The Milliets, VIII: A Study Trip to Italy

The Milliet Family

I

MILAN

AUGUST–SEPTEMBER 1868

First painting: a Hamadryad. — Orsel and Perrin. — Second journey to Italy. — Luini at Milan and Saronno. — Letters of two young artists. — Childish metaphysics.

1

During the summer of 1868, Paul M. remained in Paris to work on his first painting, which depicted a Hamadryad. His mother and his sisters had gone to Geneva; his father was resting at the Colony of Condé.

Paul M. to his sister Louise

Paris, 10 August 68.

I went to M. Gleyre’s and I expect him tomorrow. Perhaps I shall be expecting him for a long time. I paid him a long visit and I had great pleasure in hearing him speak of art. But he is very witty, very mocking, and I am so intimidated that I must seem to him as stupid as a goose.

He has just finished two charming little paintings. One depicts two young Greek women bathing a child in a great cup of red marble. In the background one glimpses trees, between the columns of a beautiful Ionic portico. The other painting is a woman seen from behind playing the double flute, a replica of one of the figures of his decorative panel Minerva and the Graces. The site is of a ravishing freshness, solitary without anything somber;

one would like to stop at the foot of those beautiful gray rocks and listen… The young girl plays her sweetest airs to a blue bird, perched on the branch of a plane tree: “the blue bird of youth,” M. Gleyre explained to me. He likes to hide a poetic idea in his painting, and of all the noble or tender sentiments that he knows how to express with so much charm, there is one that he is more inclined to vary in a thousand ways, and that is the sweet regret for the beautiful years gone by. The first painting is in America, what a pity! the other has been bought by Goupil; we shall at least have the photograph of it. M. Gleyre is to come tomorrow to give me a consultation for “my daughter.” I should like him to come, and yet I expect him only with trembling. The patient still retains the traces of her stiff neck and I am dealing with a terrible physician. What if he should cut off her arms or legs, what if he should cut off her head! I shudder at it. — I intend to spend next winter in Italy; if my painting is not ready, well, the exhibition of 1869 will have to resign itself to doing without it. M. Gleyre approves of me. Every year, after the Salon, a good bath of Italy to wash one’s ideas — that must be very healthy.

Paul to his young sister

Paris, 15 August 68.

Nothing new to announce to you, except some very sad things: first the fatal demise of one of the fish of your aquarium, then the grievous loss of one of your eels, both deceased on a day of storm. What would you have?… they were our mortals!

As I ought to have expected, M. Gleyre did not come; he has no doubt forgotten me again. I shall go tomorrow to M. Perrin’s. I have great need of advice, for I really no longer know what I am doing.

Dear father,

Paris, same date.

The day is so gray and so sad that my ideas fall into unison with it, and my painting does not seem to me a masterpiece. M. Perrin is to come and see it, I tremble in advance. What he said to me is not calculated to encourage me: he believes that my talent will be like a door left ajar that little by little

closes again. Modesty aside, it seems to me nonetheless that I am rather making progress; I am not yet falling into second childhood. But, I know it well, M. Perrin has very exclusive principles, with which one had better not trifle. Although I do not entirely share his way of seeing things (especially when he says that I am a door left ajar), his ideas are nonetheless worthy of being meditated upon. I should have many things to answer him, but my age does not permit me to argue with him. — His system is a singular mixture of philosophical and religious ideas, which he pushes in painting as far as the allegorical rebus, joined to a sort of excessive realism. He does not admit, for example, that I should take two models for my Hamadryad; one must choose a single one and copy it with rigorous exactitude, qualities and defects alike. Courbet would not have said otherwise. — I gently objected that my Hamadryad did not seem to me bound to resemble the first model that came along. “Then you should not have chosen that subject!” — Perhaps he is right. (1) It is permitted only to a master sure of himself to dare to bring out of his brain an idea armed at all points. If I continued in the idealist path, into which I have somewhat madly engaged myself, I should soon fall into mannerism. It is always to nature that one must return, and, like Antaeus, one quickly loses one’s strength when the ground gives way beneath one’s feet. (2) I believe nonetheless

(1) He was right. (2) I took up the same idea again in some verses entitled:

REALIST ART

The ideal is far off, the real is alive. Observe with love and, in your humble sphere, Drive your furrow straight and strive to perfect it. From the wild dung-heap [save] the pure fire and the child.

Do not abandon yourself to an inconstant dream. Art does not dwell at the top of the Earth: If it ceases to draw from the breast of its mother It casts about in vain, and sits down, [turned] to the East.

Be simple and fear nothing. All is true in Homer; Imitate the hero who slew the Chimera. Nourish yourself on nature and on reality.

Greek art transfigures the ugliness of the old world, Pegasus issues from the blood of the foul Gorgon. From the horrible a pure beauty can be born.

that liberty and the power to imagine remain the most beautiful privileges of the artist. — Like Orsel, M. Perrin makes little account of instinct, of feeling, and of creative imagination. For him the Beautiful is a thing that is reasoned out and analyzed; the painter must weigh everything, calculate everything, will everything. The will, that is Orsel’s great quality; it sufficed him to produce works which, to be sure, are not banal, for they manifest a high intelligence, a stubborn labor, a great science and a rare energy; but they remain frozen; they lack that warm life, that indefinable charm which will always escape analysis.

M. Gleyre’s ideas are much broader, though also very singular. It is impossible for me to guess his opinion in advance. What a pity that a man of such taste and of such good counsel should take so little interest in what I do. He had promised to come and did not come. Now he is in Switzerland.

I hope to be able to leave for Italy as soon as mama returns.

Félix Milliet to his son

The Colony, 20 August 68.

I regret for your sake, my dear friend, that Gleyre left without seeing your painting, but above all that he takes no greater interest in a pupil who has remained faithful to him (1) and who, I hope, will one day do him honor.

I do not share, you may well believe, M. Perrin’s ill-sounding opinion concerning you, and what you tell me of his theories astonishes me to the last degree. I see with pleasure that you are not tempted to bite at his realist system. As for Orsel, if, to the will that made his strength, he had joined that je ne sais quoi which is called human, creative feeling, or better, inspiration, he would have been a greater painter. Labor, reasoning, analysis are excellent

(1) At the time of the founding of the free and official studios of the École des Beaux-Arts.

qualities, even necessary ones, but they neither exclude nor replace imagination, that is to say the “matrix” force. One of the most precious qualities of the artist is to mark his works with his own stamp, less by the execution than by the profound expression of his feeling.

2

Leaving my painting unfinished, I decided to set out on a study trip to Italy. — There then began a long correspondence between my mother, my sister, and myself. In the extracts I give of it here, one will excuse the maternal pride — even exaggerated, it always retains something touching — the ingenuous vanity of a girl of 13 or 14, and the doctoral tone of the young professor. This self-assurance belongs to their age. One must not reproach artists too severely for the confidence they have in themselves; it is a precious stimulant for work. It is so good to believe and to hope! If a painter had no illusions at the beginning of his career, he would never do anything. My mother, seeing me somewhat discouraged, wrote to me:

Paris, Sept. 68.

… I went into your studio to water your little oak trees; I cannot tell you what a good impression your Hamadryad made on me; the head is charming; the slight broadening of the shoulders has made her look much better in health; she can await your return in all security, you will see her again with great pleasure.

Paul to his mother

Milan, Sept. 68.

… What you tell me of my Hamadryad gave me pleasure, although I know very well that you speak of it thus in order to

restore my courage. I had good intentions, and that is already something; so many people have bad ones.

I should have liked to show that the nude can be chaste, and to personify in a single ideal figure the impressions I feel in the depths of the woods. But how am I to explain all that to you? Impressions are subtle things; they refuse analysis and evaporate as soon as one tries to formulate them. The man of letters does not always know how to speak; the Painter, on the contrary, who sees reality with much more precision, can only express certain abstract ideas by forms and colors, that is to say in a manner at once more profound and more vague.

Paul M. to his mother

Milan, September 68.

… After having visited a few churches, I have taken up residence at the Ambrosian Library and at the Brera. I have obtained permission to make sketches, despite the exhibition of living artists which unfortunately hides, without replacing them, a great number of paintings of the masters. My four words of Italian have not been useless to me, and as I took care to implore the pardon of Monsieur the Curator, all the doors are open to me.

In Italy, each city has its painter. It is at Milan and at Saronno that one must study Luini. It was there that he passed his long life, covering the walls with his easy frescoes. When you come here, you will see whether I am wrong to be enthusiastic. (1)

Luini’s frescoes seem to me superior to his paintings. He is a marvelous improviser. Evi-

(1) Having made several journeys to Italy, in order to avoid repetitions, I am completing the letters of 1868 with a few others more recent. These additions are printed in larger characters, that is to say in the character of the ordinary narrative and not in that of the letters and citations.

dently he did not escape the influence of Leonardo — how is one to withdraw from the domination of such a genius? — He often borrowed from him a few traits of his ideal of beauty; the types of his young women and of his adolescents are exempt from weaknesses; but the differences leap to the eye, and I am astonished that connoisseurs were able for so long to attribute to Vinci certain works of Luini, such as the Modesty and Vanity, for example.

Leonardo is unsatisfied desire, the restless spirit that nothing could satisfy. Was it not he who said: “I have wept for what I desired, as soon as I had it.” The soul of Luini is calm, happy, and serene, a little less ingenuous perhaps than that of Fra Angelico, but without the least affectation. In him, as in Raphael, grace is spontaneous and natural. His works were born without effort, without hesitation, without searching; they are the necessary flowers and fruits of his genius. Hence a sort of joyousness in fecundity that charms us. Luini is never violent, nor impetuous, nor sublime, nor even voluptuous; he is calm and gentle; he is tender, but without any languor, without any fever; he is not suave — I should like to reserve that word to characterize the paintings of Correggio. His smile has nothing mysterious about it, nor anything perverse.

His compositions present an inexhaustible variety of attitudes and of unexpected arrangements, because he draws his inspiration directly from nature. He has no prejudice of school, he disdains that symmetry, that learned but artificial poise which has been fixed in academic formulas. The execution of his paintings is likewise all spontaneous, simple and frank, far removed from the

subtle profundity and the complicated refinements of Leonardo.

How happy I should have been to live near such masters, to let myself be directed by them! I should have helped them in their works with the most entire humility, with the most complete abnegation, because I divine, through their paintings, beautiful loyal souls.

I have made a sketch after a charming painting of Luini, rather little known, depicting the Drunkenness of Noah. It is admirable in clarity, simplicity, and naturalness.

At the monastery of Saint Maurice the Greater, Luini painted a series of large frescoes, with numerous figures of female saints, whose style recalls that of the della Robbias. Even when he is careless, his drawing always retains the savor of things seen; it has something joyous and youthful about it, a liberty, a facility, a suppleness of execution which can be summed up in one word, life.

To my mind, these qualities place Luini’s frescoes above the cold orderings, the learned combinations of lines, according to which Fra Bartolommeo too often disposed his lay figures. Luini draws his inspiration directly from nature; he is ignorant of those conventional practices, those artifices by which certain artists try to make up for the failings of their imagination.

The rapid procedure of the fresco (the necessity of painting a portion on the plaster while it is fresh and the impossibility of retouching) compels a great simplification. Hence a breadth of execution which reacts upon the conception and ennobles the most familiar subjects. Three young girls playing at hot-cockles, painted by Luini, in no way evoke the idea of a genre subject, but rather that of a work of grand style.

Paul M. to his mother

Milan, September 68.

The exhibition of modern paintings is pitiable. The public falls into ecstasy before this commercial painting, made to please savages or enriched grocers. In the newspaper reviews, not a criticism, not a reservation, not a piece of advice. One must believe that this kind of art answers to the ideal of the country. Yet the Milanese race seems molded of intelligence, of finesse and of distinction. The women have beautiful features, great superb black eyes, and a complexion of a certain matte gray of an admirable delicacy. The military uniforms are very beautiful, but the young officers who wear them strut about in a very pretentious fashion. With their tight trousers and their padded chest, they always look as though they were on stage and getting ready to sing some cavatina. It is no doubt the same desire to put on a show that inspires in their artists this gaudy and garish painting, these theatrical gestures and these overblown expressions.

… I have only one book in my valise, but it is my delight, it is the big volume of Vasari, Lives of the Painters; it is my breviary. I read it in the railway carriage and every time I can take a moment of rest. Despite a few errors which the learned point out, this book remains unalterably precious, indispensable to consult, all full of living anecdotes, of conscientiously gathered information, and of judicious reflections.

Paul M. to his sister Louise

Milan.

You can guess with what emotion, with what pious respect I entered for the first time the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where Leonardo painted his famous Last Supper.

The monks and the soldiers have made the masterpiece undergo numerous mutilations; it is half destroyed. Fortunately, however, the latest restorations have consisted

in making the odious retouchings disappear which had soiled it.

The master chose the moment when Christ pronounces that terrible accusation: “One of you will betray me.” He speaks without bitterness, [in an] attitude resigned. The apostles are astonished and indignant; they protest; their faces and their gestures express with energy the diverse sentiments that animate them: perhaps one discerns them a little too well. In the primitive masters, simple and grave attitudes marked a sort of silent consternation, more moving than a gesticulation of deaf-mutes. No doubt the artist feared not being understood, but mimicry is a language that sometimes lacks precision. One apostle, for example — the second to the spectator’s right — seems troubled rather than indignant; his oblique gaze, whose direction is contrary to the movement of the head, suggests the idea of hypocrisy, and more than one spectator has taken this personage for Judas. Yet the true traitor holds a purse, near his treason. You see, this attribute was not useless, despite what it has of the conventional and a little naive about it. Judas is a hardened criminal, his face expresses no remorse, his features are moreover neither more accentuated nor more tormented than those of the other apostles, who almost all have the great aquiline noses of one of the races of the Jewish nation.

Leonardo da Vinci, wishing to give each of the heads a very individual character, drew for that purpose numerous studies which are admirable. As for the ideal head of the Christ, one must see the marvelous chalk drawings of it. It is, I believe, the most beautiful head of Christ in the world, it is at least the most moving, the most profoundly pathetic. A simple majesty, a divine sweetness, an ineffable resignation can be read upon that noble sorrowful face. Never has Rembrandt himself created an image more sincerely moved, and this masterpiece is the best answer to those who wish to see in Leonardo only an artist of high intelligence.

Beside these superior qualities of feeling and of expression, I admired further in the Cenacolo the art of

perspective. The lines of the ceiling, those of the floor and of the table, all invincibly bring the attention back toward the head of Christ.

Paul M. to his mother

Milan.

Here I am, returned to Luini. I have always regretted the irremediable loss of the masterpieces of Greek painting; well, Luini gives us perhaps an idea of them. He does not have the grandiose power of Michelangelo, nor that intensity of nervous life which in Leonardo stirs you to the very marrow of your bones; always calm, exempt from the modern fever, he retains the charm of simplicity and of sincerity, with that robust health of thought which art has so rarely known since the Greeks.

There is in the Brera Museum a small celebrated and charming fresco depicting Saint Catherine of Alexandria borne by the Angels to Mount Sinai. The invention of it is so happy that one cannot forget it. The saint seems to sleep, chastely wrapped in a great mantle, and the angels who carry her off respectfully have a smile full of mystery. This beautiful group floats in silence in a sky of a milky white, above a sarcophagus decorated with two olive trees in bas-relief. These amphibious beings symbolize the double life of men, the one we know on earth, the real life, and the other (?).

Still at the Brera, a delicious fragment of fresco shows us Joseph and Mary going joyously to the temple. They are both young and hold each other amicably by the hand. This is full of amiable and true tenderness, of a very personal, very human feeling. And how far it is from the somber austerity of the Byzantines and of the orthodox traditions!

In our day a few artists of great talent (such as Cazin) seek to rejuvenate biblical subjects by introducing into them details of costume borrowed from contemporary life; but it was through ignorance that the primitives had this boldness; today these ana-

chronisms shock us like a false naïveté; they are in contradiction with what everybody knows.

The frescoes have grown much paler. The draperies perhaps formerly had brighter colors; time and dust have given them fine and delicate tones which recall the open air. In nature the shadows reflected by the sky are gray; in oil paintings, they have often yellowed or blackened. In the romantic period, these tones of old well-seasoned pipes were much admired; the ideal was then to be “warm of tone and vigorous of form,” and the fashion was to paint with a brown sauce. Today taste has changed; in imitation of the frescoes, and also thanks to my master and friend Puvis de Chavannes, one seeks matte and light tones. But as all progress degenerates into formulas, I fear that soon we shall come to painting with a white sauce. (1)

Paul M. to his mother

Milan.

Last Monday I went to Saronno through a driving rain. The country is well cultivated, but little picturesque; it is a vast kitchen garden, regularly planted with mulberry trees up which vines climb. One understands that these fat and rich regions should have so often attracted rapacious invaders.

In the period of the Renaissance, the least little market towns built, vying with one another, pretty churches, not religious at all, neither grandiose nor severe, but of a charming and delicate style, freely inspired by the antique. The church of Saronno is attributed to Bramante, and it is worthy of such a master. The paintings which decorate it are a veritable treasure. Facing

(1) I could not foresee the iridescent painting fashionable today.

these delicious frescoes, painted by Luini in his green old age, I have ceased to put reservations on my admiration. There is there a Jesus among the Doctors and above all a Marriage of the Virgin! What shall I tell you of it? If I had the Prix de Rome, I would ask to be charged with copying it! I set to drawing with such ardor that I had a fever from it. The rain continued to fall in torrents, the sky was all black, one could see nothing, no matter! I kept on drawing. My sketches are worth nothing; I made seven of them in my day’s work, which is absurd, but I would not give for very much the pleasure I felt nor the memory I retain of it.

In these paintings all the personages seem to be portraits. A handsome old man with a white beard is said to represent Luini himself.

I am on the best of terms with the sacristan, whose palm I did not forget to grease; he was very obliging and permitted me to work even during the mass. I was beside the priest and we each did our task very conscientiously, to the great astonishment of the faithful, more occupied perhaps with my sketches than with the paternosters of my neighbor.

