churches in America, but of course they do not come up to European
cathedrals. St. Paul’s in London was disappointing, and Notre Dame
in Paris was not up to the advance advertising. But when it comes
to impressiveness St. Peter’s at Rome is to my mind the greatest
imaginable. It is so big and yet so proportioned, so grand and yet so
substantial, so full of precious memories of martyrs and divines and
so tastefully and magnificently decorated with pictures that tell the
story of the faith it stands for. All the people in Hutchinson could
worship in one side of St. Peter’s, and yet there is none of that
barny, barracksy look which usually goes with great size and capacity.
The length is 232 yards, the transept is 150 yards and the height of
the nave 151 feet, the dome is 435 feet to the cross. But figures don’t
tell anything about St. Peter’s. The interior is tapestry and painting,
gold without tinsel, pictures without tawdry effect, and columns that
add and do not detract from the dignity of the structure. Under the
great dome is the tomb of Peter, the disciple who made so much trouble,
but knowing his energy and power, whom Christ made the rock upon which
the church was to be built.
Next door to St. Peter’s is the Vatican, where the pope resides, and
the first thing we saw there was the Sistine Chapel. Here is where my
view-point differs from most people. I concede that the paintings in
the Sistine Chapel are beautiful, especially in their design and their
color. The old masters who did the work under the direction of Michael
Angelo have never been equaled in their ability to make rich color.
But I contend that the subject of a picture should count as well as
the drawing and the color. When Michael Angelo attempted to paint God
Almighty he couldn’t do it. The color is all right and the proportions
are perfect, but all that Michael Angelo did was to paint a man a
little larger than Adam, and that does not come up to my ideal of the
Divine. The fact is that neither Michael Angelo nor anyone else can put
onto canvas such a subject, and therefore Michael should not have tried
it. His fault was in his judgment of what can be painted. The entire
effect of the remainder of the beautiful ceilings and walls with their
paintings of scenes from Old and New Testament, was spoiled for me when
I couldn’t get away from that central figure, that failure of ability
to do the impossible.
I would like to have the support of the women-folks in my theory in
regard to the failure of the Sistine Chapel, so I will add that in the
picture where Michael paints the devil, he makes the devil half snake
and the upper half a woman. If I remember correctly, the great painter
was an old bachelor,—probably not one of his own motion.
The paintings mix up the pagan with the Christian. “The Last Judgment”
has Christ the central figure as judge, surrounded by apostles and
saints, and the hell part of the painting is according to Dante, with
the old Roman idea of the boatman Charon ferrying the lost across the
river. In this picture Michael Angelo made a hit. He put the face of
an enemy of his, an officer of the pope, on the painting of Minos, one
of the leading devils of hell. The offending official had objected to
some of the artist’s work on account of the nudity of the figures, and
Michael has sent him down the ages as the face of a devil.
[Illustration]
But there is no call for me to describe paintings and statuary and
cathedrals. A hasty sketch like this is not giving them fair treatment.
You can’t go anywhere in Rome without running into something beautiful
or something historic. Go down a street and there will be the baths
of Diocletian, turn around and there will be the Forum, and next is
the Coliseum, the Arch of Constantine, Trajan’s forum and column, the
Palace of Tiberius, the Stadium, and so on until you can’t rest with
the long list of things you saw and ought to remember, and some that
you ought to have seen but didn’t because you were just too tired to
look around. The Forum, the Coliseum and all this kind of things look
just like the pictures, and they are there,—that’s all I can say about
them, although the feeling of actually having seen and touched is one
of a great deal of satisfaction and worth going to Rome to have.
I don’t know how many churches there are in Rome. There are eighty
dedicated to the Virgin and fully as many to St. Peter. They are
filled with great paintings and statuary. Rome is the center of the
greatest Christian church, and for centuries the civilized world, or
a large part of it, has sent its gifts to the temples and shrines.
Thousands and tens of thousands of young men are studying here for the
priesthood. The streets are filled with their black gowns and hats.
Here and there along the streets and roads are shrines erected to
patron saints. All the churches are open seven days in the week, and
there are always people in them at their devotions.
