Juris Doctor Johannes-Baptista Bottinius
Fisci et Rev. Cam. Apostol. Advocatus
If I might read instead of print my speech,—
Ay, and enliven speech with many a flower
Refuses obstinately blow in print
As wildings planted in a prim parterre,—
This scurvy room were turned an immense hall;
Opposite, fifty judges in a row;
This side and that of me, for audience—Rome:
And, where yon window is, the Pope should be—
Watch, curtained, but yet visibly enough. (10)
A buzz of expectation! Through the crowd,
Jingling his chain and stumping with his staff,
Up comes an usher, louts him low, “The Court
“Requires the allocution of the Fisc!”
I rise, I bend, I look about me, pause
O’er the hushed multitude: I count—One, two—
When it may hap some painter, much in vogue
Throughout our city nutritive of arts,
Ye summon to a task shall test his worth, (20)
And manufacture, as he knows and can,
A work may decorate a palace-wall,
Afford my lords their Holy Family,—
Hath it escaped the acumen of the Court
How much a painter sets himself to paint?
Suppose that Joseph, Mary and her Babe
A- journeying to Egypt prove the piece:
Why, first he sedulously practiseth,
This painter,—girding loin and lighting lamp,—
On what may nourish eye, make facile hand; (30)
Getteth him studies (styled by draughtsmen so)
From some assistant corpse of Jew or Turk
Or, haply, Molinist, he cuts and carves,—
This Luca or this Carlo or the like:
To him the bones their inmost secret yield,
Each notch and nodule signify their use,
On him the muscles turn, in triple tier,
And pleasantly entreat the entrusted man,—
“Familiarise thee with our play that lifts
“Thus, and thus lowers again, leg, arm, and foot!” (40)
—Ensuring due correctness in the nude.
Which done, is all done? Not a whit, ye know!
He,—to art’s surface rising from her depth,—
If some flax-polled soft-bearded sire be found,
May simulate a Joseph (happy chance!)
Limneth exact each wrinkle of the brow,
Loseth no involution, cheek or chap,
Till lo, in black and white, the senior lives!
Is it a young and comely peasant-nurse
That poseth? (be the phrase accorded me!) (50)
Each feminine delight of florid lip,
Eyes brimming o’er and brow bowed down with love,
Marmoreal neck and bosom uberous,—
Glad on the paper in a trice they go
To help his notion of the Mother-Maid:
Methinks I see it, chalk a little stumped!
Yea and her babe—that flexure of soft limbs,
That budding face imbued with dewy sleep,
Contribute each an excellence to Christ.
Nay, since he humbly lent companionship, (60)
Even the poor ass, unpanniered and elate
Stands, perks an ear up, he a model too;
While clouted shoon, staff, scrip and water-gourd,—
Aught may betoken travel, heat and haste,—
No jot nor tittle of these but in its turn
Ministers to perfection of the piece:
Till now, such piece before him, part by part,—
Such prelude ended,—pause our painter may,
Submit his fifty studies one by one,
And in some sort boast “I have served my lords.” (70)
Or when ye cry “Produce the thing required,
“Show us our picture shall rejoice its niche,
“Thy Journey through the Desert done in oils!”—
What, doth he fall to shuffling ’mid his sheets,
Fumbling for first this, then the other fact
Consigned to paper,—“studies,” bear the term!—
And stretch a canvas, mix a pot of paste,
And fasten here a head and there a tail,
(The ass hath one, my Judges!) so dove-tail (80)
Or, rather, ass-tail in, piece sorrily out—
By bits of reproduction of the life—
The picture, the expected Family?
I trow not! do I miss with my conceit
The mark, my lords?—not so my lords were served!
Rather your artist turns abrupt from these,
And preferably buries him and broods
(Quite away from aught vulgar and extern)
On the inner spectrum, filtered through the eye,
His brain-deposit, bred of many a drop, (90)
E pluribus unum: and the wiser he!
For in that brain,—their fancy sees at work,
Could my lords peep indulged,—results alone,
Not processes which nourish the result,
Would they discover and appreciate,—life
Fed by digestion, not raw food itself,
No gobbets but smooth comfortable chyme
Secreted from each snapped-up crudity,—
Less distinct, part by part, but in the whole
Truer to the subject,—the main central truth (100)
And soul o’ the picture, would my Judges spy,—
Not those mere fragmentary studied facts
Which answer to the outward frame and flesh—
Not this nose, not that eyebrow, the other fact
Of man’s staff, woman’s stole or infant’s clout,
But lo, a spirit-birth conceived of flesh,
Truth rare and real, not transcripts, fact and false.
The studies—for his pupils and himself!
The picture be for our eximious Rome
And—who knows?—satisfy its Governor, (110)
Whose new wing to the villa he hath bought
(God give him joy of it) by Capena, soon
(’Tis bruited) shall be glowing with the brush
Of who hath
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