S.M. “del Pillar,” Our Lady of the Pillar, is protectress of Saragossa.  According to the Legend, she descended from heaven standing on an alabaster pillar, and thus appeared to St. James (Santiago) when he was preaching the gospel in Spain.  The miraculous pillar is preserved in the cathedral of Saragossa, and the legend appears frequently in Spanish art.  Also in a very interior picture by Nicolo Poussin, now in the Louvre.

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Some celebrated pictures are individually distinguished by titles derived from some particular object in the composition, as Raphael’s Madonna de Impannata, so called from the window in the back ground being partly shaded with a piece of linen (in the Pitti Pal., Florence); Correggio’s Vierge au Panier, so called from the work-basket which stands beside her (in our Nat Gal.); Murillo’s Virgen de la Servilleta, the Virgin of the Napkin, in allusion to the dinner napkin on which it was painted.[1] Others are denominated from certain localities, as the Madonna di Foligno (now in the Vatican); others from the names of families to whom they have belonged, as La Madonna della Famiglia Staffa, at Perugia.

[Footnote 1:  There is a beautiful engraving in Stirling’s “Annals of the Artists of Spain.”]

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Those visions and miracles with which the Virgin Mary favoured many of the saints, as St. Luke (who was her secretary and painter), St. Catherine, St. Francis, St. Herman, and others, have already been related in the former volumes, and need not be repeated here.

With regard to the churches dedicated to the Virgin, I shall not attempt to enumerate even the most remarkable, as almost every town in Christian Europe contains one or more bearing her name.  The most ancient of which tradition speaks, was a chapel beyond the Tiber, at Rome, which is said to have been founded in 217, on the site where S. Maria in Trastevere now stands.  But there are one or two which carry their pretensions much higher; for the cathedral at Toledo and the cathedral at Chartres both claim the honour of having been dedicated to the Virgin while she was yet alive.[1]

[Footnote 1:  In England we have 2,120 churches dedicated in her honour; and one of the largest and most important of the London parishes bears her name—­“St. Marie-la-bonne”]

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Brief and inadequate as are these introductory notices, they will, I hope, facilitate the comprehension of the critical details into which it has been necessary to enter in the following pages, and lend some new interest to the subjects described.  I have heard the artistic treatment of the Madonna styled a monotonous theme; and to those who see only the perpetual iteration of the same groups on the walls of churches and galleries, varied as they may suppose only by the fancy of the painter, it may seem so.  But beyond the visible forms, there lies much that is suggestive to a thinking mind—­to the lover of Art a higher significance, a deeper beauty, a more various interest, than could at first be imagined.