I
Florence being oppressively hot and delivered over to the mosquitoes,
the occasion seemed to favour that visit to Siena which I had more than
once planned and missed. I arrived late in the evening, by the light
of a magnificent moon, and while a couple of benignantly-mumbling old
crones were making up my bed at the inn strolled forth in quest of a
first impression. Five minutes brought me to where I might gather it
unhindered as it bloomed in the white moonshine. The great Piazza of
Siena is famous, and though in this day of multiplied photographs and
blunted surprises and profaned revelations none of the world’s wonders
can pretend, like Wordsworth’s phantom of delight, really to “startle
and waylay,” yet as I stepped upon the waiting scene from under a dark
archway I was conscious of no loss of the edge of a precious presented
sensibility. The waiting scene, as I have called it, was in the shape of
a shallow horse-shoe--as the untravelled reader who has turned over his
travelled friends’ portfolios will respectfully remember; or, better, of
a bow in which the high wide face of the Palazzo Pubblico forms the
cord and everything else the arc. It was void of any human presence that
could figure to me the current year; so that, the moonshine assisting,
I had half-an-hour’s infinite vision of mediæval Italy. The Piazza being
built on the side of a hill--or rather, as I believe science affirms, in
the cup of a volcanic crater--the vast pavement converges downwards in
slanting radiations of stone, the spokes of a great wheel, to a point
directly before the Palazzo, which may mark the hub, though it is
nothing more ornamental than the mouth of a drain. The great monument
stands on the lower side and might seem, in spite of its goodly mass and
its embattled cornice, to be rather defiantly out-countenanced by vast
private constructions occupying the opposite eminence. This might be,
without the extraordinary dignity of the architectural gesture with
which the huge high-shouldered pile asserts itself.
On the firm edge of the palace, from bracketed base to grey-capped
summit against the sky, where grows a tall slim tower which soars and
soars till it has given notice of the city’s greatness over the blue
mountains that mark the horizon. It rises as slender and straight as a
pennoned lance planted on the steel-shod toe of a mounted knight, and
keeps all to itself in the blue air, far above the changing fashions of
the market, the proud consciousness or rare arrogance once built into
it. This beautiful tower, the finest thing in Siena and, in its rigid
fashion, as permanently fine thus as a really handsome nose on a face of
no matter what accumulated age, figures there still as a Declaration
of Independence beside which such an affair as ours, thrown off at
Philadelphia, appears to have scarce done more than helplessly give way
to time. Our Independence has become a dependence on a thousand such
dreadful things as the incorrupt declaration of Siena strikes us as
looking for ever straight over the level of. As it stood silvered by
the moonlight, while my greeting lasted, it seemed to speak, all as from
soul to soul, very much indeed as some ancient worthy of a lower order,
buttonholing one on the coveted chance and at the quiet hour, might
have done, of a state of things long and vulgarly superseded, but to the
pride and power, the once prodigious vitality, of which who could expect
any one effect to testify more incomparably, more indestructibly, quite,
as it were, more immortally? The gigantic houses enclosing the rest of
the Piazza took up the tale and mingled with it their burden. “We are
very old and a trifle weary, but we were built strong and piled high,
and we shall last for many an age. The present is cold and heedless, but
we keep ourselves in heart by brooding over our store of memories and
traditions. We are haunted houses in every creaking timber and aching
stone.” Such were the gossiping connections I established with Siena
before I went to bed.
Since that night I have had a week’s daylight knowledge of the surface
of the subject at least, and don’t know how I can better present it than
simply as another and a vivider page of the lesson that the ever-hungry
artist has only to _trust_ old Italy for her to feed him at every single
step from her hand--and if not with one sort of sweetly-stale grain from
that wondrous mill of history which during so many ages ground finer
than any other on earth, why then always with something else. Siena has
at any rate “preserved appearances”--kept the greatest number of them,
that is, unaltered for the eye--about as consistently as one can imagine
the thing done. Other places perhaps may treat you to as drowsy an odour
of antiquity, but few exhale it from so large an area. Lying massed
within her walls on a dozen clustered hill-tops, she shows you at every
turn in how much greater a way she once lived; and if so much of the
grand manner is extinct, the receptacle of the ashes still solidly
rounds itself. This heavy general stress of all her emphasis on the past
is what she constantly keeps in your eyes and your ears, and if you be
but a casual observer and admirer the generalised response is mainly
what you give her. The casual observer, however beguiled, is mostly
not very learned, not over-equipped in advance with data; he hasn’t
specialised, his notions are necessarily vague, the chords of his
imagination, for all his good-will, are inevitably muffled and weak. But
such as it is, his received, his welcome impression serves his turn so
far as the life of sensibility goes, and reminds him from time to time
that even the lore of German doctors is but the shadow of satisfied
curiosity. I have been living at the inn, walking about the streets,
sitting in the Piazza; these are the simple terms of my experience. But
streets and inns in Italy are the vehicles of half one’s knowledge;
if one has no fancy for their lessons one may burn one’s note-book.
