The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 09 (of 12)

by William Hazlitt

CHAPTER XIX

‘As London is to the meanest country town, so is Rome to every other city in the world.’

So said an old friend of mine, and I believed him till I saw it. This is not the Rome I expected to see. No one from being in it would know he was in the place that had been twice mistress of the world. I do not understand how Nicolas Poussin could tell, taking up a handful of earth, that it was ‘a part of the Eternal City.’ In Oxford an air of learning breathes from the very walls: halls and colleges meet your eye in every direction; you cannot for a moment forget where you are. In London there is a look of wealth and populousness which is to be found nowhere else. In Rome you are for the most part lost in a mass of tawdry, fulsome common-places. It is not the contrast of pig-styes and palaces that I complain of, the distinction between the old and new; what I object to is the want of any such striking contrast, but an almost uninterrupted succession of narrow, vulgar-looking streets, where the smell of garlick prevails over the odour of antiquity, with the dingy, melancholy flat fronts of modern-built houses, that seem in search of an owner. A dunghill, an outhouse, the weeds growing under an imperial arch offend me not; but what has a green-grocer’s stall, a stupid English china warehouse, a putrid trattoria, a barber’s sign, an old clothes or old picture shop or a Gothic palace, with two or three lacqueys in modern liveries lounging at the gate, to do with ancient Rome? No! this is not the wall that Romulus leaped over: this is not the Capitol where Julius Cæsar fell: instead of standing on seven hills, it is situated in a low valley: the golden Tiber is a muddy stream: St. Peter’s is not equal to St. Paul’s: the Vatican falls short of the Louvre, as it was in my time; but I thought that here were works immoveable, immortal, inimitable on earth, and lifting the soul half way to heaven. I find them not, or only what I had seen before in different ways: the Stanzas of Raphael are faded, or no better than the prints; and the mind of Michael Angelo’s figures, of which no traces are to be found in the copies, is equally absent from the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Rome is great only in ruins: the Coliseum, the Pantheon, the Arch of Constantine fully answered my expectations; and an air breathes round her stately avenues, serene, blissful, like the mingled breath of spring and winter, betwixt life and death, betwixt hope and despair. The country about Rome is cheerless and barren. There is little verdure, nor are any trees planted, on account of their bad effects on the air. Happy climate! in which shade and sunshine are alike fatal. The Jews (I may add while I think of it) are shut up here in a quarter by themselves. I see no reason for it. It is a distinction not worth the making. There was a talk (it being Anno Santo) of shutting them up for the whole of the present year. A soldier stands at the gate, to tell you that this is the Jews’ quarter, and to take any thing you choose to give him for this piece of Christian information. A Catholic church stands outside their prison, with a Crucifixion painted on it as a frontispiece, where they are obliged to hear a sermon in behalf of the truth of the Christian religion every Good Friday. On the same day they used to make them run races in the Corso, for the amusement of the rabble (high and low)—now they are compelled to provide horses for the same purpose. Owing to the politeness of the age, they no longer burn them as of yore, and that is something. Religious zeal, like all other things, grows old and feeble. They treat the Jews in this manner at Rome (as a local courtesy to St. Peter), and yet they compliment us on our increasing liberality to the Irish Catholics. The Protestant chapel here stands outside the walls, while there is a British monument to the memory of the Stuarts, inside of St. Peter’s; the tombs in the English burying-ground were destroyed and defaced not long ago; yet this did not prevent the Prince Regent from exchanging portraits with the Pope and his Ministers!—‘Oh! liberalism—lovely liberalism!’ as Mr. Blackwood would say.

