Hæc tenet ara caput Catharinæ; corda requiris?

Hæc imo Christus pectore clausa tenet.

The frequent conversations which she held with S. Dominic and other

patrons of the Church, and her supernatural marriage, must be referred

to the same category. Strong faith, 59 and constant familiarity with

one order of ideas, joined with a creative power of fancy, and fostered

by physical debility, produced these miraculous colloquies. Early in

her career, her injured constitution, resenting the violence with which

it had been forced to serve the ardours of her piety, troubled her with

foul phantoms, haunting images of sin and seductive whisperings, which

clearly revealed a morbid condition of the nervous system. She was on

the verge of insanity. The reality of her inspiration and her genius

are proved by the force with which her human sympathies, and moral

dignity, and intellectual vigour triumphed over these diseased

hallucinations of the cloister, and converted them into the instruments

for effecting patriotic and philanthropic designs. There was nothing

savouring of mean pretension or imposture in her claim to supernatural

enlightenment. Whatever we may think of the wisdom of her public policy

with regard to the Crusades and to the Papal Sovereignty, it is

impossible to deny that a holy and high object possessed her from the

earliest to the latest of her life—that she lived for ideas greater

than self-aggrandisement or the saving of her soul, for the greatest,

perhaps, which her age presented to an earnest Catholic.

[56] It is not impossible that the stigmata may have been naturally

produced in the person of S. Francis or S. Catherine. There are cases

on record in which grave nervous disturbances have resulted in such

modifications of the flesh as may have left the traces of wounds in

scars and blisters.

The abuses to which the indulgence of temperaments like that of S.

Catherine must in many cases have given rise, are obvious. Hysterical

women and half-witted men, without possessing her abilities and

understanding her objects, beheld unmeaning visions, and dreamed

childish dreams. Others won the reputation of sanctity by obstinate

neglect of all the duties of life and of all the decencies of personal

cleanliness. Every little town in Italy could show its saints like the

Santa Fina of whom San Gemignano boasts—a girl who lay for seven years

on a back-board till her mortified flesh clung to the wood; or the San

Bartolo, who, for hideous leprosy, received 60 the title of the Job of

Tuscany. Children were encouraged in blasphemous pretensions to the

special power of Heaven, and the nerves of weak women were shaken by

revelations in which they only half believed. We have ample evidence to

prove how the trade of miracles is still carried on, and how in the

France of our days, when intellectual vigour has been separated from

old forms of faith, such vision-mongering undermines morality,

encourages ignorance, and saps the force of individuals. But S.

Catherine must not be confounded with those sickly shams and

make-believes. Her enthusiasms were real; they were proper to her age;

they inspired her with unrivalled self-devotion and unwearied energy;

they connected her with the political and social movements of her

country.

Many of the supernatural events in S. Catherine's life were founded on

a too literal acceptation of biblical metaphors. The Canticles,

perhaps, inspired her with the belief in a mystical marriage. An

enigmatical sentence of S. Paul's suggested the stigmata. When the

saint bestowed her garment upon Christ in the form of a beggar and gave

Him the silver cross of her rosary, she was but realising His own

words: 'Inasmuch as ye shall do it unto the least of these little ones,

ye shall do it unto Me.' Charity, according to her conception,

consisted in giving to Christ. He had first taught this duty; He would

make it the test of all duty at the last day. Catherine was charitable

for the love of Christ. She thought less of the beggar than of her

Lord. How could she do otherwise than see the aureole about His

forehead, and hear the voice of Him who had declared, 'Behold, I am

with you, even to the end of the world.' Those were times of childlike

simplicity when the eye of love was still unclouded, when men could see

beyond the phantoms of this world, and stripping off the accidents of

matter, gaze upon the spiritual and eternal truths 61 that lie beneath.

Heaven lay around them in that infancy of faith; nor did they greatly

differ from the saints and founders of the Church—from Paul, who saw

the vision of the Lord, or Magdalen, who cried, 'He is risen!' An age

accustomed to veil thought in symbols, easily reversed the process and

discerned essential qualities beneath the common or indifferent objects

of the outer world. It was therefore Christ whom S. Christopher carried

in the shape of a child; Christ whom Fra Angelico's Dominicans received

in pilgrim's garb at their convent gate; Christ with whom, under a

leper's loathsome form, the flower of Spanish chivalry was said to have

shared his couch.

In all her miracles it will be noticed that S. Catherine showed no

originality. Her namesake of Alexandria had already been proclaimed the

spouse of Christ. S. Francis had already received the stigmata; her

other visions were such as had been granted to all fervent mystics;

they were the growth of current religious ideas and unbounded faith. It

is not as an innovator in religious ecstasy, or as the creator of a new

kind of spiritual poetry, that we admire S. Catherine. Her inner life

was simply the foundation of her character, her visions were a source

of strength to her in times of trial, or the expression of a more than

usually exalted mood; but the means by which she moved the hearts of

men belonged to that which she possessed in common with all leaders of

mankind—enthusiasm, eloquence, the charm of a gracious nature, and the

will to do what she designed. She founded no religious order, like S.

Francis or S. Dominic, her predecessors, or Loyola, her successor. Her

work was a woman's work—to make peace, to succour the afflicted, to

strengthen the Church, to purify the hearts of those around her; not to

rule or organise. When she died she left behind her a memory of love

more than of power, the fragrance of an unselfish and 62 gentle life,

the echo of sweet and earnest words. Her place is in the heart of the

humble; children belong to her sisterhood, and the poor crowd her

shrine on festivals.

Catherine died at Rome on the 29th of April 1380, in her thirty-third

year, surrounded by the most faithful of her friends and followers; but

it was not until 1461 that she received the last honour of canonisation

from the hands of Pius II., Æneas Sylvius, her countryman. Æeneas

Sylvius Piccolomini was perhaps the most remarkable man that Siena has

produced. Like S. Catherine, he was one of a large family; twenty of

his brothers and sisters perished in a plague. The licentiousness of

his early life, the astuteness of his intellect, and the worldliness of

his aims, contrast with the singularly disinterested character of the

saint on whom he conferred the highest honours of the Church. But he

accomplished by diplomacy and skill what Catherine had begun. If she

was instrumental in restoring the Popes to Rome, he ended the schism

which had clouded her last days. She had preached a crusade; he lived

to assemble the armies of Christendom against the Turks, and died at

Ancona, while it was still uncertain whether the authority and

enthusiasm of a pope could steady the wavering counsels and vacillating

wills of kings and princes. The middle ages were still vital in S.

Catherine; Pius II. belonged by taste and genius to the new period of

Renaissance. The hundreds of the poorer Sienese who kneel before S.

Catherine's shrine prove that her memory is still alive in the hearts

of her fellow-citizens; while the gorgeous library of the cathedral,

painted by the hand of Pinturicchio, the sumptuous palace and the

Loggia del Papa designed by Bernardo Rossellino and Antonio Federighi,

record the pride and splendour of the greatest of the Piccolomini. But

honourable as it was for Pius to fill so high a place in the annals of

his city; to have left it as a poor adventurer, to return to it first

as bishop, then 63 as pope: to have a chamber in its mother church

adorned with the pictured history of his achievements for a monument,

and a triumph of Renaissance architecture dedicated to his family,

_gentilibus suis_—yet we cannot but feel that the better part remains

with S. Catherine, whose prayer is still whispered by children on their

mother's knee, and whose relics are kissed daily by the simple and

devout.

Some of the chief Italian painters have represented the incidents of S.

Catherine's life and of her mystical experience. All the pathos and

beauty which we admire in Sodoma's S. Sebastian at Florence, are

surpassed by his fresco of S. Catherine receiving the stigmata. This is

one of several subjects painted by him on the walls of her chapel in

San Domenico. The tender unction, the sweetness, the languor, and the

grace which he commanded with such admirable mastery, are all combined

in the figure of the saint falling exhausted into the arms of her

attendant nuns. Soft undulating lines rule the composition; yet dignity

of attitude and feature prevails over mere loveliness. Another of

Siena's greatest masters, Beccafumi, has treated the same subject with

less pictorial skill and dramatic effect, but with an earnestness and

simplicity that are very touching. Colourists always liked to introduce

the sweeping lines of her white robes into their compositions. Fra

Bartolommeo, who showed consummate art by tempering the masses of white

drapery with mellow tones of brown or amber, painted one splendid

picture of the marriage of S. Catherine, and another in which he

represents her prostrate in adoration before the mystery of the

Trinity. His gentle and devout soul sympathised with the spirit of the

saint. The fervour of her devotion belonged to him more truly than the

leonine power which he unsuccessfully attempted to express in his large

figure of S. Mark. Other artists have painted the two Catherines 64

together—the princess of Alexandria, crowned and robed in purple,

bearing her palm of martyrdom, beside the nun of Siena, holding in her

hand the lantern with which she went about by night among the sick.

Ambrogio Borgognone makes them stand one on each side of Madonna's

throne, while the infant Christ upon her lap extends His hands to both,

in token of their marriage.

The traditional type of countenance which may be traced in all these

pictures is not without a real foundation. Not only does there exist at

Siena, in the Church of San Domenico, a contemporary portrait of S.

Catherine, but her head also, which was embalmed immediately after

death, is still preserved. The skin of the face is fair and white, like

parchment, and the features have more the air of sleep than death. We

find in them the breadth and squareness of general outline, and the

long, even eyebrows which give peculiar calm to the expression of her

pictures. This relic is shown publicly once a year on the 6th of May.

That is the Festa of the saint, when a procession of priests and

acolytes, and pious people holding tapers, and little girls dressed out

in white, carry a splendid silver image of their patroness about the

city. Banners and crosses and censers go in front; then follows the

shrine beneath a canopy: roses and leaves of box are scattered on the

path. The whole Contrada d'Oca is decked out with such finery as the

people can muster: red cloths hung from the windows, branches and

garlands strewn about the doorsteps, with brackets for torches on the

walls, and altars erected in the middle of the street. Troops of

country-folk and townspeople and priests go in and out to visit the

cell of S. Catherine; the upper and the lower chapel, built upon its

site, and the hall of the _confraternità_ blaze with lighted tapers.

The faithful, full of wonder, kneel or stand about the 'santi luoghi,'

marvelling at the relics, and 65 repeating to one another the miracles

of the saint. The same bustle pervades the Church of San Domenico.

Masses are being said at one or other chapel all the morning, while

women in their flapping Tuscan hats crowd round the silver image of S.

Catherine, and say their prayers with a continual undercurrent of

responses to the nasal voice of priest or choir. Others gain entrance

to the chapel of the saint, and kneel before her altar. There, in the

blaze of sunlight and of tapers, far away behind the gloss and gilding

of a tawdry shrine, is seen the pale, white face which spoke and

suffered so much, years ago. The contrast of its rigid stillness and

half-concealed corruption with the noise and life and light outside is

very touching. Even so the remnant of a dead idea still stirs the souls

of thousands, and many ages may roll by before time and oblivion assert

their inevitable sway.

66

MONTE OLIVETO

I

In former days the traveller had choice of two old hostelries in the

chief street of Siena. Here, if he was fortunate, he might secure a

prophet's chamber, with a view across tiled houseroofs to the distant

Tuscan champaign—glimpses of russet field and olive-garden framed by

jutting city walls, which in some measure compensated for much

discomfort. He now betakes himself to the more modern Albergo di Siena,

overlooking the public promenade La Lizza. Horse-chestnuts and acacias

make a pleasant foreground to a prospect of considerable extent. The

front of the house is turned toward Belcaro and the mountains between

Grosseto and Volterra. Sideways its windows command the brown bulk of

San Domenico, and the Duomo, set like a marble coronet upon the

forehead of the town. When we arrived there one October afternoon the

sun was setting amid flying clouds and watery yellow spaces of pure

sky, with a wind blowing soft and humid from the sea. Long after he had

sunk below the hills, a fading chord of golden and rose-coloured tints

burned on the city. The cathedral bell tower was glistening with recent

rain, and we could see right through its lancet windows to the clear

blue heavens beyond. Then, as the day descended into evening, the

autumn trees assumed that wonderful effect of luminousness

self-evolved, 67 and the red brick walls that crimson afterglow, which

Tuscan twilight takes from singular transparency of atmosphere.

It is hardly possible to define the specific character of each Italian

city, assigning its proper share to natural circumstances, to the

temper of the population, and to the monuments of art in which these

elements of nature and of human qualities are blended. The fusion is

too delicate and subtle for complete analysis; and the total effect in

each particular case may best be compared to that impressed on us by a

strong personality, making itself felt in the minutest details.

Climate, situation, ethnological conditions, the political vicissitudes

of past ages, the bias of the people to certain industries and

occupations, the emergence of distinguished men at critical epochs,

have all contributed their quota to the composition of an individuality

which abides long after the locality has lost its ancient vigour.

Since the year 1557, when Gian Giacomo de' Medici laid the country of

Siena waste, levelled her luxurious suburbs, and delivered her

famine-stricken citizens to the tyranny of the Grand Duke Cosimo, this

town has gone on dreaming in suspended decadence. Yet the epithet which

was given to her in her days of glory, the title of 'Fair Soft Siena,'

still describes the city. She claims it by right of the gentle manners,

joyous but sedate, of her inhabitants, by the grace of their pure

Tuscan speech, and by the unique delicacy of her architecture. Those

palaces of brick, with finely moulded lancet windows, and the lovely

use of sculptured marbles in pilastered colonnades, are fit abodes for

the nobles who reared them five centuries ago, of whose refined and

costly living we read in the pages of Dante or of Folgore da San

Gemignano. And though the necessities of modern life, the decay of

wealth, the dwindling of old aristocracy, and the absorption of what

was once an independent state in the Italian nation, 68 have

obliterated that large signorial splendour of the Middle Ages, we feel

that the modern Sienese are not unworthy of their courteous ancestry.

Superficially, 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.

The most charming district in the immediate neighbourhood of Siena 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.

