This work brought me luck, and earned me the kindest of congratulations. To it I owe my life appointment of "Honorary Chapel-master" to the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi. Little did I foresee I should be asked to give a performance of the work and conduct it in person the very next year in Germany. Later on I will detail the consequences of this second performance, and the benefits it brought me.[4]
The longer I stayed at Rome, the more irresistible I found the mystic charm and matchless calm that reign within its walls.
Coming from the jagged, bold volcanic outline of the crater of Naples, the simple, quiet, solemn lines of the Campagna, framed by the Alban, the Latian, and the Sabine hills, Soracte the majestic, the mountains of Viterbo, Monte Mario, and Janiculum, made me think of some open-air cloister, quiet and serene. The village of Nemi, with its pretty lake sunk in a great crater, and fringed with luxuriant vegetation, was one of my favourite spots near Rome. The walk round the lake by the upper road is one of the most beautiful that can possibly be imagined. I shall never forget the beauty of that view, as I had the good luck to see it one lovely day, at the close of which I watched the sun go down into the sea from the heights of Gensano.
But the neighbourhood of Rome abounds in such exquisite scenes, objects of endless pleasure trips for travellers and tourists—Tivoli, Subiaco, Frascati, Albano, Ariccia, and a hundred other places, the happy hunting grounds of landscape painters, not to mention the Tiber, many spots on the banks of which are full of majestic beauty and grandeur.
In this memoir of my youthful days, I must not omit to mention, among the artistic treasures which are Rome's special glory, a set of masterpieces which share with the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel the proud boast of being the glory of the Vatican. I mean those immortal pictures by the painter Raphael, forming the collection known as "Le Loggie e le Stanze." In the Stanza della Segnatura hang the immortal canvases of the "School of Athens" and the "Disputa del Sacramento." These two masterpieces, like many others from this unrivalled painter's brush, are of a beauty which appears absolutely unapproachable.
Yet so irresistible is the ascendency of genius, that this Raphael, this matchless painter whom history has set on the very pinnacle of fame, was himself influenced by Michael Angelo. He felt the mighty Titan's grip, he bowed before the giant's power, and his later works give ocular proof of the homage he paid the sublime and almost supernatural genius that dwelt within that powerful and gigantic brain.
Raphael may be the first of painters—Michael Angelo stands alone. In Raphael's case, power expands and blossoms into charm; in Michael Angelo's, on the other hand, charm seems to subjugate and govern power. Raphael enraptures and captivates, while Michael Angelo fascinates and overwhelms. One paints the earthly paradise; the other, like the prisoner of Patmos, gazes with eagle eye even into the recesses of the bright abode of the Archangels and the Seraphim.
These two great apostles would seem to have been called to stand side by side in the high noontide of art, so that the calm and perfect beauty of the younger might serve to temper the dazzling splendour revealed to the poet-painter of the Apocalypse.
A detailed description of the innumerable art treasures of Rome would be out of place in these recollections, of which the sole object has been to relate the principal incidents of my early artistic career.
In the winter of 1840-41 I had the privilege of seeing and hearing the sister of Madame Malibran, Pauline Garcia, who had just married Louis Viardot, then Director of the Théâtre Italien in Paris; they were, in fact, on their honeymoon.