"Madonna" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stables of Vienna and St. Petersburg. Among the personal relics seen in the museum is the coat of mail worn by Cortez during his battles from Vera Cruz to the capital, also the silk banner which was borne in all his fights. This small flag bears a remarkably lovely face of the Madonna, which must have been the work of a master hand. The shield of Montezuma is also exhibited, with many arms, jewels, and picture writings, these last relating to historic matters, both Toltec and Aztec. The great sacrificial stone of the aborigines, placed on the ground floor of the museum, is, ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... occupied him for a moment. "Every man should be engaged, I think, to at least one woman. It is the homage we owe to womankind, and a duty to our souls. His fiancee is indeed the Madonna of a true-hearted man; the thought of her is a shrine at the wayside of one's meditations, and her presence a temple wherein we cleanse our souls. She is mysterious, worshipful, and inaccessible, something perhaps of the woman, possibly even propitious and helpful, ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... "The Madonna of Mount Carmel, for all the world!" said that worthy cavalier, saluting her chapeau-bas, and ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... unfortunate in his undertakings. The king believed the physician's statement, that the said termination to this accouchement was caused by the too chaste life the queen had led, and believing himself responsible for it, he founded the Church of the Madonna, which is one of the finest in the town of Palermo. The Sire de Monsoreau, who was a witness of the king's remorse, told him that when a king got his wife from Spain, he ought to know that this queen would require more attention than any other, because the Spanish ladies were so lively that ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... name?—Mildred Wallace. Tell me what she is like, I hear you say. Of graceful height, willowy and exquisitely molded, not over twenty-four, with the face of a Madonna; wondrous eyes of darkest blue, hair indescribable in its maze of tawny color—in a word, the perfection of womanhood. In half an hour I was her abject slave, and proud in my serfdom. When I returned to the hotel ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... have already alluded. Such was the town in which the British Hercules was set to card wool. The Burtons occupied ten rooms at the top of a block of buildings situated near the railway station. The corridor was adorned with a picture of our Saviour, and statuettes of St. Joseph and the Madonna with votive lights burning before them. This, in Burton's facetious phrase, was "Mrs. Burton's joss house;" and occasionally, when they had differences, he threatened "to throw her joss house out of the window." Burton in a rage, indeed, was the signal for the dispersal of ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... if you can, with a floating violet robe and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward, and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands,—those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house,—those ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... gulp if one as much as takes one's eyes off it. A miniature Santa Claus, a pasteboard monkey, and several other articles of bric-a-brac of the kind the tenement affords, complete the outfit. The background is a picture of St. Donato, their village saint, with the Madonna "whom they worship most." But the incongruity harbors no suggestion of disrespect. The children view the strange show with genuine reverence, bowing and crossing themselves before it. There are five, the oldest a girl of seventeen, ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... array of rings was there, small and delicate, huge, bizarre; great signet rings and poison rings, love tokens, charms and amulets, rings which had been worn by wives, by mistresses, by favorite slaves and by young girls in convents; rings with the Madonna and rings with many other saints graven on large heavy stones; rings French and Russian, Polish, Italian, Spanish, Syrian. Some were many centuries old. In nine shallow metal trays they filled the safe in Roger's room. ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... has the true German atmosphere. Adele Aus der Ohe, whose personality is well remembered in America, on account of her various pianistic tours, now wears her brown hair softly drawn down over her ears, in Madonna fashion, a mode which becomes ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... country with his name and with the works that he made, to which witness is borne in Florence by the pictures that he wrought, such as the front of the altar in S. Cecilia, and in S. Croce a panel with a Madonna, which was and still is placed against a pilaster on the right within the choir. After this, he made a S. Francis on a small panel on a gold ground, and portrayed him from nature (which was something new in those times) as best he knew, and round ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... And she was not of an iron virtue. But she wouldn't look at a little thing like me. Can't think why. Come, now, don't look so demure. We aren't all plaister saints like you. I'm not, in spite of my Madonna face. Wasn't that the truth? The Marchesa story is for the gallery. But you and I are behind the scenes. Mum's the word. But wasn't that why Carstairs was hanging about the house after everyone else had gone just for the same reason that I was—to ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... sitting with a friend. There were a few beautiful things in the room, and a few well-bound books; but they had a dusty, uncared for look about them. It teased the young priest to see a medicine bottle and a half-washed medicine glass standing on a bracket with an exquisite statuette of the Madonna. The present occupier of these lodgings had had very true artistic perceptions before ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... "notes" in colour, or black and white, chosen from one or other of those moderns who can in a sensitive line or two convey the beauty or the harshness of nature. Over the mantelpiece there was a pencil drawing by Domenichino, of the Madonna and Child; a certain ecstatic languor in the Madonna, and, in all the lines of form and drapery, an exquisite flow ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Surgeon looked from the beaming profile to the tense, drawn outline of mouth and chin belonging to the nurse in charge of Ward C, and he found himself wondering if art had ever pictured a crucified Madonna, and, if so, why it had not taken Margaret MacLean as a model. That moment the President called ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... can stand and rattle his tin box on the summit, and if he could, there is no passenger to heed or hear him; the Sabine model belle is not there to offer herself to the first artist who wants a madonna or a saint, nor amateur bandits, nor faun-like children playing on the steps; even the patient goats, long since milked, lie panting under the convent wall; not a dog is visible on the large immondezaro in front of it; and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... circular window. Ten Aprils had