_Some Famous Convents and Monasteries_
Beyond the Porta Ovile, on the hill known as the _Capriola_, rises the
convent of the Osservanza, one of the chief houses of the
_Osservanti_--San Bernardino's followers of the strict observance of the
rule of St Francis, who have recently been united with the _Riformati_
and others of their spiritual kindred to form one body, under what Mr
Montgomery Carmichael, our chief lay authority on matters Franciscan,
appropriately calls "the glorious and primitive style and title of the
Friars Minor." From the earliest Middle Ages, there stood upon this spot
a little chapel dedicated to the hermit St Onuphrius. Bernardino passed
this way in June 1406, and found that a crowd of people had come out
from the city, to celebrate the hermit's feast. Before the young
Franciscan's eyes lay stretched that noble panorama of Siena that we see
from the convent to-day. Suddenly fired, he climbed up into a tree and
addressed them in words so inflamed with divine love that, while many
wept, there were some that deemed him mad. A few years later the Spedale
of Sta. Maria della Scala, to which the place belonged, made it over to
him, and he founded the present convent upon the site of the chapel.
The present convent and church were rebuilt by
[Illustration: _Fountain outside Porta Ovile_]
Pandolfo Petrucci, but were considerably altered and enlarged in the
latter part of the seventeenth century. The church is said to have been
designed by Giacomo Cozzarelli, shortly before that master reared for
Pandolfo his own sumptuous palace near the Duomo, and to have been
actually built by four friars of the Order--Filippo and Leone of
Florence, Leonardo da Potenza, and Leone da San Gimignano.[159] It is
full of terra-cotta work and early Sienese pictures. In the first chapel
on the left is a perfect little gem by Sano di Pietro; the Madonna and
Child enthroned, with Angels clad in the green and red of hope and
love, winged with the white of faith. In the next chapel is the
Coronation of the Madonna, perhaps the most divinely beautiful of all
the works of Andrea della Robbia, with the Annunciation, Nativity and
Assumption in the predella; the motive of St Francis, with his hand upon
the head of the kneeling St Clare, is especially happy. This is surely
the kind of sculpture in which Dante saw the examples of humility on the
wall of the first terrace of Purgatory. The altar-piece of the third
chapel is also by Sano di Pietro, representing the Madonna and Child
between Bernardino and St Jerome; while in the fourth is a picture of
Saints by Taddeo di Bartolo, with a predella by Sano. In the chapels
opposite are a Madonna and Child, with St Ambrose and St Jerome, the
Annunciation above, a meritorious work by Stefano di Giovanni, and the
Crucifixion, the masterpiece of Bazzi's son-in-law, Il Riccio, but badly
restored. The terra-cottas on the vaults are ascribed to Francesco di
Giorgio. In the choir are statues of Mary and Gabriel of the
Annunciation, of the school of the Della Robbia; and a contemporary
portrait of San Bernardino, said to have been painted in 1439 by Pietro
di Giovanni Pucci. Certain of his relics are preserved beneath the high
altar in a silver reliquary of 1472, the work of Francesco di Antonio.
Pandolfo Petrucci is buried in the sacristy, which contains a Pietà
questionably ascribed to Giacomo Cozzarelli. Among the numerous
sepulchres in the crypt is that of Celia Petrucci, a fashionable beauty
of the sixteenth century. Under the church is a little chapel formed of
the original cell of San Bernardino--transported bodily from the older
convent--with the same wooden door wherewith he shut himself out, for
brief intervals, from the turbulent world for which he laboured. Thus
are the memories and relics of Siena's great apostle of peace curiously
linked with those of her first tyrant.
Somewhat more than a mile beyond the Porta San Marco is the Abbey of
Sant' Eugenio, usually known simply as _Il Monastero_. This is the
castle-like building that is so conspicuous in the foreground to the
south, in the view from the ramparts of Santa Barbara. It is reached
from the gate through pleasant lanes, lined with vineyards and olive
plantations, that in spring and summer swarm with that noblest of
European butterflies, the tiger-striped _Papilio Podalirius_. It was
originally a monastery of the Benedictines of Monte Cassino and was
founded in the eighth century; Piero Strozzi fortified it in 1554, but
it was soon occupied by the imperial forces. At present it is the
property of a Sienese family, the Griccioli, and has been completely
modernised. From one of the former cloisters there is a fine view of the
mountains to the south. The best of the pictures have gone from the
church, and those that remain have been repainted. There is a much
damaged Bearing of the Cross, belonging to the series of frescoes that
Bazzi painted for the Compagnia di Santa Croce. Two frescoes by
Benvenuto di Giovanni--the Resurrection and the Crucifixion--are among
that painter's better works. In the chapel to the right of the choir is
a Madonna and Child with two Angels by Francesco di Giorgio, and, in the
chapel to the left, a Madonna and Child, an authentic work by Ambrogio
Lorenzetti. The famous Assumption of the Madonna--somewhat too
enthusiastically praised in England--by Matteo di Giovanni, which once
adorned the high altar, is now in the National Gallery of London, and a
Madonna by Duccio, which was formerly in the sacristy, appears recently
to have followed it beyond the Alps--unless it has made a longer voyage
and, like other Italian pictures, crossed the Atlantic.
