IV.
CANOVA'S BIRTHPLACE.
From Venice to the city of Vicenza by rail it is two hours, and thence you must take a carriage if you would go to Bassano, which is an opulent and busy little grain mart of some twelve thousand souls, about thirty miles north of Venice, at the foot of the Alps. We reached the town at nine o'clock. It was moonlight; and as we looked out we saw the quaint, steep streets full of promenaders, and everybody in Bassano seemed to be making love. Young girls strolled about the picturesque way with their lovers, and tender couples were cooing at all the doors and windows. Bassano is the birthplace of the painter Jacopo da Ponte, who was one of the first Italian painters to treat Scriptural story as accessory to mere landscape, and who had a peculiar fondness for painting Entrances into the Ark, because he could indulge without stint the taste for pairing-off early acquired from observation of the just-mentioned local customs in his native town. This was the theory offered by one who had imbibed the spirit of subtile speculation from Ruskin, and I think it reasonable. At least it does not conflict with the fact that there is at Bassano a most excellent gallery of paintings entirely devoted to the works of Jacopo da Ponte and his four sons, who are here to be seen to better advantage than anywhere else. As few strangers visit Bassano, the gallery is little frequented. It is in charge of a very strict old man, who will not allow people to look at the pictures till he has shown them the adjoining cabinet of geological specimens. It is in vain that you assure him of your indifference to these scientific seccature; he is deaf, and you are not suffered to escape a single fossil. He asked us a hundred questions, and understood nothing in reply, insomuch that when he came to his last inquiry, "Have the Protestants the same God as the Catholics?" we were rather glad that he should be obliged to settle the fact for himself.
Underneath the gallery was a school of boys, whom, as we entered, we heard humming over the bitter honey which childhood is obliged to gather from the opening flowers of orthography. When we passed out, the master gave these poor busy bees an atom of holiday, and they all swarmed forth together to look at the strangers. The teacher was a long, lank man, in a black threadbare coat, and a skull-cap,—exactly like the schoolmaster in "The Deserted Village." We made a pretence of asking him our way somewhere, and went wrong, and came by accident upon a wide, flat space, bare as a brick-yard, beside which was lettered on a fragment of the old city wall, "Giuoco di Palla." It was evidently the play-ground of the whole city, and it gave us a pleasanter idea of life in Bassano than we had yet conceived, to think of its entire population playing ball there in the spring afternoons. We respected Bassano as much for this as for her diligent remembrance of her illustrious dead, of whom she has very great numbers. It appeared to us that nearly every other house bore a tablet announcing that "Here was born," or "Here died," some great or good man of whom no one out of Bassano ever heard. There is enough celebrity there to supply the world; but as laurel is a thing that grows anywhere, I covet rather from Bassano the magnificent ivy that covers the portions of her ancient wall yet standing. The wall, where visible, is seen to be of a pebbly rough-cast, but it is clothed almost from the ground in glossy ivy, that glitters upon it like chain-mail upon the vast shoulders of some giant warrior. The bed of the moat is turned into a lovely promenade, bordered by quiet villas, with shepherds and shepherdesses carved in marble on their gates. Where the wall is built to the verge of the high ground on which the city stands, there is a swift descent to the wide valley of the Brenta, waving in corn and vines and tobacco.
It did not take a long time to exhaust the interest of Bassano; but we were sorry to leave the place, because of the excellence of the inn at which we tarried. It was called "Il Mondo," and it had everything in it that heart could wish. Our rooms were miracles of neatness and comfort; they had the freshness, not the rawness, of recent repair, and they opened into the dining-hall, where we were served with indescribable salads and risotti. During our sojourn we simply enjoyed the house; when we were come away we wondered that so much perfection of hotel could exist in so small a town as Bassano. It is one of the pleasures of by-way travel in Italy, that you are everywhere introduced in fanciful character,—that you become fictitious, and play a part as in a novel. To this inn of "The World" our driver had brought us with a clamor and rattle proportioned to the fee received from us, and when, in response to his haughty summons, the cameriere, who had been gossiping with the cook, threw open the kitchen door, and stood out to welcome us in a broad square of forth-streaming ruddy light, amid the lovely odors of broiling and roasting, our driver saluted him with, "Receive these gentle folks, and treat them to your very best. They are worthy of anything." This at once put us back several centuries, and we never ceased to be lords and ladies of the period of Don Quixote as long as we rested in that inn.
