The Certosa of Pavia leaves upon the mind an impression of bewildering
sumptuousness: nowhere else are costly materials so combined with a
lavish expenditure of the rarest art. Those who have only once been
driven round together with the crew of sight-seers can carry little away
but the memory of lapis-lazuli and bronze-work, inlaid agates and
labyrinthine sculpture, cloisters tenantless in silence, fair painted
faces smiling from dark corners on the senseless crowd, trim gardens
with rows of pink primroses in spring and of begonia in autumn, blooming
beneath colonnades of glowing terra-cotta. The striking contrast between
the Gothic of the interior and the Renaissance facade, each in its own
kind perfect, will also be remembered; and thoughts of the two great
houses, Visconti and Sforza, to whose pride of power it is a monument,
may be blended with the recollection of art-treasures alien to their
spirit.
Two great artists, Ambrogio Borgognone and Antonio Amadeo, are the
presiding genii of the Certosa. To minute criticism, based upon the
accurate investigation of records and the comparison of styles, must be
left the task of separating their work from that of numerous
collaborators. But it is none the less certain that the keynote of the
whole music is struck by them. Amadeo, the master of the Colleoni chapel
at Bergamo, was both sculptor and architect. If the facade of the
Certosa be not absolutely his creation, he had a hand in the
distribution of its masses and the detail of its ornaments. The only
fault in this otherwise faultless product of the purest quattrocento
inspiration is that the facade is a frontispiece, with hardly any
structural relation to the church it masks; and this, though serious
from the point of view of architecture, is no abatement of its
sculpturesque and picturesque refinement. At first sight it seems a
wilderness of loveliest reliefs and statues--of angel faces, fluttering
raiment, flowing hair, love-laden youths, and stationary figures of
grave saints, mid wayward tangles of acanthus and wild vine and
cupid-laden foliage; but the subordination of these decorative details
to the main design--clear, rhythmical, and lucid, like a chant of
Pergolese or Stradella--will enrapture one who has the sense for unity
evoked from divers elements, for thought subduing all caprices to the
harmony of beauty. It is not possible elsewhere in Italy to find the
instinct of the earlier Renaissance, so amorous in its expenditure of
rare material, so lavish in its bestowal of the costliest workmanship
on ornamental episodes, brought into truer keeping with a pure and
simple structural effect.
All the great sculptor-architects of Lombardy worked in succession on
this miracle of beauty; and this may account for the sustained
perfection of style, which nowhere suffers from the languor of
exhaustion in the artist or from repetition of motives. It remains the
triumph of North Italian genius, exhibiting qualities of tenderness and
self-abandonment to inspiration which we lack in the severer
masterpieces of the Tuscan school.
To Borgognone is assigned the painting of the roof in nave and
choir--exceeding rich, varied, and withal in sympathy with stately
Gothic style. Borgognone, again, is said to have designed the saints and
martyrs worked in _tarsia_ for the choir-stalls. His frescos are in some
parts well preserved, as in the lovely little Madonna at the end of the
south chapel, while the great fresco above the window in the south
transept has an historical value that renders it interesting in spite of
partial decay. Borgognone's oil-pictures throughout the church prove, if
such proof were needed after inspection of the altar-piece in our
National Gallery, that he was one of the most powerful and original
painters of Italy, blending the repose of the earlier masters and their
consummate workmanship with a profound sensibility to the finest shades
of feeling and the rarest forms of natural beauty. He selected an
exquisite type of face for his young men and women; on his old men he
bestowed singular gravity and dignity. His saints are a society of
strong, pure, restful, earnest souls, in whom the passion of deepest
emotion is transfigured by habitual calm. The brown and golden harmonies
he loved are gained without sacrifice of lustre: there is a
self-restraint in his coloring which corresponds to the reserve of his
emotion; and though a regret sometimes rises in our mind that he should
have modelled the light and shade upon his faces with a brusque,
unpleasing hardness, their pallor dwells within our memory as something
delicately sought if not consummately attained. In a word, Borgognone
was a true Lombard of the best time. The very imperfection of his
flesh-painting repeats in color what the greatest Lombard sculptors
sought in stone--a sharpness of relief that passes over into angularity.
This brusqueness was the counter-poise to tenderness of feeling and
intensity of fancy in these Northern artists. Of all Borgognone's
pictures in the Certosa, I should select the altar-piece of St. Siro
with St. Lawrence and St. Stephen and two fathers of the Church, for its
fusion of this master's qualities.
The Certosa is a wilderness of lovely workmanship. From Borgognone's
majesty we pass into the quiet region of Luini's Christian grace, or
mark the influence of Leonardo on that rare Assumption of Madonna by his
pupil, Andrea Solari. Like everything touched by the Leonardesque
spirit, this great picture was left unfinished; yet Northern Italy has
nothing finer to show than the landscape, outspread in its immeasurable
purity of calm, behind the grouped Apostles and the ascendent Mother of
Heaven. The feeling of that happy region between the Alps and Lombardy,
where there are many waters--_et tacitos sine labe lacus sine murmure
rivos_--and where the last spurs of the mountains sink in undulations
to the plain, has passed into this azure vista, just as all Umbria is
suggested in a twilight background of young Raphael or Perugino.
