The Life and Times of Moses Jacob Ezekiel by Nash Peter Adam;

Author:Nash, Peter Adam;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

It was not long before Ezekiel’s romantic studio in the Baths of Diocletian was famous on both sides of the Atlantic, attracting visitors from near and far. Locals and tourists alike found the American charming and vied for a place at his popular soirées. His innate urbanity made him a pleasure to know. “He had an extraordinary ability to make friends,” writes Zebulon Vance Hooker, in his essay “Moses Jacob Ezekiel: The Formative Years,” “yet his efforts were never ‘studied,’ and were always sincere.” So kind and gregarious was Ezekiel, so generous and diverting a host, that soon he had made the acquaintance of nearly every prominent person in Rome—from composers Franz Liszt and Giovanni Sgambati to the prima donna Adelaide Ristori and the divas Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse to Kaiser Wilhelm II and la Regina Madre herself, the accomplished and much-adored Queen Margherita. They each were drawn to seek the company of this Virginia gentleman in his romantic lair where they were treated to fine food and conversation, heard music and poetry, and listened with interest to the latest theories on science and art from a steady stream of itinerant lecturers. As Abner A. Layne describes him in a letter written in response to a query made by the assistant librarian at Westminster Abbey, regarding Ezekiel’s bust of Lord Sherbrooke there, “He was as he wished to be: gentle, kind and compassionate, tolerant, punctilious to every obligation, honorable and truthful, courteous to the point of courtliness, courageous without bravado, cultured and accomplished and, naturally, armed and dangerous.”[22]

Fortunately, there exist many fine descriptions of his home and studio as they were at the time, a number of which are worth quoting at length. When in 1880 the popular Dutch writer Carel Vosmaer met Ezekiel on a visit to Rome he was so impressed with the man and his studio that he fashioned a character after him for his novel The Amazon, an American sculptor by the name of Askol, who also lived and worked in the Baths of Diocletian.

Askol had hired a couple of spacious vaults in the Baths of Diocletian and filled them up as workrooms. Upstairs he had a more elegant studio; downstairs he kept his clay and marble for larger works. The studio was reached by an outer staircase, which he had adorned with climbing plants, flowers, and fragments of ancient sculpture. Before the door stood a table of antique fashion, and on it a bronze cast of one of his works—a fettered martyr, a vigorous reproduction, where the somewhat forced posture showed the influence of Michael Angelo. Above the door stood a bust of Bacchus, once called Ariadne.

The studio upstairs was a large vaulted apartment, whose tessellated floor was mediaeval; the walls were hung here and there with old tapestry. Askol had painted the open spaces with large festoons and boughs and fruits, such as are seen in one of the apartments of the house of Livia on the Palatine—those beautiful festoons with their rich, deep colors, that remind us so strongly of Flemish and Dutch paintings.

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