Beyond the old church the hill slopes up to the Badrutt Park, named
after a famous dynasty of hoteliers. Here is provision for golf,
abounding in speculative and absorbing contingencies. In the larch
wood on the upper road from St. Moritz to Camfer is the Segantini
Museum, in which are gradually being collected works of the painter
who loved and studied the Engadine with life-long devotion.
In the way of pictures, St. Moritz possesses a treasure of the last
kind one would look to find in a mountain village. In the Palace
Hotel is--what shall I say?--a copy, a replica, the original, for
even that claim has been made for it, of Raphael's Madonna di S.
Sisto, assuredly the noblest presentment of motherhood that the world
can show. By a happy inspiration it has been placed in the Ladies'
Room, where it must awaken a _Magnificat_ in many a heart.
Apart from technique, there are slight but unmistakable differences
between it and its famous compeer at Dresden. In the Madonna's gaze
is less of wonder and amazement, something reaching far into
futurity, assurance of final triumph and disdain of intermediate
obstacle; not yet had the sword that should go through {15} her soul
set its sign on the young mother's face. In the Child the difference
is in an opposite sense; in both pictures there is the same wonderful
suggestion of the awakening of the divine spirit amid the strange
limitations of humanity, but here it is rather the human pathos than
the divine power that holds our attention; there is less imperial
moulding of brow and mouth, less profound mastery in the eyes: the
eyes to which all things were open but which saw them now as man
sees, appear contemplating with perplexed wonder the path that was to
be trodden--he had known it all along, but it looked so different now.
In the flat land at the head of the lake, a little more than a mile
from St. Moritz, and linked to it by an electric tramway, are the
famous chalybeate springs, round which has grown up the cluster of
buildings known as St. Moritzbad. About half-way down, on the
larch-clad slope that rises to the right of the road, is the Museum
Engiadinais, the charming building in old Engadine styles in which
Signur Hartmann has housed the magnificent collection of Rhaetian
antiquities made by Signur Campell of Celerina. To speak of this
museum as a collection of antiquities gives a very inadequate notion
of its interior. Whole rooms, halls and corridors have been
installed there, and, combined with the old styles of the building
and the furniture and surroundings of {16} old life, make wandering
about it like an excursion into the past.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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