Rivalta assured me that he did not look at them, for he understood very well, that instead of being of help to him they would have confused him, and that he found himself more free and unhampered when trusting himself only to working from the live model. Having established this most essential point in art, I left him, well pleased with both myself and him. But in the meantime, this obvious, clear, and easy lesson of mine created at first an angry feeling, and afterwards a rupture, between me and my colleague, the author of the bas-relief; and this happened because a youth in Rivalta's studio reported that I had said to my scholar, "Do not look at those casts, for they are rubbish." I heard this from Professor de Fabris, to whom our friend made a clean breast of it. It was not enough for him that this friend of ours took up my defence, saying that he knew me thoroughly well, and that I was incapable of saying such things, adding, that he ought himself to know well enough that I was averse to giving offence to any one, and so might feel sure there was some misunderstanding. But all this was useless, so that our friend De Fabris, for the sake of peace, thought best to speak to me of it. It can be imagined how astonished and how pained I was. I at once told him how the matter really stood, and begged that he would assure the professor of my affection and esteem for him as a friend and as an artist. It was all in vain, and he insisted in believing in a boy who had listened badly and reported still worse, rather than in me, or even Rivalta's testimony that I offered to bring forward.
HOW A FRIENDSHIP WAS BROKEN UP.
I should not have mentioned this small matter had it not been to explain the sort of sensitiveness and obstinacy that one observes generally in the artist class, and most specially amongst us sculptors, although, to speak the truth, those defects showed themselves oftener, and to a greater degree, amongst artists of the past, or who are now old. The young men of to-day are more frank, more tolerant, and more friendly amongst each other, and sometimes they even go to the excess of these virtues by being frank even unto insolence, tolerant even to scepticism, and careless, thoughtless, frivolous, and even worse, in their friendship. Who ignores the little bursts of temper and cutting words bandied between Pampaloni and Bartolini, between Benvenuti and Sabatelli, and between Bezzuoli and Gazzarrini? I shall not write a record of them, out of respect for their names, and for Death, who, under his broad mantle, has enshrouded them in solemn silence. Sleep in peace, pilgrim souls,—within a short time even we shall join you; and when we are awakened at the dies iræ, we shall smile at our little outbursts of temper in this most foolish life, and become for ever really brothers. We shall be happy if we have nothing besides the remembrance of these little sins, already forgiven us by God, if we have forgiven others! If by chance there be any one who thinks that I have offended him by excess of vivacity of temperament or otherwise, even though it be involuntary, as might happen easily, I beg his pardon.
JEALOUSIES OF ARTISTS.
This little war of words, sarcasms, and what is worse, reticences, I have always deplored; and to succeed in being less tiresome to my colleagues, and for want of occasion to induce them to temperance, I have always kept myself aloof, and have spoken of them as I could wish them to speak of me. To be just, however, I must declare that I have seldom been (openly, I mean) exposed to the sting of their words; and if, as it happened, I was once attacked with certain insistence in the newspapers on the occasion when my three scholars, Pazzi, Sarrocchi, and Majoli, exhibited their works in the Academy, my friend Luigi Mussini, who handles the pen in the same masterly way as he does the brush, reduced to silence with one single article the poor writer who had been put up to say evil of the works of my scholars in order to do injury to the master. These injurious words have been forgotten and amply pardoned, but the beautiful and generous defence of my friend I have never forgotten. I repeat, however, that these little annoyances are much less nowadays than they were, or at least they have changed form. To-day, instead of suggesting in undertones and mellifluous words the defects of a work to some poor writer, adding many that do not exist, and being silent as to its merits, it is rather the custom to come out frankly and openly before your face with a criticism which, if it has not the merit of temperance, does at least not bear that ugly stain of hypocrisy as a mask to truth. To this school, although he be numbered amongst the old and the dead, Bartolini did not belong; and although one of the elect in spirit and strength, yet he sometimes allowed himself to give way to passion. While he was a young man in Paris, Canova was there making the portrait of the Emperor Napoleon I. Bartolini demanded and obtained help from that great and beneficent artist; but being asked if he would return with him to his studio in Rome, he refused: but to say, as he did openly to me and to others, that Canova wished to take him with him to put an end to his studies, was not in conformity with the truth, or with Canova's well-known and benevolent character. To the sculptor Wolf, who one day brought him a note from Rauch, he said, without even opening it—
BARTOLINI.
"How is Rauch?"
"He is very well, and sends you his greetings, as you will see from the letter I have given you."
I CHANGE MY STUDIO.
"Rauch," began Bartolini, ... but I have said above that the dead sleep in peace, and the portraits of Bartolini and Rauch are also at peace with each other, for in my house, at the villa of Lampeggi, they look each other in the face, and smile good-naturedly. Evviva! So, perhaps, they smile in the true life eternal at the littlenesses of our brief life here.