pictures must rank before Rubens. Who was ever piously affected
by any picture of the master? He can depict a livid thief writhing upon
the cross, sometimes a blond Magdalen weeping below it; but it is a
Magdalen a very short time indeed after her repentance: her yellow
brocades and flaring satins are still those which she wore when she was
of the world; her body has not yet lost the marks of the feasting and
voluptuousness in which she used to indulge, according to the legend.
Not one of the Rubens's pictures among all the scores that decorate
chapels and churches here, has the least tendency to purify, to touch
the affections, or to awaken the feelings of religious respect and
wonder. The "Descent from the Cross" is vast, gloomy, and awful; but the
awe inspired by it is, as I take it, altogether material. He might have
painted a picture of any criminal broken on the wheel, and the sensation
inspired by it would have been precisely similar. Nor in a religious
picture do you want the savoir-faire of the master to be always
protruding itself; it detracts from the feeling of reverence, just as
the thumping of cushion and the spouting of tawdry oratory does from
a sermon: meek religion disappears, shouldered out of the desk by
the pompous, stalwart, big-chested, fresh-colored, bushy-whiskered
pulpiteer. Rubens's piety has always struck us as of this sort. If he
takes a pious subject, it is to show you in what a fine way he, Peter
Paul Rubens, can treat it. He never seems to doubt but that he is doing
it a great honor. His "Descent from the Cross," and its accompanying
wings and cover, are a set of puns upon the word Christopher, of which
the taste is more odious than that of the hooped-petticoated Virgin
yonder, with her artificial flowers, and her rings and brooches. The
people who made an offering of that hooped petticoat did their best, at
any rate; they knew no better. There is humility in that simple, quaint
present; trustfulness and kind intention. Looking about at other altars,
you see (much to the horror of pious Protestants) all sorts of queer
little emblems hanging up under little pyramids of penny candles that
are sputtering and flaring there. Here you have a silver arm, or
a little gold toe, or a wax leg, or a gilt eye, signifying and
commemorating cures that have been performed by the supposed
intercession of the saint over whose chapel they hang. Well, although
they are abominable superstitions, yet these quee