There Would Be The Figure Of Marcus Aurelius, Commanding Us
With Outstretched Arm From The Back Of The Bronze Charger Which Would
Not Obey Michelangelo When He Bade It "Go," Not Because It Was Not
Lifelike, But Because It Was Too Fat To Move.
Against the afternoon
sky, looking down into the piazza with dreamy unconcern from their
vantage would be the statues
On the balustrated roof of the museum.
There would be the sense, rather than the vision, of the white shoulders
of Castor and Pollux beside their steeds above the dark-green garden
spaces on either hand; there would be the front of the Church of Ara
Coeli visible beyond the insignificance of Rienzi's monument; and
filling in the other end of the piazza which Michelangelo imagined, and
not the Romans knew, there would be the palace of the senator, to which
the mayor and the common council of modern Rome now mount by a double
stairway, and presumably meet at the top in proceeding to their
municipal labors. Facing the museum would be the palace of the
Conservatori, where in the noblest of its splendid halls the present
company would find itself in the carved and gilded arm-chairs of the
conservators, seated at an afternoon tea-table and restoring itself from
the fatigues of more and more antique art in the galleries about. After
this there would be the gardened court of the palace, with a thin lawn,
and a soft little fountain musing in the midst of it, and the sunset
light lifting on the wall where the fragments of Sep-timius Severus's
marble map of Rome order themselves in such coherence as archaeology can
suggest for them.
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