From the works of these architects Odo formed his first
conception of the earlier, more virile manner which the first contact
with Graeco-Roman antiquity had produced. The Count told him, too, of
the great painters whose popularity had been lessened, if their fame had
not been dimmed, by the more recent achievements of Correggio, Guido,
Guercino, and the Bolognese school. The splendour of the stanze of the
Vatican, the dreadful majesty of the Sistine ceiling, revealed to Odo
the beauty of that unmatched moment before grandeur broke into bombast.
His early association with the expressive homely art of the chapel at
Pontesordo and with the half-pagan beauty of Luini's compositions had
formed his taste on soberer lines than the fashion of the day affected;
and his imagination breathed freely on the heights of the Latin
Parnassus. Thus, while his friend Vittorio stormed up and down the quiet
rooms, chattering about his horses, boasting of his escapades, or
ranting against the tyranny of the Sardinian government, Odo, at the old
Count's side, was entering on the great inheritance of the past.
Such an initiation was the more precious to him from the indifference of
those about him to all forms of liberal culture. Among the greater
Italian cities, Turin was at that period the least open to new
influences, the most rigidly bound up in the formulas of the past. While
Milan, under the Austrian rule, was becoming a centre of philosophic
thought; while Naples was producing a group of economists such as
Galiani, Gravina and Filangieri; while ecclesiastical Rome was
dedicating herself to the investigation of ancient art and polity, and
even flighty Venice had her little set of "liberals," who read Voltaire
and Hume and wept over the rights of man, the old Piedmontese capital
lay in the grasp of a bigoted clergy and of a reigning house which was
already preparing to superimpose Prussian militarism on the old feudal
discipline of the border.
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