BLUE, or the sapphire, expressed heaven, the firmament, truth, constancy, fidelity. Christ and the Virgin wear the red tunic and the blue mantle, as signifying heavenly love and heavenly truth.[12] The same colours were given to St. John the evangelist, with this difference,—that he wore the blue tunic and the red mantle; in later pictures the colours are sometimes red and green. YELLOW, or gold, was the symbol of the sun; of the goodness of God; initiation, or marriage; faith, or fruitfulness. St. Joseph, the husband of the Virgin, wears yellow. In pictures of the apostles, St. Peter wears a yellow mantle over a blue tunic. In a bad sense, yellow signifies inconstancy, jealousy, deceit; in this sense it is given to the traitor Judas, who is generally habited in dirty yellow. GREEN, the emerald, is the colour of spring; of hope, particularly hope in immortality; and of victory, as the colour of the palm and the laurel. VIOLET, the amethyst, signified love and truth: or, passion and suffering. Hence it is the colour often worn by the martyrs. In some instances our Saviour, after his resurrection, is habited in a violet instead of a blue mantle. The Virgin also wears violet after the crucifixion. Mary Magdalene, who as patron saint wears the red robe, as penitent wears violet and blue, the colours of sorrow and of constancy. In the devotional representation of her by Timoteo della Vite,[13] she wears red and green, the colours of love and hope. GREY, the colour of ashes, signified mourning, humility, and innocence accused; hence adopted as the dress of the Franciscans (the Grey Friars); but it has since been changed for a dark rusty brown. BLACK expressed the earth, darkness, mourning, wickedness, negation, death; and was appropriate to the Prince of Darkness. In some old illuminated MSS., Jesus, in the Temptation, wears a black robe. White and black together signified purity of life, and mourning or humiliation; hence adopted by the Dominicans and the Carmelites. The mystical application of attributes and colours was more particularly attended to in that class of subjects I have distinguished as _devotional_. In the sacred historical pictures we find that the attributes are usually omitted as superfluous, and characteristic propriety of colour often sacrificed to the general effect. These introductory observations and explanations will be found illustrated in a variety of forms as we proceed; and readers will be led to make comparisons and discover analogies and exceptions for themselves. I must stop here;—yet one word more.