The City's Most Beautiful Painting

My dear Peacock,

( ... ) the Cathedral is a most astonishing work of art ( ... ) The interior, though very sublime, is of a more earthly character.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letters In: Peacock's Memoirs of Shelley

"With its stained glass and massy granite columns overloaded with antique figures, and the silver lamps, that burn forever under the canopy of black cloth beside the brazen altar and the marble fretwork of the dome, give it the aspect of some gorgeous sepulchre."

"There is one solitary spot among those aisles, behind the altar, below the stained glass, where the light of the day is delicate and golden, I decided to go there to read Dante."

"That aerial host of figures human and divine, white as the snows of Appennine indurated by frost."

William Wordsworth, in Memorials of a Tour on the Continent (1820).

"The Cathedral is a most astonishing work of art. It is built of white marble, and cut into pinnacles of immense height, and the utmost delicacy of workmanship, and loaded with sculpture."

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letters in: Peacock's Memoirs of Shelley.

"This mountain possesses its flora: a fantastic vegetation of roses in stone, of closely massed foliage that developed under the hand of the Christian sculptor ( ... ) It has its silent, eternal population: four thousand statues, the product of different centuries, that seem to guard the edifice."

Vicente Blasco Ibañez. In the Land of Art.

"But what is most striking is a tour of the Cathedral. Imagine a vast mass, all marble, statues, and fretwork decoration, similar to lace".

Fedor Mihajlovič Dostoevskij. Epistolary.

"Renzo ascended one of these paths to the high ground, whence he beheld, as if rising from a desert, and not in the midst of a city, the noble structure of the cathedral, and he forgot all his misfortunes in contemplating, even at a distance, this eighth wonder of the world, of which he had heard so much from his infancy."

Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed (1840).

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