with Roman statuaries, to represent Hemon stabbing himself and supporting Antigone killed by Creon. The Pluto carrying off Proserpine is a good work by Bernini. The ceiling of the Aurora, by Guercino, is considered his chef-d'œuvre Guido's fresco has possibly more majesty, but this is superior for movement, picturesque, and colour, though the principal figure appears too big and too strong for an Aurora. Another ceiling by Guercino, Fame, is admirable. The calcareous concretion of alabaster, bearing the impression of the bones of a man crushed under a rock, is an interesting natural curiosity, presented to the learned and virtuous Pope Gregory XV. (Ludovisi.)

CHAPTER XXXIII.

Fountain of Triton.-Barberini palace.-Library.— Thorwaldsen's studio.-Christ and the apostles.Trevi fountain.-Water of Rome.

The Barberini palace occupies the site of the Circus of Flora, noted for the abomination of the feasts celebrated there at night by torchlight in honour of that deified courtesan, who had bequeathed the wealth acquired by her debaucheries to the Roman people, then unworthy of such an heritage. The rigid Cato, unwilling to interrupt the public pleasures, thought proper to retire from these games, which they dare not, out of respect for his virtue, begin in his presence; and the wags of Rome wittily asserted that he came for the sole purpose of going away. The fountain of the Triton, one of the best of its kind, is a poetic and clever composition by Bernini, as he had but a scanty supply of water to dispose of. This fountain forms an object equally pleasing to the eye, whether the rays of the sun form a rainbow in its streams, or the frost ornaments it with its cristals.

The Barberini palace is for the most part of Bernini's architecture, who finished it and executed the magnificent front. The idea of its fine winding stair is not less ingenious than the ensemble is majestic. Some few of its sculptures

"You bind my body to destroy it, but you loosen my soul for immortality." The prison of La Cenci is still showa in the ancient Tor di Nona, become the theatre of Apollo, the property of S. Torlonia, and the finest theatre in Rome, lighted in the French style, where grand operas are played dur

and paintings place this palace among the first in Rome. The celebrated Sleeping Faun is gone to Munich. A Lion, an antique basso-relievo adorning the principal staircase, is superb. The ceil ing of Pietro of Cortona, one of the largest known, a fantastical half-pagan, half-christian allegory in honour of the Barberini, passes for one of the chefsd'œuvre of this master, little esteemed by present judges. His enormous composition evinces nevertheless a kind of fecundity, and the double talent of the artist, as a painter and an architect, common to the Italians, and found with still greater brilliancy in their first masters. The five portraits by Titian, in the hall of Portraits, are not of his best. The authenticity of a Piety by Michael Angelo is not thoroughly proved. The Christ and Magdalen by Tintoretto, like all his other paintings at Rome, is little remarkable. The small painting of the Virgin and infant Jesus, by Andrea del Sarto, has all the qualities of his sweet and accurate talent. The Apprehension of Christ, by Gherardo delle Notti, has an illusion produced by the wonderful truth in the play of the light. The Sacrifice of Abraham, by Michelangelo di Caravaggio, preferable to his Musician and Martyrdom of St. Catherine, has all his energy. Germanicus on the point of death making his friends swear to avenge him (so far was ancient heroism from knowing certain virtues commanded and rendered familiar by christianity), is a work of Poussin's, well composed, but of feeble execution, far below the page of Tacitus; and the drawing and adjustment of the figures give little idea of Romans of the time of Germanicus. The pathetic head of La Cenci, dressed with elegance and coquetry, is supposed to be the work of Guido's early youth, and to have been made from memory after he had seen the heroine mount the scaffold, where she addressed the executioner, who was binding her hands, in these forcible Roman words: Tu leghi il corpo al supplicio, e sciogli l' anima all' immortalità. La Cenci, in the opinion of

ing carnival, and which has replaced the one whose conflagration was the occasion of a pretty poem in the Roman patois, the Incendio di Tor di Nona, by the abbé Carletti, prior of the female convicts of Saint Michael.

