FOOTNOTES:
[13] Wieseler, Friedrich. Theatergebäude und Denkmaler des Buhnenwesens, beiden Gricchen und Römern. Göttingen, 1851. Vandenhœik und Ruprecht.
The Fine Arts.
All Europe abounds in memorials of illustrious men, and in the present time there is more than ever before a disposition manifested to consecrate art to the honor of the benefactors of mankind, or to those who have been most eminent for great qualities. From Munich, we learn by the latest journals, that two colossal statues—those of Gustavus Adolphus and of the Swedish poet Tegner—have just been cast at the royal foundry of that capital, with complete success. Both were modelled by Schwanthaler, and are destined for public places in the city of Stockholm. In France, the inhabitants of Andelys have been inaugurating a statue of Nicolas Poussin, with great ceremonial. On the same day a statue to Poisson, an eminent mathematician, was inaugurated with pomp, at his native place, Pithiviers, near Orleans. A little before, one was erected to Froissart, the quaint old chronicler of knightly deeds, at Valenciennes, where he was born. Jeanne Hachette is about to have one at Beauvais; Gresset, the author of 'Vert Vert', at Amiens; and the village of Rollot, in Picardy, has just caused to be placed in its public square a bust of the translator into French of the Thousand and One Nights, Antony Galland. He was sent by Colbert to the East on account of his great knowledge of the Hebrew and other oriental languages, and on his return published the Arabian Nights, and a treatise on the origin of coffee.
There is, in fact, scarcely a Frenchman of real eminence in poetry, literature, war, science, statesmanship, or the arts, who is not honored with a statue, either in his birthplace, or in the town made his own by adoption. Most of the statues are erected at the expense of the respective localities; the good people thinking it a duty to render every respect to their illustrious dead. And when they happen to be too poor to incur much cost, they erect a fountain, or some other useful work, which bears the great man's name. In the small and poor village of Chatenay, near Paris, where Voltaire was born, you see, for example, a small plaster bust of him, in an iron cage, and on the parish pump the words "à Voltaire." And, as the Literary Gazette has it, very justly, "the man who should scoff at this simple tribute to genius would be an ass,—it is all that poor peasants can afford to pay." The names of distinguished men are also frequently given by the French to streets and squares. In Paris alone, Molière, Racine, Corneille, Voltaire, Boileau, Montaigne, and I know not how many others, together with men of science by the hundred, have streets named after them: so have Chateaubriand and Béranger; so have even the English Lord Byron and the Italian Rossini. The ships in the navy, too, receive also the names of distinguished men, foreign as well as native—there is a man-of-war named after Newton, and several public works have the name of our own Franklin. But in the United States, although we have sometimes named after soldiers and statesmen, we have scarce any monuments, and no statues at all, except a few of men distinguished in affairs. In Union Square, opposite the house in which he lived, there should be a statue of the great Chancellor Kent; in Richmond, one of Marshall, next to Washington, the greatest of Virginians; in Northampton, one to Jonathan Edwards; in New Haven, one to Timothy Dwight; before the Academy of Sciences in Philadelphia, one to Franklin, one to Rittenhouse, and one to Alex. Wilson; at Cambridge, one to Allston; in Boston, one to Bowditch; and in New-York, memorials of some sort to Audubon, Gallatin, Hamilton, &c.
In the new park which is to be reserved in the upper part of the city, we have an opportunity to commemorate the patriotism and misfortunes of the first magistrate chosen by the people of New-York, the first under whom municipal elections were held here, and the first martyr to Liberty in the New World—Governor Leisler. Leisler Park sounds well, and it has additional fitness from the fact, that the unfortunate governor was once proprietor of a part of the grounds to be so appropriated. If it shall not be called Leisler Park, there is another illustrious New-Yorker, whose name appears to have been forgotten by those who have given names to public places here,—Governor Colden, who wrote the History of the Five Nations.
When the Emperor of Russia was at Rome, four or five years ago, he engaged Barberi, the worker in mosaic, to undertake certain large works, and with the instruction of six Russian students with a view to the establishment of a great school of mosaic art in St. Petersburgh. Since that time Barberi and his pupils have been occupied with works for the imperial residence, the last of which, just completed, consists of an octagonal mosaic pavement, from the ancient design of the round hall in the Vatican Museum, with twenty-eight figures, a colossal head of Medusa in the centre, and a variety of ornaments, all inclosed in a brilliant wreath of fruits, flowers, and foliage. The series already executed consist of four scenic masques, each of which is valued at £5200 sterling. With these finished works Cavaliere Barberi is about to forward to St. Petersburgh a number of vitreous mosaic tablets of every shade and style of drawing and decoration, as models for younger students.
