University of Virginia Library

30. LETTER XXX.

Another evening is here, and my friends have crept
to bed with the exclamation, “how much we may live
in a day.” Bologna is unlike any other city we have
ever seen, in a multitude of things. You walk all over
it under arcades, sheltered on either side from the
sun, the elegance and ornament of the lines of pillars,
depending on the wealth of the owner of the particular
house, but columns and arches, simple or rich, everywhere.
Imagine porticoes built on the front of every
house in Philadelphia or New York, so as to cover the
sidewalks completely, and down the long perspective
of every street, continued lines of airy Corinthian, or
simple Doric pillars, and you may faintly conceive the
impression of the streets of Bologna. With Lord
Byron's desire to forget everything English, I do not
wonder at his selection of this foreign city for a residence,
so emphatically unlike, as it is, to everything
else in the world.

We inquired out the gallery after breakfast, and
spent two or three hours among the celebrated master-pieces
of the Carracci, and the famous painters of the
Bolognese school. The collection is small, but said
to be more choice than any other in Italy. There
certainly are five or six among its forty or fifty gems,
that deserve each a pilgrimage. The pride of the
place is the St. Cecilia, by Raphael. This always
beautiful personification of music, a woman of celestial
beauty, stands in the midst of a choir who have been
interrupted in their anthem by a song, issuing from a
vision of angels in a cloud from heaven. They have
dropped their instruments, broken, upon the ground,
and are listening with rapt attention, all, except the
saint, with heads dropped upon their bosoms, overcome
with the glory of the revelation. She alone,
with her harp hanging loosely from her fingers, gazes
up with the most serene and cloudless rapture beaming
from her countenance, yet with a look of full and
angelic comprehension, and understanding of the
melody and its divine meaning. You feel that her
beauty is mortal, for it is all woman; but you see that,
for the moment, the spirit that breathes through and
mingles with the harmony in the sky, is seraphic and
immortal. If there ever was inspiration, out of holy
writ, it touched the pencil of Raphael.

It is tedious to read descriptions of pictures. I
liked everything in the gallery. The Bolognese style
of color suits my eye. It is rich and forcible, without
startling or offending. Its delicious mellowness of
color, and the vigor and triumphant power of conception,
show two separate triumphs of the art, which in
the same hand are delightful. The pictures of Ludovico
Carracci especially fired my admiration. And
Domenichino, who died of a broken heart at Rome,
because his productions were neglected, is a painter
who always touches me nearly. His Madonna del
Rosario is crowded with beauty. Such children I
never saw in painting—the very ideals of infantile
grace and innocence. It is said of him, that after
painting his admirable frescoes in the church of St.
Andrew, at Rome, which, at the time, were ridiculed
unsparingly by the artists, he used to walk in on his
return from his studio, and gazing at them with a dejected
air, remark to his friend, that he “could not
think they were quite so bad—they might have been
worse.” How true it is, that “the root of a great
name is in the dead body.”

Guido's celebrated picture of the “Massacre of the
Innocents,” hangs just opposite the St. Cecilia. It is a
powerful and painful thing. The marvel of it to me
is the simplicity with which its wonderful effects are
produced, both of expression and color. The kneeling
mother in the foreground, with her dead children
before her, is the most intense representation of agony
I ever saw. Yet the face is calm, her eyes thrown up
to heaven, but her lips undistorted, and the muscles of
her face, steeped as they are in suffering, still and natural.
It is the look of a soul overwhelmned—that has
ceased to struggle because it is full. Her gaze is on
heaven, and in the abandonment of her limbs, and the
deep, but calm agony of her countenance, you see
that nothing between this and heaven can move her
more. One suffers in seeing such pictures. You go
away exhausted, and with feelings harassed and excited.

As we returned, we passed the gates of the university.
On the walls were pasted a sonnet printed with
some flourish, in honor of Camillo Rosalpina, the
laureate of one of the academical classes.

