He did not like the easel-paintings
of Raphael on account of their hard outlines; those in the Vatican did
him better justice. This idea he may have derived from William Morris
Hunt, the Boston portrait-painter. He considered the action of the Niobe
group too strenuous to be represented in marble.
Miss Mary Felton liked the Niobe statues; so Lowell said, "Now come back
with me, and I will sit on you." Accordingly we all returned to the Niobe
hall, where Lowell lectured us on the statues without, however, entirely
convincing Miss Felton. Then we went to the hall in the Uffizi Palace,
which is called the _Tribune_. Mrs. Lowell had never been in the
_Tribune_, where the Venus de' Medici is enshrined; so her husband
opened the door wide and said, "Now go in"--as if he were opening the
gates of Paradise.
At Bologna he wished to make an excursion into the mountains, but the
100 veturino charged about twice the usual price, and though the man
afterwards reduced his demand to a reasonable figure Lowell would not go
with him at all, and told him that such practices made Americans dislike
the Italian people. It is to be feared that a strange Italian might fare
just as badly in America.
Readers of Lowell's "Fireside Travels" will have noticed that the first
of them is addressed to the "Edelmann Storg" in Rome.
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