where husbandmen regaled themselves with such aesthetic fare as
bread and celery and walnuts, washed down by plentiful libations
of amber wine; and savoury kitchens where pigs and calves were
roasted whole on spits; and stalls of peasant jewellery--strings of
blood-red coral and over-chased earrings; and booths of lace and
embroidery. Here boots and shoes were spread beside the road; there
sun-burnt peasant women were buying stays, heaped on the ground
close to a stall of fluttering kerchiefs. The majolica and copper
dishes were also ranged along the roadside, as were the stalls of
wooden implements, bobbins, and spoons and trays. But the cotton
umbrellas, scarlet and blue and emerald green, were hung like
fantastic lanterns from the branches of the avenue.
What a scene it was! The lowing of the kine mingled with the
distant music of the bells of Narni. Every moment fresh arrivals
added their quota to the merry bustle of the market, some bearing
on their heads great baskets heaped with fruit, some laden with
captive turkeys and chickens, some leading in their wide-horned
oxen, gay with scarlet fillets and bells slung round their silken
dewlaps. The brilliant kerchiefs of the women made them look like
flower-gardens as they stood in smiling groups before some alluring
bargain held up to their admiring eyes by salesmen. And mingling
with the crowd were fortune-tellers, and ballad-singers, and the
terrible crawling beggars of Italy.
Later in the day we went down the hillside and rested in the
shadow of the great ruined bridge of Augustus, that splendid relic
of Imperial Rome, which once carried the Flaminian Way across the
waters of the Nera. Only one arch is left to stride across the
ravine, and in the middle of the sulphureous stream the second pier
has fallen sideways in huge blocks, as though it had been toppled
over by an earthquake. But even in its ruin it is a monument of the
greatness of Rome, and it frames a wonderful vista of the wooded
glen of the Nar and the ancient convent of San Casciano.
[Illustration: NARNI: MARKET PEOPLE.]
The contadini were pouring out of the city and across the river
by the mediaeval bridge that takes on its shoulders the modern
traffic, which, had the years been kinder, would still have been
carried by the Ponte d'Augusto. They were all laden with purchases
from the fair, and they made merry as they passed along, driving
before them, not without a struggle, their unwilling cattle. But
we did not stay there long to watch them, notwithstanding the
picturesque beauty of the scene. For the pitiable cries of the
mothers, struggling to go back to their calves, resounded through
the valley; and the blind unreasoning misery of their offspring,
driven with blows along an unaccustomed road, was heartrending to
witness. Though common sense was plausible to point out how soon
the agony would pass, it was too human to be anything but tragic.
So we climbed the hill back to Narni and wandered through her empty
streets, astonished to find them rich in ancient grandeur. For we
had grown to think of her as a pastoral queen of Arcady, forgetting
her antiquity--that as Nequinum she was great among the cities of
the Umbri; that under the Romans she was a fortress of importance
commanding the Flaminian Way; and that in the fifteenth century she
bore a famous name as the ancestral home of Gattamelata, the great
Condottiere of the Venetians. Narni has good reason to be proud of
her sons. One was an Emperor, one a Pope, and one a hero.
And she herself has an heroic history, for so great was her
defence against the Romans that when at last she fell before the
Consul Fulvius in B.C. 299, he was given a Triumph 'de Samnitibus
Nequinatibusque,' and in the fatal year, 1527, she offered an
historic and gallant resistance to the _lanzknechts_ of the Bourbon
when they retreated from the horrors of the Sack of Rome. For this
the little citadel suffered the terrors of a sack in which one
thousand men and women were brutally put to death by the Spanish
and German mercenaries. So that there is again cause for wonder
that so many of her ancient churches and palaces have been left
unharmed, like the gracious little chapel of Santa Maria Impensole,
the Gothic Palazzo Comunale and Palazzo dei Priori, and the
beautiful cathedral, which is so rich in tombs, and counts among
its treasures a Romanesque shrine of high antiquity and interest.
But though the Bridge of Augustus was the glory of Nequinum in
the days of Martial, it is Erasmus, called Gattamelata, who is
the chief pride of Narni. A whole quarter of the city bears his
name. In the Vicolo Gattamelata a humble little house is inscribed
'Narnia me genuit, Gattamelata fui,' and in the Palazzo Comunale,
beside Narni's great Ghirlandajo, is a copy of that Knight of
the Uffizi, which up to the last few years has been ascribed to
Giorgione, and which the citizens of this little hill-town treasure
as a contemporary portrait of their hero.
