ngredients of this bewitching picture; but as to what
it is all about I have no knowledge, for I have looked in vain among
books for any information. I find a S. Tryphonius, but only as a grown
man; not a word of his tender years and his grotesque attendant. How
amusing it would be to forget the halo and set the picture as a theme
among a class of fanciful fantastic writers, to fit it with an
appropriate fairy story! For of course it is as absolute a fairy tale
illustration as the dragon pictures on the other wall.

It is now well to ask the way to S. Francesco della Vigna, where we
shall find S. Jerome and his lion again. This vast church, with its
pretentious and very unwelcoming facade by Palladio covering the
friendly red brick, is at the first sight unattractive, so huge and
cold and deserted is it. But it has details. It has, for example, just
inside the door on the entrance wall, high up, a very beautiful early
Christian coloured relief of the Madonna and Child: white on blue, but
far earlier than the Delia Robbias. The Madonna is slender as a pole but
memorably sweet. It has also a curious great altar picture on wood by a
strange painter, Frater Antonius da Negropon, as he signs himself--this
in a little chapel in the right transept--with most charming details of
birds, and flowers, and scrolls, and monochrome reliefs surrounding a
Madonna and Child who beam comfort and assurance of joy. The date is
supposed to be about 1450 and the source of Brother Antonio's
inspiration must have been similar to that of the great Mantegna's.

There are also the very delightful marble pictures in the chapel of the
Giustiniani family to the left of the choir, the work of the Lombardi.
About the walls are the evangelists and prophets (S. John no more than a
beautiful and sensitive boy), while over the altar are scenes in the
life of S. Jerome, whom we again see with his lion. In one relief he
extracts the thorn from its foot; in another the lion assists in holding
up the theological work which the saint is perusing, while in his other
hand the saint poises a model of the church and campanile of S.
Zaccaria. Below, on the altar cloth, is a Last Judgment, with the
prettiest little angel boys to sound the dreadful trumps. To these must
be added two pictures by Paul Veronese, one with a kneeling woman in it
who at once brings to mind the S. Helena in our National Gallery.

Furthermore, in the little Cappella Santa is a rich and love