"

We possess prints of Rubens's house at Antwerp. That princely artist
perhaps first contrived for his _studio_ the circular apartment with a
dome, like the rotunda of the Pantheon, where the light descending from
an aperture or window at the top, sent down a single equal light,--that
perfection of light which distributes its magical effects on the objects
beneath.[258] Bellori describes it _una stanza rotonda con un solo
occhio in cima_; the _solo occhio_ is what the French term _oeil de
boeuf_; we ourselves want this _single eye_ in our technical language
of art. This was his precious museum, where he had collected a vast
number of books, which were intermixed with his marbles, statues,
cameos, intaglios, and all that variety of the riches of art which he
had drawn from Rome:[259] but the walls did not yield in value; for they
were covered by pictures of his own composition, or copies by his own
hand, made at Venice and Madrid, of Titian and Paul Veronese. No
foreigners, men of letters, or lovers of the arts, or even princes,
would pass through Antwerp without visiting the house of Rubens, to
witness the animated residence of genius, and the great man who had
conceived the idea. Yet, great as was his mind, and splendid as were the
habits of his life, he could not resist the entreaties of the hundred
thousand florins of our Duke of Buckingham, to dispose of this _studio_.
The great artist could not, however, abandon for ever the delightful
contemplations he was depriving himself of; and as substitutes for the
miracles of art he had lost, he solicited and obtained leave to replace
them by casts which were scrupulously deposited in the places where the
originals had stood.

Of this feeling of the local residences of genius, the Italians appear
to have been not perhaps more susceptible than other people, but more
energetic in their enthusiasm. Florence exhibits many monuments of this
sort. In the neighbourhood of _Santa Maria Novella_, Zimmerman has
noticed a house of the celebrated Viviani, which is a singular monument
of gratitude to his illustrious master, Galileo. The front is adorned
with the bust of this father of science, and between the windows are
engraven accounts of the discoveries of Galileo; it is the most
beautiful biography of genius! Yet another still more eloquently excites
our emotions--the house of Michael Angelo: his pupils, in perpetual
testimony of their admiration and gratitude, have ornamented it