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After all wanderings in this temple of art, we return to Antonio Amadeo, to his long-haired seraphs playing on the lutes of Paradise, to his angels of the Passion with their fluttering robes and arms outspread in agony, to his saints and satyrs mingled on pilasters of the marble doorways, his delicate Lavabo decorations, and his hymns of piety expressed in noble forms of weeping women and dead Christs.
And the "lavabo," as it is here called, a spacious room with an ostentatiously noisy rush of water which may be heard afar and awakens one at night. The sanitary and mechanical age we are now entering makes up for the mercy it grants to our sense of smell by the ferocity with which it assails our sense of hearing.
After the lavabo the Archbishop asked the blessing, and the Imperial family took their places in the following order; in the middle, the Empress of the French; on her right, the Emperor of Austria; on her left, the Empress; on the two sides the Archdukes Charles, Joseph, Antoine, John, Reinhardt, Louis, Rudolph, the Prince of Neufchatel, the Ambassador Extraordinary.
The word sacred now leads us to another determining necessity of our work of art. For this place, where the lavabo stands, is actually consecrated; it has an altar; and it is in it that take place all the preparations and preliminaries for the most holy and most magnificent of rites.
Very little remains in the church that is of any interest to us. In the sacristy, however, we may see in the present lavabo some fragments of the ancient ciborio. And in the nave at the western end on the Gospel side is an ancient sarcophagus of Greek marble which was carved in the Renaissance and in the seventeenth century became the sepulchre of one of the Pasolini family.
It has still rich vestments, fine woodwork, and a gay and elaborate lavabo by one of the della Robbias, with its wealth of ornament and colour and its charming Madonna and Child with angels.
The other reliefs are Donatello's too; but the lavabo in the inner sacristy is Verrocchio's, and Verrocchio's tomb of Piero can never be overlooked even amid such a wealth of the greater master's work.
The other colours, too, were well represented, and were the work of a famous convent in the south of France. All the other articles, too, were of silver: the lavabo basin, the bell, the thurible, the boat and spoon, and the cruets. It was a joy to all the Catholics who came to see the worship of God carried on with such splendour, when in so many places even necessaries were scarcely forthcoming.
There are also two pictures a Madonna and Saints, of the earlier Venetian school, and an enthroned Madonna and Child with four panels of saints at the sides, both restored. In the sacristy are a Venetian lavabo, some embroideries, and a fine fifteenth-century processional cross. An iron grille round a side altar bears the Visconti arms, which are also those of Mezzo.
After all wanderings in this Temple of Art, we return to Antonio Amadeo, to his long-haired seraphs playing on the lutes of Paradise, to his angels of the Passion with their fluttering robes and arms outspread in agony, to his saints and satyrs mingled on pilasters of the marble doorways, his delicate Lavabo decorations, and his hymns of piety expressed in noble forms of weeping women and dead Christs.
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