The great attraction to students of Italian art in the convent of Monte
Oliveto is a large square cloister, covered with wall-paintings by Luca
Signorelli and Giovannantonio Bazzi, surnamed Il Sodoma. These represent
various episodes in the life of S. Benedict; while one picture, in some
respects the best of the whole series, is devoted to the founder of the
Olivetan Order, Bernardo Tolomei, dispensing the rule of his institution
to a consistory of white-robed monks. Signorelli, that great master of
Cortona, may be studied to better advantage elsewhere, especially at
Orvieto and in his native city. His work in this cloister, consisting of
eight frescoes, has been much spoiled by time and restoration. Yet it
can be referred to a good period of his artistic activity (the year
1497) and displays much which is specially characteristic of his manner.
In Totila's barbaric train, he painted a crowd of fierce emphatic
figures, combining all ages and the most varied attitudes, and
reproducing with singular vividness the Italian soldiers of adventure of
his day. We see before us the long-haired followers of Braccio and the
Baglioni; their handsome savage faces; their brawny limbs clad in the
parti-coloured hose and jackets of that period; feathered caps stuck
sideways on their heads; a splendid swagger in their straddling legs.
Female beauty lay outside the sphere of Signorelli's sympathy; and in
the Monte Oliveto cloister he was not called upon to paint it. But none
of the Italian masters felt more keenly, or more powerfully represented
in their work, the muscular vigour of young manhood. Two of the
remaining frescoes, different from these in motive, might be selected as
no less characteristic of Signorelli's manner. One represents three
sturdy monks, clad in brown, working with all their strength to stir a
boulder, which has been bewitched, and needs a miracle to move it from
its place. The square and powerfully outlined drawing of these figures
is beyond all praise for its effect of massive solidity. The other
shows us the interior of a fifteenth century tavern, where two monks are
regaling themselves upon the sly. A country girl, with shapely arms and
shoulders, her upper skirts tucked round the ample waist to which broad
sweeping lines of back and breasts descend, is serving wine. The
exuberance of animal life, the freedom of attitude expressed in this,
the mainly interesting figure of the composition, show that Signorelli
might have been a great master of realistic painting. Nor are the
accessories less effective. A wide-roofed kitchen chimney, a page-boy
leaving the room by a flight of steps, which leads to the house door,
and the table at which the truant monks are seated, complete a picture
of homely Italian life. It may still be matched out of many an inn in
this hill district.
Called to graver work at Orvieto, where he painted his gigantic series
of frescoes illustrating the coming of Antichrist, the Destruction of
the World, the Resurrection, the Last Judgment, and the final state of
souls in Paradise and Hell, Signorelli left his work at Monte Oliveto
unaccomplished. Seven years later it was taken up by a painter of very
different genius. Sodoma was a native of Vercelli, and had received his
first training in the Lombard schools, which owed so much to Lionardo da
Vinci's influence. He was about thirty years of age when chance brought
him to Siena. Here he made acquaintance with Pandolfo Petrucci, who had
recently established himself in a species of tyranny over the Republic.
The work he did for this patron and other nobles of Siena, brought him
into notice. Vasari observes that his hot Lombard colouring, a something
florid and attractive in his style, which contrasted with the severity
of the Tuscan school, rendered him no less agreeable as an artist than
his free manners made him acceptable as a house-friend. Fra Domenico da
Leccio, also a Lombard, was at that time General of the monks of Monte
Oliveto. On a visit to this compatriot in 1505, Sodoma received a
commission to complete the cloister; and during the next two years he
worked there, producing in all twenty-five frescoes. For his pains he
seemed to have received but little pay--Vasari says, only the expenses
of some colour-grinders who assisted him; but from the books of the
convent it appears that 241 ducats, or something over 60_l._ of our
money, were disbursed to him.
Sodoma was so singular a fellow, even in that age of piquant
personalities, that it may be worth while to translate a fragment of
Vasari's gossip about him. We must, however, bear in mind that, for some
unknown reason, the Aretine historian bore a rancorous grudge against
this Lombard, whose splendid gifts and great achievements he did all he
could by writing to depreciate. "He was fond," says Vasari, "of keeping
in his house all sorts of strange animals: badgers, squirrels, monkeys,
cat-a-mountains, dwarf-donkeys, horses, racers, little Elba ponies,
jackdaws, bantams, doves of India, and other creatures of this kind, as
many as he could lay his hands on. Over and above these beasts, he had a
raven, which had learned so well from him to talk, that it could imitate
its master's voice, especially in answering the door when some one
knocked, and this it did so cleverly that people took it for
Giovannantonio himself, as all the folk of Siena know quite well. In
like manner, his other pets were so much at home with him that they
never left his house, but played the strangest tricks and maddest pranks
imaginable, so that his house was like nothing more than a Noah's Ark."
