Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [54]
Incident then succeeded incident so quickly that Morse had little time to think. Passing from town to town, through two hostile armies, he encountered soldiers asleep in the streets; crowds crying “Viva la libertà”; prisoners under escort, tied by the wrists; priests sporting the tricolor revolutionary cockade—dragoons, scouting parties, clusters of artillery, a singular air of alarm and sadness. Constitutional rebels or troops of the Pope often stopped the vettura to question him and his companions about the number and position of the enemy. The rebels liked Americans, he discovered. At a stop about fifty miles north of Rome, the commander of the Revolutionary Army, General Sercognani, even welcomed him and the others, “pleased to meet with citizens of a country which had taken so distinguished a part in promoting the liberties of the world.”
Morse slipped out of papal territory just in time. He later learned that he and his companions had no sooner left Civita Castellana, after their five-hour detention, than an order was issued for their arrest. And had he lingered in Rome he would have joined some English artists on their outing to the noted Grotto Ferrata. All the artists became gravely ill, he learned, some revolutionist having mistaken them for Germans and poisoned their wine with a solution of copper—“a most diabolical attempt.”
Reaching Florence was a relief. While living in Rome, Morse had longed for the amenities of bourgeois Protestantism, holding his nose for the sake of seeing the art. It cheered him to be in a culture that valued neatness and industry. “Everything in Northern Italy appears superior to the South, the cities, the people, the roads, the cultivation.”
During Morse’s two months in Florence, his relief turned to joy. His experience of Italy had meant a day-by-day readjustment of aesthetic standards, each discovery of some dazzling collection dimmed by the discovery of another still more dazzling. And in Florence he reached pure radiance, the city of Dante, Michelangelo, Leonardo, “the beautiful city.” While working on commissioned copies of self-portraits by Rubens and Titian, he studied paintings in the Pitti Palace and other collections that outshone anything he had seen in Rome, climaxed by the incomparable Tribune Room of the Uffizi Gallery—“the richest collection of art I have ever seen, every picture and statue is of the highest class.”
Morse took apartments in a house at 14488 Via Valfonda, where Thomas Cole and the Boston artist Horatio Greenough also roomed. Cole, an early member of the National Academy of Design, was developing a distinctive landscape style rich in historical reference, a hybrid landscape/history painting. Morse had met Greenough two years earlier in New York, through their mutual mentor and idol, Washington Allston. A bewhiskered six-footer, Greenough was on his way to becoming America’s first sculptor of international reputation. While in Florence he executed a perceptive marble bust of Morse. It records the furrows beginning to show at the corners of Morse’s mouth, lending his sensitive face a clenched determination that makes him seem at once gentle and severe.*
Morse admired Greenough as someone “wholly bent upon one object, excellence in his art.” But their friendship was uneasy. A Harvard graduate with an irreverent wit, Greenough disdained academies of art as pompous and joked about “my natural depravity of heart.” He teasingly called Morse “wicked Morse” and breezily advised him not to stay unmarried: “a man without a true love is a ship without ballast, a one-tined fork, half a pair of scissors.” He twitted Morse on religious issues too. His own “stubborn head,” he said, refused to “believe infants are born charged and primed with sin.” For Morse, art, sex, and original sin were solemn matters,