As a contrast to the power and greatness of the present church we went
to see the catacombs, the burrows in the earth to which the Christians
of the early centuries fled for safety, and in which they buried their
dead. The catacombs of St. Calixtus, which we visited are said to
contain twelve miles of underground passages. Along the sides and in
the occasional niches and chapels are the places where the bodies were
put. The passages go down thirty to forty feet and the catacombs are
from four to six stories downward, just as a building is that much
above ground. In these places the early Christians kept alive their
faith under the terrible persecution of the emperors. Amid the tombs
they met and worshipped in spite of imperial decree and certain death
if captured. Rude pictures and inscriptions on the walls tell part
of the story which has made the world wonder ever since as the Roman
government did then, at the power of the faith for which men and women
would so live and so die.
[Illustration]
Coming out of the catacombs we drove along the Appian Way, the great
military road constructed over 300 years B. C. I had expected to have a
good thrill of enthusiasm over the Appian Way, but somehow it did not
come. The Appian Way is an ordinary good country road lined with old
houses, wine gardens, ruins and high fences. There are still a number
of villas and palaces, but the owners are poor and the basements are
usually rented out for stables and the upper apartments for tenements.
Italian noblemen are generally poor, and if they have palaces are
obliged to rent rooms and keep boarders.
[Illustration]
Another cherished hope of mine is gone. I had read about the beautiful
Italian peasant girls and have seen them on the stage singing in opera
and dressed in fetching short skirts and bright-colored bodices.
Italian girls work in the fields with the boys and then help their
mothers with the children, and most of them look tired and sickly. The
fetching skirts hang like loose wall-paper and the “bright bodice”
looks as if the girl was wearing her mother’s old corset outside her
clothes.
The largest and most numerous ruins in Rome are those of the public
baths erected by the state and by the emperors. The Romans in those
days were sporty, banqueted all night and bathed all next day to get
over the effects. But there are no public baths now—at least none of
consequence. And judging by the ordinary senses of sight and smell,
bathing has become one of the lost arts with a large number of the
Romans of to-day.
VENICE, THE BEAUTIFUL.
VENICE, July 3, 1905.
I suppose everybody knows about Venice, the city built in the
water. During the sixth century the “barbarians” from the north
were overrunning Italy, killing or making slaves of the people and
destroying the cities and towns. A number of the inhabitants of
northeast Italy fled for safety to a group of small islands in the
shallow bay of the Adriatic sea, and there built up little villages
which were united in a republic and became the city and suburbs which
we call Venice. They naturally were a seafaring and trading people,
and Venice was the port of commerce between the Orient and Europe.
The Crusades stimulated business, and Venice was the most important
trading-point on the Mediterranean. At that time there was no Suez
canal and no knowledge of an ocean route to Asia, and all commerce
passed through Venice. The little republic grew strong and powerful,
captured and retained possessions in Italy and the islands of the
Mediterranean. Venice was one of the powers of Europe about the
fifteenth century, and thought she had the world by the tail. But the
Turks captured Constantinople, other routes to Asia were discovered
about the time Columbus reached America, and Venice as a great
political power and business center suffered a collapse. In other
words, the boom in Venice busted and Venice has never done much on her
own account since. The first few hundred years the government was that
of a republic, but about the close of the thirteenth century the nobles
who had won leadership through trade and war declared their offices
hereditary, and thereafter Venice was an aristocracy with a president
called “the doge.” During the French Revolution the French captured
Venice, and then Austria got it, and finally, in 1868, it was united
with the kingdom of Italy, where it belongs.
[Illustration]
Built on islands, crossed by canals like streets in other cities,
without a carriage or a horse, Venice is a strange, and to me, an
attractive place. The railroad runs out on a long trestle bridge. It
is hardly appropriate to say “landed” in a place like Venice, but we
arrived here at ten o’clock at night. The porter for the hotel to which
we were going took us through the station and put us into a gondola,
and away we went, down back streets and under bridges, with no light
except a few corner lamps and the stars. The Venetian gondoliers may be
poetical, but their looks do not invite the confidence of the traveler
when he intrusts himself to their hands for the first time and late at
night. Little chills creep up and down your back as you see the gondola
going straight for a corner—sure to hit it, but accidentally doesn’t.
