presentments of humanity, magnified as by the eyes of a visionary,
overflowing in mighty sympathetic pages of cyclopean symbolisation. Royal
grace and nobility, sovereign peacefulness and power--every beauty shone
out like natural florescence. And there was perfect science, the most
audacious foreshortening risked with the certainty of success--an
everlasting triumph of technique over the difficulty which an arched
surface presented. And, in particular, there was wonderful simplicity of
medium; matter was reduced almost to nothingness; a few colours were used
broadly without any studied search for effect or brilliancy. Yet that
sufficed, the blood seethed freely, the muscles projected, the figures
became animated and stood out of their frames with such energy and dash
that it seemed as if a flame were flashing by aloft, endowing all those
beings with superhuman and immortal life. Life, aye, it was life, which
burst forth and triumphed--mighty, swarming life, miraculous life, the
creation of one sole hand possessed of the supreme gift--simplicity
blended with power.
That a philosophical system, a record of the whole of human destiny,
should have been found therein, with the creation of the world, of man,
and of woman, the fall, the chastisement, then the redemption, and
finally God's judgment on the last day--this was a matter on which Pierre
was unable to dwell, at this first visit, in the wondering stupor into
which the paintings threw him. But he could not help noticing how the
human body, its beauty, its power, and its grace were exalted! Ah! that
regal Jehovah, at once terrible and paternal, carried off amid the
whirlwind of his creation, his arms outstretched and giving birth to
worlds! And that superb and nobly outlined Adam, with extended hand, whom
Jehovah, though he touch him not, animates with his finger--a wondrous
and admirable gesture, leaving a sacred space between the finger of the
Creator and that of the created--a tiny space, in which, nevertheless,
abides all the infinite of the invisible and the mysterious. And then
that powerful yet adorable Eve, that Eve with the sturdy flanks fit for
the bearing of humanity, that Eve with the proud, tender grace of a woman
bent on being loved even to perdition, that Eve embodying the whole of
woman with her fecundity, her seductiveness, her empire! Moreover, even
the decorative figures of the pilasters at the corners of the frescoes
celebrate the triumph of the flesh: there are the twenty young men
radiant in their nakedness, with incomparable splendour of torso and of
limb, and such intensity of life that a craze for motion seems to carry
them off, bend them, throw them over in superb attitudes. And between the
windows are the giants, the prophets and the sibyls--man and woman
deified, with inordinate wealth of muscle and grandeur of intellectual
expression. There is Jeremiah with his elbow resting on his knee and his
chin on his hand, plunged as he is in reflection--in the very depths of
his visions and his dreams; there is the Sibylla Erithraea, so pure of
profile, so young despite the opulence of her form, and with one finger
resting on the open book of destiny; there is Isaiah with the thick lips
of truth, virile and haughty, his head half turned and his hand raised
with a gesture of command; there is the Sibylla Cumaea, terrifying with
her science and her old age, her wrinkled countenance, her vulture's
nose, her square protruding chin; there is Jonah cast forth by the whale,
and wondrously foreshortened, his torso twisted, his arms bent, his head
thrown back, and his mouth agape and shouting: and there are the others,
all of the same full-blown, majestic family, reigning with the
sovereignty of eternal health and intelligence, and typifying the dream
of a broader, loftier, and indestructible humanity. Moreover, in the
lunettes and the arches over the windows other figures of grace, power,
and beauty appear and throng, the ancestors of the Christ, thoughtful
mothers with lovely nude infants, men with wondering eyes peering into
the future, representatives of the punished weary race longing for the
promised Redeemer; while in the pendentives of the four corners various
biblical episodes, the victories of Israel over the Spirit of Evil,
spring into life. And finally there is the gigantic fresco at the far
end, the Last Judgment with its swarming multitude, so numerous that days
and days are needed to see each figure aright, a distracted crowd, full
of the hot breath of life, from the dead rising in response to the
furious trumpeting of the angels, from the fearsome groups of the damned
whom the demons fling into hell, even to Jesus the justiciar, surrounded
by the saints and apostles, and to the radiant concourse of the blessed
who ascend upheld by angels, whilst higher and still higher other angels,
bearing the instruments of the Passion, triumph as in full glory. And
yet, above this gigantic composition, painted thirty years subsequently,
in the full ripeness of age, the ceiling retains its ethereality, its
unquestionable superiority, for on it the artist bestowed all his virgin
power, his whole youth, the first great flare of his genius.
