In the profusion of joyous mythological deities which give the facade of the Casino the richness of decoration of a jewel-casket, nymphs and graces dance, Pan flutes, and marine monsters frolic with all the abandon of classical feeling, and it is in the ornamental details, not in the conception of the ensemble, that we detect the influence of the Villa of Hadrian. When the papal villa was approaching completion, Ligorio attracted the attention of Cardinal Ippolito d'Este II. (the patron of Tasso) a connoisseur and dilettante in all the arts, who wisely entrusted to the young architect the construction of his famous villa at Tivoli.

The Cardinal had the right to quarry materials from the neighbouring ruins, and among the first of the great discoveries which Ligorio records is that of a statue of Antinous. It depicted the youth under the attributes of Bacchus, and was possibly a replica of the beautiful statue found later at Praeneste and now in the Sala Rotonda of the Vatican.

From the hour that it was carried in triumph to the terraces of Villa d'Este, Ligorio and his patron as well, were taken captive by a new enthusiasm, for a lucky chance had guided the excavators to the most richly ornamented of all the apartments in the Emperor's wonderful palace—the heavy-folded curtain of Time had rolled upward disclosing the scene of the happiest hours in the short life of Antinous.

An exquisite circular palazzita lay before them, islanded by a marble-lined canal five metres broad from an encircling portico, whose roof was supported by forty Corinthian columns of precious giallo antico. Noting the important part played by water in this construction, the canal fed by fountains, whose pipes and mechanism plainly showed within the statues which ornamented the rotunda, Ligorio hastily concluded that this was the Emperor's natatorium or swimming pool. But the feminine elegance of the fairy-like suite of apartments, to which the canal served as a moat; the presence of drawbridges worked from the centre, thus cutting off or affording communication with the colonnade at the will of the occupant, and evidences that the canal itself was a nympheum or aquatic garden, among whose rose-coloured lotus blossoms white swans glided, flamingoes darted, and tall clusters of papyrus screened the porticoes from the gaze of passers, favoured the conclusion that this pavilion of all delight was designed for some beautiful woman royally beloved. The frieze of loves, mounted upon hippocampi imitating the games of the circus, which Ligorio copied in the vestibule of the Villa Pia formed a part of the decoration lavished here.



The conspicuous situation of the palazzita between the basilica and the imperial apartments, to which its encircling colonnade served as a corridor of communication, indicated that the lady was not a favourite of low degree, to be hidden away in some Rosalind's bower of the immense labyrinthine palace, while the most valuable statues in the entire villa, such as the replica of the Cnidian Venus by Praxiteles, the Eros bending the bow, by the same master, made this temple of love and Venus a fitting pavilion for an empress. Such it may well have been, for here was found the sculptured portrait of Faustina, the wife of Antoninus Pius, Hadrian's successor, who resided in the villa both before and after the death of Antinous.

She was the beautiful mother of a more beautiful daughter of the same name, an empress in her turn, and both branded by a historian of the time as infamous.

Swinburne's apostrophe in Ave Faustina Imperatrix applies equally to the portrait bust of mother or daughter:

"Your throat, Strong, heavy, throwing out the face, And hard, bright chin And shameful, scornful lips that grace Their shame, Faustine."

But it is possible that Swinburne was too hasty in accepting ancient gossip, and that both the Faustinas were maligned. "Modern scholarship," says Monsieur Victor Duruy, "argues for their rehabilitation, and chiefly because the husbands of each, good and wise men both, have left such unequivocal testimony of their respect."

"To the gods," wrote Marcus Aurelius of the younger Faustina, "I am indebted that I have such a wife, so obedient, so affectionate, and so simple."

And after the death of his wife (Faustina the elder) Antoninus Pius cried in his grief: "O God, I would rather live with her in a desert than without her in this palace."

In this enchanting palazzita the younger Faustina may have passed her childhood, while the scholarly boy, Marcus Aurelius, her cousin, listened to the disquisitions of the philosophers as they discussed great problems with the Emperor.



