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THAAEE HUMDRED AND FORTY-F/VE ENGRAVINGS OW WOOD
DESIGNED BY THE MOST CELEBRATED ARTISTS
ANI)
A PLAN OF ROME
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY W. W. STORY
NEW YORK
D. A PPLE T ON & Co., B R O A.D W A Y
1872 -
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INTRODUCTION.
GENTLEMEN,
YoU wish me to write an introduction to the interesting work of Mr. Wey on
Rome—a translation of which you are about to publish. I do not in the least think
that Mr. Wey needs a word from me to recommend him to public notice, as his book
is already well known in its original form and language, and has commended itself to
all who have seen and read it. Yet as I have been a resident of Rome for many years,
and may be supposed to be familiar with some of the myriad features of that wonderful
and delightful city; to have studied the classic remains of its ancient days, and not
to have shut my eyes to its living present, my opinion may be of weight with some
persons, and I very willingly give it. - *
Mr. Wey's book seems to me worthy of commendation not only for its letterpress,
which is full of varied interest, and written in a lively and sympathetic spirit, but also
for its illustrations, which form perhaps its most characteristic feature, and are so
exceedingly attractive and spirited, that they alone would make every one who loves
Rome desire to possess it. Though they only profess to illustrate, and as it were to
frame the text, one might say of them, after the manner of auctioneers when they sell
a picture at a low price, that the frame is worth twice the price.
A book on Rome requires pictorial illustrations to bring again vividly before the eye
the objects which it describes, and to give to them that colour and life which no mere
verbal description can ever convey; when both are happily united, as in this case, the
text interprets the picture, and the picture gives point to the text.
A large number of the illustrations are taken from photographs, with adjustments
and modifications of light and dark, distance and effect, So as to produce a pictorial
effect—and this is done with skill and judgment. Many are also taken from original
drawings, which, if wanting in the literal accuracy of photographs, are in other
respects truer than any photograph could be to the character and feeling of the
places they represent. One does not alone see with the eye, but with the mind and
the soul, and nothing truly artistic can ever be produced mechanically. It is the
transfusion of nature through the spirit of the artist, which alone can give us a work
of art. A mere photograph is very rarely and exceptionally a picture, but it is a
(2
vi AVTRODUCTION.
--~~. *...—
most valuable basis for one, provided it be not followed too slavishly. The dead soulless
eye of the camera obscura gives us only the corpse of what, when we look at it, is full of
life and feeling. It repeats statistically, not artistically, the dead facts, with all their
accidents of mould, and stain, and breakage, insisting upon them with always too strong
an emphasis; it takes no heed of the difference between colour as colour and as light
and dark, thus falsifying the true impression on the eye; giving, for instance, yellow as
dark, while it really is positive, and produces the effect of light, and restating blue,
which is negative, as positive light; and it also takes no heed of planes of distance,
representing all parts as upon one plane. Doubtless, despite these very essential
defects, it is of great value and interest. Yet however interesting and valuable are the
photographs of Rome, they invariably lose all or nearly all that makes Rome the
delight it is—the tender gradations of distance—the soft luminous sky—the delicate
light and colour—and the refined and lovely atmosphere which enfolds everything with
a veil of sentiment and romance. That which the heart of man feels as he wanders
over the ruins of Rome or muses on the slopes of the Campagna, and which he remembers
afterwards as one remembers a perfume or a tone,
“The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet's dream,”
which haunts him perpetually, and rises like a phantom at the very name of Rome, all
this escapes the cold hard lens of the camera. It has nothing to do with sentiment,
but simply to repeat facts—the husks and shells of things. Tant pis for the sentiment
if it cannot get itself recorded—being intangible and invisible.
Yet the truth of the Photograph is always insisted on—at least it does not lie, we
are told. Yet, despite of all its pretensions, it does lie. Its planes are false; its colours
falsely reported; its chiaroscuro wrong. Besides, there are two kinds of Truth; one,
truth to the imagination, which may be given in the slightest sketch, and by sug-
gestion create or revive in the mind the spirit of a form or place; one, truth to the
literal facts from which the soul that animated them may have fled, and which may
want the magnetic touch that was the life of the thing itself. Of course, if one could
have them both, it would be best; but if one must choose between them, is not the
spirit better than the letter?
But to return to the illustrations of Mr. Wey's book. They are carefully drawn
by clever artists. The scenes and the points of view are well selected, and in many
of them the sentiment is happily caught. There is, of course, considerable inequality
of merit among them; but the best are admirable, and the least good are perhaps
among those which are deeply indebted to photography, while many of them do, as far
as is possible without colour, give an idea of Rome, and record not only the facts but
the sentiment of the places and scenes they represent. In point of number of designs,
AWZTRODUCTION. - vii.
excellence of execution, and general character, no illustrated book on Rome can
compare with this. The range of pictures is very great—from the games of the
people, the life of the streets, the priestly processions, the costumes and ceremonies
of the church, the fountains, churches, palaces, and villas of to-day, to the paintings
of the early Italian masters, the catacombs of the primitive Christians, the statues of
ancient Rome, and the ruins of the city and the Campagna.
As a matter of course the text is even wider in its range, and it is a pleasant
feature in Mr. Wey's book that it is a sort of pot-pourri, like Rome itself, in which
the new and the old, the romantic and the commonplace, the imposing and the
ludicrous, elbow each other at every turn. The life of the people has for him a
charm as special as the Ruins—the characteristic anecdote of to-day as the record
of history. The contadino and the model are as much facts as the Apollo and the
Laocoön,-the booth where the ſrittate of S. Giuseppe are sold, as the temple of Nerva
before which it is planted,—the open-air barber in the Piazza Montanara as Caesar
and Vercingetorix,−the green aisles of the villas with their shadowy walks, pulsing
fountains, and lofty pines, where the young priest tucks up his long skirts and plays
like a boy at ball, as the imposing and massive arches of the gigantic Thermae of
Caracalla. A living doctor is to him as good as a dead dog, according to the Roman
proverb, and he is excellent company in his wanderings and reminiscences. If you
do not believe the villa or the ruin is charming as he says, look at the sketch he has
placed beside his description, and you will see that he is justified in his enthusiasm.
As he carries you along without a settled plan from place to place he sketches the
chief points of its history neatly, and does not bore you with his archaeology; nor,
to use his own words, does he indulge in “ronflantes prosopopées, indice d'une
impression débile et d'une émotion absente.” On the other hand, his book is far
from trivial. He has studied as well as seen, and the results of his reading are
pleasantly given and without pretence or pedantry.
Finally—every one, I should think, would be glad to have a copy of this book,
who loves Rome and can afford it; and then—the frame is worth twice the price.
But I must not say more lest I arouse the envy of the author of Roba di Roma,
who has secretly confessed to me that he has been sorely tempted to purloin
Mr. Wey's illustrations for his own book.
Yours faithfully,
W. W. STORY.
To ſhe Puč/ishers
of Wey's Æome.
PRE FA C E.
points of view, and often with success: I ought to explain why I again
take up this glorious subject; the plan I laid down for myself; why I
thought that there was still room for an attempt to produce, by thorough
industry, a new and original work. -
Rome is a world; whatever has possessed greatness in the west,-art, religion,
history, has left its traces in this city. Pagan antiquity, the origins of Christianity and
of Byzantine civilization, the struggles and the transformation of the early middle
age, the ecclesiastical supremacy of the thirteenth century, the Renaissance of the
fifteenth and sixteenth—all these epochs had Rome for centre; they covered it with their
works, and they live again in it in a crowd of monuments. How many considerable
States present us, in comparison with the reminiscences accumulated here, with nothing
but fragments without significance In such a collection each author has made his
choice; it struck me that one ought, for once at least, to decide to see all and to
study all. -
Still, even in a special frame, completeness is rare. As day by day and slowly
you pursue the pilgrimage of the wonders of Rome, at each step, in the reminiscences
of the inhabitants, in the knowledge of the learned men of the country, in forgotten
books, and most of all in personal discoveries, you come upon a series of facts which
have not been collected before, and you gradually rectify a multitude of erroneous
traditions as to the monuments and works of art. In the midst of the masterpieces
that fill the churches and palaces, how many undetected gems Among the famous
ruins, all through the ancient dwellings of the populous quarters and deserted suburbs,
how many remarkable footprints that have hitherto been little remarked | Even in
the sanctuaries whose very names call to them the attention of all, how many ex-
plorations have been left only partially accomplished Every one has spoken of the
Vatican, but its multitudinous collections and the splendid halls raised to contain them,
have never been the object of a thoroughly complete description. To judge from
the works I have consulted, half Rome still awaits its historian : I may hope, then,
that long and laborious research will render some service. -
If the share of personal research ought to be great, what account ought we not
to make of the steps forward taken by erudition 1 Although surrounded with difficulties
and dry details, which too often are the only points that strike the public, this science
only aspires to awake the soul of the past; a new touch, a livelier tint, brought to
life again on the likeness of the vanished ages, such is the last word of the most
special monography. I took singular pleasure in this part of my task. There will
be found in these pages the results of the most recent works on Roman antiquities,

X - PREFACE.
on primitive Christianity, on that strange life of the Renaissance, on the lives of painters
and their works; there will be found here not only the restoration, from the last
excavations and from epigraphy, of certain regions, of many edifices of the city of
consuls, Caesars, pontiffs, but also the revelation of curiosities, of monuments hardly
exhumed yesterday, such as the barrack of the Vigiles of the seventh cohort, the
covered portions of underground Rome, the frescoes of the crypt of St. Clement,
the imperial edifices of the Palatine, the admirable paintings of the house of Livia.
The external aspect of things occupies a considerable place in the emotions which
make up a stay at Rome: all travellers have felt this; but it seems to me that our
time has new qualities for feeling and describing. The taste for precision, the eye
for the beautiful and the interesting, while remaining faithful to reality, are carried
very far in our time. Here still, to confine oneself to general impressions is to be
incomplete; we have to do for the sites of Rome and the Campagna, so different
from all others, what works of art call for; we have to be patient, curious, intimately
penetrated with all their poetry, How many pictures then offer themselves to our
eyes | The artist finds richer and more varied galleries than those of museums and
palaces, and they are no less vivid. The study of monuments and landscapes, that of
men and manners, of past and present, mingle incessantly in this book, as they are
confused also in the eyes of whoever lives in Rome: you refresh yourself with one after
leaving the other; and then the reader is accustomed to the indefinable charm of the life
of Rome, and to those delights which you never forget after having once felt them.
It had to be one of the cares of my work to seek the drawings which should furnish
the best commentary on my descriptions. I am indebted to my publishers for leaving
me full liberty, for not shrinking from either the number or the expensive perfection
of the engravings; they animate and brighten many pages in which the tongue
cannot say all : I could thus reproduce sites and a number of monuments not hitherto
published. Eminent artists have given us their assistance, and some of their useful
advice: MM. Louis Français, Thérond, Catenacci, H. Clerget, C. Nanteuil, Anastasi,
Jules Lefebvre, E. Bayard, A. de Neuville, Hector Leroux, Paquier, Viollet-le-Duc,
Paul Baudry, have long shown with what tact they can understand and interpret works
of art and the Italian nature.
Can I forget in this band him whom a heroic death has just snatched from us !
The only studies that Henri Regnault designed on wood are devoted to the illustra-
tion of this volume. This career, already marked out for glory, was fatally broken ;
he was only eight-and-twenty years old. Will people find in his rare pictures, as
well as in the twenty-seven crayons collected here, the last relics of an artist
so highly gifted, the variety of his imagination, his marvellous suppleness in dealing
with all kinds of work, his skill in composing scenes and grouping figures 2
What shall I say of the general idea of my book? You have no concern with
Rome, unless you recognise two sentiments in yourself—the love of the beautiful
and respect for what is great. *
Rome is the museum of all the ages. Above erudition, above scrupulous
accuracy and the best conducted researches, what ought to rule here is the love of
what Rome has loved; she has preserved her greatness in the world by the
passion she declared for all the expressions of the beautiful. Many are the sects
to-day in this religion of art, some simply didactic, others philosophical, historical,
AREFACE. xi
or even moral. The reader will see, after experience of them all, that we have
not given ourselves slavishly to any of them, having recognised that the genius of
the city and its artists was not dissipated in these chimaeras, but that it followed
surer instincts which carried it on in the simple search after ideal beauty. When
you come to Rome after an attentive study of the whole of Italy—and I had the
good fortune to prelude by this necessary initiation,-you perceive that in this city
the various schools of a country more fruitful in models than any other all sum
themselves up, and that particular theories have here necessarily become general. I
would fain have known how to explain all that has been exceptional and fertilising
in their destiny; if I had only succeeded in part, this book would still contribute to
the progress of the history of art. -
As for reverence for all that is great, notwithstanding the criticisms that we
might make and which escaped nobody, pontifical Rome, which I explored on the
eve of an approaching revolution, would have commanded this in the most sceptical
person. All of us, historians, artists, worshippers of tradition, we had a difficulty in
thinking of this city, fallen from its universal character, reduced to the condition
of vulgar capitals, become a constitutional, military, administrative centre; Rome
seemed too deeply poetical for such a part. It was the reverses of France that
brought about this occupation. We have not to seek what time will do with this
conquest, but we could never find a way of regretting any of our illusions.
The Rome that I have depicted is the ancient metropolis, the religious metropolis,
the native land of the arts, the sanctuary of incomparable memories, the home of a
people who even to this hour are like no other. That city may look with indif-
ferent eye upon our revolutions, upon our politics of a day: its glory, which has
already defied so many ruins, will see new ones, but it has not to dread the fainting
memory of men; so long as our society stands, Rome will remain a holy city, or
rather, as the admiration of the old world used to say with majestic simplicity, it
will remain the Urbs,-the City of cities.
CONTENTS.
------------Q- --------
CHAPTER I.
School Prejudices and First Impressions.—Il Tritone and the Piazza Barberini.-ZYattorie: the food of the
people.—The odour of Rome.—Fountain of Trevi.-The Acqua Vergine and its legend.—Montaigne
and the Albergo dell' Orso.-First aspect of the Vatican Basilica.-The Streets.-Pantheon of
Agrippa, and Temple of Antoninus.-Shops.-Vision of the Ancient World.—On the Tiber : Tarquin's
Cloaca Maxima.-In the Trastevere: Shop of the Fornarina.-The last road ascended by St. Peter.
—Snuff-mania of the Romans; the handkerchief and snuff-box of the Sovereign-Pontiff—Church
of S. Pietro in Montorio.—La Flagellation by Sebastian del Piombo, &c.—Rome, from the Janiculum,
in the sunset
CHAPTER II.
Novitiate : Installation.—Description of the Forum Romanum.—St. Paul fuori le mura.—What a Basilica
The
is.-Origin and purpose of Ancient Basilicas.—Appropriation of the Christian Basilicas.—Hierarchy
of the Roman Churches.—Arch of Placidia.—Ciborium of Arnolfo, etc.—Cloister of St. Paul.—
Legends of the Road: the Ladder of St. Bernard.—The Three Fountains.—Pyramid of Cestius.-
Bridge of Horatius Cocles.—Origin of Monte Testaccio.—Walk to the Coliseum.—Ascent of the
Flavian Amphitheatre
CHAPTER III.
regulation of public conveyances, of justice, of the Post-Office.—Open-air life.—Young Monks at the
Lyceum, Dominicans at nurse, Prelates in the sun.—Peasants in the great city.—The Aurora at the
Rospigliosi Palace.—The Barberini Palace and Gallery; the Fornarina; Poussin and the Death of
Germanicus; Portraits of the Cenci, etc.—Gems of the Sciarra; the Violinist of Raphael.—The Doria
Palace, apocryphal works and masterpieces: the Mill of Claude, André Doria and Pope Innocent X.,
etc.—At the back of San Crispino.—Search for the Cenci-Bolognetti Palace.—Ripetta and its ferry.—
Transformation of the Mausoleum of Augustus and of that of Adrian.—Dramas of the Castle of
St. Angelo.—Origin of the present name.—Theodora and Marozia.—Trial and execution of Beatrice
de' Cenci . . * © tº g e e ſe & © • -
PAGE
I 9
43
CHAPTER IV.
Di la, Di quâ. . . . . . —Sant’Andrea delle Fratte in holiday dress.-Lemoyne and his victims.-Château-
briand and Poussin at San Lorenzo in Lucina.-Last interview with the Marchese C***; funeral pro-
cessions and costumes.—Hygiene of grief—Discovery of an unknown fresco: Polydore of Caravaggio.
—The house where St. Clara died.—Usages of small traders; perpetuity of the Roman race.—Church
of St. Mark and Palace of Venice.—Legend of the Two Adams.-St. Susannah and the Brothers
Duquesnoy.—St. Frances, a Roman lady.—The Temple of Antoninus and Faustina.-Basilica of Con-
stantine and Legend of the Arches of Peace.—Road from the Forum Palladium by the Colonnacce of
Nerva.-Venus and Rome.—Origin of triumphal arches: Septimius Severus.-The Arch of Titus:
Jewish anecdote.—Arch of Constantine ; its first purpose, etc.—Nocturnal roaming in some cut-throat
places.—Manners and customs of brigandage.—History of robbers.-The terrible adventure of M.
Schnetz
ô
65
xiv
COWTENTS.
CHAPTER V.
Theatres, Faust.—Meeting with Francis II.-The Metastasio company at the Colonna Palace : the ‘Loves
of AEneas.’—The Dioscuri of the cardinalate.—Annos Petri.—Why the Popes changed name.—Baths of
Caracalla.—The Salarian bridge and its memories.—Walk at Fidenae.—Assault of the town by
Mamilius the Dictator.—Point of view at Castel Giubileo.—Foundations of the town.—Last catas-
trophe under Tiberius.
BASILICA OF ST. CLEMENT.-Antiquity of the church.-Exhumation of the former temple.—Approach and
entry of St. Clement.—Interior; primitive arrangement of the Presbyterium.—Alexandrine pavement
and mosaics of Turrita.-Masaccio and the chapel of St. Catherine.—Origin of the communities.—
Visit to the subterranean paintings.—Revelation of an unknown school; interpretation of symbols.-
The Serpent of St. Libertinus.-Texts in Italian of the year 9oo.—Art sustained in the ninth century
by the citizens of Rome.—Romance of St. Alexis the pilgrim, etc. .
CHAPTER VI.
From the Borgo to the Janiculum by the Ramparts.-A robber story.—The Pauline Fountain.—Stephen
The
Maderno and his St. Cecilia.-Curiosities of the Church.-Origin and Decoration of Santa Maria in
Trastevere.—St. Chrysogonus ; High Mass in deserto.—The Corps of Firemen in the time of Augustus;
recent discovery of a district barrack.--From the banks of the Tiber to the Monastery of Sant'
Onofrio; monument, mortuary chamber, and portrait of Tasso; what he saw from his window.—
Gardens.—Industrial hive of the Theatre of Marcellus.-The buried temples of San Nicolo in Carcere.
—Remains of the Porticoes of Octavia and Quarter of the Fishwives; Alleys, Crossways.-Some
Profiles of the Ghetto; look of the place.—The quasi-tragical Adventure of a Parisian.—The Tanners'
Quarter.—Return to the bank of the Tiber; Points of view.—The Cloaca Maxima, and what Dionysius
of Halicarnassus thought of it.—Fortuna Virilis and Temple of the Sun.—Santa Maria in Cosmedin.—
Excursion round the house attributed to Cola di Rienzi
CHAPTER VII.
Piazza Navona and its market.—St. Agnes and the Fornici of the Agonal Circus.--From the Porta Pia
to St. Agnes extra Muros.-Souvenirs of the praetorian camp.–Source and consecration of the pallium.
—The baptistery of Constantia.—THE CATACOMBS.–Descent to those of St. Agnes; origin and
primitive purposes.—Visit to the Catacombs of Callistus; how they were discovered, and their con-
dition under the Antonines.—Episodes, inscriptions, pictures, symbols of the first ages.—Assassination
of Stephen I.-The martyr Popes, and the administration of the subterranean church.-On the Mons
Sacer.—The path by which Nero fled, etc. .
P.AGE
86
. I I 4
. I4O
CHAPTER VIII.
Morning walk on the Coelian.—Street of St. John and St. Paul, its flying arches and the Arch of Dola-
bella.-Gate of the Trinitarians; John of Matha and the Mathurins.—Santa Maria in Domnica.—
The game of mora.--Funzione of S. Stefano Rotondo; melodrama of martyrs.--From the foot of
the Capitol to the Tarpeian Rock.-The Academy of St. Luke and its Museum.—The celebrities:
Wicar, Thorwaldsen, Mme. Vigée-Lebrun, etc.—Descent into the Tullianum.—Extracts from the
registers of the Mamertine prison, from Manlius to St. Peter: Perseus, Jugurtha, Lentulus, Vercinge-
torix, Sejanus, etc.—Tombs of Bibulus and the Claudians.—Capitoline approach under the Loggia of
the Tabularium.—The Senatorial Palace: corridors and offices; view from the windows.-The pre-
tended palaces of Michelangelo.—His realistic bust.—Brutus and Leo X.-Pinacotheca.-Destiny of
the sarcophagus of Agrippa.—Statues, bas-reliefs, curiosities.—Historical portraits of the Capitoline
Museum.—The Gabinetto.—An infirmary on the pavement.—Public benevolence and charitable esta-
blishments.-School of Fine Arts and Conservatory of Music at the hospital of St. Michael.—
Innocent III. and San Spirito.—Curious inscription at the Lungara tº © gº
CHAPTER IX.
Tarpeian Rock.-Jupiter and Santa Maria in Ara Coeli.-The Bambino.—Appearance and costumes at
Christmas ; the Pifferari, etc.—Church of the Capitol.—Antiquity of family chapels.-St. Bernardin of
Sienna and the frescoes of Pinturicchio.—Legends of the island of the Tiber.—AEsculapius and
St. Bartholomew.—Roman medicine in the time of Cato.—Apostolic miniature.—Crèche on the summit
. I61
COWTEAWTS. XV
PAGE
of a tower.—Raphael and the fable of Psyche at the Farnesina.-Galatea and her cortége.—The
Corsini gallery.—Ercole Grandi and his namesake.—Ortolano; his adventure and his portrait.—
Public library of the palace.—Mission of the Roman princes; results of nepotism.—Visit to the Villa
Pamphili Doria.—Assault of our troops at the gate of San Pancrazio . & e e tº e . I 9o
CHAPTER X.
Santa Maria sopra Minerva; epitaph of Fra Angelico by Nicholas V-Statue of Leo X. ; his portrait
by a prisoner of Chillon.—Francis I. and Charles V. at the feet of the Pope.—Pre-Raphaelite rarities:
Cosimato, Filippino Lippi and Sermonetta, Benozzo of Forli, Verrocchio, Mino da Fiesole, etc.—The
architecture of the Jesuits and the sepulchral shrine of St. Ignatius at the church Del Gesù.-
Souvenir of the time of Sulla.-Chapel of the novitiate.—Stephen Monnot (Bisontinus).—How
Bernini conceived St. Theresa in ecstasy.—Visits to Domenico Zampieri on a rainy day,+to St.
Sylvester of the Quirinal,—to St. Andrew della Valle,_to St. Charles in Catinari.--Tomb of the
Father Ventura.-Origin of the word Theatin.—The first printing press at Rome.—Daniel of Volterra
and Horace Vernet, apropos of Holophernes.—How the Massimi descend from Fabius Maximus.-
Rubens at Santa Maria in Vallicella.-Origin of oratorio.—The managing Father of the Philippines.
—Halt at St. John of the Florentines.—Instruction in the Roman College.—Collections of Father
Kircher and of Cardinal Zelada :—caricature of an Assyrian soldier in campaign ;-Greek and
Etruscan curiosities, etc.—Primitive coins and their symbols.—What became of the sword of the
Constable of Bourbon.—Porta Maggiore.—First public bake-houses; the manufacture of bread under
Tiberius.-Minerva Medica.-The nympheum of Severus; Amphitheatrum Castrense.—Rustic point of
view on the Sette Sale.—Botanical lesson by a gardener—The baths of Titus.-Nero's house.—First
painters of Rome (Etruscan period); First decline (Greek school).—St. Martin ai Monti.-The ancient
basilica of Constantine at the Vatican e e e tº . º o e o ſº ſe © . 2 I 4
CHAPTER XI.
THE BASILICA OF ST. PETER ON THE VATICAN . e e & & e º tº g g e . 24O
CHAPTER XII.
Meaning of the Cannuccia of the Penitentiaries.—Christmas mass at the Vatican basilica.-The pope's
entry on the Sella Gestatoria.-Portrait of Pius IX.-Anecdotes.—The pontifical funzione of the
2nd of February.—Benediction of the tapers and procession of the candles.—Official reception at the
Spanish embassy.—Ball toilettes.—Portrait of Cardinal Antonelli-Roman society—What is thought
of economists at Rome . © g e © * e e º e e * e § . 262
CHAPTER XIII.
On the Piazza of San Pietro in Vincoli.-The Moses of Michelangelo.—The brothers Pollajuolo, etc.
—St. Sixtus and the frescoes of Father Besson; legend of a forgotten painter.—Journey on the Appian
Way:-Porta Capena, sacred grove of Egeria;-St. Sergius;–Arch of Drusus.-Jewish catacombs,
anterior to Christ.—Historical landscapes.—Tumuli of the Horatii and Curiatii.-Caecilia Metella and
feudal brigandage.—Romulus Maxentius; the ancient circuses.—The camp of the Volsci and Corio-
lanus.-Loss of the spoils of Syracuse; works of art drowned in the Tiber.—The Latin Way and its
sepulchral chambers . e e © e tº o & e e e e . e . . 274
CHAPTER XIV.
From the Porta del Popolo to the Villa Madama.—Casino of Julius III.-The Milvian bridge.—Origin,
appearance, and paintings of the Villa Madama.-Return by the Borgo and Porta Angelica.--Halt at
Sant' Agostino :—The Madonna of Sansovino ;-Paintings of Guercino and his school;-Copy of a
lost Raphael.—Raphael at Sta. Maria della Pace : the Sibyls.—Fresco of Peruzzi.-Foreign colonies:
the church of the Germans.—Origin of the title of Sta. Maria dell' Anima.—Flemish and Dutch
monuments.—Madonna of Giulio Romano.—Anecdote of Adrian VI. ; his tomb by Peruzzi.-
Democratic souvenir of the Palazzo Riario ;-San Lorenzo in Damaso. —Assassination of Count
Rossi.-The Farnese palace.—Exhumation of the curia where Caesar was slain;–Origin of the
Mastai Hercules indicated by Cicero.—Statue of Pompey and gallery of the Spada palace.—The
Tartarughe and the ex-palace Mattei.-What the Quadrifrons arch was.-Oxen in the Forum.—Bodin
and Diderot on the independence of Papinian.—The Aventine.—Discovery of the wall of Ancus.--
Temples and convents: Ceres and Juno ; St. Sabina and St. Alexis. . tº { } tº e tº • 293
ô 2
xvi CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XV.
TAGE
The Palatine and its Legends.—Exhumation of the walls of Romulus.—Present aspect of the Farnese
gardens.—Annexation of the Palatine to the private domain of the French crown.—Discoveries of the
Cav. Pietro Rosa,—Houses of the kings, of the patricians, of the Caesars.-Examination of a
street under the palace of Augustus.-Cicero and the house of Clodius.-Houses of Scaurus, Catullus,
Crassus.—Buildings of Tiberius, Domitian, etc.—Discovery of the Casa of Livia; its decoration and
paintings.—Sight of a street in the time of Agrippa.—Bust ad vivum and caricature of Nero.—Divinity
of Caligula; restoration of his palaces.—Tacitus commented upon by the excavations; arrival of
Otho ; last moments of Vitellius.-Popularity of Nero.—Last guests of the Palatine.—Exploration of
the public palace and earlier substructions.—Rape of the Sabines.—Organization, games, and sights of
the Circus Maximus.—Proclamation of a victory at the Roman Circus.-Perseus and his children;
triumphal procession of Paulus AEmilius . e e ſº o e e e o o © . 32O
CHAPTER XVI.
Excursion to the Alban Hills.—Aspect of Albano.—Road to Castel-Gandolfo (Galleria).-A village Iliad.—
The lake of Alba and its geology.—Map of Latium by the Cavaliere Rosa,—Goethe on the site of
Rome.—Works of Pius IX. at Genzano and Ariccia.-President Sauzet and the woods of Albano.—
Sixtus V. and the brigands.-Rocca di Papa.-The emissarium of Camillus.—Legend of Domenichino
and the Communion of St. Jerome.—Domitian at the chase.—Site of Alba Longa.-Halt at the
Ferentine spring.—Marino and the Colonna.-Legend of the Madonna of St. Barnabas.-Frescoes of
Zampieri at the convent of Grotta Ferrata.-Ascent of the Via Tusculana.-Origin and remains of
Tusculum.—Descent into Frascati.-Visit to the Aldobrandini Borghese villa.-Physiognomy of the
town, and view from the terrace - e & © e © e gº ſe te © e © . 345
CHAPTER XVII.
Forum and column of Trajan.—St. Sylvester's report of an imperial session at the Ulpian basilica.--St. John
Lateran; origin and legends.-Illustrations of the Golden basilica; Fabiola, etc.—Reconstruction of
the edifice; embellishments and decay.—Baptistery and cloister.—St. Helena and Sta. Croce in
Gerusalemme.—Aspects of the quarter and piazza of St. John Lateran.-Point of view: evening
effects.-Visit to the Lateran collection : Portrait of Trajan, the Medea, the Antinois, etc.—Boxers
and gladiators.-New museum of Christian antiquities.—Explanation of a sarcophagus.-Pagan symbols
with double meaning.—A few words on the obelisks.-Complement of a known anecdote . e . 362
CHAPTER XVIII.
The Colonna palace, its galleries, gardens, ruins.—Via della Pilotta.—Church of the Santi Apostoli:
Canova and Volpato, Julius II., Cardinal Bessarion, etc.—Fountain and piazza of Monte Cavallo.—
Appearance, character, and reminiscences of the Quirinal palace.—Santa Maria degli Angeli and
the Thermae of Diocletian.—Michelangelo and the cloisters of the Carthusians.—The St. Bruno of
Houdon.—The Piazza di Spagna and the Immacolata.-The Barcaccia and the great steps of the
Pincian.—Inundation of the Tiber.—The Trinita dei Monti.-Daniel of Volterra and Poussin.—The
Via Sistina and Via Gregoriana.--Studio montanari : the Pascuccia.-Gardens of Messalina.-Galileo
with the Medici.-The Convent of the Holy Heart . e e g e e e e e • 379
CHAPTER XIX.
Visit to the Calcografia camerale, and the jeweller Castellani.-History of a band of brigands.-Protec-
torate of the institution.—Multiplicity of places of refuge.—The Villa Medici and its refugees.—Origin
of the Academy of France, and its objects.-Comical reception ceremonial,—History and appearance
of the villa.-Rome as the metropolis of art and literature.—Would our Academy be better placed
elsewhere?—Services of the institution and some desirable expansions of it.—Origin and mission of the
Istituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica . e e e e C e . . & * . 392
CHAPTER XX.
Punishment and prophecy of St. Sixtus.—Tomb of the deacon Laurence.—Origin of the basilica of San
Lorenzo fuori le Mura.-Electoral battle in the sanctuary in 366.-Description of the church and the
cloisters.-Santa Pudenziana and the guests of St. Peter.—Two words on the legend.—Mosaic of the
cowTENTS. xvii
Pudentii in the fourth century: opinion of Poussin.-Tullia and the Via Scelerata.-Mosaic of
SS. Cosma e Damiano.—Souvenir at S. Prassede.—Popular funzione at Sta. Maria Maggiore.—Decora-
tion and curiosities of this basilica.—Symbolism of its mosaics.-Iconographic legend of Our Lady
of the Snows
CHAPTER XXI.
The Roman Carnival.—Unforeseen consequence of a pastoral mandate.—Sights in the Corso. — Colezione
at the Simonetti palace.—Queen of Naples and Francis II.-The Academy of France and its car.
—Official ceremonial for the organization of festivals.-The Moccoli.-Burlesque scenes.—Origin and
description of the great masquerade of the Germans.—The gardens of Sallust.—Historical illustra-
tions of the Ponte Salario and the Colline gate.—The Villa Albani.—Homage to Winckelmann.—
Return by the Villa Ludovisi.—Paul Delaroche before the Aurora of Guercino.—The Juno of Argos,
etc.—Effect of the malaria .
CHAPTER XXII.
PAGE
• 404
• 423
Passion of the ancients for collections—Borghese palace and galleries—The school of Ferrara, Garofalo,
Francia, etc.—The Danaë of Correggio.—Incongruity of Caravaggio.—Decorative peculiarities.—The
Nuptials of Alexander and Roxana.-Bellini, Titian, Bonifazio, etc.—Maria de' Medici and Maxi-
milian of Holbein.--Piazza and church of Sta. Maria del Popolo—Legend as to Nero's tomb.-
Pinturicchio, Lorenzetto, Rossellini; Florentine work at the church del Popolo.—Raphael as sculptor.
—Bas-relief of the Pisans, etc.—Borghese villa and gardens.—Early work of Bernini—Canova and the
Borghese Venus.—Van Blömen at Rome.—Belisarius and Justinian.—Scene of Messalina's death .
CHAPTER XXIII.
Excursion to Tivoli:-Temples and Waterfalls.-Old houses of Tibur—The Villa d'Este and its gardens.
—AElius Adrianus and his Album of Travel.—Borders of the Villa Adriana.-Thickets and ruins.—
Opening of spring
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE DIVINE city of THE VATICAN.
Origin of this residence.—Entrance by the Court of St. Damasus.—Appearance of the Loggie.—Visit to
Pinturicchio in the apartments of the Borgias.-Portrait of Alexander VI. and other paintings.—THE
LIBRARY.-Enumeration of manuscripts.-Bibliographical curiosities.—Sequestration of documents.-
Appearance of the galleries.—Vittori Cabinet: religious curiosities.—Collection of Benedict XIV.,
Gregory XVI., Pius VII., etc.—The Charters of Ravenna in the Cabinet of the Papyri.—Aldobrandini
Nuptials; antique landscapes. -
The Forty of the Vatican PINACOTHECA; Beato Angelico, Crivelli, Mantegna, etc.—The St. Jerome of
Leonardo.—Resurrection of Perugino and the prisoners of the Louvre.—Curious fresco of Melozzo da
Forli...—Guido, Guercino, Poussin, Caravaggio, Giulio Romano, etc.
EGYPTIAN GALLERIES : Mummy of Amosis.—Sarcophagi, symbolical animals, queens and goddesses.—
Colossi of Arsinoë and Nepthys—Egyptian pasticci of the second century; statues of Antinois, the
Nile, etc.—View of the Hall of the Greek Cross. -
ETRUSCAN MUSEUM : general aspect.—Wases, etc.—Cippi and bas-reliefs.-Various curiosities
CHAPTER XXV.
THE DIVINE CITY OF THE VATICAN (continued).
LAPIDARY COLLECTIONS.
MUSEO CHIARAMONTI :—Julius Caesar as Pontifex Maximus.-Legend of Alcestis on the sarcophagus
of Evhodus;–Bacchus and Ariadne,—Tiberius and Julia.-The real likeness of Cicero.—Imperial
profiles.—Rape of Ganymede.—An oil-press under the Antonines.—Canova and the frescoes of 1815.
LE BRACCHIO NUOvo :—Augustus and the arms of AEneas.--Titus and his daughter.—The two Demosthenes.
—Greek art under Roman influence; Antonius and Lepidus.-The Nile and its symbols.-Domitian,
Philip I., Claudius.-The Triumphs of Titus.--Mosaics, etc. g
THE PIo-CLEMENTINE GALLERIEs:—Tomb of Scipio; inscription of the fifth century of Rome.—The
Torso of the Belvedere and Michelangelo.—Court and porticoes of the Belvedere.—The Perseus;
reminiscence of Cellini, Mercury and N. Poussin.—The Apollo.—Prejudices as to the Laocoön.-
Egyptian figures; Sacrifice to Mithra.-Ossuary of Q. Vitellius.-Sarcophagus of the Nereids, etc.
• 437
. 450
• 457
xviii CONTENTS.
THE MÉNAGERIE OF ANTIQUES:—Origin and character of the collection.
GALLERY of STATUES.—The Cupid of Praxiteles.—Paris, Penelope, Apollo Sauroktonos.-Likenesses of
Posidippus and Menander.—The Faun and the Danaid.—The Ariadne.
THE CABINET OF MASKs:—Etruscan figures with landscape background.
THE HALL OF BUSTs:—Caracalla, the old age of Octavius, Nero Citharaedus.-Other likenesses of the
Caesars.-Romance of an ancient household, etc.
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE DIVINE CITY OF THE VATICAN (continued).
The Vatican gardens.—Excursion to the Gallery of the Maps and to that of the Tapestries.—Arazzi of the
Medici and cartoons of Raphael.—Miscellanies of the Gallery of the Candelabra.—The sarcophagus
of Niobe, Arianna ritrovata da Bacco.—Rotunda della Biga: The Indian Bacchus, The Discobolos
of Myron.—Monuments in the Hall of the Greek Cross:—Imperial Figures,-The great Constantinian
sarcophagi.—The Round Hall, history of its construction.—Halt at the Sacellum of the Muses.—The
Pierides and their worshippers: Demosthenes, Epicurus, Alcibiades, Aspasia and Pericles, etc.—The
Apollo Musagetes.—Return to the pontifical gardens. .
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE DIVINE CITY OF THE VATICAN (continued).
Sanctuaries of the Renaissance.—Hour of the apogee fixed by Julius II.-Pontifical ceremony at the Sixtine
Chapel.—Michelangelo and the Last Judgment.—First steps of the Decadence: Royal and Ducal
Halls.—The Conversion of St. Paul, and the Crucifixion of St. Peter, at the Pauline Chapel.—Return
to the Sixtine.—Last works of the pleiad of the Forerunners; the Twelve Frescoes.—Luca Signorelli,
Andrea d'Assisi, Perugino, Cosimo Rosselli, D. Ghirlandajo, Piero di Cosimo.—The true author of the
Spozalizzio of Raphael.—Sandro Botticelli...— First paintings of Michelangelo on the vault of the Sixtine.
—Singular plan of their conception.—The Sibyls and the Prophets.-The Ignudi and their conse-
quences.—Scenes taken from Genesis; their unlikeness to antique art.—Creation of Adam and Eve,
Fall of Man, Paradise Lost, the Drunkenness of Noah.—Filiation of Jacopo della Quercia
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE DIVINE CITY OF THE VATICAN (conclusion).
SANCTUARIES OF THE RENAISSANCE (continued).-Oratorio of Nicholas V. and Fra Angelico.—Legends of
St. Stephen and St. Laurence.—Likeness of Nicholas V. by John of Fiesole, etc.
THE LOGGIE.—Their decoration, and paintings by Raphael and his pupils.—Arabesques and Stuccoes.—
The Pictures of the Bible in the compartments of the thirteen vaults.-Inferiority of our copies.
THE STANZE.—Historical pilgrimage ; story of political evolutions told by the frescoes.—The Mass of
Bolsena.-The Heliodorus, Attila, Deliverance of St. Peter.—Pontifical illusions; grisailles of Polydore
of Caravaggio.—Palinode: the Incendio del Borgo.—Attila becomes, the good Charlemagne; Justifica-
tion of Leo III.-Coronation of the Carolingian, under the features of Francis I.-Discouragement
of Raphael, and its result.—Skirmish at Ostia : the Defeat of the Saracens.—The Medallions of
Perugino.—St. Sylvester receiving the gift of Rome.—Francis I. becomes Maxentius–Preludes of
decline. . -
CAMERA DELLA SEGNATURA; apogee of Raphael.—Universal character of the work.—Raphael as a theo-
logian.—Symbolism of the Accord before the Holy Sacrament.—Borrowings from Fra Bartolommeo.—
Savonarola rehabilitated.—Collaboration of Dante and Ariosto.—Opinions of Schlegel and Lanzi.-
The School of Athens.—The Jurisprudence.—Gregory IX. publishing the Decretals.—Justinian
restoring the Digest to Tribonian.—Laocoön and the type of Homer.—Correction on the subject of the
Grisailles.—Raphael's qualities as colourist. - -
MICHELANGELO AND RAPHAEL.-Their distinct vocations; characters of these two men of genius.—The
Vatican University. .
------------. -- - ----------------------------- *------- ----. -- *
PAGE
. 48o
. 5o I
• 5 I5
• 53 I
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PLATES.
FOUNTAIN OF TREVI e e e © & © . . . . . . . . . . . e tº e e 6 º' e tº ſº tº e & © tº e ... to face
BRIDGE AND CASTLE OF ST. ANGELO
FIRST VIEW OF THE CAMPO-VACCINO
INTERIOR OF THE FORUM ROMANUM : TEMPLES oF SATURN AND VESPASIAN tº º e
ENTRY OF THE FORUM ROMANUM BY THE VIA SACRA.—TEMPLE OF VENUS ET ROMA.—STA. FRANCESCA
ROMANA, ARCH of TITUS, CAMPANILE OF THE CAPITOL, &c. ... tº € 6 & º º © tº e
ST. PAUL EXTRA MUROS
GENERAL VIEW OF THE COLISEUM
WOMEN OF THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA ... tº º º * † 6 * * * tº ſº e gº tº dº tº ſº º
MoLE OF ADRIAN, BANKs of THE TIBER BETWEEN RIPETTA AND THE BRIDGE of ST. ANGELo
ARCH OF TITUS
ARCH OF CONSTANTINE
THE COLISEUM AND THE ARCH OF CONSTANTINE, SEEN FROM THE ARCH OF TITUS
CALDARIUM of THE BATHs of CARACALLA .
INTERIOR OF ST. CLEMENT's ... e q tº tº a tº © e ºs * & e • e e e tº º tº º º © º º
ALTAR AND MONUMENT of St. CAECILIA tº º º • * * e e e tº o º tº e º e e º tº º c
PORTICO of OCTAVIA (SIDE OF THE PESCHERIA) ... tº º º tº º gº ge º 'º tº e a e º 'º
PESCHERIA WECCHIA ... © º gº e e º © tº o e tº G tº º tº ge e > & Cº º & © tº tº º º
VIEW ON THE TIBER IN FRONT OF THE CLOACA MAXIM.A ... tº º & ... e º e © tº º © º º
PIAZZA NAvonA AND CHURCH of ST. AGNES... tº gº tº te e Q © º e tº tº º 9 @ 9 tº º ſº tº º º
PLAYERS AT Bowls tº º e e tº º e e Q © º º tº o & tº te tº © tº wº tº e > tº G &
INTERIOR OF SANTA MARIA IN DOMNICA tº º º tº º º © C e © C &
PAGE
5
I6
2O
28
FAQADE OF THE SENATORIAL PALACE ON THE CAPITOL ; MUSEUM, PALACE OF THE CONSERVATORS ;
THE DIOSCURI, ETC.... tº tº e to ſº º • e tº tº e º tº G e tº tº º © tº º tº dº ſo tº º º
THE SCALA Coeli, THE GREAT STEPs of SANTA MARIA of THE CAPITOL tº tº g e - ©
ISLAND OF THE TIBER, ST. BARTHOLOMEw, AND THE QUATTRO CAPI BRIDGE ... tº º e e e e
ToMB of CARDINAL FERRICI, AT THE MINERVA tº º º tº º e * @ e g s e { } tº e º 'º tº e ºp
VIEW OF ST. PETER’s AND THE WATICAN © e º tº e e tº º º * * * tº º e gº tº e e tº e e tº ºn
THE PIAZZA OF ST. PETER AT THE GREAT BENEDICTION ... & Cº º g tº e tº Q & e Q & & e
INTERIOR OF ST. PETER's (VIEw TAKEN FROM LEFT TRANSEPT) ... ... tº ºn tº
THE POPE AT THE FEET OF ST. PETER e e gº tº º º * G - ... e is º dº º e e e tº ...
NAVE OF ST. PETER’s ... © º º © e & tº o º tº tº º © º G © º º e - © e º º gº tº º
MAUSOLEUM OF JULIUS II. ; THE MOSES OF MICHELANGELO . . . . . . gº tº º tº C tº e - e.
RUINS OF THE AQUEDUCTS of CLAUDIUS, NEAR THE ROAD TO ALBANO ... tº º º e e & e e e
Fountain AT THE VILLA of Pope JULIUS III. • , , . . . . . . . . . ~ * * * * * * * * *
THE ROMAN FORUM tº C & tº º º tº @ Q © º & & O e & O & © tº º e tº tº tº gº º tº tº e e g tº
AVENTINE MOUNT AND ST. SABINA, SEEN FROM Ponte ROTTO ... g e & e e ſº g º Oe 4 g (2
33
4O
45
57
76
8 I
84
89
IOI
II 7
I 25
I 28
I36
I4O
I6o
I64
I 73
I93
I97
217
237
24. I
245
264
269
276
285
293
3I3
316
XX JAST OF ZZZ US7RATIO/WS.
PLAN OF THE ExCAVATIONS ON THE PALATINE . . . i.e. e. gº e e ge © C & tº gº e © º º ... to face
RESTORATION of THE CLIVUs VICTORIAE tº e g . . . . tº e tº e tº e © e e © e e o “º e
VIEW FROM THE PALATINE, TOWARDS THE COELIAN ... & O is . . . . . . e tº e © e e
ROAD TO CASTEL-GANDOLFO : LA GALLERIA ... . . . tº e e tº e ∈ © & O tº º º • , ; © tº tº tº º º
BANKS OF THE LAKE of NEMI ... tº º º tº e e e tº e to e e e º & © to 0
LAKE of ALBANo AND PONTIFICAL VILLA (EVENING) tº º º e & © © C & c º º e e e tº e e
TRAJAN's COLUMN AND ULPIAN BASILICA ... Q Q & e tº e e e e tº º &
CLoISTER OF ST. JoHN LATERAN e tº e e e & tº e & º e e © e > tº º &
ARRIVAL of The CARDINALs at the QUIRINAL PALACE ... * @ 9 e e c º C º e e º © tº e
LA BARCACCIA AND THE STEPS OF LA TRINITA DEI MONTI e & O tº e e
COLUMN OF THE IMMACOLATA ... tº c is e e Q tº º º © tº gº e e > o “e o tº º º tº gº tº e e ſº
MEETING OF THE VIA SISTINA AND WIA GREGORIANA © tº º tº º ſº tº º º
PONTIFICAL PROCESSION AT THE FEAST OF THE MADONNA ... tº go ºn © C to © º º
VILLA MEDICI (GARDEN FRONT) © tº º e - ſº tº tº 0 tº e > © e is tº e >
View FROM THE PORTICO of THE ACADEMY ... e e ſº tº e º © º º tº º º tº ſº tº © º e
TRANSEPT AND CONFESSIONAL OF SAN LORENzo
PULPIT OF THE GOSPEL, AT SAN LORENzo
VIEW AT THE BACK OF THE CHOIR, SAN LORENzo ... e e is e e e © e e * &
STA. MARIA MAGGIORE (FAQADE OF BENEDICT XIV.).—Convent of SANT' ANTONIo
RACE OF THE BARBERI : THE START ...
GERMAN MASQUERADING: THE MARCH PAST ... tº e e © º º tº e tº tº @ & • e
THE GERMAN FESTIVAL : ENTERING THE GROTTOEs ... tº e a e e 9 & Q ſº
GARDENS OF THE BORGHESE, AFTER THE REVOLUTION • e & e & © tº e
ARCH OF THE ACQUA FELICE, NEAR THE TIBURTINE GATE dº º ſº tº º o
THE CASCATELLE OF TIVOLI
GREAT GALLERY OF THE WATICAN LIBRARY ... e e º tº ſº tº ge º 'º e e e
Awaiting THE ILLUMINATIONS, ON THE STEPs of THE BASILICA
THE CHIARAMONTI GALLERY ... tº $ tº g ºn e tº tº & Cº tº e dº e e e e
ALTAR OF SIXTINE CHAPEL ... e tº e e is ... ... © e de tº gº e e e e
ERYTHRAEAN SIBYL (CEILING OF THE SIXTINE CHAPEL) ...
Portion of THE CEILING of THE SixTINE CHAPEL ... tº º tº
THE LOGGIE (VATICAN) ...
THE GALLERY of MAPs (VATICAN)
GARDENs of THE WATICAN
MUSEO Pio-CLEMENTINo ... tº s tº e tº e tº e e {e º &
THE BRACCHIO NUOVO tº tº e e tº e tº
PORTION OF THE SCHOOLS OF ATHENS (GALLERY DELLA SEGNATURA)
WOOD ENGRAVINGS.
PAGE
Arch of Septimius Severus tº e º tº e º tº º º I The Pantheon of Agrippa
Cross of the Capucins, Piazza Barberini Temple of Antoninus ... tº ſº º
Fountain of the Triton ... Fish Market tº gº e ſº e
Column of Antoninus ... tº º tº e tº º View of St. Peter in Montorio ... e e e
The Colonnades of St. Peter © Gate of St. Paul, or Ostiensis ... de Q & tº e º
‘The valets of the cardinals . . . . very cere- Temple of Vespasian, and Portico of th
monious under antiquated liveries' ... . . . IO Twelve Gods ... tº e e tº º o
:
PAGE
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336
34o
348
349
356
364
368
372
376
38o
384
389
396
4OO
405
408
4I 2
42O
425
429
432
448
452
453
468
476
481
505
509
5 I3
5I 7
52 I
525
532
537
54I
PAGE
I 2
I3
I4
I8
I9
2 I
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
Entablature of the Temple of Concord
Remains of the Temple of Castor
Column of Phocas * @ e © e º o
Pavement of Julian Basilica and Tabularium ...
Pyramid of Cestius
Interior of the Coliseum
The Arena of the Coliseum
A Corridor of the Coliseum tº º º e e g
‘The scholars ... with voluminous shovel hats'
On the Pincian ... tº e e tº e º to º ſº tº e e
The Aurora of Guido Reni, in the Rospiglio
Palace
Vicolo Sterrato ... & © tº e e e © tº e
La Fornarina of the Barberini Palace at Rome
La Fornarina of the Uffizi at Florence...
The Beatrice de' Cenci, by Guido Reni
The Violinist of Raphael (Sciarra Palace)
Behind San Crispino © tº
Temple of Antoninus and Faustina
Gate of the Palace of Venice
Basilica of Constantine ... e © tº º
Interior of the Basilica of Constantine...
Temple of Nerva, Pantani Postern
Forum Transitorium, or Forum of Nerva
Bas-relief of the Arch of Titus ...
Another Bas-relief
Ponte Salario tº º º tº Q tº tº gº º
|Pulpit of the Epistle, at St. Clement's ... o
Street of St. John Lateran—Side Entry of St.
Clement's * @ Q tº º º
External Portico of St. Clement's © º dº
Fragment of a Fresco of the Fourth Century ...
Another Fragment tº tº tº tº e e e e ºs
Legend of St. Libertinus : Fragments of the
Eighth Century C & e tº e tº º o tº e de
Assumption of the Virgin: Fresco of the time
of Leo IV. tº 9 º' , º º º tº o º
Byzantine Madonna: Fresco of the Ninth Cen-
Legend of St. Clement: Episode of Sisinius
(Tenth Century) tº º º & © tº © tº gº
Miracle at the Tomb of St. Clement (Tenth
Century) tº º º tº e C © º º © C & tº gº tº
St. Blasius plucking a Thorn from the Throat
of a Child: Fresco on a Pilaster (Ninth
Century) tº º e © º º tº º ſº tº e >
Daniel spared by the Lions: Pilaster painted in
the Ninth Century e º e © º Q © º º
Legend of St. Alexius: Fresco of the Tenth
Century • e o • * *
St. Cecilia, by S. Madern
The Pauline Fountain ... © e © e e
Portico of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere...
Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere
Young Woman of the Trastevere
&e
PAGE
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38
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5 I
55
65
7o
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74
75
76
8o
85
86
95
97
Sant'Onofrio e tº e tº º te
Portrait after the Mask of Tasso
Pediment of the Portico of Octavia
Gate of St. Angelo in Pescheria e tº º
Courtyard in the Palazzo del Governo Vecchio
(Via della Pescheria) ...
Barber in the open air ...
Quarter of the Tanners ... & tº tº dº e tº e G
‘A fisherman on the watch before his girella '...
Fountain of Bizzaccheri, and Temple of the Sun
Or Vesta tº º º
Santa Maria in Cosmedin © e e e e e
House of Rienzi and Temple of Fortuna Virilis
The Market of the Piazza Navona
“While the contadini drink' © e º ' to o e
St. Agnes, after the Mosaic of the Choir (Third
Century) ge º Gº tº p & tº e Q tº º o
St. Agnes extra Muros, on the Via Nomentana
Subterranean Galleries and Loculi of the Cata-
comb of St. Agnes ... e tº e tº tº e e is e
Subterranean Altar, Tombs, and Chapel in the
Cemetery of St. Agnes tº º º tº ſº º & O ſº
Valerianus and Caecilia, Mosaic of the Ninth
Century, at St. Caecilia « »
Diogenes the Gravedigger tº ſº tº e º º © C &
The Children in the Furnace—Prayer—Jonah
and the Whale tº º º ge º e © º º
Paintings of the First Century on a Chapel
Vault (Catacombs of Callistus)
Ponte Nomentano
Romans playing at Mora tº º º
Street and Apse of San Giovanni e Paolo
Arch of Dolabella, and Gate of the old Convent
of the Trinitarians tº e C. © º tº e tº
Entry of the Convent of St. John and St. Paul
San Stefano Rotondo * - e. e G
Arches of San Giovanni e Paolo, as seen when
descending from the Coelian ...
Fragment of Raphael tº gº
Madame Vigée-Lebrun, by herself (e
One of the Trophies, called of Marius, at the
Capitol tº º º gº º te tº º º tº º ſº
Steps of the Senatorial Palace; Tarpeian Stair-
C2S6.
Junius Brutus
The Wounded Gaul
Faun, after Praxiteles
The Amazon
Marius
Messalina e e Q © º e © tº e
Agrippina, daughter of Drusus... tº gº º
Roman Lady, taken for the first Agrippina
The Hospital of St. Michael ... © & © tº C º
Nest of Houses on the banks of the Tiber
(Trastevere) ...
xxi
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I 29
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I 32
I 33
I 37
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I56
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I62
98
Io.3
IO3
IO4
Io 5
I of
Io 7
Io9
I IO
I IO
II 2
II.4
I 16
II 7
II.8
I 2.2
I 74
I75
176
I79
I8o
18o
181
181
181
182
I86
xxii
Piazza of the Capitol: Gallery of Antiques
Interior of the Church of Santa Maria in Ara
Coeli e tº e e e & tº º º
Frontage of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli ...
The Bambino • * * tº º º tº e & º, º º
Holiday Carriage of the Holy Father, the
Equipage of the Bambino ... tº º e - C
Principal Door of the Ara Coeli
Entrance to the Convent of the Ara Coeli
“Wide corridors with ogival vaults'
Well of the Convent of the Ara Coeli ... tº gº º
Upper Gallery of the Cloister of the Ara Coeli...
Keep of the Anguillara ... © º º
La Porta Settimiana in the Trastevere...
View of the Villa Pamphili-Doria
Gardens of the Pamphili Villa ...
The same © º e tº e c tº º º tº tº e
St. John of the Florentines.—Trasteverine Bank.
—Slope of the Janiculum.—Hospital for the
Insane... tº gº to º Q tº e º tº e Q
The Father Manager of the Philippines
Porta Maggiore ... º tº e ºs tº º
Ancient Casino, called Minerva Medica
Interior of the Minerva Medica
Arch of Gallienus
The Sétte Sale
Family of Beggars tº gº tº tº º º e tº e
Ancient Constantinian Basilica of St. Peter's ...
Façade and Loggia of the Benediction in the
old Basilica tº e e - © tº º e
Façade where the Navicella of Giotto was
Under the Portico of St. Peter's (side of the
Sacristy) tº gº º tº e e tº gº º
Plan of the Basilica of St. Peter... e - C
Curule Chair attributed to the Apostle Peter ...
The Grand Penitentiary at St. Peter's...
Tomb of Innocent VIII. ſº tº e
State Carriage coming from St. Peter's... e
Angels of the Cupola, after Melozzo da Forli...
Angel of the Cupola, again ... © tº º
Passage under the Portico of St. Peter'
Tribuna and Chair of St. Peter... tº º º
Obelisk of Caligula and Fountains of the Piazza
of St. Peter's ... tº e
Ordinary Penitentiary ...
The Pope on the Sedia ...
Fan-bearers
Noble Guard tº º c
The Pope's Swiss Guard
The Pope's Bearers
Benediction from the Loggia e
Swiss, bearing the Two-handled Sword
Tiara-bearer tº º º
Display of the Grand Relics
A Mace-bearer ... &
PAGE
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I92
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I99
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2 IO
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2 I 3
2I4
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226
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236
237
238
... 239
24O
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248
25o
25 I
253
255
256
257
258
26o
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264
265
265
268
269
27,o
271
272
273
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAG3
Piazza of San Pietro in Vincoli... . . . 274
Vaulted Passage under the Palace of Lucrezia
Borgia... tº º ſº tº e e G e tº º º ... 275
Well in the Cloister of San Pietro in Vincoli ... 277
Candelabrum of San Nereo 278
Arch of Drusus ... 28o
The Appian Way 281
Mole of Caecilia Metella tº tº ge ... 284
Ancient Nymphaeum, called Fountain of Egeria 286
‘A bronzed maiden . . . .” 288
Circus of Romulus-Maxentius ... e c º ... 29 I
Between the Ponte Molle and the Monte Mario 293
Casino of Julius III. ... e ſº º tº @ Q . . . 294
St. Peter and St. Paul, by the Bridge of St.
Angelo © © º º 297
Sibyls of Raphael 3oo
Riario Palace (Cancellaria) 3O4
Pellegrino Rossi, after Tenerani 305
The Farnese Palace tº º ve tº º º ... 306
Loggia of the Farnese, from the bank of the
Tiber ... © tº º © º º 3O7
Cobbler installed in a ruined Palace 308
The Mastai Hercules 309
The Spada Pompeius o 3 Io
Brokers and Bookworms in open air ... 3II
Fountain of the Tartarughe 3I2
Court of the Mattei Palace e Q e . . . 3 I 3
Arcus Argentariorum : Porch of San Giorgio in
Velabro tº º e 3I4
In the Palace of Caligula 3I5
Porch of Santa Sabina ... o 3IQ
Exhumation of the House of Livia 32O
Ruins on the Palatine ... tº º º tº e ºs . . . .322
Remains of the Public Palace, and Loggia of
the Farnese ò º c tº º tº tº e e 323
Remains of the Public Palace of Domitian 326
Plan of Livia's House ... 33O
Livia's House (Left Wing) 33 I
Paintings of the Tablinum of Livia ... 332
Vaulted Passage between the Palace of Tiberius
and the Public Palace 334
Ruins of the Palaces of Tiberius . . . .335
Remains of the Library of the Public Palace ... 337
Ruins of the Palatine, towards the Circus
Maximus © tº e © e e gº º º • . , 339
Old Tower of the Palatine, facing the Circus
Maximus tº @ Q © º e 34O
Staircase in the Palace of Caligula 343
Ariccia and its Viaduct... • 345
At Rocca di Papa • 353
Youthful Shepherdess 356
The Salita of Marino © º º 357
Oxen of the Roman Campagna... 361
The Piazza of St. John Lateran 362
Ancient Procession to the Lateran 366.
IIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
Well of the Sixth Century, in the Cloister of St.
John tº e e tº tº e © e
Santa Croce in Gerusalemme
Portico of St. John Lateran .. © e
Penitents ascending the Holy Staircase
Sophocles e e ge e e - Q & C
Christ symbolized in Orpheus ...
“A group slumbering over a cradle’
On the Terrace of the Pincian...
Via della Pilotta... tº º Gº tº tº º
Fountain of the Piazza Monte Cavallo
Perron of the Trinita
La Pascuccia º gº tº tº © e tº © º º
The Emblems of Justice (Raphael's Stanze) ...
Portico of the Villa Medici
Viale Coperto, in the Villa Medici
TJnder the Portico e e e {e º &
On the Terrace of the Medici Gardens
Cloister of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura ...
Basilica and Convent of San Lorenzo fuori le
Mura ... e tº C e e tº e
Convent of Santa Pudenziana ...
Door of Santa Pudenziana
Mosaic of Santa Pudenziana tº º º e de &
SS. Prassedes and Pudentiana (Catacomb of
Priscilla) tº e e to e Q
Church of SS. Cosma e Damiano
Interior of S. Prassede ... © • * e e e &
Door of the Colonna Chapel, at S. Pras-
sede tº º e & ſº º tº e e
‘Oriental bishops with long beards’ © e tº
Car of the Academy of France leaving the
Pincian e º e e © e e
Piazza del Popolo © º º e e ſº tº tº º
Terraces and Portico at the Villa Albani
Gardens of the Villa Albani e Q ſº to tº ge
Piazza and Porta del Popolo—Church of Sta.
Maria ... e © tº e tº tº º tº gº e
Nuptials of Alexander and Roxana ... e e e
Tomb of William Rocca (Sacristy of Sta. Maria
del Popolo) © tº tº © e e
Florentine Statues, Bas-relief of the Pisans
(Corridor of the Sacristy)
Bernini's Daphne e tº e
Fountain in the Borghese Gardens
The Borghese Venus tº C G © & ©
A Street at Tivoli e e º tº o Q © & ©
PAGE
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374
376
378
379
382
384
389
39 I
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395
398
4OI
4O3
4O4.
4O7
4IO
4 II
4I 3
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416
4I 7
422
423
426
433
435
437
44 I
443
Ravine: Temple of Hercules, called of the Sibyl
“Some Pecorari like Clephts' ...
Remains of the Villa Adriana ...
Vatican Library ... tº º º
A Cardinal entering the Vatican
The Throne Room at the Vatican tº e tº
Bed-chamber of Pope Pius IX. - tº º º tº º º
Porta Angelica—Pontifical Residence in th
Vatican e e e tº º º e e e tº º e
Hall of the Animals (Museo Pio-Clementino)
Sarcophagus of the Bacchantes...
Augustus (Bracchio Nuovo)
Demosthenes (Bracchio Nuovo)
The Nile (Bracchio Nuovo)
Torso of the Belvedere ...
The Perseus of Canova... • . tº º tº
Antique Group (Hall of the Animals)...
Menander (Pio-Clementine Gallery) ...
The Ariadne (Pio-Clementine Gallery)
Gardens of the Vatican © o º
Gallery of the Candelabra
The Biga tº e tº e e º
Hall of the Greek Cross
Casino of Pius IX. e & e
Exit from the Pontifical Garden
The Ignudi (vault of the Sixtine Chapel)
At the Entrance to the Sixtine Chapel
Julius II. tº º º tº º º tº C e tº º º
The Prophet Joel (ceiling of the Sixtine)
Delphic Sibyl (ceiling of the Sixtine) ... tº e º
At the Sixtine: the Pope bearing the Hol
Sacrament tº ſº ... ...
Creation of Adam (roof of the Sixtine)
Creation of Eve (roof of the Sixtine) ...
The Fall of Man (roof of the Sixtine)
Jacob meeting Rachel and Leah (sixth vault of
the Loggie) © tº e tº º ſº tº º e tº e e
St. Stephen before the Council (Chapel of San
Lorenzo, in the Vatican) ... tº º º © tº º
Christ between Justice and Faith (Chamber o
Charlemagne)
Poetry
Theology e e ſº e e e tº º tº tº e
Gregory IX. receiving the Decretals (Camera
della Segnatura) to e c tº º º tº º º
The First Fault (La Segnatura) e e º tº wº
Angels presenting the Gospels (La Segnatura)
... . 513
5I 5
xxiii
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ARCH OF SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS.
() \| E.
CHAPTER I.
School Prejudices and First Impressions.—ſ/ ZY iſome and the Piazza Barberini.-ZPaſſorie: the food of the
people.—The odour of Rome.-Fountain of Trevi.-The Acqua Vergine and its legend.—Montaigne
and the Albergo dell’Orso. — First aspect of the Vatican Basilica.-The Streets.-Pantheon of Agrippa,
and Temple of Antoninus.-Shops.-Vision of the Ancient World.—On the Tiber: Tarquin's Cloaca
Maxima.-In the Trastevere : Shop of the Fornarina.-The last road ascended by St. Peter.—Snuff-mania of
the Romans; the handkerchief and snuff-box of the Sovereign-Pontiff —Church of S. Pietro in Montorio.
—Za Fageſ/a/ion by Sebastian del Piombo, &c.—Rome, from the Janiculum, in the sunset.
I.
ST different times in traversing Italy I had deliberately avoided Rome, so much
did I dread the almost absolute authority of the ancient metropolis, until
after a severe illness, being driven from Florence by the doctors towards
the end of October, and forced to find a place of exile as near as possible,
I was reduced to seek in the Eternal City a milder and more equable climate. I arrived
there one misty night.
A friend who awaited me at the station despatched my luggage to his house, where
B


2 A’O.]//Z.
I was to pass the night, and what I could discern in a shortish drive by the rays of a
few lanterns, which were like stars in the darkness of the closed houses, made me suppose
that he lived in a remote and deserted suburb. After a few minutes we sallied forth
into a mean-looking street to procure a late supper from the waiters of a dirty fraſtoria,
a genuine suburban tavern; and after that we made our way back by other alleys,
equally filthy and bordered by black ruins. As we went along, I was amazed to learn
that I was in the middle of the elegant quarters of Rome, that I had crossed the end
of the Piazza di Spagna, supped at the renowned restaurateur’s of the Via de' Condotti,
and that, in short, I should have the honour of sleeping under a roof in the street of the
Quattro Fontane, which, by the Felice and Sistini roads, comes out on the Pincian, the
Tuileries garden of the city of Romulus.
The night passed slowly in a
gloomily employed wakefulness. The
Gaulish independence of the barbarian
with which my youth had been imbued
in the spring of the romantic emancipa-
tion, had thrown me into an attitude of
distrust towards Rome and the ascend-
ency that she has exercised in every
age over thought, opinion, and doctrine.
Recalling the artists, the authors, whom
this spot had disturbed, I was alarmed
at an influence which can dispel every
previous conviction, leaving only a void
behind ; I felt menaced with the peril
of once more falling back to the benches
of a school that had from age to age
sent back so long a succession of Scho-
lars, discouraged and intimidated, to
their own countries. That indolence of
our present life which in this city and
for so many minds has substituted hesi-
tating dreams for the activity of labour,
was this to invade me in my turn and
- paralyse all effort 2
CROSS OF THE CAPUCINS, PLAZZA BARBERIN.I. Day at length Came, pale and icy;
and in spite of these terrors, stimulated
by a feverish curiosity, I stole away from the house to venture alone into the dreaded
labyrinth.
On my right the straight and hilly street made with its high walls a distant frame for
a conical belfry sketched against a grey and rainy sky. I did not know the situation of
Santa Maria Maggiore. I was still further from suspecting that in these blurred swell-
ings I saw the renowned Quirinal and Viminal hills. The road continued on the left
in absolute monotony: before me in false square, in an ill-kept court, arose a vast
building with a tolerably new look about it, and with a portico crowded with soldiers.
The edifice struck me as handsome enough for a barrack; but recognising it as the
famous palace of the Barberini, I thought it too much of a barrack for a palace.

P/AZZA /3.4/º/3/ZR/V/. 3
Past the corner of this, I approached a large open space that I ascended bearing to
the left, and there, between a poor alley of squat trees and the wall of a convent of
Capucins, ending in a seventeenth-century church, there, fixed before a mission-cross
on a pedestal flanked by four boundary-stones, I asked myself as I gazed on this piazza
—so irregular, unpaved, with its little houses, its trees as of a sous-préfecture, and that
village cross—if it was at Vannes or at Brive that I had found myself in an exactly
similar spot, with the same sound of the creaking of the lamps as they swung to and
fro in a rainy wind. In the left corner of the piazza, under a balcony where I should
have lodged the notary of the place, I observed this sign over a narrow door : ANTICA
TRATTORIA—O// /&estaurant. With us customers are only got by novelty. “Come,’
said I, here I am really at Rome . . . .”
On this Piazza Barberini, as you return towards the street, you come upon a fountain
of sombre colour, but whose basin is in good proportion with the design that occupies
the centre; four dolphins, whose gaping throats just touch the water, are solidly bound
together, forming by their raised tails a base for the arms of the Barberini, and on this
FOUNTAIN OF THE TRITON.
is placed, describing a semi-spiral and serving for an upper basin, a large shell, of
which the overflow falls away in a shower of pearls. From the midst of this, solidly
supported, there rises a vigorous Triton, who blows to the sky in a horn of shell form,
from which spirts a thread of water, of which the artist has made good use. This
original and robust conception, which reminded me of Pierre Puget, is the work of
Bernini. I did not know it then, and in giving this piece of information I am antici-
pating: I beg the reader to allow me often to do this, and to complete these first
impressions by the further results of my studies, so as thus to avoid returning to the
same subject.
Turning my back to the piazza, I took a cross-street, which ought to descend in the
very heart of the city—the Via del Tritone, which begins with shops for the sale of
smoked and greasy meat, traffore that the Germans must frequent, for you see in them
a vast quantity of sausages and choppes of beer; the common people, squatting or

B 2
4 A&OM/E.
leaning against the wall all round the door, rolled themselves in the greasiness of the
place, which comes out even into the street, so as to suck up the odour of the scraps.
Among this plebs, proud, idle, sober, the cook’s art stirs platonic loves for which the
steam alone is enough ; lean under stout garments, they seem fed on aspirations like the
orchid; browned in the incense of things frying, they no longer perceive that their bread
is dry and their beans dressed with the sauce of pure water.
To justify them, it must be confessed that at Rome the privileged spots where food
is to be seen pour de bon are but very common. In this country, where fever is endemic,
I do not know if sobriety be an instinct of self-preservation; at any rate, it is exemplary
in all classes, and in truth the quality of the articles of food decidedly encourages so
estimable a disposition. Veal killed too young is bad and scarce; mutton is stale and
hard; beef has little taste; fowl is skinny and tough as leather. Game only is of
superior quality, and, except partridge, it is common. Close and insufficiently kneaded,
the bread is heavy; the wine, usually tolerable, is carelessly made : it should be
excellent. Pastry, made with a mixture of oil and dripping, is repugnant enough to
bring one's heart up.
For that matter, the humbler folk care little about these culinary elements. This is
how they sustain themselves: all the winter they prepare for the public at the street
corners in large cauldrons twice a day, those long, greenish cauliflowers called broccoli,
and they are carried home on drainers from shop to shop. They eat also considerably
of large lupins, round and yellow, cooked in water, without butter or dripping. On the
broccoli they put salt and oil with vinegar. Add some olives, some dry figs, cervelas,
parched and often rancid, and stalks of fennel; and for dessert, nuts, pinocchi, almonds
of pine-apple. In summer, fruits, especially water-melon and the green gourd with
purple pulp, of so poor a flavour. Such is pretty nearly the substance of the diet of
the people of Rome, if you add a few common pastes.
Their ancestors, who prepared polenta with oatmeal and linseed, who spiced their
sauces with anise and peppermint, who regaled themselves on a dessert of basil and
poppy seed done over with honey, and who included in their list of delicacies white
grubs got from the bark of the oak and fattened on meal; the Romans whose artificial
taste Pliny stigmatizes, would seem to us even less dainty than their descendants. I
prefer, without hesitation, the pure water with which the latter quench their thirst, to
the wines of Lucullus, in which they threw rue, anise, bitter-almonds—in which they
introduced resin, mastic, saffron, parsley, and which they kept in jars done with
turpentine and perfumed with myrrh. Add, that they poured into it sea-water, or more
or less salt, and that they clarified this frightful beverage with powdered marble, with
sulphur, and especially with ashes which had served for lye. So dirtiness is no new trait
in the Eternal City.
Some muddy streets, without footways; some mean, arched shops, with narrow
doors, such as you see at La Châtre and Dinan; walls in which the peeling plaster has
received a daubing of earth from the splashing of the gutter; now and then some church
with shabby façade in the modern taste, set in among the houses; much animation
and babbling among the people; all the women ragged, and with hair elaborately
dressed, even those who have none, terrible to behold—this is what greets you at every
corner. I there received, for the first time, the distinct impression of the odours, or,
more poetically speaking, the perfume of Rome; it is a local exhalation of cabbage or
broccoli broth mixed with the raw smell of roots, sulphurous emanations to which one
-
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FOUAV7.4/AV OF TREV/. 5
has to become accustomed, for the pavement and the black mud of the streets are
impregnated with that essence, which has not become pure in becoming everlasting.
Gradually, as I advanced along a narrow street with the air of a kitchen-garden, in
which the crowd was thickening and where leaves of vegetables were all trampled under
foot, I perceived a sort of indistinct murmur like that of the waves, which first accom-
panied and then overwhelmed the noises of the throng, and all at once, at the corner
of the street, I was dazzled by sheets of water, which, from a pell-mell of rocks, domi-
nated by a building covered with statues, tumbled foaming and sparkling on every side,
to be engulfed in cavernous holes. I was in front of the fountain of Trevi.
II.
It is a showy example of ostentatious decoration as understood by the school of
Bernini. In the midst of rock-work and shell, Neptune emerges with his steed from
the basement of a palace to which this enormous construction is fixed. The pretty and
graceful bas-reliefs describe the discovery of the Acqua Vergine by a youthful maiden
in the neighbourhood of Tusculum. From the upper basins, from the hollow of rocks
in which intertwine climbing plants carved on rough stone, streams, of whose size one
has no idea, spout forth on every side; a cataract or river . . . . in the guise of the
stage 1 The waters for that matter are the most limpid and pure; their salutary virtues
are reputed to cure twelve disorders. The torrent breaks forth with the tumult of a
mountain cascade. + g -
On the brink of the lower basin, on an evening when the moon makes this agitated
sheet sparkle like the steel links in a hauberk, you sometimes see a young maiden bend
over the water, while a lover eyes her pensively. She has drawn in a new glass, which
she will break as soon as used, some water to offer with a smile of hope to the friend,
who leaves her for a journey. It is a popular tradition, that if you have drank from
this spring, you cannot remain absent from Rome for ever; destiny will bring you back.
For some this ceremony is a simple form of vow; praised be they who have full faith
in the presage of the fountain The Germans expect to make it favourable by bribery;
when they have quaffed the philtre of return, they throw a halfpenny into the basin.
Must we judge the fountain of Trevi in the name of the principles of a severe art 2
No. It is what one might call rococo triumphant, but endowed with a size, an
exuberance, which are the apology and the attraction of this kind. If we could perceive
from the distance this tower of water with its majestic scaffolding, its impression would
be thoroughly victorious. We understand, after all, that the dry and poverty-stricken
imitation of such a style, as it is to be seen in France, and especially in Prussia, is the
most obsolete of all the forms of artistic decline.
It was in the time of Augustus that the Aqua Virgo was discovered, for which
Agrippa had an aqueduct made. I would fain have seen, at the epoch when this Naiad,
placed amid the fields at the crossing of two paths, gave her flocks to drink, the
rustic and becoming adornments consecrated to her by the most memorable of Roman
AEdiles. But how many times, I exclaimed, must this structure have been built and
rebuilt since the dictatorship of the victor of Actium ! Let us end here what remains to
be said on the subject.
6 A’O/A.
One morning, as at about a couple of hundred paces from the Piazza Trevi, I was
passing to the Via del Nazzareno, I saw at No. 12 a small door, from which issued
several women carrying on hurdles heaps of newly-washed herbage. A narrow stair-
case had the threshold for its first step, and the air from the house blew a certain
freshness, accompanied with the noise of plashing water. I approach, go down twenty
steps into the shadow, and find a badly lighted cellar, where, in a long stone trough
fed by two copious jets, people were damping hay for a purpose of which I am ignorant.
In a few moments, along the wall a sort of entablature came into outline, and at last
I found the frame of an enormous inscription, in which, all at once, the name of Agrippa
struck me : I was in front of the primitive fountain of the time of Augustus. Its fine
and simple style bespeaks the last ages
of the Republic; the inscription that
the sun once made bright testifies, by
its inhumation, the sinking of the ground
on which the existing city stands. This
bit of discovery has allowed me to look
at the fine fountain of Trevi without
regret; for its pompous style has not
effaced the fountain of Agrippa, which
still flows forth full of life at the bottom
of that tomb.
But the day on which, for the first
time, I strayed through the streets of
Rome, distrustful and disenchanted, and
less instructed as to the sources of the
fountain, I confined myself to eyeing with
amazement this trick of a river flowing
from under the pillars of a house, and
the fine posture of the god of the sea,
and the generous relief of that firmer
example of the mythological basins of
|
* ------g
º
|T
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Versailles, bringing its brawling into
the midst of a plebeian quarter. I
º ----------- should have been surprised, then, to
colºrs or Antonists. learn that this architecture, which re-
minds one of Mansart, and even of
Philibert Delorme, only dates from 1735; for I did not know that the taste, which up to
the end of the seventeenth century hastened the Roman decadence, from the beginning
of the following century rather retarded it, and went no further than enriching the
style of the previous age with grotesque fantasies.
By accident I came out into the Corso. Another deception: this famous road, which
serves as a turf for equestrians, is narrow and full of shops, like our Rue Neuve des
Petits Champs, which it recalls still further by its mean footpaths. A number of small
shops where wares of no great value are retailed; a palace here and there to relieve
the rows of houses. In passing by the side of the great Colonna piazza, I measured
with my eyes the tall Doric shaft of white marble which adorns the centre, vaguely
provoked that the column of Trajan left so slight an impression. Far abroad as I









THE ABBAE. 7
was, a man becomes thoughtless; it was only the Antonine pillar, and I never even
thought of it.
It was under Sixtus V. that in restoring the half-buried pedestal of this monument,
raised in honour of Marcus Aurelius after his victories over the Germans, they mistook
its real purpose, and attributed to Antoninus Pius a structure that only dates from his
successor. The old inscription, with several bas-reliefs, was brought under Gregory XVI.
to the middle of the Giardino della Pina, so called because in the centre of one of the
façades with which Bramante surrounded this great space surrounded with quincunxes,
there figures between two iron peacocks a large bronze pine-apple—funereal emblems
taken from the Pantheon of Agrippa, and not, as has been said, from Adrian's Mole.
The vast square where the pillar of the Antonines rises is monumental, surrounded
as it is with the Ferraioli and Chigi palaces, the last raised by the nephews of
Alexander VII., as well as the Piombino palace, which on the Corso fronts the building
of the Grand’ Garde, carried on a long peristyle whose pillars came from the excavations
of the ancient city of Veii.
A fine intermittent rain plastered the buildings with black and covered up the reliefs
when I came under the balcony of the Ruspoli, then the residence of our general
Montebello. Not knowing what direction to take—having lost all illusion as to the
Via de Condotti, the bottom of which was at this moment obliterated by mist—I had
ascended as far as the tiresome façade of San Carlo, which reminded me of the churches
of Arras and Nancy, when a passer-by stopping me uttered a joyful exclamation and
held out his hands. We embraced in the middle of the gutter—a thing that surprises
nobody in Italy, and gives pleasure to the onlookers. We made our way to the café,
there to partake, as in Tuscany, the breakfast of an anchorite, that I sometimes made
scandalous by the addition of an egg. ‘There,” said the abbé, “there, that is how
people collect humours; and with vagaries like that are you surprised at being ill?”
III.
What the abbé is—what he was, alas, do not expect me to tell. Picture Pliny,
Vitruvius, Ammianus Marcellinus, and Vasari, all resuscitated ; imagine a torch piercing
the night of ages, a taste to defy the most expert, a library walking and talking with
you: there is the abbé. With his experience of men and a country that he had studied
for fifteen winters, he appreciated my humour all the more quickly, as my ideas were
known to him, and as he had combated my prejudices at Florence, where I had known
him. Too prudent to show any surprise at seeing me in the streets of Rome, he took
me by the arm, and, in an engaging but decided tone, said, ‘Come, my good friend,
I shall take you straight to St. Peter’s.’
This was taking the bull by the horns; he knew it. So in following him with a
somewhat complacent geniality—‘if it is with that,' I thought, ‘that he intends to
make a beginning with me . . . .”
From the end of the Santa Lucia bridge to the bridge of St. Angelo, you follow an
interminable row of streets, whose appearance is wretched, and even reaches downright
repulsiveness, as one approaches the Via di Tordinone. This ugliness at last amuses
you. Besides, as I looked about, I listened to the abbé with all my ears; with him
8 - A’O.]//E.
this polypus of streets became full of life. At the point where two lanes divide, he
showed me the Albergo dell' Orso, where Montaigne once lodged. Nothing has been
changed there; nothing does change in Rome: waggoners and market people put
up their carts under this gateway, even then ancient, where the Bordelais gentleman
dismounted with his suite.
It is a symbolical protest against the vanities of the stage to have condemned
Apollo, patron of the opera at Rome, to take up his abode in a kind of ignoble closet,
which, seen from without from the extremity of the street, under its robe of brown
plaster and bare of all ornament, has at once the equivocal physiognomy of an ill place
and the ghastly look of a sinner in the livery of public penitence. The high blank wall
THE COLONNADES OF ST. PETER.
which descends steeply to the river, flanked with little huts and wooden corridors, is like
the enclosure of a tannery.
I was blunted by too many iconographic reminiscences, but, with the satisfaction of
a vision realised, I recognised the bridge of St. Angelo and Adrian's Mole. My com-
panion laid himself out to distract my attention; he named a hundred objects and
flashed in my eyes a hundred souvenirs. I was surprised by the breadth of the Tiber
and the extent of the buildings of the San-Spirito Hospital.
At last, at the end of the Borgo Nuovo, from the bottom of the Piazza Rusticucci,
we discerned the façade of St. Peter, colossal collet of the ring described by the
colonnades of Bernini.
This was the great deception of the day. The vain majesty which renders this

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FIRST SIGHT OF ST. PETER’.S. 9
gigantic work empty and dumb struck me spontaneously with a crudity that was almost
choking.
I had hoped that by dint of a strong expectation of not being surprised, I should
be so by some unforeseen sensation, and that, as happens in the case of monuments
become familiar by representation, nature adding something else would cause all to be
forgotten. But this proof-print was at the moment so coldly washed on a dull sky,
that I seemed to see a piece executed after the engravings in which I had examined
the elevation. From the bottom of the place the columns of Bernini connected them-
selves easily with the façade, on each side of which they are seen to mark nearly a right
angle. But when, as I went forward, I saw them fold in a circle behind me, and thus
form with the portal a sort of scorpion with a double tail, it all seemed to me an abuse
of the permission to pile stone on stone for the mere amusement of the eye. The real
vastness of the work might have had the power of impressing me: nothing of the
kind; the immensity of the proportions escaped me. The commonplace of the style
extinguished whatever interest the whole ought to have inspired.
Looking to the ground, I found the open space well paved; the obelisk of Sixtus V.
interested me, especially on account of Fontana; the three-story arcades where the
Loggie are, glazed as they are at the present day, affected me like an enormous cage,
and nothing, in truth—I confess it to my shame—nothing within me would have stirred,
unless the abbé, showing me behind the other buildings a small, low roof on a corner
of bare wall, had not said, 'Tis the roof of the Sistine Chapel.
To enter that sanctuary was not to be thought of in a moment of such dismay. I
even refused to enter the church. ar
In the open space I had noticed a carriage pass by, which only pulled up at the foot
of the great steps. I thought the vehicle and its horses ridiculously small. There
got down from it two or three ants. . . . When we came in front of the portico, the
abbé gently said to me, Place yourself quite close—closer; there, measure with your
arms the diameter of these columns and their flutings. -
Their size was indeed formidable; statues might have been niched in the flutings!
Come away, I cried, overwhelmed. My guide was a trifle discouraged: I was no
less so at responding so ill to his instructions. “I have no longer,' I said, ‘any.
occasion to seek the origin of our decline of the last two centuries; from Lewis XIII.
to Thermidor, all is there, down to the endive wreaths of our Panthéon Ste. Geneviève.' .
The basilica of St. Peter, said my friend, offers one particularity: at the first approach
its faults all stare you in the face, and its aspect surprises nobody; but the more you
visit it, the more unforeseen revelations you find there; and there comes a moment when
surprise, gradually developed, becomes prodigious—the single example of an energetic
impression like amazement and marvelling admiration springing up by degrees. As
Soon as you can appreciate St. Peter's, you will have taken a great step.
But in what sense 2 thought I, with inward disquiet. -
I had time to reflect on it; for the abbé left me alone for half-an-hour, to execute
in passing a commission at the house of an Eminent Excellency who received that day.
We mounted to a story as high as the third in the Paris houses, and I waited for my
companion in the antechamber, where loitered, in an indolence quite in harmony with
my own discouragement, groups of valets, very important and in very poor feather.
A few poor wretches crouched on benches: the valets of the cardinals affected a
diplomatic style, being extremely ceremonious under antiquated and rich liveries, too
C
IO A’OME.
large, too narrow, or too long for those whom they clothed. Pretentious disclosures
of domestic distress, these cast-off things must have passed into the possession of half-
a-score of dignitaries, and held as many lackeys as a sentry-box shelters sentinels.
Such old frippery worn with burlesque gravity, and the tricks of these live mannikins,
gave me a certain inward gaiety. When the abbé rejoined me, the streets into which we
again plunged struck me as more lively; the weather, too, had cleared up. We came
across palaces rich and curious, porticoes and galleries at the bottom of alleys; some-
times even figures of frescoes marked off, like half-lost shadows, portions of the walls;
old convents bordering rich churches gave feature to the lines of the crossways. I was
amused by the people doing nothing and chatting with one another on the steps of their
shops, which were incongruous and half-empty, where everything has been to sell for
ages, but where now there is hardly anything. I was entertained by a singular quantity
of inscriptions which on each bit of public building recall some historic fact, some pope,
some monument, occasionally some quarter; one deciphers the city in walking through
|
--
--
-
---
“THE WALETS OF THE CARDINALS. . . . VERY CEREMONIOUS UNDER ANTIQUATED LIVERIES.”
it. Thus, while the abbé, to complete so many indications, evoked in this labyrinth
of dark streets celebrated names and ancient traditions, with my mind dazzled by the
flashing of the scene, and overcome by a sort of dizziness, I only took possession of the
place by repeating inwardly to myself, with a kind of stupefied satisfaction, I am at
Rome. The persistency of this assurance persuaded me that, in spite of all my
systematic prohibitions, I had been more curious about this journey than I had ever
confessed to myself.
My companion, well aware of the importance, in this country above all, of first
impressions, and knowing how much time may be lost before finishing the stage of small
criticism, was bent on alluring me from this prelude, and on hastening forward my
initiation. Those only will understand these lines who have not only visited Rome, but
who have lived in it long enough to undergo the enchantment.
My mentor felt that it was not enough to rest on a deception, and that the study of
a pure work would be an antidote. He had brought me by a mesh-work of alleys to
the Pantheon of Agrippa, which he made me enter without any preparation. The

PANTH/EOW OF A GAZAPA. I I
portico, though added afterwards, appeared to me in all the bold and original solidity
of its Roman character, with more clearness than impressiveness. I had visited the
Greek temples at Paestum. Still I regarded with interest a monument raised at the
dawn of the age of Augustus. I went out, I turned round it, and looked at it from the
bottom of the piazza; I returned to it again, never wearied of examining an example
so precious of the art of building at the end of the Republic, during that too fugitive
period which, from the middle of the following reign, the dull Velleius Paterculus, in spite
of his shameful admiration for Tiberius, fixes on for the formal decline of letters and arts.
It is thence, I perceived at once, that Vasari has taken the model of his chapels with
triangular pediments, with ten columns under an entablature, a Roman arrangement that
he so much abused, and which, displeasing even at the Pantheon where it crushes the
rotunda, and after that model universally adopted, has disfigured so many churches in
the majority of Catholic states. It furnished a series of great spaces for placing pictures,
and with Vasari, the painter had an interested share in the design of the architect. I
established with more sympathy in this severe and classic monument the considerable
part assigned by an architect of the great age, thirty years before the death of Augustus,
to personal and original sentiment, or, as we should say in our own day, to fancy or
caprice. -
To understand this more promptly, we ought only to enter the rotunda, where
Boniface IV., in 608, replaced gods by martyrs, and where Gregory IV., in 830, instituted
the festival of All Saints, we ought, I say, only to enter here, after considering, from
the portal of Minerva, the flattened elliptical cavity of the cupola of the Pantheon. If,
then, you enter the building, lighted by a round hole contrived in the top, you would
be much more surprised at finding a dome of apparent sphericity, far deeper than it
really possesses. It was by means of an ingenious artifice that the builder contrived to
produce these illusions. He covered the vault with four rows of caissons worked hollow,
and superposed in close perspective, from the base to the top of the hemisphere in which
they are. Moreover, in each of these square compartments he cut four mouldings slant-
wise, one in the other; and instead of arranging them regularly, he made the sides
unequal, in proportion as the caissons rise, in such a way as to deceive the spectator.
In other words, he adopted the only kind of ornament which, being too simple and too
geometric to arouse distrust, could solve the problem of hollowing for the eye only an
extremely elliptical vault, and of hollowing it to the depth of a true cupola, by applying
to this vault the continuous perspective of a demi-sphere. s -
From a height of forty-four métres or more, the light of the sky pours down with the
sun or rain, by an opening of twenty-four feet in diameter, on the marbles and porphyry
roses with which the middle of the temple is floored. I have seen, while vespers were
being sung, the azure of the air reflected in a pool of water, as well as the vault on which
the sun describes his progress by tracing on it luminous ellipses. Catching the edges of
the caissons, its rays, divided in geometrical projections, cut figures on the rough mate-
rial of the dome, set it all aflame, and make it dazzling as a mosaic on a ground of gold.
Forgetting oneself a moment, with head turned back before this curiously-lighted cupola,
one has the most striking sight that can be produced by simple means, subordinated to
an idea at once bizarre and just. *
Perhaps earlier than Agrippa who finished it, and primitively dedicated (Pliny tells
us) to Jupiter the Avenger, the Pantheon whose dome offers a very model of building
is, as has been said, fronted by a portico or peristyle or sort of hors d’auvre, which rests
C 2 -
I 2 A&O//E.
on sixteen enormous monolithic columns of oriental granite, crowned by the finest capitals
that Rome has bequeathed to us. These columns, eight in front, are doubled by a
second row; engaged pilasters form a third against the building itself. Here, mark
another singularity which produces an illusion as to the depth of the portico. Instead
of being arranged in line on parallels forming a right angle with the steps, these columns
radiate gradually, in such a way that from the middle of the piazza, where those of the
first row that support the pediment ought to conceal those of the second and the third
row, we see them on the contrary in echelons, because their slightly oblique position
produces an imaginary perspective, whose result is to throw the distances back. These
are artifices, such as Virgil permitted himself expressly to scandalize M. Lhomond.
There is no harm in hinting to youth that, as distinguished from pedagogues, masters
have allowed themselves to invent, and that there is in the arts, especially at the great
epochs, a purity far loftier than servility.
This piazza of the Pantheon, cleared by Eugenius IV. of the ruins, which included
|
| Hº.
THE PANTHEON OF AGRIPPA.
the basalt lions, a bronze head of M. Agrippa, a chariot, a porphyry sarcophagus in
which Clement XII. made his bed, this little piazza, inherited by the hucksters with their
petty trade, was once a wild and mysterious spot, the valley of the She-Goat; swamps
bristling with reeds, surrounded with underwood, in the midst of which the second
prodigy of the genesis of Rome was accomplished—the disappearance of Romulus.
IV.
“At nearly every step,” said my guide, taking me back to the granite obelisk with
which Clement XI. surmounted the charming fountain of Honorio Longhi, ‘you will
come upon monuments as precious as the Pantheon, and recalling a host of memories.
Do not forget that this building, contemporary with Tibullus, is the tomb of Caraccio,
of Balthazar Peruzzi, of Giovanni d'Udine, of Perino del Vaga, of nearly all the school

V/S/OAW OF 7//E AAVC/EAVZ" WOA&M, D. I 3
of Raphael who sleep at the feet of their master. You saw in the third chapel to the
left the Madonna del Sasso that Lorenzetto carved to decorate the altar that covers the
remains of the most harmonious genius of modern art.”
And drawing me into an alley to the left of the little Piazza di Pietra, the abbé,
drawing himself on one side, showed a modern palace of two stories, surmounted by an
attic, the whole imprisoned as in an open-worked basket by a row of fluted columns, to
the number of eleven, whose capitals support a magnificent entablature of marble. An
accidental encounter, just to show the frequency of these marvels; but, by the direction
we took afterwards, I soon saw that we had turned aside by design.
It was at the end of the seventeenth century that the douane de ferre was installed in
the remains of a temple of the second
century, dedicated, to all appearance, to
Antoninus Pius. The old building was
vaulted, and, seen from the inside, the
back part of the architrave and the base
of the vault seem like a rock raised in
the air, and resting on a wall. We must
know that Borromini, who restored two
centuries ago the frieze and the enta-
blature, connected the whole with a
coating of stucco, which produces
the illusion. The Corinthian engaged
columns in the modern building have
branches of olive among the acanthus
of the capital, but the delicacy of these
capitals is far from equalling the purity
of those of the Pantheon. Fires have
cracked the shafts, torn like the trunks
of trees that the lightning has blasted. | º | | | | | | º
In the court, among the bales, boxes, 1. ºn I- !. |º
carts, a whole population of clerks and | || º
draymen is busy. Incongruous spec- sº lºs º
tacle of that dead ruin, which encloses -
and shows in its bosom a house full of
life. TEMPLE OF ANTONINU.S.
Such aspects began to interest me;
I was pleased even, no doubt in virtue of some innate pedantical instinct, before a
myriad of provincial churches that came in one's way, in tracing their architecture to
the style of the Jesuits and the prototype of St. Peter. The dome, the court, the
buildings of our Parisian Sorbonne speak that sort of Italian without accent. Then we
made our way into alleys of a problematical period, which realised in my eyes an ancient
ideal of our Latin country; now we passed under vaults which, striding from one side
to another, rested on ruins of the Lower Empire, and bore ruins perched above them.
What one perceives of the habits of the people contributes also to the eclipse of the present
age: as in the time of the king Anarchus, folks go and buy at a stall at the corner their
victual ready cooked, and their sauce elsewhere. The vessels of brown earthenware,
the vases shaped like amphorae; the display in front of the shops of a quantity of wares
º

14 A’OME.
that for a century have never been used anywhere else; the revelation of a careless
indolence so little usual in these times, and the visible absence of any attempt to procure
customers;–all this makes it like a congregation of gay and sympathetic shadows, and
one soon forgets what point of chronology one has got to.
As I walked along in a half-dreaming state, in which the absent spirit allowed the
eyes to wander as they would, lending an inattentive ear to my guide, who continued his
instruction, it came to pass that the mind thus cradled supposed itself absolutely asleep,
in perceiving suddenly a vision such as dreams give.
I do not know either whence we came, or how I had got in my absence to such a
point, when the abbé bade me raise my eyes and look around. We were passing trans-
FISH MARKET.
versely on a sort of road the top of a long irregular space of unequal levels, cut by
two swamps, from which rose right and left columns with their architraves supported in
the air, spectres of temples raised on a pell-mell of marble skeletons, plans of basilicas
sketched by their flooring; while, as at Pompeii, ancient ways with their footpaths spread
out the squares of their Pelasgic pavement, and lost themselves under the ruins. A
triumphal arch, on which a shadow fell like a scarf, raised up in front of me from a deep
trench its attica and entablature, where I might have read the name of Septimius: on the
top of a neighbouring hill, cypresses bristled on wall-fronts and open vaults; finally, in the
distance, to shut in the little valley, at the back of a white portal on a ground of purple
mountain, there spread out the vast mass of the Coliseum, which seemed only to find an
accompanying accessory in the façade of a church flanked by a convent and surmounted

ST. PETER / W. MOAZOA&MO. I5
by a sombre Byzantine tower. . . . . The Coliseum had blue shadows, like the reverse
of some Alpine peak; the circumference shone with the burnished gold of the sun and
the ages. *
During this time, without letting me stop, the abbé, leaning on my shoulder and
pointing with his finger, named Cicero and the tribune, Pompey and Caesar, Virginius
and Nero, pell-mell with the gods who saw the greatness of Rome. I had divined it was
the Forum, and there resounded in my agitated breast the salvo of great names and
great deeds, suddenly fired by all the cannons of history !
I reckon here one of the three most overwhelming commotions that a spectacle ever
gave me. The two others are: the first sight of the Alpine glaciers, four thousand feet
above the Lake of Geneva; and my arrival one evening, by the arcades at the bottom,
at the Piazza of St. Mark at Venice. -
I felt it unavoidable either to take rest in the Roman Forum, or to take flight at once,
as a man closes his eyes when he is dazzled. ‘Come, come,’ cried the abbé, “we will
look at all that another time. It is getting late.’ . - - -
What I may have seen next, turning by the western side of the Palatine, all honey-
combed with obstructions, and as far as the Ponte Rotto, I could not tell: I should only
have kept the effaced memory of a dream if I had left Rome that evening. Effects
succeeded one another in a throng, but there was no time for distinct impressions.
Crossing the Tiber, intoxicated by sights that become a real landscape of style between
the Cloaca of Tarquin and the field of Porsenna, I was content with a glimpse of the
treasures from which I should soon draw. . -
It seems that we had arrived in the Trastevere without any understanding either why
or where I was so swiftly carried along. I noticed three streets by reason of the mono-
tony of their names: the Lungara, the Lungarina, the Lungaretta. In the midst of this
rapid flight one recollection struck me, and remained with me. Close to the Borgo, by
the ancient Septimian gate, at the corner of the Via Santa Dorotea, in the old rag-stone
wall of a dirty building, is the outline of the stopped arch of an arcade of shops. It is
flanked by a granite column, over which rises an Ionic pilaster, the whole enframed in
the wall. ‘An old bakery,’ said the abbé, “before which Raphael passed many a time:
it was there that the Fornarina lived.’ - - - - wº
As we began to ascend, and as the grass became more abundant in the street as the
houses grew less frequent, I asked whither we were going, and was told that we were
climbing the Janiculum, the Monte d'Oro where Janus had his town of Antipolis in front
of that of Saturn; where, according to Titus Livius, the tomb of Numa was found;
where the citadel of Ancus Martius rose; where, according to the Christian legend, the
Apostle Peter was crucified. * -
But before entering San Pietro in Monte Aureo, or more commonly Montorio, my
friend begged me not to turn my eyes on the escarped side of the ascent. ‘It may seem
childish,” he said, “to find amusement in contriving surprises; but I want to place you in
a particularly fine point of view, in its proper light, at the right time, and it is too soon
yet. Then, after all we have passed through, the attention requires rest by change of
object. We will repose by looking at this church here and its little convent, which our
soldiers share very fraternally with the good Capucins; you will see them, snuff-box in
hand, performing friendly offices with unwearying profusion for all those military noses.’
Along the street I had already remarked that snuff-boxes are a usage as hospitable
as universal, and that in this respect Rome still lingered in the habits of the age of
I6 FOME.
Fontenelle, when both sexes carried about a snuff-box and a walking-stick. The Romans
have dropped the stick; it would need an effort to carry one. The monks of the Montorio
took and offered about two pinches a minute; it is the base of conversation. The abbé,
who insisted on hindering me from looking behind me, was eager to inform me that in
all classes, young and old, handsome and ugly, bourgeois, peasants, monks and soldiers,
everybody crams his nostrils most zealously. “You will see at the Sistine Chapel, where
the whole sacred college figures, how funny this labour of nasal alimentation is. A
veteran snuff-taker, Pius IX. constantly uses a genuine Capucin’s handkerchief, a bit of
cretonne of red and blue check, such as we hardly ever see at home except among the
Lorraine farmers. This poor rag jars with the gold and purple of the heir of the
emperors of Rome: don’t you think that such a sample from the wardrobe of the sove-
reign-pontiff reveals the conventual simplicity of the monk framed in the splendours of
the church 2'
This observation recurred to me, when afterwards I had the honour to approach the
Holy Father, whose habits are of extreme simplicity. His snuff-box which I looked at one
day, when he condescended to talk to me, is of oval shape, deep, and of thick shell. On
the lid is fixed a common medallion, a design copied from the Virgin of the Chair of
Raphael, of which the original is in the Pitti Palace.
At the moment we were going to cross the threshold of the church, the abbé, plucking
me by the arm, resumed : ‘Let me tell you, before going in, that Baccio Pintelli of
Florence, who died in 1480, rebuilt, at the expense of Ferdinand IV. of Spain, the church
of St. Peter in Montorio for monks of the Order of St. Francis, to whom it had been
ceded.” But this did not much interest me, for good reason.
V.
In spite of my efforts to check that curiosity which was the destruction of Lot's wife,
I had been so dazzled by a glimpse from the top of the terrace of the panorama of Rome,
that at first I only gave a very divided attention to the examination of this little church.
It has in its unique nave a profusion of those fine works of sculpture and painting, due
to secondary masters whom we do not learn to appreciate until one has acclimatised one's
taste to certain traditional qualities. -
We cannot, however, help admiring there one of the good works of Sebastian del
Piombo, the Flagellation of Christ. The work is supposed to have been executed after
a cartoon of Michelangelo; its style is lofty without being either violent or harsh ; the
painting, of a very deep quality, would be more easily appreciated if the small chapel
which gives it shelter were less sombre. It is on the master-altar of St. Peter in Mon-
torio that, before our Italian campaigns, Raphael’s Transfiguration was to be found, a
famous work of a painter whom it represents when handed over to the ambitions of his
third manner: then this famous canvas was sent to the Louvre, whence it was restored
in 1815. Since then it remains at the Vatican. I should have noticed at St. Peter the
sepulchral chapel of the Del Monte family, by Ammanato, who has carved some fine
figures, among others that of Justice, which offers the little known singularity of having
been taken from the same model as the renowned statue of G. della Porte at the tomb
of St. Paul in the Vatican basilica.
Let us mention a small round temple, surrounded by sixteen grey marble columns,
|||||||||||&/
º
* º ºf
*** * * * *
|
:
º
|
|
|



SUNSET FROM THE JANICULUM. 17
and surmounted by a cupola. Ferdinand and Isabella had it erected by Bramante at
the very spot where St. Peter is said to have been crucified. A gift of alms will procure
you a present of a pinch or even a packet of the dust of the place. I scandalized my
companion by considering this little object as a fine example of those correct styles that
the Joseph Prud’hommes of art have consecrated. Nothing is worse adapted for a great
commemoration, or so ill becomes a spot where Nero had set up the cross of the first
of the popes, as this prototype of the belvederes which, in our English gardens under
Lewis XVI., prepared resting-places at the top of the grass-plots for the Aspasias of the
Directory.
We remained seated a long while in this trim nave, the construction of which I should
have placed much later than it really ought to be—a mistake often occurring before
the monuments of Rome, which have been tardily imitated by our architects. An
intensely blue sky projected through the window-panes a less lively light, when, growing
impatient to let my eye wander over a vaster horizon, I begged to leave the church of
St. Peter in Montorio. *
To describe what meets one on this terrace, from which Montaigne three centuries
ago threw his eye over a noble winter prospect (26th January), one would have to
introduce into the description the abridgment of Roman history. Rome is only a
foreground of the picture; for the view extends towards the north over the plains reach-
ing as far as the Apennines, whence once rushed down Equi, Sabini, Hernici. Towards
the south-east at the foot of the Alban mountains, it embraces those plains of the old
Latium which open out by the country of the Rutuli on the swamps of the Volsci. The
sun ready to set behind us in the Tyrrhene Sea, inflamed with its crepuscular purple the
domes, towers, and pinnacles, the façades of palaces and ruins, as well as the volcanic
mounds scattered at the foot of the chains and over the plateaux: a few peaks silvered
with early snow crowned the violet Apennines with a pyramid of rose colour, where
brighter lines marked here and there a hamlet perched high. Between these two
extreme points, the blue-tinged mountains, the city glowing and ruddy in the midst of
the bronze zone of its Byzantine walls, lay stretched before us, a mixture of verdure and
russet outlines, the country crossed by aqueducts, covered with ancient villas, and
pierced by long roads of old renown, marked out and lined with tombs. The yellow
Tiber, flavus as Horace called it, winds at your feet like a track of sand; going up
towards the horizon it melts, on one side in the azure of the sky, on the other in the fires
of the setting sun.
While the abbé continued to point out to me each monument, each site, from Mount
Soracte to Tivoli, from the tomb of Adrian to the mole of Caecilia Metella, I fancied I saw
again what he introduced to me. To the right especially, beyond St. Paul and the
Ardean road, to the culminating point of the hill of Jupiter; from Alba Longa and the
distances of the Appian Way to the old Latin gate, memorable spots occur in such
numbers, on a theatre so noble, that one looks forth, as in a dream where one traversed
the air with wings, over all the legend of the ages closing in its sanctuary—the Forum
Romanum, whose ruins, rising to the left of the Coliseum, at this moment glittered in
a burning light. Framing panoplies of ruins and little domes and terraced gardens, the
famous hills, the Coelian, the Palatine, the Capitoline, marked the enclosure of the dale
of Romulus and the swamps of the Velabrum. How many mighty names, how many
mighty things in this little space How many kingdoms in miniature destroyed by wars
of giants -
ID
18 A’OME.
Gazing on this city in the majestic serenity of its work achieved, cradle of our
civilizations and old capital of our ancient world, how inevitably one ends,-under the
prestige of so many reminiscences restoring the mind to its first steps in study, the
imagination to the first brightness of its dawn, how inevitably one ends by a sentiment
of happiness at awaking in this primitive fatherland, after only seeing it dimly and in
far-off dreams | The Christian epopee which allies itself to the traditions of ancient
history and everlasting verse makes this spiritual filiation more direct, and this impression
of Roman maternity more venerable and more touching.
The light fell; but I could have forgotten myself there for a lifetime, as in those
spheres of paradise where ecstasies of hours will be the eternal joy of the chosen. “Do
you know,” said I to the abbé with sincere distress, “I am undone? Never shall I have
the courage to quit Rome, and give up the sight of all this.’
‘Come,” he replied, with the modesty which becomes a victor; “there are three
months gained in a single hour. You will now have to wander at your will, to traverse
the whole pell-mell, to acclimatise yourself without fatigue; and after five or six weeks
of such a life as that, thanks to so fortunate a preparation, we shall then be in a state to
begin to see Rome.’ -
TITIMILLIII'll ſºlºiſſºlſ|TFº
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VIEW OF ST. PETER IN MONTORIO.

































GATE OF ST. PAUL OR OSTIENSIS.
CHAPTER II.
Noviciate : Installation-Description of the Forum Romanum.—St. Paul fuori le mura. What a Basilica is
Origin and purpose of Ancient Basilicas.-Appropriation of the Christian Basilicas.-Hierarchy of the
Roman Churches.—Arch of Placidia.-Ciborium of Arnolfo, &c.—Cloister of St. Paul. Legends of the
Road: the Ladder of St. Bernard–The Three Fountains.—Pyramid of Cestius.-Bridge of Horatius Cocles.
–Origin of Monte Testaccio.—Walk to the Coliseum.—Ascent of the Flavian Amphitheatre.
T lasted pretty nearly forty days, that period of vagabondage which the abbé's
experience had foreseen From morning to evening we went from one
quarter to another, from a church to baths, from basilicas to museums, trying
hard to bind together by some idea of doctrine or chronology so many objects
of observation and study. But too many objects that were absolutely new presented
themselves in riddles; the proper names of history, of mythology, of art, were all
mingled together as in an urn, and after days of panting curiosity, there remained in
the evening only confused visions, made feverish by the weakness of convalescence,
and disentangled with effort in the restless wakefulness of the nights.
By way of contrast with this dispersive existence, I had happily the refuge of an
accustomed life at home, the communicative intimacy of the family, and even security
of service. On this subject, not less in the interests of health than with a view to
economy, I will urge any one who intends to make a prolonged stay in Italy, to take his
master-cook or cookmaid with him, and to establish himself as neither more nor less than


ID 2
2O ACOME.
a citizen of Rome in an apartment, which will always be spacious but never elegant.
Ours was in the Via di Capo le Case, on the slope of the Pincian, near the walk of the Villa
Medici, where we counted certain juvenile friendships among the scholars of the French
Academy. Introductions easily procured acquaintances of distinction; some artists
from Paris in this way added to our party of an evening. This is rest and diversion of
mind; the healthy return, in a climate where fatigue is a danger, to the repairing habits
of ordinary life.
It was only after some time, and without any deliberate plan of utilising my notes that
I applied myself to the study of things one by one and closely. Friendly encouragements
emboldened me to venture still further; more than these, however, the familiar demon
which by instinct and habit stimulates our impressions to revive in firm shape, and
forces our aspirations to the labour of writing.
Still, in the midst of the memories of Rome, it is prudent for a writer to keep himself
aside; he has so many things to present that if, as in ordinary travels, he placed himself
in relief to animate the scene, the frame of his composition would usurp a boundless space.
The author then will rest in the background, like a bird singing unseen in the sacred
wood. And the motives will unfold themselves in the pell-mell of epochs, in the strange
contrast in which centuries and men are entangled. Nature presents Rome to you so ; it
is this even which animates the only city of the dead where we are vivified by the full
breath of the ages.
These assurances given once for all, it will be understood that the Forum Romanum
and the Coliseum, of which we have just had a glimpse, were the object of our first
pilgrimages. -
I.
When we remember what this bit of narrow valley was, the interests of the world that
have been debated there, the voices that have resounded there, the dramas that have been
there unfolded; when we think that from the almost fabulous time of the alliance of the
Sabines with the hordes of Romulus down to the last Augustuli, this spot was the very
brain of the immense Roman Empire, we hardly dare to tread its soil, so profoundly is
one seized with a religious impression. The entire history of a people, of the most
renowned of all peoples, worked itself out on this scene, Soul and sanctuary of Rome.
A little while ago it was only known as the Campo Vaccino, so far had the Catholic
middle age forgotten the Forum. It was France which at the beginning of the century
restored its title, that has become popular again since our administration has cleared the
ruins away from a part of the old soil, a highly honourable enterprise. But before people
put up their rustic vehicles here, an adjoining field had already received, towards the year
426 of Rome, a qualification derived from the surname of Vitruvius Vaccus, chief of the
revolt of the Privernates, who lived in great splendour at Rome, where, according to Livy,
“he had in front of the Palatine a house which was razed to the ground, and its site
being sown with grass took the name of Fields of Vaccus.” In Vacci pratis, writes Cicero
in his turn, domus ſuit M. Vacci, gua publicata est et eversa.
These texts have been relied upon to create for the Campo Vaccino a new etymology,
and to trace to antiquity a designation that is really modern. In fact, the historians
never describe the Forum so, and if the name of the place had come from Vaccus, it
INTERIOR OF THE FORUM ROMANUM : TEMPLES OF SATURN AND VESPASIAN.

AWORUM ROM/AMUM. 2 I
would have given Vacceio, or Vaccio, and not Vaccino, of which the meaning is distinct.
If this untenable etymology had not been recently brought into fashion, I should not have
spoken of it.
We know where the Forum was, but its exact boundaries leave room for a host of
uncertainties, and have given rise to numerous controversies. A portion only of the place
has been exposed by excavations. The truth as to the whole is still half buried under
four-and-twenty feet of ruins heaped up in the eleventh century by the vandalism of
Robert Guiscard, who, to avenge the popes, destroyed their capital, the marvel of the old
world. It would have been necessary, therefore, only the coffer of St. Peter is not rich
enough, to continue on this long space, divided by two distinct levels, the excavations
begun under Paul III., pushed on with
more activity when Rome, violently
usurped, made part of the French Em-
pire, and since then under the reigns
of Leo XII. and Gregory XVI.
The interruption of these explora-
tions, the painful ignorance in which
people of different nations have re-
mained on a point that interests all, is
to my mind a humiliating mark of the
barbarism that still governs inter-
national relations. States that are a
little cultivated ought surely to have
come to an understanding with the Holy
Father for the common digging up of
this morsel of the ancestral field.
If, to appreciate the state of the
Forum, we seek from books the ele-
ments of a complete inventory of its
treasures, we shall find matter for plenty
of regrets. Then, like numbers of au-
thors, we shall draw up in tearful and
sonorous periods a report of things
missing enumerated with all compla-
cency. Let us remark that in general TEMPLE OF VESPASIAN AND PORTICO OF THE TWELVE GODS.
in these descriptions which take in hand
the restoration of the Forum, everything is heaped up that it might have contained in
ten successive epochs. People seem to forget that in so narrow a space, each period
from Romulus and Tatius to the Emperor Julian must have pulled down to build up ;
that the Forum in the time of Scipio was no longer like the Forum of Tarquin; that
the first Caesars laid low the buildings of the Republic; then that they in turn yielded
their temples and basilicas to the ambitious enterprises of the Flavii, the Antonines,
and their heirs. How many monuments must have succeeded one another on the Via
Sacra, changed names and destinations, and disappeared, from the temple of Venus-
et-Roma to the Tullian Prisons, and from the ruins of Caligula's palace to the foun-
dations of the fallen Temple of Concord ' Between the church of San Lorenzo in
Miranda encorbelled in the temple of Faustina, and Sta. Maria Liberatrice which marks

22 - A&OME.
the old domain of the Vestals; between the arch of Titus, and the Tabularium of
Sylla which supports on the Doric columns engaged in its walls the palace of the Capitol,
there is a long half-hollowed trapezium, the most splendid of historical sepultures, on
which one might expatiate for ever. -
As at Pompeii, we recognise the streets with their footpaths worn by passengers who
for fifteen centuries have ceased to pass; we are amazed to find ourselves succeeding
them on this Cyclopean pavement, repaired on the same system ever since the time when
the Censors Flaccus and Posthumius Albinus had Rome paved, as well as the Clivus
Capitolinus, which at this epoch (173 years before the reign of Augustus) went from the
temple of Saturn to the senate and its curia. - -
To cross the place and gain from the pit of the Quirinal the bank of the Tiber by the
Velabrum, there has been thrown at the open and hollow extremity of the Forum a
bridge, at the end of which you find an approach enabling you to descend into the
territory of anterior civilization. Immediately on leaving the arches of this bridge and
facing the portico of Sylla, you see yourself surrounded by temples in ruins, steps, ancient
trenches, broken columns, fragmentary inscriptions, basilicas reduced to their pavements.
The Sacred Way winds, marked and ample, as if the queen city were still flourishing.
Following its line, you lose with the sight of modern things the memory of the centuries
that divide us from antiquity. - -
Towards the top of the necropolis this street bifurcates, and the right branch comes
out on the portico of the Twelve Gods, the Dii Consentii who had to be consulted
previously to every grave undertaking. Ennius has preserved their names for us; they
were—Vesta, Jupiter, Juno, Neptune, Venus, Mars, Minerva, Ceres, Apollo, Diana,
Mercury, and Vulcan. They were lodged in twelve shrines, adorned with statues believed
by St. Augustin to be endowed with a supernatural power, and in which he supposed
the priests to be able by a magic virtue to incarnate demons. The worship of these gods
endured to the close of Paganism, for the portico whose colonnade Pius IX. has raised
is of the fourth century. Out of twelve sanctuaries seven remain, leaning on the modern
incline of the Capitol; I should be disposed to think with Canina that the five other
shrines must exist under the slope, beside the lower layers of an outer wall which must
have belonged to the temple of Jupiter Tonans, erected by Augustus after a violent storm.
This last monument was believed to be found quite close to the Tabularium, in front of a
ruin reduced to three fluted columns, connected with an entablature whose frieze is
adorned with arabesques of much richness, but drily executed, a restoration of the time
of Septimius or Caracalla: they are the remains of the temple of Vespasian. We know
in fact that he erected it, in order to give himself a pretext for walling up under the
Tabularium an entry to the Capitol by which Sabinus might have invaded him. The
walled gateway, which is still to be seen close to the building, contributes to confirm the
explanation that we here prefer.
That among the monuments whose dedication seems best ascertained, especially
since the discovery of a celebrated inscription, is the temple of Saturn, which, for want of
a careful study of Cicero, archaeologists had stupidly dedicated to Concord. It was taken
also for the temple of Fortune, and for others also; there was no lack of dedications for it.
The AErarium was kept in this edifice, as is shown by numerous inscriptions, in which the .
public treasury is described as Ærarium Saturni, as is proved also by the titles of the
commissioners and collectors—prayecti, viatores quastorii—aô ºrario Saturni. Reduced
in our days to a few bits of its pavement, to some of the lower courses, and to eight
AWORUM A&OMAAWUM. 23
columns which remain standing with an entablature supported on Ionic capitals, the
temple of Saturn replaced, under Maxentius in the fourth century, an earlier edifice. This
monument is patched; disparate among themselves, the shafts show some courses set
inversely; the friezes are made up of collected pieces. The direction of the cella is shown
by the columns of the portico; the site from the time of Caesar is fixed by the inscription
Anciria. We should come then to determine pretty accurately the spot where, like
Marius, like Sylla, like most of the masters of the Republic, Julius Caesar presented
himself to lay hands on the treasure. It was there, on the steps of this portico, that
having menaced the tribune Metellus with death, he said with an appalling tranquillity to
the inviolable magistrate; Dost thou not know, young man, that it is easier for me to
do it than to say it?
The spot recalls many another memory. It was on this Capitoline slope that the
house was situated which the state presented to M. Manlius, after he had saved the
citadel from the Gauls who were scaling its approaches. Soon accused of aspiring after
the kingship, Manlius Capitolinus was thrice put upon his trial, before it was possible to
wring from the people the condemnation of a hero who called Jupiter to witness for his
defence, and pointed to the Capitol which his courage had saved. Then the senators
appointed a place beyond the Nomentane Gate in the sacred forest of Petelia, whence the
monument of his glory was no longer visible. He was condemned, “a verdict hateful to
the very judges themselves,’ and the tribunes hurled him from the Tarpeian rock.
Thus, says Livy, the same spot was for this man the witness of the loftiest glory and the
most degrading of punishments. *
His house was razed to the ground, and it was decreed that henceforth no private
person should have a habitation within the Capitoline enclosure. After the Auruntian
war, the dictator Lucius Furius, son of the great Camillus, raised on the site a temple
to Juno, distinct from that of Juno Moneta; for the surname of Moneta only ascends to
the war of Pyrrhus and the Tarentines, during which, being consulted about the scarcity
of money from which the Romans suffered, the goddess warned them (monet) that resources
would never fall short if they devoted themselves to justice and arms.
As we have named Juno Moneta, let us explain that her temple was situated not in the
Forum, as has often been supposed, but on the Capitoline on this same side, on the site
now occupied by the gardens of the Caffarelli Palace (the Prussian legation). Excavations
a couple of years ago exhumed the considerable remains of this temple, where as far back
as the consular era coin was struck, and which by the Hundred Steps could communicate
with the AErarium. - - .
The first coins of the Republic were of copper, and were put into circulation under
the Decemvirs, the year 301 of Rome. Thirty-three years after appeared silver money,
personified in the god Argentinus, son of AEsculanus, the god of bronze. The pieces of
ten, of five asses, the sesterces, estimated at two and a half pounds of copper, did not
come into circulation, according to Pliny, until 270 years before our era. He adds that the
first gold coin appeared sixty-two years later. Mommsen, who makes them date from the
Punic wars, remarks that the gold coin was never deified. Everybody knows that in the
earliest times of Rome King Servius cast cubic ingots of bronze, marked off by weight,
and stamped with the figure of a sheep (pecus), whence the word pecunia. Later on, the
people gave the name of moneta to the pieces which were issued from the temple of Juno
Moneta—ex acde Moneta, writes Cicero. Hence the origin of the name money. Juno had
more than one temple in this name, and here is still a cause of mistake. Open Livy, you
24 A’OME.
will see there that the praetor Cicereius, once secretary of Scipio Africanus, vowed a temple
to Juno Moneta as soon as he had subdued Corsica; he expected to receive some valuable
advice from the goddess on these terms. But if you go on to the forty-fifth book, the
dedication of this monument will show you that it was on the Alban hill.
The Temple of Saturn is separated from that of Vespasian by a branch of the Via Sacra
which was called the Clivus Capito/imus, or slope of the Capitol. Leaving this to follow a
sort of alley encumbered with broken marbles, you reach the Schola Xantha. Here are
the lodges (faberna), to the number of six, which served as bureaux for the scribes, the
archivists, the praccomes of the curule ediles. These vaulted shops have still their threshold;
they continue below and in front of the portico of the Twelve Gods as far as the foot of
the Tabularium. Pius IX. had them
cleared out and restored in 1857.
Let us now cross, parallel to the
Tabularium, the base of the Capitoline
inſermon/ium, by directing our course on
the side of the Tullian prison and the
Gemoniae, which have given way to the
slope of the Ara Coeli. We shall come
across, between the arch of Septimius
Severus and the corner of the portico
erected in 676 of Rome by Lutatius Catu-
º º: |lºſſ º lus, in front of the building where they
º, | kept the tables of bronze (the archives
of the Republic), the remains of the
renowned temple of Concord, erected,
it is said, by Tiberius. On this point no
uncertainty; votive inscriptions con-
firm with reference to the site and
aspect of this edifice the indications of
Plutarch, Dion Cassius, and Festus. The
entry of the temple, one of the stirring
historic spots of ancient Rome, is still
marked by the holes in which the hinges
of the gates turned. The monument
*
º
T.
º
1.
.
.
º
º
t
ENTABLATURE OF THE TEMPLE OF CONCORD. WaS enOrmous, nearly Square; they de-
scended from its vast portico by steps
of marble, of which numerous fragments still remain in their place.
Turned to the Forum, close to the Gemoniae, standing back at the foot of the Capitol,
the portico of the Temple of Concord served as a meeting-place; the senate assembled
there on great occasions, where there was occasion to address the people assembled before
the rostra. The place of the speaker, therefore, must have been placed between the steps
of the temple and the popular comitia of the Forum.
Now the tribune, at first placed near the temple of Castor and Pollux, long confounded
with the Graecostasis, where from the time of Pyrrhus foreign ambassadors were quartered,
the tribune for orations was afterwards transferred between the comitium, of which these
steps are still to be recognised, and the foot of the many steps of the Temple of Concord,
almost in the angle of Severus's arch. There still remain of it massive constructions of

ACORUM ROMAAWU)/. 25
peperino or volcanic rock ten mêtres long. I have measured them. Close by is the office
of the scribes who preserved the speeches, officials who, from Tullius Tiro downwards,
Cicero's freedman, may be compared to our short-hand writers.
These signs are written unmistakably, and the essential portions still subsist. I shall
be forgiven, then, if I abstain from dissertations on the subject. I should fear to chill the
impressions which this spot stirs. Nor will I expatiate on the monography of the Temple
of Concord; facings of the ce//a in antique yellow, African marbles that introduced all the
animation of natural polychromy, . . . . extinguished splendours of which one is reduced
to a mere list of memories. To establish the antiquity of the work, I will remind the reader
that one superb entablature and some -
highly-decorated bases of columns pre-
served in the Capitol, are in work and
design closely recalled by some square
bases and other fragments found in
Nero's palace under the baths of Titus.
It was at the entry to the Forum that
the Piso lived whom Agrippina accused
of having poisoned Germanicus, and it
was there where he was mysteriously
assassinated; Tacitus insinuates that it
was at the instigation of Tiberius, who
might have been compromised by his
complicity. What wondrous events on
a scene as narrow as that of a play-
house, from the days since Brutus showed
there the dagger of Lucretia, and Vir-
ginius bought in the shops to the north
of the Forum, whose site is still marked,
the knife which, to reach the decemvirs,
was to pass through his daughter's
heart, down to the memorable occasion
when the curia was burnt before the
body of Caesar! To animate all, to
justify all, to bring back the great spec-
tres of history that they may introduce
the emotions of their presence, it is
enough to seat oneself on a column, and fit reminiscences to that fallen ornament.
Disperse a murmuring populace over the comitium, whose steps are before your feet;
from top to bottom of the steps of the Temple of Concord arrange senators draped in their
togas, attentive, breathless. . . . . At the tribune Cicero fulminates his last oration against
Catiline; the people, torn by conflicting emotions, interrupt the consul by prolonged
uproars, while farther off on your left the accomplices of Catiline, fast in the Mamertine
prison, terror-struck at the cries and at Marcus Tullius's eloquence, so mortal for them,
feel their doom and wait death.
Ingenious at exciting two different kinds of audiences, Cicero now electrifies the Senate,
and he alarms it by letting loose the populace that he knows how to calm by a word; acting
in turn now on the comitia, now on the patricians, turned successively towards one and
E
º
º
tº eun
º
º
REMAINS OF THE TEMPLE OF CASTOR.

26 A’OME.
the other, he ends by rallying all to a single opinion and a single will. The sight of the
places enlightens stories often obscure to those who only read, who do not know how to
explain to themselves these effects almost simultaneously exercised by Cicero at once on
the senate and the populace. We feel a certain thrill when we touch the tribune in which
the holes still remain that the rostra were fitted to, the tribune to which the young Octavius
nailed the head and the two hands of Cicero.
It was after the submission of the Latins, 334 years before our era, that the vessels of
Antium having been burnt, their beaks were made to adorn the tribune in the Forum.
Since then the rostra became the formal and indispensable decoration of the tribunes.
This comitium was suppressed by Caesar: he substituted for it—an institution less disturbing
to his own designs — a temple that
Augustus did not fail to complete. The
place had long been sacred; rostrayue
id fem//um aft/eſ/a/um, says the same
Tullius. For the Romans every place
consecrated by the augurs took the
name of temple. Augustus no doubt
attached to it an expiatory significance.
In order to read the events of these
epochs without confusion, it will be use-
ful, even at the risk of repetition, to fix
more exactly certain changes that have
been too vaguely indicated. The rostra
had been placed not far from the Temple
of Castor and Pollux up to the time of
Sulla, and perhaps later; the abbé
declared that he was able to show that
Cicero had pleaded against Verres and
for Milo at the tribune where, under
dictatorships anterior to Caesar, Cato
undoubtedly spoke. The Catilinarian
orations were pronounced, as I have
said, before the steps of the portico of
Concord; at last, after the suppression
COLUMN OF PHOCAS. of this sacred comitium, the tribune was
removed to the front of its first site—
that is, to the foot of the Quirinal, between St. Adrian and San Lorenzo in Miranda,
but nearer the latter church and standing more forward, under the very trees of the
avenue which the excavations must have destroyed. It was at this third tribune that
Antony spoke against the murderers of Caesar, and it was there that he bared his corpse
before the eyes of the people.
Before descending from the Vulcanal let us place ourselves in the centre, at a spot
where the road widening is bordered by footpaths of peperino of a tolerable height; it
was here that at the close of a triumph they unyoked from the triumphal car the conquered
chiefs and kings. They then took the right street, which still leads towards the Mamertine
prison where they were strangled. Jugurtha walked with bowed body where we pensively
tread; Syphax, Perseus, in their turn followed this Via Dolorosa. A man loves to lose

`,
FORUM A&OMAAWUM. 27
memory of himself among the stones that the flame of the sun makes warm and dazzling,
in these richly-coloured ruins, where all lives, all speaks, where what is no more seems to
date from yesterday, where all melancholy is put to flight by the brightness of the day and
the activity of one’s mind.
Here are the marble flagstones and the vast enclosure of the great Julian basilica, that
Caesar built lest they should be tempted to re-establish the comitia above or on that side
of the Temple of Castor, rebuilt afterwards by Tiberius at the very spot where once the
Dioscuri appeared to announce the victory of Aulus Posthumius over the Tarquins—a
legend borrowed from the war of the Crotonians against Locri a century earlier. There
remained there four noble columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux, but one of them
has been since transported nearer the arch of Septimius Severus, and re-erected in honour
of the Emperor Phocas. Smaragdus, exarch of Ravenna, took the responsibility of this
monument raised to a hideous usurper under pretext of his benefactions. Let me explain
that at the prayer of Boniface III., Phocas had forbidden the patriarch of Constantinople
to assume the title of universal bishop. Noble recollections are effaced ; since the year
607 Phocas survives in happy obscurity with his ill-acquired memorial.
It was from the height of the Julian basilica, looking to the Via Sacra, that for some
days Caius Caligula fantastically took it into his head to throw money to the people, daily
changing his dress to add more grace to his largesses. He was seen first in a tunic coloured
and low-necked, bright with precious stones, and with the wrists fastened by bracelets;
then with the robes and ornaments of a woman; next with a beard of gold, and holding a
caduceus in his left hand; then in the breastplate of Alexander the Great that he had taken
from his tomb. Finally he appeared as Venus, or in undress; Suetonius is most clear. This
feminine array must have sat curiously on a man of immense stature, pale, enormously
corpulent, with hollow eyes and hollow temples, a fierce brow, very bold, and an extremely
shaggy breast.
A few years afterwards, on his return from an expedition to Greece, the expedition of
an artist who goes to give performances in the provinces, Nero, entering the Via Sacra
by the great circus, whose gate he had removed, turned the corner of the Forum, and
proceeded in order to present himself at the Temple of Apollo-Palatinus on the triumphal
car of Augustus, to pass before the Julian basilica, clad in a purple robe, and a chlamys
sprinkled with golden stars, his brow encircled by the Olympic crown, and that of the
Pythian Games in his right hand. They bore before him other crowns worn on the theatre;
on his path they sacrificed victims; they scattered offerings of incense, birds, ribands, and
cakes of cheese.
Let us follow the procession with the crowd to gain, between the basilica of Julius
Caesar and the three pillars of the Dioscuri, the Via Nova which, confounded with its
homonym of the Palatine recognised by Pietro Rosa, did much to mislead the commen-
tator: we shall see some admirable coffer-work under the architraves of the ruins by
which we pass.
The Forum ended there. Between its enclosure and the northern reverse of the
Palatine, came in order the house of the vestals, the habitations of the Rex Sacrificulus,
of the Pontifex Maximus, and the temple of the goddess on which has been placed the
rotunda of St. Theodore. Along the hill on flowery terraces there stretched out some
much-envied dwellings, such as the houses of Clodius and Cicero. The last which
belonged afterwards to Censorinus, then to Sisenna (Paterculus is our authority), had
been originally built by the tribune Livius Drusus, who had said to the architect—
E 2
28 A’OME.
“Arrange it so that my life may be in the open day, and my actions without
mystery.”
At the very foot of the Palatine, at the bottom and on the lower sides of the Forum as
well as along the Via Sacra, was a row of shops of which one strikes the remains at the
first stroke of the pick-axe; there are still collected here shopkeepers' signs engraved on
squares of marble. I have held one, belonging to one of the jewellers who succeeded one
another there, from the time when Papirius Cursor distributed the bucklers of chased gold
and the magnificent arms of the Samnites, so that being displayed in front of the shops
those trophies might furnish a magnificent decoration to the Forum. The custom was
afterwards observed by the aediles.
PAVEMENT OF JULIAN BASILICA AND TABULARIUM.
Into whatever place you step, you come upon memorials; on whatever side you turn,
the eye is interested by monuments. A little on this side of the column of Phocas, right
of the Via Sacra, the damp ground covers the fountain of Juturna where Curtius sacrificed
himself. Exactly here stood the milliarium aureum, and on this pavement Galba was
massacred by his furious legionaries, who carried off the bald head of the emperor
supporting it through the mouth. Lift your eyes beyond the Forum, turning your back
to the Palatine; the walls, the brackets, the stucco of the Emilian basilica, lose themselves
under the portal of St. Adrian. Near the gaol of Tullius is St. Luke, formerly
St. Martine; between St. Luke and St. Cosmo here is San Lorenzo in Miranda, which
grasps in its arms the temple of Antoninus and Faustina. As we cross the open space
transversely going towards the arch of Septimius Severus, we follow the road along

ENTRY oF THE FORUM ROMANUM BY THE VIA SACRA.–TEMPLE OF VENUS ET ROMA.–sTA. FRANCESCA RoMANA, ARCH oF TITUs, CAMPANILE o F THE CAPITOL, ETC.

CHURCHES AAWD BASIZICA.S. 29
which Vitellius was dragged, down to the narrow staircase of the Gemoniae by which
criminals passed out from the Mamertine prison. - -
The Forum with its frame of buildings, from the heights of the Capitol to the basilica
of Constantine, was assuredly within small compass the most imposing spot in the
universe: no wonder the restoration of this city of monuments, perched one above another
under the sides of the three hills, is the privileged historic romance of all architects. It
is certain that this multitude of temples, basilicas, porticoes, piled up and placed one
above another, and stretching against the blue sky their white and rose profiles, that these
forests of columns of all shades, standing in rows from the Julian basilica to the Temple of
Jupiter Capitolinus, and letting the oblique sun-rays play between their ruddy shafts, that
these deep vaults, this network of aisles and shining architraves against the chiaro-oscuro
of the galleries, must indeed have dazzled barbarian and Gaul as they drew near the
Olympus of the conquering divinities.
In these structures supported on trunks of granite or alabaster, all is left open to the
light, all expands itself in the air; but by the surface of the soil there was nothing but traps,
obscure passages, labyrinths, mystery. With what anxiety must they have interrogated
these close passages, these dumb temples, these threatening resounding doors of bronze,
when, on one of those great days of the civil wars where eloquence was only an appeal to
force, where the toga hid a poniard, they listened before the rostra to a consul or a tribune
who, staking life and the destinies of an empire, laid anxiously in wait for the moment
when from the secret places surrounding the Forum there should rush to hurl themselves
on tribune and senate, apostate soldiers followed by a populace in fury! These saturnalia
of Roman demagoguism, example and scourge of modern nations, were held here; for
fifteen hundred years the world has never turned its passions or its thoughts away from
this corner of earth. - -
Such as it became, this necropolis is still, I repeat; for one still feels it, until one is
overwhelmed beneath the thought, to be the most considerable spot on the globe. After
losing oneself in forgetfulness there until night, like a scholar on his first pilgrimage one
turns away, with a blue veronica between the pages of one's album, and a tiny bit of
marble in one’s pocket.
II.
The abbé insisted on a visit to St. Paul extra Muros, although this basilica is newly
reconstructed, and is now lost among the fields nearly a league from the gate of Ostia.
Our friend seemed to attach to this journey a sort of conventional propriety, in which it
would be unbecoming to fail. One day as he returned to it before a number of persons,
I took it into my head to show some surprise that in the state into which the pontifical
finances had come even under Leo XII., they should have sacrificed such large sums to
rebuild far from the inhabited quarter a church that was of no use for worship and very
burdensome to keep up. & - & *.
No one answered; there was on all sides a silence full of reproach and shame, and I
felt that I had placed myself in quarantine as infected by the utilitarian murrain. Witness
of this first attack, the painter Bénouville had the courage to approach me and say in a
low tone as he passed quickly by: ‘St. Paul is one of the seven Mayor Basilicas . . .’
Then the abbé in a contrite voice threw out these words of still greater mystery, ‘It
is one of the ſºve . . . .”
3O A&OME.
Then like the other he turned away. To escape from an ignorance which exposed me
to the shame of putting my neighbour to the blush, I resolved to settle the question—
What is precisely a Roman basilica? -
By force of inquiring and pressing I discovered that nobody, or hardly anybody,
knows anything about it—a thing that comes of everybody imagining that he knows.
The origin of the basilicas, their classification, their function—these are ideas not only
curious but indispensable for the appreciation of the churches in their descent from the
primitive times of the faith.
It is less easy than might be supposed to make out the Roman basilicas clearly, and to
fix them historically with any precision. A certain proverb marks in Rome “as many
churches as days in the year: ' a calculation that should include the oratories, the
chapels attached to the religious associations, to the guilds and other charitable
foundations, which give a much higher figure, I do not doubt. Above these inferior
churches, come the churches called National, served by officials belonging to the different
countries; then the Parishes. -
If we ascend to the higher class, there are the Stational churches, in whose favour
their age establishes a kind of nobility. They are built on the site of the house, or the
burying-place of a saint, or the place of a martyr's execution. The Christians of the
persecuting times went to pray in these spots consecrated by tradition, and when
churches replaced the modest sacella, they remained attached to solemn stations which are
still observed in time of jubilee. Above these churches come the Cardinalist churches.
In their origin, the cardinals (word equivalent to principals) were the priests set over the
clergy of each church provided with a ſixed title by Pope Evaristus, when he distributed
Rome into parochial quarters at the opening of the second century. The same dignity
was assigned to the seven deacons charged with the administration of alms as well as of
the property of the poor, a number that was doubled by St. Gregory, and augmented
afterwards. Finally, the seven suburban vicars whose diocesan head-quarters border the
gates of Rome had also the title of cardinals. Hence these three orders: cardinal
bishops, cardinal priests, cardinal deacons. At the present day they count fifty-one
cardinalist churches for the priests or bishops, and fifteen for the cardinal deacons.
Each cardinal bears the name of the church to which he is attached; he is bound to
provide for its spiritual and material wants, an obligation promulgated in the fifth Lateran
council, and recalled by Sixtus V., in a bull in which he commends to the titular princes
the decoration, the sustentation, and the offices of these foundations. The foreign
cardinals when they come to Rome are lodged of right in the quarters attached to their
church ; it belongs to them, and has to bear some mark of this infeudation.
Still ascending in the hierarchy; we come at last to the Basilicas, which are the
dignitaries among this nation of temples.
One of the Athenian archons, who bore the name of BagiNews or king, administered
justice under a portico, named for this reason basilica, a term that in other countries of
Greece and Asia was given to the royal palaces. Cato the Censor, who declaimed much
against the arts and customs of the Greeks, yet borrowed from them their hall of justice,
and it was he who about a hundred and ninety years before our era erected in Rome the
first basilica. After that they multiplied. *-
Thus in its origin the basilica is a civil edifice; under the emperors, when the
magistrates sat by delegation from the sovereign, this description of their tribunals
corresponded exactly to a monarchic institution. But as the Greek language was then in
CHURCHES AAWD BASIL ICA.S. - 3 I
favour, the residences themselves of the sovereigns were equally described as basilicas;
this is what happened with the palace, with the Regia or basilica of the Lateran, which
bequeathed its name to the first church that in this imperial residence Constantine had
had built.
It was not merely for this reason, and in conformity with this precedent, that numerous
other churches in Rome have since borne the title of basilicas.
Let us not forget that the edifices so called were above all things praetoria, where
they decided commercial cases, disputes among dealers, and that the merchants had
besides the right to assemble there to discuss their common interests. The inscription of
Bxchange and 7%ibunal of Commerce recently furnished among ourselves the exact definition
of these basilicas. There was to be found there a large hall with sometimes two or three
aisles. Separated from the temple by a septum or barrier, the judges ranged themselves
on three circular sets of benches, in the hemicycle of the principal bay, round the
president who occupied the centre marked by a stall or chair of honour with a high back,
cathedra. It is to this origin that we have to trace, as a name for the seat of the bishop,
the word tribuna invented in the lower Latinity by the side of the old expression tribunal;
the place belonging to the magistrate or tribune. A portico and galleries with columns
stood in front of and around the basilica, like a private Forum attached to some judicial
establishment.
A building of this kind may serve many purposes. As there was nothing sacramental
about the place, it was utilised for a place of assembly, to harangue the people, and even
for public discourses. It was thus that the Apostles and their disciples after them
expounded the doctrines of Christ in the basilicas or tribunals, and it has often happened
that they were brought there to confess at the bar of the judges the truths delivered by
them to the people. Hence the name of Confession, which is still preserved in the old
churches for the spot where in the corresponding basilicas the accused appeared to declare
his faith. It was there that the custom remained of placing the master-altar, every pains
being taken to make its base the exact burying-place of a martyr, so that his relics may
still continue to bear witness. The civil basilicas were numerous; they reckoned more
than forty of them when Diocletian forbade the erection of more. His edict is
important; for it helps us to conceive how under the successors of Constantine so many
churches could take the name of basilicas and really fill their office.
It was Theodosius who erected Catholicism into a judiciary institution and con-
stituted it a state religion; in his reign the bishops acquire rights of jurisdiction that
were speedily extended from clerks to the whole body of the faithful. In 408, under
Honorius, a law excluded from the army as well as from public office all pagans and
heretics; the same year, after the assassination of Stilicho, another law extends the
jurisdiction of the bishops; six days after, a third law enjoins the demolition of the
temples, and orders the substitution of ecclesiastical action for that of the magistrates;
finally, the episcopal jurisdiction applied to nearly all civil affairs, and is freed from all
liability to an appeal; the bishops became praetorian prefects. After these arrangements,
which have been transmitted to us in the Codes of Theodosius and Justinian, the bishops,
and below them the clerks who administered quarters or districts, passed their days in
deciding suits, to the detriment of the religious instruction of the faithful. Far from being
flattered at this augmentation of power, St. Augustin deplores a pompous drudgery
‘which, devouring hours claimed by holy things, constrains him to live amid the hateful
tumult of chicane.’
32 * * * ROME.
These sacerdotal magistrates then occupied most of the old basilicas; the clergy
appropriated some, of which they made churches, while many of them must have con-
tinued to serve for tribunals. Hence the large number of temples which have claimed as
a mark of honour and precedence the title of basilicas, limited in our days—as well as the
privileges, indulgences, and pontifical favours by which the pre-eminence is supported—to
thirteen churches which answer to the number of the Apostles, reckoning among them
St. Matthias who was substituted for Judas, and St. Paul who was admitted into the
apostolic college after his conversion. - & -
But among these thirteen edifices we must distinguish at first seven primitive or Con-
stantinian basilicas, which are or rather were—St. John Lateran, St. Peter of the Vatican,
St. Paul extra Muros, St. Cross in Jerusalem, St. Lawrence extra Muros, St. Agnes
beyond the Nomentane Gate, and Saints Marcellinus and Peter on the Via Labicana.
St. Agnes and Saints Marcellinus and Peter, having been replaced by Sta. Maria
Maggiore and St. Sebastian, these two churches with the five others compose the
seven Major Basilicas of Rome. “They are seven in number,’ says a historian, “to
correspond to the seven hills, their altars being the seven fortified mounts of the church.”
Possibly: but I prefer another explanation, of Panvinio if I am not mistaken, who supposes
the seven basilicas to have been instituted by way of figuring the seven churches of the
Apocalypse, namely, Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia,
Laodicea. - - • * - • • *
The Minor Basilicas—Santa Maria in Trastevere, San Lorenzo in Damaso, Sta. Maria
in Cosmedin, Santi Apostoli, San Pietro in Vincoli and Sta. Maria in Monte Santo, are
only basilicas by assimilation; they have been ennobled.
That is not all : among the seven major basilicas are classed apart and Occupy a
distinct rank, Five Patriarchal Basilicas, whose significance is more striking. Onofrio
Panvinio will assist us to discover it: ‘It is the singular prerogative of the chief of the
universal church to have beside the pontifical see, four other churches where he is
accustomed to officiate as if he were cardinal bishop of each of them. He there exercises
full pontifical jurisdiction on. the titular festivals of these churches, as in the cathedrals
which are peculiarly his own.” - : .* - • *
But why these five cathedrals 2 To establish the sovereignty of the Pontifex Maximus
of Rome over all the bishoprics in the world, represented by the great patriarchates
which once formed distinct churches. St. Lawrence extra Muros is the church of the
patriarchate of Jerusalem, Sta. Maria Maggiore represents the church of Antioch,
St. Paul that of Alexandria, St. Peter of the Vatican that of Constantinople.
The last three have moreover the prerogative of possessing the Holy Door. This is an
entry to the church which is constantly walled up except during jubilees, at the inaugura-
tion of which it is opened by the Sovereign-Pontiff, who strikes it with a golden hammer.
This privilege of the Porta Santa, the three churches I have named have the distinction
of sharing with St. John Lateran, keystone of the ecclesiastical edifice, first Christian
basilica of imperial foundation, queen of Roman cathedrals, metropolis of the first bishopric,
seat of the patriarchate of the west and of the world.
The history of this venerable title of nobility explains how becoming it was to go to
salute the basilica of St. Paul ſuori le mura.
|
|
|
º º
Tººl
§

S7. AA UAE EXTRA MUROS. 33
III.
Still, a son of the north, something of an archaeologist and always an arguer, will have
some trouble in preventing himself from regretting, as he makes his way into St. Paul’s,
that the piety of the faithful towards sacred traditions should have led them to restore
what a catastrophe had laid in ruins. The new church is splendid; the most costly
materials are piled up ; it costs Christendom millions; so much expense and effort
only succeeds in mournfully recalling the basilica founded by Constantine on the tomb
of St. Paul, rebuilt with great splendour from 386 to 392 by the Emperors Valentinian,
Theodosius, Arcadius, and Honorius, preserved for fifteen centuries, and burnt in 1823 by
some clumsy plumbers. -
It was restored on the same plan in the same spot, at the angle of the hill that was cut
to disengage the monument of the Apostle Paul from its catacomb. As we pace these
five aisles, with their superb colonnades, reflected as in a glass in the polished paving of
marble cut in arabesques, can we ever come to forget the mosaics of Nicholas III., the
bronze gates that the consul Castelli had brought from Byzantium, the eighty giant
columns of Paros of violet breccia and pentelica, spoils of the AEmilian basilica, which
supported the edifice on a forest of gems; and those paintings of the year IOOO, and the
pavement of Alexandrian mosaic and antique inscriptions, and the panels fitted to the
frieze where from age to age they drew the reigning popes, from St. Sylvester to Pius VII.,
and the pillars of granite and cipolin which divided the transept into two naves, and so
many other splendours of which it is best to be silent, since they will never be seen more
This president of Catholic basilicas measured nearly four hundred feet long, and the
first Christian ages told their story in it.
When the Ostian basilica was destroyed, Pius VII. was dying; they contrived to hide
the disaster from his knowledge. It was then Leo XII. who ordered the reconstruction
of St. Paul on the same dimensions, copying the dead basilica from memory. The
whole world joined in the work. Schismatical Russia offered the gift of an altar of
malachite; Mahomet brought as tribute to the sanctuaries of Christ four columns of
oriental alabaster, presented by the Sultan; gold, silver, and jewels flowed in from every
side. Hence the porticos of veined Greek marble, the pilasters taken from the quartz
of the Simplon, the walls of Carrara, framed with gems of varied hues; the entablature
of Paros with its violet frieze; the enormous capitals, so lavish in size, so delicate in
execution. Wondrous spectacle, at first sight especially, that vast monument so ancient
and so new, unique in our bourgeois age, of a colossal reliquary executed as if it were
a miniature, and revealed in all its dazzling freshness.
But you do not lose yourself there, as in the old edifices of Ravenna, in a dream of
wondering and confiding admiration. The moment you pass to analysis, the poverty
of existing artists is disclosed in such a degree, that to restore to this noble shrine some-
thing of its soul and the veneration that it ought to inspire, you apply yourself to the
search for the smallest vestiges of the primitive basilica that may have escaped from the
disaster of 1823. This examination is repaid by a few consolations. - -
The mosaic of the apse, or tribuna, work of the thirteenth century representing Christ
with the Apostles, has been restored but too much retouched; the hands are mannered,
and the Christ has been endowed with a feminine adolescence that is a little ridiculous.
At the arch of Galla Placidia, which divides the nave from the transept and which has
F
34 ROME.
retained the name of the daughter of Theodosius, a mosaic of the sixth century, Jesus and
the Twenty Four Old Men of the Apocalypse, might have been preserved more in its
integrity. It belongs to a rather savage state of art, and is wilder than the paintings of the
same time that are to be seen at Ravenna. Rome then became provincial, and ceased
to attract good artists; the capital was elsewhere. A monument perfectly preserved is the
paschal candelabrum of white marble, twelve feet high. This column, on which, among
garlands of fruit and symbolical animals, move a legion of tiny figures representing scenes
of the Passion, is a marvellous work of the ninth century. The Christ upon the Cross is
there represented clothed, which is not a little uncommon. They have also preserved the
old altar executed in the thirteenth century by Arnolfo del Cambio, the most illustrious of
the pupils of Nicholas of Pisa. Under the dome of its campanile flutter pretty seraphim,
and on fine mosaics sport diminutive monks of felicitous design, accompanying exquisite
little figures of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. By ill-luck, in order to make use of
four shafts of oriental alabaster, the whole is overweighted with a heavy canopy, which
swallows up the pinnacles of the altar and intercepts the great mosaic. -
At the bottom of the tribune the pontifical seat is in deplorable style and of a pre-
posterous richness; a large and stupid picture surmounts it—the Apotheosis of St. Paul,
by Camaccini. They were bent on restoring the medallions of the various popes all along
the friezes, but most of the heads are purely imaginary—an unpardonable piece of folly.
The directors of the work did not take the trouble to make the necessary inquiries so as to
procure the real likenesses of the sovereign-pontiffs; you only find those which everybody
knows; the others imply in their inventors very little understanding of physiognomy
considered in relation to character.
It is at St. Paul extra Muros that they preserve the famous crucifix which spoke to
St. Bridget; it is the work of the most mystic of Giotto's pupils, the Roman Cavallini, a
holy character whose works used to impress people's feelings. On one of the walls of the
transept they have made a copy of one of Raphael's great compositions: it is frightful.
The late King Ludwig of Bavaria, whom I honoured as a serious amateur for the art-
institutions that he has created at Munich, and who accidently happened to be there,
destroyed an illusion by asking in my presence if this feeble and rose-coloured imitation
was not an original Raphael. - .
For all these imperfections, St. Paul will continue to be reckoned among the important
monuments of Rome; its richness and splendour and certain details still preserved, make
the building still interesting. But if the church did not exist, it would yet be necessary to
go there to visit the cloister, one of the two finest works in that kind that the thirteenth
century has bequeathed to us. The other is the cloister of St. John Lateran, which this
recalls very closely. º
It is in vain that people claim to be able to connect each work of art with the pedigrees
of the schools; the human mind under the empire of common sentiments arrives at results
which are very much alike. This cloister, which is of 1215, connects itself with the French
architecture of transition styled Romano-ogival. Here the arch reigns, and was never
wholly abandoned, but the columns become thin and tend to group themselves; the
passion for episodic prettinesses fritters away the idea of unity in diversion for the eyes.
Only as the workman is in presence of severe monuments, and as antiquity has trained his
taste, the times keep a little of a purity that has become less stiff; the ornaments fall into
a certain order relatively to one another, instead of escaping madly in wild suckers; laws
of proportion have regulated the dimensions with reference to each of the accessories of
MOAVTE TESTACC/O. 35
the building. The shrine is of profuse richness, but the pearls are so well arranged that
the superfluity does not appear, and nothing disturbs the eye in a contented and smiling
passage among these flowery arches.
We must not neglect in passing from the vestibule of the cloister some frescoes of
the twelfth century, representing the Saviour surrounded by martyrs spaced off by palm
trees. It is certainly somewhat rude, but the paintings of this date are not numerous.
In this the artist, drawing his inspiration from ancient mosaics, has avoided the routine
immobility of the Byzantine workers. Tolerably near stands isolated, on the scene of the
slaughter of the soldier martyrs of the tribune Zeno who shared their doom, the church of
Sta. Maria Scala Coeli, where St. Bernard celebrated mass, and where in sacrificing he had
the vision of a ladder by which legions of seraphim ascended to heaven. At some paces
off is St. Paul of the Three Fountains, on the very spot where the Apostle's head was cut
off. His head made three bounds, the legend says, and from the points that it touched
there gushed up three living jets; they are confined in the oratory, and pilgrims quench
PYRAMID OF CESTIUS.
their thirst there. Another chapel in the plain consecrates the spot where St. Paul and
St. Peter embraced at the crossing of the ways as they separated to go to their martyrdom,
the one on this hill, the other on the edge of the Tiber. Farther on, before passing the
double crenellated gates of the road to Ostia attached to the old walls of Rome, you skirt
on your left the pyramid of that Caius Cestius, the contemporary of Agrippa, who presided
with six other septemvirs over the sacred banquets of the ſectisternium. His tomb is just
one-fourth in height of the great pyramid; but the triangular cone of Cestius is faced
with plaques of white marble a foot thick. This pyramid, flanked by two fluted columns,
shaded by some cypresses that connect it with the battlements of the postern, the whole
enveloped in a recess of the walls, makes a picture in a charming style and full of warm
colour. It was here that they found the gigantic foot of bronze to be seen on the Capitol;
it belonged, they say, to a colossal statue of the Septemvir.
Farther on you leave to the left the artificial mound of Monte-Testaccio, formed in
long years by the pile of earthenware vessels, in which the peasants placed most of their

F 2
36 - . A&OME.
wares that they brought to the great market of Rome, and whose fragments they threw
away in this common place of deposit established behind the Emporium, from which they
have recently cleared away the débris. Most of the wares they unloaded there, even dried
vegetables, were carried in vessels of clay, and not as in our time in tilted carts, in
baskets, sacks, or chests. These worthless vessels once emptied were tossed away, and
this explains what was for long the enigmatical existence of the enormous cumulus. You
then come to the Marmorata, a store of the marbles of Greece and Italy; they have just
exhumed, for the purpose of making use of them, blocks that have been unloaded there
these fifteen centuries, and known ever since the time of Sixtus V., a fact that facilitated a
discovery that has in these later times made much noise. Hence we pass to the foot of
the convent of Sta. Sabina, whose bells sound on the Aventine, whose church has seen
St. Dominic and Father Lacordaire; famous names that open and close the annals of
the order of preaching friars. In front beyond the Tiber is the hospital of St. Michael,
where they have a school of arts and trades for orphans. Finally, at the extremity of this
escarped face of the Aventine, covered with shrubs and brambles, you gradually see the
city encircle the stream behind the remains of the Pons Sublicius which Ancus Martius
placed on wooden joists, as its name indicates, and which was rebuilt by the censor
AEmilius Lepidus in the reign of the second of the Caesars. This was the bridge that
Horatius Cocles defended; it is from this primitive monument, whose construction, preser-
vation, and maintenance was confided to the college of priests, that our word pontiff comes.
From these heights of the past, we need only a movement of the wing to launch our-
selves into fable. We had just doubled the little hill where smoked the culmen that
nurtured Romulus; and passing under the embankments of the palace of the Tiber, we
had sought with our eyes among the brushwood of the Palatine for the mouth of the
cavern where Cacus was exterminated by Hercules. p
IV.
The impression produced by the first sight of the Flavian amphitheatre does not always.
answer to its colossal dimensions. It is subordinated to the circumstances of the hour,
effects of light, point of view. Reflection even will contribute to it. Hence a good many
strangers appreciate the Coliseum better, after frequenting it for some time. You have
got the habit of crossing it like a passage in returning from the Coelian, and all at once,
as before a sudden vision, you stop. The colossus that has hitherto been dumb has made
itself heard.
In an essay specially devoted to the reproduction of sincere impressions, we shall often
pass rapidly over information that belongs to the region of history. All the world knows.
that Vespasian commenced this gigantic construction in the gardens of Nero, that it was.
continued by Titus, and completed under Domitian. We shall not profoundly inquire
whether the Venerable Bede in the eighth century was the first person who described this
amphitheatre as Colosseo, nor whether, in giving it that title, people thought of its size,
or recalled its proximity to the old bronze statue of Phoebus Apollo, a colossus of a
hundred and ten feet, deprived of its head to please Nero, without respect for a work of
the Zenodorus who had carved a colossal Mercury for that new city of the Arverni,
Nemossus, that we call Clermont Ferrand. We do not know what, since the fifth century,
7'HE COL/SEUM. 37
when it was still to be seen standing, has become of the Neronian giant that Vespasian
had drawn by four-and-twenty elephants from the atrium of the Golden House, to station
it on a pedestal of travertine which is like a rampart, and where Domitian again cut off
the head in order to make room for his own.
At the inauguration of this theatre the games lasted a hundred days, six thousand
beasts and four thousand gladiators were immolated. It is to be regretted that we
cannot trace over again the scenes that animated the theatre, when from the year IO60
to 1310 the Frangipani, the Annibaldi, quartered themselves and sustained sieges in
this hollowed rock, transformed by feudal contests into a strong citadel. We should in
vain put violence on the Bollandists to extract from them the names of the Christian
martyrs butchered in the arena, or on the historians to ascertain exactly whether the
theatre held a hundred thousand spectators or could only hold eighty thousand. Nor
have annalists marked the dark lobby where Lucilla resolved to have the Emperor
Commodus, her brother, stabbed by Quintianus; finally, I will only mention, by way of
reminder, the burning of the Coliseum in 1332 and the earthquake of 1381. It would
be curious if one were only able to describe the hospital which was organized in the
middle ages in the cells of this enormous hive, an idea incongruous above all others.
We should have to be carried too far away if we had to enumerate all the attacks
against the work of the Flavians for the sake of its materials, or to tell in detail the
useful repairs of Pius VII., the clumsy restorations of Leo XII., the works of Gregory
XVI., or, lastly, the more intelligently conducted works of Pius IX., which will allow
us to climb to the last platform of this concave mountain, whose circular and almost
woody sides reach a height of a hundred and fifty-seven feet.
Like the majority of simple tourists, I came at night by moonlight to stray among the
staircases and under the arcades of the Coliseum. Some English visitors scrambling
along the tiers, gliding along the platforms, burying themselves in the lobbies with
torches with ruddy flames that the smoking pitch surrounded with its dark veil, shed
yellow streaks of flame over the blocks of travertine, in violent contrast with the blue tone
of the sky, dissolved by the moon in the white vapours that she poured down into the
shaft. The Coliseum loses much by being seen in these variegated and diffused lights;
the darkness makes it blurred, the torches dwarf it, adorning it with an amusing effect
worthy the Lenains and the Van Schaendels.
The efforts of book-writers to speak worthily of the Coliseum did not escape me; of
all the famous spots in Rome it is this which has occasioned the most swelling proso-
popoeias, sure sign of a weak impression and absent emotion. Whence this poverty of
feeling in presence of one of the most considerable monuments of antiquity, one endowed
with most multitudinous associations, and one of the purest, for Vespasian who built it
was five years old when Augustus died ? It is so with many marvels which, like the great
pyramid, are more imposing by their mass than by finish of detail or originality of
invention. Once this combination tried, to unite two theatres into one, the invention was
at an end; it has remained fixed; everybody accepts this, and he who has seen one
amphitheatre knows them all.
That of Rome where terrible dramas have been acted, where you summon the shades
of consuls, of the Senate, of the college of vestals, of aediles, of pontiffs and emperors, has
for its distinction its immensity, the indestructible solidity of construction, the bulk of the
materials, the regular piling up of rocks worked by Titans. This bottom of a basin
seems the chalk mould in which the seven hills of Rome were run.
38 A’O.]//E.
The magnificence of the building has been so well appreciated, that the popes have at
great expense restored and consolidated the Flavian amphitheatre; they are proud of a
solicitude with which all Rome associates itself. We may conceive the fine effect
produced some years ago by one of our French bishops, when preaching in the pulpit of
the Coliseum, he ventured to exclaim: ‘What, ruins of abomination, relics of impurity,
you still stand O shame, that Christians should endure the sight of these infamous
INTERIOR OF THE COLISEUM.
walls! They do not scatter the stones of this Babel, heaped up by the impious pride of
the enemies of the faith ! . . . . . .” Here were eloquent emotions to convince a
Genseric or an Attila; but the prelates of Rome have a less primitive zeal. Whence it
follows that in condemning, by this appeal for the destruction of the Coliseum, so many
pontiffs who had been the religious preservers of its antique splendours, Monseigneur just
a little compromised his country. “At the bottom of your hearts, an official remarked
to me on this subject, ‘you are the descendants of the Gauls who devastated Italy.”

ASCENT OF THE FLAVIAA AMPHITHEATRE. 39
Let us guard against this virtuous rigour, and as we are in presence of the most vast,
the most ancient, or nearly so, of known theatres, let us not forget to observe how much
of what is strange and striking is offered by its situation in the heart of a valley that
divides three hills all become desert. This was formerly a point of junction between four
quarters of the capital of the world; the fire and sword of the barbarians have turned it
into a solitude.
V.
One Sunday afternoon when the museums were shut, when into the damp streets of
Rome there fell from the roofs grey shadows tinted by a bright blue sky, one of these
days devoted to Murcia, the goddess of Inactivity (Fainéantise), as we had an intense
desire, the abbé and I, to take wing, Paul Baudry came up to us on the Piazza di Spagna,
and we all three started off, convinced without saying so that we were going for a good
walk, but avoiding a formal statement of our purpose, so as to leave the choice of a
destination to our feet and to ourselves the charms of hazard. There we were then,
chattering without direction, guided by instinct, traversing, as if we were turning
the leaves of a book, deep alleys that the abbé in passing made out for us by quotations.
When you do not know whither you are going, you infallibly arrive at the Forum, by that
accustomed attraction of twenty centuries, which following one another from all the points
of the universe to this spot, have without exception decreed that every road leads to
Rome, that is to say here. At the end of two hours that were dissipated in a moment,
the abbé said to us, ‘Let us go and see the sunset on the height of the Coliseum !’
We made our way thither by the Via Sacra, and while we mounted the last tiers of
seats without any of the tourist’s deliberation and set purpose, as one should go to the
abbey of Montmartre for the sake of passing the time, I hardly thought of more than
offering my eyes from that height the refreshment of a vast autumn landscape. As for
the Coliseum, I reserved for that as usual a rapid salutation. And I never really saw it
except on that afternoon, when I expected hardly to look at it.
The high and sombre arcades of the basement, that narrow and rounded aisle with its
worn-out stones, its streaming vaults, its dark pools which double the height of the arches,
its cavernous atmosphere and the streams of unexpected light darting through loopholes
half covered up with briars; all this phantasmagory of building and light stopped us more
than once as we made our way into the inner parts of the amphitheatre: the fancy of
Piranese is felt to be realised there in all the singularity of its grandeur. Once arrived on
the piece of escarped terrace which is under the friezes, and which from beneath looks
like an accumulation of scaffolding that has remained in equilibrium, we saw a sight that
cannot be forgotten. - - -
Summer had perched itself in the corner warmed by the declining sun, as if in its last
fortress; on the stone of the upper tier, the north-east breeze from the Sabine Hills,
sprinkled with a first dust of snow, whistled on the grass of the ruin a winter tune;
around us, bunches of small flowers, as if to fête this reminiscence of fine days, festooned
themselves in the joinings of the stones; the wall-flowers perfumed at the height of the
Coliseum that heavenly box, in which we were successors at such far distance of time to
the plebs and the women of Rome. It was there that in old days they used to chatter
4O A’O.]//E.
above the freedmen, like the Syracusan women in Theocritus. The fennel threw in
abundance on every side its waves of green tresses; a host of curious little plants and
unknown flowers supplied smiling variety.
The quantity of shrubs, of pellitory, of saxifrage, that the Coliseum nurtures is even
less surprising than the rarity of the species. Whether it is that this vast mass raised
high in the air intercepts wandering germs on their passage, or that the nature of the
artificial soil or the composition of the cements that bind the stones have been favourable
to exotic growths, it is the case that the botanists have drawn up a considerable herbarium
of Colisean objects that are to be found in no other place under the Roman sky. This
mountain of the Flavii has its own flora, like Hymettus or Hybla.
THE ARENA OF THE COLISEUM.
It is not, however, in the first moments that you give your attention to these details
that are so close to you. By an instinct which is an aspiration after the infinite, the eye
first of all darts to the farthest point of the horizon that the soul would fain pass. Above
the escarped edges of this crater, you discover at the points of the four cardinal winds, not
landscapes, not a city, not a simple bird’s-eye view, but the unnumbered illustrations of
the greatest book of history. This spectacle you regard with the sensations of a dream
peopled by apparitions. -
Before us, there spreads itself out, sustained by the embankments of the palace of
Claudius, the Coelian with its convents all entangled amid ruins, the Coelian desert as in
the days when Tullus Hostilius came to settle there in the midst of the colonised Albans;
a little to the left on the extended base of the hill of Jove, a sloping line on the violet-

º
º
º
- º

SOMSEZ' FROM 7THE COZISEUM. 4 I
coloured velvet of the hill marked the site of Alba Longa. To our right shone in light
the plateau of the Palatine brought down by excavations, and projecting the blue
shadows of its columns on the whiteness of the scorched earth. The convent of
St. Bonaventura with its vines and its palm, opposite the Argiletum where from
Martial’s time the booksellers' quarter had replaced that temple of Janus which Numa
closed; the green garden of the Farnese, and behind the hill the blue and jagged line
of the Janiculum, enframed in deep and lofty setting this chequered board of ruins
mixed with lawns, these vaults tossed into space which compose the ideal of all out-
lines. 'Twas on this winding slope that once ran with torches, long before the
companions of Romulus, the Arcadians of King Evander; they feasted the god Pan,
destroyer of the wolves. To abolish the Lupercalia, it required in the fifth century
all the authority of Pope Gelasus. - t
Between the hills so sublimely adorned, the glance extends far over the plain
of Latium, an ocean of half-russet verdure whose long waves, thrown into shadow by a
falling sun, run with ruddy indentations in a perspective rendered infinite by the ultra-
marine of the Mediterranean. At the threshold of this desert, I recognised the pyramidal
tomb of Cestius before which I had recently passed, and which fills in, along with the
walls of Aurelian and the fine gate that Belisarius had crenellated, the base of the
intermontium. Following into the distance the silvery festoons of the Tiber, one last
mound marks for you the site of Lavinium, Rome's ancestress; more to the left there was
Ardea, the town of the Rutuli that was blockaded by the Tarquinians when Collatinus
rashly took Aruns and Sextus to sup with Lucretia. The mind speeds across this
infinitude of the horizon, which answers to the indefiniteness of the semi-fabulous stories
of legend.
It is only after wandering long and far, from the tombs of the Appian Way to
St. Stephen the Round, which furnishes a pendant to the marble tower of Caecilia
Metella, and from the mouths of the Tiber where St. Augustin's mother died, to the
foot of the hill where Porsenna’s Etruscans entrenched themselves, and where St. Peter
was crucified, that the eyes turning homewards plunge with stupefaction into the funnel
of the Coliseum, into that storied and profound well on whose brink you have perched
yourself.
As the lowering sun brought the outlines into greater clearness and made them
more extended, and as from the substructions of the Coelian to the sea, these outlines
streamed over the rim of the monstrous vessel, the plains seemed to describe three
enormous concentric zones: the first seemed to continue, all sombre, the width of the
great hollow of the Coliseum; the second, still vigorous, received furrows of light; the
last buried itself in the azure by violet and rose-coloured undulations; but all three
continued the tiers of the amphitheatre. •
The whole horizon, a magic effect and of a grandeur that was all but terrifying, was
by this time simply the mouth of a pit forty leagues round. The circus, to which the
evening clouds served as velarium, had invaded the whole, and absorbed the whole;
nature spread forth under our gaze became only a monument, and in an inverse sense the
frenzied dream of the tower of Babel seemed to be accomplished.
Silence, which often makes its impression without the spirit being conscious of it,
perhaps increased the illusion of the mirage, and for that reason a noise that was suddenly
made conveyed to us the sensation of being roughly awakened. From the bottom
of this crucible for fusing stars in, confusedly issued strains of church music; our eyes
G
42 A’OA)//E.
attracted to the bottom of the abyss distinguished a microscopic procession of penitents
masked by their sheets, taper in hand and banner at the head, who followed by
countrymen and shepherds, chanted the office of the Iºa Crucis before the fourteen
chapels which are arranged round the arena. From these depths up to the purple of
the west where the solar ball was sinking, we measured strange distances, gradations
of light and colour more marvellous than ever.
And without being able to speak, we gazed; as the night fell we still gazed.
|
º
º
nºn º
lºſſº
| |
|
T
||
A CORRIDOR OF THE COLISEUM.

sº lºſſ
“THE SCHOLARS . . . . WITH VOLUMINOUS SHOVEL-HATS.”
CHAPTER III.
The regulation of public conveyances, of justice, of the Post-Office.—Open-air life.—Little Monks at the Lyceum,
Dominicans at nurse, Prelates in the sun.-Peasants in the great city.—The Aurora at the Rospigliosi
Palace.—The Barberini Palace and Gallery; the Fornarina; Poussin and the Death of Germanicus; Portraits
of the Cenci, &c.–Gems of the Sciarra; the Violinist of Raphael.-The Doria Palace, apocryphal works
and masterpieces: the Mill of Claude, André Doria and Pope Innocent X., &c.—At the back of San
Crispino.—Search for the Cenci-Bolognetti Palace.—Ripetta and its ferry.—Transformation of the Mausoleum
of Augustus and of that of Adrian.-Dramas of the Castle of St. Angelo.—Origin of the present name.—
Theodora and Marozia.-Trial and execution of Beatrice de' Cenci.
HE horned and meditative brows with which the last century peopled the ruins
of the Campo Vaccino symbolized sufficiently well the dreamy inaction of the
Roman life, which might be summed up in these terms, to ruminate on ruins.
No city is better organized for making days of existence slip away in lost
hours; so foreigners, combatting an inextricable formalism, find their arrangements con-
tinually put to rout by unforeseen impediments. To visit the galleries and libraries,
one must spend much time in solicitation, and in waiting for tickets of admission, from
which there is never wanting the interdict against introducing dogs and servants—
singular relic of feudal pride in the land of equality. These permissions, besides, are
accorded to everybody without any inquiry as to rank or name, which are left blank.
What purpose, then, does this vain formality serve, since it is usually gratuitous 2
The Romans, in their ideas of progress, have curious prejudices: they have not
admitted the use of omnibuses for fear of damaging the cabmen. Go and tell economists
of that sort that the establishment of omnibuses in Paris has tripled the number of
persons who thus travel !
On the other hand the cabs only cost fifteen baiocchi (ten sous in Naples) and
without four/oire, the Romans, and particularly the Neapolitans, only drinking the water
of the springs. On this side things go easier than in Paris, where in proportion as the


G 2
44 A&OME.
growth of the city renders these conveyances more needful, they augment their tariff So as
to make more and more impossible for people of moderate means a resource of an ever-
increasing necessity. Perhaps authority, which with us meddles with everything, stands
in Italy too much aloof from this branch of administration; in some circumstances
everybody would be all the better for a more active supervision. “We are not happy,'
said the driver to me one day, ‘because nobody protects us. Suppose a peasant fallen
from the hills, and who has never even seen Rome before in his life, has himself inscribed
as driver, they will take him without any information about him, and without inquiry;
he will compete on the Piazza with folk who know their trade. That is why foreigners
are often forced to leave their carriage in the middle of the street, and to return on foot
from ever so far; and there's their day gone. All the vagabonds driven from Naples
and Calabria are taken in at Rome. How should they live 2. Of course they are forced
to ručare for food, and the foreigners in fright desert Rome, where we shall die of
hunger because no profession has guarantees. They say it is liberty Yes, if there
was justice; but one is thrown into prison without knowing why; one would be forgotten
there if one had not protectors. Is that, too, liberty P Basta / abóiamo un cattivo governo /’
This good man was Roman, Roman from father to son ; and all along the road he
crossed himself before the madonnas. His countrymen call eagerly for reforms. The
error of the Italians is to imagine that they are appealing to the foreigner, and the
error of the French is to suppose that the Italians of Milan, of Turin, or of Naples are
countrymen for the Roman.
Let us admit, however, that regular justice with the guarantee of its publicity is
difficult to organize in a country where every injured man who should prefer a suit, where
every witness who should go against the accused, would be nearly certain of assassina-
tion. To procure information in criminal cases, the judges are induced to interrogate
the witnesses in the profoundest secrecy, and the veils with which truth covers itself do
nothing but help the abused indulgence of this weak and paternal government, whose
principal vice is barely to have an existence.
The customs of the administration denote more clearly, perhaps, the stagnant and
retrograde situation of a city which was, and which still supposes itself, the first on the
globe. Nothing is more singular in this respect than the postal organization. It will
not be useless to say something on this, for every traveller for lack of information runs
the risk of being left, as I was at the beginning of my sojourn, without his correspond-
ence. Up to the 1st October, 1865, a simple letter from Marseilles to Rome cost
twenty sous or baiocchi. A letter of allotment printed and not sealed cost me forty-
one. Under pretext of the poverty of their finances, the Roman States maintained
these heavy taxes; it was impossible to convince the people concerned that a lowering
of the tariff would benefit the treasury by multiplying the correspondence. There was a
risk to run, and Rome knows nothing of speculation.
To avoid the risk of a loss, the Roman post refuses to receive any letter which is not
paid to the boundaries of the Pontifical States. But, still more incredible, the letters
which reach the office will remain there for ever if you do not go for them, or if you have
not informed the officials that it is your wish to receive them at home. How many
inconveniences must have arisen from the ignorance of a usage far too absurd to be
guessed It is the receiver of letters who defrays the expenses of the letter-carriers;
each letter is surtaxed with a supplementary halfpenny given to the postman from your
hand to his. So many letters, so many halfpence. You may save this expense by going
v Nova Iºvo Nvivo， º HL TO NGINOAA

OPEV-A/A L/AFE. 45
for your correspondence at the head office; hence the crowding of the grating, and the
ease with which they hand a letter to any first-comer who asks for it.
The institution of postmen paid by the public has another inconvenience of a
different kind. These messengers, who go their beat without box or case, provide for
themselves at certain taverns or confectioners' shops, known resting-places, to which
the people of each quarter come to examine if there is anything for them in the
scattered heap which lies on the table at the disposal of the customers. Candour
worthy of the golden age Provided that the passive distributor sees each letter
that is taken away replaced by a halfpenny, the operation is regular, and the more
rapidly it goes on the more will the beat be simplified; you can then without hindrance
acquire for a baiocco any missive that you please. What I describe I have seen prac.
tised ten times. Beg a friend to take your letters as he passes, in case he meets the
postman; your friend will have no occa-
sion to say that he comes on your be-
half, and if he says it no proof will be
required.
The multiplicity of journeys and
visits, the absence of omnibuses, the
scarcity of cabs, all combine, then, to
keep you on the trot more than half the
day from street to street. But you take
this duty with patience, because the
streets change in physiognomy accord-
ing to the quarter, and because on the
pavement there overflows a tide of com-
mon people, simple in their manners,
and bringing with them into full day,
besides their porringers and chafing-
dish, their household habits, sometimes
the practice of their trade, without being
disturbed by prohibitive regulations.
In the long monastic streets where
the grass grows, on the road for
instance from Santa Maria Maggiore
to the Lateran, amusing processions
move without noise along with the few and discreet passers-by. The scholars of
seminaries and colleges, originally from the five parts of the globe, dressed up like
little abbés in all colours according to their nations, with voluminous shovel hats on thin
bodies and childish faces, furnish a diverting sight. The Germans wear red cassocks,
the English violet; the white frock of the little Americans contrasts with the browned
heads of young negroes and red skins brightened by the Indian sun.
On the Pincian every morning appointments are made for talking politics between
heteroclite and discreet persons whom you would take for retired clerks or merchants,
were it not for their clerical dress, which savours of the ancient régime and suggests
the old comedy rather than the church. A yellowish umbrella under the arm, a snuff-
box in the hand, these prelates have the air of honest shopkeepers of old days.
In consequence of some maternal vow one used to see Carmelites, Franciscans,
ON THE PINCLAN.

