of Milan. The entrance leads to a court-yard enclosed in an ogive
arcade surmounted by pointed windows in terra-cotta mouldings. The
walls of this court are still frescoed with the Borromean crown, and
the _Humilitas_ of the haughty race; and a doorway leads into the
muniment-room, where the archives of the house are still stored, and
where, on the damp stone walls, Michelino da Milano has depicted the
scenes of a fifteenth-century villeggiatura. Here the noble ladies of
the house, in high fluted turbans and fantastic fur-trimmed gowns, may
be seen treading the measures of a mediæval dance with young gallants
in parti-coloured hose, or playing at various games--the _jeu de
tarots_, and a kind of cricket played with a long wooden bat; while in
the background rise the mountains about Lake Maggiore and the peaked
outline of the Isola Bella, then a bare rock unadorned with gardens and
architecture. These frescoes, the only existing works of a little-known
Lombard artist, are suggestive in style of Pisanello’s dry and vigorous
manner, and as records of the private life of the Italian nobility in
the fifteenth century they are second only to the remarkable pictures
of the Schifanoia at Ferrara.
Not far from the Borromean palace, another doorway leads to a different
scene: the great cloister of the Ospedale Maggiore, one of the most
glorious monuments that man ever erected to his fellows. The old
hospitals of Italy were famous not only for their architectural
beauty and great extent, but for their cleanliness and order and the
enlightened care which their inmates received. Northern travellers have
recorded their wondering admiration of these lazarets, which seemed as
stately as palaces in comparison with the miserable pest-houses north
of the Alps. What must have been the astonishment of such a traveller,
whether German or English, on setting foot in the principal court of
the Milanese hospital, enclosed in its vast cloister enriched with
traceries and medallions of terra-cotta, and surmounted by the arches
of an open loggia whence the patients could look down on a peaceful
expanse of grass and flowers! Even now, one wonders whether this
poetizing of philanthropy, this clothing of charity in the garb of
beauty, may not have had its healing uses: whether the ugliness of the
modern hospital may not make it, in another sense, as unhygienic as the
more picturesque buildings it has superseded? It is at least pleasant
to think of the poor sick people sunning themselves in the beautiful
loggia of the Ospedale Maggiore, or sitting under the magnolia-trees
in the garden, while their blue-gowned and black-veiled nurses move
quietly through the cloisters at the summons of the chapel-bell.
[Illustration:
_The Tower of S. Stefano_
E. C. Peixotto
MILANO. 1901.
]
But one need not enter a court-yard or cross a threshold to appreciate
the variety and colour of Milan. The streets themselves are full of
charming detail--_quattro-cento_ marble portals set with medallions of
bushy-headed Sforzas in round caps and plaited tunics; windows framed
in terra-cotta wreaths of fruit and flowers; iron balconies etching
their elaborate arabesques against the stucco house-fronts; mighty
doorways flanked by Atlantides, like that of Pompeo Leoni’s house (the
_Casa degli Omenoni_) and of the Jesuit seminary; or yellow-brown
rococo churches with pyramids, broken pediments, flying angels, and
vases filled with wrought-iron palm-branches. It is in summer that
these streets are at their best. Then the old gardens overhanging
the Naviglio--the canal which intersects Milan with a layer of
Venice--repeat in its waters their marble loggias hung with the vine,
and their untrained profusion of roses and camellias. Then, in the more
aristocratic streets, the palace doorways yield vistas of double and
triple court-yards, with creeper-clad arcades enclosing spaces of
shady turf, and terminating perhaps in a fountain set in some splendid
architectural composition against the inner wall of the building. In
summer, too, the dark archways in the humbler quarters of the town are
brightened by fruit-stalls embowered in foliage, and heaped with such
melons, figs and peaches as would have driven to fresh extravagance
the exuberant brush of a Flemish fruit-painter. Then again, at the
turn of a street, one comes across some little church just celebrating
the feast of its patron saint with a brave display of garlands and red
hangings; while close by a cavernous _bottegha_ has been festooned with
more garlands and with bright nosegays, amid which hang the painted
candles and other votive offerings designed to attract the small coin
of the faithful.
