There are few livelier expressions of vitality than tombs, especially
tombs designed or commissioned by their occupants. These be projections
of personality beyond the grave, extensions of egotism beyond the body.
The Magnificent Ones have invariably the mausolean habit. It is another
of their humilities. The majesty of death, they know, is not enough to
cover their nakedness. Moses, the true Superman, had his sepulchre
hidden that none might worship at it. The false Superman ostentates his
sepulchre in the hope that some one may worship at it. His Magnificence
is only Serene in his tomb: his life passes in uneasy tiptoeings after
greatness. Sometimes his mortuary tumefactions are softened by his
spouse being made co-tenant of his tomb, as in the Taj Mahal of Agra, or
in that beautiful monument ordered by Lodovico of Milan for himself and
Beatrice d’Este. And sometimes when “the Bishop orders his tomb” it may
be with an extenuating design to beautify his church—“ad ornatum
ecclesiae” as “Leo Episcopus” says of the monument he designed for
himself in Pistoja Cathedral. Unfortunately Bishop Leo’s worthy object
is scarcely attained by the two fat angels leaning sleepily against his
sarcophagus, or by the skull and the shell-work over it, though in
comparison with Verrocchio’s adjacent monument of Cardinal
Forteguerra—or rather the bust and the black sarcophagus superimposed
upon the original marble—the Bishop’s tomb is a thing of beauty.
But it is only when the corpse has not commanded the monument that I am
able to endure its magnificence. The Cardinal of Portugal in San
Miniato, the poisoned Pope Benedict in Perugia, St. Dominic in Bologna,
St. Agatha in Venice, and even the mysterious Lazaro Papi, “Colonel for
the English in Brazil,” the “esteemed writer of verses and history,”
whose friends raised him so elaborate a memorial in the cathedral of
Lucca in 1835, all lie as guiltless of their monumental follies as
Mausolus himself, who, it will be remembered, was the victim of his
designing widow. Nor could the _Ossa Dantis_ well escape that domed
mausoleum at Ravenna, though they lay low for a century and a half.
Still further removed from responsibility for his own posthumous pomp is
St. Augustine, who with all his inspiration could not foresee the
adventures of his corpse; how from Hippo it should come to rest at
Pavia, by way of Sardinia, and there, a thousand years after his death,
have that marvellous Arca erected over it by the Eremitani. Nor could
St. Donato, when he slew the water-dragon of Arezzo by spitting into its
mouth, foresee the great shrine embodying this and other miracles of his
which the millennial piety of the town would rear over his desiccated
dust.
But the Medici, the magnificent Medici! Not their chapel in Santa Croce,
full though it be of the pomp of marble and majolica; not their San
Marco monastery with their doctor-saints—St. Cosmo and St. Damian—not
their Medici Palace, despite that joyous Benozzo fresco with its gay
glamour of landscape and processions; not the Pitti with its
incalculable treasures; not the Villa Medici, nor even the Venus
herself, so reeks with the pride of life as all that appertains to their
tombs. When I gaze upon the monuments of these serene Magnificences in
the Old Sacristy of Florence, with the multiple allusions to the family
and its saints—in marble and terra-cotta, in stucco and bronze, in
fresco and frieze, in high-relief and low-relief—I feel a mere
grave-worm. And when I crawl into the Capella dei Principi where stand
the granite sarcophagi of the Grand Dukes, there glances at me from
every square inch of the polished walls and the pompous crests and rich
mosaics a glacial radiation of the pride of life—nay, the _hubris_ of
life. That hushed spaciousness is yet like an elaborate funeral mass
perpetually performed by an orchestra opulently over-paid.
I wonder how in their life-time men dared to apply to these Magnificent
Ones the common Italian words for the body and its operations and why
there was not evolved for them—as for the bonzes of the Cambodgians—a
specific vocabulary to differentiate their eating and drinking from the
munching and lapping of such as I. And yet in the New Sacristy I find
consolation. For, inasmuch as the genius of Michelangelo was harnessed
to the funeral car of his patrons, I perceive that here at last they are
truly buried. They are buried beneath the majestic sculptures of Day and
Night, Evening and Dawn, and ’tis Michelangelo that lives here, not
they. Peace to their gilded dust.
