A prophet is never without honour in his own country after his fame has
been recognised by the world; indeed, his own country will cling piously
to him after the tide of his larger reputation has receded, being as
slow to unlearn as to learn. Particularly is this true of painters. And
when the artist has achieved the feat of substituting himself for a town
in the popular imagination, like Bassano, Garofalo, Luini, Sassoferrato,
Correggio, the town thus snubbed is usually prudent enough to identify
itself with his glory. But it must be humiliating for a town like
Correggio, once the capital of a principality, to owe its only hold upon
the present to a painter who did not live there, and of whom it does not
possess a single picture. Let arrogant cities take warning: the time may
come when their only niche in history will be provided by some obscure
citizen now neglected, if not ill-treated or repudiated.
Once arrived, then, the Old Masters are not to be shaken off, even after
they have departed again. Their birthplace or their working centre makes
a cult of them, and it is touching to see them at home, each presiding
over a _sala_ at least of his works, and though depreciated abroad, yet
still at an exorbitant premium in his local shrine, like some obscure
paterfamilias basking and burgeoning at the family hearth. Guercino is
still a god at Cento, his statue in the piazza, his pictures in the
gallery. Possagno has a shrine with casts of all Canova. With what a
gusto did the cicerones of Mantua talk of Giulio Romano! How the name
rolled from the tongue, how it brightened a dingy fresco and glorified a
dubious canvas. _Si! Si! Tutto di Giulio Romano!_ Poor Giulio Romano!
Not that those giants of yours tumbling on their heads in the Palazzo Te
are as detestable as Dickens said. Those of David and Goliath in the
great courtyard are even charming. And more fortunate than poor Guido,
who must share his Bologna with Francia, you have a town to yourself.
Even in his own _sala_ poor Guido is put in the shade by the poetry of
Niccolò da Foligno.
Moretto is properly the hero of Brescia, though not born there, and he
dominates the Palazzo Martinengo with his charming _St. Nicholas
presenting the School Children to the Virgin_, and a dozen other
pictures, as he dominates the bishop’s palace and the churches. It is
rare that so large a proportion of a painter’s work should remain at
home, even when the painter himself is as homekeeping as was Moretto.
Very proud are they in Forli of Melozzo, exhibiting engravings of all
his works, and even a rescued shop sign of his representing a
pepper-brayer banging with his pestle. Marco Palmezzani, too, is high in
honour in Forli. Correggio, who made his home in Parma, has been adopted
by that city, and it is one of the few things to the credit of Marie
Louise that she inspired this sacrosanct treatment of his work, in rich
pilastered frames, under sculptured and vaulted ceilings, with two
pictures to a room, or in the case of the _Madonna della Scodella_ a
room to itself. Poor Parmigiano, the real native of Parma, is thrown
into the shade, though there is a Parmigiano room in the Pinacoteca and
a Parmigiano statue in the Piazza della Steccata.
Urbino, a city as dead as Correggio, except for the fame of its ancient
majolica, resembles it further in not possessing a single example of the
work of its greatest son, so that Raphael’s father, who had the talent
which so often sires a genius, pathetically holds the place of honour
with his _Santa Chiara_ and other more or less mediocre pictures. And
yet there were five years at least in which Guidobaldo Montefeltro might
have summoned Raphael to that famous Court which Castiglione depicted as
a model. To-day, of course, the steep cobbled old city is all Raphael,
with the exception of Polidoro Virgili, “the most learned man of letters
of the fifteenth century,” and Gianleone Semproni, “Epic Poet”(!). A
Contrada Raffaello, and a bronze bust, and a monument 36 ft. high, all
attest his glory. But it would have been far wiser to have perpetuated
his exclusion from the Montefeltro Palace than to represent him by a
hideous complete set of cheap tiny photographs of his works, all set
side by side in a large frame which stands in the chapel, together with
his skull in a glass case! At least, it is not really his skull—it has
not even that excuse—it is merely a cast in clay, though the clay was
taken from his skeleton, from the cavity where once the heart that loved
all beauty had pulsed. And here, looking upon the scenes his youthful
eye had dwelt on; here, where one would wish to surrender oneself to
memories of his magical creations, this skull with its perfect teeth is
set to grin its mockery of art and life.
An anthropologist, we are told by an eminent historian of art, supposed
this cast to be that of a woman, and we are invited to see in it the
explanation of Raphael’s suavity. But I had been satisfactorily
explaining this suavity myself by the amenities of the tame
landscape—olives, poplars, hawthorn, a half-dried river, pairs of white
oxen—as I trudged the forty kilometres from Pesaro to Urbino, till to
my chagrin the character of the country changed and grew wilder and
wilder as I approached his birthplace.
At dusk I was climbing up to an Urbino towering romantically above me
with its few twinkling lights and wafting down the music of its vesper
bells. My persuasion that I had explained Raphael dwindled with every
painful step up the “Contrada Raffaello,” probably the steepest and
worst-paved street in the world, and vanished altogether by the time I
had climbed one of the gigantic stone staircases of the rock-hewn
fortress city. And next morning I looked from the loggia of the great
hook-nosed Duke upon wonderful rolling mountains, range upon range,
snow-capped at the last, and winding paths twisting among them in a
great poetry of space. Ha! Poetry of space! Was not that now set down as
Raphael’s one real claim to greatness? And it was here no doubt he had
found it, just as Piero dei Franceschi had found it, when here at the
Duke’s invitation. But a hundred thousand other people—I suddenly
remembered—have been born or have lived at Urbino, and why—I asked
myself—were they not inspired to paint like Raphael? And a hundred
thousand other men have had feminine skulls (not to mention women), and
why have they not produced _Transfigurations_ and _Schools of Athens_?
Alas! I fear the Taine method has its limitations. Rousselot in his
“_Histoire de l’Évangile Éternel_” talks as if Calabria with its
solitary mountains and valleys could not help producing Joachim of
Flora, nor Assisi St. Francis. But why do these places not go on
producing saints and mystics?