Works ›The Novel of My Life

Chapter 6Studies and DreamsSTUDIEN UND TRÄUME

draft

📖 This chapter with the German alongside →

My mother had written to relatives in Karlsruhe to ask whether I might live with them; then I was to enter the painting class of the landscape painter Hans Gude. When an affirmative answer came from my “aunt,” I steamed off to Karlsruhe immediately after the close of Carnival. My little attic room could not be heated — and, like many a “learner” before me, I had to knock the ice off my washing water with my toothbrush. But what was that against my inner fires! — With Professor Gude they were, to be sure, very much damped! There I sat now, as once with Morgenstern, and had to copy Gude (in winter there was no landscape study out of doors). I had one ancient fellow pupil, Kitty Kielland, the sister of the writer Alexander Kielland. She was the only interesting thing to me in the deadly boring instruction. She told me about Norway and its beauties.

Then one day I visited the studio of Professor Ferdinand Keller, a new colouristic genius of the decorative school. He and Gude were at daggers drawn. But my mind was made up, for his blaze of colour intoxicated me. I asked him whether he would have me as a pupil. “With that you are poking a wasps' nest,” he said. But what did I care.

Gude was deeply offended, more with Keller than with me. Until a studio fell vacant in the art school I was allowed to work in a corner of Keller's anteroom, directly from nature; pumpkins and grapes spraying colour, and a panther skin and thyrsus staff, became my second still life. The first had been a skull on violet velvet. Beside it a length of chain. “Burst Fetters1” I called this one. The other, “At the Bacchanal.”

How utterly I was in my own element here. Keller often marvelled at me, at how quickly I grasped everything and how I advanced technically, with a great gift for colour. “Why, you have more talent than I have,” he would say sometimes, quite astonished. Even if it was not true, it delighted me all the same.

How infinitely much there was to see in Keller's studio. He was painting “Mummedy Flemming” just then, Bettina's granddaughter, daughter of the somewhat “touched” (as the Karlsruhers put it) Countess Flemming. Mummedy was my own age and very pretty, with gold-red hair and auricula eyes. He painted her in red velvet, with a great wreath of thistles around the picture. “So that all the donkeys will bite,” laughed her mother.

Once, while Keller was away travelling, Countess Flemming turned out the giant studio with three scrubwomen. She swept everything upside down. He wrung his hands in despair on his return, and said to me reproachfully, why had I permitted it. As though I could have held my ground against such energy. I had bolted myself in and denied myself long enough. — —

It was highly stimulating for me in the master's studio. Daily new things dawned on me and old prejudices sank away. Once the old Grand Duke of Baden came. The talented new pupil was presented to him. A few brushes slipped from my hand. Gallantly the sovereign bent down to hand them to me. Keller stood aghast. But I said, smiling: “Did not Charles V pick up Dürer's brushes too?2” — —

At last a studio fell free for me, an attic studio with an anteroom. This I now furnished to my own taste — with a few antique things that I coaxed out of my parents. I felt like a king. I worked at my pumpkin still life and turned over great plans. Keller thought I ought to paint a large decorative piece for once: a relief head, held by a torch-swinging putto (that one I could copy), with grapes and pumpkins below. The picture was begun, and went forward briskly, too.

Naturally I was infatuated with my brilliant teacher, and since he appeared daily in the late afternoon to correct my work, I wanted to give him a pleasure for once. He had often said that he found me beautiful and wanted to paint me. So one afternoon I loosed my hair, threw a panther skin he had lent me over my shoulders and took the thyrsus in my hand. I sat motionless as he came in, expecting that he would break into cries of delight. For a long while he stood without moving.

“Are you quite out of your mind?” came at last, reproachfully, from his lips. “If your aunt sees you like that she will have you transported home under escort3.” I was utterly frozen and sobered, and found that he was indeed a great artist but had no dash in him at all. Often, later, we laughed about that scene together. —

It had grown warm, had grown summer and then autumn again. Then my aunt declared that she now needed the little attic room afresh for her son, who was studying music abroad but would be coming back. I was thunderstruck, and wailed, and poured out to Professor Keller my grief that now, after three-quarters of a year, I should have to give up my studies again already, since my father would never permit me to go into lodgings with strangers.

