“Es Maria la nave de gracia,
San Jose la vela, el Niño el timon;
Y los remos son las buenas almas
Que van al Rosario con gran devocion.”
There is another chapel of Our Lady in the cathedral of Seville, in which is a richly-sculptured retable with pillars, and niches, and statues, all of marble, and a balustrade of silver, along the rails of which you read, in great silver letters, the angelic salutation: Ave Maria!
At the further end of one of the art-adorned sacristies hangs Pedro de Campaña’s famous “Descent from the Cross,” before which Murillo loved to meditate, especially in his last days. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, in deep-red mantles, let down the dead Christ. St. John stands at the foot ready to receive him. The Virgin is half fainting. Magdalen is there with her vase. The figures are a little stiff, but their attitudes are expressive of profound grief, and the picture is admirable in coloring and religious in effect, as well as interesting from its associations. It was once considered so awful that Pacheco was afraid to remain before it after dark. But those were days of profound religious feeling; now men are afraid of nothing. And it was so full of reality to Murillo that, one evening, lingering longer than usual before it, the sacristan
came to warn him it was time to close the church. “I am waiting,” said the pious artist, rousing from his contemplation, “till those holy men shall have finished taking down the body of the Lord.” The painting then hung in the church of Santa Cruz, and Murillo was buried beneath it. This was destroyed by Marshal Soult, and the bones of the artist scattered.
In the same sacristy hang, on opposite walls, St. Leander and his brother Isidore, by Murillo, both with noble heads. The latter is the most popular saint in Spain after St. James, and is numbered among the fathers of the church. Among the twelve burning suns, circling in the fourth heaven of Dante’s Paradiso, is “the arduous spirit of Isidore,” whom the great Alcuin long before called “Hesperus, the star of the church—Jubar Ecclesiæ, sidus Hesperiæ.” The Venerable Bede classes him with Jerome, Athanasius, Augustine, and Cyprian; and it was after dictating some passages from St. Isidore that he died.
St. Isidore is said to have been descended from the old Gothic kings. At any rate, he belonged to a family of saints, which is better; his sister and two brothers being in the calendar. His saintly mother, when the family was exiled from Carthagena on account of their religion, chose to live in Seville, saying with tears: “Let me die in this foreign land, and have my sepulchre here where I was brought to the knowledge of God!” It is said a swarm of bees came to rest on the mouth of St. Isidore when a child; as is related of several other men celebrated for their mellifluence—Plato and St. Ambrose, for example. Old legends tell how he went to Rome and back
in one night. However that may be, his mind was of remarkable activity and compass, and took in all the knowledge of the day. He knew Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and wrote such a vast number of works as to merit the title of Doctor Egregius. There are two hundred MSS. of his in the Bibliothèque Royale at Paris, and still more at the Vatican, to say nothing of those in Spain. His great work, the Etymologies, in twenty books, is an encyclopædia of all the learning of the seventh century. Joseph Scaliger says it rendered great service to science by saving from destruction what would otherwise have been irretrievably lost.