Corona, the witty physiologist of Rome, was the true type of an Italian maiden, and the head attributed to Guido has wonderfully expressed this ardent, simple, and tender character. We may further distinguish: Dedalus and Icarus, by Guercino; the celebrated Andrea Corsini, by Guido; a Fornarina, a copy ascribed to Giulio Romano from the blackness of the shade, a head, at first sight little attractive, and requiring some attention to seize all its beauty, and which, notwithstanding the difference of costume and head-dress, must have been taken from the same model as the Fornarina of the Tribuna of Florence, far superior in colouring. A portrait in earthenware of Pope Urban VIII. by a blind man, Giovanni di Gambisi, seems a prodigy. In the antechamber, a coarse oval basso-relievo of the middle ages passes for a Portrait of Rienzi; he is crowned with olive, cuirassed, and has altogether the theatrical and pedantic air of that hero.

The Barberini library possesses about sixty thousand volumes and some precious manuscripts. The Greek manuscripts, a thousand in number, are considered the most important. The miniatures and characters of an Exultet, a Latin manuscript of the eleventh century, by their variety and caprice disconcert the conjectures of paleographic science. The celebrated manuscript on parchment, of 1321, fuil of drawings of ancient monuments, and on which Giuliano San Gallo had begun to work with his own hand as early as 1465, proves incontestably that the Italians were the first to engage in the study of antiquity. The manuscripts of Dante are more than twenty: the manuscript of the fourteenth century, on vellum, a large folio, must be considered as one of the most magnificent that can be cited, for its figures and pretty arabesques. A fine manuscript of the fifteenth century, with miniatures in the Flemish style, is a French translation of the strange book of

The original letters of Peiresc are four hundred la number. They show the prodigious ardour of the French scholar, the friend of Cardinal Barberini, afterwards Urban VIII., and more than twenty years the correspondent of Malherbe. (See the volume of Letters addressed to him by the poet, published at Paris in 1822. in 8vo.) The Biographie universelle mentions the published letters of Peiresc. Other letters, procured from the library of Carpen

Peter Comestor, the Scholastica Historia, by Gujart Desmoulins, priest, canon, and dean of Saint Peter's of Aire, in 1297, a curious and but little known monument of our old language, bearing the arms of the dukes of Ferrara, to whom it belonged. The Barberini library is especially rich in autograph manuscripts of the most illustrious literati, such as Bembo, della Casa, Galileo, Benedetto Castelli, Peiresc, Cardinals Pallavicini and Bellarmin. The Passion of Jesus Christ is the subject of forty original discourses by Chiabrera. A multitude of papers, documents, and reports addressed to Urban VIII., whose pontificate of twenty-one years was the longest previous to Pius VII., and who first, in 1630, conferred the title of eminence on the cardinals for a Christmasbox; these papers, chiefly written in French, present new details on the history of the two first Stuarts, and the attempts to restore catholicism in England. A great number of printed books have almost the interest of autographs, from the marginal notes with which they are covered by eminent writers, such as Aldus and Paulus Manutius, Scaliger, Leo Allatius, the first librarian of the Barberiana, Luca Holstenius, David Hoeschel, Barbadori, and, above all, Tasso, whose remarks are spread over more than fifty volumes, a precious discovery made some years ago by S. Rezzi, the present active and intelligent librarian. A Plato, the Latin version of Marsilio Ficino, is not only annoted in Tasso's hand, but also by his father Bernardo, and it shows to what an extent the beautiful language and poetic dreams of the Greek philosopher were studied and meditated in this family. The remarks on the Divina Commedia, which, though Serassi thinks otherwise, appear to be authentic,' bear witness to the profound study that, from his youth, Tasso bad made of the great poet, and his high admiration. volume of the cantos of the Gerusa

The

tras, the old library of the President Mazaugues, whose father bad married a great-niece of Peiresc's. by Prospero Balbo, were published at Turla in 1828 in a 12mo collection of inedited Letters.

