A manuscript palimpsestus of the Vatican, which, like those of the Ambrosian at Milan, came from the convent of Saint Colomban di Bobbio, has supplied to Cicero's Republica some new fragments, hidden for eight or nine centuries under the text of Saint Augustine's Commentary on the Psalms. The precious autograph manuscript of Petrarch's Rime shows to what extent he laboured his poems: Da indi in qua cotante carte aspergo Petrarch throws some familiar details of his life among his verses in this manner he writes that he is called to supper (sed vocor ad cœnam), and other remarks not less prosaic. A fine manuscript of Dante in Boccaccio's writing, was sent by him to Petrarch, who, as some say, has annoted it. This manuscript, the most precious of the Divina Commedia in existence, is connected with and represents the three great creators of Italian literature, but it does little honour to Petrarch, as it proves how little eager he was to procure the Divina Commedia, and shows us by the singular answer to which this present gave occasion, that he concealed his envy of Dante's verses under a show of contempt. The magnificent Latin Bible of the dukes of Urbino, two large folio volumes, illustrated with figures, arabesques, landscapes, is a monument of art which has been reckoned worthy of Perugino or the best painters his contemporaries. The mutilated scroll, thirty-two feet long, of fine parchment covered with miniatures, representing a part of the History of Joshua, which ornaments a Greek manuscript of the seventh or eighth century, is one of the greatest curiosities of the Vatican. The menologus, or Greek Calendar, | 'Trionfi. These 'Rime, with the note at the Ambrosian and the letter to Dondi (see book VII. ch. v.), are the principal autographs of Petrarch now extant. There is a story stating that in bis solitary walks at Vaucluse and Arquà, he had written a great number of verses on bls pelisse; but that this garment was burnt at Florence in the sixteenth century, during a plague, as suspected of contagion. See the Preface to the edition of the | ordered by the emperor Basil, embellished with four hundred rich and brilliant miniatures representing martyrdoms of saints of the Greek church, with views of churches, monasteries, and basilics, is a curious and complete monument of the cold, pompous, monotonous painting of the Byzantian school at the end of the tenth century. The Breviary of Mathias Corvinus is admired for the composition and richness of its miniatures and ornaments. This great king of Hungary had collected at Bude a library of more than fifty thousand volumes and manuscripts, confided to two Italians, Galeotti and Ugoletti, the finest of its time; and its pillage by the Turks in 1527, the year in which Rome was sacked by the troops of Charles V., may be regarded as one of the great bibliographic catastrophes of modern times, and one of the chief events of his reign and of the history of his country. Corvinus purchased annually to the amount of 30,000 ducats, a prodigious sum, equal to 72,6001. of our present money. This Breviary, of the end of the fifteenth century, seems to have been executed at Florence by one of the clever calligraphers that he maintained in Italy, of whom he had no less than thirty. A Life of Federico, duke of Urbino, presents some fine miniatures by Dom Clovio, a good painter of such portraits, pupil of Giulio Romano and friend of Annibale Caro. The curious Mexican calendar unfolds and stretches to a prodigious length. It is not on human skin like the two horrible Mexican manuscripts of the Dresden and Vienna libraries; the manuscript in the first of these libraries is also a calendar, and both of them have been represented by Humboldt. A Plutarch, from Christina's library, has manuscript notes by Grotius. The imperfect miniatures of the twelfth century on the manuscript of Donizon's Latin poem present the full Rime with various readings, followed by the treatise on the Moral Virtues of King Robert, who therein takes only the title of king of Jerusalem so as to be more like Solomon; of the Tesoretto, by Brunetto Latiui, and of four Canzoni, by Bindo Bonicchi, of Siena, Rome, 1642, in folio. See a charming letter written in his name by the latter to a young German lady, also a vignette painter, t. vi. p. 565 et seq. length portrait of the heroical countess Matilda, holding a grenade: her costume is rich and picturesque; she is covered with a gold cap of a conical form, ornamented with precious stones in the lower part; a rose-coloured veil is thrown over this cap; the chlamys is lack colour, with a gold band also set with stones; the gown is sky blue. Some scenes are characteristic: one miniature represents the emperor Henry IV. prostrated before Matilda, and Hugo, abbot of Cluny, with his crosier and mitre; the inscription is: The king implores the abbot and Matilda also. He was in reality indebted to their intercession for the absolution which the pope had refused him; but a powerful emperor at the feet of an abbot and a woman shows the spirit of the age. The manuscript of the Lives and poems of Provençal poets, by Le Monge, of the Golden Isles, as he was surnamed, of the isles of Hyères where this monk, who died in 1408, had his hermitage; this brilliant manuscript had belonged to Petrarch and Bembo, and bears some