‘Sweet is the dialect of Arno’s vale:Though half consumed, I gladly turn to hear.’
‘Sweet is the dialect of Arno’s vale:Though half consumed, I gladly turn to hear.’
‘Sweet is the dialect of Arno’s vale:Though half consumed, I gladly turn to hear.’
‘Sweet is the dialect of Arno’s vale:
Though half consumed, I gladly turn to hear.’
So Dante makes one of his heroes exclaim. It is pleasant to hear or speak one’s native tongue when abroad; but possibly the language of that higher and adopted country, which was familiar to the scholar of former times, sounded even sweeter to the ear of friendship or of genius.
The first thing you do when you get to a town abroad is to go to the Post-office in expectation of letters, which you are sure not to receive exactly in proportion as you are anxious to have them. Friends at a distance have you at a disadvantage; and they let you know it, if they will let you know nothing else. There is in this a love of power or of contradiction, and at the same time a want of imagination. They cannot change places with you, or suppose how you can be so much at a loss about what is so obvious to them. It seems putting them to unnecessary trouble to transmit a self-evident truth (which it is upon the spot) a thousand miles (where it becomes a discovery). You have this comfort, however, under the delay of letters, that they have no bad news to send you, or you would hear of it in an instant.
When you are disappointed of your letters at the post-office at Florence, you turn round, and find yourself in the square of the Grand Duke, with the old Palace opposite to you, and a number of colossal statues, bleached in the open air, in front of it. They seem a species of huge stone-masonry. What is your surprise to learn, that they are the Hercules of Bandinello, and the David of Michael Angelo! Not far from these, is the Perseus of Benvenuto Cellini, which he makes such afussabout in his Life.[41]It is of bronze. After a great deal of cabal, before he was employed on this work, and great hostility and disagreeable obstacles thrown in his way in the progress of it, he at length finished the mould, and prepared to cast the figure. He found that the copper which he had at first thrown in did not work kindly. After one or two visits to the furnace, he grew impatient, and seizing on all the lead, iron, and brass he could lay his hands on in the house, threw itpell-mell, and in a fit of desperation, into the melting mass, and retired to wait the result. After passing an hour in the greatestagitation, he returned; and inspecting the cast, to his extreme joy discovered it to be smooth and perfect, without a flaw in any part, except a dint in the heel. He then sat down to enjoy his triumph over his enemies, and to devour a cold chicken (which he had provided for his supper) with vast composure and relish. It is a pity that a work produced under such auspicious circumstances does not altogether answer the romantic expectations formed of it. There is something petty and forced about it; and it smells of the goldsmith’s and jeweller’s shop. I would rather see the large silver vase, richly embossed by him with groups of flowers and figures, which was ordered by the Pope and placed under his table for the Cardinals and other guests to throw their bones into, instead of throwing them on the floor for the dogs to pick up, as had hitherto been the custom—a fine proof of the mingled barbarism and refinement of those days.[42]Benvenuto was a character and a genius, and more of a character than of a genius; for, after all, the greatest geniuses are ‘men of no mark or likelihood.’ Their strongest impulses are not personal, but pass out of themselves into the universe; nor do they waste their energies upon their private whims and perverse peculiarities. In Bandinello one does not look for much; he was never much esteemed, and is made a butt of by Benvenuto Cellini. But what shall we say to acommonplaceor barbarous piece of work by Michael Angelo? The David is as if a large mass of solid marble fell upon one’s head, to crush one’s faith in great names. It looks like an awkward overgrown actor at one of our minor theatres, without his clothes: the head is too big for the body, and it has a helpless expression of distress. The Bacchus in the Gallery, by the same artist, is no better. It ispotbellied, lank, and with a sickly, mawkish aspect. Both these statues were, it is true, done when he was very young; and the latter, when finished, he buried underground, and had it dug up as an antique, and when it was pronounced by thevirtuosiof the day to be superior to any thing in modern art, he produced the arm (which he had broken off), and claimed it as his own, to the confusion of his adversaries. Such is the story; and under the safeguard of this tradition, it has passed, criticism-proof. There are two pictures here attributed to this great artist; one in the Gallery, and another in the Palace Pitti, ofThe Fates, which are three meagre, dry, mean-looking old women. I shall not return to this subject till I get to the Vatican, and then I hope to tell a different story. Nothing more casts one down than to find an utter disproportion between the reality and one’s previous conceptions in a case of thiskind, when one has been brooding all one’s life over an idea of greatness. If one could sneak off with one’s disappointment in one’s pocket, and say nothing about it, or whisper it to the reeds, or bury it in a hole, or throw it into the river (Arno), where no one would fish it up, it would not signify; but to be obliged to note it in one’s common-place book, and publish it to all the world, ‘tis villainous! It is well one can turn from disagreeable thoughts like these to a landscape of Titian’s (the Holy Family at the Pitti Palace). A green bank in the fore-ground presents a pastoral scene of sheep and cattle reposing; then you have the deep green of the middle distance, then the blue-topped hills, and the golden sky beyond, with the red branches of an autumn wood rising into it; and in the faces of the bending group you see the tints of the evening sky reflected, and the freshness of the landscape breathed on their features. The depth and harmony of colouring in natural objects, refined in passing through the painter’s mind, mellowed by the hand of time, has acquired the softness and shadowy brilliancy of a dream, and while you gaze at it, you seem to be entranced! But to take things somewhat more in order.—
