[Footnote 4: Girolamo Marchesi da Cotignola, was a painter of the Francia school, whose works date from about 1508 to 1550. Those of his pictures which I have seen are of very unequal merit, and, with much feeling and expression in the heads, are often mannered and fantastic as compositions. This agrees with what Vasari says, that his excellence lay in portraiture, for which reason he was summoned, after the battle of Ravenna, to paint the portrait of Caston de Foix, as he lay dead. (See Vasari, _Vita di Bagnacavallo_; and in the English trans., vol. iii. 331.) The picture above described, which has a sort of historical interest, is perhaps the same mentioned in Murray's Handbook (Central Italy, p. 110.) as an _enthroned_ Madonna, dated 1513, and as being in 1843 in its original place over the altar in the Serviti at Pesaro; if so, it is there no longer.] DEVOTIONAL SUBJECTS. PART II. THE VIRGIN AND CHILD. 1. LA VERGINE MADRE DI DIO. 2. LA MA DRE AMABILE. THE VIRGIN AND CHILD ENTHRONED. _Lat._ Sancta Dei Genitrix. Virgo Deipara. _Ital._ La Santissima Vergine, Madre di Dio. _Fr._ La Sainte Vierge, Mère de Dieu. _Ger._ Die Heilige Mutter Gottes. The Virgin in her maternal character opens upon us so wide a field of illustration, that I scarce know where to begin or how to find my way, amid the crowd of associations which press upon me. A mother holding her child in her arms is no very complex subject; but like a very simple air constructed on a few expressive notes, which, when harmonized, is susceptible of a thousand modulations, and variations, and accompaniments, while the original _motif_ never loses its power to speak to the heart; so it is with the MADONNA AND CHILD;--a subject so consecrated by its antiquity, so hallowed by its profound significance, so endeared by its associations with the softest and deepest of our human sympathies, that the mind has never wearied of its repetition, nor the eye become satiated with its beauty. Those who refuse to give it the honour due to a religious representation, yet regard it with a tender half-unwilling homage; and when the glorified type of what is purest, loftiest, holiest in womanhood, stands before us, arrayed in all the majesty and beauty that accomplished Art, inspired by faith and love, could lend her, and bearing her divine Son, rather enthroned than sustained on her maternal bosom, "we look, and the heart is in heaven!" and it is difficult, very difficult, to refrain from an _Ora pro Nobis_. But before we attempt to classify these lovely and popular effigies, in all their infinite variety, from the enthroned grandeur of the Queen of Heaven, the SANCTA DEI GENITRIX, down to the peasant mother, swaddling or suckling her infant; or to interpret the innumerable shades of significance conveyed by the attendant accessories, we must endeavour to trace the representation itself to its origin.