It is the same with his female Saints. I have said that they are insignificant looking, and it is true; but how their features, too, are transfigured and effaced under the Divine
touch! They are drowned in adoration, and spring buoyant, though motionless, to meet the Heavenly Spouse. Only one remains but half escaped from her material shell: Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who, with upturned eyes of a brackish green, is neither as simple nor as innocent as her sisters; she still sees the form of man in Christ; she still is a woman; she is, if one may so, the sin of the work.
Still, all these spiritual degrees clothed in human figures are but the accessories of this picture. They are placed there, in the august assumption of gold and the chaste ascending scale of blue, to lead by a stair of pure joy to the sublime platform whereon we see the group of the Saviour and the Virgin.
And here, in the presence of the Mother and Son, the ecstatic painter overflows. One could imagine that the Lord had merged into him, and transported him beyond the life of sense, love and chastity are so perfectly personified in the group above all the means of expression at the command of man.
No words could express the reverent tenderness, the anxious affection, the filial and paternal love of the Christ, who smiles as He crowns His Mother; and She is yet more incomparable. Here the words of adulation are too weak; the invisible is made visible by the sacramental use of colour and line. A feeling of infinite deference, of intense but reserved adoration, flows and spreads about this Virgin, who, with Her arms crossed over Her bosom, bends Her little dove-like head, with downcast eyes and a rather long nose, under a veil. She resembles the Apostle St. John who is just behind her, and might be his daughter; and she is enigmatic; for that soft, delicate face, which in the hands of any other painter would be merely charming and trivial, breathes out the purest innocence. She is not even flesh and blood; the material that clothes Her swells softly with the breath of the fluid that shapes it. Mary is a living but a volatilized and glorious body.
We can understand certain ideas of the Abbess of Agréda who declares that She was exempt from the defilements inflicted on women; we see what St. Thomas meant who asserted that Her beauty purified instead of agitating the senses.
Her age is indeterminate; She is not a woman, yet She is
no longer a child. It is hard to say even that She is grown up, just marriageable, a girl-child, so entirely is She refined above all humanity, beyond the world, so exquisitely pure and for ever chaste.
She remains incomparable, unapproached in painting. By Her, other Madonnas are vulgar; they are in every case women; She alone is the white stem of the divine Ear of corn, the Wheat of the Eucharist. She alone is indeed the Immaculate, the Regina Virginum of the hymns; and She is so youthful, so guileless, that the Son seems to be crowning His Mother before She can have conceived Him.
It is in this that we see the glory of the gentle Friar's superhuman genius. He painted as others have spoken, inspired by Grace; he painted what he saw within him just as St. Angela of Foligno related what she heard within her. Both one and the other were mystics absorbed into God; thus this picture by Angelico is at the same time a picture by the Holy Ghost, bolted through a purified sieve of art.