By A. F. Jacassy. UR collections are rich in fine examples of modern European art, so rich, indeed, as to excite the jealousy of the great art centres of the Old World; however, comme toute médaille a son revers, that flattering picture has a side touch full of significance for the observer; it is that these chefs-d'œuvre were dearly paid for at a time when the names of the artists had reached the pinnacle of fame. It might be said that such is the rule everywhere, so it isonly with us the rule suffers scarcely any exceptions, while in certain other countries the exceptions are numerous. A logical inference to be deducted from that fact seems to be that our collectors, for one reason or another, perhaps because diffident of their own judgment and seeking security against humbug pictures and possible pecuniary losses, invariably accept the world's opinion as a criterion of choice, making good their lack of early appreciation by a willingness to pay generously for acknowledged masterpieces. It is a very good fashion to aim at buying what is best, but its defect-a capital one-is, what is best is not always that which is so considered even in Paris or London. The art market is influenced by many causes having nothing to do with art, and the selling of pictures is a sharp business in which well concocted, ingeniously constructed advertisement plays as important a part as it does in making notorious patent medicines. The great public is easily led by noise and fireworks, but the collectors ought to make a class apart, above the mode of the day, judging pict'ures, public, and merchants from intimate and discriminating knowledge. Certainly our understanding, as well as our love of art, has broadened and deepened since the days when William Morris Hunt, with a true artist's enthu siasm, was playing the prophet to Millet, and notwithstanding his personal influence, powerful in a large circle, he met with but meagre and disheartening results. We have progressed wonderfully since then, but much remains to be done. If we look at France, for example, from whence our best art notions come nowadays-and justly, for no school of this century has the thoroughness, the completeness, and the dignity of the French -we find many art collectors worthy of the name of amateurs and of all that implies in its best sense; a phalanx of far-sighted men whose pre-eminent characteristic is to be ahead of their time, to have the love, feeling, and knowledge that make them hunt out talent and genius wherever it is to be found, whether in or out of the beaten tracks heralded by the thousand trumpets of renown, or unknown but to a small circle. They play the forerunners to public opinion, which at first opposing and ridiculing them, as it does all apostles of new creeds, at length, with time and patience, follows their lead and applauds. That kind of man, the amateur, is unfortunately a rara avis in America, and while there is cause for just pride in our patronage of art, there is room for improvement-there are gaps in our galleries-there are worthy men we do not know. I want to speak of one of those men, as unknown to us as he is to the French and English masses-Domenico Morelli-the patriarch and the head of the present Italian school-and, in a later paper, of two of his pupils, Michetti, Gemito, of whom we know something, but far from much; we have had glimpses of their earliest work, but not of their latest and worthiest. The life of an artist, like that of any man, to be justly and fully appreciated, must be looked at in its relation to the times and the society in which it was spent ; for sometimes circumstances help him to find the path best adapted to his genius, while at others they are obsta cles that throw him out of the right way. Only to a few great men is it given to rid themselves of the despotic influence of surroundings to jump and stride ahead, opening by the sole force of unflinching will and superior genius a new path for the coming generations. Domenico Morelli is such a pioneer, he was the promoter and leader of the second Renaissance of true art in the terra sacra of the arts-Italy. Strangely enough, this movement, which is intimately connected with the national struggle for independence, had its birth and attained its highest development in the capital of the last province wrested from the hands of the petty potentates who divided the ownership of Italy-in Naples, besotted under a corrupted régime, the home of the dirtiest, laziest, the most ignorant and superstitious population in the peninsula. It is as if each province of the United Kingdom had played its part in the national regeneration: the North with statesmen and men of action, Mazzini, Cavour, Garibaldi; the South with its artists, Morelli and Palizzi; for it was in the artistic field that were visible the first signs of an awakening of the free modern spirit, and the study of the present Neapolitan school is a social study intimately linked with the history of social progress. After the great bewilderment of 1789, the autocratic power of kings seemed reinforced and strengthened by their victory over Napoleon, that formidable son of the Revolution-and the return to the old régime, in Naples especially, was marked by excesses of all sorts. The aristocracy, hand in hand with the religious authorities, as if bent on avenging past persecutions, curbed the people under a despotic rule which worked infinite damage to its character and prosperity. No more freedom of speech nor of thought, no more education, no books but those glorifying an old and rotten past, no more acknowledgement of individual worth and talent; all positions, honors, rewards went back to birth and caste, as if the tremendous influences of the eighteenth century and of the Revolution could be checked or blotted out forever. It was anew the reign of perruques and powder, a new bud ding of old time customs, of sigisbés and cavalieri serventi, of bad morals and fine manners. There were again two classes, not the eternal two, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant, but