The next picture has been terribly damaged, and it is difficult to
understand the subject; but a learned gentleman of Perugia, to whom we
are indebted for various most ingenious suggestions, fancies that it is
simply the representation of some miracle of healing performed by the
Saint in Rome; certainly Bonfigli has striven to combine in his
background a marvellous mixture of Roman and Etruscan architecture, the
arch of Constantine mingling with Porta Susanna and the Colosseum!
The following fresco is perhaps the most delightful of the series. It
represents the burial of the Bishop of Toulouse. Now S. Louis is known
to have died in his father's castle of Brignolles in Provence at the
early age of twenty-four, but all this was of very secondary importance
to the ingenuous Bonfigli. It was sufficient for him to know that a dead
Bishop had to be painted. He selected the architecture that he loved
best--his own Perugian church of S. Pietro--he sliced it in half so that
all might look inside it, and on a bier in the centre of the aisle he
laid the corpse of a quite middle-aged Bishop. With infinite care and
faithful precision he copied the lines of his church. The true basilica
is here, not touched at all by decoration. There was no choir in those
days; a dark blue sky looks in at the windows, the roof is bare with all
its rafters showing. But the central figure is out of all proportion.
The feet and the head of S. Louis of Toulouse almost touch the columns
in the aisle. His robe, with the golden fleur de lis, is neatly folded
round him, his mitre glistens in the light; his face is grey and calm,
and full of dignity and of repose. Bonfigli had a sense of humour and
could not refrain from a touch of caricature. It is impossible to look
at the group of monks and prelates round S. Louis, and not to feel at
once convinced of this. A fat and pompous Bishop, in golden cope and
mitre, is saying the mass for the dead. His large red book is supported
by the head of a kneeling friar, and the very thumbs of this friar
express his disgust and discomfort. To the left of the Bishop a group of
roaring monks take up his words and repeat them in dolorous voices. Only
to look at their faces one knows that their litany is absolutely out of
tune. At the head of the Saint another priest is reading in a book, his
acolytes swing incense, one holds the Bishop's staff. The rest of the
church is filled with quiet groups of men and women; and the most
charming figure of the whole is that of a young man in a red gown with a
shock of yellow curls, who kneels, lost in prayer, at the knees of the
dead Saint, his back turned to us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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