The cities I refer to are Leghorn, Pisa, Lucca and Pistoia, among which
I have been spending the last few days. The most striking fact as to
Leghorn, it must be conceded at the outset, is that, being in Tuscany,
it should be so scantily Tuscan. The traveller curious in local colour
must content himself with the deep blue expanse of the Mediterranean.
The streets, away from the docks, are modern, genteel and rectangular;
Liverpool might acknowledge them if it weren’t for their clean-coloured,
sun-bleached stucco. They are the offspring of the new industry which is
death to the old idleness. Of interesting architecture, fruit of the
old idleness or at least of the old leisure, Leghorn is singularly
destitute. It has neither a church worth one’s attention, nor a
municipal palace, nor a museum, and it may claim the distinction, unique
in Italy, of being the city of no pictures. In a shabby corner near
the docks stands a statue of one of the elder Grand Dukes of Tuscany,
appealing to posterity on grounds now vague--chiefly that of having
placed certain Moors under tribute. Four colossal negroes, in very bad
bronze, are chained to the base of the monument, which forms with their
assistance a sufficiently fantastic group; but to patronise the arts is
not the line of the Livornese, and for want of the slender annuity
which would keep its precinct sacred this curious memorial is buried
in dockyard rubbish. I must add that on the other hand there is a very
well-conditioned and, in attitude and gesture, extremely natural and
familiar statue of Cavour in one of the city squares, and in another a
couple of effigies of recent Grand Dukes, represented, that is dressed,
or rather undressed, in the character of heroes of Plutarch. Leghorn
is a city of magnificent spaces, and it was so long a journey from the
sidewalk to the pedestal of these images that I never took the time
to go and read the inscriptions. And in truth, vaguely, I bore the
originals a grudge, and wished to know as little about them as possible;
for it seemed to me that as _patres patrae_, in their degree, they might
have decreed that the great blank, ochre-faced piazza should be a trifle
less ugly. There is a distinct amenity, however, in any experience of
Italy almost anywhere, and I shall probably in the future not be above
sparing a light regret to several of the hours of which the one I speak
of was composed. I shall remember a large cool bourgeois villa in the
garden of a noiseless suburb--a middle-aged Villa Franco (I owe it as a
genial pleasant _pension_ the tribute of recognition), roomy and stony,
as an Italian villa should be. I shall remember that, as I sat in the
garden, and, looking up from my book, saw through a gap in the shrubbery
the red house-tiles against the deep blue sky and the grey underside of
the ilex-leaves turned up by the Mediterranean breeze, it was all still
quite Tuscany, if Tuscany in the minor key.
If you should naturally desire, in such conditions, a higher intensity,
you have but to proceed, by a very short journey, to Pisa--where, for
that matter, you will seem to yourself to have hung about a good deal
already, and from an early age. Few of us can have had a childhood
so unblessed by contact with the arts as that one of its occasional
diversions shan’t have been a puzzled scrutiny of some alabaster model
of the Leaning Tower under a glass cover in a back-parlour. Pisa and its
monuments have, in other words, been industriously vulgarised, but it
is astonishing how well they have survived the process. The charm of the
place is in fact of a high order and but partially foreshadowed by the
famous crookedness of its campanile. I felt it irresistibly and yet
almost inexpressibly the other afternoon, as I made my way to the
classic corner of the city through the warm drowsy air which nervous
people come to inhale as a sedative. I was with an invalid companion who
had had no sleep to speak of for a fortnight. “Ah! stop the carriage,”
she sighed, or yawned, as I could feel, deliciously, “in the shadow of
this old slumbering palazzo, and let me sit here and close my eyes, and
taste for an hour of oblivion.” Once strolling over the grass, however,
out of which the quartette of marble monuments rises, we awaked
responsively enough to the present hour. Most people remember the happy
remark of tasteful, old-fashioned Forsyth (who touched a hundred other
points in his “Italy” scarce less happily) as to the fact that the
four famous objects are “fortunate alike in their society and their
solitude.” It must be admitted that they are more fortunate in their
society than we felt ourselves to be in ours; for the scene presented
