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By Root 615 0

excessive and unproductive expense. For a number of years the Treasury of the Republic, having purchased the collection for next to nothing from the impoverished order, ruined itself grandly by artistic patronage, a pursuit worthy of some royal house. But already the next generation of city fathers, more practical and mindful of economic necessities, after fruitless negotiations with the curators of an archducal collection to whom they had tried to sell the museum, closed it down, dismissed its trustees, and granted the last keeper a pension for life. During these negotiations, it has been authoritatively stated by experts, the value of the collection had been greatly exaggerated by local patriots. The kindly Fathers of Saint Basil had, in their praiseworthy enthusiasm, bought more than a few fakes. The museum did not contain even a single painting by a master's hand but owned the whole oeuvre of third- and fourth-rate painters, whole provincial schools, known only to specialist art historians.

A strange thing: the kindly monks had militaristic inclinations, and the majority of the paintings represented battle scenes. A burnt, golden dusk darkened these canvases decayed with age. Fleets of galleons and caravels and old forgotten armadas moldered in enclosed bays, their swelled sails carrying the majestic emblems of remote republics. Under smoky and blackened varnishes, hardly visible outlines of equestrian engagements could be discerned. Across the emptiness of sun-scorched plains under a dark and tragic sky, cavalcades passed in an ominous silence balanced on the left and right by the distant flashes and smoke of artillery.

In paintings of the Neapolitan school a sultry, cloudy afternoon grows old in perpetuity, as if seen through a bottle darkly. A pale sun seems to wilt under one's eyes in those landscapes, forlorn as if on the eve of a cosmic catastrophe. And this is why the ingratiating smiles and gestures of dusky fisherwomen, selling bundles offish to wandering comedians, seem so futile. All that world has been condemned and forgotten a long time ago. Hence the infinite sweetness of the last geatures that alone remain, frozen forever. And deeper still in that country, inhabited by a carefree race of merrymakers, harlequins, and birdmen with cages, in that country without any reality or earnestness, small Turkish girls with fat little hands pat honey cakes lying in rows on wooden boards; two boys in Neapolitan hats carry a basket of noisy pigeons on a pole that sways slightly under the burden of its cooing, feathered load. And still farther in the background, on the very edge of the evening, on the last plot of soil where a wilting bunch of acanthus sways on the border of nothingness, a last game of cards is still being played before the arrival of the already looming darkness.

That whole lumber room of ancient beauty has been subjected to a painful distillation under the pressure of years of boredom.

"Can you understand," my father used to ask, "the despair of that condemned beauty, of its days and nights? Over and over again it had to rouse itself to fictitious auctions, stage successful sales and noisy, crowded exhibitions, become inflamed with wild gambling passions, await a slump, scatter riches, squander them like a maniac, only to realize on sobering up that all this was in vain, that it could not get anywhere beyond a self-centered perfection, that it could not relieve the pain of excess. No wonder that the impatience and helplessness of beauty had at last to find its reflection in our sky, that it therefore glows over our horizon, degenerates into atmospheric displays, into these enormous arrangements of fantastic clouds I call our second or spurious fall. That second fall of our province is nothing but a sick mirage projected through an expanse of radiation into our sky by the dying, shut-in beauty in our museums. Fall is a great touring show, poetically deceptive, an enormous purple-skinned onion disclosing ever new panoramas under each of its skins. No center can ever be reached. Behind each wing that