One of the striking things in the Gallery at Florence (given to the City by one of the Medici Family) is the Collection of Antique Busts. The Statues of Gods are the poetry of the art of that period. The busts of men and women handed down to us are the history of the species. You see the busts of Vitellius (whose throat seems bursting with ‘the jowl’ and a dish of lampreys), Galba, Trajan, Augustus, Julia, Faustina, Messalina; and you ask, were there real beings like these existing two thousand years ago? It is an extension of the idea of humanity; and ‘even in death there is animation too.’ History is vague and shadowy, but sculpture gives life and body to it; the names and letters in time-worn books start up real people in marble, and you no longer doubt their identity with the present race. Nature produced forms then as perfect as she does now.—Forsyth and others have endeavoured to invalidate the authenticity of these busts, and to shew that few of them can be traced with certainty to the persons whose names they bear. That with me is not the question. The interesting point is not to knowwhothey were, butthatthey were. There is no doubt that they are busts of people living two thousand years ago, and that is all that my moral demands. As to individual character, it would be as well sometimes to find it involved in obscurity; for some of the persons are better looking than for the truth of physiognomy they ought to be. Nero is as handsome a gentleman as his eulogists could wish him to be. The truth is, that what pleases me in these busts and others of thesame kind that I have seen is, that they very much resemble English people of sense and education in the present day, only with more regular features. They are grave, thoughtful, unaffected. There is not a face among them that you could mistake for a French face. These fine old heads, in short, confirm one in the idea of general humanity: French faces stagger one’s faith in the species!
There are two long galleries enriched with busts and statues of the most interesting description, with a series of productions of the early Florentine school, the Flying Mercury of John of Bologna, &c.; and in a room near the centre (called the Tribune) stands the Venus of Medici, with some other statues and pictures not unworthy to do her homage. I do not know what to say of the Venus, nor is it necessary to say much where all the world have already formed an opinion for themselves; yet, perhaps, this opinion, which seems the most universal, is the least so, and the opinion of all the world means that of no one individual in it. The end of criticism, however, is rather to direct attention to objects of taste, than to dictate to it. Besides, one has seen the Venus so often and in so many shapes, that custom has blinded one equally to its merits or defects. Instead of giving an opinion, one is disposed to turn round and ask, ‘What doyouthink of it?’ It is like a passage in the ‘Elegant Extracts,’ which one has read and admired, till one does not know what to make of it, or how to affix any ideas to the words: beauty and sweetness end in an unmeaning commonplace! If I might, notwithstanding, hazard a hypercriticism, I should say, that it is a little too much like an exquisite marble doll. I should conjecture (for it is only conjecture where familiarity has neutralized the capacity of judging) that there is a want of sentiment, of character, a balance of pretensions as well as of attitude, a good deal of insipidity, and an over-gentility. There is no expression of mental refinement, nor much of voluptuous blandishment. There is great softness, sweetness, symmetry, and timid grace—a faultless tameness, a negative perfection. The Apollo Belvidere is positively bad, a theatrical coxcomb, and ill-made; I mean compared with the Theseus. The great objection to the Venus is, that the form has not the true feminine proportions; it is not sufficiently large in the lower limbs, but tapers too much to a point, so that it wants firmness and a sort of indolent repose (the proper attribute of woman), and seems as if the least thing would overset it. In a word, the Venus is a very beautiful toy, but not the Goddess of Love, or even of Beauty. It is not the statue Pygmalion fell in love with; nor did any man ever wish or fancy his mistress to be like it. There is something beyond it, both in imagination and in nature. Neither have we a firm faith in theidentity of the Goddess; it is a nice point, whether any such form ever existed. Now let us say what we will of theideal, it ought, when embodied to the senses, to bear the stamp of the most absolute reality, for it is only an image taken from nature, with every thing omitted that might contradict or disturb its uniformity. The Venus is not a poetical and abstract personification of certain qualities; but an individual model, that has been altered and tampered with. It would have had a better effect if executed in ivory, with gold sandals and bracelets, like that of Phidias (mentioned by Pliny), to define its pretensions as belonging to the class of ornamental art; for it neither carries the mind into the regions of ancient mythology, nor of ancient poetry, nor rises to an equality of style with modern poetry or painting. Raphael has figures of far greater grace, both mental and bodily. The Apollo of Medicis, which is in the same room, is a very delightful specimen of Grecian art; but it has the fault of being of that equivocal size (I believe calledsmall-life) which looks like diminutive nature, not nature diminished.
