Pencillings by the Way Part 23

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 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 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 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, pa.s.sing 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 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 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, 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 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 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.

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 att.i.tudes 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 gra.s.s, 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 pa.s.sion 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 stalact.i.tes 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 gra.s.s 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 a.s.sociations 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 princ.i.p.al 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 t.i.tUS AND CARACALLA.

The yearly ceremony of giving dowries to twelve girls, was performed by the Pope, this morning, in the church built over the ancient temple of Minerva. His Holiness arrived, in state, from the Vatican, at ten, followed by his red troop of cardinals, and preceded by a clerical courier, on a palfrey, and the body-guard of n.o.bles. He blessed the crowd, right and left, with his three fingers (precisely as a Parisian dandy salutes his friend across the street), and, descending from his carriage (which is like a good-sized gla.s.s boudoir upon wheels), he was received in the papal sedan, and carried into the church by his Swiss bearers. My legation b.u.t.ton carried me through the guard, and I found an excellent place under a cardinal's wing, in the penetralia within the railing of the altar. Ma.s.s commenced presently, with a chant from the celebrated choir of St. Peter's. Room was then made through the crowd, the cardinals put on their red caps, and the small procession of twelve young girls entered from a side chapel, bearing each a taper in her hand, and robed to the eyes in white, with a chaplet of flowers round the forehead. I could form no judgment of anything but their eyes and feet. A Roman eye could not be otherwise than fine, and a Roman woman's foot could scarce be other than ugly, and, consequently, there was but one satin slipper in the group that a man might not have worn, and every eye I could see from my position, might have graced an improvisatrice. They stopped in front of the throne, and, giving their long tapers to the servitors, mounted in couples, hand in hand, and kissed the foot of his Holiness, who, at the same time, leaned over and blessed them, and then turning about, walked off again behind the altar in the same order in which they had entered.

The choir now struck up their half-unearthly chant (a music so strangely shrill and clear, that I scarce know whether the sensation is pleasure or pain), the Pope was led from his throne to his sedan, and his mitre changed for a richly jewelled crown, the bearers lifted their burden, the guard presented arms, the cardinals summoned their officious servants to unrobe, and the crowd poured out as it came.

This ceremony, I found upon inquiry, is performed every year, _on the day of the annunciation_--just nine months before Christmas, and is intended to commemorate the incarnation of our Saviour.

As I was returning from a twilight stroll upon the Pincian hill this evening, the bells of the convent of Santa Trinita rung to vespers. I had heard of the singing of the nuns in the service at the convent chapel, but the misbehavior of a party of English had excluded foreigners, of late, and it was thought impossible to get admittance.

I mounted the steps, however, and rung at the door. It was opened by a pale nun, of thirty, who hesitated a moment, and let me pa.s.s. In a small, plain chapel within, the service of the altar was just commencing, and, before I reached a seat, a low plaintive chant commenced, in female voices from the choir. It went on with occasional interruptions from the prayers, for perhaps an hour. I can not describe the excessive mournfulness of the music. One or two familiar hymns occurred in the course of it, like airs in a recitative, the same sung in our churches, but the effect was totally different. The neat, white caps of the nuns were just visible over the railing before the organ, and, as I looked up at them and listened to their melancholy notes, they seemed, to me, mourning over their exclusion from the world. The small white cloud from the censer mounted to the ceiling, and creeping away through the arches, hung over the organ till it was lost to the eye in the dimness of the twilight. It was easy, under the influence of their delightful music, to imagine within it the wings of that tranquilizing resignation, one would think so necessary to keep down the heart in these lonely cloisters.

The most considerable ruins of ancient Rome are those of the _Baths_.

