■ % REMARKS, &c. A J. M'Creery, Printer, Black-Horse Court, Luudun* I REMARKS ON ANTIQUITIES, ARTS, AND LETTERS DURING AN EXCURSION IN ITALY IN THE YEARS 1S03 AND 1803. BY JOSEPH FORSYTH, ESi^. LONDON: PRINTED FOR T. CAOEIX AND W, DAVIES, STRAND. 1813. I lOAN STACK GIFT I. M^Creery, Printer, Black-Horse Courl» I '^ I LEFT England in November 1801, with- out any intention of sporting my pen on so beaten a field as Italy, and had reached Pisa before I began to commit to paper such re- marks as are usual in travelling. Materials of this kind readily accumulate. From these I have been recently prevailed upon to select^ and to offer to the Public, what relate to An- tiquities, Arts, and Letters. I design my ob- servations chiefly for those who have already examined the objects I review : but not with- out the anxiety, which the lateness of their appearance is but too well calculated to ex- cite. How far they may have lost their in- terest, or been anticipated by publications 557 VI in England during my long captivity, I have no means of knowing. My misfortune denies me all acquaintance with the works of others, and may perhaps claim some indulgence for the many defects of mine. * CONTENTS. PAGE Riviera di Ponente ... 1 Genoa 4 Pisa, Edifices 8 University .... 16 Poets 20 Climate 27 Lucca 31 Tuscan Republics ... 34 Florence, GabinettoFisico 37 Royal Gallery . 43 ■ Libraries ... 50 Improvvisatori . 54 Theatre .... 59 Architecture . 69 Environs ... 77 Vallombrosa 86 Camaldoli 92 La Verna 97 Excursion to Gorton a . . 100 Siena, City i 108 Assumption . . 116 Country .... 122 Journey to Rome .... 128 Rome, Topography . . 138 Works of the^ ,., Republic . .3 the 7 Rome, Works of the Empire Works of the Middle Ages Modern Ar chitecture Churches Palaces Vatican Capitol Villas . Relievos Letters and Arts ■ The Campagna Tivoli Journey to Naples . . . Naples, City Phlegraean Fields Portici . . . . Caserta . . . . Pompeii . . . . Excursion to Paestum Journey to Ancona . . Journey to Venice . . . Venice Journey to Turin . . . . PAGE 151 170 178 V 193 205 217 226 236 249 258 265 270 283 292 301 314 322 329 337 346 352 361 373 RIVIERA DI PONENTE. — Mihi mine Ligus ora Intepet, hybernatque mare. Fersius. On Christmas day 1801 I arrived at NrCE, where a soft and balmy air, oranges glowing in every garden, lodgings without a chimney, and beds with mosquito-curtains presented the first signs of Italy. At Nice I embarked for Genoa in a felucca; but the wind, though fair, raised too heavy a sea for so slender a bark, and drove our timid crew into Noli. In the only inn of this city four of us passed a sleepless night on two filthy beds, de- voured by fleas and tormented by passengers who could find no bed at all. Here we left the felucca, and crossed on foot a mountain, which modern geographers class among the Appenines, though D. Brutus describes it as the last of the Alps.* This pass, which appeared to Dante one of the four ^ worst in Italy, brought B us 2 RIVIERA DI PONENTE. US round the promontory up to a gap in the sum- mit, where a hurricane, meeting us with all the advantage of a blast-tube, threatened to blow us back into the sea. The population of this state runs into a line of narrow towns, forming one row of white houses, drawn along the strand and interrupted only where the sea denies footing. Savona is a crowded, irregular town, and its harbour naturally so excellent as to feel the jea- lousy of the metropolis. The shipping lies safely moored under the Blessed Virgin, on the pedestal of whose statue is an inscription at once Latin and Italian, which the Mediterranean seamen sing in storms, • In mare irato in subita procella Invoco te, nostra benigna stella! We now hired mules and rode along the Cor- nice, amid the grandest combinations of moun- tain and sea. Above us rose the bald and burnt tops of the Apennines, the sides of which were cut into narrow terraces, and planted with olive trees. Here the olive receives the best cultivation, and finds that schistous, slaty, loose, broken ground, and those craggy hills, which Virgil recommends for the tree. The spolverino, indeed, when salt- ed by winds from the sea, may corrode the plan- tation RIVIERA DI PONENTE. 5 tation next the beach 3 but there it stops and is spent. We passed through COGURETO, a small fishing town, which is generally supposed the birth-place of Columbus. Some, indeed, maintain that he was born at Genoa, of parents who, though origi- nally of Cogureto, were then settled as wool- combers at Savona. Three other towns, Quinto, Nervi, and Pradillo, have laid pretensions to his birth. The Piedmontese, however, have perhaps a fairer claim than any to Columbus as their coun- tryman. The supreme council of the Indies so- lemnly decided that he was born at Cuccaro in Montferrat. The Chroniclers of the 17th century, Alghisi, Malabaila, Donesmundi, Delia Chiesa, assert the same, and in 1589 a judicial plea was published at Venice, claiming for a Colombo of Cuccaro the inheritance of the great Christopher. • Ad Vada venit, quern locum volo tibi esse notum. Jacet inter Apenninum et Alpes, impeditissimus ad iter faciendum.— CicEBo. Epist. Fam. II. 13. B 9 GENOA. GENOA. !Ecco ! vediam la maestosa immensa Citta, che al mar le sponde, il dorso ai monti Occnpa tutta, e tutta a cerchio adorna. Qui volanti barchette, ivi ancorate Navi contemplo, e a poco a poco in alto Infra i lucidi tetti, infra I'eccelse Cupole e torri, il guardo ergendo a I'axupio Girevol mura triplicate, i chiusi Monti da lore, e le minute rocche A luogo a luogo, e i ben posti ripari Ammiro intomo : inusitata intanto Vaghezza a I'occhio, e bell 'intreccio fanno Col tremolar de le frondose cime, Col torreggiar de I'appuntate moli. BEtTiNELLi. Such is Genoa sketched from the sea; but in this general picture the palaces should perhaps be more prominent than the poet makes them. The palaces, I apprehend, gave to this city the epithet of Proud ; their black and white fronts were once the distinctive of the highest nobility 3 but most of those marble mansions have disappeared ; the mo- dern palaces are all faced with stucco, and some are painted in fresco. This fashion of painting figures GENOA. 5 figures on house-fronts was first introduced at Venice by Giorgioni, and has been lately admired even by severe critics ; but to me it appears too gay for any building that affects grandeur. No- thing can be grand in architecture that bears a perishable look. The Ducal palace is large and magnificent enough even for Genoa; but two balustrades break the unity of the front and lessen its ele- vation. The statues are not ill arranged. Their enemies are chained on the attic, and their bene- factors are lodged within. Prince Doria's palace is detached from the throng, and commands attention as an historical monument. Though magnificent when viewed from the bay or the mole, the mansion itself is patched and neglected ; the titles of the immortal Andrew, which extended 200 feet in front, have been effaced by the late revolution, the gardens are unnaturally pretty; colossal statues rise over dipt box ; nothing corresponds with the majesty of the site. The Serra palace boasts the finest saloon in Eu- rope. This celebrated object is oval in plan, the elevation a rich Corinthian, the v^alls are covered with gold and looking glass; the floor consists of a pohshed mastic stained like oriental breccia. Sur- faces 6 GENOA. faces so brilliant as these would deaden any pic- tures except those of a ceiling, which, on the con- trary, require a bright reflection from the walls. Here then the ceiling alone is painted, and bor- rows and lends beauty to the splendor below. The hospitals of Genoa vie with its palaces in magnificence, and seem more than sufficient for all the disease and misery that should exist in so small a state. They are crowded with honorary statues; but I write only from recollection, and one seldom recollects things so pompous and so uniform as the effigies of rich men. At the Al- bergo de Poveri is a sculpture of a higher order, a dead Christ in alto relievo by Michael Angelo. The life and death which he has thrown into this little thing, the breathing tenderness of the Virgin, and the heavenly composure of the corpse, ap- peared to me beauties foreign to the tremendous genius of the artist. At the hospital of Incura- bles I found priests and choristers chanting be- tween two rows of wretches, whom their, pious noise would not suffer to die in peace. The very name of such hospitals, by forbidding the patient to hope and the physician to struggle, cuts off at once two sources of recovery. As for the national character, we need not bring Virgil nor Dante to prove failings which the Ge- noese themselves tacitly acknowledge. So low are the GENOA. 7 the common people sunk in the esteem of their own countrymen, that no native porter is admitted into the Porto Franco, where Bergamasques alone are employed.** A suspicion, unworthy of Italian merchants, who w^ere once the most liberal on earth, excludes also from this free port the clergy, the military, and women, as persons who may pilfer, but who cannot be searched. • Travellers have often applied the " Vane Ligus, &c/* to the Genoese character ; but the " Patrias tentasti lubricus artes" appears to me to be levelled rather at an individual, the " fallaci Anno," than against the nation at large. * These Bergamasque Porters tread nimbly through very narrow streets with amazing loads, suspended by ropes from lateral poles, each of which rests on two men's shoulders; a mode which I have remarked in one of the ancient painting* found in the catacombs of Rome. PISA. PISA. EDIFICES. Ex MERITO LAUDARE TUO TE, PiSA! LABORANS^ KITITUR E PROPRIA DEMERE LWDE TUA. TUT taceam rkliqua, quis dtgnum dicer ET ILLA Tempore PRiEXERiTo quje tibi contigerint. In&cription* Pisa, while the capital of a republic, was cele- brated for its profusion of marble, its patrician towers, and its grave magnificence. It still can boast some marble churches, a marble palace, and a marble bridge. Its towers though no longer a mark of nobility, may be traced in the walls of modernized houses. Its gravity pervades every street, but its magnificence is now confined to one sacred corner. There stand the cathedral, the baptistery, the leaning tower, and the campo- santo j all built of the same marble, all varieties of the same architecture, all venerable with years, and PISA. 9 and fortunate both in their society and their soli- tude. The Cathedral, though the work of a Greek, and surmounted by a cupola, is considered by ItaHans as Gothic. Its date (1063—1096) is certainly the age of that style, but I saw nothing here that con- stitutes the Gothic of the north; no pointed arches, no clustered pillars, no tracery in the niches, no ribs nor keystones in the vaults. To prove it Gothic, they have adduced some barbarisms in the west front; but the most irre- gular arches in that front are as round as the angle of the roof, under which they are crushed, could admit; they all rest on single columns, and those columns, though stunted, are of the same Greek order as the columns below. On the sides are some large arches, each including two or three smaller ones ; a combination which we certainly find in the Gothic and Saxon works; but here again the arches are all round, and they rest jon columns or pilasters of Greek order*^ On some columns we see lions, foxes, dogs, boars, and men figured in the capitals; but such ornaments, though frequent in Gothic churches, are found also in the Italian basilica, and were recom- mended by St. Nilus to the primitive churches of Asia and Greece, as a pious decoy to the con- templation of the cross. In 10 PISA. In fact, the very materials of this cathedral must have influenced the design; for columns taken from aacient temples would naturally lead to some such architecture as they had left. It is a style too impure to be Greek, yet still more remote from the Gothic -, a style which may be called the Lombard, as it appeared in Italy first under the Lombard princes ; a style which in- cludes whatever was grand or beautiful in the works of the middle ages, and i.his was perhaps the noblest of them all. The plan and elevation are basilical. The five aisles are formed by insulated columns; the choir and the transepts are rounded like the tribuna ; the general decoration of the walls consists in round arches resting on single columns or pilas- ters ; a decoration vicious every where, parti- cularly here, where the arches bear no proportion to the shaft. This defect reaches up to the very cupola, and degrades the noble peristyles of the nave. How beautiful do columns become when they support a roof! how superior to their effect as an idle decoration ! what variety in these, still chang- ing their combinations as you pace along the aisles ! how finely do their shafts of oriental gra- nite harmonize with the grandeur of the pile, while their tone of color deepens the sombre which pre- vails PISA. 11 vails here in spite of an hundred windows ! How sublime might such a nave be made if taken as a whole ! but the architect, apparently anxious to extend and diversify, branched this out into a Latin cross 3 and thus broke the unity of the de- sign. The side altars are beautiful : the high altar is only rich. The pictures, though not much admir- ed, assist the architecture ; but the sculpture and the tombs interrupt some of its general lines. Even the marble pulpit, jfine as it is, impairs the sym- metry by standing before a column. This pulpit is supported by a naked figure of most gross design. Indeed, few churches in Italy are free from the in- congruous. Here are Bacchanals and Meleager's hunt incrusted on the sacred walls, an ancient statue of Mars, worshipped under the. name of St. Potitus, and the heads of satyrs carved on a cardinal's tomb. The Baptistery, Here also is a profusion of un- necessary columns, placed under mean and unne- cessary arches, round an immense polygon; and here too may something like Gothic be found, par- ticularly in the second order; for certainly the figure inscribed in each of the acute pediments there, does resemble the Gothic trefoil. The inner elevation is still inferior to the outside. Arches 12 / PISA. Arches are perched on arches, and pedestals are stilted on the capitals of columns, as a base to a hideous tunnel which screens the fine swell of the cupola. Who could ever suppose that such a structure and such dimensions were intended for a christening ? The purpose of an edifice should appear in the very architecture; but here we must seek it only in the accessories; for the furniture of the place, the font, statues and relievi are all al- lusive to baptism. The Leaning Tozver. Here are eight cirtles of columns all supporting arches, which are smaller and more numerous in proportion as you ascend. Such a profusion only betrays that poverty of ef- fect, which must ever result from small columns and a multitude of orders. As to the obliquity of this tower, I am surprised that two opinions should still exist on its cause. The observatory in the next street has so far de- clined from the plumb-line as to affect the astro- nomical calculations of the place. A neighbouring belfry declines to the same side, and both these evidently from a lapse in the soft soil, in which water springs every where at the depth of six feet. This great tower, therefore, leans only from the same cause, and leans more than they, because it wants the support of contiguous buildings. Many Pisans, however, are of the old opinion. One of their PISA. 13 their literati took pains to convince me that the German architect contrived this declination, which his Itahan successors endeavoured to rectify. The Campo Santo. The portico of this vast rec- tangle is formed by such arcades as we find in Roman architecture. Every arch is round, and every pillar faced with pilasters ; but each arcade includes an intersection of small arches rising from slender shafts like our cathedral windows. This is Gothic beyond dispute; but it seems an addition foreign to the original arcades, which were open down to the pavement. Such cloistered cemeteries as this were the field where painting first appeared in the dark ages, on emerging from the subterranean cemeteries of Rome. In tracing the rise and genealogy of mo- dern painting we might begin in the catacombs of the fourth century, and follow the succession of pictures down to those of St. Pontian and Pope Julius; then, passing to the Greek image-makers of the tenth and eleventh centuries, we should soon arrive at this campo santo which exhibits the art growing through several ages, from the simplicity of indigence to the simplicity of strength. I Here the immensity of surface to be covered forbade all study for perfection, and only required facility 14 PISA. facility and expedition. The first pictures show us what the artist was when he separated from the workman. They betray a thin, timid, ill-fed pen- cil y they present corpses rather than men, sticks rather than trees, inflexible forms, flat surfaces, long extremities, raw tints, any thing but nature. As you follow the chronology of the wall, you catch perspective entering into the pictures, deep- ening the back-ground, and then adjusting the groups to the plans. You see the human figure first straight, or rather stretched ; then foreshort- ened, then enlarged : rounded, salient, free, various, expressive.* Throughout this sacred ground paint- ing preserves the austerity of the Tuscan school : she rises sometimes to its energy and movement, she is no where sparing of figures, and has pro- duced much of the singular, the terrible, the im- pressive 5 — but nothing that is truly excellent. All the subjects are taken from scripture, the legends, or Dante ; but in depicting the life of a patriarch or a saint, the artists have given us the dress, the furniture, and the humours of their own day. A like anachronism has introduced some portraits of illustrious Tuscans, which are rather fortunate in such works as these. But how many anachronisms disfigure the first paintings in Italy ! How painful it is to see, in the finest nativities and crucifixions, a St. Francis, or St. Dominic, or the donatorCy or the painter himself, or the painter^s PISA. 15 painter's strumpet, looking out of the picture and impudently courting your remark.^. Some of these frescos have been exposed to the open air for 500 years, and the earhest works are mouldering away from moisture.'' What pity that a country full of antiquaries and engravers should let such monuments perish without a re- membrance ! How superior these to the coarse remains of Anglo-Gothic art, w^hich our draughts- men are condemned to search out for those old mumbling collectors who are for ever picking at the bare bone of antiquity ! • A similar progress may be traced in the sculpture called Etruscan, which passed from the meagre style to the round, and from the attitudinarian to the natural. * This practice was ancient; Pliny reprobates Arellius for introducing his mistresses into sacred pictures. ^ This climate, however, is favorable even to the materials of art. The outside marble of the Duomo has in 700 years contracted very little of the lichen which would blacken an English tomb- stone in 50. The bronze door of 1184 is not yet corroded with patina. The iron griffons of the Strozzi palace, wrought in the time of Lorenzo the magnificent, are still as sharp as when they cam*^ Trom Caparra's smithy. UNIVERSITY. UNIVERSITY. -lUud sis vide Exemplum disciplinae ! Terenoe. This university is now reduced to three col- leges ', but in these every branch of each faculty has still its chair. Many of these chairs have lost their old scholastic importance, and left their professors idle, for the students attend only the classes which are necessary to their future de- gree. Universities, being in general the institution of the early ages, are richest in objects related to church or state. Divinity and law engrossed tha manors of the pious founders, and left little or nothing to the improvement of natural science. It was here that Physics found the earliest pro- tection. Pisa boasts the first anatomical theatre and the first botanical garden in Europe; both created before the middle of the I6th century. The botanical chair is now admirably filled by the learned UNIVERSITY. yj learned and amiable Santi ; yet, in general science, Pisa is declined much below the fame of Pavia. Tlie library is full of civil and canonical law, polemics, councils, fathers, and metaphysics 3 but in science or polite literature I saw nothing very curious or rare. On the classical shelves are some early Italian editions, the remains, I pre^ sume, of the Aldine legacy. The observatory is adjoining, and includes a school for astronomers; but no student intrudes at present on Dr. Slop's repose. The lectures were formerly given in Latin from the chair, and were then recapitulated in Italian under the portico of the schools ; but this stoic exercise, and the Latin, are both fallen into dis- use. That censorial discipline which once expell- ed members through the window is now obsolete and unknown. Attendance passes for merit; time, terms, and the archbishop, confer academic eal rank. How infinitely more important are private schools scattered over the country than insti- tutes like this, which young men seldom enter till they are able to teach themselves I In uni- versities the very multitude of helps only tends to relax, to dissipate, or embarrass the attention. Neither Pisa, nor any academical city in Italy C has 18 UNIVERSITY. has given birth to a man of transcendent genius, if we except Galileo, who was dropped here by chance. That excluding spirit which prevails in other universities is here unknown. No religion is pro- scribed. All degrees, except in divinity and ca- nonical law, are open to heretics and jews. Such liberality must win a number of volunteers. Others are forced to attend as a qualification for legal practice; for in Tuscany every attorney's clerk is a doctor. Pisa, though long posterior to Bologna, was the second school of law in Italy. Some ascribe this early eminence to Jier possession of the Pan- dects ^ but this celebrated manuscript was so hoarded, both here and at Florence, that instead of restoring the Roman law, it remained useless and lost to study, till Politian was allowed by Lo- renzo the magnificent to collate it with the pan- dects first published at Venice. Politian's collated copy of that edition escaped the sack of the Me- dici library in 1494, and after a long train of travels and adventures it at last re-appeared at Florence in 1734. * Pisa lays some claim to the introduction of alge- bra, which Bonacci is said to have transplanted hither from the east; while the Florentines con- tend UNIVERSITY. 19 tend that their Paolo dell* Abbaco was the first to use equations. Algebra was certainly known in Europe before 1339, the date of this university. The professorships are in general reduced to one-fourth of their original emolument. Fran- cesco Bartolozzi, in a paper read at the Accade- mia Economica, states their mean salary to have been 2,000 crowns, at a time when the great Macchiavel received only 180, as secretary to the Florentine republic.