She Was Given To Piedmont
In 1815 By The Congress Of Vienna, And She Has Formed Part Of Italy Ever
Since The Unification.
I believe that now she is of rather radical
opinions in politics, though the bookseller who found on his
Shelves a
last copy of the interesting sketch of Genoese history which I have
profited by so little, said that the Genoese had been disappointed in
the Socialists, lately in power, and were now voting Clerical by a large
majority.
The fact may have been colored by the book-seller's feelings. If the
Clericals are in superior force, the clerics are not: nowhere in Italy
did I see so few priests. All other orders of people throng the narrow,
noisy, lofty streets, where the crash of feet and hoofs and wheels beats
to the topmost stories of the palaces towering overhead in their stony
grandiosity. Everywhere in the structures dating after the Gothic period
there is want of sensibility; the art of the Renaissance was not moulded
here in the moods of a refined and effeminate patriciate, such as in
Venice tempered it to beauty; but it renders in marble the prepotence of
a commercialized nobility, and makes good in that form the right of the
city to be called Genoa the Proud. Perhaps she would not wish to be
called proud because of these palaces alone. It is imaginable that she
would like the stranger to remember the magnificence with which she
rewarded the patriotism of her greatest citizen after Columbus and
Mazzini: that mighty admiral, Andrea Doria, who freed this country first
from the rule of Charles V. and then from the rule of Francis I.; who
swept the Barbary corsairs from the seas; who beat the Turks in battles
on ship and on shore; who took Corsica from the French when he was
eighty-eight years old; who suffered from civil faction; who outlived
exile as he had outlived war, and who died at the age of ninety-four,
after he had refused the sovereignty of the country he had served so
long; who was the Washington of his day, and was equally statesman and
soldier, and, above all, patriot. It is his portrait that you see in
that old palace (called the Palace of the Prince because Charles V. had
called him Prince) overlooking the port, where he sits an old, old man,
very weary, in the sole society of his sarcastic cat, as I have noted
before. The cat seems to have just passed some ironical reflection on
the vanity of human things and to be studying him for the effect. Both
appear indifferent to the spectator, but perhaps they are not, and you
must not for all that fail of a visit to the Church of San Matteo, set
round with the palaces of the Doria family - the palace which his
grateful country gave the Admiral after he refused to be her master, and
the palaces of his kindred neighboring it round.
I do not remember any equal space in all Europe which, through a very
little knowledge, so takes the heart as the gentle little church founded
by an earlier Doria, and, after four hundred years, restored by a later,
and then environed with the stately homes of the race, where they could
be domesticated in the honor and reverence of their countrymen because
of the goodness and greatness of the loftiest of their line. It is such
a place as one may revere and yet possess one's soul in self-respect,
very much as one may revere Mount Vernon. The church, as well as the
piazza, is full of Dorian memories, and the cloister must be visited not
only for its rather damp beauty, but for the full meaning of the irony
which Doria's cat in the portrait wished to convey: against the wall
here are gathered the fragments of the statue of Doria which, when the
French Revolution came to Genoa, the patriots threw out of the ducal
palace and broke in the street below.
We were some time in finding our way into the magnificent hall of the
Great Council where this statue once stood, with the statues of many
other Genoese heroes and statesmen, and I am not sure that it was worth
all our trouble. Magnificent it certainly was, but coarsely magnificent,
like so much elsewhere in Genoa; but, if we had been at ten times the
trouble we were in seeing the Palace of the Municipality, I should not
think it too much. There in the great hall are the monuments of those
Genoese notables whose munificence their country wished to remember in
the order of their generosity. I do not remember just what the maximum
was, but the Doge or other leading citizen who gave, say, twenty-five
thousand ducats to the state had a statue erected to him; one who gave
fifteen, a bust; and one who gave five, an honorary tablet. The
surprising thing is that nearly all the statues and busts, whether good
likenesses or not, are delightful art: it is as if the noble acts of the
benefactors of their country had inspired the sculptors to reproduce
them not only in true character, but in due dignity. 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.
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