An artist, it is true, might often thank his stars for those old houses,

so picturesquely time-stained, and with the plaster falling in blotches

from the ancient brick-work. The prison-like, iron-barred windows, and

the wide arched, dismal entrance, admitting on one hand to the stable,

on the other to the kitchen, might impress him as far better worth

his pencil than the newly painted pine boxes, in which--if he be an

American--his countrymen live and thrive. But there is reason to suspect

that a people are waning to decay and ruin the moment that their life

becomes fascinating either in the poet's imagination or the painter's

eye.

As usual on Italian waysides, the wanderers passed great, black crosses,

hung with all the instruments of the sacred agony and passion: there

were the crown of thorns, the hammer and nails, the pincers, the spear,

the sponge; and perched over the whole, the cock that crowed to St.

Peter's remorseful conscience. Thus, while the fertile scene showed the

never-failing beneficence of the Creator towards man in his transitory

state, these symbols reminded each wayfarer of the Saviour's infinitely

greater love for him as an immortal spirit. Beholding these consecrated

stations, the idea seemed to strike Donatello of converting the

otherwise aimless journey into a penitential pilgrimage. At each of them

he alighted to kneel and kiss the cross, and humbly press his forehead

against its foot; and this so invariably, that the sculptor soon learned

to draw bridle of his own accord. It may be, too, heretic as he was,

that Kenyon likewise put up a prayer, rendered more fervent by the

symbols before his eyes, for the peace of his friend's conscience and

the pardon of the sin that so oppressed him.

Not only at the crosses did Donatello kneel, but at each of the many

shrines, where the Blessed Virgin in fresco--faded with sunshine and

half washed out with showers--looked benignly at her worshipper; or

where she was represented in a wooden image, or a bas-relief of plaster

or marble, as accorded with the means of the devout person who built,

or restored from a mediaeval antiquity, these places of wayside worship.

They were everywhere: under arched niches, or in little penthouses with

a brick tiled roof just large enough to shelter them; or perhaps in

some bit of old Roman masonry, the founders of which had died before the

Advent; or in the wall of a country inn or farmhouse; or at the midway

point of a bridge; or in the shallow cavity of a natural rock; or high

upward in the deep cuts of the road. It appeared to the sculptor that

Donatello prayed the more earnestly and the more hopefully at these

shrines, because the mild face of the Madonna promised him to intercede

as a tender mother betwixt the poor culprit and the awfulness of

judgment.




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