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The historical subjects comprise the events from the Life of the Virgin, when treated in a dramatic form; and all those groups which exhibit her in her merely domestic relations, occupied by cares for her divine Child, and surrounded by her parents and kindred, subjects which assume a pastoral and poetical rather than an historical form.

All these may be divided into Scriptural and Legendary representations.  The Scriptural scenes in which the Virgin Mary is a chief or important personage, are the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Purification, the Adoration of the Magi, the Flight into Egypt, the Marriage at Cana, the Procession to Calvary, the Crucifixion (as related by St. John), and the Descent of the Holy Ghost.  The Traditional and Legendary scenes are those taken from the apocryphal Scriptures, some of which have existed from the third century.  The Legend of Joachim and Anna, the parents of the Virgin, with the account of her early life, and her Marriage with Joseph, down to the Massacre of the Innocents, are taken from the Gospel of Mary and the Protevangelion.  The scenes of the Flight into Egypt, the Repose on the Journey, and the Sojourn of the Holy Family at Hieropolis or Matarea, are taken from the Gospel of Infancy.  The various scenes attending the Death and Assumption of the Virgin are derived from a Greek legendary poem, once attributed to St. John the Evangelist, but the work, as it is supposed, of a certain Greek, named Meliton, who lived in the ninth century, and who has merely dressed up in a more fanciful form ancient traditions of the Church.  Many of these historical scenes have been treated in a devotional style, expressing not the action, but the event, taken in the light of a religious mystery; a distinction which I have fully explained in the following pages, where I have given in detail the legends on which these scenes are founded, and the religious significance conveyed by the treatment.

A complete series of the History of the Virgin begins with the rejection of her father Joachim from the temple, and ends with the assumption and coronation, including most of the events in the History of our Lord (as for example, the series painted by Giotto, in the chapel of the Arena, at Padua); but there are many instances in which certain important evens relating to the Virgin only, as the principal person, are treated as a devotional series; and such are generally found in the chapels and oratories especially dedicated to her.  A beautiful instance is that of the Death of the Virgin, treated in a succession of scenes, as an event apart, and painted by Taddeo Barrolo, in the Chapel of the Palazzo Publico, at Siena.  This small chapel was dedicated to the Virgin soon after the terrible plague of 1848 had ceased, as it was believed, by her intercession; so that this municipal chapel was at once an expression of thanksgiving, and a memorial of death, of suffering, of bereavement, and of hope in the resurrection.  The frescoes cover one wall of the chapel, and are arranged in four scenes.