AN AESTHETIC COMPANY
On the evening after Miriam’s visit to Kenyon’s studio, there was an
assemblage composed almost entirely of Anglo-Saxons, and chiefly of
American artists, with a sprinkling of their English brethren; and some
few of the tourists who still lingered in Rome, now that Holy Week was
past. Miriam, Hilda, and the sculptor were all three present, and with
them Donatello, whose life was so far turned from fits natural bent
that, like a pet spaniel, he followed his beloved mistress wherever he
could gain admittance.
The place of meeting was in the palatial, but somewhat faded and gloomy
apartment of an eminent member of the aesthetic body. It was no more
formal an occasion than one of those weekly receptions, common among
the foreign residents of Rome, at which pleasant people--or disagreeable
ones, as the case may be--encounter one another with little ceremony.
If anywise interested in art, a man must be difficult to please who
cannot find fit companionship among a crowd of persons, whose ideas and
pursuits all tend towards the general purpose of enlarging the world’s
stock of beautiful productions.
One of the chief causes that make Rome the favorite residence of
artists--their ideal home which they sigh for in advance, and are so
loath to migrate from, after once breathing its enchanted air--is,
doubtless, that they there find themselves in force, and are numerous
enough to create a congenial atmosphere. In every other clime they are
isolated strangers; in this land of art, they are free citizens.
Not that, individually, or in the mass, there appears to be any large
stock of mutual affection among the brethren of the chisel and the
pencil. On the contrary, it will impress the shrewd observer that the
jealousies and petty animosities, which the poets of our day have flung
aside, still irritate and gnaw into the hearts of this kindred class of
imaginative men. It is not difficult to suggest reasons why this should
be the fact. The public, in whose good graces lie the sculptor’s or the
painter’s prospects of success, is infinitely smaller than the public to
which literary men make their appeal. It is composed of a very limited
body of wealthy patrons; and these, as the artist well knows, are but
blind judges in matters that require the utmost delicacy of perception.
Thus, success in art is apt to become partly an affair of intrigue; and
it is almost inevitable that even a gifted artist should look askance at
his gifted brother’s fame, and be chary of the good word that might help
him to sell still another statue or picture. You seldom hear a painter
heap generous praise on anything in his special line of art; a sculptor
never has a favorable eye for any marble but his own.
Nevertheless, in spite of all these professional grudges, artists are
conscious of a social warmth from each other’s presence and contiguity.
They shiver at the remembrance of their lonely studios in the
unsympathizing cities of their native land. For the sake of such
brotherhood as they can find, more than for any good that they get from
galleries, they linger year after year in Italy, while their originality
dies out of them, or is polished away as a barbarism.
The company this evening included several men and women whom the world
has heard of, and many others, beyond all question, whom it ought to
know. It would be a pleasure to introduce them upon our humble pages,
name by name, and had we confidence enough in our own taste--to crown
each well-deserving brow according to its deserts. The opportunity
is tempting, but not easily manageable, and far too perilous, both in
respect to those individuals whom we might bring forward, and the far
greater number that must needs be left in the shade. Ink, moreover, is
apt to have a corrosive quality, and might chance to raise a blister,
instead of any more agreeable titillation, on skins so sensitive as
those of artists. We must therefore forego the delight of illuminating
this chapter with personal allusions to men whose renown glows richly on
canvas, or gleams in the white moonlight of marble.
Otherwise we might point to an artist who has studied Nature with
such tender love that she takes him to her intimacy, enabling him to
reproduce her in landscapes that seem the reality of a better earth,
and yet are but the truth of the very scenes around us, observed by the
painter’s insight and interpreted for us by his skill. By his magic,
the moon throws her light far out of the picture, and the crimson of
the summer night absolutely glimmers on the beholder’s face. Or we might
indicate a poet-painter, whose song has the vividness of picture, and
whose canvas is peopled with angels, fairies, and water sprites, done to
the ethereal life, because he saw them face to face in his poetic mood.