Far more reposeful, at least for the spectator, is Michelangelo’s own
burial place in Santa Croce, which is the most satisfactory church the
Franciscans have produced, and in its empty spaciousness an uplifting
change from the stuffy, muggy atmosphere, the tawdry profusion of
overladen chapels, which make up one’s general sense of an Italian
church. It is not free from poor pictures and monuments, and only some
of the coloured glass is good, but the defects are lost in the noble
simplicity of the whole under its high wooden roof. Michelangelo’s
monument is unfortunately impaired by one of the few errors of
overcrowding, for the frescoes above it make it look inferior to the
Dante cenotaph, though it is really rather superior. Curiously enough
the line anent the “great poet”
“Ingenio cujus non satis orbis erat,”
does not come from Dante’s monument, but from that of a certain Karolus,
presumably Carlo Marsuppini!
I have spoken of the museum as the mausoleum of reality. But mausolea
too, turn into museums; in losing their dead they, too, die and become a
mere spectacle. Such is the melancholy fate of the Mausoleum of
Theodoric the Great outside Ravenna, robbed of its imperial heretical
bones by avenging Christian orthodoxy. Infinitely dreary this dead tomb
when I saw it in the centre of its desolate plain, to which I had
trudged through sodden marshland that would have been malarious in
summer; snowbound it lay, its arched substructure flooded, its upper
chamber only just accessible by a snow-crusted marble staircase: a bare
rotundity, a bleak emptiness, robbed even of its coffin, uncheered even
by its corpse. O magnificent Ostrogoth, conqueror of Italy, O most
Christian Emperor, when you turned from the splendour of your court at
Ravenna to build your last home, you with your imperial tolerance could
hardly foresee that because you held Christ an originated being, as
Arius had gone about singing, a Christian posterity would scatter you to
the four winds. And that rival gigantic tomb in the Appian Way at Rome,
does Cæcilia Metella still inhabit it, I wonder? I mourn to see such
spacious tombs stand empty when there are so many living Magnificences
whom they would fit to a span. Very proper was it to bury Beatrice, the
mother of Matilda, in the sarcophagus of a Pagan hero. Mausolea no more
than palaces should remain untenanted. Let them be turned into orts and
castles, an you will, like Hadrian’s Tomb into Sant’ Angelo, or into
circuses, like the Mausoleum of Augustus—sweet are the uses of
Magnificence—but to keep them standing idle when there must be so many
Magnificences in quest of a family sepulchre is a crime against America.
The tomb of Theodoric is, I fear, too secluded for American taste, but
the Exarch Isaac’s in such cheerful contiguity with town and church may
arride the millionaire more. For a consideration the Exarch’s own
sarcophagus might be had from the Museum, and the Exarch scrapped. Or
there is Galla Placidia’s Mausoleum, with its Byzantine mosaics thrown
in. Come! Who bids for these rare curios, one of the few links between
Antiquity and the Renaissance, with their grotesque mediæval sincerity.
Remark, _Signori_, that prefiguration of the Index Expurgatorius, that
bearded Christ or S. Lorenzo (you pay your money and you take the
choice) who is casting into a crate of serpentine flames one of those
Pagan volumes for which the Cinquecento will go hunting madly. No, that
cabinet does not contain cigar-boxes—what did the saints know of
cigars?—nor are Marcus, Lucas, Matteus, Joannes, the names of brands.
Those apparent cigar-boxes, as you might have seen from the strings, are
holy manuscripts triumphant over the Pagan volume. This naïve
draughtsmanship, _Signora_, is just what makes them so precious and your
petty bids so amazing. What is that you say, _Signorina_? Galla Placidia
is still in possession? And two Roman Emperors with her? Nay, nay, a
nine hundred and ninety-nine years’ lease is all that a reasonable ghost
may desire; after that, every tomb must be esteemed a cenotaph; unless
indeed the heirs will pay the unearned increment. Choose your
sarcophagus, _Signori_, an Emperor’s sarcophagus is not in the market
every day.
