Mr. Powers petrified me by the sang-froid with which
he turned out, and pointed out, his statues. Great artists are apt to
be like reflections from a greater light,--they know more about that
light, than about themselves; but Mr. Powers seemed to me to defy art
to lord it over his splendid mechanical genius, the self he managed so
well. To prove beyond a doubt that material could not resist him, he
would step from the studio into an adjoining apartment, and strike off
button-like bits of metal from an iron apparatus which he had
invented. It was either buttons or Venuses with him, indifferently, as
I supposed.
Gray to me, though "bright" to my mother, were the galleries and
narrow halls of marble busts, where started back into this life old
Medicean barbarians, of imperial power and worm-like ugliness;
presided over, as I looked upon them in memory during my girlhood, by
that knightly form of Michel Angelo's seated Lorenzo de' Medici, whose
attitude and shadowed eyes seem to express a lofty disapproval of such
a world.
A morning dawned when the interest in living again became vigorous. A
delicate-looking, essentially dignified young gentleman, the Count da
Montauto, seeming considerably starved, but fascinatingly
blue-blooded, appeared in our tiresome house. I heard that we were to
remove to a villa at Bellosguardo, a hill distant fifteen minutes'
drive from the city, where the summer was reasonable; and as the count
owned this haunt of refreshment, I became enthusiastically tender in
my respect for him.
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