De: ITALIAN FANTASIES
The Palace was begun under the dynasty which preceded the Gonzagas, it saw all the glories of the Renaissance, saw Mantua sacked by the Germans, and the Gonzaga dynasty extinguished by the Austrians, and the city fallen to the French, and re-fallen to Austria, and caught up into the Cisalpine Republic, and then into the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, and then Austrian again till the yoke was broken by Victor Emmanuel and the stable dulness of to-day established. It is in fact a microcosm of Mantuan history from the day Guido Bonacolsi laid the first stone somewhere near the year 1300. The building had not proceeded very far before the Gonzagas came into power in 1328, in time to stamp the apartments with their character, and it is with Isabella d’Este that its most inventive features are associated.
A hundred and eighty rooms, said the janitor, and when one remembers the crowd of resident courtiers and the great trains with which the Magnificent Ones travelled, one should not be astonished at the resemblance of an ancient Palace to a modern Grand Hotel. Isabella d’Este’s brother-in-law, Lodovico the Moro, once visited her here with a suite of a thousand persons, and that was only half the number with which Lodovico’s brother, Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, descended upon Florence in 1471. But no modern hotel could keep open a week with such apartments. I do not refer merely to their dearth of conveniences, but to their mutual accessibility, their comparative scarcity of corridors. I do not see how a man could go to bed without passing through another man’s bedroom. Grandeur without comfort, art without privacy, such was the Palace in its peopled prime. Think of it to-day—grandeur in rags, art torn from its sockets, and a lonely scribe trailing through vaulted and frescoed emptiness.
The portraits of the Gonzagas are still in the Hall of the Dukes, but when I ascended the beautiful staircase to the vast armoury, I found an aching void. The weapons had been carried off in the sack of Mantua—a sack so complete that Duke Carlo on his return had to accept a few sticks of furniture from the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The Hall of the Caryatides preserves its paintings but the Apartment of the Tapestry is a chandeliered vacancy. The Apartment of the Empress (for Maria Theresa crossed Mantua’s line of life) is in yellow silk upholstery with gilded ceilings and an antique chandelier from Murano, but one wall is relapsed to rough brick, in sharp contrast with the white medallioned ceiling. The Refectory or Hall of the Rivers survives, a curious symphony in brown, a long vaulted room with frescoes of Father Po and his brother-rivers and lakes, with grottoes, and caryatides, and marmoreal mosaics, its windows looking on a hanging garden—yea, Babylon is fallen!—with a piazza of Tuscan columns and a central temple.
A sense of passing through a fantastic dream-world began to steal upon me as I wandered through the Hall of the Zodiac with its great blue roof of stars and celestial signs and ships drawn by dogs, and its walls gay with figures in green and gold, and came to a bed with tall green curtains, in which the inevitable Napoleon had once slept. He was not, I mused, of those who could not sleep in a new bed. Followed a suite of three rooms of the Emperor, decorated with painted tapestry, the real removed to Vienna.
And the nightmare continued—one long succession of cold stone floors below and crystal chandeliers on high, bleakly glittering. There was a Hall of the Popes, bare as a barrack. There was a long shiny gallery of bad pictures, which was once a shrine of the Masters. There was a Ducal Apartment modernised, but with the old gilded and bossed ceiling, and dark cobwebbed canvases of the Flemish school. There was the Hall of the Archers, picturesque with the great wooden rafters of its ruined roof and still painted with illusive white pillars, statues, and scenes. Most monstrous of all was the many mirrored, many chandeliered Ball-room—its rows of mirrors reflecting what dead faces, its gold frieze of _putti_ still echoing what madrigals and toccatas, the gods of Olympus looking down from its frescoed ceiling, Apollo driving his chariot and four, and the Arts, the Sciences, Parnassus, Virgil, Sordello, peeping from every arch and lunette. And from the Hall of the Archers my nightmare led me through Ducal Halls and still other Ducal Halls, till I had passed through seven—vasty Halls of Death, with marvellous gilded ceilings and unplastered walls, or with plaster or whitewash over frescoes, or with a sixteenth-century ceiling swearing at an elegant Austrian bathroom (hot and cold). Vivid, even in this strange dream, stood out a ceiling intaglioed with a labyrinth of gilded wood recording the victory of Vincenzo over the Turks:
“Contra Turcos pugnavit Vincenzo Gonzaga”
—and intertangled repeatedly with the labyrinth the device which d’Annunzio has borrowed for his latest novel—_Forse che si, forse che no_—and reproduced upon the cover. An old mirror with the glass half-sooted over reflected these glories drearily and showed me the only living face in this labyrinthine tomb.