the animated appearance for which, on any fine spring day, all the
choicest haunts of ancient quietude in Italy are becoming yearly more
remarkable. There were clamorous beggars at all the sculptured portals,
and bait for beggars, in abundance, trailing in and out of them under
convoy of loquacious ciceroni. I forget just how I apportioned the
responsibility, of intrusion, for it was not long before fellow-tourists
and fellow-countrymen became a vague, deadened, muffled presence, that
of the dentist’s last words when he is giving you ether. They suffered
mystic disintegration in the dense, bright, tranquil air, so charged
with its own messages. The Cathedral and its companions are fortunate
indeed in everything--fortunate in the spacious angle of the grey old
city-wall which folds about them in their sculptured elegance like a
strong protecting arm; fortunate in the broad greensward which stretches
from the marble base of Cathedral and cemetery to the rugged foot of the
rampart; fortunate in the little vagabonds who dot the grass, plucking
daisies and exchanging Italian cries; fortunate in the pale-gold tone to
which time and the soft sea-damp have mellowed and darkened their marble
plates; fortunate, above all, in an indescribable grace of grouping,
half hazard, half design, which insures them, in one’s memory of things
admired, very much the same isolated corner that they occupy in the
charming city.
Of the smaller cathedrals of Italy I know none I prefer to that of Pisa;
none that, on a moderate scale, produces more the impression of a great
church. It has without so modest a measurability, represents so clean
and compact a mass, that you are startled when you cross the threshold
at the apparent space it encloses. An architect of genius, for all that
he works with colossal blocks and cumbrous pillars, is certainly the
most cunning of conjurors. The front of the Duomo is a small pyramidal
screen, covered with delicate carvings and chasings, distributed over
a series of short columns upholding narrow arches. It might be a
sought imitation of goldsmith’s work in stone, and the area covered is
apparently so small that extreme fineness has been prescribed. How it is
therefore that on the inner side of this façade the wall should appear
to rise to a splendid height and to support one end of a ceiling as
remote in its gilded grandeur, one could almost fancy, as that of St.
Peter’s; how it is that the nave should stretch away in such solemn
vastness, the shallow transepts emphasise the grand impression and the
apse of the choir hollow itself out like a dusky cavern fretted
with golden stalactites, is all matter for exposition by a keener
architectural analyst than I. To sit somewhere against a pillar where
the vista is large and the incidents cluster richly, and vaguely revolve
these mysteries without answering them, is the best of one’s usual
enjoyment of a great church. It takes no deep sounding to conclude
indeed that a gigantic Byzantine Christ in mosaic, on the concave roof
of the choir, contributes largely to the particular impression here as
of very old and choice and original and individual things. It has even
more of stiff solemnity than is common to works of its school, and
prompts to more wonder than ever on the nature of the human mind at a
time when such unlovely shapes could satisfy its conception of holiness.
Truly pathetic is the fate of these huge mosaic idols, thanks to the
change that has overtaken our manner of acceptance of them. Strong the
contrast between the original sublimity of their pretensions and the way
in which they flatter that free sense of the grotesque which the modern
imagination has smuggled even into the appreciation of religious forms.
They were meant to yield scarcely to the Deity itself in grandeur, but
the only part they play now is to stare helplessly at our critical, our
aesthetic patronage of them. The spiritual refinement marking the hither
end of a progress had n’t, however, to wait for us to signalise it; it
found expression three centuries ago in the beautiful specimen of the
painter Sodoma on the wall of the choir. This latter, a small Sacrifice
of Isaac, is one of the best examples of its exquisite author, and
perhaps, as chance has it, the most perfect opposition that could
be found in the way of the range of taste to the effect of the great
mosaic. There are many painters more powerful than Sodoma--painters who,
like the author of the mosaic, attempted and compassed grandeur; but
none has a more persuasive grace, none more than he was to sift and
chasten a conception till it should affect one with the sweetness of a
perfectly distilled perfume.
