"Friday, April 30. Painting all day except two hours at the Colonna Palace—Landi's pictures—horrible!! How I was disappointed. I had heard Landi, the Chevalier Landi, lauded to the skies by the Italians as the greatest modern colorist. He was made a chevalier, elected a member of the Academy at Florence and of the Academy of St. Luke in Rome, and there were his pictures which I was told I must by all means see. They are not merely bad, they are execrable. There is not a redeeming point in a single picture that I saw, not one that would have placed him on a level with the commonest sign-painter in America. His largest work in his rooms at present is the 'Departure of Mary Queen of Scots from Paris.' The story is not told; the figures are not grouped but huddled together; they are not well-drawn individually; the character is vulgar and tame; there is no taste in the disposal of the drapery and ornaments, no effect of chiaroscuro. It is flimsy and misty, and, as to color, the quality to which I was specially directed, if total disregard of arrangement, if the scattering of tawdry reds and blues and yellows over the picture, all quarrelling for the precedence; if leather complexions varied by those of chalk, without truth or depth or tone, constitute good color, then are they finely colored. But, if Landi is a colorist, then are Titian and Veronese never more to be admired. In short, I have never met with the works of an artist who had a name like Landi's so utterly destitute of even the shadow of merit. There is but one word which can express their character, they are execrable!
"It is astonishing that with such works of the old masters before them as the Italians have, they should not perceive the defects of their own painters in this particular. Cammuccini is the only one among them who possesses genius in the higher departments, and he only in drawing; his color is very bad.
"A funeral procession passed the house to-day. On the bier, exposed as is customary here, was a beautiful young girl, apparently of fifteen, dressed in rich laces and satins embroidered with gold and silver and flowers tastefully arranged, and sprinkled also with real flowers, and at her head was placed a coronet of flowers. She had more the appearance of sleep than of death. No relative appeared near her; the whole seemed to be conducted by the priests and monks and those hideous objects in white hoods, with faces covered except two holes for the eyes."
In early May, Morse, in company with other artists, went on a sketching trip to Tivoli, Subiaco, Vico, and Vara. This must have been one of the happiest periods of his life. He was in Italy, the cradle of the art he loved; he was surrounded by beauty, both natural and that wrought by the hand of man; he had daily intercourse with congenial souls, and home, with its cares and struggles, seemed far away. His notebooks are largely filled with simple descriptions of the places visited, but now and then he indulges in rhapsody. At Subiaco he comes upon this scene:—
"Upon a solitary seat (a fit place for meditation and study), by a gate which shut the part of the terrace near the convent from that which goes round the hill, sat a monk with his book. He seemed no further disturbed by my passing than to give me the usual salutation.
"I stopped at a little distance from him to look around and down into the chasm below. It was enchanting in spite of the atmosphere of the sirocco. The hills covered with woods, at a distance, reminded me of my own country, fresh and variegated; the high peaks beyond were grey from distance, and the sides of the nearer mountains were marked with many a winding track, down one of which a shepherd and his sheep were descending, looking like a moving pathway. No noise disturbed the silence but the distant barking of the shepherd's dog (as he, like a busy marshal, kept the order of his procession unbroken) mixing with the faint murmuring of the waterfall and the song of the birds that inhabited the ilex grove. It was altogether a place suited to meditation, and, were it consistent with those duties which man owes his fellow man, here would be the spot to which one, fond of study and averse to the noise and bustle of the world, would love to retire."
Returning to Rome on June 3, after enjoying to the full this excursion, from which he brought back many sketches, he found the city given over to ceremony after ceremony connected with the Church. Saint's day followed saint's day, each with its appropriate (or, from the point of view of the New Englander, inappropriate) pageant; or some new church was dedicated and the nights made brilliant with wonderful pyrotechnical displays. He went often with pleasure to the Trinita di Monti, where the beautiful singing of the nuns gave him special pleasure.
Commenting sarcastically on a display of fireworks in honor of St.
Francesco Caracciolo, he says:—
"As far as whizzing serpents, wheels, port-fires, rockets, and other varieties of pyrotechnic art could set forth the humility of the saint, it was this night brilliantly displayed."
And again, in describing the procession of the Corpus Domini, "the most splendid of all the church ceremonies," it is this which particularly impresses him:—