"Yes," I sullenly replied, "skiddoo!" But it is now one of the
regrets which I shall always feel for my wasted opportunities in Rome
that I did not buy all his post-cards.
Patient gayety like his merited
as much.
As it was, I drove callously away from Santa Maria Maggiore to San
Pietro in Vincoli, where I expected to renew my veneration for
Michelangelo's Moses. That famous figure is no longer so much in the
minds of men as it used to be, I think; and, if one were to be quite
honest with one's self as to the why and wherefore of one's earlier
veneration, one might not get a very distinct or convincing reply. Do
sculptors and painters suffer periods of slight as authors do? Are
Raphael and Michelangelo only provisionally eclipsed by Botticelli and
by Donatello and Mino da Fiesole, or are they remanded to a lasting
limbo? I find I have said in my notes that the Moses is improbable and
unimpressive, and I pretended a more genuine joy in the heads of the two
Pollajuolo brothers which startle you from their tomb as you enter the
church. Is the true, then, better than the ideal, or is it only my
grovelling spirit which prefers it? What I scarcely venture to say is
that those two men evidently lived and still live, and that
Michelangelo's prophet never lived; I scarcely venture, because I
remember with tenderness how certain clear and sweet spirits used to bow
their reason before the Moses as before a dogma of art which must be
implicitly accepted. Do they still do so, those clear and sweet spirits?
The archaeologist who was driving my cab that morning had pointed out to
me on the way to this church the tower on which Nero stood fiddling
while Rome was burning. It is a strong, square, mediaeval structure
which will serve the purpose of legend yet many centuries, if progress
does not pull it down; but the fiddle no longer exists, apparently, and
Nero himself is dead. When I came out and mounted into my cab, my driver
showed me with his whip, beyond a garden wall, a second tower, very
beautiful against the blue sky, above the slim cypresses, which he said
was the scene of the wicked revels of Lucrezia Borgia. I do not know why
it has been chosen for this distinction above other towers; but it was a
great satisfaction to have it identified. Very possibly I had seen both
of these memorable towers in my former Roman sojourn, but I did not
remember them, whereas I renewed my old impressions of San Paolo fuori
le Mura in almost every detail.
That is the most majestic church in Rome, I think, and I suppose it is,
for a cold splendor, unequalled anywhere. Somehow, from its form and
from the great propriety of its decoration, it far surpasses St.
Peter's. The antic touch of the baroque is scarcely present in it, for,
being newly rebuilt after the fire which destroyed the fourth-century
basilica in 1823, its faults are not those of sixteenth-century excess.
It would be a very bold or a very young connoisseur who should venture
to appraise its merits beyond this negative valuation; and timid age can
affirm no more than that it came away with its sensibilities unwounded.
Tradition and history combine with the stately architecture, which
reverently includes every possible relic of the original fabric, to
render the immense temple venerable; and as it is still in process of
construction, with a colonnaded porch in scale and keeping with the body
of the basilica, it offers to the eye of wonder the actual spectacle of
that unstinted outlay of riches which has filled Rome with its
multitudes of pious monuments - monuments mainly ugly, but potent with
the imagination even in their ugliness through the piety of their
origin.
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