Earthwork Out Of Tuscany
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Maurice Hewlett >> Earthwork Out Of Tuscany
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And now cross the Piazza and come down the steep incline by the Palazzo
Commune, turn to the left, and behold the crown of Pistoja, the Spedale
del Ceppo. Everybody knows Luca's masterpiece at Florence, the Foundling
Hospital on whose front are some twenty _bambini_ in pure white on
blue: babies or flowers, one does not know which. In 1514 the Pistolesi
remodelled their own hospital, and called in the successors to Luca's
mystery to make it joyful. Andrea, Giovanni, Luca II. and Girolamo came
and conjured in turn, and their wallflowers sprouted from the limewashed
sides. I fancy myself out in the patched Piazzo del Ceppo as I write,
looking again on the pleasant quietness of it all. It is a grey day with
thunder smouldering somewhere in the hills, close and heavy. The blind
walls about me stare hard in the raw light, but the wards of the hospital
are open back and front to the air; it is a rest for the eye to look into
their cool depths within the loggia. It is a square, very plain, yellow
building, this hospital, unrelieved save for its loggia, its painted
frieze of earthenware, and a rickety cross to denote its pious uses.
Through the wards I can see to the wet sky again and a gable-end of vivid
red and yellow. A thin black Christ on his cross stands up against this
bright square of distance, pathetic silhouette enough for me; reminder
something sinister, you might think, for the sick folk inside. But not so;
this is a crucifix, not a _Crucifixion_. This poor wooden Rood,
bowing in the shade, speaks not of high tragedy, but of the simple annals
of the poor again; not of St. John, but of St. Luke, I shall be called
sentimental; but with the band of garden colours before me I can't get
away from the streets and alleys, I am not sure the craftsmen intended I
should.
The hospital itself is low and square; it is limewashed all over, and has
the blind and beaten aspect of all Italian houses:--red-purplish tiles
running into deep eaves, jalousied windows, and the loggia. It is on the
face of this that the workers in baked clay--"lavoro molto utile per la
state," so cool and fresh is it, so redolent of green pastures and the
winds of April--have moulded the Seven Acts of Pure Mercy in colours as
pure; blue of morning sky, grass-green, daffodil-yellow. Once more, no
heroics: here is what the workmen knew and we see. Black and white
_frati_, not idealised at all, but sleek and round in the jaw as a
monk will get on oil and _asciutta_, minister to sunburnt peasants,
and ruddy girls as massive in the waist and stout in the ankle as their
sisters of to-day. Then, of course, there is Allegory. Allegory of your
well-ordered, gravitated sort, which takes us no whit further from
wholesome earth and the men and women so plainly and happily made of it.
No soaring, no transcendentalism. Carita is a deep-breasted market-girl
nursing two brown babies, whom I have just seen sprawling over a gourd in
the Campo Marzio; Fortezza, Speranza, Fede, I know them all, bless their
sober, good eyes! in the fruit-market, or selling newspapers, or plaiting
straws in the Piazza. After this we slide into religion pure and direct,
the beautiful ridiculous Paganism which has never left the plain heathen-
folk. Wreathed medallions in the spandrils give us Mary warned, Mary
visited, Mary homing to her Son, Mary crowned; what would they do without
their Bona Dea in Tuscany? She is of them, and yet always a little beyond
their grasp. Not too far, however. That means Gothicism. The advantage of
the Italian religious ideal is obvious. Art may never leave for long
together the good brown earth; and it can serve religion well when it
plucks up a type to set, clean as God made it, just a little above our
reach, to show Whose is "the earth and the fulness thereof."
An example. I leave the white and crumbling Piazza, its old marble well,
its beggars, its sick, and its meadow-fresh border of Delia Robbia
planting, and stray up the Via del Ceppo towards the ramparts. High at a
barred window a brown mother with a brown dependent baby smiles down upon
my wayfaring. She has fine broad brows and a patient face; when she
smiles, out of mere kindness for my solitary goings, it is pleasant to
note the gleam of light on her teeth and lips. I take off my hat, as Luca
or Lippo would have done, to "ma cousine la Reine des cieux."
