Note 8 — Chapter IV

The picture is in tempera on canvas, and was put up on the ceiling of Pio Nono's sitting room in the Quirinal Palace. But when the King of Italy took possession, a new canvas with cupids and putti was stretched over it, and the Pope's sitting room is now turned into Prince Humbert's bedroom. This brutality might almost justify the good painter in his belief that Satan is now let loose upon earth. Yet the plea has not without reason been urged that the picture is a deliberate attack on the King's temporal power. The original cartoon was, in 1876, exhibited in the National Gallery, Berlin, and the same subject the artist repeated in an oil picture (10 feet by 8 feet), now in the Antwerp Museum. Overbeck had been made a "Membre effectif" of the Antwerp Academy in 1863, and the commission for this replica followed thereon. I am told on authority that in Antwerp "the work is considered very mediocre."