There were several designs by Michael Angelo, none of which made much
impression on me; the most striking was a very ugly demon, afterwards
painted in the Sistine Chapel. Raphael shows several sketches of
Madonnas,--one of which has flowered into the Grand Duke's especial
Madonna at the Pitti Palace, but with a different face. His sketches
were mostly very rough in execution; but there were two or three designs
for frescos, I think, in the Vatican, very carefully executed; perhaps
because these works were mainly to be done by other hands than his own.
It seems to one that the Pre-Raphaelite artists made more careful
drawings than the later ones; and it rather surprised me to see how much
science they possessed.
We looked at few other things in the gallery; and, indeed, it was not one
of the days when works of art find me impressible. We stopped a little
while in the Tribune, but the Venus de' Medici seemed to me to-day little
more than any other piece of yellowish white marble. How strange that a
goddess should stand before us absolutely unrecognized, even when we know
by previous revelations that she is nothing short of divine! It is also
strange that, unless when one feels the ideal charm of a statue, it
becomes one of the most tedious and irksome things in the world.
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