SPURS IN THE PICTURE GALLERIES.
Florence, city of my delight! how do I thrill at the recollection of the
asylum afforded me by thee in the Via Parione. The room was tiled, and
cool, and high, and its single window looked out upon a real palace,
where the family of Corsini, presided over by a porter in cocked hat and
an exuberance of gold lace, gave me frequent glimpses of gauze dresses
and glorious eyes, whose owners sometimes came to the casement to watch
the poor little foreigner, writing so industriously.
Every young traveller has two or three subjects of unrest. Mine were
girls and art. The copyists in the galleries were more beautiful studies
to me than the paintings. The next time I go to Europe, I shall take
enough money along to give all the pretty ones an order; this will be an
introduction, and I shall know how they live, and how much money they
make, and what passions have heaved their beautiful bosoms, to make
their slow, quiet lives forever haunted and longing.
Love, love! There are only two grand, unsatiated passions, which keep us
forever in freshness and fever,--love and art.
In Italy I breathed the purest atmosphere; all the world was a
landscape picture; all the skies were spilling blueness and crimson
upon the mountains; all the faces were Madonnas; all the perspectives
were storied architecture. Westward the star of Empire takes its way,
but that of art shines steadily in the East. Thither look our American
young men, no matter at which of its altars they make their
devotions,--painting, sculpture, or architecture. And I, who had known
some fondness for the pencil till lured into the wider, wilder field of
letters, felt almost an artist's joy when I stood in the presence of
those solemn masters whose works are inspired and imperishable, like
religion.
Having passed the first thrill and disappointment,--for pure art speaks
only to the pure by intuition or initiation, and I was yet a novice,--my
old newspaper curiosity revived to learn of the successful living rather
than of the grand dead.
Correspondents, like poets, are born, not made: the venerable
associations around me--monuments, cloisters, palaces, the homes and
graves of great men whom I revered, the aisles where every canvas bore a
spell name--could not wean me from that old, reportorial habit of asking
questions, peeping into private nooks, and making notes upon
contemporary things, just as I had done for three years, in cities, on
routes, on battle-fields. And as the old world seemed to me only a great
art museum, I longed to look behind the tapestry at the Ghobelin
weavers, pulling the beautiful threads.
"Where dwell these gay and happy students, who quit our hard, bright
skies, and land of angularities, to inhale the dews of these sedative
mosses, and, by attrition with masterpieces, glean something of the
spirit of the masters?"
Straightway the faery realm opened to me, and two months of Italian
rambling were spent in association with the folk I esteemed only less
than my own exemplars.
Art, in all ages, is the flowery way. No pursuit gives so great joy in
the achieving, none achieved yields higher meed of competence,
contentment, and repute. Its ambition is more genial and subdued than
that of literature, its rivalry more courteous and exalting; its daily
life should be pastoral and domestic, free from those feverish mutations
and adventures which cross the incipient author, and it is forever
surrounded by bright and beautiful objects which linger too long upon
the eye to stir the mind to more than emulation.
Is it harsh to say that artists have been too well rewarded, and
thinkers and writers too ill? Vasari dines at the ducal table, while
Galileo's pension is the rack; the mob which carries Cimabue's canvas in
triumph, drives Dante into exile; Rubens is a king's ambassador, and
Grotius is sent to jail; to Reynolds's levees, poor, bankrupt Goldsmith
steals like an unwelcome guest, and Apelles's gold is paid to him in
measures, while Homer, singing immortal lines, goes blind and begging.
Art students take rank in Italy among the best of travellers, but
Bohemianism in art is at one's peril. There are many wasted lives among
the clever fellows who go abroad ostensibly for study. I recall Jimman,
who was an expert with the pencil, and who colored with excellent
discrimination. He went to Dusseldorf at first, and became known to
Leutze, who praised his sketches. He began to associate at once with
students and tipplers, and dissipated less by drinking than by talking.
I have a theory that more men are lost to themselves and the age by a
love of "gabbing" than by drinking. It is not hard to eschew cognac and
claret, but there is no cure for "buzzing." There is a drunkenness of
talk which takes possession of one, and Jimman would have had the
_delirium tremens_ in a week, with nobody to listen to him. To my mind
the Trappiste takes the severest of monastic vows.
Jimman used to rise in the morning betimes, full of inflexible
resolution. Having stretched his canvas, and carefully prepared his
pigments, he went to breakfast, pondering great achievements. Here he
fell in with a lot of Germans,--the most incurable race of gossipers in
the world,--and while they discussed, in a learned way, every subject
under the sun, the meal extended into the afternoon, and Jimman
concluded that it was then too late to undertake anything. In this way
his ambition burnt away, his money was squandered, he lost facility of
manipulation, and came back to Paris at the age of twenty-eight, to
pursue the same listless, garrulous existence; debts and grisettes,
buzzing and brandy, the utterance of resolves which expired in the
utterance, and Jimman finally became, perforce, a common apprentice to a
moulder, that he might not entirely starve.
