The Spirit of Rome Author:Vernon Lee Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A PONTIFICAL MASS AT THE SIXTINE CHAPEL T NEVER knew so many hours pass so pleasantly as in this tribune, surrounded by those whispering, elbowing, plunging, ... more »veiled women in black, under the wall painted with Perugino's Charge of St. Peter, and dadoed with imitation Spanish leather, superb gold and blue scrolls of Rhodian pomegranate pattern and Delia Rovere shields with the oak-tree. My first impression is of the magnificence of all these costumes, the Swiss with their hal- berts, the Knights of Malta, the Chamberlains like so many Rubenses or Frans Halses, the Prelates and cardinals, each with his little trainof purple priestlets ; particularly of the perfection in wearing these clothes, something analogous to the brownish depth of the purple, the carnation vividness of the scarlet, due to all these centuries of tradition. At the same time, an impression of the utter disconnectedness of it all, the absence of all spirit or meaning; this magnificence being as the turning out of great rag bag of purple and crimson and gold, of superb artistic things all out of place, useless, patternless, and almost odious: pageantry, ritual, complicated Palestrina music, crowded Renaissance frescoes, that huge Last Judgment, that mass of carefully grouped hideous nudities, brutal, butcher-like, on its harsh blue ground ; that ceiling packed with superb pictures and figures, symmetrical yet at random, portentous arm and thighs and shoulders hitting one as it were in the eye, The papal procession, white robes, gold candlesticks, a wizen old priest swaying, all pale with sea-sickness, above the crowd, above the halberts and plumes, between the white ostrich fans, and dabbing about benedictions to the right and left. The shuffle of the people down on to their knees, and scuffle again on to thei...« less