enchanting. At the left of the first ascent lies the Falernian mount,
whose wines are immortalized by Horace. It is a beautiful hill, which
throws round its shoulder to the south, and is covered with vineyards.
I dismounted and walked on while the horses breathed at the post-house
of St. Agatha, and was overtaken by a good-natured-looking man,
mounted on a mule, of whom I made some inquiry respecting the modern
Falernian. He said it was still the best wine of the neighborhood, but
was far below its ancient reputation, because never kept long enough
to ripen. It is at its prime from the fifteenth to the twentieth year,
and is usually drank the first or second. My new acquaintance, I soon
found, was the physician of the two or three small villages nested
about among the hills and a man of some pretensions to learning. I was
delighted with his frank good-humor, and a certain spice of drollery
in his description of his patients. The peasants at work in the fields
saluted him from any distance as he passed; and the pretty contadini
going to St. Agatha with their baskets on their heads, smiled as he
nodded, calling them all by name, and I was rather amused than
offended with the inquisitiveness he manifested about my age, family,
pursuits, and even morals. His mule stopped of its own will, at the
door of the apothecary of the small village on the summit of the hill,
and as the carriage came in sight the doctor invited me, seizing my
hand with a look of friendly sincerity, to stop at St. Agatha on my
return, to shoot, and drink Falernian with him for a month. The
apothecary stopped the vetturino at the door; and, to the astonishment
of my companions within, the doctor seized me in his arms and kissed
me on both sides of my face with a volume of blessings and
compliments, which I had no breath in my surprise to return. I have
made many friends on the road in this country of quick feelings, but
the doctor of St. Agatha had a readiness of sympathy which threw all
my former experience into the shade.
We dined at Capua, the city whose luxuries enervated Hannibal and his
soldiers--the "_dives, amorosa, felix_" Capua. It is in melancholy
contrast with the description now--its streets filthy, and its people
looking the antipodes of luxury. The climate should be the same, as we
dined with open doors, and with the branch of an orange tree heavy
with fruit hanging in at the window, in a month that with us is one of
the wintriest.
From Capua to Naples, the distance is but fifteen miles, over a flat,
uninteresting country. We entered "this third city in the world" in
the middle of the afternoon, and were immediately surrounded with
beggars of every conceivable degree of misery. We sat an hour at the
gate while our passports were recorded, and the vetturino examined,
and then passing up a noble street, entered a dense crowd, through
which was creeping slowly a double line of carriages. The mounted
dragoons compelled our postillion to fall into the line, and we were
two hours following in a fashionable corso with our mud-spattered
vehicle and tired horses, surrounded by all that was brilliant and gay
in Naples. It was the last day of carnival. Everybody was abroad, and
we were forced, however unwillingly to see all the rank and beauty of
the city. The carriages in this fine climate are all open, and the
ladies were in full dress. As we entered the Toledo, the cavalcade
came to a halt, and with hats off and handkerchiefs flying in every
direction about them, the young new-married Queen of Naples rode up
the middle of the street preceded and followed by outriders in the
gayest livery. She has been married about a month, is but seventeen,
and is acknowledged to be the most beautiful woman in the kingdom. The
description I had heard of her, though very extravagant, had hardly
done her justice. She is a little above the middle height, with a fine
lift to her head and neck, and a countenance only less modest and
maidenly than noble.
LETTER LV.
ROME--FRONT OF ST. PETER'S--EQUIPAGES OF THE CARDINALS--
BEGGARS--BODY OF THE CHURCH--TOMB OF ST. PETER--THE
TIBER--FORTRESS-TOMB OF ADRIAN--JEWS' QUARTER--FORUM BARBERINI
PALACE--PORTRAIT OF BEATRICE CENCI--HER MELANCHOLY
HISTORY--PICTURE OF THE FORNARINA--LIKENESS OF GIORGIONE'S
MISTRESS--JOSEPH AND POTIPHAR'S WIFE--THE PALACES DORIA AND
SCIARRA--PORTRAIT OF OLIVIA WALDACHINI--OF "A CELEBRATED
WIDOW"--OF SEMIRAMIS--CLAUDE'S LANDSCAPES--BRILL'S--
BRUGHEL'S--NOTTI'S "WOMAN CATCHING FLEAS"--DA VINCI'S QUEEN
GIOVANNA--PORTRAIT OF A FEMALE DORIA--PRINCE DORIA--PALACE
SCIARRA--BRILL AND BOTH'S LANDSCAPES--CLAUDE'S--PICTURE OF
NOAH INTOXICATED--ROMANA'S FORNARINA--DA VINCI'S TWO PICTURES.