This is the landscape which the two sixteenth-century novelists of

Siena, Fortini and Sermini, so lovingly depicted in their tales. Of

literature absorbing in itself the specific character of a country, and

conveying it to the reader less by description than by sustained

quality of style, I know none to surpass Fortini's sketches. The

prospect from Belcaro is one of the finest to be seen in Tuscany. The

villa stands at a considerable elevation, and commands an immense

extent of hill and dale. 69 Nowhere, except Maremma-wards, a level

plain. The Tuscan mountains, from Monte Amiata westward to Volterra,

round Valdelsa, down to Montepulciano and Radicofani, with their

innumerable windings and intricacies of descending valleys, are dappled

with light and shade from flying storm-clouds, sunshine here, and there

cloud-shadows. Girdling the villa stands a grove of ilex-trees, cut so

as to embrace its high-built walls with dark continuous green. In the

courtyard are lemon-trees and pomegranates laden with fruit. From a

terrace on the roof the whole wide view is seen; and here upon a

parapet, from which we leaned one autumn afternoon, my friend

discovered this _graffito_: '_E vidi e piansi il fato amaro!_'—'I

gazed, and gazing, wept the bitterness of fate.'

II

The prevailing note of Siena and the Sienese seems, as I have said, to

be a soft and tranquil grace; yet this people had one of the stormiest

and maddest of Italian histories. They were passionate in love and

hate, vehement in their popular amusements, almost frantic in their

political conduct of affairs. The luxury, for which Dante blamed them,

the levity De Comines noticed in their government, found counter-poise

in more than usual piety and fervour. S. Bernardino, the great preacher

and peacemaker of the Middle Ages; S. Catherine, the worthiest of all

women to be canonised; the blessed Colombini, who founded the Order of

the Gesuati or Brothers of the Poor in Christ; the blessed Bernardo,

who founded that of Monte Oliveto; were all Sienese. Few cities have

given four such saints to modern Christendom. The biography of one of

these may serve as prelude to an account of the Sienese monastery of

Oliveto Maggiore.

The family of Tolomei was among the noblest of the 70 Sienese

aristocracy. On May 10, 1272, Mino Tolomei and his wife Fulvia, of the

Tancredi, had a son whom they christened Giovanni, but who, when he

entered the religious life, assumed the name of Bernard, in memory of

the great Abbot of Clairvaux. Of this child, Fulvia is said to have

dreamed, long before his birth, that he assumed the form of a white

swan, and sang melodiously, and settled in the boughs of an olive-tree,

whence afterwards he winged his way to heaven amid a flock of swans as

dazzling white as he. The boy was educated in the Dominican Cloister at

Siena, under the care of his uncle Cristoforo Tolomei. There, and

afterwards in the fraternity of S. Ansano, he felt that impulse towards

a life of piety, which after a short but brilliant episode of secular

ambition, was destined to return with overwhelming force upon his

nature. He was a youth of promise, and at the age of sixteen he

obtained the doctorate in philosophy and both laws, civil and

canonical. The Tolomei upon this occasion adorned their palaces and

threw them open to the people of Siena. The Republic hailed with

acclamation the early honours of a noble, born to be one of their chief

leaders. Soon after this event Mino obtained for his son from the

Emperor the title of Cæsarian Knight; and when the diploma arrived, new

festivities proclaimed the fortunate youth to his fellow-citizens.

Bernardo cased his limbs in steel, and rode in procession with ladies

and young nobles through the streets. The ceremonies of a knight's

reception in Siena at that period were magnificent. From contemporary

chronicles and from the sonnets written by Folgore da San Gemignano for

a similar occasion, we gather that the whole resources of a wealthy

family and all their friends were strained to the utmost to do honour

to the order of chivalry. Open house was held for several days. Rich

presents of jewels, armour, dresses, chargers were freely 71

distributed. Tournaments alternated with dances. But the climax of the

pageant was the novice's investiture with sword and spurs and belt in

the cathedral. This, as it appears from a record of the year 1326,

actually took place in the great marble pulpit carved by the Pisani;

and the most illustrious knights of his acquaintance were summoned by

the squire to act as sponsors for his fealty.

It is said that young Bernardo Tolomei's head was turned to vanity by

these honours showered upon him in his earliest manhood. Yet, after a

short period of aberration, he rejoined his confraternity and mortified

his flesh by discipline and strict attendance on the poor. The time had

come, however, when he should choose a career suitable to his high

rank. He devoted himself to jurisprudence, and began to lecture

publicly on law. Already at the age of twenty-five his fellow-citizens

admitted him to the highest political offices, and in the legend of his

life it is written, not without exaggeration doubtless, that he ruled

the State. There is, however, no reason to suppose that he did not play

an important part in its government. Though a just and virtuous

statesman, Bernardo now forgot the special service of God, and gave

himself with heart and soul to mundane interests. At the age of forty,

supported by the wealth, alliances, and reputation of his semi-princely

house, he had become one of the most considerable party-leaders in that

age of faction. If we may trust his monastic biographer, he was aiming

at nothing less than the tyranny of Siena. But in that year, when he

was forty, a change, which can only be described as conversion, came

over him. He had advertised a public disputation, in which he proposed

before all comers to solve the most arduous problems of scholastic

science. The concourse was great, the assembly brilliant; but the hero

of the day, who had designed it for his glory, was stricken with sudden

blindness. In one 72 moment he comprehended the internal void he had

created for his soul, and the blindness of the body was illumination to

the spirit. The pride, power, and splendour of this world seemed to him

a smoke that passes. God, penitence, eternity appeared in all the awful

clarity of an authentic vision. He fell upon his knees and prayed to

Mary that he might receive his sight again. This boon was granted; but

the revelation which had come to him in blindness was not withdrawn.

Meanwhile the hall of disputation was crowded with an expectant

audience. Bernardo rose from his knees, made his entry, and ascended

the chair; but instead of the scholastic subtleties he had designed to

treat, he pronounced the old text, 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'

Afterwards, attended by two noble comrades, Patrizio Patrizzi and

Ambrogio Piccolomini, he went forth into the wilderness. For the human

soul, at strife with strange experience, betakes itself instinctively

to solitude. Not only prophets of Israel, saints of the Thebaïd, and

founders of religions in the mystic East have done so; even the Greek

Menander recognised, although he sneered at, the phenomenon. 'The

desert, they say, is the place for discoveries.' For the mediæval mind

it had peculiar attractions. The wilderness these comrades chose was

Accona, a doleful place, hemmed in with earthen precipices, some

fifteen miles to the south of Siena. Of his vast possessions Bernardo

retained but this—

The lonesome lodge,

That stood so low in a lonely glen.

The rest of his substance he abandoned to the poor. This was in 1313,

the very year of the Emperor Henry VII.'s death at Buonconvento, which

is a little walled town between Siena and the desert of Accona. Whether

Bernardo's retirement was in any way due to the extinction of immediate

hope 73 for the Ghibelline party by this event, we do not gather from

his legend. That, as is natural, refers his action wholly to the

operation of divine grace. Yet we may remember how a more illustrious

refugee, the singer of the 'Divine Comedy,' betook himself upon the

same occasion to the lonely convent of Fonte Avellana on the Alps of

Catria, and meditated there the cantos of his Purgatory. While Bernardo

Tolomei was founding the Order of Monte Oliveto, Dante penned his

letter to the cardinals of Italy: _Quomodo sola sedet civitas plena

populo: facta est quasi vidua domina gentium_.

Bernardo and his friends hollowed with their own hands grottos in the

rock, and strewed their stone beds with withered chestnut-leaves. For

S. Scolastica, the sister of S. Benedict, they built a little chapel.

Their food was wild fruit, and their drink the water of the brook.

Through the day they delved, for it was in their mind to turn the

wilderness into a land of plenty. By night they meditated on eternal

truth. The contrast between their rude life and the delicate nurture of

Sienese nobles, in an age when Siena had become a by-word for luxury,

must have been cruel. But it fascinated the mediæval imagination, and

the three anchorites were speedily joined by recruits of a like temper.

As yet the new-born order had no rules; for Bernardo, when he renounced

the world, embraced humility. The brethren were bound together only by

the ties of charity. They lived in common; and under their sustained

efforts Accona soon became a garden.

The society could not, however, hold together without further

organisation. It began to be ill spoken of, inasmuch as vulgar minds

can recognise no good except in what is formed upon a pattern they are

familiar with. Then Bernardo had a vision. In his sleep he saw a ladder

of light ascending to the heavens. Above sat Jesus with Our Lady in

white 74 raiment, and the celestial hierarchies around them were

attired in white. Up the ladder, led by angels, climbed men in vesture

of dazzling white; and among these Bernardo recognised his own

companions. Soon after this dream, he called Ambrogio Piccolomini, and

bade him get ready for a journey to the Pope at Avignon.

John XXII. received the pilgrims graciously, and gave them letters to

the Bishop of Arezzo, commanding him to furnish the new brotherhood

with one of the rules authorised by Holy Church for governance of a

monastic order. Guido Tarlati, of the great Pietra-mala house, was

Bishop and despot of Arezzo at this epoch. A man less in harmony with

coenobitical enthusiasm than this warrior prelate, could scarcely have

been found. Yet attendance to such matters formed part of his business,

and the legend even credits him with an inspired dream; for Our Lady

appeared to him, and said: 'I love the valley of Accona and its pious

solitaries. Give them the rule of Benedict. But thou shalt strip them

of their mourning weeds, and clothe them in white raiment, the symbol

of my virgin purity. Their hermitage shall change its name, and

henceforth shall be called Mount Olivet, in memory of the ascension of

my divine Son, the which took place upon the Mount of Olives. I take

this family beneath my own protection; and therefore it is my will it

should be called henceforth the congregation of S. Mary of Mount

Olivet.' After this, the Blessed Virgin took forethought for the

heraldic designs of her monks, dictating to Guido Tarlati the blazon

they still bear; it is of three hills or, whereof the third and highest

is surmounted with a cross gules, and from the meeting-point of the

three hillocks upon either hand a branch of olive vert. This was in

1319. In 1324 John XXII. confirmed the order, and in 1344 it was

further approved by Clement VI. Affiliated societies sprang 75 up in

several Tuscan cities; and in 1347, Bernardo Tolomei, at that time

General of the Order, held a chapter of its several houses. The next

year was the year of the great plague or Black Death. Bernardo bade his

brethren leave their seclusion, and go forth on works of mercy among

the sick. Some went to Florence, some to Siena, others to the smaller

hill-set towns of Tuscany. All were bidden to assemble on the Feast of

the Assumption at Siena. Here the founder addressed his spiritual

children for the last time. Soon afterwards he died himself, at the age

of seventy-seven, and the place of his grave is not known. He was

beatified by the Church for his great virtues.

III

At noon we started, four of us, in an open waggonette with a pair of

horses, for Monte Oliveto, the luggage heaped mountain-high and tied in

a top-heavy mass above us. After leaving the gateway, with its massive

fortifications and frescoed arches, the road passes into a dull earthy

country, very much like some parts—and not the best parts—of England.

The beauty of the Sienese contado is clearly on the sandstone, not upon

the clay. Hedges, haystacks, isolated farms—all were English in their

details. Only the vines, and mulberries, and wattled waggons drawn by

oxen, most Roman in aspect, reminded us we were in Tuscany. In such

_carpenta_ may the vestal virgins have ascended the Capitol. It is the

primitive war-chariot also, capable of holding four with ease; and

Romulus may have mounted with the images of Roman gods in even such a

vehicle to Latiarian Jove upon the Alban hill. Nothing changes in

Italy. The wooden ploughs are those which Virgil knew. The sight of one

of them would 76 save an intelligent lad much trouble in mastering a

certain passage of the Georgics.

Siena is visible behind us nearly the whole way to Buonconvento, a

little town where the Emperor Henry VII. died, as it was supposed, of

poison, in 1313. It is still circled with the wall and gates built by

the Sienese in 1366, and is a fair specimen of an intact mediæval

stronghold. Here we leave the main road, and break into a country-track

across a bed of sandstone, with the delicate volcanic lines of Monte

Amiata in front, and the aë;rial pile of Montalcino to our right. The

pyracanthus bushes in the hedge yield their clusters of bright yellow

berries, mingled with more glowing hues of red from haws and glossy

hips. On the pale grey earthen slopes men and women are plying the long

Sabellian hoes of their forefathers, and ploughmen are driving furrows

down steep hills. The labour of the husbandmen in Tuscany is very

graceful, partly, I think, because it is so primitive, but also because

the people have an eminently noble carriage, and are fashioned on the

lines of antique statues. I noticed two young contadini in one field,

whom Frederick Walker might have painted with the dignity of Pheidian

form. They were guiding their ploughs along a hedge of olive-trees,

slanting upwards, the white-horned oxen moving slowly through the marl,

and the lads bending to press the plough-shares home. It was a delicate

piece of colour—the grey mist of olive branches, the warm smoking

earth, the creamy flanks of the oxen, the brown limbs and dark eyes of

the men, who paused awhile to gaze at us, with shadows cast upon the

furrows from their tall straight figures. Then they turned to their

work again, and rhythmic movement was added to the picture. I wonder

when an Italian artist will condescend to pluck these flowers of

beauty, so abundantly offered by the simplest things in his own native

land. Each city has 77 an Accademia delle Belle Arti, and there is no

lack of students. But the painters, having learned their trade, make

copies ten times distant from the truth of famous masterpieces for the

American market. Few seem to look beyond their picture galleries. Thus

the democratic art, the art of Millet, the art of life and nature and

the people, waits.

As we mount, the soil grows of a richer brown; and there are woods of

oak where herds of swine are feeding on the acorns. Monte Oliveto comes

in sight—a mass of red brick, backed up with cypresses, among

dishevelled earthy precipices, _balze_ as they are called—upon the hill

below the village of Chiusure. This Chiusure was once a promising town;

but the life was crushed out of it in the throes of mediæval civil

wars, and since the thirteenth century it has been dwindling to a

hamlet. The struggle for existence, from which the larger communes of

this district, Siena and Montepulciano, emerged at the expense of their

neighbours, must have been tragical. The _balze_ now grow sterner,

drier, more dreadful. We see how deluges outpoured from thunder-storms

bring down their viscous streams of loam, destroying in an hour the

terraces it took a year to build, and spreading wasteful mud upon the

scanty cornfields. The people call this soil _creta_; but it seems to

be less like a chalk than a marl, or _marna_. It is always washing away

into ravines and gullies, exposing the roots of trees, and rendering

the tillage of the land a thankless labour. One marvels how any

vegetation has the faith to settle on its dreary waste, or how men have

the patience, generation after generation, to renew the industry, still

beginning, never ending, which reclaims such wildernesses. Comparing

Monte Oliveto with similar districts of cretaceous soil—with the

country, for example, between Pienza and San Quirico—we perceive how

much is owed to the perseverance of the monks whom Bernard 78 Tolomei

planted here. So far as it is clothed at all with crop and wood, this

is their service.

