Из книги: ITALIAN FANTASIES
Far more reposeful, at least for the spectator, is Michelangelo’s own burial place in Santa Croce, which is the most satisfactory church the Franciscans have produced, and in its empty spaciousness an uplifting change from the stuffy, muggy atmosphere, the tawdry profusion of overladen chapels, which make up one’s general sense of an Italian church. It is not free from poor pictures and monuments, and only some of the coloured glass is good, but the defects are lost in the noble simplicity of the whole under its high wooden roof. Michelangelo’s monument is unfortunately impaired by one of the few errors of overcrowding, for the frescoes above it make it look inferior to the Dante cenotaph, though it is really rather superior. Curiously enough the line anent the “great poet”
“Ingenio cujus non satis orbis erat,”
does not come from Dante’s monument, but from that of a certain Karolus, presumably Carlo Marsuppini!
I have spoken of the museum as the mausoleum of reality. But mausolea too, turn into museums; in losing their dead they, too, die and become a mere spectacle. Such is the melancholy fate of the Mausoleum of Theodoric the Great outside Ravenna, robbed of its imperial heretical bones by avenging Christian orthodoxy. Infinitely dreary this dead tomb when I saw it in the centre of its desolate plain, to which I had trudged through sodden marshland that would have been malarious in summer; snowbound it lay, its arched substructure flooded, its upper chamber only just accessible by a snow-crusted marble staircase: a bare rotundity, a bleak emptiness, robbed even of its coffin, uncheered even by its corpse. O magnificent Ostrogoth, conqueror of Italy, O most Christian Emperor, when you turned from the splendour of your court at Ravenna to build your last home, you with your imperial tolerance could hardly foresee that because you held Christ an originated being, as Arius had gone about singing, a Christian posterity would scatter you to the four winds. And that rival gigantic tomb in the Appian Way at Rome, does Cæcilia Metella still inhabit it, I wonder? I mourn to see such spacious tombs stand empty when there are so many living Magnificences whom they would fit to a span. Very proper was it to bury Beatrice, the mother of Matilda, in the sarcophagus of a Pagan hero. Mausolea no more than palaces should remain untenanted. Let them be turned into orts and castles, an you will, like Hadrian’s Tomb into Sant’ Angelo, or into circuses, like the Mausoleum of Augustus—sweet are the uses of Magnificence—but to keep them standing idle when there must be so many Magnificences in quest of a family sepulchre is a crime against America. The tomb of Theodoric is, I fear, too secluded for American taste, but the Exarch Isaac’s in such cheerful contiguity with town and church may arride the millionaire more. For a consideration the Exarch’s own sarcophagus might be had from the Museum, and the Exarch scrapped. Or there is Galla Placidia’s Mausoleum, with its Byzantine mosaics thrown in. Come! Who bids for these rare curios, one of the few links between Antiquity and the Renaissance, with their grotesque mediæval sincerity. Remark, _Signori_, that prefiguration of the Index Expurgatorius, that bearded Christ or S. Lorenzo (you pay your money and you take the choice) who is casting into a crate of serpentine flames one of those Pagan volumes for which the Cinquecento will go hunting madly. No, that cabinet does not contain cigar-boxes—what did the saints know of cigars?—nor are Marcus, Lucas, Matteus, Joannes, the names of brands. Those apparent cigar-boxes, as you might have seen from the strings, are holy manuscripts triumphant over the Pagan volume. This naïve draughtsmanship, _Signora_, is just what makes them so precious and your petty bids so amazing. What is that you say, _Signorina_? Galla Placidia is still in possession? And two Roman Emperors with her? Nay, nay, a nine hundred and ninety-nine years’ lease is all that a reasonable ghost may desire; after that, every tomb must be esteemed a cenotaph; unless indeed the heirs will pay the unearned increment. Choose your sarcophagus, _Signori_, an Emperor’s sarcophagus is not in the market every day.
But I do not think that even the vulgarest millionaire would desire his ashes to dispossess the Doges of Venice, or at least not Giovanni Pesaro. The most romantic auctioneer might despair of disposing of that portal wall of the Frari which is sacred to the Gargantuan grotesquerie of his colossal memorial. Does the whole world hold a more baroque monument? Going, going—and how I wish I could say gone!—that portal upheld by bowed negro giants on gargoyled pedestals, with patches of black flesh gleaming through holes in their trousers. Item, one black skeleton surmounted by other unique curios, including two giraffes. Item, His Sublimity, the Doge himself, sitting up on his sarcophagus, holding up his hands as if in expostulation, gentlemen, against your inadequate bids. Item, a wealth of heroic figures, and an array of virtues and vices, all life-size. (Could be sold separately as absolutely incongruous with the negro portions of the monument.) Also, in the same lot if desired, two hovering angelets, holding a wreath, suitable for any Christian celebrity.
