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Heaven can't be painted, and they'd better not try. Madonna, by Girolamo, was lovely. Room of the Abbess, with rosy children peeping through the lattice, very charming. Madonna della Scodella the boy Christ very charming. The old Farnese Theatre most interesting; got a scrap of canvas from a mouldy scene. Dead old place is Parma.
The great influence of his life, however, was Fra Girolamo Savonarola, whom he would often go to S. Marco to hear. Savonarola was preaching as ever against vanities, that is to say, pictures, statues, verses, books: things doubtless anathema to one whose whole future depended upon the amount of interest he could awaken in himself.
Then, taking up the dead girl and decking her, as they use to deck the dead, they laid her beside Girolamo on the same bier and there long bewept her; after which the twain were buried in one same tomb, and so these, whom love had not availed to conjoin on life, death conjoined with an inseparable union."
And as Girolamo could not give it up, she confided her distress to his guardians, speaking for by reason of her boy's great wealth she thought to make, as it were, an orange-tree out of a bramble on this wise: "This boy of ours, who is now scarce fourteen years old, is so in love with a daughter of one of our neighbours, a tailor Salvestra is the girl's name that, if we part them not, he will, peradventure, none else witting, take her to wife some day, and I shall never be happy again; or, if he see her married to another, he will pine away; to prevent which, methinks, you would do well to send him away to distant parts on the affairs of the shop; for so, being out of sight she will come at length to be out of mind, and then we can give him some well-born girl to wife."
Finally, when he had come to the age of seventy-eight, thinking at last that he had lived too long in that darkness, and rejoicing in death, in the hope of going to enjoy eternal light, he finished the course of his life on the 6th of September in the year 1559, leaving a son called Girolamo, who is a very gentle person, and a daughter.
I should breathe the atmosphere of Italy again. I should ease my heart among the masterworks of Girolamo dai Libri and Cavazzola, and, in the presence of the blue castellated mountains they loved to paint, my spirit would even be as theirs. In this old-world city, I fondly imagined, I should forget the Regent's Park, and attune my mind to the life that once filled its narrow streets.
The second 'nipote, Girolamo Riario, remained a layman, and did not seek the Pontificate. From this time the 'nipoti, by their endeavors to found principalities for themselves, became a new source of confusion to Italy.
His most important work is now in the Academy at Vienna an altar-piece painted for the Church of Corpus Domini, Venice, S. Veneranda Enthroned. In the Imperial Gallery at Vienna are a Last Communion and Funeral of S. Girolamo.
And so he chose, as the better course, to return to the service of the Cardinal at Monte Cavallo; for which action Girolamo was much commended, for it is too wretched a life to have to be always contending all day long and on every least detail with one person or another, and, as he used to say, it is at times better to enjoy peace of mind on bread and water than to sweat and strive amid grandeur and honours.
The little Zuane had eaten his supper of polenta and, in the painted cradle which his grandfather Girolamo had bought for him from under the arcades of the Piazetta, lay at last asleep, consigned to the care of all those saints and guardian angels who make the little ones their charge, and who smiled down upon him from the golden aureoles and clouds of rose and blue on the cradle-roof while, slowly balancing, it charmed him into dreams.
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