University of Virginia Library

55. LETTER LV.

Drawn in twenty different directions on starting
from my lodgings this morning, I found myself, undecided
where to pass 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 cassock.

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 mosaie. Its walls are encrusted
with precious stones and masterly workman
ship 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, passing
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
noble effect of a vast mosaic floor, unencumbered 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 passed 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 passed them, I
say, with the same lost and unexamining, unparticularizing
feeling which I can not 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, passed 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 noble 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 glass is filled with moving and reanimated
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 philoso

phers, 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 God.” 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 master-pieces
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 familar 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 Titian'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 passed 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 passion 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 passing,
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 scull, beneath
which is written—“I, too, was of Arcadia;” and, at a
little distance, gazing at it in attitudes 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 grass, 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 passion 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 Cœlian 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 stalactites, 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 grass
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
associations of the spot was ample and untroubled.
I could wish every refined spirit in the
world had shared our pleasant hour upon the Palatine.