Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/332

324 we cannot linger in them longer; let us hasten to visit another place. It is only a block away from the Museum that we find a public institution which shows yet more forcibly what a truly munificent government has at some time or other ruled over Mexico. This is the Academy of Fine Arts, the Institute of San Carlos, founded in 1781, "We are astonished," says Humboldt, "at seeing here that the Apollo of Belvedere, the group of Laocoön, and still more colossal statues, have been conveyed through mountain roads at least as narrow as those of St. Gothard; and we are surprised at finding these masterpieces of antiquity collected together under the torrid zone, in a table-land higher than the convent of the great St. Bernard." The casts are scarcely worthy of notice in these later times, but there seems to me much to admire in the five saloons devoted to paintings. The first and second are crowded with the works of the old Mexican painters, and contain some very worthy productions, mostly treating of sacred subjects; several dating from a period nearly three centuries ago, but more of two hundred years back.

The European school is well represented in the third by copies and originals, containing, among others, three by Rubens, one a large Descent from the Cross; a Saint John of God, by Murillo; one Titian; three paintings from the school of Leonardo da Vinci; the Olympic Games, by Charles Vernet; an Episode of the Deluge, by Coglieti; Saint Jerome, by Alonzo Cano; a Saint Sebastian, attributed to Van Dyck; a Virgin by Perugino; and another by Pietro de Cortona; an Odalisque, by Decaen; and several pictures from the Flemish and Dutch schools.

But though an artist might linger longest in these galleries, the fourth and fifth saloons possess greater charms for the lover of Mexico and the student of her progress, for they are devoted to the works of the modern Mexican school. The fourth contains those beautiful paintings of the valley of Mexico, rendered so faithfully, pictured so entrancingly, by the renowned Velasco, and which were exhibited by the government at the Centennial Exposition in the United States. One would not need go to