Parma is laid out with a regularity which may be called characteristic
of the great ducal cities of Italy, and which it fully shares with
Mantua, Ferrara, and Bologna. The signorial cities, Verona, Vicenza,
Padua, and Treviso, are far more picturesque, and Parma excels only in
the number and beauty of her fountains. It is a city of gloomy aspect,
says Valery, who possibly entered it in a pensive frame of mind, for
its sadness did not impress us. We had just come from Modena, where
the badness of our hotel enveloped the city in an atmosphere of
profound melancholy. In fact, it will not do to trust to travellers in
any thing. I, for example, have just now spoken of the many beautiful
fountains in Parma because I think it right to uphold the statement
of M. Richard's hand-book; but I only remember seeing one fountain,
passably handsome, there. My Lord Corke, who was at Parma in 1754,
says nothing of fountains, and Richard Lasells, Gent., who was there a
century earlier, merely speaks of the fountains in the Duke's
gardens, which, together with his Grace's "wild beasts" and "exquisite
coaches," and "admirable Theater to exhibit Operas in," "the Domo,
whose Cupola was painted by the rare hand of Corregio," and the church
of the Capuchins, where Alexander Farnese is buried, were "the Chief
thing to be seen in Parma" at that day.
The wild beasts have long ago run away with the exquisite coaches, but
the other wonders named by Master Lasells are still extant in Parma,
together with some things he does not name. Our minds, in going
thither, were mainly bent upon Correggio and his works, and while our
dinner was cooking at the admirable Albergo della Posta, we went
off to feast upon the perennial Hash of Frogs in the dome of the
Cathedral. This is one of the finest Gothic churches in Italy, and
vividly recalls Verona, while it has a quite unique and most beautiful
feature in the three light-columned galleries, that traverse the
façade one above another. Close at hand stands the ancient Baptistery,
hardly less peculiar and beautiful; but, after all, it is the work of
the great painter which gives the temple its chief right to wonder and
reverence. We found the fresco, of course, much wasted, and at first
glance, before the innumerable arms and legs had time to order and
attribute themselves to their respective bodies, we felt the
justice of the undying spite which called this divinest of frescos a
_guazzetto di rane_. But in another moment it appeared to us the most
sublime conception of the Assumption ever painted, and we did not find
Caracci's praise too warm where he says: "And I still remain stupefied
with the sight of so grand a work--every thing so well conceived--so
well seen from below--with so much severity, yet with so much judgment
and so much grace; with a coloring which is of very flesh." The height
of the fresco above the floor of the church is so vast that it
might well appear like a heavenly scene to the reeling sense of the
spectator. Brain, nerve, and muscle were strained to utter exhaustion
in a very few minutes, and we came away with our admiration only
half-satisfied, and resolved to ascend the cupola next day, and see
the fresco on something like equal terms. In one sort we did thus
approach it, and as we looked at the gracious floating figures of the
heavenly company through the apertures of the dome, they did seem to
adopt us and make us part of the painting. But the tremendous depth,
over which they drifted so lightly, it dizzied us to look into; and
I am not certain that I should counsel travellers to repeat our
experience. Where still perfect, the fresco can only gain from
close inspection,--it is painted with such exquisite and jealous
perfection,--yet the whole effect is now better from below, for the
decay is less apparent; and besides, life is short, and the stairway
by which one ascends to the dome is in every way too exigent. It is
with the most astounding sense of contrast that you pass from the
Assumption to the contemplation of that other famous roof frescoed by
Correggio, in the Monastero di San Paolo. You might almost touch
the ceiling with your hand, it hovers so low with its counterfeit of
vine-clambered trellis-work, and its pretty boys looking roguishly
through the embowering leaves. It is altogether the loveliest room
in the world; and if the Diana in her car on the chimney is truly a
portrait of the abbess for whom the chamber was decorated, she was
altogether worthy of it, and one is glad to think of her enjoying life
in the fashion amiably permitted to nuns in the fifteenth century.
What curious scenes the gayety of this little chamber conjures up, and
what a vivid comment it is upon the age and people that produced it!
This is one of the things that makes a single hour of travel worth
whole years of historic study, and which casts its light upon all
future reading. Here, no doubt, the sweet little abbess, with the
noblest and prettiest of her nuns about her, received the polite
world, and made a cheerful thing of devotion, while all over
transalpine Europe the sour-hearted Reformers were destroying pleasant
monasteries like this. The light-hearted lady-nuns and their gentlemen
friends looked on heresy as a deadly sin, and they had little reason
to regard it with favor. It certainly made life harder for them in
time, for it made reform within the Church as well as without, so that
at last the lovely Chamber of St. Paul was closed against the public
for more than two centuries.