And Pierre found but one word to express his feelings: Michael Angelo was
the monster dominating and crushing all others. Beneath his immense
achievement you had only to glance at the works of Perugino,
Pinturicchio, Roselli, Signorelli, and Botticelli, those earlier
frescoes, admirable in their way, which below the cornice spread out
around the chapel.
Narcisse for his part had not raised his eyes to the overpowering
splendour of the ceiling. Wrapt in ecstasy, he did not allow his gaze to
stray from one of the three frescoes of Botticelli. "Ah! Botticelli," he
at last murmured; "in him you have the elegance and the grace of the
mysterious; a profound feeling of sadness even in the midst of
voluptuousness, a divination of the whole modern soul, with the most
troublous charm that ever attended artist's work."
Pierre glanced at him in amazement, and then ventured to inquire: "You
come here to see the Botticellis?"
"Yes, certainly," the young man quietly replied; "I only come here for
him, and five hours every week I only look at his work. There, just study
that fresco, Moses and the daughters of Jethro. Isn't it the most
penetrating work that human tenderness and melancholy have produced?"
Then, with a faint, devout quiver in his voice and the air of a priest
initiating another into the delightful but perturbing atmosphere of a
sanctuary, he went on repeating the praises of Botticelli's art; his
women with long, sensual, yet candid faces, supple bearing, and rounded
forms showing from under light drapery; his young men, his angels of
doubtful sex, blending stateliness of muscle with infinite delicacy of
outline; next the mouths he painted, fleshy, fruit-like mouths, at times
suggesting irony, at others pain, and often so enigmatical with their
sinuous curves that one knew not whether the words they left unuttered
were words of purity or filth; then, too, the eyes which he bestowed on
his figures, eyes of languor and passion, of carnal or mystical rapture,
their joy at times so instinct with grief as they peer into the nihility
of human things that no eyes in the world could be more impenetrable. And
finally there were Botticelli's hands, so carefully and delicately
painted, so full of life, wantoning so to say in a free atmosphere, now
joining, caressing, and even, as it were, speaking, the whole evincing
such intense solicitude for gracefulness that at times there seems to be
undue mannerism, though every hand has its particular expression, each
varying expression of the enjoyment or pain which the sense of touch can
bring. And yet there was nothing effeminate or false about the painter's
work: on all sides a sort of virile pride was apparent, an atmosphere of
superb passionate motion, absolute concern for truth, direct study from
life, conscientiousness, veritable realism, corrected and elevated by a
genial strangeness of feeling and character that imparted a
never-to-be-forgotten charm even to ugliness itself.
Pierre's stupefaction, however, increased as he listened to Narcisse,
whose somewhat studied elegance, whose curly hair cut in the Florentine
fashion, and whose blue, mauvish eyes paling with enthusiasm he now for
the first time remarked. "Botticelli," he at last said, "was no doubt a
marvellous artist, only it seems to me that here, at any rate, Michael
Angelo--"
But Narcisse interrupted him almost with violence. "No! no! Don't talk of
him! He spoilt everything, ruined everything! A man who harnessed himself
to his work like an ox, who laboured at his task like a navvy, at the
rate of so many square yards a day! And a man, too, with no sense of the
mysterious and the unknown, who saw everything so huge as to disgust one
with beauty, painting girls like the trunks of oak-trees, women like
giant butchers, with heaps and heaps of stupid flesh, and never a gleam
of a divine or infernal soul! He was a mason--a colossal mason, if you
like--but he was nothing more."
Weary "modern" that Narcisse was, spoilt by the pursuit of the original
and the rare, he thus unconsciously gave rein to his fated hate of health
and power. That Michael Angelo who brought forth without an effort, who
had left behind him the most prodigious of all artistic creations, was
the enemy. And his crime precisely was that he had created life, produced
life in such excess that all the petty creations of others, even the most
delightful among them, vanished in presence of the overflowing torrent of
human beings flung there all alive in the sunlight.
