The peasantry still crowd the cellar, still sing the old lays, and each day tell over again the old legend of Mephistopheles’ miraculous exit.
“I saw him, with these eyes, upon a wine cask riding
Out of the cellar door, just now.”
CHAPTER XI.
Pictures at Dresden.—Raphael’s Madonna.—Bayard’s Art Education.—His Exalted Ideas of Art.—His Enthusiasm.—Visits Bohemia.—Stay in Prague.—The Curiosities of Vienna.—Tomb of Beethoven.—Respect for Religion.—Listens to Strauss.—View of Lintz.—Munich and its Decorations.—The Home of Schiller.—Poetic Landscapes, and Charming People.—Statue by Thorwaldsen.—Walk to Heidelberg.
At Dresden, Bayard visited the picture-gallery, for the purpose of seeing Raphael’s Madonna and Child, known as the Madonna di San Sisto. His description of that painting, so unfortunately abridged in his book, was one of the finest examples of art criticism to be found in print. His appreciation of painting and sculpture was remarkable, indeed, for one who never made them a professional study, and whose rude sketches in pencil in his note books, contained nearly all of his undertakings as an amateur. His soul seemed cast in the proper mould for that kind of work, but his hand was never trained to materialize the pictures that filled the galleries of his imagination. He had all those finer sensibilities and acute instincts which fitted him for art in poetry or stone, and he saw in paintings and statuary, beauties or defects which thousands of colder but more studious critics failed to notice.
He spoke of that Madonna at Dresden, as a painting that moved his whole nature in admiration. He enjoyed it. He feasted on it. He read it as one follows an exciting romance. He felt the power of the picture as Raphael felt it, and seemed to appreciate it even more keenly than the artist. How much satisfaction and delight he found in the enormous collections of art in the Old World, cannot be told or understood by any one whose natural genius leads them not in such a direction. His mental appetite for such things grew so keen, as he went on from city to city and gallery to gallery, that he much preferred to leave his meals untasted, than pass a great painting without study. Like the true artist, his mind took in the grand ideals, and his respect and admiration for the divine handiwork in producing man and beast, caused him often to wince under the suggestive and degrading obtrusiveness of fig-leaves and rude drapery in sculpture. The human form in all its heavenly beauty and godlike majesty, as reproduced in marble by the great artists, was too sacred and pure to him, to be marred by the suggestions of sin. No man or woman will ever become an artist, in its highest, noblest sense, until their love for beauty, simplicity, and purity, lifts them above the impressions that are born of ignorance, vulgarity, and sin. Bayard, in after years, thus beautifully wrote of sculpture:—