Of the patient successive efforts of painting to arrive at the supreme
refinement of such a work as the Sodoma the Campo Santo hard by offers a
most interesting memorial. It presents a long, blank marble wall to the
relative profaneness of the Cathedral close, but within it is a perfect
treasure-house of art. This quadrangular defence surrounds an open court
where weeds and wild roses are tangled together and a sunny stillness
seems to rest consentingly, as if Nature had been won to consciousness
of the precious relics committed to her. Something in the quality of the
place recalls the collegiate cloisters of Oxford, but it must be added
that this is the handsomest compliment to that seat of learning. The
open arches of the quadrangles of Magdalen and Christ Church are not
of mellow Carrara marble, nor do they offer to sight columns, slim and
elegant, that seem to frame the unglazed windows of a cathedral. To be
buried in the Campo Santo of Pisa, I may however further qualify, you
need only be, or to have more or less anciently been, illustrious, and
there is a liberal allowance both as to the character and degree of
your fame. The most obtrusive object in one of the long vistas is a most
complicated monument to Madame Catalani, the singer, recently erected
by her possibly too-appreciative heirs. The wide pavement is a mosaic of
sepulchral slabs, and the walls, below the base of the paling frescoes,
are incrusted with inscriptions and encumbered with urns and antique
sarcophagi. The place is at once a cemetery and a museum, and its
especial charm is its strange mixture of the active and the passive,
of art and rest, of life and death. Originally its walls were one vast
continuity of closely pressed frescoes; but now the great capricious
scars and stains have come to outnumber the pictures, and the cemetery
has grown to be a burial-place of pulverised masterpieces as well as of
finished lives. The fragments of painting that remain are fortunately
the best; for one is safe in believing that a host of undimmed
neighbours would distract but little from the two great works of
Orcagna. Most people know the “Triumph of Death” and the “Last Judgment”
from descriptions and engravings; but to measure the possible good faith
of imitative art one must stand there and see the painter’s howling
potentates dragged into hell in all the vividness of his bright hard
colouring; see his feudal courtiers, on their palfreys, hold their noses
at what they are so fast coming to; see his great Christ, in judgment,
refuse forgiveness with a gesture commanding enough, really inhuman
enough, to make virtue merciless for ever. The charge that Michael
Angelo borrowed his cursing Saviour from this great figure of Orcagna is
more valid than most accusations of plagiarism; but of the two figures
one at least could be spared. For direct, triumphant expressiveness
these two superb frescoes have probably never been surpassed. The
painter aims at no very delicate meanings, but he drives certain gross
ones home so effectively that for a parallel to his process one must
look to the art of the actor, the emphasising “point”--making mime.
Some of his female figures are superb--they represent creatures of a
formidable temperament.
There are charming women, however, on the other side of the cloister--in
the beautiful frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli. If Orcagna’s work was
appointed to survive the ravage of time it is a happy chance that
it should be balanced by a group of performances of such a different
temper. The contrast is the more striking that in subject the
inspiration of both painters is strictly, even though superficially,
theological. But Benozzo cares, in his theology, for nothing but the
story, the scene and the drama--the chance to pile up palaces and spires
in his backgrounds against pale blue skies cross-barred with pearly,
fleecy clouds, and to scatter sculptured arches and shady trellises over
the front, with every incident of human life going forward lightly and
gracefully beneath them. Lightness and grace are the painter’s great
qualities, marking the hithermost limit of unconscious elegance, after
which “style” and science and the wisdom of the serpent set in.