* See the letter of S. L. M. Rezzi to S. Rosini, placed before the Postille, t. xxx, 1, of the complete edition of Tasso.

3 See Variétés Italiennes.

lemme liberata, printed in quarto at Venice (1580), to the poet's great displeasure, seems one of the copies that he addressed to his friends to ask their advice, as we learn from some of his letters; he seems to have spared them as little as Ariosto, who was perpetually consulting all that came near him. Among the rarities, are distinguished: a copy of the edition of the Divina Commedia, Venice (1477), with autograph notes by Bembo; and one of the twelve known copies of the first complete edition, on paper, of the Hebrew Bible (Soncino, 1488).

Near the Barberini palace, I visited the studio of Thorwaldsen, who, at Rome, seems to have succeeded Canova in the opinion of Europe, and whose pure, severe, and poetic talent is in some respects superior to him, particularly in basso-relievos. His thirteen colossal statues of Christ and the Apostles are a noble composition. The Christ, especially, an original figure stamped with the simple and sublime genius of the Gospel, has the majesty without the terror of Jupiter Olympus. These statues, intended for the cathedral of Copenhagen, show the embarrassment accruing to protestantism from the nudity of its worship and the new pomp it now aims at. Thorwaldsen, despite his twenty years' residence at Rome, continued a man of the North in every respect, and his rough appearance, which by no means lessens his politeness or attentions, forms a true contrast with his works, imitated, inspired from Grecian art, and the Italian physiognomies that people his studio.

The palace inhabited by Bernini is interesting from its connection with that superior artist, despite his errors. It presents his statue of Truth, larger than life, a sketch of the fountain in the piazza Navona, and the portrait of King James by Vandyck.

The Acqua Vergine, the best water of Rome, which a young girl pointed out to Agrippa's soldiers, still flows in torrents from the Trevi fountain, and retains its pleasing name. The water is brought from the distance of eight miles, on the Tivoli road. The great Leone Battista Alberti, whose skill in bydraulics 'See ante, book vit. ch. xil.

2 Letter of Claudio Tolomei written from Rome

was one of many acquirements, assisted in repairing this ancient aqueduct under Nicholas V. The architectural richness of the new fountain ordered by Clement XII. of Nicolao Salvi is in bad taste, but not without effect, produced by the art with which the waters are made to play. The waters of Rome, so wholesome, light, and abundant, are one of its wonders, and yet how far modern Rome is inferior even in that to ancient Rome: Dov'è oggi l' Aniene vecchio? Dov'è l' acqua Appia? Dov' è la Claudia? Dove la Tiepola, la Giulia, l' Augusta e le altre?

The piazza di Spagna, without the grand and noble structure of the stairs of the Trinity de' Monti, would really appear, with its numerous hotels, clean, new, and characterless, the square of a provincial town. Whatever is great and distinguished visits Rome. Madame de Stael wittily surnamed this admirable city the drawing-room of Europe; and if its monuments are associated with all ages, the foreigners who meet there comprise every country. The simple contemplation of Rome and a prolonged residence, may supply the place of long studies and much travelling. It must be added that these strangers come to see, to know, or to repose themselves, and that they are taken and observed at the best moment. Therefore Rome with its ruins, reminiscences, and the important persons it receives, is the spot of the earth where the gaze of wonder is least seen; it would be useless and stupid to aim at effect there, and many a wit not apprised of this has thrown off his dissertations, thoughts, and witticisms, with only his trouble for his pains.

The fountain called Barcaccia, by Bernini, if little honourable to his taste, still proves the fecundity and resources of his talent, as the water, though tolerably abundant, could not be thrown in the air nor rise above this level.

The little house of Poussin, on Mount on the 26th of July, 1543, to Giambattista Grimaldi, on the waters and fountains of Rome.

