-x 188o.]
raiment and the habit of dismal speech human sentiment painted pictures while yet the fagots grew apace for their de struction as well as for the funeral-pyre of their scolding and bellowing enemy, Savonarola. For where Fra Angelico, working from the life, could create a San Sebastian so instinct with earthly vitality and earthly bloom that pious Florentine women could not say their prayers in peace in its presence, there
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must have been sometimes unbending from the dole and drear of medizeval asceticism into something very like hu man fun. One day the Leatherstonepaughs were all at work in the immense studio. Silen tia alone was idle, and, somewhat indec
orously draped only in a bit of old tap estry, with dishevelled hair and lolling head, leaned against the wall, apparent ly in the last stages of inebriety. There
YOUNG CAIN INTERVIEWING SILENTIA.
were three easels, each bearing a canvas,
in different parts of the room. Before each easel worked a Leatherstonepaugh, each clad with classic simplicity in a long blue cotton garment, decorated with many col ors and smelling strongly of retouching varnish, that covered her from the white
ruffle at her throat to the upper edge of her black alpaca flounce. The room was silent, and, except for the deft action of brushes, motionless.
Only that from below was heard the mu sical splash of the Barberini Tritons, and that from the windows could be seen the sombre pines of the Ludovisi gardens swaying in solemn rhythmic measure
against the blue sky, all the world would have seemed petrified into the complete passiveness of sitting for its picture. Marietta was their model. She was posed in a nun's dress, pensive gray, with virginal white bound primly across her brow. Marietta is a capital model, and her sad face and tender eyes were upturned with exactly the desired expres sion to the grinning mask in the centre of the ceiling. Silentia kindly consented to pose for the cross to which the nun clung; that is, she wobbled weakly into the place where the sacred emblem would have been were this Nature and not Art, and
where the cross would be in the picture