At last we climb the crowning hill, emerge from a copse of oak, glide

along a terraced pathway through the broom, and find ourselves in front

of the convent gateway. A substantial tower of red brick, machicolated

at the top and pierced with small square windows, guards this portal,

reminding us that at some time or other the monks found it needful to

arm their solitude against a force descending from Chiusure. There is

an avenue of slender cypresses; and over the gate, protected by a

jutting roof, shines a fresco of Madonna and Child. Passing rapidly

downwards, we are in the courtyard of the monastery, among its stables,

barns, and out-houses, with the forlorn bulk of the huge red building,

spreading wide, and towering up above us. As good luck ruled our

arrival, we came face to face with the Abbate de Negro, who administers

the domain of Monte Oliveto for the Government of Italy, and exercises

a kindly hospitality to chance-comers. He was standing near the church,

which, with its tall square campanile, breaks the long stern outline of

the convent. The whole edifice, it may be said, is composed of a

red-brick inclining to purple in tone, which contrasts not unpleasantly

with the lustrous green of the cypresses, and the glaucous sheen of

olives. Advantage has been taken of a steep crest; and the monastery,

enlarged from time to time through the last five centuries, has here

and there been reared upon gigantic buttresses, which jut upon the

_balze_ at a sometimes giddy height.

The Abbate received us with true courtesy, and gave us spacious rooms,

three cells apiece, facing Siena and the western mountains. There is

accommodation, he told us, for three hundred monks; but only three are

left in it. As this order was confined to members of the nobility, each

of 79 the religious had his own apartment—not a cubicle such as the

uninstructed dream of when they read of monks, but separate chambers

for sleep and study and recreation.

In the middle of the vast sad landscape, the place is still, with a

silence that can be almost heard. The deserted state of those

innumerable cells, those echoing corridors and shadowy cloisters,

exercises overpowering tyranny over the imagination. Siena is so far

away, and Montalcino is so faintly outlined on its airy parapet, that

these cities only deepen our sense of desolation. It is a relief to

mark at no great distance on the hillside a contadino guiding his oxen,

and from a lonely farm yon column of ascending smoke. At least the

world goes on, and life is somewhere resonant with song. But here there

rests a pall of silence among the oak-groves and the cypresses and

_balze_. As I leaned and mused, while Christian (my good friend and

fellow-traveller from the Grisons) made our beds, a melancholy sunset

flamed up from a rampart of cloud, built like a city of the air above

the mountains of Volterra—fire issuing from its battlements, and

smiting the fretted roof of heaven above. It was a conflagration of

celestial rose upon the saddest purples and cavernous recesses of

intensest azure.

We had an excellent supper in the visitors' refectory—soup, good bread

and country wine, ham, a roast chicken with potatoes, a nice white

cheese made of sheep's milk, and grapes for dessert. The kind Abbate

sat by, and watched his four guests eat, tapping his tortoiseshell

snuff-box, and telling us many interesting things about the past and

present state of the convent. Our company was completed with Lupo, the

pet cat, and Pirro, a woolly Corsican dog, very good friends, and both

enormously voracious. Lupo in particular engraved himself upon the

memory of Christian, into whose large legs he thrust his claws, when

the cheese-parings and 80 scraps were not supplied him with sufficient

promptitude. I never saw a hungrier and bolder cat. It made one fancy

that even the mice had been exiled from this solitude. And truly the

rule of the monastic order, no less than the habit of Italian

gentlemen, is frugal in the matter of the table, beyond the conception

of northern folk.

Monte Oliveto, the Superior told us, owned thirty-two _poderi_, or

large farms, of which five have recently been sold. They are worked on

the _mezzeria_ system; whereby peasants and proprietors divide the

produce of the soil; and which he thinks inferior for developing its

resources to that of _affitto_, or leaseholding.

The contadini live in scattered houses; and he says the estate would be

greatly improved by doubling the number of these dwellings, and letting

the subdivided farms to more energetic people. The village of Chiusure

is inhabited by labourers. The contadini are poor: a dower, for

instance, of fifty _lire_ is thought something: whereas near Genoa,

upon the leasehold system, a farmer may sometimes provide a dower of

twenty thousand _lire_. The country produces grain of different sorts,

excellent oil, and timber. It also yields a tolerable red wine. The

Government makes from eight to nine per cent. upon the value of the

land, employing him and his two religious brethren as agents.

In such conversation the evening passed. We rested well in large hard

beds with dry rough sheets. But there was a fretful wind abroad, which

went wailing round the convent walls and rattling the doors in its

deserted corridors. One of our party had been placed by himself at the

end of a long suite of apartments, with balconies commanding the wide

sweep of hills that Monte Amiata crowns. He confessed in the morning to

having passed a restless night, tormented by the ghostly noises of the

wind, a wanderer, 'like the 81 world's rejected guest,' through those

untenanted chambers. The olives tossed their filmy boughs in twilight

underneath his windows, sighing and shuddering, with a sheen in them as

eerie as that of willows by some haunted mere.

IV

The great attraction to students of Italian art in the convent of Monte

Oliveto is a large square cloister, covered with wall-paintings by Luca

Signorelli and Giovannantonio Bazzi, surnamed Il Sodoma. These

represent various episodes in the life of S. Benedict; while one

picture, in some respects the best of the whole series, is devoted to

the founder of the Olivetan Order, Bernardo Tolomei, dispensing the

rule of his institution to a consistory of white-robed monks.

Signorelli, that great master of Cortona, may be studied to better

advantage elsewhere, especially at Orvieto and in his native city. His

work in this cloister, consisting of eight frescoes, has been much

spoiled by time and restoration. Yet it can be referred to a good

period of his artistic activity (the year 1497) and displays much which

is specially characteristic of his manner. In Totila's barbaric train,

he painted a crowd of fierce emphatic figures, combining all ages and

the most varied attitudes, and reproducing with singular vividness the

Italian soldiers of adventure of his day. We see before us the

long-haired followers of Braccio and the Baglioni; their handsome

savage faces; their brawny limbs clad in the particoloured hose and

jackets of that period; feathered caps stuck sideways on their heads; a

splendid swagger in their straddling legs. Female beauty lay outside

the sphere of Signorelli's sympathy; and in the Monte Oliveto cloister

he was not called upon to paint it. But none of the Italian masters

felt more keenly, or more powerfully 82 represented in their work, the

muscular vigour of young manhood. Two of the remaining frescoes,

different from these in motive, might be selected as no less

characteristic of Signorelli's manner. One represents three sturdy

monks, clad in brown, working with all their strength to stir a

boulder, which has been bewitched, and needs a miracle to move it from

its place. The square and powerfully outlined drawing of these figures

is beyond all praise for its effect of massive solidity. The other

shows us the interior of a fifteenth-century tavern, where two monks

are regaling themselves upon the sly. A country girl, with shapely arms

and shoulders, her upper skirts tucked round the ample waist to which

broad sweeping lines of back and breasts descend, is serving wine. The

exuberance of animal life, the freedom of attitude expressed in this,

the mainly interesting figure of the composition, show that Signorelli

might have been a great master of realistic painting. Nor are the

accessories less effective. A wide-roofed kitchen chimney, a page-boy

leaving the room by a flight of steps which leads to the house door,

and the table at which the truant monks are seated, complete a picture

of homely Italian life. It may still be matched out of many an inn in

this hill district.

Called to graver work at Orvieto, where he painted his gigantic series

of frescoes illustrating the coming of Anti-christ, the Destruction of

the World, the Resurrection, the Last Judgment, and the final state of

souls in Paradise and Hell, Signorelli left his work at Monte Oliveto

unaccomplished. Seven years later it was taken up by a painter of very

different genius. Sodoma was a native of Vercelli, and had received his

first training in the Lombard schools, which owed so much to Lionardo

da Vinci's influence. He was about thirty years of age when chance

brought him to Siena. Here he made acquaintance with Pandolfo Petrucci,

who had 83 recently established himself in a species of tyranny over

the Republic. The work he did for this patron and other nobles of

Siena, brought him into notice. Vasari observes that his hot Lombard

colouring, a something florid and attractive in his style, which

contrasted with the severity of the Tuscan school, rendered him no less

agreeable as an artist than his free manners made him acceptable as a

house-friend. Fra Domenico da Leccio, also a Lombard, was at that time

General of the monks of Monte Oliveto. On a visit to this compatriot in

1505, Sodoma received a commission to complete the cloister; and during

the next two years he worked there, producing in all twenty-five

frescoes. For his pains he seemed to have received but little

pay—Vasari says, only the expenses of some colour-grinders who assisted

him; but from the books of the convent it appears that 241 ducats, or

something over 60_l._ of our money, were disbursed to him.

Sodoma was so singular a fellow, even in that age of piquant

personalities, that it may be worth while to translate a fragment of

Vasari's gossip about him. We must, however, bear in mind that, for

some unknown reason, the Aretine historian bore a rancorous grudge

against this Lombard whose splendid gifts and great achievements he did

all he could by writing to depreciate. 'He was fond,' says Vasari, 'of

keeping in his house all sorts of strange animals: badgers, squirrels,

monkeys, cat-a-mountains, dwarf-donkeys, horses, racers, little Elba

ponies, jackdaws, bantams, doves of India, and other creatures of this

kind, as many as he could lay his hands on. Over and above these

beasts, he had a raven, which had learned so well from him to talk,

that it could imitate its master's voice, especially in answering the

door when some one knocked, and this it did so cleverly that people

took it for Giovannantonio himself, as all the folk of Siena know quite

well. In like manner, his other pets were 84 so much at home with him

that they never left his house, but played the strangest tricks and

maddest pranks imaginable, so that his house was like nothing more than

a Noah's Ark.' He was a bold rider, it seems; for with one of his

racers, ridden by himself, he bore away the prize in that wild

horse-race they run upon the Piazza at Siena. For the rest, 'he attired

himself in pompous clothes, wearing doublets of brocade, cloaks trimmed

with gold lace, gorgeous caps, neck-chains, and other vanities of a

like description, fit for buffoons and mountebanks.' In one of the

frescoes of Monte Oliveto, Sodoma painted his own portrait, with some

of his curious pets around him. He there appears as a young man with

large and decidedly handsome features, a great shock of dark curled

hair escaping from a yellow cap, and flowing down over a rich mantle

which drapes his shoulders. If we may trust Vasari, he showed his

curious humours freely to the monks. 'Nobody could describe the

amusement he furnished to those good fathers, who christened him

Mattaccio (the big madman), or the insane tricks he played there.'

In spite of Vasari's malevolence, the portrait he has given us of Bazzi

has so far nothing unpleasant about it. The man seems to have been a

madcap artist, combining with his love for his profession a taste for

fine clothes, and what was then perhaps rarer in people of his sort, a

great partiality for living creatures of all kinds. The darker shades

of Vasari's picture have been purposely omitted from these pages. We

only know for certain, about Bazzi's private life, that he was married

in 1510 to a certain Beatrice, who bore him two children, and who was

still living with him in 1541. The further suggestion that he painted

at Monte Oliveto subjects unworthy of a religious house, is wholly

disproved by the frescoes which still exist in a state of very

tolerable preservation. They represent various episodes in the legend

of S. 85 Benedict; all marked by that spirit of simple, almost childish

piety which is a special characteristic of Italian religious history.

The series forms, in fact, a painted _novella_ of monastic life; its

petty jealousies, its petty trials, its tribulations and temptations,

and its indescribably petty miracles. Bazzi was well fitted for the

execution of this task. He had a swift and facile brush, considerable

versatility in the treatment of monotonous subjects, and a

never-failing sense of humour. His white-cowled monks, some of them

with the rosy freshness of boys, some with the handsome brown faces of

middle life, others astute and crafty, others again wrinkled with old

age, have clearly been copied from real models. He puts them into

action without the slightest effort, and surrounds them with

landscapes, architecture, and furniture, appropriate to each successive

situation. The whole is done with so much grace, such simplicity of

composition, and transparency of style, corresponding to the _naïf_ and

superficial legend, that we feel a perfect harmony between the artist's

mind and the motives he was made to handle. In this respect Bazzi's

portion of the legend of S. Benedict is more successful than

Signorelli's. It was fortunate, perhaps, that the conditions of his

task confined him to uncomplicated groupings, and a scale of colour in

which white predominates. For Bazzi, as is shown by subsequent work in

the Farnesina Villa at Rome, and in the church of S. Domenico at Siena,

was no master of composition; and the tone, even of his masterpieces,

inclines to heat. Unlike Signorelli, Bazzi felt a deep artistic

sympathy with female beauty; and the most attractive fresco in the

whole series is that in which the evil monk Florentius brings a bevy of

fair damsels to the convent. There is one group, in particular, of six

women, so delicately varied in carriage of the head and suggested

movement of the body, as to be comparable only to a strain of concerted

86 music. This is perhaps the painter's masterpiece in the rendering of

pure beauty, if we except his S. Sebastian of the Uffizzi.

We tire of studying pictures, hardly less than of reading about them! I

was glad enough, after three hours spent among the frescoes of this

cloister, to wander forth into the copses which surround the convent.

Sunlight was streaming treacherously from flying clouds; and though it

was high noon, the oak-leaves were still a-tremble with dew. Pink

cyclamens and yellow amaryllis starred the moist brown earth; and under

the cypress-trees, where alleys had been cut in former time for pious

feet, the short firm turf was soft and mossy. Before bidding the

hospitable Padre farewell, and starting in our waggonette for Asciano,

it was pleasant to meditate awhile in these green solitudes.

Generations of white-stoled monks who had sat or knelt upon the now

deserted terraces, or had slowly paced the winding paths to Calvaries

aloft and points of vantage high above the wood, rose up before me. My

mind, still full of Bazzi's frescoes, peopled the wilderness with grave

monastic forms, and gracious, young-eyed faces of boyish novices.

87

MONTEPULCIANO

I

For the sake of intending travellers to this, the lordliest of Tuscan

hill-towns, it will be well to state at once and without circumlocution

what does not appear upon the time-tables of the line from Empoli to

Rome. Montepulciano has a station; but this railway station is at the

distance of at least an hour and a half's drive from the mountain upon

which the city stands.