Drawn in twenty different directions on starting from my lodgings this
morning, I found myself, undecided where to pass my day, in front of
St. Peter's. Some gorgeous ceremony was just over, and the sumptuous
equipages of the cardinals, blazing in the sun with their mountings of
gold and silver, were driving up and dashing away from the end of the
long colonnades, producing any effect upon the mind rather than a
devout one. I stood admiring their fiery horses and gay liveries, till
the last rattled from the square, and then mounted to the deserted
church. Its vast vestibule was filled with beggars, diseased in every
conceivable manner, halting, groping, and crawling about in search of
strangers of whom to implore charity--a contrast to the splendid
pavement beneath and the gold and marble above and around, which would
reconcile one to see the "mighty dome" melted into alms, and his
holiness reduced to a plain chapel and a rusty cassock.
Lifting the curtain I stood in the body of the church. There were
perhaps twenty persons, at different distances, on its immense floor,
the farthest off (_six hundred and fourteen feet from me!_) looking
like a pigmy in the far perspective. St. Peter's is less like a church
than a collection of large churches enclosed under a gigantic roof.
The chapels at the sides are larger than most houses of public worship
in our country, and of these there may be eight or ten, not included
in the effect of the vast interior. One is lost in it. It is a city of
columns and sculpture and mosaic. Its walls are encrusted with
precious stones and masterly workmanship to the very top, and its
wealth may be conceived when you remember that, standing in the centre
and raising your eyes aloft, there are _four hundred and forty feet_
between you and the roof of the dome--the height, almost of a
mountain.
I walked up toward the tomb of St. Peter, passing in my way a solitary
worshipper here and there, upon his knees, and arrested constantly by
the exquisite beauty of the statuary with which the columns are
carved. Accustomed as we are in America, to churches filled with
pews, it is hardly possible to imagine the noble effect of a vast
mosaic floor, unencumbered even with a chair, and only broken by a few
prostrate figures, just specking its wide area. All Catholic churches
are without fixed seats, and St. Peter's seems scarce measurable to
the eye, it is so far and clear, from one extremity to the other.
I passed the hundred lamps burning over the tomb of St. Peter, the
lovely female statue (covered with a bronze drapery, because its
exquisite beauty was thought dangerous to the morality of the young
priests), reclining upon the tomb of Paul III., the ethereal figures
of Canova's geniuses weeping at the door of the tomb of the Stuarts
(where sleeps the pretender Charles Edward), the thousand thousand
rich and beautiful monuments of art and taste crowding every corner of
this wondrous church--I passed them, I say, with the same lost and
unexamining, unparticularizing feeling which I cannot overcome in this
place--a mind borne quite off its feet and confused and overwhelmed
with the tide of astonishment--the one grand impression of the whole.
I dare say, a little more familiarity with St. Peter's will do away
the feeling, but I left the church, after two hours loitering in its
aisles, despairing, and scarce wishing to examine or make a note.
Those beautiful fountains, moistening the air over the whole area of
the column encircled front!--and that tall Egyptian pyramid, sending
up its slender and perfect spire between! One lingers about, and turns
again and again to gaze around him, as he leaves St. Peter's, in
wonder and admiration.
