Page:Impressions of Spain in 1866.djvu/41

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MADRID.
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represented. There are exquisite Raphaels, one especially, 'La Perla,' once belonging to our Charles I., and sold by the Puritans to the Spanish king ; the 'Spasimo,' the ' Vergin del Pesce,' &c. ; beautiM Titians, not only portraits, but one, a 'Magdalen,' which is unknown to us by engravings or photographs in England, where, in a green robe, she is flying from the assaults of the devil, represented by a monstrous dragon, and in which the drawing is as wonderful as the colouring ; beautiM G. Bellinis, and Luinis, and Andrea del Sartos (especially one of his wife), and Paul Veronese, and others of the Venetian and Mila- nese schools. In a lower room there are Dutch and Flemish chefe-d'oeuvre without end : Rubens, and Vandyke, and Teniers, and Breughel, and Holbein, and the rest. It is a gallery bewildering from the number of its pictures, but with the rare merit of almost all being good ; and they are so arranged that the visitor can see them with perfect comfort at any hour of the day. In the ante-room to the long gallery are some pictures of the present century, but none are worth looking at save Goya's pictures of the wholesale masftacre of the Spanish prisoners by the French, which are not likely to soften the public feeling of bitter-

ness and hostility towards that nation.