The Guide, To Whom We Had Fallen In The Absence Of Our French-Speaking
Guide Of The Day Before, Spoke A Little English, And He Seemed To Grow
In Sympathetic Intelligence As The Morning Passed.
He made our
sightseeing include visits to the church of St. John of God, and the
church of San Geronimo, which was built by Gonsalvo de Cordova, the
Great Captain, and remains now a memorial to him.
We rang at the door,
and after long delay a woman came and let us into an interior stranger
ever than her being there as custodian. It was frescoed from floor to
ceiling everywhere, except the places of the altars now kept by the
painted _retablos_ and the tombs and the statues of the various saints
and heroes. The _retablo_ of the high altar is almost more beautiful
than wonderful, but the chief glory of the place is in the kneeling
figures of the Great Captain and his wife, one on either side of the
altar, and farther away the effigies of his famous oompanions-in-arms,
and on the walls above their heraldic blazons and his. The church Was
unfinished when the Great Captain died in the displeasure of his
ungrateful king, and its sumptuous completion testifies to the devotion
of his wife and her taste in choosing the best artists for the work.
I have still the sense of a noonday quiet that lingered with us after we
left this church and which seemed to go with us to the Hospital of St.
John of God, founded, with other hospitals, by the pious Portuguese,
who, after a life of good works, took this name on his well-merited
canonization.
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