I crossed the Tiber, at the fortress-tomb of Adrian, and thridding the
long streets at the western end of Rome, passed through the Jews'
quarter, and entered the Forum. The sun lay warm among the ruins of
the great temples and columns of ancient Rome, and, seating myself on
a fragment of an antique frieze, near the noble arch of Septimius
Severus, I gazed on the scene, for the first time, by daylight. I had
been in Rome, on my first visit, during the full moon, and my
impressions of the Forum with this romantic enhancement were vivid in
my memory. One would think it enough to be upon the spot at any time,
with light to see it, but what with modern excavations, fresh banks of
earth, carts, boys playing at marbles, and wooden sentry-boxes, and
what with the Parisian promenade, made by the French through the
centre, the imagination is too disturbed and hindered in daylight. The
moon gives it all one covering of gray and silver. The old columns
stand up in all their solitary majesty, wrecks of beauty and taste;
silence leaves the fancy to find a voice for itself; and from the
palaces of the Cesars to the prisons of the capitol, the whole train
of emperors, senators, conspirators, and citizens, are summoned with
but half a thought and the magic glass is filled with moving and
re-animated Rome. There, beneath those walls, on the right, in the
Mamertine prisons, perished Jugurtha (and there, too, were imprisoned
St. Paul and St. Peter), and opposite, upon the Palatine-hill, lived
the mighty masters of Rome, in the "palaces of the Cesars," and
beneath the majestic arch beyond, were led, as a seal of their
slavery, the captives from Jerusalem, and in these temples, whose
ruins cast their shadows at my feet, walked and discoursed Cicero and
the philosophers, Brutus and the patriots, Catiline and the
conspirators, Augustus and the scholars and poets, and the great
stranger in Rome, St. Paul, gazing at the false altars, and burning in
his heart to reveal to them the "unknown God." What men have crossed
the shadows of these very columns! and what thoughts, that have moved
the world, have been born beneath them!
The Barberini palace contains three or four masterpieces of painting.
The most celebrated is the portrait of Beatrice Cenci, by Guido. The
melancholy and strange history of this beautiful girl has been told in
a variety of ways, and is probably familiar to every reader. Guido saw
her on her way to execution, and has painted her as she was dressed,
in the gray habit and head-dress made by her own hands, and finished
but an hour before she put it on. There are engravings and copies of
the picture all over the world, but none that I have seen give any
idea of the excessive gentleness and serenity of the countenance. The
eyes retain traces of weeping, but the child-like mouth, the soft,
girlish lines of features that look as if they never had worn more
than the one expression of youthfulness and affection, are all in
repose, and the head is turned over the shoulder with as simple a
sweetness as if she had but looked back to say a good-night before
going to her chamber to sleep. She little looks like what she was--one
of the firmest and boldest spirits whose history is recorded. After
murdering her father for his fiendish attempts upon her virtue, she
endured every torture rather than disgrace her family by confession,
and was only moved from her constancy, at last, by the agonies of her
younger brother on the rack. Who would read capabilities like these,
in these heavenly and child-like features?
I have tried to purchase the life of the Cenci, in vain. A bookseller
told me to-day, that it was a forbidden book, on account of its
reflections upon the pope. Immense interest was made for the poor
girl, but, it is said, the papal treasury ran low, and if she was
pardoned, the large possessions of the Cenci family could not have
been confiscated.
The gallery contains also, a delicious picture of the Fornarina by
Raphael himself, and a portrait of Giorgione's mistress, as a
Carthaginian slave, the same head multiplied so often in his and
Titian's pictures. The original of the admirable picture of Joseph and
the wife of Potiphar, is also here. A copy of it is in the gallery of
Florence.
I have passed a day between the two palaces Doria and Sciarra, nearly
opposite each other in the Corso at Rome. The first is an immense
gallery of perhaps a thousand pictures, distributed through seven
large halls, and four galleries encircling the court. In the first
four rooms I found nothing that struck me particularly. In the fifth
was a portrait, by an unknown artist, of Olivia Waldachini, the
favorite and sister-in-law of Pope Innocent X., a handsome woman, with
that round fulness in the throat and neck, which (whether it existed
in the originals, or is a part of a painter's ideal of a woman of
pleasure), is universal in portraits of that character. In the same
room was a portrait of a "celebrated widow," by Vandyck,[7] a had-been
beautiful woman, in a staid cap (the hands wonderfully painted), and a
large and rich picture of Semiramis, by one of the Carraccis.
In the galleries hung the landscapes by Claude, famous through the
world. It is like roving through a paradise, to sit and look at them.
