Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

ing from ardent lips, as an extraordinary note came from the singers, until the interruptions became positively fatal to the artistic effect. A characteristic difference is noticeable in the behavior of the Italian orchestra as compared with the German. Little of that serious attention and absorption in their work, so observable in German orchestras, was to be seen in this large and excellent Italian orchestra. They talked with each other as they played, looked about at the audience, and wore a much lighter and less dignified appearance. There was a great deal of talking in the audience, a sharp and constant rapping of his score by the conductor, and a notice every now and then for silence as some passage of special interest was about to be sung. The pauses were long, and the performance, which began a couple of hours later than the opera in German cities, was protracted late into the evening. The Italians evidently have what has recently been said to be an evidence of superior civilizationa much greater tendency than the Germans to live into the night! There are evidences in Bologna of the patronage which America has extended to Italian singers. Frezzolini, who brought her decayed but once exquisite voice to America, has a palace of her own in Bologna, which was doubtless partly purchased with American gold. Salvi, too, whose 'Spirito Gentil" all lovers of music must remember, is wealthy, and has a beautiful home in Geneva and another in Bologna. The Campo Santo here has a costly tomb erected by him to the memory of his daughter. Our guide had been eighteen years traveling as a servant with Badiali, whose glorious baritone we recall so vividly, and he spoke with enthusiasm of the money he had made in America.

66

We visited the "Villa Reale" of Victor Emanuel, an old monastery on a beautiful hill, a mile out of Bologna, which the king has converted into a country seat. The prospect

A Palace and a Cemetery.

31

from it is one of the finest in all Italy. It is an example of the taste which the old monks, and, indeed, all Catholic priests, have so uniformly shown for a preoccupation of all the finest sites about great communities for their residences. The king has stocked this palace with many fine modern statues, and a few pictures from suppressed churches; but he is seldom there, as the neighborhood affords no opportunity to gratify his passion for hunting. Wherever we come upon his traces, we find proof of the diminished hold he has upon the affections and confidence of the Italian people. His homely visage, unshapely and repulsive, meets us upon most walls and windows; but now that he has forfeited, in Italian eyes, the proud title of Galantuomo, it seems to stand out, a just exponent of the aversion which is openly confessed for his person and character.

The cemetery of Bologna is one of the finest in Europe. It was founded early in this century, and already holds the ashes of 250,000 people. It is the sole burial-place of the city, and is necessarily constantly extended. The place is surrounded by long corridors, open on the inside, which are lined with costly monuments of the wealthier class. The poor are neatly buried, without unseemly crowding, in the open space within. There is a propriety, beauty and elegance about the place, which constrasts strongly with Pere de la Chaise and other public Continental cemeteries. But, certainly, it has little of the charm of Greenwood, Mount Auburn, and a hundred other rural cemeteries in America. The monuments are generally mural, although there are many splendid exceptions. One of the finest of these is a statue to Murat, King of Naples. A brother of Prince Galatzin, of Russia, is commemorated with the touching inscription, "Amabat nesciri." Fenelon, I remember, somewhere says, "I love to be unknown."

A beautiful fountain in bronze, a figure of Neptune, by John of Bologna, is one of the grandest and most original remains of that great master. It is, perhaps, the finest thing in Bologna.

The picture gallery here, the Pinocateca, happily not crowded with trash as most foreign galleries largely are, contains some of the most delightful and instructive pictures in the world. Here the three Caracci, the uncle and two nephews, created what is known as the Bolognese school. Hannibal, the most distinguished for color, has many pictures of great richness and scope in this gallery, but Ludovico, the uncle, seems to me to have been the bolder and grander genius. Their greatest pupil, generally considered to have surpassed his masters, was Domenichino, and Guido may dispute with him, and with almost any other painter, the palm of victory. Albani, Fiarini, Guercino, are other celebrated masters of this school. For a certain largeness, fullness and richness of design, and a copious grace and majesty of manner, the Caracci can not be surpassed. I can name only a few of the more famous pictures in this gallery. Doubtless the most prized (although I should not choose it first) is the "Saint Cecilia" of Raphael. This picture has been transferred from panel to canvas, and has probably suffered in the transfer; at any rate, it seems to lack the purity of color seen commonly in Raphael's best pictures. The design is exquisite. The saint, surrounded by St. Paul and St. John, St. Augustine and Mary Magdalen, holds a lyre in her drooping hands, while she listens with ecstatic upward gaze to the music of cherubs who are seen above, singing as they float. The other saints have thrown their musical instruments at her feet, as if all earthly harmonies must be mute in the presence of such celestial music.

