St. Gregory! The Blessed Fina lies on her wooden plank in a little
white room which is empty of ornament or furniture--except for
a long, low settle bearing a plate, and a dish of pomegranates,
and a flask of wine covered with a napkin of fine linen. The door
and window both stand open to the sun and wind, and through the
casement we see the Tuscan landscape, soft with the green of early
spring, with a towered city crowning a hill, and little white
clouds on the clear blue sky. Two women in wimples sit beside her,
the old nurse Beldia supporting the child's head on her hand, for
the chronicler tells us that, notwithstanding, 'the strength of her
body lessened and waned even to swooning, yet, withal, she suffered
exceedingly from within her head.' The other woman, obviously a
neighbour who has looked in to see the sick child, sits on a chair
beside them. Her hand is raised and her head turned towards the
open door, as if she has been startled in the midst of speaking,
or is listening to some unwonted sound. But Saint Gregory in cope
and mitre, in a glory of cherubs, has floated in at the door and is
speaking to the saint, who listens with rapt attention and hands
folded in the attitude of prayer.
There is no reference to the horrible corruption of the Holy Fina's
fair body which her hagiographers insist upon. 'She was palsied all
over, and in no wise could she rise from her couch, nor yet move
hand or foot. And as God willed that she should be thus afflicted
she would not that her body rest upon any soft and yielding thing,
rather laid she herself down to sleep upon a plank of wood; and
because one side of her body was afflicted with the sickness and
wearied her greatly, she slept upon the other; and during the space
of five years she did so lie upon that side, neither would she
allow any one to move her or yet change her raiment. For so many
a long day lay this holy virgin upon her one side only, that the
flesh became corrupted and the plank begat vermin which devoured
her flesh. Moreover, because of the corruption of these things, the
rats gathered together and devoured her flesh.'
Ghirlandaio could read no poetry into this perverted moral. He
forgot the rats and vermin and the sore corruption, thinking of her
only as the fair maiden, so goodly to human eyes, whose claim to
saintship rested on her holiness and chastity and patience. Listen
once more to the words of Fra Giovanni her chronicler. 'Whilst
yet a little maiden she withdrew herself from all converse that
could imperil her soul, forswearing those pleasures in which her
like often indulged; such as to gambol and frolic, and such-like
frivolities and pleasantries, and the setting fast of their hearts
and minds on fine raiment and worldly joys.... She avoided all
frivolous comings and goings as being harmful to her peace of mind,
and if peradventure she walked abroad, she first made treaty with
her eyes that they should look always upon her feet; lest by their
vain outward glance they should tempt her guileless spirit. And
whilst it pleased God that she should possess a fair countenance,
be of tall stature, and all things in her were goodly proportioned;
yet in no fashion would she adorn her face, willing only to please
God and not to gratify the sight of worldly men.... And she worked
unremittingly with her hands in the calling of women folk; but all
these acts she would perform, not for the great need she were in,
but to eschew idleness, which the Holy Scripture saith is a snare
for the feet of the Lord's servants. Likewise, when not in prayer,
she laboured steadfastly, following thus in the footsteps of our
Mother the Virgin Mary: as of her it is spoken in the Epistles
of St. Jerome, that she earned each day the wherewithal for the
sustenance of her body.'
Nor does the artist give us any hint of the miraculous fragrance
which pervaded her chamber and her person, and of the flowers
which blossomed from the board on which she lay. Unless he meant to
represent them by the sweet spring sunshine and fresh air, scented
by the breath of flowers grown without, which fills her white room.
On the other wall we see her lying in state on a bier of gold
brocade, clad in fine silk, her poor fair head at rest on a rich
cushion. Round her stand the bishop and the choristers with candles
and banners, and behind them are the stolid citizens who, in the
usual manner of Quattrocento burghers in frescoes, pay no attention
to the little ceremony. A small, tearful child is kissing the
dead saint's feet. It is the moment of the healing of Beldia, who
stands grief-stricken beside the bier; and Santa Fina, 'lifting her
arm as though she were yet quick,' has taken the afflicted hand
in her slender fingers. The artist has forgotten nothing--in the
background he has painted the towers of San Gimignano whose bells,
'each one and severally, not being pulled by hands of mortal men,
were set to ring with sweetest unison and melody.' Even the little
angel who set them ringing is there, flying in haste from tower to
tower with the sunlight gilding his wings.
