More Than Any Other Church Except That Of San Paolo Fuori Le
Mura, Santa Maria Maggiore Imparts This Sense, For, As I Have Already
Pretended, St. Peter's Fails Of It.
Without as well as within the church
is spacious and impressive from its spaciousness; but it seems more
densely fringed than most others with peddlers of post-cards and mosaic
pins.
On going in you can plunge through their ranks, but in coming out
you do not so easily escape. One boy pursued me quite to my cab, in
spite of my denials of hand and tongue. There he stayed the driver while
he made a last, a humorous appeal. "Skiddoo?" he asked in my native
speech. "Yes," I sullenly replied, "skiddoo!" But it is now one of the
regrets which I shall always feel for my wasted opportunities in Rome
that I did not buy all his post-cards. Patient gayety like his merited
as much.
As it was, I drove callously away from Santa Maria Maggiore to San
Pietro in Vincoli, where I expected to renew my veneration for
Michelangelo's Moses. That famous figure is no longer so much in the
minds of men as it used to be, I think; and, if one were to be quite
honest with one's self as to the why and wherefore of one's earlier
veneration, one might not get a very distinct or convincing reply. Do
sculptors and painters suffer periods of slight as authors do? Are
Raphael and Michelangelo only provisionally eclipsed by Botticelli and
by Donatello and Mino da Fiesole, or are they remanded to a lasting
limbo?
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