Street kept men’s company mostly. He had for friends all that was most
living in London, the Rossettis and Holman Hunt, George Boyce and J. W.
Inchbold, William Bell Scott, Madox Brown, Morris and Burne-Jones.
That _enfant terrible_ of the last generation, Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer,
has probably reminiscences of him. He had, before all, his son, who on
quitting Oxford came up to work under him; he had his associates in his
own profession and in the Royal Academy. In that last year he made a
tour with Arthur Street among the German cities, but the drawings that
could date it are few, and one of the latest notebooks passes within a
few leaves from pulpits in southern Italy to the landscape around S.
Gervais. Thither he had gone in the autumn to take the waters: “he was
troubled more or less by headache the whole time, but he did a good
deal of walking and sketching in spite of very bad weather.” That was
in September. The stroke fell on him the middle of November; then he
was better, was planning a long journey in Egypt. On December 18 he was
dead. The tireless energy never knew a real abatement. He lies in the
nave of the Abbey as Pierre de Montéreau lies in S. Germain-des-Prés,
and in Rheims Robert de Coucy.
It is not a long life as you count it over: five years with Scott and
Moffatt; five in and near Oxford; twenty years in London of triumphant
work; then five of honours like the pause at flood-tide, and never the
ebb. Like such a great river as that he knew so well and frequented all
his days, his life flowed steadily and strongly, the brimming stream
augmenting always, deepening and widening, the heavier current moving,
at the end, more slowly but not through slackening of power, until,
at the last turn, the majestic estuary opens and broadens, as, with
no hurry of fretting waves, no straining through silted sandbanks,
undiminished, the mighty mass of waters mingles with the sea.
NOTES OF A TOUR IN CENTRAL ITALY TO WHICH ARE APPENDED A FEW NOTES FROM
A LATER TOUR
II
NOTES OF A TOUR IN CENTRAL ITALY
(_From a notebook of 1857_)
_August 20, 1857._
Left town at 8.30 P.M. by South-Eastern Railway for Folkstone. A close
push for it, as I was an unwilling auditor of Lord Riverdale in the
House of Lords till 7 P.M. I then had a conference with the Bishop of
Oxford.
I left them to settle if possible the Divorce question and rushed home
just in time to pack and be off. A very quiet passage over to Boulogne
was seconded by a weary hour’s waiting at the station before the train
started.
We reached Paris at 9.10 and drove to the _Hôtel de l’Europe_ and
then wandered about for the day seeing sights. Tried for but could
see no good MSS. Drove to the _Bois de Boulogne_ and went to the
_Pré Catalan_, for which I cannot say much. By dint of watering the
grass vigorously they get it to look very green, but it is coarse
stuff, more like a water meadow in texture than an English lawn. The
_Pré Catalan_ without a soul in it except the show men, etc. eating
_al fresco_ dinners, is rather slow, so we came back soon. In the
afternoon went to the Hippodrome. The best thing probably was the
racing between three men each riding a four-in-hand and going at a
great pace. Dined at Véfour’s and then off to the station, and in a
rash moment, and in submission to the peremptory order of a grand
railway clerk, booked ourselves through from Paris to Turin. The train
was very full but I rested tolerably well and awoke in the morning
just in time to get a glimpse of the cathedral at Tournus.[3] At Mâcon
we changed to another train and crossing the Saône turned off toward
Geneva; the country invisible in a thick fog till we reached Ambérieu,
the junction with the line from Lyons, where it rose sufficiently to
disclose an exceedingly picturesque situation. From this point up to
Culoz, where we left the line, the country is very wild and beautiful.