But I do not think that even the vulgarest millionaire would desire his
ashes to dispossess the Doges of Venice, or at least not Giovanni
Pesaro. The most romantic auctioneer might despair of disposing of that
portal wall of the Frari which is sacred to the Gargantuan grotesquerie
of his colossal memorial. Does the whole world hold a more baroque
monument? Going, going—and how I wish I could say gone!—that portal
upheld by bowed negro giants on gargoyled pedestals, with patches of
black flesh gleaming through holes in their trousers. Item, one black
skeleton surmounted by other unique curios, including two giraffes.
Item, His Sublimity, the Doge himself, sitting up on his sarcophagus,
holding up his hands as if in expostulation, gentlemen, against your
inadequate bids. Item, a wealth of heroic figures, and an array of
virtues and vices, all life-size. (Could be sold separately as
absolutely incongruous with the negro portions of the monument.) Also,
in the same lot if desired, two hovering angelets, holding a wreath,
suitable for any Christian celebrity.
Alas, Barnum is no more and bidding languishes. And yet I do not see why
the lot should not be knocked down. Who was this Pesaro that he should
have the right to impose this horror on posterity? Why should
generations of worshippers at the Frari be obsessed by this nightmare?
There can be no sacredness in such demented mural testaments. And Time,
who preserved this, while he has destroyed so many precious things, who
shattered Leonardo’s horse and melted Michelangelo’s bronze Pope, is
hereby shown of taste most abominable. History must get a better
curator.
The black skeleton—I had not thought before that skeletons could be
negro—flourishes a scroll which ascribes to the Doge the wisdom of
Solomon and an implacable hostility against the foes of Christ, while a
tablet held by one of the giant negroes announces
“Aureum inter optimos principes vides.”
_Aureum_ indeed! Doubtless only some faint sense that sheen and death
are discrepant held back the Doges from being buried in golden caskets.
The Doge lives again in this monument, boasts the Latin, and one can
only reflect that if the dogal taste reached this depravity by the
middle of the seventeenth century, _actum est de republicâ_ might have
been written long before Napoleon. Fortunately for the memory of the
Pesaro family it finds a nobler, if no less bombastic expression, in the
great Titian altar-piece, the Madonna di Casa Pesaro, in which the Queen
of Heaven bends from her throne to beam at its episcopal representative,
and St. Francis and St. Anthony grace by their presence the symbols of
its victory over the Turk, while St. Peter pauses in his pious lection.
But the dead Doges lie mostly in S. S. Giovanni e Paolo, where their
funeral service was performed. It is the very church for Their
Sublimities—floods of light, pillared splendour, imposing proportions.
Their tombs protrude from the walls, and their sculptured forms lie on
their backs, their heads on pillows, their feet comfortably on cushions.
Even when we are reminded of the finer things for which the Republic
stood, there is an echo of material opulence.
“Steno, olim Dux Venetiorum, amator
Justitiæ, Pacis, et Ubertatis anima.”
_Ubertatis_ anima! The soul of prodigal splendour! Even spiritual
metaphor must harp on images of Magnificence.
But not every dead Doge consents to be couchant. Horatio Baleono, who
died in 1617, “hostes post innumeros stratos,” has for monument a
cavalier (of course, gilded) riding rough-shod over writhing forms and a
broken-down cannon, and Pietro Mocenigo, whose mausoleum vaunts itself
“ex hostium manubiis,” stands defiant on the summit of his sarcophagus,
which is upborne by a trinity of figures.
What a family this Casa Mocenigo, with its record of Doges! Remove their
memorials and mausolea from this church and you would half empty it of
monuments. Tintoretto, no less than Titian, was dragged at their
triumphal car. There is an _Adoration of the Saviour_ at Vicenza, which
might just as well be the adoration of the Doge, Alvise Mocenigo, who is
in the centre of the picture. For though he is kneeling, he has all the
air of sitting, and all the other figures—the worshippers, the angel
flying towards him, and the Christ flying down to him—converge towards
him like a stage-group towards the limelit hero. Compare all this
posthumous self-assertion with the oblivion fallen on Marino Faliero,
the decapitated Doge of Byron’s drama, whose dubious sarcophagus was
shown to the poet in the outside wall of this church.
Nor could Padua, Venice’s neighbour, fall behind her in mortuary
magnificence.
