sade of the eleventh and twelfth centuries orientally affected the representations of the Virgin. Apocryphal Gospels and legends of Palestine were "worked up into ballads, stories, and dramas, and gradually incorporated with the teaching of the church." The contemplative thirteenth century was a new era in art; the singular combination of religious enthusiasm with chivalry, required representations more in sympathy with human sentiment. The stern unsympathising rigid formality of the Greek school was now to give way to expressions of benignity and softness. This feminine character of the Divine, if we may so term it, was enthusiastically received. "The title of Our Lady' came first into general use in the days of chivalry, for she was the lady of all hearts,' whose colours all were proud to wear. Never had her votaries so abounded. Hundreds upon hundreds had enrolled themselves in brotherhoods, vowed to her especial service (as the Levites, who were called in France les esclares de Maria), or devoted to acts of charity to be performed in her name (as the order of 'Our Lady of Mercy' for the deliverance of captives). Already the great religious communities, which at this time comprehended all the enthusiasm, learning, and influence of the church, had placed themselves solemnly and especially under her protection. The Cistertians wore white, in honour of her purity; the Servi wore black, in respect to her sorrows. The Franciscans had enrolled themselves as champions of the Immaculate Conception, and the Dominicans introduced the rosary. All these richly-endowed communities vied with each other in multiplying churches, chapels, and pictures in honour of their patroness, and expressive of her several attributes. The devout painter, kneeling before his easel, addressed himself to the task of portraying those heavenly lineaments which had visited him, perhaps in his dreams. Many of the professed monks and friars became themselves accomplished artists. "But of all the influences on Italian art in that wonderful fourteenth century, Dante was the greatest. He was the intimate friend of Giotto. Through the communion of mind not less than through his writings, he infused into religious art that mingled theology, poetry, and mysticism, which ruled in the Giottesque school during the fourteenth century, and went hand in hand with the develop ment of the power and practice of imitation. Now the theology of Dante was the theology of his age. His ideas respecting the Virgin were precisely those to which the writings of St Bernard, St had already lent all the persuasive power Bonaventura, and St Thomas Aquinas, of eloquence, and the church all the weight of her authority. Dante rendered these doctrines into poetry, and Giotto and his followers rendered them into form. In the Paradise' of Dante, the glorification of Mary, as the 'Mystic Rose " (Rosa mystica) and Queen of Heaven-with the attendant angels, circle within circle, floating round her in adoration, and singing the Regina Coeli, and saints and patriarchs stretching forth their hands towards her-is all a splendid but indefinite vision of dazzling light crossed by shadowy forms. The painters of the fourteenth century, in translating these glories into a definite shape, had to deal with imperfect knowledge and imperfect means: they failed in the power to realise either their own or the poet's conception; and yet, thanks to the divine poet that early conception of some of the most beautiful of the Madonna the Sposalizio-has never, as a religious subjects for instance, the Coronation and and poetical conception, been surpassed by later artists, in spite of all the appliances of colour, and mastery of light and shade, and marvellous efficiency of hand since attained." It is undoubtedly true that Dante is the poetical founder of art. His own character, coloured by the troubles he encountered, not unmixed with the tenderness which is ever the gift of genius, and especially of contemplative genius, impressed itself doubtless both on the theology of his day and the expression of it in art. There was the severity and the piety, the sternness and the gentleness, and these were favourable to this admission of the feminine element, so exalted and so benign, as tempering the more awful and fear-begetting characteristics of religion. Whatever may be said of the worship of "Our Lady" (and much may be said of this deplorable fact) superseding the worship of "Our Lord"of the sin proclaimed against the idolators of old, by Jeremiah, of worshipping "The Queen of Heaven," the revived title appropriated to the Virgin Mary— or of the heathen title of "Mother of the Gods"-of the renovation, under a new personage, of denounced supersti tions, preserved in some shape or other through orientalism and heathenism-a thinking mind will not doubt that this feminine element, in cases where real essential Christianity had a looser hold of the people, tended greatly to ameliorate the manners of wild and boisterous periods in man's history, and to bring the civilisation of gentleness over barbarism. It tended greatly to raise woman; and it was better, by a romantic worship, that she should be lifted above an equality with man, than be degraded infinitely below him. It tended to protect the human race from the crime of infanticide, by venerating maternity. We may even be allowed to say, that, in merciful benignity to mankind, Providence had allowed the intermixture of an ameliorating good in