Stagg used the old studio of Buchanan Read, just off the Via Seragli.
I stumbled upon him one morning, and saw more than I anticipated.
A young, plump girl, without so much as a fig-leaf upon her, was posing before his easel, so motionless that she scarcely winked, one hand extended and clasping her loosened tresses, and bending upon one white and dimpled knee.
She had the large dark eyes of the professional modello, and a bosom as ripe as Titian's Venus. Her feet were small, and her hands very white and beautiful. But of me she took no more notice than if I had been a bird alighting upon the window, or a mouse peeping at her from the edge of his knot-hole.
Old Stagg, who was commonly grave as a clergyman, now and then left his easel to alter her position, and when he was done, she gathered up her clothes, which had lain in a heap on the floor, and took her few silver pieces with a "Mille grazie, Signore!" and went home to take dinner with her little brothers.
A studio in Florence costs only fifteen or twenty francs a month,—seldom so much. There are a series of excellent ones in the same Via Seragli, in a very large dismantled convent. There is a well in the centre of its great courtyard, and innumerable ropes lead from it to the various high windows of the building, on which buckets of water are forever ascending. All this of which I speak refers to a year ago, when Florence was not a capital; doubtless, studios command more at present.
The models at Florence were to me strange personages. There was a drawing-school which I sometimes attended, where one old woman kept three daughters, aged respectively twenty, seventeen, and thirteen years. They lived pretty much as they were born, and while they posed upon a high platform, the old woman took her seat near the door and looked on with grim satisfaction. She was very careful of their moral habits, but the second one she lost by an excess of greed. She resolved to make them useful by day, as well as by night, and put them to work at the studios of individual artists. But as no one artist wanted three models, the girls had to separate, and, out of the mother's vigilance, the second one, Orsolo, went to the atelier of a wicked and handsome fellow, and met with the usual romance of her class.
The oldest girl, Luigia, married a man-model, and their nuptials must have been of a most prosaic character.
Among the many men who thus stood for the artists, was one old fellow, tall, and bearded, and massively characterized, who used to remain motionless for hours; until he seemed to be dead. He had been a model in every stage of life, from childhood to the grave, and represented every subject from Garibaldi to Moses.
The walks in and around Florence occupied all my Sabbaths. Stagg and I used to stroll up to Fiesole, by the villa where Boccaccio's party of story-tellers met, and look up old pictures in the village church; we measured the proportions of the chapel on the hill of Saint Miniato, and he endeavored in vain to imitate the hue of the light as it fell through the veined marble of Serravezza; we spent contemplative afternoons in the house of Michael Angelo, and went up to Vallambrosa, at the risk of our necks, to look at a Giotto no bigger than a tea-plate. In Florence there is enough out-of-door statuary to make one of the finest galleries in the world. The majesty of Donatello's "Saint George" arises before me when I would conceive of any noble humanity, and the sweep of Orgagna's great arches give me an idea of vastness like the sea; in the Pitti palace only giants should abide; the Campanile goes up to heaven as beautiful as Jacob's ladder, and in the perpetual twilight of the Duomo I was not of half the stature I believed when roaming under the loftier sky.