ther's lap. It is interesting to trace this pretty
_motif_ through other works of art. No phase of motherhood is more
touching than the watchful care which guards the child while he
sleeps; nor is infancy ever more appealing than in peaceful and
innocent slumber. Mrs. Browning understood this well, when she wrote
her beautiful poem interpreting the thoughts of "the Virgin Mary to
the Child Jesus." Hopes and fears, joy and pity, are alternately
stirred in the heart of the watcher, as she bends over the tiny face,
scanning every change that flits across it. Each verse suggests a
subject for a picture.

We should naturally expect that Raphael would not overlook so
beautiful a theme as the mother watching her sleeping child. Nor are
we disappointed. The Madonna of the Diadem, in the Louvre, belongs to
this class of pictures. Like the pastoral Madonnas of the Florentine
period, it includes the figure of the little St. John, to whom, in
this instance, the proud mother is showing her babe, daintily lifting
the veil which covers his face.

The seventeenth century produced many pictures of this class; among
them, a beautiful work by Guido Reni, in Rome, deserves mention,
being executed with greater care than was usual with him. Sassoferrato
and Carlo Dolce frequently painted the subject. Their Madonnas often
seem affected, not to say sentimental, after the simpler and nobler
types of the earlier period. But nowhere is their peculiar sweetness
more appropriate than beside a sleeping babe. The Corsini picture by
Carlo Dolce is an exquisite nursery scene. Its popularity depends
more, perhaps, upon the babe than the mother. Like Lady Isobel's child
in another poem of motherhood by Mrs. Browning, he sleeps--

"Fast, warm, as if its mother's smile,
Laden with love's dewy weight,
And red as rose of Harpocrate,
Dropt upon its eyelids, pressed
Lashes to cheek in a sealed rest."

In Northern Madonna art, the Mater Amabilis is the preeminent subject.
This fact is due partly to the German theological tendency to
subordinate the mother to her divine Son, but more especially to the
characteristic domesticity of Teutonic peoples. From Van Eyck and
Schongauer, through Duerer and Holbein, down to Rembrandt and Rubens,
we trace this strongly marked predilection in every style of
composition, regardless of proprieties. Van Eyck does not hesitate to
occupy his richly dressed enthroned Madonna at Frankfort with giving
her