mple of apostle as apostles generally go. Two or three of
them are nervously anxious to find appropriate quotations in books
that lie open before them, which they are searching with eager
haste; but I do not see one figure about which I should like to say
positively that it is either good or bad. There is a good bust of a
man, matching the one in the Birth of the Virgin chapel, which is
said to be a portrait of Giovanni d'Enrico, but it is not known whom
it represents.

Outside the church, in three contiguous cells that form part of the
foundations, are:--

1. A dead Christ, the head of which is very impressive, while the
rest of the figure is poor. I examined the treatment of the hair,
which is terra-cotta, and compared it with all other like hair in
the chapels above described; I could find nothing like it, and think
it most likely that Giacomo Ferro did the figure, and got Tabachetti
to do the head, or that they brought the head from some unused
figure by Tabachetti at Varallo, for I know no other artist of the
time and neighbourhood who could have done it.

2. A Magdalene in the desert. The desert is a little coal-cellar
of an arch, containing a skull and a profusion of pink and white
paper bouquets, the two largest of which the Magdalene is hugging
while she is saying her prayers. She is a very self-sufficient
lady, who we may be sure will not stay in the desert a day longer
than she can help, and while there will flirt even with the skull if
she can find nothing better to flirt with. I cannot think that her
repentance is as yet genuine, and as for her praying there is no
object in her doing so, for she does not want anything.

3. In the next desert there is a very beautiful figure of St. John
the Baptist kneeling and looking upwards. This figure puzzles me
more than any other at Montrigone; it appears to be of the fifteenth
rather than the sixteenth century; it hardly reminds me of
Gaudenzio, and still less of any other Valsesian artist. It is a
work of unusual beauty, but I can form no idea as to its authorship.

I wrote the foregoing pages in the church at Montrigone itself,
having brought my camp-stool with me. It was Sunday; the church was
open all day, but there was no Mass said, and hardly anyone came.
The sacristan was a kind, gentle, little old man, who let me do
whatever I wanted. He sat on the doorstep of the main door, mending
vestments, and to this end was cutting up a fine piece of