Thus goes life In Pistoja and the rest of the world.
XIII
DEAD CHURCHES AT FOLIGNO
From my roof-top, whither I am fled to snatch what cooler airs may drift
into this cup of earth, I can see above the straggling tiles of gable and
loggia the cupolas and belfries of many churches. I know they are all
dead; for I have wound a devious way through the close inhospitable
streets and met them or their ghosts at every corner. The ghost of a dead
church is the worst of all disembodied sighs: he wails and chatters at
you. Here I have seen churches whose towers were fallen and their tribunes
laid bare to the insults of the work-a-day world. There were churches with
ugly gashes in them, fresh and smarting still; some had sightless eyes, as
of skulls; and there were churches piecemeal and scattered like the
splinters of the True Cross. A great foliated arch of travertine would
frame a patch of plaster and soiled casement just broad enough for some
lolling pair of shoulders and shock-head atop; a sacred emblem, some
_Agnus_ indefinably venerable, some proud old cognisance of the See,
or frayed Byzantine symbol (plaited with infinite art by its former
contrivers), such and other consecrated fragments would stuff a hole to
keep the wind away from a donkey-stall or _Fabbrica di pasta_ in a
muddy lane. I met dismantled walls still blushing with the stains of
fresco--a saint's robe, the limp burden of the Addolorata;--I met texts
innumerable, shrines fly-ridden and, often as not, mocked with dead
flowers. And now, as I see these grey towers and the grand purple line of
the hills hemming in the Tiber Valley, I know I am come down to the sated
South, to the confines of Umbria, the country of dead churches, and of
Rome the metropolis of such deplorable broken toys. This appears to me the
disagreeable truth concerning the harbourage of Saint Francis and Saint
Bernardine, and of Roberto da Lecce, a man who, if everybody had his
rights, would be known as great in his way as either. You will remember
that Luther found it out before me. The religious enthusiasm we bring in
may serve our turn while we are here: it will be odd if any survive for
the return; impossible to go away as fervid as we come. Other enthusiasms
will fatten; but the wonderful Gothic adumbration of Christianity was born
in the North and has never been healthy anywhere else. Gothicism, driven
southward, runs speedily to seed; an amazing luxuriance, a riot, strange
flowers of heavy shapes and maddening savour; and then that worse
corruption to follow a perfection premature. So mediaeval Christianity in
Umbria is a ruin, but not for Salvator Rosa; it has not been suffered a
dignified death. That is the sharpest cut of all, that the poor bleached
skull must be decked with paper roses.
All this is forced upon me by my last days in Tuscany where a lower mean
has secured a serener reign. I had hardly realised the comeliness of its
intellectual vigour without this abrupt contrast. Pistoja, with its
pleasant worship of the wholesome in common life; Lucca, girdled with the
grey and green of her immemorial planes, and adorned with the silvery
gloss of old marble and stone-cutter's work exquisitely curious; then
Prato, dusty little handful of old brick palaces and black and white
towers, where I heard a mass before the high altar but two Sundays ago.