And so at last by many rooms and ways and up a little staircase of eleven steps under a painted ceiling, I came, like a soul that has travailed, to the Apartment of Paradise, the bower of the beautiful sweet-voiced Isabella d’Este, where, under her ceiling-device “_nec spe nec metu_,” she lived her married life and her long years of widowhood, with her books and her pictures and her antiquities, playing on her silver lyre and her lute and her clavichord, and corresponding with her scholars and poets, “the first lady of the Renaissance.” Piety for this legendary “_dame du temps jadis_” seems to have preserved her six-roomed apartment much as it was, with her wonderful polychrome wooden ceilings and her wonderful doors fretted with porphyry and marbles and her bird’s-eye views of great cities she had not seen—Algiers, Jerusalem, Lisbon, Madrid—and her real view of the panorama sloping towards the Po; this combination of a river, a garden and a lake being so _stupendo_ to the inhabitants of that melancholy region of Italy that Isabella’s apartment took thence its name of Paradise, much as that dull Damascus is “the pearl of the East.” Her music-room, too, is intact, save for the rifling of its pictures. Its intarsia depicting dulcimer, virginal, harp, and viol, and musical notation, its heavy-gilded vaulted ceiling with its musical staves and other decorations, and the little bas-relief showing herself with her beloved instruments, remain as in the days when Gian Trissino wrote a _canzone_ “To Madonna Isabella playing on her lute.” But the Mantegnas she commanded, the Lottos and the Perugino, are at the Louvre, doubtless at the behest of Napoleon, that despot of a greater Renaissance to whom even Isabella’s formidable brother-in-law, the Moro, was a pigmy, though both of them died in prison and exile, as is the habit of the Magnificent Ones.
Did my nightmare end in this Paradise, softening in this quiet bower into a sleep
“Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing”?
Nay, it grew only more incoherent—vast Halls ruined by being turned into barracks, the statues smashed by a rude soldiery, the pictures slashed, and only the inaccessible splendours of the ceiling safe—though not from the damp; in the Hall of the Triumphs no Triumph remaining save the Triumph of Time and of Fate, Mantegna’s pictures of the Triumphs of Cæsar haled to Hampton Court, only their empty oaken frames here gaping; corridors, empty and long, corridors echoing under the footstep, corridors adorned with stuccos and rafaellesques; the Hall of the Moors with a splendid old ceiling and figures of Moors on a frieze of gilded wood; the Corte Vecchia; the Apartment of Troy, with crowded wall-frescoes by Giulio Romano, Mantegna, Primaticcio; the lovely salon of Troy, dismantled, discoloured, its frescoed legend of Troy undecipherable, its ceiling of intaglioed wood dilapidated; the Hall of the Oath of the Primo Capitano, the Hall of the Virtues, Halls anonymously mouldering; the Saletta of the Eleven Emperors denuded of Titian’s portraits, to the profit of the British Museum; the Hall of the Capitani with a Jove of Giulio Romano thundering from the ceiling but ironically damaged by real rainstorms; the Saletta of Troy, with more Homer and Virgil—do you begin to have a sense of the monumental desolation? But you have yet to figure me drifting in my dream through the Court of the Marbles and the empty Sculpture Gallery with its great ruined ceiling and the _Cavallerizza_, or Hippodrome, the largest of its time, now stilled of the clangour of tournament and the plaudits of ladies, and the Apartment of the Boots and the Gallery over the lake, and another garden hanging dead, with a Triton for a tombstone and owls for mourners, the Apartment of the Four Rooms, blackened by the smoke of days when they were let as lodgings, and Halls and more Halls, and still more Halls and Cabinets, and the Hall of the Shells, with its tasty pictures of fish and venison, and the Hall of the Garlands, and the Apartment of the Dwarfs, with their miniature chambers and their staircases with small squat steps—a quarter in itself!
_Basta!_ The nightmare grows too oppressive. Why wake the buffoons from their pigmy coffins of dwarf oak?
Poor little jesters! Are their souls, too, I wonder, stunted, and is there for them in heaven some Lilliputian quarter, where the Magnificent Ones must make sport for _them_?
“Isabella Estensis, niece of the Kings of Aragon, daughter and sister of the Dukes of Ferrara, wife and mother of the Marquises of Gonzaga, erected this in the year 1522 from the Virgin’s bearing.”
