under a Gothic canopy and crowned as queen of heaven, offers her breast to the divine Infant Then the Mother adores her Child.  This is properly the Madre Pia afterwards so beautifully varied.  He lies extended on her knee, and she looks down upon him with hands folded in prayer:  or she places her hand under his foot, an attitude which originally implied her acknowledgment of his sovereignty and superiority, but was continued as a natural motif when the figurative and religious meaning was no longer considered.  Sometimes the Child looks up in his mother’s face with his finger on his lip, expressing the Verbum sum, “I am the Word.”  Sometimes the Child, bending forwards from his mother’s knee, looks down benignly on the worshippers, who are supposed to be kneeling at the foot of the altar.  Sometimes, but very rarely he sleeps; never in the earliest examples; for to exhibit the young Redeemer asleep, where he is an object of worship, was then a species of solecism.

When the enthroned Virgin is represented holding a book, or reading, while the infant Christ, perhaps, lays his hand upon it—­a variation in the first simple treatment not earlier than the end of the fourteenth century, and very significant—­she is then the Virgo Sapientissima, the most Wise Virgin; or the Mother of Wisdom, Mater Sapientiae; and the book she holds is the Book of Wisdom.[1] This is the proper interpretation, where the Virgin is seated on her throne.  In a most beautiful picture by Granacci (Berlin Gal.), she is thus enthroned, and reading intently; while John the Baptist and St. Michael stand on each side.

[Footnote 1:  L’Abbe Crosnier, “Iconographie Chretienne;” but the book as an attribute had another meaning, for which, see the Introduction.]

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With regard to costume, the colours in which the enthroned Virgin-Mother was arrayed scarcely ever varied from the established rule:  her tunic was to be red, her mantle blue; red, the colour of love, and religious aspiration; blue, the colour of constancy and heavenly purity.  In the pictures of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and down to the early part of the fifteenth, these colours are of a soft and delicate tint,—­rose and pale azure; but afterwards, when powerful effects of colour became a study, we have the intense crimson, and the dark blue verging on purple.  Sometimes the blue mantle is brought over her head, sometimes she wears a white veil, in other instances the queenly crown.  Sometimes (but very rarely when she is throned as the Regina Coeli) she has no covering or ornament on her head; and her fair hair parted on her brow, flows down on either side in long luxuriant tresses.