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Books by Mr. Story.


  POEMS. I. PARCHMENTS AND PORTRAITS. II. MONOLOGUES AND LYRICS. 2
    vols. 16mo, $2.50.

  HE AND SHE; or, A POET’S PORTFOLIO. 18mo, illuminated vellum, $1.00.

  FIAMMETTA. A Novel. 16mo, $1.25.

  ROBA DI ROMA. New Revised Edition, from new plates. With Notes. 2
    vols. 16mo, $2.50.

  CONVERSATIONS IN A STUDIO. 2 vols. 16mo, $2.50.

  EXCURSIONS IN ART AND LETTERS. 16mo, $1.25.


  HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
  BOSTON AND NEW YORK.




  EXCURSIONS IN ART
  AND LETTERS


  BY
  WILLIAM WETMORE STORY

  D.C.L. (OXON.)
  COMM. CORONA ITALIA, OFF. LEG. D’HONNEUR, ETC.


  [Illustration]


  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
  HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
  The Riverside Press, Cambridge
  1893




  Copyright, 1891,
  BY WILLIAM WETMORE STORY.

  _All rights reserved._


  THIRD EDITION.


  _The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._
  Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.




CONTENTS.


                                                                    PAGE

  MICHEL ANGELO                                                        1

  PHIDIAS, AND THE ELGIN MARBLES                                      49

  THE ART OF CASTING IN PLASTER AMONG THE ANCIENT GREEKS AND ROMANS  115

  A CONVERSATION WITH MARCUS AURELIUS                                190

  DISTORTIONS OF THE ENGLISH STAGE AS INSTANCED IN “MACBETH”         232




EXCURSIONS IN ART AND LETTERS.




MICHEL ANGELO.


The overthrow of the pagan religion was the deathblow of pagan Art. The
temples shook to their foundations, the statues of the gods shuddered,
a shadow darkened across the pictured and sculptured world, when
through the ancient realm was heard the wail, “Pan, great Pan is dead.”
The nymphs fled to their caves affrighted. Dryads, Oreads, and Naiads
abandoned the groves, mountains, and streams that they for ages had
haunted. Their voices were heard no more singing by shadowy brooks,
their faces peered no longer through the sighing woods; and of all the
mighty train of greater and lesser divinities and deified heroes to
whom Greece and Rome had bent the knee and offered sacrifice, Orpheus
alone lingered in the guise of the Good Shepherd.

Christianity struck the deathblow not only to pagan Art, but for a time
to all Art. Sculpture and Painting were in its mind closely allied
to idolatry. Under its influence the arts slowly wasted away as with
a mortal disease. With ever-declining strength they struggled for
centuries, gasping as it were for breath, and finally, almost in utter
atrophy, half alive, half dead,—a ruined, maimed, deformed presence,
shorn of all their glory and driven out by the world,—they found a
beggarly refuge and sufferance in some Christian church or monastery.

The noble and majestic statues of the sculptured gods of ancient Greece
were overthrown and buried in the ground, their glowing and pictured
figures were swept from the walls of temples and dwellings, and in
their stead only a crouching, timid race of bloodless saints were seen,
not glad to be men, and fearful of God. Humanity dared no longer to
stand erect, but groveled in superstitious fear, and lashed its flesh
in penance, and was ashamed and afraid of all its natural instincts.
How then was it possible for Art to live? Beauty, happiness, life, and
joy were but a snare and a temptation, and Religion and Art, which can
never be divorced, crouched together in fear.

The long black period of the Middle Ages came to shroud everything in
ignorance. Literature, art, poetry, science, sank into a nightmare of
sleep. Only arms survived. The world became a battlefield, simply for
power and dominion, until religion, issuing from the Church, bore in
its van the banner of chivalry.