So runs—O rare Renaissance lady—the Italian vaunt in the frieze round thy Grotto, and I reading it from thy little courtyard, sit and chew the cud of bitter fancy. Poor Madonna Isabella, whose inwoven name still clings so passionately to thy bourdoir walls, in what camera of Paradise dost thou hold thy court? Methinks thy talent for viol and harp, and that lovely singing voice of thine, should find fit service in that orchestral heaven, where thou—always _desiderosa di cosa nuova_—enjoyest perchance an ampler pasture for thy sensibilities. _Forse che si, forse che no_. But from earth thou art vanished utterly, and Renaissance for thee is none. Where be thy pages and poets and buffoons, thy singing seraphs, thy painters and broiderers, thy goldsmiths and gravers, thy cunning artificers in ivory and marble and precious woods? Where is Niccolò da Correggio, thy perfect courtier? Where be Beatrice and Violante, who combed thy hair, and Lorenzo da Pavia who built thy organ, and Cristoforo Romano who carved thy doorway and designed thy medal, and Galeotto del Carretto who sent thee roundelays to carol to thy lute? Have all these less substance than the very brocades in which thy soul was wont to bask? Can these chalcedony jars of thy Grotto outlive them, these shells mock their flippant fleeting? And thy rhyming and thy reasoning, and thy gay laughter and that zest to ride all day and dance all night—could all this effervescence of life settle into mere slime? And this hideous doubt—this fluctuant _forse_—can we really face it _nec spe nec metu_?
A horn sounds and steeds clatter up and down thy graded staircase. The hounds give tongue, the hawk flutters on thy wrist. The great spaces of the _Cavallerizza_ fill with jousting paladins; dames in cloth of gold and silver look down from the balconies, princes and ambassadors dispute their smiles. Where has it vanished, all that _allegro_ life—for I must speak to thee by the stave—that gay gavotte that went tripping its merry rhythm through the vasty vaulted halls? Whither has it ebbed? On what shore breaks that music?
And that Mantuan populace that poured in like a stage-crowd to hear its Dukes take the oath of fidelity—are the supers, too, dismissed for ever with the run of the dynasty? And the Dukes themselves, the haughty Gonzagas, is it possible that they are crumbled even more irredeemably than those plasterless walls of their palace? Can it be that Mantegna’s portraits are less phantasmal than the originals?
“For the honour of the illustrious Lodovico the Magnificent and Excellent Prince, and unconquered in Faith, and his illustrious Consort Barbara, the incomparable glory of women, his Andrea Mantegna, the Paduan, executed this work in 1473.”
At last, at last something lives and breathes in this vast wilderness of shadows. Bless you, Barbara, incomparable glory of women, with your strong masculine face; and you, too, Magnificent long-nosed Lodovico. Far have I been driven in my dream—I am wandered even to the adjoining ruin of the Ducal Castle—but now I am with the quick, with pigments whose life, though it has its fading, is a quasi-immortality compared with our transience. Go, get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her to be painted, for this canvas complexion is the sole that will last.
Isabella d’Este lives at Vienna, recreated by Titian, and at Paris Vittore Pisano shows us what a princess of her house was like, painting beauty of face and brocade against a Japanese background of flowers and butterflies. A more shadowy life she lives in this legend of the princess of the Renaissance, which the prince of Italian writers has revived in his novel, “_Forse che si, forse che no_,” a book in which my Italian friends tell me d’Annunzio has won yet another triumph of language, old words being so cunningly mingled with new that they do not jar, but chime. D’Annunzio is a demi-incarnation of the Renaissance spirit, exanimate of the Christian half, and it is characteristic that the qualities round which his adoration of Isabella plays are the qualities not of a great lady, but of a great courtesan; a leader of the demi-monde. But as d’Annunzio lives in a half-world, what can his heroines do but lead it? His Isabella d’Este—as re-created through the worshipful eyes of Aldo—is the rival in dress of Beatrice Sforza, Renata d’Este, and Lucrezia Borgia; marchionesses borrow her old clothes as models, Ippolita Sforza, Bianca Maria Sforza, and Leonora of Aragon are hopelessly out-dressed. Her sister Beatrice alone sticks like a thorn in her side—Beatrice whose wardrobe had eighty-four accessions in two years! But Isabella squeezed ninety-three into one year!! Lucrezia Borgia, when she went to marry Alfonso d’Este, had two hundred marvellous chemises; Isabella outdid her, and even Lucrezia must have recourse to her for a fan of gold sticks with black ostrich feathers. Isabella invented new styles and new modes, and the fashion of the carriage at Rome. Isabella loved gems, particularly emeralds, and succeeded in obtaining the most beautiful in existence. She had her goldsmiths at Venice, at Milan, at Ferrara. She possessed not only the finest jewels, but the finest settings, rings, collars, chains, bracelets, seals, and so through the list of gewgaws and baubles. She was the admiration of France. She adored perfumes and compounded them, and masks, and sent Cæsar Borgia a hundred, and had the most exquisite nail-files for manicuring, and was head over ears in debt—_per sopra ai capelli_—for she had a mad desire to buy everything that took her whimsy. Has any one ever better summarised the eternal courtesan?