In Siena everything is Sienese. The inn has an English sign over the
door--a little battered plate with a rusty representation of the lion
and the unicorn; but advance hopefully into the mouldy stone alley which
serves as vestibule and you will find local colour enough. The landlord,
I was told, had been servant in an English family, and I was curious to
see how he met the probable argument of the casual Anglo-Saxon after the
latter’s first twelve hours in his establishment. As he failed to appear
I asked the waiter if he, weren’t at home. “Oh,” said the latter, “he’s
a _piccolo grasso vecchiotto_ who doesn’t like to move.” I’m afraid this
little fat old man has simply a bad conscience. It’s no small burden for
one who likes the Italians--as who doesn’t, under this restriction?--to
have so much indifference even to rudimentary purifying processes to
dispose of. What is the real philosophy of dirty habits, and are foul
surfaces merely superficial? If unclean manners have in truth the
moral meaning which I suspect in them we must love Italy better than
consistency. This a number of us are prepared to do, but while we are
making the sacrifice it is as well we should be aware.
We may plead moreover for these impecunious heirs of the past that even
if it were easy to be clean in the midst of their mouldering heritage
it would be difficult to appear so. At the risk of seeming to flaunt the
silly superstition of restless renovation for the sake of renovation,
which is but the challenge of the infinitely precious principle of
duration, one is still moved to say that the prime result of one’s
contemplative strolls in the dusky alleys of such a place is an
ineffable sense of disrepair. Everything is cracking, peeling, fading,
crumbling, rotting. No young Sienese eyes rest upon anything youthful;
they open into a world battered and befouled with long use. Everything
has passed its meridian except the brilliant façade of the cathedral,
which is being diligently retouched and restored, and a few private
palaces whose broad fronts seem to have been lately furbished and
polished. Siena was long ago mellowed to the pictorial tone; the
operation of time is now to deposit shabbiness upon shabbiness. But
it’s for the most part a patient, sturdy, sympathetic shabbiness,
which soothes rather than irritates the nerves, and has in many cases
doubtless as long a career to run as most of our pert and shallow
freshnesses. It projects at all events a deeper shadow into the constant
twilight of the narrow streets--that vague historic dusk, as I may call
it, in which one walks and wonders. These streets are hardly more than
sinuous flagged alleys, into which the huge black houses, between their
almost meeting cornices, suffer a meagre light to filter down over
rough-hewn stone, past windows often of graceful Gothic form, and great
pendent iron rings and twisted sockets for torches. Scattered over
their many-headed hill, they suffer the roadway often to incline to the
perpendicular, becoming so impracticable for vehicles that the sound of
wheels is only a trifle less anomalous than it would be in Venice. But
all day long there comes up to my window an incessant shuffling of feet
and clangour of voices. The weather is very warm for the season, all the
world is out of doors, and the Tuscan tongue (which in Siena is reputed
to have a classic purity) wags in every imaginable key. It doesn’t
rest even at night, and I am often an uninvited guest at concerts
and _conversazioni_ at two o’clock in the morning. The concerts are
sometimes charming. I not only don’t curse my wakefulness, but go to my
window to listen. Three men come carolling by, trolling and quavering
with voices of delightful sweetness, or a lonely troubadour in his
shirt-sleeves draws such artful love-notes from his clear, fresh
tenor, that I seem for the moment to be behind the scenes at the opera,
watching some Rubini or Mario go “on” and waiting for the round of
applause. In the intervals a couple of friends or enemies stop--Italians
always make their points in conversation by pulling up, letting you walk
on a few paces, to turn and find them standing with finger on nose
and engaging your interrogative eye--they pause, by a happy instinct,
directly under my window, and dispute their point or tell their story
or make their confidence. One scarce is sure which it may be; everything
has such an explosive promptness, such a redundancy of inflection and
action. But everything for that matter takes on such dramatic life
as our lame colloquies never know--so that almost any uttered
communications here become an acted play, improvised, mimicked,
proportioned and rounded, carried bravely to its _dénoûment_. The
speaker seems actually to establish his stage and face his foot-lights,
to create by a gesture a little scenic circumscription about him; he
rushes to and fro and shouts and stamps and postures, he ranges through
every phase of his inspiration. I noted the other evening a striking
instance of the spontaneity of the Italian gesture, in the person of a
small Sienese of I hardly know what exact age--the age of inarticulate
sounds and the experimental use of a spoon. It was a Sunday evening, and
this little man had accompanied his parents to the café. The Caffè
Greco at Siena is a most delightful institution; you get a capital
_demi-tasse_ for three sous, and an excellent ice for eight, and while
you consume these easy luxuries you may buy from a little hunchback the
local weekly periodical, the _Vita Nuova_, for three centimes (the two
centimes left from your sou, if you are under the spell of this magical
frugality, will do to give the waiter). My young friend was sitting on
his father’s knee and helping himself to the half of a strawberry-ice
with which his mamma had presented him. He had so many misadventures
with his spoon that this lady at length confiscated it, there being
nothing left of the ice but a little crimson liquid which he might
dispose of by the common instinct of childhood. But he was no friend,
it appeared, to such freedoms; he was a perfect little gentleman and he
resented it being expected of him that he should drink down his remnant.