3 See ante, ch. xviii.

Pincio, piazza della Trinità No 9 (such a name excuses these details), which communicates with the church by a long terrace, is near the house of Salvator Rosa and opposite that of Claude Lorrain, another great and poetical master of the true. This house, which the mould of the Farnese Hercules half-filled, was preferred by Poussin to the house in the garden of the Tuileries given him by Louis XIII., though that also had its views. He died in this retreat after forty-two years' residence in Rome, except a two years' visit in France. His taste for simplicity has been erroneously taken for poverty, as he was in the receipt of a handsome and honourable income from works painted by request. The old age of Poussin was gloomy and full of suffering. "Some time ago," he writes, "I forsook my pencils, thinking only of preparing for death, which my body touches on.' He was a foreigner, and without a friend, "for," said he, "there are none in this town;" a bitter remark, which I heard authenticated by persons who have resided at Rome and were its most ardent admirers. The house of the great French painter has belonged for many years to an English painter, Mr. Dei, living in London and more than a hundred years of age; his son-in-law, Mr. B******, occupies it at present, but it appears that a lawsuit between the brothers Massani, creditors of Mr. Dei, and Mr. B., which he has already twice lost, will transfer to the two Roman litigants the historical house, the monument of Mount Pincio.

The Medici villa was built about 1550 by Cardinal Giovanni Ricci di Montepulciano, on the designs of Annibale Lippi, excepting the elegant interior front, ascribed without proof to Michael Angelo. This fine villa, which once possessed the Venus and other antique masterpieces of the Florence Gallery, and was Galileo's prison during his trial, is now the Academy of France. This institution, founded by Louis XIV. in 1666, has been assailed by specious arguments: Girodet was one while of opinion that the young men should be left to travel where they pleased. Although

See the Letters XLV. and XLVII. of his Correspondence, t. 11. of his OEuvres posthumes, published and arranged by M. P. A. Coupin. Paris, 1829. At a subsequent period Girodet duly appreciated the merit of the Academy which he designates (note 7

since his able letter, dictated by the disgust that a pupil so impatient and full of ardour experienced at the Academy, where however he has executed his best work, the regime of the establishment has undergone considerable ameliorations, there is yet room for more; the pupils, for instance, though animated with so keen a craving after celebrity, live too much apart and among themselves, continue too Parisian, and do not study Italy sufficiently. But if there be a possibility of revising the rules of the Academy, giving it more independence, and putting it more in unison with the march of events, according to the wish of its last and brilliant director, it would be a lasting subject of regret to suppress so powerful a means of emulation for the pupils, which attaches them for several years to the study of the beautiful, instead of compelling them to make the art a matter of lucre, and destroying one of the most munificent encouragements ever accorded to the arts. Instead of overthrowing the monument of the grand siècle, I would rather see it extended in a proper and novel manner. A visit to Italy is singularly useful to the developement of literary talents; why should not the government send into this classic land the ureats of poetry and eloquence crowned by the Academy? The sojourn at the Villa with its vast gardens and admirable view, presenting, on one side, the complete prospect of Rome, Saint Peter's, the Vatican; on the other, the solitude and pines of the Borghese villa,-this melancholy abode would inspire our poets. The artists in their turn would profit by such an association, and we should see a renewal of those intimacies, those friendships between them and the writers, frequent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which reciprocally contributed to the taste and perfection of their respective works.3 The men of letters, scholars, painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, all the travellers from our country distinguished by their intellectual labours might also, as they passed, be received at the Academy, which would thus become, as it were,

of the first canto of his poem of the Peintre) as un bel et utile établissement.

2 See Horace Vernet's letter written from Rome, September 3, 1830.

See ante, book VI. ch. ill, and book vit. ch xii.

the artistical and literary hotel of France in Italy. The non-occupation of the buildings of the convent of the Trinità de' Monti, through the extinction of the French Minims who inhabited it and served the church, was perhaps favourable to this project. Notwithstanding all the respect due to the nuns of the Sacred Heart, who have been illegally established in those buildings for some years, I confess that I should have preferred this profane appropriation.'

