Befitting was it at Mantua to feel so poignantly the _lachrymæ rerum_. I
should perhaps have felt it at Virgil’s own tomb at Naples, had that not
been so vague and rambling a site that no moment of concentration or
even of conviction was possible. But the ancient Ducal Palace of the
Gonzagas in the Piazza Sordello had the pathos of the unexpected.
Nothing in its exterior suggested ruin and desolation, nay the
scaffolding across the façade spoke rather of restoration and repair.
The tall red brick arches of the portico beneath, the double row of
plain straight windows in the middle, and the top tier of ornamental
arched windows, surmounted by the battlements, conveyed an impression of
Gothic solidity and moderate spaciousness. It was not till I had walked
for many minutes through an endless series of dilapidated chambers and
mutilated magnificences—propped-up ceilings and walled-up windows and
rotting floors, and marble and gold and rich-dyed woods and gorgeous
ceilings, and mouldering tapestries and paintings, and musty grandeurs
multiplied in specked mirrors, and faded hangings and forlorn frescoes,
and chandeliers without candles, and fly-blown gilding and broken
furniture and beautiful furniture and whitewash and blackened plaster
and bare brick and a vast unpeopled void—that there began to grow upon
my soul the sense of a colossal tragedy of ruin, a monstrous and
melancholy desolation, an heroic grandeur of disarray, a veritable poem
of decay and destruction. Not the Alhambra itself is so dumbly eloquent
of the passing of the Magnificent Ones.
“Babylon is fallen, is fallen.”
For the interior answers not to the exterior, whether in preservation or
in character. It is renaissance and ruin, with a minor note of the
Empire; all the splendours of the world fallen upon evil days. Only by
remembering the mutations of Mantua can one account for this hybrid
Cortile Reale of dishevelled grandeurs, whose face so belies its
character and its fortunes.
The Palace was begun under the dynasty which preceded the Gonzagas, it
saw all the glories of the Renaissance, saw Mantua sacked by the
Germans, and the Gonzaga dynasty extinguished by the Austrians, and the
city fallen to the French, and re-fallen to Austria, and caught up into
the Cisalpine Republic, and then into the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy,
and then Austrian again till the yoke was broken by Victor Emmanuel and
the stable dulness of to-day established. It is in fact a microcosm of
Mantuan history from the day Guido Bonacolsi laid the first stone
somewhere near the year 1300. The building had not proceeded very far
before the Gonzagas came into power in 1328, in time to stamp the
apartments with their character, and it is with Isabella d’Este that its
most inventive features are associated.
A hundred and eighty rooms, said the janitor, and when one remembers the
crowd of resident courtiers and the great trains with which the
Magnificent Ones travelled, one should not be astonished at the
resemblance of an ancient Palace to a modern Grand Hotel. Isabella
d’Este’s brother-in-law, Lodovico the Moro, once visited her here with a
suite of a thousand persons, and that was only half the number with
which Lodovico’s brother, Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, descended upon
Florence in 1471. But no modern hotel could keep open a week with such
apartments. I do not refer merely to their dearth of conveniences, but
to their mutual accessibility, their comparative scarcity of corridors.
I do not see how a man could go to bed without passing through another
man’s bedroom. Grandeur without comfort, art without privacy, such was
the Palace in its peopled prime. Think of it to-day—grandeur in rags,
art torn from its sockets, and a lonely scribe trailing through vaulted
and frescoed emptiness.
The portraits of the Gonzagas are still in the Hall of the Dukes, but
when I ascended the beautiful staircase to the vast armoury, I found an
aching void. The weapons had been carried off in the sack of Mantua—a
sack so complete that Duke Carlo on his return had to accept a few
sticks of furniture from the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The Hall of the
Caryatides preserves its paintings but the Apartment of the Tapestry is
a chandeliered vacancy. The Apartment of the Empress (for Maria Theresa
crossed Mantua’s line of life) is in yellow silk upholstery with gilded
ceilings and an antique chandelier from Murano, but one wall is relapsed
to rough brick, in sharp contrast with the white medallioned ceiling.
The Refectory or Hall of the Rivers survives, a curious symphony in
brown, a long vaulted room with frescoes of Father Po and his
brother-rivers and lakes, with grottoes, and caryatides, and marmoreal
mosaics, its windows looking on a hanging garden—yea, Babylon is
fallen!—with a piazza of Tuscan columns and a central temple.