[Illustration: NARNI: THE PONTE D'AUGUSTO.]
I have another memory of Narni. One morning, very early before
sunrise, we set out from that little city and made pilgrimage along
the Old Flaminian Way to the altar of an unknown, quite forgotten
god. It was our fancy to pay homage by the roadside where the
careless feet of generations had passed by. But we had not thought
to find such unexpected beauty on this ancient highway whose stones
were old before the Caesars had been dreamed of by the oracles of
Rome.
The Via Flaminia girdled the hillside, now disappearing round
the bluff of overhanging cliffs, now plunging into bosky depths
of wooded slopes, now reappearing across the ravine like a white
thread among the firs and ilexes which clothe the valley of the
Nera; now climbing down to the open plain. The air was fragrant
with the freshness of a sweet September morning, and musical
with the liquid song of larks. Below the road the hill sloped
sharply from our feet to where the Nera encircled the folds of
its mountains; and above us to the right towered a sheer cliff,
curtained with wild flowers.
At last we reached the altar of the Unknown God, or so we called
him, because, unlike Aius Locutius of the Palatine, we knew nothing
of him save that in the distant ages, even before the coming of
the Romans, men sacrificed and offered incense here before a god.
It was only a rough-hewn table of stone, raised above the level
of the road, overlooking the deep valley of the Nera where it
pierces the wooded hills and widens out into that misty plain of
the Tiber,--already a mighty river on its way to Rome. As we stood
before it, gazing down the valley, Phoebus gilded the hill-tops.
Our feet were on the Old Flaminian Road. And because the day was
young and the air like wine, and the ancient way to Rome was as
beautiful as a poem, we gathered together ferns and dried leaves,
and lit a fire upon this cold altar of the God of an older world.
It began in play. The Poet put a sprig of scented thyme upon
the ancient stone. But as the fire leapt up, and the blue smoke
ascended to the clear air like fumes of incense, our laughter died
away. Just for that moment all we were slipped from us. We became
as children playing in a temple who turn from their games at the
solemn voice of the prayer-bell, and leave their toys unheeded for
a while. Just for that moment there was only beauty, and the need
of worship to the God of beautiful things. No longer can we say,
'Glory and loveliness have passed away;
For if we wander out in early morn,
No wreathed incense do we see upborne
Into the east to meet the smiling day.'
For standing on the steep hillside upon the Old Flaminian Way,
we made a heap of scented herbs, thistles and dry mullein stalks,
all that the withered bosom of the earth could yield, and made our
offering to the valley and the hills and the great plain which
opened out before us.
So the old stone was warmed, the old god propitiated. And as the
smoke curled up to the blue heavens we saw the feet of Apollo
golden on the hill-tops. When we turned back we found Narni
sheathed in sunlit mists, as Turner painted her, like a mediaeval
saint rapt in the mystic glory of communion with nature.
The Poet quoted softly:--
'For, it may be, if still we sing
And tend the shrine,
Some Deity on wandering wing
May there incline;
And, finding all in order meet,
Stay while we worship at her feet.
ORVIETO: THE CITY OF WOE
'To rear me was the task of Power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.'
DANTE.
The broad white steps of Orvieto Cathedral were strewn with
thousands of dead flies, killed by the merciless glitter of its
new mosaics in the eye of the sunshine. Poor little dust of
life scattered at the door of Madonna Mary's temple, with your
shattered wings and your sightless crawling agony, meeting your
death unwittingly in the heart of this city of woe! You are the
key to its desolation, you with your myriads of dead, the horrid
harvest of an insatiable ghoul. For not even the shrill music of
Luca Signorelli's angels, hovering above the gloomy fortresses
of Orvieto with their hair streaming in the breeze of the dawn,
can raise her up to life. She is a city of the dead--shrivelled
and dark-browed, standing high over the plain on an island of
volcanic rock, 'dark-stained with hue ferruginous,' like Malebolge
within the depths of hell. Death lies around her in the valleys
where the earth is riddled with the tombs of Etruria--one vast
necropolis--and she herself, though she held life so dearly, as we
can see by her grim Romanesque houses each with its back to the
wall as it were, each armed at every point, would be almost dead
to the world if it were not for the Tuscan glitter of her great
Miracle Church.
