assumed, in the sixteenth century, a stereotyped form from which a
stronger genius than Correggio’s could hardly have freed it; and that
the triumphs of that day should be sought rather in the domain of
decorative art, where conventionality becomes a strength, and where
the æsthetic imagination finds expression in combinations of mere line
and colour. Many of the decorative paintings of the sixteenth century
are indeed among the most delightful products of Italian art; and it
might have been expected that Correggio’s extraordinary technical skill
and love of rhythmically whirling lines would have found complete
development in this direction. It is, of course, permissible to the
artist to regard the heavenly hosts as mere factors in a decorative
composition; and to consider Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues,
Powers only in their relation to the diameter of a dome or to the
curve of a spandril; but to the untechnical spectator such a feat is
almost impossible, and in judging a painter simply as a decorator, the
public is more at its ease before such frankly ornamental works as
the famous frescoes of the convent of Saint Paul. It might, in fact,
have been expected that Correggio would be at his best in executing
the commission of the light-hearted Abbess, who had charged him to
amplify the symbolism of her device (the crescent moon) by adorning her
apartments with the legend of Diana. There is something delightfully
characteristic of the period in this choice of the Latmian goddess to
typify the spirit of monastic chastity; and equally characteristic is
Correggio’s acceptance of the commission as an opportunity to paint
classic bas-reliefs and rosy flesh and blood, without much attempt to
express the somewhat strained symbolism of the myth.
[Illustration:
_The “Little Palace of the Garden”_
E. C. Peixotto
PARMA. 1901.
]
The vaulted ceiling of the room is treated as a trellised arbour,
through which rosy loves peep down on the blonde Diana emerging from
grey drifts of evening mist: a charming composition, with much grace of
handling in the figure of the goddess and in the _grisailles_ of the
lunettes below the cornice; yet lacking as a whole just that ethereal
quality which is supposed to be the distinctive mark of Correggio’s
art. Compared with the delicate trellis-work and flitting cupids of
Zucchero’s frescoes at the Villa di Papa Giulio, Correggio’s design
is heavy and dull. The masses of foliage are too uniform and the
_putti_ too fat and stolid for their skyey task. This failure of the
decorative sense is rendered more noticeable by the happy manner in
which Araldi, a generation earlier, had solved a similar problem in the
adjoining room. Here the light arabesques and miniature divinities of
the ceiling, and the biblical and mythological scenes of the frieze,
are presented with all that earnest striving after personal truth of
expression that is the ruling principle of fifteenth-century art. It is
this faculty of personal interpretation, always kept in strict abeyance
to the laws of decorative fitness, which makes the mural painting
of the fifteenth century so satisfying that, compared with the
Mantegna room at Mantua, the Sala del Cambio at Perugia, the Sala degli
Angeli at Urbino, and the frescoed room at the Schifanoia at Ferrara,
all the later wall-decorations in Italy (save perhaps the Moretto room
at Brescia) seem to fall a little short of perfection.
Of a much earlier style of mural painting, Parma itself contains one
notable example. The ancient octagon of the Baptistery, with its
encircling arcade and strange frieze of leaping, ramping and running
animals, is outwardly one of the most interesting buildings in Italy;
while its interior has a character of its own hardly to be matched
even in that land of fiercely competing individualism. Downward from
the apex of the dome the walls are frescoed in successive tiers with
figures of saints in rigid staring attitudes, interspersed with awkward
presentments of biblical story. All these designs are marked by a
peculiar naïveté of composition and great vehemence of gesture and
expression. Those in the dome and between the windows are attributed
to the thirteenth century, while the lower frescoes are of the
fourteenth; but so crude in execution are the latter that they combine
with the upper rows in producing an effect of exceptional decorative
value, to which a note of strangeness is given by the introduction,
here and there, of high-reliefs of saints and angels, so placed that
the frescoes form a background to their projecting figures. The most
successful of these sculptures is the relief of the flight into Egypt:
a solemn procession led by a squat square-faced angel with unwieldy
wings and closed by two inscrutable-looking figures in Oriental dress.
