IDEALISTS AND ACADEMICIANS.
It is necessary now for me to touch upon a question vital to art, and which was being agitated just at the time I was modelling the Abel. This work served to inflame it, and to encourage as much one side as the other—that is, either the idealists or the academicians in opposition to Bartolini, who, while he was not naturalistic in the strict sense of the word, proposed to introduce this principle into his teaching by bold innovations. It is necessary for me to speak of this, inasmuch as this dispute and my statue served as the target for the shots of one as well as the other parties, and had the effect of estranging Bartolini from me—although, as we shall see later, it was another and less justifiable cause that made the great sculptor indignant with me.
When Stefano Ricci, Master of Sculpture in the Royal Academy, died, it was wisely decided to call Lorenzo Bartolini to his place (this was a little before I modelled the Abel), and Bartolini took possession of the school with the air of a conqueror. Various were the causes for his extremely overbearing conduct. First, the opposition his demands encountered on the part of the President and others of the Academy; then his before-mentioned principles of reform, diametrically opposed to those now taught in the school; also, finally, the heated political and religious opinions, which were discussed with little charity on either side. He altered everything, theories and systems. The position of his assistant, Professor Costoli, was unpleasant; but he was obliged to remain. He prohibited all study from statues, and restricted the whole system of teaching to an imitation only of nature; and he pushed this principle so far, that he introduced a hunchback into the school and made the young students copy him. This daring novelty raised a shout of indignation: they cried out against the profanation of the school, of the sacred principles of the beautiful, &c.; said that he was ignorant of his duties as master, and that he misled the youths, extinguishing in them the love of the beautiful by the study of deformity; and many other accusations of this agreeable sort, in a freer and more pointed style than mine.
IMITATION OF NATURE—THE HUNCHBACK.
Neither was Bartolini the man to allow this deluge to fall upon his head, which, together with much that was true, carried with it a torrent of errors and unreasonable absurdities. As he understood well the clever use of the pen, he launched forth certain articles so stinging and cutting that they were delightful. The Abbé Chiari and the Abbé Vicini were treated by old Baretti with distinction as compared with the treatment Bartolini gave the Anonymous Society of the Via del Cocomero. I recollect one of the foolish arguments raised by his detractors against Bartolini, which was so ingenuous that it showed in its author more emptiness and smallness of mind than cleverness or bad faith. This is what he said: "The expert gardener, by means of his art, transforms a forest which is rough and horrid, as nature made it, into a beautiful grove, by rooting out plants, opening alleys, pruning into a straight line the projecting branches," &c. How much this comparison of the grove to the human figure diverted Bartolini is not to be told. I have not before me his sharp stinging words, and I do not wish to spoil them by repeating them from memory, but to me he appeared to be as pleasant and brilliant a writer as he was admirable as an artist.
BARTOLINI'S VIEWS AND CHARACTER.
This dispute was rekindled, as I have said, on the appearance of my Abel. I do not remember by which side was first pronounced my name and my work, but certain it is that Bartolini said that the most convincing proof of the excellence of his method was "precisely the Abel," which statue was made by a youth who knew nothing of Phidias or Alcamenes, nor of the others—who had not breathed the stifling air of the Academy—that he had trusted himself to beautiful nature, and that he had copied her with fidelity and love. After this there was fresh sarcasm against him and his system of copying nature, even when deformed, &c. Added to this, there were long-winded eulogies on my work, and I could see that these were advanced merely to put this man in bad humour.
He had taken a dislike to me, and wished to tell me so. He sent his father-in-law, Dr Costantino Boni, to summon me. I went, and when I arrived he received me in the great ante-room, and said to me, with his usual striking bluntness, "I have sent for you to tell you that I do not wish to see you again." How astounded I was by these words you can imagine who know the veneration and affection I had always felt for this celebrated master; and I could only reply—"Why?"
"Why! You have no more need of me, nor I of you; stay in your own studio, and don't come any more to mine."
It appeared to me so strange, not to say unreasonable, that he should send for me to tell me not to come to him, that I could not do less than reply that I had come to his studio because he had sent for me, and that I was very sorry to be forbidden to return, as I always wished to learn.