lues and lilacs, and a return
also to his niminy-piminy lines, to all the wax-doll world of the missal
painter. The fine fresco of St. Dominick at the foot of the cross, which
seems to constitute an exception to this rule, really goes to prove it,
since it is intended to be seen very much like the cell frescoes: white
and black on a blue ground at the end of the first corridor, a thing
to be looked at from a great distance, to impress the lay world that
sees it at the cloister and from outside the convent railing. The cell
frescoes are, I have said, the most exclusively religious paintings in
the world, since they are to the highest degree, what all absolutely
pious art must be, _aids to devotion_. Their use is to assist the monk
in that conjuring up of the actual momentary feelings, nay, sensations,
of the life of Christ which is part of his daily duty. They are such
stimuli as the Church has given sometimes in an artistic, sometimes in a
literary form, to an imagination jaded by the monotonous contemplation
of one subject, or overexcited to the extent of rambling easily to
another: they are what we fondly imagine will be the portraits of the
dear dead which we place before us, forgetting that after a while we
look without seeing, or see without feeling. That this is so, that these
painted Gospel leaves stuck on the cell walls are merely such mechanical
aids to devotion, explains the curious and startling treatment of
some of the subjects, which are yet, despite the seeming novelty and
impressiveness, very cold, undramatic, and unimaginative. Thus, there
is the fresco of Christ enthroned, blindfold, with alongside of Him a
bodiless scoffing head, with hat raised, and in the act of spitting;
buffeting hands, equally detached from any body, floating also on the
blue background. There is a Christ standing at the foot of the cross,
but with his feet in a sarcophagus, the column of the flagellation
monumentally or heraldically on one side, the lance of Longinus on the
other; and above, to the right, the floating face of Christ being kissed
by that of Judas; to the left the blindfold floating head of Christ again,
with the floating head of a soldier spitting at Him; and all round
buffeting and jibing hands, hands holding the sceptre of reed, and
hands counting out money; all arranged very much like the nails, hammer,
tweezers and cock on roadside crosses; each a thing whereon to fix
the mind, so as to realise that kiss of Juda