Art

I remember when in my younger days I had heard of the wonders of Italian painting, I fancied the great pictures would be great strangers; some surprising combination of color and form; a foreign wonder, barbaric pearl and gold, like the spontoons and standards of the militia, which play such pranks in the eyes and imaginations of schoolboys. I was to see and acquire I knew not what. When I came at last to Rome and saw with eyes the pictures, I found that genius left to novices the gay and fantastic and ostentatious, and itself pierced directly to the simple and true; that it was familiar and sincere; that it was the old, eternal fact I had met already in so many forms⁠—unto which I lived; that it was the plain you and me I knew so well⁠—had left at home in so many conversations. I had the same experience already in a church at Naples. There I saw that nothing was changed with me but the place, and said to myself⁠—“Thou foolish child, hast thou come out hither, over four thousand miles of salt water, to find that which was perfect to thee there at home?” That fact I saw again in the Academmia at Naples, in the chambers of sculpture, and yet again when