^ Such was the encourage- ment that drew the celebrated Decius so often back to Pisa from contending powers ; for this great oracle of the laws appeared so important a possession to Louis XII. and to Venice, that they threatened hostilities on his account. « Bartolozzi calculates from a curious fact — that for four centuries wheat was bartered in Tuscany for its weight of butcher's meat, of oil, of flax, or of wool, however the money- prices might fluctuate. C 2 POETS. POETS. Kf a qui la morta poesi' risorga. DantE. ITALIAN poetry has at length revived from a long death-like winter, and seems now to flourish in a second spring. Every book-shop, every cir- cle, swarms with poets; and the Pisan press is now selecting a Parnassus of the living, as a rival to that of the dead. Where should we seek for the principle which multiplies poets so incalculably in this country? Is it in the climate or in the language? Is it education, or leisure, or fashion, or facility, or all these together ? Interest it cannot be. No where is poetry so starving a trade; nor do its profits, rare as they are, arise so much from the sale of books as from dedication-fees. Gianni prints his flattery in very small retail. In a single duodecimo he gives thirteen dedications, twelve of which were lucrative, and one was thrown away upon sensi- bility. A certain Count lives by this speculation : his POETS. SI his works serve only as a vehicle to their inscrip- tions. Satirists, the most useful of all poets, write under other discouragements : — the censure of the press, and the sacredness of public men and measures. Hence their brightest things are confined to pri- vate circles, where they come out with hesitation and fear from the pocket-book. Hence the ne- cessity of masking their satire has led some to a beauty, when they sought only a defence. In reviewing some of these bards, I shall begin with Pignotti, as he still belongs to Pisa. So little does this elegant fabulist owe to genius, that his very ease, I understand, is the result of severe study; and conscious of this he seems to describe his own faculty in these lines : La natura Parra die versati habbia da vena FacU vcrei che costan tanta pena. Pignotti admires Pope and resembles him. The powers of both seem confined to embellish the thoughts of others ^ and both have depraved with embellishment the simplicity of the early Greeks. Pope's Homer is much too fine for the original ; and Pignotti, for want of Esop's naivete, has turned his fables into tales. Some of his best novelle are reserved for private circles. I heard him ^2 POETS. him read one on " the art of robbing,*' which could not be safely published by a Tuscan place- man. In the man himself you see little of the poet, little of that refined satire which runs through his fables and has raised those light-winged, loose, little things to the rank of Italian classics." Bertola is perhaps a more genuine fabulist than Pignotti. He does not labour to be easy; for he has naturally the negligence and sometimes the vacuity of a rhyming gentleman. His fugitive pieces are as light as the poetical cobwebs of his friend Borgognini. His sonnets run upon love or religion, and some inspire that mystic, unmeaning tenderness which Petrarch infuses into such sub- jects. Bertola is too fond of universality and change. He has been a traveller, a monk, a secu- lar priest, a professor in different universities and in different sciences, an historian, a poet, a bio- grapher, a journalist, an improvisatore. Bondi has also been bitten by the " estro" of sonnet ; but he is more conspicuous as a painter of manners. His " conversazioni'* and " alia moda'* expose some genteel follies wnth great truth of ridicule. His " giornata villareccia" is diver- sified, not by the common expedient of episodes, but by a skilful interchange of rural description, good-natured satire, and easy philosophy. The same subject has been sung by Melli in Sicilian, which POETS. S3 which is the doric of Italian poetry and full of the ancient Theocritan dialect. Cesarotti is the only Italian now alive (I hope Caiafa will pardon the exclusion) that has shown powers equal to an original epic ; but those noble powers he has wasted in stooping to paraphrase the savage nonsense of Ossian, and in working on Homer's unimprovable rhapsodies. The Iliad he pulls down and rebuilds on a plan of his own. He brings Hector into the very front, and re-moulds the morals and decoration of the poem. He re- tains most of the sublime that flashes through the original ; but he has modernized some of its man- ners, given a certain relief to its simplicity, and suppressed those repetitions peculiar to Homer, and to the literature of the early ages. Parini has amused, and I hope, corrected his countrymen by the Mattina and the Mezzogiorno, for the other two parts of the day he left imperfect. An original vein of irony runs through all his pic- tures, and brings into view most of the affecta- tions accredited in high life or in fine conversation. He lays on colour enough, yet he seldom carica- tures follies beyond their natural distortion. His style is highly poetical, and, being wrought into trivial subjects, it acquires a curious charm from the contrast. He is thought inferior to Bettinelli in the structure of blank verse s but the seasoning and 24 POETS. and pungency of his themes are more relished here than the milder instruction of that venerable bard. Fantoni, better known by his Arcadian name Labindo, is in high favour as a lyric poet. This true man of fashion never tires his fancy by any work of lengthy he flies from subject to subject, delighted and delighting. You see Horace in every ode, Horace's modes of thinking, his variety of measures, his imagery, his transitions. Yet La- bindo wants the Horatian ease; he is too studious of diction, and hazards " some taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,'' which remind us of our late Delia Crusca jargon, Pindemonte was connected with some of our English Cruscans, but he cannot be charged with their flimsy, gauzy, glittering nonsense. He thinks, and he makes his readers think. Happy in description, sedate even in his hght themes, ge- nerally melancholy and sometimes sublime, he bears a fine resemblance to our Gray, and like Gray, has written but little in a country where most poets are voluminous. Casti^ is the profligate of genius. He rivals La Fontaine in the narrative talent, and surpasses him in obscenity. His late work, *' Gli Animali parlan- ti," though full of philosophy and gall, must soon yield POETS. 25 yield to the fate of all political poems. Its form and its agents are tiresome. We can follow a sa- tirical fox through a short fable, but we nauseate three volumes of allegorical brutes connected by one plot. His '' novelle" are on the contrary too attractive, too excellently wicked. Such also is their reverend author. He has lived just as he wrote, has grown old in debauchery and suf- fered in the cause. Yet Casti is courted and caressed in the first circles of Italy ; he is the arbiter of wit, and the favourite of the Fair. All these gentlemen seem to have renounced that epic chivalry, both serious and burlesque, which forms the principal poems in the language. Most of them have imbibed the philosophical spirit of the present day, a spirit destructive of the sublime, which it poorly compensates by the terse, the correct, the critical. They borrow language, imagery, and allusions incessantly from science. They affect the useful and the didactic. Some have sung the rights of man ; others the topogra- phy and economics of their country ; a few have attempted the scientific themes which the Phy- siocritics of Siena introduced into poetry. Such subjects naturally led their poets into blank verse, which, from its very facility, has grown into a general abuse. Many Italians could go spinning ** versi sciolti** through the whole businesg t6 POETS. business of the day ; though it is more difficult to excel in these than in rhyme. I heard some un- published heroids flow with such ease from that benevolent chemist, the Marquis Boccella, that I forgot he was reading verse. Blank verse requires a certain poetical chemistry to concentrate, to fuse, to sublime the style, and to separate its measures from the rhythm of periodical prose. * Pignotti, who is now engaged on a history of Tuscany, once repeated to me, with great satisfaction, what Gibbon says of the ItaUan historians, among whom he anticipates a niche for himself. This led him to compare Mr. lloscoe's Life of Lorenzo with Fabroni's history of the same great man, when Monsignore himself entered the room and stopped his parallel. Why does that prelate write modern lives in an ancient language ? Is he ashamed, in this silver age of Italian letters^ to appear a *' Fab- bro del parlar materno ?" ^ Casti, and several persons whom I have mentioned in this and some of the following articles as living, died since I left Italy. THE CLIMATE. THE CLIMATE. O utioam liybcrnae duplicentar tempora bramae ? Propertius. i The great evil of this climate is humidity. Both the Arno and its secondary streams glide very slovi^ly on beds which are but little inclined, and nearly level with the surface of the Pisan territory. Hence their embankments, however stupendous, cannot ultimately protect the plain. They may confine to these channels the deposite of earth left by floods ; but an accumulation of deposites thus confined has in many parts raised those channels above the level of the country. Should any water, therefore, escape through breaches into the plain, the difficulty of draining it must yearly increase; for even the bed of the sea has been rising for ages on this coast, and has stopped up some ancient outlets. Drainage, however, made very important con- quests during the last century, and has greatly, improved the climate. Scotto, with the spirit of a merchant 28 THE CLIMATE. merchant accustomed to wholesale success, lately attempted to drain his part of the marshes be- tween Pisa and Leghorn; but the villas which he built for his future tenantry were filled the first winter with water. The Ferroni, who have doubled their rental by their colmate near Pescia, are now pursuing a still grander design on the lake of Bientina. We may calculate the mischief of inundations in this country from the violence of the rain ; for its annual height, (47 inches,) is about double that of our climate, while its duration is not one half. It generally falls in large round drops direct to the ground : it never breaks into mist, nor/dims the air, nor penetrates the houses, nor rusts metals, nor racks the bones, with the searching activity of an English shower. Winter is by far the finest season at Pisa and fully as mild as our Spring. The East wind, in- deed, being screened only by the Verrucola is exceedingly sharp, and freezes at ^5"", The South West, being flat, lies open to the Libecci, which is therefore more felt than the other winds, and is fully as oppressive on the spirits as the leaden sirocco of Naples. Some Pisans feel the climate colder, and I should suppose it drier too, since the neighbour- ing THE CLIMATE. ^9 ing Apennines were cleared of their woods. Others compare the quantity of snow on the Apennines with that on the mountains of Corsica j and, if the former exceed the latter, they expect fair weather; if the reverse, rain: but I remained here long enough to find the prognostic fallible. One reverend meteorologist accounted to me still more philosophically for a chill which I once com- plained of in Lent. " This cold (said the priest) is a mortification peculiar to the holy season and will continue till Easter ; because it was cold when Peter sat at the High-priest's fire on the eve of the crucifixion." The Spring is short, for violent heat generally returns with the leaf. In Summer the mornings are intensely hot ; at noon the sea breeze springs up; the nights are damp, close, suffocating, when not ventilated by the maestrale. Pisa may reverse what physicians say of the capital — " They hardly conceive how people can live at Florence in Win- ter, or how they can die there in Summer." The Lung 'Arno di mezzo giorno, wliich is in fact the north side of the river, is usually recom- mended to invalids as the healthiest quarter of the city. The hottest it certainly is, for its curve tends to concentrate the meridian rays; but on that very account it appears to me scarcely ha- bitable in Summer. On this side, the house fronts are so THE CLIMATE. are baked by a powerful sun which throws into the chambers a close fetid warmth, and more than their proportion of the moisture which it pumps up. On the opposite side the houses are all damp, and many are covered with lichens. On both sides, the exhalations from the river seem unable to clear the lofty tops of the palaces which line it; for walking at night on the quays, I have often perceived my stick and my hair moistened with the descending vapours. On that account, being convinced that the general temperature of Pisa is mild enough for any constitution, I should prefer the quarter of Santo Spirito, or Via Santa Maria, as sharing only the common weather of the place, and being free from adventitious heat, or humi- dity. LUCCA. LiBERTAS. Inscription on the Gate. I ENTERED the Lucchese territory at Ripa- fratia. The very name of this place indicates how little the proudest imbankments can resist the Ser- chio, when its floods are repelled by a South wind. On passing this frontier I remarked a national change of feature, and a costume distinct from the Pisan. All the women were slip-shod : their dress was precisely alike ; — the colour scarlet. This little state is so populous, that very few acres, and those subject to inundation, are allotted to each farmer in the plain. Hence their superior skill in agriculture and draining; hence that va- riety of crops on every enclosure, which gives to the vale of Serchio the economy and show of a large kitchen garden. So rich is the creation of poor men who must render up to their landlord two-thirds of their produce, and sell him whatever he demands of the remainder at his own price ! Even 32 LUCCA. Even the little that is left to their own disposal they cannot sell at home; their very milk they must export every morning to a foreign state like Pisa. Oppressed, howrever, as this peasantry is, per- haps the advocates for large farms would find it difficult to prove that the Lucchese would pro- duce better crops, if tilled by fewer tenants. Italy might bring against that system the authority of her Virgil, her Pliny, her Columella; the example of Lucca where husbandry is so subdivided, that of Tuscany where the farms are so limited, that of the Roman state where they are so large. Every state in the peninsula is productive, I believe, in proportion to the number of farmers on a given space of land equally good. This plain is skirted by vine-clad hills, where the celebrated villas rise on such sites as court admiration from the city. Indeed they deserve to be conspicuous, as monuments of that ancient lordliness which dignified the Lucchesi with the epithet of Signori. The ramparts of the city, though neglected even as a walk, attest the same national magnificence. The cannon, once their ornament and happily nothing but an ornament, are gone. The armo- ry, which was also admired, and useless like the cannon. LUCCA. 33 cannon, is now empty. The palace of the republic, no longer the residence of the Gonfaloniere, bears a deserted and vacant aspect. This immense and august edifice makes the city round it look little^ yet only half the original design is completed. Those petty Italian states, when commercial and free, had a public soul too expansive for the body. In its present decline, I remarked through the city an air of sullen, negligent stateliness, which often succeeds to departed power ; a ceremonious gravity in the men, a sympathetic gloominess in the houses, and the worst symptom that any town can have — silence. The Cathedral is of the same age, and the same marble as that of Pisa; nor did I see any thing very peculiar here except a wide arched porch crowded with sculpture, and the round temple of the Santo Volto insulated in the nave. THE THE TUSCAN REPUBLICS. Ex Thusca Graecula facta est. Juv. Every city in Tuscany having been once a separate republic, still considers itself a nation dis- tinct from the rest, and calls their inhabitants fo- reigners. If we compare these httle states with those of ancient Greece, we shall find that in both countries the republics emerged from small prin- cipalities, they shook off the yoke by similar means, and they ended in a common lord who united them all. In both, we shall find a crowded population and a narrow territory; in both, a public mag- nificence disproportionate to their power ; in both, the same nursing love of literature and of the arts, the same nice and fastidious taste, the same am- bitious and excluding purity of language. Viewed as republics, the Tuscans and the Greeks were equally turbulent within their walls, and equally vain of figuring among foreign sovereigns; always jealous of their political independence, but often negligent of their civil freedom ; for ever shifting their alliances 4 THE TUSCAN REPUBLICS. S5 alliances abroad, or undulating between ill-balanced factions at home. In such alternations of power, the patricians became imperious, the commons blood-thirsty, and both so opposite, that nothing but an enemy at the gates could unite them. But in no point is the parallel so striking as in their hereditary hatred of each other. This pas- sion they fostered by insulting epithets. The Tus- cans called the Pisans traditoriy the Pistoians per^ versi, the Senese pa;222, the Florentines* ciechi, &c. The Greeks (take even Boeotia alone) gave Tanagra a nickname for envy, Oropus for avarice, Thespiae for the love of contradiction, &c. Nor was their hatred satisfied with mockery: it became serious upon every trifle. Athens waged a bloody war on iEgina for two olive stumps, the materials of two statues : Florence declared hostili- ties against Pistoia, on account of two marble arms which had been dismembered from one statue.'' The first private wars among the free cities of Italy broke out in Tuscany, between Pisa and Lucca. Tyrant never attacked tyrant with more exterminating fury, than these republics, the hy- pocrites of liberty, fought for mutual inthralment. No despot ever sported more cruelly with his slaves, than the Thessalians and Spartans did with D ^ their S& THE TUSCAN REPUBLICS. their Penestae and Helots, or the Florentines with their Pisan prisoners. These wretches were brought in carts to Florence, tied up like bale- goods : they were told over at the gates, and entered at the custom-house as common merchandise: they were then dragged more than half naked to the -Signoria, where they were obliged to kiss the posteriors of the stone Marzoccho which remains as a record of their shame, and were at last thrown into dungeons where most of them died. Such was lia rabbia Fiorentina che superba Fu a quel tempo si, com' ora e putta. The Florentines brought home in triumph tlie chains of the unfortunate harbour, and suspended them in festoons over the two venerable columns of porphyry which Pisa had presented in gratitude for a former service. The Pisan chains hang like a fair trophy on the foreign bank of Genoa ^ but to place them at Florence over those pledges of ancient friendship, betrayed a defect of moral taste, and to expose them still at that sacred door, which Michael Angelo thought worthy of paradise, tends only to keep up the individuality of those little states, which it is the interest of their common governor to efface. No trifle should be left to re- cord their separate independence, or to excite that repulsive action^ — that tendency to fly off from their present FLORENCE. 37 present cluster, which is doubly fatal in an age and a country so prone to partition. * The Florentines themselves account for their nickname ciechi, by the whiteness of their houses which blinds so many of ^he inhabitants ; but the other Tuscans contend that the epithet of Blind, applied nationally to Florence, should mean what it weant at Chalcedon. ^ E liete, in cambio d'arrecarle aiuto V Italiche citta del suo periglio Ruzzavano tra loro, non altrimenti Che disciolte poledre a calci e denti. Tassoiji. FLORENCE. GABINETTO FISICO. -Neqae ego illi detrahere ansim fiaerentem capiti multa cam laude coronara. Hor. 1 HIS was originally an assemblage of several scattered collections in natural history, and is therefore rather full than complete. It is richest in 38 FLORENCE. in fossils, corals, shells, and insects; but the grand object of this museum are the anatomical imita- tions. Wax was first used in imitating anatomy by Zumbo, a Sicilian of a melancholy, mysterious cast, some of whose works are preserved here. Three of these bear the gloomy character of the artist, who has exhibited the horrible details of the plague and the charnel-house, including the de- composition of bodies through every stage of pu- trefaction — the blackening, the swelling, the burst- ing of the trunk — the worm, the rat and the taran- tula at work — and the mushroom springing fresh in the midst of corruption. I was struck by the immensity of this collection, which occupies fourteen rooms ; yet, considered as a system, anatomists find it both defective and re- dundant. Sig. Fabbroni told me that many articles should be melted down as useless; that others were inaccurate; that all, from the yielding nature of the wax, wanted frequent retouching; and that, beginning anew, he could make the system more complete in half the compass. But such is ever the course of experiment. Every new step in science is the correction of an old one. Science may be considered as the art of remedies which both originate and end in defect. This FLORENCE. 39 This awful region which should be sa<;red to men of science is open to all. Nay, the very apartment where the gravid uterus and its pro- cesses lie unveiled is a favourite lounge of the ladies, who criticise aloud all the mysteries of sex. This museum is under the direction of Felice Fontana, now a cavaliere, yet more generally known than his brother by the title of Abbe; merely because he had once worn the clerical habit, from motives of economy. Fontana seems ^o preside here in the scientific world ; not by superior knowledge, for his is rather diffuse than deep; by bringing into science the man-of-the- world faculty, by a well-managed talent of display and evasion, which gains him credit for double what he knows, by the art of improving the in- ventions of others, and passing their joint work under his own name. In his hands every man's ability is available, and nothing is lost. Fontana is above that consequential reserve which many affect on subjects where they are known to excel. He readily detailed to me the history of imitative anatomy, *^ an art invented by Zumbo, and revived,'* said Fontana, " by me. I began with a very young artist, w^hom I in- structed to copy the human eye in wax. This I showed to Leopold, who pleased with the attempt, and 40 FLORENCE. and desirous that his sons should learn anatomy with- out attending dissections, ordered me to complete the whole system.'* '' I stood alone in a new art, without guide or assistants. Anatomists could not model, and mo- dellers were ignorant of interior anatomy. Thus obliged to form workmen for myself, I selected some mechanical drudges, who should execute my orders without intruding into my design. Superior artists are too full of their own plans to follow pa- tiently another's ; too fond of embellishing nature to toil in the slavish imitation which I required. Such difficulties I surmounted; but before I finish- ed the system, the funds had failed.'* This active Prometheus is creating a decompos- able statue, which will consist of ten thousand separable pieces, and three millions of distinct parts, both visible and tangible. I saw only the head and the upper region of the trunk ; but this machine appeared to me as sensible to the weather as its fleshly original is. The wood is so warped by the heat, that the larger contours are already perceptibly altered, and the pieces are connected by pegs which become unfit on every change of atmosphere. When I suggested this to the Ca- valiere — " The objection is nothing. Ivory is too dear : papier mache has been tried, but it fail- ed." Fontana FLORENCE. 41 Fontana succeeded so well with his wax in the rest of anatomy that he has appHed it even to the imitation of bones, and has substituted, with- out any necessity, a waxen skeleton for the real preparation. He has also employed wax as a supplement to the herbal, in copying the mush- rooms and the thick-leaved plants. Nay, he means to extend this imitation to the whole sylva of trees, and has already exhibited a few specimens of the stump cut horizontally with a twig, leaves, blossom and fruit. I asked him whether the real stump would not be truer, cheaper, and more du- rable than its waxen copy; but this objection glanced from his foil. Signor Fontana may boast that the first anato- mical cabinet in Europe was created under his direction ; but his direction, I have been assured, was only official. He left the business of direction to Manteucci and BonicoH,* and that of modelling to Ferini. Clemente Susini afterwards united both offices, and attained such skill in this museum that, from recollection alone, without consulting a real subject, and by combinations perfectly new, he has lately developed the whole lymphatic sys- tem on two statues only, with an accuracy which astonished the Pavians who had ordered them. Fortunately for Fontana*s pretensions, this young man is as modest as he is ingenious. The 42 FLORENCE. The Cavaliere has the merit of finding out, and sometimes of rearing talents which had been lost in obscurity ; but those talents he lays under un- sparing contributions to his own fame. He drew Sig. Giov. Fabbroni from a sphere where none would expect to find genius; but this singular man, who was half in all his labours, rose too ra- pidly for his patron. His genius opened to him ad- vantages and celebrity which were incompatible with the friendship of Fontana : language, literature, science broke down before him, and left him nothing to conquer but invidious, academic cabals. * Bonicoli, being reduced to want, lately drowned himself in the Amo. THE THE ROYAL GALLERY. 1 peregrini marini che vi foro Da dotta mano in varie forme scnlti, Pitture, e getti, e tant' altro lavoro. Ariosto. This gallery seemed deserted by the natives. The vacant frames and pedestals could only remind them of the treasures v^^hich were absent, and lessen their esteem for those which remained. On entering this grand repository the Founders meet you in the vestibule. Some of their busts are in red porphyry ; a substance the art of carving which had been long lost, but which, it is said, one of those Medici had the felicity to recover. But porphyry is, in my opinion, improper for statu- ary. Astatue should be of one colour. That colour, too, seems the best, which the least suggests any idea of colour, and is the freest from any gloss or radiance that may tend to shed false lights, and confuse vision. Hence I should prefer white mar- ble to black, black marble to bronze, bronze to gold, and any of them to a mottled surface like porphyry. The 44 THE ROYAL GALLERY. The first things that strike you in the gallery it- self, are some glaring Madonnas painted on wood by Greek artists in the tenth and eleventh centu- ries. These pictures are uniform ; the drapery of the Virgin is dark, but bespangled with stars; the posture of the child the same in all ; for when the divine maternity was acknowledged at Ephesus, the child was then first coupled with the Madonna, but the mode of painting both was fixed by the ritual. Painting in that age was satisfied with producing mere forms, and did not aspire at ex- pression or movement. Conscious of her own weakness, she called in the aid of gold, and azure, and labels, and even relief; for these pictures are raised like japan-work. They present all the mea- greness, the angular and distinct contours, the straight, stiff parallelism of attitude, the vacant yet pretty little features, which are common to the productions of unenlightened art: and are more or less perceptible in the Egyptian idol, the Gothic statue, the Indian screen, and the Chinese jar. The paintings of this gallery run strangely into series — a series of Florentine portraits classed on the ceiling in compartments of the same form — a series of 850 ilhistrious foreigners running on the same level in -frames of the same size — a series of 350 painters crowded into the sanie apartment — a series of the arts — a series of the elements, all exact to THE ROYAL GALLERY. 