III
Yet Milan is not dependent on the seasons for this midsummer magic
of light and colour. For dark days it keeps its store of warmth and
brightness hidden behind palace walls and in the cold dusk of church
and cloister. Summer in all its throbbing heat has been imprisoned
by Tiepolo in the great ceiling of the Palazzo Clerici: that revel of
gods and demi-gods, and mortals of all lands and races, who advance
with linked hands out of the rosy vapours of dawn. Nor are loftier
colour-harmonies wanting. On the walls of San Maurizio Maggiore,
Luini’s virgin martyrs move as in the very afterglow of legend: that
hesitating light in which the fantastic becomes probable, and the
boundaries between reality and vision fade; while tints of another
sort, but as tender, as harmonious, float through the dusk of the
sacristy of Santa Maria delle Grazie, a dim room panelled with
intarsia-work, with its grated windows veiled by vine-leaves.
But nothing in Milan approaches in beauty the colour-scheme of the
Portinari chapel behind the choir of Sant’ Eustorgio. In Italy,
even, there is nothing else exactly comparable to this masterpiece
of collaboration between architect and painter. At Ravenna, the tomb
of Galla Placidia and the apse of San Vitale glow with richer hues,
and the lower church of Assisi is unmatched in its shifting mystery
of chiar’-oscuro; but for pure light, for a clear shadowless scale
of iridescent tints, what can approach the Portinari chapel? Its
most striking feature is the harmony of form and colour which makes
the decorative design of Michelozzo flow into and seem a part of the
exquisite frescoes of Vincenzo Foppa. This harmony is not the result
of any voluntary feint, any such trickery of the brush as the later
decorative painters delighted in. In the Portinari chapel, architecture
and painting are kept distinct in treatment, and the fusion between
them is effected by unity of line and colour, and still more, perhaps,
by an identity of sentiment, which keeps the whole chapel in the same
mood of blitheness,--a mood which makes it difficult to remember that
the chapel is the mausoleum of a martyred saint. But Saint Peter
Martyr’s marble sarcophagus, rich and splendid as it is, somehow fails
to distract the attention from its setting. There are so many mediæval
monuments like it in Italy--and there is but one Portinari chapel.
From the cupola, with its scales of pale red and blue, overlapping
each other like the breast-plumage of a pigeon, and terminating in a
terra-cotta frieze of dancing angels, who swing between them great
bells of fruit and flowers, the eye is led by insensible gradations
of tint to Foppa’s frescoes in the spandrils--iridescent saints and
angels in a setting of pale classical architecture--and thence to
another frieze of terra-cotta seraphs with rosy-red wings against a
background of turquoise-green; this lower frieze resting in turn on
pilasters of pale-green adorned with white stucco _rilievi_ of little
bell-ringing angels. It is only as a part of this colour-scheme that
the central sarcophagus really affects one--the ivory tint of its old
marble forming a central point for the play of light, and allying
itself with the sumptuous hues of Portinari’s dress, in the fresco
which represents the donator of the chapel kneeling before his patron
saint.
IV
The picturesqueness of Milan has overflowed on its environs, and there
are several directions in which one may prolong the enjoyment of its
characteristic art. The great Certosa of Pavia can, alas, no longer be
included in a category of the picturesque. Secularized, catalogued,
railed off from the sight-seer, who is hurried through its endless
corridors on the heels of a government custodian, it still ministers to
the sense of beauty, but no longer excites those subtler sensations
which dwell in the atmosphere of a work of art rather than in itself.
Such sensations must be sought in the other deserted Certosa at
Chiaravalle. The abbey church, with its noble colonnaded cupola, is
still one of the most conspicuous objects in the flat landscape about
Milan; but within all is falling to ruin, and one feels the melancholy
charm of a beautiful building which has been allowed to decay as
naturally as a tree. The disintegrating touch of nature is less cruel
than the restoring touch of man, and the half-ruined frescoes and
intarsia-work of Chiaravalle retain more of their original significance
than the carefully-guarded treasures of Pavia.
