The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton

by Robert J. Begiebing

  “The Faun of Bellosguardo!” I cried, startling our model to wakefulness. We all laughed. And hereafter Mr. Greenough often addressed him as “My Dear Faunus.”

  The Barberini Faun. With permission from Staatliche Antikesammlugen und Glyptothek, München, Germany. Photo by H. Koppermann.

  I began then to reconsider, at varying levels of awareness, my newly vaunted celibacy. And I recalled frequently what Mr. Greenough had once said on the matter, after examining some of these passionate specimens of antique sculpture: “The fire that consumes your house is the same fire that cooks your steak, and though its action as regards yourself is hard, it has under God and Nature only done its duty. If you force a person to celibacy as a means of ensuring chastity, let alone if you build your whole social pile on the like monstrous proposition, you will soon find that nature will do in the moral world what she has always done in the physical. What is denied a natural and easy outlet will make itself an irregular for you—a painful one. The fistula we say is a disease. But no, the fistula replies, ‘I am a compromise between obstruction and death.’” He paused to look at me, as if to be sure I was not offended.

  Mr. Spooner did not hesitate to continue his theme: “Perhaps the day will come when decency will consist in showing a wholesome, clean, and well-developed body instead of hiding a dirty, sick one.” They laughed. “It is possible that then too we shall see that not only the soul but the body also is of God, and that even the brutes whom we despise have learned to make passions harmonize with Providence.”

  “Shall we ever see such a time?” Mr. Greenough wondered. “So far, my friends, Christianity is the flower of our strongest yearning after the truth. But is it not also fundamentally imperfect—as long as it remains an intellectual and spiritual aristocracy, dividing our animal from our divine nature, as evil from good?”

  To own the truth, it was not long thereafter before Mr. Spooner and I began to live in compatible intimacy, as if in some Pelasgian Eden on our Tuscan mountainside. Never, reader, have I felt happier, never so full of purpose and the excitement of mental discovery with another, never so vital in my life and work, never as the ancient Roman has it, so “inebriated with the warm desire to live and enjoy.” These early halcyon days of immersion in our passion I knew even at the time were not meant to last, not the birthright of poor creatures living beneath the sky, not the legacy passed to a young woman who takes a married man—nay, her old friend and master!—for her lover.

  BY THAT SUMMER, as I said, I was working on a painting that I hoped to enter into the annual exhibition of the Academy of Fine Arts, to which Mr. Greenough had been elected as a member of the faculty some years ago. At Mr. Spooner’s request, Mr. Greenough had agreed to consider any work I put forward for his recommendation.

  I had for some time been examining statues of fauns, satyrs, and Sileni; and I had considered as well their less frequent appearances in paintings. I had examined, also, what I had been able to view of antique representations, whether in cast, copy, or original. Some of these were quite Dionysiac—erotic scenes of great frankness, or ithyphallic figures—and my idea now was for a muscular faun of quite human character, asleep in some local and actual Tuscan orchard or vineyard, and—if I could achieve it—altogether most unfamiliar to the modern viewer. That is to say, not idealized; rather, intimating by position, flesh tones, and textures that species of mindless masculine power which had so startled me upon recognizing it in my master, even as he reclined before our busy sketch pads.

  At first I had thought to recall Chas Sparhawk as a suitable prototype. But he seemed, finally, cast by nature in proportions too heroic; he might seem on canvas not quite human enough, some figment of the artist’s fancy, some mere sensualist’s Dream of Arcadia. So I returned to the very object of my revelation and took my studies of Mr. Spooner’s torso and attitude as my model form, obscuring only a facial resemblance.

  Almost from the beginning, however, questions rose before me like hectoring tribes of Satyrs. Should I place my sensual faun in the context or attitude of one of the numerous Florentine saints I had been studying, and by contrast to my fleshy depiction exaggerate the absence of so completely an otherworldly spirituality? That, I had thought, would force the attention of the viewer upon the ancient attitude toward spirit-and-flesh—a more Panlike figure, translated, Faunuslike, to the hills and rivers of Latium. Or should I forgo the saintly allusions and iconographic tricks and allow my virile figure to speak more directly to my contemporaries?

  Beyond that, there was the question of his degree of nakedness.

  That question I more easily settled because I soon realized I was determined to make the figure reveal my original idea of him without resorting to the merely scandalous. I allowed the towel to remain as a more appropriate branch of leaves. But this work was, in short, the most difficult thing I had ever attempted: that spirit which impresses upon the viewer an awareness that something more is being expressed than even the artist could have foreseen or calculated, that ever-elusive power I had often felt while attending to a master work executed in the very ebulliency of his genius. Such was my other sweet mania that summer, as if my soul were wandering heedless toward oblivion.

