LETTER XXVII.
FLORENCE—THE GALLERY—THE VENUS DE MEDICIS—THE TRIBUNE—THE FORNARINA—THE CASCINE—AN ITALIAN FESTA—MADAME CATALANI.
Florence.—It is among the pleasantest things in this very pleasant world, to find oneself for the first time in a famous city. We sallied from the hotel this morning an hour after our arrival, and stopped at the first corner to debate where we should go. I could not help smiling at the magnificence of the alternatives. "To the Gallery, of course," said I, "to see the Venus de Medicis." "To Santa Croce," said one, "to see the tombs of Michael Angelo, and Alfieri, and Machiavelli." "To the Palazzo Pitti," said another, "the Grand Duke's palace, and the choicest collection of pictures in the world." The embarrassment alone was quite a sensation.
The Venus carried the day. We crossed the Piazza de Granduca, and inquired for the gallery. A fine court was shown us, opening out from the square, around the three sides of which stood a fine uniform structure, with a colonnade, the lower story occupied by shops and crowded with people. We mounted a broad staircase, and requested of the soldier at the door to be directed to the presence of the Venus, without delay. Passing through one of the long wings of the gallery, without even a glance at the statues, pictures, and bronzes that lined the walls, we arrived at the door of a cabinet, and, putting aside the large crimson curtain at the entrance, stood before the enchantress. I must defer a description of her. We spent an hour there, but, except that her divine beauty filled and satisfied my eye, as nothing else ever did, and that the statue is as unlike a thing to the casts one sees of it as one thing could well be unlike another, I made no criticism. There is an atmosphere of fame and circumstantial interest about the Venus, which bewilders the fancy almost as much as her loveliness does the eye. She has been gazed upon and admired by troops of pilgrims, each of whom it were worth half a life to have met at her pedestal. The painters, the poets, the talent and beauty, that have come there from every country under the sun, and the single feeling of love and admiration that she has breathed alike into all, consecrate her mere presence as a place for revery and speculation. Childe Harold has been here, I thought, and Shelley and Wordsworth and Moore; and, farther removed from our sympathies, but interesting still, the poets and sculptors of another age, Michael Angelo and Alfieri, the men of genius of all nations and times; and, to stand in the same spot, and experience the same feeling with them, is an imaginative pleasure, it is true, but as truly a deep and real one. Exceeding, as the Venus does beyond all competition, every image of loveliness painted or sculptured that one has ever before seen, the fancy leaves the eye gazing upon it, and busies itself irresistibly with its pregnant atmosphere of recollections. At least I found it so, and I must go there again and again, before I can look at the marble separately, and with a merely admiring attention.
Three or four days have stolen away, I scarce know how. I have seen but one or two things, yet have felt so unequal to the description, that but for my promise I should never write a line about them. Really, to sit down and gaze into one of Titian's faces for an hour, and then to go away and dream of putting into language its color and expression, seems to me little short of superlative madness. I only wonder at the divine faculty of sight. The draught of pleasure seems to me immortal, and the eye the only Ganymede that can carry the cup steadily to the mind. How shall I begin to give you an idea of the Fornarina? What can I tell you of the St. John in the desert, that can afford you a glimpse, even, of Raphael's inspired creations?
The Tribune is the name of a small octagonal cabinet in the gallery, devoted to the masterpieces of the collection. There are five statues, of which one is the Venus de Medicis; and a dozen or twenty pictures, of which I have only seen as yet Titian's two Venuses, and Raphael's St. John and Fornarina. People walk through the other parts of the gallery, and pause here and there a moment before a painting or a statue; but in the Tribune they sit down, and you may wait hours before a chair is vacated, or often before the occupant shows a sign of life. Everybody seems entranced there. They get before a picture, and bury their eyes in it, as if it had turned them to stone. After the Venus, the Fornarina strikes me most forcibly, and I have stood and gazed at it till my limbs were numb with the motionless posture. There is no affectation in this. I saw an English girl yesterday gazing at the St. John. She was a flighty, coquettish-looking creature, and I had felt that the spirit of the place was profaned by the way she sailed into the room. She sat down, with half a glance at the Venus, and began to look at this picture. It is a glorious thing, to be sure, a youth of apparently seventeen, with a leopard-skin about his loins, in the very pride of maturing manliness and beauty. The expression of the face is all human, but wrought to the very limit of celestial enthusiasm. The wonderful richness of the coloring, the exquisite ripe fulness of the limbs, the passionate devotion of the kindling features, combine to make it the faultless ideal of a perfect human being in youth. I had quite forgotten the intruder, for an hour. Quite a different picture had absorbed all my attention. The entrance of some one disturbed me, and as I looked around I caught a glance of my coquette, sitting with her hands awkwardly clasped over her guide-book, her mouth open, and the lower jaw hanging down with a ludicrous expression of unconsciousness and astonished admiration. She was evidently unaware of everything in the world except the form before her, and a more absorbed and sincere wonder I never witnessed.