Even her name has a sinister ring about it--Orvieto--the Old City.
To the writers of antiquity she was Urbs Vetus, but no man knows
her ancient name, and although archaeologists dispute in vain as
to the rival claims of Herbanum and Salpinum, it is recognised
that the origin of Orvieto is plunged in mystery. Unlike the other
cities of Southern Etruria, built on the extremity of a peninsula
of hills, she is isolated on a volcanic rock in the heart of the
melancholy valley of the Paglia, an impregnable position, as many a
Pope has realised with thankfulness as he fled to it for Sanctuary
from the wrath of Emperors or the malice of Cardinals, or, more
often still, the vengeance of the people of Rome. For Orvieto was
consistently Guelf in her sympathies, and no less than thirty-two
Popes have taken refuge within her walls since Adrian IV., Nicholas
Breakspear, the only Englishman who ever sat upon the Papal throne,
held his court there in 1157, because Rome had not yet forgotten
the martyrdom of the heroic Arnold of Brescia.
[Illustration: BELOW THE WALLS OF ORVIETO.]
We came to Orvieto by rail and scaled her precipice on the
funicular, which connects the station down on the plain with the
city on the rock above. If we had come by road, only a toilsome
climb of several miles would have brought us to the grim Porta
Maggiore, where Boniface VIII., in his twofold tiara, keeps watch
from his niche above the gateway.
Does any city frown so fiercely on the traveller as Orvieto? The
arch is gloomy and the road within is dark and steep. The sheer
cliffs sweep to right and left like the pylons of an Egyptian
temple, and above them peer fortified houses, squat and brown. This
surely is the city named of Dis, which Dante had in mind, whose
walls 'appeared as they were framed of iron,' upon whose gates the
citizens looked down with ireful gestures!
Through this gate hastened the Popes, fleeing from wrath to come,
and in their footsteps we toiled up the steep street between the
same houses of yellow volcanic tufa gone black, which frowned upon
the turbulent successors of St. Peter, who let down their nets, not
for the drawing in of souls, but for the dragging in of wealth and
the entangling of the feet of the unwary. Through dark alleys we
could see the gloomy depths of caves, hollowed out of the living
rock behind them: in the low _bassi_ the citizens of this broken
city toiled silently, and outside their doors sat hooded owls on
poles driven into the stony ground. Here indeed were the Middle
Ages, but not the Middle Ages of pomp and pageantry, of Gothic
palaces and slim young knights in silken hose. There are some
streets in Orvieto which look as though war had stalked through
them only yesterday; as though the terror-stricken Ghibellines
still cowered within doors, while the Monaldeschi rang bells in
triumph, as they did on that fateful day in the year of grace 1312,
when the Filippeschi had tried in vain to open the gate of the city
to Henry VII. of Luxemburg.
[Illustration: ORVIETO: THE CLOCK TOWER.]
Well, that is over now. But the curse of the Prophet Isaiah seems
to have fallen upon the papal City of Refuge. 'In that day shall
her strong cities be as a forsaken bough, and an uppermost branch
... and there shall be desolation.' So that it was with a kind
of wonder, as though we too had assisted at a miracle, that we
came suddenly upon the Duomo of Orvieto with its rare marbles and
brazen beasts of the Evangelists, its glittering mosaics, and
gilded pinnacles soaring to the heavens. For this great cathedral,
built to commemorate the triumph of the dogma of the Roman Church
over northern intelligence in the Miracle of Bolsena, is a bird of
strange plumage to find nesting on the melancholy rock of Orvieto.
Siena or Florence, Pisa or Lucca, any of the flowery cities of
Tuscany would have been its proper setting. It is too gay for
Umbria, whose hills are bathed in the serene, ineffable calm of a
mystic holiness, who, remembering her many saints, still keeps the
low estate of a handmaiden of the Lord. It is like a golden iris
plucked from some Tuscan garden, and transplanted upon the bosom
of this sombre precipice of tufa upheaved by Nature in primeval
struggles. For chance and the Papacy have grafted the most exotic
bloom of Italian Gothic architecture upon the rock of Orvieto.
