Читать книгу The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor онлайн

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“I saw him, with these eyes, upon a wine cask riding

Out of the cellar door, just now.”

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Pictures at Dresden.—Raphael’s Madonna.—Bayard’s Art Education.—His Exalted Ideas of Art.—His Enthusiasm.—Visits Bohemia.—Stay in Prague.—The Curiosities of Vienna.—Tomb of Beethoven.—Respect for Religion.—Listens to Strauss.—View of Lintz.—Munich and its Decorations.—The Home of Schiller.—Poetic Landscapes, and Charming People.—Statue by Thorwaldsen.—Walk to Heidelberg.

At Dresden, Bayard visited the picture-gallery, for the purpose of seeing Raphael’s Madonna and Child, known as the Madonna di San Sisto. His description of that painting, so unfortunately abridged in his book, was one of the finest examples of art criticism to be found in print. His appreciation of painting and sculpture was remarkable, indeed, for one who never made them a professional study, and whose rude sketches in pencil in his note books, contained nearly all of his undertakings as an amateur. His soul seemed cast in the proper mould for that kind of work, but his hand was never trained to materialize the pictures that filled the galleries of his imagination. He had all those finer sensibilities and acute instincts which fitted him for art in poetry or stone, and he saw in paintings and statuary, beauties or defects which thousands of colder but more studious critics failed to notice.