The portraits of the dukes of Milan and their families carry us into a
very different realm of feeling. Medallions above the doors of sacristy
and chancel, stately figures reared aloft beneath gigantic canopies, men
and women slumbering with folded hands upon their marble biers--we read
in all those sculptured forms a strange record of human restlessness
resolved into the quiet of the tomb. The iniquities of Gian Galeazzo
Visconti, _il gran Biscione_; the blood-thirst of Gian Maria; the dark
designs of Filippo and his secret vices; Francesco Sforza's treason;
Galeazzo Maria's vanities and lusts; their tyrants' dread of thunder and
the knife; their awful deaths by pestilence and the assassin's poniard;
their selfishness, oppression, cruelty, and fraud; the murders of their
kinsmen; their labyrinthine plots and acts of broken faith--all is
tranquil now, and we can say to each what Bosola found for the Duchess
of Malfi ere her execution:
Much you had of land and rent;
Your length in clay's now competent:
A long war disturbed your mind;
Here your perfect peace is signed!
Some of these faces are commonplace, with _bourgeois_ cunning written on
the heavy features; one is bluff, another stolid, a third bloated, a
fourth stately. The sculptors have dealt fairly with all, and not one
has the lineaments of utter baseness. To Cristoforo Solari's statues of
Lodovico Sforza and his wife, Beatrice d'Este, the palm of excellence
in art and of historical interest must be awarded. Sculpture has rarely
been more dignified and true to life than here. The woman with her short
clustering curls, the man with his strong face, are resting after that
long fever which brought woe to Italy, to Europe a new age, and to the
boasted minion of fortune a slow death in the prison palace of Loches.
Attired in ducal robes, they lie in state; and the sculptor has carved
the lashes on their eyelids heavy with death's marmoreal sleep. He, at
least, has passed no judgment on their crimes. Let us, too, bow and
leave their memories to the historian's pen, their spirits to God's
mercy.
After all wanderings in this temple of art, we return to Antonio Amadeo,
to his long-haired seraphs playing on the lutes of Paradise, to his
angels of the Passion with their fluttering robes and arms outspread in
agony, to his saints and satyrs mingled on pilasters of the marble
doorways, his delicate _Lavabo_ decorations, and his hymns of piety
expressed in noble forms of weeping women and dead Christs. Wherever we
may pass, this master-spirit of the Lombard style enthralls attention.
His curious treatment of drapery, as though it were made of crumpled
paper, and his trick of enhancing relief by sharp angles and attenuated
limbs, do not detract from his peculiar charm. That is his way, very
different from Donatello's, of attaining to the maximum of life and
lightness in the stubborn vehicle of stone. Nor do all the riches of the
choir--those multitudes of singing angels, those Ascensions and
Assumptions, and innumerable bass-reliefs of gleaming marble moulded
into softest wax by mastery of art--distract our eyes from the single
round medallion, not larger than a common plate, inscribed by him upon
the front of the high-altar. Perhaps, if one who loved Amadeo were
bidden to point out his masterpiece, he would lead the way at once to
this. The space is small; yet it includes the whole tragedy of the
Passion. Christ is lying dead among the women on his mother's lap, and
there are pitying angels in the air above. One woman lifts his arm,
another makes her breast a pillow for his head. Their agony is hushed,
but felt in every limb and feature; and the extremity of suffering is
seen in each articulation of the worn and wounded form just taken from
the cross. It would be too painful, were not the harmony of art so rare,
the interlacing of those many figures in a simple round so exquisite.
The noblest tranquillity and the most passionate emotion are here fused
in a manner of adorable naturalness.
From the church it is delightful to escape into the cloisters, flooded
with sunlight, where the swallows skim and the brown hawks circle and
the mason-bees are at work upon their cells among the carvings. The
arcades of the two cloisters are the final triumph of Lombard
terra-cotta. The memory fails before such infinite invention, such
facility and felicity of execution. Wreaths of cupids gliding round the
arches among grape-bunches and bird-haunted foliage of vine; rows of
angels, like rising and setting planets, some smiling and some grave,
ascending and descending by the Gothic curves; saints stationary on
their pedestals and faces leaning from the rounds above; crowds of
cherubs and courses of stars and acanthus-leaves in woven lines and
ribbons incessantly inscribed with Ave Maria! Then, over all, the rich
red light and purple shadows of the brick, than which no substance
sympathizes more completely with the sky of solid blue above, the broad
plain space of waving summer grass beneath our feet.
It is now late afternoon, and when evening comes the train will take us
back to Milan. There is yet a little while to rest tired eyes and
strained spirits among the willows and the poplars by the monastery
wall. Through that gray-green leafage, young with early spring, the
pinnacles of the Certosa leap like flames into the sky. The rice-fields
are under water, far and wide, shining like burnished gold beneath the
level light now near to sun-down. Frogs are croaking; those persistent
frogs whom the muses have ordained to sing for aye, in spite of Bion and
all tuneful poets dead. We sit and watch the water-snakes, the busy
rats, the hundred creatures swarming in the fat, well-watered soil.
Nightingales here and there, new-comers, tune their timid April song.
But, strangest of all sounds in such a place, my comrade from the
Grisons jodels forth an Alpine cowherd's melody--_Auf den Alpen droben
ist ein herrliches Leben!_
Did the echoes of Gian Galeazzo's convent ever wake to such a tune as
this before?