The cupola of the church of Saronno is painted by Gaudenzio Ferrari, a rival a little inferior to Luini, and a brilliant colorist. I did not know that one was so gay in Paradise. Picture to yourself a teeming swarm of angels and cherubim who sing and play various instruments. They go at it with all their heart, with an incredible spirit, and must make a deafening din. It is a tutti for grand orchestra: the brasses roar, the clarinets whine, the little flutes warble, the harps fling toward heaven their enthusiastic arpeggios, viols and violins, lutes, guitars and mandolins accompany with joyous pizzicati the strident fortissimi of the little celestial sopranos who bawl at the top of their voices: Hosanna! Gloria in excelsis! And the bassoons go droning on, while triangles and cymbals accentuate with vigor the rapid rhythm of this devilish allegro. — All this is perhaps not very paradisiac, nor even of a very elevated feeling, it is indeed a little

vulgar, but so alive, so full of freshness, charming in sum!

And to think that there are not yet any photographs after these masterpieces!

3

Madame Milliet to her son

The Colony, 21 September 68.

… Louise draws for hours every morning, not counting her little portraits. She has made some very good likenesses, but I believe M. Perrin will find her pencil stroke too bold. Philosophy has occupied her a great deal these past days and I think she is going to speak to you about it. It is an odd mixture: she passes from the skipping-rope to philosophy, from that to drawing or to the swing, not, I would say, with the same ardor, but with the same calm and, at bottom, the same pleasure. She is still too young to make a study trip to Italy. It is better to wait a year or two so that it may be more profitable for her.

Louise M. to her brother

The Colony, 21 September 68.

… Two or three times a week there is a children’s ball at the Colony and we enjoy ourselves heartily.

There are here three young girls of about the same age: Rose, Marie, and myself. We are not precisely the three Graces: Rose, although she is sixteen years old, has not at all the air of a young lady; long, dry, wearing beautiful hair, with an awkward and ungainly air, especially when she dances, a not very kindly character, devout into the bargain and putting all of religion into observances, doing nothing, and consequently bored. — Marie, 17 and a half, an agreeable figure, gentle, good, but a baby! devout also… — As for the third, I know her: a tall girl, not at all pretty, but still not too disagreeable, loving, not very demonstrative, slow, taking a very long time before understanding things, often in the clouds, aspiring to philosophy, to

elevated things, to grand painting, but not yet having wings to raise herself into such high regions. Despite all her faults I will tell you that it is the third whom I love best, because I believe that she is worth more than the others, and is that not your opinion?

Then come the little girls. Berthe, a real devil, occupying herself neither with dress nor with lessons, passing her day playing at horses, a good nature for all that. — Juliette, eleven years old, a pretty face, beautiful eyes without expression. — Marguerite, a fine little face, always finding a funny answer to give; her witticisms are the joy of the Colony, everyone repeats them. — Finally, two little dolls, timid, neat, dressed to the nines.

On the boys’ side: Jules, a poser and a joker, a strong mathematician. — Paulo, a sly and crafty little rascal. — Alfred, a good boy, not stupid. — Pierre Nus, a mediocre middling sort, with fairly sound judgment, a hard worker and a good boy.

We swing very often, and the ropes of the swing being rotten, we have fallen several times, but they have put on new ropes.

Following a bet, which Jules won, he proposed to Rose two embarrassing questions, and I was asked for advice; it was:

What difference is there between the body and the soul of man and of woman?

I answered: The body of man is the symbol of brutal force, that of woman of beauty and grace. The depth of man’s soul is selfishness, ambition, and injustice. That of woman, goodness, spirit, devotion.

In my turn I put twenty questions to Jules and to Pierre and, as their answers were worth nothing, I redid them to show them that girls beat the boys. Mama helped me a little, but they had copied from a dictionary and from a catechism. I am going to cite the principal ones, for the others are rebuses:

What is God?

Boys: — God is an infinitely perfect being who created all things.

Girls: — God is the principle of the Beautiful and of the Good; our soul is a parcel of his being, eternal like him. All that is beautiful, true, and good in the universe emanates from him.

Give proofs of the existence of God.

Boys: — It is God who created man, woman, and all that exists.

Girls: — If man cannot create matter, all the more can he not create intelligence. He observes the transformations of matter, that of the acorn which becomes an oak, for example, but he cannot explain them. There is therefore an intelligence above his own.

What is the soul?

Boys: — The soul is the immaterial part of our being.

Girls: — The soul is the source of life in all beings; it is perfectible and eternal.

What is the body?

Boys: — The body is the material part of an animate being. (Adopted)

What becomes of the soul after death?

Boys: — It appears before God to be judged according to its good or its bad actions.

Girls: — It returns toward God, while still conserving its personality. It rises or descends in the scale of beings according to its degree of perfection. Life is the means God gives to man to perfect his soul.

I showed these answers to M. Nus; he said that the palm went to the girls.

Between ourselves, you understand that the other little geese found nothing, it was I who composed everything.

Every morning, papa, M. de Carton, Mme de Boureuille and M. Nus discuss philosophy, but I do not listen to them, for they are materialists, except M. Nus, and they say such things!… in the manner of father Chassavant. There is no danger of my ever being of their opinion!

Paul to his sister Louise

Milan, September 68.

I intend to go and spend a few days at Padua. It was there that, in former times, a man named Giotto received the visit of a certain Dante Alighieri. How I should have liked to put up at the same inn! I have chosen the Croce d’Oro, solely because it is not far from the naive frescoes of Giotto, a proximity which moreover proves nothing as to the naïveté of the innkeeper. At Bologna, I shall put up at the Cannon of Gold. The Italians have gold everywhere, except in their pockets.

As for Venice, I am quite perplexed. It would be difficult to express the complicated sentiments it inspires in me. I think it frightens me enough that I shall have the courage not to go there this time. I flee “the great Venetians” for fear of loving them too much.

I have already — while making a sketch after the Noah of Luini, I could not prevent myself from casting on the sly a furtive glance — do not tell M. Perrin — at a Bonifazio Veneziano which is near it; an impertinent madness, my guide assures me, but the most seductive in the world for the richness, the gaiety, and the harmony of the color. That would scarcely please you, you old primitive. — I already have a good number of sketches and of photographs; but I never have enough of them; I should like to carry off Italy in my valise.

Paul to Louise

Milan, September 68.

… I read with great pleasure your philosophical questions. I like to see you take an interest in such subjects, but it is not astonishing that a girl of your age should sometimes employ terms whose import she does not well understand.

Your ideas have on me a little the effect of those children who try on their grandmother’s dress. I will tell you that you are passably pantheist, without knowing it; elsewhere a spiritualist, and the two agree with difficulty. — Did not mama read you a few passages of a certain philosophical effusion, published recently by George Sand in the Revue des Deux Mondes? I admire very much her descriptions of landscapes and

her studies of character, but I will confess to you that this sentimental and transcendental hodgepodge was not to my taste: after a few pages of nebulous metaphysics there came, one knows not very well why, a little piece of romantic botany, for the use of people of the world, no doubt incapable of remaining long at such heights. — You do not yet suspect the difficulty of these questions. All the great philosophers have tried to give an answer to them, but they reflected longer than you. Nothing would be easier than to “stump” you. You say, for example: All that is true, beautiful, and good in the Universe emanates from God. — But the rest, that True which is nonetheless neither beautiful nor good, from whom does it emanate? — You affirm that after death souls return toward God and are absorbed into him. — But since there are no two souls alike, their imperfections will be found in God. And his unity, what do you do with that?

Perhaps you can already read and understand… Halfway, again, my insolent one, the Discourse on Method of Descartes; you will find it in my library. You would see at least how one can treat the most abstract subjects in a profound manner, in a clear and natural style, not German at all.

There is one branch of philosophy that one cannot study too soon, and that is ethics, and above all practical ethics. In the absence of a positive religion, it seems to me very necessary to cultivate within oneself the idea of the good, and to work at making oneself better. Religions were invented to fortify the conscience and to replace it a little in those who do not have enough of it. They served further to raise minds above vulgar interests and daily cares. So, despite all the harm that some of their priests have done and still do, one must say that they have played a great and beautiful role in history. They will be difficult to replace.

You already know what the idea of duty is, conscience, liberty, responsibility. One can call all that into question, but it seems that these notions have deep roots in the human soul. Believe me, the one who denies them believes in them so well at bottom that you will see him

grow indignant against a bad action, admire devotion, sacrifice, and refute thereby his own doctrines.

Louise M. to her brother

The Colony, Sept. 68.

… Your enthusiasm for Luini is contagious; mama and I promise ourselves to go and study him at the Louvre. I will tell you that my Loggia of Raphael is at last finished and I carried it today to the little H. girls. There were admirations and praises without end. I had shown it before to father Joost (former professor at the École Polytechnique), who was quite warmed by it. He opened his mouth at it even wider than usual and remained as if petrified. Madame Morellet found it better than the model; in short, despite your recommendations, I cannot prevent myself from telling you that I found it not bad at all.

I had written on my hand-rest what you often repeat to me: “One always makes the reflections too light and the half-tones too dark”; so it was very luminous and there was not the slightest little bit of white in my shadows. (1) I am sorry you did not see it. It is really a pity to have given it to people who know nothing about it.

… I spent part of the day at their house. We played comedies, among others the Death of Socrates. I was Socrates; I had made myself a great white beard with tow, a handkerchief hid my hair, a white petticoat fastened over my shoulders was my tunic; a sheet thrown over two chairs formed my bed. I had a big book in my hands and I made speeches in Greek: I recited declensions and a few verses of Love Stung by a Bee, that is all I know. My disciples lamented and deplored seeing me condemned so unjustly. They proposed to me to make me

(1) It is thus that a piece of advice, just in certain cases, becomes a debatable formula.

escape, but I refused, and I consoled them by explaining to them the immortality of the soul. Then I ordered the hemlock to be brought to me. It was Claire who was the slave; she had put her hairnet over her face to appear a negro, and she presented to me water and parsley in a bowl. We had a fine time. Only it was so laughable that it cut short my fine philosophical speeches.

Louise to her brother

The Colony, Sept. 68.

The subjects you gave me are too difficult. I cannot picture to myself those allegorical figures.

You must be a bit of a sorcerer to have guessed that mama had read me a few philosophical passages of George Sand in the Revue des Deux Mondes; that was very true; however, I do not believe that it influenced me. What makes you say that I am a little pantheist, it is because I say: Our soul is a parcel of his being. I am not sure of it, it is only a supposition, seeing that no one knows anything about it. (1)

Madame Milliet to her son

The Colony, 28 Sept. 68.

I will tell you, regarding the journey to Venice, what Saint Paul said of marriage: Go there, you will do well, do not go there, you will do still better. You are too impressionable; the colorists are going to stir you, to upset you; they will harm the calm serenity that Luini must have left you. — In the end you will probably follow your impulse; whether I said something to you or nothing would be the same thing, but I should be well pleased to learn that you did not go there.

The description of the church of Saronno interested us greatly, and we always say with Louise: we shall go there.

(1) Without suspecting it, a naive little girl thus found the last word of metaphysics. No one knows anything about it.

II

PADUA

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 1868

GIOTTO. THE ARENA CHAPEL. ALLEGORIES. — A PROFESSOR TOO LEARNED.

1

Paul M. to Louise

Padua, 30 Sept. 68.

If I gave you the desire to know Luini, how much more do I desire that we should come back together to study Giotto here. He is a genius of quite another range, as to moral elevation and as to depth of expression. Perhaps he is more difficult to understand without preliminary study, because he is farther from us. He has weaknesses and ignorances, but how easily one forgets all that, when one has come to understand him. Giotto makes me think of the little sleeping Jesus of Raphael’s Virgin with the Veil: he has all the grace of childhood, with a serene gravity, and a je ne sais quoi of the divine.

The little chapel of the Arena is entirely covered on the inside with fresco paintings. Picture to yourself the happiness I feel at being shut up, all alone, beneath this blue vault, sown with stars of gold, where angels fly off into the azure. These saints in prayer, these young girls so pure who advance chastely draped, these blue backgrounds, all this intoxicates you and transports you above the earth, one believes one is dreaming, it is heaven!

I remain there for hours in a sort of ecstasy, and

it seems to me that Giotto comes and sits down beside me, in silence, and takes me by the hand.

But I am soon disturbed from my dreams by some indiscreet visitor, curious and in a hurry, who wants to have seen everything in a quarter of an hour and who goes away without having understood anything. The English admire on trust: their guide has told them to admire. The French are more foolish, they make fun of Giotto: “Just look at these Chinamen! — What grimaces! They look as though they were laughing instead of weeping. How ugly they are! How ugly they are!” — And I, replying very low: How stupid they are!

Yet, on reflection, their foolishness is perhaps not inexcusable. The drawing of the primitives is not always correct, the heads do not have a regular beauty, with their eyes too close together and their mouth too far from the nose. In the expression of the sentiments that Giotto’s soul felt with so much force, his hand may sometimes have betrayed him. One ends by admiring even his weaknesses; it would be a danger to imitate them.

I forgot to tell you that the chapel of the Arena is for sale. Naïve as ever, I believed it my duty to give notice of it at once to M. de Nieuwerkerke. The municipality of Padua offers a hundred thousand francs for this chapel; it is worth ten times more. But our poor Louvre will let slip this opportunity, the last perhaps, before the Italian government has scraped clean all the marvels of this country.

I already saw the chapel of Giotto transported in fresco into the great courtyard of the Louvre. The operation would not be easy, but I do not believe it impossible. And to think that there will not be found one intelligent connoisseur to send me two hundred thousand francs!

To Monsieur the Director of Fine Arts

Padua, 30 September 68.

Monsieur the Director,

Permit me to inform you of a piece of news which will no doubt interest you: it would be possible at this moment to acquire at Padua the little church of Santa Maria dell’Arena, entirely painted by Giotto.

Is there need to remind you how rare

such opportunities are becoming in Italy, and how much it would be to be desired to see such a master represented at the Louvre in so splendid a manner! Distrusting my own enthusiasm, I let M. du Pays speak, the author of an excellent guide to Italy:

“This chapel is one of the most precious monuments of the art of painting. It is here, as well as in the church of Saint Francis of Assisi, that one must study the great initiator of modern art, it is here above all… The painter drew his inspiration, for certain themes, from Dante, who came to visit him in this chapel, but he drew from his own feeling the grace, the simplicity, the grandeur and the calm, which he was able to spread over this vast ensemble of so striking a unity.”

Studied by Overbeck, these frescoes were religiously studied by Ingres and by Flandrin, who did not disdain to make ample borrowings from them.

As for the difficulty of transporting to Paris these light walls of brick with their precious plaster coating, I do not believe it would be enough to frighten specialists; each composition, surrounded by a band of ornaments, could be detached separately.

The Commune of Padua is in negotiations to buy the church; there is talk of a hundred thousand francs offered. Nothing is yet concluded. It would be a unique and grandiose thing to take this church in your hand, to endow with it the Louvre and France.

Pardon, I beg you, in my youthful enthusiasm an idea perhaps unrealizable, but which nonetheless deserves not to be rejected without examination.

Accept… etc.

2

IDEALISM

I have followed in its light flight the Fancy. The True that is said so beautiful, sometimes seems to me ugly And foul; I should like, with a good sweep of the broom, To purify your temple, O chaste Poetry.

The rut in which I stagnate, I did not choose it, And, being ill-satisfied with the foul mud, I dream of beauty, of love without jealousy, Of attractive work and of perfect happiness.

Muse, my boat sails on the azure waves of the dream, See the liquid sapphire where my oar plunges, Yonder the enchanted isle with its marvelous treasures;

The harps of the breeze have divine accords, It is like a wedding song that far off the echo prolongs… I love you, come! Thank you! In my arms your beautiful body!

Paul M. to his mother

Padua, Oct. 68.

At last I receive your letter! I was sad, on edge. It was raining. The storms followed one another without interruption. I felt myself alone, abandoned, without news. So whoever might have seen me throw myself upon your letter, laugh and weep while reading it, would not have accused me of being cold. — Now I am at Padua; I shall find nothing more beautiful elsewhere, and I remain here. (1) — I have given up Mantua. I should hardly see there anything but works of Giulio Romano, which displease me in advance. I reserve Venice for later, when I shall be stronger.

I told you that after each Salon one ought to take a good bath of Italy. How happy I am to be on this regimen: I bathe, I wash myself with delight, and I feel falling away little by little all that grime of the studio and of the school which is called “the knack.” I am like a fish in water, but in a water so strangely charged with electricity. I am quite beside myself with it, and you must find me very exalted; but I feel that this exaltation is good and salutary. To contemplate beautiful things is for the spirit a veritable purification.

(1) I have not described in my letters the admirable works of Donatello nor of Mantegna at Padua, I preferred to study them pencil in hand.

Madame Milliet to her son

Paris, 7 Oct. 68.

It is a month now since you left us, dear child, you must try not to stop along the way. Keep a little of your enthusiasm and of your money to get all the way to Rome. I think you will go through it quickly, unless along the road you come upon some little chapel of which you make yourself the chaplain, and where we shall one day be obliged to go and fetch you… Giotto absorbs you entirely; you will have impregnated yourself with him so as to keep a lasting memory of him. These are very lively pleasures, but I fear for you too much overexcitement. Think, dear child, in the midst of the enjoyments of your spirit, of that poor body of which you have great need; care for it, listen to it, and make it rest when it tells you it has had enough. I recommend it to you, do not forget it. Whereupon I embrace you with all my heart and love you tenderly.

Madame Milliet to her son

Paris, 8 October 68.

… Fernand has finally arrived. General du Barail has promised to support him, so that he has a little hope of becoming an officer in the month of January.

I went yesterday to see M. Carré about Louise. He is a very intelligent man, a great partisan of Greek, a friend of M. Egger, who understands that an artist should have the desire to know the ancient languages. These considerations prevent me from regretting the somewhat high price I shall give him per month. For the moment, Louise would not need so learned a professor.

