Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [49]
As he gazed and gaped, Morse took rapturous notes, listing the scores of paintings he saw and occasionally making small outline sketches of their composition. He made many discoveries, for instance finding painterly strengths in such “early masters” as Giotto and Ghirlandaio. To a modern eye their works seemed “rude, and stiff, and dry,” yet he saw much worth studying, especially “variety of attitude character and expression,” strong points of his own portraits as well. Other canvases leaped out to him as revelations, such as a portrait by Veronese: “proves that harmony may be produced in one color,” he noted, excitedly; “Curtain in the back ground hot green, middle tint sleeves of the arms cool, vest which is in the mass of light as well as the lights of the curtain warm, white collar which is the highest light cool!!!!”
Morse soon got down to business, copying paintings by Poussin, Rubens, and others to fill the commissions that made his life in Rome possible. In sending the completed pictures back to his patrons in the United States, he rolled up the canvases, coating them with a special varnish to prevent sticking. The commission that occupied most of his time involved a work by the artist considered in America to be the greatest painter of them all—Raphael’s School of Athens. The fifty or so figures in this summit of Western art include Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Euclid, Ptolemy, and Raphael himself. Morse often worked at the copy all day, sitting in the famous Stanza della Segnatura of the Apostolic Palace and trying to shrink Raphael’s intricate wall-size fresco onto a canvas thirty by forty inches.
When he could, Morse visited the studios of some of the many European artists in Rome, not without envy. Students at the French Academy painted in a villa on the Pincian Hill overlooking the city, their ateliers provided rent-free by the French government, with a stipend for living expenses. Could he live that way, Morse felt, not forced to support himself by copying the works of others, “I too might paint the picture I have so long desired to paint.” He also saw the extensive studios in the Palazzo Barberini of the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorwaldsen, an old man with wild gray hair straggling over his ears, yet honored by the potentates of all Europe—“the greatest sculptor of the age,” Morse thought. The classical simplicity of Thorwaldsen’s work seemed to him no mere imitation of the antique but a reincarnation of its spirit. He got to walk with Thorwaldsen for recreation and to paint his portrait. In his diaries he noted but crossed out the information that the great man had taken an English noblewoman for one of his mistresses and fathered two children by another.
Thorwaldsen presented Morse with a cast of his Venus to send back to the National Academy of Design. From artists and patrons in the Rome art community Morse rounded up other benefactors for the N.A.D. as well. He shipped to New York such gifts as a ten-foot-high cast of the Farnese Hercules and scores of prints and books containing heads by Raphael, views of Pompeii, sulfur impressions of gems. The donations turned out to be costly, however. Freight charges from Rome to New York ate up funds set aside for operating expenses, and ran the N.A.D. into debt. Word came back to Rome to send “NO MORE PRESENTS.”
Morse found the Roman summer scorchingly hot, with a glaring sunlight that pained his eyes. He made several excursions into the surrounding countryside, including a month-long tour of Hadrian’s Villa and the Sabine Hills, a popular trail for plein-air sketching. He carried his painting gear slung over his shoulder, taking along a field chair and tall umbrella. The villa, with the decayed splendor of its amphitheater, temples, and fountains, was peerless, “the finest ruins I have ever seen.” Snacking on a basket