From the window of the house where I lodge, I have a view of the whole city at once: nay, I can see St. Peter’s as I lie in bed of a morning. The town is an immense mass of solid stone-buildings, streets, palaces, and churches; but it has not the beauty of the environs of Florence, nor the splendid background of Turin, nor does it present any highly picturesque or commanding points of view like Edinburgh. The pleasantest walks I know are round the Via Sistina, and along the Via di Quattro-Fontane—they overlook Rome from the North-East on to the churches of Santa Maria Maggiore, and of St. John Lateran, towards the gate leading to Naples. As we loiter on, our attention was caught by an open greensward to the left, with foot-paths, and a ruined wall and gardens on each side. A carriage stood in the road just by, and a gentleman and lady, with a little child, had got out of it to walk. A soldier and a girl were seen talking together further on, and a herd of cattle were feeding at their leisure on the yielding turf. The day was close and dry—not a breath stirred. All was calm and silent. It had been cold when we set out, but here the air was soft—of an Elysian temperature, as if the winds did not dare to visit the sanctuaries of the dead too roughly. The daisy sprung beneath our feet—the fruit-trees blossomed within the nodding arches. On one side were seen the hills of Albano, on the other the Claudian gate; and close by was Nero’s Golden House, where there were seventy thousand statues and pillars, of marble and of silver, and where senates kneeled, and myriads shouted in honour of a frail mortal, as of a God. Come here, oh man! and worship thine own spirit, that can hoard up, as in a shrine, the treasures of two thousand years, and can create out of the memory of fallen splendours and departed grandeur a solitude deeper than that of desert wildernesses, and pour from the out-goings of thine own thoughts a thunder louder than that of maddening multitudes! No place was ever so still as this; for none was ever the scene of such pomp and triumph! Not far from this are the Baths of Titus; the grass and the poppy (the flower of oblivion) grow over them, and in the vaults below they shew you (by the help of a torch) paintings on the ceiling eighteen hundred years old, birds, and animals, a figure of a slave, a nymph and a huntsman, fresh and elegantly foreshortened, and also the place where the Laocoon was discovered. A few paces off is the Coliseum, or Amphitheatre of Titus, the noblest ruin in Rome. It is circular, built of red stone and brick, with arched windows, and the gillyflower and fennel growing on its walls to the very top: one side is nearly perfect. As you pass under it, it seems to raise itself above you, and mingle with the sky in its majestic simplicity, as if earth were a thing too gross for it; it stands almost unconscious of decay, and may still stand for ages—though Mr. Hobhouse has written Annotations upon it! There is a hypocritical inscription on it, to say that it has been kept in repair by the Popes, in order to preserve the memory of the martyrs that suffered here in cruel combats with wild beasts. As I have alluded to this subject, I will add that I think the finest stanza in Lord Byron is that where he describes the Dying Gladiator, who falls and does not hear the shout of barbarous triumph echoing from these very walls:—

‘He hears it not; his thoughts are far away,

Where his rude hut beside the Danube lay;

There are his young barbarians, all at play,

They and their Dacian mother; he their sire

Is doom’d to make a Roman holiday.

When will ye rise, ye Goths? awake and glut your ire!’

Childe Harold.

