It was in the year of grace 1490, in the reign of Guidobaldo, Lord
of Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino,--the year, by the way, of the
birth of that most illustrious and gracious lady, Vittoria
Colonna.
It was in the spring of the year, in that mountain eyrie beloved
of the Muses and coveted of the Borgia, that a little boy stood
looking out of a grated casement into the calm, sunshiny day. He
was a pretty boy, with hazel eyes, and fair hair cut straight
above his brows; he wore a little blue tunic with some embroidery
about the throat of it, and had in his hand a little round flat
cap of the same color. He was sad of heart this merry morning, for
a dear friend of his, a friend ten years older than himself, had
gone the night before on a journey over the mountains to Maestro
Francesco at Bologna, there to be bound apprentice to that gentle
artist. This friend, Timoteo della Vita, had been very dear to the
child, had played with him and jested with him, made him toys and
told him stories, and he was very full of pain at Timoteo's loss.
Yet he told himself not to mind, for had not Timoteo said to him,
"I go as goldsmith's 'prentice to the best of men; but I mean to
become a painter"? And the child understood that to be a painter
was to be the greatest and wisest the world held; he quite
understood that, for he was Raffaelle, the seven-year-old son of
Signor Giovanni Sanzio.
He was a very happy little boy here in this stately, yet homely
and kindly Urbino, where his people had come for refuge when the
lances of Malatesta had ravaged and ruined their homestead. He had
the dearest old grandfather in all the world; he had a loving
mother, and he had a father who was very tender to him, and
painted him among the angels of heaven, and was always full of
pleasant conceits and admirable learning, and such true love of
art that the child breathed it with every breath, as he could
breathe the sweetness of a cowslip-bell when he held one in his
hands up to his nostrils. It was good in those days to live in old
Urbino. It was not, indeed, so brilliant a place as it became in a
later day, when Ariosto came there, and Bembo and Castiglione and
many another witty and learned gentleman, and the Courts of Love
were held with ingenious rhyme and pretty sentiment, sad only for
wantonness. But, if not so brilliant, it was homelier, simpler,
full of virtue, with a wise peace and tranquillity that joined
hands with a stout courage. The burgher was good friends with his
prince, and knew that in any trouble or perplexity he could go up
to the palace, or stop the duke in the market place, and be sure
of sympathy and good counsel. There were a genuine love of
beautiful things, a sense of public duty and of public spirit, a
loyal temper and a sage contentment, among the good people of that
time, which made them happy and prosperous.
All work was solidly and thoroughly done, living was cheap, and
food good and plentiful, much better and more plentiful than it is
now; in the fine old houses every stone was sound, every bit of
ornament well wrought; men made their nests to live in and to pass
to their children and children's children after them, and had
their own fancies and their own traditions recorded in the
ironwork of their casements and in the woodwork of their doors.
They had their happy day of honest toil from matins bell to
evensong, and then walked out or sat about in the calm evening air
and looked down on the plains below that were rich with grain and
fruit and woodland, and talked and laughed among each other, and
were content with their own pleasant, useful lives, not burnt up
with envy of desire to be some one else, as in our sickly,
hurrying time most people are.
Yes, life must have been very good in those old days in old
Urbino, better than it is anywhere in ours.
Can you not picture to yourself good, shrewd, wise Giovanni
Sanzio, with his old father by his side, and his little son
running before him, in the holy evening time of a feast day, with
the deep church bells swaying above-head, and the last sun-rays
smiting the frescoed walls, the stone bastions, the blazoned
standard on the castle roof, the steep city rocks shelving down
into the greenery of cherry orchard and of pear tree? I can,
whenever I shut my eyes and recall Urbino as it was; and would it
had been mine to live then in that mountain home, and meet that
divine child going along his happy smiling way, garnering
unconsciously in his infant soul all the beautiful sights and
sounds around him, to give them in his manhood to the world.
"Let him alone: he will paint all this some day," said his wise
father, who loved to think that his brushes and his colors would
pass in time to Raffaelle, whose hands would be stronger to hold
them than his own had been. And, whether he would ever paint it or
not, the child never tired of thus looking from his eyrie on the
rocks and counting all that passed below through the blowing corn
under the leafy orchard boughs.