half ripened them. The boy had dark hair, and a touch of sunlight in his darker eyes. The girl was light and delicate—with a face of spiritual beauty, dream-like, heavenly, like the pictures of the Madonna which genius has hung on the chapel walls of ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... this; the elder child teaching the younger was the beginning of the school. We are making over all these inherited traditions and inherited tendencies and socializing them.... The ideal woman is no longer a far-away Madonna with her feet on the clouds; she is as divine but she is human. What means the humanizing of religion and the passing of harsh, old creeds but that a greater, more human, more womanly influence is felt in all the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... an excellent copy of one of Landseer's stags, Felix and I were well pleased; but Peter averred that he would rather have the Madonna that looked like his Aunt Jane, and the Story Girl agreed that if his sermon was the best she would ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... own thoughts, their own feelings, in those expressed by the author, as if on purpose for them to read. Undoubtedly they give great relief to solitary young persons, who must have some ideal reflection of themselves, and know not where to look since Protestantism has taken away the crucifix and the Madonna. The recipient of these letters sometimes wonders, after reading through one of them, how it is that his young correspondent has managed to fill so much space with her simple message ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... in the day, sweeping each out with his elbow when the children had seen enough of it, and sketching another in its stead,—faces and dogs' heads, and men in sledges, and old women in their furs, and pine trees, and cocks and hens, and all sorts of animals, and now and then—very reverently—a Madonna and Child. It was all very rough, for there was no one to teach him anything. But it was all lifelike, and kept the whole troop of children shrieking with laughter, or watching breathless, with wide ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... became the father of a daughter—Girolama de Borja—by a spinster, whose name again does not transpire. Like Pedro Luis she too was openly acknowledged by Cardinal Roderigo. It was widely believed that this child's mother was Madonna Giovanna de' Catanei, who soon became quite openly the cardinal's mistress, and was maintained by him in such state as might have become a maitresse en titre. But, as we shall see later, the fact of that maternity of Girolama is doubtful ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... manifests its quality; the books the ordinary man reads turn enormously on love- making, his theatre has scarcely ever a play that has not primarily a strong love interest, his art rises to its most consummate triumphs in Venus and Madonna, and his music is saturated in love suggestions. Not only is this so with the right and proper life, but the greater portion of those acts we call vice draw their stimulus and pleasure from the impulses that subserve this sustaining fact of our being, and ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... carved with the heads of hairy Franks and Saxons, according to the tradition of the older Norman architecture at the Church of St. Paul's, which we shall next visit, near the river. Near the western end, on the northern exterior, is a dilapidated Madonna, and an old bricked-up doorway. But it is the inside that will chiefly repay you for your trouble. Through the triple portal of the west entrance, with plain round arches set on slightly carved Norman capitals, ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... night, the good monk arose in the first purple of the dawn, and instinctively betook him to a review of his drawings for the shrine, as a refuge from troubled thought. He took his sketch of the Madonna and Child into the morning twilight and began meditating thereon, while the clouds that lined the horizon were glowing rosy purple and violet with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... and her hands clasped at the back of her head, while her elbows rested upon a small table in front of her. Her superb brown hair fell in a thick wave on either side over her white round arms, and the graceful curve of her beautiful neck might have furnished a sculptor with a study for a mourning Madonna. The doctor had just broken his sad tidings to her, and she was still in the first paroxysm of her grief—a grief too acute, as was evident even to the unsentimental mind of the merchant, to allow of any attempt at consolation. A greyhound appeared to ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... cathedral, the front of which is decorated with holy figures, each standing by itself in a separate niche. In the open church tower are great chimes which flood the city with melody, and in the corner fronting upon the intersecting street is a tiny shrine with an image of the Madonna smiling downward. It is only a little recess in the wall, with barely room for a few kneeling figures, but at night its bright radiance illumines the darkness round about and lends the spot a ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... linen shirt perforated by a Mexican drawn-work pattern beneath which glowed a bright red silk undergarment. Women's gowns on the flowing and Grecian order were not uncommon. These were usually coupled with the incongruity of parted hair brought low and madonna-wise over the ears. As the two entered, a very powerful blond man was just finishing the declamation of a French poem. He was addressing it directly at two women seated on ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... turbot. After that, it would take a chartered accountant at least 122-214 days to check his figures. One can gather from this some idea of the enormous industry of men of science. For myself, I could more easily paint the Sistine Madonna or compose a Tenth Symphony than be content to loose myself into this universe of numbers. Pythagoras, I believe, discovered a sort of philosophy in numbers, but even he did not ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... in the shelter of his arm, and she searched his face with eyes like a Madonna on ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... then a tear rolled down the leprous cheek. Ay! indeed! my poor little Madonna, my little child, whose beauty was such a dream of Paradise, was changed. The large, lustrous eyes were untouched; but the fair cheek was one hideous, leprous sore. The black, glossy hair was now a few dirty wisps. The child, whose face and figure every one turned around to look ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... an upright figure, from side to side (as very notably in the dress of one of the musicians who are playing to the dancing of Herodias' daughter, in one of his frescoes at Santa Croce); and this predilection was mingled with the truly mediaeval love of quartering.