Part 14
The Cathedral of Orvieto will illustrate these remarks. Its design is very simple. It consists of a parallelogram, from which three chapels of equal size project, one at the east end, and one at the north and south. The windows are small and narrow, the columns round, and the roof displays none of that intricate groining we find in English churches. The beauty of the interior depends on surface decoration, on marble statues, woodwork, and fresco-paintings. Outside, there is the same simplicity of design, the same elaborated local ornament. The sides of the Cathedral are austere, their narrow windows cutting horizontal lines of black and white marble. But the façade is a triumph of decorative art. It is strictly what Fergusson has styled a “frontispiece”; for it bears no relation whatever to the construction of the building. Its three gables rise high above the aisles. Its pinnacles and parapets and turrets are stuck on to look agreeable. It is a screen such as might be completed or left unfinished at will by the architect. Finished as it is, the façade of Orvieto is a wilderness of beauties. Its pure white marble has been mellowed by time to a rich golden hue, in which are set mosaics shining like gems or pictures of enamel. A statue stands on every pinnacle; each pillar has a different design; round some of them are woven wreaths of vine and ivy; acanthus leaves curl over the capitals, making nests for singing-birds or Cupids; the doorways are a labyrinth of intricate designs, in which the utmost elegance of form is made more beautiful by incrustations of precious agates and Alexandrine glasswork. On every square inch of this wonderful façade have been lavished invention, skill, and precious material. But its chief interest centres in the sculptures executed by Giovanni and Andrea, sons and pupils of Nicola Pisano. The names of these three men mark an era in the history of art. They first rescued Italian sculpture from the grotesqueness of the Lombard and the monotony of the Byzantine styles. Sculpture takes the lead of all the arts. And Nicola Pisano, before Cimabue, before Duccio, even before Dante, opened the gates of beauty, which for a thousand years had been shut up and overgrown with weeds. As Dante invoked the influence of Virgil when he began to write his mediæval poem, and made a heathen bard his hierophant in Christian mysteries, just so did Nicola Pisano draw inspiration from a Greek sarcophagus, which had been cast upon the shore at Pisa. He studied the bas-relief of Phædra and Hippolytus, which may still be seen upon the tomb of Countess Beatrice, in the Campo Santo, and so learned by heart the beauty of its lines, and the dignity expressed in its figures, that in all his subsequent works we trace the elevated tranquillity of Greek sculpture. This imitation never degenerated into servile copying; nor, on the other hand, did Nicola attain the perfect grace of an Athenian artist. He remained a truly mediæval carver, animated with a Christian, instead of a Pagan spirit, but caring for the loveliness of form which art in the Dark Ages failed to realize.
Whether it was Nicola or his sons who designed the bas-reliefs at Orvieto is of little consequence. Vasari ascribes them to the father; but we know that he completed his pulpit at Pisa in 1230, and his death is supposed to have taken place fifteen years before the foundation of the Cathedral. At any rate, they are imbued with his genius, and bear the strongest affinity to his sculptures at Pisa, Siena, and Bologna. To estimate the influence they exercised over the arts of sculpture and painting in Italy would be a difficult task. Duccio and Giotto studied here; Ghiberti closely followed them. Signorelli and Raphael made drawings from their compositions. And the spirit which pervades these sculptures may be traced in all succeeding works of art. It is not classic; it is modern, though embodied in a form of beauty modelled on the Greek.
The bas-reliefs are carved on four marble tablets placed beside the porches of the church, and corresponding in size and shape with the chief doorways. They represent the course of Biblical history, beginning with the creation of the world, and ending with the Last Judgment. If it were possible here to compare them in detail with the similar designs of Ghiberti, Michel Angelo, and Raphael, it might be shown that the Pisani established modes of treating sacred subjects from which those mighty masters never deviated, though each stamped upon them his peculiar genius, making them more perfect as time added to the power of art. It would also be not without interest to show that in their primitive conceptions of the earliest events in history, the works of the Pisan artists closely resemble some sculptures executed on the walls of Northern cathedrals, as well as early mosaics in the south of Italy. We might have noticed how all the grotesque elements which appear in Nicola Pisano, and which may still be traced in Ghiberti, are entirely lost in Michel Angelo, how the supernatural is humanized, how the symbolical receives an actual expression, and how intellectual types are substituted for mere local and individual representations. For instance, the Pisani represent the Creator as a young man, standing on the earth, with a benign and dignified expression, and attended by two ministering angels. He is the Christ of the Creed, “by whom all things were made.” In Ghiberti we find an older man, sometimes appearing in a whirlwind of clouds and attendant spirits, sometimes walking on the earth, but still far different in conception from the Creative Father of Michel Angelo. The latter is rather the Platonic Demiurgus than the Mosaic God. By every line and feature of his face and flowing hair, by each movement of his limbs, whether he ride on clouds between the waters and the firmament, or stand alone creating by a glance and by a motion of his hand Eve, the full-formed and conscious woman, he is proclaimed the Maker who from all eternity has held the thought of the material universe within his mind. Raphael does not depart from this conception. The profound abstraction of Michel Angelo ruled his intellect, and received from his genius a form of perhaps greater grace. A similar growth from the germinal designs of the Pisani may be traced in many groups.
