In Italy, the decline of Art in the seventeenth century is nowhere more apparent, nor more offensive, than in this subject.  A finished example of the most execrable taste is the mosaic in St. Peter’s, after Pietro Bianchi.  There exists, somewhere, a picture of the Conception, by Le Brun, in which the Virgin has no other drapery than a thin, transparent gauze, and has the air of a Venus Meretrix.  In some old French prints, the Virgin is surrounded by a number of angels, defending her with shield and buckler against demons who are taking aim at her with fiery arrows.  Such, and even worse, vagaries and perversities, are to be found in the innumerable pictures of this favourite subject, which inundated the churches between 1640 and 1720.  Of these I shall say no more.  The pictures of Guido and Murillo, and the carved figures of Alonzo Cano, Montanez, and Hernandez, may be regarded as authorized effigies of “Our Lady of the most pure Conception;” in other words, as embodying, in the most attractive, decorous, and intelligible form, an abstract theological dogma, which is in itself one of the most curious, and, in its results, one of the most important of the religions phenomena connected with the artistic representations of the Virgin.[1]

[Footnote 1:  We often find on pictures and prints of the Immaculate Conception, certain scriptural texts which the theologians of the Roman Church have applied to the Blessed Virgin; for instance, from Ps. xliv. Omnis gloria ejus filiae regis ab intus—­“The king’s daughter is all glorious within;” or from the Canticles, iv. 7, Tota pulchra es amica mea, et macula non est in te,—­“Thou art all fair, my love, there is no spot in thee.”  I have also seen the texts, Ps. xxii. 10, and Prov. viii. 22, 28, xxxi. 29, thus applied, as well as other passages from the very poetical office of the Virgin In Festo Immaculatae Conceptionis.]

We must be careful to discriminate between the Conception, so styled by ecclesiastical authority, and that singular and mystical representation which is sometimes called the “Predestination of Mary,” and sometimes the “Litanies of the Virgin.”  Collectors and writers on art must bear in mind, that the former, as a subject, dates only from the beginning of the seventeenth century, the latter from the beginning of the sixteenth.  Although, as representations, so very similar, yet the intention and meaning are different.  In the Conception it is the sinless Virgin in her personal character, who is held up to reverence, as the purest, wisest, holiest, of created beings.  The earlier theme involves a yet more recondite signification.  It is, undoubtedly, to be regarded as an attempt on the part of the artist to express, in a visible form, the idea or promise of the redemption of the human race, as existing in the Sovereign Mind before the beginning of things.  They do not personify this idea under the image of Christ,—­for they conceived that, as the