[12] The figure of the Madonna in the small tempera pictures in the Academy at Florence is always completely divided into two narrow ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... the Juniper is regarded with much veneration, because it is thought to have saved the life of the Madonna, and of the infant Jesus, whom she hid under a Juniper bush when flying into Egypt ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... the statue of Poggio which raises a problem familiar to students of fifteenth-century art, especially frequent in paintings of the Madonna, namely, the cryptic lettering to be found on the borders of garments. In the case of Poggio, the hem of the tunic just below the throat is incised with deep and clear cyphers which cannot be read as a name or initials. Many cases could be quoted ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... is an old convent, and it is a little startling to see the church facade, with a statue of the Madonna over the central porch. At the steps a number of women stood waiting with pots and jars and handkerchiefs full of food for their relatives within; and when the doctor appeared several rushed up to ask about a father or a son that lay sick. We went in and there was a melodramatic ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... and entered with a volley of giggles and a tempest of light stockinged legs, which spent themselves at once when she observed me. In a wink she became the demure maiden. She had long, straight hair to the waist, and the pure candour of her face gave her the air of an Italian madonna. She was of The Casino Juveniles. We had met before, so she sidled up to me and inquired how I was and what's doing. Within half a minute I was besieged by tossing hair and excited hands, and an avalanche of talk about shop, what they were doing, where they were this week, where next, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... have known me such a short time. Suppose you should see someone else—" and she glanced at Pilar's pretty, heart-shaped face, and the velvet eyes raised in contemplation of a carved Madonna. ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... quickly given in charge of one of the nurses, a gentle, madonna-faced woman. She was quickly put to bed, and everything done for her that skill and experience could suggest. Hubert Varrick begged permission to sit by her couch and watch the progress ...
— Kidnapped at the Altar - or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain • Laura Jean Libbey
... branches, were much in evidence, refurbished, and coming in solemn state to testify their approval of an alliance so honorable to their house, with many wise worldly maxims and pious thanks to the Madonna. ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... closed his eyes again, before I could answer, and as he did most assuredly bore me, I sat silent, and looked up at the Madonna and Child by Raphael. In the meantime, the valet left the room, and returned shortly with a little ivory book. Mr. Fairlie, after first relieving himself by a gentle sigh, let the book drop open with one hand, and held up ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... announces the result of his eavesdropping to the assembled gods, and stimulates them thereby to desperate resolutions. Elsewhere, it is true, in his writings, Thetis, Ceres, Aeolus, and other pagan deities pay willing homage to the glory of the Madonna. ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... so indistinct that it seems like a dream; and yet, how often at this hour does a vision come to my mind of a dark-eyed, soft-voiced woman, holding kneeling child against her bosom, to whom she taught a whispered prayer to the madonna! And the child seems me—and the lady, my mother; but it flits away, and then I think it is a dream of ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... respect of every one in jail. Singular as the taste may seem, he had his corner in the cell decorated with little framed prints. Among them we noticed one of the crucifixion, and another of the Madonna. After reading the chapters, they retired to their hard beds. About nine o'clock the next morning, Daley came to the door with a piece of neck meat, so tainted and bloody that its smell and looks more than ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... a Madonna-like smile on her lips, and she put out the toe of her slender foot and appeared to study it for a moment—" I was intended ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Northern harbour of Trapani, to which I suppose the writer of the "Odyssey" to be here referring, still bears the name Malconsiglio—"the rock of evil counsel." There is a legend that it was a ship of Turkish pirates who were intending to attack Trapani, but the "Madonna di Trapani" crushed them under this rock just as they were coming into port. My friend Cavaliere Giannitrapani of Trapani told me that his father used to tell him when he was a boy that if he would drop exactly three drops of oil on to the water ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... first, the Blessed Virgin is rising from a throne with her baby in her arms. You realise in looking at this Child that He is the Mighty God and Everlasting Father; and the expression on the face of the Virgin—more than of any other Madonna that I have ever seen—convinces you that she was not only the Mother of the Counsellor upon whose shoulders the Government would fall, but the Mother of ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... between Mme. Recamier and Josephine, the two women of the Napoleonic era who exerted so powerful an influence upon the social and political fortunes of France. At the time of Napoleon's first success, the former was only twenty-one, with Madonna-like charms and attractiveness; the latter, thirty-five, but with exquisite taste in dress and skill in beautifying. Possessed of unstudied natural grace and elegance, and always attired in perfect harmony with her beauty of face and form, she could easily stand a ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... is another Italy. She must have her miracles, and if God will not perform them, so surely will some one be at hand to invent them. Still further, the miracle must be a miracle pertaining to the Virgin. La Madonna! the mind, the heart, the tongue of the Italians are full ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... Madonna, to which you have given so much time, and on which you have expended so much care!' Then with a sudden change of tone, in which astonishment darkened into fear, she exclaimed: 'Are you ill, Jemschid? You have ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... all in blue and white, with the Madonna of the Chair over the mantelpiece and the ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... Griskinissa—such was the fair creature's name—"was as lovely a bit of mutton," her father said, "as ever a man would wish to stick a knife into." She had sat to the painter for all sorts of characters; and the curious who possess any of Gambouge's pictures will see her as Venus, Minerva, Madonna, and in numberless other characters: Portrait of a lady—Griskinissa; Sleeping Nymph—Griskinissa, without a rag of clothes, lying in a forest; Maternal Solicitude—Griskinissa again, with young Master Gambouge, who was by this time the offspring ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a friend, a M. de Bussieres, who had some business to transact in the sacristy. The Jew, who professed complete infidelity, meantime was looking at the pictures. But M. de Bussieres, when his business was done, found him prostrate on the pavement in front of a picture of the Madonna. The Jew on coming