I doubt if, after St. Mark's in Venice, the Duomo at Parma, and the
Four Fabrics at Pisa, there is a church more worthy to be seen for
its quaint, rich architecture, than the Cathedral at Ferrara. It is
of that beloved Gothic of which eye or soul cannot weary, and we
continually wandered back to it from other more properly interesting
objects. It is horribly restored in-doors, and its Renaissance
splendors soon drove us forth, after we had looked at the Last
Judgment by Bastianino. The style of this painting is muscular and
Michelangelic, and the artist's notion of putting his friends in
heaven and his foes in hell is by no means novel; but he has achieved
fame for his picture by the original thought of making it his revenge
for a disappointment in love. The unhappy lady who refused his love
is represented in the depths, in the attitude of supplicating the pity
and interest of another maiden in Paradise who accepted Bastianino,
and who consequently has no mercy on her that snubbed him. But I
counted of far more value than this fresco the sincere old sculptures
on the façade of the cathedral, in which the same subject is treated,
beginning from the moment the archangel's trump has sounded. The
people getting suddenly out of their graves at the summons are all
admirable; but the best among them is the excellent man with one
leg over the side of his coffin, and tugging with both hands to
pull himself up, while the coffin-lid tumbles off behind. One sees
instantly that the conscience of this early riser is clean, for he
makes no miserable attempt to turn over for a nap of a few thousand
years more, with the pretense that it was not the trump of doom, but
some other and unimportant noise he had heard. The final reward of the
blessed is expressed by the repose of one small figure in the lap of
a colossal effigy, which I understood to mean rest in Abraham's bosom;
but the artist has bestowed far more interest and feeling upon the
fate of the damned, who are all boiling in rows of immense pots. It is
doubtful (considering the droll aspect of heavenly bliss as figured
in the one small saint and the large patriarch) whether the artist
intended the condition of his sinners to be so horribly comic as it
is; but the effect is just as great, for all that, and the slowest
conscience might well take alarm from the spectacle of fate so
grotesque and ludicrous; for, wittingly or unwittingly, the artist
here punishes, as Dante knew best how to do, the folly of sinners as
well as their wickedness. Boiling is bad enough; but to be boiled in
an undeniable dinner-pot, like a leg of mutton, is to suffer shame us
well as agony.
We turned from these horrors, and walked down by the side of the Duomo
toward the Ghetto, which is not so foul as one could wish a Ghetto
to be. The Jews were admitted to Ferrara in 1275, and, throughout the
government of the Dukes, were free to live where they chose in
the city; but the Pope's Legate assigned them afterward a separate
quarter, which was closed with gates. Large numbers of Spanish Jews
fled hither during the persecutions, and there are four synagogues
for the four languages,--Spanish, German, French, and Italian. Avventi
mentions, among other interesting facts concerning the Ferrarese Jews,
that one of their Rabbins, Isaaco degli Abranelli, a man of excellent
learning in the Scriptures, claimed to be descended from David. His
children still abide in Ferrara; and it may have been one of his
kingly line that kept the tempting antiquarian's shop on the corner
from which you turn up toward the Library. I should think such a man
would find a sort of melancholy solace in such a place: filled with
broken and fragmentary glories of every kind, it would serve him for
that chamber of desolation, set apart in the houses of the Oriental
Hebrews as a place to bewail themselves in; and, indeed, this idea may
go far to explain the universal Israelitish fondness for dealing in
relics and ruins.