Part 6

All the walls and arches are partially striped with black, the black courses being very thin with a considerable space between them. The north and south walls of the nave and transepts are cased in much later work than the west front and are good specimens of Italian pointed of the thirteenth century. The carving of foliage in this work is very bad and what little moulding there is hardly looks like the work of Gothic men. There is a good inlaid string-course under the windows. A fine campanile stands a little in advance of the south-west angle of the cathedral. It is of Romanesque date and built of brownish rough stone below and of white stone (or marble) above; it is of very considerable height and effect. The interior is certainly grand but disappointing--almost all the arches are semicircular but (as the groining bays are not square) the wall ribs of the groining bays are pointed, and this gives in some way a general effect of pointed to the whole work. The main arches are round, but they were so covered with red hangings that it was impossible to see much of them. The triforium is of great height and consists in each bay of two round-head windows, filled in with slight tracery--the whole is of poor character and badly proportioned. Above these two windows is a small circular window which serves for clerestory. The groining of the nave is painted richly. It has broad borders next the ribs and the wall is painted blue, and figures in the centre of each painted in a circle. The borders have a good many white lines, but there is no gold in any part of the work.

The planning of the transepts is very singular. They are divided by an arcade down the centre, and as the nave arcades and triforia are continued across them some singular combinations are produced. The pavements have small compartments of Italian fifteenth century geometrical patterns in mosaic, surrounded by square arrangements of plain black and white.

Close to the cathedral is S. Giovanni, which, though not otherwise remarkable, has an immense baptistery built on against its north transept; it is a square of about fifty-seven feet internally and covered with a square vault of a domical form. The old font has been removed.

Near the south end of the cathedral is the little chapel of S. Maria della Rosa. It is a small low building of about the proportions of the Spina chapel, and mainly remarkable for the window tracery in its side wall. This is, like all other tracery hereabouts, unpalatable to me. The windows are shafted and I suppose therefore that they must have had their glass put in frames inside. This seemed to have been the case in the Spina chapel. There are dates of 1309 and 1333 on the building, the latter on part of a door which in England I should venture to call Renaissance. We could not get inside but saw through a window that the interior had been completely modernized....

When we reached Siena we found the station elaborately decorated with wreaths and flowers in pots, banners, and every possible kind of railway utensil (even portions of engines), and all in honor of the Pope who had left that morning for Città della Pieve on his way home after a tour through various parts of Italy. He seemed to have been greatly fêted at Siena.

Siena is situated on the irregular summit of a considerable hill. All streets are up and down and in some places very precipitous. A sort of natural amphitheatre in the centre of the city--the Piazza del Campo--is the chief point round which the rest is built, containing the Palazzo Pubblico, a grand Gothic building, out of the end of which soars the finest campanile, after that at Verona, that I have seen. On the circle of the Campo opposite the Palazzo Pubblico are some old houses but not any of special interest. The Palazzo Pubblico is of the usual type of brick buildings here and very regular.... The campanile is brick without break or ornament of any kind for a great height, and then is boldly corbelled forward on all sides; the whole of the work is in stone. The arches of the machicoulis, the bands round them, and some older parts, are rendered much more distinct by the introduction of lines of black marble. Seen by a bright moonlight this campanile possesses such an exquisite contour that nothing can be much more beautiful. The contrasts of colours too are most admirably arranged, and the exceeding simplicity of the lower part cannot be too much praised.

A considerable ascent leads from the Campo to the east end of the cathedral. This has a central door and on entering you find a small chapel under the altar of the cathedral gained out of the slope of the ground. The detail of this chapel and of the east end of the cathedral above it is by far the best example of Gothic work in the city. There are all kinds of things which, to an eye used to the exceptional skill and care in fitting one part to another usual among northern architects, are very unscientific-looking, but nevertheless this work is original in its character and certainly beautiful in its effect. It is of white marble striped sparingly with black. A flight of steps leads up from the east end to a north doorway in the east wall of the immense unfinished work which, though in the position of a south transept, would really have been rather larger than the existing nave of the cathedral.

