One of the latest examples I can point to is also one of the most simple and grand in conception. (Madrid Gal.) It is that by Velasquez, the finest perhaps of the very few devotional subjects painted by him. We have here the three figures only, as large as life, filling the region of glory, without angels, witnesses, or accessories of any kind, except the small cherubim beneath; and the symmetrical treatment gives to the whole a sort of sublime effect. But the heads have the air of portraits: Christ has a dark, earnest, altogether Spanish physiognomy; the Virgin has dark hair; and the _Padre Eterno_, with a long beard, has a bald head,--a gross fault in taste and propriety; because, though the loose beard and flowing white hair may serve to typify the "Ancient of Days," baldness expresses not merely age, but the infirmity of age. Rubens, also, painted a "Coronation" with all his own lavish magnificence of style for the Jesuits at Brussels. After the time of Velasquez and Rubens, the "Immaculate Conception" superseded the "Coronation." * * * * * To enter further into the endless variations of this charming and complex subject would lead us through all the schools of art from Giotto to Guido. I have said enough to render it intelligible and interesting, and must content myself with one or two closing _memoranda_. 1. The dress of the Virgin in a "Coronation" is generally splendid, too like the coronation robes of an earthly queen,--it is a "raiment of needlework,"--"a vesture of gold wrought about with divers colours"--generally blue, crimson, and white, adorned with gold, gems, and even ermine. In the "Coronation" by Filippo Lippi, at Spoleto, she wears a white robe embroidered with golden suns. In a beautiful little "Coronation" in the Wallerstein collection (Kensington Pal.) she wears a white robe embroidered with suns and moons, the former red with golden rays, the latter blue with coloured rays,--perhaps in allusion to the text so often applied in reference to her, "a woman clothed with the _sun_," &c. (Rev. xii. 1, or Cant. vi. 10.)