I
Did Really Revisit The Pal-Lavicini-Durazzo Palace, And There Revived
The Pleasure I Had Known Before In Its Wonderful Van Dycks.
Most
wonderful was and will always be the "Boy in White," the little serene
princeling, whoever he was, in whom_ the painter has fixed forever a
bewitching mood and moment of childhood.
"The Mother with two Children"
is very well and self-evidently true to personality and period and
position; but, after all, she is nothing beside that "Boy in White,"
though she and her children are otherwise so wonderful. Now that I speak
of her, however, she rather grows upon my recollection as a woman
greater than her great world and proudly weary of it.
She was a lady of that very patrician house whose palace, in its cold
grandeur and splendor, renews at once all one's faded or fading sense of
the commercial past of Italy, when her greatest merchants were her
greatest nobles and dwelt in magnificence unparalleled yet since Rome
began to be old. Genoa, Venice, Pisa, Florence, what state their
business men housed themselves in and environed themselves with! Their
palaces by the hundreds were such as only the public edifices of our
less simple State capitols could equal in size and not surpass in cost.
Their _folie des grandeurs_ realized illusions in architecture, in
sculpture, and in painting which the assembled and concentrated feats of
those arts all the way up and down Fifth Avenue, and in the millionaire
blocks eastward could not produce the likeness of.
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