"Princess," I answered, "I do not know if that little figure is pretty or not, but I am glad that you think so, for it is mine, one of my very first works. I modelled it in 1843, inspired by that sublime sonnet of Dante which begins—
'Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare,' &c.
I made the first copy of this statuette for Signor Sansone Uzielli of Leghorn; the second for the Grand Duke, which, with the young Dante, he gave to the Princess Isabella his daughter, who married the Prince Luitpoldo of Bavaria; and the one that you saw was presented to the Count of Syracuse by the Grand Duchess."
SANT'ANTONINO.
The noble lady smiled, and said, "I must have been mistaken."
The Count of Syracuse was a great lover of sculpture, and occupied himself with it as much as was consistent with the position he occupied. Several of his works are most praiseworthy, and I keep some of the photographs of them that he was so kind as to send me.
To return to my Sant'Antonino that I left unfinished. This model cost me an immense deal of work. The subject required character, bearing, and attitude of an absolutely simple and natural treatment, such as I gave the Giotto; but fearing to meet with censure from the lovers of the classic, I kept doing and undoing my work in my sketches, as well as in my large model. It is useless! One must be decided, and sure of the side one wishes to take. This see-sawing between ideal beauty and truth to nature in portraiture will not do, just as it would be absurd and bad to adhere entirely to nature in other subjects, especially sacred ones.
THE NATURAL AND IDEAL.
And although imitation of beautiful nature is the foundation and substance of any work, yet the mode of seeing it and reproducing it constitutes the style that every artist, who is elevated, great, and pure, draws from within himself, according to his subject and the measure meted out to him by nature and education. In portrait statues one must abandon the ideal, even as regards the ordinary rules of the just proportions of the body. Sant'Antonino was named thus because he was small of stature. I was tempted several times to make him faithfully just as he was, small and crooked; and I made a sketch of him thus, which I still preserve, and it is precious on account of the little stick on which he leans, for this stick was no other than Giuseppe Verdi's pen. But I did nothing more with it, as I was vacillating between the rules of art and the close imitation of nature; and it is just this close imitation of the details of nature that constitutes the character of a portrait statue—a sound canon put wisely in practice by the ancients, as can easily be seen from their statues of the philosophers in the Vatican, such as the Zeno, and more particularly in that of Diogenes; and in the bas-relief of Æsop, where one sees even the absolute hump on his back. But the copying in detail from nature does not mean a too close imitation of every little thing, of every wrinkle; these are the mechanical nothings that are, as it were, the battle-horse to those who make a trade of art, and should be left to them.