A couple of days since, driving to Fiesole, we came back by the castle
of Vincigliata. The afternoon was lovely; and, though there is as yet
(February 10th) no visible revival of vegetation, the air was full of a
vague vernal perfume, and the warm colours of the hills and the yellow
western sunlight flooding the plain seemed to contain the promise of
Nature’s return to grace. It’s true that above the distant pale blue
gorge of Vallombrosa the mountain-line was tipped with snow; but the
liberated soul of Spring was nevertheless at large. The view from
Fiesole seems vaster and richer with each visit. The hollow in which
Florence lies, and which from below seems deep and contracted, opens
out into an immense and generous valley and leads away the eye into
a hundred gradations of distance. The place itself showed, amid its
chequered fields and gardens, with as many towers and spires as a
chess-board half cleared. The domes and towers were washed over with
a faint blue mist. The scattered columns of smoke, interfused with the
sinking sunlight, hung over them like streamers and pennons of silver
gauze; and the Arno, twisting and curling and glittering here and there,
was a serpent cross-striped with silver.
Vincigliata is a product of the millions, the leisure and the
eccentricity, I suppose people say, of an English gentleman--Mr. Temple
Leader, whose name should be commemorated. You reach the castle from
Fiesole by a narrow road, returning toward Florence by a romantic twist
through the hills and passing nothing on its way save thin plantations
of cypress and cedar. Upward of twenty years ago, I believe, this
gentleman took a fancy to the crumbling shell of a mediæval fortress on
a breezy hill-top overlooking the Val d’ Arno and forthwith bought it
and began to “restore” it. I know nothing of what the original ruin may
have cost; but in the dusky courts and chambers of the present elaborate
structure this impassioned archæologist must have buried a fortune. He
has, however, the compensation of feeling that he has erected a monument
which, if it is never to stand a feudal siege, may encounter at least
some critical over-hauling. It is a disinterested work of art and really
a triumph of æsthetic culture. The author has reproduced with minute
accuracy a sturdy home-fortress of the fourteenth century, and has kept
throughout such rigid terms with his model that the result is literally
uninhabitable to degenerate moderns. It is simply a massive facsimile,
an elegant museum of archaic images, mainly but most amusingly
counterfeit, perched on a spur of the Apennines. The place is most
politely shown. There is a charming cloister, painted with extremely
clever “quaint” frescoes, celebrating the deeds of the founders of the
castle--a cloister that is everything delightful a cloister should
be except truly venerable and employable. There is a beautiful castle
court, with the embattled tower climbing into the blue far above it,
and a spacious loggia with rugged medallions and mild-hued Luca della
Robbias fastened unevenly into the walls. But the apartments are the
great success, and each of them as good a “reconstruction” as a tale
of Walter Scott; or, to speak frankly, a much better one. They are all
low-beamed and vaulted, stone-paved, decorated in grave colours
and lighted, from narrow, deeply recessed windows, through small
leaden-ringed plates of opaque glass.
The details are infinitely ingenious and elaborately grim, and the
indoor atmosphere of mediaevalism most forcibly revived. No compromising
fact of domiciliary darkness and cold is spared us, no producing
condition of mediaeval manners not glanced at. There are oaken benches
round the room, of about six inches in depth, and gaunt fauteuils of
wrought leather, illustrating the suppressed transitions which, as
George Eliot says, unite all contrasts--offering a visible link between
the modern conceptions of torture and of luxury. There are fireplaces
nowhere but in the kitchen, where a couple of sentry-boxes are inserted
on either side of the great hooded chimney-piece, into which people
might creep and take their turn at being toasted and smoked. One may
doubt whether this dearth of the hearthstone could have raged on such
a scale, but it’s a happy stroke in the representation of an Italian
dwelling of any period. It shows how the graceful fiction that Italy
is all “meridional” flourished for some time before being refuted
by grumbling tourists. And yet amid this cold comfort you feel the
incongruous presence of a constant intuitive regard for beauty. The
shapely spring of the vaulted ceilings; the richly figured walls, coarse
and hard in substance as they are; the charming shapes of the great
platters and flagons in the deep recesses of the quaintly carved black
dressers; the wandering hand of ornament, as it were, playing here and
there for its own diversion in unlighted corners--such things redress,
to our fond credulity, with all sorts of grace, the balance of the
picture.
And yet, somehow, with what dim, unillumined vision one fancies even
such inmates as those conscious of finer needs than the mere supply of
blows and beef and beer would meet passing their heavy eyes over
such slender household beguilements! These crepuscular chambers
at Vincigliata are a mystery and a challenge; they seem the mere
propounding of an answerless riddle. You long, as you wander through
them, turning up your coat-collar and wondering whether ghosts can catch
bronchitis, to answer it with some positive notion of what people so
encaged and situated “did,” how they looked and talked and carried
themselves, how they took their pains and pleasures, how they counted
off the hours. Deadly ennui seems to ooze out of the stones and hang in
clouds in the brown corners. No wonder men relished a fight and panted
for a fray. “Skull-smashers” were sweet, ears ringing with pain and
ribs cracking in a tussle were soothing music, compared with the cruel
quietude of the dim-windowed castle. When they came back they could only
have slept a good deal and eased their dislocated bones on those meagre
oaken ledges. Then they woke up and turned about to the table and ate
their portion of roasted sheep. They shouted at each other across the
board and flung the wooden plates at the servingmen. They jostled and
hustled and hooted and bragged; and then, after gorging and boozing
and easing their doublets, they squared their elbows one by one on the
greasy table and buried their scarred foreheads and dreamed of a good
gallop after flying foes. And the women? They must have been strangely
simple--simpler far than any moral archraeologist can show us in a
learned restoration. Of course, their simplicity had its graces and
devices; but one thinks with a sigh that, as the poor things turned away
with patient looks from the viewless windows to the same, same looming
figures on the dusky walls, they hadn’t even the consolation of knowing
that just this attitude and movement, set off by their peaked coifs,
their falling sleeves and heavily-twisted trains, would sow the seed of
yearning envy--of sorts--on the part of later generations.
There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest
against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and
sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful
useless things. But the healthier state of mind surely is to lay no tax
on any really intelligent manifestation of the curious, and exquisite.
Intelligence hangs together essentially, all along the line; it only
needs time to make, as we say, its connections. The massive _pastiche_
of Vincigliata has no superficial use; but, even if it were less
complete, less successful, less brilliant, I should feel a reflective
kindness for it. So disinterested and expensive a toy is its own
justification; it belongs to the heroics of dilettantism.