A sense of passing through a fantastic dream-world began to steal upon
me as I wandered through the Hall of the Zodiac with its great blue roof
of stars and celestial signs and ships drawn by dogs, and its walls gay
with figures in green and gold, and came to a bed with tall green
curtains, in which the inevitable Napoleon had once slept. He was not, I
mused, of those who could not sleep in a new bed. Followed a suite of
three rooms of the Emperor, decorated with painted tapestry, the real
removed to Vienna.
And the nightmare continued—one long succession of cold stone floors
below and crystal chandeliers on high, bleakly glittering. There was a
Hall of the Popes, bare as a barrack. There was a long shiny gallery of
bad pictures, which was once a shrine of the Masters. There was a Ducal
Apartment modernised, but with the old gilded and bossed ceiling, and
dark cobwebbed canvases of the Flemish school. There was the Hall of the
Archers, picturesque with the great wooden rafters of its ruined roof
and still painted with illusive white pillars, statues, and scenes. Most
monstrous of all was the many mirrored, many chandeliered Ball-room—its
rows of mirrors reflecting what dead faces, its gold frieze of _putti_
still echoing what madrigals and toccatas, the gods of Olympus looking
down from its frescoed ceiling, Apollo driving his chariot and four, and
the Arts, the Sciences, Parnassus, Virgil, Sordello, peeping from every
arch and lunette. And from the Hall of the Archers my nightmare led me
through Ducal Halls and still other Ducal Halls, till I had passed
through seven—vasty Halls of Death, with marvellous gilded ceilings and
unplastered walls, or with plaster or whitewash over frescoes, or with a
sixteenth-century ceiling swearing at an elegant Austrian bathroom (hot
and cold). Vivid, even in this strange dream, stood out a ceiling
intaglioed with a labyrinth of gilded wood recording the victory of
Vincenzo over the Turks:
“Contra Turcos pugnavit
Vincenzo Gonzaga”
—and intertangled repeatedly with the labyrinth the device which
d’Annunzio has borrowed for his latest novel—_Forse che si, forse che
no_—and reproduced upon the cover. An old mirror with the glass
half-sooted over reflected these glories drearily and showed me the only
living face in this labyrinthine tomb.
And so at last by many rooms and ways and up a little staircase of
eleven steps under a painted ceiling, I came, like a soul that has
travailed, to the Apartment of Paradise, the bower of the beautiful
sweet-voiced Isabella d’Este, where, under her ceiling-device “_nec spe
nec metu_,” she lived her married life and her long years of widowhood,
with her books and her pictures and her antiquities, playing on her
silver lyre and her lute and her clavichord, and corresponding with her
scholars and poets, “the first lady of the Renaissance.” Piety for this
legendary “_dame du temps jadis_” seems to have preserved her six-roomed
apartment much as it was, with her wonderful polychrome wooden ceilings
and her wonderful doors fretted with porphyry and marbles and her
bird’s-eye views of great cities she had not seen—Algiers, Jerusalem,
Lisbon, Madrid—and her real view of the panorama sloping towards the
Po; this combination of a river, a garden and a lake being so _stupendo_
to the inhabitants of that melancholy region of Italy that Isabella’s
apartment took thence its name of Paradise, much as that dull Damascus
is “the pearl of the East.” Her music-room, too, is intact, save for the
rifling of its pictures. Its intarsia depicting dulcimer, virginal,
harp, and viol, and musical notation, its heavy-gilded vaulted ceiling
with its musical staves and other decorations, and the little bas-relief
showing herself with her beloved instruments, remain as in the days when
Gian Trissino wrote a _canzone_ “To Madonna Isabella playing on her
lute.” But the Mantegnas she commanded, the Lottos and the Perugino, are
at the Louvre, doubtless at the behest of Napoleon, that despot of a
greater Renaissance to whom even Isabella’s formidable brother-in-law,
the Moro, was a pigmy, though both of them died in prison and exile, as
is the habit of the Magnificent Ones.
Did my nightmare end in this Paradise, softening in this quiet bower
into a sleep
“Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing”?
