Romance of Roman Villas Part 33

Fortunately for Italy, England found a contesting bidder in Cardinal Albani, and the majority of the statues found in the Pantello were purchased by him. At the same time the magnificent collection of Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, was offered at public sale by the degenerate spendthrift who inherited it, and sixty of the finest statues were secured for Villa Albani and rejoined their old companions.

Winckelmann gloated over their beauty, for he united the artist's appreciation to the connoisseurship of the archaeologist. What solicitude for its appropriate setting, only surpa.s.sed by that of Hadrian himself, did he bestow on the placing of each individual statue, and with what exultation he records its arrival.

"The Cardinal has brought from Tivoli on a _carro_ drawn by sixteen bullocks a female river deity of colossal size well preserved" (and still to be seen reclining on the margin of a reservoir). To the relief of _Antinous_ Winckelmann gave the place of honour which it now occupies. Let us read his own record of the esteem in which he held it.

"The glory and the crown of sculpture in this age _as well as in all ages_" he does not hesitate to a.s.sert, "are two likenesses of Antinous."

One of them, in the Albani villa, is in relief, the other is a colossal head in the Mondragone villa.

"The former disinterred from Hadrian's villa is," says Winckelmann, "only a fragment of an entire figure which probably stood on a chariot.

For the right hand, which is empty, is in a position that leads me to conclude that it must have held the reins. In this work therefore would have been represented the deification of Antinous as we know that figures so honoured were placed upon cars to signify their translation to the G.o.ds.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Villa Albani]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Casino, Villa Albani

_Alinari_]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Alinari_

Candelabrum from Hadrian's Villa

Museum of the Vatican]

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Alinari_

Candelabrum from Hadrian's Villa

Museum of the Vatican]

"The colossal head in the Mondragone villa (now in the Louvre) I hold it no heresy to say is, next to the Vatican Apollo and the Laoc.o.o.n, the most beautiful work which has come down to us."

The two friends lived a charmed life more in the past than in the Rome of their own day until the spree was rudely broken by Winckelmann's tragic death at the hands of a vulgar robber, and the grey-haired cardinal wandered alone among his cherished marbles. Many of these he donated to the Capitoline Museum and to the Vatican, but the relief of Antinous he held among his most cherished possessions. It would have broken the good man's heart to have known that these statues were doomed to wander far from the home which he had provided for them. The French took possession of Italy, and the masterpieces of the Villa Albani formed only a fraction of the wholesale robberies which for a time enriched the museum of the Louvre.

On the fall of Napoleon the Pope chose the sculptor Canova as his envoy to negotiate with the allies for the return of the art treasures of Italy. Canova was successful, for he pleaded from a full heart; but although he secured the rest.i.tution of the two hundred and ninety-four statues which Napoleon had taken from the Villa Albani, Cardinal Giuseppe Albani, an unworthy successor of the great collector, sold all but one in order to avoid the cost of their return transportation. The poor peripatetic philosophers, emperors, empresses, G.o.ds, and G.o.ddesses trooped on like uneasy ghosts, not a few of them finding shelter in the Glyptothek at Munich.

The one piece of sculpture reserved from this fate of expatriation, and reinstated in triumph in its old position in the salon at the left of the main gallery of the villa, it is hardly necessary to state, was the relief of _Antinous_. Here it remains and lures us, according to our bent, to study or to dream of the life which its original so pa.s.sionately lived, and instinctively we search for some statue of a woman of equal charm to link with it in our dreams.

Ebers thought he had found it in the loveliest of the nine muses which Ligorio discovered in the theatre of Hadrian's villa. In 1689 Velasquez was sent to Rome to acquire them for Philip V. Eight of them may still be seen in the Museum of Madrid, but the ninth muse, Urania, from which the d'Estes could not then be induced to part, is now in the Sala delle Muse of the Vatican. This is the Urania which Ebers imagines to have been carved by the young Alexandrine sculptor, Pollux, from the Selene whom we are told Antinous vainly loved.

The face is very winsome and the romance might satisfy us, but for a portrait-statue of a genuine Selene, found by Ligorio near the palazzita and now in the casino of the Villa Albani.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Alinari_

Urania

Museum of the Vatican]

It is catalogued as _Iris Descending_, but mistakenly, says Monsieur Guzman, for Iris was invariably represented with wings, and this graceful figure is wingless, a torch in hand, and floating downward so gently that her motion scarcely agitates her soft drapery. Authorities are now agreed that the lovely figure represents Selene, the moon-G.o.ddess, who, enamoured with Endymion, kept tryst with him in his dreams, and a beautiful "Sleeping Youth" was actually discovered beneath the descending Selene, thus completing the composition and verifying the a.s.sumption as to its subject. That the rec.u.mbent youth was not at once recognised as intended to represent Endymion is due to the inability of the scientific mind to grasp more than one idea at a time, for the features bore so marked a resemblance to those of Antoninus Pius that it was rightly considered a portrait of that Emperor in his youth. Only recently have archaeologists accepted the t.i.tle, _Antoninus Pius as Endymion_ and it seems probable that the Selene of Villa Albani portrayed the Empress Faustina, and that this group was a tribute of the Emperor's to his beautiful wife, his "Diva Faustina," who stooped to him like the moon-G.o.ddess from the sky. Is it not equally possible that he caused the symbols of Selene to be cut upon her signet that she might use it in her intimate correspondence, that the charm of this wonderful woman was a.s.sociated in his mind with the magic of moonlight, gentle, love-compelling, and pure? Such a testimonial does in fact exist in a medal struck by the command of Antoninus Pius after the death of the Empress, representing Faustina bearing two torches, but returning to heaven, and depriving him of the light which had illumined their wedded life; and lest there should be any doubt that the deity typified in this apotheosis is Selene the Emperor caused the words _Luna lucifera_ to be engraved beneath the name of Faustina.