46 A&OME.
Carthusians, from eight to ten months old at their nurse's breast; this is what still happens
in the Kingdom of Naples. Down to Leo XII. and Gregory XVI., who put an end to
another abuse, the clerks of solicitors and notaries, as well as a host of officials belonging
to the administration, arrogated to themselves the privilege of wearing the cassock, while
they kept the life and behaviour of the young men of the day. Hence for foreigners
many an occasion for Scandal, they attributing to the clergy the follies and misdeeds of
the lawyers' clerks. The cassock is there what with us the administrative frock and
military uniform are, the dress of those who are something in the State.
Many monks and nuns and a certain quantity of soldiers are what contribute to
give variety to the look of the streets, setting off somewhat the raggedness of the
Trastevere or of the Suburra. Popular costumes no longer exist at Rome, but there
still come a few from the country. The country districts send up to the great city,
besides models for painters, families who in order to utilise some necessary journey
of the head of the tribe will accompany him in full force in their fine costume,
equipped with some gewgaws to sell, some couplets to sing, or a curiosity to exhibit.
The principal business concluded or the market closed, the good folk stay where they
have got out, at the piazza Montanara, in the quarter of the Regola, in the environs of the
Farnese Palace, towards the Ponte Sisto, or at the corner of the Quattro Capi bridge,
waiting for the hour of return to the mountains, and munching morsels of bread. Seated
on a curb-stone, or arranged in a group on the angular heap and the parapets, a rural
household will be seen there all installed as if in their quarters, the youngsters sporting
round the maternal skirts, and the contadina suckling the youngest while she awaits
her lord.
II.
These are the sights of the street; they offer a diversion as one hurries from a church,
or from one gallery to another. The undress of the populace, the character of physi-
ognomies or attitudes, present with frequent fidelity the models which being perpetuated
by successive ages have posed for the pictures in the museum.
One of the first galleries that I visited was that of the Barberini Palace joining my
house, and in which rain often confined me, but I had begun by the Rospigliosi on the
Quirinal, in consequence of a pious engagement towards an old amateur of the Bolognese
SeCt. -
Warned against the classic seductions of Guido no less than against those of
Domenico Zampieri, I still felt as I looked in the original on the ceiling of the Aurora,
too chilled by the graver of Morghen, the sensation that is produced by a work poetically
treated and indebted for a happy effect to a choice of colour full of freedom and
delight. Preceded by a Genius who bears in the air the torch of day, Apollo on his car
advances in flame through the sky to commence his day. He is followed by Flora
and surrounded by the Hours, who dance around. These have been nourished without
any economy, and are perhaps a little too plump; would to Heaven that in these full
and jubilant visages one could recognise the poor and wretched. At the bottom
of the picture, in the distances of earth, the sea and its shores, still bluish, are not
warmed by the freshness of the dawn. The composition is harmonious, the painting
7/7/2' AAA’/3/7/8/AW/ PA/AC/2. 47
bright and tranquil; the draperies are studied and the poses graceful. It is the attractive
masterpiece of an artist usually cold, and of whom we shall find among the Barberini
collection the best or at any rate the most agreeable portrait.
As to the First Fault, by Domenichino, it is a sketch of Breughel de Velours enlarged
by a Roman from Bologna who knows his rank; the graces of the subject humanise the
magisterial cleverness of the painter. Adam plucking the apple, Eve who receives it
stooping, are attractive figures; the menagerie distributed in an Eden inspired from the
Roman Campagna gives animation to a scene of rich fancy. Built for Scipio Borghese,
the Rospigliosi Palace was formerly acquired by Mazarin. After the death of the
cardinal minister they stationed the French Embassy there, which only left it in 1704.
Let us go down again to the street of the Quattro Fontane.
The vast Barberini Palace, at which three generations of architects worked, Charles
Maderno, Borromini, and Bernini, is thrown in false square on hilly gardens whose lofty
trees have seen pass beneath them all the race of the nephews of Urban VIII. This
cultivation in terraces seems strange when from the entry of the Vicolo Sterrato which
THE AURORA OF GUIDO RENI IN THE ROSPIGLIO PALACE.
bounds them on the north-east, you contemplate the perspective that they furnish to a
small convent situated at the extremity. There is, however, only a cascade of green
bindweeds over an old wall, with a statue emerging from the medley, from which rises
a pine three times secular. This unpaved street, this cloaca, has such an aspect, and
all is so unmoving at Rome that twenty generations of painters have copied it. Just
as I so often saw it, exactly so it was restored to me by Piranese and Panini.
The present masters of the Barberini Palace had lately given up the ground-floor to
our artillery. Singular effect of the courteous wars of our time, a Roman prince has
his dwelling over a quarter of French cavalry; they sound the morning drum under his
windows, he might suppose himself a colonel of horse. For the rest, as soon as one had
mounted the staircase on the right or the staircase on the left, the one of Borromini,
imitated from Bramante, who took a model from St. Nicolo of Pisa, the other of Bernini,
one had crossed a frontier; Rome showed herself on the spot by the peculiar note of
her patrician dwelling-places. The great hall to which you approach by two staircases
of honour, has for ceiling an immense production of Peter of Cortona, the Triumph of
Glory, capo d'opera as far as knowledge and skill, a swarming conception which escapes

48 A’OME.
from all the conditions of verisimilitude that have hitherto been respected in ceilings.
On the walls an ancient picture of Roman Masquerade, infinitely curious; in the
neighbouring rooms family portraits and ancient busts. In the form of credence or console
a Madame Barberini of old days, travestied as Diana in repose, sleeps her last sleep over
an enormous and ancient sarcophagus. Restored mausoleums in this way become here
furniture for an ante-chamber or a dining-room.
As for the gallery, which is situated in a low entresol, one of its attractions is that it
WICOLO STERRATO.
offers the original and indisputable portrait of a woman beloved by Raphael, whom
tradition has made a female baker. Rome possesses five or six copies of it; they are
inferior to the authenticated example of the Villa Barberini. They show that the
adorable brunette of the Tribuna of the Uffizi at Florence, is not that friend of the
painter whose real name was Margaret and who is called La Fornarina, and I regret it
for his sake, for the lady of the Uffizi is handsomer than the lady at Rome. The latter, as
she is presented by the portrait of the Barberini, is the relief of an artist wearied of the

7///, /3A/ø/3//ø//W/ AM/O SC/A/8/8A GA/, //, /ö//E.S. 49
ideal and of ethereal creations. She is a substantial, hearty woman in full bloom, whose
nose drinks the wind with full aspiration, accompanying little greedy eyes, and a mouth
softened by laughter. The jet-black locks are harmonized with the skin by browned tones
of a burning warmth; she has over her the sketch of a diaphanous robe. The signature
of the master, or of the slave, is on a narrow circlet
attached in the shape of a bracelet round the biceps
of the left arm. One perceives that she was very
finely made; the hands are pretty, but we discern
there as well as on the arms vexatious repaintings.
The piece in its smoky tone is cleverly restored ;
still the model has less delicacy than frankness.
For anybody who knows the two portraits, that
of Rome and that of Florence, two women who
have not the most distant likeness, the once cele-
brated work of Quatremère de Quincy on the works
of Raphael loses much of its value. He expatiates
gravely on the question whether it is the Fornarina
of the Pitti Palace, or its re/roduction in the Bar-
berini Palace, which is the true original. He can
only have seen one of the two pictures, for it is very
much as if one should ask which is the original of
a portrait of Mademoiselle de la Vallière or of a
portrait of Madame de Montespan. LA FORNARINA OF THE BARBERINI PALACE, AT ROME.
Around this picture there are others of which
one ought only to speak in order to warn good souls against the pretensions of the Notice.
The Holy Family of Andrea del Sarto, that one of his pupils would have painted with
a less awkward servility of imitation; apocryphal
Madonnas of Bellini, of Francia, of that Antonio
-
- - - - - -
Razzi who is calumniated in more forms than one; |
a Jesus among the Doctors, a bit of Teutonic bar- sº
barism impudently attributed to Albert Dürer; a º |
cardinal’s portrait which would compromise the |
name of Titian if the draperies were less dull; a
so-called portrait of Masaccio, in which they have
only copied his cap: here are equivocal works -
denoting the oblivion of tradition in a country
so rich in subjects of study.
A curious picture of this gallery, a portion
detached from that of the Sciarra Palace, is the
Death of Germanicus, by Poussin; a canvas of a fine
2. Aº
and with this master candour is hardly CO111111011. LA FORNARINA OF THE UFFIZI, AT FLORENCE.
Probably when he executed it the artist had not yet
colour, of a dramatic sentiment, full of simplicity,
impregnated his spirit with the monuments of antiquity. A reminiscence of the
etiquette of courts governs the arrangement of the Death of Germanicus: before
these Romans we think of the warriors of Lebrun; we involuntarily look for Lauzun
and the Marshal de la Feuillade by the pillow of the son of Drusus. Robbed of
H




5O A’OME.
his manner, away from his system, Poussin becomes less professorial and more
pleasing.
It is here also that we find the original of an extremely sweet portrait of a young girl,
a hundred times reproduced by engraving in all sizes—the Beatrice de' Cenci of Guido,
a face fascinating and suffering, with a head-dress of white draperies heavily arranged, a
melancholy interesting figure, though a little too set.
Michelangelo of Caravagio painted, in an effect of shadow after the manner of
Rembrandt, with a head-dress still more massive, the mother of this heroine; finally, a
third picture, the best and the least remarked, the portrait of a ripe beauty with an elegant
sweep of outline and a physiognomy expressive of calm cruelty, transmits to us, they say,
the features of the mother-in-law of Beatrice, the Lucrezia Petroni; this work is by Scipio
of Gaéta. Not here, but a little later, we shall attempt to retrace that horrible tale; these
fine portraits, especially the first, being suspected of being apocryphal. In fact, although
at the death of Beatrice, Reni was already four-and-twenty, it is doubtful whether he
arrived at Rome before the death of Clement VIII. Moreover, the portrait of the Cenci
has less the air of a study executed from nature, than of a head composed with the help
of an earlier portrait. Guido may have executed afterwards an idealized likeness of the
famous heroine. However this may be, to personify so romantic a victim no face could
have been chosen more touching in expression or more sure to move pity.
III.
From the street of the Quattro Fontane to the Corso the distance is not great; it is still
less from the Barberini Gallery to the Sciarra Gallery, a collection which is the tribuna
or sanctuary of the other. The casket presents in
fact among some pebbles of the Rhine certain
precious stones of fine water. The two figures
called Vanity and Modesty justify by their perfec-
tion the mistake of those who have so often attri-
buted to Leonardo the works of Bernardino Luini,
that affectionate artist so loyal to the glorification of
his master, like all who heard and loved that famous
man. Between the Circe of Garofalo, a landscape
where the companions of Ulysses are in the very
struggle of being transformed into beasts, and the
St. Sebastian of Perugino, Albert Dürer in the
Death of the Virgin makes us pardon the country
of his birth by force of skill and simplicity. He is
rarely seen to gain this triumph.
º Poussin has in this palace some curious can-
º =s º * vases: the St. Erasmus, whose bowels execu-
THE BEATRICE DE CENCI, BY GUIDO RENI. tioners are tearing out, a ghastly subject handled
with vigour so as to be copied in mosaic, a picture
with more energy and truth than his representation of St. Peter; the St. Matthew writing,
a very fine piece which has not become too dark; the views of the banks of the Tiber,
and of the Acqua Acetosa, rendered by a master who loves the sites and the district.

THE /OOA’/A AA/LAC/E. 5 I
But among smaller marvels are certain tiny landscapes of Claude of Lorraine; one
in particular, which, from the sides of the green crater into which heaven has poured the
lake of Albano, represents on the horizon the crest of Castel Gandolfo. Another of these
compositions, of a more costly finish, was painted on a plate of silver, a piece of far-fetched
luxury to little purpose, which nobody can perceive, and that I should not know of but
for the Princess Barberini having since then revealed it to me in a Paris saloon. The
weight of a silver mounting scarcely adds to the value of the jewels of the master, Claude.
Rome Triumphant, and the Death of St. John the Baptist, are the two most important
pieces of Valentino. This last painting has an effect in relief of great power; the
Herodiad is a magnificent piece. From this picture to that of Michelangelo of Cara-
vagio, realist in a time when people did not yet possess words so ill compounded, the
interval is easily traversed: it will strike a simple spectator vividly, and may possibly stop
in passing the connoisseur, and even the moralist, who usually only understands the vicious
sides of the arts. Two sharpers agree to pluck -
a pigeon; one posted behind the stripling marks | - | |
on his fingers for his accomplice the number of | |
- |
and branded by vice and infamy in every line of -
|A|
|\
points. The first is an old rascal, seamed, stamped, |
his face; the other, the accomplice who plays, pale,
stooping, prematurely degraded, confronts with his º
debased adolescence the candid youth of his vic-
tim. From his doublet he withdraws a card,
assuring himself by an oblique and false glance of
the success of his knavery.
I have reserved to the last the Young Man
with the Bow, or Violinist of Raphael. It is here
we find this so justly-renowned picture, dated 1518
and signed. Everybody recalls that delicate and
feminine face, with its black cap so gracefully
adjusted and posed over a broad collar of fur. - ann-Ma
Many artists have copied this masterpiece. No- THE violinist of RAPHAEL (scaRRA PALACE).
body in my opinion has seized it so closely, nor
drawn it with so much intelligence, as Clement Chaplain, medallion-engraver, sculp-
tor, and laureate of our school.
IV.
These two palaces, whose galleries are not too undigested, gave me a fancy for
collections formed by families of the country, the intelligent luxuries of the Roman princes.
Some deceptions, however, awaited me at the Corso, in the Doria Palace, whose salons,
richly decorated in the time of Innocent X, with those daubings that our architects of the
great reign imitated, exhibit among several masterpieces mediocre copies and apocryphal
pieces in great number. The catalogues not being published, it may be convenient to
point out the best pictures, and to mark among the golden ears parasitic blights, such
as some Murillos, several Andrea del Sartos and Francias, that those masters never
saw. Poussin, Van Dyck, Titian especially, are frequently compromised by cold imitators;





























H 2
52 A&OME.
they give for the original of the last painter a weak enough copy of his Magdalen of the
Pitti Palace. - -
Wandering here and there, you come upon a fine Descent from the Cross in the style
of the primitive painters of the north, attributed presumptuously to Hemling; and a good
portrait of a man, attributed to Giorgione. On the right hand of the great gallery let us
notice a pretty little Reader, by Lucas of Leyden, and let us unmask a copy of the Aldo-
brandine Nuptials, attributed very gratuitously to Poussin. In the centre of the bay you
will be scandalized by portraits usurping the names of Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van
Dyck. Those who have named these paltry things have not even had respect to the chrono-
logical indications furnished by the dress, for the way in which the pictures are assigned
involves the most amusing blunders. Thus a rather villainous copy of a picture of three
faces in the Pitti Palace, which represents three Italians without beard, is thus described,
“Calvin, Luther, and Catherine, by Giorgione.” Giorgio Barbarelli, who died in 151 1,
cannot have painted the portrait of the wife of Luther, still less that of Calvin, who was
born in 1509. They attribute to Leonardo da Vinci a copy of the Jane of Arragon that
the books of the Louvre properly give to Raphael. In the Doria Palace the face offers
some variations, and especially in the background, where a bright green curtain recalls
Andrea di Solaria. This charming head of the granddaughter of Ferdinand I., who
married the Constable Colonna, is known at Rome under the pseudonym of Queen Jane
of Naples. What more common than such blunders At Paris did they not take the
Lucrezia Crivelli for La Belle Féronnière P This good and old copy of Madame Colonna
has a false air of the school of Leonardo; but the original, that we have had in our
possession since the reign of Francis I., has not the very marked characteristic of a
portrait of Raphael. So recourse has been had to the usual expedient of throwing on
to Giulio Romano the execution of the body and the accessories. .
How conceive that the Doria-Pamphili could have attributed to Claude of Lorraine
so many works unworthy of his pencil, when they possessed masterpieces so justly
renowned as Mercury stealing the Flocks of Apollo while the god of the poets is lost
in playing on the flute, as the Sacrifice to Phoebus, and as the gem so well known under
the title of the Mill ! There remain to us of that far-shining master, Claudio, landscapes
of the highest quality, but in point of freshness of preservation none of ours is com-
parable. Rarely have such spaces been so ingeniously filled; there is a little of German
complication, but the result is so striking, so delicate a harmony brings to the general
effect both reality and unity, that we are drawn in fascination into the roses of that dawn,
to Giulio or begin dreaming before those pure southern distances.
This painting contains all the poetry of the Roman Campagna. A river of some
breadth, its basin cut off by a sluice, descends facing the spectator from the Alban hills
which bound plains strewn with the ruin of aqueducts; at the back to the right is a small
town inspired by that picturesque Etruria of which the old painter dreamed before the
ruins of the Latin towns; on the other bank turns, at the corner of a rustic manufactory,
a watermill whose wheel shines like silver; it contrasts with the small temple of Vesta
perceived at the foot of a hilly indentation; the whole is toned in vast foregrounds of
verdure plunged by enormous trees into thick translucent shadow, in which idyllic figures
glance to and fro in dancing and rustic games. The vigour, the intensity, the movement
of this foreground, prolonged in far perspective, produce a delicate and variegated light
which fascinates our eyes and attracts them to the sky, to the Monte Gennaro, the snows
of the Apennines, and the remote hills which fall away in the Campagna. Before a
AT THE BACK OF SAM CRISPINO. 53
diversity of detail like this we have a difficulty in understanding such limpid tranquillity
of effect and impression. There is nothing staring; as in nature, you have to get
accustomed and recognise the whole site little by little.
After crossing several saloons, in which nothing stops one but a false Filippo Lippi,
you come to a very light boudoir, which of itself alone would justify this visit. You are
received there by the great admiral, Andrea Doria, dressed in black, and having on his
head a crumpled cap, which denotes like his capacious and worn garments the activity of
a leader caring little for his person. The sailor has an unkempt and matted beard, a
bronzed complexion, a piercing eye. The authority and gravity of a person of mark,
the duplicity of the Genoese and the audacity of the corsair, complicate this strange
physiognomy, accented in all the large and strong style of Sebastian del Piombo. In face
of the illustrious chief of the Doria is the loftiest glory of the Pamphili, Pope Innocent X.,
by Velasquez. Between the two paintings the contrast is not less vivid than it was
between the careers of the original, the pontiff and the pirate. Innocent X. was high in
complexion, his ruddy skin seeming to shine with moisture stands forth as in a blaze
from a hood of red satin with a purple-coloured background ; the figure is seated in a
chair of orange-red velvet. The surprising harmony of all these staring tones, the life,
the life of flesh and blood, which circulates under the features with an exuberance that
might have made Rubens despair, give to this portrait a superior rank among the works
of Velasquez. The hands only, though shown with just feeling, are a little feeble.
What shall I quote besides 2 Some pretty reproductions of the Paradise of Breughel,
and a Village Festival by Teniers; a Holy Family by Bellini, wholly repainted; a
greenish monk, entitled the Confessor of Rubens, which would give prolonged amusement
to the Antwerpers; lastly, a Madonna col Bambino surrounded by two saints, attributed
to Francesco Francia, which is an enchanting picture. If you reduce this collection by
three-fourths you would have a charming gallery, in which everything would possess a
more perceptible worth. . The surplus may serve to furnish a curious glimpse of the
manufacturing of paintings after the manner of the different masters; workshops of
dishonesty which abounded in Rome in the last century.
V.
After my visit to the Barberini Palace the features of the Beatrice de' Cenci remained
in my memory, and I had vague dreams of seeking out the palace once inhabited by the
actors in one of the most sombre tragedies of the past time. I was still ignorant of the
situation of the house, when one day wandering about the city I took it into my head that
chance had brought me to the quarter of the Cenci.
At the entry of the Trastevere by the Ponte Rotto, at the back of the chapel of San
Crispino, which is kept by a sacristan who does his cooking in a cassock in the middle of
the street, I had gone down to view the old arches of the bridge, and the charming
situation which takes life from the round Temple of the Sun, the cypresses and the ruins of
the Palatine, when I found myself in a small piazza of a very singular kind. It is irregular,
steep, fringed with decayed houses, or rather with nests constructed in old and feudal
walls, the whole attaching itself to the chevet of the chapel, and in a state of dilapidation
truly sinister. By means of a flight of mouldering steps erected against the party-walls of
54 A’OA)/E.
this cut-throat spot, windows turned into doors furnish an approach to dens of filthiness;
on cords stretched from one wall to another there swung in the wind tattered things
washed in the mud of the Tiber; old broken pots equipped windows without frames and
without glass; horrible hags in mud-coloured tatters and half-dressed men appeared
about the doorways. But in the midst of these peeling walls, which have been perhaps
º
tº:
rºl
BEHIND SAN CRISPIN.O.
patched ever since the days of antiquity, there shines a great armorial escutcheon from
which stand out the forked antlers of a heraldic stag.
How comes it that the half-worn device carved on this stone is that of the Cenci of
Bologna 2 This can only be explained by the great numbers of domains that the house
possessed; still as I deciphered this unexpected record, I was all the more persuaded that

A&IPETTA. 55
I had discovered the ruins of the palace of Beatrice, as I knew it to be situated in a poor
quarter in the neighbourhood of the river. To put away all doubt I proceeded to ask
some half-dressed girls who were chattering in front of a door on pretence of sewing.
They referred me to a matron who was selling with many airs of importance three
bundles of vegetables, and who having convoked the whole quarter to make out my
meaning, pointed out to me on the other bank beyond the Quattro Capi, towards the
zione of the tanners, the situation of the Cenci Bolognetti palace. So I looked once
more at the unknown cloaca of the chevet of San Crispino, into which perhaps no
painter has ever ventured, and then I went in search of the palace that I thought I
had found. - - - -
The aspect of the house is scarcely less appropriate to the melodrama which has made
the old name of the Cenci so familiar. It is in the corner of a small choked and uneven
piazza, that the old entry to the palace hides itself under a truncated tower, the palace on
this side only revealing a straight outline. Iron cross bars impress on the façade a
character of mystery and duress; one of the gates arched and carved is surmounted by
an antique mask of a Medusa of a dreary and tearful expression. In the other corner of
the piazza, shut in and lugubrious as the court of an old dungeon, Francesco Cenci—he
who was assassinated—had raised towards I 575, to the honour of St. Thomas, a small
Oratory on the wall, of which an inscription perpetuates this reminiscence. They have also
fitted into the walls adjoining two small cippi or funeral altars, bearing the name of one
Marcus Cintius. They were for the Cenci stone charters, for their boast was that they
had descended from this Cintius, as the Muti descended from Mutius Scaevola. They
would have been more happily inspired in claiming kinship with Lucius Cincius
Alimentus, who I 53 before our era, being praetor in Sicily, was made prisoner by
Hannibal, of whom he wrote a history, quoted by Macrobius and praised by Livy. But
the ignorance of the feudal barons was as great as their vanity, as is frequently pro-
claimed by their pretensions of this sort. The Santa Croce boasted of being of the line
of Valerius Publicola: hence the name of Santa Maria de Publicolis given to the church
where they have their burying-places, among which, besides fine monumental stones of
the fourteenth century, one ought to mention a magnificent Florentine mausoleum.
The continuation of the Cenci palace, in the inside of which there is nothing any
longer to recall the contemporaries of Clement VIII., reaches to another larger and
lower square in front of the synagogue. The principal existing entry is surmounted
with the inscription, CENCI BologNETTI; but the heirs of the name do not live in
the palace. - 4.
It was in the Castle of St. Angelo, that Roman version of the Tower of Nesle, and in
face of the mole of Adrian, that the terrible adventure of their ancestors came to its end.
You can by making some turns approach this strange outlined monument by alleys that
isolate and set off the massive and imposing prison-house. .
Before going down so far as this, the Tiber describes a semicircle which, encroaching
on the most populous streets in Rome, seems to throttle the handsome quarters between
the Pincian and the river. It is at the angle of the elbow formed by the Tiber that
Clement XI. had constructed the little port of Ripetta, with large steps which make the
approach easy to the people, who in this busy street disembark firewood, wine, oil, grain,
and the other produce which comes down from the Sabine country and from Umbria.
The port of Ripetta, opening a few paces from the Corso on the much-frequented street
which leads from the Piazza del Popolo to the Piazza Navone, fronts a deserted plot which
56 A&OME.
has never been built upon, and whose verdure serves as a pedestal for the Monte Mario
situated in the background.
To pass to the other side and reach the Castle of St. Angelo and the present suburbs
of the Borgo by the fields, they established perhaps twenty centuries since a ferry which
leaving the most lively centre of the city comes to a sandy champaign where solitude
begins instantly. In less than five minutes, the time taken in going from one bank to the
other, you are transported from the greasy, muddy, much-betrodden pavement of the Via
di Ripetta, to a track bordered as the winter comes to an end with green elders, with black-
thorns already in blossom and eglantine in bud. The narrow beaten path has for its
setting clumps of lotus and violet. If you turn to the right, you would come to the fields
where Cincinnatus, forty minutes away from the Campus Martius, lived so far from Rome;
he would be scarcely separated from it in our day. If you go straight forward instead of
turning to the north, you come to pastures, to miniature gardens, to cottages which the
people of Marseilles call bastides and the Romans vignes. There are some country boxes
among the farms, whose courtyards, all encumbered with rustic tackle, serve as a close
for chickens, geese, and sheep. The city, cut off by a strip of water, is fifty metres off;
the noise of public vehicles mingles with the song of the lark. The reach of the Tiber,
St. Peter, and in the background the side-face of the Castle of St. Angelo, vast and
sombre, bound this little nook of solitude.
It is very surprising that having absorbed, as well on one bank as on the other, three-
quarters of that circumference of which the stream describes a half, the city should never
have invaded the ground which under the Caesars would have connected the Flaminian
Way with the habitations across the Tiber, and which ever since the time of Constantine
would place the rich quarter of the town in direct communication with the strong Castle
of the Popes and the Vatican.
But no one, and here is a trait which paints Roman aedileship, nobody ever bethought
him by throwing a bridge across the port of Ripetta of suppressing that tongue of desert
which is an enclave in the city. In the present condition of things one boat suffices for the
traffic, for the pathway that has been beaten for two thousand years has never grown
larger, so scanty is the number of town-folk who believe themselves rich enough to shorten
their road by making use of a boatman in whose palm you have to leave a halfpenny.
VI.
In spite of the original head-dress with which the popes from the time of Boniface IX.
crowned it, the tower-shaped burying-place of the Antonines, which is not less than six
hundred feet in circumference, still keeps an equivocal and sinister expression, especially
when viewed from the river, or from the poor districts of which I have spoken. Trans-
formed in the middle ages into a prison and into a fortress; disguised afterwards as the
residence of a prince, then as a barrack, the mole of Adrian, of which the Orsini in
the fourteenth century made a lair for themselves, has never been able to strip itself
of the physiognomy of its original destination ; before the postern one still expects
to see a coffin go in and an executioner come out.
These sepulchral dungeons were then in use. Without speaking of those of the
Appian Way, let us remember that on the other bank at Ripetta there rose and still
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CASTLE OF ST. AAWG.E.L.O. 57
stands in part, the model of the Castle of St. Angelo, the mole built by Augustus for
the Caesars of his family. It is well to say a few words about it, if only to prove the
uselessness of troubling oneself about it. & -
It is a thick, large, Squat tower, engaged in buildings; its masonry was almost
entirely of reticulated work. The Colonna fortified and quartered themselves there in
the middle age; but since then, mockery of fate, they have arranged a small daily
spectacle in that vast columbarium, where, with the exception of Nero, most of the Caesars
down to Adrian reposed. & -
Suetonius leaves no doubt as to the site of the sepulchral chambers that Augustus
prepared between the Flaminian Way and the bank of the Tiber. We should say
to-day between the street and the port of Ripetta. Marcellus, Agrippa, Octavia,
Drusus Germanicus, Claudius, have slept in that rotunda where they now play farces
twice a day. Before Pius VIII. they had bull-fights there. It is to be presumed that
the form of the mausoleum of Augustus, whose magnificence is celebrated by
Strabo, determined the plan of the burying-place of Nero, constructed farther off at the
foot of the Pincian, near that of Sulla, nearly where Santa Maria del Popolo now rises.
The form of the Neronian Mole is determined by the legend of the church; it was under
Pascal II. a gigantic tower, in the heart of which an enormous walnut-tree had spread its
roots. Thus the mausoleum of Augustus furnished the plan for that of Nero, and both
inspired Adrian with the ambition of surpassing his predecessors. . . .
What a monstrous melodrama, the history of the Castle of St. Angelo ! It only wore a
rather smiling look in the days when it received the dead. Procopius paints it for us at
that first epoch; the immense rotunda, terminating in different elevations, with the
imperial colossus on the summit, had its sides covered with Parian marble; the circum-
ference had pilasters surmounted with a ring of Greek statues; the whole on a basement,
decorated with festoons, and tablets with funeral inscriptions, and colossal equestrian
groups in gilt bronze at the four corners. Round the monument was an iron grating
surmounted by peacocks, also in gilt. * * * g . {
In 537 this fine structure was still intact, but Vitiges having attacked it, they broke
the statues, in order to hurl the pieces on the assailants. During the three centuries
which followed, the mole of Adrian, connected from the time of Honorius, perhaps, with
the defences of the city, served as a fortress. It was to entrench himself there that the
patrician Crescentius, who wished (974) to restore the Roman republic, made himself
master of it. He even kept it tolerably long, as the monument took from him the name
of Castel Crescenzio. But, invited by one of the anti-popes of that anarchic period, the
Emperor Otto having invaded Rome and massacred Crescentius with his principal
partizans at a banquet, the tomb of Adrian was discovered and dismantled. g -
Half a century before, this spot had been the theatre of a tragedy which followed
strange saturnalia. An incongruous relic of antique profligacy and of the monstrosities
of the lower empire, drawing a mischievous power from feudal institutions, Theodora, a
Roman lady, illustrious for her rank and her beauty, quartered herself from the year 908
in the Castle of St. Angelo, from which she exercised over Rome a complete tyranny,
sustained against German influence by an Italian party, which counted among its chiefs
Adalbert II., Count of Tuscany, the father of this Messalina. Theodora caused several
pontiffs to be deposed, and nominated eight popes successively. She had a daughter
as beautiful and as powerful as herself, and of still worse perversity. Marozia, So she
was called, reigned likewise in the Castle of St. Angelo, where she caused the election of
I
58 A&OME.
Sergius III. and Anastasius III. and John X., a creature of Theodora, who had had him
nominated to the bishopric of Ravenna. Early the widow of a Marquis of Tusculum, and
married to Guy, Prince of Tuscany, Marozia speedily had John X. Suffocated in the Castle
of St. Angelo; then united by a third marriage to Hugo of Provence, brother of her
second husband, after having successively exhibited on the pontifical throne Leo VI. and
Stephen VIII., she gave the tiara to John XI., one of her youngest sons. She had only
too many children, for one of them imprisoned in this same dungeon both his mother and
his brother, the Pope, and there destroyed them. Such at that time, under the brutal
pressure of feudal anarchy, had the chair of St. Peter become. -
The Castle of St. Angelo, from the seventh to the ninth century, is found connected
with all the outrages and all the factions that desolated Rome; and, down to the end of
the fourteenth, its destiny was not very different. It was then that Boniface IX., a
Neapolitan by origin, crowned the dungeon, to make it still stronger, with the works which
make it at once less gloomy and more striking. Alexander VI. completed the resto-
ration, and, by a passage constructed in the wall of the Leonine city, he brought the
Castle of St. Angelo into communication with the Vatican. This idea was profitable
(1527) to Clement VII., when he was obliged, in order to escape the unbridled hordes of
the Constable de Bourbon, to seek an inviolable asylum in the thick walls of the Castle
of St. Angelo. .
Before entering, let us recall the manner in which it acquired the name that time has
consecrated. -
In the year 590, as St. Gregory the Great, recently called to the pontificate by the
people and the bishops, was bewailing the misfortunes of his flock that a plague was then
decimating, he ordered a general procession to the tomb of St. Peter to seek the removal
of this scourge. The procession was headed by Pope Gregory himself, who walked with
naked feet. As it crossed the Tiber on the AElian Bridge, built by Adrian, a bridge which
still stands and confronts his mausoleum, suddenly above the mole Gregory saw,
starting from the clouds and appearing to him as symbol of hope, the radiant Archangel
St. Michael. Thus it was not by any means, as the guide-books have it, on account of
the bronze statue placed on the top by Benedict XIV. that the mole became the Castel
Sant' Angelo. The first book would have proved that they had called it so for a
thousand years. -
Two centuries before Benedict XIV., Cardinal Tiberio Crispo had already placed
on the summit of the edifice the statue in marble of St. Michael, carved by Raffaelle da
Monteluppo, and afterwards the AElian Bridge, baptized in turn by Trajan, by AElius
Adrianus, and by the church of St. Peter, had taken the name of the citadel of the
papacy. Now, these angelical designations are ten times justified, for St. Michael has
by ill-fortune attracted to the bridge a whole flight of Seraphim, to come and perch on
the parapets of the Ponte Elio, repaired by Nicholas V., after an accident which cost
the lives of a hundred and seventy-two persons, and widened and beautified by Clement
IX., who imprisoned the work of Adrian in his own. By ill-fortune, I say, to come
and arrange themselves on this famous bridge-way, the angels awaited the signal of
Bernini, and they are none the better for it.
Is this saying that these spirits, with their wings and draperies twisted in exaggeration
of attitude, want animation and force P By no means; they are only too well in keeping
with the bronze St. Michael of Verschaffelt, which Benedict XIV. substituted for the
bolder statue of the old Monteluppo; only rather sombre recollections come and suggest
story of BEATRI&E DE’ cºvci. 59
contrasts, as one passes between those two files of rococo angels, and before that clump
of lilac and willows which envelops the gate of the dungeon so recently thronged by our
soldiers. -
Let us cross the Tiber. At one of the ends of the bridge is the dungeon of Beatrice
de' Cenci; at the other was raised that family scaffold, where she was beheaded with her
stepmother and her elder brother in the presence of the younger, who was condemned to
undergo the spectacle of a mother, a brother, and a sister butchered before his eyes.
VII.
Every country possesses among its judicial annals some never-to-be-forgotten drama
of which legend takes possession. The middle age had among ourselves the adventure
of Gabrielle de Vergy, that of Aubri de Montdidier; later, the assassination of the
Marquise de Ganges, and the poisonings of Madame Brinvilliers supplied stories for an
evening. In Italy, and at Rome especially, these atrocities have never been rare; the
great school is there. But nothing equals the interest, and nothing has counterbalanced
the renown of Beatrice de' Cenci.
The family was extremely rich and in possession of a sombre kind of celebrity of
remote date; for it boasted of counting in its ancestral stock Crescentius, that consul of
whom we have just spoken, and who took up his quarters in the Castle of St. Angelo,
where we see the prison of his descendants. It was one of the Cenci who, being stationed
on Christmas night in the same dungeon by Henry IV., while Gregory VII. was cele-
brating the first mass, seized him at the altar and dragged him by the hair out of the
sanctuary to throw him into a cell. These examples had perhaps contributed to main-
tain a violent spirit in the family, of which the most odious shoot is, towards the end
of the sixteenth century, that Francesco Cenci who had inflicted on three of his sons the
most abominable and unspeakable outrages; who had the second and the third assassi-
nated; who overwhelmed his daughter and his second wife with ill-usage; and who, twice
convicted of the most infamous crimes, escaped the penalties by bribing his judges.
Taking pity on the eldest among the children, as well as on the eldest of the two
sisters, the Pope had rescued the sons from a degrading yoke and married the daughter,
at the same time compelling Francesco to give her dower. Afterwards, the youngest
children of the monster, Beatrice and Bernardino, as well as Lucrezia Petroni, their step-
mother, losing courage to go on bearing the usage that lay so heavy on them, addressed
to Clement VIII. one of the most touching memorials, imploring his pity and protection.
Their supplication miscarried and remained unanswered, to the despair of Lucrezia and of
Beatrice, who abhorred in her father the dishonour of the family and the murderer of her
two brothers. -
At last, one night when Francesco Cenci was at the quarters of the Colonna, at the
castle of Rocca di Petrella in the kingdom of Naples, he was assassinated there by
unknown hands and in the most singular manner. During his sleep, two enormous nails
were driven into his eyes with a hammer, a feat which implied the co-operation of two
accomplices at least. This took place the 15th of September, 1598. Lucrezia was
speedily suspected. On the first inquiries, Guerra, a very handsome monsignore who
passed for the chosen friend of the young Beatrice, took to flight, after procuring the
murder of one of the two assassins whose track had been discovered and who was called
I 2
6O g ROME.
Olimpio. The other, named Marcio, arrested and put to the torture, declared that he as
well as his slain comrade had been hired by Jacopo, Lucrezia, and Beatrice de' Cenci,
seconded by Guerra, who, having put their victim to sleep with a narcotic draught, then
introduced the two bravi into his room, where Lucrezia had placed in their hands the
nails that were to be the instruments of vengeance. After that they had given them a
thousand crowns of gold. -
At the first rumour of these inquiries, the female De Cenci returned tranquilly with the
two sons to Rome to their palace, where the Pope placed sentinels to hold them in arrest.
Marcio was transferred to the pontifical prisons, where he repeated his declarations; but
being confronted with Beatrice, he was so crushed by the reproaches, the denials, and the
ascendancy of that marvellous beauty, that he retracted all, and persisted thenceforth in
his denial even in the midst of the tortures which at last killed him.
It was at this moment that there began in this extraordinary trial the strange turns
brought by unforeseen circumstance. The whole of Rome was absorbed with the event,
and offered all its vows for two beautiful, young, oppressed women. The recantation of
Marcio was then all the better received by the judges, as Beatrice had endured the torture
with superhuman courage, while she protested her innocence. - .
But while the issue was going in this direction, the police arrested for some offence a
ruffian, who was recognised as the assassin of Olimpio, the second murderer of the count.
The witness thus suddenly raised up confirmed the first deposition of Marcio. This story
charged the two women, as well as Jacopo and Guerra. The whole family of the Cenci
was thrown into the Castle of St. Angelo, where the proceedings were resumed and slowly
persevered in. At that time they hardly condemned an accused person who persisted in
attesting his innocence on the holy Gospels; but to compel him to confess a crime, they
detained him for months and even years in the dark and rotting atmosphere of the
dungeons. Then, from time to time, they dragged him to the torture chamber, to subject
him to ordeals which increased in rigour up to the moment when he brought himself to
confess, overcome by anguish and troubled by the pangs of death. If an accused,
sustained by the conviction of truth, and by the heroism that it has the power of inspiring
in energetic natures, triumphed over these tests, they were careful not to press them so
far as to be mortal; they took him back to his dungeon, in the hope that he would be
better inclined another time, and they resumed the besotted and execrable ordeal until
the victim spoke or died. All the world knows that, but we must repeat it again to
realize it, so monstrous does that judicial barbarity appear which, upheld for centuries,
was only abolished with us on the motion of Lewis XVI. ; well did the nation repay him
This anguish of the torture Beatrice de' Cenci confronted for nearly a year without a
word of confession. Such was the interest excited by her courage that even the judges
were subjugated by so many attractions of youth and eloquence. It was necessary to with-
draw the cause from them and to entrust it to more callous persons. Her elder brother
and her mother-in-law, their constancy worn out, then confessed; the young Bernardino,
a stranger to the whole affair and who knew nothing of it, confessed all that they wished,
in order to escape from that gehenna. Later on his innocence was demonstrated.
Why should one not regard as acquitted all the wretches condemned on their own
testimony thus extracted by torment P But it was in vain that they opposed to the
young heiress of the Cenci the crushing evidence of her family; she persisted in the
enthusiastic declaration of her innocence. No threat, no torment vanquished her;
and her tenacity suspended the doom of the accused.
STORP OF BAEA 7'R/CE DE” CEAVC/. 6 I
The winter passed in this way; Beatrice was compared to Lucretia, to Virginia, to
Clelia, Roman women of the heroic time, whose firmness she recalled while she surpassed
their charms. One day, in order to apply some new torture, they had to begin by
cutting off all her hair; they were fair locks, the most silken, the longest, the most
marvellous in colour ever seen. Beatrice grew pale; she was vehemently stirred, and
repelling the executioner, she cried out, ‘Touch not my head; let me die without
mutilation l’ -
Sad wage for so much bravery ! She destroyed herself to save her tresses; and
by a full confession confirmed all the depositions.
They were all four condemned to die, a decree against which Beatrice protested by a
fierce access of indignation that found an echo in every soul. In the city, in the palaces,
even in the cloisters, they talked of nothing else. If the valour of this noble soul had
won for her so much sympathy, judge of the effect wrought on a population of artists
and poets by this unforeseen weakness, childlike and truly touching, by which the young
maiden and the woman had betrayed the heroine ! It was an effect of delirium, of
adoration; and Clement VIII. was inclined to yield to the current of feeling, when, by a
second stroke of fate, one Massini poisoned his father. Other crimes of this kind already
weighed heavily on the nobles; the Pope resolved on making an example, and he con-
firmed the judgment on the four prisoners. Such a sentence, undoubtedly unjust so far
as it touched the young Bernardino, and of doubtful equity, as we must confess, with
reference to the others, revolted the whole city. Cardinals and religious corporations,
magistrates and citizens, threw themselves at the knees of the Pontiff, urgently seeking
revision of judgment. Clement VIII., yielding to this request, supplied the Cenci with
skilful champions, Nicolo de' Angeli and Farinacci, and he ordered the case to be argued
in his presence. . - • ..º.
Officially appointed to plead before the Holy Father, the two advocates displayed
irresistible eloquence; recalling the abominations of Francesco Cenci twice snatched from
justice, and the probable murder of his sons, Farinacci argued that such a monster must
have created a host of foes and stirred up against him more than one avenger. He had
the art of convincing and softening to such a degree, that the Pope left the hearing
profoundly moved. Everybody then was in expectation of mercy when, third fatal
incident while the case was yet pending, a young Marquis of Santa Croce assassinated
his mother. Did the Pope believe himself warned by heaven and exhorted to harsh-
ness P In any case, from this moment he remained inflexible; and having pardoned
Bernardino, whose innocence was notorious, he gave the order for hastening the execu-
tion, forcing the youthful son of the Cenci to look on at the butchery of his family. The
judicial agony of these unhappy souls had lasted a year. - .
They were to be slain on the 8th of September, 1599, but it was the festival of the
Holy Virgin. It was Beatrice who thought of this, and who, that the day of the Madonna
might not be stained with blood, implored the respite of a few hours, an act of piety which
rendered her fate still more touching. - - . - •
On the morning of the 9th, the Pope Aldobrandini, to be far away from the scene of
punishment, quitted Rome; he passed before the Castle of St. Angelo, over the bridge
that was soon to be trodden by the condemned. A pontiff with erudition, the son of an
illustrious man of letters, Clement VIII. was not inaccessible to pity; he only went as far
as a convent that was near the walls, so that being warned by three discharges of cannon
of the fatal moment, he might absolve the poor folk who were going to die. When the
62 - A’OME.
booming resounded through the air, the Pope raised himself; he went through the form
of plenary absolution and then fell back almost Swooning.
If he had seen what was passing the same hour in the section of the piazza of the
bridge of St. Angelo, lying between the quay and the opening of the streets Paola and
del Banco di San Spirito, what would he then have done, what thought then of his
justice -
For the punishment of these three victims, there had been organized there, under the
name of mannaya, a sort of mechanism with a knife whose clumsy play perhaps retarded
for two centuries the great political machine of 1793. The heat was suffocating ; the Sun
poured down on the crowd held in by horsemen; the carriages were crowded together up
to the very edge of the scaffold; the three open spaces were densely thronged; from the
streets, from the piazza, from windows, from roofs, everybody could see advancing across
the bridge in front of the huge and massive dungeon of the Antonines, the sinister proces-
sion. The condemned ascended the scaffold, which was placed on the piece of ground
before the statues of St. Peter and St. Paul. Soon this crowd, that had already been
stirred to the heart by the youth and beauty of Beatrice de' Cenci, saw with horror
Lucrezia, her stepmother, who was large and corpulent, struggling for shame, held down
and uncovered under the hands of the executioner while the knife hacked her throat.
The shrieks of the wretched woman were answered by cries of horror from the depths
of the crowd. Whilst the rage of the people directs itself to the scaffold, and the horses
of the soldiers rear against the carriages, which are thrown in their turn on the women
and children crushed in the shock, the executioners, dripping with blood and stricken with
confusion, hasten to cut off the head of Beatrice; and as Giacomo de' Cenci, mastering
with his voice the tumult that surrounded him, denounces the sentence which makes their
young brother a witness of the appalling scene, bitter shrieks answer him—the shrieks
of Bernardino, torn by convulsions, and who was hurried away at the moment when he
saw one of the executioners raise a mass of iron over Giacomo and strike him down like
a 11 OX.
His body was cut into four quarters in the presence of the crowd; those of the women
remained exposed until nightfall on the bridge of St. Angelo, and after that Beatrice
de' Cenci, being claimed by a religious company, was buried behind the altar of St. Peter
in Montorio, at the foot of the Transfiguration of Raphael. - -
By her will, the reading of which raised to its height the compassion that always
surrounded the heroine, she disposed of a part of her property in dowering and marrying
fifty young girls. But nearly all the appanages of the Cenci were confiscated, an incident
of condemnations which never helped to make them less frequent; it was the result of
this acquisition that a few years after, by the wish of Paul X. the domains of the
Cenci were given to his nephews. In this way one estate of the condemned became the
Villa Borghese, a spoliation which rendered this terrible tragedy yet more unpopular.
A report of the execution found in the Vatican, and researches made a few years ago.
among the archives of the family by a Cenci Bolognetti, threw new light on an event that
had been travestied in romances and on the stage. Guerrazzi alone is trustworthy for the
facts, though not for the induction which he draws from them ; his book is declamatory
and common.
7'HE MOZA' OF A DR/AAW. 63
VIII.
It was under the impression of this tragic legend that I entered the Castle of
St. Angelo; the sombre tone that it leaves in one’s thoughts suits the aspect of the place.
Nowhere does antiquity seem more sinister than in the cavern fashioned between the
thick walls by the successor of Trajan, and distributed into enormous cells where, in old
days, giants of marble loomed in the darkness.
Along the circular passage, which by a gentle inclination slopes spirally to the foun-
dations of the tower, throw a cannon-ball; it disappears in the shadow, and continuing
to roll on the arena and awaking a multitude of echoes, conveys to the ear with the
prolonged sound of thunder the perspectives of the distance. In the heart of the dungeon
a vault of extreme height, with niches hollowed out to receive Colossi, marks the old
Columbarium of the Antonines. The solid structure of this Roman catacomb, smoky
with the torches which with their tongues of resinous fire half reveal its lines, gives it
a character all the more mysterious and solemn, inasmuch as sounds are swallowed up
there just as light is. The useless splendour of mosaics and facings of Parian marble had
been lavished in this densely black chamber; the corridors found from a few pyramidal
loop-holes a memory of the light. . . . . . . - -
The modern prisons, that is to say of the last three centuries, have been arranged in
upper stories; they consist of cells, small obscure rooms surrounding an oblong court:
here for the grandiose ferocity of absolute will and arbitrary power is substituted the mean
ugliness of a wretched social institution. You will have shown to you the dungeons of
the Cenci and many others; you will be invited to shudder over prisons . . . which are
the repository of the archives. It is in pleasant rooms decorated by the school of
Raphael that you must seek the chamber in which, by order of Pius IV., was strangled
Cardinal Caraffa, nephew of the previous Pope, the same day on which his brother the
Prince Paliano had his head cut off; the room in which an old rancour was gratified
against the nephew of Paul IV. is designated quite naturally Chamber of Justice.
Zuccheri, who has drawn there the Virtues in fresco, has endowed the virtue of justice
with graces that are perhaps slightly deceptive. On the doors, on the walls of these
apartments, adorned by care of Cardinal Crispo and recently occupied by a French
commandant, pupils of Giovanni d' Udine or Perino del Vaga traced elegant arabesques
by way of frame for divers pieces of local history. Now in this country the annals of the
city are another name for Roman history.
I visited this building in the company of some Frenchmen, with the porter on guard
for our cicerone. He was a sergeant-major of Franche-Comté who had crammed his head
with the legends and traditions of the spot, and who, having dramatised the whole after
the manner of boulevard dramas, as he pointed out things mangled the names and sent
forth swelling r's like the traitors at the Ambigu. This jovial fellow had a fixed idea of a
comical kind ; it was his wish to find an opportunity of arresting an Englishman—one of
those English who mutilate objects of art to provide themselves with relics. He fancied
that if one of these indiscreet persons were once well thrashed the example would suffice
to correct the rest. He took the trouble, therefore, to mislay here and there some trifles
of antiquity, and when, after having verified his bait, he was acting as guide to English
families, he pretended to turn his back, after which he returned to see if the trap
64 . . A&OME.
had succeeded. As nothing was ever taken away, the Cerberus used to sigh. If the
presumed larcenies of the tourists exasperated him, their honesty tried his patience
still more. -
They showed us at the back of a niche the ancient figure of an archangel carved by
Monteluppo that Paul III. had erected on the summit of the Castle of St. Angelo, and
which the seventeenth century replaced by the rather thick-set and prosaic cherubim of
the Fleming Verschaffelt. Paul III. having fought Turks and heretics, his archangel
drew forth the sword; the spiritual and conciliatory Benedict XIV., who was bent on
pacifying the Church, wished for symbol a St. Michael putting up his sword. The statue
is more philosophic in intention, and in form likewise. . -
They have deposited at the Castle of St. Angelo in long stores like the hold of a
ship, supplies of oil which, so do customs perpetuate themselves in ancient countries,
are arranged in great clay jars in two rows, and fixed in cement as in the shops of
Pompeii. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - - ,
My companions, who were unknown to me, surveyed all with inattentive eye, and
hurried on with the impatience of sated curiosity. When we emerged on the platform
of the building, whence one has so many noble points of view of the city over St. Peter
and the Vatican, over the eight hills of Rome, over its ruins and over the Campagna,
everybody gave a cry of delight; the light is so glorious, the vast horizons of life burst
upon us with such transporting brightness, when the eye embraces them at the exit
of a dungeon. * - -
TEMPLE OF ANTON IN US AND FAUSTINA.
CHAPTER IV.
Di là, Di qua. . . . .-Sant' Andrea delle Fratte in holiday dress.-Lemoyne and his victims.-Chateau-
briand and Poussin at San Lorenzo in Lucina.-Last interview with the Marchese C***; funeral pro-
cessions and costumes.—Hygiene of grief—Discovery of an unknown fresco: Polydore of Caravagio.-
The house where St. Clara died.—Usages of small traders; perpetuity of the Roman race.—Church of
St. Mark and Palace of Venice.—Legend of the Two Adams.-St. Susannah and the Brothers Duquesnoy-
—St. Frances, a Roman lady.-The Temple of Antoninus and Faustina.-Basilica of Constantine and
Legend of the Arches of Peace.—Road from the Forum Palladium by the Colonnacce of Nerva.-Venus
and Rome.-Origin of triumphal arches: Septimius Severus.-The Arch of Titus: Jewish anecdote.—
Arch of Constantine; its first purpose, etc.—Nocturnal roaming in some cut-throat places.—Manners
and customs of brigandage.—History of robbers.-The terrible adventure of Mr. Schnetz.
I.
&S it happens to a sportsman on an idle day to sally out with his gun, without
even a dog for guide, and to come by hazard on a battue of rabbits, so has
\º it often happened to me in the quarters of Rome that are so full of game for
the tourist, to beat the pavement aimlessly, my pencil in my pocket, and to
take notes here and there a ſa / iſºe.
One morning, when stormy weather had prevented the arrival of couriers from France,
lounging gloomily towards the country, without any other intention than of going nowhere,
I found, at the bottom of my hilly street of Capo le Case, an opportunity for scribbling
this: “When a ſunzione has to bring people and cardinals into a church, they will rapidly
R.


66 A&OME.
hide the porphyry, the jaspers, the porta-Santa, the cipollino, the African granite, under
coverings of red or blue calico; over the precious columns of antiquity they will draw
pantaloons of yellow muslin. Is it not as if to receive kings at the Vatican Museum, they
were to clothe the Apollo like a waiter serving lemonade, and Venus like a miss behind
the counter? I have seen the nave of Saint Andrea delle Fratte travestied in this way,
and the Romans flutter with joy, whilst I fancied I must be entering the shop of the Deux
Magots.”
This bad taste characterises the clergy of all countries. It threw me so out of
patience that without seeking out of all that assortment of calicoes the Miraculous
Virgin which effected the conversion of the Abbé Ratisbonne, I at once sauntered back to
the Corso, where I encountered a tall Octogenarian personage, with nutcracker profile, in
whom I recognized the sculptor Lemoyne, that everybody supposes dead, and who lives
even self-forgotten in Rome. For nearly half a century, he has modelled with his clay
most of our celebrities who have died in the Eternal City.
Chateaubriand, when he was ambassador, commissioned him to execute the monu-
ment that he erected at his own expense to Poussin, against one of the pillars of San
Lorenzo in Lucina. My meeting with the sculptor suggested the idea of entering the
church, where I easily found the inscription :
F. A. DE CHATEAUBRIAND
A.
NICOLAS POlſ SSIN
POUR LA GLOIRE DES ARTS ET L’HONNEUR DE LA FRANCE.
The great poet inscribed his own name the first, under a poor bust in which Poussin
resembles a virtuous artisan. Then fearing, perhaps, lest he should be confounded with
an ordinary diplomatist, the author of René has had reproduced in bas-relief the
picture of the Bergers Arcadiens, in order to be able to engrave beneath these words,
ET IN ARCADIA EGO. ~.
How happens it that the homage rendered by Chateaubriand to himself, under this
delicate and pensive form, does not fail to touch P Has the reigning envy in our
time exaggerated too much the duties of false modesty 2 This little church adjoining
the Corso, so often rebuilt since the time when on that spot they used to sacrifice to
Lucina, offers nothing else of interest. The existing building (dating from 1606) was
decorated ten years ago.
An impression that is difficult to forget awaited me a few steps off. A few months
before, when I was at Naples, I dined nearly every day in the company of a young Roman
lady, French in origin, speaking several languages and gifted with a kindly spirit. It
was the Marquise Capranica, sister-in-law of Ristori, who married one of the younger
Capranica, the Marquis del Grillo. The health of my fellow guest was bad; through
the night I heard her cough, for her apartment adjoined mine. I was far from thinking
of this lady, when, carried away in the crowd that invaded the Corso, I arrived just in
time to see defiling before me a procession of priests and monks with tapers.
Between these priests and a train of blazoned carriages, completely empty, two rows
of bearers raised on their shoulders a cataletto, where a corpse reposed, with bared
face, in full attire, surrounded by valets in dress livery bearing torches. I recognized
my unfortunate neighbour, the Marchese Capranica, whom I had been accustomed to see
I'UAVERAL PROCESSIO/VS. 67
so gay and so little the slave of the stiffness of etiquette. The accustomed pomp of such
obsequies had impressed its majesty on the wasted face.
The Capranica are ancient; a cardinal of their house instituted the Capranica College,
which has given a name to a piazza and to a theatre.
When a prince or a princess of Rome dies, they clothe the dead in robes of ceremony
and lay them out on a state-bed under the canopy of the throne, where the body remains
exposed in the midst of a constellation of tapers for the sensibility of the populace.
You will not be edified, as in our countries, by the tender assiduity of relations or by their
affectionate urgency round the dying. At Rome, and throughout nearly all Italy, when
a sick person is at the extremity, the family flee from the house: a husband, a beloved
wife, a father, a grandfather, dies abandoned; the last gaze meets only hired faces.
This custom, which speaks clearly as to the real religion of the people of Rome, has for
its origin the rather pagan dread of being bewitched; they imagine that the dying have
the evil-eye. They do not accompany the train of friends and relatives to the cemetery;
the procession—a procession of state (more decent at Rome than in Tuscany, where in an
evening, carried along by the light of torches, the dead hasten so swiftly)—is only
recruited from among the religious orders. It is joined by the servants, the carriages of
the defunct, his horses if he has any, and his dogs, very likely, if their inclination carries
them thither.
Nothing is lighter than the temperaments of demonstrative and violent passion. When
the Romans are struck by an affliction, they hasten to apply alteratives and drench the
stomach. One day as I accompanied a friend to a traitoria, where the host and hostess
with two marriageable daughters were sitting together, my companion inquired the
reason why on the preceding evening the house was closed. ‘Alas!' replied the father,
‘they were carrying our son to his grave; we are deeply afflicted l’
Whilst my friend brought forward the usual formulas of condolence, there comes up
an apothecary with four bottles, which he places in a row upon the table, and while the
father, the mother, and the two daughters each seize one, the landlady says to us, in a
pathetic tone, “One may well take rimedio for such deep grief!’
They shake them off, these deep griefs, with a good deal of courage. I remember
that on the eve of the funeral of the father of a family, I saw the widow and the two
daughters all dressed up to go out. “Poor things l’ said the mother; “they have wept so
much that they need some distraction. For me, I only do it on their account. . . .”
She was taking them to the play !
I wandered for a long time without seeing anything in the labyrinth of alleys that
separates the Roman College from the bridge of St. Angelo, and near the Via Sant'
Apollinare, in the alley of the Maschera d’Oro, in front of the Camuccini Palace, if I am
not much mistaken, a chance that made me lift my eyes to a sufficiently sombre house,
disclosed to me a monument of art little known, which I think it a duty to point out.
The façade has been covered with paintings; those filling the intervals between the
windows are large figures, very much effaced; but below a high and long frieze exhibits
the fable of Niobe, executed in sgraffito by Polydore of Caravagio, classed among the
pupils of Raphael, and who must have worked more with Giovanni d'Udine and Giulio
Romano. In love with the ancient sculptures, this master delighted in decorations done
in white and black, which when handled with vigour are like bas-reliefs. His sgraffiti, with
their brown and neutral tint, are rainbow coloured in finely shaded cameos. The artist
has substituted movement for the effects of colour. One has rarely seen ancient figures
FC 2
68 A’O.J//'.
grouped in a succession of actions so violent, or subjects of exceeding animation pre-
sented with more classic regularity. This is assuredly one of the best works of Polidoro
Caldara, and that which gives the most just idea of his talents. Unhappily this frieze
has not been engraved; it is lost in a corner where nobody passes, and time daily effaces
a nearly forgotten masterpiece.
The chances of this walk brought me, as I followed behind the Pantheon the Via di
Tor-Argentina, before a souvenir of a very different nature, which did not fail to interest
me. Following two pontifical Zouaves, I came with them to the old home of one of the
most famous saints of the Church.
Of all mortal creatures the saints are in my eyes the most extraordinary personages.
Thought only discovers them in unknown spheres. We feel them to be more inimitable
than the most brilliant genius, and their celebrity, the only one in which fortune goes for
nothing, makes them no enemies. Altars are raised to them, and no one is envious.
Then, too, before such heroes of will and abnegation, even scepticism is seized with a
respectful curiosity, when recalling one of these mystic heroes in the asylum where he
was only a man; we picture him as palpable and mingling in the life of his time. The
house of St. Catherine of Sienna, the castles of Menthon, of Thorens in Savoy, where
lived St. Bernard the Hermit and Francis de Sales, occasion that kind of interest which is
so often aroused by the pilgrimage to Rome, which is built over the ashes of martyrs.
One of the most celebrated foundresses of orders, St. Clara, who in 12 I 2 instituted the
Clarisses, and afterwards the Capucines, the Annonciades, the Cordelières or Grey Sisters,
the nuns of the Ave Maria and of the Conception, and the Récollettes; St. Clara, who
at the moment when all the communities were extorting from the popes the authorization to
possess property, solicited from Innocent IV. in favour of her order the privilege of per-
petual poverty; St. Clara, who has her tomb at the Minerva, dwelt between the Pantheon
and the Thermae of Agrippa. The tenement she occupied at the time of her decease
still exists, and is not very well known. In the Via di Tor-Argentina, keep on to the
end of the Via Santa Chiara; the first house on the right on this little triangular place
lodged the first convent of the Clarisses. If, crossing the gateway, you turn to the left of
the court, you will face two windows of a slightly raised ground-floor. It was there that
Innocent IV. visited her, and there on the 12th of August, 1253, listening to the reading
of the Passion in the midst of her weeping nuns, died the first Abbess of the Clarisses, the
founder of four thousand religious houses: St. Clara of Assisi, daughter of the noble
Favorino Sciffo and of the lady Hortulana, who took the veil from the hands of a
spiritual mother whom she had brought into the world.
II.
In tasting that sovereign liberty of isolation, which is conscious of being beyond all
risk of importunity, a rare privilege in the populous streets of a city, I looked at the
Roman shopkeepers, who, smiling cheerfully at one who passes their door, only open the
shop on hours and days when they have nothing better to do. One buys so little ! A
joiner, my neighbour, only showed himself three times a week; some keep holiday till
noon, others take the liberty of closing at four o'clock, to go and parade on the Pincian.
The evening in winter and summer alike all is closed at sunset; and nothing is more
THE WEA/E7/AAW PAZACE. 69
judicious, since after nightfall the thieves depopulate the streets, which become all the
more dangerous, as the closing of the shops makes them darker.
Often from a low stall, from a dirty house, from a blind alley, I used to see issue
beautiful women or ill-clad hucksters, with looks and faces to remind one of the knife of
Virginius, a final argument brought into fashion by the quarrels of the Gracchi, by the
civil wars of Marius and Sulla still more, and retained among the customs of the people
(previously boxing and battles of stones had been enough to satisfy quarrels of less
vigorous hatred). Here and there Madonnas with taper ends, people playing at mora,
hoarse voices, broken by passion,-and some good old woman, who crosses herself, and
flits away at your glance.
In spite of invasions, the people have changed little; the barbarians sacked Rome
and did not stay there. There is still the antique race with its old character, its instinct
for attitude and beauty. Like their ancestors, the Romans of to-day are idolaters; by
an irresistible impulse, they still invent auguries to add faith to them ; gambling and life
in the open air are their dominant tastes. Disposed to theft, as a consequence of their
indolence, they prefer winning their subsistence to earning it. You will find in them the
same pride, and in their attitude the same gravity. Passionate lovers of all spectacles,
they have an invincible attraction for violent scenes, and even for the fierce enjoyment of
inflicting death. In fine, they have retained their infatuation for phrases, for the decla-
mation and the sounding words by which their ancestors inoculated our modern societies
with pedantry. - *
The perpetuity of these hereditary signs amazes us. To have neutralised the inter-
mixtures brought by the ages, this blood must possess a wonderfully rich concentration
and a rare virtue. How could the races maintain their purity in a country where fever is
endemic, where the filth is frightful, where the habitations are all infectious 2 They eat
little, as I have already said; they touch neither milk nor wine nor spirituous drinks. The
water that they drink is very pure; the fire of the climate does the rest. Add to these
facts, which place the old physic above the new, the absence of industries which etiolate,
and of studies which cultivate in childhood both intellect and consumption, life in the sun,
absence of ambition and care, a free expansion left to youth, a health-giving indolence
at all ages—these are the true preservatives; for you cannot even say these people
are accustomed to the insalubrity. The emanations raised and quelled by the Roman sun
carry away so many people, that in the alleys where the people throng you do not often
meet an old man. Suppose that needy freedom, that progress, industry, forced activity
come upon them, and that a new state of things transforms this population into manu-
facturers, into lawyers, into officials and other bond slaves, cribbed in our social galleys,
you will see them perish by thousands. -
The neighbourhood of St. Mark lends to the Venetian Palace, at the corner of which
I came out, such a local colouring, that I have seen numbers of people ingenuously
admiring that remarkable specimen of Venetian Architecture. The austere and heavy
palace, with its sober façade and its battlements, is a purely Florentine building and of a
fine epoch. The church, a monument of the same stock, has been made young again after
the Roman manner. One and the other were built in 1468, not by Julian de Maiano, as
Vasari says, but, as is proved from a contemporary chronicle quoted by Muratori, by one
Francesco di Borgo San Sepolcro. Mino da Fiesole executed, they say, nearly all the
sculptures: it is permitted us to doubt that. .
Pope Paul II., who was called Barbo and came originally from Venice, reconstructed
7O A’OA)//.
the church that Gregory IV. had already built over again in 833, and that had been
founded in 336 by the Pope St. Mark in honour of the Evangelist his patron. Paul II.
could not be content without having a fine church freshly decorated in the neighbourhood
of a palace in which he lived, and where there dwelt more or less after him nineteen
pontiffs; it was to this natural desire that the oratory of Gregory IV. was sacrificed, of
which, however, they respected the tribuna on account of its ninth-century mosaic, which
has for predella the symbolical lamb with its twelve sheep, but which is otherwise meanly
rude. The porch of this temple is graceful, and its gate is exquisite.
A sermon had attracted a number of women to the church ; it was charming to see
them leaning against some pillar, the head covered by the hood, the eyes lifted and
attentive, like the holy women of an old
painting. We know that it is forbidden
--------
|||}|| || to the sex to enter the naves bareheaded
|ill|| || || || T.
|||—|| at Rome, where women of every age go
-T)|||||| out without a head-dress even in winter.
To attend a mass or a /unzione, they
make a hood out of their shawls or a
muffler with their handkerchiefs. This
prescription dates from the primitive
church; I believe even St. Paul says
something on the subject. The Barbo
Palace had cost the friends of antiquity
dear; to raise its walls they have used
materials chipped away in the Coliseum,
which was turned into a quarry. Charles
VIII. took up his abode there in 1494,
when he was on his expedition against
the kingdom of Naples. It was Pius
IV., and not Clement VIII. (Aldobran-
dini), who ceded this residence to the
Venetian Republic, to recompense it for
being the first to receive the Council
of Trent. The Republic installed her
- - - ambassadors there. Then when the
GATE OF THE PALACE OF VENICE. Austrians took possession of the Lom-
bardo-Venetian provinces, the palace
of Venice was annexed to them by right of conquest, and they established their legation
there.
º
Observe that at Rome names which consecrate such memories are not liable to change
at the mercy of passion or circumstance. While with us so many streets and so many
monuments have been unbaptized, too often a commemoration of public ingratitude,
this palace has kept its winged lion and its primitive name; the ambassador of Austria
remained the guest of the Republic. As the Germans had acquired it with the territory
of Venice, so, if I mistake not, they ought to have restored it when they surrendered the
province, for it was to the diocese and state of Venice that the Popes gave it.
As I continued my walk, I discovered on the right side of a court in an alley which
goes from St. Mark to the Capitol, an enormous Christ upon the Cross, of a tolerably














THE BROTHERS DUQUE'S.V.O.P. 7 I
modern but rude style of sculpture, remarkable for this peculiarity, that from the hillock
in relief where the tree is planted, and which represents Calvary, there emerges from a
cleft not only the traditional death's head, but the vertebrae and the breast bone of a
skeleton that seems to push for some outlet. I do not think I ever saw anywhere else so
formal a rendering of the little-known tradition of the Eastern churches, from whence
has come our custom of placing a death’s head at the foot of a crucifix. A number of
casuists see in it nothing but an allusion to the idea that Christ conquered death ; a
metaphor would not have been enough to fix so constant a usage.
Following the legends of the oriental patriarchates collected by the Greeks, our
first father, banished from Eden, came to dwell in the place where afterwards rose
. Jerusalem; and consequently it was on Mount Golgotha that Adam must have been
buried. Hence the surname of Calvary, which signifies sku//, given to the hill which
covered the remains of the ancient man until the death of Christ; but the day on which by
his cruel sacrifice he redeemed the first man from sin, at the very hour when Jesus expired
on the cross, when the earth opened, Adam thus delivered escaped from the tomb. It was
to recall this tradition that the orientals adopted the custom of placing at the foot of the
cross that symbolical skull which gives the name to Calvary, and manifests the burial of
Adam, emblem of the first death and consequence of sin, under the symbol of redemp-
tion, the source of eternal life. -
As it is necessary to take a little rest, on arriving at the Piazza of Trajan, I entered
St. Marie de Lorette, the little octangular church of which Antonio of San Gallo orna-
mented the cupola with such a beautiful lantern, and I paid a visit to the St. Susannah
of Francis Duquesnoy, one of the exquisite statues produced by the seventeenth century.
The youth and beauty of the model, and the soft purity of execution, make one love this
admirable figure, and its charm is not so austere and mystical that one cannot sit down
a moment before it, while we reduce it within the scope of humanity as conceived by the
poetry of our own time.
In the centre of Italy an artist of Flanders becomes a compatriot. The remembrances
of an embittered existence helped to render more touching that inspiration of a man who
passed through so much misery, sustained by the friendship of Poussin; of a sculptor
who was inspired by the painters of Venice; of an artist whom Bernini and his set
plunged again into distress, and who at last found a port in the hospitality of the King
of France, when he died of poison given by a rival who was his own brother, Jerome
Duquesnoy. Like his elder brother, this Jerome excelled in fashioning cherubim and
angels. On his return to his country, ten years after the death of Francis, he was
arrested for some infamies that were then punished as crimes, and was condemned to be
burnt alive: it was in the midst of his tortures that he confessed to the murder of his
brother.
The masterpiece of the estimable Duquesnoy recalled to me that at the left of the
Sacred Way the little church of St. Francesca Romana contains the work of a French
artist. So I went there by the avenue of stupid little trees, ill nourished by a heap of
rubbish which ought to be cleared away, and which, without giving me much shade from
the burning sun of this evening, intercepted the frame of the Forum. It is not to vaunt
the carvings designed by Bernini on the tomb of Francesca, a Roman lady of the fifteenth
century who, under the title of Oblates, founded Beguines at Rome, that I shall mention
this little church; nor to point out the tomb of our compatriot Gregory XI., who
re-established the pontifical see at Rome after seventy-two years of exile. I shall content
72 - ACOME'.
myself with commending some interesting objects that people do not usually seek, and
of which the guides say nothing. There is, to begin with, behind the master-altar a
mosaic of the tenth century, which represents the Virgin surrounded by four saints,
separated from one another by arches and columns. In a transept on the left two pictures
attributed to Perugino; one is of the school of Francia, and the other might very well be
the work of a rare master—Gerino da Pistoja. e
Let us make honourable mention of a good piece of our countryman Peter Subleyras,
native of Uzès. It decorates the altar of one of the chapels, and represents St. Placida
restoring life to a child; a very religious conception of lofty aspect and striking effects,
to which Lesueur might have put his name. The Louvre possesses a reduction of this
composition, but the idea of the master has become very cold in it. I also recall the
beautiful equestrian figure in bas-relief of a Paduan Condottiere of the fifteenth century,
whose tomb was decorated by a Florentine.
III.
The shadows which were shutting in the Palatine, the purple rays which struck the
buildings on the Esquiline slope, warned me that the hours had passed like dreams. In
involuntary and complete forgetfulness of self, how lightly at Rome does one accept
solitude To visit without companions certain centres of actual life in all its ambition,
activity, and tumult, such as London or Paris, would be a saddening ordeal. On the
bank of the Tiber, where the present century sends forth so few scouts, the mind lets itself
glide back into the past, where the measure of time fades. 'Tis here that we must drink
the consolations of Lethe; under the portico of the future world, constructed by the ages
of old time. What a refuge for glory that has made shipwreck, for disgust with our
changing systems, for understanding outraged by human maleficence, for betrayed
ambition, for devotion sated with ingratitude ' What a glorious waiting-place for pre-
paring oneself, by forgetting to exist, for the transition to death, for encountering it
serenely, by the attraction of that frequent use with which death surrounds you in this
Elysium ! *
From the rising ground which surrounds the Via Sacra, I watched the shadows
advance over the pavement of the most ancient street in Europe. It bears this name in
memory of the propitiating sacrifices that were celebrated by Tatius and Romulus at the
foot of the Capitol. As I strove to embrace in a single prospect those far-famed spots in
the valley lying between the Palatine, the Esquiline, and the Coelian, more keenly than
ever did I admire in its ensemble the opulence of that historic frame. A glorious back-
ground for the colonnade of the Forum is found in the Tabularium of Sulla, in the Temple
of Antoninus and Faustina, in the Basilica of Constantine, in the apse of Venus-and-
Rome, in the Arch of Titus, and the Coliseum.
Antoninus and Faustina, with its travertine cella, crowned with the frieze on which
griffins sport, separated by candelabra and vases; the temple whose columns, the greatest
monoliths of cipollino that are known, have for diadems an entablature of enormous blocks
of Carrara: this pagan edifice grasps a church nave in stalwart arms that time has
covered with a metallic tint. Those who placed it there have left it under the symbol of
Faustina and Antoninus out of respect for a fine inscription of the second century; the
7'EA/P/A OF AAVZOAV/AWO'S AAWD ACA O.S 7/ATA. 73
people paid their tribute to the art of their ancestors by marking the parish by a word:
they name it San Lorenzo in Miranda. The columns of the hexastyle are not less than
forty-three feet; they are under the ground in our time by about five mêtres: under
the emperor you ascended twenty-one steps to reach the temple.
When we have passed the monument of the founders of Rome, at whose feet, by
a just homage, had been spread out the map of the great city which they had created
—a map whose ruins are at the Capitol; when in favour of his mosaics we have pardoned
St. Cosmo for quartering himself with Romulus, we stand in front of three high and broad
apses in which the eye seeks as if on the threshold of three caverns to pierce the dark-
ness, and which the vulgar call the Arches of Peace. The remains of the building, whose
º
BASILICA OF CONSTANTINE.
plan is not at the first glance intelligible, are so massive and thick, that we should be
mistaken as to their elevation if the people of the neighbourhood, who have worn a short
cut under these naves, did not give you so many opportunities of comparing with the size
of the blocks, as well as of the scattered foundations of the fallen portion, the lilliputian
proportions of a passer-by.
In the twelfth century, when the troubadours, those who had only seen the works of
Charlemagne, placed among the rhymes of their romances of chivalry one of these monu-
ments of Roman power, they attributed the foundation of them to genii of the pit, or to
giants of Saracen stock. The vaults are more than sixty feet in arch; the marble cornices
measure a frightful cubic content, and weigh thousands.
From all time these ruins and the mystery that belongs to them have filled the
L


74 A’O//E.
popular imagination. Some authors since the fifteenth century have fancied that they
recognised a Temple of Peace erected by Vespasian: an inscription from the Capitol
found in the neighbourhood gave rise to this supposition, but it is no longer tenable.
The characters of the architecture, the plan which is that of a basilica, the testimony of
the annalists, the marks stamped on the bricks employed in the construction-everything
INTERIOR OF THE BASILICA OF CONSTANTINE.
denotes that it is later, and must be attributed to the competitor of Constantine, to that
Maxentius who was triply in the wrong, by having been beaten, by having deserved to be
beaten, and by being out of intelligence with the ideas of his time. When this contu-
macious votary of the worship of Venus and Silenus had succumbed on the Milvian bridge
along with the religion of his ancestors, the senate consecrated to the conqueror the

AAS///CA OF CONSTAAWT/AW/2. 75
basilica of the conquered, as a well-instructed senate never fails to do. An anonymous
author informs us that Domitian once placed there, under the name of Horrea Piperatoria,
the bazaar of eastern products which, according to Galienus and Dion, was burnt in
the year 191 ; Rufinus, Aurelius Victor, and the anonymous author of the Notitia Romae,
establish the site of the basilica of Constantine as near the Via Sacra.
The Christian annalists still are for the name of Archi della Pace; they admit, according
TEMPLE OF NERVA, PANTANI PostERN.
to Suetonius, Josephus, Pliny—and they may well—that a Temple of Peace was burnt
under the reign of Commodus; but it is here that they place it, adding that at that time
it was no more than a ruin. Its first construction is attributed to Augustus after the peace
of Actium. When he had finished, they say, this enormous and solid edifice, the emperor
consulting the gods asked of them for how long his work would stand; and the oracle
replied, “Until a virgin bring forth a son–Quoadusque virgo paria! / Octavius augured
from this that the emblem of his new empire would last for ever; but the night on which
the child-god was born, the Temple of Peace fell.

L 2
76 A’O.J//º.
This tradition recalls another, which confers upon the first a certain value by showing
us on the subject of Vespasian, who came from Jerusalem when he was raised to the
empire, a prophecy relative to Christ ingenuously attested by a mistake of Suetonius:–
“It was an ancient and constant belief held throughout the East that the fates would call
about this time men come from Judea to be lords of the world. The Jews took to them-
selves the glory of this oracle: it concerned Vespasian ; the event has proved it.’
º
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FORUM TRANSITORIUM, OR FORUM OF NERVA.
In these quarters it seems that the ancient city prolongs itself indefinitely. At the
bottom of a street a little before the basilica, you see in a row, captive in a trench, the
columns of the Temple of Nerva, supported by a wall which bars the way and is pierced
by an enormous arch, by which there was a communication with the Forum, that bore
several names. They called it Transitorium, because it was necessary to cross it to
ascend the three hills that command it; Forum of Nerva, because Trajan had dedicated
it to his father; and Forum Palladium, because the Colonnacce, the remains, according

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FORUM AMD 7'EMPLE OF AWERVA. 77
to some, of a temple to Minerva erected there by Domitian, bear on their fluted shafts,
that are two-thirds underground, a figure of Pallas crowning the fine entablature of an
attica. The frieze has bas-reliefs of charming execution, but much damaged. Below
these marbles, these reliefs, this foliage of acanthus and laurel, a baker has his stall and
his oven. -
The Forum of Nerva reminds me of an anecdote much admired in colleges, and the
scene of which lay here. A courtier, Vetronius Turinus, trafficked in the friendship of
the prince and retailed the imperial favours. Alexander Severus had some bundles of
straw damped and set on fire, and in the smoke they suffocated Vetronius, while a
herald exclaimed, ‘Smoke punishes the seller of smoke l’ The emperor had been
educated by his brother in certain pedantical tastes.
If one loses oneself in these descents by taking to the left the Via Alessandrina, we find
again, at the corner of an alley which climbs and turns, that enormous wall which we crossed
in the Via Bonella under the Pantani postern. The peperino blocks of which it is built
are put together without cement, and fastened with wooden clamps; the structure, the
direction, the turns of this enclosure, evidently older than the Caesars, propound to the
antiquaries a problem that has no solution. A little farther, at the Salita del Grillo, is
a second mystery—the ruins of a semicircle with shops or taberna paved with mosaics,
marble and basalt. The bricks date from the reign of Trajan; but perhaps it is only a
piece of patchwork. Some writers have named this the Thermae of Paulus Emilius. What
it is we should perhaps know if the environs were cleared away. This quarter of the city,
one of the poorest, one of those where a buried civilization heaves up the modern streets
—all this quarter, from the tower of the Conti to the Temple of Venus-and-Rome, is as
fascinating as it is mysterious. - - -
Of this last monument, which on a level with the Summa Via Sacra confronts the
Coliseum, there remain huge blocks on which the outworks of St. Francesco Romano
abut; and in the midst of this mass, rough with wall-plants, is the excavation of an apse
which discloses a sketch of medallions between lozenge-shaped compartments. Rome,
born of a son of Venus, claimed the goddess for ancestress; and the Emperor Adrian,
who dedicated to her this temple, built on the atrium of Nero's house, expected without
doubt to expiate by this offering some of his abominations against the goddess. Dion
Cassius has fixed the site of the monument which, according to Victor, Maxentius
reconstructed or repaired. It was a fine building—pseudo-dipteral, writes Vitruvius,
who gives this name to temples which have two rows of columns on each façade, with a
single row on the sides. This one was enormous, three hundred and forty feet in length;
the materials were colossal; fluted columns, six feet in diameter; marble facings, nearly
six feet thick, etc. One of the signs of growing barbarism was this particular kind of
luxury—an excess of proportions that only aims at amazing.
IV.
But what distinctively contributes to embellish these solitudes, that rise where for so
many centuries all the world has made its pilgrimage and where we meet no one; what,
adding the prestige of art to the old documents of stone, lends so great a charm to the
horizons of the Via Sacra, are the triumphal arches which have served for models to so
many votive buildings. Like the custom of triumphs, these vaulted arches are of Roman
78 A’OME.
origin; the oldest was raised in the year 634, two years after the death of Caius Gracchus,
in honour of a Fabius who had beaten the Allobroges. The three most splendid types of
this construction are found very little apart from one another, by the side of the way
along which the triumphs passed.
By dint of coming across them daily as the ornaments of a picture which is too
striking to permit us to descend to analysis, by dint of passing constantly under these
arches and constantly seeing them, we almost forget to look at them. What a marvel is
the smallest of the three It is that of Septimius Severus, which marks the old level of the
Forum at the foot of the steps of the Temple of Concord. (See p. 1.) It was surmounted
by a car with six horses, in which the emperor was seen seated between his two sons.
On the front of the structure a long and fine inscription describes the dedication of it, a
memorial doubly interesting since Caracalla, having assassinated Geta his brother,
had his name and all that concerned him erased. The marble broken, hollowed, ill
repolished, the new characters cut in afterwards—all this seems of yesterday.
It was to celebrate the victories of the emperor over the Parthians, over the Arabs and
other tribes of the East, that this triumphal arch was erected, at an epoch when art had
degenerated. There has been such loud proclamation of this degeneracy, that every
tourist passes with disdain before the bas-reliefs of the close of the second century. They
have lost the purity of the Flavian time, but in spite of a certain heaviness, we mark in
them a character of reality which makes them expressive. The types of race observed
with a genuine sagacity are perhaps more interesting than if they restored with less
simplicity, by approaching more nearly to the Hellenized forms of antique beauty, the
expression, the attitude, the figure of the population of farthest Asia. At the foundations
of one of the three columns which support the cornice, there are three captive chiefs
wearing the Phrygian cap, in chains, wild and full of their degradation, which notwith-
standing the injuries of time struck me as exceedingly beautiful.
What I had previously explored and with an impatient curiosity was the Arch of Titus,
entirely bared of the castrum with which in the middle ages the Frangipani had overloaded
it. What a glorious effect is produced from three or four different points of view by this
noble arch, with a single gateway, robust in its ensemble, exquisite in detail, and which,
seen from afar, has for its principal decoration the fine letters of its inscription | We
decipher it without any trouble from the end of the Via Sacra, from the summit of which
against the blue sky this splendid pile presents its outline, all in enormous cubes of a
Pentelican marble which glows red in the fires of the sun, and which the shadows chill with
a blue grey.
Why should not our architects, who occasionally fix in mean illegible letters, as in our
church of the Trinity, or in the characters of a shop-front, as at the Opera, lying inscrip-
tions to make people suppose, for instance, that a theatre is an academy where poems are
written and where treatises on dancing are composed—why do not our aediles draw their
inspiration from the intelligent and legible inscriptions of antiquity ? The nearer we come
to the age of Augustus, the more constantly are these inscriptions traced in large letters.
These people with their fine reason understood that the eye must find a completed
satisfaction in all that is offered to it, and that the characters, a speaking arabesque
which animates and fills a surface, ought to be read from the point of withdrawal from
which the monument will be contemplated in its ensemble. And what did they contain,
these inscriptions? They contained the dedication, the history, and not the symbol of the
edifice. They have written on the attica of the Arch of Titus:—
4 RCA/ OF TVTU.S. 79
SENATUS
POPVLVSQVEROMANVS
DIVOTITODIVIVESPASIANIF
VESPASIANOAVGVSTO.
On the other face they have described in a summary the capture of Jerusalem and the
submission of Judaea. Seventeen hundred years and more have gone by since Domitian
dedicated this triumphal arch to his brother and to their father Vespasian. Divo 77to
proves that the work was completed after the death of Titus.
With its four engaged columns of composite order under a delicate architrave, with its
simple frieze which supports so fine a cornice, and the rich framing of the arch with broad
mouldings, with its keystone and its flying figures of Victory on either tympanum,_the
Arch of Titus, precious for its materials as well as for its style, roseate and white from its
eternal youth, solidly planted on the ancient pavement of the Via Sacra, is one of the
pure gems of the first century. x
The thoroughly established age of this model has given credit in our schools of
architecture to the opinion that arches with three gateways are later than those with only
one, and that this departure from primitive simplicity already marks decline. A numis-
matic expert showed me a medal of the fourteenth year of the reign of Augustus, on the
reverse of which is stamped a triumphal arch with three gateways. It would be easy to
multiply examples.
On the inscription towards the Capitol we observe given to Vespasian the title of
Pontifex Maximus which the popes have inherited : it takes on the Arch of Titus a
mystical signification. By sending his son to destroy the city and temple of the ancient
law, the Sovereign-Pontiff Vespasian accomplished the prophecies of Scripture.
This lapidary notice proves to us also a truth confirmed by the recent labours of
M. de Saulcy, that the last century depreciated the worth of the people of Israel: honour
is given to Titus for having ‘subjugated the nation of the Jews and destroyed the
city of Jerusalem, vainly attacked and besieged before him by generals, kings, and
nations.”
The vaulting of the arch is decorated with rosettes in richly carved coffers, forming
frames with several mouldings, the whole surrounded with graceful arabesques below the
impost: great bas-reliefs, precious above all, represent the triumphal procession so well
known by the curious narrative of the historian Josephus. We see the conqueror in the
middle of his troops standing in the chariot, holding in one hand a palm, in the other a
sceptre, and crowned by a Victory, mutilated like the visage of Titus, at which the Jews
took delight in throwing stones. His costume was that of Jupiter Capitolinus; his face
and his arms, says Josephus, were, like the statue of Jupiter Triumphans, enamelled with
minium or vermillion, colouring matter discovered according to Theophrastus in the
silver and mercury mines by Callias of Athens in the year 349 of Rome. On the bas-
relief placed in front the spoils of the subjugated nations are conveyed on litters, borne
by legionaries wreathed with laurel. We recognise the table of the shew-bread which
was of solid gold, the trumpets of the jubilee, and the golden candlestick with the seven
branches from Solomon’s temple so often repeated on this monument, which alone has
transmitted its form to us. After the tables of the law marched barefooted in a black
robe the chief of the Israelites, Simon, son of Gioras. In point of execution, in point of
delicacy, and in point of design, these bas-reliefs, alas, too much damaged, are to be
8O A’OME.
classed among the most perfect that antiquity has left in Italy. They demonstrate the
veracity of Josephus, and Josephus attests the fidelity of the sculptors.
This spot is full of the misfortunes of the Jews. The Arch of Titus is at the foot of the
Palatine, which held their spoil and from which went forth the order to exterminate them ;
in the sculpture we see the Israelitish captives dragged to the Capitol; a few steps
farther there rises the Coliseum, where Titus made them slave as workmen in such number
and with such harshness that, according to Cassiodorus, more than twelve thousand of
them succumbed. A few years after, Domitian, fallen short of money through his prodi-
galities, crushed them by imposts that were collected with such rigour that Suetonius in
his childhood saw an old man publicly visited to ascertain whether he bore the
Israelite mark. Rome at this time did not lodge less than seventy thousand Hebrews.
As I was about to examine the sculptures of the triumphal arch, I hear feminine cries,
guttural and furious, and I see on the Via Sacra a red-haired little girl with her hair all
disordered, coming under the archway. It was, I perceived, a little Jewess; the clamours
BAS-RELLEF OF THE ARCH OF TITUS.
which had disturbed me came from a path that the children of Israel had trodden,
between the back of the Palatine and the Arch of Titus. The child had ventured far
away from one who appeared to be its mother; and the latter, in a language that I did
not understand, was adjuring it with fury not to pass under the accursed arch. I pro-
ceeded to take by the hand the little child who was thus tempted by disobedience, and the
woman perceived me. She was an old woman, a grandmother most likely. Persuaded
that as a Christian I must wish her ill, and that as a Frenchman I must be mischievous,
she turned all her rage upon me. Her eyes swollen over cheek-bones that stood out and
were divided by a hooked nose, the lip foaming, the gesture rendered more sinister by
the arms of a skeleton; shaking her hanging rags and the relics of her thin locks, this
daughter of Jacob overwhelmed me with the most violent maledictions that one can
hear without understanding. The child persisted in trying to drag me under the arch-
way: I made it turn back, and, passing the corner of the monument, I restored it to
its grandmother, whose anger went down by degrees like the foam of a vessel as you
take it from the fire.
Never does any Jew pass under the Arch of Titus.

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7'HE ARCA/ OF CONSTAAV7/AWE. 8 I
I slowly came down the eastern incline of the Via Sacra, between the ruins of shops
where perhaps Horace bought something, as far as the spot where in front of the
Meta Sudans you count around you, starting from the left, the Temple of Venus-and-
Rome, the end of the Thermae of Titus, the Coliseum, a glimpse of the terrace of
Claudius on the Coelian ; and on the right a third triumphal arch, the Arch of Con-
stantine, at the opening of the little valley which led to the Appian Way.
After attaching myself more than usual to the arches of Titus and Septimius Severus,
it seemed worth while to compare them with a third, which like that of Septimius has
three open arches. The Arch of Constantine produces the liveliest impression ; we
admire without having analysed any part of it. Perhaps it wants solidity, but in front
it fascinates by its grandeur, by the harmony of its proportions, by the fine ordering of
its chief parts. It is the finest of the three, exclaim nearly all travellers; only scarcely
any of them have examined its details sufficiently to remember it. This is its single
defect, the abuse of richness. It only tends towards degeneracy by the fixed resolution
it shows to accumulate wonders. What it contains in exquisite figures, in charming
groups, in bas-reliefs that form pictures composed with a master’s hand, it is impossible
to enumerate. -
But it was not to celebrate the defeats of Licinius and Maxentius that so many
masterpieces were carved. Two centuries before Constantine, the senate and people
had resolved to honour an adored sovereign, the emperor Trajan. The desire of com-
memorating a number of glorious deeds inspired the artists with the plan of multiplying
the compartments on the façades, which admits besides threefold friezes eight
medallions, eight other square bas-reliefs on the atticas on each side of the inscription,
several subjects on the foundations of the pillars as well as on the body of the arch ;
finally, eight statues of the captive kings engaged to the pilasters on the cornice, to
continue the eight fluted columns of antique yellow which support the entablature.
This complication, the purists object, is the sign of a falling away in taste. I would
rather see in it a sign of enthusiasm for a hero whose renown they were fain to
make permanently manifest, at a moment when the panegyric of Pliny was in every
hand. e
There is a general agreement in considering the eighteen principal bas-reliefs of the
Arch of Constantine (three-quarters of the work) as having been wrought to celebrate,
on an arch previously existing, the Entry of Trajan into Rome, the Restorations of the
Via Appia, the Distribution of Food to the Army, the Triumphs over the King of
Armenia and over Decebalus, King of the Dacians, the Proclamation of a new King
of the Parthians, the Conspiracy of Decebalus baffled, divers Sacrifices to the Gods,
etc. These assertions are incontestable; but what is no less so, and what seems to
have escaped notice, is that the Arch of Trajan, in order that so many elements of so
peculiar a form should be capable of adaptation, to it, must have had both the exact
dimensions and the exact arrangements of the existing monument assigned to the period
of Constantine. It is natural, then, to admit that the bulk of the edifice belongs to the
same age as such considerable decoration ; for the eight columns, with their bases and
the statues which surmount them, are recognised as dating from the first epoch. We
shall be led to admit, in the same way, that, by changing in the fourth century the
destination of the Arch of Trajan to the honour of another prince—and here is a moral
decline—they must have limited themselves to completing it or repairing what had been
destroyed, and perhaps to replacing some portions.
M
82 A&OME.
The statues in violet marble of the conquered kings are very fine; but the heads,
carried away, it is said, by a nephew of Clement VII., have been restored by P. Bracci
under Clement XII. One of the inscriptions offers concerning Maxentius this indication
of an unfamiliar style: Constantine defeated him instinctu Divinitatis; but the cross does
not figure on the bas-reliefs. º s
A splendid monument of ancient art at the end of the first century, the Arch of
Constantine, which is comparable in importance and finish to the Column of Trajan,
presents a species of merit possessed by no other triumphal arch in the same degree.
I know no other where the attica agrees so harmoniously with the body of the edifice, in
such a way as to compose with the lower part a homogeneous ensemble without solution
of continuity, instead of producing the effects of an excrescence placed by an after-
thought over the cornice. The art employed to obtain such a result is easily seized;
but explanation would involve technical terms of a very heavy sort, while the general
impression on the eye is so rapid g -
e Such were the distractions that the city provided for a deep disquiet one day when,
without news of my friends in France, I plunged into the streets, with my curiosity blunt
and my mind in dull trim. A city must be very rich that can give, even for its full
harvest, as much as you glean at Rome by chance and without search
V.
As I wandered thus in the neighbourhood of the Coliseum, the sun which, in spite
of the assertions of tourist, does not plunge into the Tyrrhenian Sea with the rapidity
of a note falling into a letter-box, especially in the seasons when the day is short, the
sun passed gently away from Rome by the Latin gate, and the surrounding objects
grew pale before the darkness. It was not slow in extinguishing this vision of the old
world, a dream followed by a yet more fantastic reality. -
The solitude is absolute, the obscurity complete; the stillness allows one to hear
the evening breeze which brings with it the shivering of fever; the strange outlines
which stand out on the tumbled heaps acquire, in the black pall in which night envelops
them, proportions lugubriously misshapen; a few rows of cypresses mingled with the
nearest blocks so accentuate the sepulchral physiognomy of the horizon that, every sign
of present life being eclipsed, one feels that one has entered the domains of death, and that
you see on every hand a cemetery of gigantic mausoleums which invades the little valleys,
which covers the hills, and which surely must spread itself far over infinite spaces. .
Who could imagine after nightfall how absolutely deserted, funereal, almost appalling
become the regions of the Forum, of the Via Sacra, of the Coliseum, of the St. John
Lateran, of the Esquiline, and the Coelian The memories of the terrible scenes that
have stained these famous spots with blood are transformed into spectres; many of these
spaces where the streets survive the habitations have a reputation for being haunted, and
few citizens would venture into ancient Rome at the hour when the shadows are abroad
over the face of it. - - -
The aspect of such spots must have contributed to give them this evil name. To
their fantastic character is added a vague suspicion that they are lurking-places; and it
is especially at the beginning of the evening that people are in fear of phantoms with
STORIES OF ROBBERS. 83
a knife. The gentry employed in the agencies for assassination have most regular
habits; they love to go to bed betimes, so that in the middle of the night you would be
less exposed to the inconveniences of an institution that has flourished long, for even in
the time of Montaigne it was in full vigour. Cut off from my lodging by labyrinths of
evil look, I was in an incomparably good situation for retracing, apart from personal
observation, the stories that had struck me, in a city where you hear nothing but tales of
tragical adventure and nocturnal ambuscade. - *
A few days before I had, in seeking some one from one house to another, thanks to
an inexact direction, had experience of a usage so often observed since, that I may fairly
describe it from a general point of view. The Roman citizens are so afraid of their
dwellings being invaded, and families are so little re-assured by the presence of their
chiefs, that they keep themselves barricaded all day long as in a fortress. The only
luxury they know is that of locks and bolts, while a Żudas, of which the opening would
not allow either a bullet or a dagger to enter, permits the besieged to explore the stair-
case. This Judas-hole, made in a plate of sheet iron, is closed with a bit of metal; often
there are two locks, one of them enormous, with the key of a jail; then two good bars,
with pins to prevent them from slipping; finally, tightened chains fixed on a hook
shaped like a corkscrew. - - - • - - - -
If you ring at a door, you immediately hear the creaking of rusty irons. They are
not going to open; on the contrary, they are making all haste to shut, and with as
much noise as possible, whatever was not hermetically sealed before. Then, in the midst
of a silence that has again become profound, they observe you, and take stock of you ;
if you are unknown, they will never open; if, ringing again and with persistency, you
bring the people to the other side of the door sill, the whole family arrives in force;
they chatter, they hesitate, and the most masculine of the band in sharp and nasal tones
will ask, ‘Chi è?’ If it is a matter of handing in a letter or a parcel, “Aspettate;’
they are going to moderate their defensive works. The chain will be loosened in such
a way as to allow the door just to open, but so as to prevent you from pushing it. You
hardly get at the Romans at their own houses except through slits and chinks. Is it
not natural that a country where poltroonery is cynical to such a degree as this, should
be cultivated by brigands 2 - - - - - .
Thus what they fear above all things, even in broad daylight, is to have their throats
cut in their own houses; these citizens, in fact, have not a piece of furniture worth four
crowns, and when the family is out, all this safety machinery is reduced to a simple
lock. I was entertaining myself with these not very comforting thoughts when, by the
feeble light of a solitary lantern, which swings and creaks from the end of its crook at
the corner of a wall, I proceeded to ask myself whether I should venture by prolonging
my route to ascend the back of Esquiline by the old Via Labicana, which once led to the
Prenestine gate. The bit of bravado attracted me, because I should have to take, in
order to return by Santa Maria Maggiore by the light of the stars only, the tortuous and
sinister alley of the Sette Sale, one of the most notorious of the cut-throat places of
Rome. Three weeks before a priest had been poniarded there in the middle of the day.
To raise my courage, I said to myself that as no bandit would ever suspect anybody
of the imprudence of taking this route, it must be less perilous than the more central
streets, where the cut-purses have a better chance of finding work, where impunity is
scarcely any less probable, and where the resolute closing of the shops leaves the public
road nearly as sombre. I had inquired for the reasons of this precipitate taking of
M 2
84 A&OME.
holiday, and the explanations that I received invite one to conclude, it must be confessed,
that on the arrival of night Rome belongs to the men of prey. This tale was too
uncomfortable to be forgotten all along that truly lugubrious alley of the Sette Sale.
It seems that in the most frequented business streets the few shops that remain open
are exposed to such an adventure as this. Three customers enter a shop; the last remains
watching in the doorway, while the two others approaching the counter, one leans over
to the shopkeeper to whisper something in his ear, and at the same moment holds a
dagger to his throat by way of persuading him to silence, and in the meantime the other
carefully empties the money-box; the operation finished, the gentlemen salute and
proceed to continue their collection in other shops. They have not to concern them-
selves further, so absolute is their confidence in the public discretion; not a soul will
complain, not one will quit his stall to cry out “Stop thief!” It is only, and that very
seldom, through indiscretion, that the police are set on the watch, but they hardly ever
succeed in extorting a deposition or an avowal from the victims whom their own cowardice
thus transforms into accomplices.
I had still to leave the Esquiline, to cross the Viminal, and then the Quirinal,
and last the slope of the Pincian. This long, straight street was deserted also ; but it
is broader than the other, and the recesses are less unforeseen. Hunger began to
give me wings; two or three passers-by, astonished to meet another, had made me
tremble by emerging from some adjacent street, and I was so reassured that I began to
regret not having been favoured like every one else with a little adventure. But
past the Via Rasella, I perceived that I was followed at a distance; beyond the Piazza
Barberini the man, who had doubled his pace at my heels and taken the other side of
the pavement, went brusquely in front of me. Then he turned back, and, barring the
path, made me a profound bow. He had a very lean and hungry air.
At first he spoke to me of his pride, his dignity, his sacrifices, his clouded glory.
Was it Pyrrhus or Belisarius 2 Then he assured me of his protection; he watched over
me, he would preserve me from every disagreeable meeting; ‘For one finds in the
world people who—but he would not offend any one.’ Finally he informed me that I
was an illustrious and magnanimous signor; he even touched delicately on my generous
feelings per l'umanita . . . /a patria, ed. . . ed. . . lowering his voice, e per la liberta /
Towards the turning his tone became superb and his expressions more epic; it was
with the majesty of Hortensius that, laying a hand on my arm, in a voice still more
concentrated but solemn, my Roman wound up in these terms: ‘Excellence 1 if your
noble heart could favour me with an old pair of trousers l’
VI.
To finish the evening, I proceeded to the Villa Medici, where, when I entered, they
had for two hours been terrifying the ladies by tales of brigandage. They made fewer
stories with us under the Directory about the chauffeurs, than are daily retailed in Rome
at fireside gatherings. The good and lamented Schnetz, who from a feeling of local
colour took not unkindly to the bandits, ends in the narration of a personal adventure
by carrying us back to the recollection of a pedestrian excursion in the environs of
Rome. His story shall be, according to taste, the epilogue or the moral of this chat
of mine.
§
§
|S
THE COLISEUM AND
THE ARCH of CONSTANTINE,
| º
[.
SEEN FROM THE ARCH OF TITUS.
s

AAAWD/Z.S. 85
Without arms and with a single companion, Schnetz in the flower of his age used to
traverse infested roads. In each ſocanda people blamed their imprudence and offered vows
for their youth. The further they advanced the more sombre grew the menaces of the
desert; at the descent of a close valley, behold a dead horse, then a hat and some rags
in a ditch. They walked close to one another in silence, eye and ear on the watch,
when from a thick hedge there spring up, at right and left of the road, four armed
ruffians of most evil aspect. The two boldest leaving the others follow the artist and his
companion, drawing gradually nearer, in such a way as to join them at the foot of
the dell, while their accomplices, watching from a distance, cut off retreat. Impossible
to go back, and they could discover neither a hut nor a shepherd within sight. Nearly
at the foot of the slope our travellers, who felt themselves completely shut in, were
seized with a fright that is very easy to imagine. They crossed a pool of congealed
blood on the road. Almost at the same moment, passing the last of the thicket, they
perceive in front of them a swollen torrent which barred the road. It was there that
they waited for them ; the brigands were then close by ; they advanced openly and
stood with a malicious smile in front of our young countrymen, who put themselves
on the defensive as well as they could.
‘It must have been,” added M. Schnetz, that our attitude imposed upon them; for
not being able to meet our eyes in front, they suddenly turned and bent their backs.
This situation utilised our only arms, our iron-shod boots, and we let fly together; but
the monsters only made it a joke. Then profiting by their equestrian posture, we
bestrode their backs and they breasted the torrent. These ruffians, would you believe it?
were boats with two feet, who lay in wait for travellers to make them cross the water on
their backs. We had to pay our ransom, to drop our two baiocchi, and to console them
besides for the death of a mule that they had bled the evening before on the high
road ' '
By way of peroration, the facetious director of our Academy never failed to declare
that in all his life he had never met any other sort of bandits. The reader will learn
later on, when we come to inspect the Villa Medici, to what degree this optimism was
amusing.
BAS-RELIEF OF THE ARCH OF TITUS.

º
s
PONTE SALARIO.
CHAPTER V.
Theatres, Faust.—Meeting with Francis II. —The Metastasio company at Colonna Palace: the ‘Loves of AEneas."
-The Dioscuri of the cardinalate.—Ammos Zºfri.-Why the Popes changed name.—Baths of Caracalla.
The Salarian bridge and its memories.—Walk at Fidenae.-Assault of the town by Mamilius the Dictator.
—Point of view at Castel Giubileo.—Foundations of the town.—Last catastrophe under Tiberius.
BASILICA OF ST. CLEMENT.-Antiquity of the church. — Exhumation of the former temple.— Approach and
entry of St. Clement.—Interior; primitive arrangement of the Presbyterium.—Alexandrine pavement and
mosaics of Turrita.-Masaccio and the Chapel of St. Catherine.-Origin of the communities.—Visit to the
subterranean paintings.-Revelation of an unknown school; interpretation of symbols.-The Serpent of
St. Libertinus-Texts in Italian of the year 9oo.—Art sustained in the ninth century by the citizens of
Rome.—Romance of St. Alexis the Pilgrim, &c.
3OME is a grave country, where solemn and passionate habits banish the comic
& spirit into the background; between joyful Tuscany and the mad Campania,
& the consular city preserves the seriousness of a queen who has held the empire
of the world. At the small theatre where, as at Capranica, the burlesque
element intrudes, it is common and indistinct. Stentarello, the polichinello of the modern
Quirites, is an overdone noodle, who thwacks his ribs without being very amusing:
Patacca, a braggart citizen of the old quarter, aims at the character and falls into parody.
Called by the name of Apollo, the great theatre of Tordinone presents a well-arranged
saloon between lugubrious walls; its white decorations relieved with gold are a
-



THEATRES. 87
little cold; the hangings of grey dimity in two tones which furnish the boxes, are still
colder. Of these, the whole are let without exception. Nothing is more difficult for a
foreigner than to find a place, unless he knows some one who sends him his key or who
offers him a seat: families dispose of their box, as of every other apartment, without
dealing with any one. Although in France people represent the theatres of Rome as
filled with Monsignori and prelates, the truth is that you never see a cassock in them.
At the invitation of our ambassador, I saw played there the Faust of M. Gounod.
The lover restored to youth by Mephisto had the air of an extremely old Socrates, and
he raved as if he had the hemlock in his mouth. After the fatal nocturnal interview, he
gave Marguerite a kiss prescribed by the scenario, but forbidden by the canons, for which
reason the Roman police inflicted on him a fine of ten crowns. The next day he relapsed,
and Marguerite must have been deeply touched by it. Then he threatened to quit Rome
if they impaired the sincerity of his part. Such rigour does more harm to religion, by
raising a smile at the expense of its ministers, than the sight of a kiss would give trouble
to conscience. To put Faust on the stage, Goethe’s work had to be a good deal
modified: Satan, or Mephisto, is replaced by a doctor; and so that nothing might recall
the livery of the devil, they required that the slashings of the pourpoint, instead of being
flame-coloured, should wear the harmless hue of the meadows. The actor, Brémond,
who played the part, protested against the childishness of such scruples by rounded eye-
brows, a peaked beard, and by the curling back of his fingers into claws. Thus did
Satan recover his compromised personality | During an interval in the performance, in
which the tricoloured dancers in a ballet of adorable nonsense were immensely applauded,
I had the honour of approaching the dispossessed King of Naples, and even of joining a
group in which he was conversing. This tall young man, slightly pale, with an eye that
burns feebly, and who with his long features resembles Philip V. of Spain, kept up with
an air of timidity a conversation on grave subjects, in which he showed a discernment that
struck me. He mixes in society with the bonhommie of a Roman prince. The course of
conversation brought the interchange of a few words between us, though I had not had
the honour of being presented. * *
I had spared myself the Metastasio theatre; it was the theatre which sought me out
the evening of a Shrove Tuesday, when with a numerous party I had been dining at the
French embassy. At half-past ten the company gave us a parody of the ‘Loves of Dido
and AEneas;’ the connection of Rome and Carthage is not even yet quite antiquated on
the banks of the Tiber. The singularity of the Trasteverine jargon made me lose the
thread of the story every moment; the play on words was particularly obscure to me;
and I did not tire of admiring our stylish young officers, who laughed more loudly than
the Romans themselves, to prove that they understood without any effort. The Marquis
of Rocca-Giovine had been so courteous as to seat me next to himself, and he translated
for me the jokes which caused such perpetual hilarity; and so, in my turn, by way of
responding to the complaisance of the husband of the Princess Julie, I applauded in my
best style pieces of childishness that were chilled by translation. The dresses were not
disagreeable. What would be called with us, in carnival time, “Romans of the barrier'
are still more grotesque in old Rome. The firemen’s helmets set out with reliefs, the
small-clothes, the silk stockings, combined with the armour of the Trophies of Marius,
the Scarlet caraco of Dido, prolonged at the back into a royal mantle, and its tower-
shaped diadem, form hybrid products too violently accentuated.
The conversation struck me in the Roman saloons as better kept up than in our
88 ROME.
Parisian world, which may be attributed to the church dignitaries, men of cultivated and
polished intelligence, who give to conversation both substance and direction, as used to
be done in our society by the wearers of the clerical bands before '89. At the house of
the Princess. P’” I had met a cardinal of extreme accomplishments; I was astonished
not to find him at the Embassy. “Cardinal O***,' I was told, ‘could not come to-night,
as Cardinal G*** is here.” On inquiring the causes of an enmity which hindered these
two eminent personages from breathing the air together in the same salon, I was
informed confidentially that they loved one another like Castor and Pollux, but that
poverty obliged them, like the Dioscuri, to live one after the other. The style that is
indispensable for a cardinal requires a tolerably heavy staff; so those who have no
resources beyond their thousand a year, are obliged to put up with valets hired for a few
hours only. This is why it is impossible to find certain prelates at home except at the
fixed dates of their receptions; the people all gone, the master barricades himself, and if
he wants a cup of tea, the prince of the church will put his kettle on the fire. Now their
Eminences O’” and G*** had only for both a single establishment, in respect of
livery and emblazoned carriage: a tremendous secret, so well known by all the world,
that nobody was ever astonished at not meeting them together. -
It was on this evening that, during an entr’acte of the ‘Loves of Æneas,' I was initiated
in two local superstitions relative to the sovereign-pontiffs. As they were talking of the
renewed health of the Pope, some one suggested that perhaps he would attain the years
of St. Peter. It was a period of five lustres, that only the Apostle has yet accomplished;
hence the opinion that God will never grant to any other pope to reign for a quarter of a
century: AVon widebis annos Petri. In truth, out of the two hundred and fifty-nine
pontificates, of which the average duration has been seven years and sixteen days, only
four have gone beyond twenty years; those of Urban VIII., Clement XI., Pius VI., who
only wanted six months to falsify the oracle, and Pius IX., who was proclaimed on the
17th of June, 1846. The other superstitious prejudice is connected with the usage
adopted by all popes, of changing their names from the time of their accession. One of
the Conti furnished an example of this when, in 956, he was called Octavian, and he
took the name of John XI. His successors did the same, and so gradually there took
root among the people, one cannot tell how, the belief that a pope who should keep his
Christian name would die in the year. Thus, when after Adrian VI., Giulio de' Medici
desired to style himself Julius III., his supporters in alarm compelled him to become
Clement VII. Shortly afterwards, Marcel Servius, who was still young and robust and
free from prejudice, insisted on destroying this particular form of prejudice. Marcel II.
preserved his name; but he died at the end of three weeks, and nobody since has
ventured to imitate him. -
II.
One of the most considerable monuments in the world is the Baths of Antoninus
Caracalla, which are situated at the extremity of the Circus Maximus, between the back
of the Aventine and that of the Coelian, in one of those stripped suburbs where fields and
gardens flourish over the graves of an ancient quarter. Contained in a narrow valley,
measuring their height with the elevation of the hills, these Baths are the finest ruins in
|
- nºw
"Tºº
CALIDARIUM OF THE BATHS OF CARACALLA.


BATHIS OF CARA CA/C/A. 89
Rome. There remain some such considerable portions of the two chief blocks, forming
two massive squares, the one in the other, between which extends the space of a vast
close surrounded with porticos, that with the aid of the Thermae of Caracalla it has been
possible to trace out the destination of the analogous edifices of Titus and Diocletian.
We should have a false idea of these establishments if we were to take things literally,
and see in them only a place of luxurious and very perfect baths. Assuredly the stoves
occupied a notable place in them, since, according to Olympiodorus, the baths of
Caracalla could supply warm baths for sixteen hundred persons at a time; but that
was only a pretext of a monument, the porticos of which, according to Lampridius,
were only erected between Heliogabalus and Alexander Severus. Besides the baths of
different temperatures, the chambers heated by steam, and the basins and fountains,
there were found in the thermae scent-shops, stalls for articles of fashion, buffets
for refreshments, kitchens and refectories, peristyles for conversation and walking in
wet weather, libraries and reading-rooms, a stage for the performance of comedy,
gymnasia for athletes, an arena for running and wrestling : they had there got
together and administered by a numerous staff of virtuosi, artists, and slaves, all that
could divert an indolent people and make it forget life. There were even picture
galleries and museums of statues: it was pleasure raised to the rank of an institution
and organized on the plan of an architect. For sovereigns who had to maintain a power,
as absolute as it was fragile, over a corrupt population in whose breasts not even faith
in their country had survived, the distribution of the public amusements on an enormous
scale was a political interest of the first consequence. Thus the more the nation abases
itself and grovels, the more does the ministration of pleasure increase in importance:
the despots could only maintain themselves by becoming proxenetae. Continued by
Heliogabalus, the Baths of Caracalla are the most magnificent of all : several thousand
citizens were able there every day to exhaust the varied cycle of the delights of mind
and sense.
The exterior buildings form a perimeter of 4,200 feet. In the court thus cut off
by these buildings there rose on Babylonian vaults another edifice in several stories,
which was nearly 700 feet long by 450 broad. The Caldarium, a rotunda lighted from
above like a greenhouse, can only be compared to the Pantheon of Agrippa, which is
purer in its ornamentation, but not so bold in construction. What one cannot depict is
the imposing sight, morning or evening, of these gigantic wall-fronts over foundations
already plunged in shadow, their inflexed tops which supported the vaults only share
with the mountain peaks the rays of the sun. The angles that remain from the body
of the edifice are like belfries, spires, towers, which, thanks to internal steps, one can
ascend and on the narrow platform of which you move along tiny alleys bordered with
lentisks, broom, laurel mixed with yellow gilly-flowers, and stems of finocchio, an edge
of flowers that marks on each side the abyss at your feet, under which there sings the
sounding wind. If one is ever obliged to fathom the precipice, one is almost alarmed in
presence of that circle of spectral giants. The projection to an immense distance of the
shadow which descends from the slender corners, reveals still further to you the colossal
size of ruins that time has made into empty husks. Some of the arches have left semi-
circular bands, airy bridges over which you venture after repressing certain inclinations
towards dizziness. Below, the courts and half-destroyed chambers have preserved
admirable pavements of mosaic. Those of the exhedra of the gymnasiarchs are celebrated,
representing the portraits of victorious athletes; we shall see them in a chamber of the
N
90 A&OMZ.
Lateran Palace. On the highest platforms you walk over other mosaics: these crests
perched in the clouds were the pavement of an upper tier of galleries, porticos, and
terraceS.
Here they came, no doubt, in those days, to contemplate from this high Babel the
splendours of Rome and the fairy domains of the masters of the world. From the
Palatine, a collection of castles connected by terraces on which white statues mingled
with the black cypresses, and from the Circus Maximus to the distant undulations of the
Appian Way with its border of mausoleums, the eye only stays at the Temple of Jupiter,
which crowns the volcanic mountains where Alba Longa has left no more than its name.
There are horizons that we never try to reproduce, and of which we continue in the
exile of our France to dream all our days as of a past love.
III.
Fidenae . . . It was necessary to go back to the classic recollection of my infancy
as well as of that of Rome to discover again the traces of that unlucky sister of Faleriae,
Ceninium, and Antemna, of the neighbour of Cures and Nomentum, of the ally of the
Veientians, ever ready to cross the Tiber: of the Etruscan Fidenae that Romulus besieged
and which he took by a stratagem, the first instance of what became the ordinary tactics
of the Romans. These tactics are simple enough : to make an ambuscade among the
brushwood, to harass the besieged right up to the walls, to draw him forth in a sally,
to fly before him and suffer chase up to the foot of some rising ground, where the band
that is making certain of victory is all at once taken in flank by a troop that seems to
spring up out of the earth. They are all scattered here and there; the enemy makes its
way back in disorder to the town, and the Romans enter it pell-mell along with them. At
this half-fabulous epoch the regions of Etruria, Umbria, Samnium, of the Sabines,
Albani, Marsi, Equi, Hernici, Caraceni, Latini, Volsci, were subdivided in small sepa-
rate states, with their Lucumons, their generals, and their autonomy. What mighty
frays on how small a stage; what conquests had the Roman hamlet to make Caere,
Laurentium, Ardea, Antium, Anxur, Formiae, Ferentinum, Praeneste, Volsiniae, Tarquiniae,
Carventum, Ecetra, Verrugo, Artena, Bolae, Lavicum, Clusium, Norba, Privernum, Setia,
Satricum, Carseolae, Arpinum, Frusinum, Sora, Crustumerium, Tribalani, Thurium,
Eretia, Gabiae, represented so many peoples organized after the manner of the Romans,
who borrowed their institutions from the Sabines and the Etruscans. These localities
and many others of which the memory has become extinct preceded Rome, who colonized
while she displaced them or razed them to the ground, which is still rough with the
roots of that forest of cities.
It was of these things et quibusdam that we chatted as we came down the Via Sistina,
then the Via Felice as far as the Piazza Barberini to hire a vehicle, to which was
harnessed a thin jade with rough coat, such an equipage as assuredly was never seen
by the good people of Fidenae. As by the back of the Pincian, along the gardens of
Sallust (a thing of yesterday), we gained the extremely ancient gateway of that Salarian
road by which they used to carry salt, and by which all the barbarian invasions except
that of Genseric entered Rome, we looked without too much respect upon the Aurelian
walls of the Rome that we were leaving behind us, to visit a town that was thrown into
ruins four hundred and twenty-three years before the birth of Christ. We crossed first
PESTRUCTION OF FIDEWA’. 9 I
the open space where the camp of the Visigoths under Alaric had been ; then, as soon as,
at the back of the Pincio, we reached the rising ground where once stood Antemna, Rome
suddenly vanished: the desert begins. You come upon the Teverone and its ancient
bridge that Narses rebuilt after the second defeat of Totila : it was there, on this Ponte
Salario, that Manlius won the surname of Torquatus for accepting the challenge of a
Gaulish giant, of whose torquis or collar he won possession. It was to the right of
this bridge that Tullus Hostilius beat the people of Veii and Fidenae, and it was there
that they put to death Metius Fuffetius, an act that led to the destruction of Alba Longa.
The recent invasion, which the battle of Mentana brought to nothing, made ruins of this
celebrated bridge, over which Hannibal passed. Starting from Castel Giubileo, a station
on the railway from Ancona, you pass in review on the right hand a row of hollowed
rocks, having in front of you on the left of the road, which winds between two pieces
of rising ground, a conical hill crowned by a rustic fort with something of the look of
a convent or grange. It is a little of all; the farm, which was a fort, possesses a
chapel, in which during the pastoral season priests come and sing the mass for the
shepherds and the women who make the hay.
There, it is said, was the citadel of Fidenae; we quitted the vehicle at the foot of
this hill, to walk to its summit. The Etruscan town straggled to the east in the narrow
intermontium, and over a hill belonging to the chain which follows the line of the Tiber.
We ascended in single file by a track made rough by that short and crisp grass that
becomes so long in summer, but which at this moment a cross breeze blowing from the
district of the Marsi bent low, making it rustle under our steps. Seven hundred and
forty years before our era, under these low hills, on ground commanded by several points,
Romulus was able to hide as if at the bottom of a green basket his cavalry posted
in ambush, and half of his foot-soldiers as well. The soil is now absolutely bare;
the maquis would speedily resume its thick tresses, were it not cut down in the blade by
the nibbling sheep : at a distance all seems to be covered with a kind of russet felt, but
as one actually walks among these pastures, one’s feet are entangled in stunted and
woody roots. -
Later on, Fidenae became the general quarter of the last Etruscan league, in which a
part was taken by all the tribes of the neighbourhood who had lost their nationality. The
alarm at Rome was so great that all the shops in the Forum were closed, business was
suspended, the basilicas were shut, the gates were made fast, and in dread of a surprise
they established a camp before the old Colline gate of Servius Tullius. Called for the
second time to the office of dictator, Mamilius AEmilius, who had already fought with
Veientians and Falisci before Fidenae, came and encamped a mile off, at a spot where
the Tiber protected his left, while his right was supported by the gradual slopes that
Livy calls mountains; the site is so marked that from the top of the citadel we were able
with our eyes to set it off on the plain. Although Mamilius had placed a force along
the heights at the back of the town, to throw themselves upon the Etruscans the moment
they should be broken, the struggle was long and desperate. The fate of Italy was
staked for the last time on a supreme effort, and on its issue hung the independence
of twenty nations, or the definite supremacy of that Rome which was already looming so
powerful. - .
The gates of Fidenae opened on a glacis that descended between two slopes to the vale
of the Tiber. It was at the point of intersection that the heat of battle centred, kept up by
the Romans with such vigour that the allies of the people of Fidenae, not any less obstinate,
N 2
92 A&OME.
gave way step by step. They could only effect this retrograde movement very slowly, for
the reason that as they fell back they had to ascend, and the consequence of the retreat
was to restore to them the advantage of the ground. They threw themselves afresh
down into the plain, from whence they were again thrown back by Roman valour. This
go-and-come, by keeping the struggle at the same spot, must have caused a frightful
butchery, up to the moment when the decimated people of the Fidenae, taken in flank by
the reserve, finally gave way. Persuaded that victory was in their grasp, the Romans
forming the Testudo with their bucklers over their heads, advanced in close column to
breach the wall, massed in a single block that resembled a dragon covered with scales,
when suddenly the gates of Fidenae opening wide leave a passage for a torrent of
fire, and vomit forth with brands, with flames, and frightful cries, a second army which in
the evening shadows, mingling the dust they raise with the pitchy smoke of the torches,
hurl themselves upon the Romans, all blinded and scorched. In a moment the soldiers
halt and give ground; the cavalry overwhelms the panic-stricken infantry that falls
into confusion ; the rout begins. Then Mamilius, the dictator, throwing himself into
the thick of the attacking lines and turning swiftly round, from the midst of the flames
shouts to his soldiers to snatch the brands and set fire to the town. “What,’ he cries,
‘will you flee like bees before a little smoke P’
- Then turning bridle, he is the first to make a road, and the soldiers precipitately follow
with eyes shut. From that moment the Veientians in confusion roll rather than descend
towards the Tiber; Sabines and Fidenates seek a refuge in the town, which the Romans
enter pell-mell with them. They stab one another in the twilight, and make massacre in
the streets in the glare of the burning edifices. Fidenae is ruthlessly pillaged, and when
there no longer remains anything to seize or any one to slay, they set furiously to work to
demolish the walls. Then it was that this strong place was blotted out from the world;
the escarped sheepfold in which we were, the two grassy hillocks, like grave mounds,
that we saw at our feet, under which might be found the skeleton of the town, this is what
remains of Fidenae. -
But what time can never annihilate as long as our planet survives, is the melancholy
landscape of the desert over which the past has spread its poetry. All the southern
outline, from the campaniles of St. John Lateran, and from the pointed belfry of
Sta. Maria Maggiore to the domes of the Piazza del Popolo, is festooned with a lacework
of distant buildings which, supported on the borders of pyramids of yews and the
spreading pines with which the hill is fringed, cut the horizontal lines of the clouds with
their black tops. Nearest to you, there emerge from shadow the square pavilions of the
Villa Medici; farther off, closing the picture on the right, between two promontories the
dome of St. Peter surmounts the rectilinear masses of the buildings of the Vatican. The
Monte Mario makes a pendant to the basilica, and starting from its base, before and
after the rock of the Nasos, where the apocryphal grave of Ovid is all open, there come
in succession the tombs, the Prima Porta, the Villa of Julia; the whole development of
that great way which, as Polybius informs us, was paved 219 years before our era as far
as Ariminum by the censor C. Flaminius, whose name it has retained : it runs wave-like
along the line of the slope. In the plain, that is green with islets of tall rushes out
of which elms rise, the Tiber describing a triple curve surrounds the pedestal of the
promontories with a ring of silver.
Towards the east the sight is magical. Starting from the rough hillocks, over which
we plunged, divided by a yellow torrent which is raised to the dignity of river in the
FYOEZVZ. e 93
Violier des histoires Romaines, and which was the Allia where the Gauls so cruelly dis-
comfitted the Romans, across those vast undulating spaces between the Tiburtine Way
and the Via Nomentana, as far as the Villa of Zenobia, as far as the ascending grounds
where Ceninium spread itself out, as far as the Patulan hill which threw the morning
shadows over the Villa of Maecenas, the glance at last seems to run aground as if it had
been borne on billows of the sea before the Sabine chains, where a volcanic Ocean seems
to slumber against the blue and rose Apennines, crowned by the snows of the
season falling back behind Gennaro. Among the wild herbage of the country, where
meagre flocks are folded with shepherds that never move and are clad in large grey
cloaks, you would suppose yourself to be treading the Alpine soil of some plateau lost
in the recesses of the mountains. The snows of the Lionese and of Cervara, forming,
with the other peaks which here and there intercept them, a mixed work of silver and
azure, add to the illusion. The cyclamen, the saffron, the anemones, the coltsfoot, scatter
among the grass the flora of high grounds; you hear the cry of the goats and the song
of the pecorari in the distance; clouds of crows, falcons, and vultures hover over these
pastures, which the burning glow of the south brings into life, without succeeding in
giving them gaiety. Who' has not seen those green and fresh regions where it seems
as if, the very day after the creation, one had ventured before all other men | Here,
on the contrary, one would imagine that the ages had run their course, and that, the
books of history now sealed up for ever, one was the last belated wayfarer of a race
that had come to an end. - -
For this Etruscan Fidenae, of which nothing remains, yesterday is so distant. It was
with books and geometrical calculations, recently worked out by the perspicacious and
learned Pietro Rosa, that we succeeded in recognising the site, where on coming down
from the citadel we wandered long in search of some godsend, some exhumation, some
verification; but the earth obstinately guarded her secrets, and treating us like children
amused us with flowers. However, at the back of one of those little valleys that in
France are called comóes, Lefebvre, stirring among the more or less natural cavities that
honeycomb the tufa, found some constructions that would be hard to define. Were they
columbaria, nooks for the shepherds, dwellings for troglodytes, or haunts for bandits 2
Perhaps a little of all one after the other. In an artificial cavern, whither we followed
our companion by clambering from rock to rock, our eyes became accustomed to the
darkness, and recognised the broken vault of a long cloaca. Close by are seen some
foundations all interbound with roots. These material proofs of the situation of Fidenae,
seized by chance amid the underwood by the favour, perhaps, of some landslip of the day
before, were they furnished by actual knowledge? It was allowable to suspect it. Could
we have made a discovery 2 That was an illusion allowable on a soil so rich, and as
little disentangled as confused archives would be. The hope of seizing a treasure or of
penetrating a mystery may reasonably attend pilgrims, and impart to them along with
the enthusiasm of the archaeologist some of the eager emotion of the hunter.
Although Fidenae never again became a city, its site towards the end of the republic
attracted around it a few villas, and under the empire it used to be the scene of parties
of pleasure. It was upon one of these occasions that, under Tiberius, the conquered
gods of ancient Etruria paid to the manes of the people of Fidenae the honours of a
bloody hecatomb. Suetonius and Tacitus have told how a freedman named Atilius, a
contractor for public festivities, had constructed at Fidenae an enormous amphitheatre of
wood, whither he drew to a gladiatorial spectacle the citizens devoured by weariness,
94 & A&OME.
under the rigorous and suspicious régime of Tiberius. There flocked to it an immense
crowd from Rome; but no sooner were the people seated than the scaffolding gave way;
the number of dead and wounded amounted to fifty thousand persons. This slaughter
is described in the Annals with appalling reality.
After antiquities so remote the recollections of the Christian era seem quite fresh; and
as they present generally in a smaller degree the fascination of the unknown, the mind
that has been seduced by those far-off horizons does not return without an effort to
subjects less vague and more limited. One church only of those which ascend to
primitive times offers as many problems to the intelligence and as many mysteries to the
imagination as the remains of the cities of the dead of Latium. In such a mood as
this it will be understood that a sort of instinct brought me to a religious foundation which
speedily made me forget all the rest.
IV.
Before 1857, when people wished to give the idea of a Constantinian church arranged
as in primitive times, they chose St. Clement. It was known from St. Jerome that a
church was built in Rome which, from an early date, perpetuated the recollection of the
successor of St. Anaclete, and that in 417 it had acquired the rank of basilica when
St. Zosimus pronounced judgment in it against Celestius, who had fallen into the
Pelagian heresy. St. Leo speaks of this temple in a letter to St. Flavian; it is mentioned
in 499, on the occasion of the council which Symmachus presided over; St. Gregory the
Great, who had delivered two homilies in it, described the last moments under the
Clementine porch of St. Servulus, the paralytic. Adrian I., Leo III., in the eighth
century, Leo IV. and John VIII., in the ninth, did, as we know from Anastasius, the first
of them restore the roofing, the second and third enrich the church with sacred ornaments,
with marbles, above all with paintings, whose loss was long deplored. The last of the
four rebuilt the choir, as is shown by his monogram which is repeatedly carved on the
plutei or balustrades. - - -
To justify these traditions the interior of the building displayed as so many witnesses
the columns of its portico in grey granite, its pillars of cipollino and of red granite which
separate the three naves, and which come from the ruins of pagan temples. Ancient
friezes annexed to the entablatures, and inscriptions of the era of the martyrs set in the
walls, added the proofs of a charter house of stone, and when finally, convinced by such
striking evidence, the visitor yielded to the impression produced by so venerable a
sanctuary, a more attentive examination confirmed his convictions. He recognised the
appropriation of the primitive basilicas in conformity with the ceremonial of the ancient
liturgy. These were, the ante-chapel, the first inclosure, in which the sub-deacons, the
minor clerks and the chanters had place; at the two sides the pulpits, with porphyry
plaques and contemporary with John VIII., in the loftier of which, on the left, the
deacons read the Gospel, proclaimed edicts, and denounced the excommunicated, while
the other was only used for the Epistle, which was chanted by a sub-deacon; before the
passage to the right, the desk, from which the lectores gave information of the sacred
readings, and where the chanters said the Gradual; finally, the twisted pillar, destined
for the Easter taper, a ribbon of mosaic under a Corinthian capital, bearing an ancient
vase, decorated under Innocent IV. The sanctuarium appears equally decisive and
APAS///CA OF ST. C//////V7. 95
curious, separated as it is from the naves, a usage still preserved in the oriental churches.
Cut off by the ancient railing from the transept, the altar or confession is covered by a
ciborium, supported on slender columns of violet marble; in the circle of the apse is the
presbyterium, in the centre of which the chief seat is raised by three steps, all multiplied
proofs of a very lofty antiquity.
Things were thus settled from time immemorial, when a few years ago in raising
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PULPIT OF THE EPISTLE, AT ST. CLEMENT's.
some pavement for the purpose of digging a well, the prior of the Dominicans of Ireland,
to whom the convent was given by Urban VIII., discovered, buried under the present
church of St. Clement, the real Constantinian basilica that had passed into a subterranean
state. How could one suspect that far from depreciating the monument which had been
the object of so extraordinary a misconception, this discovery would soon give it a triple
value. As they removed the earth with which the crypts were filled up, they perceived
by the light of their torches, the walls gradually peopling themselves with strange forms

96 ROME.
resuscitated from the darkness. The operation is not yet completed, but it has already
produced more than one series of legendary frescoes, painted between the fourth and the
eleventh century. The church above was a cabinet of curiosities, while the church under-
ground is a gallery, and the only one which could by authentic pictures fill up a gap of
nearly four centuries in the history of painting. -
Before enumerating the riches of either sanctuary, of the older especially, which is
still little known and has never been seriously examined, let us briefly explain what
happened in this consecrated spot long before Constantine, and where we shall find at
the bottom of a primitive crypt a Roman house, itself supported on Etruscan foundations.
During the struggle about Investitures, the Emperor Henry IV., whom Gregory VII. had
excommunicated, having made himself master of Rome, where he had installed an anti-
pope in the Lateran Palace, the legitimate pontiff, who was quartered in the Castle of
St. Angelo, saw himself forced to appeal for assistance to the Duke of Calabria, who was
then in Greece. The Duke Robert Guiscard, who founded the school of Salerno, and
who is described to us as a lettered prince, proved in these circumstances to Pope
Hildebrand as little enlightened a friend as a certain bear in a fable; for, under pretence
of avenging the pontiff, Guiscard nearly utterly demolished the capital of the
Pontifical States. It was particularly on the quarters of the Coelian and the Esquiline,
which had given shelter to the emperor and the Archbishop of Ravenna, thus intruded
into the papacy, that the destructive rage of the Norman hordes expended itself. When
Gregory VII. returned to the Lateran Palace, his eye wandered over a mass of ruins.
The edifice was then buried in 1084, and as the level of the soil had been greatly
raised by the load of ruins, when four-and-twenty years after they wished to rebuild the
church, instead of building other foundations, they completed the filling up of the hidden
basilica, after taking the pains to withdraw from it the ciborium, the plaques of marble
and porphyry which had separated the transept, most of the columns, and whatever else
could, without destroying the edifice underground, contribute to the adornment of the
new temple while perpetuating the memory of the old. The idea does honour to that
Pope Pascal who was a Cluniac monk, and whose character was so amiable that
Gregory VII., to whom he had been deputed by his monastery, not wishing to allow him
to return to Burgundy, made him Abbot of St. Paul and then titular cardinal of
St. Clement. These authenticated dates limit the presumable age of the subterranean
paintings of which we are going to speak, while the exhumation of the primitive temple
vindicates the antiquity of the existing decoration. Let us examine, one after the other,
two sanctuaries, so emphatically curious that England and Prussia, though both Pro-
testant countries, have been willing to contribute towards the resurrection of the ancient
edifice,—a consoling sign of the spirit of our epoch.
V.
The erudition of a learned guide could be nowhere so necessary as at St. Clement’s ;
but the abbé refused on various vain pretences to accompany me thither. I afterwards
perceived that this monument tempts to the raising of a number of questions, on the
subject of which prudence dissuades a man from pronouncing an opinion, and the abbé
did not like even before insoluble problems to plead guilty to a doubt. My obstinate
CA/UA’CA/ OF ST. CLEMENT. 97
curiosity disturbed him; and, under pretext of accustoming me to the toil of research, he
left me without a mentor.
The church of St. Clement is situated between the Coliseum and the church of
St. John Lateran, at the left of a long, open, and rather steep street. In this part of
a quarter that has now become desert, and where trees crown the walls, as you turn from
the middle of the Via San Giovanni you have on the left the railing, the sculptured frieze,
and the trophies of a villa; at the extremity of a perspective of masonry a colossal
fragment of the Flavian Amphitheatre, sombre in spite of the openings through which
the light shines; and close to you on the right the low roofing of a gable end, with the
framework of a false door that is topped by a sort of skylight arch with a small circumflex
STREET OF ST. John LATERAN–SIDE ENTRY OF ST. CLEMENT's.
roof of round tiles. An iron cross on the top of the building, and a second iron cross on
the hood of the small door, mark a chapel that in a quarter where the birds are singing
assumes a rustic physiognomy. This roof of such homely look is the church of St.
Clement.
You enter to the left of an alley of monastic rudeness by a heavy porch, poor of
aspect, though with fine columns that do not match, and of such primitive simplicity that
we wonder if it may not have seen Pope Liberius pass. The atrium is joined to a much
lower portico, of which the arches rest on ancient columns with Ionian capitals; this
arrangement is the frame to a small cloister which usually stood in front of the first
basilicas, and in which catechumens as well as penitents remained. A side-door gives
access to the monastery, and here you must ring to have the church opened, as it is
O

98 A’OME.
nearly always shut up. From the Coliseum I had not met a living soul, and the bell
of the cloister tinkled long in the silence of noon without bringing any one.
The first sight of the temple, as you front the master-altar from the bottom of the
narthex, is as striking as it is unexpected, and you are filled with a dazzled veneration.
The homely roofs, arranged to cover the vaults, do so little to prepare one's mind for the
dimensions of a rich church with three naves, that with the interest thus spontaneously
awakened there mingles the magic of a supernatural vision. While the treasures of the
place present the very ideal of a historical monument, various portions and their arrange-
ment according to the primitive rites carry the mind back to the morrow of the catacombs.
Even certain marks of barbarism contribute to the general effect. At what time, to level
the unmatched columns of the atrium,
could they have taken it into their
heads, instead of shortening the shafts,
to saw off the capitals in the middle 2
Robert Guiscard, who destroyed so well,
built better, for he made the cathedral
of Salerno. Although this church was
beautified under Innocent III. and Inno-
cent IV., under Eugenius IV., under
Sixtus V., and more dangerously re-
stored under Clement XI. by Stephen
Fontana, who twined endive under the
arches, still the works of the good times
have such a preponderance that these
partial discords are lost in the general
harmony. The ancient barriers of the
transept, with their Byzantine crosses,
their plaited crowns, their untwined ser–
pents, and their frames of glittering
mosaic; the pulpits of so grave a form,
the ciborium, the inscriptions, the fune-
real symbols of antiquity mixed with the
bas-reliefs of the pagan era, that pro-
-- fusion of marbles of every age and every
EXTERNAL PORTICO OF ST. CLEMENT's. colour, would suffice to raise the value of
the monument amply high enough. But
it is to other riches that it owes the spontaneousness of effect. From the door of the church
to the choir you tread upon the flowery gardens of a tapestry of coloured marble arranged
six centuries since, that is at the best moment of the oftus A/exandrinum ; and then, behind
the tabernacle above the presbyterium, which was completed the beginning of the twelfth
century by Cardinal Anastasius, the semi-circle of the apse, a demi-cupola of dark gold
traversed by arabesques in which mystic figures appear among the darkness of legend
and of ages, the whole of this portion of the church is one immense piece of mosaic,
executed in the time of Jacopo da Turrita, that is, in the revival which crowned the
thirteenth century. Displayed between these sumptuous pictures of the Alexandrine
pavement and of the tribuna, the smallest objects possess a strange value, for they
are not overwhelmed. Time has gilded the fresh crudities of the marbles, and cooled

CA/URCH OF ST. C.L.EMENT. 99
the too glowing warmth of the gold of the mosaic; and these elements of what would
have been an incongruous splendour have gained an intensity which wraps them in charm
and mystery. -
Below the ornaments of the cupola, where the cross rises from a scroll rose, a frieze
rich in veined marble, marked by the uncials of an inscription, separates the neo-Greek
emblems from the corresponding Latin realities. On the upper course are arranged in
two processions on each side of the Lamb, who has a golden nimbus and is placed in
the centre, the Twelve Sheep whom he bade follow him, and who eye him with an inter-
rogating expression. Under the entablature Christ is seen with his mother, surrounded
by the twelve disciples, separated from one another by as many palms. This decoration,
due to Celano, belongs to the fourteenth century. On the pendants of the vault certain
apocalyptic figures with floating draperies spread forth like clouds. We recognise over
Bethlehem and Jerusalem, Isaiah, Jeremiah, St. Laurence, St. Paul, St. Clement, and
St. Peter; Urban VIII. introduced St. Dominic. To the right of the altar, beneath the
flourishes of a pilaster, is a ravishing tabernacle of mosaic and sculpture in the Gothic style
of the Pisans, a gem that Cardinal Tomasio of the Minor Brothers had executed in 1299,
at the same time as the great arabesques of the semi-circle, “to please the city of Rome
and his uncle, Boniface VIII.' -
In one of the chapels of St. Clement is the marble statue of St. John the Baptist, one
of those living representations of asceticism and penance that no one dared approach but
the supple and vigorous Donatello, with all his contempt for the traditions of antiquity.
This figure is attributed to Simon, brother of that distant forerunner of Michelangelo. In
the same chapel have been erected, also in the fifteenth century, two Florentine tombs of
admirable quality, especially that of Cardinal Roverella. Votive inscriptions exhumed
from the catacombs revive upon the walls and recall to one’s mind ancient and romantic
names that seem to have been gleaned from the poets. The presence of these shades
gives to our meditation such unfamiliar themes, that we find pleasure in following them
in the sanctuary, where we contemplate so many rare works that are still full of life
because they have not been displaced; for the relics of art transported into a cabinet are
like cut flowers. The good monks of Ireland, who have at St. Clement's their only
paradise in this world, understand the feelings of some of their visitors in the matter; when
the sacristan brother had accompanied us for some time to find an honest pride from our
admiration, he left us with only a request that we would carry the key back to the
convent, a not very common mark of confidence, of which I was justly proud.
We find an undoubted pleasure in exclusive possession: these walls tell such old
stories that one amuses oneself in deciphering them alone, by seeming to find confidences
in them. By a common instinct my companion and I separated, to wander as we listed;
at a distance I perceived her above barriers of marble that perhaps Cyril the Philo-
sopher had touched; she passed like a shadow between the columns behind the pulpits
that John VIII., in the time of Charles the Bald, freshened up with his cypher. We met
for a moment at the bottom of the naves in the chapel on the left of the entrance door,
which is one of the most precious monuments of the church, having been entirely painted
in the first half of the fifteenth century. It is the work of that disciple of Brunelleschi
and of Gentile da Fabriano, who between 1420 and 1428, when he died at the age of
twenty-six, launched painting into the way of Science, and gave the art such an impulse
that, nearly a century afterwards, Raphael and Michelangelo still studied him. The
works of Masaccio have become very rare; you appreciate his frescoes at St. Clement's
O 2
IOO FOME.
better—they are a landmark in the history of the Renaissance—if you have been
accustomed to trace out a design under heavy retouchings and stupid restorations. In
the fine composition of the Crucifixion, at the back of the altar, the group of holy women
supporting the fainting Virgin, is all that retains delicacy of face and expression. As for
what remains of the legend of St. Catherine, drawn on the side partitions, not only do
the motions still show by their suppleness and their truth the skill of the young master,
but two of the subjects, St. Catherine defying the Power of the Idols, and St. Catherine
converting the Daughter of Maximin, have always been respected; the heroine of
Alexandria preserves in them her first beauty. A figure that has been painted over
again, but still remains charming in attitude and expression, is the saint on her knees at
prayer, between the two portions of the wheel which would have torn her in pieces had it
not miraculously broken asunder. The subjects of the opposite wall have been not only
repainted, but mutilated. Some of the figures of the vault, representing the evangelists
and the doctors of the Latin church, have been better preserved. The whole, in fine, is
enough to give a very high idea of Tomaso Guidi, called Masaccio, whom Vasari
wrongly includes under the patronage of the Medici, improperly giving him his fellow-
workman, Mazzolino, for a master, and whom all the biographies represent as alive down
to 1443, an assertion disproved by recent inquiry. -
As we were coming out we exchanged discoveries, and we had to see the whole church
over again, so as to see together what each had been able to find out alone. Such is the
charm of these wanderings in a place so glorious, that its wonders make you forget the
frightful ceiling of Clement XI., with its apotheosis of Chiari, a mere operatic glorifica-
tion, and that the pompous affairs of Conca, Grecolini, Odazzi, Piastrini would be
unperceived, if the singular objects they represent in honour of St. Clement did not by
their very incongruity raise questions to which only tradition can reply.
VI.
Few legendary personages are virtually better approved by history than St. Clement
the Roman. He figures as the fourth on the list of pontiffs; we know that he travelled
with St. Paul, who in his Epistle to the Philippians designates him as one of his helpers,
whose names are written in the book of life; his namesake of Alexandria compares him
to the apostles, and Rufinus speaks of him in the same terms; the Christian annals
commemorate his restraining influence from the time of the first troubles which disturbed
the church of Corinth, and we have on this point decisive testimony, namely, two epistles
in Greek and Latin from Clement to the faithful of Corinth, the first of which is perhaps
the most ancient monument (after the Acts of the Apostles) of Christian letters in the
first century. The Fathers of the third and fourth inform us that St. Clement was the
first to despatch missionaries to the Gauls; our Lorraine annalists even pretend that he
visited them, and St. Clement possesses his local legend in the diocese of Metz; in fine,
it is believed that he was martyred at the time of the third persecution under the
Emperor Trajan. But in spite of these elements of publicity, the origin of the blessed
Clement has remained doubtful and, on a point which is of high importance in clearing
up the history of the foundation of our basilica, three versions have been current, the most
accredited of which, although accepted by history, is the only one that can be damaged
with real evidence. According to Alban Butler, the orthodox theologian of Northampton,
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INTERIOR OF ST. CLEMENT's.

J. EG ENDS OF ST. CZACMEAV7. IOI
all the biographies attribute to Clement the Roman a Jewish origin, resting on the
fact that in the first of his letters to the Corinthians he declares himself son of Jacob.
Now twice have I read, not only the famous epistle, but all of St. Clement that is left to
us, without finding in it any trace of such a statement, which indeed could not fail to
be very perplexing. According to the same biographer, this son of Jacob must have
had the name Faustinus, which is not a very Semitic designation.
The second tradition, which has always been widely believed in Rome, is that
St. Clement belonged to the Flavian race, and that he had at the foot of the Coelian,
among the possessions of his family in the neighbourhood of the Vespasian amphitheatre,
a palace in which after his conversion he had an oratory built. Let us observe, for this
is an essential point, that many churches and the majority of the first communities were
actually constituted in this way. Quite recent excavations, to which discoveries made at
St. Clement's gave an impulse, disclose under each of the ancient churches the sub-
structions of an oratory or chapel, made usually with indifferent material and fixed in the
solid walls of the palace. The new convert, if he was a proprietor or great lord, received
his clients or neophytes in the chapel of the house, where they met for grave discussions,
and where Levites found shelter; then on his death the master bequeathed to his
brethren this embryo of a church and community. All the temples of the first century
which were not built over the burying-place of a martyr were, I would venture to affirm,
established in this way. - .
Now some remains of a palace adjoin the old subterranean basilica of St. Clement and
communicate with it. Even below the crypt two deeper chambers have been recently
found, and in one of them they believe they recognise the primitive oratory. The masonry
of the building beneath indicates a construction anterior to the second century; in some
places it is mixed with large bricks, materials that were employed even before Romulus,
as is shown by the ramparts of Arezzo, referred to by Vitruvius. These buildings have
settled over thick stonework of an Etruscan construction, as to which one cannot be
mistaken. Such circumstances show that the founder was a personage of mark,
possessing a palace in which he gave himself the luxury of a chapel; and what completes
the proof is that Clement I., not having died at Rome, whither his remains did not come
until the ninth century, the church cannot have had his tomb for its origin. However,
there is no justification for believing that Clement the Roman sprang from the Flavian
house, and we may suppose that the first hagiographers confounded our hero with
Clement of Alexandria, who was called Titus Flavius Clemens.
The third version of this genealogy, and the only one that is supported by writings of
proved antiquity, attributes to the fourth of the popes a Roman and patrician origin. It
is compatible with the preceding statements, as well as with the enormous popularity
proved by the saint's legend; it would, in fact, be nearly without example, and it is a
melancholy remark to make, for it applies to all time, it would be most improbable for
so much popular renown to attach itself to a poor man and a plebeian name.
VII.
It is not without an emotion above ordinary curiosity that you prepare in one of the
low naves, while the guides are lighting their torches, to descend from the church
where so many antiquities have entranced you, down to a monument of a yet more
I O2 A&OME.
venerable antiquity, in which time has displaced nothing on the evil pretence of restoring or
beautifying. We are sure that the torches will light up halls in which St. Augustin, St.
Sylvester, St. Gregory the Great made their voices heard; we know that for eight hundred
years no eye beheld this sanctuary, in which Gregory VII. was the last to officiate.
The paintings of remote times are documents of art so rarely preserved; the oldest
which Roman histories mention only dates from 173 years before our era. This is the
commemorative picture which, after subduing the island of Sardinia, the consul Sempronius
Gracchus placed in the temple of Mater Matuta. This work, that was still to be seen in
the time of Livy, represented ‘the form of the island, and in it were painted likenesses of
battles.’ Well, even if one were to find the ex-voto of the consul Sempronius Gracchus,
the piece would hardly be more curious or possess more importance for the history of art
than the Clementine paintings so long anterior to the Renaissance. -
When Pascal II. had the San Clemente rebuilt, they only left in the lower church
some marble pilasters and a few columns, and these blocks still mark the separation of
the naves. The rough casting of the walls, that is frequently peeled off, lets us see the
irregular layers of a building formed for the most part of inferior materials, mixed with
parts of much greater antiquity. As soon as the torches cease to wave in front of you,
the compositions disclose themselves. We perceive that time and damp have wrought
much destruction by making the pozzuolana fall away from the facings, but besides that
whole pages have remained all but untouched, whatever is not destroyed has preserved
the freshness of its colouring. The general appearance from this point of view is that
of the mosaics of Ravenna, I would even say of the early frescoes of the Campo Santo at
Pisa, if the usage of cruder colours, of ochres especially, which make deep reds and
yellows, did not give to these pictures a more truly antique simplicity of aspect. As for
the design, it has in general more suppleness of movement; in the less ancient portions
the composition is more freely picturesque than it was under the hand of the contem-
poraries of Ducci and Giotti. -. -
Let us proceed in the order of the dates, as far as possible, to a rapid analysis of
these curiosities, that are too little known and that have not yet been explained. They
lately found two heads of life-size, the one on a kind of island of plaster of considerable
thickness, the other on a piece of very light rough cast, which permits the stones to be
seen through it; these fragments are, so far, the oldest nobiliary titles of the monument.
The one represents a woman, true type of the Roman matron, with black eyes, and eye-
brows deeply arched under a low brow. This face, framed in a nimbus, seems to belong
to the end of the fourth century, and it recalls with more art the processes used in the
frescoes of the catacombs. The other reproduces them still more perceptibly; it is a
man's head, with the bust draped in the Roman fashion ; short hair marks off the brow,
which is low, the nose is extremely aquiline, the chin salient and broad, the eyes finely
cut, the mouth accentuated, and the mask joined to the shoulders by a well-set neck.
This fresco is obtained by a succession of tones passed one over the other and forming
flat tints, a process which characterises also the likenesses in the catacombs. The woman
is, perhaps, Euodia or Eutyche, that St. Paul gives to St. Clement for helpers, or Domi-
tilla, whom he converted. As for the man, it would be difficult to hazard any theory.
Still, it may be said that in the opinion of the most competent this head, which is of a
style and sweep purely Roman, can Scarcely have been painted later than the year 3 Io.
The vir fogatus permits us, therefore, to attribute to this portion of the church an origin
anterior to Constantine.
THE SUBTER/CAAWEAAW PA/NT/MG.S. IO3
The most ancient fragments, though sadly mutilated, that we next find in the northern
wing date from the eighth century, and offer three subjects taken from the legend of St.
Catherine of Alexandria. This is the most ancient iconographic mention of the virgin-
martyr, and it contradicts the
critical historians who have main-
tained that she was not honoured
in the West before the second
Crusade. The discovery of her
relics at the foot of Sinai by the
Christians of Egypt, who depo-
sited them on the summit of the
mountain in the convent of St.
Helen, made great stir in the
time of St. Gregory III., origin-
ally from Syria. It was at this
epoch, without doubt, or a little
after, between 740 and 760, that
they represented the life of a
saint whom this event had re-
stored to popular renown. These
paintings, in which we find some
hints of movement, are of a re-
FRAGMENT OF A FRESCO OF THE FOURTH CENTURY.
markable rudeness. They are more barbarous than those devoted to St. Gregory the
Great, on account, no doubt, of the homilies which he pronounced in this church. There
is a small subject, nearly destroyed, in which he is represented as writing to St. Augustin
of Canterbury, to congratulate
him on the conversion of the
English. The three others are
taken from the numerous writings
of St. Gregory, who, describing
some traits of the holy monk
Libertinus, recounts how the
monk charged a serpent to watch
the vegetables of the monastery
of Fondi, which a robber used to
come and carry off every night
by scaling the walls. The ser-
pent seized with his coils the foot
of the offender, and hissed loudly
by way of summoning Libertinus,
who unbound the captive, and
authorised him in order to avoid
sin to come henceforth to the
house for the fruit of which he
|
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FRAGMENT OF A FRESCO OF THE FOURTH CENTURY.
had need. This Libertinus was of such humility that, after being beaten by his superior,
he presented himself before him with as much sweetness as if nothing had happened,
and the abbot was so moved that he prostrated himself before the simple brother, and




IO4 A’OME.
besought his forgiveness. One day as Libertinus was entering Ravenna, a woman took
his horse by the bridle, and forced the monk to come and bring to life again the child
that she had just lost. These legendary stories, evoked by the writings of St. Gregory,
were evidently painted subsequently to his death in 604; but they may have been painted
less than a century after under Gregory II., who was a Savelli, and who was, I believe,
titularly of this church, for the popes gladly illustrated the canonised predecessor whose
name they bore. These frescoes, in great part destroyed, are placed under the chapel
of St. Catherine, and may have been executed between 715 and 730, for they recall pretty
closely the Vatican manuscripts of the same epoch. I think that I can still point out the
trace of an art peculiar to the West in two paintings placed side by side, which seem, if
not of a different age, to have been executed at any rate by two artists of very unequal
talent. A part of the wall collects, after the Christ on the Cross, some points in the life
of Jesus referring to the resurrection, the redemption, and the eucharist, symbolised by
the Holy Women at the Tomb, by Adam taken from Limbo, and by the Miracle of Cana.
LEGEND OF ST. LIBERTINUS : FRAGMENTS OF THE EIGHTH CENTURY.
These paintings are weak, and without much movement, while the drawing of the Christ
on the Cross is barbarous.
The neighbouring compartment, evidently executed to complete an exposition of
doctrine, is more remarkable: it is the oldest known representation of the Assumption of
the Virgin. Round the tomb the apostles express their stupefaction by their faces and by
the attitudes of a movement that is as varied as it is energetic. Covered with an ample
cloak, slightly lifted by her extended arms, with eyes raised to the sky, where she beholds
her son seated in the midst of four angels and surrounded by an ellipsoid nimbus, the
Madonna rises from the earth. The scene has a motion in it which is still far away from
Byzantine immobility.
These compositions anathematise the heresies of the Pelagians and their errors
touching grace, the holy sacrament, original sin, and the divinity of Christ. Close by
they have introduced, armed with his Chronicle and his Poems against the deniers of
grace, St. Prosper, who came from Marseilles at the invitation of St. Leo the Great to
fight by the side of Augustin against the Pelagians. In order the better to show the

UAVATAWOWV SCA/OOL.S. IO5
invention, at one of the extremities of the picture of the Assumption, they place St. Vitus,
Archbishop of Vienne, who had destroyed as against the Arians certain analogous errors.
He forms a counterpart to the illustrious Pope Leo IV., a Roman of old time, who
resisted the Saracens, who fortified Rome, constructed the Leonine enceinte round the
Vatican, and made great restorations in the church of St. Clement. The square green
nimbus surrounding his head is a sign that, at the time he was painted, he was still
living. Still we ought not in general to grant absolute authority to this presumption; it
assists a probability without warranting certainty. Leo IV., who was canonised, wore the
tiara from 847 to 885. It was he who had this fresco composed; the formal and curious
inscription that informs us on this point shows us Latin prosody in decay; it contributed
also to prove the age of the paintings:
QUOD HAEC PRAE CUNCTIS SPLENDET PICTURA DECORE,
COMPONERE HANC STUDUIT PRAESBYTER ECCE LEO.
One can have no hesitation
in connecting with the same
period a large fresco, of which
all is obliterated save two groups
of heads symmetrically arranged,
in which the Reverend Father
Joseph Mullooly thinks that he
recognises the audience of the
council that was held in this
church in the fifth century by
Pope Zosimus for the condemna-
tion of Pelagius. At any rate,
among the thirty-two figures of
the left group you remark several
women, some of them approach- || || - #
- | AECFRMR) RADECORE COMPONEREHM
ing beauty; above that on the º
right are represented scales with ASSUMPTION OF THE VIRGIN : FRESCO OF THE TIME OF LEO IV.
two dishes in equilibrium, with
the words, Stateram augeſ modium justum, taken from an epistle of St. Clement. This is
a very old instance of a balance with two dishes; but the baptistery of Constantia, the
daughter of St. Helen, furnishes another much older, engraved at the head of an
inscription.
At the beginning of the ninth century, events which led to a profound division of
Rome and the Westerns from the Empire of the East also modified the condition of art.
The heresy of the Iconoclasts which had come to light under Zeno had recovered favour,
and it became tyrannical under Leo the Isaurian, who had it formally authorised by a
council held at Constantinople. Notwithstanding the thunders of Gregory II. and his
successors, the fury against images continued under Leo the Khazarian and under Leo
the Armenian; those who painted them were driven from Constantinople, and were com-
pelled to find an exile in the West, where the worship which was abominated in their own
country was still held in honour. Italy welcomed these artists, whom the popes protected,
and who from their states spread into the orthodox countries. These are the circum-
stances with which it is proper to connect the Greek, or, as we say, Byzantine influence,
P

IO6 A’OA)/E.
and we perceive it at this moment appear in a painting of an indisputable character. At
the north of the crypt is a Madonna with a diadem loaded with stones or drachms; she
is posed in full face, her eyes fixed in front of her, with her son below also in full face,
and with that sphinx-like immobility to which these people systematically condemned
their figures. To right and left two saints, of whom we only see that the heads are
equally mummified; above, in a medallion, the Christ, beardless and draped as in the
primitive times, belongs to another hand, if it is not earlier. Lower than the lateral
figures, two subjects from the Sacrifice of Abraham form pendants to one another; we
should suppose that they were copied from one of those sculptured oliſants sent by
Saracen art to the stout folk of the Carolingian cycle. As this painting was found under
another, Father Mullooly inclines to
ºº:: carry it back as far as the year 600;
sº E. but in my own opinion it is not earlier
| tº than the second half of the eighth cen-
tury, if even it does not belong to the
ninth. The purely Greek style of this
little chapel in the form of a niche, we
shall soon see undergoing modification,
because at that time those who imparted
it were still open to the influence of the
||||||Whº º
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ºf º \º º WaS not entirely extinc at the 6-11C1 O
F \º º T the ninth or the beginning of the tenth
- i - - -
HT li º - century. Certain monuments, in fact,
| || || | | - - -
Fº | // will disclose to you at that distant date
º º/ | the abortive attempt at renaissance ;
Mºll º - - - - -
||||| ºl abortive because the Roman inspiration
soon completed the process of its ex-
tinction, while the Greek school, remain-
| ing absolute master of the field, ended
|
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|||ſº
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||||Will º
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- - ------------------ by imposing its iconography, in the
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Fº |ll --- º º symmetrical immobility of which the
| | º | - - - - - -
| "". º IIIſ -º-, ºil orientals satisfied their instinctive aver-
BYZANTINE MADONNA : FRESCO OF THE NINTH CENTURY, sion for images. Of these last produc-
tions of a hybrid school, connected
with the Roman tradition by its movement, its feeling, and its intelligence, with the
school of Byzantium by its mannerism and costume, no one would ever have suspected
the existence if the crypts of St. Clement did not furnish proof of such a transition.
So far we have only seen Pope Clement in his church in an episodic state. The
finding of the remains of this pontiff by St. Cyril the Philosopher, brother of St.
Methodius, and the translation of the relics under Nicholas I., that is, between 858 and
869—this return of a patrician martyr to his home after seven centuries of exile gave a
new impulse to the worship of the saint.
The event and its date are of extreme importance for settling the origin of our church
and the age of the paintings that are left for me to describe. According to the Bol-
landists, Philosophus Constantinus, originally from Thessalonica, came from the Tauric

A'RESCOES OF AN/AWTH AND / EVTH CEVTUR/ES. Io'7
Chersonese among the Khazars, and found there the body of Clement, which he carried
into the Crimea, then into Moravia, and finally brought to Rome, whither he had been
summoned by Pope Nicholas I., who had the relics placed in the church for many years
dedicated to St. Clement. The librarian, Anastasius, who took a part in the festivities
of this translation, at which also the Bishop of Velletri was present, writes in an epistle
dated Kalends of April, 874, the words that I translate literally: ‘Constantinus Philo-
sophus, a man of repute, a model of apostolic life, came to Rome under Adrian II., and
restored the body of St. Clement to its abode.’ Baronius, who reports these traditions,
and who establishes also the identity of Philosophus with Cyril, a name assumed late
divino monitu, adds that this priest was Bishop of the Morannes, vulgarly the Moravians,
supported by an anonymous hagio-
grapher of the Carolingian era, the
manuscript of whom comes out of the
library of Arundel; these facts concur
in indicating the Tauric Chersonese as
the spot where St. Clement perished
in exile. These testimonies, supported
from the writings of St. Clement of Alex-
andria, of St. Jerome, of St. Zosimus,
as well as the ecclesiastical fathers of
the East and the annalists of Bohemia,
conclusively prove that Clement I. died
far away from Rome, that he was not
buried there, and that consequently its
name, under which before this tardy
translation the church of St. Clement
was designated, had been kept in
memory of the founder of the oratory
and of the /a/rom of the house.
It was, according to all appearance,
between 900 and 940 that they set them-
selves to paint on the walls of the prin-
cipal naves the series of illustrations
of a legend suddenly become popular.
These subjects, which are numerous and LEGEND of sr, clºſest: Episode of sissius (TENTH CENTURY).
most interesting, are as a rule in good
preservation. The first which presents itself on a thick and very broad pilaster, quite
close to the master-altar, is the most important page in the series; it is the Conversion
of Sisinius, the friend of Domitian.
The principal subject is that of the centre, which represents a church lighted by seven
lamps, answering to the seven gifts of the Spirit of Light; the lamp which surmounts
the altar on which the missal and the chalice are placed itself consists of seven flames
arranged in a circular lustre. They have chosen the moment when St. Clement, who
is officiating, with the pallium on his shoulder and wearing a chasuble falling to a point,
turns round with extended arms to chant the fax domini sit sem/er zobiscum, and when the
pagan Sisinius, drawn to the temple by a malignant curiosity, becomes blind and deaf
his steps are uncertain, and a young attendant much marvelling leads him forth. The

P 2
108 A&OME.
pious wife of the courtier, Theodora, beholds what has happened with a surprise that has
nothing painful in it. The deacons and bishops, placed on the other side of the altar,
present the givers of the fresco, who, in elegant apparel, bear crowns. They are in
stature less by a half than the chief personages of the drama; an inscription that is
over the arabesques on which the picture rests has transmitted to us the names of these
persons:
EGO BENO DE RAPIZA CUM MARIA. UXORE MEA PRO AMORE DEI ET BEATI CLEMENTIS.
The space being too short to continue, the following characters have been placed
vertically over one another under the last letter of Clementis: P. G. R. F. C. They
offer by far the most singular method of abbreviation that I think I ever met, the initials
of each syllable being included, Pin Geße/FeC. Elsewhere the same formula in all
letters, beginning by ego Beno, &c., ends by ſecit—Ego . . . ſecit. This is Latin in
extreme decay. -
But the subject treated en prédelle with more negligence will bring in philological
curiosities of a different sort. Sisinius having commanded his attendants to strangle
Clement, they bind and drag along the shaft of a column which, thanks to a miracle,
they mistake for the saint. The saint has escaped at the opposite end; he is only repre-
sented by his last words, pronounced as he crosses the portico on which the painter has
written: ‘DURITIAM CORDIS VESTRIS (sic) . . . SAXA TRAERE MERUISTI.’ The two
attendants of Sisinius, who struggle to draw the column, are named Cosmaris and
Albertel. The first has pulled the cord on to his shoulder, the other has it under his
arm; ‘ALBERTEL TRAI,’ says the legend, written over his head, ‘Albertel draws.’
Trai is no longer Latin, but it belongs to vulgar idiom. On the side at which the saint
has fled, a person, probably of his suite, and named Colopalo, is turning round. Rushing
with a stick, as with a rope he shakes the base of the shaft, he looks at an attendant, who
was drawing at the other end, and casts at him some words that are figured thus:
“FALITEDERETo.’ To discover the sense of this queer group of syllables, I think we
must decompose it to these four words, Fali te de reto / and translate it by this ironical
phrase, “Cheat thyself by this delusion l’ It is Italian, ill-taken from Latin forms;
de reto, instead of di rete, is explicable, by a propensity of the decline to assimilate the
forms of the second declension to most substantives. That the inscription is in Italian
one could show by that which is placed as a pendant, and as to which no uncertainty
can be maintained, but the apostrophe of Sisinius is too rude to be reproduced. In the
central composition the costumes are Greek; a certain unity presides over the arrange-
ments; the frame is filled up with indisputable art, for the intentions, without being
forced, are shown in a free and natural manner, and the heads are far from being
inexpressive. Those artists succeeded better in young than in old forms, in the heads of
women and the figures of men, in draped personages than in those which are not so—
all of them characteristic traits of Christian art. The figure of Theodora is graceful, well
draped, supple, and of a handsome cast. - -
We shall see again, in the continuance of this legend, all the family of Beno de
Rapiza, at the bottom of the representation of the miracle which took place before the
submarine grave of St. Clement, when a widow finds there her child, who had been
forgotten at the festivities of the previous year. Below the fresco, in a great medallion,
is the pontiff, to whom Beno, his son Clement, his daughter Atila, his wife Maria, and
A'RESCOES OF AN/AWTH AAWD TENTH CEVTUR/ES. IO9
the grandmother of the children, bring each a taper with crowns. These are priceless
studies of costume. In another medallion, arranged in the shape of a cross, is this prayer
of barbarous Latinity:
ME PRECE FERENTES ESTOTE NOCIVA CAVENTES.
The upper subject, destroyed as on the previous panel, represented the construction
of the tomb by an angel, as the half-preserved inscription shows. As for the principal
picture, the arrival of the clergy of Kherson, with the bishop at their head, to assist at
the prodigy of the child found safe and sound, the work is one of the most remarkable,
as much by the architecture of the little monument on which the altar appears, the
curtains of the Tabernacle having been
symmetrically looped up, as by the
drawing of the figures, which are repro-
duced in a double action. The stooping
mother raises the child extending its
arms to her ; then, standing upright,
pressing it to her breast, she leans her
head tenderly against that of her son.
In the second subject, the group has a
movement so faithful, and the draperies
are of such a style, that this charming
figure recalls the sculptures of Chartres
and those of Erwin of Steinbach at
Strasburg. It shows to an equal extent
the thought and intelligence of the West
applied to the art of Byzantium, but the
artists who here reach this result are
three centuries before Giotto. The
miraculous shrine in which the scene
passes is covered with large tiles, like
the churches of Ravenna; four arches,
in spite of symmetry, are only equipped lº - - -
with three lamps, because these lights MIRACLE AT THE ToMB of ST. CLEMENT (TENTH CENTURY).
symbolize the divine virtues. The
anchor that they fastened about the neck of the pontiff when he was drowned by order
of Trajan is fastened to a ring in the wall; peopled by fish swimming, the waves of the
sea envelop the miraculous chapel. In the shape of epilogues are added the acts and
deeds of St. Cyril, who died under Nicholas I. during his stay at Rome. A fresco, of
which few traces remain, placed above an excavation by which we descend into the
darkness of earlier times down to the Etruscan substructions, allows us to recognise
Cyril, or Constantine the Philosopher, receiving from the Emperor Michael III., called
the Drunkard, the mission to go and convert the Slaves and Bulgarians. Behind the
apostle is, or rather was, for few fragments remain, his brother Methodius. Close by we
perceive the King Bogoris, being baptized naked in a piscina in which he is plunged up to
the waist. Let us further remark two extremely curious pilasters, which might very well
date from Leo IV. On one are represented St. Giles and St. Blasius, one above the other;

I IO A’OME.
the Armenian bishop, at the prayers of a weeping mother, is drawing from the throat of her
child a thorn which choked it. It is for this reason that, in order to be cured of quinsy,
people go to touch at the church of Santa Maria in Via Lata the relic of the throat of
St. Blasius. Below is drawn a kind of devouring wolf, which is carrying off a creature
and scratching it with its whiskers; this subject is separated from the basement by an
ornament taken from the acanthus, and inspired from the ancient arabesques. On the
H
==
º
º
º
** **** -
ST. BLASIUS PLUCKING A THORN FROM THE THROAT OF A DANIEL SPARED BY THE LIONS: PILASTER PAINTED IN THE
CHILD : FRESCO ON A PILASTER (NINTH CENTURY). NINTH CENTURY.
other pilaster, St. Antonine the Martyr, in the time of Diocletian, has beneath him Daniel,
whose feet two lions of a heraldic make are licking, twisting themselves into the strangest
posture. The prophet, who was minister to the kings of Babylon, wears the gay and
half-warlike costume of the young Byzantine lords of the ninth century. A broad belt
is over the surcoat; the breastplate is trimmed with ornaments; short open cuffs expose
to sight long and tight sleeves, fastened at the wrist by an embroidered decoration; the
buskins are elegant. In the lower compartment struggle five monsters that we might

THE LEGEAWD OF ST. A.J. EX/U.S. . I I I
call man-lions, three of which erect on their hind feet try to devour Daniel, and open
formidable jaws. The ornament of the base is of exquisite taste, consisting of curves
which meet enclosing rosettes between denticulated cinctures. What would lead one to
suppose that these pilasters are earlier than the second half of the ninth century is that
there is no question of St. Clement, and that St. Giles of Nismes acquired renown in
Rome at the end of the seventh. Let us not omit a composition entirely Greek and of
later date, Cyril and Methodius presented to Christ, the one by St. Clement, whose
relics he has brought back; the other by St. Andrew, the predecessor of Methodius in
the apostolate to the Scythians. The Saviour, draped in the toga, is too short by more
than a third considering the size of the head; he is blessing in the Greek manner, that
is, the ring finger bent under the thumb and the three others extended, a unique example
of the oriental rite in the monuments of Rome, but not in the rest of the West, where
we meet it from one remote time to another up to the twelfth century.
At the bottom of the church is a painting that can only be attributed to the authors
of the miracles of St. Clement, already described. It is the representation of the funeral
of St. Cyril, carried to the Vatican with face uncovered on a cataletto, covered by a rich
quilt. The clerks in long dresses have torches in their hands; the incense-bearers
swing their spherical censors. In front of the altar of St. Peter is the pope, who pro-
nounces the Pax Domini. This pontiff, who is Nicholas I., is also drawn at the head of
the procession, with a mitre on his head, or pointed tiara with single circle, and wearing
a white pallium sprinkled with black crosses. At his right walks Methodius, the brother
of the deceased, in deep sorrow. The two saints and the Eastern clergy wear the beard,
while the Roman clergy are shaven. Behind the cross-bearer of the pope rise banners of
stuff sprinkled with gold, surmounted with a Greek cross. Under the frieze, which is framed
by two inscriptions, we learn that ‘Maria the butcher's wife (Macellaria) for the reverence
of God and the healing of her soul has had this drawn.' Here, then, in religious buildings,
long before the development of the monasteries and the impulse given by Franciscans
and Dominicans, here are works of art due to the munificence of the Roman citizens.
We may conclude from this that throughout the events of the middle age the commune
preserved a certain preponderance, and that the middle classes had gathered the spoils of
the fallen patriciate. Nothing is truer: it was not before the end of the tenth century
that civil discords brought Rome to ruin, sacked and destroyed property, and extin-
guished for two hundred years and more the intellectual lights which had begun again
to shine forth. . -
Along the nave, perhaps to fill up an empty space, towards the same epoch, the end
of the ninth or the beginning of the tenth century, they grouped into a single frontispiece
the principal points in the legend of St. Alexius. They are painted in the midst of a
ravishing ornamentation of rosettes and compartments decked with flowers among which
birds move with a cornice half destroyed on which Christ figured, censed by the two
archangels, Michael and Gabriel, who are accompanied by St. Clement and Nicholas I.
The three acts of this edifying little drama pass in front of the house of the senator
Eufimianus, father of the pilgrim who in his early youth quitted the paternal roof to
exile himself in Palestine; the buildings of the palace occupy three-quarters of the back-
ground placed in the middle of a fresco. Under a window, from which without
recognising him, his betrothed, whom he abandoned on the day of their nuptials, is
regarding him, Alexius having returned to Rome, with the staff and wallet of the
traveller, goes before the patrician, who arrives on horseback followed by an escort.
II 2 A’O.)/A2.
The pilgrim without being recognised offers his services to his father, who receives
him into the number of his attendants. This figure, walking and speaking, is posed with
an ingenuousness which does not exclude observation of nature; we perceive that the
young man solicits humbly and entreats warmly. He separates himself from a group on
which he turns his back, and which represents another situation;–the pope, followed
by his clergy, and coming, warned by a voice from heaven, to release the body of a
Saint in the house of Eufimianus. They find at the door, resting on a mat, the poor
servant who for seventeen years dwelt under a staircase in his father’s palace. In the
III'ſ III
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LEGEND OF ST. ALEXIUS : FRESCO OF THE TENTH CENTURY.
hands of Alexius was folded a writing, which the pontiff unrolls and reads before the
company and the sorrow-stricken kinsfolk; this third subject in the distribution of the
figures is combined with the two others. The groups balance one another, and the scene
is so skilfully occupied that we seem at first to have to examine only one homogeneous
subject cleverly disposed. The blessed one is placed on a couch, covered by a counter-
pane with alternate medallions of Greek crosses and doves. The betrothed of Alexius,
hastening up, presses him in her arms, while the father and mother have rent their
garments and are tearing their hair.
This picture fixes the date of the adventure of St. Alexius; it must have taken place

ST. CZFMEAVZ”.S. II.3
under Boniface I., who held the Roman bishopric from the year 418 to 422. The
name of the pontiff is shown thus: Boniphatius. This curious painting, in the inscription
which serves for legend, offers the most singular example of the prosodical decomposi-
tion of Latin verse, and of the transition from scanned rhythm to syllabic and rhymed
rhythm. The events traced by the painter are summed up in these two hexameters:—
NON PATER AGNOSCIT, MISERERIQUE SIBI POSCIT;
PAPA TENET CARTAM, viTAMQUE NUNTIAT ARTAM.
It can escape no one that each of these verses cut in two forms two versicles of
modern structure with leonine rhymes.
Thus the church of St. Clement, a museum of archaeology in its upper story, a
gallery of paintings unique over the whole world in its crypt underground, furnishes,
besides the revelation of certain unknown schools, precious documents on the decom-
position of Latinity and specimens of the Italian tongue towards the end of the age of
Charles the Great. The monument so recently discovered also throws a vivid light on
the origin of the first basilicas, on the rites, usages, and costume of the obscurest
epochs, as well as on the antiquity of legends. Only, to exhibit the whole interest which
a Roman church may stir, it was necessary to leave nothing out, for here detail is the
very web of history.
º-ſº
*
ST. CECILIA, By S. MADERNo.
CHAPTER VI.
From the Borgo to the Janiculum by the Ramparts.-A robber history.-The Pauline Fountain.-Stephen
Maderno and his St. Cecilia-Curiosities of the Church.-Origin and Decoration of Santa Maria in
Trastevere.-St. Chrysogonus; High Mass in deserto.—The Corps of Firemen in the time of Augustus;
recent discovery of a district barrack-From the banks of the Tiber to the Monastery of Sant'Onofrio;
monument, mortuary chamber, and portrait of Tasso; what he saw from his window.—Gardens.—Indus-
trial hive of the Theatre of Marcellus.-The buried temples of San Nicolo in Carcere—Remains of the
Porticoes of Octavia and Quarter of the Fishwives; Alleys, Crossways.-Some Profiles of the Ghetto; look
of the place.—The quasi-tragical Adventure of a Parisian.-The Tanners' Quarter.—Return to the bank
of the Tiber; Points of View.—The Cloaca Maxima, and what Dionysius of Halicarnassus thought of it.—
Fortuna Virilis and Temple of the Sun.-Santa Maria in Cosmedin.-Excursion round the house attributed
to Cola di Rienzi.
PRETTY walk, but in a very different quarter, when for instance you have
passed the morning in the libraries or museums of the Vatican, is the hilly
road that you find in coming out of the Borgo by the Cavalleggeri gate,
before which the Constable Bourbon delivered the assault in which he was
slain. You gain the summit of the Janiculum outside the ramparts of Urban VIII., by the
rustic path which plunges on to a ravine where there are some cottages surrounded by
gardens, and, if you turn half round, you will be at the best point of view for appre-
ciating as a whole both St. Peter and the buildings around it. As some enclosed
property partially takes up the long crest of the hill on which Janus reigned over


A ROB/3 ER STORFT. II 5
Antipolis—in the time when Saturn was enthroned in the Capitol—you must, to return to
the town, go up as far as the postern of St. Pancras, the old Porta Janiculensis, which
was unchristened towards 1620 by a neighbouring chapel. Along this slope the walls
open the city to you, on which by crossing the enceinte you come all at once. It is a
happy way to approach the hill and then fall back on the Trastevere by the incline
where a little before the war against Antiochus were found, according to Livy, the
sarcophagus and books of the wise Numa, whom the senators burnt for showing himself
wiser than they. As you follow the broken lines described by the walls, you meet at the
corner of a bastion the statue of St. Andrew on a commemorative monument, and are
reminded of a recent incident.
At the time of the troubles of 1848, a man in whom liberal ideas had overthrown the
prejudices of a “vain superstition,” took it into his head, for the sake of trying an essay
in philosophy, to carry off from the basilica of St. Peter the head of St. Andrew, a relic
contained in a golden shrine and enriched with precious stones; and after that our knave
sold the metal for its weight, retailed the jewels one by one, and thrust the head of the
Apostle into a corner. All succeeded according to his desires when the triumvirate
disappeared, the Sovereign-Pontiff returned to Rome, and with him the ideas of order
and the traditions of religion. From that moment the sacrilegious possession of the
skull of St. Andrew awoke the scruples of the thief and prevented him sleeping. He
thought of throwing it into the Tiber, but he feared the head would only return to the
top surrounded by an aureole of light; he thought of carrying it to a church, but what
if the Apostle should think of disclosing himself miraculously and denouncing the robber!
After many reflections, our friend arrayed the head of St. Andrew duly in its velvet cap,
and on a dark night went to bury it at the foot of the ramparts of the Janiculum; this
ceremony over, the culprit concluded by reciting all the prayers he knew, and returned
in some tranquillity to his house. Shortly this knave with the timid conscience began
to doubt whether his sacrilege was adequately redeemed, and to fancy that the business
would bring him some ill-luck, so to find with heaven some support against St. Andrew,
he went and confessed to a Franciscan father, whom such an avowal plunged into strange
perplexity. To inform of a crime revealed in the confessional would have been blame-
worthy, while to leave the head of an Apostle unhonoured in profane ground seemed
monstrous. The good father therefore tried hard to induce his penitent to declare his
crime by proving to him that only the Pope could relieve him from the excommunication
he had incurred. “But why,” objected the culprit, “should you not charge yourself with
restoring the relic to St. Peter? All the mischief would be repaired.’
“But the gems of the reliquary thou hast no longer; the shrine had touched the
relics, and so was itself holy; I should have to give an account, and what should I
answer? and to think that thou mightest die in such a state It makes one shudder.’
The father so disturbed his quaking conscience that the robber, once more to be at
peãce with himself, finished by resolving to declare his crime, a noble example of faith.
So they took up the head of St. Andrew from its post on the ramparts, to restore it to
the transept of St. Peter; the Pope had erected in front of the bastion a small com-
memorative monument, while the delinquent, condemned for form’s sake, but pardoned
according to use and loaded with favours, served in the interests of morality to demon-
strate by his example the efficacy of the fruits of penitence.
On passing the gate of St. Pancras you begin to hear sounds of a cascade, which
announce the Pauline Fountain. The ornamentation of this waterwork has for its single
Q 2
I I6 A’OME.
purpose to accompany the inscriptive tablet, which is perhaps the most gigantic in the
world. As the building is nearly on the top of the Janiculum, you will discover from a
great distance this page of writing framed in marble vignettes, which are accompanied by
six columns of red granite taken from the Forum of Nerva; the ostentatious style of the
seventeenth century triumphs here by its size. Paul V., restoring life to the aqueducts
of Trajan, and infusing Lake Bracciano into their arteries, did not mean it to enter Rome
in poor guise; below the arms of the Borghese, illustrated by the tiara crowning of the
attica, there rush forth brawling from three open gateways three currents, and from two
neighbouring niches pretty streams. Dragons also spout forth other streams. These
masses of water, so unexpected on the bare summit of a hill, and pure as the crystal of
the Alps, pour down into a vast marble basin. There was once here a temple of
Minerva. The Nympheum, a monument of the liberal foresight of the popes, nobly
enough connects their power with the secular tradition of the emperors, by making the
THE PAULINE FOUNTAIN.
memory of Trajan flower again among the younger buds of the Borghese. The con-
struction does honour to Fontana as well as to the sculptor-architect, Stephen Maderno.
You find this last artist again at the foot of the Janiculum in a very different and
perhaps more original work, if after turning the base of the hill towards the south,
leaving to the right the convent of Franciscans in which dwelt St. Francis of Assisi,
and following the suburban street in which the great St. Benedict stayed in the sixth
century, you finally enter the church of St. Cecilia.
What has made the legend of the virgin martyr disputable is that her execution is
imputed, under Alexander Severus who did not persecute the Christians, to one Almacus,
a pretorian prefect unknown to history. Signor de Rossi has shown the error of the
Bollandists on this point, and confirmed the statement of Fortunatus, who places the
martyrdom of St. Cecilia under Marcus Aurelius. The place of her burial shows the
family from which she sprang; but these are points to which we shall return as we pro-
ceed among the catacombs.
The church of Cecilia, which gives a title to a cardinal priest, passes as having been

‘VITIOSŁYO 'LS JO JLNȚIIND NOIN GIN V NIVITV

..ST. CEC//, /A. I 17
built by Urban I. towards the year 230, on the site of the saint's dwelling-place. They
show you in one of the chapels to the right the remains of the baths of her house, and
on a lower story some fragments of the primitive pavement. Pascal I. who rebuilt the
temple respected, as they had done in the third century, the remains of the furnace,
where we recognise the conduits for heat and water. Clement VII. presented St. Cecilia
to the Benedictine Sisters; Clement VIII., in 1599, had opened the sarcophagus of their
patron, the body of whom, intact and masked by the folds of a long robe, disclosed itself
in an expressive and singular attitude, and this exhumation occasioned one of the finest
statues that was executed the beginning of the seventeenth century. The pope being
desirous that it should represent the
saint in the vestments and the position
in which they had surprised her, the
task was confided to Stephen Maderno.
The body lies supported on the right
side; the head, enveloped in linen bands
that conceal the features, seems lying
on the ground, the legs half-bent, the
arms rigid, the hands close to one
another and open. This marble which
is indebted to reality alone for its strik-
ing aspect, and to its natural impression
for the emotion it causes, is the orna-
ment of the master-altar, which is sur-
mounted by a baldachin of white marble
of the thirteenth century, and with
ogival arcs resting on four columns of
Aquitanian stone, a work that is further
distinguished by charming bas-reliefs
and settings of mosaic. It is the most
intact of the rare monuments left at
Rome by the illustrious Florentine
Arnolfo. The small statues of St.
Cecilia and of Pascal I. possess a great - - --
deal of character, while the Evangelists PORTICO OF SANTA CECILIA IN TRASTEVERE.
sculptured on the tympana are works
already studied and expressive in their naïveté. This curious little temple rises in front
of an apse of the ninth century, in which a mosaic has bequeathed to us, besides a
portrait of Pascal I., the figures of St. Cecilia and her husband Valerianus, in the
costume of the patricians and Roman ladies ten years after the death of Charles the
Great. The saint wears a white mantle over a tunic of green, with a golden border;
the robe and the peplum of Cecilia are of golden stuffs, and richly over-wrought.
Flowers are scattered on their way; by their side palm-trees laden with fruit symbolize
the merits of martyrdom, while over one branch is the haloed phoenix, the emblem of
resurrection. The nave would be remarkable, but that in 1823, by order of Cardinal
George Dona, the architect Salvi, the better to support the weight of a coffer-work
ceiling already dilapidated, had the African granite columns of the building imprisoned
in twenty-four square pilasters imitating wainscoting.

