Mrs. Jameson

“ We love our country because it is our country; our home because it is home: London or Paris we may prefer, as comprehending in themselves, all the intellectual pleasures, and luxuries of life: but, dear Italy!—we love it, simply for its own sake: not as in general we are attached to places and things, but as we love a friend, and the face of a friend; there it was "luxury to be,"—there I would willingly have died, if so it might have pleased God.
Till this evening we have not seen a gleam of sunshine, nor a glimpse of the blue sky, since we crossed Mount Cenis. ”

“ Were I to judge from the specimens I have seen here and elsewhere, I should say that a cold, glaring, hard tea-tray style prevails in painting, and a still worse taste, if possible, in sculpture. No soul, no grandeur, no simplicity; a meagre insipidity in the conception, a nicety of finish in the detail; affectation instead of grace, distortion instead of power, and prettiness instead of beauty. Yet the artists who execute these works, and those who buy them, have free access to the marvels of the gallery, and the treasures of the Pitti Palace. ”

“ I walked across the first bridge, from which I had a fine view of the Ponte della Trinità, with its graceful arches and light balustrade, touched with the sparkling moonbeams and relieved by dark shadow: then I strolled along the quay in front of the Corsini palace, and beyond the colonnade of the Uffizi, to the last of the four bridges; on the middle of which I stood and looked back upon the city— (how justly styled the Fair!) —with all its buildings, its domes, its steeples, its bridges, and woody hills and glittering convents, and marble villas, peeping from embowering olives and cypresses ”

“ A feeling of vastness filled my whole mind, and made it disagreeable, almost impossible to speak or exclaim: but it was a style of grandeur, exciting rather than oppressive to the imagination, nor did I experience any thing like that sombre and reverential awe, I have felt on entering one of our Gothic minsters. The interior of St. Peter's is all airy magnificence, and gigantic splendour; light and sunshine pouring in on every side; gilding and gay colours, marbles and pictures, dazzling the eye above, below, around. The effect of the whole has not diminished in a second and third visit ”

“ The coup-d'œil of Genoa, splendid as it is, is not equal to that of Naples, even setting poetical associations aside: it is built like a crescent round the harbour, rising abruptly from the margin of the water, which makes the view from the sea so beautiful: to the north the hills enclose it round like an amphitheatre. The adjacent country is covered with villas, gardens, vineyards, woods, and olive-groves forming a scene most enchanting to the eye and mind, though of a character very different from the savage luxuriance of the south of Italy. ”

“ I had from early associations a delightful impression of the beauty of this lake, and it did not disappoint me. It is far superior, I think, to the Lago Maggiore, because the scenery is more resserrè, lies in a smaller compass, so that the eye takes in the separate features more easily. The mountains to the north are dark, broken, and wild in their forms, and their bases seemed to extend to the water edge: the hills to the south are smiling, beautiful, and cultivated, studded with white flat-roofed buildings, which glitter one above another in the sunshine. ”

“ I saw Naples from the Castle of Saint Elmo—setting aside the sea and Mount Vesuvius, those unequalled features in that radiant picture—the view of the city of Naples is not so fine as the view of Rome: it is, comparatively, deficient in sentiment, in interest, and in dignity. Naples wears on her brow the voluptuous beauty of a syren—Rome sits desolate on her seven-hilled throne, "the Niobe of Nations." ”

“ When at Lord Grosvenor's or Lord Stafford's I have been seated opposite to some beautiful Italian landscape, a Claude or a Poussin, with a hill crowned with olives, a ruined temple, a group of peasants seated on a fallen column, or dancing to the pipe and the guitar, and over all the crimson glow of evening, or the violet tints of morning, I have exclaimed with others, "How lovely! how picturesque, how very poetical!" No one thought of saying "How natural!" because it is a style of nature with which we are totally unacquainted ”

“ At Covigliajo in the Apennines.—O for the pencil of Salvator, or the pen of a Radcliffe! But could either, or could both united, give to my mind the scenes of to-day, in all their splendid combinations of beauty and brightness, gloom and grandeur? A picture may present to the eye a small portion of the boundless whole—one aspect of the every-varying face of nature; and words, how weak are they!—they are but the elements out of which the quick imagination frames and composes lovely landscapes, according to its power or its peculiar character ”

“ Venice, October 25th.—I feel while I gaze round me, as if I had seen Venice in my dreams—as if it were itself the vision of a dream. We have been here two days; and I have not yet recovered from my first surprise. All is yet enchantment: all is novel, extraordinary, affecting from the many associations and remembrances excited in the mind. Pleasure and wonder are tinged with a melancholy interest; and while the imagination is excited, the spirits are depressed.
The morning we left Padua was bright, lovely, and cloudless. ”

“ The mind and the eye are shocked and fatigued by the succession of revolting and sanguinary images which pollute the walls of every palace, church, gallery, and academy, from Milan to Naples. The splendour of the execution only adds to their hideousness; we at once seek for nature, and tremble to find it. It is hateful to see the loveliest of the arts degraded to such butcher-work. I have often gone to visit a famed collection with a secret dread of being led through a sort of intellectual shambles, and returned with the feeling of one who had supped full of horrors. ”

“ We talked as usual of women, of gallantry, of the French and English character, of national prejudices, of Shakspeare and Racine (never failing subjects of discussion) , and he read aloud Delille's Catacombes de Rome, with great feeling, animation, and dramatic effect.
La mode at Paris is a spell of wondrous power: it is most like what we should call in England a rage, a mania, a torrent sweeping down the bounds between good and evil, sense and nonsense, upon whose surface straws and egg-shells float into notoriety, while the gold and the marble are buried and hidden till its force be spent. ”