All Prato was in church that showery morning, I think. The air was close,
even in the depths of the great nave: the fans all about me kept up a
continual flicker, like bats' wings, and the men had to use their hats, or
handkerchiefs where they had them. To hear the responses rolling about the
chapels and echoing round the timbers of the roof you would have said the
thunder had come. It was too dark to see Lippi's light-hearted
secularities in the choir; one saw them, however, best in the
congregation--the same appealing innocence in the grey-eyed women, and the
men with the same grave self-possession and the same respectful but
deliberate concern with their own affairs which gives you the idea that
they are lending themselves to divine service rather out of politeness
than from any more intimate motive. Lippi saw this in Prato four centuries
ago, and I, after him, saw it all again in a rustic sacrifice which I
should find it hard to distinguish from earlier sacrifices in the same
spot. And indeed it is informed with precisely the same spirit, an
inarticulate reverence for the Dynamic in Nature. How many religions can
be reduced to that! In Florence again, what a hardy slip of the old stock
still survives! You may see how the worship of Venus Genetrix and Maria
Deipara merged in the work of Botticelli and Ghirlandajo, Michael Angelo
and Andrea del Sarto; you may see how, if asceticism has never thriven
there, there was (and still is) an effort after selection of some sort and
a scrupulous respect for the _elegantia quaedam_ which Alberti held to
be almost divine; you may see, at least, a religion which still binds, and
which, making no great professions, has grown orderly and surely to
respect. Thus from a Tuscany, pagan, kindly, exuberant and desponding by
turns, but always ready with that long slow smile you first meet in the
Lorenzetti of Siena and afterwards find so tenderly expressed in its
different manifestations in the Delia Robbia and Botticelli--a smile where
patience and wistfulness struggle together and finally kiss,--I came down
to Umbria and a people dying of what M. Huysmans grandiosely calls "our
immense fatigue." Here is a people that has loved asceticism not wisely.
This asceticism, pushed to the limit where it becomes a kind of
sensuality, has bitten into Umbria's heart; and Umbria, with a cloyed
palate, sees her frescos peel and lets her sanctuaries out to bats and
green lizards. Surely the worst form of moral jaundice is where the
sufferer watches his affections palsy, but makes no stir.
From the ramp of the citadel at Perugia you can guess what a hornet's nest
that grey stronghold of the Baglioni must have been. It commands the great
plain and bars the way to Rome. Westward, on a spur of rock, stands
Magione and a lonely tower: this was their outpost towards Siena. Eastward
there is a white patch on the distant hills--Spello, "mountain built with
quiet citadel," quiet enough now. There was always a Baglione at Spello
with his eyes set on chance comers from Foligno and Rome. Seen from
thence, _Augusta Perusia_ hangs like a storm cloud over her cliffs,
impregnable but by strategy, as wicked and beautiful as ever her former
masters, the Seven Deadly Sins, grandsons of Fortebraccio. The place is
like its history, of course, having, in fact, grown up with it: you might
say it was the incarnation of Perugia's spirit; it would only be to admit,
what is so obvious over here, that a town is the work of art of that
larger soul, the body politic. So to see the crazy streets cut in steps
and crevasses across and through the rocks, spanning a gorge with a stone
ladder or boring a twisted tunnel under the sheer of the Etruscan walls,
to note the churches innumerable and the foundations of the thirty
fortress-towers she once had--all this is to read the secret of Perugia's
two love affairs. Of her towers Julius II. left but two standing, blind
pillars of masonry; but there were thirty of them once, and the Baglioni
held them all, for a season. Now it was these wild Baglioni--"filling the
town with all manner of evil living," says Matarazzo, but nevertheless
intensely beloved for their bold bearing and beauty, as of young hawks;--
it was just these blood-stained striplings, this Semonetto who rode
shouting into the Piazza after an affray and swept his clogged hair clear
of his eyes that he might see to kill, this black Astorre, "of the few
words," who was murdered in his shirt on his marriage-eve by his cousin
and best friend; it was this very cousin Grifone, so beautiful that "he
seemed an angel of Paradise," who, in his turn, was cut down and laid out
with his dead allies below San Lorenzo that his widow might not fail of
finding him and his marred fairness--it was just this stormy crew that
fell weeping at Suor Brigida's meek feet, confessed their sins and
received the Communion (encompassers and encompassed together, and all in
a rapture) on the very eve of the great slaughter of 1500; it was they who
adorned the Oratory of San Bernardino and made it the miracle of rose-
colour and blue that it is; who reared the enormous San Domenico below the
Gate of Mars, and who, in this hot-bed of enormity, nurtured Perugino's
dreamy Madonnas. What it meant I know not at all. There are other riddles
as hard in Umbria. Renan saw the gentle cadence of the landscape--violet
hills, the silver gauze of water, oliveyards all of a green mist; read the
_Fioretti_ and the dolorous ecstasies of Perugino's Sebastian, and
straightway adapted the high-flown parallel worked out in detail by
Giotto. Umbria for him was the Galilee of Italy, and Francis son of
Bernard an _avatar_ of Christ. But Renan was apt to allow his
emotions to ride him. Another dazzling contrast, which has recently
exercised another dextrous Frenchman, is Siena with her Saint Catherine
and her Sodoma who betrayed her--Saint Catherine, as great a force
politically as she was spiritually, and Sodoma, who painted her like a
Danae with love-glazed eyes fainting before the apparition of the
Crucified Seraph.