"Superficially," writes John Addington Symonds, "much of the present
charm of Siena consists in the soft opening valleys, the glimpses of
long blue hills and fertile country-side, framed by irregular brown
houses stretching along the slopes on which the town is built, and
losing themselves abruptly in olive fields and orchards. This element of
beauty, which brings the city into immediate relation with the country,
is indeed not peculiar to Siena. We find it in Perugia, in Assisi, in
Montepulciano, in nearly all the hill towns of Umbria and Tuscany. But
their landscape is often tragic and austere, while this is always suave.
City and country blend here in delightful amity. Neither yields that
sense of aloofness which stirs melancholy."[160]
We leave Siena by the Porta Fontebranda, along the way by which the
returning Noveschi crept up to the city walls on that fateful night
between July 21st and 22nd, 1487, turning back at intervals for the
varied glimpses of San Domenico with its huge red bulk and tower, or the
gleaming marbles of the Duomo. At the antimony works, where the road
divides, we take the way to the right, westwards. Presently we mount up
again, through lanes on either side that might almost be English--only,
when these break away, the silvery olives, the convents on the hills,
Siena's towers and the distant mountains remind us that we are in
Tuscany. "The most charming district in the immediate neighbourhood of
Siena," to quote Symonds once more, "lies westward, near Belcaro, a
villa high up on a hill. It is a region of deep lanes and golden-green
oak woods, with cypresses and stone-pines, and little streams in all
directions flowing over the brown sandstone. The country is like some
parts of rural England--Devonshire or Sussex. Not only is the sandstone
here, as there, broken into deep gullies; but the vegetation is much
the same. Tufted spleenwort, primroses, and broom tangle the hedges
under boughs of hornbeam and sweet-chestnut." The view of Siena behind
us gradually expands, as we mount up. When the little chapel is passed,
we keep to the right; presently an avenue of oaks and ilex-trees leads
to the villa, or castello, of Belcaro.
Belcaro, superbly situated and thickly clothed round with a magnificent
grove of rich, dark-green ilex-trees, was a strongly fortified place in
the early days of the Republic, and in the fourteenth century it
belonged to the Savini. At the beginning of 1377 it was much decayed,
and Nanni di Ser Vanni Savini gave it to St Catherine, with the consent
of the government, to be made into a convent of "religious women who
shall continually pray for the city and inhabitants of Siena." She
called it Santa Maria degli Angeli, and several of her letters are
addressed from it. Later on, the convent became a fortress once more,
and at one time belonged to the Bellanti; in 1525 it came into the hands
of the Turamini, a rich family of bankers. Crescenzio Turamini had the
present palace, loggia and chapel built from the designs of Baldassare
Peruzzi, and employed the master himself to decorate them with frescoes.
On the ceiling of a hall on the ground floor is the Judgment of Paris,
which has caught not a little of the Raphaelesque grace and charm of the
decorations of the Farnesina. It has been repainted. A loggia is
likewise covered with decorative work, mythological scenes and
arabesques, which have been so modernised by restoration that nothing
really remains of Peruzzi's original work save the invention and design.
In the chapel there are a Madonna and Saints behind the altar from his
hand, with Evangelists and Saints on the walls, and the arms of the
Turamini above. These are practically Peruzzi's last works, and were
finished at the beginning of 1535, but have all been more or less ruined
by the restorers. In a room in the villa there is a Madonna and Child
with St Catherine and San Bernardino--a lovely little picture by Matteo
di Giovanni.
There is a typical inclosed Italian garden of romance, with its
lemon-trees and pomegranates; but the chief charm of Belcaro is its
noble view. Upon all sides, as we wander along its terraces and
parapets, the mountains and the valleys of the Sienese dominion lie
outstretched before us, Siena herself _l'amorosa madre di dolcezza_ away
to the east, the grove of ilex-trees at our feet. A trophy of canon
balls records the great siege of the city. At the beginning of the war,
Belcaro was held by the forces of the Republic. On April 4th, 1554, it
was attacked by the imperialists in force, 2000 infantry and 50
horsemen, with two pieces of artillery. A mere handful of French
soldiers, eight in number, under a Beaufort, held out till noon, when
their officer was killed and the rest surrendered. Afterwards, the
Marchese di Marignano had his headquarters here. Beneath Peruzzi's
fresco or among the trees of the garden, he may have drunk wine with his
captains while the hapless victims, the "useless mouths," lay perishing
between the walls of the city and the trenches of his soldiery. Here, in
April 1555, he received the two Sienese ambassadors, Girolamo Malavolti
and Alessandro Guglielmi, who came to make the necessary arrangements
for the surrender of the city, after the terms of the capitulation had
been decided in Florence.
Instead of turning up at the chapel to go to Belcaro, we turn down to
the right and then again down through the flowery lanes to the left,
where huge white or grey oxen drawing wains block the way at intervals,
and a dark-eyed boy, leading two beautiful white goats, greets us in his
pleasant musical Tuscan. Suddenly the landscape changes. The lanes end
and woods appear--we are approaching the great _Selva del Comune_.