The railway runs up a very narrow winding valley hemmed in with grand
hills, showing here and there fine bold bluffs of rock. The stream, a
mountain torrent, was nowhere--but wide banks of well-worn stones show
that it is powerful enough after rain or in the winter and spring. At
Culoz we embarked on a long and very shaky steamboat, the “Coquette,”
and going stern foremost a half mile down the rapid Rhone (here a dirty
white colour) we finally turned out of it into a sort of canal which
connects the Lac du Bourget with the Rhone. Our steamer was so long
that in getting along we invariably just touched land at one end and
occasionally at both, but by dint of great energy in the steering and
by aid of men who ran along the bank to push us off, we were safely
discharged into the lake. The water here is of the blue green which one
remembers at Geneva. The banks are precipitous and the lake, though
not very large, very pretty. The Dent du Chat on the south-west is
a fine hill, and the high bold hill above Culoz stands out to great
advantage over the immense, perfectly flat, meadow which occupies
the space between the Rhone and the lake, and which to-day is full
of haymakers,--I should say some two or three hundred--all hard at
work. We embarked at a temporary kind of port called S. Innocent and
went thence by railway to Chambéry. Here we stopped for five hours to
see the cathedral, wash and eat. The cathedral is of small interest.
Its flamboyant west front is fairly good of its kind. On the whole
the church wants dignity, and gives the impression of a parish church
more than of a cathedral. The castle which rises above the west side
of the town has not much old remaining. The chapel is poor flamboyant
with some good stained glass in the apse. The king has a fine papered
and cushioned gallery at the west end. I looked into one or two other
churches but found no old features.
The situation of Chambéry is exquisite. It is hemmed in on all sides
by mountains, and their outlines are generally unusually sharp and
bold, finishing as many of them do with great bluffs of rock. A figure
resting on the fore-quarters of four elephants who spout water from
their trunks is the most remarkable modern feature in the city. It is
to the memory of General ----[4], a great benefactor. The streets
contain few old houses: I saw one of the sixteenth century nearly all
windows. The fronts of the shops have the old arrangement of a stone
arch the whole width of the front and a bold stone counter.
We left Chambéry at 5.30 P.M. for S. Jean de Maurienne. The scenery as
long as we could see it was beautiful, but the clouds were low and at
the point where Mont Blanc ought to have been seen they effectually
prevented our seeing anything. At S. Jean we took possession of the
diligence for Turin and saw nothing till we were well up on the
mountain from Lons-le-Bourg. It took us two hours to scale this height,
pulled at a slow pace by nine mules and two horses. The ascent was
uninteresting but we gradually came upon more and more snow and the
pass increased in interest. There is a small lake at the top and a
dreary drive across a crest led us to the fine part of the descent.
This is, for the last hour and a half before reaching Susa, singularly
fine, finer indeed, I am inclined to think, than any descent I have
yet seen. The mountains are fine in their outlines, and the road winds
backward and forward between chestnut and walnut trees. Susa is mainly
remarkable for its beautiful situation among mountains with snowy peaks
always in sight, and a burning sun just now. The cathedral has a good
campanile of brick and a west front built on by the side of an old
Roman gateway, whose scale makes that of the church seem very small.
The spire of the cathedral is covered with small pieces of copper (I
think) cut like slates. The interior is painted all over in the worst
possible taste. Indeed throughout the Sardinian dominions there seems
to be a passion for painting shaded imitations of tracery upon walls
and groining. Chambéry cathedral is a notable specimen of this and
Susa not much better. We left Susa at 8.30 P.M. and reached Turin at
10.30. I expected nothing here and was agreeably disappointed. A city
cannot fail to be charming which has at the end of every street such
a view, of mountains and snow at one end and hills at the other, as
Turin can show. And then, though quite modern, its streets have that
narrow picturesque character so universal in Italy, and in every way
leave a pleasanter impression than one would expect from maps and
descriptions....
The women in Turin wear handkerchiefs on their heads. The streets are
some of them arcaded, by arcades filled with stalls of all kinds of
wares--but fruit is the staple commodity now. The effect is to make
the place look rather shabby and rubbishy. There is not one church of
any interest. The view of the city from the opposite bank of the Po
is charming, owing to the immense chain of Alps spreading from right
to left all behind the city, and the hills above the Po are very
respectable, rising as they do about 2000 feet above the city to where
they are crowned by the church called the Superga.
