was composed to remind us of it; already it has passed away
from reality, is indeed merely a memory in which the artist has seen
something less and something more than the truth.

Divided into three compartments, we see through the beautiful round
arches of some magic casement, as it were, the valleys and hills of
Italy, the delicate trees, the rivers and the sky of a country that is
holy, which man has taken particularly to himself. And then, as though
summoned back from forgetfulness by the humanism of that landscape where
the toil and endeavour of mankind is so visible in the little city far
away, the cultured garden of the world, a dream of the Crucifixion comes
to us, a vision of all that man has suffered for man, summed up, as it
were, naturally enough by that supreme sacrifice of love; and we see not
an agonised Christ or the brutality of the priests and the soldiers, but
Jesus, who loved us, hanging on the Cross, with Mary Magdalen kneeling
at his feet, and on the one side Madonna and St. Bernard, and on the
other St. John and St. Benedict. And though, in a sort of symbolism,
Perugino has placed above the Cross the sun and the moon eclipsed, the
whole world is full of the serene and perfect light of late afternoon,
and presently we know that vision of the Crucifixion will fade away,
and there will be left to us only that which we really know, and have
heard and seen, the valleys and the hills, the earth from which we are
sprung.

There are but six figures in the whole picture, and it is just this
spaciousness, perhaps, earth and sky counting for so much, that makes
this work so delightful. For it is not from the figures at all that we
receive the profoundly religious impression that this picture makes upon
all who look unhurriedly upon it; but from the earth and sky, where in
the infinite clear space God dwells, no longer hanging upon a Cross
tortured by men who have unthinkably made so terrible a mistake, but
joyful in His heaven, moving in every living thing He has made; visible
only in the invisible wind that passes over the streams suddenly at
evening, or subtly makes musical the trees at dawn, walking as of old in
His garden, where one day maybe we shall meet Him face to face.

Turning down Via di Pinti to the left, and then to the right along Via
Alfani, we pass another desecrated monastery in S. Maria degli Angioli,
once a famous house of the monks of Camaldoli. This monastery has
suffered many violatio