The Dutchman's wife was a plain, honest, affectionate creature, bearing the humors of two heated and ill-tempered children, with a patience we were compelled to admire. Her husband smoked and laughed, and talked villainous French and worse Italian, but was glad to escape to the cabriolet in the hottest of the day, leaving his wife to her cares. The baby screamed, and the child blubbered and fretted, and for hours the mother was a miracle of kindness. The "drop too much," came in the shape of a new crying fit from both children, and the poor little Dutchwoman, quite wearied out, burst into a flood of tears, and hiccupped her complaints in her own language, weeping unrestrainedly for a quarter of an hour. After this she felt better, took a gulp of wine from the black bottle, and settled herself once more quietly and resignedly to her duties. We had certainly opened one or two very fresh veins of human character, when we stopped at the gates.
There is but one hotel for American travellers in Bologna, of course. Those who have read Rogers's Italy, will remember his mention of "The Pilgrim," the house where the poet met Lord Byron by appointment, and passed the evening with him which he describes so exquisitely. We took leave of our motley friends at the door, and our artists who had greatly admired the lovely Venetian, parted from her with the regret of old acquaintances. She certainly was, as they said, a splendid model for a Magdalen, "majestical and sad," and, always in attitudes for a picture: sleeping or waking, she afforded a succession of studies of which they took the most enthusiastic advantage.
LETTER XXX.
EXCURSION TO VENICE CONTINUED—BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF BOLOGNA—GALLERY OF THE FINE ARTS—RAPHAEL'S ST. CECILIA—PICTURES OF CARRACCI—DOMENICHINOS' MADONNA DEL ROSARIO—GUIDO'S MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS—THE CATHEDRAL AND THE DUOMO—EFFECTS OF THESE PLACES OF WORSHIP, AND THE CEREMONIES, UPON THE MIND—RESORT OF THE ITALIAN PEASANTRY—OPEN CHURCHES—SUBTERRANEAN-CONFESSION CHAPEL—THE FESTA—GRAND PROCESSIONS—ILLUMINATIONS—AUSTRIAN BANDS OF MUSIC—DEPORTMENT OF THE PEOPLE TO A STRANGER.
Another evening is here, and my friends have crept to bed with the exclamation, "how much we may live in a day." Bologna is unlike any other city we have ever seen, in a multitude of things. You walk all over it under arcades, sheltered on either side from the sun, the elegance and ornament of the lines of pillars depending on the wealth of the owner of the particular house, but columns and arches, simple or rich, everywhere. Imagine porticoes built on the front of every house in Philadelphia or New York, so as to cover the sidewalks completely, and, down the long perspective of every street, continued lines of airy Corinthian, or simple Doric pillars, and you may faintly conceive the impression of the streets of Bologna. With Lord Byron's desire to forget everything English, I do not wonder at his selection of this foreign city for a residence, so emphatically unlike, as it is, to everything else in the world.
We inquired out the gallery after breakfast, and spent two or three hours among the celebrated master-pieces of the Carracci, and the famous painters of the Bolognese school. The collection is small, but said to be more choice than any other in Italy. There certainly are five or six among its forty or fifty gems, that deserve each a pilgrimage. The pride of the place is the St. Cecilia, by Raphael. This always beautiful personification of music, a woman of celestial beauty, stands in the midst of a choir who have been interrupted in their anthem by a song, issuing from a vision of angels in a cloud from heaven. They have dropped their instruments, broken, upon the ground, and are listening with rapt attention, all, except the saint, with heads dropped upon their bosoms, overcome with the glory of the revelation. She alone, with her harp hanging loosely from her fingers, gazes up with the most serene and cloudless rapture beaming from her countenance, yet with a look of full and angelic comprehension, and understanding of the melody and its divine meaning. You feel that her beauty is mortal, for it is all woman; but you see that, for the moment, the spirit that breathes through, and mingles with the harmony in the sky, is seraphic and immortal. If there ever was inspiration, out of holy writ, it touched the pencil of Raphael.
It is tedious to read descriptions of pictures. I liked everything in the gallery. The Bolognese style of color suits my eye. It is rich and forcible, without startling or offending. Its delicious mellowness of color, and vigor and triumphant power of conception, show two separate triumphs of the art, which in the same hand are delightful. The pictures of Ludovico Carracci especially fired my admiration. And Domenichino, who died of a broken heart at Rome, because his productions were neglected, is a painter who always touches me nearly. His Madonna del Rosario is crowded with beauty. Such children I never saw in painting—the very ideals of infantile grace and innocence. It is said of him, that, after painting his admirable frescoes in the church of St. Andrew, at Rome, which, at the time, were ridiculed unsparingly by the artists, he used to walk in on his return from his studio, and gazing at them with a dejected air, remark to his friend, that he "could not think they were quite so bad—they might have been worse." How true it is, that, "the root of a great name is in the dead body."
Guido's celebrated picture of the "Massacre of the Innocents," hangs just opposite the St. Cecilia. It is a powerful and painful thing. The marvel of it to me is the simplicity with which its wonderful effects are produced, both of expression and color. The kneeling mother in the foreground, with her dead children before her, is the most intense representation of agony I ever saw. Yet the face is calm, her eyes thrown up to heaven, but her lips undistorted, and the muscles of her face, steeped as they are in suffering, still and natural. It is the look of a soul overwhelmed—that has ceased to struggle because it is full. Her gaze is on heaven, and in the abandonment of her limbs, and the deep, but calm agony of her countenance, you see that nothing between this and heaven can move her more. One suffers in seeing such pictures. You go away exhausted, and with feelings harassed and excited.
As we returned, we passed the gates of the university. On the walls were pasted a sonnet printed with some flourish, in honor of Camillo Rosalpina, the laureate of one of the academical classes.
We visited several of the churches in the afternoon. The cathedral and the Duomo are glorious places—both. I wish I could convey, to minds accustomed to the diminutive size and proportions of our churches in America, an idea of the enormous and often almost supernatural grandeur of those in Italy. Aisles in whose distance the figure of a man is almost lost—pillars, whose bases you walk round in wonder, stretching into the lofty vaults of the roof, as if they ended in the sky—arches of gigantic dimensions, mingling and meeting with the fine tracery of a cobweb—altars piled up on every side with gold, and marble, and silver—private chapels ornamented with the wealth of nobles, let into the sides, each large enough for a communion—and through the whole extent of the interior, an unencumbered breadth of floor, with here and there a solitary worshipper on his knees, or prostrated on his face—figures so small in comparison with the immense dome above them, that it seems as if, could distance drown a prayer, they were as much lost as if they prayed under the open sky! Without having even a leaning to the Catholic faith, I love to haunt their churches, and I am not sure that the religious awe of the sublime ceremonies and places of worship does not steal upon me daily. Whenever I am heated, or fatigued, or out of spirits, I go into the first cathedral, and sit down for an hour. They are always dark, and cool, and quiet; and the distant tinkling of the bell from some distant chapel and the grateful odor of the incense, and the low, just audible murmur of prayer, settles on my feelings like a mist, and softens and soothes and refreshes me, as nothing else will. The Italian peasantry who come to the cities to sell or bargain, pass their noons in these cool places. You see them on their knees asleep against a pillar, or sitting in a corner, with their heads upon their bosoms; and, if it were as a place of retreat and silence alone, the churches are an inestimable blessing to them. It seems to me, that any sincere Christian, of whatever faith, would find a pleasure in going into a sacred place and sitting down in the heat of the day, to be quiet and devotional for an hour. It would promote the objects of any denomination in our country, I should think, if the churches were thus left always open.