The lumbering train which brought us one October evening from Asciano

crawled into this station after dark, at the very moment when a storm,

which had been gathering from the south-west, burst in deluges of rain

and lightning. There was, however, a covered carriage going to the

town. Into this we packed ourselves, together with a polite Italian

gentleman who, in answer to our questions, consulted his watch, and

smilingly replied that a little half-hour would bring us easily to

Montepulciano. He was a native of the place. He knew perfectly well

that he would be shut up with us in that carriage for two mortal hours

of darkness and downpour. And yet, such is the irresistible impulse in

Italians to say something immediately agreeable, he fed us with false

hopes and had no fear of consequences. What did it matter to him if we

were pulling out our watches and chattering in well-contented undertone

about _vino nobile_, _biftek_, and possibly a _polio arrosto_, or a

dish of _tord_? At 88 the end of the half-hour, as he was well aware,

self-congratulations and visions of a hearty supper would turn to

discontented wailings, and the querulous complaining of defrauded

appetites. But the end of half an hour was still half an hour off; and

we meanwhile were comfortable.

The night was pitchy dark, and blazing flashes of lightning showed a

white ascending road at intervals. Rain rushed in torrents, splashing

against the carriage wheels, which moved uneasily, as though they could

but scarcely stem the river that swept down upon them. Far away above

us to the left, was one light on a hill, which never seemed to get any

nearer. We could see nothing but a chasm of blackness below us on one

side, edged with ghostly olive-trees, and a high bank on the other.

Sometimes a star swam out of the drifting clouds; but then the rain

hissed down again, and the flashes came in floods of livid light,

illuminating the eternal olives and the cypresses which looked like

huge black spectres. It seemed almost impossible for the horses to keep

their feet, as the mountain road grew ever steeper and the torrent

swelled around them. Still they struggled on. The promised half-hour

had been doubled, trebled, quadrupled, when at last we saw the great

brown sombre walls of a city tower above us. Then we entered one of

those narrow lofty Tuscan gates, and rolled upon the pavement of a

street.

The inn at Montepulciano is called Marzocco, after the Florentine lion

which stands upon its column in a little square before the house. The

people there are hospitable, and more than once on subsequent occasions

have they extended to us kindly welcome. But on this, our first

appearance, they had scanty room at their disposal. Seeing us arrive so

late, and march into their dining-room, laden with sealskins,

waterproofs, and ulsters, one of the party 89 hugging a complete

Euripides in Didot's huge edition, they were confounded. At last they

conducted the whole company of four into a narrow back bedroom, where

they pointed to one fair-sized and one very little bed. This was the

only room at liberty, they said; and could we not arrange to sleep

here? _S' accomodi, Signore! S' accomodi, Signora!_ These encouraging

words, uttered in various tones of cheerful and insinuating politeness

to each member of the party in succession, failed to make us comprehend

how a gentleman and his wife, with a lean but rather lengthy English

friend, and a bulky native of the Grisons, could 'accommodate

themselves' collectively and undividedly with what was barely

sufficient for their just moiety, however much it might afford a

night's rest to their worse half. Christian was sent out into the storm

to look for supplementary rooms in Montepulciano, which he failed to

get. Meanwhile we ordered supper, and had the satisfaction of seeing

set upon the board a huge red flask of _vino nobile_. In copious

draughts of this the King of Tuscan wines, we drowned our cares; and

when the cloth was drawn, our friend and Christian passed their night

upon the supper table. The good folk of the inn had recovered from

their surprise, and from the inner recesses of their house had brought

forth mattresses and blankets. So the better and larger half of the

company enjoyed sound sleep.

It rained itself out at night, and the morning was clear, with the

transparent atmosphere of storm-clouds hurrying in broken squadrons

from the bad sea quarter. Yet this is just the weather in which Tuscan

landscape looks its loveliest. Those immense expanses of grey

undulating uplands need the luminousness of watery sunshine, the colour

added by cloud-shadows, and the pearly softness of rising vapours, to

rob them of a certain awful grimness. The main street of Montepulciano

goes straight uphill for a considerable distance 90 between brown

palaces; then mounts by a staircase-zigzag under huge impending masses

of masonry; until it ends in a piazza. On the ascent, at intervals, the

eye is fascinated by prospects to the north and east over Val di

Chiana, Cortona, Thrasymene, Chiusi; to south and west over Monte

Cetona, Radicofani, Monte Amiata, the Val d' Ombrone, and the Sienese

Contado. Grey walls overgrown with ivy, arcades of time-toned brick,

and the forbidding bulk of houses hewn from solid travertine, frame

these glimpses of aë;rial space. The piazza is the top of all things.

Here are the Duomo; the Palazzo del Comune, closely resembling that of

Florence, with the Marzocco on its front; the fountain, between two

quaintly sculptured columns; and the vast palace Del Monte, of heavy

Renaissance architecture, said to be the work of Antonio di San Gallo.

We climbed the tower of the Palazzo del Comune, and stood at the

altitude of 2000 feet above the sea. The view is finer in its kind than

I have elsewhere seen, even in Tuscany, that land of panoramic

prospects over memorable tracts of world-historic country. Such

landscape cannot be described in words. But the worst is that, even

while we gaze, we know that nothing but the faintest memory of our

enjoyment will be carried home with us. The atmospheric conditions were

perfect that morning. The sun was still young; the sky sparkled after

the night's thunderstorm; the whole immensity of earth around lay

lucid, smiling, newly washed in baths of moisture. Masses of

storm-cloud kept rolling from the west, where we seemed to feel the sea

behind those intervening hills. But they did not form in heavy blocks

or hang upon the mountain summits. They hurried and dispersed and

changed and flung their shadows on the world below.

91

II

The charm of this view is composed of so many different elements, so

subtly blent, appealing to so many separate sensibilities; the sense of

grandeur, the sense of space, the sense of natural beauty, and the

sense of human pathos; that deep internal faculty we call historic

sense; that it cannot be defined. First comes the immense surrounding

space—a space measured in each arc of the circumference by sections of

at least fifty miles, limited by points of exquisitely picturesque

beauty, including distant cloud-like mountain ranges and crystals of

sky-blue Apennines, circumscribing landscapes of refined loveliness in

detail, always varied, always marked by objects of peculiar interest

where the eye or memory may linger. Next in importance to this

immensity of space, so powerfully affecting the imagination by its mere

extent, and by the breadth of atmosphere attuning all varieties of form

and colour to one harmony beneath illimitable heaven, may be reckoned

the episodes of rivers, lakes, hills, cities, with old historic names.

For there spreads the lordly length of Thrasymene, islanded and

citadelled, in hazy morning mist, still dreaming of the shock of Roman

hosts with Carthaginian legions. There is the lake of Chiusi, set like

a jewel underneath the copse-clad hills which hide the dust of a dead

Tuscan nation. The streams of Arno start far far away, where Arezzo

lies enfolded in bare uplands. And there at our feet rolls Tiber's

largest affluent, the Chiana. And there is the canal which joins their

fountains in the marsh that Lionardo would have drained. Monte Cetona

is yonder height which rears its bristling ridge defiantly from

neighbouring Chiusi. And there springs Radicofani, the eagle's eyrie of

a brigand brood. Next, Monte Amiata stretches the long lines of her

antique volcano; the swelling mountain flanks, 92 descending gently

from her cloud-capped top, are russet with autumnal oak and chestnut

woods. On them our eyes rest lovingly; imagination wanders for a moment

through those mossy glades, where cyclamens are growing now, and

primroses in spring will peep amid anemones from rustling foliage

strewn by winter's winds. The heights of Casentino, the Perugian

highlands, Volterra, far withdrawn amid a wilderness of rolling hills,

and solemn snow-touched ranges of the Spolentino, Sibyl-haunted

fastnesses of Norcia, form the most distant horizon-lines of this

unending panorama. And then there are the cities placed each upon a

point of vantage: Siena; olive-mantled Chiusi; Cortona, white upon her

spreading throne; poetic Montalcino, lifted aloft against the vaporous

sky; San Quirico, nestling in pastoral tranquillity; Pienza, where

Æneas Sylvius built palaces and called his birthplace after his own

Papal name. Still closer to the town itself of Montepulciano,

stretching along the irregular ridge which gave it building ground, and

trending out on spurs above deep orchards, come the lovely details of

oak-copses, blending with grey tilth and fields rich with olive and

vine. The gaze, exhausted with immensity, pierces those deeply cloven

valleys, sheltered from wind and open to the sun—undulating folds of

brown earth, where Bacchus, when he visited Tuscany, found the

grape-juice that pleased him best, and crowned the wine of

Montepulciano king. Here from our eyrie we can trace white oxen on the

furrows, guided by brown-limbed, white-shirted contadini.

The morning glory of this view from Montepulciano, though irrecoverable

by words, abides in the memory, and draws one back by its unique

attractiveness. On a subsequent visit to the town in springtime, my

wife and I took a twilight walk, just after our arrival, through its

gloomy fortress streets, up to the piazza, where the impendent houses

93 lowered like bastions, and all the masses of their mighty

architecture stood revealed in shadow and dim lamplight. Far and wide,

the country round us gleamed with bonfires; for it was the eve of the

Ascension, when every contadino lights a beacon of chestnut logs and

straw and piled-up leaves. Each castello on the plain, each village on

the hills, each lonely farmhouse at the skirt of forest or the edge of

lake, smouldered like a red Cyclopean eye beneath the vault of stars.

The flames waxed and waned, leapt into tongues, or disappeared. As they

passed from gloom to brilliancy and died away again, they seemed almost

to move. The twilight scene was like that of a vast city, filling the

plain and climbing the heights in terraces. Is this custom, I thought,

a relic of old Pales-worship?

III

The early history of Montepulciano is buried in impenetrable mists of

fable. No one can assign a date to the foundation of these high-hill

cities. The eminence on which it stands belongs to the volcanic system

of Monte Amiata, and must at some time have formed a portion of the

crater which threw that mighty mass aloft. But sons have passed since

the _gran sasso di Maremma_ was a fire-vomiting monster, glaring like

Etna in eruption on the Tyrrhene sea; and through those centuries how

many races may have camped upon the summit we call Montepulciano!

Tradition assigns the first quasi-historical settlement to Lars

Porsena, who is said to have made it his summer residence, when the

lower and more marshy air of Clusium became oppressive. Certainly it

must have been a considerable town in the Etruscan period. Embedded in

the walls of palaces may still be seen numerous fragments of sculptured

basreliefs, the works of that mysterious people. Apropos of

Montepulciano's importance 94 in the early years of Roman history, I

lighted on a quaint story related by its very jejune annalist, Spinello

Benci. It will be remembered that Livy attributes the invasion of the

Gauls, who, after besieging Clusium, advanced on Rome, to the

persuasions of a certain Aruns. He was an exile from Clusium; and

wishing to revenge himself upon his country-people, he allured the

Senonian Gauls into his service by the promise of excellent wine,

samples of which he had taken with him into Lombardy. Spinello Benci

accepts the legend literally, and continues: 'These wines were so

pleasing to the palate of the barbarians, that they were induced to

quit the rich and teeming valley of the Po, to cross the Apennines, and

move in battle array against Chiusi. And it is clear that the wine

which Aruns selected for the purpose was the same as that which is

produced to this day at Montepulciano. For nowhere else in the Etruscan

district can wines of equally generous quality and fiery spirit be

found, so adapted for export and capable of such long preservation.'

We may smile at the historian's _naïveté_. Yet the fact remains that

good wine of Montepulciano can still allure barbarians of this epoch to

the spot where it is grown. Of all Italian vintages, with the exception

of some rare qualities of Sicily and the Valtellina, it is, in my

humble opinion, the best. And when the time comes for Italy to develop

the resources of her vineyards upon scientific principles,

Montepulciano will drive Brolio from the field and take the same place

by the side of Chianti which Volnay occupies by common Macon. It will

then be quoted upon wine-lists throughout Europe, and find its place

upon the tables of rich epicures in Hyperborean regions, and add its

generous warmth to Trans-atlantic banquets. Even as it is now made,

with very little care bestowed on cultivation and none to speak of on

selection of the grape, the wine is rich and noble, slightly rough to a

95 sophisticated palate, but clean in quality and powerful and racy. It

deserves the enthusiasm attributed by Redi to Bacchus:[57]

Fill, fill, let us all have our will!

But with _what_, with _what_, boys, shall we fill.

Sweet Ariadne—no, not _that_ one—_ah_ no;

Fill me the manna of Montepulciano:

Fill me a magnum and reach it me.—Gods!

How it glides to my heart by the sweetest of roads!

Oh, how it kisses me, tickles me, bites me!

Oh, how my eyes loosen sweetly in tears!

I'm ravished! I'm rapt! Heaven finds me admissible!

Lost in an ecstasy! blinded! invisible!—

Hearken all earth!

We, Bacchus, in the might of our great mirth,

To all who reverence us, are right thinkers;

Hear, all ye drinkers!

Give ear and give faith to the edict divine;

Montepulciano's the King of all wine.

[57] From Leigh Hunt's Translation.

It is necessary, however, that our modern barbarian should travel to

Montepulciano itself, and there obtain a flask of _manna_ or _vino

nobile_ from some trusty cellar-master. He will not find it bottled in

the inns or restaurants upon his road.

IV

The landscape and the wine of Montepulciano are both well worth the

trouble of a visit to this somewhat inaccessible city. Yet more remains

to be said about the attractions of the town itself. In the Duomo,

which was spoiled by unintelligent rebuilding at a dismal epoch of

barren art, are fragments of one of the rarest monuments of Tuscan

sculpture. This is the tomb of Bartolommeo Aragazzi. He was a native of

Montepulciano, and secretary to Pope Martin V., that _Papa_ 96 _Martino

non vale un quattrino_, on whom, during his long residence in Florence,

the street-boys made their rhymes. Twelve years before his death he

commissioned Donatello and Michelozzo Michelozzi, who about that period

were working together upon the monuments of Pope John XXIII. and

Cardinal Brancacci, to erect his own tomb at the enormous cost of

twenty-four thousand scudi. That thirst for immortality of fame, which

inspired the humanists of the Renaissance, prompted Aragazzi to this

princely expenditure. Yet, having somehow won the hatred of his

fellow-students, he was immediately censured for excessive vanity.

Lionardo Bruni makes his monument the theme of a ferocious onslaught.