We left Turin at 5.30 and reached Genoa at 9.30. The views of the Alps
by sunset very charming. At Asti we had a bottle of the effervescing
_vin d’Asti_ brought to our carriage, and could not resist indulging in
the pleasant draught....
_The notes on Genoa appear in the second edition of_ Brick and Marble.
_August 29_, PISA.
My expectations were very high here and were a little disappointed. The
Gothic work in the grand group is mainly confined to the Campo Santo
and the baptistery, and in the former the traceries are, as Pisano’s
always are, very unscientific and more like a confectioner’s work than
an architect’s, whilst the latter has undergone such an amount of
“restoration” that not one old crocket is left and barely one old piece
of tracery. There is abundant evidence however in the Spina chapel and
in the few portions of the original marble still left in the Baptistery
that Pisano could do his work in a way very different from what we do,
and I therefore prefer to think only of what his work once was and
not of what it is. The external design is very striking and if the
cone above the dome were properly finished with a circle of canopied
traceries and figures I have no doubt its effect would be perfect. The
traceries, carvings, etc., when looked into are very bad, and it should
be seen therefore from a distance. The interior looks much older than
the exterior and there can be no doubt that this must be the case,
notwithstanding the inscription which says it was “ædificata de novo”
in 1728. Unquestionably this must refer to the destruction of the
exterior which left the interior all but untouched. The dome is in part
covered with red tiles and in part with metal.
The Campo Santo is architecturally not pleasing. Its large traceries,
unskilful and long, never at all fit on to the capitals of the shafts
that support them--but its great length and size are very effective
and the court with its greensward and some tall cypress trees at the
centre, the mountains blazing in the sun and the deep blue sky above,
combine to make a very charming picture. The great treasure here is
the frescoes with which its walls are covered. Orcagna’s great fresco
of the Last Judgement quite and more than came up to my hopes. It is a
wonderful work and full of exquisitely natural treatment of figures in
most delicate colours. The aureole round the figure of our Lord is too
green, I think, otherwise the dignity of the figure is unmatched if not
unapproachable.
The cathedral is not to my mind a pleasing structure. Like most of the
great churches in this part of the world, it is raised on a basement of
several steps extending in front of it on every side. It is Romanesque
in character throughout, its nave of great height and the crossing
covered with a low and ugly tiled dome. The columns between the nave
and aisles (there are two aisles on each side) are either antique or
closely copied from the antique and have nowhere any trace either in
their proportions or sculpture of any really Romanesque character. The
columns everywhere have the entasis distinctly developed. All the walls
are arcaded externally and striped with black marble. All the Pisan and
Luccan buildings are similarly striped and (unlike the architecture at
Genoa) the black forms but a very small proportion of the whole wall.
It is generally spaced regularly, and introduced at springings and
sills of windows and under cornices, and there is no approach even to
irregularity in its arrangement. The roof is one of a class of heavy
panelled wooden roofs which were common here in the Renaissance period,
similar in idea to the roof of the Banqueting House at Whitehall. The
aisles are pleasing, vaulted without ribs. In the old glass, of which
some quantity remains, the colours are very rich, there is scarcely any
white (if any) and the designs are almost entirely made of lead lines
and not by painting. The pulpit has two figures and some lions under
the columns which were preserved from an older pulpit said to be the
work of Giovanni Pisano. The detail of all the ornamental mouldings
is completely Roman, the egg and tongue being everywhere finely
introduced....
Of domestic buildings Pisa retains very extensive remains, inasmuch as
almost every house bears evidence of being mediaeval, but they have
been so much cut about that there is little to be seen now at all
perfect. There is an elaborate brick and terra cotta front to a house
on the Lungarno but it is of very late date--almost Renaissance in much
of its detail and very flat, regular, and ineffective.
On the opposite side of the Arno is another old house now used as the
Custom House; this is of stone but its traceries and details are poor,
very much like those of the Ptolomei palace at Siena. The windows are
shafted, but the capitals of the shafts are generally too large for the
arch mouldings which they have to support, and the mouldings, if they
may be called so, do not unite properly and are singularly ineffective.