He was very ponderous, my good father, and this whole business of studying away from home was a thorn in his side. So he wanted to use the opportunity to have me come back. But Keller was sorry, for the sake of all the progress I had made in that short time. He spoke about it with Frau von Putlitz, wife of the poet and theatre intendant Gustav zu Putlitz. I had already been in their house a number of times, and had always been most kindly received.

Now the Putlitzes resolved, in the most generous way, for the sake of my regular course of study, to take me into their home. Frau von Putlitz wrote to my mother to that effect.

My parents gladly consented. And now, for several years, I became a member of the household. And I owe an endless stimulus to this piece of good fortune in my life.

Of another piece of good fortune I must still tell, which had fallen to me a few weeks after my arrival in Karlsruhe. I had put together my best poems at that time and sent them, with a high-flown letter, to Viktor Scheffel4. His answer came by return:

The glow of a youth-hot heart, starlight out of the land of dreams, the sparking of deep-disappointed affection smoulders and flashes out of this volume. Wild with longing it sounds, and inwardly; as a prophet I give it back: soon one will come, dear and loving-sweet, (I found that word dreadful) and the song will fall silent in happiness!

Beside it lay a friendly invitation — to lunch the following Sunday.

With my heart pounding I set out at the appointed hour for Scheffel's house in the lower Stephanienstraße. He had celebrated his sixtieth birthday5 shortly before, and a whole room was still set out with the most exquisite presents and tributes. He lived quietly and withdrawn with his growing son, a slim, shot-up youth. The poet of Ekkehard had a red, strong face, a grey-blond goatee, and wore a gaily checked velvet waistcoat. A giant goose was brought in, which he carved with the utmost artistry. He was exceptionally kind to me. I swam in sheer bliss.

He told me the story of Irene von Spilimberg, Titian's pupil6, about whom he wanted to write a novel once he had “peace of heart” again. Might I not be the one to give him that peace of heart, he said, joking. This moved me for a long while. At the end he invited me to lunch every Sunday of my stay in Karlsruhe. I was blissful about it. I revered the poet, and took it very much amiss when others told me that Viktor Scheffel was too fond of the bottle, and that this was the only reason he was separated from his wife.

He had a property on Lake Constance, on the Uffenau7, and was at odds with the fishermen of that peninsula. He lived at odds with a great many people, and for all his fame I soon gained the conviction, on those Sundays, that he was not happy. —

When I moved to the Putlitzes', Frau von Putlitz invited Viktor Scheffel for lunch every Sunday. There was then always a larger circle assembled; I myself, though, found it far cosier at those Sunday meals alone with him in the Stephanienstraße. Everyone secretly made fun of the good man, how much he drank and how many waistcoats he had pulled on over one another. Once we counted four of them. A pink one, a blue-and-grey checked one, under those a black one and a yellow-grey one. Later, since Karlsruhe no longer suited him, he moved to Lake Constance for good.

I meant to visit him there once, but did not find him at home. —

There was always a large circle in the Putlitz house. The four grown sons and their friends, the just-grown daughter and her friends. And Miss Mac, the Scottish governess, the “Mißchen,” English correctness personified, who nevertheless perjured herself in cold blood when she was required to state her age in court. Every day from five o'clock, at the tea hour, there was a grand reception, a “grande cour,” at Frau von Putlitz's. The closest friends were then taken along to the theatre, into the dark proscenium box that held ten or twelve people, at the back of which Frau von Putlitz lay on the sofa. I soon learned to love the theatre and went along practically every day, sometimes only for an act or two. The conductor Dessoff8 was a friend of the house; later came Felix Mottl. —

Actors, too, came almost daily to the tea hour. I came to know many famous guests. Gheza Zichy, the one-armed Hungarian pianist, was a guest in the house for a time; his playing and his person made a strong impression on me. Gustav zu Putlitz, recently made an Excellency on some jubilee occasion, loved to tease, and I was his standing target. I was to brush the hair out of my face; but the moment I stepped out of the house I combed it again as I pleased. Once, for a Viennese Gschnas ball — I had a costume after Keller's design: black velvet with gaily coloured Japanese fans — I had stuck thistles in my hair. These the good man indignantly tore out; but outside, in front of the door, I at once stuck them back in, and with that coiffure, to his displeasure when he heard of it, I carried off great triumphs. No one in the world knew how to keep me in fear and respect as Frau von Putlitz did. But I was probably not the only one; whereas the intendant was loved by everybody and feared by nobody. —

In the intendant's box Mummedy Flemming often sat too, discussing with Stephan Putlitz the proposition that love was merely a childhood illness. Later they married each other.