It is small wonder that the people of San Gimignano are proud
of their Cappella della Beata Fina, for besides the frescoes of
Ghirlandaio it contains the exquisite shrine which Benedetto da
Maiano wrought of white marble, finely gilt, to hold the bones of
the saint.
San Gimignano was the home of saints, and it is to them that she
turns now in her poverty and simplicity, glad of their ancient
sanctity which has survived the years, and has not vanished in
memories like her dreams of glory. From the beginning she was
beloved of saints. Is not her very name an echo of the legend of
St. Geminianus, the Martyr of Modena, who appeared before her walls
during a siege and routed the barbarians of Attila? Until that day
the city had borne the enchanted name Castello della Selva--the
Castle of the Wood--because of the great oak forests which clothed
the hillside and the plain, where now the olive sheds its silvered
shade. But when Attila, who, like Totila and the other invading
barbarians, was often defrauded of legitimate victory by patriotic
saints, retreated from the citadel, the people changed its name to
San Gimignano in memory of the martyred Bishop's timely appearance.
Putting aside this legend she had four saints: the Holy Fina; the
Blessed Bartolo, whose life was spent in humble service, and who
for twenty years was a victim of leprosy which he caught from the
plague-stricken people to whom he devoted his life; the hermit
San Vivaldo; and Saint Peter, who was one of the first in the
brotherhood of St. Francis to suffer martyrdom.
[Illustration: SAN GIMIGNANO: THE WASHING PLACE.]
After Saint Fina it is the Blessed Bartolo, 'the Angel of Peace,'
whom the San Gimignanesi venerate most. Like Santa Fina he has a
noble shrine by Benedetto de Maiano; and he lies, as we are told he
wished to do, in Sant'Agostino, the great bare friar's church on
the hillside, which is a treasure-house of mediaeval art.
If all the towers of San Gimignano were chimneys belching smoke,
and all her mediaeval palaces were ugly modern houses, the world
would still visit her to see Gozzoli's inimitable frescoes of
the life of Saint Augustine. They are so fresh and unspoiled, so
stately and human, so full of quaint imaginings. For he was a great
humorist this pageant-painter of the Renaissance, and his naïve
pictures are the ideal illustrations to the naïve Confessions of
that very human saint, Augustine!
Gozzoli came to Sant'Agostino from his work in the Riccardi
Chapel at Florence. There he had slipped beyond the monastic
conventionalities of his master, Fra Angelico, and adventured
into the gay Florentine life of the fifteenth century with its
sports and pageantry. Here he has wandered further from his gentle
instructor, and does not hesitate to reproduce with genial wit the
humour as well as the pageantry of the age in which he lived. For
it goes without saying that his Augustine is transplanted to the
Quattrocento, and his life pictured in Gothic cities where Gozzoli
himself and his gay compatriots all play their parts. From the
beginning, if we except perhaps the first of the series in which
the saint is being spanked by his schoolmaster for some small
misbehaviour, Augustine is a charming and dignified figure, whether
we see him a thoughtful youth setting out in state for Milan
through a typical Gozzoli landscape, or he wanders disconsolately
in the monastic habit upon the shore, and is rebuked by the
little child making mud-pies there, in the immemorial fashion of
childhood, for trying to probe into the mysteries of the Trinity.
This great church has many other treasures, frescoes and tombs,
such as Gozzoli's San Sebastiano or the effigy of the Augustan
brother who fell asleep in the worn pavement so many years ago;
or, best of all, the tomb of Fra Domenico Strambi, the grand old
monk who commissioned Benozzo Gozzoli to paint his choir, and who
lies below a fresco which Mr. Gardner aptly calls 'a masterpiece of
municipal sentiment.'
San Gimignano is extremely rich in frescoes, considering that she
had no native school of painting, but drew her artists first from
Siena and later from Florence, when she had yielded her freedom
to that city. The Pieve or Collegiata is like an ancient missal
full of illustrations. Besides the frescoes of Ghirlandaio in the
Cappella della Beata Fina, and his Annunciation in the Oratory of
St. John,[11] the walls of the nave are covered with the quaint
and primitive frescoes of Taddeo di Bartolo and Bartolo di Fredi;
and many other painters besides Piero Pollaiolo and Benozzo Gozzoli
have added their quota to this ancient scroll of art. The choir
of Sant'Agostino, as I have remarked above, is a masterpiece by
Gozzoli; and the museum in the Palazzo Comunale boasts a fine
collection which includes two beautiful pictures by Pinturicchio
and Filippino Lippi.
