which the vines run, and often hang in festoons from tree to tree. This is the time of gathering grapes, and the whole land smells of the vintage. It is rather agreeable than otherwise, though not exactly the thing to excite very romantic ideas, being an ascetous fragrance. This afternoon, at dinner, we had again some fine street music, from three blind performers; one on the violoncello, and two on the violin; and this evening, the same performers have been under my window, as I have been writing. My pen has frequently stopped, that I might more perfectly listen, or because the common-place thoughts that moved it, stopped: for I have scarcely ever heard, by the wayside, such strains of music. For ease, execution, and grace, they really reminded me of the performance of the Germans from the Royal Conservatory of Munich, which we had, you know, in New Bedford. Alas for me! I had rather see the spire of our old church than St. Peter's at Rome: and I had rather, at this moment, hear our organ out of tune, than the finest orchestra in Italy! COVIGLIAJO, October 17.-I did not mean to write this evening, but the scene is too amusing to pass by entirely. This is the usual restingplace, on the top of the Apennines, and, in the general flocking from Florence and Rome, it is a place of great resort. The house is crowded to-night, and the scene is like one of those hostelries of former days, where soldiers and minstrels, gentlemen and beggars, nobles and their retainers, were crowded together in promiscuous confusion. People of all languages are here; waiters, hurrying to and fro, are invoked in every tongue; new guests are continually arriving; scene succeeds to scene, dinner to dinner, talking and laughing, drinking and smoking, crying children and anxious nurses, may be seen and heard all over the house. There were six persons at our dinner table here to-day, and we made ourselves out to be the representatives of five different nations. There was an English mademoiselle, and a Russian, and a gentleman from Siberia, and an Italian, and myself, an American. I was intending, if I wrote at all this evening, to write a tirade against the Italian inns; this, however, is, in some points, an exception. But generally, out of the large towns, the inns are dreadfully uncomfortable; dark, damp, desolate places, stone floors, without a rag of carpeting, even by the bedside; the waiters all men-even those who make the beds and arrange the chambers, are men; and the men, the chambers, the floors, the tables, the dishes, dirty, dirty-everything dirty but the beds, and they are damp. I do not say, however, that the beds are full of vermin, though that is the common report. But for myself, I have not found a bug or a flea in Italy. 1 CHAPTER XIII. FLORENCE -THE PITTI PALACE -MODE AND EXPENSE OF LIVING IN ITALY GALLERY OF FLORENCE GENERAL ASPECT OF THE CITY AND ENVIRONS CHARACTER OF THE PEOPLE - MANNERS -MONKS-HOLY DAYS. FLORENCE.-Florence at last, this eighteenth of October. It is not Rome, but it is to the traveller the threshold of Rome; the last point of any long delay, before reaching the eternal city. But to turn back again a little: the road from Bologna is over the Apennines, and it is very uninteresting; no scenery; the Apennines are best seen at a distance. On the top, I saw, what I never saw before, orchards of chestnut trees. By the bye, the chestnuts of this countrytwo or three times the size of ours-constitute a part of the food of the people. In every town and village, quantities of them are found at every corner, raw, roasted, baked, and boiled, soliciting buyers, and finding them in great numbers. The descent from the Apennines is more agreeable than any other part, and especially as the traveller approaches Florence: six miles from which, the plantations of olive trees commence and cover the whole country. The tree is of the size of the peach tree; the leaf resembles that of our willow, only the green is much darker. The trees are now loaded with fruit, apparently near the state for pickling. We passed near the ancient city of Fiesole, situated on a beautiful slope of country, rising from Florence towards the north. At a convent on its summit Milton spent a considerable time-whence he represents "the Tuscan artist" as viewing the moon "At evening from the top of Fiesole." The monastery of Vallombrosa, whose scenery he also celebrates, is situated about seventeen miles in the country above, twenty miles from Florence. It is the surrounding wood of Atebelle, to which he refers in the well-known words "Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks In Vallombrosa, where the Etruscan shades October 20.