A few years later still, Stephan — he had just been called to a professorship at Halle — shot himself in an American duel9 over precisely that “childhood illness.” Mummedy then married her lover. As Elisabeth von Heyking10 she later wrote Letters Which Never Reached Him. —

I burned like a candle at both ends. My correspondence with Theodor Storm spurred me to my first novella. He had written to me:

“Domestic competence11 is the foundation of a woman's education. It is hard and time-consuming and cannot be carried on as a sideline.” That wounded me in my young artist's pride, and I wrote a little novella, “Das Weib,”12 which I sent to my fatherly friend, as he called himself. — “Well, you have given me a thorough tousling there,” he answered me. “Speaking seriously, it really is a hard conflict.” — I now sent Storm a good many further sketches for novellas, and he thought at the time that my literary talent perhaps outweighed the painterly one. “I am astonished that you are already able to follow the stirrings of the human psyche so keenly. But do not write yet, or rather, do not let anything be printed until you have gathered sufficient experience of life. Your lyric talent is great and singular, and justifies the greatest expectations.” That made me not a little happy at the time. But even so, how many years were still to pass before my first volume of poems appeared. Seven volumes of poetry13 have now been published — but what have I achieved with them?

What have I achieved at all, after all the great expectations, the onslaughts, the hopes?! Sometimes it seems to me that I mistook the road and have ended up in a blind alley. What is to blame for it? Not my talent, but rather my temperament, the overabundance and the impetuousness of my nature. And the inability to fit talent and inclination to business calculations. I always wanted to go through the wall head first, wanted every thing exactly as I had thought and wished it. Afterwards everything was always different from what I had dreamed, and kept changing further and further away from what I had striven for.

And as I once said in a novella: my dream-gold had always been a sham-gold14, and I was left eternally with empty hands. — —

A Karlsruhe friend, the painter Adeline Schrödter, daughter of the well-known painter of initials Malvine15, who had wanted to train me up as her successor, which went against the grain with me, was to be married to a German-Englishman, Mr. Trier. The wedding was celebrated over many days, with great pomp, in the Black Forest. I had written a festival play in which I, as the Genius of Love, blessed the bridal pair. But then I found no shelter for the night; my room had been taken, and I, poor “Genius of Love,” wandered homeless in the open until daybreak. That always seemed to me symptomatic of my later life. —

Many people came closer to me in Karlsruhe, but to none of them could I open my innermost self. A friend of Stephan Putlitz, Alfred Waag, worshipped me, according to “Mißchen's” pronouncement. I could never believe it, just as I never noticed at all when a man liked me, but on the contrary always imagined that nobody cared for me. I have since found thousands of young girls who lived in the lovely belief that every man must fall in love with them. I believe they are much happier in that assumption. At Adeline's wedding I had come to know a young Baron Seldeneck. We corresponded for a while, but I never became clear about him; I think he was even odder than I was. I then painted him a Vielliebchen; I have no idea what became of the friend.

The Putlitz sons had come back from Italy and Egypt, tanned brown, with long hair, like savages. I envied them burningly for everything they had seen.

I now attempted profile portraits of Stephan and Wolfgang. They came out fairly like, and still hang at Retzien, the Putlitz family estate. Stephan then gave me lessons in philosophy. But — either he was far too impatient or I far too ungifted — or both. Nothing came of it but tears, wailing and gnashing of teeth16. I have surely never possessed a talent for philosophical world-views. —

Karlsruhe itself pleased me more and more, especially in spring, when the Hardtwald spread its light-green veils about it.

How many walks we took, the Putlitz young people, under Mißchen's aegis.

And on Sundays we went out to Grötzingen with the whole art school. That was glorious, especially in the “tree-blood.” But it often went with me there as it had once at school: I felt lonely and forsaken. And then the next Sunday I preferred to stay in the studio, painting. “You will fade before your time if you overdo the work like this,” Professor Keller said to me once — yet he took pleasure in my progress all the same.

The great decorative still life with the torch-swinging putto had long been finished; Herr von Putlitz had christened it “The Barn Door” — I later gave it to my parents, and now it hangs in my sister's workroom in Wiesbaden17.

