We might transcribe, for the entertainment of the reader, the passage to which we have already referred, describing Salvator’s departure, in the company of his father, for the college of the Congregazione Somasco; but we prefer one which, though highly coloured and somewhat dramatic, is more to our purpose—the commencement of Salvator’s studies as an artist under his brother-in-law Francanzani. We cannot, however, do this at once: for, in endeavouring to lay our hands upon the passage, we were as usual intercepted by showers of roses and clouds of perfume. Lady Morgan’s style resembles ‘another morn risen on mid-noon.’ We must make a career therefore with the historian, and reach the temple of painting through the sounding portico of music. It appears that Salvator, after he left the brotherhood of the Somasco, with more poetry than logic in his head, devoted himself to music; and Lady Morgan preludes her narration with the following eloquent passage.
‘All Naples—(where even to this day love and melody make a part of the existence of the people)—all Naples was then resounding to guitars, lutes and harps, accompanying voices, which forever sang the fashionable canzoni of Cambio Donato, and of the Prince di Venusa.[[22]] Neither German phlegm, nor Spanish gloom, could subdue spirits so tuned to harmony, nor silence the passionate serenatas which floated along the shores, and reverberated among the classic grottoes of Pausilippo. Vesuvius blazed, St. Elmo thundered from its heights, conspiracy brooded in the caves of Baiæ, and tyranny tortured its victim in the dungeons of the Castello Nuovo; yet still the ardent Neapolitans, amidst all the horrors of their social and political position,[[23]] could snatch moments of blessed forgetfulness, and, reckless of their country’s woes and their own degradation, could give up hours to love and music, which were already numbered in the death-warrants of their tyrants.... It was at this moment, when peculiar circumstances were awakening in the region of the syrens “the hidden soul of harmony,” when the most beautiful women of the capital and the court gave a public exhibition of their talents and their charms, and glided in their feluccas on the moonlight midnight seas, with harps of gold and hands of snow, that the contumacious students of the Padri Somaschi escaped from the restraints of their cloisters, and the horrid howl of their laude spirituali, to all the intoxication of sound and sight, with every sense in full accordance with the musical passion of the day. It is little wonderful, if, at this epoch of his life, Salvator gave himself up unresistingly to the pursuit of a science, which he cultivated with ardour, even when time had preached his tumultuous pulse to rest; or if the floating capital of genius, which was as yet unappropriated, was in part applied to that species of composition, which, in the youth of man as of nations, precedes deeper and more important studies, and for which, in either, there is but one age. All poetry and passion, his young Muse “dallied with the innocence of love;” and inspired strains, which, though the simple breathings of an ardent temperament, the exuberance of youthful excitement, and an overteeming sensibility, were assigning him a place among the first Italian lyrists of his age. Little did he then dream that posterity would apply the rigid rules of criticism to the “idle visions” of his boyish fancy; or that his bars and basses would be conned and analyzed by the learned umpires of future ages—declared “not only admirable for a dilettante, but, in point of melody, superior to that of most of the masters of his time.”[[24]]
‘It happened at this careless, gay, but not idle period of Salvator’s life, than an event occurred which hurried on his vocation to that art, to which his parents were so determined that he should not addict himself, but to which Nature had so powerfully directed him. His probation of adolescence was passed: his hour was come; and he was about to approach that temple whose threshold he modestly and poetically declared himself unworthy to pass.
“Del immortalide al tempio augusto
Dove serba la gloria e i suoi tesori.”
