Pictures From Italy

by Dickens, Chales

refuse, but for such things being thrown anywhere and everywhere in

  Rome, and favouring no particular sort of locality. We got into a

  kind of wash-house, belonging to a dwelling-house on this spot; and

  standing there in an old cart, and on a heap of cartwheels piled

  against the wall, looked, through a large grated window, at the

  scaffold, and straight down the street beyond it until, in

  consequence of its turning off abruptly to the left, our

  perspective was brought to a sudden termination, and had a

  corpulent officer, in a cocked hat, for its crowning feature.

  Nine o'clock struck, and ten o'clock struck, and nothing happened.

  All the bells of all the churches rang as usual. A little

  parliament of dogs assembled in the open space, and chased each

  other, in and out among the soldiers. Fierce-looking Romans of the

  lowest class, in blue cloaks, russet cloaks, and rags uncloaked,

  came and went, and talked together. Women and children fluttered,

  on the skirts of the scanty crowd. One large muddy spot was left

  quite bare, like a bald place on a man's head. A cigar-merchant,

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  with an earthen pot of charcoal ashes in one hand, went up and

  down, crying his wares. A pastry-merchant divided his attention

  between the scaffold and his customers. Boys tried to climb up

  walls, and tumbled down again. Priests and monks elbowed a passage

  for themselves among the people, and stood on tiptoe for a sight of

  the knife: then went away. Artists, in inconceivable hats of the

  middle-ages, and beards (thank Heaven!) of no age at all, flashed

  picturesque scowls about them from their stations in the throng.

  One gentleman (connected with the fine arts, I presume) went up and

  down in a pair of Hessian-boots, with a red beard hanging down on

  his breast, and his long and bright red hair, plaited into two

  tails, one on either side of his head, which fell over his

  shoulders in front of him, very nearly to his waist, and were

  carefully entwined and braided!

  Eleven o'clock struck and still nothing happened. A rumour got

  about, among the crowd, that the criminal would not confess; in

  which case, the priests would keep him until the Ave Maria

  (sunset); for it is their merciful custom never finally to turn the

  crucifix away from a man at that pass, as one refusing to be

  shriven, and consequently a sinner abandoned of the Saviour, until

  then. People began to drop off. The officers shrugged their

  shoulders and looked doubtful. The dragoons, who came riding up

  below our window, every now and then, to order an unlucky hackneycoach

  or cart away, as soon as it had comfortably established

  itself, and was covered with exulting people (but never before),

  became imperious, and quick-tempered. The bald place hadn't a

  straggling hair upon it; and the corpulent officer, crowning the

  perspective, took a world of snuff.

  Suddenly, there was a noise of trumpets. 'Attention!' was among

  the foot-soldiers instantly. They were marched up to the scaffold

  and formed round it. The dragoons galloped to their nearer

  stations too. The guillotine became the centre of a wood of

  bristling bayonets and shining sabres. The people closed round

  nearer, on the flank of the soldiery. A long straggling stream of

  men and boys, who had accompanied the procession from the prison,

  came pouring into the open space. The bald spot was scarcely

  distinguishable from the rest. The cigar and pastry-merchants

  resigned all thoughts of business, for the moment, and abandoning

  themselves wholly to pleasure, got good situations in the crowd.

  The perspective ended, now, in a troop of dragoons. And the

  corpulent officer, sword in hand, looked hard at a church close to

  him, which he could see, but we, the crowd, could not.

  After a short delay, some monks were seen approaching to the

  scaffold from this church; and above their heads, coming on slowly

  and gloomily, the effigy of Christ upon the cross, canopied with

  black. This was carried round the foot of the scaffold, to the

  front, and turned towards the criminal, that he might see it to the

  last. It was hardly in its place, when he appeared on the

  platform, bare-footed; his hands bound; and with the collar and

  neck of his shirt cut away, almost to the shoulder. A young man -

  six-and-twenty - vigorously made, and well-shaped. Face pale;

  small dark moustache; and dark brown hair.

  He had refused to confess, it seemed, without first having his wife

  brought to see him; and they had sent an escort for her, which had

  occasioned the delay.

  He immediately kneeled down, below the knife. His neck fitting

  into a hole, made for the purpose, in a cross plank, was shut down,

  by another plank above; exactly like the pillory. Immediately

  below him was a leathern bag. And into it his head rolled

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  instantly.

  The executioner was holding it by the hair, and walking with it

  round the scaffold, showing it to the people, before one quite knew

  that the knife had fallen heavily, and with a rattling sound.

  When it had travelled round the four sides of the scaffold, it was

  set upon a pole in front - a little patch of black and white, for

  the long street to stare at, and the flies to settle on. The eyes

  were turned upward, as if he had avoided the sight of the leathern

  bag, and looked to the crucifix. Every tinge and hue of life had

  left it in that instant. It was dull, cold, livid, wax. The body

  also.