Above
[Illustration:
_Alinari, Florence_
THE CORONATION OF THE MADONNA
(ANDREA DELLA ROBBIA. OSSERVANZA, SIENA)]
the forest ground, over the scantier trees to the left, rises, solitary
and austere, the convent of the Augustinian hermits, San Salvatore di
Lecceto: "a blessed place," writes Ambrogio Landucci, "in which the Most
High chose to work so many wonders." According to tradition, the
disciples of St Ansanus fled to these woods when the Roman persecutors
discovered their hiding-places in the city; St Augustine found hermits
here in the fourth century, and gave them a rule of life. St Monica and
St Jerome are said to have visited the place, and William of Aquitaine
(this, at least, seems a historical fact), whom Dante afterwards saw
among the warriors of the Cross in the rosy sphere of Mars. "Our ancient
hermitage," says Landucci, "was ever a sweet attraction for sanctity."
Francis, the Seraphic Father of Assisi, came here too, and plucked from
one of its ilexes the stick which he afterwards stuck into the ground at
Capraia, and which grew up into a goodly tree. The place was originally
known as the _Convento di Selva_, the Convent of the Wood, which was
also called the _Selva di Lago_, because of the lake or swamp
(afterwards drained) that lay at the foot of the hill. The name Lecceto
is derived from the abundant ilex-trees which, though much reduced in
numbers, are still one of the glories of the district. The golden age of
the convent begins after 1256, when Pope Alexander IV. united all the
Augustinian hermits into one order, and Lecceto became the head house of
Tuscany. It produced an enormous number of _beati_, of whom Fra Filippo
Agazzari, the pious novelist, and William Flete, St Catherine's
correspondent, an Englishman who had settled here, are the only ones
whose fame has penetrated beyond the boundaries of Tuscany.
Wonderful legends linger round the convent and the forest, told with
much vividness and simplicity by Fra Filippo, with much unction by
Landucci. Angels are said to have descended in human form, to eat with
the hermits in their refectory or to succour them in their needs; the
flowers of this forest, when sent to other places, healed the sick and
worked miracles, "all evident signs that here flourished a continual
spring of Paradise." The Dominican Ambrogio Sansedoni, then a young
knight, coming from Siena up through the wood to the convent (the very
way in which we are treading now), was assailed by the fiend in the
guise of a beautiful girl whom two ruffians had bound to a tree. The
pious historian assures us that the knots had been tied by the Gordius
of Hell to entangle Ambrogio's soul, but that, while he laboured to
untie them, he discovered the snare and repulsed the foe by the sign of
the Cross.[161]
Very sweet and pleasant are the pictures that Fra Filippo gives us of
the priors of Lecceto in his day; for "the friars who had to choose
them, always put in that convent for prior the best friar and the one of
most holy life that there was in the province." He tells us of Frate
Bandino de' Balzetti, who was so strict in the rules that when he saw a
thief taking away the convent donkey at the time of silence, rather than
break the silence or cause the friars to break it, he let him lead it
off, while he himself went into the church to pray for the redemption of
that thief's soul. Of course the thief was miraculously moved to
repentance, and the prior sent him away in peace with a plenteous
alms.[162] He tells in full the life of Frate Niccolò Tini, a friar of
the convent of Sant' Agostino in Siena, young in years but old in wisdom
and sanctity, who was made Prior of Lecceto in 1332 and ruled it until
his death in 1388. It was under him that Filippo himself entered as a
novice in 1353, and he records with enthusiastic love and admiration
the man's boundless humility and meekness, patience and charity.
Suffering agonies from two horrible complaints, the Prior was always
bright and kind, though his face would show sometimes the agony he
endured. He loved to tend the sick with his own hands, to distribute all
that the convent had of bread and wine to the poor--himself going to the
gate to do it, because he knew that they would not fare so well at the
hands of the other brethren. "His joyous face seemed that of Moses, so
burned his heart with love and charity, and with such gladness did he
receive strangers, especially the servants of God." Many times during
his priorate the friars had to fly from the place, when the wandering
companies of mercenaries were ravaging the contado. "One morning," says
Fra Filippo, "I arrived there with a companion at the dinner hour, in
the days when a company was expected, and already all the place was
cleared, and we found the Prior alone, for the other friars had fled
with the goods from the place. And as soon as he saw us, that blessed
Prior received us with so much love and charity and with such gladness,
that it was a wondrous thing. And in all the place there remained
nothing to eat, save only two rolls which he had kept for himself, very
small, and some wine and some leeks. And with a holy charity he
constrained us to eat with him, and he set those two rolls on a table
without a cloth, and the wine and the leeks. God knoweth that I do not
lie, but I never found myself at feasts nor at weddings nor at any
banquet, where I seemed to myself to fare so well and so abundantly or
where the food did me so much good; and the like befell my companion.
For the sweetness of the words of God that were on his lips was meat
above all the meats of the world."