Seen after the Baptistery, the Cathedral is perhaps something of a
disappointment; yet to pass from its weather-beaten front, between the
worn red lions of the ancient porch, into the dusky magnificence of the
interior, is to enjoy one of those contrasts possible only in a land
where the humblest wayside chapel may disclose the stratified art of
centuries. In the great cupola, Correggio lords it with the maelstrom
of his heavenly host; and the walls of the nave are covered with
frescoes by Mazzola and Gambara, to which time has given a golden-brown
tone, as of sumptuous hangings, that atones for the pretentious
insignificance of their design. There is a venerable episcopal throne
attributed to Benedetto Antelami, that strangely dramatic sculptor
to whom the reliefs of the Baptistery are also ascribed, and one of
the chapels contains a magnificent Descent from the Cross with his
signature; but except for these works the details of the interior,
though including several fine sepulchral monuments and a ciborium by
Alberti, are not exceptional enough to make a lasting impression.
On almost every Italian town, whatever succession of masters it may
have known, some one family has left its dominant mark; and Parma is
distinctively the city of the Farnesi. Late-comers though they were,
their lilies are everywhere, over gateways, on palace-fronts and in the
aisles of churches; and they have bequeathed to the town a number of
its most characteristic buildings, from the immense unfinished Palazzo
della Pilotta to the baroque fountain of parti-coloured marbles which
enlivens with its graceful nymphs and river-gods the grassy solitude of
the palace-square. It is to Rannuccio I, the greatest of these ducal
builders, that Parma owes the gigantic project of the Pilotta, as well
as the Farnese theatre and the University. To this group Duke Ottavio,
at a later date, added the charming “Little Palace of the Garden,” of
which the cheerful yellow façade still overlooks the pleached alleys
of a formal pleasance adorned, under the Bourbon rulers who succeeded
him, with groups of statuary by the court sculptor, a Frenchman named
Jean Baptiste Boudard. Ottavio commissioned Agostino Carracci to
decorate the interior of the ducal villa, and even now, after years
of incredible neglect and ill-usage, the walls of several rooms show
remains of the work executed, as the artist’s pious inscription runs,
_sub umbra liliorum_. The villa has been turned into barracks, and
it is difficult to gain admission; but the persistent sight-seer may
succeed in seeing one room, where large-limbed ruddy immortals move,
against a background of bluish summer landscape, through the slow
episodes of some Olympian fable. This apartment shows the skill of the
Carracci as decorators of high cool ceremonious rooms, designed to
house the midsummer idleness of a court still under the yoke of Spanish
etiquette, and living in a climate where the linear vivacities of
Tiepolo might have been conducive to apoplexy.
[Illustration:
_The Worn Red Lions
of the Ancient Porch_
E. C. Peixotto
PARMA. 1901.
]
The most noteworthy building which arose in Parma under the shadow
of the lilies is, however, the famous theatre built by Aleotti for
Duke Rannuccio, and opened in 1620 to celebrate the marriage of
Odoardo Farnese with Margaret of Tuscany. Externally it is a mere
outgrowth of the palace; but to those who feel a tenderness for the
vivacious figures of the _commedia dell’ arte_ and have followed
their picturesque wanderings through the pages of Gozzi and Goldoni,
the interior is an immediate evocation of the strolling theatrical
life of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--that strange period
when players were passed on from duchy to principality to perform at
wedding-feasts and to celebrate political victories; when kings and
princes stood sponsors to their children, and the Church denied them
Christian burial.
The Farnese theatre is one of those brilliant improvisations in wood
and plaster to which Italian artists were trained by centuries of
hurriedly-organized _trionfi_, state processions, religious festivals,
returns from war, all demanding the collaboration of sculptor,
architect and painter in the rapid creation of triumphal arches,
architectural perspectives, statuary, chariots, flights of angels, and
galleons tossing on simulated seas: evanescent visions of some _pays
bleu_ of Boiardo or of Ariosto, destined to crumble the next day like
the palace of an evil enchanter. To those who admire the peculiarly
Italian gift of spontaneous plastic invention, the art of the
_plasticatore_, to borrow an untranslatable term, such buildings are of
peculiar interest, since, owing to the nature of their construction,
so few have survived; and of these probably none is as well preserved
as Aleotti’s theatre. The ceiling of painted canvas is gone, and the
splendid Farnese dukes bestriding their chargers in lofty niches on
each side of the proscenium are beginning to show their wooden anatomy
through the wounds in their plaster sides; but the fine composition of
the auditorium, and the throng of stucco divinities attitudinizing in
the niches and on the balustrades, and poised above the arch of the
proscenium, still serve to recall the original splendour of the scene.