  There was a great deal of blood. When we left the window, and went

  close up to the scaffold, it was very dirty; one of the two men who

  were throwing water over it, turning to help the other lift the

  body into a shell, picked his way as through mire. A strange

  appearance was the apparent annihilation of the neck. The head was

  taken off so close, that it seemed as if the knife had narrowly

  escaped crushing the jaw, or shaving off the ear; and the body

  looked as if there were nothing left above the shoulder.

  Nobody cared, or was at all affected. There was no manifestation

  of disgust, or pity, or indignation, or sorrow. My empty pockets

  were tried, several times, in the crowd immediately below the

  scaffold, as the corpse was being put into its coffin. It was an

  ugly, filthy, careless, sickening spectacle; meaning nothing but

  butchery beyond the momentary interest, to the one wretched actor.

  Yes! Such a sight has one meaning and one warning. Let me not

  forget it. The speculators in the lottery, station themselves at

  favourable points for counting the gouts of blood that spirt out,

  here or there; and buy that number. It is pretty sure to have a

  run upon it.

  The body was carted away in due time, the knife cleansed, the

  scaffold taken down, and all the hideous apparatus removed. The

  executioner: an outlaw EX OFFICIO (what a satire on the

  Punishment!) who dare not, for his life, cross the Bridge of St.

&
nbsp; Angelo but to do his work: retreated to his lair, and the show was

  over.

  At the head of the collections in the palaces of Rome, the Vatican,

  of course, with its treasures of art, its enormous galleries, and

  staircases, and suites upon suites of immense chambers, ranks

  highest and stands foremost. Many most noble statues, and

  wonderful pictures, are there; nor is it heresy to say that there

  is a considerable amount of rubbish there, too. When any old piece

  of sculpture dug out of the ground, finds a place in a gallery

  because it is old, and without any reference to its intrinsic

  merits: and finds admirers by the hundred, because it is there,

  and for no other reason on earth: there will be no lack of

  objects, very indifferent in the plain eyesight of any one who

  employs so vulgar a property, when he may wear the spectacles of

  Cant for less than nothing, and establish himself as a man of taste

  for the mere trouble of putting them on.

  I unreservedly confess, for myself, that I cannot leave my natural

  perception of what is natural and true, at a palace-door, in Italy

  or elsewhere, as I should leave my shoes if I were travelling in

  the East. I cannot forget that there are certain expressions of

  face, natural to certain passions, and as unchangeable in their

  nature as the gait of a lion, or the flight of an eagle. I cannot

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  dismiss from my certain knowledge, such commonplace facts as the

  ordinary proportion of men's arms, and legs, and heads; and when I

  meet with performances that do violence to these experiences and

  recollections, no matter where they may be, I cannot honestly

  admire them, and think it best to say so; in spite of high critical

  advice that we should sometimes feign an admiration, though we have

  it not.

  Therefore, I freely acknowledge that when I see a jolly young

  Waterman representing a cherubim, or a Barclay and Perkins's

  Drayman depicted as an Evangelist, I see nothing to commend or

  admire in the performance, however great its reputed Painter.

  Neither am I partial to libellous Angels, who play on fiddles and

  bassoons, for the edification of sprawling monks apparently in

  liquor. Nor to those Monsieur Tonsons of galleries, Saint Francis

  and Saint Sebastian; both of whom I submit should have very

  uncommon and rare merits, as works of art, to justify their

  compound multiplication by Italian Painters.

  It seems to me, too, that the indiscriminate and determined

  raptures in which some critics indulge, is incompatible with the

  true appreciation of the really great and transcendent works. I

  cannot imagine, for example, how the resolute champion of

  undeserving pictures can soar to the amazing beauty of Titian's

  great picture of the Assumption of the Virgin at Venice; or how the

  man who is truly affected by the sublimity of that exquisite

  production, or who is truly sensible of the beauty of Tintoretto's

  great picture of the Assembly of the Blessed in the same place, can

  discern in Michael Angelo's Last Judgment, in the Sistine chapel,

  any general idea, or one pervading thought, in harmony with the

  stupendous subject. He who will contemplate Raphael's masterpiece,

  the Transfiguration, and will go away into another chamber of that

  same Vatican, and contemplate another design of Raphael,

  representing (in incredible caricature) the miraculous stopping of

  a great fire by Leo the Fourth - and who will say that he admires

  them both, as works of extraordinary genius - must, as I think, be

  wanting in his powers of perception in one of the two instances,

  and, probably, in the high and lofty one.