the very superstitions which the wilfulness of man had set up in defiance of His pure revealed religion. There needs much, not only in barbarous but in civilised nations, to keep down the brutalities of our nature; and there is such a thing as a cultivated brutality. Civilisation enlarges both ways, our virtues and our vices, for it supplies both with appliances and means. The ferocity of badly-cultivated man is a thousand times worse than the ferocity of the savage. We need but refer to the reports of our police courts. The feminine element, then, by the permission of Providence, had its good tendencies, notwithstanding its idolatry. Nor was this good confined to a few spots: it spread far and wide; nor is it yet lost in places where we might least expect to find it. Mr Layard found it as a singular trait of Arab character. We learn that "these lawless races have a species of code called Dakheel, which is religiously observed among them. If a man eat another's salt and bread, perform certain acts, or repeat a prescribed formula of words, he is henceforth entitled to his protection, though he may be the son of his bitterest enemy himself. woman can protect any number of persons, or even of tents." The first portion of this dakheel was somewhat violated by our yeoman freebooter, the popular Robin Hood (and popular, we hope, for the one virtue), for he regularly gave his hospitality first A and robbed after, that his guest might To dyne I have no lust, In londe where that he were, That he loved of all other moste. For doute of dedely synne, That ony woman was ynne." It is out of our purpose to pause and inquire how and whence this feminine element grew into its various superstitions-this superseding of the masculine, even in the heathen mythology-for practically the female deities had the greater number of worshippers. The Church of Rome, in its corruptions, did but amalgamate itself with old and still popular creeds. If the learned Athens was dedicated to and placed under the protection of Athene-if Ephesus had its Dianathe Romish cities as unhesitatingly placed themselves under the protection of the Virgin. By degrees the religion of the apostles becomes another religion-the worship of " our Lady". Lord" the worship of " and even the beautiful and the pure in this religion deteriorated, as we see in the annals of art. our 66 During the thirteenth century there was a purity in the spirit of the worship which at once inspired and regulated the forms in which it was manifested. The Annunciations and Nativities were still distinguished by a chaste simplicity. The features of the Madonna herself, even where they were not what we call beautiful, had yet a touch of that divine and gians and poets had associated with the contemplative grace which the theoloqueenly, maternal, and bridal character of Mary. "Thus the impulses given in the early part of the fourteenth century continued in progressive development through the fifteenth; the spiritual for some time in advance of the material influences; the moral idea emanating, as it were, from the soul, and the influences of external nature flowing into it; the comprehensive power of fancy using more and more the apprehensive power of imitation, and both working together till their 'blendéd might' achieved its full fruition in the works of Raphael." In the fifteenth century, and during the Hussite wars, when indignities were offered to the sacred images, the Church felt compelled to restore the damaged veneration for the Virgin. Hence votive pictures;-and the same zeal moved both the votaries and the artists. Towards the end of this century, pictures of the Holy Family first appear. Such subjects naturally induced a temptation to indulge rather in domesticity than in sanctity. And as at the same period, by the revival of learning, a classical taste began to exercise its influences over art, grace and even a certain dignity were added to representations; but the real purpose the sanctity-was lowered, till at length mere beauty took the place of feeling, and the aim at varying groups terminated in irreverence. The melancholy story of perhaps the halfinsane Savonarola is well known. Shocked at the visible impieties images of the Virgin Mother in gorgeous and meretricious apparel, taken from infamous models-he spared none, and made an imposing bonfire of them in the Piazza at Florence. He was persecuted to the death by the Borgia family, and perished at the stake. Yet his influence in a great degree prevailed; and art recovered its dignity, severity, and chastity in Botticelli, Lorenzo de Credi, and Fra Bartolomeo. This influence extended to Raphael himself, who visited Florence after the death of Savonarola, whose portrait he inserted in his fresco of the "Theologia." The sixteenth century, rich in art, saw the declension of piety. The wealth of the Church was spent in luxury and magnificent ornament, and, in consequence, artists had an enlarged employment, but sacrificed feeling to taste. Art enlarged her compass, but lost her intensity. There was everything for the eye, and, comparatively speaking, little for the art. Spiritual art," says Mrs Jameson, was indeed no more. It was dead: it could never be revived without a return to those modes of thought and belief which had at first inspired it. Instead of religious art, appeared what I must call theological art. Among the events of this age, which had great influence on the worship and representations of the