The dusty gloom of the place suggests some impending transformation,
and when fancy has restored to the roof the great glass chandeliers
now hanging in the neighbouring museum, their light seems to fall once
more on boxes draped with crimson velvet and filled with lords and
ladies in the sumptuous Spanish habit, while on the stage, before a
gay perspective of colonnades and terraces, Isabel and Harlequin and
the Capitan Spavento, _plasticatori_ of another sort, build on the
scaffolding of some familiar intrigue the airy superstructure of their
wit.
In the adjoining palace no such revival is possible. Most museums
in Italy are dead palaces, and none is more inanimate than that of
Parma. Many of the ducal treasures are still left--family portraits
by Suttermans and Sir Antony Mor, Bernini-like busts of the Bourbon
dukes of Parma, with voluminous wigs and fluttering steinkerks; old
furniture, old majolica, and all those frail elaborate trifles that
the irony of fate preserves when brick and marble crumble. All these
accessories of a ruined splendour, catalogued, numbered and penned up
in glass cases, can no more revive the life of which they formed a part
than the contents of an herbarium can renew the scent and murmur of a
summer meadow. The transient holders of all that pomp, from the great
Alexander to the Duchess Marie Louise of Austria, his last unworthy
successor, look down with unrecognizing eyes on this dry alignment of
classified objects; and one feels, in passing from one room to another,
as though some fanciful heroic poem, depicting the splendid vanities
of life, and depending for its effect on a fortunate collocation of
words, had been broken up and sorted out into the different parts of
speech.
This is the view of the sentimentalist; but from that of the student
of art the museum of Parma is perhaps more interesting than the palace
could ever have been. The Correggios are in themselves an unmatched
possession; the general collection of pictures is large and varied, and
the wealth of bronzes and marbles, of coins, medals and architectural
fragments of different schools and periods, would be remarkable in any
country but Italy, where the inexhaustible richness of the small towns
is a surprise to the most experienced traveller.
On the whole, the impression carried away from Parma is incomplete
and confusing. The name calls forth as many scattered images as
contradictory associations. It is doubtful if the wanderer reviewing
from a distance his Italian memories will be able to put any distinct
picture of the place beside the concrete vision of Siena, Mantua or
Vicenza. It will not hang as a whole in the gallery of his mental
vignettes; but in the mosaic of detached impressions some rich and
iridescent fragments will represent his after-thoughts of Parma.
MARCH IN ITALY
I
March is in some respects the most exquisite month of the Italian year.
It is the month of transitions and surprises, of vehement circling
showers with a golden heart of sunlight, of bare fields suffused
overnight with fruit-blossoms, and hedgerows budding as suddenly as the
staff of Tannhäuser. It is the month in which the northern traveller,
grown distrustful of the promised clemency of Italian skies, and with
the winter bitterness still in his bones, lighting on a patch of
primroses under a leafless bank, or on the running flame of tulips
along the trenches of an olive orchard, learns that Italy _is_ Italy,
after all, and hugs himself at thought of the black ultramontane March.
It must be owned, however, that it is not, even in Italy, the safest
month for excursions. There are too many _voltes-face_ toward winter,
too many moody hesitating dawns, when the skies will not declare
themselves for or against rain, but hanging neutral till the hesitating
traveller sets forth, seem then to take a cruel joy in proving that
he should have stayed at home. Yet there are rare years when some
benign influence tames the fitfulness of March, subduing her to a long
sequence of golden days, and then he who has trusted to her promise
receives the most exquisite reward. It takes faith in one’s luck to
catch step with such a train of days, and fare with them northward
across the wakening land; but now and then this fortune befalls the
pilgrim, and then he sees a new Italy, an Italy which discovery seems
to make his own. The ancient Latin landscape, so time-furrowed and
passion-scarred, lies virgin to the eye, fresh-bathed in floods of
limpid air. The scene seems recreated by the imagination, it wears the
pristine sparkle of those
_Towers of fables immortal fashioned from mortal dreams_
which lie beyond the geographer’s boundaries, like the Oceanus of the
early charts; it becomes, in short, the land in which anything may
happen, save the dull, the obvious and the expected.
