Monday, August 30:
With the help of ventilation, sogni tranquille, net curtains around the beds, etc., we procure ourselves a very good night, and, relieved, I set out in the morning with the children on a quest for art treasures. First of all we look at the fine altar and the Sibyl in Fontegiusta; the latter fresco brings home to me the impossibility of basing a school on a man of genius; in the main figure Peruzzi, under the influence of M[ichel]angelo, seems to me to have produced something which goes almost beyond his own abilities, but in the process the whole style of an epoch has eluded him; having once caught hold of sublimity, he, and then all others after him, lost forever the sense of beauty and fine proportion. I should describe this Sibyl as transcendental in a popular sense.
In the noble and simple spaces of S. Domenico, on the other hand, we discover in the Saint Catherine with the stigmata a full manifestation of inspiration. After this I find it difficult to look at anything else, and the three female figures remain in my mind as an eternal exhortation to nobility.
While we were gone, R. wrote to Prof. Schrön, and he is in good and cheerful spirits, even if he always tends to greet the return of the sightseers with a certain amount of irony. At lunch an article by Tappert gives rise to many jokes. "People are fighting over the degree of my divinity," R. says laughingly. A Bohemian (Prokrok) declares that it would be a very good thing if all writings except the Ring des Nibelungen were destroyed by fire, for then one would be able to study this work unhindered; he also says that the reason he does not call Wagner a god is that all the gods are too puny. And E. von Hagen asks what the entire world of women signifies compared with these three notes (from Eva's motive). Fictitious realities.
In the evening he reads to us the 5th act of Faust up to [left blank], giving us unqualified pleasure.