His broad green lawns, his half-hidden temples, his life-like
luxuriant trees, his fountains, his sunny streams--all flush into the
eye like the bright opening of a Utopia, or some dream over a
description from Boccaccio. It is what Italy might be in a golden
age--her ruins rebuilt into the transparent air, her woods unprofaned,
her people pastoral and refined, and every valley a landscape of
Arcadia. I can conceive no higher pleasure for the imagination than to
see a Claude in travelling through Italy. It is finding a home for
one's more visionary fancies--those children of moonshine that one
begets in a colder clime, but scarce dares acknowledge till he has
seen them under a more congenial sky. More plainly, one does not know
whether his abstract imaginations of pastoral life and scenery are not
ridiculous and unreal, till he has seen one of these landscapes, and
felt _steeped_, if I may use such a word, in the very loveliness which
inspired the pencil of the painter. There he finds the pastures, the
groves, the fairy structures, the clear waters, the straying groups,
the whole delicious scenery, as bright as in his dreams, and he feels
as if he should bless the artist for the liberty to acknowledge freely
to himself the possibility of so beautiful a world.
We went on through the long galleries, going back again and again to
see the Claudes. In the third division of the gallery were one or two
small and bright landscapes, by Brill, that would have enchanted us if
seen elsewhere; and four strange pictures, by Breughel, representing
the four elements, by a kind of half-poetical, half-supernatural
landscapes, one of which had a very lovely view of a distant village.
Then there was the famous picture of the "woman catching fleas" by
Gherardodelle Notti, a perfect piece of life. She stands close to a
lamp, with a vessel of hot water before her, and is just closing her
thumb and finger over a flea, which she has detected on the bosom of
her dress. Some eight or ten are boiling already in the water, and the
expression upon the girl's face is that of the most grave and
unconscious interest in her employment. Next to this amusing picture
hangs a portrait of Queen Giovanna, of Naples, by Leonardo da Vinci, a
copy of which I had seen, much prized, in the possession of the
archbishop of Torento. It scarce looks like the talented and ambitious
queen she was, but it does full justice to her passion for amorous
intrigue--a face full of the woman.
The last picture we came to, was one not even mentioned in the
catalogue, an old portrait of one of the females of the Doria family.
It was a girl of eighteen, with a kind of face that in life must have
been extremely fascinating. While we were looking at it, we heard a
kind of gibbering laugh from the outer apartment, and an old man in a
cardinal's dress, dwarfish in size, and with deformed and almost
useless legs, came shuffling into the gallery, supported by two
priests. His features were imbecility itself, rendered almost horrible
by the contrast of the cardinal's red cap. The _custode_ took off his
hat and bowed low, and the old man gave us a half-bow and a long laugh
in passing, and disappeared at the end of the gallery. This was the
Prince Doria, the owner of the palace, and a cardinal of Rome! the
sole remaining representative of one of the most powerful and
ambitious families of Italy! There could not be a more affecting type
of the great "mistress of the world" herself. Her very children have
dwindled into idiots.
We crossed the Corso to the _Palace Sciarra_. The collection here is
small, but choice. Half a dozen small but exquisite landscapes, by
Brill and Both, grace the second room. Here are also three small
Claudes, very, very beautiful. In the next room is a finely-colored
but most indecent picture of Noah intoxicated, by Andrea Sacchi, and a
portrait by Giulio Romano, of Raphael's celebrated Fornarina, to
whose lovely face one becomes so accustomed in Italy, that it seems
like that of an acquaintance.
In the last room are two of the most celebrated pictures in Rome. The
first is by Leonardo da Vinci, and represents Vanity and Modesty, by
two females standing together in conversation--one a handsome, gay,
volatile looking creature, covered with ornaments, and listening
unwillingly to what seems a lecture from the other, upon her foibles.
The face of the other is a heavenly conception of woman--earnest,
delicate, and lovely--the idea one forms to himself, before
intercourse with the world, gives him a distaste for its purity. The
moral lesson of the picture is more forcible than language. The
painter deserved to have died, as he did, in the arms of an emperor.
The other picture represents two gamblers cheating a youth, a very
striking picture of nature. It is common from the engravings. On the
opposite side of the room, is a very expressive picture, by Schidone.
On the ruins of an old tomb stands a skull, beneath which is
written--"_I, too, was of Arcadia_;" and, at a little distance, gazing
at it in attitudes of earnest reflection, stand two shepherds, struck
simultaneously with the moral. It is a poetical thought, and wrought
out with great truth and skill.
