Minor Arts

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

is the cry of a vendor of brass heel-tips, I hear daily under my window. The first two statements are a long, reverberating, melancholy cadence; the injunction is brisk, energetic, and the suggestiveness of the phrase lingers with me after he turns into the street of Tor de’ Specchi. Tower of Mirrors, — how magic are those street names of the older quarters of Rome! The Tower of Mirrors recalls the tradition of a tower lined with mirrors, where Virgil sat and watched in their reflections all the secrets of the city; and there is the Street of the Golden Keys, and of the Sword of Roland, and of the Marble Foot, and of the Fairy Morgana, — all summoning up a world of folk-lore. A black alley, called after bright Phœbus, emphasizes its own darkness; and a little by-way, called after Tata Giovanni, commemorates the pious cobbler whose heart was stirred to pity for the waifs of his neighborhood and gathered them into a school and taught them for love, and, in return, was called Daddy John by his little beneficiaries. All this, a hundred years ago, when the streets were unlighted and people emptied their slops out of the front windows.

In threading the narrow streets of old Rome, what strikes one most is the subdivision of trades and the sense of each artisan that his is an art. The very names of the streets emphasize the idea. This is the way of the shoe-makers, that of the slipper-makers, this of the chair-makers, that of the hamper-makers, or little basket-makers. In this tiny shop a handsome woman with white hair à la Pompadour, fits gloves and subtly flatters,— it is part of her art; in one place they weave hose, in another nothing is made but baby-shoes. There are broiderers in gold and broiderers in white, broiderers in silk and broiderers in wool. This woman is a button-hole maker, that a hemmer. A tiny sign over yonder door says: “Rammendatrice” (darner),and in a little cubby-hole near by is the “ovana ” (egg-woman) whose sole commodity is eggs of different degrees of freshness. Near by is a shop where nothing is offered but the wafer used in celebrating the mass.

Varnisher, gilder, carver, cabinetmaker, — the list might be indefinitely prolonged; and though I have lived all my life in Rome, I have not mastered the ramifications, nor do I know, when a job is to be done, which artist I need, — and artist he is when he comes. Art for art’s sake is in the fibre of the Italian people. A carpenter summoned to drive a nail for a picture cannot stop at that. He squints his eye to see which is the best light, where it will look best in relation to other things; he must express his opinion. I went the other day to order a rushbottom chair of uncommon shape. The man’s shop was a fragment of a house pulled down to make way for the Victor Emmanuel monument. I gave him the measurements and my idea; his face lighted up; of course he understood,— would I allow him to make a design ? He knelt on the ground, a dismantled chair for table, with a stump of pencil and a dirty piece of wrapping-paper. Three children swarmed up his legs and back, to see him do it. With a face rapt in the joy of conception, he drew just what I wanted, adding a few improvements in the antique manner, showing an interest in the work, apart from profit, which is one of the curious contradictions of the Italian character. When completed, a small boy and a baby brought home the chair; the legs were not quite even, and I sent it back to be planed. When brought again I protested that it still rocked a hair’s breadth; the child replied, “Eh, signora mia, where is the man absolutely without vice ?”

His reply reminded me of a shoemaker who said to me when I was unduly insistent as to the wear of shoes I was ordering, “Yes, they are good; yes, they will last; but not forever. No stuff is eternal.”

We Anglo Saxons think we have the monopoly of moral conviction; but sometimes an arrow comes to us from a Latin quiver. A man in a tiny twine shop did up a package for me to post, with much skill and patience, and I, thanking, protested, “But I have taken up so much of your time.” He replied gravely, “What is it in comparison with eternity!”

With the spring scores of new trades leap into being: first, the vending of lemon, orange, and barley water from a stand which is a real nosegay of leaves and lemons. Who can forget the glowing, admirably disposed colors of a Venetian or Roman green grocer ? I often recall the quaint market-place at Ferrara, where the booths were garlanded with blushing pomegranates wedded to their delicate green glossy leaves limned against a deep blue sky. A mournful wail of “Spiderhunter, spider-hunter ” announces an old man laden with long canes, bunches of prickly butchers-broom for house-cleaning before Easter. Then comes the man who sells cherries “ with and without a master,” and he who carries “ fruits of the sea,” and the little donkey carts filled with flasks of “acid water” from a mineral spring near Rome, which is delivered at your door be it even on the fourth floor, for one cent, with a bright smile thrown in for lagnappe.

Those who have spent Christmas in Rome know how gay the Piazza Navona is made for Epiphany with booths of cheap toys. The main stock is of presepi — little sheds of cork-bark with miniature terra cotta figures representing the Nativity. A small shed with the Holy Family costs from twenty to forty cents, and additional figures of shepherds, magi, peasants, and all kinds of domestic animals, can be had for one cent apiece. Pausing one day before a stall, I apologized for merely looking. The old vendor beamed on me kindly and said, “Look, look, Signora, how can people fall in love with my wares unless they do look.”