on the one side the rulers and courtesans, on the other the vast majority of those whose lives did not count, who had human semblance but no souls, who were evidently intended for the benefit and amusement of the former. These times of reaction, permeated with a spirit of vengeance, would seem of medieval date when evoked before the free Italy of the present, if living witnesses did not testify to their reality in the first half of this nineteenth century. In those days the artists were a deplorable set, held in contempt, their profession the appanage of wholly inferior and extravagant people. No one thought of buying a work of art for its own sake, and only the noble families had pictures and statues, because such were indispensable to the conventional adornment of their palaces and gardens, and because the title of Mecenas, though cheaply and falsely bought, had always been one becoming to great personages. King and clergy, from necessity imposed by a tradition of which they were the slaves, were obliged to assume the rôle of patrons of art, but as they cared nothing about it, they only demoralized and lowered it as they had done everything else, by following the dictates of those inane academies, which were nothing but sorts of lounging institutions for titled loafers, pretended savants, pedantic rhetoricians, diseurs de beaux riens. That academic taste was then a miserable mimicry, tainted with affectations and mannerisms of the classics, whose grandeur served only to throw into shameful relief the poverty and servility of their degenerate followers. The narrow path of imitation leads down always, up never, so the course of studies in the fine art schools was a sort of pharmaceutical routine. There were receipts for the color of the flesh and the arrangement of the hair, for the folds of drapery and the manipulation of light and shade, for the composition also; in such a way, for instance, that if the foot of a figure was thrust forward the corresponding arm had to be thrown back ward, and groups could only be balanced in symmetrical forms like pyramids, triangles, etc. An infraction of these rules, supposed to hold the secret of the ancient masters' style, was a crime. The choice of subjects even was carefully limited; there was not a sentiment, an affection that could be expressed by brush or chisel, if it had not been previously treated by the classics. Nothing could be more delightfully orderly than the appreciation of past art, which placed in the first rank as the greatest masters the oldest-the Greeks, then followed them by the Romans, next by the artists of the Renaissance, David and Canova in their turn, and finally VOL. VIII.-72 the professors of the schools, followed a long way behind by the pupils. This ludicrous catalogue is but a statement of fact, and such was the sort of education that Morelli found when he entered the academy, somewhere in 1838. His comrades looked up steadfastly, as generations of their predecessors had done, to the hierarchical degrees culminating in the Greeks; closed to outer influences, to the life of the people about them, to nature so rich and beautiful, to the noble aspirations of the élite of their contemporaries toward the redemption and grandeur of the mother-country; their souls and talents stifled in an artificial atmosphere. Domenico, gifted with an ardent, which would call for admiration were poetic temperament, was an ignorant it that of a man who had every facility boy, as became his humble parentage; for acquiring it, is not less than sur Christ Mocked. (Drawn from Morelli's painting by A. F. Jacassy.) but as he had original ideas and a strong will, the professor, crusted in his routine, declared from the very first day that there was nothing to hope from him. Quite unmindful of that verdict, and upheld by faith, Morelli began to study hard, and from the beginning in his own way as far as the severe discipline of the school allowed. Soon his enthusiastic language made him a few warm friends among his comrades. He instinctively sought for the acquaintance of literary students-in these ways, as in others, the boy gave the measure of the man; for Morelli is one of the few artists who fully recognize that art, in order to be truly great, ought to go hand in hand with literature, which supplies it with food for thought and fancy. Almost without means, he had to practise small sacrifices and use every ingenuity to obtain the necessary materials for study. Once in a while he could scrape together enough soldi to buy books, and in such haphazard and persevering fashions he managed to acquire a very thorough education. He is a scholar, and his range of knowledge, prising when one considers with what difficulty and how by piecemeal it was obtain ed. In those times of reaction the memories of great events, which were to leave an indelible imprint on the world's mind, were fresh in all thoughts. The turmoil of the great Revolution, appeased at the surface, was still agitating the masses; our country, in throwing off an oppressor's yoke, offered a tempting example which the Greeks were following in fighting for liberty. All generous hearts of the young generation were irresistibly carried by the tide toward a better era. Then, in the midst of contradictions of present and past and the hopes for the future, a boy became quickly a man. In Morelli's thoughtful mind new ideas found birth, and he began to revolt mentally against the schools, realizing that their meagre formulas had little to do with art, and paintings laboriously elaborated according to rigid rules, seemed to that lad representations of men, of facts he did not meet with in this world; and solely on that account he could not acknowledge them admirable. What could he feel for the subjects given in the monthly competitive trials? What could he put of himself in mythological and religious compositions except artificiality-which jarring on his life and ideals, was but the technical exposition of what he was so poorly learning; the reluctant rendering of |