Nay, it grew only more incoherent—vast Halls ruined by being turned
into barracks, the statues smashed by a rude soldiery, the pictures
slashed, and only the inaccessible splendours of the ceiling
safe—though not from the damp; in the Hall of the Triumphs no Triumph
remaining save the Triumph of Time and of Fate, Mantegna’s pictures of
the Triumphs of Cæsar haled to Hampton Court, only their empty oaken
frames here gaping; corridors, empty and long, corridors echoing under
the footstep, corridors adorned with stuccos and rafaellesques; the Hall
of the Moors with a splendid old ceiling and figures of Moors on a
frieze of gilded wood; the Corte Vecchia; the Apartment of Troy, with
crowded wall-frescoes by Giulio Romano, Mantegna, Primaticcio; the
lovely salon of Troy, dismantled, discoloured, its frescoed legend of
Troy undecipherable, its ceiling of intaglioed wood dilapidated; the
Hall of the Oath of the Primo Capitano, the Hall of the Virtues, Halls
anonymously mouldering; the Saletta of the Eleven Emperors denuded of
Titian’s portraits, to the profit of the British Museum; the Hall of the
Capitani with a Jove of Giulio Romano thundering from the ceiling but
ironically damaged by real rainstorms; the Saletta of Troy, with more
Homer and Virgil—do you begin to have a sense of the monumental
desolation? But you have yet to figure me drifting in my dream through
the Court of the Marbles and the empty Sculpture Gallery with its great
ruined ceiling and the _Cavallerizza_, or Hippodrome, the largest of its
time, now stilled of the clangour of tournament and the plaudits of
ladies, and the Apartment of the Boots and the Gallery over the lake,
and another garden hanging dead, with a Triton for a tombstone and owls
for mourners, the Apartment of the Four Rooms, blackened by the smoke of
days when they were let as lodgings, and Halls and more Halls, and still
more Halls and Cabinets, and the Hall of the Shells, with its tasty
pictures of fish and venison, and the Hall of the Garlands, and the
Apartment of the Dwarfs, with their miniature chambers and their
staircases with small squat steps—a quarter in itself!
_Basta!_ The nightmare grows too oppressive. Why wake the buffoons from
their pigmy coffins of dwarf oak?
Poor little jesters! Are their souls, too, I wonder, stunted, and is
there for them in heaven some Lilliputian quarter, where the Magnificent
Ones must make sport for _them_?
“Isabella Estensis, niece of the Kings of Aragon, daughter and sister of
the Dukes of Ferrara, wife and mother of the Marquises of Gonzaga,
erected this in the year 1522 from the Virgin’s bearing.”
So runs—O rare Renaissance lady—the Italian vaunt in the frieze round
thy Grotto, and I reading it from thy little courtyard, sit and chew the
cud of bitter fancy. Poor Madonna Isabella, whose inwoven name still
clings so passionately to thy bourdoir walls, in what camera of Paradise
dost thou hold thy court? Methinks thy talent for viol and harp, and
that lovely singing voice of thine, should find fit service in that
orchestral heaven, where thou—always _desiderosa di cosa
nuova_—enjoyest perchance an ampler pasture for thy sensibilities.
_Forse che si, forse che no_. But from earth thou art vanished utterly,
and Renaissance for thee is none. Where be thy pages and poets and
buffoons, thy singing seraphs, thy painters and broiderers, thy
goldsmiths and gravers, thy cunning artificers in ivory and marble and
precious woods? Where is Niccolò da Correggio, thy perfect courtier?
Where be Beatrice and Violante, who combed thy hair, and Lorenzo da
Pavia who built thy organ, and Cristoforo Romano who carved thy doorway
and designed thy medal, and Galeotto del Carretto who sent thee
roundelays to carol to thy lute? Have all these less substance than the
very brocades in which thy soul was wont to bask? Can these chalcedony
jars of thy Grotto outlive them, these shells mock their flippant
fleeting? And thy rhyming and thy reasoning, and thy gay laughter and
that zest to ride all day and dance all night—could all this
effervescence of life settle into mere slime? And this hideous
doubt—this fluctuant _forse_—can we really face it _nec spe nec metu_?