Raphael’s Fornarina (which is also in this highly-embellished cabinet of art) faces the Venus, and is a downright, point-blank contrast to it. Assuredly no charge can be brought against it ofmimmini-pimineeaffectation or shrinking delicacy. It is robust, full to bursting, coarse, luxurious, hardened, but wrought up to an infinite degree of exactness and beauty in the details. It is the perfection of vulgarity and refinement together. The Fornarina is a bouncing, buxom, sullen, saucy baker’s daughter—but painted, idolized, immortalized by Raphael! Nothing can be more homely and repulsive than the original; you see her bosom swelling like the dough rising in the oven; the tightness of her skin puts you in mind of Trim’s story of the sausage-maker’s wife—nothing can be much more enchanting than the picture—than the care and delight with which the artist has seized the lurking glances of the eye, curved the corners of the mouth, smoothed the forehead, dimpled the chin, rounded the neck, till by innumerable delicate touches, and the ‘labour of love,’ he has converted a coarse, rude mass into a miracle of art. Raphael, in the height of his devotion, and as it were to insinuate that nothing could be too fine for this idol of his fancy (as Rousseau prided himself in writing the letters of Julia on the finest paper with gilt edges) has painted the chain on the Fornarina’s neck with actual gold-leaf. Titian would never have thought of such a thing; he could not have been guilty of such a solecism in painting, as to introduce a solid substance without shadow. Highly as Raphael has laboured this portrait, it still shows his inferiority to Titian in the imitative part of painting. The colour on the cheeksof the Fornarina seems laid on the skin; in the girl by Titian at the Pitti Palace, it is seen through it. The one appears tanned by the sun; the other to have been out in the air, or is like a flower ‘just washed in the dew.’ Again, the surface of the flesh in Raphael is so smooth, that you are tempted to touch it: in Titian, it retires from the touch into a shadowy recess. There is here a duplicate (varied) of hisMistress at her Toilette(to be seen in the Louvre), dressed in a loose night-robe, and with the bosom nearly bare. It is very carefully finished, and is a rich study of colouring, expression, and natural grace. Of the Titian Venus (with her gouvernante and chest of clothes in the background) I cannot say much. It is very like the common print. The Endymion by Guercino has a divine character of pensive softness, and youthful, manly grace, and the impression made by the picture answers to that made by the fable—an excellent thing in history! It is one of the finest pictures in Florence. I should never have done if I were to go into the details. I can only mention a few of the principal. Near the Fornarina is the Young St. John in the Wilderness, by Raphael; it is very dark, very hard, and very fine, like an admirable carving in wood. He has here also two Holy Families, full of playful sweetness and mild repose. There are also two by Correggio of the same subject, and a fine and bold study of the Head of a Boy. There is a spirit of joy and laughing grace contained in this head, as the juice of wine is in the grape. Correggio had a prodigious raciness and gusto, when he did not fritter them away by false refinement and a sort of fastidious hypercriticism upon himself. His sketches, I suspect, are better than his finished works. One of the Holy Families here is the very acme of theaffettuosoand Della Cruscan style of painting. The figure of the Madonna is like a studiously-involved period or turn upon words: the infant Christ on the ground is a diminutive appellation, a prettiness, a fairy-fancy. Certainly, it bears no proportion to the Mother, whose hands are bent back over it with admiration and delight, till grace becomes acramp, and her eye-lids droop and quiver over the fluttering object of her ‘strange child-worship,’ almost as if they were moved by metallic tractors. The other Madonna is perfectly free from any taint of affectation. It is a plain rustic beauty, innocent, interesting, simple, without one contortion of body or of mind. It is sweetly painted. The Child is also a pure study after nature: the blood is tingling in his veins, and his face has an admirable expression of careless infantine impatience. The old Man at the side is a master-piece, with all this painter’s knowledge of foreshortening,chiaro-scuro, the management of drapery, &c. Herodias’s Daughter, by Luini, is an elaborate and successful imitation ofLeonardo da Vinci. The Medusa’s Head of the latter is hardly, I think, so fine as Barry’s description of it. It has not quite the watery languor—the dim obscurity. The eyes of the female are too much like the eyes of the snakes, red, crusted, and edgy. I shall only notice one picture more in this collection—the Last Judgment, by Bronzino. It has vast merit in the drawing and expression, but its most remarkable quality is the amazing relief without any perceivable shadow, and the utmost clearness with the smallest possible variety of tint. It looks like a Mosaic painting. The specimens of the Dutch and other foreign schools here are upon a small scale, and of inferior value.
