit of the Mother again clothed in its unspotted tabernacle, surrounded by angelic harmonies, and sustained by wings of cherubim and seraphim, soars upwards to meet her Son, and to be reunited to him forever.

* * * * *

We must consider this fine subject under two aspects.

The first is purely ideal and devotional; it is simply the expression of a dogma of faith, “Assumpta est Maria Virgo in Coelum.”  The figure of the Virgin is seen within an almond-shaped aureole (the mandorla), not unfrequently crowned as well as veiled, her hands joined, her white robe falling round her feet (for in all the early pictures the dress of the Virgin is white, often spangled with stars), and thus she seems to cleave the air upwards, while adoring angels surround the glory of light within which she is enshrined.  Such are the figures which are placed in sculpture over the portals of the churches dedicated to her, as at Florence.[1] She is not always standing and upright, but seated on a throne, placed within an aureole of light, and borne by angels, as over the door of the Campo Santo at Pisa.  I am not sure that such figures are properly styled the Assumption; they rather exhibit in an ideal form the glorification of the Virgin, another version of the same idea expressed in the Incoronata.  She is here Varia Virgo Assumpta, or, in Italian, L’Assunta; she has taken upon her the glory of immortality, though not yet crowned.

[Footnote 1:  The “Santa Maria del Fiore,”—­the Duomo.]

But when the Assumption is presented to us as the final scene of her life, and expresses, as it were, a progressive action—­when she has left the empty tomb, and the wondering, weeping apostles on the earth below, and rises “like the morning” ("quasi aurora surgens”) from the night of the grave,—­then we have the Assumption of the Virgin in its dramatic and historical form, the final act and consummation of her visible and earthly life.  As the Church had never settled in what manner she was translated into heaven, only pronouncing it heresy to doubt the fact itself, the field was in great measure left open to the artists.  The tomb below, the figure of the Virgin floating in mid-air, and the opening heavens above, such is the general conception fixed by the traditions of art; but to give some idea of the manner in which this has been varied, I shall describe a few examples.