II 8 A’OA)//Z.
What shall I mention besides 2 On the right, the graceful little figure of the fifteenth
century, that has been too much retouched; at each side of the doors two tombs, one of
Cardinal Adam of Hereford, a vigorous conception of the fourteenth century, the other
of Fortiguerra (1473), a very pure model of the old Florentine cenotaphs; finally, on the
floor tombstones from 1301 to 1380 representing nuns, and which they ought to raise up.
The church is in a square court, and its porch on four pillars of red granite and Aqui-
tanian marble is adorned with a delicate frieze of mosaic, with medallions of St. Cecilia,
a work of the thirteenth century and not of the ninth, as archaeologists have supposed.
II.
At some distance from St. Cecilia and at the end of the Lungaretta, rises the capital
church on the right bank of the Tiber, Santa Maria in Trastevere. It is contended that
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PIAzzA SANTA MARIA IN TRASTEVERE.
on this spot there was erected under the first emperors a 7&ſerma meritoria, a sort of
hospital for the invalids of the army, and that this institution, having been abandoned at
the time of Caracalla and Heliogabalus, no doubt because the number of cripples became
too great, the building was conceded to the Christians by Alexander Severus, with per-
mission to found an oratory there, a project that was realized by the pope, St. Callistus.
Anterior by nearly a century to the era of Constantine, Santa Maria in Trastevere
ought to be the oldest church in Rome, and perhaps in the West. What is certain is that

S7A. MARIA IN TRASTEVERE. I IQ
Pope Julius I. rebuilt this temple at an epoch when assuredly there was no other to
reconstruct (349), and that before I 140 Innocent II. Substituted for the monument of
Pope Julius the present church, which is one of the prettiest in Rome and one of the
most interesting from the point of view of art and archaeology. .
It gives you promise from its façade decorated by a mosaic of the twelfth century, an
epoch not often represented at Rome. There is a Madonna in the Byzantine style,
and around her in a line are the Wise Virgins, lamp in hand, with crowns and haloes.
The Foolish Virgins, dressed in the oriental manner, and whose varied attire is very rich,
also carry lamps; but instead of holding them reversed, they keep them upright, a
derogation from traditional usage due to the restorations of the seventeenth century,
which were executed by an ignorant worker in mosaic. Below these pictures a porch has
been constructed not any too soon; the inscriptions with which it is decorated prepare one
for the singular appearance of the church, which from the bottom of the naves appears
so well furnished with curious objects that you suppose you are entering a museum.
These naves are described by two avenues of columns of granite, with capitals of various
orders, on some of which are seen the figures of Harpocrates and Jupiter Serapis. It is
probable that these magnificent shafts formed part of the reconstruction of Pope Julius,
for they would scarcely have left such splendid materials unused down to the time of
Innocent II. We might deliver here a splendid lecture on mosaic workers; from the
façade to the apse, and from the master-altar to the vessels for holy water, and from the
twelfth century to the fifteenth they have left many pages, among which the predella of
the choir, Scenes from the Life of the Virgin, by Pietro Cavallini, seems to me to occupy
the first rank. There are even on a pilaster two mosaics of antiquity; one represents
some birds and the other a seaport. The painting, too, covers an equally extended
cycle, from the fresco, which is still Giottesque, to the Assumption of Domenichino,
which glows among the gold of the ceiling. Let us suppress many graceful details,
the anticipated attraction of a church that Bernardino Rossellini rehandled in the time
of the good Nicholas V., the friend of Fra Angelico. The chapel at the bottom of the
left nave contains a fresco in which Cardinal Altemps has had represented the Council of
Trent, closed by Pius IV., an official painting, in which likenesses and ceremony have
been sought with all conscientiousness, but in which conscience has added nothing;
curiosities do not always move admiration. At the bottom of the presbyterium is set, as
in the basilicas, a massive cathedra of white marble. Finally I must mention a tomb of
the fourteenth century, with a bas-relief of the school of Cosimato representing the death
of the Virgin; which tomb, though nearly ignored, contains the remains of a prince of
the house of France, the Cardinal d’Alençon, brother of Philip the Fair.
It is one of the churches of character in which everybody can glean; the pavement
of Alexandrine work contributes to its air of opulence. They have just finished decking
it up afresh, but I rejoice at having seen it before it became superb. I remember that
trying to go out, and having mistaken the entrance to the sacristy for a door, I observed
in a passage some small tabernacles, on one of which some very charming but little-
known bas-reliefs are signed OPUs MINI ; for those who have studied Florence, necessary
initiation for a journey to Rome, the name of Mino da Fiesole is placed under the banner
of Ghiberti, between those of Fra Angelico and the La Robbia. You come out on the
other side of the cross by a lateral door which joins the railing of a pretty little garden,
that is made cheerful by an ossuary, furnishing an unexpected reminiscence of Lower
Brittany. -
I 20 A&OME.
It often happens that in a quarter possessing a fine old church of great renown, all
the others are like it. This is what one observes in St. Chrysogonus, a few steps from
Santa Maria, only here the columns are of Siennese granite, with modern Ionic
capitals, on which have been carved cherubim on the ovoli. The altar is sur-
mounted by a heavy and rich baldachin with a cupola, supported by four columns of
ornamental alabaster; the bow of the tribuna rests on two shafts of porphyry. We
necessitous and gloomy folk of the North, reduced as we are to grey stone, have no idea
of the splendid effects of marble nor of the power of mosaic, even if it be a little too Cima-
buesque and retouched in the time of Scipio Borghese, like that at San Grisogono which
represents the patron of the place accompanied by St. James with the Madonna, whose
draperies are worthy of the thirteenth century. The square bell-tower in the style of the
time of my countryman, Callistus II., makes one regret a multitude of similar towers
which have disappeared from the south of Gaul. This is half brick and half marble,
and through large arched openings you see the bell moving under the blue sky.
As I was at the bottom of the nave, priests, deacons, and sub-deacons sang vespers
before the illuminated altar, which lighted up the copes of sombre gold. The incense per-
fumed the bays where I was absolutely alone; from the point whence I contemplated this
ceremony in a desert, the Alexandrine mosaic of the pavement, a carpet variegated with
enamels in the brightest colours, retreated in perspective as far back as the Septum,
where it received the golden rays from the tapers, and from there to the vestments of the
priests, which seemed to continue and to animate that precious tissue of lacework and
flowers. From the solitary piazza of San Grisogono we pass into a dull and irregular
piazzetta, ambitiously called Monte di ſtore. I scarcely suspected in crossing it that a
few years after I should be brought thither again in the suite of the learned world by the
least foreseen of all discoveries. This quarter had furnished some antiques to the
Vatican and the Capitol. Three years ago two inquirers, MM. Gagliardi and Antonio
Ciocci, obtained permission to open some excavations under this little place. At the
very beginning they found almost at the surface of the soil walls that formed a square;
they followed them, digging to a depth of eight mêtres, and disengaged a black and
white mosaic, on which were figured fish, marine monsters, tritons, and nymphs. They
thought they must have exhumed a bath-chamber; but having cleared off the earth with
which the walls were plastered, they deciphered inscriptions which gave very different
importance to the ruins. &
To understand it, we must remember that the military institution of firemen, as it
exists in Paris at the present day, had for its earliest founder and may claim for patron
the Emperor Augustus. Before him the duty of extinguishing the fires that were so
frequent in Rome, had devolved upon public slaves quartered under the ramparts. The
heir of Caesar, gradually to raise this function, substituted for them freed men, and then
struck with their usefulness he replaced the freed men by picked soldiers, and created
under the name of Vigiles a new militia, distributed into seven cohorts, to each of them
being committed the guardianship of two of the fourteen quarters or regions of Rome.
By texts and by epigraphic proofs we were tolerably informed as to the posts of the
first six cohorts of the Vigiles, but as to the seventh, “not a letter cut in stone,’ writes
De Rossi, ‘mentioned it or revealed a trace of it.’
Yet a considerable although ill-defined institution was in question. It was known
that its founder had added to the primitive duties the night guard of deserted districts
as well as certain functions of aedileship. The Vigiles protected property and citizens,
SANT' ONOFRIO. I 2 I.
and as their triple mission, joined to the unpopularity of a purely imperial origin, had
made them subject to the quolibets that among a corrupt people attach to the most useful
functionaries, Augustus and his successors overwhelmed with graces, immunities, and
high pay these cohorts, to which in the long-run people quarrelled for admission. Their
barracks became palaces, they were surrounded with porticoes, they established in them
baths, libraries, chambers for games, and they peopled them with statues, bas-reliefs,
and columns.
Soon we shall have precise notions as to the station of the Vigiles of the seventh
cohorts, the only one of which a little time ago we knew nothing, and now to-day the
only one whose habitation can be thoroughly explored. On this point no uncertainty,
for they have got up in this monument of the first century the stamps of Adrian, who
augmented it; inscriptions mention the embellishment of Caracalla ; the numerous
graffiti drawn with a nail by the soldiers bear after the names the description of Vigiles
and the mark of the seventh cohort. One of these scribblings, of which the style is
always correct and the writing often bad, recalls that Rome was illuminated at the
festivities of the adoption of Alexander Severus by Heliogabalus; another celebrates
the natal day of Severus, which corresponded with the anniversary of Alexander the
Great. Then to satisfy the prayers of archaeologists the Holy Father, by a rescript of
the 20th of February, 1867, ordered the expropriation of three little houses which were
in the way of the digging. They dig with zeal but with economy, for of the treasures
of Julius II. we have nothing left but his love of art. The walls mark out their own plan
already. They have delivered from the darkness two fine cows of bronze, which will be
followed by other monuments, until the laying bare of the whole shall at length permit
us to come to a conclusion, from the establishment, as to the functions and discipline
of the militia who lived in it.
III.
One of the interesting pilgrimages from the Trastevere, and from that slope of the
Janiculum on which gardens look towards the city, is the monastery of Sant'Onofrio, the
witness of the agony of Tasso. When, after examining the mean buildings that adjoin
the Tiber, and having looked in passing at some handsome Trasteverine who comes,
bright and gay, out of the obscurity of a filthy hovel, and traversed the interminable
street of the Lungara, you mount to the convent of Sant’ Onofrio by an old track on
which the grass is high; and as you discover the arcades, the painted portico, the church
with its rustic belfry placed on an escarped terrace, you are vehemently struck by the
impression of things of the old time. The rustic look of primitive monasteries marks the
buildings, before which one summons the heroes of religious legends, from having seen in
twenty pictures the representation of these monastic fabrics; the fifteenth century appears
here in full life. Thus the paintings of Domenichino, which tell to the birds of the air the
life of St. Jerome, only intervene as a short episode; the eye quits them to roam over
the panorama of the ancient world; then let us turn to the convent, to this green slope,
to this little space where flowers among the stones of the pavement simulate mosaic.
Without fastening on any particular point, the mind inhales the placid charm of this
poetic nook.
R
I 2.2 A’O//E.
But as soon as one has set foot in the little church of Sant' Onofrio, the comic
element speedily puts these romantic leanings to rout. The monument of Torquato
Tasso, inaugurated in 1857 by Pius IX., does more honour to the sentiments of the
Holy Father than to the talent of Giuseppe Fabrizi, to whom for want of somebody
better, no doubt, they had to confide its execution. His bas-reliefs and his figure of
Tasso are of a smooth, scraped, and pomaded execution, and of a taste quite extra-
ordinarily laughable. Frizzled with little curls trimmed like a barber's wig block, with
a ruff like Scaramouche's and two kinds of cantaleups adjusted under each shoulder, the
poet is, as it were, fortiſe by lyric enthusiasm; he figures as feebly a torso incongruously
cut, that seems to be held in a muslin doublet. In the midst of the masterpieces of
Greece and Rome, a hundred steps
from the Vatican, close to the Capitol,
in the inmost intimacy of a population
of statues, how could anybody have lost
sight and the notions of art to such an
extent? A chilled bas-relief represents
the funeral of the poet in 1596. The
procession of his friends, the renowned
men of the time, offers us not portraits,
but true punchinelloes, accoutred just
as they used to bundle up the paladins
with us in 1818. Since the Savoyard
troubadours of the Abbey of Haute-
º combe, I had never seen anything like it!
Close to the door is the ancient burying-
place, where under a modest stone
has slept for more than two centuries
the author of the Jerusalem /Je/izereaſ,
at the foot of a portrait of the time,
which is bad enough but which may be
a likeness. Some shadows of an equi-
vocal glory keep company in Sant'
Onofrio with the shadow of Tasso :
Alessandro Guidi, the pastoral poet of
the Queen of Sweden, who quitted pas-
torals to put into verse the homilies of
Clement XI. : John Barclay, who, under the inspiration of the orthodox church, drew up
satirical romances in Latin; then that Cardinal Mezzofante who, if the collection of words
had not absorbed in him the place of ideas, and if he had not possessed fifty dialects, might
have made a linguist and even a philologist. We passed with indifference before the
rather cold frescoes of the master-altar by Peruzzi; those of Pinturicchio, which decorate
some compartments, stirred in us only a feeble interest, either because they have under-
gone too many retouchings, or because the disgrace of evil company may compromise
even masterpieces. The church is much tricked up and over-furnished, as is usually
the case in convents. My companions and I sought far and wide, with the curiosity that
expects suddenly to proclaim the find of a gem.
It is in the passages of the monastery, where one loves to adventure in the footsteps
YOUNG WOMAN OF THE TRASTEVERE.

TASSO. I 23
of the poet, that the pearl is found, and like most pearls this is scarcely more valuable
than if it dwelt at the bottom of the ocean. I speak of a little fresco representing the
Virgin and Child, who blesses a donor at prayer. The picture is arched, and is sur-
rounded with a frame in flowers and fruit on an enamelled ground, a rude imitation of
Andrea della Robbia. The donor's portrait in profile, the infant Jesus from a soft model
and of charming gesture, the fine movement, the delicate sweep, the lofty brow of the
smiling Madonna, all reveals and proclaims Leonardo da Vinci, to whom this precious
jewel is justly attributed. We left it to ascend to the room in which Tasso ended his sad
and glorious life.
The chamber is well placed; the landscape which it commands harmonises with
impressions answering to the triple poetry of misfortune, of the cloister, and of love.
What Tasso looked upon in his last dreams, we see to-day just as he left it; it is a
solitude of building, a desert by the hand of man, where, through cloistered gardens
mingling with tiny cemeteries cut into groves, the eye descends as far as the buildings
SANT' ONOFRIO.
of the Vatican city, which is connected with the Castle of St. Angelo by a long girdle of
brick. On the horizon unequal and smiling hills envelop the perspectives of the city,
starting from the Monte Mario, clothed with large trees up to the Pincian, the elysian abode
of the time of Sallust. Nothing is comparable to such visions under the brightness of the
southern sun, when the soul feels itself carried joyfully forth into the pure air. Leaning
on the window where the lover of Eleonore d’Este leaned, we beheld with rapture what
he beheld with such gloom ; in our chat we were less attentive to our words than struck
with the more concentrated accent of the voices which testified to the accord of the
impressions that we all felt silently in common. The chamber in which the last rhap-
Sodist of the Christian epopee passed away on the eve of the day set for his triumph in
the Capitol, this sanctuary is still just as he left it for the vault of Sant'Onofrio; a few pale
marks on the walls show the place of things that have disappeared. Yet all has not been
dispersed : certain objects have been preserved that belonged to the poet; his table,
with an inkstand of wood, his great chair covered with Cordovan leather very worn, a

R 2
I24 A’OME.
small German cabinet, a mirror, an autograph letter, a large bowl, a crucifix. There is
found also the original of a mask in wax, moulded from nature, and the copies of which
known abroad have become much effaced. The monks have placed this face on a clothed
bust, an incoherence from which there springs a fantastic effect. The head is delicate, of
a peculiarly spiritual beauty, and of a fascinating expression; the purity of the profile
and the firmness of the mouth heighten the distinction of the poet’s face. As had been
the case in the church, the bad taste of contemporaries procured for us here another
deception. A Neapolitan who surmounted the new tomb of Torquato with shocking
frescoes took it into his head in 1864 to make small account of his chamber, and to
plaster over its recollections by painting on the plastered back of a false door the picture
of Tasso, done in a deceptive way so as to cause surprise to Boeotians; this piece of
caricature is not even copied from the authentic head. We could not restrain ourselves
from protesting against such fatuity,
and the good brother who accom-
panied us thought he was well out of
it by assuring us that the artist had
painted the thing for nothing. How
is it that this piece of indecency has
not been scraped out already?
After crossing the cloister, under
an arcade that rests on small antique
columns that have seen Tasso pass,
we gained the hill, to finish the
evening in the gardens, which furnish
a famous point of view over Rome
and the country as far as the sea,
s Z%.<^ s with the plantations of the Janiculum
s § ſº § for foreground. The oak at the foot
§ w of º the poet sat has thrown out
º º- - - a vigorous shoot, which replaces the
trunk that was overthrown by a hurri-
cane. Almost at the side, you still
PORTRAIT AFTER THE MASK OF TASSO. perceive under the grass the 1 OWS as
of an amphitheatre, where the founder
of the Oratorians, St. Philip Neri, who died in the same year as Tasso, gave conferences
in the open air when the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella became too small for the
number of his hearers. The neglected gardens of the monasteries, ill-defended against
the invasion of wild flowers which increase and multiply over disused cemeteries, speak
of the old time as distinctly as the ruins do; the new verdure of the secular plants
restores the graces of youth to the oldest mementoes. With its orange groves, its long
row of monastic buildings, its bronzed cypresses, and its white bell-towers, the garden of
Sant' Onofrio awakens visions of ideal lands that we have travelled over in the romances
of old days.
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7A/EA TRE OF MARCELA, U.S. I 25
IV.
Let us return for a moment to the streets and cross-roads, a necessary distraction
after visits to churches and convents, the examination of which, if anything of them is to
remain with us, must be a genuine study. The quarters of new Rome, which are like
those of the old populous cities of Rouen, of Lyon, of Arles, or of Toulouse, so far as
the regions newly built over the ancient Campus Martius are less young than our Gothic
cities of Gaul,—these labyrinths of habitations in decay on which each century has
printed its mark, have been little explored. People have disdained, in favour of noble
and academic monuments, this common folk of buildings in tatters.
Between the southern slope of the Tarpeian Rock and the Fabrician bridge, near the
Piazza Montanara, where peasants stand all day chatting over their affairs, and where so
many public writers scribble at the disposal of a crowd made various by costumes of marked
colours, here you come upon one of the pure monuments of the best epoch, the theatre
dedicated by Augustus to the young Marcellus, his nephew. It replaced an old temple
to Pity, erected under the Republic, on the very spot where a young woman had suckled
her mother who had been condemned to die of hunger. It was at the opening of the
theatre of Marcellus that the Romans for the first time admired a tame tiger. -
Such is the perfection of this monument that the Doric and Ionic columns of the two
superimposed orders which supported the arches have been adopted by architects since as
models of proportion. There remains an enormous segment of this building, of which
the Pierleoni and the Savelli made a fortress in the middle age. Since then the palace of
the Orsini eviscerated the theatre of Marcellus and installed itself in the interior; houses
supported themselves against the high tower-shaped wall which abuts on the Piazza
Montanara. On the two stories of the porticoes, as well as in the cells of that honey-
comb eaten through by ants, workmen have quartered themselves and have stopped up
the arches with brick, rag-stone, or old plaster. The arches of the half-buried ground-
floor have been turned into black caves where Vulcan makes his anvil sound; rags hang
in the windows; stove-pipes and chimneys come confusedly out of that living and
swarming ruin, where the eye recognises amid soot-stained blocks fine Ionic capitals on
the second story, and seeks on the lower level the crowning of the other order, supported
on engaged columns that go gradually into the ground; these bits restore in the midst
of the most miserable huts the grandeur of the style of the Romans. In the neighbour-
hood of this little Piazza Montanara, thus given to humble crafts, once was towards the
middle of the Vicolo della Bufala the Carmentale gate of the first enclosure of Rome. It
is said, but one is allowed to doubt, that it took its name from Carmenta, the mother
of the King Evander; under King Servius, who built the wall five centuries before the
birth of Virgil, people did not think of the family of the King Evander.
Close to the theatre of Marcellus, at the bottom of an alley whither chance will
hardly lead you, in a conflict of masonry a little church fights its way, before which you
would pass and into which you would enter without a suspicion that it contains remains of
the highest antiquity. The architects have restored San Nicolo in Carcere so well, that
its ancient columns and its fine urn of green porphyry, which supplies as the decoration
to the altar some heads of Medusa, would no longer suffice to justify an expedition as
far as the populous quarters that surround the Piazza Montanara. But the buildings of
126 º A&OME.
the middle age to which San Nicolo is joined, mask the ruins of three temples, one con-
tiguous to the other, which go back to the Roman Republic. They were erected in the
Forum Olitorium or vegetable market. The fluted columns of one of these buildings
were of peperino and of the Doric order, marks of a respectable antiquity; every one is
agreed in thinking that they belong, the one to the end of the fifth, and the other to the
sixth century of Rome. Many strangers seek, without finding these temples, which
have received various hypothetical designations. Buried deep down, they must have
served in the fourth century for laying the foundations of the church, while the remains
of their friezes and of their upper entablatures are engaged and lost, either in the higher
part of San Nicolo or among the roofs of the neighbouring houses. If, entering a
Small court behind the transept, you descend with a torch by a long slope to the two
caves of the church, one over the other, you will find in the lower of them enormous blocks
whose courses are laid in the Etruscan manner. Among these foundations you will
recognise the bases of a series of columns, and will distinguish without trouble the
peristyles of the three buried temples. Against one of the exterior facings of the church
you perceive the continuation of the fluted columns set in the wall; climbing by a ladder
on to the terrace of a neighbouring house, you reach the upper entablature of one of
the temples; their modern sepulture pursues and imprisons them even in the sky.
When, doubling the round of the theatre of Marcellus, you proceed to lose yourself
in the region of the Pescheria Vecchia, you discover a memento of Augustus in a
colonnade, once splendid, whose imposing remains which penetrate as far as two or three
blind alleys, mark off the secular cloacae of the Israelitish Bohemia, which is so strange
at Rome and deliberately sequestered as it is no longer anywhere else. Octavius, who
had dedicated to the son of his sister the neighbouring theatre begun by Julius Caesar,
placed under the patronage of Octavia the new portico, in which he placed together the
altars of Jupiter and Juno. These were the temples referred to by Velleius Paterculus in
a passage where he informs us that to erect the portico of Octavia, Augustus pulled
down the monuments that had been raised by Metellus on his return from the wars of
Macedonia. Only he omits to tell us what became of the army of statues that had been
brought from Greece and installed in this triumphal building by the fortunate Quintus.
Their discovery would be of value, for the statues that were placed there 148
years before our era, had been ordered by Alexander the Great from Lysippus
to honour the heroes who had fallen at the passage of the Granicus, the theatre of the
defeat first of Darius and afterwards of Mithridates. In the time of Pliny the elder
there was still to be seen in the portico the seated statue of Cornelia, the mother of the
Gracchi. On the vast circumference of the porticoes of Octavia, which were burnt under
Titus, and restored first by Septimius Severus and then by Caracalla, there remain a
few columns, which form the retreating perspective of an alley containing capitals
engaged in buildings of brick, and an enormous entablature with a pediment, from the
top of which there falls a rope line ending with the cross-bar of a street lantern. In the
middle is the little church of St. Angelo in Pescheria, crowned by a covered belfry. It
was from here that Cola de Rienzi, on the 19th of May, 1347, after hearing mass, came
forth escorted by his adherents and the Vicar Apostolic to ascend to the Capitol, where
the populace whom he had convoked conferred upon him the lordship of the Roman
Republic. Situated in a poor quarter with all sorts of incoherent masonry, the ruins of
antiquity are connected on every side with buildings from the seventh to the thirteenth
century. Under the pediment they have described an arch, by way of replacing two
AORT/CO OF OCTA V/A. 127
broken pillars; of the neighbouring colonnades there remain two capitals, one of them
muffled in masonry, the other a fine piece crowned with acanthus, placed on a pedestal of
brick; a pilaster disrobed of its surrounding of marble. The principal effect of these ruins
comes of the contrast between the grandeur and the magnificence of the antique style,
and the picturesque, sordid, and inveterate squalor of dens that are now given up to the
fishery and Jewry installed there by the middle age.
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Turning the corner of the portico and passing under a low arch, you suddenly come
out at the head of a deep, narrow street, the houses of which, dark of unequal height,
are made yet more obscure by pent-house roofs and by clothes-lines set up, as at
Smyrna, across the road in the shape of ropes on which swing garments of varied hue.
These abodes exhibit a complete harlequinade of all sorts of epochs and all sorts of
purposes. The majority of them have been in turn palaces, convents, oratories, houses
of business in many forms, and at last they are become garrets and dens for sheltering

I 28 A’OME.
wretchedness. Everybody has patched up the walls for his own use, and such is the
quality of the cement that a square of wall pierced, stopped, mined, torn away ten times
in twelve centuries, remains solid as a rock, without there being any need to prop it.
Hence, before each of these façades made up of pieces and bits, one recognises, as on
an ill-scraped parchment on which various texts have followed one another, the plan and
the appropriation of the previous dwellings. The small Roman bit, the remains of
some sace//um of the lower empire, will form a kind of figured stuff with the narrow
bricks of the thirteenth century and the large courses of travertine of the fifteenth. You
will perceive from story to story spacious round windows stopped and replaced by tiny
lattices, which are to-day in their turn condemned. Vast arches sketching their festoons
in a wall pierced by a window will recall
ancient porticoes. A console perched
high in notched bas-reliefs, a shaft of
syenite or of African granite coming
out of these mosaics of masonry, will
betray a whole mystery of vanished
greatness. Marbles fouled with soot
mingled here and there with the mud
of the buildings; casting furtive glances
to the bottom of the avenues, you will
discover among the filth of a blind court
captive colonnades and the crumbling
. º/ scraps of some palace, such as those of
º |iſº the Governo Vecchio, whose porticoes
– ſº are half concealed amid the hovels
of the Pescheria. At Rome to build
they never completely pulled down;
erections having come from age to
age to hive themselves one against
the other like cells, it follows that the
old quarters abandoned to the populace
retrace the rank and tell the story of
the life of the castes which from century
to century have been quartered there.
Even the doors have been re-cut or
re-hung; marvellous lock fastenings,
antique and complicated gratings, will close sinks; a sarcophagus will serve for a trough,
a grave-stone for a basement, while dirty water will have for gutters tombs that were
contemporary with Gregory VII. In this way the smallest bit of building may become
a summary of history, but you must inspect it close, for too often by dint of passing
from hand to hand the book has been effaced. -
On each side of this curious street lie large flagstones of white marble, gently
inclined like tombstones, which forming a double row at the foot of the houses take
towards nightfall, when the street is deserted, a most lugubrious look; it seems that the
graves of ancestors are arranged before the doors. These blocks of Carrara or cipollino,
taken from the temples of the gods or the inferior palaces, serve as stalls for the vendors
of fish. When on these tables they cut up the bronze-coloured sword-fish, sea-eels,
GATE OF ST. ANGELO IN PESCHERIA.

"VIHOOGIA VINH HOSGI a.

A PESCA/ERIA. I 29
doradoes with bluish gill, their blood mingles in violet and rose-coloured webs with
threads of carmine over the delicate whiteness of the marble, composing bouquets of colour
which would have given delight to a rival of Van Ostade. When this quarter, in which,
as Pliny and Pausanias tell us, they had gathered together a host of masterpieces of Greek
art, was burnt under Titus, the flames consumed the Cupid of Praxiteles, and Dion
Cassius has commemorated the irreparable loss. It was in digging at the end of this
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street that in the seventeenth century they exhumed the Venus de Medici at the entrance
of the rione of the Jews, who with an amazing thoughtlessness have never thought of
scratching the fruitful earth whose treasures they trample under foot.
Ever since the revolution of 1848 the Ghetto has been opened; but when the friends
of equality of creed made the chains fall which at night barred the Jewish quarter, its
inhabitants, raised to the civic dignity of Christians, protested energetically against such
a favour. The common system which people condescended to apply to them, and which
S

I3O A’OME.
associated them with taxation and the burdens of the city, was in fact more rigorous
than the exceptional system under which they had lived since the last century. This
quarter is so withdrawn from all control, these crossed proletarian races of Zingari,
Moors, and all the confused dynasties of the Bohemians, those tribes whose generic title
has become compromising for the Jewish sect, are to such an extent masters in their
own district, that it is not always prudent, particularly for well-dressed women, to venture
alone to the Ghetto with no other motive than curiosity, and especially on Sunday, when
the shopkeepers of this caravansary plunder the rustics, who have no other day to lose
for coming and buying provisions in the city. Let us observe that in this respect the
pontifical government surpasses the Swiss Republic and free England, where religious
concerns are equally regulated by the civil authority. Rome allows the Israelites to
keep open shop on the Sunday, and it does not forbid Christians to make their purchases
in the Ghetto on that day, nor even to go and buy cigar-ends by the pound, or be shaved
by the barbers in the open air where people wait their turn with so much patience, while
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BARBER IN THE OPEN AIR.
they gather from the lips of the inexhaustible Figaro the news of the quarter and of the
two hemispheres. To have one's beard shaved is for the Romans the only toilette
luxury over which their taste for dirt has not triumphed; thus Ticinius Mena, who in the
year of Rome 454 brought from Sicily the first barbers that Rome ever saw, inaugurated
the most durable of fashions. Varro informs us that nobody before Scipio AEmilianus
had himself shaved every day. Previously everybody wore his beard long, and the old
men long continued the practice, since contemporaries of Sulla mentioned by Aulus
Gellius were astonished that a bust of Scipio Africanus represented him as beardless at
a time when he was over forty. Octavianus was the first great noble who shaved himself;
the humblest subjects of Pius IX, are more advanced. But let us return to the manners
and customs of the Ghetto. -
One morning as I was passing along the Piazza de' Cenci, to reach the bank of the
Tiber, I hear cries on my left, and almost immediately a lady, rushing hastily from the
Ghetto, throws around her an alarmed look and pale with fright runs up to place herself

THE GHETTO. I 3 I
under my protection; a ladies' maid followed her close in an even livelier state of agitation.
Offering her my arm, I perceived some hags fall back grumbling into the alley, while the
lady dragged me from the quarter. As she eagerly made excuses for her proceeding, and
at the same time expressed her gratitude at having found me, she could hardly find
breath, and her ideas only found their way to words by bits. She was like most of the
intelligent women of our French society, as I found out afterwards—a Parisian shut up
in the provinces. . Being fastidious in her impressions, she could not endure the guides,
the cicerone who shows you a city as if it were a menagerie; so to get a sight of the
Ghetto she had come to explore it with a maid. In the principal artery of the Jewish
quarter everybody lives in front of his door; the stalls let down like the mouth of an
oven, the narrow doorways, the entries to these dens for old clothes, were all crowded
with women, children, old men, squatting on the thresholds, or leaning against the
window-jambs. This lively and ragged brood runs up in front of the prey provided by
the goodness of the God of Jacob, and as there is competition, it is a question who shall
first seize a customer. Madame S***, had scarcely taken ten steps before three or four
hags proceeded to run by her side, vaunting their wares, old stuffs, lace from Venice,
Moorish nicknacks. It is not uncommon to find the richest things from China or
India in infected dens, foul with rags and dirt. The two women listened with a smile,
pursuing their way; but a young clown who, in a cloak and his hat thrust over his eyes,
had observed them as they were looking at the Bolognetti Palace, and had followed them
at a distance, suddenly drew close, and in a jargon that Madame S*** could not seize
uttered to these hags in a low voice, with ironical and sombre air, some words whose
effect was terrible. What superstition, what fierce sentiments had he roused ? At any
rate, from being obsequious and suppliant, they suddenly pass to the state of furies;
they bar the road, they shriek, they insult, and they threaten; they attract a legion of
ragged ghouls, while children mingle their shrill cries with these hoarse croakings;
enraged creatures issue from every shop, and the farther the strangers push on the more
does this tumultuous wave swell around them. It was in front of them that the dis-
cordant concert perpetually revived, it continued at their side, everybody shouted from
window to roof, and the swarm became exasperated by its own rage. g
This old Roman Jewry is in truth a sinister and formidable caste; a yellow or copper-
coloured race, gilded by bile for lack of sun, cynical and degraded while remaining ener-
getic, brutalised, but their features inflamed by the eternal scars of hate. In the case of the
old women, and they seem to be very numerous, for time marks them early, these brands
freeze one with horror. When their crisp locks have passed from ebony or vermilion to
the condition of tawny and discoloured hay; when the wind scatters in clumps the frag-
ments of hair over seamed temples; when you see, gleaming across noses like eagles'
beaks, those eyeballs of live coal kindled by fever, and twisted necks in which swells a
network of black veins, convulsed by rage and shrieking; when you hear these croakings
of a guttural dialect issue from a hundred toothless mouths; when you see those lean
fists, those muscles straining under a parchment which is too big for them, those bare
breasts, mingling their contortions with the grimaces of the rags, and when you see
these living bundles of rag intoxicated with a wild fury pressing against you, fierce as
jackals on your track, it is permitted especially to two poor women to feel some alarm.
Madame S*** pursued her way with an appearance of perfect calm, and her servant
pressed close to her. She was quite aware that if she stopped, if she turned aside or
tried to speak, if she took to flight or quickened her step, if by ill-fortune one of these
S 2
I 32 A’OME.
harridans should lay a hand upon her, or if some missile should strike her, she would run
the risk of being torn in pieces. So she affected an impassive dignity, and traversed
this long den of lions without much hope of coming to its issue. In the depths of the
street the distant space was being peopled with hungry heads and her reception was
making ready. Half way down on the right an alley without doors or windows presented
itself. Madame S*** hurrying down fell upon a family of patriarchs, where three tawny
generations, squatting on the ground, were feeding on some scraps. At sight of the
stranger they all rose with fierce air, and the hostile band came flowing up at the
same time. Seized with terror our countrywoman started like a roe, threw herself down
another lane, and close followed by the most furious came out frozen with fright,
QUARTER OF THE TANNERS.
upon the Cenci Piazza. Here ended the domain of that wild Bohemia; aggression
hardly dares to encroach on Christian territory. A protector had arisen, and all
disappeared.
An exaggerated picture, some traveller will say. We warrant the scrupulous exactness
of the story. But, it will be objected, no crime is committed in the Ghetto. What do
you know of this? Who could prevent it? Where is the supervision, control, or
publicity 2 What agents does the police send into the domain of a race living under the
privileges of ostracism, in the midst of a labyrinth filled with traps, in deep cellars, the
approach to which is absolutely unknown 2 At any rate, you will answer, nobody has
ever heard tell of anything; and who is to tell? At a certain time the Duke of Tuscany
insisted on priding himself that he did not have a single assassin in his territory, and he

THE REGION OF 7A/E 7AAWAVER.S. I33
published statistics which were the honour of his reign, the glory of humanity, the text
of the philanthropic declamations of philosophers. Only when a murder took place, they
put out of sight the culprit as well as the victim, proceedings were stified, and so they
avoided giving scandal to their neighbours.
Above the Ghetto and Cenci Palace, between this piazza and the Via de' Pettinavi,
are the lines along the Tiber with its deserted barges, of certain streets, still more
curious than those of the tribe of the Hebrews. From the bank you see retreating in
perspective a mass of habitations, one leaning over the other, as if they had been
driven by a blast of wind. The sight continues as far as the Ponte Sisto, under which
you will hardly discover a fisherman on the watch before his gireſ/a stretched at the
foot of an arch. Penetrating to the principal street, which is parallel to the stream, but
sinuous and with a breach here and there in its line, this ragged quarter is alive with the
noise of the people and with the incongruity of contrasts. There are deep lanes, showing
at their mouths palaces without name, whose fifteen centuries of architecture tumble one
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upon another; the lemon-tree and the laurel push out from clefts in the stone in the midst
of filthiness and the creatures of the courtyard. These places are called the Rione della
Regola, and are inhabited by tanners; the sour and pungent odour of the tan and the
hides mix with the accustomed perfume of the cabbage. The people who work the
leather as workmen and artisans, not a very numerous class in this part of the world, are
supposed to be turbulent. The Mazzinian party has preserved here, they say, some
followers, who would be well inclined, not for revolt, but to second a movement, and,
in case of success to contribute some tragical episodes of the old Roman stamp. In the
struggles of the free towns in Flanders, as in the time of the civil wars in Sienna,
the leather-workers were famous for their restlessness.















I 34 - - ROME.
V.
There results from the prolonged suffocation of these grimacing beauties, and this
ugliness that so fascinates curiosity, an eager desire to find broad horizons and open
perspectives. I turned back to get near the old Palatine Bridge that was finished by
Scipio, the conqueror of Carthage, which has been restored by the popes, and which, half
carried away under Clement VIII., has kept the name of Ponte Rotto. I even went
further, so as to take in under several aspects two of the finest points in Rome, a
spectacle that Pius IX. has given us by authorizing a foreign company to fix an iron foot
bridge over the mutilated arches of the old bridge, of which he was anxious that they
should respect the remains. The stream is wide and deep at each side of the Tiberine
island. A quay frequently interrupted, all sorts of irregular buildings on terraces
descending to the water, a few barges, monuments in the background, a couple of
bridges thrown from one bank to another, brick, verdure, and marble; black chimneys over
groups of little houses scattered in queer disorder—such are the banks of the Tiber.
The gulls flit over the double channel, which is surrounded by buildings with round tiles
on tumble down and jutting roofs. This bank is noisy, for the popular chattering at the
turning of the Quattro Capi accompanies the Swarming movement of the district. Those
who come there in the heats of July, when everybody is under cover or asleep, find, like
my friend Amédée Achard, the city dead and depopulated.
From the point at which the winding stream discloses on every side the spacious
horizon, the eye embraces both banks, from the Isle of Æsculapius as far as the old
Fabrician Bridge, which ends an uneven row of houses, protected by terraces festooned
with laurels and orange-trees arranged in hedgerows, and cypresses rising like bell-
towers; the burnt hue of this fantastic quarter seems to become a flame in the evening
sun. From the middle of the Palatine Bridge you recognise to the east on the hill of
Romulus the grove in which he was nourished, and the festoons of the palace of Tiberius
and Caligula; then leaning towards the south, the escarpment of the Aventine Rock, where
Cacus was slain by Hercules, and beneath the high convent of St. Sabina the still visible
piles of the Sublician Bridge which King Ancus constructed, and where Horatius
Cocles stopped the host of the Etruscans. Nearer on the same side opens out the
arched vault of the Cloaca Maxima, that senior among all the public works which, after
absorbing the marshes of the Velabrum, has been ever since the reign of Tarquin the
principal and indestructible sewer of the quarter of which the Forum was the centre.
The vaults of this construction are composed of enormous blocks, forming three con-
centric courses, on which the embankment rests. ‘Three things,’ wrote Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, ‘reveal the magnificence of Rome, the aqueducts, the roads, the sewers.
The extent of the last demonstrates not so much their utility, as the enormous sums that
must have been expended upon them. We know from the testimony of C. Aquilius that
the maintenance of the sewers cost the censors more than twelve millions.” -
‘The sewers are an immense work,' writes in his turn the elder Pliny; ‘these exca-
vations having been made in the mountains, they would sail with their boats in Rome
suspended high as Thebes. . . . Agrippa caused to flow there seven torrents, which in
their rapid course hurry along all the refuse; swollen by rain, they beat against the
bottom and the walls of the Cloaca ; often driven inward by the Tiber, the currents
THE CLOACA MAXIMA—7EMPLE OF FORTUAVA VVKAZZS. I35
struggle with one another in the channel, and yet the building resists. Masses of water
are free between these walls without any part giving way; houses falling into ruin or
destroyed by fire, and even earthquakes do their best against this vault, still the work
of Tarquin remains impregnable.” -
What astonished Pliny is much more surprising now, ten centuries later. ‘Let us
not omit,” he says, “a fact that has been passed over by our most celebrated annalists.
When Tarquin employed the people on these endless, dangerous, and detested works, a
number of labourers in despair destroyed themselves. But as the Quirites fear above
all things shame, the tyrant found a singular means of forcing them to live; he had the
corpses of those who committed suicide exposed upon crosses to the gaze of the people
and the voracity of birds of prey.’ -
Once upon a time, thieves, pickpockets, and other scandalous persons sought refuge
near the sewers or channels at the edge of the Tiber. Festus, who edifies us as to the
habits of these men of prey, calls them canalicolae—“Canalicola, ſorenses homines pauperes
dicti quod circa canales ſori consisterent.’ In spite of this authority I should continue to
believe that our word canaille comes from the word canis, rather than find its birthplace
at the mouth of the Cloaca Maxima. When, to examine a work that has so often been
imitated, you ascend towards the Velabrum as far as a paper-mill installed at a distance of
three hundred mêtres from the Tiber, you come upon a fragment of the channel of this
cloaca at the very spot where it receives the crystal of the Juturnian Fountain, which
from a basin on whose brink the Dioscuri appeared to the founder of Rome, came flowing
with full stream into a subterranean aqueduct. The aqueduct still exists, the water yet
flows and babbles there, but the naiad no longer comes to the foot of the fraternal
columns of Castor and Pollux, to mirror her comeliness in the sun.
This deserted quarter is full of old memories. Just above the Tarquinian sewer rises
the little tetrastylar temple of Fortuna Virilis, which the Romans, misled by the rudeness
of the materials, would fain trace back as far as Servius Tullius, but which is hardly earlier
than Caesar, and whose fluted columns with Ionic capitals still have their bases surrounded
with the pavement, a score of times secular, of the Palatine Way. So the building has
long consecrated by favour of a deceitful tradition the memory of a slave become king.
In the year 670, Pope John III. installed the Holy Virgin in the temple of Fortuna
Virilis. He erected an altar, the dedication of which, changed ten centuries later,
immortalised another redemption, that of St. Mary the Egyptian. A few steps off is the
graceful Rotunda of the Sun, dedicated by some modern archaeologists to Vesta, a
gracious monument of the age of Trajan, very inferior to the more ancient marvel of
Tivoli, but still attractive in spite of having lost its architraves and its pediment. To
save this pagan altar, of which the primitive institution ascends, they say, as far as
Numa, it was placed by the popes under the protection of St. Mary of the Sun. This
plaything in style has for pendant the basin, in the midst of which by order of
Clement XI. Carlo Bizzaccheri placed high and dry upon a rock two sirens of no very
dangerous beauty. - - -
The bottom of this piazza is occupied by the porch of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. It
is a common opinion that Pope Adrian I., in reconstructing this church, which was of
Constantinian origin, enriched it with an ornamentation so splendid that it retained the
surname, in Cosmedin, from kóguos, decoration or ornament; but this designation is
earlier than the year 780. Santa Maria, at the foot of the Aventine and the Palatine, at
the end of the street Bocca della Verità and at the bottom of a piazza, surrounded by
136 A&O/E.
ancient monuments, has been installed between the Corinthian arms of a temple of Ceres
and Proserpine rebuilt by Tiberius. We can still distinguish a portion of the Cella in
large blocks of travertine, as well as eight columns of the peristyle in white marble,
fluted and of the composite order. Seven of them are set in the walls of the church,
which itself contains two distinct kinds of construction. The small basilica, which is
primitive and probably of the date of Constantine, is drawn across the ancient temple:
it is narrow, deep, and divided from the lower aisle of more modern date by antique
columns with various capitals. The pavement is Alexandrine work of hard stone of
the richest and oldest sort; the pulpits, of the sixth century, were adorned in the
thirteenth by some rows of mosaic; at the bottom of the basilica is placed the
cathedra belonging to the first ages; it was here that Pope Gelasius II. and the anti-Pope
Benedict XII. were proclaimed: the master-altar is surmounted by a ciborium, supported
on four columns of granite. This church, on which the primitive times have left their
mark, is a hundred steps from the school where St. Augustine professed rhetoric, and
FOUNTAIN OF BIZZACCHERI, AND TEMPLE OF THE SUN OR VESTA.
the adjoining street perpetuates the recollection, for it is still called the Via della Greca,
though the Bishop of Hippo taught in Latin the lessons of Homer, whose own tongue he
had not studied. It is under the vast porch of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, where we find
a splendid tomb of the twelfth century, that there has been fixed against a wall the
colossal mask in veined marble, from four to five feet in diameter, so well known under the
name of the Bocca della Verità. It is a flat or slightly concave face, with a mouth opening
in a circle in the middle, as if to serve for the funnel of some tube. We possess a
similar mask but not quite so large in stone, and likewise belonging to an era of decay
but much worse made, at the Castle of Polignac near Puy. Only as in our France it is
indispensable to appear ingenious and new ; as besides we have neither the habit of
running after antique objects, nor the good sense of the Romans, who are very little
inclined to exaggerate the mysteries of history, the learned men of Velay have made of
their mask with its circular mouth an orifice for the proclamation of oracles; an ear for
listening with, after the manner of that of Syracuse; a drain for human sacrifices; and I

III.
º
VIEW ON THE TIBER IN FRONT OF THE CLOACA MAXIM.A.

S74. Al/A/º/A /V CO.S.)//E/D/AW. I 37
know not what besides. At Rome they consider the Bocca della Verità as the ornament
of a fountain pipe in the funnel of a drain. As for the rather sibylline title that the Mask
has given to the open space in front of the church, it is less ambitious than you might
suppose, the children of the neighbourhood amusing themselves by clambering on to the
great lunar face and burying their fists in its round mouth. The grandmothers have
fancied and repeated for centuries to these youngsters that if they put their hands into
the occa after telling a lie, they will never be able to draw them back again. The little
folk believe, and to escape the terrible test they make up their minds to honourable
confession.
Close by the side of the Temple of Fortune, some centuries of less venerable antiquity
SANTA MARIA IN COSMEDIN.
have introduced the elements of an enigma that has a very different complication. Built
with a collection of sculptured materials got from I know not whence, fragments covering
a period between the fourth century and the thirteenth, the Loggia, surmounted with a
curious erection which they call the Casa di Rienzo, would furnish the frame for a long
lecture in archaeology. It is the single and most strange instance of an elegant and tradi-
tional house of great antiquity in which they have utilised a medley of old fragments, while
at the same time struggling to make the ornament harmonize with the style of Roman
architecture. This little palace, besides the singularity of a pastiche executed in the last
years of the Byzantine era, presents a historical problem difficult to solve. The people
of the quarter call the building the house of Pilate, with a legend to support their name.
An inveterate tradition assigns it to Colà di Rienzi, who governed the commune of
T

I38 A’O.]//E.
Rome; finally, an inscription in Latin rhymes placed above the ancient door, now con-
demned, which opens on the Vicolo della Fontanella, the foulest and most infectious sink
that ever was, attests that Nicholas, son of Crescentius and Teodora, bequeathed this
possession to his son David. The inscription, which passes for one of the eleventh
century, did not strike us as earlier than the fourteenth. Now it is known that the
tribune Crescentius, the precursor of Rienzi, was slain by order of Otto III. in 998.
Otherwise, the house seems later by two hundred years than this pretended testator,
Nicholas, the son of Crescentius. Finally, what completely strips this stone document
of all authority is the name of Teodora attributed to the wife of the Crescentius aforesaid.
This Roman lady who, to avenge her husband, gained the love of the Emperor Otto,
whom she poisoned, was called Stephania. I am sorry to weaken the only account of
the building that the local annalists have admitted.
It remains to weigh another theory of livelier interest. Before fixing himself at the
Capitol and taking shelter in the Castle of St. Angelo, could the friend of Petrarch, Colà
HOUSE OF RIENZL AND TEMPLE OF FORTUNA VIRILIS.
di Rienzi when he was notary apostolic, have lived in this house 2 The thing does not
seem improbable. Towards the year 1340 Rienzi, his imagination inflamed with the old
Rome, with the orators of the queen of the universe whose equal he claimed to be, with
republican manners which he strove hard to restore with the view of rousing public spirit
and suppressing feudal brigandage, Colà di Rienzi, who in preaching his crusade recalled
to mind the Gracchi, the Fabricii, the Brutuses, the Scipios, this Roman of old time who
appealed on behalf of freedom to inscriptions, monuments, ruins, may well have made his
home at the bottom of the Velabrum in front of the camp of Porsenna, close to the
Fabrician bridge, at the foot of the Tarpeian rock, before the rotunda of the Sun, at the
side of the republican temple of Fortuna Virilis, and is a house that had been built out
of the ruins of Roman grandeur. It was then, perhaps, that to surround the house with
a twofold consecration, they spread abroad or revived the legendary notice which attri-
butes possession of it to the family of the tribune Crescentius, and chiselled in archaic
characters the inscription in verses of low rhymed Latinity, of a taste in harmony with

THE CASA D/ R/EWZO. I 39
the usage of the fourteenth century, to corroborate the illusion. The continuity of the
tradition which installs Colà di Rienzi here is a weighty indication; the evocation of
Crescentius and his kin under the same roof, in this bit of Roman bric-à-brac in the
midst of old Rome, adds a tolerably strong argument to probability. In the last place,
the description of Casa di Pilato, which remains popular as well as the other, is not unlike
one of the insults with which a tribune is wont to be stigmatized after his fall. However
it may be, this house is one of the highest interest, because it combines ornamentation
in such a way as to utilise entablatures, friezes, bas-reliefs, galleries, doorways, foliage,
of various sources and incongruous proportions—discordances out of which they have
drawn a very advantageous originality, for rich arabesques of the fourth century har-
monize without any excess of incompatibility with sculptures that recall, though with
greater heaviness, the manner of the Pisans. Only, what we shall probably never know
is by whom and for whom this entertaining patchwork was constructed. Under the
patronage of Rienzi or Rienzo, tradition has consecrated it not only to the republican
memories of the middle age, but to the democratic aspirations of all times; for whenever
a movement in a liberal sense breaks out, it is always before the house of Rienzi that the
crowds hasten to mass themselves.
THE MARKET OF THE PIAZZA NAVONA.
CHAPTER VII.
The Piazza Navona and its market.—St. Agnes and the I’ornici of the Agonal Circus.--From the Porta Pia to
St. Agnes extra Muros.-Souvenirs of the praetorian camp.–Source and consecration of the pa//ium.—
The baptistery of Constantia.-THE CATACOMBs.-Descent to those of St. Agnes; origin and primitive
purposes.—Visit to the catacombs of Callistus; how they were discovered, and their condition under the
Antonines.—Episodes, inscriptions, pictures, symbols of the first ages.—Assassination of Stephen I.-The
martyr Popes, and the administration of the subterranean church.-On the Mons Sacer.—The path by
which Nero fled, etc. -
ECONSTRUCTED by Borromini and Rainaldi on the great piazza Navona,
which is blocked with booths and stalls and animated with all the hum and
- S4 noise of a market, the church of St. Agnes with its cupola, accompanied
by two flashing belfries, its façade adorned with composite columns and joined to the
palace which it overwhelms, St. Agnes, a mass of broken lines, of sombre openings
and projections whence the sun flashes back his rays, bursts upon you between two
fountains, whose bubblings play accompaniments to the chatter of the market-women.
Around these market-women, encamped under enormous umbrellas of yellow chintz,
stirs the tide of customers, housekeepers and servants, Franciscans foraging, women
from the Trastevere or the Suburra, peasant women with their traditional head-dress.
As they march along with hand on hip and head laden with a basket of fruits, you
would take them for canephorae come out of Greek sculpture. Even the prolix



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S7. A GAWE'S. I4 I
ornamentation of one of these fountains is truly architectural chattering, it answers to
the tumultuous babbling of the water. Out of the wide basin rises an isle of rockwork,
on which the chisel has made ivy grow and lotus and burdock; there is a cavern from
which rush a horse and a winged lion, who go prancing into the basin. On this
artificial Naxos Innocent X. had planted an obelisk of red granite of the height of
eighty-five feet. At sight of such theatrical decorations, one fancies oneself in front
of a market at the opera, and one hears the ritornello of a popular chorus—say, the
fishermen of the Mercato Vecchio of Naples in the Muette de Portici.
St. Agnes perpetuates the material proofs of a legend, for in this country they
rebuild temples from age to age, which grow again with roots seventeen times secular
like the new shoots of a vigorous plant. Dig below St. Agnes, so well restored to
flowering life by Innocent X., and you will find in the ground the Formici of the ruins
of Alexander Severus, infamous places where a virgin martyr was exposed. However,
one makes no sort of attempt in the case of reconstruction to connect them by any
fancied imitation of style with the time of these distant memories; the more modern
rockery and the iconography of the day will illustrate this story of the third century,
without heed to archaeology or costume, in the academic taste of Antonio Raggi, of
Ferrata, and of Bernini. Of what avail these pretensions to probability, when you are
on the very ground of truth herself! Thus under the cupola inscribed in a Greek
cross, to enliven the lofty facings of Carrara and the columns of coffame/ſo, a red-veined
marble with grey streaks, you must see how they have rejoiced in it all—the Ciro Ferri,
the Corbinelli, the Baciccio, the Guidi, and other Maini! On the four altars bas-reliefs,
violently forced to such an effect as may replace paintings, simulate perspectives: you
see busts and arms rushing out of the frame and leaving portions buried in the marble;
all that shows a decline and an ingenuity above the common. Yet these people loved
the antique in their own way; look at the St. Sebastian, a pagan statue canonised by
Paolino Campi: I would defy the Greek artist who brought it into the world to recognise
it under its transformation. For understanding the power of an inferior art, the piazza
Navona and St. Agnes are not to be despised. After you have thoroughly examined
under the walls of the church St. Alexis and St. Emerentianus, St. Agnes, St. Eustace,
and St. Cecilia, suffering so gallantly the elegances of martyrdom, you descend by a
narrow stair into the underground passages which supported the steps of the Agonal
circus: they abutted on the Fornici that are marked by the line of the corridor. Two
chapels were erected there: one of the altars, it is said, rises where the saint's prison
was, while the other occupies the spot where she was exposed. So that some memory
of the chaste beauties of Agnes might remain, Algardo has represented her in bas-
relief at the moment when, being led to martyrdom in a state of complete nakedness,
she is miraculously withdrawn from sight by her hair, which all at once grows long and
abounding and enwraps her in its waves. To follow St. Agnes to her tomb, it is
necessary to ascend the Quirinal and leave Rome.
II.
You can scarcely ever forget the day on which for the first time you tread the Roman
campagna, especially if, directing your steps towards the Mons Sacer, you have gone
out by the Porta Pia which replaces the old Nomentane gate by which the Emperor
I42 A’OA)/E.
Nero, in full flight from his soldiers, who had at last revolted, made his escape from
Rome followed by a slave. There still remain in the walls of Honorius some signs of
their masked outlet, and in the projection of an embankment the remains of a camp
occupied by the praetorians, under which the fugitive Caesar passed so close to them that
he could hear them shout, “Long life to Galba.’ It was there that in later times these
troops sold the empire by auction: it was there, in the midst of this praetorian camp, that
Caracalla slew his brother Geta in the arms of their mother, Julia, who was covered with
blood and wounded in the hand in attempting to defend one son against the other.
Built by Pius IV., the Porta Pia was designed by Michelangelo.
To penetrate into the uncultivated regions of the great historic and pastoral desert,
you had not then to traverse that suburb of small houses and taverns which ends in the
masquerades of the Villa Torlonia, where its owner has constructed imitative ruins. To
set up counterfeit in the midst of the richest necropolis of antiquity—what clumsy
competition A little beyond on a low rising ground let us observe an osſerie where the
º *- ---------- sº º,.
− Azz//V2: … As ***…*.*.*.*
* WHILE THE CONTADINI DRINK.’
peasants from the north of the Abruzzi make their last halt, when they come down from
the counterforts of the Monte Corno to visit the great markets of Rome. The sluggish
train of lean jades wait at the door with entire philosophy while the contadini drink;
sorry brutes with ascetic profile, only developed in belly and shoes, which clatter under
them in proportion to the pace, with downcast head, and teaching too late to the defunct
palfrey of the four sons of Aymon how without eating one can persist in living. To
seize on their travels and sketch accurately in outline and expression this race of small
Sabine horses, on which the mountaineers post themselves in all manner of proud
attitudes, it needs the precise pencil of my young friend Henry Regnault. The country
begins to open glimpses of glorious landscape as soon as one reaches the church of
St. Agnes. This church is at the corner of a monastery, and its extremely sober walls
would not lead one to guess half its antiquity.
When at the prayer of his daughter, Constantine, in order to discover the body of
the saint, had the catacombs of the Via Nomentana explored, they took up from

7///, /34/27/ST/C/º P OF COMS/AAW//A. I43
around the tomb the earth of the galleries, and the basilica imprisoned the mausoleum.
One has then, in order to descend into this church, which comes after a series of caverns,
to count forty steps under a vault whose walls are adorned with fragments and ancient
inscriptions. The basilica has three aisles with two stories of colonnades. Its pillars of
granite, of violet marble, of porta Santa, taken from ancient temples; its seat of marble
of the fourth century; its mosaic of the year 626, representing between Damasus and
the first Honorius Agnes crowned, wearing a laticlave golden and jewelled, with white
borders and a violet tunic; all contributes to the religious impression of a monument
half underground. It would be deeper still if Pius IX. had not had this rich basilica
restored. On an altar to the right, you may forget to seek a Head of Christ attributed
to Michelangelo, and which does not even come
from his school. It is to St. Agnes that on the H
T
21st of January the abbot of the regular chapter
of St. Saviour comes after mass to bless two
lambs placed on the altar; a ceremony after
which they are restored to a dignitary of
St. John Lateran, who carries them for the papal
benediction, whence they are taken away to be
fed in some convent of nuns appointed by the
holy father. At Easter one of these lambs is
served on the pontifical table, and from their | -
wool is woven the /a//iu/z. The ſa//iu/z, which
NS
|
before the fourth century was an exclusive pri- |
vilege of the popes, recalls the obligation of
bearing on the neck like the Good Shepherd
the sick and strayed sheep. As this mission
proceeds from the apostle Peter, it is from his
tomb, where they have been placed on the eve of
the festival, that the pope takes the /a//ia for the
purpose of distributing them.
Near St. Agnes and in the domain of the | º s º º, |
community is a monument of older origin pre- |*|| sº |M
N |
served in greater entirety. To see it you must, *
by a path strewn with fragments of marble, make -
for a Christian cemetery that is open to the sky, ST. AGNES, sº THE CHOIR
and is perhaps the oldest that was ever esta-
blished. It is bounded by a thick wall of brick belonging to the sixth century, supported
on an embankment of more than a hundred feet. There rises a rotunda wholly Constan-
tinian; it was for his daughter and his sister that the son of St. Helen erected the
baptistery of Constantia, as Ammianus Marcellinus attests. The great porphyry sarco-
phagus of St. Constantia, placed in the Vatican by the order of Pius VI., has from the
fourth to the end of the eighteenth century furnished on the spot a no less formal proof.
When, in 1256 he erected this baptistery into a church, Alexander IV. had deposited under
the altar in the middle the body of St. Constantia and that of St. Emerentianus. They
are there still. A Christian church can hardly date from an earlier epoch than this, and
among the basilicas of the same date there is none in a more satisfactory state of
preservation. This baptistery, in which St. Sylvester christened the two Constantias,

I44 A’OA)/A2.
presents among all the edifices of the Roman decline the most ancient example of
coupled columns. They are of ancient origin and reach the number of four-and-twenty;
their shafts of granite support over varied capitals very curious protuberant friezes, above
which rises a cupola. The vaults of the Ambulatorium which forms the circumference
are decorated with mosaics on a white ground, belonging to the first half of the fourth
century, a specimen that would be unique if those of St. Pudentiana had not been
preserved equally, for the frieze of Santa Maria Maggiore can only belong to the end of
the same century. The precious mosaics of the baptistery have for their subjects flowing
designs formed by vine-shoots turned in various directions and laden with ripe bunches.
Pagan genii at large, and angels latest born of the Mother of the Loves, gather the grapes
from branch to branch; some interspaces are furnished with grotesque heads; some
coffer-work frames rosettes connected by interlacings which form crosses. Nothing can
be more interesting than this specimen of the decorative art of antiquity before its final
decline. As the work has been executed by an artist who lacked the too recent inspira-
ST. AGNES EXTRA MUROS, ON THE VIA NOMENTANA.
tion of Christian feeling, these charming mosaics are only connected by their intention
with the new faith, and accordingly the baptistery of St. Constantia long passed for a
temple of Bacchus. Such mistakes are no longer permissible, since so many sarcophagi
of the first centuries have shown us this subject of the vintage, of which the mystic
sense is definitely stated by the Fathers, as well as by the following passage of the Acts
of St. Eugenia; ‘Now is the time of the vintage, when the rich grapes shall be severed
to be pressed, after their separation from the slender vine-branches, into the heavenly
cups.' The form, style, and delicate design of these compositions has for set-off another
mosaic representing in an embrasure of a door the baptism of Christ; it belongs to the
ninth century and is wholly rude. It is much too late, yet it is too early.
Round the little convent of St. Agnes, over a space of two or three acres on a road-
side, you have the complete picture of the heroic ages of religion. The martyrs, the
subterranean worship in three stories of catacombs, the symbolical inscriptions, the
sacred paintings of the earliest centuries, all await you in the depths of the earth. Then

THE CATA COMB.S. I45
that worship which was thus spreading its roots pierces through the soil and flourishes
in the open sunlight; the basilica and the baptistery spread; the very dead, raised from
the depths of the crypts, come and take their sleep among the flowers of the field to the
sound of bells that ring forth victory.
III.
Below the ancient Rome, along the fifteen Consular roads which radiated from
the Capitol as centre, there existed in the third century, besides a score of underground
cemeteries consecrated to families, twenty-six great catacombs, which answer to the
number of the parishes of that time. It has been calculated that these labyrinths
must measure a hundred and fifty leagues of gallery, and must contain six millions
of the dead. The average width of the corridors is eighty centimétres; placed one
over another, so as sometimes to form five stories, they are never dug deeper than
five-and-twenty mêtres, a thickness beneath which the volcanic crust ends to make
way for humid clays. Nothing can be more interesting than this cradle of religion,
this elysium of the martyrs of imperial tyranny, ancestors whom all Christian com-
munions venerate. As one cannot visit so many caverns, many people are content
with taking a few steps in the public catacombs of St. Sebastian which are entirely
broken down, and they return in the persuasion that it is everywhere the same; hence
perhaps the prejudice that these cemeteries were established in old sand quarries,
arenaria. At St. Agnes these travellers would find, but above crypts, genuine arenaria
with more spacious vaults and wide passages practicable for carriages. In these
quarries are frequently cut narrow stairs or traps to descend mysteriously into real
catacombs, the approaches to which were generally concealed by the sand quarries
when they had ceased to be worked. -
The cemetery where St. Agnes had her tomb, which, as it has been exposed, now
serves as an altar for the church constructed about it, this dormitory, for such is the
literal and spiritualistic meaning of the word, is situated a distance of two miles from
Rome; you go down to it from the midst of a wild garden by some thirty steps. At
the bottom of the cellar steps you penetrate a series of narrow corridors one after
another, cut at right angles, intricate like a network of lanes, and whose complexities
could certainly never have permitted any kind of working. What could they have
extracted from these underground caverns 2 Their divisions are not made either of
stone for building or of pozzalana for the preparation of cement; on the other hand,
for hollowing places of burial the sand of the arenaria would have offered too little
resistance, while the rock of the quarries would have been too hard to cut. The
Christians must then have chosen in the intermediate section of the volcanic stratum
that porous marl which was of a sufficient consistency, while it was tolerably easy
to chip away; a light substance of which the fracture is soft, which does not split,
and where one could work excavations without encumbering the passages with bulky
heavy blocks, which would be difficult to get out.
Such is the geological constitution of the catacombs. The useless matter of which
they are formed, was heaped up in the passages out of the way, or brought from the
bottom of these sacred burrowings under some look-out hole, and from these the
U
I46 A’OA)/A2.
rubbish was raised by means of rope and basket, and mixed either with the sand of
the quarries of the upper range or with the uncultivated ground of the surface. At
any rate it is assured that the catacombs, so misunderstood at a time when Raoul
Rochette affirmed that to know them it is not necessary to have seen them, could
only have been established to serve as cemeteries, and to be expressly set apart for
that purpose. Their use, for that matter, long preceded the Christian era; Pliny
|
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SUBTERRANEAN GALLERIES AND LOCULI OF THE CATACOMB OF ST. AGNES.
informs us that the practice of incineration was not very ancient, and that many great
families had preserved the custom of burying their dead. Sallust had under his
gardens catacombs provided with locuſi, the Dictator Sulla was the first of the
Cornelian family whose body was burned.
The walls of these sepulchral galleries became in some sort chests, where they
ranged the dead in superimposed rows hollowed in the tufa close to one another,
so that the open burying-places among which you walk seem like cupboards from

TA/E CA 7.1 COA)/AP,S. I47
which the drawers have been taken. The cavity worked in the wall to receive the
corpse was vertically closed, either with large bricks or with thin pieces of marble.
As we see with what economy they utilised space, leaving no more than the necessary
room between the compartments, and taking advantage of the very smallest nooks
for the burial-places of children, of which the number is prodigious, we are better
instructed here than in any book as to the rapid propagation of the faith during the
SUBTERRANEAN ALTAR, TOMBS, AND CHAPEL IN THE CEMETERY OF ST. AGNEs.
first centuries. The complexity of the place explains how, under the territory of
the ancient city alone, they could have made five hundred and eighty kilometres of
winding ways. Pagan Rome was simply mined by the catacombs.
If I add that before the year 316 these cities of the dead, where the holy mysteries
were celebrated, and where catechumens were instructed, sometimes hid as many
of the living as they concealed of the dead, we can understand how at the moment
when Christianity was officially proclaimed, it had rallied all the lower and middle

U 2
148 ROM/E.
class, only leaving to pagan worship as the defender of ancient institutions the
support of the old Roman aristocracy, which was the enemy of a dogma that while
it proclaimed equality and the fraternal possession of earthly goods in common,
annihilated at once both large properties and the institution of slavery, the single
means of working such extensive appanages. Thus Tacitus, the mouthpiece of the
most oppressive tyranny that ever was, describes the Christians as ‘infamous and
pestilent men, execrated for their crimes.” In yielding to the necessity of attracting
the Nazarenes to his party and placing the cross upon his standard, Constantine made
sure of the empire; in hoc signo vicit. And we may imagine how imperious this necessity
must have been, when we recall that more than a century before under Septimius
Severus, Tertullian affirmed that if the Christians were forced to emigrate, the Roman
empire would become a desert. - -
Some visitors are so vividly impressed by the aspect of the catacombs, and so
suffocated by the atmosphere of their narrow, low, and never-ending passages, where
the air is made thick by the smoke of torches, that they beg to be allowed to make
their way back. In truth, if the torches were to go out, one would be condemned to
await death, in this tomb of some millions of souls; if the old and bowed guide who
went before us had by mischance been struck by apoplexy, probably not one of us would
ever again have seen the light. The caverns of St. Agnes not being public, we had come
alone to our appointment; and even supposing that a week after another guide should
have brought a company, the party would most likely have directed its steps towards
some different quarter. These are reflections to which people do not stoop until after
the event. The tombs of martyrs and heroes often nameless draw one's attention
specially; it is easy to make them out, for when the gravemakers closed them, they
fastened in the cement by the side of the head an ampulla of glass in which the blood
of the confessor had been collected. You still see on nearly every hand the mark and
often the fragments of these vessels. When the martyrs had been drowned, burnt, or
put to death without spilling of blood, there in sealing up the burial-place the workman
with the point of his trowel drew in the fresh mortar a rude sketch of a palm-tree, and
a certain number of these are to be seen. Occasionally we recognise the calcined
bones of a martyr burnt alive, and it sometimes happens that the bones are crystallised
to such a degree as to shine. Inscriptions give the name of the dead; those in Greek
are usually the oldest, Greek having been the official tongue of the primitive Church.
Many of the tombs are closed fast and untouched.
During the persecutions of which the rigour was not unbroken, the mysteries of
worship took place in narrow oratories still subsisting in their entirety, as well as in
baptisteries of which the underground spring is still flowing. The sacred celebration
took place on the tomb of some illustrious martyr; hence the origin, the form, and
even the name of our altars, which we still consecrate by the introduction of relics.
You find also the seat (cathedra) of the bishops cut in the tufa with tiers of benches
around it; there sat several successors of St. Peter in the first three centuries.
In certain chapels two chairs, placed as far as possible apart from one another and
arranged diagonally, represent confessionals. Ordinarily these churches are divided
into two parts, one for men and the other for women, the latter recognisable by its
double seats; during the giving of instruction to female catechumens, a second assistant
deacon was appointed to supervise. In the tympana of the arches under the vault of the
tomb-altar, there are visible, not sculptures, for the substance did not lend itself to
THE CATA COM/B.S. I49
this and sculptures would have been poorly appreciated by lamplight, but paintings, the
first that Christianity produced, curious documents of the primitive religion. Sometimes
in walking along this sub-Roman world, so complete and so populous, we see blue
hues moving on the russet walls, and the opening into the vaults of one of the light-
holes that are lost in the brushwood above, and which used to bring a little air into these
unknown caves so as to permit the Christian world to breathe.
If you wish to penetrate further in the study of the catacombs and its symbols, it
is necessary to return to Rome, cross the whole of the city, reach the gate of St.
Sebastian adjoining the Porta Capena, which was once the beginning of the Appian
Way, and get introduced to the subterranean cemetery of St. Callistus, which we shall
appreciate better after having seen that of St. Agnes. To finish what we have still to
say, and not to scatter such a subject, let us undertake this journey, sacrificing unity
of place to unity of story, dating our digression from the grounds of St. Agnes which we
have not yet done exploring, and whither we shall return to continue as far as the
Mons Sacer our walk on the Via Nomentana.
IV.
Forgotten for centuries, confounded even no more than twenty years back either
with the cemetery of St. Sebastian or with that of Domitilla, the catacombs of
Callistus were definitely discovered in 1852, by the most eminent of Roman archaeologists,
Signor Rossi. The discovery in a vineyard on the right of the Appian Way of an
imperfect inscription of immense significance, revealed the proximity of some approach ;
it contained the last six letters of the name of St. Cornelius, who was known to
have been buried near St. Cyprian in the cemetery of Callistus, along with several of
the pontiffs. It were here then that they ought to dig, and it was by this vineyard that they
entered the crypt where, close to the tomb of St. Caecilia that was found two years later,
reposed twelve martyr popes, among whom they have already recognised by their
inscriptions the pontiffs Cornelius, Anterus, Fabian, Lucius, and Eutychian. St.
Callistus is one of the caves which help us best to understand what after the reign of
Constantine was the fate of the catacombs, the brilliant period of which answers to the
years included between the reign of Theodosius and the invasion of the barbarians.
Pope Damasus and his successors decorate them and organize stations in them; light-
holes are made above the monuments made illustrious by saints; they wall up
corridors that had no interest and which only added to the complications of the
labyrinth; they allow new loculi to be hollowed out for the burial of pious families
under the protection of the blessed patrons of the ages of trial. It was then that the
faithful of the fourth century described this place as the Jerusalem of the martyrs of
the Lord. Believers came thither from all the extremities of the world; Prudentius
gives an account of these pilgrimages, which have left some curious graffiti.
This catacomb was constructed long before the epoch at which Pope Callistus I.,
sprung, they say, from the Domitian family, but who had directed a bank in the Forum,
bequeathed his name to a cemetery lying under his vines; some loculi are closed with
bricks, the stamping on which dates from Marcus Aurelius; everything shows that this
cemetery of pagan origin was created by the Metelli on their vast territories, which
I5O A&OME.
extended as far as the mole of Caecilia Metella. The Caecilii having become Christians,
they provided burial in their galleries for some pontiffs near an illustrious martyr of
their family, St. Caecilia, who in her interrogatory declared that she was noble and of
senatorial stock. M. Rossi, in his endeavours to clear up these obscure points, has
shown that Septimius Severus ceded to the Christians the property of the old cemetery
of the Caecilii, which must consequently be the earliest in date of the possessions of the
Church. This fact explains why a series of popes, beginning with Zephyrinus, were buried
there rather than at the Vatican. Inscriptions inform us that at the beginning of the
reign of Alexander Severus, St. Callistus used his credit with the prince to have these
galleries enlarged; it was soon necessary to seek a shelter here, for the persecutions
recommenced and the distinction of a patrician origin could not save Callistus from
martyrdom.
The catacombs were frequently opened, and the roomy stairs to be found in them
may well have been earlier than Constantine. In fact the Christians who in those ages
of wisdom and humility never left anything undone to live in peace with the civil
authorities, obtained by their submission long truces, or at any rate peace for their dead.
The inscriptions alone will reveal something of those annals which were lost at the time
when the late and violent persecution of Diocletian destroyed the archives of the
church. It was then that to preserve the tombs of the martyrs, the believers filled with
earth several galleries, which are now being cleared out, and where every day they
find the funeral inscriptions of a number of Saints inscribed in the martyrologists, and
whose existence had been freely denied by Tillemont.
As at St. Agnes, it is from the midst of an uncultivated garden that by the corner
of a ruined country box you descend into that legendary spot where the most modern
restorations date from between 366 and 420. Halfway down the descent, along which
the steps and the face of the wall are stocked with vegetation, as soon as you have
lost sight of the city and its hills, the torches are kindled and each visitor, flambeau
in hand, penetrates into this labyrinth of sanctuary very much as the subterranean
processions used to go. Armed with torches, the guides who precede you plunge
deeper and deeper into the sombre corridors, where the black smoke of the resin
seems to throw them into stifling and funereal perspectives. For very nervous persons
the sensation of fright is not less invincible here than it is at St. Agnes, and we
frequently see women and old men so overwhelmed that they stop and pray to be taken
back to the light of the sun. You are among not less than three stories of sepulchre one
over another; skeletons are under your feet as over your head; they elbow you right
and left; men by hundreds of thousands have prayed and sung in these galleries, and
now they sleep in them the sleep of death. -
It is near the burial-places of St. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, and St. Eusebius,
who died in 31 I, that one of the inscriptions of Damasus in six verses engraved
upon a tablet of marble, informs us that the bodies of St. Peter and St. Paul were
long concealed in these catacombs. Christians from the East had furtively carried
them away from the graves of the Vatican, and placed them in the underground refuge
with a view to carrying them back to their country; but the Roman clergy perceived
the robbery and hindered their design. Since then, under Heliogabalus who wished
to enlarge the circus of Nero, they kept the Apostles at St. Callistus. “They were the
children of the East who sent them to us,’ writes Damasus, “but Rome was bound to
defend Roman citizens as her own.”
7A/E CA 7.4 COA)/A; S. I5 I
In the second and third centuries the little underground basilica of St. Callistus
and the chambers which surround it were the metropolis of the Holy See, and the
centre of the pontifical administration. They still show there the little cell which
served as working-room for these spiritual masters of the Christian world, reduced to
this curious appanage unknown to the sun. They had as guardians, as soldiers, and
as legates, mendicants posted from distance to distance who kept watch along the
Appian Way. When St. Caecilia wanted to send her husband Valerianus to be baptized
to Pope St. Urban, who was concealed in this cemetery; “Go,” she said, “as far as the
third mile on the Appian Way; there you will find some poor people who beg alms of
the passers-by. I have always helped them, and they possess the secret; thou wilt
- VALERIANUS AND CAECILIA, MOSAIC of THE NINTH CENTURY, AT ST. CAECILIA.
salute them, saying to them, “Caecilia has sent me to you that you may lead me to the
holy old man, Urban, because she has charged me with a secret mission for him.” "
The site of the tomb of St. Caecilia is still marked at St. Callistus, as well as the
spot where St. Lucina reposed. Around the loculus of St. Caecilia, tombs and a
multitude of inscriptions placed on the walls by enthusiastic pilgrims announce that
famous personage, before in a crypt adjoining the papal room one has recognised the
likeness of the saint and that of Urban who buried her. In a cellar I observed a
Christian sarcophagus, made in imitation of pagan barrels and of very rude art; it
is only of the fourth century, and Christianity had not then produced sculptors. In
other sarcophagi and under glasses were found two bodies whole, one still being dressed
in its shroud. Further off under a common inscription are united with two other

I 52 A&O//E.
confessors, St. Dionysius and St. Zoe, St. Heliodora and St. Procopius. Birds and
flowers, as well as a peacock, emblems of the joys of paradise and immortal life, are
painted in the Arcosolium above the tomb. As at St. Agnes, it happens that pufeo/i
plunging from story to story allow us to discern from the very deepest crypt, as if
one were at the bottom of a well, a circle of blue sky framed in transparent foliage
with the stars shining in it and forming in the darkness an illusive appearance of night.
Sometimes, too, a circumstance of which certain critics have made use, you stumble
against the remains of pagan Sculpture and inscriptions, but always near these lucernaria
through which such fragments rolled with masses of sand and ruin. The two hostile
creeds really co-existed the one upon the other. Under Constantine the strata tended
to intermingle, and it was then that at certain points they raised for the Agapai above
the catacombs certain square chapels, several of which, still standing, are reduced to
their four bare walls. It was under one of these edifices, transformed into a cellar, that
M. Rossi found the steps for the descent into the catacombs of Callistus. At what
epoch did they cease to frequent, and at last even to know the situation of these under-
ground abodes 2 I am scarcely less ignorant of it than the authors by whom I might
have allowed myself to be edified on the point. The signs of the perpetuity of the
pilgrimages after the ninth century are clear to me from the examination of a little
Byzantine Madonna that I saw above a tomb. It is known that in the twelfth century
the pilgrims of Einsiedeln visited them, and I lately acquired the proof of this by going
to establish in the celebrated convent of the canton of Schweitz the real age of the
Regionarium; but, what is more surprising, in the fifteenth century an archbishop of
Bourges placed in the cemetery of St. Callistus two inscriptions, which I recognised.
This subterranean Vatican of the primitive church abounds in interesting epitaphs; I
contented myself with translating as we passed, by the flickering light of the torches,
and hastily; for you must follow the guide who holds the thread of your days.
THE FIFTH OF THE KALENDS OF NOVEMBER.
HERE WAS LAID TO SLEEP
GORGONIUS, WHOM ALL LOVED AND WHO HATED NONE.
This inscription, like many others, is in Greek; the following are in Latin, but
without any date, which is a sign of great antiquity:-
TOO SOON HAST THOU FALLEN
CONSTANTIA | ADMIRABLE FOR BEAUTY
AND FOR HER CHARMS, SHE LIVED
xvi.II YEARs, VI MONTHS, xvi DAYs.
CONSTANTIA, IN PEACE.
There are some which retrace the memories of the persecutions; such is that of one
Marius, a young officer under Adrian, “who lived long enough, ſor he spent his life and
his blood ſor Christ.’ His friends laid him there with much wailing and many fears.
This one, which comes from St. Agnes, and which is composed in Latin with Greek
letters, has a very different significance:—
AAPISODES AAWD INSCRIPTIONS. I 53
HERE GORDIANUS
MESSENGER FROM GAUL, SLAIN FOR THE FAITH,
WITH ALL HIS FAMILY.
THEY REST IN PEACE.
THEOPHILA, THEIR SERVANT, HAD THIS DONE.
The poor envoy from Gaul, put to death on foreign soil with all his family; the
servant, left alone and far from her land, raising a monument to her master and adorning
it with a palm—here is a touching episode in the inner life of our forefathers. The
workmen of the catacombs, or grave-makers, formed not a corporation but a minor order
of the clergy. An inscription has been found at St. Callistus with these words:—
DIOGENES THE GRAVEDIGGER, IN PEACE
LAID HERE
THE EIGHTH BEFORE THE KAL. OF OCTOBER.
This is placed above the delineation of
the deceased. His tunic comes down to his
knees, and he is shod with sandals. On his a
left shoulder is a piece of fur or stuff; on his
right shoulder as well as above the knees
are traced small crosses; in one hand he
holds a mattock, and in the other a lamp
hung by a small chain; around him are the
tools of his business. The characteristic of
most of the inscriptions is tender and con-
solatory thought; affection sighs its regrets,
and faith breathes in hope. There is
nothing pompous, nothing to recall the
dignities of this world; much cheerfulness, -
much simplicity, much sweetness. J. Pero r. lº.º.º.
`--~
º ...sts fessor in pace DEP0sº `-->
A ovº \{A L C N tº A UJ
-: S º º -sº
| |
- TO ADEODATA, MERITORIOUS VIRGIN, -
WHO RESTS HERE IN PEACE, HER CHRIST HAVING WILLED IT SO.
The virtues praised among the deceased are always amiable virtues; /riend of the
poor, tender and blameless soul, lamb of the Zord. A widower recalls fifteen years of union
sine lesione animi; he was father of seven children, but his wife has ſour of them with her
with the Zord. -
MAY THY SOUL BE REFRESHED
IN SUPREME BLISS,
O KALEMIRA
Certain names show how recent the conversions were. Two sons address this
prayer over the tomb of their mother: -
LORD, MAY THE soul of our MoTHER, VENUS,
NOT BE LEFT IN DARKNESS.




X.
I 54 A&OME.
People frequently commend themselves to the prayers of the dead, and place their
dear ones departed under the protection of some saint who happens to be their
neighbour: -
LADY BASILIA,
I COMMEND TO THEE THE INNOCENCE OF MY VERY DEAR SON GEMELLUS.
FAREWELL, SWEETEST CHILD ;
WHEN THOU SHALT IN BLISS ENTER THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST,
FORGET NOT THY MOTHER, AND FROM SON BECOME GUARDIAN.
A husband has added with his hand to the inscription of his wife; Pray ſor thy
/husband, CELSIANUs. Some widows are described as vidua, ZXei, matrons who had conse-
crated their widowhood to the Lord. On the pavement of one of the chapels we read
the words:
PAULUS EXORCISTA DEPOSITUS MARTYRIES.
On this subject let us remark that the funeral inscriptions suffice to reconstruct all
the degrees of the clerical hierarchy, bishops, priests, deacons, sub-deacons, acolytes,
exorcisers, readers, grave-makers, &c. Calvin was far from supposing it when he cried,
‘What is the monument of Christian antiquity that ever spoke of your exorcists l’
We come also among the adepts upon notable distinctions; catechumens, neophytes,
faithful, newly illuminated, &c. Some very fine inscriptions from the historical point of
view are those of Pope St. Damasus, who disclosed to us the names of many pontiffs of
the second century buried in the little underground basilica. He had likewise recognised
the situation of the sarcophagus in which Pope Urban I. with his own hands laid the
remains of St. Cecilia, whom Pascal II. found in perfect preservation in the ninth
century when he had her transferred. She was still intact in the sixteenth century, when
from her body Stephen Maderno executed a figure of her, of which the reader finds a
drawing at the head of our sixth chapter. The largest of the inscriptions of Damasus
is due to M. Rossi, who having collected a hundred and fifty broken bits, succeeded in
piecing them together. It retraces the memories of a heresy which made blood flow,
and the marble on which the story is graven had served already, for on the verso of the
page of Luna we may read an inscription in honour of the Caesars. In a sort of gallery
close to the upper part of the catacomb, another inscription encrusted on the wall and
recovered by Baronius, who had borrowed it from the “Annals of the Martyrs,’ retraces
one of the moving scenes of which our cemetery of Callistus was the theatre: “While
St. Stephen (pope under Valerian) was celebrating there the sacrifice of the mass,
soldiers came up before the altar, where the fearless priest, continuing the mysteries, had
his head struck off.’ You may to this day touch the spot where the episcopal seat of
Stephen I. stood, and tread the spongy turf which drank up his blood before the altar
where he officiated sixteen hundred and fourteen years ago.
It seemed to me that at St. Callistus the paintings were more numerous as well as
more important than at St. Agnes. You come upon the Anchor, which symbolizes hope
and figures the cross; the Dove flying away with the olive-branch in his mouth, emblem
of the Christian soul that quits this world in peace; the Ship at the foot of a beacon; the
Fish, IXeyx, whose Greek name recalls that of Christ and furnishes the initials of the
SPT.]//?O/.S. I55
formula, Ingots Xplotós Geoſ Yios Xortſp; Bread, symbol of the Eucharist; the Rabbit
gnawing, symbol of the destruction of the body. The Tortoise and the Dormouse
signify that the sleep of death will be followed by an awakening; the Children in the
Furnace remind the confessor that he must brave torment; Daniel given to the Lions is
the patron of martyrs; Jonas is the emblem of regeneration by faith. In a group these
signs become the elements of a hieroglyphic tongue, of which only the initiated can
penetrate the meaning. Thus the Anchor and Fish, hope in Christ; a Fish carrying
Bread is Jesus giving himself in the Eucharist; a Tree covered with Birds pecking its
fruit, is the phalanx of the chosen on the tree of life in the heavenly garden. The
parables and the Bible supply a number of transparent allegories, such as the Sower, the
Fisherman making a draught of Souls, the Good Shepherd bringing back the lost sheep,
the Reaper, the Vine-dresser, the Raising of Lazarus, and so forth. Noah in the Ark
meant the Christian saved and received into alliance; Moses striking the Rock sym-
bolizes baptism, as well as the doctrine which Christ has made to flow out on to the
world, to bring back life to it. Above Moses we sometimes read the name of St. Peter,
the Moses of the new law. In a vault distributed into compartments, a number of these
subjects make a frame to Orpheus, who draws a crowd of animals and even turtles to
- -
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THE CHILDREN IN THE FURN.A.C.E. PRAYER. JONAH AND THE WHALE.
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himself. This curious vault, which Bosio first sketched, goes back, according to
D'Agincourt, to the end of the first century.
In another painting, Jesus dispatches his disciples to preach to the nations, who are
represented by sheep. Observe how they will receive the divine word. One of them
feels itself drawn towards the apostle; another moves away; this listens attentively, but
with misgiving; the last, which would fain conciliate both God and the world, while
listening lowers its head to browse at the same time. In the first centuries we see Christ
under the form of the Good Shepherd and sometimes seated in the midst of the Twelve;
but this face, so young, Apollo-like, beardless, and smiling, is destitute of all iconographic
character, while Peter and Paul belong to a confirmed type and spring from a traditional
portrait. The representation of the Virgin with her Son is frequent. The Christ is
sometimes symbolized in Orpheus. Still, if we except Psyche (the soul elevated to
mystic love), the images drawn from paganism are rare. Besides the ever-green ivy
which accompanies many epitaphs, we notice the pine-apple, a fruit which passed for
incorruptible by a tradition that ascends to the ages of paganism.
The cemetery of Callistus makes us acquainted with the works of embellishment
executed in the catacombs down to the pontificate of Pascal I. Starting from





















X 2
156 A&O///.
St. Damasus, described as the Virgin Doctor of the virgin church by St. Jerome, who
was his secretary, and who remembered wandering in the catacombs in his childhood.
This pope, who prevented the raising in the senate of a pagan altar of Victory, and who
obtained from Valentinian in 370 a decree forbidding members of the clergy from
receiving donations or testamentary bequests—Damasus, who regretted the purity of the
old days of trial, wished to be buried, not in the cemeteries, even of Caecilia and of
Callistus, for which his humility disinclined him, but in a small outside chapel near one
of the light-holes. The four walls of this chapel still stand.
\ | sº
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- - -
PAINTINGS OF THE FIRST CENTURY ON A CHAPEL WAULT (CATACOMBs OF CALLISTUs).
The trace of ancient events, especially the pilgrimages of the Byzantine era, makes
these catacombs singularly alive: the walls are laden with memories, and lost confidences,
and the ideas once traced by the pilgrims, such as the butterflies which are emblems of
souls, as soon as ever the flame of the torch draws near, once more resume their old life
and reality. You may revive conversations that have been suspended ever since the
reign of Charles the Great, and by these unpublished reminiscences ascend again to the
era of the Caesars. To experience here the impression of which great historic mementoes
bring the charm to us, it is enough to know what was accomplished by these conclaves

THE MAA’TFTR AOPES. I57
of martyrs on every side of us, generations of indefatigable and sovereign victims,
oppressed as slaves, dictating to the world laws which it follows still, and from the
episcopal seat hidden in these caverns following one another for three centuries, to
defend the same dogmas at the price of their lives, and to affirm it by their death.
There is nothing stranger than what we might call the Decretals of the Catacombs.
St. Linus and St. Anacletus, the first legislators, having been martyred, Clement, ordained
priest like them by St. Peter, destined like them also to be a martyr, restores order in the
growing church of Corinth, and establishes bishoprics in Gaul, of which his missionaries
first began the conquest. Disposing of Rome four centuries beforehand, Evaristus his
successor divides the quarters into parishes as they will be one day, and sets up the
ecclesiastical department of Rome: he was slain under Adrian. The epistles of St. Sixtus,
which are still admired, spread the light even to the extremities of Asia, while the pontiff
whom they obey dwells in the darkness, and will only leave it to go before his murderers.
After the martyr Telesphorus, who established the nocturnal Christmas mass, St. Hyginus,
who strove for unity against the first heresiarchs, fixes rank and precedence in his eccle-
siastical court, which was to accompany him in regular order to his dungeon and before
his judges. Harassed on every side, the first Pius will adjourn the proscriptions of
Marcus Aurelius; he will cause unity to prevail against the neo-platonism of Valentinus,
who was for fusing St. John with Hesiod; and against the utopias of Marcion, who was
for mingling with evangelical ideas the theogonies of Persia and India. Anicetus, whom
his discussions with St. Polycarp on the date of Easter made famous: St. Soter, a
theologian who fought against the Montanists, are all honoured in the martyrologist :
St. Eleutherius, put to death under Lucius Commodus, had from the depth of his catacomb
brought under the faith of Christ one of the kings of Britain. St. Victor, who assembled
a general council under the oppression of Caracalla, and who condemned Theodore of
Byzantium for opposing the divinity of Christ, sealed his affirmation with his blood.
Zephyrinus, who passed through five persecutions and was only slain in the sixth under
Heliogabalus, had to sustain at once the Christians, menaced and wavering; the disci-
pline of the clergy, which was attacked by innovators; and lastly, dogma against the
opinions of Theodotus the leather-dresser, as well as against Praxeas, who did not admit
the Trinity. St. Callistus who was the first, above the pontifical catacomb which had
grown into a city of 174,000 Souls, to dare to build churches in the face of heaven, was
massacred in the streets. One of the Fabians had governed for fourteen years and
organized Christianity. Decius slays the descendant of three dictators; St. Cornelius,
who withstood Gallus, and brought to nought Novatian, the first of the anti-popes,
perished in a dungeon; Stephen, martyred under Valerian, assembled three councils, and
one on the shores of Africa; Sixtus II. marched to his doom at the head of his clergy,
who suffered death with him; Dionysius had enough political influence and enough
money to treat, after the capture of Caesarea, for the ransom of the captives of Cappa-
docia, a circumstance that did not protect the negotiator from being put to death under
Claudius II. Still under these first popes, gathered from all the corners of the world to
defend the faith, authority rooted itself and shot its rays afar; even in the centre of
oppression that hierarchy established itself, which was to subordinate all the other
patriarchates to the tomb of St. Peter. -
All nations and all classes had been represented on the curule chair of the apostle of
Bethsaida. The consular stock of the Helvidii, the Calpurnii, the Fabii, had furnished
pontiffs; and so had the imperial houses. Athens had sent Anacletus, Hyginus,
I58 A&O//E.
Sixtus II. ; Telesphorus was Greek; Anicetus, Syrian ; Evaristus from Bethlehem, Eleu-
therius from Nicopolis, Caius from Dalmatia, Eusebius from Calabria, Soter from Cam-
pania, Victor from the regions of Africa. They all made their way to Rome, the home of the
persecutions; apostles of freedom of conscience, they showed that men spread their beliefs
by dying for them ; and it was by them that Christianity gave for the first time to the
wonder-stricken world the spectacle of force conquered and made powerless. From every
land they brought a supreme protest before the metropolitan see, already so revered that
the humility of the confessors now and again constrained the clerks to impose on some
saint the twofold glory of spiritual sovereignty and of martyrdom. The last to cement
the Christian edifice with his blood was Caius, a kinsman of Diocletian. From the depth
of an unknown retreat he governed in the shadow the radiant empire of souls. Diocletian
had Caius slaughtered, the twenty-eighth successor of St. Peter, the twenty-fourth of the
pontiffs slain in tortures. It was necessary that they should thus for a space of three cen-
turies demonstrate their faith in human fraternity and their assurance of a better life, that
so the world might be enlightened, and the empire might fall to pieces under their efforts.
The work of these twenty-eight popes is incomprehensible, if it was not providential ;
without oppressing any, always persecuted, always perishing, they had so seated their
kingdom, and so undermined the ground, that from the moment when Constantine threw
himself into their arms, the City of the Caesars belonged to the Church. Instantly, in
fact, overthrowing with equal authority the Donatists, the Arians, and the altars of the
high places, St. Sylvester gives for supreme law to the spiritual universe a programme
formulated in another senate that he convokes, that he peoples with all the bishops of the
world, and that he himself presides over. Everybody has already named the great
council and the symbol of Nicaea. The prolonged miracle of the regeneration obtained
by these means and at this price was prepared in the catacombs, and all that issued
thence still endures. By dint of fighting unarmed, these legendary popes purchased with
their blood the only dynasty that has succeeded in traversing eighteen centuries of revo-
lution. The emotion or the disdain stirred by such a work achieved in such a place, must
depend upon the impulse given to our first studies. If for some the catacombs remain
dumb, we must recall that our theological instruction is weak; it is there neither an affair
of opinion, nor a question of philosophy.
V.
Without making them the object of special labour, we can hardly speak of all the
catacombs of Rome; still it is proper to mention, besides the Jewish cemeteries, of
which the one recently discovered is earlier than St. Peter, that of Priscilla, to which its
name was given by the wife of the senator Pudens or Pudentius, who is supposed to
have lodged in his house the prince of the apostles. These hypogea of Priscilla, already
known in the time of Baronius, were among the most curious of all for their paintings,
belonging to the primitive ages; but they have torn the most interesting pages from
them to enrich the museum of the Lateran, where we shall find them.
Let us retrace our steps towards St. Agnes, to continue the road of Nomentum, as
far as the pasture lands, where from a famous point you embrace the whole region. It
is only above this basilica, and even above the Teverone, that the inhabited suburb
OW THE MOWS SACER. I 59
comes to an end and the poetry of the fields begins. Soon we roam among the windings
of the stream, which in our days is no longer called Anio after leaving the mountains;
you cross it by a bridge thrown over it by Belisarius, and topped by Nicholas V. with a
pretty little castle with dove-tail battlements. A sort of mural basket over this rural
stream, the Nomentane bridge contributes with a massive tomb, in which the shepherds
have hollowed out a hut for themselves, to give colour to a landscape of tranquil simplicity.
Then you leave the road to climb, through the grass, a slope which is that Mons Sacer
of such great renown, whither the Roman plebs withdrew, still oppressed and starved by
the patriciate two hundred and sixty years after the foundation of the city, so swift-footed
is tyranny in aristocratic republics. Every one is familiar with the story and the
apologue of Menenius Agrippa, and the creation of the tribunes, and the second
secession of the people fifty years after the first, when the death of Virginia had raised
them in revolt against the despotism of the decemvirs. If from this special mole-heap
you had not on every side an admirable point of view, you might believe yourself on a
plain, the site being only a little scarped towards the east, where you break down upon the
sinuosities of the Teverone. The enormous space which divides the Sabine Hills and the
chain of the Monte Cavo from the edge of the sea has scattered over it a few chaplets of
hills, and has been encumbered by the hardened streams of the lava launched at various
times over a number of leagues by the volcanic craters of the mountains. If one were
to spread, one over the other, in the middle of an arena, sheets of molten lead which
should spread themselves out before becoming solid, and should jut out in capes more or
less depressed, one would give, on a microscopic scale, a plan in relief of the campagna of
Rome, which is more vast than one can describe, more supremely lovely than one can
imagine, and of a colour that escapes the devices of painting.
Nothing is so mysterious as these uncultivated and bare Thebaids, where the mind,
little by little, takes on the imprint of the poetic horror which is born of the sight of
places abandoned by men. The air is penetrating and keen, and every outline stands
out in it as on the tops of mountains where the air is rarefied; the torrents of sunlight
which stamp the remote backgrounds draw forth in relief, or leave in blue shadow, some
rock or ruin which makes a rent here or there in the green carpet. In the distance a
song, a curl of ascending smoke, reveal shepherds and scattered flocks. We receive an
indescribable impression of virgin earth on this burial-ground of a civilization; it seems
as if one had before one’s feet the hanging peaks of lofty mountains torn from their
tops and extended horizontally. All over this Pyrenean pasture-land thus brought low,
entries of places underground look like caverns and suggest dreams of a subterranean
world. Each hillock is a mask of Roman size. Rows of tombs following the depressions
of the soil make landmarks along the roads that led to the universal capital: immense
lines of aqueducts, vertebrated skeletons, prolong over the prairies the shadows of their
arches—the sombre filling of these austere landscapes that the light only intoxicates
without making cheerful. One might pass these days of emotion while imagining that
one was thinikng of nothing, to such an extent does one breathe in the soul of the
ancient world. Like the Great Desert, the Roman campagna is eternally unknown; no
one crosses it without searching for something, and each year is witness of some
discovery. What a splendid basin and inexhaustible treasure is that vast region which,
from Rome to the snow-clad Sabine Hills, is unfolded between the Soracte which Horace
sang and the foot of the mountains of which the foot was once marked by a temple of
Jupiter, and which bore Alba Longa on their slope
I6O A’OME.
The country is only a mausoleum. It is almost with wonder that you see living on
these slumbering fields oxen with enormous horns, and buffaloes whose cry sounds like a
trumpet, and farm tracks, and peasant women riding towards the mountains of cobalt
and rose, the harmonious framework of the glowing plains. Long did my eyes follow one
of these rustic couples, trotting conjugally along, leg here, leg there, only making one
with their beast, showing forth a bust well planted in the midst of a quantity of tackle,
arranged on the croup of the horses with involuntary art. Turning to the left of the
Mons Sacer they had quitted the road by a track which wound up the slope of a hill
and which they soon abandoned. This path traced in the grass, narrow and sinuous,
goes to a squarish hillock, which would seem artificial, even if one did not see embank-
ments and ancient vaults; close to, on the right, you guess from a distance that there is
the low arched entry of some underground place. Everything in the campagna, even to
a bridle-path, takes the mysterious air of a monument; that white road whose mazes are
cut out as on the background of some primitive fresco, and which visibly comes to an end
at a cluster of deserted ruins, already wound along when Nero came there to end with
his life the flight from the Nomentane gate. Near at hand was the villa of Phaon, his
freedman, where he found his last shelter. As they passed before the black vault, which
is still to be seen, and which furnishes an approach to a sand-quarry, Phaon advised his
terror-stricken master to hide himself there. ‘No,' cried the emperor; ‘no, I will never
enter a grave alive.’ So he went to Phaon’s house, where, wearied and hotly chased as
he was, he drank a little brackish water and found strength enough to make an end.
Suetonius has described his route and fixed the spot with perfect precision.
At the present day, the sons of the plebeians to whom Menenius gave his lesson, no
longer go to the Mons Sacer; on this side of the Teverone they stay to empty flasks
under the green arbours of the rural tavern, and they furnish employment both for their
idleness and their passions by quarrelling over points at a game of bowls.
PONTE NOMENTANO.

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ROMANS PLAYING AT MORA. -
CHAPTER VIII.
Morning walk on the Coelian.-Street of St. John and St. Paul, its flying arches and the Arch of Dolabella.-
Gate of the Trinitarians; John of Matha and the Mathurins.—Santa Maria in Domnica.-The game of
mora.-Funzione of S. Stefano Rotondo; melodrama of martyrs.--From the foot of the Capitol to the
Tarpeian Rock.-The Academy of St. Luke and its Museum.—The celebrities: Wicar, Thorwaldsen, Mme.
Vigée-Lebrun, &c.—Descent into the Tullianum.–Extracts from the registers of the Mamertine prison, from
Manlius to St. Peter: Perseus, Jugurtha, Lentulus, Vercingetorix, Sejanus, &c.—Tombs of Bibulus and the
Claudians.—Capitoline approach under the Loggia of the Tabularium.—The Senatorial Palace: corridors
and offices; view from the windows.-The pretended palaces of Michelangelo.—His realistic bust.—Brutus
and Leo X.-Pinacotheca.-Destiny of the sarcophagus of Agrippa-Statues, bas-reliefs, curiosities.—
Historical portraits of the Capitoline Museum.—The Gabinetto.—An infirmary on the pavement.—Public
benevolence and charitable establishments.-School of Fine Arts and Conservatory of Music at the hospital
of St. Michael.-Innocent III, and San Spirito.—Curious inscription at the Lungara.
HE Coelian being a melancholy desert, it is best to go there alone, so as to gain
an impression in harmony with the look of the place. That is what I did at the
end of December on a violently windy day, utilising hours that were too early
for the Capitoline museum, to which I meant to ascend. This slope was once
called Queryuefuſanus, because it was covered with oaks before the time of Tarquin, who
quartered there the Etruscans of Coeles Vibenna, who bequeathed the name of Tuscan to
the district adjoining the Forum. Tullus Hostilius allotted it to the fugitives from Alba
Y


I62 A’O.]/A'.
Longa. The Coelian subsequently formed a settlement which, after being rebuilt by
Tiberius, was ten centuries after so completely destroyed by Robert Guiscard that the hill
has remained nearly uninhabited ever since. To ascend this slope, you leave on the right
the monastery of rich and substantial aspect that marks the site of the house of the Anician
º
º
|
STREET AND APSE OF SAN-GIOVANNI-E-PAOLO.
family; and it was here that Gregory the Great was born. The street, which runs along
trees planted chequerwise, is commanded on the left by the lofty apse of the conventual
church of St. John and St. Paul, which has belonged ever since Clement XIV. to the
Passionist fathers. The tower-shaped chevet is crowned with a rounded diadem of arches
cut in festoons and supported on little columns. Sometimes along the line of this road,

AAC// OF DO/ABEL/A–7//E MAZZZZZZAWS. I63
ancient pavement varies the chess-board pattern of the modern; the wall on the right,
which separates various gardens from the street, twenty times secular, is contemporary
with Nero. This wall, mixed with opus reticularium of brick and peperino, shows against
its thick and hollow sides the traces of a row of small habitations. To uphold the embank-
ment and support the Redemptorist convent, which is on the edge of the street, they have
thrown from one side to the other a series of flying arches under which you pass, and
º s
Tº III
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-
ARCH OF DOLABELLA AND GATE OF THE OLD CONVENT OF THE TRINITARIANs.
forming a perspective at the back of which, set fast among buildings and cut down, rises
the arch of Dolabella, erected by that consul and his colleague Silanus, the Flamen
Martialis, in the year ſo of our era, and on which Nero was shortly afterwards to Support
his aqueduct. One ascends so far to see two churches; but if you do not saunter with
conscientious idleness, you will run the risk of missing the remains of the old convent of
St. John of Matha, the founder under Innocent III. of the Trinitarians for the redemption
of prisoners. He was of Provence; his first house was established near Meaux, and his

Y 2
I64 A’O//E.
name of Matha gave the French Trinitarians the title of Mathurins. There only remains
of the cloisters of the Cóelian a gate, of which the mouldings are very fine, for the date
especially so, surmounted by a curious mosaic of the end of the thirteenth century. It is
the work of James Cosimato and his son, and represents what is a curiously advanced idea
for that age, our Lord calling to him a white man and a negro.
Quite close and on the same side, you arrive in the piazza where Leo X. had placed
a small boat of marble, which has given a surname to the church, Sta. Maria della
Navicella, more commonly described as in Oomnica, because it replaced the house of a
noble lady, St. Cyriaca. This temple, supported on ancient columns of granite and
porphyry, was restored by Leo X. from the plans of Raphael. The frieze above the
architraves of the nave, although it is
attributed to P. del Vaga and Giulio
Romano, might well have been designed
and even partially executed by Giovanni
d'Udine. The mosaic of the choir,
from the year 817 to 824, is all the
more interesting, as the paintings of
the ninth century are not very common
in Rome. This plateau, transformed
into a monastic Thebaid, contained
vacant spaces even under the Caesars,
for inscriptions found between the
Navicella and San Stefano Rotondo
reveal the site of the castra peregrina,
where they quartered the foreign legions.
There was a barrack there, in which,
according to Ammianus Marcellinus, a
Teutonic chief called Khodonhomer,
taken prisoner by Julian near Strasburg
in 359, was incarcerated and died. In
this campus //artia/is, where the eques-
trian games were celebrated when the
Tiber overflowed the plain, they show
- -------------- (at the Villa Mattei), besides the frag-
ENTRY OF THE CONVENT OF ST. JOHN AND ST. PAUL. ment of an obelisk, some pedestals
consecrated to Caracalla and Maximinus
by the fifth cohort of Vigiles. There has been found there also a double Hermes, with
the joined heads of Socrates and Seneca; was the latter of them a stranger to such an
association ? It was on the Coelian, too, that the Mamurra dwelt, who was prefect of
Caesar’s workmen in the Gauls, and who was branded by Catullus as having stolen
all that Gallia Barbata possessed; he was the first, according to Cornelius Nepos, to have
the walls of his house faced with marble of Luna.
Leaving the Villa Mattei, I lost no more time in listening to the wind whistling in the
cypresses, for a popular tide began to swell. It was the feast of St. Stephen, and to
find the church I had only to follow the crowd along a battered street which footsteps had
already made slippery; a true mountain pilgrimage intra muros. As this strange temple
is only open once a year, the day of the ſunzione, taverns and stalls where they sell small

* VOININOGI NI V 1， v_1\ v LN v S „IO （IOI^IGILNI
º
ſº

AA MORA-,S.A.V SZTE/FAAVO ROTO.V/OO. 165
tapers are improvised at the approaches to the monument. Holiday-makers of the
Rione Toscano, coachmen, pilgrims from the country, all stop there to see the stream of
people returning and to gather a few baiocchi from them upon occasion. You would
sometimes imagine that these good folk are quarrelling and must be going to cut one
another's throats; they are playing at mora, a word which while expressing the idea of
delay or check, describes a game that keeps the adversaries constantly on the alert and
excites them to excess. It consists in presenting very suddenly to your partner your
right hand, keeping one or two fingers shut, and in crying at the same moment the
number of fingers extended. The adversary, who is obliged to seize your intention with
magic rapidity, has at the same moment to imitate his comrade, and to pronounce the
same number as rapidly as he. The left hand serves to mark the points gained. The
precipitate haste, the tensity of mind required, the rapidity of the turns, make both
players cry their words in jerks; the faces of the players become glowing and contracted,
while their voices, breathless and hoarse, accent with a guttural dryness the numbers
SAN STEFANO ROTONDO.
cried monosyllabically—/Duº/–Quatºr'ſ—CVn' /–7 re' /–Cing'ſ Animated by this trifling,
which not seldom degenerates into a downright quarrel, so easy and so doubtful is a
mistake, the Romans unconsciously assume postures and expressions of ferocious beauty.
At the street corners I was never weary of looking at them. It is said that their
ancestors played at mora while besieging Syracuse, and they even talk of a Greek
bas-relief where the petulant Ajax is beaten by the sage Ulysses in presence of the
aged Nestor.
The church of San Stefano Rotondo has given singular embarrassment to a certain
school distinctly bent on upholding the position that the Christians of the Empire built
nothing. How many theories have not been hazarded as to the primitive destination of
this rotunda! It is extremely spacious, and a double colonnade surrounded it previously
to Nicholas V. ; its roofing comes sloping on to an architrave which covers fifty-six
columns, as well in marble as in granite, with Ionic and Corinthian capitals. The
unequal dimensions of the shafts, certain disproportions between their diameters and

I66 A’OA)//E.
those of the heads, the rude design of some of the ornaments, a number of incised
crosses in the heart of the acanthuses, all denote a Christian temple constructed of bits
and pieces on a circular ground-plan at the end of the fifth century. It is said, in fact,
that it was inaugurated towards 465 by Pope Simplicius, who as a native of Tivoli might,
before the Sibylline temple, have acquired a fancy for monuments of round form. This
is surrounded by a perfect necklace of altars; one of them still preserves a mosaic of
the seventh century. Let us also not forget to mention a very fine Bishop lying on a
sarcophagus by Lorenzetto. But this is not the principal curiosity of San Stefano
Rotondo, nor what makes it so popular. In old times, when spectacles were rare, the
spiritual and temporal pastors of a people that were degenerate in their passion for
theatres, in order to attract the popu-
lace, whose mind it was necessary to stir,
had invested most of the churches with
ceremonies and display of a peculiar
character. At St. Peter, the regal
pomps of the sovereign church; at the
Ara Coeli, the pastoral of the Nativity;
at St. Stephen the Round, they repre-
sent with all its terrors the melodrama of
martyrdom, and this is quite naturally
the spectacle which the populace prefer.
The famous day is the 26th of De-
cember. Never in my life had I been
mixed up in such a crowd of nurses and
cookmaids. This is saying that warriors
were not wanting, nor the Franciscans,
nor the white monks; for the curiosities
which soldiers have, religious orders
have also: the children of discipline are
amused by the same diversions. From
morning to night they make a queue in
the court in the midst of the carriages
and under the porch, where innocent
- - ºut." youngsters scale the Byzantine cathedra
Arches or sas Giovass e Paolo, as sees when descending of marble, from which St. Gregory the
FROM THE COELIA. Great in old days pronounced the
homily of St. Stephen. Then begins
in the church, as before a museum, the interminable walk round the circle. You ought
to hear the exclamations of the Trasteverini and of the peasant women come down from
the mountains ! Let us come to the objects of this keen curiosity. Formed by a double
row of columns, this church was primitively open to daylight; Nicholas V., in 1452, had
the exterior ring walled up where the pillars, remaining engaged in the masonry, emerge
in the state of pilasters. Between each of these compartments, Pomerancio and
Tempesta, in the second half of the sixteenth century, painted the fresco of the Tortures
of the Martyrs under the Jews, under the emperors, and under the Vandal kings. The
horrors of the charnel-house or the amphitheatre, the most hideous inventions of canni-
balism, the ferocities of human butchery interpreted in a nightmare; that is what the



A CA/OAA)/P OF ST. Z UATE. 167
good people come for here, and that is what is shown with all the imagination that can
make the delirium of reality more terrible.
These ghastly visions pursued me while I returned down from the Coelian to the
Coliseum, where such scenes were played ad vivum. The throng and stunning noise of
the crowd had wearied me; I only went as far as the foot of the Capitol, and before
ascending it, I made a halt at the Academy of St. Luke.
II.
Rome, which gave birth to few eminent artists, hardly produces a greater number
who are worthy of attention. This is no reason for supposing that routine precepts are not
taught there to youth. They have there also a School of Fine Arts, and in this school
the museum of painting, in the formation of which the didactic spirit has been singularly
wanting. The institution is due to Sixtus V. When organizing the Academy of
Painters, towards the year 1588, he installed it in a house near the church of St. Martina,
which itself became a benefice of the school. Accordingly its directors did their best to
have the temple rebuilt by Peter of Cortona, who placed a cupola on the top of it, and
they lost no time in dedicating it to their patron, the evangelist St. Luke. It was to
provide for the expenses of this insignificant construction that they sold to the Florentines
their fine collection of portraits, representing the illustrious painters, gifts of the great
men, their masters. To enter the gallery, you have to ring at a modest door on the
left of the Via Bonella, and once entered, you find yourself in full pasture-ground, before
Some cows that Berghem has brought to graze among the ruins. A fine shipwreck of
Tempesta, a landscape of Salvator Rosa, a few country pieces of Blömen, instantly give
you the key of the modern note and of simple nature.
I wish I could give some sketch of this museum, of the impression it makes, of the
entertainment or use that one may find there, without believing myself obliged to mention
this or that, under penalty of appearing incomplete. For those who have gone through
it, I only offer a souvenir, and for other people only reasons for visiting it. As for detail,
there is a catalogue. The principal attraction of this collection comes of its diversity;
it possesses something of every school, and the most thorough, rather than the largest,
examples of each school, a rare circumstance in a gallery created with a view to teaching.
We see there a quantity of those miniature room-pictures, painted from age to age in the
taste of a passing hour, and which might serve to illustrate the annals of fashion; from
time to time a great name, a Vandyke or a Poussin, either mistaken or compromised, as
Titian is, by a parody of the St. Jerome in the Desert. This master furnishes with less
risk a pattern for the Venus with the Jewels, a reposing figure of a sweet and luminous
model, surrounded by treasures, while at her feet are cast a sceptre and a diadem, with
the legend, Omnia Vanitas. The picture has been rehandled, but it preserves both value
and charm. Let us notice an apocryphal Memling, a Portrait of Baciccio, which repre-
sents, and here is a mistake of the books, Clement IX. and not Innocent XI. ; some views
of the Roman Campagna, by Salvator and by Van Blömen; a Joseph Vernet, with a
rather chilly Sunrise; pretty rustic scenes by Locatelli; a sea-piece, falsely attributed to
Claude Lorraine; a Paul Veronese, very like, but heavy; a curious representation of the
Forum, by Panini; a singular historical picture of George Harlowe, an English painter,
I68 - A&O///'.
representing Campeggio giving the Cardinal’s hat to Wolsey; a charming sea-piece of
Fidanza; and, close by, a Bassano di Arimo carſe/ſo, the Birth of Christ announced to
the Shepherds by an Angel. The Iris of Guido Head inspired by Guido Reni, the
Vestal buried Alive, the Cupid and Psyche of Leopardi, the Apollo condemning Marsyas
of Tofanelli, the Hebe giving Drink to the Eagle of Jupiter, and the Innocent kissing a
Lamb, by Durantini, as well as some sketches of Camuccini, of Rati, of Cadès, give
singular views of modern art in Rome.
The sanctuary of the place is dedicated to Raphael on account of two important
paintings; the one which represents a robust and beautiful child, naked, in the style of
Farnesini, is a piece of fresco detached from one of the rooms of the Vatican, and which
once belonged to Wicar, the benefactor of the museum
at Lille; the other picture has been made common by
engraving, and the painters have placed a copy of it in
their church. It is the St. Luke painting the Madonna,
who descends from heaven to pose for him; behind the
evangelist a pupil, probably Raphael, looks and draws
in inspiration; a charming head, painted with much
suppleness. But in its flat and monotonous yellow
drapery, how common is the St. Luke, and how clumsy
from head to foot! The Madonna and Child, awkwardly
banished to the corner of the picture, just under the
border, have the common profile. If we must leave to the
debit of Raphael this doubtful and apparently too late
canvas, at any rate let us reduce it to as low a point as
possible by saying that Giulio Romano, and others after
him, have repainted the Child as well as the Virgin,
and let us not fear to say that the St. Luke must have
been repainted by everybody. To give some relief to
this picture they have surrounded it with a number of
suspicious companions; Christ and the Pharisee, a Titian
worth ten crowns; an Ariadne of the same painter,
very shame having forbidden them to see more than a
copy in this, they lay upon Poussin the blame of having
done it; a Galatea, from which they have relieved
rººs or sº. T Carlo Maratto, at the expense of Giulio Romano; three
other little Titians that Titian never saw ; finally, not
far from a great piece of Guido (Bacco e Arianna, a pretty decorative painting, rather
glassy, but laughing, bright, and pearly), the Susanna, or rather one of the Susannas
of Veronese, still living, but a great deal too much plastered over. The Sextus
Tarquinius with Lucretia, a work of charming colour, and sprung of the Bolognese
decline and due to Castagni, never fails to produce its effect. We have no faith either
in a Marriage of St. Catherine, which is a trifle Gothic and attributed to Veronese, or
in a Diana in the Bath of Titian, any more than in a Bonifazio, or in the Family of
Paul III., which is not even a copy from the prince of the Venetians. We shall see with
quite another eye the little canvas with a portico and a staircase over white construc-
tions, the whole of a tender and transparent effect, in which the light becomes actually
musical: it is a Canaletto that has not rusted, and is the freshest existing.

Al/ODERM PORTRA/7S. 169
Perpetuated by copies, the Gallery of the Illustrious has lost its value, so far as the
ancient part of it goes, since the original portraits figure at the Uffizi at Florence. But
besides the authentic heads, they imagined others to fill up the blanks; these have
remained, and it is not without some mirth that we pass in review the theatrical mien
and the costumes attributed by the contemporaries of Corinne to artists who lived before
Sixtus V. The genuine portraits, in which the first-born of the present century have
handed themselves down to the admiration of posterity, are not less strange; the majority
of them betray in their accoutrements, which have become superannuated and comical,
the ‘good taste’ of their day as well as their personal pretensions. John Baptist Wicar
has the dress and posture of a strolling player; Thorwaldsen has disguised himself as the
Hamlet of 1825; by a happy inspiration Angelica Kauffmann has presented a lively and
simple apparition of herself, and one which will not date. One of the gems of the
gallery is the portrait of the handsome Madame Vigée-Lebrun, whom I knew when she
was nearly a hundred years old, at Louveciennes,
where she died. A grey dress, a cloud of white
muslin, serving at once for kerchief round the neck
and coiffure for the head, constitute her négligé.
This celebrated artist, who had exhausted all the
triumphs that fame and beauty can confer, had cut
on her gravestone the simple words, “AZ /asſ / rest.’
In going through the incongruous elements of
these collections, one could not but be surprised
that professors should have shown themselves so
little exclusive, and that masters so liberal, should
have produced such weak disciples. For it must be
confessed, in the hall of the entresol, where the
works of the academicians, with those of the
laureates in their competition, are exposed as if in
the pillory, you will be struck with compassion. In
the middle of these sorry things, the Cain of
M. Schnetz, a good exercise, stands out full of life,
and condemns without appeal the crowd of conven-
tional faces and positions. In short, you may amuse yourself by lounging among the
cosmopolites of the galleries of St. Luke, as one does in the cabinet of a capricious
amateur. It is a refuge for the days when some sudden shower drives you from the
Coliseum, the Palatine, or the Forum.
Turn the street to begin the ascent of the Capitol; at the corner of the Via del
Marforio, under the small church of San Giuseppe, a monument of an entirely different
sort will arrest you on your way.
MADAME VIGEE-LEBRUN, BY HERSELF.
III.
Every country implants in one’s memory certain names which, periodically recurring
in the sombre pages of history, end by acquiring a sinister value. Such is the kind of
notoriety conferred by the Roman annals on two dungeons, one over the other, which, by
way of recalling their founders, bear the denominations of the Mamertine prison, in
Z

17o A&OA/AC.
memory of the King Ancus Martius (issue of Mars, whom the Oscans called Mamercus),
and of the Tullian prison, because the king, Servius Tullius, they say, had the deeper of
the two dug out under the first. Varro half a century before our era recalled the origin
of the Tullianum, whose situation he specifies exactly; he insists that to construct these
dungeons where so much illustrious blood was spilled, the kings, Ancus and Servius,
made use of a quarry out of which the founders of Rome had extracted the materials of
their earliest buildings. These caves of detention, the oldest in the world, are seen in
the nakedness of primitive construction, and in the simplicity proper for the circum-
stances which their name is enough to make remarkable.
The Mamertine prison, properly so called, into which you descend at the present day
by the church of St. Joseph, due to the corporation of the carpenters, is in the shape of a
trapezium twenty feet long by about sixteen broad; the masonry consists of enormous
blocks of volcanic stone or reddish peperino, cubed and arranged in the Etruscan way;
the vault, which is semi-cylindrical (though irregular, the sides of the square being
unequal), is formed of immense quarters. This chamber, where you recognise the traces
of a window that has been long condemned, had no door; previously bound tight, the
prisoners were plunged through a round hole into the Mamertine by means of a rope.
The communication between the prison of Ancus and the Tullianum was by a round hole,
pierced in a flat vault which separates the two dungeons; the lictors or executioners
descended with ladders into the caverns, either to chain the prisoners to the walls or to
slay the victims at the bottom of the Tullianum, in such a way that those who were kept
in the upper prison, after being for a moment lighted up by torches, heard the cries of
those below. The bleeding and mutilated corpses were then brought up before the
captives, who saw them swinging in space; then they threw them from the top of the
stairs of the Gemoniae, whence they were publicly dragged by hooks through the Forum
Velabrum, as far as the Sublician bridge, where the Tiber became their grave. The
compartment below that cavern of slaughter, which in the time of Hannibal was already
eighteen palms below the level of the Forum, the Tullianum, is smaller in dimensions
than the Mamertine. This cave, nearly circular in form, is of volcanic peperino and
deeply smoke-stained; the layers of stone are rather disjointed; the lateral walls have
scarcely any height at all, as the vault falls extremely low. As in the other chamber,
there are no traces of a door to be discovered: one of the sides is walled by the pure
rock, as also it is in the Mamertine story. At the present day, the Tullianum contains
for its furniture a modest altar, the shaft of a column, and a tin cup fastened by a chain
by the side of a fountain, which flows clear and without reflection over a blackish earth
where there has been much blood to drink. An inscription traced upon the wall of the
Mamertine prison informs us that in the year 22 of our era Rufinus and Cocceius Nerva,
the consuls, made some repairs. This is one thousand eight hundred and fifty years
since, and is, I believe the only modern restoration of the monument.
Some antiquarians pretend, not without probability, that long before the creation of
Rome, in the unknown ages when the Etruscans occupied the city and hill of Saturn, the
Tullianum was already built with the single object of collecting into a vast cistern the
waters of a spring that rises in the darkness. But they add, when Tarquinius Priscus had
consecrated the summit of the mountain to Jupiter, the situation of this nympheum nearly
below the temple at once destined it to become a dependency of that. The Lucumos of
Tarquiniae were sprung of the Etruscan stock which permitted human sacrifices, and the
crypt of the temple dedicated to their gods must have been a slaughter-house. Josephus
7HE MAA/EA’7”/AWE APR/SOWS. 171
demonstrates the duration of these customs. “It is a pious usage,’ writes the Jewish
historian, “to put to death in the Mamertine prisons the chiefs of the conquered nations,
while the triumphant conqueror sacrifices on the Capitol to Jupiter.” For at the same
time Pliny the Elder saw buried alive in the Forum Boarium, with the design of winning
the favour of the gods, a man and a young woman born in Gaul, with which they were
then at war; and this pious atrocity seems quite natural to Pliny.
It is not without a certain sensation that, by the flaming glare of a torch, you con-
template a spot thus little dealt with by time, which of all the monuments of the primitive
ages of Rome, has only entirely respected a dungeon and a sewer. The time which for
the unhappy travelled very slowly in the depths of the Tullianum, flies rapidly as one
mentally traverses in a few instants so long a succession of ages, evoking so many great
shades in their last home. This prison was exactly as we see it to-day four or five
centuries before the Caesars, in the time of the Decemvirs, when Appius Claudius, pursued
by the hate of a people devoted to the passion for justice even to ferocity, after the heroic
parricide of Virginius slew himself in this prison. Who has not thought, as he meditates
on the ingratitude of nations towards saviours crucified in all lands, of the lot of Manlius
Capitolinus, reduced to appeal in vain for his defence against the envious Camillus, to
thirty enemies slain with his own hand, to his eight civic crowns, to his thirty-two military
awards, and to the scars that adorned his breast? He was plunged into the frightful
Tullianum. As soon as Rome extended her conquests, the prison built by Ancus becomes
the last dwelling of the conquered kings of the universe. Perseus who adorned the
ovation of Paulus AEmilius wept under the vault of the Tullianum, and they took him
from it to imprison him at Alba, where he starved himself to death. Then arrives in this
hostelry of slaughter, before Syphax king of Numidia, Jugurtha, who carried on so long a
campaign, and whom Marius and Sulla together would never have conquered, if the
treason of the king of Mauritania had not delivered him to the Republic; as he came
down from the Capitol where he had figured in the triumphal car of Marius, Jugurtha, like
an actor whose part is over, was stripped and cast into the Tullianum. ‘By the gods !’
he exclaimed, as they entered his name on the jailer’s scroll, ‘how cold your stoves are l’
For death to come to him, six days of inanition were enough.
It was in the Tullianum that they strangled Cethegus, Gabinius, Statilius, and Ceparius,
those hardy accomplices of Catilina, after Cicero had dragged Lentulus to the prison,
whom he caused to be put to death first, proceeding in his own person to that swift
transaction. Cicero scarcely foresaw that to punish him for thinking that he had saved
his country, an exceptional law would come, confiscating his property and driving him
into exile. Aristobulus and Tigranes, after the triumph of Pompeius, were incarcerated
according to custom in the Mamertine prisons.
After all, these Romans were a cruel people, and these great men had small souls.
The valiant fair-haired warrior of the Gauls, Vercingetorix, who confronted Julius Caesar
with an enemy worthy of him, who harassed him, who beat him even, who repulsed the
stranger from his country, executed prodigies of military skill and energy; Vercingetorix,
the noble defeated of the siege of Alesia, offered himself up as a holocaust to appease the
proconsul and gain safety for his people. Clad in his richest armour, he rides forth alone
from the city on his war horse, and hastening at full gallop up to the tent where the great
Julius held his court, he throws himself on the ground before him and casts at his feet his
javelin, his helmet, and his sword. Caesar impassive, stern, dumb, made a sign for him to
be carried away by the lictors, and he was transported to the Mamertine cage to await the
Z 2
172 A&OMAE.
ceremony of the triumph. It was put off for six years; Vercingetorix figured in it, and
then Caesar had him slain under the vault of the Tullianum. It has devoured people of
every sort, this famous jail, and even criminals. Sejanus was put to death in it, as well
as his daughters; the pattern of favourites, he conspired against his benefactor. It is true
that this good master was Tiberius, but the minister was not even as good as his sove-
reign. In the year 70 of our era, after the heroic revolt of Judea, in which, according to
Josephus who organized the resistance in the holy city, there perished no less than eleven
hundred thousand Israelites, Simon son of Joras, whom we also call Simon of Goria, one of
the principal chiefs of the struggle against foreign dominion, was dragged to Rome, was
fastened to the triumphal car of Titus, was beaten with rods along the road by an unusual
rigour that looked like a reprisal for the flagellation of Christ, and then finally the warrior
of Israel, the last prince of Judah who smote with the sword, perished by the knife in the
Tullianum. He was, they say, penetrated with the Holy Scriptures; as he saw in the
mirror of prophecy the last events of Jerusalem, he might have given himself to strange
meditations in the depth of his dungeon. Six years before the remnant of Israel had
entered there, another Simon, Simon the Fisher, and Saul the converted philosopher of
Damascus, had borne into these caves their last fetters. It is in memory of this captivity
that the Tullianum has become a chapel under the designation of San Pietro in Carcere.
It is said that St. Peter was bound to the pillar at the side of the altar. The tin bowl
placed near the subterranean spring is for the use of the faithful who care to drink water
which quenched the thirst of the Apostle and baptized his jailers, Processus and
Martinianus.
As you reflect that at the dawn of the Republic these prisons already belonged to an
earlier régime, that for five and twenty centuries so many illustrious victims have wept,
raged, prayed, groaned in this cave with its soil kneaded with blood, you are profoundly
moved at the contemplation of what has been looked upon by kings of Asia, by consuls,
by enemies of Rome, by saints; by seeing them exactly as these men left them, by
breathing in the atmosphere in which they lived, and by saying to yourself as you touched
the walls, that there perhaps where your hand lies, the first of the popes rested his head,
which had been touched by the hand of Christ.
IV.
A few steps further off, in the Via del Marforio, you enter one of the old quarters
inhabited by the people. The street is narrow and low, and filthy shops wed themselves
to the muddy hue of the gutter. This quarter made no part of the city at the epoch
when the inhabitants of Rome were Romans, that is to say, under the Republic; it was
outside of the Porta Ratumena. Examine the bottom of the houses, the door-frames
and the sills; try to decipher the palimpsests of the walls; you will find from step to
step the traces of the tombs which filled in the edges of the road. The most remarkable
is of great severity of style; it is that of Publicius Bibulus, aedile of the people, long
before they spoke of Calpurnius Bibulus, who had quarrels with Caesar, and who is not to
be confounded with Publicius. This monument of travertine, adorned with a fine cornice
and four pilasters, which from the middle narrow pyramidally, was composed of two
orders; but the lower story is buried, a thing to be regretted, inasmuch as this tomb is
hardly less ancient than that of the Scipios. A little further the haughty race of the
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THE SEMA 7'ORIA C PAZACE. I 73
Claudii had burial-places that have not disappeared: in the tomb of two heroes of this
mobilissima gens Claudia two butchers have established their stall.
If we turn back as far as the corner of the street at the foot of the Capitoline slope,
we shall seek the trace of the Gemoniae; then the old embankment, supporting on a
scarped gallery the Senatorial Palace, will reveal to us the remains of the Tabularium.
They are composed of seven archways which face the Forum, and which, in the time of
Michelangelo, in order to sustain the buildings which they were preparing to erect on the
hill, were all masked, with the exception of one only; from the Via Sacra you perceive it
to the right high on the side of the lofty wall whose lower courses date from the Dictator
Furius Camilius, and are of large stones placed over one another in the Etruscan way—
substructum saxo quadrato, says Livy.
They approached the Tabularium on the side which in our days furnishes an approach
to the offices of the Commune and of the lower jurisdictions of the city. Forming
before it reaches the Intermontium a more acute angle, the road at that time followed as
far as the sixth arch the portico or gallery of the Tabularium; there sloping to the left, it
finished its ascent of the Capitoline slope under a vault by broad inner steps which were
called the Scala triumphaſis. Suppress in your mind the arches that serve as props, built
of brick, and the enclosures of the galleries; all remains standing. The arches have their
crests and the vaults are entire; those of the scala, whose first step is of the original date,
as well as those that have fallen, are constructed of opus incertum. It is under this loggia,
which was contemporary with Sulla, and by which since Marius all the celebrities of
Rome have passed, that they have set up a splendid cornice of the Temple of Concord
with its frieze and the whole architrave. When on leaving the Tabularium you mount
the staircase of the palace, you come upon doors pierced in the tufa and walled up since
the time of Vespasian, who reconstructed the upper part of the burnt monument.
Nothing surprised me so much as to find along the corridors all that is most common,
consequently all that is most unexpected; figures of the bureau, copyists, clerks,
attorneys, going hither and thither with their bundles of paper, vulgarly busy, and
reproducing alike in dress and physiognomy the worthy tribe of municipal scribblery. On
the upper story I slipped into various rooms. After so many months spent far away
from the atmosphere of offices, 1 fancied that I had found again, in presence of all these
portfolios, the red tape and parchment so supreme in my native land. An official invited
me to enter as I was looking for a window, to embrace from such an elevation the sight
of old Rome; he eagerly opened one of the lattices that seem from below so small and
are in reality enormous, and, joining to this Roman good-nature a friendly familiarity
that is Roman too, our official came and leaned on his elbows beside me.
Why am I not installed in this office to spend glorious days here in contemplation
without doing anything? From the top of a castle that twenty-two centuries in
succession have exalted, the luminous horizon was bounded in front and to the left by
the Alban hills and the chain of the Gennaro; near, and forming an unequal round of
temples and churches, the Aventine at the extreme right, the Esquiline at the left, and
between them the Coelian, the Palatine, opened by the palaces of the Caesars, by the
Coliseum, by the basilica of Constantine, by the Arch of Titus, and Nero's house,
perspectives of ruin extending to the very azure and poetising all the fields. At my
feet spread out the Forum, Solitary in the middle of a populous quarter. One can
hardly measure from any other point the perimeter of the temples and basilicas, and the
line of the half-encumbered roads.
I 74 A’O//2.
On the side opposite to the portico of the Tabularium, the Senatorial Palace, planted
on that ancient base, has its chief frontage in the midst of the Intermontium. Cut down
steep on one side on to the Forum, which it masks, this piece of architecture on the
other side bounds a space, standing in the middle of which you have on your right the
Protomotheca, founded by Pius VII., and the palace of the Conservators or civil
magistrates, who are presided over at Rome by a chief with the title of Senator, and
styled in the rest of the Roman comarca prior or gonfalonier. The left side is occupied
by the museum of the Capitol. A little behind rises the church of the Ara Coeli, where
the Temple of Jupiter used to be, a pendant to the Tarpeian rock, which was crowned of
old by the Acropolis. The enceinte of the small central space has for boundary marks
balustrades guarded by lions, and some
steps, above which rise the colossal figures
of Castor and Pollux, adjoining those cele-
brated trophies which have retained the
name of Marius, but which belong to the
age of Trajan.
Between the steps and the principal
palace rises the single equestrian bronze
bequeathed to us by Roman antiquity. Yet
this only owed its preservation during the
middle ages to a mistake; the pseudonym of
Constantine protected Marcus Aurelius. In
the fifth century, Totila is said to have
carried off this statue, which was then gilded,
and he was proceeding to put it on ship-
board when Belisarius recovered it. In the
time of Sylvester II. the pretended Con-
stantine edified the faithful in the Forum
Boarium; Pope Scolari (Clement III.) trans-
ported it to the front of the Lateran palace,
the old abode of Constantine. The Marcus
Aurelius stayed there until the time when,
- - under Paul III., Michelangelo had it brought
ONE OF THE TROPHIES, CALLED OF MARIUS, AT THE on to the Capitoline piazza, at the very spot
CAPITOL. where Arnold of Brescia had been burnt in
I 155; near the steps at the foot of which,
two centuries after, Rienzi, on his flight from the Capitol, came to his end under the
knife of an artisan. When Andrea Verocchio, the best jeweller in Florence, came to
Rome, the Marcus Aurelius made so vivid an impression upon him that he was
emboldened by that revelation of equestrian sculpture to execute the Bartolommeo
Colleone of the Piazzetta Zanipolo at Venice, a truly incomparable masterpiece. The
illustrious pupil of Ghirlandajo and Verocchio, Leonardo da Vinci, was likewise inspired
by the Marcus Aurelius, and also, according to Paolo Jove, by the horses of the Dioscuri,
when he offered to the admiration of the people of Milan his model of the equestrian
figure of Francis Sforza, which, when exposed to view in 1493, seemed superior to
the Donatello of Padua (Gafſame/afo) and even to the Verocchio of Venice. The
revolution of 1499 hindered the execution of this masterpiece: nothing is left of the

SEWA TOR/A/ PA/AC/E. I75
sculptures of the great Leonardo, and it is only from the testimony of Ludovico Dolce
that we know to what a point this artist, the only one of the three greatest contemporary
painters whose school maintained itself without degeneracy, was ‘stufendissimo in ſar
caza//i.’
Although the Capitoline hill makes a noble decoration, it is not merely for the sake
of admiring the palaces of the Senators, of the Conservators, and of the Museum, that
one has to ascend to this platform, in the middle of which, leaning on his great
charger, Marcus Aurelius seems hardly a better horseman than befits a philosopher to be.
These buildings, of the epoch of complete decadence, though they have been much
praised because they were believed to be the work of Michelangelo, were only erected
STEPS OF THE SENATORIAL PALACE: TARPEIAN STAIRCASE.
under Innocent X, and Alexander VII. by an architect who made his patrons believe that
he was executing the designs of the late master. Thus, without feeling any obligation
to make a halt before all these pilasters, let us enter the senatorial palace, and salute the
she-wolf, under whom they have fitted or restored her two foster children, Romulus and
Remus. Cast with the iron coin exacted as penalty for offences, she was placed 296
years before our era at the foot of the fig-tree of Rumia.
At the very first we are attracted by the singularity of another bronze, the bust of
Michelangelo in his old age, from a marble sculpture from life by one of his pupils. It
is surely the most extraordinarily constructed head, the most gnarled skull, the most
violent, the most diabolic outline. No other portrait has reached this stupefying reality

176 A&O//E.
As a pendant to it there rises another still more striking figure, Junius Brutus, founder of
the Republic. His short, flat hair, his brow with its acute angles, his frowning eyebrows,
under which there shine out in the tawny glow of the bronze black eyeballs on an
enamelled crystal; the severe shape of a very aquiline nose, the broad chin, the iron lips,
the firm set lines of a jaw that stands out under a short bristling beard—all impresses
upon this physiognomy, which has a beauty incompatible with grace, a really terrible
character. This example of a traditional portrait shows, by vague reminiscences of the
Etruscans, how well the primitive type was respected. The personality will not be novel
for one who has stopped before the picture of Lethière: Brutus sacrificing his Sons, and
having them put to death in his presence. The painter copied this pitiless head, of which
he could not exasperate the expression. Under the Terror, the section of Marat had sent
to each of the departments the cast of the bust of this political executioner, commended
to the admiration of our earliest years by the declamations of the pedagogue.
Frescoes of a feeble epoch describe over
again on the walls some of the most renowned
of the legendary facts of the history of the
world, and which in this fallen municipality are
no more than local anecdotes—a combination
of greatness and fall that touches one. Among
the busts that adorn these apartments I read
the name of Scipio Africanus. They have
placed him there to be a spectator for ever of
his own exploits, described by Annibal Car-
raci on a frieze which surmounts tapestries
designed by Rubens. The Fleming and the
man of Bologna have scarcely any interest
here; the one recites and the other exclaims;
conventional art with both of them.
I have not to speak of a number of works
which made no impression upon me, good or
bad, but I cannot pass over in silence the
effigy of a personage whose exterior is hardly
in keeping with the ideas of renascent beauty and artistic elegance that his name stands
ºil.
T.
JUNIUS BRUTUS.
for. The colossal seated statue of Leo X., executed in his own time, and after nature as
we cannot doubt, would be regarded in our time as the work of an intrepid realist;
the expression, the gesture, the puffy obesity of the pontiff, give him the look of a great
infant of sixty years of age who has not been weaned. If we look at the profile of this
strange mask, the nose, the projecting lower lip, the obliterated chin, and three other
folds which continue it, give a succession of six festoons by way of border of the circle of
a moon; the eyes stare out of their orbits like those of batrachians; the thick lips make
us guess a thick tongue; it seems as if the blood could hardly have circulated in such a
mountain of flesh, that such a thing could neither have thought nor acted. Yet he was a
revengeful and formidable sovereign, and he had too a lofty and tender heart, for did he
not kiss the hand of the dead Raphael and leave a tear upon it? No one would have
dared to carve a caricature of Leo X., nor would anybody have wished it; and if the
statue in the senatorial palace had passed for a malicious representation, it would never
have been placed in the Capitol. Everything shows then that this work of Giacomo del

AA LACE OF THE CONSERVATORS. 177
Duca had the authority of a striking resemblance, and after that this servile copy of the
original becomes a precious document for helping us to appreciate the charms of style, by
the aid of which in his portrait in the Pitti gallery, Raphael, without altering either the
resemblance or the cut, contrived to spiritualise so grotesque a figure.
In the Palace of the Conservators, which you find on your left in leaving the municipal
building, they formed at a time of decline, under Benedict XIV., a gallery of paintings of
mediocre composition; many from Bologna of an inferior sort, copies, poor things made
for the garret, and here and there a wandering star. The repetition by Poussin of the
Triumph of Flora, in which all the tones have lost their harmony and become violent;
two graceful pieces of Garofalo; an admirable portrait of Gian Bellini, by himself; &c.
Let us omit of set purpose Giorgione and Francesco Francia, represented by an apocryphal
series, and let us mention the most important piece in the gallery—the Death of the
Virgin, by Cola dell' Amatrice, a work in which the minute execution of the primitive
Schools nevertheless attains to a high dramatic effect. The palace of the Lateran alone
possesses a canvas of this rare master. It is in the staircase of the museum that another
curiosity is to be found, the bas-relief of Curtius on his horse plunging into the gulf. The
wildness of this Etruscan design proves it to be of high antiquity. A third visit to this
gallery, which usually people do not take the trouble to see a second time, enlightened
me as to the inanity of a Titian, of two landscapes of Claude, of a Perugino, and of a por-
trait that Michelangelo can never have painted. A small picture of Salvator, glowing
and bizarre, representing a witch, as well as a repetition of a carrying off of Europa
inferior to the Veronese of the palace of the Doges, but to which the painter has added
the head of a bull who espies the scene with jealous eye, struck me at my second explora-
tion. The company of mediocre works is so hurtful to good ones that I had not remarked
the Persic Sibyl of Guerchino, a portrait of his wife; nor the Saint Petronilla, said to
be his master-piece, which has been copied in mosaic for the basilica of St. Peter. This
collection has no catalogue, whence it follows that the ciceroni have fine scope for
baptizing the pictures. The greatest names fill the columns of the guide books, but when
you come before the subjects you find endless mistakes; it seems as if you had fallen into
an assembly of the valets of good houses, lavishing upon one another the titles of their
maSterS.
Descending from the museum you enter a court decorated as they all are by antique
fragments. I remarked among them a group energetically cast, representing a horse
devoured by a lion; the important restoration of this piece corroded by damp is attributed
to Michelangelo. The philologists scarcely fail in deciphering beneath the modern fac-
simile of the column of Duilius, the inscription in primitive and archaic Latin so often
published, which recalled the great naval victory of the year 492 of Rome over the Cartha-
ginians. Under the portico of the palace, between a statue of Augustus and that of Julius
Caesar, which is so poor in execution that the monument may seem apocryphal, there must
not be omitted on the left side of the court a large square urn, which during the middle
age served as a standard for the measuring of grain. On one of the sides of this
hollowed marble the municipality has had carved the arms of the city supported by
two heralds, and underneath, the escutcheons of the three conservators who at that time
held the office of sheriff. On the frieze they have cut in uncial letters of the fourteenth
century this very exact indication: Rvg|ITELLA DE GRANO. But if you pass to the opposite
side of this cube, you there read the following inscription in fine characters of the first
century:—
A A
178 A&OME.
OSSA
AGRIPPINAE M. AGRIPPAE
DIVI AVG. NEPTIS VXORIS
GERMANICI CAESARIS
MATRIS C. CAESARIS AVG.
GERMA NICI PRINCIPIS.
Thus this standard of measure held the bones of the grand-daughter of Augustus, the
daughter of Julia and of Vipsanius Agrippa, the great aedile who transformed Rome; of
that chaste heroine who was the wife of Germanicus, who braved the hate of Tiberius, and
whom destiny made the maternal grandmother of Nero. Her remains must have been
brought back at the beginning of the reign of Claudius, for she died in the isle of Panda-
taria, consumed by the weariness of widowhood and exile.
V.
On the summit of the Capitol, where stood a statue of Apollo thirty cubits high that
Lucullus had brought from Apollonia Pontica, on the sacred hill where the great captains
had their triumph and the pontiffs their metropolis, an asylum has been opened on
Christian earth for the ancient society of Rome. It was Clement XII. who convoked this
assembly of patricians in marble, and who installed them at home in the palace that fronts
the Conservators. These galleries constitute a veritable Olympus, a court, an academy;
the divinities dismissed from the temples, a succession of imperial families, the philoso-
phers, the writers, the poets of Italy and Greece, dwell side by side in this refuge of pagan
glories. Their appearance is almost familiar; from chamber to chamber you are greeted
by known figures. Nothing would be more sterile than to verify all these statues; we
should wander in the midst of them as we should in a salon ; and the best plan is only to
frequent the Capitol after one has become accustomed to live under the preoccupation of
the events and the principal actors in them. Then we come from time to time to salute
them in their own home, in order to add more distinct personalities to our recollections.
The real concierge of the palace is the statue of the Ocean ; it awaits you lying at
the bottom of a small court, against a wall coated by the damp with a light green moss.
The Romans have an affection for this colossus which they call Marforio, and which has
given its name to one of the neighbouring streets. It was found in the Forum of
Augustus, or of Mars, Marte-Foro, and hence according to some the name of Marforio;
but this etymology is barely satisfactory. We decipher in this court a number of inscrip-
tions of praetorian soldiers; we find in it sarcophagi, statues, bas-reliefs; but what I
observed there particularly were the ornamented fragments of the temple of Concord, cut
with marvellous art. An amateur will scarcely omit to look at the fine tomb from which
the Portland vase was taken. : The staircase; has for its decoration those plaques of
marble which were taken from the Temple of Romulus, and which preserve for us a plan
of Rome engraved under Septimius Severus. In a saloon that was arranged ten years
ago for works in metal, you will find with interest, marked with an undeniable Greek
inscription, the strange and noble bronze that Mithridates gave to the gymnasium of the
Eupatorists; and close by the side of it, near the charming group of Diana Triformis, an
THE CAPITO//WE MUSEUM. I79
ancient tripod and Roman balance, a candelabrum of bronze from the imperial palace,
and adorned with portraits of the family of Septimius. There are also graduated weights
and measures of ancient Rome; an admirable Hercules in gilded bronze; the Greek
Child holding a comic mask, by which Raphael was more than once inspired; and the
Ariadne, the ideal of fascinating beauty. A mistake has given a name to the chamber of
the Gladiator. The warrior mortally wounded, that for so many years has been admired
in the Capitol under the designation of the Dying Gladiator, does not in truth represent
a gladiator at all, but a Gaulish chieftain. The collar or torques leaves no doubt on this
subject. One may compare this type with the combatants of the battle of Telamone,
fought with the Gauls 355 years before our era by Attilius Regulus, who was killed
there. The figures of this curious sarcophagus recalled, by their type and their curling
hair, this dying warrior who offers us in his anguish-stricken features the heroes of
Our 1 a.Ce.
Enriched by Benedict XIV., by Clement XIV., by Pius VI., Pius VII., and Leo XII.,
-
THE WOUNDED GAUL.
F=
=
this museum has been nearly doubled by Pius IX. Besides the variety of marbles and
subjects, it represents a number of sculptures on pieces of furniture. One bas-relief,
which transmits to us the Roman foot divided into sixteen toes; another reproduces a
print of Cybele with the symbols of her worship; a sarcophagus retraces the doctrine of
the neo-platonists as to the formation and destruction of man. Above is the celebrated
mosaic of the Doves, imitated from that of Pergamus which Pliny admired so, and which
was found at the villa of Adrian. You will see also stiles in ivory, for writing on waxen
tablets; an Amphora for wine, adorned with a female bacchanal; and the famous vase of
Pentelican marble found near the mole of Caecilia Metella, placed upon a fine cylindrical
altar on which are represented the Twelve Gods. One cannot forget the admirable Faun in
antique red from Adrian's villa: this stone of deep cinnabar of such fine grain, of a tender
and flat polish, is no longer to be found, and we know not whence the ancients procured it.
This room possesses a charter of bronze, the decree of the senate conferring the imperial
power on Vespasian: Rienzi had it placed at St. John Lateran, where he had commented

A. A 2
18O
A’O//E.
on it before the assembled populace. An altar to Isis, and a mystic cistus from the
monuments of Egypt and Palmyra, a
ravishing bust of Alexander, and an old
reproduction of the Faun of Praxiteles;
some Etruscan fragments, and a quan-
tity of works from Greece, including
even archaic pasticci, initiate the visitor
into a multitude of forms, schools, prac-
tices. It is in a chamber of this museum
that the Antinois is to be found, the
ideal of sensual beauty. There the bust
of the murderer of Caesar, Marcus
Brutus, a fine, spiritual, marked, and
sombre head, strangely recalling the
features of Armand Carrel; also that
statue, so naturally posed and so well
draped, of a Roman lady, in which with-
out valid reason people have pretended
to recognise, now Agrippina, and now
Domitia. We will only cite, by way of
enumeration, the figures of Flora, the
Amazon, and the infant Hercules whose
club is heavy. -
The inhabitants of Olympus are no
more than the lares of this palace; in
proportion as the great personages of
In AUN AFTER PRAXITELES.
antiquity are resuscitated by the excava-
tions, our popes send them to recruit
the lofty society of the Capitol. How, in the midst of so noble a population, can we help
s
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THE AMAZON.
believing with the contemporaries of Apuleius, with St.
Augustin himself, that the spectres of marble are tenanted
by souls 2 Etiquette has formed two distinct salons: in
one of them the writers and philosophers of Rome give
hospitality to those of Greece; and this areopagus forms
an assembly in which more than eighty celebrities shine.
There you visit Socrates, Seneca, Agrippa, Diogenes, Theo-
phrastus, Apuleius, the architect Posidonius, Demosthenes,
Sophocles, Cato, Thucydides, Antisthenes, Terence, Apol-
lonius of Tyana, Aspasia and Pericles, Archytas, Sappho,
Periander . . . . we cannot cite all of them. In the
middle sits Marcellus the victor of Syracuse; while on the
walls are bas-reliefs: among them a Sacrifice to Hygieia,
marked by Callimachus.
The other salon is consecrated to the august. In this
chamber are gathered together, from Marius whose flat
head is so little Roman, to Decentius Magnus, that brother
of Magnentius, whose ephemeral reign came to so tragic an end on the banks of the
















- Aſ/STOR/CA/, PORTRA/7.S. I 81
Yonne, the various imperial families, who must marvel that they can no longer play at
mutual slaughter. Marius is the mortal to whom flattery has decreed most statues; the
aediles set up one of him in each street of the city, and his ugliness apparently disarmed
envy. For all that, Sulla threw them down. Nero's eyes are treated in a way which
enables us to understand that blinking which Pliny describes, and the fact that his visual
organ was excessively weak; so he conceived the idea of having a flat emerald cut and
polished, through which during the games of the circus he used to watch the contests
of the gladiators.
There are in this hall some unique portraits; women, girls, brothers of emperors, that
are only found here. It is a collection of inestimable value which by familiarising us
with these faces, brings antiquity as close to us as the era of the House of Valois is in
our eyes. Yet by the side of authentic figures, such as those of the first Caesars, and of
princesses such as Messalina, who belies by the beauty of her physiognomy the ugliness
of her repute, or as the first Agrippina, widow of Germanicus, with her hair so strangely
MARIUS. MESSALINA. AGRIPPINA, DAUGHTER OF DRUSUS.
dressed, there has slipped into this chosen assembly more than one unknown, by favour
of a hypothetical name. Lavater would have raised lively objections to an Alcibiades
with a meanly bourgeois physiognomy. The Cicero that they show there is not the true
Cicero. How accept those Democrituses of barbarian mien, who were only perhaps
upstart freedmen 2 For that matter, the designations change from time to time under
certain influences; for instance, the bust of Ctesiphon, which has been chosen by the
Germans to represent the conqueror of Varus, namely, Arminius. The portraits at the
Capitol give occasion to a physiological observation; in proportion as in following the
march of ages we enter those epochs of ruin, in which contest and intrigue excite the
passions and corrupt manners, the faces become seamed and wrinkled. In the first
century of imperial Rome we meet irregular heads full of life, with a mark of distinct
personality.
It does not take very long to come down from a mountain whose summit is not more
than fifty metres above the level of the sea. Lost in the alleys that wind between the

I82 ACOME.
Tiber and the Monte Caprino, which, before the time of Manlius, the goats had already
deserted, I went along full of infatuation at my relations with the celebrities of the
Capitol, when I encountered full front, thinking I was coming out on some passage, a
gallery of ancient beggar women, exhibited with all the symmetry of a hospital ward.
Rome offers these unexpected contrasts at every step. It is at the hospital of La
Consolazione, belonging to the sick of the weaker sex, where a dormitory opens on to a
piazza in direct continuation of a long street; pierced at the extremity, the doors are
wide as those of a church. It was fine weather and they had thrown them entirely open,
so that, from the back of their beds the patients seemed as if they were taking a part in
the life outside. These pensioners continue their residence in the midst of the streets,
with the advantage of having a roof over their heads, a very happily devised arrange-
ment for driving nostalgia away from gossips accustomed from age to age to live on the
public causeway. It is even to the dura-
tion of these habits that we may best
attribute the miserable, unfurnished,
squalid look, and the more than ne-
glected housekeeping in the homes of
the common people; they are mere
niches to sleep in, where nobody is ever
received, and where they never settle
down, all the relations of life being
carried on outside, as in old days they
used to be carried on at the Forum.
For a foreigner coming from the clois-
tered regions of the North, nothing is
more curious than thus to rub skirts
in the street with the inmates of a
hospital; than to see the line of the
houses continued right and left by a
perspective of truckle-beds, and nurses
and dying attending to their business
without a thought of the passer-by.
A cart or a horse left to themselves by
an absent driver could have gone down
this dormitory without any hindrance.
This encounter put it into my head to explore the charitable establishments of Rome, and
to inform myself about the benevolent institutions of a State which is ruled by a
sovereign priest who goes down on his knees before the poor to wash their feet. The
object of such a study struck me as a touchstone, from the point of view of evangelical
sentiment, as well as of pontifical administration.
ROMAN LADY", TAKEN FOR THE FIRST AGRIPPINA.
VI.
Two Catholic countries, Italy and France, possess the distinction of having preceded
other nations in the foundation of hospitals. Our first bishops opened refuges; the
crusades multiplied throughout Gaul the hospices with which some provinces were

CA/AR/TAP//' ESTABLISH///EMTS. 183
already endowed: but Rome was the first to organize and develop genuinely special
institutions. Rome has long applied most of those perfections, reputed modern, of
which the honour is claimed by democracies where we go in search of what they learnt
from the Eternal City. It does not enter into our plan to institute an elaborate study
of the nineteen hospitals of Rome, that overbounding hospitality which relieves the sick
poor from the necessity of seeking protection and attendance, and which saves them from
being refused at the gate if they are foreigners or friendless, a piece of administrative
barbarity which still remains the shame of the whole of France. Only, before paying a
visit to San Spirito, the most considerable of them, I will make a note of the foundations
most characteristic of the country, with their dates; for this information will astonish
more than one reader.
THE HOSPITAL OF ST. MICHAEL.
As you enter Rome by the Porta Portese, situated at the southern extremity of the
Janiculum, you leave to the right the Tiber and the vast hospital of St. Michael, which
occupies at Ripa Grande, a port constructed by Innocent XII., part of the site of the
Prata Mutia. It is here that legend places the camp of Porsenna and the royal tent where
Mutius Scaevola thrust his hand into the flame. St. Michael is a reformatory for young
prisoners, combined with a conservatory of industrial craft and the fine arts, while they
also receive into it the poor, the aged, the infirm, of both sexes. Four hundred assisted
children are collected there, formed by the most skilful masters, and kept until the age of
twenty-one, when the lads, provided with a position, go away with full purses, and the

184 A&OME.
girls receive a dower of a hundred crowns. One of the branches of the instruction here
testifies to an elevated and liberal spirit; if special vocation invites any of these aban-
doned and indigent orphans to somewhat higher destiny than an ordinary trade the best
painters, celebrated composers, and renowned singers, will come and teach the disin-
herited little ones of St. Michael. The most famous names of Italy have given lessons
there since the reign of Innocent XI., Clement XI., and Pius VI., who developed the
institution founded by Odescalchi in 1689. It was from St. Michael that the illustrious
engravers Mercuri and Calamatta came. Now speak to our municipal councillors of
organizing in the hospitals, for the profit of the deserted children, a school to turn them
into artists, and you will speedily see how the prudery of solid good sense will receive
you. As far as regards the reformatory section, let me give place to an administrator,
whose authority will seem conclusive. Charged by our Government, in 1839, with the
task of reporting on Italian prisons, an inspector-general whom we can hardly suspect,
for he belonged to the Israelitish religion, wrote in his report thus: “ The reformatory is
part of Rome where Clement XI. had constructed, in 1703, after the designs of Charles
Fontana, an enormous house of correction for young prisoners. The correctional system
is Christian and Catholic; it had its birth with the monasteries, and a pope baptized it at
the moment when he introduced it into the world. America did not discover it nor
perfect it, but borrowed it from Ghent, which had taken it from Milan and Rome. Yes,
it was from Rome that the movement started which manifests itself to-day in the two
worlds; it was Rome who established the first cellular house, and who applied simul-
taneously absolute isolation and partial isolation. It was a pope who, with his own hand,
drew up the first regulations of a house of correction.” And M. Cerfbeer logically
concluded that if this reformation “was to be consistent with its origin, it must be
essentially Christian in order to be salutary.’
Let us come to other miseries to which society is held bound to give assistance.
Ever since 1770, long before Vienna, which passes for having taken the initiative,
Rome established a lying-in hospital for indigent women, the hospital of St. Roch at
Ripetta, where all women near their term are received without even any inquiry as to
their name; they may even, if necessities of situation demand it, present themselves
veiled before the Prioress and make their home in the hospital long previous to their
delivery.
Under the influence of a beneficent empress, Paris has at last just created two conva-
lescent asylums for patients prematurely discharged from the hospital. With what good
reason have people applauded this charitable novelty, of which the English had already
given an example in 1791. La Trinita de' Pellegrini, at Rome, has the same object.
Now this St. Philip Neri founded in 1551, and since then Sixtus V., Innocent XII., and
the last three bearers of the name of Pius, have developed the work, which goes on with
regularity. When a patient comes out of the San Spirito or the San Salvatore (females),
the conveyance devoted by each hospital to the purpose takes them to the home for
convalescents. But though the churching of women may be put off, there are workmen
without work and without advances, exposed to absolute want while they seek a situation.
This necessity has been foreseen, and there exists a great agency, working with an
almonry which has its office at the Vatican, and where are enrolled for the public works
the names of unemployed labourers, who have distributed to them either payment in
advance or secret relief. This service is hierarchically organized; the sub-officers who
direct it are, with the exception of the inspectors, chosen among the workmen; and
CAHAA"/7AAPL E. ESTAA/E/SH///EZVZ.S. 185
nothing can be more paternal than the foresight which has presided over these arrange-
ments. In Paris and in London there exist hideous dens, the haunts of nocturnal
prowlers, where for a trifling payment they gain a night's shelter; these sinks of abject
vice have been stigmatized not by moralists but by romance writers, and the English
men of letters have driven the State to institute a certain supervision. So great an
evil and so great a peril for the society against which these agglomerations are a standing
conspiracy, was anticipated in Rome as far back as the seventeenth century, when Marc'
Antonio Odelcaschi opened night refuges for the unsheltered poor. He used to seek
them in the winter evenings through the street and take them in his own carriage to the
hospice prepared for them, in which he succeeded in placing sometimes as many as six
hundred. Their rags and their shoes were repaired; they found bed, fire, soup, and
spiritual instruction. Things still go on so at Santa Gallicana in the Trastevere, a
hospital devoted to diseases of the skin, and where the poor are received up to half-past
eight. It contains two hundred and twenty-four beds in five dormitories, of which one,
furnished with eleven beds, is set apart for poor clerics. Received by the almoners,
these homeless people are kept so long as they are without a domicile; they are
catechized, they are preached to, they have edifying stories read to them, and in this
way the collection of a multitude that might easily become morally gangrened, ends in
the purification of the most unfortunate of classes. Father Galizzi, a hundred and fifty
years ago established an analogous home for women. As we see, the least rich quarter
is that in which charity most abounds; as you approach the Ponte Sisto, and from there
pass in review the dens heaped one over another by the hands of wretchedness, in the
ruins of buildings whose age is beyond finding, you feel with horror the terrible evils
which must lurk among those strange coverts, sometimes picturesque as the buildings of
old Cairo. It is further off, at La Lungara, that we find the hospital for the insane,
St. Mary of Pity. This fine establishment dates from 1548, and is therefore the senior
of all institutions of this kind in Europe. * -
It remained to extend public benevolence to the poor who will not, if they are ill, leave
their children, wife, or mother, and who, surrounded by the attention of the family, are
not left in want either of physic or physician. Innocent XII. instituted for them the
Apostolic Almonry, by which he divided the entire city into eleven Visits or sections.
Each of them embraces several of the fifty-four parishes of Rome, and directed by an
ecclesiastical visitor, has its own physician, surgeon, and apothecaries. To receive
assistance, it is enough to give notice to the neighbouring curé, whence a ticket trans-
mitted to the dispensary of the quarter sets the doctor instantly to work. Such
establishments give a very high idea, not only of the generosity of the government to
the poor, but of the liberal charity of Roman society. This liberality is enormous, and
it has not, as with us, the stimulant of réclames; the patrimony of the poor still rises to
upwards of four million francs of annual revenue. And I leave aside institutions such as
the Commission of Relief which, being directed, under the presidency of a cardinal, by
members chosen for six years and divided into twelve districts, distributes among the
necessitous, in order to lighten the miseries of the shamefast, linen, bedding, furniture,
tools, to the amount of more than sixty thousand crowns a year, furnished by the
Apostolic Chamber. Pawnbroking establishments were started in the fifteenth century
by Father Barnabas of Terni, with a view of rescuing small dealings from the clutch of
Jewish usurers; a savings-bank has been established; finally the lottery which Benedict
XIII. abolished, and which his successor found himself forced to restore, to hinder the
IB B
I86 A’O.]/E.
people from taking their money to the neighbouring states; the lottery in which lots
were augmented by eighty per cent., and the profits of which by a brief of Benedict XIV.
had to be exclusively spent for the benefit of the poor, expends in alms 4,500
crowns a year, and 3,500 crowns for dowering orphans—an extenuating circumstance
in connection with the institution, especially if the regulations are conscientiously
followed.
NEST OF HOUSES ON THE BANKs of THE TIBER (TRAstEveRE).
I have reserved what concerns the ordinary object of charitable establishments, the
treatment of the patients and the administration of the numerous hospitals. The most
considerable is that of the San Spirito, which contains also a refuge for foundlings, a
very old creation of the evangelical charity of the popes, for it goes back as far as
the twelfth century, four hundred and fifty years before anything of the same kind was
thought of in France under the influence of St. Vincent de Paul, who had seen the
establishment in Rome, and that in Florence, which had been established in the fifteenth
century.

THE SAAW SAE/R/TO. 187
It was in I 198 that, as he was walking on the banks of the Tiber, Innocent III. came
upon a fisherman who had just brought up in his net three dead infants. Keenly moved,
the Holy Father immediately had established on a barge contiguous to the hospital of
San Spirito, which he had just instituted, a movable turning box lined with a mattress,
in which they might at any hour place abandoned children; at the same time he
forbade, under severe penalties, all inquiry as to who placed them there. The children
are kept at San Spirito till they are old enough to be sent to the asylum at Viterbo, where
they are taught a trade. At seventeen they receive enough to live upon for a year.
The girls are the object of a still more paternal solicitude. We cannot either too much
admire, or too warmly praise, or be too much struck, as we recognise that Rome has
constantly directed the Christian world in the path of charity; if religion has truth for its
basis, that was bound to be so, and the thing being so, to state it becomes a duty.
On the banks of the Tiber adjoining the Vatican, in the place where the Gauls and
Germans who were brought by Vitellius perished of fever, and sought according to
Tacitus in the waters of the stream a disastrous relief from the summer heats, here is
the hospital of San Spirito. I have no intention of describing this vast establishment. It
is situated on the abrupt corner which separates the Vatican hill from the northern
extremity of the Janiculum, where it occupies a triangle as large as a small town.
Marchione of Arezzo, Bacio Pintelli, San Gallo, perhaps even Palladio, worked suc-
cessively at this charitable construction. To establish it, Innocent III. chose a site
already consecrated by a Saxon king, who in 717 set up there a hospitium for his
countrymen, and hence the name of San Spirito in Sassia, which the house still bears.
The bull of foundation bears date 1198.
The buildings completed, the pope brought from France to undertake the administra-
tion Guy of Montpellier, with some brothers of the hospitallers of the Holy Ghost founded
by him. This choice of a French order to baptize and manage the pontifical foundation
is a testimony to the development at that distant time of our charitable institutions.
Completed and enlarged by the sovereign pontiffs, the hospital of the San Spirito has at
its disposal 1,600 beds for fever and other patients, divided into twelve wards and sepa-
rated in classes corresponding to the nature of the disorder. One of these wards, built
by Pintelli, is 380 feet long by nearly 50 feet high ; such is the breadth of this nave,
that six rows of beds allow passage between them by five long avenues. With San
Spirito are connected an anatomy theatre, a clinical School, an enormous medical library,
a historical collection of surgical instruments, a dispensary, and an admirably arranged
dissecting room. Let us observe that the anatomical studies of which the analysis of the
human body is the base received due honour here under the intelligent authority of the
spiritual sovereigns, while in Protestant countries the prejudices of a narrow religiosity
have placed and still place obstacles in the way of labours of the highest utility to
mankind.
It is proper to bring out the universal and liberally catholic character of the institu-
tion. Whilst in other kingdoms a patient has to satisfy a host of conditions to be, not
admitted, but admissible, into a hospital, at San Spirito whoever suffers is received and
tended, whatever the position, the country, the age, or the creed of the patient. Is not
Rome then after all the spiritual father-land of all nations 2 The service is admirably
organized; the establishment is directed by two professors, four physicians, and two
surgeons, each having assistants compelled to reside in the hospital, while the number
of permanent attendants exceed one hundred and fifty. The mortality at San Spirito is
B B 2
I 88 A’OME.
only from nine to ten per cent., and in point of salubrity no hospital is better off.
Ornament mingles with utility. These magnificent wards are decorated with paintings;
thrice a week there are performances on the great organ in the refectory; various
brotherhoods and pious laymen come bringing to the sick a few permitted comforts, as
well as the amusement of their conversation. St. Camille of Lellis was one of the most
assiduous attendants in the spiritual clinic. Such institutions of charity truly recall that
Roman greatness of which they are an evangelical transformation.
One of the practices in which the intelligent civilization of Italy and of Rome especi-
ally seems to me to make its best mark, is that which from time immemorial multiplies on
the walls of buildings interesting and instructive inscriptions; the past ages thus still
speak for ever, and remote descendants listen to the voice of their ancestors. To supply a
monograph of San Spirito, it would be enough to walk round it and copy its history from
the marble. These lapidary archives, although they may sometimes have been abused
|
PLAZZA OF THE CAPITOL GALLERY OF ANTIQUES.
by personal vanity, endow the city with a soul and spiritual life which help to attach
newcomers to the fatherland of us all.
As I left the hospital, following the extremity of the everlasting Via Lungara, which
begins at La Farnesina and ends at San Spirito, I stopped to make out against the chapel
wall situated in the line of the street, one of those inscriptions which has escaped
travellers, and which is as curious as it is little known –
D. O. M.
BERNARDINO PASSERIO
JULII II LEONIS X ET CLEMENTIS
VII PONTTT MAXXX AURIFICI
AC GEMMARIO PRESTANTISS”
QUI CUM IN SACRO BELLO PRO
PATRIA IN PROX" JANIC. PARTE

CHAR/TABLE ESTABLISHMEWTS. 189
HOSTIUM PLUREIS PUGNANS
OCCIDISSET ATQUE ADVERSO
MILITI VEXII.LUM ABSTULISSET FOR-
TITER OCCUBUIT PER N. MAſ oo DXXVII
V. A. XXXVII. M. VI. D. XI.
JACOBUS ET OCTAVIANUS PASSERII
FRATREs PATRI AMANTIss" PosueRE.
This inscription adds a flower to the basket of the jewellers of the Italian middle age,
those artisans of genius who from the stalls of the Ponte Vecchio arose as painters,
sculptors, architects, poets, and engineers; the jeweller Orgagna, who made bridges,
fortresses, and paintings, was also soldier upon occasion. This Bernard Passerius
or Passier, the jeweller of three popes, who during the assault of Rome in 1527 came
and fought valiantly for the country at the foot of the Janiculum behind the church
of the San Spirito, up to which the Leonine wall then extended, perished about a
thousand yards from the breach in which the Constable Bourbon fell, in the same age, the
same day assuredly, and the same hour probably; for the assault at this decisive point
was short and terrible. He was some artist of heart and talent, and the humble familiar
of two great sovereigns, but his heroic end for a holy cause has not saved his name from
oblivion.
INTERIOR OF THE CHURCH OF SANTA MARIA IN ARA COELI.
CHAPTER IX.
Tarpeian Rock.-Jupiter and Santa Maria in Ara Coeli.-The Bambino.—Appearance and costumes at Christmas;
the Pifferari, etc.—Church of the Capitol.—Antiquity of family chapels.-St. Bernardin of Sienna and the
frescoes of Pinturicchio.—Legends of the island of the Tiber.—Esculapius and St. Bartholomew.—Roman
medicine in the time of Cato.—Apostolic miniature.-Crèche on the summit of a tower.—Raphael and the
fable of Psyche at the Farnesina.- Galatea and her cortége.—The Corsini gallery.—Ercole Grandi and his
namesake.-L'Ortolano ; his adventure and his portrait.—Public library of the palace.—Mission of the
Roman princes; results of nepotism.—Visit to the Villa Pamphili Doria.-Assault of our troops at the
gate of San Pancrazio.
LTHOUGH the Capitoline promontory, looking on the Tiber and the Palatine,
is nearly to its top scaled by houses of tolerable height, the Tarpeian rock has
not disappeared; to see it quite close you have to go by the lane of Torre
de’ Specchi, in front of a religious house, which depends upon St. Francesca
Romana. There, under the escarped terraces of the hill, opens an irregular court,
encumbered with old buildings, sheds, pent-houses, which seem to carry on their roofs the
little gardens of this point of lugubrious memory. The rock, of which the citadel
followed the outlines, is porous and of a dark shade, being a tufa like that of the
Tullianum. It bounds abruptly on the plateau the garden of the old Caffarelli Palace,


THE 7AA&PE/AAW ROCK. I9 I
whence the eye can measure above plenty of other ruins, the ruins of a precipice so deep
that by jumping down one would be perfectly sure to break one's bones. It was there
that in old times ingratitude and envy used to launch into eternity the great men who
had done too much for their country, and genius that was too embarrassing for the ruling
mediocrity. The anſractuosities of this aerial cemetery of glory are scented with yellow
violets and rose-coloured gillyflowers.
Seen from a slight distance the rock by no means discloses its size, because it is
masked ; but in entering at the back of the Hospital della Consolazione, in a lane which
comes out upon the Via Bocca della Verita, you measure better the real height of the
Tarpeian rock, with one or two cavities in it, and veined with sewers of an indefinite age.
One of the houses perched upon this rock was inhabited a few years ago by the lamented
Ampère, whence he used to contemplate the historic horizons of ancient Rome. Although
the grounds of the Velabrum and the neighbouring quarters have since the time of Sulla
been raised by forty-two feet, the Tarpeian rock is less changed in appearance than
might be supposed. In his description of the siege of the citadel by the partisans of
Vitellius, who wished to recover it from the soldiers of Sabinus, and who set fire to it,
Tacitus represents the besiegers as climbing ‘the hundred steps which separate the
sacred wood of refuge from the Tarpeian rock,” and he adds that the soldiers mounted
to the fortress ‘by the roofs of houses, which owing to a long peace, had been built
close to the walls, so high that they reached the level of the Capitol.” If this description
dated from yesterday we should think it exaggerated.
It seems that at this epoch the destruction of the Capitol did not spare the cedar-wood
statue of Jupiter, which Pliny saw, and which from the year 661 preserved the citadel,
since the audacity of the Gauls and the Germans waxed greater from the superstitious
conviction that the gods were abandoning Rome. “In other times,” said their Druids,
“we took it, but Jupiter was still standing. Now he delivers to us the impious who have
ruined his temple, and the sovereignty of the world is about to pass to the transalpine
nations.” Then to put an end to these prophecies Vespasian made haste to have the
temple as well as the Castrum rebuilt, under the direction of Lucius Vestinus, on the same
spot and the same plan. On a bright day, the eleventh before the calends of July, the
enclosure was marked out with fillets and garlands, and they introduced within it soldiers
with auspicious names, bearing green branches agreeable to the divinities. Pontiffs,
senators, magistrates, plebeians, harnessed themselves to the cables of the first stone,
which was enormous; into the foundations they cast medals of gold and silver and metal
which the fire had never mastered. Only they gave greater height to the walls of the
temple, because the old one was too crushed in its proportions.
To find the immortally consecrated site of the building let us gain the other summit
of the Capitol.
II.
This mound of about sixty metres is loftier in glory than the Himalaya. The kings
of gods and men have come one after another to it, ever since the days of the fabled
Saturn, who dwelt in it and planted a people there. Romulus there opened a refuge;
Tarpeia, the daughter of his lieutenant, gave her name to the rock; the first Tarquin
I92 A’O///Z.
there dug up the head which the name of the Capitol commemorates; the second
installed Jupiter there. Camillus, after the retreat of the Gauls, restored the citadel,
and surrounded it with walls flanked by square dungeons; Sulla rebuilt in Parian marble
the temple of the sacred hill; Vespasian did over again on a larger scale the work of
Sulla; Domitian enriched his father's building, and had modelled in massive gold a
FRONTAGE OF SANTA MARIA IN ARA C CELI.
statue of the god. It was here that the pontiffs used to sacrifice, and here the triumphant
generals used to ascend. The era of polytheism coming to an end, when the temple had
given way to a church dedicated to the Virgin Mother, they took for its embellishment,
even from imperial palaces, granite columns from Egypt, precious capitals, bas-reliefs
from Greece, and they heaped up mosaic and gold work, finally consummating the task
of three centuries. Michelangelo erected, to ascend to this new Capitol, a flight of one
hundred and sixty stairs of white marble, made of blocks torn away from the palaces, the

“To Llavo ſa H L &ſovIſI vix v.L.N.vs do sãº：Ls Lvºſioſ º HL “11， po vivos ſi H.L.

