The numerous--often most beautiful--heads and half-length figures which represent the Virgin alone, looking up with a devout or tender expression, or with the head declined, and the hands joined in prayer, or crossed over the bosom with virginal humility and modesty, belong to this class of representations. In the ancient heads, most of which are imitations of the old Greek effigies ascribed to St. Luke, there is often great simplicity and beauty. When she wears the crown over her veil, or bears a sceptre in her hand, she figures as the queen of heaven (_Regina Coeli_). When such effigies are attended by adoring angels, she is the queen of angels (_Regina Angelorum_). When she is weeping or holding the crown of thorns, she is Our Lady of Sorrow, the _Mater Dolorosa_. When she is merely veiled, with folded hands, and in her features all the beauty, maiden purity, and sweetness which the artist could render, she is simply the Blessed Virgin, the Madonna, the _Santa Maria Vergine_. Such heads are very rare in the earlier schools of art, which seldom represented the Virgin without her Child, but became favourite studies of the later painters, and were multiplied and varied to infinitude from the beginning of the seventeenth century. From these every trace of the mystical and solemn conception of antiquity gradually disappeared; till, for the majestic ideal of womanhood, we have merely inane prettiness, or rustic, or even meretricious grace, the borrowed charms of some earthly model. L'INCORONATA. The Coronation of the Virgin. _Lat._ Coronatio Beatæ Mariæ Virginis. _Ital._ Maria coronata dal divin suo Figlio. _Fr._ Le Couronnement de la Sainte Vierge. _Ger._ Die Krönung Mariä. The usual type of the Church triumphant is the CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN properly so called, Christ in the act of crowning his Mother; one of the most popular, significant, and beautiful subjects in the whole range of mediæval art. When in a series of subjects from the life of the Virgin, so often met with in religious prints and in the Roman Catholic churches, we find her death and her assumption followed by her coronation; when the bier or sarcophagus and the twelve apostles appear below, while heaven opens upon us above; then the representation assumes a kind of dramatic character: it is the last and most glorious event of her history. The Mother, dying on earth, is received into glory by her Son who had gone before her, and who thus celebrates the consummation of his victory and hers.