At Orta, some years since, looking one evening into a
chapel when the light was fading, I was surprised to see a saint whom I
had not seen before; he had no glory except what shone from a very red
nose; he was smoking a short pipe, and was painting the Virgin Mary's
face. The touch was a finishing one, put on with deliberation, slowly,
so that it was two or three seconds before I discovered that the
interloper was no saint.
The figures in the chapels at Oropa are not as good as the best of those
at Varallo, but some of them are very nice notwithstanding. We liked the
seventh chapel the best--the one which illustrates the sojourn of the
Virgin Mary in the Temple. It contains forty-four figures, and
represents the Virgin on the point of completing her education as head
girl at a high-toned academy for young gentlewomen. All the young ladies
are at work making mitres for the bishop, or working slippers in Berlin
wool for the new curate, but the Virgin sits on a dais above the others
on the same platform with the venerable lady-principal, who is having
passages read out to her from some standard Hebrew writer. The statues
are the work of a local sculptor, named Aureggio, who lived at the end of
the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century.
The highest chapel must be a couple of hundred feet above the main
buildings, and from near it there is an excellent bird's-eye view of the
sanctuary and the small plain behind; descending on to this last, we
entered the quadrangle from the north-west side, and visited the chapel
in which the sacred image of the Madonna is contained.
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