There is nothing like this in the history of Tuscany, whose palaces not
long were fortresses nor her monks at any time successful politicians.
Cosimo had pulled down the Florentine towers or ever the last Oddi had
loosed hold of Ridolfo's throat, I know that Siena is just within that
province geographically; in temperament, in art and manner, she has always
shown herself intensely Umbrian. Take, then, the case of Savonarola. The
Florentines received him gladly enough and heard him with honest
admiration, even enthusiasm. Still, there is reason to believe they took
him, in the main, spectacularly, as they also took that portentous old
monomaniac Gemisthos Pletho who made religions as we might make pills.
For, observe, Savonarola lost his head--and his life, good soul!--where
the Florentines did not. The cobbler went beyond his last when the
_Frate_ essayed politics. He suffered accordingly. But in Perugia, in
Siena, in Gubbio and Orvieto, the great revivalists Bernardine, Catherine,
Fra Roberto, held absolute rule over body and soul. For the moment
Baglione and Oddi kissed each other; all feuds were stayed; a man might
climb the black alleys of a night without any fear of a knife to yerk him
(the Ancient's word) under the ribs or noose round his neck to swing him
up to the archway withal. So Catherine brought back Boniface (and much
trouble) from Avignon, and Da Lecce wrote out a new constitution for some
rock-bound hive of the hills, whose crowd wailing in the market-place knew
the ecstasy of repentance, and ran riot in religious orgies very much
after the fashion of the Greater Dionysia or, say, the Salvation Army. And
how Niccolo Alunno would have painted the Salvation Army!
So it does seem that the two great passions of Umbria burnt themselves out
together. They were, indeed, the two ends of the candle. When the Baglioni
fell in the black work of two August nights, only one escaped. And with
them died the love of the old lawless life and the infinite relish there
was for some positive foretaste of the life of the world to come. Both
lives had been lived too fast: from that day Perugia fell into a torpor,
as Perugino, the glass of his time and place, also fell. Perugino, we
know, had his doubts concerning the immortality of the soul, but painted
on his beautiful cloister-dreams, and knocked down his saints to the
highest bidder.[1] Vasari assures me that the chief solace of the old
prodigal in his end of days was to dress his young wife's hair in
fantastic coils and braids. A prodigal he was--true Peruginese in that--
prodigal of the delicate meats his soul afforded. His end may have been
unedifying; it must at least have been very pitiful. Nowadays his name
stands upon the Corso Vannucci of the town he uttered, and in the court
wall of a little recessed and colonnaded house in the Via Deliziosa.
Meantime his frescos drop mildewed from chapel walls or are borne away to
a pauper funeral in the Palazzo Communale.
[Footnote 1: See, however, what he has to say for himself in Chapter V.
