University of Virginia Library

27. LETTER XXVII.

Florence.—It is among the pleasantest things in
this very pleasant world, to find oneself for the first
time in a famous city. We sallied from the hotel this
morning an hour after our arrival, and stopped at the
first corner to debate where we should go. I could
not help smiling at the magnificence of the alternatives.
“To the gallery, of course,” said I, “to see the
Venus de Medicis.” “To Santa Croce,” said one,
“to see the tombs of Michael Angelo, and Alfieri, and
Machiavelli.” “To the Palazzo Pitti,” said another,
“the grand duke's palace, and the choicest collection
of pictures in the world.” The embarrassment alone
was quite a sensation.

The Venus carried the day. We crossed the Piazza
del Granduca, and inquired for the gallery. A
fine court was shown us, opening out from the square,
around the three sides of which stood a fine uniform
structure, with a colonnade, the lower story occupied
by shops and crowded with people. We mounted a
broad staircase, and requested of the soldier at the
door to be directed to the presence of the Venus without
delay. Passing through one of the long wings of
the gallery, without even a glance at the statues, pictures,
and bronzes that lined the walls, we arrived at
the door of a cabinet, and putting aside the large crimson
curtain at the entrance, stood before the enchantress.
I must defer a description of her. We
spent an hour there, but, except that her divine beauty
filled and satisfied my eye, as nothing else ever did,
and that the statue is as unlike a thing to the casts
one sees of it as one thing could well be unlike another,
I made no criticism. There is an atmosphere of
fame and circumstantial interest about the Venus,
which bewilders the fancy almost as much as her
loveliness does the eye. She has been gazed upon
and admired by troops of pilgrims, each of whom it
were worth half a life to have met at her pedestal.
The painters, the poets, the talent and beauty, that have
come there from every country under the sun, and the
single feeling of love and admiration that she has
breathed alike into all, consecrate her mere presence
as a place for revery and speculation. Childe Harold
has been here, I thought, and Shelley and Wordsworth
and Moore; and, farther removed from our sympathies,
but interesting still, the poets and sculptors
of another age, Michael Angelo and Alfieri, the men
of genius of all nations and times; and to stand in the
same spot, and experience the same feeling with them,
is an imaginative pleasure, it is true, but as truly a
deep and real one. Exceeding, as the Venus does
beyond all competition, every image of loveliness painted
or sculptured that one has ever before seen, the
fancy leaves the eye gazing upon it, and busies itself
irresistibly with its pregnant atmosphere of recollections.
At least I found it so, and I must go there
again and again before I can look at the marble separately,
and with a merely admiring attention.

Three or four days have stolen away, I scarce know
how. I have seen but one or two things, yet have
felt so unequal to the description, that but for my
promise I should never write a line about them.
Really, to sit down and gaze into one of Titian's faces
for an hour, and then to go away and dream of putting
into language its color and expression, seems to me
little short of superlative madness. I only wonder at
the divine faculty of sight. The draught of pleasure
seems to me immortal, and the eye the only Ganymede
that can carry the cup steadily to the mind. How
shall I begin to give you an idea of the Fornarina?
What can I tell you of the St. John in the desert, that
can afford you a glimpse even of Raphael's inspired
creations?

The Tribune is the name of a small octagonal cabinet
in the gallery, devoted to the masterpieces of the
collection. There are five statues, of which one is the
Venus de Medicis; and a dozen or twenty pictures,
of which I have only seen as yet Titian's Two Venuses,
and Raphael's St. John and Fornarina. People walk
through the other parts of the gallery, and pause
here and there a moment before a painting or a statute;
but on the Tribune they sit down, and you may wait
hours before a chair is vacated, or often before the occupant
shows a sign of life. Everybody seems entranced
there. They get before a picture, and bury
their eyes in it, as if it had turned them to stone.
After the Venus, the Fornarina strikes me most forcibly,
and I have stood and gazed at it till my limbs
were numb with the motionless posture. There is no
affectation in this. I saw an English girl yesterday
gazing at the St. John. She was a flighty, coquettish-looking
creature, and I had felt that the spirit of the
place was profaned by the way she sailed into the room.
She sat down with half a glance at the Venus, and
began to look at this picture. It is a glorious thing,
to be sure, a youth of apparently seventeen, with a
leopard-skin about his loins, in the very pride of maturing
manliness and beauty. The expression of the
face is all human, but wrought to the very limit of
celestial enthusiasm. The wonderful richness of the
coloring, the exquisite ripe fulness of the limbs, the
passionate devotion of the kindling features combine
to make it the faultless ideal of a perfect human being
in youth. I had quite forgotten the intruder for an
hour. Quite a different picture had absorbed all my
attention. The entrance of some one disturbed me,
and as I looked round I caught a glance of my coquet,
sitting with her hands awkwardly clasped over her
guide-book, her mouth open, and the lower jaw hanging
down with a ludicrous expression of unconsciousness
and astonished admiration. She was evidently
unaware of everything in the world except the form
before her, and a more absorbed and sincere wonder I
never witnessed.