But we must not linger at the gate. Let us enter the Cathedral and see some of the wonders it contains. Statues of gigantic size adorn the nave. Of these the most beautiful are the work of Ippolito Scalza, an artist whom Orvieto claims with pride as one of her own sons. The long line of saints and apostles whom they represent, conduct us to the high altar surrounded by its shadowy frescoes, and gleaming with the work of carvers in marble and bronze and precious metals. But our steps are drawn towards the chapel of the south transept, where now a golden light from the autumnal sunset falls across a crowd of worshippers. From far and near the poor people are gathered. Most of them are women. They kneel upon the pavement and the benches, sunburnt faces from the vineyards and the canebrakes of the valley. The old look prematurely aged and withered--their wrinkled cheeks bound up in scarlet and orange-coloured kerchiefs, their skinny fingers fumbling on the rosary, and their mute lips moving in prayer. The younger women have great listless eyes and large limbs used to labour. Some of them carry babies trussed up in tight swaddling-clothes. One kneels beside a dark-browed shepherd, on whose shoulder falls his shaggy hair; and little children play about, half-hushed, half heedless of the place, among old men whose life has dwindled down into a ceaseless round of prayers. We wonder why this chapel alone in the empty Cathedral, is so crowded with worshippers. They surely are not turned towards that splendid Pietà of Scalza--a work in which the marble seems to live a cold, dead, shivering life. They do not heed Angelico’s and Signorelli’s frescoes on the roof and walls. The interchange of light and gloom upon the stalls and carved work of the canopies can scarcely rivet so intense a gaze. All eyes seem fixed upon a curtain of red silk above the altar. Votive pictures and glass cases full of silver hearts, wax babies, hands and limbs of every kind, are hung around it. A bell rings. A jingling organ plays a little melody in triple time; and from the sacristy comes forth the priest. With much reverence, and with a show of preparation, he and the acolytes around him mount the altar steps, and pull a string which draws the curtain. Behind the curtain we behold Madonna and her child--a faint, old, ugly picture, blackened with the smoke and incense of five hundred years, a wonder-working image, cased in gold, and guarded from the common air by glass and draperies. Jewelled crowns are stuck upon the heads of the mother and the infant. In the efficacy of Madonna di San Brizio to ward off agues, to deliver from the pangs of childbirth or the fury of the storm, to keep the lover’s troth and make the husband faithful to his home, these pious women of the marshes and the mountains put a simple trust.
While the priest sings, and the people pray to the dance-music of the organ, let us take a quiet seat unseen, and picture to our minds how the chapel looked when Angelico and Signorelli stood before its plastered walls, and thought the thoughts with which they covered them. Four centuries have gone by since those walls were white and even to their brushes; and now you scarce can see the golden aureoles of saints, the vast wings of the angels, and the flowing robes of prophets through the gloom. Angelico came first, in monk’s dress, kneeling before he climbed the scaffold to paint the angry Judge, the Virgin crowned, the white-robed army of the Martyrs, and the glorious company of the Apostles. These he placed upon the roof, expectant of the Judgment. Then he passed away, and Luca Signorelli, the rich man who “lived splendidly and loved to dress himself in noble clothes,” the liberal and courteous gentleman, took his place upon the scaffold. For all the worldliness of his attire and the delicacy of his living, his brain teemed with stern and terrible thoughts. He searched the secrets of sin and of the grave, of destruction and of resurrection, of heaven and hell. All these he has painted on the walls beneath the saints of Fra Angelico. First come the troubles of the last days, the preaching of Antichrist, and the confusion of the wicked. In the next compartment we see the Resurrection from the tomb; and side by side with that is painted Hell. Paradise occupies another portion of the chapel.