The myth of the love of the lady-moon has nowhere been so exquisitely rendered as in the _Endymion_ of Keats, and his description of the descent of Selene applies well to the moon-maiden of the Villa Albani:

"I raised My sight right upward, but it was quite daz'd By a bright something sailing down apace, Making me quickly veil my eyes and face.

Her locks were simply gordianed up and braided Leaving in naked comeliness unshaded Her pearl round ears, white neck, and orbed brow.

. . . I see her hovering feet More bluely veined, more whitely sweet Than those of sea-born Venus when she rose From out her cradle sh.e.l.l. The wind out-blows Her scarf into a fluttering pavilion, 'Tis blue and over-spangled with a million Of little eyes, as though thou wert to shed Over the darkest lushest blue-bell bed Handfuls of daisies."[11]

Faustina may have known Antinous before her marriage, while Hadrian still hoped to make him his successor, ere the clamours of the people forced him to make the wiser choice. Had Antinous been so favoured, is there any doubt whether Faustina would not have inclined to him instead of to the good man with the serious, anxious face, who was more than twice her age when he became her husband?

The statues of Antinous fully realise Keats's ideal of Endymion.

"His youth was fully blown Shining like Ganymede to manhood grown, A smile was on his countenance; he seemed To common lookers-on like one who dreamed Of idleness in groves Elysian But there were some who feelingly could scan A lurking trouble in his nether lip.

Then would they sigh, 'Ah! well-a-day Why should our young Endymion pine away?'"

We know not on what authority Ebers links the name of Antinous, Endymion-like, with that of Selene. Was there some missive sealed by a moon-beam torch, or addressed to the lady moon which went astray and set the gossip of the Court crackling like a flame in dry gra.s.s? Or was it merely his aspiration for the throne of the Caesars which was signified by the common expression, "he longed for the moon," and not a love hopeless, but beyond his power to conquer for the unattainable Selene, which saddened his young life so deeply, and determined him to throw it away when the occasion seemed to demand the sacrifice.

Both research and fancy will lead you far, for it was in Egypt that the most dramatic part of the story was enacted, and that Antinous, believing that in so doing he saved Hadrian's life, launched forth upon the Nile during a terrific tempest, and standing erect in the unguided canoe sought a voluntary death in the storm-lashed waters.

The Emperor's grief was wildly extravagant. He gave the beautiful body a king's burial in a tomb flanked by obelisks and guarded by a sphinx; and he built about it a magnificent city which he called Antinopolis, a city which exists to this day though no man lives within its desolate columned streets.

But the deserted city has been identified in the ruins called by the Egyptians, Antinoe. Its hippodrome, and theatres, and temple tomb have all been mapped by archaeologists, and its Arch of Triumph, of Roman bricks faced with white marble, its long colonnades of Corinthian columns, and its melancholy waving palms have been photographed by troops of unreflecting tourists.

While erecting memorials to his friend, Hadrian was not unmindful of his own sepulchral monument, the present castle of St. Angelo. It served as a mausoleum for the imperial family. The ashes of Faustina (to whose memory her husband erected the beautiful temple bearing her name) were placed here, their urn guarded by two bronze peac.o.c.ks, the emblems of an empress.

These peac.o.c.ks with the pineapple, which crowned the summit of the tomb, now ornament the Court of the Belvedere of the Vatican, in whose galleries may be found some of the statues with which Hadrian decorated the upper colonnade of the mausoleum, and which were wrenched from their pedestals and toppled upon the heads of the Goths when Totila besieged Rome.

Gregorovius in his scholarly biography of Hadrian thus sums up his achievements and estimates his character:

"He ruled the empire like a n.o.ble Roman, with prudence and strength. He enjoyed life with the joy of the ancients. He travelled throughout the world and found it worth the trouble. He restored it and embellished it with new beauty. He was lavish on a great scale."

We certainly do not know what he thought of his whole life at the end of it. He might have agreed with the estimate of Marcus Aurelius: "All that belongs to the soul is a dream and a delusion; life is a struggle and a wandering among strangers, and fame after death is forgetfulness."

That he had some vague belief in the immortality of the soul the well-known poem written shortly before his death certainly shows:

"Animula, vagula, blandula; Hospes, comesque corporis, Quae nunc abibis in loca; Pallidula, rigida, nudula, Nec ut soles dabis jocos?"

"Celestial spirit, evanescent fay, Supernal guest and sharer of my might, Wherefore and whither dost thou fly away, Exquisite phantom, nude and ghostly white, Never with me again to flit and play, Never with me to play?"

Reluctantly, after all our search, we find that archaeology, while it tells us much of Hadrian, leaves Antinous still a mystery.

The forsaken pleasure palace is silent and empty save for ghosts of the imagination. We see the imperial barges glide up the Nile as in a pageant, but it is all a wordless pantomime, though the beautiful immortal figure stands.

"Still there where he a thousand years hath stood And watched, with gaze intent, the ages' flood His graceful limbs reflecting, then as now His lotus crown the sadness on his brow, And races new in line unending glide Along in sh.e.l.ls upon the flowing tide; But aye as they approach and look on him Athwart their joy there falls a sorrow dim, The citherns cease that rang as they drew nigh, On glowing lips the jests and kisses die.

And, lo! the heart is seized by infinite woe, With arms outstretched they gaze as on they go-- 'O waken, boy! O waken from thy dream!

Say what thou seest below the ages stream, Tell us, is life's enigma known to thee?

Give us thy own fair immortality!'

But ere he from his revery wakens they Have with the river drifted far away."

[Ill.u.s.tration: View through the Key-hole of the Gate of the Villa of the Knights of Malta]