The Palace Pitti was begun by one of the Strozzi, who boasted that he would build a palace with a court-yard in it, in which another palace might dance. He had nearly ruined himself by the expense, when one of the Medici took it off his hands and completed it. It is at present the residence of the Grand Duke. The view within over the court-yard to the terrace and mount above is superb. Here is the Venus of Canova, an elegant sylph-like figure; but Canova was more to be admired for delicacy of finishing, than for expression or conception of general form. At the Gallery there is one room full of extraordinary pictures and statues: at the Palace Pitti there are six or seven covered with some of the finest portraits and history-pieces in the world, and the walls are dark with beauty, and breathe an air of the highest art from them. It is one of the richest and most original Collections I have seen. It is not so remarkable for variety of style or subject as for a noble opulence and aristocratic pride, having to boast names in the highest ranks of art, and many of their best works. The Palace Pitti formerly figured in the Catalogue of the Louvre, which it had contributed to enrich with many of its most gorgeous jewels, which have been brought back to their original situation, and which now shine here, though not with unreflected lustre, nor in solitary state. Among these, for instance, is Titian’s Hippolito di Medici (which the late Mr. Opie pronounced the finest portrait in the world), with the spirit and breadth of history, and with the richness, finish, and glossiness of an enamel picture. I remember the first time I ever saw it, it stood on an easel which I had to pass, with the back to me, and as I turned and saw it with the boar-spear in its hand, and its keen glance bent upon me, it seemed ‘a thing of life,’ with supernatural force and grandeur. The famous music-piece by Giorgioni was at one time in the Louvre, and is not a whit inferior to Titian. The head turned round of the man playing on the harpsichord, for air, expression, and a true gusto of colouring, may challenge competition all the world through. There goes atradition that these are the portraits of Luther and Calvin. Giorgioni died at the age of thirty-four, heart-broken, it is said, because one of his scholars had robbed him of his mistress—possibly the very beauty whose picture is introduced here. Leo X., by Raphael, that fine, stern, globular head, on which ‘deliberation sits and public care,’ is in the same room with the Cardinal Bentivoglio, one of Vandyke’s happiest and mostspiritualheads—a fine group of portraits by Rubens, of himself, his brother, Grotius and Justus Lipsius, all in one frame—an admirable Holy Family, in this master’s very best manner, by Julio Romano—and the Madonna della Seggia of Raphael—all of these were formerly in the Louvre. The last is painted on wood, and worn, so as to have a crayon look. But for the grouping, the unconscious look of intelligence in the children, and the rounding and fleshiness of the forms of their limbs, this is one of the artist’s most unrivalled works. There are also several by Andrea del Sarto, conceived and finished with the highest taste and truth of feeling; a Nymph and Satyr by Giorgioni, of great gusto; Hercules and Antæus, by Schiavoni (an admirable study of bold drawing and poetical colouring), an unfinished sketch by Guido, several by Cigoli and Fra. Bartolomeo; a girl in a flowered dress, by Titian (of which Mr. Northcote possesses a beautiful copy by Sir Joshua); another portrait of a Man in front view and a Holy Family, by the same; and one or two fine pieces by Rubens and Rembrandt. There is a Parmegiano here, in which is to be seen the origin of Mr. Fuseli’s style, a child in its mother’s lap, with its head rolling away from its body, the mother’s face looking down upon it with green and red cheeks tapering to a point, and a thigh of an angel, which you cannot well piece to an urn which he carries in his hand, and which seems like a huge scale of the ‘shard-borne beetle.’—The grotesque and discontinuous are, in fact, carried to their height. Here is also the Conspiracy of Catiline, by Salvator Rosa, which looks more like a Cato-street Conspiracy than any thing else, or a bargain struck in a blacksmith’s shop; and a Battle-piece by the same artist, with the round haunches and flowing tail of a white horse repeated, and some fierce faces, hid by the smoke and their helmets, of which you can make neither head nor tail. Salvator was a great landscape-painter; but both he and Lady Morgan have been guilty of a great piece ofegotismin supposing that he was any thing more. These are the chief failures, but in general out of heaps of pictures there is scarce one that is not of the highest interest both in itself, and from collateral circumstances. Those who come in search of high Italian art will here find it in perfection; and if they do not feel this, they may turn back at once. The pictures in the PittiPalace are finely preserved, and have that deep, mellow tone of age upon them which is to the eyes of a connoisseur in painting as the rust of medals or the crust on wine is to connoisseurs and judges of a different stamp.
The road between Florence and Rome by Sienna is not very interesting, though it presents a number of reflections to those who are well acquainted with the changes that have taken place in the history and agriculture of these districts. Shortly after you leave Florence, the way becomes dreary and barren or unhealthy. Towards the close of the first day’s journey, however, we had a splendid view of the country we were to travel, which lay stretched out beneath our feet to an immense distance, as we descended into the little town of Pozzo Borgo. Deep valleys sloped on each side of us, from which the smoke of cottages occasionally curled: the branches of an overhanging birch-tree or a neighbouring ruin gave relief to the grey, misty landscape, which was streaked by dark pine-forests, and speckled by the passing clouds; and in the extreme distance rose a range of hills glittering in the evening sun, and scarcely distinguishable from the ridge of clouds that hovered near them. We did not reach these hills (on the top of one of which stands the fort of Radicofani) till the end of two days’ journey, making a distance of between fifty and sixty miles, so that their miniature size and fairy splendour, as they crowned the far-off horizon, may be easily guessed. We did not find the accommodation on the road quite so bad as we had expected. The chief want is of milk, which is to be had only in the morning; but we remedied this defect by a taking a bottle of it with us. The weather was cold enough (in the middle of March) to freeze it. The economy of life is here reduced to a very great simplicity, absolute necessaries from day to day and from hand to mouth; and nothing is allowed for the chapter of accidents, or the irregular intrusion of strangers. The mechanism of English inns is accounted for by the certainty of the arrival of customers, with full pockets and empty stomachs. There every road is a thoroughfare; here a traveller is a curiosity, and we did not meet ten carriages on our journey, a distance of a hundred and ninety-three miles, and which it took us six days to accomplish. I may add that we paid only seven louis for our two places in the Voiture (which, besides, we had entirely to ourselves) our expences on the road included. This is cheap enough.