Or we might bow before an artist, who has wrought too sincerely, too
religiously, with too earnest a feeling, and too delicate a touch, for
the world at once to recognize how much toil and thought are compressed
into the stately brow of Prospero, and Miranda’s maiden loveliness; or
from what a depth within this painter’s heart the Angel is leading forth
St. Peter.
Thus it would be easy to go on, perpetrating a score of little
epigrammatical allusions, like the above, all kindly meant, but none
of them quite hitting the mark, and often striking where they were not
aimed. It may be allowable to say, however, that American art is much
better represented at Rome in the pictorial than in the sculpturesque
department. Yet the men of marble appear to have more weight with the
public than the men of canvas; perhaps on account of the greater density
and solid substance of the material in which they work, and the sort
of physical advantage which their labors thus acquire over the illusive
unreality of color. To be a sculptor seems a distinction in itself;
whereas a painter is nothing, unless individually eminent.
One sculptor there was, an Englishman, endowed with a beautiful fancy,
and possessing at his fingers’ ends the capability of doing beautiful
things. He was a quiet, simple, elderly personage, with eyes brown and
bright, under a slightly impending brow, and a Grecian profile, such as
he might have cut with his own chisel. He had spent his life, for forty
years, in making Venuses, Cupids, Bacchuses, and a vast deal of other
marble progeny of dreamwork, or rather frostwork: it was all a vapory
exhalation out of the Grecian mythology, crystallizing on the dull
window-panes of to-day. Gifted with a more delicate power than any other
man alive, he had foregone to be a Christian reality, and perverted
himself into a Pagan idealist, whose business or efficacy, in our
present world, it would be exceedingly difficult to define. And, loving
and reverencing the pure material in which he wrought, as surely this
admirable sculptor did, he had nevertheless robbed the marble of its
chastity, by giving it an artificial warmth of hue. Thus it became a sin
and shame to look at his nude goddesses. They had revealed themselves
to his imagination, no doubt, with all their deity about them; but,
bedaubed with buff color, they stood forth to the eyes of the profane in
the guise of naked women. But, whatever criticism may be ventured on
his style, it was good to meet a man so modest and yet imbued with such
thorough and simple conviction of his own right principles and practice,
and so quietly satisfied that his kind of antique achievement was all
that sculpture could effect for modern life.
This eminent person’s weight and authority among his artistic brethren
were very evident; for beginning unobtrusively to utter himself on
a topic of art, he was soon the centre of a little crowd of younger
sculptors. They drank in his wisdom, as if it would serve all the
purposes of original inspiration; he, meanwhile, discoursing with
gentle calmness, as if there could possibly be no other side, and often
ratifying, as it were, his own conclusions by a mildly emphatic “Yes.”
The veteran Sculptor’s unsought audience was composed mostly of our own
countrymen. It is fair to say, that they were a body of very dexterous
and capable artists, each of whom had probably given the delighted
public a nude statue, or had won credit for even higher skill by the
nice carving of buttonholes, shoe-ties, coat-seams, shirt-bosoms, and
other such graceful peculiarities of modern costume. Smart, practical
men they doubtless were, and some of them far more than this, but still
not precisely what an uninitiated person looks for in a sculptor. A
sculptor, indeed, to meet the demands which our preconceptions make upon
him, should be even more indispensably a poet than those who deal in
measured verse and rhyme. His material, or instrument, which serves
him in the stead of shifting and transitory language, is a pure, white,
undecaying substance. It insures immortality to whatever is wrought in
it, and therefore makes it a religious obligation to commit no idea
to its mighty guardianship, save such as may repay the marble for
its faithful care, its incorruptible fidelity, by warming it with an
ethereal life. Under this aspect, marble assumes a sacred character; and
no man should dare to touch it unless he feels within himself a certain
consecration and a priesthood, the only evidence of which, for the
public eye, will be the high treatment of heroic subjects, or the
delicate evolution of spiritual, through material beauty.
