Regina Coeli laetare! Alleluia. Quia quem meruisti portare: Alleluia. Resurrexit sicut dixit: Alleluia.
At the same time St. Gregory saw an angel upon a castle, which made clean a sword all bloody, and put it into the sheath, and thereby St. Gregory understood that the pestilence of this mortality was passed, and after that it was called the Castle Angel.’
In memory of this legend the great processions from S. Marco, until the prohibition of processions in A.D. 1870, used to strike up the antiphon ‘Regina Coeli’, as soon as they came to the bridge of Hadrian.
For the true source of this legend there is no need to look beyond the vision of the angel at the threshing-floor of Araunah: ‘And David lifted up his eyes, and saw the angel of the Lord stand between the earth and the heaven, having a drawn sword in his hand stretched out over Jerusalem.’ In the Capitoline Museum is an altar dedicated to Isis by some traveller on his safe return, and bearing the customary imprint of two feet. The devout believed these to be the footprints of the angel that appeared to Gregory, and the altar once stood in the church of Ara Coeli.
It is certain that at least as early as this time pictures were carried in public procession. Theophylactus[138] has described two occasions on which a sacred effigy of Christ, believed not to have been made by human hands, was carried into battle for the sake of inspiring valour and discipline into the soldiery (A.D. 586 and 588). Among the many gems in which Bede’s _Ecclesiastical History_[139] abounds is that picture of the arrival of Augustine and his companions in Thanet ‘bearing a silver cross for their banner, and the image of our Lord and Saviour painted on a board’ (A.D. 597). The sixteenth-century chronicler Baronius says, that the picture which Gregory carried in this plague procession of A.D. 590 was that of the Madonna, now preserved in the church of S. Maria Maggiore on the Esquiline, and still believed to protect Rome from plague and pestilence. Rome has no fewer than four pictures of the Madonna attributed like this one to the hand of Luke the Physician, and all of them reputed to have wonder-working powers. Expert opinion, alas! pronounces the oldest of them a fifteenth century production.