's medallions from the story of Adam expelled
from Paradise, which fill the space beneath the cupola, leading the eye
upward to Ferrari's masterpiece.

The dome itself is crowded with a host of angels singing and playing
upon instruments of music. At each of the twelve angles of the drum
stands a coryphaeus of this celestial choir, full length, with waving
drapery. Higher up, the golden-haired, broad-winged divine creatures are
massed together, filling every square inch of the vault with color. Yet
there is no confusion. The simplicity of the selected motive and the
necessities of the place acted like a check on Ferrari, who, in spite of
his dramatic impulse, could not tell a story coherently or fill a canvas
with harmonized variety. There is no trace of his violence here. Though
the motion of music runs through the whole multitude like a breeze,
though the joy expressed is a real _tripudio celeste_, not one of all
these angels flings his arms abroad or makes a movement that disturbs
the rhythm. We feel that they are keeping time and resting quietly, each
in his appointed seat, as though the sphere was circling with them round
the throne of God, who is their centre and their source of gladness.
Unlike Correggio and his imitators, Ferrari has introduced no clouds,
and has in no case made the legs of his angels prominent. It is a mass
of noble faces and voluminously robed figures, emerging each above the
other like flowers in a vase. Each too has specific character, while
all are robust and full of life, intent upon the service set them. Their
instruments of music are all lutes and viols, flutes, cymbals, drums,
fifes, citherns, organs, and harps that Ferrari's day could show. The
scale of color, as usual with Ferrari, is a little heavy; nor are the
tints satisfactorily harmonized. But the vigor and invention of the
whole work would atone for minor defects of far greater consequence.

It is natural, beneath this dome, to turn aside and think one moment of
Correggio at Parma. Before the _macchinisti_ of the seventeenth century
had vulgarized the motive, Correggio's bold attempt to paint heaven in
flight from earth--earth left behind in the persons of the apostles
standing round the empty tomb, heaven soaring upward with a spiral
vortex into the abyss of light above--had an originality which set at
naught all criticism. There is such ecstasy of jubilation, such
rapturous rapidity of flight, that we who strain our eyes from