LETTER XXXII.

My Dearest:  Florence is still eating up all my time and energies:  I promised you there should be austerity and self-denial in the matter of letter-writing:  and I know you are unselfish enough to expect even less than I send you.

Girls in the street address compliments to Arthur’s complexion:—­ “beautiful brown boy” they call him:  and he simmers over with vanity, and wishes he could show them his boating arms, brown up to the shoulder, as well.  Have you noticed that combination in some of the dearest specimens of young English manhood,—­great physical vanity and great mental modesty? and each as transparently sincere as the other.

The Bargello is an ideal museum for the storage of the best things out of the Middle Ages.  It opens out of splendid courtyards and staircases, and ranges through rooms which have quite a feudal gloom about them; most of these are hung with bad late tapestries (too late at least for my taste), so that the gloom is welcome and charming, making even “Gobelins” quite bearable.  I find quite a new man here to admire—­Pollaiolo, both painter and sculptor, one of the school of “passionate anatomists,” as I call them, about the time of Botticelli, I fancy.  He has one bust of a young Florentine which equals Verocchio on the same ground, and charms me even more.  Some of his subjects are done twice over, in paint and bronze:  but he is more really a sculptor, I think, and merely paints his piece into a picture from its best point of view.

Verocchio’s idea of David is charming:  he is a saucy fellow who has gone in for it for the fun of the thing—­knew he could bring down a hawk with his catapult, and therefore why not a Goliath also?  If he failed, he need but cut and run, and everybody would laugh and call him plucky for doing even that much.  So he does it, brings down his big game by good luck, and stands posing with a sort of irresistible stateliness to suit the result.  He has a laugh something like “little Dick’s,” only more full of bubbles, and is saying to himself, “What a hero they all think me!” He is the merriest of sly-dog hypocrites, and has thin, wiry arms and a craney neck.  He is a bit like Tom Sawyer in character, more ornate and dramatic than Huckleberry Finn, but quite as much a liar, given a good cause.

Another thing that has seized me, more for its idea than actual carrying out, is an unnamed terra-cotta Madonna and Child.  He is crushing himself up against her neck, open-mouthed and terrified, and she spreading long fingers all over his head and face.  My notion of it is that it is the Godhead taking his first look at life from the human point of view; and he realizes himself “caught in his own trap,” discovering it to be ever so much worse than it had seemed from an outside view.  It is a fine modern zeit-geist piece of declamation to come out of the rather over-sweet della Robbia period of art.