CHA-ZSTMAS CUSTOMS. * I 93
baths, the basilicas of the Julii, and the generations trod upon the histories of the heroic
ages engraved on these steps in Greek and Latin characters. For what imposing rites
and august mysteries is the soul prepared, as one climbs by the celestial staircase (Scala
Caeli), that Olympian height of the two Romes eternally consecrated Diis majoribus when
Jupiter 2,620 years ago already succeeded Saturn l Now listen to what was given me
to see there one Christmas feast.
A whole population was going up ; the sun shed his rays over the bare front, the
same sun who had seen thus coming up AEmilius Paulus, the Scipios, Marius, Caesar,
and the long procession of the Emperors. Thus the steps of the Ara Coeli were
ascended in their turn by this Roman people which inherits an immortal name. Where
find hierophants to answer to such memories 2 -
The crowd flocked round two Capuchins who, in front of a small theatre arranged as a
chapel, exhibited paper cuttings of a landscape peopled with little figures of wax covered
with tinsel. Before this childish vision of nature, St. Joseph, the Madonna with the
shepherds, and a consul representing Rome, came to adore the Bambino, a doll of
painted wood clad with regal magnificence, for it receives gifts and legacies, and wears
precious stones worth from two to three hundred thousand crowns. That is what they
admire on the top of the Capitol. What they hear there, is it the voice of the oracles
that ruled the destinies of the world P -
Against a pillar of the church,-a block of granite brought in the time of Augustus
from the kingdoms of Cleopatra,-on a table covered with red serge is perched up a little
girl between six and seven years old, with hair still blonde. She gesticulates before the
company of the faithful, and her little voice is strained in declamation ; she preaches a
homily on the birth of the Child-god ; her attitude, her utterance, that art of imitation so
natural to the Italians, constitute a perfect aping of the preacher. Exclamations,
invectives, oratorical transitions, pathetic bits, nothing is wanting. Sometimes the little
amateur stops short; then her kinsfolk whose honour is at stake, encourage and stimulate
her. A motley crowd—people of the world, peasants, townspeople, soldiers, priests,
young monks, scholars of all colours—listen with entire gravity to the eulogy of the
infant Jesus pronounced by children. This crèche in a puppet-show with wax figures
and all sorts of gewgaws, these preachers a single lustre old, lisping on a trestle in a
nest of Capuchins—there is the Capitol on the day of a solemnity. By the side of such
practices, with what majesty do we invest the ancient annals of the Capitol, of their
supreme pontiffs, of their sacrifices; and those curule dignities loftier than thrones,
ascending to the temple of Jupiter to adjure or question their immortal gods !
Let us picture Rome invaded by a plague, besieged by Gauls, menaced by Hannibal.
It is needful to turn aside the wrath of heaven, declared by a crowd of portents. As the
land is in danger, consuls would not be enough to appease Jupiter, the best and the
mightiest; a dictator is necessary. They name a dictator. Then, escorted by the Flamen
Dialis, by the augurs, by the Fetiales, followed by his master of the horse, by tribunes, by
aediles, by the senate, and accompanied by the whole population, this absolute sovereign
ascends to the Capitol; he crosses the threshold of Jupiter, and to put an end to the
public calamities, he accomplishes in person an infallible ceremony. Directing his course
towards the side of the monument, ‘which looks to the temple of Pallas,” the dictator, to
whom they have given a hammer, plants in the wall with profound solemnity a large nail.
After this, the disasters of fate being conjured away, the supreme chief resigns a power
which had only been conferred upon him “for fixing the nail.’
C C
I94 A’OME.
Now does not the infatuation for the virtues of the Bambino and for all the bambineries
of the crèche, seem quite as justifiable as all this? Between opposing superstitions, where
are we to place the wisdom of a true religious sentiment P Such reflections, which with
us will seem natural, would not be understood beyond the Alps, where you run some risk,
if you show any of this perplexity, of passing not only for a free-thinker, which would be
no more than the suspicion of a weakness, but for a depraved person. For throughout
Christmas week each church has its day
of pious diversion, of cradles, and of
infantine preaching. The workmen take
holiday; people run from one parish to
another; the city is in a most joyful
bustle. Rome is probably the only
place in the world in the present day
where the birth and resurrection of
Christ are occasions of national re-
joicing.
III.
The signal is given by the shepherds,
who at the approach of winter come
down from the Abruzzi and other moun-
tains, in memory of those who quitted
their flocks in Palestine to follow a star
to the stable where the Son of David
was newly born. During Advent and
until after Christmas the pifferari play
on the hautboy, on the hurdy-gurdy,
and the bagpipes, and dance saltarellas
before the Madonnas in the streets, a
form of popular worship which replaces
the open-air altars of paganism.
Everybody knows the costume of these
musicians; it is found even in the
frescoes and the mosaics of the four-
teenth century. Christmas finished,
the Carnival will bring mandolines and
gay singers, who carry on nocturnal
serenades; there are among these pipers some so clever and with such true instruments,
that in the hands of a virtuoso they produce the effect of a violin. The heats of the
violent season reduce these birds to silence; but in the evenings of September, choirs
of song rise out of the silent obscurity of the streets.
This digression brings us back to the best feted saint in the Capitoline Church, to the
Bambino, for whom the pifferari form a procession when he makes his visits in a gala-
coach, which was acquired by the Franciscans in a singular enough manner. In 1848,
THE BAMBINO.

THE BAMB/yo. I95
the people having set to work to burn the pope's carriages, one of the triumvirs bethought
him, in order to save the finest, of making a present of it to the Bambino. On his return
Pius IX. had some scruples about taking back what had been offered to God. The
Bambino, cut from a block of cedar by a monk of the sixteenth century, is transported in
his royal equipage to the bed of the sick, who send for him when medicine has no power.
Only he is not moved while the exhibition of the crèche lasts, and when the first day of the
year comes, it is the sick who set off to convey him their homage. At the feast of the
Epiphany, when the shepherds of the cradle have taken off their dress only to be decked
up in the livery of the Magian kings, towards four o'clock the Bambino is taken in
procession to the church of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli by a dignitary, who then, coming
out with the mitre on his brow and advancing on to the platform, of which the steps are
crammed with a compact crowd, elevates above his head the Bambino, all covered with
gold and precious stones, and shows it to the kneeling populace. The bishop next turns
to the left part of the parapet, a terrace from which the temple of Jupiter used to
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command the Intermontium, and again shows the sacred puppet to the mass of people on
the place of the Capitol round the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, whose rather
astonished air seems on such a day tolerably easy to explain. The ceremony is not
edifying for us from the north, yet the faith of the spectators gives it a certain interest.
What augments its effect is the singularity of the façade at the foot of which the ſunzione
is performed. On the top of the immense staircase of antique marbles, where inscriptions
may be deciphered, this lofty side of brick wall with its three small doors has an austerity
which is all the more striking, as the masonry of the eleventh century seems perched over
rich architecture and over masses of green trees and flowering bindweed. Such, since
the loss of its mosaics, is the façade of the temple which succeeds to the sanctuary of
Jupiter Capitolinus; it has the poverty of the mendicant orders, and its brown hue recalls
their livery.
For all this, the popular instinct associates the church with the greatness of the place;
hence its popularity. The humblest workman of the Suburra will tell you that the

C C 2
196 A’O//E.
nineteen columns of Egyptian granite dividing the three aisles come from the temple of
Jupiter; but this assertion is belied by Plutarch, who says they were of pentelican
marble, for he had seen them. Livy informs us that Jupiter, like the modern Madonna,
was hung over with votive offerings; the year 178 before our era, “the censor Lepidus
had scraped, whitened, and repolished the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, as well as its
colonnades, and they profited by the occasion to clear the pillars of the mass of trophies
and votive shields which obstructed them, as well as the peristyle, which was encum-
bered with a whole population of statues.’ They were probably figures of wood or
of stone of Albano, and a few perhaps of bronze, brought home from the wars; for
works in marble were still rare, and it was not until the year 572 of Rome that the first
gilded statue ever seen was inaugurated;
the decemvir Acilius Glabrio had dedicated
one to his father.
All shows that to build up the bric-à-
brac of antiquity called the Ara Coeli at a
distant and undeterminate period, for the
first known dedication dates from the
year 595, they dug among a quantity of
ruins, which makes this church strangely
furnished, hybrid, and curious. Different
in module, the columns do not present
three capitals that are alike ; one of them,
above the third column to the left as you
enter by the great nave, bears on the
abacus this equivocal inscription, though
the characters seem ancient enough :
E CVBICVLo Avg. Gilded with gold taken
from the Turks at the battle of Lepanto,
the church is richly paved, but the border-
ings, in opus A/exandrinum, are reduced to
patches by the profusion of sculptured
tombstones; those of the fourteenth cen-
tury, which abound in relief, are so nume-
rous, that in going through the church one
is caught at every step. These reclining
figures, which replace under your eyes in
the churches the society that once frequented them, render them more animated. The
Temple of the Ara Coeli is a veritable museum. It would take too long to enumerate all;
but we cannot pass over, towards the top of the lower aisle on the right, the tombs of the
Savelli from 1260 to 1306. That of Pope Honorius IV. and the monument raised to his
father present a small model of the frontage of a Pisan church, in the style of San
Miniato; adorned with rosettes and bands of mosaic, the little temple is of marble, and
is an authentic work of Arnolfo. This Pope Honorius, who reposes among his kinsfolk,
is a fine figure that the trumpets of the last day will not awake without trouble, in such
deep slumber is it plunged. The tiara of 1290, by its rudimentary shape, adds still
further to the verisimilitude of this repose, for it is like a cotton night-cap. There
reposes, too, the first pope of the house of Savelli, Honorius III., who, in 1216, succeeded
PRINCIPAL DOOR OF THE ARA COELI.

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SAMTA MAR/A //W AAA COE/./. I 97
Innocent III. ; this chapel belonged to the family. The great houses of Rome thus
possessed Sacella and churches of which they had the patronage. How far we must go
back to find the origin of this custom Long before the Christian era, in the metropolis
of the world that was become a city of temples, each patrician family had its privileged
gods, whom it already honoured with a building for its own glorification, and where after
triumphs it deposited bas-reliefs, the arms that had been won, vases beyond price,
statues, spoils from Greece, and the images of ancestors. Other times and another
worship have permitted the same manners to survive.
Let us not forget near the pulpits, which are of the twelfth century, and which are
remarkable, a tombstone set against the wall, which must oblige the Queen Catherine of
Bosnia to sleep standing, widow of that
King Stephen whom Mahomet II. had
flayed alive; nor, in a chapel to the left,
the mausoleum of Philip of Valla, a
Florentine monument of rare delicacy.
The two weeping genii who bear the
scutcheons, the reclining statue, the
arabesques of the lower part, are treated
with a master-hand. At the bottom of
the nave close to the door, the chapel
of the Bufalini, at the invitation of St.
Bernardin of Sienna, was decorated by
Pinturicchio with frescoes which ought
to be fixed upon as among the finest
inspirations of this genius: the death of
the saint, who has had himself laid out in
a bier, where he expires in the midst of his
religious comrades, is a most skilful com-
position. This master already attained
a style without sacrificing sentiment: it
is enough to enable us to recognise him,
merely to raise our eyes to the evan-
gelists who are painted on the four
compartments of the vault. Camuccini
has restored both with talent and discre-
cretion these precious paintings, at which one of the most illustrious artists of a great
epoch had worked with love and humility, though knowing well that they would be ill-
lighted. Yet one ends by making them out by favour of the brightness of morning, and
I have sometimes found an opportunity on my way to the hospitable library of the minor
brothers of St. Francis, installed in the convent, which seems to hold itself nicely
balanced at the back of the Capitoline slope. You enter by a charming doorway, which
admits you to the church as well. I recall wide corridors with ogival vaults tinted with
pale gleams of light, along which one would summon the shade of a St. Bruno ; as well
as a cloister in two tiers, austere, of fine style, which has an air of a Thebaid, three
paces away from the Capitol and its museums. The convent, at the time of the jubilee
of 1450, when St. Bernardin of Sienna was canonised, received in general chapter
three thousand brethren from the houses founded by this blessed patron.
ºmiſſ
ENTRANCE TO THE CONVENT OF THE ARA COELI.

198 A’O//E.
I was doomed in this spot, where it is maintained that Augustus, upon the revelation
of an oracle, raised an altar to ‘the unknown God born of a virgin –I was doomed here
to see nothing but puerilities, such as the cradle, the Bambino, and infantine preachers.
One morning, as I was present at low mass, when two persons were to communicate,
as the priest took the holy sacrament out of the tabernacle, and so long as the host
was exposed to the sight of the faithful, a good lady who had brought her dog to worship,
held its head reverentially hidden under her shawl. The holy ciborium restored to the
tabernacle, without discontinuing her prayers she restored her dog to liberty. Surely a
great respect for holy things, and a great tolerance too! In Paris, a peevish sacristan,
or a Swiss dressed like a colonel, would
| have hastened to expel the cur with all
the solemnity of an exorcism and the
violence of an affair of police.
IV.
The Tiber, which is rapid, large,
and deep, divides into two arms in the
midst of Rome, and thus leaves an isle
which is tolerably populous; you reach
it by a bridge of stone, built by Fabri-
cius, under the Republic; you leave it
by the Ponte Cestio, that Valentinian,
Valens, and Gratian constructed, to
come out upon the right bank, where
is that Trasteverine quarter which Ancus
Martius fortified against the Etruscans.
In the present day the bridge of Fabri-
cius is called Quattro Capi, because
they have kept at the extremity of its
parapet a couple of Hermes with four
faces, which in old days held the
balusters of bronze. As for the foot-
bridge of Gratian, it is now the
bridge of St. Bartholomew, a title borrowed from the adjoining church, of which we
shall say a few words, after observing that Rome possesses four ancient bridges, the
oldest of which, the Ponte Rotto, was finished under the censorship of Scipio Africanus,
and that this city furnished the model of all the stone bridges constructed in the
ancient world. St. Bartholomew replaces, at what may be called the stern of the
island, a temple to Æsculapius, erected in the year 401 of Rome, an age already
respectable; but the isle itself is a historical monument of a more remote century. Its
formation, according to a legend mixed up with history, would go back to the expulsion
of the Tarquins.
The heats of summer and its glorious nights had ripened the harvests of Tarquinius
Superbus, when he was driven out; his vast fields comprised all the space that after-
* WIDE coRRIDors WITH OGIVAL VAULTS.”

J. EG EVDS OF THE 7//?/ER/WE / SLAND. I99
wards became the Campus Martius, and where is now the city of the popes. After the
despot was banished, the people gathered the harvest from his lands and bound it in
sheaves, and then with a sudden horror of the heritage of an impure race, they cast them
into the Tiber, whose waters were then low. The sheaves thus became heaped together
in the middle of the stream on a sand-bank, where they sprouted, and where, packed one
upon another, they formed an obstacle to the current which enveloped the cumulus with
mud, on which vegetation fastened and which has since been surrounded by a rampart of
stone. Some time after, when fevers were depopulating the city, the senate, in obedience
to a sibylline oracle, sent presents to the temple of Epidaurus, and the priests of the god
handed to the ten deputies from Rome, charged to bring back AEsculapius, a live lizard
that had come out of the sanctuary, to
the possession of which health and sº sº |
healing belonged. - -*: º |
On the return from the Pelopon- *||
nesus, the ships of the Romans ascended
the Tiber as far as the promontory of
our islet, where it proceeded to moor.
As they were preparing to disembark
the serpent, attracted by the smell of
the earth, it slipped away like a thread
of water from the fingers that held it,
and glided among the rushes, where it
disappeared from sight. The spot was
therefore consecrated to Æsculapius, and
they built a temple to him on it; more-
over, to recall this event and the embassy,
consolidating the ground at that end of
the island by massive facings of traver-
tine, they gave them the form of the
stern of a vessel, which is still pre-
served, and they sculptured on it a lizard,
which the flowing of the water has not
yet defaced. Some pretend even that
a hospital was erected there at the same
time, but there is nothing to support WELL OF THE CONVENT OF THE ARA COELI.
this assertion. However, it is the case
that for two or three centuries this sanctuary of Æsculapius has been flanked by two
hospices dedicated to St. Bartholomew, to whom his martyrdom in Armenia in the
year 71 procures the honour of being the patron of lepers; we know that the apostle
of Lycaonia and of India was flayed alive.
The foundation of a hospital in the Island of the Tiber in times half fabulous, close to
the Temple of Æsculapius, is rendered very improbable by this reflection, that we can
barely conceive the idea of a sanitary establishment without the assistance of medicine.
Now the Romans for a very long time admitted no other panacea than the clemency of
the gods; Rome had existed for five centuries and a half, when a skilful man from
Peloponnesus, Archagathus, son of Lycanias, came and established himself there to
practise medicine. Cassius Hemina informs us that they gave him the right of citizenship
º

2OO A’OJ/E.
with quarters in the Acilian street, but as he employed the knife and fire to wounds, the
people conceived an aversion both for surgery and surgeon. Although Dionysius of
Halicarnassus mentions at the time of the 82nd Olympiad a plague which threw the Roman
practitioners into despair, it is more rational to conjecture with Pliny that in the first
centuries medical science ranked among the Greek arts which were disdained by Roman
gravity. He adds, that for nearly six hundred years the whole physic of the Romans
consisted of the use of cabbages, and that Cato knew no other specific. Pompeius
prepared an advance in this experimental science by having translated the books of
medicine which were found in the palace of Mithridates, and by protecting an asclepiad
of a school opposed to that of Hippocrates; he was a Bithynian, and undertook to cure
ſuſo, celeriter eſ ſucunde. What could be
more attractive 2. It was among the
formularies of Mithridates, who had
infallible remedies against all poisons,
that they found a composition of an
universal antidote, which acted as a pre-
ventive for the whole day, on condition
that it was taken fasting :-Take two
dry nuts, two figs, twenty leaves of rue,
and pound the whole with a grain of
salt.
In the time of the same Pliny, to
cure the jaundice (morºus regius), already
very common at Rome, they used to
make the patients drink an infusion of
asses’ dung in wine. To make the voice
powerful and clear, singers used to
eat leeks with oil, and Nero discovered
that the best came from Lariccia. In
the age of Trajan, Charmis of Mar-
seilles obtained a great reputation by
applying lotions, douches, cold immer-
sions, for a number of infirmities, and
- - - hence our system of water cure. It was
UPPER GALLERY OF THE CLOISTER OF THE ARA COELI. from the Gauls that they got their good
receipts, their best dishes, their most
comfortable customs; and to prove it by a magnificent example, let us remember that
our ancestors in the time of Caesar taught the Romans how to make mattresses.
It has been asked whether the granite columns which separate the aisles of
St. Bartholomew of the Island were not a portion preserved from the Temple of
AEsculapius. They are small, which diminishes the improbability; but their too
cylindrical proportions seem more recent. Two of these pillars are of the marble called
onion-peel; cippolino, and even granite, under the republic before the dictatorship of
Sulla, were not in frequent use. It is a church of the early lustra after the year
rooo. It has for its gem, and probably for its very reason of being, a large and fine
urn of porphyry, on which rests the master-altar and in which are collected the relics of
the four martyrs, Bartholomew, Paulinus, Exuperantius, and Marcel, which the Emperor

A CRAD/F O/W A YOUAVGEOM. 2OI
Otto III. is supposed to have brought to Rome. This church during the last week in
December receives also preachers fresh from the nurse, and offers amid a childish setting
the spectacle of the Nativity. But its cradle and even that of the Ara Coeli are
nothing compared with the one which chance discovered to me on the top of a dungeon.
This is the most original, the most popular, and the least known by strangers, for it has
never been described by any one.
The Sunday after Christmas, as I was wandering in the Trastevere, I espied in a poor
and narrow alley near the corner of the street which leads to San Grisogono, a large,
dilapidated, and open gate in a block of extremely black houses. A dungeon planted
back arose from the roofs; the crowd out for its Sunday holiday was pressing in, and I
followed it. I recognised one of those brick towers raised to defend the town in the times
when the barbarians inaugurated the middle age by ruins; dungeons absorbed after-
wards by the feudal barons, who quartered themselves there to carry on war against the
pope and to harass the citizens. The family who had appropriated this, surrounded it
in the fourteenth century by a house whose massive pillars encroach upon the parts of the
wall which shut in the Loggia. Compromised by hovels grouped at the sides of a court
of the shape of a trapezium, these pieces of architecture have a strange effect, decked out
as they are with rags and tatters. The impression is still more lively, when we know that
this sink was inhabited by the divine Agnese Colonna whom Petrarch sang. It was from
this palace on the 8th of April, 1341, that the Senator Ursus Anguillara, the husband of
this celebrated beauty, came forth to ascend the Capitol to crown the poet. I was, then,
at the foot of the dungeon and in the forgotten enclosure of the Anguillara, one of
those old names which matched with the Orsini, the Colonna, the Gaetani—an almost
extinguished celebrity that the fine book of Gregorovius on the Roman middle age
has just restored to light.
Under a paved slope, suspended like the arch of a bridge, and which from the bottom
of the court reaches as high as the first story, a glass-blower has set up with his furnace
a complete apparatus for moulding bottles; it is he who has spread a fine gauze of soot
over this pile of wall and roof. The flying skirts of the Trasteverine women who climbed
the approach to the dungeon in front of me, the white frocks of the monks, the tunics of
the soldiers, the many-coloured aprons and bright sleeves of the stout matrons of Albano,
with their hair dressed in silver filigree, came out all the better for these smoky tints:
they all went to the mysterious tower like the procession in some legend of enchantment.
In the interior are narrow dilapidated staircases, on which the people going up pressed
hilariously against those wanting to come down. After many efforts, as with the notion
that I should come out upon a platform, I took the last steps of the escarped belvedere,
they ended at the entry of a low cavern, with holes in it here and there, and outside of
which I perceived the horizons of a fantastical landscape. This grotto, constructed on
the top of a tower, contains valleys and lakes that mirror banks animated by miniature
villages, beyond which the eye of the spectator sees retreating to the horizon the
Palatine, the Aventine, the Coelian, the Janiculum, the monuments and the mountains
of the real Roman Campagna. The cattle of the size of mice, the huts of this Cosmos
built for inmates seven inches high, lend to the real distances gigantic proportions;
perceived at the end of a lawn of green cloth where shepherds adore the miraculous star,
the Colosseo gives terrible justification for its name. Under light softened by rose-
coloured transparencies in the centre of the grotto, slumbered the infant Jesus in rose-
coloured wax, surrounded by his kinsfolk and his ordinary court, composed of kings and
ID D
2O2 A’O.]/E.
shepherds. The spectators were moved with fervour and dumb with admiration. Happily
there were only at the cradle young monks, fine lasses from the country, old soldiers,
children, and myself. Transported with delight in all simplicity, we passed from one
rustic house to another; and from the peaks to the plain, we followed little boats on the
rivers of glass; we saw before their doors artizans at work putting hoops round little
barrels that a tear of St. Peter would have filled, or drawing threads through tiny sandals
that Queen Mab might have put on.
KEEP OF THE ANGUILLARA.
It is maintained, and I should not be much surprised if it were true, that the
blameless Francis of Assisi is the inventor of these diversions. At any rate the cradle
su// antica torre degli Anguiſ/ara is one of the oldest; the poets of the people have
consecrated sonnets and odes to it. The sight of so many masterpieces, of so many
splendours with which Rome is filled, never prejudices among primitive natures the
instincts of curiosity; I understand it all the better, as I myself found an incontestable

BACCHAMAZIA OF THE EPIPHAMP. 2O3
charm in this amusement of recalling the earliest impressions of infancy, as I admired
a population of puppets in fantastic landscapes, called forth under a cavern of cork,
by magicians who have no quarrel at the school of fine arts.
V.
It is before the not very interesting church of St. Eustace, and in the street of the
Caprettari that the end of the Christmas festival takes place, concluding with the
rejoicings of the Epiphany, or the day of the kings. These small spaces, irregular, long,
choked, contrived in the midst of a labyrinth of alleys between the Pantheon and the
piazza Navona, are the theatre of a popular diversion which opens on the 5th of January,
and is prolonged throughout the entire octave. The mise-en-scène is of a gothic
simplicity. Round the piazza booths are set up in the open air, where they sell an
immense number of dancing-jacks, punchinellos from Naples, and grotesques of every
sort; earthenware bells with a sweet ring, little drums, steel trumpets, Bambini of
coloured plaster, and so on; they present too fried pinocchi and confetti, and things fried
in oil, the equivocal incense offering of the solemnity.
At the third hour after the vinti-quattro, the crowd collects at the approaches of
St. Eustace; everybody is provided with noisy instruments, and until after midnight this
assembly, which includes every class as well as every age, moves and tosses about with
immense tumult in the narrow space; all try, along the illuminated street where they
are trampling and elbowing one and other, who shall produce the most formidable
uproar. They whistle, they howl, they imitate by means of calls the cries of savage
beasts, they stamp and bellow, they push and are pushed; the tumult is diabolical, the
image of violence is on every side, but there is no temper; brawls are uncommon, and it
would be to fail in the etiquette of this feast of unreason to get up a quarrel. At the end
of two hours of their orgies for the ear, deafened, giddy, and as if intoxicated, you are
seized with convulsive laughter; you cry and shout without knowing why, and sometimes
even without knowing it. All this goes on before that famous university which Leo X.
installed in a palace begun by Michelangelo; and while the Romans deliver themselves
to this debauch of riot, to this delirium without a name, the gleaming of the torches
brings out over their heads, on the front of a window over the great gate of the palace,
this versicle from the psalmist: Initium Sapientia, Zimor Domini. It is actually this old
inscription which gives the university of Rome a grave and noble name, the college Della
Sapienza.
VI.
I had been present at so many church ceremonies, at so many civic festivals, that I
was impatient to discover at the villa of the Farnese the divinities of Olympus, those
finished models of the perfect form, so prodigal of attractions for initiating mortals into
the science of the beautiful. It was then with a certain satisfaction that, remaining in
the tranquil region of the Trastevere, in order to gain the perpective of the Lungara, I
passed under the choked archway and dovetail battlements which in the middle age
travestied the Porta Settimiana, which got its name from the father of Geta, which was
restored by Alexander VI., and then condemned under Urban VI. to be no more than
an ornament of the quarter. -
D ID 2
2O4 A’OA)/A2.
In the Farnesina palace that Peruzzi built for a friend of Raphael, for the banker
Agostino Chigi who survived him by only a few days, we come upon that pagan Renais-
sance which so dazzled the Valois. Described as a villa, although it is in the city nearly
in the front of the Corsini palace, but because it is in a garden, the Farnesina has a very
gloomy aspect from the outside. The purity of the lines and pinnacles impresses an
eternal youth on the edifice, which for all that has a dilapidated kind of physiognomy;
LA PORTA SETTIMIANA IN THE TRASTEVERE.
the neglected aspect of the uncultivated grounds contributes to the same impression.
'Tis the entry of a paradise lost, and has the melancholy of all deserted spots made
beautiful by the sensation of felicity that we have only to regret. As soon as you pass
the staircase to enter the most unfurnished-looking rooms that were ever seen, we
triumph rapidly enough over the chill which centuries of abandonment have spread over
them; for twelve great subjects designed and begun by Raphael, and then executed by
the eagles of his school, fill the roof of the vast hall which serves for vestibule. And

THE FARAWES/WA PAZACE. 2O5
what an adorable subject have these great men exhibited It is the romance of Psyche,
which Apuleius recounted with that elegant scepticism, that picked imagery, and those
delicacies of feeling relieved by wit, which mark the beginning of ages of decline.
They no longer believe in greatness, and the gods are obliged to turn themselves into
good folks like the rest of us, if they would gain a licence to continue to live; tender
secrets replace mysteries, and it was in the sacred woods that mysticism chose its last
asylum. The African poet of Madaura travelled through Greece and visited the East;
he had stayed in Rome at a time when the travels of Adrian had brought into fashion a
taste for running about the world; as from people to people he touched upon incongruous
theogonies, at the same time that the aspirations of the Christian myth were beginning to
soften the spirit, he was seized with that slightly mocking doubt which is the philosophy
of the people who have seen much, and which in the soul of a poet is preserved from
dryness by the attractions of nature and the freshness of his creations. It is thus that
Apuleius introduces the gods upon the Scene, in the romance of those two childhoods in
which he has symbolized desire and ideal—matter and spirit; this love shut within the
shadow of curiosity is continued by the struggle, it ends by invading Olympus, by subju-
gating the councils of the immortals, and the court of Jupiter consecrates the dogma of
the supremacy of the soul, of pure and infinite love. Inspired by the fables of Miletus,
the symbolical poem of an epoch, in which it marks the definite term of epopee, this
book, or rather this episode, Psyche, such is the subject that Raphael adopted. In
choosing this theme, the painter of Madonnas remembers that in passing from the School
of the Neo-platonists into the catacombs, the myth of Psyche had become the symbol of
the human soul regenerated by sacrifice and trial.
Let us not fail to observe how far our painters of the time of Leo X, were marked out
for such an enterprise. Ideas in their time ascended the current which Apuleius had
descended ; the two inspirations must meet midway. In fact, just as the thinkers of the
time of the Antonines bequeathed paganism to the service of poets, in like manner the
artists of the Renaissance revived paganism only for the profit of poetry and the arts.
To open such reflections is to define the character of that history of Psyche, which is
so well translated at the Farnese palace. That these subjects and the allegorical figures
of the friezes have been touched up and refreshed in part under the pencil of Carlo
Maratti, which for that matter is both skilful and respectful,-these are accidents that we
cannot dispute; but the conception was so full of life and freedom, that this illustration
of the fable of Apuleius has preserved nearly all its striking qualities. In a small picture,
where Cupid presents his bride to the Graces, the back of one of the three sisters is a
miracle of execution, and accordingly this figure has been attributed to Raphael alone.
She is so beautiful and her companions are so full of charm that the artist, vanquished by
himself, renounced the idea of placing Psyche in the same frame, and Love points out to
the Graces an absent rival.
Two great compositions divide the ceiling; the Marriage of Psyche, the piece which
has suffered most from retouching, and the Assembly of the Gods, where the figure of
Mercury, that of Cupid, and the head of Venus, are of exquisite line. The accessory
subjects, distributed above the friezes by triangular coffer work framed by thick garlands
of flowers, plants, and fruit, upon an azure sky, are perhaps superior to the two large
pictures. The incidents of this drama of sentiment have a grace that is so favourable
to painting. Venus, irritated that a mortal should dare to love her son, shows her to
him with contempt, hinting to him to plunge her into an unworthy passion. Disobeyed,
206 A&OME.
abandoned even by Juno and Ceres, the goddess with adorable airs goes to complain to
Jupiter. Vain intrigues; sustained by three Genii or Virtues, Psyche, astonished and
smiling, traverses the air with the gifts of Proserpine, that with ingenuous mien she will
present to the angry Venus. Finally, by the command of Jupiter, Psyche, brought back
by Mercury, will come to unite herself with Cupid, after the irresistible infant shall have
pleaded his cause upon the knees of the master of the gods. This vigorous and
free piece reminds one of certain freaks of the audacious naturalism which delights
Michelangelo. -
This decoration is in the taste of our time, yet Greece would have admired it. The
simple and rich disposition of so enormous a painting completes that feast for the
eyes which is helped by a series of little Cupids, charged with showing how their
patron mocks all those gods whom men have compounded of their own weaknesses.
Sprightly, insolent with life and beauty, they make, across the empyrean, a plaything
of the immortals as well as of their attributes, and they tease with impunity the most
ferocious beasts. One of these sprites covers himself in playful naughtiness with the
buckler of Minerva; another, the prettiest of them, bestrides Cerberus, brandishing the
trident of Pluto. For is not love stronger than death itself? -
Other objects of admiration are arranged in the neighbouring saloon. It is there
that Galatea sails in a shell drawn by dolphins; there is placed that famous fresco of
Raphael which has been so often copied, and which Richomme, an unfaithful interpreter,
has made popular with us in an engraving where, like a grammarian, he has corrected
the master. The Farnese, when they possessed this villa, understood well the worth of
such a gem; to throw it into relief they left the stage empty on the panels right and
left, which were confined to the office of bounding the gulf in which Galatea sports.
These spaces contribute further to concentrate interest on the work of Raphael; they
tranquillise the eye without soliciting attention, and the giant Cyclops who contemplates
his rebel from a distance, hardly disturbs the quiet more than a rock would do.
Sebastian del Piombo, to whom they attribute the Polyphemus, does himself more
honour with the small frescoes of the slumbering Admetus from whom his daughter is
plucking the golden tress that makes him invincible, and with the Fall of Icarus. The
merit of this painter, whose tone is generally too violent, is that he harmonizes here by a
certain softness with the key of Raphael. His Juno on a car drawn by two peacocks,
which is placed above the Galatea, is not too entirely eclipsed by so formidable a
proximity. The painting is supple and blonde; the movement of the figure, the beauty
of the head and neck, the line of the shoulder and the arm have an elegance that
is particularly rare with this master, whom his passion for Michelangelo made hard and
sombre. Among his works at Rome, I only found here the graces of a Madonna
that I had admired, and that few persons go in search of, at Venice in the church
of St. John Chrysostom, near the Rialto.
VII.
We have described as confronting the Farnesina villa, the ancient palace of the Riari,
that rich line of the sister of Sixtus IV., the first pontiff who formally by political alliances
and large appanages erected his family into a dynasty. Enlarged and decorated anew
under Clement XII., whose name it has retained, this mansion when they acquired it, had
THE CORS/MI PAAA CE. - 2O7
witnessed the death of Queen Christina of Sweden. One must visit this palace, its
splendid library, its apartments so rich in souvenirs and objects of art, and especially its
vast gallery of paintings which fill nine saloons, and which teach one to conceive how
deeply the eye can be offended and the spirit thrown into discomfort by an agglomeration
of mediocre pieces where there is no invention or originality, and which, turning upon
monotonous subjects, follow one another like so many third-hand imitations. Nowhere
can you perceive to better effect the dangers of evil companionship for true masterpieces.
There are some, even a considerable number, in the Corsini palace, but the dulled eye
discerns no greatness, and the attention loses its hold and is lost.
It is then a worthy task to point out not those false Madonnas of Andrea del Sarto
which are at the best by Puligo, nor that Holy Family of Fra Bartolommeo, so retouched
that it might well be signed Legion; nor that portrait of Julius II.; of which assuredly
Raphael never superintended the copy; nor those false Vandykes, nor those little pictures
attributed to Michelangelo; nor so many other apocryphal pieces; but some of the works
of the highest merit which honour these vast galleries which the Corsini princes have
insisted upon overfilling. We have noted what comes out of the common, and nothing
makes one so severe as having to glean among tares. I will remark three Heads of
Christ, spiritless in different ways, but yet not without beauty, by Carlo Dolci, Guido,
and Guerchino: the last has the palm in an academic competition which owes to this a
part of its interest;-an Interior of a Butcher's Shop by D. Teniers, of a degree of
reality that would make Chardin and Ribera grow pale—a prodigious piece, if it had
not been retouched. - -
In the fourth saloon are found, among twelve small subjects, the originals by Jacques
Callot of a charming and famous series, that engraving has spread far and wide, the
Miseries of War. The painting is extremely smooth, a little cold in tone, a little over-
finished, but of clear design and delicate nicety of touch. By the side of a Hare by
Albert Dürer, painted so that you can nearly count the hairs, is found a small and
exquisite piece, the Judgment of Paris by Giulio Romano. His master never did better;
he would perhaps have had less accent. Benedetto Lutti left here a good portrait of
Cardinal Corsini (Clement XII.). If a pitiable copy of the pretended Fornarina of the
Uffizi could be attributed to Sanzio, Raphael would be extremely inferior to Lutti, that
almost posthumous offshoot of the Florentine school. Let us not quit this room without
mentioning two precious monuments: a silver cup, a gem of Greek art, round which a
clever designer has figured in bas-relief Orestes judged by the Areopagus, an admirable
piece of a very fine epoch; secondly, an Etruscan seat of marble, very massive, on the
open back of which two processions are carved one above the other, the one of mounted
warriors, the other of a wild boar-hunt. Round the base are carved various scenes. All
this is extremely skilful, from the point of view of the carving, of attitude, and of move-
ment, and very curious for the history of costume; the cavaliers recall the art that was
contemporary with Phidias. Only we must not suppose out of deference for the authors
who have spoken of this Cathedra, that it ever served for a curule chair as they pretend; no
curule chair was ever made of marble, for that would have needed an elephant to carry.
The adjoining apartment, which was the bedroom of Christina of Sweden, is lighted
by two windows that open on to a small garden; the alcove is figured by the abutment
of an arch, taking its supports from an architrave borne by two fluted columns, stuccoed
and painted, with gilded Corinthian capitals. Between these pillars expired on the 19th
of April, 1689, that famous woman, who had the nature of an artist, and genius without
2O8 A&OME.
an object, a creature of fancy, straying so marvellously out of a royal line as to be an
enigma for all time. On the arched ceiling of this room small frescoes of the sixteenth
century succeed one another, representing the stories of the Bible. The walls are
adorned with some interesting pieces, among them three studies painted from nature by
Guido Reni, for his famous Christ on the Cross in the Museum of Bologna: the heads
which served for St. John, for the Magdalen, and for the principal figure, are very
superior to the too ambitious interpretation of the picture itself. Let us recount besides
a Holy Family of Rosso, a soft painter and yet sufficiently firm ; also an exquisite little
bronze of the Florentine school, the St. Sebastian.
A small saloon devoted to portraits, contains some precious canvasses, which have
unluckily for the most part been retouched. They set down to Titian the Sons of
Charles V., Ferdinand and Philip; the two children, standing and clad in grey, make a
group of a delicate and subtle harmony. Rubens is represented by two fine studies of
bearded models; Holbein and Rembrandt by good portraits; the Cardinal Farnese of
Titian is a most magisterial piece; Monsignor Ghiberti, painted by Giulio Romano, is
one of the firmest and most living portraits in the world. I was astonished to find among
the princes Corsini, a family of Florentine origin, and set down to Bronzini, a portrait
of the Duke Ferdinand de' Medici classed in this way: ‘Portrait of Cardinal Bibbiena.”
The picture no more recalls Bronzini, than the son of Cosmo I. is like Cardinal Bibbiena,
so well known by the portrait of Raphael.
Going on we come to a triptych of which the panels represent, one the Descent of
the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles, and the other the Assumption. They give one
pleasure, but the central subject, a Last Judgment of Fra Angelico, is one of the purest
visions of this mystical master. He has given the Christ the traditional gesture trans-
mitted by Orgagna to Michelangelo who brutalised it; the figures of the angels, of
St. Augustin, the Portrait of Nicholas V., raised into glory among the blessed by a
grateful friendship, are all adorable miniatures. This little panel is one of the most
important works of the holy artist that Rome has got, and it may give a complete idea
of the feeling of that unique painter to those who have never lived at Florence. From
Fiesole to Rubens the contrast is violent; his St. Sebastian, from whose body the pitying
angels are withdrawing the arrows, is a mannered work which has decidedly faded.
Near this a Virgin with easy and amiable expression, of which Murillo has made such
constant use, lifts to her knee a child whose head is too ample by a good third. To
understand the science and design of this cherub of Spain, it is necessary to see how
he fares in the company of the Italians. - -
We have spoken elsewhere of a fresco of Polydore of Caravaggio, which, on the
façade of the Camuccini palace, pourtrays the tragedy of the Children of Niobe; the
cartoons of this great work are in the Corsini palace, in a saloon where I will also point
out a fine painting of a namesake and kinsman, Ercole Grandi of Ferrara, who lived to
1531, while the better-known author of the pictures of San Petronio at Bologna died in
1513. Like the last, the other and nearly anonymous Grandi was one of the most
delicate masters of that school at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Since recent
inquiries have revealed this artist, it has been necessary to restore to him various pieces
attributed either to his kinsman or to F. Francia, whose feeling and manner he made his
own even better than Lorenzo Costa, his actual master. This painter figures in no
biography; he executed some works, since destroyed, at the Cathedral of Bologna, where
his rivals stole his drawings in the very church, which discouraged him so that he
THE CORSVNZ GADA. ERIES. 2O9
returned to Ferrara. The painting of the Corsini palace represents St. George over
throwing a very ludicrous imp in the midst of a feudal landscape, arranged so as to
introduce a crenellated castle with postern and drawbridge; in the background St. Margaret
is on her knees. This form of the ex voto is original : the George and the Margaret,
chatelains symbolized in front of their battlements, found an ingenious interpreter with a
spirit at once proud and tender. The paladin in his armour is planted gracefully on his
palfrey; the rural background is singular and of a luminous calm; the style, with a greater
charm, recalls the small equestrian archangels of Raphael; the depth and brilliance of
the Venetian colouring heighten the charm of the painting. The error of the common
attribution of it is all the more flagrant as the initials of the painter are inscribed on the
horse of St. George. A picture of the Nativity, ascribed to Garofalo, will furnish
material for another correction; it belongs to Ortolano, a very rare master, of whom the
note is sadder, the execution closer, and who also studied under Lorenzo Costa, where he
had for a comrade Garofalo, with whom he has been frequently confounded. Ortolano
was saved from the gallows by the Duke of Ferrara, after the assassination of a rival in
love, a recollection that left to the artist a weight of remorse that made the rest of his
life sombre to him. This may be observed from his portrait in the museum of the Louvre,
painted by himself, somewhat smaller than life, with a brown cape on his shoulder and a
pink in his hand. The daisy recalls the worthy and candid Garofalo, but that pale
head, with dark and restless eye, and vividly coloured, is the portrait of Ortolano.
When Domenichino had finished the Chase of Diana, of the Borghese Palace, he
copied over again one of the naked nymphs who surround the goddess, then dipping her
in the springs of Siloe, he placed behind her on trunks of trees, two grey-beard heads,
and thus the attendant of Diana became the Chaste Susannah of the Corsini Palace. Let
us point out, in conclusion, a magnificent Interior of a Sheepfold, by Teniers, a work
di primo cartello, if it had only been less retouched; next passing disdainfully before two
apocryphal Poussins, let us admire with disgust the horrible Prometheus of Salvator
Rosa, gnawed by the vulture who tears his bowels; and then let us look with more
complacency at four charming landscapes of his young days, where calm and dreamy
nature looks on at hordes fighting. I would not speak of the Virgin, of Carlo Cignani,
to whom an angel, the symbol of her presentiments, offers the instruments of the future
fate of her son still unborn, if Paul Delaroche had not been inspired by the subject, which
he has enlarged by graver and more formal intention. With the anacreontic tastes of
Cignani, an angel is Cupid, who would play as well with roses as with nails and the
crown of thorns. . -
*- Perhaps we should have discovered more gems in these ample galleries, if we had
not been compelled to fish for pearls in troubled water; the Corsini princes would have
been all the better advised if they had been content with the choice works, as their
palace, so superior to a merely rich residence, is an exceptional place, a real institution.
From a respect for luxury and the beautiful, that is very common among these noble
families, founded and constantly illustrated by intelligence, not by the brutalities of war,
and continued in their original traditions of cultivation, the distinguishing characteristic
of the Roman princes, the Corsini have consecrated their reception rooms to the
splendours of art, and the whole of the first story of the gorgeous palace of Clement XII.
to the various collections. The show-rooms are even more numerous and more spacious
than the galleries; ancient Florentine brocades displayed as hangings, historical furniture
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, boudoirs furnished in vernis Martin, testify to
E E
2 IO A’O///Z.
true luxury of ancient date. In the immense concert-room, seven lustres of Venetian
crystal with many-coloured flower-work extend over the head of the visitor the brightness
of some arbour with a foliage of diamonds. But the marvel of the Corsini palace is its
rich and imposing library, possessing precious manuscripts, and where, in an enormous
room given up to engravings, are found the engraved and, very often, complete works of
the rarest masters. Every day of the week, except Wednesday, these collections are
placed at the disposal of the public; young men and scholars may work in this establish-
ment, which is better warmed in winter than most private houses, and which is attended
by a staff directed by a librarian, who is appointed by Prince Corsini with the approbation
of the Pope.
These rich domains and princely appanages, in the city as well as in the provinces,
VIEW of THE VILLA PAMPHILI-DORIA.
these enormous fiefs granted by the sovereign pontiffs to their nephews, have been of
advantage, not only to the arts, but to civilization, to the public security, to education,
and to the life of cities. When people declaim against the nepotism of these sovereigns,
they forget that the burdens and the charges undertaken by the pontifical families were
the troublesome conditions of donations and investitures. A personage thus provided
for, found himself under an obligation to establish a church, a convent, a hospital, farms,
or colleges, and to place all his luxury, his books, and his garden, at the disposition of
the people. He was obliged to pay for a staff of attendants, to undertake for a whole
district of the city the expense of aedileship, to have agents for the discharge of police
duties, and to pay even the surgeons and apothecaries for all his retainers. On his
country estates the lord had to construct or maintain roads, to make water-channels or

THE PAMPHIZZ GAA’DEAVS. 2 I I
dykes, to clear wood, and rebuild chapels, if any were wanted for the celebration of
worship. Let us remark, that in a city that was poor, and that was day by day becoming
poorer, full of horrible dens and vague properties, the donations were then the only
means of setting up a protective administration. Powerful but responsible, with feudal
engagements towards the pope and his successors, these lordships formed so many
rich administrative divisions. People had in them, in what is peculiarly the land of
hierarchies, hereditary governors, and no prescription has so far liberated them. Let us
remember, that when they left Avignon, the sovereign pontiffs found at Rome no more
than 17,000 souls scattered over their city; and it was with the assistance of kinsmen,
to whom they bequeathed their pious designs along with their treasure, that the popes
set all in order again. Such is the weight of the obligations that still weigh by hereditary
titles on a number of appanages, that in 1848 some impoverished owners, being no
longer able to meet them, hoped that the revolution would relieve them of their feudal
tenure, leaving them as simple owners in their estates. -
As one looked in these palaces upon the galleries, the ceilings of masters, the Venetian
mirrors with their enwreathed cupids by Mario de' Fiori, one stays for a moment on the
threshold of an apartment which is of a simpler, graver richness, where fauteuils are
placed in a circle under a royal canopy with the pontifical arms; it is the chamber of the
pope. Many people have been tempted to smile before this apparent proof of the pre-
tentious vanity of the proprietor, but it is a mistake. This canopy, this figured throne,
, these cushions, are the demonstrations of vassalage ; the holy father is at home in the
palace of the heirs of his predecessors, he is the fixed ancestor of all the branches of the
pontifical family; his chair at their hearths recalls and consecrates the delegation of so
many appanages which are held from him. Generally the fauteuil on which the holy
father has sat, on the occasion of any solemn reception, is not used again; and lest any
profane person should come and install himself in it, it is turned to the wall.
VIII.
To see again for a few moments green fields and fresh waters after one has been so
busy exploring a city, to end under the shade of trees a day where one has summoned up
all the visions of mythology in company with Raphael, and laboriously scanned the
frames of a gallery, is a temptation that a man hardly resists, especially if you remember
that the Farnese and the palace of the Corsini are not far from one of those fairy works
where the mind is so ready to call up the divinities of woods and fountains.
You know, reader, that in the Roman Campagna the small properties described else-
where as orchards, meadows, lodges, are called vineyards; hence so many bas-reliefs and
statues found among the vines. A garden is a very different thing. This term often
means enormous spaces, comprising groves, meadows, hills, ponds, and rivers, with ruins
and scattered monuments; such are the Pamphili gardens on the site of those of Galba.
Under the rampart of Rome, a few yards from the gate of St. Pancras, of warlike memory,
they present the close dales, the woody shades, the plantations of genuinely rural solitude.
As the approach to the domain is at the back of the plateau which bounds Rome on this
side, you no sooner enter the park than the city disappears from the horizon, except
towards the north, where at the extremity of a valley shut in between hills rises solitary
E E 2
2 I 2 A’OME.
the enormous mass of St. Peter, flanked by the Vatican, and framed on every side by
meadows, fields, and gentle slopes, like a colossal Chartreuse lost in the midst of a
Thebaid. Between the rose-hued Soracte and the Monte Mario, the dome rises into the
clouds supported by masses of trees and bounded by the Leonine city, which winds
across the slope, its lands of brick running from distance to distance by keeps of the
ninth century.
The ruins of a villa restored in the manner of a triumphal arch, furnish an approach at
present to those groves of oak, of planes, of great spreading pines. At the back of these
wooded plains, long avenues spread out unseen by the day, aisles in which the birds
sing, and dividing a slope at the end of which the plain extends far out of sight, a kind of
|
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GARDENS OF THE PAMPHILI WILLA.
solid ocean which the other ocean made level in old times. This shady labyrinth, which
goes up and down by turns, will show you the snows of the Apennines through the breaks
in the trees; to perspectives of verdure will succeed perspectives of water. Under the
cool freshness of the waters and the tall trees the grass gets a fineness and brightness
which recall the Alps; in the dawn of spring, the anemones, violets, periwinkles,
primroses, and cyclamen, display their mosaic on the turf. Further off the walls of the
embankment are crowned with camellias; the arabesques of the parterres of the flower
beds, the enamel of their compartments, which frame bas-reliefs and statues, cause the
surprises of art to come upon the poem of nature.
You recognise, from having seen it in pictures, a certain semicircle of architecture
reflected with its garlands of trees in a sheet of water; the rest is unforeseen and causes
new sensations; you believe you walk in a dream. The gardens of Rome were assuredly

THE VILLA PAMPHILA. 2 I 3
thus in the time of Virgil and the poets of the Empire. Tasso lost himself in such spots,
before painting the Eden in which the paladin Rinaldo forgot his glory at the feet of
Armida. These Pamphili gardens, their silence, their mystery, the prodigality which has
gathered together the plants of every climate, the melancholy and distant points of view
which appeal beyond eye and thought, all cradles you in the reminiscences of an ideal
existence, which you seem to have lived and to be regretting. Even if you were to stray
there surrounded by all that you love, you would still have aspirations for what cannot be
attained; and if you had about you the most joyous of your friends, though there should
be only one wanting, he who never returns, you would feel deserted in this Thessalian
vale of the Pamphili Villa. -
It was by the flowery slopes of this paradise that the soldiers of Oudinot, at the time
of the capture of Rome in 1849, rushing from the head-quarters of our army, established
at the entrance of the plain at the Contucci villa, mounted for the final assaults at the end
of the month of June. Supported on the right by the slope which preserved them from
the fire of the ramparts, they went up these ways chequered all along by pools and little
cascades, whilst above their heads the wall was breached. Towards the Porta San
Pancrazio, which was destroyed then and has since been rebuilt by Pius IX., the rampart
was opened by artillery, and emerging from the cover our soldiers rushed in. But they
had not foreseen the obstacle of the walls of Aurelian which arrested them, and from
which they were driven back with considerable loss to the Pamphili Gardens. Three
other breaches had to be made on the road of the Porta Portese, and it was by the largest
of them, which is recognisable from the two others by the lighter shade of the bricks,
that Colonel Espinasse entered, the same who eleven years later become general, minister,
and senator, gave his life in Italy like the youngest soldier. The eternal city was once
more taken by the Gauls.
Many Frenchmen were left under the lily and asphodel of the Pamphili Villa; Prince
Philip Andrew Doria has consecrated in the park a magnificent burial-place to the
warriors who sleep under the spreading wings of the pines. On tablets of white marble
figure the names of the soldiers who fell at the gates of Rome which they had never seen;
their epitaphs would be perhaps less touching if they were better.
GARDENS OF THE PAMPHILI WILLA-

st. John of THE FLORENTINEs.-TRASTEVERINE BANK.—SLOPE OF THE JANICULUM.—HOSPITAL FOR THE INSANE.
CHAPTER X.
Santa Maria sopra Minerva; epitaph of Fra Angelico by Nicholas V.-Statue of Leo X. ; his portrait by a
prisoner of Chillon.—Francis I. and Charles V. at the feet of the Pope.-Pre-Raphaelite rarities: Cosimato,
Filippino Lippi and Sermonetta; Benozzo of Forli, Verrocchio, Mino da Fiesole, &c.—The architecture of
the Jesuits and the sepulchral shrine of St. Ignatius at the church Del Gesù.-Souvenir of the time of
Sulla-Chapel of the novitiate.—Stephen Monnot (Bisontinus).-How Bernini conceived St. Theresa in
ecstasy.-Visits to Domenico Zampieri on a rainy day, to St. Sylvester of the Quirinal,—to St. Andrew
della Valle,_to St. Charles in Catinari-Tomb of the Father Ventura.-Origin of the word Theatin.-
The first printing press at Rome.—Daniel of Volterra and Horace Vernet, apropos of Holophernes.—How
the Massimi descend from Fabius Maximus.-Rubens at Santa Maria in Vallicella.-Origin of oratorio.—
The managing Father of the Philippines.—Halt at St. John of the Florentines.—Instruction in the Roman
College.—Collections of Father Kircher and of Cardinal Zelada –caricature of an Assyrian soldier in
campaign;–Greek and Etruscan curiosities, &c.—Primitive coins and their symbols.-What became of the
sword of the Constable of Bourbon.—Porta Maggiore.—First public bake-houses; the manufacture of
bread under Tiberius.-Minerva Medica.-The nympheum of Severus; Amphitheatre Castrense.—Rustic
point of view on the Sette Sale.—Botanical lesson by a gardener.—The baths of Titus.-Nero's house.—First
painters of Rome (Etruscan period); First decline (Greek school).-St. Martin ai Monti.-The ancient
basilica of Constantine at the Vatican.
Maria Maggiore at Rome, are for architecture, painting, and sculpture, true
museums by the aid of which one might unfold all the annals of modern art.
Such is the church of the Dominicans, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, so called because it
replaces a temple erected by Pompeius to the Virgin of paganism. This monument
ought to be most frequently visited, for it is close to the Pantheon, in the centre of the
city and at the side of the enormous hotel where most Frenchmen stay; yet for all that,
whether it is that down to the end of their visit they always keep it for the morrow, or that
having gone over it at once, before getting accustomed to distinguish beauties below the


SAMTA MARIA SOPRA MINERVA. 2 I5
surface it covers, they pass it over lightly, I observe that they often go away without
retaining any distinct souvenir of so many rare and interesting works. You might make
a volume out of the Minerva; I may be forgiven for limiting myself to a few pages.
Nothing is so unexpected as the first aspect of its three ogival aisles supported on pillars
without either capitals or bases, like huge trunks reflected in the polished marble
pavement. The vaults and walls lighted dimly from above are of a bluish green, and
shining like the moist walls of a marine grotto covered with lotus, seaweed, and scolo-
pendra. The monks in 1855 had the temple covered with a kind of stucco, imitating
with an excessive brightness the tint and veining of green porphyry. The date of the
building is about the end of the fourteenth century; the nave is wide and fairly high; the
choir, more modern and recently harmonized with the ogival style, is of fine proportion;
a series of chapels very highly decorated cluster in the rather narrow side-aisles. But
as you enter, you are so struck with the green and lustrous colour of a nave that
doubles itself under your feet in a mirror of polished marble, that the church under its
skylight seems dark and empty; to commence to make it out, one must acclimatize one’s
eyes. As often happens to people who pry, one of the first monuments that I proceeded
to discover was one of those most hidden. On a tombstone set up in a deep chapel in
the left transept, is represented in relief a monk, an ascetic with hollow cheeks, with
delicate and angular features, with a large arched brow which gives accent to a pensive
expression, while the slender and knotty fingers indicate at once manual activity and
the sentiment of the ideal. It is the only known portrait of the angel of Florentine
painting, of the blessed John of Fiesole, the painter of souls and the heaven of which he
had had glimpses. Who does not now admire this holy artist? The President de
Brosses, Dupaty, Beyle, have never even pronounced his name. I insisted on keeping
the epitaph of the patron of religious artists, composed by his venerable friend
Nicholas V., who died the same year: * > *
HIC JACET VENER. PICTO. F.R. JO. DE FLO. ORDIS PDICATO P
Non mihi sit laudi quod eram velut alter Apelles,
Sed quod lucra tuis omnia, Christe, dabam:
Altera nam terris opera extant, altera coelo.
Urbs me Johannem Flos tulit Etruriae. MCCCCLV.
Close to this, under the arches of a modern altar, is the cenotaph of St. Catherine of
Sienna. Crossing the nave, down to the other side by the sight of some Florentine
monuments, I reached in front of the chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul, two tombs of the
finest of all epochs, which leave the spectator doubtful between the manner of Julian of
Maiano and that of Rossellini. Here also is a modern bust worthy of mention; the
portrait by Tenerani of the late Marchesina Spada, the sister of M. Komar, whom we
used to meet not long ago in Parisian society. Not only is this marble treated by a
skilful hand, but the expression of the face is at once living and of a singular softness.
Let us pause before the small mosaics, a charming work of Cosimato's, which crown the
mausoleum of a French bishop, whom his patron is presenting to the Madonna. The
bishop is William Durand, Episcopus Mimatensis, says the inscription.
The cenotaph of Cardinal Orsini also goes back to the end of the fourteenth century.
The monuments of that age are superior to those of the following century by their
collected gravity; the last slumber is profound then ; later on death becomes a triumph,
first for its victim, and next for the artist charged with commemorating him; the hero
2 I 6 ACOME.
continues to act, to live, to command. We may associate with this school the mausoleums
of the two Medici who are not at Florence; Leo X. and Clement VII. Of the two
statues in sitting posture and confronting one another, attended in the air by figures of
saints singularly twisted and tormented, the best is that of Pope Leo, which seems to
have inspired François Bonivard, the prisoner of Chillon, with that other Portrait
recently published at Geneva: ‘. . . . savant en lettres grecques et latines et davantage
bon musicien . . . . a la reste, bel personnage de corps, mais de visaige fort laid et
difforme; car il l’avoit gros plutót en enflure que par chair ni graisse; et d'un Oeil ne
voyoit goutte, de l'autre bien peu, sinon par le bénéfice d’une lunette de béryl appelée en
italien un ochial; mais, avec iceluy, il y voyoit plus loin que homme de Sa cour.” The
author of the Advis et Devis might, when he was prior of St. Victor, have seen Pope
Leo X. close.
Very different from his uncle, Clement VII. was slender, with large regular features,
and a certain expression of fine impassibility which lends itself to sculpture. Yet his
statue by Bacio Biggio is inferior to that of Leo X. by Raphael of Montelupo. The
Clement VII. is stiff; it is the classical interpretation of a figure arranged after a common
model. The arrangement of these monuments is attributed to Antonio of San Gallo; it
must have been after the death of this artist, that Bandinelli cut the allegorical statues
with which it is adorned, and which are not good. The Italians attribute these works to
Pintelli, who departed thirty years before the accession of Leo X., but in these quarters
they do not look so close. For that matter the tombs were not made in a day, for the
bas-reliefs with which they are surmounted seem to be of the end of the sixteenth century.
One represents the reception of Leo X. by King Francis of Valois, and the other shows
Charles V. received in the same way by Clement VII.
Nothing can be more unlike these bas-reliefs than the four great tormented saints of
Bacio Bandinelli, who received from his master in this very temple, at the entrance to the
choir, one of those counsels in action which he did not often lavish, and which were still
more rarely followed. The Christ presenting the Cross is one of the rare figures of
Michelangelo where grace dissembles force, and where that herculean gift which the
master abused, disappears under the satin of a rich and soft execution; but we must know
that he began in his youth this marble which he continued in 1520, and into which
Federigo Frizzi, entrusted with its completion, introduced at the expense of vigour the
supplenesses of a timid polish.
Ligorio designed the superb statue of the severe Paul IV., which is placed in the chapel
of Thomas Aquinas, where Florentine art has drawn some noble pages. It was there
that Filippino Lippi painted above the altar that charming picture in compartments, in
which are represented, near the Virgin, St. Thomas and Cardinal Oliviero Caraffa; it
was here that he distributed the groups of that Assumption, where the apostles figure in
such fine movement. On the right side, the Auto da Fé, which represents the burning
of the books condemned by St. Dominic, presents the characters before buildings of an
exquisitely ordered architecture, which allow us to see in the distance the equestrian
statue of Marcus Aurelius, which is in the piazza of the Capitol. There is also in the
foreground a marvellous portrait of the general of the Dominicans. The sibyls and
angels of the vault are the only fresco remains of Raffaellino del Garbo, the single pupil
of Filippino. Alas, how these specimens make us regret what time has destroyed
At the time when Buonarotti, grown old, was opposing to the teaching of his youth the
sad examples of his decline, the adepts of the grand manner still succeeded from time to
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SAMTA MARIA SOPRA A/YAVERVA. 217
time, if they happened to forget themselves, in dreaming some glorious and scientific
conceptions, without borrowing them from the exaggerations of the school. Such are
two adorable and too little observed figures, by an artist whose renown is mediocre,
only because his works are too scarce: the St. Agatha and the St. Lucy of Sermonetta,
a pupil of Perino del Vaga.
Going back in tradition as far as the most brilliant master of the ecstatic school, we
find in the chapel of the Annunciation Benozzo Gozzoli, the smiling and animated
disciple of Fra Angelico. His picture of the Annunciation, on a golden ground, is one
of those in which he has revealed with most grace the secret of producing a peculiar kind
of penetrative emotion, which is the great beauty of these primitive works. A cardinal
presents orphans to the Madonna; an angel is near her; the Eternal Father appears in
the heavens. The head of the seraph and the expression and attitude of the Virgin are
visions truly celestial. To measure the progress made by this respectful and timid art,
it is enough to turn one's eyes to the great crucifix, covered with Giottesque painting,
placed in one of the chapels of the right transept. We have there the three epochs of
Florentine art; and it is hardly further from the almost Byzantine attempts of the four-
teenth century to the soft brilliance of the artists whose faith Savonarola had tempered,
than it is from the principles of these last to the theories of Michelangelo and Raphael.
But with what swiftness did this revolution proceed When Benozzo Gozzoli finished,
Sanzio was just on the point of being born, and Michelangelo was beginning to grow tall.
In the neighbouring chapel, consecrated to the Aldobrandini, and where Clement VIII.
has his mausoleum, surrounded by those of his father and his mother preserved by the
Virtues and the Patron Saints, we observe very different intentions in the statuary: the
appeal to astonishment, the majestic exhibited as a spectacle. All these figures, with the
exception of the statue of the pope, are the work, estimable but with too much an air of
the virtuoso about them, of a compatriot who worked at Rome at the end of the sixteenth
century. The Cordieri of the Italian catalogues is Honorat Cordier, a native of St. Mihiel,
and it is worth remarking, that this village of Lorraine towards that time furnished two
Soldiers to the service of Michelangelo; the other is Ligier-Richier, who, in the church
of his native place has cut in a block of white stone thirteen figures grouped at the tomb
of Christ; a heavy work, but in which the expressive and anguish-stricken face of the
Virgin is worthy of praise. From the tomb of Francesco Torna, towards the door of the
church, to the feeble monument of Clement VIII. we may measure how much sculpture
had lost in a single century; it was a pupil of Donatello, Andrea Verrocchio, who carved
that fine figure which sleeps the slumber of this life, and reveals, by the pensive and
happy colour of the features, the dimly seen awakening in some other sphere. The urn
and its ornamentation betray the old jeweller, a true masterpiece.
Here we must stop, under penalty of falling into mere making of lists, and we must
omit a quantity of works of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. All styles are repre-
sented in this assemblage; close to the entrance is an exquisite Florentine tomb of the
end of the fifteenth century; in the vestibule of the sacristy we will follow the march of
taste, by looking at the burial-place of an architect who died in the early years of the
following century. We will compare one and the other with the graceful monument which
in a cloister of rare richness, presents to us at the side of the tomb of Cardinal Agnense,
and of that of Cardinal Ferrici, who died in 1478, a Virgin between two angels, an exquisite
and well-preserved bas-relief, probably due to Benedetto da Maiano. Do not forget in the
chapel where slumbers standing the ever-blessed brother Angelico, five remarkable tomb-
F F
218 ACOME.
stones of the end of the fourteenth century, which they ought to re-erect, and over two of
which they have been guilty of the barbarism of placing confessionals. It would be good,
in a survey embracing five centuries, not to disdain in the Altieri chapel, so rich in
African marbles, the pictures of Baciccio, of Carlo Maratti, and, a little further off, those
of Venusti. In fact what seems cold or secondary when treated isolatedly, recovers its
interest when it becomes by due comparisons a document in the history of human
thought. This reflection is applicable to a group of buildings which we shall pass in
review, and which, without being possessed of a superior renown, owe to some works of
merit or to the effect of contrast a very lively attractiveness. We must not impose too
rigid rules upon ourselves in the choice of our relations with works of art.
II.
The church del Gesù, erected by Giacomo della Porta in 1575, after the designs of
Vignola, with a magnificence worthy of the fortune of the order, furnished the model of
that sumptuous style which declaims the glories of God in the taste of the fine world,
and which, being imported among us by the Company, is called the architecture of
the Jesuits. When it presents itself under Lewis XIV. and Lewis XV., deteriorated by
the enervation of the profiles and the abused inflation of the volutes, and impoverished
by the dryness of the ornamentation, then this style assumes a really incomprehensible
ugliness. Those who have imitated it did not perceive this; under the prestige of the
church del Gesù and of the mighty memories of Rome, before the skeleton of their own
construction they saw in a dream the splendour which they thought they were repro-
ducing. In Vignola's conception the monument has a grandeur that is imposing; the
profiles are firm, the vaults have a certain spaciousness; generously distributed, the light
kindles artificial bouquets in marvels of painting and decoration; and the solidity of
the structure and its massive elegance bear without confusion a costume that is over
whelming in its richness. Such is even the splendour of the pilasters in yellow of Verona,
of the facings, of the coffer-work in rose and white marble, that these materials go
harmoniously with formidable masses of gilding, without being overwhelmed by them.
It is at the tomb of St. Ignatius that the Order have displayed their most dazzling
magnificence. To form this shrine they referred only to themselves, and confided the
work to one of their own number, to that father Andrea Pozzi, who at the end of the
seventeenth century practised with talent the professions of architect and painter. Before
this chapel, which is without depth, and where all is fully displayed, my mind by an
involuntary turn saw flowing the stream of gold which this must have cost: the altar, a
luminous centre, is placed in a sarcophagus of gilded bronze, where very delicate bas-
reliefs of marble and gold are mixed with arabesques, in which precious stones, set in
shape of flowers, sparkle on every side; some groups accompany to right and left the
statue of the saint, which commands the altar, and the picture in which he is represented.
The statue is of silver. The general disposition of the chapel is defined by four enormous
columns entirely encrusted with lapis-lazuli, with bases and capitals of vermeil; the
pedestals and cornices are of antique green. From the centre of the pediment stands
boldly forth a group in white marble of the Holy Trinity, from which there disengage
themselves some tolerably fine Angels by Bernardino Ludovisi, supporting in the air a
JESUIT CHURCHES AND ARCHITECTURE. - 2 IQ
globe of about four feet in diameter, of lapis-lazuli; it is the greatest block of such
precious stone that has ever been wrought. The master-altar and its tribuna, the pilasters,
the friezes, the façade, a rich and classic model of that decline in science which with us
has lost its licence and its Latin, are all worth looking at. In France, there is hardly a
town of any size in which during the last two centuries they did not set up a pale and
hardly recognisable imitation of the church del Gesù : it is interesting to go back to the
original model and to seize its spirit, by seeing how it interprets the poem of the
Church triumphant.
We might call up on this spot such memories as would make this shining edifice put
on the air of a mausoleum. The Dictator Sulla on his return to Rome after the battle of
the Colline gate, convoked the Senate at the temple of Bellona near the Villa Publica,
where he had got together, with a considerable number of proscripts, six thousand
Samnite and Lucanian prisoners. As he was delivering that famous harangue, in which
he vowed he would pardon none, they commenced the massacre of the captives. The
slaughter of six thousand human creatures (Livy, Appian, and St. Augustin say eight
thousand), the frightful butchery filled the air with horrible cries. The senators heard
them, and turned away panic-struck, Sulla saying to them calmly, “Listen to my words,
not to empty noises outside.” On this site of the temple of Bellona rises in our time
the church of the Gesù, which must not be confounded with the church of the Jesuits
on the Quirinal.
The latter, which was designed by Bernini in the shape of an elliptical rotunda, and
in which also marbles are displayed with ample prodigality, serves for the novices of the
order. I only entered it to resume acquaintance with William Courtois, a painter of
Franche Comté, and brother of the Burgundian much better known. This artist has left
here a remarkable composition, the Crucifixion of St. Peter. It is a sort of compromise
between the school of Bologna and the precursors of Vanloo, but the colour is glowing,
and the composition has a brilliant look.
Tolerably near, continuing the street on the side of the Porta Pia, you come upon the
convent and little church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, which is indebted for its surname
to victories over the Turks, illustrated by the flags of Lepanto, and where we are stopped
by an anecdote as well as one of the four masterpieces of Bernini. The monks of this
convent found one day a statue in their enclosures which scandalized and embarrassed
them. They submitted their scruples to Cardinal Scipio Borghese, who accepted the
compromising marble, and for price of the concession, had the façade of the church built
for them by Soria. Not everybody knows as he looks in the Louvre at the reposing
figure of the Hermaphrodite, that the equivocal Eros was bartered for a portico for a
temple of the Virgin. Besides the frescoes of Domenichino and large bas-reliefs of Peter
Stephen Monnot, a sculptor of Besançon, who signed them in 1699 with the mark of his
native country, works marked by all the faults of the time, but indicating a consummate
workman, one does well to go in search of the Ecstasy of St. Theresa. Nowhere in fact
has Bernini violated the religious style with a more unceremonious gallantry.
III.
Often in going through collections engraved after the masters, I have wondered
whence came four medallions of Domenichino, which are the flower of his work—the Judith,
F F 2
22O - FOME.
the David dancing before the Ark, the Queen of Sheba sharing the throne of Solomon,
and especially the Swoon of Esther, when one day a shower having surprised me in
coming down from the Quirinal, I took shelter in a church of rather mean appearance,
where in a chapel to the left I recognised, as one might discover some imprisoned rays of
the sun, voluminous and sweet originals of these four charming frescoes. They embellish
the pendentives of the cupola of St. Sylvester, where is seen the most enormous and best
piece of Scipione Gaetano. This last nephew of the masters strained himself to attain the
supreme effort of his style, and accordingly he has produced a fine piece; but we feel
that he has done it specially, and the triumph of a strained will is the defect of the work.
*As for the small frescoes of the Bandini chapel it would be hard to cite more harmonious
compositions; the drawing of the figures, which attains true nobleness from having
no ambition beyond grace, borrows a victorious charm from the Smiling and pearly
harmony of the colouring. Such light and such freshness have rarely been attained in
fresco, not even by Zampieri, so clever in shading tones. A certain perfume of aristo-
cratic devotion adds to the attraction of these pictures, without making them insipid.
The great people of modern Rome have made a fine use of their treasures. This
oratory of Cardinal Bandini is one of the three thousand chapels which the pontifical
families and the cardinals have had decorated; the people and the guilds of artisans
taxed themselves for the birth of a noble work and for the glorification of the genius
which honoured their century. Our age of progress has changed all that. In this
pretty church Paul V. and Gregory XIV. erected on each side of the door tombs to
cardinals who were their friends, in which the transition from the style of the sixteenth
to that of the seventeenth century is very marked. At the back of the second chapel
to the left, you ought to look for a fine picture of the Virgin surrounded by various saints,
a rather precious piece of Mariotto Albertinelli, and the only painting of this pupil of
Fra Bartolommeo that Rome possesses. Let us also remark the burial-places of two
persons of great dissimilarity, alike in character and in fortune; one is Cardinal
Bentivoglio; the other, a monument of the mild charity of Pius VII., is Cardinal Maury,
one of the few persofiages of our country who did not draw from his treason an unclouded
popularity nor a fortune exempt from reverse. - .
The medallions of St. Sylvester having given me favourable leanings towards the
Bolognese, I was bent on improving them; that bright colouring had cheered my sight;
the weather continued frightful, so the opportunity seemed a good one for making a
campaign in the territory of Domenichino, and I went down to St. Andrew of the Valley,
its façade full of sweeping architectural floridnesses, a large and very rich church where
Zampieri painted the Evangelists on the pendentives of the cupola. These figures might
make one think that the imitator of the Caracci ventured this time to raise his eyes to
Michelangelo; for the rest, we find here the serenely bright colouring which goes so well
with the architecture. The effect of these qualities is still more perceptible in the vault
of the choir and on the apse, where the same artist has distributed in compartments
elegantly marked out by garlands of arabesques, his figures of the Virtues and various
points in the legends of St. Peter and St. Andrew. Whatever the merits of the
personages and the compositions, qualities that are hardly to be disputed, it happened
to me to forget the actors for the scene, and Domenichino will often occasion these
distractions to people with a passion for a certain interpretation of nature. In the
subject which represents St. John pointing out the Saviour to Simon and Andrew, the
landscape has a charm and invention that are admirable; the Crucifixion of St. Andrew
POMEAVYCHINO ZAMPIERY. 22 F
rises from architecture that forms a splendid decoration. The Florentines of the famous
epoch had not so much style; nor Veronese so much purity. e
But what we ought to see, and what cannot be looked at without amazement is the
enormous cupola of the dome, which is fifty metres round, and which Lanfranc, the
malignant rival of Domenichino, has painted with a verve that may be called practical
dexterity exercised with fury. People ought to come here to study the scientific means
of throwing a Swarm of figures into vertical perspective, under the concavity of a hemi-
sphere, and of making them fly across the clouds of a boundless sky, with all the fore-
shortenings of a bird’s-eye view seen from earth. Let us not pass Sant' Andrea della.
Valle without recalling the Florentine tombs of Pius II. and Pius III., interesting remains '
of the primitive basilica of St. Peter, and banished from the new one in consequence of
the reckless passion for symmetry which has in recent ages presided over construction in
the noble style. They have set these admirable monuments in the walls of the nave, with
their pure and graceful statuettes. The bas-relief which crowns the mausoleum of the
more illustrious of the two Siennese, the reclining statue of AEneas Sylvius, and above,
between St. Peter and St. Paul, the Madonna presenting the departed pontiff to her son—
these are the subjects that animate such a construction as Tuscany has almost alone had
the art of arranging. I have only to mention in the Strozzi chapel two wonderful
flambeaux in carved bronze of the sixteenth century: you must seek them out, for the
place is rather sombre and their tint does not bring them into any relief, consequently
they pass for the most part unperceived. In the middle of the nave, a stone covers the
remains of a celebrated contemporary, Father Ventura, who sleeps at the foot of that
pulpit of St. Andrew from which his voice thundered for eleven consecutive years.
He died at Versailles in 1861. The general of the Theatins reposes in his own land,
for the church belongs to the Order. On his stone they have cut the simple epitaph :—
DEFUNCTUS ADHUC LOQUITUR.
The Theatins and Domenichino Zampieri, for whom I had taken a fancy that day,
made me think of the church of San Carlo in the quarter of the crockery dealers, called
for this reason, in Catinari, St. Charles among the dishes. It is the mother-church of the
Barnabites, who built it in honour of St. Charles Borromeo, with the magnificence
befitting a saint of noble family and princely fortune. Vespignani, the great architect of
the day, he who lately disfigured San Lorenzo extra muros, has faced San Carlo with
marbles, with stucco, with gold. They have also spread out there paintings of which we
will not say a word: it is not the shade of the Hamerani buried here who shall reproach
me with speech on the matter; the coins that can never be forgotten and the superb
medals which they engraved are in a very different style. The four great pendentives of
the cupola, the work of Domenichino, the four cardinal Virtues surrounded by emblematic
animals, have the same brilliance as his other works, and more fame because they are
more ambitiously placed; but these bounding and turgid Virtues remind one of the highly
fed Magdalens of Guido Reni. It is possible that the low-minded jealousies and persecu-
tions of which the good Zampieri was the butt for his rivals and even for his masters, which
was a bitterer trial, may have helped to interest posterity in his favour. When we think
that at such a time in the midst of the mediocrities who were precipitating the destinies
of art, the adversaries of this artist and their clique all but succeeded in scraping and
destroying the frescoes of Domenichino at Sant’Andrea della Valle, during his lifetime
222 - . A&OME.
and when he had just completed them; it is intelligible how such wrong may have stirred
honest hearts. It was this reminiscence which in spite of persistent rain helped to make
me tramp from St. Sylvester to St. Andrew, and from St. Andrew to St. Charles, which is
not very far off. The convent of St. Charles, it may be worth adding, served for a
residence for the illustrious Cardinal Lambruschini, even after he had put on the purple
and had to perform the highest duties of state.
Perhaps it would not be unseasonable as we leave the church of the Theatins, to
recall why this name was given to one of our orders. Voltaire took away its name with
us from the quay of the Theatins. The order of the Theatins was founded under
Clement VII. by John Peter Caraffa, bishop of Chieti, a town situated in the Abruzzi, this
side of the entrance to the kingdom of Naples, and which was called in antiquity Theate.
It has transmitted this name to the order which took its birth within its walls.
In the middle of these regions and of this review of minor churches, you are not sorry
to find without going too far round, a diversion before some of the palaces. The most
interesting is situated between St. Andrew of the Valley and San Pantaleone; I came
across it on my road towards Santa Maria in Vallicella, which is much further off. The
Massimi palace may be placed in the number of those pure gems of architecture, which
show that caprice and gracefulness when compatible with correctness may admit a certain
irregularity. Balthazar Peruzzi, who before undergoing Roman influence had passed his
younger years by the edifices of Sienna and Florence, seems sometimes to continue the
work of the ancients instead of imitating it; I should have seen without too much amaze-
ment Atticus or Maecenas come out from the portico of this Massimi palace. The archi-
tect showed intelligence by lodging thus princes who claimed to be sprung from the
Fabii. The site was confined and not regular, and it was better to lose none of it, than
to cut it to right angles: Peruzzi accepting the form of the ground designed a rather
narrow and very inflated façade, where the windows, their entablatures, the friezes, the
cornices, are of a smiling severity. All this rests upon a portico of six Doric columns
intercepting enframed coffer-work. We see from the street a fore-court with a loggia,
which makes one long to enter the house itself; bas-reliefs of stucco, Greek statues, and
among them a copy of the Discobolus of Myron, a pretty fountain, antique sarcophagi
fixed above the doorways, give to the court, which is surrounded by arcades with
extremely simple Doric pillars, that chaste look, that exquisite and modest richness, which
reminds one of the harmonious age of Augustus—the charm of the works in which the
artist only made himself accessible to minds of true delicacy, as if all the rest did not
exist.
The decorators of the group of Raphael illustrated the antiquity which they revived
and made intelligible; when you have examined the edifices inspired by that revival, you
feel better initiated in the aesthetic of the ancients, and seize with greater ease its variety,
its number, and its smiling fertility and originality. At the back of the Massimi palace,
the posterior block, opening upon a little piazza by which hardly any one passes, contains
frescoes of Daniel of Volterra representing the history of Judith. They are much injured
and little known, by the common people I mean, for Horace Vernet copied from them, or
almost copied, his figure of Holophernes. By way of frieze the master has pourtrayed a
Battle worthy of all admiration, as well for intelligence of composition as for its assimila-
tion of ancient art. It was on the second story of this palace that in 1584 St. Philip of
Neri resuscitated Paolino Massimi; it was in the block backing upon the second court,
that in 1467 Sweynheim and Pannartz sent forth from their presses the first volume that
ZA VALLICELLA—ST. John of THE FLORENTINEs. 223
Roman typography produced, the ‘Civitas Dei' of St. Augustin. These Massimi had
the art of assisting their heraldic pretensions by a good deal of wit. The emperor
having come to take possession at Milan of the crown of iron, was complimented by a
prince of this house, of whom he asked if it was really established that the Massimi
descended from Fabius Maximus. “All that I can say,” answered the prince in a modest
tone, ‘is that it has been believed at Rome for two thousand years.” Not far from here,
in the Vicolo dell’Aquila, let us notice another anonymous palace, whose outlines possess
an extreme delicacy and grace, and which is given by some judges to Raphael. The
style is too primitive and too delicate; I would willingly attribute it to Julian of San
Gallo.
To understand the weariness that may come to the eyes from the pure architecture
drawn by the line, it is only necessary to come and yawn in front of the monuments of
correct France; Rome, which contains everything, leaves nothing to be desired on this
point; two centuries before us she had built churches like St. Waast of Arras, St. Sulpice
and St. Geneviève of Paris. Santa Maria in Vallicella, which Philip of Neri had rebuilt
by Martin Longhi and Giovanni Matteo through the liberality of Gregory XIII., shows
how far the influence of the basilica of St. Peter had made taste poor and style dry. It
is an amplification of that triumphant rococo which from Rome, where it formed itself,
took its flight over the universe. The paintings suit the edifice, and the incontestable
merit of the frescoes of Peter of Cortona by no means prevents them from being over-
powering. You must throw off the indifference with which you are overcome, to observe
a fine Christ of Scipione Gaetano, and a soft and delicate picture of Baroccio, the
Presentation in the Temple. Those who go to the Vallicella intend also to see on the
master-altar three rather singular pictures of P. P. Rubens. That of the centre, a medal-
lion of the Virgin in the midst of a swarm of little angels, is a treat after the Flemish
manner; but the Saints of the right and left frames, draped, posed, carefully drawn, almost
Venetian, belong to those hybrid works where, following style, the master leaves himself,
to become what is called Rubens in Italy. In a chapel belonging to this church the
Philippines have kept up, since the time of their founder, the practice of summoning the
faithful to sermons which are preceded and followed by pieces of sacred music, performed
by an orchestra and singers. The vogue of these spiritual concerts, to which the best
masters have contributed their compositions, has won the name of oratorio for a kind of
work which was first performed among the fathers of the oratory. The Convent of the
Philippines possesses a very fine library, in which also they preserve some unpublished
works of Baronius. I only entered this establishment once, accompanying one of our
artists who was anxious to buy an old tapestry, which the society was willing to part with
for a very moderate price, so it was said. But as soon as we came into the presence of
the father manager, whose ascetic leanness I have still before my eyes, he gradually raised
his pretensions so high, that in spite of the efforts of a young frater who pleaded for us,
it became necessary to give up an acquisition that was too visibly desired. As we parted
in mutual dissatisfaction, I lost an opportunity of seeing the famous Bible of Alcuin which
is there; the young artist recompensed me by a too expressive sketch of our little scene.
It will be meritorious to continue these halts up to St. John of the Florentines. The
distance is not long; you have only to reach the Via Giulia and follow it to the height of
the wire foot bridge, in which the chevet of St. John would reflect itself, if only the yellow
stream were less turbulent. The edifice is more severe, that is to say, has a less ornate
look, lines reign without interruption, the classical barrenness is displayed with all the
224 A’OME.
courage of indigence erected into a principle. On our academic grounds they would take
St. John, which dates from 1590, for a monument of the time of Lewis XVI., and they
would give the Vallicella to the youth of Madame de Pompadour. Still more if they
found there the rich astragals, the sumptuous display and dazzling harmonies of the
Chartreuse of Naples | But no, here are the compassed and correct themes of Pomerancio,
the elegant and sage interpretations of Alessandro Allori; and the St. Jerome of Passig-
nano, and Lanfranc who paints on a vault a Christ dancing; and the subject of St. Cosmo
and St. Damianus, a picture warmed by a polar ray, in which Salvator Rosa betrays by
the abuse of composition the mechanical tranquillity of his transports. The study of the
buildings which consummated in the West the corruption of taste, would be incomplete if
we left out St. Ignatius, one of the
- i. tº -- flowers of the company of Jesus. I
º went in one Sunday with some friends,
while waiting for the hour for visiting
º - -
| the curious collections of the Roman
College, which does not open its gallery
to strangers in the forenoon. We
gº
§
º
º
º
meant to examine the great bas-relief
of our old sculptor Le Gros, where
St. Lewis of Gonzaga raised in glory
introduces into the midst of the decla-
mations of that period the graces of an
expression so strikingly youthful in its
limpid innocence. One must also see
with what bustle and cleverness Father
Pozzi has disposed in his fresco in the
great nave, the ceremonial of the
Triumphant Entry into Heaven of the
great St. Ignatius, the patron of the
order and one of its three founders.
You should pass also before the mauso-
leum of Gregory XV., and before so
many other flamboyant tombs, as all
the rest of the church is flamboyant.
THE FATHER MANAGER OF THE PHILIPPINES. It was erected in I63O by Cardinal
Ludovici, in that pompous and twisted
style, which won for the illustrious company the honour of baptizing the most worldly
and least pure religious architecture of the time of decline. Before the third chapel on
the right used to be at the end the convent infirmary; it was here, before the construction
of St. Ignatius, that they placed the bed in which St. Louis of Gonzaga gave up his
last breath.
| |
IV.
We left these gilded roofs to enter the Roman College, an imposing and vast erection
of Ammanati, which contains many wonders, without speaking of its treasures of erudition.
The fathers of the church are only really known, commented upon, and explained as

COLLECTIOM'S OF THE ROM/AM COLA, EGE. 225
classics in the Roman College, where, at the end of a long series of probations, the
eagles of the Company of Jesus are summoned to profess the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew
tongues, sacred eloquence, philosophy, liturgy, the canon law, dogmatic theology,
physical sciences, and mathematics. Hence there issues a swarm of doctors and masters.
Founded in 1582 by Gregory XIII., the Roman College, that source of light for the
Church, is the stronghold of orthodoxy. This unique establishment, which is attended
by a thousand scholars, may be specially described as Catholic, that is to say, universal;
for there may be acquired, without external succour, the sum of human knowledge. A
large cabinet for physics, a renowned astronomical observatory, pictures, statues, one of
the most remarkable and precious libraries in Rome, provide the means of study and
application. Numismatics even may be followed there in the collection of Etruscan,
Sabine, Latin, Oscan, and Roman coins of the primitive ages, collected by the learned
librarian of the Vatican, the Cardinal Zelada, who lived through the whole of the
eighteenth century. -
Finally, and here is the principal interest of the house for the curious, it possesses
what is without dispute the strangest and the most instructive historical museum that
exists. The elements of it were collected in the seventeenth century by one of the most
learned fathers of the order, the Reverend Athanasius Kircher, who joined to universal
knowledge a great deal of originality, and a candid credulity, which is not the least
singular trait in a man who knew so much and had seen so many things. He professed
in turn the Oriental languages, philosophy, and mathematics at the Roman College.
He was one of those precursors whom vulgar barbarism is willing to take for madmen.
He was among the first to study Coptic; he was the first to interpret hieroglyphics, a
hundred years before the Utopians of the last century; he explained a host of facts by
magnetism, and applied it to the treatment of certain disorders. It was he who invented
the magic lantern. It would be curious in the present day to analyse the Magneticum
Maturae Regnum, which this learned German published in 1667, as well as his theories on
music and on universal writing. The work on hieroglyphics is ingeniously entitled
OEdipus Agyptiacus.
As space would fail me to give a description of the bronzes, the marbles, the terra-
cotta, in a word all the curiosities collected by Father Kircher, let me attempt to make
up for this by recalling the enormous knowledge and strange character of the collector.
Independent and original as he was, and guided as he was by science, was he not sure
to abandon commonplace researches to attach himself to objects that others, especially
at that time, would no doubt have disdained, and of which he alone could appreciate the
meaning and the value? Since his death the Jesuits have continued the collection;
to visit it with an expert guide would be to make a unique course of archaeology applied
to manners and customs; but it is difficult to examine it in detail and to study it fruit-
fully. The museum is not classed nor regularly divided; catalogues are wanted. It is
forbidden to take the slightest sketch, and even to jot down the Smallest pencil note
in one’s note-book.
This prohibition prevented me from resisting the desire of surreptitiously copying an
extremely ancient little bronze, that was found in the Island of Sardinia, and which
represents a foot-soldier of the kingdom of Assyria in full equipment for his campaign;
nothing can be more comic or singular than this emaciated figure marching with chest
thrust forward, obstructed but resolute. Having on his head a helmet decorated with
two horns projecting horizontally from the front, the warrior holds in front of him his
G. G.
226 A&OME.
round buckler with his two hands, which are already embarrassed, the right by a bow,
the left by three short javelins; above the robe, tight and short, is adjusted a set of
crossed straps in front; their object is to support on each side of the back two kinds of
hooks, in which fit nearly perpendicularly the poles of a long litter, ending in a chariot
or barrow on two wheels, bearing a square caisson screwed on the axle. It is in this
that the soldier puts his baggage: the barrow, the truck, and the wheels, all balance
upon his back and overtop his head. You can figure the oddness of this horned soldier,
under the weight of such an equipment.
We must glean by chance in these three apartments, in which my friends and I
fluttered about, driven by cosmopolitan hordes. We endeavoured to precede them
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PORTA, MAGGIORE.
before a very fine Roman seat, of which the arms are formed by long shoulders of horses
of most harmonious curves, from which rise heads exquisitely carved ; these subjects go
with Bacchic figures. This piece, of the seventh century, is hardly less rare than a large
vase, evidently of Athenian origin, which is crowned with small figures designed with
an ideal purity. They represent three scenes from the expedition of the Argonauts,
sketched in a spirit which does not preclude that comic and familiar element, which is so
precious an indication of custom. In one of these subjects a pugilist is taking exercise
by hitting into a large sack, full of tow or sand, hanging from a post; close by a Silenus
caricatures him, by thwacking his own paunch. One would like to exhaust all the
surprises occasioned by the collection of bronzes, assuredly the most incongruous
possible. The age of many of these little figures, which make one think of the times

PORTA MAGGYORE. 227
of Evander, is perilous to determine; in the sarcophagi so many Etruscan personages
have been found with Trajan’s coin in their pockets .
Your prelude opens with Columbarii, in which urns are arranged with really remark-
able collections of bas-reliefs and of the epigraphy of the earliest Christian times. The
numismatic treasures are well arranged. The medal-case of Cardinal Zelada, containing
types originating in the half-fabulous tribes whom the Romans destroyed, goes back as
far as the primitive period when trade was carried on by ingots of bronze. Then came
the large square coins which look like tiles, and on which is the imprint of some
symbolical creature. On the oldest Etruscan coins figures a wheel, the conveyance of
Fortune. In the districts of Latium these blocks of coin bore the emblems of the gods:
a thunderbolt designates Jupiter, a shell recalls Venus, the tortoise recalls Mercury.
Some very ancient ases, bearing an open hand, are arranged according to size and
weight; their relative values are fixed by a row of points marked in relief. As soon as
the human face appears, an art that is skilful, simple, large, rich, with deep reliefs and
finished shapes, discloses itself even in the imprints which are most elementary in
process. Who had transmitted to these half-savage tribes the divine inspiration, that
was interpreted elsewhere by the rivals of Phidias and by the medallists of Syracuse?
V.
The day following that on which in consequence of rain I had followed the frescoes of
Domenichino from church to church, and sown the seeds of an attack of jaundice, the
weather was no better, and I was still only in that state of vague discomfort when you
suppose you can shake off the evil by means of forced exercise. Weary of the mire of
the city, and disposed to play the truant by one of those high winds which delight sea-
gulls and scholars, I reached the Nomentane gate, and making the circuit of the old
Praetorian camp, I continued along the walls of the Aurelian enclosure, which cut the
desert in two. It was on my return by way of the Praenestine gate that, with my hat over
my eyes and my chest thrown forward to make way against the wind, I traversed for the
first time the oriental slope of the Esquiline, those spaces planted with garden and ruin
which were a city, and which are now not even a suburb, and where a few market
gardeners have been able to bring a necropolis into cultivation, without robbing it of its
expression. -
The pilgrimage began by the triumphal gate which is set in the aqueduct of Claudius,
at the point where the road to Praeneste branched off from the Via Labicana. A large
framework of wall, under which are two wide arches, having at their sides three small
gates, crowned with pediments resting on columns; there in all its simplicity is the Porta
Nevia, better known as Porta Maggiore. Its austere and solid character, and the
roughness of the outlines, give full effect to the façade which three emperors left
unfinished, without ordering it to be roughcast: the Romans concerned themselves
before all else with utility, with just and practical appropriateness. This façade is
reduced to what may be called a speaking ornamentation ; three inscriptions placed
one over another, cut in handsome capitals on that white page, describe from two
thousand years ago the consolidation of the monument as well as of the aqueducts by
Claudius, the son of Drusus, by Vespasian, and by Titus. The middle age reduced the
G G 2
228 A’O//E.
dimensions of the porticoes by inscribing in them smaller arches, surmounted by crenel-
lated copings of extremely unhappy effect.
On the exterior side of the gate is the tomb of Marcius Virgilius Eurysaces, baker
and provision dealer; some freedman of Greek origin, whose fortune goes back to the
last years of the Roman republic. The little shrine rests on a base formed of cylinders
standing one against the other, like sacks of corn in a row ; the bas-reliefs of the frieze
represent the processes of the bakery in the time of Marius or of Caesar. Pliny tells us
that before the war of Perseus the public bakeries did not exist; each family prepared
its own bread, and in those remote times they used to sprinkle chopped parsley on the
ANCIENT CASINO, CALLED MINERVA MEDICA.
lower side of the loaf, while the upper crust was washed with yolk of egg and sprinkled
with small comfits of poppy-seed.
Out of the Porta Maggiore, set with antique pavement, and parallel with the
aqueducts, of which Aurelian and Honorius made a rampart, the old Praenestine road
begins. Five or six aqueducts cross one another in this plateau, and their great arches
rise against the sky, and are continued in the background by other ruins. After seeking
to trace out among these winding channels the Aqua Julia brought by Agrippa, the Aqua
Tepula introduced by Cn. Cepio in the year 627 of Rome, the Aniene Vecchia brought
in 482 by Manius Dentatus; the Aqua Marcia, the purest of all, which to descend from
the mountains used to traverse a distance of sixty miles; and the Neronian waters, which
the successor of Claudius turned aside to throw them on his palaces, I retreated before

7///E J//AVER WA Al///D/CA. 229
a shower of rain, as well as before a vision that was truly deplorable in the midst of such
ruins: it was their parody, the ruins of a railway-station.
The old Via Labicana, the Via Porta Maggiore, and the nameless alleys that lead
into the various properties, are marked by enclosures stuffed with old bricks, with pieces
of marble, with mutilated inscriptions; only one comes across no roof under which one
may take shelter in a storm. The streets at the lower end of the gardens are carpeted
INTERIOR OF THE MINERVA MEDICA.
with a grass that grows rapidly, and that after rain gets soaked to an indefinite depth;
you sink almost to the knee in this grass, which grows in strips at the side of pathways of
mud. At considerable distances there is a worm-eaten door here and there, with a high
sill. At one of them a cord hung from a wire; I pulled the cord ; a bell sounded forlorn
in the hurricane of wind, and I saw afar a row of childish heads above the walls among
the rushes and boughs. Elders came next, examined me, and reflected ; I rang once
more, and at the end of quarter of an hour, when the rain had ceased, they came and

23O FOME.
offered me shelter. I went in from curiosity; in the middle of a nursery-garden, in
which ancient chambers served for greenhouses and tool-sheds, I perceived a ruin many
a time used by Poussin and Claude of Lorraine. It is a polygon of ten sides, flanked
with niches for statues rather like chapels, while its half-broken vault raises into air a
piece of inaccessible thicket. This is known by the name of Minerva Medica. Nothing
can be more singular at the highest point of the garden, in which a rivulet from the
Claudian arteries bubbles, than this gigantic flower-box. The Minerva called Medica has
nothing in common with AEsculapius nor with Minerva; so little so, that this charming
pavilion was once a gay boudoir in the gardens of Valerian and Gallienus, and there
were found in it the divinities usually honoured in such rustic retreats, Pomona, Adonis,
Venus, Hercules, a Faun, and even the beautiful Antinóus.
It is at the end of the street, half-way from Sta. Maria Maggiore, that we come upon
the familiar remains known as the Trophies of Marius, an apocryphal description
disguising a nympheum constructed under the Aqua Giulia in the time of Alexander
Severus. The monument had been decorated with trophies of greater antiquity, which
Sixtus V. had transferred to the piazza of the Capitol where we saw them ; Viollet le Duc
believes them to be anterior to Trajan. In the fifteenth century the monument of the
Esquiline was still untouched; I found the proof of it at Sta. Maria Novella in Florence,
in the Strozzi chapel which Filippino Lippi decorated. His fresco represents St. Philip
the Deacon overthrowing an idol, from the pedestal of which he roots out a demon; at
the back of the picture is the waterwork of Alexander Severus, with its architecture
complete, in which we recognise the famous trophies; Filippino, who saw this monument
reproduced it in 1486. A few steps further on was the commencement of an old market
of which Cicero speaks, and which was rebuilt by Livia, whose name it retained. Here
by the side of the little church of St. Vitus is an arch in large blocks of travertine of
good style, but too broad for its height; it was erected in the third century by one
Marcus Aurelius Victor, who was smitten by the learned and valiant Empress Cornelia
Salonia and devoted to her husband Gallienus. This Aurelius Victor paid by this offering
the debt owed by literature to princes so in love with philosophy as to be willing, in order
to give pleasure to Plotinus, to build in Campania, under the name of Platonopolis, a
city in which the laws of Plato's Republic were to be applied. The too meagre inscrip-
tion which is traced on the arch of Gallienus along the architrave, which rests at one
end upon a pilaster with a lotus leaf capital, sets forth the intention of the founder.
The obstinate squall which drove me before it, compelled me to seek another exit by
the side of St. Cross. There a good little monk or friar made me stay, and he took me
to the Amphitheatrum Castrense, which touches the church and curtails the rampart. It
is the oldest building of the kind in Rome; it is wholly in brick and dates from Nero:
Honorius in joining it to the walls, stopped up the arches and cut off its upper storey.
In the arena where the masonry presents in its circumference some curious aspects, they
used to make savage beasts fight with prisoners of war, and we may presume that the
blood of the first Christians flowed plentifully in this enclosure. I was returning directly
towards Sta. Maria Maggiore, when a pedantic fancy made me take the Via Labicana to
the left, which has never changed its name. It describes the same curves as in the time
when Horace passed along it, to visit the ſrigidum Praeneste. Cicero went by it, as well
as Propertius, to visit what before the tyranny of Sulla had been Gabii; Gabii which,
according to Robello, possessed a university to which Numitor sent his grandchildren,
Romulus and Remus, to take their degrees | Made up of old and patched walls, this Via
ZA/E SEZ'7E SAL/2. 23 I
Labicana, which divided gardens, has preserved as far as the Coliseum, where it comes to
an end, a peculiar physiognomy; eighteen centuries have made no change in it, because
it was uninhabited of old and is so still. As you stray in the choked portion where it
bounds the Thermae of Titus, you expect to see coming out of the guard-house a decurio
and legionaries clad as on the bas-reliefs of the Antonine column. At the corner of this
post, which keeps guard I think over a powder store, there begins a solitary and tortuous
ARCH OF GALLIENUS.
street, which towards six in the evening puts on a most cut-throat look. As I found in
my way along it a door opening on the vineyards, which form a vast domain above
the Thermae, I ventured into another legendary paradise.
At once you come to the Sette Sale, which are nine in number, not seven, and which
are not chambers, but reservoirs which divide broad vaulted corridors parallel to one
another. These basins are made to communicate with one another by small round door-
ways, made transversely and nearly opposite to one another, but slantwise, so that from

232 A&OME.
one of the extremities the eye takes them obliquely, a strange effect of perspective which
prolongs the distances. The ancients had a curious ingenuity; and this is all the more
curious, as the doorways were constantly under water, as is proved by the level of a sedi-
ment with which it has coated the walls. This erection, which goes back as far as Titus,
is of formidable solidity. With only a cavernous light penetrating through the verdure,
encumbered with waggons and rustic paraphernalia, the Sette Salle, with their casemated
walls and ancient vaults, occasion considerable astonishment. But to enjoy a fine view,
you must climb on to the artificial hill produced by this block of building. Its roof
consists of turf crowded with violets, and the thin feathery fennel curls in the joints of
the stones. In the middle of this grassy place ages have spared a parterre; it is a
large mosaic framed in plants, and proving that a storey was placed over the vaults
of the Nine Halls.
From this point you see nothing but country around you, though you are in Rome
and inside the ramparts. It is a sheepfold, with all its equipments and all its life, and with
the addition of a certain slovenliness that is not without a grace of its own;–decapitated
towers, fragments of vaults, a shaft of a column which serves for a bench, the first courses
of a Loggia, arabesques in mosaic creeping along by the side of luxuriant herbage; a
lemon tree or an oak leaning against a ruin; low vines running over brickwork, of which
they define the outlines; on every side fountains pouring out into sarcophagi water
from the aqueducts of Nero and Claudius, whose half-empty channels high on their arches
jut out here and there; and finally, among all this chequer-work of vines, pasture-
lands, and flower-beds, the bronzed labourers and the brown and handsome young women
who, with beasts of burden, work the fields thus enlocked in Rome. These women are
like living statues, carrying amphorae on their heads with ornaments that go back to the
times of the Etruscans; the hut in which they train flowers is made in a Cella of Titus or
Domitian ; the rustic steps by which they descend once served the palaces of Caesar. At
the sight of the young husbandmen, who trudge hither and thither, with legs, arms, and
chest all bare, wearing on their heads the conical straw hats that Damoetas and Myrson
in the Greek bas-reliefs toss back upon the neck, you try to pick up again the hemistichs
of the Eclogues to give a welcome to the passing rustics.
The monuments of the city which frame this horizon, reproduce the historic back-
grounds of the frescoes of Masaccio and Benozzo Gozzoli. You see the pinnacles of
St. John rise up with the statues on the façade, St. Cross in Jerusalem with its open belfry,
Sta. Maria Maggiore lifting her severe tower between two domes, accompanying the
Corinthian column that bears the Madonna. On the western slope the eye is led from
the Coliseum, from the temple of Venus and Rome, and the tower of St. Francesca, to the
bold campanile of the Capitol. We ought to designate twenty other edifices, of which
only the Caesars could tell us the names, and which rise too from nursery-gardens, from
orchards, from fields, as the eye wanders from hill to hill. Here and there stand out one
or two cypresses, a mass of grey Olives, some armfuls of oranges above the walls, a
twisted fig-tree, spreading pines from which by chance rises a palm, the naturalised guest
of the desert. -
From these gardens, of which the accidents are determined by buildings underground,
I came down with the Coelian in front, botanizing from terrace to terrace, as a bird
comes to pick up prey on the ground, when weary of wandering too high in air. I
noticed a climatic circumstance calculated to produce indulgence for our countries of
the North, namely, that in this latitude, far to the South as it is, they bring up young
AVERO”.S. PA/AC/E. 233
plants under frames, and that they prick them again after cold. This was what a gardener
was busy with nearly at the foot of the hill, where his underlings had let me make my
way as spitefully as Dauphinese or Picards could have done, without warning me that the
outlet of the Via della Polveriere had been closed by the brothers of St. Peter in Vinculis,
the owners of the enclosure. However I made friends with the worthy gardener of the
monks, and he let me out on the Via Labicana by a way which led me within ten paces of
the Golden House of Nero, brought down to the entre-sol of the Baths of Titus, which
bear on their shoulders the marshy garden ground of the Esquiline.
They had short lives after all, these monuments which the emperors thus ranged one
over the other, with the solidity of works that should be everlasting. Rome is full of
THE SETTE SALE.
such ruins, which attest both the pride of their builders, and a savage indifference as to
their preservation. The Golden House, which was looked upon as a wonder of the world,
and which was built in such a way as to last as long as the world, had not endured for
thirteen years, when Titus supported the Neronian vaults with party-walls, so as to give
them strength enough to support the Flavian palace. In order the more effectually to
thrust away a glory of the house of Augustus, the conqueror of the Jews, giving a greater
extension to the portion of the buildings which looks towards the Coelian, completely
masked the old façade behind a front forming a projecting arc, and divided into five or six
compartments upheld by very high vaults. The Neronian house is set fast inside this;
we perceive it lived in a kind of twilight, just as in descending the slopes of the palace of
Nero we find, at the left corner of the back part, and on a lower range, the still more
H. H.

234 A&OME.
ancient foundations and lozenge-shaped mosaics of the villa of Maecenas, whose palace
Nero absorbed in his Golden House. There remains then the skeleton, two-thirds buried,
of an imperial palace; the portion that one can visit was relieved in 1812 of the rubbish
which still buries the rest as far as the summit of the vaults; previously one had a good
deal of difficulty in getting into these regions underground. Raphael saw the paintings
on Nero's palace, and drew inspiration from them for his works at the Vatican ; since
then, some crumbling had made the approach more difficult, which may have given rise
to the improbable story which represents the painter of Urbino as a jealous soul, who
having found a treasure, hastened to draw from it privately, and then buried it up again
to keep it from the crowd. e
I was sauntering round the ruins, when the keeper who was passing invited me to enter.
To see the Golden House, it is necessary to fasten torches to rods from twenty to thirty feet
long, in order to make out on the vaultings and friezes the remains of their paintings,
which Nero saw and criticized. His residence comprised winter apartments to the south,
and summer apartments facing to the north, which opened upon gardens; lofty vaulted
corridors of a Homeric and severe aspect separated the summer house from the winter
house, and contained between them some oblong chambers. You proceed along these
by the light of the flambeaux, listening all the while to the explanations of the cicerone,
who indicates without hesitation the use of each of the chambers, as if he had been
groom of the chamber to the son of Agrippina. In the principal room there is painted
a Venus half reclining and dreamy as she contemplates Love standing at her feet. It is
only the shadow of a fresco, but the pose has a most felicitous naturalness, and the style
attains that involuntary sublimity which expresses itself with perfect simplicity. The
subjects in these corridors furnish an unequalled revelation of decorative painting at an
epoch most imperfectly known. Divided into compartments, flowered with arabesques
mixed with griffins, winged creatures, even heads of buffalo in foliage placed on thyrsi,
these vaults possess medallions, squares in which the artist has distributed figures,
groups of birds, sometimes even landscapes that you would take for chinoiseries inter-
preted by fantastical artists imbued with the Italian nature; all is light, standing clear
out, marked with delicacy, and in a taste as Smiling as it is pure. One of the most
distinct and important subjects represents the shepherd Faustulus, who after discovering
the sucklings of the she-wolf retires in amazement; Mars appears in the clouds and con-
templates the scene, which is rendered expressive by the excellently seized movement of
the shepherd, the best preserved figure of this charming composition. At the base of the
vaults the painter has arranged a row of eagles with wings spread out, holding in their
claws small medallions with portraits in profile of the imperial family. The ordering and
colour of this decoration, the clearness of the ground, remind one of the Loggie of
Raphael; the monument by its size, and the painting by its science and firmness of
execution, efface all that is to be seen at Pompeii. It is of the same epoch, but there is
all the distance between the capital and the province, and the great masters and their
school; the lord of the world only employed the best workmen of Greece.
Perhaps without knowing it we look at some vestiges of small subjects that were
painted in this house ‘which was the prison-house of his art,' by Amulius, author of a
Minerva, much admired by Pliny, because she followed the spectator with her glance—
Spectantem spectans quacumque aspiceretur. This astonishment shows that the art had not
made rapid progress, since the time when Fabius Pictor had decorated the Temple of Salus
(450), and the poet Pacuvius, nephew of Ennius, adorned with paintings the temple of
S7. MAR7/W AZ MOAVTV. 235
Hercules in the Forum Boarium; but these first amateurs were only inspired by the poly-
chromatic paintings of Ardea and Caere, Latin works older than Rome. Pliny cites an
Atalanta and a Helen as both admirable, and adds that the exhibition of prize pictures
only commenced at the return of Lucius Mummius (607 of Rome). It is from this that we
must date the influence of Greek art, and, as happens in every period of imitation, decline
seems to have followed quickly, as Pliny closes his remarks on the subject of painting
in the following terms:—‘I have said enough on the dignity of an art that is dying.’
VI.
I have reserved to close this chapter, and serve for introduction to the next, a small
church of which, after passing under the Arch of Gallienus, I proceeded in search in a
recess of the Vicolo delle Sette Sale. You make your way through a square court into the
impoverished temple of San Martino ai Monti, and you can come out of it, by the side of
the apse through a small door, at the end of a claustral looking alley. On one side as on
the other this place is solitary to a degree rarely equalled. Hence it was not without
astonishment that I met in it at a corner, under an armorial escutcheon, a beggar-woman
lying down installed with her three children. To make an appeal to compassion she had
decked herself as bravely as possible: her eyes like those of a she-wolf, glaring and
famished, shone in the shadow of an enormous coif that recalled the old Madonnas, and with
a want of foresight which characterizes a nation that is not very clever in seeking gain, the
brood had come and lost themselves in a deserted corner. By an instinct which was
probably rather artistic than the result of interest, as soon as I appeared, they grouped
themselves as if for a picture: the little girl leaned over a sleeping baby, while behind
her her elder brother bent his head towards his mother, with the studied attitude of a lad
of extreme sensibility. It was thus, speaking only by looks, that they awaited my alms.
St. Martin tries the sagacity of archaeologists, because there are in this place two or
three churches one over another. In reconstructing the oratory at the beginning of the
sixth century, St. Symmachus prepared at the Baths of Trajan a burial-place for Martin I.,
who was actually buried there one hundred and fifty years later. Below the church which
Symmachus dealt with, there is another that Peter of Cortona totally disfigured; from
this you descend into a crypt where St. Sylvester has his tomb, and where he is said to
have presided over the council of Rome in 324. It is paved in black and white mosaic.
Remaining poor, though twice decked out in the finery of the decadence, St. Martin has
neither vaults nor ceiling ; the wood-work of the roof is by an original contrast supported
on twenty-four ancient Corinthian columns of precious marble. They preserve here the
seat of Pope Martin, whom Constant II. sent to end his days in exile in the depth of the
Chersonese, because he had condemned the heresy of the Monothelites. Let us also note
a small mosaic of the seventh century, which is very curious though damaged. As at
St. Agnes for Honorius I., as at Santa Maria in the Trastevere for St. Cornelia, I remarked
that the pope always wore a slipper with a cross embroidered on it, and that as in all
the other figures of the sovereign pontiff, the metropolitan of Rome has no crosier. A
cross is drawn upon the slipper, so that when people kiss the foot of the father of the
faithful, the homage is addressed to the symbol and not to the man. There have been
refinements in humility resorted to, ever since St. Gregory the Great adopted and
H H 2 -
236 A&O///2.
transmitted the formula, Servus servorum. /Je: ; they are more laudable in intention than in
appearance, for the cross might be more suitably placed than on a slipper. The absence
of the crosier among the insignia of the papacy is explained by a legend that Innocent III.
will tell us in a very few words. ‘The Roman pontiff has no pastoral staff, because
the blessed apostle Peter gave his to Eucherius, first bishop of Trier, to awake from the
dead Maturnus, whom he had sent with Valerius to preach the gospel to the Teutonic
a r , (/ - -
… /* –
—
FAMILY OF BEGGARS.
nation, and Maturnus succeeded Eucherius. This staff is still preserved at Trier with the
greatest veneration.” (ZJe Sacriſ, Miss., C. VI.) St. Thomas Aquinas completes the story
in the following terms: ‘The Roman pontiff does not use a staff, because St. Peter sent
his to resuscitate one of his disciples, who was made bishop of Trier. This is why the
popes only carry the pastoral staff in the diocese of Trier, and not in other dioceses.’
What especially attracted me to the church was the desire to see a series of fresco

’N VOLLVA GIHIL CIN v s. XIGILGI， 'LS TO AGIA

SZ' MAA’7”/AW. A / MOAZZ. 237
landscapes, that a Carmelite prior had painted on the walls of the aisles. The points of
view are wide, and thus they are composed in a bright and luminous tone; their painter
is Dughet, the brother-in-law and the best disciple of Poussin. I meant also to examine
two older paintings, which are documents of great price. One represents St. John
ZZºº:
ANCIENT CONSTANTINIAN BASILICA OF ST. PETER’S.
Lateran before the restorations which have modernised it; the other, the interior of the
ancient basilica of St. Peter on the Vatican, just as it was under Nicholas V., as it was,
consequently, when erected by Constantine in 326. Viollet le Duc, who has copied this
fresco with his photographic precision, has had the kindness to place his drawing at my
disposal, in which we recognise the spot that was formerly occupied by the ancient

238 A’O.]/E.
bronze statue of the apostle, and in which we see that they, even at that time, descended
at the end of the great nave to the Confession of St. Peter; that the aisles, to the number
of five, were separated by Corinthian columns, raised by six steps above the central nave,
- / _ \ N -- wº
FAccIATA INTERIOREDELLACHIESAANTICHA DISPIETRO INVATICANOE Svo ATRIO
Dºria da Carlo Phdredw d/ºgnate et ſnºylala da Civanni Batſa Falda.
a unique arrangement, I believe; finally, that these splendid pillars supported even in
the aisles apparent roofs. Some engravings of G. Battista Falda, that are become rare,
FACCLATAESTERIORE.F. LocGIA DELLABENEDITTIONE DELIANTICHA BASILICAVATICANA
Deſtriº & Caric Padreaso - After intº da Grezada Aalaa.
-
- - ** -
FAQADE AND LOGGIA OF THE BENEDICTION IN THE OLD BASILICA.
complete our information for the outside: they restore for us the cloister with its
monumental cone in the middle under a small shrine : then the portico and the façade
of the church, which were adorned with mosaics; the belfries, one of the eleventh


THE AMC/EV7' VA 7/CAAW BAS//, /CA. 239
century, massive and thick, the other more meagre and less ancient, which rose
above the Loggia, close by the side of the modest and classical entry of the Vatican
residence.
These memories take us back, by a chronological path, from the Esquiline to the
Vatican, and from San Martino ai Monti to the basilica of St. Peter.
FACCIATA Dovrº veniwa sitv
dell'Antitha Baſilica Wahcana
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FAQADE WHERE THE NAVICELLA OF GIOTTO WAs.











|
|
UNDER THE PORTICO OF ST. PETER’s (SIDE of THE SACRISTY).
~
- CHAPTER XI.
THE BASILICA OF ST. PETER.
I.
HE friend who had disturbed my first illusions, often repeated, “Do not weary
of returning to St. Peter's, but without making yourself stiff against it; arrive
at comprehension before judging, and you will have taken a long step.” I
lent myself to this method of progress with entire good faith. I left nothing
undone to assimilate an art which wants neither spirit nor vigour. I hastened with all


=========~==

SZ". AETER’.S. 24 I
abnegation in the pursuit of an infatuation that I dreaded. To familiarise myself with it,
I used to wander round this colossal object, and contemplate it under every aspect.
Let us examine first what concerns the general appearance of the work; then let us
point out the most remarkable of the numerous objects of art which the Basilica contains,
with the hope of calling especial attention to works that are either not appreciated at all,
or not appreciated as they should be; finally, let us do our best to rise to the idea which
presides over this conception, which gives it a unique significance, and which constitutes
its grandeur. -
At the exit of the Piazza Rusticucci, at the moment when, facing the dome, you
proceed to make your way into the round of Doric columns, which mark the ellipsoid
outline of an immense space, you are struck with the apparent unity of so vast a con-
struction, commenced in 1450 and continued over two centuries and a half. The more
we look at these erections, the more astonished we are, as we recall the names of
Bramante, of the two San Gallo, of Raphael, of Peruzzi, of Michelangelo, and of
Vignola, the principal masters of the first century of the construction, the more, I say,
we are astonished at finding ourselves before an ensemble which, from a distance, we
should assign to some contemporary of Soufflot, until the moment when we draw near
the façade, and suppose we have to do with some rival of Mansart. The reason of these
analogies is simple enough : from the reign of Lewis XIV. to that of Lewis XVI. the
French only copied St. Peter or imitations of St. Peter; to this period corresponds the
disappearance from among them of a national architecture. The circular colonnade of
Bernini, nearly three hundred columns, set in four rows, and leaving between them a
central passage for carriages, this enormous phantasy is the manifesto of a style which
subordinates utility to symmetry, and rules to decorative effect: these two hundred and
eighty-four columns, which are strong enough to support the palaces of Semiramis,
support nothing at all; they are placed there for show; they are the feet of two
banqueting tables set for a congress of giants, on which are drawn up in a row ninety-
six statues of between three and four metres, which from a distance cannot be distin-
guished, and which you do not see any better when you are near. For that matter, no
one looks at them; and such is the fate of works of art that are lavished out of place.
We cannot deny that this colonnade, connecting itself with the piazza by two curves
of such amplitude, is an imposing conception. It is still more so on paper; it would have
its effect if one could take a bird’s-eye survey of the whole; it would be too easy to show
that this plan is a theoretic expression, and that the ground furnishes no point of view
from which the whole spectacle is to be obtained. Too large for the round form, the
vast, useless, and unoccupied space makes one regret that they did not arrange over this
sublime colonnade, or in its place, the incoherent palaces of the Vatican court, thrown
confusedly out of straight line, and which, by encumbering one side, disorder the noblest
symmetry that the schools have ever dreamed of. One other thing gave me a constant
shock: the basilica of St. Peter, for the glorification of which this immense device has
been contrived, declares itself in the skies by a great hemispheric dome, flanked by two
other smaller domes; these cupolas, particularly that of the centre, whose curve,
attributed to Michelangelo, was rectified by Giacomo della Porta, would have gained by
rising in rectilinear construction. The conflict of the horizontal and vertical arcs of a
circle is not happy, and the proof is, that from the points of view at which the dome of
St. Peter has not the round of Bernini for a foreground, it rises with a much superior
effect. Those who paved the piazza seem to have understood this: from the foot of the
I I
242 A&OME.
obelisk, that rises in the centre, they made a series of radii in white stone diverge,
which, by giving more firmness to the surface, lead the eye by direct lines to the four-
and-twenty steps of the church. Two sparkling fountains adorn the semicircles of this
vast arena, accompanying the obelisk—and that is why the obelisk of our Place de la
Concorde is supported by a couple of fountains.
The façade is unhappy; everybody has said so to satiety; it masks the dome, its
pediment is abortive, its attica ill accented by a row of small, low, and misshapen
windows; its top is ridiculously equipped by the thirteen colossal figures of Christ and
the apostles gesticulating on the balustrade. Under the frieze, with the inscription of
Pope Borghese (Paul V.), is placed the central balcony, whence the sovereign pontiff
blesses the city and the universe. This window, its four neighbours, as well as the five
doors whose entablature is supported on columns of precious marble, form so many
details of an elegant regularity. I like also the interior gallery running the length of the
façade and ending at the extremities by vestibules, at the foot of which appear two weak
and characterless equestrian statues. One of them, the work of Bernini, represents
Constantine; and the other, Charles the Great. Above the great door they have
replaced the Bark of St. Peter, a mosaic executed in 1298 by Giotto for the old basilica;
the work has been so re-handled as to have lost its character. The last door on the
right is walled-up, with a bronze cross in the centre; it is that of the Jubilees; it is only
opened in the holy year, four times in a century. The middle approach, adorned with
imperial profiles in medallions, and which comes from the first basilica, is the work of
Simon, brother of Donatello, assisted by Antonio Philarete; it presents on its bas-reliefs
the martyrdom of St. Peter and St. Paul, as a pendant to Eugenius IV. giving audience
to the deputations from the East, and crowning the Emperor Sigismund.
In Italy they do not shut the churches by a system of small doors, soon made greasy
oy the hands of the populace. Giving a literal interpretation to Christ's saying, “My
Father's house is always open,” they are content with a curtain; but in order to prevent
it from flying about in the wind this curtain, especially for doorways of great size like
that of St. Peter, is a sort of canvas with lead at the foot of it, and doubled by a piece of
leather. The process is dirtier than ours, for, as it falls back on you, the leather, which
is plastered with all the filth from people's hands for centuries, often gives you a brush in
the face. However, there is no noise; you enter as if you miraculously made a hole in a
wall that instantly closed up again. The sensation is particularly striking at St. Peter's,
where you are dazzled with a mass of splendour, and it would be still more so if the
longest of known naves, and one of the highest, since the vault is forty-eight metres from
the pavement, disclosed to you instantaneously its astonishing dimensions.
II.
When, without settling, the eye draws lines through these spaces, your calculations
grow, but as soon as it pauses on details, they are so distinctly perceptible that the church
thus made small becomes a mere casket of jewellery. The formidable telescope through
which you seem to be examining such a gem produces the presumption of a tinier reality;
the mind does not take in so excessive an enlargement, and it is only by degrees that it
comes to accept for true the vast cavern of polished marbles, of mosaics, of golden
S7. AETER’.S. 243
foliage freshly come from the lapidary's workshop. Some wonder, too, results from the
general freedom of light, as well as from the freshness of particular tints; the walls faced
with stucco, the pilasters, the architraves, the pedestals, all seem shot with fine shades
from white to opal and from gray to rose. The lustrous and embellished pavement under
one’s feet turns, as one retires, into mirrors doubling as on the surface of a lake all the
arches and vaults. Finally, what adds to the mundane splendour of this official basilica
is that on the counter-pilasters, playing with the ensigns of the priesthood, circle those
charming angels which, first emancipated by the child of Cythera, have become for three
centuries in the palaces of kings the sportive pages of every allegory.
Is it true that you have no suspicion of the immensity of the church, before you have
measured yourself with Liberoni’s angels in yellow marble, two metres high, which
support against the first pillar a vessel for holy water in the shape of a shell? This is not
quite accurate; the thickness of the air which makes the bottom of the nave cloudy, the
microscopic Smallness of distant passers by, have already given you warning. The Angels
in question occasion a peculiar illusion; the mere prettiness of these naked children,
recalling a number of analogous subjects smaller than nature, hinders you at the first
glance from conceiving that a pier should have been exaggerated to such a point. To
understand what must have passed here, and to explain their disproportions, which are
real in spite of the theories which are strained for their justification, it is indispensable to
describe the various phases which the structure has passed through.
Rossellini and Alberti, the first interpreters of the intentions of Nicholas V., confined
themselves to raising from the ground the walls of an enlarged apse when, to answer to
the vast designs of Julius II. and to efface the renown of Brunelleschi, who had constructed
the cupola of Florence, Donato Lazzari, called Bramante, proposed to raise in the middle
of a Greek cross formed by four long naves in the style of Constantine, a cupola on the
model of that of Agrippa, but enlarged to untold proportions. Such was his ardour,
stimulated by the large and ambitious character of Julius II., that in 1513, after seven
years of work, the cupola without supports launched its arches into the sky, but erected
too quickly and on unsure foundations, the Babel threatened ruin and had to be demo-
lished. Raphael, the successor of Bramante, who in taking his flight “dreaded,” he
wrote, ‘the doom of Icarus,” Raphael, assisted by Giuliano da San Gallo and by Fra
Giocondo, strengthened the pillars; curtailing the chevet and the transepts, he adopted
the design of a Latin cross; his design has not been preserved. Balthazar Peruzzi
-erected the apse and returned to the idea of a Greek cross less developed; consequently
Antonio da San Gallo, when he replaced him, preferred the Latin cross. They still show
his plan in relief, rich in belfries and pyramidal outline, a scheme that Michelangelo
depreciated by accusing it of savouring of Gothic. San Gallo showed himself more
penetrating than his predecessors; divining the rock on which they had split, he sup-
ported the buildings by formidable stays, and excavating the mysterious Soil of the
Neronian Circus, which was furrowed by the graves of martyrs, he solidified the whole of
the circumference down to an extreme depth. After that they could build on sub-
stantial foundations.
This was preparing the glory of Michelangelo, who did not fail to return to the Greek
cross, and who ended the drum of the cupola, to which the rest was subordinate. It has
been maintained that he meant to raise a portico with columns, in the style of that of the
Pantheon; but the elevation of his plan, executed in colour under Sixtus V. against one
of the cartouches of the Vatican Library, contradicts this assertion. It shows us four
I I 2
244 A’OAl//.
small bays in a cross terminated by semi-circular apses, and the great cupola surrounded
by a circle of statues at the base and accompanied by four small domes. All these
rounded masses were to be isolated in a quadrangular space of a calm and severe archi-
tecture. Vignola and Pirro Ligorio who came next, in accordance with the wishes of
Pius V., conformed to the plans of Michelangelo; but as soon as Giacomo della Porta had
finished the dome, Carlo Maderno, left too free by Paul V., made haste, in order to
show his genius by a novelty—a novelty four times tried—to return to the Latin cross by
elongating the great nave. He ended it by that frightful façade which Bernini connected
with a bracelet of columns.
A. Chapel of St. Sebastian.
B. -> ,, the Holy Sacra-
ment.
11. Tomb of Gregory XIII.
I2. -> Gregory XIV.
13. St. Jerome.
14. Bronze statue of St. Peter.
15. Tomb of Benedict XIV.
16. Martyrdom of St. Processus.
C. Gregorian chapel.
D D'. Transepts.
E. Pontifical altar.
F. Confessional of St. Peter.
G. Entrance to Sacristy.
H. Clementine chapel.
I. Choral chapel.
L. Presentation chapel.
17. St. Erasmus.
17". Statue of St. Bruno.
18. Tomb of Clement XIII.
19. St. Michael (Guido Reni).
20. St. Petronilla.
. Tomb of Clement X.
22. -> Urban VIII.
23. Pulpit of St. Peter.
24. Tomb of Paul III.
25. -> Alexander VIII,
26. Bas-relief.
27. Tomb of Alexander VII.
28. Crucifixion of St. Peter
(Guido Reni).
29. Stigmata of St. Francis
(Domenichino).
30. St. Peter and St. Andrew
(Pomerancio).
31. St. Gregory the Great
2
I
M. Baptistery.
N. Scala Regia.
O, P. Galleries of Bernini.
v. Urn with remains of last pope.
ar. Tomb of Innocent VIII.
3. Entrance of stairs to dome.
z. Tomb of the Stuarts.
1. The Jubilee gate.
2. Statue of Charles the Great.
3. 22 Constantine.
4. Chapel of the Pietà.
5. Tomb of Christian of Sweden.
6. -- Leo XII. (Sacchi).
7. ** Innocent XII. 32. Tomb of Pius VII.
8. ,, Countess Matilda. 33. Transfiguration (Raphael).
9. -> Sixtus IV. 31. Tomb of Leo XI.
IO. ** Gregory XII. 35. -- Innocent XI.
PLAN OF THE BASILICA OF ST. PETER.
It was not without good reason that the most expert, Peruzzi, Michelangelo, Vignola,
Della Porta, were bent on avoiding a conflict between so enormous a dome and the
longest nave that had been seen. As it was necessary, after the death of Bramante, in
order to support a cupola nearly as high as the Great Pyramid, to more than double the
thickness of the pillars of the choir and make them terribly massive, these great men
understood that it was necessary to bring the supports of the nave into proportion, and
that it would be crushed by them. Such is the peril that Maderno braved, being obliged,
in order to bring himself into harmony with the end portion, to give to the pillars of his
nave a volume so monstrous, that only three could be arranged on each side, and it is

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INTERIOR OF ST. PETER's (VIEW TAKEN FROM LEFT TRANSEPT).

S7. PETER’.S. 245
these enormous supports which do more than anything else to make the gigantic church
look small. In fact, who will dream of suspecting that a nave whose length only divides
into three arches, is the longest in the world? I was bent on measuring these blocks of
masonry which give the nave so short a perspective; each pilaster measures thirty of my
steps, and the pillars of the cupola are two hundred and six feet in circumference. The
ornamentation with which they overlaid such surfaces, to disguise their ugliness and
make them so that we should only see pillars in them, necessarily took exorbitant
dimensions. Maderno hollowed within two tiers of niches, and peopled them with figures
eighteen feet high ; on right and left of these niches he reared fluted pilasters nearly
three metres broad; the entablature, seventy-seven feet from the pavement, is not less
than six metres thick. These masses stream with the splendour of marble; capitals,
architraves, golden arabesques, stucco miniatures of the great arches, rosettes on the
vault, everything comes from step to step at last to attain such exaggeration, that
in the judgment of the spectators the accustomed scales of proportion are reversed.
That this construction should grow, it needs the darkness of evening to come and
extinguish it; simplified by time, the ruin would seem of prodigious immensity.
Nothing makes the unfortunate effect of these disproportions more intelligible than
the canopy which surmounts the altar, which is set backwards, that is, towards the west,
because when the pope officiates he looks to his people. This canopy is not less than
eighty-seven feet high, yet it is impossible to suspect it. Hence, perhaps, certain
warnings, certain landmarks contrived by Maderno, a man of superior talent at a time
when they compassed great missions with small means, to inform the public that the
heaviness of the construction has their enormous size for excuse. At the very threshold
you touch in passing the engaged columns of the portico, in the fluting of which you
could niche a statue; the sensibly exaggerated height of the pedestals and bases cannot
escape you, for your own height serves you for a scale; along the nave you next meet the
copper lines which mark on the pavement the length of the largest cathedrals known, &c.
Reflection gradually makes you understand that our ogival metropolitan churches of the
thirteenth century could be held in pairs in St. Peter's; but in spite of this reality, your
memory recalls them to your imagination as larger and especially as higher—an illusion
due to the prolongation and multiplicity of the vertical lines, and the bold and aspiring
form of their vaults.
As for the traditionally professed opinion with reference to St. Peter's, that these
dwarfing deceptions are the valuable result of an ideal harmony of the proportions, that
is a piece of nonsense begotten of the servility of inferior schools, and we should not
trouble ourselves about it, if it were less widely spread. Surely there would be a ruinous
inconsistency in laying out money to erect the largest religious edifice in the world, and
yet to do so in such a way that it should appear small. We should rather incline to the
contrary idea : to build the edifice as vast as possible, and try by a skilful combination
of lines to make it seem even larger than it is. How can we help perceiving, in the
course of this long undertaking, the continual influence of personal vanities 2 Bramante
and Maderno claim to surpass, the one all the cupolas, the other all the naves, and their
ambition comes to nothing; the cupola of St. Peter is higher, but it is neither so deep
nor by any means so wide in diameter as that of Florence, by the great and simple
Brunelleschi; the nave of the basilica exceeds all others in length, but we only set forth
this advantage to mark an effect that has completely miscarried.
In the accomplishment of this work, in which pride ever went before, the error of the
246 A&OME.
popes lay in putting into a position of rivalry with one another a series of men of genius,
who were too illustrious to consent to execute with docility a rival’s conception. Each
of them on coming forward claimed that he was the bearer of new prodigies; the people
were full of joy, the pontiffs were radiant, and it cost them dear; for towards the end of
the seventeenth century, Carlo Fontana calculated that the expenses up to that time
mounted to nearly 152,000,000 francs. To meet this demand it was necessary, from the
reign of Leo X., to coin money in every fashion, and hence the traffic in indulgences,
which furnished such dangerous weapons to Luther. Rome thought she was raising on
the tomb of the apostle the monument of triumphant unity; she was working for the
Reformation : the breach between modern art and religious sentiment, of which the last
champion perished on the scaffold of Savonarola, was to be consummated for ever by the
pompous style of the edifice that was consecrated to the temporal glory of the popes.
III.
When you pay a visit to St. Peter's, you might imagine that you were come to pay
court to some one. So many prelates and pontiffs in their dresses of ceremony seem still
to exist there, the statues of an illustrious congregation of saints unite respect for cere-
mony with attitudes so deliberate, that, the great man driving from mind the ascetic or the
martyr, and the astragals making the idea of the palace master that of a temple, the place
invites less to prayer than to conversation; the basilica is the vastest reception-room on
the globe. What contributes during winter to this mistake is, that you are caressed by a
tepid and soft temperature, an inexplicable phenomenon, except for the scientific men,
who, if it were bitterly cold there, would also explain why you freeze in it. The
mildness of the air will allow us, then, to seek out some pearls from among much
trumpery, and people will understand the necessity of self-restraint on the subject of a
church where we count forty-four altars, seven hundred and forty-eight columns, and a
council of three hundred and eighty-nine statues. On this account I will omit whatever
leaves no trace in the memory, and that is, with perhaps a score of exceptions, all the
decoration of the transepts, of the apse, and of the aisles.
The old basilica, situated in the same place, lasted for eleven hundred years, when
Pope Nicholas V., though with pious designs, committed the archaeological impiety of
presuming to substitute for it a temple superior to that of Solomon. By good fortune
the Constantinian basilica was only pulled down proportionally with the works, and fifty
years after the death of Thomas of Sarzano one-half of the church still served for
worship; and these delays still permitted the replacing in the new church of various
monuments which it was good to preserve. The statue which people generally visit first,
by way of paying dutiful respect to the patron of the place, is the seated statue of
St. Peter, a bronze of the fifth century, which, towards the year 445, Pope Leo placed in
the basilica. I do not know who has advanced the doctrine that it was the ancient statue
of Jupiter Capitolinus, but it must have been a jest, for no one can take for the statue of
massive gold, which Domitian set up in the first century, this bronze of the very middle
of the decadence, stiff, poor in design, and with the right hand, which blesses, and the
left, which holds the keys, cast along with the rest of the body. This statue is the object
of such veneration, that the kisses of the faithful have polished and worn its foot. It is
S7. AETER’.S. 247
doubtful whether any bronze figure of life-size consecrated to a Christian hero can be
earlier than this. The St. Peter interested me for another reason; among the gems
preserved under the glasses of the Library of the Vatican, chance had disclosed to me
an oval medallion, and, according to the opinions of experts, belonging to somewhere
between the first and second centuries; this piece, which is little known, has on it the
profiles of St. Peter and St. Paul, modelled after nature at an epoch when art still joined
simplicity of style to suppleness of execution. Now the statue of St. Peter, in spite of
cold and awkward execution, presents a marked likeness to one of the profiles of the
Vatican Library. Conformably to primitive traditions, the apostle has abundant and
crisp hair, the beard curled, rather blunt features leaning to mobility of expression;
something of the Arabian ; the air of a child of the people, with the healthy leanness of a
man of action. This prototype of Christian numismatics shows Saul, or Paul, to us as
Nicephorus has described him: quite bald, with long features, aquiline nose, the
meditative, argumentative, and half-wearied air of a philosopher of the porch, worn by
the struggles of life and the spirit. With the aid of this comparison we are rather
brought to think that the bronze statue of St. Peter was made after types traditionally
handed down, a practice conformable enough to those of ancient Rome.
At the bottom of the nave the eye is attracted to the front of the master-altar, at
the foot of which are the eighty-seven lamps, perpetually burning on the circular
balustrade of the crypt or confession; you would take them for a mass of yellow roses.
Their stems are gilded cornucopias. At the foot of the steps is Pius VI. kneeling in
prayer, his eyes fixed on the tomb of the apostles; his last desires, as he lay a dying in
exile, were a dream of this burial-place. Canova has impressed on the martyr's features
a sublime aspect of devout meditation and fervour. The Confession gives access to a
fragment of the primitive oratory raised by Anacletus on the monument of his pre-
decessor, and the tomb of Peter and Paul serves for an altar to that chapel of the
Grottoes, above which they have replaced the master-altar of the new patriarchal church,
in the very spot where the successors of St. Sylvester officiated. It was in all times a
venerable spot, and so surrounded with fear that Alaric had brought to it in solemn
procession the sacred vessels of which a soldier had taken possession. Urban VIII.,
aided by Maderno, has made all this into something which is no more than delightful:
he also had constructed by Bernini the great canopy of the master-altar of gilded bronze,
with twisted columns loaded with an entablature which, filled at the corners by four
angels standing, supports a globe surmounted by the cross. Nothing has been so often
imitated as these twisted columns: from 1630 to 1680 all altars had glorias like that of
the Tribuna, and twisted pillars like those of St. Peter's. We ought to know, to explain
this fashion, that the form of the columns of Bernini had been determined by four small
marble pillars of the old Ciborium, brought, it is said, from Jerusalem, and which are
supposed to have come from the Temple: they are still seen, arranged with others that
have been copied, on the four balconies constructed in the pillars of the transept. It is
from one of these projecting balconies, that which commands St. Veronica, that during
the holy days they display the great relics, the holy face, the wood of the true cross, and
the lance of Longinus.
I have mentioned the dimensions of the canopy; that estimate adopted for a standard,
you take in almost with terror the height of the vault, beneath which this toy of twenty-
nine metres is lost. The apse is one hundred and sixty-four feet long. At the back, is
the presbyterium, where in the days of pontifical solemnity the sacred college is ranged
248 A’OME.
around the pope. There is in it a sumptuous altar, and, in the middle of a glory, the
Chair of St. Peter, sustained by four colossal figures of bronze and gold, which represent
two fathers of the Latin and two of the Greek Church. The Chair, by Bernini, is only
an outside case, containing the curule seat of Egyptian wood faced with ivory, which is
supposed to have been given by the senator Pudens to his guest, the apostle Peter.
They show in the sacristy a model of this precious piece, which is rarely exhibited, as
well as some of the small ivory facings that have been detached from it; they represent
the Labours of Hercules, and are of an indisputable antiquity.
We know that in Pliny’s time the workers in ivory already veneered wood, and that
they executed marqueterie, either with shell or with bits of ivory cut very small and fixed
with glue. This is at any rate a sort of sedan chair, such as the senators employed
under the first Caesars, and such as Horace describes in the words curule effur. This
Pudens, the first patrician to receive the
faith of Christ, and his family, whom we
follow for three generations by the
funeral inscriptions on the loculi in
the catacombs, may out of veneration
for the memory of the first bishop of
Rome have piously kept and trans-
mitted to the Christians the seat from
which Peter had spoken, a relic of which
there is mention in the acts of the pri-
mitive church. Tertullian and Eusebius
prove the practice which prevailed, of
preserving with respect the seats of
apostles and bishops.
On the sides of the Tribuna, and
joining the Sun of an operatic apo-
theosis, are two mausoleums which
deserve mention. At the bottom of
S. that of Paul III. which is to the left,
* - --- - Guglielmo della Porta had sculptured
CURULE CHAIR ATTRIBUTED TO THE APOSTLE PETER. in marble al naked and half-reclining
figure of Justice, beautiful enough to
excite the love of knavery itself; no Venus has a more charming head. As for
the body, we cannot any longer form an opinion upon it; it was found decorous to
have Justice clad in a tunic of zinc by Bernini, who hardly profited by the lesson. The
same artist in the mausoleum to the right has represented in bronze Urban VIII.
seated, the right arm raised in the act of benediction. Bernini is not one of the men
whom we can sacrifice wholesale; his statue of Urban VIII. is sufficiently calm,
extremely full of life, and majestic. I will observe on this subject that the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries multiplied in the churches of Rome and even at St. Peter
pontifical statues seated and giving the benediction; that of Urban VIII. is the oldest,
and the becomingness of the attitude, as well as the grace with which the sculptor
accompanied it, gave the first impulse to all the numerous imitations. But it is curious
to observe that in seeking this same movement, none of the successors of Bernini has
succeeded in making it at once paternal and noble. Innocent X. at St. Agnes,

ST. PETER 'S. 249
Clement XIV. at the Santi Apostoli, are the one affectedly grave and the other clumsy;
Gregory XVI. looks like a man performing some operation; Alexander VIII. has the
air of a warrior threatening; Clement X. of a man calling out in amazement; in a word
they have all more or less failed, so difficult is it to seize the expression of a gesture.
Bernini had sought it in nature, while others thought they could make it their own by
studied interpretation; the secret of every era of decline is there.
Let us come down the church again, and take the right to the back of the transept,
at the entrance of which on Holy Thursday is erected the seat of the Grand Penitentiary,
who on that day after public confession gives absolution to some great sinner muffled up
as a pilgrim. We will pass before the chapel of St. Leo without allowing ourselves to be
dazzled by the queer cleverness of Algardi; his bas-relief of Attila is a virtuoso's trick
and nothing more. At the foot of this altar is, not the tombstone, but the commemorative
monument, of Leo XII. with the following votive inscription which he wrote a few days
before his death :— -
LEONI MAGNO PATRONO CELESTI
ME SUPPLEX COMMENDANS
HIC APUD SACROS EJUS CINERES
LOCUM SEPULTURAE ELEGI
LEO XII HUMILIS CLIENS
HEREDUM TANTI NOMINIS MINIMUS.
How far more touching is this humility than the funereal paraphernalia with which
Bernini surrounded Alexander VII. ' However, Cherubini maintained that it is good now
and then to see and hear something bad, so as not to fall into it from ignorance.
As you gain the Tribuna from the arm of the cross, you will find in a niche the statue
of a sacristan of the eighteenth century with the face of a cherub, decked out in ermine
and laces; this is the way in which they have appreciated the austere and great
St. Norbert. If you pass straight in front of the Clementine chapel, you will see on an
altar at the back of a pilaster of the cupola, the finest specimen of the Roman mosaics
of which the Vatican is the workshop; it is a copy of the Transfiguration of Raphael,
and has such accuracy of tints as to produce a genuine illusion. This is a picture which
will never fade; there it is fixed in its freshness, until the next invasion of the barbarian ;
a precious art that ought to have been imported into our climates, where as damp
destroys paintings and frescoes, the monuments are of a frosty monotony. A return
towards the chapel of Clement VIII. would give us an opportunity of saluting the tomb
of Pius VII., a curious monument of an epoch and of the complicated taste of northern
imagination. I will not speak of the figures of Force and Wisdom, descending from a
clock that has long stopped ; but we cannot help admiring how under the hand of
Thorwaldsen, the good Pope Chiaramonti, while remaining like himself, has been able to
Germanize his expression. They have seated him on a Greek throne perched over an
Egyptian Sepulchre. -
Before the Choral chapel where each day, with a view to hearing the practice of
singing, strangers go and seat themselves in white ties and dress coats, we at last, against
the pillars of an arch, come upon a work of a pure time, origin, and style, the tomb of
Innocent VIII. Antonio Pollajuolo at the end of the fifteenth century made it in bronze
for the old basilica. What grandeur, after so many vulgarities, has this Florentine
- K. K.
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jewellery. Compare these four Virtues in bas-relief with the great Bellonas of the
Barberini, and mark the nobleness, the personality, of these two statues of the pontiff, the
one representing him full of life, the other extinguished in death. In its elegant
refinement, the ornamentation waits without solicitation or stir for the eye to come and
rest upon it. Opposite is a door, and above it a coffer of stucco, which contains the
corpse of the last Pope deceased, until the demise of his successor.
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THE GRAND PENITENTIARY AT ST. PETER’s.
Before coming to the baptismal fonts, remarkable for their porphyry basin, which is
the upturned lid of the sarcophagus of the Emperor Otto II. (a gem twelve feet long
cut in the tenth century, and set by Fontana in a fine mounting), you will pass before
the pillar against which lean the tombs of the last of the exiled Stuarts. People were in
the full fervour of monarchical restorations, when Canova having to pourtray these
three princes, bravely gave to the children of James II, the titles of Charles III. and
Henry IX. Rome professes the eternal perpetuity of right, and only confers the

ST. PETER '.S. 25 I
absolution of the /ai/ accompli by favour of repentance. Above these two Augustuli, an
Angel and Religion exhibit in a Lewis XV. frame a fine medallion in mosaic of Maria
Casimir, the inconstant and adventurous grand-daughter of John Sobieski.
We pass in front of the chapel of the Pietà, a word that we ought to translate by Pity,
if you prefer the real sense to a nonsense of custom. It is so called because on the altar
is a marble group representing the Mater Dolorosa with the dead Christ. When he thus
ventured to cast this corpse across the knees of a divine mother, Michelangelo was not
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TOMB OF INNOCENT VIII.
four-and-twenty; hardy, already original, but ingenuous; stirred by ancient beauty, but
imbued with Christian sentiment, he enlarged the expression without as yet altering it.
If I note in passing the triumph of the Cross that Lanfranc painted on the vault, it is to
rectify the widely-spread error that all the paintings at St. Peter's are mosaics. They
have preserved the sarcophagus of Probus Anicius, which in the old basilica served for
baptismal font. It was Fontana who designed the tomb of Christina of Sweden, and who
adorned it with a colossal medallion of gilded bronze, a fine portrait executed with a
K. K. 2

252 A&OME.
master hand. The mosaic copy of the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian by Domenichino, of
which the original is at St. Mary of the Angels, has given a name to the following chapel;
this mosaic is dull, coldly modelled, and very inferior to the painting, of which the colour
is tender and lively. Nearly opposite, on the reverse of a pillar is the mausoleum by
Bernini of the famous Matilda of Tuscany, who dying in 1125 bequeathed her lands to the
church: she had been originally deposited in a sarcophagus on which the history of
Phaedra and Hippolytus was sculptured, and which John of Pisa studied; Urban VIII. in
1635 had transferred to St. Peter's the remains of a benefactress, who made her vain
munificence cost so much blood. This figure is a purely ideal composition : the head
grave and animated, with a sweep comparable to the fine things of antiquity, is
admirably posed and admirably attached; the vigorous and feminine arm carrying the
sceptre expresses resolution; the left with more timid gesture hesitatingly sustaining the
tiara and the keys; the majesty and the pose are enhanced by the arrangement of the
draperies.
IV.
What stillness in this museum ! Twenty groups of strangers do not lessen the impres-
sion of solitude; a hundred persons entering at once and dispersing under the arches are
lost and vanish. A company of persons is talking with animation in the distance: you
do not hear a voice; and if a procession of scholars winds its way at the bottom of the
basilica, you see them gliding noiselessly away, reflected on the pavement like a flock of
sea-birds going afoot over a wet shore. But when the patriarchal basilica contains some
thousands of the faithful, moving round an army which manoeuvres under the naves, then
statues, bas-reliefs, portraits of every colour and every size come to life, and mingle with
the swarming crowd : the stones cry out, doctors and saints revive, the whole church
lives.
Even when some ſunzione brings festival into the basilica, certain chapels far away
from the centre are left solitary as grottoes. The finest and one of the most spacious is
that of the Holy Sacrament, where in front of a copy in mosaic of Caravaggio's Descent
from the Cross, and at the foot of the altar which it decorates, is a monument in bronze,
very lowly since it lies upon the ground, and very simple as you take it in at a glance,
but which is in my eyes the marvel of the basilica : the true amateur has already named
the tomb of Sixtus IV. which Antonio Pollajuolo executed. The construction, which has
a very wide and open pedestal, rests on large feet attached to the corners by foliage; in
the middle the pontiff slumbers on a simple truckle bed. But to the right and left, on the
border of the pedestal, seven Virtues surround him, and as these are not enough to
illustrate the life of a sovereign, the arts and sciences are added, forming the subjects
of admirable grace: the little figure representing Music is one of the gems of the
Renaissance. This composition is rich without confusion, noble with simplicity, delicate
without dryness: the portrait of Sixtus IV. in which an intelligent thinness and
close execution translate the spirit of a doctor and saint of the church, as well as the birth
of a man of old stock, is among those which serve as touchstones to biography. The
warlike Julius II., who without taking death into account had resolved to raise at leisure
the vastest church in the universe to be a shrine for his tomb, came and sought a shelter
here, where the two popes of the contested house of Della Rovere are intertwined like two
ST. PETER’.S. 253
oaks; the second still happy to find in the funereal hospitality of his great-uncle Sixtus,
what he had dreamed with more ambition than taste.
In the chapel of the Virgin, on the inscription of Benedict XIV., we notice the appear-
ance of a practice that was introduced by the impoverishment of the pontifical families,
who were no longer rich enough to erect royal mausoleums to their celebrities. Those
who acquitted this debt to Benedict XIV. were his natural clients, Cardinales aſ eo creaſi.
Such is the custom at the present day, whence it follows that long reigns create many
donors to the profit of their memories.
It is in the arm of the cross on the north side that Nicholas Poussin has his great
mosaic, on a subject little in harmony with his tranquil, epic, and in some sort Racine-like
- .
lºſiº ſºlºiºſº |
STATE CARRIAGE COMING FROM ST. PETER’s.
talent: St. Erasmus having his belly opened, that his bowels may be wound out upon
a wheel. In a niche near the altar people greatly admire the large figure of St. Bruno
by Michael Slodtz of Paris, latest born of those Slodtz of Antwerp who worked so
hard at the sculpture in the gardens of Versailles under Lewis XIV. and Lewis XV.
This figure is well worth looking at ; it is the apogee of anecdotic and amusing statuary:
that is its merit and perhaps its slight defect also. St. Bruno refused to be pope, for
which reason Slodtz represents him as tempted by an angel who offered him the tiara
and the keys. The saint, whose posture is somewhat mannered, turns aside and refuses
with undecided gesture, all the more expressive as it is not free from a certain clumsiness.
To be ashamed of the triple crown in the beard of so many pontiffs who have worn it,

254 A&OME.
and in their own basilica, would, without the introduction of certain forms, be to teach a
lesson to the spiritual sovereigns; so Bruno refuses with hesitation, feebly, while his
master lets fall a tender smiling glance on the pontifical ensigns, from which he has
difficulty in taking regretful eyes. But then where would be the merit, if Bruno was not
tempted P
Let us finish with an incomplete work, in which what is defective is more widely
renowned than what is sublime. Canova was in his early maturity when he designed the
monument of Clement XIII. ; the great sculptor then worked under the influence of the
Maecenases of the north and academic theorists; I fear that he was bent on surpassing
himself. Whatever it was, this construction, which is too big, too empty, too rectilinear,
with its virago who is too short, and whose skirts are too short, and who personifies
Religion; with its two figures fixed in bas-relief to the sarcophagus, and its too smooth
and intelligent lions, of which one watches while the other slumbers with one eye open ;
with its Genius of Death, who weeps as he turns down the torch of life; this affair has a
coldness, an insipid attempt at poetry, and a past taste which will never return. But
above the sarcophagus the kneeling statue of Pope Clement is avowedly the finest
representation ever executed of a priest at prayer; this figure, which prays with so much
fervour of soul, would be less expressive if the attitude did not exactly harmonize with
the radiant spirit of the countenance.
Such are, so far as I remember, not all the important works contained in St. Peter,
but at least those which it is essential to study, to preserve the recollection of it. My
involuntary omissions will give pilgrims a better chance of making discoveries; my
notes, by the elimination of a mass of secondary works, will help people to find with less
trouble what are of a truly superior kind by each master of each school. I seek
indulgence for my criticisms, and a good mark for my omissions.
V.
Pope Pius VI. put an end to the buildings by making Marchionni erect sacristies,
which are of a purer taste than the earlier portions. Towards the end of the eighteenth
century architecture, making a supreme effort, seized more closely and with a less mixed
taste the ancient traditions. I meant to find the colossi of St. Peter and St. Paul that
Pius II., a Piccolomini of Sienna, had carved, not by Mino da Fiesole, as is vulgarly
repeated, but by Paolo, who copied the St. Paul after the fine head of Demetrius, tyrant
of the Morea; they figured in front of the Vatican until Pius IX. replaced them. You
visit these disgraced statues in a vestibule rich with coloured marble; they are without
style or character, but the statues which succeeded them are worth no more, and
Pius IX. would have done well to let the new ones also go to the basilica of St. Paul
which was awaiting them. - - -
The clerks and canons are lodged in these vast buildings, which contain a small
world; besides the common sacristy, which is octagonal in form, are counted three
others for special purposes. You reach them by galleries adorned with antique
inscriptions in the spaces between the columns. The capitals of the pilasters bear the
complicated arms of Pius VI. : palms rolled in volutes, a star for the eye, and the branch
of lily in the centre. In the sacristy of the canons there is in front of the altar, which
S7. PETER’.S. 255
is decorated by a picture by Fattore, a painting by Giulio Romano, the Virgin with the
infant Jesus and St. John, which deserves a special place in the work of a master, whose
too ostentatious science is not always tempered by sentiment and charm. In the
chapter-hall is the reproduction of the ancient Seat of the Apostle, with a host of
precious objects which it would take too long to enumerate. These Italian sacristies are
at once cabinets of curiosities and private apartments; the priests dress and undress;
they write, they hum, they despatch their breviary; and if your discretion detains you
on the threshold they bid you enter. I could never succeed in Italy, in spite of con-
scientious efforts, in rendering myself inopportune. In the chamber of the beneficiaries
you will find pleasure in a Christ surrounded with Angels by Giotto, and above all in
nineteen ravishing little frescoes by Melozzo da Forli, seraphim charming in design, and
with a sweetness of effect particularly surprising so far back as 1471, two-and-twenty
years before the birth of Correggio. Enlarged in mosaics, these figures taken from the
º
º
mºnº-In-Tºm -
A-Gus--and-s- ºw ºvere dr.
ANGELS OF THE CUPOLA, AFTER MELOZZO DA FORLI.
Santi Apostoli have been executed on the sky of the cupola, where they produce a happy
contrast with what surrounds them. There are also to be noticed there some small
predellas that may be attributed to Giotto, and a Virgin of the end of the fourteenth
century, that is rather remarkable.
Fully to appreciate the extravagant immensity of the basilica it is not enough to
saunter there for long hours; you must wander all round it, and contemplate from the
gardens the dome and one of the apses, falling formidably and as at a single cast down
to the branches of the great green oaks, which are made to look like mere shrubs; you
must pass under the portico which from the outside leads to the sacristy, and from the
basement of the church watch at the end of the piazza the distant houses which look like
German toys; you must in descending laterally from the portico count the twenty steps
of a staircase, which does not reach up to the stylobate of the neighbouring pilaster;
you must estimate the little space which is taken on its pedestal by the equestrian figure




256 A’O.]//E.
of Constantine, entirely absorbed as it is in the thickness of a pillar. But above all do
not shrink from the ascent of the cupola of St. Peter. Let us conclude by examining this
monument.
A gentle interior slope, cut by some very low steps, and that sheep might ascend,
raises you to the platform between the summit of the façade and the drum of the dome;
it is the first plateau of this artificial mountain. Advancing immediately towards the
piazza, to throw a glance from this height upon the pavement, I leaned against
an upright rock, posted there like a Druidical altar; and as other similar masses
disclosed their outlines at my side, I recognised the twelve statues of the apostles which
crown Maderno's façade. Turning right round, I had in front of me a sort of plain,
ending in the monstrous tower of which the cupola is the roof. To right and left like
hills the small octagonal domes, now become considerable, bound the valley which is
the flattened roof of the three aisles. The country
is inhabited; there has been formed in it a small
hamlet, with workshops, huts, sheds for domestic
beasts, a forge, a carpenter's stores, wash-houses,
ovens; some little carts are stabled ; a fountain
sparkles in a rivulet which conducts it to a large
basin or small lake in which the dome mirrors
itself; you feel that there is up here an organized
existence. For several families in fact, it is a native
land; the workmen of St. Peter, called San Pietrini,
succeed one another from father to son, and form
a tribe. The natives of the terrace have laws and
customs of their own. From this spot, whence you
discern the height of the building in full develop-
ment, there are still two hundred and eighty-five
feet to climb.
Another point of view over the interior of the
church is contrived in the entablature which describes
the circumference of the cupola. This border is more
than two metres high, although from the pavement
you would take it for a simple moulding; it seems
narrow up here, when you undertake on such a slip a circular walk of three hundred paces.
From this height the church seems to you like the bottom of an abyss; the canopy of
the altar sinks into earth, the pillars attenuated at their base by a retreating perspective
form a reversed pyramid, and the faithful are dots; a bluish haze increases the enor-
mousness of the space. And as your eyes ascend the walls of the dome, the frieze
discloses in capital letters seven feet high the famous inscription, TU Es PETRUs,
which from below does not seem more than six inches high. On the pendentives I had
remarked a St. Mark of a reasonable stature; seen from here it stretches under the cupola
like a cloud; the pen with which he writes is a metre and a half in length.
At length the real ascent begins between the two shells of the cupola, and this strange
journey in which as you climb you lean over curved and inclined planes, at last by a
curious sensation robs you of all feeling of a horizontal line, and consequently of a
perpendicular. You are then in a state of considerable amazement, when you come out
ANGEL OF THE CUPOLA, AFTER MELOZZO.

.S7. PETER’.S. 257
upon two sights of a most singular effect; in the inside, seen from a circular balustrade
devised in the lantern, the pavement of the church as if seen at the end of a telescope
with the object at the small end; outside, from a narrow gallery round the lantern, a
perspective that is almost unbounded; it embraces all the old Latin world from the
Sabine hills to the sea, and from the heights of Alba to Etruria. Only when you come
out from the inner arches into the full and dazzling sun of this eagle's nest, you are not
only dazzled, but almost lifted up in the air by hurricanes of wind which come from the
Mediterranean to dash themselves against this height. You have now only to seek the
ball of bronze, which from below has the effect of a melon, and which is capable of
holding sixteen persons. You reach it by an iron ladder absolutely perpendicular.
The percussion of the wind makes
this iron globe constantly musical; it is
pierced with loopholes invisible from
below, and through which, seated on an
iron ledge, you prolong your gaze far
over the mountains. Seen thus from the
blue tract of the skies, the Roman Cam-
pagna loses its russet glow in a green
mirage; the flattened slopes no longer
justify the many windings of the Tiber,
and the seven hills of Rome—which are
in truth ten—recede among the abstrac-
tions of history. These perspectives are
still more magical from the Giro dei
Candelabri where, commanding the
cupola with its arches descending like
the slopes of an escarped island from a
lower height, you measure the extent
of the Borgo and the Vatican palaces,
which with their square buildings and
labyrinthine gardens produce the effect
of a heavenly Jerusalem in the illumina-
tions of some old missal.
The dome, which makes the cross
sparkle over the horizon of Rome higher
than the eagles of Jupiter ever flew, is
the true mountain of this spiritual
empire, and the hills make a circle of homage around it. For the basilica of St. Peter is
even more than a prodigy of human will; it is the sensible translation of a thought; it is
the history of Christianity sung in a poem of stone and marble, and attested by the
witness of proofs in the spot where they actually occurred. For all sects, for all believers
of whatever faith, St. Peter's is one of the sacred enclosures of the universe. Let the
work be more or less perfectly achieved as to detail, it will still remain mightier for its
ideal and mystical value, than for the accumulation of gold and marble.
PASSAGE UNDER THE PORT1co of ST. PETER’s,

258 A’OM/E.
VI.
The most ancient monument of the Vatican that is still standing, is an obelisk to which
the authors of the first century first called the attention of posterity; Pliny tell us how to
bring it from Egypt, Caligula sent to sea the greatest ship that ever existed. The obelisk
º
TRIBUNA AND CHAIR OF ST. PETER.
disembarked, they set it up at the Spina of the circus which Caligula had established in
his gardens in the Vatican, and this circus took the name of Nero when the successor of
Claudius received through his mother Agrippina the inheritance of Caligula. But before,
as after Nero, the hill was always desert and of evil name. Under the republic, people
heard voices there; waticinia were given there, and hence, according to some, the origin
of the word Vatican. Spectres and wild beasts persisted under the Caesars in haunting

ST. PETER’S. 259
these retreats, serpents multiplied, and Pliny tells how in the reign of Claudius they
killed one of these monsters here, who had inside him the remains of a human child. We
know from Tacitus that after the burning of Rome Nero, to appease the gods and turn
aside from himself the suspicions of men, “subdidit reos et quaesitissimis poenis affecit quos
per flagitia invisos, vulgus Christianos appellabat. . . . . Et pereuntibus addita ludibria, ut
ferarum tergis contecti, laniatu canum interirent, aut crucibus affixi, aut flammandi, atque
ubi defecisset dies, in usum nocturni luminis urerentur. Hortos suos ei spectaculo Nero
obtulerat, et circense ludicrum edebat, habitu aurigae permixtus plebi, vel curriculo
insistens.’
All then began in these gardens in Nero's circus, at the foot of the obelisk that still
remains standing; for in the middle of the ruins of the Vatican, which was abandoned at
the end of that reign, the witness that had been sent from Egypt never fell. Sixtus V.
found it in its place, close to the present sacristy, in a court where it continued to mark
the Spina of the circus which had been the theatre of the first martyrdoms. It was here
that the Christians dug graves for their brethren, under the very ground on which they
had confessed to their belief. The spot was henceforth consecrated; when its abandon-
ment by the emperors had left it desert, the faithful brought hither the head of St. Paul,
which had been buried near the Salvian springs on the Ostian Road; it was the same
with St. Peter, whom his disciples hid for some time, before burying him on the Vatican
with the other victims of the first persecution. Evidence shows, so far as testimony of
that sort is evidence, the authenticity of this burial-place; four-and-twenty years after
the execution of Peter, Anacletus marked it by a small oratory of which a portion
remains, for this monument was preserved by Pope St. Sylvester when he had the Vatican
catacombs excavated, in order to lay the foundation of the basilica erected by command
of Constantine on the ruins of the oratory of Anacletus. Eleven centuries later they
overturned the ground still further for the commencement of a larger basilica, but on the
same spot, still continuing to respect the tomb of the apostle, round which still remains
in the grottoes the pavement of the Constantinian church : finally, three centuries ago
the grave was opened and the presence of the bones established.
What is the idea controlling the plan of the patriarchal basilica of Rome, and what does
it symbolize? It resumes in sensible and palpable forms the annals of Christianity from
its first public manifestations in the west; it connects by an unbroken spiritual filiation the
reigning pope with the spiritual lineage of St. Peter; it places the church, to affirm the
catholic faith and unity, at the bar at which the defenders of doctrine and the chiefs of the
church succeeded one another—on the tomb of the first of the confessors. To the assembly
of the popes whose images line the basilica, are added the princes who constituted the
sovereignty of the popes, and those too who came in search of shelter under the sh:.dow
of the apostles; the Emperor Otto, Charlotte, Queen of Jerusalem and Cyprus, the kings
of the dispossessed dynasty of England, the Countess Matilda, the Queen of Sweden, and
before all, the guardians of this majestic place of refuge, Constantine, who consecrated
the spiritual supremacy, and Charles the Great, who constituted the terrestrial sovereignty.
To this council there came, represented by colossal statues ranged along the bays on
the passage of the pontiffs, the men who in all parts of the world spread the Christian
civilization by their writings and their works, the founders of the monastic orders. At
the foot of the curule chair of the first bishops of Rome, where the ages have seen seated
so many canonised pastors, are placed as sentinels the principal doctors of the Latin and
Greek churches, Ambrose and Augustin, Athanasius and Chrysostom. From above, the
L. L 2
26O A’OM/E.
four evangelists hover over the altar; the annals of religion unroll themselves in inde-
structible pictures on the walls of the basilica, and the pope as he officiates may read
above his head on the circle of the cupola, ‘Tº es Petrus, et super /anc Petram acdiſſcado
ecclesiam meam, effiói d'abo claves regni calorum.”
As, surrounded by bishops and cardinals, a spiritual court recruited from among all
nations, and the generals of the great societies, the sovereign pontiff intones at mass the
OBELISK OF CALIGULA AND Fount AINS OF THE PIAzzA OF ST. PETER’s.
Symbol of Nicaea, which is repeated aloud with him by all the members of this perpetual
council, they affirm and confess where Peter and Paul confessed; it is on their tomb that
the chief of religion sacrifices, where two hundred and fifty-eight pontiffs have gone
before him. The mortal remains of eight apostles, eleven fathers of the Church, eleven
founders of orders, of thirty-five canonised popes or martyrs who have also guarded the
body of St. Peter, still await the resurrection under these vaults, where their successors
will slumber at the feet of the common ancestor. Finally, to bring nearer distances of

ST. PETER’S. 26 I
time that are confounded by so long a chronology, when the pope celebrates the holy
mysteries, around him the cohort of the martyrs who were contemporary with the apostles
press above the heads of the faithful, for the enormous columns of bronze which support
the canopy of the great altar have been filled with the bones exhumed from the Vatican
catacombs, when they were destroyed to lay the foundations of the triumphal temple.
This is the basilica of St. Peter, and this is what that obelisk of Caligula watches,
which saw all done at its base, and all grow over a tomb once dug in a garden, it will
soon be two thousand years ago, by timid and disquieted shadows.
ORDINARY PENITENTIARY.
CHAPTER XII.
Meaning of the Cannuccia of the Penitentiaries. –Christmas mass at the Vatican basilica.-The pope's entry on
the Sella Gestatoria.-Portrait of Pius IX.-Anecdotes.—The pontifical funzione of the 2nd of February.—
Benediction of the tapers and procession of the candles.—Official reception at the Spanish embassy.—
Ball toilettes.—Portrait of Cardinal Antonelli...—Roman society.—What is thought of economists at Rome.
I.
HEN a long residence at Rome has familiarised you with the basilica of
St. Peter, the monument acquires an extreme importance in your mind; from
the banks of the Tiber, from the green solitudes of the Villa Pamphili, from
the distant slopes of the Sabine country, the eye seeks that peak which gives
their character to the horizons of the district. In the midst of the confused outlines of
the city and the Campagna, the cupola is a culminating point which rallies all eyes; it is
the Mont Blanc of the pontifical states.
Under the naves where one loves to wander and think, all concurs, the moment you
are free from the minutiae of analysis, to raise you to the feeling of a truly universal
conception, uniting all peoples in a common fraternity. Certain practices contribute to
this impression: round the arms of the cross, here as at St. John Lateran, the priests of
ten nations, almost in permanence, hear penitents submissive to the same dogma, and
coming to profess it in all tongues; the dialects are marked by a sign on the front of


CO.VACESS/OAV A 7" S7. PETEA’’.S. 263
each chapel. Before the door of each tribunal is fixed a long pole like a fishing-rod,
and often, as a priest listens to his penitent, you see a believer approach with clasped
hands and sink on his knees before the confessional three or four paces off; then, without
interrupting his exhortations, the priest raises his line, stretches out his arm, and places
the end of the rod on the head of this passing penitent. It is a summary form of
reconciliation: ‘I will make thee a fisher of men,” said the Saviour. In fact by this act
the confessor can only hook venial faults, little more than involuntary, such as may have
Tº
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THE POPE ON THE SEDIA.
escaped between the absolution and the eucharist. In the ancient ages, to emancipate
a slave, his master struck him on the head with a small wand called windicta; the
cannuccia of the basilicas is the sign of spiritual enfranchisement. By this confirmation
of absolution, the slave of sin is exonerated.
It was at the Christmas festival that I observed for the first time the royal basilica
in full activity. The antiquity of a ceremonial fifteen centuries old gives rise to com-
parisons that make archaeology itself expressive. Thus, you will remember that the

264 ROME.
custom of exalting on a sella gestatoria the fathers of the Roman country, the sovereign
pontiffs, the patricians, and the emperors, has its origin under the Republic, in the time
when Sulla was dictator: was not the first seat of the popes, lent to St. Peter by Pudens,
a curule chair? On a Pontiſex maximus, a title perpetuated to our own day, in the year
511 of Rome, was conferred for the first time the privilege of being carried in a chair to
the senate; at the time of a conflagration in the temple of Vesta, Caecilius had at the
peril of his life saved the sacred things. Since then the dignitaries of state have claimed
a privilege first enjoyed by a supreme pontiff, and which only the sovereign pontiff has
retained.
I was prepared for the spectacle, but
the impression which it causes is unex-
pected. When the morning of Christ-
mas poured vast populations into the
vast nave, and above an ocean of heads
you see coming, his brow bearing the
triple crown, and his frame dignified by
the sacerdotal habit, this prince of
priests and father of kings, then the
mind pictures that vast line of descent,
and all the popes appear to you in one
only. That sparkling and voluminous
tiara, which makes you think of the
sovereign of Nineveh, that dais high in
the air, those great fans and feathers
which evoke reminiscences of India,
all amazes you in the presence of the
majesty which approaches thus.
Seen close, when you can discern
his features, the holy father causes a
lively sensation; it comes from a formal
contrast between the dominant and bold
situation of the only sovereign of our
equalitarian time who still has human
beings to bear him, and the modest,
fatherly, and collected bearing of the
FAN BEARERS. prince who seems to cling to the world
only by the blessings that he scatters.
Pius IX., whose energetic eye and remarkable head are tempered by a harmonious
paleness, possesses that majesty of age which so well beseems the pontifical dignity;
we discern in it a mixture of nobleness and humility. There is in his movements a
grace that a sculptor might find adorable. The pope chants correctly and has the
modulation of a true master; his basso-cantante voice has the roundness and power of
a bell; it fills the bays of the basilica, and when from the height of the Loggia
commanding the great piazza, his holiness blesses the city and the world, none of
the nations represented before the basilica loses a syllable. The pontiff officiates at
the master-altar with the ardour of a young Levite at his first mass.
During the high mass at Christmas, an elegant crowd, more curious than select,

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A PAMEGPA’/C OM 7THE ROM/AAVS. 265
presses everywhere. It is not uninteresting to let yourself be amused by the observation
of your neighbours. Behind me happened to be a fine lady absorbed in her prayers,
until the moment when the pontifical troops in their sixteenth-century equipment
marched in after the pope, to form groups at the entry of the aisles; a survival of the
time of Lautrec and Gaston de Foix. At this sight the lady could no longer contain
herself: “How splendid What discipline ! What a wretched show do our French
troops make by the side of these Christian warriors' etc. She caused such scandal that
her neighbour, who was the wife of an officer in our army, lost patience and administered
a sharp scolding to her.
* ...
NOBLE GUARD. THE POPE's SWISS GUARD.
Political passions occasionally sow in certain minds amusing prejudices. At my side
was a lady between two ages, who seemed to me to belong also to good society, with a
certain provincial air, which does no harm to distinction, while it allies itself with a more
communicative humour; my neighbour in fact helped me to chat with her. I noticed
under her black veil a locket with fleur-de-lis; her handkerchief had a cypher framed
with branches of the lily: thus the plumage enlightened me as to the note, even before
the bird had begun to sing.
For eight years she had passed her winters at Rome. “What a nation she cried,
‘and how you will love them | But one must know these Romans, that people calumniate
so ; they have a piety, a candour, sentiments . . . . An admirable, admirable people!'
M. M.

