In the Venetian and German pictures, she is often most gorgeously arrayed; her crown studded with jewels, her robe covered with embroidery, or bordered with gold and pearls.  The ornamental parts of her dress and throne were sometimes, to increase the magnificence of the effect, raised in relief and gilt.  To the early German painters, we might too often apply the sarcasm of Apelles, who said of his rival, that, “not being able to make Venus beautiful he had made her fine;” but some of the Venetian Madonnas are lovely as well as splendid.  Gold was often used, and in great profusion, in some of the Lombard pictures even of a late date; for instance, by Carlo Crivelli:  before the middle of the sixteenth century, this was considered barbaric.  The best Italian painters gave the Virgin ample, well disposed drapery, but dispensed with ornament.  The star embroidered on her shoulder, so often retained when all other ornament was banished, expresses her title “Stella Maris.”  I have seen some old pictures, in which she wears a ring on the third finger.  This expresses her dignity as the Sposa as well as the Mother.

With regard to the divine Infant, he is, in the early pictures, invariably draped, and it is not till the beginning of the fifteenth century that we find him first partially and then wholly undraped.  In the old representations, he wears a long tunic with full sleeves, fastened with a girdle.  It is sometimes of gold stuff embroidered, sometimes white, crimson, or blue.  This almost regal robe was afterwards exchanged for a little semi-transparent shirt without sleeves.  In pictures of the throned Madonna painted expressly for nunneries, the Child is, I believe, always clothed, or the Mother partly infolds him in her own drapery.  In the Umbrian pictures of the fifteenth century, the Infant often wears a coral necklace, then and now worn by children in that district, as a charm against the evil eye.  In the Venetian pictures he has sometimes a coronal of pearls.  In the carved and painted images set up in churches, he wears, like his mother, a rich crown over a curled wig, and is hung round with jewels; but such images must be considered as out of the pale of legitimate art.

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Of the various objects placed in the hand of the Child as emblems I have already spoken, and of their sacred significance as such,—­the globe, the book, the bird, the flower, &c.  In the works of the ignorant secular artists of later times, these symbols of power, or divinity, or wisdom, became mere playthings; and when they had become familiar, and required by custom, and the old sacred associations utterly forgotten, we find them most profanely applied and misused.  To give one example:—­the bird was originally placed in the hand of Christ as the emblem of the soul, or of the spiritual as opposed to the earthly nature; in a picture by Baroccio, he holds it up before a cat, to be frightened and tormented.[1] But to proceed.