Personally I Disagree With Smollett, Though The
Balance Of Cultivated Opinion Has Since Come Round To His Side.
The guilt of Smollett lay in criticizing what was above
criticism, as the contents of the Tribuna were then held to be.
And in defence of this point of view it may at least be said that
the Uffizi was then, with the exception of the Vatican, the only
gallery of first-rate importance open to the travelling public on
the Grand Tour. Founded by Cosimo I, built originally by George
Vasari, and greatly enlarged by Francis I, who succeeded to the
Grand Duchy in 1574, the gallery owed most perhaps to the
Cardinal, afterwards Ferdinand I, who constructed the Tribuna,
and to Cardinal Leopold, an omnivorous collector, who died in
1675. But all the Medici princes added to the rarities in the
various cabinets, drawing largely upon the Villa Medici at Rome
for this purpose, and the last of them, John Gaston (1723-1737),
was one of the most liberal as regards the freedom of access
which he allowed to his accumulated treasures. Among the
distinguished antiquaries who acted as curators and cicerones
were Sebastiano Bianchi, Antonio Cocchi, Raymond Cocchi, Joseph
Bianchi, J. B. Pelli, the Abbe Lanzi, and Zacchiroli. The last
three all wrote elaborate descriptions of the Gallery during the
last decades of the eighteenth century. There was unhappily an
epidemic of dishonesty among the custodians of gems at this
period, and, like the notorious Raspe, who fled from Cassel in
1775, and turned some of his old employers to ridicule in his
Baron Munchausen, Joseph Bianchi was convicted first of robbing
his cabinet and then attempting to set it on fire, for which
exploit the "learned and judicious Bianchi," as Smollett called
him in his first edition, was sent to prison for life. The
Arrotino which Smollett so greatly admired, and which the
delusive Bianchi declared to be a representation of the Augur
Attus Naevius, is now described as "A Scythian whetting his knife
to flay Marsyas."
Kinglake has an amusingly cynical passage on the impossibility of
approaching the sacred shrines of the Holy Land in a fittingly
reverential mood. Exactly the same difficulty is experienced in
approaching the sacred shrines of art. Enthusiasm about great
artistic productions, though we may readily understand it to be
justifiable, is by no means so easily communicable. How many
people possessing a real claim to culture have felt themselves
puzzled by their insensibility before some great masterpiece!
Conditions may be easily imagined in which the inducement to
affect an ecstasy becomes so strong as to prove overpowering.
Many years ago at Florence the loiterers in the Tribuna were
startled by the sudden rush into the place of a little man whose
literary fame gave him high claims to intuitive taste. He placed
himself with high clasped hand before the chief attraction in
that room of treasures. "There," he murmured, "is the Venus de
Medicis, and here I must stay - for ever and for ever." He had
scarcely uttered these words, each more deeply and solemnly than
the preceding, when an acquaintance entered, and the enthusiast,
making a hasty inquiry if Lady So-and-So had arrived, left the
room not to return again that morning.
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