THE PITTI PALACE--TITIAN'S BELLA--AN IMPROVISATRICE--VIEW FROM A WINDOW--ANNUAL EXPENSE OF RESIDENCE AT FLORENCE.
I have got into the "back-stairs interest," as the politicians say, and to-day I wound up the staircase of the _Pitti Palace_, and spent an hour or two in its glorious halls with the younger Greenough, without the insufferable and usually inevitable annoyance of a _cicerone_. You will not of course, expect a regular description of such a vast labyrinth of splendor. I could not give it to you even if I had been there the hundred times that I intend to go, if I live long enough in Florence. In other galleries you see merely the Arts, here you are dazzled with the renewed and costly magnificence of a royal palace. The floors and ceilings and furniture, each particular part of which it must have cost the education of a life to accomplish, bewilder you out of yourself, quite; and, till you can tread on a matchless pavement or imitated mosaic, and lay your hat on a table of inlaid gems, and sit on a sofa wrought with you know not what delicate and curious workmanship, without nervousness or compunction, you are not in a state to appreciate the pictures upon the walls with judgment or pleasure.
I saw but one thing well--Titian's BELLA, as the Florentines call it. There are two famous Venuses by the same master, as you know, in the other gallery, hanging over the Venus de Medicis--full-length figures reclining upon couches, one of them usually called Titian's mistress. The _Bella_ in the Pitti gallery, is a half-length portrait, dressed to the shoulders, and a different kind of picture altogether. The others are voluptuous, full-grown women. This represents a young girl of perhaps seventeen; and if the frame in which it hangs were a window, and the loveliest creature that ever trod the floors of a palace stood looking out upon you, in the open air, she could not seem more real, or give you a stronger feeling of the presence of exquisite, breathing, human beauty. The face has no particular character. It is the look with which a girl would walk to the casement in a mood of listless happiness, and gaze out, she scarce knew why. You feel that it is the habitual expression. Yet, with all its subdued quiet and sweetness, it is a countenance beneath which evidently sleeps warm and measureless passion, capacities for loving and enduring and resenting everything that makes up a character to revere and adore. I do not know how a picture can express so much--but it does express all this, and eloquently too.