I cannot refrain from congratulating you on your Introduction to the Roman Catalogue of British Paintings, etc. Not only its literary felicity, but its fine and illuminating judgment; the choiceness of the language; and the apt biographical illustrations; the humane diplomacy of occasional gentle, but searching suggestions of censure; the insight of the aperçus; and the contribution of several original maxims to the sterling floating currency of criticism, make it one of the most memorable of such pieces.
Yours,
Edward Russell.”
But Rome as a city he loved not, as he loved the Tuscan and Umbrian towns; its vast antiquities oppressed him, its medieval structures he disliked, and the race that had left its impress there bored him; even in the natural surroundings he found too much melancholy—definitely contrasted in his mind with that Northern sternness which breeds Romance; but he shall speak for himself.
“The archeological side of Rome I can only gape at as a tourist: I have no learning that way: though, of course, there are scenes of the old world which touch the imagination without the kind of knowledge that must, to those who possess it, make the place deeply interesting. The more modern Rome—the Rome of the Renaissance, scarcely makes a single appeal and creates no such satisfying atmosphere as Florence. The Sistine I must see again; the light was bad to-day and the effect at so great a height did not immediately leave the tremendous impression of Michael Angelo’s power that comes of the more intimate knowledge given by our photographs. The colour, however, yielded more than I had expected. Tell Fred if he is by you that I am wholly at one with him about the Stanze of Raphael. They gain in site, and although I knew the compositions well, I found them better than I knew with a charm of colour unexpected and superior to any of his easel pictures, except perhaps the Madonna at Dresden; truly a marvellous genius, using all the resources of style with the freedom and ease of a painter of genre—and here, which is not always so in his later work, absolutely free from rhetoric in gesture: I must go back to them again.
“In the general style of Roman Renaissance building I have no delight—and never thought to have; but, of course, there are separate things to discover that I have as yet not had time to see. But St. Angelo makes a great barbaric pile that is mightily impressive. St. Peter’s seems to me much less noble in general effect than St. Paul’s, and its interior ornament, painting and sculpture, seemed, on a swift view, to be a wilderness of that kind of art I don’t love—all except Michael Angelo’s Pietà, which stood out in modest simplicity and intensity amid the garish surroundings.
Yours,
Joe.”
“Dearest,