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Every Professor of Christianity—traditional, or conscientious-whether his creed adopts the sign for the Substance, or the Substance for the sign, must turn with complacency-perhaps with veneration, from Temples dedicated to volup tuous Deities, and exterminating Heroes, to a Church of which the foundations were laid in the Fourth Century-by the Survivors of the Tenth Persecution -for the worship of a meek, and selfdenying Saviour!

LETTER XI.

A

The Appendages of St. Peter's.

BOVE the principal Gate of the

Portico, and beneath the elevated Balcony, from which are pronounced, over kneeling Multitudes, the benedictions, and the anathemas, of the Tiara; and upon the bronze enclosure of the Chair of St. Peter, at the west end of the Nave, are exquisitely embossed, in brass and marble, the story of the Great Shepherd, charging Peter to feed his Sheep, and that of his presenting him with the keys of the Kingdom; when the well known allusion was made to the

name

name of the Apostle, as also signifying

a stone.

Pretended Infallibility might blush for its literal construction of the equivocal epithet, on recurring to the Patriarchal prediction of the Stone of Israel * the Prophetic anticipation of the Royal Psalmist, that the Stone, which the Builders would reject, should become the Head of the Corner; or the promise of the God of Abraham, by the mouth of the Evangelical Prophet, "Behold I lay in Zion, for a Foundation, a Stone-a tried Stone-a precious Corner Stone."

If however by this sublime annunciation, concurring Prophets can be supposed to have proclaimed the Apostle,

let

*Genesis xlix. 24.

let the Apostle himself explain the Prophets: "Be it known unto you

you all (said Peter to the unbelieving Jews) "that Jesus Christ, of Nazareth, whom "God raised from the Dead, is the Stone "which was set at nought of you Build

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ers, which is become the Head of the "Corner."*

AMONG the innumerable Monuments of Art with which St. Peter's abounds, in Painting and Sculpture, the most remarkable are the Transfiguration-of Raphael, the Communion-of Domenichino, and the St. Petronilla-of Guercino da Cento.

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Acts iv. 10, II.

These

These celebrated Masterpieces are here exquisitely copied from the Originals, in Mosaic-work, a species of colouring which consists of square pieces of marble, or composition, so perfectly arranged, that at the distance of a few feet, it can only be distinguished from Paintings in oil by the marble gloss, that renders the colours more vivid.

Each of them contains fifteen or twenty Figures, larger than the life, in a pannel fifteen feet wide, and five and twenty high.

I have mentioned them in the order in which they are usually esteemed at Rome, which is the scale of their respective Authors, in the estimation of Italian Connoisseurs: but Foreign taste,

regardless

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