_ante._]
In his finely studied _Sensations_ M. Paul Bourget, it seems to me,
flogs the air and fails to climb it when he struggles to lay open the
causes of poor Vannucci's embittering. If ever painting took up the office
of literature it was in the fifteenth century. The _quattrocentisti_
stand to Italy for our Elizabethan dramatists. This may have produced bad
painting: Mr. George Moore will tell you that it did. I am not sure that
it very greatly matters, for, failing a literature which was really
dramatic, really poetical, really in any sense representative, it was as
well that there led an outlet somewhere. At any rate Lippi and Botticelli,
to those who know them, are expressive of the Florentine temper when Pulci
and Politian are distorted echoes of another; Perugino leads us into the
recesses of Perugia while Graziani keeps us fumbling at the lock. And
Perugino's languorous boys and maids are the figments of a riotous erotic,
of a sensuous fancy without imagination or intelligence or humour. His
Alcibiades, or Michael Archangel, seems green-sick with a love mainly
physical; his Socrates has the combed resignation of his Jeromes and
Romualds--smoothly ordered old men set in the milky light of Umbrian
mornings and dreaming out placid lives by the side of a moonfaced Umbrian
beauty, who is now Mary and now Luna as chance motions his hand. How
penetrating, how distinctive by the side of them seems Sandro's slim and
tearful Anima Mundi shivering in the chill dawn! With what a strange magic
does Filippino usher in the pale apparition of the Mater Dolorosa to his
Bernard, or flush her up again to a heaven of blue-green and a glory of
burning cherubim! This he does, you remember, with rocket-like effect, in
a chapel of the Minerva in Rome. But it is the unquenchable thirst of the
Umbrians for some spiritual nutriment, some outlet for their passion to be
found only in bloodshed or fainting below the Cross, some fierce and
untameable animal quality such as you see to-day in the torn gables, the
towers and bastions of Perugia, it is the spirit which informed and made
these things you get in Perugino's pictures--in the hot sensualism of
their colour-scheme, the ripeness and bloom of physical beauty encasing
the vague longing of a too-rapid adolescence. The desire could never be
fed and the bloom wore off. Look at Duccio's work on the facade of San
Bernardino, Duccio was a Florentine, but where in Florence would you see
his like? What a revel of disproportion in these long-legged nymphs, full-
lipped and narrow-eyed as any of Rossetti's curious imaginings. Take the
Poverta, a weedy girl with the shrinking paps of a child. Here again
(exquisite as she is in modelling and intensity of expression) you get the
enticement of a malformation which is absolutely un-Greek--unless you are
to count Phrygia within the magic ring-fence--and only to be equalled by
the luxury of Beccadelli. You get that in Sodoma too, the handy Lombard;
you have it in Perugino and all the Umbrians (in some form or other); but
never, I think, in the genuine Tuscan--not even in Botticelli--and never,
of course, in the Venetians, Duccio modelled these things while the Delia
Robbia were at their Hellenics; and a few years after he did them came the
end of the Baglioai and all such gear. The end of real Umbrian art was not
long. Perugino awoke to have his doubts of the soul's immortality. No
great wonder there, perhaps, given he acknowledged a merciful heaven....
I chanced to meet an old woman the other day in a country omnibus. We
journeyed together from Prato to Florence and became very friendly. Your
dry old woman, who hath had losses, who has become, in fact, world-worn
and very wise, or like one of Shakespeare's veterans--the Grave-digger, or
the Countryman in _Antony and Cleopatra_--has probed the ball and
found it hollow; such a battered and fortified soul in petticoats is
peculiar to Italy, and countries where the women work and the men,
pocketing their hands, keep sleek looks. We had just passed a pleasant
little procession. It was Sunday, the hour Benediction. A staid nun was
convoying a party of school-girls to church; whereupon I remarked to my
neighbour on their pretty bearing, a sort of artless piety and of
attention for unknown but not impossible blessings which they had about
them. But my old woman took small comfort from it. She knew those cattle,
she said: Capuchins, Jacobins, Black, White and Grey,--knew them all.
Well! Everybody had his way of making a living: hers was knitting
stockings. A hard life, _via_, but an honest. Here it became me to
urge that the religious life might have its compensations, without which
it would perhaps be harder than knitting stockings; that one needed
relaxation and would do well to be sure that it was at least innocent.
Relaxation of a kind, said she, a man must have. Snuff now! She was
inveterate at the sport. The view was very dry; but I think its reasoned
limitations also very Tuscan, and by no means exclusive of a tolerable
amount of piety and honest dealing. Foligno, by mere contrast reminds me
of it--busy Foligno huddled between the mighty knees of a chalk down, city
of fallen churches and handsome girls, just now parading the streets with
their fans a-flutter and a pretty turn to each veiled head of them.