I saw him, for the last time, in the Louvre, looking at Zurbaran's
"Kneeling Monk."
"Ah, Townsend," he said, "I might have done something like that. All my
zeal is gone."
And he began to chat in the same loose, familiar way. Dumbness and
deafness would have been endowments rather than deprivations for him.
I had rooms in Florence with Gypsum and Stagg. The former was a young,
industrious fellow, of German descent, who worked hard, but not wisely.
He spent half a year in copying a face by Paul Veronese, and the other
half in sketching an old convent yard. But he did not visit, and an
artist, to get orders and take rank, must be seen as well as be earnest.
He need not be hail-fellow, but should keep well in the circle of
respectable travellers; for these are to be his patrons, if he pleases
them. Gypsum was over-modest and too conscientious; he had only a trifle
of money, and was careless of his attire. So he disregarded society, and
society forgot him. Therefore, at dawn, he betook himself to the old
convent-yard, and stood at his easel bravely, never so unhappy as when
one of the church's innumerable holy days arrived, for then he was
forbidden to work upon the convent premises. With all his
conscientiousness he received no orders; while Stagg, who was not more
clever, proportioned to his longer experience, was befriended on every
hand, because he went to the American chapel regularly and wore a
dress-coat at the sociables.
Stagg used the old studio of Buchanan Read, just off the Via Seragli.
I stumbled upon him one morning, and saw more than I anticipated.
A young, plump girl, without so much as a fig-leaf upon her, was posing
before his easel, so motionless that she scarcely winked, one hand
extended and clasping her loosened tresses, and bending upon one white
and dimpled knee.
She had the large dark eyes of the professional _modello_, and a bosom
as ripe as Titian's Venus. Her feet were small, and her hands very white
and beautiful. But of me she took no more notice than if I had been a
bird alighting upon the window, or a mouse peeping at her from the edge
of his knot-hole.
Old Stagg, who was commonly grave as a clergyman, now and then left his
easel to alter her position, and when he was done, she gathered up her
clothes, which had lain in a heap on the floor, and took her few silver
pieces with a "_Mille grazie, Signore!_" and went home to take dinner
with her little brothers.
A studio in Florence costs only fifteen or twenty francs a
month,--seldom so much. There are a series of excellent ones in the same
Via Seragli, in a very large dismantled convent. There is a well in the
centre of its great courtyard, and innumerable ropes lead from it to the
various high windows of the building, on which buckets of water are
forever ascending. All this of which I speak refers to a year ago, when
Florence was not a capital; doubtless, studios command more at present.
The models at Florence were to me strange personages. There was a
drawing-school which I sometimes attended, where one old woman kept
three daughters, aged respectively twenty, seventeen, and thirteen
years. They lived pretty much as they were born, and while they posed
upon a high platform, the old woman took her seat near the door and
looked on with grim satisfaction. She was very careful of their moral
habits, but the second one she lost by an excess of greed. She resolved
to make them useful by day, as well as by night, and put them to work at
the studios of individual artists. But as no one artist wanted three
models, the girls had to separate, and, out of the mother's vigilance,
the second one, Orsolo, went to the atelier of a wicked and handsome
fellow, and met with the usual romance of her class.
The oldest girl, Luigia, married a man-model, and their nuptials must
have been of a most prosaic character.
Among the many men who thus stood for the artists, was one old fellow,
tall, and bearded, and massively characterized, who used to remain
motionless for hours; until he seemed to be dead. He had been a model in
every stage of life, from childhood to the grave, and represented every
subject from Garibaldi to Moses.
The walks in and around Florence occupied all my Sabbaths. Stagg and I
used to stroll up to Fiesole, by the villa where Boccaccio's party of
story-tellers met, and look up old pictures in the village church; we
measured the proportions of the chapel on the hill of Saint Miniato, and
he endeavored in vain to imitate the hue of the light as it fell through
the veined marble of Serravezza; we spent contemplative afternoons in
the house of Michael Angelo, and went up to Vallambrosa, at the risk of
our necks, to look at a Giotto no bigger than a tea-plate. In Florence
there is enough out-of-door statuary to make one of the finest galleries
in the world. The majesty of Donatello's "Saint George" arises before me
when I would conceive of any noble humanity, and the sweep of Orgagna's
great arches give me an idea of vastness like the sea; in the Pitti
palace only giants should abide; the Campanile goes up to heaven as
beautiful as Jacob's ladder, and in the perpetual twilight of the Duomo
I was not of half the stature I believed when roaming under the loftier
sky.
I saw a jail in Florence, and it troubled me; who in that beautiful city
could do a crime? How should old age, or bad passions, or sickness, or
shame, exist in that limpid atmosphere, in the shadow of such
architecture, in the presence of those pictures?