“Nequidque patavino splendore deesset”
says a monument to Alessandro Contarini in the nave of the cathedral, a
monument supported by six slaves and embracing a bas-relief of the
fleet. Another in the worst dogal style exhibits Caterino Cornaro, a
hero of the Cretan War (who died in 1674) in a full-bottomed wig and
baggy knee-breeches, holding a scroll as if about to smack the universe
with it. Sad is it to see so many “eternal monuments” of faded fames.
The Scaliger street-tombs in Verona are at least artistically laudable,
however ironically their Christian ostensiveness compares with the
record of the Family of the Ladder, whose rungs were murdered relatives.
But even had Can Signorio lived the life of a saint, it would have
needed a considerable conquest of his Christian humility before he could
have commissioned that portentous tomb of his from Bonino da
Campiglione. Knowing the Magnificent One, Bonino gave him solidity and
superfluity, a plethora of niched and statued minarets of saints and
virtues armed warriors, and bewildering pinnacles clothed with figures,
all resting on six red marble columns springing from a base which
supports the tomb, and is itself upborne by angels at each corner and
adorned with pious bas-reliefs. And while the dead man lies in stone
above his tomb, guarded by angels at head and foot, he also bestrides
his horse and sports his spear on the uttermost pinnacle of his
ladder-crested memorial, as though making the best of both worlds; which
was indeed the general habit of the Magnificent, who desired likewise
the beatitudes of the Meek, and often shed tears of sincere repentance
when they could sin no more. Mastino della Scala’s tomb is more gilded
and elegant than Can Signorio’s, though not less assertive and
bi-worldly. And as for the tomb of Can Grande—“Dog the Great,” as Byron
translated him in “The Age of Bronze,”—which is perched over the church
door and soars up into a turret, it was—on the day I first saw
it—provided with a long and dirty ladder for repairing purposes. So
that I say Father Time—if he be a poor curator—is at least a fellow of
infinite jest. One of his jests is to hound the Magnificent dead from
pillar to post, from church to monastery, from crypt to chapel. In the
grave there is rest? Fiddle-faddle! No body is safe from these chances
of mortality. Stone walls do not a coffin make, nor iron bars a tomb.
Call no body happy until it is burnt. After five centuries of rest
Matilda of Tuscany was carried off from Mantua in a sort of mortuary
elopement by her great admirer, Pope Urban VIII, and hidden away in the
castle of S. Angelo, till she could be inhumed in St. Peter’s, and it
was only the pride of Spoleto that saved Lippo Lippi from being sold to
Florence. Napoleon, in suppressing churches, disestablished many an
ancient corpse, and the pious families of Verona hastened to transport
their sarcophagi to the church of S. Zeno on the outskirts. Hither must
ride the dead Cavalli with their equine scutcheons, flying before the
World-Conqueror on his white horse.
Dismemberment, too, befalls tombs at the hands of the merry jester. The
friars of S. Maria delle Grazie who owed so much to the great Sforza
Duke, broke up his monument and offered his effigy and his wife’s for
sale. The more loyal Carthusians snapped up Cristoforo Solari’s
beautiful sculptures for the beggarly price of thirty-eight ducats, and
Lodovico and Beatrice in marble must leave their dust and make a last
journey to Pavia. A last journey? _Chi sa?_
“Iterum et iterum translatis,” sighs the monument over the bones of Cino
in Pistoja Cathedral, and who knows that the “pax tandem ossibus” is
more than a sanguine aspiration? Cino was not the only Italian poet to
be thus “translated,” though neither Petrarch nor Ariosto was
“translated” so often. Petrarch indeed was rather pirated than
“translated,” for his right arm was stolen from his sepulchre at Arquà
for the Florentines, and the rest of him is now supposed to be in
Madrid—a town which also holds that monarch of sanctity, Francesco di
Borja, likewise minus an arm, for the Gesù of Rome kept back that
precious morsel of the Duke who had entered the kingdom of heaven by the
rare gate of abdication.
But stranger than these mutations of mortality is the fact that Italy
holds the ashes of our Shelley and Keats, as it held so much of the life
of Byron and Browning. As if Rome had not riches and memories to
super-satiety! A Protestant cemetery seems indeed out of key as much
with these poets as with Rome, but that overshadowing Pyramid of Cestius
restores the exotic touch, and violets and daisies blot out all but the
religion of beauty, so that Shelley could write: “It might make me in
love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.”
