of the late Spanish and Flemish painters, are formed out of earth’s most coarse and commonplace materials, the aerial throne of floating fantastic clouds suggests a disagreeable discord, a fear lest the occupants of heaven should fall on the heads of their worshippers below.  Not so the Virgins of the old Italians; for they look so divinely ethereal that they seem uplifted by their own spirituality:  not even the air-borne clouds are needed to sustain them.  They have no touch of earth or earth’s material beyond the human form; their proper place is the seventh heaven; and there they repose, a presence and a power—­a personification of infinite mercy sublimated by innocence and purity; and thence they look down on their worshippers and attendants, while these gaze upwards “with looks commercing with the skies.”

[Footnote 1:  Or the “Vescica Pisces,” by Lord Lindsay and others.]

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And now of these angelic and sainted accessories, however placed, we must speak at length; for much of the sentiment and majesty of the Madonna effigies depend on the proper treatment of the attendant figures, and on the meaning they convey to the observer.

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The Virgin is entitled, by authority of the Church, queen of angels, of prophets, of apostles, of martyrs, of virgins, and of confessors; and from among these her attendants are selected.

ANGELS were first admitted, waiting Immediately round her chair of state.  A signal instance is the group of the enthroned Madonna, attended by the four archangels, as we find it in the very ancient mosaic in Sant-Apollinare-Novo, at Ravenna.  As the belief in the superior power and sanctity of the Blessed Virgin grew and spread, the angels no longer attended her as princes of the heavenly host, guardians, or councillors; they became, in the early pictures, adoring angels, sustaining her throne on each side, or holding up the embroidered curtain which forms the background.  In the Madonna by Cimabue, which, if it be not the earliest after the revival of art, was one of the first in which the Byzantine manner was softened and Italianized, we have six grand, solemn-looking angels, three on each side of the throne, arranged perpendicularly one above another.  The Virgin herself is of colossal proportions, far exceeding them in size, and looking out of her frame, “large as a goddess of the antique world.”  In the other Madonna in the gallery of the academy, we have the same arrangement of the angels.  Giotto diversified this arrangement.  He placed the angels kneeling at the foot of the throne, making music, and waiting on their divine Mistress as her celestial choristers,—­a service the more fitting because she was not only queen of angels, but patroness of music and minstrelsy, in which character she has St. Cecilia as her deputy and delegate.  This accompaniment of the choral angels was one of the earliest of the accessories, and continued down