As I write the light dies down, the wind drops, huge inky clouds hang over
the west; the sun, as he falls behind them, sets them kindling at the
edge. The worn old bleached domes, the bell-towers and turrets looming in
the blue dusk, seem to sigh that the century moves so slowly forward. How
many more must they endure of these?
It is the hour of Ave Maria. But only two cracked bells ring it in.
ENVOY: TO ALL YOU LADIES
Lovely and honourable ladies, it is, as I hold, no mean favour you have
accorded me, to sit still and smiling while I have sung to your very faces
a stave verging here and there on the familiar. You have sat thus enduring
me, because, being wrought for the most part out of stone or painter's
stuff, your necessities have indeed forbidden retirement. Yet my
obligations should not on that account be lighter. He would be a thin
spirit who should gain a lady's friendly regard, and then vilipend because
she knew no better, or could not choose. I hope indeed that I have done
you no wrong, _gentildonne_, I protest that I have meant none; but
have loved you all as a man may, who has, at most, but a bowing
acquaintance with your ladyships. As I recall your starry names, no blush
hinting unmannerliness suspect and unconfessed hits me on the cheek:--
Simonetta, Ilaria, Nenciozza, Bettina; you too, candid Mariota of Prato;
you, flinching little Imola; and you, snuff-taking, wool-carding ancient
lady of the omnibus--scorner of monks, I have kissed your hands, I have at
least given our whole commerce frankly to the world; and I know not how
any shall say we have been closer acquainted than we should. You, tall
Ligurian Simonetta, loved of Sandro, mourned by Giuliano and, for a
seasons by his twisted brother and lord, have done well to utter but one
side of your wild humour? The side a man would take, struck, as your
Sandro was, by a nympholepsy, or, as Lorenzo was, by the rhymer's appetite
for wherewithal to sonnetteer? If I understand you, it was never pique or
a young girl's petulance drove you to Phryne's one justifiable act of
self-assertion. It was honesty. Madonna, or I have read your grey eyes in
vain; it was enthusiasm--that flame of our fire so sacred that though it
play the incendiary there shall be no crime--or where would be now the
"Vas d'elezione"?--nor though it reveal a bystander's grin, any shame at
all. I shall live to tell that story of thine, Lady Simonetta, to thy
honour and my own respect; for, as a poet says,
"There is no holier flame
Than flatters torchwise in a stripling heart,
... a fire from Heaven
To ash the clay of us, and wing the God."
I have seen all memorials of you left behind to be pondered by him who
played Dante to your Beatrice, Sandro the painting poet,--the proud
clearness of you as at the marriage feast of Nastagio degli Onesti; the
melting of the sorrow that wells from you in a tide, where you hold the
book of your overmastering honour and read _Magnificat Anima Mea_
with a sob in your throat; your acquaintance, too, with that grief which
was your own hardening; your sojourn, wan and woebegone as would become
the wife of Moses (maker of jealous gods); all these guises of you, as
well as the presentments of your innocent youth, I have seen and adored.
But I have ever loved you most where you stand a wistful Venus Anadyomene--
"Una donzella non con uman volto," as Politian confessed; for I know your
heart, Madonna, and see on the sharp edge of your threatened life, Ardour
look back to maiden Reclusion, and on (with a pang of foreboding) to
mockery and evil judgment. Never fear but I brave your story out to the
world ere many days. And if any, with profane leer and tongue in the
cheek, take your sorrow for reproach or your pitifulness for a shame, let
them receive the lash of the whip from one who will trouble to wield it:
_non ragioniam di lor_. For your honourable women I give you Ilaria,
the slim Lucchesan, and my little Bettincina, a child yet with none of the
vaguer surmises of adolescence when it flushes and dawns, but likely
enough, if all prosper, to be no shame to your company. As yet she is
aptest to Donatello's fancy: she will grow to be of a statelier bevy. I
see her in Ghirlandajo's garden, pacing, still-eyed, calm and cold, with
Ginevra de' Benci and Giovanna of the Albizzi, those quiet streets on a
visit to the mother of John Baptist.
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