Less melancholy than Chiaravalle, and as yet unspoiled by the touch
of official preservation, is the pilgrimage church of the Madonna of
Saronno. A long avenue of plane-trees leads from the village to the
sumptuous marble façade of the church, an early Renaissance building
with ornamental additions of the seventeenth century. Within, it is
famous for the frescoes of Luini in the choir, and of Gaudenzio Ferrari
in the cupola. The Luini frescoes are full of a serene impersonal
beauty. Painted in his latest phase, when he had fallen under the
influence of Raphael and the “grand manner,” they lack the intimate
charm of his early works; yet the Lombard note, the Leonardesque
quality, lingers here and there in the side-long glance of the women,
and in the yellow-haired beauty of the adolescent heads; while it finds
completer expression in the exquisite single figures of Saint Catherine
and Saint Apollonia.
[Illustration:
_The Church at Saronno_
E. C. Peixotto
1901.
]
If these stately compositions are less typical of Luini than, for
instance, the frescoes of San Maurizio Maggiore, or of the Casa Pelucca
(now in the Brera), Gaudenzio’s cupola seems, on the contrary, to sum
up in one glorious burst of expression all his fancy had ever evoked
and his hand longed to embody. It seems to have been given to certain
artists to attain, once at least, to this full moment of expression: to
Titian, for instance, in the Bacchus and Ariadne, to Michael Angelo in
the monuments of the Medici, to Giorgione in the Sylvan Concert of the
Louvre. In other works they may reveal greater powers, more magnificent
conceptions; but once only, perhaps, is it given to each to achieve
the perfect equipoise of mind and hand; and in that moment even the
lesser artists verge on greatness. Gaudenzio found his opportunity
in the cupola of Saronno, and for once he rises above the charming
anecdotic painter of Varallo to the brotherhood of the masters. It
is as the expression of a mood that his power reveals itself--the
mood of heavenly joyousness, so vividly embodied in his circle of
choiring angels that form seems to pass into sound, and the dome to
be filled with a burst of heavenly jubilation. With unfaltering hand
he has sustained this note of joyousness. Nowhere does his invention
fail or his brush lag behind it. The sunny crowding heads, the flying
draperies, the fluttering scores of the music, are stirred as by a wind
of inspiration--a breeze from the celestial pastures. The walls of the
choir seem to resound with one of the angel-choruses of “Faust,” or
with the last chiming lines of the “Paradiso.” Happy the artist whose
full powers find voice in such a key!
V
The reader who has followed these desultory wanderings through Milan
has but touched the hem of her garment. In the Brera, the Ambrosiana,
the Poldi-Pezzoli gallery, and the magnificent new Archæological
Museum, now fittingly housed in the old castle of the Sforzas, are
treasures second only to those of Rome and Florence. But these are
among the catalogued riches of the city. The guide-books point to
them, they lie in the beaten track of sight-seeing, and it is rather
in the intervals between such systematized study of the past, in
the parentheses of travel, that one obtains those more intimate
glimpses which help to compose the image of each city, to preserve its
personality in the traveller’s mind.
ITALIAN BACKGROUNDS
I
In the Italian devotional pictures of the early Renaissance there are
usually two quite unrelated parts: the foreground and the background.
The foreground is conventional. Its personages--saints, angels and Holy
Family--are the direct descendants of a long line of similar figures.
Every detail of dress and attitude has been settled beforehand by laws
which the artist accepts as passively as the fact that his models
have two eyes apiece, and noses in the middle of their faces. Though
now and then some daring painter introduces a happy modification,
such as the little violin-playing angels on the steps of the Virgin’s
throne, in the pictures of the Venetian school, such changes are too
rare and unimportant to affect the general truth of the statement.