This south transept is quite unfinished though very considerably advanced. Its south wall shows that the vaulting was to have been semicircular in section like that of the nave. The proportions of the whole are very bold and fine.... The rest of the exterior has been much modernized. The west front is much like that of Orvieto but I don’t know how much is original. There is very little in it which I should accept as really pointed architecture. The foliage and the feeling of the whole is very Renaissance and the steep gables are all sham and are very unpleasantly conspicuous in a distant general view of the church. The campanile, coursed in black and white in nearly even proportions (two courses of white material for one course of colours), is Romanesque, of very great height, and follows the usual rule of increasing its number of openings in each stage. It is capped with square spirelets at the angles, and a low octagon spire, I think of stone--this I thought had crockets, but I found they were only some arrangements for illumination in honour of the Pope’s visit.... Internally the church has been painfully modernized; a row of Popes’ heads--about as artistic as a row of barber’s blocks--is ranged all round above the nave arcade, and the whole of the church has been plastered and painted in the most abominable manner. The walls are striped in exactly equal courses (about eight and a half inches in height) of black and white. The effect is certainly too bizarre. There are no good specimens of carving, and the detail of groining ribs, arches, etc., is hopelessly bad. All of the pavements are covered with subjects formed by inlaying and incising the marbles which compose them. There is a certain grandeur in the completeness of the idea but the effect is not good....

We spent some hours to great advantage in the _Accademia_. The collection of pictures of the early Sienese school is wonderfully rich and gave me a very high idea of the power of some of the men whose names one does not often hear.

There are three or four tondos similar to that at San Domenico and a considerable number of reredoses of various sizes. A favorite subject is the B. V. M., surrounded by saints in the outer compartments. Nothing can exceed the beauty of some of the angels. In all, the wood seems to have had canvas laid on it which was prepared with a thick layer of size, and on this gold was laid all over preparatory to painting. In some the colour has peeled off and left the gold with lines for the outline of the figures scratched on it. Generally speaking the preservation of the colours in these pictures is something quite marvellous, not a crack being visible anywhere; may this be attributed to the gold ground?

The later pictures are not so interesting nor is the collection of them so complete as it is of the others. Room III is that in which the work is most beautiful. There were several students at work drawing from the life, and in one of the rooms all the designs submitted in competition for prizes were exhibited. The architectural designs were generally very commonplace but one or two for a holy-water stoup showed power of drawing and some fancy. Renaissance is the only style thought of....

_September 2._

The view from Cortona is very fine, over the broad Val de Chiana with the end of Lake Thrasimene full in view, and the irregular mountain outlines of Monte Cortona and other heights filling up the whole of the background.

We left after only two hours’ pause and soon reached the head of the lake. We were busy making out all the sites of the battle (which may be done with great vividness), when we reached the Papal dogana. There were two difficulties--first, my passport was improperly viséd but this I got over; and second, our driver had no visé at all, and it was half an hour before he was allowed to take us on as far as the next village under strict promise to come back again at once. It rained heavily as we started and we lost some of the beauty of this the best part of our drive. Thrasimene is a grand sheet of water but wants some striking feature on its banks, some jutting out rocks or mighty hills plunging perpendicularly into its depths, to make it thoroughly attractive. Now it has a deserted look: its banks are not grand and yet no houses or villages show there and one gets a rather gloomy impression. The place at which we changed our horse, Pasignano, is a miserable Italian village,--and how miserable that is I can hardly say--with its fair proportion of beggars, _i.e._, every one whose eye you catch holds out a hand immediately for a _mezzo baioccho_. It is prettily situated, and, as one of the places at which _vetturini_ stop on the road to Rome, ought to be rather better favoured as to an inn. The only one did not look promising and we preferred fasting to trying it. A few miles more and we left the lake, and aided by two bullocks climbed a steep hill above its banks, reached the cathedral and village of Magione, and drove the rest of the way by moonlight to Perugia where we were heartily glad to find ourselves at 10.30 P.M. very ready for something to eat.

_September 4._

Lucca in its flat, surrounded by mountains, Pisa grand with water and hills, Genoa with the blue Mediterranean at its feet, Siena on its lofty though arid hills, and Arezzo with its fine prospect of cultivated valley girt with hills, must all, lovely as they are, give way to Perugia, seated on the irregular summit of a mountain, looking one way toward Thrasimene and Monte Cortona, another toward the irregular peaks of the Appenines, a third down the rich flat valley of the Tiber, and last of all toward the noble mountain against whose streaked side stands whitely shining in the distance the object of many an artistic as well as many a religious aspiration, the shrine of the great saint of Assisi. Add to this beauty of situation a beauty of atmosphere which we never dream of in England, and the picture is complete.

Certainly since we have been here this has been no land of cloudless blue skies. We have had glorious weather, and yet without any doubt the most glorious cloud scenery we have ever known anywhere. Sometimes a violent storm in the distance and another close at hand, sunsets short in duration but brilliant to excess while they last, and in midday a purple, blue or violet tint over every portion of the wonderful landscape....

