e these with
the groups round the enthroned Virgin in the later altar-pieces,
where the saints elbow each other in attitudes, where mortal men sit
with unseemly familiarity close to personages recognized as divine.
As I have remarked further on, it is one of the most interesting
speculations connected with the study of art, to trace this decline
from reverence to irreverence, from the most rigid formula to the most
fantastic caprice. The gradual disappearance of the personages of the
Old Testament, the increasing importance given to the family of the
Blessed Virgin, the multiplication of legendary subjects, and all the
variety of adventitious, unmeaning, or merely ornamental accessories,
strike us just in proportion as a learned theology replaced the
unreflecting, undoubting piety of an earlier age.

* * * * *

The historical subjects comprise the events from the Life of the
Virgin, when treated in a dramatic form; and all those groups which
exhibit her in her merely domestic relations, occupied by cares for
her divine Child, and surrounded by her parents and kindred, subjects
which assume a pastoral and poetical rather than an historical form.

All these may be divided into Scriptural and Legendary
representations. The Scriptural scenes in which the Virgin Mary is a
chief or important personage, are the Annunciation, the Visitation,
the Nativity, the Purification, the Adoration of the Magi, the Flight
into Egypt, the Marriage at Cana, the Procession to Calvary, the
Crucifixion (as related by St. John), and the Descent of the Holy
Ghost. The Traditional and Legendary scenes are those taken from
the apocryphal Scriptures, some of which have existed from the third
century. The Legend of Joachim and Anna, the parents of the Virgin,
with the account of her early life, and her Marriage with Joseph,
down to the Massacre of the Innocents, are taken from the Gospel of
Mary and the Protevangelion. The scenes of the Flight into Egypt,
the Repose on the Journey, and the Sojourn of the Holy Family at
Hieropolis or Matarea, are taken from the Gospel of Infancy. The
various scenes attending the Death and Assumption of the Virgin are
derived from a Greek legendary poem, once attributed to St. John the
Evangelist, but the work, as it is supposed, of a certain Greek, named
Meliton, who lived in the ninth century, and who has merely dressed
up in a more fanciful form ancient traditions of the Church. Man