THE DOGARESSA. Villegas
‘Are these dingy old pictures all you have to show?’ I once took a Chilian to Rome. When he saw the Sistine Chapel he was furious. ‘Why do the writers deceive us?’ he said, ‘we have better chapels in Valparaiso.’ Suppose Don Alfonzo should order a hundred portraits of himself—people might laugh but nobody could stop him. If the President of the Argentine ordered twenty, or five, or even one portrait of himself, and paid for it out of the public money, would you reëlect him?”
“Art is a luxury,” the Argentino began.
“Ah, there’s your mistake, it’s a prime necessity, it is the great civilizer!” Don Luis was roused. “North Americans are not so ignorant of art as South Americans,” he added, remembering there were two present. “They are the great buyers now. Villegas’ Baptisimo is in New York, and now his Dogaressa has gone to Washington.”
Here Patsy plunged into the talk and reminded Don Luis of the Age of Phidias, the painters of the Dutch and Venetian Republics. The great periods of art had little to do with the form of government under which they flourished. Art was a rare and wonderful flowering of the human intelligence, the fairest flower on the tree of life. It depended on the development of the race, not the will of the ruler.
“That may be,” said the Argentino, “but if we are ever again to have a great art, the artist must be protected, his trade must be taken as seriously as the baker’s or the plumber’s. If art is the fine flower of civilization, it must in its very nature be the costliest of products—so to most people it seems a luxury.”
“Is religion a luxury, is poetry a luxury? Is anything that lifts the ideals, or stimulates the imagination a luxury?” cried Don Luis, passionately.
The old arguments were brought forward and threshed out, the discussion became heated; meanwhile Villegas worked on steadily. On the flat bare canvas a dim foreshadowing of what would be Angoscia’s perfect face grew and grew under his hands. While the others talked about art he was at work upon his latest masterpiece, the portrait of Angoscia.[5]