266 A&OME.
I acquiesced with a bow, with that gravity of conviction which is claimed by polite
adhesion to doubtful truths. But as by giving in so quickly one would lose the grace of
submission—“It is to be regretted,” I murmured timidly, “that they should have been
represented as rather inclined to small rogueries; but . . .”
‘Don’t let us speak of that,’ interrupted my neighbour with vivacity: “rather
inclined, you say; I must confess they are very much inclined; it is their weak side, it
afflicts me.”
“They are so poor,” I hastily concluded, to soften so painful a confession.
“Not at all : they are only lazy, and they find it more convenient to thieve than to
work. 'Tis sooner done; they are so lively For the rest, easily contented, sober,
without ambition; a truly admirable people; and how gentle they are !’
‘Yet one hears, too, of certain thrusts with the knife. . . .”
“Ah, mon Dieu, that’s true ! A bad habit, a want of instruction. . . . And all that
is the more to be regretted as they are an admirable people.’
“If the police were sterner. . .”
‘Quite true; it is the fault of the police, for at bottom there is not a more docile
population.’
“Then if the government were to spread among the poorer classes the benefits of
education.’
‘Oh, as for that, impossible ! They have a horror of being taught, and perhaps it is
a good thing, as ignorance has left them in their primitive candour. But you will see,
when you know them better, that they are an admirable people.’
From concession to concession, the admirable people had gradually got blackened
with the darkest tints of atrocity, and the good soul while she kept repeating her refrain,
gave all up without knowing it.
II.
Assisting at the offices of the great festivals in the Roman basilicas, one wonders
whether the columns of their naves, refugees from pagan temples, have not seen
something analogous to the display of the Catholic ceremonial: the transition was so imme-
diate that they were bound to avoid shocking by violent contrast those whose creed they
were changing. The deeper you dig in Rome, the more you meet and the more you
want to find; but the ground of search and of interpretations becomes unlimited, if you
open the campaign under the guidance of a conviction that nothing ends and that all
transforms itself. Do you wish, like the Ramnenses and Luceres to assist in our own
day at the Lupercalia, the feast of the shepherd and tillers of the soil older than Rome,
celebrated since its foundation on the Palatine by the Quinctian clan in honour of Ceres
or Faunus, and of Pan, the destroyer of wolves? Then go to high mass at St. Peter's
on Candlemas Day.
These processions with torches in honour of the gods went back so far, and were so
keenly relished, that it was indispensable to retain them with a double physiognomy:
popular and in the street, by the Moccoli of the carnival: hieratic and in the temple, by
the procession of the candles at the Purification. To sanctify what they did not venture
to annihilate, they connected the row of tapers with the memory of the divine light
proclaimed by St. Simeon, who, after waiting for many years in the Temple at Jerusalem,
AYUS THE AWI WTH. 267
that Saviour whom a revelation had promised that he should see before dying, beheld the
Virgin-mother and her son enter on the day of the purification, and suddenly inspired,
advanced before them with the improvised words of the AVunc dimittis, that canticle of
the old who quit this world happy and with fulfilled desires. Such is the triple origin of
the Feast of Candles, less renowned than the ceremonies of Holy Week, but not any
less curious.
Thanks to the kindness of our ambassador, a place was reserved for me behind the
Sacred College and the bishops, in the very circle of the apse, at the back of which the
pope, surrounded by great dignitaries, occupies his cathedral seat established under the
pulpit of St. Peter. But to find the superior officer of the pontifical guards, who was to
introduce me, I had to go down the nave, which seemed nearly deserted, so vast is that
basilica, where on my way I left battalions of troops behind me, drawn up in various
corners and forming merely certain small groups under the enormous size of the vaults.
At the very bottom of the church were soldiers and chamberlains—the head of a
procession which seemed to be waiting for some one. In the middle of the group was a
large kind of trestle with two long transverse rods on the right and left of it; on this
a spacious red arm-chair, and by it a double row of stout bearers clad in crimson
pourpoints of Utrecht velvet.
Pius IX. arrived, praying in low tones, his face looking weary, his frame somewhat
feeble, and his features moved by a certain internal agitation. He took his seat and
composed himself; he arranged, not without a certain inquietude of air, the long purple
cope, and adjusted with some impatience the enormous white mitre which they placed on
his head. Heedless of what was going on around him, his whole expression was one of
weariness and annoyance. The bearers making ready to raise him from the ground, he
tightened his two arms, and his face grew pale and as if contracted by some nervous
movement; suddenly by a single movement, supple but resolute, the fourteen athletes
hoist him above the tallest heads; the chair traces its way amid the crowd, and the
procession forms itself behind the sovereign, transfigured and magnified by majesty of
gesture and attitude into gigantic dimensions.
This revelation of the pontiff in the state of a simple mortal reminded me of a fact
which was barely a year old, of the time when Pius IX. was sick and seemed to be
touching his last days. Though he felt himself sorely strained, he was bent on the
Holy Thursday on ascending to the Loggia to give his blessing, according to custom,
urbi et orói. But the weather becoming bad, the physicians opposed the wishes of the
sovereign pontiff who had to resign himself to perform the ceremony in the interior of
St. Peter's, where the curule chair was carried in procession before the cardinals, the
bishops, the dignitaries, and the members of the diplomatic body, who attentively
watched the attenuated face of the holy father. The pope rose with difficulty, but at the
moment for intoning the benediction, his voice failed, he raised his eyes to heaven, and
fell back; then hiding his face in his hands, he broke into sobs. The crisis lasted some
moments, which seemed long enough to spectators who were moved with pity and
alarm, for they feared to see the father of the faithful expire before their eyes. At
length, Pius IX. slowly raised his head, and then making a marvellous effort he stood up,
and with smiling lips and a failing arm pronounced the benediction which he expected to
be his last, and then fell down as if annihilated. -
On Candlemas Day the cardinals wear a violet chasuble richly embroidered with
gold, and mitres like the bishops, who wear copes to match. When the holy father is
M. M. 2
268 A’O///Z.
installed on the pontifical throne, the ceremony commences by the benediction of a
multitude of torches; at the Introit, the priests and the deacons of the choir come and
fall on their knees in turn before the pope, who supports in his two hands a taper placed
horizontally, to which they have fastened crosses and Madonnas at each of the ends.
It is offered to the prelates to kiss, after which, as the postulant kneels before him, the
pope raising his arms places the taper above his head; then one of the officials takes it
and hands it to the recipient. The cardinals and bishops, the chamberlain, the heads of
orders, the senators, the prince assistant (this year a Doria) all come for a taper; after
them defile in the train of the mace-bearers, the conservators, ambassadors, and
generals; each in turn accomplishes the same ceremonial. During the formalities of
this homage to the pontifical throne,
tapers are distributed to personages of
lower dignity; the cross-bearers resume
their advance, and a new procession of
torches, starting from the right of the
baldacchino, completes the circle of the
church, returning by the left. Cardinals,
mitred bishops, to the number of some
fifty, in their chasubles and copes all
glittering with gold, surrounding the
curule chair of the sovereign, this time
wearing a mitre of gold; foreign princes,
ambassadors, officers, men-at-arms in
full uniform, all compose a most
striking spectacle. The old Teutonic
and archaic uniform of the pontifical
guards recalling the militia of Gessler in
Wiſ/ia/, /ö// and the warriors of Frois-
sart, offers the strange sight in a historic
edifice of living figures more ancient in
costume than the monument in which
they are seen moving.
On the return of the procession, all
the ecclesiastical ornaments, the chair
of the holy father and the back of the
papal dais, suddenly change colour;
white has replaced scarlet. Returning
to the choir, the holy father is robed
afresh in a long silver cope, while the cardinals, quitting the chasubles, resume their long
purple cloak with ermine hood; the mitre is replaced by a biretta which they hold folded
up, and which looks like a fan. This public change of toilettes produces a half comic
kind of animation. The high mass of Candlemas is celebrated by a cardinal wearing a
mitre of gold on which in relief stand out ears of corn and flowers; he is assisted by
four deacons and as many sub-deacons. The pope gives the benediction, after intoning
the accustomed 7e Deum in commemoration of the earthquake of 1703. The ceremony
offers nothing else that is very peculiar, unless it is that at the Conſºleor, the Credo, and
the Domine mom sum dignus, the cardinals leaving their seats descend rapidly in a circle
THE POPE's BEARERs.

NAVE OF ST. PETER’s.

CAAW/O/L EA/AS DAP. 269
to the middle of the choir, where half turning to one another, as if to call one another
mutually to witness, they recite with loud voice the sacramental prayers; the pope
does the same with his assistants; and the sound of the words crossing one another
in this way is very singular.
Raised on several steps, the high altar at St. Peter's has an inevitable bareness,
because in the patriarchal basilicas they celebrate so as to face the faithful assembled
BENEDICTION FROM THE LOGG.I.A.
in the nave. Tiaras and precious mitres taken from the treasury are placed in dishes
at the angles of the altar—a usage that rather surprised me. Around me some young
seminarists admired the handsome shoes of the officiating cardinal, picked out with
flowers of gold worked in relief on white satin; people remarked too the fine bearing
of the first deacon, Cardinal Antonelli.

27o A’OME.
III.
As we have made our way by the basilica of St. Peter into the great world of digni-
taries and princes of whom the pontifical court is composed, let us approach a little
more closely a political body whose physiognomy is as peculiar as it may well be, with
a sovereign who says mass with his ministers for deacons. I had already observed
at my ease the notables who constantly engage public attention; with the entertain-
ment where I had touched shoulders
with them, is connected a custom that
it may be as well not to pass over in
silence, the diplomatic Aºicevimento.
A new ambassador, on the day when
he lays his credentials before the holy
father in solemn audience, has to open
his house to the whole city at night.
Anybody may present himself at this
reception on condition of being in full
dress; the names are given in the ante-
chamber, and ushers who follow an-
nounce you in a loud and distinct voice.
Here, where life has not much variety,
nothing was discussed in the month of
January, 1865, but the next reception
of the Spanish ambassador. His court
was in high favour; invested with the
confidence of the Vatican, Spain had
been designated to represent, in the
compulsory dealings of commerce and
international police, that Sardinia which
had grown into Italy and had been put
into the Index. The day of the audience
having been announced in the Gazette,
everybody knew that the reception in
which the greatest personages were to
figure was for the 19th of the month.
Two days before, tribunes fitted with upholstery had been erected on the Piazza di
Spagna for the musicians in front of the palace, but torrents of rain made all these
preparations useless. Nevertheless eight o'clock had hardly struck from the Trinita
dei Monti, when carriages began to flow in ; between rows of these, a few people of the
neighbourhood stepped modestly on foot along pavement polished by the rain, and
glittering with the reflection of lamps and torches.
The apartments, arranged in a line and with nothing to disguise their worn-out
panelling, had the empty and common look of those official places where everybody
passes and where too many persons have passed. People had crowded together at
the lowest end of the suite, deserting free and ample spaces to throng the boudoir
SWISS, BEARING THE TWO-HANDLED SWORD.

A D/A/OMA 7/C R/C E V////E/WZO. 27 I
and private parlours. Before making my way into this crowd, I halted in the first
chambers to watch the march past; there was scarcely anybody there, and all seemed
to think it a duty to move away from the entry of the rooms. They think it proper
to leave a spacious arena for the spectacle of entries and presentations, and to give
the master of the house a respectable quantity of room for all the evolutions of etiquette.
In a stiff uniform all over gold, the Spanish ambassador would have derived a less
equivocal majesty from his splendour, if certain of its decorations had not imparted
a vague resemblance to liveries. In the next room, through which all the world passed,
the ambassadress, standing up in the midst of a circle of ladies, to whom she gave
a few scattered words between each
reverence to the new comers, seemed
| ||
to me to be aiming at French petulance, º
under a costume which had the true - .
Castilian heaviness.
When a cardinal or other very
great dignitary is signalled from below
by the number of strokes made by the
halberdier, all the world rushes towards
the landing, and the high personage
is introduced by a squad of valets
armed with large tapers. Behind the
diplomatists come their secretaries in
some confusion ; behind the cardinals
their chamberlains, at a distance care-
fully kept uniform. For the rest, their
eminences show as much assurance as
modesty in their bearing; the higher
the rank, the greater the simplicity, I
would almost say, the bonhomie. The
dress of the cardinals is grave without
being pretentious, paternal and half
familiar, in which dignity is distinctly
marked, and from which the changing
vanities of fashion are excluded.
Cardinal Antonelli, head of the
government, made his entrance without
haste, looking around him with the
complaisance of a man who is assured of finding an offering of incense. His face is
open, cordial, perhaps a little triumphant. He is tall and robust, and his bronzed
tint recalls the mountaineer; the eye, which is black, piercing, and without final
direction, is an eye of authority; rather coarsely modelled, the mouth has a certain
fineness; and in spite of the rusticity of the bony conformation, the brow is still
luminous.
TIARA BEARER.
The Italian equality, the Roman freedom, which on a given day transforms salons
into a succursale of the Forum, led me to suppose that I should meet at the public
reception of the embassy a very miscellaneous society; this was not the case. None
who belong to retail trade, to small finance, to the lower grades of the public service,

272 A’OME.
none who live on their own industry, or even on their talents outside of the liberal
careers; in a word, none who are not traditionally inscribed in the rolls of elegant
Society, ever dream of presenting themselves. I was present at a spectacle that has
not been seen in Paris since 1788, an assembly exclusively recruited from people of
quality and—a thing unknown to a Frenchman—at this reunion so rigorously sifted,
the first comer had a right to present himself. I doubt if I shall have an opportunity
of stating a more sensible difference between our manners and those of Rome.
DISPLAY OF THE GRAND RELICS.
There, as in other salons, three elements mingled; the patriciate and the dignitaries;
foreigners of distinction, as the phrase is, which means presented; and men of letters,
savans, and artists. I must confess that the position accorded to the elect of intellectual
life by the high Roman society is thoroughly gracious and cordial. Between the toilettes
of our fine ladies and those of the Roman princesses there is a certain difference;
without pretending to characterize it in detail, I deduce it from a general impression.
Their style is less light and more rich than ours; there is a certain air of deliberate

GREA 7" PERSOAVAGES. 273
costuming, with a vague reminiscence of portraits; rich materials are more lavishly
used than in France, and fitted to younger shoulders. Then there are the family jewels,
all classed and become heraldic.
In the two or three rooms where those of greatest beauty and highest rank thronged,
the prelates, the monsignori, the cardinals, moved about from group to group, saluting
these, approaching those, but always with an air of serenity and warmth. How far
these eminent and learned gossippers help to elevate or sustain conversation, is a
thing unknown among our miscellaneous routs, where a reunion, almost in its very
dress, offers the medley of a waiting-room at a railway station. Active members or
ministers of a government, these prelates form the staff of a court; it is essential that
they should be accessible, and their presence in the world is completely justifiable on
this account; they hold their place in it with good taste, with ease, and with an absence
of stiffness which shows in its best light the light-hearted administration of this areo-
pagus of old bachelors. Nothing surprised me more than the freedom with which
people maintain before them political theses of a hazardous sort; under the Restora-
tion at the Palais Royal, or at the house of a minister of the interior under Louis
Philippe, much more reserve would have been kept up. Speak as you please of republics
and kings, of despotism and liberty, they will give you perfect freedom of speech.
But do not approach pauperism, or questions of wages and the proletariat, nor any
of those problems of political economy which with us fill the suffering classes with
so many vain illusions, and invest their authors with so dangerous a popularity; if
you do that, you would run the risk of dismissal from Rome.
_E=
==
-
A MACE-BEARER.
N. N.


PIAZZA OF SAN PIETRO IN WIN.COLI.
CHAPTER XIII.
On the Piazza of San Pietro in Vincoli...—The Moses of Michelangelo.—The brothers Pollajuolo, etc.—St. Sixtus
and the frescoes of Father Besson; legend of a forgotten painter—Journey on the Appian Way:-Porta
Capena, sacred grove of Fgeria;-St. Sergius;–Arch of Drusus.-Jewish catacombs, anterior to Christ.—
Historical landscapes.—Tumuli of the Horatii and Curiatii.-Caecilia Metella and feudal brigandage.—
Romulus Maxentius; the ancient circuses.—The camp of the Volsci and Coriolanus.-Loss of the spoils of
Syracuse; works of art drowned in the Tiber.—The Latin Way and its sepulchral chambers.

THE MOSES OF MICA/E/AAWGAEZO. 275
ÇNE would be more eager to enter the little church of San Pietro in Vincoli
but for the temptation to seat one's self on the steps outside, before a
& vista contrived at the bottom of a rather steep space, half shut in by old
buildings at the foot of which grass springs up in the pavement. This
piazzetta is a sort of embankment over an uneven street, and above it there come
into outline, the Capitol, some houses perched on the Tarpeian Rock, and the
distant monastic grounds of the Jani-
culum. In the foreground are grouped
the irregular roofs and square clock-
tower of a monastery, from which
a fine palm-tree stands out, enriching
the back-ground with an elegant set-
ting-off; here and there certain enclo-
sures are marked with orange-trees,
cypresses, and laurels; the picture is
bounded to the right by the patched
and ancient walls of the palace of
Lucrezia Borgia under which you go
down to the Via Scelerata. This irre-
gular assemblage of buildings attracts
the imagination; antiquity and the
middle age, the cloister and the palace,
all helps to fill in a picture where
the sun animates the tints of the
brick, the marbles, and the spongy
tufa. But in spite of this luminous
diversity, the ensemble results in an
impression of gloom; the silent life
flows away drop by drop behind these
severe walls, and none of it sends a
jet without. This ground of the past
is deserted; the bird chases the butter-
fly, and the murmurs of the lower
quarters hardly rise so high. Like most places consecrated to the past by the
desertion of men, the little place of S. Pietro in Vincoli, though surrounded by
houses, reminds one of the desert.
Cross the threshold of the church and go up the nave; art sounds her most
tremendous blast: you are before the Moses of Michelangelo.
The monument which occupies the right side of a well-lighted choir, is placed
well in front of a marble recess; seated before you on the same plane of the horizon,
the figure is colossal and animated by a superhuman power of execution: thus, as
one is not accustomed to see one's self face to face and so close to giants, the first
impression is one of stupor. To the amazing grandeur of the style, which charac-
N. N. 2
WAULTED PASSAGE UNDER THE PALACE OF LUCREZI.A. BORGIA.



276 A&OME.
terizes a conception as singular as it is naturally worked out, is added the finish of
this most delicately wrought piece of rock; no lapidary ever caressed with such
affection the model of a cameo. The Moses is a miniature eleven feet high ; the
polish of the marble makes it shining as an onyx. Everybody knows the work, or
thinks he knows it; in truth the soul of the creation resides nowhere but in the
original. Though the front of the Moses is Olympian and its eyes of formidable
power, the nose, which is only energetic, overhangs under dense moustaches a pro-
minent mouth, so thick, so brutal, that the face becomes that of a person who is
not merely ugly but repulsive from the point of view of common-place beauty.
Hence the deception of people who are not sufficiently gifted to be seized at once by
the sovereign grace, which in all the rest unites itself to sovereign vigour. The
attitude at once so singular and so little strained, the half antique and half oriental
arrangement; the sculptural beauty of the arm and the hand, which resting on the
book of the Law raises the tresses of the beard; the ample beard itself distributed
in masses so noble in motive as to be a monument on the figure; the model of the
legs, bent back in their Asiatic gear by a movement which fixes and accentuates the
person; the drapery whose ample folds enframe a knee that, if it had been found by
itself in course of some excavation would betray one of the greatest masters of the
world—such are the salient traits that one recalls; to describe them is to offer
points of mark to the memory, but to risk being obscure for eyes that have not seen.
This Moses is in some sort an ideal portraiture of the genius which was incarnate in
Michelangelo; at least people figure it so to themselves; it is impossible to isolate
from this creation the personality of the master, and this is what gives the statue a
language at once so distinct and so lofty. -
The church celebrated for the possession of this masterpiece is not without
interest. At a time when ogres, while they devoured the Roman Empire, were pre-
paring a brutal sketch of the monarchies of the middle age, an execrable woman
founded the church of St. Peter in Vinculis, to be the reliquary of the chains by
which the first apostle had been fastened; the recollections of St. Helen apparently
took away sleep from Eudoxia, daughter of Theodosius II., wife of that base Valen-
tinian whom Maximus slew, to make himself heir of the empire and of the empress
also. She did not know that she was giving herself to the assassin of her husband,
but the new emperor having been infatuated enough to boast of the murder as a
mark of his passion for her, Eudoxia, to avenge herself, the daughter of a sovereign
and the wife of two emperors, wrote to Genseric, king of the Vandals, and invited him
to the conquest of Rome, the Rome which Attila had just respected. The barbarians
pillaged the city for fourteen days; statues, vessels of gold, precious furniture, riches
gathered together for so many ages and from so many nations,—all was seized or
destroyed. What could not be carried off to Africa was tossed into the Tiber; a
quinquereme laden with masterpieces of Greek art in bronze and marble was swallowed
up in the sea beyond the mouth of the river. The Vandals carried away even the
covering of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus of gilded copper. It was then that they
embarked for Carthage the spoils of Jerusalem, brought to Rome in old days by Titus.
And when Genseric had completed the sack with all the ferocity of a wild beast and a
child, he carried off the empress herself, to make a slave of her. He also took her
daughters from her, one for a servant, the other as a present for his son.
It was, I suppose, Athenais-Eudoxia, wife of Theodosius II., who having withdrawn
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III.
MAUsoleum of JULIUs II.; THE MOSES OF MICHELANGELO.

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SAM PIETRO /AV V/AVCO/L/. 277
into the Holy Land, whither she came to seek a refuge and a tomb, sent her daughter
Eudoxia the chains which St. Peter had borne at Jerusalem. However that may be,
the church has always been grateful to the widow of Valentinian III. and Maximus
for her faith; her foundation protects her; historians sing the praises of her
V11tues.
Adrian I. in the eighth century restored the church of Eudoxia; Julius II. before
being pope had it again restored by Bacio Pintelli; Francesco Fontana disfigured it as
much as he could in 1705; but starting from antiquity, which bequeathed to it twenty-
four columns of cipollino, all ages have left their mark on it. Guido, Domenichino,
Guercino, go with the last restorations and the Genoese ceiling of Parodi; the
Florentine taste of Pintelli is recalled
by monuments of some interest, the
tomb of Nicholas of Cusa among others.
Here is buried the jeweller, the
sculptor, the bronze-worker, the painter,
Antonio Pollajuolo (Puſ/arius), by the
side of his brother Peter, who initiated
him in oil colours, recently revealed to
his master Andrea del Castagno by
Domenico, whom Andrea assassinated,
that he might remain the solitary pos-
sessor of the secret. The inscription
of Antonio, which recalls the tombs of
Sixtus IV. and Innocent VIII., tells
how he wished to repose by the side of
his brother. The two died a few months
from one another in 1498; but this text
shows against all the notices that Peter
preceded Antonio. The latter was
seventy-two years old. In front of the
monument in small oval niches are
placed the busts of the two brothers,
still young and endowed with a happy e-º-º: tºº.
simplicity of expression. Above is a jº $º:
*:::-
º - -
º */º vº
ºº::…
fresco of the fifteenth century, repre-
senting the Plague of Rome, after the
legend of St. Sebastian; you see the
angel of darkness knocking with a spear at the doors of houses, but at the inter-
cession of a cardinal a cherub arrests the spirit of evil. The principal merit of this
little fresco consists in having given to M. J. Delaunay the first idea of a charming
picture, which all Paris admired at a recent exhibition. Then there is the mausoleum
of Giovanni Giotto of Sienna, who died in 1563,--who finding a city too small for “his
lofty soul, chose for country the universe; the monument and the phrase are presents
from his friends. Here, now, is Jerome de la Rovere, the last cardinal of his name,
who died in 1592; humbler than his predecessors, he only distinguished himself in
philology. On the altar of St. Sebastian, a mosaic of the seventh century represents
the warrior with a long beard, robed in the chlamys, fixed on the right shoulder by
WELL IN THE CLOISTER OF SAN PIETRO IN VINCOL.I.


278 A&O/E.
a fibula, and on his head a cap like a purse with tassels—the noble costume of the
time, which I had remarked in the mosaics of Ravenna.
Finally you return to Moses. The structure of which it occupies the centre was meant
to form one of the sides of the four-fronted tomb which Julius II. promised himself in
the middle of the nave of St. Peter's : the scattered materials of this vast design
contribute to the adornment of the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence, of San Lorenzo, and
even of the Louvre. After the Medici, Paul III. reduced the work to a fourth, and
sent this fragment to San Pietro in Vincoli. Lying uneasily over the empty tomb,
the bust almost upright, Pope Julius sleeps leaning on his elbow above the exiled
Moses. The disposition of the mausoleum was ambitious enough, but heavy and
inelegant: the Virgin, the four alle-
gorical figures that seem to keep guard
over the Moses, are poor and soulless
by the side of the master-piece; for
all that, they are the work of Raphael
of Montelupo ; but nothing can live
beside Michelangelo.
As you leave this church and its
little visited cloister, in the middle of
which is a well with a remarkable
brim, you are pleased to see the little
piazza again before plunging under the
black vault which ends in the via
Scelerata, bounded by Etruscan sub-
structions, and which brings you down
into the still plebeian quarter of the
Suburra, whither flocked in old days
the companions of the seven guilds
already constituted under the Tarquins,
namely, the flute-players, the jewellers,
the carpenters, the cordwainers, the
copper-workers, the potters, the dyers.
As these went nearer to the Forum, their
place was taken by the barbers, and
CANDELABRUM OF SAN NEREO. by the makers of scourges for the
castigation of slaves—a large branch
of trade; finally to the Phrynes, who gave in their accounts to their masters, the
patricians.
|||ſſ i.
lº
II.
From S. Pietro in Vincoli to the arch of Drusus, where I was to find travelling
companions for an excursion along the Appian way, it is a considerable distance over
solitudes crowded with incongruous memories, about which one might write volumes. At
the issue of the via de Cerchi, where the Coelian at my left summoned up St. Gregory,
the sound of a bell from the opposite side on the Aventine, called my wandering

SAM NEREO—FAZA/ER BESSOM. 279
glances from the Fornici of the circus at my feet to the convent of Santa Sabina,
which I discerned under the sky on the highest point of the horizon. Nearer at hand,
there is the church which replaces the house of St. Prisca, whom St. Peter baptized; this
faced the temple of Diana erected by Severus. Then, the valley opening out, the
arches of the baths of Caracalla rise up like the skeleton of a mountain. Far off on
the slope, St. Saba recalls other recollections, and soon after there interposes the little
church of S. Nereo, where St. Gregory the Great pronounced his twenty-eighth homily
on a cathedra of white marble that is still supported in the middle of the presbyterium
by two stooping lions. How can one help entering S. Nereo to see once more its
desks, its ciborium, its mosaics of the ninth century, and, above all, the paschal
candlestick, an enormous antique candelabrum, with a Cupid among arabesques worked
by the fairies of Greece.
St. Sixtus stops us in front of S. Nereo. St. Dominica lived in the little convent
where no one now knocks, which covers many epochs, and in which four canonized
popes sleep. A chapel of the thirteenth century rises at the very spot where he
restored Napoleon Orsini to life, and cured a mason who fell from a scaffolding.
How can we pass in silence the tiny church in which, at a ſunzione under Gregory XIII.,
Michael Montaigne saw the second ambassador that Russia sent to Rome 2 The
author of the Essays paints him to us as ‘clad in a scarlet cloak and a tunic of cloth of
gold, his hat in the shape of a night-cap of cloth of gold trimmed with fur, and beneath
a skull-cap of silver-stuff. He was come to beseech the pope to hinder the King of
Poland from making war on the Muscovites, alleging that it was their burden to
sustain the first onslaught on the Turks, and that if they were weakened, then the
Turks would advance without opposition into the west. He offered to give way in
some differences of religion that they had with the Roman Church,” etc. This is the
Eastern question as it was put in the sixteenth century.
The Dominicans of Ireland having restored their chapel fifteen years ago, a French
monk, at that moment prior of the Sta. Sabina, undertook its decoration. Still young,
this unknown rival of Lorenzo, of Fra Bartolommeo, had been a pupil of Paul Delaroche;
he had been a landscape-painter before being a monk, and in one career as in the
other, he came close to fame without reaching it. Some letters of Lacordaire, one or
two passages of the Abbé Perreyve, are all that reveal to the world this singular life,
which was crowned by martyrdom. Yet father Hyacinthe Besson has left a unique
work in Rome, one that is considerable though incomplete:—four large legendary
frescoes surmounted by arched cartouches, several medallions in white and black, and
some detached figures.
Notwithstanding his monotonous execution and rather crude colour, father Besson
has produced the only paintings of our time, which without being pasticci, are pro-
foundly impregnated with religious sentiment. The St. Dominica restoring a Child
is a figure that few masters could have painted better; in the fresco where the saint
restores to animation the young Orsini, who has been thrown from his horse, the monk’s
visage conveys the most ardent expression of prayer. The Resurrection of the Mason
is a still more vivid scene, and is superior in composition. But it is in the simpler
sketches, where the idea presents itself free of all the heaviness of cold execution, that
the poetry of the artist reveals itself in all its generous freshness and tender inspiration.
For father Besson these works were only a recreation, in favour of which he took
nothing from his duty. Through the long summer days, each morning before four,
28O A&O//E.
the prior of Sta. Sabina came down from the Aventine by the rocky path that still
exists, and proceeded to reproduce the miracles of the founder of the order at the
spot where they were performed. The work, as I have said, is unfinished, and here is
the reason.
Twelve years ago an Englishman converted to Catholicism and turned Dominican,
was sent to the Euphrates to spread the faith. This crack-brained person here returned
ARCH OF DRUSU.S.
to the Anglican sect, and, after his second abjuration, began to preach against the
regular orders, which are so respected throughout the East. Such a scandal caused
a profound affliction to father Besson ; listening only to his zeal, and braving, in spite
of the advice of his doctors, the fatigues of a long journey as well as the dangers of a
devouring climate, he insisted on going to repair the check that his order had just
received. ‘A Dominican did the mischief,' he said: ‘a Dominican must repair it.’
So he abandoned for this mission his priory of the Aventine, the darling work of

THE APP/AAW WAP. 28 I
St. Sixtus; and as he had himself foreseen, he served as expiatory victim. Father
Besson died in the deserts, near the ruins of Babylon.
These matters exhausted, a road turns aside to the left. Here was the opening of
the Latin way in the time of Strabo, and here, a little back from the road, was the
Porta Capena, in a recess in which Juvenal fixed with precision the site of the sacred
grove of Numa and the nymph Egeria. At this first milestone the country commenced
in old days: some Columbaria and the devastated tomb of the Scipios take us back
to the first ages of Rome, from which we are soon carried away by the old church of
S. Cesareo, which Clement VIII. disfigured, in which St. Sergius was chosen pope,
and which still preserves graceful pulpits and an ancient seat. Then behold the Porta
Appia, rebuilt by Narses, and the triumphal arch decreed by the senate to the father
of Claudius, to Drusus Germanicus after his victories over the Germans and the Alpine
tribes. The son of Livia, adopted by Augustus, is the first Roman leader who sailed
on the North Sea. His monument, under the arch of which the Appian way retreats
in perspective, is topped by an appendage that bristles with brambles—an addition
THE APPIAN WAY.
of unhappy effect due to Caracalla, who made the triumphal arch of Germanicus serve
as a support for the aqueduct of his baths.
Outside of the Aurelian walls, other pictures come to variegate this mosaic of
many memories: in such a conflict of reminiscences and aspects, how difficult it must
be to limit one’s self to a chronological plan | Here is St. Sebastian, a basilica of
Constantinian origin, its nave disfigured by the cardinal Borghese ; then a chapel
into which it is useless to enter, but that one cannot hear named without questions as
to its origin. It has for title—Domine yuo wadis? St. Ambrose tells how, at the
beginning of the persecution of Nero, St. Peter fled from Rome at the prayer of his
disciples, who conjured him to preserve a life so precious for the growing church.
He went forth by the Porta Capena. Having passed the walls, Simon Peter at sunrise
was measuring with his steps the shadows of the tombs by which the Appian way is
bordered, when on the broad pavement, which still remains in places, he saw approach-
ing, with face set towards the city, his ancient master, Jesus Christ. Lord, where
goest thou?' cried the amazed apostle:–/0omine quo wadis?
And Jesus answered him, ‘I go to Rome to be crucified a second time.’
The fugitive understood, and bowed his head; Peter returned to Rome, where
O O

282 A&OME.
martyrdom awaited him, and on his tomb the church was founded. The teaching of
the legend is plain. To pontiffs tempted at the first threats to abandon the tomb of
the apostles, the Appian way would offer good counsel; the echo of this foundation
would awake, crying to them, Domine quo vadis?
As far as St. Sebastian the aspect of this never-ending suburb is that of a poor
and half-abandoned faubourg. You follow, without diversion, the road which the
censor Appius Claudius, after digging the first aqueduct to direct the waters of
Praeneste on Rome, opened and paved three hundred and ten years before our era.
It has kept the name of its founder, though Caesar prolonged it far beyond the country
of the Volsci, while Augustus, that is to say Agrippa, who had the honour of finishing
it, carried it as far as Cumae. The road is broad and very straight, with remains of paths
and open spaces in Visigothic pavement; the grass is green on the way, but the track
remains definitely marked with a melancholy grandeur by two avenues of mausoleums
in ruins of every shape and size, which, from the gate of St. Sebastian down to
the foot of Albano, are counted by thousands. In the middle age, some feudal bandits
having transformed several of these tombs into fortresses for detaining travellers for
ransoms, the latter deserted a sinister avenue bristling with strong castles; they
gradually wore to the left the present road to Albano, and even the very track of the
Appian way at last was effaced by grass and brushwood. We owe its exhumation to
Pius IX., who has had it cleared, who has had the tombs repaired over a space of
five or six miles, and who has given back to the civilised world the most splendid of
historical promenades. Excavations have been carried on along this avenue, where
thirty thousand mausoleums are to be counted. Nothing is so marvellous with this
foreground as the points of view of the uneven plain, commanded by the road which
goes undulating through the pastures, like a channel diked in by the materials of a
museum. Its fluvial and torrent-like aspect is all the more striking as there is a good
reason for it; the Appian way follows the current of the stream of lava which from
the craters of Nemi and Albano flowed over the plain in three eruptions, three immense
layers, spreading out as far as the mole of Caecilia Metella, whence one has so clear
a comprehension of this geological adventure.
The learned abbé who had constituted himself my Virgil had, along with another
comrade, joined me in this limbo with a car very unworthy of the magnificence of
the surroundings. They waited for me at the approach of a vineyard, where Signor
Rossi, eight years ago, discovered some Jewish catacombs; and the abbé explained
to us that on the monuments of this hypogeum, the persistent representation of the
trumpet, the palms, and the seven-branched candlestick, as well as the inscriptions,
leave no doubt either as to the origin or the age of the catacombs, which are earlier
than the Christian era. In the corrupt times of the Republic, a colony of industrious
Jews came, as they would to-day, to practise usury and buy and sell in the capital of
civilisation. To justify the presence of a Syriac cemetery at the opening of the Appian
way, the abbé reminded us that in the third satire Juvenal thunders against the Jewish
tribes who had profaned the sacred grove of Egeria by taking up their abode there.
We were now in the very heart of antiquity. Pliny, Asinius Pollio, the AEmilii,
and Licinius, and Popilius, and Canidius, and Curio, if they were to return, would
point out the illustrious dead whom they once knew ; with a gesture they would mark
the villas once scattered on the slopes. All across the plain you see the long aqueducts
of Claudius measuring the distance; to the north, you follow with your eyes the tombs
THE AAPIAAW WAP. 283
of the Latin way; then on the mounds, fragments of walls and clumps of dark trees
marking the site of villas. Rome appears behind you, with its hills covered with
buildings, its domes, its ruins, its cypresses; Rome in her bronzed girdle of the
ramparts of the Lower Empire, with the violet mountains of Etruria far beyond. From
a neighbouring plateau, whence the view commands the four cardinal points, Latium,
to the south, went down to the sea; in the opposite direction, on the olive slopes of
the Alban mountains, tiny constructions allowed us to reckon the villages which once
were towns, and which ancient victories made for ever famous: Tusculanum, Gabii,
Palestrina, which once was Praeneste; AEsula, which is become San Gregorio; Tibur;
Torre-Vergata, which replaces Corniculum, below Monticelli, which used to be Cenina.
Finally, between Ausonia and the Alpine Gennaro, glitter in the distant background
of the sky the snows of the Hernican mountains. You might pass hours listening to
what the wind says to the sun.
A little further, at a spot where the Appian way makes an elbow to respect a
tumulus, Cluilius, general of the Albans under king Tullus, had made the ditches of
his encampment: Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Livy have given us the cadastral
elements necessary for verification of this. The fixing of the Cluilian trenches has
allowed us to determine the functions of five tumuli with their foundations of dry stone
free from earth, works evidently Etruscan, which, facing towards Rome, succeed one
another at unequal intervals. That which causes the bend in the road, covered the
first who fell of the Curiatii. It is a fashion with us to regard the heroes of the first
age of Rome as so many myths: yet why should we in so absolute a fashion throw
discredit by our systems on the historians of antiquity, who were nearer to primitive
events than we are to the crusades 2 These tumuli, evidently anterior to the Appian
way, and evidently the objects of veneration since, for the sake of sparing one of them,
they threw the line of the way out, answer exactly in number and position to the
narratives of the chroniclers; I shall continue to hold them respectable until it shall
have been demonstrated by proofs and not by theories that the Romans of the year 86
constructed five little mounds, only to prop up six centuries later a fable not yet
devised.
You stop, on returning to the road, before a pyramidal mausoleum, choked at its
base, and resembling an enormous jug on a narrow pedestal. Stripped of its peeling
of marble, this nucleus of masonry vaguely recalls the shrines of Mexico and India.
Our carriage seemed to me miserably slight, as, on our return to the Appian way,
we saw at the end of the rise in the ground the outline, in front of the mole of Caecilia
Metella, the sorry beast with quivering shanks, and the carriage hood browned by the
sun, which made us think of the rats and the pumpkin of the equipage of Cinderella.
The turriform mausoleum is not less than one hundred feet in diameter, and it must
be a third more in height; the walls, which are thirty-five feet in thickness, contained
until the reign of Paul V. the fine sarcophagus that is to-day to be seen in the court
of the Farnese palace. Caecilia, daughter of Metellus Creticus and wife of the triumvir
Crassus, lived in the last period of the Republic; her monument, faced with travertine,
is crowned with a frieze and a cornice of marble, with an ornament of festoons; the
inscription, which was surmounted by a bas-relief, of which only some vestiges are
left, faces the road. This tower is the oldest Roman building of an assured date,
where the use of marble is shown.
In the thirteenth century the tower of Caecilia was decorated with a keep with
O O 2
284 A’OME.
dovetailed battlements by the Gaetani, who had imprisoned in their castrum the two
sides of the Appian way, by throwing an arch over it, under which was a postern gate.
No one could pass without paying ransom: that was what the Ghibelines called making
war on the despotism of the popes. There remain the ruins of the enclosure, some
pieces of wall, and a portion of the chapel, with the escutcheon of the Gaetani in marble.
Towards the seventh mile, people used to fall into the clutches of another lord of the
highway, who had entrenched himself in the tomb of Messalinus Cotta, planted on a
quadrangular tumulus one hundred and twenty feet long. It is to Valerius Corvus
the dictator that they attribute the lower portion of a monument that was completed
and decorated under the Caesars. The tower, one of the largest in existence, is on
one side crowded nearly up to the summit with a mass of ruins of marble and stone
from Albano; Corinthian capitals, scattered limbs of archways, pieces of cornice, that
crowned a decoration in which pilasters separated candelabra and scenic masks. You
scale the edifice over those avalanches of carved stone. In the foundations five niches
MOLE OF CAECILIA METELLA.
had been fitted with benches for travellers, whose eyes were caught by bas-reliefs fitted
to the corners of the hemicycles; they have found there some charming Nereids.
The wide entablature of the cornices was surmounted by an attica, which supported
a roof covered with slabs of marble in the form of scales. The summit has been
levelled and the salient works rased ; they have made a road for small carts on this
mole, from which the feudal constructions have all disappeared, and which from the
road-side shows scarped and sheer. But—a strange fancy and whimsical appearance
which may give some idea of the enormous size of the Casal Rotondo—on its high
platform is perched a rural demesne, a cottage and farm, with stables and quarters;
and this village house, planted high upon marbles of the time of Virgil, has for garden
and for shelter a grove of olives. Nothing can be more original than this pastoral
landscape, a plaything for the children of Atlas or Gargantua, spread on a stand three
hundred and sixty feet in circumference. A number of these monuments are built in
reticular courses; others in oftus incerſum ; others in squares of tufa, sign of most

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THE AAPPIAAW WAP. 285
remote antiquity; or in flat bricks of the time of Nero, long, and very carefully fitted.
Thus every form and every century is represented along this immense funereal museum
of antiquity: it is for the pagan era the pendent of the catacombs. In old time shady
places added some mystery to the beauty of this Elysian avenue. Very unlike the
fine world of to-day, which has hardly any religion left and is none the richer in
philosophy, the Romans of quality associated the two ideas of death and rustic quietude;
on fine days they came to pass the mornings in the sepulchral chambers of the family;
thermae that have been discovered prove, with other signs, that people went to bathe,
dine, take a siesta, study and pass the night with their ancestors.
We had got into the carriage again, and with frequent pauses we passed in review
that vast collection of gravestones: so many great names are inscribed on the
tombs along this road that we seem to have come upon a society of whom we saw
something dimly in our youth in the days of classical study. From the monument
of Servilius Quartus re-adjusted by Canova in a piece of masonry (happily conceived
but clumsily executed), up to the Three Taverns where St. Paul stayed and Gallienus
was buried, up to Bovillae where the tribune Clodius was slain by Milo –in the passage
by this unrolled band of the palimpsests of history, the mind is not rapid enough
to comment upon the documents, the sight of which strikes blow upon blow.
As I listened to the gossip of the abbé about this world, which no priest of Cybele
or Saturn knew better, I had noted some celebrities, as one does in one's album
quitting a salon : Seneca put to death, according to Tacitus, at the fourth milestone
on the Appian way; Sextus Pompeius Justus, a freedman of the Pompeian house;
Licinius with his wife and his daughters, a sculptured monument of the imperial
era; Hilarius Fuscus who lived under the Antonines; Claudius Secundus, collector
under Trajan; Apuleius Pamphilus, near a large quadrangular tomb that Piranese
has engraved; Hermodorus, Rabiria his daughter, and Usias, priestess of Isis, a
charming shrine with portraits. Pompeia Attia has left her mausoleum to return
to Rome, where she figures in the Vatican among that sculptured population of heroes
and gods; the noble Septimia was neighbour to Sergius Demetrius, a wine merchant
in the Velabrum. A little before the tower of Silex or Torre-Selce, another feudal
keep, Lollius Dionysius, banker in the Esquiline quarter, is buried opposite to a
family composed of two couples drawn in bas-relief; one of the ladies has on her
shoulder her squirrel, the other her little dog. If Nibby had not preceded me, I
should have copied the inscription in which Evhodus, jeweller in the via Sacra,
and his relative, the steward of Claudius, pray the passenger to stay, to behold the
burial-place of one who was good, pitiful, the friend of the poor; and beseech the
traveller, in wishing him all health, not to defile the monument; forbidding, more-
over, that any should be laid there but the kinsfolk and children designated by will.
They placed precious objects in the tombs, as witness the fine Egyptian vase of the
Vatican, taken from a nameless sepulchre at the eighth mile, close to the exedra of
the Flavians and the Red Tower, a feudal construction which has played its part in
civil discords. Then come, further than the villa of Bassus mentioned by Martial,
the tomb of one Cassius, redemptor of marbles, and of Persius, and of so many others.
We did not go beyond the seventh mile, although the works conducted since
1850 by Canina extend as far as the twelfth ; but the monuments are less numerous
and of inferior importance at the approach to the ruins of Bovillae, which under
the kings was a dependency of Alba. On our way the abbé made us take on the
286 A’OME.
same side some sloping pastures which come out upon a mass of ruins that the
Romans of the late times named Roma Vecchia. These are the remains of the villa
of the Quintilii, two brothers who became so rich that Domitian, or as some say,
Commodus, had them put to death that he might possess their domains. Prince
Torlonia, another financier, has exhumed these ruins, whence he has extracted statues,
bas-reliefs, columns, entablatures of marble, of high value. At the foot of the villa,
ANCIENT NYMPHEUM, CALLED FOUNTAIN OF EGERIA.
which is perched on one side on high embankments, we see an aqueduct rising from
the valley; it conveyed to the Quintilii the waters of Claudius and Agrippa in
leaden conduits which still exist, and on which are stamped the names of the opulent
proconsuls. After a nympheum on the side of the road you recognise the thermae,
the site of the theatre and the portico, and even the perspectives of the gardens:
these nabobs chose their sites from one of the finest points of view of the district.
A pathway leads down to a fountain where ignorance made a niche for the nymph

AAWC/E/W7 MWP MPHEUAl/. 287
Egeria in a grotto at the bottom of a grove of sibylline aspect; they must have for-
gotten Symmachus and Juvenal. This grotto where the wise counsellor of Numa was
never met except by my old friend Nanteuil (and heaven knows with what advantage),
this pretended grotto is an oven-shaped vault, rising under a rock clad with brush-
wood, lotus, scolopendra ; water falls from the roof in harmonious drops into the black
basin, in which is reflected the ancient and greenish statue of a slumbering stream-
deity. The sombre tints of the brick give a little warmth to this little shaft abandoned
by the Naiads; the spring hastens on to rejoin the Almo. You meet here nearly intact
a consecration to the divinities of woods and running streams; according to some
antiquaries, the pretended nympheum of Egeria made part of a villa of Herodes-
Atticus, the Greek rhetorician who had Marcus Aurelius and Verus for disciples,
and who, when consul in 143 of our era, caused superb edifices to be erected, among
which they count a theatre and a stadium of white marble.
After complying with the observances recommended by Hesiod towards fountains,
those daughters of Jupiter, we had to repair an oversight by ascending from the bottom
of this little Caffarella valley up to a wild and dilapidated farmhouse, resting on
foundations, and partially composed of materials, of great antiquity. The ground
abounds in broken marbles; ears of maize and strings of ruddy onions hang under
vaults that were contemporary with the Antonines. There vegetate in a dirtiness
that is amusing because it is not unwholesome, and a disorder that fills you with
desire for canvas and paint-brush, a family of cultivators, like field-sparrows making
their nest in this falcon's eyrie, which was once a senatorial villa. There remains a
monument that would now be called the chapel of the castle; when it was discovered
in 1616, they made it out to be a temple of the muses, but a Greek inscription has
restored to the protection of Bacchus the altar, surmounted by a vault that still retains
traces of bas-reliefs. They have placed in the façade some fluted columns with
Corinthian capitals of unknown origin, and as this temple of Bacchus had become in
the sixth century the chapel of St. Urban, the aisle is covered with frescoes representing
anecdotes from the life of Jesus Christ, passages from the legend of St. Caecilia and
St. Urban, with the name of one Bonizzo, a monk (possibly the artist), and the date
M.XI. Thus we are able in the neighbourhood of Rome to study the forms of art
during a thousand years, among the implements of rustic industry. While by a stony
pathway, on which the running water has made cresses spring up, we were preparing
to ascend long fallows in search of the work of Palladio before the ruins of the
temple of Romulus, the son of Maxentius, the only known temple still retaining its
peribolus, that is, its large surrounding cloister, our companion called our attention
to the fact that the poetic character of these regions, made for eclogue and for battle-
field, results from the absence of all food-raising culture; we ask on what the husband-
man could have lived upon with such a soil. The sight of some vegetables and a
quarter of a pumpkin in the heart of the temple of Bacchus gave our caterer an
amazed satisfaction; still there was nothing to drink but the water of the neigh-
bouring nympheum, brought for our use by a tall bronzed maiden who might have
been taken for a model of an Isis in the time of Adrian.
The temple of Romulus Maxentius is close to the circus bearing the same name.
They made some noise in 1825 about the discovery of these curious ruins, but what
was really found were the inscriptions which decide archaeologists as to the date of
foundation. As for the circus itself, it could never have been lost; the whole arena
288 A’OME.
and its circumference came out in the grass, to a length of 1,680 Roman feet, and a
breadth of 250. There are few obscurer personages than this grandson of Maximian,
sprung from a dethroned father—than this Romulus who was twice consul when the
consulate was only a mockery, and who would have been flung to the lay-stall if he
had not happened to die soon enough to pass for a god like everybody else, and so
to obtain apotheosis instead of the Gemoniae. His temple and the circus dedicated by
Maxentius to his son, the only ancient circus that time has respected, perpetuate the
memory of the Romulus who did nothing.
Recent researches prove that the Spina of this monument was a real museum;
the mattock brings to light numerous pedestals on the borders of the way, the middle
of which was furnished with votive columns, and
was lighted by some mirrors of water in which
the marbles were reflected. Several bas-reliefs of
the Metae have been collected, belonging to the
Constantinian decline. From the situation of the
brackets we know where once stood—a Venus of
which a fragment remains; the two columns of
grey marble which were united by an architrave
and supported Seven Dolphins in honour of Nep-
tune, the patron of coursers; the statues of
Phoebus and Paris; then between two basins of
cement, the box of earth where grew the palm-
tree of which they took a leaf for the profit
of the winner; one column bore the image of
Victory, near an obelisk which Domitian had had
carved. In the third section of the circus, the
statue of Hercules preceded an Amazon, to whom
a Proserpine was neighbour; and two figures sepa-
rated by a little temple, on the roof of which they
disposed the seven eggs of gilded wood used in
counting the turns of the course. In this long
arena now become so rustic, nothing is obscure or
uncertain; you decipher the past in legible cha-
racters. The arena is a lawn ; slopes of grass
mark the steps of the Podium ; the Carceres
are yawning gaps in the Sward; the Spina is a
green carpet worked over with brambles, and
worn into holes by the foundations; nature here has certain regularities which do not
lessen the savagery that time has given her, and the abandonment is so remote
that it has lost its sadness. The circus of Romulus the son of Maxentius, where
vast populations used to throng, is now only the haunts of birds and adders.
Back again on the Appian way and already close to the city, we found our poor
carriage waiting for us in front of the tomb of Geta, the Septizonium reduced to its
pyramidal germ. We had left behind us the old camp of C. Marcius, where Veturia
and the Roman ladies came and prostrated themselves before the victor of Corioli,
who has surrounded treason with such poetic prestige. In making our way back to
the walls, we sought the site of the temple of Mars, from which the triumphal pro-
“A BRONZED MAIDEN . . . .”

RETURN ACROM THE APP/AAW WAP. 289
cession used to set out, and of the Clivus which they followed to make their way to
the Capitol. If they were to turn away the rubbish which masks the substructions
of the Porta Capena, perhaps we should see the ruins of the temples by which it
was surrounded, and where Marcellus the conqueror of Sicily deposited a portion
of the marvels of which he had despoiled Syracuse, the richest in objects of art and
the most splendid of all the cities of Greece.
The rarest statuettes, Sicilian jewellers’ work in precious metals, had been heaped
up by Marcellus elsewhere on the banks of the Tiber, in the temple of Æsculapius,
which received other spoils after the Macedonian war. How many masterpieces would
be found at the bottom of the river, for the Vandals, like Vandals as they were, threw
everything into it. Every invasion, every intestine discord, gorged this preserving
mud. The Christians threw into it the images of the false gods that had been brought
from Greece and Asia; the emperors drowned in it the deified images of their pre-
decessors; before them Sulla and Marius had plunged into it, at every return of
success, the boastful mementoes of the loser. To obtain such magnificent results
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CIRCUS OF ROMULUS MAXENTIUS.
it would be enough to dig a channel under the Monte Mario, to continue it beyond
into the low lands which descend from Brebiana towards the sea by the marshes of
Fregenae, and to turn the Tiber aside for two or three winters, while as a sanitary
precaution you could restore it to its channel during the summer.
III.
From the Via Appia to the Latin way the distance is not long, the latter being at first
nearly parallel, and then ascending towards the north as far as the junction with
the Via Tusculana. Deserted for ages, it was nearly effaced when Pius IX, suggested
it for archaeological studies, which has occasioned some curious discoveries: let us
return to this suburb to describe them.
Formerly the approach to the Latin way was by the Porta Asinaria, still to be
recognised by its two towers, but walled up since Gregory XIII. opened the gate
of St. John. The road is more closed in than the Appian way: the grounds, which
P P

29O A&OME.
frequently stand higher, describe curves round the long avenue of pasture-lands,
divided by Pelasgic pavement. From time to time the line of the causeways makes
its mark; tombs with intervals between them succeed in a double row. On one
side the monuments of the Appian way cluster into far distances, which they seem
to put to flight; on the other, winding through the desert, the aqueducts of Claudius
turn your eye to the tower del Fiscale, a bit of antiquity seen from everywhere and
placed everywhere by the painters. It is no longer a keep, but an old model from a
studio, which regains in beauty all that years take away from it.
Once, that is to say twelve years ago, to understand decorative art among the
Romans, people had only at their disposal Pompeii, documents of an inferior order,
and scanty specimens on the obscure and too lofty vaults of the Neronian palaces.
Now, the house of Livia on the Palatine, and two burial-chambers in perfect condition,
belonging to the end of the first century, discovered in the Latin way in 1858 by
Lorenzo Fortunati, restore to us the pure marvels of antique decoration, which the
school of Raphael guessed so wonderfully. How striking, in fact, to find after all,
as justificatory pieces, what would have passed for a model closely copied, if when he
designed the Vatican Loggie, Raphael could have known the Scavi of the Latin way.
These crypts which were unknown to ancient travellers are nearly at the second
mile, in front of one another, near the remains of the basilica of St. Stephen, erected
by Demetria in the fifth century and destroyed in the ninth. To come upon these
subterranean constructions, it was only necessary to remove the earth with which
the lower layers had been crusted. Then they recognised, for the tomb on the right,
the basements of a tetrastylar portico, and continuing to clear away, they descended
some steps which came to a fine long room containing a sarcophagus much mutilated;
then a second chamber, a true shrine, also vaulted, and filled to the roof with a friable
earth which had been the means of preserving it. We may imagine the joy of the
Chevalier Fortunati, so well named, as bit by bit he set free the arabesques of this
enormous gem. -
It offers the ornaments, the complicated compartments, the ingenious interlacings,
which fifteen centuries later seemed such novel combinations. On the precious
empyrean of this vault, among the rosettes and coffer-work, are grouped bas-reliefs in
stucco, and aquatic divinities;—nymphs riding marine monsters, Tritons, Nereids
sporting among strangely imagined hippogriffs, all with an appreciation for beauty
which expresses itself even in grotesque lines. As for the miniature figures, nothing
can equal the purity of their design or the naturalness of their attitudes; the edges
are softened by delicate arabesques describing curves gracefully united with rectangular
forms. Works of this purity can hardly be later than Domitian ; the Italians and
some Germans give the honour of them to the hundred and sixtieth year of our era,
relying on a fact into which aesthetic appreciation counts for nothing, and which can
only be an appearance; in a small room adjoining this, without ornaments and con-
taining a mutilated tomb, some flat bricks have been recovered with stamps answering
to the last year of Antoninus. But, apart from the fact that a partial restoration,
any simple repair, might mix late materials with old work, there is nothing to pre-
vent us from supposing that the little chamber in question was added afterwards by
later generations. Anyhow, there is no proof; this wonder is nameless, like that in
front of it. -
The latter is the more remarkable of the two. Once a Triclinium, of which the
SEPULCARAA, CHAMBERS OF THE LA TIAW WAP. 29 I
pavement remains in black and white mosaic representing Fish, surmounted the sepul-
chral chambers to the number of two, to which you go down by stairs paved in the
same way. You thus come to an ante-room of which the vault has been pierced by
a hole, so to as permit the descent of the funeral urns; here are niches with remains
of paintings that represent certain birds, among them ducks. There is here a tomb
without any effigies, of uncertain date. But the neighbouring chamber, which is
oblong, and containing in the centre an enormous sarcophagus, made to hold two
corpses of which the bones have been found,-this chamber occasions a lively astonish-
ment. You cannot, in fact, withhold a certain compassion for artists who executed
masterpieces in the dark, and expended so much talent with the assurance that the
work would be admired by no one.
The decoration is polychromatic, and the painting contributes at least as largely to
it as the sculpture. Thanks to the diversity of colour, they have been able to give a
greater complication to the intertwining of the arabesques, to multiply the polygons
formed by the intersections of the mouldings, and to introduce an ensemble of effect
among a series of medallions of graduated dimensions, from the cartouche which
contains an important subject, down to a reduced space that represents a cameo.
It is the art since applied to the decoration of the Vatican Loggie, and divined by
our best modern school. For the rest, although the work evidently goes back to the
first century, one can produce the marks of a civilisation that is refined in its excessive
nicety of details and still more in their profusion ; this tendency answers so precisely
to the condition of societies, that at the French Revolution we saw ornamentation
disappear from among decorative arts, at the moment when equalitarian barbarism
set to work to destroy the traditions of the glories of the old world. The mausoleums
of the Latin way reproduce the expansion of worldly habits under the first Caesars,
as the Loggie and the villa Madama of which we shall soon have to speak, describe
public manners under Paul III.
Let us return to our chamber. Mouldings hollow and in relief, genre painting,
landscapes, all unite in enriching the vault, which is divided into compartments pro-
cured by means of semi-cylindrical sections, triangular pendentives, cartouches with
imperfect angles; forms which stimulate the subtlety of an ingenious artist. The
artist here seems to have employed his colours in giving rest to the eye, in opening
tranquil perspectives before which are the firm outlines of the important subjects,
modelled in stucco for the most part. Such are the settings of a large oval conch,
from the middle of which, forming the key of the vault, emerges Jupiter borne on
an eagle. The bas-reliefs represent: Achilles at Scyros, the Judgment of Paris,
Ulysses and Diomede carrying off the Palladium, Philoctetes at Lemnos, Hercules
Citharaºda, Priam begging back the body of Hector. Other compartments present
Flamines, various divinities, and Centaurs fighting with wild beasts. At the corners
of the room are detached four miniatures, in very high relief and of exquisite purity.
Flowers and vases filled with fruit are arranged here and there; lower down in com-
partments are painted birds, and landscapes in camaieu, chimerical as those at
Pompeii, but more distinct and of a superior delicacy. These decorators amused
themselves by placing on three columns the entablature of a ruined temple, before
perspectives retreating to shores where they perched real Chinese huts on stakes, with
fishing-tackle at the side of them. Some water-colours of the time of Lewis XVI.
nave an accidental likeness to these fancies.
& P P 2
292 ROMAE.
When we reflect that rare and costly wonders like these were not meant to be
seen, and that their owners got no honour from them, one says that the Romans no
longer knew what to do with their colossal fortunes. In attributing to the Eastern
war the introduction of luxury and the arts of peace, ancient authors have failed to
remark that at the same time, 173 years before our era, was promulgated a law
which must have exercised a very different influence and accelerated the decline of
manners. This is the Lex Voconia, which takes from women the rights of inheritance,
and allows no bequest in their favour exceeding IOO,OOO sesterces, the aim being
to preserve property in families. As modern nations have taken their legislation
from Rome, we may say that this political measure has conferred on all aristocracies
their means of power, and in consequence of inevitable abuse the elements of their
dissolution.
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BETWEEN THE PONTE MOLLE AND THE MONTE MARIO.
CHAPTER XIV.
From the Porta del Popolo to the Villa Madama.-Casino of Julius III.-The Milvian Bridge.—Origin,
appearance, and paintings of the Villa Madama.-Return by the Borgo and Porta Angelica.-Halt at
Sant' Agostino –The Madonna of Sansovino;-Paintings of Guercino and his school;-Copy of a lost
Raphael.-Raphael at Sta. Maria della Pace: the Sibyls.-Fresco of Peruzzi.-Foreign colonies: the
church of the Germans.—Origin of the title of Sta. Maria dell' Anima.-Flemish and Dutch monu-
ments.-Madonna of Giulio Romano.—Anecdote of Adrian VI. ; his tomb by Peruzzi.-Democratic
souvenir of the Palazzo Riario;-San Lorenzo in Damaso. —Assassination of Count Rossi.-The Farnese
palace.—Exhumation of the curia where Caesar was slain;–Origin of the Hercule-Mastal indicated by
Cicero.—Statue of Pompey and gallery of the Spada palace.—The Tartarughe and the ex-palace Mattei.-
What the Quadrifrons arch was.-Oxen in the Forum.—Bodin and Diderot on the independence of Papinian.
-The Aventine.—Discovery of the wall of Ancus.-Temples and convents: Ceres and Juno ; St. Sabina
and St. Alexis.
ought to carry the memory of one's impressions in all their freshness before
the decorative paintings of the school of the Sanzio, either in the Vatican
galleries, or at the Villa Madama, decorated for Julius de' Medici by the
pleiad of Raphael. This excursion, which is one of the most interesting to be made
in the environs, will take us out of Rome in an entirely opposite direction; by the Porta
del Popolo, or else the Porta Angelica.
At the time when Cardinal Julius, who became Pope under the name of Clement VII.,


2.94 A&O//E.
leagued himself with Charles V. against Florence, to seal that honourable pact, he
married Alexander de' Medici to a natural daughter of the Emperor, and endowed
her with the villa, which was still Margaret’s when, having become a widow, she
married Ottavio Farnese. Having quitted the government of the Low Countries,
she came to end at Rome in 1586 a life of many and chequered days. The title of
Madame was preserved to this daughter of the Emperor, hence the designation still
preserved by a residence that recalls unhappy times and sinister figures. This
rusted gem, that one would suppose to be without a master, now belongs to the last
King of Naples.
To gain the Monte Mario, at the back of which the Villa Madama is situated, we
took the way of scholars, for the course
was towards the Ponte Molle, that
Milvian bridge of which Livy speaks
in his account of the second Punic war,
and at the end of which you come upon
the Flaminian way. Our first pause
after leaving the Porta del Popolo was
in front of the villa of Julius III., a
casino built by Vignola, who from an
architectural medallion has sent a foun-
tain bubbling forth, where the peasants
refresh their beasts before entering the
city. Thence little by little the country
exposes itself, and after the second mile
you come to the edge of the stream.
*E*-* ||5-ºº: With its ancient arches, ten times
ſºlſ iſ patched and decorated by Nicholas V.,
|º]}}|| || || || Calixtus III., and Pius VII., with its
massive tower pierced like a triumphal
arch, its escutcheons and its statues
posted like sentries, the Milvian bridge,
that Scaurus was already rebuilding
in the seventh century of Rome, has all
the aspect of a historical spot. The
º OF JULIUS III. nocturnal farces of Nero added to its
celebrity; in crossing it you cross
over the arches where Cicero arrested the ambassadors of the Allobroges, who had
sold themselves to Catilina, and where four centuries later, under the guidance of a
flaming aerial cross, Constantine defeated Maxentius.
The Tiber describes up stream a fine curve, of which the line loses itself in the
windings of the ground as it breaks in escarpments towards the ancient Fidenae, and
which place a bar in front of the violet curtain of the mountains. As you turn down
stream, the river bends gracefully, bordered by the road which, turning the base of
the Monte Mario, bounds its woody slopes, with their pretty cupola and rustic
convent. In sight of all these views, from the little chapel where Pius II. received
the head of St. Andrew, to St. Peter's rising colossal out of the pile of the Vatican,
you seem to be continuing a dream, and it is some time before you can recall where
=

V/L/A MADAMA. 295
you have already had this vision: that horizon of hills whose line has so accentuated
a balance, has been shown to us by Raphael and Giulio Pippi in the great battle against
Maxentius, so popular in the engraving ; these accidents of ground, these familiar
buildings, that anticipated track by which you seem to remember having once passed,
is, or was, the promenade of Poussin.
On the side of the hill which has kept the name of Mario Millini, some thickets
end in a rustic gate contrived in the broken walls of the Villa Madama. You have
to knock long before the rustic guardians of the domain, dispersed in the fields, receive
warning of your presence by the barking of their dogs. When the gate had at last
disclosed to us a good woman, as prosaic in style and costume as a Chloe of Burgundy
or the Nivernais, our talk went out in the shadows of a high vaulted apartment, with
its plaster dropping from the walls by damp, and in the cracks of which brambles, that
had made a way through the walls, were in full leaf; vegetables, farm tools, supplies
of fodder, as well as a few household utensils, received on a darkish ground the
reflections of a dulled light. For all this, this damp and reeking cavern with its blind
windows was a splendid state chamber.
In the darkness, there opened a door the bottom of which was broken into a fringe
like a beggar's skirts; all at once we came out with dazzled eyes into full light of day,
by the back of an enormous Loggia divided into three lobes, painted and carved
like the porch of a palace of fairies, and whose arches, grouped in broad shadows
on the pavement, threw a pure outline against the ethereal depth of the blue sky. This
masterpiece of ornamentation was designed by Giovanni da Udine and Giulio Romano;
we should be tempted to assign it to the artists of the first century who executed the
chambers lately discovered on the Latin way, with such success did Raphael and
his group, impregnated as they were with the ancient arts, proceed perspicaciously from
the known to the unknown.
As in the Roman monuments of the same sort, as also in the decoration of the
Vatican Loggie, I observed at once a system of ornamentation which consists in
diversifying and connecting the compartments with one another, so as to procure
frames fit to hold the greatest possible number of subjects, without confusing or
overtasking the eyes. From the cartouche with its tolerably large figures, up to the
tail-piece with cameos copied in miniature, the scale is filled; but this swarming
ensemble causes no fatigue, because if you relieve yourself from the duty of being
attentive, you can imagine that you have seen everything without looking very closely.
The subjects instead of staring you in the face rather retire from sight; but if you
examine nearly, there instantly appear distinct combinations, capable of being dis-
tinguished and traced out, and beneath these others again, each of them drawing your
eye to rest on unperceived sights. You are stupefied at the apparent simplicity of such
complicated work, and at the real complication of a thing so simple at the first view.
This was probably invented for people who, as they seldom left home, had to find some
amusement in discovering at the end of six months a host of small gems which they
never expected.
This little sketch of such a decoration will not explain sufficiently, but will perhaps
help to explain, how it was that these three chambers appeared to us, partly no doubt
by reason of their more favourable dimensions, superior to the Loggie of the Vatican,
exception made, I need not say, of the illustrations of the Bible which Raphael com-
posed for the ceilings. At the Villa Madama the great subjects are less grave; the
296 A&OME.
vault, divided in four medallions, contains loves sporting over our heads; some dance in
a ring, others clamber up a high mast, others bestride the silvery backs of swans. The
frieze of the chamber represents a cavalcade of tiny cupids on hippogriffs and dolphins,
executed with most striking freedom. Alarmed by our presence, bats with noiseless
flight crossed with their shadows this radiant vision, while under our feet and between
our legs geese and chickens fluttered about with many cries.
I found in the third chamber, whose chimney-piece is of a severe style and its frieze
of splendid design, a painter, a man of lively impressions, loving to seize the ensemble
of things and to enjoy in wholes. So he led me back to the Loggia, which one must
look at, and look at again, and which one cannot leave. With the unalloyed pleasure
of a child gifted with a fresh palette and a dexterous and intrepid hand, he hunted
out in these tangled thickets of arabesque, microscopic subjects pure as bas-reliefs,
fine as engraved stones; he laughed at the coquetry of genius, which hid such gems
in a medley of lines, like violets among herbage. Then we returned to the pendentives
of the central vault, where the Bales of the Medici, symmetrically arranged, serve as
heart for enormous rosettes mounted on acanthus stems; then to the gay bas-reliefs
which run into the thickness of the arch; finally to the cameos of the vault, to the
fauns, nymphs, and satyrs of the semicircles, creations of marked purity and framed
in delicate arabesques. Finally we went to take our pleasure among the ruined gardens
where, before enormous basins reflecting the clouds in limpid water brought from afar,
Margaret of Parma once contemplated the melancholy landscapes of the Roman
Campagna. These perspectives offered a certain repose, after that mass of compositions
made to furnish a stock to all the ornamentists of the world; after those adorable
frescoes that show us Giulio Romano tender, coy, and light as a severer Watteau,
reared among the marble gods and trained by Virgil.
II.
By way of the Borgo the way back is short, and we went so quickly that the day
was not far advanced when, having passed the Porta Angelica, and turned the colonnade
of Bernini, we passed at the feet of St. Peter and St. Paul, coming from off the bridge
of St. Angelo. But at the end of the via de' Coronari, heat and fatigue made us long
for a resting-place; and as you seek at Rome in churches what in Paris you ask at a
café, we chose for our halting-place Sant' Agostino.
The pilgrims of the north come to pay homage in this temple to the body of
St. Monica, which, having been conveyed from the estuary of the Tiber in 1430, was
taken from its ſignea arca by order of Calixtus III., and placed in a round vessel of
antique green with Florentine supports, its sides marked with undulating flutings.
They came here also to kneel before a crucifix, at the foot of which St. Philip Neri
passed hours of ecstasy. -
What the superstitious race of the south seeks at St. Augustin's is a Madonna
in such high credit in these quarters, as to have become extremely rich in consequence.
The good people find in a moment the person to whom to speak; the statue receives
them at the door, and they venture no further. J. Tatti, detto il Sansovino, cut the
Virgin-Mother out of an immense block of marble, ‘a respectable work for the period,'
7A/E A/ADOVVA OF SAMZ" A GOSZZYO. 297
say the Italian guide-books absurdly; for the period happens to be that of Julius II.
and Leo X. Sansovino, who left Venice so many charming works, has given to this
figure, with much greatness, the kind of originality to which they venture to approach
in works of jewellery. It is a romantic interpretation of the style of Greece; all
contributes to the striking impression caused by a personage with an equivocal
physiognomy, that leaves the spectator undecided between the idol and the Madonna.
Is it the Virgin about to bless 2 Is it the Sphinx about to propound with her lips the
enigma discerned in her eyes? The perpetual illumination of eighteen lamps and
twelve tapers, the sparkle of the jewels with which the work of Sansovino is con-
stellated, recall to one’s mind the ideas of magic and sortilege: the lady wears a perfect
cuirass of diamonds, rubies, topazes, and emeralds; she is covered with pearl necklaces,
bracelets, carbuncles; behind her and over her head the walls are plated with polished
metals that the tapers kindle into flame, and with bas-reliefs of gold and silver. This
ST. PETER AND ST. PAUL, BY THE BRIDGE OF ST. ANGELO.
ironical sister of the virgin of Athens wears on her head a heavy diadem, ending in
a nimbus of stars of precious stones; the child disappears under armfuls of jewels;
his mother wears earrings; brilliants sparkle like live fire on her tresses, plaited like
the tresses of the Asiatic queens who allured the conquerors of the world. Resting
on a pure and vigorous neck, the head—a reminiscence of some nymph of woods or
waters—would doubtless be less disturbing if only the goddess, too little compliant
with evangelical humility, did not betray herself by the pride of her attitude. To
preserve the foot of the Madonna from the devouring caresses of a piety that wears
out marble, it was necessary to double it with a golden buskin, incessantly warmed by
ardent lips. The Roman plebs, sprung of Venus and second cousin to the great gods,
idolizes the Madonna of Sant' Agostino; can they have recognised by the instinct
of the maternal race divinities dear to their sires 2 If I had not been assured that this
image cures children and makes women fruitful, I should never have guessed why,
among so many chaster Madonnas, that of St. Augustin has succeeded in realising
so enormous a fortune.
Q Q

298. & A&O//E.
While superstition masses treasures here, other visitors ask of the church satisfaction
of another sort. Before the wide stairs which serve for base to the façade, architects
note the elegance with which, under Sixtus IV., a great master like Bacio Pintelli
had the art of giving interest to a style reduced to live abstinently. The classic
frontispiece of travertine is simple and light; these good people worked for the refined,
which is the eulogy of Cardinal d’Estouteville, ambassador of Lewis XI. at Rome, the
prelate who built Sant' Agostino. The dome, with its graceful curve, is the senior
of the modern cupolas of Rome: when it was erected, Florence alone possessed a
cupola, modelled, they say, on that of St. Peter, which, all proportions kept, has more
analogy with that of Sant' Agostino. w g
As for the people of ordinary curiosity, they come, and rightly, to seek here a little
of everything. In the circle of the choir are some very life-like busts of the seventeenth
century, when, in Rome and for portraits, sculpture subordinated with rare success the
conventions of style to the animation of reality. To the transept on the right, in the
chapel to which he gives a name, St. Augustin is represented on the master-altar
between St. John and St. Paul the Hermit : a good piece by Guercino, a little sombre,
but for that reason of powerful effect.
People who pry into the byeways of history will stop before the tomb of the young
and learned Onofrio Panvinio, famous for his inquiries into Roman antiquities, who
after following Cardinal Farnese to Palermo, died there in 1568 at the age of thirty-nine.
His bust is most winning, so gracious is the character of that ascetic and smiling face;
and it was his friends who raised the monument to him. Friendship indeed plays a
considerable part and assumes a number of duties, among the heirs of a people where
the family was recruited by adoption. On the mausoleums of several cardinals and of
a certain number of popes figures the votive commemoration of friends; each time
that a sovereign pontiff consecrates a monument to any prelate, he never fails to
justify the honour by the bonds of a lasting friendship.
We salute, in passing, the burial-place of Father Angelo Rocca, who founded in
this very house the Angelica library, the richest in Rome after those of the Minerva
and the Vatican. After that let us follow the old lover of pictures, compiler of
catalogues, discoverer of hidden wonders, who, in the second chapel to the left of
Sant' Agostino, comes to mark for the tenth time the description of a painting lost
or carried off from the sanctuary of Loretto; a masterpiece of which the whole artist
world is still in quest. In truth it is a question of one of the loveliest pages in Raphael’s
second manner. An artist of old times has transmitted to us in a fair copy, though
somewhat heavy perhaps, the memory of the Virgin of the Rose. Leaning over the
infant Jesus, who is awaking, Mary lifts a veil and plays with her son; St. Joseph
watches them; while from the clouds above angels shower down lilies and roses on
to the white coverlet. The original must have been exquisite. Has it been burnt 2
Does it still exist amid the smoke of some hovel, or in a village sacristy 2
Now what all the world will go to see at Sant' Agostino is that abjuration of his
own principles and sentiment which Raphael expressed in his famous fresco of the
Prophet Isaiah ; an inexplicable piece, if he did not mean to prove that the style, which
consists in twisting the body and loading it with sculptural draperies, only to produce
the travestie of a prophet, is no difficult task. Let us hope that such was the intention
of the painter-poet Giovanni Santi, whom Pietro Bembo insisted for love of euphony
in calling Sanzio, so delicate was the ear of the author of Gli Asolani, the Ciceronian
RAPHAE/, 'S S/BPTLS A 7' STA. M/A/R/A D/E/, LA PACE. 299
prelate who was so hostile to bad Latinity that he never read his breviary, and that
he described the Epistles of St. Paul as Epistolacce. -
The nave was under repair, and among the plaster this unique work of art against
a pilaster and in front of bare walls produced a cold and imposing effect. That solid
and muscular frame, the body straining for an attitude, those stuffs like painted stone;
the skill which, while dressing the knee, has allowed a portion to be seen through the
covering, as in the figure of Moses; the head composed with the vigour of a mask
for Caryatides—all, down to the Herculean and rather flat angels which fill the spaces,
seems a disavowal of the mystic inspiration which dreamed the Disputa del Sacramento,
the St. Cecilia, and the Madonna of Foligno. If Raphael meant to strive with Buonarotti
on the same ground, he was venturing into perilous games, for the figure has neither
the nobleness nor the biblical majesty of his rival, and his glory will always remain
under the slur of a semi-abdication before Michelangelo.
To estimate the prepossessions of Raphael, divided in presence of his terrible rival
between fascination and resistance, it is enough on leaving Sant' Agostino to go—it
is not very far even for tired walkers—as far as the church of Santa Maria della Pace,
the foundation of Sixtus IV., who succeeded for a while in closing the gates of Janus.
You will see there one of the most important frescoes of the painter of Urbino’s Four
Sibyls, which he painted because Michelangelo had painted Sibyls. Only he seems
to me this time to have been inspired by designs more worthy of his genius. At
Sta. Maria the impressionable young man shows himself a proselyte to the idea that
it is necessary, even in religious paintings, to rival the statuary of the ancients in
beauty of form, and the pagan subject of the Sibyls, in which the aesthetic of the two
religions is united, seemed to him a happy occasion for affirming these doctrines. But
he does not renounce his own manner of sentiment, his theological prepossessions, or
even the habits of composition which he inherited from the painters who were impreg-
nated with the teachings of Savonarola. Thus the arrangement of the subject which
surrounds and crowns the outside of the large arch, destined to mark off a not very
deep chapel, recalls, but with an interval, the proportions of Perugino. The Cumaean
Sibyl, the Persic, the Phrygian, the Tiburtine, are pensive figures and not viragoes
after the antique; posed so as to give effect to pure forms, they are wholly free from
violence, and power is wrapped in grace. There is much life, spiritual life, in their
tranquillity; they are the prophetesses of a deity who was to be born in a stable.
But how completely do the accessory figures show in Raphael the resolution to carry
on the contest with his own qualities, and an entirely distinct fashion of interpretation 1
A Child-angel, even more exquisite than those of the Vatican chambers, is placed on
the keystone of the vault at the top of the fresco, connecting two Seraphin, turned
right and left to show on legends the predictions with which the Holy Spirit is to
inspire his priestesses. At each extremity of the field other divine messengers hover
over them, as if to breathe upon them, unconsciously upon the first three, and upon
the fourth against her will, the mystery which they will announce to the pagan world.
The second Sibyl to the right is a reminiscence of the fine Imperia that we shall meet
again in the Parnassus. Let us remember that in the execution of this painting Raphael
had for assistant the pure and candid Timoteo Viti, whom the deposition of the dukes
of Urbino exiled from Rome, and who had been the favourite disciple of Francia.
Camuccini has intelligently restored this fine fresco, which owes nothing to Michel-
angelo, and is the emanation of an original genius. What is difficult to understand
Q Q 2
3OO A’OJ/E.
is how Sanzio, after sustaining the competition with so much brilliance, should have
repudiated his natural gifts in the Isaiah, by way of repulsing Michelangelo. However
that may be, the game went against him ; the supreme and even the extravagant
expression of the passion of the time for anatomical study, Buonarotti had the wind
behind him, and his word was law: he came there one day with a large train to
St. Augustin’s, and standing in front of that unseasonable brother of the Prophets
of the Sixtine, proclaimed aloud the sublimity of the fresco, congratulating the artist
on the enormous stride which he had taken in it; he could thus award a palm to
himself with honour, and relegate to the second rank, by his eulogy of a work so
different from Raphael's earlier labours, the whole handiwork of this sublime artist.
These ideas pursued me while, with half attention, I walked about the nave of
Our Lady of Peace. In front of the chapel surmounted by the Sibyls of Raphael,
and which contains sculptures by Fancelli and Ferrata, Balthazar Peruzzi has left a
fresco, the Virgin between St. Catherine and St. Bridget, figures of a rare sweetness,
un
| s=–
| - - - -
*
º |
Sº
| |
.."
|
H
º
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-
the first especially, of which the expression is adorable. They present the founder of
the oratory, Fernando Ponzetti, to a Madonna rather Raphaelesque in physiognomy,
with a cast of face to be met with in the paradise of Leonardo.
The second chapel to the right of the nave is entirely bizarre; but the monument
which fills it has that powerful originality which impresses. So they say that Michel-
angelo designed the plan, which was carried out by his pupils, especially by Simeon
Mosca, who cut its marvellous arabesques. As for the figures of St. Peter and
St. Paul, as well as the other personages, they are the work of Rossi da Fiesole, a
herculean conception, with a virtuoso's execution. On large vessels borne by Sphinxes,
lie in front of one another the statues of a cardinal and his mother. In spite of its
extreme richness, this monument produces as spontaneous an impression as if it were
simple. The history of modern art according to the churches of Rome, which from
the time of Martin V. had laid all the genius of Italy under contribution, would draw
an interesting chapter from Santa Maria della Pace.

S7A. MARIA DELZ. ' AAV/AMA. 3OI
III.
When we left the church della Pace, it was too late to go into the Sta. Maria
dell’ Anima, which is situated close by the side of it, and my companions moreover
insisted on remaining under the impression of Raphael, who had thus crowned a day
begun in the society of his school at the Villa Madama. So, crossing the piazza
Navona, we reached home. But on the following day I began my wanderings with
this foundation, which serves as hospital for the poor of the various nations of Germany.
At the beginning of the fifteenth century, when they began the construction of the
church by means of a legacy instituted by a Fleming, they found in the ground a
bas-relief of the holy Virgin between two kneeling suppliants, symbols of the soul.
So they carved on the pediment of the great door a not very good copy of the
bas-relief, and the church retained from this its mystic surname of Santa Maria dell’
Anima, which is suitable enough for a temple under the patronage of subjective
Germany. On your entrance you will be received by a numerous circle of Flemings
and departed Tedeschi, a choice society which in this Italian sanctuary has preserved
much accent. Some writers assign to San Gallo the flat brick wall, pierced with large
windows without frames, of the façade which is animated by three rows of Corinthian
pilasters. I have as much difficulty in admitting this, as in laying on Balthazar Peruzzi
the blame of the coldly correct gates of the church, which, when you have crossed
the threshold, seems big enough inside, but is in fact very small. The height of the
piers of the chapel, whose arches rise up to the vault, produces this serviceable illusion.
Although the principal works decorating the walls are due to Italians, yet the first
glance discloses that you are among another people. Certain habits imprinted on the
fittings of the church and the dressing of the altars, epitaphs in pointed letters, here
and there frescoes washed by northern artists, the tendency to dispersive detail and
to the elaborate expression of the simple, but especially some profiles and some busts—
all awakens a vague memory of the banks of the Mein and the Danube.
I visited the church with a view to some objects of secondary importance: â picture
of respectable simplicity by Saraceni, some frescoes of Sermonetta, a good copy of
the Pietà of Michelangelo by Nanni; the tomb of the Duke of Cleves by some Flemings
who have placed him down on his knees as stiff as a rod of iron; the fine statue of the
Cardinal of Austria by Francis du Quesnoy of Brussels, that clever artist who was
poisoned by his brother; and the frescoes of Coellier, and that of John Miel of Antwerp,
and the mausoleum that Alexander Farnese with Andrea della Valle raised to their
incomparable friend, the illustrious Bolognese, Bartolommeo Saliceti, mausoleum on
which they have placed in so few words this finished funeral oration :-
Scire sat Salicetus hic sepultus,
Socratem perisse bis putato.
As I was returning from the corridor leading to the sacristy which had attracted
my instincts of hunter, I stopped before the master-altar, where on a large and rather
dark canvas is represented the Madonna escorted by Saints. The deep quality of
the tones gives I know not what of mordant and suggestive to this picture, at once
smiling and severe; we are astonished to find in it a happy mixture of the style of
3O2 A&O.]/E.
Raphael with the graces of the early Lombard school. 'Tis a Giulio Romano, but
one of the finest that this great school has left us. At length we reach what must
be the principal aim of every intelligent halt at St. Mary of the Soul, the monument
of Adrian VI., designed by Peruzzi, and executed by two craftsmen of genius, Michel-
angelo of Sienna and Tribolo of Florence. e
When Charles V. had given the tiara to that old professor of Utrecht of whom he
had already made an archbishop and even a viceroy, and as the old soul made his
entry at the Vatican with his clerk and his old domestic, at the sight of the pagan
statues and naked deities of Olympus, he crossed himself and turned his head away,
crying, ‘They adore idols!’ He wished to break them all; as they opposed this
design, he went into an attic under the roof, so as to avoid further commerce with
Jupiter and Venus. What a strange successor had policy thus given to the Maecenas
of the Renaissance, to that lover of the beautiful whose name was Leo X., and who
had just given so keen an impulse to the worship of antiquity Behold Rome under
the government of a village priest. The character of the timid pope offers a rather
piquant contrast to his mausoleum : if the magnificent sleeping figure of the pontiff
could take flight, if his portrait should bethink itself to speak, what indignation we
should have at the sumptuosities that cover his remains ! The Virtues, the Angels
bearing escutcheons, the Genii posted at the angles of the cenotaph, and extinguishing
torches, all this ideal world would savour to him of sorcery, as if summoned from the
Elysian hell of the unbelievers of the time of Augustus. Few monuments unite to
their royal ordering a more exquisite perfection. In the centre on a broad panel is
carved in bas-relief the Solemn Entry of Adrian VI. into Rome, whose streets he
traverses on horseback. Nothing is more curious as a historic scene, nor more
finished in point of design and composition. Our bas-reliefs of the tomb of Francis I.
have neither that reality nor that surprising finish.
IV.
A little distance from the church of S. Luigi dei Francesi and in the neighbourhood
of Pompey's theatre, a swarming quarter of which the Campo di Fiori is the centre, we
come across some French memories in the Riario palace, which in our own days
witnessed the end of a tragical adventure. In 1848 they appropriated for the chamber
of representatives an immense saloon, in which in a series of empty and awkward
compositions, Giorgio Vasari is supposed to have illustrated the acts of a Farnese, of
Paul III., who assembled the Council of Trent with the twofold aim of conciliating
the Protestants and reforming the abuses of the Church. Charles V., skilled in
developing any germs of division, brought the laudable undertaking to nought.
Bramante built this palace for a nephew of Sixtus IV. ; in it he employed
stones taken from the Coliseum, and the marbles of the arch of Gordian. He made
a sober design of a façade with pilasters, in which the outlines and the medallions of
the windows possess a delicacy that can only be compared with the nobleness of the
ensemble; only the gorgeous decadence reconstructed the entrance gate. The court, of
rich and severe aspect, has two tiers of galleries with arches resting on forty-four
granite columns, taken from the portico of Pompeius. As you ascend to the great
7HE ASSASS/MA 7'IOM OF ROSS/. 3O3
hall of the Chancellery, do not neglect, in the gallery of the first story, two small
doors which they ought to copy. The Riario palace had a fine chapel until Valadier
in 1823 reconstructed the work of Bramante, which itself came after a basilica of the
fourth century dedicated by the first Damasus to St. Laurence; hence the title of
San Lorenzo in Damaso. Here are to be seen: a fine Florentine tomb, the exquisite
bust of a princess Massimi, the tombs of Sadolet, the diplomatic cardinal and poet,
and of Annibal Caro, who translated Virgil; finally the mausoleum of a scholar, a
jurisconsult, an economist, an Italian statesman, who made himself celebrated in
three countries, at Geneva, in France, and at Rome, where he died from the blow
of an assassin. Tenerani has carved a bust in a lofty style on the tomb which Pius IX.
erected to his minister, Count PELLEGRINo RossI.
The memory of this tragedy still gives a certain sombreness to the church and
palace where the crime was perpetrated. Like the first of the Caesars, Rossi was
warned five times in the same day of the lot which awaited him; the public was in
the confidence of a plot against which no obstacle was interposed. Devoted to the
task of obtaining for Italy by means of negotiation the liberal conquests, for which
he doubted the chances of war, and of organizing at Rome a parliamentary system
by moderating the excesses of revolution; hostile like every lover of freedom to the
tyranny of the plebs, and the victim of the demagogic party, spurred on, they say,
by the aristocratic faction, Rossi was immolated exactly as he would have been in
the time of the Gracchi or of Marius.
It was the 15th of November, 1848: they expected Rossi at the Assembly, where
he was to develop his plan of an Italian confederation under the aegis of the sovereign-
pontiff. At daybreak an anonymous note put the minister of the first constitutional
pope on his guard: Caveat consul. A moment after, a diplomatist informed of the
plot by his valet came to warn the minister; the wife of one of his colleagues wrote
to the same effect. At the Vatican, whither he had gone to receive the final counsels of
the holy father, a chamberlain exposed the plot to him. Finally, as he was coming
down after his audience into the court of St. Damasus, a priest who awaited him
declared the design of the murderers. “I have no time,’ replied the first minister;
‘they are waiting for me at the Chancellery.’ Then the ecclesiastic seized him by the
arm, and clinging to him cried, “If you go there, you are a dead man l’ Rossi
seemed troubled; but after a short silence he went on as far as the staircase, where
he said to the priest who still followed him : ‘Causam optimam assumpsi; miserebifur
/Deus.’ -
-- He went straight to the Riario palace, where there was a great crowd, for the
anticipation of a sight which was vaguely hoped for had brought together bravoes
and the curious in a throng under the portico, on the steps, and as far as the
gallery of the first storey, in presence of the civic guard, which was drawn up in the
court and which, without clearing the peristyle or protecting the minister, saw the
preparations for the murder and looked on without an attempt to hinder it.
Count Rossi entered by the great door; immediately he was greeted by loud
shouts and some thirty Bersaglieri cut off his retreat, while the other conspirators
threw themselves in his path. He passed the portico with deliberate step, and with
his head upright; and as he was proceeding to mount the second flight, and passed
by a small round door let into the wall, the Bersaglieri rushed upon him and thrust
him against this wall. Then one of the bravoes slipping between Rossi and the
3O4. A&O///E.
door, struck him rudely on the left shoulder. By a natural movement Rossi turned
his head, thus exposing his neck, when one Jergo took advantage of this expected
motion to plunge a poniard of great length into his throat. This monster and his
accomplices remained on the spot without any risk of arrest.
Instantly informed of what had happened, the assembly of deputies took no measures,
and the president passed to the order of the day. At Rome in a case of murder, the
disgrace falls on the victims; the people is of the party of monsters. ‘A’ra uno
/ºcs/iere e un’ eretico,” said the Trasteverini, giving us a glimpse in their phrase of the
influential complicity of the old absolutist parties. As for the great men of another
colour, they only half concealed their satisfaction. When Martinez de la Rosa was
stupefied by the sitting not even being interrupted, ‘Bastal a high personage
answered him, ‘was this Genevese, then, the king of Rome?' Cries of joy and a
sort of delirium followed the deed; the wife and children of Rossi, lately saluted
with smiles, had to see under their windows all the ferocity of this exultation, and
*
º *
º
ºilſ ſº
Fº
Hºl
RIARIO PALACE (CANCELLERIA).
to have their grief insulted. In the absence of all repression, a duty which the chief
of police declined, the murderers fraternised with the troops, and in the evening,
under the windows of Galetti, the horde vociferated the patriotic hymn Bandicra Sacra,
substituting for these two words, Sacro /*gnaſe (holy dagger). The next day the
prepared rising broke out; and on the 24th of the month the sovereign of Rome fled
to Gaëta.
Let us not seek in communities held in tutelage a philosophy lofty enough to be
generous, and intelligent enough to be moderate; let us not ask of them the moral
bravery of the just man whom Horace has drawn in a line, and whom he would not
even have thought of, if he had lived later in Rome. When Count Rossi had rolled
on to the steps of the palace, and while his life was ebbing out with his blood, his
remains were abandoned; it was with difficulty, adds Count d'Harcourt, that the
minister's servant could find help to draw him out of the public passage and carry
him to the threshold of a vestibule, where the body remained exposed to the outrages

THE FAA’AWESE PA/ACA. 305
of an impudent curiosity. It was a French Franciscan, Father Vaur, who, braving
all murmurs, had the courage to take it up in his arms and hide in the cellars of
San Lorenzo, before it was dragged through the streets, the victim of this ignoble
plot. This Father Vaur was the friend of M. de Rayneval, then French minister at
Naples and afterwards ambassador at Rome, where he had previously resided as
first secretary. When the minister was prematurely cut off in 1858, Vaur died of
chagrin. Count Pellegrino Rossi, the Italian from Modena, who had gained high
posts in the administration of the Gauls, was stabbed at a distance of a hundred
paces from the curia where, under the steel of the accomplices of Brutus, Julius
Caesar had fallen of old at the feet of the statue of Pompeius.
Let us proceed to seek the statue which thus beheld the murder of Caesar.
V.
To find it, you must go to the
Spada palace; but if the little spec-
tacle of popular manners displayed in
the piazza Campo di Fiori do not make
you forget your object in amusement
on your way, the Farnese palace,
before which you will come out before
turning the via del Mascherone, solicits
a visit that you will hardly refuse.
The last king of Naples lives there in
his own house, since his family inherits
from the Farnese; his presence pre- -
vented me from seeing on the first Nº
story the Gallery of Vignola, as well
as the celebrated fresco of Annibal
Caracci, the Triumph of Bacchus. I
did not miss, however, a saunter round -
the Farnese palace, and I made long | ||
halts in its splendid court, a cloister - PELLEGRINO ROSSI, AFTER TENERANI.
with two rows of arches, surmounted by
a third order with Corinthian pilasters.
I will beg all travellers given to art to study this monument: the vast edifice of
which Alexander Farnese, before becoming pope, that is, before 1534, confided the
plan to Antonio San Gallo, is one of those classics which it is well worth while to read
over again. When Quatremère de Quincy wrote, the Farnese was considered the finest
palace of modern architecture, a circumstance which should not prevent us from con-
fessing that this square and regular mass, with all its imposing majesty, mixes with
all its severity of proportions and of taste some shocking phantasies. San Gallo, who
did not live long enough to finish his work, had two years before his death been
deprived of his just privilege of continuing it; as that great architect was finishing
the second story of the front façade, Paul III. offered the task of crowning it to
competition. Immediately there hastened to the work Perino del Vaga, Sebastian
R. R.

3O6 - A’OME.
del Piombo, the inevitable Vasari, e tufti Quanff. Michelangelo won the day, being
then seventy-one years old; his taste, which in matters of architecture was always
warped by caprices, was at this time more incoherent than ever. I will confess, then,
that as at the Farnese palace I look at the cornice, so rich, large, and marvellous in
effect, which bears the name of Buonarotti, it is difficult for me not to admit with
many critics that the Florentine, who was very much occupied at the time, must have
abandoned to Vignola, who succeeded him as architect of the palace, the task of
designing the entablature and studying its details. What is certain is that its modematura
is admirable; it would be the paragon of modern art, if Pollajuolo had not executed
at Florence the cornice of the Strozzi palace, in which the antique impression is perhaps
more profound, and whose effect comes upon the eye with a still more striking power.
THE FARNESE PALACE.
The façade of the palace is singularly ennobled by the projections and dimensions
of this cornice. The windows of the first storey, with pediments supported on columns,
have been imitated from the small altars of the Pantheon, which have been so much
abused since. Michelangelo unluckily interrupted the lines of the front by placing in
the middle a cold and poor loggia. On the upper storey the little pillars are supported
on consoles, an awkward arrangement, in which my eyes refuse to recognise the high
reason of San Gallo. The portico, with arched vault, rests on twelve Doric pillars of
granite. This peristyle, in the form of an avenue, is a masterpiece of elegant and
sumptuous luxury. The entrance passed, one has some difficulty in reconciling one's
self to the pillars on which the arches surrounding the court fall: they are columns

THE FAA’AVES/2 PA/ACAE. 3O7
half engaged in the pilasters, a complication singular enough in itself; but, besides
that, each of these pilasters is topped by two imposts, one over the other, which adds
to this double employment a pleonastic reduplication. Michelangelo reproduced on
the first range the pilaster and engaged column; only he filled the arches, in the
middle of which he pierced large lattices; the Corinthian pilasters of the upper range
cut up a wall in panels, which he pierced with small windows. All this is rather
hybrid and rather incoherent; but the disposition of the bases was so harmoniously
conceived, such were the richness, elegance, and vigour of the outlines, that the
superiority of the conceptions of the first master remains manifest; its impression is
triumphant.
*
*** *
º . º,
LOGGIA OF THE FARNESE, FROM THE BANK OF THE TIBER.
Giacomo della Porta, towards the end of the sixteenth century, executed the façade
at the back, separated from the via Giulia by a small garden. The framework of the
florid architecture of this loggia is a feast for the eyes, but into the eye already there
glides a redundant prodigality, as well as a certain thinness of design ; we do not
notice these faults from a distance, from the arches of the Ponte Sisto, for instance,
where it brightens on the horizon the sordid walls reflecting themselves in the river.
The Farnese palace has a colour which animates it and increases its charm: brick mixed
with stone forms the ground of the façades; the entablature, the bands, bossages, win-
dows, columns, are of travertine taken from the theatre of Marcellus, and even from the
Coliseum, which still seems all but untouched, and in which the centuries have drawn
R. R. 2

308 A&OME.
supplies as if from a quarry. In the court of the palace used to be the Hercules and
the group of the Farnese Bull, better exposed in those days, and in front of a monument
worthier of their stature, than they are in a dilapidated garret of the museum at
Naples. There is now nothing to be seen in the cloister but two sarcophagi; the
one with perpendicular flutings is a Christian monument of the third century; the
other, in the form of a gondola, loaded with sculptures and ornaments, has acquired
a great celebrity: it is that assigned to Caecilia Metella, if we may believe scholars,
who by multitudinous dissertations have confirmed this account of its origin. It cannot
really be thrown further back than the time of Adrian.
In this quarter of Campo di Fiori, where we wander in search of a statue made
immortal by the murder of Caesar,
everything takes us back to recollec-
|
| #
tions of Pompeius and to undeniable
witnesses of the tragedy. Near the
streets of the Giubbonari and the
Chiavari cross those of the Monte
della Farina, of the Sudario, of the
Barbieri, of Argentina. This populous
quarter is incongruously pierced by
roads which describe curves and
awkward angles very unfavourable to
circulation. In such a case, when
there is nothing apparent to justify
such an abnormal breach of lines, the
first cause lies buried in the arcana
of the soil, for the streets survive
buildings which put a constraint on
their continuity. If you took away
from the massive apse of St. Andrew
of the Valley some of the surrounding
houses, as well as the Pio palace, rebuilt
by the family of the Ursini in 1440,
and possessed in our time by the
- Chevalier Righetti, we should find at
CoBBLER INSTALLED IN A RUINED PALACE. a certain depth the pavement that was
trodden nineteen centuries since by
senators on their way to the curia of Pompeius; we should exhume the remains of his
portico and his theatre, the first in which, in spite of sumptuary edicts, stone and
marble were employed. To escape the blame of the censors, the triumvirs erected
a temple at the summit of the theatre; afterwards his marble tiers, destined for a
people which was too much flattered to think of complaining, became the steps of a
sanctuary; while the jealousy of the senate was appeased by the satisfaction of meeting
in the curia, when the assembly came so far to assist at the games provided by the
ostentatious Pompeius, who hardly thought that he was preparing here a place of
punishment for his future rival.
The Righetti palace contains deep cellars of two stories, which wind under the
court. I saw these caves, remains of the portico and the theatre, rising at the back

THE MAS7A HERCULES 3O9
of an opening pierced to enlarge the hotel Pio.
As they were clearing away to come
upon foundations that should resist them, the workmen struck on what seemed a block
of gold; under the gilding they recognised bronze.
At length they made out a
Hercules, fourteen feet high, whose face, hands, and arms are intact, and which only
wants one of its feet.
The skull with a circular hole behind denotes that the statue
delivered oracles; the son of Alcmena has on his right arm the skin of the Nemean
lion.
In front of this figure, youthful, simple in model, broad in style, in which the
features are delicate but vigorous and the hands superb; before this monument which
is nearly contemporary with Alexander, they thought at first of Theseus, but medals and
cameos, reproducing of this type, resolved the
question in favour of Hercules.
bronze, cast in a single piece, it has been pro-
posed to christen Mastai, in honour of Pius IX.,
to the generosity of whom solely is Rome
indebted for its preservation. The Russian
agents, favoured by a connivance which we
cannot describe, had in fact concluded their
bargain with the owner. As no work of art can
be carried away from the Roman states without
permission, they must have had the Hercules
secretly conveyed to a piece of ground acquired
by the czar for excavation, and there had it
publicly unburied for the benefit of the pos-
SeSSOr; Notice,
however was given to Pius IX., who insisted
on seeing the statue, and he declared that he
would not let such a masterpiece be carried
away. This good deed cost the holy father,
who is not rich and yet who did not hesitate,
IOO,Ooo crowns. We know that Pompeius
adorned his theatre with twelve colossal statues
of the gods brought from Greece, whence it
follows that if they would work other scavi under
this palace, they would have a good chance
of exhuming the other eleven.
This enormous
this comedy is well known.
In presence
- | | | | W
|
M.
. º |
==
I-1
THE MASTAf HERCULES.
of this one, I remembered that Cicero, through the agency of Atticus who was then
living in Athens, made himself the purveyor of the omnipotent consul; and my admira-
tion, taking for its organ a well-known Epistle, confirmed the eulogies addressed on
behalf of Pompeius by the great writer to the friend, who had chosen with so much taste
the statues that were destined to embellish the new building. We shall see the Mastai
Hercules again at the Braccio Nuovo of the Vatican.
Let us now approach the old palace of the Mignanelli, where, still in search of the
statue which saw Caesar fall, we shall again be distracted by other things, such sport
does the multiplicity of Roman curiosities make of plans and methods.














3 IO A’OME.
VI.
In crossing the piazza Capo-di-Ferro I had already noticed the Spada palace,
not only for the ornaments and bas-reliefs of stucco with which its façade is covered,
but on account of an illusion that, at the back of the courts, in front of the principal
entrance, continues the perspective by the fiction of a portico. Daniele da Volterra
raised the edifice for the cardinal who has bequeathed his name to the piazza; Borromini
decorated the house under Urban VIII. for Cardinal Spada, and introduced a
magnificent staircase. The attendants
greet you in the galleries with a
civility that gives the best idea of their
maSter.
Out of gratitude I would fain have
found everything admirable. As I
passed through the four spacious rooms
consecrated to painting, I tried hard,
for the justification of the owners of the
palace, to attribute the most impossible
pieces to the best masters; the cicerone
guided me to them with so engaging
a smile. One of the rooms is painted
by one of Raphael’s good pupils; let
the name of Giulio Romano pass with-
out inquiry. In the following rooms
we only find six or seven pieces worth
remark; a graceful picture of the
Visitation due, not to Andrea del Sarto,
but to one of his pupils, who has con-
N tented himself with putting into colour
''', --- one of his grisailles at Florence; a
_2~ H- | — ` good portrait of Julius III., the only
- - one we possess, by Scipione Gaetano; a
Lucretia; a Judith, of Guido; the Bear-
ing of the Cross, by Parmegiano da
Forli, a rather scarce Gothic master. Let us also mention, but only as curiosity, a
canvas swarming with small figures, and representing the Insurrection at Naples under
Masaniello, in the Mercato Vecchio; finally, one of the most bizarre pages that was
ever risked by the ancestor of all realists, Michelangelo of Caravaggio; two peasant
women, one old, the other young, are seated in a farmhouse; the first winds a bal
of worsted, the other makes black lace. The plaited hair of the younger one, her
apron, her childish mouth concentrated on work, make of this painting a pretty scene
after the Flemish manner and one of the most simple. Only our villagers have the
nimbus; we behold the Education of the Virgin
But all this was not what had brought us to the Spada palace; after having heard
at the curia of the Mazzinians who witnessed the death of Rossi, we quitted the curia of
|||
THE SPADA POMPEIU.S.











SZAZ"UE OF POM/PE/U.S. 3 II
Pompeius to seek a witness of the death of Caesar. Buried a certain depth down, the
colossus of the defeated of Pharsalia was exhumed in 1552 in the street of the Leutari,
near the palazzo Riario, and nearer still to the theatre of Pompeius, among the sub-
structions of its portico and of the chamber, where was perpetrated the classic model of
the assassinations called political. When they found this figure of the man whom an
interested flattery of Sulla, and not the suffrage of the people, proclaimed the great
Pompeius, the statue had on its neck the first course of a party-wall; whence it follows
that by a decree of consular justice, the marble had been cut in two and divided between
the two bordering proprietors, when Julius III. acquired it and offered it to Cardinal
Capo di Ferro, by way of recompense for informing him of so barbarous a decision.
The attitude of the statue is majestic without being forced; the features have a striking
mark of individuality, an expressive and severe physiognomy. The triumvir carries
the object of his cheated ambition—the globe, an attribute that he may have appro-
priated to himself by having his head placed on the decapitated trunk of some god;
E.
BROKERS AND BOOKWORMS IN OPEN AIR.
for the head is fitted on, and Pompeius was not too modest. Such substitutions become
frequent under the emperors.
So far as concerns the identity of this figure with that which saw Caesar expire
under the blows of Cassius and Brutus, the presumption may be reasonably upheld.
It was exhumed near the spot where the murder was committed;—Suetonius informing
us that he saw it ‘in a palace adjoining the theatre of Pompeius, whither Augustus
had had it transported.” As it is not very probable that the hero, at a time when they
did not multiply statues, would be represented twice under the same portico, we have
good grounds for admitting, in spite of a school that is ready to deny everything,
that the colossal Pompeius of the palazzo Spada may have seen the fall of Caesar.
The monument is not very familiar, the Spada princes never having allowed it to be
either modelled or copied.
Fallen to the ground at the foot of this block of marble, the great Julius, as he
drew the fold of his toga over his head, must have exchanged a supreme and singular

3 I 2
ACOME.
glance with the spectre of his ancient victim, become, thanks to the note of Cato, the
patron of democrats whom fortune has betrayed. For my part, I have always found
Cato a little easy, and our Pompeians still more so, in comparing their cause to that of
these two ogres who, having snatched the possession of the world from a fraudulent and
gorged aristocracy, then proceeded to quarrel about the tyranny with a cupidity
that was insatiable.
on the public credulity 2
VII.
But when shall we shake off the prejudices inflicted by parties
The attraction which led me out of my way across the inexhaustible bric-
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FOUNTAIN OF THE TARTARUGHE.
à-brac of the old quarters brought me
out, near the piazza Montanara, by a
stall, where under awnings erected at
a street corner, amateurs and clerics
disputed a few smoked and trashy pic-
tures, antiquities of modern date, and
old books ill-used by time. Much
theology, which was not my affair, but
which interested seminarists, a Domi-
nican, and some Philippines who, for
cheapness read the books on the spot
instead of buying them; one of them,
however, pressing three small coins to
his heart, was driving his bargain with
much fury and gesticulation. The
group formed so good a subject that
a painter posted ten paces off mali-
ciously took out his pencil.
As I followed the labyrinths of
streets that end at the back of the
Capitol, a wrong turning brought me
to the Fountain of the Tortoises, that
a little while before I had been vainly
seeking. Imagine two basins, the upper
of which is supported by four young
Tritons, their feet on the heads of four dolphins; these aquatic divinities are thrusting
tortoises into the upper vase, from which the water flows over.
The complexity of
the arrangement does not obscure the clearness and graceful movement of the
figures; all is animated, unusual, and charming. Giacomo della Porta designed the
Fontana delle Tartarughe, but the bronze figures are the work of Taddeo Landini, of
Florence.
Close at hand rises the lofty and sombre gate of one of those palaces which
have fallen from their high estate, proud homes of families that have vanished, on
which time and misery imprint their marks: it is the ancient palace of the Mattei.


































“IN TYHO H NVIWOYI GIHT,
##
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ZTA/E O/L/D MA 7'7E/ PA/AC/E. 3 I 3
The court, which is surrounded by a peristyle contemporary with Pius V., still pre-
serves some statues, and a few busts on consoles. Staunch at their posts, the
Emperors receive the rain in this solitude among the remains of their thermae and
villas, fixed in the building as high as the third story. These four walls are a museum
which nobody either visits or even knows any longer. This is what has survived of
the famous Mattei collection, the wonders of which have been reproduced by
engraving, and which have been admired on this very spot by the greatest per-
sonages in Europe:–at the bottom of the court a hooper was fastening staves round
a tub, and a dyer was washing some skeins of red wool. A few steps from the
house two Ciabattini have erected their stall between ancient columns, and they
patch shoes under the entablature of a
palace.
As I was thinking of all this decay º!
and a thousand other things in a #
quarter where old memories come thick
upon one, I came to the western slope
of the Palatine, and I only perceived it
as I came to lean against the Four-
faced Arch (Quadrifrons) assigned by
the vulgar to Janus, who however was
only two-faced. The second of the
Antonines had this building constructed
at the end of the Forum Boarium,
which has kept its physiognomy so well
that if you were asked to make a guess
at its purpose, you would at once think
of a cattle-market. Many people ima-
gine that it is the Campo Vaccino,
which up to our time inherited this
function, and they amuse themselves
by showing oxen at the foot of the
tribune; some with more boldness still
introduce flocks ruminating over the
pastures, planted there apparently by - -
the muse of history. What perpetuates COURT OF THE MATTEI PALACE.
the mistake is that the Forum Roma-
num, which adjoins some immense storehouses for fodder, occasionally serves
to give stabling for a few hours to carts and cattle, that have brought the stores of
hay into the neighbouring streets. More than once I have seen this noble space
thus rustically blocked up; among all the confusion of carts and waggons and long-
horned oxen lying pell-mell at the foot of the ancient temples, the majesty of the
spot was joined to rural episodes which were not without poetry.
In a country where all life goes on in the open air, the use of porticoes is very
ancient; the Quadrifrons arch was a Loggia in which cattle-dealers transacted their
business; Janus had nothing to do with it. In the thirteenth century, the Frangi-
pani erected a little fortress on this construction, of which the ensemble is heavy
and its ornamentation gone. Nearly in front, opposite the graceful little basilica
S S

3 I-1 A’OME.
of S. Giorgio in Velabro you notice a graceful miniature of a triumphal arch built,
or one might say chiselled, by the jewellers and cattle-dealers in honour of Septimius
Severus, from whom they received various favours. This cube loaded with ornaments
is pierced by a single opening. As on the other monuments of this reign, Caracalla
on coming to the throne erased the name of his brother Geta in the dedicatory
inscription, in which Septimius Severus, the Empress Julia, and their children figure.
One of the pilasters represents the emperor and his wife offering a sacrifice; on the
others figure Antoninus Caracalla and his brother; the place of the latter has
remained empty since his murderer had this piece of the bas-relief broken. We
know that he poniarded Geta in the arms of their mother, to such haste was he com-
pelled, to avoid being anticipated in the match of fraternal emulation.
ARCUS ARGENTARIORUM : PORCH OF SAN GIORGIO IN VELABRO.
These princes had friends, since Caracalla judged it prudent to have twenty
thousand of his brother's partisans massacred ; a proof that Antoninus Caracalla had
many more, which is a fact much to the honour of the society of the epoch. Among
the victims was Papinian, on whom his sovereign had imposed the task, for the
service of people charged with their own execution, of writing an apology for
suicide, and who refused. So Bodin, in the third book of his Republic, has shown
to what a point such a rebellion transgresses wisdom; a line of argument which
Diderot took for his own in his eulogy of Seneca, and which has served for a theme
to the majority of the people who have had to spin arguments in favour of passive
obedience and political nullity.

S. G/ORG/O /V VE/AAEA’O. 3 I5
Taught perhaps by our barbarisms of which they have been the victims, the
Romans, when in the sixth century they supported the little basilica of St. George
in the Velabrum against the arch of the Silversmiths, covered up the bas-reliefs instead
of breaking them ; you see the figures continued intact under the bed of mortar
which envelops them. But how are we to reconcile this apparent respectfulness with
the stupidity of making a great wall rest against a monument, in such a way as to
mask one of its sides 2 Yet I pray travellers to bear no malice against this little
church of St. George, whose aisles are only familiar with silence.
To go in, you must seek at a neighbouring house a Portinaio, who seems surprised
at your visit. Then under a charming porch of the thirteenth century erected by
Stefano, prior of St. George, you enter
a temple with three aisles, marked by
twelve columns of granite and four of
violet marble, fluted, the shafts of
which, without stylobates, bury them-
selves in the mosaics of the pavement,
like trunks of trees in a flowery sward.
Heavy arches trust themselves to these
rather slight pillars; the old and
decayed ceiling matches the dilapi-
dation of a pavement patched with
inscriptions, and made green by mould
that is impregnated with the mysterious
perfume of old marbles, the chilly
incense of the buildings of a thousand
years ago.
Although Pope Zacharias, at the
date when the Merovingians were
coming to their end, reconstructed the
church where St. Gregory pronounced
one of his homilies, and though after
that a nephew of Boniface VIII. had
it partially decorated, still it has pre-
served an antique physiognomy; it
produces that rare impression of imma-
culate monuments. In Italy and at
Rome especially the most intelligent
preserver of monuments is poverty; the great city has never been rich enough to make
blunders everywhere. This charming altar with its mosaics and its ciborium, an
open campanile formed of several ranges of small columns, is only of the thirteenth
century, but it is intact. The aisles, which by a notable peculiarity narrow from
the porch to the Presbyterium, end in a Campo-santo of inscriptions contemporary
with the catacombs, and which no doubt Pope Zacharias must have had taken away
from some cemetery in order to illustrate these walls. At the Tribuna we see with
interest a fine fresco of the thirteenth century, too much retouched in the fifteenth,
but in which the Christ and the Virgin are of such sweetness that, notwithstanding
certain Byzantine reminiscences, the work which reminds one of Giotto, if one did
IN THE PALACE OF CALIGUI.A.

S S 2
3 I6 & ROME.
not know him for the author of the painting. The Presbyterium is shut off by
antique barriers, some of which are very curious. Those in the chapel to the right
are exactly of the same design and the same marble as those of the Coliseum, which
date from Vespasian, and then even were only an imitation; for the excavations of
the chevalier Rosa on the Palatine proved to me that the parapets of the Flavian
amphitheatre reproduced a railing of the palace of Caligula.
Let us watch falling into the Cloaca Maxima the Acqua Argentina, which is said
to have its source in the lake of Juturna, and which remains as pure and crystal as
when the Vestals used to draw there; next let us cross, past the street of the Greeks
where St. Augustin professed, the Marrana stream which Caesar banked in, and
turning from the shores of the Tiber, having caught a glimpse of the Aventine, let us
on that bring to a close a journey marked by so many miscellaneous recollections. If
chance had turned us to right or left, the harvest would have been just as fertile;
when you have worked through the streets of Rome, and explored them house by
house, you know too well that the task of describing everything can only end in
skimming a subject whose real extent is boundless.
VIII.
The Aventine, where three convents stand out on a deserted plateau, was once
one of the plebeian sections of Rome. It was there that 630 years before our era,
King Ancus is said to have quartered the inhabitants of four conquered or destroyed
Latin cities. Rome thus became for the conquered first a place of exile, then a colony,
and finally a country. Historians contend that in order to put this suburb out of
danger of foreign incursions, this king surrounded the Aventine with a strong wall,
and Dionysius of Halicarnassus even traces its outline. But the traditions of nearly
a fabulous epoch are almost always suspicious, especially when they are supported by
no palpable proof: Mommsen, who does not contest the primitive era of the kings,
seems only to admit the existence of those whose name has never been pronounced
by history; his scepticism is intimidating. Granting that we may assign to this
Ancus Martius or Mamercus the Mamertine prison that his contemporaries would
recognise, under what patronage are we to present this wall of the Aventine, that for
so many centuries nobody ever found out 2 .
Some years ago the Jesuits preserved at the back of this hill, between the Domi-
nicans and the plain of the Circus Maximus, a vineyard from which an antiquarian
in his saunterings saw one day two carts come out, containing stones magnificently
cut. He penetrated into the enclosure and perceived that the gardener of the fathers
was working a quarry of blocks of peperino perfectly squared; then following the
tracks already made, our archaeologist assured himself of the exhumation of a long
thick wall which traversed the sinuosities of the hill. The construction, of Titanic
solidity, was Etruscan; houses in ruins placed long ago over this buried wall, and
built in a reticular style that was in use between the reigns of Augustus and Vespasian,
proved that from the first century of the empire they no longer took any account of
this enclosure, which perhaps even then had ceased to be known; here were signs of
great antiquity. Finally the study of the texts and an examination of the ground
justified its identification with the old enclosure which King Ancus is supposed to
...I
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Nº.
AVENTINE MOUNT AND ST, SABINA, SEEN FROM PONTE ROTTO.


THE A VEVZVAWE. 3 I 7
have set upon the Aventine, for the purpose of isolating the Latin community which
he established there. e - e
On this hill with its kitchen gardens, in which are twisted fig-trees, and angular
paths revealing the track of the old streets, we should perhaps find under the vineyards
the temples of Minerva and Venus, that of Juno Regina, raised by the dictator Camillus
after the capture of Veii, and that of Diana founded by Servius. From the year
176 to the year 219 of Rome, they installed there a wooden copy of the Ephesian
Artemis, the first statue erected in a city where (according to Varro) they adored the
gods a hundred and seventy years before personifying them by images. Here, besides,
were the Thermae of Decius and those of Varus; a house that Trajan lived in before
coming to power, and the Armilustrum in which in Pliny’s day they had recognised
the tomb of Tatius.
It seems as if the winds that are let loose on the Aventine had swept all away.
Livy tells how, a hundred and eighty-two years before our era, they tore away the
gate from the temple of Luna and hurled it against the wall of Ceres. Thus the
temples must already have been numerous, and the surrounding habitations too low
to shelter the public edifices. It was not until the reign of Claudius that the Pomoerium
was extended to the seething and plebeian population crowded on this pentagon of
eighteen furlongs. In our time it is the most deserted of all the Roman hills; the
old ways have lost their raison d’être along with the buildings which used to line them.
The priory of Sta. Maria replaces the Bona Dea, a temple celebrated by Cicero's
epistles: S. Sabina rises between the temple of Juno and the remains of the fortress
of Honorius III., as the convent which replaces the house where St. Peter baptized
St. Prisca rises between Minerva and Diana.
The history of the Catholic world plays as important a part on the Aventine as
legend does. It has been said and repeated that Christianity by enfranchising women
prepared their influence over society, and thus through them impressed an entirely
different mark upon civilisation. It was upon the Aventine that this transformation
began to work itself out, under the triple form of the political club, the literary salon,
the convent. In the time when there came to Rome from Egypt the solitaries,
Athanasius, Ammonius, and Isidore, the noble Albina, then living on the hill of
Ancus, greeted them in company with Sperantia, Abutera, and Eutropia, the sister
of Constantine. In the circle of these great ladies, whose memoirs have been traced
by Athanasius and St. Jerome, they used to discuss the mysteries of the faith, they
encouraged and inspired the fathers of the Church, they decided the differences of
the oriental dioceses, but especially they listened to the stories of the mystical life
begun in the Thebaids of Nitriae. St. Macarius, Serapio, Pacomius, Antony, replaced
for the great-grand-daughters of consuls the heroic fighting-men of Livy and
Homer. . -
Shortly after, Marcella, the daughter of Albina, refusing the hand of a kinsman of
the Caesars, sold her jewels, clad herself in brown woollen, and instituted in her
palace pious gatherings for mutual instruction. St. Jerome, who has chronicled the
spiritual and tragic romance of this society, has transmitted to us the names of Asella,
of Furia descended from the great Camillus, of Fabiola descended from Fabius
Maximus, of Marcellina, and, above all, of Paula and her two daughters, Eustochium
and Blesilla, who in the Lararium consecrated to the gods of the family, saluted the
paternal statues of Paulus AEmilius and of Agamemnon. The husband of Paula went back
3.18 - A&OME.
to the Julian house, to AEneas consequently: so this descendant of Venus remained
true to the worship of his ancestors, and brought up his son in their faith. Here then
was a family half pagan, half Catholic, to use a term which was heard even before
Theodosius: the men honoured Apollo and the Cyprian goddess; the women vowed
themselves to Christ and the Virgin Mary.
These mixed marriages were commended by St. Paul; the Apostle prophesied
that saints would be born of them, so firm were his presentiments of the power of
women. In fact the daughter of Paula, in spite of Venus and the pride of caste,
succeeded in converting her husband; now her grandfather was Albinus, a priest of
Jupiter. “Who could have foreseen,’ cries St. Jerome quaintly, “that there would be
born to the pontiff Albinus, a grand-daughter who should rejoice him by lisping at
his knees the Hallelujah of Christ, and that the old man would bring up in his fold
a virgin of God!’ A curious picture, this priest of the idols of Olympus sporting
with his Christian posterity It was this grand-daughter of Albinus, the last of
three holy generations, who was one day in the convent of Bethlehem to close the
eyes of St. Jerome, the scholar, poet, traveller, the guide in every mystical and
learned pilgrimage. - - -
Political, scholarly, and Christian society received its impulse from this earliest
convent, of which you seek the traces on the Aventine between Sta. Sabina and
St. Saba, in a tolerably limited radius; at the house of Marcella they received
communications from the doctors and faithful of the West, and from the sisters and
brethren who had given themselves up in the deserts to the monastic life; to the salon
was added a cloister, whither came the highest ladies for some days or some hours
to find rest and edification in retreat. Before long, these primitive nuns, preparing
the way for the Benedictines of the future, embraced the study of the Greek and
Hebrew tongues, so as to go up to the springs of holy Scripture and purify its texts.
Marcella, and in a yet higher degree, Paula, became so powerful in exegesis, that
their decisions passed for law. In the enterprise of the revision of the Scriptures,
which was inspired by them, they were auxiliaries and fellow-workers of St. Jerome.
Need we be astonished that under the name of domestic church or small church,
this reunion speedily exercised a considerable ascendancy over the government of
Christianity ? If you follow these champions of Christ across Europe and Asia,
and work out this episode of the most romantic period of history, you will then
look on the gardens of the Aventine with a yet livelier interest, upon horizons that
were once watched by these holy women, the courageous intelligences of the new
era, the founders of the religious orders of their sex, the friends of Jerome and
Augustin, the first queens in the dynasty of women. -
It did not last long, this convent of imperishable memory. On the 24th of August,
4 Io, the hordes of Alaric invaded the cloistered palace of Marcella, who was left
alone with Principia, her daughter by adoption: they treated these noble women so
frightfully, in order to extort from them the treasures that had long since been
lavished on the poor, that Marcella, after she had been carried into the basilica of
St. Paul, a place of refuge, almost instantly expired. This was a mortal grief to
Jerome; it mingled with his anguish at the capture of Rome, which drew tears from
St. Augustin. When the very universe seemed overthrown in the loss of its belief in
the eternity of the city of the Caesars, Jerome, forsaking all labour in the depths of
Judaea, only uttered one brief plaint—‘The light of the world is gone out; the
7A/E F/A-S7 COAVWEAV7. 3 IQ
empire has been deprived of its head; the world expires in a single city, the mother
and tomb of its people. . . . . Who shall be safe if Rome has perished?'
In the midst of the calamities which filled so lofty a soul with consternation,
Jerome thought of his beloved convent on the Aventine, of that spiritual family with
whom he had passed divinest hours; memories which he revived by the water of his
tears, along paths now trodden by none, still flower again for us.
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PORCH OF SANTA SABINA.

EXHUMATION OF THE HOUSE OF LIVIA.
CHAPTER XV.
The PALATINE and its Legends.-Exhumation of the walls of Romulus.-Present aspect of the Farnese gardens.
-Annexion of the Palatine to the private domain of the French crown.—Discoveries of the Cav. Pietro
Rosa.-Houses of the kings, of the patricians, of the Caesars.-Examination of a street under the palace
of Augustus.-Cicero and the house of Clodius.-Houses of Scaurus, Catullus, Crassus.-Buildings of
Tiberius, Domitian, etc.—Discovery of the Casa of Livia; its decoration and paintings.-Sight of a street
in the time of Agrippa-Bus! ad vivum and caricature of Nero. —Divinity of Caligula; restoration of his
palaces.--Tacitus commented upon by the excavations; arrival of Otho ; last moments of Vitellius.
Popularity of Nero.—Last guests of the Palatine.-Exploration of the public palace and earlier
substructions.-Rape of the Sabines.—Organization, games, and sights of the Circus Maximus. Procla-
mation of a victory at the Roman Circus.-Perseus and his children; triumphal procession of Paulus
AEmilius.
there, according to the legend, that the twin sons of Mars and Sylvia
were suckled by a she-wolf, then reared by the shepherd Faustulus, and
it was there that after their recognition by Numitor they founded the new city under
the guidance of favourable auguries. The site determined on, Romulus proceeding
to trace the fomarium or sacred enclosure of the future capital, harnessed to the plough
a heifer and a bull without blemish, and then he raised his wall on the furrow which
the share had traced between the rising and the going down of the sun. Although,
according to all appearance, this line described an elongated trapezium with a break
towards the east, the city of Romulus owes to this enclosure its designation of Koma
guadraſa.
Among the legendary stories invented to occupy our minds, the most seductive
are those which project historic proofs into the domain of fable. To allow that
Romulus ever existed is a condescension that has gone out of fashion. Livy,
Dionysius, Plutarch, Tacitus even, raise a smile by their credulity. Does not the last


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PLAN OF THE EXCAVATIONS ON THE PALATINE.
INDICIA.
A. Pomoerium Romuli urbis:
1. **. . . Æ? qraoa Aomtaerraavz Romulus posuera? : /gw/tar a /oro
/5vario uöz aereum faurz sz'mu/acrum aspicimus . . .
ut magnam Hercu/is aram amp/ecferetur.
. //zae certas sAa/zas zrazeryeczz /aAaa'es per ima mom*as Pa/a*, wt
. ad aram Cowasz,
. mox curias zcferes,'
. fum ad
( 6 (bis). Sace//um Zarrum
7. Forumque /'omanum.''
2
.
i
(TAcir. Anyt. xii. 24.)
£3. Roma quadrata ea incipit a silva quae est in area Apollinis. (Tit. Liv.)
C. Roma quadrata et ad supercilium Scalarum Caci habet terminum ubi
tugurium fuit Faustuli; ibi Romulus mansitavit. (Solinus.)
D. Porta Mugonia a Romulo instituta.
E. Gcrmalus a gcrmanis Romulo ct Remo, quod ad ficum ruminalem ibi
Grave par Erhard
inventi, quò aqua hiberna Tiberis eos detulerat in alveolo expositis.
(VARRo, de Lang. Jaf. v. 54.)
F. Porta Romana instituta est a Romulo infimo clivo Victoriae. (Festus.)
G. Ancum in palatio ad portam Mugionis secundum viam sub sinistra, ub:
aedes larium est. (VARRo et Solixus.)
H. Caligula ponte transmisso palatium Capitoliumque conjunxit.
(Suet. CaZ.)
I. Caligula, magna parte noctis vigiliae cubandique tedio . . . nunc per
longissimas porticus vagus, invocare identidem atque exspectare
lucem consueverat. (Suet. Ca/.)
K. Caligula partem palatii ad Forum usque promovit.
L. Otho per Tiberianam domum in Velabro, inde ad miliarium aureum sub
ædem Saturni pergit. (TAcit. Amm.)
M. Vitellius, capta urbe, per aversam palatii partem Aventinum in domum
uxoris sellula defertur, dein mobilitate ingenii in palatio regreditur.
(TAcit. Hist. lib. III., lxxxv.)



THE PAZA 7/AWE. 32 I
of them, outdoing his predecessors, take it into his head in the twelfth book of the
Annals to describe complacently the outline of Roma quadrata: “Igitur a ſoro boario
(towards the west) uði aereum tauri simulacrum aspicimus, quia id genus animalium
aratro subditur (see on the plan A. 1), sulcus designandi oppidi captus, ut magnam Herculis
aram amplecteretur (A. 2): inde certis spatiis interſecti lapides perima montis Palatini
(A. 3) ad aram Consi (A. 4), mox ad Curias veteres (A. 5), tum ad sacellum Zarium
(A. 6 6.), ſorumque Romanum ” (A. 7). We know from other writers that to the east
the wall opened at the Porta Mugionis (D), established by Romulus, and that there
it made an angle in the groves of the temple of Apollo (B).
Fifteen more or less sceptical centuries have disdained these marks: our century,
which is as prompt in denial as it is ardent in research, has thrown the doctors into
a certain embarrassment, by exhuming some years ago, and at the very points
described by Tacitus, the massive wall of Roma quadrata. Almost everywhere buried
under buildings contemporary with the Caesars, this wall of enclosure has reappeared
in three characteristic places; near the Porta Mugionis, at the ancient Curiae, and
above the Forum Boarium, between the cavern of Cacus and the hut of Faustulus (C),
a site formally confirmed by Solinus. This curious construction consists of enormous
blocks of masonry placed four or six thick according to the Etruscan system ; the
nature of the materials shows that it cannot be later than some tribal chief, reduced
by the want of any territory beyond the Palatine, to use the tufa which is so porous,
fragile, and difficult to work, forming the rocky base of the hill and not found else-
where. The works of the last kings, who are as boldly charged with never having
existed as their founder, are of fine stone extracted from the surrounding quarries,
and even from the Capitol, which Romulus did not possess when he had to content
himself with the volcanic scoriae in raising his wall, which is exhumed precisely where
the annalists of the Empire, guided by older chroniclers, have described it.
As you sit there facing the Aventine, residence of Remus and the Fabii, on the
remains of the pomaerium of Romulus, you may fairly imagine that on this very spot,
for having contemptuously climbed over the growing wall, the brother of the first
king of Rome was struck down by his twin brother, crying, ‘Thus perish whosoever
shall cross this wall !” We shall not be sorry, thanks to this discovery, to gain an
honourable pretext for seeking some other traces of the primitive reigns, that for
thirty years have been reduced to myths. It was above the cavern of Cacus,
celebrated by Hercules, and not far from the ſicus ruminalis, that tradition placed the
hut of the shepherd Faustulus, covered with reeds, according to Dionysius of Halicar-
nassus, in whose lifetime they showed both the fig-tree and the hut, piously preserved.
To the north-west of the Porta Mugionis, at the very spot indicated by Livy, they
have just exhumed the peribolus of the temple dedicated to Jupiter Stator by the
founder of Rome, when the god made the fleeing Romans resume the offensive. In
the time of Pliny the equestrian statue of Cloelia rose opposite to their temple,
reconstructed by Regulus after the war of the Samnites. More to the west and near
the Via Sacra, to the right of the temple of Vesta, the ruins of Castor and Pollux
mark the spot where the Dioscuri appeared for the first time. If they went on
digging indefinitely in the tufa of this hill, which has served to give a name to all
the palaces of the world, I am sure that they would finish by the discovery of Pallan-
teum, the Arcadian colony of King Evander
Before letting our feet stray at will in so renowned a spot, which has just acquired
T T
322 A’O.]/E.
a double interest, thanks to the excavations of which we have just described the results,
let us sketch some of the present aspects of this Palatine, which is less spacious than
the garden of the Tuileries, and which has held all the grandeurs of Rome.
An embankment-wall, in the centre of which Vignola has set one of the correct
doors such as are given to pupils in art schools to draw, separates the Palatine from the
Via Sacra. At the very entrance you ascend a slope divided into green compartments;
RUINS ON THE PALATINE.
then you mount by broad steps, on the top of which is planted a Casino, well situated
as a point of view for antique Rome, and which the Farnese constructed when they
transformed the Palatine desert into a historical garden. Verdure had long enveloped
the enclosure of Romulus, too great for modern generations; they moved away from
the terrible shadows which its ruins summoned to the mind. It seems even that our
religion, the faith of slaves and the poor, fell back before the sanctuary of monarchical
unity and Roman pride; this ſºomarium is the only consecrated ground of which

CA V. ROSA ’S EXCAVATIONS. 323
Christianity did not take possession. No pope touched the Palatine before Paul III.,
who in an age that had become reconciled to the gods of Olympus, built a villa
there. But it was the destiny of the hill to remain a royal appanage; the last
heiress of the pontiff and the Farnese, Elizabeth brought the Palatine to the King of
Spain, Philip V., and through Don Carlos it entered into the possession of the kings
of Naples. Then by a singular play of fortune, the cradle of the Caesars passed from
the house of Bourbon into the hands of Napoleon III.
There is only one dweller there, the good, learned, and ingenious Pietro Rosa.
Epigraphist, geographer, consummate Latinist, expert geologist, the descendant of
Salvator Rosa had been exploring Rome and its campagna for twenty years, when
Napoleon III. chose him to direct the excavations which he proposed to undertake in
the Palatine, and installed him in the midst of the Farnese gardens, which in the
Space of eight years Rosa turned up, to disclose in their place another Pompeii. It
º REMAINS OF THE PUBLIC PALACE, AND LOGGIA OF THE FARNESE.
is there that he restores with proofs the confused map of the Palatine; there too that
he elaborates on a wall of his residence a geological map of the old Latium, the
information of which we shall soon have to utilise. His house opens to the south on
a little garden after the French manner, beyond which rises a large, irregular, and
dismantled Loggia. To the right, retreat the groves gradually stripped of their wood
and leaf by the excavations, and the mantle of verdure slowly unfolding discovers the
traces of archaeology and sometimes of sculpture, for a museum has been made of
the fragments of antique statuary exhumed in the Palatine. Let us mention among
the most remarkable a draped Venus of a fine Grecian epoch, an Apollo, a Milo of
Crotona without a head; a herculean Torso seated, of life size, worthy of rivalling
that of the Belvedere, and a bas-relief of terra-cotta, on which boys armed with slings
run naked—the only known representation of the Lupercalia. Discovered in 1869,
the two last pieces have remained at Rome, as well as several small figures in
bronze, bits of rare marble, trinkets, and a child in a colossal hand. Four other
pieces were sent to Paris and given by the Emperor to the Louvre, where three of

T T 2
324 4. - A&OME.
them are exposed : a head of Julia, the daughter of Augustus; a head of Flavia
Domitilla, the only portrait that we possessed of the mother of Titus; and a Cupid,
which though a Greek figure, is banished without any mark of its origin to the door
of the Assyrian antiquities, where nobody would think of seeking it.
As for the fourth fragment, the most precious of all, inasmuch as the experts of
Rome and Paris have not hesitated to recognise in it the original of the Fauns derived
from that of Praxiteles, the administration mislaid it for four years, even affirming in
writing that they had never received it, when I had the good fortune to find it myself
among the plaster-rubbish of a workshop, all covered with dust. Only the torso is
left of this admirable work, but the freedom of movement, the broad, soft, and full
style of an adolescent frame, reveal the work of a master who, the type being esta-
blished, can be none other than Praxiteles. .
They lately observed across the Farnese gardens the double symmetry of the
horticulture and the ruins: a gallery was set forward towards a grove; the windings
of a woody path expired under the sculptured vault of a Triclinium. Even now, if
your steps venture as far as the escarpments commanding the Velabrum, the quarters
of the Capitol and the Janiculum, with their red roofs over black walls illumined by the
sun, will dazzle you at the turning of an alley, in a gap of these blue-tinted patches of
green, which the persistent leafage of the shrubs of the Italian peninsula contrasts with
the glow of the sky. On the side looking to the Coliseum and the Coelian, all is limited
by a plantation of the Barberini and by the convent of St. Bonaventura, the bell-tower
of which rising from a long line of buildings that look like barns, is accompanied by two
palm-trees that recall the East. Nearer the imperial palaces, the separation is decisively
marked by the wall of the Visitandines, surmounted by a row of dark cypresses. How
was it that twelve years ago they allowed these good sisters to appropriate the site of
the house of Augustus, and to confiscate at once, beyond the hope of ulterior discoveries,
the rooms of the Octavian palace found less than a century ago, as well as the palaestra,
of which the exedra with its tribuna still remains 2 It is said that these ladies refused
all terms of arrangement; but this is not true, as they offered to surrender possession
in compliance with the wishes of the Emperor of the French.
II.
As we have made the acquaintance of the Cavalier Rosa, let us saunter with him
among these thickets of ruins and flowers, as we verify without trouble all that he has
cleared, for each fragment finds its identity guaranteed by a citation from some annalist
or poet of antiquity. Romulus inhabited the summit of the plateau between the peribolus
of Jupiter Propugnator and the spot where Tiberius afterwards built his palace; Numa,
the corner of the Via Sacra and the Velabrum, towards the temple of Vesta: Hic ſuit
antiqui regia Żarva Muma, said Ovid. The temple of the Penates, says Solinus, under
Heliogabalus, replaced on the Velia (eastern slope) the dwelling of Tullus Hostilius.
It is lower down than the Porta Mugionis, above the Summa via Sacra, near the altar
of the Lares, that Varro fixes the dwelling of Ancus (G.). Tarquinius Priscus installed
himself more at the back, at the Summa via Nova. It was there that the children of
Ancus had him slain by shepherds; you may mark the spot, “from a high window
PALACE OF THE CAFSA FS. 325
looking on to the Via Nova, for the king was quartered close to Jupiter Stator.”
Tanaquil addressed the Quirites and caused Servius to be proclaimed king. The site
of the temple has been restored by Rosa, as well as that of the Porta Mugionis indicated
by Solinus. * sº
This sanctuary of the primitive city devolved on the demi-gods of royalty in such
a way that the consul Valerius found the opportunity of inaugurating there the dull
dynasty of the flatterers of the populace, by having his house demolished, which gave
umbrage because it was on the Velia. When the Republic had fastened the nation
under the yoke of a rapacious aristocracy, persons of mark who were rich enough to
pay for the usurpation of authority sought a dwelling on the Palatine. There dwelt,
besides the chief dictators, the Gracchi, as well as Catullus, Flaccus, Hortensius, Sulla,
and even Catiline, in the neighbourhood of Marcus Tullius. This last built facing the
Via Sacra below the house of Scaurus, bought, as Asconius tells us, by the tribune
Clodius, against whom Cicero pleaded. “I will raise my roof higher,’ wrote the great
orator, ‘not from contempt for thee, but to veil from thee the view of the city which
thou wouldst fain have destroyed.’ Violets grow there under rose-trees, and the sub-
structions mark the compartments of a parterre.
Clodius paid 14,800,000 sesterces for the house of Scaurus, which possessed a famous
theatre, with three tiers of benches supported on columns. Those of the first, to the
number of thirty-eight, were of black Chian marble, says Lucullinus, and of single
blocks; the pillars of the upper storey were of crystal; those of the third of gilded wood.
Three thousand bronze statues inhabited the edifice, the spoils of which, afterwards taken
to Tusculum, were there burnt by some slaves—a loss estimated by Pliny at IOO,OOO,OOO
SeSterCeS.
Yet at that time the finest house of the Palatine did not belong to Æmilius Scaurus,
but was that of Catullus, Marius’s colleague in the war against the Cimbri. The portico
had for its supports four columns brought from Mount Hymettus, a rare luxury at the
end of the Republic. The palace of Licinius Crassus was scarcely less splendid, since
Domitius offered for it sixty millions of sesterces on condition that he would include
in the bargain six large trees, whose umbrageousness was afterwards admired by Pliny,
and which perished at the age of one hundred and eighty at the time of the fire of Rome
under Nero: these celebrated trees, described under the name of lotos, and which were
most likely nettle-trees, are described as thorns, by various translators who do not
know their botany. Below the roof of Cicero, more to the right, ‘to the east of the
sacred wood of Vesta,” Julius Caesar came and established himself as soon as he was in
possession of the pontificate. Before, adds Suetonius, “he had lived in a modest habita-
tion among the plebeians of the Suburra.” Marcus Antonius resided on the Palatine;
Claudius Nero, the father of Tiberius, and Octavius, father of Augustus, built on the
eastern and southern slope of Roma quadrata. It was before the house of Octavius that
a palm-tree, springing up between two stones, was carefully tended by his son. The
Caesars having come to resume on the Palatine the thread of royal tradition, Augustus
ascended higher, to avoid throwing down the altar of Jupiter Stator: his palace, rebuilt
after a fire with the aid of a public subscription—a residence to which he annexed a
temple of Apollo, containing the statue of the god, a colossus of forty-six feet—this
palace and the foundations of the temple are buried to-day under the convent of the
Visitandines. Augustus extended his constructions as far as the slope facing the Circus
Maximus; and to prolong his palaces to the east to the intermontium, he displaced a
326 A’OME.
street, the Via Nova, without suspecting the cruel mistakes to which he would expose
the archaeologists of the future. In truth, if we suppose that before him this Via Nova
passed between the Velabrum and the Palatine, an error long accredited, the indications
furnished by historians as to the situation of buildings become unintelligible. The
Cavaliere Rosa has shown that previously to Augustus the Via Nova began, nearly at
right angles from the Summa via Sacra, to ascend the Palatine, and came down again
opposite to the Aventine, to which it led. In the early ages of Rome they would
never have thought of turning by the Velabrum, which was only a marsh, while it was
natural to come straight upon the Murcian valley, where in old days the flocks of
Hercules had grazed, according to Aurelius Victor, who declares that it was pasture
REMAINS OF THE PUBLIC PALACE OF DOMITIAN.
land. This is why Ovid, mentioning the Via Nova, and making it turn the Palatine to
reach the Tiber by the Velabrum, observes that it is situated there nume, which clearly
implies that it had not always been so. This once recognised, the text becomes clear,
and scholars are no longer reduced to the necessity of accusing contemporaries of
being mistaken. It is now an assured truth, for after having deduced from observa-
tion and from texts this expropriated street, Rosa found it in the depths of the earth:
I walked behind him on the pavement, where our footsteps followed those of Virgil and
Horace, and which after nineteen centuries the sun again shines upon.
Domitian was the first to build a public palace in the dependencies of the imperial
quarters. His constructions occupy a vast space to the north-west of the house of
Augustus, on which they possibly encroached: for below the Flavian ruins you find

THE HOUSE OF Z/V/A. - 327
galleries which they consolidated by filling them up from top to bottom with masses of
mortar between planks, of which the imprint still remains. The walls were so thick, the
pillars so robust, the pozzuolana so tenacious, that before building they did not take
the trouble to pull down. Each generation settled over the quarters of predecessors.
In the early times of the Empire the hill of Romulus shakes off the patrician residences.
Tiberius, who built between the Auguratorium and the old house of Clodius, and who
surrounded his edifices to east and South with a half subterranean portico, still left at
the corner of his Cryptoporticus a private habitation that has been quite recently
exhumed, and which is at this hour the most curious and considerable discovery of the
whole Palatine.
III.
In liberating it some months ago from the earth with which it was filled up, Rosa at
once observed that it was contiguous to the buildings of Tiberius, that it was approached
by the very portico, and that as it was placed on a lower level, they must have set up
some steps in order to go down into it. These circumstances showed that it must have
belonged to the successor of Augustus and was older than the palace; for they would
not have erected it lower down, except to make the best of an inconvenient arrangement.
Other circumstances persuaded the Cavaliere Rosa that it had had for its owner
Claudius Nero, the first husband of Livia; but at the beginning of 1870, the pursuit of
the excavations brought to light a subterranean passage, round which, in the direction
of the ancient palace of Augustus, were the leaden pipes that used to bring water
to the pretended Domus Tiberiana. On these pipes we read from distance to distance
IvLIAE Avg. As the name of the owner is constantly inscribed on pipes of this kind,
this inscription, as M. Léon Renier observes, is a genuine proof of ownership, and
“informs us that the house in question belonged to the empress Livia, Julia Augusta ;
means, in fact, Livia, widow of Augustus.” When he instituted her heir to a third of
his property, Augustus prescribed that she should take his name. - 4.
“It will perhaps be objected,” continues M. Renier, “that she might have become owner
of the house as heir to her first husband. But this is inadmissible. Livia, the divorced
wife of Tib. Claudius Nero, could not have inherited from him ; particularly she could
not have inherited from the paternal house of the family, at a time when two members
of the family were still left, Tiberius and Drusus, sons of its last chief. One cannot
suppose, either, that Tiberius when he had become emperor, gave it to her. We know
what were his relations with his mother after the death of Augustus, and the nature of
these relations makes any such supposition wholly inadmissible. It is much more
probable that Livia had had the house in her share of the succession of Augustus, who,
as we know on the testimony of Velleius Paterculus, bought a number of houses on the
Palatine. Livia wished to be the first priestess of her husband after he was raised to
the rank of the gods. This explains the subterranean passage which went from her
house to that of Augustus; she probably had it constructed so as to be free to go,
without passing through the public street, to fulfil the ministrations of her function.
This passage is now interrupted at the junction with the ades publica, erected in the reign
of Domitian. But shortly before arriving at these a des, we observe the passage branch to
the right, and which was most likely made in order to turn them. There another leaden
328 A&OME.
pipe has been found, soldered to the first at the point of divergence, and containing
this inscription:—
IMPDOMITIANICAESARAVG SVBCVRA
EVTYCHIL - PROC - FEC HYMNVSCAESARNSER
Imp(eratoris) Domitiani Casar(is) Aug(usti).-Suá cura
Eutychi /(ifferti) proc(uratoris) ſec(it) Hymnus Caesaris m(ostri) ser(vus).
“At Livia's death, her house, together with all her inheritance, became the property
of Tiberius her son. It then made part of the imperial domain, along with which
it passed to the succeeding emperors. There is no ground, therefore, for any surprise
at its having belonged to Domitian. Only this inscription proves that it existed and
was still carefully preserved, when this prince had the ades publica constructed, since
they took measures at that time to prevent any interruption of the supply of water.
It existed even long after this epoch, for in a letter of the IOth of last April, M. Rosa
informs me that on a new pipe which he has just discovered under the paving of the
peristyle, a pipe which is soldered to that of Julia Augusta, and which seems to have
taken its water from the piscina to be observed in a corner of the Domus Tiberiana, the
following inscription may be read:—
L • PESCENNIVSEROS • CAESARVM.
‘This inscription ought to be read thus: Zucius Pescennius Eros (ſecit). Casarum
(that is to say belonging to the Caesars). The names of the workman who made the
pipe seem to denote a freedman of the family of Pescennius Niger, the rival of
Septimius Severus. In that case the word Caesarum would mean the latter prince and
his son Caracalla, or else Caracalla and his brother Geta. The house of Livia must
therefore have been kept up until the early years of the third century. We notice
at the point where the Cryptoporticus ends, one of the great doors of the Domus
Tiberiana. M. Rosa informs me in the letter to which I have referred that he
has discovered in front of this door a street turning towards the extremity of the
Circus Maximus, and coming out on a Clivus alternately formed of gentle slopes and
flights of steps of peperino, that is of the stone employed in the most ancient
buildings of Rome, which steps bear unmistakable marks of extremely long usage.
This Clivus seems to be nothing but a locality, the recollection of which connects
itself, in the authors, with the most ancient traditions of the eternal city; I mean the
staircase of Cacus, Scala Caci, which Solinus places in this spot and on the summit of
which was the house of Romulus.’
(L. RENIER, Revue Archéologique.)
Since the recent publication of these lines the continuation has strengthened the
presumption of Cav. Rosa. This slope of Cacus, the second fortified entrance of the
Arx Palatina, ascended to the very heart of the Roma quadrata, between two Etruscan
walls of excessive thickness, since discovered over a considerable distance, and which,
like the walls attributed to Romulus, are built of the tufa of the Palatine, the use of
which is earlier even than peperino. The road forms two elbows combined for
defence; it descended to a gate situated under the rock of Cacus, to the left of the
THE HOUSE OF Z/VIA. 329
altar of Hercules erected before the theatre of his victory, and where festivals in
honour of the god have been celebrated from time immemorial. A passage in the
AEneid indicates the remote antiquity of the gate and steps of Cacus; it is by this
that Virgil makes Evander, on leaving the Heraclean games, accompanied by AEneas,
on whom he leans as he ascends the steps, enter the Palatine city. This slope was
towards the south-west on leaving the house of Livia, which we are about to enter.
The exhumation of a Roman dwelling-house of the time of Augustus, and whose
date is assured, is a considerable fact. If we add to this that the residence of Livia
contains the finest and most ancient pictures bequeathed to us from such distant ages,
the reader will hardly reproach us for having edified him with proofs as to the origin
of the building which we have now to describe. You approach by the south side of
the Cryptoporticus of Tiberius, going down four steps, to come to a vestibule opening
on to the Atrium in which figure the altars of the Lares covered over with minium,
as well as their foundation. You then front the Tablinum, chambers of honour in
which the master of the house kept his family archives and received his guests; to
your right is situated the Triclinium. These porticoes, near which space for an ante-
chamber has been procured, form four apartments, the only ones decorated; we shall
return to them. At the back of the three compartments of the Tablinum, which
adjoin chambers belonging to the private living-place (Cubicula), is situated the
Peristylum, in the middle of which a staircase with two flights led up to the stories
where guests never entered. Of these quarters there remain thirteen chambers with-
out any ornament, faced with a brown pigment. They had outlets both on the peristyle
and on a long corridor (Fauces) which, constructed between the Tablinum and the
Triclinium, and traversing the extent of the buildings, furnishes an approach both
right and left to the apartments on the ground-floor. These comprise two bath
chambers, narrow and dark as they are described by Seneca, until Maecenas had,
according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, set up the first Caldarium that the Romans
ever saw. The walls of these baths are of opus reticularium, a system in use under
Augustus, and to make up for the absence of the Caldarium, they constructed in one
of the cabinets a sort of stove (Hypocaustum). Beyond the Balnea and opening on
a street of which they have exhumed the pavement and the causeways—a road
contrived between the house and the offices of the temple of Jupiter Victor—two
shops, let to merchants, had been thriftily contrived at the corner of Livia's casa ;
they have no communication with the interior of the house. Let us proceed to the
most interesting part of this exhumation, to the painted chambers opening on to the
Atrium. They are not very large; they have greater depth than breadth and the
height of the walls does not exceed four metres. Their decoration is distributed in
panels separated by figured columns, of which the entablatures bear cornices and rest
on stylobates also painted.
Among the decorative subjects of the Triclinium, we observe large transparent
Paterae, filled with fruit piled up pyramidally—the simple indication of the vessels
in which they presented fruits at their banquets. One of the panels contains a fanciful
landscape in which trees, terraces animated by statues, bridges thrown out into
space, rockeries, and flowing waters make up a site that would delight a Chinese :
in the foreground three ducks are coming out of an aquatic grotto, leaving long
furrows in the water. Animals run along the cornice. The bottom of the room is
enlivened by another landscape, in the midst of which a pillar supporting a Greek
U U
33O A’OME.
vessel rises out of the verdure, while to right and left winged griffins follow one
another on a wainscoting. The Tablinum and its two Alae are treated pretty nearly
in the same way, but with a more elaborate display of ingenuity. At the bottom and
on the sides of the left wing, at the entrance to which survive the fragments of a
mosaic pavement that Livia once trod, the panels are surmounted by a series of
cartouches with a clear ground, on which Genii stand out in pairs with wings of blue,
green, and rose colour, recalling some of the small figures of Raphael; they sport
too among the arabesques. These cartouches have a purple framing, and are
separated by mouldings with a gold ground with griffins running, from brown panels,
marked by a line of lotus of a bluish tint, and divided by garlands of leaves of pale
|
AE DES
1 ovus VICTORIS
r lvia
Triclinium
Ala destra
[ ]
Tablinum ATR ] UM
Ala sinistra
AREA PALATINA -
Cryptoporticus Tiberianus
3 * 5 Metrº PISCINA Do Mu S
of 2 3 * zoºſever - T is E. R. An a
PLAN OF LIVIA’s HOUSE.
green : the lower portions, red upon red, are detached from the panels by a broad
plinth of a chamois tone. The whole decoration is rich, bold, and harmonious.
In the right wing the chamois panels are enriched, by way of single ornament,
with thick garlands of flowers and fruits succeeding one another in festoons and bound
with ribands. On a band above these compartments, and under a frieze of dark
yellow, defiles a curious procession of tiny figures, such as are to be seen in the Egyptian
hypogea ; they represent scenes borrowed from the daily movement of the popular life
of the streets. A consul, escorted by lictors without arms and preceded by an
Accensus, is attending to his private business; matrons go to the neighbouring
temple; others along the Appian way visit the tombs and carry offerings to the
altars; women of the people go with their baskets to market; lawyers make their
way to the Forum, of which you see the outline in front of them; merchants come with

THE A/OUSE OF LIV/A. 33 I
their camels laden with wares; the freedmen go about their affairs, hunters are on
their way back to town, a fisherman spreads his snares. Nothing can be more lively
than these revelations of popular habits at the end of the Republic.
It is for the central compartment of the Tablinum, that art has reserved the
principal subjects. Starting from basements of brown framed with scarlet, the false
columns, whose flutings are broken by rings of foliage, support cornices equally
illusory, and of strange opulence: between the panels of a brighter red, set off by
friezes of a delicate blue and varied by yellow coffer-work, between these architectural
caprices so elegant in their strangeness, is a succession of well-preserved paintings.
The finest in point of style represents, seated at the foot of a column, and watched
by a draped Juno, Io, the daughter of
Inachus, watched by Argus and just
about to be taken from him by
Mercury. The Hermes and Argus
are naked and of superb design; the
first has his name inscribed at his feet.
The identity of Argus has been demon-
strated by two paintings at Pompeii,
nearly resembling one another and
described by M. Helbig, as well as by an
intaglio representing that personage in
the same attitude; Argus wears on his
bent knee a violet chlamys covered
by the skin of some beast. “It refers,”
says M. Perrot, “to a characteristic
point in the legend of the hero, for,
according to Apollodorus, Argus slew a
wild bull who was laying Arcadia waste,
and he threw the spoils of it over his
shoulder.” This is again a convincing
sign. The figure has been copied from
Greek cameos, and, a singular thing,
one of these cameos, was studied nine-
teen centuries after by Ingres, who º -
from this Argus on the watch drew his LIVIA's House (LEFT wing).
GEdipus. The identity is complete.
On the walls of the same chamber two cartouches represent, one the sacrifice of a
lamb, the other an incantation. In the first the people, the draperies, the attitude of the
priestess, as she pours water from an amphora, are marks of the work of a Greek
artist; the head and Roman coiffure of the matron seated and holding a fan, denote
by contrast that this figure is a portrait. A more free and less hieratic composition,
presents a lady and her attendant; the latter stands upright, while the other who is
seated holds a pyxis on her knee. Before a tripod on which flame sparkles, rises
solemn, and draped from head to foot, the sorceress, whom the mistress of the house
watches with attentive gaze. The philtre box in the hands of the latter, her stricken
attitude, her diadem, the girdle or baldric which the sorceress presents, marks
which answer to a passage of the Hippolytus of Euripides, have led Cav. Rosa

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332 A’OME.
to suppose that Phaedra is the principal figure of this charming and expressive
composition.
At the back of the apartment is a picture of Galatea on waves, in which two other
Nereids swim. Elegant and supple, the nymph turns disdainfully round, carried on
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PAINTINGS OF THE TABLINUM OF LIVIA.
STREET VIEW. SACRIFICE OF A LAMB. - 10 AND ARGUS. .
a sea-horse snorting in the waters: behind a rock rises the colossal bust of Polyphemus,
with an Eros perched upon his shoulder.
Between this painting and that which represents Io, and on the same wall, is a
subject that gives us all the representation we have of the external aspect of the

PALACES OF CALIGULA, TIBERIUS, ETC. 333
bourgeois dwellings of the seventh century of Rome. Two houses issue on the street
by small square doors of a single leaf; the upper stories, pierced with small windows,
fall back and leave projecting terraces, one of which forms a covered gallery supported
on two pillars; a cordon divides the first floor from the second. At a window and
on balconies five persons follow with their eyes down into the street a becomingly
draped lady, who, fanning herself with a ſlabellum, has just gone out, followed by a
little girl.
These paintings are of a rare delicacy; their colouring even in the tones of
minium, which often grows black, has preserved all its freshness; the ochres possess
a good deal of liveliness; and the ensemble of tints presents a sprightly variety.
Pliny (xxxv. 10) attributes to an artist named Tadio or Ludio—who must have been
the first before the time of Augustus to adorn houses with agreeable subjects—
fantastic themes, such as one would suppose to be exactly described from the house
of Livia. He defines, after Vitruvius, the manner in which the wall was prepared
and polished, as well as the varnish with which the work was covered, to bring out
the colours and assure their permanence. Both add that these processes, which were
devised by Apelles, fell into disuse in the time of Augustus. Now these walls have
been prepared just in this way, the paintings are on waxed surfaces, and the encaustic
described by Vitruvius still covers the best preserved portions. Moreover, Cav. Rosa
having made up the varnish in question after the old receipt, applied it to these rooms
in accordance with the same method, and the paintings ceasing to peel off have
recovered all their brightness. - -
Such, then, is a nearly unique monument of an early school imported from Greece,
described by authors of the first century, and of whom nothing else has been left.
If I add that these works existing in the only ancient house of which we know both
the exact date and the owner, are superior to all that Pompeii has bequeathed to
us, I shall be pardoned for having availed myself of the confidences of Cav. Rosa,
and the obliging contributions of M. Renier, in publishing the results of so marvellous
a discovery.
IV.
Let us return to the ruins of the palace of Tiberius, continued on a vaster scale
by his successor as far as the extremity of the Palatine, breaking down on to the
Via Sacra. It is on this side that you pass through guard-houses, where to pass the
time the soldiers used to draw on the walls confidences and emblems, sometimes
with their signature, and sentences that are easily deciphered. There has lately been
found here a caricature of Nero; a small narrow brow with a garland, and a chin tufted
with a growing beard; the profile is very life-like. The excavations around the modest
house of Livia have brought to light a marble bust of the same emperor, the only one
which goes back with certainty to the time when he lived.
Caligula brought under his gigantic palaces (K) the Clivus Victoriae and the
Porta Romana (F), which Romulus opened at the western corner of his wall to go
down into the Forum. In keeping his palace on the level of the summit, by means
of galleries as high as the mountain itself, the successor of Tiberius, to unite the
Palatine to the Capitol, undertook above the Velabrum that immense bridge whose
334 A’OME.
abutment has just been brought to light (H), and which was demolished by Claudius.
It was in clearing out the accumulation of this precipice erected by the hand of a man,
that Rosa, sustaining galleries and vaultings with as much art as economy, succeeded
in extricating from a mass of debris the most ancient portions of the imperial
residence; bas-reliefs, a few cartouches of stucco representing wanton scenes, corridors
terminating in small chambers, enable us to recognise the haunts, out of which,
according to Suetonius, the emperor raised a tax, and where the senators made it a
duty to degrade themselves in order to please Caesar. The coffers of the vaults
formed a decoration of a purer kind than the ornaments of Pompeii. As to the
Argiletum, Caligula prolonged his palaces, according to Suetonius, towards the
Forum as far as the temple of Castor, to which he made a vestibule, where he
exhibited himself as an object of
public adoration, under the title of
Jupiter Latinus. On the Palatine
itself, an altar to his personal divinity
was served by Flamens, and before
his golden statue, which was every
day decked in garments like those
which he wore himself on that day,
his priests immolated flamingoes,
peacocks, black geese, and pheasants.
Round the long galleries of Tiberius,
which Cav. Rosa has restored to
us (I), and whose ruins our eyes
measure in amazement, Caligula
during his long fits of sleeplessness
used to roam alone, in close com-
panionship with the immortals. He
was heard scolding Jupiter and
threatening to send him back to
Greece, and on the nights when the
star of Diana shone in a clear sky, he
invited the goddess to descend and
VAULTED PASSAGE BETWEEN THE PALACE OF TIBERIUS AND THE give herself to him.
PUBLIC PALACE. After the great fire of the year 64,
described by Tacitus, Nero rebuilt on
plans of such immensity, that they invaded the valley and assailed even the Esquiline
slope as far as the ancient palace of Maecenas. Otho installed himself in a section
of the palaces of Tiberius, that Messalina and Claudius had once inhabited. Vespasian,
Titus, Domitian, and their successors, must have enlarged their dwellings on the
side of the Auguratorium, and continued the porticoes, which had then become
subterranean, from which another gallery branches out, discovered not many months
ago (O). Covered with a low vault and lighted from above, it allowed the emperors
to proceed, without being seen, from their private dwelling to the throne-room, by
penetrating at the back of the Tribuna of the basilica, into the palace appropriated
by Domitian for audiences and receptions. The discovery of this passage justifies
the account given by Tacitus of the circumstances attending the usurpation of Otho,

PALACES OF TIBER/US, ETC. 335
consummated by the assassination of Galba. This emperor was sacrificing on the
Palatine in the temple of Apollo, and Otho was present, when the freedman
Onomastus came to inform him that he was awaited by his architect. It was the
signal agreed upon to announce the meeting of the conspirators in the Forum. So
he excused himself, explaining that he wished to examine a house which he was
thinking of buying, and “leaning on his freedman, he returned by the palace of 77/erius
RUINS OF THE PALACES OF TIBERIUS.
to the Velabrum (L) and from thence to the golden milliarium by the temple of
Saturn. There three-and-twenty men saluted him as Imperator, and as he was
alarmed at their scanty number, they raised him into a litter and carried him hastily
away with swords drawn.' Suetonius says that after embracing Galba he hurried
off 'Aostica parſe /a/ati.” It was necessary for him to arrive among his partisans
without being seen by the people, or stopped on the way by the guards who surrounded
the palace, which he could hardly have avoided, if he had gone down by a public way

336 A&OME.
from the temple of Apollo to the Via Sacra, so as from that point to gain the
northern extremity of the Velabrum. Since the exhumation of the gallery connecting
the two palaces, the text has no obscurity; Otho went at the back of the Lararium
into the public palace, which he passed through; then he threaded the passage and
turned the palace of Tiberius. Next he gained the Clivus Victoriae and came out by
the Porta Romana between the Velabrum and the Forum, which he reached by
passing behind the temple of Castor, in such a way as to make his appearance all
at Once.
The discoveries of Rosa are a commentary on the Histories, in what relates to
the dramatic peripeteia of the reign of Vitellius, and their commentary here is of a
still more striking lucidity. Tacitus says that Rome being occupied by the generals
of Vespasian, the vanquished emperor escaping by the rear of the palace, had himself
carried in a litter on to the Aventine to the house of his wife, accompanied by his
cook; then, with the capriciousness of people who have lost presence of mind, he
returned to the deserted palace. The postern of the palace which opened facing the
Aventine, must have come out on the Scalae Caci. It was there that Vitellius,
according to the account of Suetonius, barricaded himself in cellulam ſanitoris,
after piling up a bed and a mattress before the door, and fastened at the threshold
the porter's dog, his last defender. It was in this place of refuge that the soldiers
found him, and from here that they dragged him off to the Gemoniae.
Commodus installed himself in the middle of this pile of palaces. Substructions
extending to the east as well as the south, prove that up to the fourth century the
Caesars continued to rebuild; in the crypts we recognise on some walls of the repub-
lican era, works of consolidation executed on two occasions, in order to sustain new
buildings; it is a blunder, therefore, for people to attribute to Nero ruins that were
contemporary with Decius, Aurelian, Diocletian. For the rest, just as all the vestiges
of the Roman ways take the name of Appius, all the old towers, even if they belong
to the middle age, are under the patronage of Nero. g
If, as you come down from the southern slope, you continue to keep along towards
the left by a series of ruined edifices, you come to some chambers which the Russians
have cleared out. They were prepared under Septimius for the instruction of the young
patricians; it was a sort of School for pages. Inscriptions in cursive Latin and Greek,
caricatures, quotations, signatures drawn with the point of the stilus or knife, confirm
the assertions of antiquaries. One of these pieces of facetiousness, which has been
placed in the Roman College, proves in a bizarre way, the invasion by Christianity
in the second century of the very palace of the Caesars. Some small youth, by way
of teasing one of his comrades, sketches in the plaster a crucified ass, and writes
beneath in Greek, “Cleomenes, behold thy god l’
Up to the time of Constantine the emperors mostly resided on the royal hill.
Genseric encamped there in 455, and he carried away from it the spoils of the Temple
of Jerusalem. After him they only kept up in these palaces a few nooks and corners,
to give shelter at long intervals to the diminished heads of the empire. Heraclius
sojourned there in the seventh century; Charles the Great took possession of it when
he was proclaimed Emperor of the West. He closed the series of the crowned guests
of the Palatine, a series that in the stories of the chroniclers opens with Romulus, and
goes back in the songs of the poets as far as King Evander.
-
RESTORATION OF THE CLIW US VICTORIAE.


