Part 23 (1/2)

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 pa.s.s 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 das.h.i.+ng 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 ca.s.sock.

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 wors.h.i.+p 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 workmans.h.i.+p 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, pa.s.sing in my way a solitary wors.h.i.+pper 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 n.o.ble effect of a vast mosaic floor, unenc.u.mbered 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 wis.h.i.+ng 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, pa.s.sed 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 n.o.ble 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 gla.s.s 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 G.o.d.” 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 t.i.tian'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 pa.s.sed 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 moons.h.i.+ne 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sing, 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.