He protested therefore, and it was the manner of his protest that struck
me. He didn’t cry audibly, though he made a very wry face. It was no
stupid squall, and yet he was too young to speak. It was a penetrating
concord of inarticulately pleading, accusing sounds, accompanied by
gestures of the most exquisite propriety. These were perfectly mature;
he did everything that a man of forty would have done if he had been
pouring out a flood of sonorous eloquence. He shrugged his shoulders
and wrinkled his eyebrows, tossed out his hands and folded his arms,
obtruded his chin and bobbed about his head--and at last, I am happy to
say, recovered his spoon. If I had had a solid little silver one I would
have presented it to him as a testimonial to a perfect, though as yet
unconscious, artist.
My actual tribute to him, however, has diverted me from what I had in
mind--a much weightier matter--the great private palaces which are the
massive majestic syllables, sentences, periods, of the strange message
the place addresses to us. They are extraordinarily spacious and
numerous, and one wonders what part they can play in the meagre economy
of the actual city. The Siena of to-day is a mere shrunken semblance
of the rabid little republic which in the thirteenth century waged
triumphant war with Florence, cultivated the arts with splendour,
planned a cathedral (though it had ultimately to curtail the design) of
proportions almost unequalled, and contained a population of two hundred
thousand souls. Many of these dusky piles still bear the names of the
old mediaeval magnates the vague mild occupancy of whose descendants has
the effect of armour of proof worn over “pot” hats and tweed jackets and
trousers. Half-a-dozen of them are as high as the Strozzi and Riccardi
palaces in Florence; they couldn’t well be higher. The very essence of
the romantic and the scenic is in the way these colossal dwellings are
packed together in their steep streets, in the depths of their little
enclosed, agglomerated city. When we, in our day and country, raise a
structure of half the mass and dignity, we leave a great space about
it in the manner of a pause after a showy speech. But when a Sienese
countess, as things are here, is doing her hair near the window, she
is a wonderfully near neighbour to the cavalier opposite, who is being
shaved by his valet. Possibly the countess doesn’t object to a certain
chosen publicity at her toilet; what does an Italian gentleman assure
me but that the aristocracy make very free with each other? Some of the
palaces are shown, but only when the occupants are at home, and now they
are in _villeggiatura_. Their villeggiatura lasts eight months of the
year, the waiter at the inn informs me, and they spend little more than
the carnival in the city. The gossip of an inn-waiter ought perhaps to
be beneath the dignity of even such thin history as this; but I confess
that when, as a story-seeker always and ever, I have come in from my
strolls with an irritated sense of the dumbness of stones and mortar,
it has been to listen with avidity, over my dinner, to the proffered
confidences of the worthy man who stands by with a napkin. His talk is
really very fine, and he prides himself greatly on his cultivated tone,
to which he calls my attention. He has very little good to say about the
Sienese nobility. They are “proprio d’origine egoista”--whatever that
may be--and there are many who can’t write their names. This may be
calumny; but I doubt whether the most blameless of them all could have
spoken more delicately of a lady of peculiar personal appearance who had
been dining near me. “She’s too fat,” I grossly said on her leaving
the room. The waiter shook his head with a little sniff: “È troppo
materiale.” This lady and her companion were the party whom, thinking
I might relish a little company--I had been dining alone for a week--he
gleefully announced to me as newly arrived Americans. They were
Americans, I found, who wore, pinned to their heads in permanence, the
black lace veil or mantilla, conveyed their beans to their mouth with
a knife, and spoke a strange raucous Spanish. They were in fine
compatriots from Montevideo.
