The sunset was almost spent, and a four days’ moon hung above the
Western Apennines, when we took our first view of the palace. It is
a fancy-thralling work of wonder seen in that dim twilight; like
some castle reared by Atlante’s magic for imprisonment of Ruggiero,
or palace sought in fairy-land by Astolf winding his enchanted horn.
Where shall we find its like, combining, as it does, the buttressed
battlemented bulk of mediæval strongholds with the airy balconies,
suspended gardens, and fantastic turrets of Italian pleasure-houses?
This unique blending of the feudal past with the Renaissance spirit of
the time when it was built, connects it with the art of Ariosto--or
more exactly with Boiardo’s epic. Duke Federigo planned his palace
at Urbino just at the moment when the Count of Scandiano had begun
to chaunt his lays of Roland in the Castle of Ferrara. Chivalry,
transmuted by the Italian genius into something fanciful and quaint,
survived as a frail work of art. The man-at-arms of the Condottieri
still glittered in gilded hauberks. Their helmets waved with plumes and
bizarre crests. Their surcoats blazed with heraldries; their velvet
caps with medals bearing legendary emblems. The pomp and circumstance
of feudal war had not yet yielded to the cannon of the Gascon or the
Switzer’s pike. The fatal age of foreign invasions had not begun
for Italy. Within a few years Charles VIII.’s holiday excursion would
reveal the internal rottenness and weakness of her rival states, and
the peninsula for half a century to come would be drenched in the blood
of Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, fighting for her cities as their
prey. But now Lorenzo de’Medici was still alive. The famous policy
which bears his name held Italy suspended for a golden time in false
tranquillity and independence. The princes who shared his culture and
his love of art were gradually passing into modern noblemen, abandoning
the savage feuds and passions of more virile centuries, yielding to
luxury and scholarly enjoyments. The castles were becoming courts, and
despotisms won by force were settling into dynasties.
[Illustration: THE PALACE OF URBINO, ITALY.]
It was just at this epoch that Duke Federigo built his castle at
Urbino. One of the ablest and wealthiest Condottieri of his time, one
of the best instructed and humanest of Italian princes, he combined
in himself the qualities which mark that period of transition. And
these he impressed upon his dwelling-house, which looks backward to
the mediæval fortalice and forward to the modern palace. This makes it
the just embodiment in architecture of Italian romance, the perfect
analogue of the “_Orlando Innamorato_.” By comparing it with the
castle of the Estes at Ferrara and the Palazzo del Te of the Gonzagas
at Mantua, we place it in its right position between mediæval and
Renaissance Italy, between the age when principalities arose upon the
ruins of commercial independence and the age when they became dynastic
under Spain.
The exigencies of the ground at his disposal forced Federigo to give
the building an irregular outline. The fine façade, with its embayed
_loggie_ and flanking turrets, is placed too close upon the
city ramparts for its due effect. We are obliged to cross the deep
ravine which separates it from a lower quarter of the town, and take
our station near the Oratory of S. Giovanni Battista, before we can
appreciate the beauty of its design, or the boldness of the group it
forms with the cathedral dome and tower and square masses of numerous
outbuildings. Yet this peculiar position of the palace, though baffling
to a close observer of its details, is one of singular advantage to its
inhabitants. Set on the verge of Urbino’s towering eminence, it fronts
a wave-tossed sea of vales and mountain summits towards the rising
and the setting sun. There is nothing but illimitable air between the
terraces and loggias of the Duchess’s apartments and the spreading
pyramid of Monte Catria.
A nobler scene is nowhere swept from palace windows than this,
which Castiglione touched in a memorable passage at the end of his
_Cortegiano_. To one who in our day visits Urbino, it is singular
how the slight indications of this sketch, as in some silhouette, bring
back the antique life, and link the present with the past--a hint,
perhaps, for reticence in our descriptions. The gentlemen and ladies
of the court had spent a summer night in long debate on love, rising
to the height of mystical Platonic rapture on the lips of Bembo, when
one of them exclaimed, “The day has broken!” “He pointed to the light
which was beginning to enter by the fissures of the windows. Whereupon
we flung the casements wide upon that side of the palace which looks
towards the high peak of Monte Catria, and saw that a fair dawn of
rosy hue was born already in the eastern skies, and all the stars had
vanished except the sweet regent of the heaven of Venus, who holds the
border-lands of day and night; and from her sphere it seemed as though
a gentle wind were breathing, filling the air with eager freshness,
and waking among the numerous woods upon the neighbouring hills the
sweet-toned symphonies of joyous birds.”