º |
AU/9/.../C PA/AC/2. 337
V.
In the public palace the lower courses of most of the rooms have been brought into
daylight: the stumps of the columns still mark the galleries, the levelled soil is the
roughcast in which the mosaics were laid, of which a few scattered bits are still left.
Thanks to these works, the internal arrangement is clearly marked: after the Portico,
the Tablinum, a vast chamber, with an apse at the back of it for the throne. Statues
formerly adorned this place of reception, situated between the basilica dedicated to
Jupiter and the chapel of the Lares. At the lower end of the Regia two issues came
out on a Peristylum, a spacious square court surrounded with porticoes, on the sides
of which was the approach to some small apartments. Next they entered the Triclinium
(707 is canaſio), with nymphea whose masonry, for that on the right, still subsists. The
|| ||
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tº
REMAINS OF THE LIBRARY OF THE PUBLIC PALACE.
seats used to describe a very elongated oval, to face the benches with which the
walls of an oblong chamber were furnished ; above the seats there fell a sheet of water
collected in narrow basins, and surmounted by rockwork and flowers. At the Tribune
of the Triclinium, which was surrounded by columns projecting from broad pilasters,
a pavement of mosaic marks the spot where these masters of the world used to feast.
Beyond, a second portico covering foundations of the date of the Republic, and further
on the Library, reconstructed at the very place where Augustus established two, one
for Greek books, the other for Latin. It is contiguous to the Academia, a room for
reading and dissertation upon poets and philosophy; it was separated from the Libreria,
so that the noise might not disturb the readers; and it was brought next to it so as
to have the documents close at hand.
I cannot help remarking on this subject, that relying too much on partisan historians,
modern generations are excessively rigorous towards these unlucky emperors, justly
odious to the Christians of the time as they were to the republican aristocracy, and whose

X X.
338 - A&OME.
history was mainly written with a view to pleasing his successor, and very often his
assassin. Had they really fallen into the abject brutishness, the swinish degradation,
that is attributed to most of them 2 These libraries, so near to the banqueting
chambers, and which every emperor from Augustus downwards made richer; close by,
this academy with its marble tiers of seats for listening to poets and orators and
satisfying intellectual enthusiasm—surely here are signs of pleasures of a certain
elevation. In our time the need of an Academia is no longer felt in palaces.
Beyond this hall for conversation, the ground falls away, and at the bottom of a
ravine of buildings in fragments, your eyes wander over the narrow valley of the
Circus Maximus. Close by at your right is the peribolus, with three steps, of the
temple of Jupiter Victor, erected by Q. Fabius Maximus; the Caesars respected it.
On the platform are still to be seen some pillars of this Etruscan building, which was
found by the Cav. Rosa on the ides of April, the anniversary of the day on which
Ovid informs us that it was dedicated. From the Triclinium, where you see yourself
surrounded on every hand by ruins, continued towards the north by the ancient edifices,
and next by the modern quarters of Rome, the perspective is such as could only be
furnished by a capital six-and-twenty times secular. Yet the fascination of a mystery,
of which you have a presentiment, will carry you away from the vision: at the extremity
of the Triclinium a hole has allowed the arrangement of some steps, which, penetrating
through two series of crypts, introduce you into an underground Tablinum. Windows
and doors have been walled up in these now subterranean chambers, one of which
has preserved an archivolt as well as an arch, decorated with paintings finely touched
on clear grounds; a number of figures of divinities, a Sacrifice to the Lares, and in
the neighbouring room two personages in fresco, of a particularly fine style. Had
this palace several stories, and did it touch the house of the son of Octavianus 2 What
is certain is that through the ruins of this profound cavern you discern other crypts
profounder still.
VI.
Viewed from the Murcian valley, where the Circus Maximus was, the southern
slope of the Palatine is as a tapestry of ruins. One day as we were returning by these
from an expedition round the Porta Capena, a young officer suddenly exclaimed, “Do
they know the scene of the rape of the Sabines P’ I made haste to explain to him that
this event is a fable, that the kings are symbols, the most ancient consuls myths, and
I should have gone on scepticizing much longer, if the Abbé had not met me with
Ancus's enclosure in the Aventine, the prison of the Tullianum, and the Tarquinian
cloaca, real works, and of stone rather too heavy to be handled by chimerical abstractions.
“If we are to believe the historians,’ continued the Abbé, “it must have been on the
very spot where we now are, that the Romans carried off the Sabine women; Romulus
having chosen this valley, which extends between the Aventine and the Palatine, there
to celebrate games in honour of a god Consus, that is, Neptunus Equestris. This
space was henceforth consecrated to their festivals. Tarquin there set up the first
circus, which growing larger from age to age, has remained the largest of all, the
Circus Maximus. In the time of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, it held nearly one
hundred and fifty thousand spectators; Vespasian having altered it, one hundred
C/RCUS MAXIMU.S. 339
thousand persons more could find quarters in it, according to Pliny. After Constantine
this figure was augmented by one hundred and thirty thousand more under Aurelius
Victor; others carry it as far as four hundred thousand. It was at the side of the
Circus Maximus that, 493 years before Christ, Spurius Cassius erected the finest temple
the republican era had as yet produced, though far less sumptuous than that of the
kings. So the consul, accused of aspiring to the throne, was hurled from the Tarpeian
rock.’
In ordinary language we have come to confound circuses with amphitheatres.
Among the Romans the circus was not a round monument, but a very elongated
enclosure (more than a kilomètre), making a course for chariots, men, and horses
§§sº
fºs
CEL tia riº
RUINS OF THE PALATINE, TOWARDS THE CIRCUS MAXIMUS.
between the terraces covered with seats, and nearly parallel to one another. The
circus is wider at the entrance than at the other end, which allows the cars to be
arranged at starting in the shape of a fan, so as to equalise the conditions of distance
between them. To mark what we should now call the course, a road divides the circus
in two throughout its length, only leaving at the extremity room for the course or
arena, which turns the spur of it. This kind of causeway, called the Spina, was drawn
rather obliquely, in such a way as to leave more breadth at the starting-post where
the cars were not yet in a file, than at the goal, where they would only go out one
by one. The principal ornament of the circus was this Spina, which was less than
two metres high, and in breadth only from eight to nine, and on which from all sides
the eyes of the onlookers were directed, because it divided the arena. So on this


X X 2
34O A’OME.
long causeway art had collected all the charms at its disposal; there were ranged round
the narrow channel filled for irrigation, the master-pieces of Greek statuary and the
curiosities of the East. It was there that they found the obelisks that decorate the
Piazza del Popolo and that of St. John Lateran. Thirteen arches on a segment of a
circle formed the Carceres, from which the cars, to the number of twelve, shot forth;
the arch in the middle only introduced the festal procession, ſom/a circensis. At each
end of the Carceres rose towers, on which they stationed fifes, drums, and trumpets,
to animate the horses by their fanfares. Under a small portico the charioteers prepared
themselves, divided by their colours into four /actions, Albata, Russata, Prasina, Veneta
(white, red, green, and azure). Above the Carceres, and between the towers, on the
terrace of the Oppidum, gathered the privileged amateurs, betting men, and owners.
At a given signal the barriers were lowered, and the cars came forth, four in a row,
one of each colour. They filed before the Podium, which supported the tiers separated
by their Praecinctiones: a broad fringe crowded with people. The competing rivals
-
OLD TOWER OF THE PALATINE, FACING THE CIRCUS MAXIMUS.
began by passing in front of the first Pulvinar, a projecting box appropriated to the
aediles, censors, and praetors, in a word to the civic authorities. It was under the censors
Flaccus and Posthumius Albinus, one hundred and seventy-three years before our era,
that boxes were for the first time placed at the disposal of these magistrates. As for
the senators, up to the time of Scipio Africanus, they remained mixed up with the
crowd; for separating them from the plebs at the scenic representations of the Megalesia,
Scipio raised a great clamour. The senatorial box and its neighbour, which divided
the right side into two equal portions, almost faced another and loftier Pulvinar, where,
as the word shows, the seats were covered with cushions: this, communicating with
the Regiae of the Palatine, was reserved for the court and the emperor. Four doors
gave access to the arena, two at the side of the towers of the Oppidum, a third in
front of the first goal, the fourth at the extremity of the circus. These goals were
conical, and had on the top an egg, in honour of the Dioscuri, whom Leda hatched
like swans. On the pedestals were bas-reliefs representing the games of the circus.
Seven movable eggs of gilded wood were arranged conspicuously in sight on a small

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C/A&C US MAX/M/U.S. 34 I
temple at the back of the Spina; they served to mark the progress of the running;
one was withdrawn at each circuit, and to complete the race seven were needed.
Finally, at the points of entry and egress, that is near the Carceres, a wall pierced
with a hole was crossed by a beam, whence the Linea began, a tight cord which marked
the moment of starting and that of coming in. -
The circuses were not used merely for races of chariots and horses; wrestling, boxing,
foot races, the chase after ferocious animals, varied the spectacles. It was in this
theatre that Androcles, when exposed to the beasts, was caressed by a lion of his
acquaintance; they had met in the deserts of Africa, and Androcles had relieved the
lion of a thorn in its foot. Everybody in his childhood has been charmed with this
anecdote, which Aulus Gellius has contributed to the history of famous animals, from
the narrative of Apio, a grammarian of the first century, who was a witness of the
incident. The circuses also served for curious exhibitions; it was here that Æmilius
Scaurus, to inaugurate his aedileship, showed to the Quirites a hippopotamus and five
crocodiles. Julius Caesar exposed there the first giraffe they ever saw ; Pompeius had
a procession of four hundred and ten panthers, and Augustus four hundred and twenty.
Caligula displayed one hundred and twenty-four pounds in weight in silver; Claudius
the crown of the ancient kings of Hither Spain, weighing seven thousand pounds, and
that of Gallia Barbeta, which weighed nine hundred.
We seated ourselves on stones, facing the Palatine all bristling with ancient con-
structions entangled in brambles and masses of bindweed. The base of the hill along
the broad and empty Via de' Cerchi is marked by a line of houses often broken ;
habitations devoted to suburban traffic. But the façades are only appendages;
these barns, stables, workshops, are contrived in the boxes and Fornici of the Circus
Maximus. At the back of us, among great wan reeds, bordering a watercourse, for
which the deified Julius made the channel, some arches served to measure the breadth
of the circus—about seven hundred and fifty-five feet. These ruins, which disappear
slowly under ground, are low and almost concealed ; the street is white and dusty as
the roads of Languedoc. - - - >
VII.
We returned by the Forum, and I went to continue my old reveries among the
Dominicans of Sta. Maria sopra Minerva. You are most auspiciously quartered in
their library for a commentary on Livy, and this is the companion to be followed to
the Circus Maximus to assist at the chariot races, at the Games of Troy, or those
decursiones or parades, which were the delight of a warlike nation, until indolence and
cruelty had substituted slaves and wild beasts for the gymnastic exercises of a noble
youth. One loves to picture these diversions of the republican era, when the flower
of the Roman nobles entertained the people with warlike exhibitions. One day while
AEmilius Paulus was carrying on war against Perseus, a scene happened here which
recalls the heroic times of Athens. -
The struggle was prolonged; on the issue of the war hung the definitive possession
or the loss of Greece. So Rome was in a state of anxious expectation, and the public
solicitude threw a sombre shadow over the accustomed celebration of the great games
of the Circus, fixed for the 15th of the Kalends of October. Still, as the air was mild
342 FOME.
and the sun gentle, an enormous crowd thronged the seats of the theatre; even outside
the circus, along the Aventine slopes, above the shambles and the statue of Vertumna,
adjoining the old house of Scipio Africanus, recently taken to make room for the
Sempronian basilica; in the opposite direction as far as the summit of the Palatine,
where the buildings seemed a continuation of the alveoli of the Circus, a countless
crowd looked gloomily down into the arena. Let us now allow Livy to speak:—“As
the consul Licinius was mounting his chariot to give the signal for the race, a messenger,
professing to have come from Macedonia, held out despatches to him; they were
wreathed in laurel. The chariots started, then the consul mounts again into his car,
and as he drives along the circus in front of the seats where the public were, he displays
to all the people the tablets enveloped with laurel. At such a sight, the crowd plunge
into the middle of the arena, following the consul; the senators are called, the missive
is read to them, and the consul announces to the people that his colleague AEmilius
has given battle, that the army of the Greeks is annihilated, King Perseus in flight,
and all the cities of Macedonia in the power of the Roman people. At these words
an immense shout is raised ; the games are abandoned, and men run off to their homes
to tell the glorious news to their wives and their old men.” The next day came to
Rome three delegates from AEmilius, for the purpose of formally announcing the great
victory. Hurried along by the popular torrent, and followed by an innumerable throng,
they went as far as the Forum, and made their way into the Tribunal, where the Senate
could scarcely keep them, such was the eagerness of the people assembled under the
porticoes to hear them. By order of the consul, the temples were all opened, and the
population hastened to offer thanks to the gods. Decreed by unanimous vote, the
triumph of L. AEmilius Paulus lasted three days; he triumphed over Perseus and
Macedonia and over envy itself, and the magnificence of the procession outdid all that
had ever been known. We can almost recall this procession as, from the Porta Capena
to the Clivus Capitolinus, we again perform this pilgrimage with Livy and Plutarch for
our guides, beset by a throng of shadows that they restore to life before you. The first
day is hardly enough to see the display, upon two hundred and fifty cars, of the statues
and pictures that have been taken, the remains of the splendours of Philip and Alexander
the Great. Many a halt was necessary, for the people learnt how to admire: it was
a fine art exhibition, and a horticultural exhibition also, for from the first of the great
expeditions to the East, they used to carry the rare trees of Arabia and India along
in boxes.
The next day, on a still greater number of cars, were carried the arms of the
Macedonians, newly burnished and resplendent. Then came, four and four, burdened
with seven hundred and fifty vessels filled with coined money, three thousand men,
followed by other soldiers supporting on their shoulders, or holding in their hands, goblets
of chased silver, bowls covered with bas-reliefs, enormous cornucopias decorated with
embossings of admirable workmanship. Thus wealth to the amount of one hundred
and thirty million sesterces passed along—so considerable an acquisition for the
Treasury, that the people were for a long while free from taxation in consequence.
At the dawn of the third day, the march opened with the sound of trumpets, which
instead of blowing the blasts usual on holidays, gave out the music of war-songs. Then
was seen advancing a splendid offering, a hundred and twenty fatted oxen with gilded
horns and fillets, led by heifers girt with bright scarves, and escorted by children
bearing golden paterae. Then after the canephorae laden with precious metals, they
A TRIUM/PHA/L PROCESSION. 343
admired the golden cup enriched with precious stones, which L. AEmilius intended
to offer after the sacrifice, and the golden paterae which had adorned the banquets of
the Greek kings, as well as the gold and silver from the board of Perseus. At the
approach of the children of Perseus, a daughter and two youths, who walked amid
their tutors with hands uplifted in supplication, the old men could not restrain their
tears.
Perseus himself, their redoubtable foe, wearing mourning garments, walked by the
side of the queen as one stupefied, from whom calamity has taken away all feeling.
His courtiers, with faces bathed in tears and their eyes fixed on him, forgot their
woes in his. Immediately behind the victorious procession recommenced;—forty
STAIRCASE IN THE PALACE OF CALIGULA.
messengers, bearing as many crowns of gold offered to AEmilius Paulus by the cities
of Greece and Asia.
Finally, on a lofty triumphal car, whose bright gilding sparkled through the
laurels, followed by men of eminence, escorted by squadrons of cavalry and cohorts,
who with branches in their hands sang in hoarse and bantering tones the customary
parodies, appeared in his purple mantle, with the threefold majesty of age, rank, and
an insurmountable sadness, the victorious consul, AEmilius Paulus. As, having passed
the height of the Esquiline and turned the corner of the hill of Romulus, he proceeded
into that portion of the Via Sacra which traverses a narrow valley between the foot
of the Viminal, where the tribes of the quarter of the Suburra had stationed them-
selves, and the Palatine, of which the habitations displayed up to the roofs a second

344 A&OME.
population above that which crowded the scaffoldings, a spontaneous impulse bowed
all the immense host before the consul. All Rome knew that of the two children
who were the heirs of his name, and who ought to have figured after him in the toga
praetexta, the youngest had died five days before the triumph, and the elder had only
a few hours to live. So he passed along, insensible to his glory; he preserved the
same stoical dignity when, giving to the people a report of the events of the great
war which had dragged on for four years, and which he brought to an end in a
fortnight, he concluded with this peroration :- My fortune was too good; I mis-
trusted it; I feared, for the return of our armies and the treasures that I was bringing
back, all the perils of the sea. But after all was brought without harm into Italy,
having no longer anything to wish, and yet still threatened with the terrors of Fortune,
I prayed the gods that their rigour might rather strike my house than the republic.
This is why I hope that the commonwealth will be acquitted of her debt to fate,
thanks to my misfortunes, and because my triumph, decisive of our destinies, took
place between the funeral rites of my two sons. Perseus and I offer two examples of
the lot of mortal men: he who in fetters sees his children led along captive, but yet
who possesses them still ; and I, who mounted aloft in the triumphal car, fresh from the
funeral of one son, only came down from the Capitol to find the other expiring. Of
so noble a line there will not one be left to bear the name of L. AEmilius Paulus; of
the house of AEmilius, except an old man, there survives nothing !’
So he triumphed, the victorious consul, and the world saw him without envy. The
men on his way meant by their shouts to sustain his high courage; the mothers
stretched out their arms to him, and flowers were scattered before him. In the Forum,
the enthusiasm became a delirium. AEmilius Paulus remained impassive. Leaving
at his back the temple of Concord, and turning the corner of the portico of Saturn,
he came to an end of the ascent of the triumphal way; he entered a silent temple,
into the presence of pontiffs deaf to such woes, to offer thanks to Jupiter, the Mightiest
and Most Excellent.
ARICCIA AND ITS WIADUCT.
CHAPTER XVI.
Excursion to the Alban Hills.-Aspect of Albano.—Road to Castel-Gandolfo (Gal/eria).-A village Iliad.—
The lake of Alba and its geology.-Map of Latium by the Cavaliere Rosa,—Goethe on the site of Rome.—
Works of Pius IX. at Genzano and Ariccia.-President Sauzet and the woods of Albano.—Sixtus V. and
the brigands.-Rocca di Papa.-The emissarium of Camillus.-Legend of Domenichino and the Com-
munion of St. Jerome.—Domitian at the chase.—Site of Alba Longa.-Halt at the Ferentine spring.—
Marino and the Colonna.-Legend of the Madonna of St. Barnabas.-Frescoes of Zampieri at the convent
of Grotta Ferrata.-Ascent of the Via Tusculana.-Origin and remains of Tusculum.—Descent into
Frascati-Visit to the Aldobrandini Borghese villa.-Physiognomy of the town, and view from the terrace.
I.
FTER some months of residence at Rome, after incessant occupation amid
ruins, basilicas, galleries, libraries, one is struck with a desire to be among
fields and woods. This is what happened to me one fine morning in
February, when I had gone at daybreak to take the air in the gardens of
the Pincian. The sky was pure and the sun smiling; the flowers that with us belong
to April, diffused persuasive odours: I felt myself touched with the ma/ des montagnes.
The attack was so irresistible that I returned instantly to arouse my companion, ready
for any vagabond fancy, and I carried her off to the ſºrro-via of Naples, which you have
to leave at Albano to ascend to the forests and lakes of the Alban hills, one of the
rural paradises of the Pontifical States.
In the artificial rusticity of the first miles, you do not discover the true Latin
Y Y


346 A&O.M.E.
campagna as nature made it; you understand that the ground was once covered
with buildings, and it still preserves numerous traces of them. I was surprised to
see how far the assertions of ancient authors were justified by evidence of our own
time. “All the regions surrounding the city are inhabited,’ writes Dionysius of Hali-
carnassus; “if anybody supposes that he can measure the size of Rome, he will find
his mistake, being unable to recognise by any certain sign where the city ends and
where it begins. The suburbs are so closely joined to it, as to convey the idea to
one traversing them of a city prolonged indefinitely.” “It descends,’ says in his turn
Aristides of Smyrna, who travelled in the time of the Antonines, ‘as far as the sea,
the common market and warehouse of all the productions of the earth. So vast is this
Rome, that at whatever point you halt, there is nothing to prevent you from supposing
yourself in the very middle of the city.’ Confirming these statements by proof of
figures, Cassiodorus informs us that in the middle of the fourth century the population
of this queen of cities reached 5, 184,072 inhabitants. Under the Emperor Claudius
the census, of which the figures are transmitted by Tacitus, gave 6,944,OOO citizens.”
At the end of the sojourn of the popes at Avignon, there only remained in Rome
17,000 souls; to-day they do not count 18O,OOO.
In traversing these solitudes, better than in the city itself, where the diversity of
objects absorbs the mind, I felt the impressions which Montaigne has described with
such warmth and point. “I could not see the tomb of this city so great and powerful
without admiration and reverence. I was acquainted with the affairs of Rome long
before I was acquainted with those of my own house; I knew the Capitol and its plan
before I knew the Louvre, and the Tiber before the Seine. And I am so enchanted
by it, that the state of this old Rome, free, just, and flourishing, stirs interest and
warms enthusiasm in me. Why could I never see these ruins deep as the antipodes,
without finding myself fascinated 2 It is the only common and universal city. . . . .
it is the mother city of all Christian nations; every one there is at home. Its very
ruin is glorious and exalting; it still retains in the tomb the marks and the image
of empire.”
As soon as you begin the ascent of the Alban hills the spectacle changes; from the
iron way which we went gliding along, turning the foot of the chain, we had glimpses
of primitive nature. The station of Albano is a considerable distance from the town,
and to reach it you reckon on an omnibus, which will not take the trouble of a journey
when the profits are doubtful; so we had to go up the high road on foot for a long
hour. It was too late to describe as déjeuner the meal for which we felt cravings, when
having passed up the chief street of Albano, which is spacious, irregular, and pierced
with sombre openings in mysterious edifices, we entered the Hôtel de Russie, a sort
of strong castle, of which the façade at the back is escarped on the slope of the hill;
a Locanda of the old style, where in the resounding upper stories you may forget
yourself all day long, in contemplating the green undulations of Latium reaching down
to the Tyrrhene sea. We felt ourselves all at once far removed from ordinary places
of abode. The town lay asleep in that sadness of the dead season, of which the
watering places of the Rhine in winter would give a just idea. To this is joined
the absence of anything like protection: in the streets they had examined us as curious
prey, without the least apparent good-will. When we went out, guides lay in wait for
us at the door, and it was not easy to get rid of them.
* The better opinion is that the population of Rome was between 700,000 and 8oo,ooo.—TRANS.
THE GAZZ ERYA OF CASTEZ GAAWDOZA'O.—A V/ZZA GE /Z/AD. 347
Some charming water-colours we had seen a few evenings before, made us impatient
to go to Castel Gandolfo by an old embanked road, carried in some way over the
projecting roots of an avenue of trees, eight times secular; their umbrageousness,
through which you discover all the lower country between the branches, has justly
procured for this high avenue the name of Galleria. These giant trees that the sea
wind has tossed and overthrown without destroying, still resist, all distorted as they
are in the most violent shapes; dear to the people, they are propped by great wooden
bulks, and pillars of brickwork; a cavernous trunk, of which only the bark remains,
will be filled up by a tower of rubbish. And under the dark shadow of the oaks,
lindens, planes, sycamores, cork trees, the slopes are carpetted with moss mingled with
ivy, with laurels under which cyclamens and periwinkles glow. Through the medallions
made by the lower branches of the trees, the warm air of the plain mounts up to the
freshness of this air.
After undergoing the pleasantries of Some comely damsels who, in a court sur-
rounded with green slopes, were chattering and posing round a fountain, we approached,
not without apprehension, for evening had brought the inhabitants about their doors,
the hilly street of Castel Gandolfo, which, lying between two precipices, has by way
of balustrade on either side the double row of its ancient houses. In their construction
you distinguish a traditional style truly rustic and local, grafted on inveterate habit:
why in these Latin hamlets did I think of the Etruscans ? This is what I could not
explain. For the rest, in the strange manifestation of public curiosity, you divine the
primitive tribe with its inflammable passions. All this forms a bizarre ensemble that
you seize with interest, and perhaps with some disquiet also ; the further we advanced,
the more did the latter sentiment master the other.
Our nationality which is so often embarrassing, was more unpopular than ever. At
this moment the French held under bolt and bar in the prison of Albano some fifteen
of the great chiefs of strife, who had stirred up the people, fermented a league with
Marino, with Ariccia, with the mountaineers of Rocca di Papa, and organized a plan of
attack for invading Castel Gandolfo with about seven hundred allies, and burning it
to the ground. The prisoners, before whose place of detention we passed the next
day, launched prayers to us through the gratings of the ground floor, and from each
of their windows issued at the end of a long rod a leathern purse, by the aid of which
these fettered warriors, appealing to the liberality of the passers by, fished for pence.
Such is the custom. As soon as they are oppressed, they beg. But this detail does
not at all obscure the heroic virtues, which in such circumstances had been excited by a
legitimate grievance. Castel Gandolfo is regarded as a privileged place, because the
popes have their summer villa there. Exalted by such lofty patronage, these contadini
have become too proud : envy accuses them of believing that they are allowed to
do anything. However that may be, two proprietors of Albano being out sporting
on the territory of the people of Castel Gandolfo, the latter pursued them with guns,
wounded one of the Albans, and killed the other. The body was brought home on
a litter; it was covered with laurel and myrtle; a crowd collected and vowed vengeance;
the religious orders, echoing the popular sentiment, honoured the victim with Solemn
obsequies; then they marched in disorder upon Castel Gondolfo, which defended itself
and added another victim to the first. Then was concluded the Alban league, which
the French soldiers, less reverent than the gods of Olympus, hindered from accom-
plishing its destiny. A citizen of Gandolfo, to whom we spoke, Sang to us in pompous
Y Y 2
348 FOME.
strains this miscarried Iliad, insisting on the grievances of the country against France,
and extolling the mildness of the good folk who had allowed us to brave them even
at their own doors without cutting our throats. So much clemency was worth at least
a baioccho, and this was the rhapsodist’s peroration. -
At the top of this agitated village rise nearly sheer from the lake of Albano the
dome and terraces of the pontifical villa. As near the church you wander on the heights
above the lake of Albano, you are struck with the contrast presented between the
symmetrical regularity of its circumference and the wildness of the banks. This piece
of oval water, in a frame as of an amphitheatre, seems imitated from a drinking cup half
filled; the lake of Albano occupies the bottom of a crater.
Over this gulf, whence once rushed out streams of fire, the stars now mirrored
themselves in the water, and the liquid stratum collected over the ancient furnace is
not less than four hundred feet. The edge of the bowl is in some places formed
by a succession of tiers, which helps still more to give the idea of a watery coliseum,
which should be three leagues in circumference and from six to seven hundred feet
high. The return to Albano by the same way towards nightfall, when the twisted trees
of the Galleria put on the distorted attitudes of overthrown colossi, presents on the
opposite bank, where the Sun went down towards the sea, sights perhaps still more
striking. Half dissolved in a stormy sky, the sun was eclipsed in the centre of a
Gloria, darting in every direction long bars of red, as far as the water, where they
became level and melted into fluid. - - - - -
A good fire awaited us in our hotel-fort, of which the upper story had been left
at our disposal. We traversed its deserted garrets, along with the wind and the mice,
finding all ready and seeing no one; an attentive mute ultimately served us a rural
supper, moistened with a red wine of Albano, which is the beaujolais of these lands, and
distinguished by a fennel salad. Fennel is a plant that loves ruins, which it clothes with
waving tresses: what they call the tomb of the Curiatii, and which others give without
better reason to Pompeius, is entirely clothed with it. The bright green of the fennel
also brings its complementary tints to the reddish ruins of the gardens of the Villa
Doria, disposed among the ruins of a country house that once belonged to Domitian.
Mingled with patches of wall in reticulated courses, these grounds displayed under our
windows trees of biblical amplitude, at the back of which you see the slope of Albano
gradually breaking away, and the boundless plain stretching far into the azure. But to
gather the finocchio in abundance, you must go and share it with the goats in the
grounds of the reformed monks of San Paolo; orchards and coppices spreading out
over the tiers of an ancient amphitheatre, which has been changed into a basket of fruit.
Outside in the lodges they have set up sheep-folds; the centre is a tiny garden, and this
little handle of verdure has no outlet save by a breach from which you discover, between
a grove perched on ruins and a piece of wall contemporary with Sulla, Latium and
the sea stretching beyond sight. Behold two little pictures suggested by a salad |
II.
As at Rome and its environs, this district and its hamlets are full of historic
memories, of monuments, of mysteries unfathomable in these solitudes, where the
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EXPLANATION OF THE ROMAAW SITE. 349
sovereign aristocracy of the world concealed its inmost life. These country scenes that
nature has clothed in supreme beauty have not been disfigured by the modern time;
as we go through them, we smile at their striking resemblance to the pictures that the
Latin poets have drawn of them. . .
In the early morning we again saw from another point, and in the lights of a
different hour, the profound hollow of the lake of Albano. On the terrace of the
Capucins, the point of view is higher and the solitude more complete, and you can
observe geologically the bizarre configuration of a region that volcanoes have over-
flowed twice or thrice. It was on the slope of these counterforts that mild and intelligent
peoples had supported on the sacred forests of Algidus, before a radiant site, the houses
of Alba Longa, which speedily grew rich, for everybody wished to go and live in this
Elysium, which, unluckily, could not render itself formidable. It was for the leisures
of peace that the gods had got ready these mountain slopes, destined to become the
prey of a ruder race, installed in such a way as to possess nothing except by conquest.
For the hilly ground and uneven trenches among which a few adventurers came and
planted Rome, was uncultivated from all antiquity. An unhealthy soil engendering
fevers, swamps instead of valleys, stony mounds thrown confusedly here and there,
broke the plain and formed a triple enclosure; such was the earliest possession of the
Quirites and the land of their choice. - -
Nothing is more advantageous than to have studied, before setting out for Albano,
the geological map of Rome, fixed to a wall by Pietro Rosa, and the fruit of observations
enlightened by matchless sagacity. The analysis of the district shows that no place
was entrenched in such a way as to be so easily defended as Rome, or so difficult
to force even by a considerable body of troops. From the Capitol, from the Palatine,
from the Coelian, on the contrary, as well as from other points, the offensive was in
every direction both practicable and covered. Besides this, in proportion as the circle
of Roman occupation grew larger, nature from furlong to furlong had arranged lines
already fortified, and distant parallels round the centre of action. - -
All this the plan of Cavalier Rosa enables you to place your finger upon, by showing
how the configuration of the district results from the furnace of the Alban hills, which
overflowed the greater part of Latium. It explains why the Romans, destined to
master the whole of the known universe, were obliged to spend two centuries in
gaining foot by foot the small tribes, of nearly equal force, who flourished within a
radius of thirty miles round the Pomoerium. To meet their obstinate defence,
strengthened as it was by incessant leagues, Rome had on her side only the choice
of ground. She had established herself in the only situation which, in the existing
state of communities and of military combinations, was to mass a province round a
village and then make of this small kernel the capital of Italy, and then of Italy
itself the head of an enormous polypus. In his surprise that the vultures did not
construct for themselves in the groves of Albano a dove's nest, Goethe mistook the
warlike and aggressive instinct which directed these founders of empires to the true
strategic point, and made them brave the ungraciousness of a soil that was thankless
even to sterility. They could not possibly have made such blunders unwittingly;
it must have been, then, that in quartering themselves in their labyrinth of arid
slopes, the Romans adjudged to themselves by anticipation the fine plantations of the
hills and the plains, and felt that the neighbours who lived on them were to be
made their growers and purveyors.
35O A&OME.
Through umbrageous avenues, through forests regretted by nymphs, through the
towns of Genzano and Ariccia, expressly arranged for painters, we reached the
Villa Cesarini, the other extremity of a woody plateau which on one side envelops
the lake of Albano and on the other the lake of Nemi. Hollowed out at the back
of Albano, the crater of the lake of Nemi is not so wide, but more escarped and
more regular than the other; its edges join the plateau by pasture-lands, and a village
of an original aspect; this circle of verdure is more rustic with less wildness. You
descend to the brink of the water by the sinuosities of the Cesarini park, which is
neglected and nearly sheer. A diadem of forest crowns the lake; its bared branches
sketched a dark fringe against the hoar frost of the Monte Cavo, on to the summit
of which Virgil makes Juno come down, to watch the contests of AEneas with Turnus.
To the right is the peak of the Monte Jove, with its tufted grove, which replaces a
destroyed temple; under our feet, at a formidable depth slumbered the lake. We made
our way down by these charming paths, where you have the curious emotion of leaning
without danger over an abyss. All along this crase down to the water's edge it is
nothing but turf sprinkled with rocks, tufts of laurustinus, and the flowering wild
cherry; the ground was crowded with blue and violet hyacinths, camomile, and crocus
of many hues. Olive, cactus, aloe, date, green trees in the distance made dark by
contrast with the snows, married winter to spring, Switzerland to Magna Graecia.
As in amazement, turning the branches aside, bounding over the roots, one
follows the circle of the water, all that one has seen is forgotten; the pastoral
reveries of one’s affections are all effaced. There is nowhere a ground plan com-
parable to these low rocks with their riband of murmuring fountains, mingled with
oaks and planes bending over the water. Through openings, the eye ascends cascades
of vine branches and mossy grass; steep pastures with she-goats wandering, and
sheep whose type recalls those which, in the mosaics of the twelfth century, figure
among the satellites of the Lamb. This estate belonged in 1671 to a nephew of
Urban VIII., Cardinal Antonio Barberini, once the almoner of Anne of Austria and
Lewis XIV., afterwards Bishop of Poictiers and Archbishop of Rheims. The Marquis
of Seignelay, who visited him there, adds to this account:—‘I saw nothing at Nemi
worthy of remark.” -
The way back is shortened by three viaducts, with which the popes have presented
these slopes all cut up by ravines. At Genzano, to which we had come by following
a round of the old via Appia, which went by there before crossing through the
country of the Volsci to Anxur, you first come upon the bridge of Gregory XVI.
Pius IX, has done more: he has thrown viaducts over the two abysses, and that of
Ariccia is so deep, that it has required one of those bridges of three superposed
ranges of arches, which figure among the wonders worthy of comparison with ancient
achievements. The splendour of the site enhances the style of the erection. Near
the entrance to Albano you see a pyramid, flanked at the corners by cones; for the
erudite of the village it is the tomb of Aruns. “At any rate it is the tomb of some
one,' Brid'oison would say. On the new via Appia, Pius IX. has marked his sixteenth
and seventeenth mile. He has inscribed them on meta of antique shape, with an
antiquarian ambition that one is glad to honour.
A L/CETTO AAWD M. SA UZEZ'. 35 I
III.
It is a good thing for certain mountaineering expeditions to hire an ass, so as to
have an ass-driver instead of a cicerone for your guide. Only the practice teaches
you that on occasion the ciceroni turn themselves into ass-drivers, without shrinking
from both one trade and the other; and this is what happened to us. Among the
officious folk who from the moment of our arrival, at a season when visitors are
scarce, had not ceased to haunt the threshold of the hotel, my Pylades had chosen
the poorest in appearance; for my part I had singled him out for his civil mien, and
I reflected that he was one whom it would be better to keep in front of one than to
leave behind. He was a little old man, very bony, with an unkempt beard; his
weasel-face, his eye as of live coal, suggested uneasy thoughts; his restless and
disquieted physiognomy put him in a class between the unhappy and the criminal.
His name was Conte, and he answered to the compromising surname of Alicetto, a
term derived from alicetta—small poniard.
The first day on which we brought him into our service, we had before lunch only
a stroll on the side of Lanuvium ; we left the ass in the stable, and contented ourselves
with the driver, who made himself indispensable as he described the intricacy of the
roads and the insecurity of the country. Alicetto was full of small attentions; a very
poodle in gentleness, a snail in prudence and timidity. As we returned to Albano
towards noon, we sent him to saddle his ass and begged him to return after he had
dined: we wished to employ the rest of the day in going round the lake through the
woods, in identifying the ancient via triumphaſis of the Alban mount, in ascending the
deserted counterforts of the Monte Cavo, as far as Rocca di Papa, an escarped hamlet
to which the landscape painter enticed us. At the end of twenty minutes Alicetto and
his beast halted at our door, which gave me a high idea of the moderation of the
master. During this second expedition and in the depths of the forest our guide
showed much less reserve; his chatter exhibited him as proud of a certain knowledge,
and disposed to give a very strong opinion of himself. He had long wavered
between the monastic vocation and that of a postilion, but love had ruled his career;
his wife after giving him fifteen children had died, leaving the two youngest on his
hands. The daughters, all settled except the youngest, were angels; the boys were
small sheep; only, one was in prison for having tried to set fire to Castel Gandolfo,
and another was in retreat under bolt and bar at Rome, because being coachman to
the impressario of the Apollo, and wishing on the Occasion of the last carnival to
procure respect for some female dancers whom he was driving, he found himself com-
pelled in the interests of rightful precedence to rip up with his knife the belly of
the coachman of some monsignore. But what could be done? The other was too
big and too strong for this poverino ſanciullo, soft as honey, etc. From this moment
and as soon as ever we had got far away from all houses, the talk of the father
of these lambs turned to the adventures of brigands and the stories of coltellate, with
an enthusiastic predilection. -
One evening at Pistoia the abbé A*** told me that twelve years before, in April,
1853, in the very woods through which we were now passing, he had been stopped by
bandits with a party, of whom one was M. Sauzet, formerly president of the Chamber
352 A’OME.
of Deputies; that taking aim at them, the brigands had ordered them to throw
themselves flat on the ground; that in this posture they had searched and rifled
them; finally their misadventure ended judicially in three sentences of condemnation,
including that of the guide who had led them into the ambuscade. I was hardly
thinking of this anecdote, when towards the end of the lake, the worthy Alicetto
asks me if we knew the Signor Auzette, an old president. Thereupon he informs
us with candour that twelve years ago he had brought the president Sauzet and his
family to these slopes, accompanied by a captain and a canonico francese. ‘We were
just where we are now, when men started out of the grotto you see there, levelled
arms at us, and extorted ransoms. I even ran the risk of una causarella, because one of
the brigands said good-day to me as he passed.’
The discovery was not absolutely reassuring. After such a confidence I insisted on
quietly keeping Alicetto on in front, and following him closely. I admit there were
extenuating circumstances. The site was superb; Mrs. Radcliffe could have invented
nothing finer. On the wooded amphitheatre to the left were the terraces, the roofs,
and the dome of Castel Gandolfo: the sun gilded the façade of Palazzuolo; in front
of us the lake in its longest extent, a blue sheet three miles in diameter; and beyond
the slope of this Coliseum of verdure and water, the whole Roman campagna as far as
Soracte. - - . -
Alicetto drew me away from this scene, to show me the remains of an aqueduct
of the Caesars, and further off beyond Palazzuolo the ruin of a consular mausoleum.
A small valley all shut in involved him in a dissertation on Tarquin, who had established
his head-quarters there: and on Hannibal, who came after him in the back part of the
same recess. Decidedly Conte, surnamed Alicetto, might as well have been Benedictine
as postilion. -
We had just entered a forest of chestnuts, when as we passed by the old road to
Naples, recognisable by its pavement, our guide obstinately bent on peopling these
solitudes with dreadful legendary figures, told us in a more or less disfigured shape
a story handed down by tradition for three centuries. Pope Sixtus V. having taken
upon himself to free these regions from the malefactors who infested them, pursued
them in person, and devised warlike stratagems against them. One day in order to
capture a whole band the pontiff took it into his head to disguise himself as a rustic;
after posting his carbiniers, he took a whip, harnessed a truck, and set off along the
road with a load of two barrels of a good wine of Velletri, in which he had mixed
opium. As he had foreseen, he was stopped by the bandits who, not content with
seizing the barrels, reproached him ironically with having forgotten the meat. The
waggoner took his mishap gaily. “So much the worse for my master,’ he cried, “for
'tis of the best drink; the load will be all the lighter for the beast and me.” So
the whole band began to drink greedily; the narcotic operated ; while the brigands
snored, Sixtus V. had them bound fast and hoisted on to the cart, and then he entered
Rome with his captives by the light of torches. The tale does not sit badly on the
energetic personality of Sixtus V.
At the Madonna del Tuffo (a votive chapel commemorating a fall of rocks, which
the virtue of a prayer stopped before two cavaliers) there is a new point of view. You
then find yourself under the Monte Cavo; a small convent of Passionists replaces the
temple of Jupiter Latialis, where in old times the Feriae Latinae were celebrated. The
sun having cleared a portion of the plain, we perceived the enormous dome of St. Peter's
A’OCCA D/ PAPA. 353
rising out of the mist with its Vatican pedestals: of the whole eternal city, at that
distance this is the only building you can distinguish ; the rest was dissolved in the
soft undulations of the Etruscan hills. We still kept mounting, and the snows, which
had begun by tiny embroideries in the grass of the underwood, gradually covered it,
when we reached an escarped causeway, that forms the lower approach to the town
to which we were going. From this point the lake is a vessel only half full; beyond its
highest brink you roam over another horizon, the sheet of the Pontine marshes
extending to the sea, which spreads white sails to the sky.
Rocca di Papa presents the sight of a pyramid faced with brown houses, and
terminated on the summit by a ruined fort; you climb up here through a labyrinth of
alleys by forty steps. While the goats pressed round the hovels, the men played at
mora; the sound of songs came out of the houses; girls, in holiday attire, kept going
to the fountain and running from house to house in sportive bands, many of them so
handsome as to provoke a cry of surprise; the more calm among them returned from
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the water, bearing on their heads the handsome copper amphora, which we knew from
the Etruscan bas-reliefs and the paintings of Pompeii. In the midst of all this noise,
and trampling of feet which gives the snow a dark tint, the children ask for baiocchi;
the men bid you good even in rough tones; the women turn upon you a serious eye,
and as soon as you have passed a group, the joyous clamour is resumed behind you.
We offered the guide refreshments, but he declined ; he even dissuaded us from
stopping because it was late, and it were better not to be overtaken by night too far
from Albano. This prudence struck me as opportune enough; we had met in the
forest some wood-cutters, of whom their guns had made me a little suspicious, because
after all it is not by gunshot that one fells trees. We made therefore a hasty survey
of Rocca di Papa, an Alpine village from which, with feet in the snow, you could
see eighty kilometres of olive-trees. But this poor place, with its striking style, its
concentric alleys, its old and low gateways, and its roofs pointed as in the north, left
on me a very vivid impression.
Z Z

354 - A&OME.
On our way, as the track went down, the ass of master Alicetto grew so frisky,
that he carried his rider out of reach. At length becoming uneasy, the rider herself
came to a stop, and to temper the ardour of his beast I prayed our former mate
of the brigands to take hold of the bridle. Suddenly Alicetto uttered loud exclamations
of despair and astonishment; he had led us wrong, he to whom these woods were so
familiar ! This error produced a sensible extension of our road, and night enveloped
us in the very thick of the forest. Still Alicetto continued to regale us with his
stories. In spite of the want of light, he showed us the Emissarium or overflow
channel of the lake of Alba, constructed by the dictator Furius Camillus, and
mysteriously hollowed in the thickness of the mountain during the siege of Veii,
to fulfil a tradition of the Delphic oracle, which had foretold that the city would be
taken as soon as they should see the Alban lake empty itself in the plain. The
curious work of the soldiers of Camillus still exists; its outlet lies nearly three hundred
feet below Castel Gandolfo. Next quitting archaeology for history, Alicetto told in his
own way the story of Coriolanus, on the pretext that he had that same morning showed
us at the foot of Ariccia the site of Corioli, the city of the Volsci. Again, popular
legends circulate in this district even among the field labourers, concerning famous
painters and their works: our good man knew that Domenichino was called Zampieri,
and he reported on the subject of the Communion of St. Jerome a story which shows
what importance a fine picture possesses in the mind of these people. Abusing the
weakness of the painter for a woman who attracted him to Frascati, the monks made
him work for a paul a day: the work done, they refused to pay him, and Domenichino
found himself in such need as to be forced to go in search of better fortune into
Spain. On his return, although now grown rich, he came to the convent to demand
either payment or the restoration of his picture. As the Franciscans were in distress,
they surrendered to him his Communion of St. Jerome, out of which he made large
gain. A curious deduction from some real facts It is known that the monks of
the Ara Coeli paid for this important piece 60 crowns, that they thrust it into a garret,
and that they offered it to Poussin to cut up and utilise the canvas for painting on.
Poussin enlightened them on the value of the work, which, for all that, they afterwards
gave up to San Girolamo della Carita, where it remained until 1717.
The lights of Albano were twinkling in the distance, when Alicetto, his repertory
now exhausted, confessed to us that he had taken no food since the previous evening.
He said this in a very good-humoured tone, no doubt finding nothing else with which
to enliven our journey. In spite of my horror and remonstrance, he would not allow
us to quicken our steps; to induce him to do this, we had to remind him of his
daughter at home. We ended by a downright race. ‘There are not many people
at Albano at this season,’ he said by way of excuse; “it is by the mercy of heaven
that you are sent here to-day, and it was time!’ The poor retired bandit insisted on
conducting us back to our hotel, whence he refused to take any food away with him,
so that people might not guess that his house wanted bread. Still in good spirits,
while we were half-choked with pity, he took leave of my companion by offering her
a large nosegay of violets and other flowers that he had gathered in the snow; and
when he had taken his money and received his appointment for the next day, he only
let some slight emotion escape him in the accent with which he said that now they
would have something for supper.
MAR/WO. 355
IV.
I saw these slopes of Albano again in the last days of the solstice, when the
fevers of the plain pursue the Roman emigrants to the foot of the mountains. The
enervating heat only allowed us the night, in which to throw off an immovable
indolence. Nothing can render the splendour of these regions in the dawn, when a
copious dew has refreshed their vegetation; but by the fires of the setting sun, when
nature wearied of her day-long struggle scarcely responds by a few quiverings of
the foliage to the first appeal of the sea-breeze, I do not know if their faintness,
so sad and so laden with suggestion, is not still more moving.
One evening I had accompanied on the road to Marino, beyond Castel Gandolfo,
Louis Français, who has a mania for working without cessation, and who wished to
find some outlines. His sketches finished, we left the road to seek in the approaches
to the lake some other subject of study. But the sky was so rich, the day was closing
in such noble state, that we sat down on the dry grass to contemplate the lake now
become sombre, and the blueness of the night, which drawing in from the depths of
the basin, mounted along the woods and, repelled by the warmth of the west, was
gaining the terraces, the roofs, and finally the dome of Castel Gandolfo. This year
the ambitions of Italy held over the pope's head threats of which the effects were
to be conjured away at Mentana : everybody trembled for the institution to which
Rome owes the Elysian kind of character of a spiritual capital, with no other bond
to this world than recollections and masterpieces. The mind sometimes, by presenti-
ments not unlike a regret, attaches itself to mighty things threatened with their
ending. Pius IX., as we knew, had just quartered himself at Castel Gandolfo: with
our eyes turned towards his palace, growing sombre in the dusk, we felt a movement
of compassion for the old man against whom revolutions unchain their storm. As we
talked, Français sketched the exquisite view in the simplicity of its twilight effect.
From Albano to Frascati over the mountain, the journey even in winter is varied and
interesting. It introduces you to hamlets more or less populous, but more curious than
this renowned patron of so many places of pleasure. As we passed in the morning mist
to the extremity of the garden of the Pope, and leaving the lake to the right, we
made our way under the early trees of Marino, our guide Alicetto, who by way of
doing us honour had been accompanied so far by his daughter—a blonde, with brown
skin and blue eyes—Alicetto reminded us that, long before Paul V. and Urban VIII.,
who built here a summer-palace for themselves, the “great Emperor Domitian' had a
hunting-seat there, from which he used to go to the woods of Alba, and that this skilful
bowman used to bring down a hundred head of game a day. So the statements of
Suetonius have become traditional on the spot. It was on the slope of Palazzuolo
that they showed us the exact position of Alba Longa, built by the son of AEneas,
and which long after its destruction by Tullus Hostilius, bequeathed its name to the
hamlet formed round an entrenched camp, established to protect the Appian way at
the time of the second Carthaginian invasion. These recollections brought us to the
entrance of Marino, by the valley in which still runs the spring of the goddess
Ferentina, the Venus Genitrix of the old Latins; it was there, before the foundation
of Rome, that under the presidency of Alba the representatives assembled of the
Z Z 2
356 ACOME.
thirty cities of which the Latin confederation was composed. Tarquin reddened with
the blood of Herdonius that water to which we saw two she-goats going down,
pensively tended by a girl between thirteen and fourteen. She did not raise at our
approach her pretty head, bent over the spindle which her fingers turned ; you might
have taken her for a little princess playing at being shepherdess.
Pius IX. has made a viaduct which shortens the ascent to the feudal hamlet of
the Colonna, where on the market-place their keep of the thirteenth century mingles,
at the four corners, with towers fastened up in the neighbouring streets. Close by
they possessed, in 1400, a house decorated with stucco representations of ancient heads,
and bas-reliefs adorned with arabesques, as well as pannels of mosaic, and further
on a large palace of a degenerate epoch, more
stately but less elegant. Between the two rises
the church of St. Barnabas, in which the finest
Guercino that I have seen (the Martyrdom of
St. Bartholomew), produces a superb effect.
The apostle is fastened to a beam; two execu-
tioners begin to flay his body all full of life and
light, while the victim raises a glance of anguish
and ecstasy on an angel descending to strengthen
and comfort him.
A very modern legend calls one's attention
to a certain picture of the Madonna placed in
a chapel to the left, covered with a curtain.
At the time of the French Revolution, the
people of Velletri came and took possession of
the bells of Marino, not to melt them, but to
ring them in their own tower, as well as of this
Madonna, not to burn her, but to get the benefit
of the miracles she wrought; it was thus that
in 1798 they understood the French principles of
1789. A few years after, as a waggoner was
passing through the forest of Marino, an
unknown lady begged him to take her in his
cart as far as the town, to which the man
YOUTHFUL SHEPHERDESS. consented ; and as they approached the church
- of St. Barnabas, the bells began to ring out a
full peal. ‘Who can have brought them back from Velletri P’ cried the carrier in
amazement, turning towards his companion. But the lady had vanished. The
vetturino in high confusion stopped in front of the church; he went in, and attracted
by a supernatural brightness to the chapel of Mary, he recognised in the Madonna,
who had resumed possession of her shrine, the unknown whom he had brought on
the road. It is since then that this painted figure has been crowned with a diadem
of gilt copper, in which they have set some bits of coloured glass, which has not by
any means a good effect, and which is to be seen in Italy on many pictures of the
Virgin and the saints: the decoration signifies that miraculous graces, set forth in the
chapter of St. Peter, have been due to these images. Southern devotion has in all
times welcomed miraculous facts, with greater confidence than the piety of the peoples
of the north.

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GAZOZTA AC/E/CACA /A. 357
Below this temple, of which the lower side makes the border of a broad descending
street, rises a large palace, which the Colonna had built by Turkish prisoners after the
battle of Lepanto; in front, a terrace on which the church is supported, presented a
sweet spring landscape. If you linger at Marino, you will find other palaces there,
with paintings and bas-reliefs; you will identify ruins and decipher inscriptions.
V.
We had in leaving Marino to ascend one of the slopes that radiate over the
valley, which is cut into tiers by the successive currents of lava. Shortly, beyond a
THE SALITA OF MARINO.
precipice clad with olives, Grotta Ferrata revealed itself, a fortified block out of
which arise the pyramidal façade of a church masked in theatrical Gothic, and its
large belfry of rose-coloured brick. Such structures inundated by the light of a
cold sun came out brightly on a ground of sombre and threatening sky. Grotta
Ferrata is only an abbey with its dependencies; a crenellated abbey of most feudal
and most cenobitic appearance. Round its walls, flanked with squat towers, as I
saw the outline of my two travelling companions on their asses, before a romantic
landscape, a vague memory of Sancho Panza and the heroines of Cervantes came into
my head with a vision of Spanish gallantries.
A postern introduces you into the surviving quarter of a Florentine cloister. At

358 - ROME.
the church of Sta. Maria, you find a charming rest before four frescoes of the young
days of Domenichino. By the command of Cardinal Farnese, he executed them at
the age when the ardent soul dreams rather of expressing what it has felt, than of
exhibiting the skill of a cunning craftsman. These works reproduce the life of the
founders of the monastery, the monks St. Nilus and St. Bartholomew, who towards the
year IOOO, fleeing from the Saracens, came and hid themselves in this solitude. In the
subject representing St. Nilus received by Otto III., the prince as well as the monks are
expressive figures with a fine mystic sentiment. It is here that the artist has placed
the portraits of the four leaders of the second Bolognese school—Guercino, Guido
Reni, Annibal Caracci, and the artist himself. Nobody has handled the fresco with a
pencil so supple, or more rich than that of Zampieri. St. Nilus at Prayer to avert
a Storm—the Exorcism of a Child—the Monk Bartholomew at Prayer, are besides all
else understood with a true religious sentiment, that is to say with simplicity.
Let us observe in the chapel a baptismal vessel of marble, of the seventh century,
which might have been taken for a Christian sarcophagus of earlier date. They have
cut at the base of it a stream, in which from the top of a porch two people stark
naked are catching fish with a line. This is a common emblem of baptism, but the
nudity of the apostles is peculiar. Close by, from the roof of a tower, another
person plunges into the stream, in order to be caught, no doubt; on the lid are
drawn Dolphins—the Christian struck by love for his God. AElianus in his books
De Naturâ Animalium, and Pliny in his Natural History, had collected such charming
stories about the tender heart of the Dolphins, as to have procured for them the
honour of sometimes symbolizing Christ himself. On the frieze of the master-altar,
a fine mosaic of great correctness for the time, for I assign it to the end of the
fourteenth century, represents what is a rather Byzantine reminiscence, the Lamb
with the nimbus, surrounded by the twelve apostles. I say nothing of a Madonna
of Annibal Caracci, not having been able to see it for the sombreness of the altar
which it decorates. This convent belongs to Greek monks of the rule of St. Basil.
Lucullus once had a villa on this spot—a bitter souvenir for us starving people who did
not even find bread at Grotta Ferrata—which completes the analogy of the place with
La Mancha and Estremadura. As you begin to gain the mountain again, you front
Rocca di Papa, from which you are separated by two deep glens. The Monte Cavo,
as you look at it in front, presents two such regular slopes from the peak, and both
of them trace lines so pure, that this exhausted volcano recalls Vesuvius. But here
the plume of smoke is replaced by a tuft of trees.
We had got high up on the mountain; the cold became so keen, that the riders
were freezing on their donkeys, and the vegetation on the fairly difficult slope which
we had to climb was sprinkled with a slippery powdering of snow. On the height,
a Columbarium gave us notice of a Roman way, and in fact we came out on the
Via Tusculana, which preserves, besides a part of its Pelasgic pavement, the remains
of its foot-paths. The further we advanced, the thicker got the snowy humps that
we trod under our feet; nothing is stranger than to walk under the illusion of Alpine
glaciers, in drawing from one's memory warm and balmy recollections, and to repeat
that you are going to Tusculum, with all your teeth chattering.
7'USC UL UM. - 359
VI.
No place has been more extolled for the mildness of its temperature, sheltered
as it is from the cold winds of east and north, than this little town, which was incor-
porated in the Roman State 381 B.C., and which at that epoch retained its walls and
its municipal independence. The flowers and trees of Tusculum were the delight of
Cicero; Hortensius had a house there, to which he added a chamber for Cydias's
picture of the Argonauts; thither withdrew both pleasure-seekers and sages—and
the two were often only one in the times of Augustus. So to symbolize this happy
vocation of a town of pleasure, people assigned its foundation to a son of Circe
the sorceress, by Ulysses the eloquent—to that Telegonus who, when pressed by
hunger, slew his father by mistake in his search for a meal.
It is a rare circumstance when visiting the ruins of Tusculum to tread on forty
centimetres of snow; never in my life have I seen anything so lugubrious or so
desperately deserted; it produced the impression of a village at the pole, abandoned
after the country was frozen up. The palace ruins, discovered almost at the summit
of the mountain, where the wind moves noiselessly over the bare ground, may go
back to Cicero as well as to Tiberius, that sombre and skilful administrator who
made choice of three great workshops for landscape painters, Rhodes, Tusculum,
Caprea. The opus reticularium is everywhere: the Schola has left circular traces:
some mutilated statues have been found, with which they have decked and supported
the four corners of a house of a custodian, whom the winter had put to flight—a
building crammed full of pieces of old marbles; against the wind laden with snow-
flakes we had no shelter but the wall side. To the left of the theatre, along a pathway
hidden by brushwood, still exists a fountain in peperino, in a broad style. The interior
vault of this nympheum, more ancient according to some audacious scholars than the
invention of the arch, is made of superposed blocks, which as they ascend come
nearer to one another, and which at a certain height have in the shape of a culmen
upright stones, one supported upon another to close the pyramid. It is difficult
to admit that the work is earlier than the Etruscans and goes back to the Pelasgi,
and that in the time of the Tusculans they preserved it from curiosity; is it not more
probable that from Tiberius to Adrian, they amused themselves by making a rustic
fountain in imitation of the nymphea of primitive times? Copies always please ages of
refinement.
The theatre of Tusculum remains nearly untouched; the outline of the tiers of
seats came out very softly and almost effaced from under the snow, whence rose on
the Proscenium the shafts of some Doric columns, fluted, massive, and without
stylobates; the art of Magna Graecia, brought into fashion by the villegiature of
Pompeii, of Baiae, and Poestum, must have smiled at a Hellenized aristocracy. Here
and there rows of pillars, sunk partially underground and surmounted by their
capitals, rose from a dark pavement like huge mushrooms. If you clamber across
constructions of which you get confused glimpses, you will obtain one of those birds'-
eye points of view which amaze the eye and launch the mind into the infinite. The firma-
ment was sombre, save in the west, where a luminous girdle extended from the Monte
Gennaro to the mouth of the Tiber; the land therefore lay very deep, but extremely
36O ROME.
clearly marked. As far as the last hills that divide Rome from the sea, the outlines
were sharply cut in two or three tones of violet sinking down to carmine. Under
an emerald opening, through which the broken clouds engulfed a sheaf of rays, the
snows of the Sabine country stood out with metallic brightness. But what was most
singular in these vast horizons was the contrast of the Siberia of the mountains with
the spring-like Canaan of the plains: Rome, where you could distinguish St. Peter's
and the Coliseum, seemed aflame; we were shivering in snow.
Half an hour after, revived by a breath of warm wind, we descended to Frascati.
We came to the villa Rufinella, which belongs to Victor Emmanuel; then the villa
Mondragone, so vain of its three hundred and seventy-four windows; and the villa
Taverna, and I know not what others; for as you enter Frascati, the villa of the
Belvedere, designed by Giacomo della Porta for the Cardinal Aldobrandini, drives all the
rest from your mind. * -
What charms this villa of the Borghese would have, if its splendid furniture
included a table duly furnished, or even if the most ascetic refection had been placed
in the list of subjects of which you are permitted to speak to the doorkeeper!
Accustomed to abstinence, our guide Alicetto understood neither the languid eyes
of the lady, nor the summary swiftness with which I hastened over so many marvels.
So I shall make no sketches. My only reminiscence presents to me a confused
picture of cascades, arranged one over another in such a way as to produce from
the dining-room their full effect. These waters falling from Algidus, travel twenty
leagues to meet in the centre of a portico adorned with statues. The architect has
given himself the trouble of making a mountain the accessory of a house, which is
wanting neither in taste nor grandeur. In the apartments we found energy enough
to notice superb tapestries and the old chair of carved wood of Paul V.; on a ceiling
a small fresco, which is a true gem, the Judith of Domenichino, a portrait of the fair
siren who is said at Frascati to have fascinated the needy youth of the artist; in the
chapel a Christ on the Cross by Guido. -
Entering Frascati you salute the tomb of Lucullus, name of blessed omen. As
they laid the table in a Locanda fronting the cathedral, we crossed the threshold of the
temple—a rococo church, built by the Barberini and dotted all over with their heraldic
bees. To the left of the door rises the mausoleum of the Pretender, Charles Edward,
the vanquished of Culloden, son of James III. ; he was sixty-seven when he died in
1788, and this burial-place was dedicated to him by his brother, the Cardinal Henry
Stuart, Bishop of Tusculum, who was at the trouble to proclaim himself Henry IX.
Frascati was no more than a villace of middling interest, lying on a slope whose
fame is not usurped. The principal edifice of the great piazza is a seminary built by
Benedict XIV. ; the finest ornament of the quarter is a terrace from which you behold
Rome. Along the fertile slope by which you go down to the sterility of the plain,
a profusion of small gardens, villas, cafés, and other refuges for idleness, which justify
for Frascati the equivocal glory of having baptized all the tea-gardens in the universe.
At the fall of the day it was permitted us to break our fast; and as an old guide
who has ventured into the career of brigandage is not a vulgar person, we sat at
table in front of our worthy Alicetto, at the risk of irritating the shadow of the
ex-president of the chamber of deputies. The sober Alicetto, transcendant as he was
in the art of living without food, proved to us that his rich organization is adapted
for anything; he had the appetite of two lions. At dessert he had leave to carry off
AL/CETTO’S FAREWELZ.S. 361
for his daughter half a dozen of the small red apples, which Appius Claudius was the
first to obtain by grafting the apple of Scandius on a quince-tree; but he was better
pleased at learning the origin of these apples of Appius, than at possessing them.
In taking leave of us he had the grace to grow tender, and to overwhelm us with excel-
lently turned compliments, and the goodness to promise us protection for the rest of our
days. Delighted at having formed relations with the friends of the worthy people
whom he had in old times helped to pillage, and whom at a distance he loved like
old comrades in adventure, he renewed his regrets at having learned our intimacy
with the canonico /rancese too late to take us to see the old chief of the band, who
lived in all honour at Genzano, and who would have been so happy to offer us a glass of
his Asti. He ended by begging us to present his respects to the abbé, and to assure
him with what pleasure they would see him again. “What more natural?” said my
companion; ‘Alicetto is grateful to them for submitting to the operation without
resistance, and he thinks they ought to be delighted at having escaped death : he
has the good feeling of a doctor towards old patients.’ He was right, for when
on our return I gave the abbé these polite invitations, I had an opportunity of
perceiving to what an extent a residence of fifteen years in these poetic regions had
Italianized him. “Well in truth,” he cried, ‘and are the poor souls still there 2 When
I go to Albano, I shall be charmed to see them again.”
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THE PIAZZA OF ST. JOHN LATERAN.
CHAPTER XVII.
Forum and column of Trajan.-St. Sylvester's report of an imperial session at the Ulpian basilica.-St. John
Lateran; origin and legends.-Illustrations of the Golden basilica; Fabiola, etc.—Reconstruction of the
edifice; embellishments and decay.—Baptistery and cloister.—St. Helena and Sta. Croce in Gerusalemme.—
Aspects of the quarter and piazza of St. John Lateran.-Point of view: evening effects.-Visit to the
Lateran collection : Portrait of Trajan, the Medea, the Antinois, etc.—Boxers and gladiators.-New
museum of Christian antiquities.—Explanation of a sarcophagus.-Pagan symbols with double meaning.—
A few words on the obelisks.-Complement of a known anecdote.
out upon a great piazza which you name at once without ever having seen
it before: Trajan’s column serves as ensign for a forum, of which Apollodorus
of Damascus erected the porticoes. The lines described by the remains of
a plantation of pillars will help you to identify the perimeter of the temple which
Adrian consecrated, and the site of the Ulpian library which was divided into two
chambers, one for Greek books, and the other for Latin ; and finally the situation of
the basilica, of which the entrance was to the forum and its apse in the north-north-
west direction. Divided into five aisles, it was paved with antique yellow and violet
breccia; the facings were in marble of Luna ; the ceiling of gilded bronze reposed
on columns of granite. You even find the remains of five massive steps of forta Santa,
which elevated the monument upon a rich pedestal. Dion Cassius has described


SCENE IN THE ULPIAN BASILICA.—TRA/AW'S COLUMN. 363
these wonders. The basilica survived the invasions of the barbarians and even the
Vandals of Genseric; but the contests of the middle ages and the pious brutalities
of the stupid and valorous Normans have buried in ruins a monument, which for
Christians especially must have been an object of veneration.
It was in the Ulpian basilica that in 312 Constantine, having assembled the notables
of the empire, came and seated himself in the Presbyterium, to proclaim his abjuration
of polytheism in favour of the religion of Christ; it was on this day and at this spot
that the prince closed the cycle of antiquity, opened the catacombs, and inaugurated
the modern world. The Acts of St. Sylvester described many passages of the
discourse in which ‘invoking truth against mischievous divisions,’ and declaring
that he “put away superstitions born of ignorance and reared on unreason,’ the
emperor ordains that “churches be opened to Christians, and that the priests of the
temples and those of Christ enjoy the same privileges.” He himself undertakes to
build a church in his Lateran palace.
The senators listened to the harangue in dull silence, for the patrician houses
remained attached to the old worship. But along the aisles of the basilica pressed
the Christian populace, now for the first time expanding in Sunshine; when the
emperor ceased speaking, ‘there was as it were a long breath;’ then the popular joy
burst forth and the cries of the multitude broke out ‘for the space of nearly two
hours.” They exalted the power of Christ and his glory, and then the enthusiasm
reaching almost to delirium, they declared to be foes of the emperor all who should
not honour the God who had vanquished Maxentius; at last the populace, exasperated
by the attitude of the senators, demanded the expulsion of the old priests and the
proscription of all who continued to offer sacrifice. A massacre was imminent, when
Constantine, again speaking, began to set forth the difference between the service of
God and that of men, that the second is forced while the first is free. “To be
Christian,’ he said, “it is needful to desire to become one. To refuse admission to
one who seeks it would be blameworthy; to impose it would be against equity; this
is the rule of truth. Those who do not imitate us shall not lose our good graces ;
those who become Christians with us shall be our friends.’ Truly great on that day,
Constantine had the tolerance of a sage, a rare virtue among neophytes; at one
stroke he proclaimed the faith of Christ and freedom of conscience. To regain what
he gave, not less than fifteen centuries have been needed.
It was without doubt in commemoration of the incident which took place here,
that Sixtus V. placed the statue of St. Peter on the summit of the column of Trajan,
to replace that of the emperor, which was carried off in 663 by that Constans II. who
pillaged Rome, and who sold to a Jew broker the débris of the Colossus of Rhodes, a
bronze work of Chares, who was a pupil of Lysippus. I do not think there exists
any monument in the world more precious or more exquisite in its proportions than
Trajan's column, nor one that has rendered more capital service. This has been set
forth with more authority than I can pretend to, by Viollet-le-Duc, the architect who
has written best on his own art; his description sums the subject up and covers it
with light. A set of pictures of the campaigns of Trajan against the Dacians, the
bas-reliefs reproduce the arms, the accoutrements, the engines of war, the dwellings
of the barbarians; we discern the breed of the warriors and their horses; we look
upon the ships of the time, canoes and quinqueremes; women of all ranks, priests of
all theogonies, sieges and assaults: such are the merits of this sculptured host, that
3 A 2
364 g A&OME.
Polydore of Caravaggio, Giulio Romano, Michelangelo, and all the artists of the
Renaissance have drawn thence models of style and picturesque strategy. We should
be able to see Trajan’s column very well at Paris, and should have a chance of profiting
by its lessons, if the managers of our museums had not put out of sight the recently
executed casts of the immense erection. Before the original you cannot distinguish very
clearly: the distance is too great; the dull tints of the marble, stained by time and
lighted in a diffuse manner, weaken the effects of the shadows; it is then a genuine
benefit for art and historical study to have wished to bring this inestimable treasure
within their reach. Let us do justice to a worthy and patriotic thought, even when
emanating from an ill-seconded ruler.
Trajan’s column is of pure Carrara marble. The shaft is about ninety-seven
English feet, by twelve of diameter at the base, and ten below the capital, which is
Doric and composed of a single block; the structure consists of thirty-four distinct
blocks, hollowed out and cut internally into a winding staircase. Along the outside,
forming a spiral round the shaft, is a series of bas-reliefs, divided from one another
by a narrow band which, running parallel to the inner staircase of a hundred and
eighty-two steps, describes twenty-three circuits to reach the platform on which the
statue is placed. The foot and the pedestal are seventeen feet high; the torus, of
enormous diameter, is a monolith ; the whole construction reaches a hundred and
thirty-five feet from the ground. These thirty-four blocks, of eleven metres round by
one metre high, had—a test of considerable precision—to have holes made in them
to receive the screw of the staircase, and then it was necessary to find on the outside
in the same piece the exact spot for the precise continuity of the bas-reliefs, which
were due to several hands and which are more deeply worked, in proportion as they
gain in height, so as to appear of an equal projection.
One evening as the sky was clear, the base of the column extinguished in shadow,
and its summit all aflame, I followed with my eyes over the ancient soil the
arabesques and chess-board patterns marked by the pavement, interrupted here and
there by mosaics. A very minute green moss, an emerald lichen, have formed there
like a meadow silvered by a mass of Easter daisies; this verdant carpetting, whence
rose trunks of columns, seemed like the ground of a forest of pines broken by the
tempest. In the midst of this mass of broken granite and shoots of marble, pearly-
tinted like birch-trees, Trajan’s column is as some giant peulven of the Druids. Turn
your head and the vision disappears; the forum of Trajan and the corner of the
Magnanapoli street will only show you a muddy and plebeian quarter, still nobly
enclosed by two foundations crowned by symmetrically-arranged cupolas. From the
Ulpian basilica, where he has just made the church free, let us follow Constantine to
his Lateran house, where he founded the first cathedral.
II.
When Giotto towards 1320 executed for a monastery of Pisa the St. Francis
receiving the Stigmata, which is now in the museum of France, he painted below
the chief subject, three small legendary subjects, one of which, that to the left, is
peculiar enough :—on a bed with columns and canopy, with the tiara on his head,
a pope slumbers, to whom St. Peter appears, probably to disclose to him some peril,
Fº - - - Hºmi-
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TRAJAN'S COLUMN AND ULPIAN BASILICA.

THE CATHEDRAZ OF ROME. 365
for while the pontiff sleeps, over his head a church is on the point of falling down;
but a monk supports it with his arms and raises it up. Nearly opposite to this
miniature of Giotto, our Louvre exhibits another picture in which Beato Angelico
has represented the crowning of the Virgin. By a happy juxtaposition which allows
us to compare in a single motive the style and the sentiment of the two stars of art
in the middle age, Giotto and Fra Angelico have, at a distance of a century from one
another, treated nearly identical subjects in the miniatures of their predellas. Lying
in an alcove before the Castle of St. Angelo, as feudalism had caricatured it, a pope
reposes with the triple crown upon his brow. On the side of the frame, the façade
of a church bulges out, and a monk prevents it with his arms from falling.
The two subjects represent the same pontiff, Innocent III. In the first St. Peter,
to exhort him to protect the minor brothers, makes him see in a dream the Roman
church tottering and only upheld by St. Francis. In the second, this pontiff who
hesitated to confirm the statutes of St. Dominic, dreams that his church is going to
fall and that Dominic sustains the fabric. The falling temple, represented in both
cases as the symbol of pontifical power, is not St. Peter's, nor St. Sophia at Byzantium,
nor the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem; it is the basilica of St. John Lateran.
Built by Constantine in the enclosure of his palace, St. John is the metropolis of
the Roman bishopric, as officially recognised by the emperors. The son of St. Helena,
as he had announced at the foot of Trajan's column, set apart for the building and
the inhabitation of the bishops a portion of his residence to the east of the Coelian, esta-
blished on the old confiscated domain of the Plautius Lateranus, who was driven from
the Senate, and exiled for having been one of Messalina's lovers; afterwards recalled,
he was put to death by Nero for having taken part in the conspiracy of Piso and
Epicharis. It was he who, when stabbed by the tribune Statius, died without pro-
nouncing a word or uttering a complaint, ‘plenus constantis silentii,’ says Tacitus, ‘nec
tribuno officiens eamdem conscientiam.’
The name of Lateranus, who perished in the year of the martyrdom of St. Peter,
was destined to an unforeseen but lasting renown; for after Constantine had finished
his primitive church, adorned with such splendour that it was proclaimed the Golden
Basilica, after also St. Sylvester had consecrated it to the Saviour, and eight years
later, after Lucius II. had dedicated it to the two saints John, the foundation of Con-
stantine continued to bear the name of Lateranus, of that victim whose memory the
people had perpetuated in the designation of an imperial palace basely acquired. The
poet Prudentius Clemens, who wrote in the fourth century, spoke of the Basilica of
Lateran : ‘Who does not now despise the polluted altar of Jupiter, to run with the
multitude to the abode of Lateranus in search of the royal unction of the Christian l’
Chosen in the church in Zucinis, a designation derived, according to Pliny, from
Mucus, St. Damasus was consecrated in the Lateran basilica; it was there that since
Sylvester I. the popes have taken possession of their see. At St. Peter of the Vatican
the pope is the spiritual sovereign of the world; at St. John Lateran he is bishop;
the basilica of St. John is the cathedral of Rome. Hence the church has been described
as Mater et caput ecclesiarum urbis et orbis. -
St. Jerome describes in his epistles the crowd which invaded the basilica of Lateranus
when a descendant of the great Fabius, to expiate a second marriage after the divorce
of a first husband, came, clad in sackcloth, with hair covered with ashes, to submit
herself to the humiliations of public penance. Jerome represents to us, at the time of
366 A&OME.
this great act, which made a violent breach in the civil law, and prepared its reform
under the influence of the popes, the whole city as hurrying to behold Fabiola, so
beautiful and so vain, prostrate in the dust, shedding tears, and imploring forgiveness.
She sold all she had, to found at Ostia the oldest known hospital, and this high lady
spent the rest of her days in serving the sick and poor.
St. John Lateran preserved its pre-eminence; in the general procession which starts
from the nave of St. Peter's the clergy of the Vatican basilica only take the second
place. From all time this mother church has kept its liturgic rites: ‘The church of
Lateran,’ wrote Abélard to St. Bernard, ‘this mother church of all the others, retains
the ancient office, which none of her daughters do, not even the church of the Roman
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palace.’ It allowed no other prayer than the Pater: “It was seemly,’ wrote the Deacon
John in the thirteenth century, “that the supreme church should use only the supreme
prayer.’ He adds that at the third versicle of the Agnus Dei they left out the doma
nobis facem, the Lateran being the symbol of the eternal temple in which Christ shall
be the peace of the just, and there will be no more need of craving it. St. John Lateran
had no doors, but simple curtains, in order that people might be able to find refuge
there at any hour; it was through this metropolis that the right of exile was handed
down from the pagan temples to our churches. Down to the reign of Pius VII, the
newly-elected popes, after they left the Quirinal, used to come and take possession of
their cathedral of Lateran; they proceeded thither on a white mule richly caparisoned,
preceded by the religious orders, the cardinals, the bishops, and patriarchs, escorted



SAM GIO WAAVAWI WAV ZA 7TERAAVO. 367
by the Swiss and the guard of nobles. An old engraving, executed at the accession
of Clement X., is the only thing that can now represent to us this suppressed pro-
cession. If we were bound to recall the principal events that have passed in the
Lateran palace and in the basilica, where nearly all the popes have been crowned,
the narrative would embrace nearly the whole history of the church. It was there
that they condemned the heresies of Berengarius and Amauri of Chartres, as well as
the errors of the Manicheans. From the time of Pope Melchiades, who held the first
council in the very apartment of the Empress Fausta, down to the pontificate of
Alexander II., the patriarchal palace gathered under its roof no less than six synodal
assemblies; from the reign of Julius I., contemporary of Constantius, down to Leo X.,
the primatial church witnessed the assembly of fifteen ordinary and five general councils.
Of all these grandeurs no other witness is left save a Baptistery, separated from
the church by a court, and disfigured by various restorations; but the eight columns
of porphyry, surmounted by eight columns of marble, Supporting the Octagonal cupola,
are in Constantinian style, as well as the pillars and the ancient entablature, which
though now set in the wall, still mark the centre of the old porch. There, according
to a Roman legend, Constantine was baptized ; but this is a mistake, for he did not
receive baptism until the approach of death, at Nicomedia. In those days they gladly
put off baptism as long as possible, as it was the purification from all stains.
Its Baptistery apart, San Giovanni in Laterano is now little more than a place con-
secrated by great memories. The basilica of Constantine had lasted ten centuries,
when, towards 1308, a fire destroyed the temple and palace. Clement V., who
lived at Avignon, commenced the reconstruction, and carried it on a considerable
way; then Urban V. and Alexander VI. continued and decorated it; Pius IV.
burdened the nave with its heavy gilded ceiling, and erected on the piazza the
lateral façade with its two bell-towers, too far apart; Sixtus V. commissioned Fontana
to add the Portico, and Salimbeni to paint it. It was there that Nicholas Cordier
placed the bronze statue of Henry IV., canon of St. John Lateran, like all the sove-
reigns of France. Giacomo della Porta, under Clement VIII., rebuilt the transept;
Borromini rebuilt the rest under Innocent X. ; Clement XII. had the principal façade
erected by Galilei, which provided a mean imitation of that of St. Peter, and was like
that surmounted by a regiment of statues. The style of the forerunners of Bernini
presided over the work; as at the Vatican, it is a vast portico with the Porta Santa
at the extremity, and five other entrances, of which the centre one in bronze is said
to come from the AEmilian basilica: at the end of the gallery rises a colossal statue
of Constantine, the only authentic likeness of that emperor. Under the aisles you
come upon the enormous pilasters of St. Peter, square piers in which Borromini
imprisoned fine columns of granite; and against these pilasters, niches with cut lines,
whence project twelve distorted and dull colossi of the Apostles, imitations of the
attitudinising giants of St. Peter's. Bas-reliefs, statues, pictures, facings of grey
marble, all is pale and cold, all has a savour of artifice and the theatre. They extol
highly, as a masterpiece of the exuberance of the decline, a chapel of the Corsini,
containing the tombs of Clement XII., and his uncle, the cardinal Neri ; but the first
is bad, and the second burlesque. To see how far art has come down, you must
examine the chapel of the Torlonia, where, however, Tenerani has executed in very
high relief a Descent from the Cross in a pure and delicate style, but too sentimental
to rise to religious inspiration. -
368 A&O//E.
It took me more than one day to discover among this profusion of precious materials
so vainly lavished, some vestiges of a more expressive and less modern art. Near the
door, at the back of a pillar, a small fresco attributed to Giotto hands down to us
the likeness of Boniface VIII., who, placed between two cardinals, proclaims the jubilee
of 1300. The pontifical master-altar, where they celebrate facing the people, occupies
the centre of the arm of the cross, and is surmounted by a tabernacle or ciborium of
the fourteenth century, adorned with Siennese frescoes of exquisite composition. In
the small subject of the Coronation and the Annunciation, the heads possess that
delicate and dreamy beauty which delights us in the works of Guido and Duccio; but
by the care of Pius IX. these works have been restored so conscientiously,' that at
first I took them for contemporary
pasticci. However the holy father had
a fine staircase constructed to go down
to the Confession of St. John, which is
guarded by one of the Colonna, pope
Martin V., worthily entombed by
Simone, brother of Donatello. Although
St. John Lateran has been rebuilt at
least three times, we are led to suppose
that the fire of 1308, which destroyed
the building of the fourth century, still
spared the apse, or else that this
chevet had been re-erected before the
end of the thirteenth ; for its vault is
decorated with mosaics signed by
Jacopo da Turrita, Fra Jacopo da
Camerino, and executed in 1291 for
pope Nicholas IV. ; it was Gaddo Gaddi,
they say, who finished them. In sen-
timent and style they are not very
remote from art as it was practised in
the Ile de France between I2OO and
1250; but here the design has more
suppleness, and the colour has a sweet
and tender brightness, which the mosaic
workers of Venice two centuries later
seldom surpassed.
Pious and trustful souls will have shown to them the table on which our Lord
partook of the supper with his disciples the night before his death; in any case the
piece is of very old wood. I commend to attention the pavement of the church, formed
of rosettes and festoons of costly marble, and embroidered with mosaics separated
by plaques of porphyry; we owe this carpetting of precious stones to Martin V., who
died in 1431. If I may point out for their value alone some remarkable blocks, the
columns of red oriental granite which define the nave, and the fluted pillars of antique
yellow which support the organ, are worthy of mention; the first are thirty-four feet
high; the second, also in a single piece, and the largest known of this rare material, are
nine metres high. But the marvel of the kind is the four fluted columns in gilded
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WELL OF THE SIXTH CENTURY, IN THE CLoISTER OF ST. JoHN.

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SAAV7'A CROC E VAW GERUSA/CEMA/E. 369
bronze of the Holy Sacrament; they are not less than eight and a half feet in cir-
cumference. On their enormous composite capitals reposes an entablature of bronze;
the purity of the lines, the precision of the flutings, the curve of the volutes, the relief
of the acanthus, the sparkling play of light on these bouquets of golden leafage—
everything about this gigantic gold-work, causes the surprise and the full satisfaction
of perfect works. Then, what theories as to the origin of the columns ! It was
Octavianus, say some, who out of the bronze prows of the vessels taken at Actium
had these votive columns made to be placed in the Capitol. They took them, say
others, from the basilica of the great Julius, or from the palace of Titus. There are
those, again, who think they belonged to the Golden Basilica, at the time when
Constantine made of it one of the marvels of Rome.
If you are bent on finding some remains of the Lateran buildings going back into
respectable ages, you must seek them in the cloister. This monument of the thirteenth
century, of which the arches surmounted by mosaics rest on small columns diversified by
an ingenious fancy, this cloister is one of the most delicious erections in Rome or in
the world. It can only be compared to that of St. Paul, belonging to the same epoch;
they both offer the variety of the buildings of the middle ages, made regular in
harmony of outline by frequent resort to antique monuments. Under the arcades you
see the massive seat of the old metropolis; how many pontiffs have sat on this since
the eighth century ! They preserve here also a number of bas-reliefs earlier than the
fourteenth, and notably among other fragments of the old altar, a graceful carving,
in which some small clerks blow with pipes on the pan of a censer. Let us also notice
a marble statue of Boniface VIII. In the middle of this court, with some neglected
plants growing around it, is a fine well of the sixth century.
III.
From St. John Lateran to Santa Croce, the fourth basilica of Rome, the distance is
short; it is enough to go between gardens bounded by the aqueduct of Claudius and
the walls of the city, along a grassy piece which descends to the ruins of the Amphi-
theatrum Castrense. Here, to the south of the Praenestine gate, were the Variani
gardens, bequeathed by Sextus Varius to his son Heliogabalus, as Lampridius informs
us. St. Helen, when she brought back from Jerusalem the Saviour's cross, built a
church for it, which being rebuilt by Benedict XIV. in 1743, with the exception of the
apse, still betrays the inclination to imitate St. Peter's. But the bolder façade does
not want grace; a pretty open campanile of the thirteenth century, a rustic chapel
close by, masses of trees arranged among the buildings, bring the little church of
Domenico Gregorini into the disposition of a series of landscapes. -
One would not feel bound to visit it, if it had not preserved at the Tribuna of the
high altar some large frescoes which, although a little too much retouched, leave no
doubt as to the name of their author, Pinturicchio. They represent the finding of
the holy cross; the discovery of the three pieces of wood, the trials to which they
were subjected, and the procession of St. Helen on her return to Jerusalem. Christ
hovers above the semicircle. These compositions are dramatic, still simple and already
skilful : ’tis the apogee of the inspired school which goes immediately before Michel-
angelo and Raphael. Near the high altar you go down to the chapel of St. Helen,
3 B
37O AeC).]//º.
which is only moderately lighted, which prevents a very fair appreciation of Nicholas
or Antony Cirignani, called Pomerancio. As for the mosaics, it is a mistake to attribute
them to Balthazar Peruzzi. This chapel is separated in two by a grating, which women
cannot pass without incurring excommunication, while in the reserved space a chest
is opened, in which they keep a very large fragment of the true cross, the only one
whose authenticity can be guaranteed. I never passed through this peristyle with
ladies, without a revolt on their part against the decree excluding them from the
sanctuary. In truth the Judaic reminiscence attributing impurity to them seems unjust
in the Catholic system, of which they form so vigorous a support; it must be con-
fessed also that it seems particularly illogical to refuse access to the chapel of
St. Helen to women, since it is to their sex that we owe the relics which are the
very reason why the basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme has any existence.
Let us return to the Piazza del Laterano. When you have seen the principal
towns of France, in which the streets are usually narrow and the population huddled
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SANTA CROCE IN GERUSALEMME.
close round the cathedrals, you might suppose that all Rome crowded round the
Constantinian metropolis of the city and the universe. Nothing of the sort; solitude
and silence reign on the deserted plateau of St. John Lateran, and the grass grows
on it; the obelisk of Thothmes, the greatest of known monoliths, turns round the piazza
a shadow which from morning to night meets no creature. The street which, since
the time of the Flavians ascends from the Coliseum to the palace of Lateranus, becomes
solitary as you draw near to the plateau, and when from a rather elevated point you
view the few houses which are around you at a respectful distance, and the lower as
they come nearest to the church, it seems as though they were prostrating themselves
before their mother. Two hospitals, some cloistered buildings which connect the
baptistery with the chevet of the church, from which the principal front of the palace
runs, with its peculiarly cold aspect;—there you have all the Piazza del Laterano.
What engraves it in the memory is the fact that, framed by monuments all unlike
one another, and grouped against the sky, it is irregular, and that on the side which
continues the palace it presents to the eye a large empty passage, coming out into the


THE QUARTER OF ST. JOHN. 37 I
country. Every step in this direction discloses a picture that by certain signs one
feels to be curious; the breeze which comes up from long distances, and which makes
music at the corner of the walls with the sonorousness of mountain blasts, gives you
warning that behind the palace and the church there must be an immense space.
The spot to which you have come is one of those where you are lost in self-forget-
fulness. Many a time have I sat there of an evening, on the top step of the portico
of St. John, letting night fall and time flee until the moment when the rays of the moon
restored to me what my eyes had shortly lost. On whichever side you turn, the
sight and the mind are well repaid. From the ancient Porta Asinaria, by which Totila
invaded Rome, to the Praenestine gate marked by a triumphal arch of Agrippa, the
PORTICO OF ST. JOHN LATERAN.
glacis descending in a gentle slope is bounded by the crenelated walls of Aurelian,
in which the Amphitheatrum Castrense is incrusted, a ring whose collet is the basilica
of St. Cross. On the other horizon, vague outlying grounds are surrounded by the
Neronian and Claudian aqueducts connecting themselves with the walls, beyond which
you discover the theatre of the earliest wars of the republic, spreading plains along
which uncoil the old roads, recognisable by their tombs. The horizon is terminated
by hills, and the ancient cities of Latium which decorate the pedestal of the Sabine Hills.
To give perspective to these successive distances, you have curtains of dark trees,
and nearer to you, in front of the Scala Santa, where the pilgrims climb on their knees
the eight-and-twenty steps of the staircase of Pontius Pilate, the Triclinio, a fragment of
the ancient refectory of the popes in the eighth century: Benedict XIV. added to it

3 B 2
37.2 A&O//E.
an apse to expose three mosaics of Leo III. on a golden ground. That in the middle
represents the apostles girding themselves to go forth and preach to the nations; the
two others, St. Sylvester and Constantine receiving from Christ's hands the Labarum
and the keys; then St. Peter giving the pallium to Leo III. and the standard to
Charles the Great; two portraits of the time, which are unique and which survive
in open air. Around you at this deserted extremity of the city, all is monumental,
but without symmetry; all is celebrated and neglected.
PENITENTS ASCENDING THE HOLY STAIRCASE.
At distant intervals you meet a few sick people, who have come in from the fields to
climb the Scala Santa; I remember at the foot of the Triclinio, and in the heat of the
sun, a sickly group asleep in a cradle between two fragile creatures. Their functions
fulfilled, they wait the shades of evening to pass the walls again, the fever which their
faith hardly mistrusts lying in wait for them. No spot seems so well exposed to the
purifying breezes from the mountains, none less swampy nor farther away from unwhole-

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some quarters; yet fever reigns on this plateau, and has reigned there from all time, to
such an extent as to depopulate it. But what is still more singular, this fever-stricken
spot has been selected as a site for two hospitals for fever patients.
The palace is only inhabited by the custodians. Sixtus V. had it rebuilt by Fontana
on the foundations of the old edifice, which was burnt in the sixteenth century. The
interior, a cloister with two stories, is damp, austere, cold. As men could not live
there, Gregory XVI. installed statues in it, and Pius IX, a historical museum which
is curious in a very different way.
IV.
A few words, first, on the Gregorian collections, which occupy no less than fourteen
apartments. Let us first note a bas-relief of Trajan with three other figures, a piece
which comes from the old arch of that emperor, and has been taken from his Forum.
No other likeness of Trajan has such delicacy or such truth of expression—the intel-
lectual and benevolent physiognomy of a man who, understanding all, can pardon all.
A pretty bas-relief of Medea with Jason made young again, was found in a tomb of
the Appian Way—symbolical eulogy of a young woman by some happy greybeard.
The boasted piece of this collection is the Antinois, of which the drapery has been
re-handled, but whose execution is marked by a wonderful polish. It is a stout young
man, sleek with a touch of sensuality in its intention, and in my opinion the work savours
of the inferiority of its aim ; the body, so perfect in its finish, is treated in a heavy
manner. The Braschi found this masterpiece near Palestrina, and Pope Gregory paid
seventy thousand francs for it. After giving some attention to a collection of cippi
from the Appian Way, I stopped in front of two Hermes with faun's heads; they
present that goatish character, full of wantonness and irony, that forked beard and
those V-shaped eyebrows over round eyes, which constitute the type of the devil,
especially since the Germans, under the inspiration of Goethe, have given him the
traits of the satyr.
The Gregorian museum possesses the finest draped statue I have seen : it repre-
sents a man of fine port, eloquent, sure of himself, accustomed to dazzle, practised in
making his talents avail by the seductive authority of mien. Made to tell from head
to foot by the clever negligence of the drapery, the figure is a thorough success, and
the great Sophocles, for it is he, as Jahn and Welcker have proved, has taken with
ease an imposed attitude which has become natural to him, and which completes the
representation. Under the folds of the robe, which is half tightened round him, the
body describes its lines in a harmonious curve, the head harmonizes perfectly with the
attitude, the beard is curled with art, and the outlines are well balanced. It was near
the old Anxur that they exhumed this masterpiece in the time of Gregory XVI., and
the family of the counts Antonelli offered it to the sovereign: it is even maintained
that it was in order to lodge it worthily that Pope Capellari transformed the palace into
a museum. Let us also mention certain documents of interest for the antiquary, such,
for instance, as the tombstone of a master mason with a figure of a wheel for raising
stones. Another sarcophagus restores an arch consecrated to Isis, which preceded
on the highest point of the Via Sacra the Arch of Titus.
But this Lateran palace offers, as I have said, collections of a more curious kind
374 A’OME.
in the galleries and in some chambers of the upper story, where they preserve the
boxers and gladiators in mosaic that were taken from the Thermae of Caracalla. These
naked figures, stronger than nature, are likenesses with the names of the models;
realistic works, if ever there were any, which give us vigour in all its ugliness, animal
vigour stripped of all style. It was after a defeat of the Samnites, 307 B.C., that
gladiators appeared at Rome for the first time: Livy says that they tricked them up
in the arms won in Samnium, and that during meals they used to cut their throats
for the entertainment of the guests. Decidedly such a sight would take away one's
appetite in these days.
Let us proceed to that portion of
the museum which is an idea of Pius IX.
The pontiff wished the house of Con-
stantine and the first cloister of St. Syl-
vester to become a museum of Chris-
tian epigraphy and iconography. So,
adding to the inscriptions the tomb-
stones and sarcophagi got up every
day in the course of the excavations,
and to these elements joining the fac-
similes of paintings that it was neither
possible nor proper to take from the
catacombs, Pius IX. formed so rich a
collection, that all along the broad
staircase of state, on the landings, in
the chambers and galleries of the first
story, the walls are entirely covered.
The pope has had all these monuments
thus extracted from the cemeteries
underground, classified by the man
most learned in such matters, the
Cav. de' Rossi. This museum is a
in unique source of information as to the
Rººse º forms, the rites, the spirit, and the
- tendencies of dogma, in these almost
unknown ages.
SOPHOCLES. At the first steps of the staircase you
are stopped by a series of sarcophagi, in
which bas-reliefs bring together the correlative symbols of the Old Testament and the
New. One of the most complete is a large Constantinian vessel, of which the carvings
placed over one another in pairs, and grouping several subjects in four divisions,
reproduce the symbolism of our spiritual history. Man and his companion are repre-
sented as created not by the Father, but by the Trinity; Jesus draws from the side of
Adam the first woman, the Father touches her brow, the Holy Spirit breathes a soul
into her. The Son and the Holy Spirit are always beardless; the Father, after
Olympian precedents, is also young, as Diespiter was. Then comes the First Fault,
so represented as to banish every painful or humiliating idea : Christ gives to Adam
and Eve the emblems of work; to him some ears of wheat, to her a sheep whose wool
à
à
Ilºil

THE ZATERAAW COZA, ECTIONS. 375
she is to spin. The second canto opens with the Incarnation of the Son; the magi
come to adore; the Virgin is attended by two youths, the Holy Spirit and St. Joseph :
the latter is constantly represented as young in the primitive monuments. In the next
bas-relief Christ gives sight to the man born blind—symbol of the redemption. Then
St. Peter denies his master: at his feet the cock crows; the second fall is a pendant
to the first. Then the apostle repentant, and confessing the faith, follows pagans
who drag him after them. Finally he becomes Moses and explains the sense of the
figures; it is he, Peter, who strikes the rock and makes the water gush forth, in which
we see the troop of the faithful borne along; Moses and Peter play alternately the same
part. Then we come to the Eucharist figured under the two kinds, by the Marriage
of Cana, and the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes. The fish, ix0üs, incomplete
anagram of Xplotós, was a mysterious sign for the adepts of evangelical law; it often
appears on a mausoleum among pagan divinities; the Christians only knew the signi-
ficance of the hieroglyph. These means of rallying were indispensable for the neophytes
who, mingling in the pagan world, concealed the dangerous mystery of their faith;
it was said or written of a friend, in giving news of him: ‘He eats the fish—he lives
on fish.” The meaning escaped the profane. In Augustine's Civitas Dei I find this
passage: “Fish is the mysterious name of Christ, who, plunged into our mortality,
could keep himself living in it, that is, without sin.” In the centre of the sarcophagus
are marked two unworked medallions: these tombs were prepared and carved before-
hand, and only room was reserved for the portraits of the future purchasers. +.
Towards the end of the third century, when opulent families had embraced Chris-
tianity, it was necessary for mausoleums to find signs that should be unintelligible even
to the artists who carved them, for the best sculptors still belonged to polytheism. Hence
certain tombs have to be examined very closely, particularly those in which Orpheus
appears, those in which Bacchanalia are reproduced, and other scenes which lend them-
selves to the introduction of vine shoots and grapes. Often a stone is covered with
trellises among which Genii and Souls flit; in the centre a sheep-pale; but the pastor
Aristeus bears on his shoulder a sheep which he is taking back to the fold.
On another sarcophagus, also of a fine era, figures a head in a hemisphere; this
hemisphere was among the ancients the emblem of heaven. Above, Jesus rises from
the earth, opening a new way. In the other compartments it is Christ before Pilate, who
is washing his hands; it is Jesus making Simon carry his cross, which in those primitive
scenes he does not carry himself; finally, it is the Saviour crowned by a soldier, not with
a diadem of thorns, but with a circlet of golden pearls. Christ is never shown under-
going torture, or even mournful; fruitful and luminous, he makes the beholder think
of Apollo, now poet, now shepherd. In this way they avoided alarming the Christians
by the threats of hell, by the sight of eternal pains, or by terrifying miracles: all is
spring, gentleness, hope; all is solace, tenderness, and bliss. The demons and their
terrors only came later, when the ecclesiastical princes, become powerful, invested with
feudal lands, and leagued with lords and kings, found an interest in enslaving men and
ruling them by fear. Thus the abuse of a devil, like the abuse of punishment, charac-
terizes barbarous epochs and down-trodden peoples. In these times, when the peace
of the church was so recent, the Christians, happy in their victory, represented at the
ends or on the depth of the sarcophagi the first Constantinian basilicas; we know from
this that they were those of the Lateran and St. Peter. In the centre of the monument
they engraved the monogram of Christ.
376 ROME.
The study of symbols teaches us to determine the Christian myths of those early
times; we see religion completely formed at the end of the first century, in which
paintings and sculptures are taken by choice either from the Gospel of St. John, a tardy
and victorious reply to the scholars, who thought it later than Eutychian, or from the
allegorical picture of the reign of Nero, written by the same apostle at Patmos and
called the Apocalypse. Recent researches have shown equally plainly, contrary to the
assertion of Mgr. Gerbet, that the first Christians did by no means abstain from
personifying God the Father. For a long time they dissembled the mystery of the
sacraments under emblems: the passage of the Red Sea meant baptism; the blind
restored to sight, penitence; Jonas interprets the idea of resurrection. Adam, the first
sinner, is always beautiful; Eve is often seated by the side of Mary, and in the hand
of the first woman they place not one apple, but seven—the deadly sins. I noticed
on frescoes of the first century, the Magian kings reduced to two, or raised to four ;
they wear Phrygian caps, and in these paintings the Virgin is always pretty and
elaborately draped. Certain subjects are represented by symbolical animals, on
CHRIST SYMBOLIZED IN ORPHEUS.
account of their crudity: thus, a sheep between two foxes on the edge of a fountain
represents the chaste Susannah. So far as concerns usages and costumes, these drawings
are invaluable. Besides the fac-similes, they have placed in the collection the remains
of frescoes, from the era of the Caesars down to the fifteenth century, fixed on canvas
with much skill. A curiosity of the first rank is the seated statue of St. Hippolytus,
bishop of Porto, a work of the third century discovered in the catacombs of St. Lawrence.
The head is a restoration, but the monument furnishes us, engraved against the episcopal
seat, with the Paschal calendar, which the prelate composed to refute the Quartodecimani,
who obstinately persisted in celebrating Easter on the same day as the Jews.
I passed hastily through the rooms, where I only caught glimpses of a few fine
pictures, among them, an Annunciation, by F. Francia; a Legend of the Virgin, by
Beato Angelico; two Marco Parmigiani; the St. Jerome of Giovanni Santi, Raphael’s
father, a painting of a sweet harmony, with the grace of Perugino slightly Germanized;
two tapestries executed for the hospital of St. Michael, after Fra Bartolommeo ; a charming
Virgin and two other subjects of admirable execution, by Carlo Crivelli (1482); an

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LA BARCACCIA AND THE STEPS OF LA TRINITA DEI MONTI.

THE ZA 7'ERAAW COLA, EC 77OAVS. 377
Assumption, a remarkable work of a rare master, Colà dell’Amatrice, with the date
of 1515; a Cesare da Sesto; the Crowning of the Virgin, by Filippo Lippi; a Triptych
of Antonio Demurao, going back to 1464; and a Pannel of Benozzo Gozzoli. It would
be no bad thing to transport to the Vatican these important pieces, which are lost in
the solitudes of the Lateran.
One day when I was there with some friends, a door opened and the custodian called
out, ‘The great Hall of the Councils l’ What memories do these words awake in
the Lateran palace | We entered full of awe and curiosity. O deception | Down the
long and vast aisle, savage tribes of Canada, figured in painted plaster, with eyes of
enamel all flaming, illuminated with red ochre, grimacing, posturing madly, covered
with bits of tinsel, were awaiting us on trestles, on which the horde looked as if they
had been suddenly fixed by magic in the midst of a burlesque jig. We had not expected
such a council as this. If we had, perhaps it might have had some interest, but in
contrast with the harmony of the palace it detonates and jars. So our Hurons put
us to flight.
When after an aimless saunter between the ramparts and the Claudian waters we
returned to the Piazza of St. John Lateran, which was already plunged, like the palace
and the turrets of the church, in the shadows of evening, the obelisk rooted in the
middle of it had its peak still red with the sun’s crepuscular fires; this prodigious
wedge, dipping its point into the freshness of the blue sky, never seemed more immense.
It is, as I have said, the loftiest of the monoliths, and it is covered with curious
hieroglyphics. Constantine brought it on board ship; he had it dragged to Rome and
set up in the Circus Maximus. Overthrown by the barbarians, it broke into three
pieces, and the earth buried it : Sixtus V., who dug it up, had it fastened together
again, and then erected it before his palace of Lateran.
Gifted with most energetic activity, this pontiff had a passion for astonishing colossi.
It led him to exhume the needle of Rhamses III., which Octavianus after Actium
brought back from Heliopolis, and which Pliny attributes to one of the Pharaohs named
Semsertes; Sixtus V. had it set up in the Piazza del Popolo. It is the second of the
three obelisks which are earlier than Cambyses; the third is that of which Augustus
made a gnomon in the middle of the Campus Martius; it marked the time by the
projection of its shadow on a dial-plate engraved in the marble. Pius VI. disinterred
the solar obelisk in 1789, placed a globe on the top of it, and made it an ornament of
the Piazza of Monte Citorio, an eminence formed of the substructions of an amphitheatre
erected by Statilius Scaurus. Clement XI. placed in front of the Pantheon the ancient
needle of the temples of Isis and Serapis; Alexander VII. re-erected that of the Minerva,
found in 1665 in the gardens of the Dominicans; Pius VI. dug up from the gardens
of Sallust that of the Trinity, and from the tomb of Augustus that of the Quirinal. It
was there also that Sixtus V. found the obelisk in red granite of Sta. Maria Maggiore,
about the time when he planted in front of the Vatican basilica the obelisk of Caligula,
which is of smaller archaeological value, since it is free of all inscriptions and of modern
origin, for Caius Caligula had it cut. Yet of all these various obelisks, the last is
perhaps the most renowned, because to its erection belongs the well-known anecdote
of the man who, in the midst of the silence imposed under penalty of death by the
first of the absolute pontiffs, saved the compromised operation by calling to Fontana,
“Acqua alle ſumi /* This spectator was a coaster of the Genoese Riviera, named Bresca.
3 C
378 A’OM/E.
He obtained for his reward authority to fly the pontifical flag at his mast, and the
hereditary privilege of supplying the apostolic palace with palm leaves on Palm
Sunday.
We may reflect with awe on the money that has been spent, and the men that have
been employed, by the Pharaohs, the Emperors, and the sovereign pontiffs, to endow
their capitals with these gigantic curiosities.
-
‘A C Roup SLUMBERING OVER A CRADLE.”

ON THE TERRACE OF THE PIN CIAN.
CHAPTER XVIII.
The Colonna palace, its galleries, gardens, ruins.—Via della Pilotta-Church of the Santi Apostoli: Canova
and Volpato, Julius II., Cardinal Bessarion, etc.—Fountain and piazza of Monte Cavallo.—Appearance,
character, and reminiscences of the Quirinal palace.—Santa Maria degli Angeli and the Thermae of
Diocletian-Michelangelo and the cloisters of the Carthusians.—The St. Bruno of Houdon.—The Piazza
di Spagna and the Immacolata.-The Barcaccia and the great steps of the Pincian.-Inundation of the
Tiber.—The Trinita dei Monti...—Daniel of Volterra and Poussin.-The Via Sistina and Via Gregoriana.-
Studio montamari: the Pascuccia.-Gardens of Messalina.-Galileo with the Medici.-The Convent of the
Holy Heart. -
I.
HE Colonna palace is situated between the Corso and the Quirinal, on the
slope of which the gardens extend, contiguous to the church of the Santi
Apostoli; with that the buildings occupy one of the great sides of a long
piazza, bounded on the north by the narrow Saporelli palace, where died
the last Stuart, nominally James III. It was at the Saporelli palace that a young
maiden was brought up, who has left romantic reminiscences and a correspondence,
skilfully set by Edmond About in the romance of 79//a. This heroine came to die
near here in the convent of Sant' Antonio, which touches on the Piazza Sta. Maria
Maggiore.
On account of certain analogies of style, the Colonna palace presents a curious
appearance to persons who have studied the decorations of our royal residences of the


3 C 2
38O ROME.
great age. It is not that the galleries are filled with paintings, but the selections
are happy, the portraits of the family are of the highest value, and the Colonna
palace preserves pictures that are not to be found elsewhere. Such is the portrait in
profile of a young man, by that Giovanni Santi, Raphael’s father, of whom our bio-
graphers have not failed to make a mediocre painter, to enhance by so much the
genius of the son. Unluckily, the works of Santi are very rare, but they are in
general of a warm and vigorous colour for pictures of such exquisite finish: the
Giovinetto of the Colonna palace unites to the delicate physiognomy of a Francia
the deep colouring of a Venetian. Among the pictures which have the privilege
of attracting all eyes, one cannot help naming the Madonna and Child of Botticelli,
and the same subject with St. John by Giulio Romano, two pieces of rare value; the
latter of them has the charm of a Raphael of the second period. Near a small
portrait of Maria Mancini, of a beauty that explains the youthful ardour of Lewis XIV.,
is a Last Judgment composed by Pietro of Cortona expressly for the Colonna family;
a most comical idea is presented in it with the greatest gravity. You see emerging
from their tombs all the heroes of the race down to Philip Colonna, who was twice
married: Lucrezia, his first wife, seems outraged on her return to the light to see
rising by her side another and a younger wife; but an angel intervenes to explain
the matter to her, while Philip Colonna, triumphant yet embarrassed, casts an oblique
glance to see how it will end.
A lively portrait of Isabel Colonna by Pietro Novelli, who has represented her on
foot with her rosy-coloured child rosily dressed, does still more to justify the
posthumous jealousies of Lucrezia, whom Van Dyck in another picture has armed
in warlike guise, to contest her charms before posterity. This figure, clad in black
like her rival, and with an expressive head framed in a heavy frill, is one of the most
living triumphs of the Flemish master.
These pieces are at the end of the great gallery of the Colonna, a splendour
discerned from a distance and that made us pass more quickly before a Paris
Bordone, before a Bonifazio, both of which are worth remembering; before the
St. Jerome of Lo Spagna, the finest work of this faithful disciple of Perugino that
is to be found in Rome. We were constrained, however, to salute in passing a fine
Palma (rara avis); then two pre-eminent portraits, one by Paul Veronese and the
other by Titian. The latter represents Onofrio Panvinio, the historian of Roman
antiquities, a pensive face whence the life radiates under a pale and transparent
carnation. And as we were going away, Lorenzo Colonna, brother of Martin V.,
held us fixed under his glance: it is master Holbein who places in your way this
gentleman with tawny beard, mixed with the furs of a robe, and from whose features
life shines tranquilly out. Contrary to what is customary, the search for the real
does not in this portrait end in dryness; the painting is rich and powerful, and as the
proportions are just, the colour assumes a deep brilliance. I have never seen one
of Holbein’s portraits comparable to this of Lorenzo Colonna.
Established in 1572 after the battle of Lepanto to consecrate the glory of Marco
Antonio Colonna, who commanded the Christian galleys against the Turks, the great
gallery of this palace reminds one of that of St. Cloud, and still more of the gallery of
mirrors at Versailles. The structure rests on pilasters in antique yellow; medallions
and bas-reliefs have been disposed under each of the ten great windows, the intervals
between them being occupied by panoplies of oriental arms; the frescoes tell the story
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OF THE IMMACOLATA.

THE CO/COMAWA PAZACE. 381
of the Battle of Lepanto, along the arches of the ceiling. On a series of mirrors
arranged down the hall, Mario de' Fiori has painted Cupids among the finest garlands
that his pencil ever drew. Add to all this elegance and wealth a pavement of antique
marbles; multiply in symmetrical proportions the furniture with its sweepingly-turned
lines, the giant consoles of which the tables of oriental breccia are supported by Turks
stooping and in fetters; Asiatic cabinets in ivory and lapis and ebony; count up the
statues, the groups, the portraits, the cartouches; and you will have an idea of the
vast gallery where, as at St. Cloud, the paintings like the portraits are arranged in
the ornamentation. The more you look, the more convinced you are that Mansart
drew his inspiration for the decoration of Versailles from the great hall of the Colonna
palace, and what increases the probability of this imitation is the timidity of the copy.
The vestibules which serve for porticos to this gallery, prolong it at the extremities
with even greater richness; they are ornamented in such a way as to detain the
visitor before the long perspective of that heraldic aisle. Swanevelt, Canaletto, Gaspar
Poussin, Claude of Lorraine, Berghem, Paul Brill, Breughel, Orizonte, have enlivened
with peaceful and luminous landscapes the cartouches, tympana, and medallions,
arranged by the design of the architects. The Ruins of the Palace of the Caesars
face a fine View of the church of SS. Giovanni and Paolo, which the Venetians in their
smooth dialect style the Zanipoſo.
Enter the sanctuary: the Colonna await you there in full costume of immortality,
thanks to Van Dyck, who has painted a superb equestrian portrait of Carlo Colonna;.
to Scipione Gaétano, who presents to us the victorious Constable; to Agostino Caracci
who stands godfather to the Cardinal Pompeo Colonna; to Sustermans who has treated
Federigo with master hand; to Giorgione who, on a ground of feudal country with
strong castle and glacis, has created the mighty-armed figure of Giacomo Sciarra
Colonna. Other pieces, subjects taken from history and saintship, give variety to the
scene, and leave space and air between all these personages, whom you will hardly
leave without bowing before the poetic Vittoria Colonna, that muse of delicate and
penetrative loveliness. To reach the second vestibule you ascend a few marble steps;
one of the steps, it will hardly be believed, was broken during the last siege
by a bullet which, having been discharged from the Janiculum, must, to come here,
have passed straight through the four windows of two houses divided by a court,
then entered at the end of the gallery and rushed down its entire length without an
obstacle. Justly promoted to the rank of a curiosity, the projectile has been fixed
in the block of marble which it indented. Quite close to these steps you find, between
a false Poussin and a suspicious Ghirlandajo, the St. John the Baptist of Salvator
Rosa, very curious on account of its striking personality; it is the portrait of the
artist, who took this original pretext for representing himself naked in a wilderness.
Julius II. inhabited this palace for some time: it had been commenced by Martin V.
towards 142O, while its gardens, extended in steep embankments up to the summit of
the Quirinal, preserve the vaults of several ancient edifices of unknown origin. From
the top of a terrace you lean with a sort of dizziness over the profundities of these
caverns, in which the sun’s rays, precipitated by the slope of the vaults, have drawn
from the damp earth a few patches of verdure throwing upon the walls reflections
like moonlight. At the other end of the rampart, which is enlivened by plants,
streams, and fountains, are the remains of a temple which was reconstructed by
Aurelian after his victories in Syria. Under this reign, they set to work to turn
382 A’O//Z.
back the current of the decline of art, and to seek purity of form, without renouncing
their taste for the colossal, that barbarous passion alike of the youth and old age of
a civilization. The monolithic entablatures of the Colonna gardens, two cut rocks of
formidable dimensions, have profiles which would seem too delicate for this period,
if Palmyra did not offer ruins of the Aurelian epoch quite as exquisite in their purity;
it was archaeology already. One of these fragments comprises in a single block,
an architrave and its frieze, with corbels of nearly a foot for the iron clamps designed
to bind these rocks together.
The communication between the palace and its escarped gardens is by two or three
bridges, each of one arch, thrown over a
deep street, the Via della Pilotta, which
runs round the foot of the hill, and on
which the branches of the trees pour
down festooned shadows. The palace,
the ruins twenty times centenary, the
basins of green water, and this pre-
cipice changed into a cascade of flowers
—all are in the very heart of the town,
and in a very populous quarter;
silence has never brooded over this
solitude. But the noise there is still
louder for the spirit, than it is for the
ear; from the platform, which has an
issue on the piazza of the Quirinal
palace, you embrace the whole city,
from the Capitol to the Monte Mario,
and from the Janiculum to the Pala-
tine; St. Peter’s rises above the hills,
and in the distance the azure of Monte
Cimino refreshes the sight with the
glow of the Roman suburbs, bristling
with rockeries which were villas or
thermae.
VIA DELLA PILOTTA.
II.
On the long piazza, which has taken the name of the Colonna palace, is the church
of the SS. Apostoli, a cold specimen of sage architecture, in which the poverty of the
worthy Valadier adapts itself to the linear pruderies of Fontana; Valadier added a
façade to the portico built under Sixtus IV. You find here one of those small museums
of the second rank, where historical interest attaches you to works that are often
mediocre, but that possess a certain value when seen in their place. Under the porch
is the tomb of Volpato, the Venetian who made Raphael's Stanze so popular, inter-
preting them so ill with so much talent. Volpato was the friend of Canova, who
drew up an allegorical epitaph for him in marble; before the bust of the deceased,


CHURCH OF THE SAAV77 AAOSTOZA. 383
Friendship leans over in tears. Nothing is more meagre than the bas-relief, but the
disconsolate figure is touching.
Here is the great nave, with the pompous Triumph of the Franciscans, diluted by
Baciccio. In this glassy machine, Baciccio seems to be a Bolognese Tiepolo, of a
more negligent sort, as is right enough for a Genoese of the time of Innocent XII. We
may pass in review, in going through this temple, painters of the last hour, such as
Francesco Coghetti, Lapiccola, Benedetto Luti, Nasini, even Muratori; I mix them
all up without scruple; for the last hundred and fifty years they are all of the same age,
those of the present being no more inspired than those of the furthest period.
At the right side of the Tribune is the mausoleum of the favourite nephew of
Sixtus IV., of that Cardinal Riario, who died conveniently to leave the field open to
Julian della Rovere. Michelangelo, so they say, designed this tomb, which recalls
much more the style of Maiano, witness the two little Angels that, posed like genii
on escutcheons, look sulkily at Death, as they mourn over the deceased. Nearly
underneath this ambitious decoration, a glance towards the little tomb, so simple and
of such exquisite taste, in honour of a French cavalier of the armies of Lewis XII.
The vault of this chapel deserves that you should raise your eyes to the disturbing
matters which are being transacted there. One of the demoniacally-possessed decorators
of the seventeenth century, Odazzi, has painted up here the precipitation of the rebel-
lious angels from heaven ; thrust forth by a large hole, they topple down in clusters,
and roll across the vault in pulpy masses. In the same way as they commend for the
name of Michelangelo the tomb of Cardinal Riario, they extol that of Clement XIV.
because it is by Canova. The latter is not very good; the figures of Temperance
and Mercy want character, but in the seated statue, Pope Ganganelli has too much
impetuosity; he blesses with a melodramatic gesture. How many papal effigies whose
movement is forced, because people insisted on drawing their inspiration from the right
hand of Urban VIII.
The church is set in a convent; to get in, you go along a corridor adorned with
the most interesting commemorative monuments. One must hasten to breathe in the
mystic fragrance of these inner arrangements of the cloister. Sixtus IV. was a
member of this monastery; Julius II. also ; and we imagine the impatience with
which the latter made his sandal patter along the marble of this corridor. The coffin
of Michelangelo, who died in this parish in 1564, was for some time preserved in the
gallery here, where the memory of it is consecrated by a cenotaph of marble, repre-
senting Buonarotti lying among the emblems of the arts; a curious likeness, and an
interesting piece of sculpture, which has never been reproduced.
They have placed opposite to him Cardinal Bessarion, renowned Hellenist and
theologian, who, being brought from Trebizond into Italy by the Emperor John VIII.
Palaeologus, worked for too short a time at the Council of Florence, to effect a reunion
between the Greek and Latin churches. A defender of Plato, translator of Xenophon
and Aristotle, born among the Greeks and adopted a citizen of Rome, where his palace
was an academy, this Maecenas, who preached union by example, came and gave up
his last breath, as if on neutral ground, at Ravenna. The large medallion, with its -
bearded profile, representing him in a cardinal’s hat of immense size, thrust far over
the head, as for one going out to war, presents a strange personage. -
Let us now approach the plateau of the Quirinal by the outlet from the Colonna
gardens.
384 A’OME.
III.
Why has the hill which rises between the Viminal and the Pincian kept the mystic
surname of Romulus 2 This dedication is not of formal antiquity, because under the
Republic, and even under the emperors, they designated the Quirinal under the name
of Mons Agonalis. Scholars bring forward Sabine etymologies; with us, when they
claim to trace words to an unknown tongue, they go back to Celtic, which is nearly
as thoroughly studied as the Sabine may be at Rome.
Every one knows that the popes enclosed the most notable portion of the Quirinal
between the walls of the vast palace in which they have established a residence, if
not for summer, at least for the semi-season, and also a residence for winter. But
this erection of Gregory XIII., designed by the Lombard, Flaminio Ponzio, finished
under Sixtus V. and Clement VIII. by Fontana, enlarged by Carlo Maderno, completed
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by Fuga and Bernini, and restored under Pius VII.-the work of ten pontiffs, the
Quirinal palace, has not had the honour of giving its name to the piazza which its
principal façade decorates. In the middle of the piazza a jet of water plays in a
basin of oriental granite; Pius VII. brought it thither from the Forum; above the
basin stand in hard outline against the sky two athletic statues and two horses of
marble, placed there by Sixtus V. ; afterwards Pius VI. subordinated the two groups,
reducing them to serve as accessories to a needle of red granite, once posted as
sentinel before the Mausoleum of Augustus. These fine figures, and still finer
coursers—groups in which the Quirites amused themselves by recognising their old
patrons, Castor and Pollux—these masterpieces attributed to Praxiteles and Phidias,
chose the hill for pedestal, and re-named it. Unfortunately, they are cut in a porous
marble which the damp blackens; placed too high, they only appear like a bare
outline in the air; in another way the obelisk planted between the two disperses the
interest, and this conflict of precious works adorning the Piazza Monte Cavallo,
produces a discordant effect.

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THE QUIRINAL. 385
It almost faces the window where, at the end of the conclaves, they proclaim the
chosen of the sacred college; it is from this balcony that the popes let their first
blessing fall upon the world. De Brosses, who had the good fortune to see an
election, has told the story in some pages which are curious, intelligent, and indicative
of sound observation; but he did not speak of the palace; in the days when he had
the good luck to live, the cares and labours which the Revolution has brought upon
us, had not inclined all minds to repose as in a dream in the description of sites and
famous spots. -
Seen from the outside, the building is a fairly handsome barrack, soberly-faced,
with small architectural elegance. Ample staircases, an enormous court of cloistered
appearance, the gardens of peculiar arrangement—such is the aspect of the Quirinal.
As you enter, you distinguish with a certain surprise the inner physiognomy of a
residence built for a sovereign to whose character there is no parallel. It presents
an incongruous combination of the luxury of potentates, with the scruples of a pastoral
humility bent on displaying itself: the religious sense and the consciousness of sovereign
power are in continual contradiction with one another, and this rather incoherent side
of the situation constitutes the singularity of the thing. The quantity of thrones and
the profusion of stools for prayer; so many small chapels and better adorned rooms
of state; these chambers of audience with dais of purple and gold, with a table of
polished walnut and a beechen crucifix for the only manual; in the sleeping-rooms,
simple little keepsakes consecrated as among homely folk to the devotion of the
fireside—all helps to keep the mind undecided between respect and a smile. In this
familiar Italy, the candour of the priest has no care to hide itself; between the throne
and the table is a spittoon. On the whole, comfort and luxury have not come to a
bad understanding in this residence, where the pontiff, loosening his girdle, takes a
little rest in all the simplicity of a prince of the earth. If they had thought of such
a building in the happy ages of Bramante and Pollajuolo, they would have expanded
it into the most perfect monastic palace of Catholicism. The academic decline has
come out of it as it best could : the ground is austere, the splendours are simple
veneering. Except the small apartments, where the holy father has arranged some pretty
furniture for his own use, you meet nothing in the interminable series of antechambers
but noisy stucco work, daubed ceilings, doorways with cartouches. Then after the
great chamber—which is very long, with the dais and chair at the end—come a
multitude of special reception-rooms; a throne for receiving the salutations of ambas-
sadors, a throne for the morning audiences, a throne for extraordinary audiences, a
throne for evening receptions, a throne for dining alone in a room whose use is not
shown, a throne for festivals, when the pope eats apart, a throne—but I despair of
remembering them all. -
Each room, then, has its rigorously appointed purpose; we see in all this multitude
of special appropriations, a pitiless etiquette, which only makes a slave and a victim of
the prince who is bound to submit to it, and to keep it up. Not a cabinet, nor a private
corridor, nor a secret staircase; the palace is transparent; only the patience of a monk
and the innocence of a dove can acclimatize themselves in this great cage, whose bars
are disguised under Scenes offering all manner of free life and power—in tapestry,
presented by various princes. It is our Gobelins, who under Lewis XIV. and Lewis XV.
furnished the best pieces; all Jean Jouvenet has gone there; Napoleon III. only figures
by the copy of a Ribera. In front of these hangings, great imperial vases from China
3 D
386 ACOME.
shine out; but the seats are of wood, waxed and polished as in the parlour of a hospital.
As they have sought the subjects of the decorative paintings in the holy Scriptures,
you seem to be going through a suite of Florentine or Siennese sacristies, too freely
and tawdrily decorated. The severity of the cloister has shrunk from the use of
mirrors and glasses, but the chimney-pieces have pannels of porphyry and antique
red, as well as bas-reliefs in bronze.
And what skilful flattery has devised the emblems The glory of religion is
symbolized in the Triumph of Constantine; Julius Caesar dictating in four languages
to as many secretaries belonging to the four quarters of the globe, personifies a
sovereignty that has been prolonged by the pontiffs over all empires; a great ceiling
by Andrea Corsi celebrates Trajan, whom God received into paradise at the prayers
of St. Gregory; Trajan, the only pagan whom hell has given up, is shown to us
receiving the ambassadors of all the peoples in the world. The allusion is doubly
prophetic, for by a curious chance the Trajan of Corsi, incarnate in another Caesar
for whom Europe was then waiting, is a striking likeness of the first Napoleon. Nothing
is austerer nor less ornate, in spite of its columns of porta Santa, than the great
consistorial chapel, in which newly-promoted cardinals are proclaimed. On the altar
is a colossal Madonna of Stephen Maderno, the copy of which has been adapted to
the clock in the great court. At the other end they have placed a picture of the
Virgin surrounded by Saints, a triptych on a golden ground attributed to Lorenzo
of Florence, but which seems to me to belong to some Siennese—Vanni, perhaps,
or more probably Taddeo di Bartolo. This pannel is interesting.
Among the apartments are some respectable pieces before which one hardly stops,
but let us mention two very fine figures of Fra Bartolommeo, St. Peter and St. Paul,
produced in 1514 under the influence of Michelangelo, at a time when our monk
came to make the pilgrimage of the Sixtine chapel. The St. Paul, which is the better
of the two, has some analogy to the Isaiah of Sanzio, that young friend of a too
impressionable artist. Della Porta left the St. Peter unfinished, and Raphael completed
it: the contemptuousness of Leo X. had repulsed Fra Bartolommeo. I remember
also a chamber where Overbeck left a ceiling, which I only point to by way of land-
mark; this is the room in which Pius IX. received the envoys of the Revolution, and
in which nearly half a century before Pius VII. had been arrested—two painful
reminiscences. - -
The gardens of this great convent turned into a royal residence, with their terraces,
their statues, their fountains, their clipped avenues, their parterres cut into arabesques,
their architectural arbours, and their flaunting kiosk which Fuga erected to be a
buffet, in which the holy father in the midst of the landscapes of Battoni and
Orizonte offers sherbet and coffee to the greatnesses of this world—these gardens with
their capricious alleys, with such far perspectives over groups of campaniles and
domes, must be a vision of the infantine paradise of mysticism for our provincial
clerics. They make one think of the verdant carpetings of old, of the labyrinthine
grounds which decorate the heavenly Jerusalem of middle-age art; symmetrical fancies
which people of taste will discuss, but which are adored by the very simple, and
perhaps by the very subtle too.
On certain days, the Quirinal, where grass grows and the spider weaves, sees
the carriages and rich liveries of the prelates rolling up in front of its walls. This
is when the palace, deprived of its usufructuary lord, transforms itself into a hotel
S7A. MARIA DEG// AAVGEZ/. 387
for cardinals, and when, each evening, a motley populace of twenty nationalities,
with eyes fixed on a large balcony, awaits the name of the master whom the conclave
will give to themselves, to launch it on the echoes of the whole world.
IV.
The Via di Porta Pia which continues that of the Quirinal, will take us to the
Chartreuse of Sta. Maria degli Angeli. Buonarotti was over eighty when he took it
into his head to plant in the rotunda of the Thermae of Diocletian this church, which
he had been intrusted to build by Pius IV. So, while he raised the floor of the temple
by twelve feet, he kept the eight enormous monolithic columns of Egyptian granite
which supported the entablature, and faced the bases with marble. We know how
Vanvitelli and the Carthusians dishonoured this edifice, where the eye shocked by dispro-
portions fixes on the masterpiece of a French sculptor, the St. Bruno of Houdon. “He
would speak,’ cried Clement XIV., “if he were not kept back by the discipline of his
order l’ It was no small enterprise for an artist at the end of the eighteenth century,
imbued with antique models and philosophy, to hit by talent and suppleness of spirit
alone upon the seraphic expression which enlightens the soul of the saints. Houdon
succeeded in this; his work is of his own time; the figure is angelic without recalling
either the processes or the sentiment of a Fra Angelico, a Rosselino, a Mino da
Fiesole.
It was to Sta. Maria degli Angeli that they brought, after adroitly carrying it off
from St. Peter's and substituting for it there a copy in mosaic, Zampieri's Martyrdom
of St. Sebastian; the saint, the angels, and the Christ appearing in the heavens, are
most magisterial figures; in the foreground is a group of women and of common people
trampled on by the cavalry, while they strangle the martyr; a veritable masterpiece of
movement and execution. You pass in front of this, to reach the famous cloister
of the hundred columns, one of the largest that exists. It has the greatness which
the will of Michelangelo dreamed of in every circumstance. -
In the centre of this cloister with its hundred pillars of travertine, four cypresses,
tossed by time and grown into irregular forms, which Michelangelo planted, disguise
the edge of the well like a tomb: the distant lines of the low galleries against a blue
sky give to these sombre giants colossal dimensions. The square of the court makes
a kitchen-garden, in which smile some Bengal roses, but nothing interferes with the
grave and silent poetry of an enclosure vowed to meditation.
The monument is so enframed in the Thermae of Diocletian, that crossing a small
court you find yourself in the presence of one of the most considerable fragments of
that architecture, less antique, less pure, in worse preservation, than the Thermae of
Caracalla. On my way back, going through the church, I remarked a tolerably life-
like bust of Francis Alciati, professor of St. Carlo Borromeo. This nephew of Andrew
Alciati, was, according to Muretus, ‘the ornament of his century;' his contemporaries
are all agreed in offering praises to his genius; his glory is never to pass away!
He published nothing. They composed for him a very great inscription in only six
words:— -
VIRTUTE VIXIT, MEMORIA VIVIT, GLORIA VIVET.
3 D 2
388 A&OME.
Let us regain the street of the Quattro Fontane, and pass Capo le Case, to go as
far as our church of the Trinita dei Monti, built on the Pincian in 1494 by Charles VIII.
for the brethren of S. Francesco de Paolo. It is a mediocre monument, but with a
considerable appearance; to keep a favourable idea of it, confine yourself for a long
time to looking at the outside, especially from the Piazza di Spagna, at the top of which
it crowns a magnificent staircase. As you come out from the cosmopolitan street
baptized by the subterranean conduits (condotti) of the Acqua Vergine, you are dazzled
by the cascade of steps, which half-way down leaves two terraces encorbelled with
balustrade and pilasters, and then escaping by a division into two, proceeds to reunite
on the Pincian at the steps of a church ; the whole slope is absorbed by this decoration,
which imparts a certain appearance of size even to narrow spaces. This construction,
designed by A. Specchi and ended by De Sanctis, is not due, as is so constantly said,
to a M. Gouffier, our ambassador; France never sent to the popes any ambassador
of that name. It was Cardinal Melchior de Polignac who, when French minister at
the court of Benedict XIII., utilised and augmented by two-thirds a sum that had
been left in 1632 for this purpose by one of his predecessors, Gueffier—a sum that had
remained unemployed up to this time, because it was insufficient: the princely structure
was not completed until 1725. e
The foot of the steps is marked by a grotesque fountain, the Barcaccia, which is
erroneously attributed by some of our writers to Bernini, whereas it is really the
work of his father, Pietro Bernini, whom his adventurous temper led to seek his
fortune in the region of Naples. The fountain has for its principal subject a small
boat, foundered in a basin on a level with the ground; in the middle of the bark is a
vase from which a jet of water shoots up. This original subject wants common sense,
only the defect is so obvious as not to be worth demonstrating. The object of the
Barcaccia is to recall a memorable circumstance: towards 1624 the waters of the Tiber,
passing through the whole city and invading the Corso and the adjoining streets,
mounted to the foot of the Pincian, and a bark was moored at the bottom of the
Piazza di Spagna. * -
A friend told me one evening that fifteen winters before, as he was returning home
one thick night, he heard a low noise making a continuous kind of bass to a curious
plashing; a lantern swinging above threw serpentine flashes over black water, which
was stealthily rising between the walls of the Via Condotti. People are not wanting
who tell you that inundations are only due to the stripping of wood from the mountains,
but the archives of our provinces prove the disasters occasioned by the rivers in
the thirteenth century, and as for the Tiber, we know from Livy that in the time of
Scipio Africanus the low quarters and the Campus Martius, in which are the principal
streets of the modern town, were invaded by floods twelve times in one year. On
the Piazza di Spagna, in front of the College of the Propaganda, the nursery of
missionaries for barbarous countries, rises the column of the Immacolata, which, since
1856, consecrates the dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception. They made
use for this purpose of a shaft of Carystian marble, exhumed in 1778 from the Piazza
Campo Marzio. - -
Everybody has ascended a hundred times, by its broad hollow with gentle steps,
the slope leading from the piazza to which the palace of the Spanish ambassadors
has given a name, to the Villa Medici and the Pincian Gardens. In proportion as
you rise, you see the façade of the Trinita dei Monti lessen; it is cut in two by a little
*VNNOCIVIN GIHUL HO JLSVGIŁ GIHL LV NOISSCHOONIGI TIVOIHILNOGI

THE 7/8/AV//'A D/E/ MOV//. 389
obelisk planted in front of the portico, where it tries to make itself big by the aid
of a pedestal which is too long. It was a vexatious idea of the good Pius VI., this
obelisk, which was topped in 1789 by a fleur-de-lis surmounted by a star, with an
iron cross above. Two square belfries with pilasters and pediments form part of the
façade; you would take them for shabby pavilions, if the pediments did not support
on their four triangles the octagonal faces and roof of two campaniles. From the
Barcaccia to the lantern of these bell-towers, how many discords and heresies ' Yet the
ensemble has a singular fascination.
On an angular pile by the steps of the church, two popes have displayed their
arms; above they have placed an enormous capital taken from some temple of the
third century; on this capital they
have fastened a tomb-stone, and as no
less has been done on the other side,
this bit of bric-à-brac is an agreeable
ornament to the space in which the
Via Gregoriana and the Via Sistina
come out, separated by the house with
tetrastyle porch where Poussin died,
ten steps from the house of Salvator
Rosa, and nearly fronting that of Claude
of Lorraine. These three sanctuaries
guard the approach of the terrace, which
ends at our academy of painting and
at the Pincian Gardens. This park
extends to the end of the hill, and
descends on the Piazza del Popolo,
which is so flaunting on the occasion
of the festival of the Madonna, when
entering the city in gorgeous procession
by the bridge of St. Angelo, the car-
riage of the sovereign pontiff, preceded
by the cross-bearer on a caparisoned
mule, comes out of the Via di Ripetta
on its way to Sta. Maria del Popolo.
Now enter the church, which rises PERRON OF THE TRINITA.
like a tabernacle at the extremity of the
city; the monument is heavy and characterless. The French Revolution made of it a great
lumber-room; Lewis XVIII. having returned it to worship, M. de Blacas had it restored
according to the poverty-stricken and frosty taste of the time, by the correct archaeologist
of the palace of Scaurus. Exclusively devoted to the science of antiquity, the son-
in-law of Alexander Duval and the great-uncle of our dear and regretted Henry
Regnault, the estimable Mazois had not the art of restoring its physiognomy to a
church of the fifteenth century; he modernised it after the antique of the day.
How much I should have preferred seeing it as Ingres saw it, when towards 1810 he
turned it into a studio in which to paint his Romulus, conqueror of Acron In a small
water-colour the artist has drawn himself almost microscopically, and as seen from
behind, busy painting on a stool at the corner of his enormous canvas; his faithful

39C) A&OMAE.
violin rests on the ground against the picture; above you recognise the arches of
the nave.
The public of to-day go there to look at some tiresome frescoes of Alberti and
Rossetti, after the cartoons of Daniele da Volterra; some paintings assigned to Sodoma,
by people who have never seen Sienna; then in the last chapel to the right, some
frescoes contemporary with Perugino, that is to say with the foundation of the church,
but weak in sentiment and not very elegant in point of taste. Let us also remark the
Appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalene, only because they give Giulio Romano the
credit of this mediocre piece of some more modern artist; and certain figures by
Cesare Nebbia, which are rather turgid, but not without merit. Vien, Langlois, and
Some others are the equivocal interpreters of our school. Finally, the classic master-
piece that has received a traditional admiration for the last three centuries at the Trinita
dei Monti; the Descent from the Cross, by Daniele de Volterra.
It is on the faith of Poussin that they have continued to extol this painting: ‘The
Transfiguration of Raphael, finished by Giulio Romano, the Communion of St. Jerome
by Domenichino, the Descent from the Cross by Daniele de Volterra, these,” said
Nicholas Poussin, “are the most important works in existence.’ This was to give the
palm to three works of manufacture, clever, academic, weak in inspiration, and which,
this supremacy being accepted, have diverted the public taste in a path too favourable
to the school of Poussin : with this decree authoritatively formulated on many occasions,
our artist for two centuries led a sheep-like public opinion astray. This Descent from
the Cross, preserved in the second chapel to the left in the Trinita dei Monti, is a
rather loaded composition, with hard reliefs accentuated by the contrast of light and
shadow. The Christ presents an inert and lifeless body, more realistic than divine:
the expression of the Virgin is violently forced; the accessory figures remain in an
undecided kind of sentiment between naturalism and conventionalism. Beccafumi, the
true master of Daniel of Volterra, often debates in the same way, when he means to
fill his anatomical creatures with passion. Painted originally on the wall, the Descent
was transferred to canvas in 1811 to be despatched to Paris; but, the operation com-
pleted, the work seemed too fragile, and since then it has been restored by Camuccini.
The Trinita dei Monti and the old convent of the Minimes are occupied by the
nuns of the Sacré Coeur; it is a fine establishment with most extensive grounds. The
pupils wander in all innocence among gardens where Messalina once took her pleasure,
having acquired them from the heirs of Lucullus; they chatter where Galileo used to
dream, when, after being condemned by the holy office, this great man was installed
with all honour by the ambassador of Tuscany in the palace of the dukes.
It was there that cardinals and princes used to come to visit him, and it was on his
return that he wrote to his disciple, father Rineceri, the letter quoted in 1784 by Mallet-
du-Pan, a Calvinist who turned defender of Rome for love of truth: “The pope thought.
me worthy of his esteem; they lodged me amid the delights of the Trinita dei Monti.
When I arrived at the holy office, two Jacobins very worthily invited me to prepare
my apology. As for repression, they interdicted my Dialogues; and after a stay of
five months at Rome, they gave me my dismissal. As the plague was raging at
Florence, they assigned to me for my residence the palace of my best friend at Sienna,
archbishop Piccolomini. Now I breathe a pure air near my native town at my country
house of Arcetri.” Such were for this great man the ‘dungeons' of the Inquisition.
Nearly every morning I passed in front of the Trinita, on my way either to the Pincian
J.A. Z.A.S.C UCC/A. 39 I
for a view of the hills lighted up by the rising sun, or to the Villa Medici, at the approaches
to which the artists find ready for them some damsels from the fields clad in rustic
attire, the materials of local colouring for the use of the studios. There used often to
plant herself a ravishing creature, that our students did their best to see with the eyes
of Leonardo—the Pascuccia, whose wide black eyes and waving hair I have seen on
many a canvas. Occasionally I entered the church from which one by one the faithful
issued forth. Two or three serving sisters then appeared, and I would seek an oppor-
tunity of a word with them to see if I could discover in them anything of their native
land; their discreet smile and mystic aspect reminded me of our provincial convents.
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LA PASCUCC. A.

p
THE EMBLEMs of JUSTICE (RAPHAEL's stanze).
CHAPTER XIX.
Visit to the Calcografia camerale and the jeweller Castellani.-History of a band of brigands.-Protectorate
of the institution.—Multiplicity of places of refuge.—The Villa Medici and its refugees.—Origin of the
Academy of France, and its objects.-Comical reception ceremonial.-History and appearance of the
villa.-Rome as the metropolis of art and literature.-Would our Academy be better placed elsewhere?—
Services of the institution and some desirable expansions of it.—Origin and mission of the Istituto di
Corrispondenza Archeologica.
I.
O encourage the art of engraving and diffuse the works of painters, the
sovereign pontiffs have created the Caſcografta cameraſe, long anterior to
our Chalcography at the Louvre, which has produced more and taken a
happier flight within the last five-and-twenty years. One day as I was
returning by the Piazza Trevi and so was following the Via della Stamperia towards
the Pincian, I took it into my head to visit the pontifical workshops; I should have
liked to come upon a nice engraved proof of the small Claude of the Barberini palace,
and especially, rarissimae azes, some pieces of Marco Antonio. But I established to my
own regret that the old popes did not acquire the plates of the illustrious Raimondi,
that delicate disciple of Francia whom the study of Albert Dürer made so skilful, and
who, by simplifying his larger manner, placed at the service of Raphael a science of
design so vigorous in its interpretations. It was this great Marco Antonio whose head
Clement VII. was one day for cutting off, because he had engraved certain compositions
of Giulio Pippi for an edition of the too sprightly verses of Aretino.
At the Roman Chalcography you will find those grey, heavy, soft plates which are
due to Volpato and his pupil Morghen, and which have at once compromised and
popularised the Stanze of Raphael. Ruined by repeated printing, retouched from time
to time, so that the whole must have been recut, and heaven knows how, these plates,
with the exception of the one representing the Emblems of Justice, furnish now extremely
insipid interpretations. Nothing is more sad than to see what has become of the delicate
heads of the Parnassus, and the Dispute on the Sacrament. For that matter, these
figures were always too heavy. The Romans are convinced that all this is perfection,
and so the price has gone up in proportion as the work has got worse: these Stanze


ROMAW JEWELLERP. 393
of Volpato cost two hundred and twenty francs, and are not worth anything. The Mill
of Claude, a parody without relief or light, thirty-five francs. Among the painters of
the later period the cameral administration has only had Camuccini engraved: Guercino,
Domenichino, and Guido Reni form the bulk of the collection. By a surprising and
laudable anomaly, they have reproduced the too-little visited frescoes of Fra Angelico
in the chapel of Nicholas V. at the Vatican, but what a reproduction | If you insist on
one's quoting some good engravings, you would have to choose the Temptation of
Adam and Eve (Loggia), engraved by Carocci; the Supper of Leonardo, by Foli; and
the Sibyls of Sta. Maria della Pace, by Bertini. In short, a poor collection, an adminis-
tration without enterprise, a school without activity, a shop without customers.
As we are in this quarter, let us take the opportunity to visit the only industrial
establishment worth mentioning. Art is its object, and archaeological studies are the
foundation of a business which offers us monuments of the taste and fashion of the
remotest ages of antiquity. From the jewels of Assyria, Egypt, Greece, that he has
exhumed and studied, the goldsmith Castellani has deduced a kind of work which was
so vastly old as to seem quite new, and which has promptly produced its own School; his
shops constitute a unique cabinet, formed by a man of technical skill both as amateur
and dealer. From the very entrance he overpowers you; his staircase is a museum of
odds and ends set in the walls. Pieces of inscriptions, mutilated bas-reliefs, lions and
panthers from cabinets, heraldic wolves without head or tail, detritus of the sarcophagi;
he has utilised everything, and all prepares ingenuous nabobs for the splendours of
transcendent art-work. Besides, Castellani has furnished credentials of his condition;
and his little books on the Jewellery of the Ancients and on Primitive Civilization have
been placed by the papal government in the Index.
In the ware-rooms, too many vases and equivocal things. This is a great pity, for
the collection of antique jewels, both from the east and the peoples of old Latium, is
really of inestimable value. Tombs have given up entire parures; necklaces, bracelets,
rings, ear-rings, brooches; there are Some Tuscan gems, marvels going back possibly
to the Pelasgians. There are Etruscan mirrors, in which the engraving of fairy
delicacy contains figured scenes from the Iliad and the Odyssey; there is a Torques,
of which the work is of a most skilful complication; a vase of Tyrrhenian silver, stamped
with ornaments mixed with chimerical animals, and with a handle of miraculous finish.
Among these masterpieces, the jewellery of Greece is inferior to that of Egypt; Babylon
is superior to Memphis; and the aborigines of Latium to the jewellers of Athens; it is
the half-fabulous nations, from whom you must ask the secret of perfection.
^- Castellani had travelled through Europe and Asia in search of the artifice of soldering,
which enabled the jewellers of old to incorporate the most microscopic ornaments by an
invisible junction in an enamelled surface. One day during the carnival he fell in
with a peasant girl on the Corso, who had in her ears barquettes like those of the Etruscan
tombs. He questioned her as to their origin, and found that they had been made by
a village artificer in the heart of the Sabine hills. It was in the workshop of this
obscure craftsman, that he found the lost art of Etruscan soldering, thus perpetuated
by tradition for between five-and-twenty and thirty centuries. The copies due to
Castellani’s perseverance, and for the production of which he has had to invent a special
set of instruments, are scarcely less miraculous than the Sabellian originals. It is a
misfortune for art that the best customers in the world, the Americans, are at the same
time the worst connoisseurs; for, to allure them, Castellani finds himself compelled to
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394 A&OME.
fabricate hybrid products, which he displays before these inexperienced buyers. He
has some consolation in composing veritable masterpieces to show to people of
instructed tastes, who, whether they buy or not, will at any rate appreciate them.
From the old meeting of the Tre Vie and Castellani’s, let us ascend the Pincian Hill.
We will then enter the Villa Medici, and let us prelude by a few words on brigands,
perhaps an unexpected introduction to the French palace.
II.
During my residence at Rome, the first half of January was marked by fifteen
nocturnal robberies effected by violence in the streets, and of which information was
given to the police to no purpose. These fifteen attempts in as many days, perpetrated
on strangers only, imply on an average in the city and its environs a hundred episodes
of the same kind in a month. An incident which occurred three weeks after, led to
the amazing disclosure that there was at least one band of no less than thirty members,
who had an organized system of robbery, under the protection and patronage of persons
of some consideration, who shared in the profits of this distinguished calling. It was
in vain that the French police pursued into the Campagna men who were suspected
of the robbery and murder of a soldier. The monks, like other great landlords,
shelter the birčanti for fear of being assassinated if they should refuse; but above all
they dread lest resentment should induce the brigands to resort to arson; only able to
count on themselves, the convents, palaces, villas, great farms, and manufactories,
choose from out of the ranks of brigandage their clients whom they support, and by
whom in turn they are protected. . -
This is the way in which places of asylum and refuges of impunity have come to
be so multiplied, and among them rascals of distinction used to quote with eulogy and
seek by predilection the Villa Medici, residence of the French artists, who owe a just
popularity to this feudal condescension. The picturesque bandit has been thoroughly
used by our school. His domestication in our academy goes back, it is said, to Horace
Vernet, who drew certain keenly relished pictures from the “Institution.” It has been
made a reproach to one of his successors, whose administration has lasted longer than
all the others, that he welcomed this studio property too warmly to the villa. Such
condescension has its inconveniences; under Schnetz’s administration our six-and-twenty
artists, including their chief, bore the charges of sixty-four agents of an equivocal pack
of attendants. Thus there was no more room for housing the pupils of our Athenian
school, when they accomplished their mockery of a pilgrimage to Rome, limited to four
weeks, like a notary’s holiday.
The chambers and work-rooms of our scholars are for the most part mere garrets
in this magnificent palace, the walls of which almost form a museum. It all struck me
as ill kept, dirty, damaged; the locks hardly fasten the shaky doors. Surely such
facilities provoke weakness in virtues out of practice. What can be done P By a
peculiarly Italian feeling of the national prerogatives, a director may insist on main-
taining the right of asylum exercised by France in her own palace, and it is certain that
all this tolerance invests our academy with great popularity. Besides the fact that
such tolerance seems to the Romans princely and of the best taste, it protects our
THE VILLA MED/C/. 395
students when they face the suburbs and the Campagna. Still, Roman as he had
become, M. Schnetz tried hard to moderate the too vivacious excesses in the direction
of local colour; when his students complained of having been robbed, he haled the
offender before him; he harangued him and compelled him to promise there should
be no relapse; above all, he insisted on convicting him of the delinquency. One of
them having been robbed of one or two Napoleons by a servant, ‘Menez-le rondement,’
cried our director, ‘tenez bon Tâchez qu'il vous restitue au moins la moitié, et même
exigez-le: il faut de la fermeté !" If I dwell on these details, it is because they depict
what goes on in most of the palaces of Rome, in which live lords great enough to have
a pack of clients. These devouring creatures who would alarm us, are compared by
them to rats, who go nibbling about the house and do not make it at all uninhabitable.
M. Schnetz, whom I found there, I still remembered in the green years of his inter-
minable youth, tall, bony, dark-haired, with a twinkling eye; he was of the Trasteverine
type, or of that of a hardy companion from the Abruzzi. A friend of war, like the people
-
ºº:
Rºw: º --- AºA' º
I,
PORTICO OF THE VILLA MEDICI.
who have seen the pomps of the Empire, and childish as a soldier; fond of his art,
but without ambition, this distinguished intelligence extracted from the illusions of
others, in the shape of morality, a scepticism for which I should blame him; for this
leaning has held back the full flight of a talent, of which he was hardly conscious. In
his eagerness to put the master out of sight, our director had an almost exaggerated
respect for the independence of the students; far from imposing his own ideas or his
own manner, he fell back on subterfuges, when they constrained him to give his opinion;
sometimes even he would get out of it at his own expense with all the gaiety in the
world. His personality made so little effort to bring itself out in relief, that one of
the numerous French officers to whom he gave up his Thursday evenings, could not
guess if the master of the house were sculptor or painter. Intimidated by the example
of one of his chiefs, who had inquired of the laureate of musical composition, what was
his instrument—this young man came to inquire of me in a corner what was the
speciality of M. Schnetz. To justify such complete abnegation, you will remember


3 E 2
396 - A&OMAE.
that this is by no means a school; it is a residence gained by formed artists, who are
no longer pupils, and who are quite aware of that circumstance. But in France we
like to see everywhere lyceums or barracks; witness the warrior who when receiving our
painters introduced by their chief, benignly asked of the inmates of the Villa Medici,
‘Eh bien, travaille-t-on 2 est-on sage dans les dortoirs 3’
III.
France procures at a low price the honour of awarding to her best artists so glorious
a crowning of their studies: our students of the Villa Medici receive two hundred and
ten francs a month from the state. They have from this to deduct their board, seventy-
five francs; they must besides buy their own wine, and give fees to the servants; this
absorbs about twelve hundred francs, and so they have about thirteen hundred left
for clothing, fires, lights, canvas and colours, payment of models, and—travelling.
Such is the lot of the laureates of painting, sculpture, engraving, and musical com-
position : the architects have, by a special exception and in consideration of the
Athenian journey, the advantage of an indemnification limited to six hundred francs,
a munificence so narrow that a young man reduced to the bare official subsidies cannot
ever visit Italy. Many of them out of so modest a sum will still deduct something to
help a straitened family, and if there is any good work in question, they hasten to
assist. I have not often observed so much generosity, as in the ranks of these young
1116-11.
The students from the Academy of Antwerp have no palace, but after winning the
prize and passing a literary examination to show that they are instructed enough to
profit by their journey (in case of failure in this their departure is postponed), they
receive from this small state a sum of three thousand five hundred francs for a residence
of some years in Italy. Our students, whom a vexatious decree, recently introduced,
had confined to a limit of age curtailed by five years, have before them, and I must
regret it, only four years instead of a lustre: they have got permission to spend half
their time in travelling, if they have money enough to pay expenses, and they are
allowed, considering the absence of all intellectual instruction, to remain as ignorant as
the writer of a vaudeville. There are some among them who would like to be placed
in a situation for acquiring a more thorough knowledge of the Roman annals, and for
appreciating more correctly the ancient schools and the works of art that twenty
centuries have accumulated in them ; but some persons consider the prohibition of
general studies as the pledge of a freedom most wholesome to genius. There is a
doctrine that would have surprised Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Van Dyck, and
Poussin
It is not then without thinking twice that a man of tact, who does not feel sure
of being the equal of Apelles or Phidias, would venture to play the master with
young blades who may believe themselves to be sprung full armed from the brow of
Jove, and that is the reason no doubt why Schnetz, with a slightly ironical circum-
spection perhaps, contented himself with offering examples rather than counsels. A
Roman in carelessness and sobriety, he did not regret for his students the extreme
modesty of their provision; as for the interior comfort, which leaves so much to be
*(LNOYIJ NGICIN v9) IoICIAJN VIIIA
T

A&ECEPTION OF AWEW-COMERS. 397
desired, this philosopher found it no bad thing that his young friends should feel the
sting of distress in the midst of a palace, and should be preserved by straitened means
from Capuan luxuriousness.
Yet how radiant they all are, and how an artist who has dreamed for five years
of his youth under the Elysian shades of the Villa Medici, will love for all the rest
of his days the memories which he takes back with him to his native land With what
ardour, when exiled in the north, he longs to see them again, with what intoxication
he crosses once more the threshold of this palace | This was shown to me towards
the end of my sojourn by an old laureate since become famous, and now proud to
spread his wings by the nest whence he took his flight. Like the Olympio of the poet,
M. Gounod insisted on seeing everything again, but not for the purpose of awaking
the melancholy of recollection. The moment after his arrival, all dirty as he was, he
climbed the steps of the Trinita dei Monti. On the threshold of the villa, he recognises
with emotion the window of the room appropriated to the laureate composer; it was
open, when suddenly, O flattery of chance the pupil within set up on his piano the
march from Faust. Then the happy master invades the house, mounting the steps
three at a time, and falls with transport into the arms of the amazed scholar: “Almaviva
son’ io /* The little scene might have figured in Corinme.
Some ingenuous customs bring out the turn of mind and way of living peculiar to
these youths. From time immemorial the new laureates were expected on a given
day by the inland road, and their reception was turned into a festival. At daybreak,
the old scholars, mounted on asses and leading trucks for the baggage, went out by the
Porta del Popolo on the road to Viterbo, and after a meal at the Ponte Molle, they
went on until they met the berlin, which the joyful band stopped in order to seize the
new-comers. They have at length touched Roman ground ! They all fall upon them,
they embrace them a score of times, they thee and thou them instantly, and such is the
warmth of greeting that many of them in the midst of peals of laughter are softened
even to tears. But all this was the insidious prelude of a series of ordeals. The
embracing came to an end, the troop returned on foot and from the farthest possible
distance to the suburbs of Rome, where, under pretence of shortening the way, they
introduced the new-comers into a labyrinth of frightful alleys : they kept them
trudging along until evening, mentioning the name of Some famous palace before
hideous buildings which the others were led to admire on trust. This trick did not even
spare the directors. Alaux on one of these occasions so distinguished himself by his
credulity, that his pupils preserved for him the surname of Alaux de Rome. Night
has fallen ; worn out with fatigue and stupefied with the immensity and the hideousness
of the eternal city, our young friends enter the Villa Medici, which is designedly plunged
into the profoundest darkness. They are directed to grope their way to the kitchen,
where, by the light of sorry candles they are presented with a small bit of black bread,
and where, at a table without a cloth, they partake of a meagre and detestable Supper,
served by attendants in rags or got up as mendicant friars, as brusque and rude as
they can be. Still the seniors do not cease to extol the charms of the house before
their new comrades, whose spirits are fast clouding over; then with always increased
tenderness and attention, they escort them to the most hideous garrets of the palace,
where their apartments are prepared ; a truckle bed, a chair without a seat, a jug
without a basin, or a basin without a jug. We need not tell how mattresses on their
trestles treacherously fall to the ground, how tuneful cats give concerts, and how in
398 A&O/Z.
the hideous nightmare of their Eldorado these poor lads, worn out with weariness, are
aroused by terrific noises.
This original and lugubrious phantasmagoria is arranged so as to prepare a most
dazzling awaking. All at once sunlight and gaiety break into these darkened garrets;
the sleepers still stupefied, are pulled out of the caverns where they believed themselves
imprisoned, and carried off amid loud and joyful shouts into the midst of the marbles
of the portico, before the façade of the palace with its walls worked over with antique
bas-reliefs, on to the terrace whence they behold all Rome stretched at their feet;
then into those joyous rooms, whence the eye reaches to the Sabine hills; finally to
their studios, deep buried in their ver-
dure. The ecstasy of these dazzled youths
—this is the delicious spectacle which
their elders waited for, and had prepared
for. A feast in the fine refectory of the
Academy crowns these mad days.
Neither intelligence nor feeling is
wanted to these diversions, and the
imbroglio has been devised with a view
to an idea that makes it not unamiable.
The evening of the next day is
devoted to a reception, of which the
honours are done by the musical
laureate, who executes for his new
family the victorious cantata which won
him his place among them. Behold
them all full of attention to the work
of the young brother, impatient to
distinguish in it the germ of genius.
No rivalries yet; no heed of money, or
of that future of which they all feel
assured. Surely it is the very golden
age for these young souls, all proud
of one another, all rejoicing in a triumph
which is not divided, and all victors at
the Olympian games.
VIALE COPERTO, IN THE VILLA MEDICI.
IV.
Elevated on the hill of the gardens whence it dominates city and fields, the Villa
Medici, which you see from all sides, is masked by the two pavilions rising out above
the trees, over a broad and clear façade. From the exterior side which faces towards
Rome, the building has a cold look; windows of tolerable simplicity and very spacious,
a very high doorway crowned by a balcony—such is the unostentatious arrangement
adopted in 1540 by Annibale Lippi, when he erected the palace for the Cardinal
Montepulciano. This soberness has been well conceived, especially if at the time they

THE VILLA MED/C/. 399
had the intention of making of the opposite side a gem of architecture enriched by
a collection of bas-reliefs, the precious fragments of antique sculpture. This façade
with its portico sustained on splendid columns and watched by lions, is in vivid
contrast with the other, of which the design has without the slightest proof been
attributed to Michelangelo. t
It is probable, for the rest, that the plan was modified when Cardinal Alessandro de
Medici acquired possession of it, and gave it a name. He amused himself by decorating
it in the few periods of leisure which he was allowed under Clement VIII. from the
negotiations with which he was charged at the courts of various sovereigns, and among
others at the court of the Béarnais, Henry IV. On the death of Aldobrandini, the cardinal
having been chosen pope on the 1st of April, 1605, he took the name of Leo XI.,
and died only twenty-seven days after, leaving as many regrets as he had inspired
hopes. The Cardinal de Medici commenced collections which under the Florentine
sovereigns continued to enrich the villa on the Pincian : on the vase placed in front
of the steps was once seen the Mercury of John of Bologna ; a document recently
published informs us that in 1671 the young marquis of Seignelay admired in these
gardens a Cleopatra, Ganymede, Marsyas, as well as Niobe with her fourteen children.
It was Cosmo III. who, towards the end of his interminable reign, despoiled the Roman
villa for the benefit of his gallery of the Uffizi at Florence; the deserted husband
of Margaret of Orleans died an octogenarian in 1723.
At this period our school of painting was installed in the Corso in the palace of
Nevers, so called since Philip Julian Mancini, Mazarin's nephew, had inherited the
duchy of Nevers, which his uncle had bought in 1660; he was the brother of the
cardinal’s pretty nieces. The twelve scholars of Charles Errard, the first director of
the Academy which had been founded on the proposal of Colbert, having been sheltered
in the Corso, their chief lost no time in returning to Paris, since in 1672 Coypel
had replaced him, and two years before that, the same Errard, painter and architect,
completed the construction of our church of the Assumption and its unsuccessful cupola.
They had chosen this artist to inaugurate the new institution, on the ground that he
knew Rome, whither Richelieu, resuming by the advice of Poussin a project of
Francis I., had sent him to collect works of art for France, and have copies and
casts executed in the interest of the national studies. Charles Errard was from Nantes;
he returned to die at Rome in 1689, at the age of eighty-three.
De Troy (1738), Natoire (1751), and Vien (1774), in turns brought ability to the
directorial functions, which at the outset of the Revolution were exercised by the
allegorical and graceful Ménageot; a bond of union between the school of Boucher
and the reforms of Vien his second master. In 1722 Lewis XVI. appointed Joseph
Benedict Suvée, born at Bruges in 1743, and who had gained the chief prize in 1771,
but this estimable artist had not time to start before the Ioth of August; he was
cast into the prisons of the Terror, while the Academy of France at Rome was
suppressed.
Suvée did not arrive at his post until 1801, when our schools were re-organized by
the First Consul; it was then, by negotiations of which he was the soul, that this
adopted son of France contributed to endow her with the most magnificent domain
she possesses abroad: he died in 1807 in the establishment whose royal aspect adds
marked lustre to our school. To obtain the transference to the fine arts in 1803 of
this inheritance of the Medici, Suvée had many obstacles to surmount; but as he made
4OO A&OME.
sure that the purpose of the building could not be changed, he did not hesitate to add
to the insufficient resources of the state his personal fortune, which being nearly
altogether sunk there, consecrates the destination of the Villa Medici, if not for ever,
at least so long as our country shall preserve its respect for the engagements contracted
in its name. Diplomacy, which is lately said to have coveted this residence, could not
know to what universal blame it would devote any sovereign, who should banish from
their sanctuary in Rome the fine arts of the French fatherland. -
The principal directors at the Villa Medici since the beginning of the century have
been Guérin, who was more remarkable as professor than as painter, and Horace Vernet,
who had more prestige than influence, and who poured some of his own popularity
round the Academy. He was administrator from 1828 to 1834, and was replaced by
Ingres, who for six years had extreme influence over our laureates. After him, the
chiefs of the institution, having less tenacity and less robust faith in their doctrines, and
much more of that subtlety of spirit which engenders doubt, rarely looked on themselves
as masters with this or that system to propagate. Guérin had preached in the matter
of art that liberty of which Schnetz was the most respectful support, and also the most
disinterested. The administrator hardly ever administers, supplemented as he is by a
steward with an unlimited commission and hardly any responsibility, a combination which
is not without its inconveniences. This is very clear from the material state of the house,
which, probably not having been repaired since 1803, presents the dilapidated aspect to
which I have referred, and which contrasts oddly with the splendour of such a palace.
The most remarkable of the domestic apartments is the dining-room, adjoining a
kitchen whence issues that disturbing and too familiar odour of such offices in lyceums
and boarding-houses. This fine refectory is vaulted, and the arch has been divided
into compartments, in which since 1811 the portraits of our laureates have been placed
by their comrades: a brotherly idea, which too often suggests melancholy reflections,
for how many are unknown among these laurelled heads. Independently of the bad
taste that belongs to every period of fashion, two things struck me; how little common
are passable portraits, and how rare on these young brows is the luminous halo of
youth. One of the most extraordinary is Hector Berlioz, with high tufts of hair over
the head of a cock, strangled in a cravat half a foot high. In the features of F. Halévy,
nearly a child to look at, we have some trouble in recognising the amiable and
saddened man, who bore with visible resignation the burden of his life. Ambrose
Thomas (by Flandrin) and Francis Bazin are the models whom years have done least
to alter; one of the masterpieces of the gallery is the profile of a musician painted
by M. Henner. Among these likenesses, the epic laureates of 1812 and the romanticists
of 1827 have, the one a sombre mien d la Curtius, the others Byronic expressions, which
seem ridiculous to the more citizen-like realists of our own day. I may add that the
establishment possesses a library, which is treated by the majority of these gentlemen
with a respectful consideration.
V.
Rome is the last city of our busy century, in which abstinence from labour has kept
its ancient dignity. Free from the thirst of amassing money and from the desires of
luxury, withdrawn by its indolent independence from the deterioration produced by
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A’O.]/E'S PRIV// EGED A//SS/OAV. 4OI
manufactories, exempt from military conscription and from our heavy taxes, as from
the envious prejudices which seem to flow from the possession of political rights, the
Roman people, living in the open air in perfect freedom, has preserved its original
beauty: it keeps a proud air, imperious gestures, and the attitudes of sculpture. In
no other country can you find such a collection of creatures worthy to furnish models
in the highest style. Go a few furlongs away; the slopes that mirror in the Tiber
their ruins and domes, the Sabine and Alban hills, will revive all the inspirations of
Claude and Poussin. Their historic landscapes, formed by the masters of the world,
have preserved the balanced lines and grave aspects which, reminding us of far-off ages,
make a way to the soul like some sounding harmony:-that majesty of nature, which is
the language of art is expressed by the word style. In a word, this city, the ancestress
of our civilizations, is the storehouse of the most numerous and the most perfect
monuments of ancient and modern art alike. In later times the germs of the Renais-
sance which had been developed in the neighbouring states, came and flourished in the
UNDER THE PORTICO.
capital of Martin Colonna, of Nicholas V., of Julius II., and of Leo X. ; so that for all
branches of art Rome is the vastest studio and most complete museum that exists.
Assuredly it was here and not elsewhere that it was right to establish for sculptors,
painters, and architects a centre of studies, a home for observation, where everything
comes to take its just place and reach its own end. Only I ask myself whether it would
not be well to help in the development of the talent sent to these intellectual pastures,
by giving an impulse to cultivation of intelligence by means of a programme of studies.
The painter Pamphilus, who under Philip of Macedon founded the school of Sicyon and
Was the master of Apelles, required of his pupils a profound study of history, the natural
sciences, and the poets. We know that the artists of the Renaissance, beginning with
Giotto who was the friend of Dante, and Memmi who was the friend of Petrarch,
used to live with the philosophers, the scholars, and the writers of their time. I was
saddened, I confess, to find so generally in our Academy, great gifts along with
intelligences left uncultivated for want of elementary studies; to see men of such

3 F
4O2 A&OME.
Superiority in technical skill reduced to instinct alone, before so grand a book which
they had never been taught how to read.
These virtuosi need intellectual direction: I would prefer to seek it in the lettered
class, rather than among painters. It is agreed in fact that the latter have no longer
anything to profess before artists who are expert enough, and that, even if they did
exercise an ascendancy, it would be at the expense of the originality which is peculiar
to certain impressionable natures, that run the risk of losing it by passing under outside
influences. A scholar, on the contrary, an archaeologist, a critical historian, even a
poet, would produce advantages: for outside of all literary culture, the statuary will
only be a workman without style or poetry: the painter will rarely know how to
compose. It is not merely by courses of lectures, but by close communication with men
of study and science—a resource by the aid of which they may at Paris make up for
an inadequate classical education, but a resource that at Rome is absolutely wanting
to our artists;—it is by the habitual communication of a group of scholars of a solid
stamp, that the state would develope in our Academy the benefits of education.
Why should other nations have the advantage over us in an institution of the kind
I have suggested P. M. de Blacas, our representative, shared with Bunsen and Ghérard
in founding at the Capitol the Institute of Archaeological Correspondence: this esta-
blishment, which was destined to prosper, was assisted at the restoration by a sub-
scription for fifty copies of the Annals of the society, but after the Revolution of 1830
M. Guizot suppressed this allowance. Vainly did the munificence of the Duke of
Luynes take up for a number of years this debt owed by his country to literature:
official influence was wanting, and the ascendancy of Prussia became undisputed. She
established an archaeological library, the richest in Rome at this hour; she organized,
in the palace of her resident, academic saloons; scholars of different nations were
associated, professors of archaeology installed, and in a short time the Academy of
Berlin was enabled to send to the Institute of Correspondence, with scholarships, young
writers devoted to works of erudition. They are provided for two years with an
inadequate allowance of 1,2OO francs, which compels them to work in the public
libraries for the German booksellers. Placed under the aegis of the director and the two
Secretaries of the Institute, who give courses and readings, and under whose guidance
they explore fruitfully all the monuments and museums, the students are brought into
relation with the correspondents, and both co-operate in the collections of the Society
and profit by its labours, which are considerable. Forty-two volumes of Annals, thirty-
three volumes of Bulletins, two volumes of Memoirs, show the fruitful industry of this
international institution, to which our government has lost its right of sending scholars,
but which we are bound to speak of with all praise, as an example to imitate and a
subject of emulation to our country.
Would it not be both reasonable and wholesome that France should instal at Rome
at her Villa Medici, literary laureates as well as sculptors and painters ? Whence
comes our literature, if not from the Latin schools P. As for the humaner letters, Paris
is no more than a provincial centre; the capital is Rome, and the highest studies
must go back to that. And since in our democratic age, when every one must live by
his work, literature has become a profession, would it not be well to raise its level,
to strengthen by elevated study and the most precious of journeys, those talents which
with us, brought face to face from a tender age with the necessity of producing, tend
more and more to go down, so as to make a mark more rapidly? You have for painters
THE ACADEMP OF FRANCE. 4O3
a school at Rome, where they only learn by involuntary absorption; you have one
at Athens for four slips from the Normal School, and it has no notoriety because it
has no programme and the competition has no glory: you send engravers to Rome,
where people engrave no longer; you exile musicians to Rome, who hear no music
there, and who on their return invariably imitate at Paris the music of Germany:—
and you have no room for the writers, the art critics, the historians and poets, in a
place where everything would exalt their spirit, and every object would be a source
of lofty instruction
An incomplete institution, the Academy of France leaves much to desire; does
it follow that it is sterile in influence and results 2 Let us leave such an opinion to
levity and ignorance. To what degradation would the current commercialism have
brought decorative and monumental painting, already deteriorated, if one may not
say debased, if from generation to generation a few leaders, taking their impulse
from the Villa Medici, did not return to uphold traditions, to perpetuate style while
modifying it, and to uphold a sinking level? Without Roman initiation, where would
Pradier, Ingres, and so many others have been 2
If it had no other advantages than that of isolating in a spot where horizons expand
and even silence is eloquent, a number of young men who at home would be made
heavy by the triple prose of interests, examples, and dangerous pleasures, the Academy
of France would still be an advantage.
There is a grace which must leave in the understanding, the feelings, and consequently
in the works, an ideal that is ineffaceable, in having lived for five years away from the
commands of fashion and its purveyors, and having breathed the air with the marbles
of Greece and the creations of Raphael and Michelangelo, who are there in their
integrity; in having contemplated the beautiful under the horizons of Rome, and having
absorbed the aroma of all its majesties; in having passed through the decisive phases
of youth in the shade of the gardens where Armida is replaced by study, and where,
as in the Elysium of the poets, you daily frequent, and almost hear speak, the great
masters of the world by their own hearth.
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CLOISTER OF SAN LORENZO FUORI LE MURA.
CHAPTER XX.
Punishment and prophecy of St. Sixtus.--Tomb of the deacon Laurence.—Origin of the basilica of San
Lorenzo fuori le Mura-Electoral battle in the sanctuary in 366.-Description of the church and the
cloisters.-Santa Pudenziana and the guests of St. Peter.—Two words on the legend.—Mosaic of the
Pudentii in the fourth century: opinion of Poussin.-Tullia and the Via Scelerata.-Mosaic of SS. Cosma
e Damiano.—Souvenir at S. Prassede.—Popular funzione at Sta. Maria Maggiore.—Decoration and
curiosities of this basilica.-Symbolism of its mosaics.-Iconographic legend of Our Lady of the Snows.
Rome, the pontifical see was filled by an old man who was a native of
Athens, honoured under the name of St. Sixtus: he was put to death in
259, as his predecessor Stephen had been two years before. As he went
to punishment, a young deacon followed close behind him, and cried to him with many
tears, ‘Will you go without your son 2 Shall I not help you more in this last sacrifice P’
‘My son,’ replied the old man, ‘thou shalt rejoin me in three days.”
The deacon who thus invited martyrdom was called Laurentius. Sixtus II. intrusted
to him the treasures of the church, and when he found himself being dragged to the
praetorium, he bade him sell the sacred vessels and share the price of them among
the poor. The bishop having been slain, the prefect enjoined on the deacon to hand
these riches to the AErarium, and Laurence having begged for some hours in which


º º
Tilliºl||
mº
TRANSEPT AND CONFESSIONAL OF SAN LORENZO.

SAN LOREWZO FUORY ZE MURA. - 4O5
he might bring them together, reappeared with a crowd of mendicants in his train.
‘Behold,” he said, ‘the treasures of the children of Christ !”
Taking for a mockery these words which he could not rightly understand, the
prefect commanded that the young Laurentius should be beaten with rods; then he
had him stretched all bleeding over a gridiron heated red hot by live coal. His courage
and gentleness appeared so superhuman, that many people were converted to the
Christian faith, seeing this execution, which took place on the 10th of August, the fourth
day after the death of St. Sixtus, as he had foretold.
When the night was come, the faithful brought the body into a cemetery belonging
to the property of Veranus, a mile beyond that Tiburtine gate which Honorius recon-
structed, connecting it with the aqueduct of the Marcian, Tepulan, and Julian sources,
restored by Octavianus. At this time the Christians, already tolerably numerous, had
brothers and protectors among the patrician classes, who acquired the fields under
which reposed the martyrs in the Catacombs. The old possession of Veranus, near the
Tiburtine gate, had been bought by a lady named Cyriaca, who has transmitted her
name canonised to the crypt of which she was the last guardian : she gave the ground
to her co-religionists, and they afterwards dug out two tiers of Loculi round the burial-
place of St. Laurence, to construct the aisles of a church. Thus granite, porphyry,
and marbles gladdened this tomb, where lamps and incense burnt. When Constantine
came to inaugurate the church of St. Laurence, the oldest among the old could recall
the death of the martyr, the translation of his remains, and the underground vigils
before the relics of the blessed one. - - . . .
But by a return, which betrays the fragility of institutions and their swiftness in
degenerating, the faithful who had in their childhood seen the consecration of the
basilica, had in their last days also to see within the same sacred enclosure cabals and
murderous scenes, which did little to recall the ages of St. Sixtus or St. Sylvester. It
was at St. Laurence that in 366 took place the tumultuous election of Pope Damasus,
which was disputed by Ursinus or Ursicinus, who was supported by the party of the
deacons, strengthened by the vagabonds, buffoons, and charioteers of the circus. They
fought round about the church, even in the very sanctuary itself, which was taken and
retaken, and while the partisans of Damasus protected the altar where the newly elect
was consecrated by the bishop of Ostia, the electors shouted and stamped their feet
in blood. . - -
Three weeks after, Ursinus took his revenge and had himself ordained in his turn
by the bishop of Tibur, but seconded by the soldiers of the prefect, the partisans of
Damasus intervened, armed with axes and swords, and as their barricaded adversaries
resisted the assault, they climbed on to the roof, from which they tore off the tiles,
and then they showered them down like arrows on the heads of the defenders of the
anti-pope; finally they set fire to the building and burnt them. According to Ammianus
Marcellinus a hundred and thirty people perished, and according to Rufinus a hundred
and sixty. In the time of the Catacombs the bishopric of Rome was not an object of
such controversy; but since then the emperors had turned their function into the most
enviable of posts. “If you will make me bishop of Rome in your stead, I am ready
to turn Christian,’ said a prefect to the pope who was trying to convert him. . .
It was in the midst of persecutions that Damasus passed the first sixteen years of
his pontificate, until the moment when, despairing of finding judges, he assembled a
general council in which he had for secretary and defender St. Jerome, who was destined
4O6 A&OME.
to help this old man in reforming the church, and in extending his jurisdiction over
the sees of Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria. Son of a scribe, a reader attached
to the basilica where he was chosen, the pontiff Damasus may have counted the church
of St. Laurence in some sort as his country. The quarter was witness of more tragedies
than one. It was at the Tiburtine gate, become the Laurentian gate, that on the
night of the 20th of November, 1347, Rienzi crushed, almost to the youngest offshoots
of the stock, the whole race of the Colonna, who had formed a coalition among the
barons of the country to recover Rome. Gregorovius has reproduced in an admirable
narrative this epopee, which recalls the old massacre of the Fabii at the Cremera.
In the sixth century St. Laurence extra Muros, one of the patriarchal basilicas, was
half buried; Pope Pelagius had it disimprisoned; making a centre of the apse, at the
foot of which rest the remains of the deacon, he doubled the extent of the church by
erecting aisle facing aisle. Towards 1216 Honorius III. simplified the temple, which had
two levels, by raising the presbyterium, of which the foundation was to a large extent
filled up ; the altar since then has been at a still greater height above the sepulchral vault.
Pius IX. wished to exhume the whole: having completed the isolation of the church
from the hill, he disengaged the eight fluted columns with Corinthian capitals of the
Constantinian basilica, to which Pelagius had added two pillars crowned with trophies
and figures, and resting on bases adorned with rosettes and crosses. It is to Pope
Honorius that we owe the fine mosaic which, on the arch of the vault, represents on
one side St. Laurence and Pope Pelagius II. led before the Saviour by St. Peter, and
on the other St. Paul between St. Stephen and St. Hippolytus, draped in white. The
Christ is seated on the globe; Bethlehem and Jerusalem, his cradle and his tomb, are
drawn at each end of this important composition. The pulpits, which Innocent III. had
decorated with pannels of red porphyry and green serpentine, are heightened in effect
by settings of small mosaic. Rome possesses nothing in this kind which attains such
charm of effect with so much simplicity. The choir having been freed by Pius IX.
from the rubbish which supported it, they had to stay it on a colonnade, which upholds
a ceiling of modern taste and out of harmony with the style of the church; this space
isolates the tomb of St. Laurence, which you discern in shadow through a gilded
grating. These restorations disturbed me from the first; Virginius Vespignani's talent,
which is less supple than it is correct, was not calculated to reassure me; as I walked
round the peristyle, I was only too well reminded of Fontaine and Percier, those Dioscuri
of our Thermidorian Greece. At the corners of the basilica they found doors walled
up, which continued the aisles through the Catacombs.
It happened that the illustrious author of Roma Sotterranea, M. de' Rossi (who did
me the honour to explain St. Laurence extra Muros), having one day gone down at
a considerable distance in the plain to the bottom of an unexplored cemetery, and
lost himself, he began to walk on, trusting to accident for an outlet, when finally he
heard with amazement the sound of religious singing accompanied by the organ.
He pushed on, thrust against a door which was rotten and blocked up, and having
cleared a way, he saw himself to his own stupefaction in the basilica of St. Laurence.
These labyrinths furnish the most terrifying perspectives to the imagination: they tell
the story of one archaeologist who, having lost himself three miles from Rome in a
maze of the cemetery of St. Agnes, wandered in despair all through a long night of
forty hours between two hedges of tombs, and finally returned to the light of day under
the Trinita dei Monti, in front of an air-hole in the Piazza di Spagna. Everybody
SAM / OA’/AWZO /"UOA’/ / / /UA’A. 4O7
remembers the adventure of Hubert Robert, which has been versified by the abbé
Delille. The Laurentian basilica has been planted so deep in the Catacombs, that
niches and pieces of wall painted in the third century still subsist in the church; even
under the burial-place of St. Laurence there is a third tier of Loculi. It will soon
be brought to the light, which has never yet descended into it.
This basilica, one of the five cathedrals of the pontifical Roman bishopric, possesses
in the centre of its Presbyterium an antique and massive seat, which was decorated in 1254
with two graceful torse columns, was edged with fine mosaics, and was set in a facing
of marble, with porphyry coffer-work framed with gems. We cannot omit to mention
the ornamentation of a monument, on which so many centuries have left their traces.
BASILICA AND CONVENT OF SAN LORENZO FUORI LE MURA.
In fact the sculptured débris of palaces or temples, entablatures preserved from the
primitive basilica, are supported on twelve antique columns of violet marble with
Corinthian capitals. The upper gallery forms a square enclosure, resting on twelve
other small columns with Ionic capitals, also fluted, and a greenish granite from Egypt,
the rarest in the world. These materials suggest a curious identification. Thus, for
one peculiarity, with which not many persons concern themselves, the Ionic capitals
of the Constantinian portion have received among their foliage two strange figures,
a lizard and a frog. Now Pliny informs us that in the time of Agrippa, two artists
from Corinth, whose works he admired, not having been able to obtain the favour of
placing their names on the temples they decorated, translated them into hieroglyphics.
He adds that one was called Saºpos (lizard), and the other Bárpaxos (frog). A century

408 ROME.
after, Pausanias found in Greece the trace of these famed artists, and described in
his Corinthica some of their works. Thus are the sources of the Laurentian basilica
explained by the contemporaries of Tiberius and Marcus Aurelius. -
The following ages have upheld these traditions. After the works of the sixth
century, and the mosaics embellished from age to age, the abbé Hugo in 1147 had
placed on four columns of porphyry the elegant open cupola of the tabernacle or
ciborium; in the nave of Honorius, supported by twenty-two Ionic pillars of granite,
a mosaic interrupts the Alexandrine arabesques of the pavement, representing two
knights of the crusades, with their escutcheons; one is Peter of Courtenay, Emperor
of Constantinople, whom Pope Honorius consecrated in the Laurentian basilica.
Near the door below a mosaic of the early Renaissance, seek in that antique
sarcophagus the ceremonial of Marriage in pagan Rome; it contains the bones of
Cardinal Fieschi, nephew of Innocent IV. How many marvels have thus been saved
by devotion to the arts | -
To close what concerns this church, let us not forget under its vast porch forty
frescoes of the thirteenth century, consecrated to the legends of St. Laurence,
St. Hippolytus, and that other saint who perished nine months after the Saviour—
St. Stephen, the first martyr, and the second who prayed for his executioners. From
the year 415, when the remains of Stephen were dug out from the field of Gamaliel,
the Roman deacon Laurence, and the archdeacon of Jerusalem—St. Irenaeus gives
him this title—were gathered together under the altar of St. Laurence without the
walls. The frescoes are extremely curious in point of movement and of costume,
and for the usages which they reproduce; but they have been repainted with a
heaviness which lessens their worth. After taking a last glance at the heraldic
lions at the foot of the two pilasters of the doorways, and seen from the piazza the
walls, with deep open cornice, of that house which, though so little striking without,
is a magnificent temple within ; after looking at the buildings of the Franciscans
with their low cloister and sombre campanile, at St. Laurence on his pillar, at the
cypresses of the cemetery—even then the interest of the place is not exhausted.
On the polite pretence of seeking our opinion upon some inscription, Signor de' Rossi
introduced us into a cloister that is very rarely visited. Its galleries have arches
fully vaulted, narrow and low; their pillars, which are unlike one another, and are
sometimes joined in pieces, adapt the gorge or cavetto which surmounts them to
bevelled entablatures; three-lobed niches ornament the upper story, resting on a
frieze in a romantic taste of a very accentuated kind. Earlier than the wonderful
cloisters of St. Paul and St. John Lateran, this which shows the same principle of art
in its beginnings, belongs to the eleventh century; an amateur instructed by the
monuments of Gaul could only agree on this point with the opinion of the learned
De' Rossi. By his care, the galleries of the cloister of St. Laurence, the oldest in
Rome, filled with inscriptions, bas-reliefs, and fragments collected in the catacombs
of Cyriaca and in the basilica, become a museum of history and archaeology. The
centre of the court has been transformed by the Franciscans, who kept coming and
going, weeding or handling the watering-pot, in a diminutive garden of rare plants
from distant climates. When we had scribbled some notes on the corner of a
sarcophagus, we had to give a smile to the aloes, orchids, and Syrian plants, of the
good brothers who have deserved so well of learning by the favour they have shown
to the labours of Signor de' Rossi.
º º ſ -
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T.
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PULPIT OF THE GOSPEL, AT SAN LORENzo,

S. PUDENZIAM.A. 4O9
II.
After returning to the city by a long rectilinear street, in which high walls hide
the gardens of the Esquiline from you, and when you have crossed the piazza and
turned the church of Sta. Maria Maggiore, you observe at the corner of the Via
Urbana a small church placed on a lower level of ground.
St. Pudentiana is announced by a square bell-tower of brick, of solid and firm
look, although on its four fronts it is opened by a triple row of three-lobed arches,
supported by two columns. Each of these stories, adorned with small medallions of
black marble, is finished by a cornice of round tiles, with modillions with projecting
denticules; a double coping runs round the arches; a low roof surmounted by an
iron cross crowns the whole, while tiny bits of vegetation mingle green veins
with the tone of the brick. Such bell-towers are numerous at Rome; their form,
derived from the antique style, ennobles in them a certain indefinable look of poverty
and dilapidation.
At the corner of the street there comes into sight one of those convents of an
indefinite age, its bare walls stained with ancient marks, of which time only possesses the
art, and in which the taste of the ages of beauty is only betrayed in a few details of
a not very striking kind. Beyond these buildings, some steps go down into a
square court, at the end of which is the church-door, always kept shut, possessing
an air of mystery, and stirring one with a desire to go in. The uprights of this door
are framed by half-a-dozen mouldings of gentle relief; it has ancient columns
with torse flutings, whose capitals, baskets of lotus, support on broad abaci an
entablature surmounted by a frieze of the twelfth century, and which is decorated by
five medallions connected by leafage (see p. 411). The church is associated with the
first patricians of Rome who professed Christianity; you still distinguish under the
crypt the foundations of a palace of which Pius I. made an oratory in the year 154:
this palace was that of a Senatorial family, who are supposed, under that pontiff, to
have given hospitality to St. Justin, as its ancestors had given to St. Peter. Thus
the Catholic ſasſi must have begun there, with the earliest preachings.
Perhaps we have all become somewhat too contemptuous of legendary documents,
those instructive gazettes, so to speak, which the churches of different countries inter-
changed with one another. Although epigraphic discoveries occasionally arise to
contradict the historians of paganism, yet Suetonius, Polybius, Livy, who often con-
tradict one another, Sallust who was a good-for-nothing, Quintus Curtius even, are
all powers, while the annalists of the primitive Church, who lavished their blood in
pledge of their sincerity, are not even so much as discussed. For having had doubts
about Tacitus, and with good reason, Rollin and Voltaire were well scolded by
D'Alembert, Thomas, and La Harpe. Yet it seems as if the enormities charged by
the profane historians against the Caesars lend some probability to the cruelties described
by the historians of the Church. They were among the practices of the time; it
was in this way that they were accustomed to treat slaves, prisoners of war, and even
senatorial families, and if the historians say little of the martyrs, it is because the
victims were mostly obscure, and because they aimed at stifling, not bringing into full
light of publicity, those who countenanced a dangerous sect. How can we help
3 G
4 IO A’O.]//Z.
becoming fearful of denying, when we see one of the least probable monstrosities,
the Massacre of the Innocents, attested by the Platonist Macrobius, who among the
Ana of his Saturnalia, recalls on this subject, as alluding to a notorious fact, a certain
saying of Augustus perpetuated by tradition 2 Having learnt,’ says Macrobius,
‘that among the infants under two years old who were massacred in Syria by Herod,
King of the Jews, that prince had also caused his own son to be slain, Augustus
exclaimed, // were effer to be //erod's hog ſhan his chi/a//
So let us not be afraid of admitting as authorities the Acts of the Apostles, the
Epistles of St. Paul, the Acts of St. Justin, the chronicles of Eusebius, the works
of Anastasius and of St. Jerome, the Annals even of Baronius, and the Bollandists,
who have compelled all to enter in.
These writers follow for more than a
century the family of the senator
Punicus Pudens who, with his mother
Priscilla, had welcomed and protected
St. Peter; the Acta have transmitted
the memory of the children of this
patrician, Pudentius and Sabinella;
finally, that of the third generation
represented by two brothers, Timothy
and Novatus, and two girls, Prasseda
or Praxedes and Pudentiana. Inscrip-
tions confirm the witness of the sacred
historians: the cemetery, underground,
where, close to the Viminal, beyond
the Salarian gate, Punicus Pudens and
his wife were buried, has kept the
name of Priscilla; St. Peter was repre-
sented there in the third century
between the two daughters of Sabinella
(see p. 414); in the eighth, Pascal I.
discovered and brought to Rome
the bodies of St. Praxedes and
St. Pudentiana, the two hostesses of
CONVENT OF SANTA PUDENZIANA. St. Justin : we still read in the
catacombs of Priscilla the inscription
of a Cornelia Pudentianeta which attests the immense duration of this family burying-
place.
From so many facts thus corroborating one another, it is not unreasonable to con-
clude that, after founding the church of Antioch, the prince of the Apostles arrived
at Rome in the reign of Claudius, preceded no doubt by a certain renown ; for he had
been recently called to Caesarea to baptize a centurion, and Simon Magus, who had
gone before him to the eternal city, had probably made his name known while seeking
to cast discredit on him. As in all the countries where the aristocracy had not yet
sunk into sensual degradation, the great lords in Rome no doubt made it a point of
honour to welcome the philosophers of Greece and the East: St. Peter then may well
have been quartered in the house of some partisan of the new ideas, and the proof

MOSAIC OF S. PUDEMZ/AAWA. 4 II
of such leanings existing might be inferred from the rapid conversion of Pudens and
his family.
This house, where St. Peter is supposed to have lived and to have professed before
approaching the basilicas, and to have sat in the curule chair of the senator, which
has probably been preserved, this house was so marked that after an interval of less
than a hundred years a pope consecrated it, and under Constantine the modest chapel
was replaced by a church dedicated to Sancta Pudentiana. This emperor divided the
aisles by twelve ancient columns of grey marble, which in 1598 it was necessary to
surround by pilasters; he had placed in a chapel to the right an altar, on which
St. Peter was said to have sacrificed; he left open under the pavement the Puſeolus of a
domestic catacomb where Pudentiana
had gathered together the bodies of a | |*|| ||
legion of martyrs, whose remains are * ==
still to be seen. In the cemetery of T º, - |||||||||||||||||||||III
Priscilla they have recovered several º
portraits of this family, a fact that *--
adds to the interest of the impor-
tant work of which I have now to
speak.
The Constantinian mosaic, of great
size (see p. 413), executed in the tribune
of the choir at the back of the high
altar, and composed in honour of the
family of Punicus Pudens, is something
more than a document or a curiosity;
it is a masterpiece of Christian anti-
quity. Giulio Romano must have loved
this rare piece, which Poussin could
never weary of contemplating and
extolling. The composition is simple
and well arranged in its symmetry; in
the centre is seated the Christ, draped
in a toga of gold; to his right and left
are placed St. Peter and St. Paul - - ==
crowned, the one by St. Pudentiana, DOOR OF SANTA PUDENZIANA.
the other by her sister Praxedes;
around these principal figures are grouped Pudens and his descendants, Pudentius,
Novatus, Timothy, and Sabinella. The draperies of the Saviour are well distributed;
the calm of the picture, the character and arrangement of the figures, are all alike
remarkable. It is the most ancient Christian picture that can be studied at Rome
from the point of view of art; those of the catacombs are rather curious documents,
the mosaics of S. Costanza and of S. Agnese hardly represent more than ornament
and decoration, those of Sta. Maria Maggiore are feebly lighted, and are so small that
from below you cannot examine them; finally, those of Ravenna are later. Some
Italian critics have attributed this mosaic to the reign of Pope Adrian I. ; but one
must have had little experience, to plant a work of this kind in the very depth of the
decline, towards the end of the ninth century. If we consider the revolutions in art

3 G 2
4 I2 FOME.
between the second and the twelfth, we shall understand that the purer a work appears
in form and style, the nearer it comes to antiquity; just as the more dramatic sentiment
or tender and mystic expression you discover in it, the closer will it be to the thirteenth
century. - - . -
In following to the bottom the Via Urbana which Urban VIII. had laid out,
but which under the kings, as Livy tells us, was already called clivus Urbius, you fall into
the quarter of the Suburra which figures so often in the Roman annals. If you then
ascend a certain alley escarped on one side, which winds and leads to St. Francis of
Paola, you tread ground that a legend has made very famous. “Tullia regained her
house,’ says Livy, “and when come to the top of the Cyprian Way, where the altar of
Diana had been, she turned to the right to go down the Urbian slope, so to go up again
on to the slope of the Esquiliae, when suddenly the driver of her car stopped in terror,
and holding the reins showed to his mistress Servius lying slain. There, as tradition
says, was wrought a hideous deed, and this spot is the commemoration of it, for
ever since the name of Vicus Sceleratus has been given to that, in which Tullia,
delirious and tormented by the furies, urged her car over the corpse of her father,
and being splashed with the blood from the wheels, carried with her to her own home
her share of the gore and slaughter: this is why the gods, angry at that bad beginning
of the reign, made ready an evil end for it.’ The Vicus Sceleratus has the foul and
horrid aspect of spots that have a curse upon them.
As curiosity has brought us down into the Suburra, let us turn our digression to
advantage by going to the entrance of the Forum, in front of the choirs of SS. Cosma
e Damiano, to look at other mosaics, nearly as important as those of St. Pudentiana,
and which ought to find a place here.
III.
Like St. Lorenzo in Miranda, its neighbour, the church of St. Cosmus has enclosing
it the colonnades and the sanctuary of an ancient temple. You will read everywhere
that this temple was consecrated to Romulus and his brother; the truth is, that nobody
knows to whom it was dedicated, and that probably from 526 to 530, when Felix IV.
erected this little church, and gave it the pagan cella for vestibule, contemporaries
knew no more than we do. This rotunda possesses an antique door of bronze, adapted
to its primitive marbles: that circumstance throws a good deal of doubt, in my opinion,
upon the tradition which brings from Perugia, at some indeterminate date, a door whose
curious ornamentation, like the temple itself, probably belongs to the end of the third
century. It was Felix IV. who gave the order for the mosaics of SS. Cosmus and
Damianus which, in style and taste of design, still preserve some connection with the
expiring schools of antiquity. To make me appreciate them the better, a young monk
informed me that the noun mosaic comes from Musivum, and means worthy of the Muses.
What a glorious etymology It would be worth discussing, if it were proved that the
mosaics of the Temple of Fortune, erected at Praeneste by Sulla—the first, says Pliny,
that were seen at Rome—represented Muses. He adds that the Greeks received the
processes of mosaic from the Persians, and that in his time they began to make them
in coloured glass.
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VIEW AT THE BACK OF THE CHOIR, SAN LORENZO.

