e sort we did thus
approach it, and as we looked at the gracious floating figures of the
heavenly company through the apertures of the dome, they did seem to
adopt us and make us part of the painting. But the tremendous depth,
over which they drifted so lightly, it dizzied us to look into; and
I am not certain that I should counsel travellers to repeat our
experience. Where still perfect, the fresco can only gain from
close inspection,--it is painted with such exquisite and jealous
perfection,--yet the whole effect is now better from below, for the
decay is less apparent; and besides, life is short, and the stairway
by which one ascends to the dome is in every way too exigent. It is
with the most astounding sense of contrast that you pass from the
Assumption to the contemplation of that other famous roof frescoed by
Correggio, in the Monastero di San Paolo. You might almost touch
the ceiling with your hand, it hovers so low with its counterfeit of
vine-clambered trellis-work, and its pretty boys looking roguishly
through the embowering leaves. It is altogether the loveliest room
in the world; and if the Diana in her car on the chimney is truly a
portrait of the abbess for whom the chamber was decorated, she was
altogether worthy of it, and one is glad to think of her enjoying life
in the fashion amiably permitted to nuns in the fifteenth century.
What curious scenes the gayety of this little chamber conjures up, and
what a vivid comment it is upon the age and people that produced it!
This is one of the things that makes a single hour of travel worth
whole years of historic study, and which casts its light upon all
future reading. Here, no doubt, the sweet little abbess, with the
noblest and prettiest of her nuns about her, received the polite
world, and made a cheerful thing of devotion, while all over
transalpine Europe the sour-hearted Reformers were destroying pleasant
monasteries like this. The light-hearted lady-nuns and their gentlemen
friends looked on heresy as a deadly sin, and they had little reason
to regard it with favor. It certainly made life harder for them in
time, for it made reform within the Church as well as without, so that
at last the lovely Chamber of St. Paul was closed against the public
for more than two centuries.

All Parma is full of Correggio, as Venice is of Titian and Tintoretto,
as Naples of Spagnoletto, as Mantua of Giulio Romano, as Vicenza of
Palladio, as Bassano of Da Ponte, as Bolo