CHAPTER XIII.
NEVER MAKE A PRESENT OF YOUR WORKS—POPE REZZONICO BY CANOVA—TENERANI—OVERBECK'S THEORIES—MINARDI AND HIS SCHOOL—A WOMAN FROM THE TRASTEVERE WHO LOOKED LIKE THE VENUS OF MILO—CONVENTIONALISTS AND REALISTS—AN AMBITIOUS QUESTION AND BITTER ANSWER—FILIPPO GUALTERIO.
The church of Gesu Nuovo was at that time under the ordinance of the Jesuit Fathers, and one of these fathers, who was devoted to the church, set on foot a work which did him much honour. Though the church was beautiful in its design and decorations and rich in marbles, the high altar was of wood, and this was quite out of keeping with the general effect. Padre Grossi, who was as learned as he was zealous in his religion and a lover of art, made the resolve that this altar should be entirely renewed and reconstructed of precious marble, and he succeeded in carrying this into effect. Everybody contributed—the Court, the nobility, the people, owners of marble, and artists. It was not, however, yet finished; some ornaments were still wanting, and among these the panels of the pyx. I was asked by Padre Grossi to make a model for this to be cast in silver, and I cheerfully accepted the commission. The subject, which was singular and unusual, but extremely pleasing, was suggested to me by the Padre himself. It represented a youthful female figure, accompanied by an angel, at the foot of the altar, who came to partake of the mystic bread. As soon as I had finished the model, I sent it to Padre Grossi, who expressed his satisfaction with it. Not so the superior and the other fathers, to whom the subject seemed to be too unusual. The superior wrote me a very courteous letter of thanks, the substance of which, stripped of all its sweet and useless phrases, was that he could not give his approval to the work. I then took back my model and presented it to Professor Tommaso Aloysio Juvara, who kept it as a pleasant memorial of me; and thus this work also, which was intended as a present, fell through.
MY MENTAL CONDITION.
The time for my return to Florence now drew near, for my health could now be considered as quite restored, save that a slight melancholy still hung about me, induced by an importunate and persistent feeling that made me doubt my own powers to overcome the difficulties of art, and of that art upon which I had at first entered, as it were, in triumph. I was oppressed by a torpor or indecision, a sense of something vague and undefined, resembling that state of moral weakness which shows itself in sudden impulses and as sudden prostrations—all indications of lively fancy and active sensibility, together with a great weakness of judgment and will. In a word, I had become a coward. In my excited imagination I felt the beauty of art, but I could not bring myself to lay hold of it, and express it, and reproduce it. I desired to go back to my first steps, and so felt my vanity offended. The bello ideale, ill defined and ill understood, smiled upon me with all its flattering and illusory charms. At slight intervals I seemed to feel these allurements, and then again I suddenly fell into uncertainty.
"E quale è quei, che disvuol ciò che volle
E per novi pensier cangia proposta;"[8]
this was my state, and it afflicted me.
STATUE OF POPE REZZONICO.
The decision which was to overcome all my uncertainty came to me from an idealist, or rather from an imitator of Greek art, Canova, and from one of his works not drawn from the ideal, but from life. I was about to return from Rome to Florence, when, as I stood looking vaguely about one morning in St Peter's, a prey to fleeting and changeable thoughts, my eyes were arrested by the statue of Pope Rezzonico. How often I had looked at that grandiose monument and passed on! This time the movement and expression of concentrated feeling in this statue, united with a sentiment of imitation so strong, and yet so free from minute and servile detail, made a great impression on me; and this was all the more vivid, because I could confront it with the other statues of the same monument, all of which are characterised by mannerism and imitation of the antique. This comparison stood me in stead of the most powerful of reasonings and criticism, and I seemed to hear a voice issue from those marbles which said, "See the great affection and study that Canova has given to these statues, and still they do not speak to your heart like that praying figure of the Pope. Why is this? Reflect!" And, in fact, I know no subject more worthy of consideration than to seek among the statues of Canova for the reasons of his oscillation between the imitation of nature and the imitation of the antique; for exactly here is the knot of that grave question which even to-day keeps artists divided into two schools—that of the Academicians and that of the veristi.