Madonna, I must place the battle of Lepanto, in 1571, in which the combined fleets of Christendom, led by Don Juan of Austria, achieved a memorable victory over the Turks. This victory was attributed by Pope Pius V. to the especial interposition of the Blessed Virgin. A new invocation was now added to her Litany, under the title of Auxilium Christianorum; a new festival, that of the Rosary, was now added to those already held in her honour; and all the artistic genius which existed in Italy, and all the piety of orthodox Christendom, were now laid under contribution to encase in marble, sculpture, to enrich with countless offerings, that miraculous house, which the angels had borne over land and sea, and set down at Loretto, and that miraculous, shrined within it." bejewelled, and brocaded Madonna en The Caracci school, aiming to embrace the practical excellences of every other school-themselves devout worshippers-for a while maintained a certain expression of sanctity in the representations of the Virgin; but this strict taste and feeling, the expression of human sympathy blended with the sanctity, rendered it too natural for adoration. The popular veneration returned to the old, the formal Byzantine type: superstition loves not familiarity, and what is natural is familiar. Mrs Jameson notices this unsatisfying character of art in its more perfectly artistic condition. "This arose from the fact, always to be borne in mind, that the most ancient artistic figure of the Madonna was a purely theological symbol: apparently the moral type was too nearly allied to the human and the real to satisfy faith. It is the ugly, dark-coloured, ancient Greek Madonnas, such as this, which had all along the credit of being miraculous; and 'to this day,' says Kugler, 'the Neapolitan lemonade-seller will allow no other than a formal Greek Madonna, head, to be set up in his booth.”” with olive-green complexion and veiled This does not excite our surprise; it must be a cultivated mind that can thoroughly feel through art. We have no doubt that this indifference, this lack of perception, might be shown in most of our villages-in the common coloured Scriptural subjects which pedlars circulate through our villages as ornaments for humble cottages. "The Madonna di San Sisto" itself, great and beautiful as it is, might, in the minds of our poor admirers, bring some similitude, from its naturalness, to familiar faces, and on that account be little valued. The prints we allude to, it must be confessed, bear little similitude to anything human. We have yet to learn that the attempts of societies to set before the people Scriptural subjects in better specimens of art, have been at all successful. The spiritual element was lost in the works of the most eminent artists of the seventeenth century. Of this period Mrs Jameson gives preference to the Spanish school. She admires the Spanish painters— "Not because they more realise our spiritual conception of the Virgin-quite the contrary, for here the expression of life through sensation and emotion prevails over abstract mind, grandeur, and grace; but because the intensely human and sympathetic character given to the Madonna appeals most strongly to our human nature. The appeal is to the faith through the feelings, rather than through the imagination. Morales and Ribera excelled in the Mater Dolorosa; and who has surpassed Murillo in the tender exultation of maternity? There is a freshness and a depth of feeling in the best Madonnas of the late Spanish school, which puts to shame the mannerism of the Italians, and the naturalism of the Flemish painters of the same period, and this because the Spaniards were intense and enthusiastic believers, not mere thinkers, in art as in religion." We cannot entirely agree with Mrs Jameson in her admiration of the Spanish school. We know that we run counter to the present public opinion. Murillo, in particular, has ever appeared to us a vulgar painter. The divine was quite beyond his reach. He may be occasionally, in his Madonnas, tender, but nothing more-never elevated; and we are unorthodox enough in taste to dislike his uncertain execution, and his colouring. Accident has made his works a fashion; they have, of late, reached VOL. LXXIV.-NO. CCCCLIII. enormous sums; but knowing something of the influences which move collectors, we are not thereby raised to the required enthusiasm. We cannot understand how the most believing Romanist can give a fervour to devotion by looking at a Madonna by Murillo. Poor Partridge thought the actor who ranted and spouted the character of the king a finer actor than Garrick, simply because the latter was natural. We believe it will be ever so with devotional works of art, if representations of saints and Madonnas too much resemble ourselves and neighbours; the wonder which strangeness and unlikeness, skilfully managed, is wont to produce, will not give its imaginative aid. And here we may be allowed to notice an error which our modern glass-painters fall intothe attempt to imitate individual nature in a material not only ill-calculated for the attempt, but whose genius, if the term may be allowed to the material, is altogether of imaginative power, and of a mystery in light and shadow and colour quite foreign to close naturalness. Our Protestant authoress, if not inspired to a faith, is inspired by sentiment more than poetic to give utterance to her reverential love of the "Madonna di San Sisto," in words of no common