735. ST. ROCH WITH THE ANGEL.
Paolo Morando (Veronese: 1486-1522).
Paolo Morando, otherwise known as Cavazzola (his father was Taddeo Cavazzola di Jacobi di Morando), was a pupil of Morone (see 285). He "infused a higher life, and a fine system of colouring into the Veronese School, making thus a great advance upon his contemporaries, and preparing the way for Paul Veronese.... He shows, as Dr. Burckhardt has justly observed, 'a marvellous transition from the realism of the fifteenth century to the noble free character of the sixteenth, not to an empty idealism'" (Layard, i. 270). His masterpieces are still in his native Verona, and nowhere else, except in the National Gallery, can he be studied.
St. Roch is the patron of the sick and plague-stricken. The legend says that he left great riches to travel as a pilgrim to Rome, where he tended those sick of the plague, and by his intercession effected miraculous cures. Through many cities he laboured thus, until at last in Piacenza he became himself plague-stricken, and with a horrible ulcer in his thigh he was turned out into a lonely wood. He has here laid aside his pilgrim staff and hung his hat upon it, and prepared himself to die, when an angel appears to him and drops a fresh rose on his path. There is no rose without a thorn, and no thorn in a saint's crown without a rose. He bares his thigh to show his wound to the angel, who (says the legend) dressed it for him, whilst his little dog miraculously brought him every morning a loaf of bread.