The Greeks, who were artists in words, were the most refined
voluptuaries of antiquity. The sophists flourished in the greatest
number during the age of Pericles, the Golden Age of pleasure.
This germ had found a favourable soil in the unhealthy culture of the
young man's mind. By degrees, insincerity--rather towards himself than
towards others--became such a habit of Andrea's mind, that finally he
was incapable of being wholly sincere or of regaining dominion over
himself.
The death of his father left him alone at the age of twenty, master of a
considerable fortune, separated from his mother, and at the mercy of his
passions and his tastes. He spent fifteen months in England. His mother
married again, and he returned to Rome from choice.
Rome was his passion--not the Rome of the Caesars, but the Rome of the
Popes--not the Rome of the Triumphal Arches, the Forums, the Baths, but
the Rome of the Villas, the Fountains, the Churches. He would have given
all the Colosseums in the world for the Villa Medici, the Campo Vaccino
for the Piazza di Spagna, the Arch of Titus for the Fountain of the
Tortoises. The princely magnificence of the Colonnas, the Dorias, the
Barberinis, attracted him far more than the ruins of imperial grandeur.
It was his dream to possess a palace crowned by a cornice of Michael
Angelo's, and with frescos by the Carracci like the Farnese palace--a
gallery of Raphaels, Titians and Domenichini like the Borghese; a villa
like that of Alessandro Albani, where deep shadowy groves, red granite
of the East, white marble from Luni, Greek statues and Renaissance
pictures should weave an enchantment round some sumptuous amour of his.
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