{Illustration: THE RED PALACE, SIENA.}
The genius of old Siena, however, would make little of any stress of
such distinctions; one representative of a far-off social platitude
being about as much in order as another as he stands before the great
loggia of the Casino di Nobili, the club of the best society. The
nobility, which is very numerous and very rich, is still, says the
apparently competent native I began by quoting, perfectly feudal and
uplifted and separate. Morally and intellectually, behind the walls of
its palaces, the fourteenth century, it’s thrilling to think, hasn’t
ceased to hang on. There is no bourgeoisie to speak of; immediately
after the aristocracy come the poor people, who are very poor indeed.
My friend’s account of these matters made me wish more than ever, as
a lover of the preserved social specimen, of type at almost any price,
that one weren’t, a helpless victim of the historic sense, reduced
simply to staring at black stones and peeping up stately staircases;
and that when one had examined the street-face of the palace, Murray in
hand, one might walk up to the great drawing-room, make one’s bow to the
master and mistress, the old abbe and the young count, and invite
them to favour one with a sketch of their social philosophy or a few
first-hand family anecdotes.
The dusky labyrinth of the streets, we must in default of such
initiations content ourselves with noting, is interrupted by two great
candid spaces: the fan-shaped piazza, of which I just now said a word,
and the smaller square in which the cathedral erects its walls of
many-coloured marble. Of course since paying the great piazza my
compliments by moonlight I have strolled through it often at sunnier and
shadier hours. The market is held there, and wherever Italians buy and
sell, wherever they count and chaffer--as indeed you hear them do right
and left, at almost any moment, as you take your way among them--the
pulse of life beats fast. It has been doing so on the spot just named, I
suppose, for the last five hundred years, and during that time the cost
of eggs and earthen pots has been gradually but inexorably increasing.
The buyers nevertheless wrestle over their purchases as lustily as so
many fourteenth-century burghers suddenly waking up in horror to current
prices. You have but to walk aside, however, into the Palazzo Pubblico
really to feel yourself a thrifty old medievalist. The state affairs of
the Republic were formerly transacted here, but it now gives shelter
to modern law-courts and other prosy business. I was marched through
a number of vaulted halls and chambers, which, in the intervals of the
administrative sessions held in them, are peopled only by the great
mouldering archaic frescoes--anything but inanimate these even in their
present ruin--that cover the walls and ceiling. The chief painters of
the Sienese school lent a hand in producing the works I name, and you
may complete there the connoisseurship in which, possibly, you will have
embarked at the Academy. I say “possibly” to be very judicial, my own
observation having led me no great length. I have rather than otherwise
cherished the thought that the Sienese school suffers one’s eagerness
peacefully to slumber--benignantly abstains in fact from whipping up
a languid curiosity and a tepid faith. “A formidable rival to the
Florentine,” says some book--I forget which--into which I recently
glanced. Not a bit of it thereupon boldly say I; the Florentines may
rest on their laurels and the lounger on his lounge. The early painters
of the two groups have indeed much in common; but the Florentines had
the good fortune to see their efforts gathered up and applied by a few
pre-eminent spirits, such as never came to the rescue of the groping
Sienese. Fra Angelico and Ghirlandaio said all their feebler _confrères_
dreamt of and a great deal more beside, but the inspiration of Simone
Memmi and Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Sano di Pietro has a painful air of
never efflorescing into a maximum. Sodoma and Beccafumi are to my taste
a rather abortive maximum. But one should speak of them all gently--and
I do, from my soul; for their labour, by their lights, has wrought a
precious heritage of still-living colour and rich figure-peopled shadow
for the echoing chambers of their old civic fortress. The faded frescoes
cover the walls like quaintly-storied tapestries; in one way or another
they cast their spell. If one owes a large debt of pleasure to pictorial
art one comes to think tenderly and easily of its whole evolution, as
of the conscious experience of a single mysterious, striving spirit, and
one shrinks from saying rude things about any particular phase of it,
just as one would from referring without precautions to some error or
lapse in the life of a person one esteemed. You don’t care to remind a
grizzled veteran of his defeats, and why should we linger in Siena to
talk about Beccafumi? I by no means go so far as to say, with an amateur
with whom I have just been discussing the matter, that “Sodoma is a
precious poor painter and Beccafumi no painter at all”; but, opportunity
being limited, I am willing to let the remark about Beccafumi pass for
true. With regard to Sodoma, I remember seeing four years ago in the
choir of the Cathedral of Pisa a certain small dusky specimen of the
painter--an Abraham and Isaac, if I am not mistaken--which was charged
with a gloomy grace. One rarely meets him in general collections, and I
had never done so till the other day. He was not prolific, apparently;
he had however his own elegance, and his rarity is a part of it.
