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 After the time of Velasquez and Rubens, the "Immaculate Conception" superseded the "Coronation."
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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.)
2. In the set of cartoons for the tapestries of the Sistine Chapel (Kugler's Handbook, ii. 394), as originally prepared by Raphael, we have the foundation, the heaven-bestowed powers, the trials and sufferings of the early Church, exhibited in the calling of St. Peter, the conversion of St. Paul, the acts and miracles of the apostles, the martyrdom of St. Stephen; and the series closed with the Coronation of the Virgin, placed over the altar, as typical of the final triumph of the Church, the completion and fulfilment of all the promises made to man, set forth in the exaltation and union of the mortal with the immortal, when the human Mother and her divine Son are reunited and seated on the same throne. Raphael placed on one side of the celestial group, St. John the Baptist, representing sanctification through the rite of baptism; and on the other, St. Jerome, the general symbol of sanctification through faith and repentance. The cartoon of this grand symbolical composition, in which all the figures were colossal, is unhappily lost; the tapestry is missing from the Vatican collection; two old engravings, however, exist, from which some idea may be formed of the original group. (Passavant's Rafael, ii. 258.)
3. It will be interesting to remember that the earliest existing impression taken from an engraved metal plate, is a "Coronation of the Virgin." Maso Finiguerra, a skilful goldsmith and worker in niello, living at Florence in 1434, was employed to execute a pix (the small casket in which the consecrated wafer of the sacrament is deposited), and he decorated it with a representation of the Coronation in presence of saints and angels, in all about thirty figures, minutely and exquisitely engraved on the silver face. Whether Finiguerra was the first worker in niello to whom it occurred to fill up the lines cut in the silver with a black fluid, and then by laying on it a piece of damp paper, and forcibly rubbing it, take off the fac-simile of his design and try its effect before the final process,—this we can not ascertain; we only know that the impression of his "Coronation" is the earliest specimen known to exist, and gave rise to the practice of cutting designs on plates of copper (instead of silver), for the purpose of multiplying impressions of them. The pix finished by Maso in 1452 is now in the Florence Gallery in the "Salle des Bronzes." The invaluable print, first of its species, exists in the National Library at Paris. There is a very exact fac-simile of it in Otley's "History of Engraving," Christ and the Virgin are here seated together on a lofty architectural throne: her hands are crossed on her bosom, and she bends her meek veiled head to receive the crown, which her Son, who wears a triple tiara, places on her brow. The saints most conspicuous are St. John the Baptist, patron of Florence and of the church for which the pix was executed, and a female saint, I believe St. Reparata, both standing; kneeling in front are St. Cosmo and St. Damian, the patrons of the Medici family, then paramount at Florence. (Sacred and Legendary Art.)
4. In an illuminated "Office of the Virgin," I found a version of this subject which must be rare, and probably confined to miniatures. Christ is seated on a throne and the Virgin kneels before him; he bends forwards, and tenderly takes her clasped hands in both his own. An empty throne is at the right hand of Christ, over which hovers an angel bearing a crown. This is the moment which precedes the Coronation, as the group already described in the S. Maria-in-Trastevere exhibits the moment which follows the Coronation.
5. Finally, we must bear in mind that those effigies in which the Madonna is holding her Child, while angels place a crown upon her head, do not represent THE CORONATION properly so called, but merely the Virgin honoured as Mother of Christ and Queen of Heaven (Mater Christi, Regina Coeli); and that those representations of the Coronation which conclude a series of the life of the Virgin, and surmount her death-bed or her tomb, are historical and dramatic rather than devotional and typical. Of this historical treatment there are beautiful examples from Cimabue down to Raphael, which will be noticed hereafter in their proper place.