Most of the old houses seem to have had a row of plain pointed arches
rising some twenty feet from the ground line, but I could not make out
whether they had been filled in with windows, or whether they belonged
to the stage of stables and coach houses so universal in these Italian
towns. The work is either brick or stone, but in no case did I see the
two materials countercharged.
On the Sunday evening there was a grand procession of a figure of the
B. V. M., with a vast number of attendants all with lighted candles, a
military band, and a few cavalry to bring up the rear. The view from
the lowest bridge looking up the Arno, with the picturesque outlines
of the bold hills above Pisa behind the towers, is one of the most
charming I remember.
A railway journey from Pisa of an hour brought us to Lucca. The railway
cuts some fine hills, and passes by the ruins of a large castle close
to the station before Lucca.
Lucca is entirely enclosed within elaborate brick fortifications, there
being, I think, no vestige of suburbs on any side. The ramparts are
well planted with trees, and the view of them from below, giving an
impression of the tall walls covered with trees and these surmounted
by the tall towers of the town, is fine. The view of the surrounding
mountains is, too, very exquisite.
Of course our first object was the cathedral. Its west front need
hardly be described. Its detail is very rich and beautiful and there
is a great deal of very good inlaid work. In the upper part subjects
from field sports are introduced, whilst lower down they are mainly
geometrical patterns. Some of the shafts are inlaid. The three great
arches which stretch across this front give a dignity to it in which
S. Michele, Lucca, Pisa cathedral, and the other imitations, are quite
wanting. They are remarkable for the way in which their arches are
treated; these are semicircular and the width of the voussures is two
or three times as great at the crown as at the springing--the effect is
good. An image is cut in the right-hand upper end of this front.
All the walls and arches are partially striped with black, the black
courses being very thin with a considerable space between them. The
north and south walls of the nave and transepts are cased in much later
work than the west front and are good specimens of Italian pointed of
the thirteenth century. The carving of foliage in this work is very
bad and what little moulding there is hardly looks like the work of
Gothic men. There is a good inlaid string-course under the windows.
A fine campanile stands a little in advance of the south-west angle
of the cathedral. It is of Romanesque date and built of brownish
rough stone below and of white stone (or marble) above; it is of very
considerable height and effect. The interior is certainly grand but
disappointing--almost all the arches are semicircular but (as the
groining bays are not square) the wall ribs of the groining bays are
pointed, and this gives in some way a general effect of pointed to the
whole work. The main arches are round, but they were so covered with
red hangings that it was impossible to see much of them. The triforium
is of great height and consists in each bay of two round-head windows,
filled in with slight tracery--the whole is of poor character and badly
proportioned. Above these two windows is a small circular window which
serves for clerestory. The groining of the nave is painted richly.
It has broad borders next the ribs and the wall is painted blue, and
figures in the centre of each painted in a circle. The borders have a
good many white lines, but there is no gold in any part of the work.
The planning of the transepts is very singular. They are divided by
an arcade down the centre, and as the nave arcades and triforia
are continued across them some singular combinations are produced.
The pavements have small compartments of Italian fifteenth century
geometrical patterns in mosaic, surrounded by square arrangements of
plain black and white.
Close to the cathedral is S. Giovanni, which, though not otherwise
remarkable, has an immense baptistery built on against its north
transept; it is a square of about fifty-seven feet internally and
covered with a square vault of a domical form. The old font has been
removed.
Near the south end of the cathedral is the little chapel of S. Maria
della Rosa. It is a small low building of about the proportions of the
Spina chapel, and mainly remarkable for the window tracery in its side
wall. This is, like all other tracery hereabouts, unpalatable to me.
The windows are shafted and I suppose therefore that they must have had
their glass put in frames inside. This seemed to have been the case in
the Spina chapel. There are dates of 1309 and 1333 on the building,
the latter on part of a door which in England I should venture to call
Renaissance. We could not get inside but saw through a window that the
interior had been completely modernized....