Hadrian loved the lad, and for his absolute truthfulness nicknamed him Verissimus, making him a knight at the age of six. He was the comrade of Antinous, and as they passed to and fro together through colonnaded rotonda they must have often noted the young mother (she was sixteen when married) and her bewitching child, waving white hands from across the lily-padded moat.

Here, then, are certain of the actors, as well as our mise-en-scene, and Marcus Aurelius, in his Meditations, has himself given us a hint as to the drama. "Forget not," he writes, "that in times gone by everything has already happened just as it is happening. Place before thine eyes whole dramas with the same endings, the same scenes, just as thou knowest them by thine own experience, or from earlier history—such, for example, as the whole Court of Hadrian."

If with these instructions we remember Marcus Aurelius's still more significant words, "Even in a palace life may be well led," each of us can according to his own fancy divine the secret which Antinous kept so well.

Had Ligorio given to literature the sympathetic imagination which he displayed in his art it might have been worthily revealed. For ten years he explored with the most intense enthusiasm the interminable apartments which were to prove an inexhaustible mine of art for modern museums, and whose bibliography would fill a library. Then in 1572 his munificent patron died, and the work suddenly came to an end.

For two centuries the Villa of Hadrian lay neglected until new discoveries revived popular interest, and a young German scholar was called to superintend the building and installation of the last of the great villas erected in Rome by a member of its hierarchical aristocracy.

There exists such striking parallelism in the history of the Villa d'Este and the Villa Albani, and on such identical lines was the work carried on that it would almost seem that, the duration of human life not being sufficient to complete it, Cardinal Ippolito and Pirro Ligorio were granted reincarnation for another fifty years in Cardinal Albani and his friend Winckelmann.



Notwithstanding the many masterpieces secured by Cardinal d'Este it was known from ancient records that the greatest treasures of the Villa Hadriana had escaped his eager search, having been so securely hidden on the invasion of the Goths, that they evaded as well all other plunderers. But early in the eighteenth century Gavin Hamilton, commissioned to secure antiques for the British Museum, drained an extensive marsh called the Pantello and found it to be the depository in which Belisarius had secreted the missing statues on the approach of Totila.[10] From this hiding-place there emerged between 1730 and 1780, the Antinous of the museum of the Capitol and the relief of the Villa Albani together with the Resting Faun of Praxiteles which so captivated the imagination of Hawthorne, and many another famous work of art now the glory of some far distant museum.

Fortunately for Italy, England found a contesting bidder in Cardinal Albani, and the majority of the statues found in the Pantello were purchased by him. At the same time the magnificent collection of Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, was offered at public sale by the degenerate spendthrift who inherited it, and sixty of the finest statues were secured for Villa Albani and rejoined their old companions.

Winckelmann gloated over their beauty, for he united the artist's appreciation to the connoisseurship of the archaeologist. What solicitude for its appropriate setting, only surpassed by that of Hadrian himself, did he bestow on the placing of each individual statue, and with what exultation he records its arrival.

"The Cardinal has brought from Tivoli on a carro drawn by sixteen bullocks a female river deity of colossal size well preserved" (and still to be seen reclining on the margin of a reservoir). To the relief of Antinous Winckelmann gave the place of honour which it now occupies. Let us read his own record of the esteem in which he held it.

"The glory and the crown of sculpture in this age as well as in all ages" he does not hesitate to assert, "are two likenesses of Antinous." One of them, in the Albani villa, is in relief, the other is a colossal head in the Mondragone villa.

"The former disinterred from Hadrian's villa is," says Winckelmann, "only a fragment of an entire figure which probably stood on a chariot. For the right hand, which is empty, is in a position that leads me to conclude that it must have held the reins. In this work therefore would have been represented the deification of Antinous as we know that figures so honoured were placed upon cars to signify their translation to the gods.



"The colossal head in the Mondragone villa (now in the Louvre) I hold it no heresy to say is, next to the Vatican Apollo and the Laocoon, the most beautiful work which has come down to us."