No ideas such as the foregoing--no misgivings suggested by them
probably, troubled the self-complacency of most of these clever
sculptors. Marble, in their view, had no such sanctity as we impute
to it. It was merely a sort of white limestone from Carrara, cut into
convenient blocks, and worth, in that state, about two or three dollars
per pound; and it was susceptible of being wrought into certain shapes
(by their own mechanical ingenuity, or that of artisans in their
employment) which would enable them to sell it again at a much higher
figure. Such men, on the strength of some small knack in handling clay,
which might have been fitly employed in making wax-work, are bold to
call themselves sculptors. How terrible should be the thought that the
nude woman whom the modern artist patches together, bit by bit, from a
dozen heterogeneous models, meaning nothing by her, shall last as long
as the Venus of the Capitol!--that his group of--no matter what, since
it has no moral or intellectual existence will not physically crumble
any sooner than the immortal agony of the Laocoon!
Yet we love the artists, in every kind; even these, whose merits we are
not quite able to appreciate. Sculptors, painters, crayon sketchers, or
whatever branch of aesthetics they adopted, were certainly pleasanter
people, as we saw them that evening, than the average whom we meet
in ordinary society. They were not wholly confined within the sordid
compass of practical life; they had a pursuit which, if followed
faithfully out, would lead them to the beautiful, and always had a
tendency thitherward, even if they lingered to gather up golden dross
by the wayside. Their actual business (though they talked about it very
much as other men talk of cotton, politics, flour barrels, and sugar)
necessarily illuminated their conversation with something akin to the
ideal. So, when the guests collected themselves in little groups, here
and there, in the wide saloon, a cheerful and airy gossip began to be
heard. The atmosphere ceased to be precisely that of common life; a
hint, mellow tinge, such as we see in pictures, mingled itself with the
lamplight.
This good effect was assisted by many curious little treasures of
art, which the host had taken care to strew upon his tables. They
were principally such bits of antiquity as the soil of Rome and its
neighborhood are still rich in; seals, gems, small figures of bronze,
mediaeval carvings in ivory; things which had been obtained at little
cost, yet might have borne no inconsiderable value in the museum of a
virtuoso.
As interesting as any of these relics was a large portfolio of old
drawings, some of which, in the opinion of their possessor, bore
evidence on their faces of the touch of master-hands. Very ragged and
ill conditioned they mostly were, yellow with time, and tattered with
rough usage; and, in their best estate, the designs had been scratched
rudely with pen and ink, on coarse paper, or, if drawn with charcoal or
a pencil, were now half rubbed out. You would not anywhere see rougher
and homelier things than these. But this hasty rudeness made the
sketches only the more valuable; because the artist seemed to have
bestirred himself at the pinch of the moment, snatching up whatever
material was nearest, so as to seize the first glimpse of an idea
that might vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Thus, by the spell of
a creased, soiled, and discolored scrap of paper, you were enabled to
steal close to an old master, and watch him in the very effervescence of
his genius.
According to the judgment of several connoisseurs, Raphael’s own
hand had communicated its magnetism to one of these sketches; and, if
genuine, it was evidently his first conception of a favorite Madonna,
now hanging in the private apartment of the Grand Duke, at Florence.
Another drawing was attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, and appeared to be
a somewhat varied design for his picture of Modesty and Vanity, in the
Sciarra Palace. There were at least half a dozen others, to which the
owner assigned as high an origin. It was delightful to believe in their
authenticity, at all events; for these things make the spectator more
vividly sensible of a great painter’s power, than the final glow
and perfected art of the most consummate picture that may have been
elaborated from them. There is an effluence of divinity in the first
sketch; and there, if anywhere, you find the pure light of inspiration,
which the subsequent toil of the artist serves to bring out in stronger
lustre, indeed, but likewise adulterates it with what belongs to an
inferior mood. The aroma and fragrance of new thoughts were perceptible
in these designs, after three centuries of wear and tear. The charm lay
partly in their very imperfection; for this is suggestive, and sets
the imagination at work; whereas, the finished picture, if a good one,
leaves the spectator nothing to do, and, if bad, confuses, stupefies,
disenchants, and disheartens him.
Hilda was greatly interested in this rich portfolio. She lingered so
long over one particular sketch, that Miriam asked her what discovery
she had made.
“Look at it carefully,” replied Hilda, putting the sketch into her
hands. “If you take pains to disentangle the design from those
pencil-marks that seem to have been scrawled over it, I think you will
see something very curious.”
