Whether They Marked Her Grave Or Merely Commemorated
Her, It Was Easy To Impute A Pathos To The Fancy Of Having Them There,
Which It Might Not Have Been So Easy To Verify.
You cannot attempt to
pass over any ground in Rome without danger of sinking into historical
depths from which it will be hard to extricate yourself, and it is best
to heed one's steps and keep them to the day's activities.
But one
could not well visit the Villa Pamfili Doria without at least wishing to
remember that in 1849 Garibaldi held it for weeks against the whole
French army, in his defence of republican Rome. A votive temple within
the villa grounds commemorates the invaders who fell in this struggle;
on a neighboring height the Italian leader triumphs in the monument his
adoring country has raised to him.
If we are to believe the censorious Hare, the love of the hero's
countrymen went rather far when the Roman municipality, to please him,
tried to change the course of the Tiber in conformity with a scheme of
his, and so spoiled the beauty of the Farnesina garden Avithout
effecting a too-difficult piece of engineering. The less passionate
Murray says merely that "a large slice of this garden was cut off to
widen the river for the Tiber embankment," and let us hope that it was
no worse. I suppose we must have seen the villa in its glory when we
went, in 1864, to see the Raphael frescos in the casino there, but in
the touching melancholy of the wasted and neglected grounds we easily
accepted the present as an image of the past. For all we remembered, the
weed-grown, green-mossed gravel-paths of the sort of bewildered garden
that remained, with its quenched fountain, its vases of dead or dying
plants, and its dishevelled shrubbery, were what had always been; and it
was of such a charm that we were gratefully content with it. The truth
is, one cannot do much with beauty in perfect repair; the splendor that
belongs to somebody else, unless it belongs also to everybody else,
wounds one's vulgar pride and inspires envious doubts of the owner's
rightful possession. But when the blight of ruin has fallen upon it,
when dilapidation and disintegration have begun their work of atonement
and exculpation, then our hearts melt in compassion of the waning
magnificence and in a soft pity for the expropriated possessor, to whom
we attribute every fine and endearing quality. It is this which makes us
such friends of the past and such critics of the present, and enables us
to enjoy the adversity of others without a pang of the jealousy which
their prosperity excites.
There was much to please a somewhat peculiar taste in our visit to the
Farnesina. The gateman, being an Italian official, had not been at the
gate when we arrived, but came running and smiling from his gossip with
the door-keeper of the casino, and this was a good deal in itself; but
the door-keeper, amiably obese, was better still in her acceptance of
the joke with which the hand-mirror for the easier study of the roof
frescos was accepted. "It is more convenient," she suggested, and at the
counter-suggestion, "Yes, especially for people with short necks," she
shook with gelatinous laughter, and burst into the generous cry, "Oh,
how delightful!" Perhaps this was because she, too, had experienced the
advantage of perusing the frescos in the hand-mirror's reversal. At any
rate, she would not be satisfied till she had returned a Roland for that
easy Oliver. Her chance came in showing a Rubens in one of the rooms,
with the master's usual assortment of billowy beauties, when she could
say - and she ought to have known - that they had eaten too much macaroni.
It was not much of a joke; but one hears so few jokes in Rome.
Do I linger in this study of simple character because I feel myself
unequal to the ecstasies which the frescos of Raphael and his school in
that pleasure dome demanded of me? Something like that, I suppose, but I
do not pride myself on my inability. It seemed to me that the coloring
of the frescos had lost whatever tenderness it once had; and that what
was never meant to be matter of conscious perception, but only of the
vague sense which it is the office of decoration to impart, had grown
less pleasing with the passage of time. There in the first hall was the
story of Cupid and Psyche in the literal illustration of Apuleius, and
there in another hall was Galatea on her shell with her Nymphs and
Tritons and Amorini; and there were Perseus and Medusa and Icarus and
Phaeton and the rest of them. But, if I gave way to all the frankness of
my nature, I should own the subjects fallen sillv through the old age of
an outworn life and redeemed only by the wonderful skill with which they
are rendered. At the same time, I will say in self-defence that, if I
had a very long summer in which to keep coming and dwelling long hours
in the company of these frescos, I think I might live back into the
spirit which invented the fables, and enjoy even more the amusing taste
that was never tired of their repetition. Masterly conception and
incomparable execution are there in histories which are the dreams of
worlds almost as extinct as the dead planets whose last rays still reach
us and in whose death-glimmer we can fancy, if we will, a unity of life
with our own not impossible nor improbable. But more than some such
appeal the Raphaels and the Giulio Romanos of the Farnesina hardly make
to the eye untrained in the art which created them, or unversed in the
technique by which they will live till the last line moulders and the
last tint fades.
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