The bland imagery of Raffaello was exalted to a type of devotion by M. Angelo, and place and scenery are adjusted with allegoric or prophetic ornament: thus in the picture painted for Angelo Doni, where the enraptured mother receives the Infant from the hands of Joseph, the scene behind exhibits the new sacrament in varied groups of Baptists, immersing themselves or issuing from the fount. In another, representing the annunciation, we discover in the awful twilight of a recess, the figure of Moses breaking the tables he received on Sinai, an allusion to the abolition of the old law--an infringement of Jewish habits, for the figure is not an apparition, but a statue, readily forgiven to its allegoric beauty. Even in those subjects relating to Christ and his family, where the back-ground is destitute of allusive ornament, it appears the seat of meditation or virgin purity, and consecrates the sentiment or action of the figures, as in the salutation of St. Giovanni in Laterano, and in that where Maria contemplates her son spread in her lap, and seems to bend under the presentiment of the terrible moment which shall spread him at her feet, under the cross; but in that monumental image of Jesus expired on the cross, with the Madonna and John on each side, what is the scenery but the echo of the subject? The surrounding element sympathises with the woe of the sufferers in the two mourning Genii emerging from the air--a sublime conception, which Vasari fancied to have successfully imitated and perhaps improved, when in a repetition of the same subject, he travestied them to Phœbus and Diana extinguishing their orbs, as symbols of sun and moon eclipsed.[87]