Carthusian, very fine--but the figure of the Madonna is the prize they
value, and before this I did see some men kneel with a truly idolatrous
devotion. That it was painted by St. Luke is believed by them all. But
if it _was_ painted by St. Luke, said I, what then? do you think _he_,
or the still more excellent person it was done for, would approve of
your worshipping any thing but God? To this no answer was made; and I
thought one man looked as if he had grace enough to be ashamed of
himself.

The girls, who sit in clusters at the chapel doors as one goes up,
singing hymns in praise of the Virgin Mary, pleased me much, as it was
a mode of veneration inoffensive to religion, and agreeable to the
fancy; but seeing them bow down to that black figure, in open defiance
of the Decalogue, shocked me. Why all the _very very_ early pictures of
the Virgin, and many of our blessed Saviour himself, done in the first
ages of Christianity should be _black_, or at least tawny, is to me
wholly incomprehensible, nor could I ever yet obtain an explanation of
its cause from men of learning or from connoisseurs.

We have in England a black Madonna, very ancient of course, and of
immense value, in the cathedral of Wells in Somersetshire; it is painted
on glass, and stands in the middle pane of the upper window I think, is
a profile face, and eminently handsome. My mind tells me that I have
seen another somewhere in Great Britain, but cannot recollect the spot,
unless it were Arundel Castle in Sussex, but I am not sure: none was
ever painted so since the days of Pietro Perugino I believe, so their
antiquity is unquestionable: he and his few contemporaries drew her
white, as Sir Joshua Reynolds and Pompeio Battoni.

Whilst I perambulated the palaces of the Bolognese nobility, gloomy
though spacious, and melancholy though splendid, I could not but admire
at Richardson's judgment when he makes his beautiful Bigot, his
interesting Clementina, an inhabitant of superstitious Bologna. The
unconquerable attachment she shews to original prejudices, and the
horror of what she has been taught to consider as heresy, could scarcely
have been attributed so happily to the dweller in any town but this:
where I hear nothing but the sound of people saying their rosaries, and
see nothing in the street but people telling their beads. The Porretta
palace is hourly presenting itself to my imagination, which delights in
the assurance that genius cannot be conf