_September 6._

We started at 5.30 A.M. for Assisi.... The sacristan took us up through the sacristy by a staircase which opens into the north transept of the upper church. From the gloom of the lower church to the flood of coloured light in the upper the contrast is very great. The latter is in all respects one of the most joyous buildings I have ever seen, bold, nervous and simple in its design, exquisitely harmonious in all its colouring, and in most respects unharmed by the hand of the restorer. Obviously however the frescoes on the roof are losing their colour and being gradually washed out. This is not difficult to account for when one sees the state of the outer roof of the church, which, I have no doubt, admits an ample supply of wet at the top of the groining. The upper church is used only on some few great days during the year and is I suppose even less cared for. It gave me a pang to be shown into such a building by a door in a corner, to see the principal door permanently closed, grass growing thick upon the dreary piazza in front of it: it was even more mournful, I think, than is the sad solitude of the great group at Pisa.

I am much puzzled by the interior of this upper church. I cannot get out of my head the impression that they [the two “churches”] were designed and _in part executed_ by Frenchmen. The detail of the groining piers and their capitals and bases are so peculiarly and characteristically French that (seeing how very different Italian work of the same date was) I cannot believe that they were ever wrought by Italian hands from French designs, because sculpture of foliage was just one of these things in which the character of different schools was so marked that it was impossible to get any but Frenchmen to do such work as this. Above this point I do not feel the same thing because I see that the window traceries, though very fair, have a feature peculiar to Italian Gothic--in the way in which the circles, etc., in the tracery are put under the main arch, just touching but not uniting with it. The string under the windows has for a considerable portion of its length a complete English dog-tooth. The whole of the walls are painted. Below the string-course, which is very high from the floor, is, first a painted imitation of hangings (much like our thirteenth century patterns) in which the diaper is continued regularly without reference to folds in the draperies; then a row of noble frescoes by Giotto; and above the string on each side of the windows other frescoes by Cimabue. The roof is by the latter, and the groining bays are alternately blue studded with stars, and frescoed in subjects. The latter have a predominance in the ground of a rich chrome--reddish yellow--and the ribs throughout are bordered with wide patterned borders. The contrast of colours is admirable and finer than anything I have seen. The borders round the work done by Giotto are very inferior to those in Cimabue’s work. The latter[5] are all severely flat and geometrical, indulging, after a few feet of plain pattern, in a quatrefoil

or one inscribed on a square, painted with a head on a blue ground. Giotto’s, on the other hand, though in some respects very beautiful, indulge too much in perspective, _e.g._ each division between the groining piers is divided into the subjects by painted and shaded imitations of twisted columns bearing cornices. There are some features of interest in the work beyond the exquisite beauty. To me it was new to find Cimabue painting with so little rudeness and so much magnificent simplicity and breadth of purpose. I note another of Giotto’s frescoes is interesting as showing the original use of the painted roods of which we have seen so many. I think there can be little doubt they were to be placed on the rood-screen, as he distinctly shows them, and, curiously, I find in this upper church the two ends of the ancient rood-beam sawn off a foot from the wall. This was a few feet west of the crossing. The transepts, altar and stalls are all modern in their arrangements.

Externally there is nothing to notice save the fine west door and circular window over it, of a type peculiar so far as I have seen to the churches of Assisi. The glass in the nave windows is certainly old and good, very little white introduced.

After seeing this most interesting building well, we betook ourselves to the not very easy work of climbing about the city to see the other churches. The whole place is as decayed, forlorn and dirty as the smallest and rudest of fishing villages in the worst out-of-the-way parts of Cornwall, spread out to ten times the extent. Old walls remain nearly all round, with gateways, and at the highest point the picturesque ruin of a castle.

The west end of the cathedral is fine and the campanile by its side is also of noble size and good character though built with very rough stone....

_September 7._

We left Perugia this morning at 6 A.M. in the banquette of the diligence for Arezzo. The day was charming so that we enjoyed the ride thoroughly, though we had done it all so lately on our way to Perugia.

Here I shall note down a few of the things we have discovered on the road:--

Hay and corn stacks are all made round a tall pole fixed in the ground. Another piece of wood nailed across often converts this into a cross over the corn.

In Arezzo cathedral during tierce a black cat was howling about the cathedral in a most ludicrous manner. It belongs to the church and is always howling about, sitting on altars, and so forth. Foreigners never care about taking animals into church with them. Dogs are special church-goers in Italy!

About Perugia the women’s costume is good: white sleeves, blue skirt, pink bodice and bright handkerchief over the head. The women usually wear immense straw hats about two feet six inches in diameter, generally pinned on to the back of the head and flapping back to shade none of the face. Between Arezzo and Florence the women often wear round beaver hats with broad flat brims--and very ugly they are. Women carry a fan instead of a parasol. Women in Genoa wear white veils.