Sienna is a fine old town, but more like a receptacle of the dead than the residence of the living. ‘It was,’ might be written over the entrance to this, as to most of the towns in Italy. The magnificence of the buildings corresponds but ill with the squalidness of the inhabitants; there seems no reason for crowding the streets so close together when there are so few people in them. There is at present no enemy without to huddle them together within the walls, whatever might have been the case in former times: for miles you do not meet a human being, or discern the traces of a human dwelling. The view through the noble arch of the gate as you leave Sienna is at once exquisitely romantic and picturesque: otherwise, the country presents a most deplorable aspect for a length of way. Nature seems to have here taken it upon her to play the part of a cinder-wench, and to have thrown up her incessant heaps of clay and ashes, without either dignity or grace. At a distance to the right and left, you see the stately remains of the ancient Etruscan cities, cresting the heights and built for defence; and here and there, perched on the top of a cliff, the ruinous haunt of some bandit chief (the scourge of later days), that might be compared in imagination to some dragon, old and blind, still watching for its long-lost prey, and sharing the desolation it has made. There are two of these near the wretched inn of La Scala, where we stopped the third morning, rising in lonely horror from the very point of two hills, facing each other and only divided by a brook, that baffle description, and require the artist’s boldest pencil. Aided by the surrounding gloom, and shrouded by the driving mist (as they were when we passed), they throw the mind back into a trance of former times, and the cry of midnight revelry, of midnight murder is heard from the crumbling walls. The romantic bridge and hamlet under them begins the ascent of Radicofani. The extensive ruin at the top meets your view and disappears repeatedly during the long, winding, toilsome ascent. Over a tremendous valley to the left, we saw the distant hills of Perugia, covered with snow and blackened with clouds, and a heavy sleet was falling around us. We started, on being told that the post-house stood directly on the other side of the fort (at a height of 2400 feet above the level of the sea), and that we were to pass the night there. It was like being lodged in a cloud: it seemed the very rocking-cradle of storms and tempests. As we wound round the road at the foot of it, we were relieved from our apprehensions. It was a fortress built by stubborn violence for itself, that might be said to scowl defiance on the world below, and to promise security and shelter to those within its reach. Huge heaps of round stones, gnarled like iron, and that looked as if they would break the feetthat trusted themselves among them, were rolled into the space between the heights and the road-side. The middle or principal turret, which rose between the other two, was thrown into momentary perspective by the mist; a fragment of an outer wall stood beneath, half covered with ivy; close to it was an old chapel-spire built of red brick, and a small hamlet crouched beneath the ramparts. It reminded me, by its preternatural strength and sullen aspect, of the castle of Giant Despair inThe Pilgrim’s Progress. The dark and stern spirit of former times might be conceived to have entrenched itself here as in its last hold; to have looked out and laughed at precipices and storms, and the puny assaults of hostile bands, and resting on its red right arm, to have wasted away through inaction and disuse in its unapproachable solitude and barbarous desolation. Never did I see any thing so rugged and so stately, apparently so formidable in a former period, so forlorn in this. It was a majestic shadow of the mighty past, suspended in another region, belonging to another age. I might take leave of it in the words of old Burnet, whose Latin glows among these cold hills,Vale augusta sedes, digna rege; vale augusta rupes, semper mihi memoranda!—We drove into the inn-yard, which resembled a barrack (so do most of the inns on the road), with its bed-rooms like hospital-wards, and its large apartments for assemblages of armed men, now empty, gloomy, and unfurnished; but where we found a hospitable welcome, and by the aid of a double fee to the waiters every thing very comfortable. The first object was to procure milk for our tea (of which last article we had brought some very good from the shop of Signor Pippini, at Florence[43]) and the next thing was to lay in a stock for the remaining half of our journey. We were not sorry to pass a night at the height of 2400 feet above the level of the sea, and immediately under this famous fortress. The winds ‘howled through the vacant guard-rooms and deserted lobbies’ of our hostelry, and the snow descended in a heavy fall, and covered the valleys; but Radicofani looked the same, as we saw it through the coach-windows the next morning, old, grey, deserted, gloomy, as if it had survived ‘a thousand storms, a thousand winters’—the peasant still crawled along its trenches, the traveller stopped to gaze at its battlements—but neither spear nor battle-axe would glitter there again, nor banner be spread, nor the clash of arms be heard in the round of ever-rolling years—it looked back to other times as we looked back upon it, and stood towering in its decay, and nodding to an eternal repose! The road in this, as in other parts of Italy, is evidently calculated, and wasoriginally constructed, for the march of an army. Instead of creeping along the valleys, it passes along the ridges of hills to prevent surprise, or watch the movements of an enemy, and thus generally commands an extensive view of the country, such as it is. It was long before winding slowly into the valley, we lost sight of our last night’s station.