* * * * *
Our eyes aching and our attention exhausted with pictures, we drove
from the Sciarra to the ruined palaces of the Cesars. Here, on an
eminence above the Tiber, with the Forum beneath us on one side, the
Coliseum on the other, and all the towers and spires of modern and
Catholic Rome arising on her many hills beyond, we seated ourselves on
fragments of marble, half buried in the grass, and mused away the
hours till sunset. On this spot Romulus founded Rome. The princely
Augustus, in the last days of her glory, laid here the foundations of
his imperial palace, which, continued by Caligula and Tiberius, and
completed by Domitian, covered the hill, like a small city. It was a
labyrinth of temples, baths, pavilions, fountains, and gardens, with a
large theatre at the western extremity; and adjoining the temple of
Apollo, was a library filled with the best authors, and ornamented
with a colossal bronze statue of Apollo, "of excellent Etruscan
workmanship." "Statues of the fifty daughters of Danaus Siuramdert
surrounded the portico" (of this same temple), "and opposite them were
equestrian statues of their husbands." About a hundred years ago,
accident discovered, in the gardens buried in rubbish, a magnificent
hall, two hundred feet in length and one hundred and thirty-two in
breadth, supposed to have been built by Domitian. It was richly
ornamented with statues, and columns of precious marbles, and near it
were baths in excellent preservation. "But," says Stark, "immense and
superb as was this first-built palace of the Cesars, Nero, whose
extravagance and passion for architecture knew no limits, thought it
much too small for him, and extended its edifices and gardens from the
Palatine to the Esquiline. After the destruction of the whole, by
fire, sixty-five years after Christ, he added to it his celebrated
'Golden House,' which extended from one extremity to the other of the
Coelian Hill."[8]
The ancient walls, which made the whole of the Mount Palatine a
fortress, still hold together its earth and its ruins. It is a broad
tabular eminence, worn into footpaths which wind at every moment
around broken shafts of marble, fragments of statuary, or broken and
ivy-covered fountains. Part of it is cultivated as a vineyard, by the
degenerate modern Romans, and the baths, into which the water still
pours from aqueducts encrusted with aged stalactites are public
washing-places for the contadini, eight or ten of whom were splashing
away in their red jackets, with gold bodkins in their hair, while we
were moralizing on their worthier progenitors of eighteen centuries
ago. It is a beautiful spot of itself, and with the delicious soft
sunshine of an Italian spring, the tall green grass beneath our feet,
and an air as soft as June just stirring the myrtles and jasmines,
growing wild wherever the ruins gave them place, our enjoyment of the
overpowering associations of the spot was ample and untroubled. I
could wish every refined spirit in the world had shared our pleasant
hour upon the Palatine.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] So called in the catalogue. The custode, however, told us it was a
portrait of the wife of Vandyck, painted as an old woman to mortify
her excessive vanity, when she was but twenty-three. He kept the
picture until she was older, and, at the time of his death, it had
become a flattering likeness, and was carefully treasured by the
widow.
[8] The following description is given of this splendid palace, by
Suetonius. "To give an idea of the extent and beauty of this edifice,
it is sufficient to mention, that in its vestibule was placed his
colossal statue, one hundred and twenty feet in height. It had a
triple portico, supported by a thousand columns, with a lake like a
little sea, surrounded by buildings which resembled cities. It
contained pasture-grounds and groves in which were all descriptions of
animals, wild and tame. Its interior shone with gold, gems, and
mother-of-pearl. In the vaulted roofs of the eating-rooms were
machines of ivory, which turned round and scattered perfumes upon the
guests. The principal banqueting room was a rotunda, so constructed
that it turned round night and day, in imitation of the motion of the
earth." When Nero took possession of this fairy palace, his only
observation was--"Now I shall begin to live like a man."
LETTER LVI.
ANNUAL DOWRIES TO TWELVE GIRLS--VESPERS IN THE CONVENT OF
SANTA TRINITA--RUINS OF ROMAN BATHS--A MAGNIFICENT MODERN
CHURCH WITHIN TWO ANCIENT HALLS--GARDENS OF MECAENAS--TOWER
WHENCE NERO SAW ROME ON FIRE--HOUSES OF HORACE AND
VIRGIL--BATHS OF TITUS AND CARACALLA.