II
It was, for instance, on such a March day that we rowed across the
harbour of Syracuse to the mouth of the Anapus.
Our brown rowers, leaping overboard, pushed the flat-bottomed boat
through the line of foam where bay and river meet, and we passed
over to the smooth current which slips seaward between flat banks
fringed with arundo donax and bamboo. The bamboo grows in vast
feathery thickets along these Sicilian waters, and the slightly
angular precision of its stem and foliage allies itself well with
the classic clearness of the landscape--a landscape which, in spite
of an occasional excess of semi-tropical vegetation, yet retains the
Greek quality of producing intense effects with a minimum of material.
There is nothing tropical about the shores of the Anapus; but as the
river turns and narrows, the boat passes under an arch of Egyptian
papyrus, that slender exotic reed, brought to Sicily, it is supposed,
by her Arabian colonizers, and thriving, strangely enough, in no other
European soil. This plumy tunnel so enclosed us as we advanced, that
for long stretches of our indolent progress we saw only the face of
the stream, the summer insects flickering on it, and the continuous
golden line of irises along its edge. Now and then, however, a gap in
the papyrus showed, as through an arch in a wall, a prospect of flat
fields with grazing cattle, or a solitary farm-house, low, brown,
_tassée_, with a date-palm spindling against its well-curb, or the
white flank of Etna suddenly thrust across the sky-line.
So, after a long dreamy lapse of time, we came to the source of
the river, the azure bowl of the nymph Cyane, who pours her pure
current into the broader Anapus. The haunt of the nymph is a circular
reed-fringed pool, supposedly so crystalline that she may still be seen
lurking on its pebbly bed; but the recent spring rains had clouded her
lair, and though, in this legend-haunted land, one always feels the
nearness of
_The faun pursuing, the nymph pursued_,
the pool of Cyane revealed no sign of her presence.
Disappointed in our quest, we turned back and glided down the Anapus
again to visit her sister-nymph, the more famed but less fortunate
Arethusa, whose unhappy fate it is to mingle her wave with the
brackish sea-tide in the very harbour of Syracuse, where, under the
wall of the quay, the poor creature languishes in a prison of masonry,
her papyrus wreath sending up an anæmic growth from the slimy bottom
filled with green.
We were glad to turn from this desecrated fount to the long
russet-coloured town curving above its harbour. Syracuse, girt with
slopes of flowering orchard-land, lies nobly against the fortified
ridge of Epipolæ. But the city itself--richer in history than any
other on that crowded soil, and characteristically symbolized by its
Greek temple welded into the masonry of a mediæval church--even the
thronging associations of the city could not, on a day so prodigal of
sunlight, hold us long within its walls. These walls, the boundaries
of the Greek Ortygia, have once more become the limits of the shrunken
modern town, and crossing the moat beyond them, we found ourselves
at once in full country. There was a peculiar charm in the sudden
transition from the old brown streets saturated with history to this
clear smiling land where only the spring seemed to have written its
tale--its ever-recurring, ever-fresh record of blossom and blade
miraculously renewed. The country about Syracuse is peculiarly fitted
to be the exponent of this gospel of renewal. The land stretches away
in mild slopes laden with acre on acre of blossoming fruit-trees, and
of old olive orchards under which the lilac anemones have room to
spread in never-ending sheets of colour. The open pastures are plumed
with silvery asphodel, and every farm-house has its glossy orange-grove
fenced from the road by a rampart of prickly pear.
The highway itself, as we drove out toward Epipolæ, was thronged with
country-folk who might have been the descendants of Theocritan nymphs
and mortal shepherds, brown folk with sidelong agate eyes, trudging
dustily after their goats and asses, or jogging townward in their
little blue or red carts painted with legends of the saints and stories
from Ariosto. After a mile or two the road curved slowly upward and we
began to command a widening prospect. At our feet lay Syracuse, girt by
the Plemmyrian marsh, and by the fields and orchards which were once
the crowded Greek suburbs of Neapolis, Tyche and Achradina; and beyond
the ridge of Epipolæ and the nearer hills, Etna rose white and dominant
against the pale Calabrian coast-line.