I was working on a picture, “At the Antiquary's.” In the foreground weapons and gleaming fabrics. Deep in the shadow one saw the head of a Shylock18 dawning out of the dark. This picture even received a medal at a large Karlsruhe art exhibition. In my beginnings I had more luck than later. How I dreamed, amid all the hot and heavy work. In summer, when the limes were in blossom in the old art-school garden, I always thought of Scheffel's words: “Farewell, sweet-scented avenue of limes, thou gate of Garsten cloister, where in my first urge to sing I stole the words from the little birds.” —

Scheffel himself had long since moved to the Uffenau; Karlsruhe had ceased to suit him. I sometimes thought with melancholy of those first Sundays in his house. —

The Karlsruhe palace garden, too, gave me raptures when the magnolias were in bloom. How I dreamed myself, standing before them, into far southern lands. Yes, longing was my travelling companion again, and her hot hands19 stroked across my heart. —

At the beginning of my stay I had often been with the family of the famous history painter Lessing20. He was a fine patriarch's head. But he died soon afterwards. — And I was in the house of the painter Professor Riefstahl, who was famous for his peasant processions in the high mountains. He looked like Wallenstein and his wife like a Holbein Madonna.

Carl Gussow was called to the art school. He had a new painting of reality that astounded everyone, and made himself much talked about. The Norwegian Thaulow, too, who later became so famous in Paris, delighted me with his mood landscapes. I was often with him in his studio. A quite good portrait painter was Count Waldenburg. His wife is said to have been a laundry girl. She was rosy and charming and had a child every year. He died early, I believe. — Then there was an old and very capable portrait painter, Marie Graz, and a flower painter, Helene Strohmeyer, who had lived a long time in London. All these artists made a great impression on me. With the Gudes I never came together again. That was sometimes awkward in company. — Then a young American painter turned up, Maggie Hormuth. She too became a pupil of Keller's, and copied everything I did, absolutely everything. She was very pretty, with long black ringlets, and later married Kallmorgen, a pupil of Gude's. Then she had a great many sons and gave up painting21. —

Yes, a motley world surrounded me. Many actors who came to Frau von Putlitz's tea hour, Marie Schanzer22, for instance, the young tragedienne, later the wife of the musician Hans von Bülow. She often came up to my studio too, and told me of her joys and sorrows.

I should have liked to become an actress too. In those days, in my dark urgency, before I came to Karlsruhe, I secretly practised many a night, when my father supposed me asleep, a part I had seen my favourite actress Beilhac play on the stage. This lady I even called on once, in my Backfisch days. It seemed to me such an enormous deed at the time that I almost feel I should get palpitations at the thought of it even today. But in Karlsruhe, in the Putlitz house, the acting profession became my daily bread. That was not the least of the attractions for me in my life there. Although it becomes clear to me, when I think back to that time, that I always felt unfree there.

A niece who also wanted to become a painter and had come to Karlsruhe was given me by Frau von Putlitz as a room-mate. She was called “Olga,” not “Luise” von François, like her aunt, the last “Reckenburg woman.” She was very talented, very clever, twenty-four years old, and quite deformed. She possessed a blazing sensuality, and would entertain me half the night with all the adventures she had to withstand. No man left her in peace; in the street by day and by night she was always accosted. In my innocence I did not understand this. I was, after all, “beautiful” now, as Keller and others maintained, and such a thing never happened to me. Something like envy took hold of me at her charming hump. Poor creature! After the summer holidays she did not come back. She had caught cold on the journey (at my instigation she had made a detour by way of Salzburg, and I therefore secretly held myself to be the cause of her death, for in Salzburg she contracted pneumonia) and died at her aunt François's within a few days. —

So now I was alone again in my Putlitz room. To Lita Putlitz I attached myself fairly closely, although her biting sharpness of mind made me uneasy. — The good soul later grew into a canoness in a spinsters' foundation.

But a young pupil of Gude's, Emma Lutteroth, came closer to me. We even made a holiday journey together by way of Mannheim, and she spent two days with me at my parents'. I see her still before me, great shining eyes and a hooked nose. She was really very pretty. As long as I knew her she wore a black velvet band around her neck, and “at the dangerous age,”23 decades later, she came to a sad end, of which I shall tell later.

