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Updated: June 26, 2025
I begged the monk to inform me why these women were here on their knees, and praying. "They are worshipping the Bambino," he replied. "Oh! worshipping, are they?" I exclaimed, in affected surprise; "how stupid I am; I took it for a piece of wood." "And so it is," rejoined the monk; "but it is miraculous; it is full of divine virtue, and works cures." "Has it wrought any of late?" I inquired.
I remember once going into a little church in a small village some miles from a great European capital. The special object of adoration in this humblest of places of worship was a bambino, a holy infant, done in wax, and covered with cheap ornaments such as a little girl would like to beautify her doll with.
For the same reason, I suppose, that the devout prefer a hideous Bambino and a Madonna in crinoline to the most graceful artistic conception of those sacred personages, San Moise is the most popular church for the midnight mass in Venice, and there is no mass at all in St. Mark's, where its magnificence would be so peculiarly impressive.
Above, the Castle Rock was invisible, but certainly cut strange beautiful shapes out of the mist; beneath it lay the Gardens, a moat of darkness, raising to the lighted street beyond terraces planted with rough autumn flowers that would now be close-curled balls curiously trimmed with dew, and grass that would make placid squelching noises under the feet; and at the end of the Gardens were the two Greek temples that held the town's pictures the Tiepolo, which shows Pharaoh's daughter walking in a fardingale of gold with the negro page to find a bambino Moses kicking in Venetian sunlight; the Raeburns, coarse and wholesome as a home-made loaf; the lent Whistler collection like a hive of butterflies.
Two visits are necessary, as on the first you are at once seized by the sacristan, who can conceive of no other motive for entering this church on the Capitol Hill than to see the miraculous Bambino the painted doll swaddled in gold and silver tissue and "crusted over with magnificent diamonds, emeralds, and rubies."
"But pardon me yet farther; you say the Bambino is of wood, and that these honest women are praying to it. Now I have been taught to believe that we ought not to worship wood." To make sure both of my interrogatories and of the monk's answers, I had been speaking to him through my friend Mr Stewart, whose long residence in Rome had made him perfectly master of the Italian tongue.
And do we not often see ourselves small and humble under the eyes of a child? The look with which the Bambino of Botticelli contemplates the innocent Virgin is heavy with a sad unconscious experience, and as old as the world. The affection of Clerambault and Rosine was of this sort; fine, religious, above the reach of reason.
I told Gaspare to take Ciccio's, and it is too far to see, but I'll soon make them hear me. The signora loves the 'Pastorale. She says there is all Sicily in it. She loves it more than the tarantella, for she is good, Lucrezia don't forget that though she is not a Catholic, and perhaps it makes her think of the coming of the Bambino and of the Madonna. Ah!
Where art and antiquity are so abundant as in Rome, the Bambino incident is probably what the reader, when he has visited the Church of Ara Coeli will chiefly remember, and I will not pretend to be any better than the reader, though I will say that I have a persistent sense of something important about the roof; and there are the Pinturrichio frescos, which an old Sienese like me must have the taste for.
"But now began for me the greatest misfortunes. My 'bambino' fell ill at the beginning of April, the doctors were unable to discover the cause of his ailment, and the poor little thing, fading away, expired in the arms of his mother, who was beside herself with despair. That was not all. A few days after my little daughter fell ill in turn, and her complaint also terminated fatally.
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