Writing to Poggio Bracciolini, Bruni tells a story how, while

travelling through the country of Arezzo, he met a train of oxen

dragging heavy waggons piled with marble columns, statues, and all the

necessary details of a sumptuous sepulchre. He stopped, and asked what

it all meant. Then one of the contractors for this transport, wiping

the sweat from his forehead, in utter weariness of the vexatious

labour, at the last end of his temper, answered: 'May the gods destroy

all poets, past, present, and future.' I inquired what he had to do

with poets, and how they had annoyed him. 'Just this,' he replied,

'that this poet, lately deceased, a fool and windy-pated fellow, has

ordered a monument for himself; and with a view to erecting it, these

marbles are being dragged to Montepulciano; but I doubt whether we

shall contrive to get them up there. The roads are too bad.' 'But,'

cried I, 'do you believe _that_ man was a poet—that dunce who had no

science, nay, nor knowledge either? who only rose above the heads of

men by vanity and doltishness?' 'I don't know,' he answered, 'nor did I

ever hear tell, while he was alive, about his being called a poet; but

his fellow-townsmen now decide he was one; nay, if he had but left a

few more money-bags, 97 they'd swear he was a god. Anyhow, but for his

having been a poet, I would not have cursed poets in general.'

Whereupon, the malevolent Bruni withdrew, and composed a

scorpion-tailed oration, addressed to his friend Poggio, on the

suggested theme of 'diuturnity in monuments,' and false ambition. Our

old friends of humanistic learning—Cyrus, Alexander, Cæsar—meet us in

these frothy paragraphs. Cambyses, Xerxes, Artaxerxes, Darius, are

thrown in to make the gruel of rhetoric 'thick and slab.' The whole

epistle ends in a long-drawn peroration of invective against 'that

excrement in human shape,' who had had the ill-luck, by pretence to

scholarship, by big gains from the Papal treasury, by something in his

manners alien from the easy-going customs of the Roman Court, to rouse

the rancour of his fellow-humanists.

I have dwelt upon this episode, partly because it illustrates the

peculiar thirst for glory in the students of that time, but more

especially because it casts a thin clear thread of actual light upon

the masterpiece which, having been transported with this difficulty

from Donatello's workshop, is now to be seen by all lovers of fine art,

in part at least, at Montepulciano. In part at least: the phrase is

pathetic. Poor Aragazzi, who thirsted so for 'diuturnity in monuments,'

who had been so cruelly assaulted in the grave by humanistic jealousy,

expressing its malevolence with humanistic crudity of satire, was

destined after all to be defrauded of his well-paid tomb. The monument,

a master work of Donatello and his collaborator, was duly erected. The

oxen and the contractors, it appears, had floundered through the mud of

Valdichiana, and struggled up the mountain-slopes of Montepulciano. But

when the church, which this triumph of art adorned, came to be

repaired, the miracle of beauty was dismembered. The sculpture for

which Aragazzi spent his thousands of crowns, which Donatello touched

with his immortalising chisel, over 98 which the contractors vented

their curses and Bruni eased his bile; these marbles are now visible as

mere _disjecta membra_ in a church which, lacking them, has little to

detain a traveller's haste.

On the left hand of the central door, as you enter, Aragazzi lies, in

senatorial robes, asleep; his head turned slightly to the right upon

the pillow, his hands folded over his breast. Very noble are the

draperies, and dignified the deep tranquillity of slumber. Here, we

say, is a good man fallen upon sleep, awaiting resurrection. The one

commanding theme of Christian sculpture, in an age of Pagan feeling,

has been adequately rendered. Bartolommeo Aragazzi, like Ilaria led

Carretto at Lucca, like the canopied doges in S. Zanipolo at Venice,

like the Acciauoli in the Florentine Certosa, like the Cardinal di

Portogallo in Samminiato, is carved for us as he had been in life, but

with that life suspended, its fever all smoothed out, its agitations

over, its pettinesses dignified by death. This marmoreal repose of the

once active man symbolises for our imagination the state into which he

passed four centuries ago, but in which, according to the creed, he

still abides, reserved for judgment and re-incarnation. The flesh, clad

with which he walked our earth, may moulder in the vaults beneath. But

it will one day rise again; and art has here presented it imperishable

to our gaze. This is how the Christian sculptors, inspired by the

majestic calm of classic art, dedicated a Christian to the genius of

repose. Among the nations of antiquity this repose of death was

eternal; and being unable to conceive of a man's body otherwise than

for ever obliterated by the flames of funeral, they were perforce led

back to actual life when they would carve his portrait on a tomb. But

for Christianity the rest of the grave has ceased to be eternal.

Centuries may pass, but in the end it must be broken. Therefore art is

justified in 99 showing us the man himself in an imagined state of

sleep. Yet this imagined state of sleep is so incalculably long, and by

the will of God withdrawn from human prophecy, that the ages sweeping

over the dead man before the trumpets of archangels wake him, shall

sooner wear away memorial stone than stir his slumber. It is a slumber,

too, unterrified, unentertained by dreams. Suspended animation finds no

fuller symbolism than the sculptor here presents to us in abstract

form.

The boys of Montepulciano have scratched Messer Aragazzi's sleeping

figure with _graffiti_ at their own free will. Yet they have had no

power to erase the poetry of Donatello's mighty style. That, in spite

of Bruni's envy, in spite of injurious time, in spite of the still

worse insult of the modernised cathedral and the desecrated monument,

embalms him in our memory and secures for him the diuturnity for which

he paid his twenty thousand crowns. Money, methinks, beholding him, was

rarely better expended on a similar ambition. And ambition of this

sort, relying on the genius of such a master to give it wings for

perpetuity of time, is, _pace_ Lionardo Bruni, not ignoble.

cpposite the figure of Messer Aragazzi are two square basreliefs from

the same monument, fixed against piers of the nave. One represents

Madonna enthroned among worshippers; members, it may be supposed, of

Aragazzi's household. Three angelic children, supporting the child

Christ upon her lap, complete that pyramidal form of composition which

Fra Bartolommeo was afterwards to use with such effect in painting. The

other basrelief shows a group of grave men and youths, clasping hands

with loveliest interlacement; the placid sentiment of human fellowship

translated into harmonies of sculptured form. Children below run up to

touch their knees, and reach out boyish 100 arms to welcome them. Two

young men, with half-draped busts and waving hair blown off their

foreheads, anticipate the type of adolescence which Andrea del Sarto

perfected in his S. John. We might imagine that this masterly panel was

intended to represent the arrival of Messer Aragazzi in his home. It is

a scene from the domestic life of the dead man, duly subordinated to

the recumbent figure, which, when the monument was perfect, would have

dominated the whole composition.

Nothing in the range of Donatello's work surpasses these two basreliefs

for harmonies of line and grouping, for choice of form, for beauty of

expression, and for smoothness of surface-working. The marble is of

great delicacy, and is wrought to a wax-like surface. At the high altar

are three more fragments from the mutilated tomb. One is a long low

frieze of children bearing garlands, which probably formed the base of

Aragazzi's monument, and now serves for a predella. The remaining

pieces are detached statues of Fortitude and Faith. The former reminds

us of Donatello's S. George; the latter is twisted into a strained

attitude, full of character, but lacking grace. What the effect of

these emblematic figures would have been when harmonised by the

architectural proportions of the sepulchre, the repose of Aragazzi on

his sarcophagus, the suavity of the two square panels and the rhythmic

beauty of the frieze, it is not easy to conjecture. But rudely severed

from their surroundings, and exposed in isolation, one at each side of

the altar, they leave an impression of awkward discomfort on the

memory. A certain hardness, peculiar to the Florentine manner, is felt

in them. But this quality may have been intended by the sculptors for

the sake of contrast with what is eminently graceful, peaceful, and

melodious in the other fragments of the ruined masterpiece.

101

V

At a certain point in the main street, rather more than halfway from

the Albergo del Marzocco to the piazza, a tablet has been let into the

wall upon the left-hand side. This records the fact that here in 1454

was born Angelo Ambrogini, the special glory of Montepulciano, the

greatest classical scholar and the greatest Italian poet of the

fifteenth century. He is better known in the history of literature as

Poliziano, or Politianus, a name he took from his native city, when he

came, a marvellous boy, at the age of ten, to Florence, and joined the

household of Lorenzo de' Medici. He had already claims upon Lorenzo's

hospitality. For his father, Benedetto, by adopting the cause of Piero

de' Medici in Montepulciano, had exposed himself to bitter feuds and

hatred of his fellow-citizens. To this animosity of party warfare he

fell a victim a few years previously. We only know that he was

murdered, and that he left a helpless widow with five children, of whom

Angelo was the eldest. The Ambrogini or Cini were a family of some

importance in Montepulciano; and their dwelling-house is a palace of

considerable size. From its eastern windows the eye can sweep that vast

expanse of country, embracing the lakes of Thrasymene and Chiusi, which

has been already described. What would have happened, we wonder, if

Messer Benedetto, the learned jurist, had not espoused the Medicean

cause and embroiled himself with murderous antagonists? Would the

little Angelo have grown up in this quiet town, and practised law, and

lived and died a citizen of Montepulciano? In that case the

lecture-rooms of Florence would never have echoed to the sonorous

hexameters of the 'Rusticus' and 'Ambra.' Italian literature would have

lacked the 'Stanze' and 'Orfeo.' European scholarship would have been

defrauded 102 of the impulse given to it by the 'Miscellanea.' The

study of Roman law would have missed those labours on the Pandects,

with which the name of Politian is honourably associated. From the

Florentine society of the fifteenth century would have disappeared the

commanding central figure of humanism, which now contrasts dramatically

with the stern monastic Prior of S. Mark. Benedetto's tragic death gave

Poliziano to Italy and to posterity.

VI

Those who have a day to spare at Montepulciano can scarcely spend it

better than in an excursion to Pienza and San Quirico. Leaving the city

by the road which takes a westerly direction, the first object of

interest is the Church of San Biagio, placed on a fertile plateau

immediately beneath the ancient acropolis. It was erected by Antonio di

San Gallo in 1518, and is one of the most perfect specimens existing of

the sober classical style. The Church consists of a Greek square,

continued at the east end into a semicircular tribune, surmounted by a

central cupola, and flanked by a detached bell-tower, ending in a

pyramidal spire. The whole is built of solid yellow travertine, a

material which, by its warmth of colour, is pleasing to the eye, and

mitigates the mathematical severity of the design. Upon entering, we

feel at once what Alberti called the music of this style; its large and

simple harmonies, depending for effect upon sincerity of plan and

justice of balance. The square masses of the main building, the

projecting cornices and rounded tribune, meet together and soar up into

the cupola; while the grand but austere proportions of the arches and

the piers compose a symphony of perfectly concordant lines. The music

is grave and solemn, architecturally expressed in terms of measured 103

space and outlined symmetry. The whole effect is that of one thing

pleasant to look upon, agreeably appealing to our sense of unity,

charming us by grace and repose; not stimulative nor suggestive, not

multiform nor mysterious. We are reminded of the temples imagined by

Francesco Colonna, and figured in his _Hypnerotomachia Poliphili_. One

of these shrines has, we feel, come into actual existence here; and the

religious ceremonies for which it is adapted are not those of the

Christian worship. Some more primitive, less spiritual rites, involving

less of tragic awe and deep-wrought symbolism, should be here

performed. It is better suited for Polifilo's lustration by Venus

Physizoe than for the mass on Easter morning. And in this respect, the

sentiment of the architecture is exactly faithful to that mood of

religious feeling which appeared in Italy under the influences of the

classical revival—when the essential doctrines of Christianity were

blurred with Pantheism; when Jehovah became _Jupiter Optimus Maximus_;

and Jesus was the _Heros_ of Calvary, and nuns were _Virgines

Vestales_. In literature this mood often strikes us as insincere and

artificial. But it admitted of realisation and showed itself to be

profoundly felt in architecture.

After leaving Madonna di San Biagio, the road strikes at once into an

open country, expanding on the right towards the woody ridge of Monte

Fallonica, on the left toward Cetona and Radicofani, with Monte Amiata

full in front—its double crest and long volcanic slope recalling Etna;

the belt of embrowned forest on its flank, made luminous by sunlight.

Far away stretches the Sienese Maremma; Siena dimly visible upon her

gentle hill; and still beyond, the pyramid of Volterra, huge and

cloud-like, piled against the sky. The road, as is almost invariable in

this district, keeps to the highest line of ridges, winding much, and

following 104 the dimplings of the earthy hills. Here and there a

solitary castello, rusty with old age, and turned into a farm, juts

into picturesqueness from some point of vantage on a mound surrounded

with green tillage. But soon the dull and intolerable _creta_, ash-grey

earth, without a vestige of vegetation, furrowed by rain, and

desolately breaking into gullies, swallows up variety and charm. It is

difficult to believe that this _creta_ of Southern Tuscany, which has

all the appearance of barrenness, and is a positive deformity in the

landscape, can be really fruitful. Yet we are frequently being told

that it only needs assiduous labour to render it enormously productive.

When we reached Pienza we were already in the middle of a country

without cultivation, abandoned to the marl. It is a little place,

perched upon the ledge of a long sliding hill, which commands the vale

of Orcia; Monte Amiata soaring in aë;rial majesty beyond. Its old name

was Cosignano. But it had the honour of giving birth to Æneas Sylvius

Piccolomini, who, when he was elected to the Papacy and had assumed the

title of Pius II., determined to transform and dignify his native

village, and to call it after his own name. From that time forward

Cosignano has been known as Pienza.

Pius II. succeeded effectually in leaving his mark upon the town. And

this forms its main interest at the present time. We see in Pienza how

the most active-minded and intelligent man of his epoch, the

representative genius of Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century,

commanding vast wealth and the Pontifical prestige, worked out his whim

of city-building. The experiment had to be made upon a small scale; for

Pienza was then and was destined to remain a village. Yet here, upon

this miniature piazza—in modern as in ancient Italy the meeting-point

of civic life, the forum— 105 we find a cathedral, a palace of the

bishop, a palace of the feudal lord, and a palace of the commune,

arranged upon a well-considered plan, and executed after one design in

a consistent style. The religious, municipal, signorial, and

ecclesiastical functions of the little town are centralised around the

open market-place, on which the common people transacted business and

discussed affairs. Pius entrusted the realisation of his scheme to a

Florentine architect; whether Bernardo Rossellino, or a certain

Bernardo di Lorenzo, is still uncertain. The same artist, working in

the flat manner of Florentine domestic architecture, with rusticated

basements, rounded windows and bold projecting cornices—the manner

which is so nobly illustrated by the Rucellai and Strozzi palaces at

Florence—executed also for Pius the monumental Palazzo Piccolomini at

Siena. It is a great misfortune for the group of buildings he designed

at Pienza, that they are huddled together in close quarters on a square

too small for their effect. A want of space is peculiarly injurious to

the architecture of this date, 1462, which, itself geometrical and

spatial, demands a certain harmony and liberty in its surroundings, a

proportion between the room occupied by each building and the masses of

the edifice. The style is severe and prosaic. Those charming episodes

and accidents of fancy, in which the Gothic style and the style of the

earlier Lombard Renaissance abounded, are wholly wanting to the rigid,

mathematical, hard-headed genius of the Florentine quattrocento.