45 to the same dimensions. Such uniformity betrays the furnishing taste of a tradesman. Method and multitude are ever remote from excellence. What a disparity of forms in a select cabinet ! There every picture is a separate unit, and bears no re- lation to its neighbour. As to the merit of those pictures, I leave to the initiated all the metaphy- sics of that quality. I value painting only as it excites sentiment, nor do I ever presume to judge beyond the expression or story ; convinced by the absurdities which I have been so often condemned to hear, that the other parts of the art are myste- ries to all but the artist. The series of imperial statues and busts is the most valuable of all, as they shew the iconography, and the state of sculpture from Julius Cassar down to Constantine. Some individuals re-appear in se- veral busts, and in busts not always similar. No difference of age could reconcile to me the three which are called Julia, daughter of Titus. One head of Marcus Aurelius appeared to me different, even in its elements, from the rest. Those of his son Commodus are not very like each other, nor does any of them breathe the terrors and threats remarked by Herodian. Several doubts may be started on the sculpture of this gallery. The Ju- lius Caesar which begins this series bears no great resemblance to his effigy on coins. A head which had been long called Cicero now passes for Cor- buloj 46 THE ROYAL GALLERY. bulo; from its likeness, I presume, to the twa Gabine busts, which can plead only local proba- bilities for the name assigned to them. Two of the cross-legged Apollos have been lately degraded into Genii, and their swans into geese. Physiognomists, who can read sermons in stones, find a world of character and history in those imperial heads. They can discover habitual paleness in the face of a Caligula, can see the slaver dripping from the lips of a Claudius, and the smile of yet unsettled ferocity in a Nero. All this, I confess, sounds mystical to me. Some heads are certainly marked with appropriate mind ; but in others, as Titus, Didius, Septimius Severus, I looked for the men in vain. None of those heads are absolutely entire. Most of their noses and ears have been mutilated. In- deed, such defects were common even in an- cient galleries,* and may partly be imputed to the fury of ancient mobs. An imperial nose, however, may be always authentically restored, as it appears on coins in profile. In several busts the flesh is of white marble and the drapery of coloured ; but neither Homer, nor Virgil, nor Phidias, nor Canova, nor the Ve- nus which this gallery has lost, nor the Marsyas which remains,^ no authority can defend a mix- ture THE ROYAL GALLERY. 47 ture so barbarous. Sculpture admits no diversity of materials ; it knows no colour 5 it knows no- thing but shape. Its purpose is not to cheat the eye, but to present to the mind all the truth and beauty and grace and sublimity of forms. Did the excellence of a statue depend on the illusion produced, or on the number of idiots who mistake it for life, the Medicean Venus would then yield to every wax-work that travels from fair to fair. I saw nothing here so grand as the group of Niobe j if statues which are now disjoined, and placed equidistantly round a room may be so called. Niobe herself, clasped by the arm of her terrified child, is certainly a group, and, whether the head be original or not, the contrast of pas- sion, of beauty, and even of dress, is admirable. The dress of the other daughters appears too thin, too meretricious for dying princesses. Some of the sons exert too much attitude. Like gladiators, they seem taught to die picturesquely, and to this theatrical exertion we may perhaps impute the want of ease and of undulation, which the critics condemn in their forms. One of the cabinets is full of Etruscan idols and penates, with their implements of worship both earthen and bronze. Those little images came probably from the lazaria; some of them are mi- nute enough for the lazaria of children 5 some are as 48 THE ROYAL GALLERY.' as rude as a barber's block; some are wrapt like the " statuae compernes'* in swathing clothes, and lead us back to the very cradle of art, and the in- fancy of the style called Etruscan. There is certainly a class of statues scattered over Italy, which bear a family likeness in their long faces, their pointed chins, their flat eyes and simpering mouths. But who has removed all doubt of their country ? who can now trace the fine limit which separates this manner of design from the later Egyptian, or the earlier Greek ?^ Stiffness of form does not indicate nation, but age; not Etruscan art alone, but the art of all rude times and retired situations. * Et Curios jam dimidios, humeroque minorem Corvinum, et Galbam auriculis nasoque carentem. — JuvenaL ^ Homer brings gold, silver, and tin into the sculpture of Achilles' shield. — Virgil admires the effect of gold on marble: *' Pariusve lapis circundatur auro." — Phidias composed both his Jupiter and his Minerva of ivory and gold. He also inserted metal bridles into the heads of the marble horses which have been lately carried off from the frieze of the Parthenon. — Canova has given a golden cup and spinther to his Hebe. — The Venus de' Medici and the daughters of Niobe have their ears pierced for jewels. — The two Mar^j/as are of white marble interspersed with red stains to represent the flayed flesh ; and, in gems, this figure is generally carved on red jasper. So common a statue was Marsyas in ancient Rome, and so invariably were his hands bound, as they are here, over his distorted visage, that Juvenal's image THE ROYAL GALLERY. 49 image would be more obvious to the Romans, and more a pic- ture, if read *' ceu Marsya vinctus" The ancients always affixed bronze heads, hands, and feet, to alabaster bodies, from prescription alone, which seemed to re- gulate those barbarisms, and give laws to deformity. ^ The Egyptian statues may be considered as a part of the architecture for which they were formed, and have all the so- lidity proper for their office. Their backs are flattened for ad- hering to the wall, their arms stick close to their flanks ; and the head is secured to the shoulders by broad taeniae, or by tresses falling down to the breast. Such protections have preserved entire some statues of Isis and Serapis, which are older than the Ptolemies. The sculpture of Greece, also, sprang out of architecture. Pausanias saw in Laconia some statues which had not fully emerged from the form of columns. Ruder than any Hermes, they consisted merely in shafts, on which a face was carved for the capital, and toes for the base. The Caryatides appear to have been afterwards adopted in the Greek architecture, merely as an imitation of those earlier antiques. We may still trace the statue blended with the column in the temple of Pandrosos at Athens. Etruria received its gods, and consequently its statuary, either by direct or by secondary emigrations from both those countries ; but from Egypt it also contracted that priestly dread of innovation which checked all improvement. I should, there- fore, attribute what Winkelmann calls the second and third styles of Etruscan sculpture, either to Greece, or to the Greek part of Italy. E LIBRARIES, LIBRARIES. Multiplici pariter condita pelle latent. Mart. The Laurentian library contains only the public manuscripts, which are chained to desks and wrapt in woollen clothes. Ancient manuscripts, being in their nature unique and their loss irreparable, will justify the precaution of securing them, when thus exposed to the world. But how illiberal do the chains appear in some colleges tethering print- ed books which money can always replace ! The oldest monument that this library possessed was the Virgil written, it is supposed, in the reign of Valens, and corrected by the consul Asterius in the fifth century ; but this celebrated book, which had been formerly stolen and re-stolen by priests, disappeared during the late war, and is now lost for ever to Florence. Tlie Pandects were better guarded, and sent to Palermo for safety. Government, indeed, had always kept LIBRARIES. 51 kept them under its own key, and opened them only by torch-light to the great, on an order from the senate. Tradition says that this famous code was discovered in a barrel at Amalfi ; and Hume, who believes the story, ascribes to this discovery the revival of the Roman law. But it is far more probable that the Pisans brought it from Constan- tinople while their commerce flourished in the Levant, and it is certain that, before they took Amalfi, Irnerius had been teaching the Pandects at Bologna. The earliest works that now remain here, of a date inscribed or otherwise ascertained, are some venerable classics, both Greek and Latin, of the eleventh century, which are far more legible than the illuminated writing that succeeded. In the older illuminations I saw nothing to admire but the brilliancy of their colours, which were used in the virgin state, perhaps only because the art of mixing them was unknown. This brilliancy is, I believe, the chief merit of Gothic miniature, if any thing can be called merit that arises from ignorance. Some of those illuminations came from the pen- cil of Oderisi, whom Dante extols as " the honour of the art.*' This art, however, grew into a lux- ury which was baneful to learning. Every copyist became a painter, and wasting his time in the em- E 2 bellishing 52 LIBRARIES. bellishing of books, rendered books in general rare. Early in the fifteenth century this art made a most rapid progress, as appears very eminently in some of these manuscripts -, and Attaventi, who wrought for the magnificent founder of this library, had brought it near to perfection, when printing put a check to its importance. Hence the works usually shown here as objects of beauty, such as the Pliny, the Homer, the Ptolemy, the Missal of the Flo- rentine Republic, are all of that age, and contain portraits of the Medici painted in the initials and margins. The first illuminator of the present day is Ciatti, whom I found here at work supplying lost or damaged leaves. This ingenious artist copies in fac-simile the waiting of every age, and gives to vellum the due tinge of antiquity. His enrichments have all the system of modern composition, though inferior to the old illuminations in their general effect. In the former we admire an harmonious design ; in the latter a rich confusion. Such is an English carpet compared with a Persian. The Magliahecchian library is the great reposi- tory of printed books, and the seat of the Floren- tine academy, a name in which the Delia Crusca and two others are now lost. It has been the fate of the greatest libraries to resound LIBRARIES. 53 I: resound with the trifling of poets. Asinius Pollio founded the first poetical meeting and the first public library in Rome, probably for each other. ^ The Apollo and the Ulpian were appropriated to the ancient recitations. The Magliabecchian af- fords a similar vent to a thousand ephemeral poems, which could never aspire to a place on its shelves. I once attended here a solemn Accademia, which always supposes the presence of the sove- reign. The king, however, was only represented by his picture hung on the throne, and his chair of state was reversed on the audience. On each side of the throne were academicians seated round tables, and in the gallery was a band of music, the only thing excellent that I heard. Sarchiani, being Lettore d'eloquenza Toscana, opened the Accademia with an oration elegantly dressed in the common-place of an elogy. Then music. Next rose La Fantastici and read a copy of verses on the late peace; a subject which enter- ed allusively into all the succeeding compositions in Italian, Latin, and Greek. These were read by their authors. My blind acquaintance Giotti re- cited some sonnets. Music and applause crowned the recitations; but the applause came chiefly from the academicians themselves, for the audience gradually withdrew muttering — " seccatura P* IMPROVVISATORI. IMPROVVISATORI. Andiamo al bel cimento SuUe all del momento. La Fantastici. Florence has been long renowned for Improv- visatori. So early as the 15th century the two bUnd brothers Brandolini excelled here in singing Latin extempore. The crowned and pensioned Gorilla drew lately the admiration of all Italy, and Sig- nora Fantastici is now the improvvisatrice of the day. This lady convenes at her house a crowd of ad- mirers, whenever she chooses to be inspired. The first time I attended her accademia, a young lady^ of the same family and name as the great Michael Angelo began the evening by repeating some verses of her own composition. Presently La Fan- tastici broke out into song in the words of the motto, and astonished me by her rapidity and command of numbers, which flowed in praise of the fair poetess, and brought her poem back to our IMPROVVISATORI. 55 our applause. Her numbers, however, flowed ir- regularly, still varying with the fluctuation of sen- timent; while her song corresponded, changing from aria to recitativo, from recitativo to a mea- sured recitation. She went round her circle and called on each person for a theme. Seeing her busy with her fan, I proposed the Fan as a subject; and this little weapon she painted as she promised, " col pennel divino di fantasia felice.'^ In tracing its origin she followed Pignotti, and in describing its use she acted and analyzed to us all the coquetry of the thing. She allowed herself no pause, as the mo- ment she cooled her estro would escape. So extensive is her reading that she can chal- lenge any theme. One morning, after other clas- sical subjects had been sung, a Venetian count gave her the boundless field of Apollonius Rhodius, in which she displayed a minute acquaintance with all the argonautic fable. Tired at last of demi- gods, I proposed the sofa for a task, and sketched to her the introduction of Cowper's poem. She set out with his idea, but, being once entangled in the net of mythology, she soon transformed his sofa into a Cytherean couch, and brought Venus, Cupid and Mars on the scene; for such embroidery enters into the web of every improvvisatore. I found this morning-accademia flatter than the first. Perhaps 56 IMPROVVISATORI. Perhaps Poetry, being one of the children of plea- sure, may, like her sisters, be most welcome in the evening. I remarked that La Fantastici, when speaking of her art, gave some cold praise to her rival La j Bandettini; but she set an old Tuscan peasant above all the tribe, as first in original and poetic thinking. She seemed then to forget her once- admired Gianni, the Roman Stay-maker. This crooked son of Apollo was the contested gallant of the first beauties in Florence, where he displayed powers yet unequalled in impromptu ; defying all the ohbligaxioni or shackles that the severest au- dience could impose on him, yet the very idea of imposition is a violence fatal to genius. The poetical commands thus executed, like laureate odes and other tasks, may shew skill, prac- tice, talent^ but none of the higher felicities of art. Such " strains pronounced and sung unmedi- tated, such prompt elegance,'' such sentiment and imagery flowing in rich diction, in measure, in rhyme, and in music, without interruption, and on subjects unforeseen, all this must evince in La Fantastici a wonderful command of powers ; yet, judging from her studied and published composi- tions, which are dull enough, I should suspect that this impromptu-exercise seldom leads to poetical IMPROVVISATORI. 5? poetical excellence. Serafino d^Acquila, the first improvvisatore that appeared in the language, was gazed at in the Italian courts as a divine and in- spired being, till he published his verses and dis- pelled the allusion. . An Italian improvvisatore has the benefit of a language rich in echoes. He generally calls in the accompaniment of song, a lute, or a guitar, to set off his verse and conceal any failures. If his theme be difficult, he runs from that into the near- est common-place, or takes refuge in loose lyric measures. Thus he may always be fluent, and sometimes by accident be bright. I once heard a little drama given extempore with great effect, from the acting talent of the poet : but dramatic poetry is not so much the sub- ject of Italian impromptu, as it was among the Greeks. The Greek language and the Italian ap- pear to me equally favourable to this talent. Equally rich and harmonious and pliant, they allow'poets to alter the length and the collocation of words, to pile epithets on epithets, and some- times to range among different dialects. From attending to the Italian improvvisatori, I began to find out or to fancy several points in which they resemble their great predecessor Homer. I remarked in both the same openness of style and simplicity 58 IMPROVVISATORI. simplicity of construction, the same digressionsj rests, repetitions, anomalies. Homer has often recourse to shifts of the moment, like other im- provvisatori.'' Like them he betrays great inequa- lities. Sometimes when his speech is lengthening into detail, he cuts it short and concludes. Some- times when the interest and difficulty thicken, the poet escapes, like his heroes, in a cloud. I once thought of Homer in the streets of Florence, where I saw a poor cyclic bard most cruelly perplexed in a tale of chivalry. He wished to unravel j but every stanza gave a new twist to his plot. His hearers seemed impatient for the denouement, but still the confusion increased. At last, seeing no other means of escape, he vented his poetical fury on the skin of his tambourine, and went off with a " maledetto.'* * Homer seems to have kept a stock of hemistichs, which re- cur incessantly at the close of verses; as t'jreoc 'jrrefoevroc vpoa-vivScc' 6i« yXayKft/Ti? *A^^fv), &c.; expletive epithets, as, ^Toq — 5a»jxovtu, &c., which appear in so many, and so opposite meanings that they cease to have any meaning at all ; expletive phrases which he ap- plies indiscriminately, as the op^ct(/i.oi; uvSpuv, both to the monarch and the swine-herd; set forms which introduce his speeches, as, Tlv 5'a9r«ft«^o/x6»os wpoas^i?, &c. — or else begin them, as, aM§e5 Irs ^tXo», &c., and thus leave him time to collect thoughts for the speech itself. When he has killed off one warrior, in comes the Avirn:Ka, feast, to refresh himself as well as his heroes ! How often does the H*^os S'wptysvwa ^a>»i, &c. begin the business of the day ! The return THE THEATRE. 59 return of such passages was a breathing place to the improvvisa- tore. The names and titles which he heaps on his Gods, were only, says Luc i an, an expedient to fill up a verse. Such was Homer and such the Italian ; both literally singers ; and the harp of the 'tf o*3of is now most generally represented by a guitar. THE THEATRE. Quam non adstricto percarrat pnlpita socco ! Hor. The Italian theatre would be the oldest now in existence, if traced up to the Istrioni of the 12th century ; but those were mere ballad-singers, and never rose to histrionic imitation. No dialogue was attempted before the moralities of the next age, nor did these monkish pastimes bear any other mark of drama, until the history of Abraham appeared here in 1449. Thirty years afterwards Politian revived, in his Orfeo, the ancient form of acts and choruses ; a form which excited so many imitations of the Greek, that a regular theatre, the first 60 THE THEATRE. first in modern Europe, was built at Milan in 1490 on the Greek model. Tragedy now began to speak Italian. The first was Carretto's Sofonisba in 1502 5 for that of Tris- sino did not appear till 1515. After a lapse of some years came Alamanni, Martelli, Speroni, Giraldi, Anguillara, Dolce, Tasso, Torelli. All these tragedians wrote on the ancient plan in long solemn dialogues, quite foreign from the purpose of playing, and as heroically stiff as our own imi- tations of the Greek drama. Comedy was first introduced by Hercules, duke of Ferrara, in his translation from Plautus. Then came Ariosto with a comedy of his own. The crowd that succeeded wrote plays as exercises for princes and scholars, who recited those comedies, now called " Erudite,** in courts, academies, and colleges. The very title, the purpose, the place, and the players, seem to have condemned the whole species to stupidity and oblivion. The best of that class were unfortunately obscene, a vice unknown on the present stage. The " Commedie dell* arte** took a different aim. Being made for a profession of men who subsisted on the public curiosity, they were obliged to catch and to reflect all the popular humours. Their very] essence was action, they seldom ventured THE THEATRE. 61 ventured into print, their plots alone were chalked out, and the dialogue was trusted to the extempo- rary wit of the actors. Each of these was confined to a single character, and bred to his own mask ; yet though always re-appearing as Harlequin and his fellows, those maskers could furnish an inces- sant variety of story, satire, and fun. Tragedy could not, like her sister, descend to the mob; and therefore sunk under the heavy coalition of her scholastic poets and gentlemen- players. To rouse her from this lethargy, they applied the fatal remedy of music. In 1597 Vec- chi and Rimuccini introduced the recitativo into tragedy, and about fifty years afterwards, II Cig- nonini interspersed this recitativo with airs. The result was the Opera, that genuine child of the Seicento, Nothing so extravagantly unnatural as the opera has ever stood so long. For the opera, Italians have erected their grandest theatres, invented a new system of decoration, instituted academies, and mutilated men. Music, though introduced only as an assistant to tragedy, soon became the prin- cipal ; and any poetry was thought good enough for an entertainment where no poetry could be un- derstood. The musical demon fell next upon comedy, and begot 6^ THE THEATRE. begot the monster called opera huffa ; a composi^ tion more wretched, if possible, than the serious melo-drama. This last innovation, however, pam- pered the two great appetites of the nation with music and buffoonery, and drew the upper classes of society away from poor prosaic Harlequin, who sunk to the level of our Bartholomew-Fair. In this low state was the Italian theatre when Goldoni appeared. Obliged, like Moliere, to ac- quiesce for a while in the established barbarisms, he at first wrote for the old masks ; but, introduc- ing beauties which were foreign and unfit for them, he gradually refined the taste of his spectators, made them ashamed of their former favourites, and then ventured to exclude the whole Harlequin family. Chiari and his adherents clamoured against this exclusion; but Goldoni has so completely succeeded, that his own masked comedies are now banished from the regular stage to the marionette. This revolution necessarily reduced the number of acting plays, and though Federici is very diligent in supplying the deficiency, the public seems at present to prefer translations from the German and French to Italian originals. The players seem to keep pace with the poets in improvement. As if ashamed of their descent from the ^* maschere deir arte," they have re- nounced the rant and buffoonery of the old stage, and THE THEATRE. 63 and affect a temperance bordering upon tameness. Yet still degraded in society, subject in some states of Italy to a police as humiliating as the ancient,' and every where rated below the warbling wethers of the opera, they claim no respect for an art which denies them the rank and emolument of liberal artists : they style it only recitation ; they expose, like showmen in the streets, their scenes *^ painted upon a pole and underwrite'' and they close each performance with a long imploring, invitation to the next. The theatrical year is divided into four or five seasons. Each season brings a different company of performers to each theatre. The singers and dancers, whom I ignorantly omit in this review, are perpetually changing their engagements ; but the comedians adhere to their manager, and follow him from city to city. Most of the comic troops are composed of Lombards, and of these the best are inlisted under Goldoni, a relation of the great dramatist. In his company are the two first actors of the day, Zanerini and Andolfati. Zanerini's walk is the " padre nobile," and surely in pathetic old characters he carries the exquisite and the forceful as far as they can exist together. Andolfati excels as a caratteristay and has dra- matised 64 THE THEATRE. matised for himself some passages in the life of Frederic lid., whom he imitates, tale quale, in his voice, walk, and manner. But Andolfati's merit rises far above mimickry ; he can thrill the heart as well as shake the sides, and (what is more difficult than either) he can excite through long scenes that secret intellectual smile which, like the humour of Addison, never fatigues. The scene of their plays lies often in England ; yet they dress English characters wide of all truth. I saw Milord Bonfil appear in three different co- medies, with a broad silver lac^ on the calf of his right leg to represent the garter. Their scenery often corresponds with their dress. Ill painted, ill set, inappropriate, rumpled, ragged and slit, it presents its strolling poverty in the face of the noblest architecture. No illusion can be attempt- ed on a stage, where the prompter rises in the front, and reads the whole play as audibly as his strutting echoes who, froni their incessant change of parts, can be perfect in none. Their benefits are not conducted with much de- licacy. A prima donna is bound to call on all the gentry of the place, to solicit their attendance. On the evening allotted to her, she sits greedily at the receipt of custom, and bows for every crown that is thrown on her tea-tray. The price of a ticket is but three Pauls, nor will this appear so low, TH.E THEATRE. 