The landscape and the wine of Montepulciano are both well worth the
trouble of a visit to this somewhat inaccessible city. Yet more remains
to be said about the attractions of the town itself. In the Duomo, which
was spoiled by unintelligent rebuilding at a dismal epoch of barren art,
are fragments of one of the rarest monuments of Tuscan sculpture. This
is the tomb of Bartolommeo Aragazzi. He was a native of Montepulciano,
and secretary to Pope Martin V., that _Papa Martino non vale un
quattrino_, on whom, during his long residence in Florence, the
street-boys made their rhymes. Twelve years before his death he
commissioned Donatello and Michelozzo Michelozzi, who about that period
were working together upon the monuments of Pope John XXIII. and
Cardinal Brancacci, to erect his own tomb at the enormous cost of
twenty-four thousand scudi. That thirst for immortality of fame, which
inspired the humanists of the Renaissance, prompted Aragazzi to this
princely expenditure. Yet, having somehow won the hatred of his
fellow-students, he was immediately censured for excessive vanity.
Lionardo Bruni makes his monument the theme of a ferocious onslaught.
Writing to Poggio Bracciolini, Bruni tells a story how, while travelling
through the country of Arezzo, he met a train of oxen dragging heavy
waggons piled with marble columns, statues, and all the necessary
details of a sumptuous sepulchre. He stopped, and asked what it all
meant. Then one of the contractors for this transport, wiping the sweat
from his forehead, in utter weariness of the vexatious labour, at the
last end of his temper, answered: "May the gods destroy all poets, past,
present, and future." I inquired what he had to do with poets, and how
they had annoyed him. "Just this," he replied, "that this poet, lately
deceased, a fool and windy-pated fellow, has ordered a monument for
himself; and with a view to erecting it, these marbles are being dragged
to Montepulciano; but I doubt whether we shall contrive to get them up
there. The roads are too bad." "But," cried I, "do you believe _that_
man was a poet--that dunce who had no science, nay, nor knowledge
either? who only rose above the heads of men by vanity and doltishness?"
"I don't know," he answered, "nor did I ever hear tell, while he was
alive, about his being called a poet; but his fellow-townsmen now decide
he was one; nay, if he had but left a few more moneybags, they'd swear
he was a god. Anyhow, but for his having been a poet, I would not have
cursed poets in general." Whereupon, the malevolent Bruni withdrew, and
composed a scorpion-tailed oration, addressed to his friend Poggio, on
the suggested theme of "diuturnity in monuments," and false ambition.
Our old friends of humanistic learning--Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar--meet us
in these frothy paragraphs. Cambyses, Xerxes, Artaxerxes, Darius, are
thrown in to make the gruel of rhetoric "thick and slab." The whole
epistle ends in a long-drawn peroration of invective against "that
excrement in human shape," who had had the ill-luck, by pretence to
scholarship, by big gains from the Papal treasury, by something in his
manners alien from the easy-going customs of the Roman Court, to rouse
the rancour of his fellow-humanists.
I have dwelt upon this episode, partly because it illustrates the
peculiar thirst for glory in the students of that time, but more
especially because it casts a thin clear thread of actual light upon the
masterpiece which, having been transported with this difficulty from
Donatello's workshop, is now to be seen by all lovers of fine art, in
part at least, at Montepulciano. In part at least: the phrase is
pathetic. Poor Aragazzi, who thirsted so for "diuturnity in monuments,"
who had been so cruelly assaulted in the grave by humanistic jealousy,
expressing its malevolence with humanistic crudity of satire, was
destined after all to be defrauded of his well-paid tomb. The monument,
a master work of Donatello and his collaborator, was duly erected. The
oxen and the contractors, it appears, had floundered through the mud of
Valdichiana, and struggled up the mountain-slopes of Montepulciano. But
when the church, which this triumph of art adorned, came to be repaired,
the miracle of beauty was dismembered. The sculpture for which Aragazzi
spent his thousands of crowns, which Donatello touched with his
immortalising chisel, over which the contractors vented their curses and
Bruni eased his bile; these marbles are now visible as mere _disjecta
membra_ in a church which, lacking them, has little to detain a
traveller's haste.
