n to a palace--I am sure I forget the name of it--where we saw a
large gallery of pictures. Of course, in a picture gallery you see three
hundred pictures you forget, for one you remember. I remember, however,
an interesting picture by Guido, of the Rape of Proserpine, in which
Proserpine casts back her languid and half-unwilling eyes, as it were,
to the flowers she had left ungathered in the fields of Enna.

We saw besides one picture of Raphael--St. Cecilia; this is in another
and higher style; you forget that it is a picture as you look at it; and
yet it is most unlike any of those things which we call reality. It is
of the inspired and ideal kind, and seems to have been conceived and
executed in a similar state of feeling to that which produced among the
ancients those perfect specimens of poetry and sculpture which are the
baffling models of succeeding generations. There is a unity and a
perfection in it of an incommunicable kind. The central figure, St.
Cecilia, seems rapt in such inspiration as produced her image in the
painter's mind; her deep, dark, eloquent eyes lifted up; her chestnut
hair flung back from her forehead--she holds an organ in her hands--her
countenance, as it were, calmed by the depth of its passion and rapture,
and penetrated throughout with the warm and radiant light of life. She
is listening to the music of heaven, and, as I imagine, has just ceased
to sing, for the four figures that surround her evidently point, by
their attitudes, towards her; particularly St. John, who, with a tender
yet impassioned gesture, bends his countenance towards her, languid with
the depth of his emotion. At her feet lie various instruments of music,
broken and unstrung. Of the colouring I do not speak; it eclipses
nature, yet has all her truth and softness.

_Letters from Italy. The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley_,
edited by Harry Buxton Forman (London, 1880).

[Illustration: ST. CECILIA.
_Raphael._]

THE LAST SUPPER

(_LEONARDO DA VINCI_)

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

We will now turn to _The Last Supper_, which was painted on the wall of
the refectory of St. Maria delle Gratie in Milan.

The place where this picture is painted must first be considered: for
here the knowledge of this artist is focussed. Could anything more
appropriate, or noble, be devised for a refectory than a parting meal
which the whole world will reverence for ever?

Several years ago when travelling