Alas, Barnum is no more and bidding languishes. And yet I do not see why the lot should not be knocked down. Who was this Pesaro that he should have the right to impose this horror on posterity? Why should generations of worshippers at the Frari be obsessed by this nightmare? There can be no sacredness in such demented mural testaments. And Time, who preserved this, while he has destroyed so many precious things, who shattered Leonardo’s horse and melted Michelangelo’s bronze Pope, is hereby shown of taste most abominable. History must get a better curator.
The black skeleton—I had not thought before that skeletons could be negro—flourishes a scroll which ascribes to the Doge the wisdom of Solomon and an implacable hostility against the foes of Christ, while a tablet held by one of the giant negroes announces
“Aureum inter optimos principes vides.”
_Aureum_ indeed! Doubtless only some faint sense that sheen and death are discrepant held back the Doges from being buried in golden caskets. The Doge lives again in this monument, boasts the Latin, and one can only reflect that if the dogal taste reached this depravity by the middle of the seventeenth century, _actum est de republicâ_ might have been written long before Napoleon. Fortunately for the memory of the Pesaro family it finds a nobler, if no less bombastic expression, in the great Titian altar-piece, the Madonna di Casa Pesaro, in which the Queen of Heaven bends from her throne to beam at its episcopal representative, and St. Francis and St. Anthony grace by their presence the symbols of its victory over the Turk, while St. Peter pauses in his pious lection.
But the dead Doges lie mostly in S. S. Giovanni e Paolo, where their funeral service was performed. It is the very church for Their Sublimities—floods of light, pillared splendour, imposing proportions. Their tombs protrude from the walls, and their sculptured forms lie on their backs, their heads on pillows, their feet comfortably on cushions. Even when we are reminded of the finer things for which the Republic stood, there is an echo of material opulence.
“Steno, olim Dux Venetiorum, amator Justitiæ, Pacis, et Ubertatis anima.”
_Ubertatis_ anima! The soul of prodigal splendour! Even spiritual metaphor must harp on images of Magnificence.
But not every dead Doge consents to be couchant. Horatio Baleono, who died in 1617, “hostes post innumeros stratos,” has for monument a cavalier (of course, gilded) riding rough-shod over writhing forms and a broken-down cannon, and Pietro Mocenigo, whose mausoleum vaunts itself “ex hostium manubiis,” stands defiant on the summit of his sarcophagus, which is upborne by a trinity of figures.
What a family this Casa Mocenigo, with its record of Doges! Remove their memorials and mausolea from this church and you would half empty it of monuments. Tintoretto, no less than Titian, was dragged at their triumphal car. There is an _Adoration of the Saviour_ at Vicenza, which might just as well be the adoration of the Doge, Alvise Mocenigo, who is in the centre of the picture. For though he is kneeling, he has all the air of sitting, and all the other figures—the worshippers, the angel flying towards him, and the Christ flying down to him—converge towards him like a stage-group towards the limelit hero. Compare all this posthumous self-assertion with the oblivion fallen on Marino Faliero, the decapitated Doge of Byron’s drama, whose dubious sarcophagus was shown to the poet in the outside wall of this church.
Nor could Padua, Venice’s neighbour, fall behind her in mortuary magnificence.
“Nequidque patavino splendore deesset”
says a monument to Alessandro Contarini in the nave of the cathedral, a monument supported by six slaves and embracing a bas-relief of the fleet. Another in the worst dogal style exhibits Caterino Cornaro, a hero of the Cretan War (who died in 1674) in a full-bottomed wig and baggy knee-breeches, holding a scroll as if about to smack the universe with it. Sad is it to see so many “eternal monuments” of faded fames.