Alix has just left here; we reread the letter and we all felt very happy at your enthusiasm. I am curious to know whether M. de Nieuwerkerke will act upon your letter and seek to acquire the chapel of Giotto. I much fear that it will be too dear for the Louvre. If it were a cannon, money would always be found. (1)

(1) Needless to add that my letter remained without answer.

Louise to her brother

Paris, 7 Oct. 68.

You make us quite envious with your descriptions of the frescoes of Giotto, it seems to me that I see them, it must be very beautiful.

Your enthusiasm is not shared by Fernand. He claims that your imagination makes you see things [where there are none] and things of which the painter never thought. He does not understand the pleasure one can find in contemplating such scrawls, and he ended by saying that the best painting was not worth his piece of cheese. If you heard him, it would make you indignant.

At the Louvre, I have begun to copy the Infant Jesus of Luini, in the Adoration of the Shepherds. We asked for a permit, but one needs the recommendation of a

known painter.

I am going to take arithmetic lessons from our old phalansterian, father Chassavant. Will he find a way to make this work attractive, and will he end by getting the four rules into my head?

Louise M. to her brother

Paris, October 68.

… We have received the famous crate. You must have ruined yourself in photographs. So much the better! you will come back to us more quickly. All that seemed to me very beautiful, but what I like best are your drawings. I believe M. Perrin will be jolly pleased with them!

Giotto’s allegories pleased me greatly, although they are not all very clear: Prudence is seated at a counter and looks at her watch? I do not see what is prudent about her. Imprudence is a savage clothed [in skins] holding a club, I do not see what is imprudent about him.

Paul M. to Louise

Padua, Oct. 68.

You ask me for explanations of the Allegories of Giotto, the photographs of which I sent you. It must be

admitted, certain abstract ideas are not expressed very clearly by painting, yet they can furnish interesting motifs. To express his thought, the artist has at his disposal a whole special alphabet: squat or elegant forms, attitudes, gestures, physiognomies, costumes — all this presents the most varied characters. Now, each line, each color, each proportion can serve for a symbolic expression; each individual can be raised to the rank of typical figure, by him who knows how to draw from it the essential and general traits.

Prudentia, Wisdom or Good Sense, is an honest matron seated at her counter; she does not bustle about, she looks at herself in a mirror, symbol of reflective meditation, or simply of conscience. The image reflected by the mirror can also represent true thought, the faithful portrait of things. The head is very beautiful; the photograph makes it ugly with half-tones too dark. She is coiffed at the back with a sort of mask; this second face, which is that of an old man, expresses memory, the experience which serves us as a guide in life. Prudence holds a compass: Must she not measure all things with care?

Facing her is Stultitia, Madness or Folly. Her costume is bizarre like the toad. It is a short tunic whose irregular scallops lengthen behind into a bird’s tail, and let the bare legs be seen. The head is crowned with feathers in the manner of savages; the gaze is wild, dazed. The badly balanced pose is a happy find! I am astonished that you, you have not understood it. The gesture seems to provoke an enemy, but the gait is undecided, the expression of the face irresolute, and the club, which Folly holds limply in her hand, will be for her a useless weapon. She has neither the energy nor the cool-headedness that gives victory.

Justice, with severe features, is nobly seated facing front, her brow circled with a royal crown, for it is she who ought to reign. Giotto did not give her the blindfold, a symbol of double meaning, which often covers her eyes. The two pans of the scale — an ingenious idea — rest upon the very hands of Justice. It is she who weighs good and evil. In the right-hand pan one sees a

little angel who crowns labor, a workman before an anvil. In the other pan, an executioner is about to cut off the head of a kneeling guilty man, his arms bound behind his back. It is Justice that punishes Idleness (we would say today the idle Capitalist).

Injustice is figured by a brigand or a condottiere of cruel mien, seated at the entrance of a fortified cavern, at the corner of a wood. With one hand he holds a sword, with the other a halberd with recurved points. At his feet a little painting in grisaille shows us a scene of murder: Here lying upon the road is a woman whom two brigands have just struck down and whom they have stripped of her garments. A third pulls by the bridle a recalcitrant horse whose rider, put to death, also lies stretched upon the ground. Meanwhile two soldiers, armed with shields and with lance forward, come to the rescue of the massacred travelers, “too late, naturally.”

I cannot explain all of it to you, guess a little at the other allegories.

These ingenious ideas, which Dante inspired, would have little value if Giotto had not expressed them as a painter, with his talent as draftsman and observer. What I admire in the drawing and in the modeling of Giotto is above all their principle. He sees forms by their great aspect and neglects details. His modeling is broad and fine, without much spring, it respects the wall and does not seek relief in trompe-l’œil; he is right. His color, which has grown pale, gives the impression of the open air. Oil paintings take on with time yellowed tones which suit only interior effects. Here, in the chapel of the Arena, the blue backgrounds have replaced the gold background of the Byzantines; they give the whole a marvelous impression of calm and of serenity.

Giotto always goes straight to the goal, simply, boldly. He expresses with power the scene as he conceives it. He has a charming ignorance of the balancings of lines, of pyramidal groups, of hole-fillers,

of sacrifices, of privileged rays which illuminate a single personage, of all those banal conventions, thanks to which all paintings end by resembling one another, and which pass at the school for rules of art.

Giotto proves to us that all that is false and useless. The best arrangement will always be the simplest and the most expressive.

The calm of Giotto, his gentleness, his moderation, bring him close to the Greeks; they do not prevent one from divining in him a strong, virile soul, capable of profound emotions. In this his genius seems to me superior to that of Fra Angelico, a nature more tender, more feminine or more childlike. Assuredly Fra Angelico possesses charming qualities, and even of the most elevated order, but sometimes, even in his frescoes, one finds again a little of the miniaturist. His Florentine grace is not absolutely exempt from a sort of unconscious mannerism, delicious moreover; sometimes his young female saints, his cherubs and his little monks have such pretty little features that they lack a little character. (1)

3

Louise to her brother

Paris, 17 October 68.

… You are not advantageously replaced by M. Carré. The day of my first lesson, he had a toothache and, with a plaster on his cheek, he was frightfully ugly. I showed him my books, I explained to him the method of

(1) I had not yet seen the admirable frescoes which he painted at the Vatican.

Jacquet, but he understood nothing of it, he was not listening… He questioned me on my Caesar exercise-book; I did not answer badly, but on his questions of analysis I was not brilliant. That is not astonishing, he speaks to me of syntax which I have not seen… He tells me that Caesar is a refined author and that, beginning, I cannot understand anything of it; I must look up all the words in the dictionary. He will have me translate Cornelius Nepos, then a dialogue of the dead by Lucian (I found them in your room). He asks that it be in very good French, after that he tells me that he wants it word for word, then he does not want it to be “elastic.”

I also took a first arithmetic lesson from father Chassavant. Imagine that he does not want to be paid for them.

He swore that in a few lessons I should be very strong and that it would amuse me greatly. He explains, in fact, very well. They were things I already knew, but I understood, and it did not bore me. I must write down all together everything he told me, for without that it goes in one ear and out the other; but there is no way of taking notes, he does not stop for an instant, he is a real mill of words. At the end of the lesson, one is quite dumbfounded.

Louise M. to her brother

Paris, October 68.

M. Carré no longer has a toothache, but he has a rheumatism in his eye, and his wife has received a stovepipe in the cheek; those people always have something. For the Greek (the Dialogue of the Dead) he had explained it to me, making use of grand words which I understood, but I not always; begging my pardon for the not very choice expressions which Caesar makes use of in speaking of that, and concerning the dog of Menippus. He corrects my exercise-book; that serves me at the same time as a lesson in style and in spelling, because my good French is not always very French, and he does not let the slightest fault escape. He complimented me Sunday on my exercise; in spite of that he said that it was not bad and that he was very pleased with it.

III

RAVENNA

OCTOBER 1868

BYZANTINE MOSAICS.

Paul M. to his mother

Ravenna, October 68.

I am no doubt undergoing the influence of the weather and of fatigue, but the city seemed to me frightfully sad. In the deserted streets reigns a deathly silence; one hears only the noise of one’s own steps. I shall not stay here long. The Italian brigands are not a myth: about a week ago, C…, one of my comrades from the Gleyre studio, on his honeymoon journey, found on returning to the hotel his trunk forced open and his money disappeared. He had to telegraph to his parents in order to be able to continue his journey. A band leader having been condemned recently, his comrades carried off the son of the President of the Tribunal, a boy of fifteen, and rather than see him killed or mutilated, the unhappy judge had to pay twelve thousand lire of ransom.

The churches are of the greatest interest, entirely covered on the inside with those splendid gold-ground mosaics which I knew only by reputation. The saints, clothed for the most part in the long white tunic, with two vertical bands of purple, are draped in very

varied fashions, in the white and square mantle of the Greeks (which in no way resembles a toga). Sad and wild, they look at you with their great deep-set eyes. It is superb in its barbarian gravity.

These paintings are of the fifth and sixth centuries. Giotto will come only in the thirteenth. Thus, between these first Christian masters and me, a longer time has elapsed than that which separates us from Raphael.

Louise ought to practice already at drawing draperies. She will find in my studio a great white mantle, and Fernand would consent well enough to pose a little for her, but I believe she will have difficulty making a saint of him. Yet, with a halo and a gold background… he would lay low the demon just like any other.

Paul M. to his sister Louise

Ravenna, October 68.

It is here that one must come to learn to know the dangers of idealism. The Byzantine mosaicists never looked at the real world, and what for? The artist passed his life then in preparing himself for death, in dreaming of the Beyond. So did those solitaries who, perched on a high column, remained there, motionless, fasting, contemplating for long hours their navel, in order to see the celestial light spring forth from it. These exaggerations of an ascetic spiritualism, this contempt for matter and for beauty are fatal to art. According to the Fathers of the Church, Christ would have been ugly.

In painting as in sculpture, the mystic neurosis manifests itself by visual aberrations, by the forgetting of proportions and the lack of balance. The feet of the Byzantine personages seem seen from above and as though set upon an inclined plane. The art that claims to do without reality falls very quickly to the last degree of debasement.

The most elementary notions of perspective, those that a simple attentive observation would have sufficed to reveal to them, are unknown to these inhabitants of the moon.

Consider, for example, in a Byzantine mosaic, a simple rectangular object, a table, a stool! you will see with astonishment that the side farthest away is figured by

a line longer than the side nearest, in such a way that the lateral lines, instead of converging toward a single point, recede in diverging. Now this oddity does not denote merely an ignorance, but a total absence of observation, an inconceivable disdain for things visible and tangible.

We have two brains, as we have two eyes, the right and the left. In a state of health, these two twin organs function in accord; but strabismus does not exist only for the eyes, there are people who squint in the brain, who see crookedly and who reason falsely, and who do not suspect it, and who are quite pleased with it. Have they not faith? They follow with assurance the tradition of those who squinted before them.

Note it well, the gross error of perspective that I point out to you is not an accidental thing; for centuries it was taught as a sacrosanct rule. You will observe it, without a single exception, in all the mosaics, in all the ivories, in all the miniatures of the Byzantines. Docilely, devoutly, foolishly, for centuries, painters and sculptors repeated the same blunder, again, without once having the idea of looking at what they had every day before their eyes, a table! And they continued to paint these squares from the other world which narrow mystically the wrong way round, in the inverse sense of human perspective.

That Cimabue should not have known how to free himself from the Byzantine errings, that is excusable, but what astonishes me, what saddens me, is to find this shocking defect again in the fourteenth century, in my dear master and friend, in the great Giotto himself. How could this free spirit, so open, so positive, so far from all traditional superstition, how could this bold innovator who created modern art by breaking so many old formulas, how could he have respected that one?

Is it not a striking example of the danger there is in trusting traditions without verification, were they consecrated by the centuries and by the most respectable authorities?

In drawing, as in all things, let us therefore make use of free examination, and if, as is probable, our contemporary art is still stuffed with scholastic conventions, let us make an effort to free ourselves from them.

This boldness, the great Italians of the fifteenth century had it. It is thanks to it that all the Renaissances have been accomplished and will be accomplished.

Byzantine art served as a transition between the past and the future. A complicated and confused mixture of memories and of hopes, it presents a singular amalgam of shocking defects and of elevated qualities. Is it an old man who drivels or a child who babbles? I do not know. Its defects are these:

An unheard-of incorrectness of drawing, ignorance of modeling and of chiaroscuro, ignorance of anatomy, ignorance of perspective — it is more than ignorance, it is aberration — disdain for science and for reality, forgetfulness of beauty.

Like people dazed after a long orgy, the Byzantine artists are sick with the mystic neurosis.

Sick like them are their saints with the stupid and bewildered air, with the fixed, wild eye, sadly lost in vague hallucinations.

Sick like them are these puppets who do not stand upright; they have lost their balance; their soft and flabby legs give way, unable to bear the weight of their torso. Sometimes their proportions lengthen out of all measure.

Sick are their eyes which no longer see the relief

of bodies, which forget space and distance and the marvelous envelope of the atmosphere.

Sick are these architects, who yet know how to invent still for their columns capitals delicately and ingeniously ornamented, but who duplicate and superpose these capitals without reason, as in the vision of a drunken man.

Everywhere the vivifying study of real things has given place to written rules, to false traditions, religiously consecrated, immutable and dead.

Let us be just, however. After having noted the morbid weaknesses of Byzantine art, I shall try to tell you also its beauty and its grandeur.

These incorrect artists are grave, serious, convinced men. Degenerate Greeks, but still Greeks, they have preserved something of the high qualities of their race. Their disdain for the goods of the earth is not without nobility. Their imagination engenders bizarre beings, but of an imposing majesty: this terrible God, this Christ Pantocrator, this Virgin crowned and triumphant, the Panagia, these dried-up ascetics, emaciated and haggard, who loom up in their great white mantles with broad bands of purple, preserve a simple nobility, inherited from their ancestors carved in Greek marble.

Of what were these saints so sad dreaming? They meditate perhaps with regret upon the great mystery of this life which they did not understand and which they did not know how to transmit. They neglected reality for the dream, which consoles poorly. Alone, before the golden walls of these celestial palaces, the Panagia appears to them in her imposing stiffness of an idol: she sits upon a throne of gold studded

with precious stones, sovereign empress of a fantastic world, the world of ecstasies and of hypostases.

Here is revealed the master quality of Byzantine art, the fairy splendor of the colorations. At Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo, the Virgin wears a tunic and a mantle of purple; the Child is clothed in white; the throne is green, white, and gold, the cushion orange and gold.

Nothing in our most beautiful cathedrals, in our most sumptuous palaces, can give an idea of the marvelous richness of a Byzantine basilica entirely clothed in mosaics. Everything appears poor and paltry compared to these grave splendors. (1)

Have you not heard, in a fine concert of classical music, a work of a master, performed by an assembly of choice artists? Have you not felt a delicious shiver run through your whole being, at the accents of that great collective voice, the orchestra, which sometimes vibrates with power, sometimes murmurs very low some melodious prayer? Its gentleness is never insipid, but remains nervous, and its contained vigor is never brutal violence. So it is in the Byzantine mosaics: upon the splendor of the gold backgrounds, the most dazzling colors and the fires of the precious stones [shine] as though veiled with mystery, they sing in the half-light, sotto voce. Nothing garish, nothing tinselly, nothing that resembles the vulgar luxury of Turkish art or of modern art.

And from these colorations at once so strong and so gentle, from these somber blues, deep as a summer night sown

(1) Viollet-le-Duc showed himself singularly unjust toward this kind of decoration in which color plays the principal role. A learned draftsman, a clear mind, a friend of precision and of logic, he resisted the charm of these enamels, the moving harmony of these oriental colorations. He reproaches mosaics with not according with stone and with making one forget the line and the construction. But would not this observation be still more just, if one applied it to the hypnotizing brilliance of stained-glass windows? Mosaic should not be employed in small isolated patches, but when it entirely covers the interior of an edifice, the effect is prodigious.

with stars, from these pale blues of dying turquoise, from these milky opal whites, from these tender or austere greens, from these purples, the color of old wine, which shine discreetly, like rare flowers, in the muted glow of the old golds, from all this there is released a grave, austere, penetrating impression, which intoxicates you like a perfume.

Forget then the incorrectnesses of the drawing, see no longer anything but the color, and Byzantine art will appear to you as the grandiose dream of an Oriental poet, as the disturbing vision of a pious imagination which sinks and drowns in the contemplation of the Infinite.

Madame Milliet to her son

October 68.

I have just received your letter from Ravenna, dear child, one can see that you are tired, that you have carried too heavy a trunk, that it is raining, that it has been a very long time that you have been alone in bad inns, perhaps not well… I should like to know you with a ray of sunshine and someone to talk to.

We go to the Louvre twice a week, I cannot tell you whether what Louise does is good, all I know is that she applies herself as much as she can and gives herself entirely to it. When, at the end of two hours, I tell her that we must leave, she looks at me with an astonished air, she imagines that we have just arrived.

IV

SOJOURN AT FLORENCE

OCTOBER 1868

THE SPANISH CHAPEL. — ANDREA PISANO. — GHIBERTI. — DONATELLO. — MASACCIO. — FILIPPO LIPPI. — GHIRLANDAJO. — BOTTICELLI. — LETTERS OF LOUISE.

1

Paul M. to his sister Louise

Florence, October 68.

Here I am again at Florence in the midst of my friends the Primitives, and happy as a fish in water. Giotto formed numerous pupils, less great than he, but still very interesting. It is they who covered with their paintings the Spanish Chapel at Santa Maria Novella. Their program is very curious for the history of teaching. There are there fourteen allegorical figures, representing the Sciences that were studied then, and at their feet a celebrated scholar. Shall I confess it to you, some of these celebrities I scarcely know except by name. Should we be less educated than the people of the Middle Ages?