Not a word about the nobler Isabella, the kind-hearted lady who was always interceding for criminals or unfortunates; not a word of the Isabella of unspotted reputation in an age of demireps (naturally d’Annunzio would hush this up); not a whisper of the Isabella who felt the defence of Faenza against Cæsar Borgia “as a vindication of the honour of Italy.” Scarce a hint of the inspirer of humanism, the patroness of some of the finest artists of all time; still less any suggestion of the other Isabella, the housewife who sent salmon-trout to her friends, the philosopher who, when the King of France had entered Naples, pointed out to her lord that the discontent of the people is more dangerous to a monarch than all the might of his enemies on the battlefield, and the worldly wise woman who, when he was hesitating over an inglorious military appointment, bade him take the cash and let the credit go.
So complex an Isabella is beyond the scope of d’Annunzio, whose Isabella Inghirami is an elemental creature of passion and tragedy.
“_Forse che si, forse che no._” An inhabitant of the full world, beholding this motto written and rewritten in the ceiling-labyrinth of the Gonzaga Palace, might fall into contemplation of the labyrinth of human life, and see this device scribbled all over it; he might hail it as the philosophy of Montaigne in a nutshell, and jump, if he were a novelist, at this magnificent setting for some tale of high speculative fantasy. But for d’Annunzio there can be only one problem lying between these mighty opposites. Will a woman yield to her lover, or will virtue resist him? To this petty issue must these measureless words be narrowed. ’Tis not even a _forse_. With d’Annunzio there can be no negative in such an alternative. And so the mighty Mantuan ruin which has known so many desolations receives its last humiliation, and passes into literature as a background for lust. _Sunt lachrymæ rerum._
The true Isabella d’Este has been as much rarefied by the Renaissance legend as she has been materialised by d’Annunzio. For she cannot be wholly exonerated from d’Annunzio’s panegyric. “Would to God,” she cried at sight of her brother-in-law’s treasure, “that we who are so fond of money possessed as much.” It was this treasure of the Duke of Milan’s that did, indeed, make her sister Beatrice a thorn in her side, if also a rose in her breast, since darling Duchess Beatrice set the pace at a rate ruinous to the Marchioness of Mantua. Isabella could not even go to Venice at the same time as Beatrice, lest all that magnificence (whose very leavings overwhelmed me in her Palace) should appear shabbiness. And when she lost her mother, she appeared more anxious about the proper shade of mourning than the proper sentiment of grief. (How came d’Annunzio to have missed this trait? What a chance for analysis of the æsthetic temperament!) More pardonable was her anxiety as to the colour of the hangings in the Moro’s rooms, her hurried borrowing of plate and tapestries, when he impended with that suite of a thousand. But even for Beatrice’s death she seemed to find some satisfaction in the ultimate reversion of her much-coveted clavichord, and she found it possible to borrow a Da Vinci portrait from the Duke’s former mistress—her sister’s cross. Nor—after the Duke was in exile—does it seem very loyal to that fallen idol and faithful admirer, to have ingratiated herself with the French conqueror. That she should rejoice in the election to the papacy of her profligate kinsman, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, was perhaps not unnatural, but when every allowance is made for her virtues, it must be admitted that she was not utterly unworthy of d’Annunzio’s admiration.
