In the Carthusian Monastery outside the Roman Gate, mutilated and
profaned though it is, one may still snuff up a strong if stale
redolence of old Catholicism and old Italy. The road to it is ugly,
being encumbered with vulgar waggons and fringed with tenements
suggestive of an Irish-American suburb. Your interest begins as you
come in sight of the convent perched on its little mountain and lifting
against the sky, around the bell-tower of its gorgeous chapel, a coronet
of clustered cells. You make your way into the lower gate, through a
clamouring press of deformed beggars who thrust at you their stumps
of limbs, and you climb the steep hillside through a shabby plantation
which it is proper to fancy was better tended in the monkish time. The
monks are not totally abolished, the government having the grace to
await the natural extinction of the half-dozen old brothers who remain,
and who shuffle doggedly about the cloisters, looking, with their white
robes and their pale blank old faces, quite anticipatory ghosts of their
future selves. A prosaic, profane old man in a coat and trousers serves
you, however, as custodian. The melancholy friars have not even the
privilege of doing you the honours of their dishonour. One must imagine
the pathetic effect of their former silent pointings to this and that
conventual treasure under stress of the feeling that such pointings were
narrowly numbered. The convent is vast and irregular--it bristles with
those picture-making arts and accidents which one notes as one lingers
and passes, but which in Italy the overburdened memory learns to resolve
into broadly general images. I rather deplore its position at the gates
of a bustling city--it ought rather to be lodged in some lonely fold of
the Apennines. And yet to look out from the shady porch of one of the
quiet cells upon the teeming vale of the Arno and the clustered towers
of Florence must have deepened the sense of monastic quietude.
The chapel, or rather the church, which is of great proportions and
designed by Andrea Orcagna, the primitive painter, refines upon the
consecrated type or even quite glorifies it. The massive cincture
of black sculptured stalls, the dusky Gothic roof, the high-hung,
deep-toned pictures and the superb pavement of verd-antique and dark red
marble, polished into glassy lights, must throw the white-robed figures
of the gathered friars into the highest romantic relief. All this luxury
of worship has nowhere such value as in the chapels of monasteries,
where we find it contrasted with the otherwise so ascetic economy of the
worshippers. The paintings and gildings of their church, the gem-bright
marbles and fantastic carvings, are really but the monastic tribute to
sensuous delight--an imperious need for which the fond imagination of
Rome has officiously opened the door. One smiles when one thinks how
largely a fine starved sense for the forbidden things of earth, if it
makes the most of its opportunities, may gratify this need under
cover of devotion. Nothing is too base, too hard, too sordid for real
humility, but nothing too elegant, too amiable, too caressing, caressed,
caressable, for the exaltation of faith. The meaner the convent cell the
richer the convent chapel. Out of poverty and solitude, inanition and
cold, your honest friar may rise at his will into a Mahomet’s Paradise
of luxurious analogies.
There are further various dusky subterranean oratories where a number
of bad pictures contend faintly with the friendly gloom. Two or three of
these funereal vaults, however, deserve mention. In one of them, side
by side, sculptured by Donatello in low relief, lie the white marble
effigies of the three members of the Accaiuoli family who founded the
convent in the thirteenth century. In another, on his back, on the
pavement, rests a grim old bishop of the same stout race by the same
honest craftsman. Terribly grim he is, and scowling as if in his stony
sleep he still dreamed of his hates and his hard ambitions. Last and
best, in another low chapel, with the trodden pavement for its bed,
shines dimly a grand image of a later bishop--Leonardo Buonafede, who,
dying in 1545, owes his monument to Francesco di San Gallo. I have seen
little from this artist’s hand, but it was clearly of the cunningest.
His model here was a very sturdy old prelate, though I should say a very
genial old man. The sculptor has respected his monumental ugliness,
but has suffused it with a singular homely charm--a look of confessed
physical comfort in the privilege of paradise. All these figures have
an inimitable reality, and their lifelike marble seems such an
incorruptible incarnation of the genius of the place that you begin to
think of it as even more reckless than cruel on the part of the present
public powers to have begun to pull the establishment down, morally
speaking, about their ears. They are lying quiet yet a while; but when
the last old friar dies and the convent formally lapses, won’t they rise
on their stiff old legs and hobble out to the gates and thunder forth
anathemas before which even a future and more enterprising régime may be
disposed to pause?
Out of the great central cloister open the snug little detached
dwellings of the absent fathers. When I said just now that the Certosa
in Val d’Ema gives you a glimpse of old Italy I was thinking of this
great pillared quadrangle, lying half in sun and half in shade, of its
tangled garden-growth in the centre, surrounding the ancient customary
well, and of the intense blue sky bending above it, to say nothing of
the indispensable old white-robed monk who pokes about among the lettuce
and parsley. We have seen such places before; we have visited them in
that divinatory glance which strays away into space for a moment over
the top of a suggestive book. I don’t quite know whether it’s more or
less as one’s fancy would have it that the monkish cells are no cells
at all, but very tidy little _appartements complets_, consisting of a
couple of chambers, a sitting-room and a spacious loggia, projecting out
into space from the cliff-like wall of the monastery and sweeping from
pole to pole the loveliest view in the world. It’s poor work, however,
taking notes on views, and I will let this one pass. The little chambers
are terribly cold and musty now. Their odour and atmosphere are such
as one used, as a child, to imagine those of the school-room during
Saturday and Sunday.