In the same chapel, other paintings recall the theological controversies which then impassioned the whole people: Can one win heaven by holding to the ancient dogmas of the Church, or must one submit respectfully to the recent dogmas? That does not trouble

you beyond measure, but it is the latter opinion that the Inquisition upheld by the persuasive means that you know. — Sheep gathered at the feet of pope Benedict XI figure the believers. These dogs spotted with white and black are the Dominicans, domini canes (Latin pun); they triumph over heresy represented by wolves which they bite with relish. The devout have moreover never lost the habit of tearing their neighbor to pieces.

In the middle ground, here is a rustic festival: a few naive little girls dance, holding each other by the hand, to the sounds of a rustic bagpipe. Four beautiful ladies seated before a grove figure the Pleasures of life, and, while bad urchins, climbed up into the trees, regale themselves with fruits probably forbidden, Saint Peter, the amiable doorkeeper of Paradise, invites to enter a troop of docile children whom two angels crown with flowers. Higher up at last, the Eternal Father, with the throne and a heap of celestial accessories, the Madonna, the Lamb, the Dove; the whole family.

To my mind, these dense and complicated compositions are not worth the clear simplicity of the frescoes of Padua. The exuberant richness of the invention caricatures, it is true, the art of the Renaissance in which life overflows, but the genius of Giotto, like that of the Greeks, consists in simplifying, in saying what is necessary, nothing more. It is an art that I do not yet possess, and this letter gives you the proof of it.

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Paul M. to his mother

Florence.

Among the primitive masters whom I am studying this year there is one for whom I have a singular admiration and predilection, it is Andrea Pisano, the great sculptor, the contemporary and the friend of Giotto. The author of the first door of the Baptistery, where in 30 compartments in the form of quadrilobed lozenges, he related the life of Saint John. (1)

(1) He worked on it 9 years and finished it in 1330.

The backgrounds are ordinarily quite plain, then it is the suppression of the idea of place; elsewhere a few details of architecture or of landscape are indicated, but with a conciseness truly sculptural, according to the true laws of the bas-relief. The subjects chosen by Andrea have been treated a thousand times since; never with such power.

One of the most beautiful compositions represents the death of the Precursor. He is on his knees, his head lowered, resigned. The executioner rises on the tips of both feet, to strike him with his heavy sword, in a movement of astonishing rightness. One will have to wait more than a hundred years before an artist knows how to create a figure as learnedly constructed as that of this executioner. Giotto himself did not attain this science of proportions, of anatomy, and of the balance of the human body, this powerful and firm breadth. Two soldiers, who observe the scene of the murder, draw back with an instinctive movement of pity. In those days soldiers had a horror of shedding innocent blood; it is admirable! (1)

The first door of the Baptistery aroused at Florence a well-deserved enthusiasm, and Andrea was charged with decorating with marble bas-reliefs the Campanile of Giotto. The very beautiful program elaborated by the two friends has aged so little that it could still be proposed in our day to artists. It is a sort of abridged history of civilization, the first discoveries, Commerce, Agriculture, etc.

In the bas-relief that represents Sculpture, nothing is more touching than to see with what moved gravity, with what feeling of the dignity of his art, the sculptor measures the blow of his mallet upon the chisel which carves in the marble a young body. This sketched-out child, still half hidden in the paternal lap, the artist seems to create it from his own substance.

Below this series, seven bas-reliefs figure the Sacraments. By a bizarre coincidence, after having

(1) The artist lent them his own sentiments, in order to suggest them to the spectator.

made a few drawings of them, I was rereading one evening the beautiful poem of Schiller, The Bell, and the verses of the poet seemed to me an exact description of the bas-reliefs of Andrea Pisano. In these two masterpieces, the theme is in effect the same; it is that it is of all times: do not the bells of the Campanile ring for all the joys and for all the sorrows of life? Here, no sought-after allegories, it is man himself that the great sculptor is going to show us from the solemn day when the beloved child awakens to the light of day, to the somber hour when begins “that last sleep from which no one has awakened.”

Here is the Baptism: a young father holds his child over the baptismal font, while a monk with an energetic and grave face pours the holy water. Farther off, a man of mature age gives the unction of the Holy Chrism; he stands upright, leaning, facing the child and seems to foresee the future: “The joyful or somber hours of destiny are still hidden in the veils of time, but the mother’s love watches with tender care over its golden morning.” And the mother listens naïvely to the mysterious words, vaguely moved, divining with her heart what her ignorance understands only by halves. The child is serious already, as though he had consciousness that this hand, placed upon his young brow, seeks to make thought arise there.

I scarcely know more than one modern work that can rival that one for solemn simplicity and for the profound feeling of the mysteries of life, it is the Grafting of François Millet. The so ordinary act of the peasant made the philosopher-artist muse. The sour wild stock will grow and become a great tree, and it will bear sweet fruits… and, at this thought, the mother remains pensive, with her child in her arms. Grafting, is it not the true symbol of education?

I have expressed the same idea in the following verses:

The peasant who finds a robust wild stock Wishes to correct the harshness of its bitter fruits. By what divine radiance of Goodness Will the graft make of it a savory shrub?

The woman is there, standing, who watches… She feels That her man is accomplishing something august, A hope of the future germinates in her rude soul: The mother has clasped her child in her arms. May he be strong, be good, be just!

Now a painter who was at once simple and great, Taking the emotion, incrusts it in his color.

I have not consulted the archives, but I believe I can affirm without fear that Andrea Pisano did not sculpt the bas-relief of the Marriage and did not even inspire it. The artist — I suspect him of being some barbarian come from the North — saw the godfather his neighbor pass the ring onto the finger of the godmother his neighbor. The scene seemed funny to him, and he wished to make us laugh by relating it. Oh, he too, he observed the realities of life, but he saw them by the small side, vulgar and base, incapable as he was of raising himself to a general idea. In the midst of these works of grand style, he dared to place a genre scene, of Flemish taste. The figures piled in disorder overflow the frame; the personages are portraits, but ugly and of a trivial character. When the same artist showed us the shop of a goldsmith and a few housewives coming to bargain for vases, naturalism was more in its place, but here it is the Marriage, an eternally young subject, charming and grave; the realistic drolleries cut a sad figure there.

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Paul M. to his sister Louise

I send you two large photographs of the doors of Ghiberti and I advise you to study them with care. The compositions are conceived rather as paintings than as bas-reliefs and, by enlarging them, one could make superb tapestries.

It was in 1407, following a competition, that Ghiberti, aged 23, was charged with executing the first of these doors, the one that was already to rival the masterpiece of Andrea Pisano. Donatello was as yet only 18, and in that same year was born Masaccio, one might say there was born modern art. In those days artists had the desire to do well and not to earn money as rapidly as possible. Ghiberti worked 25 years on his doors (from 1407 to 1452) and he had himself helped by 19 sculptors. The good public, which admires in passing and on trust one of these conscientious and strong works, is persuaded that it has very seriously studied it, when it has looked at it for ten minutes. Very few people have respect for these marvelous labors, in which a man of genius has put his thought, his heart, and the best of his being.

In the bas-relief of the Christ among the Doctors, I point out to you the standing Virgin; she is charming, draped with an elegant carefulness, with a grace very Florentine, which can rival the prettiest terra-cottas of Tanagra. I should like to have a separate cast of it.

You will find in the Kiss of Judas details interesting for the history of costume, or rather for the history of the ideal. The pseudo-Roman get-up of an elegant little soldier announces fashions which will be in favor two centuries

later; his abundant and long head of hair will serve as model for the pretentious wigs of Louis XIV, which will be the caricature of it.

In the scene of the Holy Women at the tomb, note that the Apostles placed at the back on a balcony are too large for the architecture. Ghiberti does not yet know the laws of perspective which Brunelleschi is soon going to discover and teach. Yet this unity of proportions between the personages and the architecture, it is this same Ghiberti who is going to find it and who will give admirable examples of it in the third door of the Baptistery.

Here each leaf of the door is divided into five large rectangular panels, a more happy arrangement than the quadrilobed lozenges, because it offers the artist broader surfaces, in which the compositions can develop more freely.

The influence of antique art, which Ghiberti had studied with passion, is easily recognizable in this work, so original nonetheless.

A rule generally admitted, but against which Michelangelo protested as well as Ghiberti, is the rigorous unity of the subject figured in a single frame. That is a pure convention. What! we should have the right to unroll, in a series of drawings or of paintings, a long history, but each scene should be presented in distinct slices, separated by apparent divisions! A molding, a pilaster, or an ornament should always interpose itself, like an entr’acte, between the successive parts of the action! (1)

To my mind, Ghiberti, in each of his decorative panels, perfectly respected the unity of the subject. The different scenes of one and the same drama follow one another

(1) The method of Ghiberti, like the doctrine of M. Bergson, seeks to render perceptible the continuity of our ideas.

freely across a single landscape, but in their logical linking. The Expulsion from Paradise, for example, is it not the tragic denouement which follows the fall of man; and was not sin foreseen and willed by God, from the moment of the Creation of Adam and Eve? These scenes have between them relations of cause and effect, the unity of the action is complete, and justifies the unity of place.

A second reproach has been addressed to Ghiberti: Certain figures, almost in full relief, come out of the plane which they ought to decorate. One must at least note with what art the projections have been managed according to the distance of the figures. These bas-reliefs are also found too picturesque, and our pedant historians have the pretension of teaching the master what he ought to have done. For me, the doors of the Baptistery being thus, I find them good, I content myself with them; one would content oneself with less. If, seeing a greyhound, you find that it has legs too long, and seeing a basset hound, you say that it has legs too short, that simply proves that you do not understand what character is. Do not dream of impossible corrections! This necessary, unchangeable aspect is that of true artistic creations. The work imposes itself; its defects, if it has any, form so well an integral part of itself, that one cannot correct them without its ceasing to be.

Our modern realists seem to me also to have an excessive horror of the Renaissance turn. They are right, when it is a learned formula, a mannerism, but the rhythm of lines has nonetheless its charm. To forbid it absolutely would be to be mistaken, like those who reproach poets with speaking in verse.

If Ghiberti had not begun with a goldsmith, his talent would perhaps have had still more amplitude and liberty, but with less finesse and precision. If he had not studied painting and perspective, his reliefs would perhaps have been conceived in more sculptural terms, but we should not possess the masterpieces that he created.

A pupil will do well to avoid the excessive search for the picturesque in sculpture, as also in painting an aspect too sculptural, but one must make a distinction between the advice that a wise professor gives to beginners and the appreciation of the masterpieces which escape this grammar and this rhetoric of schoolboys.

One must strive to understand the masters, one must study them, respect them, love them; but one must also guard against a blind admiration. Art, even in the most beautiful epochs, remains the art of an epoch; it answers to ideas, to customs, to beliefs which are no longer ours. Despite the undeniable importance of individual geniuses, one cannot forget the influences they underwent, the milieu in which they lived. — (Good! here I am speaking like M. Taine, whose theory seems to me nonetheless exaggerated.) — Let us not try to do over again what they did, we should not succeed in it.

4

Paul M. to his sister Louise

Florence, October 68.

… Donatello is one of the masters at once the most celebrated and the most discussed. Some admire him because of his real-

ism, others in spite of his realism. The Renaissance was a return to the direct study of nature and to the science of realities, as well as to the search for an ideal beauty. It is the idea of choice that presides over its flowering, as over that of antique art. The naturalist and idealist tendencies are therefore not at all contradictory; both are opposed to the immutable and hieratic formulas of the Byzantines. Donatello represents very brilliantly this new spirit. He notes individual characters with a joyous audacity; the impetuosity of the movements gives his art an intense life, something violent, passionate, dramatic, “strangely modern.”

By turns delicate and brutal, he underwent diverse influences, and he had, sometimes simultaneously, several manners; without the certain documents that we possess, one would not dare to attribute to the same master works of tendencies so opposed.

Donatello studied antique sculpture greatly; it is he who rediscovered the true principles of the bas-relief; so certain connoisseurs consider him the greatest of the modern sculptors.

You will point out to me, as I do, the Saint George of which I send you the photograph and who resembles Fernand a little. He is standing, bareheaded and so proudly planted on both legs that, seeing him, I recalled the beautiful verses of Tyrtaeus describing a Greek hoplite: “Let us hold ourselves firm and steady, the feet apart, well planted in the earth. Let the teeth bite the lip, let the flanks of the broad shield protect below the legs, above the chest and the shoulders.” A sort of chlamys is knotted carelessly upon the shoulder of the young hero. The direct and almost provocative gaze has all the assurance of true courage.

The bronze David of Donatello is one of the first statues in which the human form, so little understood in the Middle Ages, was again presented without any garment. It is a young Florentine boy with nervous forms, lean and a little dry, bizarrely coiffed with a great straw hat. This realism, like that of Masaccio, was for me a revelation. I understood that individual characters

can ally themselves with the grandest style; but young and beautiful forms being just as real as ugliness, an artist has indeed the right to prefer them and to choose them.

Even in his statues of saints, Donatello completely freed himself from the sanctimonious and frozen traditions; he made portraits strongly characterized, and this passionate sincerity takes nothing away from the breadth of his style. What is perhaps a little too modern is a sort of fever that agitates all his personages. In him, it is indeed life that overflows; this proud bearing, this fury of execution of which Donatello and Michelangelo are not always masters, it is the very depth of their temperament, the very nature of their genius. That has nothing in common with the false impetuosity and the false fever of certain moderns (such as our romantic Carpeaux). If Donatello is the greatest portraitist of that epoch, Ghiberti is more of a poet, he composes better, he knows better how to coordinate the scenes and remains more equal to himself. In Donatello, beside admirable finds, one meets weaknesses and exaggerations of violence which chill the emotion.

The bas-reliefs of the two pulpits of the church of San Lorenzo, for example, show us an excessive search for dramatic expression. The personages are heaped confusedly, it is a throng of people who gesticulate and struggle about; the faces grimace. It seems that the aging artist makes an effort to astonish the world once again by his audacity; but these overdone movements, these theatrical expressions leave me cold, and I think then of the contained gestures, sober and as though unconscious, which Andrea Pisano found in the sincere obser-

vation of life and in the profound feeling of his heart.

Paul to his sister Louise

Florence.

… What I study by preference in ancient art is that which can serve as a model for modern art. Benedetto da Maiano, having to make the portrait of Onofrio Vanni, knew how to avoid the use of our disagreeable pedestals; he placed his bust in a niche, with a broad cartouche bearing an inscription. The head is ugly and of a plebeian type, but intelligent, full of finesse and good nature. Our sculptors ought to draw inspiration from such examples, instead of encumbering our squares with statues or pedestals of more or less celebrated contemporaries. The trousers, the hat, or the boots of a great man interest us little. What posterity will desire to know is the face and the head, that bony box which forms the envelope of a well-organized brain.

5

I shall never forget the profound impression I felt when I entered for the first time a venerable sanctuary, the Brancacci Chapel, at the church of the Carmine. It is poor and badly lighted, this little chapel, and yet, when the eye has grown accustomed to the half-darkness of these walls blackened by the smoke of candles, there springs up radiant the immortal thought of Masaccio. The young artist did not finish his admirable frescoes, he died in his flower, and this premature end is forever regrettable. Poor and unrecognized, was he at least sustained in his task by the joy of creating a masterpiece? Did he have full consciousness of the profound revolution that his genius was going to produce in modern art? One must hope so.

Masaccio was the first to give the example of a perfect accord between the learned observation of reality and that power of inner vision which gives life to a legendary scene. The painter fixes a lasting image of it by a sort of creation.

They knew it well, those great masters of the Renaissance who all, beginning with Michelangelo, came on pilgrimage to the humble chapel, and who remained there long hours, in a respectful contemplation. They listened to and meditated upon what these old walls say, which teach so well artistic simplicity, conviction, and honesty.

It is there that, for the first time, I learned that there exists a great and beautiful naturalism, as far removed from paltry or coarse vulgarity as from the pompous, exorbitant academic [productions], a naturalism which says the truth strongly, without softenings or reticences, but which knows how to choose the essential traits and to neglect the rest. This realism scarcely resembles that of the little Flemings, whose meticulous and finicking observation pries curiously into nature in order to draw up too complete a report of it. For them beauty does not count. The nobility of the human form is unknown to them, and they do not suspect, the wretches, to what point those ugly fellows, whose wrinkles and warts they study with so much zeal, remain ungraceful, ungainly, and ill-built.

When, in thought, I imagine a Flemish painting strayed into the midst of the noble Italian frescoes, it seems to me that I see a duck paddling beside swans. (1)

For Masaccio drawing is not only an accounting

(1) Exclusive admirations are permitted, even useful, in a young artist; they would be a defect in an historian of art. I have learned since then that there are several manners of painting well, as there are several sorts of beauty.

but the sculptural understanding of forms, he distributes the shadows in broad masses which determine the great planes. A statuary could model after these figures so well constructed.

Compare the Adam and Eve of Van Eyck, or else the kind of ugly apes to which Rembrandt gave these names, with the fresco of Masaccio, so simple and so beautiful, so moving by the true expression of despair that Raphael remembered it in the Loggias of the Vatican. Admire the boldness of the foreshortening in the figure of that inexorable angel who descends from heaven and whose flaming sword shows to the whole human race the hard road of life.

Paul M. to his mother

Masaccio was working on the frescoes of the Carmine, when Filippo Lippi, a young monk who had just pronounced his vows, asked him for lessons in painting. This novice was a frank merry fellow who was not long in escaping from the convent. Taken prisoner by corsairs, he returned to Florence only after a thousand adventures and a thousand pranks.

One day Cosimo de’ Medici, in order to oblige him to finish a work begun, took it into his head to lock him up under key. Filippo cut the sheets of his bed and escaped through the window to go and rejoin the fair one.