The Scaliger street-tombs in Verona are at least artistically laudable, however ironically their Christian ostensiveness compares with the record of the Family of the Ladder, whose rungs were murdered relatives. But even had Can Signorio lived the life of a saint, it would have needed a considerable conquest of his Christian humility before he could have commissioned that portentous tomb of his from Bonino da Campiglione. Knowing the Magnificent One, Bonino gave him solidity and superfluity, a plethora of niched and statued minarets of saints and virtues armed warriors, and bewildering pinnacles clothed with figures, all resting on six red marble columns springing from a base which supports the tomb, and is itself upborne by angels at each corner and adorned with pious bas-reliefs. And while the dead man lies in stone above his tomb, guarded by angels at head and foot, he also bestrides his horse and sports his spear on the uttermost pinnacle of his ladder-crested memorial, as though making the best of both worlds; which was indeed the general habit of the Magnificent, who desired likewise the beatitudes of the Meek, and often shed tears of sincere repentance when they could sin no more. Mastino della Scala’s tomb is more gilded and elegant than Can Signorio’s, though not less assertive and bi-worldly. And as for the tomb of Can Grande—“Dog the Great,” as Byron translated him in “The Age of Bronze,”—which is perched over the church door and soars up into a turret, it was—on the day I first saw it—provided with a long and dirty ladder for repairing purposes. So that I say Father Time—if he be a poor curator—is at least a fellow of infinite jest. One of his jests is to hound the Magnificent dead from pillar to post, from church to monastery, from crypt to chapel. In the grave there is rest? Fiddle-faddle! No body is safe from these chances of mortality. Stone walls do not a coffin make, nor iron bars a tomb. Call no body happy until it is burnt. After five centuries of rest Matilda of Tuscany was carried off from Mantua in a sort of mortuary elopement by her great admirer, Pope Urban VIII, and hidden away in the castle of S. Angelo, till she could be inhumed in St. Peter’s, and it was only the pride of Spoleto that saved Lippo Lippi from being sold to Florence. Napoleon, in suppressing churches, disestablished many an ancient corpse, and the pious families of Verona hastened to transport their sarcophagi to the church of S. Zeno on the outskirts. Hither must ride the dead Cavalli with their equine scutcheons, flying before the World-Conqueror on his white horse.
Dismemberment, too, befalls tombs at the hands of the merry jester. The friars of S. Maria delle Grazie who owed so much to the great Sforza Duke, broke up his monument and offered his effigy and his wife’s for sale. The more loyal Carthusians snapped up Cristoforo Solari’s beautiful sculptures for the beggarly price of thirty-eight ducats, and Lodovico and Beatrice in marble must leave their dust and make a last journey to Pavia. A last journey? _Chi sa?_
“Iterum et iterum translatis,” sighs the monument over the bones of Cino in Pistoja Cathedral, and who knows that the “pax tandem ossibus” is more than a sanguine aspiration? Cino was not the only Italian poet to be thus “translated,” though neither Petrarch nor Ariosto was “translated” so often. Petrarch indeed was rather pirated than “translated,” for his right arm was stolen from his sepulchre at Arquà for the Florentines, and the rest of him is now supposed to be in Madrid—a town which also holds that monarch of sanctity, Francesco di Borja, likewise minus an arm, for the Gesù of Rome kept back that precious morsel of the Duke who had entered the kingdom of heaven by the rare gate of abdication.
But stranger than these mutations of mortality is the fact that Italy holds the ashes of our Shelley and Keats, as it held so much of the life of Byron and Browning. As if Rome had not riches and memories to super-satiety! A Protestant cemetery seems indeed out of key as much with these poets as with Rome, but that overshadowing Pyramid of Cestius restores the exotic touch, and violets and daisies blot out all but the religion of beauty, so that Shelley could write: “It might make me in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.” It is pleasant to think that only a year later Shelley, however exiguous his ashes, found in that sweet place the rest and re-union for which his _cor cordium_ yearned.
“’Tis Adonais calls! oh hasten thither, No more let life divide what Death can join together.”
With what a wonderful coast Shelley has mingled his memory—fig-trees, olives, palms, cactus, hawthorn, pines bent seaward, all running down the steep cliff. What enchanting harmonies they make with the glimpses of sea deep below, the white villages and campaniles, seen through their magic tangle. As you pass through the sunny dusty village roads, the girls seem to ripen out of the earth like grapes, both white and black, for there are golden-haired blondes as well as sun-kissed brunettes. They walk bare-footed, with water-jars poised on their heads, sometimes balancing great russet bundles of hay. And the old peasant women with Dantesque features sit spinning or lace-making at the doors of their cottages, as they have sat these three thousand years, without growing a wrinkle the more, if indeed there was ever room for another wrinkle on their dear corrugated faces. What earth lore as of aged oaks they must have sucked in during all these centuries!
