His eye fell on a large, purple satin coverlet heavily embroidered with gold, a splendid piece of late seventeenth-century Venetian work that his grandfather had found in a convent near Bologna.
Yes, that would serve to wrap the dreadful thing in.

It had perhaps served often as a pall for the dead.

Now it was to hide something that had a corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death itself--something that would breed horrors and yet would never die.
What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas.

They would mar its beauty and eat away its grace.

They would defile it and make it shameful.