The nuns of Prato having ordered from the young monk an altar painting, he could not do without a model for his Madonna and obtained leave to have a charming novice named Lucrezia Buti pose. One day the young girl devoutly asked permission to go and see the exhibition of the girdle of the Virgin. But the ingenuous one did not return, having let herself be carried off by that pagan Filippo. An indulgent pope released them both from their vows; they could have married, but it is claimed that the painter, jealous of his liberty, preferred not to take advantage of the permission. From this free union was born Filippino, an artist of great talent, who finished the frescoes begun by Masaccio.

I should not have related to you this scandalous anecdote, if I did not find it altogether symbolic: it seems to me to

sum up the history of religious art in the period of the Renaissance. And then Filippo Lippi is a great painter; he pushed so far the analysis of chiaroscuro in his delicate half-tones, that forty years in advance, he gives a foretaste of Leonardo da Vinci.

If you wish to know the features of Lucrezia Buti, I send you her photograph: this Virgin of the Uffizi is her faithful portrait, in no way idealized. She has a broad brow and the lower part of the face very fine, with a sly, mocking, and not very frank mien. Her elegant costume, the light veil, arranged with art in her coquettish coiffure, all that was of the latest fashion, all that — her history above all — must have given many distractions to the young Florentine women at prayer. The infant Jesus is a good fat baby, but the little Saint John has quite the air of a rogue full of malice like the painter his father, his gaiety and his roguish little face make me laugh in this hardly edifying [painting]…

Ghirlandajo is the true heir of the art of Masaccio. In his beautiful frescoes of Santa Maria Novella, he painted religious subjects and treated them in an admirable manner, but what is no less interesting for us, are the groups of numerous contemporary personages which he knew how to introduce into them. There are portraits! It is really a whole epoch that comes back to life. Those people have such an intensity of life that one believes one has met them in the street, one knows them, one is about to address a

word to them. The drawing of Ghirlandajo is of the grandest style; the modeling firm, simple and broad; the colorations form a very harmonious ensemble in their sobriety; they are tones of dead leaves or else beautiful colorings of the Indies. In the background, woodwork of old oak with a few fine arabesques of gold.

When you come to Florence, it is that art that I shall advise you to study, rather than that of the tender master Botticelli. Do not do as I did. Shall I confess it to you, I let myself be seduced by that charmer, against whom M. Perrin had nonetheless put me on guard. How resist? They are so exquisite, his long thin women, with the sweet alluring smile! Their melancholy grace made me forget

that they are not always very correctly constructed and that they sometimes neglect to hold themselves steady.

6

Paul M. to his sister Alix

Florence, October 68.

… For this time, my intention was to study uniquely the primitive masters, but I am already much pulled about, much undecided. I do not know whether it will be at Rome. How right I was not to go to Venice! There are moments when I am a little weary of copying children’s drawings; Michelangelo, who has already turned the heads of so many people, has not yet finished. — At other times I remember Phidias, and one must forget him a little, if one wishes to admire the Renaissance without restrictions. Beside the Greeks, all this formidable art seems a little tormented in its grace, even incorrect, despite all its science.

That is what that Gentleman in the black coat called Good Taste tells me. I have all that, but I confess that grace carries it off. — The Florentines are, some so naive in their manner, so charming in their faults, others so proud and so noble in their emphasis, they have so much youth, élan, life, that I let myself be seduced in spite of Giotto, in spite of Phidias and in spite of Minerva. Yet if I come before that beautiful bronze called the Idolino, then, as before the pediments of the Parthenon, Michelangelo seems to me a sick giant, nobly exalted by fever. His impetuosity, his bitter genius, his tragic sorrow are not worth Greek serenity.

You see, I am always the same floating and restless spirit, always in quest of the better, admiring only with one eye and not knowing how to stop at anything. Between Giotto and Michelangelo there is an abyss; well, I am at the bottom of it; I climb sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left, losing in continual hesitations all the fruit of my studies.

Tell mama that I am in marvelous health; she was quite

wrong to worry; my letter from Ravenna was that of an individual annoyed by the rain and the Byzantines, but not ill at all.

7

Louise M. to her brother, November 1868.

At the farm of the Échelles we had fine weather. I believe that, if I had stayed there a few days more, I should have ended by adopting the accent and the manners of speech of those good people, which greatly shocked M. Carré.

Imagine that he asked me whether I had read Tacitus. Now that he knows his Tacitus thoroughly, he no longer reads the newspapers; all the political acts one can imagine are in there. (1) — He intends to write a work on the relation of Greek coins and their value; above all I must not speak of this idea, it would be stolen from me. He speaks to me of a heap of things which are not useful at all, for example, that Cicero always put the subjunctive, because he had an undecided character, etc… In short he is very interesting, but too learned for me. He always believes that he is dealing with a grown person, very educated, and he is mistaken.

I also wanted to ask you what the Brera is, whether it is a city or a man.

Madame Milliet to her son

Paris, November 68.

Louise is going to relate to you the visit of M. Perrin, and I, I feel the need to tell you all the pleasure it gave me. Louise must be as naive as she is not to have her head a little turned by all the praises

(1) Like Beulé, the learned professor noted numerous analogies between the manners of the Roman decadence and those of the Second Empire.

he gave her: “You have entirely the feeling of the ancient masters.” — Of her Infant Jesus after Luini: “Ravishing; it is pure Luini.” — Of her heads from nature, the little Julien: “He has character, [but] a fault of drawing.” But that of Rose: “Very well drawn, it speaks, very good likeness! He is sure of it.” — Her compositions? What interested him most was her Venus animating the statue. He remained at least a quarter of an hour considering it: “Charming, ravishing!” A few objections however, which Louise will tell you.

For myself, I give you my impression; I confess it to you, I am a little dazzled by it, foolishly so, but I say it to you alone and have not let it be seen at all.

Let us speak of you now. M. Perrin congratulates you on not having been to Venice. He recommended, twice over: “Madame, when your son is back, above all let him not set foot in any studio other than mine, and no comrades! One recognizes their influence at once.” — I did not dare to tell him that your intimate enemy was yourself, for that is much more serious; one can show a friend the door, but when the contradiction is within oneself, what is to be done? There is only one means, it seems to me, to show one of the two selves the door.

You are far from the exclusivism of M. Perrin. I drew his wrath upon myself by a clumsy answer. He was saying to Louise: “Do not look at the colorists!” — And Louise replied that she did not like them at all. — Whereupon, I have the stupidity to say: “She likes them so little that she does not even want the beauties of their works.” — The little gray eyes of M. Perrin light up and flash lightning, his lips disappear: “Madame, there is nothing to see in the colorists, nothing to seek there, it is only an envelope!” I considered myself told.

Louise M. to her brother

November 1868.

M. Perrin came to our house, it is very fine on his part. He first looked at my Hercules and Antaeus and showed me with

the compass faults of balance. My flowers from nature pleased him greatly, he said that it was done simply, that one could see I had not copied flower models; he nonetheless found some greens a little heavy in them. Then came a donkey after a plaster cast; he found the head well drawn: “That is the principal thing, one should always draw the heads better than the rest.”

A Descent from the Cross after Fra Angelico; he fell into ecstasy and said that I had the spirit of the primitive masters. But his eyes having fallen on the engraving of the Loggia of Raphael that I copied, he exclaimed that it was very dangerous to copy a model engraved coarsely and brutally, while the original was fine and delicate. — Of my compositions, it is the one of Venus that he likes best, except that the Pygmalion is a little young. In sum, he paid me more compliments than he found faults in me.

Mama asked him for a recommendation so that I might draw at the Louvre, but he said that he was very little known. Mama did not dare to insist. — He spoke to us of Orsel, for whom he has a veritable veneration and who, he claims, when he drew the leaves of the Jardin des Plantes, had mastered them.

I will tell you also that we had a composition of style: the Child and the Guardian Angel. My angel made a magnificent sermon to the child. You would have found it a little long and tiresome, and would have cut out half of it. I do believe that at bottom it would have been better, but I should have cried out about it. I was first.

Farewell, my dear master, for it is to you that I owe the compliments I have received.

Madame Alix Payen to her brother

November 68.

Julien Plissonnier has seen the drawings and compositions of Louise. He did not stint her in praises. He is truly astonished, dumbfounded at what she has done.

Sunday we were dining at mama’s with Fanny and

Maria (of the Colony); there was talk of women, of their education, the discussion was very animated. Louise said her word very well, always with a tranquil air. As for Fernand, he has a singular idea of women. Besides, those whom he has frequented could not give him a just opinion. He may well have known many women, he does not know women, it is always the same one that he has seen…

Madame Milliet to her son

November 68.

… Today they are burying Rothschild, tomorrow Rossini, Berryer is very ill, Lamartine also. The great men of the century are going away; let the young ones make haste!

V

ASSISI AND ROME

NOVEMBER 1868 — JANUARY 1869

ASSISI. — ALLEGORIES. — ROME. — RAPHAEL. — MOSAIC OF SANTA PUDENZIANA. — LETTERS OF LOUISE

1

Paul M. to his father

Assisi, November 68.

I traveled in the same compartment with three young aristos quite fresh out of some Jesuit establishment. Ah! how well they had profited from the excellent principles inculcated by our Reverend Fathers! One of them was relating with many cynical details his precocious pranks, of which he seemed very proud. And as his father had required that he note down very exactly all his expenses, his notebook bore certain costs ingeniously inscribed under this heading of double meaning: “Works”; without specifying, he said, whether it was a matter of good works or of works of the flesh, for one must never lie!

My experience is not very long, but I have always noticed that immorality and hypocrisy are in direct proportion to devotion… among the Catholics at least, for I am glad to acknowledge that my friends who are very religious nonetheless remain the most loyal and the most honest fellows I know.

Paul to his mother

Assisi, November 68.

Here I am at Assisi, the homeland of Saint Francis. This gentle visionary aroused in his lifetime an indescribable enthusiasm, and his life soon became legendary. Series of paintings were devoted to celebrating him who has been nicknamed the Patriarch of Democracy.

It was only after a few follies of youth that Francis decided to renounce the world. One day his father, a positive man, publicly overwhelmed him with reproaches; the young exalted one cried out that he wished to owe nothing more to his parents, to keep nothing of what they had given him. At once, in the full public square, he strips himself of his garments which he throws to the ground, and there he is, all naked, who continues to call heaven to witness. — In our day, a similar escapade would lead straight to the police court. Fortunately the bishop, who was passing by, interposes! He shelters under his priestly mantle the young mystic, and protects the rebellious son against the wrath of his father.

I do not know whether it is very wise to propose to the admiration of youth such acts, which reveal a sickly and contagious state. But on the other hand the doctrines of Saint Francis were a religion truly new, a religion without hatred, all of tolerance and of goodness. Assuredly his love for nature contributed to giving the arts a very happy direction. He extended his sympathy to all beings, to animals, to plants, to the Sun, to the Earth our mother. People began to contemplate with emotion these marvels, disdained for long centuries and replaced by abstract symbols. Eyes were at last going to open upon the real world.

I therefore willingly forget the hallucinations and the ecstasies of the unbalanced sick man, and I am

infinitely grateful to him for his tenderness toward all that breathes, for that goodness which devotes itself, for that poetry which brought a little joy and hope to the poor folk of his sad epoch.

Paul M. to his sister Louise

Assisi.

I was somewhat disappointed in seeing the great paintings of Giotto in the lower church of Assisi; they are far from being worth those of Padua. (1) These allegories celebrate the virtues of Saint Francis, Chastity, Obedience, and finally the Marriage of the Saint with Poverty.

Today the ingeniousness of the intentions, the poetry itself and the elevation of the moral thought do not seem to us sufficient to constitute by themselves alone a masterpiece of art, and there is scarcely anything else here:

Upon an arid rock Poverty stands upright in the midst of a thornbush. She is little seductive, my faith! lean, ugly and clothed in dirty patched rags. Christ unites her to Saint Francis, who passes onto her finger the nuptial ring, while a choir of angels and of the faithful attends this mystic union. Lower down, in the foreground, an urchin throws stones at Poverty and a cur barks at her. To the left, a good young man, docile to the counsels of his guardian angel, strips himself of his beautiful red mantle to give it to an old beggar, while to the right, a young and elegant huntsman, rapacious as his falcon, seems to turn into derision this charitable act; deaf to good counsels, he prepares to follow in the tracks of that miser who clasps a purse against his heart.

The allegory of Chastity is a bombastic rebus. Distrust the art critics and their fine phrases: [it is said to be] the palfrey of a virtuous damsel shut up in a high tower of ivory defended by crenellations and machicolations. For me, I have seen only a rather

(1) They seem for the most part to have been executed by his pupils.

ugly woman, seated at the window of a minuscule turret, in which she could not stand upright. — A little lower down lean two women, half hidden by crenellated ramparts. Their names are inscribed above them, very fortunately, for without that I should have had great trouble divining that it is Purity with Fortitude of soul (Mundilia and Fortitudo). They present the lance and the shield to a young neophyte who, very humbly, washes his sins in the lustral water. To the left, a holy warrior wields a discipline with leather thongs, while Saint Francis stretches out his hand to a few of the faithful who will mount toward him. To the right, the holy militia bears itself to the defense of the citadel attacked by a terrible enemy, Love, a great naked winged boy, his eyes covered with a thick blindfold, his brow crowned with roses, and whose legs end in the claws of a bird of prey. A monk, also winged, strikes him with the thongs of his whip. At his feet, fallen on his back, sprawls Impurity, a monster with hairy legs and the head of a pig. In the background, in the shadow, Death appears, horrible, brandishing her scythe against a satyr who personifies the sensual desires.

Does not all that seem to you too ingenious, terribly complicated, obscure, subtle? The moderation and the gravity of the gestures preserve, it is true, something imposing, but the science of drawing is still in its infancy, and the frescoes of Padua, later only by a few years, mark a great progress in the talent of Giotto.

Assisi, Nov. 68.

Yesterday evening I saw arrive at my inn a little French abbé, pretty, pretty as a girl, quite young, with a babyish face, white and pink. He had himself served a fine dinner: fritto misto, omelette with rum, truffled partridge, sweet entremets, varied desserts, the whole washed down with old Chianti and first-choice Orvieto. Scarcely arrived, he had donned a warm dressing-gown and put on velvet slippers; then, his back to the fire, beatifically thrown back in a great armchair, he set himself to savoring like a connoisseur a glass of chartreuse, the color of topaz, and said to me, putting on an air of compunction: “Yes, I come on pilgrimage to make my visit to Saint Francis.” He had become very talkative,

witty, gay, almost tender, when suddenly a little pout puckered the corner of his sensual lips, a shadow passed over his plump face, anger shone in his beautiful eyes, and he felt the need to make known to me the cause of his vexation: “I had stopped at Perugia, and I asked to say my mass. They showed me superb sacerdotal vestments, veritable works of art, and I was already rejoicing at officiating in public under these rich ornaments, when an old priest, jealous no doubt, disdainfully gave me a black chasuble with silver embroidery, as old and as ugly as himself. That is not done! It is to understand very badly the duties of hospitality. In the church, there were many women… and even dances…

It is not for myself, but in the interest of religion, that I regret a superb chasuble of crimson velvet, all embroidered with gold and pearls; it made me greatly envious, I admit it.”

Humble Saint Francis, apostle of Poverty, what would you have said of your pilgrim?

2

THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA

Like a pale ribbon, the muddy Tiber Nonchalantly lingers in sinuous windings, In an immense plain where, morbid mystery, A warm vapor vibrates as it rises from the earth.

No trees, no flowers, neither vine nor plowed land; In a dreary infinite, yonder, Rome appears. The fever reigns alone in the solitary fallows, Beware of breathing in its noxious poisons.

The stormy Sirocco, in the summer season, Is not the healthy breath of a lively gust, It benumbs, overwhelms, one falls asleep, one collapses.

I call upon you, to the rescue! Triumphant Quinine, Stronger than the shafts of angered Heracles, Slay all the rapacious birds of Stymphalus.

Rome, November 68.

Having left Assisi at 5 o’clock in the morning, I hoped to arrive at Rome before nightfall; I would have rented a room that very day. But our train, which would never end, stopped at every instant; we were traveling in the company of immense herds of oxen and of pigs. It was late when we entered Rome. At once, I deposit my trunk at the station, and there I am, off in search of lodging, finding my way in the Eternal City, like someone who already knows it a little. I entered first the famous restaurant Lepri (that is to say, of the Hare) and I supped there with appetite.

People looked at me. I had, it seems, a singular figure, with my dusty and disheveled overcoat, the pockets stuffed with a heap of things, and my old straw hat in the month of November. The traveler thus clad, presenting himself by night, without baggage, did not inspire confidence. At the Hotel of the Caesars, they looked me up and down: “There is no room!” That would have made me be taken for a thief.

[Before] running about the city, I repaired as best I could the disorder of my dress, I took my Joanne guide out of my pocket and, renouncing my kitchen Italian, I spoke simply French. That succeeded, I was received in a little hotel, not however without their having asked me for my passport. — The next day, very early in the morning, I had rented a room where I installed myself in haste, then off for the Vatican! I visited only a very small part of it, but I am dazzled by it.

That very evening I was drawing at the Villa Medici, where the living model poses every day, from seven o’clock to nine o’clock. I intend to take advantage of it. “Nature and the masters,” that is the good formula. I have not the slightest desire to waste my time in the café. But what a nuisance! here all the museums are closed on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, not counting two or three feast days a week. This pious idleness, so useful for my salvation, does not at all suit my purpose in this lower world.

November 68.

This morning I shall go to pay a visit to Raphael. The frescoes of the Farnesina are visible only on the 1st and the 15th of each month.

Madame Milliet to her son

Paris, 15 November 68.

I am very glad that you have found young people of your acquaintance, I do not fear as much as M. Perrin that you should frequent comrades. It will be a pleasure for you to go and draw at the Villa Medici, and you will find there beautiful models. I deplore with you all these feast days which are going to prevent you from working in the museums; however, you must not absorb yourself completely in the contemplation of the masters. Remember from time to time that you inhabit the earth, that there still happen there sometimes interesting things worth being looked at.