65 low, when you consider the short roll of actors, their small salaries, their mean wardrobe, and the cheap composition of an orchestra, where noble- men volunteer their fiddles with the punctuality of hirelings. Every theatre in Tuscany has its epithet and device, as the Immobili and their windmill, the Jnfuocati and their bomb, &c. An epithet, de- vice, and motto, were thought necessary here to every society, to every prince, to every academy, and to every academician. Previous to Alfieri, there was not a tragedy in the Italian language that would now draw an au- dience. The players, therefore, finding nothing else better adapted to the buskin, had recourse to Metastasio*s operas, which they still recite occa- sionally, omitting the airs. But verses composed for a composer of music are not the language of men speaking to men ; nor can much passion be excited by speeches so antithetical, so measured, and so balanced as those of Metastasio. Hence tragedy is but seldom performed, and very few performers excel in that sphere. No tragic genius has yet appeared here equal to that of a boy, who died lately at the age of fifteen. This little prodigy was the son of Count Montanti, governor of Leghorn. Though born a dwarf, he F had 66 THE THEATRE. had the perceptions of a hero -, he could grasp the gigantic thoughts of Alfieri, present them to their author in all their original grandeur, and force him, against his nature, to admire. Alfieri is, next to Dante, the Italian poet most difficult to Italians themselves. His tragedies are too patriotic and austere for the Tuscan stage. Their construction is simple, perhaps too simple, too sparing of action and of agents. Hence his heroes must often soliloquize, he must often de- scribe what a Shakspere would represent, and this to a nation immoderately fond of picture. Every thought, indeed, is warm, proper, energe- tic ; every word is necessary and precise ; yet this very strength and compression, being new to the language and foreign to its genius, have rendered his style inverted, broken,"* and obscure; full of ellipses, and elisions ; speckled even to affectation with Dantesque terms ; without pliancy, or flow, or variety, or ease. Yet where lives the tragic poet equal to Alfieri ? Has England or France one that deserves the name ? Schiller may excel him in those peals of terror which thunder through his gloomy and tem- pestuous scenes ; but he is poorer in thought, and inferior in the mechanism of his dramas. Alfieri's conduct is more open than his works to censure. THE THEATRE. 6? censure. Though born in a monarchy, and living under mild princes, this Count concentered in his heart all the pride, brutality, and violence of the purest aristocracies that ever raged in Genoa or Venice. Whoever was more or less than noble was the object of his hatred or his contempt. The same pen levelled his Tirannide against princes, and his Antigallican against plebeians. The patri- otism which he once put on could never sit easy upon such a mind, nor fall naturally into the forms and postures of common life. He forced it on so violently ; that it burst, and was thrown aside. This hatred of princes led him to dedicate his Agis to our Charles 1st. I admit the jurisdiction of posterity over the fame of dead kings. But was it manly, was it humane, to call up the shade of an accomplished prince, a prince fully as unfortu- nate as he was criminal, on purpose to insult him with a mock-dedication ? and of all Italians, did this become Alfieri, the reputed husband of that very woman whose sterility has extinguished the race of Charles ? His aristocratical pride, working on a splenetic constitution, breaks out into disgusting eccentrici- ties, meets you at his very door,*^ bars up all his approaches, and leaves himself in the solitude of a sultan. How unbecoming of a poet was his con- duct to General Miollis, the declared friend of all F 2 poets 68 THE THEATRE. poets living and dead ! How often has he descend- ed from his theatrical stateliness to the lowest scurrility ! How true is his own description of himself ! Or stimandomi Achille ed or Tersite. * " Praetoribus jus virgarum in histriones esset." — Tac. In one part of Lucian we find the players subject to be whipped at the discretion of the audience ; in another we find the a6^o0£T» exercising that right. They He under the same scourge in the pope's dominions. ^ The periodical and voluminous style of Italian tragedies having led actors into a musical monotony, it was to correct this vice that Alfieri cut his speeches into short and unequal members. Such a precaution at first betrayed him into a harsh- ness of versification which, though indignant at the critics who dared to blame it, he was obhged to file down in the second edi- tion of his plaj^s. Parini told him his defect fairly : Dove il pensier tuona Non risponde la voce arnica e franca. ** He posted up in his lobby the following advertisement, which breathes precisely the same sentiment as his answer to iGeneral Miollis, who had politely invited him to his quarters : " Vittorio Alfieri non riceve in casa ne persone, ne ambasciate di quelli che non conosce e da' quali non dipende." The following was his grateful return to Count Delce for a present of two tragedies : Tragedie due gia fc Che il solo sa Satire or fa Saran tragedie tre. Of his scurrility take this elegant specimen addressed to ano- ther poet : Losco, fosco, io ti conosco ; Se avessi pane, non avreSti tosco. ARCHITECTURE, ARCHITECTURE. Tal SOPRA SA8S0 SASSO dl giro in giro eternamente 10 strussi ', Che cosi passo passo, Alto girando al ciel mi ricondussi. Inscription, The edifice which commands our chief attention here, as beginning a new era in the history of architecture, is the Cathedral founded by Lapo in 1298, and crowned by the cupola of Brunelleschi, the object of the above inscription. This is the first church that Italians raised in the present proportions of the arcade. It is gene- rally considered as a mean between the Gothic style and the Greek; yet nothing can, I conceive, be more remote from either. In opposition to the fretted, frittered surfaces, and spiry flights of the Gothic, here is the most naked simplicity and strength unconcealed. Of the Greek, on the other hand, not a particle entered into the original idea. Instead of columns, the exterior decoration con- sists 70 ARCHITECTURE. sists of three kinds of marbles composed into panels, and the interior in pillars and round arches; but no arches were known in Greek architecture, nor can be traced in the ruins of Greece. What architecture then is this but the ancient Roman, revived as completely as the pur- poses of a church would admit? Brunelleschi has raised here the first double cu- pola, and, I believe, the widest in Europe. No columns assist as latent buttresses to shore it up. The same coloured marbles that face the walls continue their decoration round the drum. Though this cupola is polygonal, and bears on the perpendicular, it may fairly be considered as the prototype of St. Peter's. Michael Angelo drew his famous bravado from the Pantheon, but this grand enterprise of Brunelleschi gave him the assurance of performing it. Under the cupola is the choir, corresponding in plan with the great polygon above ; but its Ionic elevation, though fine, is at variance with the fabric, and seems a beauty as foreign to this cathedral as the Grecian screen is to that of Win* Chester. Cathedrals in general, lying under the control of tasteless men, have lost their original unity, and become mere galleries of architecture ; in which specimens of every style are built side by side, just as pictures of every school are hung upon ARCHITECTURE. ?! upon the same wall. A choir thus enclosed is ne- cessarily darker than the nave. Here is just that •* dim religious light** which pleases poetical and devout minds ; a light which heightens the effect of the lamps and candles, of the gold, silver, and brocade of catholic worship, while it shades the mediocrity of the paintings and sculpture. This cathedral contains very few pictures, and none of any value. I remarked a portrait of the English condottiero John Hawkwood, painted and even cut out on horseback j nay, loaden with mi- litary praise for having sold the Pisans, who sub- sidized him, to their Florentine enemies. Such honours lavished on a traitor were disgraceful to a whole republic. Next to our worthless countryman stands the venerable form of Dante, painted by Orcagna se- veral years after his death, and placed here by the republic which had condemned him to the stake. Such was the poor palinodia that Florence paid to the man who made her language the standard of Italy : while three foreigners, in three different ages, raised to him in a foreign state his sarcopha- gus and tomb and funeral chamber. Well might he call his countrymen Qaello 'ngrato popolo maligno Che discese di Fiesole ab antico, £ tien' anchor del monte e del macigno. I have 1% ARCHITECTURE. I have been assured that not only this, but all the portraits now existing of Dante are, like those of " our divine poet,'* posthumous : yet as all re- semble this venerable work of Orcagna, uniformity has given a sanction to the common ^^\^y of the bard. Not so Shakspere's. Most of the portraits that pass for his are dissimilar 5 the only e^\^y re- corded by a contemporary was in bronze. None of the pictures are authentic, none certainly ori- ginal, none such as the mind can repose on, and fix its idolatry.* The other churches of Florence have nothing very peculiaror important in their construction. The chapel de Depositi is a work of Michael Angelo's, and the first he ever built ; but the design is petty and capricious: its two orders are insignificant and altogether unworthy of the impressive monu- ments which he raised within it. The contiguous chapel de' Medici is more noble and more chaste in the design itself; though its architect was a prince, and its walls were destined to receive the richest crust of ornament that ever was lavished on so large a surface. The palaces may be divided into two classes: those of republican date, and the modern. The former had originally towers, like the Pisan, which were introduced towards the close of the tenth century, as a private defence in the free cities of Italy. ARCHITECTURE. 75 Italy. To these succeeded a new construction, more massive, if possible, and more ostentatiously severe than the Etruscan itself; a construction which fortified the whole basement of the palace with large, rude, rugged bossages, and thus gave always an iuiposing aspect, and sometimes a ne- cessary defence to the nobility of a town for ever subject to insurrection. Such are the palaces of the Medici, the Strozzi, the Pitti. This harsh and exaggerated strength prevails only below. The upper stories are faced with vermiculated blocks or free-stone, and the^ whole is crowned with an overpowering cornice which projects beyond all example. Here, indeed, are no co- lumns to regulate its proportions, and its very ex- cess diffuses below a certain grandeur distinct from the character of any other architecture. The court is generally surrounded with Greek orders, and bears no analogy to the outside. The modern palaces are generally faced with stucco, but not painted. A few near Santa Croce are hatched with figures " al ^sgraffitOy' a style peculiar to Polidore Caravaggio. The larger pa- laces, such as the Capponi, &c., run rather into long fronts than quadrangular courts. Their doors and windows are admirably designed, and being sparingly distributed they leave an air of solidity and grandeur on the wall. The •J^' ARCHITECTURE. The interior distribution accords with the length of front. One line of doors enfilades the apart- ments and lays open the whole house; a plan^ rather incommodious for private life, but very proper for a gala, and suited to a hot climate. It sometimes, indeed, makes a thoroughfare of Sig- nora*s bed-chamber ; but those sacred retirements which an Englishwoman requires are unnecessary in a country where ladies affect no restraint, and feel embarrassed by no intrusion. In every house the lower rooms are vaulted. The upper apart- ments are hung very generally with silk ; never with paper. The walls are coated with a stucco W^hich is rather gritty, but well adapted for fresco- painting. Columns are very seldom employed in public works : and no where happily. In the " piazza della SS. Nunziata" the porticos are composed of arches resting on Corinthian columns, a combina- tion every where wrong, and here very meagre in its effect. In the Uffizzi the columns stand too high for so solid an order as the Doric. The tri- umphal arch of San Gallo is a hideous accumula- ,tion of orders and sculpture, in the most perfect opposition to the grave and austere architecture of the city which it announces. Some of the principal edifices have remained for ages unfinished — such as the Cathedral, St.Lorenzo, Santa ARCHITECTURE. ^$ Santa Croce, Santo Spirito, the chapel of the Medici, &c. The Pitti palace wants a wing ; the Strozzi half its entablature; the vestibule of the Laurentian Library is still encumbered by the very scaffolding which Michael Angelo erected. In the same unfinished state I saw several sta- tues of this mighty master ; — the dead Christ at the cathedral ; the Madonna ; the day and the twihght at the tombs of the Medici ; the bust of Brutus in the royal gallery; the Victory in the Palazzo Vecchio -} — and so sacred is the terror of Michael's genius, that these statues remain un- touched, and inviolate in the midst of restorers who are daily trifling with the sculpture of antiquity. So many works thus began and abandoned cannot all be considered as failures of the chisel ; which certainly, in the heat and confidence of genius, he drove sometimes too deep into the marble. Some, perhaps, we should impute to the fastidious taste of an artist who rejected whatever came short of his first conceptions ; some, to his rapid succes- sion of designs, which were too numerous and too grand even for a life of ninety years, made still more productive by the ambidexter faculty. * Dante and Shakspere form a striking parallel. They are the master-bards of Italy and England. They are oppressed with praise and annotation at home, and ridiculed as barba- rians 76 ARCHITECTURE. rians by foreign critics. Dante rose before the dawn of letters in Italy : and Shakspere soon after they had spread to England. They found their native tongues without system or limit ; but the creative genius of each formed another language within his own. The Dantesque style^nd the Shaksperian are peculiar as their creators, and still enter like authorities into common Itahan and English : to add nerve, and spirit, and dignity, and beauty. Both have stood the obliterating waste of ages, have seen younger styles grow old and disappear, have survived all the short-lived fopperies of literature, and flourish now in unabated fashion, inviting and resisting ten thousand imitations. Altri Danteggia Era duri versi brancola, e s'avvolge, E si perde d' Averno tra le bolge. Pignotti. ^ I saw several of his drawings at the Buonarroti palace in the same half-finished state. Most of those are the sketches of a boy, but a boy who broke out an original sculptor at the age of fourteen; and who excelled most in that part of sculpture which forms the very essence of drawing. I saw nothing finished ex- cept a Christ extended as on the cross, and a figure of Fortune on her wheel; both in red chalk, on thin paper; and both full of singularity and mind. His paintings in the library are much defaced ; his books have lately disappeared ; but the bust re- mains and is the best resemblance extant of the immortal foun- der : for John Bologn has given the full contusion on his nose which was flattened, as the story runs, by the fist, or, as a relation of his own assured me, by the mallet of an invidious rival. Though all the great artists of that age affected universality, none united so many talents as Michael Angelo. Sculptor, painter, poet, architect, civil and military engineer, mechanist ; in short, here he is every thing. An Italian, when at a loss for the au- thor of any object that you admire, will immediately rank it among the labours of M. Angelo, the Hercules of modern art. I once ENVIRONS. 77 I once stopped to examine some cart-wheels which were lying in the Campo Vaccino, when the maker came out, expatiated on the advantage of their enormous diameter, and gave Michael Angelo for the inventor, — " Michael Angelo ?" said I,—" yes, surely ; else why was he named Buonarroti ?" ENVIRONS. -Sic fortis Etruria crevit. Virg. The environs of Florence owe their beauty to a race of farmers who are far more industrious, in- telligent, and liberal/ than their neighbours born to the same sun and soil. Leopold toiled to make his peasants all comfortable, and the steward takes care that none shall be rich. They pass the year in a vicissitude of hard labour and jollity ; they are seldom out of debt, and never insolvent. Negli- gent of their own dress, they take a pride in the flaring silks and broad ear-rings of their wives and daughters. These assist them in the field; for the farms, being too small to support servants, are laboured 78 ENVIRONS. laboured in the patriarchal style by the brothers, sisters, and children of the farmer. Few of the proprietors round Florence will grant leases ^ yet so binding is the force of pre- scription, so mutual the interest of landlord and tenant, and so close the intertexture of their pro- perty, that removals are very rare, and many now occupy the farms which their forefathers tilled during the Florentine republic. The stock of these farms belongs half to the landlord, and half to the tenant. This partnership extends down to the poultry and pigeons : the only pecillium of the farmer is the produce of his hives. Hence the cattle run usually in pairs. One yoke of bullocks is sufficient for a common farm. Their oxen are all dove-coloured ; even those which are imported from other states change their coat in Tuscany, where they are always fed in the stall, and never go out but to labour. They are guided in the team by reins fixed to rings which are in- serted in their nostrils : sometimes two hooks jointed like pincers are used like the postomis of Lucilius, which has teazed so many antiquaries. Every field in the environs of Florence is ditched round, lined with poplars, and intersected by rows of vines or olive-trees. Those rows are so close as to impede the plough ; and here indeed, the plough, though ENVIRONS. 79 though it saves labour, is thought to lessen the produce. On this account the tenant is bound by his landlord to dig, or rather to shovel one-third of his farm with the triangular spade. This rich plain of the Val d*Arno yields usually two harvests a year, the first of wheat, the second of some green crop 5 but the second crop is some* times ploughed up, and left to rot on the field as manure for the next. This course is interrupted every third or fourth year by a crop of Turkey corn, sometimes of beans or rye, and more rarely of oats. Barley was unknown here until the breweries lately established at Florence and Pisa called it into cultivation. As you approach the skirts of this narrow plain, you perceive a change in agriculture. The vine and the olive prevail ; and corn ceases to be its principal object. What a variety of arts, and these very complicate, does a single farm put in action ! In addition to our objects of husbandry, the Tuscan must produce wine, oil, and silk, which constitute the principal exports of the state. Of corn an average crop brings only five returns in the Flo- rentine territory ; in the Senese eight or nine ; and the aggregate affords but ten months' subsist- ence to all Tuscany, although the mountaineers live mostly on chesnuts.^ This 80 ENVIRONS. This garden of Tuscany seems to require more manure than it produces. To keep it perpetually in crop the farmers must resort to the infectious sewers of the city ; they send poor men and asses to pick up dung on the roads ; and at certain rest- ing-places on the highway they spread litter, on which all the cattle that pass stop to urine for their benefit. The objects most admired in these environs are the villas, particularly those of the crown. I shall however, confine my remarks to Doccia alone, on account of the porcelain manufactory established there about sixty years ago by the Marquis Gehori. This " fabbrica nobile" had been represented to me as a " cosa stupenda, portentosa," and the villa itself conspired with the grandeur of those epithets to raise ideas which none of the manufac- tories realized. I found only fifty men employed in the house, and some of those fellows were idling from one wheel to another; some, while making their moulds, taught their children to read ; none had the activity nor the manner of our workmen. The museum at Doccia contains a great variety of fossils found in the country; but the ware- rooms make but a poor display. In a country anciently so famous for its pottery, I expected to find ENVIRONS. 81 find some near approaches to the hello antico which now gives models to all our furniture and fashions. Here, indeed, are casts of ancient sta- tues in chalk, gypsum, and terra-cotta ; but no- thing else did I see that bore any print of classical beauty. The forms, the relief, the very paintings of their terrines and jars are as inferior to ours as the quality of the porcelain. They exceed us only in dearness. For a dinner-service of clumsy red china they charge 150 sequins, for a tea-pot of the same kind two sequins ; nor would any of those services pass for complete at an English table, where the little subdivisions of convenience are far more multiplied than in Italy. At Doccia they work only for their own country, and for the tastes which prevail there. Whenever they imitate us, they become inferior to themselves. Our su- periority in trade is acknowledged universally at Florence, where the name of English, or, at least, the " air USD dTnghilterra," is imposed upon the most laboured productions of Italian and German workshops. You discover here, on the very surfaces of things, how greatly commerce has degenerated in a coun- try which gave it birth, and language, and laws. The counting-houses are in general dirty, dark, mean vaults 3 the ledgers stitched rather than bound, and covered with packing paper. All commodities are weighed by the old steel-yard : G the 82! ENVIRONS. the only balance that I remarked here was held by the statue of Justice. In trades no regular ap- prenticeships are requisite ; nor are the usual appropriations of sex observed. In the same street, I have seen women at the loom and the awl, while the men were sewing curtains. The Italian shopkeeper only calculates down- wards. His sole object is to gain the most from his customers. He does not remount to the first sources that supply his shop ; he abandons the general state of his own line to his merchant. In Britain, on the contrary, the great fluctuations of commerce may originate in the capital, but they presently spread through the whole island. The common retailer in the remotest town brings poli- tics in aid of his trade, anticipates taxes, watches the return of fleets, and speculates on the commercial effects of peace and war. It would be ungrateful in me to leave the envi- rons of Florence without mentioning the pleasure which I once enjoyed " at evening from the top of Fesoky The weather was then Elysian, the spring in its most beautiful point, and all the world, just released from the privations of Lent, were fresh in their festivity. I sat down on the brow of the hill, and measured with my enrap- tured eye half the Val d*Arno. Palaces, villas, convents, towns, and farms were seated on the hills. ENVIRONS. 83 hills, or diffused through the vale, in the very points and combinations where a Claude would have placed them — Monti superbi, la cui fronte Alpina Fa di se contro i venti argine e sponda! Valli beate, per cui d'onda in onda L'Arno con passo signoril cammina! My poetical emotions were soon interrupted by an old peasant, who sat down at the same resting- place, and thus addressed his companion, " Che bella occhiata ! guardiamo un po* la nostra Firenze. Quanto e bella ! quanto cattiva ! chi ci sta in chie- sa, chi ci fa birbonate. Ah Gigi ! quante ville ! quante vigne ! quanti poderi ! — ma non v' e nulla di nostro." Those notes of exclamation end in a selfishness peculiar to age. There is generally something sordid at the bottom of the bucket which old men throw upon admiration. Fiesole stands on a hill precipitously steep. The front of it is cut into a gradation of narrow terraces, which are enclosed in a trellis of vines, and faced with loose-stone walls. Such a facing may per- haps cost less labour, and add more warmth to the plantation than turf-embankments would do ; but it gives a hard, dry effect to the immediate pic- ture, which, viewed from Florence, is the most beautiful object in this region of beauty. G 2 The 84 ENVIRONS. The top of the hill is conical, and its summit is usurped by a convent of Franciscans, whose leave you must ask to view the variegated map of coun- try below you. Their corridores command a mul- tiplicity of landscape : every window gave me a different scene, and every minute before sunset changed the whole colouring. Leopold once brought his brother Joseph up to shew him here the garden of his dominions ; and this imperial visit is recorded in a Latin inscription as an event in the history of the convent ; but Gray, and his lines on the Faesulan hill, were equally unknown to the very friar who acts here as Cicerone. The season brought a curious succession of in- sects into view. On the way to Fiesole my ears were deafened with the hoarse croak of the cigala, which Homer, I cannot conceive why, compares to the softness of the lily. On my return the lower air was illuminated with myriads of lucciole or fire-flies ; and I entered Florence at shutting of the gates. Come la mosca cede alia Zanzara. a Their liberality is conspicuous in the contributions of their rural fraternities, who come in procession to Florence with splendid fusciacche, and leave their donations in the churches. Hence the clergy keep them well disciplined in faith, and, through the terror of bad crops, they begin to extort the abo- lished tithes. I saw ENVIRONS. 