to himself declared that the Virgin had stepped from her frame, and addressed him, with the result, as he said, that having fallen to the ground an infidel, he rose a convinced Christian! Mademoiselle D'Henin writes in a tone which indicates ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... am so afraid you will never get to Lisbon. Take this, it will help you through, The Blessed Madonna will protect you ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... cautiously, putting one foot slowly in front of the other, then stopped and craned her neck, casting a suspicious look to right and left. Then giving a graceful little jump and shaking out her tail feathers, she hopped up to the Black Madonna. Then she stood stock still a few moments, scrutinising the sleeping watchman and questioning the darkness and silence with eyes and ears alert. At last with a mighty flutter of wings she alighted on the table ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... the direction of the ape! Here was zoology mutely but eloquently telling us why there had blossomed no Confucius, no Moses, no Napoleon, upon that black stem; why no Iliad, no Parthenon, no Sistine Madonna, had ever ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... for example—turn your head— All that's behind us! You don't understand Nor care to understand about my art, But you can hear at least when people speak: And that cartoon, the second from the door— It is the thing, Love! so such things should be; Behold Madonna!—I am bold to say, I can do with my pencil what I know, What I see, what at bottom of my heart I wish for, if I ever wish so deep— Do easily, too—when I say perfectly, I do not boast, perhaps: yourself are judge, Who listened to the Legate's talk last week; And just ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... artistic taste. A few tarnished gold frames leaned against the gaudily-papered wall, and the only picture stood on the dilapidated easel in the middle of the floor, a small canvas of a woman's head, a gentle Madonna face, with large supplicating eyes, and a sensitive, sad mouth, which seemed to mourn over the desolation of the place. The palette and a few worn brushes were scattered on the floor, where the artist had laid them down for ever. ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... the Madonna," she continued after a pause, "the one I like best is where Mary is sitting, holding in her hands the crown of thorns; everything else had been wrenched from her grasp, but this they had no use for. ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... home about this time we have his early impressions concerning the Japanese. The princess took great interest in the subjects discussed by Anjiro, and was especially struck with a picture of the Madonna and child which he showed her. She asked to have the heads of the Christian faith put in writing in order that she might study them. For this reason a creed and a catechism were prepared and translated into the Japanese language, for the use of ...
— Japan • David Murray
... first used to amuse the Italians. Ah, poor Italy! I am as mortified as an Italian ought to be. They have only the rhetoric of patriots and soldiers, I fear! Tuscany is to be spared forsooth, if she lies still, and here she lies, eating ices and keeping the feast of the Madonna. Perdoni! but she has a review in the Cascine besides, and a gallant show of some 'ten thousand men' they are said to have made of it—only don't think that I and Robert went out to see that sight. We should have sickened at it too much. An amiable, refined people, too, these Tuscans are, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... if it were possible to know everything. And then to hear that you have just forgotten to see what was most charming! I am sure I was quite tired of these everlasting Madonnas; one was almost turned into a Madonna one's self." ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... excited girls alternately told their beads and then joined in the dance again, while the gray-haired mother, kneeling on the marble pediment of what might have been the fragment of a temple of Bacchus, lifted her hands in prayer to a little shrine of the Madonna, placed there, strangely enough, amidst the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... with the weaver's loom in the large kitchen, the meat-block by the fireplace, and the big bread-tray by the stove, where the yeast was as industrious as the reapers beyond in the fields. She was in keeping with the chromo of the Madonna and the Child upon the wall, with the sprig of holy palm at the shrine in the corner, with the old King Louis ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... every account I was delighted to see him face to face. I can't tell you what else we have done or not done. It's a great dazzling heap of things new and strange. Barry Cornwall (Mr. Procter) came to see us every day till business swept him out of town, and dear Mrs. Jameson left her Madonna for us in despite of the printers. Such kindness, on all sides. Ah, there's kindness in England after all. Yet I grew cold to the heart as I set foot on the ground of it, and wished myself away. Also, the sort of life is not perhaps the best for me and the sort of ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... could give them relief. The others I could help. But no words of mine could induce them to bear their terrible sufferings like men. They screamed and groaned, not like women, for few would have been so craven-hearted, but like children; calling, in the intervals of violent pain, upon Jesu, the Madonna, and all the saints of heaven whom their lives had scandalised. I stayed with them until midnight, and then got away for a little time. But I had not long been quiet, before the mule-master was after me again. ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... the Gallery of Bologna, in all which pictures the lower portions are incomparably the finest, owing to the light distance behind the heads. Raffaelle, in his fall, betrayed the faith he had received from his father and his master, and substituted for the radiant sky of the Madonna del Cardellino, the chamber-wall of the Madonna della Sediola—and the brown wainscot of the Baldacchino. Yet it is curious to observe how much of the dignity even of his later pictures, depends on such ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... scholars and poets who had an exalted idea of the Deity, as witness the Poems of Pentaur. This is true also of some of the Greek Poets who had a deep insight into divine things. It is not a little interesting to note also that artists of different nations paint the Madonna after the style of their own women. Very few of the pictures in the great art galleries are after the style of face which you see in the Orient. Hence there are Dutch Madonnas, and Italian and French and English ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... another art came to its finest flowering in the Italian Cinquecento, when Raphael, Da Vinci, and Michael Angelo added color to form. They agreed that never again would paintings be produced fit to be classed with the Sistine Madonna. Another two centuries passed, and the Bachs began the great music which these three modern artists thought of as the reigning art of our time. Here came their question, "What is to be the next and ...
