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This had evidently at one time been a magnificent building, probably the finest of its kind in the entire country; but now it was in a state of utter ruin, its beautiful roof and walls having been stripped entirely of the massive hammered and engraved gold and silver plates which, Phil asserted, had once adorned them, while its marble pavement was heaped high with immense fragments of masonry, some of which were evidently portions of a boldly moulded cornice that had once adorned the inner walls of the structure, while others bore upon their faces signs of having been exquisitely sculptured in alto or basso rilievo.
As at Sokol and Ushitza, I was not permitted to enter the inner citadel; so, returning to the gate, where we were rejoined by the soldiers, we went to the fourth tower, on the left of the Stamboul Kapu, and looking up, we saw inserted and forming part of the wall, a large stone, on which was cut, in basso rilievo, a figure of Europa reposing on a bull.
This profusion of sculptured rilievo is nearly all that remains to show how rich the palace was in things of beauty. Castiglione, writing in the reign of Guidobaldo, says that 'in the opinion of many it is the fairest to be found in Italy; and the Duke filled it so well with all things fitting its magnificence, that it seemed less like a palace than a city.
He was in the habit of talking and laughing pretty loud in school-hours, of throwing wads of paper reduced to a pulp by a natural and easy process, of occasional insolence and general negligence. One of the soft, but unpleasant missiles just alluded to flew by the master's head one morning, and flattened itself against the wall, where it adhered in the form of a convex mass in alto rilievo.
He was in the habit of talking and laughing pretty loud in school-hours, of throwing wads of paper reduced to a pulp by a natural and easy process, of occasional insolence and general negligence. One of the soft, but unpleasant missiles just alluded to flew by the master's head one morning, and flattened itself against the wall, where it adhered in the form of a convex mass in alto rilievo.
I think it was an eleemosynary smile, for my pleasantry seems to me a particularly basso rilievo, as I look upon it in cold blood. But conversation at the best is only a thin sprinkling of occasional felicities set in platitudes and commonplaces. I never heard people talk like the characters in the "School for Scandal," I should very much like to. I say the Master smiled.
A lady, no doubt Adelaide herself, appears in alto rilievo on the paddle-box. She has a short waist, long skirt sans crinoline, leg-of-mutton sleeves, lofty bearing, and stands like Ariadne on an island of pedestal size, surrounded by two or more pre-Raphaelite trees.
A woman with a creamy voice, and finished in alto rilievo, would be a variety in the boarding-house, a little more marrow and a little less sinew than our landlady and her daughter and the bombazine-clad female, all of whom are of the turkey-drumstick style of organization.
The antique basso rilievo which Raffaelle has introduced in the former, being certainly imitated both as to lines and grouping, is so distinct, both in character and form, from the surrounding figures, as to render them a distinct people, and their very air reminds us of another age.
He had executed a large alto- rilievo monument of my mother, which is now in my parish church, and the model of which is on the landing of one of the staircases of the National Gallery. His studio was always an interesting lounge, for he was ever ready to lecture upon antique marbles. To listen to him was like reading the 'Laocoon, which he evidently had at his fingers' ends.
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