The Emperors t.i.tus, Caracalla, Nero, and Agrippa, constructed these immense places of luxury, and the remains of them are among the most interesting and beautiful relics to be found in the world. It is possible that my readers have as imperfect an idea of the extent of a Roman bath as I have had, and I may as well quote from the information given by writers on antiquities. "They were open every day, to both s.e.xes. In each of the great baths, there were sixteen hundred seats of marble, for the convenience of the bathers, and three thousand two hundred persons could bathe at the same time. There were splendid porticoes in front for promenade, arcades with shops, in which was found every kind of luxury for the bath, and halls for corporeal exercises, and for the discussion of philosophy; and here the poets read their productions and rhetoricians harangued, and sculptors and painters exhibited their works to the public. The baths were distributed into grand halls, with ceilings enormously high and painted with admirable frescoes, supported on columns of the rarest marble, and the basins were of oriental alabaster, porphyry, and jasper. There were in the centre vast reservoirs, for the swimmers, and crowds of slaves to attend gratuitously upon all who should come."

The baths of Diocletian (which I visited to-day), covered an enormous s.p.a.ce. They occupied seven years in building, and were the work of _forty thousand Christian slaves, two thirds of whom died of fatigue and misery_! Mounting one of the seven hills of Rome, we come to some half-ruined arches, of enormous size, extending a long distance, in the sides of which were built two modern churches. One was the work of Michael Angelo, and one of his happiest efforts. He has turned two of the ancient halls into a magnificent church, in the shape of a Greek cross, leaving in their places eight gigantic columns of granite.

After St. Peter's it is the most imposing church in Rome.

We drove thence to the baths of t.i.tus, pa.s.sing the site of the ancient gardens of Mecaenas, in which still stands the tower from which Nero beheld the conflagration of Rome. The houses of Horace and Virgil communicated with this garden, but they are now undistinguishable. We turned up from the Coliseum to the left, and entered a gate leading to the baths of t.i.tus. Five or six immense arches presented their front to us, in a state of picturesque ruin. We took a guide, and a long pole, with a lamp at the extremity, and descended to the subterranean halls, to see the still inimitable frescoes upon the ceilings. Pa.s.sing through vast apartments, to the ruined walls of which still clung, here and there, pieces of the finely-colored stucco of the ancients, we entered a suite of long galleries, some forty feet high, the arched roofs of which were painted with the most exquisite art, in a kind of fanciful border-work, enclosing figures and landscapes, in as bright colors as if done yesterday. Farther on was the niche in which was found the famous group of Laoc.o.o.n, in a room belonging to a subterranean palace of the emperor, communicating with the baths. The Belvedere Meleager was also found here. The imagination loses itself in attempting to conceive the splendor of these under-ground palaces, blazing with artificial light, ornamented with works of art, never equalled, and furnished with all the luxury which an emperor of Rome, in the days when the wealth of the world flowed into her treasury, could command for his pleasure. How short life must have seemed to them, and what a tenfold curse became death and the common ills of existence, interrupting or taking away pleasures so varied and inexhaustible.

These baths were built in the last great days of Rome, and one reads the last stages of national corruption and, perhaps, the secret of her fall, in the character of these ornamented walls. They breathe the very spirit of voluptuousness. Naked female figures fill every plafond, and fauns and satyrs, with the most licentious pa.s.sions in their faces, support the festoons and hold together the intricate ornament of the frescoes. The statues, the pictures, the object of the place itself, inspired the wish for indulgence, and the history of the private lives of the emperors and wealthier Romans shows the effect in its deepest colors.

We went on to the baths of Caracalla, the largest ruins of Rome. They are just below the palaces of the Cesars, and ten minutes' walk from the Coliseum. It is one labyrinth of gigantic arches and ruined halls, the ivy growing and clinging wherever it can fasten its root, and the whole as fine a picture of decay as imagination could create. This was the favorite haunt of Sh.e.l.ley, and here he wrote his fine tragedy of Prometheus. He could not have selected a more fitting spot for solitary thought. A herd of goats were climbing over one of the walls, and the idle boy who tended them lay asleep in the sun, and every footstep echoed loud through the place. We pa.s.sed two or three hours rambling about, and regained the populous streets of Rome in the last light of the sunset.

LETTER LVII.