The fortress of Euryalus, on the crest of Epipolæ, might be called the
Greek Carcassonne, since it is the best-preserved example of ancient
military architecture in Europe. Archways, galleries, massive flights
of stairs and long subterranean passages may still be traced by the
archæologically minded in the mass of fallen stones marking the site
of the ruin; and even the idler unversed in military construction will
feel the sudden nearness of the past when he comes upon the rock-hewn
sockets to which the cavalry attached their horses.
Euryalus, however, more fortunate than Carcassonne, has escaped the
renovating hand of a Viollet-le-Duc, and its broken ramparts lie in
mellow ruin along the backbone of the ridge, feathered with those
delicate growths which, in the Mediterranean countries, veil the
fallen works of man without concealing them. That day, indeed, the
prodigal blossoming of the Sicilian March had covered the ground with
a suffusion of colour which made even the mighty ruins of the fortress
seem a mere background for the triumphant pageant of the spring. From
the tall silhouette of the asphodel, classic in outline as in name, to
the tendrils of scarlet and yellow vetch capriciously fretting the
ancient stones with threads of richest colour, every inch of ground and
every cleft of masonry was overrun with some delicate wild tracery of
leaf and blossom.
But to those who first see Syracuse in the month of March--the heart of
the Sicilian spring--it must appear pre-eminently as one vast unbounded
garden. The appeal of architecture and history pales before this vast
glory of the loosened soil. The walls and towers will remain--but
this transient beauty must be caught upon the wing. And so from the
flowered slopes of Euryalus we passed to the richer profusion of the
gardens that adjoin the town. Fringing the road by which we descended,
a hundred spring flowers--anemones, lupins, sweet alyssum, herb-Robert,
snapdragon and the fragrant wild mignonette--linked the uncultivated
country-side to the rich horticulture of the suburbs; and in the
suburbs the vegetation reached so tropical an excess that the spring
pilgrim’s memory of Syracuse must be a blur of golden-brown ruins
immersed in a sea of flowers.
There are gardens everywhere, gardens of all kinds and classes, from
the peasant’s hut hedged with pink geraniums to the villa with its
terraced sub-tropical growths; but most wonderful, most unexpected of
all, are the famous gardens of the quarries. Time has perhaps never
done a more poetic thing than in turning these bare unshaded pits of
death, where the Greek captives of Salamis died under the lash of the
Sicilian slave-driver and the arrows of the Sicilian sun, into deep
cool wells of shade and verdure. Here, where the chivalry of Athens
perished of heat and thirst, a damp mantle of foliage pours over the
red cliff-sides, fills the depths with the green freshness of twilight,
and effaces, like a pitiful hand on a burning brow, the record of
that fiery martyrdom. And the quarries are as good to grow flowers in
as to torture men. The equable warmth of these sheltered ravines is
as propitious to vegetation as it was destructive to human life; and
wherever soil has accumulated, on the ledges and in the hollows, the
“blood of the martyrs” sends up an exuberant growth.
On the edge of one of these hell-pits a monastery has been built; above
another stands a villa; and monastic and secular hands have transformed
the sides of the quarries into gardens of fantastic beauty. Paths and
rocky stairways fringed with fern wind down steeply from the upper
world, now tunnelled through dense growths of cypress and olive, now
skirting cliff-walks dripping with cataracts of ivy, or tufted with
the glaucous spikes and scarlet rockets of gigantic cactuses. In the
depths, where time has amassed a soil incredibly rich, the vegetation
becomes prodigious, febrile, like that of the delirious garden in “La
Faute de l’Abbé Mouret.” Here the paths wind under groves of orange
and lemon trees, over a dense carpeting of violets, stocks, narcissus
and honey-scented hyacinths. Trellises of red roses lift their network
against the light, and damp clefts of the rock are black with dripping
maidenhair. Here are tall hedges of blue rosemary and red-gold
abutilon, there shrubby masses of anthemisia, heliotrope and lavender.
Overhead, black cypress-shafts spring from the bright sea of foliage,
and at the pit’s brink, where the Syracusan citizens, under their white
umbrellas, used to lean over and taunt the captives dying in the sun, a
great hedge of prickly pear writhes mockingly against the sky.
III
At noon of such another day we set out from Rome for Caprarola.