She was, in brief, a Magnificent One, and if the Magnificent Ones are, as a rule, less monstrous when they are women, at the best they are a seamy shady lot, grinding the faces of the poor, that their babes may lie in foolish cradles of gold, and building themselves lordly pleasure-houses designed by hirelings of genius. Even Da Vinci prostituted his genius to plan a bathroom for that minx of a Beatrice, and a pavilion with a round cupola for the castle-labyrinth of his Most Illustrious Prince, Signor Lodovico. Yet Lodovico must be commended for his taste, which is more than can be said for the Magnificent Ones of to-day, who are apt to combine the libertine with the Philistine. Save for the mad King of Bavaria, I can recall no modern monarch who has had a man of genius at his Court. The late King Leopold exacted gold and executed evil on a scale beyond the dreams of the Moro, but where were his Leonardos and Bramantes? Burckhardt tells us that the Renaissance Despot, whose sway was nearly always illegitimate, gathered a Court of genius and learning to give himself a standing; the pompous dulness of our modern Courts shows that Gibbon’s plea for stability of succession failed to reckon with the stagnation of security.
Prosaic compared with the fate of the Palace at Mantua is the fate of the Castle of Ferrara, the cradle of Isabella d’Este. ’Tis one of those gloomy massive four-towered structures that recall the fables of the giants, with its moat still two yards deep and its drawbridge intact—a barbarous mediæval pile, forbidding by daylight and sinister in the moon, with a great clock that has so much leisure that it strikes the hour before every quarter.
Yet this grim fortress, originally built by a despot as a refuge from his subjects, is merely the seat of telegraph and other civic offices; like some antediluvian dragon tamed and harnessed, instead of wastefully slain, by the St. George who gleams above the portcullis.
In the piazza before the castle, where I saw only a cab-rank of broken-down horses, the _festa_ of this patron-saint of Ferrara was wont to set Barbary horses racing for the pallium, and splendid battle-chargers ramped in that great tournament which was held by Duke Ercole, Isabella’s father, in honour of his son-in law, the Moro, and which was won by Galeazzo di Sanseverino, the model of the _Cortigiano_. Isabella d’Este in her glad virginal youth walked her palfrey up and down the great equine staircase, now given over to messenger boys and clerks. Under the sportive ceilings and adipose angels of Dosso Dossi, or within that girdling frieze of _putti_ driving their teams of birds, beasts, snakes or fishes, pragmatic councillors hold debate. In the castle ball-room are held—charity dances!
But infinitely the saddest relic of the Magnificent Moro is his former palace in Ferrara. Why he needed a palace in Ferrara I do not know, unless to accommodate the overflowings of his suite when he visited his ducal father-in-law. Of this palace the excellent Baedeker discourses thus: “To the S. of S. Maria in Vado, in the Corso Porta Romana, is the former Palazzo Costabili or Palazzo Scrofa, now known as the Palazzo Beltrami-Calcagnini. It was erected for Lodovico il Moro, but is uncompleted. Handsome court. On the ground-floor to the left are two rooms with excellent ceiling-frescoes, by Ercole Grandi; in the first, prophets and Sybils; in the second, scenes from the Old Testament in grisaille.”
It could not have been done better by an auctioneer. Here is the reality. A courtyard with arches, dirty, refuse-littered, surrounded by a barrack of slum-dwellings. The first room I penetrated into was palatial in size but occupied by three beds, and a stove replaced the old hearth. The floor was of bare brick. Sole touch of colour, a canary sang in a cage, as cheerfully as to a Magnificent One. The crone whose family inhabited this room conducted me at my request to the chamber with the ceilings by Ercole Grandi. She opened the door, and—like _Maria_ of Sicily—entered crying, “_È permesso?_” with retrospective ceremoniousness, and I followed her into a vast lofty room, dingy below, but glorious above, though more to faith than to sight, for the firmament of fresco was difficult to see clearly in the gloom. The floor was of stone, and held two beds, a chair or two, a cradle, a stout dwarfish old woman and a sprawl of children with unkempt heads. In the adjoining room sat a sickly and silent woman working a sewing machine under the hovering Sybils and Prophets, dim and faded as herself.
For those who covet a Renaissance chamber, even after this exposure of the auctioneer, let me say that the rent of this last room was thirty-two scudi a year, Sybils and Prophets thrown in.
The entire Palace Beltrami-Calcagnini is, I imagine, to be acquired for a song. When I first read in Ruskin’s “A Joy for Ever,” his exhortation to Manchester manufacturers to purchase palaces in Verona so as to safeguard stray Titians and Veroneses, I felt that the Anglo-Saxon aspiration to play Atlas had reached its culminating grotesquerie. But now that I have seen the state of the Ercole Grandi frescoes, I feel that the Anglo-Saxon might do worse than step in, and I cannot understand why Italy, so rigid against the exportation of her treasures, is so callous to their extinction.