Mount Pincio, the ancient Collis hortorum, so called from the gardens of Sallust, Lucullus, and Domitian, has again become worthy of its first name since the creation of its public promenade, the only one in Rome, begun and far advanced by the French administration, and finished under Pius VII.

CHAPTER XXXV.

Port of Ripetta.-Borghese palace.-Gallery.-Madama palace.-Raphael's house.-Piazza Navona. -Fountain. Lago.-Philharmonic Academy.Pamfili palace. -Donna Olimpia.-Braschl palace. -Pasquino.-Massini palace.-Printing at Rome. -Mattel palace.-Fountain delle Tartarughe. Costaguti palace.

The little picturesque port of Ripetta receives the boats loaded with wine, oil, corn, wood, and charcoal, that descend from Sabina and Umbria. The travertine of an arcade of the Coliseum, thrown down by the earthquake of 1703, forms part of its structure. Two columns near a fountain mark the different inundations of the Tiber: the highest and most fatal was in the year 1598, which swept away two arches of the Pons Palatinus, thence called Ponte Rotto.

The fronts of the immense Borghese palace would, if united, surpass in extent that of the Pitti palace at Florence. It is in the form of a harpsichord, and is known by the name of il cembalo di Borghese. The architecture is by the elder Martino Longhi: it is esteemed for

The convent of the Trinità de' Monti, near the Academy of France, has undergone the barbarous change to the Italian clock, from the French mode of counting the hours, which was heard in the time of the Minims. The priory of Malta, a building near the other side of the convent, was bought by the king of Bavaria, and there was question for a moment of establishing an academy like ours there: this convent of nuns devoted to female education would thus have been singularly placed between two schools of artists. The nuns of the Sacred

2

its court with porticos of two stories, and the judicious and skilful ordinance of the plan, though the soil is very irregular. The gallery, the richest in Rome, and kept in the best order, has seventeen hundred original paintings. Among so great a number of excellent works the following may be recommended to particular notice: by Garofolo, the Descent from the cross, the primest of his paintings at Rome, which has several fine figures of an extraordinary power of modelling; by Domenichino, the Chase of Diana, eternally copied, of more delicate execution than usual with him: some nymphs seem worthy of Correggio for lightness and colour; the Cumean Sibyl, inferior to Guercino's Sibyl Persica, though perhaps more expressive and more inspired; by Paolo Veronese, St. Anthony preaching to the fish, a mute audience, which one might suppose not over intelligent, but it appears attentive, agitated; the St. John in the desert: the landscape is only sketched, the saint is awry, but the three Turklike figures listening to him are of the most brilliant colouring; by Raphael, Christ deposited in the tomb, a masterpiece of his twentyfourth year, full of grace, of the most touching expression and admirable purity of design; the terrible Cesare Borgia with Machiavel, the action and thought of the fifteenth century; by Rubens, a Visitation; by Giorgione, à David; by Giulio Romano, another and excellent copy of the Fornarina; by Titian, the exquisite Return of the prodigal son; Divine and profane Love, a pure and precise composition; his Three Graces, of a colour so fine and rich; by Andrea del Sarto, a Holy Family; by Giovanni Bellini, the Virgin and infant Jesus; by Correggio. a Danae; and by Joseph Vernet, eight of his best and largest landscapes. The fine porphyry vase in the second room, found in the castle of Saint Angelo, whatever they may say, can never have contained the ashes of Adrian.

Пeart, thirteen in number, were invited from Paris by Leo XII. to undertake the education of children of quality; among these ladies was a young Russian princess, L*** G*******, who gave lessons in English and drawing. Notwithstanding the pope's protection and bis recommendations to the nobles of Rome to send their children to this house, it was not in a flourishing condition, the Roman ladies not being willing, it appears, to let their daughters be better educated than themselves.

See ante, ch. xiil.