Category: The Madonna

Considering the importance given to the Annunciation in its mystical sense, it is strange that we do not find it among the very ancient symbolical subjects adopted in the first ages of Christian Art. It does not appear on the sarcophagi, nor in the early Greek carvings and diptychs, nor in the early mosaics — […]

Had the Annunciation to Mary been merely mentioned as an awful and incomprehensible vision, it would have been better to have adhered to the mystical style of treatment, or left it alone altogether ; but the Scripture history, by giving the whole narration as a simple fact, a real event, left it free for representation […]

Ital. La Visitazione di Maria. Fr. La Visitation de la Vierge. Ger. Die Heimsuchung Maria. (July 2.) After the annunciation of the angel, the Scripture goes on to relate how ” Mary arose and went up into the hill country with haste, to the house of her cousin Elizabeth, and saluted her.” This meeting of […]

In this volume, as in the former ones, I have adhered to the distinction between the devotional and the historical representations. I class as devotional all those which express a dogma merely ; all the enthroned Madonnas, alone or surrounded by significant accessories or attendant saints ; all the Mystical Coronations and Immaculate Conceptions ; […]

Ital. La Madonna col Bambino. La Madonna col celeste suo Figlio. Fr. La Vierge et l’Enfant Jésus. Ger. Maria mit dem Kind. There is yet another treatment of the Madonna and Child, in which the Virgin no longer retains the lofty goddess-like exaltation given to her in the old time. She is brought nearer to […]

A beautiful version of the Mater Amabilis is the MADRE PIA, where the Virgin in her divine Infant acknowledges and adores the Godhead. We must be careful to distinguish this subject from the Nativity, for it is common, in the scene of the birth of the Saviour at Bethlehem, to represent the Virgin adoring her […]

The famous Correggio in the Uffizi, Florence, is also a Madre Pia. It is very tender, sweet, and maternal. The Child lying on part of his mother’s blue mantle, so arranged that while she kneels and bends over him she cannot change her attitude without disturbing him, is a concetto admired by critics in sentiment […]

That which the genius of the greatest of painters only once expressed, we must not look to find in his predecessors, who saw only partial glimpses of the union of the divine and human in the feminine form; still less in his degenerate successors, who never beheld it at all. The difficulty of fully expressing […]

THE LEGEND OF JOACHIM AND ANNA Ital. La Leggenda di Sant Anna Madre della Gloriosa Vergine Maria, e di San Gioacchino. OF the sources whence are derived the popular legends of the life of the Virgin Mary, which, mixed up with the few notices in Scripture, formed one continuous narrative, authorized by the priesthood, and […]

Ital. La Nascità della B. Vergine. Fr. La Naissance de la S. Vierge. Ger. Die Geburt Maria. This is, of course, a very important subject. It is sometimes treated apart as a separate scene ; and a series of pictures dedicated to the honor of the Virgin, and comprising only a few of the most […]