With regard to costume, the colours in which the enthroned Virgin-Mother was arrayed scarcely ever varied from the established rule: her tunic was to be red, her mantle blue; red, the colour of love, and religious aspiration; blue, the colour of constancy and heavenly purity. In the pictures of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and down to the early part of the fifteenth, these colours are of a soft and delicate tint,--rose and pale azure; but afterwards, when powerful effects of colour became a study, we have the intense crimson, and the dark blue verging on purple. Sometimes the blue mantle is brought over her head, sometimes she wears a white veil, in other instances the queenly crown. Sometimes (but very rarely when she is throned as the _Regina Coeli_) she has no covering or ornament on her head; and her fair hair parted on her brow, flows down on either side in long luxuriant tresses. In the Venetian and German pictures, she is often most gorgeously arrayed; her crown studded with jewels, her robe covered with embroidery, or bordered with gold and pearls. The ornamental parts of her dress and throne were sometimes, to increase the magnificence of the effect, raised in relief and gilt. To the early German painters, we might too often apply the sarcasm of Apelles, who said of his rival, that, "not being able to make Venus _beautiful_ he had made her _fine_;" but some of the Venetian Madonnas are lovely as well as splendid. Gold was often used, and in great profusion, in some of the Lombard pictures even of a late date; for instance, by Carlo Crivelli: before the middle of the sixteenth century, this was considered barbaric. The best Italian painters gave the Virgin ample, well disposed drapery, but dispensed with ornament. The star embroidered on her shoulder, so often retained when all other ornament was banished, expresses her title "Stella Maris." I have seen some old pictures, in which she wears a ring on the third finger. This expresses her dignity as the _Sposa_ as well as the Mother.