‘At one of the popular festivities annually celebrated at Naples in honour of the Madonna, the beauty of Rosa’s elder sister captivated the attention of a young painter, who, though through life unknown to “fortune,” was not even then “unknown to fame.” The celebrated and unfortunate Francesco Francanzani, the inamorata of La Signorina Rosa, was a distinguished pupil of the Spagnuoletto school; and his picture of San Giuseppe, for the Chiesa Pellegrini, had already established him as one of the first painters of his day. Francanzani, like most of the young Neapolitan painters of his time, was a turbulent and factious character, vain and self-opinionated; and, though there was in his works a certain grandeur of style, with great force and depth of colouring, yet the impatience of his disappointed ambition, and indignation at the neglect of his acknowledged merit, already rendered him reckless of public opinion.[[25]]
‘It was the peculiar vanity of the painters of that day to have beautiful wives. Albano had set the example’—[as if any example need be set, or the thing had been done in concert]—‘Domenichino followed it to his cost; Rubens turned it to the account of his profession; and Francanzani, still poor and struggling, married the portionless daughter of the most indigent artist in Naples, and thought perhaps more of the model than the wife. This union, and, still more, a certain sympathy in talent and character between the brothers-in-law, frequently carried Salvator to the stanza or work-room of Francesco. Francesco, by some years the elder, was then deep in the faction and intrigues of the Neapolitan school; and was endowed with that bold eloquence, which, displayed upon bold occasions, is always so captivating to young auditors. It was at the foot of his kinsman’s easel, and listening to details which laid perhaps the foundation of that contemptuous opinion he cherished through life for schools, academies, and all incorporated pedantry and pretension,[[26]] that Salvator occasionally amused himself in copying, on any scrap of board or paper which fell in his way, whatever pleased him in Francesco’s pictures. His long-latent genius thus accidentally awakened, resembled the acqua buja, whose cold and placid surface kindles like spirits on the contact of a spark. In these first, rude, and hasty sketches, Francanzani, as Passeri informs us, saw “molti segni d’un indole spirituosa” (great signs of talent and genius); and he frequently encouraged, and sometimes corrected, the copies which so nearly approached the originals. But Salvator, who was destined to imitate none, but to be imitated by many, soon grew impatient of repeating another’s conceptions, and of following in an art in which he already perhaps felt, with prophetic throes, that he was born to lead. His visits to the workshop of Francanzani grew less frequent; his days were given to the scenes of his infant wanderings; he departed with the dawn, laden with his portfolio filled with primed paper, and a pallet covered with oil colours; and it is said, that even then he not only sketched, but coloured from nature. When the pedantry of criticism (at the suggestion of envious rivals) accused him of having acquired, in his colouring, too much of the impasting of the Spagnuoletto school, it was not aware that his faults, like his beauties, were original; and that he sinned against the rules of art, only because he adhered too faithfully to nature.’—[Salvator’s flesh colour is as remarkably dingy and Spagnuolettish, as the tone of his landscapes is fresh and clear.]—‘Returning from these arduous but not profitless rambles, through wildernesses and along precipices, impervious to all save the enterprise of fearless genius, he sought shelter beneath his sister’s roof, where a kinder welcome awaited him than he could find in that home where it had been decreed from his birth that he should not be a painter.
‘Francanzani was wont, on the arrival of his brother-in-law, to rifle the contents of his portfolio; and he frequently found there compositions hastily thrown together, but selected, drawn, and coloured with a boldness and a breadth, which indicated the confidence of a genius sure of itself. The first accents of “the thrilling melody of sweet renown” which ever vibrated to the heart of Salvator, came to his ear on these occasions in the Neapolitan patois of his relation, who, in glancing by lamp-light over his labours, would pat him smilingly on the head, and exclaim, “Fruscia, fruscia, Salvatoriello—che va buono,” (“Go on, go on, this is good”)—simple plaudits! but frequently remembered in after-times (when the dome of the Pantheon had already rung with the admiration extorted by his Regulus) as the first which cheered him in his arduous progress.’ p. 94.
The reader cannot fail to observe here how well every thing is made out: how agreeably every thing is assumed: how difficulties are smoothed over, little abruptnesses rounded off: how each circumstance falls into its place just as it should, and answers to a preconceived idea, like the march of a verse or the measure of a dance: and how completely that imaginary justice is everywhere done to the subject, which, according to Lord Bacon, gives poetry so decided an advantage over history! Yet this is one of our fair authoress’s most severe and literal passages. Her prose-Muse is furnished with wings; and the breeze of Fancy carries her off her feet from the plain ground of matter-of-fact, whether she will or no. Lady Morgan, in this part of her subject, takes occasion to animadvert on an opinion of Sir Joshua’s respecting our artist’s choice of a particular style of landscape painting.