Marzios Crucifix and Zoroaster | Page 2

truth in the saying. The material is old--the older the better;
it has passed under the hand of the artist again and again; it has taken
form, served for the model of a lasting work, been kneaded together in
a lump, been worked over and over by the boxwood tool. The workman
feels that it has absorbed some of the qualities of the master's genius,
and touches it with the certainty that its stiff substance will yield new
forms of beauty in his fingers, rendering up some of its latent capacity
of shape at each pressure and twist of the deftly-handled instrument.
At the extremities of the long bench huge iron vices were fixed by
staples that ran into the ground. In one of these was fastened the long
curved tool which serves to beat out the bosses of hollow and
small-necked vessels. Each of the workmen had a pedal beneath his
foot from which a soft cord ascended, passed through the table, and
pressed the round object on which he was working upon a thick leather
cushion, enabling him to hold it tightly in its place, or by lifting his foot
to turn it to a new position. In pots full of sand were stuck hundreds of
tiny chisels, so that the workmen could select at a glance the exact form
of tool needful for the moment. Two or three half balls of heavy stone

stood in leathern collars, their flat surfaces upwards and covered with a
brown composition of pitch and beeswax an inch thick, in which small
pieces of silver were firmly embedded in position to be chiselled.
The workshop was pervaded by a smell of wax and pitch, mingled with
the curious indefinable odour exhaled from steel tools in constant use,
and supplemented by the fumes of Marzio's pipe. The red bricks in the
portion of the floor where the two men sat were rubbed into hollows,
but the dust had been allowed to accumulate freely in the rest of the
room, and the dark corners were full of cobwebs which had all the air
of being inhabited by spiders of formidable dimensions.
Marzio Pandolfi, who bent over his work and busily plied his little
hammer during the interval of silence which followed his apprentice's
last remark, was the sole owner and master of the establishment. He
was forty years of age, thin and dark. His black hair was turning grey at
the temples, and though not long, hung forward over his knitted
eyebrows in disorderly locks. He had a strange face. His head, broad
enough at the level of the eyes, rose to a high prominence towards the
back, while his forehead, which projected forward at the heavy brows,
sloped backwards in the direction of the summit. The large black eyes
were deep and hollow, and there were broad rings of dark colour
around them, so that they seemed strangely thrown into relief above the
sunken, colourless cheeks. Marzio's nose was long and pointed, very
straight, and descending so suddenly from the forehead as to make an
angle with the latter the reverse of the one most common in human
faces. Seen in profile, the brows formed the most prominent point, and
the line of the head ran back above, while the line of the nose fell
inward from the perpendicular down to the small curved nostrils. The
short black moustache was thick enough to hide the lips, though deep
furrows surrounded the mouth and terminated in a very prominent but
pointed chin. The whole face expressed unusual qualities and defects;
the gifts of the artist, the tenacity of the workman and the small
astuteness of the plebeian were mingled with an appearance of
something which was not precisely ideality, but which might easily be
fanaticism.

Marzio was tall and very thin. His limbs seemed to move rather by the
impulse of a nervous current within than by any development of normal
force in the muscles, and his long and slender fingers, naturally yellow
and discoloured by the use of tools and the handling of cements, might
have been parts of a machine, for they had none of that look of
humanity which one seeks in the hand, and by which one instinctively
judges the character. He was dressed in a woollen blouse, which hung
in odd folds about his emaciated frame, but which betrayed the
roundness of his shoulders, and the extreme length of his arms. His
apprentice, Gianbattista Bordogni, wore the same costume; but beyond
his clothing he bore no trace of any resemblance to his master. He was
not a bad type of the young Roman of his class at five-and-twenty years
of age. His thick black hair curled all over his head, from his low
forehead to the back of his neck, and