In the Palazzo Giovanelli there is one of the loveliest of
Giorgiones. It is called “His Family,” and it represents a beautiful
nude woman with her child and her lover. It seemed to me an outrage
that this young brother should know nothing of the world, of life. I
was determined that he should see this picture. I think I expected
Brother Leo to be shocked when he saw it. I know I was surprised
that he looked at it—at the serene content of earth, its exquisite
ultimate satisfaction—a long time. Then he said in an awed voice:
“It is so beautiful that it is strange any one in all the world can
doubt the love of God who gave it.”
“Have you ever seen anything more beautiful; do you believe there is
anything more beautiful?” I asked rather cruelly.
“Yes,” said Brother Leo, very quietly; “the love of God is more
beautiful, only that cannot be painted.”
After that I showed him no more pictures, nor did I try to make him
understand life. I had an idea that he understood it already rather
better than I did.
When I took him back to the piazza, it was getting on toward sunset,
and we sat at one of the little tables at Florian’s, where I drank
coffee. We heard the band and watched the slow-moving, good-natured
Venetian crowd, and the pigeons winging their perpetual flight.
All the light of the gathered day seemed to fall on the great golden
church at the end of the piazza. Brother Leo did not look at it very
much; his attention was taken up completely in watching the faces of
the crowd, and as he watched them I thought to read in his face what
he had learned in that one day in Venice—whether my mission had been
a success or a failure; but, though I looked long at that simple and
childlike face, I learned nothing.
What is so mysterious as the eyes of a child?
But I was not destined to part from Brother Leo wholly in ignorance.
It was as if, in his open kindliness of nature, he would not leave
me with any unspoken puzzle between us. I had been his friend and he
told me, because it was the way things seemed to him, that I had
been his teacher.
We stood on the piazzetta. I had hired a gondola with two men to row
him back; the water was like beaten gold, and the horizon the
softest shade of pink.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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