A horn sounds and steeds clatter up and down thy graded staircase. The
hounds give tongue, the hawk flutters on thy wrist. The great spaces of
the _Cavallerizza_ fill with jousting paladins; dames in cloth of gold
and silver look down from the balconies, princes and ambassadors dispute
their smiles. Where has it vanished, all that _allegro_ life—for I must
speak to thee by the stave—that gay gavotte that went tripping its
merry rhythm through the vasty vaulted halls? Whither has it ebbed? On
what shore breaks that music?
And that Mantuan populace that poured in like a stage-crowd to hear its
Dukes take the oath of fidelity—are the supers, too, dismissed for ever
with the run of the dynasty? And the Dukes themselves, the haughty
Gonzagas, is it possible that they are crumbled even more irredeemably
than those plasterless walls of their palace? Can it be that Mantegna’s
portraits are less phantasmal than the originals?
“For the honour of the illustrious Lodovico the Magnificent and
Excellent Prince, and unconquered in Faith, and his illustrious Consort
Barbara, the incomparable glory of women, his Andrea Mantegna, the
Paduan, executed this work in 1473.”
At last, at last something lives and breathes in this vast wilderness of
shadows. Bless you, Barbara, incomparable glory of women, with your
strong masculine face; and you, too, Magnificent long-nosed Lodovico.
Far have I been driven in my dream—I am wandered even to the adjoining
ruin of the Ducal Castle—but now I am with the quick, with pigments
whose life, though it has its fading, is a quasi-immortality compared
with our transience. Go, get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her to
be painted, for this canvas complexion is the sole that will last.
Isabella d’Este lives at Vienna, recreated by Titian, and at Paris
Vittore Pisano shows us what a princess of her house was like, painting
beauty of face and brocade against a Japanese background of flowers and
butterflies. A more shadowy life she lives in this legend of the
princess of the Renaissance, which the prince of Italian writers has
revived in his novel, “_Forse che si, forse che no_,” a book in which my
Italian friends tell me d’Annunzio has won yet another triumph of
language, old words being so cunningly mingled with new that they do not
jar, but chime. D’Annunzio is a demi-incarnation of the Renaissance
spirit, exanimate of the Christian half, and it is characteristic that
the qualities round which his adoration of Isabella plays are the
qualities not of a great lady, but of a great courtesan; a leader of the
demi-monde. But as d’Annunzio lives in a half-world, what can his
heroines do but lead it? His Isabella d’Este—as re-created through the
worshipful eyes of Aldo—is the rival in dress of Beatrice Sforza,
Renata d’Este, and Lucrezia Borgia; marchionesses borrow her old clothes
as models, Ippolita Sforza, Bianca Maria Sforza, and Leonora of Aragon
are hopelessly out-dressed. Her sister Beatrice alone sticks like a
thorn in her side—Beatrice whose wardrobe had eighty-four accessions in
two years! But Isabella squeezed ninety-three into one year!! Lucrezia
Borgia, when she went to marry Alfonso d’Este, had two hundred
marvellous chemises; Isabella outdid her, and even Lucrezia must have
recourse to her for a fan of gold sticks with black ostrich feathers.
Isabella invented new styles and new modes, and the fashion of the
carriage at Rome. Isabella loved gems, particularly emeralds, and
succeeded in obtaining the most beautiful in existence. She had her
goldsmiths at Venice, at Milan, at Ferrara. She possessed not only the
finest jewels, but the finest settings, rings, collars, chains,
bracelets, seals, and so through the list of gewgaws and baubles. She
was the admiration of France. She adored perfumes and compounded them,
and masks, and sent Cæsar Borgia a hundred, and had the most exquisite
nail-files for manicuring, and was head over ears in debt—_per sopra ai
capelli_—for she had a mad desire to buy everything that took her
whimsy. Has any one ever better summarised the eternal courtesan?
Not a word about the nobler Isabella, the kind-hearted lady who was
always interceding for criminals or unfortunates; not a word of the
Isabella of unspotted reputation in an age of demireps (naturally
d’Annunzio would hush this up); not a whisper of the Isabella who felt
the defence of Faenza against Cæsar Borgia “as a vindication of the
honour of Italy.” Scarce a hint of the inspirer of humanism, the
patroness of some of the finest artists of all time; still less any
suggestion of the other Isabella, the housewife who sent salmon-trout to
her friends, the philosopher who, when the King of France had entered
Naples, pointed out to her lord that the discontent of the people is
more dangerous to a monarch than all the might of his enemies on the
battlefield, and the worldly wise woman who, when he was hesitating over
an inglorious military appointment, bade him take the cash and let the
credit go.