Aquapendente is situated on the brow of a hill, over a running stream, as its name indicates, and the ascent to it is up the side of a steep rugged ravine, with overhanging rocks and shrubs. The mixture of wildness and luxuriance answered to my idea of Italian scenery, but I had seen little of it hitherto. The town is old, dirty, and disagreeable; and we were driven to an inn in one of the bye-streets, where there was but one sitting-room, which was occupied by an English family, who were going to leave it immediately, but who, I suppose, on hearing that some one else was waiting for it, claimed the right of keeping it as long as they pleased. The assertion of an abstract right is the idea uppermost in the minds of all English people. Unfortunately, when its attainment is worth any thing, their spirit of contradiction makes them ready to relinquish it; or when it costs them any thing, their spirit of self-interest deters them from the pursuit! After waiting some time, we at last breakfasted in a sort of kitchen or outhouse upstairs, where we had very excellent but homely fare, and where we were amused with the furniture—a dove-house, a kid, half-skinned, hanging on the walls; a loose heap of macaroni and vegetables in one corner, plenty of smoke, a Madonna carved and painted, and a map of Constantinople. The pigeons on the floor were busy with their murmuring plaints, and often fluttered their wings as if to fly. So, thought I, the nations of the earth clap their wings, and strive in vain to be free! The landlady was a woman about forty, diminutive and sickly, but with one of those pale, mild, penetrating faces which one seldom sees out of Italy. She was the mother of two buxom daughters, as coarse and hard as any thing of the kind one might meet with in Herefordshire or Gloucestershire! The road from Aquapendente is of a deep heavy soil, over which the horses with difficulty dragged the carriage, The view on one side was bounded by two fine conical hills clothed to the very top with thick woods of beech and fir; and our route lay for miles over an undulating ground covered with the wild broom (growing to the size of a large shrub), among which herds of slate-coloured oxen were seen browzing luxuriously. The broom floated above them, their covering and their food, with its flexible silken branches of light green, and presented an eastern scene, extensive, soft and wild. We passed, I think, but one habitation between Aquapendente and San Lorenzo, and met but one human being, which was aGen d’Armes! I askedour Vetturino if this dreary aspect of the country was the effect of nature or of art. He pulled a handful of earth from the hedge-side, and shewed a rich black loam, capable of every improvement. I asked in whose dominions we were, and received for answer, ‘In the Pope’s.’ San Lorenzo is a town built on the summit of a hill, in consequence of the ravages of themalariain the old town, situated in the valley below. It looks like a large alms-house, or else like a town that has run away from the plague and itself, and stops suddenly on the brow of a hill to see if the Devil is following it. The ruins below are the most ghastly I ever saw. The scattered fragments of walls and houses are crumbling away like rotten bones, and there are holes in the walls and subterraneous passages, in which disease, like an ugly witch, seems to lurk and to forbid your entrance. Further on, and winding round the edge of the lake, you come to Bolsena. The unwholesome nature of the air from the water may be judged of from the colour of the tops of the houses, the moss on which is as yellow as the jaundice, and the grass and corn-fields on its borders are of a tawny green. The road between this and Monte-Fiascone, which you see on an eminence before you, lies through a range of gloomy defiles, and is deformed by the blackened corses of huge oak-trees, that strew the road-side, the unsightly relics of fine old woods that were cut down and half-burnt a few years ago as the haunts of bands of robbers. They plant morals in this country by rooting up trees! While the country is worth seeing, it is not safe to travel; but picturesque beauty must, of course, give place to the police. I thought, when I first saw these cadaverous trunks lying by the side of the lake, that they were the useless remains of cargoes of timber that we had purchased of the Holy See to fight its battles, and maintain the cause of social order in every part of the world! Let no English traveller stop at Monte-Fiascone (I mean at the inn outside the town), unless he would be starved and smoke-dried, but pass on to Viterbo, which is a handsome town, with the best inn on the road. You pass one night more on the road in this mode of travelling (which resembles walking a minuet, rather than striking up a country dance) at Ronciglione; and the next day from Baccano, you see rising up, in a flat, hazy plain, the dome of St. Peter’s. You proceed for some miles along a gradual descent without any object of much interest, pass the Tiber and the gateDel Popolo, and you are in Rome. When there, go any where but to Franks’s Hotel, and get a lodging, if possible, on the Via Gregoriana, which overlooks the town, and where you can feast the eye and indulge in sentiment, without being poisoned by bad air. The house of Salvator Rosa is at present let out in lodgings. I have now lived twice in houses occupied by celebrated men, once ina house that had belonged to Milton, and now in this, and find to my mortification that imagination, is entirely athing imaginary, and has nothing to do with matter of fact, history, or the senses. To see an object of thought or fancy is just as impossible as to feel a sound or hear a smell.
‘As London is to the meanest country town, so is Rome to every other city in the world.’