Tenerani, the most eminent of contemporary Italian sculptors, has finished a statue of Bolivar. The figure is standing, full draped, and holding a laurel crown in the left hand. The pediment is ornamented with three bas-reliefs, the three provinces, Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia. Two statues, Justice and Liberality, symbols of the hero's virtues, stand at the side of the monument, which will be erected in the cathedral of Caraccas. It is a fine instance of the beauty and delicate grace of Tenerani's treatment. The expressive head of "The Liberator," with the high, arched brow, the large, soft, and sagacious eyes, the sharply chiselled but agreeable features, beaming with intellectual radiance, are happily conceived and exquisitely executed.
In the same kind we note an equestrian statue of Bernadotte by Togelberg, a Swede resident in Rome. The horseman's mantle has fallen aside, the staff of a commander is in his hand, and the able marshal, "king that shall be," looks graciously down from his horse. In his face there is the imperial force of military genius, with the genial grace of sensibility. The horse is finely done.
Steinhauser's statue of Hahnemann, the father of homœopathy, destined for Leipsic, is almost finished. The same artist has in hand the Goethe monument, designed by Bettina von Arnim. The sketch serves as the illuminated title-page to the second volume of the correspondence with a child. She describes it as follows: "Goethe sits upon a throne, within a semi-niche, his head reaches over the niche, which is not closed above, but is cut away, and seems, half seen, like the moon rising over the rim of a mountain. The mantle, tied round the neck, falls back over the shoulders, and is brought forward again under the arms into the lap. The left hand rests upon the lyre, supported upon the left knee. The right hand, which holds my flowers, is sunk negligently in the same way, and, forgetting fame, he holds the laurel wreath, and looks toward heaven. The young Psyche stands before him, as then I stood, raises herself upon tip-toe to touch the strings of the lyre, which he permits, lost in inspiration."
The artist has appreciated this conception. He has represented Goethe not as an old man, but as a man of ideal expression, holding indeed the well-won laurel, but with the harp in hand, as if inspiration were exhaustless.
Herr Kiss's group in bronze of an Amazon encountering a lion has been purchased by the Prince of Prussia as a present for the Queen of England. A copy of the same work in zinc has been purchased by a gentleman from the United States for £2500. It is said that Kiss has received a commission for two other copies for persons in the United States.
The English critics complain that they have not any longer a great portrait painter. This branch of art is declining, and the walls of the Academy this year bear testimony to the fact. From the death of Lawrence to the present time, now more than twenty years, it has been gradually subsiding into the mere record of literal fact—ignoring those great principles which made it once a means of historical record. In America we have occasion for no such regrets. Elliot is equal to any man in the world for a masculine and noble head, and Hicks and several others would in any country or in any time command the applause due to great masters.
For three years Mr. Pyne, the landscape painter, has been taking a series of views in the lake counties of England. The pictures comprise all the important objects in a tour through the country they illustrate, treated under a variety of aspects, which renders the collection valuable in an artistic point of view. A feeling for atmospheric distance is one of Mr. Pyne's most important attributes, and in representing wide reaching views of mountains and lakes he has had full scope for his talent. The pictures are to be copied in a series of colored lithographs, and published in a volume.
Among the pictures in the Royal Academy this season are several by British army officers on foreign duty. By the Hon. Lieutenant Colonel Percy there are, A Study of Niagara from the under Horse-Shoe Fall, The River St. Lawrence and Mouth of the Saguenay, and a view on the same river Near the Chaudiere Bridge, Quebec.
Rauch, the sculptor, whose statue of Frederic the Great has just been erected in Berlin, has been the object of an artistic ovation. The Academy of Sciences gave a banquet in his honor, the king, royal family, and ministers assisted, and Meyerbeer composed a Cantata for the occasion.
Mr. Healy's picture of Mr. Webster replying to Colonel Hayne is completed, in Paris, and will be brought to New-York in the present month (of August). It is twenty-eight feet long. The painter has published proposals for engravings of it, at twenty dollars per copy.
An original painting by Raphael, The Boar Hunt, was destroyed in a recent fire at Downhill House, the family seat of Sir Hervey Bruce, in England.
The French and English journals mention several important improvements of the daguerreotype, some of which are of the same character as Mr. Hill's. Mr. Brady, of this city, has gone to London, to establish a branch of his house in that city.