I had endless plans and dreams and wishes. And I worked all the while at enlarging the programme of everything there was to see of the world. Every time I went to Darmstadt and came back from Darmstadt, I widened this programme. The most interesting thing of all to me, though, was my visit to Anselm Feuerbach24, who was then living with his stepmother in Heidelberg. He received the young, impetuous little painting-woman25 who came storming so enthusiastically into his studio with the greatest kindness. He gave me his portrait, which I still possess. He was forty-two at the time, small, slender and dark, with long hair and artist's curls and great, sad, blue eyes. Later I was allowed to visit him often in Venice, shortly before his death. —

Slowly I began to sell something! The picture “At the Antiquary's”! — But the winner of the raffled picture, a worthy carpenter, offered it back to me for purchase, to Herr von Putlitz's delight. “Did you not say that you thank God to be rid of it yourself?” he asked me, beaming, for weeks, every single day. —

In my next holidays my flight went to Paris. But I did not arrange it very practically. I was there eight days — the whole journey cost a hundred francs, and I brought back mountains of photographs into the bargain — but after my return I had to spend the rest of the holiday lying in bed at my parents', eating and sleeping. I was completely worn out. Out of sheer thrift I had never eaten a hot meal, and had walked the longest distances on foot to save the omnibus fare, and then in the galleries had slept on the upholstered benches from exhaustion instead of looking. My main meal of the day was a pot of milk-coffee in a crémerie.

Nine times after that I was in Paris, often for months. But this first forced march I shall never forget! And yet, how happy I was to have brought it off! After the next Christmas I was to take in a few court balls quickly at Darmstadt in January. At these the Grand Duchess Alice was quite particularly gracious to me. She said that I would only learn to recognise the true blessing of painting once I had been really unhappy. — I was never to see her again26.

My mother no doubt thought I ought to make use of this matrimonial opportunity — the court balls. They attracted me little. What other interests I had! All the same, there was a Lieutenant Cantor who greatly captivated me. But he took no notice of me. He was a Livonian, possessed millions and played the piano ravishingly — all night long, so rumour claimed. He looked very interesting, and bitterly world-weary. So I wrote to him, signing myself “Erik Arved,”27 that I understood him, and that he should not be so unhappy, for there were still women who felt with him. With a pounding heart I waited for the next ball. He did dance with me, but to my sorrow entertained me with everyday things. — —

A little later he left the army and became a Trappist monk. After a few years he married a distinguished, rich girl who was paralysed in both legs. He used to push her about Mentone in a wheelchair. When she had died he went to Capri and there fell in love with his milk-girl. He sent the beautiful child to a boarding school in Naples, then married her and built himself a magnificent villa in Anacapri.

Decades later I visited him there with my husband. We went walking together. My husband strolled with the Capri woman, who coquettishly displayed her red silk petticoat. “She is like a beautiful animal,” said Cantor. “Then why did you marry her?” — “That was only the reaction after the marriage with the paralysed one!” — “Do you remember that you once received a letter signed ‘Erik Arved’?” I asked. — He looked at me wide-eyed. “A glorious letter,” he said then. — “The letter was from me!” — “Great God, how different everything would have been if I had known that at the time!” he said. — So do human destinies often hang by a silken thread. We then went on with him to his villa. He improvised so wonderfully as we had scarcely ever heard before. But his wife was dissatisfied with it. “When he plays like that he cannot sleep all night again,” she said, and then, with a sigh: “Non dorme quasi mai” —.

I never saw Cantor again; he died soon afterwards of pneumonia. He too was a person without luck, without a star. —

I now made small journeys ever more often, out from Karlsruhe. I was independent, after all, despite my not yet twenty years28. Into every art-school holiday I set myself a different goal. Once I wanted to go to Holland, to visit Henriette Schadee-Philippi in Rotterdam, on whom I had once had a schoolgirl crush. And then the idea came to me to travel to London first. Money, to be sure, I had little of. I went into a tiny boarding house and lived on tea and marmalade. To my father I sent a short telegram: “Am in London for a few days.” — In my mind's eye I saw him wringing his hands and saying his favourite phrase: “That child will end on the gallows yet!” —

But I was enchanted! The British Museum! The Tower!