S.S. COSMA E DAM/AMO. 4 IS
In examining, on the arcade of the choir of St. Cosmus, which is unhappily cut at its
extremities, the ensemble of the compositions by which it is decorated, we recognise
that in those times the Christian revolution had brought to artists, along with a new
inspiration, special means of effect to palliate the decay of the sense of the beautiful,
and the skill which lights it up. Placed upright on the summit of the arch, between
St. Damianus and St. Cosmus, who are presented by St. Peter and St. Paul, the figure
of the Saviour, blessing with his right hand, and with his left holding the Gospels, and
clothed under an ample white mantle, with a purple dalmatic, this figure with its nimbus
possesses an incontestable majesty. St. Cosmus bears one of those crowns of flowers
which covered the bread of oblation, offered by the faithful—a usage perpetuated down
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to our own time. Distributed with great dignity, the draperies are well suited to the
attitudes and forms; it is still somewhat antique art, but under another law. To the left
is represented the fourth of the popes canonized under the name of Felix, a precious
portrait, the head of which, over-restored by a mosaic-worker of the sixteenth century,
seems very weak by the side of the rest. On the other side St. Damianus is followed by
St. Theodore. Below this large subject, at once monumental and simple, the Twelve
Sheep surrounding the crowned Lamb come out in a line, as predella, from the two holy
cities, Bethlehem and Jerusalem, the birthplace and the tomb. On the frieze flit cherubs,
beside the Book with the Seven Seals and the Golden Chandelier; above the Christ, are
spread out the four views of the terrestrial paradise, emblems of the truth which comes
down from heaven and fertilises the cardinal points of the earth. Let us not omit
| tº : *A* * T |
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MOSAIC OF SANTA PUDENZIANA.

4 I4. A’OME.
the Phoenix—winged prototype of the resurrection, and having a star for nimbus. These
mosaics can only be compared to those of St. Pudentiana, and to those which we shall
soon see at Sta. Maria Maggiore. Let us not forget that nine centuries afterwards, when
he designed for the tapestries of Leo X. the cartoons of which seven originals are at
Hampton Court, Raphael did not disdain for figure of the Saviour, to copy, or almost
copy, the Christ of SS. Cosma e Damiano.
Let us return to the Esquiline and salute, before entering the basilica of Our Lady of
Snows, the grand-daughter of the senator Pudens—the younger sister of St. Pudentiana.
IV.
Above the old theatre of Florus, and the piazza where the house of Propertius
was, which Ovid and Tibullus used to visit, a few steps from the house of the Pudentii,
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SS. PRASSEDES AND PUDENTIANA (CATAcOMB OF PRISCILLA).
and probably in their grounds, were the Thermae of Novatus, brother of Prassedes.
Pius I. founded an oratory there, which Pascal I., in the eighth century, erected into a
church. Innocent III. ceded this temple to the monks of Vallombrosa, which is still
very interesting, though it was em/eſ/ished by St. Charles Borromeo, cardinal of
S. Prassede.
So far as restoration goes, saints are undoubtedly not so bold of hand as the other
princes; for St. Prassede has preserved a venerable and attractive air. Aisles divided
by sixteen columns of granite, an altar-canopy supported on pillars of porphyry; a choir
with two flights of steps of enormous blocks of rosso antico, the most valuable of stones
since it is no longer to be found—such are the materials which throw back into antiquity
a Carolingian temple all decked out with fragments of the pagan era. The great arch
and the Tribune have mosaics also, belonging to the ninth century, and curious from
various points of view. While at St. Pudentiana the two sisters are crowning the
apostles, here they are presented to the Christ by the guests of the family, St. Peter and























































S. PA’A.S.SED/Z. 4 I 5
St. Paul. In memory of their high birth, the artist has clad them like great ladies of the
time of Stephen V., in their very finest apparel. At the angles of the semicircle appear
Pius I. and Pascal I.-the last being a likeness. Above the great arch the Twenty-four
Old Men of the Apocalypse, draped in white, offer their crowns.
This mosaic has a strange style about it; the taste and execution of it are of a
wildness, which proves long secular distances between the almost classic work of
St. Pudentiana and that of St. Prassede. You find there, by way of lower border or band,
the Twelve Sheep and the Lamb, which being substituted more and more under the
successors of Theodosius for the real representations of Christ and the apostles,
threatened to annihilate Christian art at the outset. A council in 707 had to be appealed
to, to pass a decree on this question, and they promulgated a prohibition against trans-
forming Jesus and his disciples into
sheep; a prohibition which cannot have
been very absolute, for more than one
hundred years later, from 817 to 824,
the mosaics of St. Prassede reproduce
these emblems. They only fell into
desuetude along with the subjects taken
from the Apocalypse; that is, after the
year IOOO, when the vision of St. John,
who assigned this date for the end of
the world, was for the moment dis-
credited by the undisturbed continuation
of the century. Other mosaics, inferior
to those of St. Pudentiana, that is more
recent, decorate the closed chapel
where they keep a shaft of a column of
oriental breccia—a piece brought from
Jerusalem in 1223 by John Colonna,
who brought it with credulous piety,
in the persuasion that Christ had been
bound to it at the Flagellation.
Enriched with mosaics, mostly with a
golden ground, curious in arrangement,
adorned with exquisite splendour, this
chapel is a perfect jewel-casket; the
thirteenth century, completing it, was
content to give it a certain fineness or delicacy which enhances the oriental
character of the whole. On three sides the base of the wall is faced with marbles
of an amber shade; at the corners are raised on antique stylobates four granite
pillars with gilded Corinthian capitals, and pedestals of four angels in mosaic,
whose heads touch the top of the vault, which is occupied by a figure of Christ.
The space is filled by several of the blessed, singularly apparelled; above the door are
represented Sabinella, and SS. Prassedes, Pudentiana, and Bridget: on the altar, between
two columns of oriental alabaster, they have executed in mosaic a very incongruous
Madonna. Nothing can be more unexpected in a half darkness, than this little
sanctuary, which shows us in its sparkling richness the sentiment of the beautiful
CHURCH OF SS. COSMA E DAMIANO.

416 A’OME.
among the Barbarians, expressed with originality, and served by precious materials. If
one does not speak of the Flagellation which is in the vestry, it is because this
Giulio Romano, treated with elaborate search after archaism, has a most frosty look.
V.
With its crushed domes, its seventeenth and eighteenth century façades, its double
porticos vaguely degenerate from St. Peter's, the patriarchal basilica of Santa Maria
lº -
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Fºr º -
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INTERIOR OF S. PRASSEDE.
Maggiore would only announce a modern monument, if our countryman, Gregory XI.,
had not presented it with a great bell-tower of four stories, with a conical roof, which
is the highest in Rome: that is not saying much. You see the tower from the two
ends of the very long street which this church interrupts and divides,—the street which
from Santa Croce to the Trinita dei Monti, touches the Esquiline, Viminal, and Pincian,
going through populous regions and through deserts.
Santa Maria Maggiore is a great name: Peter the Venerable says that the basilica
of Lateran apart, that of Liberius is the first (mayor dignitaſe) of the churches of Rome
and of the world. A foundation so venerated as this, so favoured with indulgences,
and endowed with the Porta Santa, must have become rich enough to enjoy a frequent
change of decoration. As I was only moderately attracted by a bell-tower of 1376, a


A'UAVZZOAVE AT STA. MARIA MAGG/ORE. 4 I 7
very early date for Rome, and as I was not much attracted by the common and modern
look of the outside facings, I had got into a habit of passing before Sta. Maria Maggiore
with indifference. I used in passing to salute the obelisk of Augustus and the high
fluted columns of the basilica of Constantine, turned into the pedestal of a Madonna;
farther on, I would give a glance to the lively and multiplied mouldings that frame
the fine door of the convent of Sant' Antonio, and a smile to the pillar that com-
DOOR OF THE COLONNA CHAPEL, AT S. PRASSEDE.
memorates the conversion of Henry of Navarre; and after that I used to proceed
about my business.
One night, however, as the crowd was pouring into the church, the fascination of
example and the urgency of a friend made me follow the rest. It was Christmas Day.
At the bottom of the nave I was suddenly intoxicated with fragrant perfumes and
with harmony; out of the clouds that were raised by the incense, mixed with the dust
stirred up by the faithful, was seen the depth of the three aisles divided, under a

3 H
418 A&OME.
magnificent entablature, by thirty-eight white columns of polished and lustrous marble
from the old Temple of Juno. The ancient arrangement of the primitive basilicas
revealed itself, in spite of modern settings, in the life and unaccustomed pomp of a
festival. Sta. Maria Maggiore amazed me, as I might have been amazed, if I had
recognised under a peruke the features of a father of the church.
The Nativity is a solemnity everywhere, but most of all in the basilica which prides
itself on possessing the very cradle of the Saviour. All day long on the 25th of
December, the church is illuminated with candles; behind the altar a numerous body
of clergy, presided over by cardinals, celebrate the offices until the evening; on the
seats figured abbés and oriental bishops, with long beards, clad in copes crumpled with
much travelling, and their brows buried in vast episcopal coifs, supple and shapeless,
which a friend called night-mitres. There is a perpetual concert, and this melodiousness
mingles through the naves with the sharp perfumes of the box and myrtle, broken
and strewn along the pavement, and with the fragrance of the incense, whose rosy
vapours envelope the officiating clergy in a kind of transparent fog, through which
you see the glitter of the gold of the sacred vestments. All through the church and
in the chapels, all classes of people are mixed up together; they chat with one another,
and form groups, and the movement of a great gathering accompanies the hymns
with a singular murmur; it is the stir of a drawing-room, kept in by a sordine.
In the midst of this musical promenade under the colonnades, you come upon
people prostrate in a row, who move quickly along on their knees, praying and kissing
the pavement; you move a little out of the way, to let them have clear path to the
cradle of Christ: they will come back and chat with the passers-by, as soon as their
business is finished; for here each acts for himself without heed of anybody else.
When a temple of this antiquity has not ceased to be held in honour, bad taste is
sure to introduce a good many caricatures; still time has left some precious treasures
here. The mosaics which behind the papal altar decorate the great arch of the transept,
and those which on the architrave of the nave run on both sides under the windows,
form no less than thirty-eight compositions. The object was to expose in a logical
series the points in the life of the Virgin and her Son, corroborating the dogma of
the divinity of Christ. These would be the oldest known in this kind, if those of
St. Pudentiana did not exist. Criticism in Germany and even in Italy has thrown
doubts on their antiquity, and for lack of precise arguments, taking a reasonable
middle term, it has attributed to the eighth century what really belongs to some time
between 434 and 438, as we shall show without difficulty.
We know that at this epoch, eighty years after its primitive foundation, Sixtus III.
rebuilt the church; we know too that this pontiff had just resisted the heresy of Nestorius,
who denied the divinity of Christ; now the examination of the mosaics by Ciampini,
and the study of them by special scholars, demonstrate that the symbolism of this
great work resolves itself into an iconographic demonstration of the truths denied by
the Nestorians. The pope of that time, appreciating the importance of the work and
of the instruction it presented, inscribed on the arch of the apse, ‘SIXTUS PLEBI DEI.’
Let us add that these pictures were referred to at the second council of Nicaea, as a
proof of the antiquity of image-worship.
They are interesting compositions, in which art, already become religious in the
movement of the figures and groups, goes back rather for design than costume to
ancient tradition. Their place is between the mosaic of St. Pudentiana and that of
STA. MARIA MAGGYORE. 4 IQ
St. Cosmus. Unluckily these small subjects crowning the friezes are placed so high,
that to study them you must have either good spectacles or the eyes of a lynx.
Towards the end of the thirteenth century, Nicholas V. refitted the pavement of the
nave with some old opus Alexandrinum, composed of rosettes on a ground of porphyry
and granite : this carpet is superb. Let us also note that the two Borgian popes
made Julian San Gallo devise the richest ceiling that is to be found at Rome. The
catholic Isabella sent to gild it the first ingots that Columbus brought from the
American archipelago.
Leaving on right and left the tardy mausoleum of Nicholas IV. and that of
Clement IX., where Charity gives suck before the whole world, you come to the high
altar and its canopy, of which I have only to say that it limits the nave and masks
the mosaic of the hemicycle; but Benedict XIV., the most philosophical among popes,
was not without some acquaintance with the ‘good taste’ of De Brosses. The con-
fessional ought to be superb, for its reorganization cost Pius IX. very dear; only
the coloured marbles with which the walls are faced, in such a way as to form circles
and rectangles, recall the wood-work with which they decorate fashionable steamboats
in the United States. The balusters do not harmonize either with the style of the
nave, or that of the baldachin. e
At the risk of being incomplete, let us leave to the admirers of costly objects the
porphyry basin of the baptismal fonts, their columns, their paintings; the Assumption
of Bernini, and even the polychromatic bust of the Ambassador of Congo; but let
us make our way into a small chamber adjoining the baptistery, in which is hidden
a fine bronze statue of Paul V. by Silla of Milan. This mitred figure is a life-like
and individual portrait; the pontiff is represented, younger than in the posthumous
statue executed by the same artist for the tomb. In the dazzling chapel which Paul V.
built for the Borghese, he erected to Clement VIII. a mausoleum of a very ambitious
sort, but cold in its look.
The guides will not fail to stop you before the altar of the Virgin, while they lie
in watch for the symptoms of a speechless admiration on your face; it is only oriental
jasper, gilding, medallions of agate, and bas-reliefs of gold framing, in the midst of
a ground of lapis nearly fifteen feet high, an image of the Madonna very old and
very black, but framed by precious stones and supported by five gilded Angels.
Luckily the picture which is crushed in this way is worth nothing, but is that any
reason for attributing it to St. Luke 2
- I should pass over in silence the chapel of the Sforza, in which the canons go
through their offices, if it did not happen to contain some works of Sermonetta and
did not adjoin two French tombs, one over the other, and of a handsome style—the
Cardinal Philip de Levis and his brother, both archbishops of Arles towards the end
of the fifteenth century. But I prefer, at the back of the aisle to the right, a simple
tomb of the first years of the fourteenth, adorned with charming mosaics by John
Cosimato, who has added to them a portrait of the deceased, Cardinal Rodriguez,
who died in 1299. The works of a Roman artist are rare, especially at such remote
epochs. -
How many times, wandering with our countrymen, have I not quitted them on
the threshold of the chapel of the Holy Sacrament 1 In the compartments of these
storied shrines, even if they were by Fontana, I forget the monument and I produce on
myself the effect of a weevil fallen into a jewel casket. Yet there are here two fine
3 H 2
42O ACOME.
pieces of sculpture, or even three, on the tombs of Pius V. and Sixtus V. The last,
planned in a certain style, is surmounted by a statue of the pontiff at prayer, by
Valsoldo; a very interesting portrait. A statue by Leonard of Sarzana represents
ascetic and smiling, the blessed Pius V. ; the figure, here so full of life, you find again
in the lower portion of the mausoleum, all unstrung and chilled by death, in a gilded
bas-relief of a very delicate significance; this second is by Nicholas Cordier, who drew
his inspiration from our French tombs. It is under the cupola of this great chapel,
formed like a Greek cross, that the faithful honour the cradle, the true cradle of the
Lord : beati qui crediderunt / This little church in the great basilica was specially
constructed for the Santo Presepio. Sta. Maria Maggiore possesses besides a quantity
of relics, among which figure the remains of twelve canonized popes.
Legend being the poetry of churches, the nearer you approach the legendary ages,
the less meaningless and common is the ornamentation : in this respect, Sta. Maria
Maggiore is greatly indebted to Nicholas IV., that very enlightened and slightly
romantic pontiff, who favoured the Ghibelines, who dreamt of new crusades, and who
founded our university of Montpellier. He enlarged and consolidated the apse of the
basilica; he caused to be executed between 1288 and I292, by Fra Jacopo da Torrita,
mosaics of great extent, the finest of that century. Towards the same time, he
confided to Philip Rossuti, pupil of Torrita (he signed Aºussuli), the task of decorating
the external façade fronting the piazza with an immense picture, presenting for the
instruction of the populace the iconographic story of the Festival of Snows and the
Liberian foundation, which Benedict XIV. masked with the galleries of a vulgar
façade, designed by Ferdinando Fuga. It remains to speak of these two mosaics,
which are of no common importance, to attract the attention of tourists to those of
the Tribune, and perhaps to reveal the others to many ill-directed travellers.
On the large hemicycle which goes round the Presbyterium, behind the master-altar,
the Franciscan monk, Turrita or Torrita, with the suavity peculiar to a disciple of
the Siennese school at the dawn of the prosperities of that republic, painted in an
enormous medallion in a ground of starred blue, the Crowning of the Virgin. The
divine throne, a seat with two places, occupies the centre of this composition, in which
the Christ is of a triumphant beauty. The remainder of the vault is equipped with
saints on a gold ground, who are divided from the Virgin by two groups of Angels,
having above them and at the sides a sort of frame of intertwined branches, enamelled
with flowers and animated by birds : nothing is richer or tenderer to the eye, than
the fair harmony of this decoration. In the figures you come upon the style of our
artists of the reign of St. Lewis, with a less frosty majesty; the Madonna is posed and
arranged with unspeakable charm. It marks the apogee of an art whose first rise we
have not seen, and which gives the pleasure that is inherent in the perfect works in
which neither effort nor imitation betrays itself. - .
Between the windows and in the well-lighted thickness of the wall, Gaddo Gaddi
has devised other mosaics of happy effect, among which we have to remark the Death
of the Virgin, a delightful piece, too near a formidable rival; Gaddi seems less free
from Byzantine stiffness. Cardinal Colonna, and it is an honour for this noble house,
helped Nicholas IV. with his fortune in the endowment of Our Lady with these
masterpieces. So Torrita has placed at one of the corners the likeness of the prelate
kneeling; he has represented himself in modest proportions, on his knees, in his monk’s
dress: he belonged, as I have said, to the Minor Brothers, among whom the pope had
J. EGEND OF OUR LADP OF SAWOWS. 42 I
been. This work, which is not wholly completed, struck me as more luminous than
those with which he adorned St. John Lateran, and in which Gaddi did more work.
I have indicated other still more considerable mosaics, the execution of which
Nicholas IV. had confided to Rossuti, a pupil of Torrita, and which Benedict XIV.
caused to disappear behind the arches and great balcony of his façade. To see them,
one has to slip between the wall which they decorate, and the colonnades which the
last century introduced in front. Now everybody does not know that to hoist one’s self
up here, you ought to climb the steps of a capitular building lately transformed into a
barrack—a staircase along which have been deposited, together with a number of tomb-
stones of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, taken from this church, some bas-
reliefs of the same time, torn by Vespignani from the old Confessional, where some
facings have but poorly taken their place. -
These captive mosaics, with the arms of Cardinal Colonna, must have been finished
before the death of Boniface VIII., at the dawn of the century which opened with the
Jubilee of 1300; they belong to an art which is less chaste and less elevated than those
of Master Torrita, but they form a more considerable series of connected subjects,
handled with a dramatic intention and an air of reality, that are very interesting. There
is a bed-chamber with the furniture of the time, palaces having their Loggia and
their Guelfic battlements, the interior of a painted basilica, a throne elaborately figured,
very peculiar civil and pontifical costumes—that of the pope among others, who is
draped in a green mantle, and who was even then preceded, not only by the cross
of gold, but by a dais in the shape of an enormous Indian parasol with conical
top. These precious contributions to the history of manners, and even of etiquette and
furniture, describe the legend of Sta. Maria Maggiore; they are unintelligible, unless
you know the origin of the Festival of Snows. -
In the time of Pope Liberius, a rich bourgeois named John Patricius, and his wife,
resolved to give all they had to the Virgin Mary. But in order to know how to
employ their riches so as to please her, they prepared themselves by fasting for the
receiving of inspiration from on high. Shortly, deigning to appear to each of them
in a dream one burning night in August (the 5th), the Queen of the Angels bade
them go at dawn on to the Esquiline, and build a church on the spot which they should
find covered with snow. Awaking at the same time, the pair described to one another
their vision, and did not wait for the day: they hastened to the sovereign pontiff, who
was expecting them, having been also warned by a dream. The priests were summoned,
and the people gathered together, and the Sun was hardly up, when Pope Liberius,
followed by Patricius and the clergy, set out in procession from the Lateran palace.
On the Esquiline hill they perceived that a considerable space was covered with a
carpeting of snow; they marked out its limits, and the pious couple raised thereupon
the first church dedicated by Rome to the Virgin Mary. So they named it at first
Our Lady of Snows and the church of Liberius, because this miracle came in his time.
Afterwards it was described as the Basilica of Sixtus, on account of that successor
of Celestinus, who had it rebuilt and adorned by rich mosaics. But after they had
devoted so many other churches at Rome to Our Lady, that of the Snows was called
Saint Mary the Greater, to show its excellence and primacy.
It occupies a site that had been dear to the Apicii of the empire—the old market
of Livia, which Tiberius had sumptuously rebuilt, and in which were retailed the rare
dainties from distant provinces.
422 A’OM/E.
Such is the adventure of which Nicholas IV. wished the narrative to be exposed
to the eyes of the faithful. Hence in a series of pictures the artist calls up the house
in which slumbers the good Patricius, and the palace in which the pope sleeps, two
interiors too precisely marked in their details, not to be taken from reality; then the
rich citizen coming to tell his vision to Liberius; the Virgin and her Son with a smile
making the snow fall on the Esquiline; finally, the procession escorting the pontiff, who
wears the pointed tiara of the thirteenth century, as he goes on to the hill to discover
the site of the future basilica.
To erect his façade with columns, a poor reminiscence of that of the Lateran, the sage
Lambertini rent the most gigantic miniature—if the antithesis be allowed—with which
a page of the Golden Legend was ever illustrated.
ORIENTAL BISHOPS WITH LONG BEARDs,” ETC.

CAR OF THE ACADEMY OF FRANCE LEAVING THE PINCIA.N.
CHAPTER XXI.
The Roman Carnival.-Unforeseen consequence of a pastoral mandate. —Sights in the Corso. — Colezione at the
Simonetti palace.—Queen of Naples and Francis II.-The Academy of France and its car.—Official
ceremonial for the organization of festivals.-The Moccoli.-Burlesque scenes.—Origin and description of
the great masquerade of the Germans.—The gardens of Sallust.—Historical illustrations of the Ponte
Salario and the Colline gate.—The Villa Albani.-Homage to Winckelmann-Return by the Villa Ludovisi.
—Paul Delaroche before the Aurora of Guercino.—The Juno of Argos, &c.—Effect of the malaria.
HE pope, during the winter of 1865, having issued an edict in which modern
ideas are abused, some French bishops felt themselves authorized to preach a
crusade against the transalpine revolution, and it resulted from this that the
Italian committee resolved to suppress in Rome the rejoicings of the carnival.
The four previous years the same thing had happened on other pretexts, not without
harm to trade, nor without gloom for a people which has not much amusement, and
especially for country-people, who have such a passion for the secular joys of the
carnival, that the obligation of taking a bride to the great city is stipulated in the
contract. The pontifical states were going for the fifth time to obey a party edict,
when an incident that happened far enough away from the Corso, changed the
arrangements of the secret power. Persuaded of the danger to the pontifical cause
of placing it in antagonism with the French government, and of satisfying political
animosities at the expense of his holiness, the archbishop of Paris published a moderate
and conciliatory pastoral letter. Then the party of action, who thought they read in
the writings of four or five bishops the opinion of France, suddenly deducing it from
the new charge in the opposite sense, hastened to make merriment the order of the
day, and to prepare travesties Aer /a liberta. Mgr. Darboy scarcely suspected that
in calming by his memorable Quos ego the too lively ardour of his colleagues, he would
cause the consumption at Rome of so many com/eſ/ſ, nor that among the fruits cf


424 A&OME.
his vigils would be the most brilliant carnival that had for a long while made holiday
in the city of Romulus. -
In old days the confetti were really of sugar, and even now the use of them in
this form is not wholly lost; they have, for economy’s sake, substituted hailstones of
plaster, and such is the consumption of them that an hour before the opening of the
games, the facchini carry up to the houses the supply for the day, filling baskets as big as
barrels; they shoot them forth with horns of pasteboard, like those used for tric-trac.
Majestic personages, noble ladies, sovereigns in exile, do not disdain these pastimes;
you will recognise them in their chariots, under disguises which defy every outrage; their
faces are preserved by wire masks, like those worn in fencing-rooms. In a moment
this rout, in which all classes are mixed up, seems covered with flour, for they pour
on to the equipages thick clouds of plaster made into powder. From the Piazza del
Popolo to the foot of the Capitol, the Corso, which is long and moderately broad, and
the houses of which,-made motley for the occasion by stuffs shaken in the wind,
have their windows covered with people from garret to ground floor. The Corso
resounds with a chattering that deafens you : between the carriages and palaces is a
constant interchange of lazzis, compliments, epigrams; it is sharp-fire of words,
projectiles, and flowers. Woe to the unhappy mortal who is obliged to cross the
Corso, and ventures to do so in black clothes; in the twinkling of an eye he beholds
himself turned white. Platforms, at once militant and besieged, connect the base of
the houses with the spectacle in the streets, so that movement, disorderly animation,
and infernal uproar, are everywhere at once. These games, which are like a battle,
extend from one Tuesday to another without a quarrel, in the midst of an equalitarian
license, such as you cannot imagine; whoever enters the arena knows that all is
permitted to him, and that he ought to endure all with laughter. I have seen grave
personages, who were nothing but shapeless ragout of yolk of egg and flour, half blinded,
receive a pelting of small shot, delivered from some one close at hand, and yet, though
red with anger, go out of it with the forced bursts of a gaiety, proof to every
provocation. t
A. hospitable fellow-countryman, General Polhès, who resided in the Simonetti palace,
had invited the fine Roman and French societies to come and watch the procession
of the masks. It was from this balcony that I watched the saturnalia of the Corso.
As my eyes turned to the right, out of the agitated waves of the crowd, they saw
rising up the walls of Sta. Maria in Via Lata, where once, at the house of the centurion
his host, St. Paul baptized neophytes whom he had converted. In front of our windows,
by the side of St. Marcel, consecrated to a pope whom Maximus had tortured, was
a monastic house, which replaces the quarters in which St. Lucina lived ; a house that
the Servite brothers had placed at the service of the populace. Under this claustral
pediment, which was contemporary with Urban VIII., appeared at the top windows
several groups of soldiers; on the lower story monks were leaning with their elbows
against the windows; on the draped balcony of the entresol were vigorous peasant
women and Trasteverine couples hurling confetti. This is the way in which Rome
every instant offers you opportunity for noting a contrast, or shrinking back from an
antithesis.
On the cars and in the street, millers with enormous felt hats, and pierrots with
pointed caps, formed the immense majority, but I was not long in recognising that
each people marks by its national colours the disguise that it adopts; from this come
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terrible fights when, on two vehicles meeting one another, these figure rival empires.
Nothing is like confetti for dealing with burning questions; you should see in full
conflict with the tricolour factions of Italy, the yellow millers who disguised the Zouaves
of the holy father. In the high regions courtesy had concluded some armistices; at the
Bonaparte palace, where I went to pay a visit, when the young Queen of Naples came
under the balcony of the French princesses, she threw enormous bouquets, to which
we replied by a shower of flowers. When Francis II. went by, wearing a peaked
cap and covered with white powder, the balconies stopped their fire, but it was not
the same in the street, where I saw the royal couple shot at with fury.
Returning to the Simonetti palace, which is now called Buoncompagni, and under
the open cloisters of which the uproar of the street could not come, I found myself
suddenly transported afar off by the sight of a broad winding staircase, spiral,
supported on coupled columns, imitated by Alessandro Specchi from that which I had
seen the previous summer in the deserted convent of San Nicolo, near a silent quay
at Pisa. As I ascended the steps, I represented to myself the tranquil banks of the
Arno and the tower of the monastery—Our Lady of the Holy Thorn—leaning over
the stream like a forgotten shrine; and the wide streets through which none pass,
with fine houses of brick and yellow stone from which none come out; and the mosaic
of grass, which makes the pavement green around the Baptistery, the Duomo, and
the Campo Santo; and the great pines of the Cascine under which you see, as in the
solitudes of the East, the dromedaries that have been in exile here ever since the
time of the crusades. I saw them in memory jogging along the beach where the
sea-wind continues up to the violet hills of Carrara the mysterious song of the waves.
II.
It is on Shrove Tuesday that the diversions of a populace fallen into childhood,
and collected together into a single street, reach the very phrenzy of their gaiety.
An hour before the Ave Maria, a moment when a cannon shot will suddenly extinguish
all this merriment, you ought to go through the Corso, from the piazza del Popolo to
the Piombino palace, at the risk of being torn by Maenads. I do not know how
the women with bouquets for sale succeed in moving between the close lines of
carriages, or the dealers in confetti coming with fresh supplies for the sort of trays
which hang on the edges of the cars.
Peasant-women in their dazzling and beflowered costumes, polichinelles and
harlequins, roaming dominoes, small boys with colossal heads, dragons on horseback,
among these human floods, where rows of masks pushing through the crowd leave mark
as of winding currents; military music, stray fanfares, rattles from the carriages,
artificial detonation; soldiers of every arm, and women of every colour; Turks and
chauchardes, motley processions following a tabor, horses covered with festoons and
staring rosettes, handsome damsels blinded and laughing, balconies overflowing;
incessant hail pouring down from the windows, and forming on the pavement a sunny
carpet of crushed plaster; packets of flowers continually mounting or falling through
the air; lobsters, dolphins, and other monsters vomiting from monstrous throats great
mouthfuls of chalk—all in a word, all with every disorder of contrast that you can
3 I
426 ROME.
imagine, is joyous, insensate, like to turn heads and intoxicate the eyes. If you were
alone, you would lose the sense of isolation, for everybody accosts you, and making
merry with you or at you, offers himself as a butt for your whims.
The students of our Academy of France had organized a break, hung with white,
with escutcheons at the corners and gilded wheels: the enormous box was placed,
like a nest, in a bed of leaves; the four horses had garlands of flowers for reins
and harness. Clad in white, with African burnouses or flowered hoods on their heads,
our young artists hurled such a profusion of bouquets, that they seemed to grow
under their fingers. In the centre of the car, incense smoked in an antique tripod;
at the back, behind a griffin, was a graceful little model, whom our gentlemen had
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PIAZZA DEL POPOLO.
Via del Babbuino.-S. Maria di Monte Santo.-Entry to the Corso.-S. Maria de' Miracoli-Ripetta.
daubed over into a negro. The Apollo of the Egyptians, Orus, carried a thyrsus on
the front of the equipage.
Equalitarian and popular, these festivals, which for a few moments level all classes,
have no resemblance to our ignoble carnival, which is abandoned by the taciturn
prudery of our time to the lowest ranks of the populace. The carnival, among these
childish people of Rome, is taken seriously by all the nobility, and this associates
everybody in the common madness; it is an institution. So, as in old times by the
Consuls, now the games are opened with all solemnity by the Senators of Rome and
the Conservators, municipal dignitaries much richer in honours than in power.

7F/E CARAVYVAZ * Z.HE BAA-APEA-I. 427
The Monday and the Thursday after Sexagesima, the cannon fired, the magistrates
of the commune, preceded by runners and macebearers in costume of the sixteenth
century, make their entry by the Porta del Popolo between two troops of cavalry;
they traverse the Corso as far as the foot of the Capitol, in five state coaches of
princely magnificence. Everybody presses forward to see the distant posterity of
praetors and aediles. Salvoes of artillery solemnise this procession, which ranks with that
of the Lord Mayor, while the golden cassocks awake reminiscences of the doges. This
is the inauguration of these real diversions, the only ones, O reader, that this century
offers you, and on condition of your going to Rome; for everywhere else in our poor old
utilitarian and constitutional world, public recreations are over: the festivals of the
national family are at an end with the youth of peoples. These pastimes have preserved,
along with their vivacity, a certain candour; not a quarrel, not a drunken man, not
a battle, in the thick of a populace so ready at shedding blood to wipe out an
insultſ .
Four times while the carnival lasts, they end the day by a spectacle that it would
be impossible to improvise with a people gone mad with the glory of never obeying.
The preparations are as curious as the representation itself. Towards half-past five,
the soldiers have made the carriages pass round by the adjacent streets; there only
remain foot passengers on the Corso-a moving mosaic of hats and bonnets. Then
the carbiniers, in files two broad, invading the middle of the street, divide the compact
crowd in two ; they heave it aside, so to say, on to the causeways, as Snow is swept
back on mountain roads. The centre is nearly empty, but unequally; the edge
straggles over its border; so hardly is this first operation complete, before a squadron
of cavalry rushes forward at full gallop to finish the clearing of the street. After this
double expedition the road is made, and the field swept clean. Almost immediately,
from the piazza del Popolo, where they are held back by cables that they not
unfrequently break through, there are let loose on the Corso six Barbary steeds, wild,
and without any gear, without riders, or bits, or bridles, free as in the desert. The
mane plaited, with glowing eye and foaming mouth, they fly down this long narrow
avenue, in which even the houses seem full of life and passion; they finish this straight
course in the twinkling of an eye, terrified at the loud cries and shouts of the crowd
at their side, and of the great quantity of people up at the windows. The swiftest
are applauded and goaded on by an uproar that makes them rear, while the last are
escorted by hissings and hootings. The cavalcade clears the space like some dark
flash ; behind it the throng resume possession of the street, which once more becomes
choked up. At the outlet of the piazza of Venice the barberi come rushing to the
foot of the balcony where the Senator sits, who hands to the winner the prize of the
race, as well as a great standard of precious stuff from ten to twelve metres long. These
are of woven silk and gold thread of extreme magnificence, because the Israelites of
Rome, bound ever since the Middle Age to furnish this standard by way of feudal
service, make it a point of honour to be generous.
For many years past the horses of this sport, winners and losers, belong to Cecchi,
the banker, who was so sure of winning that he ceased to find rivals. His triumphs
would have led to the abolition of the races, if he had not made himself the entrepreneur
of them, so the prize is no longer a crown, but an indemnification.
In olden times they did not confine themselves to making horses run. Montaigne
saw running au Caresme premant, children and old men quite naked, asses, buffaloes . . .
3 I 2
428 A&OME.
and Jews, from one end of the town to another. Each race had for prize il palo (palio),
because it consisted of stuffs of cloth or velvet. But what was still better, “the gentle-
men ran the quintaine before the ladies, among whom there are fewer ugly ones than
in France.” Yet, adds Michael Montaigne, ‘en France le corps est mieux fait; car
ici, elles ont l'endret de la ceinture trop läche.'
As soon as the horses have vanished, madness resumes its course until the hour when
authority, by a monosyllable uttered by the cannon of St. Angelo, suddenly restores the
delirious city to its right mind. The confetti cease to rain down; the cries all stop; you
see on the Corso only tranquil citizens making their way home.
III.
The birth of Arion, the most ancient courser with the gift of speech, caused, as
we know, so much shame to Ceres, that she withdrew into a grotto, where she would
be still, if Pan had not pointed her out to the master of the gods, who exhorted her to
seek distraction in travel. The goddess had just quitted Corcyra to visit her Sicilian
harvests, accompanied by the brown Pherephalta that she had had by Jupiter, when
Pluto met the pretty child gathering flowers, and carried her off among the fiery furnaces
of his realm. Ceres in despair complained to Olympus, where the thing was taken
coolly, and she was counselled to take infusion of poppy by way of recovering her
slumber. Then trusting only to herself, the mother of Proserpine yoked two winged
dragons, she girt up her long robe, and armed with a torch which she kindled in passing
the flames of Etna, she hastened swiftly through the air, calling for her daughter with
piercing cries.
It was the custom among the ancients in the festivals which they kept, to perpetuate
by certain imitative rites the memory of the exploits attributed to the gods. So
when the noble Quintus Memmius imported from Greece and instituted in the Circus
Maximus the festivities of Ceres, which had been instituted by Triptolemus, he added
some ceremonies already in use in Sicily, and notably the practice of making women
run round the temples at nightfall, clad in white and furnished with lighted torches,
followed by a clamorous throng. It is not merely to trace, as many scholars have
done, the rites of the carnival from the Cerealia of April combined with the
Lupercalia of February, that I have recalled these doubtful origins; I supposed that
for the people who are enamoured of erudite amusements, this association would
heighten the significance of the final scene of the Roman carnival which I have still
to describe. -
The last evening of the carnival, the barberi gone and the night closed in, the
carriages return to the Corso where the masquerading pedestrians throng more thick
than ever. Small candles have been distributed, and around cars illuminated with
torches, tapers, fireworks, every one holds up in the air his lighted moccolino. In the
stands, balconies, windows, up to the roofs and inside the rooms, the moccoli are
sparkling everywhere. To the prolonged shouts of the crowd have succeeded short
and stifled laughs, little panting breathless cries—slight and chirping noises of a most
singular effect: a struggle has begun, which produces an indescribable animation,
everybody trying to blow out the candle of his neighbour, and to keep his own alight;
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THE MOCCOLT—MASQUERADE OF THE GERMANS. 429
and this, not only in the street where nothing is seen but people jumping and blowing,
but also in all the houses as well.
If a man is too tall, or if he has got his moccoletto at the end of a long pole, they
mount on his shoulders, or hang on to his arms, they pursue him with other poles,
armed with bunches in the shape of extinguishers. On the cars, whose sides are
scaled, the lights flicker and vacillate, twenty times extinguished and twenty times
rekindled. From the street you will see through the open windows of palaces, the
lights moving rapidly on the ceilings, and madmen jumping about in continuation
indoors of the exhilarating drama of the Corso; universal movement, and of a contagious
fascination I have seen princes, ambassadors, even prelates, battling in real delirium,
and the noble beauties of Rome, lost in the war of the streets, sacrifice, in order to
extinguish tapers and resinous torches, their embroidered handkerchiefs, India shawls,
and muffs of the finest furs. -
If, pursuing on to the balcony some fugitive Ceres, you lean behind her over the
perspective of the Corso, all paved with heads, starred with fires, full of carriages
that describe a river of light—if plunging into the distance, you look at that wave
marked by golden points dancing on every story, you will be tempted to suppose
that the heavenly Urania has turned miller, and is amusing herself with winnowing the
harvest of the stars. -
IV.
Rome has other festivals like the carnival, but of German importation, and
celebrated the 1st of May, a day of joy across the Rhine, where they still solemnise
the new season. The masquerade which we are going to see, was created by the
artists of the German club, organized at the beginning of this century, when the
Tedeschi borrowed from us the custom of going forth to receive at the Ponte Molle
the new recruits on their arrival at Rome. To affiliate them to the colony, they
made them pass with a certain ceremonial the Milvian bridge, after a common repast
where the neophyte paid for his welcome to the company—a usage the opposite of
ours, where it is the candidate whose expenses are paid. After the peace of 1815,
this Society of the Ponte Molle having been organized and extended, it instituted
the festival of Spring, which has diverted the Roman populace ever since 1820. Its
most brilliant period was from 1832 to 1845.
The character of the fêtes recalls the middle ages, like every burlesque exhibition
of pagan rites: it has its dignitaries, its militia, its corporations of musicians, of high
priests, of cooks, of scullions, of poets, of masters of the ceremonies, and of Vetturini,
who must all accept the office to which they are appointed, and dress themselves
out in grotesque costumes. At daybreak the whole band goes out by the Porta
Maggiore, and proceeds as far as the Torre de' Schiavi, a general meeting-place,
whence the procession makes its way for the grottoes of Cervara, seven miles from
Rome, near Teverone. At the moment of departure, on a car festooned with garlands
and drawn by four great oxen whose ample horns have been gilded, appears the
President in the midst of his court of chamberlains, of madmen, and poets: he passes
his countrymen in review, makes them a solemn and grotesque discourse, and distributes
to the worthiest the knightly order of the Baiocco; then the procession proceeds on
43O A&OME.
its way, escorted by its fourgon of wines, its cooking battery, and its cup-bearers,
towards the grottoes, chosen for a monster festival on account of their freshness and
their darkness, which is favourable to effects of illumination. As at the Feast of
Unreason, asses furnish a heroic mount to the heroes of the masquerade; they are
harnessed in toys from Nuremberg; their riders are clad in garments which make
them look like good men of the woods. -
Soon commence, under the title of Olympic games, parades which not long since
used to attract to Cervara the elegant population of Rome, and even the official repre-
sentatives of different nationalities: donkey races, foot races, sack races, and other diver-
sions, in which the victors have decreed to them burlesque diadems and Campanian
vases, decorated for the occasion. At the bottom of the grotto a high priest calls
up the Sibyl who, appearing in the midst of Bengal fires, recites in comic verses the
exploits of the school, and prophesies the destinies of its artists for the following year.
A Homeric supper prepared and served by our friends on stone tables in the
heart of the cavern, which is lighted by torches and festooned by garlands, precedes
the return, which is animated by torches and noisy trumpet-blasts. I do not think
a foreign colony ever organized abroad a national festival with spirit and originality to
compare with this ; the enormity of the farce in it represents the old German gaiety,
while the picturesque display of the spectacle could only have been imagined by
artists. The era of the Festival of the Germans is reckoned by Olympiads; inter-
rupted by the Revolution of 1848, it was resumed in 1853, in which the procession
took Castel Giubileo for its theatre; in 1855, when they met in the dell, misnamed
from the Nymph Egeria; quite recently (Werner Olympiad) they went back to
Cervara. - -
V.
The tumult of crowds at last awakens the desire of silence and repose. The Roman
carnival was still in high flow, when I promised myself to go and seek in the moun-
tains the holiday that I needed after such laborious recreations; but the uncertainty
of the weather confined my ambition to the suburbs, and it was on the side of the
villa Albani-Castelbarco that, on Ash Wednesday, I followed some artists of our
academy, whom the dissipations of the week had thrown out of the working groove.
As the city belongs to a government which never goes on foot, the roads are barely
practicable; we went skipping from side to side along the Salarian way, a very ancient
road by which they used to convey salt to the Sabines. On the right, the break in
the walls allows you to perceive the half effaced outline of the circus where they
discovered the obelisk that is now placed in front of the Trinita dei Monti. It was an
ancient proconsul of Numidia, the historian Sallust, who for the embellishment of his villa
had this hippodrome drawn, whose ruins support a perfect fleece of verdure. On the
other slope, below the festoons formed by the walls, extends the Barberini vineyard,
where the Agger of Servius Tullius begins, near which was enclosed the Campus
Sceleratus, where they buried alive the unchaste Vestals. The Salarian gate, which
makes a break in the wall of Honorius, and which you pass under, is a double postern
of military aspect; it was by this that in 409 Alaric made his way into Rome; he
THE VIZZA AZAAAVY. 43 I
burnt the palaces of Sallust, which were inhabited after that writer by Nero, Vespasian,
and Nerva, who died there.
The road leads to the ancient bridge over the Teverone, where Manlius won the
surname of Torquatus; it was there that Tullus Hostilius defeated the Veientians,
and that Metius Fuffetius was quartered, which hastened the ruin of Alba Longa. The
last Garibaldian invasion caused the destruction of the Ponte Salario, rebuilt by Narses.
The postern which you go through to reach it, has replaced the old Colline gate, by
which Hannibal very nearly surprised Rome, for this is the weakest side of the city.
The Italian leaders who had coalesced against Sulla with the remains of the party
of Marius, knew it, when one gloomy night Pontius Telesinus pushed up to the
Colline gate to surprise Rome, ‘and smoke out that warren of wolves.” The battle, a
battle of giants, in which Sulla fought from morn until the evening of the next day,
lasted more than thirty hours. It was on the day following this affray that, when he
was addressing the Senate in the temple of Bellona, he saw his hearers disturbed by
horrible cries that were heard in the distance; they were massacring eight thousand
prisoners. He started thence for the recovery of Praeneste, and the proscriptions
began.
The undulating Campagna, covered with aggeres and tumuli, is the theatre of
these tremendous struggles; it is a cemetery fallen into disuse. Its still and taciturn
aspect prepares you by striking contrast for the spectacles of the villa Albani Castel-
barco. Here all seems happy and youthful, all is splendour and light. The porticoes
and their statues, the verdurous terraces, the masses of tropical trees rising in clumps
out of a foreground of flowered beds, stand out with a firm harmony against the rosy
distance and the azure of the Sabine hills. The silvery snows in the sky make a
wonderful frame for the lemon trees, the pine, the laurel of the poets, the cypress,
and the palms of the desert, bringing to the city of the apostles a reminiscence of
Jordan.
The constructions of the villa, bedizened in the Greek manner of the last century,
were designed with a view to a museum of antiquities, and made worthy of a family
originally from Epirus, which after the wars of Skanderbeg quitted the glades of Pindus
for Italy. Winckelmann, a skilful renderer of the ideas of the learned Cardinal Alexander
Albani, purified the idea of the nephew of Clement XI. ; the illustrious archaeo-
logist realised theories, which with us have only produced the school of David and
the antiquity of Thermidor. It was a question of introducing into their various house-
hold gods the divinities and heroes of Athens and Rome, without misplacing them;
from this point of view, the success is striking; the theatre becomes the actors.
I will not exhaust myself in describing the galleries and small temples of these
habitations all open to the sun, from the vestibule of the Caryatides, who escort the
fine Canephorae marked Crito and Nicolaos, up to the stylish edifice prosaically deno-
minated Bigliardo, and to the charming semi-circular portico built for scenic masks,
statues, and Hermes, which are symmetrically arranged in it. This pavilion, placed
in the midst of an ornamental garden divided into parterres, is probably a faithful
image of the shrines in which the proconsuls of the time of the Flavians grouped the
masterpieces of the Greece they had despoiled, and this reminiscence of pure anti-
quity is called, O barbarism Coffee-house. - -
Among the marbles of the Villa Albani you will notice a number of mutilated
copies of statues of renown, and many pieces of the later ages; but besides that the
432 A&OME.
study of them is profitable, these are more than compensated for, by the astonishing
profusion of pieces of the rarest quality, and of monuments which you do not find
anywhere else. It was, we have to remember, in these galleries, the richest of all
private collections, that Winckelmann found most of the material for his writings on
the art of the ancients. Among the pieces of value and importance, I observed one
reproduction of the bas-relief of Zethe, Antiope, and Amphion, so called in the cata-
logues of the Louvre, and which evidently represents Eurydice carried off by Mercury,
and whom Orpheus would fain keep back. The compositions of the great masters
contemporary with Pericles were reproduced in copies from age to age; this is
extremely fine; the copies of Paris and Naples struck me as inferior to the type of
the Villa Albani.
From the gardens to the galleries, from the saloons to the porticoes, and even
to the greenhouses, all is peopled with a throng of marble figures, among which we
sought personalities who were peculiar either in point of race or costume—a thing
not to be seen everywhere. How many times have I not heard our young students
cry out in presence of certain audacities, ‘With us they would tolerate nothing like
that.” It is certain that for lack of having seen antiquity in its caprices and freedom,
our taste has become too narrow and severe. We found there statues of Hierophants,
and Etruscan bas-reliefs which were very curious: Berenice-Euergetes, a Hercules,
an Apollo, are submitted to conventions in attitude and outline, which no longer mingle
any of the wildness of old Egyptian art with expansion of form.
It would be to run the risk of mistake to attribute an Etruscan origin, as Winckel-
mann has sometimes done, to many statues, tomb-stones, bas-reliefs, which are handled
with deliberate archaism and intention to imitate; just as we now make Gothic or
Roman, so they then manufactured Etruscan or primitive Greek. The villa Albani
possesses many of these pasticci; it is good to learn how to distinguish them. One
of the best results of a stay at Rome is to extend the horizon of our ideas by diversity
of observation : we must not, as was once said, ‘content, ourselves with peeping at
the temple of art through the keyhole.” We made these reflections in passing the
graceful bronzes of Pallas and Apollo, and the bas-relief of the Repose of Hercules;
in saluting that medallion of Perses, supported by such charming figures; in passing
by that great marble tazza, on which a delicate chisel has cut the Labours of Hercules,
and in admiring the sarcophagus of the Nuptials of Peleus. Among our party, some
flitted here and there as scouts; we grouped ourselves at their summons round the
most remarkable pieces; it was thus that we were stationed for a long time in front
of a monstrosity, which is one of the strangest monuments in the villa Albani.
Should we not be very curious to know how the great artists of Athens could
have introduced into art the popular deformities of a Quasimodo or a Richard III. P. A
Greek sculptor surmounted this difficulty by a skilful exaggeration, subjected to certain
conditions of a strident harmony. The likeness of AEsop, the poet philosopher, the
famous hump-back of Phrygia, includes the entire trunk to the thighs. The angular
outlines, the bony projections, the reliefs of the protuberance, have been balanced in
so ingenious a fashion, the curiously contorted arms are so vigorous, and so little heavy
in their articulation; from this trunk, in which a horizontal section would almost give
you the lines of a star, rises with grotesque look a queer head, so attractive and of
such penetrating intuition, that before this brow, knotted and amazing as it is, but
which still by force of style almost reaches a certain beauty of monster or Chimaera,
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THE V/L/A ALBAM/. 433
you stand so charmed, that you can scarcely tear yourself away from it. The visage
which suffers, which thinks, which judges, and which seems to penetrate all like the
serpent of Genesis, is an apparition which you cannot forget.
At the side of the Bigliardo, bas-reliefs, cenotaphs, tombstones, and figures of the
god Terminus, animate the thick shades of the green oaks which lead to a pavilion,
placed like an observatory before the open fields. From here, by parterres cut
geometrically, which we call French, but the design of which was taught in Italy in
the middle ages by the religious orders, you return to the Coffee-house, the portico
of which, with its Doric columns taken from the Villa Adriana, is adorned, as I have
said, with scenic masks collected at the theatre of Marcellus.
Arranged in edifices with wide and free openings for them, as in the villas of Cicero,
imumº
|||
-- - - ===NeºEs- ==
TERRACES AND PORTICO AT THE WILLA. ALBANI.
Hortensius, and Pompeius, these collections have nothing of the sepulchral aspect
which is given to them with us by the vaulted prisons to which we condemn them. I
have preserved the confused memory of a series of monuments, which initiate the
traveller into a quantity of usages and mythological rites. Let us note in passing,
an extremely fine Juno ; a Marsyas whose legs and nose have been restored; a very
fine Egypto-Grecian Ibis in antique red :—in the greenhouses, a Brutus, rather trivial,
attempted in violent reality, but rather negligently executed than ill conceived; an
elegant bust on a pedestal, which is supposed to represent Leonidas:–then under the
great portico, two seated statues, one of Augustus, a little too much repaired, the other
of Faustina. In the niches, I will only cite Julius Caesar, whose head has been fitted
on to a body contemporary with Trajan.


3 K
434 ROME.
The paintings are not very numerous; I scarcely remember more than a triptych
representing the Annunciation, the Cradle, the Crucifixion, and which must be one
of the early pictures of Perugino, unless you attribute it to Lorenzo di Credi; the
Virgin adoring before the Infant-God has a sentiment that recalls the inspiration of
the Umbrian school. Let us also cite the two cartoons of Love and Psyche, by Giulio
Pippi, to recall that these sketches of Giulio Romano were executed by him at Mantua,
at the Palazzo del Te.
The definitive impression left upon us by this wonderful place, is at once that of
a rich bazaar and that of a sanctuary; many interesting pieces, but some jays in
peacock's feathers. In general, at the Villa Albani the bas-reliefs are superior to the
statues: if you go there several times, this is the important section to which you
will do well to attach yourself. A grove adjoins the palace—a sacred wood, where
the columns of mighty oaks neighbour the trunks of granite and marble, supporting
together a leafy vaulting, which passes the grains of light through a sieve on to the
gods disposed in the woods beneath.
At an opening in this Elysian grove, just recognition and gratitude have erected
a colossal bust of Winckelmann, in the middle of that fairyland which he created and
which depicts him; nothing is more singular than that twice Germanic head (for Wolf
was the sculptor), among all these people from the land of Alcibiades and Aspasia.
VI.
We were too near the Villa Ludovisi, which you pass on your way back to Rome,
not to avail ourselves of the permission to visit it, which we had obtained with sufficient
trouble. The park is limited on one side by the wall and towers of Honorius, and
on the other by the Via Salaria. One of the three mansions of the estate, the principal
one, was built by Domenichino Zampieri; it offers no very curious feature. The
second is a museum of statues; the third leaves only one moderately agreeable
recollection, that of a fresco representing Aurora on her car, banishing Night, and
casting flowers before her. More dull than the famous pictures of a decayed school
sometimes are, the Aurora of Guercino is far from being comparable to the Aurora
of Guido Reni in the Rospigliosi palace: it is a piece of a discordant and inadequate
effect; the types are common, there is nothing aerial, the design has no selectness;
and the composition is set in heavy architectural ornaments, which do not help to
increase its value. . -
To console me for this deception and some others, they told me that for twenty
years the Villa Ludovisi had been closed to the public, so much had Prince Piombino,
its owner, been irritated by the indelicacy of an Englishman who had mutilated one
of the statues in the garden, for the sake of carrying a fragment away. This Englishman,
who is marked everywhere, must be always the same person, for by an exception
which his countrymen must deplore, he damages the reputation of the English gentry
for discretion and decency; possibly too they place the misdeeds of all other nations
on the head of that which travels more than any other in Europe. However this
may be, it was to steps taken by Paul Delaroche that the public is indebted for the
removal of a rigorous obstruction : he would not enter the saloon of the Aurora, until
Z///E V//, /A /, UDO V/S/. 435
he had obtained the same favour for the public; and his friends tell how in face of
this over-praised fresco, which gained much by being admired on trust, our illustrious
countryman regretted having taken so much trouble for such small result.
I like to think that the colossal head of the Ludovisi Juno, a masterpiece of the
poetic ages and inspired by Greek art, when purity of form renders itself without
dryness in that generous model, which only belonged to the age of Pericles, must have
made the lamented artist who reopened the villa to us, quite forget Guercino. All
supports the presumption that in contemplating this marvel, we are in the presence
of a very old and very faithful copy of the celebrated Juno of Argos, by Polycletes:
it was before this divinity that Goethe is reported to have said his prayers every
morning.
GARDENS OF THE VILLA. ALBANI.
The building that contains the sculpture gallery, offers other works that are worthy
to attract amateurs. We will mention—the Mars at rest; a bronze head of Caesar
already old, a realistic likeness, of a very strange expression, and which must be
compared with the Caesar as Pontifex Maximus of the Vatican (no cast of either of
them has been made); a thrilling group of Orestes recognised by Electra, two like-
nesses probably, and of an indescribable sweetness; the Gaul, who after poniarding
his wife, kills himself to escape the conqueror (another masterpiece of expression and
feeling); finally, a charming little Faun. Such are the most striking pieces among
good works. My friends had some trouble in finally leaving the group of Electra,
where the breath of a modern spirit seems to play in antique forms. The names

3 K 2
436 ROME.
inscribed on the marble respond to this double, impression; the sculptor was called
Menelaos, and his master Stephanos.
In these gardens, which are of vast extent, you stop in front of a colossal bust,
though too much retouched, of Constantine in his youth. It is one of the two known
portraits of the son of St. Helen ; the other, which is on foot, decorates, as we have
already said, the porch of St. John Lateran.
When after admiring the two giant planes adjoining the block of Egyptian
granite on which they have placed the obelisk of Sallust, you lose yourself among
the great trees of the park, you are not slow in forgetting Latium in a sort of vision
of the melancholy produced by Swiss solitudes. All through the woodland meadows,
ruminating cows of the north, goats, châlets, conspire in the illusion, which is only
incomplete because the privet, cypress, and other green trees, have too hard tints
to lend themselves to the changing and shaded effects of our climates: in this Helvetian
guise, Ausonian nature seems to shiver with weariness. In the gardens of glowing
Italy you need terraces, projections from which the light may rebound in joyful cascades,
with perspectives artistically open over the azure freshness of the mountains. Whatever
our old romanticists may have said, the symmetries of the architectural garden har-
monize with the sites of old Rome, where two thousand years of possession have
acclimatized them, and where they answer to the impression of the ruins; the artificial
has become the second nature of these villas, which have remained, as everything
concurs in proving, what they were in the time of Germanicus and Octavia.
We remained the latest at the Villa Ludovisi, free from all heed of study, like
folk who have done their day; chattering eagerly, as people do when the fatigued
spirit reposes, and letting our eyes wander without any longer seeing things over a
horizon of wonders. Night was falling as we quitted these domains, in face of which,
on the side of the road touching the Quirinal, Sallust gave himself the patrician
luxury of a cemetery. To give celebrity to his catacomb, he showed there in loculi
the skeletons of Posion and Secundilla, two giants of ten feet and three inches: Pliny
the Elder pretends to have measured the bones.
PIAZZA AND PORTA DEL POPOLO-CHURCH OF STA. MARIA.
CHAPTER XXII.
Passion of the ancients for collections.—Borghese palace and galleries.—The school of Ferrara, Garofalo,
Francia, &c.—The Danaë of Correggio.—Incongruity of Caravaggio.—Decorative peculiarities.—The
Nuptials of Alexander and Roxana.-Bellini, Titian, Bonifazio, etc.—Maria de' Medici and Maximilian of
Holbein-Piazza and church of Sta. Maria del Popolo—Legend as to Nero's tomb.-Pinturicchio,
Lorenzetto, Rossellini, and Florentine work at the church del Popolo.—Raphael as sculptor.—Bas-relief of the
Pisans, etc.—Borghese villa and gardens.—Early work of Bernini.-Canova and the Borghese Venus.-
Van Blömen at Rome.—Belisarius and Justinian.—Scene of Messalina's death.
HE love of collections has distinguished the Roman aristocracy at all times;
at the end of the Republic, the habitations of notable citizens were filled
with paintings, Greek sculptures, and Etruscan curiosities. The public was
admitted to see the galleries of Lucullus, as well as the statues which peopled
the gardens of Servilius; Caesar had only collected works of irreproachable purity;
Pompeius, less refined, had a preference for pieces that were strange, colossal, or made
of very costly material; Pollio, who lived in the Aventine, where he opened his library
to the public, possessed statues by Praxiteles, as well as the group which has been
so famous ever since as the Farnese Bull; the villas of Hortensius, Cicero, and Agrippa,
were crowded with marvels that had been collected at a great price. Yet the
philosophers never ceased to declaim against luxury; the most ancient authors who


4.38 A&OME.
fix the war against Antiochus, 187 B.C., as the date of the invasion of Oriental effeminacy,
hand down to us the diatribes of contemporary virtue against the importation of beds
adorned with bronzes, of carpets, of sideboards. Such riches will seem modest, if we
compare them with the treasures that are heaped up in certain modern houses, like
the palace of the Borghese.
This vast and solid idea of Martin Longhi, which was completed by Ponzio under
Paul V., is so near the Via Condotti and the Corso, that in general it is among the
first that are visited; and there is no harm in this, for being built in the last years of
the sixteenth century, it gives a fair idea of those Roman palaces where they strove to
dazzle contemporaries by pleasing the wandering shades of the patricians of antiquity.
The friezes and the cornice of the Borghese palace, its spacious doorway, correspond with
the style of the court, which is surrounded by two ranges of arches, supported on the
ground-floor on ninety-six Doric columns of granite, joined in pairs, and supported on
the upper story by Corinthian pillars. A number of bas-reliefs and sarcophagi
contribute, with the ornamental colossi of Ceres, Sabina, and Julia, to clothe the whole
with a truly majestic aspect: the imperial effigies are at home, and the princes of
to-day continue past generations. -
The galleries are the principal attraction of this hospitable house, where artists
and the public are admitted to copy, as freely as in our own museums, the masterpieces
which have been so long in collecting ; twelve saloons (the whole ground-floor) are
filled with pannels and canvasses. One of the principal merits of this collection is
that better than any other it makes us acquainted with the school of Ferrara, not
in its primitive masters like Galassi or Cosimo Tura, but in the disciples and grand-
disciples of Francia and Lorenzo Costa, in that pleiad where round Dosso-Dossi and
Garofalo gravitate artists like Mazzolino, Francis and Jerome Cotignola, Ercole Grandi,
Scarcellino, Ricci, Girolamo da Scarpi, down to the Bonona, who was such an imitator
of the Caracci. It may even be remarked that the chiefs of the school figure more
extensively here than their satellites: Benvenuto Tisi, called Garofalo, is represented
by a Holy Family, and by the Marriage at Cana, a small but precious reproduction
of a great picture that is lost; by the Resurrection of Lazarus, painted for the church
of St. Francis at Ferrara ; by a Madonna between St. Joseph and St. Michael; by
that Descent from the Cross, so justly famous, which opposes to the same subject
treated by Raphael in his youth, the rivalry of an inspiration drawn from his third
manner by a disciple of genius. Both pictures are in the Borghese gallery. Let
us also mention the Adoration of the Magi, by Mazzolino of Ferrara, the rival of Tisi;
and the Circe of Dosso-Dossi, one of the rare masters among the Ferrarese; the
colouring is almost Venetian. This indeed is the tendency of the school; we feel
in it already the approaches of the Adriatic lagoons, the less embrowned Holland of
Italian painting. We remark among the artists of Ferrara at this epoch, and especially
in the numerous works of Garofalo, a constant anxiety to charm by elegant harmonies:
the pure tints smile as in a posy; only the general tone is raised to such powerful
intensity, that it is not without surprise that you see a soft palette free itself from so
deep a scale. It is not impossible that the superior qualities of Garofalo as a colourist,
may produce Some illusion as to the real value of his compositions: let us say, too,
that a pure and worthy soul, reflecting itself in its work, rendered more sympathetic
the compositions of this lover of beauty and goodness, of nature and light, who expiated
the joy of his eyes by ten years of bitter sightlessness.
BORGHESE PAZACE A/VD GA/C ZERYES. 439
Let me be allowed not to describe this gallery, but to chat about it with the reader,
as if we were wandering through it together. I stopped my companion before a
Madonna of Sandro Botticelli, surrounded by a choir of angels; it is a more important
piece than the Holy Family of Lorenzo di Credi, attributed to Verocchio. The Caesar
Borgia, counted among the Raphaels, about which there has been most talk, is a very
remarkable figure, strangely arranged; but nothing proves that it represents the
nephew of Alexander VI., while everything shows that it is not by Raphael; the absence
of certain supplenesses and the uniformity of tone would make one presume rather
that this portrait was painted by a skilful artist after an ancient engraving. The
neighbouring portrait, a Cardinal, belongs to Raphael, but you are reduced to a guess
about this, under the retouchings with which they have plastered it over. There is
no necessity to think oneself obliged to take for masterpieces of Leonard or Francia
all the works of the old school of Milan and that of Ferrara, which seduce you as
you pass along these galleries; the first glance attracts, but if you approach, you
soon distinguish that the subjects inspired by these masters and composed in their
manner, are of a less delicate execution;—here and there some hardnesses, drier outlines,
a simpler model, pieces less studied. However, the Borghese palace possesses one
pearl of Francesco Francia, which may serve for a touchstone; that is the small kneeling
and ecstatic figure of St. Stephen, a clear painting of a supreme finesse, and of a
feeling that is almost beyond this world; round this picture everything grows pale
and heavy, and seems effaced. And to think that for nearly three centuries this artist
had fallen into oblivion | Cochin and Marigny, in their enumeration of the paintings
Of Bologna, have not even mentioned it; later on, at the time of our conquests,
they did not think it worth while to carry off to the Louvre a single Francia.
If, reader, we had to visit this gallery together, we should go straight to the
Danaë of Correggio, and we should look at it for long in every possible light without
uttering a word; before wonders like this, where science expends itself to realise
the charm of forms, we ought to open the eyes very wide, and not to talk, for the
impression, like the description of it, only translates itself on such an occasion by
stupidities. The Antiope of the Louvre is asleep, her sister Danaë is employed
differently, and this piece is worth the others. What seems even to give it the advantage
are two small Loves, which, with an arrow in the hand in the form of pen or stilus,
write Jove's last conquest promptly down. As you see very badly in the Janiculum
the Christ of the Column, of Sebastian del Piombo, one is not sorry to find here in a fine
sketch what you sought at St. Pietro in Montorio. Let us follow Domenichino in
that Hunt of Diana, a fine piece, about which Dupaty went mad. In truth the president
did not perceive that the painter, who imitated the ancient Romans so far as to be
without women, instead of carrying off some Sabines, has made all the nymphs of
the chase from the same model, save a few ingenious variations devised at the moment.
One of Diana's followers, bathing in the foreground of the picture, must have been
surprised at being plunged once more, some time later, into another bath under the
name of Susanna, and looked at by senile Actaeons whom their dogs did not devour :
it was at the Corsini palace that I found this old acquaintance again. -
Then came the Caracci, Guido Reni, Carlo Dolci, and the Paduan, with his Venus
at her Toilette, and Albano with his Seasons—small nudities served in verdure, to
enliven the Jocondes of 1818, and provoke the swoonings of Stendhal. Here is the
only profane picture of Federigo Barocci—AEneas carrying away his Father. The
44O A&O/E.
movements and the heads possess grace; but what a singular notion for an ascetic,
to seek the sensual and redundant manner of Correggio. A picture to rejoice Jordaens
or Goya, is the Holy Family of that Caravaggio who compromised with such adroit
cynicism the name of Michelangelo. What a hectorer of a painter | Yet a leonine
tread, after all, bringing out of the canvas a splendid relief and fleshliness of
Scandalous opulence.
Hardy ornamentation has at all times been relished among the Romans, as their
monuments show; less obliged than the Greeks to reason about their decorations, less
pure and therefore more audacious in taste, withdrawn from the criticisms of constituted
blockheads who find barbarous every original idea which they could not have conceived,
the artists and architects of Rome have admitted sometimes, at the Renaissance as
well as in antiquity, ideas that are almost infantine. Such is the perspective, quite
incomprehensible at first, which by cheating the eyes prolongs the Borghese palace
into imaginary gardens. You are at the extremity of the house; by a window you
look down on to a narrow street, and on the same side an opening in the wall shows
you beyond flowers, a jet of water; then the banks of the Tiber towards the harbour
of Ripetta, with a distant glimpse of the grounds in which Fabius Maximus, when
they came to seek him for the dictatorship, was hoeing lettuces without taking any
heed of Hannibal. This avenue, at the extremity of the galleries, seems a path in
some vast park. Return to the adjoining window ; all has vanished; you no longer
see anything but an obscure vicolo. To obtain this decorative effect they pierced in
the wall, at the end of the galleries making an obtuse angle with the alley, a door
slantwise, after buying the house opposite; this house, which looks on to the Quay,
has been perforated from room to room, following the axis of the Borghese gallery;
in the middle of the oblique passage thus procured, they made a fountain of water in
a small court, and the opening gives to the palace a landscape background.
This amusing problem furnishes the visitors with an interlude, which allows them
to give a less wearied attention to the paintings in the last saloons, by which you return
to the first starting point, and to begin with, in a chamber next the Stanza degli Specchi,
to three renowned little frescoes of Raphael, saved in 1848 from the Vandals who
sacked the Villa Borghese. The Nuptials of Alexander and Roxana, forming two
subjects in which allegory and emblems of gallantry come in as in the time of Gessner,
show us points of Moreau the younger, of Boucher, or of Lancret, raised to the dignity
of the beautiful. What an absence of primness and affectation in this heroic pastoral,
and yet how the artist has dissembled his vigour under a grace in which nothing is
enervated ! I marked a group of Loves who are carrying off another in their arms;
they have a movement and design truly adorable. Another fresco of the master,
the Vices attacking Virtue, is not less remarkable. Virtue, under the likeness of the
god Terminus, receives on a buckler a hail-shower of darts launched by the Passions
in full alliance: the spirit of the figures drawing the bow is worthy of the happiest
bas-reliefs. This piece is curious from the fact that it is not imitated, but improved,
from the style of Michelangelo: the preoccupation is manifest, the intention of
lightening, or of spiritualising it, as we should say, is no less so. Giulio Romano
seems to have proceeded in a contrary direction in his Discovery of the Tomb of Numa,
and in the no less heavy subjects of the Clelia, brought from the Villa Lanti. It is
from the Villa Aldobrandini that two graceful frescoes of Domenichino came : the
Apollo flaying Marsyas, and the Death of Coronis; from the midst of the sky into
THE BORGHESE GALLERIES. 44 I
which he is thrown the god launches an arrow at the nymph. A charming thing is the
landscape of these pictures, especially of the second ; nobody has presented a view
at once more simple and more splendid of the Roman Campagna.
It is proper to refer even in haste to what one cannot forget: a Madonna and Child
of Gian Bellini, a piece of blonde harmony, a pearl not very common in the work
of a master inclined to the sombre ; the masterpiece copied from Titian, representing
seated on the brink of a wall, two young women of a supreme beauty, one draped and
the other naked, in such a way as to torture critical allegorisers. Is it Vice and Virtue,
or Artifice and Truth, or Sacred Love and Profane Love, the most common but the
absurdest, for these poetic themes do not belong either to the time or the country or
the habits of Titian 2 Jacopo Palma, a rare master, figures in this gallery, where Paul
Veronese has put his name to some screens, such as St. John the Baptist in the Desert.
What is worth more is the illustration of the Legend of St. Anthony of Padua; he
preached on the sea-shore to ears that were distracted; to shame them he turned and
addressed the fish, who rise in the water to hear him. Some good portraits, one by
Pordenone, the other by Giorgione (the latter too much restored); the Virgin between
NUPTIALS OF ALEXANDER AND ROXANA.
two Saints by Lorenzo Lotto, a Venetian of high worth, who remained more faithful than
Titian to the traditions of Gian Bellini, their common master, could not be passed
over in silence; nor the three graceful pictures of Bonifazio, a tender and gentle
Venetian, who sometimes finds power by only seeking to please; nor the Family of
Pordenone, also a Venetian of the great epoch; nor so many other pieces which would
do honour to any collection. In the midst of these constellations, I have only marked
the planets.
Among the Italian galleries, I am inclined to neglect the exiles from Holland and
Flanders. Yet the Borghese palace possesses in this series, besides some pieces of
merit, two gems which neither the amateur nor the historian can despise. One is
the portrait of Maria de' Medici, by Van Dyck, very delicate in physiognomy, very
expressive, and remarkable for the differences which it offers in point of expression
and character, as compared with the more common interpretation of Rubens. The
other is one of the finest Holbeins and the best preserved that I have seen; it repre-
sents, in full light and facing you, a person clothed in furs and with a bonnet on his
head. The Notice tells us that the original is unknown; in reality it is the portrait
of the Emperor Maximilian, while still only archduke and before he wore a beard.

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442 A&OM/E.
*
f
II.
Since we have gone through the Borghese galleries, let us finish the afternoon at
their villa, so as to appreciate the collections of the family as a whole. The distance
is not long; you have only to follow the Corso as far as the Piazza del Popolo, which
is ornamented by the terraces of the Pincian, an obelisk of Rameses III., taken from
the Circus Maximus and set up again by Sixtus V., the two small corresponding
domes of Sta. Maria de' Miracoli and Sta. Maria del Monte Santo; and finally the
important church of Sta. Maria del Popolo, which will stay our steps.
Although Nero was the most popular personage of Rome, it cannot be denied that
there were troublesome stories about the successor of Claudius. In the middle ages
spectres and demons used to come roving under the gardens of the Pincian, round the
tomb of the son of Agrippina: repulsed by frequent exorcisms, they discovered an
ingenious means of retaining possession of the sepulchre. On the tomb of the Domitian
clan where, as Suetonius informs us, Nero was buried by his nurses Ecloge and
Alexandra, they planted a nut-tree which took gigantic proportions, in which these
maleficent genii chose a home in the shape of a cloud of black crows. The tree,
a dome of verdure, became at nightfall a cupola of basalt, and the birds infested the
whole quarter. To free it from them, Pascal II. had recourse to the Madonna, who
in a dream commanded him to fell the albero ma/mato, to cast its ashes to the winds,
and to raise a temple on the site of the mole of Nero. Whether Pope Pascal offered
this propitiatory edifice to his people, or the Quirites of the thirteenth century raised it
at the public charge, it is at any rate true that the uncle of Julius II. had it rebuilt in
the fifteenth century by the Florentine Bacio Pintelli, who invited for the embellishment
of his work the great artists of his country at the very time when they had their best
inspirations. Hence to go through the church of Sta. Maria del Popolo is to go back
to Florence, and make a summary revision of the fruitful art of Tuscany.
At the threshold you are attracted to the first chapel to the right, which was
established by the family of Sixtus IV., as is proved by the Rovere arms, that rooted
oak which was so good a symbol for Pope Julius. Pinturicchio by some luminous
frescoes lighted the angles of the vaults and the tympana, where he drew some
anecdotes from the life of St. Jerome, who reappears in the altar-piece, representing
one of those cradles where the Madonna kneels with the saints, to adore the child-god
whom she has brought. The subject lends itself to subtle interpretations of phy-
siognomy, for it is necessary to render at once the protection of maternal sentiment,
and the respect commanded by divinity. In the circumference of the altar the artist
has lighted up one of those landscapes, which every one has dreamed of, and which
the mystic painters discovered in the horizons of the future life. In the midst of these
splendours rises the tomb of Cardinal Christopher della Rovere, by a Florentine of
the good time, Rossellini perhaps; the perfections of this sculpture remind one of the
famous mausoleum of San Miniato. You will find Pinturicchio again in the third
chapel, the whole of which he decorated for Sixtus IV. ; it was here that he surpassed
himself in the picture of the Assumption, near the bronze statue of a sleeping bishop,
which Pollajuolo would not disavow. Pinturicchio in the following chapel has given
for guardians to two fine Florentine monuments, the Fathers of the Latin Church.
SAAV7'A MARIA DEL AOPOLO. 443
Finally, he painted in the vault of the choir at the back of the high altar, the Coronation
of the Virgin, surrounded by compartments ornamented with pale lightness, containing
the four Evangelists and four Fathers, as well as the Sibyls stooping. Pinturicchio
shows himself the immediate forerunner of Raphael; the charm of his figures, the
ordering of the compositions, all make one think of the Vatican. As we have seen,
this church is important for the work of a great master nearly unknown in France,
|
Li
m
l |
TOMB OF WILLIAM ROCCA (SACRISTY OF STA. MARIA DEL Popolo).
and whom we shall find again, less brilliant and less pure than here, at the Sixtine
and in the apartments of Alexander VI.
It is in the choir of Sta. Maria del Popolo that there rise to right and left, up
to the vault, the two finest Florentine tombs that Rome possesses; Julius II. had them
executed by Andrea Contucci for the Cardinals Basso and Ascanio Sforza. In the
second, the statues of the Virtues, and especially of Force, are splendid pieces. The
arrangement of the compositions, their delicacy which is never dry, their opulence

3 L 2
444 A’OME.
which remains sober, that sumptuosity which remains grave, and so much grandeur
without emphasis—all contribute to recommend these monuments. We ought not
to forget the windows of Peter and Claude of Marsillac, and not of Marseilles, as so
many critics have written it. They were Dominicans from Limoges, whom Leo X.
summoned to paint the glass of the Vatican, an art in which our country was
without a rival in the middle ages. Of all the works that these masters executed at
||||||
FLORENTINE STATUES, BAS-RELUEF OF THE PISANS (CORRIDOR of THE SACRISTY).
Rome, where they acquired such reputation, there only remain these—a Life of the
Virgin; John della Rovere had them designed by Pinturicchio. Carlo Maratti,
the Caracci, and Contucci, who restored with tact a portion of the frescoes of the
Perugian master, also made their mark at Sta. Maria del Popolo. We will neglect
them, to make our way into the chapel of the Chigi, who unluckily re-handled and
modernised this church.
The Chigi were bankers of Julius II. As is usual with financiers arrived at the

THE BORGHESE VIZZA AND GAA’DEMS. 445
plenitude of fortune, these, in the decoration of their chapel, strove to eclipse the
powers they had ransomed; they wished that Raphael should design them a statue,
and they had it executed by Lorenzetto: it is Jonas, gracefully seated on his
whale. Lorenzetto made for pendant an Isaiah, whom Jonas depreciates by the
comparison. The painter of Urbino designed the whole chapel; its cupola, its mosaic,
cartoons for the frieze, as well as for the altar-piece (Birth of the Virgin, intrusted to
Sebastian del Piombo, and too meanly completed by Salviati). In the last chapel
let us not omit, besides two Florentine monuments, one of which was erected between
I 501 and 1507 for a Cardinal Pallavicini who, having so fine a shrine prepared for
himself, wished to enjoy it before being closed fast in it—let us not omit to recall
that among the flags of the pavement are set some figures from tombs of the fourteenth
century, the well-preserved remains of the earlier church—a frequent and always
praiseworthy usage.
These hints would give a very inadequate idea of the importance of Sta. Maria
del Popolo, if we did not add these which are wanting everywhere, namely—the
mention of three other Florentine tombs of the fifteenth century, very admirable, and
one of them, that of William Rocca, Archbishop of Palermo, may be attributed to
Benedetto da Maiano: they were remounted in the sacristy, when they cut the
ancient cloister to consolidate the terraces of the Pincian. Finally, in the corridor
of this sacristy, where you will find in an ex roto three statues of 1497, there is over
a door a bas-relief belonging to a school that is rarely represented at Rome. It is
a sculpture of the Pisans—the Crowning of the Virgin. The piece is remarkable;
you already feel in it the approach of Giotto. Out of the fine things scattered here,
they would form with us a brilliant museum of Florentine art of the fifteenth
century, the golden age of the modern muse.
III.
Let us now pass the wall of Honorius by the old Flaminian gate which Narses
opened at the foot of the slope, and whose paltry decoration, in spite of Vignola
and Michelangelo who designed it, was compromised by Bernini; then a few steps
away, let us leave the road to Viterbo and turn to the right. We shall come to the
propylaea of the Borghese villa. Its gardens, into which you enter at once, do not
more than half justify their reputation ; we will soon say why. The enormous number
of the statues assembled in the palace occasions a lively astonishment, when we
learn the origin of so rich a gallery. When after his marriage with Pauline
Bonaparte, Prince Camillo Borghese, invited by his brother-in-law to sell his collection,
had seen it depart for the Louvre, where it constitutes our museum of antiques, he
was seized in presence of his depopulated galleries with a very natural regret: then
he had all his estates thoroughly explored, and they gave him, like the sowing of
Cadmus, a second crop of men in marble, yet more abundant than the first; such
is the source of the present collection. What treasures must be hidden in a soil out
of which, without leaving your own property, you extract a quarry of statues.
At the first saloon, you will be stopped by the mosaics of the pavement, repre-
senting Gladiators in action—a work of the end of the empire, found at Tusculum,
446 A’OME.
and which gives us precious hints as to the equipment, costume, and arms of the
combatants. They have set in the wall the extremely projecting relief of a Horse
leaping from a precipice; the movement is so just, and has so much power, that
Bernini was not too proud to restore the piece, and to throw on to the back of the
creature a Curtius, disposed with a singular conformity of style. It is not often that
we can condemn without appeal a man of celebrity and the age which glorified him;
certain well-chosen works of Bernini restore him to the front rank. Among these
will be comprised the strange fountain of the Borghese gardens, composed of a circle
of Hippogriffs coming out of the waves, and their interlacing tails supporting the
basin—a decorative masterpiece of
great originality.
In the saloon of Hercules, the statue
of the hero in female draperies is
remarkable enough, but the great sar-
cophagus representing his labours is
still more so. Winckelmann has de-
scribed its lid, on which are figured
the Amazons going to the succour of
Troy. The small triangular altar is
more ancient; it goes back to the
school of Ægina. And let us not
forget the Daphne, whom the laurel
already wraps in its bark, and whose
fingers are growing out into branches;
it is the only antique statue that repre-
sents her during her transformation.
In the gallery is a line of clever modern
busts of the emperors, of red porphyry,
with draperies of alabaster, placed on
pedestals of African granite. Let us
note a splendid urn of porphyry, and
an exquisite bronze representing Nero
as a child.
On the upper story are grouped
three interesting works of Bernini's
youth. AEneas carrying away his Father
is a rather cold group, without great
- elevation, but in which the legs are
very fine and the execution consummately skilful; the artist was fifteen when he worked
with this authority. David with his Sling is a portrait of Bernini at twenty; his
Daphne, pursued by Apollo, struggling in the arms of the god, and crying out while
undergoing transformation, is a work of just renown—a vivid piece, executed with great
force and knowledge in its minutest parts, and which must have shed the halo of masters
round a brow of only eighteen springs. Before becoming Urban VIII., Cardinal
Barberini improvised at the foot of the group the following moral –
BERNINI’s DAPHNE.
Quisquis amans sequitur fugitivae gaudia formae
Tronde manus implet, baccas seu carpit amaras.

7F/E BORGA/ESAE GA/, / ER/ES. 447
Bernini, who is very well represented in this palace, executed a magnificent bust of
Cardinal Scipio Borghese, who built the house. Among so many marvels, in the
number of which the Borghese Gladiator figures, purely modern art is introduced by
Canova, thanks to the beauty of his most celebrated model. It is here that the Princess
Pauline lends to Venus—made young once more—forms made for the marble which
seems to have created them, and the outlines of a visage inspired from the Athenian
cameos of the time of Alexander. The imperial Cypris holds the apple triumphantly.
If I mention fairly pure reproductions of the Venus stooping, of Corbulo, of the
Hermaphrodite, of the Faun—an interpretation of Praxiteles which is less delicate
perhaps, but broader and simpler than that of the Capitol, which in its turn yields the
FOUNTAIN IN THE BORGHESE GARDEN.S.
palm to the original fragment found in the Palatine—it is in order to recall that once,
instead of exacting incessantly something novel as we do now, and expecting an
unknown masterpiece from every workman who handles plaster, they used to adopt and
consecrate certain interpretations, that were really worthy of the veneration of peoples
and of the majesty of the gods, and thenceforth, until the arrival of another type,
not intruded or offered, but invited from some great artist for a new temple, they
reproduced with traditional piety the idea of the favourite heroes of the muse. From
this circumstance results an almost perfect certainty that most of the figures of Greek art
are translations, more or less faithful, from Phidias, Zeuxis, Apollodorus, Praxiteles, and
some other men of genius, whose names have come down to us. With these statues, as
with the proofs of an engraving, the first produced—that is, the oldest—are best in accent

448 A’OM/E.
and purity. But in Rome, where they poured out the treasures of the world, not to
preserve them, alas, but to destroy in mass with a blind fury, how uncommon it is to see
rising, out of the heaps accumulated by so many barbarisms, a copy from the time near
the heroic ages, such as the Venus of Milo, such as the Hercules of the theatre of
Pompeius, such as our Achilles, or even as the Torso of Ganymede at this Villa Borghese,
where are collected so many fine things which our fathers did not know! Let us remark
a mosaic of the second century, representing a Sacrifice of the Fetiales: three peasants
conclude a bargain or ratify a pact on a goat-skin before a statue of Mars. Nothing is
more curious in point of costume or type, or as a document, than this ceremony of the
ordinary and domestic rites of the last pagan ages. Thanks to the variety which
enlivens these villas, you will make acquaintance to a considerable extent with a Dutch
landscapist, of whom there is very little with us–Van Blömen, who died in 1740, after
passing part of his life in Italy, where he is known under the name of Orizzonte. This
r Ž. A4 --~~~
|III
| | |
THE BORGHESE VENUS.
master has decorated a saloon of the Villa Borghese with fifty-two pieces, and the
grateful princes have placed in it the portrait of the guest to whom they gave such long
shelter. Van Blömen’s painting is large, and has even a certain looseness of truth,
though it is keen. His points of view, which are complicated in position, so as to offer
the eye the amusement of varied perspectives, accumulate abrupt forms for the
advantage of distance; but he displays them harmoniously. His colour is warm, his
sites curious and effective; he handles landscape as a delicate ornament, with a
dexterity that complacently proves itself transcendent.
I have said that the gardens of this villa—the ordinary close of a walk for the quality
of the Pincian—have lost their splendour. Since the nephew of Paul V. had them laid
out, this noble family has placed them at the disposal of the Roman populace. So
when, in 1848, demagoguism replaced the pontifical régime, the grateful mob, by way
of repaying the hospitality which they had received for ten generations, made haste to
fell the great trees, to destroy the statues, to sack the palace, and to burn the pavilions

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GAA DENS OF Z UC U/C Z U.S. 449
which had for so long given them shelter. Prince Borghese has replanted, but the trees
are still young : let us hope that the good people to whom he has opened his domain
will let them grow.
Formerly you could leave the park by the Porta Pinciana, which dates from Honorius,
and which Belisarius rebuilt without succeeding in bequeathing his name to it. Yet it
is here, on the pedestal of a broken column, that tradition seats the blind disgraced
general, with his helmet in his hand, praying an alms. On the top of the Pincian, a
public park of French creation, and formerly Hill of the Gardens, used to be, as you
know, the gardens of Lucullus, which were afterwards appropriated by the wife of
Claudius, who postponed payment until the Greek kalends. It was here, behind the
Villa Medici, in the groves amid which she had taken refuge, that Messalina was slain
by a tribune whom the freedman Evodius had guided in pursuit of her.
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A STREET AT TIVOLI.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Excursion to Tivoli:-Temples and Waterfalls.-Old houses of Tibur—The Villa d'Este and its gardens.—
Ælius Adrianus and his Album of Travel.—Borders of the Villa Adriana.-Thickets and ruins.—Opening of
spring.
I.
HE cascades of Tivoli have often been compared to those of the Alps, and as
one does not come into the Roman Campagna merely to find Switzerland
over again, I felt little attraction for the excursion. The very name of so
celebrated a spot inspired me with a sort of aversion, for Tibur takes one
back to the sentimental classics of the Restoration, and Tivoli appeals to gay remi-


A&OAZO ZO ZYVOAA. 45 I
niscences; the whole answers to an idea of dejection. During this mood, the winter,
which in this latitude finishes its course with great rapidity, rolled back towards the
north; the tepid breezes wafted from Sicily had brought all the gardens into festival
and all the trees into full blossom. The spring here has an opening song, rapid and
indescribable, with all the themes loved of all climates; sad the day before, Italy,
which will be burnt to-morrow, presents an ideal spectacle for the moment. Some
feeling of this reached even the city, where all sorts of pastoral provocatives filled the
air; we allowed ourselves so quickly to be seduced by it, that at the moment of depar-
ture the abbé treated us like young folk, with one of those saddened smiles of which
we were only too soon to discover the mysterious meaning. We made a party of four.
The equipage was quickly improvised, too quickly even, for it very nearly left us on
the pavement before we had passed the walls, the horse having fallen down at the
end of a street which is terminated by a gate constructed by Sixtus V. in the aqueduct of
the Marcian, Tepulan, and Julian waters, at the time when this pontiff supported his
Felice aqueduct on walls successively restored by Octavianus, Titus, and Caracalla.
Under this arch of Solid structure retreated in perspective the trees of an avenue
all radiant with fresh verdure; they half veiled the battlements of the city and of the
Tiburtine gate. We had time to contemplate this glimpse, while they refitted with
cords of rope the most tattered, the most funereal equipage that ever held a joyous
Company. -
There is no better preparation for a miniature Switzerland than the steppes among
which the road to Tivoli winds. At ten miles or so, the osteria ael Zavernucoſe
amused us by its sign, a neo-Pompeian fancy, on which some drinkers make merry in
company with a blue capon, a lost genus. Farther on, the broken outline of Castell'
Arcione, a ruin isolated on a sharp mound, then the bridge of La Solfatare over an
ill-coloured, fetid, and sulphureous stream, an overflow channel for the Lago de Tartari,
contribute to darken the aspect of these fallow lands;–nature in her ugliest poverty.
Pausanias described Albula as water that recalls the stream of Baréges; but this term,
which Strabo gives also to the Anio, is assigned equally by Pliny the Naturalist to
the Tiber: “Tiberis, antea Zióris, et prius Albula.”
tº When any plant grows there, the water petrifies it; the pond which feeds the
trenches of this unclean Naiad, agglomerates its bituminous weed in little islands on
which parasitic herbs languish; Augustus, who had a skin disorder, used to bathe in it.
Along these plains, which are not quite level, you find enormous blocks of travertine
half hewn : slaves rolled them thus far at the time of the erection of the Coliseum ;
abandoned for seventeen centuries, they come at length to their destination, and find
shelter in the buildings of the day. If you did not meet the Ponte Lucano in a picture
from which Poussin drew something, and the burying place of the Plautian clan, a tower
with battlements of the middle ages, no journey would seem so ungracious as this. So
gaiety reigned without restraint, for the amusements of the road did not hinder
conversation.
When our jade began to travel the final slope, wearied at her slowness, we jumped
to the ground to ascend directly to Tivoli by a rough and dry incline, marked at
intervals by some old and twisted trunks which on the grass, pierced here and there by
rock, take the look and colour of Squares of stones that had thrown out branches and
leaves; this is what they call a forest of olives. So far the Tibur of the poets did
nothing to recall the land of William Tell. On the site of Tivoli, the Sabine hills open
- 3 M 2
452 A’OM/E.
out in a horse-shoe: the old town, founded, they say, more than four centuries before
Rome by refugees from Argos, occupies the southern extremity of the semicircle, and
looks to the north, which contributes to the freshness of the site. This hill is now
utilised by various works, but through the boundaries of the fields ruins are seen
rising; names sung under Augustus appear among the owners of the factories.
A number of old houses, and hilly streets with shops which have nothing in them;
substructures on every side; old postern-gates where the aloe kindles his taper in
the crevices of the wall; a chattering populace; long alleys, low rooms whence in the
evening issues the sound of rhythmic songs, with the tabor; cascades on every side,
even under the caves of a crest in which the houses, piled one over the other, seem
to be on the point of being launched into the abyss; below terraces the sheer rock;
finally on the side of this cavernous
arch, a stream shot forth in three
leaps with frightful uproar—all that is
Tivoli.
This Niagara of the Teverone, a
wild device of nature over which time
has no power, gives a primitive aspect
to a spot where art holds a strange
position. Viewed from the front, the
falls have for their crown gardens,
arches resting on rocks, battlements,
campaniles; the masses of water rush
down from these structures, and gush
out from their foundations. When the
cloud of vapours collected by the
boiling of the foam receives a trans-
verse ray from the sun, its broken fires
describe an arc with prismatic hues, of
which the lower extremity is extin-
guished in the cold depths of the
abyss, while the other throws above
the cascades a halo round the circular
Greek temple of Hercules, as well as
- - - upon the little square temple of the
RAVINE : TEMPLE OF HERCULES, CALLED OF THE SIBYL. Sibyl, both standing on the edge of the
precipice. Nothing is more charming on
these denuded rocks than the rotunda, which is earlier than Tiberius, with its Corinthian
fluted columns supporting an entablature, adorned with festoons and bucrania. Its
execution is of extreme delicacy, and we have the contrast between rugged creation
and the refinements of art. It was under the foundation of the temple that five-and-
forty years ago, the great cascade of the Anio still poured its waters; an inundation
came, which carried away the upper sluice and unchained such a deluge over the
town, thus perched on the brim of an abyss, that the swollen torrent swept away a
whole cluster of houses. How could all that hold? We cannot understand it. You
see pieces of wall launched into space, cellars pierced in the rock with windows
to which you cannot any longer reach, and a paved street which ends in void.

ARCH OF THE ACQUA FELICE, NEAR THE TIBURTINE GATE.


|

TV VOL/. - 453
In order to save the ancient houses and buildings, it was necessary to turn this
terrible scourge aside, and by digging a covered channel for the Anio in the heart
of Monte Catillo, to open another outlet for the stream, which now falls more to the
left. But only the main sheet of water goes down here: the town being placed
as it were over a sieve, from all sides of the hill and over an enormous breadth the
waters make their escape from the town, like columns from a besieged town making
a furious sortie. They form little cascades in a carpet of thick verdure, and it is
only at the opening of the valley that after this dispersion over half a league of fall,
the army of waters proceeds to reconstitute itself compactly in the channel of the
Teverone. To heighten the splendour of this long spectacle, each point of elevation
is crowned with a monument of the
Renaissance or of antiquity: there is
St. George with his bell-tower on a
temple contemporary with Marius; there
is the convent which has replaced the
house of Catullus; there is the pre-
tended villa of Maecenas, a vast block
of ruins which were the great temple
of Hercules, once the seat of a public
library, where a friend of Aulus Gellius
went to seek in Aristotle a proof that
melted snow is an unwholesome drink;
there are the green campaniles of the
house of Ferrara, the highest cypresses
in the world ; farther on are the much-
contested villa of Horace, and the
incontestable fortress of the Varus who
let his legions be massacred.
As soon as you arrive up here, you
want to see and embrace all, and as
from this little hotel of the Sibyl, where
so many travellers have come to perch
themselves, the eye wanders over the
exordium of the drama, you only pass -
through the house to plunge imme- some PEcoRAR LIKE clephts.'
diately, with or without guide, into a
sort of perpendicular labyrinth. The descent to the cascade by an intertwining pathway
is one of the most entertaining, so much has the work of ages cut and slashed the
rocks and complicated the vegetation of this brilliant cascade. Galleries, niches,
grottoes, porches, have been worked in the tufa, which is all honeycombed with pigeon-
holes, with black pigeons flying in and out. Helping the work of men, the waters have
fashioned aqueducts; they have excavated, and then petrified, tree-trunks in which
rivulets make their way. Alpine plants wed with those of Greece; the acanthus
with the erodium, the myrtle with the cyclamen; the orchises of Amalfi with the
fiery periwinkles dear to the Etruscans, who cut this charming species in their jewels.
As we were standing on an angle of the rock, three shots made us jump, and on
turning round we saw in the distance a white-clad cook, who not being able to make

454 Sº A&OME.
us hear in such an uproar, called us to him by signals. It was the master-cook of
the hostelry; he had just slain the meat for our dinner; three of the black pigeons,
which, crammed with grape and myrtle, coo in the hollow of the Tiburtine rocks and
are the exquisite game of these mountains, where they grill them with a primitive
talent that is beyond reproach.
You are entertained here by worthy folk, not spoilt by travellers, whose reception
is cordial, and whose service has a gaiety that recalls the good old times. The artists
in fact have won the victory over the nabobs, and given the tone, because they stay
there more. Indeed everybody here tries to join in the festival of sight; groups of
people are posted here and there as if only for the express-purpose of giving animation
to the scene. On a Saturday evening, the town puts on an air of happy holiday; on
Sunday morning the men with their long gaiters, their green cloaks, their picturesque
frippery; some Pecorari like Clephts and incongruously attired; the women with their
corslets, with their handkerchief cut square upon the neck, and their red or white coif,
bring out the southern character of the locality. Both sexes group themselves at the
street corners, round fountains whose water flows over into antique sarcophagi.
The inspiration of antiquity and of the palace of Armida erected by Tasso lends a
strange charm to the villa of the Cardinal Hippolytus d’Este, uncle of the Eleonora
whose beauty was so fatal to the poor Torquato. With its grottoes of mosaic where the
water drips in sounding drops, its pieces of green water where the lotus languishes, its
theatrical magnificence and its neglect, this deserted and lordless fairy-land produces
the impression of a palace of romance and adventure.
Between Tivoli and the Villa Adriana at the head of the plain in the last recess of the
mountain, you could recover a host of subjects worked by Claude and Van Blömen, and
nearly all the grounds of Poussin; the younger Schools, beginning with Joseph Vernet,
have all illustrated this district. We made our way down into it the next day, by the
slope opposite the cascatelle which you count on your left, as from the winding glades
through which you pass, you watch the many changes in the outlines of Tivoli, crowned
by loftier crests. Its slopes are of such richness that I would willingly with Flaccus have
wished the repose of Tibur for my near decline: like him we hung over the stream,
as we wandered among the woods where orchards ripen,
“Et praeceps Anio, et Tiburni lucus, et uda
Mobilibus pomaria rivis.'
We seek involuntarily the shades of that L. Munatius Plancus, who governed the
Gauls and was the founder of Lyons: ‘densa Zióuris umbra tui.’
II.
When Adrian on his return from Syria which he had governed, from Athens where
he had been archon, from the wild regions of Britain and Armorica which he had
explored as a traveller, from Judaea which he had held subject, from Asia Minor and
Egypt which he had studied as an archaeologist—when this crowned patron of all
tourists, wearied with the toils of empire and travel, wanted to instal his souvenirs, he
laid out as gardens some leagues of a country that was varied with many dells and
THE VIL/CA AIORYAMA. 455
slopes. To find, as in an album of souvenirs, what had charmed him in his journeys over
the face of the world, he bade his architects reproduce the Academy, the Lyceum, the
Prytaneium, the Poecile of Athens; the temple of Serapis at Canopus, a theatre at
Corinth, and the Pyramids of Giseh. He even had Tartarus executed just as Homer
had described it, “etiam Inſeros ſinvit,” says Spartianus; and the Elysian fields as Virgil
dreamed them. Thanks to the topography of the district and its richness, he succeeded,
by excavating green basins and transplanting mountains, in creating a second time the
wonder of Thessaly—that Vale of Tempe, where the river Peneus under its mighty trees
hid from Olympus the pranks of Pan, unveiled by Ovid.
For this immense villa the emperor employed materials stripped from three parts of
the world: the workmen of twenty nations helped in the enterprise. From the hut of the
Scythian to the mysterious grottoes of the Armoricans, from Babylonian palaces to the
hypogea of the Pharaohs, the Villa Adriana offered everything remarkable that had been
presented to the master of the world by the usages and customs of the countries through
which he had gone. In his youth AElius Adrianus, with the aid of his fleets, had skimmed
from the conquered universe the paintings, statues, even mosaics and bas-reliefs, the
masterpieces of Greece and Egypt; he had despoiled the temples, and dug up from among
the tombs, and by his command his commissioners stripped the palaces of tributary
sovereigns. The colossi of India, the Greek vases which were earlier than the Eupa-
trids; the Sphinxes and Pharaohs of basalt and onyx of the first dynasties; the idols of
gold and silver; the gods of Parian and alabaster set up by Zeuxis and Praxiteles;
the bronzes that were contemporary with Alexander; the decorations of Athens and
Corinth and Argos—everything came to swell the most monstrous cabinet of curiosities
and antiquities the world ever saw.
For seventeen centuries this poetic bazaar has become the inexhaustible quarry,
whence they have taken columns and friezes; mosaics for paving palaces, blocks for
building ten cities for fairies, works of art to gorge most of the museums of the west.
It was from this great storehouse that the collection of philosophers assembled at the
Vatican came; hence came the Medicean Venus, the Antinois, a set of Egyptian
statues, a menagerie of animals in marble, the four pillars in porphyry of the Ciborium
of Sta. Maria Maggiore and its thirty-eight Ionic columns of cipollino polished like ivory.
The Faun in antique red of the Capitol, and the Adonis of the Villa Albani, have
slumbered amid these thickets. Even in our own time, if an antique pavement is wanted
for a gallery, and African granite to sustain it, they know that it will suffice just to
remove the earth.
By the reign of Caracalla, this sublime madness of Adrian was only a storeroom;
after Totila, who besieged Tivoli, the villa became a quarry. Its gardens, in turn
abandoned and restored to cultivation, owe to these changes of fortune an aspect of
wildness, which raises them to the majesty of true nature: its trees are enormous; but
under the meadow-lands you divine substructures, and vaulted abysses open in the turf.
Perhaps it would be proper to speak both of the Poecile and of the Grecian theatre, and
of the Cento Camerelle, and of the temple of Serapis, and of the porticoes. Among all
this collection of vaults and galleries, before these masses of red brick swallowed up in
verdure, it would be a meritorious work to decide the purpose and destination of such
a mass of architecture; it would be proper . . . . But it was noon; the first heat of the
south had aroused the crickets, the forerunners of the grasshoppers; above the lofty
pines, the sky was of the sweetest blue, their spreading branches sung the song of the
456 A’OME.
sea; perfumes so penetrating ascended from a bed of double violets, married to varieties
of white and rose colour, that to give oneself up to archaeology, one must have had
Etruscan pottery in place of heart.
No park translates so poetically the impressions of solitude and many recollections.
The grounds are carpetted with vegetation renewed for centuries by the breezes from the
mountains; the olive plantations have become a forest; the cypresses announce ruins
from afar. Along the avenues, under the arches of porticoes which crumble over a bed
of new flowers, you discern in distant glimpses the ancient Praeneste, where in the time
of Petronius roses dropped; on the opposite side the villas of Zenobia and Martial;
farther on Mentana, perched in a clump behind Nomentum. For the last four centuries
the Villa Adriana has been the cartoon of painters; in the time of Pinturicchio, they
provided themselves here with materials and groves for the grounds of their frescoes.
No region can offer what the Roman country gives to the landscape painter with such
prodigality. -
We wandered about all the day, dispersing for the sake of being alone, reuniting to
admire in concert; passing the hours on beds of moss, watching the blue sky through
the pines. When they are very lofty, with a trunk of two or three feet in diameter
whose smooth bark has turned red, the spreading cover of the tree seems to rest on a
column of porphyry: the pine in Italy assumes monumental grandeur in the midst of
rustic architecture. Without any untimely incident to disturb our dreams, we were
content merely to go on living in these Elysian fields until the evening, when, touched
by the red of twilight, vegetation recovered a livelier splendour. The birds saluted the
close of a glorious day; the nightingale sang over them all, and seemed from the
highest tree-tops to be answering the first star.
REMAINS OF THE VILLA ADRIANA.

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VATICAN LIBRARY.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE DIVINE CITY OF THE VATICAN.
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Origin of this residence.—Entrance by the Court of St. Damasus.-Appearance of the Loggie-Visit to Pintu-
ricchio in the apartments of the Borgias.-Portrait of Alexander VI. and other paintings.--THE LIBRARY.-
Enumeration of manuscripts.-Bibliographical curiosities.—Sequestration of documents.-Appearance of
the galleries.—Vittori Cabinet :
religious curiosities.—Collection of Benedict XIV., Gregory XVI.,
Pius VII., etc.—The Charters of Ravenna in the Cabinet of the Papyri.-Aldobrandini Nuptials; antique
landscapes.



3 N
458 A&OME.
The Forty of the Vatican PINACOTHECA; Beato Angelico, Crivelli, Mantegna, etc.—The St. Jerome of Leonardo.
—Resurrection of Perugino and the prisoners of the Louvre.—Curious fresco of Melozzo da Forli.—Guido,
Guercino, Poussin, Caravaggio, Giulio Romano, etc.
EGYPTIAN GALLERIES: Mummy of Amosis.-Sarcophagi, symbolical animals, queens and goddesses.—Colossi of
Arsinoë and Nepthys.-Egyptian pasticci of the second century; statues of Antinois, the Nile, etc.—View
of the Hall of the Greek Cross.
ETRUSCAN MUSEUM : general aspect.—Vases, etc.—Cippi and bas-reliefs.-Various curiosities.
I.
§ T a distance of a mile from Rome, at the extremity of a narrow valley
between the western slope of the Janiculum and the little chain which on
this side doubles the Trasteverine hills, near a road which from the Villa
Pamphili takes a course towards the old camp of Vitiges, there once flowed,
with little noise, losing itself in the thicket, a fountain much frequented by shepherds,
who had adorned it with a rustic nymphaeum. In the reign of Valentinian II., the
successor of Liberius imprisoned the water in a subterranean aqueduct, and led it, by
turning the basilica of St. Peter, into the court whose buildings have been many a
time renewed since, but where the fountain has perpetuated the name of St. Damasus,
friend of St. Jerome, the exile of Gratian. It is the great court of the Vatican
palaces, through which you approach the pontifical apartments, the venerable library,
which in the fifth century St. Hilary had commenced in the palace of Lateranus,
the museums, which contain the richest collection of the ancient arts, as well as
the sanctuaries where the masterpieces of the two sovereigns of modern art contend,
Michelangelo and Raphael of Urbino. Pure and salubrious over all the waters of
Rome, which are renowned for being pure and salubrious, the spring brought from
so far to this court of St. Damasus, which all the powers of the world have crossed,
is the most ancient sign of a habitation of the popes in the fourth century at the
foot of the basilica. We know that at the end of the eighth century, before putting
to flight the rooks of the Palatine to take possession of the palace of the Caesars,
Charles the Great drank the waters of this fountain, at the house of Leo III. his
host. - - -
No one, that I know of, has ever verified the statement that the Vatican contains
eleven thousand rooms, and if it is true, no pontiff has visited them : what is
certain is that among the buildings of this assemblage of palaces belonging to all
ages, and where Bramante, Raphael, Pirro Ligorio, Fontana, Maderno, Bernini, and
so many others have worked, they count up twenty courts, and that to move among
them, they have had to construct two hundred and eight staircases. The right side
of the court of Damasus is occupied by a double thickness of buildings, in the upper
stories of which, in front of the Piazza Rusticucci, are lodged the first dignitaries of
the state. You had to climb not far short of two hundred steps, to have audience of
Cardinal Antonelli. The holy father lives below his ministers, at the angle of this
high building; a situation which you do not very well make out, except from the
approaches of the Porta Angelica, behind Bernini’s colonnade, whence you see the
pontifical residence towering above the crenelated walls of the Borgo.
To raise the edifices surrounding the court, they pulled down a façade of Julian
of Maiano which looked towards the Castle of St. Angelo, and it was Raphael who

FWTRAAVCE TO THE VATYCAAV. 459
designed those round arcades between pilasters, Doric in the first story and Ionic
above, the whole surmounted with composite columns to sustain the architrave. Of
the three wings, he only finished the longest; Gregory XIII. and his successors had
it copied, when they continued the work. The principal characteristic of these galleries
is their lightness; the walls aim at the sober taste and freedom from ostentatious
projections, which distinguish Raphael’s architecture. The spectator's interest was
formerly attracted under these arcades, where from below you caught glimpses of the
paintings of the master, framed in the ornamentation of John of Udine and the school;
but some years ago, by the care of Cardinal Antonelli, the Loggie have been protected
by glazed sashes, so that these enormous windows give the appearance of a green-
house or clock factory to the porticoes that were formerly open, and substitute an
overwhelming platitude for what used to be elegant simplicity. During the summer
the galleries of the upper story, the most precious, are turned into a furnace, and
thus expose the paintings, as rumour says, to far more perils than those of wind.
Nine pretentious inscriptions tell in lapidary's style of the Flavians and Agrippa, how
the sovereign pontiff fitted windows to a series of arcades; it might be the erection
of St. Peter’s or the Coliseum, the result would hardly justify such loud fanfares. As
we have touched on this point, let us set down among the vanities of Rome the
eulogistic inscriptions about even the most insignificant works of aedileship : a wall
rough-cast, the pipe of a fountain repaired, a window enlarged, a door walled up,
will give rise to a slab of marble in which triumphal epigraphs, supported by the
pontiff’s armorial bearings, tell the tale of such famous enterprises. Rome and the
Campagna are infested with these tablets; the churches, which are subject to frequent
repairs, are so variegated with lapidary pretensions, that the popes seem to dispute
with one another as to who among them was the builder and founder.
It is by a staircase on the left, facing the pontifical perron, that you ascend to
the Loggie, a gallery of thirteen arcades, to reach from there the apartments of the
former pontiffs Nicholas V., Sixtus IV., Alexander VI., Julius II., Leo X., Clement VII.,
etc. These dismantled rooms only serve for the pleasure of intelligent strangers,
the instruction of artists, and the glory of the Della Rovere and Medicean popes.
For to-day we will not go beyond the first story of the buildings, which have been
constantly enlarged since Celestine III. rebuilt them in 1192, and since, after the return
from Avignon under Gregory XI., they held a conclave there in 1378 for the first time,
in which the Neapolitan Prignani was chosen, who took the name of Urban VI.
Largely restored, if not rebuilt under Pius IX., the Loggie of the primo piano, though
decorated by John of Udine, have kept the name of Bramante who commenced
the edifice. Their paintings, an unpretending amusement for the eyes of the
passers-by, are distributed on the vaults in rectangular covings along the gallery,
where architectural perspectives stand out, mixed with trellis-work, on which are drawn
a hundred varieties of grape clustered in their vines, and groups of birds of every hue.
People think too much of the galleries of the upper story, almost wholly devoted
to the muse of Raphael, to linger before this fanciful tracery, which seems to lead
you to some rural feast.
Their lightness is a curious preparation for entering two garrets—of the most
pompous sort, but still garrets—the most heavily decorated in the world: I speak of
the long Ducal Hall with its hanging, its enormous cornice, its stucco Children, its
great landscapes of Brilli and of the Piedmontese Cesare, and its Labours of Hercules
3 N 2
46O A&OME.
by Matthew of Sienna; then the Sala Regia, finer but still heavier, for Paul III.
insisted on having the ‘noble style” delivered to him by the bushel; Antonio of San
Gallo did not fall behind in this, nor Perino del Vaga, nor Vasari, nor the Zuccari,
nor Mario of Sienna, those victims of Michelangelo, swollen and convulsive at his
feet at the threshold of the Sixtine chapel. I happened one day to be wandering
along this hall in search of a door and a guide, to make my way into a little-visited
section of the arcana of art, earlier than the illustrious rivals whom Julius II. pitted
against one another. Some countrymen were passing, escorted by a prelate who
possessed the Sesame, and I followed them to the Borgia apartments, which were in
great part decorated by Pinturicchio for Alexander VI.
Bernardino Betti, called Pinturicchio, is the most interesting personage of a group
of artists who, following by the side of Raphael the discipline of the Renaissance,
still preserved to a larger degree the simplicity of sentiment, episodic, tender rather
than noble, which inspired the schools of the middle age. Preserved more pure in
the mountains of Umbria, at Perugia where Pietro Vannucchi marks the culminating
point of the period, this tradition to which Raphael is indebted for a peculiar charm, is
still more strongly impressed on the works of Pinturicchio, a fellow-worker of the angel
of Urbino, submitted to his influence, and instructed by his teachings. Pinturicchio is
much closer to the old time; he was twenty-nine when Raphael was born ; his first
masters are earlier than Perugino, to whom they have insisted on giving him for a
disciple, and who could only have preceded his pupil by eight years. Both were
formed by Benedetto Buonfigli; both with distinct sentiments follow the same track;
but while Perugino in his trouble ends by discouragement and loss of himself, his
rival, not so highly strung perhaps, continued to progress to the end, by that time
representing alone and the last, the tradition of Umbria. It seems even that this
resistance contained a certain involuntariness; for this pupil of the cloister and the
mountain had been so touched by the passion for antiquity, that he baptized his
children by the names of Camillus and Julius Caesar.
What I wished to see in the small apartments of Pope Alexander VI., were works
less heavily overwhelmed by retouchings than the frescoes of Sta. Croce in Gerusalemme,
and than those of the Belvedere. At the epoch when Bernardino executed those of
which we are about to speak, recently tried by the atmosphere of Rome (which was
ever so little mephitic under the Borgias), he had not yet produced either the paintings
of the Libreria of Sienna, or those with which he afterwards decorated, by order of
Sixtus IV., the vault of the choir and three chapels at Sta. Maria del Popolo. Without
reaching so high a value, the works executed for Alexander VI. on the spaces of the
roof, decorating four halls, are touched with slightly timid grace, and with a freshness
of colouring that is peculiarly tender. Perhaps too deeply impressed by the moral
sense of ideas, the most serious writer of our time, M. Rio, in his aversion for the
Borgias and his wrath against Bernardino for taking their pay, seems to me very
severe in respect of these works, where, better than anywhere else, you find the simple
elegance of the time already united to a science which was far removed from all
anatomical pedantry. * -
Before coming to these chambers you pass through apartments transformed into
a library, which come out into a first saloon, dismantled by Leo X. and decorated afresh
by Giovanni da Udine and Perino del Vaga. In the next you come to some scenes
from the life of Christ and the Virgin by Pinturicchio. As I was thinking in this
APARTMENT'S OF A LEXAAWDER VI. 461
abode of Lucrezia, Francis, Caesar Borgia, of the melodramatic figures who walked
here, of the incidents that came to their crisis here, of the words that these walls.
muffled, the young monsignore who was the polite guide of my companions, begged
them to admire in the pictures of Bernardino Betti the candid devotion and sincere
faith of the good Pope Alexander VI., who to adorn his house chose a painter so
edifying and subjects more edifying still. This attempt at rehabilitation only half
astonished me; for some years worthy scholars have been collecting historical testi-
monies for the revision of the verdict against Alexander VI. A curious fact is that
Voltaire was the first who tried to relieve him from the atrocities imputed to him by
Guicciardini. They may perhaps end by proving him a man instead of a monster,
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A CARDINAL ENTERING THE WATICAN.
but a priest, never. I ought to say that having visited him at home and having
been received by his Portrait, I found the look of this personage peculiarly disturbing;
his round squat body, his twisted mouth, his magpie's eye, his parrot's nose, the
bilious tinge of his skin, all denote a sensual, changing, active and wilful character;
the short and fat clenched hands help to complete this image of a prickly spirit, and
a master of turbulence.
There are charming things in the scene representing the Child-god addressed by
the Virgin and St. Joseph, escorted by angels. The Ascension is less successful; it
is one of those pieces in which the vexatious co-operation of Benedetto Buonfigli,
Pinturicchio's old master, makes itself felt; yet the type of the Christ is absolutely
the same as in the chapel of St. Bernardino at the Ara Coeli. Rich and sombre, the
decoration of this room causes some brilliant details to sparkle, which yet leave all





462 A&OME.
their value to the Prophets, painted as busts in the medallions of the vault. That of
the next room, which is also nearly square, is more sumptuous; bas-reliefs mingle with
the painted figures. As for the great subjects traced so profusely, they indicate
by their diversity the idea of lending every imaginable attraction to the pious works;
it is religious art for the habitation of a lord of the great ecclesiastical world. Against
the wall at the end facing the window, the artist has presented with superb accom-
paniment St. Catherine of Alexandria appearing before the Emperor Maximilian,
and carrying away by her knowledge a whole areopagus of philosophers assembled
to dispute with her. She there gained the honour of becoming the patroness of schools,
but while they burnt those she had beaten, she still suffered martyrdom on the wheel.
In the middle of the picture, a triumphal arch executed in relief bears this inscription,
Pacis cultori, but it has no date, so ephemeral were the truces in a reign when the
prince only cultivated peace very privately. You pass the Martyrdom of St. Juliana,
and a St. Barbara fleeing from her father's house, an adorable figure of youth, of simple
attitude, and singularly well draped. It is neither in Baronius, who makes her a disciple
of Origen, nor in Metaphrostus, who places her death in Nicomedia under Galerius,
that St. Barbara is the heroine of the legend in which she has for executioner her
own father, who is suddenly struck dead by lightning. Yet this version has been
popular from Greece to Muscovy, and from the Orientals to the Latins, since the
lightnings of artillery have been placed under the protection of St. Barbara. In the
picture of the Visitation, the Virgin seems to be a portrait; this was a novel profanation
at that time. The landscape and the buildings of the ground add to the charm of
this painting, which is however less seductive than that in which St. Anthony and
St. Paul the hermits divide the bread brought to them by a crow, while three angels
and two white monks look on. Pietro Vannuchi alone, and after him Fra Bartolommeo,
has combined to such a degree the humble and the elevated style proper to give
life to cloister heroes. In the Death of S. Sebastian, which comes next, the principal
personage and the fine bowmen who have taken him for target, are original figures;
but the eye willingly loses itself across a very charming landscape ground, in which
you recognise the Coliseum and a small convent which already existed on the Caelian.
Pinturicchio was among the first to launch his figures in the full air of true horizons;
the exquisite composition of these landscapes and their tender shades surround the
subjects with harmonious reality. .
The room which comes next, takes from the old scholastic vagaries a kind of
decoration that has often been imitated since, and with much less simplicity. Seven
subjects are distributed here, representing on as many thrones the Attributes of the
Divine and Human Sciences, allegorical queens at whose feet are the personages
illustrious in each branch. Nothing can be more interesting or better conceived;
nothing seemed to me so graceful, so new in aspect, as these symbols, which are earlier
than most works of the same kind. Instead of being planted upright like two or three
faggots, as would certainly be the case to-day, these celebrities, under the presidency
of the Genius to whom they belong, are represented at work according to their calling,
full of inspiration and fervour. Here and there on golden grounds, cut in small
cubes which simulate a chequer of mosaic, project borderings, fringes, or arabesques,
incongruous specimens of the liberties they used to take in internal ornamentation.
Such license in my eyes only attenuates in a very small degree, the merit that results
from the graceful variety of the figures and subjects which animate them.
THE BOA'G/A APARTMENTS. 463
The following rooms are sensibly inferior, because Bernardino Betti in them had
himself supplemented by his old master Buonfigli. One of them presents, in a series
of semicircles, Prophets and Angels in pairs. Charming biblical subjects fill the
pendentives of the last chamber, in which is the end of those series of Archangels, which
connect tolerably closely the tradition of Perugino with the forms of Raphael. It
is in the mixed character of these compositions that, in spite of their having made
of Umbria the seat of a distinct school, the Florentine, and still more the Siennese
THE THRONE ROOM AT THE WATICAN.
filiation, is so easily seized. Nowhere can we better study this tradition at its apogee,
and Pinturicchio in the expression and characteristic of his talent, than in front of
the works of the Borgia chambers. Engraving has not reproduced them, authors have
hardly described them, or else have criticized without seeing them, and this is why
we have tried to estimate them with somewhat less brevity. In the judgment of any one
who has examined them carefully, Buonfigli can only have painted a portion of the
last rooms, at the time when, busy in decorating the cathedral of Orvieto, the master,

464 A&OME.
whom they all disputed with one another, found himself rated by the religious of the
chapter for his absences, and for his too costly debauches in ultramarine and in white
wine.
From the great court of the Belvedere, the austerest possible, you recognise at
the southern extremity this old home of the brood of the Borgias. The windows of
the upper story have cross-bars, and from the side of the aged walls runs a projecting
balcony supported on small arches, so narrow for their height, that you would suppose
them ogival.
II.
The Vatican museums form so vast a labyrinth that, before involving ourselves
in them, it would be better to prelude by the LIBRERIA VATICANA. A broad nave,
ending in the middle of a long transverse gallery, such is the place that Sixtus V.
had arranged by Domenico Fontana for the manuscripts of the pontifical library, leading
out of the Borgian apartments, where since 1840 they have arranged a considerable
portion of the printed books, now reaching the number of 100,500. What raises the
Vatican Libreria above other collections is the value and number of its manuscripts;
of these they reckon now 25,577, some of which go back to the fifth century. All ages
and all peoples of Europe and Asia have furnished their contingent to this treasure.
It is to be regretted that, to furnish us with striking points of comparison, Pliny did
not transmit the numerical inventory of the first library of Rome, founded for his
contemporaries by Asinius Pollio, who placed in it the statue of Varro, while that
writer was still living.
The establishment is of ideal magnificence; all is arranged so as to give a festival
to the eyes. While in places like the Bodleian at Oxford, and still more in the typo-
graphical cemetery in the Rue Richelieu, the people who write, as well as the people
who read, are overwhelmed by the sight of a great mass of books which they will
never be able to know, which prove to you the vanity of composing more, and which
are piled up over your head in endless walls, at the Vatican, on the contrary, you do not
See a single volume. It is under cover of a multitude of shut and gilded presses,
illuminated by fresh colouring, a really magical decoration, that to the nine thousand
manuscripts of Nicholas V. are added the collection of the learned Fulvio Orsini, who
in his childhood begged alms, and who has left a splendid cabinet; that of the
Benedictines of Bobbio, so rich in palimpsests; that of the Castle of Heidelberg, stripped
by Maximilian of Bavaria, chief of the Catholic league; the substance of the Libreria
of the Dukes of Urbino, collected by Guid’ Ubaldo of Montefeltro, and increased by
the Della Rovere; the fine books of Christina of Sweden; the library of the Ottoboni,
commenced by the old Pope Alexander VIII., who, pressed in his old age to enrich
his kinsmen, gave for reason, “Son’gia le zenti-tre e mezzo,” the Capponi collection,
bequeathed in 1746 by the Marquis Alexander, who in his quality of Foriere maggiore,
was charged with organizing the Capitoline Museum for Clement XII., and who
enriched the Kircher collection with so fine a bequest; the complex cabinet of the
Cardinal Zelada, another librarian; finally, the Greek manuscripts of the convent of
Grotta Ferrata, and those of Cardinal Mai, acquired by Pius IX. There are eighteen
Slave manuscripts, ten from China, twenty-two from India, thirteen from Armenia;
CURIOSITIES OF THE VATICAN LIBRARP. 465
two from the old land of the Iberians; eighty in Coptic, and one from Samaria; seventy-
one from AEthiopia; five hundred and ninety of Hebrew origin, and four hundred and
fifty-nine of Syrian ; sixty-four from Turkey, seven hundred and eighty-seven from
Arabia, and sixty-five from Persia, illustrated with fine miniatures.
If you have adequate authority, for you these will come forth from their shrines—
the Bible of St. Gregory the Great, the Roman manuscript of Terence, and the
palimpsest in which Cardinal Angelo Mai deciphered unknown fragments of Cicero Pro
Scauro, In Clodium, Pro Flacco, and De Republica, which he published in 1814 and
1822. You will not obtain sight of the Codex Vaticanus, that vastly ancient manu-
script of the gospels, which the learned prefect of the library had such difficulty in
obtaining permission to comment upon; but among the less ancient codici you will have
no trouble in exploring “THE AFFIRMATION OF THE SEVEN SACRAMENTs against Martin
Zuther, by the Invincible king of England and France and lord of Ireland, Henry, Eighth of
his name.’ This book, written in Latin and printed in London in 1521 at Pynson's,
bears on the last page from the hand of Henry VIII. this word to the sovereign pontiff:
‘Anglorum rex Henricus Zeoni X” mittit hoc opus ad ſidei testem et amicitia.’ The Assertio
against Luther procured for the apologist of Catholic unity the title of Fidei Defensor,
which was decreed to him by the pope, and afterwards turned against him by the
schismatic sovereigns of Great Britain, who continued to use it. The Correspond-
ence of Henry VIII. with Anne Boleyn is known; the Letters of Bossuet have been
carried into a neighbouring room, to the Archivio instituted by Pius IV., and in which
we have gleaned. There too is the Trial of Galileo.
Must I cite the Homilies of St. Gregory, the Dogmatica Panoplia, the Monologue
of Basil II. (of the eleventh century); the Book of Joshua (of the seventh); the Dante
and Missal of Matthias Corvinus, King of Bohemia and Hungary, masterpieces of
the fifteenth century; the adorable pontifical Antiphonaries, illustrated by the mystical
geniuses of the Umbrian school; the Book of Venery of the Emperor Frederick II.,
the Virgil of the twelfth century, the Terence of the ninth ; another Virgil, said to be
contemporary with Pope Pelagius, and which I should be inconsolable not to have seen P
When in our country they choose librarians from among the marshals of France,
that happy piece of progress will render our collections as unapproachable as that of
the Vatican, which has a guardian who wears the purple. One single Small room for
work, whence you are banished at noon, and which, thanks to the number of festivals,
does not open on a hundred mornings in the year; manuscript catalogues, which are
said to exist, but which are not shown, with the exception of the Inventory of Oriental
Codici, the only one yet printed; the necessity of a fresh permission for each volume,
and of sending an ambassador on a campaign to obtain it—these are enormous
obstacles | On account of the multiplicity of steps which it is thus necessary to take,
the exploration of these virgin forests of erudition and curiosities would absorb the
days of Methuselah. And things have always gone so, since Montaigne, who owed
a more polite hospitality either to the caprice of the people or to his own comely
address, tells how our ambassador, obliged to quit Rome without seeing the Vatican
Libreria, ‘se pleignoit de ce qu'on lui vouloit, pour cela, faire faire la cour au
cardinal Charlet, maistre de cette libreria.” We may deplore that these splendid
collections are hidden under a bushel; but as if to make us forget the marvels that
it conceals, with what magnificence this bushel is adorned
As soon as you have traversed the office of the copyists, of which the vault is
3 O
466 ROME.
painted in grotesques, that is to say in imitation of antique paintings found in subter-
ranean constructions (grotte), and cast a glance on the Sibyls of Marco da Faenza,
enlivened by some landscapes of Paul Brill, you enter the great chamber constructed
by Sixtus V., and as the modesty of the entrance (a small iron door to the left in the
gallery of Inscriptions) has not at all prepared you for such splendour, you stop for
a moment on the threshold, dazzled. Decorated, illuminated, painted, gilded, furnished
like a boudoir, a reliquary, the hall which developes its luminous perspective before your
eyes is scarcely less than fifty feet wide by two hundred and twenty feet long. Seven
large pillars, lined with frescoes, with pannels covered with miniatures, divide it into
two aisles; on the buffet is exposed a collection of Etruscan vases. Viviani, Salviati
of Florence, Cesare di Nebbia, Salimbeni of Sienna, in old days covered the walls,
friezes, and vaults with instructive, animated, and graceful frescoes (those of Ventura
Salimbeni especially). Let us note among the principal subjects, Domenico Fontana
presenting the plan of the library to Sixtus V., the work of Scipio of Gaeta; the
representation of the CEcumenical Councils, assemblies in which theological science
makes laws, placed opposite the Creation of the most celebrated Libraries of Antiquity;
then the Legend of the pontifical Founder, in which among the anecdotes of his life,
the fable does not figure of the famous crutches falling at his feet while he intoned
the Te Deum. You behold the Coronation of Sixtus V. in front of the construction
of the new basilica of St. Peter; the drum of the dome appears in exactly the state
in which the work was in 1585, nineteen years after the death of Michelangelo.
Against the pillars they have drawn the Fabulous Inventors of the Alphabets peculiar
to different tongues, with the very characters in frieze above the figures. Along the
bays you will see all sorts of precious objects, gifts of sovereigns, among whom
figure even Turks, and all the schismatics except the English. These curiosities do
not always miss being ugly, when they are like the enormous vases offered by our
King Charles to Leo XII., pieces of work whose merit is purely industrial, or even
like the large font, also of Sèvres, made for the baptism of Napoleon II.
The junction of this hall with the long and rich gallery is marked by two candelabra
in hard porcelain, adorned with griffins and bucrania, on a pedestal of elegant outline;
these with the ornamentation of 1805 have the double merit of being at once studied
works in point of style, and extraordinary achievements in point of execution. Near
these candelabra, in the centre of the three arms, of which the one supports itself at
right angles upon the two others, you are struck with amazement at the rich avenues
which attract you on each side. Making a sort of small cupola with four mouldings,
whence luminous pictures stand out in large arabesques, like windows opening on real
scenes, this transept is surrounded by a frieze with flying Loves, interrupted by three
flattened arches varying the curves of the bays. One would fain return to the point
whence one started, to such a degree has change of position removed the optical
effects of this lantern of colours and images: but as the eye measures to right and left
the perspective of the gallery, into the middle of which you are transported, the passion
of divining and knowledge calls you to both extremities at the same time. Have
patience: you will see a line of seven hundred and ninety-four metres of paintings.
Is it conceivable, I wondered, that I am in a library !
As at the British Museum and our own national establishment, they have combined
the literary collections with those of a museum and a cabinet of enamels, cameos, and
other precious things; but while at Paris and London the specialities are separate, here
VAT/CAM LIBRARP. 467
all is in the same spot, and these artistic people, the Romans, have only displayed what
offers an attraction to the eye. Still, as order is indispensable, instead of cutting up the
space in special apartments by partitions, they have only marked the divisions by slight
barriers, bare of ornament, so as to be plainly seen: so the eye roves without an
obstacle beyond the libraries to the very extremity of the cabinet, in which are preserved
the remains of the Trireme of Tiberius, once ashore in the lake of Nemi, and now, in an
opposite sense, at the bottom of the sacred museum.
It is along this Appian Way of books that they have placed the collection of Count
Cicognara, facing the books of the Marquis Capponi. But you will only read on the
road the succession of literary history, from Nicholas V. to Paul V., written by the
BED-CHAMBER OF POPE PIUS IX.
brush by the easy and unpretentious school of the Knight of Arpino. Further on, these
lectures are rather hard for a Frenchman to undergo before witnesses; and I confess
that I gladly suffered my attention to be distracted by some columns, so as to lose the
savour of the commentaries with which a too zealous cicerone seasoned for me the
picture of the persecutions inflicted on those two poor disarmed old men, Pius VI. and
his successor. An antique sarcophagus found in 1777 near the Porta Capena gives us
the plaited hair of a Roman lady; a fine text in carved poetry for a romantic Finally
you come to some handsome silver chasings: the Death of Medusa, the Titans struck
by the Thunder, pieces assigned to Benvenuto Cellini; then to some delicate mosaics
of the Villa Adriana, and to four famous bronzes—Nero, Balbinus, Septimius Severus,
and an Augustus of speaking truthfulness. There is close at hand an even preferable

3 O 2
468 ROME.
piece—the small bronze Head of a graceful girl, extremely youthful, and whose charms
are rendered with admirable sincerity.
The branch to the left, which you take after retracing your steps as far as the Sèvres
candelabra, leads to the sacred museum, of which the origin goes back to Benedict
XIV., who, admiring the collections formed by Francesco Vettori, conceived the
ingenious idea of appointing him conservator of the Vatican museum. The learned
professor did not fail, in 1770, to bequeath his treasures to the establishment which he
had administered. They might therefore have conceded him the posthumous favour
of placing his bust among the cardinal-librarians, on one of the eight presses of his
collection; to which Pius IX. has joined six tables with glass cases, filled with small
curiosities connected with the worship of the first Christian ages. There are episcopal
rings through which, maybe, the finger of some saint has passed; ivory diptychs of the
eighth or ninth century; cinerary vases; the glass lachrymals in which they collected
the blood of martyrs, according to a doubtful tradition; antique lamps of terra cotta,
like those of Pompeii, but collected from the Catacombs, and having the symbols of the
faith figured upon them; as well as a quantity of small pannels, interesting as they
are rare, of the mystic masters of the epochs that were nearly Byzantine. This section
completes the exhibition of certain ancient pictures collected by Gregory XIV. in one
of the following compartments, and in which you come upon precious pieces of Cimabue,
Guido, Duccio of Sienna, Giotto, Masaccio, Lorenzo Monaco, and the blessed John of
Fiesole. As the passion for works called Gothic had not yet, at the epoch when
Gregory XIV. lived, crossed the mountains of Etruria, the collectors of those primitive
paintings, who did not criticize them in so systematic a fashion, were hard to please:
they could only be seduced by plain native quality, or the attraction of an evident
curiosity. It follows from this that no gallery of the Giottesques of the thirteenth or
fourteenth century, or fifty years beyond that, fails to contain as fine examples of
these paintings. Originality of composition, uses and symbols that are lost, revelations
as to costume, buildings, and great unknown artists, at epochs which have left nothing
else;—this is what these presses offer you, and what you see nowhere else.
In the neighbourhood is a cabinet in which Pius VII. had classified all the stamps
on terra cotta which they have been able to collect, and which under the empire served
to mark tiles, brick, pipes, and other material for building. This collection was begun
by that abbé Gaétano Marini, who defended the archives of the holy See against our
robberies. After that, a decree interned Marini in France, and constrained him to assist
in the classification of the Vatican spoils; subsequently, another decree having driven
him from Paris, he died there before he could change his place of exile, a month
before Waterloo. The idea of collecting these stamped marks was natural enough in
an antiquary who consecrated a volume to their elucidation; the energy with which
this idea was developed, does honour to the pontiff, for in fact the stamps disclose the
dates of buildings in ruins, signs doubly useful, most of the ancient monuments
having been more than once rebuilt or partially restored. Among the paintings
exhibited in this cabinet, they will present to you as authentic a portrait of Charles the
Great, with beard and crown; it is the Karles d la barbe ſtorie of the romances of
chivalry; this likeness with the toneless eye must only, like them, date from the eleventh
or twelfth century.
The Stanza dei Papiri is one of the richest of all the compartments, from its profusion
of porphyry, granite, and gilding, and from the splendour of a decoration of Pius VI.,
GREAT GALLERY OF THE
WATICAN LIBRARY.

THE A/POBRAAWD/MI A/UPZYAZS. 469
which Mengs has enhanced by a fine fresco, representing on the vault of the ceiling the
Muse of History writing, with the shoulders of Time for desk. Here are unrolled, and
here I saw with singular satisfaction, the fine Charters of Ravenna, originals on papyrus
of the ninth or twelfth century. Gaétano Marini published them in 1805 in his Papyri
Piplomatici descritti ed illustrati, comprising one hundred and fifty-seven bulls, diplomas
of sovereigns, and various contracts and charters, of which the oldest goes back to the
year 441. We know none earlier.
The cabinet of Frescoes, in which Guido Reni has fixed certain incidents in the life
of Samson, preserves the most celebrated piece of painting bequeathed to us by
antiquity. It was in 1606 that, on the Esquiline, near the Arco di Galliano, were
discovered the Nozze Aldobrandini: the great-nephews of Clement VIII., represented by
Cardinal Aldobrandini, surrendered it to Pius VII. for a price of 30,000 francs.
Previously to the exhumations of Pompeii, we possessed no other complete monument of
antique painting ; but I ought to add that Pompeii has not so far produced anything
comparable in style and intelligence of composition to the Aldobrandini Nuptials.
Scholars have wondered whether it is the marriage of Thetis and Peleus, or of Bacchus
and Cora, or of the Julia of Catullus with Manlius. It is more probable that it is simply
the marriage of the heads of the house where this gem was discovered, doubly precious
for the light it throws on usages and rites. The figures of Canace and Myrrha, of
Pasiphaë, and Phaedra, found likewise on the Esquiline some years ago in a spot where
Virgil is said to have lived, are also of a broader style than the pictures at Pompeii.
There are also large bright landscapes, with figures moving in them which represent
some scenes from the Odyssey: they were found in a crypt in the quarter of the Monti.
The difficulty is to tear oneself away from the solicitations of a museum so opulent in
rare pieces, so distracting in its unpretentious economy; but the custode protects you
from all temptation to such halts. Still as we returned by the same way, I resolutely
lagged before the too little explored presses and glass cases of the museum of
Benedict XIV., and in spite of the pantomime of the guardian I persisted in a revolt of
inertia, founded on the very rational ground that he would not be strong enough to
thrust me forward by the shoulder, and that the scoldings of his bad temper were utterly
indifferent to me. So for twenty minutes I was an imitator of Horace's tenacem propositi;
for it was under the last glass to the right, in the midst of a crowd of curiosities, that I
perceived in a medallion of bronze the profiles of St. Peter and St. Paul, which I have
described and criticized already. (See Chapter XI.)
This is all the view I can give you of the Vatican Library. Except a few papyri and
two inscriptions or legends mixed with the paintings, I had not seen a line of writing nor
discovered the back of one book. It would be well for the diplomacy of different
nations to procure a more liberal set of regulations; but if ever they come to handle this
matter, it will be for France to interfere with some deference, for in 1799 our countrymen
pillaged the medal case of Queen Christina. If we had not a few years after decreed
the robbery of the manuscripts of Rome by the strong hand, it is probable that the
pontifical court would have less repugnance to reveal its riches. This reflection,
inspiring me with just modesty, at length made me tolerably docile before the urgencies
of the custode, and in my profound gratitude that they had not shut the door in my face,
I consented to have it shut on my heels. -
47O A&OME.
III.
You may fall back before difficult tasks, but you have to come to them after all.
The more I frequented the Vatican, the better did I understand how my predecessors
had shirked traversing this labyrinth with their readers, to the very end and throughout.
Before penetrating to the very quick of the old world, a long pilgrimage in which when
once engaged there is no possibility of turning back, I still catch a glimpse of one
episodical diversion, the Gallery of Pictures. This famous collection being, according to
the Notices, only a very small bouquet of pearls, let us hasten at once to these celebrated
frames of which the list will be speedily exhausted.
Transferred in 1857 from the Borgian apartments to the top of the Vatican
Loggie, this gallery passes for a wonder, because it is composed of hardly forty
works, which are signed with the greatest names. Pius VII. who instituted it, placed
there, in 1816, the pictures which were restored to Italy by France after the robberies
of the first empire, and since that time the pontiffs have slightly enriched this
museum, which owes more than one gem to the munificence of Pius IX. It is not
uninteresting to make some remarks on the subject of this collection, which is of
real importance, both for the value of many of its pieces, and for the illustration
it affords for the annals of mode, studied in its influence on the conception of the
beautiful.
The first of the four halls is set apart to smaller subjects: Raphael, Beato
Angelico, Leonardo da Vinci, Garofalo, Crivelli, Mantegna, Perugino, all shine in
this saloon, where, close to these small pannels, so delicate and minute, three
charming pieces by Murillo seem more negligent and slovenly than a Jordaens
would seem by the side of a Titian. The two small subjects taken by the angel
of Fiesole from the legend of S. Nicholas of Bari, bishop of Myrrha, were carried
to the Louvre, where they most likely figured among curious ‘Gothicisms.” Even
now at Rome, to raise this exquisite master somewhat, the author of the Notice of
this museum feels himself brought to imagine that Beato Angelico was considered
the Guido Reni of his time’ The charming predella (No. 5) of the Miracles of
S. Hyacinthe, animated subjects full of costumes and the elegant architecture of
the fifteenth century, is attributed to Benozzo Gozzoli, the pupil of Fra Angelico;
but it is more likely that the work belongs to Francesco di Giorgio, a painter of
the Siennese school, unknown in France, who died young in 1524, and of whose
work the gallery of fine arts at Sienna possesses a Triptych, representing Susanna
at the Bath, and two subjects from the history of Joseph. I was sorry they had
not given a better light to the Dead Christ of Crivelli, that Venetian of the middle
ages who was even then a colourist, at a time when Venice did not yet draw. He
was the master of John Bellini. What a distance between this simple workmanship,
in which expression is overdone, so much is it felt, and the small grisailles, so
pure in style, so full of grace, in which Raphael has symbolized the Theological
Virtues; they are the originals of those little masterpieces, which are so well known
by the engraving, which has made them larger. We must also notice in this first
room the St. Jerome, an authentic sketch by a very rare master, Leonardo da Vinci.
With it is connected a singular anecdote. The pannel having been cut in two, as
THE PIMA COTHECA. 47 I
one easily perceives, Cardinal Fesch found among some old lumber the lower portion
of the body, which served as lid for a chest. Some years after, chance discovered to
him the other of the pieces, containing the head and bust, at his cobbler's, who
had nailed it under a stool; the two portions fitted in with one another exactly.
Reserving to the last some pieces that will occasion certain reflections, let us find
the third room, over which presides the magnificent Doge whose profile Titian has
drawn with such vigorous majesty. Close by is the Resurrection, by Perugino, at
which it is erroneously supposed that Raphael worked, because the master has given
to the youngest of the sentinels asleep in the sepulchre the youthful profile of his
pupil. The work is interesting for more reasons than one : it is here that the painter
has represented himself, under the tunic of one of the Soldiers who were witnesses of
the Lord’s rising; the strange expression which he has given to his features, betrays
the bitter scepticism into which this spirit was plunged after the martyrdom of
Savonarola. Pietro Perugino stands incarnate in this veteran; the only one roused,
he darts upon the Christ a smile marked by suspicion, almost enmity, and stamped
by a questioning fixity.
The near kinship of Sanzio with his master, particularly at the time when the
disciple first came out, appears in the Coronation of the Virgin, which Raphael
executed in 1502 for the Benedictines of Perugia. It is a Perugino without leanness,
with the same simplicity ennobled by an instinct of style; the taste of Raphael
discloses itself with unconscious originality; you will recognise higher aspirations in
it, than in the work of Perugino. Still the Virgin on the Throne, by the latter,
surrounded by four Saints at prayer, is more clearly a master-work: we have a more
perfect conviction that the artist has given complete expression to his whole idea.
It is the apogee of the art which preceded the Dioscuri of the Renaissance,
and perhaps Perugino's masterpiece; containing exquisite figures, powerful in
colouring, on a fine horizon with cleverly sketched buildings. He painted it for
the Commune Hall of his native town; France who carried it off, did not care to
keep it: it was one of those unappreciated gems, with which the Thermidorian
school reproached Bonaparte for loading his baggage waggons.
How trivial seems the Pieta of Caravaggio beside these mystic inspirations, and
how academic and discordant in tones seems the ugly picture of the Martyrdom of
S. Erasmus, the most serious error of Poussin' He was not made for melodrama,
with which indeed didactic purity does not go well. So that no great name might
fail to answer the call, some brokers inspired Pius VII. with the ambition of
acquiring at a very high price the Christ the Saviour, of Correggio; I have not
to describe this piece, which is numbered 40, and which in the eyes of a serious
connoisseur of experience might be worth one hundred crowns. They took the
trouble to transport to Paris the Saint Michelina of Baroccio, but the allies reclaimed
this dull painting. The Madonna alla Cintola is the weakest or most retouched of
the pictures of Cesare da Cesto, the eclectic pupil of Leonardo. As an illustration
of history, the fresco of Melozzo da Forli, brought by Leo XII. from the Library to
the Loggie, then from a wall on to canvas, and representing Sixtus IV. receiving
Platina his librarian, is one of the most interesting pieces, for it gives the portraits
of Jerome Riario, lord of Forli, of John della Rovere, of Bartolommeo Sacchi, called
Platina, author of the History of the Popes, a fine head and subtle face; of Pope
Sixtus; finally, of his nephews, the cardinals Peter Riario and Julian della Rovere,
472 A’O///.
the first renowned for his prodigalities and who died young ; the second very famous,
for he became Julius II. These personages are treated with a master hand, and
we recognise the talent of an artist whom Raphael Maffei classed in the front rank
of the portrait painters of that time; consequently we can put confidence in the
truth of the interpretations, and fix the changes which age and the practice of
authority wrought in the countenance of Julius II. Here, he is a young man, brown
and spare, of reserved attitude and modest mien ; the expression is intelligent and
-
|
PORTA ANGELICA—PONTIFICAL RESIDENCE IN THE WATICAN.
graceful, the nose is extremely projecting, because its roots are not yet hid in a
fleece of moustache: Julian della Rovere is drawn beardless. When one remembers
the portrait by Raphael, of which the original is at London, and the Venetian copy
at the Pitti palace, or the vigorous profile of the Mass of Bolsena, this head of
the warlike pontiff in his youth causes one lively amazement.
Out of the forty-two pictures of this gallery, the Louvre received and then gave
back one-and-twenty. But the works that were taken away from the pontifical
states at the time of our victories, were not restored by the popes to the cities or

THE ST: JEROME, TRANSFIGURATION, Ezc. 473
to the establishments which had lost them : the convents and basilicas of Rome, the
cities of Perugia, Pesaro, Foligno, even the sanctuary of Loretto, remained stripped
for the benefit of the Vatican ; is not this abuse of sovereignty rather like the
excesses of victory? Let us also observe that the paintings which in 1797 gave
rise to these spoliations of ours were by preference academic works due to Guercino,
Valentin, Nicholas Poussin, Guido Reni, Andrew Sacchi; to the Bolognese, or the
Romans, or the French who followed them. The Virgin and St. Thomas of Reni
is one of the most mediocre pieces you can look at; yet they dragged it from
Pesaro to Paris, and the Italians brought it back with honour from Paris to the
Vatican, instead of restoring it to Pesaro, so much did the name of Guido dazzle
people ! As it may be curious to draw up, in connection with the Pinacotheca,
the list of our compulsory restitutions after 1815, we will remind the reader that
out of twenty-one pictures taken back, Fra Angelico, Poussin, Valentin, Guercino,
Michelangelo of Caravaggio, Giulio Romano, associated with Penni, called Il Fattore,
figured each of them for one subject; Baroccio, Andrew Sacchi, Guido, each
furnished two; Perugino three; Raphael five, among them that famous Trans-
figuration which occupies a room apart, facing the Communion of St. Jerome by
Domenichino, a cardinal piece which we had also to restore, and which, owing to
a tradition of admiration, caused more bitter regrets to amateurs fifty years since,
than the sacrifice of all the rest of the gallery. .
It remains to us to speak of the St. Jerome and the Transfiguration, which face one
another from each side of a vast casement, leaving in the background at the bottom
of the room a picture which the fine world looks at far less—the Madonna of Foligno.
Such is the influence of a certain pedagoguishness over the ciceroni, who are only
professors, alas, for the favourites of fortune: this monument of an ideal purity and
tender colouring, which marks the apogee of the second manner of Raphael, fails to
captivate the crowd, which, rivetted by order to two admirations, casts a glance without
stopping on the Madonna of Foligno, as on a secondary and respectable object. I
have passed long hours there, and my observations are faithful. -
The Transfiguration of Raphael is assuredly a fine picture, although the author
has emancipated himself in it from unity of action, which is cried up as a general
thesis by the classic admirers of this master; they have had to admit the double vision
of a poem in the clouds, and a drama with its peripeteia on the earth. Jesus, transformed
in the azure between Moses and Elias, the mystic figures of the apostles, the kneeling
bodies of St. Laurence and St. Julian, the patrons of Cardinal Julius de Medici who was
destined to become Clement VII.-the whole of this scene of Tabor goes back, further
even than the youth of Raphael, up to the primitive Florentine traditions; only the
prestige of an extremely ennobled style and design has prevented the filiation from
being striking. This evangelical legend of the Transfiguration Raphael took as a theme
before the first door of Ghiberti, and Ghiberti himself found the arrangement in Giotto.
There is a shocking contrast when we see in the same frame two episodes, one flowing
from Gothic traditions, while the other answers to the absolutely opposed doctrines
which were cried up by Vasari under the influence of Michelangelo, and accepted by
Giulio Romano, who partly executed the Drama of the One Possessed, joined on
by an effort to the Transfiguration. In this lower part, where the colouring
takes a harder force, where the theatrically posed figures are thinking of the
spectator, where feeling and nature are replaced by impression and effect; before this
3 P
474 . A&OME.
piece where Raphael may contend with the masters of ages to follow him, you recognise
all his skill, but you no longer enjoy his genius. It is not without curiosity that you
watch the coldly arranged convulsions of the little energumen, to whom his father sets
an example of surprising attitudes; round them, everybody plays his part as in the
arrangement of a tableau vivant, and this method is to become a law of composition,
for ever, it may be
From the time when Raphael Mengs classified this above all the works of the
Sanzio, even to the day when Quatremère de Quincy proclaimed it the finest picture
in the world, such doctrines must have exercised over taste an influence which explains
the common infatuation for the Communion of St. Jerome. That was, as has been
often enough repeated, the only picture fit to be compared with the Transfiguration.
What a lesson for Raphael, if only it had not been posthumous ! Nicholas Poussin,
who placed on the same line two painters above all others, Raphael and Domenichino,
considered the St. Jerome as one of the finest pictures in Rome. If we preserve
independence and candour enough to shake off imperious prejudices, we shall recognise
that the composition of the St. Jerome, too sensibly inspired by Augustin Caracci,
is cold. Its principal charm is derived from a background of admirable landscape,
under a sky on which hover some tolerably stiff angels. But how full of defects the
principal figure ! The greenish body of the dying man, of an ill-studied design, in
which we imagine the ravages of a merely conventional senility; the sinking head
without a halo, which has no longer any consciousness of the great eucharistic act,
nor in the distinction of the lines any traces of what St. Jerome was ; the familiarly
benign expression of St. Ephraim, bearing the viaticum as a nurse would present a
draught; and the figure of the Arab, who has nothing to do with the scene, and
who, they say, represents the east; finally, in the whole, the absence of emotion, of
poetical faith in the mysteries which are being unveiled, in the mysteries which it is
desired to summon before us . . . . It is a composition executed with much splendour,
but of inferior significance, and with a good deal of theatrical flashiness. It will keep
the rank it has usurped: Panurge and his sheep assure me of it.
IV.
It is time to penetrate into the numerous galleries consecrated to the masterpieces
of antique art. This long journey, we will begin with the primitive ages; chronology
serves us as bond for the Schools, as well as for the facts of history. It is to Gregory XVI.
that the Vatican owes two collections, which take us back even beyond historic times
to the origin of the arts in the farthest east and old Latium. The Pope Capellari
was a Venetian ; the establishment of the Egyptian museum, and the erection of an
Etruscan museum, express the ideas of an artist and a scholar. Let us first make
our way through the Egyptian galleries.
I do not know whether the Vatican collection, like that of the Viceroy of Egypt,
possesses effigies that go back to Chephren, that Pharaoh of the fourth dynasty who
built the second Pyramid, and whose pensive portrait displays a youth unchanged
by sixty centuries. But from Amosis, who commences the eighteenth, the husband of
Aah-Hotep, whose ornaments also figure in the collection of Boulak, some monuments
THE EGP PT/AAV GA/, LERYES. 475
of the New Empire are dispersed in the Roman gallery. This new era corresponds
with the last years of the patriarch Jacob, about. 1800 years B.C. To this epoch
belongs the Mummy, only too well preserved, for it is horrible to see, of a priest
of Ammon, who bears inscribed on his breast the name of Amosis. The face still
preserves its skin, stretched with effort over the teeth, which pierce through, so as
to offer in a violent rictus a sight of derision at the living reality. At the bottom of
the principal hall you come upon a statue in black granite, which is said to represent the
mother of the hero of the nineteenth dynasty, of that Rameses II, whom the Greeks called
Sesostris, and whose son Menephtah was swallowed up in the Red Sea at the time of
the flight of the Children of Israel. It was in the gardens of Sallust that they exhumed
the grandmother of this Pharaoh ; the head-gear, surrounded by a vulture of the
strangest description, the bizarre lines of this naked figure, which is very delicately
executed, will prevent you from forgetting it. The enormous Sarcophagi of the
vestibule, in which arabesques mingle with symbolical figures, might possibly not be
earlier than the time when Egypt, temporarily delivered from the yoke of the successors of
Cambyses, rises up again with the twenty-eighth dynasty under the first Nectanebo ; this
period is rich in fine sarcophagi. One of these, however, is more ancient; it is that of
a priest called Neith Mah, who lived under one of the Psammetichi, at a time when,
according to Herodotus, the city of Sais became the capital of a civilization which was
travelling northward. The Egyptians thus went before the Greeks; in the same way
the Hellenic influence made itself felt in their art before the Macedonian era, although
subsequently to the era of which we speak the country fell back under the domination of
the Persians of the thirty-first dynasty, of which Manetho alone reveals the existence.
It is to the last three races of the New Empire, that we have to assign such
monuments as the fine Lions which so long decorated the Acqua Felice fountain, and
which were found near the Pantheon in 1443. They date from King Acoris, who
continued the temple of Philae, and are a very free and sculptural representation of
leonine forms. For these antique peoples animals were a theme for ornamentation ;
they did not feel themselves obliged by zoological scruples to post two huge beasts,
stupidly realistic, as sentries at a palace gate. The horses of Phidias, which are more
true than nature, only existed in the Iliad.
I would willingly connect with these later epochs the Statues of Women, half
natural. One is draped in a fine and closely adhering gauze; her features have a
mysterious expression; you expect her lips to open with an enigma. The other, wearing
a kind of peplum, and carrying a horn of plenty, is evidently Egyptian also ; but
she might just as well represent some matron of the early ages of Rome, cut by one
of those Etruscan artists who had discovered in the east the land of their origin.
The statue of Acoris, of which only the lower part remains, the granite colossi of
Ptolemy Philadelphus and Arsinoë, so frequent a name in the Ptolemaic dynasty, offer
objects of valuable comparison, though less significant perhaps than the giant idol
of the goddess Nepthys, whose function was to watch at the feet of the dead, with
Isis who guarded their pillow. This figure offers in a degree not surpassed by the
Greeks themselves, skill in outline and in feminine expression. A ravishing piece,
the little Crocodile of basalt, evidently belongs also to these skilful days.
I need only speak of the Papyri, to bear witness to the admirable arrangement of this
part of the collection, and to point out in the rooms whither you go for them, a quantity
of small curiosities—enamels, bronzes, little figures of terra cotta and of wood, small gods
3 P 2
476 FOME.
wearing enormous perukes, animals (including a most marvellous parrot), mummies of cats
only tolerably pleasing, etc. I observed also a large jasper scarabaeus, bearing the date
of the eleventh year of Amemphis III., the hero of the eighteenth dynasty, the same who
on the architraves of the temple of Luxor, plumes himself on being the Bull who rules by
the Sword, the Lord of the two Worlds, and the Child of the Sun. Less rich than ours
in extremely antique pieces and of colossal dimensions, the Egyptian museum of the
Vatican commends itself by its diversity; it allows us to penetrate more deeply into the
life of this mysterious people; the very arrangement of the subjects is less cold, less
lugubrious, than in the ground-floors of the Louvre, and less prim than in the presses
of the first story, where the dispersiveness of a monotonous classification transforms
the frightened curious into swift passers-by. •
After getting together the elements of this colossal collection, the judicious
Gregory XVI. undertook the task of separating, so as to make them the object of an
instructive study, the Egyptian pasticci that fashion or caprice produced under the
emperors, and particularly Adrian. The colossal marble Antinois, the last-born of
the demigods of sculpture, is the capital piece of this section of the museum; it was
found in the Villa Adriana. Like all the Antinoises, this is executed with a feminine
exquisiteness of rounded and velvetty outlines. It is a figure cut by a Greek, under the
hieratic arrangement of the sacred royalties of Egypt, and in the attitude of a Roman :
this threefold character is clearly indicated. The Nile, an enormous recumbent figure,
is equally allied to Greek art. What is generally wanting in the profuse imitations
under Adrian is accent, is that perfume which every artificial flower lacks; these figures
do not think, nor do they suggest thought: their expression, their pose, involuntarily
modern, almost lead you to guess what was the fashionable type of beauty at the
beginning of the second century. In the sterile and skilful time of the Antonines, these
interpretations seemed identical with the art of Egypt; time has dissipated the
illusions for us by placing us at a distance: do not our own pasticci run the risk
of an analogous destiny? Without speaking of the differences inherent in the material
processes, of which we take no account, and yet which have extreme influence over
the most, let us observe that the Osirises, the Ptahs, the Horuses of Adrian, no longer
restore the forms of a definite race, which the true Egyptians unconsciously gave us;
so there only remains an episode in the history of taste: the worth of the monuments
results from the price of the material, from the difficulties of the finish of the execution.
When Time turns workman and intervenes with his patience in the works of men, he
bequeaths to them a part of his own duration; but in these affairs of pasticci and of
passing fashion, he lowers them to the level of industrial art, at which it hardly
becomes us to express ourselves much shocked, for it is to be feared that with the future
our own epoch may have no other representative.
V.
After having seen among the Egyptians the remains of an art earlier than our
written traditions, it is well to go and compare on the spot that primitive asthetic (it is
primitive for us), with that of the Etruscans, of whose history we are ignorant, and who,
having emigrated from the regions of Asiatic Greece, occupied not only Tuscany, but
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THE ETRUSCAAW MUSEUM. 477
a part of Latium, before the historic ages of Italy. To pass from one study to the
other, and from the first museum to the second, the eyes receive a very stirring distrac-
tion in the quarters of the Vatican Greece which you have to go through. It is impossible
to help stopping in a certain hall which forms a vestibule, and which, being open on
several sides, with a splendid staircase in three flights for ascending to the galleries,
forms a centre in a very labyrinth of wonders of which you have vague glimpses.
This, through which we are passing, is called the Hall of the Greek Cross; one of
those architectural gems, in which the end of the old régime sometimes found out
proportion and grace, and which answer to our ideas of the antique palaces. The
mosaic in the middle, the red granites, the columns of coralline brecchia and green
porphyry which support the arched vaulting and lateral entablatures of the marble
steps; those bas-reliefs set to right and left of the central archway; the vase of green
granite which serves on the architrave as a point for the perspectives of the upper vault;
the simplicity of a frieze in which lilies, stars, and eagles mix, and that Boreas of the
storm,-pieces detached from the new arms of the good Pope Braschi; the Sphinxes
which guard the stairs, and that happy arrangement which allows three stories of
splendours to be embraced under different lights; the animation, the modest richness,
the delight one has in visiting at home, in an abode prepared for them, the gods and
heroes of Attica—all this seductive harmony and peaceful movement affect one with a
fulness of contentment so rare, that there results a lively intuition of the superiority of
classic works when brought to such a point of perfection. This sanctuary where you are
surprised not to meet Alcibiades and Phryne, forms part of the charming constructions
which Pius VI. intrusted to Camporese and Simonetti, two artists of high worth, and yet
which no Biography has thought it worth while to name. The great doorway of the
hall is set up in Sienese granite; its two shafts supporting Egyptian colossi serving as
caryatides, rise under an entablature that bears vases of red granite ; an entrance of
severe beauty, brightened by a bas-relief which occupies the centre. You see those
glorious profiles moving and ever renewed, as slowly and with eyes drawn away on
all sides at once, you ascend the steps leading to the Etruscan museum, the second
creation of Pope Gregory XVI. - -
This collection struck me as more curious than the other, for it was newer to me.
Emanating from uncertain epochs, perhaps anterior to our petty notions of history, the
art of the Etruscan which Mommsen almost denies, has only a distant resemblance to
Egyptian art. Before works of Tuscan origin, you are not stunned, as you are before
the basalts of Thebes or Memphis; you have no longer to do with the gods of another
race, propounding in a frightful immobility enigmas to which there is no solution.
Families from Asia naturalised in Latin lands—Seneca expressly says this—the
Etruscans only suffer themselves to be half divined; the movement and expression
sought by their artists, are identified with our own dramatic sense: the various expres-
sions seem nearer of kind to our peoples of to-day, than the models who are represented
by the artists of the Renaissance. And the reason is simple; the Etruscans were not
constrained by a school didactic to assimilate mere borrowed types. -
Researches having exhumed small objects, which belonged to usual life, in such
numbers that this gallery is for the Etruscans, and Sabellians perhaps as well, what the
Pompeian museum at Naples is for the Romans, we are in a position to characterize so
many different works by establishing certain distinctions among them. I observed that in
the domestic carvings, such as bas-reliefs, small bronzes, terra cotta, funeral monuments,
478 FOME.
the sentiment of the ideally or conventionally beautiful is, just as among the peoples of
the west during the middle ages, subordinate to animation of expression; while in the
decoration of ceramic works appears a certain idea of heroic form, made slighter, it
is true, by the wish to put the subjects on the stage in a clear and definite action.
To bring out these characteristics by means of contrasts, they have exhibited Greek
vases by the side of Etruscan vases with white grounds, which are the most ancient
—two distinct sources that were for long confounded together. The potiche of the
Education of Bacchus, the great tazze or paterae of the Argonautic series, are like our
paintings and statues of the Roman period, but with more elegance; a superiority of
taste that seems to be inherent in the Ausonian soil. -
As I entered, I remarked among the terra-cotta and alabaster urns of Volterra four
great tombs, one of which, in stone like peperino but of smaller grain, is surmounted
by the recumbent statue of the dead, escorted by wife and children; the bas-relief
represents a human sacrifice. On the second sarcophagus, which is of travertine,
sleeps a priest surrounded by the attributes of his functions; the two others also bear
reclining figures. In style and arrangement, but above all in the mien of the persons,
these monuments seem to have been executed in the middle ages; they would lead
you to suppose that in the twelfth century the inhabitants of Chiusi, Cornetto, Arezzo,
and more southern regions, forgetting Greeks and Romans, resumed by instinct the
autochthonic tradition of the Etruscans. In many cippi the grotesqueness of Asiatic
conception is allied with the finesse of Greek art; but more commonly the types
resemble the ‘primitives’ of Florentine art. It is especially by their physiognomy
that most of the Busts attract you : I will point out two in terra cotta, which you would
suppose to have been moulded after blonde Englishwomen by some pupil of Lawrence.
Before a bronze statue found at Todi, which represents a warrior with a winged helmet
on his head, and with a doublet under his cuirass—a figure of a superb head, a true
attitude, legs firmly designed, you seem to see an AEginetan equipped like one of our
crusading barons. Genii, winged and grotesque divinities, have an aspect so funda-
mentally eastern, that their apparitions carry the mind back to the extremity of India.
They have discovered a complete Biga, or two-wheeled car, in wood covered with
copper: the nave of the wheels is adorned with Cynocephalai; assuredly nothing is
more rare or curious than such an object. I had begun a small drawing of it, when
I was forbidden to continue that dishonest occupation.
This museum does not seem as if it had fallen from the skies like the Greek
collection, the Olympus of divinities with nothing human in the neighbourhood. Here,
on the contrary, is a profusion of the furniture and utensils of domestic life; seats and
beds, mirrors, vases, arms, and battle harness; chafing-dishes, frying-pans, utensils of
every sort. The excavations at Caere, Tarquiniae, Volsci, Bolsena, have given up
treasures beyond hope, from the inscription in a legible but unknown tongue, up to the
most ancient and delicate cups of Etrurian art. At Caere one single chamber has given
up, besides pottery and a cooking apparatus, all the trinkets of a family, a real jeweller's
shop, which has given rise in our days to the fashion of Etruscan gems, and began
the fortune of Castellani. To immortalise such a find, and to give a more complete idea
of these mausoleums, they have constructed, here in the Gregorian museum, the
sepulchral chamber of Caere. All the objects are most conveniently exposed in revolving
cases of glass, cylindrical or pyramidal.
These Etruscan remains are fruitful in information as to the customs which the
THE EZTRUSCAAW MUSEUM. 479
Romans borrowed, and whose origin is cleared up by them. We possess furnaces for
the incineration of the bones of the dead before enclosing them in tiny sarcophagi
of terra cotta, where the dead slumber in effigy, holding in their hands poppy
stems, as well as the round mystic mirror, so frequently found in Sepulchral chambers.
The paintings of Tarquiniae and Volsci, which the learned Gregory XVI. has had
copied, represent dances, funeral feasts, players on musical instruments, and gladiators,
who thus confirm the presumption of the Etruscan origin of that institution. There
is also a great iron bed for the incremation of the dead. From the notable diversity
which even in similar objects proves clearly marked schools, we may infer the enormous
duration of a period that we are accustomed to sum up in a word. Etruscan popu-
lation, usages, processes, lasted up to the era of the Caesars, as writers tell us and
as architecture showed. In certain works in which we note the intervention of a Greek
inspiration, this tardy influence lends them an ingenuous grace whose attraction you
cannot resist : the oval Toilette, round which an unknown artist has thrown the Combat
of the Amazons, is one of those works in which the rays of Polycletus and Myron
are reflected. Before such charming marvels, it is hard to accept with Mommsen that
the heirs of the Tyrrhenians, given up to sinister rites, sanguinary and darkened by
horrible phantasmagorias, introduced no art into Italy, where they are supposed to
have remained below the Sabines and even the Samnites.
|
..
|
|\ .
E.
HALL OF THE ANIMALS (MUSEo Pio-CLEMENTINo).
CHAPTER XXV.
THE DIVINE CITY OF THE VATICAN (continued).
Lapidary collections.—Museo Chiaramonti.-The Bracchio Nuovo.—Entrance to the Pio-Clementine Galleries.—
Court and portico of the Belvedere.—The Laocoön.-The Hall of the Animals.-Galleries of Statues.—
Decorations and statues of the Cabinet of Masks.
I.
HE Vatican necropolis has as many inhabitants as one of our sub-prefectures,
and these populations of marble belong entirely to the great world: what
time we should need to become familiar with them | Built under the shadow
of St. Peter's by the heirs of the good shepherd, who in guise of sheep
have brought back so many lost or buried gods, this pagan city is divided into
seventeen regions, corresponding to as many special collections. Each princely house
has brought its tribute here: and zeal and sacrifices have redoubled for a century
past, in spite of the evil fortune of the time. In paying homage to the persevering
liberality which has endowed the universe with its most magnificent museum, we cannot
help pointing out to the recognition and gratitude of nations four sovereigns of our
age, who to crown so great a work surmounted many obstacles. These missionaries of
art are Pius VI., Pius VII., Gregory XVI., and Pius IX. We should add Clement XIV.,
if by beginning the Clementine collection, Pope Ganganelli had done more than yield
to the impulse of his treasurer-general, Cardinal Braschi, who was shortly to become
Pius VI.
You penetrate into this labyrinth by a long vaulted avenue, which Bramante built,
and where Pius VII. organized the lapidary museum. At the bottom of the perspective
you perceive a distant grating; it cuts the wide corridor in two; it is the barrier which
limits this suburb. Tombstones and sarcophagi are drawn up in a double row along
the preliminary alley, whose walls are a mosaic of inscriptions; just as to come to


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THE CHIARAMONTI GALLERY.

THE CHIAFAMOAVT/ MUSEUM. 481
Rome, you follow the Appian Way all lined with tombs, so you get into the Vatican
city by a road of sepulchres. These monuments succeed one another over a length
of nearly six hundred feet; all is classed by kinds, centuries, creeds, purposes. On
one side extend, in rows over one another, family epitaphs; then friends, consular
personages, patricians of imperial lineage; finally people belonging to the different
trades. In front of this inlaying of marbles, set in the right wall, are arranged between
the windows the sarcophagi as well as the inscriptions of new-born Christianity, pages
taken from the Catacombs and written in Latin or Greek; sometimes in a hybrid
tongue and illustrated by symbolical designs. These inscriptions are usually short but
expressive; in presence of them we still perceive the ardent anguish of beings, turned
to air these eighteen centuries past. - *
Nothing is more instructive than the bas-reliefs devoted to the craftsmen of a time
when every dealer was an artisan. We see them in the workshop in the midst of their
tools; the cutler forges, tempers, beats the iron; hatchets, pincers, scissors, are hung
up in the shop, where we see the knives in rows, and, lower down, the counter with
its drawers. The architect has the compass in his hand; the potter or the locksmith
handles the wheel or the file. This Roman world, in which they lavished so much
marble for artisans, for freedmen, and even for slaves commended by the name and
certificates of the masters, this people so reverent towards the dead, was it pre-
destined for a spiritualist and equalitarian religion ? In the middle of the gallery,
on the pagan side, where the inscriptions bear the impress of the same manners,
you are inevitably stopped before enormous lions' heads decorating a sarcophagus
contemporary with Titus, on which dance in escort upon Dionysus draped Bacchantes,
of a charming style. Scenic masks fill up the voids of this sculpture, which its purity
would no doubt allot to very remote times, if the Greek artist to whom it is due had
drawn out its reliefs to inferior depth.
Interesting as this public vestibule is, on the first days you do not linger there;
the treasures accumulated behind the grating and which sparkle from a distance like
blocks of snow, make you impatient to penetrate into the reserved enclosures. Under
these large vaults, you march one hundred and fifty metres between two close hedges
of groups and busts set up in rows on consoles with statuettes, figures seated or upright,
on pedestals adorned with bas-reliefs, and surmounted by other bas-reliefs set in the
walls. - -
The first gallery of the Chiaramonti museum, organized by Pius VII., contains
nearly eight hundred works of art; the heroic figures, the tombs with their masks,
the portraits, the Gods accommodated to Latin rites, all tell you the ideal history of
Rome, but written in Greek; not one work has come forth from the soil; the works
of elegance and beauty are tribute paid to the conquering race by the vanquished
of Athens and Argos; the sons of Homer formed to poetry, but they could never
raise to sculpture, the soldiers who had to subdue a world. The Romans were masters
only in architecture; it belonged to the legislators of property to teach nations the
art of construction. . -
To approach all the marbles in these galleries would be to paraphrase a catalogue,
so I shall do no more than mention what remain in my memory. The first is a bust
of Julius Caesar, the head draped as high pontiff on the point of sacrificing. Caesar
is represented in the last years of his life; his face seamed and furrowed, betrays
a supreme lassitude, the dry expression of a man who has exhausted everything. No
3 Q
482 A’OME.
word would convey the contemptuous majesty, which on this luminous and ruined head,
unites with a mixture of nobility, pedantry, and moral desolation. How is it that they
have not made a model of the masterpiece, which transmits to us so profound a reve-
lation ? Further on, the fine sarcophagus of Junius Evhodus and his wife, found in
the excavations at Ostia, represents the legend of Alcestis, copied from older bas-reliefs.
This romance of conjugal love traced on the marble is a homage of Evhodus ‘to his
very dear and very blessed wife Metilia Acte.” These people, who had little dread
of death, prepared tombs most tastefully adorned, and gallantly offered like a madrigal
to the loved object. Close by is a magnificent Urn, where you see the grapes being
trampled in a vat, and above, Bacchus seated with Ariadne—a work of the time of
the Antonines. The colossal bust of the Pallas taken from old Laurentum would be
worth a description. The Athlete in Repose, which the waves of the sea had rolled
to the port of Antium, where it was found, is a figure of peculiar elegance; the bas-
relief of Azzia Agela presents us, as surprised in the practice of the habits of domestic
life, the deceased seated on a Triclinium
before her work-table. Near a colossal
|| || - head of Octavianus, represented young,
| | is a statue of his successor at the
| l | | || | opening of his reign; Tiberius is seated,
- illuſ "- clothed in the chlamys, knotted over
the shoulder, and crowned with oak-
leaves; he holds with one hand a long
sceptre, while the other rests on the
Parazonium. This statue, found at
Veii, is splendid; the aristocratic beauty
of the features, the kindly animation
which shines in the expression, give to
the head a fascination that throws sus-
picion on the veracity of Tacitus. The
unique bust of Julia, the daughter of
SARCOPHAGUS OF THE BACCHANTES. Augustus, was exhumed under Pius IX.
at Ostia, in the same place as the
youthful Augustus in Parian marble, the most delicate likeness of the first of the
emperors.
Let us be on our guard against incarnating the supple spirit of Cicero in that big,
good-natured face, which we see in plaster in our French museums and provincial
schools. The real Marcus Tullius, conformably to the authentic Greek medal published
by father St. Clement, is that lean head with meagre cheeks, with penetrating and
caustic expression: a strangely living figure, whose expressive lines Themis and Apollo
seem to have hollowed together. The great man has not on his nose the traditional
mole; for he was called Cicero like his father and like his brother Quintus, and not
because he had a wart like a vetch on his face. The true bust of the Chiaramonti
museum is numbered 423; and we have no cast of it. -
To manufacture for themselves an emperor that would last awhile, the provinces
were occasionally less ceremonious than the praetorian legions. They took a Jupiter
or a Meleager, they put a globe or a sceptre into his hand, and the effigy served
equally well under all reigns. The statue numbered 453 offers an instance of this.

