round a
quadrangle. At the top of this we knocked at a great door, which looked
wormeaten and decayed. It was opened by a little boy, and strange and
striking indeed was the scene that presented itself. The room is an
immense and very lofty one, reaching to the rafters of the building. It
is lighted by one enormous window to the north, giving the artist just
the light his work requires. On one wall, opposite to the window, was
the cartoon which Signor Moretti had executed for the window we had been
admiring. It is of the size of the original, and is in all respects a
perfectly and highly finished drawing in black and white. The colors are
not shown on it. On an easel near it was the drawing of a colossal head
of Saint Donato, bishop and martyr, destined for a window for a church
in Arezzo. It is full of life and vigor. The head is that of an
evidently born and Nature-ordained ruler of men. And such Rome's bishops
for the most part were in the days when Saint Donato gave his life for
the faith. The window for which this drawing has been made will be a
circular one in the centre of the west front of the church in Arezzo.
Other designs, large and small, were hung with a total disregard of
symmetry or order on the wide white walls, and among them an infinity of
plaster casts of almost every part of the human body. The floor and
furniture of the vast chamber seemed to the eye of a stranger to offer
an inextricable and wellnigh indescribable medley of objects in the
utmost confusion. Quaint-looking bottles and jars of every conceivable
and inconceivable form, and of many more than all the colors of the
rainbow, were on all sorts of tables and brackets and shelves,
containing the coloring-matters which, when let out from beneath the
stoppers that held them down, were, like imprisoned genii in the Arabian
Nights' tales, destined to produce such marvelous effects. Other
suspicious-looking flasks, wearing a warning touch-me-not air, contained
chemical agents of varied kinds and properties. And everywhere, upon,
among and under all this heterogeneous litter, was glass of every
kind--plain glass, colored glass of every hue under the sun, unshaped
panes of glass, glass cut into every imaginable form. And all to any eye
save that of the master seemed to be a very type of orderless confusion.
On a large easel backed against the abundant light from the great window
was the partly-completed portion of another work, also destined for
Are