-Florence is a city of most confounding irregularity. I have found my organ of locality serving me very well everywhere else, but here it is utterly at fault. I am like "the man with the turned head." If I would reach any particular spot, I seem to myself to go directly away from it. "Hem! the Campanile, the Gallery, the Porta da Pinti-it is there," I say-and then set off in the opposite direction. It is really quite uncomfortable. I never feel myself settled in a place till I have rightly fixed the points of the compass. It is strange to me; and I feel more than I otherwise might, that I am a stranger. To have the sun rise in the west and set in the east-it is as if the very elements had ceased to be one's friends. Alas! they are some times the traveller's only acquaintances; as they are mine here*-for all the friends that I expected to find here are fled to Rome. But what a curious feeling it is, by the bye, with which one tries-and tries— to pull and heave the great world around and bring it right-and cannot! The north will not give up, and the south keeps back. October 21.-Yes, and there are- -I am considering the sky again -there are more glorious sunsets here than anywhere else; at least in a clear day: I have seen no gorgeous clouds like those which appear in our American horizon- but there has been a sunset this evening in a cloudless heaven, with a variety and softness of colouring, continuing for a whole hour, such as I have never seen before. I say not altogether a new thing, but something beyond. I have spent the last two days in going through the Pitti Palace, the residence of the grand duke or rather, I should say, through the gallery of paintings. It consists of many rooms, most splendidly furnished and finished: the floors of marble, ceilings arched and painted in fresco, and filled with statues; tables of porphyry, jasper, &c. with stones inlaid in many forms of shells, birds, flowers, &c. in the style called pierre dure; chairs richly gilt and cushioned; pillars of marble, and vases of alabaster, &c. But all this is nothing-though some of the tables cost thirty thousand dollars; the works of genius that cover the walls are the only attraction that any one thinks of. It is not what the Medici and their successors have done here (except as purveyors for the public taste) that draws the crowd, but it is what Raphael, and Michael Angelo, and Salvator Rosa, and Carlo Dolci, and Rembrandt, and Rubens, and Christopher Allori, and Chialli, and Andrea del Sarto, and many others have done. [I had intended to strike out all such slight and hasty notices of paintings, as appear in the following page or two. But such is the eagerness among us to know everything that can be known about celebrated paintings, that I have been induced to let some of these notices, such as they are, stand in the manuscript. Nothing could have been farther from my thoughts, than publishing them, when they were written; or, indeed, anything else that belongs to the mere journal, in these volumes. I first name the painter, then the piece, and then add my comment.] Petrazzi: the Espousals-the female espoused looking very serious and deeply satisfied-those around, with countenances much more moved from their common expression - that's natural. Christopher Allori: Judith and Holofernes-a very powerful painting, no doubt; but how is it possible to paint a woman's face, whose hand clutches by the hair a bleeding head, which she has just cut off! Raphael: La Madonna della Seggiolat-surely very beautifulbut I have something more to say about that. Raphael: Madonna-(del' Impannata ‡)-oh! very beautiful; the living, dark Italian eye of the youthful John-the glee of the infant I should be ungrateful not to add, that I afterward made the acquaintance here of one of the most attractive and interesting, as well as the kindest men I ever knew, in the person of our sculptor, Greenough. † So called because the Madonna is represented sitting. The Madonna here is more beautiful than any other I have seen of Raphael. From the paper window. the fond adoration of the aged woman-the touching, admiring sensibility of the younger-the calm, satisfied, sweet expression of the Madonna-the mother in the Madonna! Michael Angelo: the Fates-stern, calm, inexorable, and haggardlooking enough, and very powerful. Salvator Rosa: a very horrible battle piece. Leonardo da Vinci: female portrait-most exquisite softness and nature, like that I saw in the palace of Orange at Brussels. Salvator Rosa: the Conspiracy of Cataline-the eye of Cataline shows the master. Raphael: Vision of Ezekiel; in miniature, but amazingly striking. Carlo Dolci: a head of Moses-like everything from his hand, fine in his way. ness. Ligozzi: Virgin and St. Francis-very touching expression of sadI should suppose "sad as St. Francis," would be a proverb: for they all make him a very desolate-looking being. He is in this piece represented as stretching out his hands to the infant Saviour. Mazzolino: La Femme Adultére-small, but capital, especially the different countenances of the accusers. Live Meus: portrait of himself-singular effect of shading the eyes -as if they were looking out of a dark closet; and scarcely anything can be seen but the-as it were, not the eye, but the meaning of the eye, mysteriously revealing itself. Benvenuti (a living artist of this city): -fresco painting