The antiquarian genius is always very busy at Rome, because its exhumations supply food to greedy minds bent on recovering the earliest history of our race, as if the future of mankind would one day turn up engraved on tiles. These sort of enthusiasts do not comprehend that the further they go back, the greater grows the historic lie, and that as far as it concerns true knowledge, their labours are utterly fruitless. Antiquarians and geologists are both earth-searchers; but does the ruin-grubber deem himself on a par with the inspector of organic remains?
I took my view of the Transfiguration of Rome, moulded by the avenger in a way no man could paint or model. I wanted to see the other Transfiguration, which art-genius pronounced the finest picture in the known world, as if it were as great a miracle as the one it represents.
Rome is rich in metamorphoses, besides being one itself: the fine bronze statue in the cathedral, a figure of Jupiter, has been transfigured into Peter, who reigns in its stead.
But the most valued Transfiguration of all is Raphael’s: it has a fault of the first magnitude, a ghastly fault that hands it over to the ruins.
The great painter was but a fragmentary genius, or he would not have made that hideous epileptic the conspicuous rival of Christ. Our eyes join the eyes of the painted crowd in looking at a sight so loathsome, and that in so healing a Presence.
But let us be thankful: Raphael has left us his mighty cartoons, his portraits, his Madonnas.
There were other treasures of art in the Vatican, notably the Laocoon, that I desired earnestly to examine. I had need to speak of it in my “sculptured poem,” but could draw no inspiration from it in the copy at Florence. Strange to say, though the copy and the original are so alike, the moment I saw this last its life passed into me. I required also to look at the Apollo Belvidere, but found it to be only Lord Chesterfield during his apotheosis.
In the Doge’s palace in Venice there is a striking picture of Ariadne. I knew there was a sculpture of the same in the Vatican gallery, a place which may be called an indoor street of marbles: this, too, I found. Then I made my way to the very end of this Via di Scolpitura, where stood the Athlete. How long I stayed with my eyes and heart upon it, I know not; but while looking at that most natural of all marble wonders, every Apollo had disappeared from mythology, from this world itself.
But now to the Barberini Palace, to visit the apocryphal portrait of Beatrice Cenci. We could kiss the very canvas did we not know that her tragedy is but a myth. She breathed into Shelley her tragic breath, so we all go to see the familiar face; and, hard by the Ghetto, the Cenci palace, too. But this, how changed. It was let out to the dirtier class by its then owner—a cardinal, too; and I saw that the grand entrance at the back was used for a dust-heap. All the property of a cardinal, all going to decay; yet is there a cleanly church opposite, built at the cost of a Cenci.
It is with some loss of equanimity that one thinks of Roma and finds that its citizens are proud of it in its humbled and chastised condition. It is like the worn-out pedigree of a once illustrious name. They may be proud of their tombs, for one is of the Scipios, of Seneca another; but their ruins are a disgrace, the work of their avenging, conquering foes, such as Guiscard in the eleventh century, who battered down every wall that it might never be defended again. But they are proud of their ruins! Their Forum, a bit of Palmyra; their Coliseum, a broken cup; their ghost of the palace of the Cæsars, its own burial-place; of their Baths of Caracalla, an artificial desert; of their Theatre of Marcellus, in one of the fine arches of which I saw a flourishing blacksmith’s forge, blazing to the memory of a glorious past.