It is pleasant to think that only a year later Shelley, however exiguous
his ashes, found in that sweet place the rest and re-union for which his
_cor cordium_ yearned.
“’Tis Adonais calls! oh hasten thither,
No more let life divide what Death can join together.”
With what a wonderful coast Shelley has mingled his memory—fig-trees,
olives, palms, cactus, hawthorn, pines bent seaward, all running down
the steep cliff. What enchanting harmonies they make with the glimpses
of sea deep below, the white villages and campaniles, seen through their
magic tangle. As you pass through the sunny dusty village roads, the
girls seem to ripen out of the earth like grapes, both white and black,
for there are golden-haired blondes as well as sun-kissed brunettes.
They walk bare-footed, with water-jars poised on their heads, sometimes
balancing great russet bundles of hay. And the old peasant women with
Dantesque features sit spinning or lace-making at the doors of their
cottages, as they have sat these three thousand years, without growing a
wrinkle the more, if indeed there was ever room for another wrinkle on
their dear corrugated faces. What earth lore as of aged oaks they must
have sucked in during all these centuries!
It is here that one understands the Paganism of d’Annunzio, whose soul
lies suffused in these sparkling infinities of sun and sea and sky,
whose marmoreal language is woven from the rhythmic movement and balance
of these sculptural bodies.
Viareggio, which holds Shelley’s monument, is a place of strange twisted
plane-trees. The Piazza Shelley is a simple quiet square of low houses
fronting a leafy garden and the sea. It leads out, curiously enough,
from the Via Machiavelli. There is a bronze bust, which admirers cover
with laurel, and an inscription which represents him as meditating here
a final page to “Prometheus Unbound.” (Baedeker, comically
mis-translating “una pagina postrema,” represents him as meditating “a
posthumous page”!)
Not here, however, but in La Pineta is the place to muse upon Shelley.
It is a thick, sandy pinewood with an avenue of planes. The pines are
staggering about in all directions, drunk with wind and sun. Very silent
was it as I sat here on a spring evening, watching the rosy clouds over
the low hills and the mottled sunset over the sea. The birds ventured
scarcely a twitter; they knew they could not vie with Shelley’s skylark.
Shelley’s epitaph in the Roman cemetery is like a soft music at the end
of a Shakespeare tragedy.
“Nothing of me that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.”
What a curious and pacifying fusion of poetry and wit! It reconciles us
to the passing back of this cosmic spirit into the elements by way of
water. But what a jarring perpetuation of the world’s noises on the
tombstone of Keats!
“This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who on
his death-bed, in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious powers of
his enemies, desired these words to be engraven on his tombstone: ‘Here
lies one whose name was written in water.’”
Water again! But water as chaos and devourer. How ill all this
turbulence accords with the marble serenity of his fame, a fame that so
far as pure poetry is concerned stands side by side with Shakespeare’s!
We are a good way now from the twenty-fourth of February, eighteen
hundred and twenty-one. A few years more and Keats will have been silent
a hundred years, and we know that his nightingale will sing for ever.
What profits it, then, to prolong this mortuary bitterness, to hang this
dirty British linen on the Roman grave? The museum is the place for this
tombstone—I could whisk it thither like the Doge Pesaro’s wall. Will it
save the next great poet from the malice of his enemies? Will they speak
a dagger less? Not a bodkin! The next great poet, being great and a
poet, will appeal in novel and unforeseeable ways, and be as little read
and as harshly reviewed as the marvellous boy of Hampstead whose death
at twenty-five is the greatest loss English literature has ever
sustained. Were it not fittest, therefore, to celebrate the centenary of
this death by changing his epitaph for a line of “Adonais”?—
“He lives, he wakes; ’tis Death is dead, not he.”
The tragedy of Keats is sufficiently commemorated in Shelley’s preface
and in the pages of literary history and in the doggerel of Byron.
“‘Who killed John Keats?’
‘I,’ says the _Quarterly_,
So savage and Tartarly
’Twas one of my feats.”