To The American Who
Views Them And Remembers That We Have Now So Much Money That Some Of Us
Do Not Know What To Do With It, They Will Suggest That Our Millionaires
Have An Unrivalled Opportunity Of Immortality In The Same Sort.
There is
hardly a town of ten thousand inhabitants in the country where there are
not men who could easily afford to give a hundred thousand dollars, or
fifty, or twenty to their native or adoptive place and so enter upon a
new life in bronze or marble.
This would enrich us beyond the dreams of
avarice in a high-grade portrait statuary; it would give work to
hundreds of sculptors who now have little or nothing to do, and would
revive or create the supplementary industries of casting in metal or
carving in stone.
The time was in Genoa, it seems, as the time is now with us, when a
great many people did not know what to do with their money. There were
sumptuary laws which forbade their spending it, either they or their
wives or daughters, in dress; apparently they could not even wear Genoa
velvet, which had to be sold abroad for the corruption of the outside
world; and this is said to be the reason why there were so many palaces
built in Genoa in the days of the republic. People who did not wish to
figure in that hall of fame put their surplus into the immense and often
ugly edifices which we still see ministering to their pride in the wide
and narrow streets of the city. Now and then a devout family built or
rebuilt a church and gave it to the public; but by far the greater
number put up palaces, where, after the house-warming, they dwelt in a
cold and economical seclusion. Some of their palaces are now devoted to
public uses; they are galleries of pictures and statues most worthy to
be seen, or they are municipal offices, or museums, or schools of art or
science; but part are still in the keeping of the families that
contributed them to the splendor of their city. The streets in which
they stand are loud with transit and traffic, but the palaces hold aloof
from the turmoil and lift their lofty heads to the level of the gardens
behind them. Huge, heavy they are, according to the local ideal, and
always wanting the delicacy of Venetian architecture, where something in
the native genius tempered to gentleness the cold severity of Palladio,
and where Sansovino knew how to bridge the gulf between the Gothic and
the Renascent art that would have been Greek but halted at being Roman.
The grandeur of those streets of palaces in Genoa cannot be denied, but
perhaps, if the visitor quite consulted his preference or indulged his
humor, he would wander rather through the arcades of the busy port, up
the chasmal alleys of little shops into the tiny piazzas, no bigger than
a good-sized room, opening before some ancient church and packed with
busy, noisy people.
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