Note 28 — Chapter XXXI

What remains of Céspedes’s poetry is to be found in the eighteenth volume of Fernandez’s collection. His life is well set forth in the excellent “Diccionario de los Profesores de las Bellas Artes, por A. Cean Bermudez,” Madrid, 1800, 6 tom. 12mo, Tom. I. p. 316; besides which, its learned author, at the end of Tom. V., has republished the fragments of the poem on Painting in a better order than that in which they had before appeared; adding a pleasant prose discourse, in a pure style, on Ancient and Modern Painting and Sculpture, which Céspedes wrote in 1604, when recovering from a fever, and two other of his trifles; to the whole of which is prefixed a judicious Preface by Cean himself. Céspedes had been a Greek scholar in his youth, and says, that, in his old age, when he chanced to open Pindar, he “never failed to find a well-drawn and rich picture, grand and fit for Michel Angelo to paint.” He was a friend of Carranza, the great archbishop, who, after being a leading member of the Council of Trent, and confessor of Mary of England after she married Philip II., was worried to death by the Inquisition in 1576. (See, ante, Vol. I. p. 466.) Céspedes himself came near suffering from a similar persecution, in consequence of a letter he wrote to Carranza in 1559, in which he spoke disrespectfully of the Grand Inquisitor and the Holy Office. Llorente, Hist., Tom. II. p. 440.