Rubens, also, painted a “Coronation” with all his own lavish magnificence of style for the Jesuits at Brussels.  After the time of Velasquez and Rubens, the “Immaculate Conception” superseded the “Coronation.”

* * * * *

To enter further into the endless variations of this charming and complex subject would lead us through all the schools of art from Giotto to Guido.  I have said enough to render it intelligible and interesting, and must content myself with one or two closing memoranda.

1.  The dress of the Virgin in a “Coronation” is generally splendid, too like the coronation robes of an earthly queen,—­it is a “raiment of needlework,”—­“a vesture of gold wrought about with divers colours”—­generally blue, crimson, and white, adorned with gold, gems, and even ermine.  In the “Coronation” by Filippo Lippi, at Spoleto, she wears a white robe embroidered with golden suns.  In a beautiful little “Coronation” in the Wallerstein collection (Kensington Pal.) she wears a white robe embroidered with suns and moons, the former red with golden rays, the latter blue with coloured rays,—­perhaps in allusion to the text so often applied in reference to her, “a woman clothed with the sun,” &c. (Rev. xii. 1, or Cant. vi. 10.)

2.  In the set of cartoons for the tapestries of the Sistine Chapel (Kugler’s Handbook, ii. 394), as originally prepared by Raphael, we have the foundation, the heaven-bestowed powers, the trials and sufferings of the early Church, exhibited in the calling of St. Peter, the conversion of St. Paul, the acts and miracles of the apostles, the martyrdom of St. Stephen; and the series closed with the Coronation of the Virgin, placed over the altar, as typical of the final triumph of the Church, the completion and fulfilment of all the promises made to man, set forth in the exaltation and union of the mortal with the immortal, when the human Mother and her divine Son are reunited and seated on the same throne.  Raphael placed on one side of the celestial group, St. John the Baptist, representing sanctification through the rite of baptism; and on the other, St. Jerome, the general symbol of sanctification through faith and repentance.  The cartoon of this grand symbolical composition, in which all the figures were colossal, is unhappily lost; the tapestry is missing from the Vatican collection; two old engravings, however, exist, from which some idea may be formed of the original group. (Passavant’s Rafael, ii. 258.)

3.  It will be interesting to remember that the earliest existing impression taken from an engraved metal plate, is a “Coronation of the Virgin.”  Maso Finiguerra, a skilful goldsmith and worker in niello, living at Florence in 1434, was employed to execute a pix (the small casket in which the consecrated wafer of the sacrament is deposited), and he decorated it with a representation of the Coronation in presence of saints and angels, in all about thirty figures,