Of all the Palazzi Comunali of vanished republics San Gimignano's
is the most forlorn. It seems to have fallen asleep like the
rest of the city, and forgotten to do anything but flower and be
beautiful. Its faded fourteenth-century courtyard has an outside
stairway leading to a raftered loggia; grass grows in its brick
pavement; and tall grey towers, fringed with flowers, rise above
its walls. Without the Tuscan sunshine to beautify its stones it
would be a little desolate, all faded fresco and broken plaster.
And this, mark you, although it is the _nuovo_ palace of the
Podestà. The _antico_ Palazzo, facing the Pieve, so picturesque
with its loggia and tower and municipal clock under its wide Tuscan
eaves, is older and more ruinous still. It is not battlemented
like its neighbour, and it has no processional staircase; nor is
its tower, which 'marked the limit to which noble citizens might
build their private towers,' as lofty as the Torre del Comune, for
this bestrides a street and is the giant of the city, a monument
to the vanity of the San Gimignanesi, being built with the money
contributed by magistrates who wished their arms to be fixed to it
when they went out of office.
We went up the steps which have seen so many municipal pageants
to try and learn the history of San Gimignano from the threadbare
splendour of her garments. How like they all are to each other,
these little cities of United Italy, with their smug municipal
dignity sitting in the midst of tatterdemalion glory! Here, in this
very chamber where to-day Lippo Memmi's great fresco of the Virgin
and Child, enthroned among the angels, looks down on office chairs
and ink-stained tables covered with American cloth, came Dante
in the year of the first jubilee, 1300, in all the splendour of
Florentine embassy! Here he spake to the lords of San Gimignano,
and invited them to send representatives to the election of a
captain to lead the Ghibelline League of Tuscany. Here, where
all the petty business of a little town is ratified, the men of
San Gimignano were wont to deal with their affairs of state, to
settle wars, and speak of popes and emperors. We read the story
of it round the walls--Memmi's fresco with its proud baldachin of
armorial bearings surmounted by the Ghibelline eagle has effaced
the greater part of it, but under the timber roof are the arms
of the noble families of San Gimignano; and below them jousting
knights tilt at invisible combatants, long ago lost in plaster;
and huntsmen chase their vanished prey; and the Guelphs and
Ghibellines fight out their everlasting warfare in dim distemper.
The sunset was gilding the towers of San Gimignano when we came
out again, and all the bells were ringing for evensong. Already
the streets were bound in shadows, so we wandered out among the
olive-trees to the little ruined church of the Templars. From here
we passed out of the city by an ancient gate, and down the hill
to the Gothic washing-pool, where the women of San Gimignano wash
and wring their linen in the cool of the evening. The delicate
afterglow of Tuscany filled the sky, and the tall poplars whispered
and shivered in the sunset wind. Up and down that steep and
stony hill under the old Gothic gate went the women, with their
snowy linen piled in baskets on their heads. The sound of their
voices and laughter floated back to us, mingled with the music of
bells from the city above. In the hollow below the road a little
waterfall babbled to the stones as it leapt over them to the plain.
Between the whispering poplars a white road wound up the hill like
the roads up which Benozzo Gozzoli's stately young men rode to
their Gothic cities. And below, stretching far away to the east
where it was lost in rose and purple mists, billowed the vast Val
d'Elsa.
Seen through the magic of a summer evening--when the poplars were
making music in the breeze, and the shadows were sweeping across
the Tuscan plain; when the women, having folded their linen under
the silver olives and piled it on their heads, climbed the steep
hill into their tower-girt home--the world and all its doings were
as beautiful as a sacrament. Here, at least, in these dim forgotten
_paesi_, 'glory and loveliness have not passed away.'
But, after all, it is at night that San Gimignano is most
beautiful. Then she is a city bewitched, unspeakably lovely and
romantic. Her silent streets are thronged with memories; her
shuttered palaces are given back to ghosts; her proud old towers
loom up against the star-lit sky like mediaeval giants.
