special attention; and also a hideous figure of Lucifer.”

Gaudenzio’s devils are never quite satisfactory.  His angels are divine, and no one can make them cry as he does.  When my friend Mr. H. Festing Jones met a lovely child crying in the streets of Varallo last summer, he said it was crying like one of Gaudenzio’s angels; and so it was.  Gaudenzio was at home with everything human, and even superhuman, if beautiful; if it was only a case of dealing with ugly, wicked, and disagreeable people, he knew all about this, and could paint them if the occasion required it; but when it came to a downright unmitigated devil, he was powerless.  He could never have done Tabachetti’s serpent in the Adam and Eve Chapel, nor yet the plausible fair-spoken devil, as in the Temptation Chapel, also by Tabachetti.

To conclude my extracts from Mr. King.  Speaking of the Crucifixion Chapel, he says:—

“Though this combination of terra-cotta and fresco may not be as highly esteemed in the present day as in the times when this extraordinary sanctuary sprang into existence, yet this composition must always be admired as one of the greatest of Ferrari’s works, and undoubtedly that on which he lavished the full force of his genius and the collected studies and experience of his previous artist life.”

It is noteworthy, but not perhaps surprising, that this observant, intelligent, and sympathetic writer, probably through inability to at once understand and enter into the conventions rendered necessary by the conditions under which works so unfamiliar to him must be both executed and looked at, has failed to notice the existence of Tabachetti, never mentioning his name nor referring to one of his works—not even to the Madonna and Child in the church of S. Gaudenzio, which one would have thought could hardly fail to strike him.