speak to the heart; so it is with the MADONNA AND CHILD;--a
subject so consecrated by its antiquity, so hallowed by its profound
significance, so endeared by its associations with the softest and
deepest of our human sympathies, that the mind has never wearied of
its repetition, nor the eye become satiated with its beauty. Those who
refuse to give it the honour due to a religious representation, yet
regard it with a tender half-unwilling homage; and when the glorified
type of what is purest, loftiest, holiest in womanhood, stands before
us, arrayed in all the majesty and beauty that accomplished Art,
inspired by faith and love, could lend her, and bearing her divine
Son, rather enthroned than sustained on her maternal bosom, "we look,
and the heart is in heaven!" and it is difficult, very difficult, to
refrain from an _Ora pro Nobis_. But before we attempt to classify
these lovely and popular effigies, in all their infinite variety,
from the enthroned grandeur of the Queen of Heaven, the SANCTA
DEI GENITRIX, down to the peasant mother, swaddling or suckling
her infant; or to interpret the innumerable shades of significance
conveyed by the attendant accessories, we must endeavour to trace the
representation itself to its origin.

This is difficult. There exists no proof, I believe, that the effigies
of the Virgin with the infant Christ in her arms, which existed before
the end of the fifth century, were placed before Christian worshippers
as objects of veneration. They appear to have been merely groups
representing a particular incident of the New Testament, namely,
the adoration of the Magi; for I find no other in which the mother
is seated with the infant Christ, and this is an historical subject
of which we shall have to speak hereafter. From the beginning of
the fourth century, that is, from the time of Constantine and the
condemnation of Arius, the popular reverence for the Virgin, the
Mother of Christ, had been gaining ground; and at the same time the
introduction of images and pictures into the places of worship and
into the houses of Christians, as ornaments on glass vessels and even
embroidered on garments and curtains, became more and more diffused,
(v. Neander's Church History.)

The earliest effigies of the Virgin and Child may be traced
to Alexandria, and to Egyptian influences; and it is as easily
conceivable that the time-consecrated Egyptian myth of Isis and
Horus may have suggested the original type,