There were so many things to see in Urbino in that time, looking
so over the vast green valley below: a clump of spears, most
likely, as men-at-arms rode through the trees; a string of market
folk bringing in the produce of the orchards or the fields;
perchance a red-robed cardinal on a white mule with glittering
housings, behind him a sumpter train rich with baggage, furniture,
gold and silver plate; maybe the duke's hunting party going out or
coming homeward with caracoling steeds, beautiful hounds straining
at their leash, hunting horns sounding merrily over the green
country; maybe a band of free lances, with plumes tossing, steel
glancing, bannerets fluttering against the sky; or maybe a quiet
gray-robed string of monks or pilgrims singing the hymn sung
before Jerusalem, treading the long lush grass with sandaled feet,
coming towards the city, to crowd slowly and gladly up its rocky
height. Do you not wish with me you could stand in the window with
Raffaelle to see the earth as it was then?
No doubt the good folks of Urbino laughed at him often for a
little moonstruck dreamer, so many hours did he stand looking,
looking,--only looking,--as eyes have a right to do that see well
and not altogether as others see. Happily for him, the days of his
childhood were times of peace, and he did not behold, as his
father had done, the torches light up the street and the flames
devour the homesteads.
At this time Urbino was growing into fame for its pottery work:
those big dishes and bowls, those marriage plates and pharmacy
jars which it made, were beginning to rival the products of its
neighbor Gubbio, and when its duke wished to send a bridal gift,
or a present on other festal occasions, he oftenest chose some
service or some rare platter of his own Urbino ware. Now, pottery
had not then taken the high place among the arts of Italy that it
was destined very soon to do. As you will learn when you are
older, after the Greeks and the Christians had exhausted all that
was beautiful in shape and substance of clay vases, the art seemed
to die out, and the potters and the pottery painters died with it,
or at any rate went to sleep for a great many centuries, whilst
soldiers and prelates, nobles and mercenaries, were trampling to
and fro all over the land and disputing it, and carrying fire and
torch, steel and desolation, with them in their quarrels and
covetousness. But now, the reign of the late good duke, great
Federigo, having been favorable to the Marches (as we call his
province now), the potters and pottery painters, with other gentle
craftsmen, had begun to look up again, and the beneficent fires of
their humble ovens had begun to burn in Castel Durante, in Pesaro,
in Faenza, in Gubbio, and in Urbino itself. The great days had not
yet come: Maestro Giorgio was but a youngster, and Orazio Fontane
not born, nor the clever baker Prestino either, nor the famous Fra
Xanto; but there was a Don Giorgio even then in Gubbio, of whose
work, alas! one plate now at the Louvre is all we have; and here
in the ducal city on the hill rich and noble things were already
being made in the stout and lustrous majolica that was destined to
acquire later on so wide a ceramic fame. Jars and bowls and
platters, oval dishes and ewers and basins, and big-bodied, metal-
welded pharmacy vases were all made and painted at Urbino whilst
Raffaelle Sanzio was running about on rosy infantine feet. There
was a master-potter of the Montefeltro at that time, one Maestro
Benedetto Ronconi, whose name had not become world-renowned as
Orazio Fontane's and Maestro Giorgio's did in the following
century, yet who in that day enjoyed the honor of all the duchy,
and did things very rare and fine in the Urbino ware. He lived
within a stone's throw of Giovanni Sanzio, and was a gray-haired,
handsome, somewhat stern and pompous man, now more than middle-
aged, who had one beauteous daughter, by name Pacifica. He
cherished Pacifica well, but not so well as he cherished the
things he wrought--the deep round nuptial plates and oval massive
dishes that he painted with Scriptural stories and strange
devices, and landscapes such as those he saw around, and flowing
scrolls with Latin mottoes in black letters, and which, when thus
painted, he consigned with an anxiously beating heart to the trial
of the ovens, and which sometimes came forth from the trial all
cracked and blurred and marred, and sometimes emerged in triumph
and came into his trembling hands iridescent and lovely with those
lustrous and opaline hues which we admire in them to this day as
the especial glory of majolica.