So said an old friend of mine, and I believed him till I saw it. This is not the Rome I expected to see. No one from being in it would know he was in the place that had been twice mistress of the world. I do not understand how Nicolas Poussin could tell, taking up a handful of earth, that it was ‘a part of theEternal City.’ In Oxford an air of learning breathes from the very walls: halls and colleges meet your eye in every direction; you cannot for a moment forget where you are. In London there is a look of wealth and populousness which is to be found nowhere else. In Rome you are for the most part lost in a mass of tawdry, fulsomecommon-places. It is not the contrast of pig-styes and palaces that I complain of, the distinction between the old and new; what I object to is the want of any such striking contrast, but an almost uninterrupted succession of narrow, vulgar-looking streets, where the smell of garlick prevails over the odour of antiquity, with the dingy, melancholy flat fronts of modern-built houses, that seem in search of an owner. A dunghill, an outhouse, the weeds growing under an imperial arch offend me not; but what has a green-grocer’s stall, a stupid English china warehouse, a putridtrattoria, a barber’s sign, an old clothes or old picture shop or a Gothic palace, with two or three lacqueys in modern liveries lounging at the gate, to do with ancient Rome? No! this is not the wall that Romulus leaped over: this is not the Capitol where Julius Cæsar fell: instead of standing on seven hills, it is situated in a low valley: the golden Tiber is a muddy stream: St. Peter’s is not equal to St. Paul’s: the Vatican falls short of the Louvre, as it was in my time; but I thought that here were works immoveable, immortal, inimitable on earth, and lifting the soul half way to heaven. I find them not, or only what I had seen before in different ways: the Stanzas of Raphael are faded, or no better than the prints; and the mind of Michael Angelo’s figures, of which no traces are to be found in the copies, is equally absent from the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Rome is great only in ruins: the Coliseum, the Pantheon, the Arch ofConstantine fully answered my expectations; and an air breathes round her stately avenues, serene, blissful, like the mingled breath of spring and winter, betwixt life and death, betwixt hope and despair. The country about Rome is cheerless and barren. There is little verdure, nor are any trees planted, on account of their bad effects on the air. Happy climate! in which shade and sunshine are alike fatal. The Jews (I may add while I think of it) are shut up here in a quarter by themselves. I see no reason for it. It is a distinction not worth the making. There was a talk (it beingAnno Santo) of shutting them up for the whole of the present year. A soldier stands at the gate, to tell you that this is the Jews’ quarter, and to take any thing you choose to give him for this piece of Christian information. A Catholic church stands outside their prison, with a Crucifixion painted on it as a frontispiece, where they are obliged to hear a sermon in behalf of the truth of the Christian religion every Good Friday. On the same day they used to make them run races in the Corso, for the amusement of the rabble (high and low)—now they are compelled to provide horses for the same purpose. Owing to the politeness of the age, they no longer burn them as of yore, and that is something. Religious zeal, like all other things, grows old and feeble. They treat the Jews in this manner at Rome (as a local courtesy to St. Peter), and yet they complimentuson our increasing liberality to the Irish Catholics. The Protestant chapel here stands outside the walls, while there is a British monument to the memory of the Stuarts, inside of St. Peter’s; the tombs in the English burying-ground were destroyed and defaced not long ago; yet this did not prevent the Prince Regent from exchanging portraits with the Pope and his Ministers!—‘Oh! liberalism—lovely liberalism!’ as Mr. Blackwood would say.
From the window of the house where I lodge, I have a view of the whole city at once: nay, I can see St. Peter’s as I lie in bed of a morning. The town is an immense mass of solid stone-buildings, streets, palaces, and churches; but it has not the beauty of the environs of Florence, nor the splendid background of Turin, nor does it present any highly picturesque or commanding points of view like Edinburgh. The pleasantest walks I know are round the Via Sistina, and along the Via di Quattro-Fontane—they overlook Rome from the North-East on to the churches of Santa Maria Maggiore, and of St. John Lateran, towards the gate leading to Naples. As we loiter on, our attention was caught by an open greensward to the left, with foot-paths, and a ruined wall and gardens on each side. A carriage stood in the road just by, and a gentleman and lady, with a little child, had got out of it to walk. A soldier and a girl were seen talking together further on, and a herd of cattle were feeding attheir leisure on the yielding turf. The day was close and dry—not a breath stirred. All was calm and silent. It had been cold when we set out, but here the air was soft—of an Elysian temperature, as if the winds did not dare to visit the sanctuaries of the dead too roughly. The daisy sprung beneath our feet—the fruit-trees blossomed within the nodding arches. On one side were seen the hills of Albano, on the other the Claudian gate; and close by was Nero’s Golden House, where there were seventy thousand statues and pillars, of marble and of silver, and where senates kneeled, and myriads shouted in honour of a frail mortal, as of a God. Come here, oh man! and worship thine own spirit, that can hoard up, as in a shrine, the treasures of two thousand years, and can create out of the memory of fallen splendours and departed grandeur a solitude deeper than that of desert wildernesses, and pour from the out-goings of thine own thoughts a thunder louder than that of maddening multitudes! No place was ever so still as this; for none was ever the scene of such pomp and triumph! Not far from this are the Baths of Titus; the grass and the poppy (the flower of oblivion) grow over them, and in the vaults below they shew you (by the help of a torch) paintings on the ceiling eighteen hundred years old, birds, and animals, a figure of a slave, a nymph and a huntsman, fresh and elegantly foreshortened, and also the place where the Laocoon was discovered. A few paces off is the Coliseum, or Amphitheatre of Titus, the noblest ruin in Rome. It is circular, built of red stone and brick, with arched windows, and the gillyflower and fennel growing on its walls to the very top: one side is nearly perfect. As you pass under it, it seems to raise itself above you, and mingle with the sky in its majestic simplicity, as if earth were a thing too gross for it; it stands almost unconscious of decay, and may still stand for ages—though Mr. Hobhouse has written Annotations upon it! There is a hypocritical inscription on it, to say that it has been kept in repair by the Popes, in order to preserve the memory of the martyrs that suffered here in cruel combats with wild beasts. As I have alluded to this subject, I will add that I think the finest stanza in Lord Byron is that where he describes theDying Gladiator, who falls and does not hear the shout of barbarous triumph echoing from these very walls:—
‘He hears it not; his thoughts are far away,Where his rude hut beside the Danube lay;There are his young barbarians, all at play,They and their Dacian mother; he their sireIs doom’d to make a Roman holiday.When will ye rise, ye Goths? awake and glut your ire!’Childe Harold.