notes by them. If it be not the original and one of the best manuscripts of the troubadours, it must still be esteemed the most curious monument of the ancient poetry of Provence that the Vatican possesses. The manuscript copy of the Treatise on the Seven Sacraments, the work of Henry VIII., sent and dedicated by him to Leo X., and which procured its author the title of Angelic, despite the coarse abuse it lavishes on Luther his adversary, is laboriously written. At the bottom of the last page is this distich in the king's hand : Anglorum rex Henricus, Leo Decime, mittit The letters of Henry VIII. to Anne Boleyn, his mistress, the title by which he addresses her, are seventeen in number: nine in French and eight in English. They were at our great library for eighteen years. Love-letters might have been left in France, where they would 1 See ante, book VIII. ch. II. Lib. II., Eleg. ultim. v. 65. 3 This number of four thousand eight hundred is taken from the catalogue printed at Fisa in 4824; have been more naturally placed than in the Vatican. A sketch of the three first cantos of the Gerusalemme, written by Tasso in his nineteenth year, when living at Bologna under the protection of the duke of Urbino, to whom he dedicates them, is singularly interesting. Of the one hundred and sixteen octaves in this manuscript, several are retained in the poem. it was on reading these fine fragments that the Bolognese senator Bolognetti, likewise a poet, rapturously repeated the verses of Propertius on the Eneid: Cedite. Romani scriptores, cedite Grail. The other autographs of Tasso consist of several of his treatises and dialogues: viz.: Piposta a Plutarco sulla fortuna de' Romani, e della virtù d' Alessandro; il Forzio, Dialogo della Virtù ; il Minturno, Dialogo della Bellezza ; il Cataneo, Dialogo delle Conclusioni amorose; il Ficino, Dialogo dell' Arti; il Malpiglio, secondo Dialogo del Fugir la Moltitudine; e il Constantino, Dialogo della Clemenza. Some printed works at the Vatican, on vellum, are in the first rank of the masterpieces and rarities of typography; three copies of the Treatise on the Seven we may enumerate as such: one of the Sacraments (London, 1501), sent by Henry VIII. to Leo X.; one of the four in four languages, called the Polyglot of copies of the famous edition of the Bible Cardinal Ximenes (1514-17); the magnificent Arabic Bible (Rome, 1671); the fine Greek Bible of Aldus (1518); one of the three copies of the Epistles of St. Jerome (Rome, 1468); one of the three copies of the first and rare edition of Aulus Gellius (Rome, 1469). The lignara, containing more than four thoubrary of works on art formed by Cicosand eight hundred articles, was sold by him for 4,000l. and given to the Vatican by Leo XII. It must be esteemed one of its most important additions. the library was farther augmented by Cicognara, and a considerable number of volumes of the Vallcan have since been added thereto. CHAPTER V. Museum.-Chiaramonti museum.-Medica Minerva. -Nile.-Pio-Clementino museum.-Torso.-Meleager - Canova's Perseus, Wrestlers.- Mercury. -Laocoon. The Apollo.- Hall of animals. Ariadne.-Jupiter.-Visit by torchlight.-Gregoriano museum.-Geographical maps.-Arazzi. The museum of the Vatican, the finest and richest in the world, was begun about fifty years ago in a court and a garden. One hardly knows which to admire most, the zeal of the late pontiffs, or the singular fecundity of a soil which has produced so many chefs-d'œuvre in so little time. Pliny states that in his day there were more statues at Rome than inhabitants. The abbé Barthélemy calculated that, notwithstanding the ravages of centuries and the mutilations of the barbarians, the number of statues exhumed at Rome up to the present century exceeded seventy thousand. If we likewise consider the great number of its columns, differing in size and workmanship, without including those destroyed or transported to other countries, how numerous must the edifices have been, how glorious the splendour of the eternal city, when peopled with this multitude of figures, uninjured or new, placed in these same sumptuous edifices! A bishop of Tours, the venerable Hildebert, who died in 1139, celebrated the antique statues then discovered at Rome in verses remarkably elegant for the time, and with a kind of profane reverence extraordinary in a bishop of the twelfth century: Nec tamen annorum series, nec flamma, nec ensis Que miranda Deum signa creavit homo. It is impossible to contemplate unmoved this great number of personages known and unknown, of these names, stones, and inscriptions, which are like an apparition, a resurrection of antiquity. The physiognomies of many of these personages differ much from their fame: the features of Nero, of a noble expression, are not disfigured by crime; Marcus Aurelius has not a very fine face; Claudius might be supposed a wit. The vast Chiaramonti museum was created by Pius VII. and classed by Canova. The following articles may be distinguished: a fine fragment of a bassorelievo of Apollo seated; a statue of a woman with the attributes of Autumn; the hermes, called Plato, Sleep, or the bearded Bacchus, but which seems to be a portrait of a person unknown; the curious little hermes presenting the double emblem of Bacchus, young and old; a statue of Domitian; a Discobulus in a