—and intertangled repeatedly with the labyrinth the device which d’Annunzio has borrowed for his latest novel—Forse che si, forse che no—and reproduced upon the cover. An old mirror with the glass half-sooted over reflected these glories drearily and showed me the only living face in this labyrinthine tomb.
And so at last by many rooms and ways and up a little staircase of eleven steps under a painted ceiling, I came, like a soul that has travailed, to the Apartment of Paradise, the bower of the beautiful sweet-voiced Isabella d’Este, where, under her ceiling-device “nec spe nec metu,” she lived her married life and her long years of widowhood, with her books and her pictures and her antiquities, playing on her silver lyre and her lute and her clavichord, and corresponding with her scholars and poets, “the first lady of the Renaissance.” Piety for this legendary “dame du temps jadis” seems to have preserved her six-roomed apartment much as it was, with her wonderful polychrome wooden ceilings and her wonderful doors fretted with porphyry and marbles and her bird’s-eye views of great cities she had not seen—Algiers, Jerusalem, Lisbon, Madrid—and her real view of the panorama sloping towards the Po; this combination of a river, a garden and a lake being so stupendo to the inhabitants of that melancholy region of Italy that Isabella’s apartment took thence its name of Paradise, much as that dull Damascus is “the pearl of the East.” Her music-room, too, is intact, save for the rifling of its pictures. Its intarsia depicting dulcimer, virginal, harp, and viol, and musical notation, its heavy-gilded vaulted ceiling with its musical staves and other decorations, and the little bas-relief showing herself with her beloved instruments, remain as in the days when Gian Trissino wrote a canzone “To Madonna Isabella playing on her lute.” But the Mantegnas she commanded, the Lottos and the Perugino, are at the Louvre, doubtless at the behest of Napoleon, that despot of a greater Renaissance to whom even Isabella’s formidable brother-in-law, the Moro, was a pigmy, though both of them died in prison and exile, as is the habit of the Magnificent Ones.
Did my nightmare end in this Paradise, softening in this quiet bower into a sleep
“Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing”?
Nay, it grew only more incoherent—vast Halls ruined by being turned into barracks, the statues smashed by a rude soldiery, the pictures slashed, and only the inaccessible splendours of the ceiling safe—though not from the damp; in the Hall of the Triumphs no Triumph remaining save the Triumph of Time and of Fate, Mantegna’s pictures of the Triumphs of Cæsar haled to Hampton Court, only their empty oaken frames here gaping; corridors, empty and long, corridors echoing under the footstep, corridors adorned with stuccos and rafaellesques; the Hall of the Moors with a splendid old ceiling and figures of Moors on a frieze of gilded wood; the Corte Vecchia; the Apartment of Troy, with crowded wall-frescoes by Giulio Romano, Mantegna, Primaticcio; the lovely salon of Troy, dismantled, discoloured, its frescoed legend of Troy undecipherable, its ceiling of intaglioed wood dilapidated; the Hall of the Oath of the Primo Capitano, the Hall of the Virtues, Halls anonymously mouldering; the Saletta of the Eleven Emperors denuded of Titian’s portraits, to the profit of the British Museum; the Hall of the Capitani with a Jove of Giulio Romano thundering from the ceiling but ironically damaged by real rainstorms; the Saletta of Troy, with more Homer and Virgil—do you begin to have a sense of the monumental desolation? But you have yet to figure me drifting in my dream through the Court of the Marbles and the empty Sculpture Gallery with its great ruined ceiling and the Cavallerizza, or Hippodrome, the largest of its time, now stilled of the clangour of tournament and the plaudits of ladies, and the Apartment of the Boots and the Gallery over the lake, and another garden hanging dead, with a Triton for a tombstone and owls for mourners, the Apartment of the Four Rooms, blackened by the smoke of days when they were let as lodgings, and Halls and more Halls, and still more Halls and Cabinets, and the Hall of the Shells, with its tasty pictures of fish and venison, and the Hall of the Garlands, and the Apartment of the Dwarfs, with their miniature chambers and their staircases with small squat steps—a quarter in itself!
Basta! The nightmare grows too oppressive. Why wake the buffoons from their pigmy coffins of dwarf oak?
Poor little jesters! Are their souls, too, I wonder, stunted, and is there for them in heaven some Lilliputian quarter, where the Magnificent Ones must make sport for them?
“Isabella Estensis, niece of the Kings of Aragon, daughter and sister of the Dukes of Ferrara, wife and mother of the Marquises of Gonzaga, erected this in the year 1522 from the Virgin’s bearing.”
So runs—O rare Renaissance lady—the Italian vaunt in the frieze round thy Grotto, and I reading it from thy little courtyard, sit and chew the cud of bitter fancy. Poor Madonna Isabella, whose inwoven name still clings so passionately to thy bourdoir walls, in what camera of Paradise dost thou hold thy court? Methinks thy talent for viol and harp, and that lovely singing voice of thine, should find fit service in that orchestral heaven, where thou—always desiderosa di cosa nuova—enjoyest perchance an ampler pasture for thy sensibilities. Forse che si, forse che no. But from earth thou art vanished utterly, and Renaissance for thee is none. Where be thy pages and poets and buffoons, thy singing seraphs, thy painters and broiderers, thy goldsmiths and gravers, thy cunning artificers in ivory and marble and precious woods? Where is Niccolò da Correggio, thy perfect courtier? Where be Beatrice and Violante, who combed thy hair, and Lorenzo da Pavia who built thy organ, and Cristoforo Romano who carved thy doorway and designed thy medal, and Galeotto del Carretto who sent thee roundelays to carol to thy lute? Have all these less substance than the very brocades in which thy soul was wont to bask? Can these chalcedony jars of thy Grotto outlive them, these shells mock their flippant fleeting? And thy rhyming and thy reasoning, and thy gay laughter and that zest to ride all day and dance all night—could all this effervescence of life settle into mere slime? And this hideous doubt—this fluctuant forse—can we really face it nec spe nec metu?
A horn sounds and steeds clatter up and down thy graded staircase. The hounds give tongue, the hawk flutters on thy wrist. The great spaces of the Cavallerizza fill with jousting paladins; dames in cloth of gold and silver look down from the balconies, princes and ambassadors dispute their smiles. Where has it vanished, all that allegro life—for I must speak to thee by the stave—that gay gavotte that went tripping its merry rhythm through the vasty vaulted halls? Whither has it ebbed? On what shore breaks that music?