of the chamber of Hercules; very showy and splendid—his fault seems to lie in that direction. Chialli: two pieces-one the choir of the Capuchins, and the other a funeral-wonderful perspective, like that of the Capuchin Chapel exhibited in America. A statue of a little boy with a bird's nest in the one hand, and the other hand laid on and detaining the parent bird: so joyous, that you can hardly help laughing out with him. Beautiful statues in the bathing-room. Some wonderful mosaics of scenery, with figures-the necessary lights and shadows effected by stones of different colours, and, where it is requisite, by an exquisite adjustment of the different colours of the same stone. Fine perspective is actually made in this way, and very perfect figures of men and animals given. The Holy Families in this collection are almost innumerable, and many of them, certainly, are very beautiful; but the idea of sanctity among these painters seems to be rather negative-beauty, calmness, but no very high, intellectual, or moral expression. Even of Raphael's Madonnas I cannot but say this. They do not satisfy me. They do not come anywhere near to the beau ideal of saintly beauty in my own mind, and, of course, cannot satisfy me. The calm, but eloquent, touched, enraptured soul, spreading its mingled light and shadowing over the whole countenance; the lines of intellectual expansion and heavenly dignity and delicacy, drawn upon the temples and forehead; the thoughts (such as we may suppose hers to have been "who kept all these sayings in her heart")-the thoughts that fill the depths of the dark eye, too strong for utterance: these things, and more that I If, conceive of, I do not find in Raphael's Madonnas. The engravings of the Madonna del Sisto, at Dresden, it is true, show more of all this, more especially in the eye, which is full of a sweet and serious meaning. But while the Madonnas of Raphael here, are all very, very beautiful, the beauty is more that of form and colour, than of expression. They have not so much soul in them as some of the old Grecian statues. indeed, as is said, Raphael drew the idea of the Madonna's countenance partly from that of the Fornarina, it might be doubted, on every account, whether the result was likely to be very successful. In short, it is not Raphael's genius that I so much call in question here, as the very ideas which have thus far prevailed among men of genius, as well as the world at large, of what heavenly sanctity is. October 23.-I have been to-day to see a collection of paintings in the palace of the Corvini family. There is an Achilles, Hector, and Priam, and other figures; the foot of Achilles on the dead body of Hector, in which the dead body is the best part; for the rest, the colours too glaring, and in the countenances too much distortion, and too little passion. There are many beautiful Carlo Dolci's, and striking Salvator Rosa's-especially of the former, the celebrated representation of poetry-beautiful enough, but with little enough of inspiration, as it strikes me, in the countenance. It is curious to see how much mannerism all these distinguished painters have. Carlo Dolci paints almost in chiaro oscuro- - nothing but light shadow; almost no colouring; and yet out of the dark ground -too dark-of the head and neck, he does cause to come forth most beautiful and natural faces. Salvator Rosa's pictures of nature are dark, and savage, and horror-striking, as we might imagine it to have appeared to Cain, after the murder of Abel. The same character appears in his historical paintings. The sea, indeed, when he paints it, compels him to throw a brighter splendour, and a warmer glow over the canvass. Then again, how distinctly to be marked is the simplicity, the keeping, the quiet, unpretending naturalness, the exquisite softness, of Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. But Rubens, powerful as he is often, never paints without something of " the raw head and bloody bones" style; as if parts of his faces had been flayed, before he painted them. But I have gone far enough now, for a novice. A great collection of paintings is like a great library. There is much trash in both; many things ordinary, and some things glorious; and some parts of a considerable number-some passage of the book, some figure of the painting, or even sometimes only a single hand in a picture-that is finely done. Neither the great painter nor the great author always does things worthy of himself. Both are artists; and is not the latter an artist with greater advantages? The painter can do little more than exhibit one thought, in one single light; and it must be a thought, too, with which the world is already familiar. But the writer may unfold, explain, modify, enlarge, originate-give to the world new systems of philosophy, present religion and morals in new lights, unfold new regions of the beau ideal and the beautiful, and mi That of the palace of Pitti, however, is, to an extraordinary extent, an exception from this remark. |