Once whilst Frate Niccolò was prior--it must have been a few years after
Filippo entered the convent--Lecceto was threatened by the Sienese
themselves. Shortly after the fall of the Nine in 1355, when Massa and
Casole and other places were in arms against the new regime of the
Twelve, a son of Messer Ranieri da Casole was seen to come into the wood
with certain foot soldiers. The rumour spread that the Prior of Lecceto
was sheltering outlaws, who came to do evil to the city of Siena. More
than four hundred armed contadini threatened the convent, captured three
of the men in the wood and sent them to the Podesta, while in Siena
there uprose an uproar in the Campo, and the people shouted to go to
Lecceto and burn the place down. The friars of Sant' Agostino sent a
warning to the Prior, that the people were already on their way to waste
the place. While the armed crowd of peasants broke into the convent and
rang the bells _a martello_, the Prior shut himself into the chapel and
prayed earnestly before the image of the Saviour. At once a sudden rain
fell; the three prisoners, whom the mob had been going to hang, were led
back to the Podesta and proved innocent; the armed forces of the people
turned back, the contadini went quietly home, "so that in a short while
all the Place was cleared of folk, and that blessed Prior remained in
peace with his friars."[163]
Perhaps, St Catherine preferred saints of a more robust temper. It is
somewhat curious that she appears to have had no intercourse with Frate
Niccolò, though we have several letters of hers addressed to other
friars of Lecceto, especially Antonio da Nizza and William Flete. They
were among the men of holy life whom Pope Urban summoned to Rome, to
assist in the reformation of the Church, and neither wished to leave
their beloved solitude. "I shall see," she wrote to them, "if we really
have conceived love for the Reformation of holy Church. For if it is
really so, you will follow the will of God and of His Vicar, you will
leave the wood and come to enter upon the field of battle. But if you do
not do it, you will be disregarding the will of God. And, therefore, I
pray you, by the love of Christ crucified, that you come soon, without
delay, at the demand that the Holy Father makes of you. And do not fear
that you will not have a wood; for here there are woods and
forests."[164]
We pass up through the oaks and ilex-trees--the latter, scanty in parts
and freshly planted round the convent buildings, are grand and dense
enough further on to make a real forest still--until we reach the
_Eremo_, with its small church and castle-like square tower of the
monastery. The present buildings, though restored, date from the
fourteenth century, and the tower was built in 1404, when Filippo
himself was Prior. The place is silent and deserted now, left in the
charge of a family of contadini, save for a month or so in the year,
when the students of the Archbishop's seminary of Siena come here for
their _villeggiatura_.
Outside the church, in the portico, are frescoes painted about 1343 by a
certain Paolo di Maestro Neri, a follower of Ambrogio Lorenzetti,
somewhat recalling the style and spirit of those of the master himself
in the Sala de' Nove, or those by that other unknown pupil of his in the
Campo Santo of Pisa. The whole portico in front of the church is covered
with them, mainly in monochrome; partly obliterated, they originally
formed one of those vast allegories of human life in which the painters
of the Trecento--above all the Sienese--delighted. The artist here is as
severely ascetical and monastic in spirit as the unknown master of the
"Triumph of Death." On the one side is Paradise; on the other side is
Hell. The long wall between them sets forth the life of the cloister and
the life of the world, the one leading to Heaven, the other to Hell. In
the one, we have peace and war; love-making and dancing; feasting and
dicing, the loser seizing the winner by the throat; the car of pleasure,
over which Cupid flies, while youths and ladies are with musicians
within; a great boar-hunt; money-changing; a court of law; travellers
waylaid by robbers. The devils are in it all; they wait by the
gaming-table, they sit on the horse that draws the car of pleasure, they
watch the hunting and all man's ordinary business, they pounce upon the
soul of the murdered, they preside over the death-bed of the impenitent.
War is raging in earnest; a grim sea-fight is in progress, the devils
are blowing on the ships and urging them against each other; there is
the storming of a castle--the demons sound the trumpets for the
onslaught, and carry off through the air the souls of those that fall.
But above, behind the city from whose gates the pleasure-seeking crowd
of worldlings has passed out, is Christ with the banner of the
Resurrection--ready to save, if only they will turn to Him.[165] And in
the other fresco to our left, a number of men of all ages and conditions
have taken their crosses upon their shoulders, to carry them after
Christ. We are shown the Works of Mercy and the life of the Evangelical
Counsels. The devil is here too--but only to be vanquished and put to
flight. Then we have the death of the just--in the corner, to match the
death of the impenitent sinner at the end of the other fresco. And after
that, comes only the Paradise.
The frescoed Christ over the door of the church is probably by the same
painter. In the second cloister there are a number of frescoes
originally painted at the beginning of the Quattrocento. They are
greatly damaged, obliterated in parts, completely restored in others; we
get a vague general impression of hermits doing works of mercy and
seeing visions, of St Augustine giving his rule, of holy deaths in
convents and hermitages. Further on are five better preserved. The first
is the story of Giovanni di Guccio, told by Fra Filippo.[166] Giovanni
di Guccio, who belonged to a wealthy family of the Monte de' Nove,
entered Lecceto as a boy, but in the noviciate found the coarse food so
trying that he thought that he would have to leave the Order. In the
wood he met "an ancient man of right venerable aspect," who confirmed
him in his vocation. "And suddenly He showed him the wounds of His side
and of His hands and feet, from which there issued such great splendour
that that of the Sun is nothing in comparison with it, and they all
seemed bleeding. Then, straightway, He vanished." This Giovanni was
prior in 1323 and often told this story as an example, as of another
person, and not until his death did the brethren know that he spoke of
himself. In the other frescoes, we see an abbot preaching in front of
the convent, a painted ideal of penitential life and pious death, the
monks journeying with a sainted prior in their midst, and the return of
the lost sheep to the fold. The whole cloister, with the well in the
middle, is picturesque. There is little to see in the church, where a
few frescoed saints seem striving to emerge from the whitewash.