Every Thursday afternoon we go to the Louvre. Madame Page has entrusted Brigitte to me, who comes with us. Louise persists in remaining among the Egyptians, and it is Siberian cold there. I freeze, my feet on the marble flagstones; she also, only she does not notice it. The Greek vases are closed, otherwise I should have dragged her, willing or not, toward those less hyperborean regions.

Julien Plissonnier is in Paris, Henri asked him for a plaster bust, to try out necklaces. For that he made a cast of the polisher-girl. It seems that he had not oiled the poor girl enough, and she gave peacock cries when the mold had to be taken off.

Henri intends to go to Nice, and there is question also of this journey for Alix. As I said that I did not find it reasonable that she should be away at the same time as her husband, they no longer speak of it to me, but I do believe — reason not being positively their guide — that she will go and rejoin him.

Paul M. to his mother

Rome, Nov. 68.

I have gone several times to M. Pilliard’s, (1) always very amiable, very obliging, very witty. His painting, imitated from the Pompeian style, pleases me only by halves; it is sensible, well done, and boring. — At each visit I have

(1) A friend of M. Perrin.

met at his house new priests, young ones and old ones, all educated, speaking very well of art and of literature. But as soon as it was a question of religion or of politics, you have no idea of their verve and of their rage. That amuses me enormously. It is a veritable torrent of antediluvian theories, senseless. Their eloquence is indeed that of despair: more insults than reasons. Those poor people feel themselves lost; coarse words are their last resources, and that army has never done much harm to anyone.

Of course, I did not say a word against my thought; but I confess that my silence was a little Jesuitical; one could take it for an approval. I had a great desire to see their bewildered air, if I had declared myself a fiery socialist; but that would have stopped their verve, I should have lost too much.

Those people have a singular way of understanding Christian charity. One must see how they treat that poor M. Duruy, and those scoundrels of republicans; and with what ferocious joy they foresee civil war in Spain; with what enthusiasm they went to see the odious executions of political prisoners ordered these last days. — On this point I could not prevent myself from telling them my way of thinking.

Paul M. to his sister Louise

Rome, Nov. 68.

… There is a formula that is repeated everywhere and that exasperates me; it is said: the Greeks sought only physical beauty, modern art found expression. It is false! But this error (which Taine repeated) has spread, because rare are those who read Greek, I mean those who understand what a Greek sculptor expressed in one of those heads, today without a nose, in one of those torsos, today without a head and without arms.

And yet these mutilated fragments suffice to reveal to us clearly, besides the perfection of the human form, the simple and natural nobility, the serenity of a well-balanced soul, Greek life with its liberty, its calm,

its health, and the triumphant joy of the most marvelous epoch. — Very foolish are those who believe that the marbles of Phidias express nothing! What these Philistines need is statues that resemble an actor making the grimace of fright or of anger, or better still whose head leans and whose tender eye lifts toward heaven, with a tear!

Paul M. to his father

Rome, Nov. 68.

It is with great difficulty that I find a moment to write to you, so occupied am I all day at the Vatican and in the evening at the Academy. I am like a horse that approaches the stable, I feel that the end of my journey is not far off, I make haste, I pile up sketches and souvenirs. — I put all the more ardor into it because I had to lose eight days in the offices soliciting a permit to work. I was sent from the Vatican to the Villa Medici, then to the French Embassy to have my request countersigned; it had to be begun again because the paper was not of a large enough format, that was to lack respect for His Excellency! From there, I went to Monsignor Pacca, Major-domo of His Holiness, the next day to the offices of the Administration, and finally to the Director of the Museums, whose address no one would tell me and whom I had to find as best I could. One needs patience for it! Ah, if I had had a confessor, all would have been much easier. At last I am in order; but that does not spare me tips at each door. There is a gate, and at each gate a guard who opens only for money; that ends by becoming irritating. Add to that the customs, the passports, the gendarmes, the heaps of tolls, the priests, the vermin, the beggars and all the holy filth; there is enough to make one take a dislike to the Eternal City. Fortunately Raphael and Michelangelo are there, who make one forget all that.

You know whether I am moderate, whether I am disposed to respect all opinions and all sincere beliefs; I even have a sort of sympathy for mysticism, when

I encounter it in beautiful souls like Fénelon or Fra Angelico; but here all these cretins with the absurd and right-thinking air make me lose my temper; this mixture of debauchery and bigotry is repulsive.

Assisi had seemed to me an antediluvian curiosity; it is a village remained a thousand years behind; that amused me. There were there old mummified monks who might have been several times centenarians; they showed me the house of Saint Francis and spoke of him as though they had been his contemporaries.

At Rome Jesuitism is all-powerful. I saw with astonishment that the ugly beast still lives, that disgusts me and irritates me.

Everywhere else in Italy I found obligingness and that simplicity of manners by which one recognizes at once the people who have received a liberal education. Here, on the contrary, everything shocks me: One adores what I despise and one outrages what I venerate. The antique statues are soiled by stupid restorations; the Venus of Praxiteles has a petticoat of zinc; the monuments are left to abandon, in the midst of filth; one transforms into churches these veritable ruins with an impudence of bad taste that is painful to see. Everywhere the baroque and rococo styles display their ridiculous emphasis and mannerism. It would take more time than I have to grow accustomed to all that and to see it no longer. Yet in the midst of this jumble one discovers admirable things. I have seen so many of them and so rapidly, that I have as it were an indigestion of marvels.

3

Paul to his mother

Rome, Nov. 68.

M. Perrin may say what he likes, it will always be difficult for me to admit that the art of the divine Raphael is the beginning of the decadence. M. Lugardon was not of that opinion.

What is unique in the world, that of which the copies of the

Balze brothers do not give you the slightest idea, are the frescoes of the Chambers of the Vatican: the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament, the Parnassus, the School of Athens, etc. It would take a courage that I do not have, to close one’s eyes before these masterpieces, and to shut oneself up in the exclusive study of the Primitives.

In the Disputation, the part that was executed first still lets timidity and dryness be seen, Raphael comes out of the school of Perugino, while the right-hand part already shows an execution much more free and very superior. It is the precise moment of the blossoming. Like those plants that one sees grow and flower in a day of spring, the genius of Raphael then develops with an astonishing rapidity.

Even today the powerful Roman race has preserved something of that natural nobility, of that robust health which I have admired in the figures of Psyche and of the goddesses of the Farnesina. Beside these sculptural forms, the lymphatic elegances of our Parisiennes appear quite mawkish and quite poor.

I must say however that the Loggias somewhat disappointed me, not for the composition, which I admire greatly, but for the execution, which is often brutal, slack and even incorrect. They are moreover pupils, apprentices, who executed these paintings under the direction of Giulio Romano. — One recognizes in places his harshly accentuated colors and his brick colorings. — However, in a small number of charming heads, for example those of the young girls who watch the little Moses saved from the waters, I believe I distinguish the retouchings of the true master. The sketches so lively which Raphael improvised for all these

compositions are in part preserved. As for the engravings of Chapron, they are little faithful, Rubens has passed through there, the drawing has become flamboyant, in the style of the seventeenth century; M. Perrin is right, Louise will do well to distrust them.

Paul to his sister Louise

Rome, November 68.

I much prefer the frescoes of the Stanze to the famous painting of the Transfiguration. Here, I range myself with the opinion of M. Perrin; the simplicity of the Primitives has already disappeared, we are on the path that leads to the academic style. Look, for example, at the man seated on the left and the superb woman kneeling in the foreground. Never was drawing more learned, never modeling more solid, more full, never drapery better disposed to let the nude be guessed at; yet these attitudes were chosen, not to express an emotion felt by the artist, but because they furnished him with beautiful motifs, beautiful passages. The arrangement is impeccable, but it is an arrangement, each fold was sought with care upon the lay figure, and copied with a prodigious skill, but draperies and personages who wear them will not move, they would be afraid of disturbing the beautiful ordering of the painting, they are posing. I regret the time when Raphael was less learned, but more moved.

Paul M. to his father

Rome, December 68.

… Raphael entrusted to his pupil Giovanni da Udine the execution of the stuccoes and of the charming arabesques which decorate the pilasters of the Loggias. If one had need to demonstrate to what point manners were relaxed in that epoch, it would suffice to present a few of the licentious compositions which found a place in the dwelling of Leo X. These ribald images were not such as to shock prelates who were scarcely alarmed by the most scandalous realities. Here, still more perhaps than at the Farnese palace, La Bruyère could have grown indignant at seeing “the filthiness of the gods painted for the Fathers of the Church.”

Paul M. to his mother

Rome, December 1868.

… Strolling the other day at random, I entered the church of Santa Pudenziana, a monument whose architecture has undergone modern restorations and which did not seem to offer great interest. The guides do not speak of it.

Scarcely, however, had I taken a few steps into a badly lighted nave, when I was forced to stop short, stupefied, dazzled. My heart beat with emotion, I had before my eyes a spectacle which nothing approaches, the most splendid mosaic in the world.

Picture to yourselves, in a sky of flax-blue, streaked with great gray clouds, the monstrous symbols of the four Evangelists looming up, scarcely glimpsed, as in a dream. Below, a few personages cut at half-body: Saint Pudentiana and Saint Praxedes holding crowns above the heads of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. In the background, a portico in a half-circle, whose dark openings of a somber blue have the color of night; the roof is made of plates of bronze framed with gold. Above rise in tiers the monuments of a strange city, and, higher still, an arid hillock, upon which stands, solemn, a tall cross of gold.

But all that fades away, all disappears before a supernatural vision: Christ is there, of colossal stature; his beard is brown, his long black hair hangs upon his shoulders. He looks into the distance, vaguely, with his pale and severe eyes, [upon] the human iniquities; the gaze is so sad, so intense, so poignant, that it goes to the very depth of your soul. Tears rose to my eyes. The left hand holds an open book, while the right extends in a great gesture of benediction. The tunic of gold has broad sleeves and two vertical bands of azure; the Greek mantle, draped over the legs, is also entirely of supple cloth of gold; the throne of gold, of a barbaric design and ornamented with emeralds and rubies, covered with a rich cushion of purple delicately embroidered with gold.

What constitutes, to my mind, the exceptional interest of this moving figure of Christ, is that I believe it inspired by a memory of the Olympian Jupiter of Phidias. Evidently, there has been transposition and free interpretation, but this grandiose and superhuman being can nonetheless help us to divine the imposing aspect of those colossi of ivory and gold which the most illustrious of the Greek statuaries had created, and of which nothing in modern art could give us even an approximate idea. (1)

4

Paul M. to his mother

Rome, December 68.

I must make reproaches to you both. Why have agreed to illustrate that Book of Honor? Louise has already so little time to do serious studies. Her holidays were employed in tinkering up pretty little drawings for gifts, it is deplorable! For a painter, questions of taste are important things. In this Paris so refined, so mannered, so far from nature, it is rare to find a true sentiment, a simple and spontaneous gesture. It is nonetheless on that that painting lives.

To resist the influence of this artificial milieu, avoid, out of hygiene, having Louise copy the fashionable drawings: no Bertall, no Gustave Doré, no more either of your little German engravings. Even in the best, the drawing is hard, heavy and dry. The graceful subjects are explained systematically there, too many little flowers, little birds, little brooks, little thatched cottages, little curly-haired children more so than they really look, too many banalities of a sentimental, paltry and bourgeois poetry. No Gavarni, no

(1) The mosaic of Santa Pudenziana has undergone some restorations in the eighth and then in the sixteenth century, but the composition, which probably dates from the fourth century, has been respected. A poor reproduction of it in chromolithography is to be found in Labarte, History of the Industrial Arts, volume II, plate 9.

Töpffer! — The great masters had not the notion of the ridiculous. Today we are afraid of it, and that paralyzes us. — I saw at Munich the colossal caricatures of Kaulbach, it is colossally sad and little witty. I know indeed a few antique caricatures which are charming pieces of banter, but, in general, laughter is not of the domain of the plastic arts. (1) The Aeginetan smile is already irritating. Fortunately for Louise, she studies the Egyptians, it is an excellent counter-poison. Those people are indeed a little stiff, they have eyes of faience in heads in profile, but at least, they do not jest, they do not banter, they make neither simperings nor little airs.

Louise M. to her brother

December 68.

… Try not to be too well pleased down there; you must not grow accustomed to living all alone. I assure you that we do not grow accustomed at all to your absence, you make a great emptiness for us; your sermons, which are so useful to me, I miss them. Think also of your poor Hamadryad who must find the time very long.

Imagine that I am a pupil of M. Gleyre. Your niece asked him for the recommendation so that I might obtain permission to draw at the Louvre. Mama takes Brigitte Page and me, every Thursday. We have been there only three times, always among the Egyptians. Brigitte does not draw badly, but frankly that is not by a long way worth what I do. That is probably because she has not received good lessons such as you give me.

I also did a style: A Day of Happiness. It merited a place of first, but one thing makes me indignant: Madame G… said to me: “It is good, but you have ideas too elevated for your age.” I found that so absurd, so stupid! I am very glad to have elevated ideas! It seems to me that one should seek to raise one’s ideas and not to narrow them.

(1) This opinion seems to me today very exaggerated.

Madame Milliet to her son

Dear child,

Paris, December 68.

We yesterday, Louise and I, spent the evening at madame Page’s with M. Gleyre and M. Monchablon. M. Gleyre was charming; he asked me for news of you with much interest, then I thanked him for his letter for Louise and I presented his pupil to him. — “But certainly, it is my pupil,” said he, “she has originality and that is a rare thing today.” — I asked him whether it would not be indiscreet to bring her to his house. — “Not at all,” he answered me, “that will give me great pleasure.” — You see how amiable that is, for him above all. — I spoke to him of the chapel of Giotto and of your photographs. — I told him that this chapel was for sale, and that you had written about it to M. de Nieuwerkerke. — “Ah well, he addresses himself well!” — He seems to detest Nieuwerkerke, but with M. Monchablon, they got excited over the chapel; I believe that if they had been able to buy it on the spot, they would have done it.

He then spoke to us of his journey to Egypt. He went up the course of the Nile for 700 leagues; he went as far as the frontiers of Abyssinia, was nearly devoured by crocodiles, etc… In short, he was very interesting.

M. Monchablon is going to do the portrait of madame Page. — It will be a very good likeness, he was drawing, M. Gleyre watched him opening his eyes wide and smiling slightly, with the shrewd air that you must know. Madame Page would like her portrait to be ready for the Exhibition, but M. Monchablon wants to finish his Moses first: “People find my angels too pretty,” he was saying, “very well, I am going to make them less pretty. I do not know the time that is going to take me, but after that, you will see how your portrait will get along; it will be done at once.” M. Gleyre kept on smiling. — Apart from that, Monchablon has the air of an excellent fellow, an open and pleasing figure.

A singular thing, the two words of M. Gleyre made more of an impression on Louise than all the compliments of

M. Perrin; she felt herself somebody. M. Perrin admired her compositions naïvely, but as she was perfectly of his opinion and would no doubt have found him an idiot if he had not appreciated them, that had slid over her; whereas the attention with which M. Gleyre occupied himself with her flattered her greatly.

Paul M. to Louise

Rome, Dec. 68.

I shall perhaps astonish you, but I am a little of the opinion of the schoolmistress. It is not good to have ideas above one’s age. This maxim is not as absurd as you think. I like, moreover, your indignation. You find that there is nothing too high for you, and it is an excellent thing to seek to elevate one’s mind; but one must not climb too fast, on pain of tumbling down and breaking one’s nose. The fruits of the hothouse have no savor. I have at your service a heap of fine sentences or of big platitudes which do not lack a certain foundation of truth. — Philosophy, if one occupies oneself with it too soon, jades and disgusts one with everything. One would make you work a great deal, and I believe that, outside of your studies, the best thing you have to do is to play and to laugh a little, without passing your nights meditating on destiny. — There is a host of beautiful books that you would not yet understand, no offense to you. As for science, one must not refine: try first to know well what everybody knows. You are still far from the mark.

As for art it is different. There is nothing too beautiful, even for beginners. You see, however, that I found the Venetians above my age, and I am delighted that you do not yet like Michelangelo; that will come later.

Louise M. to her brother

24 December 68.

I come to wish you a good year, good health and a prompt return…

I see that you do not share my opinion on the ideas

of my schoolmistress, but what I said, I believed I ought to say it, for I say all that I think and I think all that I say.

We recently had a composition. I chose this subject: Judge not by appearance. I renounced my philosophy, since those little geese have minds too paltry to understand what is truly beautiful and good, and I treated my subject in a more frivolous manner. That pleased greatly; I was first with eight counters, and they gave it to me to recopy in the Book of Honor!

But the praises I received touched me little, for I knew well at bottom that my ideas were not very magnificent, nor my style very correct, only it has something funny about it that pleases, but that is not what one will see.

You find it more useful to begin by learning what everybody knows, arithmetic, grammar, etc… Certainly it is useful; but it is that which jades you, and disgusts you, and bores you to death! Whereas, if one has a little philosophy, one learns to bear disagreeable things, one loves truth, duty, and consequently study. One does a thing that is boring, because it is one’s duty to do it. Life is short enough, one must not waste it in vain futilities. To give back to God one day our soul better than we received it, one needs a constant and courageous exercise.

You tell me that there is a host of interesting books that I should not understand. That displeases me, because it proves that I am still too much of a dunce and too dense. I must try to elevate my mind and to understand.

In growing up one makes progress. When I compare my drawn compositions of now with those of formerly, there is a great difference. Later, I shall find detestable those that I do now.

We went to see Phèdre and Les Plaideurs performed for the anniversary of Racine. I was very content with my evening. Mademoiselle Agar played admirably the role of Phèdre. The costumes were very beautiful. Our Fernand is much more classical; he finds tragedy boring to death and prefers those wretched little pieces, like La Cagnotte

or La Famille Benoiton. He did not feel the slightest pity, the slightest emotion at the beautiful recitation of Theramenes, who relates the death of Hippolytus.