85 I saw all the farmers round Florence collected in the cathedral on Easter-eve, to watch the motion of an artificial dove, which, just as the priests began " Gloria in Excelsis," burst away from the choir, glided along the nave on a rope, set fire to a combus- tible car in the street, and then flew whizzing back to its post. The eyes of every peasant were wishfully rivetted on the sacred puppet, and expressed a deep interest in its flight ; for all their hopes of a future harvest depended on its safe return to the altar. " Quando va bene la colombina, va bene il Fiorentino** is an adage as ancient as the dignity of the Pazzi, who still pro- vide the car. •* One-half of Tuscany is mountains which produce nothing but timber ; one-sixth part consists of hills which are covered with vineyards or olive gardens : the remaining third is plain; The whole is distributed into 80,000 fattorie, or stewardships. Each fattoria includes on the average seven farms. This pro- perty is divided among 40,000 families or corporations. The Riccardi, the Strozzi, the Ferroni ; and the Benedictines rank first in the number. This number was greatly increased by Leopold, who, in sell- ing the crown lands, studiously divided large tracts of rich but neglected soil into a thousand little properties, and thus made them ten-fold more productive. His favourite plan of encourag- ing agriculture, consisted not in boards, societies, or premiums, but in giving the labourer a security and interest in the soil, in multiplying small freeholds, in extending the livelli, or life- leases, wherever he could, and in maintaining sacredly that equal division of stock and crop between the landlord and the tenant, which engages both equally in improving the farm. The younger Phny, who practised this last plan, sets it in its true light. " Non nummo sed partibus locem, ac deinde ex meis aliquos operis exactores fructibus ponam. Est alioquin nullum justius genus reditus quam quod terra, caelum, annus refert ; at hoc magnam fidem, acres oculos, numerosas manus poscit." VALLOMBROSA. VALLOMBROSA. Vallombrosa ; Cosi fii nominata una badia, Ric'ca e bella, non men religiosa, E cortesa a chiunqne \i venia. Ariosto. This grand solitude, which was first called Acqua Bella from the beauty of its stream, takes its present name from a valley ; but the abbey itself stands in an amphitheatre of hills; an amphitheatre so accurately described by Milton that, I am con- fident, the picture in his mind was only a recollec- tion of Vallombrosa : — Which crowns with her enclosure green As with a rural mound the champaign head Of a steep wilderness, whosdiairy sides With thicket overgrown grotesque and wild Access denied, and over-head up grew Insuperable height of loftiest shade, A sylvan scene, and as the ranks ascend Shade above shade, a woody theatre Of stateliest view. The immediate approaches to the abbey are planted in the open parkish style, and finely con- trast VALLOMBROSA. S^ trast with the black girdle of forest around it. The abbey is a large, loose pile of various con- struction, and regular only in one front. Why is no convent absolutely regular ? Surely one qua- drangle might be made sufficient for all the wants of a few monks. Allot three sides to their cells, the fourth to the general offices, refectory, library, &c., and insulate the church in the middle of the court : then would the result be cloisteral, con- nected, uniform 3 Religion surrounded with her votaries; the tabernacle in the bosom of the camp. Being introduced by a letter to the abbot, and accompanied by the brother of two Vallombrosans, I met here a very kind reception. Those amiable men seem to study hospitality as a profession. People of all ranks and religions are equally wel- come, and entertained without either officiousness or neglect. Though the monks then resident were but fourteen in number, their famiglia, including novices, lay-brethren, menials, and workmen, ex- ceeded a hundred. Jn summer the Foresteria of the abbey is generally full of strangers, and during the winter half-year all the indigent^ neighbours flock hither for their daily loaf. Such indiscriminate hospitality is, however, but the virtue of barbarous society. Baneful to indus- try and independence, it feeds poor men, but it keeps 88 VALLOMBROSA. keeps them poor ; it gives them a lodging, but it weans them from home. Not that I grudge this rich community the means of being so bountiful ; I rather grudge it the youth^ the talents, and the active powers which the institution entombs : I grudge it the very virtues of the men whom I found here. Those virtues tend only to palHate its defects, and correct its general influence by the good which they do in detail. These excellent men bring economy to the aid of beneficence. While they give bread to hun- dreds, to themselves they allow but the modest stipend of eighteen crowns a year; yet the re- venues of the abbey are about 40,000 crowns. Its fattorias are palaces, its farms are highly culti- vated, and its tenantry wealthy ; while the Insti- tution, by maintaining the same unalterable plan, and training all its members to the same habits, secures itself from the misgovernment which a pri- vate inheritance is occasionally exposed to. The private gentleman, perhaps, spends his income more profitably to the public revenue. His rents do not return so directly as the monk's into the mass of the people, which is the ultimate destina- tion of all property ; but they return through more taxable channels, through cellars and shops. Here is a museum containing some curious ob- jects connected with the place; an astonishing variety VALLOMBROSA. 89 variety of mushrooms, all natives of Vallombrosa, painted by Don Tozzi/ and two elephants* skulls which were dug up in these mountains, and are referred by some to the passage of Annibal, by others to the same causes that have lodged such fossils in many parts of Europe.** I remarked se- veral immense port-foHos, in which they pretend that a monk has collected every Madonna yet en- graved since the origin of the art. Such are the collections on which the misers and little minds of a convent turn the accumulating passion, when debarred from money. Here, too, are preserved all the pastoral staves that the abbots have borne since Gualberti founded the order. The first, a plain black stick, had its head formed like a T; the next head resembled an adze; the next an adze without its pole ; and the rest in succession bent gradually into a crosier. In the same crook- ed manner did the abbots themselves, from sub- sisting on the charity of a few nuns, creep into territory, lordship, and jurisdiction. On one of the cliffs is a monastery in miniature, called the Paradisino, which commands a distant view of Florence, the vale, and the sea. The rooms are covered with a multitude of wretched engravings, which we were obliged to praise, as their reverend collector was our guide. The cha- pel contains some pictures of del Sarto, and among these a beautiful accident of art. Andrea, having 90 VALLOMBROSA. having four large saints to paint on the altar-piece; was embarrassed by a panel which divided them into pairs. To cover this defect he carelessly rubbed two cherubs on the board, and was sur- prised to find these children of chance far more admirable than their principals. It was here that Don Hugford, a monk of Eng- lish extraction, revived the art of Scagliuola, This art had been confined to the imitation of in- animate objects, until his improvements gave it the chiaroscuro necessary to landscape and the human figure. I remarked at Vallombrosa that all Hugford's pictures are cracked in the outlines, and, on my return to Florence, I mentioned this defect to Stoppioni, who is Hugford's descendant in the art. Stoppioni imputed it to an improper oil used in the first method ; as no such flaws ap- pear in his own works, or in those of his master Gori. - Scagliuola, though its materials be different, seems to bear in its effects some analogy to the an- cient Encaustic.*" It resists the action of the air, it gives solidity to colour, and the selenite, though inserted like mosaic, is not subject to dissolution. Of the ancient Encaustic no remains have es- caped : the art itself is lost. Reiffestein, Quatre- mere, Requeno, and some other Spaniards, have lately attempted its recovery 5 but like Count Caylus VALLOMBROSA. 91 Caylus and Bacbelier, they give us a multitude of methods for want of the one sought. ■ Is the motto of this collection right in etymology ? Naturae foetus mirare, sed aufuge fungos, Namque a fungendo funere nomen habet. '' Elephants' bones have been found near Vallombrosa also in a petrified state, incrusted with oyster-shells ; and from this phe- nomenon Fortis has deduced a very bold hypothesis. He main- tains that those bones belonged to animals which had been ori- ginally marine ; that the sea left their skeletons on these moun- tains in a remote period of the world ; that, while the continent slowly emerged from the all-creative ocean, those natives of the water became gradually terrestrial ; in short, that men, quadru- peds, and birds, were originally fish. — Thus the wheel of phi- losophy turns round, and brings up again the exploded tenets of Anaximander and the reveries of Talliamed. *= I mean here the Encaustic in wax ; for the process called cestrotum was, in my opinion, nothing but poker-work. CAMALDOLI. CAMALDOLI. Fra due liti d* Italia surgon sassi, E fann' un gibbo die si chiama Latria ; Dissott' al quale e conservato un Enno, Che suol csser disposto a sola latria. Dante, From Vallombrosa, the region of the fir and larch, we rode down through a forest of oaks and beeches, and returned to the country of the oHve and fig-tree. Our guide was a Florentine cobbler, who, finding Httle to do at home, had consigned the awl to his wife, and was then strolHng for subsistence from convent to convent. By this worthy tourist were we misled into path- less woods, and obliged to put up at a solitary inn called Uomo Morto, an object as woful in aspect as in name. Its name it derives from the execution of a coiner whom Dante has packed among the damned. CAMALDOLI. 95 damned, as an accomplice to the three counts of Romena. Ivi e Romena la dove io falsai La lega suggellatta del Battista ; Perch 'io il corpo suso lasciai : Ma s'i' vedessi qui 1' auima trista Di Guido, o d' Alessandro, o di lor frate, Per fonte Branda non darei vista. The castle of Romena, mentioned in these verses, is a fine Gothic ruin standing on a precipice about a mile from our inn, and near it is a spring which the peasants call Fonte Branda. Now, might I presume to differ from his commentators, Dante, in my opinion, does not mean the great fountain of Siena; but rather this obscure spring. Though less known to the world, this last was an object more familiar to the poet himself who took refuge here from proscription, and its image would more naturally recur to the coiner who was burnt on the spot. Those counts of Romena had trained here a race of assassins, who transmitted the profession to their descendants. Long after those Guidi had lost their feudal power, when Lorenzino de* Medici meditated the murder of his cousin, he sent hither for a cutthroat. His own puny arm gave the usurper the first blow, but Scoronconcolo dispatched him. We 94 CAMALDOtr, We now crossed the beautiful vale of Prat6 Vecchio, rode round the modest arcades of the town, and arrived at the lower convent of Carnal- dolly just at shutting of the gates. The sun was set and every object sinking into repose, except the stream which roared among the rocks, and the convent-bells which were then ringing the A7igelus. This monastery is secluded from the approach of woman in a deep, narrow, woody dell. Its circuitof dead walls built on the conventual plan, gives it an aspect of confinement and defence j yet this is considered as a privileged retreat where the rule of the order relaxes its rigour; nor is any moiak allowed to reside here unless he is sick or superannuated, a dignitary or a steward, an apothe- cary or a bead-turner. Here we passed the night, and next morning we rode up by steep traverses to the Santa Eremo, where Saint Romualdo lived and established -de* tacenti'cenobiti il coro, L' arcane peniteiize, ed i digiuni Al Camaldoli suo. The Eremo is a city of hermits, walled round, and divided into streets of low, detached cells. Each cell consists of two or three naked rooms, built exactly on the plan of the Saint*s own tene- ment. CAMALDOLI. 95 ment, which remains just as Romualdo left it 800 years ago, but which is now too sacred and too damp for a mortal tenant. The unfeeling Saint has here established a rule which anticipates the pains of purgatory. Na stranger can behold without emotion a number of noble, interesting young men who are bound to stand erect chanting at choir for eight hours a day; their faces pale, their heads shaven, their beards shaggy, their backs raw, their legs swollen, and their feet bare. With this horrible institute the climate conspires in severity, and selects from society the best constitutions. The sickly novice is cut off in one or two winters, the rest are sub- ject to dropsy, and few arrive at old age. I saw nothing to be admired in the church but a silk palliotto painted by Annibal Caracci and en- circled with embroidery. Caravaggio's Infant Christ sleeping on a crown of thorns struck me as an in- decent repetition of his Cupid sleeping on a quiver. I was surprised to find, among hermits immured on the mountains and restricted to books of devo- tion, a library so rich in the earliest classics, and in works approaching the very incimabida of print- ing. Among these were Cenninis Virgil, the first Greek Homer, the first edition of Dante and of Lascaris's Grammar. To such a library and such a solitude 90 CAMALDOLI. a solitude the late bishop of Antwerp retired from persecution ; and here he closed his laborious life, without have executed his two Herculean designs of editing the manuscript histories of Germany, and of re-establishing the metaphysics of Plato.* From the Santa Eremo we proceeded up the mountain where Landinus represents the Platonists of the fifteenth century holding the Disputationes Camaldulenses. We climbed one of the heights of Falterona which, I apprehend, is the Latvia described in the motto. Our guide called it the giant of the Apennines, and, if we could believe him or Ariosto, it commands a view of both seas ; but a distant haze prevented us from ascertaining w^hether that be possible. From this point on to La Verna, the upper region of the hills is one continued botanic garden. The beech is indigenous on their tops and the oak on their sides : the chesnut-tree and the fir were planted. These forests belong to the convents of Camaldoli and Vallombrosa, and to the Cathedral- opera of Florence. Immense rafts are floated down the Arno by the winter-floods, and consigned to Leghorn, where the English paid exorbitantly, during the last war, to the catholic church, for the timber which enabled them to fight her battles. LA VERNA. 97 * The bishop left the following epitaph for his own tomb: Hie jacet Cornelius Fran, de NeUi, Episc. Anverp. Peccator et Peregrinus. But his hosts dishking. the humility which it ends in, have po- litely concealed the last line by the flooring of the chapel. Their politeness to Leopold has, in another inscription, adopt- ed a formula, which is certainly very common on ancient mo- numents, in the Imperial rescripts, and in the deifying diplo- macy of the lower empire ; but which sounds like blasphemy to a Christian ear. — " Eremitae Camaldulenses — devot. numini majea- tatique ejus— M. P." LA VERNA. Nel cnido sasso infra Tever ed Amo Da Christo prese 1* ultimo sigillo ; Che le sue membra due anni portarno. Dante. xHIS singular convent, which stands on the cliffs of a lofty Apennine, was built by Saint Francis himself, and is rendered sacred by the celebrated miracle which the motto records. Here reigns all the terrible of nature — a rocky mountain, a ruin H of 9S LA VERNA. of the elements, broken, sawn, and piled in sublime confusion — precipices crowned with old, gloomy, visionary woods — black chasms in the rock where curiosity shudders to look down — haunted caverns sanctified by miraculous crosses — long excavated stairs that restore you up to day-light. This scenery is now under the pencil of Philip Hackert, a Prus- sian, brought down by a reflux of art from the land of Vandals to charm Italy with his landscapes. On the top of the mountain is a mass of marine testaceous petrifactions, where Soldani has collect- ed for his microscopical work myriads of ammonites and nautili which are perfect in their forms, yet as minute as sand. On entering the chapel of the stigmata we caught the religion of the place ; we knelt round the rail, and gazed with a kind of local devotion at the holy spot where Saint Francis received the five wounds of Christ. The whole hill is legendary ground. Here the Seraphic father was saluted by two crows which still haunt the convent: there the devil hurled him down a precipice, yet was not permit- ted to bruise a bone of him. -Pulchra La Verna, Da mihi follere, da justum sanctumque videril What pity that so great a man should be lost among the Saints ! Francis appears to me a ge- nuine hero, original, independent, magnanimous, incorruptible. LA VERNA. 99' incorruptible. His powers were designed to re- generate society; but, taking a wrong direction, they sunk men into beggars. Tiie sanctuary-doors were unlocked to us with studied solemnity. Tapers w^ere lighted, incense burnt, prayers muttered, all fell on their knees, and the bead-roll of relics was displayed. They particularly adored a tooth of St. Christopher which, an eminent naturalist assured me, came from the jaws of a rhinoceros.* I could hardly re- frain from an heretical smile, till I began to reflect that the scene before me was the work of faith. These poor friars are more loved and respected by the people who feed them than any of the chartered orders. Obliged and obliging, they mix intimately with the peasants, as counsellors, and comforters, and friends. They give away more medicine than the rich anchorites of Camaldoli sell. In hospitals, in prisons, on the scaffold, in short wherever there is misery you find Francis- cans allaying it. They gave us a tolerable dinner and the best wine of their begging barrel which, if I may repeat their own pun, had been filled in Centumcellas. Thus having nothing, yet possessing all things, they live in the apostolical state; and renouncing money themselves, they leave all tem- poral concerns to their ProcuratorCy who thank- H 2 . fully 100 EXCURSION TO CORTONA. fully booked our names, as creditors for a few masses. Thus ended our pilgrimage to the three sanc- tuaries. * At the Certosa near Florence I saw another grinder of the same holy giant, which approached the sesquipedahan size of iEmihus* teeth. A similar imposition was practised about two centuries ago in France and England, where the bones of an elephant dug up near Chauraont were paraded about as the re- mains of the giant Teutobochus. EXCURSION TO CORTONA. ■■ ■■■ Hinc Dardanus ortas. Virg. On returning down to the Casentine we could trace along the Arno the mischief which followed a late attempt to clear some Apennines of their woods. Most of the soil, which was then loosened from the roots and washed down by the torrents, lodged in this plains and left immense beds of sand EXCURSION TO CORTONA. 101 sand and large rolling stones, on the very spot where Dante describes Tti ruscelletti che de' verdi colli Del Casentin discendon giiiso in Arno, Facendo i lor canali e freddi e molli. I was surprised to find so large a town as BiBBlENA in a country devoid of manufactures, re- mote from public roads, and even deserted by its land-holders ; for the Niccolini and Vecchietti, who possess most of this district, prefer the ob- scurer pleasures of Florence to the palaces and pr^-eminence here. The only commodity which the Casentine trades in is pork. Its hams are esteemed the best in Italy, and require no cook- ing. Sig. Baglione, a gentleman at whose house I slept here, ascribed their superior flavour to the dryness of the air, the absence of stagnant water, and the quantity of chesnuts given to their hogs. Bibbiena has been long renowned for its chesnuts, which the peasants dry in a kiln, grind into a sweet flour, and then turn into bread, cakes, and polenta. Old Burchiello sports on the chesnuts of Bibbiena in these curious verses, which are more intelligible than the barber's usual strains : ^ Ogni castagna in camiscia e'n pelliccia Scoppia e salta pe '1 caldo, e fa trictracche, Nasce in mezzo del mondo in cioppa riccia j Seeca, lessa, e arsiccia Si da per frutte a desinar e a cena ; Questi sono i confetti da Bibbiena. The 10^ EXCURSION TO CORTONA. The Casentine peasants are a hardy and simple race. Two centuries ago a fund was left here for portioning poor girls, to whom it allowed thirty crowns each, and this humble sum, though fixed for a charity, has served as a standard to all. No farmer expects more from his wife or gives more to his daughter; so that marriage is universal in all classes below the gentry, where the established prejudice drives the younger brothers into cecishe- ism or the church. The Casentines were no favourites with Dante, who confounds the men with their hogs. Yet, fol- lowing the divine poet down the Arno, we came into a race still more forbidding. The Aretine peasants seem to inherit the coarse, surly visages of their ancestors whom he styles Bottoli, Meet- ing one girl who appeared more cheerful than her neighbours, we asked her, how far it was from Arezzo, and received for answer — ^^ Quanta c'eT The valley widened as we advanced, and when Arezzo appeared, the river left us abruptly, wheel- ing off from its environs at a sharp angle, which Dante converts into a snout, and points disdain- fully against the currish race : Bottoli trova poi venendo giuso Ringhiosi piu che non chiede lor possa: E a lor disdegnoso torce '1 rnnso. ^ Arezzo EXCURSION TO CORTONA. 103 Arezzo took an active part in the late commo- tions, and exposed itself to ruin 3 but General Miollis was indulgent to a town which gave birth to Petrarch, and proposed, as usual, an apotheosis for the bard. Petrarch, if he really belong to Arezzo, was only her accidental child ;* but Redi and Pignotti, poets more delightful than he, are fairly her own, and perhaps the flower of her off- spring. Maecenas and II divino Pietro Aretino owe most of their celebrity to the meanness of their contemporaries. The other Aretini, such as Guy, Leonard, Charles, Amico, Francis, John, are names of no great currency ; Old frate Guittone is known to few except the readers of Dante ; and the laborious Vasari is less obscure than these only because he wrote on an interesting subject, and painted on conspicuous walls. The cathedral of Arezzo was then receiving a magnificent accession. Adimollo was painting there a chapel so disproportionately large that it appeared to me rather a second cathedral than a subordinate member : and all this, merely to lodge a puppet scarcely a foot high, a squat, ugly figure of painted chalk which had been lately found in the rubbish of a cellar. But this puppet was the Madonna who headed their armies, and fought their battles, and prophesied their fate. On entering the Val di Chiana, I found the peasantry 104 EXCURSION TO CORTONA. peasantry more civil and industrious than their Aretine neighbours. We met one poor girl who was driving a laden ass ; bearing a billet of wood on her head, spinning with the rocca, and singing as she went. Others were returning with their sickles from the fields which they had reaped in the Maremma, to their own harvest on the hills. That contrast, which struck me in the manners of two cantons so near as Cortona to Arezzo, can only be a vestige of their ancient rivality while separate republics. Men naturally dislike the very virtues of their enemies, and affect qualities as remote from theirs as they can well defend. The knights of St. Stephen have conquered a large part of this vale from the river Chiana which, being subject to floods, had formed here an immense morass. The method which they employed is called a colmata, and seems to have been known in the reign of the Antonines. It consisted here of an enclosure of stupendous dikes, which received the inundations, and confined them for a while on the morass. When the river had fallen, this water was sluiced off into its channel ; but, during its stagnation on the surface enclosed, it had left there a deposite of excellent earth ; and a succes- sion of such deposites has given solidity to the bog, raised it above the level of ordinary floods, and converted it into the richest arable. By this en- terprise have the religious of St. Stephen deservedly become EXCURSION TO CORTONA. 105 become the first proprietors of the plain. Round Cortona, indeed, the lands are divided into a mul- titude of small properties, unusual in Tuscany. Cortona, rising amidst its vineyards, on the acclivity of a steep hill w^ith black mountains be- hind, struck me at a distance like a picture hung upon a w^all. From Santa Marguerita it com- mands a magnificent prospect of the Thrasimene and Clusian lakes, the mountains of Radicofani and Santa Flora, the wide, variegated vale of Chi- ana, skirted with vine-covered hills, and beautifully strewed with white cottages, white fattorias, white villas, and convents of sober grey. This is a favourite seat of" Bacco in Toscana;" for good table-wine costs here but a penny the large flask. One of the Aleatic wines, called San Vincenzo, is equal to any in Redi's Dithyran bic, though it does not appear among his valued file. But Redi, as an Aretine, was the natural enemy of Cortona, which celebrates its ancient and im- mortal hatred by an annual procession most insult- ing to its neighbour. Cortona, being considered as the capital of an- cient Etruria, is the seat of the Etruscan academy, and of course swarms with antiquaries. 