Books: Pictures from Italy
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Charles Dickens >> Pictures from Italy
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There were not many people lingering about; and these were kept at
a considerable distance from the scaffold, by parties of the Pope's
dragoons. Two or three hundred foot-soldiers were under arms,
standing at ease in clusters here and there; and the officers were
walking up and down in twos and threes, chatting together, and
smoking cigars.
At the end of the street, was an open space, where there would be a
dust-heap, and piles of broken crockery, and mounds of vegetable
refuse, but for such things being thrown anywhere and everywhere in
Rome, and favouring no particular sort of locality. We got into a
kind of wash-house, belonging to a dwelling-house on this spot; and
standing there in an old cart, and on a heap of cartwheels piled
against the wall, looked, through a large grated window, at the
scaffold, and straight down the street beyond it until, in
consequence of its turning off abruptly to the left, our
perspective was brought to a sudden termination, and had a
corpulent officer, in a cocked hat, for its crowning feature.
Nine o'clock struck, and ten o'clock struck, and nothing happened.
All the bells of all the churches rang as usual. A little
parliament of dogs assembled in the open space, and chased each
other, in and out among the soldiers. Fierce-looking Romans of the
lowest class, in blue cloaks, russet cloaks, and rags uncloaked,
came and went, and talked together. Women and children fluttered,
on the skirts of the scanty crowd. One large muddy spot was left
quite bare, like a bald place on a man's head. A cigar-merchant,
with an earthen pot of charcoal ashes in one hand, went up and
down, crying his wares. A pastry-merchant divided his attention
between the scaffold and his customers. Boys tried to climb up
walls, and tumbled down again. Priests and monks elbowed a passage
for themselves among the people, and stood on tiptoe for a sight of
the knife: then went away. Artists, in inconceivable hats of the
middle-ages, and beards (thank Heaven!) of no age at all, flashed
picturesque scowls about them from their stations in the throng.
One gentleman (connected with the fine arts, I presume) went up and
down in a pair of Hessian-boots, with a red beard hanging down on
his breast, and his long and bright red hair, plaited into two
tails, one on either side of his head, which fell over his
shoulders in front of him, very nearly to his waist, and were
carefully entwined and braided!
Eleven o'clock struck and still nothing happened. A rumour got
about, among the crowd, that the criminal would not confess; in
which case, the priests would keep him until the Ave Maria
(sunset); for it is their merciful custom never finally to turn the
crucifix away from a man at that pass, as one refusing to be
shriven, and consequently a sinner abandoned of the Saviour, until
then. People began to drop off. The officers shrugged their
shoulders and looked doubtful. The dragoons, who came riding up
below our window, every now and then, to order an unlucky hackney-
coach or cart away, as soon as it had comfortably established
itself, and was covered with exulting people (but never before),
became imperious, and quick-tempered. The bald place hadn't a
straggling hair upon it; and the corpulent officer, crowning the
perspective, took a world of snuff.
Suddenly, there was a noise of trumpets. 'Attention!' was among
the foot-soldiers instantly. They were marched up to the scaffold
and formed round it. The dragoons galloped to their nearer
stations too. The guillotine became the centre of a wood of
bristling bayonets and shining sabres. The people closed round
nearer, on the flank of the soldiery. A long straggling stream of
men and boys, who had accompanied the procession from the prison,
came pouring into the open space. The bald spot was scarcely
distinguishable from the rest. The cigar and pastry-merchants
resigned all thoughts of business, for the moment, and abandoning
themselves wholly to pleasure, got good situations in the crowd.
The perspective ended, now, in a troop of dragoons. And the
corpulent officer, sword in hand, looked hard at a church close to
him, which he could see, but we, the crowd, could not.
After a short delay, some monks were seen approaching to the
scaffold from this church; and above their heads, coming on slowly
and gloomily, the effigy of Christ upon the cross, canopied with
black. This was carried round the foot of the scaffold, to the
front, and turned towards the criminal, that he might see it to the
last. It was hardly in its place, when he appeared on the
platform, bare-footed; his hands bound; and with the collar and
neck of his shirt cut away, almost to the shoulder. A young man--
six-and-twenty--vigorously made, and well-shaped. Face pale; small
dark moustache; and dark brown hair.
He had refused to confess, it seemed, without first having his wife
brought to see him; and they had sent an escort for her, which had
occasioned the delay.