The temple of Vesta is on the Tiber. It is not unlike an hour-glass—or a toad-stool; it is small, but exceedingly beautiful, and has a look of great antiquity. The Pantheon is also as fine as possible. It has the most perfect unity of effect. It was hardly a proper receptacle for the Gods of the Heathens, for it has a simplicity and grandeur like the vaulted cope of Heaven. Compared with these admired remains of former times I must say that the more modern churches and palaces in Rome are poor, flashy, upstart looking things. Even the dome of St. Peter’s is for the most part hid by the front, and the Vatican has no business by its side. The sculptures there are also indifferent, and the mosaics, except two—the Transfiguration and St. Jerome, ill chosen. I was lucky enough to see the Pope here on Easter Sunday. He seems a harmless, infirm, fretful old man. I confess I should feel little ambition to be at the head of a procession, at which the ignorant stare, the better informed smile. I was also lucky enough to see St. Peter’s illuminated to the very top (a project of Michael Angelo’s) in the evening. It was finest at first, as the kindled lights blended with the fading twilight. It seemed doubtful whether it were an artificial illumination, the work of carpenters and torch-bearers, or the reflection of an invisible sun. One half of the cross shone with the richest gold, and rows of lamps gave light as from a sky. At length a shower of fairy lights burst out at a signal in all directions, and covered the whole building. It looked better at a distance than when we went nearer it. It continued blazing all night. What an effect it must have upon the country round! Now and then a life or so is lost in lighting up the huge fabric, but what is this to the glory of the church and the salvation of souls, to which it no doubt tends? I can easily conceive some of the wild groups that I saw in the streets the following day to have been led by delight and wonder from their mountain-haunts, or even from the bandits’ cave, to worship at this new starry glory, rising from the earth. The whole of the immense space before St. Peter’s was in the afternoon crowded with people to see the Pope give his benediction. The rich dresses of the country people, the strong features and orderly behaviour of all, gave this assemblage a decided superiority over any thing of the kind I had seen in England. I did not hear the Miserere which is chaunted by the Priests, and sung by a single voice (I understand like an angel’s) in a dim religious light in the Sistine Chapel; nor did I see the exhibition of the relics, at which I was told all the beauty of Rome was present. It is something even to miss such things. After all, St. Peter’s does not seem to me the chief boast or most imposing display of the Catholic religion. Old Melrose Abbey, battered to pieces and in ruins, as it is, impresses me much more than the collective pride and pomp of Michael Angelo’s great work. Popery is here at home, and may strut and swell and deck itself out as it pleases, on the spot and for the occasion. It is the pageant of an hour. But to stretch out its arm fifteen hundred miles, to create a voice in the wilderness, to have left its monuments standing by the Teviot-side, or to send the midnight hymn through the shades of Vallombrosa, or to make it echo among Alpine solitudes, that is faith, and that is power. The rest is a puppet-shew! I am no admirer of Pontificals, but I am a slave to the picturesque. The Priests talking together in St. Peter’s, or the common people kneeling at the altars, make groups that shame all art. The inhabitants of the city have something French about them—something of the cook’s and the milliner’s shop—something pert, gross, and cunning; but the Roman peasants redeem the credit of their golden sky. The young women that come here from Gensano and Albano, and that are known by their scarlet boddices and white head-dresses and handsome good-humoured faces, are the finest specimens I have ever seen of human nature. They are like creatures that have breathed the air of Heaven, till the sun has ripened them into perfect beauty, health, and goodness. They are universally admired in Rome. The English women that you see, though pretty, are pieces of dough to them. Little troops and whole families, men, women, and children, from the Campagna and neighbouring districts of Rome, throng the streets during Easter and Lent, who come to visit the shrine of some favourite Saint, repeating their Aves aloud, and telling their beads with all the earnestness imaginable. Popery is no farce to them. They surely think St. Peter’s is the way to Heaven. You even see priests counting their beads, and looking grave. If they can contrive to get possession of this world for themselves, and give the laity the reversion of the next, were it only in imagination, something is to be said for the exchange. I only hate half-way houses in religion or politics, that take from us all the benefits of ignorance and superstition, and give us none of the advantages of liberty or philosophy in return. Thus I hate Princes who usurp the thrones of others, and would almost give them back, sooner than allow the rights of the people. Once more, how does that monument to the Stuarts happen to be stuck up in the side-aisle of St. Peter’s? I would ask the person who placed it there, how many Georges there have been since James III.? His ancestor makes but an ambiguous figure beside the posthumous group—

‘So sit two Kings of Brentford on one throne!’

The only thing unpleasant in the motley assemblage of persons at Rome, is the number of pilgrims with their greasy oil-skin cloaks. They are a dirty, disgusting set, with a look of sturdy hypocrisy about them. The Pope (pro formâ) washes their feet; the Nuns, when they come, have even a less delicate office to perform. Religion, in the depth of its humility, ought not to forget decorum. But I am a traveller, and not a reformer.