But the seasons of history are like the seasons of the year. Nothing
utterly dies. And after the long apparently dead winter of the Middle
Ages the spring came again—the spring of the Renaissance—when liberty
and humanity awoke, and art, literature, science, poesy, all suddenly
felt a new influence come over them. The Church itself shook off
its apathy, inspired by a new spirit. Liberty, long downtrodden and
tyrannized over, roused itself, and struck for popular rights. The
great contest of the Guelphs and Ghibellines began. There was a ferment
throughout all society. The great republics of Italy arose. Commerce
began to flourish; and despite all the wars, contests, and feuds of
people and nobles, and the decimations from plague and disease, art,
literature, science, and religion itself, burst forth into a new and
vigorous life. One after another there arose those great men whose
names shine like planets in history—Dante, with his wonderful “Divina
Commedia,” written, as it were, with a pen of fire against a stormy
background of night; Boccaccio, with his sunny sheaf of idyllic tales;
Petrarca, the earnest lover of liberty, the devoted patriot, the
archæologist and philosopher as well as poet, whose tender and noble
spirit is marked through his exquisitely finished canzone and sonnets,
and his various philosophical works; Villari, the historian; and all
the illustrious company that surrounded the court of Lorenzo the
Magnificent—Macchiavelli, Poliziano, Boiardo, the three Pulci, Leon
Battista Alberti, Aretino, Pico della Mirandola, and Marsilio Ficino;
and, a little later, Ariosto and Tasso, whose stanzas are still sung
by the gondoliers of Venice; and Guarini and Bibbiena and Bembo,—and
many another in the fields of poesy and literature. Music then also
began to develop itself; and Guido di Arezzo arranged the scale and
the new method of notation. Art also sent forth a sudden and glorious
coruscation of genius, beginning with Cimabue and Giotto, to shake off
the stiff cerements of Byzantine tradition in which it had so long been
swathed, and to stretch its limbs to freer action, and spread its wings
to higher flights of power, invention, and beauty. The marble gods,
which had lain dethroned and buried in the earth for so many centuries,
rose with renewed life from their graves, and reasserted over the world
of Art the dominion they had lost in the realm of Religion. It is
useless to rehearse the familiar names that then illumined the golden
age of Italian art, where shine preëminent those of Leonardo, the
widest and most universal genius that perhaps the world has ever seen;
of Michel Angelo, the greatest power that ever expressed itself in
stone or color; of Raffaelle, whose exquisite grace and facile design
have never been surpassed; and of Titian, Giorgione, Veronese, and
Tintoretto, with their Venetian splendors. Nor did science lag behind.
Galileo ranged the heavens with his telescope, and, like a second
Joshua, bade the sun stand still; and Columbus, ploughing the unknown
deep, added another continent to the known world.

This was the Renaissance or new birth in Italy; after the long
drear night of ignorance and darkness, again the morning came and
the glory returned. As Italy above all other lands is the land of
the Renaissance, so Florence above all cities is the city of the
Renaissance. Its streets are haunted by historic associations; at
every corner, and in every byplace or piazza, you meet the spirits
of the past. The ghosts of the great men who have given such a charm
and perfume to history meet you at every turn. Here they walked and
worked centuries ago; here to the imagination they still walk, and
they scarcely seem gone. Here is the stone upon which Dante sat and
meditated,—was it an hour ago or six centuries? Here Brunelleschi
watched the growing of his mighty dome, and here Michel Angelo stood
and gazed at it while dreaming of that other mighty dome of St.
Peter’s which he was afterwards to raise, and said, “Like it I will
not, and better I cannot.” As one walks through the piazza of Sta
Maria Novella, and looks up at the façade that Michel Angelo called
his “sposa,” it is not difficult again to people it with the glad
procession that bore Cimabue’s famous picture, with shouts and pomp
and rejoicing, to its altar within the church. In the Piazza della
Signoria one may in imagination easily gather a crowd of famous men
to listen to the piercing tones and powerful eloquence of Savonarola.
Here gazing up, one may see towering against the sky, and falling as it
were against the trooping