, these are the battlements of that vast
Alpine rampart in which the vale of Susa opens like a gate. To west and
south sweep the Maritime Alps and the Apennines. Beneath glides the
infant Po; and where he leads our eyes the plain is only limited by
pearly mist.

A BRONZE BUST OF CALIGULA AT TURIN.

The Albertina bronze is one of the most precious portraits of antiquity,
not merely because it confirms the testimony of the green basalt bust in
the Capitol, but also because it supplies an even more emphatic and
impressive illustration to the narrative of Suetonius.

Caligula is here represented as young and singularly beautiful. It is
indeed an ideal Roman head, with the powerful square modelling, the
crisp short hair, low forehead, and regular firm features proper to the
noblest Roman type. The head is thrown backward from the throat; and
there is a something of menace or defiance or suffering in the
suggestion of brusque movement given to the sinews of the neck. This
attitude, together with the tension of the forehead and the fixed
expression of pain and strain communicated by the lines of the
mouth--strong muscles of the upper lip and abruptly chiselled under
lip--in relation to the small eyes, deep set beneath their cavernous and
level brows, renders the whole face a monument of spiritual anguish. I
remember that the green basalt bust of the Capitol has the same anxious
forehead, the same troubled and overburdened eyes; but the agony of this
fretful mouth, comparable to nothing but the mouth of Pandolfo
Sigismondo Malatesta, and, like that, on the verge of breaking into the
spasms of delirium, is quite peculiar to the Albertina bronze. It is
just this which the portrait of the Capitol lacks for the completion of
Caligula. The man who could be so represented in art had nothing wholly
vulgar in him. The brutality of Caracalla, the overblown sensuality of
Nero, the effeminacy of Commodus or Heliogabalus are all absent here.
This face idealizes the torture of a morbid soul. It is withal so truly
beautiful that it might easily be made the poem of high suffering or
noble passion. If the bronze were plastic I see how a great sculptor by
but few strokes could convert it into an agonizing Stephen or Sebastian.
As it is, the unimaginable touch of disease, the unrest of madness, made
Caligula the genius of insatiable appetite; and his martyrdom was the
torment of lust and ennui and everlasting agitation. The accident of
empi