In the simple enthroned Madonna, variations of attitude and sentiment were gradually introduced. The Virgin, instead of supporting her Son with both hands, embraces him with one hand, and with the other points to him; or raises her right hand to bless the worshipper. Then the Child caresses his mother,--a charming and natural idea, but a deviation from the solemnity of the purely religious significance; better imagined, however, to convey the relation between the mother and child, than the Virgin suckling her infant, to which I have already alluded in its early religious, or rather controversial meaning. It is not often that the enthroned Virgin is thus occupied. Mr. Rogers had in his collection an exquisite example where the Virgin, seated in state on a magnificent throne under a Gothic canopy and crowned as queen of heaven, offers her breast to the divine Infant Then the Mother adores her Child. This is properly the _Madre Pia_ afterwards so beautifully varied. He lies extended on her knee, and she looks down upon him with hands folded in prayer: or she places her hand under his foot, an attitude which originally implied her acknowledgment of his sovereignty and superiority, but was continued as a natural _motif_ when the figurative and religious meaning was no longer considered. Sometimes the Child looks up in his mother's face with his finger on his lip, expressing the _Verbum sum_, "I am the Word." Sometimes the Child, bending forwards from his mother's knee, looks down benignly on the worshippers, who are _supposed_ to be kneeling at the foot of the altar. Sometimes, but very rarely he sleeps; never in the earliest examples; for to exhibit the young Redeemer asleep, where he is an object of worship, was then a species of solecism. When the enthroned Virgin is represented holding a book, or reading, while the infant Christ, perhaps, lays his hand upon it--a variation in the first simple treatment not earlier than the end of the fourteenth century, and very significant--she is then the _Virgo Sapientissima_, the most Wise Virgin; or the Mother of Wisdom, _Mater Sapientiæ_; and the book she holds is the Book of Wisdom.[1] This is the proper interpretation, where the Virgin is seated on her throne. In a most beautiful picture by Granacci (Berlin Gal.), she is thus enthroned, and reading intently; while John the Baptist and St. Michael stand on each side. [Footnote 1: L'Abbé Crosnier, "Iconographie Chrétienne;" but the book as an attribute had another meaning, for which, see the Introduction.] * * * * *