It was a bright and breezy Sunday when we left "Il Mondo," and gayly journeyed toward Treviso, intending to visit Possagno, the birthplace of Canova, on our way. The road to the latter place passes through a beautiful country, that gently undulates on either hand, till in the distance it rises into pleasant hills and green mountain-heights. Possagno itself lies upon the brink of a declivity, down the side of which drops terrace after terrace, all planted with vines and figs and peaches, to a water-course below. The ground on which the village is built, with its quaint and antiquated stone cottages, slopes gently northward, and on a little rise upon the left hand of us coming from Bassano, we saw that stately religious edifice with which Canova has honored his humble birthplace. It is a copy of the Pantheon, and it cannot help being beautiful and imposing, but it would be utterly out of place in any other than an Italian village. Here, however, it consorted well enough with the lingering qualities of that old pagan civilization still perceptible in Italy. A sense of that past was so strong with us, as we ascended the broad stairway leading up the slope from the village to the level on which the temple stands at the foot of a mountain, that we might well have fancied we approached an altar devoted to the elder worship: through the open doorway and between the columns of the portico we could see the priests moving to and fro, and the voice of their chanting came out to us like the sound of hymns to some of the deities long disowned; and I could but recall how Padre L—— had once said to me in Venice, "Our blessed saints are only the old gods baptized and christened anew." Within, as without, the temple resembled the Pantheon, but it had little to show us. The niches designed by Canova for statues of the saints are empty yet; but there are busts by his own hand of himself and his brother, the Bishop Canova. Among the people present was the sculptor's niece, whom our guide pointed out to us, and who was evidently used to being looked at. She seemed not to dislike it, and stared back at us amiably enough, being a good-natured, plump, comely, dark-faced lady of perhaps fifty years.
Possagno is nothing if not Canova, and our guide, a boy, knew all about him,—how, more especially, he had first manifested his wonderful genius by modelling a group of sheep out of the dust of the highway, and how an Inglese, happening along in his carriage, saw the boy's work and gave him a plateful of gold napoleons. I dare say this is as near the truth as most facts. And is it not better for the historic Canova to have begun in this way, than to have poorly picked up the rudiments of his art in the work-shop of his father, a maker of altar-pieces and the like for country churches? The Canova family has intermarried with the Venetian nobility, and probably would not believe those stories of Canova's beginnings which his townsmen so fondly cherish. I dare say they would even discredit the butter lion with which the boy-sculptor is said to have adorned the table of the noble Falier, and first won his notice.
Besides the temple at Possagno, there is a very pretty gallery containing casts of all Canova's works. It is an interesting place, where Psyches and Cupids flutter, where Venuses present themselves in every variety of attitude, where Sorrows sit upon hard, straight-backed classic chairs, and mourn in the society of faithful Storks; where the Bereft of this century surround death-beds in Greek costume appropriate to the scene; where Muses and Graces sweetly pose themselves and insipidly smile, and where the Dancers and Passions, though nakeder, are no wickeder than the Saints and Virtues. In all, there are a hundred and ninety-five pieces in the gallery, and among the rest the statue named George Washington which was sent to America in 1820, and afterwards destroyed by fire in the Capitol of North Carolina, at Raleigh. The figure is in a sitting posture; naturally, it is in the dress of a Roman general; and if it does not look much like George Washington, it does resemble Julius Cæsar.
The custodian of the gallery had been Canova's body-servant, and he loved to talk of his master. He had so far imbibed the spirit of family pride that he did not like to allow that Canova had ever been other than rich and grand, and he begged us not to believe the idle stories of his first essays in art. He was delighted with our interest in the imperial Washington, and our pleasure in the whole gallery, which we viewed with the homage due to the man who had rescued the world from Swaggering in sculpture. When we were tired, he invited us, with his mistress's permission, into the house of the Canovas adjoining the gallery; and there we saw many paintings by the sculptor,—pausing longest in a lovely little room decorated, after the Pompeian manner, with scherzi in miniature panels representing the jocose classic usualities,—Cupids escaping from cages, and being sold from them, and playing many pranks and games with Nymphs and Graces.
Then Canova was done, and Possagno was finished; and we resumed our way to Treviso.