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The houses, descending to the river brink, were cracked, scorched, rusted by innumerable burning summers, like so many antique bronzes.
The onyx is here in great superb blocks, wedded with bronze of exquisite finish, or serving as background to enamels of the most elaborate design. Within, the shop is crammed with lamps, jardinières, and monumental marbles, all relieved by bronzes, gold, and exotics. The smallest object would frighten a man of moderate means, if he inquired its price.
* furniture and works of art in the Venetian towns and palaces of Brenta, 6, 500,000; * the spoils of Rome sacked, as formerly by the mercenaries of the Duc de Bourbon, collections of antiques, pictures, bronzes, statues, the treasures of the Vatican and of palaces, jewels, even the pastoral ring of the Pope, which the Directorial commissary himself wrests from the Pope's finger, 43 millions,
There was a house at Poissy "full to the roof-tiles" of books, marbles, bronzes and innumerable curios, gathered from every corner of the earth; and a palace at Paris filled in like manner, for which Ernest Meissonier had expended more than a million francs.
For Cleveland, having attended eight days at a sale, and having moreover ransacked all the curiosity shops, and shipped off bronzes and cabinets, and Genoese silks and objets de vertu, enough to have half furnished Fonthill, had fulfilled his mission, and returned to his villa.
The furniture throughout the mansion was elegant and costly; pictures, statues, bronzes, marble, silver, rosewood, ebony, mosaics, satin, velvet naught that the most fastidious and cultivated taste or dilettanteism could suggest, or lavish expenditure supply, was wanting; while the elaborate and beautiful arrangement of the extensive grounds showed with how prodigal a hand the owner squandered a princely fortune.
From amid their ruins have been dug out the most priceless of the statues which ornament the museums of Italy the Farnese Hercules, the colossal Florae, the Torso Farnese, the Torso Belvidere, the Atreus and Thyestes, the Laocoon, beside granite and basaltic vases beautifully polished, cameos, bronzes, medals, and other valuable relics of ancient art.
The Colonial Secretary's office is only second to the Melbourne Law Courts amongst the completed buildings of Australia. It is lofty, massive, and dignified outwardly, elegant and spacious inside, although it has been fitted up in the most incongruous fashion with odds and ends of third-rate statuary, imitation bronzes, etc., until it looks like an old curiosity-shop.
Doors of plate glass protected their antique and often gorgeous bindings, and medallions of rare bronzes were inlaid in the rich carvings of the cornices.
The colour of these objects was chiefly pale or sombre: the vellum bindings, with their deep-ridged backs, gave little relief to the marble, livid with long burial; the once splendid patch of carpet at the farther end of the room had long been worn to dimness; the dark bronzes wanted sunlight upon them to bring out their tinge of green, and the sun was not yet high enough to send gleams of brightness through the narrow windows that looked on the Via de' Bardi.
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