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The mother holds her child high in her arms, bending her face over him. The babe is a beautiful little fellow, full of vivacity. He holds up a pear gleefully, to meet his mother's smile. The picture is painted with great delicacy of finish. The Mater Amabilis is the subject par excellence of modern Madonna art.
Of these we have Guay's Mater Amabilis, where the mother leans from her throne to support her child, playing on the step below with his cousin, St. John; and Mary L. Macomber's picture, where the enthroned Madonna folds her babe in her protecting arms, as if to shield him from impending evil.
In the one by Fra Bartolomeo, there is such a depth of maternal tenderness in the expression and attitude, we wonder where the good monk found his model. In his own heart? in his dreams? A Mater Amabilis by one of the Caracci or by Vandyck is generally more elegant and dignified than tender. The Madonna, for instance, by Annibal, has something of the majestic sentiment of an enthroned Madonna.
Here Raphael shone supreme: the simplicity, the tenderness, the halo of purity and virginal dignity, which he threw round the Mater Amabilis have, never been surpassed in his best pictures, never equalled.
The chief works of this period in the round are lions and gryphons supporting columns as at Ancona and Perugia, and many other Italian cities. In Rome there were several sculptors of the name of Peter. One of them, Peter Amabilis, worked about 1197; and another, Peter le Orfever, went to England and worked on the tomb of Edward the Confessor at Westminster.
Aphrodite with Ph. rosea, and proved it. Our garden hybrids are two: Ph. F.L. Ames, obtained from Ph. amabilis × Ph. intermedia, and Ph. Harriettæ from Ph. amabilis × Ph. violacea, named after the daughter of Hon. Erastus Corning, of Albany, U.S.A. Oncidiums yield only two natural hybrids at present, and those uncertain; others are suspected. We have no garden hybrids, I believe, as yet.
He had begun by imitating the mystic sweetness of Perugino's types, drawn by an intuitive delicacy of perception to this spiritual idealism, while yet too inexperienced to express any originality. Then, by an inevitable reaction, he threw himself into the creation of a purely naturalistic Madonna, and carried the Mater Amabilis to its utmost perfection.
With regard, to other painters before or since his time, the examples of the Mater Amabilis so abound la public and private galleries, and have been so multiplied in prints, that comparison is within the reach of every observer. I will content myself with noticing a few of the most remarkable for beauty or characteristic treatment.
Contrast this infernal silence of voice and fury of eye with the "risus amabilis," the festivity, the social kindness, the music, the wine, the "dulcis insania," of a Roman "coena."
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