Domitilla, there is a _cubiculum_ adorned with the finest stucco, on which a pencil more skilled in pagan than in Christian painting has drawn landscapes and figures that remind you of the houses at Pompeii and Herculaneum, rather than of the paintings of the catacombs. Compared even with these, our fresco loses nothing, but, if anything, surpasses them in composition and design. "Hence", concludes our author, "the painting in the cemetery of Priscilla, compared with those paintings, the date of which is more or less determined, is found to be as beautiful and valuable as the very oldest of them, or even more so; and allowing that some portion of its merit belongs to the artist and not to the period, we must still conclude that it is cotemporary with the very origin of Christian painting, or at least very little distant from it. In a word, the painting belongs to the period of the Flavii and of the preaching of the Apostles, or to that immediately following, namely, the period of Trajan (A.D. 98), of Hadrian (A.D. 117), and at the latest of the first Antonines" (A.D. 138). The truth of this result is confirmed on the application of the other tests mentioned above: by the style of the other ornaments of the place, which being in relief are never found in a crypt of the third century; by the history of the cemetery, which is clearly proved to have been the place of burial of the Christian family of Pudens, the first of whom were cotemporary with the Apostles; by the topography, for the spot where the painting exists was the very centre of the excavation; by the style of the inscriptions around it, which are of the most ancient form, and almost apostolical. All these arguments, taken together, are invincible, and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this beautiful painting of our Blessed Lady was traced almost beneath the eyes of the Apostles themselves. FOOTNOTES: [32] _Lives of the early Italian Painters._ By Mrs. Jameson, p. 2. [33] Ibid., pag. 4.