Down among the vines (on the left of the entrance as you face the
convent) is the famous holy well, the "Poggio Santo," now dilapidated.
According to the legend, piously recorded by Landucci, there was at
first no water to be had, but one of the hermits, _novella Moisè_
"novello" Moisè, struck the arid soil with a rod, and at once a spring
of limpid water gushed out, with miraculous powers of curing those
stricken with fever. One of the original hermits is said to have been
buried in this field, and our pious historian even discovers some hidden
mystery of divine things in the colours of the stones that lie around.
In a clearing in the wood on the eminence opposite the convent is the
little chapel, now restored, of San Pio. In November 1460, the friars of
the chapter and convent of San Salvatore, otherwise Lecceto, presented a
petition to the Signoria of Siena, to the effect that they wanted to
build an oratory under the name of San Pio and could find no place more
suited to their purpose than the hill opposite the Place of Lecceto,
"the which hill belongs to the magnificent city of Siena, and is a woody
and stony place, from which no fruit can be got." They therefore beg the
Magnificent Signoria to give them enough land on the said hill to build
their chapel: "which thing will be acceptable to our Lord God, and also
will greatly please the Holiness of our Lord Pope Pius the Second, who
has many times been to the said place. And your petitioners undertake
ever to pray to God for your Magnificent Signoria, that it may prosper
and increase in a good and pacific state." The name of "the Holiness of
our Lord Pope Pius" was at that time one with which to conjure, and
their petition was approved successively by the _Concistoro_, the
Council of the People, and the General Council.[167]
At the bridge below Belcaro, we keep to the right and then turn off to
the left, skirting the wood, to San Leonardo al Lago, the remains of a
hermitage in the forest which was connected with Lecceto. Here Agostino
Novello, who had been Manfred's minister, lived in his austere old age
and died. A few picturesque ruins of the hermitage remain, with the
woods rising up behind them, but the rest are farm buildings. The church
contains, in the choir, a beautiful series of frescoes: the Presentation
of the Blessed Virgin in the Temple, the Annunciation, the Sposalizio;
with, on the four segments of the vault, four choirs of Angels, singing
and making music, gazing down on the sacred scenes on the walls or
assisting at the Mass on the altar below. They appear to be works of
some later follower of the Lorenzetti, but are ascribed to a certain
Pietro di Lorenzo, a mediocre painter of the early Quattrocento. Four
small miracles of St Leonard, on the left, almost obliterated, are of no
artistic importance, but one of them gives a most vivid representation
of the torture of the _corda_ or strappado, with the scribe taking down
the confession; in this case, the Saint is upholding the victim. In the
crypt is the original burial-place of Agostino Novello.
The Abbazia di San Galgano, a long drive from the Porta San Marco, was a
Cistercian house whose monks at one epoch regularly served the Republic
as Camarlinghi di Biccherna. According to the legend, Galgano Guidotti
came hither in 1180, and on Monte Siepi, above the Merse, struck his
sword into the rock. Here he died in 1181. A few years later the Bishop
of Volterra, Ugo dei Saladini, built a round chapel over the hermitage
and founded a small house of Cistercians. This chapel still remains. The
great Cistercian monastery and abbey-church of San Galgano, in the plain
of the Merse, were built in the thirteenth century, being probably begun
in 1220 and 1224 respectively. Of the monastery, only a few ruins
remain. The abbey-church, magnificent still in its ruin, is one of the
purest and noblest pieces of Gothic architecture in Italy; it is a
typical building of the Cistercians, whose churches and convents, purer
in style and earlier in date than those of the Friars Minor and Friars
Preachers, have caught more of the true spirit of northern Gothic than
have theirs.[168]
The most famous, and perhaps still the most interesting, of all the
monastic houses in the State of Siena is that of Monte Oliveto Maggiore.
It can be reached either from Asciano, a picturesque little town with a
number of paintings of the Sienese school in its churches, or by driving
all the way from Siena by Buonconvento. Pedestrians, if they do not
intend to spend the night at the convent, should take the morning
diligence to Buonconvento, and walk down to Asciano from Monte Oliveto
in the afternoon to catch the evening train back to Siena. We drive out
of the Porta Romana, Siena gradually growing more distant behind us,
Monte Amiata rising nearer and more distinctly in front. About two miles
from Buonconvento we cross the Arbia, and then again by an old bridge
outside the gate.
