Being compelled to stop, he found himself in front of a niche in the wall, containing a madonna. This little chapel, sheltered by a stone projection and provided with a bench, offered a hospitable resting-place to wayfarers, and to beggars, monks, and others a convenient station at the very door of the villa, of which our traveller could descry the handsome buildings through the orange-trees planted in a triple row along an avenue of considerable length.
Michel, more annoyed than cast down by this sudden hurt, dropped his travelling satchel, seated himself on the bench, and rubbed his injured foot, but soon forgot it to lose himself in meditation.
In order that the reader may understand the reflections which his surroundings suggested to the young man, it is essential that I should introduce him somewhat more fully. Michel was eighteen years of age and was a student of painting at Rome. His father, Pier-Angelo Lavoratori, was a mere dauber, a decorator, but very skilful in his line. And, as is well known, in Italy the artisans whose business it is to cover walls and ceilings with frescoes are almost all genuine artists. Whether from tradition, or from natural good taste, they produce some very attractive decorations; and in the most modest abodes, even in wretched taverns, the eye is charmed by wreaths and rosework done in a fascinating style, or it may be by borders simply, the coloring of which is happily contrasted with the dull tints of the panels and wainscoting. These frescoes are sometimes executed as perfectly as our wall-papers, and they are much superior to them, in this respect, that one detects in them the greater ease of manner of work done by hand. Nothing can be more dismal than the stiff and regular decorations produced by machinery. The beauty of Chinese vases, and, indeed, of Chinese work in general, is attributable to that capricious air of spontaneity which the human hand alone can impart to its work. Grace, freedom, boldness, the unexpected, and even ingenuous awkwardness are, in decoration, elements of charm which we are losing day by day, as we depend more and more upon the resources of machinery and looms.
Pier-Angelo was one of the most rapid and ingenious of these decorators—adornatori. He was a native of Catania, and had reared his family there until the period of Michel's birth, when he abruptly left his province and settled in Rome. The reason he assigned for this voluntary exile was that his family was increasing in size, that there was too much competition in Catania, and that consequently his work no longer sufficed for his needs; wherefore he proposed to seek his fortune elsewhere. But people said under their breath that he had fled from the resentment of certain all-powerful patricians who were devoted to the court of Naples.
Everyone knows the bitter hatred of that conquered and down-trodden people for the government on the other side of the strait. The Sicilian, proud and revengeful, rumbles incessantly like his volcano, and sometimes erupts. It was whispered that Pier-Angelo had been involved in an attempt at a popular uprising, and that he had been obliged to fly, carrying with him his brushes and his household goods. To be sure, his social and kindly temperament seemed to contradict such a supposition; but the lively imaginations of the good people of the suburb of Catania must needs devise an extraordinary motive for the disappearance of one so loved and regretted by all his confrères.
At Rome he was hardly more fortunate, for he had the sorrow of losing all his children there except Michel; and ere long his wife died in giving birth to a daughter, whose young brother was her godfather, and who received the name of Mila, a contraction of Michelangela.
Having lost these two children, Pier-Angelo, albeit more melancholy, was much more at ease financially, and by dint of earnest work, he succeeded in giving his son an education far superior to that which he had himself received. He displayed a predilection for that boy which almost amounted to weakness, and Michel, although poor and obscure, was a veritable spoiled child.
Now, Pier-Angelo had spurred on his other sons to work, and had imparted to them early in life the ardor which was consuming him. But, whether because they had succumbed to excessive toil for which they had not received from Heaven the same aptitude and strength as their father, or because Pier-Angelo, finding his family reduced to three persons, no longer deemed it necessary to have assistance, it is certain that he seemed more anxious to handle tenderly the health of his last remaining son, than to provide him betimes with a means of livelihood.
Nevertheless, the child loved painting, and in play produced fruit, flowers, and birds, in which the coloring was exquisite. One day he asked his father why he never introduced figures in his frescoes.
"What do you say? figures?" replied the good man, who had an abundance of common sense: "one must paint very beautiful ones, or else let them alone. Figure painting is beyond such talent as I have been able to acquire, and whereas people think well of my garlands and arabesques, I should be very sure of making connoisseurs laugh if I should attempt to represent limping cupids or hump-backed nymphs dancing on my ceilings."