eloquence : "Of course we form to ourselves some notion of what we require; and these requirements will be as diverse as our natures and our habits of thought. For myself, I have seen my own ideal once, and only once, attained: there, where Raphael-inspired, if ever painter was inspired-projected on the space before him that wonderful creation which we style the Madonna di San Sisto; for there she stands-the transfigured woman, at once completely human and completely divine-an abstraction of power, purity, and love, poised on the empurpled air, and requiring no other support; looking out, with her melancholy, loving mouth, her slightly-dilated sibylline eyes, quite through the universe, to the end and consummation of all things; sad as if she beheld afar off the visionary sword that was to reach her heart through Him, now ready exalted through the homage of the resting as enthroned on that heart, yet alredeemed generations who were to salute her Blessed. Six times have I visited the city made glorious by the possession of C this treasure, and as often, when again at a distance, with recollections disturbed by feeble copies and prints, I have begun to think, Is it so indeed? Is she indeed so divine or does not rather the imagination encircle her with a halo of religion and poetry, and lend a grace which is not really there?' And as often, when I have returned, I have stood before it, and confessed that there is more in that form and face than I had ever yet conceived. I cannot here talk the language of critics, and speak of this picture merely as a pic ture, for to me it was a revelation. In the same gallery is the lovely Madonna of the Meyer family, inexpressibly touching and perfect in its way, but conveying only one of the attributes of Mary-her benign pity; while the Madonna di San Sisto is an abstract of all." We have ever been of the opinion that genius is rapid in execution; its inspirations are of a moment, and must be realised while the vigour of life is in them. In such cases the artist cannot explain his process, and in an after day wonders perhaps how his own work was done. Labour can dot down his hours, as the regular marks upon a time-piece-but the thought has escaped, and the idea of presented labour is painful. There is every reason to believe that this wondrous work of Raphael was produced with great rapidity-the visible execution is thought by connoisseurs to show as much, for it is said there are patches on the drapery where the varnish and paint with it have been left as through haste. It is said also to have been carried in procession when scarcely dry. How We fear we are reaching a period when art rapidly declined. strange have been the passages from the rigid, the stern, the severethrough loveliness still expressive of the divine, combined with excellences of artistic skill-through ideas of purity, then through representations magnificent, yet how much lower in sentiment, and by degrees to the merely ornamental and even meretricious, till the glorious art-the worthy associate of devotion-sunk into the powerless, and, we fear to say, the base; or in its better, rather amusing phase, into the semi-poetical fanciful. When we look upon the portraits of our great-great-grandmothers, acting shepherdesses with crooks and lambs, and in a pastoral background, we have perhaps never dreamed that they represent, in some degree, an original which was a religious type. Yet such was the case the naturalists adopted known portraits for their Madonnas, and too often, as poor Savonarola knew to his cost, not unfrequently of bad repute; when such practice extended, it followed, of course, that as the religious purport became weaker every day, portrait would supersede the original intention, and yet retain the type. Religious art, having submitted to classical influences, was, as it were, smothered under a profusion of flowers of poetry; but it was the poetry of the naturalists. There was no longer Paradise, but Arcadia. The sublime dogma of the deified Virgin Mother was represented in pastorals that might illustrate Theocritus. "As in early Christian art our Saviour was frequently portrayed as the Good Shepherd, so among the later Spanish fancies we find the Mother represented as the Divine Shepherdess. In a picture painted by Alonzo Miguel de Tobar, about the beginning of the eighteenth century, we find the Virgin Mary seated under a tree, in guise of an Arcadian pastorella, wearing a broad-brimmed hat encircled by a glory, a crook in her hand, while she feeds her flock with mystical roses. The beauty of expression in the head of the Virgin is such as almost to redeem the quaintness of the religious worthy of Murillo.” conceit; the whole picture is described as This worthiness we can easily credit, for such a subject was quite according to the taste and genius of Murillo; but we think the charge of "quaintness of a religious conceit" is very gently letting down the profane attempt, to reduce, as much as possible, the prescribed religious to a low poetical sentiment. This picture was painted for a Franciscan convent at Madrid, and it is said that the idea became popular. It may have been "multiplied and varied in French and German prints of the last century," as an apology for a defunct devotion, but certainly not popular, in the legitimate sense of the word. Quite of another character are the representations of the Virgin which abound in country places, near villages, and in romantic spots in |