So complex an Isabella is beyond the scope of d’Annunzio, whose Isabella
Inghirami is an elemental creature of passion and tragedy.
“_Forse che si, forse che no._” An inhabitant of the full world,
beholding this motto written and rewritten in the ceiling-labyrinth of
the Gonzaga Palace, might fall into contemplation of the labyrinth of
human life, and see this device scribbled all over it; he might hail it
as the philosophy of Montaigne in a nutshell, and jump, if he were a
novelist, at this magnificent setting for some tale of high speculative
fantasy. But for d’Annunzio there can be only one problem lying between
these mighty opposites. Will a woman yield to her lover, or will virtue
resist him? To this petty issue must these measureless words be
narrowed. ’Tis not even a _forse_. With d’Annunzio there can be no
negative in such an alternative. And so the mighty Mantuan ruin which
has known so many desolations receives its last humiliation, and passes
into literature as a background for lust. _Sunt lachrymæ rerum._
The true Isabella d’Este has been as much rarefied by the Renaissance
legend as she has been materialised by d’Annunzio. For she cannot be
wholly exonerated from d’Annunzio’s panegyric. “Would to God,” she cried
at sight of her brother-in-law’s treasure, “that we who are so fond of
money possessed as much.” It was this treasure of the Duke of Milan’s
that did, indeed, make her sister Beatrice a thorn in her side, if also
a rose in her breast, since darling Duchess Beatrice set the pace at a
rate ruinous to the Marchioness of Mantua. Isabella could not even go to
Venice at the same time as Beatrice, lest all that magnificence (whose
very leavings overwhelmed me in her Palace) should appear shabbiness.
And when she lost her mother, she appeared more anxious about the proper
shade of mourning than the proper sentiment of grief. (How came
d’Annunzio to have missed this trait? What a chance for analysis of the
æsthetic temperament!) More pardonable was her anxiety as to the colour
of the hangings in the Moro’s rooms, her hurried borrowing of plate and
tapestries, when he impended with that suite of a thousand. But even for
Beatrice’s death she seemed to find some satisfaction in the ultimate
reversion of her much-coveted clavichord, and she found it possible to
borrow a Da Vinci portrait from the Duke’s former mistress—her sister’s
cross. Nor—after the Duke was in exile—does it seem very loyal to that
fallen idol and faithful admirer, to have ingratiated herself with the
French conqueror. That she should rejoice in the election to the papacy
of her profligate kinsman, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, was perhaps not
unnatural, but when every allowance is made for her virtues, it must be
admitted that she was not utterly unworthy of d’Annunzio’s admiration.
She was, in brief, a Magnificent One, and if the Magnificent Ones are,
as a rule, less monstrous when they are women, at the best they are a
seamy shady lot, grinding the faces of the poor, that their babes may
lie in foolish cradles of gold, and building themselves lordly
pleasure-houses designed by hirelings of genius. Even Da Vinci
prostituted his genius to plan a bathroom for that minx of a Beatrice,
and a pavilion with a round cupola for the castle-labyrinth of his Most
Illustrious Prince, Signor Lodovico. Yet Lodovico must be commended for
his taste, which is more than can be said for the Magnificent Ones of
to-day, who are apt to combine the libertine with the Philistine. Save
for the mad King of Bavaria, I can recall no modern monarch who has had
a man of genius at his Court. The late King Leopold exacted gold and
executed evil on a scale beyond the dreams of the Moro, but where were
his Leonardos and Bramantes? Burckhardt tells us that the Renaissance
Despot, whose sway was nearly always illegitimate, gathered a Court of
genius and learning to give himself a standing; the pompous dulness of
our modern Courts shows that Gibbon’s plea for stability of succession
failed to reckon with the stagnation of security.