It is only in the background that the artist finds himself free to
express his personality. Here he depicts not what some one else has
long since designed for him, in another land and under different
conceptions of life and faith, but what he actually sees about him, in
the Lombard plains, in the delicately-modelled Tuscan hill-country,
or in the fantastic serrated landscape of the Friulian Alps. One must
look past and beyond the central figures, in their typical attitudes
and symbolical dress, to catch a glimpse of the life amid which the
painting originated. Relegated to the middle distance, and reduced to
insignificant size, is the real picture, the picture which had its
birth in the artist’s brain and reflects his impression of the life
about him.
Here, for instance, behind a Madonna of Bellini’s, white oxen graze
the pasture, and a shepherd lolls on a bank beside his flock; there,
in the train of the Eastern Kings, real soldiers, clerks, pedlars,
beggars, and all the miscellaneous rabble of the Italian streets wind
down a hill-side crowned by a mediæval keep, and cross a bridge with a
water-mill--just such a bridge and water-mill as the artist may have
sketched in his native village. And in the scenes of the life of the
Virgin, what opportunities for _genre_-painting present themselves! In
Ghirlandaio’s fresco of the Birth of the Virgin, in the apse of Santa
Maria Novella, fine ladies in contemporary costume are congratulating
the conventionally-draped Saint Anna, while Crivelli’s Annunciation, in
the National Gallery, shows an ornate Renaissance palace, with peacocks
spreading their tails on the upper loggia, a sumptuous Eastern rug
hanging over a marble balustrade, and the celestial messenger tripping
up a flight of marble stairs to a fashionable front door.
No painter was more prodigal than Carpaccio of these intimate details,
or more audacious in the abrupt juxtaposition of devotional figures
with the bustling secular life of his day. His Legend of Saint Ursula,
in the Accademia of Venice, is a storehouse of fifteenth-century
anecdote, an encyclopædia of dress, architecture and manners; and
behind his agonizing Saint Sebastian, tied to a column and riddled with
arrows, the traffic of the Venetian canals goes on unregardingly, as in
life the most trivial activities revolve unheeding about a great sorrow.
Even painters far less independent of tradition than Carpaccio and
Crivelli succeeded in imparting the personal note, the note of direct
observation, to the background of their religious pictures. If the
figures are placed in a landscape, the latter is not a conventional
grouping of hill, valley and river: it has the unmistakable quality of
the _chose vue_. No one who has studied the backgrounds of old Italian
pictures can imagine that realistic landscape-painting is a modern
art. The technique of the early landscape-painters was not that of the
modern interpreter of nature, but their purpose was the same; they
sought to render with fidelity and precision what they saw about them.
It is this directness of vision which gives to their backgrounds such
vividness and charm. In these distances one may discover the actual
foreground of the artist’s life. Here one may learn what was veritably
happening in fifteenth-century Venice, Florence and Perugia; here see
what horizons the old masters looked out on, and note that the general
aspect of the country is still almost as unchanged as the folds of the
Umbrian mountains and the curves of the Tuscan streams.
II
As with the study of Italian pictures, so it is with Italy herself.
The country is divided, not in _partes tres_, but in two: a foreground
and a background. The foreground is the property of the guide-book
and of its product, the mechanical sight-seer; the background, that
of the dawdler, the dreamer and the serious student of Italy. This
distinction does not imply any depreciation of the foreground. It must
be known thoroughly before the middle distance can be enjoyed: there
is no short cut to an intimacy with Italy. Nor must the analogy of the
devotional picture be pushed too far. The famous paintings, statues
and buildings of Italy are obviously the embodiment of its historic
and artistic growth; but they have become slightly conventionalized by
being too long used as the terms in which Italy is defined. They have
stiffened into symbols, and the life of which they were once the most
complete expression has evaporated in the desiccating museum-atmosphere
to which their fame has condemned them. To enjoy them, one must let in
on them the open air of an observation detached from tradition. Since
they cannot be evaded they must be deconventionalized; and to effect
this they must be considered in relation to the life of which they are
merely the ornamental façade.
Thus regarded, to what an enchanted region do they form the approach!