He was a bold rider, it seems; for with one of his racers, ridden by
himself, he bore away the prize in that wild horse-race they run upon
the Piazza at Siena. For the rest, "he attired himself in pompous
clothes, wearing doublets of brocade, cloaks trimmed with gold lace,
gorgeous caps, neck-chains, and other vanities of a like description,
fit for buffoons and mountebanks." In one of the frescoes of Monte
Oliveto, Sodoma painted his own portrait, with some of his curious pets
around him. He there appears as a young man with large and decidedly
handsome features, a great shock of dark curled hair escaping from a
yellow cap, and flowing down over a rich mantle which drapes his
shoulders. If we may trust Vasari, he showed his curious humours freely
to the monks. "Nobody could describe the amusement he furnished to those
good fathers, who christened him Mattaccio (the big madman), or the
insane tricks he played there."
In spite of Vasari's malevolence, the portrait he has given us of Bazzi
has so far nothing unpleasant about it. The man seems to have been a
madcap artist, combining with his love for his profession a taste for
fine clothes, and what was then perhaps rarer in people of his sort, a
great partiality for living creatures of all kinds. The darker shades of
Vasari's picture have been purposely omitted from these pages. We only
know for certain, about Bazzi's private life, that he was married in
1510 to a certain Beatrice, who bore him two children, and who was
still living with him in 1541. The further suggestion that he painted
at Monte Oliveto subjects unworthy of a religious house, is wholly
disproved by the frescoes which still exist in a state of very tolerable
preservation. They represent various episodes in the legend of S.
Benedict; all marked by that spirit of simple, almost childish piety
which is a special characteristic of Italian religious history. The
series forms, in fact, a painted _novella_ of monastic life; its petty
jealousies, its petty trials, its tribulations and temptations, and its
indescribably petty miracles. Bazzi was well fitted for the execution of
this task. He had a swift and facile brush, considerable versatility in
the treatment of monotonous subjects, and a never-failing sense of
humour. His white-cowled monks, some of them with the rosy freshness of
boys, some with the handsome brown faces of middle life, others astute
and crafty, others again wrinkled with old age, have clearly been copied
from real models. He puts them into action without the slightest effort,
and surrounds them with landscapes, architecture, and furniture,
appropriate to each successive situation. The whole is done with so much
grace, such simplicity of composition, and transparency of style,
corresponding to the _naif_ and superficial legend, that we feel a
perfect harmony between the artist's mind and the motives he was made to
handle. In this respect Bazzi's portion of the legend of S. Benedict is
more successful than Signorelli's. It was fortunate, perhaps, that the
conditions of his task confined him to uncomplicated groupings, and a
scale of colour in which white predominates. For Bazzi, as is shown by
subsequent work in the Farnesina Villa at Rome, and in the church of S.
Domenico at Siena, was no master of composition; and the tone, even of
his masterpieces, inclines to heat. Unlike Signorelli, Bazzi felt a deep
artistic sympathy with female beauty; and the most attractive fresco in
the whole series is that in which the evil monk Florentius brings a bevy
of fair damsels to the convent. There is one group, in particular, of
six women, so delicately varied in carriage of the head and suggested
movement of the body, as to be comparable only to a strain of concerted
music. This is perhaps the painter's masterpiece in the rendering of
pure beauty, if we except his S. Sebastian of the Uffizzi.
We tire of studying pictures, hardly less than of reading about them! I
was glad enough, after three hours spent among the frescoes of this
cloister, to wander forth into the copses which surround the convent.
Sunlight was streaming treacherously from flying clouds; and though it
was high noon, the oak-leaves were still a-tremble with dew. Pink
cyclamens and yellow amaryllis starred the moist brown earth; and under
the cypress-trees, where alleys had been cut in former time for pious
feet, the short firm turf was soft and mossy. Before bidding the
hospitable Padre farewell, and starting in our waggonette for Asciano,
it was pleasant to meditate awhile in these green solitudes. Generations
of white-stoled monks who had sat or knelt upon the now deserted
terraces, or had slowly paced the winding paths to Calvaries aloft and
points of vantage high above the wood, rose up before me. My mind, still
full of Bazzi's frescoes, peopled the wilderness with grave monastic
forms, and gracious, young-eyed faces of boyish novices.