— The Conflict between Private Monopoly and Good Citizenship • John Graham Brooks
... brotherhood of man, his classmate with the corporation practice distanced him in the pursuit of position. While he led himself through the valley of the shadow of temptation, and feared no evil because of the Madonna vision in his soul, even the Madonnas preferred Lancelot and Tristram to Galahad. It wasn't an easy world for a man who wanted to keep faith with himself. It was a pinchbeck world, of pretence and pull,—that ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... look just like your name!" she exclaimed, "all brightness and humility! What have you been doing to grow so like Murillo's Madonna?" ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... He looked on at her efforts with a feeling of deep compassion. Was not her face becoming soft like a mother's, lovely and round when she bent down to the children? The Madonna type—and still this woman had ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... this Gothic generation!" exclaimed the Antiquary,"A monument of a knight-templar on each side of a Grecian porch, and a Madonna on the top of it!O crimini!Well, tell the provost I wish to have the stones, and we'll not differ about the water-course. It's lucky I happened ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the streets, to render thanks for the apparent cessation of the activity of Vesuvius. Motley but picturesque processions were these, headed by boys carrying candles, which burned simply in the full sunshine and bearing aloft images of the Madonna or saints, clad in gorgeous robes of cheap blue or yellow satin. Their joy was suddenly changed to grief by tidings of a frightful disaster. The roof of the Monte Oliveto market, fronting on the Toledo, the main thoroughfare, had suddenly crushed in, burying ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... Bergamo? What city was ever so celebrated for honest and valiant men, in all classes, or for beautiful girls? There is but one class of those: Beauty is above all ranks; the true Madonna, the patroness and bestower of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... Via Nunziatina, directly back of the "Carmine" in the old part of Florence; but there is no loving lounger about those picturesque streets that does not remember how, strolling up the Via dei Seragli, one encounters the old shrine to the Madonna, which marks the entrance to that street made historical henceforth for having sheltered a great English writer. There, half-way down the via, in that little two-story casa, No. 2671, dwelt Walter Savage Landor, with his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... good sir, play, play for the love of the Madonna!" And the others all echoed as with one ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... the Presepio opposite. Sometimes two of them are engaged in alternate question and answer about the mysteries of the Incarnation and the Redemption. Sometimes the recitation is a piteous description of the agony of the Saviour and the sufferings of the Madonna,—the greatest stress being, however, always laid upon the latter. All these little speeches have been written for them by their priest or some religious friend, been committed to memory, and practised with the appropriate gestures over and over again at home. Their little piping voices ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... carried to another office where his life was assured for somebody not wholly unconnected with the sherry trade whom he remembered by the remarkable circumstance that he had a Straduarius violin to dispose of, and also a Madonna, formed the sum and substance of Mr Twemlow's narrative. Through which stalked the shadow of the awful Snigsworth, eyed afar off by money-lenders as Security in the Mist, and menacing Twemlow ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... this congregation got suddenly rich, and, with wealth, self-conceit and pride entered his heart. He considered it necessary, to preserve his respectability, to separate himself from the humble society he hitherto frequented, and cease to be a member of the Congregation of the Madonna, composed of industrious and virtuous youths who labored honestly for their livelihood. St. Francis, on hearing of this slight on the congregation and insult to Mary, was fired with a holy indignation. ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... what now?—Are even princes dumb? Tow'rd me scornful echoes ninefold come, Stealing through the vault's terrific gloom— Sleep assails the page by slow degrees, And Madonna gives to you the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... to paint darling babies, lovely angels, beautiful women and splendid men. In this picture of "the Madonna and St. Jerome," I want you specially to see St. Jerome and his lion. St. Jerome, a very noted man who lived four centuries after Christ, was the first person to translate the New Testament into ...