I have been enjoying all day an Italian Festa. The
Florentines have a pleasant custom of celebrating this
particular festival, Ascension-day, in the open air;
breakfasting, dining, and dancing under the superb
trees of the Cascino. This is, by the way, quite the
loveliest public pleasure-ground I ever saw—a wood of
three miles in circumference, lying on the banks of the
Arno, just below the town; not, like most European
promenades a bare field of clay or ground, set out
with stunted trees, and cut into rectangular walks, or
without a secluded spot or an untrodden blade of
grass; but full of sward-paths, green and embowered,
the underbrush growing wild and luxuriant between,
ivy and vines of all descriptions hanging from the
limbs, and winding about every trunk; and here and
there a splendid opening of velvet grass for half a mile,
with an ornamental temple in the centre, and beautiful
contrivances of perspective in every direction. I
have been not a little surprised with the enchantment
of so public a place. You step into the woods from
the very pavement of one of the most populous streets
in Florence; from dust and noise and a crowd of busy
people to scenes where Boccacio might have fitly
laid his “hundred tales of love.” The river skirts
the Cascino on one side, and the extensive grounds of
a young Russian nobleman's villa on the other; and

here at sunset comes all the world to walk and drive,
and on festas like this to encamp, and keep holyday
under the trees. The whole place is more like a
half-redeemed wild-wood in America, than a public
promenade in Europe.

It is the custom, I am told for the grand duke and
the nobles of Tuscany to join in this festival, and
breakfast in the open air with the people. The late
death of the young and beautiful grand-dutchess has
prevented it this year, and the merry-makings are diminished
of one half their interest. I should not
have imagined it, however, without the information.
I took a long stroll among the tents this morning, with
two ladies from Albany, old friends, whom I have encountered
accidentally in Florence. The scenes were
peculiar and perfectly Italian. Everything was done
fantastically and tastefully. The tables were set about
the knolls, the bonnets and shawls hung upon the trees,
and the dark-eyed men and girls, with their expressive
faces full of enjoyment, leaned around upon the grass,
with the children playing among them, in innumerable
little parties, dispersed as if it had been managed
by a painter. At every few steps a long embowered
alley stretched off to the right or left, with strolling
groups scattered as far as the eye could see under the
trees, the red ribands and bright colored costumes
constrasting gayly with the foliage of every teint, from
the dusky leaf of the olive to the bright soft green of
the acacia. Wherever there was a circular opening
there were tents just in the edges of the wood, the
white festoons of the cloth hung from the limbs, and
tables spread under them, with their antique-looking
Tuscan pitchers wreathed with vines, and tables spread
with broad green leaves, making the prettiest cool covering
that could be conceived. I have not come up
to the reality in this description, and yet, on reading
it, it sounds half a fiction. One must be here to feel
how little language can convey an idea of this “garden
of the world.”

The evening was the fashionable hour, and with the
addition of Mr. Greenough, the sculptor, to our party,
we drove to the cascines about an hour before sunset
to see the equipages, and enjoy the close of the
festival. The drives intersect these beautiful grounds
irregularly in every direction, and the spectacle was
even more brilliant than in the morning. The nobility
and the gay world of Florence flew past us in their
showy carriages of every description, the distinguished
occupants differing in but one respect from well-bred
people of other countries—they looked happy.
If I had been lying on the grass, an Italian peasant,
with my kinsmen and friends, I should not have felt
that among the hundreds who were rolling past me
richer and better born, there was one face that looked
on me contemptuously or condescendingly. I was
very much struck with the universal air of enjoyment
and natural exhilaration. One scarce felt like a stranger
in such a happy-looking crowd.

Near the centre of the grounds is an open space,
where it is the custom for people to stop in driving to
exchange courtesies with their friends. It is a kind
of fashionable open air soiree. Every evening you
may see from fifty to a hundred carriages at a time,
moving about in this little square in the midst of the
woods, and drawing up side by side, one after the other,
for conversation. Gentlemen come ordinarily on horseback,
and pass round from carriage to carriage, with
their hats off, talking gayly with the ladies within.
There could not be a more brilliant scene, and there
never was a more delightful custom. It keeps alive
the intercourse in the summer months, when there
are no parties, and it gives a stranger an opportunity
of seeing the lovely and the distinguished without the
difficulty and restraint of an introduction to society.
I wish some of these better habits of Europe were
imitated in our country as readily as worse ones.

After thridding the embowered roads of the cascines
for an hour, and gazing with constant delight at
the thousand pictures of beauty and happiness that
meet us at every turn, we came back and mingled in
the gay throng of carriages at the centre. The valet
of our lady-friends knew everybody, and taking a convenient
stand, we amused ourselves for an hour, gazing
at them as they were named in passing. Among others,
several of the Bonaparte family went by in a
splendid barouche; and a heavy carriage, with a
showy, tasselled hammer-cloth, and servants in dashy
liveries, stopped just at our side, containing Madame
Catalani, the celebrated singer. She has a fine face
yet, with large expressive features, and dark, handsome
eyes. Her daughter was with her, but she has none
of her mother's pretensions to good looks.