Studied Three Statues Half An Hour
Each - The Venus Victrix, Polyhymnia, And Gladiateur Combattant.
The
first is mutilated; but if _disarmed_ she conquers all hearts,
what would she achieve in full panoply?
As to the Gladiator, I noted
as follows on my catalogue: A pugilist; antique, brown with age;
attitude, leaning forward; left hand raised on guard, right hand
thrown out back, ready to strike a side blow; right leg bent; straight
line from the head to the toe of left foot; muscles and veins most
vividly revealed in intense development; a wonderful _petrifaction,_ as
if he had been smitten to stone at the instant of striking.
Here are antique mosaics, in which colored stones seem liquefied,
realizing the most beautiful effects of painting - quadrigae, warriors,
arms, armor, vases, streams, all lifelike. Ascending to the hall of
French paintings I spent an hour in studying one picture - La Meduse,
by Gericault. It is a shipwrecked crew upon a raft in mid ocean. I
gazed until all surrounding objects disappeared, and I was alone upon
the wide Atlantic. Those transparent emerald waves are no fiction;
they leap madly, hungering for their prey. That distended sail is
filled with the lurid air. That dead man's foot hangs off in the
seething brine a stark reality. What a fixed gaze of despair in that
father's stony eye! What a group of deathly living ones around that
frail mast, while one with intense eagerness flutters a signal to some
far-descried bark! Coleridge's Ancient Mariner has no colors more
fearfully faithful to his theme. Heaven pities them not. Ocean is all
in uproar against them. And there is no voice that can summon the
distant, flying sail! So France appeared to that prophet painter's
eye, in the subsiding tempests of the revolution. So men's hearts
failed them for fear, and the dead lay stark and stiff among the
living, amid the sea and the waves roaring; and so mute signals of
distress were hung out in the lurid sky to nations afar.
For my part, I remain a heretic. Give to these French pictures the
mellowing effects of age, impregnating not merely the picture, but the
eye that gazes on it, with its subtle quality; let them be gazed at
through the haze of two hundred years, and they will - or I cannot see
why they will not - rival the productions of any past age. I do not
believe that a more powerful piece ever was painted than yon raft by
Gericault, nor any more beautiful than several in the Luxembourg; the
"Decadence de Rome," for example, exhibiting the revels of the Romans
during the decline of the empire. Let this Decadence unroll before the
eyes of men the _cause_, that wreck by Gericault symbolize the
_effect_, in the great career of nations, and the two are
sublimely matched.
After visiting the Luxembourg, I resorted to the gardens of the
Tuileries. The thermometer was at about eighty degrees in the shade.
From the number of people assembled one would have thought, if it had
been in the United States, that some great mass convention was coming
off.
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