— The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures • Lorinda Munson Bryant
... of plain blue linen bordered with a narrow blue and white fringe. The lighting-fixtures are of carved wood, pointed in polychrome. The most beautiful thing in the room is a Fifteenth Century painting, the Madonna of Bartolomeo Montagna, which has the place ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... "The Madonna be thanked that you are safe!" Katarina, now in her girl's dress, exclaimed as she seized his hand. "Oh, Monsieur Guy, how I have suffered! It was not until two o'clock that my father returned and told us ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... ever stood in Dresden to watch that matchless picture of Raphael's, the 'Madonna di San Siste'? Engravings of it are all through the world; but no engraving has ever reproduced the mother's face. The Infant Christ that she holds is far more nearly represented than the mother. In her face there is a mist. It is wonder, it is love, it is adoration, it is awe—it ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... no English, so smiled expansively, her bony arms folded across her stomach. Her oldest daughter, a frail-looking girl in the twenties, but with a sad and spiritual beauty of the Madonna in her big eyes and straight black hair, gave us a shy good-day. Three boys, just alike in their slender, stolid Indian good looks, except that they differed in size, nodded with the awkwardness of the male. Two babies stared solemnly. A little girl with ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... frequent regularity, but, lately, they had begun to fall off, his letters were less frequent, shorter and more reserved in tone, and the burden of it all was crushing the youth out of the girl and breaking her spirit. She had grown to look like some great sorrowful-eyed Madonna, and her beauty had in it more of the spiritual quality of an angel than of a woman. As the spring came on, and the days grew longer she looked like one on whom the hand of death had ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... a steady, well-meaning, rather slow fellow, comfortably off. He was not at all handsome. But Theodosia was a very pretty girl with the milky colouring of an auburn blonde and large china-blue eyes. She looked mild and Madonna-like and was known to be sweet-tempered. Wesley's older brother, Irving Brooke, had married a woman who kept him in hot water all the time, so Heatherton folks said, but they thought there was no fear of that with Wesley ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... opera "The Jewels of the Madonna" given at the Auditorium by the Chicago Opera Company, with Carolina White in the leading role, Sammarco, Dufau, ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... she has prepared herself," Rastignac said, turning to de Marsay. "What a virginal toilette; what swan's grace in that snow-white throat of hers! How white her gown is, and she is wearing a sash like a little girl; she looks round like a madonna inviolate. Who would think that ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... going to drive to the nearest town, and that he had meant to give him a letter to post to Moscow; but the letter was not written. The letter was a very important one to a friend, asking him to bid for him for a picture of the Madonna which was to be offered for sale at an auction. As he reached the house he saw at the door four big, well-fed, well-groomed, thoroughbred horses harnessed to a carriage, the black lacquer of which glistened in the sun. The coachman was seated on ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... way," he said, "I have finished pointing up that old academic Ariadne, and I suppose it will have to go to the Salon. It's all I have ready this year, but after the success the 'Madonna' brought me I feel ashamed to send ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... Germany. He liked Dresden, and enjoyed his visit to its picture gallery, where he especially admired a Madeleine and two Virgins by Correggio, as well as two by Raphael, one of them presumably the San Sisto Madonna. The gem of the whole collection, however, in his opinion, was Holbein's Madonna; and he longed to have Madame Hanska's hand in his while he gazed at it. As he was away from her, he was very restless, and soon tired of all he saw. He longed to be ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... celebrated pictures of Correggio, with the Madonna and Child, saints, and angels, in a convent ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... look like Medea alighted from her chariot, or the Sibyl of the tempest that was rolling around her, the only living thing within hail at that moment, except ourselves. On seeing me safe she did not wait to greet me, as might have been expected; but, calling out to me, 'Ah! can' della Madonna, xe esto il tempo per andar' al' Lido,' ran into the house, and solaced herself with scolding the boatmen for not foreseeing the 'temporale.' Her joy at seeing me again was moderately mixed with ferocity, and gave me the idea of a tigress over her ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... hardly manage without sleeping there,' said Guy: 'we must sleep either at Colico, or at Madonna. Now Colico, they say, is a most unhealthy place at this time of year, and Madonna is the very heart of the fever—Sondrio not much better. I don't see how it is to be safely done; and though very likely ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... take back your Grand-duke? Observe, there's no one to force it,— Unless the Madonna, Saint Luke Drew for you, choose to endorse it. I charge you, by great Saint Martino And prodigies quickened by wrong, Remember your Dead on Ticino; Be worthy, be constant, be ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... girlish silhouette of her, her long lashes, her dented lip, her adorable chin. In the dim moonlight, as she sat with her head bent a little over Jims, the lamplight glinting on her pearls until they glistened like a slender nimbus, he thought she looked exactly like the Madonna that hung over his mother's desk at home. He carried that picture of her in his heart to the horror of the battlefields of France. He had had a strong fancy for Rilla Blythe ever since the night of the Four Winds dance; but it was when he saw her there, with little Jims ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... fine Madonna, commonly called La Virgen del Pez, from a fish which young Tobit holds in his hand. It is rather tawny in color, as if it had been painted on a pine board and the wood had asserted itself from below. It is a charming picture, with all the great Roman's inevitable perfection ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... with an ancient Chinese heroine called Miao-shen.