Madame Milliet to her son

30 Dec. 68.

… There is happening in Paris a scandal that will make you leap up: Imagine that they lend the paintings of the Louvre! — to the friends of the Government, of course. — Here is how it was discovered: A fire broke out at M. Troplong’s, president of the Senate. Two paintings, Flemish I believe, which were in madame Troplong’s room, were burned. There were at the Senate forty paintings of the Louvre; there are, it is said, some at the Imperial Circle, at the Mess of the senior Officers of the Guard, etc. Every day there are complaints and insults addressed to M. de Nieuwerkerke; there is talk of a painting of 150 thousand francs which has disappeared; and no one answers. That surpasses all decency… (1)

Try to bring back from Rome anything at all, some image or other, for our cook. We will tell her that it has been blessed by the pope; that will make her happiness in this world and in the other.

Paul M. to his sister Louise

Rome, December 1868.

… Until now I have docilely followed the advice of M. Perrin and I have scarcely studied anything but the Primitives, but I begin to believe that this method is not without danger. How live with these men of genius without loving them, and how love them without imitating them a little? Now it is their defects that I no doubt reproduce. It is easier to take from them their stiffness and their awkwardness than to infuse into oneself their simplicity of heart, the lively freshness of their child’s imagination, the communicative sincerity of their emotion.

(1) “M. Duval, a famous collector of Geneva, had ceded to the Museum of the Louvre a charming antique statue, a satyr playing the flute. When his son, M. Étienne Duval, wished to see this statue again, it had disappeared from the collections of the Museum. It was discovered that it was at the house of one of the lady friends of M. the Superintendent.” Note of M. Georges Nicole.

I have not yet spoken to you of Michelangelo, and yet his genius eclipses here all the others. I feel myself incapable of describing to you what I have seen; it is above all expression. M. Perrin had put me on guard against the tormented style and the muscular exaggerations, but I do not believe that the study of Michelangelo is as dangerous as he says. Have we not before our eyes the ridiculously pretentious works of his imitators? There is something else to study in Michelangelo than contorted attitudes and formidable muscles; no one among the moderns, not even Raphael, has had to the same degree the feeling of the beauty of the human body. This marvelous machine, he knows all its springs; but he does not only have the science of anatomy, he joins to it a lively feeling of admiration for force and for suppleness, and what one might call the poetry of anatomy. Then these figures so noble and so proud breathe a sorrowful sadness which is in no way a pose. This bitter sorrow, Michelangelo felt it sincerely, this noble pride, it was the very depth of his soul, and if he expressed without effort great and strong things, it is because it was not possible for him to think otherwise.

Paul M. to his father

January 69.

In this first sojourn, much too brief, I should have seen Rome very badly, and drawn very little. I had kept Michelangelo for the end, and I did well. If I had begun with him, I should not have left the Sistine Chapel.

… I have seen too many beautiful things, I am quite troubled by it. The imagination is like a spring, it needs calm to settle and to become pure.

I have a thousand beautiful projects, it would be better to have a single idea, fixed, immutable, clearly engraved in the brain; the execution of it would be only a game. But nothing is more delicate, more fragile than the ideas of a painter; a breath, a word, even a kindly one, suffices to modify them, and sometimes to make them vanish. What is to be done about it? Perhaps the masters themselves groped a little.

VI

JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1869

ORVIETO. — SIGNORELLI. — SIENA. — IL SODOMA. — FRESCOES OF MONTE OLIVETO. — PARMA. — CORREGGIO.

1

Paul to his mother

Orvieto, January 69.

The railway does not yet go as far as Orvieto, one must make a long detour and the stagecoach is drawn by oxen. From Viterbo, to have myself conveyed here, I had to debate the price of the journey with two vetturini who pretended to be in competition. I finally arranged matters with one of them, and it was the other who conveyed me, they were father and son. Commandanti!

There I am on the road in the midst of deserted mountains, in a Siberian cold, in a little open cabriolet. The Tramontane that was blowing yields in nothing to the north wind of Geneva; I am still quite frozen from it. It was ten o’clock at night when we arrived at Orvieto; the gates are closed at eight o’clock; there we are then, stranded before the fortified enclosure of the little inhospitable city, proudly perched on its abrupt rocks. We had to ring, to shout, to shout, to awaken the guards, who were perhaps pretending to sleep, and to parley at length. At last, at the end of half an hour, they decided to open for us.

The sacristan of the cathedral is at the same time a photographer,

a sign of progress: “It is a pity,” he said to me to frighten me, “that the railway is not finished; foreigners are really too often assassinated, both in the hotels and on the high roads.” — They content themselves with fleecing them a little. The population of these regions is, on the contrary, very gentle and even very honest. My valise is moreover so flat, I am so disheveled, so threadbare, that a brigand would not stop me. This get-up earns me economies. Seeing this poor artist on his travels, the photographers lower their prices and I believe that I excite the pity even of the innkeepers.

Paul M. to his father

Orvieto, January 1869.

… Luca Signorelli is not a pupil of the Greeks, he is a barbarian and a realist, but his savage energy is of a singular power. I know nothing more strange, more striking than the frescoes of his great chapel in the cathedral of Orvieto. — One is astonished at the courage and the vigor of this artist who, aged sixty years, dared to undertake this immense work, and who executed it with an indefatigable impetuosity. (1)

All around the chapel runs a base very richly decorated with fanciful foliage-scrolls on a gold ground, sown with little pictures, where the figures are painted in grisaille on a background the color of slate. The subjects are not drawn from the Holy Scripture, but from pagan poems, from the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses of Ovid, the Pharsalia, some also from the Divine Comedy. Everywhere naked men, violent movements, abductions, murders, a brutal drawing, but full of life and of character.

Michelangelo admired these paintings and he even drew inspiration from them, very freely moreover, for certain figures of the Sistine Chapel, and putting on them the mark of his idealist genius.

(1) From 1499 to 1504.

Among the great frescoes of Orvieto, one of the most beautiful shows us the Preaching of the Antichrist.

To the right, at the back of a great square, rises an imposing temple, surrounded by porticoes and stairways. This rectangular edifice, ornamented with niches and columns, is surmounted by rounded towers which superpose themselves, a sort of Babel which loses itself at vertiginous heights. It is there that the Antichrist has himself adored as a god.

In the sky, in the midst of a glory where a thousand stars of gold shine, the archangel Michael, ardent for combat, comes rushing on the wing. He triumphs over the Spirit of Evil who falls backward, head foremost, wrapped in a whirlwind of draperies.

Upon the earth too reigns violence. A hail of fire mingled with blood casts terror into a cohort of armed men whose horses rear. Already the ground is strewn with corpses. Before our eyes, the blood flows from the wound that a young monk has received in the head; he expires, and near him here is, struck down, an unhappy vanquished man whom they strangle. Everywhere scenes of murder.

Meanwhile, standing upon a sculptured pedestal, the Antichrist has gathered the people; he speaks, and the demon, half hidden behind his mantle, whispers in his ear the pernicious doctrines by which he wishes to sow disorder. The people who listen to him, women, young people, old men, rich and poor, all are real personages, individual portraits strongly characterized. Their costumes are those of the fifteenth century, to which are nonetheless added a few ample draperies in the antique manner.

Against all the banal rules, the center of the composition has been left empty. This boldness astonishes; this is unique, this is unforeseen like reality. This great bare, deserted square contributes assuredly to the impression of terror and of mourning which is released from the work; one feels a sort of indescribable anguish, an expectation of death, one believes one breathes the acrid odor of blood.

Signorelli lived in a troubled epoch; he was a witness and perhaps an actor in the civil wars which then tore Italy apart. The scenes of violence that he shows us

are not the dreams of his imagination; he saw all that; he affirms it to us, by placing in a corner two impassive spectators, his own portrait and that of Fra Angelico.

The Antichrist is the forerunning sign of a thousand prodigies and a thousand evils: “Then, all things accomplished, the world will end, Amen.”

The End of the World has come; the earth trembles, all crumbles. Men and women, exalted by terror and uttering great cries, a frenzied crowd which rushes in disorder, crushing without pity those who have fallen to the ground. The figures leaning forward seem to come out of the frame, all the foreshortenings are rendered with an astonishing boldness.

To the right, here is the Resurrection:

In a sky all riddled with great nails of gold which figure the stars, two angels are standing, their wings broadly spread. They are robust naked young men, with floating hair. Their cheeks puffed out, they blow with all their lungs into long tubes of copper and make burst forth a crash of thunder. — The sound waves are figured symbolically by the sinuous folds of the banners and of the long streamers which float, attached to the trumpets of the Last Judgment. — At this call, here the dead awaken and begin to come out of the soil, from which they free themselves with effort. Some are still in the state of skeletons, or else half buried under the earth; the others, already clothed again in flesh, thank heaven with effusion. There are some who leap for joy. A few friends who find one another again after a long separation hold each other fraternally embraced. All are naked. Their bones and their muscles are energetically accentuated by a nervous, precise and learned drawing.

It is with love, with a sort of fanaticism, that the great Italians of the fifteenth century such as Castagno and Pollajuolo studied anatomy. Science was their religion. — Vasari relates that a son of Signorelli having been killed at Cortona, “a son whom he loved greatly,

very beautiful of face and of his whole person, Luca, despite his sorrow, had him stripped of his garments, and with a very great firmness of soul, without heaving a sigh, without shedding a tear, he made the portrait of his son entirely naked, in order to be able always to contemplate, thanks to the work of his hands, him whom nature had given him, and whom an enemy fortune had ravished from him.”

The manly face and the proud bearing of this young man are easily recognizable in the frescoes of his father, to whom he more than once served as model.

Farther on, Signorelli shows us the Elect, robust personages almost all standing, their eyes raised toward heaven and in paradisiac nudity. (It is indeed little likely that our garments should participate in the immortality of our souls.) Angels who flutter above the blessed have placed crowns of gold upon their heads. Others throw flowers by the handful. — Raphael remembered the graceful movement of one of these angels. (1) — Others again, disposed along the arch which terminates at the top the wall, are seated on little clouds, and make their mandolins resound. But these angels themselves are not at all imaginary figures; their beauty remains earthly, they are portraits. — Perhaps, to paint the joys of Paradise and its beatitudes, one would wish a genius less fierce than that of Signorelli. On the other hand he has created an Hell truly terrifying:

Three archangels, beautiful young men provided with great wings and armed from head to foot, appear in the sky. Standing, calm, without anger, the invincible mandataries of the divine power threaten to draw from the scabbard their sword, and already demons and damned, seized with terror, fall precipitated. — In the midst of the air there descends, gliding, a

(1) At the Farnesina.

tawny demon, with the horns of a bull, with broad clawed wings; his hateful face turns round as though to spit in the face of God a last blasphemy. He carries off on his back a naked woman, shuddering, disheveled, livid with terror.

Lower down swarms a howling throng, a hideous tangle of torturers and of the tortured. Yet the disorder of this mêlée is only apparent. A profound and hidden art presided over its composition: In the foreground, the sinners already struck are cast down and lying on the ground, in foreshortenings of an extreme boldness, others prostrated on their knees, and each accursed one forms with his executioner a distinct group, worthy of a great sculptor. A naked woman has been thrown flat on her belly upon the soil; her legs straighten up convulsed, and an indescribable suffering deforms her contorted face; it is that a demon strikes her with great blows of his heel, [bracing] his foot upon this head that he crushes, while he pulls violently on the knot which grips her throat.

The executioners torture their victims with a furious rage. One of them twists the neck of a damned soul to break his vertebrae and to tear the head from the trunk.

These terrible beings, with bristling hair, with thick bushy eyebrows, have hairy bodies, and their skin has taken on the greenish or bluish tones of carrion-birds; they grind their teeth, biting with full jaws, sinking their claws into the bleeding flesh, tearing, strangling, persisting with a ferocious joy. Several carry off, head downward, their panting victims whose feet stir desperately above their heads; and farther off, like a flight of birds of prey, sinister demons, swooping down upon the corpses, make their somber bat-wings throb in the air.

The drawing of Signorelli everywhere affirms the contours, accentuates the bones and the muscles with a powerful energy; but the most violent movements always remain true; all that has been observed from nature, all that moves, all that lives. Never has physical suffering,

the terror and the anguish of the tortured, never has the cruel brutality of the executioners been expressed with more force. This Hell, Signorelli invented it entirely from his own resources; without borrowing anything from Dante, he rivals him in tragic horror.

And yet the procedure of the fresco forbade him the mysterious effects of chiaroscuro, which the painters of the fifteenth century were moreover ignorant of almost as much as Polygnotus among the Greeks. It is the same with the effects of sunlight; one scarcely finds examples of them in the Italian frescoes. The ancient masters were ignorant of the expressive power of light and of shadow, but today, obeying a scruple which we call the respect of the wall, must we forbid ourselves these effects which would make one forget the surface to be decorated? I do not know. (1)

2

Paul M. to his mother

Siena, January 69.

It is here only that one can study a very seductive painter, Antonio Bazzi, called Il Sodoma.

In a bigoted and backward little town like Siena, it was a scandal to see the son of a simple shoemaker lead a rather grand life and a merry one. The luxury of his costumes, his superb racehorses which had the insolence to win all the prizes, his numerous servants in rich liveries, the merry troop of young scatterbrains who helped him in his pranks of a sometimes doubtful taste, his mocking spirit which respected nothing and no one — there did not need to be so much to attract to Antonio the envious and enemies.

In those days the tax was already heavy upon capital and artists were not the last to complain of being subjected to heavy charges.

(1) Raphael, however, painted Saint Peter in his prison.

Il Sodoma consigned jestingly his grievances in the archives of Siena. As his house was a veritable menagerie, he enumerates first the animals he possesses: squirrels, badgers, hens, turtledoves and ducklings, then he adds to this list: “I have moreover three wicked beasts, I mean three women, etc..”

Already, at Florence, I had seen the Saint Sebastian of Il Sodoma, a beautiful naked young man, of a free and supple drawing, of a soft modeling, of a delicate and a little morbid color. I had admired the expressive power that the master knew how to draw from chiaroscuro: the face sorrowfully turned toward heaven, he made a tragic shadow descend, that of death.

It is at Siena that the most beautiful paintings of Il Sodoma are to be found. The Swooning of Saint Catherine is a masterpiece at once of tender feeling and of exact observation; the abandoned attitude of the young saint whom two of her companions support with a charitable eagerness, the sudden pallor of her face from which the blood withdraws, those eyes that close languishingly, the knees that give way, all the symptoms of the syncope are rendered with a truthfulness so to speak medical and yet full of emotion.

Paul M. to his mother

Siena, January 69.

I write to you on returning from an excursion which interested me keenly. I went all the way to the cloister of Monte Oliveto to see frescoes of Signorelli and of Il Sodoma. This long series of paintings relates the whole life of Saint Benedict and his interview with Totila. Troopers and lansquenets, clad in tight-fitting costumes, are pluckily planted, lance in fist. The scenes which unfold at different planes, in beautiful deep landscapes, are engraved there in my memory, but I do not know how to describe them, there are too many of them.

I remember, however, a young man whom Il Sodoma figured on his knees before a great monk, it is a sort of Prodigal Son whose repentance is expressed with an infinitely tender and profound feeling.

One must limit oneself, I will tell you only a few words

of a curious fresco of Signorelli which has for subject Gluttony or rather Disobedience:

Tired no doubt of the too frugal ordinary that was served them at the convent, two good monks have slipped away in secret, and there they are, seated at table in an inn, rejoicing to savor a few flasks of the best vintages and to relish a few dainty morsels. A grave sin according to the rule of Saint Benedict! — A pretty little page brings them a venison pie, while a young serving-girl, whose tight-fitting bodice molds her sculptural forms, and whose rump is elegantly draped with a double tucked-up skirt, pours out drink, her elbow raised, in an attitude at once very true and very graceful. Another timid maidservant bustles about with little airs altogether devout. Near there the hostess gives orders to an old servant who climbs a stairway. Would our two good monks have the intention of staying out all night? I fear so. — In the background, through the half-open door, one perceives a sunlit landscape, against which stands out the proud silhouette of a young man who seems to be on the watch.

All that is drawn with a science of perspective which shows in Signorelli a worthy pupil of Piero della Francesca.

Treated by another hand, such a program would have become the pretext for a piquant genre painting, but the fresco preserves to the style its dignity and its elevation. The execution remains serious and broad; this realism is excellent, all nourished with penetrating observations taken from life, witty, but without knowing it, without the slightest pretension to wit, without the slightest trace of caricatural satire.

Paul M. to his father

Parma, February 69.

… I begin to count with impatience the days that remain to me before my return into your midst. It is not that I am weary of seeing beautiful things, I shall never grow weary of it, but I have seen too many of them and in too little time. Then solitude begins to weigh on me, and I feel more and more the need of that family life of which I hope indeed never to grow unaccustomed.

I did not wish to pass through Parma without saluting Correggio; he is a veritable head of a school, one of those geniuses who know how to see what no one had observed before them. If the great Florentines found the perfection of drawing and of modeling, Correggio discovered the charm of light.

Even in Leonardo da Vinci, the infinitely delicate gradations of chiaroscuro are still only a means for analyzing the forms. In Correggio, light is studied for itself, with love, with enthusiasm, it becomes the supreme goal of painting. It is light that gives life to beings and to things, it illuminates, it warms, it envelops everything in an atmosphere of grace and of voluptuous poetry.

At the church of San Giovanni, I admired greatly the cupola decorated with figures boldly thrown out in full sky and learnedly seen from below. At the center, Christ, clad in a simple drapery of a golden pink, rises in a resplendent glory, it is a dazzlement. The apostles are seated on clouds and the science of foreshortenings is already complete in these figures. The merit was great, twenty years before Michelangelo had finished the Last Judgment.

One can criticize the decorative system of ceilings seen from below, but the idea once admitted, Correggio was right to pursue its realization logically to the very end. Here moreover the clarity still remains perfect. Later, Correggio and his imitators will abuse this science. In the cathedral of Parma, the Assumption of the Virgin is already a confused heaping up of figures which fly off. The foreshortenings are violent, the knees seem to touch the chins; one can scarcely distinguish anything but the feet and the legs of the beautiful adolescents who carry off the Virgin in a triumphal whirlwind. That forms a jumble so inextricable that it has been irreverently compared to a dish of frogs.