After you get acquainted with the ways of the city you learn to trust
the gondolier, but the first time, late at night, you have your doubts.
You may forget just how you arrived in other cities, but not in Venice.
The Grand canal, the main street in Venice, is about seventy-five
yards wide and averages sixteen feet deep. The paving question does
not bother the city council in Venice. Most of their canal streets
are only twelve to thirty feet in width. There are also a few real
streets four to ten feet wide, on the inside of the blocks formed by
the canals, and the total result is a labyrinth of alleys and canals
which are impossible for a stranger to get head or tail of. Along the
Grand canal and many others the fine houses of the old prosperous
times loom up straight from the water six or seven stories. For
example, the front of our hotel, on the Grand canal, has absolutely
no sidewalk, only marble steps leading to the water, up which the
tide rises about two and a half feet twice a day. The architecture of
Venice is Oriental, and is refreshing after the Roman and Greek styles
everywhere else in Italy. The churches and public buildings, mostly
constructed between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, have round
Moorish towers and are decorated with gold and colors and have very
ornate pillars and façades. That makes Venice a beautiful city, and
so it is,—if you don’t go into the little back alleys where you see
the undecorated side. Of the 125,000 people one-fourth have no means
of support except charity. In the last few years Venice has revived
the glass industry and has developed the lace-making, and times are
better than they were. But just think of a people where one-fourth have
no chance to earn their living! We visited one of the big lace-making
suburbs on the island of Burano. The lace, which Mrs. Morgan says is
“b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l” and over which all good women rave, is made by
girls and women who sit all day on straight-back chairs and labor over
the pillow,—and get about twenty-five cents a day wages. We visited
the glass-blowers at Murano, the finest in the world, and skilled
workmen get up to two dollars a day for a dexterity and ability which
would easily command three or four times that amount in America. The
people live mostly on fish and vegetables, are very poor and apparently
very happy. They are the best-looking folks I have seen in Italy, and
evidently enjoy the improvident life which would drive an American to
strong drink, or if he were in Italy would drive him to drink the water.
[Illustration]
The center of Venice is “the Piazza of St. Mark,” a square about two
hundred yards long and nearly half as wide, paved with marble and
inclosed by fine buildings, including the great Church of St. Mark,
the old palace of the doge, the present royal palace, and a glittering
array of shops. I should say there were ten thousand beautiful shops
in Venice selling lace, glass, art works, beads, curios, pictures,
etc. Of course there are not that many, but there seem to be. There
is practically nothing else of importance. Venice is a good deal like
the world’s fair grounds, all glitter and glass, Oriental towers and
marble palaces, beautiful bridges and lagoons, and everybody trying to
separate the stranger from his money.
[Illustration]
Venice is a night town. In the evening the canals are filled with
gondolas and everybody is out for a good time. Regular musical clubs
drift along with the sweetest Italian opera rendered with real ability,
and arias and Italian serenades and love songs until you think the
world is nothing but lights glancing on the water, drifting gondolas,
song and gladness. Every few minutes one of the singers will pass
the hat and you contribute two or three cents and remember you are
still on earth. We sit at our hotel and watch the gay crowd in the
passing gondolas, or for a few cents get into one, lean back on the
easy cushions, smoke a two-cent cigar, and forget all about these poor
people with their poverty and their fleas. They have forgotten them
themselves.
[Illustration]
The patron saint of Venice is St. Mark. In the early days, say a
thousand years ago and more, some doge dreamed that Venice would never
prosper until the bones of St. Mark were brought here for burial. The
bones happened to be in Asia or Africa, and for years the Venetians
put in their time fighting the Turks and trying to capture the relics.