Here in Siena are a couple of dozen scattered frescoes and three or four
canvases; his masterpiece, among others, an harmonious Descent from the
Cross. I wouldn’t give a fig for the equilibrium of the figures or
the ladders; but while it lasts the scene is all intensely solemn and
graceful and sweet--too sweet for so bitter a subject. Sodoma’s
women are strangely sweet; an imaginative sense of morbid appealing
attitude--as notably in the sentimental, the pathetic, but the none the
less pleasant, “Swooning of St. Catherine,” the great Sienese heroine,
at San Domenico--seems to me the author’s finest accomplishment. His
frescoes have all the same almost appealing evasion of difficulty, and a
kind of mild melancholy which I am inclined to think the sincerest
part of them, for it strikes me as practically the artist’s depressed
suspicion of his own want of force. Once he determined, however, that if
he couldn’t be strong he would make capital of his weakness, and painted
the Christ bound to the Column, of the Academy. Here he got much nearer
and I have no doubt mixed his colours with his tears; but the result
can’t be better described than by saying that it is, pictorially, the
first of the modern Christs. Unfortunately it hasn’t been the last.
{Illustration: SAN DOMINICO, SIENA}
The main strength of Sienese art went possibly into the erection of the
Cathedral, and yet even here the strength is not of the greatest strain.
If, however, there are more interesting temples in Italy, there are
few more richly and variously scenic and splendid, the comparative
meagreness of the architectural idea being overlaid by a marvellous
wealth of ingenious detail. Opposite the church--with the dull old
archbishop’s palace on one side and a dismantled residence of the late
Grand Duke of Tuscany on the other--is an ancient hospital with a big
stone bench running all along its front. Here I have sat a while every
morning for a week, like a philosophic convalescent, watching the florid
façade of the cathedral glitter against the deep blue sky. It has been
lavishly restored of late years, and the fresh white marble of the
densely clustered pinnacles and statues and beasts and flowers
flashes in the sunshine like a mosaic of jewels. There is more of this
goldsmith’s work in stone than I can remember or describe; it is piled
up over three great doors with immense margins of exquisite decorative
sculpture--still in the ancient cream-coloured marble--and beneath three
sharp pediments embossed with images relieved against red marble and
tipped with golden mosaics. It is in the highest degree fantastic and
luxuriant--it is on the whole very lovely. As a triumph of the many-hued
it prepares you for the interior, where the same parti-coloured
splendour is endlessly at play--a confident complication of harmonies
and contrasts and of the minor structural refinements and braveries.
The internal surface is mainly wrought in alternate courses of black and
white marble; but as the latter has been dimmed by the centuries to a
fine mild brown the place is all a concert of relieved and dispersed
glooms. Save for Pinturicchio’s brilliant frescoes in the Sacristy
there are no pictures to speak of; but the pavement is covered with many
elaborate designs in black and white mosaic after cartoons by Beccafumi.
The patient skill of these compositions makes them a rare piece of
decoration; yet even here the friend whom I lately quoted rejects this
over-ripe fruit of the Sienese school. The designs are nonsensical, he
declares, and all his admiration is for the cunning artisans who have
imitated the hatchings and shadings and hair-strokes of the pencil
by the finest curves of inserted black stone. But the true romance of
handiwork at Siena is to be seen in the wondrous stalls of the choir,
under the coloured light of the great wheel-window. Wood-carving has
ever been a cherished craft of the place, and the best masters of the
art during the fifteenth century lavished themselves on this prodigious
task. It is the frost-work on one’s window-panes interpreted in polished
oak. It would be hard to find, doubtless, a more moving illustration of
the peculiar patience, the sacred candour, of the great time. Into such
artistry as this the author seems to put more of his personal substance
than into any other; he has to wrestle not only with his subject,
but with his material. He is richly fortunate when his subject is
charming--when his devices, inventions and fantasies spring lightly to
his hand; for in the material itself, after age and use have ripened
and polished and darkened it to the richness of ebony and to a greater
warmth there is something surpassingly delectable and venerable. Wander
behind the altar at Siena when the chanting is over and the incense has
faded, and look well at the stalls of the Barili.
1873.