‘He hears it not; his thoughts are far away,Where his rude hut beside the Danube lay;There are his young barbarians, all at play,They and their Dacian mother; he their sireIs doom’d to make a Roman holiday.When will ye rise, ye Goths? awake and glut your ire!’Childe Harold.
‘He hears it not; his thoughts are far away,Where his rude hut beside the Danube lay;There are his young barbarians, all at play,They and their Dacian mother; he their sireIs doom’d to make a Roman holiday.When will ye rise, ye Goths? awake and glut your ire!’Childe Harold.
‘He hears it not; his thoughts are far away,
Where his rude hut beside the Danube lay;
There are his young barbarians, all at play,
They and their Dacian mother; he their sire
Is doom’d to make a Roman holiday.
When will ye rise, ye Goths? awake and glut your ire!’
Childe Harold.
The temple of Vesta is on the Tiber. It is not unlike an hour-glass—or a toad-stool; it is small, but exceedingly beautiful, and has a look of great antiquity. The Pantheon is also as fine as possible. It has the most perfect unity of effect. It was hardly a proper receptacle for the Gods of the Heathens, for it has a simplicity and grandeur like the vaulted cope of Heaven. Compared with these admired remains of former times I must say that the more modern churches and palaces in Rome are poor, flashy, upstart looking things. Even the dome of St. Peter’s is for the most part hid by the front, and the Vatican has no business by its side. The sculptures there are also indifferent, and the mosaics, except two—the Transfiguration and St. Jerome, ill chosen. I was lucky enough to see the Pope here on Easter Sunday. He seems a harmless, infirm, fretful old man. I confess I should feel little ambition to be at the head of a procession, at which the ignorant stare, the better informed smile. I was also lucky enough to see St. Peter’s illuminated to the very top (a project of Michael Angelo’s) in the evening. It was finest at first, as the kindled lights blended with the fading twilight. It seemed doubtful whether it were an artificial illumination, the work of carpenters and torch-bearers, or the reflection of an invisible sun. One half of the cross shone with the richest gold, and rows of lamps gave light as from a sky. At length a shower of fairy lights burst out at a signal in all directions, and covered the whole building. It looked better at a distance than when we went nearer it. It continued blazing all night. What an effect it must have upon the country round! Now and then a life or so is lost in lighting up the huge fabric, but what is this to the glory of the church and the salvation of souls, to which it no doubt tends? I can easily conceive some of the wild groups that I saw in the streets the following day to have been led by delight and wonder from their mountain-haunts, or even from the bandits’ cave, to worship at this new starry glory, rising from the earth. The whole of the immense space before St. Peter’s was in the afternoon crowded with people to see the Pope give his benediction. The rich dresses of the country people, the strong features and orderly behaviour of all, gave this assemblage a decided superiority over any thing of the kind I had seen in England. I did not hear theMisererewhich is chaunted by the Priests, and sung by a single voice (I understand like an angel’s) in a dim religious light in the Sistine Chapel; nor did I see the exhibition of the relics, at which I was told all the beauty of Rome was present. It is something even to miss such things. After all, St. Peter’s does not seem to me the chief boast or most imposing display of the Catholic religion. Old Melrose Abbey, battered to pieces and in ruins, asit is, impresses me much more than the collective pride and pomp of Michael Angelo’s great work. Popery is here at home, and may strut and swell and deck itself out as it pleases, on the spot and for the occasion. It is the pageant of an hour. But to stretch out its arm fifteen hundred miles, to create a voice in the wilderness, to have left its monuments standing by the Teviot-side, or to send the midnight hymn through the shades of Vallombrosa, or to make it echo among Alpine solitudes, that is faith, and that is power. The rest is a puppet-shew! I am no admirer of Pontificals, but I am a slave to the picturesque. The Priests talking together in St. Peter’s, or the common people kneeling at the altars, make groups that shame all art. The inhabitants of the city have something French about them—something of the cook’s and the milliner’s shop—something pert, gross, and cunning; but the Roman peasants redeem the credit of their golden sky. The young women that come here from Gensano and Albano, and that are known by their scarlet boddices and white head-dresses and handsome good-humoured faces, are the finest specimens I have ever seen of human nature. They are like creatures that have breathed the air of Heaven, till the sun has ripened them into perfect beauty, health, and goodness. They are universally admired in Rome. The English women that you see, though pretty, are pieces of dough to them. Little troops and whole families, men, women, and children, from the Campagna and neighbouring districts of Rome, throng the streets during Easter and Lent, who come to visit the shrine of some favourite Saint, repeating theirAvesaloud, and telling their beads with all the earnestness imaginable. Popery is no farce to them. They surely think St. Peter’s is the way to Heaven. You even see priests counting their beads, and looking grave. If they can contrive to get possession of this world for themselves, and give the laity the reversion of the next, were it only in imagination, something is to be said for the exchange. I only hate half-way houses in religion or politics, that take from us all the benefits of ignorance and superstition, and give us none of the advantages of liberty or philosophy in return. Thus I hate Princes who usurp the thrones of others, and would almost give them back, sooner than allow the rights of the people. Once more, how does that monument to the Stuarts happen to be stuck up in the side-aisle of St. Peter’s? I would ask the person who placed it there, how many Georges there have been since JamesIII.? His ancestor makes but an ambiguous figure beside the posthumous group—