He said he began immediately after Epiphany to make images for the next year; he devoted one month to pigs (very ungodly-looking black swine), one to magi, one to peasants spinning, one to cocks, and so on, reserving the last month, “when there was more inspiration,” to making the Holy Family. The Holy Family consists of the Baby, Mary, Joseph, and two cows! The old fellow’s pleasure and pride in his one-cent figurines had a flavor of the artist’s joy in creation.

I ordered some straight shelves from a plain carpenter, to hold some bits of ancient pottery. The next morning he appeared with a drawing of a graceful curved outline for the frame instead of a straight one, suggesting that divisions be omitted as they spoiled the effect. The man’s bow on arriving and leaving, his attitude while making suggestions, his deft way of picking up his kit of tools, might be envied by the leader of the cotillion, so full it was of grace and ease.

One day my sister and I found a friend in bed, and were moved to admiration by the beautiful inlaid bedstead. Where, how, could a like one be obtained ?

And Valeria replied: “It was made by a man who is a real artist; he can copy or create any design. This he adapted from my antique chest of drawers. Do you see how exquisitely the pattern is made to lend itself to the curves and different spaces ? No, he is not expensive. He restored the wood-work of the Borgia apartments. He is now making a carved altar for the Pope.”

Everything, price and all, was satisfactory; we took the man’s address and paid little heed to Valeria’s parting words, “But don’t think you’ll get that bed in a hurry.”

We sent for the artist and had a long and charming conversation with him as to wood, design, period. He talked most agreeably of the Louis XVI bureau he was to follow in making the bedstead, — its epoch, the details which were complicated to reproduce, which brass finishings were antique. He used his pencil as readily as a good talker does his tongue, and showed a real feeling for and knowledge of art, which made us feel as if we had been to hear a famous lecturer on the subject. He promised to find the proper wood on the morrow and begin the bedstead immediately. We were delighted with him and the near prospect of the bedstead.

A week later we dropped in to see him; he had not begun the work, but would the next day. Two weeks later we wrote him a note, but had no reply. Some time after we left a message at his shop asking him to call. He did so in a few weeks and paid us another charming visit to copy the design on the bureau. He sipped a glass of wine, spoke with appreciation of a seventeenth century ceiling, and told of several interesting works of art (not ours!) he was engaged in. He gave a graphic description of a fine carved bedstead he had executed for the erratic Duke of Gallese. We were a little depressed by hearing that that bed had only been delivered in time for the duke’s dead body to be laid out upon it. He added, however, with grim humor that the duke’s daughter Donna Maria was very glad to get it, as it was a more tangible possession than her father’s other bequest of Lake Albano !

Every few weeks, my brother, who has the Anglo Saxon’s intolerance of fibs and the dallyings of art, goes to see our bedstead-maker and tries threat and persuasion. He is met with gracious good-humor and promised the bed next week. My sister and I have given up going; we remember that Julius II was of an impatient, choleric disposition, but that he never got his tomb finished; and though we hope to see that bedstead in the flesh, we are not sure we ever shall. And in the mean time we have procured another to sleep on.

In having old furniture restored, one is struck by the artisan’s knowledge of and respect for the traditions of style and art. He makes subtle distinctions between what is beautiful in itself and what has the merit of a certain period or style. This inherent sense of fitness and proportion runs through all that Italians do. It makes them excellent raconteurs and actors, and cooks who vie with the French. It prevents their ever presenting such sickening scenes of public love-making as the parks afford in Germany, or committing such crimes of color and cut in dress as prevail amongst the lower classes in London.

Gabriele d’Annunzio’s graces of style and his “purple patches” fired the fancy of Italians and made them tolerate his moral lacunæ. His standard of debt-paying is well known. A tailor to whom he owed a long score vowed he would not be done out of it like the others, and departed to extract the money or give D’Annunzio a sound beating. Some one met the tailor later and inquired the result. The reply was, —

“Ah, what a wonderful man, what a talker, what an artist! Would that I had five hundred francs to lend him.”

I was asking my father’s tailor, an excellent workman whose life is made thorny by the unpunctuality of the Roman jeunesse dorée, whether he had been able to collect a certain bad debt, and he answered, —

“Ah, no, cara signora Maria, but what a conversationalist, what language, what grace! If I had a private income, I would dress that man gratis for the pleasure of hearing him converse.”

In a former paper for the Atlantic Monthly I tried to give some idea of a Calabrian hairdresser’s sense of her trade as an art. I found the same in the Roman barber who shampoos my hair. He was describing his wooing and wedding of a girl of Monte Rotondo.

“ What should I take her for a nuptial gift ? It must be something appropriate to my profession; she was marrying a poor man, but a barber, a perfumer. I decided it should be a bouquet which should compass her with odor, and perfume all Monte Rotondo. I took her a bouquet of orange blossoms which was two yards to span; it was only a nosegay, but neither Torlonia nor Colonna could surpass it. Monte Rotondo was odorous; no man needed to ask: who weds Nina Gigliucci ? The very air informed him: A Barber, a Perfumer of Rome!”