I wish to celebrate it because it seems to me one of the frankest
expressions of national taste and nature, and I do like simplicity--in
others. The modern Italians are the most literal of the realists in all
the arts, and, as I had striven for reality in my own poor way, I was
perhaps the more curious to see its effects in sculpture which I had
heard of so much. I will own that they went far beyond my expectation
and possibly my wishes; but it is not to be supposed that it is only
inferior artists who have abandoned themselves to the excesses of
fidelity so abundant in the Campo Santo. There are, of course, enough
poor falterings of allegory and tradition in the marble walls and floors
of this vast residence of the dead (as it gives you the cheerful
impression of being), but the characteristic note of the place is a
realism braving it out in every extreme of actuality. Possibly the fact
is most striking in that death-bed scene where the family, life-size and
unsparingly portraitured, and, as it were, photographed in marble, are
gathered in the room of the dying mother. She lies on a bedstead which
bears every mark of being one of a standard chamber-set in the early
eighteen-seventies, and about her stand her husband and her sons and
daughters and their wives and husbands, in the fashions of that day. I
recall a brother, in a cutaway coat, and a daughter, in a tie-back,
embraced in their grief and turning their faces away from their mother
toward the spectator; and doubtless there were others whom to describe
in their dress would render as grotesque. It is enough to say that the
artist, of a name well known in Italy and of uncommon gift, has been as
true to the moment in their costume as to the eternal humanity in their
faces. He has done what the sculptor or painter of the great periods of
art used to do with their historical and scriptural people--he has put
them in the dress of his own time and place; and it is impossible to
deny him a convincing logic. No sophistry or convention of drapery in
the scene could have conveyed its pathos half so well, or indeed at all.