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An hour may profitably be spent on Sundays strolling through the rooms viewing the interesting collection of casts and reproductions of masterpieces of painting by the pupils of the school. Delaroche's famous Hemicycle, representing the great artists of every age, seventy-five figures larger than life, will be found in the theatre of the Musée des Antiquités entered from the second courtyard.
In pursuance of his principles touching monumental work, Watts engaged himself over a period of five years on the greatest and the last of his civic paintings namely, the "Justice; a Hemicycle of Lawgivers," to which I shall later refer.
I didn't choose to walk any farther in the part of the garden they had chosen for a night promenade, and turned off abruptly. What? There, on the bench of the marble hemicycle in the north grove, sat a row of graybeards, old men in the costume of the first Revolution, a sort of serene and benignant Areopagus.
M. Viviani's last phrase, "We are without reproach. We shall be without fear," swept the whole Chamber off its feet. The vast hemicycle was a compact mass of cheering deputies, all waving aloft in their hands papers and handkerchiefs. From the tribunes of the public gallery shout after shout went up.
"A fresco painting represents, in a hemicycle, the Empress in her bridal dress, offering to the Virgin a diamond necklace; young girls are kneeling around her in prayer; admiration and fervent faith are depicted on their brows." A very large amount of the world's capital is represented in precious stones, and ninety per cent of that capital so invested is in diamonds. This was not always the case.
Delaroche's "Hemicycle" and his many historical tableaux are surely in the classic vein, however free they may seem in subject and treatment by contrast with the works of David and Ingres. They leave us equally cold, at all events, and in the same way for the same reason. They betray the painter's preoccupation with art rather than with nature.
I confound these various products of antiquated art in a genial absolution, and should like especially to tell how fine it was to watch this prodigious fountain come tumbling down its channel of mouldy rock-work, through its magnificent vista of ilex, to the fantastic old hemicycle where a dozen tritons and naiads sit posturing to receive it.
Sinking down at one end of the hemicycle, she studied the carved lion's head that ornamented the arm-rest, and the paw, thrusting out from the side-support, upon the pavement beneath.
But the garden itself seemed to know him, and to give him a tacit recognition; the great, foolish grotto before the gate, with its statues by Bandinelli, and the fantastic effects of drapery and flesh in party-coloured statues lifted high on either side of the avenue; the vast shoulder of wall, covered thick with ivy and myrtle, which he passed on his way to the amphitheatre behind the palace; the alternate figures and urns on their pedestals in the hemicycle, as if the urns were placed there to receive the ashes of the figures when they became extinct; the white statues or the colossal busts set at the ends of the long, alleys against black curtains of foliage; the big fountain, with its group in the centre of the little lake, and the meadow, quiet and sad, that stretched away on one side from this; the keen light under the levels of the dense pines and ilexes; the paths striking straight on either hand from the avenue through which he sauntered, and the walk that coiled itself through the depths of the plantations; all knew him, and from them and from the winter neglect which was upon the place distilled a subtle influence, a charm, an appeal belonging to that combination of artifice and nature which is perfect only in an Italian garden under an Italian sky.
"Fitly the fountains of silver leap, Whose sound is as soft as the listless flow Of streams that forever linger and go Down delicate, dream-far valleys of sleep." As in a dream, one looks down the last vista to the open rotunda and crescent hemicycle of the Palace of Fine Arts beyond a lagoon that mirrors them on its surface.
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