Returning to Montrigone, the Simeon is an excellent figure, and the Virgin is fairly good, but the prophetess Anna, who stands just behind her, is by far the most interesting in the group, and is alone enough to make me feel sure that Tabachetti gave more or less help here, as he had done years before at Orta.  She, too, like the Virgin’s grandmother, is a widow lady, and wears collars of a cut that seems to have prevailed ever since the Virgin was born some twenty years previously.  There is a largeness and simplicity of treatment about the figure to which none but an artist of the highest rank can reach, and D’Enrico was not more than a second or third-rate man.  The hood is like Handel’s Truth sailing upon the broad wings of Time, a prophetic strain that nothing but the old experience of a great poet can reach.  The lips of the prophetess are for the moment closed, but she has been prophesying all the morning, and the people round the wall in the background are in ecstasies at the lucidity with which she has explained all sorts of difficulties that they had never been able to understand till now.  They are putting their forefingers on their thumbs and their thumbs on their forefingers, and saying how clearly they see it all and what a wonderful woman Anna is.  A prophet indeed is not generally without honour save in his own country, but then a country is generally not without honour save with its own prophet, and Anna has been glorifying her country rather than reviling it.  Besides, the rule may not have applied to prophetesses.

The Death of the Virgin is the last of the six chapels inside the church itself.  The Apostles, who of course are present, have all of them real hair, but, if I may say so, they want a wash and a brush-up so very badly that I cannot feel any confidence in writing about them.  I should say that, take them all round, they are a good average sample of apostle as apostles generally go.  Two or three of them are nervously anxious to find appropriate quotations in books that lie open before them, which they are searching with eager haste; but I do not see one figure about which I should like to say positively that it is either good or bad.  There is a good bust of a man, matching the one in the Birth of the Virgin chapel, which is said to be a portrait of Giovanni d’Enrico, but it is not known whom it represents.

Outside the church, in three contiguous cells that form part of the foundations, are:—­

1.  A dead Christ, the head of which is very impressive, while the rest of the figure is poor.  I examined the treatment of the hair, which is terra-cotta, and compared it with all other like hair in the chapels above described; I could find nothing like it, and think it most likely that Giacomo Ferro did the figure, and got Tabachetti to do the head, or that they brought the head from some unused figure by Tabachetti at Varallo, for I know no other artist of the time and neighbourhood who could have done it.