[37] This is parallel to the legend of Ti-tsang (Kshitigarbha) who, though a male Bodhisattva, was a virtuous maiden in two of his previous existences. Evidently Chinese religious sentiment required a Madonna and it is not unnatural if the god of mercy, who was reputed to assume many shapes and to give sons to the childless, came to be thought of chiefly in a feminine form. The artists of the T'ang dynasty usually represented Avalokita as a youth with a slight moustache and the evidence ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... introduction to a young human, and he found it slightly repulsive, but Deena, in her Madonna-like ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... him as a young writer for the newspapers to describe the Salon of 1822. One brilliant poet, novelist, traveller, critic, has succeeded, and Diderot's art-criticism is at least equalled in Theophile Gautier's pages on Titian's Assunta and Bellini's Madonna at Venice, or Murillo's Saint Anthony of Padua ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... quarters. She spoke to the men in all the dialects of that land of many languages. The men of the Gulf, in general of gigantic stature, dropped their merry Venetian stories and fell down on their knees and kissed the hem of her garment; the Scaramouch forgot his tricks, and wept as he would to the Madonna; Tuscany and Rome made speeches worthy of the Arno and the Forum; and the Corsicans and the islanders unsheathed their poniards and brandished them in the air, which is their mode of denoting affectionate devotion. As ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... masters! During the feast held in its honour (January 20), pilgrims from the remotest districts of the island and from across the seas come to purify their souls at the shrine of "The Holy Child." In the same room was a beautiful image of the Madonna, besides two large tin boxes containing sundry arms, legs, and heads of Saints, with their robes in readiness for adjustment on procession days. The patron of Cebu City is ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... through France; she stayed for a time at Versailles with her father's old friends, the Kennys, and of this visit one of the daughters, now Mrs. Cox, then a child of about six years, retains a lively and pleasing recollection. Brought up in France and imbued with the idea and pictures of the Madonna and child, the little girl, on seeing Mrs. Shelley arrive with her small son, became impressed with the idea that the pale, sweet, oval-laced lady was the Madonna come to visit them; and this idea was not dispelled by the gentle manner and kind way that she had with the children, ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... own thoughts, not his. "I came to—day because I have made up my mind. I wanted them to confirm me—to say that I was right. If you weren't here, I should go up to them and whisper to them, as I've seen women do to the Madonna abroad. I should tell ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... square windows, guards this portal, reminding us that at some time or other the monks found it needful to arm their solitude against a force descending from Chiusure. There is an avenue of slender cypresses; and over the gate, protected by a jutting roof, shines a fresco of Madonna and Child. Passing rapidly downwards, we are in the courtyard of the monastery, among its stables, barns, and out-houses, with the forlorn bulk of the huge red building spreading wide, and towering up above us. As good luck ruled our arrival, we came face to face with the Abbate de ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... and have intuitions of countries, figures and scenes, like painters; of bodies, like sculptors; save that painters and sculptors know how to paint and to sculpture those images, while we possess them only within our souls. They believe that anyone could have imagined a Madonna of Raphael; but that Raphael was Raphael owing to his technical ability in putting the Madonna upon the canvas. Nothing can be more false than this view. The world of which as a rule we have intuitions, is a small thing. It consists of little expressions which gradually become greater and more ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... Farewell. A last farewell." "The last?" exclaimed he, with a wild shriek. "Oh God, Clotel, do not say that"; and covering his face with his hands, he wept like a child. Recovering from his emotion, he found himself alone. The moon looked down upon him mild, but very sorrowfully; as the Madonna seems to gaze upon her worshipping children, bowed down with consciousness of sin. At that moment he would have given worlds to have disengaged himself from Gertrude, but he had gone so far, that blame, disgrace, and duels with angry relatives would now attend any effort ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... that the young lady's face was the nearest living approach they had ever seen to that immortal "Madonna" face, which has for ever associated the idea of beauty with the name of RAPHAEL. The resemblance struck everybody alike, even those who were but slightly conversant with pictures, the moment they saw her. Taken in detail, her ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... tell you of my greatest adventure. I was in the picture-gallery at Dresden, and in that small room where hangs Raphael's 'Madonna.' I was standing before this wonderful masterpiece of divine inspiration when I felt the room crowded. I discovered that the visitors were all Americans and all looking at me. I said to them: 'Ladies and gentlemen, you are here in the presence of the most wonderful ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... Poe. James selects neither a commonplace nor a dramatic situation, but chooses some difficult and out-of-the-way theme, and clears it up with his keen, subtle, impressionistic art. A Passionate Pilgrim, The Madonna of the Future, and The Lesson of the Master are short stories that show his abstruse, unusual subject matter and ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... greatly to the effect if the countess would join us in the costume of a peasant from Puzzoli or Sorrento. Our group would then be quite complete, more especially as the countess is quite beautiful enough to represent a madonna." ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... door. "Have you not found a cord and bucket?" "No!" That was the devil there. He answered her angrily because she was a good girl; he did not say: "My child." She knocked at another door. "Have you not found a cord and bucket?" It was the Madonna who replied: "Yes, my child. Listen. You could do me a pleasure to stay here while I am away. I have my little son here, to whom you will give his soup; you will sweep and put the house in order. When I come home I will give you your bucket." The Madonna went ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... Sistine Madonna or a stray Angelo?" David asked. "Or a ghost? What is the matter? Is it another ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... this down," she said, as if apologising more to herself than Ted, "because I want to hang my large photo of the Sistine Madonna in its place." ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... Cairo, and afterwards under Francesco Albani. Though an intimate friend of the latter, and his most famous disciple, Cignani was yet strongly and deeply influenced by the genius of Correggio. His greatest work, moreover, the "Assumption of the Virgin," round the cupola of the church of the Madonna della Fuoca at Forli, which occupied him some twenty years, and is in some respects one of the most remarkable works of art of the 17th century, is obviously inspired from the more renowned fresco of Correggio in the cupola of the cathedral ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... sight of the letter flushed her face with expectation. She took it with smiles. She covered it with kisses. When she opened it, a curl from Jack's head fell on to her lap. She pressed it to her heart, and then rose and laid it at the feet of her Madonna. "She must share my joy," she said with a pathetic childishness; "she will understand it." Then, with her arm around Isabel, and the girl's head on his shoulder, they read together ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... eye is considered as the most potent and terrible charmer. The superstition is universal, and pervades all modes of thought among the ignorant classes, but its sanctuary is Naples. There it is as much a matter of faith as the Madonna and San Gennaro. Every coral-shop is filled with amulets, and everybody wears a counter-charm,—ladies on their arms, gentlemen on their watch-chains, lazzaroni on their necks. If you are going to Italy,—and as all the world now goes to Italy, you will ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... Virtue? Tut, tut, my dear! Cleverness, charm, facile smartness? The crowd gathers round. Beauty? The crowd grows thicker. Money—wealth—gold by millions? Ah! Come to our arms, you golden one, rotten to the core though you may be—gentleman with a gorilla's tastes; lady with Madonna face, Venus body, viper soul! Come to the throne; we salaam before you—your gold ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... indescribable beauty. Upon the summit of a hill within these gardens, sat a youth and maiden engaged in most earnest conversation. The maiden was exceedingly beautiful, with a face which reminded one of the Madonna of Murillo, so gentle, so tender, and so bewitchingly lovely. The youth sat at her feet upon the green turf, and with his head turned back, gazing upon her, there was disclosed a noble and most handsome countenance. His long hair, black as night, fell from his forehead, and his eyes burnt like stars ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... groups in which Hugh took part had been prodigies of virtue. The young mother with the Madonna face—Lady Newhaven firmly believed that her face, with the crimped fringe drawn down to the eyebrows, resembled that of a Madonna—with her children round her, Lord Newhaven as usual somewhat out of focus in the background; and Hugh, young, handsome, devoted, heartbroken, ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... knees and cry like a child on her lap—and swear I would reform, and drink no more and play no more, and follow women no more; when all the men of the Court used to be following her—when she used to look with her child more beautiful, by George, than the Madonna in the Queen's Chapel. I am not good like her, I know it. Who is—by heaven, who is? I tired and wearied her, I know that very well. I could not talk to her. You men of wit and books could do that, and I couldn't—I felt I couldn't. ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... creature of moods to them. They, too, like Sheba herself, were adventuring into a new world. Somehow they represented to her the last tie that bound her to the life she was leaving. Her heart was tender as a Madonna to these lambs so ill-fitted to face a frigid waste. Their mother had been a good woman. She could tell that. But she had no way of knowing what kind of man their father ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... quite so much like one of Murillo's Madonnas," thought Truesdale. "This isn't really the most important thing that has ever happened in the universe, after all." Then he sighed lightly. "Still, I suppose she is a good deal nearer to a Madonna than I am ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... stands a white church with an elegant Lombard campanile—the campanile left unwhitewashed. The whole forms a lovely little bit of landscape such as some old Venetian painter might have chosen as a background for a Madonna. ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... He was invited to share the meals of the family, and was treated with the respect due to his name, his birth, and his title. He had his reasons for capturing the good-will of the merchant and his wife; he scented his madonna as the ogre scented the youthful flesh of Tom Thumb and his brothers. But in spite of the confidence he managed to inspire in the worthy pair the latter maintained the most profound silence as to the said madonna; and not only ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... glow of the light, leaning forward toward the open air, and I, with a beating heart, gazed upon her superb beauty. Shall I ever forget it? Her head leaned upon a hand and arm which Venus herself might envy; the jetty curls which shaded her face fell in graceful profusion, Madonna-like, upon shoulders faultless in shape, and white as that crest of foam on yonder sea. Her face was the Spanish oval, with a low, broad feminine forehead, eyebrows exquisitely penciled, and arching ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... began! She saw herself as the anarchist prowling outside, tracked, spied on, held at arm's length by all decent citizens, all lovers of ancient beauty, and moral tradition; while, within, women like Susy Amberley sat Madonna-like, with the children at their knee. "Well, we stand for the children too—the children of the future!" she said to ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... have lived the life you would have me live—every request you ever made of me I have carried out. I did this knowing you would never be my wife and you would be Willits's! I did it because you were my Madonna and my religion and I loved the soul of you and lived for you as men live to please the God they have never seen. There were days and nights when I never expected to see you or any one else whom I loved again—but ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... 2, 1915, Austria, spurred on by Germany, endeavored to meet the Italian objections by offering more specific concessions. She expressed willingness to cede the districts of Trento, Roveredo, Riva, Tione (except Madonna di Campiglio and the neighborhood), and Borgo. This readjustment would give Italy a frontier cutting the valley of the Adige just north of Lavis. These districts Baron Burian considered far more than a "strip of territory," and he ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... picture in which Rubens, who felt more than any other artist the glory of the physical life, has embodied his conception of the Madonna, in opposition to the faded, cold ideals of the Middle Ages, from which he revolted with such a bound. His Mary is a superb Oriental sultana, with lustrous dark eyes, redundant form, jewelled turban, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... "Madonna!" he said, in the liquid Southern accents of his—he had spent his early life in Italy and the address came naturally to him—"if Frank Doughton were I, ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace |
