But from the heart in a more romantic sense the most learned atmosphere is not safe, and I am reminded of another University affair of the heart which I stumbled upon in Bologna.

As we know from old coins, Bononia docet. But somewhere about 1320 Bologna ceased to teach. For there was a strike of students. An old stone relief in the Museo Civico, representing a crowned figure holding a little scholar in his lap and stretching his hands to a kneeling group, celebrates the reconciliation of the Rector with his scholars and sets down in Latin a record of the episode. “The scholars of our University being reconciled with the city, from which they had departed in resentment at the capital punishment inflicted upon their colleague Giacomo da Valenza, for the ravishing of Constanzia Zagnoni, by him beloved, the Church of Peace was erected in the year 1322, in the Via S. Mamolo and this memorial was placed there.”

What a tragic romance! What a story for a novelist, the Church, the World, and the University all intermingled, what a riot of young blood all stilled six hundred years ago!

The Doctors of that day still sit in carven state beside this memorial; learned petrifactions, holding their stone chairs for a term of centuries, Bartoluzzo de’ Preti, Reader of Civil Law, who died in 1318, and Bonandrea de’ Bonandrei, Reader of Decretals, who died in 1333. The “pleasant” Doctor this Bonandrea is styled; seasoning, no doubt, his erudition with graces of style. I figure him deeply versed in the decisions published by Gregory IX in 1234, and a profound expounder of the Isidorian Decretals.

Befitting was it at Mantua to feel so poignantly the lachrymÆ rerum. I should perhaps have felt it at Virgil’s own tomb at Naples, had that not been so vague and rambling a site that no moment of concentration or even of conviction was possible. But the ancient Ducal Palace of the Gonzagas in the Piazza Sordello had the pathos of the unexpected. Nothing in its exterior suggested ruin and desolation, nay the scaffolding across the faÇade spoke rather of restoration and repair. The tall red brick arches of the portico beneath, the double row of plain straight windows in the middle, and the top tier of ornamental arched windows, surmounted by the battlements, conveyed an impression of Gothic solidity and moderate spaciousness. It was not till I had walked for many minutes through an endless series of dilapidated chambers and mutilated magnificences—propped-up ceilings and walled-up windows and rotting floors, and marble and gold and rich-dyed woods and gorgeous ceilings, and mouldering tapestries and paintings, and musty grandeurs multiplied in specked mirrors, and faded hangings and forlorn frescoes, and chandeliers without candles, and fly-blown gilding and broken furniture and beautiful furniture and whitewash and blackened plaster and bare brick and a vast unpeopled void—that there began to grow upon my soul the sense of a colossal tragedy of ruin, a monstrous and melancholy desolation, an heroic grandeur of disarray, a veritable poem of decay and destruction. Not the Alhambra itself is so dumbly eloquent of the passing of the Magnificent Ones.

For the interior answers not to the exterior, whether in preservation or in character. It is renaissance and ruin, with a minor note of the Empire; all the splendours of the world fallen upon evil days. Only by remembering the mutations of Mantua can one account for this hybrid Cortile Reale of dishevelled grandeurs, whose face so belies its character and its fortunes.

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:

—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

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.

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.

Far more reposeful, at least for the spectator, is Michelangelo’s own burial place in Santa Croce, which is the most satisfactory church the Franciscans have produced, and in its empty spaciousness an uplifting change from the stuffy, muggy atmosphere, the tawdry profusion of overladen chapels, which make up one’s general sense of an Italian church. It is not free from poor pictures and monuments, and only some of the coloured glass is good, but the defects are lost in the noble simplicity of the whole under its high wooden roof. Michelangelo’s monument is unfortunately impaired by one of the few errors of overcrowding, for the frescoes above it make it look inferior to the Dante cenotaph, though it is really rather superior. Curiously enough the line anent the “great poet”

does not come from Dante’s monument, but from that of a certain Karolus, presumably Carlo Marsuppini!

I have spoken of the museum as the mausoleum of reality. But mausolea too, turn into museums; in losing their dead they, too, die and become a mere spectacle. Such is the melancholy fate of the Mausoleum of Theodoric the Great outside Ravenna, robbed of its imperial heretical bones by avenging Christian orthodoxy. Infinitely dreary this dead tomb when I saw it in the centre of its desolate plain, to which I had trudged through sodden marshland that would have been malarious in summer; snowbound it lay, its arched substructure flooded, its upper chamber only just accessible by a snow-crusted marble staircase: a bare rotundity, a bleak emptiness, robbed even of its coffin, uncheered even by its corpse. O magnificent Ostrogoth, conqueror of Italy, O most Christian Emperor, when you turned from the splendour of your court at Ravenna to build your last home, you with your imperial tolerance could hardly foresee that because you held Christ an originated being, as Arius had gone about singing, a Christian posterity would scatter you to the four winds. And that rival gigantic tomb in the Appian Way at Rome, does CÆcilia Metella still inhabit it, I wonder? I mourn to see such spacious tombs stand empty when there are so many living Magnificences whom they would fit to a span. Very proper was it to bury Beatrice, the mother of Matilda, in the sarcophagus of a Pagan hero. Mausolea no more than palaces should remain untenanted. Let them be turned into orts and castles, an you will, like Hadrian’s Tomb into Sant’ Angelo, or into circuses, like the Mausoleum of Augustus—sweet are the uses of Magnificence—but to keep them standing idle when there must be so many Magnificences in quest of a family sepulchre is a crime against America. The tomb of Theodoric is, I fear, too secluded for American taste, but the Exarch Isaac’s in such cheerful contiguity with town and church may arride the millionaire more. For a consideration the Exarch’s own sarcophagus might be had from the Museum, and the Exarch scrapped. Or there is Galla Placidia’s Mausoleum, with its Byzantine mosaics thrown in. Come! Who bids for these rare curios, one of the few links between Antiquity and the Renaissance, with their grotesque mediÆval sincerity. Remark, Signori, that prefiguration of the Index Expurgatorius, that bearded Christ or S. Lorenzo (you pay your money and you take the choice) who is casting into a crate of serpentine flames one of those Pagan volumes for which the Cinquecento will go hunting madly. No, that cabinet does not contain cigar-boxes—what did the saints know of cigars?—nor are Marcus, Lucas, Matteus, Joannes, the names of brands. Those apparent cigar-boxes, as you might have seen from the strings, are holy manuscripts triumphant over the Pagan volume. This naÏve draughtsmanship, Signora, is just what makes them so precious and your petty bids so amazing. What is that you say, Signorina? Galla Placidia is still in possession? And two Roman Emperors with her? Nay, nay, a nine hundred and ninety-nine years’ lease is all that a reasonable ghost may desire; after that, every tomb must be esteemed a cenotaph; unless indeed the heirs will pay the unearned increment. Choose your sarcophagus, Signori, an Emperor’s sarcophagus is not in the market every day.

But I do not think that even the vulgarest millionaire would desire his ashes to dispossess the Doges of Venice, or at least not Giovanni Pesaro. The most romantic auctioneer might despair of disposing of that portal wall of the Frari which is sacred to the Gargantuan grotesquerie of his colossal memorial. Does the whole world hold a more baroque monument? Going, going—and how I wish I could say gone!—that portal upheld by bowed negro giants on gargoyled pedestals, with patches of black flesh gleaming through holes in their trousers. Item, one black skeleton surmounted by other unique curios, including two giraffes. Item, His Sublimity, the Doge himself, sitting up on his sarcophagus, holding up his hands as if in expostulation, gentlemen, against your inadequate bids. Item, a wealth of heroic figures, and an array of virtues and vices, all life-size. (Could be sold separately as absolutely incongruous with the negro portions of the monument.) Also, in the same lot if desired, two hovering angelets, holding a wreath, suitable for any Christian celebrity.

Alas, Barnum is no more and bidding languishes. And yet I do not see why the lot should not be knocked down. Who was this Pesaro that he should have the right to impose this horror on posterity? Why should generations of worshippers at the Frari be obsessed by this nightmare? There can be no sacredness in such demented mural testaments. And Time, who preserved this, while he has destroyed so many precious things, who shattered Leonardo’s horse and melted Michelangelo’s bronze Pope, is hereby shown of taste most abominable. History must get a better curator.

The black skeleton—I had not thought before that skeletons could be negro—flourishes a scroll which ascribes to the Doge the wisdom of Solomon and an implacable hostility against the foes of Christ, while a tablet held by one of the giant negroes announces

Aureum indeed! Doubtless only some faint sense that sheen and death are discrepant held back the Doges from being buried in golden caskets. The Doge lives again in this monument, boasts the Latin, and one can only reflect that if the dogal taste reached this depravity by the middle of the seventeenth century, actum est de republic might have been written long before Napoleon. Fortunately for the memory of the Pesaro family it finds a nobler, if no less bombastic expression, in the great Titian altar-piece, the Madonna di Casa Pesaro, in which the Queen of Heaven bends from her throne to beam at its episcopal representative, and St. Francis and St. Anthony grace by their presence the symbols of its victory over the Turk, while St. Peter pauses in his pious lection.