It is here that one understands the Paganism of d’Annunzio, whose soul lies suffused in these sparkling infinities of sun and sea and sky, whose marmoreal language is woven from the rhythmic movement and balance of these sculptural bodies.
Viareggio, which holds Shelley’s monument, is a place of strange twisted plane-trees. The Piazza Shelley is a simple quiet square of low houses fronting a leafy garden and the sea. It leads out, curiously enough, from the Via Machiavelli. There is a bronze bust, which admirers cover with laurel, and an inscription which represents him as meditating here a final page to “Prometheus Unbound.” (Baedeker, comically mis-translating “una pagina postrema,” represents him as meditating “a posthumous page”!)
Not here, however, but in La Pineta is the place to muse upon Shelley. It is a thick, sandy pinewood with an avenue of planes. The pines are staggering about in all directions, drunk with wind and sun. Very silent was it as I sat here on a spring evening, watching the rosy clouds over the low hills and the mottled sunset over the sea. The birds ventured scarcely a twitter; they knew they could not vie with Shelley’s skylark.
Shelley’s epitaph in the Roman cemetery is like a soft music at the end of a Shakespeare tragedy.
“Nothing of me that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.”
What a curious and pacifying fusion of poetry and wit! It reconciles us to the passing back of this cosmic spirit into the elements by way of water. But what a jarring perpetuation of the world’s noises on the tombstone of Keats!
“This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who on his death-bed, in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious powers of his enemies, desired these words to be engraven on his tombstone: ‘Here lies one whose name was written in water.’”
Water again! But water as chaos and devourer. How ill all this turbulence accords with the marble serenity of his fame, a fame that so far as pure poetry is concerned stands side by side with Shakespeare’s! We are a good way now from the twenty-fourth of February, eighteen hundred and twenty-one. A few years more and Keats will have been silent a hundred years, and we know that his nightingale will sing for ever. What profits it, then, to prolong this mortuary bitterness, to hang this dirty British linen on the Roman grave? The museum is the place for this tombstone—I could whisk it thither like the Doge Pesaro’s wall. Will it save the next great poet from the malice of his enemies? Will they speak a dagger less? Not a bodkin! The next great poet, being great and a poet, will appeal in novel and unforeseeable ways, and be as little read and as harshly reviewed as the marvellous boy of Hampstead whose death at twenty-five is the greatest loss English literature has ever sustained. Were it not fittest, therefore, to celebrate the centenary of this death by changing his epitaph for a line of “Adonais”?—
“He lives, he wakes; ’tis Death is dead, not he.”
The tragedy of Keats is sufficiently commemorated in Shelley’s preface and in the pages of literary history and in the doggerel of Byron.
“‘Who killed John Keats?’ ‘I,’ says the _Quarterly_, So savage and Tartarly ’Twas one of my feats.”
And Byron lamented and marvelled
“That the soul, that very fiery particle, Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.”
I do not share this discontent. To be snuffed out by an article is precisely the only dignified ending for a soul. This dualism of body and spirit which has been foisted upon us has degradations enough even in health. No union was ever worse assorted than this marriage of inconvenience by which a body with boorish tastes and disgusting habits is chained to an intelligent and fastidious soul. No wonder their relations are strained. Such cohabitation is scarcely legitimate. Were they only to keep their places, a reasonable _modus vivendi_ might be patched up. The things of the spirit could exercise causation in the sphere of the spirit, and the things of the body would be restricted to their corporeal circle. But alas! the partners, like most married couples, interfere with each other and intrude on each other’s domain. Body and soul transfuse and percolate each other. Too much philosophising makes the liver sluggish, and a toothache tampers with philosophy. Despair slackens the blood and wine runs to eloquence. Body or soul cannot even die of its own infirmity; the twain must arrange a _modus moriendi_, each consenting to collapse of the other’s disease. Thus a body in going order may be stilled by a stroke of bad news, and a spiritual essence may pass away through a pox.
