rld, as new as the poetry of Spenser had been, at any
rate, and with much of his gravity and sweet melancholy or pensiveness,
in those magnificent portraits of the Genoese nobility which time and
fools have so sadly misused. And as though to confirm us in this thought
of him, we may see, as it were, the story of his development during this
journey to the south in the sketch-book in the possession of the Duke of
Devonshire. Here, amid any number of sketches, thoughts as it were that
Titian has suggested, or Giorgione evoked, we see the very dawn of all
that we have come to consider as especially his own. We may understand
how the pride and boisterous magnificence of Rubens came to seem a
little insistent a little stupid too, beside Leonardo's Virgin and Child
with St. Anne now in the Louvre, which he notes in Milan, or that Last
Supper which is now but a shadow on the wall of S. Maria delle Grazie.
And above all, we may see how the true splendour of Titian exposes the
ostentation of Rubens, as the sun will make even the greatest fire look
dingy and boastful. Gradually Vandyck, shy and of a quiet, serene
spirit, becomes aware of this, and, led by the immeasurable glory of the
Venetians, slowly escapes from that "Flemish manner" to be master of
himself; so that, after he has painted in the manner of Titian at
Palermo, he returns to Genoa to begin that wonderful series of
masterpieces we all know, in which he has immortalised the tragedy of a
king, the sorrowful beauty, frail and lovely as a violet, of Henrietta
Maria, and the fate of the Princes of England. And though many of the
pictures he painted in Genoa are dispersed, and many spoiled, some few
remain to tell us of his passing. One, a Christ and the Pharisees, is in
the Palazzo Bianco, not far from Palazzo Rosso, on the opposite side of
the Via Garibaldi. But here there is a fine Rubens too; a Gerard David,
very like the altar-piece at Rouen; a good Ruysdael, with some
characteristic Spanish pictures by Zurbaran, Ribera, and Murillo; and
while the Italian pictures are negligible, though some paintings and
drawings of the Genoese school may interest us in passing, it is
characteristic of Genoa that our interest in this collection should be
with the foreign work there.

As you leave Via Garibaldi and pass down Via Cairoli, on your left you
pass Via S. Siro. Turning down this little way, you come almost
immediately to the Church of S. Siro. The present building dates from