niche of Braccio Nuovo; a head of Apollo near it; the Lucius Verus naked, as a hero, cleverly restored by Bacetti, the head and trunk only being antique; the bust of Commodus; the beautifully elegant Minerva, erroneously called Medica, in perfect preservation, the best of all statues of Minerva, surnamed by Canova, the Apollo of draped figures; the colossal Nile, noble and poetic, with the sixteen little figures, emblems of the sixteen cubits necessary to inundate Egypt; a pretty little Anadyomene Venus; an unknown Greek philosopher resembling a Homer in the head; the superb statue of Fortune; Antonia, mother of Claudius; the Juno, called Clemency; the bust of Caracalla when young; an Euripides, full of character; a graceful Ganymedes; a Demosthenes, whose stuttering is seen and heard by the motion of the lips; a Nerva superiorly draped; Antinous under the form of Vertumnus; two heads, one of which passes for Sappho, the other for Niobe; a bust of Adrian; a head of Venus of admirable outline; Sabina, Adrian's wife, as Venus; the bust supposed to be Trajan's father; a fine head of Cicero. The Pio Clementino museum takes its name from the popes Clement XIII., Clement XIV., and Pius VI., who began and augmented it; the latter bought more than two thousand statues. The sarcophagus of peperino and the noble and simple inscriptions taken from the tomb of the Scipios, seem to have been torn away by a real profanation; and they would be of far more touching effect in that solitary place, than exposed amid a promiscuous crowd of statues in a museum; the inscription of the sarcophagus, stating it to be that of Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus, the conqueror See post ch xliv. of the Sammites and of Lucania, is not, | sander and his two sons, Polydorus and as long supposed, the oldest in Latin, though among the most ancient. The sublime torso of Apollonius, perhaps the best piece of sculpture in the Vatican, is apparently one of the latest masterpieces of art among the Greeks before the loss of liberty. No other figure has the flesh so true. Winckelman, whose science is very superior to his taste, falls into a singular exaggeration in his Pindaric description of the Torso, both in comparing the back to a chain of pleasant hills of muscles, and in pretending that the body is above human wants, that it has no veins, and that it is made to enjoy life and not to eat : this stomach, with all its ideal, is that of a man of excellent digestion. Michael Angelo used to say that he was the pupil of the Torso he was indebted to it for his grandeur, as may be seen by the naked of the figures in the chapel of the Tombs, and he has almost copied it in the St. Bartholomew of the Sixtine. The tradition that he when aged and blind often felt the Torso with his hands, despite its uncertainty, is characteristic of the spirit of the time and the passion for antiquity that prevailed among the artists of that epoch. The legs and drapery of the fine Meleager, one of the best preserved antique statues, are hard and formal: the boar's head is perfect, and proves the care with which the ancients executed animals and treated the different accessories. The Perseus, by Canova in his youth, and not one of his good works, was his first heroic statue. Notwithstanding the artist's opposition, it was set on the pedestal of the absent Apollo, and obtained the surname of the Consolatrice. With all the merit of the muscles and ingenuity of contrast, the Damoxenes and Creugas have the air of pugilists; it is difficult to imagine a more ignoble conqueror than the first of these wrestlers: it is the triumph of brute force in its most abject state. Athenodorus, of Rhodes. Sadolet celebrated the discovery of the Laocoon in an eloquent poem, his best work. A lucrative recompense was accorded by Julius II. to Felice de' Fredis, who had found it in his vineyard; he and his sons received a portion of the gabel dues at the gate of Saint John in Laterano, and when Leo X. restored this revenue to the basilic, he gave them in compensation the office then called officium scriptoriæ apostolicæ, which is now abolished. A curious letter from Cesare Trivulzio to his brother Pomponio, written from Rome on the 1st of June 1506, gives an account of the festival then celebrated by the Roman Poets. Laocoon and his sons, though sacrificing at the altar in the temple of Minerva, are quite naked, and yet on beholding this isolated ideal representation of suffering humanity, of this spectacle of terror and pity excited by the anguish of the father and his children, the eye does not miss the cos tume of the high priest, or the fillets of Laocoon, so much is truth superior to reality, so completely does the imagination pass over the latter to contemplate the former. Of the multitude of productions inspired by the Laocoon, perhaps the happiest is by Canova, who has imitated the head of Laocoon in the dying Centaur of his Theseus. On an enormous granite tomb is a fine basso-relievo representing Augustus about to offer a sacrifice. The Apollo was discovered near Ostia, in Nero's baths, and madame de Staël shrewdly expressed her surprise that be could look at this noble figure without a generous emotion. The convulsive group of the Laocoon was found in the hot-baths of Titus: the two chefs-d'œuvre might have been