When we reached Siena we found the station elaborately decorated with
wreaths and flowers in pots, banners, and every possible kind of
railway utensil (even portions of engines), and all in honor of the
Pope who had left that morning for Città della Pieve on his way home
after a tour through various parts of Italy. He seemed to have been
greatly fêted at Siena.
Siena is situated on the irregular summit of a considerable hill. All
streets are up and down and in some places very precipitous. A sort
of natural amphitheatre in the centre of the city--the Piazza del
Campo--is the chief point round which the rest is built, containing
the Palazzo Pubblico, a grand Gothic building, out of the end of which
soars the finest campanile, after that at Verona, that I have seen.
On the circle of the Campo opposite the Palazzo Pubblico are some old
houses but not any of special interest. The Palazzo Pubblico is of the
usual type of brick buildings here and very regular.... The campanile
is brick without break or ornament of any kind for a great height, and
then is boldly corbelled forward on all sides; the whole of the work
is in stone. The arches of the machicoulis, the bands round them, and
some older parts, are rendered much more distinct by the introduction
of lines of black marble. Seen by a bright moonlight this campanile
possesses such an exquisite contour that nothing can be much more
beautiful. The contrasts of colours too are most admirably arranged,
and the exceeding simplicity of the lower part cannot be too much
praised.
A considerable ascent leads from the Campo to the east end of the
cathedral. This has a central door and on entering you find a small
chapel under the altar of the cathedral gained out of the slope of the
ground. The detail of this chapel and of the east end of the cathedral
above it is by far the best example of Gothic work in the city. There
are all kinds of things which, to an eye used to the exceptional
skill and care in fitting one part to another usual among northern
architects, are very unscientific-looking, but nevertheless this work
is original in its character and certainly beautiful in its effect.
It is of white marble striped sparingly with black. A flight of steps
leads up from the east end to a north doorway in the east wall of
the immense unfinished work which, though in the position of a south
transept, would really have been rather larger than the existing nave
of the cathedral.
This south transept is quite unfinished though very considerably
advanced. Its south wall shows that the vaulting was to have been
semicircular in section like that of the nave. The proportions of the
whole are very bold and fine.... The rest of the exterior has been
much modernized. The west front is much like that of Orvieto but I
don’t know how much is original. There is very little in it which I
should accept as really pointed architecture. The foliage and the
feeling of the whole is very Renaissance and the steep gables are all
sham and are very unpleasantly conspicuous in a distant general view
of the church. The campanile, coursed in black and white in nearly
even proportions (two courses of white material for one course of
colours), is Romanesque, of very great height, and follows the usual
rule of increasing its number of openings in each stage. It is capped
with square spirelets at the angles, and a low octagon spire, I think
of stone--this I thought had crockets, but I found they were only
some arrangements for illumination in honour of the Pope’s visit....
Internally the church has been painfully modernized; a row of Popes’
heads--about as artistic as a row of barber’s blocks--is ranged all
round above the nave arcade, and the whole of the church has been
plastered and painted in the most abominable manner. The walls are
striped in exactly equal courses (about eight and a half inches in
height) of black and white. The effect is certainly too bizarre. There
are no good specimens of carving, and the detail of groining ribs,
arches, etc., is hopelessly bad. All of the pavements are covered with
subjects formed by inlaying and incising the marbles which compose
them. There is a certain grandeur in the completeness of the idea but
the effect is not good....
We spent some hours to great advantage in the _Accademia_. The
collection of pictures of the early Sienese school is wonderfully rich
and gave me a very high idea of the power of some of the men whose
names one does not often hear.
There are three or four tondos similar to that at San Domenico and a
considerable number of reredoses of various sizes. A favorite subject
is the B. V. M., surrounded by saints in the outer compartments.
Nothing can exceed the beauty of some of the angels. In all, the
wood seems to have had canvas laid on it which was prepared with a
thick layer of size, and on this gold was laid all over preparatory
to painting. In some the colour has peeled off and left the gold
with lines for the outline of the figures scratched on it. Generally
speaking the preservation of the colours in these pictures is something
quite marvellous, not a crack being visible anywhere; may this be
attributed to the gold ground?