But the dead Doges lie mostly in S. S. Giovanni e Paolo, where their funeral service was performed. It is the very church for Their Sublimities—floods of light, pillared splendour, imposing proportions. Their tombs protrude from the walls, and their sculptured forms lie on their backs, their heads on pillows, their feet comfortably on cushions. Even when we are reminded of the finer things for which the Republic stood, there is an echo of material opulence.

Ubertatis anima! The soul of prodigal splendour! Even spiritual metaphor must harp on images of Magnificence.

But not every dead Doge consents to be couchant. Horatio Baleono, who died in 1617, “hostes post innumeros stratos,” has for monument a cavalier (of course, gilded) riding rough-shod over writhing forms and a broken-down cannon, and Pietro Mocenigo, whose mausoleum vaunts itself “ex hostium manubiis,” stands defiant on the summit of his sarcophagus, which is upborne by a trinity of figures.

What a family this Casa Mocenigo, with its record of Doges! Remove their memorials and mausolea from this church and you would half empty it of monuments. Tintoretto, no less than Titian, was dragged at their triumphal car. There is an Adoration of the Saviour at Vicenza, which might just as well be the adoration of the Doge, Alvise Mocenigo, who is in the centre of the picture. For though he is kneeling, he has all the air of sitting, and all the other figures—the worshippers, the angel flying towards him, and the Christ flying down to him—converge towards him like a stage-group towards the limelit hero. Compare all this posthumous self-assertion with the oblivion fallen on Marino Faliero, the decapitated Doge of Byron’s drama, whose dubious sarcophagus was shown to the poet in the outside wall of this church.

Nor could Padua, Venice’s neighbour, fall behind her in mortuary magnificence.

says a monument to Alessandro Contarini in the nave of the cathedral, a monument supported by six slaves and embracing a bas-relief of the fleet. Another in the worst dogal style exhibits Caterino Cornaro, a hero of the Cretan War (who died in 1674) in a full-bottomed wig and baggy knee-breeches, holding a scroll as if about to smack the universe with it. Sad is it to see so many “eternal monuments” of faded fames.

The Scaliger street-tombs in Verona are at least artistically laudable, however ironically their Christian ostensiveness compares with the record of the Family of the Ladder, whose rungs were murdered relatives. But even had Can Signorio lived the life of a saint, it would have needed a considerable conquest of his Christian humility before he could have commissioned that portentous tomb of his from Bonino da Campiglione. Knowing the Magnificent One, Bonino gave him solidity and superfluity, a plethora of niched and statued minarets of saints and virtues armed warriors, and bewildering pinnacles clothed with figures, all resting on six red marble columns springing from a base which supports the tomb, and is itself upborne by angels at each corner and adorned with pious bas-reliefs. And while the dead man lies in stone above his tomb, guarded by angels at head and foot, he also bestrides his horse and sports his spear on the uttermost pinnacle of his ladder-crested memorial, as though making the best of both worlds; which was indeed the general habit of the Magnificent, who desired likewise the beatitudes of the Meek, and often shed tears of sincere repentance when they could sin no more. Mastino della Scala’s tomb is more gilded and elegant than Can Signorio’s, though not less assertive and bi-worldly. And as for the tomb of Can Grande—“Dog the Great,” as Byron translated him in “The Age of Bronze,”—which is perched over the church door and soars up into a turret, it was—on the day I first saw it—provided with a long and dirty ladder for repairing purposes. So that I say Father Time—if he be a poor curator—is at least a fellow of infinite jest. One of his jests is to hound the Magnificent dead from pillar to post, from church to monastery, from crypt to chapel. In the grave there is rest? Fiddle-faddle! No body is safe from these chances of mortality. Stone walls do not a coffin make, nor iron bars a tomb. Call no body happy until it is burnt. After five centuries of rest Matilda of Tuscany was carried off from Mantua in a sort of mortuary elopement by her great admirer, Pope Urban VIII, and hidden away in the castle of S. Angelo, till she could be inhumed in St. Peter’s, and it was only the pride of Spoleto that saved Lippo Lippi from being sold to Florence. Napoleon, in suppressing churches, disestablished many an ancient corpse, and the pious families of Verona hastened to transport their sarcophagi to the church of S. Zeno on the outskirts. Hither must ride the dead Cavalli with their equine scutcheons, flying before the World-Conqueror on his white horse.