The two friends lived a charmed life more in the past than in the Rome of their own day until the spree was rudely broken by Winckelmann's tragic death at the hands of a vulgar robber, and the grey-haired cardinal wandered alone among his cherished marbles. Many of these he donated to the Capitoline Museum and to the Vatican, but the relief of Antinous he held among his most cherished possessions. It would have broken the good man's heart to have known that these statues were doomed to wander far from the home which he had provided for them. The French took possession of Italy, and the masterpieces of the Villa Albani formed only a fraction of the wholesale robberies which for a time enriched the museum of the Louvre.

On the fall of Napoleon the Pope chose the sculptor Canova as his envoy to negotiate with the allies for the return of the art treasures of Italy. Canova was successful, for he pleaded from a full heart; but although he secured the restitution of the two hundred and ninety-four statues which Napoleon had taken from the Villa Albani, Cardinal Giuseppe Albani, an unworthy successor of the great collector, sold all but one in order to avoid the cost of their return transportation. The poor peripatetic philosophers, emperors, empresses, gods, and goddesses trooped on like uneasy ghosts, not a few of them finding shelter in the Glyptothek at Munich.

The one piece of sculpture reserved from this fate of expatriation, and reinstated in triumph in its old position in the salon at the left of the main gallery of the villa, it is hardly necessary to state, was the relief of Antinous. Here it remains and lures us, according to our bent, to study or to dream of the life which its original so passionately lived, and instinctively we search for some statue of a woman of equal charm to link with it in our dreams.

Ebers thought he had found it in the loveliest of the nine muses which Ligorio discovered in the theatre of Hadrian's villa. In 1689 Velasquez was sent to Rome to acquire them for Philip V. Eight of them may still be seen in the Museum of Madrid, but the ninth muse, Urania, from which the d'Estes could not then be induced to part, is now in the Sala delle Muse of the Vatican. This is the Urania which Ebers imagines to have been carved by the young Alexandrine sculptor, Pollux, from the Selene whom we are told Antinous vainly loved.

The face is very winsome and the romance might satisfy us, but for a portrait-statue of a genuine Selene, found by Ligorio near the palazzita and now in the casino of the Villa Albani.



It is catalogued as Iris Descending, but mistakenly, says Monsieur Guzman, for Iris was invariably represented with wings, and this graceful figure is wingless, a torch in hand, and floating downward so gently that her motion scarcely agitates her soft drapery. Authorities are now agreed that the lovely figure represents Selene, the moon-goddess, who, enamoured with Endymion, kept tryst with him in his dreams, and a beautiful "Sleeping Youth" was actually discovered beneath the descending Selene, thus completing the composition and verifying the assumption as to its subject. That the recumbent youth was not at once recognised as intended to represent Endymion is due to the inability of the scientific mind to grasp more than one idea at a time, for the features bore so marked a resemblance to those of Antoninus Pius that it was rightly considered a portrait of that Emperor in his youth. Only recently have archaeologists accepted the title, Antoninus Pius as Endymion and it seems probable that the Selene of Villa Albani portrayed the Empress Faustina, and that this group was a tribute of the Emperor's to his beautiful wife, his "Diva Faustina," who stooped to him like the moon-goddess from the sky. Is it not equally possible that he caused the symbols of Selene to be cut upon her signet that she might use it in her intimate correspondence, that the charm of this wonderful woman was associated in his mind with the magic of moonlight, gentle, love-compelling, and pure? Such a testimonial does in fact exist in a medal struck by the command of Antoninus Pius after the death of the Empress, representing Faustina bearing two torches, but returning to heaven, and depriving him of the light which had illumined their wedded life; and lest there should be any doubt that the deity typified in this apotheosis is Selene the Emperor caused the words Luna lucifera to be engraved beneath the name of Faustina.

