Their work is always done in a hurry;
they knock off a copy in a week, and when it is sold, they begin
another.
If some one, more ambitious than his fellows, undertakes an original
work, whose opinion can he obtain as to its merits or demerits? The
men of the reigning class know nothing about it, and the princes very
little. The owner of the finest gallery in Rome said last year, in the
salon of an Ambassador, "I admire nothing but what you French call
_chic_" Prince Piombino gave the painter Gagliardi an order to paint
him a ceiling, and proposed to pay him by the day. The Government has
plenty to attend to without encouraging the arts: the four little
newspapers which circulate at remote periods amuse themselves by
puffing their particular friends in the silliest manner.
The foreigners who come and go are often men of taste, but they do not
make a public. In Paris, Munich, Duesseldorf, and London, the public
has an individuality; it is a man of a thousand heads. When it has
marked a rising artist, it notes his progress, encourages him, blames
him, urges him on, checks him. It takes such a one into its favour, is
extremely wroth with such another. It is, of course, sometimes in the
wrong; it is subject to ridiculous infatuations, and unjust revulsions
of feeling; yet it lives, and it vivifies, and it is worth working
for.
If I wonder at anything, it is that under the present system such
artists are to be found at Home as Tenerani and Podesti, in statuary
and painting; Castellani, in gold-working; Calamatta and Mercuri, in
engraving, with some others.
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