He immediately kneeled down, below the knife. His neck fitting
into a hole, made for the purpose, in a cross plank, was shut down,
by another plank above; exactly like the pillory. Immediately
below him was a leathern bag. And into it his head rolled
instantly.
The executioner was holding it by the hair, and walking with it
round the scaffold, showing it to the people, before one quite knew
that the knife had fallen heavily, and with a rattling sound.
When it had travelled round the four sides of the scaffold, it was
set upon a pole in front--a little patch of black and white, for
the long street to stare at, and the flies to settle on. The eyes
were turned upward, as if he had avoided the sight of the leathern
bag, and looked to the crucifix. Every tinge and hue of life had
left it in that instant. It was dull, cold, livid, wax. The body
also.
There was a great deal of blood. When we left the window, and went
close up to the scaffold, it was very dirty; one of the two men who
were throwing water over it, turning to help the other lift the
body into a shell, picked his way as through mire. A strange
appearance was the apparent annihilation of the neck. The head was
taken off so close, that it seemed as if the knife had narrowly
escaped crushing the jaw, or shaving off the ear; and the body
looked as if there were nothing left above the shoulder.
Nobody cared, or was at all affected. There was no manifestation
of disgust, or pity, or indignation, or sorrow. My empty pockets
were tried, several times, in the crowd immediately below the
scaffold, as the corpse was being put into its coffin. It was an
ugly, filthy, careless, sickening spectacle; meaning nothing but
butchery beyond the momentary interest, to the one wretched actor.
Yes! Such a sight has one meaning and one warning. Let me not
forget it. The speculators in the lottery, station themselves at
favourable points for counting the gouts of blood that spirt out,
here or there; and buy that number. It is pretty sure to have a
run upon it.
The body was carted away in due time, the knife cleansed, the
scaffold taken down, and all the hideous apparatus removed. The
executioner: an outlaw ex officio (what a satire on the
Punishment!) who dare not, for his life, cross the Bridge of St.
Angelo but to do his work: retreated to his lair, and the show was
over.
At the head of the collections in the palaces of Rome, the Vatican,
of course, with its treasures of art, its enormous galleries, and
staircases, and suites upon suites of immense chambers, ranks
highest and stands foremost. Many most noble statues, and
wonderful pictures, are there; nor is it heresy to say that there
is a considerable amount of rubbish there, too. When any old piece
of sculpture dug out of the ground, finds a place in a gallery
because it is old, and without any reference to its intrinsic
merits: and finds admirers by the hundred, because it is there,
and for no other reason on earth: there will be no lack of
objects, very indifferent in the plain eyesight of any one who
employs so vulgar a property, when he may wear the spectacles of
Cant for less than nothing, and establish himself as a man of taste
for the mere trouble of putting them on.
I unreservedly confess, for myself, that I cannot leave my natural
perception of what is natural and true, at a palace-door, in Italy
or elsewhere, as I should leave my shoes if I were travelling in
the East. I cannot forget that there are certain expressions of
face, natural to certain passions, and as unchangeable in their
nature as the gait of a lion, or the flight of an eagle. I cannot
dismiss from my certain knowledge, such commonplace facts as the
ordinary proportion of men's arms, and legs, and heads; and when I
meet with performances that do violence to these experiences and
recollections, no matter where they may be, I cannot honestly
admire them, and think it best to say so; in spite of high critical
advice that we should sometimes feign an admiration, though we have
it not.
Therefore, I freely acknowledge that when I see a jolly young
Waterman representing a cherubim, or a Barclay and Perkins's
Drayman depicted as an Evangelist, I see nothing to commend or
admire in the performance, however great its reputed Painter.
Neither am I partial to libellous Angels, who play on fiddles and
bassoons, for the edification of sprawling monks apparently in
liquor. Nor to those Monsieur Tonsons of galleries, Saint Francis
and Saint Sebastian; both of whom I submit should have very
uncommon and rare merits, as works of art, to justify their
compound multiplication by Italian Painters.