Dismemberment, too, befalls tombs at the hands of the merry jester. The friars of S. Maria delle Grazie who owed so much to the great Sforza Duke, broke up his monument and offered his effigy and his wife’s for sale. The more loyal Carthusians snapped up Cristoforo Solari’s beautiful sculptures for the beggarly price of thirty-eight ducats, and Lodovico and Beatrice in marble must leave their dust and make a last journey to Pavia. A last journey? Chi sa?

“Iterum et iterum translatis,” sighs the monument over the bones of Cino in Pistoja Cathedral, and who knows that the “pax tandem ossibus” is more than a sanguine aspiration? Cino was not the only Italian poet to be thus “translated,” though neither Petrarch nor Ariosto was “translated” so often. Petrarch indeed was rather pirated than “translated,” for his right arm was stolen from his sepulchre at ArquÀ for the Florentines, and the rest of him is now supposed to be in Madrid—a town which also holds that monarch of sanctity, Francesco di Borja, likewise minus an arm, for the GesÙ of Rome kept back that precious morsel of the Duke who had entered the kingdom of heaven by the rare gate of abdication.

But stranger than these mutations of mortality is the fact that Italy holds the ashes of our Shelley and Keats, as it held so much of the life of Byron and Browning. As if Rome had not riches and memories to super-satiety! A Protestant cemetery seems indeed out of key as much with these poets as with Rome, but that overshadowing Pyramid of Cestius restores the exotic touch, and violets and daisies blot out all but the religion of beauty, so that Shelley could write: “It might make me in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.” It is pleasant to think that only a year later Shelley, however exiguous his ashes, found in that sweet place the rest and re-union for which his cor cordium yearned.

With what a wonderful coast Shelley has mingled his memory—fig-trees, olives, palms, cactus, hawthorn, pines bent seaward, all running down the steep cliff. What enchanting harmonies they make with the glimpses of sea deep below, the white villages and campaniles, seen through their magic tangle. As you pass through the sunny dusty village roads, the girls seem to ripen out of the earth like grapes, both white and black, for there are golden-haired blondes as well as sun-kissed brunettes. They walk bare-footed, with water-jars poised on their heads, sometimes balancing great russet bundles of hay. And the old peasant women with Dantesque features sit spinning or lace-making at the doors of their cottages, as they have sat these three thousand years, without growing a wrinkle the more, if indeed there was ever room for another wrinkle on their dear corrugated faces. What earth lore as of aged oaks they must have sucked in during all these centuries!

It is here that one understands the Paganism of d’Annunzio, whose soul lies suffused in these sparkling infinities of sun and sea and sky, whose marmoreal language is woven from the rhythmic movement and balance of these sculptural bodies.

Viareggio, which holds Shelley’s monument, is a place of strange twisted plane-trees. The Piazza Shelley is a simple quiet square of low houses fronting a leafy garden and the sea. It leads out, curiously enough, from the Via Machiavelli. There is a bronze bust, which admirers cover with laurel, and an inscription which represents him as meditating here a final page to “Prometheus Unbound.” (Baedeker, comically mis-translating “una pagina postrema,” represents him as meditating “a posthumous page”!)

Not here, however, but in La Pineta is the place to muse upon Shelley. It is a thick, sandy pinewood with an avenue of planes. The pines are staggering about in all directions, drunk with wind and sun. Very silent was it as I sat here on a spring evening, watching the rosy clouds over the low hills and the mottled sunset over the sea. The birds ventured scarcely a twitter; they knew they could not vie with Shelley’s skylark.

Shelley’s epitaph in the Roman cemetery is like a soft music at the end of a Shakespeare tragedy.

What a curious and pacifying fusion of poetry and wit! It reconciles us to the passing back of this cosmic spirit into the elements by way of water. But what a jarring perpetuation of the world’s noises on the tombstone of Keats!

“This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who on his death-bed, in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious powers of his enemies, desired these words to be engraven on his tombstone: ‘Here lies one whose name was written in water.’”

