But in another moment it appeared to us the most sublime conception of the Assumption ever painted, and we did not find Caracci’s praise too warm where he says:  “And I still remain stupefied with the sight of so grand a work—­every thing so well conceived—­so well seen from below—­with so much severity, yet with so much judgment and so much grace; with a coloring which is of very flesh.”  The height of the fresco above the floor of the church is so vast that it might well appear like a heavenly scene to the reeling sense of the spectator.  Brain, nerve, and muscle were strained to utter exhaustion in a very few minutes, and we came away with our admiration only half-satisfied, and resolved to ascend the cupola next day, and see the fresco on something like equal terms.  In one sort we did thus approach it, and as we looked at the gracious floating figures of the heavenly company through the apertures of the dome, they did seem to adopt us and make us part of the painting.  But the tremendous depth, over which they drifted so lightly, it dizzied us to look into; and I am not certain that I should counsel travellers to repeat our experience.  Where still perfect, the fresco can only gain from close inspection,—­it is painted with such exquisite and jealous perfection,—­yet the whole effect is now better from below, for the decay is less apparent; and besides, life is short, and the stairway by which one ascends to the dome is in every way too exigent.  It is with the most astounding sense of contrast that you pass from the Assumption to the contemplation of that other famous roof frescoed by Correggio, in the Monastero di San Paolo.  You might almost touch the ceiling with your hand, it hovers so low with its counterfeit of vine-clambered trellis-work, and its pretty boys looking roguishly through the embowering leaves.  It is altogether the loveliest room in the world; and if the Diana in her car on the chimney is truly a portrait of the abbess for whom the chamber was decorated, she was altogether worthy of it, and one is glad to think of her enjoying life in the fashion amiably permitted to nuns in the fifteenth century.  What curious scenes the gayety of this little chamber conjures up, and what a vivid comment it is upon the age and people that produced it!  This is one of the things that makes a single hour of travel worth whole years of historic study, and which casts its light upon all future reading.  Here, no doubt, the sweet little abbess, with the noblest and prettiest of her nuns about her, received the polite world, and made a cheerful thing of devotion, while all over transalpine Europe the sour-hearted Reformers were destroying pleasant monasteries like this.  The light-hearted lady-nuns and their gentlemen friends looked on heresy as a deadly sin, and they had little reason to regard it with favor.  It certainly made life harder for them in time, for it made reform within the Church as well as without, so that at last the lovely Chamber of St. Paul was closed against the public for more than two centuries.