"Well, for my part," Pierre courageously declared, "I'm not of your
opinion. I now realise that life is everything in art; that real
immortality belongs only to those who create. The case of Michael Angelo
seems to me decisive, for he is the superhuman master, the monster who
overwhelms all others, precisely because he brought forth that
magnificent living flesh which offends your sense of delicacy. Those who
are inclined to the curious, those who have minds of a pretty turn, whose
intellects are ever seeking to penetrate things, may try to improve on
the equivocal and invisible, and set all the charm of art in some
elaborate stroke or symbolisation; but, none the less, Michael Angelo
remains the all-powerful, the maker of men, the master of clearness,
simplicity, and health."
At this Narcisse smiled with indulgent and courteous disdain. And he
anticipated further argument by remarking: "It's already eleven. My
cousin was to have sent a servant here as soon as he could receive us. I
am surprised to have seen nobody as yet. Shall we go up to see the
/stanze/ of Raffaelle while we wait?"
Once in the rooms above, he showed himself perfect, both lucid in his
remarks and just in his appreciations, having recovered all his easy
intelligence as soon as he was no longer upset by his hatred of colossal
labour and cheerful decoration.
It was unfortunate that Pierre should have first visited the Sixtine
Chapel; for it was necessary he should forget what he had just seen and
accustom himself to what he now beheld in order to enjoy its pure beauty.
It was as if some potent wine had confused him, and prevented any
immediate relish of a lighter vintage of delicate fragrance. Admiration
did not here fall upon one with lightning speed; it was slowly,
irresistibly that one grew charmed. And the contrast was like that of
Racine beside Corneille, Lamartine beside Hugo, the eternal pair, the
masculine and feminine genius coupled through centuries of glory. With
Raffaelle it is nobility, grace, exquisiteness, and correctness of line,
and divineness of harmony that triumph. You do not find in him merely the
materialist symbolism so superbly thrown off by Michael Angelo; he
introduces psychological analysis of deep penetration into the painter's
art. Man is shown more purified, idealised; one sees more of that which
is within him. And though one may be in presence of an artist of
sentimental bent, a feminine genius whose quiver of tenderness one can
feel, it is also certain that admirable firmness of workmanship confronts
one, that the whole is very strong and very great. Pierre gradually
yielded to such sovereign masterliness, such virile elegance, such a
vision of supreme beauty set in supreme perfection. But if the "Dispute
on the Sacrament" and the so-called "School of Athens," both prior to the
paintings of the Sixtine Chapel, seemed to him to be Raffaelle's
masterpieces, he felt that in the "Burning of the Borgo," and
particularly in the "Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple," and "Pope
St. Leo staying Attila at the Gates of Rome," the artist had lost the
flower of his divine grace, through the deep impression which the
overwhelming grandeur of Michael Angelo had wrought upon him. How
crushing indeed had been the blow when the Sixtine Chapel was thrown open
and the rivals entered! The creations of the monster then appeared, and
the greatest of the humanisers lost some of his soul at sight of them,
thenceforward unable to rid himself of their influence.
From the /stanze/ Narcisse took Pierre to the /loggie/, those glazed
galleries which are so high and so delicately decorated. But here you
only find work which pupils executed after designs left by Raffaelle at
his death. The fall was sudden and complete, and never had Pierre better
understood that genius is everything--that when it disappears the school
collapses. The man of genius sums up his period; at a given hour he
throws forth all the sap of the social soil, which afterwards remains
exhausted often for centuries. So Pierre became more particularly
interested in the fine view that the /loggie/ afford, and all at once he
noticed that the papal apartments were in front of him, just across the
Court of San Damaso. This court, with its porticus, fountain, and white
pavement, had an aspect of empty, airy, sunlit solemnity which surprised
him. There was none of the gloom or pent-up religious mystery that he had
dreamt of with his mind full of the surroundings of the old northern
cathedrals. Right and left of the steps conducting to the rooms of the
Pope and the Cardinal Secretary of State four or five carriages were
ranged, the coachmen stiffly erect and the horses motionless in the
brilliant light; and nothing else peopled that vast square desert of a
court which, with its bareness gilded by the coruscations of its
glass-work and the ruddiness of its stones, suggested a pagan temple
dedicated to the sun. But what more particularly struck Pierre was the
splendid panorama of Rome, for he had not hitherto imagined that the Pope
from his windows could thus behold the entire city spread out before him
as if he merely had to stretch forth his hand to make it his own once
more.
