Lilian Whiting

“ Courteous, tender, and gentle as any paladin, sweet-tongued and harmonious as any poet, liberal as any prince, was the barefooted beggar and herald of God. We ask no visionary reverence for the Stigmata, no wondering belief in any miracle. As he stood, he was as great a miracle as any then existing under God’s abundant, miraculous heavens; more wonderful than are the day and night, the sun and the dew; only less wonderful than that great Love which saves the world, and which it was his aim and destiny to reflect and show forth. ”

“ Whatever the Roman environment may have done for Allston, Page, and Story, there is no question but that to Vedder it has been as his soul’s native air. For him the sirens sing again on the coast; the sorceress works her spell; the Cumæan Sibyl again flies, wraithlike, over the plain, clasping her rejected leaves of destiny which Tarquin in his blindness has refused to buy. The Rome that lies buried under the ages rises for Vedder. His art cannot be catalogued under any known division of portrait, [94] landscape, marine, or genre, but it is simply—the art of Vedder. ”

“ The luminous air, the faint, misty blue of the distance, the deep purple shadows on the hills, make up a landscape of color. At the foot of the Spanish steps the flower venders spread out their wares,—great bunches of the flame-colored roses peculiar to Italy, the fragrant white hyacinths, golden jonquils, baskets of violets, and masses of lilies of the valley.
On many a night of brilliant moonlit glory the artistic sojourners in Rome lingered on the parapet of the Pincian Hill watching the moonlight flood the Eternal City until churches and palaces seemed to swim in a sea of silver. ”

“ There is only one living painter who can treat a portrait as a Venetian artist of 1550 A.D. would have done it, and how differently in the mastery of his material! If we go to the work of wider range, the Campo Santo of Pisa, the Stanze, the Sistine Chapel, the distance becomes an abyss; the simplest fragment of a Greek statue of 450 B.C. shows us that the best sculpture of this century, even the French, is only a happy child-work, not even to be put in sight of Donatello or Michael Angelo. ”

“ I do not believe there is a finer view in the world than that from the eastern gate of the city, embracing the Campagna, with its ruined aqueducts diverging in long broken arcades, and terminated by the sweep of the Albanian hills, sprinkled with their white villages, and celebrated in song and story! But the great charm of the scene springs from association; and though everything in Italy is really picturesque, yet strip the country of its historic recollections,—think merely of what it is, and not of what it has been,—and you will find the dream to be fading away. ”

“ Journeying from Rome to Assisi there is a constant ascent from the Campagna to the Apennines, and the road passes through wild defile and valley with amethyst peaks shining fair against the sky, with precipitous rocks, and the dense growth of oak and pine trees. In some places the valley is so narrow that the hills, on either side, rise almost within touch of the hand from the car window. The hill towns are frequent, and the apex of these towns is invariably crowned with a castle, a cathedral, or a ruin, and around it, circling in terraces, is built the town. ”

“ The air is filled with the most transparent shining haze; the sky lacks little of that intense, melting [131] blue that characterizes the ineffable beauty of the skies in Arizona; and ruins and fragments and strange relics—ghosts of the historic past—are all enshrined in trailing green and riotous blossoms. To drive on the terraced roads of Monte Mario with all Rome and the emerald-green Campagna before one; through the romantic “Lovers’ Lane,” walled in by roses and myrtle; to enjoy the local life, full of gayety and brilliancy, is to know Rome in her most gracious aspects. ”

“ These five years in which Canova, Thorwaldsen, and Gibson lived and wrought together—although the youngest of this trio was still in his student life—form a definite period in the history of modern art in Rome. The dreams, the enthusiasm, the devotion to ideal beauty which characterized their work left its impress and its vitality of influence—a mystic power ready to incarnate itself again through the facility of expression of the artists yet to come. ”

“ Traditions of beauty; of the lives of scholar and savant and princes of the church; of a court of nobility enriched and adorned by prelate and by poet; traditions, too, of a woman’s consecration to an immortal love and the solace of grief by poetic genius and exalted friendships,—all these seem to cling about Ischia in a vague, atmospheric way till memory, still groping backward in the twilight of the richly historic past, suddenly crystallized into recognition that it was Ischia which was the home of Vittoria Colonna, the greatest woman poet of the Italian [283] Renaissance. ”

“ Those of us too well aware by the experiences of previous visits to Italy that no Italian function was ever on time, from the starting of a railway train to the crowning of a king, only betake ourselves to the glories of the Palazzo Vaticano at the hour named, and we have then—as one’s prophetic soul or his commonplace memory warned him—to wait more than an hour wedged into a dense crowd of all nationalities, none of whom seem at this particular juncture, at least, to be at all overburdened with good manners. ”