I made great efforts to understand this vast composition, but I know it well only thanks to engravings.

No one knew as Correggio did how to oppose lights to lights and to drown shadows in other shadows, which gives to the whole an admirable breadth, sometimes however to the detriment of the clarity.

His virile personages lack a little austere gravity. His feminine talent breathes an amorous grace. I remember that my friend Balavoine, passing through Dresden, did not weary of admiring a Saint Sebastian whose expression seems to me, however, little mystical and terribly profane. The coquettish beauty of the Virgins of Correggio has something provoking about it, and the ardor of the saints who contemplate her is very little celestial.

In his successors, this search for a tender and refined grace will produce an art less pure, less elevated, more sensual than that of the ancient masters.

But I stop, those are criticisms of old pedants and I do not believe a word of them. In the presence of the great masterpieces, must one not first of all try to understand and to admire? How difficult it is to keep a just measure in blame or in praise! Criticism is less easy than Boileau says, and the severe judges are rarely the most equitable. To appreciate a work of art, one must guard against asking of the author anything other than what he wished to say. If I see a connoisseur fall into ecstasy, while a mocking critic sneers and disparages wittily, I always tell myself that the one who admires the most is the one of the two who has best understood. Often the defects are real, and it is not useless to recognize them, but one must above all know how to forget them. To admire the superior qualities, to bow with respect before genius, that is a great joy. Nothing in this world is perfect, the masters themselves are men. Let us pity those who do not perceive that the great men are great.

VII

1869–1870

CORRESPONDENCE OF J. NICOLE WITH PAUL M.

1

Jules Nicole to Paul M.

Ischia, the 14 August 69.

… Speak to me first of Rome, of Rome where I am indignant at not yet having gone. — I have consoled myself a little by plunging into the Roman inscriptions of Orelli. There are more than seven thousand of them, it is therefore a veritable sea to drink, but there were not too many of them for my thirst. I have the right to say that I too have passed my winter at Rome. It is not no doubt the city of the Fine Arts that I have studied as you did, I had only ancient Rome, I had to content myself with it. I assure you that I felt very lively joys during this labor. The collection of Orelli is very complete, it contains a kind of Roman encyclopedia: geography, history, internal administration, life of the provinces, private life in all the classes of society, all is found there and many things besides. The changing tableau of the Roman world reconstructs itself little by little before you. It is laborious, it is arid sometimes, and one does not always have, in reading the inscriptions, that instantaneous view and that vividness which the monuments must give, but the impression that remains with you has the advantage of being complete.

Two ideas above all stood out for me from this immense gallery of details: the crushing force of the Roman spirit, its absolute victory over all the other nationalities, that is my first idea. The few essential differences between the civilization of that time and ours, that is my second. It is not new, but at present, I am sure that it is true. You who have seen Rome at Rome, tell me what you think of my ideas.

Last year, I made the journey from Geneva to Odessa by Marseille, Messina and Constantinople. It was magnificent. It is a great happiness that God gave me. How many tableaux I see live again through memory! Without speaking of Corsica and of Sardinia which have nonetheless their value, above all Sardinia with its beautiful rocks which fall into the sea, with Caprera and the little white house of Garibaldi. I crossed at sunrise the strait of Messina, between Etna on one side, like the pediment of an immense Greek temple, and Calabria on the other, bordered with rocky hills of a color that I should have liked to take for your sake.

And Greece! I saw it also, almost all the Peloponnese; the three points of the plane-leaf passed before me; the gulf of Messenia, the Taygetus, all the country of Sparta. Ah, the Taygetus, its summits covered with snow, and that sea at its foot; that mixture of mountains and of water, of height and of infinity, and that light which enchants all that; it is something that you must see. — I passed near Cythera, a very bare island, a memory of Venus; near Argolis, finally near Athens. Yes, dear friend, I saw the Piraeus, the Acropolis and the Parthenon; I heard that inexpressible music which is released from these ruins, and I did not go up to it! At Marseille they had promised us a stop of five hours, and the captain, I do not know for what reason of economy, set off again at the end of an hour. I almost wept on seeing Athens grow distant.

I do not wish to lead you farther for this time: if I crossed the Dardanelles, one would have to go to Constantinople, and there would remain nothing for me for my next letter. It is my friend Paul Milliet who ought to send me a few

scraps of his superfluity; he who leaves Paris only to live at Rome and who is continually in an atmosphere saturated with the ideal…

Paul M. to J. Nicole

Paris, 26 August 69.

… You ask me whether the political movement interests me. One would have to be very selfish to remain completely a stranger to it. I followed a few electoral meetings; I had the honor of being jostled by the police constables; I heard ferocious speeches, in which Jules Favre was overwhelmed with insults; he was reproached above all with not being an atheist. That did not prevent me from voting for him. My father, who has indeed the right to be irreconcilable, voted for Rochefort. As for the riot, no one knew exactly what it was, nor who had made it.

I was not long in resuming my accustomed life, and I do believe that I shall never be a political man. I live too much in an imaginary world, outside of space and of time. Have I not had long and delicious chats with Giotto and with Michelangelo?

Ah, dear friend, what a beautiful dream I dreamed during four months, in that enchanted country, where the past is still so alive!

… I need calm, recollection, for enthusiasm to take hold of me. When I am alone, shut up in some adorable chapel, seated facing a fresco of Giotto, I look, motionless, I look for hours. I have made complete abdication of my reflection, of my will, I am absolutely passive. I think no more, I look… I scarcely know whether I am alive, it is annihilation in contemplation.

And during that time the image is engraved little by little within me, as upon the photographer’s plate, and becomes an ineffaceable memory. That is altogether instinctive. And then, a vague emotion arrives, faint at first, like a murmuring wave, it grows, it is a rising tide which carries me off; I drink the masterpiece in long draughts, I impregnate myself with it; it is a vision, an ecstasy; I confound myself with the work, as the mystic with God.

I come to ask myself whether this state of mind is not

disastrous for originality; but I taste it so rarely and I find in it so many charms that I have never known how to resist. Besides, there remains in my memory an image which I can consult afterward to apportion praise and blame, but it is impossible for me to admire and to judge at the same time.

… You speak to me of Rome, but of ancient Rome, of its force, of its conquests, of its civilization so little different from ours; but in the Rome of the Popes, there remains nothing of all that. I was truly saddened by it, and, without the masterpieces which make one forget all the rest, one would quickly grow disgusted with this city and with its filthy people. I have not yet succeeded in understanding the beauty of heaps of garbage. (1)

Everywhere a theatrical, pretentious architecture, statues of flamboyant style, everywhere the pose and the ostentation. The revolting luxury of the clergy, the insolent mien of the lackeys, the sanctimonious and base air of the robust beggars who pursue you, a pompous and empty whole, a mixture of superstition and of debauchery, (2) the ancient Romans become brigands or cretins, having no longer either dignity, or heart, or moral sense — is not all that sad?

In the rest of Italy, I found everywhere that simple politeness which distinguishes free men. At Rome, one is insolent or fawning according to the tip. With money and protections everything is permitted.

The frescoes of Michelangelo are blackened by the smoke of the candles. Every week ladders are leaned against the most beautiful figures of the Last Judgment, and laborers in smocks run over them without respect. I saw it, and it caused me a physical pain; my heart was wrung. In those moments, I, inoffensive, should have liked to horsewhip those brutes, or rather those who command them. It was that it was a matter of important things! the hangings of an altar had indeed to be changed, an altar which someone had the happy idea to stick

(1) Cf. G. Bizet, Letters from Rome. (2) “Is this not exaggerated?” J. Nicole asks me. — I answer: No.

upon the central group of the Last Judgment. And this ceremony is repeated at every feast! What would become of religion if the Sistine Chapel were not hung with white on the day of the Immaculate Conception?

It is then that one sees, beneath a splendid canopy, the Pope standing, who receives without laughing the incense that is flung in his face from all sides as to an idol, in the midst of the solemn chants; while the crowd prostrates itself and kisses the earth at his feet. What a picturesque spectacle! But it revolts one too much for one to be able to admire without a mental reservation.

2

The quarrel of the Classics and of the Romantics seemed ended, but the survivors of the struggles of 1830 had preserved passionate and exclusive convictions whose violence astonishes us today.

Paul M. to J. Nicole

August 69.

M. Perrin has just made me a scene by which I was profoundly troubled. You remember it, the friend of Orsel claims to put painting at the service of religion and of morality. He admits nothing outside the Primitives. Raphael and Michelangelo are for him already in the decadence.

— I find these ideas exaggerated; yet with a small part of truth, and, in order to put order into my studies, I had devoted my journey almost exclusively to the artists of the fifteenth century. I had worked with ardor, with delight. Discouragement had long been my malady, but I was coming back from Italy fortified by the study of the masters and as though intoxicated by their masterpieces.

M. Perrin received me coldly and, scarcely opening my portfolio, he cast a rapid glance at it, all the while uttering exclamations of disdain and almost of indignation. Then rising: “M. Lugardon,” said he, “recommended you to me formerly; out of consideration for him I believe I ought to tell you frankly the truth.”

This beginning frightened me. Already on the return from my first journey, M. Perrin had advised me to set aside two or three drawings and to burn all the rest. There was a fire in the drawing room, and he seemed to invite me to make in his presence this solemn auto-da-fé. Then, seeing that I did not have enough heroism to sacrifice my dear souvenirs, he advised me to make a bundle of them and to put the seals on it, so as to open it only on a day when I should be strong enough to resist the bad examples. — I expected some advice of the same kind. It was much worse!

“Have your parents any fortune?” continued M. Perrin. — “Monsieur,” I answered very troubled, “my parents permit me to continue my studies as long as it is necessary. — You are in a deplorable path. If you were a simple amateur, that would have less importance… and even then? No, I should tell you the same thing. You ought, in your whole journey, to have made only two or three drawings. Each easy sketch is a step backward. I see there only approximations, romantic daubings, that is to say without conscience.”

And, after a few injurious epithets, he ended with this one which he flung with an expression of disgust and of profound contempt: “It is Correggio!”

After which, he softened. For more than two hours, he showed me much interest, telling me that I had given him hopes, that one must not seek inaccessible qualities, that I let myself be influenced, that I must make a great effort of will, renounce my painting begun, shut myself up alone, for a year, to copy the drawings of Flaxman, correcting myself with tracings.

These reproaches and this advice lost a little of their weight by their very exaggeration. But what made on me an impression much stronger was to see a few drawings of Orsel. — M. Perrin explained them to me with a communicative enthusiasm, true masterpieces! in a cold and abstract manner, but of an admirable precision, science, probity, will!

These emotions had stirred me profoundly. I went out thanking M. Perrin very sincerely, calm in appearance, but with despair in my soul. I was then quite decidedly incapable of arriving at anything. After four months of efforts, I found myself less advanced than before. I was broken, hors de combat.

On reflection, however, I told myself that each one had his ideas. I have mine, to which I hold. I shall change my opinion only for good reasons and not on the advice of a single master, whatever be his merit and his authority.

In 1830, there were two camps; today each marches alone. We no longer admit, for our use at least, the distinction between colorists and draftsmen, a distinction useful only for criticism and the history of art. A painter ought not to exaggerate voluntarily either his qualities or his defects, in order to make for himself a factitious originality. All that one can ask of him is to express with sincerity what he sees and what he feels; whether realized in vision, it matters little, provided that he can say in conscience: this is what I have seen.

This unfortunate scene saddened me; I set to work again without relish. A few little school successes, which are of scarcely any importance, nonetheless contributed to restoring my courage.

And you, dear friend, will you come to Paris for one winter at least! I hope that the packet of programs that I send you will be a hook capable of catching you and of holding you.

Jules Nicole to Paul M.

Petersburg, the 13 January 70.

The Russians, who are three hundred years behind us, have imagined, so that one should notice it less, to recognize for us in their calendar an advance of thirteen days. That is what makes it that I am still between Christmas and the new year, that is to say on holiday, and I take advantage of it to chat a little with you.

I think constantly of my project of studies at Paris: I work and I economize; I economize above all, it is the sine qua non condition of all disinterested study. I therefore give myself over to the thirst for riches, to the pleasure of accumulating; I inform myself of the best investments; I have my eye on the stock quotations and I watch the oscillations of the exchange. You would not have believed me capable of it.

However, my ardor for gain does not prevent me from working. I divide my hours of leisure between Russian, for I must indeed bring back something from my sojourn here, and my dear ancient authors. I follow the program of the licence-ès-lettres; moreover there is nothing very formidable in it, and with it I do not make many new acquaintances. I should have a fair amount to reread, which is boring, when there are so many things one has not read.

At the head of the Greek authors is Sophocles for the Philoctetes, which I have already translated with delight. What perfection, in what simplicity!

(There follows an enthusiastic analysis of the masterpiece.)

After Sophocles comes Euripides for Hippolytus. What a fall! What a difference, I do not say with Sophocles, but with Racine. Three-quarters of the play are not by a poet, but by a maker. Philosophical reflections, veritable dissertations at the most pathetic places. One would say it was Voltaire, translated a thousand years in advance. The choruses are only a harmonious filler. Save for this harmony, it is the entr’acte music of the Comédie-Française; no relation with the episodes. From time to time a few admirable verses come to remind you that it was nonetheless at Athens that Euripides was writing. I hope for him and for myself that Hippolytus is his worst play.

*In the next letter I beg you to copy out for me the Latin translation of verses 490 to 492. You have the Didot edition, I have only the Greek text. (1)

(1) My friend, reading an edition whose text was corrupt, had, by means of ingenious and learned corrections, reestablished the better reading.

Forgive me, dear friend, for making you the victim of my studies. I have only you. When I am at Paris, you will see plenty of others.

And you, how are you? Do you still keep good house with your Hamadryad? She has often come to see me, that figure so naïvely divine; it is above all when I work at my Greek that she appears to me coming out of her oak.

… At Geneva they already look upon me as a Russian, and I shall have to make considerable expenditures of amiability and of patriotism, when it is a matter of winning for myself a place in our sun. There are moments when I am quite afraid of remaining here for good; it seems to me that I am pushing out roots like Philemon, and I have need to tell myself very quickly, to reassure myself, that I have no Baucis.

Paul to J. Nicole

25 January 1870.

… You ask me for news of my Hamadryad. She has changed a little since you saw her. I have the misfortune to believe all that is said to me, and each time that someone comes to see my painting, I begin it again, without succeeding in contenting either others or myself. My oak has nearly undergone the seasons; for the moment it is in autumn; I do not know whether it is going to grow green again in the spring.

… I am far from sharing your disdain for Euripides and in particular for the Hippolytus, which is generally agreed to be regarded as one of his best plays. Schlegel wrote in French an opuscule to demonstrate the superiority of the Greek play over the Phèdre of Racine. I do not wish to say that there are not happy changes in the French play; the role of Phèdre in its entirety is admirable, but the very elegance of the language brings us back to an epoch too civilized. The Phaedra of Euripides is farther from modern reality, and, for the Greeks, fatality and passion attained in it the [pitch of] horror. — The monotonous pomp of the Alexandrine and the lack of true simplicity seem to me to outweigh largely the

philosophical quibblings of Euripides. How can you bear the tender Aricie and “her innocent charms”? and: if I hated her, I would not flee her, and: “you see before you a deplorable prince”; these are personages of the Astrée who speak thus, and I cannot picture Aricie to myself otherwise than clad in the little peplum of pink flannel which she wears today at the theater.

As for the Hippolytus of Racine, he seems to me insipid, gallant and stupid like a little marquis. If he knows love, it is probably through the novels of Mademoiselle de Scudéry. He is far from the young mystic ascetic, so alive, so original, so full of charm, whom Euripides painted, and whom I love so much.

For me who seek in the poets subjects for paintings, I have rarely found them as numerous and as beautiful as in the Hippolytus. It is one of my favorite plays. Assuredly it is not of an art as great nor as pure as that of Sophocles, but what an admirable staging! From the very beginning, those young people who come back from the hunt; Hippolytus passing disdainfully before the statue of Venus to go and offer to Diana a crown. — How many times, when I walked alone in the forest listening to the noise of the leaves, have I thought of those mystic interviews with Diana. — Yet another painting that I shall try to do: Hippolytus listening to the voice of Diana invisible to him.

Jules Nicole to Paul M.

Warsaw. (1)

On arriving at Warsaw, I saw many things worthy of attention. How not be interested in this population so sympathetic, not to say more; and then what a picturesque contrast, unknown in our countries of equality, do not these two peoples offer, the Christians and the Jews, living in the same streets, but as separated in condition and in face as the whites and the negroes in America.

(1) This letter, begun in January, was finished only on the 2 June 1870.

I have not seen, even in Spain, a type as beautiful, as intelligent, a proportion as strong of pretty women as among the Poles; and almost as numerous as they are the Jews, all ugly, clad in long greasy frock-coats which fall to their heels and wearing two ringlets of curled hair, two corkscrews, which hang upon their cheeks and give to their ugliness something effeminate.

And so it is that, for having remained six months without writing to you, I am obliged to fall back upon the Jews of Warsaw. But I have taken toward myself the serious engagement no longer to let things drag on thus. It is by letting them stretch out indefinitely that one breaks

Those mysterious threads by which our hearts are bound.

And I do not wish to break ours.

I was rereading this week the Clouds of Aristophanes, and each word of Strepsiades came to awaken the memories of the happy times. I saw you seated beside me, facing Briant who played the peasant: “Come here, that you may weep.” And “croquer le marmot”! And “empopadourer”! If there is a paradise and if we go there, I am quite sure that we shall begin the Clouds there again.

Paul, the heedless student who, in 1869, occupied himself solely with literature and with art, was far from foreseeing the tragic events in which he was soon going to find himself mixed up.