Water again! But water as chaos and devourer. How ill all this turbulence accords with the marble serenity of his fame, a fame that so far as pure poetry is concerned stands side by side with Shakespeare’s! We are a good way now from the twenty-fourth of February, eighteen hundred and twenty-one. A few years more and Keats will have been silent a hundred years, and we know that his nightingale will sing for ever. What profits it, then, to prolong this mortuary bitterness, to hang this dirty British linen on the Roman grave? The museum is the place for this tombstone—I could whisk it thither like the Doge Pesaro’s wall. Will it save the next great poet from the malice of his enemies? Will they speak a dagger less? Not a bodkin! The next great poet, being great and a poet, will appeal in novel and unforeseeable ways, and be as little read and as harshly reviewed as the marvellous boy of Hampstead whose death at twenty-five is the greatest loss English literature has ever sustained. Were it not fittest, therefore, to celebrate the centenary of this death by changing his epitaph for a line of “Adonais”??—

The tragedy of Keats is sufficiently commemorated in Shelley’s preface and in the pages of literary history and in the doggerel of Byron.

And Byron lamented and marvelled

I do not share this discontent. To be snuffed out by an article is precisely the only dignified ending for a soul. This dualism of body and spirit which has been foisted upon us has degradations enough even in health. No union was ever worse assorted than this marriage of inconvenience by which a body with boorish tastes and disgusting habits is chained to an intelligent and fastidious soul. No wonder their relations are strained. Such cohabitation is scarcely legitimate. Were they only to keep their places, a reasonable modus vivendi might be patched up. The things of the spirit could exercise causation in the sphere of the spirit, and the things of the body would be restricted to their corporeal circle. But alas! the partners, like most married couples, interfere with each other and intrude on each other’s domain. Body and soul transfuse and percolate each other. Too much philosophising makes the liver sluggish, and a toothache tampers with philosophy. Despair slackens the blood and wine runs to eloquence. Body or soul cannot even die of its own infirmity; the twain must arrange a modus moriendi, each consenting to collapse of the other’s disease. Thus a body in going order may be stilled by a stroke of bad news, and a spiritual essence may pass away through a pox.

Think of the most powerful of the Popes, the head of Christendom, the excommunicator of the Kings of France and Spain, having to succumb to a fever; think of the great French writer, in whose brain the whole modern world mirrored itself, having to die of a gas from which even his dog recovered; think of the giant German philosopher, who had announced the starry infinitude of the moral law, degenerating into the imbecile who must tie and untie his necktie many times a minute. Surely it were worthier of man’s estate had Innocent III perished of an argument in favour of lay investiture, had Zola been snuffed out by an anti-Dreyfusard pamphlet or a romantic poem, had Kant succumbed to the scornful epigram of Herder, or even to the barkings of the priests’ dogs who had been given his name. And far worthier were it of a poet to die of a review than of a jaundice, of a criticism than a consumption. Infinitely more dignified was the death of Keats under the Quarterly than the death of Byron himself under a fever, which some trace to a microbe, itself possibly injected by a mosquito. That were an unpardonable oversight of Dame Nature, who in her democratic enthusiasm forgets that mosquitos are not men’s equals, and that these admirable insects should be blooded more economically. Assuredly the author of “The Vision of Judgment” would have preferred to die of a stanza or a sting-tailed epigram.

Dame Nature had the last word; but was Byron, foreseeing her crushing repartee, so absolutely unjustified in his criticisms and questionings of a Power that held him as lightly as the parasite on the hind leg of any of the fifty thousand species of beetles? For if Fate treads with equal foot on a Byron and a beetle, the bard may be forgiven if he takes it less christianly than the coleopteron.

Byron is “cheap” to-day in England, and while Greece celebrates the centenary of his arrival and Crete calls on his name, while Italy is full of his glory, his hotels and his piazzas, while Genoa is proud that he lived in Il Paradiso and the Armenian Monastery at Venice still cherishes the memory of his sojourn there to learn Armenian, and every spot he trod is similarly sacred, the Puritan critic reminds us that

Yes, we know, but when a poet is disapproving of the gods their standards matter less. And we are men, not gods, that their standards should be ours. Humani sumus, and nothing of Byron’s passion and pain can be alien from us. This tumult of the soul, who has escaped it? Not Wordsworth, assuredly, who wrote those lines. Only the fool hath not said in his heart, “There is no God.” Even Cardinal Manning said it on his death-bed. Not that death-bed conversions are worth anything. Matthew Arnold was apt to give us Wordsworth as the reposeful contrast to the bold, bad Byron. But the calmness of Wordsworth is only in his style, and if his questionings are cast in bronze, they were often forged in the same furnace as Byron’s, and fused through and through with the pain

Poets, even the austere, have to learn in suffering what they teach in song. Only the suffering is always so much clearer than what it teaches them. And then, as Heine says, comes Death, and with a clod of earth gags the mouth that sings and cries and questions.