THE CHIAFAMONTI MUSEUM. 483
A curious statue, the unique portrait of a Caesar whose medals are most rare, is that of
Diadumenianus, the son of Macrinus, whom Heliogabalus's soldiers massacred at the
age of sixteen. AElius Lampridius describes to what a degree the army was dazzled, when
for the first time it saw this youth appearing in the imperial vestments, ‘siderius et calestis.”
The colours of life play in his cheeks; the sculptor has warmed the marble by investing
it with certain effects of painting. Here, close by his side, is another Tiberius, of Pente-
lican marble, still very young, half naked, with drapery treated by a very skilful hand; the
latter, more real, has an air of astonishment, almost of brutishness; the man of Caprea
seems to show himself. The head of Antoninus Pius (505) is of a fine character. The
Cato (5 IO), an empty face with hanging lower lip, is apocryphal. The Marius, seen
from a distance and sideways, reminded me of our poor Halévy during the last months
of his wasting existence; but nearer, the head becomes vulgar, and Marius is only
a Terrorist porter of the faubourg St. Marceau. The colossal bust of Isis, “ queen of
the elements,’ as Apuleius says, a perfect testimony of the emigration of this worship
among the Greeks in the time of the Ptolemies, is of Pentelican marble. Near the
draped bust of Annius Verus in his infancy (559), there is another, the free execution
of which, stripped of every mere school process, deserves a glance; they suppose it
to be Domitius AEnobarbus, the happy sire of Nero. Let us observe also a grand
statue of an emperor whom his decapitation makes anonymous, and between whose
shoulders, in accordance with a too frequent practice, they have planted the head of
Claudius. Although it has no longer arms or head, the statue numbered 638 has
forms of such heteroclite beauty, that everybody fancies he sees an androgynous
representation; the set of the drapery assigns it to a fine epoch of Grecian art.
Treated with greater fancy and a purity which is not any less, the Ganymede carried
away by an Eagle is a piece of irresistible effect; the wings of the metamorphosed
Jupiter form a little pavilion over the head of the tearful giovinetto: “they often asked
from the sculptor Leucares,’ Pliny tells us, ‘the reproduction of so successful a statue.”
It was near the mole of Caecilia Metella that they discovered the bust 698, bearing
the name of Cicero: it is only mentioned here, to prevent confusion with the real
likeness mentioned above. Against the pannel before this, the important sarcophagus
of Nonius, in marble from Luna, deserves mention, though it is mediocre from the
artistic point of view, and contemporary with Caracalla. These Nonii were a family
of freedmen, grown rich in the oil trade, and having on the road to Ostia their villa
and sepulchral mole. Between the pilasters of the sarcophagus they have cut a Mola
asinaria; but here the ass is replaced by a mare. The bas-relief represents the
implements used in Squeezing the olives; the hollow vessel for collecting the liquid,
the quartarius and sextarius for measuring it, the pierced trowel for keeping back the
kernels and the pulp, panniers and baskets—everything connected with such a business.
In the midst of so many curiosities, you have no leisure to examine the small frescoes,
interesting and unpretentious, which decorate the lunettes contrived in the archways.
In a time of distress, shortly after the return of the pope in 1814, Canova, in order to
give bread to young painters as well as to keep up the practice of fresco, had these
pictures executed at his own expense, and he devoted their subjects to the memorable
acts of a pontiff by whom he was beloved. -
When one has once passed from the grating to the bottom, then from the
extremity to the point of departure, through this fine but rather cold Chiaramonti gallery,
yóu are perfectly ready to approach the rich arrangement of the second hall, into
3 Q 2
484 Rouz.
which you might have penetrated at once; for immediately beyond the railings it opens
at right angles, by two granite columns surmounted by imperial busts in basalt and
alabaster. As you go through the Bracchio Nuovo, that construction of Pius VII.
in which the shafts, red oriental granite, Carystian marble, Egyptian granite, brocatelle,
and coralline brecchia, may be counted by the half-score, you still feel some suspicion
at finding so many and still so many precious columns, of which the treasure seems
inexhaustible. We know how the Romans set to work in the production of this endless
number; and that besides the thousands of pillars, handed over completely polished
to modern buildings by those of antiquity, the earth still holds in reserve unex-
plored workshops whence smoothed pillars could yet be extracted. Full of passion
for their country, and devoted to the task of making it splendid, the Roman armies
in the distant garrisons of Greece, Asia, Egypt, cut the finest marbles into blocks or
beams: the soldiers polished a corner of it to show a specimen of the grain; the
legion or the cohort marked it, and the marbles thus despatched came and were
disembarked under the Aventine. I have seen many of these columns in a rudimentary
state, with the designation of the army and the number of the legion; if they went
on digging, they would get them up by dozens.
II.
What for me invests the galleries we are about to enter with a most fascinating
harmony, is that they were expressly constructed to receive the marbles of a museum
of antiques, and by men who had studied the ancients in ruins as well as in books.
There is no complicated conception in a hall twenty-four feet broad by two hundred
and eight long, with a small apse in the middle, forming the rudimentary arms of a
Greek cross; but before building the Bracchio Nuovo, Raphael Stern was aware that
he would have forty-three very important statues to put in relief. So he divided the
length of his gallery into twenty-eight niches, and the apse into fifteen, and he was
thus able to set the statues in a series of arches; then before the pilasters which
separate them, he placed a row of as many busts on pillars of red granite. At the
intersections of the arches are other busts supported on consoles; between the frieze
and the keys of the arches bas-reliefs are set; an entablature with very projecting
modillions serves as base for vaults, ornamented with coffer-work cut hollow into the
stone, vaults supported by twelve Corinthian columns of the finest cipollino. Each of
the doors has its pediment resting on precious columns; the light falls amply distributed
upon charming mosaic pavements; in the middle of the gallery rises a Greek vase
of black basalt on a pedestal of red granite. Thus the gallery is constructed for
what furnishes it, and the statues only form a natural decoration.
This characteristic value of a museum built to be a museum cannot be held up
too constantly for an example in our country, where economy frequently houses works
of art in old monasteries, empty palaces, desecrated churches, garrets, or cellars. The
animation of the placing in the Vatican also enables us to understand how essential
it is, under naves of middle height, that the vaults instead of remaining bare should
be worked over by sculpture and painting, and to what a point the diversity of many-
coloured marbles is necessary in all architecture that is reduced to linear severity of style.
THE BA&ACCHIO AWUOVO. 485
When, to lodge the masterpieces with which he had presented the world, Pius VII.
realised between 1817 and 1822 a project elaborated in 1806 with Cardinal Consalvi,
the pontiff set up the last pure and brilliant building that our modern ages have
planted on Roman soil. .
One of the important pieces of this gallery, the statue of Augustus, found some
six years ago at the villa of Livia, has replaced, in consequence of the munificence
of Pius IX., the Antinois with the attributes of Vertumnus, which had been restored
by the pupils of Canova. The Augustus is one of the good statues of the Vatican ;
it gives rise to observations which will perhaps seem novel. The body may have
been modelled from the prince, but the head, which perhaps remained only sketched,
is treated, or at any rate finished, in a manner that seems contemporary with Trajan.
Pliny the Naturalist tells us that Augustus had the ball of the eye very large and
very white, which gave to his greenish pupil so strange an expression, that in speaking
to the prince, people could not help staring at him with curiosity, which caused him
to wax impatient. This particular characteristic is faithfully translated by the marble;
only certain surfaces are excessively smoothed, the accent of the face is rendered
with a certain leanness, and this contrasts with the drapery, and with the armour,
which is a masterpiece. In composing it, the artist appears to me to have taken a
delicate flattery out of Virgil. It is told in the eighth book of the AEneid that Venus
gave to her son a suit of war harness, in which Vulcan had prophetically represented
the lofty deeds of the Romans down to Caesar Augustus; now the sculptor has clad
the emperor in the arms of AEneas. In the middle of the breastplate, commanded
by Jupiter from the heights of Olympus, below whom Venus starts forth on a car
in face of Mars and a Victory, you recognise Caesar, thrice invincible, consecrating
to the gods of Italy the walls and the eagles of Rome:—
‘Triplici invectus Romana triumpho
Moenia, diis Italis, votum immortale Sacrabat.”
The she-wolf of Romulus walks like a faithful hound by the side of Octavianus;
a few allegorical figures mingle in the design of the bas-reliefs, in which the statuary
has been content to hint an intention, without trying to introduce the illustrations
of the history of Rome within the limited field of a cuirass—a prodigy for which
the magic art of Vulcan is indispensable. *
In one of the niches people admire the statue of Modesty, a large figure with
a diadem on its head, whence a long veil falls back over the peplum, which covers
a robe of heavier stuff with majestic folds. These three different draperies arranged
over one another are admirably wrought; but we should only give a reserved acceptance
to the hand, which is heavy, and to the head, which is only tolerably noble in its pose:
both are modern ; the head has been composed from medals, with a superior appre-
ciation of antique art. Two very singular statues fronting one another, the one of
Titus, the other of his daughter Julia, often stopped me by their pitiless reality. The
son of Vespasian is short, squat, thickset, with a good-humoured and sensual face;
he wears big winter shoes; his figure and shape are particularly individual, you would
recognise him from among a thousand, by back or side, as if you had lived in intimacy
with him. A hive of honey is carved at his feet, the panegyric of a delicate symbolism.
Fleshly, short, stout, like her father, Julia is of a masculine ugliness, cynically portrayed.
Discovered near St. John Lateran in a garden, father and daughter represent to the
486
A’OME.
It is curious to
life one of those unceremonious families where they eat enormously.
compare the second of these likenesses with a deified figure of the same Julia (No. 56).
The Faun of the gardens of Lucullus belongs to a pure art, and would be a gem if
le
1mp
ic likeness of a si
1C
hent
ides is an aut
1p1
the Eur
-
y
had not been so much restored
work, old, therefore, and of the best style; the Demosthenes, in a natural and collected
1t
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AUGUSTUS (BRACCHIO NUOVO).
, a developed neck, a deep eye, a laborious brow, a
111 armS
th rather th
lip on which eloquence is stamped, is the figure of a thinker and a master of expression.
position, wi
Here, here truly, is the orator of the Olynthiacs, and not that athletic and shorn mask,
hich for so many years has been passed off in our schools
1ver, w
f some good 1
of design for a famous Greek.
portrait o
What a contrast with the true figure, so expressionless and morose, of an Athlete,

THE BAEACCHIO AWUOVO. 487
a supple and vigorous frame in which people consent to recognise the pure repro-
duction of a statue of Lysippus, that which the murmurs of the people forced Tiberius
to restore to the Thermae of Agrippa If this work is really Greek—I mean by that,
executed in Greece—the Ceres of the Ostian excavations, placed near an Adrian which
resembles Francis I., cannot have the same origin: it was at Rome, and to please
the gems togaía, that the Athenian refugees executed these draped divinities with
their long severe folds. We cannot say so much of the statue of Fortune.
Fallen into the pay of a people who were rationalistic, positive, and unskilled
in the matter of art, the statuaries of Greece modified the style and in some sort
the manipulation of their likenesses; they had to seek immediate resemblances, and
to ask for the secret of life in details which had hitherto been nobly neglected.
Physiology begins to find some gleanings in spelling out faces which, like the bust
of Marcus Antonius, exhumed near the Porta Pia, with those of Lepidus and Octa-
vianus, describe the personage. There is plenty of character and spirit in the face
of Antonius; the man here seems above his part; the
mouth especially has a slightly mocking delicacy which
expresses a versatile intelligence, almost one of our own
time, and, what is so unexpected, the madman who lost
the empire of the world to follow Cleopatra, has an air
which is rather profoundly vicious than sensual. What a
contrast with the face of Lepidus, -the head of a bird,
with a toneless eye, a soft brow, a retreating chin which
throws out an inert mouth; he is too like the part he
played. A fine and curious statue is the Nile, half
recumbent and surrounded by sixteen nurslings at play
about his big body, and trying to climb up on to it; they
represent the ascending degrees of the fertilising over-
flow of the stream, which to give a prosperous year
has to mount sixteen cubits. The sixteenth seems to be
coming to life out of a basket of fruits. The base repre- -
sents ichneumons, plants, oxen, ibises, and even hippopo- DEMost HENEs (BRACCHIO NUovo).
tamuses. It was under Leo X. that near the Minerva,
where Serapis had her temple, they exhumed this splendid piece. Let us still mention
for their rarity the statues of Lucius Verus, of very studied finish: of Domitian, who
recalls so closely the fraternal personages of Titus and Julia; and a superb bust of
Luna marble representing Philip the Father, the predecessor of Decius—a very fine
likeness for the time. You also pass a statue of Claudius, in which they have only
had an arm to remake, and on the features of which is plainly stamped the credulity of
the husband of Messalina. -
This is, as everybody will understand, only a feeble sketch of the hundred and
thirty-six works of art among the Bracchio Nuovo; among which, it is well to remark,
between the bas-reliefs, a Marriage Scene, the Triumph of Marcus Aurelius, and that of
Titus, in which you see better than in the arch of the Via Sacra, the ordering of the
procession, the spoils of the Temple, those of the conquered, and the retinue of
Israelite prisoners. The very mosaics of the pavement are important, especially that
representing the Travels of Ulysses, whose vessel, having just doubled the rock of
Scylla, traverses the waves where they hear the song of the Sirens.

488 A’OME.
III.
As on your way to the Pio-Clementine Museum you pass a second time before the
statues of the long Chiaramonti gallery, these monuments, in their rather bare locality,
after the splendours of the Bracchio Nuovo seem to be no more than the plebs of the
Vatican city; but the return to this avenue is an inappreciable preparation for the
crescendo effect, which will again quicken the attention by a series of surprises. One
flight of stairs takes you to the great museum, where by a singular contrast you only
meet at first a labyrinth of small chambers, sanctuaries each preserving its patron divinity.
Clement XIII. and Clement XIV. began to unite together the collections formed by
their predecessors from Julius II. downwards; but Pius VI. is the true founder of
the Pio - Clementine museum : he constructed seven large cabinets or galleries;
THE NILE (BRACCHIO NUovo).
his excavations and acquisitions enriched it with nearly fifteen hundred statues.
The public approaches the Belvedere by a square vestibule, whose ornamentation
accompanies some frescoes of Daniele da Volterra, in which I only remarked four
pretty landscapes, two of which have been spoiled by the openings for two doors.
Here, just as you enter, is the tomb of the ancestor of Scipio Africanus, found in 1780
under the direction of J. B. Visconti in a vineyard, before you come to the gate of
St. Sebastian, near the old Porta Capena. This great square chest of Albano stone or
peperino, is a rude work, whose material is common and its ornamentation elementary:
a cornice simple but salient, with denticules surmounting a frieze, in which hieroglyphics
define metaphors that have a rare interest. The profile is a little deteriorated; but the
proportions of the work clothe it with a superb style. In the burial-place of this family
they found inscriptions, which give an idea of the forms of Latin at the time of the war
of the Samnites, in the year 469 of Rome. That of Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus
is of a very marked archaic spelling; but the inscription of his son, who was consul in

7"HE BEA, VEDAERE. 489
495, is hardly less primitive. Although it has been copied, I will reproduce it from
an accurate presentation of it in a guide-book: “HoNCOINO PLOIRVME cosFNTIONT.R.
UONORO OPTVMO FUISE VIRO LVCIOM SCIPIONE FILIOS BARBATI CONSOL CENSOR AIDILIs HIC
FVET A. HEC CEPIT CORSICA ALERIAQUE URBE DEDET TEMPESTATEBV's AIDE MERETO.””
The skeleton of Scipio Barbatus was entire when they opened the sarcophagus: it
had upon the finger a ring, afterwards given by Pius VI. to Lord Algernon Percy.
In the middle of the vestibule is the Torso of the Belvedere, a colossal fragment of
Herculean stature in Greek marble. In the time of Alexander VI., when this marble
was found near the theatre of Pompeius, models contemporary with Pericles were rarer
than they are now. This possesses great value; for its author, Apollonius, Son of
Nestor of Athens, has affixed his name to it. And it made a revolution in art; Michel-
angelo studied it to such a degree, that he was wont to call himself pupil of the Torso.
In the round vestibule which comes next, is a fragment of a statue with some remarkable
drapery, a document which Raphael analyzed, and a fine statue of a woman seated.
But you will now leave all, to watch from the neighbouring balcony the splendid horizon
of Rome, the ranges which enclose it, the course of the Tiber, and of the Sabine
mountains,—a point of view that has given the name of Belvedere to the portion of
the Vatican where it presents itself to the eye.
The next cabinet, containing the inscription of L. Mummius, the conqueror of
Corinth, and a colossal bust of Trajan, is dedicated to Meleager, the ideal of beauty in
the time of Canova. This celebrated figure, in which the hero rests on his lance
between his dog and the head of the Calydonian boar, unites in a rare degree those
qualities of elegance which began, seventy-five years ago, to mark that lower kind of
beauty which is sometimes called distinction. The marble is dealt with, as by a
lapidary; the forms have the purity assigned by the vulgar to smooth surfaces: but how
cold the head is, and how soft the dog. They will tell you that Michelangelo did not
dare to replace the missing head; the popes found in this a neat excuse to prevent some
fattore from begging and intriguing for the commission. It is a very graceful statue :
visitors who wish for instruction will not do ill, after having tasted this, to return to the
Torso of the Hercules in repose.
We come to the Octagonal Court, of which you would convey a more just idea by
calling it a square, with portions cut out. It was Simonetti who, under Clement XIV.,
constructed round an antique fountain this court, whose space widens out in porticoes,
supported on sixteen Ionic columns of red granite and oriental grey, with pilasters of
coralline brecchia. Eight large Masks of the time of Agrippa occupy the pediments,
eight bas-reliefs furnish the intercolumnar spaces; statues and sarcophagi are arranged
against the walls, and you perceive other figures under the archways of the galleries.
Nothing can be more animated than this little court; nothing, I fancy, gives a juster
idea of the peristyle of a lover of antiquities in the time of Verres. Under the arches are
placed separately, in a series of cabinets, so as to be seen without distraction, some pieces
that are known to the whole world. Under this portico is the great sarcophagus found
against St. Peter's, in digging the foundation of the sacristy, and which represents, in
an exquisite design, a Dance of Bacchantes; there is also the famous sarcophagus of
* Hunc unum plurimi consentiunt Romae bonorum optimum fuisse virum Lucium Scipionem. Filius Barbati
consul, censor, aedilis hic fuit . . . . Hic cepit Corsicam, Aleriamgue urbem. Dedit tempestatibus aedem
merito.
3 R
490 AeC)ME.
Varius Marcellus, the father of Heliogabalus; its inscription edified us as to the dignities
exercised by this person, and as to the senatorial origin of his wife. This text also
reveals that the prefects of the praetorium had lieutenants. Turning to the right, you
come to a Sacellum dedicated to Canova, in the presence of the Perseus and the
Pugilists. If Canova sometimes gives us his inspiration somewhat chilled, we cannot
deny its power. The Perseus reveals rare gifts; but besides that the pose recalls with a
less expressive accent the bronze of Cellini under the loggia of the Orcagna at Florence,
the limbs have not the same bounding suppleness; the free, exquisite, one might almost
say, tender limbs of the marble of Canova, fall in the elaborate search for the dis-
tinguished. Yet this interpretation of
a certain school is strong; it shows a
distant descent from the Apollo and the
Meleager; the artist should have gone
back to the Mercury, that model of
serene beauty, which we find in the
neighbouring division,--a work done
in Greece, and according to which
Poussin fixed the proportions of the
academic figure.
Before the great figure of marble,
lustrous as an onyx, of the Apollo of
the Belvedere, unexpected sensations
awaited us. As it appeared to us in
all its luminousness, against the greenish
grey ground of the cabinet which it
occupies alone, you are dazzled at the
real incarnation of the god—/Jeus, ecce
/Jews / And suddenly an idea presents
itself, the copies are not faithful;
people do not know it. Seized in a
moment by an effort of supreme
happiness, the pose has something more
determinate, the expression of the face
justifies it more formally, than in the
multiplied reproductions in plaster. The
..TORSO OF THE BELVEDERE. head has nothing collected or cold; it is
associated in every muscle with the power
of the eye, of the lips, of the swelling nostrils; the glitter of the polish renders it moist
and quivering. No one who has seen it, will ever again recognise Apollo except by
his affinity with this type, a synthesis of his characteristics: it is, therefore, reasonable
to describe in it a traditional reproduction of some model, historically consecrated from
the times of Euphranor and Lysippus, names which conclude the heroic and fabulous
ages of the history of the beautiful. Whether the Apollo of the Belvedere is a Greek
marble or marble of Luna, whether it has been copied from a bronze or not, these are
secondary questions; the criticisms of the restorations of Montorsoli, the disputations
of grammarians of the line, seem to me mere puerilities. Found near the sea at Antium,
and acquired by the Cardinal della Rovere, who first of all placed it in his palace

THE LAOCOöy. 49 I
adjoining the SS. Apostoli, the Apollo with which Julius II. crowned the Vatican, is one
of its most ancient conquests. It would have exercised a more prompt influence on art
but for Michelangelo, who, under the charm of the Torso and some fragments (for he
did not see the Parthenon), made the aberrations of the second Grecian epoch prevail
over those of the third, which was less wide, but more seductive for the contemporaries
of Canova.
Three Rhodian sculptors, Agesander, Polydorus, Athenodorus, have left no less
renowned a group, occupying a separate division, and which was found in 1506 in the
ruins of the palace of Titus, in the spot where Pliny had described it; this is the
Laocoön. The effect of the original marble is so superior to that of the representations
that we are led to consider them all as derived from copies, and not from a cast. In
replacing a missing arm, Giovan Angelo Montorsoli has extended it, while from certain
signs left in the hair, it is presumed that this arm was convulsively folded back behind the
head with an expression of desperate grief.
Others attribute this arm to Bacio Bandinelli;
it would be difficult for me to explain without
periphrases why I think it more modern.
Pliny, who supposed the group to be cut in a
single block (the sutures not then being
visible), describes the Laocoön as oftus omnibus
statuariae artis fºra/onendum, and Michelangelo
called it a miracle of art.
Yet there is not a drawing-master in our
primary schools who does not know how to
demonstrate the gross faults, which these three
ignorant souls have committed. They did not
perceive that the sons of Laocoön, whose
bodies show full-grown men, are too small in
comparison with their father, the high priest of
Neptune ! So I have heard sculptors making
merry over our admiration most triumphantly.
Some of them, at any rate, end by confessing
that by favour or chance, from the point of view
of effect, the thing does not go badly; that the group receives a pyramidal form which
is very happy; that the person and torso of the high priest derive from the contrast a
lofty and superhuman greatness; but what these critics remark, they never suppose that
the artist can have sought. Long before the Greeks, for a long while after the Romans,
and down to the distant times when philosophers passed the scissors of absolute logic
over the wings of the Muse, artists have never made any scruple in presenting to the
imagination figures proportioned to the importance of the person. At Nineveh as at
Mayence, at Corinth as at Ravenna, we see gods, genii, saints, commanding, gigantic,
over the humbler crowd of lords or kings. In the idea of Agesander, Laocoön, the
prophet of the woes of Troy, was, and ought to seem, mightier than his sons.
Round the five chapels, whose patrons we have now celebrated, you meet many
monuments which ought to be examined at leisure, such as the bas-reliefs and sarco-
phagi, in which the usages of the life and rites of prae-Christian faiths are described.
Some historical figures diversify the curiosities of which the court is the centre; I
THE PERSEUS OF CANOVA.

3 R 2
492 A&OME.
remember a Venus-mater, with her Bambino, a likeness of the wife of Alexander
Severus, at the foot of which is written that this statue was offered to their ancient
mistress by her two freedmen, Sallustia and Elpidia. The figure, as we see, has been
treated with affection; the head is that of a person surrendered to a kindly reverie,
and the charm of an inmost expression lights up the lines of an antique face with a
peculiarly modern radiance. Trunks of columns in red porphyry, two cornices of
antique red coming from S. Prassede, the great Bath of Carian marble, a tender rose
and grey, veined in concentric zones, contribute to the variety of shades.
In the cabinet of Mercury, a bas-relief on which they have cut an Egyptian pro-
cession in a primitive taste, struck me as remarkable for simplicity and ingenuous grace.
Let me also mention the pannel of an ancient tomb (60) on which, between likenesses
and genii, you discover through a half-open door the interior perspective of a temple;
and the bas-relief of the Sacrifice to Mithra, on the cornice of which we read, Soli invicto
deo; and the Roman lady as Bacchante, lying with graceful abandonment on the
sepulchre where she sleeps so fast; and the large bas-relief (81) representing a Sacred
Procession, with lictors, and likenesses of consuls and pontifices; and the Ossuary in
form of a house, which held the remains of Quintus Vitellius; and the elegant sarco-
phagus of the Nereids. . . . . . To be equitable one ought either to mention all, or
to refer to nothing ; but when the memory is full, it is not easy, it would even be cruel,
to pass through a whole world in silence, repulsing the shades which throng in chase
of your attention. •
IV.
To effect a diversion before penetrating into the other galleries, it is well to take
a turn in the Jardin des Plantes, and amuse oneself by seeing the life in their special
domain of the rich menagerie which antiquity has bequeathed for our admiration ;
the collection is unique in the world, for it contains hardly less than one hundred
and fifty subjects taken from all kinds of species. In seeing how the Greek artists
applied the style and processes of their art to the form and character of the beasts,
we have a better appreciation of the principles that guided them in their interpretation
of the human body. This hall is brilliant with red granite shaped into Ionic columns,
and it is paved with imperial mosaics, in which barn-door fowls, eaglets, and hares
disport.
Begun by Pius VI. and established by his successor, this collection has been cleverly
arranged by Francesco Franzoni, whose numerous restorations are generally supple
and well conceived: Franzoni, one of the celebrities of modern sculpture, a name well
known in Rome, is absent from all our biographies miscalled universal, which ignore
equally a good half of the masters of the Florentine school. Once engaged in this
zoological excursion, you soon enjoy it, because the most familiar species put on a
certain ideality, while the Hippogriffs, Minotaurs, Sphinxes, and other Chimaeras, are
impregnated with a verisimilitude that almost makes you a believer. It is curious
also to notice in some kinds, and specially in the horse and the dog, the types which
the ancients knew and appreciated. In the Attack on a young Stag we find a peculiar
species of hound, of a spring and muscular power excellently rendered, and with rare
beauty; the type is less flat-nosed than ours, the ears are cropped as we crop them
7A/E A/ALL OF THE AM/MAL.S. 493
now. At the side is the Combat between a Bear and a Bull. The two Greyhounds,
of which one playfully bites the ear of the other, are the Apollo and Venus among
greyhounds: you would say as much of the Hunting Dogs, of the Whelp putting
out its paw, of the Setter of violet brecchia; of a Bull of the same marble; of the Cows,
of the Running Greyhound, and so many other subjects. Horses are rare, but in the
midst of this marble menagerie an important place is given to grotesques and to animals
for food; the pleasures of the table flourished at the beginning of the empire. There
are ducks, cocks and hens, quails, a goose whose pose is a masterpiece of observation ;
a lobster in green Carrara marble, which cheats you into thinking it real; water-fowl,
a hare, a bustard; a turkey, the merit of which can only be fully appreciated by
people who have had to contend with this humorsome beauty and its gobbling
anger. Among the burlesques one must not leave out a toad in antique red; nor
the rats and crabs of green porphyry, and the scorpions; nor the lynx, and some
curious storks quaintly represented. In the Group of Mithras, where a bleeding bull
ANTIQUE GROUP (HALL OF THE ANIMALS).
has his blood licked up by a dog stretching to reach the wound, the accord of the
style with reality is surprising. In composing the Rape of Europa, the artist has
skilfully made the divinity of Zeus radiant on the head of the bull. Hercules drags
away the Nemean lion, which is dead enough, and whose slackened limbs possess a
surprising reality. I should omit the Commodus on horseback in hunting-dress, if
it had not inspired Bernini with his equestrian figure of Constantine under the portico
of St. Peter: this landmark will help to find, close by, the group of the Eagle with its
brood of eaglets, huddled together like the voracious dynasty of the pelican. It is
a work of astonishing vigour. The Panther of veined alabaster, with its stripes given
by the marble, is a gem; but the recumbent Tiger in Egyptian granite, coarsely
modelled in surfaces in so stubborn a material, is still more remarkable. The Lion
in grey marble, larger than life, with a calf's head between its claws, is curious in point
of execution; the body of superlative polish has a fleshy solidity that is exaggerated,
to give lightness and crispness to the mane, which is very abundant, and is still left

494 A&OME.
shaggy and heavy. There are the head of a cow and the head of an ass crowned with
ivy, which are models; the second, in grey marble, seems a depository of the soul
common to the whole race of nags. And what charming groups | The small Goat
bitten by an asp, the Stork defending against two serpents a frightened she-goat
and the kid at suck; the Sow with her litter, superb in mass, with much character
extracted from a simple hint; the Pelican holding her young in her open sides, the
Chained Cerberus carried away by Hercules, . . . . . one ought really to refer to all.
Among the subjects in which the fantastic comes as a substitute for nature, and it is
especially this we see revealing itself to the imagination of the contemporaries of
Lucretius, Ovid, and still more of Apuleius, I will name a two-winged Sphinx, a Sea-
Tiger, a Chimaera of most powerfully consistent extravagance, a sort of Loup-garou,
singularly engendered of the incongruous mixture of fox, wolf, and stag, as well as the
lugubrious and terrifying bovine figure of the Minotaur, in which the head is connected
with the human body by hybrid articulations of the most skilful kind. To show the
variety that commends these collections, let us mention at hazard, as we go along, some
of the subjects mingled among them—such as the Early Paradise of Breughel : a
Hedgehog, a simple outline in bas-relief of extreme delicacy; a head of a Rhinoceros,
a surprising production which derives a relative truth from its similitude; the Peacock
and Peahen from the Villa Adriana; the clever Baboon holding an apple; the Elephant
in extreme bas-relief, with a small bell on its neck; a Horse, with the look of the courser
of a Slavonian ballad; the Wild Boar rearing on his hind feet, recalling that of Florence,
of which the repetition is in the Mercato Nuovo; a Crocodile minutely studied, and
nearly of life size; the fight of a Griffin with a Porpoise, an enchanting group of oriental
alabaster; a colossal head of a Camel, which has served for a fountain; lastly, the Cow
in grey marble (209), represented in a style so noble that only one shepherd, he who
tended the flocks of Admetus, would be worthy to milk it; it was found at Genzano.
One more word for a rural scene represented in a curious bas-relief; its subject is a
Lustration, a religious practice which perhaps the Etruscans taught to the Romans, and
which is not without an analogy with certain Semitic rites. They proceeded to these
regenerations by fire, water, or incense: mothers after their delivery, animals after
bringing forth, and new-born children, were purified by aspersion, while they burnt
laurel, juniper, and sulphur; after which the shepherds, having thrice gone round the
fold, offered wine, pure milk, and a cake or a bunch of millet to Pales. Our bas-relief
describes the lustration of a heifer, who suckles her calf, an antique work as perfect as
it is rare. We recognise the temple and its enclosure, the sacred fountain under a
tree, the lustral bowl and the brush, an olive branch; the shepherd carries strung
on his crook two geese, which he is about to sacrifice. While all is thus being
prepared, the cow, as she lets her young one suck, dips her muzzle into the cup and
drinks the consecrated water.
Nothing is fuller of life than this gallery; but it is especially by young nations,
still passionate for nature and movement, that these representations of the wild and
savage world are relished; the old nations only seek melodrama and phrases. The
cockneys of Italy and those of France march along these halls without stopping, yet
I have seen Americans and Swiss forget the hours. Before returning within the
domains of the statues, I took breath at a window through which you contem-
plate under torrents of light the burning slope that stretches beyond the Leonine
enclosure. Among the rock-work and bushes of this slope, I seemed to see running,
7'HE PIO-CLEMENT/ME GALZ ERYES. 495
as in some fantastic chase, the spectres of the ancient animals, and the apparition of
which remained in my memory: I seemed to hear the distant sounds of the horn,
borne along the whirling blasts from Samnium.
V.
A short time after the death of Sixtus IV., a pontiff of Greek origin, a native
of Genoa, and probably a lover of nature, Pope Innocent VIII. constructed for him-
self, in the middle of the Vatican enclosure, in the very Belvedere, a rustic house which
he had decorated by Mantegna and by Pinturicchio, assisted by their pupils. It is from
this villa that there went forth for all Christian realms his philippics against the
Turks, and it was there that subsequently he received from Bajazet the quarters of
a pension of 40,000 crowns, for keeping in a fast prison Zizim, a dangerous brother
of the sultan. There was sealed with the leaden bull of the Fisherman the brief of
excommunication against Ferdinand of Naples, to the advantage of Charles VIII., who
was invited to possess himself of the realm—an investiture which cost us dear, and
Italy too. -
But antiquity, which takes the Vatican little by little for its own, and chases away
the pontifical shadows by its statues, has since the reign of Clement XIV. invaded the
rural domain of Pope Innocent. The marble gods have thrown the partitions to the
ground, to instal themselves, with imperial beauties and goddesses, in this transformed
house in a gallery which had to be enlarged under Pius VI. Continuing the work
which he had inspired a love for in Ganganelli, so dear to philosophers, Cardinal Braschi
when he became Pius VI. renewed the decoration of the vaults; he had constructed the
archways with their ample mouldings, whose entablatures rest on fine Ionic capitals
of white marble, supported by shafts of porta Santa, veined in brown on a yellow
ground; finally, he enriched with garlands, with escutcheons, and bas-reliefs, the spaces
in which have been preserved, in the tympana and between the tops of the arches,
some paintings of Mantegna, as well as of the school of Pinturicchio. This long
avenue with its walls of marble, its vaults loaded with arabesques, its bas-reliefs, its
frescoes, its mosaic pavement, and its double procession of masterpieces, a perspective
closing at one extremity with the Ariadne, and at the other, beyond the cabinet of
busts, with a Jupiter seated Sceptre in hand, this avenue has thus become the gallery
of the Pio-Clementine museum.
To enjoy these creations without excess of fatigue, you must be on your guard
against hunting with too much eagerness and solicitude among so many works. It
is best to walk about there as at a kermess, and to be content with answering by
a glance the sculptured personages who allure you by the way. Half-a-score of
visits will bring you new acquaintances, so numerous is the assembly: the very
pedestals even are most of them adorned with bas-reliefs: if one were to insist on
reckoning up every piece worthy of remark, the figure would amount to two or
three hundred. I would fain therefore pass on, but the torso and the features of an
adolescent Cupid copied from Praxiteles, which strike me at the first step, rob me
of the courage of silence; the head, whose expression distils poison and honey, is the
most exquisite that any chisel ever created. Then there is the Paris seated, a figure
496 A’O.]/E.
in which grace of pose unites itself with a magisterial puissance. The Penelope,
which by a frequent caprice in primitive art, is rather smaller than nature, has the
folds of its robe arranged like pipes as on the Etruscan bas-reliefs; the work goes
back to the most ancient periods of Greek statuary; it recalls the terra cottas of
the Kircher collection. The Apollo Sauroktonos, trying his arrows upon lizards,
is also a reproduction from that renowned Praxiteles, who survives by the grace of
literature far more than by a few copies at third, nay seventh hand: the Borghese
gallery possesses another copy which is more complete and less cold than this. On
the same side rises, in Parian marble spangled with diamond dust, an Amazon of
great antiquity, for Augustus had it placed in the portico of the physicians.
Two personages seated at the end of the gallery attracted me so that, to rejoin
them the more rapidly, I neglected plenty of other wonders on my way. The one to
the right is Posidippus, and the other Menander, two lucky poets, and especially the
second ; his glory will never awake the
impatience of a Zoilus, for there only remain
of his two hundred comedies scanty frag-
ments of two or three of them. Posidippus,
born one knows not where, and who lived
one knows not when, would be unknown,
if the Anthology had not taken from him
Some fifteen epigrams (among them that
on Opportunity, which Machiavelli has trans-
lated so daintily), and if he had not had
the quaint fortune to survive to the most
remote posterity, thanks to such a likeness
as is not produced in every generation. This
statue, simply wrought, in harmony with
the familiar ease of the attitude, is clad
in a tunic, and with the pallium thrown
over the left shoulder. The poet, a true
--- |Tºmmunºminimum academic head, wrinkled with age, but subtle
- (PIO-CLEMENTINE GALLERY). and pensive, holds a roll between his fingers,
which have rings on them. Menander is
robust and younger; we know, in fact, that he scarcely lived beyond fifty. It is by
his resemblance to the likeness in the famous bas-relief of the Farnesina, that Quirinio
Visconti recognised this prince of Greek comic authors, who most likely lived before
Posidippus. The attitude has more movement; the poet in repose, with his left arm
resting on the round back of his seat, his head inclined as for study of what is
passing before him, has the conformation of a man of alertness, with the roundly
caustic expression of an observer wearied of the scenes of the world. They used to
take for Marius and Sulla these two worthy men of wit, who were found on the Viminal,
in the time of Sixtus V.
Turning back after thus saluting the master of Plautus, we come upon an Apollo
Citharaedus, in whom cognoscenti claim to recognise Nero—a more than doubtful
assertion. There follow, the Wounded Adonis, as beautiful and as stupid as he ought
to be ; the Bacchus lying down, of great repute, because it has become defaced, which
gives it a false air of the grand epoch, and rescues it from dryness; the Opelius Macrinus,
º
º
º
º
-
-

GA/L/AA’P OF THE STATUES. 497
the unique statue of an emperor of whom the medals are rare, interesting monu-
ment of the art of the third century, when the science of interpretation was yielding to
the mechanical imitation of nature. From that point of view, this is a powerful
figure; it brings out all the better the brutal form and foul shape of the Numidian
upstart, said to have sprung from slavery, to have been reared in domestic service,
to have risen by assassination, and who ended like a coward. Treasures are buried
on all sides in Rome: the enormous Bath of oriental alabaster was recently found in
the middle of the Piazza SS. Apostoli, in repairing a water conduit. Nearly opposite,
beside AEsculapius, is Hygeia, the goddess of health; a friend whom you find passing
fair, the moment she leaves you; the statuary regretted her perhaps, for he has
made her adorable. This figure, which
must belong to about the same time as
the Danaid of Praeneste, is far from
equalling the Faun leaning on the trunk
of a tree, which was discovered in the
Marsh of Ancona," and is a copy from
Praxiteles: the original, mutilated and
reduced to a torso, was found in the
excavations on the Palatine. Finally,
under an arch between columns of
antique yellow flanked by Candelabra
of marble with figures worth describing,
is lying that celebrated figure of Ariadne
deserted, which an ophidian bracelet
caused people to take for Cleopatra,
when Julius II. had this masterpiece
placed in the Belvedere. The tunic
half undone, the sorrowful features, the
veil falling from the head, the tumbled
folds of the drapery—all indicates the
prostration which follows violent anguish.
The sarcophagus of the struggling
Giants whom we see changing into
hydras—the pedestal of this noble piece,
is of an inferior and later school. THE ARIADNE (rio-curvestise GALLERY).
The present designation of the
Ariadne is confirmed by a neighbouring bas-relief, not less important as a document
than it is as a piece of work, in which we see the same figure inversely arranged,
between Theseus who climbs the side of his ship, and a Faun who precedes Bacchus: a
goat in it symbolizes Naxos, an islet of the rocky herd in the AEgean. Notwith-
standing several restorations which date for the most part from the fifteenth century,
this bas-relief, exhumed under the auspices of Cardinal d’Este, at the Villa Adriana,
is one of the most curious sculptures in the museum. The Mercury and the Tortoise,
the Bacchanal in bas-relief, the exquisite Torso, though a little too smooth, supported
by a small rough sketch representing the games of the Circus, ought to occupy us
too; but in the embrasure of a window is placed in a fine light a Well-brim, of such
richness as to eclipse all that surrounds it. This piece is known under the name of

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498 A&OME.
Pozzo Giustiniani; it was the Prince of Canino (Lucien Bonaparte) who gave it up
to the museum. The bas-reliefs with which this marble cylinder is loaded, represent
various Bacchic scenes. Nothing is more delicate or better ordered than these com-
positions, in which the heads are comely, varied, and simple.
In the Cabinet of Masks, open on the side of the gallery, and so called from three
scenic Masks which are painted on the mosaics of the pavement, you look less at
the paintings of the vault than at this pavement, which was taken from the Villa
Adriana. The eight pilasters and eight columns with gilded capitals which surround
the hall, are rare specimens of a lost kind of marble—the veined alabaster of the
Monte Circeo, a quarry that is exhausted. Let us not speak of the great porphyry
seats, nor of a series of bas-reliefs which plunge you into illusions about the heroic
and pastoral life of Athenian or Sicilian Greece: in the midst of such splendours,
let us content ourselves with rapid homage to a Dancer, who is rather excessively
feminine, but who belongs to a good epoch; to the Kneeling Venus of Pentelican
marble, the work of Bupalo who signed it; to the matchless bas-relief of the Labours
of Hercules; to the Ganymede, an adorable little statue found near the gate of
St. John Lateran; finally, and above all, to the Faun of antique red, a piece as
superior in point of inspiration and workmanship, as it is precious for the scarcity
of its material: in fact we no longer know whence the ancients got this stone, of a
grain so dead and so tender that its pores seem absolutely moist. The Faun has
upon his shoulder the nebris, or deer skin; he holds in his left hand a crook, and
in his right a bunch of grapes which he devours with all his eyes; the flute and
tymbals lie at his feet.
Instead of at once gaining the new halls by repassing those you have visited,
you may come and breathe the air on a terrace fronting the Monte Mario, and
which, supported on walls contemporary with Innocent VIII., prolongs itself parallel
with the Gallery of Statues. In measuring from this lofty point of view the spaces
you have traversed, you understand the immensity of the Vatican constructions,
and you are astonished to see far off, from the richest museum in the world, such
melancholy solitudes. Yet the antique visions will pursue you even here : Pius VI.
continued the galleries on the outer wall along the terrace, where works of art rise
between you and the slopes of the Veientians, the Capenates, and the land of the
Falisci, immortalised by poets, who admired in the palace of Augustus the statues
that we study in the palace of the popes.
They have classed among the curiosities of archaeology the bas-relief of Faustulus
discovering the Twins in the Lupercalian cave; but the friends of Maecenas would
probably have been no better able than ourselves to tell the age or the origin of
this primitive sculpture. Others offer an analogous character: a Chase; the winged
Genius fastening a dog to a tree, bearing a covey of birds which a serpent is
trying to reach : this bas-relief goes back to the Etruscan myths. There is a third
of some singularity, in which Mercury takes two brothers to the dark river brink in a
car drawn by rams. The Eteocles and Polynices, the great bas-relief of Rhea
Sylvia, those in which they recognise a Sacrifice; finally, a figure at prayer,
kneeling, which is very uncommon, seem to me worthy of mention. Such is the
familiar character of those genre pictures drawn by the chisel, that as we examine
them in open air, before the landscapes of Latium and Etruria, we involuntarily
transport their actors to the hills, and looking from bas-relief to the country,
7'HE HAZZ OF BUSTS. 499
we see living once more in the light of the sun, in the condition of wandering
shades, those pure outlines, ingenuous illustrations of the poetry and piety of the
fields.
VI.
The Hall of Busts, which ends the Gallery of Statues at its northern extremity,
prolongs the illusions of mythology and history which carry you into the spheres
of the past world; while by abridging the distances between such remote terms, the
known likenesses collected in this spot take us back to Roman society: you seem
thus to be returning to actual life, to such an extent are the realities of the present
hour obliterated.
At the entrance, there is Julius Caesar, the bust draped in the toga ; a poor head
and of doubtful resemblance; then we pass an Augustus crowned with wheat-ears,
and a pseudo-Cicero which can no longer impose on us. There is Marcus Aurelius,
and Mamaea, with her son Alexander Severus; farther on, a veiled matron, whose
robes are curiously draped. The helmeted head of Menelaus is so well known, that
it has taken a place among true personages. You think you recognise Ptolemy,
king of Mauritania, by his crisp hair and energetically accented signs of race. Does
it not seem as if this stupid hyaena who was Caracalla, is going to Scream, as you
receive the sombre flash from his eyes, and detect the expression of the skilfully
executed mouth P Fine head of an assassin and a restless tyrant; he carried it
slightly bent, to imitate Alexander of Macedon, and he gains by this piece of folly
the look of an angry cat, which completes him. Augustus reappears, so aged, with
a mouth at once so scornful and so dejected; the majesty of the old machine goes
out in such exhaustion of disenchantment, that the head of the imperial greybeard
sums up a life of experience in absolute contempt for men. This likeness is larger
than nature, as well as those of Antoninus and Septimius Severus : of Otho, in a
draped bust of that orange-coloured oriental alabaster, which the Italians call cotogmino;
finally, of Nero with the harp; a virtuoso with weak and blinking eyes, so represented
as to confirm the confidential testimony of Pliny upon the cat-like glance of this
emperor. -
After saluting the cold effigy of Jupiter, we pass the colossal head of a Barbarian
King, said to come from the arch of Constantine. A work of the decadence, this poor
chance king produces here the effect of a sheep-dog among the pure greyhounds of
the pack. Commodus figures among the best likenesses, as well as Sabina with her
husband Adrian, close to a fine Aristophanes who comes from their villa. Near a
draped bust of oriental alabaster, and which is assuredly not a Julius Caesar, you will
remark the energetic and common head of a Plebeian, which was found near the
tomb of the Scipios, and which somewhat recalls Cardinal Antonelli: then, Livia
Drusilla, fourth wife of Augustus; Philip the Younger, in red porphyry; a Scipio
Africanus completely apocryphal; Saloninus son of Gallienus, and Julia a daughter of
Titus. These galleries are so rich in likenesses, that they present images of royal
children hardly mentioned in history, such as Annius Verus, a son of Marcus Aurelius,
who was proclaimed Caesar at the age of three, and who died three years after-
3 S 2
500 A&OME.
wards. When you have visited the Capitol and the Vatican, you know the great people
of the Roman empire more distinctly than our own kings and heroes anterior
to Lewis XIV.
Some sculptures are attached to the walls in the Hall of Busts; several grave-
stones have been placed here. I will mention the bas-relief entitled Prometheus
and the Parcae, admirable remains of a very ancient epoch of the Greek art practised
in Italy. The figures are accompanied by old Latin inscriptions in which the V
takes the form of Y; these letters also reproduce an archaic idiom. The Parcae
spin and cut the threads of human life; but Prometheus possessing himself of a soul
that Atropos has extinguished, rekindles and restores it. This myth explains
the symbolical part of Prometheus in the first ages of Christian iconography.
Among the images coming from the tombs, is one which I will point out, for the
present work ought to draw attention to certain choice pieces which might pass
unperceived. Now this monument, banished near a door, is likely to be overlooked;
only accident made me notice it. -
There are two semi-figures on a cippus—a Husband and Wife—the latter young,
and probably a survivor, the other of a very ripe age. They are represented opposite
one another, and executed as sculpture used to be handled in the time of Augustus;
but the sentiment of the artist has drawn over these faces the poem, I would almost
say the romance, of the household: the rather paternal tenderness of the husband
for this young wife with her pure brow, and the smiling gratitude of the elder, and
in his companion the modest satisfaction of duty performed, make the whole radiant
with the chaste gleam of Christian affections. Still the expressive and speaking head of
the man who goes away recognising his domestic good fortune, and whose likeness
is only an action of gratitude and a recompense, has a certain vulgarity of mien ;
yet the idea makes it bright. This monument, which you can hardly look at without
emotion, was taken by Clement XIV. from the Villa Mattei : unreflecting amateurs
pretended to see in it Cato and his daughter, or his son-in-law Brutus with Porcia,
not remembering that neither one nor the other was buried at Rome, but ended
their lives far away. Besides, there is nothing in these tender and serene figures to
recall the pedantic virtues of the suicide of Utica.
GARDENS OF THE WATICAN.
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE Divine city of THE VATICAN (continued).
The Vatican gardens.—Excursion to the Gallery of the Maps and to that of the Tapestries.—Arazzi of the
Medici and cartoons of Raphael–Miscellanies of the Gallery of the Candelabra :-The sarcophagus of
Niobe, Arianna ritrovata da Bacco-Rotunda della Biga -The Indian Bacchus, The Discobolos of
Myron–Monuments in the Hall of the Greek Cross :—Imperial Figures,--The great Constantinian
sarcophagi—The Round Hall, history of its construction—Halt at the Sacellum of the Muses.—The
Pierides and their worshippers: Demosthenes, Epicurus, Alcibiades, Aspasia and Pericles, etc.—The
Apollo Musagetes.—Return to the pontifical gardens.
I.
GROUP of persons, under the charm of those caprices of friendship which
travel improvises, had proposed to pass the morning in a chat in the Vatican
gardens. These grounds, which are too rarely visited, and which must not
be confounded with the Orto della Pigna, are entrenched behind the Basilica
and the palaces, as if at the foot of a mass of rocks: from the city you do not perceive
this dell or its groves, which ascend the slope up to the walls of the dungeons erected
by Leo IV.
To go through the great Italian gardens that were planned in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries is, as has been said, to acquire an idea of the paradises realised


502 - A&OME.
by the proconsuls, and discovered later by the ascetics in their mystic dreams. The
Eden of the successors of St. Peter and Julius II. is a poetic solitude. On three sides
the perspectives extend by views over the distant country, and the foreground composed
of architecture like rock-work, of marbles and clipped foliage, prepares happy contrasts
with the thickets, the brambles, the scorched hills; next with the violet undulations, and
sometimes the snows that lie beyond. The valley is divided into compartments;
limited by terraces, the squares where low plantations make figures of rosettes, are
framed by walls, tapestried with orange-trees cut into hedges, in which the gold of the
fruits and the perfumed alabaster of the blossoms give animation to the foliage. Shut
in by partitions of box and laurel, high as groves of oak, the avenues cross and recross
one another, half veiled by those shades which call the night and prepare for mystery.
Here and there antique tombs give colour to dreams, and statues now and again
standing out in the hedges give you a start. -
You thus advance from surprise to surprise, hesitating which way to go; for at each
outlet you feel yourself drawn away, as far as the Loggia, a miniature villa which was
constructed by that lucky namesake of the Medici, who owed their patronage to his
name, and who, to justify so ambitious a relationship, instituted seminaries, founded
the Vatican painting establishment, and directed Pirro Ligorio, his architect, by the
traditions of the reigns of Leo X. and Clement VII. This construction, the most
irregular of works in taste and style, gives a happy idea of the caprices and jovial
humour of Pius IV. In truth, never have the debauches of architecture dreamed since
by our painters of gay merrymakings, exceeded the amusing simplicity of this chinoiserie,
which was inspired by Giovanni da Udine. Terraces, open galleries, cabinets of
painting, marbles and rock-work, bas-reliefs and festoons of verdure, baths and boudoirs,
basins and fountains, are all mixed in premeditated confusion; unforeseen effects are
renewed at every step; the mosaic and the quaint delicacies of the statuary are further
enlivened by the pencil of Baroccio, Zucchari, and Santi di Tito.
II.
Being graciously permitted by the sympathetic divination of my special companion
to follow my own desires, I proceeded to the end of the Gallery of Maps, the farthest
of the halls of the second story. Between the thirty windows which on one side, as
on the other, give light to this long perspective, Gregory XIII., the reformer of the
calendar, had painted in colours enormous maps of the provinces of Italy. By his order,
the gallery was furnished with marble benches and a double row of Hermes, antique
busts resting on high pedestals. Simply paved, this chamber has for vault a many-
coloured paradise of medallions, of coffer-work, or trophies of stucco framing paintings,
where projecting pediments are peopled with statuettes flitting under the arches, and
representing Loves or Angels, according to the disposition of the spectator. I traversed
rapidly the Gallery of Maps, and I did the same with that of Tapestries. You are
astonished to find even under the roofs, above the Chiaramonti museum, new aisles as
high and as rich in columns, archways, precious marbles, and splendidly decorated
vaults. Paved with polished marble, in which the pedestals of four porphyry columns
are reflected, the Galeria degli Arazzi is of more sober ornamentation; it was only
GALLERP OF MAPS; OF TAPESTRIES ; OF THE CANDELABRA. 5O3
finished under Pius VIII. : all interest is invited by these famous tapestries which Leo X.,
for the decoration of the Sixtine chapel, had executed from designs furnished by Raphael.
They are fourteen in number, but they only attribute eleven to the master himself, the
same number as the cartoons. I had seen the seven of them which are at Hampton
Court. The Tapestries are more finished, and of a richer shade of colour, and they do
honour to the Flemish workmen, for they have worked without heaviness, from simple
hints; but then in these hints what freedom, what brightness | Below the principal
subjects, which offer scenes taken from the Gospels, are arranged between the borders,
almost as a sort of predella, other subjects, borrowed from the history of the Medici:—
the Return to Florence of the cardinal of that name; John de Medici being taken
prisoner at the battle of Ravenna; John (afterwards Leo X.) fleeing from Florence in the
dress of a capuchin, and his Entry into Rome to attend the conclave. Among the
tapestries of which the design is not attributed to Raphael, let us remark, the Allegory
of the Papacy, the Massacre of the Innocents, and Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene.
After these hangings they have placed others of the same time, which are not Raphael's;
these have been copied more than once, and yet they are still uncommon. I have
seen reproductions of them, rather dulled and less delicate, but still very valuable,
and too little noticed, on the walls of the avant-choeur of the cathedral of Beauvais,
where, too, are some hangings after the master.
As I had a long way to go, and as I felt it a duty not to leave my friend in the
pontifical gardens too long, I was filled by a kind of alarm in presence of the riches
of the Gallery of the Candelabra, an old Loggia, which was enclosed under Pius VI.,
and divided into six compartments by as many archways, supported by twelve Doric
columns of various marbles. The labyrinth of miscellanies, which does not include
less than two hundred and seventy-one items, closed by a capricious bouquet the
Pio-Clementine museum, of which we shall take the last halls backwards. Let us
give a word to the monuments of antique art, to which this gallery owes its name:
they are eight very tall Candelabra of white marble, with delicately sculptured out-
lines, covered with light arabesques, and on their triangular bases are disposed in
bas-relief, Fauns, Dancing Bacchantes, and subjects such as Marsyas and Apollo,
Jupiter and Minerva, Venus, Genii, the Attributes of Diana, and other fancies treated
with minute finish. Many of these high stands which figured in the sacrifices became
furniture in the churches, in spite of their pagan emblems; three of the finest bore
torches in the Baptistery of Constantia. We estimate how much the Italian Renaissance
has drawn from these models of design, of delicate sculpture and ornamentation: we
ought to have done as much for the candelabra of our public buildings and spaces.
I can only mention in passing the most remarkable pieces, such as the Great Bowl
in which Silenus and the Fauns make the vintage, a work of a fine style; the wounded
Phrygian Soldier, a piece of a later age, but of extreme vigour; the small Vase of brown
Egyptian granite; the Ceres with fine draperies in Parian marble; the Bowl in which
horses and dolphins carry Neptune; the Cup of red oriental granite streaked like Spanish
beans; and that which has such pretty handles, composed of adders twisted into masks
(it is of superfine porphyry, dark green on light green, with marblings). These gems
are on altars of marble and jasper, covered with inscriptions. On another vase, in
the shape of a mortar, are sketched emblems mixed with animals; you could not
believe the degree to which, among so many objects of classic execution, the differences
in process are numerous and extraordinary. The statue of a Victorious Virgin (222),
5O4 A’OM/E.
reveals a fashion and an elaborate search after the Etruscan, just as we make pasticci
of our own middle age. The Mortar (210), round which Baccchantes dance in a
ring, as well as its cylindrical base, in which cities and provinces figure, is a model
of grace and lightness. If one allowed oneself to be fascinated by the splendour of
certain gems, such as a Goblet, a Vase in semi-transparent alabaster, streaked with
concentric zones, and two other Vases of rose-coloured alabaster, veined with the
tenderest shades, one would run the risk of passing inattentively the splendid
Sarcophagus which serves as a support for them, of which the bas-reliefs are very
remarkable. They represent Apollo and Diana exterminating with arrows the too fair
family of Niobe. This massacre presented in a moving fashion, between the impassive
figures of the gods shooting their arrows, unites to the nobleness of Greek art the
science of composition and the intelligence of dramatic emotion: the despair, the agony
of death, the supplication of terror, all is expressed with soul. The lid furnishes an
original frieze, composed of a group of dead bodies. Not far from here a niche shelters
a singular statue : Jupiter dressed as a woman, with the attributes of Diana the huntress.
He is disguised thus to cheat Calisto, one of the nymphs of the goddess. Three
children, one of which beats a swan that another is dragging by the wing and the neck,
whilst the third carries off fruit in a nebris, appeared to me small masterpieces; they
formed part of a group which decorated a fountain at Roma Vecchia, between the
Latin Way and the Appian Way. Near the great Candelabrum representing Hercules
and Apollo disputing for the tripod of Delphi, there are three vases which, besides their
elegance, are curious specimens of rare and precious marble. One of an amazing
size is of Orta alabaster of an agate shade, broadly veined with interior lines; the
second, absolutely unique, is of jasper radicellato, with a purple ground streaked with
grey rays, bluish and white; the third, in black African antique, has for handles two
rooks, which with tails fixed in the body of the vase, bend back to sharpen their beak on
the brim of the bowl. -
The Ariadne discovered by Bacchus is one of the four principal sarcophagi of the
Vatican. Like its neighbour, the sarcophagus of Niobe, it is announced from afar by
pillars with vases on the top ; these are fluted, one in violet marble, the other in
falombino. From the point of view of composition, the Ariadne is the masterpiece of
bas-relief; the scene is full without confusion, and the interest concentrated on the
principal subject; figures are grouped with a happy harmony. The attitude of Ariadne
is exactly that of the great Ariadne of the Gallery of Statues, which they took for
Cieopatra. In the Satyr there is a hint, in the head only, of the Moses of Michel-
angelo, who never saw this bas-relief. The last figure to the left, a woman, the small
Bacchanals of the frieze or lid, with a cartouche supported by Loves, are exquisite pieces
of sculpture. As an art of hollowing and making statuary in bas-relief effective, without
weakness or harshness, there are in these two masterpieces, the Ariadne and the Niobe,
the material for a school. I saw again with pleasure, but without stopping, the fine
statue of a Roman lady as Polyhymnia; it is thus that, with a less noble severity, they
used to travestie our fine ladies of the court of old days into Muses. The graceful
figure of a Naval Victory, and especially among the objects bequeathed by the son
of Victor Amadeus, eight antique paintings set in the wall, representing female dancers;
here are pearls which would be compromising for one who should abstain from
collecting them. In the compartment which follows, come some curiosities of a more or
less miscellaneous kind : a quadrant or gnomon traced in the hollow of a quarter of
ALTAR OF SIXTINE CHAPEL.

GALLERP OF 7'HE CAAWDELA BA’A. 505
a sphere, with the months and zodiacal signs marked on it in Greek; several cinerary
vases, pure in form and ornamentation; a magnificent tripod of rose-coloured alabaster,
with deep crystalline markings; it is placed on a pedestal of green of Ponsevera; the
Ganymede carried off by the eagle, in which some amateurs see a reproduction of a
celebrated original due to Leochares, a contemporary of Scopas, a fellow worker with
Praxiteles at the tomb of Mausolus, and author of the Jupiter Tonans, which, in the time
of Pliny, they used to worship at the Capitol. There is nothing to hinder one
maintaining also that the charming Venus Anadyomene wiping her tresses is copied from
the picture of Apelles, which Augustus introduced into the Temple of Venus Genitrix.
A mention is owed to the cinerary urn of white marble, on which are figured in
| N Till º
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Tiſiſ. H
Fºroſ º ºſſillº-
GALLERY OF THE CANDELABRA.
deep bas-relief of an exquisite delicacy, hippocampi, fish, masks, and groups of leaves;–
to three stooping Sileni, with goat skins over their shoulders, which support a triangular
modern basin ; –to the pretty statuette of a Kneeling Barbarian, carrying a large
jug ;—to the Solar Clock found in the papacy of Pius IX. at Ostia; —to the ravishing
little group, in which a satyr draws the thorn out of the foot of a faun; – to the oval
sarcophagus consecrated to a youth, found in the catacomb of Cyriaca : it belongs to
the decadence, but in the figures of the Muses as in the dress of the departed, Quirino
Visconti fancied he could recognise the emblems of the sophistical sect;-finally, to
two pieces of a rather strange fancifulness, the trunks of trees in white marble,
one of which parts into two branches, and which bears nests: in one there are five
small birds wide awake, while in the other are three asleep. These fledglings are

3 T
506 A’OME.
Bambini exquisitely moulded and posed; those who sleep are superior to the brood on
the other tree. On the pedestal is carved, among the bas-reliefs, an Egyptian hawk in
a semi-heraldic style; the broods of children must be, according to Raffei, symbols of
fecundity.
III.
Such absorbing diversions made me forget the groves of the Vatican, but as I
left the Hall of the Candelabra, and went by the magnificent staircase of Simonetti,
I thought of the charming companion who was awaiting me below under the great
oaks. To overcome this weakness I entered the circular hall of the Biga, so-called
because Pius VI. had placed in the centre, a chariot with two horses, a Biga of marble,
which long served in the church of St. Mark for a cathedra. Entrusted with the
THE BIG.A.
restoration of this Greek car, the pole of which ending in a ram's head had been
preserved, Franzoni fitted wheels that are somewhat heavy, he made a new head
for the fine galloping courser, of which Prince Borghese had made a present to the
holy father, he created a second horse, and the monument was re-established. To
plant a head in the antique style on an admirable equestrian torso is no vulgar merit,
and this restoration is a masterpiece of the kind; only the ornamentation of the car,
composed of foliage flowing among rosettes, and mingled with wheat ears, was of
inimitable workmanship. The whole seemed so wonderful to Pius VI. that to install
the Biga, he had this rotunda constructed by Camporese, with a cupola imitated from
the Pantheon, resting on a marble cornice, supported by eight fluted columns with
Corinthian capitals. Besides the famous chariot, the hall of the Biga contains some
pieces of value: an Indian Bacchus of the second century, a bearded figure with long
plaited hair, clad in a sleeved tunic, with sandals; to hint that this Asiatic divinity
presided over heedless pleasures, the artist has engraved the word SAPAANAIAAAOS

AIA/A, OF THE BIGA. 507
on the hem of the peplum ;—the small sarcophagi with the races of the circus drawn
on them : interesting pieces, for the one comes from the catacomb of St. Sebastian,
while the other, which was found in the same vineyard as the tomb of the
Scipios, is of rare delicacy. Let us also recall the Apollo Citharaºdus, and the
Discobolos of Pentelican marble, found on the Appian Way, a celebrated statue, so
correct as to have acquired a didactic value. Still, notwithstanding its irreproach-
able proportions, how inferior it seems to the reproduction of the Discobolos of
Myron, placed close by The admirably posed figure of a young athlete hurling
the discus shows a nature at once full of spring and strength; the arms and chest
modelled broadly with simplicity, the secret of which was too soon forgotten, recall
the great epoch symbolized by the name of Phidias. The artist who drew his
inspiration from the bronze of Myron, has written on the base, at the foot of which is
a strigil: MYPON ETIOIEI. The huntress Diana, with a quiver on her shoulder and
a dog by her side, is thrown into a kind of movement, and displays a face which
reminds us of the gallant figures of the youth of Louis XIV. ; but what a model of
grace and execution | What can be more curious than the statue of that driver of a
car, who having been victorious in the circus, with one hand holds the palm and with
the other the reins. He has a hook for weapon; his torso is as if encircled by bands
of iron arranged above the tunic. We have spoken of the Hall of the Greek Cross;
you must go through it to reach the Round Hall. The first serves so constantly for
a passage either towards the gardens or to ascend to the Etruscan and Egyptian
Museum, or to descend to the library, that you run the risk of neglecting certain
objects there. The statue of Augustus veiled as the high pontiff, the half-draped
Octavius, whose head by a curious singularity has never been detached from the
trunk;—the Lucius Verus, so well planted, though the head is a little too strong;-
an esteemed, though in my opinion a weak copy of Venus of Gnidus;–the Sphinxes in
Egyptian granite on each side of the staircase;—the colossal heads of Trajan and
Marcus Aurelius;–the Marciana;-the unknown Empress draped as Ceres or Modesty,
to whom the statuary has given the eyes of a vampire;—these are some of the notable
pieces. There are two others which, reduced to their money value and to the industrial
merit of execution, so seize the eye that they help to prevent one from seeing the
rest; these are two gigantic sarcophagi, of the red porphyry which is so hard to
cut; monoliths, whose mass is truly imposing, and which are erected in the upper
part of this great vestibule. Of the colossal gems one, taken from the baptistery
attached to St. Agnes beyond the walls, has held the remains of the daughter of
Constantine; Genii, Vintagers, figures that the Romans take for grotesques, so
incorrect is the execution, stand out in extreme relief from this block of purple, which
is polished like a cornelian. How many difficulties thus conquered, to carve in hard
stone the products of an art which is absolutely degenerate Pius VI. had brought
to the Vatican these renowned curiosities, splendid as the decoration of a hall, precious
above all as historical documents. In fact, the second sarcophagus of porphyry,
which is still more enormous than the other, and has on the top a sculptured
pyramidal lid, was entrusted by Constantine to five and twenty workmen, who laboured
nine years to give a worthy burial-place to the mother of the emperor. St. Helena
slept easily at Tor Pignattara, in this Titan’s toy, transferred afterwards to St. John
Lateran, whence Pius VI. removed it. On its sides run and gallop the soldiers of
the Battle against Maxentius. These bas-reliefs, which project so much that they
3 T 2
508 A’OME.
are round engaged embossings, extend their triumphant defiles over the four faces.
In those times they were reduced to seek success in difficulties of handiwork, and it
was really necessary, for the art of bas-reliefs is no longer possessed by the workmen
of that epoch.
IV.
The hours went less slowly; the curiosity of seeing and studying triumphed more
and more over the attractions of the pontifical garden. As I had only two sanctuaries.
more to explore, the Round Hall and the Chamber of the Muses, I stifled my remorse.
To resist the seduction of the Round Hall and halt at the threshold, one would
need the courage of the barbarians;
for this rotunda is the splendid and
striking restoration of an antique saloon.
You would suppose yourself there to
be in the galleries of Maecenas, of
Verres, of Cicero, or of Titus, and you
may analyse the causes of this illusion.
To create the Round Hall, that great
and venerable friend of the arts whom
we call Pius VI., proceeded like the
contemporaries of Augustus; he dis-
posed the casket for gems he had
collected beforehand, instead of doing
as we do, who build a box without
- | Fºl ſº || thinking beforehand of the contents.
: º #ſºlº ºlºš The pontiff Braschi possessed eight
ºn- #|| fine colossal figures, ten busts, an
enormous vase of red porphyry, and
| the mosaic pavement of an ancient
rotunda. So he placed a cupola upon
ten fluted pilasters of Carrara marble;
between each of them they made an
arched niche, to hold the great statues
on pedestals of Greek marble; before
HALL OF THE GREEK CROSS. each pilaster were placed the busts on
brackets of red porphyry; the mosaic of
Otricoli, where Medusa is encircled by the Combat by the Lapithae and Centaurs,
and where Tritons move with Nymphs and Chimaeras, was again made the pavement
of an antique hall; finally the basin of red porphyry, forty-one feet in circumference,
found in the Thermae of Diocletian, was installed in the middle of the hall
erected to contain it. In this rich arrangement all is justified, all contributes to
a certain harmony, all is homogeneous and seems to belong to one and the same age.
Since by such complete illusions they are brought back to the old world, it is
proper first of all to bow before Jupiter Optimus Maximus, Maximus particularly,
for an unspeakable majesty characterises this prototype of the Olympian head. The

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ERYTHRAEAN SIBYL (CEILING OF THE

MONUMENTS AAW THE ROUVD HAZZ. r 509
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projecting eyebrows of a monumental front, the pitiless impassibility of this ideal and
virile beauty; the parted lips, superior to every emotion, and through which only
oracles can pass: all contributes to convey the idea of a superhuman being, all powerful,
with no vindictiveness and no pity, and in whose eye mortals are but as insects. Near
the master of the gods is a colossal Bacchus, the torso of which recalls by its modelling
the fine bronze Hercules found in the Righetti palace. In this hall gods and emperors
are assembled, as they were in the ideal Olympus of the Romans. Near the drunken
Bacchus leaning on a faun, a charming head which is effective without complication,
is the great Ligurian head of Pertinax, broadly sketched and full of a crafty geniality;
near these are Plautinus and the Julia Pia, second wife of Septimius Severus, separated
from a colossal bust of Claudius (his finest known likeness) by the great Juno of
Lanuvium, surrounded by curious attributes. She is less handsome, however, than the
famous Barberini Juno, placed near Jupiter Serapis, in which the King of Olympus,
personified according to doctrines of the Alexandrian school, appears with the tresses of
Pluto and in the centre of the rays of Phoebus. The Juno, whose head is superb, her
draperies elegant and supple, the hair skilfully dealt with, and the bosom revealed
with grace under the transparency of the peplum, this Juno that was discovered on
the Viminal, is a work of marked style, and it is not astonishing that they should
have asked at the sight of it whether the Juno of Praxiteles had not been brought
away from the Temple of Plataea. The enormous and bizarre Hermes of Parian marble,
which represented not the Ocean, as they say, but a grotesque Triton in a pool in
the garden of Pozzoli, separates Antoninus from Nerva, two fine statues, especially
the first, which is clad in a cuirass and holds the parazonium in the left hand; Marcus
Aurelius set it up in the villa of Adrian. As for the seated figure of Nerva, a singular
fact is connected with it: they discovered the upper half of it between the basilicas
of Santa Croce and the Lateran; then they gave it to restore to the sculptor Cavaceppi,
who had at home the lower part, which had been found elsewhere at some indefinite
period. On the pedestal is a comic bas-relief, witty and graceful, representing a
household scene taken from the first book of the Iliad, Vulcan indoctrinating Juno
so as to make her less intractable with Jupiter.
Comedy and Tragedy are represented by two Hermes, curious specimens of Greek
art in the time of Adrian, who had them sculptured to support the door of his antique
theatre of the villa at Tivoli. Comedy, with a chaplet of vine-leaves, is full of laughter;
the head, like that of Tragedy, is of a sort that might be called bourgeois : these
beauties seem modern ; the old heroic world was vanishing. If Ceres, another colossus,
affects so rigid a mien, it is because she is without doubt indignant that they should
have placed a fairly reputable goddess between Antinoiis and Adrian. As for the
colossal Adrian exhumed from the fosses of St. Angelo, this head in Pentelican marble,
of which the execution is transcendant, must have fallen from a statue posted as
guardian in the vestibule of the tomb. -
We have only, after more than one piece of forgetfulness perhaps, to make honour-
able avowal at the feet of Mnemosyne, described HMHOuCINH on the inscription in
old Greek letters on her statue, which is nearly half smaller than nature; Clement XIV.
purchased this masterpiece from the Barberini. Her arms engaged in her draperies,
Mnemosyne wrapped within herself seems, so vague is her glance, to be watching some
inner horizons; it is thought that gives life to this inactive figure. Let us leave the
Round Hall with this sister of Saturn: she will very properly introduce us into the
5 IO - FOME.
boudoir of the nine poetic maidens of whom Zeus made her the mother, having been
obliged, in order to seduce Memory, the inspiring source of the Muses, to replace his
sceptre by the shepherd's crook.
V.
The sanctuary of the Nine Sisters, presided over by Apollo Musagetes, clad in long
tunics and playing the flute, is enriched by the spoils of the villa of Tivoli and the
palaces of the Esquiline, to which they have adapted sixteen columns of Carrara
marble. The softened light that falls on the works of this octagonal chamber, helps to
make the circle of the Muses more imposing, and this economy of the light is all the
more favourable, as it plunges into a half obscurity the frescoes of the Cavalier Conca,
while it allows the eye to rest on the arabesques of the mosaic with which the hall is
paved. What makes these exhibitions of the theogony of old days so animated, is that
at the feet of the immortals you find the society of the illustrious men who adored
them : this chamber is really a Sacellum, to such a degree does the architecture of
Pius VI., retempered by Winckelmann and the ephemeral Renaissance which the Revo-
lution crushed, add to the illusion : you breathe, as you enter this court, a certain
fragrance of sanctity, and you are seized with involuntary respect. The faith of the popes
must have been very robust, that in this Rome which is so pagan in instinct and in
its memories, they could dare, in the presence of a superstitious and sensual people, to
restore to honour, in the very heart of their palaces and of the domain of St. Peter,
the divinities of their ancestors, ever adorable by the prestige of ideal beauty.
Let us select, as we enter, some familiars of the college of the Muses to whom it
seems mannerly to present ourselves. To begin with, there is Demosthenes; the
earliest glimpse enables you to recognise that head which is so full of life, and has so
spiritually characteristic an expression. Antisthenes, the pupil of Socrates and the
master of Diogenes, with his lips parted under an expressive beard, is likewise a mask
of an evident individuality, but his disciple and he have an air of ignorance of one
another: this grave and calm Diogenes seems to me to have been christened by an
afterthought, unless he be some namesake. The Sophocles, small and dry, with an
official kind of face, is in my eyes an unknown, who having kept only the second half
of his name—. . . . OKAHX—makes too good profit out of a gallantry of Time.
Epicurus is authentic; he had so many friends, that he was often pourtrayed. Zeno the
Stoic is very good, as well as AEschines, Metrodorus, Socrates, and the sleepy
Epimenides. Meanly executed, the Alcibiades has the mannered and almost modern
expression of a genius skilled in exploiting the infatuation of fashion; it is a curious
face, that I expected to meet in that world. What a difference between this pet of
renown, and the valiant and admirably interpreted figure of Themistocles 1, Lycurgus,
Periander, Bias, Euripides, ought not to be passed in silence. As I came and saw on
a Graeco-Roman bas-relief the ceremony of a marriage, my eyes fell on a grave
and comely woman, whose head was modestly veiled; it is the friend of Plato and
Socrates, a hetaira who presided over the intellectual movement of an epoch summed
up in the mighty name of Pericles. Near Aspasia is placed the royal dictator of
the Athenian democracy, Pericles, the son of Xanthippus. Intelligent, subtle, delicate,
AALL OF 7'HE MUSES. 5 II
and shapely under the helmet which so adds to its size, his head has the rather mocking
expression of great leaders who know men, and play at pulling the wires of the puppets.
Found in the time of Pius VI., these authentic portraits (the names are engraved upon
them) have made the modern world acquainted with two illustrious figures of antiquity.
Between the pair is seated the Tenth of the Muses, Sappho of Mitylene, a statue broad
in style and pure in sentiment. -
To conclude this summary review, we have only to make our halt before the Pierides.
This collection of the nine statues of the Muses is really unique, especially if you
consider that it is completed by the Mnemosyne and the Apollo Citharedus; yet all
these figures are by no means of equal beauty. Melpomene is one of the best; her
dishevelled hair, intermixed with grapes, her young and grave glance, the movement in
her attitude, the heaviness of the tunic, the noble grace with which the syrma is flung
—all gives the goddess, armed with the poniard, a passionate expression. Thalia is
more laughing; she has for attributes the pedum which answers to pastoral poetry, the
comic mask and the tympanum ; she is seated, the lower part of the body enclosed in a
large mantle, whence sandal-shod feet escape. Every one knows that childish and
frolicsome face, the brow framed in ivy leaves, projecting shadows. These two Muses,
as well as Polyhymnia, Clio, Erato, Calliope, Terpischore, and Apollo Musagetes, were
discovered in 1774 at Tivoli, in an ancient rustic house of Cassius. Pius VI. instantly
made these precious acquisitions; then he strove to complete the procession, and
constructed for the divinities the octagonal chapel of the Muses. As one goes over
the creations of that lofty, liberal, poetic spirit, and in presence of the marvels left by
this pontiff, and remembers the persecutions which slew the noble old man, we can
hardly help asking on which side were true greatness and civilization.
In contemplating the stars, Urania by mistake let her head fall at Velletri, where it
was taken for Fortune. Pope Braschi has placed upon her shoulders a very fine antique
head; he has delivered her from her modern gear, and has restored her ray and starred
globe; a gentle figure, admirably draped, yet not more so than Polyhymnia, the Musa
tacita, who presides over pantomime and fables. Who has not seen the reductions of
that pensive figure, with the peplum thrown back over the shoulder, and stamped with a
grace that has nothing forced about it? The lyric Erato, of Pentelican marble, has two
fore-arms entirely new ; as she had lost her head, they consoled her with that of a Leda,
which suits her very well. Calliope, pugilares in hand, seems in search of some epic
strophe; the Terpischore, holding a flute, is not remarkable; Euterpe, though seated,
is still wanting in beauty; Clio has the same arrangement as the Muse of Epopee, only
as she has longer stories to tell, instead of tablets she holds a volumen or scroll.
Standing on an antique altar consecrated to Augustus, Apollo, clad down to his feet
in a long robe, a mixed impersonation between the high priest and the bard, leads
the choir of the Pierides gathered around him. This easily recognisable divinity, in
the strange majesty of a hieratic costume, completed by a large mantle thrown back,
this consecrated figure, the reproduction of a type created in the distant ages of
Greece, is of a vivid, superhuman, and incongruous beauty. The lyre, of strange shape,
on one of the branches of which they have cut the Punishment of Marsyas, is hung
to a strap flung crosswise over the shoulder of the god, whose bosom heaves and
vibrates; for, while accompanying himself with his fingers, he sings without effort.
Such is the unity of action impressed on this group of ten figures by the sentiment
of a rite and the power of symmetry, that speedily under the magic impulse of the
5 I:2 A’OME.
leader of the Muses, their procession becomes animated, and the ear even seems to
perceive the harmonies of a mystic concert. ‘The dark earth,’ says Hesiod,
‘resounded with their hymns, and as they advance, in their steps there rises up
harmonious murmur. . . . . Plunging from the heights and wrapped in clouds, they
form light-footed dances; they roam during the night-season, and their voices sing
the things that have been and are to be.”
Before such a vision we ask what, when darkness enfolds the palace, what these
captive divinities turn into, who followed Apollo of old in the gardens of Cassius to
the sounds of the cascades of Tibur 2 May be they come down on the rays of the
CASINO OF PIUS IX.
moon into the fields of Nero, to these Vatican shades, to form rings and make merry;
and as dawn sends back Phoebus and his coursers, the white phantoms remount their
pedestals.
VI.
These fancies reminded me that I was being waited for in these same groves, and
content with having performed my task, I made haste in search of a Muse really alive,
to whom the graces of solitude lent some poetry. How time had sped In the
garden the light had changed its zone; the already purpling rays of evening were
falling on to the western slopes of the Vatican, and the shadows of the trees spread

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AºETURN 7"O 7"HE POWZT/E/CA/, GAA’DEAV.S. 5 I 3
over the flower-beds. Far as I could see, not a soul was visible; the statues, like vain
spectres, only brought me into irritating mistakes; the air was stifling and dumb: the
nests were silent. In the search for my companions, I had again seen in these saddened
places the Casino of Pius VI., and going over to the foot of the slopes, I approached
the grating by which I had entered, when I found myself in front of so singular a
landscape that I stopped to look at it.
To the left, striped with oblique shadows, were the spreading surfaces and roofs of
the Vatican buildings, whence rose one of the small cupolas; to the right, beyond
the Casino, over a slope of brambles was a path leading by zig-zag to terraces
tapestried with lemon-trees and privet, the supports of a forest, pierced by fiery darts
*====
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EXIT FROM THE PONTIFICAL GARDEN.
towards the tops, and with bluish openings among the dense masses. Through two
glades you caught glimpses high in the horizon of some of the battlements of the
Leonine enclosure; finally, to fill the centre, and carry the summit of the pyramid
into the skies, there arose, commanding from their giant pedestals, the suddenly
dwarfed woods,-there arose, I say, the aisles, and, above them, the formidable cupola
of St. Peter, whose golden ball against the distances of deep azure sparkled like a
star at nightfall. Few people have seen, and no painter has reproduced, this asto-
nishing perspective.
Around is no noise; in the air from time to time the clear ring of some convent
bell. I understood that, weary or offended at the delay, my companion had returned
by the homeward road. But to satisfy a vague hope, as well as to complete my tour

3 U
5 I4 A&OME.
through the gardens, to which I should never surely return, I ascended the path
which had fascinated me, and turned towards the sacred groves of the spot. A few
glimpses and openings allow you to follow the oblique course of the Tiber through
the Campagna ; sarcophagi bequeathed by the earliest Christian ages disclosing them-
selves among the brambles, you decipher Caesarean inscriptions under the ivy; Diana,
the nymphs, Sylvanus, the god Pan, shine out from the masses; they are at home,
and have no look of shivering in their exile, as in our northern regions. I wandered
in this way on my voyage of discovery as far as the reverse of a mound, where the
wood degenerates into copse, to make the most possible out of the ruins, at the other
side of which rises the hill smothered in green trees. Confused sounds reached me;
under vaults of bright leafage, over which the reflections of the sky shed tones as of
moonlight, it seemed to me as if one or two of the statues were quitting their pedestals.
“Ah, there you are l’ said a calm voice close to me, so strange after all these mute
hours, that it made me start.
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THE IGNUDI (VAULT of THE SIXTINE CHAPEI).
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE DIVINE CITY OF THE VATICAN (continued).
Sanctuaries of the Renaissance.—Hour of the apogee fixed by Julius II.-Pontifical ceremony at the Sixtine
Chapel.-Michelangelo and the Last Judgment.—First steps of the Decadence: Royal and Ducal Halls.
—The Conversion of St. Paul, and the Crucifixion of St. Peter, at the Pauline Chapel.-Return to the
Sixtine.—Last works of the pleiad of the Forerunners; the Twelve Frescoes.—Luca Signorelli, Andrea
d'Assisi, Perugino, Cosimo Rosselli, D. Ghirlandajo, Piero di Cosimo.—The true author of the Spozalizzio
of Raphael.-Sandro Botticelli...—First paintings of Michelangelo on the vault of the Sixtine.—Singular
plan of their conception.—The Sibyls and the Prophets.-The Ignudi and their consequences.—Scenes
taken from Genesis; their unlikeness to antique art.—Creation of Adam and Eve, Fall of Man, Paradise
Lost, the Drunkenness of Noah. —Filiation of Jacopo della Quercia.
I.
N the year of grace 1511, on All Saints' Day, Julius II. offered to the admira-
tion of his court the three first frescoes of Raphael in the chamber of the
Segnatura, as well as the still unfinished paintings with which Michelangelo,
since May 8, 1508, had been decorating the vault of the Sixtine Chapel.
Nothing had been seen hitherto comparable to these masterpieces, which have never
been surpassed in subsequent times; so their appearance assigns a precise date to
the culminating point of the Renaissance. That was a glorious morning, on which


3 U 2
516 A&OME.
this double revelation shone forth, and not only for the rivals united in the same
victory, but for Julian della Rovere, who had discerned and had associated with the
majesty of his reign two men of genius, equally superior though unlike; for that
Olympian pontiff, who led to the full expansion of what three centuries had been
elaborating.
Projects which had nothing ambitious about them, prepared these considerable results.
In coming to the Holy See, Pope Julius felt a repugnance to inhabit apartments that
had been defiled by the Borgia family, and he had others made ready on the upper
story; then he wished, in memory of his uncle, Sixtus IV., to decorate the ceiling of
the chapel which this pontiff built. With the clear-sightedness of a man of taste and
authority, he entrusted the apartments to Raphael of Urbino, who had been presented
to him by Bramante, and while fully appreciating Sanzio, he required that the vast
spaces of the Sixtine vault, a real battle-field, should be taken by Buonarotti, who
would fain have declined, who had never tried fresco, and to whom it was necessary
to give lessons as to a scholar, before he executed as his first essay the finest page
that any master has ever traced.
For this enormous work Bramante pointed out Michelangelo; Michelangelo recom-
mended Raphael. Julius II. held to his point; he fell into such fury, that Buonarotti
had to yield. A novice as a painter, he who was covered with glory as a sculptor,
was thirty-four years old; Raphael was only five-and-twenty. Both had drunk of the
Dantean spring, both had received the religious and liberal tempering which, under
the influence of Savonarola, warmed the last inspirations of the school of Umbria; finally,
the eldest and most energetic had not yet exercised any ascendancy over the other,
when the latter opposed the Dispute on the Holy Sacrament, the School of Athens,
the Parnassus, to that epopee of Genesis of which Michelangelo sent forth the first
strophes. So we may here study Raphael without foreign admixture and without a
rival, before the hour when the abuses of science stifled inspiration. g
The first time I crossed the threshold of the Sixtine Chapel, the lower part of the
church, which only is accessible to the public, was crowded with people, because the
sovereign pontiff was to assist at mass ; cardinals, secular and regular, robed in grey
or red, furred in ermine, occupied the benches of the sacred college, divided from the
faithful by a high balustrade. I was struck with the simplicity of the building; a
high long hall reduced to the four walls, without architectural ornaments, with rect-
angular windows pierced over the frieze. To the right, a tribune half-grated, with
trellis work for the choristers; at the bottom a very simple altar with four steps in
front, covered with a carpet; to the right of this altar, which has only six tapers,
separated from the great piece of the Last Judgment by the mantle of a narrow
baldachin, a raised seat for the pope; that is the Sixtine Chapel. It has no other .
decoration but the paintings with which it is entirely covered, up to a height of some
fifteen feet above the ground. It was to furnish the lower part, that Leo X. commis-
sioned Raphael to execute on subjects of holy scripture the series of compositions, of
which the artist painted between 1515 and 1518 eleven cartoons, to be executed in
tapestry at Arras. -
During the office, distracted by my neighbours, and not very free in my movements,
I only suspected the magnificence of the Sixtine Chapel; I was assisting for the first
time at the ceremonial of this clergy of princes; I was waiting for the entrance of
Pius IX., whom I had not then seen. The heraldic livery of the Swiss guards, the
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THE Loggie (VATICAN).

7///E SIXTIAW/E CA/APE/. 5 17
costumes of the chiefs of the orders, the magnificent ornaments of the officiating cardinal,
from which stood out in all its pale and intelligent leanness the ascetic head of the
learned Dom Pitra, son of St. Benedict and countryman of St. Bernard; all was
striking and novel for me. When the pope, in the midst of a royal, military, and
episcopal escort, made his entrance into his chapel, vibrating with harmonious cries
that seem to pour down from heaven those strange words, which we may well find
ſº
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AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE SIXTINE CHAPEL.
angelic, for they are not human ; while the wave of sacerdotal pomp swept before the
Last Judgment, I embraced all that surrounded me, with an eye that was dazzled
because the soul was stirred. The frescoes of Sixtus IV., with which the walls are
peopled, the dimly discerned ceiling, which appalled me by an indefinable immensity, the
drama of the end of the ages; all appeared to me at once. Then returning to the pontiff
with the triple crown, transformed into a giant by the prolongation of an enormous
cope; to the king who is only a monk, to the aged man who continues the dynasty of
St. Peter, of St. Sylvester, and of Julius II., transported into the presence of the purest

518 A&OME.
memories of the great ages, between the papacy and Michelangelo, I felt that I was
breathing in the noblest sanctuary which the world possesses.
While the mass lasted, every one assisting in ceremonial toilette, which only allows
for both sexes black with white linen, and in which the women must have the head
covered with a veil, I had to content myself, so far as the paintings went, with general
remarks, except for the Last Judgment, which I had leisure enough to examine without
any trouble. 4.
It seemed to me that the walls of the long nave tend to widen at the top, since
the dust, instead of floating over a vertical surface, has collected on the frescoes
where it spreads dull and cloudy zones. The picture of Michelangelo, the greatest
of all, is free from this outrage, as if it had just been wiped. When the artist, thirty
years after completing the decoration of the vault, consented under Paul III. to paint
the back of the altar, where they scraped a fresco of Perugino, the walls of the Sixtine
were already opening no doubt, for to prevent his work being exposed to the dust,
Buonarotti made the pargetting of his wall project in a perceptible manner.
Intelligent persons who have visited Paris are acquainted with this enormous work
by the copy of Sigalon, who had little trouble in rendering the general tone of a
composition whose colouring is neither gentle or tender. So I need only describe the
material condition of the original, which is less damaged than has been said, and which,
if it has acquired browned tints, especially in the sky, of which the blue has turned
metallic, owes this less to the smoke of six harmless tapers than to the defective
quality of the plaster. You recognise less easily on the copy than on the original,
the retouchings and repaintings with which the work has been loaded by Daniele
da Volterra, either to make certain perilous illusions vanish, or to clothe nudities and
even to efface likenesses, for the successors of Paul Farnese were in this respect less
scrupulous than he. Solicited as we know by Biagio da Cesena, his master of the
ceremonies, who was represented in hell as a punishment for his criticisms, with an
ass's ears and a serpent of luxury round his body, Paul III. answered him: ‘If they
had placed thee in purgatory, our prayers might have rescued thee; but the power of
the Church expires on the threshold of hell, and the damned are there for ever.’
Michelangelo spent eight years in the accomplishment of this mighty and terrible
task; he was nearly sixty when he undertook it, to realise the half of a programme
traced by Clement VII., who wished to furnish, as a pendant to the Last Judgment,
the Fall of the Rebel Angels, a subject in which the artist might have given once more
the measure of his style and skill. To order his composition, he drew his inspiration
from two poems; the Inferno of Dante (illustrated, so to speak, in the lower part of
the picture, where, like the poet, he has introduced Charon with his boat), and the
Apocalypse of St. John, whence proceeds the aerial and heavenly portion of that drama
in two ranges, in which all the figures are in the foreground. Such was the impulse
given by Michelangelo to academic studies, to the search after scientific anatomy and
after the difficulties inherent in forced attitudes and complicated fore-shortenings, that
the new work, a sort of synoptical picture of all imaginable feats of strength, filled
his contemporaries with transports of admiration. This passion exercised a decisive and
disastrous influence, by substituting means for the real end of art. The painter had
announced that he should surpass himself; he wrote it to Aretino in 1537 : So he made
a prodigious effort. The visible and sustained power of this effort excites a kind
of terror, which triumphs over the drynesses of an execution which age had made stiff,
THE LAST JUDGMENT. 5 IQ
and over the defect of interest which results from a frozen inspiration. To this work,
in which emotion is wanting, in which the abuse of the processes as well as the
extravagance of the intention, only arouse a stupefied approval, we must oppose Michel-
angelo himself, young, still mindful of the examples of Ghirlandajo, of the celestial
visions of the Umbrian School, and of the teachings of Savonarola ; Michelangelo
making over again after Moses the semi-pastoral poem of Genesis, and uniting on the
vaults of this same Sixtine Chapel the old feeling for the beautiful, with a convinced
faith in the mystery of the Scriptures. In his old age he wished to do better and more;
he dared much more, but he passed beyond his aim.
How singular the persistency of an enthusiasm which goes back to the hyperbolical
eulogies of Condivi, Vasari, and other compilers | For three centuries the crowd, on
the faith of pedagogues, has no eyes except for the Last Judgment, before which a
sheeplike host falls into ecstasy, while these same people, often highly literate, who
profess to understand the beauties of the work, have scarcely a glance to bestow on
the paintings of the vaults, the sublimest creation of the hand of man
The president De Brosses alone thought of preferring the ceiling, but on account
“of the forced attitudes of the figures of the frieze' which he calls a fury of anatomy.
Besides he only speaks of the Sybils and the Prophets; the medallions of the centre
have no mention. His opinions on the Last Judgment are original enough to be
worth recalling. ‘His picture has succeeded, because it is a confused subject in
which disorder is in its place, because he had the art of spreading a colour without
harmony, a bad general tint of an ambiguous air, bluish and reddish, which is not
unlike the mixture of the elements in the overthrow of nature. This subject was the
most suitable of which a vast sublime and ferocious spirit like that of Michelangelo
could have made choice, to harmonize with its own character. The whole piece
produces a mighty perturbation, and astonishes more than it pleases.’ But the
president, who finds all this by chance, crudely betrays his incompetence by this
verdict against Michelangelo : ‘He was, to speak decisively, a BAD but a terrible
draughtsman.” Now if we could, to use a trope thrown out of repute by Vestris, praise
a mortal for having been a god of his art, the god of drawing would be Michelangelo,
who not only created adorable outlines, which are distinct from the antique and as
beautiful, but who followed form by the regularity of the object modelled, who
drew from within, so to speak;—a sculptural precision which he first professed, and in
which so few masters have been able to follow him, that the most correct of our age
hardly understood such a kind of superiority. -
The terrestrial portion of the fresco in which the Dead emerge from the slime,
pale and stricken, still half corpses and already resuscitated; in which the Souls,
overwhelmed by their doom, are carried off by the Devils who quarrel for them,-
this lower part is treated in as new a form as it is dramatic; but the scenes which
pass in the air round the throne of Jesus the Avenger, seem harsh in consequence
of the absence of all aerial perspective. The figures launched into the spaces of the
sky have been designed in colossal proportions, so as to render them more imposing,
which makes them formidable: thus the Holy Virgin who presses against her Son
in a supplicating attitude, shows herself terror-stricken at the horrible beings that
surround him. The Christ even, whose violent and pitiless gesture has become
traditional, not as has been said since the paintings of Fra Angelico at Orvieto,
but ever since Orcagna, who himself in the Campo Santo of Pisa had interpreted it
52O A&OME.
from an earlier Pisan that I have seen, this Christ, made bluff and stout as a
consequence of muscular exaggeration, appears not to pronounce a sentence, but
to threaten sinners with a shower of blows: it is the gesture which speaks, and
we can only expect the arguments of a Hercules. Giovanni di Paolo, and Luca
Signorelli had translated this consecrated attitude with less violence.
But, it will be objected by the persons who insist upon a judgment all in one
tone, do you then think the work a failure? It is so superior to the ordinary
conceptions, so victoriously skilful and so imperiously instructive, that in the domain
of art it changed the face of the world, by stopping short the spiritualist impulse of
Italy. Thus the same man who in statuary had prepared the apogee of modern
aesthetic, and who rescued it from inaccessible heights by his first frescoes, the same
genius experienced before all others the dangers of his own doctrines; he inaugurated
the area of decline by an immortal page—the Last Judgment, the manifesto and
first monument of a system which was to lead art to its ruin.
II.
The office over, after one or two petitions which change into a praesidial throne
the cathedra of the holy father, before whom the petitioners plead on their knees,
sometimes followed by a deputation likewise kneeling; and when, to robe the cardinals
in their mantles of purple the chamberlain, accoutred much like the apothecaries of
comedy, had quitted their places at the feet of their masters, who had come down
from their stalls, I waited until a custode would be at leisure to open the Pauline
Chapel for me; and here ought I not to excuse myself for presenting the works of
Michelangelo in an order which confounds their chronology? But the interest of a
narrative requires that the facts should follow an ascending march, and this rule
forces us to begin with the last years of a career, whose perfection was at its
COmmencement.
In the Royal Hall, in the Ducal Hall, before the Hercules and the Seasons of
the Fleming and of Matteo of Sienna, before the historical frescoes of Sommaschini,
of the Zuccari, of Salviati, of Sicciolante, of Vasari, and of Lorenzino of Bologna, I
had convinced myself, not without alarm, and by a flying glance, of a rapid decline
after the Last Judgment. The Pauline Chapel suddenly presenting me with Michel-
angelo in his weakness in the midst of his victims, in all the heaviness of his
violence, enabled me to understand how the exploration of works, representing forty
years of the life of this superhuman personage, ought to busy itself with the last,
before reaching the masterpiece of so singular a genius.
Antonio of San Gallo constructed this chapel for Pope Paul III., who had it
decorated with large frescoes: Buonarotti, become undistinguishable, falls into full
accord with Zuccari and with Lorenzo Sabbatini of Bologna. Let us hasten to
remark as an extenuating circumstance, that the two frescoes of the author of the
Pensieroso, ill-preserved and copiously restored, have been much compromised; but
there are plain remains of the composition, the idea, the design of the general
outline. That which represents the Conversion of St. Paul on the road to Damascus,
is coldly academic; the Saint, in a coldly forced attitude, only represents a pose

THE GALLERY OF MAPs, VATICAN.

THE 7"WEZ VE FRESCOES OF MICHE/AAVG ELO. 52 I
inflicted on a model; Vasari would have been less slack, and he could not have
been harsher. In the Crucifixion of St. Peter, placed opposite, the apostle executed
with his head downwards, raises it already injected with blood, by a convulsive effort
which contributes to the anatomic sonata, and gives it a skilful and most horrible
grimace for theme. We should attribute to a pupil of Bronzini the no less morbid
representation of St. Paul, who in the other picture seems thrown over on his side,
blind and stupefied, while his horse takes to flight, and his companions stand round
him in terror. Postures, muscles, torsoes, instructive qualities, forms sanctioned by
convention, yes; but soul, sentiment, inspiration,-seek for these ! You discover
in the sky a Choir of Angels, crossed by the Christ launched against his crushed
foe. God plunges from the clouds head foremost, like a sunbeam or a rock; this
has been borrowed by Tintoretto in his Miracle of St. Mark.
Thanks to the passion of the séides, Michelangelo escaped the sentiment of this
decline; their enthusiasm for muscular development was become so extreme, that
not content with seeing in subjects a pretext for robust flesh, the master in his old
days thought he could make himself yet more sublime, for knowing how to invent
muscles whose use had not been foreseen by nature. He then drew certain little
groups, from his reminiscences of the Sixtine Chapel, and he enriched them with
these audacious superfetations. Luckily the original remains to avenge the artist on
himself, and this painting with its disastrous consequences imposes itself with such
authority, as to dwarf everything about it. Let us return then to the Sixtine and
ascend Michelangelo Buonarotti to the very summit. Would it not have been cruel
to leave, for the recollection of a rout, the sanctuary which is the witness of his
greatest victory! . . . -
III.
Between the offices, which are not very frequent, the paraphernalia of worship do
not encumber the wide. Presbyterium of the chapel; this vast oblong hall, with
painters at work in it, puts on the appearance of a studio. The steps by which
you mount to the altar, the lateral steps which raise the stalls of the choir, are covered
with a green carpet, which on Sundays brings out so effectively the long trains of
the purple mantles, and which on the open days offers relief to eyes that are fatigued
by the mass of paintings. Let us not forget that besides those of the ceiling and
of the friezes, and the Last Judgment, the nave is divided into twelve large frescoes,
divided from one another by settings that simulate pilasters, and are enhanced by
arabesques matching the golden chandeliers. The neighbourhood of Michelangelo
does cruel wrong to these works, which are really interesting and considerable; for
they were executed here between 1475 and 1500, under Sixtus IV., Innocent VIII.,
and Alexander VI., and are due to the coryphaei of the most brilliant epoch of the
Precursors. Let us begin with them: as at processions, let us make the simple
Levites go first. . -
The six frescoes on the left are consecrated to passages from Exodus and
Deuteronomy; those on the right which face you and are correlative, present, the
interpretation, by the new law, of the figures of the old; so they are taken from
the narratives of the Gospel.
Near the altar a picture of Perugino, the Baptism of Christ on the banks of the
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522 A’O//E.
Jordan, a work executed in conjunction with Andrew of Assisi, and in which the
amusement of a picturesque landscape weakens the interest of the personages,
answers to the Journey of Moses and Zipporah to strive against Pharaoh. It is the
moment when the prophet sees himself menaced on his road by an angel who
is turned aside by the daughter of Jethro, a symbolical figure of the Virgin interceding.
The emblem has been seized with a rare sentiment by Luca Signorelli, the favourite
pupil of Piero della Francesca, that conquest of Perugino, which Michelangelo who
loved the artist could not entirely recover. The work has a charm; it is superior
to the piece by Perugino: the Angel seen from behind, the placid Moses, the
Zipporah, the landscape, all is fed with Florentine ambrosia. The most eminent
of the pupils of Filippo Lippi, Sandro Botticelli, whom Sixtus IV. set over the
undertaking of this decoration, has grouped in one frame, Moses slaying an
Egyptian,—Watering the Flocks of Jethro, Putting to Flight the Midianite Herdsmen,
—and Coming to the Burning Bush. Opposite,
º the same painter has placed Christ tempted by
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Satan; a subject admirably arranged, peopled
with graceful figures, and faces of lifelike serenity.
Farther off, Jesus calls to him Peter and
Andrew, as Moses had called Aaron and the
chiefs of the tribes who followed him out of
Egypt through the waters of the Red Sea; a
parallel recalled in two splendid frescoes. Cosimo
Rosselli executed one, which is too rich in details;
the first master of Michelangelo, Domenico
Ghirlandajo, who, in the apse of Sta. Maria
Novella, reproduced so curiously in his Life of
the Virgin, the usages and fine society of the
fifteenth century, executed the other. The scene
passes on the banks of a river which retreats in
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perspective, marked by monuments and slopes; a
poetical point of view, in the foreground of which
JULIUS II. are the trully religious figures of Christ and the
two Apostles who are to follow him. To the
Adoration of the Golden Calf, episode of the presentation of the tables of the law,
Rosselli has opposed the Sermon on the Mount, in which the landscape, which is
charming, is supposed to have been painted by Piero di Cosimo. A number of
figures arranged with grace, an action well rendered—such are the salient merits of
this picture, in which one cannot forget peculiarly likeable and truthful groups of
attentive women. Peter Perugino, taking his revenge, is superior to Botticelli repre-
senting Corah, Dathan, and Abiram, where the last mystic of the Umbrian school
seems to add size to its qualities, to represent the Christ handing the keys to St. Peter:
never has this master shown himself so simple and so noble. The composition has a
monumental character, enhanced as it is in the background by two triumphal arches
of fine architecture, between which we recognise the Polygonal temple that, in his
Spozalizzio at Milan, Raphael could not have copied there as is said ; for at the time
when this artist painted it, he had not come to Rome. Both of them, Perugino
first, then Sanzio, borrowed this monument of fancy from a charming bas-relief of

THE FRESCOES OF THE PRECURSORS. 523
Orcagna on the tabernacle of Or’ San-Micaële, which bas-relief presents, besides, the
Marriage of the Virgin, exactly as Raphael reproduced it a hundred and twelve years
after Orcagna's death. I don’t know whether I ought to claim the priority, in an
observation which I never read anywhere. -
To the Promulgation of the Ancient Law, followed by the Death of Moses, by
Signorelli, answer in the evangelical chronicles the Institution of the Eucharist and
the Passion of Christ. To put himself in harmony with the outcome of Mosaic history,
Cosimo Rosselli was careful to show us, beyond an open loggia behind the Coena,
the distant drama of the garden of Olives, and the lines of the cross on the horizon.
The principal subject is admirable for gravity and contained emotion; the Judas seems
to me to have all the air of some usurer. In spite of the Flemish retouchings of the
sixteenth century, described by Taja, this fresco is extremely fine: Luca Signorelli
and Sandro Botticelli seem to me to occupy the first rank in this interesting exhibition,
the last ray of the fair days of Florence and Umbria. For the rest, Michelangelo, while
extinguishing the torch of the first, even here pays him homage by numerous borrowings
from the Last Judgment of Orvieto. These two precursors ended in obscurity, especially
Botticelli, who, after having shone with a livelier brilliance, was reduced to get the
bread of his old years by a subterfuge. They received him at the Hospital of Santa
Maria Nuova of Florence, where he deposited large chests of great weight and well
sealed, while he promised his inheritance to this house of refuge; which procured him
interested attentions down to the end of his days. On the death of the painter in 1515,
they opened the chests, and found in them only stones.
The twelve frescoes of the Sixtine, so much disdained, and which we have felt
bound to try to rescue from oblivion, place us in a position to appreciate the
influence of Rome on painters studied elsewhere, in their Italian lands. Tenderness
of feeling, with a tinge of primness, the respectful affection for the poetry of religion,
the minute attention to detail, such are the attractions that recommend the productions
of these inspired men, skilful enough to give us pleasure, and still fearful, which is
the stamp of their youth. That works so perfect should be reduced to be a mere graceful
framing for the greatness of a Titian, is one of the astonishing sights of the Sixtine
Chapel.
And now let us stretch ourselves out on the green carpet of the cardinals; let
us make a cushion of a footstool, and, like Jacob, let us gaze upon the heaven opening.
IV.
To subject to a certain order the figures which he designed to create, to obtain
the means of varying their proportions and multiplying their number without introducing
confusion, to diversify the surfaces by depths, and to graduate the interest, Michelangelo
provided as ground for the ensemble of the work an architectural deception, which makes
air and distances intervene in this enormous field, peopled with episodes united in a
capacious symmetry. He simulated on the border vertical pilasters, adorned with
bas-reliefs, as well as an entablature on which appears to rest a vaulting, divided
into arches producing a series of central medallions, forming nine deep openings. In
consequence of these arrangements, and by the help of a linear decoration, clear in
tone, and thrown out by projections of shadow, the artist has transformed into a storied
3 X 2
524 A’OME.
vault what is really only a ceiling. On this theme, he could suitably draw to the
front figures as large as possible, forming a very near foreground with less formidable
groups, and harmonizing better with this motive, introduced in a series of subjects of
action in which the interest was to issue. These subjects are taken from Genesis
and other books of the Bible. The ceiling being very lofty, the personages of the
medallions in the background are not less than between seven and eight feet in height,
a size combined with a correctness hitherto unknown to the spectator, who takes in
the detail with the whole without effort, in one limpid and radiant vision : it is this
preponderance of dimensions, justified by majesty of style, which annihilates every object
of comparison around. As we come to gaze upon this aerial frontispiece of the Old
Testament, the picture of the Last Judgment seems itself to have grown less, by retreating
into a distance denuded of atmosphere.
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THE PROPHET JOEL (CEILING OF THE sixTINE). DELPHIC SIBYL (CEILING OF THE SIXTINE).
On the sides between the windows, the Prophets and the Sibyls, strange impersona-
tions, truly antique types of a theogony and an art that are new, seem in continuation
of the friezes to bear the sky of the vault on their heads, and raise it still higher. There
have never been called to the service of a deception such magnificent creations as these
figures, so full of life, so solemn, so tormented in spirit as the holy books describe them,
and redeeming their incoherence by simplicity of execution, by the suppression of every
trivial ornament, by the truth of the draperies in all their magnificent amplitude. Genii
and emblematical figures of a dainty kind accompany and harmonize these colossi of
beauty—yes, of beauty; the term includes the charm which is accessible even to the
vulgar, and which subsequently Michelangelo disdained for the exaggerations of force.
The Erythraean Sibyl, whose head is attached with admirable skill, has a profile of
exquisite purity; in pose gracefully contrived to bring out exquisite arms, the Delphic
Sibyl is not only very fine, but extremely attractive and charming in her vague and


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THE CE///NG OF THE SIXTIVE. 525
dreamy expression. These legendary Pythonesses are absent-looking, and as if
unconscious; they listen with amazement to what the divine Spirit forces them to
announce, without being able to understand it.
I am particularly struck by the extraordinary aspect of the Prophets; one seems to
have always dreamt of them as this. Their images disclose persons of another faith,
of another race, than those of Greece; as robust, but tormented in spirit and consumed
by study. Their powerful heads whose beauty is wholly intellectual, a source of
AT THE SIXTINE : THE POPE BEARING THE HOLY SACRAMENT.
expression and of diversity, unknown among the Greeks, have the air of discovering
the decrees of the future, or to succumb to the fatigues of inner toils; it seems as if
the breath of God had burnt them The dogmatic epopee of the Bible, fixed in
the youthful memories of Michelangelo by the paraphrases of Savonarola, is illustrated
here with the impetuosity of a Dantesque poet, with the gravity of a Christian who
believes his legend. In his conscientious work on Italian art, M. Rio speaks of the

526 A&OME.
Prophets in terms so just that one cannot do better than reproduce them : “Of all the
personages of the Bible, they were those who had most affinity with the genius of
Michelangelo, and perhaps too with the habitual moods of his soul. So his powerfut
hand has not drawn hardy and impassive interpreters of the divine decrees, but heralds
wearied with their mandate, who disclose their prophetic visions with regret and with
crushed spirit. Isaiah, whose worn face is stamped with a resigned discouragement,
seems to ask of the angel who inspires him, whether then this is not all. Jeremiah,
so eloquent in bewailing the woes which he foretells, is absorbed in his patriotic
sadness, and has the air of self-collection for looking into the future as into an abyss.
Daniel, on the contrary, in his pose, in the energy of his glance and gesture, and
even in his hair, which is rough like a mane, shows the twofold character which dis-
tinguishes him : the intrepid confessor of the faith of his fathers, the privileged prophet
whose sight has been rejoiced by a more distinct prospect of future solace. There
is in this figure a juvenile verve, a vehemence of pride, which show a predilection
on the part of the artist, for the explanation of which we must look to personal
affinities.” (A. F. Rio, L’Art Chrétien, New Edit., iv. p. 363.)
On the false entablatures of the painted pilasters, as well on the compartments
of his archings, Michelangelo has thrown into attitudes, proper for bringing out the
transcendency of the designer, those fine Academias, which Vasari calls Nudes, and
which he praises beyond measure. Among the greatest they reckon nineteen, which,
as exercises, are masterpieces; but here was the rock. Such was the concert of praises
of which the Ignudi were the object, for hitherto painting had produced nothing
to compare with the statuary of the ancients, that Michelangelo, led astray by the
public enthusiasm, hurried too far by his group, was carried away into making of a
fancy the corner-stone of a system. So in this manifesto of modern aesthetic, where
art obtains its sublimest greatness, we can distinguish, in the germ state, what was
the undoing of the monumental art, which is inseparable among all communities from
their theogonies, and which ordinarily only droops when they do. Viewed in that
light, this masterpiece seems fatal, mysterious, and terrible, as the tree of knowledge,
which bore at the end of its branches the fruits of evil, and which, dominating all the
trees of Eden, contained the double principle of the greatness and the miseries of our
humanity. - -
V.
When they discovered the last paintings of Michelangelo in the Sixtine Chapel,
contemporaries lavished upon them all the panegyrics which had been really deserved
by the first. Interpreters of this concert, Benedetto Varchi, Ascanio Condivi, Vasari,
the panegyrists of the Last Judgment, all cry out: God gave such mighty gifts to this
chosen one to show that he belongs to heaven. . . . Blessed are they who are born
in this time, to look upon prodigies that they would never have dreamed ! Finally they
declare that “God has sent this masterpiece here below to teach men the power of
the heavenly intelligences, when with the divinity of skill and grace poured down,
they descend for a moment upon the earth.” These are rather vivid words, but if you
apply them to some of the principal biblical scenes of the Sixtine vault, I do not see
anything to modify in them.
MICHELANGELO’S ILLUSTRATIONS OF GEVES/S. 527
At the epoch when I bore my penates to Rome, a painter of a spirit too elevated
to be sceptical, a lover of the beautiful in virtue of natural tastes, an artist, in a word,
such as it is good to meet in such a holy place, was preparing himself for vast deco-
rative works by the study of Michelangelo. It is not merely for the sake of connecting
a sympathetic name with these great days of the Sixtine Chapel, that we recall this
memory: but to explain how for the Prophets, Sibyls, and the Illustrations of Genesis,
the fine copies of Paul Baudry have allowed me to analyse more nearly the forms,
the modelling of the figures, and the idea presiding over the composition. Their
greatness has something superhuman, because to the biblical sentiment are joined the
science of a Phidias and the simplicity of primitive conceptions: it seems that if
Moses had illustrated his book, that if the Creator had wished to fix the picture of
creation, they would have produced this. Sovereign authority is so inherent in the
giant of the Renaissance, that by an involuntary transposition, the spirit incarnates
it, so to speak, in all his impersonations of supreme power. It has been said that
he has depicted himself in the likeness of Julius II. ; people think they come upon him
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FROM THE ROOF OF THE SIXTINE.
also in the stricken and inspired heads of the Prophets; in his Moses we hear him
breathe; and the Father of the creation is more than ever Michelangelo. He too
has creaſed, without a reminiscence of pagan antiquity, and created in perfection, the
Man and the Woman, prototypes unknown until then. As for the Father, ‘principium
et ſons,' it is Michelangelo who has dreamed the least commonplace image of the
Being who reproduced himself in us, to launch it, either across the chaos which the
resistless will is dispersing, or on the waters over which it moves like the breath of a
spirit, or in the clouds where it kindles the stars: three frescoes as strange as they
are sublime.
God in fact draws from the slime, as a reflection of himself, the First Man, whom
we see on an inclined plane, as on the edge of a planet, starting into life, placid,
wondering, naked on the naked earth. Force, elegance, and supple harmony of
form, have produced nothing in painting which is comparable to this; the innocent
expressive head, in which thought has just dawned, in which instinctive gratitude
is the prelude to adoration, is of a touching inspiration, and so it is modern and



528 A’OME.
Christian. The admirable pose of Adam half recumbent, resting on one elbow and
the other arm stretched out towards God, the attitude which from the right shoulder
to the foot gives a nobly balanced outline; all this, mavellous to say, had been indicated
by a secondary painter, fifty years before the future master, in the frescoes of the green
cloister of Sta. Maria Novella : but Paolino Ucello, one of the first who sought the
theories of perspective, did not go beyond a happy sketch. Wrapped in a dark
flying drapery, upheld by a group of angels crowding into this conch of drapery as into
a nest, God the Father, Olympian and smiling, hovers in the air; approaching our
planet without touching it, he extends his arm towards the extended arm of his creature,
and with the index touching the index of the first man, he has just imparted to him
the vital fluid, and brought to life within him that spark of light which is the soul.
There is here a quite new idea, which seems as if it had been inspired by modern
sciences; the transmission of life by the electric contact of two fingers which meet.
The group of seraphim surrounding the Father of the universe, while it adds to the
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FROM THE ROOF OF THE SIXTINE.
charming figures of the composition, enhances the majesty of God and the gravity
of his presence. This animated group, too, brings out more perfectly Adam’s isolation,
the first dweller on the planet, on that bold and barren slope which does not withdraw
attention from the first movements, the first glance, the first thoughts, of the earliest
son of earth. The Gothic painters, the Dutch masters, would have loaded the scene
with the cages and the forcing-houses of the Jardin des Plantes. I do not hesitate
to consider this fresco as the work which is loftiest in idea, in style, in the powerful
poetry of its effect, of all the paintings to which the world has given its admiration.
For this reason I have not been afraid of speaking about it at length; but in truth
the eight other subjects, if the very lessons of such a school did not teach us con-
cision, would bear equal developments. The Creation of the Woman who, born
of the side of the slumbering Adam, throws herself forward towards the Creator,
sooner awake, readier to present herself than the Man, also reveals to us beauties
that have no rivals. God eyes her pensively, severely, without illusion; nothing

THE ILLUSTRATIONS OF GENESIS. 529
can be more imposing than the sibylline majesty of that draped figure, who reads
the future and foresees the annals of the world down to Calvary.
It is for the next subject, the Fall of Man and his expulsion from Eden, that the
author has reserved, so far as the woman goes, all the philtres of the fountain of beauty.
Once engaged in the perilous work of her sex, Eve will become wholly resistless;
stooping in a posture which shows her charms at the best, at the foot of the tree to
which her companion already stretches out his hand, she turns towards the serpent,
with an androgynous body coiled round the trunk, eyes which try their power, while
the treasures of her bosom are directed on the side of Adam. Thus the presentation
of the first woman is double in some sort; God created the mother of human creatures,
splendid for fecundity; the Serpent transforms her, and produces the Siren. Michel-
angelo has made her so lovely, that Raphael, to preserve the recollection, came and
copied her with his own hand; Lawrence acquired this drawing, which I have seen at
Oxford. -
In many of these compositions, Buonarotti has drawn his inspiration from a master
little known among us, but he was great, for he possessed in germ the style of Michel-
angelo, and he lived nearly a century before him. There is some analogy between the
two careers: Jacopo della Quercia (of Sienna), for whose works people contended, was
harassed and oppressed by two towns which tore him from one another, just as Buona-
rotti was by Pope Julius and the Medici. It was in 1506 and 1507, fifteen months
before undertaking the roof of the Sixtine, that Michelangelo saw the bas-reliefs which
frame the portal of San Petronio of Bologna. This shows the empire of tradition,
and in no way lessens the glory of Buonarotti; it would be otherwise if he had remained
inferior: it is thus that the Eve of the Barberini palace, inspired by the first fresco
of the Sixtine, adds nothing to the renown of Domenichino. .
The Sacrifice of Noah, the Deluge, the Drunkenness of Noah, complete the incom-
parable series; this last subject is striking by a mixture of grace and gravity which,
considering the scope, possesses a fitness that is really full of distinction. On the
pendentives of these feigned vaultings, one would remark quite as much, if they were
of more important dimensions, a dozen other subjects, among which we will content
ourselves with calling attention to the Brazen Serpent, in which we cannot behold
without emotion a dying woman stretching forth her arms; then Judith, after her
expedition, dexterously arranging, in a basket balanced on the head of her attendant,
the head of Holofernes. The heroic criminal is seen from behind ; you expect her
to turn round, such skill has the painter shown in making you divine that she must
be of a triumphant beauty.
On the subject of the paintings of Michelangelo, and of this roof especially, people
have not failed to show that they are the works of a sculptor, substituting for the
ordinary conditions of painting the assimilation of an art that is more familiar to him.
Besides the fact of its being tolerably easy to guess what all the world knows, this
criticism is made almost puerile by evidence so palpable, that the artist might be
taxed with excess of candour, if he had exposed himself involuntarily to such an
objection. Michelangelo strikes me as having tried with success an enterprise that
will never be imitated: without a rival in style, as in the talent of modelling in relief,
and fearing lest the sparkling qualities of painting should enervate his own qualities,
or lead to disparaging comparisons, he resolved to transport this art, which was new
for him, on to ground where no one could reach him. So he imagined these vaults
3 Y
53O A’OME.
with their compartments, and their false arches, and as he could not sustain the illusion
if he buried in them figures reduced to the attenuated relief of painting, he drew them
very salient, almost sculptured in truth, on his architectural surfaces. The conditions
made this indispensable; Raphael or Titian, if they had been subjected to them, would
have been forced equally to contrive their figures in sculptural relief.
The trait of genius in Michelangelo was in erecting this difficulty, which, leaving
the work without mystery, without possible jugglery, was to bring out in full and
dazzling force the peculiar qualities of the master. But all this arrangement, which
it was necessary to invest with various surfaces of immense depths, to make harmonious
in effect and probable, ought to have been produced with colours on a plane surface,
and there is in this, on account of the extreme sobriety of the means, the work of a
very great artist. He was so, then, in the manner of a colourist who should have to
imitate in grisaille bas-reliefs or sculptures; but with infinitely more richness and
charm; for he demanded from the painter's science, besides variety of tones, vivacity
of effects, and animation of life. For monumental and decorative painting, is not that
the true point? Such a process, I confess, could only serve once; and thus the
professional qualities of the painter are more open to discussion in the Last Judgment
than on the roof of the chapel. -
But why dissertation, when homage is so much more becoming ! Let us conclude
by noting an impression that every one has felt. On the days when you have visited the
Sixtine, it is impossible to take any interest in other works until the next day; even
statuary seems gloomy and stiffened. No painter subjugates you with such absolute
tyranny, and nothing could show better than such a proof the sovereignty of that
baptized Phidias who was Michelangelo.
FROM THE ROOF OF THE SIXTINE.

L. L. h.a. Pow
APAdule 5
JACOB MEETING RACHEL AND LEAH (SIXTH WAULT OF THE LOGGIE).
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE DIVINE CITY OF THE VATICAN (conclusion).
SANCTUARIES OF THE RENAIssa NCE (continued).-Oratorio of Nicholas V. and Fra Angelico.—Legends of
St. Stephen and St. Laurence.—Likeness of Nicholas V. by John of Fiesole, etc.
THE LOGGIE.—Their decoration and paintings by Raphael and his pupils.-Arabesques and Stuccoes.—The
Pictures of the Bible in the compartments of the thirteen vaults.-Inferiority of our copies.
THE STANZE.—Historical pilgrimage; story of political evolutions told by the frescoes.—The Mass of Bolsena.
—The Heliodorus, Attila, Deliverance of St. Peter.—Pontifical illusions; grisailles of Polydore of Cara-
vaggio.—Palinode: the Burning of the Town.—Attila becomes the good Charlemagne; Justification of
Leo III.-Coronation of the Carolingian, under the features of Francis I.-Discouragement of Raphael,
and its result.—Skirmish at Ostia: the Defeat of the Saracens.—The Medallions of Perugino.--St. Sylvester
receiving the gift of Rome.—Francis I. becomes Maxentius.-Preludes of decline.
CAMERA DELLA SEGNATURA; apogee of Raphael.-Universal character of the work.-Raphael as a theologian.-
Symbolism of the Accord before the Holy Sacrament.—Borrowings from Fra Bartolommeo.—Savonarola
rehabilitated.—Collaboration of Dante and Ariosto.—Opinions of Schlegel and Lanzi.-The School of
Athens.—The Jurisprudence.—Gregory IX. publishing the Decretals.-Justinian restoring the Digest to
Tribonian.-Laocoön and the type of Homer.—Correction on the subject of the Grisailles.—Raphael's
qualities as colourist.
MichelANGELo AND RAPHAEL.—Their distinct vocations; characters of these two men of genius.-The Vatican
University.


3 Y 2
532 RoME.
and his auxiliaries. The Rooms or Stanze are the indifferently distributed
and uninhabitable apartments, which Julius II. disposed above the Borgia
quarters; the Loggie, commenced by Bramante, are surmounted by galleries
constructed, from 1515 onwards, by Raphael, and decorated by that artist, assisted by
his school. Before halting at the Loggie, let us enter a sort of antechamber, so justly
called Hall of the Chiaroscuri, and bend our steps towards a narrow door always kept
shut, but which an attendant will open for us: it takes you to a small chapel which
many strangers miss, and in which we shall see the oldest Florentine frescoes that the
Vatican has preserved. How this oratory, which was finished by Nicholas V., escaped
the demolitions of Julius II., who swept away from these apartments the paintings of
Luca Signorelli and Perugino, save one for which Sanzio interceded; how Leo X.,
Clement VII., and after them the partisans of the decline, failed to substitute for the
work of the Beato Angelico some pompous mediocrities of Lauretti—we cannot ever tell.
I saw again here, at the end of a long stay in Rome, the angelic master whom
I had loved so much in Florence. To be frank, I will confess that his art struck me
as smaller than formerly; in the timorous piety that caresses the least detail with
unction, I fancied I found more of the trifling considerations of devotion than of religious
force and impulse; I had some trouble in banishing the notion of the convent and the
parlour: Michelangelo and the antiques had conquered me. Although the historic work
of S. Lorenzo, which crowned the career of the monk of Fiesole, is the most considerable
of all, to fall again under the charm, it was necessary to look long at it, and to recall
the legends in harmony with the idea of the painter and the conceptions of the time.
This chapel was begun by Fra Angelico under Eugenius IV. It was there, perhaps,
or in that of the Holy Sacrament destroyed by Paul III., that Eugenius, who, when
Archbishop of Sienna, had known Brother John in Tuscany, and was his friend, used
to come and watch him paint, by way of repose from the fatigues of a heavy and much
vexed pontificate. Now it fell one day that, the Archbishop of Florence being deceased,
the holy father came and found the artist on his scaffolding, and announced that he
appointed him Archbishop of Florence. We can almost see the humble painter, doubtful
of his strength and passionate for his art, letting his brushes fall, and confusedly
plucking his skirts about him to come the more quickly down to the feet of the pope,
there beseeching him with tears to turn so glorious a burden away from his weakness.
The contest between the pope and the monk was very keen : the latter had to point
out to his apostolic friend a worthier personage, one more devoted to the rule, a
tenderer friend of the poor, an old brother of the cloister of St. Mark, brother Antonio
Perozzi, the honour of the house. And it was thus that by the caution, and after the
refusal, of his favourite painter, Pope Eugenius made the most glorious promotion of
his reign, by conferring the see of Florence on a friend of Fra Angelico, whom Adrian VI.
was one day to canonize under the name of St. Antonine.
Another pontiff, Nicholas V., the true founder of the Vatican magnificences, came
and passed long hours in this boudoir for prayer, by the side of Fra Angelico, his old

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7 HE ORATORP OF MICHOLAS : FRA ANGELICO. 533
companion of the Dominicans of Florence. While the monk let his brushes work, they
discussed projects for rebuilding St. Peter, for organizing the Vatican library, for
concentrating in Rome the intellectual forces of the West. Here, without doubt, they
groaned over the woes which these paintings recall, by reproducing noble efforts to
restore the Church to unity, so as to collect all the Christian forces against the invasions
of Islamism. The pope alone understood the situation; when he tried so hard in 1450
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ST. STEPHEN BEFORE THE COUNCIL (CHAPEL OF SAN LORENzo, IN THE VATICAN).
to cement a catholic league, Nicholas prophesied to the Greeks that, “if before three
summers the figtree bore no fruit, the tree would be cut off at the root.’ Three years
after, Mahomet II. entered Constantinople, where the pope alone had sent to these
schismatics a flotilla that was powerless to save them. By the side of the political
pre-occupations of this book-loving pope, who was so enthusiastic for ancient literature,
that on his death-bed he thanked God for having given him the grace to cherish them,
the simplicity impressed by religion upon greatness lets itself be seen. One day, on








534 A&OME.
leaving the studio where we are, our two friends, the painter and the pope, went to dine
together; an improvised party, for the meal was composed of flesh, and the Dominican
artist could not eat meat without dispensation from his prior. So a chamberlain had to
bethink him that the authority of the sovereign pontiff could grant the dispensation.
These reminiscences take you back little by little to the sentiment of the frescoes of
the good brother, where there is something of this. *
Six among them are devoted to the life of St. Stephen, the five others to St. Laurence.
In the first, St. Peter instituting the First Deacon in presence of the apostles, a fine
architectural background, and some very elaborate draperies, betray the study of
bas-reliefs, without the religious sentiment losing anything by this elaborateness. In
the following picture, the Deacon distributes alms; in another subject, where Stephen
receives gifts for the Church, his features breathe an expressive purity in presence of
a handsome widow, whose hand he barely looks at. The preaching in an open space
in the city, the summoning of the saint before the Council, his interrogatory, his
proceeding to death through suburbs recalling those of Rome, his martyrdom, are
compositions in which the episodic and familiar side adds much probability and movement
to the heads and to seraphic expressions. The panels opposite, consecrated to
St. Laurence, give a point to the parallelism of the two careers. Save the fine scene of
the Farewell between St. Laurence and St. Sixtus, the artist has repeated the same
situations, which has allowed him to show very different compositions on analogous
subjects. These, I have no doubt, were painted after the others; they are firmer, the
surroundings are more developed, and the thought of the antique is more manifest. In
one of these subjects, the Distribution of Alms, a blind man who advances, feeling with
his stick, seemed to Raphael to possess such happy truthfulness, that he all but copied it
in his cartoon of St. Paul before the Proconsul. Nothing could be more animated or
more brilliant in point of costume, or as a bizarre interpretation of antiquity by the
Renaissance, than the Condemnation of Laurence by Decius, who is surrounded by his
court. The final scene of the legend, in which the emperor and his courtiers see the
martyr burnt, from the top of a terrace supported on colonnades, which are adorned by
pagan statues, is striking also from its mixture of styles, and from a naïveté which does
not shrink from tolerably crude realities. These compositions have for frame some
Doctors of the Church, so chosen as to recall the council that had recently assembled at
Florence to prepare reunion with the Greek Church. Fra Angelico, in the legend of
St. Laurence and in that of St. Stephen, has presented Sixtus II. and St. Peter under
the likeness of his friend and benefactor, Thomas of Sarzana (Nicholas V.). The
Consecration of the two deacons bequeathes to our eyes true likenesses of the pope who
celebrated the great jubilee of 1450. A dreamy, delicate, and mystic head; the small,
mild, penetrating eye; a small, rather sarcastic mouth, under a big nose, which is so
long as to end by becoming pointed—this is the strangest of sympathetic figures.
From the point of view of ideas, if not of processes, this chapel is on the straight road
which starts from Gentile da Fabriano and Masaccio, and ends with Raphael. So it is
useful to have examined it, for the sake of understanding the progress of the time, direct
and inverse: there is both one and the other. As I entered, it struck me as miniature;
when I regained the Loggie, where torrents of light make the colours and ornaments
sparkle, I seemed to be entering a casket of goldsmith's work. *
THE ZOGG/E. 535
II.
It would be better, when you have not seen Rome, to be without any idea at all of
this gallery, than to have seen it at Paris in an unfaithful translation. To make it known
to the pupils of the School of Fine Arts, the administration had copies made of the
fifty-two subjects, distributed in fours in the compartments of the thirteen vaults into
which the Loggia “is subdivided : the whole is arranged for the school in the Rue
Bonaparte in an imprisoned building, in imitation of that which, before the closing of
the court of St. Damasus, was raised by Raphael in the open air, in view of the vast
horizon of Rome. In order to produce some illusion, the badly lighted walls of Paris
have been lined with arabesques, flowers, and fruits, copied from the original ornaments;
but they simplified these light and ingenious combinations, which gives them a kind of
heavy crudity.
In their decoration of painting and stucco, counterfeited with us with a constitutional
economy, the auxiliaries of the master multiplied in the coffer-work, and mixed with the
garlands, figures in cameo, and medallions in imitation of cameo; tiny pictures of all
shades and scales. This labyrinth of lines, this palette, are so combined that the end
seems to have been to find the secret of multiplying subjects without repetition. The
resultant of these balanced colours diffuses mild harmony over the ensemble of a
decoration that is modified at each of the arcades, and peopled with miniatures so
numerous, that it would need many days to discover them all.
Francesco Penni, who had just found out the process of the ancients for making
stucco with the powder of sifted marble mixed with chalk, had executed after the
cartoons of the master, charming bas-reliefs, such as the Loves of the gods, Venus
sitting, which Marco Antonio has published in one of his finest plates, a tiny reproduction
of the statue of Jonas, modelled from a drawing of Raphael's for the chapel of the Chigi
at Sta. Maria del Popolo, &c. Besides a host of imitations of cameos, representing
Cavalcades, and those small bas-reliefs representing Artists at work, curiosities which
the burin of Santi Bartoli has made popular, you will find there in abundance subjects so
happily inspired from the thermae of Titus then only recently cleared out, and from the
traditions of Greece, that the stuccoes of the Loggia would suffice to celebrate a school.
Gold, ornaments of every kind, and painting, give warmth to this delicate work, and
the subject offers neither less variety nor interest than those which have been rendered
by the brush. Psyche with phalenae, Flora, Apollo, a Centaur, Nereids and Titans;
Seraphim, reminiscences of Umbria, Landscapes, Hunts, a Lion and Chimaera, collec-
tions of shell-work and birds; the Graces, imitated from the antique bronze of the
sacristy at Sienna; grotesques, such as a Bear, whom the Loves are making dance;
fishing and hunting Trophies; Trophies of musical instruments, among which you will
find a number of harmonic organs, the use of which has disappeared:—such, too
summarily indicated, are the elements that enrich these swarming phantasies.
Engraving has very imperfectly spread the renown of the stuccoes and arabesques; the
latter have suffered greatly; they have even disappeared in places, and their preservation
anywhere is due to the skill of the executants. The inferior talents produced the least
durable works. This inequality, which is sometimes shown by the reproductions of the
same vase or the same garland, were inevitable in a studio so crowded, that Vasari
- 536 ROME.
represents Raphael to us as marching with a procession of fifty pupils. However that
may be, nowhere except at the Villa Madama has the interpretation of ancient decorative
art been so surprising; we have some difficulty in conceiving that these ingenious men
could have assimilated to such a point the traditions of which we have glimpses in
Nero's Golden House; they scarcely knew more than these specimens. I am surprised
too, that a luxury so precious, far from hurting the historical subjects collected in
lozenge forms in the caissons of the vaults, lends a certain mass to their rather restricted
dimensions, and isolates them with luminous tranquillity. Such is the general effect in
the Vatican, where the gallery is high, wide, and with torrents of light.
In the reproduction of our School of Fine Arts, the relative proportions have been
spoiled; the Loggia is too narrow, and there is a want of light; the paintings of Raphael,
already small even over there, have been brought down to three-fifths of their height.
These very copies, of dry and meagre design, have neither the delicacy, nor the depth,
nor the quality of tone, which commend the originals. It is a duty to describe the
defects which compromise a laudable project; for these versions depreciate the school
of Raphael with us; a man speaks of the Loggie in a severe tone, when perhaps he
has only studied them in the Paris edition. -
For the rest, even in the Vatican, nothing is less convenient than the disposition of
the great subjects, which cover the four walls of a frame of which the centre is empty;
to contemplate them, you have, with head thrown back, to pivot two-and-fifty times upon
yourself. This arrangement is the most serious reproach that is to be addressed to
Raphael, who was reduced by such a dispersiveness to present his grandiose concep-
tions under too diminished dimensions. Let us remember, also, that the paintings of
the Loggie have undergone, like the Stanze, cruel outrages at the time of the pillage
of Rome by the Constable de Bourbon : they quartered the northern veterans, mostly
Lutherans, in the midst of these marvels, which they mutilated with halberd strokes, and
which they stained with smoke by lighting fires even in the Chambers. Then came
the restorations, entrusted, for the subjects of the Loggie, to the rival pencil of
Sebastian del Piombo, who made them heavy. These mutilations did not escape Titian
when he visited the Loggie in 1545, under the guidance of his countryman, Sebastian
del Piombo. “Who,’ he cried, “is the barbarian who dishonoured such noble
works P’ Sebastian stood speechless, and, adds Benvenuto Cellini, ‘rimase veramente
DEL PIOMBO.’ - .
But the outrages of war, and those of clumsy restorations, are not the only disgraces
that have touched one of the two great monuments of Raphael’s genius. Ever absorbed
with the charm of colours and the quality of tones, this great man recurred, particularly
at that time, to processes which subordinated the durability of his work to vivacity of
effect. He set himself to put shade over shade, so as to obtain tender harmonies
and the transparency which renders oil paintings more soft and mellow ; these tints.
combining have deepened, hardened, and often lost their scale along with their value.
This is an accident which has been specially injurious to the paintings of the Loggie,
where the master showed himself a colourist to such a degree, as afterwards to
excite the enthusiasm of Andrea Sacchi, who returned from the lagoons smitten by
passion for the Venetians. The tempera or distemper employed by others, to whom
the andamento of the true masters of fresco was wanting, has then hurt the works of
a virtuoso transcendent enough to display, if he had wished it, all the nimbleness of
his predecessors. -
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THE LOGGIE. 537
It was a perilous task to undertake after Michelangelo to illustrate the Bible, and
especially to reproduce the creation of the world. Raphael had the art of being great
with scanty dimensions; his compositions, while lofty in style, yet preserve the familiar
poetry of the legendary narratives. The first acts of the creation, those in which
Jehovah struggles with matter, bear comparison with the Sixtine. God bringing order
into Chaos, and God dividing the earth from the waters, are immense pictures of
reduced proportion; the Creation of the Stars, and the Separation of Darkness from Light,
carry the vivid mark of the master, although already Taja joins to him Giulio Romano,
and even Giovanni da Udine, who must have worked at the fourth fresco—the Creation
of the Animals. On the second vault, in the Creation of Woman, a new and ingenious
composition, the vinous brush of Giulio Romano allows itself to be divined in the
modelling of the first man asleep. The First Fault is by the same artist, as well as the
Expulsion from Paradise, where they plainly borrowed from Masaccio, and in which
there reappears the Angel with rainbow wings, from the Deliverance of St. Peter. The
Deluge returns more to the manner of Raphael’s execution, and Vasari attributes it to
him ; further on, we should recognise him in his fulness in the Three Angels appearing
to Abraham prostrate on the ground, if the fresco had not suffered so much. I am
disposed to think, with M. Rio, that the other subjects in this compartment are by
Francesco Penni, whose palette is richer and his drawing less firm than they are in the
works of Giulio Pippi. * x
The Fattore seems also to have executed the History of Isaac (in which the group
of the pair surprised by Abimelech is really a masterpiece), to yield place in that of
Jacob, to Pellegrino of Modena, who is more luminous and mild. Still the idyll of
Rachel at the fountain, and, farther on, Joseph telling his dream to his brethren,
charming compositions, that do great honour to Giulio Romano, leave little doubt as
to the real presence of Sanzio; he must have painted the principal personage of the
scene in which Joseph is sold by his brethren, and that in which he interprets Pharaoh's
dream. In the first of these works, as well as in the Legend of Moses, the artist
becomes romantic and pastoral, with a delicacy of sentiment which tempers the severity
of the style. So far as concerns the execution of these pictures (eighth vault), Perino
del Vaga, and Raffaellino del Colle perhaps enter the lists; but from the ninth, the
uncertain stamp, already weakened, disappears; the designs are absolutely handed over
to Raffaellino, Perino del Vaga, Buonaccorsi, Pellegrino, and others. The work, which
finishes with the advent of Christ, presents in the last vault four works treated according
to such different traditions, that the critics have been induced to attribute it, outside of
the Roman school, either to Tisi, or to Ramenghi of Bologna, or even to the youth of
Correggio—an untenable assertion. . - .
It is not easy, moreover—and the material errors committed by Vasari, who was a
contemporary, prove it—to fix in such great enterprises the exact share belonging to
each artist in a phalanx containing such names as Giulio Romano, Timoteo Viti and
his brother Pietro, Buonaccorsi, Giovanni da Udine, Vicenzio of San Geminiano, Perino
del Vaga, Luca Penni, Maturino of Florence, Schizzone, Polydore of Caravaggio,
Puppini, Pellegrino of Modena, Crocchia, Jacomone of Faenza, Raffaellino del Colle,
Ramenghi of Bologna (Bagnacavallo), Pistoia, Bernardo Catelani, Sacco, L. B. Catelani,
Garofalo, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Pagani, Pietro Campana, Pietro de Bagnaja, Mosca; Michel
Cockier or Coxie, of Malines; Bernard Van Orley, Marco Antonio (Raimondi), Andrea
of Salerno, etc. . . . I leave out half. Francesco Penni, who divided with Giulio Romano
3 Z
538 ROME.
the succession of Raphael, kept, in his quality of steward, the accounts of this
enormous studio: hence his name, Fattore.” .
The master had trained under the supremacy of his own genius, and united among
themselves by the charm of his own sympathetic disposition, all these consummate
artists, many of whom after him became the illustrious leaders of new schools. At the
epoch when this gallery was painted, besides his many works for the pope, for the
new duke of Urbino (a usurper whom he had to furnish with gifts destined for the
King of France), and the commissions of the banker Chigi, Raphael, whose health was
giving way, was overwhelmed by administrative business. To his general supervision
of antiquities were added the functions of architect of the basilica of St. Peter and of the
Vatican. Though he abandoned to his school the continuation of the Loggie, which
raised his fame to its height by bringing out his superiority in every kind of composition,
the ardour with which he performed the duties of his many offices, along with the
quantity of his works, is the single cause, as is now beyond dispute, of the exhaustion
by which his short life was brought to an end. •
III.
The STANZE of the apartment commenced by Julius II. have still more importance:
the two earliest in date as the supreme expression of Raphael’s genius; the two others
as works of art and as historical documents. The frescoes of the latter, modifying the
line dictated by Julius II., tell the story of the acts of Leo X., enveloped in allegories
under which you discern the versatility of his policy, subject to certain tackings and
changes, marking that short-sighted Scepticism which rules mere governments of cir-
cumstance. Thus, towards the end, weary of subordinating the fasti of the church
to changing interests, Raphael seems to lessen his interest in the work in proportion
as his masters tightened his bondage to their caprices. By the end of 1512, even under
Julius II., a year after the appearance of the Schools of Athens, we see Giulio Pippi
putting his hand to the task. -
In the Heliodorus driven from the Temple by angels with rods, at the prayer of the
high priest Onias, the artist followed an inspiration of Julius II., whose dream was to
expel once and for ever the French out of Italy. On his deathbed, they heard him
calling out—“Away from Italy, all barbarians !” Thus the high priest is Julius II. ;
Heliodorus, prefect of Seleucus, king of Syria is, if not the king of France, at any rate the
representation of his beaten generals: Pope Julius comes upon the scene, royally borne
on the sella gestatoria. Giulio Pippi has worked much less than Peter of Cremona at
this composition, in which the last, with his more supple modelling, passes for having
painted a very fine group of Jewish women, so remarkable that many judges attribute it,
not without probability, even to Raphael, who certainly put his hand to the picture.
Who but he would have represented in two of the Seggettieri of the sovereign pontiff,
the portraits of Bramante and Giulio Romano? -
The Mass of Bolsena, in which the artist has availed himself of the irregularities
* I find these names in an interesting work on the Stanze of Raphael by M. Gruyer, who has devoted
to the paintings of the Loggie another volume, which has appeared since these lines were written.
THE STAAVZE. 539
offered by a wall with a window hollowed out in the centre, describes the miracle which
came to pass on the occasion when a prelate, saying mass at St. Christina, and, at the
moment of consecration, was struck by a doubt as to the real presence; the host in his
hands began to bleed. The young priest celebrates before Julius II. kneeling, who thus
confirms with his aid the sacramental dogma which England and Germany began to
attack at the dawn of the Reformation. The festival of the Holy Sacrament was
instituted by Urban IV. in memory of this fact, and St. Thomas Aquinas was entrusted
with the composition of the office. Vasari pointed out behind the pope Cardinal
Raffaelle Riario, his kinsman, and the cardinal of San Giorgio. Admirable in movement,
in composition, in expression, this fresco of deep and resplendent colour is one of those
in which Raphael’s hand is most easily recognised. -
When Julius II. had gone, his successor at first was bent on continuing his policy,
a persistency established by the great picture of Attila, who came to sack Rome, and
who recoiled before Pope St. Leo, who is encouraged by St. Peter and St. Paul in the
clouds, the patrons of the city and of the papacy. This fresco, at which Giulio Romano
has done a great deal of work, is remarkable because in the drawing that he gave in,
instead of accepting the hideous savages of the legend as they had been depicted
half a century before by Ammianus Marcellinus, that is to say, ‘engendered by the
mixture of sorceresses with devils,’ Raphael drew his inspiration from the Sarmatian
warriors represented on Trajan’s column. At the back you recognise the Coliseum, with
the same breach in it as now. This composition is in extremely grand style, which
renders all the more singular the representation of St. Leo under the bland and chubby
features of Leo X. The citizen of Urbino introduced Perugino into the procession, under
the ensigns of a macebearer. We begin to see here, and especially in the fallen
Attila, those theatrical attitudes which following generations imitated to excess. This
king of the Huns is Louis XII., called with us the father of the people, because he spent
so little: the Swiss, with whom St. Leo's namesake had struck up an alliance, had
just fulfilled with success against our “ferocious hordes' the part assigned in the pic-
ture to St. Peter and St. Paul. - -
Another monument (in the same chamber) of this vehement anti-French policy, is
the deliverance of St. Peter, snatched from his prison by an angel. This masterpiece
symbolizes with a hyperbolical majesty the escape of Leo X. in the frock of a monk,
when, as legate of the holy see in 1512, he remained a prisoner of the French after the
battle of Ravenna. Raphael must have watched closely the execution of this powerful
picture, into which he introduced effects entirely new; the blue rays of the moon and the
red glare of the torches.contend with the white light, which, forming a zone round the
Angel, projects such a blaze that the corslets of the gaolers seem, according to the
expression of Vasari, “rather polished than painted.” From these oppositions result,
not discordances, but complex harmonies introduced with a power of colouring that in a
fresco of that date amazes us. In our Paris copy of St. Peter in Bonds, these effects
have not been understood; the effects struggle crudely, and this makes a conception
that Rembrandt would have admired, glassy and spotted. The apostle suddenly
aroused, flying with the confident serenity of a faith that nothing can ever surprise, and
the graceful and radiant angel conducting him, form a group in which we have to
admire what may be called reality in the ideal. - -
On the compartments of the vault have been painted, above Heliodorus, Moses
before the burning bush; above the Mass of Bolsena,—the Sacrifice of Abraham, a
3 Z 2
54O A’OME.
lesson to those whose faith wavers; above the Attila, Noah coming forth from the
ark, a commentary no less expressive; finally, above the Deliverance of St. Peter
(symbolizing Leo X.), the Vision of Jacob; a flattering allusion to the promises of the
reign and to the destinies of the Medicean house. Although damaged, and harshly
cut off on a sky which has been repainted in a violent blue, these figures are exquisite:
people hardly look at them, but they are wrong, since for the most part they have been
treated by Raphael himself. People notice still less, in the lower portion of this
chamber of Heliodorus, a series of small grisailles, monumental and calm, in which
Polydore of Caravaggio has painted antique and rustic scenes composed with very
considerable grace. It is true that time speedily damaged them, and that we do not
always find the primitive idea under the work of Carlo Maratti who restored them,
minutely assisted in his researches by the archaeological zeal of Clement XI. These
chiaroscuri represent the Blessings of Peace (in that golden age 1513); Tillage, Harvest,
Vintage; Commerce giving animation to the shores of the sea, and Warriors using their
- ==
*a-Eſt sel- Hugº-º-º:
CHRIST BETWEEN JUSTICE AND FAITH (CHAMBER OF CHARLEMAGNE).
leisure in studying antiquities: they are observing the statue of the Marforio. Some of
these subjects have been destroyed, because, in the seventeenth century, they placed
underneath the Heliodorus a chimney-piece, on the sides of which the artists perpetuated
the custom of inscribing their names. Let us call the attention of the curious to this
multitude of autographs, which open with the signature of Poussin, dated 1627. The
chamber was completed towards the end of 1514.
Let us cross, while reserving it, the sanctuary of the Segnatura, to go and meet
in the following Stanza, called of Charlemagne, a complete tack in the pontifical
policy. Leo X, is for extolling to the clouds what he has crushed by his anathemas:
the Incendio del Borgo marks the transition. This pontiff, by the success of the
interview at Bologna after the Battle of Marignan, thought that he had by true
diplomatic miracle extinguished the conflagration that then threatened Europe. How
represent such a pretension 2 They remembered that in 847 Leo IV. had by a sign
of the cross extinguished a fire that was ravaging the Borgo San Spirito At the

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CHAMBERS OF CHARLEMAGNE AND CONSTANTIVE. 54 I
risk of seeming irreverent, I will confess my want of interest in this fresco, in which
more than elsewhere the principal defect of the Stanza comes out, namely the
excessive size of the figures for the limited space of the rooms. In the Incendio
del Borgo, their disproportion is more disagreeable; clumsy repaintings have not
lightened the ruddy execution of Giulio Romano; disposed so as to bring out all
their muscles, the attitudes hardly tend to invest with much interest these giants
playing the energumen in a court where they seem nearly as big as the houses.
The fresco does not at all recall the manner of Michelangelo, only it has been
arranged in such a way as to satisfy the theories which Michelangelo patronised.
But here, behold, the King of France, instead of being Attila King of Huns and
Ogres, has become the benevolent Charlemagne—with the features of Francis I.
There were various palinodes, symbolized by a picture of the justification of
Leo III. before the son of Pepin—a solemn scene, in which the pontiff, freed from
all imputation in the presence of the two courts, has only in the following chapter
to crown emperor the rival of Charles V., and to stipulate for the wages. The
sceptre is surmounted by a fleur-de-lis; behind the emperor, a striking portrait of
Francis I. before he wore a beard, a page holding on his knees the crown of the
Lombard kings, is a likeness of Hippolito de' Medici, the holy father's nephew. At
this time, when art is merely an instrument of politics, Raphael seems to become
indifferent even to the retouchings which his designs undergo; he yields the trust
to Francesco Penni and to Vicenzio of San Geminiano. At all events the master
reappears in the spirited representation of a Defeat of the Saracens at Ostia by the
troops of Leo IV. : this was preaching the crusade against the Turks who had menaced
Italy; Raphael preserved the patriotism of the ages of Sixtus IV. and Nicholas V. This
canvas was furnished by a singular event: after the death of his brother Julian in 1515,
Leo X., who buried his affliction at Citta Lavinia, near Ostia, was very near being
carried off, so ill were the coasts guarded, by some Barbary pirates in open day. The
risk of such an affront to the Christian powers, inspired Raphael with some works for the
frescoes of the Stanze. Unhappily, this has been in great part repainted.
To estimate how the true works of masters differ from the pieces due to the labours
of the best disciples, it is enough to contemplate on the vault of this chamber, which
was completed in the spring of 1515, four large medallions by Perugino, which Raphael
caused to be respected, and which represent—the Trinity surrounded by the Apostles;
God in the midst of the Angels; Christ between Justice and Faith; Jesus between
Moses and St. John, surrounded by seraphim. In these subjects, where the idea of the
artist is rendered faithful and complete by unity of execution, the swan of the Umbrian
school discloses all his softened grace. This standing-point serves to measure the
distance that separates from the first works of Raphael, the series of the vast undertaking
according to order, into which the Stanze degenerated. . - -
This decline is well marked in the most immense of the four chambers, which was
decorated the last (between 1519 and 1524). In the midst of the rivalries for the
empire, and of the menaces which poured down upon the Vatican, Leo X, thought it
opportune to propose to the Emperor Charles the example of Constantine; to show at
what price they possessed the empire, and at the same time to affirm the temporal rights
of the Church. He thus, at the time of Luther's advent, brought forward a burning
question, which has troubled many a religious soul down to this day, and which, at the
moment I am speaking, was destined to present itself to the ambitions of Italy with the
542 - A&OME.
support of an orthodox authority, six times secular. Did not Dante, the patron of the
aspirations of the peninsula, cry: -
“Ahi, Constantin'! di quanto male fu matre
Non la tua conversion, ma quella dote
Che date prese il primo rico patre l’
The picture of the Donation of Rome to St. Sylvester was only executed under
Clement VII. by Raffaellino del Colle, who introduced into it the portraits of Pontano,
Marello, Balthasar Castiglione, and Penni. It is hardly permissible to trace the
responsibility for this cartoon up to Raphael, or to attribute to him the Baptism of
Constantine by St. Sylvester, in the baptistery of the Lateran, represented there by the
Fattore: this piece, besides, is only a symbol, since Sylvester I. did not baptize
Constantine. If Raphael had a share in the design of the Apparition of the Cross to
the rival of Maxentius while haranguing his troops, and we can scarcely doubt it, at any
rate it is certain that Giulio Pippi overloaded the composition with episodes, such as the
introduction of the Dwarf Gradasso Berettai, whose buffooneries amused the court, and
who, to please Hippolito de' Medici, is planted there, his brow fixed under a giant's
helmet. Raphael purposed to treat with his own hand the Battle with Maxentius on the
Milvian bridge, and he commenced the work: Sanzio dead, Giulio Romano executed the
cartoons in fresco, while respecting two figures, Justice and Courtliness (Comitas), which
his master had already painted, but in oil, which has browned them, and adds to their
suppleness a solidity that rather jars. Let us not forget that the Defeat of Maxentius
has served for a model to all the great battle pieces, and especially to those enormous
canvases in which Lebrun immortalised Lewis XIV. under the name of Alexander the
Great. .
And, in conclusion, admire to what a degree, in our puny humanity, perfection is
only an accident After two centuries of effort, two men of genius attained it simul-
taneously; but we saw Michelangelo, as we now see Raphael, gradually lowering his
flight. For the one, we have seized a moment of supreme and fugitive harmony in the
Sixtine: let us go and salute the ideal of the other in the chamber improperly called of
La Segnatura, a sanctuary where Raphael, in possession of the Umbrian traditions, and
of the skilful correctness of antique art, is full master of himself, and makes his amplest
harmonies sound.
IV.
It is a fit moment for recalling, for people who have not yet seen Rome, that this
dismantled ruin, described as Camera della Segnatura, because once two pontifical
tribunes (designated by this word, which means the record of a process), held their
sittings in it, has on its walls the Dispute on the Holy Sacrament, placed before the
Schools of Athens, as well as Jurisprudence opposite to the Parnassus, and that the four
medallions so often engraved, Theology, Philosophy, Poetry, and Justice, adorn in this
same room a vault in which the artist has placed subjects from Scripture by way of
pendentives. So this Tribune of Raphael contains the most august wonders of his
imagination and his pencil.
The plan of the work is easily described: to personify in the principal men of genius
CAMERA DE/, /A SEGAWA 7'URA. 543
in the world's history, the doctrines, arts, and sciences which have contributed to the
glory of humanity; then to bring these searches after sovereign truth and sovereign
beauty to an issue in the faith symbolized by the Eucharist. But in proportion as the
frame is simple, so are the accessory deductions, the arguments of the book, complex
and manifold. In our time you may blame the developments of an art, of which the
products could not be fully accessible without recourse to theological conditions: in the
time of Raphael, such notions were more widely diffused by the universities than they
are now, and the subtleties of the great artists, penetrated with glosses from the Bible,
from the fathers of the Church, and the doctors, had not the dangers of that modern
ignorance which has killed religious painting.
From the material point of view these frescoes are less damaged than is usually
paquTERJ-1. LAPLAN TEººt **ºnes del a/º/*a*4/7.
POETRY. THEOLOGY.
said; they are still perfectly ſagið/e; they have even preserved, especially the medallions
and the Dispute, such delicacy of tints and shading, that only colourists, on condition of
being skilful draughtsmen, could succeed in reproducing it in their copies. A singular
attraction of these great pieces is the diversity of local colouring among the pictures;
it helps to clothe each object with a peculiar character; it takes away all monotony,
and implies an extraordinary skill in handling the colours. Such is the perfection of
forms, such the tranquil harmony of these compositions, that in their presence you forget
the almost dismaying share accorded to metaphysical ideas; you are charmed by a
pure melody sung in a strange tongue.
The subject is the poem of the soul. To its overtures correspond the notion of
divine things, and then that of natural things (causarum cognitio)—the lot of philosophy,

544 A&OME.
which knows better whence they come than where they go. Hence arise the sentiment
of right, and in the ideal order the sentiment of beauty, the correlative of virtue, art
and poetry. These are the four summaries that Raphael has inscribed on the vault,
under the emblems figured in the medallions. Philosophy looks far off; she holds two
volumes, one concerning morality, the other the study of external phenomena. Calm,
with closed eyes, Justice has a diadem of iron, the metal of force and not of cupidity.
Poetry or Inspiration (numine afflatur) is only spirit and light: the eye is keen, the lips
are parted to speak, the face is radiant. Laurels are intertwined in the hair; a lyre to
the left and a book to the right symbolize inspiration and study. Indifferent to
terrestrial objects, austere and chaste, Theology points with her finger to the Trinity
below; she holds only a thin black volume, the Gospels. From the wreath on her
head, where, among the foliage of the pacific olive, fruits mingle with flowers, there
falls down over her shoulder a white veil, which combines with the tints of a red tunic
and a green mantle, to formulate the three theological colours. Note that the muse of
divine things is clad exactly like the prototype of celestial loves, whom Dante has created
under the name of Beatrice. It is thus from this robe of Beatrice, that liberal Italy
has cut the three pieces of her standard.
Such is the exordium. The knot of this epopee, the end to which all aspires, is
that exposition of Christian mysteries and Christian records, improperly called the
Dispute of the Eucharist, or on the Eucharist, which in the first version has no meaning,
and gives a very false meaning in the second. In fact, the author intended to represent,
in supreme agreement, the moment when there is brought to pass in the universe that
manifestation of supernatural light which puts an end to controversy, and makes the
serene exercise of the contemplative life succeed to the life of search. Who has hindered
this unity? The false prophets or false poets. Where is the first cause of our faith ?
In the original sin, which made redemption necessary. Observe in the pendentives
of the vault the two pictures which adjoin the Accord before the Sacrament: on one side
is the Chastisement of Marsyas, on the other the First Pair seduced by the Serpent.
At the other angles, to Justice will correspond the Judgment of Solomon ; to
Philosophy, Study embracing the Globe.
I tremble at the prospect of having to explain the principal paintings. On the top
of the frame God speaks, and his word creates. Below the Father, Christ shows the
stigmata, adored by the first witnesses of his mortal life, the Virgin and John the
Precursor. Below the Son, the Spirit proceeding from him. Round the Dove, the
Gospels displayed by four Angels to the earth, from the fringe of the clouds that
support the heavenly court that has come down to us, as if to lend itself to Some
communication between the divine world and our own (see p. 552). The line of union
is the Eucharistic mystery; the rays of the Holy Spirit come to illumine the Host,
set forth vertically below the Trinity, on an altar surrounded by the faithful. Nothing
is clearer than this tangible exposition of an abstract dogma
Let us continue: already, thanks to the redemption, some souls sit in the inter-
mediary Olympus of Christ, a centre of intercession between heaven and us. The
deacons, Stephen and Laurence, and St. George in armour with the dragon on the
crest of his helmet, symbolize the struggle and its recompense. Behind the Gospels,
Moses displays his book, near St. James the Less. There follow in one Law and the
other the two Fathers armed with the sword, Abraham and St. Paul. Opposite, King
David closes his Psalms, attentive to St. John, who is writing the Apocalypse.
THE ACCORD BEFORE 7/HE HOLP SACRAMEWT. 545
Strengthened with new courage, and holding the keys with a hand henceforth full of
vigour, St. Peter, the first sinner against the new law, and Adam, the first sinner under
the old, both now regenerate, eye one another, finding one in the other; the first man
seems amazed at the results of his fault. - - .
Before coming to this ample exposition of Catholic doctrines, the master had tried
his hand; the fresco of the convent of St.Severus, which he executed at Perugia towards
1508, presents with fewer developments the arrangements of this Olympus, and Raphael
took the idea of it from Fra Bartolommeo. If you return to Florence, enter a small
court which was the cemetery of the hospital of Sta. Maria Nuova ; against a wall
of the fourteenth century, under the gable of a sort of shed, you will find what is
left of the only two frescoes of Fra Bartolommeo which Florence possesses. It repre-
sents the Last Judgment. Surrounding Christ, to whom the master has left the
traditional gesture transmitted by the Siennese to Michelangelo, the Saints sitting
in tribunal recall tolerably closely what we have now under our eyes. Although
Albertinelli completed the fresco, this portion is the work of the monk; the design,
the pose of certain figures afterwards adopted by Raphael, the charm of the colouring,
etc., are all express witness of this.
But let us finish the translation of our page of history before trying to estimate
the work of the artist. Around the doctors of the new law who surround the holy
sacrament (as the inhabitants of Paradise surround the Trinity), Raphael has collected
the authorities of the Church militant and the Church teaching, so as to form a concert
of assent before the eucharist. The object was to fix one of those rare moments when
the temple of Janus was shut; between philosophy and dogma harmony seemed con-
cluded; an hour of equilibrium in the region of ideas, as in that of art. Observe
that at the moment when Raphael sent this declaration sounding forth, Luther was
at Rome and said mass there, without suspecting that this picture, with which perhaps
he was edified, would speedily become a theological protest against him.
In the centre of the lower portion of the picture are placed four doctors of the
Latin Church; St. Gregory and St. Jerome, and St. Ambrose above St. Augustin.
Gregory on one side, like Ambrose on the other, with uplifted eyes and with an
expression of ecstasy, adores the mystery of the Trinity, an action which unites the
two portions of the composition. Jerome vehemently embracing the texts restored
by him, remains sunk in dogmatic meditations; but the pope St. Leo shows him the
brightnesses from on high (Zucerna est Agnus), as if to turn him away from losing
himself in the subtleties of erudition. Before St. Ambrose, to whom Peter Lombard,
the master of the sentences, shows the finger of the Holy Spirit (who, according to
St. Thomas, is the union between the Father and the Son), there is seated with mitre
on his brow, St. Augustin, the eloquent teacher. He holds his book shut, and com-
plaisantly instructs a stooping neophyte, who takes notes while he listens; with what
naturalness this double intention is seized St. Bernard shows with his two hands
the sacrament of love; the subtle Scotus is pushed further back, uncertain and per-
ceiving the truth with less distinct proximity. Behind Ambrose and his disciple
Augustin are the eagles of scholasticism, St. Thomas and St. Bonaventura; the
first is on the right, as having expatiated more directly on the sacrament of the altar;
the seraphic doctor is writing, to show that he died with pen in hand, while elaborating
the Defences of the Council of Lyons. Between these two is the pope Anacletus,
who made communion more frequent, by authorising the priests to give the eucharist
4 A
546 ACOME.
apart from masses. Innocent III., who by his writings has particularly affirmed it,
Innocent, that firm authority defended in our days by Hurter, a Protestant writer,
precedes a group of thinkers and poets, whose orthodoxy is thus confirmed.
Dante figures here in the front rank, a consecration of his religious character, and
after him those whom that great Italian soul inspired, Beato Angelico, Bramante,
the monk Savonarola, burnt ten years before by order of a pope, and rehabilitated
by this admission to the guest-chamber of Raphael, who branded, under Julius II.,
the iniquity of Alexander VI. and the name of the Borgias. As a pendant to
Innocent III., who concerned himself much with the affairs of the world, is seated
on the cathedra which belonged to him, and which is to be seen at St. Stephen’s, Pope
St. Gregory the Great, so zealous for the conversion of the peoples of the west and
north. He serves for a transition to episodic figures of a more remote sort, who yet
help that unity of the Church of which this work is the emblem: Seekers, whom doubt
still keeps uncertain, Disputers, heretics perhaps, thirsting for truth, going towards
the light, and still debating round the Archdeacon Berengarius, who denied transub-
stantiation, and who, thrice condemned, died in penitence in a little island in the
Loire. In the distance on the left, solitary Thinkers rear in the fields their lowly huts;
on the other side, more specially devoted to the authorities, a vaster monument
rises up, already rooted in solid foundations: the church never reaches the end of
its construction. How many intentions we should still discover, among the groups
which augment the gravity of the central composition and contribute to its interest
But why multiply commentaries when, without knowing the personages or the ideas
which they stand for, we still feel the charm of so glorious a sight !
We should look too narrowly at things if we were to confront with the ordinary
limits of art this unique work, which came in its own time, and which F. Schlegel,
agreeing with Lanzi, preferred to all Raphael’s other works. The paltrinesses of
legend and the rigidities of scholasticism are banished from this composition, which
still is marked by a mysticism so deeply premeditated that, not content with collecting
texts and growing pale over Dante's poem, Sanzio consulted his friends, and among
others Ariosto, the future author of the Orlando, had some share in this sacred piece.
To give its high value to a design so strange, there were needed both the inspirations
of Umbria, and that authority of style which keeps a work from shrinking into
meanness. Take a lustre from the age of Raphael; force would have been wanting:
postpone the execution for five years; he would have experienced the ascendancy of
Michelangelo, and the pre-occupations of technical skill will have got the better of
the poet-theologian. -
This work, in which Raphael can only have been helped by Timoteo Viti, a tender
soul, the favourite disciple of Francia, divides into two periods the immense and rapid
career of Sanzio. The Accord before the Holy Sacrament crowns the schools which
have been called pre-Raphaelite. All in it is vigorous and spring-like: the heads
reach a strong and calm grace of expression; the brightness of the light only leaves
to the artist, to obtain distinct effects and avoid monotony, the diversity of vivid tints
brought to accord in a limpid and tender harmony. Raphael has resolved the difficulty
with a magic of colouring which the most illustrious Venetians have admired. But
for any one who has not examined the original itself, this assertion, well grounded
as it is, runs some risk of being suspected; it is in the Vatican sanctuaries that it
THE SCHOOLS OF A 7'HENS. 547
is best to go to the bottom of these studies of art and religious history, the only
lessons from these texts that our time is still capable of relishing. How many mornings
passed thus, and in the depth of winter | One had from time to time, on an iron
brazier of antique fashion, to revive one's numbed fingers from which the pencil fell,
and thus to learn how a chilly subject, with his mind absorbed, may freeze stiff without
perceiving it.
V.
The other pictures of the Segnatura are more easily taken in ; so it will be enough
to convey some idea of the degree to which this decorative ensemble is homogeneous,
and how far a scope so simple lent itself to variety, while entirely satisfying the reason.
It is the universal religion derived from its poets—Hesiod, Homer, Virgil, Dante,
who, with different cosmogonies, only scrutinized pious manuals. Of these epic works,
suppress the Divine Comedy; Christian art would have remained without a formula,
and there would have been no Renaissance.
In face of the dogma which sums up all, Raphael has described the intellectual
labours of the ancient world in search of truths. But the Word had not descended;
man being far from the heavens, the light is not so bright: such designed inequality
of light gives to the Schools of Athens a solid depth, which depends as much on the
will of the painter, as on the tendencies of this or that fellow-worker. It is a just and
philosophic idea, borrowed perhaps from our mediaeval glass and the Byzantine frescoes,
that of classing among the precursors, in regard to the saints, Aristotle, by whom
logic has come to us, and who, with authoritative hand, points to the earth which his
doctrine has subjected; then Plato, with inspired gestures showing the heavens, whose
problem he has dimly discerned. They are surrounded by the divers schools, but the
pagan world is grouped around them. The procession of Aristotle is numerous; the
spiritualistic Plato has fewer followers. In the camp of Aristotle they are more specula-
tive : Euclid, and Archimedes under the features of Bramante, with compass in his
hand, are surrounded by their disciples, and are at work at geometry. One of these
scholars, seated to the right of Archimedes, is Frederick II., Duke of Mantua, brother-
in-law of a nephew of Julius II. Zoroaster unravels the system of the world, Ptolemy
marks out its geography; every one is at work or else is discussing ; but the pagan
prototype of the ascetics, Diogenes, who has just thrown away his basin, turns his back
on the schools, and by his indifference demonstrates the nullity of systems. Close
by there declare themselves—vague Negation, personified by Arcesilas (the symbol of
uncertainty is turned in one direction and looks in another); then Doubt, under the
impassive and contemptuous figure of Pyrrho; he watches a disciple repeating with
the ardour of conviction the doctrines of Aristotle.
Among the precursors and the faithful of the Platonist company, are Empedocles,
Epicharmus, and Pythagoras, with Theologus, and Theano, with Anaxagoras and
Archytas near them; then the sombre Heraclitus near AEschines, and Socrates, who
perceived unity; he is standing and instructing his pupils. Close on their track,
approach after Alcibiades and Xenophon, the young Duke of Urbino della Rovere,
and Raphael himself, just opposite Perugino; it was behind Zoroaster that Vasari
pointed them out; finally, a good number of those dreamers who, by inspiration,
4. A 2
548 A’O//E.
touched the divine intuition, deceiving themselves like Hippias, placed quite at the
bottom, or who, though unwearied seekers, found nothing but void and melancholy.
A tall young man in a white mantle fringed with gold represents Francis Maria della
Rovere, Duke of Urbino by the adoption of Guid' Ubaldo. The classic Aristotle has
on his side, in a niche of the façade, Minerva, the wise goddess of constituted bodies;
behind Plato is Apollo the inspirer. Among the grisailles of the lower portion
figures the Siege of Syracuse, in reference to Archimedes, and in honour of the
martyrs of the scientific ideal.
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GREGORY IX. RECEIVING THE DECRETALS (CAMERA DELLA SEGNATURA).
The blameless enforcement of right, the sentiment of perfect equity, seemed to
Raphael so far above human passions, that the attributes of jurisprudence present
themselves alone, without any historic personage. A head with two faces, Jurisprudence,
serene, mild in expression like clemency, with her young profile looks into the mirror
(see p. 392). In her breast is fixed in a medallion the winged head of a Gorgon.
Moderation offers her a bridle, and Penetration his torch. The past instructs her : she
looks behind her with the profile of an old man. Protecting Force, armed with a green
branch, which would be an olive if /a A'overe did not mean an oak, and seated on a lion,
completes this exquisite and noble group, which, for a wonder, Audran has not made too

THE PARAVASSU.S. 549
dull; people may form a tolerably just idea of it at our School of Fine Arts, in an
excellent copy by Paul Baudry. The neighbouring compartment is shared between the
civil law and the common law: on one side Justinian hands the Digest to Tribonian; on
the other, Gregory IX. receives the Decretals, under the features of Julius II., who is
attended—priceless likenesses—by two cardinals destined to be his successors, Giovanni
de’ Medici, still young, who is to be Leo X., and Alexander Farnese, who will become
Paul III. (p. 548). Near them, a third prelate represents the Cardinal del Monte. It is
in the background of this fresco that chance has executed by Raphael’s hand a striking
likeness of Napoleon I. The authenticity of these pictures has been discussed: they are
the master's; only, having been more damaged than the others, by the Tedeschi
of the Constable, they have been more restored than was necessary. In the grisailles
of the plinth, which pursue the idea in its development, and which were executed
by Polydore of Caravaggio, aided by Maturino the Florentine, Moses and Solon
promulgate their laws.
What shall we say, finally, of that glorification of poetry, which collects on one
Parnassus, to honour the Italy of Petrarch and Dante, all the great poets under the
patronage of the Muses and the presidency of Apollo! Consecrated to the revival of
ancient literature, this piece breathes all the enthusiasm of the sublime years which
opened the sixteenth century. Placed opposite to a blonde and tender picture, the
Parnassus has a very firm tone, with amber lights to bring out the adorable figures with
which Raphael endows the ten Muses, including Sappho among them. Under her name,
the master sketched the profile of one of the intelligences of his time, the courtesan
Imperia, to whom the casuists pardoned much because she loved the beautiful much.
Dying young and bewept by the greatest men, the idol of Augustin Chigi, Imperia,
worthy of the time of Pericles, made herself the muse of the friendship which encourages
and sustains. A purer celebrity, Vittoria Colonna,-sprung through her mother from the
Montefeltro family, who of their palace at Urbino had made another Parnassus, Vittoria
is drawn sitting, sceptre in hand, at the feet of Apollo. This profile, which in the
medals rivals antique cameos, is easily recognisable; in immortalising this heavenly
creature, Raphael rewarded her beforehand for the devotion with which she was soon to
surround Michelangelo; a holy flame, which was the consolation and stay and last joy
of the noble old man. Homer and Pindar, Virgil and Dante, Alcaeus, Horace, Ovid,
Propertius, old Ennius, Plautus, Terence, Boccaccio, with Petrarch and Sannazarius
who sang the Virgin, form on the holy mountain the procession attendant on the
goddesses. Not very pitiful towards bad poets, Raphael still, to meet a wish of Julius II.,
admitted Francesco Berni, who found further protection in his relationship to the Cardinal
Bibbiena; but he showed behind the author Rime burlesche, which Corinna and Sappho
eye with astonishment. In shape of moral he painted, as a pendentive, the Contest of
Phoebus with Marsyas, in which the winner contented himself with flaying alive the
proxime accessit of the competition. The Apollo Musagetes on the peak of the Parnassus
is playing the violin—a fine figure of an inspired performer. They relate about this,
that one evening at the Vatican a very handsome virtuoso came to play before Julius II.,
and that as he left the convent the pope said to Sanzio—“Now we have found our
Apollo l’ -
Among the personages of the Parnassus, Homer is easily recognisable from his
resemblance to the famous bust in the Capitol, which so many casts have reproduced.
The analogy will seem surprising if we remember that in Raphael's time this marble
550 A&OME.
was not yet discovered, and that the cameos and comforniați medallions not then having
been described or got together in the public collections, no antique representation of
the singer of the Iliad was then known. It was with the assistance of the Laocoön,
dug up in 1506 in the vineyard of Felicie de' Fredis, that Sanzio, by a skilful and
almost magical interpretation, drew from the high priest of Neptune the mien of the
blind poet.
Many critics have been surprised that one of the great poets of Italy, Ariosto,
Raphael's friend, did not figure in the Parnassus: but this chamber was painted between
I508 and the end of 151 1 ; the Orlando did not appear until 1516, and its author had
as yet only produced some dramatic essays of doubtful value. This absence, therefore,
far from being an omission, is a proof of the poet's impartiality.
On the grisailles of the lower portion, the master has not by any means pretended,
as has been said, to oppose the Sibylline books to the AEneid. The subjects are more
happily chosen: in one, Augustus prevents Virgil from burning his poem ; in the other,
Alexander has the works of Homer placed
in a precious casket. In the middle of the
ceiling, Raphael left the arms of Nicholas V.,
instead of placing there the oak of the
La Rovere: the reason of this preference
is that Thomas Parentucelli of Sarzana,
had no other escutcheon than the tiara and
the keys.
What one despairs of appreciating fully
in the ensemble of this enormous machine,
to borrow a studio phrase, is the superior
harmony of the decoration, the brightness
of a polychromatic ornamentation whose
richness is extreme, the happy effect of the
colours, either by oppositions or by certain
accords, and the art with which they are
wedded in the medallions and the ara-
THE FIRST FAULT (LA SEGNATURA). besques subdividing the nine compartments
- of the vault. Nothing seems overloaded;
you will only see what you seek; but if you examine at leisure, you will discover a
world of marvels which, though quite distinct, wait their turn without any indiscreet
eagerness to start up before your eyes. These borders in a tone of grey stone on a
golden ground; these projecting frames so firm in tone; these polyhedra of grey blue,
a sober tone which only lets the aerial blue of the sky show radiant at the very top
through an opening; the small subjects imitated from the bas-relief which connect the
four medallions with the subjects of the pendentives;–all is combined with a knowledge
of effects that confounds you.
To show to what a degree Raphael was a colourist, it would be enough to isolate
one of these corner panels, that, for instance, in which the figures of Poetry and
Philosophy, divided by small camaieux, surmount the masterpiece, of such purity of
design, in which the First Fault is represented. The gilded field of the sky, coloured by
a delicate chequer, imitating mosaic, plays with the ground of verdure, whence stands
out with rosy freshness the young and supple body of the first woman: the arabesques of
*A*- it.

MICHELANGELO AAWD RAPHA EZ. 55 I
the frame, in which the pearl grey and the blue are harmonized by the golds accented
by flame-colour, isolate and bring out this wonderful gem. The finest of the four
medallions from the point of view of colour is the Philosophy, blonde on a golden
ground, seated on a throne which has for arms Hermes of a neutral tint, and clad in a
pale blue tunic, which runs with strange fluidity into the dying tints of the drapery,
raised by gradations up to red. To avoid crudity the artist places the shadows of the blue
robe in sea-green tones, beneath light warmed by carnation, and these shadows mark folds
in which the pale light will leave nothing but rose. All this playing upon the palette,
the equilibrium resulting from it, the bright and penetrating melody of these shadings,
softened so as to shine out on the dead gold, all contribute to bathe the figure in a
supernatural light, of which no perceptible process betrays the secret. Raphael propor-
tioned the level tone of his pictures to the degree of light they were to receive; hence,
the strongest oppositions of the Parnassus, which is placed with the light behind, as well
as of the Poetry, destined it for the ceiling in a sombre part of the vault. Nothing is
more distinct than these figures, thus rescued from lack of light. These things have
been neither well copied nor well described ; shall I be pardoned for having failed in
my desire to render what, I fear, is incapable of being translated into words?
Now we are in a condition to define and characterise, while avoiding the
groove of contemporary prejudices, the two men of genius who dominated over the
Renaissance.
Charged by Leo X, with directing the excavation of Roman antiquities, Raphael
was as much smitten as his rival by an ardent passion for the art of the ancients. It is
to the painter of Urbino, we must not forget, that we owe the most important works of
this time, executed under the inspiration of the pagan muse, the Parnassus, the Schools
of Athens, the Galatea, the Nuptials of Roxana, the poem of Psyche at the Farnesina.
Modern criticism has, then, most gratuitously enclosed Raphael in the single domain of
religious ideas, to reserve to Michelangelo, falsely represented as a pagan genius, the
honour of having inaugurated Greek art, and driven away the last seraphim of the
mystical schools. Before the authority of facts, documents, and plain evidence, these
theories are untenable. Christian by conviction, like his young rival, Michelangelo was
even much more devout; these two great men move from religious inspiration, by
sentiment and by faith. But both of them in love with the antique arts, they direct in
concert their contemporaries towards these sources of beauty, vowed to the mission of
combining the perfection of the ancients with the Catholic idea. If from this common
point of departure, and pursuing the same aim, they have reached dissimilar ends, it is
because nature was pleased at that time to create two artists of sovereign superiority
with difference of genius. Let us try in a few words to class them.
An epic poet, a commanding spirit aspiring to infinite heights of greatness, Michel-
angelo will be the Hesiod of the biblical theogony; he will impress a shape on the
redoubtable Jehovah, on the Patriarchs, on the Prophets; he will translate the Works
and Days of Genesis. Raphael, more inclined to ascend to ideas in order to divine
sentiments from them, is less struck with high facts than with symbols. Too young to
have wholly shaken off the traditions of the Umbrian school, and of tenderer
complexion, he penetrates, like some doctor angelicus, into the beloved mysteries of the
new alliance. Thus Michelangelo is pre-eminently the painter of the Old Testament;
Raphael the gentlest painter of the Gospels.
552 -
A&OME.
The ceiling of the Sixtine chapel, and the Camera della Segnatura, offer a synthesis
of modern art raised to the intelligence of ancient art; this is my reason for closing the
exploration of Rome by the study of these two monuments. If it came to pass that some
catastrophe should destroy all, and only spare these two chambers, the art of painting
might still be saved by tradition, as aesthetic civilization would be saved in its entirety
if the whole of the treasures of the Vatican were preserved. Are not these galleries the
most ancient, the most splendid of the public museums of Europe, and are not all
nations bound to gratitude for the examples given by the sovereign pontiffs in these
national collections of which they are now so justly proud 2
What the Vatican is for the things of the spirit, I will say in a word or two ; without
leaving its precincts you may drink at the purest springs the teaching of divine and
human letters; sculpture and painting, arts ancient as well as modern, revealed by the
most perfect models. Lawful owners of the galleries which their patience has brought
together, the popes were the founders, and they ought to remain the high masters, of
this university.
="isºr ºv
- - THE END.
PRINTED BY VIRTUE AND CO., CITY ROAD, LONDON.

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