The little townlet of Buonconvento itself, where Henry VII. died in 1313
and Alfonso of Calabria had his headquarters in 1480, is inclosed in
well-preserved walls of the fourteenth century, with the _balzana_ and
lion of Siena's Commune and People over the gate. In the one street,
which is practically all the place, is an old tower with armorial
bearings of generations of Podestàs. The church of San Pietro and San
Paolo, near the gate, deserves a visit for a most beautiful little
Madonna and Child by Matteo di Giovanni, over the high altar. To the
left of the altar are pictures by Sano di Pietro (the Madonna with St
Catherine and San Bernardino) and Pacchiarotti (an early work according
to Mr Berenson). There are also a frescoed Coronation of the Madonna
ascribed to Sano, on the right wall, an Annunciation with the Magdalene
and St Antony by Girolamo di Benvenuto, on the left, and a Madonna in
glory with Saints in the manner of Pacchia.
From Buonconvento we gradually mount upwards, partly through oak woods,
to Monte Oliveto. Long before we reach it, the great red-brick convent
becomes visible, with the curious little townlet of Chiusure, once
[Illustration:
_Lombardi, Siena_
A MIRACLE OF ST BENEDICT
(BAZZI)]
a place of some slight importance, high up on the hill above it, looking
like a part of the bleak mountain side. This whole region, the desert of
Accona, is wild and barren in the extreme, save where the strenuous
labour of these Olivetan monks has effected some cultivation; the
convent itself appears as an oasis in a wilderness of cretaceous
precipices, or _balze_. As we mount, it gets wilder and more bare in
front, while round and behind us an ever grander and more spacious
outlook opens; Siena is dimly seen in the distance, Monte Amiata rising
higher and higher to the south, and, more westward, that loftily placed
last home and refuge of the battered Republic, heroic Montalcino with
its towers. At last we reach the monastery portal, guarded with a
machicolated tower like a fortress; a long avenue of cypresses leads
down to the church with its massive square tower and the convent
buildings, built into the ravines. They are built of a rich red brick
which, as Addington Symonds notes, "contrasts not unpleasantly with the
lustrous green of the cypresses, and the glaucous sheen of olives."
It was, as we have seen, in the very year of the Emperor's death in
Buonconvento below, 1313, that Bernardo fled to this solitude. The son
of Messer Mino Tolomei (the head of the Ghibelline section of that
normally Guelf house) and Fulvia Tancredi, he was born in 1272, and
christened Giovanni. After a boyhood of piety and study, he was made
doctor by the Studio of Siena and knight of the Holy Roman Empire by
Albert of Hapsburg--which latter event was seized by the Tolomei as an
occasion for displaying all the wealth and splendour of their clan. He
had a dazzling career as leader of the social and intellectual life of
the city, though the stories told by his ecclesiastical biographers, of
his becoming practically ruler of the Republic, are obviously nonsense;
such things did not happen to noblemen while the Monte de' Nove held
sway. Then came his conversion. He had been going to deliver a
philosophical discourse in the Studio, so runs the legend, when he was
suddenly stricken with blindness. In the darkness he saw visions, prayed
to the Blessed Virgin and recovered his sight at her intercession.
Instead of his promised lecture, he poured out an impassioned homily
upon the contempt of the world.[169] He distributed all that he had to
the poor, retaining only a little land in this desert of Accona, to
which he now went forth with two noble companions, Patrizio Patrizi and
Ambrogio Piccolomini. The three began by raising with their own hands a
little chapel to St Scholastica. Giovanni now dressed in the roughest
hermit attire, and took the name of Bernardo. Men began to flock to him,
and certain Guelfs, suspecting a Ghibelline plot, are said to have
attempted to take his life by poison. Praying at the spot where now is
the great portal of the church, Bernardo beheld a silver ladder
stretching up to Paradise, with Angels leading white-robed men upwards
to Christ and the Madonna. Accused of heresy, Bernardo and Ambrogio were
summoned to Avignon, where Pope John XXII. received them kindly and
recommended them to Guido Tarlati, the warrior bishop of Arezzo, who (in
accordance with a special communication from the Madonna, says the
legend) gave them a rule of life, armorial bearings and the white habit.
Thus the Order was founded and Bernardo began to build the church and
convent, over which the Archangel Michael and the fiends renewed the war
that they had waged in Heaven before the creation of the world. After
having been frequently sent by the Pope to heal the factions of Guelfs
and Ghibellines in many towns of Italy, at last in 1348, when the
terrible Black Death was ravaging the peninsula, Bernardo assembled his
monks, bade them leave the convent, going two and two to every town and
city to tend the plague-stricken, and all to assemble once more in
Siena, two days before the Feast of the Assumption, in the convent that
he had founded outside the Porta Tufi. All arrived safely, as he had
promised them. On the vigil of the Assumption, he addressed them for the
last time. Then, a few days later, he died; the rest took the
pestilence, and the greater part of them passed away with the people
they had come to tend.
At present the Olivetani have been almost everywhere suppressed. Here a
few monks remain, their superior being regarded as merely the _custode_
for the government, and there are a certain number of students. The
Abbate Generale of the Order resides at Settignano.