Maestro Benedetto was an ambitious and vain man, and had had a
hard, laborious manhood, working at his potter's wheel and
painter's brush before Urbino ware was prized in Italy or even in
the duchy. Now, indeed, he was esteemed at his due worth, and his
work was so also, and he was passably rich, and known as a good
artist beyond the Marches; but there was a younger man over at
Gubbio, the Don Giorgio who was precursor of unequaled Maestro
Giorgio Andreoli, who surpassed him, and made him sleep o' nights
on thorns, as envy makes all those to do who take her as their
bedfellow.
The house of Maestro Benedetto was a long stone building, with a
loggia at the back all overclimbed by hardy rose trees, and
looking on a garden that was more than half an orchard, and in
which grew abundantly pear trees, plum trees, and wood strawberries.
The lancet windows of his workshop looked on all this quiet greenery.
There were so many such pleasant workshops then in the land--calm,
godly, homelike places, filled from without with song of birds and
scent of herbs and blossoms. Nowadays men work in crowded, stinking
cities, in close factory chambers; and their work is barren as their
lives are.
The little son of neighbor Sanzio ran in and out this bigger,
wider house and garden of Maestro Benedetto at his pleasure, for
the maiden Pacifica was always glad to see him, and even the
sombre master-potter would unbend to him, and show him how to lay
the color on to the tremulous, fugitive, unbaked biscuit.
Pacifica was a lovely young woman of some seventeen or eighteen
summers; and perhaps Raffaelle was but remembering her when he
painted in his after-years the face of his Madonna di San Sisto.
He loved her as he loved everything that was beautiful and every
one who was kind; and almost better than his own beloved father's
studio, almost better than his dear old grandsire's cheerful
little shop, did he love this grave, silent, sweet-smelling, sun-
pierced, shadowy old house of Maestro Benedetto.
Maestro Benedetto had four apprentices or pupils in that time
learning to become figuli, but the one whom Raffaelle liked the
most (and Pacifica too) was one Luca Torelli, of a village above
in the mountains,--a youth with a noble, dark, pensive beauty of
his own, and a fearless gait, and a supple, tall, slender figure
that would have looked well in the light coat of mail and silken
doublet of a man-at-arms. In sooth, the spirit of Messer Luca was
more made for war and its risks and glories than for the wheel and
the brush of the bottega; but he had loved Pacifica ever since he
had come down one careless holy-day into Urbino, and had bound
himself to her father's service in a heedless moment of eagerness
to breathe the same air and dwell under the same roof as she did.
He had gained little for his pains: to see her at mass and at
mealtimes, now and then to be allowed to bring water from the well
for her or feed her pigeons, to see her gray gown go down between
the orchard trees and catch the sunlight, to hear the hum of her
spinning wheel, the thrum of her viol--this was the uttermost he
got of joy in two long years; and how he envied Raffaelle running
along the stone floor of the loggia to leap into her arms, to hang
upon her skirts, to pick the summer fruit with her, and sort with
her the autumn herbs for drying!
"I love Pacifica!" he would say, with a groan, to Raffaelle; and
Raffaelle would say, with a smile, "Ah, Luca, so do I!"
"It is not the same thing, my dear," sighed Luca; "I want her for
my wife."
"I shall have no wife; I shall marry myself to painting," said
Raffaelle, with a little grave, wise face looking out from under
the golden roof of his fair hair. For he was never tired of
watching his father painting the saints with their branch of palm
on their ground of blue or of gold, or Maestro Benedetto making
the dull clay glow with angels' wings and prophets' robes and holy
legends told in color.
Now, one day, as Raffaelle was standing and looking thus at his
favorite window in the potter's house, his friend, the handsome,
black-browed Luca, who was also standing there, did sigh so deeply
and so deplorably that the child was startled from his dreams.
"Good Luca, what ails you?" he murmured, winding his arms about
the young man's knees.
"Oh, 'Faello!" mourned the apprentice, woefully. "Here is such a
chance to win the hand of Pacifica if only I had talent--such
talent as that Giorgio of Gubbio has! If the good Lord had only
gifted me with a master's skill, instead of all this bodily
strength and sinew, like a wild hog of the woods, which avails me
nothing here!"
