The art annals of the Rome of Christian times are of supreme interest. The greatest of the painters who came to study in Rome was Velazquez, who was offered the hospitality of Cardinal Barberini in the Vatican. He stayed, however, in a quieter lodging, at the Villa Medici, and afterwards in the house of the Spanish ambassador. Velazquez paid a second visit to Rome in 1649, where he met Poussin, and Salvator Rosa. To Rosa he remarked, “It is Titian that bears the palm.”
The Spanish painter was made a member of the Roman Academy; and at this time he painted the portrait of Innocent X., which occupies a position of honour in the Dorian Palace. Reynolds described this as “the finest piece of portrait-painting in Rome.” Velazquez’ portrait of himself is in the Capitoline Museum in the city.
The art records of Rome are so many that I cannot attempt to refer to more than a small number of them. Literary associations, too, crowd into the mind as we walk the lava-paved streets of the glowing capital.
Goethe sojourned long in Rome, and wrote many pages of his impressions. In 1787 he writes of the amazing loveliness of a walk through the historic streets by moonlight, of the solemnity of the Coliseum by night, and the grandeur of the portico of St Peter’s. He praises the climate in spring, the delight of long sunny days, with noons “almost too warm”; and the sky “like a bright blue taffeta in the sunshine.” In the Capitoline Museum he admired the nude “Venus” as one of the finest statues in Rome. “My imagination, my memory,” he writes, “is storing itself full with endlessly beautiful subjects.... I am in the land of the arts.”
Full of rapture are the letters of Shelley from Rome: “Since I last wrote to you,” he says to Peacock, “I have seen the ruins of Rome, the Vatican, St Peter’s, and all the miracles of ancient and modern art contained in that majestic city. The impression of it exceeds anything I have ever experienced in my travels.... We visited the Forum, and the ruins of the Coliseum every day. The Coliseum is unlike any work of human hands I ever saw before. It is of enormous height and circuit, and the arches, built of massy stones, are piled on one another, and jut into the blue air, shattered into the forms of overhanging rocks.”
Shelley was entranced by the arch of Constantine. “It is exquisitely beautiful and perfect.” In March 1819, he writes: “Come to Rome. It is a scene by which expression is overpowered, which words cannot convey.” The Cathedral scarcely appealed to Shelley; he thought it inferior externally to St Paul’s, though he admired the façade and colonnade. More satisfying to the poet’s æsthetic taste was the Pantheon, with its handsome fluted columns of yellow marble, and the beauty of the proportions in the structure.
The Pantheon is generally admitted to be the most noble of the ancient edifices of the city. It was erected by Agrippa 27 B.C., and sumptuously adorned with fine marbles. The dome is vast and nobly planned, and the building truly merits Shelley’s designation, “sublime.”
Keats was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, in a tomb bearing the inscription: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” His loyal and admiring friend, Shelley, wrote a truer memorial of the young poet:
“Go thou to Rome—at once the paradise,
The grave, the city, and the wilderness;
And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise,
And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress
The bones of desolation’s nakedness
Pass, till the spirit of the spot shall lead
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access,
Where, like an infant’s smile, over the dead
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread.”
In 1850 Robert Browning and his wife were in Rome, and it was then that Browning wrote the beautiful love poem, “Two in the Campagna,” telling of the joy of roaming in: