Pictures From Italy | Page 8

on the altar
furniture; and it looked as bright and cheerful as need be.
Going apart, in this church, to see some painting which was being
executed in fresco by a French artist and his pupil, I was led to observe
more closely than I might otherwise have done, a great number of
votive offerings with which the walls of the different chapels were
profusely hung. I will not say decorated, for they were very roughly
and comically got up; most likely by poor sign- painters, who eke out
their living in that way. They were all little pictures: each representing
some sickness or calamity from which the person placing it there, had
escaped, through the interposition of his or her patron saint, or of the
Madonna; and I may refer to them as good specimens of the class
generally. They are abundant in Italy.
In a grotesque squareness of outline, and impossibility of perspective,
they are not unlike the woodcuts in old books; but they were
oil-paintings, and the artist, like the painter of the Primrose family, had
not been sparing of his colours. In one, a lady was having a toe
amputated--an operation which a saintly personage had sailed into the
room, upon a couch, to superintend. In another, a lady was lying in bed,
tucked up very tight and prim, and staring with much composure at a
tripod, with a slop-basin on it; the usual form of washing-stand, and the
only piece of furniture, besides the bedstead, in her chamber. One
would never have supposed her to be labouring under any complaint,
beyond the inconvenience of being miraculously wide awake, if the
painter had not hit upon the idea of putting all her family on their knees
in one corner, with their legs sticking out behind them on the floor, like
boot-trees. Above whom, the Virgin, on a kind of blue divan, promised

to restore the patient. In another case, a lady was in the very act of
being run over, immediately outside the city walls, by a sort of
piano-forte van. But the Madonna was there again. Whether the
supernatural appearance had startled the horse (a bay griffin), or
whether it was invisible to him, I don't know; but he was galloping
away, ding dong, without the smallest reverence or compunction. On
every picture 'Ex voto' was painted in yellow capitals in the sky.
Though votive offerings were not unknown in Pagan Temples, and are
evidently among the many compromises made between the false
religion and the true, when the true was in its infancy, I could wish that
all the other compromises were as harmless. Gratitude and Devotion
are Christian qualities; and a grateful, humble, Christian spirit may
dictate the observance.
Hard by the cathedral stands the ancient Palace of the Popes, of which
one portion is now a common jail, and another a noisy barrack: while
gloomy suites of state apartments, shut up and deserted, mock their
own old state and glory, like the embalmed bodies of kings. But we
neither went there, to see state rooms, nor soldiers' quarters, nor a
common jail, though we dropped some money into a prisoners' box
outside, whilst the prisoners, themselves, looked through the iron bars,
high up, and watched us eagerly. We went to see the ruins of the
dreadful rooms in which the Inquisition used to sit.
A little, old, swarthy woman, with a pair of flashing black eyes,-- proof
that the world hadn't conjured down the devil within her, though it had
had between sixty and seventy years to do it in,-- came out of the
Barrack Cabaret, of which she was the keeper, with some large keys in
her hands, and marshalled us the way that we should go. How she told
us, on the way, that she was a Government Officer (concierge du palais
a apostolique), and had been, for I don't know how many years; and
how she had shown these dungeons to princes; and how she was the
best of dungeon demonstrators; and how she had resided in the palace
from an infant,--had been born there, if I recollect right,--I needn't
relate. But such a fierce, little, rapid, sparkling, energetic she-devil I
never beheld. She was alight and flaming, all the time. Her action was

violent in the extreme. She never spoke, without stopping expressly for
the purpose. She stamped her feet, clutched us by the arms, flung
herself into attitudes, hammered against walls with her keys, for mere
emphasis: now whispered as if the Inquisition were there still: now
shrieked as if she were on the rack herself; and had a mysterious,
hag-like way with her forefinger, when approaching the remains of
some new horror--looking back and walking stealthily, and making
horrible grimaces--that might alone have qualified her to walk up