  To come to the painful point, however, my muscular faun was ignored by the Academy. Mr. Greenough, who approved of my work, especially understanding something deeper of its provenance, was a wonderful encouragement in my own artistic and financial defeat. For if he had recommended me to the Academy’s attention in the first place, he later assured me that now more than ever “false prophets throw their rods on the ground to become serpents,” and (hurt as I might be by the response of the Academy) that the general conditions for artists were still better here than in America, where, to take but one example, Allston’s difficult career revealed, as Mr. Greenough said, “the damage an as yet unawakened nation does to her most noble children.”

  He looked to see if I believed him, and then went on: “Pay no regard to cavils. Do not fear your own originality or your exile from the crowd of aspirants,” he told me. “For they always seek to reflect the qualities of the favorite of the age, which reflections but show that painting shares the fate of all human pursuits. For is not one picture in thousands worthy of the test of time, the applause of generations, until the very canvas rots, even as the volumes of our tolerable versifiers and romancers are shelved by the thousands when their heady little day is done?”

  And as for Academies? Well, he assured me that “they habitually supply their students with a false preference for readiness of hand over power of thought. A system of apprenticeship practiced by the true masters, and not unlike your relation to the elder Spooner, is far preferable because it always has been more favorable to a natural and healthful growth of art than any hotbed culture.” He abjured me to take heart; he offered to help procure commissions, so long as I promised not to hurry back to America in defeat.

  Promising to stay in Florence was easy, and I could never have left Mr. Spooner at that time, whatever the turn of events. I was so intoxicated by selfish desire that my only fear, once, was that I was with child. I expressed this concern to Mr. Spooner, who had asked me to explain my sudden aloofness and distraction. We began to worry ourselves sick over it, kept to separate bedchambers once again, and observed every nicety to avoid temptation.

  But the following month I returned to my proper self and rushed into his workroom with the news that there had simply been some sort of mistake or irregularity. He lay down the drawings he had been completing for his book, embraced me, and danced me about in relief.

  “We could not have remained apart much longer, Allegra,” he said. “This mess was destroying us. How could we continue to deny one another?”

  I sat on a chair. “I haven’t slept through the night for a month,” I said. “We shall have to be much more careful from now on… .”

  He interrupted me, “I completely agree, my dear.”

  “I don’t think I could survive another month
like that,” I said.

  “Nor I. I assure you, darling.” He came over to me, lifted me out of the chair, and embraced me once again. And that very hour began our new explorations of pleasure, almost as if we were starting all over again.

  These explorations went on satisfactorily for some time, especially while the memory of our hopeless confusion lingered. But any degree of self-restraint began to prove difficult and contentious.

  One afternoon I entered his workroom while he was studying some private drawings he had done of certain Greek and Etruscan artifacts. These were mostly sculptures, but some included scenes from vases of erotic encounters and phylakes. And one statue in particular, carved from soft stone, I had seen before: a Greco-Roman Priapus pouring oil onto his phallus from what looked to be a clay bottle. It was this sketch-pad study—his most striking—that I drew forth out of the sheaves.

  “You recall, my dear,” he said, “what I told you Greenough said of that figure?”

  I looked up at him. “I believe so, George. That ‘the rivers of olive oil which have poured down from Mediterranean hills over the centuries have flowed not only onto these many peoples’ gustatory palates’?”

  He smiled that I should have remembered Greenough’s words. “Indeed, darling! And do you recall,” he added, “that the traditional phrase of ‘using one’s wife in the Italian manner’ had been preceded by the old Latin phrase for ‘in the Roman manner.’”

  “And no doubt ‘in the Roman’ by ‘in the Greek’!” I said, and we both laughed.

  It was soon afterward that we began to circumvent our contentious self-restraints, by introducing “certain Italian pleasures” into our relations. Mr. Spooner was an utterly thoughtful, tentative, and gentle guide—and cautious of every emollient. He did not insist that we become full celebrants immediately; he did not hurry us through those ageless, darker ceremonies of desire. Yet slowly now our relations grew more completely indulgent, taking on a certain indelibility or compulsion, a certain unanticipated enthrallment. We lived, as it were, in a revelatory flame of carnality, until Gibbon and Mrs. Spooner arrived in Florence the following spring.

  THE PREVIOUS AUTUMN, we had received a letter from them saying that they planned to travel to Italy with the spring weather. If I grew vexed about how we would regulate our lives in their presence, this letter nonetheless roused my spirits and drove me on. Gibbon explained that he had fulfilled an idea he and his father had bantered in correspondence for some time.

  Having heard me speak of my Prudence Crandall Philleo, both Mr. Spooner and Gibbon had wished to see it. While in Connecticut on other business, and through the intercession of his mother with the Rev. Mr. May, Gibbon appealed to the Crandall family to be allowed to view this portrait by his friend and former pupil of his father. The long and short of it is that finally he prevailed upon the family to lend him the portrait briefly that he “might display this excellent work in an exhibition at the Athenaeum.” Bids were offered even though it was not for sale, and one exhibition review in particular swelled the reputation of my best portrait. That review Mrs. Spooner had clipped to be enclosed in Gibbon’s epistle, and I quote from it in part for my reader’s amusement.