While Pierre contemplated the scene a sound of voices caused him to turn;
and he perceived a servant in black livery who, after repeating a message
to Narcisse, was retiring with a deep bow. Looking much annoyed, the
/attache/ approached the young priest. "Monsignor Gamba del Zoppo," said
he, "has sent word that he can't see us this morning. Some unexpected
duties require his presence." However, Narcisse's embarrassment showed
that he did not believe in the excuse, but rather suspected some one of
having so terrified his cousin that the latter was afraid of compromising
himself. Obliging and courageous as Habert himself was, this made him
indignant. Still he smiled and resumed: "Listen, perhaps there's a means
of forcing an entry. If your time is your own we can lunch together and
then return to visit the Museum of Antiquities. I shall certainly end by
coming across my cousin and we may, perhaps, be lucky enough to meet the
Pope should he go down to the gardens."
At the news that his audience was yet again postponed Pierre had felt
keenly disappointed. However, as the whole day was at his disposal, he
willingly accepted the /attache's/ offer. They lunched in front of St.
Peter's, in a little restaurant of the Borgo, most of whose customers
were pilgrims, and the fare, as it happened, was far from good. Then at
about two o'clock they set off for the museum, skirting the basilica by
way of the Piazza della Sagrestia. It was a bright, deserted, burning
district; and again, but in a far greater degree, did the young priest
experience that sensation of bare, tawny, sun-baked majesty which had
come upon him while gazing into the Court of San Damaso. Then, as he
passed the apse of St. Peter's, the enormity of the colossus was brought
home to him more strongly than ever: it rose like a giant bouquet of
architecture edged by empty expanses of pavement sprinkled with fine
weeds. And in all the silent immensity there were only two children
playing in the shadow of a wall. The old papal mint, the Zecca, now an
Italian possession, and guarded by soldiers of the royal army, is on the
left of the passage leading to the museums, while on the right, just in
front, is one of the entrances of honour to the Vatican where the papal
Swiss Guard keeps watch and ward; and this is the entrance by which,
according to etiquette, the pair-horse carriages convey the Pope's
visitors into the Court of San Damaso.
Following the long lane which ascends between a wing of the palace and
its garden wall, Narcisse and Pierre at last reached the Museum of
Antiquities. Ah! what a museum it is, with galleries innumerable, a
museum compounded of three museums, the Pio-Clementino, Chiaramonti, and
the Braccio-Nuovo, and containing a whole world found beneath the soil,
then exhumed, and now glorified in full sunlight. For more than two hours
Pierre went from one hall to another, dazzled by the masterpieces,
bewildered by the accumulation of genius and beauty. It was not only the
celebrated examples of statuary, the Laocoon and the Apollo of the
cabinets of the Belvedere, the Meleager, or even the torso of
Hercules--that astonished him. He was yet more impressed by the
/ensemble/, by the innumerable quantities of Venuses, Bacchuses, and
deified emperors and empresses, by the whole superb growth of beautiful
or August flesh celebrating the immortality of life. Three days
previously he had visited the Museum of the Capitol, where he had admired
the Venus, the Dying Gaul,* the marvellous Centaurs of black marble, and
the extraordinary collection of busts, but here his admiration became
intensified into stupor by the inexhaustible wealth of the galleries.
And, with more curiosity for life than for art, perhaps, he again
lingered before the busts which so powerfully resuscitate the Rome of
history--the Rome which, whilst incapable of realising the ideal beauty
of Greece, was certainly well able to create life. The emperors, the
philosophers, the learned men, the poets are all there, and live such as
they really were, studied and portrayed in all scrupulousness with their
deformities, their blemishes, the slightest peculiarities of their
features. And from this extreme solicitude for truth springs a wonderful
wealth of character and an incomparable vision of the past. Nothing,
indeed, could be loftier: the very men live once more, and retrace the
history of their city, that history which has been so falsified that the
teaching of it has caused generations of school-boys to hold antiquity in
horror. But on seeing the men, how well one understands, how fully one
can sympathise! And indeed the smallest bits of marble, the maimed
statues, the bas-reliefs in fragments, even the isolated limbs--whether
the divine arm of a nymph or the sinewy, shaggy thigh of a satyr--evoke
the splendour of a civilisation full of light, grandeur, and strength.
