You See Them Very
Leisurely; And Are Rarely Interrupted By A Crowd Of People.
There
are portraits innumerable, by Titian, and Rembrandt, and Vandyke;
heads by Guido, and Domenichino, and Carlo Dolci; various
Subjects
by Correggio, and Murillo, and Raphael, and Salvator Rosa, and
Spagnoletto--many of which it would be difficult, indeed, to praise
too highly, or to praise enough; such is their tenderness and
grace; their noble elevation, purity, and beauty.
The portrait of Beatrice di Cenci, in the Palazzo Berberini, is a
picture almost impossible to be forgotten. Through the
transcendent sweetness and beauty of the face, there is a something
shining out, that haunts me. I see it now, as I see this paper, or
my pen. The head is loosely draped in white; the light hair
falling down below the linen folds. She has turned suddenly
towards you; and there is an expression in the eyes--although they
are very tender and gentle--as if the wildness of a momentary
terror, or distraction, had been struggled with and overcome, that
instant; and nothing but a celestial hope, and a beautiful sorrow,
and a desolate earthly helplessness remained. Some stories say
that Guido painted it, the night before her execution; some other
stories, that he painted it from memory, after having seen her, on
her way to the scaffold. I am willing to believe that, as you see
her on his canvas, so she turned towards him, in the crowd, from
the first sight of the axe, and stamped upon his mind a look which
he has stamped on mine as though I had stood beside him in the
concourse. The guilty palace of the Cenci: blighting a whole
quarter of the town, as it stands withering away by grains: had
that face, to my fancy, in its dismal porch, and at its black,
blind windows, and flitting up and down its dreary stairs, and
growing out of the darkness of the ghostly galleries. The History
is written in the Painting; written, in the dying girl's face, by
Nature's own hand. And oh! how in that one touch she puts to
flight (instead of making kin) the puny world that claim to be
related to her, in right of poor conventional forgeries!
I saw in the Palazzo Spada, the statue of Pompey; the statue at
whose base Caesar fell. A stern, tremendous figure! I imagined
one of greater finish: of the last refinement: full of delicate
touches: losing its distinctness, in the giddy eyes of one whose
blood was ebbing before it, and settling into some such rigid
majesty as this, as Death came creeping over the upturned face.
The excursions in the neighbourhood of Rome are charming, and would
be full of interest were it only for the changing views they
afford, of the wild Campagna. But, every inch of ground, in every
direction, is rich in associations, and in natural beauties. There
is Albano, with its lovely lake and wooded shore, and with its
wine, that certainly has not improved since the days of Horace, and
in these times hardly justifies his panegyric.
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