Pienza, therefore, disappoints us. Its heavy palace frontispieces shut

the spirit up in a tight box. We seem unable to breathe, and lack that

element of life and picturesqueness which the splendid retinues of

nobles in the age of Pinturicchio might have added to the now forlorn

Piazza.

Yet the material is a fine warm travertine, mellowing to 106 dark red,

brightening to golden, with some details, especially the tower of the

Palazzo Comunale, in red brick. This building, by the way, is imitated

in miniature from that of Florence. The cathedral is a small church of

three aisles, equally high, ending in what the French would call a

_chevet_. Pius had observed this plan of construction somewhere in

Austria, and commanded his architect, Bernardo, to observe it in his

plan. He was attracted by the facilities for window-lighting which it

offered; and what is very singular, he provided by the Bull of his

foundation for keeping the walls of the interior free from frescoes and

other coloured decorations. The result is that, though the interior

effect is pleasing, the church presents a frigid aspect to eyes

familiarised with warmth of tone in other buildings of that period. The

details of the columns and friezes are classical; and the façade,

strictly corresponding to the structure, and very honest in its

decorative elements, is also of the earlier Renaissance style. But the

vaulting and some of the windows are pointed.

The Palazzo Piccolomini, standing at the right hand of the Duomo, is a

vast square edifice. The walls are flat and even, pierced at regular

intervals with windows, except upon the south-west side, where the

rectangular design is broken by a noble double Loggiata, gallery rising

above gallery—serene curves of arches, grandly proportioned columns,

massive balustrades, a spacious corridor, a roomy vaulting—opening out

upon the palace garden, and offering fair prospect over the wooded

heights of Castiglione and Rocca d' Orcia, up to Radicofani and shadowy

Amiata. It was in these double tiers of galleries, in the garden

beneath and in the open inner square of the palazzo, that the great

life of Italian aristocracy displayed itself. Four centuries ago these

spaces, now so desolate in their immensity, echoed to the tread of

serving-men, the songs of pages; horse-hooves struck upon the pavement

107 of the court; spurs jingled on the staircases; the brocaded trains

of ladies sweeping from their chambers rustled on the marbles of the

loggia; knights let their hawks fly from the garden parapets; cardinals

and abbreviators gathered round the doors from which the Pope would

issue, when he rose from his siesta to take the cool of evening in

those airy colonnades. How impossible it is to realise that scene amid

this solitude! The palazzo still belongs to the Piccolomini family. But

it has fallen into something worse than ruin—the squalor of

half-starved existence, shorn of all that justified its grand

proportions. Partition-walls have been run up across its halls to meet

the requirements of our contracted modern customs. Nothing remains of

the original decorations except one carved chimney-piece, an emblazoned

shield, and a frescoed portrait of the founder. All movable treasures

have been made away with. And yet the carved heraldics of the exterior,

the coat of Piccolomini, 'argent, on a cross azure five crescents or,'

the Papal ensigns, keys, and tiara, and the monogram of Pius, prove

that this country dwelling of a Pope must once have been rich in

details befitting its magnificence. With the exception of the very

small portion reserved for the Signori, when they visit Pienza, the

palace has become a granary for country produce in a starveling land.

There was one redeeming point about it to my mind. That was the

handsome young man, with earnest Tuscan eyes and a wonderfully sweet

voice, the servant of the Piccolomini family, who lives here with his

crippled father, and who showed us over the apartments.

We left Pienza and drove on to S. Quirico, through the same wrinkled

wilderness of marl; wasteful, uncultivated, bare to every wind that

blows. A cruel blast was sweeping from the sea, and Monte Amiata

darkened with rain-clouds. Still the pictures, which formed themselves

at intervals, as we 108 wound along these barren ridges, were very fair

to look upon, especially one not far from S. Quirico. It had for

fore-ground a stretch of tilth—olive-trees, honeysuckle hedges, and

cypresses. Beyond soared Amiata in all its breadth and blue

air-blackness, bearing on its mighty flanks the broken cliffs and

tufted woods of Castiglione and the Rocca d'Orcia; eagles' nests

emerging from a fertile valley-champaign, into which the eye was led

for rest. It so chanced that a band of sunlight, escaping from filmy

clouds, touched this picture with silvery greys and soft greens—a

suffusion of vaporous radiance, which made it for one moment a Claude

landscape.

S. Quirico was keeping _festa_. The streets were crowded with healthy,

handsome men and women from the contado. This village lies on the edge

of a great oasis in the Sienese desert—an oasis formed by the waters of

the Orcia and Asso sweeping down to join Ombrone, and stretching on to

Montalcino. We put up at the sign of the 'Two Hares,' where a notable

housewife gave us a dinner of all we could desire; _frittata di

cervello_, good fish, roast lamb stuffed with rosemary, salad and

cheese, with excellent wine and black coffee, at the rate of three

_lire_ a head.

The attraction of S. Quirico is its gem-like little collegiata, a

Lombard church of the ninth century, with carved portals of the

thirteenth. It is built of golden travertine; some details in brown

sandstone. The western and southern portals have pillars resting on the

backs of lions. On the western side these pillars are four slender

columns, linked by snake-like ligatures. On the southern side they

consist of two carved figures—possibly S. John and the Archangel

Michael. There is great freedom and beauty in these statues, as also in

the lions which support them, recalling the early French and German

manner. In addition, one finds the 109 usual Lombard grotesques—two

sea-monsters, biting each other; harpy-birds; a dragon with a twisted

tail; little men grinning and squatting in adaptation to coigns and

angles of the windows. The toothed and chevron patterns of the north

are quaintly blent with rude acanthus scrolls and classical

egg-mouldings. Over the western porch is a Gothic rose window.

Altogether this church must be reckoned one of the most curious

specimens of that hybrid architecture, fusing and appropriating

different manners, which perplexes the student in Central Italy. It

seems strangely out of place in Tuscany. Yet, if what one reads of

Toscanella, a village between Viterbo and Orbetello, be true, there

exist examples of a similar fantastic Lombard style even lower down.

The interior was most disastrously gutted and 'restored' in 1731: its

open wooden roof masked by a false stucco vaulting. A few relics,

spared by the eighteenth-century Vandals, show that the church was once

rich in antique curiosities. A marble knight in armour lies on his

back, half hidden by the pulpit stairs. And in the choir are half a

dozen rarely beautiful panels of tarsia, executed in a bold style and

on a large scale. One design—a man throwing his face back, and singing,

while he plays a mandoline; with long thick hair and fanciful beretta;

behind him a fine line of cypress and other trees—struck me as

singularly lovely. In another I noticed a branch of peach, broad leaves

and ripe fruit, not only drawn with remarkable grace and power, but so

modelled as to stand out with the roundness of reality.

The whole drive of three hours back to Montepulciano was one long

banquet of inimitable distant views. Next morning, having to take

farewell of the place, we climbed to the Castello, or _arx_ of the old

city! It is a ruined spot, outside the present walls, upon the southern

slope, where there is now a farm, and a fair space of short

sheep-cropped turf, very green and 110 grassy, and gemmed with little

pink geraniums as in England in such places. The walls of the old

castle, overgrown with ivy, are broken down to their foundations. This

may possibly have been done when Montepulciano was dismantled by the

Sienese in 1232. At that date the Commune succumbed to its more

powerful neighbours. The half of its inhabitants were murdered, and its

fortifications were destroyed. Such episodes are common enough in the

history of that internecine struggle for existence between the Italian

municipalities, which preceded the more famous strife of Guelfs and

Ghibellines. Stretched upon the smooth turf of the Castello, we bade

adieu to the divine landscape bathed in light and mountain air—to

Thrasymene and Chiusi and Cetona; to Amiata, Pienza, and S. Quirico; to

Montalcino and the mountains of Volterra; to Siena and Cortona; and,

closer, to Monte Fallonica, Madonna di Biagio, the house-roofs and the

Palazzo tower of Montepulciano.

111

PERUGIA

Perugia is the empress of hill-set Italian cities. Southward from her

high-built battlements and church towers the eye can sweep a circuit of

the Apennines unrivalled in its width. From cloudlike Radicofani, above

Siena in the west, to snow-capped Monte Catria, beneath whose summit

Dante spent those saddest months of solitude in 1313, the mountains

curve continuously in lines of austere dignity and tempered sweetness.

Assisi, Spoleto, Todi, Trevi, crown lesser heights within the range of

vision. Here and there the glimpse of distant rivers lights a silver

spark upon the plain. Those hills conceal Lake Thrasymene; and there

lies Orvieto, and Ancona there: while at our feet the Umbrian

champaign, breaking away into the valley of the Tiber, spreads in all

the largeness of majestically converging mountain-slopes. This is a

landscape which can never lose its charm. Whether it be purple golden

summer, or winter with sad tints of russet woods and faintly rosy

snows, or spring attired in tenderest green of new-fledged trees and

budding flowers, the air is always pure and light and finely tempered

here. City gates, sombre as their own antiquity, frame vistas of the

laughing fields. Terraces, flanked on either side by jutting masonry,

cut clear vignettes of olive-hoary slopes, with cypress-shadowed farms

in hollows of the hills. Each coign or point of vantage carries a

bastion or tower of Etruscan, Roman, mediæval architecture, tracing the

limits of the town upon its mountain plateau. Everywhere 112 art and

nature lie side by side in amity beneath a sky so pure and delicate,

that from its limpid depth the spirit seems to drink new life. What

air-tints of lilac, orange, and pale amethyst are shed upon those vast

ethereal hills and undulating plains! What wandering cloud-shadows sail

across this sea of olives and of vines, with here and there a fleece of

vapour or a column of blue smoke from charcoal burners on the mountain

flank! To southward, far away beyond those hills, is felt the presence

of eternal Rome, not seen, but clearly indicated by the hurrying of a

hundred streams that swell the Tiber.

In the neighbourhood of the town itself there is plenty to attract the

student of antiquities, or art, or history. He may trace the walls of

the Etruscan city, and explore the vaults where the dust of the

Volumnii lies coffered in sarcophagi and urns. Mild faces of grave

deities lean from the living tufa above those narrow alcoves, where the

chisel-marks are still fresh, and where the vigilant lamps still hang

suspended from the roof by leaden chains. Or, in the Museum, he may

read on basreliefs and vases how gloomy and morose were the

superstitions of those obscure forerunners of majestic Rome. The piazza

offers one of the most perfect Gothic façades, in its Palazzo Pubblico,

to be found in Italy. The flight of marble steps is guarded from above

by the bronze griffin of Perugia and the Baglioni, with the bronze lion

of the Guelf faction, to which the town was ever faithful. Upon their

marble brackets they ramp in all the lean ferocity of feudal heraldry,

and from their claws hang down the chains wrested in old warfare from

some barricaded gateway of Siena. Below is the fountain, on the

many-sided curves of which Giovanni Pisano sculptured, in quaint

statuettes and basreliefs, all the learning of the middle ages, from

the Bible history down to fables of Æsop and allegories of the several

months. Facing the same piazza 113 is the Sala del Cambio, a mediæval

Bourse, with its tribunal for the settlement of mercantile disputes,

and its exquisite carved woodwork and frescoes, the masterpiece of

Perugino's school. Hard by is the University, once crowded with native

and foreign students, where the eloquence of Greek Demetrius in the

first dawn of the Renaissance withdrew the gallants of Perugia—those

slim youths with shocks of nut-brown hair beneath their tiny red caps,

whose comely legs, encased in tight-fitting hose of two different

colours, looked so strange to modern eyes upon the canvas of

Signorelli—from their dice and wine-cups, and amours and daggers, to

grave studies in the lore of Greece and Rome.

This piazza, the scene of all the bloodiest tragedies in Perugian

annals, is closed at the north end by the Cathedral, with the open

pulpit in its wall from which S. Bernardino of Siena preached peace in

vain. The citizens wept to hear his words: a bonfire of vanities was

lighted on the flags beside Pisano's fountain: foe kissed foe: and the

same cowl of S. Francis was set in token of repentance on heads that

long had schemed destruction, each for each. But a few days passed, and

the penitents returned to cut each other's throat. Often and often have

those steps of the Duomo run with blood of Baglioni, Oddi, Arcipreti,

and La Staffa. Once the whole church had to be washed with wine and

blessed anew before the rites of Christianity could be resumed in its

desecrated aisles. It was here that within the space of two days, in

1500, the catafalque was raised for the murdered Astorre, and for his

traitorous cousin Grifonetto Baglioni. Here, too, if more ancient

tradition does not err, were stretched the corpses of twenty-seven

members of the same great house at the end of one of their grim

combats.

No Italian city illustrates more forcibly than Perugia the violent

contrasts of the earlier Renaissance. This is perhaps 114 its most

essential characteristic—that which constitutes its chief æsthetic

interest. To many travellers the name of Perugia suggests at once the

painter who, more than any other, gave expression to devout emotions in

consummate works of pietistic art. They remember how Raphael, when a

boy, with Pinturicchio, Lo Spagna, and Adone Doni, in the workshop of

Pietro Perugino, learned the secret of that style to which he gave

sublimity and freedom in his Madonnas di San Sisto, di Foligno, and del

Cardellino. But the students of mediæval history in detail know Perugia

far better as the lion's lair of one of the most ferocious broods of

heroic ruffians Italy can boast. To them the name of Perugia suggests

at once the great house of the Baglioni, who drenched Umbria with

blood, and gave the broad fields of Assisi to the wolf, and who through

six successive generations bred captains for the armies of Venice,

Florence, Naples, and the Church.[58] That the trade of Perugino in

religious pictures should have been carried on in the city which shared

the factions of the Baglioni—that Raphael should have been painting

Pietas while Astorre and Simonetto were being murdered by the beautiful

young Grifonetto—is a paradox of the purest water in the history of

civilisation.