I have been enjoying all day an Italian Festa. The Florentines have a pleasant custom of celebrating this particular festival, Ascension-day, in the open air; breakfasting, dining, and dancing under the superb trees of the Cascine. This is, by the way, quite the loveliest public pleasure-ground I ever saw—a wood of three miles in circumference, lying on the banks of the Arno, just below the town; not, like most European promenades, a bare field of clay or ground, set out with stunted trees, and cut into rectangular walks, or without a secluded spot or an untrodden blade of grass; but full of sward-paths, green and embowered, the underbrush growing wild and luxuriant between; ivy and vines of all descriptions hanging from the limbs, and winding about every trunk; and here and there a splendid opening of velvet grass for half a mile, with an ornamental temple in the centre, and beautiful contrivances of perspective in every direction. I have been not a little surprised with the enchantment of so public a place. You step into the woods from the very pavement of one of the most populous streets in Florence; from dust and noise and a crowd of busy people to scenes where Boccacio might have fitly laid his "hundred tales of love." The river skirts the Cascine on one side, and the extensive grounds of a young Russian nobleman's villa on the other; and here at sunset come all the world to walk and drive, and on festas like this, to encamp, and keep holy-day under the trees. The whole place is more like a half-redeemed wild-wood in America, than a public promenade in Europe.
It is the custom, I am told, for the Grand Duke and the nobles of Tuscany to join in this festival, and breakfast in the open air with the people. The late death of the young and beautiful Grand-Duchess has prevented it this year, and the merry-makings are diminished of one half their interest. I should not have imagined it, however, without the information. I took a long stroll among the tents this morning, with two ladies from Albany, old friends, whom I have encountered accidentally in Florence. The scenes were peculiar and perfectly Italian. Everything was done fantastically and tastefully. The tables were set about the knolls, the bonnets and shawls hung upon the trees, and the dark-eyed men and girls, with their expressive faces full of enjoyment, leaned around upon the grass, with the children playing among them, in innumerable little parties, dispersed as if it had been managed by a painter. At every few steps a long embowered alley stretched off to the right or left, with strolling groups scattered as far as the eye could see under the trees, the red ribands and bright colored costumes contrasting gayly with the foliage of every tint, from the dusky leaf of the olive to the bright soft green of the acacia. Wherever there was a circular opening there were tents just in the edges of the wood, the white festoons of the cloth hung from the limbs, and tables spread under them, with their antique-looking Tuscan pitchers wreathed with vines, and tables spread with broad green leaves, making the prettiest cool covering that could be conceived. I have not come up to the reality in this description, and yet, on reading it, it sounds half a fiction. One must be here to feel how little language can convey an idea of this "garden of the world."
The evening was the fashionable hour, and, with the addition of Mr. Greenough, the sculptor, to our party, we drove to the Cascine about an hour before sunset to see the equipages, and enjoy the close of the festival. The drives intersect these beautiful grounds irregularly in every direction, and the spectacle was even more brilliant than in the morning. The nobility and the gay world of Florence flew past us, in their showy carriages of every description, the distinguished occupants differing in but one respect from well-bred people of other countries—they looked happy. If I had been lying on the grass, an Italian peasant, with my kinsmen and friends, I should not have felt that among the hundreds who were rolling past me, richer and better born. there was one face that looked on me contemptuously or condescendingly. I was very much struck with the universal air of enjoyment and natural exhilaration. One scarce felt like a stranger in such a happy-looking crowd.
Near the centre of the grounds is an open space, where it is the custom for people to stop in driving to exchange courtesies with their friends. It is a kind of fashionable open air soirée. Every evening you may see from fifty to a hundred carriages at a time, moving about in this little square in the midst of the woods, and drawing up side by side, one after another, for conversation. Gentlemen come ordinarily on horseback, and pass round from carriage to carriage, with their hats off, talking gayly with the ladies within. There could not be a more brilliant scene, and there never was a more delightful custom. It keeps alive the intercourse in the summer months, when there are no parties, and it gives a stranger an opportunity of seeing the lovely and the distinguished without the difficulty and restraint of an introduction to society. I wish some of these better habits of Europe were imitated in our country as readily as worse ones.
After threading the embowered roads of the Cascine for an hour, and gazing with constant delight at the thousand pictures of beauty and happiness that met us at every turn, we came back and mingled in the gay throng of carriages at the centre. The valet of our lady-friends knew everybody, and, taking a convenient stand, we amused ourselves for an hour, gazing at them as they were named in passing. Among others, several of the Bonaparte family went by in a splendid barouche; and a heavy carriage, with a showy, tasselled hammer-cloth, and servants in dashy liveries, stopped just at our side, containing Madame Catalani, the celebrated singer. She has a fine face yet, with large expressive features, and dark, handsome eyes. Her daughter was with her, but she has none of her mother's pretensions to good looks.