the taste for eternal love. Since the day when the Virgin appeared
transfigured to the seer of the Apocalypse, she had never revealed
herself in such effulgence. Before this picture, we lose every memory of
earth and see nothing but the Queen of Heaven and of the angels, the
creature elect and blessed above all creatures. In thus painting the
Virgin, Raphael has almost reached the confines of divinity.

But everything in this picture is food for admiration, even the
atmosphere that envelops it and those innumerable and endless legions of
cherubin that gravitate around the Virgin and the Word of God. The
aureole that encircles the divine group shows nothing at first but
dazzling and golden light; then, as it recedes from the centre, this
light gradually pales and insensibly merges from the most intense gold
into the purest blue, and is filled with those heads, chaste, innocent,
and fervent, that spring beneath the brush of Raphael like the flowers
at the breath of Spring. These aërial creatures throng to contemplate
the Virgin, and their forms recall those radiances in the shape of
crowns that fill the Dantesque Paradise, making the name of Mary resound
with their praises. Our eyes and mind lose themselves in the immense
multitude of these happy spirits. "Number if you can the sands of the
sea or the stars in the sky, those that are visible and invisible, and
still believe that you have not attained the number of the angels. It
costs God nothing to multiply the most excellent things, and it is the
most beautiful of which he is most prodigal." We cannot keep our eyes
away from that sky; we gaze at it and love to dazzle and weary our eyes
with it.

On either side of the Virgin, kneel St. Sixtus and St. Barbara. Placed
also amid the clouds, but below the Madonna, they are near the sovereign
mediatrix, as mediators also between the world and the Sovereign Judge.