The Zingarella (the Gypsy) is so called from the gypsy turban worn by the Madonna.  The mother, supposed to be painted from the artist’s wife, sits with the child asleep on her lap.  With motherly tenderness she bends so closely over him that her forehead touches his little head.  It is unfortunate that this beautiful work is not better known.  It is in the Naples Gallery.

A comparison of these pictures discloses a remarkable variety in action and grouping.  On the other hand, the Madonnas are quite similar in general type.  With the exception of the Zingarella, who is the most motherly, they are all in a playful mood.  The same playfulness, but of a more sweet and motherly kind, lights the face of the Madonna della Scala.  The composition is somewhat in the portrait style, showing the mother in half length, seated under a sort of canopy.  The babe clings closely to her neck, turning about at the spectator with a glance half shy and half mischievous.  His coyness awakens a smile of tender amusement in the gentle, young face above him.

The picture has an interesting history.  It was originally painted in fresco over the eastern gate of Parma, where Vasari saw and admired it.  In after years, the wall which it decorated was incorporated into a small new church, of which it formed the rear wall.  To accommodate the high level of the Madonna, the building was somewhat elevated, and, being entered by a flight of steps, was known as S. Maria della Scala (of the staircase).  The name attached itself to the picture even after the church was destroyed (in 1812), and the fresco removed to the town gallery.  The marks of defacement which it bears are due to the votive offerings which were formerly fastened upon it,—­among them, a silver crown worn by the Madonna as late as the eighteenth century.  Though such scars injure its artistic beauty, they add not a little to the romantic interest which invests it.

[Illustration:  CORREGGIO.—­MADONNA DELLA SCALA.]

Beside such names as Raphael and Correggio, history furnishes but one other worthy of comparison for the portrayal of the Mater Amabilis—­it is Titian.  His Madonna is by no means uniformly motherly.  There are times when we look in vain for any softening of her aristocratic features; when her stately dignity seems quite incompatible with demonstrativeness.[4] But when love melts her heart how gracious is her unbending, how winning her smile!  Once she goes so far as to play in the fields with her little boy, quieting a rabbit with one hand for him to admire. (La Vierge au Lapin, Louvre.) In other pictures she holds him lying across her lap, smiling thoughtfully upon him.  Such an one is the Madonna with Sts.  Ulfo and Brigida, in the Madrid Gallery.  The child is taking the flowers St. Brigida offers him, and his mother looks down with the pleased expression of fond pride.  Again, when her babe holds his two little hands full of the roses his cousin St. John has brought him, she smiles gently at the eagerness of the two children. (Uffizi Gallery.)