Prosaic compared with the fate of the Palace at Mantua is the fate of
the Castle of Ferrara, the cradle of Isabella d’Este. ’Tis one of those
gloomy massive four-towered structures that recall the fables of the
giants, with its moat still two yards deep and its drawbridge intact—a
barbarous mediæval pile, forbidding by daylight and sinister in the
moon, with a great clock that has so much leisure that it strikes the
hour before every quarter.
Yet this grim fortress, originally built by a despot as a refuge from
his subjects, is merely the seat of telegraph and other civic offices;
like some antediluvian dragon tamed and harnessed, instead of wastefully
slain, by the St. George who gleams above the portcullis.
In the piazza before the castle, where I saw only a cab-rank of
broken-down horses, the _festa_ of this patron-saint of Ferrara was wont
to set Barbary horses racing for the pallium, and splendid
battle-chargers ramped in that great tournament which was held by Duke
Ercole, Isabella’s father, in honour of his son-in law, the Moro, and
which was won by Galeazzo di Sanseverino, the model of the _Cortigiano_.
Isabella d’Este in her glad virginal youth walked her palfrey up and
down the great equine staircase, now given over to messenger boys and
clerks. Under the sportive ceilings and adipose angels of Dosso Dossi,
or within that girdling frieze of _putti_ driving their teams of birds,
beasts, snakes or fishes, pragmatic councillors hold debate. In the
castle ball-room are held—charity dances!
But infinitely the saddest relic of the Magnificent Moro is his former
palace in Ferrara. Why he needed a palace in Ferrara I do not know,
unless to accommodate the overflowings of his suite when he visited his
ducal father-in-law. Of this palace the excellent Baedeker discourses
thus: “To the S. of S. Maria in Vado, in the Corso Porta Romana, is the
former Palazzo Costabili or Palazzo Scrofa, now known as the Palazzo
Beltrami-Calcagnini. It was erected for Lodovico il Moro, but is
uncompleted. Handsome court. On the ground-floor to the left are two
rooms with excellent ceiling-frescoes, by Ercole Grandi; in the first,
prophets and Sybils; in the second, scenes from the Old Testament in
grisaille.”
It could not have been done better by an auctioneer. Here is the
reality. A courtyard with arches, dirty, refuse-littered, surrounded by
a barrack of slum-dwellings. The first room I penetrated into was
palatial in size but occupied by three beds, and a stove replaced the
old hearth. The floor was of bare brick. Sole touch of colour, a canary
sang in a cage, as cheerfully as to a Magnificent One. The crone whose
family inhabited this room conducted me at my request to the chamber
with the ceilings by Ercole Grandi. She opened the door, and—like
_Maria_ of Sicily—entered crying, “_È permesso?_” with retrospective
ceremoniousness, and I followed her into a vast lofty room, dingy below,
but glorious above, though more to faith than to sight, for the
firmament of fresco was difficult to see clearly in the gloom. The floor
was of stone, and held two beds, a chair or two, a cradle, a stout
dwarfish old woman and a sprawl of children with unkempt heads. In the
adjoining room sat a sickly and silent woman working a sewing machine
under the hovering Sybils and Prophets, dim and faded as herself.
For those who covet a Renaissance chamber, even after this exposure of
the auctioneer, let me say that the rent of this last room was
thirty-two scudi a year, Sybils and Prophets thrown in.
The entire Palace Beltrami-Calcagnini is, I imagine, to be acquired for
a song. When I first read in Ruskin’s “A Joy for Ever,” his exhortation
to Manchester manufacturers to purchase palaces in Verona so as to
safeguard stray Titians and Veroneses, I felt that the Anglo-Saxon
aspiration to play Atlas had reached its culminating grotesquerie. But
now that I have seen the state of the Ercole Grandi frescoes, I feel
that the Anglo-Saxon might do worse than step in, and I cannot
understand why Italy, so rigid against the exportation of her treasures,
is so callous to their extinction.
And this is the Palace built by the great Moro, who “boasted that the
Pope Alexander was his chaplain, the Emperor Maximilian his condottiere,
Venice his chamberlain, and the King of France his courier”; for whose
wedding procession, which was preceded by a hundred trumpeters, Milan
draped itself in satins and brocades; who patronised the immortals of
Art; and who wore to death in an underground dungeon in France.
An older than Virgil hath spoken the final word: _Vanitas vanitatum,
omnia vanitas_.