We visited several of the churches in the afternoon.
The cathedral and the Duomo are glorious places—
both. I wish I could convey to minds accustomed to
the diminutive size and proportions of our churches
in America, an idea of the enormous size and often almost
supernatural grandeur of those in Italy. Aisles
in whose distance the figure of a man is almost lost—
pillars, whose bases you walk round in wonder, stretching
into the lofty vaults of the roof, as if they ended in
the sky—arches of gigantic dimensions, mingling and
meeting with the fine tracery of a cobweb—altars piled
up on every side with gold, and marble, and silver—
private chapels ornamented with the wealth of nobles,
let into the sides, each large enough for a communion,
and through the whole extent of the interior, an unencumbered
breadth of floor, with here and there a
solitary worshipper on his knees, or prostrated on his
face—figures so small in comparison with the immense
dome above them, that it seems as if, could distance
drown a prayer, they were as much lost as if they
prayed under the open sky! Without having even a
leaning to the catholic faith, I love to haunt their
churches, and I am not sure that the religious awe of
the sublime ceremonies and places of worship does
not steal upon me daily. Whenever I am heated, or
fatigued, or out of spirits, I go into the first cathedral,
and sit down for an hour. They are always dark, and
cool, and quiet; and the distant tinkling of the bell
from some distant chapel, and the grateful odor of the
incense, and the low, just audible murmur of prayer,
settles on my feelings like a mist, and softens and
soothes and refreshes me, as nothing else will. The
Italian peasantry who come to the cities to sell or bargain,
pass their noons in these cool places. You see
them on their knees asleep against a pillar, or sitting
in a corner, with their heads upon their bosoms; and,
if it were as a place of retreat and silence alone, the
churches are an inestimable blessing to them. It seems
to me, that any sincere Christian, of whatever faith,

would find a pleasure in going into a sacred place and
sitting down in the heat of the day, to be quiet and
devotional for an hour. It would promote the objects
of any demonination in our country, I should think,
if the churches were thus left always open.

Under the cathedral of Bologna is a subterranean
confession-chapel—as singular and impressive a device
as I ever saw. It is dark like a cellar, the daylight
faintly struggling through a painted window above the
altar, and the two solitary wax candles giving a most
ghastly intensity to the gloom. The floor is paved
with tomb-stones, the inscriptions and death's heads
of which you feel under your feet as you walk through.
The roof is so vaulted that every tread is reverberated
endlessly in hollow tones. All around are the confession-boxes,
with the pierced plates at which the priest
within puts his ear, worn with the lips of penitents, and
at one of the sides is a deep cave, far within which, as in
a tomb, lies a representation on limestone of our Savior,
bleeding as he came from the cross, with the
apostles made of the same cadaverous material, hanging
over him!

We have happened, by a fortunate chance, upon an
extraordinary day in Bologna—a festa, that occurs but
once in ten years. We went out as usual after breakfast
this morning, and found the city had been decorated
over-night in the most splendid and singular
manner. The arcades of some four or five streets in
the centre of the town were covered with rich crimson
damask, the pillars completely bound, and the arches
dressed and festooned with a degree of gorgeousness
and taste as costly as it was magnificent. The streets
themselves were covered with cloths stretched above
the second stories of the houses from one side to the
other, keeping off the sun entirely, and making in
each street one long tent of a mile or more, with
two lines of crimson columns at the sides, and festoons
of gauze, of different colors, hung from window
to window in every direction. It was by far the
most splendid scene I ever saw. The people were all
there in their gayest dresses, and we probably saw in
the course of the day every woman in Bologna. My
friends, the painters, give it the palm for beauty over
all the cities they had seen. There was a grand procession
in the morning, and in the afternoon the bands
of the Austrian army made the round of the decorated
streets, playing most delightfully before the principal
houses. In the evening there was an illumination,
and we wandered up and down till midnight
through the fairy scene, almost literally “dazzled and
drunk with beauty.”

The people of Bologna have a kind of earnest yet
haughty courtesy, very different from that of most of
the Italians I have seen. They bow to the stranger,
as he enters the cafe: and if they rise before him, the
men raise their hats and the ladies smile and courtesy
as they go out; yet without the least familiarity which
could authorize farther approach to acquaintance.
We have found the officers, whom we meet at the
eating-houses particularly courteous. There is something
delightful in this universal acknowledgment of a
stranger's claims on courtesy and kindness. I could
well wish it substituted in our country, for the surly
and selfish manners of people in public-houses to each
other. There is neither loss of dignity nor committal
of acquaintance in such attentions; and the manner
in which a gentleman steps forward to assist you
in any difficulty of explanation in a foreign tongue, or
sends the waiter to you if you are neglected, or hands
you the newspaper or his snuff-box, or rises to give
you room in a crowded place, takes away, from me at
least, all that painful sense of solitude and neglect
one feels as a stranger in a foreign land.

We go to Ferrara to-morrow, and thence by the Po
to Venice My letter must close for the present.