1 re- marked in the museum a portrait of the late Lord Cowper, as Lucomone of that academy y and in the library 105 EXCURSION TO CORTONA. library I conversed with the canon Maccari, wha is secretary and father of the Institute. This ve- nerable man has greatly enriched its present col- lection, and hinted a design of leaving it all that he possesses. Italy owes half its public institutions to the celibacy of rich men. Here are more than 40 noble families in a town reduced to 4,000 inhabitants. A society thus ba- lanced between the two orders or Ceti^ must be miserably split by that Gothic distinction. Leo- pold classed his subjects in too simple a manner for Cortona. When a foreign prince asked him how many Ceti there were in his dominions, *' Two/* replied the philosopher, ^^ men and wo- men." Indeed, quality is here so rigidly main- tained, that the heir of the rich Tommasi, having lately married a plebeian, is now shunned by his Ceto, and obliged to take refuge in the crowd of Florence. Neither the lady*s accomplishments, nor her husband's high descent could open to her the obstinate Casino de* Nobili. Nobility is every where punctilious in proportion to its poverty ; for rank becomes from necessity important to a man who has no other possession. Few of the Tuscan nobility are titled: still fewer represent the old feudal barons. Most of them are descended from ennobled merchants, or referable to the order of Capitani or Valvassores, which was first establish- ed in the free cities of Lombardy. The EXCURSION TO CORTONA. 107 The original walls of Cortona still appear round the city as foundations to the modern, which were built in the 13th century. Those Etruscan works are the most entire towards the north. Their huge, uncemented blocks have resisted, on that side, the storms of near 3,000 winters ; while, on the south, they have yielded to the silent ero- sion of the Sirocco. None of the' stones run paral- lel ; most of them are faced in the form of trape- %ia ; some are indented and inserted in each other like dove-tail. Tiiis construction is peculiar to the ruins in Tuscany : it is far more irregular, and therefore, I suppose, more ancient than the Etrus- can work of Rome. No part of these walls re- mains fortified. The army which lately laid Arezzo open, has also demolished the few defences of Cortona. Arreti muros, Coriti nunc diruit arcem. * Some gentlemen of Cortona, perhaps from a native preju- dice, endeavoured to persuade me that Petrarch was born at Incisa. Montaigne says the same : " Petrarca lequel on tient, nai du diet heu Anchisa, au moins d*une maison voisine d*un mille !" But Petrarch scarcely belongs to Tuscany, which he left when a boy, and, though often solicited, would never return to. SIENA. SIENA. THE CITY. Cor magis tibi Sena pandit. Inscription. Such is the inscription* on the CamuUia or Flo- rentine gate, where you enter a long, irregular street which nearly bisects this ill-built and ill- peopled town. In this master-line you see none of the principal objects, such as the Lizza, the citadel, the cathedral, the Piazza del Campo; but you see men, you see groups proportioned to the extent of Siena. Leave this line and you pass into a desert. The streets are paved with tiles laid in that fish- bone manner which Pliny calls the " Spicata tes- tacea." A stranger coming from the large flat stones of Florence feels the transition unpleasant ; but the extreme inequality of the ground, which is SIENA. 109 is covered with ice in winter, would render the Florentine pavement unsafe for Siena. Every- gentleman's house is called by the cour- tesy of the place a palace, although few of them include courts, which, in most languages, are the very part of a house that qualifies a palace. Some of those old mansions are built in the mixt, demi- gothic style which marks all the public works of their two great architects Agostino and Agnolo. The windows are beset with an awkward angular fret-work which I have not observed elsewhere, i The grand piazza is sloped, like an ancient theatre, for public games ; and, like that, it forms the segment of a circle, in the chord of which stands the Palazzo Pubblico. This palace is a work of different dates and designs, and parcelled out into very different objects ; such as the public offices, the courts of law, the theatre, and the prisons. The whole fabric was shaken by the earthquake of 1797, which cracked all the frescoes of Meccarino in the Sala del Consistorio, damaged half the palaces in the city, and frightened the late pope out of it. In the cathedral we find marble walls polished on both sides, and built in alternate layers of black and white — a front overcharged with ornaments on the outside, and plain within--a belfry annexed, but 110 SIENA. but not incorporated with the pile — a cupola bear- ing plumb on its four supports — circular arches resting on round pillars — doors with double archi- traves — columns Uased upon lions tearing lambs. All these are peculiar to the Tuscan churches built in the Lombard style; but here too are indisput- able marks of the Gothic, particularly on the front, the vaults, and the windows. The pavement of this cathedral is the work of a succession of artists from Duccio down to Mecca- rino, who have produced the effect of the richest mosaic, merely by inserting grey marble into white and hatching both with black mastic. The grand- est composition is the history of Abraham, a figure which is unfortunately multiplied in the same compartments; but, when grasping the knife, the patriarch is truly sublime. These works lay exposed at least for 100 years to the general tread, and have been rather improved than defaced by the attrition ; for one female figure which had never been trodden looks harsher than the rest. Those of the choir were opportunely covered two centuries ago. This work has occasioned more discussion than it deserves. It is certainly interesting as a monu- ment of early art; but were the design more ad- mirable than it really is, the very simplicity of ex- ecution unfits it for a pavement, and requires dis- tance SIENA. Ill tance to soften and set off the forms. The work is not mosaic, for there is no tessellation. It is not strictly the " pavimentum sectile/' for that con- sisted in regular-lined figures. ^Jere it passes for the invention of Duccio,* and is original on this floor. Here, as on the ancient vases, the outlines and the folds of the drapery are expressed by dark lines. A barbarous taste for the emblematic pervades this cathedral. Its front is covered v^^ith animals, all symbols of cities. Even the lion under its co- lumns conceals, I presume, an enigma ; for I have seen it at the doors of several Tuscan churches.! The pillars of the aisles are crossed by alternate layers of black and white marble, which I once condemned, conceiving that even a pillar, if round, should appear one piece : — " but. Sir,** said a Se- nese, " black and white are the colours of our city banner.*' Round the vault of the nave is a set of staring heads cast in terra cotta, each bearing the name of a different Pope, although several came evidently from the same mould. Whoever is determined to complete a series will forge what he cannot find. I have seen things as rude and unauthentic as these installed as originals by our portrait en- gravers. The 112 SIENA. The pulpit is universally admired : it is exqui- sitely carved, but in too many patterns of decora- tion; it vi^ants the unity of design necessary to so small an object. Being built, as usual, of marble it becomes a part of the cathedral itself, and hurtful to the general symmetry. Instead of this fixt and established dignitary, I w^ould call oc- casionally into use a poor old itinerant, the wooden preaching bench of St. Bernardine, which stands mouldering here in all the simplicity of holiness. The Chigi chapel glares with rich marble, silver, gilt, bronze, and lapislazzoli. There the sweep- ing beard and cadaverous flanks of St. Jerome are set in contrast with the soft beauty of a Magda- lene, which Bernini had transformed from an An- dromeda, and thus left us the affliction of innocence for that of guilt. Fronting this chapel is a library without books ; for scored music and illuminated psalms hardly deserve that title. It contains a series of gaudy, gilt pictures which, though painted by Pinturri- chio, bear the name of Raphael, from some acci- dental touches lent by the immortahzing master. Whatever Raphael sketched, or began to sketch, walls which he never painted, jars which he never saw, statues which he never cut, are still called RaphaeFs. The SIENA. lis The Dominican church sustained such a shock from the late earthquake, that it no longer serves for worship, nor contains the celebrated Madonna of Guido da Siena, the first Itajian painter whose works bear a date. The two Birramani and Baro- raba, who had appeared before him, were Greeks. Hence the Senese pretend, from the date of this picture, 1221, that their school of painting was the earliest in modern art. At present they can boast neither school nor artist, and were lately obliged to call in Adimollo, who has painted three palaces and is too much admired here for the fire, the diversity, the " este- tico** of his compositions. It is easier to delineate violent passion than the tranquil emotions of a great soul ; to set a crowd of figures on the stretch of expression, than to animate but one hero by an action which shall leave him the serenity natural to a hero. What a distance from the bloated hy- perboles of Lucan to the unstrained dignity of Virgil ! from the attitudes of a player to the natural dignity of a prince I from the vivacity and exer- tion of Adimollo to the grace and silent pathos of Raphael ! Might I point out the pictures which gave me most pleasure at Siena, the first should be Vanni*s Descent from the Cross, a jewel concealed in the obscure church of San Quirico. Here the horror I inherent 114 SIENA. inherent in the subject is softened by that amiable artist, who has finely diversified the afHiction of the three Marys, and made the mother's some- thing both human and heavenly. Casolani's Flight into Egypt, in the same church, is full of the tranquil graces, and beautifully mellow ; but should the child be old enough to travel on foot ? Perruzzi's Sibyl at Fonte Giusta is a sublime figure, but perhaps too sedate for the act of pro- phecy. She does not, as in Virgil, pant, labour, rage with the God ; nor like the Pythia, does she reel and stare and foam with the poison of the Del- phic mofeta : she rather displays the " folgovar di bellezze altere e sante" of Sofronia. The clergy, as if vain of any connexion between classical objects and Christianity, seem partial to this prophetical being ; for the Cathedral has ten different sibyls figured on its pavement. Sodoma*s* torso of Christ, in the Franciscan cloister, is a damaged figure, but much admired by the learned in art, for its colouring and ana- tomy. The Luccherini gallery and other collec- tions will not compensate the slavery of praising them, for here, being conducted by the master himself, you must admire and not pay. * Dante who was almost contemporary with Duccio, had seen perhaps some work of this kind when he wrote these verses: Monstran SIENA. 115 Monstran anchor lo duro pavimento ; Qual di pennel fii maestro, o di stile, Che ritrahesse V ombre e' trattl, ch' ivi Mirar fariano uno 'ngegno sottile ! ^ The statues of lions were placed at the doors of Egyptian temples to represent a watch. 'Valerian remarks^ the same at Mycenae. Homer, too, who borrowed so much from Egypt, may have taken from it the idea of the gold and silver dogs which stood at Alcinous' door. ^ This is the land of nicknames. Italians have suppressed the surnames of their principal artists under various designations. Many are known only by the names of their birth-place, as Cor- reggio, Bassano, &c. Some by those of their masters, as II Salviati, Sansovino, &c. Some by their Father's trade, as Andrea del Sarto, Tintoretto, &c. Some by their bodily defects, as Guercino, Cagnacci, &c. Some by the subjects in which they excelled, as M. Angelo delle battaglie, Agostino delle Perspet- tive. A few (I can recollect only four) are known, each as the prince of his respective school, by their christian names alone. Michael Angelo, Raphael, Guido, Titian. THE THE ASSUMPTION. Hi ritus, quoquo modo inducti, antiquitate defenduntur. Tacc The Vergine Assunta, being the patroness of Siena, collects here in August all the neighbours that love either masses or debauchery. This fes- tival calls forth the senate, or rather the red man- tles of the senate, borne by men who are satisfied with the title of Eccelsi, divested of its powers and its duties. It calls forth the waggon which was conquered from Florence, and a votive wax- work which is conveyed in solemn procession to the Cathedral. This last usage is important only from its high antiquity. Having furnished for many centuries a group of sacred images which differ every year, Siena may partly ascribe to it her priority in art. On this occasion the horse-races of the piazza seemed THE ASSUMPTION. il*J seemed to revive, among the different v^ards* of the city, the same rivality that prevailed in the four factions of Rome. Every soul in each ward was a party engaged in the same cause, and trembling for the glory of the same horse. At the close of the race all was riot and exultation. The victorious vrard tore their jockey from his saddle, stifled him with kisses, and bore him off in triumph to the wine-flask. Most cities in Italy are split into little sections which may sometimes unite, but which more rea- dily repel. The strongest bond of union among Italians is only a coincidence of hatred. Never were the Tuscans sp unanimous as in hating the other states of Italy ; the Senesi agreed best in hating all the other Tuscans ; the citizens of Siena, in hating the rest of the Senesi ; and in the city itself the same amiable passion was subdivided among the different wards. This last ramification of hatred had formerly ex- posed the town to very fatal conflicts, till at length, in the year 1200, St. Bernardine instituted Boxing as a more innocent vent to their hot blood, and laid the bruisers under certain laws which are sa^ credly observed to this day. As they improved in prowess and skill, the pugilists came forward on every point of national honour ; they were sung by poets, and recorded in inscriptions.^. The elegant Saviqi 118 THE ASSUMPTION. Savini ranks boxing among the holiday-pleasures of Siena — Tazze, vivande, compagnie d'amici, Mascliere, pugni, ed il bollor lascivo D'un teatro foltissimo di Belle. The pope had reserved for this great festival the Beatification of Peter, a Senese comb-maker, vi^hom the church had neglected to canonize till now. Poor Peter was honoured with all the solemnity of music, high-mass, an officiating cardinal, a florid panegyric, pictured angels bearing his tools to heaven, and combing their own hair as they soared; but he received five hundred years ago a greater honour than all, a verse of praise from Dante.*^ A solemn accademia was then held by the In- tronatiy who recited several dozens of fresh sonnets on the assumption of the Blessed Virgin. On this holy theme have those prolific academicians been rhyming for three hundred years.*^ Italy produces annually an incalculable number of bad sonnets; but it is the only country that has ever produced good ones. The few who excel in these compositions, strike them off at one ^' colpo di pennello." Like the fresco-painters, they never return to the plaster. A language so full of similar and sonorous terminations gives them peculiar facilities for the sonnet, which they either finish at one heat, or THE ASSUMPTION. 119 or else throw away. How unlike to those laboured and retouched things which are slowly hammered into the size and shape of sonnets on our English anvils ! Such workmanship, if originally bad, be- came worse by following the advice of Horace : " Male tornatos incudi reddere versus." Why are those Wartonians so perversely partial to rhymes and restraints which our language will not bend to? Why do they court unnecessary difficulty ? Mere difficulty surmounted never gave pleasure in poetry, except to the poet himself. The chaining of a flea, or the shiftings of a fiddler, may amuse us for a moment, in relation to the means ; but, in the fine arts, we never consider what pains the artist may have taken ; we consider only what excellence he has produced. English poets cannot plead for the sonnet one successful precedent. Even the greatest of them all, Shakspere, Milton, Spencer, split on this rock and sank into common versifiers. Can all the sonnets in our language collected together match the " Italia ! Italia ! O tu cui fea la sorte,*' so prophetically striking at this moment ? Have we any so exquisitely ludicrous as the sonnet written, I believe, in this town, on discovering that the sarcophagus of king Porsenna had served for ages as the washing-trough of monks? I contend,, however. 120 THE ASSUMPTION. however, against fashion. The Enghsh sonnetteer will persist in his work of torture, and yet com- plain of the engine which cramps him. But is that fair? In questo di Procruste orrido letto Che ti sforza a giacer? forzo in rovino Andra Parnaso senza il tuo sonetto ? ■ Those wards are denominated each by a respective animal or emblem, as. La contrada della Lupa, La contrada dell* Ac- quila, &c., not, as in Lombardy, by the gates. Boccace, indeed, mentions a quarter in Siena called the Porta Salvia ; but the name is now obsolete. ^ One of these I select as a burlesque on the Latin inscrip- tions which are prostituted every where in Italy. Rosso, Senensium Bajulorum facile principi. Quod tres agathones Florentinos In hac caupona combibentes, Dum invido morsu Senarum urbi obloquerentur, Pugnis liberaliter exceptos Egregie multaverit ', Bajuli Senenses patriae vindices M. P. Such has been ever the rage for inscriptions in Italy that some have been found scratched on ancient bricks and tesseras. You see Latin inscriptions absurdly used here on temporary erections, and in notices addressed to the people ; yet if Latin inscriptions can be defended in any modern nation, it is here. Here the public monuments, being built for remote ages, require an un- varying record which may outlive the present idioms. Now, if we may judge of the future by the past, the Latin alone can af- ford such a record. The Latin is the ancient language of this country. THE ASSUMPTION. 121 country, and is still the language of its religion. The Latin is more intelligible to this people, jLhan to any other. It infinitely excels the Italian in the lapidary style, which delights in bre- vity and the ablative absolute. It has received the last perfec- tion of that style from modern Italians, such as Politian, Ponta- nus. Rota, Egizzio^ &c., and from the metallic history of the Popes. ■a memoria m' hebbe Pier Pettinaio in sue sante orazioni, A cui di me per caritate increbbe. The Intronati of Siena are generally considered as the oldest academy in Europe ; yet the Rozzi of this city, if they were re- ally associated for literary pursuits, (as some of their own body have assured me) were anterior to the Intronati, and even to the club of Platonists whom old Cosimo de* Medici collected round him. Such is the passion here for academies, that the noble col- lege Tolomei has formed three out of fifty students. So early as the 16th century Siena counted 16 academies. In the following age a female one was founded here by the Grand Duchess Vittoria d* Urbino j but this did not long survive its foundress! THE THE COUNTRY. QUISQUIS Hue ACCEDIS, Quod tibi horrendum videtur MlHI AMCENUM EST. Si delectat, maneas, Si t^det, abeas, Utrumque gratum. Inscription, All the country for twenty miles round Siena is hill or mountain. The more rugged hills are planted with olive-trees. The rest are arable, in- termixed with vineyards. Some of these vineyards are celebrated. Montepulciano produces ♦" the king of wines/' and Chianti yields from its ca- nine grape a " vino scelto'' which many prefer to his majesty. Before Leopold freed agriculture from its old restrictions, the Senese scarcely raised grain enough for its own consumption ; but now it ex- ports to a large amount. The produce itself is trebled, and the price of wheat has also risen from 4 pauls a staio to 12! or 14 j but this rise, being balanced THE COUNTRY. 125 balanced by the increased circulation of specie, does not aggrieve those classes which are not engaged in farming. Thus the landholders are undeservedly enriched hy improvements to which they do not contribute. Born and bred in the city, they seldom visit their estates, but for the Villegiatura in autumn; and then, not to inspect or improve their possessions; not even to enjoy the charms of nature or the sports of the field ; but to loiter round the villa just as they loiter round the town. During the rest of the year those mansions present nothing But empty lodgings and unfurnished halls, Unpeopled offices, untrodden stones. ' Those villas are necessarily large to accommo- date the swarm of bachelors, which must result, from the system established among this nobility. In general, the uncles and brothers of the Heir in- herit, as their patrimony, a right to board and lodging in every house belonging to the family. None of these possess so many villas as the Chigi. Centinale, which lies in a wide, scraggy oak-wood about ten miles from Siena, was created by an amorous cardinal of that family. To ap- pease the ghost of a rival whom he had murdered, his Eminence transformed a gloomy plantation of cypress into a penitential Thebais, and acted there 124 THE COUNTRY. there all the austerities of an Egyptian hermit. Another Cardinal Chigi, afterwards Alexander VII., made this his favourite retreat, and has left marble tiaras at every corner, On the porch of the casino is the inscription which I have placed above.* Within I saw nothing to remark except a trick performed by an old portrait, which changes its object as the eye changes its place. From Centinale we rode to Gelso, another large and still more neglected villa, where mouldy pic- tures and disjointed furniture were thinly scattered to make up a show. We passed through the rich- est vineyards, over hills clad with olive-trees, and on roads lined with wild myrtle ; but we looked in vain for that thick-matted herbage, and those um- brageous masses of wood which distinguish an English landscape from all others. Our next visit was to the city of Colle, vfhich is stretched on the ridge of a steep hill. Here we saw a cathedral, and churches, and convents, and black old palaces where a poor nobility live in- trenched in etiquette : but there was no inn. We therefore returned to the Borgo below, where we found paper-mills, industry, and a dinner. Farther south is the Maremma, a region which, though now worse than a desert, is supposed to have been anciently both fertile and healthy. The th£ country. 125 The Maremma certainly formed part of that Etruria which was called from its harvests the annonaria. Old Roman cisterns may still be traced, and the ruins of Populonium are still visible in the worst part of this tract. Yet nature, in spite of the soil, has condemned it to disease, and man has been ever its enemy. Sylla threw this maritime part of Tuscany into enormous latifundi for his disbanded soldiers. Si- milar distributions continued to lessen its popula- tion during the empire. In the younger Pliny's time the cHmate was pestilential. The Lombards gave it a new aspect of misery. Wherever they found culture they built castles, and to each castle they allotted a " bandita'* or military fief. Hence baronial wars which have left so many picturesque ruins on the hills, and such desolation round them. Whenever a baron was conquered, his vassals es- caped to the cities, and the vacant fief was annex- ed to the victorious. Thus stripped of men, the lands returned into a state of nature : some were flooded by the rivers, others grew into horrible forests which confine the miasma of the lakes or marshes, and thus concentrate their pestilence. In some parts, the water is brackish and lies lower than the sea : in others, it oozes full of tartar from beds of travertine. At the bottom or on the sides of hills are a multitude of hot springs which form 126 THE COUNTRY. form pools, called Lagoni, A few of these are said to produce borax : some, which are called fu- mache, exhale sulphur ^ others, called bulicami, boil with a mephitic gas. The very air above is only a pool of vapours which sometimes undulate, but which never flow off. It draws corruption from a rank, unshorn, rotting vegetation, from in- numerable insects, from living and dead reptiles and fish. All nature conspires to drive man away from this fatal region ; but man will ever return to his bane, if it be well baited. The Casentine peasants still migrate hither in winter to feed their cattle : and here they sow corn, make charcoal, saw wood, cut hoops, and peel cork. When summer returns they decamp, but often too late -, for many leave their corpses on the road, or bring home the Maremmian disease. ' The hills, in proportion as they retire from the sea, are healthy and populous. Instead of cluster- ing into hamlets and villages, every cottage stands alone in the midst of the farm. This dissemina- tion formed an obstacle to Leopold's design of es- tablishing parish-schools. All children are first taught to read in Latin ; none attempt the Italian till they can spell through their prayers. Those farmers who cannot read, keep their accounts with the THE COUNTRY. , 127 the steward by the old " tapster's arithmetic'* of wooden talhes. This country is full of little, local superstitions, and overgrown with monkish faery. Every ruin is haunted, every spring has its saint, every district maintains its strega or witch. This beldam is de- scended, I imagine, from the ancient Strix ; for, like that obscure being, she is supposed to influ- ence the growth of children and cattle, and thus she subsists on the credulity of her neighbours. Many country towns are surrounded with old embattled walls. In the larger is a Vicario who judges in civil and criminal cases, subject to the revision of two higher magistracies. In the smaller towns is a FodestcL^ acting as justice of peace ^ an officer who appears in Juvenal invested with the same title : An Fidenarnm, Gabiornmque esse Potestas? ' I picked up at the gate of a Casino, near Maddaloni, another such inscription which has still more salt in it : Amicis, Et, ne paucis pateat, Etiam fictis. Journey to rome. Et quae tanta fuit Romam tibi causa videndi, Virg. I SET out for Rome after the first rains of Sep- tember. On reaching San Q.UIRICO, I found the people there just recovering from a consternation caused bj a black spectre which had lately ap- peared in the air. Wild screams were heard : the very cattle caught the alarm. The profane pro- nounced the apparition to be a monk ; the monks insisted that it was the devil himself; and the cu- rate was preparing to exorcise the parish, when at last the phantom descended in the shape of an eagle, and carried off a kid. On returning for fresh prey, he was shot by the peasants, and roasted at our inn for their supper. Near San Quirico is the hamlet of Lucignan d' Assoy where a shower of stones fell in 179^, nineteen hours after the great eruption of Vesu- vius. One of those stones which Soldani, abbot of La Rosa, shewed me, weighed about three pounds. JOURNEY TO ROME. 129 pounds, and contained malleable iron, a sub- stance never produced by volcanic heat. Soldani called the attention of the scientific world to this phenomenon, and received from all hands a diver- sity of explanations ; but these he refutes as they rise, to make room for one more surprising than them all. — In short, he forges those stones in the air itself! First he raises a whirlwind, and thus brushes up from the earth some white clay. This he suspends aloft in a little fiery vortex; mixes it up with sulphurs, bitumens, oils, minerals ; vitri- fies it by electricity, and then plays it off by vi- bration and gravitation. Padre Ricca, the most profound yet elegant scholar in this country, gave me a solution far less sublime than Soldani 's. He supposes those stones to have been ejected — not from Vesuvius, as Sir William Hamilton conjectured, but — from the very ground where they fell. For, as that neighbour- hood is full of chalk, impregnated with pyrites and ferruginous matter, small masses of the com- position may have escaped from some superficial explosion there, and been afterwards ignited in the electrical cloud which attended the phenomenon. I might add, in favour of this opinion, that two such showers had formerly fallen near the same spot. My excellent and learned friend P. Gandolfi denies the fact given : but Soldani persists in his K hypothesis. 