  It is easy to suggest a doubt, but I have a great doubt whether,

  sometimes, the rules of art are not too strictly observed, and

  whether it is quite well or agreeable that we should know

  beforehand, where this figure will be turning round, and where that

  figure will be lying down, and where there will be drapery in

  folds, and so forth. When I observe heads inferior to the subject,

  in pictures of merit, in Italian galleries, I do not attach that

  reproach to the Painter, for I have a suspicion that these great

  men, who were, of necessity, very much in the hands of monks and

  priests, painted monks and priests a great deal too often. I

  frequently see, in pictures of real power, heads quite below the

  story and the painter: and I invariably observe that those heads

  are of the Convent stamp, and have their counterparts among the

  Convent inmates of this hour; so, I have settled with myself that,

  in such cases, the lameness was not with the painter, but with the

  vanity and ignorance of certain of his employers, who would be

  apostles - on canvas, at all events.

  The exquisite grace and beauty of Canova's statues; the wonderful

  gravity and repose of many of the ancient works in sculpture, both

  in the Capitol and the Vatican; and the strength and fire of many

  others; are, in their different ways, beyond all reach of words.

  They are especially impressive and delightful, after the works of

  Bernini and his disciples, in which the churches of Rome, from St.

  Peter's downward, abound; and which are, I verily believe, the most

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  detestable class of productions in the wide world. I would

  infinitely rather (as mere works of art) look upon the three

  deities of the Past, the Present, and the Future, in the Chinese

  Collection, than upon the best of these breezy maniacs; whose every

  fold of drapery is blown inside-out; whose smallest vein, or

  artery, is as big as an ordinary forefinger; whose hair is like a

  nest of lively snakes; and whose attitudes put all other

  extravagance to shame. Insomuch that I do honestly believe, there

  can be no place in the world, where such intolerable abortions,

  begotten of the sculptor's chisel, are to be found in such

  profusion, as in Rome.

  There is a fine collection of Egyptian antiquities, in the Vatican;

  and the ceilings of the rooms in which they are arranged, are

  painted to represent a starlight sky in the Desert. It may seem an

  odd idea, but it is very effective. The grim, half-human monsters

  from the temples, look more grim and monstrous underneath the deep

  dark blue; it sheds a strange uncertain gloomy air on everything -

  a mystery adapted to the objects; and you leave them, as you find

  them, shrouded in a solemn night.

  In the private palaces, pictures are seen to the best advantage.

  There are seldom so many in one place that the attention need

  become distracted, or the eye confused. You see them very

  leisurely; and are rarely interrupted by a crowd of people. There

  are portraits innumerable, by Titian, and Rembrandt, and Vandyke;

  heads by Guido, and Domenichino, and Carlo Dolci; various subjects

  by Correggio, and Murillo, and Raphael, and Salvator Rosa, and

  Spagnoletto - many of which it would be difficult, indeed, to

  praise too hig
hly, or to praise enough; such is their tenderness

  and grace; their noble elevation, purity, and beauty.

  The portrait of Beatrice di Cenci, in the Palazzo Berberini, is a

  picture almost impossible to be forgotten. Through the

  transcendent sweetness and beauty of the face, there is a something

  shining out, that haunts me. I see it now, as I see this paper, or

  my pen. The head is loosely draped in white; the light hair

  falling down below the linen folds. She has turned suddenly

  towards you; and there is an expression in the eyes - although they

  are very tender and gentle - as if the wildness of a momentary

  terror, or distraction, had been struggled with and overcome, that

  instant; and nothing but a celestial hope, and a beautiful sorrow,

  and a desolate earthly helplessness remained. Some stories say

  that Guido painted it, the night before her execution; some other

  stories, that he painted it from memory, after having seen her, on

  her way to the scaffold. I am willing to believe that, as you see

  her on his canvas, so she turned towards him, in the crowd, from

  the first sight of the axe, and stamped upon his mind a look which

  he has stamped on mine as though I had stood beside him in the

  concourse. The guilty palace of the Cenci: blighting a whole

  quarter of the town, as it stands withering away by grains: had

  that face, to my fancy, in its dismal porch, and at its black,

  blind windows, and flitting up and down its dreary stairs, and

  growing out of the darkness of the ghostly galleries. The History

  is written in the Painting; written, in the dying girl's face, by

  Nature's own hand. And oh! how in that one touch she puts to

  flight (instead of making kin) the puny world that claim to be

  related to her, in right of poor conventional forgeries!

  I saw in the Palazzo Spada, the statue of Pompey; the statue at

  whose base Caesar fell. A stern, tremendous figure! I imagined

  one of greater finish: of the last refinement: full of delicate

  touches: losing its distinctness, in the giddy eyes of one whose

  blood was ebbing before it, and settling into some such rigid

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  majesty as this, as Death came creeping over the upturned face.

  The excursions in the neighbourhood of Rome are charming, and would

  be full of interest were it only for the changing views they

  afford, of the wild Campagna. But, every inch of ground, in every