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Updated: May 4, 2025
So writes that Doctor Amabilis of woodcraft, W. C. Prime, in his book, Among the Northern Hills, and straightway launches forth into eulogy on the white-birch. And truly it is an admirable, lovable, and comfortable tree, beautiful to look upon and full of various uses.
She is not sustained in mid-air by angels; she dwells lowly on earth; but the angels leave their celestial home to wait upon her. Such effigies, when conceived in a strictly ideal and devotional sense, I shall designate as the MATER AMABILIS.
By Bodenhausen we have the extremely popular Mater Amabilis in Gloria, where a girlish young mother, her long hair streaming about her, stands in upper air, poised above the great ball of the earth, holding her sweet babe to her heart. Pictures like these constantly reiterate the story of a mother's love an old, old story, which begins again with every new birth.
A beautiful version of the Mater Amabilis is the MADRE PIA, where the Virgin in her divine Infant acknowledges and adores the Godhead. We must be careful to distinguish this subject from the Nativity, for it is common, in the scene of the birth of the Saviour at Bethlehem, to represent the Virgin adoring her new-born Child.
He had been fellow of Pembroke, Cambridge, and after the Restoration he built a chapel for his old college, in which he was buried upon his death in 1667. He spent a great deal of money in repairing the palace at Ely, which was much dilapidated. He died in 1675. He is described on his monument as being "facundia amabilis, acumine terribilis, eruditione auctissimus."
Like that disappointing book in Patmos; or, like the comings on of melancholy, described by Burton, doth music make her first insinuating approaches: "Most pleasant it is to such as are melancholy given, to walk alone in some solitary grove, betwixt wood and water, by some brook side, and to meditate upon some delightsome and pleasant subject, which shall affect him most, amabilis insania, and mentis gratissimus error.
"Fast, warm, as if its mother's smile, Laden with love's dewy weight, And red as rose of Harpocrate, Dropt upon its eyelids, pressed Lashes to cheek in a sealèd rest." In Northern Madonna art, the Mater Amabilis is the preëminent subject.
Never for a moment did she lose sight of these things as she "pondered them in her heart." Her highest joy was to present him to the world for the fulfilment of his calling. As a subject of art, this phase of the Madonna's character requires a mode of treatment quite unlike that of the Mater Amabilis or the Madre Pia.
Her troubles have changed her; only eighteen years old, she has the air of twenty-four; her once rounded face is thin, and her childlike sweetness has become tender gravity. When she entered on this journey she resembled the girl faces of Greuze; now she is sometimes a mater amabilis, and sometimes a mater dolorosa; for her grief has been to her as a maternity.
In a group by Botticelli, angels sustain the Infant, while the mother, seated, with folded hands, adores him: and in a favourite composition by Guido he sleeps. And, lastly, we have the Mater Amabilis in a more complex, and picturesque, though still devotional, form. The Virgin, seen at full length, reclines on a verdant bank, or is seated under a tree. She is not alone with her Child.
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