Page:Anecdotes of painters, engravers, sculptors and architects, and curiosities of art (IA anecdotesofpaint01spoo).pdf/238

 qual also erred greatly, in his Marriage of the Virgin, representing her without any mantle, in a Venetian petticoat, fitting very close in the waist, covered with knots of colored ribbon, and with wide round sleeves,—"a dress," adds Pacheco, "in my opinion highly unbecoming the gravity and dignity of our Sovereign Lady." Nor were there wanting awful examples of warning to painters, as in the story related by Martin de Roa, in his State of Souls in Purgatory. "A painter," so runs the legend, "had executed in youth, at the request of a gentleman, an improper picture. After the painter's death, this picture was laid to his charge, and it was only by the intercession of those Saints whom he had at various times painted, that he got off with severe torments in Purgatory. Whilst there, however, he contrived to appear to his confessor, and prevailed upon him to go to the gentleman for whom this picture was painted, and entreat him to burn it. The request was complied with, and the painter then got out of Purgatory!"

The author cannot close this too lengthy article without citing the Life of the Virgin written by Maria de Agreda, whose absurd and blasphemous vagaries were "swallowed whole" by the Spanish nation—an unanswerable proof and a fitting result of the blight inflicted by Jesuitism and the Inquisition. Bayle says, "the only wonder is, that the Sorbonne confined itself to saying that her proposition was false, rash, and contrary to the doctrines