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.
There is a very interesting subterranean church here: the roof
supported by marble pillars, behind each of which there seemed to
be at least one beggar in ambush: to say nothing of the tombs and
secluded altars. From every one of these lurking-places, such
crowds of phantom-looking men and women, leading other men and
women with twisted limbs, or chattering jaws, or paralytic
gestures, or idiotic heads, or some other sad infirmity, came
hobbling out to beg, that if the ruined frescoes in the cathedral
above, had been suddenly animated, and had retired to this lower
church, they could hardly have made a greater confusion, or
exhibited a more confounding display of arms and legs.
There is Petrarch's Monument, too; and there is the Baptistery,
with its beautiful arches and immense font; and there is a gallery
containing some very remarkable pictures, whereof a few were being
copied by hairy-faced artists, with little velvet caps more off
their heads than on. There is the Farnese Palace, too; and in it
one of the dreariest spectacles of decay that ever was seen--a
grand, old, gloomy theatre, mouldering away.
It is a large wooden structure, of the horse-shoe shape; the lower
seats arranged upon the Roman plan, but above them, great heavy
chambers; rather than boxes, where the Nobles sat, remote in their
proud state. Such desolation as has fallen on this theatre,
enhanced in the spectator's fancy by its gay intention and design,
none but worms can be familiar with. A hundred and ten years have
passed, since any play was acted here. The sky shines in through
the gashes in the roof; the boxes are dropping down, wasting away,
and only tenanted by rats; damp and mildew smear the faded colours,
and make spectral maps upon the panels; lean rags are dangling down
where there were gay festoons on the Proscenium; the stage has
rotted so, that a narrow wooden gallery is thrown across it, or it
would sink beneath the tread, and bury the visitor in the gloomy
depth beneath. The desolation and decay impress themselves on all
the senses. The air has a mouldering smell, and an earthy taste;
any stray outer sounds that straggle in with some lost sunbeam, are
muffled and heavy; and the worm, the maggot, and the rot have
changed the surface of the wood beneath the touch, as time will
seam and roughen a smooth hand.
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