“It is a hopeless affair, I am afraid,” said Miriam. “I have neither
your faith, dear Hilda, nor your perceptive faculty. Fie! what a blurred
scrawl it is indeed!”
The drawing had originally been very slight, and had suffered more
from time and hard usage than almost any other in the collection; it
appeared, too, that there had been an attempt (perhaps by the very hand
that drew it) to obliterate the design. By Hilda’s help, however, Miriam
pretty distinctly made out a winged figure with a drawn sword, and a
dragon, or a demon, prostrate at his feet.
“I am convinced,” said Hilda in a low, reverential tone, “that Guido’s
own touches are on that ancient scrap of paper! If so, it must be his
original sketch for the picture of the Archangel Michael setting his
foot upon the demon, in the Church of the Cappuccini. The composition
and general arrangement of the sketch are the same with those of the
picture; the only difference being, that the demon has a more upturned
face, and scowls vindictively at the Archangel, who turns away his eyes
in painful disgust.”
“No wonder!” responded Miriam. “The expression suits the daintiness of
Michael’s character, as Guido represents him. He never could have looked
the demon in the face!”
“Miriam!” exclaimed her friend reproachfully, “you grieve me, and you
know it, by pretending to speak contemptuously of the most beautiful and
the divinest figure that mortal painter ever drew.”
“Forgive me, Hilda!” said Miriam. “You take these matters more
religiously than I can, for my life. Guido’s Archangel is a fine
picture, of course, but it never impressed me as it does _you_.”
“Well; we will not talk of that,” answered Hilda. “What I wanted you to
notice, in this sketch, is the face of the demon. It is entirely unlike
the demon of the finished picture. Guido, you know, always affirmed that
the resemblance to Cardinal Pamfili was either casual or imaginary. Now,
here is the face as he first conceived it.”
“And a more energetic demon, altogether, than that of the finished
picture,” said Kenyon, taking the sketch into his hand. “What a spirit
is conveyed into the ugliness of this strong, writhing, squirming
dragon, under the Archangel’s foot! Neither is the face an impossible
one. Upon my word, I have seen it somewhere, and on the shoulders of a
living man!”
“And so have I,” said Hilda. “It was what struck me from the first.”
“Donatello, look at this face!” cried Kenyon.
The young Italian, as may be supposed, took little interest in matters
of art, and seldom or never ventured an opinion respecting them. After
holding the sketch a single instant in his hand, he flung it from him
with a shudder of disgust and repugnance, and a frown that had all the
bitterness of hatred.
“I know the face well!” whispered he. “It is Miriam’s model!”
It was acknowledged both by Kenyon and Hilda that they had detected, or
fancied, the resemblance which Donatello so strongly affirmed; and it
added not a little to the grotesque and weird character which, half
playfully, half seriously, they assigned to Miriam’s attendant, to think
of him as personating the demon’s part in a picture of more than two
centuries ago. Had Guido, in his effort to imagine the utmost of sin
and misery, which his pencil could represent, hit ideally upon just this
face? Or was it an actual portrait of somebody, that haunted the old
master, as Miriam was haunted now? Did the ominous shadow follow him
through all the sunshine of his earlier career, and into the gloom that
gathered about its close? And when Guido died, did the spectre betake
himself to those ancient sepulchres, there awaiting a new victim, till
it was Miriam’s ill-hap to encounter him?
“I do not acknowledge the resemblance at all,” said Miriam, looking
narrowly at the sketch; “and, as I have drawn the face twenty times, I
think you will own that I am the best judge.”
A discussion here arose, in reference to Guido’s Archangel, and it was
agreed that these four friends should visit the Church of the Cappuccini
the next morning, and critically examine the picture in question;
the similarity between it and the sketch being, at all events, a very
curious circumstance.
It was now a little past ten o’clock, when some of the company, who had
been standing in a balcony, declared the moonlight to be resplendent.
They proposed a ramble through the streets, taking in their way some
of those scenes of ruin which produced their best effects under the
splendor of the Italian moon.