in a gallery or room with other pictures, for admiration, or criticism, or comparison.  I remember well suddenly discovering such a Madonna, in a retired chapel in S. Francesco della Vigna at Venice,—­a picture I had never heard of, by a painter then quite unknown to me, Fra Antonio da Negroponte, a Franciscan friar who lived in the fifteenth century.  The calm dignity of the attitude, the sweetness, the adoring love in the face of the queenly mother as with folded hands she looked down on the divine Infant reclining on her knee, so struck upon my heart, that I remained for minutes quite motionless.  In this picture, nothing can exceed the gorgeous splendor of the Virgin’s throne and apparel:  she wears a jewelled crown; the Child a coronal of pearls; while the background is composed entirely of the mystical roses twined in a sort of treillage.

I remember, too, a picture by Carlo Crivelli, in which the Virgin is seated on a throne, adorned, in the artist’s usual style, with rich festoons of fruit and flowers.  She is most sumptuously crowned and apparelled; and the beautiful Child on her knee, grasping her hand as if to support himself, with the most naive and graceful action bends forward and looks dawn benignly on the worshippers supposed to be kneeling below.

When human personages were admitted within the same compartment, the throne was generally raised by several steps, or placed on a lofty pedestal, and till the middle of the fifteenth century it was always in the centre of the composition fronting the spectator.  It was a Venetian innovation to place the throne at one side of the picture, and show the Virgin in profile or in the act of turning round.  This more scenic disposition became afterwards, in the passion for variety and effect, too palpably artificial, and at length forced and theatrical.

The Italians distinguish between the Madonna in Trono and the Madonna in Gloria.  When human beings, however sainted and exalted were admitted within the margin of the picture, the divine dignity of the Virgin as Madre di Dio, was often expressed by elevating her wholly above the earth, and placing her “in regions mild of calm and serene air,” with the crescent or the rainbow under her feet.  This is styled a “Madonna in Gloria.”  It is, in fact, a return to the antique conception of the enthroned Redeemer, seated on a rainbow, sustained by the “curled clouds,” and encircled by a glory of cherubim.  The aureole of light, within which the glorified Madonna and her Child when in a standing position are often placed, is of an oblong form, called from its shape the mandorla, “the almond;"[1] but in general she is seated above in a sort of ethereal exaltation, while the attendant saints stand on the earth below.  This beautiful arrangement, though often very sublimely treated, has not the simple austere dignity of the throne of state, and when the Virgin and Child, as in the works