It seems to me, too, that the indiscriminate and determined
raptures in which some critics indulge, is incompatible with the
true appreciation of the really great and transcendent works. I
cannot imagine, for example, how the resolute champion of
undeserving pictures can soar to the amazing beauty of Titian's
great picture of the Assumption of the Virgin at Venice; or how the
man who is truly affected by the sublimity of that exquisite
production, or who is truly sensible of the beauty of Tintoretto's
great picture of the Assembly of the Blessed in the same place, can
discern in Michael Angelo's Last Judgment, in the Sistine chapel,
any general idea, or one pervading thought, in harmony with the
stupendous subject. He who will contemplate Raphael's masterpiece,
the Transfiguration, and will go away into another chamber of that
same Vatican, and contemplate another design of Raphael,
representing (in incredible caricature) the miraculous stopping of
a great fire by Leo the Fourth--and who will say that he admires
them both, as works of extraordinary genius--must, as I think, be
wanting in his powers of perception in one of the two instances,
and, probably, in the high and lofty one.
It is easy to suggest a doubt, but I have a great doubt whether,
sometimes, the rules of art are not too strictly observed, and
whether it is quite well or agreeable that we should know
beforehand, where this figure will be turning round, and where that
figure will be lying down, and where there will be drapery in
folds, and so forth. When I observe heads inferior to the subject,
in pictures of merit, in Italian galleries, I do not attach that
reproach to the Painter, for I have a suspicion that these great
men, who were, of necessity, very much in the hands of monks and
priests, painted monks and priests a great deal too often. I
frequently see, in pictures of real power, heads quite below the
story and the painter: and I invariably observe that those heads
are of the Convent stamp, and have their counterparts among the
Convent inmates of this hour; so, I have settled with myself that,
in such cases, the lameness was not with the painter, but with the
vanity and ignorance of certain of his employers, who would be
apostles--on canvas, at all events.
The exquisite grace and beauty of Canova's statues; the wonderful
gravity and repose of many of the ancient works in sculpture, both
in the Capitol and the Vatican; and the strength and fire of many
others; are, in their different ways, beyond all reach of words.
They are especially impressive and delightful, after the works of
Bernini and his disciples, in which the churches of Rome, from St.
Peter's downward, abound; and which are, I verily believe, the most
detestable class of productions in the wide world. I would
infinitely rather (as mere works of art) look upon the three
deities of the Past, the Present, and the Future, in the Chinese
Collection, than upon the best of these breezy maniacs; whose every
fold of drapery is blown inside-out; whose smallest vein, or
artery, is as big as an ordinary forefinger; whose hair is like a
nest of lively snakes; and whose attitudes put all other
extravagance to shame. Insomuch that I do honestly believe, there
can be no place in the world, where such intolerable abortions,
begotten of the sculptor's chisel, are to be found in such
profusion, as in Rome.
There is a fine collection of Egyptian antiquities, in the Vatican;
and the ceilings of the rooms in which they are arranged, are
painted to represent a starlight sky in the Desert. It may seem an
odd idea, but it is very effective. The grim, half-human monsters
from the temples, look more grim and monstrous underneath the deep
dark blue; it sheds a strange uncertain gloomy air on everything--a
mystery adapted to the objects; and you leave them, as you find
them, shrouded in a solemn night.
In the private palaces, pictures are seen to the best advantage.
There are seldom so many in one place that the attention need
become distracted, or the eye confused. You see them very
leisurely; and are rarely interrupted by a crowd of people. There
are portraits innumerable, by Titian, and Rembrandt, and Vandyke;
heads by Guido, and Domenichino, and Carlo Dolci; various subjects
by Correggio, and Murillo, and Raphael, and Salvator Rosa, and
Spagnoletto--many of which it would be difficult, indeed, to praise
too highly, or to praise enough; such is their tenderness and
grace; their noble elevation, purity, and beauty.
The portrait of Beatrice di Cenci, in the Palazzo Berberini, is a
picture almost impossible to be forgotten. Through the
transcendent sweetness and beauty of the face, there is a something
shining out, that haunts me. I see it now, as I see this paper, or
my pen. The head is loosely draped in white; the light hair
falling down below the linen folds. She has turned suddenly
towards you; and there is an expression in the eyes--although they
are very tender and gentle--as if the wildness of a momentary
terror, or distraction, had been struggled with and overcome, that
instant; and nothing but a celestial hope, and a beautiful sorrow,
and a desolate earthly helplessness remained. Some stories say
that Guido painted it, the night before her execution; some other
stories, that he painted it from memory, after having seen her, on
her way to the scaffold. I am willing to believe that, as you see
her on his canvas, so she turned towards him, in the crowd, from
the first sight of the axe, and stamped upon his mind a look which
he has stamped on mine as though I had stood beside him in the
concourse. The guilty palace of the Cenci: blighting a whole
quarter of the town, as it stands withering away by grains: had
that face, to my fancy, in its dismal porch, and at its black,
blind windows, and flitting up and down its dreary stairs, and
growing out of the darkness of the ghostly galleries. The History
is written in the Painting; written, in the dying girl's face, by
Nature's own hand. And oh! how in that one touch she puts to
flight (instead of making kin) the puny world that claim to be
related to her, in right of poor conventional forgeries!