displaced. Winckelman, in his celebrated and emphatic description of the Apollo, deems it the sublimest of antique statues; his countryman, Mengs, with still more exaggeration, will have it the only complete example of the sublime. All this studied enthusiasm seems to have caused a reaction in opinions concerning the Apolle The Laocoon seems to be of the times M. de Chateaubriand thinks it trop of the first emperors. The three artists vanté; Canova and Visconti are inclined of this immortal chef-d'œuvre, so finely to suppose it an improved imitation of a blending strength, expression, and pain, statue of bronze of much greater antiwhich Pliny and Diderot reckon the sub-quity, that of Calamis, which the Athelimest performance known, were Age- niaus placed in the Ceramicus when The Mercury, long erroneously called the Antinous of the Vatican, is perfect in grace, vigour, and softness. they were delivered from the plague. | The shuddering anger of the conqueror of Python, though rather theatrical, does not impair his divine beauty. Such is the privilege of Italy, and such was our long barbarism in the arts, that the Apollo, placed by Michael Angelo in the court of the Belvedere, has reigned over the other masterpieces of antique statuary for three hundred years, whilst our Diana, which is neither less animated nor less noble, and, when placed in juxtaposition with the Apollo for fifteen years by our victories, appeared not inferior and is even preferred by some good judges of the present day, was negleeted and misesteemed in the gallery of Versailles, by the court, the men of genius of the seventeenth century, and the wits of the following. The Hall of Animals, a brilliant museum of beasts, a menagerie of art, is unique. It is a further proof of the wonderful skill of the ancients in representing animals, and in imparting to them their peculiar kind of beauty. A Stag of flowered alabaster, a Tiger, a Lion in yellow breccia, a great Lion in bigio marble, a Griffin, of flowered alabaster, are worthy of particular notice. The emperor Commodus on horseback, throwing a javelin, is living, and like the great Tiberius of the principal niche, is not misplaced amid the ferocious beasts of this gallery. The gallery of statues presents a fine Caligula; a superb Amazon drawing a bow, horribly repaired; a small and very pretty Urania; the two remarkable seated statues of Menander and Possidippus, formerly called Marius and Sylla; a Venus with a vase, supposed to be an antique copy of the Venus of Praxiteles; Ariadne forsaken, long called Cleopatra, a noble composition, which has almost given a reputation for dignity and constancy to this frivolous and voluptuous Egyptian, the real Armida of antiquity. The discovery of this figure, which is somewhat dry in the draperies and perhaps only a copy of a more perfect original, inspired the Count Castighone with one of those elegant pieces that the literati of the revival produced on the apparition of the antique chefsd'œuvre, which concludes with a Virgilian panegyric of the age of Leo X. 517 quil, with the sceptre and thunderbolt in his hands, and the eagle at his feet. The cabinet called delle Maschere, ornamented with precious marble and the magnificent mosaic pavement of Adrian's villa, contains the graceful Ganymedes and the eagle, the Venus ready to bathe, the basso-relievo of Adrian's Apotheosis, and a Diana. In the hall of the Muses, of which Melpomene, I believe, is the finest, the portraits of illustrious persons with names in Greek are extremely interesting: a hermes of Sophocles, very rare; the orator Eschines, unique; an inferior Aspasia veiled; a hermes of Pericles covered with a helmet, very scarce; Alcibiades; a hermes of Socrates. The Apollo Citharæda crowned with laurels, in a long robe, singing and dancing, is very fine. The well-lighted rotunda, the rich mosaic pavement of which is one of the largest existing, has a magnificent bowl of porphyry, found in the thermæ of Titus, a colossal head of Jupiter, and a colossal Juno. The door of the spacions hall of the Greek Cross is one of the most imposing ever seen. In the entrance, the two enormous sphinxes of red granite and in the centre on the pavement a Pallas, a mosaic of hard coloured stones, are superb. A half-naked statue of Augustus is precious, and very rare, because it retains its original head. In the grand staircase, the head of one of the two rivers recumbent was restored by Michael Angelo, but, though fine, it does not accord well with the rest of the statue; the independence of his genius must make him a most unfaithful restorer; instead of the majestic indolence common to rivers, this head has something agitated, violent, satanic. The apartment of the Car, so called from the elegant antique car, very well repaired, which stands in the middle, has the pretended Sardanapalus, which is only a bearded Bacchus; a Bacchus ; a statue of a man veiled in the act of sacrificing, the drapery of which is rich and in good taste; two horses, one antique and restored, the other modern. The long gallery of Candelabra has some excellent ones; a great Bacchus in wonderful preservation; a fine fountain In the last chamber of the busts is the supported by syrens. A mosaic reprecelebrated statue of Jupiter seated, tran-senting fish, a pullet, asparagus, dates |