And this is the Palace built by the great Moro, who “boasted that the Pope Alexander was his chaplain, the Emperor Maximilian his condottiere, Venice his chamberlain, and the King of France his courier”; for whose wedding procession, which was preceded by a hundred trumpeters, Milan draped itself in satins and brocades; who patronised the immortals of Art; and who wore to death in an underground dungeon in France.
An older than Virgil hath spoken the final word: _Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas_.
OF DEAD SUBLIMITIES, SERENE MAGNIFICENCES, AND GAGGED POETS
There are few livelier expressions of vitality than tombs, especially tombs designed or commissioned by their occupants. These be projections of personality beyond the grave, extensions of egotism beyond the body. The Magnificent Ones have invariably the mausolean habit. It is another of their humilities. The majesty of death, they know, is not enough to cover their nakedness. Moses, the true Superman, had his sepulchre hidden that none might worship at it. The false Superman ostentates his sepulchre in the hope that some one may worship at it. His Magnificence is only Serene in his tomb: his life passes in uneasy tiptoeings after greatness. Sometimes his mortuary tumefactions are softened by his spouse being made co-tenant of his tomb, as in the Taj Mahal of Agra, or in that beautiful monument ordered by Lodovico of Milan for himself and Beatrice d’Este. And sometimes when “the Bishop orders his tomb” it may be with an extenuating design to beautify his church—“ad ornatum ecclesiae” as “Leo Episcopus” says of the monument he designed for himself in Pistoja Cathedral. Unfortunately Bishop Leo’s worthy object is scarcely attained by the two fat angels leaning sleepily against his sarcophagus, or by the skull and the shell-work over it, though in comparison with Verrocchio’s adjacent monument of Cardinal Forteguerra—or rather the bust and the black sarcophagus superimposed upon the original marble—the Bishop’s tomb is a thing of beauty.
But it is only when the corpse has not commanded the monument that I am able to endure its magnificence. The Cardinal of Portugal in San Miniato, the poisoned Pope Benedict in Perugia, St. Dominic in Bologna, St. Agatha in Venice, and even the mysterious Lazaro Papi, “Colonel for the English in Brazil,” the “esteemed writer of verses and history,” whose friends raised him so elaborate a memorial in the cathedral of Lucca in 1835, all lie as guiltless of their monumental follies as Mausolus himself, who, it will be remembered, was the victim of his designing widow. Nor could the _Ossa Dantis_ well escape that domed mausoleum at Ravenna, though they lay low for a century and a half.
Still further removed from responsibility for his own posthumous pomp is St. Augustine, who with all his inspiration could not foresee the adventures of his corpse; how from Hippo it should come to rest at Pavia, by way of Sardinia, and there, a thousand years after his death, have that marvellous Arca erected over it by the Eremitani. Nor could St. Donato, when he slew the water-dragon of Arezzo by spitting into its mouth, foresee the great shrine embodying this and other miracles of his which the millennial piety of the town would rear over his desiccated dust.
But the Medici, the magnificent Medici! Not their chapel in Santa Croce, full though it be of the pomp of marble and majolica; not their San Marco monastery with their doctor-saints—St. Cosmo and St. Damian—not their Medici Palace, despite that joyous Benozzo fresco with its gay glamour of landscape and processions; not the Pitti with its incalculable treasures; not the Villa Medici, nor even the Venus herself, so reeks with the pride of life as all that appertains to their tombs. When I gaze upon the monuments of these serene Magnificences in the Old Sacristy of Florence, with the multiple allusions to the family and its saints—in marble and terra-cotta, in stucco and bronze, in fresco and frieze, in high-relief and low-relief—I feel a mere grave-worm. And when I crawl into the Capella dei Principi where stand the granite sarcophagi of the Grand Dukes, there glances at me from every square inch of the polished walls and the pompous crests and rich mosaics a glacial radiation of the pride of life—nay, the _hubris_ of life. That hushed spaciousness is yet like an elaborate funeral mass perpetually performed by an orchestra opulently over-paid.
I wonder how in their life-time men dared to apply to these Magnificent Ones the common Italian words for the body and its operations and why there was not evolved for them—as for the bonzes of the Cambodgians—a specific vocabulary to differentiate their eating and drinking from the munching and lapping of such as I. And yet in the New Sacristy I find consolation. For, inasmuch as the genius of Michelangelo was harnessed to the funeral car of his patrons, I perceive that here at last they are truly buried. They are buried beneath the majestic sculptures of Day and Night, Evening and Dawn, and ’tis Michelangelo that lives here, not they. Peace to their gilded dust.