I saw in the Palazzo Spada, the statue of Pompey; the statue at
whose base Caesar fell. A stern, tremendous figure! I imagined
one of greater finish: of the last refinement: full of delicate
touches: losing its distinctness, in the giddy eyes of one whose
blood was ebbing before it, and settling into some such rigid
majesty as this, as Death came creeping over the upturned face.
The excursions in the neighbourhood of Rome are charming, and would
be full of interest were it only for the changing views they
afford, of the wild Campagna. But, every inch of ground, in every
direction, is rich in associations, and in natural beauties. There
is Albano, with its lovely lake and wooded shore, and with its
wine, that certainly has not improved since the days of Horace, and
in these times hardly justifies his panegyric. There is squalid
Tivoli, with the river Anio, diverted from its course, and plunging
down, headlong, some eighty feet in search of it. With its
picturesque Temple of the Sibyl, perched high on a crag; its minor
waterfalls glancing and sparkling in the sun; and one good cavern
yawning darkly, where the river takes a fearful plunge and shoots
on, low down under beetling rocks. There, too, is the Villa
d'Este, deserted and decaying among groves of melancholy pine and
cypress trees, where it seems to lie in state. Then, there is
Frascati, and, on the steep above it, the ruins of Tusculum, where
Cicero lived, and wrote, and adorned his favourite house (some
fragments of it may yet be seen there), and where Cato was born.
We saw its ruined amphitheatre on a grey, dull day, when a shrill
March wind was blowing, and when the scattered stones of the old
city lay strewn about the lonely eminence, as desolate and dead as
the ashes of a long extinguished fire.
One day we walked out, a little party of three, to Albano, fourteen
miles distant; possessed by a great desire to go there by the
ancient Appian way, long since ruined and overgrown. We started at
half-past seven in the morning, and within an hour or so were out
upon the open Campagna. For twelve miles we went climbing on, over
an unbroken succession of mounds, and heaps, and hills, of ruin.
Tombs and temples, overthrown and prostrate; small fragments of
columns, friezes, pediments; great blocks of granite and marble;
mouldering arches, grass-grown and decayed; ruin enough to build a
spacious city from; lay strewn about us. Sometimes, loose walls,
built up from these fragments by the shepherds, came across our
path; sometimes, a ditch between two mounds of broken stones,
obstructed our progress; sometimes, the fragments themselves,
rolling from beneath our feet, made it a toilsome matter to
advance; but it was always ruin. Now, we tracked a piece of the
old road, above the ground; now traced it, underneath a grassy
covering, as if that were its grave; but all the way was ruin. In
the distance, ruined aqueducts went stalking on their giant course
along the plain; and every breath of wind that swept towards us,
stirred early flowers and grasses, springing up, spontaneously, on
miles of ruin. The unseen larks above us, who alone disturbed the
awful silence, had their nests in ruin; and the fierce herdsmen,
clad in sheepskins, who now and then scowled out upon us from their
sleeping nooks, were housed in ruin. The aspect of the desolate
Campagna in one direction, where it was most level, reminded me of
an American prairie; but what is the solitude of a region where men
have never dwelt, to that of a Desert, where a mighty race have
left their footprints in the earth from which they have vanished;
where the resting-places of their Dead, have fallen like their
Dead; and the broken hour-glass of Time is but a heap of idle dust!
Returning, by the road, at sunset! and looking, from the distance,
on the course we had taken in the morning, I almost feel (as I had
felt when I first saw it, at that hour) as if the sun would never
rise again, but looked its last, that night, upon a ruined world.