130 JOURNEY TO ROME. hypothesis, and is now writing a history of stone- showers, deduced from Livy's reports down to his own. We turned oiF to the Baths of St. Philip, where Dr. Vegni has employed the water upon works of art. This water being calcareous, the more it is broken the finer is its deposite. He therefore makes it fall in spray from the ceiling down upon moulds placed below, where it gradually lodges a tartar which hardens into exquisite cameos and in- taglios. On crossing the volcanic mountain of Radico- FANI, I remarked on its cone the ruins of a fort which was often conspicuous in the history of Italy. In the course of events it had lost its im- portance, and the Tuscan government, grudging to maintain yet unwilling to dismantle it, was for a long while balancing the expense against the advantage of the place, when at last the powder magazine blew up, and decided the point. This frontier has been ever notorious for high- waymen. It was once the haunt of Ghino di Tacco, an outlaw celebrated by Dante and Boc- cace, nay, knighted by the Pope himself, for robbing in a gentleman-like manner. A few months before we passed, a soldier, while escort- ing JOURNEY TO ROME. 131 ing a courier, was attacked here and murdered by a pious ruffian, who held the pistol in his right hand and a rosary in his left. On entering the Papal State, we were long fa- tigued with the same sad colour of dry clay. At length ACQUA PENDENTE broke fresh upon us, surrounded with ancient oaks, and terraces clad in the greens of a second spring, and hanging vineyards, and cascades, and cliffs, and grottos, screened with pensile foliage. Then the Lake of BOLSENA expanding at San LORENZO displayed its islands, and castellated cliffs, and banks crowned with inviolate woods, and ruins built upon ruins, Bolsena mouldering upon Volsinii. Such scenes lift the mind above its prosaic level. I passed through MONTEFIASCONE and VlTERBO without any po- etical emotions; nor could Soracte's long black ridge, though sacred to Apollo, and sung by two of his noblest sons, raise any admiration on this line of road. The vintage was in full glow. Men, women, children, asses, all were variously engaged in the work. I remarked in the scene a prodigality and negligence which I never saw in France. The grapes dropped unheeded from the panniers, and hundreds were left unclipt on the vines. The vintagers poured on us as we passed the richest ribaldry of the Italian language, and seemed to K 2 claim 1321 JOURNEY TO ROME. claim from Horace's old mndemiator a prescriptive right to abuse the traveller. RONCIGLIONE has suffered horribly from the last war. All its elegant houses were burnt into black shells, which their impoverished owners cannot repair. Having sided with the insurgents of Orvietto, they were left to expiate the offence of both. We reached Baccano when it was dark, and were therefore obliged to stop at the first inn, which may probably be the inn pointed out by Ariosto, but which was certainly the worst that I ever entered. In the court were several carriages which served as a decoys but within we found famine, filth, and a table to sleep on, a pestilential air, and horrible noises, like those of the ancient orgies which gave name to the place. The next morning we arrived at Rome, ROME. ROME. TOPOGRAPHY. Hinc septem dominos videre montes Et totam licet aestimare Romam. Mart. X HAT rage for embellishing, which is implanted in every artist, has thrown so much composition into the engraved views of Rome, has so exaggerat- ed its ruins and architecture, or so expanded the space in which they stand, that a stranger, arriving here with the expectations raised by those prints, will be infalUbly disappointed. The Flaminian Gate, after repeated changes of both place and name, remains the great entrance of Rome, and lays open its interior to the first view by three diverging streets. The streets seem to have been made only for the rich. Their small reticular pavement galls the pedestrian, they afford no pro- tection against the fury of carriages, and are lighted only 134 HOME. only by the lamps of a few Madonnas. Public reverberes had been once proposed; but the clergy, who order all things prudently for the interest of religion, found darkness more convenient for their decorous gallantry. Whichever road you take, your attention will be divided between magnificence and filth. The in- scription " Immondezzaio'^ on the walls of palaces is only an invitation to befoul them. The objects which detain you longest, such as Trajan's column, the Fountain of Trevi, &c., are inaccessible from ordure. Ancient Rome contained one hundred and forty-four public necessaries, besides the Sellce Patrocliana. The modern city draws part of its infection from the want of such convenience. In the inhabited quarters you will find palaces and churches, columns, obelisks, and fountains; but you must cross the Capitol, or strike off among the mounts, before the Genius of Ancient Rome meets you amid its ruins. The study of these antiquities leads you first to trace the figure, extent, mould, and distribution of the city. You should begin this on some emi- nence, such as the top of the Corsini garden, which is the ground denoted in the motto, or on any of the towers that command all the hills. On each hill, except the Viminal (which is the most diffi- cult ROME. 135 cult of all,) you will find one master-object, as the Villa Medici on the Pincian, the Papal Palace on the Quirinal, the three basilicas on the Esquiline, Coelian and Vatican, &c. Those objects will serve as so many points of general reference, and enable you to combine the perspective with the plan. You should then trace on foot the outlines of those hills, the successive boundaries of the ancient city, neg- lecting the division of the Augustan regions or the modern Rioni ; and at last you should make the circuit of the inviolable walls. This circuit will bring into view specimens of every construction from the days of Servius Tullius down to the present. To save expense, Aurelian took into his walls whatever he found standing in their line; and they now include some remains of the Tullian wall, the wall of the Praetorian barracks, the facing of a bank,* aqueducts, sepulchral mo- numents, a menagery, an amphitheatre, a pyra- mid. Thus do they exhibit the uncemented blocks of the Etruscan style, the reticular work of the republic, the travertine preferred by the first em- perors, the alternate tuft and brick employed by their successors, and that poverty of materials which marks the declining empire. The first Ro- mans built with a prodigal solidity, which has left the cloaca maxima to astonish perhaps as many generations to come as those which have yet be- held it. Later architects became scientific from \ very 136 E O M E. very parsimony. They calculated expenses, the resistance of arches, the weight of superstructures, and with mathematical frugality they proportioned their work to the mere sufficient. Since the first dreadful breach made by Totila, the walls have been often and variously repaired ; sometimes by a case of brick-work filled up with shattered mar- bles, rubble, shard, and mortar; in some parts the cementitious work is unfaced : here you find stone and tufo mixt in the "opus incertum:'* there, tufo alone laid in the Saracenic manner : the latter repairs have the brick revitement of mo- dern fortification. Of the gates some have been walled up for ages j others recently to save the trouble of guarding them. Eight are still open on the Latin side of the river and four on the Tuscan. Their ancient names have been long the subject of contest. Very few are certain, and even to these few the antiquaries have superadded other names, as if on ^ purpose to renew contentions. Thus the gate of San Lorenzo, though admitted to be the Tiburtine, has been called also the Porta inter Aggeres, the Esquilina, the Libitinensis, the Taurina, the Me- tia, the Randuscula, the Praenestina, the Gabiusa ; and each of these epithets has borne its debate. On the other hand, they assign the same name to very different gates. Thus some would fix the Nasvia between the Capena and the Tiber ; others confound ROME. 137 confound it with the Porta Maggiore ; others con- tend that the Porta Maggiore was no gate at all. We cannot bring all the ancient ways to their re- spective gates ; nor can we trace the translation of the same gate from the Tullian walls to Aurelian's, which coincide but a short way. How doubtful then must the three gates of Romulus be I « The bridges^ on the contrary, deny us the plea- sure of disputing on them. Some are broken, and those which are entire from reparation have chang- ed their names ; yet the first names and situations of all are certain. The city-mills are anchored between these bridges in the very currents where necessity led Belisarius to an expedient which was afterwards adopted on all great rivers. The most populous part of ancient Rome is now but a landscape. Mount-Palatine, which origin- ally contained all the Romans, and was afterwards insufficient to accommodate one tyrant, is inhabit- ed only by a few friars. I have gone over the whole hill, and not seen six human beings on a surface which was once crowded with the assem- bled orders of Rome and Italy .^ Raphael's villa, the Farnesian summer-house, Michael Angelo's aviaries, are all falling into the same desolation as the imperial palace, which fringes the mount with its broken arches. Would 138 ROME. Would you push inquiry beyond these ruins> from the PaJatium of Augustus back to the Palan- teum of Evander, you find the mount surrounded with sacred names — the altar of Hercules — the Ruminal fig-tree — the Lupercal — the Germalus — the Velia; but would you fondly affix to each name its local habitation on the hill, contradiction and doubt will thicken as you remount. Hie locus est Vestae qui Pallada servat & ignem : Hie Stator, hoc primum condita Roma loca est. How often have those verses been quoted here ! yet who can apply them to the ground ? If you fix Vesta in the round temple on the Tiber, others will contend there for Hercules, or Portumnus, or Volupia. If you assign the three magnificent co- lumns in the forum to Jupiter Stator, others will force them into a senate-house, or a portico, or a comitium, or a bridge. All round the Palatine, the forum, the Velabrum, and the sacred way is the favourite field of antiquarian polemics.*^ On this field you may fight most learnedly at an easy rate. Every inch of it has been disputed ; every opinion may gain some plausibility, and which- ever you adopt will find proofs ready marshalled for its defence. In such disputes I know no authority paramount to decide. Marliano, Donati, Panvinio, Volpi, and even Kircher, though a cheat, have all largely contributed ROME. 139 contributed to the present stock of discovery ; but not one of them can be followed as a general guide, Nardini is infected with that old-fashioned scrupu- losity which on every point must give every opi- nion, the received and the exploded all jumbled together. Venuti has sifted this farrago, and ground down the learning of all his predecessors into so clean and digestible a mass, that whoever has access to it should go to his mill.*^ Zoega, if he complete his present topographical design, will surpass them all. Vasi, Mannazale, and that tribe of vade-mecums, may serve you the first week as mere valets-de-place in print, but you will soon dis- miss them as insufficient. Those people parcel out Rome into day's-works, and throw every thing to- gether, ancient or modern, sacred or profane, that lies in the same round. This plan is convenient enough for them who desire only to show or to see Rome ; but whoever would study it must arrange the objects of his study in a different order, dedu- ced either from their kind or their age. There were in fact three ancient Romes different in substance, the city which the Gauls destroyed, that which Nero burned, and that which he and his successors rebuilt. Such a division may guide them who would survey Rome only in books, or would class its monuments as they stand in history. But as I confine my review to the structures which I have seen existing, I shall rather refer these to the 140 ROME. the grand revolutions which affected both the cha- racter and the purposes of Roman architecture. * The Muro Torto has been considered as part of the Domi- tian tomb, and in that view Venuti refers its obhquity to the side of a pyramid, a pyramid which completed would exceed the Egyptian immensity ! The Domitian tomb did certainly stand near this spot ; and from that vicinity has the Muro Torto been called also the wall of Domitia's garden. That it did face some garden seems pt-obable to me both from its inclined state, and its situation on the " Collis Hortulorum." But the garden of Nero's aunt was at Fort St.Angelo; that of Antoninus's mother was at the Lateran. These two are the only Domitiae whose gardens enter into history, and the Muro Torto is of a construction anterior to both. ^ Totum Palatium senatu, equitibusRomanis, civitate onrni, ' Italia cuncta refertum. Cic. ' On my first visit to the Campo Vaccino, I asked my valet- de-place where the lake of Curtius was supposed to have been ? " Behold it V* cried he, striking with his cane an immense gra- nite bason, called here a lago. " Was this then the middle of the forum ?" — " Certainly." " Does the Cloaca Maxima run un- derneath ?" — '^ Certainly." " And was this really the lago where the ancients threw the money ?" — " Certainly." Thus was the lacus of some ancient fountain (probably one of those which M. Agrippa had distributed through the streets) transformed by a Cicerone's wand into the Curtian lake ; and thus are thousands cheated by sounds. The devotion of Curtius may itself be a fa- ble ; but it is a fable dear to every patriot, and if retraced by some object more probable than this, it would be one sentiment more brought on the mind of a passenger. Such ignorance I am far from imputing to the professed Cice- roni of Rome, Many of these are profound in its antiquities; biit they are generally too full of their own little discoveries, which Works of the republic. 141 which often exclude more important information from the stranger. •* This book, which was rather rare, has been re-published since I left Italy, by Philip Visconti, brother of the great anti- quary. WORKS OF THE REPUBLIC, * — Exuta est veterem nova Roma senectam. Mart. Architecture was unknown in Rome until the Tarquins came down from Etruria. Hence the few works of the kings which still remain were built in the Etruscan style, with large uncemented but regular blocks. Those remains consist only in a few layers of peperine stone and a triple vault, which are found in some parts of the Tullian walls, in a prison (if indeed the Mamertine be the same as the Tullianum) and in a common sewer. Such objects, requiring only unadorned simplicity, would be built as these are by any race that built well. Though 142 WORKS OF THE REPUBLIC. Though insufficient for retracing the architectural designs of the first Romans, enough remains to show us their public masonry, and their early am- bition, which thus projected from its very infancy " an eternal city," the capital of the world. Some of the kings, particularly the last, turned architecture to objects connected with their per- sonal glory. The republic directed every arm and every art to one national object, conquest : hence its first great v»^orks were military ways. For a while the republicans emulated the kings in the solidity of their constructions. Appius Claudius founded his great way, built it like a mole, and paved it with drest basaltic stones. In the next century the roads of Flaccus and Albinus were only covered with gravel. Their successors, im- proving in economy, took advantage of hard soils, and in some parts omitted the ruderation, in others the statumen, in others both. The pavement of those ways is generally hidden under a modern coat of gravel. Where it is unco- vered, as on the road to Tivoli ; at Capo di Bove, at Fondi, &c., the stones, though irregular, were large and even flat; but their edges being worn into hollows, they jolt a carriage unmercifully. And could Procopius really have found those stones as compactly even as one continued block of flint .? could any stones resist the action of wheels for 900 years WORKS OF THE REPUBLIC. ' 145 years unshaken and unimpressed ? In some places I could distinguish the raised foot-pavement ; in others the gravelled border 3 but I saw none of those anahathra^ v^hich stood so thick on the road to supply the office of stirrups.* Aqueducts immediately followed: but of the few which belong to this period only parts of the Aqua Martia remain; and perhaps the grand arcades, which brought that water to the Esquiline, are due to the repairs of Augustus. Some have proposed the restitution of this aqueduct : " but Rome," say the Romans, " has more water than it wants.'* — " Give it then to the Campagna.'* " The Cam- pagna has no inhabitants to drink water." — " And why has it no inhabitants, but for want of good water as well as good air ?" Why do those aqueducts cross the Campagna in courses so unnecessarily long and indirect ? Seve- ral motives have been alleged, all of which may have influenced the ancients; but their chief mo- tive, in my opinion, was to distribute part of their water to the Campagna itself, and to diffuse it there like the veins in a vine-leaf. Besides this general circuit, the Romans bent their aqueducts into frequent angles, like a screen ; not so much to break the force of their currents, as to give sta- bility to the arcades. -^ Conquest, 144 WORKS OF THE REPUBLIC. Conquest, which was ever dearer to the Roman republic than its own liberty, spread at last to Greece, and brought home the fine arts in the shape of plunder. To accommodate their captive Gods more worthily, the Romans were obliged to raise new temples, or to rebuild the old in imitation of the Greek. Some of those temples have been fortunately preserved as churches. The catholic religion is surely a friend, but an interested friend, to the fine arts. It rejects nothing that is old or beautiful. ** Had ancient Rome fallen into the power of gloomy presbyterians, we should now look in vain for the sacred part of its ruins. Their iconoclastic zeal would have confounded beauty with idolatry, for the pleasure of demolishing both. They would have levelled the temple and preached in a barn. The catholics let the temple stand, and gloried in its conversion to Christianity. Every round edifice that contains alcoves is now, perhaps too generally, pronounced to have been the exhedra or the calidariiim of ancient baths. Such is the temple of Minerva Medica ; and such originally was the Pantheon. The Pantheon a bath ! could that glorious combination of beauty and magnificence have been raised for so sordid an office ? — Yet consider it historically ; detach the known additions, such as the portal, the columns, the WORKS OF THE REPUBLIC. 145 the altars ; strip the immense cylinder and its niches of their present ornament, and you will then arrive at the exact form of the calidaria now exist- ing in Rome. The cell and the portal of the Pantheon are two beauties unhappy in their union. ** The portal shines inimitable on earth." Viewed alone, it is faultless. If the pediment, in following the pedi- ment above, should appear too high from the pre- sent vacancy of its tympanum : that tympanum. was originally full of the richest sculpture. If the columns are not all mathematically equal ; yet in- equalities, which nothing but measurement can detect, are not faults to the eye, and the eye is sole judge here. But the portal is more than faultless ; it is positively the most sublime result that was ever produced by so little architecture. Its general design is best seen diagonally from the Giustiniani palace. In the obscene hole where it stands, you run more into the analysis of parts, the details of ornament, the composition of the entablature, the swell and proportions of the co- lumns. Every moulding here is become a model for the art. The little foliage that is left round the bells of the ancient capitals is white with the plaster of casts. The folding-doors of the Pantheon, whether made by Agrippa, or substituted by Genseric, ap- L pear 146 WORKS OF THE REPUBLIC. pear to me at least of classical date, for their form is common on the ancient relievi. They are not carved, as in the temple of Remus, but are stud- ded with bullae and turn upon pivots. The vacancy above betrays an unfitness vv^hich I should hardly expect in the original doors. A similar vacancy is found, indeed, over temple-doors in relievi ; but rectangular temples required it for light. Not so the pantheon. Here a flood of light falling through one large orb was sufficient for the whole circle of divinities below. Such a light is more friendly to statues than to painting, and here being diffused through a round cell it would fall impartially on all the gods. The interior of this cell is beautiful where it should be grand. Its Corinthian, though ex- quisite, is too low for the walls. H«nce an attic became here a necessarv evil. Had Adrian cauo^ht the full majesty of the naked dome, and embellished its walls with one grand order that rose to the origin of the vault ; so full a support would have balanced the vast caissons of that vault, which now over- power us, and the whole temple would have been then " more simply, more severely great.*' Vast as those caissons may appear, they are not dispro- portioned to the hemisphere, and diminishing as they ascend, they stop just at the point where they would cease to be noble or entire. What barbari- ans could have white-washed so grand a canopy ! If WORKS OF THE REPUBLIC. 