act of giving His blessing, before whom the saint is praying. At her knees are two green snakes, and above her two angels are carrying her soul, under her human form, up to heaven. Behind her, and close to a belfry, where the bells are swinging and the ropes of which are hanging down, is a group of men, one a tonsured cleric, seemingly, from his dalmatic, a deacon, with both hands upraised in surprise; near him other clerics tonsured, two of whom are reading with amazement out of a book held by a noble layman. This work contains allusions to several events in the life of St. Frances, widow, known in Italy, as Santa Francesca Romana; but a very remarkable one is here especially sketched forth. She is said to have often beheld the presence of her guardian angel, clothed as a deacon, watching over her. Such was the obedience and condescension yielded by her to her husband that, though wrapped in prayer, or busied in any spiritual exercise, if called by him or anywise needed by the lowliest servant in her family, she hastened to obey at the moment. It is told of her, that one day, being asked for as many as four times in succession, just as she was, each time, beginning the same verse again, of a psalm in the Office of the Blessed Virgin, on coming back for the fifth time she found that verse written all in gold. Here then we have the loving husband showing this prayer-book, with its golden letters, to a crowd of friends, among whom is his wife's angel hidden under a deacon's dalmatic; while the saint herself is at her devotions, foreseeing in vision the evils that are to befall Italy, through civil strife, shown by those serpents and the swinging bells betokening alarm and fright.
4456.
Table-cover; ground, coarse canvas; design, armorial bearings, symbolical subjects, fruits, and animals, besides five long inscriptions in German, dated A.D. 1585. German. 6 feet by 6 feet 6 inches.
The whole of this large undertaking was worked by some well-born
German mother as an heirloom to her offspring. At the right hand
corner, done upon a separate piece of finer canvas and afterwards
applied to the ground, is a shield of arms, sable, three lions rampant
or armed and langued gules two and one between a fess argent; at
another corner, but worked upon the canvas ground itself, a shield,
gules three bars dancetté argent; upon a third shield, argent, a fess