Among these multitudinous Madonnas, and countless Crucifixions, and Entombments innumerable, who shall dare award the palm for nobility of conception? But there is a minor theme of Renaissance Art as to which I do not hesitate. It is the PietÀ theme, but with angels replacing or supplementing the Madonna who cherishes the dead Christ, and it is significant that the finest treatment of it I have seen comes from the greatest craftsman who treated it—to wit, Giovanni Bellini. His Cristo Sorretto da Angioli you will find painted on wood—a tavola—in the Palazzo Communale of Rimini. The Christ lies limp but tranquil, in the peace, not the rigidity, of death, and four little angels stand by, one of them half hidden by the dead figure. The exquisite appeal of this picture, the uniqueness of the conception, lies in the sweet sorrow of the little angels—a sorrow as of a dog or a child that cannot fathom the greatness of the tragedy, only knows dumbly that here is matter for sadness. The little angels regard the wounds with grave infantile concern. Sacred tragedy is here fused with idyllic poetry in a manner to which I know no parallel in any other painter. The sweet perfection of Giovanni Bellini, too suave for the grim central theme of Christianity, here finds triumphant and enchanting justification.

It is perhaps worth while tracing how every other painter’s handling of the theme that I have chanced on fails to reach this lyric pathos.

Bellini himself did not perhaps quite reach it again, though he reaches very noble heights in two pictures (one now in London and the other in Berlin), in which the reduction in the number of angels to two makes even for enhancement of the restful simplicity, while in the Berlin picture there is a touching intimacy of uncomprehending consolation in the pressing of the little angelic cheeks against the dead face. But the fact that in both pictures one angel seems to understand more or to be more exercised than the other contributes a disturbing complicacy. The serene unity is, indeed, preserved by Bellini in his PietÀ in the Museo Correr of Venice. But here the three young angels supporting the body are merely at peace—there is nothing of that sweet wistfulness.

For a contrary reason the woodland flavour is equally absent from its neighbour, a picture by an unknown painter of the Paduan school. Here the peace is exchanged, not for poetry but tragedy. The Christ is erect in his tomb, and the two haloed baby angels who uphold his arms are the one weeping, the other horror-struck. The horror is accentuated and the poetry still further lessened in an anonymous painting in a chapel of S. Anastasia in Verona, where boy angels are positively roaring with grief. Nor is the poetry augmented in that other anonymous painting in the Palazzo Ducale of Venice, where one angel kisses the dead hand and the other the blood-stained linen at the foot. In Girolamo da Treviso’s picture in the Brera one child angel examines the bloody palm and the other lifts up the drooping left arm with its little frock. Great round tears run down their faces, which are swollen and ugly with grief. Still more tragic, even to grotesquerie, is an old fresco fragment in an underground church in Brescia, where the little angels are catching the sacred blood in cups—those cups invented by Perugino and borrowed even by Raphael. Francesco Bissolo, in the Academy of Venice, preserves the tranquillity of Bellini, but by making the angels older loses not only the seductive naÏvetÉ but the whole naturalness, for these angels are old enough to know better, one feels. They have no right to such callousness. Raphael’s father in his picture in the cathedral of Urbino escapes this pitfall, for his adult angels bend solicitously over the Christ and support his arms from above. But Lorenzo Lotto, though he gives us innocent child-angels, tumbles into an analogous trap, for he forgets that by adding a Madonna and a Magdalen in bitter tears he transforms these untroubled little angels into little devils, who have not even the curiosity to wonder what in heaven’s name their mortal elders are weeping over. In Cariani’s so-called Deposizione at Ravenna one little angel does weep in imitation of the mortals, leaning his wet cheek on the Christ’s dead hand—“tears such as angels weep”—but he only repeats the human tragedy, and might as well be a little boy. Two older angels howl and grimace in Marco Zoppo’s picture in the Palazzo Almerici of Pesaro, while the haloed, long-ringleted head of the Christ droops with slightly open mouth and a strange smile as provoking as Mona Lisa’s. Francia in the National Gallery gives us a red-eyed Madonna with one calm and one compassionate angel, and Zaganelli in the Brera vies with Bellini in the vague, tender wonderment of the child angels who lift up the arms, but the picture is second-rate and the angels are little girls with bare arms and puffed sleeves. Nor is it a happy innovation to show us the legs of the Christ sprawling across the tomb.