[58] Most of the references in this essay are made to the Perugian

chronicles of Graziani, Matarazzo, Bontempi, and Frolliere, in the

_Archivio Storico Italiano_, vol. xvi. parts 1 and 2. Ariodante

Fabretti's _Biografie dei Capitani Venturieri dell' Umbria_ supply

some details.

The art of Perugino implied a large number of devout and wealthy

patrons, a public not only capable of comprehending him, but also eager

to restrict his great powers within the limits of purely devotional

delineation. The feuds and passions of the Baglioni, on the other hand,

implied a society in which egregious crimes only needed success to be

accounted glorious, where force, cruelty, and cynical craft reigned 115

supreme, and where the animal instincts attained gigantic proportions

in the persons of splendid young athletic despots. Even the names of

these Baglioni, Astorre, Lavinia, Zenobia, Atalanta, Troilo, Ercole,

Annibale, Ascanio, Penelope, Orazio, and so forth, clash with the sweet

mild forms of Perugino, whose very executioners are candidates for

Paradise, and kill their martyrs with compunction.

In Italy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries such contradictions

subsisted in the same place and under the conditions of a common

culture, because there was no limit to the development of personality.

Character was far more absolute then than now. The force of the modern

world, working in the men of those times like powerful wine, as yet

displayed itself only as a spirit of freedom and expansion and revolt.

The strait laces of mediæval Christianity were loosened. The coercive

action of public opinion had not yet made itself dominant. That was an

age of adolescence, in which men were and dared to be _themselves_ for

good or evil. Hypocrisy, except for some solid, well-defined, selfish

purpose, was unknown: the deference to established canons of decorum

which constitutes more than half of our so-called morality, would have

been scarcely intelligible to an Italian. The outlines of individuality

were therefore strongly accentuated. Life itself was dramatic in its

incidents and motives, its catastrophes and contrasts. These

conditions, eminently favourable to the growth of arts and the pursuit

of science, were no less conducive to the hypertrophy of passions, and

to the full development of ferocious and inhuman personalities. Every

man did what seemed good in his own eyes. Far less restrained than we

are by the verdict of his neighbours, but bound by faith more blind and

fiercer superstitions, he displayed the contradictions of his character

in picturesque chiaroscuro. What he could was the limit set on what 116

he would. Therefore, considering the infinite varieties of human

temperaments, it was not merely possible, but natural, for Pietro

Perugino and Gianpaolo Baglioni to be inhabitants at the same time of

the selfsame city, and for the pious Atalanta to mourn the bloodshed

and the treason of her Achillean son, the young and terrible Grifone.

Here, in a word, in Perugia, beneath the fierce blaze of the

Renaissance, were brought into splendid contrast both the martial

violence and the religious sentiment of mediævalism, raised for a

moment to the elevation of fine art.

Some of Perugino's qualities can be studied better in Perugia than

elsewhere. Of his purely religious pictures—altar-pieces of Madonna and

Saints, martyrdoms of S. Sebastian, Crucifixions, Ascensions,

Annunciations, and Depositions from the Cross,—fine specimens are

exhibited in nearly all the galleries of Europe. A large number of his

works and of those of his scholars may be seen assembled in the

Pinacoteca of Perugia. Yet the student of his pietistic style finds

little here of novelty to notice. It is in the Sala del Cambio that we

gain a really new conception of his faculty. Upon the decoration of

that little hall he concentrated all his powers of invention. The

frescoes of the Transfiguration and the Nativity, which face the great

door, are the triumphs of his devotional manner. On other panels of the

chamber he has portrayed the philosophers of Greece and Rome, the kings

and generals of antiquity, the prophets and the sibyls who announced

Christ's advent. The roof is covered with arabesques of delicate design

and dainty execution—labyrinths of fanciful improvisation, in which

flowers and foliage and human forms are woven into a harmonious

framework for the medallions of the seven planets. The woodwork with

which the hall is lined below the frescoes, shows to what a point of

perfection the art of intarsiatura had 117 been carried in his school.

All these decorative masterpieces are the product of one ingenuous

style. Uninfluenced by the Roman frescoes imitated by Raphael in his

Loggie of the Vatican, they breathe the spirit of the earlier

Renaissance, which created for itself free forms of grace and

loveliness without a pattern, divining by its innate sense of beauty

what the classic artists had achieved. Take for an example the

medallion of the planet Jupiter. The king of gods and men, hoary-headed

and mild-eyed, is seated in his chariot drawn by eagles: before him

kneels Ganymede, a fair-haired, exquisite, slim page, with floating

mantle and ribbands fluttering round his tight hose and jerkin. Such

were the cup-bearers of Galeazzo Sforza and Gianpaolo Baglioni. Then

compare this fresco with the Jupiter in mosaic upon the cupola of the

Chigi chapel in S. Maria del Popolo at Rome. A new age of experience

had passed over Raphael between his execution of Perugino's design in

the one and his conception of the other. He had seen the marbles of the

Vatican, and had heard of Plato in the interval: the simple graces of

the earlier Renaissance were no longer enough for him; but he must

realise the thought of classic myths in his new manner. In the same way

we may compare this Transfiguration with Raphael's last picture, these

sibyls with those of S. Maria della Pace, these sages with the School

of Athens, these warriors with the Battle of Maxentius. What is

characteristic of the full-grown Raphael is his universal

comprehension, his royal faculty for representing past and present,

near and distant, things the most diverse, by forms ideal and yet

distinctive. Each phase of the world's history and of human activity

receives from him appropriate and elevated expression. What is

characteristic of the frescoes in the Sala del Cambio, and indeed of

the whole manner of Perugino, is that all subjects, sacred or secular,

allegorical or real, are 118 conceived in the same spirit of restrained

and well-bred piety. There is no attempt at historical propriety or

dramatic realism. Grave, ascetic, melancholy faces of saints are put on

bodies of kings, generals, sages, sibyls, and deities alike. The same

ribbands and studied draperies clothe and connect all. The same

conventional attitudes of meditative gracefulness are repeated in each

group. Yet, the whole effect, if somewhat feeble and insipid, is

harmonious and thoughtful. We see that each part has proceeded from the

same mind, in the same mood, and that the master's mind was no common

one, the mood itself was noble. Good taste is everywhere apparent: the

work throughout is a masterpiece of refined fancy.

To Perugino the representative imagination was of less importance than

a certain delicate and adequately ideal mode of feeling and conceiving.

The consequent charm of his style is that everything is thought out and

rendered visible in one decorous key. The worst that can be said of it

is that its suavity inclines to mawkishness, and that its quietism

borders upon sleepiness. We find it difficult not to accuse him of

affectation. At the same time we are forced to allow that what he did,

and what he refrained from doing, was determined by a purpose. A fresco

of the Adoration of the Shepherds, and a picture of S. Sebastian in the

Pinacoteca, where the archer on the right hand is drawn in a natural

attitude with force and truth, show well enough what Perugino could do

when he chose.

The best way of explaining his conventionality, in which the supreme

power of a master is always verging on the facile trick of a mannerist,

is to suppose that the people of Perugia and the Umbrian highlands

imposed on him this narrow mode of treatment. We may presume that he

was always receiving orders for pictures to be executed in his

well-known manner. 119 Celestial insipidity in art was the fashion in

that Umbria which the Baglioni and the Popes laid waste from time to

time with fire and sword.[59]

[59] It will not be forgotten by students of Italian history that

Umbria was the cradle of the _Battuti_ or Flagellants, who overspread

Italy in the fourteenth century, and to whose devotion were due the

_Laude_, or popular hymns of the religious confraternities, which in

course of time produced the _Sacre Rappresentazioni_ of

fifteenth-century Florentine literature. Umbria, and especially

Perugia and Assisi, seems to have been inventive in piety between 1200

and 1400.

Therefore the painter who had made his reputation by placing devout

young faces upon twisted necks, with a back-ground of limpid twilight

and calm landscape, was forced by the fervour of his patrons, and his

own desire for money, to perpetuate pious prettinesses long after he

had ceased to feel them. It is just this widespread popularity of a

master unrivalled in one line of devotional sentimentalism which makes

the contrast between Perugino and the Baglioni family so striking.

The Baglioni first came into notice during the wars they carried on

with the Oddi of Perugia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.[60]

This was one of those duels to the death, like that of the Visconti

with the Torrensi of Milan, on which the fate of so many Italian cities

in the middle ages hung. The nobles fought; the townsfolk assisted like

a Greek chorus, sharing the passions of the actors, but contributing

little to the 120 catastrophe. The piazza was the theatre on which the

tragedy was played. In this contest the Baglioni proved the stronger,

and began to sway the state of Perugia after the irregular fashion of

Italian despots. They had no legal right over the city, no hereditary

magistracy, no title of princely authority.[61] The Church was reckoned

the supreme administrator of the Perugian commonwealth. But in reality

no man could set foot on the Umbrian plain without permission from the

Baglioni. They elected the officers of state. The lives and goods of

the citizens were at their discretion. When a Papal legate showed his

face, they made the town too hot to hold him. One of Innocent VIII.'s

nephews had been murdered by them.[62] Another cardinal had shut

himself up in a box, and sneaked on mule-back like a bale of

merchandise through the gates to escape their fury. It was in vain that

from time to time the people rose against them, massacring Pandolfo

Baglioni on the public square in 1393, and joining with Ridolfo and

Braccio of the dominant house to assassinate another Pandolfo with his

son Niccolo in 1460. The more they were cut down, the more they

flourished. The wealth they derived from their lordships in the duchy

of Spoleto and the Umbrian hill-cities, and the treasures they

accumulated in the service of the Italian republics, made them

omnipotent in their native town. There they built tall houses on the

site which Paul III. chose afterwards for his _castello_, and which is

now an open place above the Porta San Carlo. From the 121 balconies and

turrets of these palaces, swarming with their _bravi_, they surveyed

the splendid land that felt their force—a land which, even in

midsummer, from sunrise to sunset keeps the light of day upon its

up-turned face. And from this eyrie they issued forth to prey upon the

plain, or to take their lust of love or blood within the city streets.

The Baglioni spent but short time in the amusements of peace. From

father to son they were warriors, and we have records of few Italian

houses, except perhaps the Malatesti of Rimini, who equalled them in

hardihood and fierceness. Especially were they noted for the

remorseless _vendette_ which they carried on among themselves, cousin

tracking cousin to death with the ferocity and craft of sleuthhounds.

Had they restrained these fratricidal passions, they might, perhaps, by

following some common policy, like that of the Medici in Florence or

the Bentivogli in Bologna, have successfully resisted the Papal

authority and secured dynastic sovereignty.

[60] The Baglioni persecuted their rivals with persistent fury to the

very last. Matarazzo tells how Morgante Baglioni gave a death-wound to

his nephew, the young Carlo de li Oddi, in 1501: 'Dielli una ferita

nella formosa faccia: el quale era in aspetto vago e bello giovane d'

anni 23 o 24, _al quale uscivano e bionde tresse sotto la bella

armadura_.' The same night his kinsman Pompeo was murdered in prison

with this last lament upon his lips: 'O infelice casa degli Oddi,

quale aveste tanta, fama di conduttieri, capitanie, cavaliere, speron

d' oro, protonotarie, e abbate; et in uno solo tempo aveste homine

quarantadue; e oggie, per me quale son ultimo, se asconde el nome de

la magnifica e famosa casa degli Oddi, che mai al mondo non serà píu

nominata' (p. 175).

[61] The Baglioni were lords of Spello, Bettona, Montalera, and other

Umbrian burghs, but never of Perugia. Perugia had a civic constitution

similar to that of Florence and other Guelf towns under the protection

of the Holy See. The power of the eminent house was based only on

wealth and prestige.

[62] See Matarazzo, p. 38. It is here that he relates the covert

threat addressed by Guido Baglioni to Alexander VI., who was seeking

to inveigle him into his clutches.

It is not until 1495 that the history of the Baglioni becomes dramatic,

possibly because till then they lacked the pen of Matarazzo.[63] But

from this year forward to their final extinction, every detail of their

doings has a picturesque and awful interest. Domestic furies, like the

revel descried by Cassandra above the palace of Mycenæ, seem to take

possession of the fated house; and the doom which has fallen on them is

worked out with pitiless exactitude to the last generation. In 1495 the

heads of the Casa Baglioni were two brothers, Guido and Ridolfo, who

had a numerous progeny of heroic sons. From Guido sprang Astorre,

Adriano, called for his 122 great strength Morgante,[64] Gismondo,

Marcantonio, and Gentile. Ridolfo owned Troilo, Gianpaolo, and

Simonetto. The first glimpse we get of these young athletes in

Matarazzo's chronicle is on the occasion of a sudden assault upon

Perugia, made by the Oddi and the exiles of their faction in September

1495. The foes of the Baglioni entered the gates, and began breaking

the iron chains, _serragli_, which barred the streets against advancing

cavalry. None of the noble house were on the alert except young

Simonetto, a lad of eighteen, fierce and cruel, who had not yet begun

to shave his chin.[65] In spite of all dissuasion, he rushed forth

alone, bareheaded, in his shirt, with a sword in his right hand and a

buckler on his arm, and fought against a squadron. There at the barrier

of the piazza he kept his foes at bay, smiting men-at-arms to the

ground with the sweep of his tremendous sword, and receiving on his

gentle body twenty-two cruel wounds. While thus at fearful odds, the

noble Astorre mounted his charger and joined him. Upon his helmet

flashed the falcon of the Baglioni with the dragon's tail that swept

behind. Bidding Simonetto tend his wounds, he in his turn held the

square.

[63] His chronicle is a masterpiece of naïve, unstudied narrative. Few

documents are so important for the student of the sixteenth century in

Italy. Whether it be really the work of Matarazzo or Maturanzio, the

distinguished humanist, is more than doubtful. The writer seems to me

as yet unspoiled by classic studies and the pedantries of imitation.

[64] This name, it may be incidentally mentioned, proves the

wide-spread popularity of Pulci's poem, the _Morgante Maggiore_.

[65] 'Era costui al presente di anni 18 o 19; ancora non se radeva

barba; e mostrava tanta forza e tanto ardire, e era tanto adatto nel

fatto d' arme, che era gran maraveglia; e iostrava cum tanta

gintilezza e gagliardia, che homo del mondo non l' aria mai creso; et

aria dato con la punta de la lancia in nel fondo d' uno bicchiere da

la mattina a la sera,' &c. (p. 50).