The myth of the love of the lady-moon has nowhere been so exquisitely rendered as in the Endymion of Keats, and his description of the descent of Selene applies well to the moon-maiden of the Villa Albani:

"I raised My sight right upward, but it was quite daz'd By a bright something sailing down apace, Making me quickly veil my eyes and face. . . . . . . . Her locks were simply gordianed up and braided Leaving in naked comeliness unshaded Her pearl round ears, white neck, and orbed brow. . . . I see her hovering feet More bluely veined, more whitely sweet Than those of sea-born Venus when she rose From out her cradle shell. The wind out-blows Her scarf into a fluttering pavilion, 'Tis blue and over-spangled with a million Of little eyes, as though thou wert to shed Over the darkest lushest blue-bell bed Handfuls of daisies."[11]

Faustina may have known Antinous before her marriage, while Hadrian still hoped to make him his successor, ere the clamours of the people forced him to make the wiser choice. Had Antinous been so favoured, is there any doubt whether Faustina would not have inclined to him instead of to the good man with the serious, anxious face, who was more than twice her age when he became her husband?

The statues of Antinous fully realise Keats's ideal of Endymion.

"His youth was fully blown Shining like Ganymede to manhood grown, A smile was on his countenance; he seemed To common lookers-on like one who dreamed Of idleness in groves Elysian But there were some who feelingly could scan A lurking trouble in his nether lip. Then would they sigh, 'Ah! well-a-day Why should our young Endymion pine away?'"

We know not on what authority Ebers links the name of Antinous, Endymion-like, with that of Selene. Was there some missive sealed by a moon-beam torch, or addressed to the lady moon which went astray and set the gossip of the Court crackling like a flame in dry grass? Or was it merely his aspiration for the throne of the Caesars which was signified by the common expression, "he longed for the moon," and not a love hopeless, but beyond his power to conquer for the unattainable Selene, which saddened his young life so deeply, and determined him to throw it away when the occasion seemed to demand the sacrifice.

Both research and fancy will lead you far, for it was in Egypt that the most dramatic part of the story was enacted, and that Antinous, believing that in so doing he saved Hadrian's life, launched forth upon the Nile during a terrific tempest, and standing erect in the unguided canoe sought a voluntary death in the storm-lashed waters.

The Emperor's grief was wildly extravagant. He gave the beautiful body a king's burial in a tomb flanked by obelisks and guarded by a sphinx; and he built about it a magnificent city which he called Antinopolis, a city which exists to this day though no man lives within its desolate columned streets.

But the deserted city has been identified in the ruins called by the Egyptians, Antinoe. Its hippodrome, and theatres, and temple tomb have all been mapped by archaeologists, and its Arch of Triumph, of Roman bricks faced with white marble, its long colonnades of Corinthian columns, and its melancholy waving palms have been photographed by troops of unreflecting tourists.

While erecting memorials to his friend, Hadrian was not unmindful of his own sepulchral monument, the present castle of St. Angelo. It served as a mausoleum for the imperial family. The ashes of Faustina (to whose memory her husband erected the beautiful temple bearing her name) were placed here, their urn guarded by two bronze peacocks, the emblems of an empress.

These peacocks with the pineapple, which crowned the summit of the tomb, now ornament the Court of the Belvedere of the Vatican, in whose galleries may be found some of the statues with which Hadrian decorated the upper colonnade of the mausoleum, and which were wrenched from their pedestals and toppled upon the heads of the Goths when Totila besieged Rome.

Gregorovius in his scholarly biography of Hadrian thus sums up his achievements and estimates his character:

"He ruled the empire like a noble Roman, with prudence and strength. He enjoyed life with the joy of the ancients. He travelled throughout the world and found it worth the trouble. He restored it and embellished it with new beauty. He was lavish on a great scale."

We certainly do not know what he thought of his whole life at the end of it. He might have agreed with the estimate of Marcus Aurelius: "All that belongs to the soul is a dream and a delusion; life is a struggle and a wandering among strangers, and fame after death is forgetfulness."

That he had some vague belief in the immortality of the soul the well-known poem written shortly before his death certainly shows:

"Animula, vagula, blandula; Hospes, comesque corporis, Quae nunc abibis in loca; Pallidula, rigida, nudula, Nec ut soles dabis jocos?"