On the left hand of the central door, as you enter, Aragazzi lies, in
senatorial robes, asleep; his head turned slightly to the right upon the
pillow, his hands folded over his breast. Very noble are the draperies,
and dignified the deep tranquillity of slumber. Here, we say, is a good
man fallen upon sleep, awaiting resurrection. The one commanding theme
of Christian sculpture, in an age of Pagan feeling, has been adequately
rendered. Bartolommeo Aragazzi, like Ilaria del Carretto at Lucca, like
the canopied doges in S. Zanipolo at Venice, like the Acciauoli in the
Florentine Certosa, like the Cardinal di Portogallo in Samminiato, is
carved for us as he had been in life, but with that life suspended, its
fever all smoothed out, its agitations over, its pettinesses dignified
by death. This marmoreal repose of the once active man symbolises for
our imagination the state into which he passed four centuries ago, but
in which, according to the creed, he still abides, reserved for judgment
and reincarnation. The flesh, clad with which he walked our earth, may
moulder in the vaults beneath. But it will one day rise again; and art
has here presented it imperishable to our gaze. This is how the
Christian sculptors, inspired by the majestic calm of classic art,
dedicated a Christian to the genius of repose. Among the nations of
antiquity this repose of death was eternal; and being unable to conceive
of a man's body otherwise than for ever obliterated by the flames of
funeral, they were perforce led back to actual life when they would
carve his portrait on a tomb. But for Christianity the rest of the grave
has ceased to be eternal. Centuries may pass, but in the end it must be
broken. Therefore art is justified in showing us the man himself in an
imagined state of sleep. Yet this imagined state of sleep is so
incalculably long, and by the will of God withdrawn from human prophecy,
that the ages sweeping over the dead man before the trumpets of
archangels wake him, shall sooner wear away memorial stone than stir his
slumber. It is a slumber, too, unterrified, unentertained by dreams.
Suspended animation finds no fuller symbolism than the sculptor here
presents to us in abstract form.
The boys of Montepulciano have scratched Messer Aragazzi's sleeping
figure with _graffiti_ at their own free will. Yet they have had no
power to erase the poetry of Donatello's mighty style. That, in spite of
Bruni's envy, in spite of injurious time, in spite of the still worse
insult of the modernised cathedral and the desecrated monument, embalms
him in our memory and secures for him the diuturnity for which he paid
his twenty thousand crowns. Money, methinks, beholding him, was rarely
better expended on a similar ambition. And ambition of this sort,
relying on the genius of such a master to give it wings for perpetuity
of time, is, _pace_ Lionardo Bruni, not ignoble.
Opposite the figure of Messer Aragazzi are two square bas-reliefs from
the same monument, fixed against piers of the nave. One represents
Madonna enthroned among worshippers; members, it may be supposed, of
Aragazzi's household. Three angelic children, supporting the child
Christ upon her lap, complete that pyramidal form of composition which
Fra Bartolommeo was afterwards to use with such effect in painting. The
other bas-relief shows a group of grave men and youths, clasping hands
with loveliest interlacement; the placid sentiment of human fellowship
translated into harmonies of sculptured form. Children below run up to
touch their knees, and reach out boyish arms to welcome them. Two young
men, with half-draped busts and waving hair blown off their foreheads,
anticipate the type of adolescence which Andrea del Sarto perfected in
his S. John. We might imagine that this masterly panel was intended to
represent the arrival of Messer Aragazzi in his home. It is a scene from
the domestic life of the dead man, duly subordinated to the recumbent
figure, which, when the monument was perfect, would have dominated the
whole composition.
Nothing in the range of Donatello's work surpasses these two bas-reliefs
for harmonies of line and grouping, for choice of form, for beauty of
expression, and for smoothness of surface-working. The marble is of
great delicacy, and is wrought to a wax-like surface. At the high altar
are three more fragments from the mutilated tomb. One is a long low
frieze of children bearing garlands, which probably formed the base of
Aragazzi's monument, and now serves for a predella. The remaining pieces
are detached statues of Fortitude and Faith. The former reminds us of
Donatello's S. George; the latter is twisted into a strained attitude,
full of character, but lacking grace. What the effect of these
emblematic figures would have been when harmonised by the architectural
proportions of the sepulchre, the repose of Aragazzi on his sarcophagus,
the suavity of the two square panels and the rhythmic beauty of the
frieze, it is not easy to conjecture. But rudely severed from their
surroundings, and exposed in isolation, one at each side of the altar,
they leave an impression of awkward discomfort on the memory. A certain
hardness, peculiar to the Florentine manner, is felt in them. But this
quality may have been intended by the sculptors for the sake of contrast
with what is eminently graceful, peaceful, and melodious in the other
fragments of the ruined masterpiece.