“ March 4.—We have had delicious weather almost ever since we arrived at Naples, but these last three days have been perfectly heavenly. I never saw or felt any thing like the enchantment of the earth, air, and skies. The mountain has been perfectly still, the atmosphere without a single cloud, the fresh verdure bursting forth all around us, and every breeze visits the senses, as if laden with a renovating spirit of life, and wafted from Elysium. Whoever would truly enjoy nature, should see her in this delicious land: "où la plus douce nuit succède au plus beau jour;" ”

“ The moment we had disembarked our luggage at the inn, we hired gondolas and rowed to the Piazza di San Marco. Had I seen the church of St. Mark any where else, I should have exclaimed against the bad taste which every where prevails in it: but Venice is the proper region of the fantastic, and the church of St. Mark—with its four hundred pillars of every different order, colour, and material, its oriental cupolas, and glittering vanes, and gilding and mosaics—assimilates with all around it: and the kind of pleasure it gives is suitable to the place and the people. ”

“ At Titian's Venus in the Tribune, one hardly ventures to look up; it is the perfection of earthly loveliness, as the Venus de' Medici is all ideal—all celestial beauty. In the multiplied copies and engravings of this picture I see every where the bashful sweetness of the countenance, and the tender languid repose of the figure are made coarse, or something worse: degraded, in short, into a character altogether unlike the original.
I say nothing of the Gallery of the Palazzo Pitti; which is not a collection so much as a selection of the most invaluable gems and masterpieces of art. ”

“ The view of Rome from these gardens is superb: though the sky was clouded, the atmosphere was perfectly pure and clear: the eye took in the whole extent of ancient and [Pg 127] modern Rome; beyond it the Campagna, the Alban Hills, and the Apennines, which appeared of a deep purple, with pale clouds floating over their summits. The city lay at our feet, silent, and clothed with the daylight as with a garment—no smoke, no vapour, no sound, no motion, no sign of life: it looked like a city whose inhabitants had been suddenly petrified, or smitten by a destroying angel ”

“ His Virgins look as if they had been born and bred in the first circles of society, and have a particular air of elegance, an artificial grace, an attraction, which may be entirely traced to exterior; to the cast of the features, the contour of the form, the disposition of the draperies, the striking attitudes, and, above all, the divine colouring: beauty and dignity, and powerful effect, we always find in his pictures: but no moral pathos—no poetry—no sentiment—above all, a strange and total want of devotional expression, simplicity and humility. ”

“ Switzerland is not Italy—is not the enchanting south. This soft balmy air, these myrtles, orange-groves, palm-trees; these cloudless skies, this bright blue sea, and sunny hills, all breathe of an enchanted land; "a land of Faery."
Between Velletri and Terracina the road runs in one undeviating line through the Pontine Marshes. The accounts we have of the baneful effects of the malaria here, and the absolute solitude, (not a human face or a human habitation intervening from one post-house to another,) invest the wild landscape with a frightful and peculiar character of desolation. ”

“ From one end of Italy to the other, nothing is listened to in the way of music but Rossini and his imitators. The man must have a transcendant genius, who can lead and pervert the taste of his age as Rossini has done; but unfortunately those who have not his talent, who cannot reach his beauties nor emulate his airy brilliance of imagination, think to imitate his ornamented style by merely crowding note upon note, semi-quavers, demi-semi-quavers, and semi-demi-semi-quavers in most perplexed succession ”

“ When we had made out our description as accurately as possible, it would do as well for any other cataract in the world: we can only combine rocks, wood, and water, in certain proportions. A good picture may give a tolerable idea of a particular scene or landscape: but no picture, no painter, not Ruysdael himself, can give a just idea of a cataract. The lifeless, silent, unmoving image is there: but where is the thundering roar, the terrible velocity, the glory of refracted light, the eternity of sound, and infinity of motion, in which essentially its effect consists? ”

“ Hence it has happened that in some of the Italian pictures I have seen in England, I have often been struck by what appeared to me a violence in the colouring, and a sharp decision in the outline, o'erstepping the modesty of nature—that is, of English nature: but there is in this climate a prismatic splendour of tint, a glorious all-embracing light, a vivid distinctness of outline, something in the reality more gorgeous, glowing, and luxuriant, than poetry could dare to express, or painting imitate. ”

“ All his heads have a peculiar expression of elevated beauty, which has been called Guido's air. His Madonnas are all but heavenly: they are tender, dignified, lovely:—but when compared with Raffaelle's, they seem more touched with earthly feeling, and have less of the pure ideal: they are, if I may so express myself, too sentimental: sentiment is, in truth, the distinguishing characteristic of Guido's style. ”

“ How I hate the discussion of politics in Italy! and, above all, the discussion of Italian politics, which offer no point upon which the mind can dwell with pleasure. I have not wandered to Italy—"this land of sun-lit skies and fountains clear," as Barry [Pg 131] Cornwall calls it, only to scrape together materials for a quarto tour, or to sweep up the leavings of the "fearless" Lady Morgan; or to dwell upon the heart-sickening realities which meet me at every turn; evils of which I neither understand the cause nor the cure. And yet say not to Italy
"Caduta è la tua gloria—e tu nol' vedi!" ”

“ Had I visited Italy in the character of a ready-made connaisseur, I should have lost many pleasures; for as the eye becomes more practised, the taste becomes more discriminative and fastidious; and the more extensive our acquaintance with the works of art, the more limited is our sphere of admiration; as if the circle of enjoyment contracted round us, in proportion as our sense of beauty became more intense and exquisite. A thousand things which once had power to charm, can charm no longer ”