The picture-galleries in Rome disappointed me quite. I was told there were a dozen at least, equal to the Louvre; there is not one. I shall not dwell long upon them, for they gave me little pleasure. At the Ruspigliosi Palace (near the Monte Cavallo, where are the famous Colossal groups, said to be by Phidias and Praxiteles, of one of which we have a cast in Hyde Park) are the Aurora and the Andromeda, by Guido. The first is a most splendid composition (like the Daughter of the Dawn) but painted in fresco; and the artist has, in my mind, failed through want of practice in the grace and colouring of most of the figures. They are a clumsy, gloomy-looking set, and not like Guido’s females. The Andromeda has all the charm and sweetness of his pencil, in its pearly tones, its graceful timid action, and its lovely expression of gentleness and terror. The face, every part of the figure, has a beauty and softness not to be described. This one figure is worth all the other group, and the Apollo, the horses and the azure sea to boot. People talk of the insipidity of Guido. Oh! let me drink long, repeated, relishing draughts of such insipidity! If delicacy, beauty, and grace are insipidity, I too profess myself an idolizer of insipidity: I will venture one assertion, which is, that no other painter has expressed the female character so well, so truly, so entirely in its fragile, lovely essence, neither Raphael, nor Titian, nor Correggio; and, after these, it is needless to mention any more. Raphael’s women are Saints; Titian’s are courtesans; Correggio’s an affected mixture of both; Guido’s are the true heroines of romance, the brides of the fancy, such as ‘youthful poets dream of when they love,’ or as a Clarissa, a Julia de Roubigne, or a Miss Milner would turn out to be! They are not only angels, but young ladies into the bargain, which is more than can be said for any of the others, and yet it is something to say. Vandyke sometimes gave this effect in portrait, but his historical figures are fanciful and sprawling. Under the Andromeda is a portrait by Nicholas Poussin of himself (a duplicate of that in the Louvre), and an infant Cupid or Bacchus, by the same artist, finely coloured, and executed in the manner of Titian. There is in another room an unmeaning picture, by Annibal Caracci, of Samson pulling down the temple of the Philistines, and also a fine dead Christ by him; add to these a Diana and Endymion by Guercino, in which the real sentiment of the story is thrown into the landscape and figures. The Ruspigliosi Pavilion, containing these and some inferior pictures, is situated near the remains of Constantine’s Bath in a small raised garden or terrace, in which the early violets and hyacinths blossom amidst broken cisterns and defaced statues. It is a pretty picture; art decays, but nature still survives through all changes. At the Doria Palace, there is nothing remarkable but the two Claudes, and these are much injured in colour. The trees are black, and the water looks like lead. There are several Garofolos, which are held in esteem here (not unjustly) and one fine head by Titian. The Velasquez (Innocent X.), so much esteemed by Sir Joshua, is a spirited sketch. The Borghese Palace has three fine pictures, and only three—the Diana and Actæon of Domenichino; the Taking down from the Cross, by Raphael; and Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love. This last picture has a peculiar and inexpressible charm about it. It is something between portrait and allegory, a mixture of history and landscape, simple and yet quaint, fantastical yet without meaning to be so, but as if a sudden thought had struck the painter, and he could not help attempting to execute it out of curiosity, and finishing it from the delight it gave him. It is full of sweetness and solemnity. The Diana of Domenichino is just the reverse of it. Every thing here is arranged methodically, and is the effect of study and forethought. Domenichino was a painter of sense, feeling, and taste; but his pencil was meagre, and his imagination dispirited and impoverished. In Titian, the execution surpassed the design, and the force of his hand and eye, as he went on, enriched the most indifferent outline: in Domenichino, the filling up fell short of the conception and of his own wishes. He was a man of great modesty and merit; and when others expressed an admiration of his talents, they were obliged to reckon up a number of his chef-d’œuvres to convince him that they were in earnest. He could hardly believe that any one else thought much of his works, when he thought so little of them himself. Raphael’s Taking down from the Cross is in his early manner, and the outlines of the limbs are like the edges of plates of tin; but it has what was inseparable from his productions, first and last, pregnant expression and careful drawing. I ought to mention that there is, by the same master-hand, a splendid portrait of Cæsar Borgia, which is an addition to my list. The complexion is a strange mixture of orange and purple. The hair of his sister, Lucretia Borgia (the friend and mistress of Cardinal Bembo) is still preserved in Italy, and a lock of it was in the possession of Lord Byron. I lately saw it in company with that of Milton and of Bonaparte, looking calm, golden, beautiful, a smiling trophy from the grave! The number and progressive improvement of Raphael’s works in Italy is striking. It might teach our holiday artists that to do well is to do much. Excellence springs up behind us, not before us; and is the result of what we have done, not of what we intend to do. Many artists (especially those abroad, who are distracted with a variety of styles and models) never advance beyond the contemplation of some great work, and think to lay in an unexampled store of accomplishments, before they commence any undertaking. That is where they ought to end; to begin with it is too much. It is as if the foundation-stone should form the cupola of St. Peter’s. Great works are the result of much labour and of many failures, and not of pompous pretensions and fastidious delicacy.