A silver moon was riding low in the heavens when we left the
doorway of the Leon Bianco and passed through the Arco de' Becci,
the great gateway of the ancient circuit of walls, which leads at
once into the heart of San Gimignano. It was velvet-black under
its ghostly tower, and the Gothic palaces of the Castello Vecchio
within seemed to be holding their breath as they watched the
shadows creeping over the pale stones of the piazza. How silent and
deserted it was! The lovely grave-eyed children, who had been our
guides all day, had vanished with their gentle mothers, whom we had
seen spinning in their doorways through the sunny hours. Where had
they gone? There were no lights in any of these silent palaces, and
the narrow streets were empty except for the shadows of the towers,
grim as bloodstains.
[Illustration: SAN GIMIGNANO.]
A white owl, soundless of wing, sank on to the parapet of an
ancient palace. Imagination plays strange tricks in this city of
ghosts, in whose streets an August moon, more than five hundred
years ago, bore witness to the greatest tragedy in the vendetta of
the Ardinghelli and the Salvucci. Was it a bird, or did I see a
scrap of paper flutter from the window of that dark tower? No. It
was only a piece of broken glass glittering among the stones--fit
emblem of the broken hopes of those two hapless boys whom Benedetto
Strozzi so foully did to death by the persuasion of the treacherous
Salvucci. Their letter went astray, thrown from the prison tower,
in the hope that a friendly breeze would carry it to the feet of
an adherent of the Ardinghelli. And very soon afterwards they met
their death, by the steps of the Palazzo Comunale, early on a
summer morning, hurriedly, because Strozzi and the Salvucci knew
that the messenger who was riding from Florence with their pardon
would be delayed only a few hours by the rising of the Elsa. He
came too late, as he was meant to do. The Salvucci had already
reaped their bloody harvest--the heads of Primerano and Rossellino,
the flowers of the noble house of Ardinghelli, had fallen to the
sickle.
It was late, and the sleepy porter of the White Lion yawned
reproachfully as we passed him on our way to the Porta San
Giovanni, whither we were bound to view the city and rid ourselves
of shadows. If tragedy lurked within the narrow streets and
byways of San Gimignano, we found nothing but beauty without. The
moonlight, flooding her broken walls and picturesque old gates,
transformed her into a city of pale jade, crowning a gloom-dark
hill. Her diadem of ghostly towers seemed enamoured of the sky, and
soared towards the heaven like young Endymion, stretching out his
arms to his enchantress. Down the hillside poured her palaces,
white as marble, rising in terraces from their dark gardens, and
far away we could hear the plaintive cry of the city watchmen as
they went their solitary rounds. At our feet a sheer cliff, filled
to the level of the road with trees, fell into the night. From
its mysterious depths ascended the fragrance of wet earth and the
bell-like chant of frogs. And beyond, and all round, lay the broad
fields of Tuscany, filled with a sea of moonlit mists, from which
the fantastic outlines of little hills rolled up, like shadowy
waves, with towered farms and slim black cypresses upon their
crests.
MONTE OLIVETO MAGGIORE
Austere and terrible, barren as the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
is the desert of Accona, where Bernardo Tolomei founded the
monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore.
At Asciano we left behind us the fruitful gardens of Tuscany,
rippling with vines, and rich with maize and olives, and embarked
upon a sea of pallid hills. It was as though a blight had fallen.
The naked earth was parched and rent with gaping fissures; the
tamarisks and spurges and the drab grass which fringed the roadside
were old and dry. The smiling valleys fled to the north and the
south as from a land accursed, 'and lo, the fruitful place was a
wilderness.'
Our way lay along a bleached white road which seared the grey
hillside and writhed among volcanic mounds and precipices. Here
and there the drab monotony was broken by the clustered spires of
cypresses round scattered farms; but their black foliage, like
funeral plumes, only added a deeper note of melancholy. It was
hot too. The August sun beat down upon us from a brazen sky, and
the glare of the road made our eyes ache for cool green shadows.
But when we reached the plateau a vision of surpassing beauty
burst upon us. It was as though, after sojourning for many hours
in the wilderness, we looked from Pisgah on the promised land. To
our right, across miles of pale clay gorges and volcanic mounds,
Siena lay rosy and smiling in her vineyards; on the other hand a
wide valley full of precipices rolled away to the purple hills of
Umbria, which hung like a mirage between earth and sky, with Monte
Amiata lifting her proud head above them all. And presently, after
we had passed through Chiusure, a shrunken little town in the heart
of a green oasis, we caught our first glimpse of Monte Oliveto.
