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 sightseers, 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
façade, 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 façade
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 façade 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
chaunt 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 frescoes 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
colouring 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 colour what the greatest Lombard sculptors sought in stone--a
sharpness of relief that passes over into angularity. This brusqueness
was the counterpoise 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 S. Siro with S. Lawrence and S.
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 Lionardo on that rare Assumption of Madonna by
his pupil, Andrea Solari. Like everything touched by the Lionardesque
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
ascendant Mother of Heaven. The feeling of that happy region between
the Alps and Lombardy, where there are many waters--_et tacitos sine
labe laous 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 poignard; 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
basreliefs 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 ribands incessantly inscribed with Ave Maria! Then,
over all, the rich red light and purple shadows of the brick, than
which no substance sympathises 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 grey-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?