Duke Frederick began the palace at Urbino in 1454, when he was still
only Count. The architect was Luziano of Lauranna, a Dalmatian, and the
beautiful white limestone, hard as marble, used in the construction,
was brought from the Dalmatian coast. This stone, like the Istrian
stone of Venetian buildings, takes and retains the chisel mark with
wonderful precision. It looks as though, when fresh, it must have had
the pliancy of clay, so delicately are the finest curves in scroll
or foliage scooped from its substance. And yet it preserves each
cusp and angle of the most elaborate pattern with the crispness and
the sharpness of a crystal. When wrought by a clever craftsman, its
surface has neither the waxiness of the Parian, nor the brittle edge
of Carrara marble; and it resists weather better than marble of the
choicest quality. This may be observed in many monuments of Venice,
where the stone has been long exposed to sea-air. These qualities
of the Dalmatian limestone, no less than its agreeable creamy hue
and smooth dull polish, adapt it to decoration in dull relief. The
most attractive details in the palace at Urbino are friezes carved
of this material in choice designs of early Renaissance dignity and
grace. One chimney-piece in the Sala degli Angeli deserves special
comment. A frieze of dancing Cupids, with gilt hair and wings, their
naked bodies left white on a ground of ultramarine, is supported by
broad flat pilasters. These are engraved with children holding pots
of flowers; roses on one side, carnations on the other. Above the
frieze another pair of angels, one at each end, hold lighted torches;
and the pyramidal cap of the chimney is carved with two more, flying,
and supporting the eagle of the Montefeltri on a raised medallion.
Throughout the palace we notice emblems appropriate to the Houses of
Montefeltro and Della Rovere: their arms, three golden bends upon
a field of azure: the Imperial eagle, granted when Montefeltro was
made a fief of the Empire: The Garter of England, worn by the Dukes
Federigo and Guidobaldo: The ermine of Naples: the _ventosa_, or
cupping-glass, adopted for a private badge by Frederick: the golden
oak-tree on an azure field of Della Rovere: the palm-tree, bent
beneath a block of stone, with its accompanying motto, _Inclinata
Resurgam_: the cipher, FE DX. Profile medallions of Federigo
and Guidobaldo, wrought in the lowest possible relief, adorn the
staircases. Round the great courtyard runs a frieze of military engines
and ensigns, trophies, machines, and implements of war, alluding to
Duke Frederick’s profession of Condottiere. The doorways are enriched
with scrolls of heavy-headed flowers, acanthus foliage, honey-suckles,
ivy-berries, birds and boys and sphinxes, in all the riot of
Renaissance fancy.
This profusion of sculptured _rilievo_ is nearly all that remains
to show how rich the palace was in things of beauty. Castiglione,
writing in the reign of Guidobaldo, says that “in the opinion of many
it is the fairest to be found in Italy; and the Duke filled it so well
with all things fitting its magnificence, that it seemed less like a
palace than a city. Not only did he collect articles of common use,
vessels of silver, the trappings for chambers of rare cloths of gold
and silk, and such-like furniture, but he added multitudes of bronze
and marble statues, exquisite pictures, and instruments of music of
all sorts. There was nothing but was of the finest and most excellent
quality to be seen there. Moreover, he gathered together at a vast
cost a large number of the best and rarest books on Greek, Latin, and
Hebrew, all of which he adorned with gold and silver, esteeming them
the chiefest treasure of his spacious palace.” When Cesare Borgia
entered Urbino as conqueror in 1502, he is said to have carried off
loot to the value of 150,000 ducats, or perhaps about a quarter of a
million sterling.
The impression left upon the mind after traversing this palace in
its length and breadth is one of weariness and disappointment. How
shall we reconstruct the long-past life which filled its rooms with
sound, the splendour of its pageants, the thrill of tragedies enacted
here? It is not difficult to crowd its doors and vacant spaces with
liveried servants, slim pages in tight hose, whose well-combed hair
escapes from tiny caps upon their silken shoulders. We may even
replace the tapestries of Troy which hung one hall, and build again
the sideboards with their embossed gilded plate. But are these
chambers really those where Emilia Pia held debate on love with Bembo
and Castiglione; where Bibbiena’s witticisms and Fra Serafino’s
pranks raised smiles on courtly lips; where Bernardo Accolti, “the
Unique,” declaimed his verses to applauding crowds? Is it possible
that into yonder hall, where now the lion of S. Mark looks down alone
on staring desolation, strode the Borgia in all his panoply of war,
a gilded glittering dragon, and from the daïs tore the Montefeltri’s
throne, and from the arras stripped their ensigns, replacing those
with his own Bull and Valentinus Dux? Here Tasso tuned his lyre for
Francesco Maria’s wedding-feast and read _Aminta_ to Lucrezia
d’Este. Here Guidobaldo listened to the jests and whispered scandals
of the Aretine. Here Titian set his easel up to paint; here the boy
Raphael, cap in hand, took, signed and sealed credentials from his
Duchess to the Gonfalonier of Florence. Somewhere in these huge
chambers, the courtiers sat before a torch-lit stage, when Bibbiena’s
_Calandria_ and Castiglione’s _Tirsi_, with their miracles
of masques and mummers, whiled the night away. Somewhere, we know
not where, Guiliano de’Medici made love in these bare rooms to that
mysterious mother of ill-fated Cardinal Ippolito; somewhere, in some
darker nook, the bastard Alessandro sprang to his strange-fortuned
life of tyranny and license, which Brutus-Lorenzino cut short with a
traitor’s poignard-thrust in Via Larga. How many men, illustrious for
arts and letters, memorable by their virtues or their crimes, have
trod these silent corridors, from the great Pope Julius down to James
III., self-titled King of England, who tarried here with Clementina
Sobieski through some twelve months of his ex-royal exile! The memories
of all this folk, flown guests and masters of the still-abiding
palace-chambers, haunt us as we hurry through. They are but filmy
shadows. We cannot grasp them, localize them, people surrounding
emptiness with more than withering cobweb forms.