Below the road the hill fell away in a deep ravine, whose tortured
sides were torn and scarred by torrents, as though the pallid
earth had bared an ancient wound. And in the midst of the grey
desolation, with towering cliffs above, and wild precipices
leaping down into the valley below, stood the Abbey of the Blessed
Bernardo. Grim and forbidding as a fortress were its bare red
walls, devoid of ornament, only redeemed from positive ugliness by
their austerity and rugged strength. And yet, as we approached the
monastery through the fragrant shade of cypress avenues, the scent
of pine needles and the song of cicalas rose together like the
voice of the wilderness and the solitary place which has been made
glad.
[Illustration: CHIUSURE FROM MONTE OLIVETO MAGGIORE.]
For, indeed, S. Bernardo and his companions laboured to make this
wilderness blossom like a rose. Early in the fourteenth century
he put aside the vanities of life. At the height of his glory,
when all Siena was ringing with his brilliance and prodigality,
he left the city, fleeing, like Shelley, from the awful spectre
of his veiled self, asking 'Are you satisfied?' And coming into
the desert of Accona he dwelt here in poverty and simplicity,
building a little chapel to Santa Scolastica, the sister of St.
Benedict, and leading a life of prayer and meditation. We read
that a great number of followers, many of them noble, came to him,
and lived upon the hillside, striving by the sweat of their brows
to transform the Tuscan desert into a garden. But in that day of
Guelph and Ghibelline disorders the rulers of Siena feared that
he was sowing the seeds of a rebellion; and, if we believe his
legend, tried to poison him. It is certain that he was accused of
heresy, and forced to make the long journey to the Papal Court of
Avignon with Ambrogio Piccolomini, one of his earliest companions,
and a scion of the noble house of Piccolomini. Nothing more is
said of the charge of heresy. The Pope, John XXII., received
them with favour and gave them letters to Guido Tarlati, the
splendid old warrior-bishop of Arezzo, in which he asked that most
unconventional of prelates to furnish them with a monastic rule.
Here again the legend adds a picturesque touch, for it tells us
that Tarlati had a miraculous vision, in which the Blessed Virgin
appeared to him and commanded him to give the rule of Benedict to
'the pious solitaries' of Accona, to clothe them in spotless white,
the symbol of her purity, and to give their hermitage the name of
St. Mary of Mount Olivet.
So with their own hands Bernardo and his companions, no longer
clad in the garb of penitents, began to build their church and
convent on the spot where he had his vision of a celestial ladder
stretching up to heaven, with angels leading his companions to the
throne of Christ. But their work was stopped by news of the great
plague which was spreading desolation throughout the country.
Going himself to Siena, Bernardo sent out the brothers two by two
to tend the people, bidding them depart with good courage, saying
that they should all meet together in Siena for the Festival of the
Assumption. He never saw his cloistered home again; he died in the
stricken city with nearly all his companions, and other hands took
up the building of his monastery; and, later, beautified it with
frescoes by Luca Signorelli and Il Sodoma, and rare intarsia by Fra
Giovanni of Verona.
But I was not thinking of the Blessed Bernardo or of his
white-robed Olivetans as we drew near the monastery. Some touch
of faery lingered in that cypress grove. We had come out to see
a convent. And lo! a battlemented gateway rose before us, with
drawbridge and portcullis, as warlike as a castle of the Sforzas.
It was as though we had ridden like princes of eld across the grey
inferno of Childe Roland, where the grass 'grew scant as hair in
leprosy,' only to wind our horns before the gate of an enchanted
city.
And the fancy grew. We passed without challenge under the
portcullis, with a smiling Godspeed from its Della Robbia Madonna,
into one of those enchanted woods of Italy, where stone-pines make
a frieze against the sky, and cicalas sing their little hearts
away in rapture. Two paths led through the flickering shadows. We
hesitated which to take, and glanced behind us, half expecting some
warden to issue from that ancient gate to ask our pleasure and
direct our steps. No one was there. But, just as St. Mary welcomed
us without, so from his niche above the arch St. Benedict, clad
in the spotless robes of Oliveto, gave us his blessing. We went
forward then, past a huge brick jebbia full of green water and down
to the stables where we dismounted by a well, as Aeneas Sylvius and
his brilliant suite of knights and choristers dismounted when they
rode here from Siena and marvelled to find so fair a garden in that
barren land.