She is not even flesh and blood; the material that clothes Her swells softly with the breath of the fluid that shapes it.
Mary is a living but a volatilized and glorious body.
We can understand certain ideas of the Abbess of Agreda who declares that She was exempt from the defilements inflicted on women; we see what St.Thomas meant who asserted that Her beauty purified instead of agitating the senses.
Her age is indeterminate; She is not a woman, yet She is no longer a child.

It is hard to say even that She is grown up, just marriageable, a girl-child, so entirely is She refined above all humanity, beyond the world, so exquisitely pure and for ever chaste.
She remains incomparable, unapproached in painting.

By Her, other Madonnas are vulgar; they are in every case women; She alone is the white stem of the divine Ear of corn, the Wheat of the Eucharist.

She alone is indeed the Immaculate, the _Regina Virginum_ of the hymns; and She is so youthful, so guileless, that the Son seems to be crowning His Mother before She can have conceived Him.
It is in this that we see the glory of the gentle Friar's superhuman genius.

He painted as others have spoken, inspired by Grace; he painted what he saw within him just as St.Angela of Foligno related what she heard within her.