Vol. IX., No. 52.—July, 1869.
Columbus At Salamanca.
"——e di te solo
Basti ai posteri tuoi ch'alquanto accume:
Che quel poco darà lunga memoria
Di poema dignissima e d'istoria." [Footnote 121]
Gierusalemme Liberata, TASSO.
[Footnote 121: "Thy single name will pour diviner light O'er history's pages; and thy fame inspire Bards, who are yet unborn, with more celestial fire."
Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered. ]
Some three years since, a large historical painting was exhibited at the gallery of the Artists' Fund Association in the city of New York. Its subject, as announced, was "Columbus before the Council of Salamanca." The picture was said to be a work of merit, and attracted much attention. It represented the great discoverer standing in the large hall of a convent, surrounded by monks and ecclesiastics, foremost among whom are three Dominican friars, who, having apparently worked themselves into a paroxysm of anger, face Columbus with gestures of violent denunciation. Grave, dignified, and majestic stands the great Genoese discoverer among them, apparently the only reasonable being in that assemblage of ignorance and bigotry, whose victim he is evidently about to become. The pictorial lesson sought to be conveyed was, clearly, that here was another Galileo business, a second e pur si muove sensation, a repetition of the favorite amusement of all churchmen, which every one knows to be the persecution of discoverers and the crushing out of knowledge. And the warrant for all this misrepresentation was said to be found in the pages of Washington Irving's History of Columbus.
Now, a perusal of those pages shows that, although Mr. Irving committed a grave historical blunder in describing a "council of Salamanca" that had no existence, he nevertheless expressly excepts from any charge of ignorance and intolerance that may be implied from his language these very Dominican monks who, in Mr. Kauffman's historical picture, are made the foremost and most violent in their denunciation of Columbus.
"When Columbus," says Irving, "began to state the grounds of his belief, the friars of St. Stephen's (Dominicans) alone paid attention to him, that convent being more learned in the sciences than the rest of the university. The others appear to have intrenched themselves behind one dogged proposition."
In the entire range of English art and literature so firmly have some of the most offensive forms of anti-Catholic prejudice become rooted, that, whenever any prominent historical character or incident comes in contact with the Catholic Church the occasion is seized, right or wrong, with or without authority, and often in the very teeth of history, to exemplify some phase of what people are pleased to call popish ignorance and persecution. Under the dark pall of bigotry that has so long overshadowed the genius of English literature, events which, in honest truth, should and do redound to the honor of the Catholic Church and its hierarchy as protectors of knowledge and promoters of noble enterprises have been, by a species of literary legerdemain, wrested into so many evidences of their intolerance.