Marco Palmezzano, with inferior beauty, also trenches on Bellini’s ground; but not only is the Christ sitting up, not quite dead, but one of the two child angels is calling out as for aid, so that the restful finality of Bellini is vanished. Still nearer to the Bellini idea approaches a picture in the Academy of Venice attributed to Marco Basaiti and an unknown Lombardian. But if this avoids tragedy, the turn is too much in the direction of comedy. The child angels are made still more infantine, so that there is neither horror nor even perturbation, merely a shade of surprise at so passive a figure. One plays with the Christ’s hair, the other with his feet—the Blake-like tenderness is not absent, but the poetry of this utter unconsciousness is not so penetrating as the wistful yearning of the Bellini angels before some dim, unsounded ocean of tragedy. This precise note I did, indeed, once catch in a corner of Domenichino’s Madonna del Rosario, where a baby surveys the crown of thorns; but this is just a side-show in a joyous, thickly populated picture, and the Christ is not dead, but a live bambino, who showers down roses on the lower world of martyrdom and sorrow.

He is almost too dead in the fading fresco of the little low-vaulted, whitewashed, ancient church of S. Maria Infra Portas in Foligno. A great gash mutilates his side, his head, horribly fallen back, lies on the Madonna’s lap, his legs and arms droop. The mother’s long hair hangs down from her halo, she clasps her hands in agony, and a child angel on either side looks on commiseratingly. Strange to say, this conserves the poetry, despite the horror, though the horror removes it out of comparison with Bellini’s handling.

In Genoa I found three more variations on the theme, two in the cathedral, the first with four angels, all gravely concerned, and the second with quite a crowd of little boys and angels, nearly all weeping. One of the little angels has taken off the crown of thorns—a good touch in a bad picture. The third variant is by Luca Cambiaso, and in the Palazzo Rosso, with a single agitated boy angel. A PietÀ in Pistoja takes its main pathos from its lonely position on the staircase of the fusty town hall: a last rose of summer, all its companions are faded and gone, all save one pretty lady saint blooming in a vast ocean of plaster. Even its own Madonna and Apostles are half obliterated; but the boy angel remains in a curious posture: he has got his head betwixt the legs of the Christ, and with his arms helps to sustain the drooping figure. Still more original touches appear in Andrea Utili’s picture in Faenza. Here the Christ has his arms crossed, and his halo, tilted back over his crown of thorns, gleams weirdly in red and gold, and on his tomb rest pincers and a hammer. The two youthful angels are deeply moved; one holds a cross and the other three nails.

If any painter could vie in enchantment with Giovanni Bellini it is Crivelli, and, indeed, there are fascinating things in his PietÀ in the Brera, idyllic sweetness in the angels, original decorative touches in the book and burning taper, and masterly imagination in the ghastly lack of vitality with which each dead hand of the Christ droops on the tender living hand of an angel. Had only the angels been a little younger, this would have been as sweetly lyrical as Bellini. From Michelangelo we have only a sketch of the subject, with his wingless child angels, over whom stands the Mater Dolorosa with useless outspread arms, that should have been helping the poor little things to support their burden. In Guido Reni’s PietÀ at Bologna her hands droop in folded resignation, while one angel weeps and one adores and pities. I fear the presence of the Madonna and other mortals destroys the peculiar celestial poetry, though of course the conjunction of mortals and angels brings a poetry of its own.

Tura’s treatment of the theme in Vienna I have not seen. But Vivarini breaks out in a new direction. His two angels fly from right and left towards the tomb, under full canvas, so to speak. But it is a pattern et prÆterea nihil. More poetic in its originality is a picture of the Veronese school in the Brera, showing us two baby angels, half curious, half apprehensive, unfolding the Christ’s winding-sheet. But it is a dark, poorly painted picture. Another new invention is Garofalo’s in the same gallery. He gives us a crowd of commonplace weeping figures in a picturesque landscape, and his angel is a sweet little cherub aloft on a pillar over the heads of the mourning mob. But the angel might be a mere architectural decoration, for all his effect upon the picture.

