but Raphael solves the problem so simply that few would suspect the
difficulties. The final touch of beauty is added in the cherub heads
below, recalling the naïve charm of the similar figures in the
Umbrian picture we have considered.

[Illustration: BOUGUEREAU.--MADONNA OF THE ANGELS.]


After the time of Raphael, a pretty form of Madonna in glory was
occasionally painted, showing the Virgin with her babe sitting above
the crescent moon. The conception appears more than once in the
paintings of Albert Dürer, and later, artists of all schools adopted
it. Sassoferrato's picture in the Vatican Gallery is a popular
example. Tintoretto's, in Berlin, is not so well known. In the Dresden
Gallery is a work, by an unknown Spanish painter of the seventeenth
century, differing from the others in that the Virgin is standing, as
in the oft-repeated Spanish pictures of the Immaculate Conception.

It is of pictures like this that our poet Longfellow is speaking, when
he thus apostrophizes the Virgin:

"Thou peerless queen of air,
As sandals to thy feet the silver moon dost wear."

The enskied Madonna involves many technical difficulties of
composition, and demands a high order of artistic imagination. It
could hardly be called a frequent subject in the period of greatest
artistic daring, and no modern painter has shown any adequate
understanding of the subject, though there are not lacking those who
have made the attempt. Bodenhausen, Defregger, Bouguereau, have all