To come again on Rome, by moonlight, after such an expedition, is a
fitting close to such a day. The narrow streets, devoid of
footways, and choked, in every obscure corner, by heaps of
dunghill-rubbish, contrast so strongly, in their cramped
dimensions, and their filth, and darkness, with the broad square
before some haughty church: in the centre of which, a
hieroglyphic-covered obelisk, brought from Egypt in the days of the
Emperors, looks strangely on the foreign scene about it; or perhaps
an ancient pillar, with its honoured statue overthrown, supports a
Christian saint: Marcus Aurelius giving place to Paul, and Trajan
to St. Peter. Then, there are the ponderous buildings reared from
the spoliation of the Coliseum, shutting out the moon, like
mountains: while here and there, are broken arches and rent walls,
through which it gushes freely, as the life comes pouring from a
wound. The little town of miserable houses, walled, and shut in by
barred gates, is the quarter where the Jews are locked up nightly,
when the clock strikes eight--a miserable place, densely populated,
and reeking with bad odours, but where the people are industrious
and money-getting. In the day-time, as you make your way along the
narrow streets, you see them all at work: upon the pavement,
oftener than in their dark and frouzy shops: furbishing old
clothes, and driving bargains.
Crossing from these patches of thick darkness, out into the moon
once more, the fountain of Trevi, welling from a hundred jets, and
rolling over mimic rocks, is silvery to the eye and ear. In the
narrow little throat of street, beyond, a booth, dressed out with
flaring lamps, and boughs of trees, attracts a group of sulky
Romans round its smoky coppers of hot broth, and cauliflower stew;
its trays of fried fish, and its flasks of wine. As you rattle
round the sharply-twisting corner, a lumbering sound is heard. The
coachman stops abruptly, and uncovers, as a van comes slowly by,
preceded by a man who bears a large cross; by a torch-bearer; and a
priest: the latter chaunting as he goes. It is the Dead Cart,
with the bodies of the poor, on their way to burial in the Sacred
Field outside the walls, where they will be thrown into the pit
that will be covered with a stone to-night, and sealed up for a
year.
But whether, in this ride, you pass by obelisks, or columns ancient
temples, theatres, houses, porticoes, or forums: it is strange to
see, how every fragment, whenever it is possible, has been blended
into some modern structure, and made to serve some modern purpose--
a wall, a dwelling-place, a granary, a stable--some use for which
it never was designed, and associated with which it cannot
otherwise than lamely assort. It is stranger still, to see how
many ruins of the old mythology: how many fragments of obsolete
legend and observance: have been incorporated into the worship of
Christian altars here; and how, in numberless respects, the false
faith and the true are fused into a monstrous union.
From one part of the city, looking out beyond the walls, a squat
and stunted pyramid (the burial-place of Caius Cestius) makes an
opaque triangle in the moonlight. But, to an English traveller, it
serves to mark the grave of Shelley too, whose ashes lie beneath a
little garden near it. Nearer still, almost within its shadow, lie
the bones of Keats, 'whose name is writ in water,' that shines
brightly in the landscape of a calm Italian night.
The Holy Week in Rome is supposed to offer great attractions to all
visitors; but, saving for the sights of Easter Sunday, I would
counsel those who go to Rome for its own interest, to avoid it at
that time. The ceremonies, in general, are of the most tedious and
wearisome kind; the heat and crowd at every one of them, painfully
oppressive; the noise, hubbub, and confusion, quite distracting.
We abandoned the pursuit of these shows, very early in the
proceedings, and betook ourselves to the Ruins again. But, we
plunged into the crowd for a share of the best of the sights; and
what we saw, I will describe to you.
At the Sistine chapel, on the Wednesday, we saw very little, for by
the time we reached it (though we were early) the besieging crowd
had filled it to the door, and overflowed into the adjoining hall,
where they were struggling, and squeezing, and mutually
expostulating, and making great rushes every time a lady was
brought out faint, as if at least fifty people could be
accommodated in her vacant standing-room. Hanging in the doorway
of the chapel, was a heavy curtain, and this curtain, some twenty
people nearest to it, in their anxiety to hear the chaunting of the
Miserere, were continually plucking at, in opposition to each
other, that it might not fall down and stifle the sound of the
voices. The consequence was, that it occasioned the most
extraordinary confusion, and seemed to wind itself about the
unwary, like a Serpent. Now, a lady was wrapped up in it, and
couldn't be unwound. Now, the voice of a stifling gentleman was
heard inside it, beseeching to be let out. Now, two muffled arms,
no man could say of which sex, struggled in it as in a sack. Now,
it was carried by a rush, bodily overhead into the chapel, like an
awning. Now, it came out the other way, and blinded one of the
Pope's Swiss Guard, who had arrived, that moment, to set things to
rights.
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