All Parma is full of Correggio, as Venice is of Titian and Tintoretto,
as Naples of Spagnoletto, as Mantua of Giulio Romano, as Vicenza of
Palladio, as Bassano of Da Ponte, as Bologna of Guido Reni. I have
elsewhere noticed how ineffaceably and exclusively the manner of the
masters seems to have stamped itself upon the art of the cities where
they severally wrought,--how at Parma Correggio yet lives in all the
sketchy mouths of all the pictures painted there since his time. One
might almost believe, hearing the Parmesans talk, that his manner had
infected their dialect, and that they fashioned their lazy, incomplete
utterance with the careless lips of his nymphs and angels. They almost
entirely suppress the last syllable of every word, and not with
a quick precision, as people do in Venice or Milan, but with an
ineffable languor, as if language were not worth the effort of
enunciation; while they rise and lapse several times in each sentence,
and sink so sweetly and sadly away upon the closing vocable that the
listener can scarcely repress his tears. In this melancholy
rhythm, one of the citizens recounted to me the whole story of the
assassination of the last Duke of Parma in 1850; and left me as softly
moved as if I had been listening to a tale of hapless love. Yet it was
an ugly story, and after the enchantment of the recital passed away, I
perceived that when the Duke was killed justice was done on one of the
maddest and wickedest tyrants that ever harassed an unhappy city.
The Parmesans remember Maria Louisa, Napoleon's wife, with pleasant
enough feelings, and she seems to have been good to them after the
manner of sovereigns, enriching their city with art, and beautifying
it in many ways, besides doing works of private charity and
beneficence. Her daughter by a second marriage, the Countess
Sanvitali, still lives in Parma; and in one of the halls of the
Academy of Fine Arts the Duchess herself survives in the marble of
Canova. It was she who caused the two great pictures of Correggio,
the St. Jerome and the Madonna della Scodella, to be placed alone in
separate apartments hung with silk, in which the painter's initial A
is endlessly interwoven. "The Night," to which the St. Jerome is "The
Day," is in the gallery at Dresden, but Parma could have kept nothing
more representative of her great painter's power than this "Day." It
is "the bridal of the earth and sky," and all sweetness, brightness,
and tender shadow are in it. Many other excellent works of Correggio,
Caracci, Parmigianino, and masters of different schools are in this
gallery, but it is the good fortune of travellers, who have to see so
much, that the memory of the very best alone distinctly remains. Nay,
in the presence of prime beauty nothing else exists, and we found
that the church of the Steccata, where Parmigianino's sublime "Moses
breaking the Tables of the Law" is visible in the midst of a multitude
of other figures on the vault, really contained nothing at last but
that august and awful presence.
Undoubtedly the best gallery of classical antiquities in North Italy
is that of Parma, which has derived all its precious relics from the
little city of Valleja alone. It is a fine foretaste of Pompeii
and the wonders of the Museo Borbonico at Naples, with its antique
frescos, and marble, and bronzes. I think nothing better has come out
of Herculaneum than the comic statuette of "Hercules Drunk." He is in
bronze, and the drunkest man who has descended to us from the elder
world; he reels backward, and leers knowingly upon you, while one hand
hangs stiffly at his side, and the other faintly clasps a wine-cup--a
burly, worthless, disgraceful demigod.
The great Farnese Theatre was, as we have seen, admired by Lasells;
but Lord Corke found it a "useless structure" though immense. "The
same spirit that raised the Colossus at Rhodes," he says, "raised the
theatre at Parma; that insatiable spirit and lust of Fame which would
brave the Almighty by fixing eternity to the name of a perishable
being." If it was indeed this spirit, I am bound to say that it did
not build so wisely at Parma as at Rhodes. The play-house that Ranuzio
I. constructed in 1628, to do honor to Cosmo II. de' Medici (pausing
at Parma on his way to visit the tomb of San Carlo Borromeo), and that
for a century afterward was the scene of the most brilliant spectacles
in the world, is now one of the dismalest and dustiest of ruins. This
_Theatrum orbis miraculum_ was built and ornamented with the
most perishable materials, and even its size has shrunken as the
imaginations of men have contracted under the strong light of later
days. When it was first opened, it was believed to hold fourteen
thousand spectators; at a later _fête_ it held only ten thousand; the
last published description fixes its capacity at five thousand; and
it is certain that for many and many a year it has held only the stray
tourists who have looked in upon its desolation. The gay paintings
hang in shreds and tatters from the roof; dust is thick upon the seats
and in the boxes, and on the leads that line the space once flooded
for naval games. The poor plaster statues stand naked and forlorn amid
the ruin of which they are part; and the great stage, from which
the curtain has rotted away, yawns dark and empty before the empty
auditorium.