Italy, the Magic Land. Lilian Whiting
about his property, but very few have it about their knowledge,” said Bishop Phillips Brooks, and he added: “One grows tired of seeing cultivated people with all their culture cursed by selfishness.” To the true idealist—as distinct from the mere emotionalist with æsthetic tastes—selfishness is an impossible prison. The only spiritual freedom lies in the perpetual sharing of the fuller life. The gift shared is the gift doubled. Art is the spiritual glory of life; the supreme manifestation, the very influence of spiritual achievement. Mr. Stillman, discussing the revival of art, has questioned: “Does the world want art any longer? Has it, in the present state of human progress, any place which will justify devotion to it?”
He questions as to whether man is still
“Apparelled in celestial light,”
or whether he has lost “the glory and the freshness” of his dreams.
“No one can admit,” continues Mr. Stillman, “that the human intellect is weaker than it was five or twenty centuries ago; but it is certain that if we take the pains to study what was done five centuries ago in painting, or twenty centuries ago in sculpture, and compare it with the best work of to-day, we shall find the latter trivial and ’prentice work compared with the ordinary work of men whose names are lost in the lustre of a school.
“Then, little men inspired by the Zeitgeist, painted greatly; now, our great men fail to reach the technical achievement of the little men of them. There is only one living painter who can treat a portrait as a Venetian artist of 1550 A.D. would have done it, and how differently in the mastery of his material! If we go to the work of wider range, the Campo Santo of Pisa, the Stanze, the Sistine Chapel, the distance becomes an abyss; the simplest fragment of a Greek statue of 450 B.C. shows us that the best sculpture of this century, even the French, is only a happy child-work, not even to be put in sight of Donatello or Michael Angelo. The reason is simple, and already indicated. The early men grew up in a system in which the power of expression was taught from childhood; they acquired method as the musician does now, and the tendency of the opinion of their time was to keep them in the good method.”
Is this not too narrow and sweeping a judgment? The art of portraiture certainly did not die with the Venetian painters of 1550, however great their work; and if there be but “one living painter” who can treat portrait art like the early Venetians, there are scores of artists who achieve signal success by other methods of treatment.
At all events, these three men, Canova, Thorwaldsen, and Gibson, worked with the conviction that art is service. With Victor Hugo, Canova could have said: “Genius is not made for genius; it is made for men. … Let him have wings for the infinite provided he has feet for the earth, and that, after having been seen flying, he is seen walking. After he has been seen an archangel, let him be still more a brother. … To be the servant of God in the march of progress—such is the law which regulates the growth of genius.”
They worked and taught by this creed. Thorwaldsen, on first arriving in Rome, wandered for three years, it is said, among the statues of gods and heroes, like a man in a dream. The atmosphere of the earlier day when Titian was employed by the king of Portugal and Raphael by the Pope to create works of great public importance still lingered and exerted over Thorwaldsen, and over all artists susceptible to its subtle influence, a peculiar spell. Its power was revealed in his subsequent works—the “Christ;” the sculptured groups for tombs in St. Peter’s and in other churches; the poetic reliefs symbolizing “Day” and “Night;” “Ganymede Watering the Eagle;” the “Three Graces,” “Hebe,” and many others.
TOMB OF CLEMENT XIII, ST. PETER’S, ROME
Antonio Canova
Among Canova’s works his immortal masterpiece is the monumental memorial group for the tomb of Pope Clement XIII in St. Peter’s. The Pope is represented as kneeling in prayer. The modelling of the entire figure is instinct with expression. The fine and beautiful hands express reverence and trust. The countenance is pervaded with that peace only known to the soul that is in complete harmony with the divine power. The Holy Father has taken the tiara from his head and it lies before him on the cushion on which he kneels. Although the entire portrayal of the figure reveals that devotion expressed in the solemn and searching words of the church service, “And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee,”—although it is the very utmost rendering of the soul to God, it is yet the deliberate, the joyful, the living acceptance of divine love and no mere trance of ecstasy. No more wonderful figure in all the range of sculpture has been created than the Clement XIII of Canova.
“THE GENIUS OF DEATH,” DETAIL FROM TOMB OF CLEMENT XIII, ST. PETER’S, ROME
Antonio Canova
The group is completed by two symbolic figures representing Religion and Death. The former is personified as a female figure holding a cross; the latter sits with his torch reversed. Grief, but not hopeless and despairing sorrow, is portrayed; it is the grief companioned by faith which ever sees
“The stars shine through the cypress trees.”
The base of the monument represents a chapel guarded by lions. Pistolesi, the great Italian authority on the sculpture of St. Peter’s and the Vatican galleries, notes that the lions typify the firmness and the force and the courage, “la fortezza dell’anima,” that so signally characterized Clement XIII. There is probably no sacred monument in the realm of all modern art which can equal this creation in its delicacy, its lofty beauty, and the noble message that it conveys.
The oldest art school, the Accadémia di San Luca, founded in 1507 by Sixtus, when he called to Rome all the leading artists of Europe to assist in the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, is an organization that magically links the present with the days of Canova, Thorwaldsen, and Gibson, as it linked them, also, with the remote and historic past. The father of the present custodian of the Academy knew Thorwaldsen well. The grandfather of the gifted Italian sculptor, Tadolini (who has recently completed the tomb for Pope Leo XIII, placed in the Basilica of San Giovanni Laterano), modelled the bust of Thorwaldsen, and in one gallery hangs the great Danish sculptor’s portrait, painted by himself. The first director of San Luca was Federigo Zuccaro. In the early years of the nineteenth century this Academy was a vital centre of art life, and it is still a school that draws students, although the visitor who does not loiter and linger in his Rome may fail to know of this most alluring place. The San Luca is in the Via Bonella, one of the old, dark, narrow, and gloomy streets of the oldest part of Rome—a short street of hardly more than two blocks, running between the Via Alessandra and the Forum. Hawthorne vividly pictures all this old Rome when he speaks of the “narrow, crooked, intricate streets, so uncomfortably paved with little squares of lava that to tread over them is a penitential pilgrimage; so indescribably ugly, moreover; so cold, so alley-like, into which the sun never falls and where a chill wind forces its deadly breath into our lungs; the immense seven-storied, yellow-washed hovels, or call them palaces, where all that is dreary in domestic life seems magnified and multiplied; those staircases which ascend from a ground floor of cook shops and cobblers’ stalls, stables and regiments of cavalry, to a middle region of princes, cardinals, and ambassadors, and an upper tier of artists just beneath the unattainable sky: … in which the visitor becomes sick at heart of Italian trickery, which has uprooted whatever faith in man’s integrity had till then endured;” the city “crushed down in spirit by the desolation of her ruin and the hopelessness of her future;” one recalls these words when passing through the unspeakable gloom and horror and desolation and squalor of ancient Rome. In these surroundings one’s cab stops at “No. 44,” and ringing the bell the door is open, whether by super-normal agency or by some invisible terrestrial manipulation one is unable to determine; but in the semi-darkness of the narrow hall he discerns before him a flight of steep stairs, and, as no other vista opens, he reasons that, by the law of exclusion,