Wonder Stories of Travel

by Eliot McCormick; E. E. Brown; Ernest Ingersoll; David Ker

It was a most wondrous thing to me to watch the brown clay take shapes and beauty under the sculptor’s touch. I can still see him fashioning a wreath of grape-leaves round a Bacchante’s head; the leaves would grow beneath his hand, in all the details of tendrils, stems, veinings. It seemed to me he must be so happy, to live in this world of his own creating. I hope that he was happy, the kindly man; he had the patience and the enthusiasm of the genuine artist,—a patience that had enabled him to surmount serious obstacles before he reached his present position. Like Powers and Rheinhart, he began life as a stone cutter. I wonder what dreams of beauty those three men saw imprisoned in the unhewn stone, to which they longed to give shape, before Fate smiled on them, and put them in the way of doing the best that in them lay!

In spite of the fact that neither Painting nor Sculpture proved propitious, a great reverence and love of Art was born in me at this time. Possibly a love and reverence all the more intense, because Art became to me, individually, an unattainable thing. I remember passing many hours, at this period, in what would certainly have been durance vile, had I not been fired with a lofty ambition. Mr. Edwin White was sketching in a picture which called for two figures—an old man and a child. The old man was easily obtained, a beautiful professional model of advanced years; but the child was not so readily found. I was filled with secret joy when it was suggested to me that I should be the required model. I was enchanted when the permission was given me to perform this important service. This was before the time of the long illness to which I referred in the beginning of this paper. The spending every morning for a week or so in Mr. White’s studio implied the being excused from French verbs and Italian translations. What a happy life, I thought, to be a model! I envied the beautiful old patriarch with whom I was associated in this picture. Kneeling beside him, as I was instructed to do, I thought what bliss it would be to be associated with him always, and to go about with him from studio to studio, posing for pictures.

There must be an inspiration for artists in the very air of Florence. The beautiful city is filled with memorials of the past, painted and carved by the masters passed away. I suppose that artists are constantly aroused to the wish to do great things by the sight of what these others have accomplished. Then, too, the history of the past, the religion of the past, are such realities in Florence. The artist feels called upon to interpret them, not as dead fancies, but as facts. The mythology of the Greeks and Romans meets one at every turn. I, for one, was as intimately acquainted with the family history of Venus, of Ceres, of Pallas, of Persephone, as with that of Queen Elizabeth, of Catherine de Medici, of Henrietta Maria. Nay, I was more intimate with the delightful elder set.

POSING

The heathen gods reigned sylvanly in the Boboli Gardens, and it was there that I formed a most intimate personal acquaintance with them. The Boboli Gardens are the gardens of the Pitti Palace, an immense, unlovely pile, the memorial of the ambition of the Marquis Pitti, who reared it. He had vowed that he would build a palace large enough to hold in its court-yard the palace of his hated rival, the Marquis Strozzi. He was as good as his word; but in carrying out his designs he ruined his fortune. The vast palace, when completed, passed out of his hands into those of the Medici, then the Dukes of Florence. Afterwards it became the residence of the foreign rulers of Florence. When I remember the city, Austrian soldiers guarded the great gateway of the Pitti, and marched up and down the court-yards; and the showy white uniforms of Austrian officers were conspicuous in the ante-chambers and guard-rooms.

But behind the great palace, the fair Boboli Gardens spread away. There was a statue of Ceres crowning a terrace, up to which climbed other terraces—an amphitheatre of terraces, in truth, from a fish-pond in the centre—which commanded the city through which the Arno flowed. Many a sunny day have we children—my sisters and I—sat at the base of this statue and gossiped about Ceres, beautiful Mother Nature, and her daughter, who was stolen from her by the Dark King. Further down, on a lower slope, was a statue of Pallas, with her calm, resolute face, her helmet, her spear, her owl. I remember that Millie and Eva and I were especially fond of this Pallas. I used to wonder why it was that men should ever have been votaries of Venus rather than of her. I have ceased to wonder at this, since then; but in those days I especially criticized a statue of Venus, after the well-known Venus of Canova, which impressed me as insipid. This statue stood hard by the severe majesty of Pallas, white against a background of oleanders and laurestines.

Then there was a second fish-pond, in the centre of which was an orange-island, about which tritons and mermen and mermaids were disposed. I can see their good-humored, gay—nay, some of them were even leering—faces, still. Soulless creatures these, we were well aware, and so were sorry for them. The immortal gods, of course, we credited with souls; but these—with the wood-nymphs, and bacchantes, and satyrs, that we were apt to come upon all through the garden,—these we classed as only on a level a trifle higher than that of the trees, and brooks, into which some of them had been transformed in the course of the vicissitudes of their careers.

Perhaps it is because the spirit of the old religion so took possession of me in that Italian garden, that to this day the woods, and the dells, and the rocks, seem to me to be the embodied forms of living creatures. A Daphne waves her arms from the laurel-tree; a Clytie forever turns to her sun-lover, in the sunflower.