It is easier to conjure up the past of this great palace, strolling
round it in free air and twilight; perhaps because the landscape and
the life still moving on the city streets bring its exterior into
harmony with real existence. The southern façade, with its vaulted
balconies and flanking towers, takes the fancy, fascinates the eye,
and lends itself as a fit stage for puppets of the musing mind. Once
more imagination plants trim orange-trees in giant jars of Gubbio ware
upon the pavement where the garden of the Duchess lay--the pavement
paced in these bad days by convicts in grey canvas jackets--that
pavement where Monsignor Bembo courted “dear dead women” with Platonic
phrase, smothering the Menta of his natural man in lettuce culled from
Academe and thyme of Mount Hymettus. In yonder loggia, lifted above
the garden and the court, two lovers are in earnest converse. They
lean beneath the coffered arch, against the marble of the balustrade,
he fingering his dagger under the dark velvet doublet, she playing
with a clove carnation, deep as her own shame. The man is Giannandrea,
broad-shouldered bravo of Verona, Duke Guidobaldo’s favourite and
carpet-count. The lady is Madonna Maria, daughter of Rome’s Prefect,
widow of Venanzio Verano, whom the Borgia strangled. On their discourse
a tale will hang of a woman’s frailty and a man’s boldness--Camerino’s
Duchess yielding to a low-born suitor’s stalwart charms. And more will
follow, when that lady’s brother, furious Francesco Maria della Rovere,
shall stab the bravo in torch-litten palace-rooms with twenty poignard
strokes ’twixt waist and throat, and their Pandarus shall be sent down
to his account by a varlet’s _coltellata_ through the midriff.
Imagination shifts the scene, and shows in that same loggia Rome’s
warlike Pope, attended by his cardinals and all Urbino’s chivalry. The
snowy beard of Julius flows down upon his breast, where jewels clasp
the crimson mantle, as in Raphael’s picture. His eyes are bright with
wine; for he has come to gaze on sunset from the banquet-chamber and to
watch the line of lamps which soon will leap along that palace cornice
in his honour. Behind him lies Bologna humbled. The Pope returns, a
conqueror to Rome. Yet once again imagination is at work. A gaunt, bold
man, close-habited in Spanish black, his spare, fine features carved
in purest ivory, leans from that balcony. Gazing with hollow eyes, he
tracks the swallows in their flight, and notes that winter is at hand.
This is the last Duke of Urbino, Francesco Maria II., he whose young
wife deserted him, who made for himself alone a hermit-pedant’s round
of petty cares and niggard avarice and mean brained superstition. He
drew a second consort from the convent, and raised up seed unto his
line by forethought, but beheld his princeling fade untimely in the
bloom of boyhood. Nothing is left but solitude. To the mortmain of the
Church reverts Urbino’s lordship, and even now he meditates the terms
of devolution. Jesuits cluster in the rooms behind, with comfort for
the ducal soul and calculations for the interests of Holy See.
Filippo Visconti, with a smile on his handsome face, is waiting for us
at the inn. His horses sleek, well-fed, and rested, toss their heads
impatiently. We take our seats in the carriage, open wide beneath a
sparkling sky, whirl past the palace and its ghost-like recollections,
and are half-way on the road to Fossombrone in a cloud of dust and whir
of wheels before we think of looking back to greet Urbino. There is
just time. The last decisive turning lies in front. We stand bareheaded
to salute the grey mass of buildings ridged along the sky. Then the
open road invites us with its varied scenery and movement.