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By the Right Rev. the Bishop of Salisbury. 229 
and Child between two Churches with spires, suggesting, in my 
opinion, how he intended to complete Salisbury and Durham. 
(15) William de la Corner’s, which is the first to represent the 
“coronation of the Virgin,” is one of the more important for the 
history of art. Unfortunately the upper part of the figures is broken 
in my example, but I believe that it represents the Blessed Virgin 
Mary seated at our Lord’s right hand, while He is in the act of 
placing a crown upon her head. The feet of both figures rest upon 
the roof of a Church, below which is the Bishop praying under a 
eanopy. The feet of the Blessed Virgin are in pointed shoes, as 
usual; those of our Lord are sandalled. The date of this seal is 
1289. It is therefore not so early an example as we might have 
expected in a Cathedral dedicated to the honvur of the Blessed 
Virgin, of what was clearly a popular form of devotion—however 
theologically indefensible—in the thirteenth as well as in the 
fourteenth century. It seems first to occur in England on the seal 
of Walter de Cantilupe, Bishop of Worcester in 1237, a cast of 
which lies before me, with the legend, 
Quem tenet hic tronus mihi sit cum matre patronus. 
To what influence we are to assign the spread of this form of 
devotion in this country I do not exactly know, but I think 
we cannot go far wrong in ascribing it mainly to the Franciscans, 
who entered England about 1220, that is a few years before 
Cantilupe’s seal. The oldest known representation of the kind 
is about a century earlier, and is found in the mosaics on the 
tribune of S. Maria in Trastevere at Rome, generally attributed 
to the years 1180—1148. It does not represent the moment of 
coronation which Fra Angelico’s pictures have made so familiar to 
us. Our Saviour, with a cruciform nimbus, holds an open book, 
with the text, Veni electa mea et ponam in te thronum meum (no 
doubt for ponam te im). His right arm is round his mother’s neck, 
and the hand rests lovingly on her right shoulder. She is crowned, 
and holds in her left hand (with the thumb and first and second 
fingers raised), a scroll with the text from the Canticles (viii. 3), 
somewhat barbarously transcribed—/eva eius sub capite meo et dextra 
illius amplesabit (for amplexabitur) me. The Worcester seal would 
Q 2 