Think of the most powerful of the Popes, the head of Christendom, the excommunicator of the Kings of France and Spain, having to succumb to a fever; think of the great French writer, in whose brain the whole modern world mirrored itself, having to die of a gas from which even his dog recovered; think of the giant German philosopher, who had announced the starry infinitude of the moral law, degenerating into the imbecile who must tie and untie his necktie many times a minute. Surely it were worthier of man’s estate had Innocent III perished of an argument in favour of lay investiture, had Zola been snuffed out by an anti-Dreyfusard pamphlet or a romantic poem, had Kant succumbed to the scornful epigram of Herder, or even to the barkings of the priests’ dogs who had been given his name. And far worthier were it of a poet to die of a review than of a jaundice, of a criticism than a consumption. Infinitely more dignified was the death of Keats under the _Quarterly_ than the death of Byron himself under a fever, which some trace to a microbe, itself possibly injected by a mosquito. That were an unpardonable oversight of Dame Nature, who in her democratic enthusiasm forgets that mosquitos are not men’s equals, and that these admirable insects should be blooded more economically. Assuredly the author of “The Vision of Judgment” would have preferred to die of a stanza or a sting-tailed epigram.
Dame Nature had the last word; but was Byron, foreseeing her crushing repartee, so absolutely unjustified in his criticisms and questionings of a Power that held him as lightly as the parasite on the hind leg of any of the fifty thousand species of beetles? For if Fate treads with equal foot on a Byron and a beetle, the bard may be forgiven if he takes it less christianly than the coleopteron.
Byron is “cheap” to-day in England, and while Greece celebrates the centenary of his arrival and Crete calls on his name, while Italy is full of his glory, his hotels and his piazzas, while Genoa is proud that he lived in _Il Paradiso_ and the Armenian Monastery at Venice still cherishes the memory of his sojourn there to learn Armenian, and every spot he trod is similarly sacred, the Puritan critic reminds us that
“The gods approve The depth and not the tumult of the soul.”
Yes, we know, but when a poet is disapproving of the gods their standards matter less. And we are men, not gods, that their standards should be ours. _Humani sumus_, and nothing of Byron’s passion and pain can be alien from us. This tumult of the soul, who has escaped it? Not Wordsworth, assuredly, who wrote those lines. Only the fool hath _not_ said in his heart, “There is no God.” Even Cardinal Manning said it on his death-bed. Not that death-bed conversions are worth anything. Matthew Arnold was apt to give us Wordsworth as the reposeful contrast to the bold, bad Byron. But the calmness of Wordsworth is only in his style, and if his questionings are cast in bronze, they were often forged in the same furnace as Byron’s, and fused through and through with the pain
“Of all this unintelligible world.”
Poets, even the austere, have to learn in suffering what they teach in song. Only the suffering is always so much clearer than what it teaches them. And then, as Heine says, comes Death, and with a clod of earth gags the mouth that sings and cries and questions.
“Aber ist Das eine Antwort?”
VARIATIONS ON A THEME
Among these multitudinous _Madonnas_, and countless _Crucifixions_, and _Entombments_ innumerable, who shall dare award the palm for nobility of conception? But there is a minor theme of Renaissance Art as to which I do not hesitate. It is the _Pietà_ theme, but with angels replacing or supplementing the Madonna who cherishes the dead Christ, and it is significant that the finest treatment of it I have seen comes from the greatest craftsman who treated it—to wit, Giovanni Bellini. His _Cristo Sorretto da Angioli_ you will find painted on wood—a _tavola_—in the Palazzo Communale of Rimini. The Christ lies limp but tranquil, in the peace, not the rigidity, of death, and four little angels stand by, one of them half hidden by the dead figure. The exquisite appeal of this picture, the uniqueness of the conception, lies in the sweet sorrow of the little angels—a sorrow as of a dog or a child that cannot fathom the greatness of the tragedy, only knows dumbly that here is matter for sadness. The little angels regard the wounds with grave infantile concern. Sacred tragedy is here fused with idyllic poetry in a manner to which I know no parallel in any other painter. The sweet perfection of Giovanni Bellini, too suave for the grim central theme of Christianity, here finds triumphant and enchanting justification.
It is perhaps worth while tracing how every other painter’s handling of the theme that I have chanced on fails to reach this lyric pathos.
Bellini himself did not perhaps quite reach it again, though he reaches very noble heights in two pictures (one now in London and the other in Berlin), in which the reduction in the number of angels to two makes even for enhancement of the restful simplicity, while in the Berlin picture there is a touching intimacy of uncomprehending consolation in the pressing of the little angelic cheeks against the dead face. But the fact that in both pictures one angel seems to understand more or to be more exercised than the other contributes a disturbing complicacy. The serene unity is, indeed, preserved by Bellini in his _Pietà_ in the Museo Correr of Venice. But here the three young angels supporting the body are merely at peace—there is nothing of that sweet wistfulness.
For a contrary reason the woodland flavour is equally absent from its neighbour, a picture by an unknown painter of the Paduan school. Here the peace is exchanged, not for poetry but tragedy. The Christ is erect in his tomb, and the two haloed baby angels who uphold his arms are the one weeping, the other horror-struck. The horror is accentuated and the poetry still further lessened in an anonymous painting in a chapel of S. Anastasia in Verona, where boy angels are positively roaring with grief. Nor is the poetry augmented in that other anonymous painting in the Palazzo Ducale of Venice, where one angel kisses the dead hand and the other the blood-stained linen at the foot. In Girolamo da Treviso’s picture in the Brera one child angel examines the bloody palm and the other lifts up the drooping left arm with its little frock. Great round tears run down their faces, which are swollen and ugly with grief. Still more tragic, even to grotesquerie, is an old fresco fragment in an underground church in Brescia, where the little angels are catching the sacred blood in cups—those cups invented by Perugino and borrowed even by Raphael. Francesco Bissolo, in the Academy of Venice, preserves the tranquillity of Bellini, but by making the angels older loses not only the seductive _naïveté_ but the whole naturalness, for these angels are old enough to know better, one feels. They have no right to such callousness. Raphael’s father in his picture in the cathedral of Urbino escapes this pitfall, for his adult angels bend solicitously over the Christ and support his arms from above. But Lorenzo Lotto, though he gives us innocent child-angels, tumbles into an analogous trap, for he forgets that by adding a Madonna and a Magdalen in bitter tears he transforms these untroubled little angels into little devils, who have not even the curiosity to wonder what in heaven’s name their mortal elders are weeping over. In Cariani’s so-called _Deposizione_ at Ravenna one little angel does weep in imitation of the mortals, leaning his wet cheek on the Christ’s dead hand—“tears such as angels weep”—but he only repeats the human tragedy, and might as well be a little boy. Two older angels howl and grimace in Marco Zoppo’s picture in the Palazzo Almerici of Pesaro, while the haloed, long-ringleted head of the Christ droops with slightly open mouth and a strange smile as provoking as Mona Lisa’s. Francia in the National Gallery gives us a red-eyed Madonna with one calm and one compassionate angel, and Zaganelli in the Brera vies with Bellini in the vague, tender wonderment of the child angels who lift up the arms, but the picture is second-rate and the angels are little girls with bare arms and puffed sleeves. Nor is it a happy innovation to show us the legs of the Christ sprawling across the tomb.
Marco Palmezzano, with inferior beauty, also trenches on Bellini’s ground; but not only is the Christ sitting up, not quite dead, but one of the two child angels is calling out as for aid, so that the restful finality of Bellini is vanished. Still nearer to the Bellini idea approaches a picture in the Academy of Venice attributed to Marco Basaiti and an unknown Lombardian. But if this avoids tragedy, the turn is too much in the direction of comedy. The child angels are made still more infantine, so that there is neither horror nor even perturbation, merely a shade of surprise at so passive a figure. One plays with the Christ’s hair, the other with his feet—the Blake-like tenderness is not absent, but the poetry of this utter unconsciousness is not so penetrating as the wistful yearning of the Bellini angels before some dim, unsounded ocean of tragedy. This precise note I did, indeed, once catch in a corner of Domenichino’s _Madonna del Rosario_, where a baby surveys the crown of thorns; but this is just a side-show in a joyous, thickly populated picture, and the Christ is not dead, but a live _bambino_, who showers down roses on the lower world of martyrdom and sorrow.
He is almost too dead in the fading fresco of the little low-vaulted, whitewashed, ancient church of S. Maria Infra Portas in Foligno. A great gash mutilates his side, his head, horribly fallen back, lies on the Madonna’s lap, his legs and arms droop. The mother’s long hair hangs down from her halo, she clasps her hands in agony, and a child angel on either side looks on commiseratingly. Strange to say, this conserves the poetry, despite the horror, though the horror removes it out of comparison with Bellini’s handling.