But look closer. Behind the aerial grace of the façade with its
bewildering embroidery of yellowing marbles, rarely carved, its
jewelled canopies of mosaic, its Lombard colonnades and soaring
pinnacles, not even Time, the great artist who puts the crown of
beauty upon all the works of man, can veil the ugly nudity of nave
and transept. If the pride of the Orvietans had only left him a
freer hand upon the façade it would have been immeasurably more
beautiful. But the mosaics which should gleam from their rich
setting with the subdued brilliance of a peacock's feather, have
been restored so garishly by a local artist that they rob the
cathedral of half her wonder. Their glitter sears like a burning
glass: only on a rainy day, or by moonlight, could we look on them
with equanimity.
It was not for these that we stayed so long outside the portal of
Santa Maria, but to study the exquisite carvings which Lorenzo
Maitani or Niccolò Pisano traced on the bases of the four
pilasters. When two such scholars as John Addington Symonds and Mr.
Langton Douglas fall out over the authorship of these sculptures
it is useless to offer any opinion on the subject. But there is a
pretty legend concerning Niccolò Pisano and his work at Orvieto;
and because the reading of it gave me much pleasure as I sat on
the stone bench below the Opera del Duomo, marvelling over the
glories of the Miracle Church, I will give it in a quotation from
Mr. Symonds' delightful essay:--'Nicola Pisano, before Cimabue,
before Duccio, even before Dante, opened the gates of beauty, which
for a thousand years had been shut up and overgrown with weeds. As
Dante invoked the influence of Virgil when he began to write his
mediaeval poem, and made a heathen bard his hierophant in Christian
mysteries, just so did Nicola Pisano draw inspiration from a
Græco-Roman sarcophagus. He studied the bas-relief of Phaedra and
Hippolytus, which may still be seen upon the tomb of Countess
Beatrice in the Campo Santo, and so learned by heart the beauty
of its lines and the dignity expressed in its figures that in all
his subsequent works we trace the elevated tranquillity of Greek
sculpture.'[28]
[Illustration: A STREET IN ORVIETO.]
And, indeed, there is a curious and unexpected beauty in these
naïve reliefs telling the ancient story of the Creation and the
Fall, the Old Testament up to the Birth of Christ, the life of
Jesus, and the Last Judgement. For though they are a typically
mediaeval expression of faith, yet they are astonishingly free from
the bizarre design and crude workmanship of mediaeval imaginings.
Lofty in conception, they tell the solemn history of Christianity
in a series of scenes divided the one from the other by the Vine,
of which it has been written, 'I am the Vine and ye are the
branches.' But here for the first time in Mediaeval Art we see
treatment worthy of the nobility of the Theme. For whether the
sculptor did really become enamoured of the antique by the study of
an ancient tomb, or whether some fire of genius within himself bade
him struggle forth from the swaddling bands of Byzantium and the
grotesqueries of the North, he has inscribed a new chapter in the
history of Art upon the walls of the Cathedral of Orvieto.
Forsaking the crowded imagery of Mediaevalism, he has made manifest
the dignity and beauty of the human form. And something else as
well. For looking on the reliefs of the Creation, we can almost
hear the rustling wings of the two guardian angels as they hover
in the silent dawn above the garden where God creates man in His
own Image. And we see the germs of that poetic imagery which was
later to bear fruit in the genius of Ghiberti and Donatello, even,
it may be, in the frescoes of the Sixtine Chapel where Michelangelo
completed the great epic of the Human Form, whose prologue we may
read upon the stones of Orvieto Cathedral.
Directly we pass through the portal and enter the bare, ugly
church, it is apparent that although its Tuscan architects and
artists began their work lightheartedly enough, and although the
Popes made offer of indulgences to all who assisted them, the
sullen influence of the place weighed on their spirits. See how
grey and gloomy is the nave behind its gay mask; see how Niccolò
in spite of his love for the human form dwelt on the grim drama of
the Fall of Man; see how the tragedy of life is blazoned forth by
Signorelli. Only the Umbrians, the simple-hearted artists of the
countryside, called in to paint the chancel with the story of the
Virgin and the Life of Christ, and the Blessed Angelico, working on
the vault of the Cappella Nuova, seem to have been untroubled.
But neither the frescoes of the Umbrians, among which we thought
we could trace the hand of Pinturicchio, and certainly he was
under commission to paint for the canons of Orvieto, when he was
working in the Borgia Rooms in Rome, nor the exquisite reliquary
which Ugolino Vieri of Siena wrought for the miraculous Corporal
of Bolsena, detained us long. For in the southern transept we
had glimpsed the Chapel of the Madonna di San Brizio, where Fra
Angelico and Benozzo Gozzoli frescoed the vault, below which, many
years later Luca Signorelli came to paint his great pictures of the
Last Judgement.
