last days of Cyril

Well its not great resolution but here's a picture of the same painting in a more natural light - as you can see the two sections are not just rubbed out, they're chipped away.  The sections removed are symmetrical in their placement - they bookend the scene.  The bricks in the front look like a later addition.

Life and Acts of Constantine is full of episodes of St. Cyril refuting through argument various heretical ideas - its something of a heroic story of his battles for truth and orthodoxy.  He debates Muslim Saracens, the Jewish Khazars, and the heretical "Patriarch Anis" - who allegedly "stirred within the capital an iconoclast heresy" (more on this guy later).  The meeting with the new Pope Adrian II in 868 is a major vindication for Cyril and Methodius's work in Moravia, against the "Trilingualists" - those Western churchmen who opposed writing and preaching in the vernacular languages.  

However Kiril became ill and died in Rome on Feb. 14 869, after 50 days in monastic seclusion.  Now I haven't seen the Julian calendar for that year, but it seems that 50 days before Feb 14 is the day after Christmas Dec 26.  The Life seems to mention them being in Rome for about five days.  It seems to imply they were ordained on the first day - its the first real event to be mentioned once they arrive in Rome bearing the relics of St. Clement.  They performed the mass in slavonic afterward, apparently at a different church every day for four days.  The fourth was the church of Paul the Apostle, where they sang all night and the next morning "celebrated the holy mass over [Paul's] grave, helped by the bishop Arsenius, who was one of the seven bishops, and Anasthasius [sic] the Librarian."  

Apart from an anecdote about Constantine explaining the proper reckoning of the age of the earth to "a certain Jew", the next thing mentioned in the text after this mass at Paul's tomb is Constantine's affliction.  So I think it is a reasonable guess for now that Constantine participated in the ceremonies leading up to Christmas (the all night hymns would be right for Christmas eve) and fell seriously ill the day after.  If this "Church of Paul the Apostle" is the Basilica Papale di San Paolo ("outside the walls"), then its possible he could have spent his last days of monastic seclusion there, since the complex includes a cloister.  

voi la