The staple production of much of Tuscany, Siena, and the Papal States seems to be olives. The trunks of the trees are always very old, crushed down in the centre and sometimes two or three feet in diameter. The branches are young wood and always trained out so as to leave a hollow circle in the centre. The colour is a very blue green and as they are planted everywhere in lines and at regular intervals, they do not improve either the near or the distant view of the landscape. Maple trees are trained in the same way for the purpose of growing vines. The vines are festooned sometimes from tree to tree and at others festooned round the tree itself.

The ploughs here are very clumsy, they have a very heavy wooden frame with an iron shoe put on in front. It does not turn the dirt over but only digs a rough furrow in the ground. Oxen are always used for all agricultural work. They are ringed through the nose and a cord, fastened to this ring and passing under a rope between the horns, serves as a rein. The carts are so made that they are loaded far out on the pole to the shoulder of the men.

All houses here have a pigeon house raised above the roof. On it are painted some flying pigeons on a white ground. It is generally a large construction and looks like a look-out room at first.

It is curious that we never see a bird flying about, yet we eat at dinner every day portions of two or three. Where do they all come from?

All the houses are built over stables.

Wayside churches seem almost always to have a small window on each side of their western door protected by a grating and with a shutter inside. Often there is an arcaded porch above.

_September 8._

We left Arezzo at 6 A.M. in the diligence for Florence. With such a bourne the pace of an Italian diligence is very aggravating--five and a quarter miles an hour is the average speed, and the poor wretches of horses have to go stages of twenty miles without stopping. The road is very interesting. It passes nearly all the way through hilly country rich in olives and vines and with the grand outlines of the Appenines in the immediate neighborhood. I saw not one architectural feature in the entire journey. We passed through two or three small towns busy with festivities in honour of the Nativity of the B. V. M. but their churches seemed to be all modern.

After passing ----[6] we recommenced a long ascent and aided by four mules and ponies achieved the highest point after about two hours of the hardest work under the hottest of suns. Here I caught a glimpse of Florence in the distance; but about three miles further the whole city suddenly opened to the view, filling up the valley of the Arno with its campanile and dome thrown out grandly by a passing shadow upon the delicate blue and violet tints of the Pistojese mountains in the background. Fiesole was on our right and the whole country between it and Florence seemed to be dotted over with villas, looking gay and lovely in the brilliant sunshine. Behind Fiesole a long hill of rich reddish brown stood out from the rest and afforded by its contrast with the other colours of the landscape as complete a whole as can be imagined. It is in vain to describe such a view: it is the most exquisite of the kind that I have ever seen, and words cannot carry the impression of an effect not produced solely by facts but in part undoubtedly by sentiment.

A long drive through suburbs brought us to an old gate (shorn of its old Florentine machicoulis, however) where we were detained nearly half an hour about our passports and luggage, and this done we soon arrived at our inn, crossing the Arno by the Ponte alle Grazie and passing in our way the Palazzo Vecchio, Or San Michele and Giotto’s tower. The latter was looked for eagerly and rewarded my anxious eyes. It is certainly the most lovely piece of building I have ever seen. I shall say no more but go on to journalize on the buildings as I am able....

_Street’s appreciation of Florence was intelligent, ardent, and characteristic, but is, more than any other of his notes, a_ journal intime. _I have respected his sincerities._

_September 13._

We spent the whole of the afternoon very profitably at Pistoia. The cathedral has not much architectural character. The west front has a good simple Romanesque door and an open arcade all across in front. At the north-west stands a very lofty and massive campanile, plain below but arcaded richly above with arcades that have the appearance of being put on in front of the real tower instead of helping to support it. They have semicircular arches and then have their tympana filled in with chequer patterns in white and black marble. The whole of this arcaded part of the steeple is coursed in alternate white and dark green: the lower part is of stone. Internally the cathedral has little to show. There is a moderately good monument near the west end to a professor who is represented lecturing; no mark of his religious faith (I think) is introduced.[7] ...

Opposite the cathedral’s west front stands the fine baptistery. This is octangular in plan and built in equal courses of white and dark marble. Its external effect is very good indeed. It has a western door[8] and north and south doors and a small chancel projected on the west side. The design recalls in some respects the baptistery at Pisa and must have been built about the time that was altered. The interior unfortunately is as plain and bare as whitewash can make it. The great octangular font in the centre is of the same kind of work as the screens at S. Miniato, Byzantine in the character of its sculpture, but delicate and elaborate in its detail and altogether a good specimen: it is executed mainly in white marble....