Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

[Of these Notes, though only eight were given in the Essays &c. (1840), eleven have already appeared in print. The rest are from a MS. Notebook, the order of which is here preserved in preference to that adopted by Medwin in The Shelley Papers and followed by Mrs. Shelley. In the preface to the 1840 collection, Mrs. Shelley says of certain of the Fragments, "Small portions of these and other Essays were published by Captain Medwin in a newspaper. Generally speaking, his extracts are incorrect and incomplete. I must except the Essay on Love, and Remarks on some of the Statues in the Gallery of Florence, however, as they appeared there, from the blame of these defects." My own impression is that the reason for this exception was negative, that Mrs. Shelley had not the original Note-books by her. Medwin was notoriously incapable of perfect accuracy; but beyond the results of that incapacity, we discern in the versions given by him, and generally adopted implicitly by Mrs. Shelley, signs of tampering, as any student of Shelley will judge by noting the variations given in the following pages. The variations between The Shelley Papers and the Essays in regard to the eight Notes printed in both, affect only five words and some dozen and a half stops, as far as I can find; and only one change is other than the printer would be likely to make. Medwin says (Shelley Papers, page 55), "Shelley, while at Florence, passed much of his time in the gallery, where, after his severe mental labours, his imagination reposed and luxuriated amid the divine creations of the Greeks. The Niobe, the Venus Anadyomine, the group of Bacchus and Ampelus, were the subjects of his inexhaustible and insatiable admiration. On these I have heard him expatiate with all the eloquence of poetic enthusiasm. He had made ample notes on the wonders of art in this gallery, from which, on my leaving Pisa, he allowed me to make extracts, far surpassing in eloquence anything Winkelman has left on this subject." In his life of Shelley (Vol. I, page 351), Medwin records that these notes were "thrown off in the gallery, in a burst of enthusiasm." He does not say that he made extracts from a similar Note-book on statues at Rome; but most likely he did; and the two books were probably continuous; as the Notes at the opening of the book in my possession are Roman, and those on the Arch of Titus and the Laocoön, given by Medwin, are of course also Roman. For convenience of identification, the particular printed sources are indicated in separate foot-notes in this edition. All the Notes on Sculpture not so distinguished are from the MS. book.-H. B. F.]

NOTES ON SCULPTURES IN ROME AND

FLORENCE.

ROME.

I.

THE ARCH OF TITUS.'

On the inner compartment of the Arch of Titus, is sculptured, in deep relief, the desolation of a city. On one side, the walls of the Temple, split by the fury of conflagrations, hang tottering in the act of ruin. The accompaniments of a town taken by assault, matrons and virgins and children and old men gathered into groups, and the rapine and licence of a barbarous and enraged soldiery, are imaged in the distance. The

The Arch of Titus appeared in The Athenæum for the 29th of September, 1832, and afterwards in The Shelley Papers. Mrs. Shelley reprinted it (Essays &c., 1840, Vol. 11, p. 208), as a note to a passage about the same arch in a letter to Peacock. We may presume that

this and the Laocoön Note were copied by Medwin from a Notebook which Shelley used in Rome; and they must of course have preceded the three Notes which in the book in my possession precede the Florentine series.

foreground is occupied by a procession of the victors, bearing in their profane hands the holy candlesticks and the tables of shewbread, and the sacred instruments of the eternal worship of the Jews. On the opposite side, the reverse of this sad picture, Titus is represented standing in a chariot drawn by four horses, crowned with laurel, and surrounded by the tumultuous numbers of his triumphant army, and the magistrates, and priests, and generals, and philosophers, dragged in chains beside his wheels. Behind him stands a Victory eagle-winged.

The arch is now mouldering into ruins, and the imagery almost erased by the lapse of fifty generations. Beyond this obscure monument of Hebrew desolation, is seen the tomb of the Destroyer's family, now a mountain of ruins.

The Flavian amphitheatre has become a habitation for owls and dragons. The power, of whose possession it was once the type, and of whose departure it is now the emblem, is become a dream and a memory. Rome is no more than Jerusalem.

II.

THE LAOCOON.'

The subject of the Laocoön is a disagreeable one, but whether we consider the grouping, or the execution,

[merged small][ocr errors][merged small]

1

nothing that remains to us of antiquity can surpass it. It consists of a father and his two sons. Byron thinks that Laocoon's anguish is absorbed in that of his children, that a mortal's agony is blending with an immortal's patience. Not so. Intense physical suffering, against which he pleads with an upraised countenance of despair, and appeals with a sense of its injustice, seems the predominant and overwhelming emotion, and yet there is a nobleness in the expression, and a majesty that dignifies torture.

His

We now come to his children.' Their features and attitudes indicate the excess of the filial love and devotion that animates them, and swallows up all other feelings. In the elder of the two, this is particularly observable. His eyes are fixedly bent on Laocoon-his whole soul is with-is a part of that of his father. arm extended towards him, not for protection, but from a wish as if instinctively to afford it, absolutely speaks. Nothing can be more exquisite than the contour of his form and face, and the moulding of his lips, that are half open, as if in the act of-not uttering any unbecoming complaint, or prayer or lamentation, which he is conscious are alike useless-but addressing words of consolatory tenderness to his unfortunate parent. The intensity of his bodily torments is only expressed by the uplifting of his right foot, which he is vainly and impotently attempting to extricate from the grasp of the mighty folds in which it is entangled.

In the younger child, surprise, pain, and grief seem to contend for mastery. He is not yet arrived at an age

This mode of transition seems suspiciously unlike Shelley.

when his mind has sufficient self-possession, or fixedness of reason, to analyse the calamity that is overwhelming himself and all that is dear to him. He is sick with pain and horror. We almost seem to hear his shrieks. His left hand is on the head of the snake, that is burying its fangs in his side, and the vain and fruitless attempt he is making to disengage it, increases the effect. Every limb, every muscle, every vein of Laocoon expresses, with the fidelity of life, the working of the poison, and the strained girding round of the inextricable folds, whose tangling sinuosities are too numerous and complicated to be followed. No chisel has ever displayed with such anatomical fidelity and force, the projecting muscles of the arm, whose hand clenches the neck of the reptile, almost to strangulation, and the mouth of the enormous asp, and his terrible fangs widely displayed, in a moment to penetrate and meet within its victim's heart, make the spectator of this miracle of sculpture turn away with shuddering and awe, and doubt the reality of what he sees.

III.

VASA BORGHESE A PARIGI.

A Bronze cast of the Bas relief-a bacchanalian subject -a beautiful reference to Unity. Bacchus with a countenance of calm and majestic beauty surrounded by the tumultuous figures whom the whirlwinds of his Deity are tossing into all attitudes, like the sun in the midst of his planets; power calm amid confusion.-He leans on a Woman with a lyre within her arms, on whom he looks with grand yet gentle love. On one side is a Silenus who has let fall the cup and hangs heavily his vinecrowned head, supported by another Bacchanal.

The

« AnteriorContinuar »