The Corsini pictures are another large and very indifferent collection. All I can recollect worth mentioning are, a very sweet and silvery-toned Herodias, by Guido; a fine landscape, by Gaspar Poussin; an excellent sketch from Ariosto of the Giant Orgagna; and the Plague of Milan by a modern artist, a work of great invention and judgment, and in which the details of the subject are so managed as to affect, and not to shock. The Campidoglio collection is better. There is a large and admirable Guercino, an airy and richly-coloured Guido, some capital little Garofolos, a beautiful copy of a Repose of Titian’s by Pietro da Cortona, several Giorgiones, and a number of antique busts of the most interesting description. Here is the bronze She-Wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus, and the Geese that cackled in the Capitol. I find nothing so delightful as these old Roman heads of Senators, Warriors, Philosophers. They have all the freshness of truth and nature. They shew something substantial in mortality. They are the only things that do not crush and overturn our sense of personal identity; and are a fine relief to the mouldering relics of antiquity, and to the momentary littleness of modern things! The little Farnese contains the Galatea and the Cupid and Psyche. If any thing could have raised my idea of Raphael higher, it would have been some of these frescoes. I would mention the group of the Graces in particular; they are true Goddesses. The fine flowing outline of the limbs, the variety of attitudes, the unconscious grace, the charming unaffected glow of the expression, are inimitable. Raphael never perhaps escaped so completely from the trammels of his first manner, as in this noble series of designs. The Galatea has been injured in colour by the stoves which the Germans, who were quartered there, lighted in the apartment. In the same room is the famous chalk head, said to have been sketched upon the wall by Michael Angelo. The story is probably a fabrication; the head is as coarse and mechanical as any thing can be. Raphael’s Loggia in the corridors of the Vatican (the subjects of what is called his Bible) appear to me divine in form, relief, conception—above all, the figure of Eve at the forbidden tree; his Stanzas there appear to me divine, more particularly the Heliodorus, the School of Athens, and the Miracle of Bolseno, with all the truth and force of character of Titian’s portraits (I see nothing, however, of his colouring) and his own purity, sweetness, and lofty invention, added to them. His oil pictures there are divine. The Transfiguration is a wonderful collection of fine heads and figures: their fault is, that they are too detached and bare, but it is not true that it embraces two distinct points of time. The event below is going on in the Gospel account, at the same time with the miracle of the Transfiguration above. But I almost prefer to this the Foligno picture: the child with the casket below is of all things the most Raphaelesque, for the sweetness of expression, and the rich pulpy texture of the flesh; and perhaps I prefer even to this the Crowning of the Virgin, with that pure dignified figure of the Madonna sitting in the clouds, and that wonderous emanation of sentiment in the crowd below, near the vase of flowers, all whose faces are bathed in one feeling of ecstatic devotion, as the stream of inspiration flows over them. There is a singular effect of colouring in the lower part of this picture, as if it were painted on slate, and from this cold chilly ground the glow of sentiment comes out perhaps the more strong and effectual. In the same suite of apartments (accessible to students and copyists) are the Death of St. Jerome, by Domenichino; and the Vision of St. Romuald, by Andrea Sacchi, the last of the Italian painters. Five nobler or more impressive pictures are not in the world. A single figure of St. Michelle (as a pilgrim among the Alps) is a pure rich offering of the pencil to legendary devotion, and remarkable for the simplicity of the colouring, sweetness of the expression, and the gloomy splendour of the background. There are no others equally good. The Vatican contains numberless fine statues and other remains of antiquity, elegant and curious. The Apollo I do not admire, but the Laocoon appears to me admirable, for the workmanship, for the muscular contortions of the father’s figure, and the divine expression of the sentiment of pain and terror in the children. They are, however, rather small than young. Canova’s figures here seem to me the work of an accomplished sculptor, but not of a great man. Michael Angelo’s figures of Day and Night, at the Chapel of St. Lorenzo at Florence, are those of a great man; whether of a perfect sculptor or not, I will not pretend to say. The neck of the Night is curved like the horse’s, the limbs have the involution of serpents. These two figures and his transporting the Pantheon to the top of St. Peter’s, have settled my wavering idea of this mighty genius, which his David and early works at Florence had staggered. His Adam receiving life from his Creator, in the Sistine Chapel, for boldness and freedom, is more like the Elgin Theseus than any other figure I have seen. The Jeremiah in the same ceiling droops and bows the head like a willow-tree surcharged with showers. Whether there are any faces worthy of these noble figures I have not been near enough to see. Those near the bottom of the Last Judgment are hideous, vulgar caricatures of demons and cardinals, and the whole is a mass of extravagance and confusion. I shall endeavour to get a nearer view of the Prophets and Sybils in the Capella Sistina. And if I can discover an expression and character of thought in them equal to their grandeur of form, I shall not be slow to acknowledge it. Michael Angelo is one of those names that cannot be shaken without pulling down Fame itself. The Vatican is rich in pictures, statuary, tapestry, gardens, and in the views from it; but its immense size is divided into too many long and narrow compartments, and it wants the unity of effect and imposing gravity of the Louvre.