Thus have we seen almost every possible variation tried—adult angels and young angels and baby angels, calm angels and callous angels, lachrymose angels and vociferous angels, helpless angels and hospital angels, boy angels and girl angels, and only one artist has seen the sole permutation which extracts the quintessential poetry of the theme—the high celestial tragedy unadulterated by human grief, and sweetened yet deepened by angels too young to understand and too old to be unperturbed, too troubled for play and too tranquil for tears.

And it is to that incarnation of evil, Sigismondo Malatesta, that we owe this masterpiece of lyric simplicity, for ’twas the Magnificent Monster himself that commissioned it—His rolling and reverberating Magnificence, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta di Pandolfo—whose polyphonous, orotund name and the black and white elephants of whose crest pervade the splendid temple which he remodelled at Rimini for the glory of God. And lest the world should forget ’twas he to whom heaven owed the delicious Pagan reliefs by the pillars, or the now-faded ultramarine and starry gold of the chapels, each first pilaster bears in Greek the due inscription:

(Pray do not pause here—epigraphs, like telegrams, are not punctuated)

No less reflexive was his apotheosis of the frail Isotta, of whom he first made an honest woman and then a goddess. What wonder if his critics carped at the “DisottÆ,” the “divine Isotta,” he wrote over her tomb, in lieu of the conventional “DominÆ IsottÆ BonÆ MemoriÆ”! But one must do the bold, bad condottiere the justice to say that while two angels bear this inscription over her in gold, his own tomb is comparatively modest. It is Isotta whose tomb is supported by shield-bearing elephants and culminates in flourishes as of elephants’ trunks, Isotta who stands over her altar in the guise of a gold-winged angel. Malatesta’s patronage of Giovanni Bellini was not his only contribution to the arts, for a cluster of poets found hospitality at his court and burial at his temple—with a careful inscription that it was Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta di Pandolfo who buried them—though these seem to have plied the trade of Laureate, if I may judge from the volume published at Paris, “L’Isotteo.” I cannot pretend to be read in Porcellio de’ Pandone or Tommaso Seneca or Basinio of Parma. But Bellini’s tavola suffices to make me say with riddling Samson, “Out of the strong cometh forth sweetness.”

For this is perhaps the teleological purpose of the Magnificent Ones, to play the MÆcenas to some starveling artist or penurious poet. There is in the santuario of the Malatesta temple a fresco of this Sigismondo. He is seen in the flush of youth, gay in a brocaded mantle and red hose, but somewhat disconcertingly on his knees before a crowned figure—his patron saint according to some, the Emperor Sigismondo more probably. Let us call it that sovereign fate to which even megaphonious Magnificence must bow. Almost divine in his lifetime, within a few years the Magnificent One’s character commences to decay, as if that too could not resist the corruption of death. Happy the prince of whom some not malodorous shred of reputation remains a century after his death. The evil that men do lives after them, the good they have not done is oft interred with their bones.

Yes, there is a pathos in the Magnificent Ones. When I consider how their autocosm ensnared them with a sense of their own perdurability, lured them into engaging painters and architects and statuaries to express their triumphant sense of timeless energising, and then ebbed away from them, leaving them putrid carbonates, phosphates, and silicates, while the work of Beauty lived on and lives, having used these momentarily swollen creatures as its channel and tool, then I find it in me to pity these frog-bulls of egotism, so cruelly bemocked and deluded.

Before parting with the PietÀ theme I would remark that in the Italian galleries the name PietÀ is often—with apparent inaccuracy—given to pictures of the dead Christ alone in his tomb. One of the most curious pictures of this sort I came upon in the gallery of Faenza, where Christ stands in his tomb, yet still nailed on the Cross, from either end of which depends a scourge. I found the same design in the centre of a little stone shield over a building marked as the “Mons Pietatis” of Faenza. And this set me speculating whether such an image as a symbol of the Monte di PietÀ was due to the mere suggestiveness of the word PietÀ, or whether there was a more mystical connection implied between the Crucifixion and the loan-offices instituted in Italy by Bernardino da Feltre to frustrate the usury of the Jews. It is the Monte di PietÀ of Treviso that shelters the Entombment ascribed to Giorgione. It seems a long way from Golgotha to the pawn-shop, yet we still talk of pledges being redeemed.

“Pictures

Of this Italian master and that Dutchman.”

James Shirley: The Lady of Pleasure.