Finally the bright idea struck them that it would be easier to steal
St. Mark’s bones than capture them by battle, and an enterprising
Venetian merchant did the job. The remains of St. Mark were brought to
Venice and a beautiful cathedral with Oriental towers and rich colors
built above them. The doge’s dream was no fake, for after that Venice
prospered greatly. Tradition says that St. Mark used to have a winged
lion for a companion, and accordingly the winged lion is the Venetian
emblem. The cathedral and the public buildings are full of Oriental
works of art captured or stolen from the Turks during the years of
the Crusades when Venice was a stronghold of Christendom. Venetian
painters have done St. Mark and the lion in every conceivable place,
and wherever you go you see his kindly face, the quill pen he used in
writing, and the playful winged lion. The only horses in the city are
of bronze, and decorate the façade of St. Mark’s cathedral. Except for
these rather poor imitations I suppose nine-tenths of the people of
Venice never saw a horse. Incidentally I will add that it is a great
advantage to live in a city where you are not awakened at daylight by
the rumble of wagons and carts over stone-paved streets.
[Illustration]
The government of Venice during the Middle Ages was something fierce.
Nominally a republic, it was controlled by the nobles, who had a
general assembly, which selected a senate of seventy-five, of which
there was an inner council of ten and a secret tribunal of three, who
met masked and did not know each other’s identity. If you lived in
Venice at that time and had an enemy you wanted to do away with, you
would drop a letter accusing him of treason into the letter-box shaped
like a lion’s head in the counter outside the room of the council of
three. It was a pretty sure thing that he would not be heard from
again. Of course you would have to do this first, for your enemy might
be dropping in a letter while you were thinking about it.
We went through the rooms of the various councils down the secret
stairway and over the “Bridge of Sighs,” which connected the palace
with the prison across the canal street. This was the way the
prisoners were brought for trial, and if they went back it was to
torture and death. The jails in those times were not built for health
or sanitary purposes, and were evidently not examined by the county
commissioners. The dungeons are dark and damp, and the guide tells you
some awful stories of the rack, the thumbscrew and the block. You can
imagine the “good old days” and shudder as you think of the cruelty and
the crime. Paraphrasing Byron, who wrote some lines on the subject:
I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs,
Visions of Old from those deep dungeons rise,—
The shrieks of pain, the terrifying cries,
Then I reflect: Perhaps it’s mostly lies.
SOME THINGS ON ART.
VENICE, ITALY, July 3, 1905.
Because I have not been writing much to The News on the subject of art,
it must not be supposed that I am omitting the regular work of every
tourist. Nor do I want it presupposed that I don’t know enough about
art to tell the difference between a renaissance and a vermicelli. If
industry and a desire to thoroughly do the job so it will not have to
be done a second time will count for anything, I have been an arduous
lover of art in all its forms since I passed the custom-house on the
Italian border. Everybody knows that the center of art is Italy and
that anything that isn’t old and Italian is second-class. When you
come to Italy you expect to see the heights of the artistic and you
are expected to have fits of ecstasy over the said heights. I have had
’em every time the guidebook told me to. I have endeavored in every
way to show that a plain, common citizen of Kansas knew what to do
when brought face to face with Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo and
the other gentlemen since whose death the world has never really seen
much in art. According to my pedometer I have traveled through 171
miles of cathedrals, 56 miles of public buildings and 85 miles of art
galleries—all in ten days. Some people may think my pedometer is too
rapid, but I know it is too slow. You know a good bird dog learns never
to “set” for anything but a game bird. And it is well established
that people with a certain kind of rheumatism can tell the approaching
changes in the weather by the twinges in their joints. And it is a fact
that even when I do not know there is a cathedral or an art gallery
within a hundred miles, let me approach one accidentally and my feet
will begin to ache. Then I know what is before me and I try to do my
duty. If the work of absorbing Italian art should prove too much for
me, the words could be as appropriately put on my tombstone as they
were over the early citizen of Dodge who died with a dozen bullets in
his body and a half-dozen enemies lying on the floor:
HERE LIES BILL.
HE DONE HIS DAMDEST.
ANGELS COULD DO
NO MORE.