His charm is natural fineness; a little more and we should have
refinement--which is a very different thing. Like all _les délicats_ of
this world, as M. Renan calls them, Benozzo has suffered greatly. The
space on the walls he originally covered with his Old Testament stories
is immense; but his exquisite handiwork has peeled off by the acre,
as one may almost say, and the latter compartments of the series are
swallowed up in huge white scars, out of which a helpless head or hand
peeps forth like those of creatures sinking into a quicksand. As
for Pisa at large, although it is not exactly what one would call
a mouldering city--for it has a certain well-aired cleanness and
brightness, even in its supreme tranquillity--it affects the imagination
very much in the same way as the Campo Santo. And, in truth, a city
so ancient and deeply historic as Pisa is at every step but the
burial-ground of a larger life than its present one. The wide empty
streets, the goodly Tuscan palaces--which look as if about all of them
there were a genteel private understanding, independent of placards,
that they are to be let extremely cheap--the delicious relaxing air,
the full-flowing yellow river, the lounging Pisani, smelling,
metaphorically, their poppy-flowers, seemed to me all so many
admonitions to resignation and oblivion. And this is what I mean by
saying that the charm of Pisa (apart from its cluster of monuments) is
a charm of a high order. The architecture has but a modest dignity; the
lions are few; there are no fixed points for stopping and gaping. And
yet the impression is profound; the charm is a moral charm. If I were
ever to be incurably disappointed in life, if I had lost my health,
my money, or my friends, if I were resigned forevermore to pitching my
expectations in a minor key, I should go and invoke the Pisan peace. Its
quietude would seem something more than a stillness--a hush. Pisa may be
a dull place to live in, but it’s an ideal place to wait for death.
Nothing could be more charming than the country between Pisa and
Lucca--unless possibly the country between Lucca and Pistoia. If Pisa is
dead Tuscany, Lucca is Tuscany still living and enjoying, desiring and
intending. The town is a charming mixture of antique “character” and
modern inconsequence; and! not only the town, but the country--the
blooming romantic country which you admire from the famous promenade
on the city-wall. The wall is of superbly solid and intensely “toned”
brickwork and of extraordinary breadth, and its summit, planted with
goodly trees and swelling here and there into bastions and outworks and
little open gardens, surrounds the city with a circular lounging-place
of a splendid dignity. This well-kept, shady, ivy-grown rampart reminded
me of certain mossy corners of England; but it looks away to a prospect
of more than English loveliness--a broad green plain where the summer
yields a double crop of grain, and a circle of bright blue mountains
speckled with high-hung convents and profiled castles and nestling
villas, and traversed by valleys of a deeper and duskier blue. In one of
the deepest and shadiest of these recesses one of the most “sympathetic”
of small watering-places is hidden away yet a while longer from
easy invasion--the Baths to which Lucca has lent its name. Lucca is
pre-eminently a city of churches; ecclesiastical architecture being
indeed the only one of the arts to which it seems to have given
attention. There are curious bits of domestic architecture, but no
great palaces, and no importunate frequency of pictures. The Cathedral,
however, sums up the merits of its companions and is a singularly noble
and interesting church. Its peculiar boast is a wonderful inlaid front,
on which horses and hounds and hunted beasts are lavishly figured in
black marble over a white ground. What I chiefly appreciated in the grey
solemnity of the nave and transepts was the superb effect of certain
second-storey Gothic arches--those which rest on the pavement being
Lombard. These arches are delicate and slender, like those of the
cloister at Pisa, and they play their part in the dusky upper air with
real sublimity.
At Pistoia there is of course a Cathedral, and there is nothing
unexpected in its being, externally at least, highly impressive; in its
having a grand campanile at its door, a gaudy baptistery, in alternate
layers of black and white marble, across the way, and a stately civic
palace on either side. But even had I the space to do otherwise I should
prefer to speak less of the particular objects of interest in the place
than of the pleasure I found it to lounge away in the empty streets the
quiet hours of a warm afternoon. To say where I lingered longest would
be to tell of a little square before the hospital, out of which you
look up at the beautiful frieze in coloured earthernware by the brothers
Della Robbia, which runs across the front of the building. It represents
the seven orthodox offices of charity and, with its brilliant blues and
yellows and its tender expressiveness, brightens up amazingly, to the
sense and soul, this little grey corner of the mediaeval city. Pi stoia
is still mediaeval. How grass-grown it seemed, how drowsy, how full of
idle vistas and melancholy nooks! If nothing was supremely wonderful,
everything was delicious.
{Illustration: THE HOSPITAL, PISTOIA.}
1874.