Their silent presence was only invaded,
when I saw them, by the twittering of the many birds that were
flying in and out of the crevices in the stones and little nooks in
the architecture, where they had made their nests. They were busy,
rising from the cold shade of Temples made with hands, into the
sunny air of Heaven. Not so the worshippers within, who were
listening to the same drowsy chaunt, or kneeling before the same
kinds of images and tapers, or whispering, with their heads bowed
down, in the selfsame dark confessionals, as I had left in Genoa
and everywhere else.
The decayed and mutilated paintings with which this church is
covered, have, to my thinking, a remarkably mournful and depressing
influence. It is miserable to see great works of art--something of
the Souls of Painters--perishing and fading away, like human forms.
This cathedral is odorous with the rotting of Correggio's frescoes
in the Cupola. Heaven knows how beautiful they may have been at
one time. Connoisseurs fall into raptures with them now; but such
a labyrinth of arms and legs: such heaps of foreshortened limbs,
entangled and involved and jumbled together: no operative surgeon,
gone mad, could imagine in his wildest delirium.
Pages:
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124