[Illustration]
There are three places where you always find art in Italy: First and
foremost, the churches; second, the public buildings; third, the art
galleries and museums. The churches come first, because the Catholic
Church has always been the support and promoter of art. For centuries
it was the only strong power that encouraged artists. It had the
tasteful men of the age and it had the money. The great artists both
in painting and sculpture would have had no opportunity and their
works would have been destroyed if it had not been for the church. In
return, the artists took the subjects of religion and portrayed them
most beautifully and effectively. There is hardly a church in Italy
which does not have paintings by some of those old painters which
would be worth a fortune now if they were for sale. The Catholic faith
especially appeals to the artistic sense, and the history of the church
furnished a boundless field of subjects. Walls and ceilings of churches
are covered with magnificent pictures, the exteriors are decorated
with sculpture, and the architecture of the buildings is brilliant and
effective. To see paintings, statues or architecture in Italy you first
go to the churches, and there you see the greatest and best.
After the churches the art treasures and galleries are found in the
public buildings, and there we get what is left of the art of Greece
and Rome, together with much of a later time. The old pagan mythology
furnished most of the ancient art, together with a few attempts at
transferring abstract ideas into concrete form. Of course I don’t
want to set up as an art critic—I have trouble enough without that.
But according to the way I was raised, a large per cent. of ancient
sculpture isn’t fit to be exhibited to young folks—or to old men.
Probably the times were different and fashions in art were acute, but
the Grecian and Roman sculptors paid no attention to the rules of
common decency as generally understood in this generation. While doing
my duty in the art galleries I have actually blushed so much that
it grew noticeable to the other art critics, and I fear that I lost
standing with them. Of course I am not a regular critic, but I know a
few things, and this is one of them.
Another objection I have to the old masters is that they never
considered any subject too big for them. I have written something of
this when I kicked on Michael Angelo attempting to make a picture of
God Almighty. There is too much of that kind of business in Italian
art. And another thing is that they couldn’t paint good animals. Some
of the pictures by the great masters have horses or lions in them, and
I believe even the horses would laugh at their own appearance.
Aside from these unimportant objections and a trifling criticism of a
great deal of ignorance about drawing and the fitness of things, the
“old masters,” by which is meant the great painters from about 1400 to
1600, are certainly worthy of their reputation. Everybody I met knew
more about art than I did—so they thought—and everyone said: “What
wonderful color.” The old masters certainly did know how to mix paints
so as to make the most beautiful and most lasting colors. I think
Titian’s red-headed girls are the prettiest reds I have ever seen.
Raphael’s paintings cannot be criticized by me—their feeling and their
execution will make a cynical Kansan stand and admire. Michael Angelo
I did not take to so well as I did Titian and Raphael, but he did a
lot of work, and he, too, had the ability to make his pictures like
life. The other great painters of Italy in these two centuries of the
renaissance have not been equaled in any period since, and in spite of
the fact that the experience of one generation ought to help the next,
I do not believe that the modern Italian painters, or the Englishmen
and Americans who go to Italy and copy, can come within several blocks
of equaling the work of the “old masters.”
There is one more objection I have to the “old masters,” and I would
like to tell it to their faces. They had the habit of taking a great
subject and making it a means of flattery for wealthy patrons. For
example, a picture of Christ or the Virgin sitting and talking
confidentially with some old scamp of a Medici. Of course I don’t blame
the old artists. The Medici were a lot of thugs, thieves, highwaymen,
murderers, and lovers of art. They put up handsomely for the great
masters, and undoubtedly assisted much in promoting art at a time when
the princes and nobility of Italy were not respectable according to our
standard. This flattery by the old masters may have been necessary to
make a living, but I don’t think it is Art.
[Illustration]
I had one objection which has been overruled on the ground that it
was simply because my apprenticeship in art had been too short. Every
artist painted a “Madonna.” Each had a different ideal or model. Mary
was a Jewess. But the Italian artists nearly all ran in pictures
of Italians, and each had a different style. It makes a confusing
aggregation. I think I have seen a thousand Madonnas, five hundred
Magdalens, and from one to three hundred of each of the saints. There
is a sameness of subject and a variance in execution which makes me
a little nervous. I haven’t worked at the art business as long as I
should, and therefore I may be too hasty in my judgment, although I
am fairly perspiring art at every pore and the climate of Italy in the
latter part of June and the first of July has nearly as much cause for
perspiration as the climate of Kansas.
AN ITALIAN FOURTH AND SO FORTH.
MENAGIO, ITALY, July 5, 1905.