14? If their rapacity tore off its ancient covering, they might have bronzed the surface exposed, and left at least the colour of their plunder behind. Though plundered of all its brass, except the ring v^^hich preserves the aperture above ; though it has been twice the prey of fire, though it is al- ways open to the rain, and is sometimes flooded by the river ; yet no monument of equal antiquity is so well preserved as this rotondo. It passed with little alteration from the Pagan into the present worship s and so convenient were its niches for the Christian altar, that Michael Angelo, ever studious of ancient beauty, introduced their design as a model into the catholic church. By giving more latitude than is due to a passage in Cicero,*" some would refer all the tombs without the Capena gate to the republic, and would fix the names of the Servilii, the Horatii, the Metelli on towers, or rather the skeletons of towers left with- out an epitaph, or mark, or tradition. The Cor- nelian tomb, which had been classed among these and was at last found within the city, should teach us a little scepticism on this ground. The only tomb that bears the name of its tenant is Caecilia Metella's. Crassus built this tomb of travertine stone ^4 feet thick to secure the bones of a single woman 3 while the adjoining castle had but a thin L 2 wall 148 WORKS OF THE REPUBLIC. wall of soft tufo to defend all the Gaetani from the fury of civil war. The general form of those tombs on the Appian way is a cylinder or a truncated cone, with a cubic base, and a convex top. This combination con- veys the idea of a funeral pyre, and has some tendency to the pyramid, the figure most appro- priate to a tomb, as representing the earth heaped on a grave, or the stones piled on a " cairn." Near those tombs is a little temple also assigned to this period, under the name of the God Redi- culus. So fresh are its red and yellow bricks, that the thing seems to have been ruined in its youth ; so close their adhesion, that each of the puny pilasters appears one piece, and the cornice is sculptured like the finest marble. Btit could such profusion of ornament have existed here in Anni- bal's days ? Whether it be a temple or a tomb, the rich chiselling lavished on so poor a design convinces me that it was fully as late as Septimius Severus. On the next hill stands another very doubtful work which is called the temple of Honour and Virtue built in this period, and extolled by Vitru- vius for the scientific symmetry of its order. At present the frieze of the front is higher than its pediment : WORKS OF THE REPUBLIC, 149 pediment : within is another enormous frieze or rather belt of defaced stuccos which Piranesi has boldly restored — those lying engravers 1 *^ We descended to the valley of Egeria and the grotto/* or rather nymphaeum : but instead of the marble magnificence which offended Juvenal here, we found the vault fallen in, the walls mantled with maiden-hair, the statue which passes for the Nymph mutilated, the muses removed from their niches, and the fountain itself a mere trough. Its water, however, was delicious, and, finding a large split reed placed over the drip, I used it as a conduit. Saepe sed exiguis hanstibns inde bibi f Egeria est quae proebet aquas. * Because no stirrups appear on the ancient equestrian monu- ments, antiquaries conclude that so simple a contrivance was unknown to the Romans. But we should consider how much of the real costume of the time was suppressed by sculp- tors — how generally the ancient vases, coins, lamps, relievi, nay even triumphal arches, represent chariot-horses without even yoke or traces — how seldom the saddles, or jather ephippia, ap- pear on statues (the spurs and horse-shoes never) — how greatly the stirrups would detract from the freedom and grace of an equestrian figure. Besides, something like one stirrup does appear on an antique at the Vatican ; the avajSoAiJ? of Plutarch would imply a stirrup as well as a groom ; and Eustathius posi- tively gives both meanings to the word. I have 1^ WORKS OF THE REPUBLIC. ^ I have found the statue of a god pared down into a Christian «aint— a heathen altar converted into a" church-box for the poor — a bacchanahan vase officiating as a baptismal font — a bacchanalian tripod supporting the holy-water bason — the sarcophagus of an old Roman adored as a shrine full of relics — cups which were inscribed to the Dis Manibus now set in pavements hallowed by the knees of the devout — the brass columns of Jupiter Capi- tolinus now consecrated to the blessed sacrament — and the tomb of Agrippa now the tomb of a pope. Nothing could protect a statue from such zealots as St. Gre- gory, but its conversion to Christianity. That holy barbarian, though born a Roman, and though pontiff of Rome, was more brutal than its enemies. Alaric and Attila plundered, Genseric and Constans removed; but Gregory's atrocious joy was to dash in pieces. Yet this man, who persecuted the fine arts, and (if We may believe John of Salisbury) burned the imperial library of the Apollo, has lately found authors to defend him. ^ Cicero led antiquaries into error by representing the Cor- nelian tomb as without the walls. In his time it certainly was so : but the Capena-gate, having been afterwards removed from the Aqua Crabra nearly on to the Almo, left the buried Scipios within the city. WORKS. WORKS OF THE EMPIRE. Haec sunt Roma. Videri velot ipsa cadavera tantae Urbis adbuc spirent imperiosa minas ! J. Vitalk. The arts of Greece, when transplanted to Rome, found an architecture estabhshed there, which was different even in origin from their own. The two opposite systems were presently combined, and the Greek column and entablature are found co-exist- ing with the Roman arch and vault, in every work of the empire. A combination so unnatural broke that unity of design which had prevailed here during the Etruscan period : it soon altered the native forms and proportions of the Greek orders ; it amassed incompatible ornaments; and beauty disappeared under the load of riches. Another enemy to the beautiful, and even to the sublime, was that colossal taste which arose in the empire, and gave an unnatural expansion to all the works of art. In architecture it produced Nero's golden house, and Adrian's villa ^ in hy- draulicSy 152 WORKS OF THE EMPIRE. draulics, it projected the Claudian emissary, and Caligula's Baian bridge ; in sculpture, it has left at the Capitol such heads and feet as betray the emperor's contempt for the dimensions of man ; in poetry it swelled out into the hyperboles of Lucan and Statins. This exaggerating spirit spread even to the games. Nero drove ten horses yoked abreast to his car, and double that number appear on an ancient stone. Architecture, thus enslaved to the selfishness of emperors, exhausted all her powders on palaces, triumphal arches, historical columns, and tombs. • The Imperial palace took root in the modest mansion of Hortensius, covered the whole Pala- tine, and branched over other hills. From Augustus to Nero is the period of its increase: from Nero down to Valentinian III., its history is but a succession of fires, and plunderings, and repairs. These would chiefly affect the walls and roofs ; but the present substructions (and little else remains) may be the original work of the Julian family. In the present chaos of broken walls and arcades we can no longer retrace the general design of this palace, as it existed in any one reign, Palladio, whose imagination has rebuilt so many ruins, for- bore from these. Parivinio tried in vain to retrace the WORKS OF THE EMPIRE. 153 the original design. Bianchini went too far. He spent his fortune and lost his life in excavating this ground ; but were the few rooms which he discovered in a corner of one quarter of the palace, or the ill-connected ruins above, sufficient data to restore the general design, and to allot geometri- cally each part of the fabric to its imperial founder ? Not satisfied with the grander distri- butions, and with the symmetry which he gives to the whole, Bianchini boldly descends into details ; he fixes the guard-rooms, the oil-cellars, the wood-house, &c., and bodies forth most mag- nificent stairs without one ancient step or stone to guide him. Others have brought into these ruins our modern ideas of convenience, and have fancied backstairs, cabinets, water-closets, contri- vances which the ancients never dreamed of. If we return from those restorers to the ruins themselves, we shall find not much grandeur nor correspondence, but a great variety of construc- tion. The walling is full of those blind arches, single, double, or triple, which the ancients in- serted in their brick- work. In some parts we find the emplecton faced with small triangular bricks, and its case covered every four feet upwards with a double course of broad ones. In the vaults, we see the mixture of tufo, pumice, and pozzuolana*^ which made them so light and durable : we can even distinguish every plank of the formas upon which 154 WORKS OP THE EMPIRE. which that mixture was carelessly cast. In the subterranean part are still some remains of the oriental marbles, the stuccos, the gold, azure, and painting, which were lavished on dark apartments, or lost in the obscurity of deep courts. If the basement and the baths were so rich, what must the imperial story have been ! The triumphal arches are too much interred for the eye to decide on their general proportions, or their distant effect. If the earth were removed, the columns, I apprehend, would lose all their importance between a stylohaton and an attic so immoderately high. What business or what meaning have columns on any arch ? The statues of captive kings are but a poor apology for so idle a support. The faces of those arches are full of compartments which tend to lessen the grandeur of their mass. Their tympana are convenient enough for the four Victories which fill those awkward triangles with their wings, and represent the old automatons dropping crowns on the con- queror. The platform above was well adapted to the curule statue. Here the triumphal car formed an historical record ; on a modern arch it is only a metaphor. Titus* arch is so rich that I can hardly think it elegant. The entablature, the imposts, the key- stones, are all crowded with sculpture, yet meagre in WORKS OF THE EMPIRE. 155 in profile : but it is hard to judge the general effect of a mutilated thing. In Septimius Severus' arch the composite starts so often and so furiously out, the poverty of its entablature meets you in so many points, as to leave no repose to the eye. Constantine's arch is larger, nobler, and even more correct in its architecture, the only object now in review : but is that architecture its own ? We know that its columns, statues, and relievi, are not ; and we may fairly suspect that even its composition was also stolen from other works, as Constantine's reign was notorious for architectural robbery. Gallienus' arch is a mere gate-way, and the arch called Drusus' seems part of an aqueduct ; yet coarse as they are, each has its Corinthian columns, and pediments still more frightfully mis- placed on the fronts. The Janus Quadrifrons is rather a compitum than an arch, and is grand enough in its general proportions to be classed among those of Domi- tian ; but the mean details betray a worse age of the art. Here are rows of pigmy columns divided by imposts, and here enormous cubes of marble are scooped, like troughs, into little scolloped niches. 156 WORKS OF THE EMPIRE. niches. Our Gothic architects loved little co- lumns and little niches 3 but they never built with large stones. The historical columns are true to no order of architecture. Trajan's has a Tuscan base and capital, a Doric shaft, and a pedestal w^ith Corin- thian mouldings. That of M. Aurelius repeats the same mixture ;i but its pedestal is restored, and though higher, both in proportions and in place, than the beautiful pedestal of Trajan, it does not associate so w^ell with its shaft. These two are the only regular pedestals that I have ever observed in Roman antiquity. The pedestal is a modern in- vention derived from the ancient stylohata, some of which form square projections under every column ; but those projections are vicious, and the insulated pedestal is worse. It should be banished from architecture, as a stilt hurtful to the shaft, and should be confined to monumental columns like these. The spiral on these two columns gives the story a continuity which horizontal rings would inter- rupt: but so thin a baton is too trifling a boundary to prevent the confusion which such a throng of prominent figures and deep shadows must throw on the general surface of the column. The ^(??726^ of Augustus, and of Adrian, appear at first WORKS OF THE EMPIRE. 157 first view absurd, extravagant, beyond all measure of comparison with the size of a coffin, or a cine- rary urn. The lower vaults of the first form a circle large enough to serve for a modern amphi- theatre : the second, though reduced to less than half its tower, has been for ages the citadel of Rome. Augustus, however, built his tomb with that ancient liberality which we find in so many epitaphs, to receive not only himself and his rela- tions, but his freedmen too, and all their families. A private tomb called only for a few rows of columbaria ^ but his imperial household required circles of vaults ; and vaults are the only vestige remaining of this pile. Adrian built his mauso- leum on the more selfish plan of Cecilia Metella's. Its figure, stript of ornament, was nearly the same; its walls were proportionately thick, and the interior designed for a iew sarcofagi. The same colossal taste gave rise to the Cobs- seum. Here, indeed, gigantic dimensions were necessary; for though hundreds could enter at once, and fifty thousand find seats, the space was still insufficient for Rome, and the crowd for the morning-games began at midnight. Vespasian and Titus, as if presaging their own deaths, hurried the building, and have left several marks of their precipitancy behind. In the upper walls they have inserted stones which had been evidently 158 WORKS OF THE EMPIRE. evidently drest for a different purpose. Some of the arcades are grossly unequal : no moulding pre- serves the same form round the whole ellipse, and every order is full of license. The Doric has no metops, and its arch is too low for its columns ; the Ionic repeats the entablature of the Doric: the third order is but a rough-cast of the Corin- thian, and its foliage the thickest water-plants : the fourth seems a mere repetition of the third, in pilasters ; and the attic, which crowns all, is still ' coarser than these. Happily for the Colosseum, the shape necessary to an amphitheatre has given it a stabihty of con- struction sufficient to resist fires, and earthquakes, and lightning, and sieges. Its elliptical form was the hoop which bound and held it entire; but barbarians rent that consolidating ring. Popes widened the breach, and time, not unassisted, continues the work of dilapidation. At this mo- ment the hermitage is threatened with a dreadful crash, and a generation not very remote must be content, I fear, with the picture of this stupen- dous monument. Yet ruined as it is, the Colosseum affords little room for dispute. Of the cavea two slopes are already demolished ; no cunei can be seen : not only the arence but the podium is interred. No member is entire round the whole ellipse; but every WORKS OF THE EMPIRE. 159 every member made such a round, and re-appears so often, that plans, sections, and elevations of the original work are drawn with the precision of a modern fabric. When the whole amphitheatre was entire, a child mig^t comprehend its design in a moment, and go direct to his place without straying in the porticos, for each arcade bears its number en- graved, and opposite to every fourth arcade was a stair-case. This multiplicity of wide, straight, and separate passages, proves the attention which the ancients paid to the safe discharge of a crowd; it finely illustrates the precept of Vitruvius,** and exposes the perplexity of some modern theatres. Every nation has undergone its revolution of vices ; and, as cruelty is not the present vice of ours, we can all humanely execrate the purpose of amphitheatres, now that they lie in ruins. Mo- ralists may tell us that the truly brave are never cruel; but this monument says *^ No.** Here sat the conquerors of the world, coolly to enjoy the tortures and death of men who had never offended them. Two aqueducts were scarcely sufficient to w^ash off the human blood which a few hours* sport shed in this imperial shambles. Twice in one day came the senators and matrons of Rome to the butchery; a virgin always gave the signal for slaughter, and when glutted with bloodshed, those ladies 160 WORKS OF THE EMPIRE. ladies sat down in the wet and steaming arence to a luxurious supper. Such reflections check our regret for its ruin. As it now stands, the Colosseum is a striking image of Rome itself: — decayed — vacant — serious — yet grand; — half grey and half greeur— erect on one side and fallen on the other, with consecrated ground in its bosom^ — inhabited by a beadsman ; visited by every cast; for moralists, antiquaries, painters, architects, devotees, all meet here to meditate, to examine, to draw, to measure, and to pray. '^ In contemplating antiquities,'* says Livy, " the mind itself becomes antique.'* It contracts from such objects a venerable rust, v^hich I prefer to the polish and the point of those wits who have lately profaned this august ruin with ridicule. The only circus that is sufficiently entire to show what a circus was, is called Caracalla's. Though meaner in construction than Caracalla's acknowledged works, it is admired for its plan, the direction of its spinas and the curve employed at the " a3quo carcere," to secure a fair start for the cars. Annexed to this circus is a spacious court, which some call Caesar's mutator ium^ and others an appurtenance of the circus itself. Its form, however. WORKS OF THE EMPIRE. I6l however, is very unlike the figure inscribed MV- TATORIVM in the ancient plan of Rome, nor vi^ill it suit any meaning yet assigned to that name. With the circus itself it had no communication, as it opened only upon the Appian way. I should rather, for the following reasons, suppose it a serapeon. • Whatever constituted a serapeon is to be found here — a rectangular court — one narrow entrance — a portico within — a round temple in the middle — and, under that, a subterranean cell necessary to the Egyptian mysteries. Rufus and Victor place the temples of Serapis and Isis in this very region, and point very near to this spot.*^ If the circus adjoining be really Cariacalla's, it gives additional probability to my opinion, for Caracalla was a great adorer of Serapis, went on pilgrimage to his shrine, and erected temples for his worship* To this period belong most of the baths. The baths of Titus, which are confounded, I suspect, with his palace, were the first gallery of ancient painting that was restored to the world. The subterranean saloons are now for the second time buried up in the Esquiline, and most of the pictures which remain visible are injured by the water oozing down from the incumbent gardens. Some of the ruins above ground rise up to the M vaulting 162 WORKS OF THE EMPIRE. vaulting of their niches; but none show their specific relation to a bath, except the Sette Sale^ the construction of which proves that it was neither a nymphceuniy nor a tepidarium, nor any- thing but a reservoir; and proves, too, how well the ancients understood hydrostatics. The stucco, like that of all reservoirs and castella, is mottled with fine stains, and hard enough for the turning iron, which could only arise from the tartareous penetration of the water. Caracalla's baths show how magnificent a coarse ruffian may be. The very dimensions of that hall which they call the Cella Solearis^ convince me that Spartianus does not exaggerate its embellish- ments. Those temples, and academies, and ex- hedra which remain were but out- works to the Thermal part. Mosaic was diffused here» as a general flooring. I followed it on the steps of a broken stair-case, up to the very summit. I found the tessellation entire even where the pavement had sunk, and had left round the room a vacancy, which was filled with a skirting of flowered alabaster. Variegated marbles had now succeeded to fresco-painting, which had spread during the three Flavian reigns, from the palace down to the stable. Indeed such was the rage for variegation, that plain marbles were stained or inlaid, and spots were incrusted on the spotted : hence their pavonine beds and pantherine tables. Diocletian's WORKS OF THE EMPIRE* 16* Diocletian's baths run into the same Tastness of dimension as his palace at Spalatro : but here I saw nothing classical or grand except in the Pinacotheca, and that was restored by Michael Angelo. The round structures, whether calidaria or exhedra, are sufficiently entire to serve for churches and granaries. The original plan of the whole being confounded by the contradictory plans of two convents, being crossed by roads and encumbered by vineyards, is now less oJt)vious than that of Caracalla's ruins, which seem to have been better distributed, and stand in an advan- tageous solitude. These baths, coexisting with others of equal extent, will appear too extravagantly large even for " the most high and palmy state of Rome," until we reflect on the various exercises connected with the bath, on the hot climate, the ancient habits, the rarity of linen, and the cheapness of bathing, which brought hither the whole popula- tion of the city. The walls of those baths run so generally into absides, that some lovers of system can see nothing but baths in the temple of Venus and Rome, in the great temple of Peace, in short in every ruin where they find such alcoves. But the alcove appears fully as frequent in the ruins of the Imperial palace, and of all the ancient villas M 2 that 164 WORKS OF THE EMPIRE. that I have seen. Vitruvius makes it a con- stituent part of every basilica ; vje can trace it in the plan of the EmiHan. In fact, the alcove seems rather an imitation of the Pra3torian tent than any thing peculiar to a bath. To combine the scattered remains of those baths, to distribute their interior, to give light to every apartment, and find out offices for them all would puzzle any regular surveyor ; but what can daunt antiquaries ? Determined to restore whatever is lost or dismembered, they bring in books to rebuild ruins, they fly to Vitruvius or Lucian, they rake up the mixt biographical rubbish of the Augustan histories, and from this chaos of discordant elements they bring forth a creation of their own. The porticos, like the baths, embraced a variety of objects, such as temples, schools, libraries j but nothing certain of this kind remains except the elegant Corinthian vestibule of Octavia*s. Perhaps the fine columns in the Piazza di Pietra- and some of those in the Campo Vaccino be- longed also to this class. Porticos were so nume- rous in this period, and so generally colonnaded that we are probably obliged to them for half the ancient columns that subsist. The brick remains of this period, though infe- rior WORKS OF THE EMPIRE. 165 ylor to the stone in character and effect, are far more general and more entire, for the ancient bricks imbibed the cement so intimately, that they break rather than separate. I was surprised to find the round and elliptical ruins so numerous. Round buildings could never have borne so large a proportion to the quadrangular, when both were entire. Most of the ancient edifices now sub- sisting as churches are round. In mixt construc- tions, the circular part of the walls has resisted time much better than the flat ; and of the roofs nothing remains that is not referable to the circle. The circular form, though destructive of regu- , larity in a private house, saves ground, prevents confusion, and cuts off useless corners in a public edifice. Beautiful in itself, it needs less decora- tion than flat surfaces , it is more capacious than angular forms of equal perimeter, and more com- modious for any assembly, whether met for worship, or sport, or deliberation. The remains of this period discover an increas- ing partiality for the Corinthian order. The Romans have used it in constructions of all kinds, still varying its ornament, yet preserving its character. In the capitals what variety of foliage, — the laurel, the parsley, the acanthus, or the thistle, and, above all, the olive-leaves which they cluster so differently! For variety, they have 166 WORKS OF THE EMPIRE. have brought griffins, eagles, cornucopiae, and other emblems into the volutes. In the entabla- tures may be found every variety of moulding: and what is the Composite* order but another variety of the Corinthian ? In the Pantheon, in the Campo Vaccine, the Capitol, the Sacred Way, every where in Rome, have they left us a richer Corinthian than can be found in Greece, where that order seems to have been rare. The Ionic y on the contrary, has rather degene- rated here. Too meagre at the Colosseum, too clumsy for its entablature at Marcellus' Theatre, irregular, nay, unequal at the Temple of Concord, full of disproportions in that of Fortuna Virilis (I mean the stucco entablature which it received during the empire), no where in Rome is it com- parable to the Ionic of the Ereetheon, which, had ^ its capital a simpler volute , might be proposed as the canon of this beautiful order. The Doric appears here in very few monuments, and is so latinized that we lose the original order. In the Roman temples columns were a mere decoration, or, at most, supported the pediment alone. In the Greek they were an integral part of the edifice; not engaged in the wall, but rather the wall itself. Hence arose a necessary difference in their proportions. At Rome the ancient Doric is WORKS OF THE EMPIRE. 167 is about 71 diameters. At Athens the greatest height of the column is but 6, at Pestum 41, at Corinth only 4. Of the order called Tuscan nothing is to be found in these, nor, I believe, in any ruins. The total disappearance of this order I would impute to its own rules. In Tuscan edifices, the columns stood so wide of each other, that wood became necessary to form the architrave, and a mixture of brick rendered the whole fabric more destrug- tible. Vitruvius found the Tuscan existing only in antiquated temples. It afterwards yielded to the taste for Greek, and the chief ruins in Italy are of the orders most remote from the Tuscan proportions. The AUiCy which notwithstanding its name is an Italian order, intrudes upon the noblest monu- ments of Rome, as the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the triumphal arches, the temple of Pallas, &c., and was more general, I suspect, than we can calculate from ruins ; for in every ruin the attic would be the first part to disappear. This bastard order, or rather accessory, is far too ignoble to surmount the Corinthian. Its proportions and its place are ever at variance. Sometimes it may hide a roof, but it unfortunately must crown the elevation. The 16^ WORKS OF THE EMf>IRE. The Romans now began to accumulate different i!)fders on the same pile. We see four at the Colosseum, Each of the Septizonia had seven> and 'though these structur^es have disappeared, perhaps in Consequence