"What chance is it?" asked Raffaelle, "and what is there new about
Pacifica? She told me nothing, and I was with her an hour."
"Dear simple one, she knows nothing of it," said Luca, heaving
another tremendous sigh from his heart's deepest depths. "You must
know that a new order has come in this very forenoon from the
duke; he wishes a dish and a jar of the very finest and firmest
majolica to be painted with the story of Esther, and made ready in
three months from this date, to then go as his gifts to his
cousins of Gonzaga. He has ordered that no cost be spared in the
work, but that the painting thereof be of the best that can be
produced, and the prize he will give is fifty scudi. Now, Maestro
Benedetto, having known some time, it seems, of this order, has
had made in readiness several large oval dishes and beautiful big-
bellied jars: he gives one of each to each of his pupils,--to
myself, to Berengario, to Tito, and Zenone. The master is sorely
distraught that his eyesight permits him not himself to execute
the duke's commands; but it is no secret that should one of us be
so fortunate as to win the duke's approbation, the painter who
does so shall become his partner here and shall have the hand of
Pacifica. Some say that he has only put forth this promise as a
stimulus to get the best work done of which his bottega is
capable; but I know Maestro Benedetto too well to deem him guilty
of any such evasion. What he has said, he will carry out; if the
vase and the dish win the duke's praise, they will also win
Pacifica. Now you see, 'Faello mine, why I am so bitterly sad of
heart, for I am a good craftsman enough at the wheel and the
furnace, and I like not ill the handling and the moulding of the
clay, but at the painting of the clay I am but a tyro, and
Berengario or even the little Zenone will beat me; of that I am
sure."
Raffaelle heard all this in silence, leaning his elbows on his
friend's knee, and his chin on the palms of his own hands. He knew
that the other pupils were better painters by far than his Luca,
though not one of them was such a good-hearted or noble-looking
youth, and for none of them did the maiden Pacifica care.
"How long a time is given for the jar and the dish to be ready?"
he asked, at length.
"Three months, my dear," said Luca, with a sigh sadder than ever.
"But if it were three years, what difference would it make? You
cannot cudgel the divine grace of art into a man with blows as you
cudgel speed into a mule, and I shall be a dolt at the end of the time
as I am now. What said your good father to me but yesternight?--and
he IS good to me and does not despise me. He said: 'Luca, my son,
it is of no more avail for you to sigh for Pacifica than for the
moon. Were she mine I would give her to you, for you have a heart
of gold, but Signor Benedetto will not; for never, I fear me, will
you be able to decorate anything more than an apothecary's mortar
or a barber's basin. If I hurt you, take it not ill; I mean kindness,
and were I a stalwart youth like you I would go try my fortunes in
the Free Companies in France or Spain, or down in Rome, for you are
made for a soldier.' That was the best even your father could say
for me, 'Faello."
"But Pacifica," said the child,--"Pacifica would not wish you to
join the Free Companies."
"God knows," said Luca, hopelessly. "Perhaps she would not care."
"I am sure she would," said Raffaelle, "for she does love you,
Luca, though she cannot say so, being but a girl, and Signor
Benedetto against you. But that redcap you tamed for her, how she
loves it, how she caresses it, and half is for you, Luca, half for
the bird!"
Luca kissed him.
But the tears rolled down the poor youth's face, for he was much
in earnest and filled with despair.
"Even if she did, if she do," he murmured hopelessly, "she never
will let me know it, since her father forbids a thought of me; and
now here is this trial of skill at the duke's order come to make
things worse, and if that swaggering Berengario of Fano win her,
then truly will I join the free lances and pray heaven send me
swift shrive and shroud."
Raffaelle was very pensive for a while; then he raised his head,
and said:--
"I have thought of something, Luca. But I do not know whether you
will let me try it."
"You angel child! What would your old Luca deny to you? But as for
helping me, my dear, put that thought out of your little mind
forever, for no one can help me, 'Faello, not the saints
themselves, since I was born a dolt!"