In the millionaire's house in Rotterdam I then rested and slept off all my hardships. More and more I felt it: only on the road, when great new impressions come storming in on me and want to be worked through, do I have peace from myself, from all that darkness and restlessness. There I no longer feel hunted and pursued. There I have peace and happiness. Oh, to travel, to travel!

My next excursion was with another, older painter, Fräulein von Baumbach, to Berlin. There I parted from her and went to visit Theodor Storm in Husum.

Three shining days I spent there. He showed me every house of the “grey town by the sea,”29 which with its red roofs did not seem grey to me at all. — — In the evenings he read from his poems, or told me and his many children and his second wife “Do” ghost stories that he had lived through himself. Yes, Storm was a “Spökenkieker.” There was something visionary in his eyes, however domestic, quiet and plain he otherwise looked. Of his poems he thought a great deal. “When everything else of mine is forgotten, those will remain,” he said confidently. — They were unforgettable days for me. I can see us still at supper, how he shelled shrimps for me with lightning speed.

And then alone with him in his room; how many a deep and beautiful word he spoke there.

— His letters to me, over three lustres30, were later published in the Deutsche Revue. They were glorious. How much I learned through him. —

A few years later I was with him once more at his new property in Hademarschen, whose garden gave him much joy. — And once more he visited me, years afterwards, in Hamburg, where in my immaturity I was ashamed of the long red scarf he had wound about his neck. After that I did not see him again. In his last illness he still wrote to me about his fever-fantasies: “Here once stood a playhouse — now all the lights are going out.” —

That might perhaps serve as an epitaph for many an artist's life:

“Here once stood a playhouse, now all the lights are going out. —”

But my own lights were burning sky-high in those days. They had devoured my peace of soul, though. I felt ever lonelier and more full of longing. How I sometimes envied a happy couple returning to their peaceful home with their child by the hand, when I strolled past the gardens, alone with my longing, on mild spring evenings, in the gardens where the buckthorn and the jasmine were in bloom and giving out their scent.

I wept my nights away then. What was it that I actually wanted? Fame and love? Why did I not find them? Was love not a thousand times more valuable than cold fame? — Then I would take my raincoat — I see it still before me, it was checked and edged with red, and shape a doll out of it. This I hugged and kissed in my lonely nights, and wetted with my tears.

Yes, I was very foolish, and felt wretched and lonely, all the world over.

And yet, humanly and artistically, I had so many outward successes. The aged Frankfurt patron and millionaire Wilhelm Metzler31, for example, I had completely conquered, without any doing of my own. He had taken me under his very particular protection, repeatedly bought larger pictures from me, placed commissions, invited me again and again to his house. My mother attached the boldest hopes and wishes to this. His daughters are said, as I learned only after many years, to have been not a little afraid that he meant to lay his millions at my feet, as his wife. I had, by the way, no notion of his intentions.

I never noticed with any man whether he was interested in me. My friend the Princess Baratov told me so even then, and went on telling me so all my life long.

This friendship, too, I had won in Darmstadt, where the small, brilliant princess32 with the Cleopatra profile raced through the court balls with her flame-coloured train. She was the wife of the Russian legation attaché. She had been married only a very short time then, had a small child, and painted. I still remember my first visit to her, with my mother, in her exotic, gaudily fantastic home. She impressed me enormously. Later, decades afterwards, I met her again in Rome, and she became a faithful friend to me in the hardest days of my life. — —

But my three Karlsruhe years were now soon at an end. At the Putlitzes' I also came to know the poet Wilhelm Jensen and his talented wife; both pressed me urgently to come to them in Freiburg. There I saw Freiburg Minster and the Höllental and spent days of great depth. “Talpa,” the mole, my new friends called me. There I felt far freer than in the Putlitz circle. But now there was soon to be a parting from there.

Success was favourable to my beginnings; I had already sold so much, a sunflower picture to the Queen of England33, several folding screens with still lifes and flowers — — I had money enough to venture my first flight to Italy. I meant to stay away a year — it became a year and a half, — and then I meant to set up on my own in Munich. —

And so I crossed the Alps for the first time; so my most burning wish of longing was granted — so life was beautiful and worth living after all — so my boldest dreams were fulfilled! If anyone had prophesied that to me a few years before: that so soon, and out of means I had earned myself, I should seek out the land of my childhood visions! And now I too could cry in anybody's face: Anch io sono pittore! —