* Best known in England, through Byron's lines, as the
Dying Gladiator, though that appellation is certainly
erroneous.--Trans.
At last Narcisse brought Pierre back into the Gallery of the Candelabra,
three hundred feet in length and full of fine examples of sculpture.
"Listen, my dear Abbe," said he. "It is scarcely more than four o'clock,
and we will sit down here for a while, as I am told that the Holy Father
sometimes passes this way to go down to the gardens. It would be really
lucky if you could see him, perhaps even speak to him--who can tell? At
all events, it will rest you, for you must be tired out."
Narcisse was known to all the attendants, and his relationship to
Monsignor Gamba gave him the run of almost the entire Vatican, where he
was fond of spending his leisure time. Finding two chairs, they sat down,
and the /attache/ again began to talk of art.
How astonishing had been the destiny of Rome, what a singular, borrowed
royalty had been hers! She seemed like a centre whither the whole world
converged, but where nothing grew from the soil itself, which from the
outset appeared to be stricken with sterility. The arts required to be
acclimatised there; it was necessary to transplant the genius of
neighbouring nations, which, once there, however, flourished
magnificently. Under the emperors, when Rome was the queen of the earth,
the beauty of her monuments and sculpture came to her from Greece. Later,
when Christianity arose in Rome, it there remained impregnated with
paganism; it was on another soil that it produced Gothic art, the
Christian Art /par excellence/. Later still, at the Renascence, it was
certainly at Rome that the age of Julius II and Leo X shone forth; but
the artists of Tuscany and Umbria prepared the evolution, brought it to
Rome that it might thence expand and soar. For the second time, indeed,
art came to Rome from without, and gave her the royalty of the world by
blossoming so triumphantly within her walls. Then occurred the
extraordinary awakening of antiquity, Apollo and Venus resuscitated
worshipped by the popes themselves, who from the time of Nicholas V
dreamt of making papal Rome the equal of the imperial city. After the
precursors, so sincere, tender, and strong in their art--Fra Angelico,
Perugino, Botticelli, and so many others--came the two sovereigns,
Michael Angelo and Raffaelle, the superhuman and the divine. Then the
fall was sudden, years elapsed before the advent of Caravaggio with power
of colour and modelling, all that the science of painting could achieve
when bereft of genius. And afterwards the decline continued until Bernini
was reached--Bernini, the real creator of the Rome of the present popes,
the prodigal child who at twenty could already show a galaxy of colossal
marble wenches, the universal architect who with fearful activity
finished the facade, built the colonnade, decorated the interior of St.
Peter's, and raised fountains, churches, and palaces innumerable. And
that was the end of all, for since then Rome has little by little
withdrawn from life, from the modern world, as though she, who always
lived on what she derived from others, were dying of her inability to
take anything more from them in order to convert it to her own glory.
"Ah! Bernini, that delightful Bernini!" continued Narcisse with his
rapturous air. "He is both powerful and exquisite, his verve always
ready, his ingenuity invariably awake, his fecundity full of grace and
magnificence. As for their Bramante with his masterpiece, that cold,
correct Cancelleria, we'll dub him the Michael Angelo and Raffaelle of
architecture and say no more about it. But Bernini, that exquisite
Bernini, why, there is more delicacy and refinement in his pretended bad
taste than in all the hugeness and perfection of the others! Our own age
ought to recognise itself in his art, at once so varied and so deep, so
triumphant in its mannerisms, so full of a perturbing solicitude for the
artificial and so free from the baseness of reality. Just go to the Villa
Borghese to see the group of Apollo and Daphne which Bernini executed
when he was eighteen,* and in particular see his statue of Santa Teresa
in ecstasy at Santa Maria della Vittoria! Ah! that Santa Teresa! It is
like heaven opening, with the quiver that only a purely divine enjoyment
can set in woman's flesh, the rapture of faith carried to the point of
spasm, the creature losing breath and dying of pleasure in the arms of
the Divinity! I have spent hours and hours before that work without
exhausting the infinite scope of its precious, burning symbolisation."
* There is also at the Villa Borghese Bernini's /Anchises carried
by Aeneas/, which he sculptured when only sixteen. No doubt his
faults were many; but it was his misfortune to belong to a
decadent period.--Trans.