rer parts, for this is the only plan by which one can
hope fully and completely to perfect by the excellent introductory works
which have been written from the fifteenth century to the present day.
The first artists and scholars have occupied their whole lives with
these objects.

And this vastness has a strangely tranquilizing effect upon you in Rome,
while you pass from place to place, in order to visit the most
remarkable objects. In other places one has to search for what is
important; here one is opprest, and borne down with numberless
phenomena. Wherever one goes and casts a look around, the eye is at once
struck with some landscape--forms of every kind and style; palaces and
ruins, gardens and statuary, distant views of villas, cottages and
stables, triumphal arches and columns, often crowding so close together,
that they might all be sketched on a single sheet of paper. He ought to
have a hundred hands to write, for what can a single pen do here; and,
besides, by the evening one is quite weary and exhausted with the day's
seeing and admiring.

My strange, and perhaps whimsical, incognito proves useful to me in many
ways that I never should have thought of. As every one thinks himself in
duty bound to ignore who I am, and consequently never ventures to speak
to me of myself and my works,[2] they have no alternative left them but
to speak of themselves, or of the matters in which they are most
interested, and in this way I become circumstantially informed of the
occupations of each, and of everything remarkable that is either taken
in hand or produced. Hofrath Reiffenstein good-naturedly humors this
whim of mine; as, however, for special reasons, he could not bear the
name which I had assumed, he immediately made a Baron of me, and I am
now called the "Baron gegen Rondanini ueber" (the Baron who lives
opposite to the Palace Rondanini). This designation is sufficiently
precise, especially as the Italians are accustomed to speak of people
either by their Christian names, or else by some nickname. Enough; I
have gained my object; and I escape the dreadful annoyance of having to
give to everybody an account of myself and my works....

In Rome, the Rotunda,[3] both by its exterior and interior, has moved me
to offer a willing homage to its magnificence. In St. Peter's I learned
to understand how art, no less than nature, annihilates the artificial
measures and dimensions of man. And in the same way the Apollo Belvide