“ In one chapel is a curious and grotesque group of sculpture,—a skeleton holding up a medallion portrait, while an angel with outstretched wings hovers over it.
San Giovanni has the reputation of being absolutely the coldest church in all Rome, which—it is needless to remark—means a great deal, for they all in winter have the temperature of the arctic regions. In all these great churches there is never any heat; no apparatus for heating has ever been introduced, and the twentieth century finds them just as cold as they were in the centuries of a thousand years ago. ”

“ The Colonna Gardens are a very dream of the past, in their ruins [132] of old temples, their shattered statues, their strange old tablets and inscriptions, and their grand view of the Capitol.
In one’s retrospective vision of a Roman season all the inconveniences and discomforts of the winter disappear, leaving only the beauty and the enjoyment to be “developed,” as the photographer would say, on the sensitive plate of memory.
No one really knows Rome until he has watched the transcendent loveliness of spring investing every nook and corner of the Eternal City. ”

“ Has it any existence save on the artist’s canvas, in the poet’s vision? Has it a resident population to whom it is a home, and not the pilgrimage of passionate pilgrims?
There are those who find this Venice of all the year round a society of stately nobles whose ancestral claims are identified with the history of the city and who are at home in its palaces and gondolas, but of this resident life the visitor is less aware than of that in any other city in Italy. ”

“ Undoubtedly the dwellers in this curious old town, whose streets have hardly one level spot but climb up and down the steep hillside, realize that their saint is their title to fame and their revenue as well; yet through all the tales there breathes a certain sincerity and simplicity of worship. The little dark primitive shops teem with relics, which make, it is true, a great draft on imagination, and by what miracle modern photography has contrived to present the saint of Assisi in various impressive attitudes and groups it would be as well not to inquire too closely. ”

“ Peter’s till the golden light through the far windows of the tribune is merged into the dusk of twilight in which the vast monumental groups gleam wraith-like. Again [viii] he is ascending the magnificent Scala Regia, and lingering in the Raphael Stanze, or in the wonderful sculpture galleries of the Vatican, or sauntering in the sunshine on the Palatine. In memory he is again spellbound by ancient and mediæval art. In the line of modern sculpture the work of Franklin Simmons in Rome is a feature of Italy that haunts the imagination. ”

“ Social life in Rome is no misnomer. From the most stately and beautiful ceremonials of balls at the court of the Quirinale, in ducal palaces, or at the embassies; of dinners whose every detail suggests stage pictures in their magnificence, to the simple afternoon tea, where conversation and music enchant the hours; the morning call en tête-à-tête, and the morning stroll, or the late afternoon drive,—a season in Rome prefigures itself, by the necromancy of retrospective vision, as a resplendent panorama of pictorial scenes. ”

“ Peter’s, from the Villa Medici, is one of the finest in Rome.
The architecture of the garden façade is attributed to Michael Angelo. These gardens have a circuit of more than a mile, laid out in the formal rectangles and densely bordered walks of the Italian custom. All manner of old fragments of sculpture are scattered through them,—a torso, a broken bust, a ruined statue, an old and partly broken fountain,—and entablatures and reliefs are seen in the walls on every hand. No sound of the city ever penetrates into this dense foliage which secludes the gardens of the famous Villa Medici. ”

“ Genoa is the paradise for walking. The streets are largely inaccessible to carriages, but the admirable street electric railway penetrates every locality. It passes in dark tunnels under the hills, reappears [452] on the high terraces, and climbs every height. From the crest of one of these Corsica can often be seen. All the hill-slopes are a dream of pictorial grandeur, with their terraces, their palaces, their sculpture, fountains, and flowers. On the summit of almost every hill there is a fortress, and often ramparts which are silhouetted, in dark masses, against the sky. ”

“ But the work of Story will survive all transient variations of opinion, even of the present realistic age; for is not true realism, after all, to be found in the eternal ideals of truth, grace, dignity, refinement, significance, and beauty? These qualities have a message to convey; and no one can study with sympathetic appreciation any sculpture of William Wetmore Story without feeling that the work has something to say; that it is not a mere reproduction of some form, but is, rather, an idea impersonated, and therefore it has life, it has significance. ”

“ To live in Venice is like being domesticated in the heart of an opal. How wonderful it is to drift—a sky above and a sky below—on still waters at sunset, with the Dream City mirrored in the depths, every shade of gold and rose and amber mirrored back,—the very atmosphere a sea of color, recalling to one Ruskin’s words that “none of us appreciate the nobleness and the sacredness of color. ”