The Italian, Paul Jovius, has composed more than three hundred concise eulogies of statesmen, warriors, and literary men, of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries; but the occasion which induced him to compose them is perhaps more interesting than the compositions.
Jovius had a villa, situated on a peninsula, bordered by the Lake of Como. It was built on the ruins of the villa of Pliny, and in his time the foundations were still visible. When the surrounding lake was calm, the sculptured marbles, the trunks of columns, and the fragments of those pyramids which had once adorned the residence of the friend of Trajan, were still viewed in its lucid bosom. Jovius was the enthusiast of literature, and the leisure which it loves. He was an historian, with the imagination of a poet, and though a Christian prelate, almost a worshipper of the sweet fictions of pagan mythology; and when his pen was kept pure from satire or adulation, to which it was too much accustomed, it became a pencil. He paints with rapture his gardens bathed by the waters of the lake; the shade and freshness of his woods; his green slopes; his sparkling fountains, the deep silence and calm of his solitude! A statue was raised in his gardens to Nature! In his hall stood a fine statue of Apollo, and the Muses around, with their attributes. His library was guarded by a Mercury, and there was an apartment adorned with Doric columns, and with pictures of the most pleasing subjects dedicated to the Graces! Such was the interior! Without, the transparent lake here spread its broad mirror, and there was seen luminously winding by banks covered with olives and laurels; in the distance, towns, promontories, hills rising in an amphitheatre, blushing with vines, and the first elevation of the Alps, covered with woods and pasture, and sprinkled with herds and flocks.
It was in a central spot of this enchanting habitation that a cabinet or gallery was erected, where Jovius had collected with prodigal cost the portraits of celebrated men; and it was to explain and to describe the characteristics of these illustrious names that he had composed his eulogies. This collection became so remarkable, that the great men his contemporaries presented our literary collector with their own portraits, among whom the renowned Fernandez Cortes sent Jovius his before he died, and probably others who were less entitled to enlarge the collection; but it is equally probable that our caustic Jovius would throw them aside. Our historian had often to describe men more famous than virtuous; sovereigns, politicians, poets, and philosophers, men of all ranks, countries, and ages, formed a crowded scene of men of genius or of celebrity; sometimes a few lines compress their character, and sometimes a few pages excite his fondness. If he sometimes adulates the living, we may pardon the illusions of a contemporary; but he has the honour of satirising some by the honest freedom of a pen which occasionally broke out into premature truths.
Such was the inspiration of literature and leisure which had embellished the abode of Jovius, and had raised in the midst of the Lake of Como a cabinet of portraits; a noble tribute to those who are “the salt of the earth.”
We possess prints of Rubens’s house at Antwerp. That princely artist perhaps first contrived for his studio the circular apartment with a dome, like the rotunda of the Pantheon, where the light descending from an aperture or window at the top, sent down a single equal light,—that perfection of light which distributes its magical effects on the objects beneath.[258] Bellori describes it una stanza rotonda con un solo occhio in cima; the solo occhio is what the French term œil de bœuf; we ourselves want this single eye in our technical language of art. This was his precious museum, where he had collected a vast number of books, which were intermixed with his marbles, statues, cameos, intaglios, and all that variety of the riches of art which he had drawn from Rome:[259] but the walls did not yield in value; for they were covered by pictures of his own composition, or copies by his own hand, made at Venice and Madrid, of Titian and Paul Veronese. No foreigners, men of letters, or lovers of the arts, or even princes, would pass through Antwerp without visiting the house of Rubens, to witness the animated residence of genius, and the great man who had conceived the idea. Yet, great as was his mind, and splendid as were the habits of his life, he could not resist the entreaties of the hundred thousand florins of our Duke of Buckingham, to dispose of this studio. The great artist could not, however, abandon for ever the delightful contemplations he was depriving himself of; and as substitutes for the miracles of art he had lost, he solicited and obtained leave to replace them by casts which were scrupulously deposited in the places where the originals had stood.
Of this feeling of the local residences of genius, the Italians appear to have been not perhaps more susceptible than other people, but more energetic in their enthusiasm. Florence exhibits many monuments of this sort. In the neighbourhood of Santa Maria Novella, Zimmerman has noticed a house of the celebrated Viviani, which is a singular monument of gratitude to his illustrious master, Galileo. The front is adorned with the bust of this father of science, and between the windows are engraven accounts of the discoveries of Galileo; it is the most beautiful biography of genius! Yet another still more eloquently excites our emotions—the house of Michael Angelo: his pupils, in perpetual testimony of their admiration and gratitude, have ornamented it with all the leading features of his life; the very soul of this vast genius put in action: this is more than biography!—it is living as with a contemporary!
[256] The room is a small wainscoted apartment in the second floor, commanding a pleasant view.
[257] The above inscription is a fac-simile of that upon the glass. The word fifth in the third line has been erased by Pope for want of room to complete it properly. It is scratched on a small pane of red glass, and has been removed to Nuneham Courtney, the seat of the Harcourt family, on the banks of the Thames, a few miles from Oxford.
[258] Harrewyns published, in 1684, a series of interesting views of the house, and some of the apartments, including this domed one. The series are upon one folio sheet, now very rare.