Like courteous hosts they efface themselves, pointing the way, but
giving their guests the freedom of their domain. It is not too
fanciful to say that each of the great masterpieces of Italy holds the
key to some secret garden of the imagination. One must know Titian
and Giorgione to enjoy the intimacy of the Friulian Alps, Cima da
Conegliano to taste the full savour of the strange Euganean landscape,
Palladio and Sansovino to appreciate the frivolous villa-architecture
of the Brenta, nay, the domes of Brunelleschi and Michael Angelo to
feel the happy curve of some chapel cupola in a nameless village of the
hills.
“Une civilisation,” says Viollet-le-Duc, “ne peut prétendre posséder
un art que si cet art pénètre partout, s’il fait sentir sa présence
dans les œuvres les plus vulgaires.” It is because Italian art
so interpenetrated Italian life, because the humblest stonemason
followed in some sort the lines of the great architects, and the
modeller of village Madonnas the composition of the great sculptors,
that the monumental foreground and the unregarded distances behind
it so continually interpret and expound each other. Italy, to her
real lovers, is like a great illuminated book, with here and there
a glorious full-page picture, and between these, page after page of
delicately-pencilled margins, wherein every detail of her daily life
may be traced. And the pictures and the margins are by the same hand.
III
As Italy is divided into foreground and background, so each city has
its perspective; its _premier plan_ asterisked for the hasty traveller,
its middle distance for the “happy few” who remain more than three
days, and its boundless horizon for the idler who refuses to measure
art by time. In some cases the background is the continuation, the
amplification, of the central “subject”; in others, its direct
antithesis. Thus in Umbria, and in some parts of Tuscany and the
Marches, art, architecture, history and landscape all supplement and
continue each other, and the least imaginative tourist must feel that
in leaving the galleries of Siena or Florence for the streets and the
surrounding country, he is still within the bounds of conventional
sight-seeing.
In Rome, on the contrary, in Milan, and to some extent in Venice, as
well as in many of the smaller towns throughout Italy, there is a sharp
line of demarcation between the guide-book city and its background.
In some cases, the latter is composed mainly of objects at which the
guide-book tourist has been taught to look askance, or rather which he
has been counselled to pass by without a look. Goethe has long been
held up to the derision of the enlightened student of art because he
went to Assisi to see the Roman temple of Minerva, and omitted to visit
the mediæval church of Saint Francis; but how many modern sight-seers
visit the church and omit the temple? And wherein lies their superior
catholicity of taste? The fact is that, in this particular instance,
foreground and background have changed places, and the modern tourist
who neglects Minerva for Saint Francis is as narrowly bound by
tradition as his eighteenth-century predecessor, with this difference,
that whereas the latter knew nothing of mediæval art and architecture,
the modern tourist knows that the temple is there and deliberately
turns his back on it.
IV
Perhaps Rome is, of all Italian cities, the one in which this
one-sidedness of æsthetic interest is most oddly exemplified. In the
Tuscan and Umbrian cities, as has been said, the art and architecture
which form the sight-seer’s accepted “curriculum,” are still the
distinctive features of the streets through which he walks to his
gallery or his museum. In Florence, for instance, he may go forth from
the Riccardi chapel, and see the castle of Vincigliata towering on its
cypress-clad hill precisely as Gozzoli depicted it in his fresco; in
Siena, the crenellated palaces with their iron torch-holders and barred
windows form the unchanged setting of a mediæval pageant. But in Rome
for centuries it has been the fashion to look only on a city which has
almost disappeared, and to close the eyes to one which is still alive
and actual.
The student of ancient Rome moves among painfully-reconstructed
débris; the mediævalist must traverse the city from end to end to
piece together the meagre fragments of his “epoch.” Both studies are
absorbing, and the very difficulty of the chase no doubt adds to its
exhilaration; but is it not a curious mental attitude which compels
the devotee of mediæval art to walk blindfold from the Palazzo Venezia
to Santa Sabina on the Aventine, or from the Ara Cœli to Santa Maria
Sopra Minerva, because the great monuments lying between these points
of his pilgrimage belong to what some one has taught him to regard as a
“debased period of art”?