e
been allied to the genius of Dante; but would Dante have acknowledged
the group of the Holy Family in the Florentine Gallery, to my feeling,
one of the most profane and offensive of the so-called _religious_
pictures, in conception and execution, which ever proceeded from
the mind or hand of a great painter? No doubt some of the sculptural
Virgins of Michael Angelo are magnificent and stately in attitude and
expression, but too austere and mannered as religious conceptions: nor
can we wonder if the predilection for the treatment of mere form led
his followers and imitators into every species of exaggeration and
affectation. In the middle of the sixteenth century, the same artist
who painted a Leda, or a Psyche, or a Venus one day, painted for the
same patron a Virgin of Mercy, or a "Mater Purissima" on the morrow.
_Here_, the votary told his beads, and recited his Aves, before
the blessed Mother of the Redeemer; _there_, she was invoked in
the purest Latin by titles which the classical mythology had far
otherwise consecrated. I know nothing more disgusting in art than the
long-limbed, studied, inflated Madonnas, looking grand with all their
might, of this period; luckily they have fallen into such disrepute
that we seldom see them. The "Madonna dell' lungo Collo" of Parmigiano
might be cited as a favourable example of this mistaken and wholly
artificial grace. (Florence, Pitti Pal.)

But in the midst of these paganized and degenerate influences, the
reform in the discipline of the Roman Catholic Church was preparing
a revolution in religious art. The Council of Trent had severely
denounced the impropriety of certain pictures admitted into churches:
at the same time, in the conflict of creed which now divided
Christendom, the agencies of art could not safely be neglected by that
Church which had used them with such signal success. Spiritual art
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 the 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 Virgi