More interesting than this precious picture is Guido's "Madonna della Pietà," which deserves to be reckoned with

Guido and Domenichino.

333

Raphael's "Transfiguration" and Titian's "Assumption." The Madonna, standing in dignified sorrow between two lovely angels, weeps in faith and patience over the dead body of the Christ. There is none of the sentimental and theatrical air about her usual in even the most esteemed Madonnas, and nothing hackneyed and conventional in her expression. The body of Christ is full of recent death. The limbs have not been straightened, and the right hand hangs limp and in exquisite naturalness below the level of the figure; the coloring and drawing are both satisfying. The angels are exceedingly beautiful in the unobtrusive sympathy they lend the Madonna. The five protecting saints of Bologna- Petronius, Carlo Borromeo, Dominick, Francis and Baculus, form below a group of dismayed, regretful disciples, only surpassed by Titian's wonderful group of the Apostles in his "Assumption" at Venice.

The "Massacre of the Innocents" is another of Guido's terribly earnest and glorious pictures. Two dead children in the left corner are indescribably fine. Another child, holding trustfully the arm of the murderer about to strike it, is in most affecting contrast with the horror-stricken face of its mother, who recognizes his deadly purpose. Another murderer seizing a woman by the hair, whose eyes start out of her head with terror as she grasps and shelters her babe, is another image that can never be forgotten. The "Cristo di Cappuccini," a third picture by Guido (a crucifixion), is enough alone to enrich any gallery, and for originality and for extraordinary drawing, Guido's "Samson slaying the Philistines with the Jaw-bone," is as remarkable as any of his works. He does not make Samson a burly Hercules, but a young, beautiful creature, with his strength in his beauty and grace, and yet he looks as if he might rout an army in his victorious courage and force of soul. Domenichino's "Peter Martyr"

will have an added interest since the recent destruction of Titian's priceless painting of the same subject. Judging from the photographs, Domenichino either meant to copy Titian's general design, or he has hit upon the same plan ; and probably the best idea of Titian's picture which is now to be got, is from the study of Domenichino's.

The Martyrdom of St. Agnes," by Domenichino; the "Communion of St. Jerome," by Augustino Caracci; the "Madonna of the Conception," by Ludovico Caracci, are other truly great pictures. The original study of so many of Guido's "Saviour Crowned with Thorns" is here to be seen in colored crayons, and is in many respects, specially in the absence of sentimentalism, superior to his finished pictures of this favorite theme.

One of the most interesting pictures here is the work of a young woman who was the friend and favorite of Guido, and a successful student of his style, who was poisoned from jealousy by a deformed artist, a vain rival of her powers. Her genius and her fate are remembered even in the modern art of Bologna, and one of the best works in the modern collection is a picture of her death-bed with Guido at her side. Woman's genius has always been specially marked in Bologna. Novella d'Andrea and Laura Bassi were honored with degrees in the University, and even lectured in Bologna to learned ladies from France and Germany. Madonna Manzolina was Professor of Anatomy; and Clotilda Tambron filled the Greek chair just before Mezzofanti, a native of Bologna. It was pleasant, and seemed a sort of evidence of the perpetuation of the influence of feminine genius in Bologna, to notice last evening a woman playing the harp in the orchestra of the opera. Nobody seemed to find any thing very noticeable in a fact so unusual or impossible in England or America-the boasted home of women's rights.

« ZurückWeiter »