Listen to Matarazzo's description of the scene; it is as good as any

piece of the 'Mort Arthur:'—'According to the report of one who told me

what he had seen with his own eyes, never did anvil take so many blows

as he upon his person and his steed; and they all kept striking at his

lordship in 123 such crowds that the one prevented the other. And so

many lances, partisans, and crossbow quarries, and other weapons, made

upon his body a most mighty din, that above every other noise and shout

was heard the thud of those great strokes. But he, like one who had the

mastery of war, set his charger where the press was thickest, jostling

now one, and now another; so that he ever kept at least ten men of his

foes stretched on the ground beneath his horse's hoofs; which horse was

a most fierce beast, and gave his enemies what trouble he best could.

And now that gentle lord was all fordone with sweat and toil, he and

his charger; and so weary were they that scarcely could they any longer

breathe.'

Soon after, the Baglioni mustered in force. One by one their heroes

rushed from the palaces. The enemy were driven back with slaughter; and

a war ensued, which made the fair land between Assisi and Perugia a

wilderness for many months. It must not be forgotten that, at the time

of these great feats of Simonetto and Astorre, young Raphael was

painting in the studio of Perugino. What the whole city witnessed with

astonishment and admiration, he, the keenly sensitive artist-boy,

treasured in his memory. Therefore in the S. George of the Louvre, and

in the mounted horseman trampling upon Heliodorus in the Stanze of the

Vatican, victorious Astorre lives for ever, immortalised in all his

splendour by the painter's art. The grinning griffin on the helmet, the

resistless frown upon the forehead of the beardless knight, the

terrible right arm, and the ferocious steed,—all are there as Raphael

saw and wrote them on his brain. One characteristic of the Baglioni, as

might be plentifully illustrated from their annalist, was their eminent

beauty, which inspired beholders with an enthusiasm and a love they

were far from deserving by their virtues. It is this, in combination

with their personal heroism, which gives a peculiarly 124 dramatic

interest to their doings, and makes the chronicle of Matarazzo more

fascinating than a novel. He seems unable to write about them without

using the language of an adoring lover.

In the affair of 1495 the Baglioni were at amity among themselves. When

they next appear upon the scene, they are engaged in deadly feud.

Cousin has set his hand to the throat of cousin, and the two heroes of

the piazza are destined to be slain by foulest treachery of their own

kin. It must be premised that besides the sons of Guido and Ridolfo

already named, the great house counted among its most distinguished

members a young Grifone, or Grifonetto, the son of Grifone and Atalanta

Baglioni. Both his father and grandfather had died violent deaths in

the prime of their youth; Galeotto, the father of Atalanta, by poison,

and Grifone by the knife at Ponte Ricciolo in 1477. Atalanta was left a

young widow with one only son, this Grifonetto, whom Matarazzo calls

'un altro Ganimede,' and who combined the wealth of two chief branches

of the Baglioni. In 1500, when the events about to be related took

place, he was quite a youth. Brave, rich, handsome, and married to a

young wife, Zenobia Sforza, he was the admiration of Perugia. He and

his wife loved each other dearly; and how, indeed, could it be

otherwise, since 'l' uno e l' altro sembravano doi angioli di

Paradiso?' At the same time he had fallen into the hands of bad and

desperate counsellors. A bastard of the house, Filippo da Braccio, his

half-uncle, was always at his side, instructing him not only in the

accomplishments of chivalry, but also in wild ways that brought his

name into disrepute. Another of his familiars was Carlo Barciglia

Baglioni, an unquiet spirit, who longed for more power than his poverty

and comparative obscurity allowed. With them associated Jeronimo della

Penna, a veritable ruffian, contaminated from his earliest 125 youth

with every form of lust and violence, and capable of any crime.[66]

These three companions, instigated partly by the Lord of Camerino and

partly by their own cupidity, conceived a scheme for massacring the

families of Guido and Ridolfo at one blow. As a consequence of this

wholesale murder, Perugia would be at their discretion. Seeing of what

use Grifonetto by his wealth and name might be to them, they did all

they could to persuade him to join their conjuration. It would appear

that the bait first offered him was the sovereignty of the city, but

that he was at last gained over by being made to believe that his wife

Zenobia had carried on an intrigue with Gianpaolo Baglioni. The

dissolute morals of the family gave plausibility to an infernal trick

which worked upon the jealousy of Grifonetto. Thirsting for revenge, he

consented to the scheme. The conspirators were further fortified by the

accession of Jeronimo della Staffa, and three members of the House of

Corgna. It is noticeable that out of the whole number only two,

Bernardo da Corgna and Filippo da Braccio, were above the age of

thirty. Of the rest, few had reached twenty-five. At so early an age

were the men of those times adepts in violence and treason. The

execution of the plot was fixed for the wedding festivities of Astorre

Baglioni with Lavinia, the daughter of Giovanni Colonna and Giustina

Orsini. At that time the whole Baglioni family were to be assembled in

Perugia, with the single exception of Marcantonio, who was taking baths

at Naples for his health. It was known that the members of the noble

house, nearly all of them condottieri by trade, and eminent for their

great strength 126 and skill in arms, took few precautions for their

safety. They occupied several houses close together between the Porta

San Carlo and the Porta Eburnea, set no regular guard over their

sleeping chambers, and trusted to their personal bravery, and to the

fidelity of their attendants.[67] It was thought that they might be

assassinated in their beds. The wedding festivities began upon the 28th

of July, and great is the particularity with which Matarazzo describes

the doings of each successive day—processions, jousts, triumphal

arches, banquets, balls, and pageants. The night of the 14th of August

was finally set apart for the consummation of _el gran tradimento_: it

is thus that Matarazzo always alludes to the crime of Grifonetto with a

solemnity of reiteration that is most impressive. A heavy stone let

fall into the courtyard of Guido Baglioni's palace was to be the

signal: each conspirator was then to run to the sleeping chamber of his

appointed prey. Two of the principals and fifteen bravi were told off

to each victim: rams and crowbars were prepared to force the doors, if

needful. All happened as had been anticipated. The crash of the falling

stone was heard. The conspirators rushed to the scene of operations.

Astorre, who was sleeping in the house of his traitorous cousin

Grifonetto, was slain in the arms of his young bride, crying, as he

vainly struggled, 'Misero Astorre che more come poltrone!' Simonetto,

who lay that night with a lad called Paolo he greatly loved, flew to

arms, exclaiming to his brother, 'Non dubitare Gismondo, mio fratello!'

He too was soon despatched, together with his bedfellow. Filippo da

Braccio, after killing him, tore from a great wound in his side the

still quivering heart, into which 127 he drove his teeth with savage

fury. Old Guido died groaning, 'Ora è gionto il ponto mio;' and

Gismondo's throat was cut while he lay holding back his face that he

might be spared the sight of his own massacre. The corpses of Astorre

and Simonetto were stripped and thrown out naked into the streets. Men

gathered round and marvelled to see such heroic forms, with faces so

proud and fierce even in death. In especial the foreign students

likened them to ancient Romans.[68] But on their fingers were rings,

and these the ruffians of the place would fain have hacked off with

their knives. From this indignity the noble limbs were spared; then the

dead Baglioni were hurriedly consigned to an unhonoured tomb. Meanwhile

the rest of the intended victims managed to escape. Gianpaolo, assailed

by Grifonetto and Gianfrancesco della Corgna, took refuge with his

squire and bedfellow, Maraglia, upon a staircase leading from his room.

While the squire held the passage with his pike against the foe,

Gianpaolo effected his flight over neighbouring house-roofs. He crept

into the attic of some foreign students, who, trembling with terror,

gave him food and shelter, clad him in a scholar's gown, and helped him

to fly in this disguise from the gates at dawn. He then joined his

brother Troilo at Marsciano, whence he returned without delay to punish

the traitors. At the same time Grifonetto's mother, Atalanta, taking

with her his wife Zenobia and the two young sons of Gianpaolo,

Malatesta and Orazio, afterwards so celebrated in Italian history for

their great feats of arms and their crimes, fled to her country-house

at Landona. Grifonetto in vain 128 sought to see her there. She drove

him from her presence with curses for the treason and the fratricide

that he had planned. It is very characteristic of these wild natures,

framed of fierce instincts and discordant passions, that his mother's

curse weighed like lead upon the unfortunate young man. Next day, when

Gianpaolo returned to try the luck of arms, Grifonetto, deserted by the

companions of his crime and paralysed by the sense of his guilt, went

out alone to meet him on the public place. The semi-failure of their

scheme had terrified the conspirators: the horrors of that night of

blood unnerved them. All had fled except the next victim of the feud.

Putting his sword to the youth's throat, Gianpaolo looked into his eyes

and said, 'Art thou here, Grifonetto? Go with God's peace: I will not

slay thee, nor plunge my hand in my own blood, as thou hast done in

thine.' Then he turned and left the lad to be hacked in pieces by his

guard. The untranslatable words which Matarazzo uses to describe his

death are touching from the strong impression they convey of

Grifonetto's goodliness: 'Qui ebbe sua signoria sopra sua nobile

persona tante ferite che suoi membra leggiadre stese in terra.'[69]

None but Greeks felt the charm of personal beauty thus. But while

Grifonetto was breathing out his life upon the pavement of the piazza,

his mother Atalanta and his wife Zenobia came to greet him through the

awe-struck city. As they approached, all men fell aside and slunk away

before their grief. None would seem to have had a share in Grifonetto's

murder. Then Atalanta knelt by her dying son, and ceased from wailing,

and prayed and exhorted him to pardon those who had caused his death.

It appears that Grifonetto was too weak to speak, but that he made a

signal of assent, and received his mother's blessing at the last: 129

'E allora porse el nobil giovenetto la dextra mano a la sua giovenile

matre strengendo de sua matre la bianca mano; e poi incontinente spirò

l' anima dal formoso corpo, e passò cum infinite benedizioni de sua

matre in cambio de la maledictione che prima li aveva date.'[70] Here

again the style of Matarazzo, tender and full of tears, conveys the

keenest sense of the pathos of beauty and of youth in death and sorrow.

He has forgotten _el gran tradimento_. He only remembers how comely

Grifonetto was, how noble, how frank and spirited, how strong in war,

how sprightly in his pleasures and his loves. And he sees the still

young mother, delicate and nobly born, leaning over the athletic body

of her bleeding son. This scene, which is perhaps a genuine instance of

what we may call the neo-Hellenism of the Renaissance, finds its

parallel in the 'Phoenissæ' of Euripides. Jocasta and Antigone have

gone forth to the battlefield and found the brothers Polynices and

Eteocles drenched in blood:—

From his chest

Heaving a heavy breath, King Eteocles heard

His mother, and stretched forth a cold damp hand

On hers, and nothing said, but with his eyes

Spake to her by his tears, showing kind thoughts

In symbols.

[66] Matarazzo's description of the ruffians who surrounded Grifonetto

(pp. 104, 105, 113) would suit Webster's Flamineo or Bosola. In one

place he likens Filippo to Achitophel and Grifonetto to Absalom.

Villano Villani, quoted by Fabretti (vol. iii. p. 125), relates the

street adventures of this clique. It is a curious picture of the

pranks of an Italian princeling in the fifteenth century.

[67] Jacobo Antiquari, the secretary of Lodovico Sforza, in a curious

letter, which gives an account of the massacre, says that he had often

reproved the Baglioni for 'sleeping in their beds without any guard or

watch, so that they might easily be overcome by enemies.'

[68] 'Quelli che li vidino, e maxime li forastiere studiante

assimigliavano el magnifico Messer Astorre cosî morto ad un antico

Romano, perchè prima era unanissimo; tanto sua figura era degnia e

magnia,' &c. This is a touch exquisitely illustrative of the

Renaissance enthusiasm for classic culture.

[69] Here his lordship received upon his noble person so many wounds

that he stretched his graceful limbs upon the earth.

[70] 'And then the noble stripling stretched his right hand to his

youthful mother, pressing the white hand of his mother; and afterwards

forthwith he breathed his soul forth from his beauteous body, and died

with numberless blessings of his mother instead of the curses she had

given him before.'

It was Atalanta, we may remember, who commissioned Raphael to paint the

so-called Borghese Entombment. Did she perhaps feel, as she withdrew

from the piazza, soaking with young Grifonetto's blood,[71] that she

too had some portion in the sorrow of that mother who had wept for

Christ? The 130 memory of the dreadful morning must have remained with

her through life, and long communion with our Lady of Sorrows may have

sanctified the grief that had so bitter and so shameful a root of sin.

[71] See Matarazzo, p. 134, for this detail.

After the death of Grifonetto, and the flight of the conspirators,

Gianpaolo took possession of Perugia. All who were suspected of

complicity in the treason were massacred upon the piazza and in the

Cathedral. At the expense of more than a hundred murders, the chief of

the Baglioni found himself master of the city on the 17th of July.

First he caused the Cathedral to be washed with wine and reconsecrated.

Then he decorated the Palazzo with the heads of the traitors and with

their portraits in fresco, painted hanging head downwards, as was the

fashion in Italy.[72] Next he established himself in what remained of

the palaces of his kindred, hanging the saloons with black, and

arraying his retainers in the deepest mourning. Sad indeed was now the

aspect of Perugia. Helpless and comparatively uninterested, the

citizens had been spectators of these bloody broils. They were now

bound to share the desolation of their masters. Matarazzo's description

of the mournful palace and the silent town, and of the return of

Marcantonio from Naples, presents a picture striking for its

vividness.[73] In the true style of the Baglioni, Marcantonio sought to

vent his sorrow not so much in tears as by new violence. He prepared

and lighted torches, meaning to burn the whole quarter of Sant' Angelo;

and from this design he was with difficulty dissuaded by his 131

brother. To such mad freaks of rage and passion were the inhabitants of

a mediæval town in Italy exposed! They make us understand the

_ordinanze di giustizia_, by which to be a noble was a crime in

Florence.

[72] See Varchi (ed. Lemonnier, 1857), vol. ii. p. 265, vol. iii. pp.

224, 652, and Corio (Venice, 1554), p. 326, for instances of _dipinti

per traditori_.

[73] P. 142. 'Pareva ogni cosa oscura e lacrimosa: tutte loro

servitore piangevano; et le camere de lo resto de li magnifici

Baglioni, e sale, e ognie cosa erano tutte intorno cum pagnie negre. E

per la città non era più alcuno che sonasse nè cantasse; e poco si

rideva,' &c.