The frescoes of the greater cloister were painted in the days of the
Abbate Generale Fra Domenico Airoldi of Lecco. They illustrate the
legend of St Benedict, as told by Pope Gregory the Great in the second
book of his _Dialogues_. They were begun by Luca Signorelli in 1497, who
painted eight frescoes beginning in the middle of the story, and then
went away to undertake greater work in the Duomo of Orvieto. In 1505 and
1506 Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, who had known Fra Domenico in Lombardy,
took up the tale, and, while he told it in line and colour, kept the
whole convent in an uproar with his japery. "It would be impossible to
describe," says Vasari, "the fun that, while he worked in that place,
those fathers got out of him, for they called him the big lunatic (Il
Mattaccio), nor the mad pranks he played there."
Beginning from the side of the cloister adjoining the monastery church,
we have first nineteen scenes by Bazzi. We see Benedict as a youth
leaving his father's house at Norcia to go to study humanities at Rome,
his faithful nurse (who plays the same part in the original legend)
riding with him on a donkey; and then, his leaving the Roman schools,
"instructed with learned ignorance and furnished with unlearned wisdom"
as Pope Gregory has it, because scandalised at the dissolute lives of
his fellow-students. These two frescoes show that Bazzi had been
impressed by Pinturicchio's work at Siena; they recall Enea Silvio
setting out from Genoa and the Congress of Mantua. In the third,
Benedict mends the borrowed sieve that his nurse had broken, and the
townsmen hang it up at their church door, "to the end that not only men
then living, but also their posterity, might understand how greatly
God's grace did work with him upon his first renouncing of the world."
Here we see Bazzi himself, a fine piece of self portraiture, surrounded
by his pet birds and beasts, wearing the knightly robes and sword that
had been discarded by a gentleman of Milan who had just entered the
Order, and which the Abbot gave him in part payment for his work. Next,
Benedict meets Romanus on the way to Subiaco. Then, while Romanus lets
down a loaf of bread to Benedict in his cave, the devil, "envying at the
charity of the one and the refection of the other," hurls a stone and
breaks the bell with which Romanus used to signal to his young friend;
the painter's pet badger calmly drinks at a pond the while. Next, a
certain priest, by divine inspiration, brings a dinner to Benedict on
Easter Day. In the seventh fresco, Benedict instructs the shepherds who
found out his retreat; "and for corporal meat, which they brought him,
they carried away spiritual food for their souls." Then he rolls among
thorns, to overcome a temptation of the flesh that the devil put into
his mind by the representation of "a certain woman which some time he
had seen." After that, certain monks, by their persistence, induce him
against his will to become their abbot. Finding him too austere, they
attempt to poison him; but when he makes the sign of the Cross over the
cup, it breaks in pieces, and he goes back unharmed to his solitude.
Bazzi has made the ill-favoured monk, who was most insistent in urging
Benedict to be abbot, the one to offer him the poisoned cup. Then, as
many flock to him, he builds the twelve monasteries at Subiaco. In the
twelfth fresco, one of the finest of the series, Benedict receives
Maurus and Placidus, the young sons of the Roman nobles Equitius and
Tertullus, who are accompanied by a splendid troop of retainers. Next,
he beats the devil out of a monk who would not say his prayers; he makes
a fountain spring forth on the top of a mountain; he makes the iron head
of a bill that had slipped into the water return to its handle again.
Now Placidus has fallen into the lake and Maurus, at the bidding of the
man of God, runs upon the water and delivers him, after which "he both
marvelled and was afraid at that which he had done," but Benedict
ascribes it entirely to his obedience. This is a particularly attractive
picture, with the sweet boyish faces of the two young monks. After
another miracle (of which the subject is not quite obvious), on either
side of the door, we come to the attempt made by the priest Florentius
to kill Benedict by a poisoned loaf; the Saint's tamed crow, somewhat
unwillingly, takes it away where no man can find it, to return presently
for his own usual allowance. In the nineteenth fresco, Florentius tries
to corrupt the monks by sending a band of young and beautiful women to
the convent, to inflame their minds by dancing and singing. This was a
subject far more after Bazzi's own heart than were the trivial miracles
of monastic legend, and in the exquisite group of women, with their
Leonardesque faces, their subtle suggestion of rhythmic movement, he has
produced a masterpiece. Vasari tells us that the painter originally
shocked the worthy Abbot by representing this scene in a more realistic
fashion (in which, we may add, he would only be following St Gregory's
own version of what happened), and that he was afterwards compelled to
drape the figures.
Beyond this last fresco, there stood originally a door that led to the
great refectory. It was closed between 1530 and 1541,[170] after which
Bazzi's son-in-law, Bartolommeo Neroni or Il Riccio, painted upon the
new wall the fresco we now see. It represents St Benedict sending out
Maurus and Placidus as missionaries, the one to France, the other to
Sicily.