It is a strange coincidence, as though some deep emotion had moved
these Tuscans to expression, that in Orvieto we see not only the
beginnings of realism in sculpture but the masterpiece of the first
great painter of the Quattrocento, who gave life to the human form
in fresco. Every one knows that Vasari claims for his kinsman,
Luca of Cortona, the honour of having inspired the Last Judgement
of Michelangelo. And no one can dispute that the Florentine, his
greater genius less exercised by the study of anatomy, clothed his
figures with more grace and dignity; and that the Dantesque terrors
of his hell, with the boatman of the Styx silhouetted against the
lurid glare of the underworld, are told with more reserve than
Signorelli's. But whether the confusion and morbidity of the whole,
already foreshadowing Baroque, surpasses the spacious compositions
of Signorelli is largely a matter for the enthusiast for technique
to declare.
[Illustration: ORVIETO: SANT'AGOSTINO.]
It is interesting to note the discrepancy between the conditions
under which these two men worked, each animated by the fire
of genius, though one so far beyond the other, each rapt in
contemplation of the awe-inspiring mystery of life and death.
Michelangelo, with the denunciations of Savonarola fresh in his
memory, worked alone and silently below the vault of the Sixtine,
where he had lavished his splendid energy twenty-two years before;
almost friendless, filled with gloomy imaginings. And looking
on the Sixtine Judgement we feel something of the inarticulate
anguish of his great spirit. But the frescoes of the Cappella della
Madonna di San Brizio are the key to an unsuspected chamber in the
soul of Luca Signorelli. For how reconcile these strange visions
of the anti-Christ and of Life after Death with our knowledge of
that courteous and stately gentleman 'who delighted in living
splendidly, and loved to dress himself in beautiful garments.'
Only one other time does he give us a glimpse into this secret
chamber, when we read the pathetic story of how he painted the
bodily loveliness of his dead son before he yielded it, dry-eyed
and silently, to the tyranny of the grave. Yet here perhaps we
have the clue to the meaning of his frescoes in the Cathedral of
Orvieto. For he had loved exceedingly, and seen his loved one
lowered to the unresponsive earth. Do not we too know what it is,
in spite of all our creeds and our philosophies, to weep for the
gentle voice and the dear brave eyes and the comforting hand of
those others whom we shall never meet again except in dreams? And
it is not only the spirit that we cry for, but the body.
So, Signorelli. And we felt this, especially looking at the fresco
of the Resurrection. For into the cold grey dawn of a featureless
world rise men and women, struggling with the clay which seems to
cling about their limbs, forcing them to make conscious efforts.
Above them in the starry heavens two strong and splendid angels
send forth the blast which calls them from the earth. The utter
aloneness and the awful sense of space make the newly-risen dead
shrink together, and some of them cling to each other, showing
a pathetic human feeling of desolation in the midst of their
wonderment and terror. Others are still engrossed in their struggle
with the encumbering earth. But there are some who meet in this
cold plain after long years of separation, and rush to hold each
other. How Signorelli loved their splendid physical beauty! Even in
his Paradise, where the heavenly choir makes music overhead, and
the angels scatter celestial roses among the saints, he does not
clothe them in gold raiment, only in their fair, strong limbs which
were to him as beautiful as flowers.
It was not so long a step as it appeared from Signorelli's Visions
of the Future Life to the Necropolis of Etruria, below the frowning
walls of the city. For Orvieto is shadowed by the Wings of the
Angel of Death--the _genie_ of the ancient Etruscans, which we see
faintly limned upon their sepulchres--and as the old custode at the
Mancini Tombs told us with arms outspread towards the plain, 'c'è
una vasta città dei morti, più grande che la città alta.'
The way was strewn with flowers, like all the paths of Umbria,
and it led us through the undergrowth at the foot of the rock of
Orvieto to the olive garden of the Mancini Necropolis. Barren figs
sprouted from the gaping crevices overhead, and sometimes the
bearded ivy hung half-way down the cliff. Once we came upon two
rude wooden crosses nailed to the brown tufa, with the marks of a
third between them, making the desolate valley more like a Golgotha
than ever.
[Illustration: ETRUSCAN NECROPOLIS BELOW THE WALLS OF ORVIETO.]