"Celestial spirit, evanescent fay, Supernal guest and sharer of my might, Wherefore and whither dost thou fly away, Exquisite phantom, nude and ghostly white, Never with me again to flit and play, Never with me to play?"

Reluctantly, after all our search, we find that archaeology, while it tells us much of Hadrian, leaves Antinous still a mystery.

The forsaken pleasure palace is silent and empty save for ghosts of the imagination. We see the imperial barges glide up the Nile as in a pageant, but it is all a wordless pantomime, though the beautiful immortal figure stands.

"Still there where he a thousand years hath stood And watched, with gaze intent, the ages' flood His graceful limbs reflecting, then as now His lotus crown the sadness on his brow, And races new in line unending glide Along in shells upon the flowing tide; But aye as they approach and look on him Athwart their joy there falls a sorrow dim, The citherns cease that rang as they drew nigh, On glowing lips the jests and kisses die. And, lo! the heart is seized by infinite woe, With arms outstretched they gaze as on they go— 'O waken, boy! O waken from thy dream! Say what thou seest below the ages stream, Tell us, is life's enigma known to thee? Give us thy own fair immortality!' But ere he from his revery wakens they Have with the river drifted far away."



L'ENVOI

A keyhole glimpse at Rome they show 'Twixt cypresses, a stately row, Where all who pass are free to see The villa of the Priory. Here belted knights, with cross on breast, In days of old were wont to rest, And 'neath the ilex hedges tall Oft paced the subtle Cardinal, His robe upon the pavement cool Mantling like some ensanguined pool.

St. Peter's keys, traditions tell, Open the gates of Heaven and Hell. O'er many a villa gate they 're shown, With triple crown carved deep in stone. If, then, you crave a fuller view Than keyhole glimpses give to you, Unlock and enter. You shall know A Heaven of art, a Hell of woe.

THE END

FOOTNOTES:

[1] His magnificent villa of Caprarola and the still more entrancing villa of Lante are linked with legends of Giulio Farnese and Vittoria Accoramboni in the author's Romance of Italian Villas, which with the Romance of the Renaissance Chateaux will be found supplementary to the present volume.

[2] From The Italian Rhapsody, by permission of Mr. Robert Underwood Johnson.

[3] Translated by E. Frere Champney.

[4] A song composed by Lorenzo de' Medici. "How lovely is our youth, and yet how fast it flies! Those who wish for joy must snatch it now. Trust not to to-morrow; seize it now, seize it now!"

[5] The earliest cards were not inscribed with hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades, but with swords, money, clubs, and cups. The same emblems are still used on the Spanish playing-cards.

[6] The French historians call him Richart de Cornouailles, the Italians Ricciardo.

[7] A stornello a fiore consists generally of a couplet beginning with an invocation to a flower, as:

Fior di limone! Limone e agro e non si puoi mangiare Ma son piu agre le pene d'amore.

Fior di granato! Se li sospiri mie fossere fuocco, Tutto il mondo sarebbe buciato.

See also the stornelli in Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi of two of which Richard's are variants.

[8] Palliano or Pagliano, for the name is variously spelled.

[9] John Addington Symonds further relates in what strange ways fate fulfilled this prediction. "Disaster fell on each of the five brothers. The first of them, Ottavio, was killed by a cannon-ball at sea in honorable combat with the Turk. Another, Girolamo, who sought refuge in France, was shot down in an ambuscade while pursuing his amours with a gentle lady. A third, Alessandro, died under arms before Paris in the troops of General Farnese. A fourth, Luca, was imprisoned at Rome for his share of the step-mother's murder, but was released on the plea that he had avenged the wounded honour of his race. He died, however, poisoned by his own brother Marcantoni in 1599. Marcantoni was arrested on suspicion and imprisoned in Torre di Nona, where he confessed his guilt. He was shortly afterward beheaded on the little square before the bridge of St. Angelo."

[10] Hamilton was aided in his work by Piranesi whose engravings record the state of the ruins at this time.

[11] The same figure is depicted in the frescoes of Pompeii, and here the deep blue of an Italian night glittering with stars gives the added touch of colour.

THE END