  “The portrait of Prudence Crandall Philleo by one Allegra Fullerton (with whose work I confess I am until now unfamiliar) arrested the attention of many a casual and seasoned observer. Was it the maturity of her subject now depicted in contrast to the more youthful, well-known image from the brush of Mr. Alexander? Was it merely the notoriety, now rather quieted, of the audacious Miss Crandall herself? Or, was it perhaps the upstart, implicit challenge to one of our acknowledged portrait masters?

  “I think it is none of these. Say rather that it is each and all of these considerations, and yet something more. And this something more is, in my judgment, the essential factor behind the dignified stir. This portrait depicts—with delicate, laborious, and masterly technique—not some serene, prim, and pleasing woman of modest principles. No, here is a portrait of a lady who has suffered much yet retained an admirable bearing; who carries her wounds somewhat below the surface of figure and physiognomy; who has chosen a rigorous simplicity that might shame our latter-day Pythagoreans and philosophes; whose renunciations and labors ennoble her resilient spirit; and whose self-assured yet quiet venerability is unassailable before the ancient and dishonorable follies, vices, and injustices of civilization. And yet this woman in the portrait is quite human for all that.

  “Mrs. Philleo’s gifts are earned, we believe as we view her, by the sheer uncommon force of her scruples and her will, by her acceptance of living and toiling under the sun—nay, by her exacting labors in the sweet and terrible vineyards of our Lord’s terrestrial zone. This is the portrait of a woman who has been tested by others but who has even more severely tested herself, a portrait of nobility without blind idealism, experience without easy compromise, castigation without defeat, and nobility that embraces the commonplace—or, that looks out at the world from a common face which yet must strike any sensible viewer as the most uncommon of womanly faces. With what cunning surety our Mrs. Fullerton hath wrought!

  “Upon inquiry, I find that she is a student of Mr. George Spooner, which fact mayhap explains some of the qualities of execution and sensibility we find in her portrait of Mrs. Philleo. But one is never comfortable attributing all the gifts of the pupil to the disciplines of the master. For there are requirements of temperament and vision and innate powers that a master can but nurture and conduct, even as a great musical conductor directs the gifted musicians who make their gorgeous music under his profoundly cognizant eye… .”

  SUCH LAUDATORY, fulsome response was indeed pleasing, in my impecunious condition in Florence, yet it struck me still as tempting Fate. But then I remembered Rembrandt’s depiction of the criticas-donkey, and felt more humble once again. Still, the response opened my way a little farther forward, thanks once again to the Spooner family. Now, however, the guilt of my betrayals began to fester, all the more so because Gibbon assured me that he and his mother had booked passage on a ship for Leghorn by way of Gibraltar. He also reported that the portrait itself had been returned as promised to the Crandall family, and none of us a whit wealthier in coin of the realm. Still, I found that other commissions followed this “stir.” Within several months, I discovered that some Americans, finding themselves in Florence and feeling desirous of portraits, copies, or Tuscan landscapes, now came to my studio to examine my work. For at the end of his review article, the author, one Pemberton Chatsworth (with whose work I confess I am until now unfamiliar), “understood,” as he put it, “that the intrepid Mrs. Fullerton now resides among the throng of international art-colonists in Florence, Italy.” Both Mr. Spooner and Mr. Greenough recommended me to friends and other travelers at every turn among the Florentine communities of visitors and exiles.

  Thus in higher expectations did I spend the balance of that year, 1844, summering in Bellosguardo, returning to the city on the plain in winter, working, working, working wherever we were, either on my commissions or studies or independent works of a higher nature.

  In all my endeavors with oil and canvas, Mr. Spooner remained my guide, as on one late afternoon in December when we walked to Galileo’s Tower up along the Poggie Imperiale bordered for a mile or more by fine cypresses, ever-green oaks, green banks, and hedges with roses even in that season, as if to remind the foot-traveler of summer all the winter long.

  We reached the square, broken tower atop the low hill, entered a courtyard where a dog saluted us, and took our position with a northward view. I had brought with me three sketch-studies for moonlit visions of the city that Mr. Spooner had agreed to examine. But first we drank in this other vision before us of Florence, with Fiesole perhaps a dozen miles away, swimming in a blue mist that softened everything into dreamy obscurity, excepting where the declining sun shone through and blazed the landscape.

  Eventually we sat on a bench, leaning against one another, and I drew out
my studies. The first study was a view of moonlight along the Lung ‘Arno where the brown river took into his breast a silvery glory that he flung back in mellow glow upon the irregular housefronts.

  The second Mr. Spooner recognized as a view of San Miniato we had cherished one moony night upon emerging from a café and seeing the towers and cypress groves wrapped in a luminous gray veil, as if they shone with their own light and lent a crystal depth to the atmosphere about them.