Now That We Were Standing In The Street, After Being Thus
Ignominiouly Escorted Thither, My Little Friend Was Plainly Reduced
To The 'piccolo Giro,' Or Little Circuit Of The Town, He Had
Formerly Proposed.
But my suggestion that we should visit the
Palazzo Te (of which I had heard a great deal, as a strange wild
place) imparted new life to him, and away we went.
The secret of the length of Midas's ears, would have been more
extensively known, if that servant of his, who whispered it to the
reeds, had lived in Mantua, where there are reeds and rushes enough
to have published it to all the world. The Palazzo Te stands in a
swamp, among this sort of vegetation; and is, indeed, as singular a
place as I ever saw.
Not for its dreariness, though it is very dreary. Not for its
dampness, though it is very damp. Nor for its desolate condition,
though it is as desolate and neglected as house can be. But
chiefly for the unaccountable nightmares with which its interior
has been decorated (among other subjects of more delicate
execution), by Giulio Romano. There is a leering Giant over a
certain chimney-piece, and there are dozens of Giants (Titans
warring with Jove) on the walls of another room, so inconceivably
ugly and grotesque, that it is marvellous how any man can have
imagined such creatures. In the chamber in which they abound,
these monsters, with swollen faces and cracked cheeks, and every
kind of distortion of look and limb, are depicted as staggering
under the weight of falling buildings, and being overwhelmed in the
ruins; upheaving masses of rock, and burying themselves beneath;
vainly striving to sustain the pillars of heavy roofs that topple
down upon their heads; and, in a word, undergoing and doing every
kind of mad and demoniacal destruction. The figures are immensely
large, and exaggerated to the utmost pitch of uncouthness; the
colouring is harsh and disagreeable; and the whole effect more like
(I should imagine) a violent rush of blood to the head of the
spectator, than any real picture set before him by the hand of an
artist. This apoplectic performance was shown by a sickly-looking
woman, whose appearance was referable, I dare say, to the bad air
of the marshes; but it was difficult to help feeling as if she were
too much haunted by the Giants, and they were frightening her to
death, all alone in that exhausted cistern of a Palace, among the
reeds and rushes, with the mists hovering about outside, and
stalking round and round it continually.
Our walk through Mantua showed us, in almost every street, some
suppressed church: now used for a warehouse, now for nothing at
all: all as crazy and dismantled as they could be, short of
tumbling down bodily. The marshy town was so intensely dull and
flat, that the dirt upon it seemed not to have come there in the
ordinary course, but to have settled and mantled on its surface as
on standing water.
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