Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/176

Rh prospects of the Italian people than in works of art, ancient or modern. In spite of this, she seems to have been diligent in visiting the galleries and studios of Rome. Among the latter she meutions those of the sculptors Macdonald, Wolff, Tenerani, and Gott, whose groups of young people and animals were to her "very refreshing after the grander attenıpts of the present time." She found our own Crawford just completing a bust of his beautiful wife, which is to-day a household treasure among her relatives. Margaret preferred his designs to those of Gibson, who was then considered the first of English sculptors. Among American painters she found Terry, Cranch, and licks at work. She saw the German Overbeck surrounded by his pictures, looking "as if he had just stepped out of one of them,—a lay monk, with a pious eye, and habitual morality of thought which lunits every gesture."

Among the old masters, Domenichino and Titian were those whom she learned to appreciate only by the study of their works. Other artists, she thinks, may be well understood through copies and cngravings, but not these. She enjoyed the frescos of Caracci with "the purest pleasure," tired soon of Guercino, who had been one of her favourites, and could not like Leonardo da Vinci at all. His pictures, she confesses, "show a wonderful deal of study and thought. I hate to see the marks of them. I want a simple and direct expression of soul." For the explanation of these remarks we must refer the reader back to what Emerson has said of Margaret's Idiosyncratic mode of judgment. Raphael and. Michael Angelo were already so well known to her through engravings, that their paintings and frescos made no new impression upon her. Not so was it with Michael's sculptures. Of his