The eight frescoes that follow are Luca Signorelli's, but they hardly
rank among his best works and are, in addition, in a bad state of
preservation. In the first is the punishment of Florentius; the devils
have thrown down his chamber upon him and are carrying off his soul;
while Benedict, hearing what has happened, laments greatly, "both
because his enemy died in such sort, and also for that one of his monks
rejoiced thereat." In the second, he converts the inhabitants of Monte
Cassino from their worship of Apollo. In the third, he exorcises the
devil who sat upon the stone and prevented the monks from raising it,
and the idol of brass, which they dug up upon the spot and which seemed
to set the convent on fire. In the fourth, he raises to life the young
monk upon whom the devil had thrown a wall. The fifth is an admirable
piece of genre-painting, intended to illustrate St Benedict's discovery
by revelation that some of his monks had disobeyed him and eaten out of
the monastery. Two monks are eating and drinking in a primitive
diningroom of the epoch (not an inn, as usually stated, but
[Illustration:
_Lombardi, Siena_
MAURUS AND PLACIDUS
(BAZZI)]
what St Gregory calls "the house of a religious woman"), waited upon by
women--fine robust daughters of the people; the Saint is just seen,
discovering to them their fault, on the right in the section of the
wall. In the sixth scene, we have the story of the devout layman, the
brother of Valentinian the monk, who was induced by a companion to break
his fast on a journey. The two remaining frescoes, the last that
Signorelli painted here, are of a far higher order and more
characteristic of his grand manner. They represent Totila, King of the
Goths, testing Benedict's supernatural wisdom by sending one of his
officers to him, disguised as himself; and then, when the Saint
recognises the deceit and rebukes the man, Totila comes in person with
his army, falls down before him and listens meekly to his words. In
both, Signorelli gives us a superb representation of the fierce
mercenary soldiery of his own day, and the work is full of his
characteristic vigour and delight in powerful, strenuous manhood. Here,
alone in the series, do we begin to recognise the future author of those
unapproachable masterpieces at Orvieto.
Bazzi now takes up the tale in the seven remaining frescoes. In the
first, Benedict foretells the destruction of Monte Cassino. The Saint
himself is barely seen in a corner, the picture representing the event
that he foretold. Monte Cassino is burning, while in the foreground is
the Lombard host, superb groups of horsemen in every attitude, which
recall Leonardo's famous Battle of the Standard which, however, it seems
probable that Bazzi could not then have known.[171] After this, we are
back in the region of petty miracles. Meal is miraculously brought to
the monks in time of famine. Benedict appears in vision to the abbot and
prior, whom he has sent to build an abbey near Terracina, and shows them
how it is to be done. Two nuns, whom he threatened with excommunication
because they would not bridle their tongues, cannot rest after death,
but are seen to rise from their graves and leave the church at the time
of the Communion, until he makes an oblation for them and (apparently)
gives communion in some mystical way to their unquiet ghosts. A young
monk, "loving his parents more than reason would," cannot be buried
after death, until Benedict bids them lay the Sacred Host upon his
breast. Another monk, wishing to forsake the abbey, finds a terrible
dragon in the way. A poor countryman, fallen into the hands of the Goth
Zalla, "an Arian heretic who, in the time of King Totila, did with
monstrous cruelty persecute religious men," is marvellously loosed from
his bonds at the sight of the man of God and Zalla himself moved to
repentance. This closes the series of Benedict's life. "Certainly," says
Peter to Gregory in the _Dialogues_, "they be wonderful things which you
report, and such as may serve for the edification of many: for mine own
part, the more that I hear of his miracles, the more do I still desire."
And we may feel disposed to say the same, if we have a Signorelli or a
Bazzi to paint them.
There are a few other frescoes by Bazzi in the convent. Between the
cloister and the church are Christ at the Column and Christ bearing the
Cross, works of intense spiritual expression, and another variously
described as Benedict giving his rule and Bernardo founding his order of
Monte Oliveto. On the stairs leading to the dormitories are the
Coronation of the Madonna and a Pietà, and, at the rooms of the Abbate
Generale, over the door, a Madonna and Child with St Michael and St
Peter. Outside the church a striking Madonna and Child in marble,
ascribed to Fra Giovanni da Verona, watches over the tombs of the
brethren. The church itself has been modernised. An old picture of the
three founders is said to mark the place where Bernardo saw the
Archangel Michael descend from Heaven in flashing armour to drive away
the devils who were threatening to destroy the foundations of the
building. It contains excellent intarsia by Giovanni da Verona,
especially on the reading desk and choir stalls, and there is similar
work by him in the library of the monastery.
Pope Pius II. came here in 1463, and in his Memoirs (those famous
_Commentarii Rerum Memorabilium_) we are given an account of his
visit.[172] He marvelled at the situation of the place and the wonderful
industry by which the monks had reclaimed so much of the desert soil, on
the very brink of the precipice, and at the excellent architecture of
the monastery. He found the woods and gardens as delightful to linger
in, as we do to-day, and struck the keynote of the feeling of every
modern visitor to these monastic houses of the past; "pleasant places of
refreshment for the monks, more pleasant still for those to whom, after
they have seen, it is lawful to depart." On the second evening of his
stay, the Pope supped with the monks in the refectory; while they were
at table he bade his choristers come in, who sang the new hymn that his
Holiness had composed in honour of St Catherine of Siena, "with such
soft harmony that they drew sweet tears from all the monks."