After viewing these frescoes, we muse and ask ourselves why Signorelli’s fame is so inadequate to his deserts? Partly, no doubt because he painted in obscure Italian towns, and left few easel pictures. Besides the artists of the Sixteenth Century eclipsed all their predecessors, and the name of Signorelli has been swallowed up in that of Michel Angelo. Vasari said that “_esso Michel Angelo imitò l’andar di Luca, come può vedere ognuno_.” Nor is it hard to see that what the one began at Orvieto the other completed in the Vatican. These great men had truly kindred spirits. Both struggled to express their intellectual conceptions in the simplest and most abstract forms. The works of both are distinguished by contempt for adventitious ornaments and for the grace of positive colour. Both chose to work in fresco, and selected subjects of the gravest and most elevated character. The study of anatomy, and the correct drawing of the naked body, which Luca practised, were carried to perfection by Michel Angelo. Sublimity of thought and self-restraint pervade their compositions. He who would understand Buonarotti must first appreciate Signorelli. The latter, it is true, was confined to a narrower circle in his study of the beautiful and the sublime. He had not ascended to that pure idealism superior to all the accidents of place and time, which is the chief distinction of Michel Angelo’s work. At the same time, his manner had not suffered from too close a study of the antique. He painted the life he saw around him, and clothed his men and women in the dress of Italy.
Such reflections, and many more, pass through our mind as we sit and ponder in the chapel, which the daylight has deserted. The country-people are still on their knees, still careless of the frescoed forms around them, still praying to the Madonna of the Miracles. The service is well-nigh done. The benediction has been given, the organist strikes up his air of Verdi, and the congregation shuffles off, leaving the dimly-lighted chapel for the vast sonorous dusky nave. How strange it is to hear that faint strain of a feeble opera sounding where a short while since, the trumpet-blast of Signorelli’s angels seemed to thrill our ears!
THE BUILDINGS OF SHAH JEHAN
G. W. STEEVENS
The north-eastern approach to Agra is through a waste of land at the same time flat and broken. Formless hillocks and ditches, colourless sand and dead turf, the whole scene was mean and depressing. I raised my eyes, and there, on the edge of the ugly prairie, sat a fair white palace with domes and minarets. So exquisite in symmetry, so softly lustrous in tint, it could hardly be substantial, and I all but cried, “Mirage!” It was the Taj Mahal.
And now we were clanking over an iron bridge above a dark-green river that filled barely a quarter of its sandy bed; deep, broad staircases stepped down to its further bank with pillared pleasure-houses overlooking them. Now on the right rose a great mosque, its bellying domes zig-zagged with red and white; dawn from the left frowned the weather-worn battlements of a great red fortress. This was the city of Shah Jehan, emperor and devotee, artist and lover.
And this, in a few words, is the passionate story of Shah Jehan. He was the grandson of Akbar the Great, the first Mogul Emperor of Hindustan. While yet Prince Royal, conquering India for the Moguls, he married the beautiful Persian, Arjmand Banu, called Mumtaz-i-Mahal, the chosen of the palace, and loved her tenderly beyond all his wives for fourteen years. But only a year after he became Sultan she died in travail of her eighth child. Shah Jehan in his grief swore that she should have the loveliest tomb the world ever beheld, and for seventeen years he built the Taj Mahal. Also he built the palace of Agra, the fort and palace of Delhi, and the great mosque of Agra; he took to wife many fair ladies, and lived in all luxuriousness, ministering abundantly to every sense, till he had reigned thirty years. Then his son Aurungzebe rose up and dethroned him, and kept him a close prisoner in his own private mosque, which he had built within the palace of Agra. There he lived seven years more, attended by his daughter Jehanara, who would not leave him, till at last, in 1645, being grown very feeble, he begged to be laid in a chamber of the palace wherefrom he could see the Taj Mahal. This was granted him, so that he died with his eyes upon the tomb of the love of his youth. There they buried him beside her. And his daughter, when her time came, wrote a Persian stanza begging that no monument should be set up to “the humble transitory Jehanara,” and praying only for her father’s soul.
Agra is the mirror of Shah Jehan. In the fort and palace you can read all the story of the warrior and the lover--in the fort so nakedly grim without and the palace so richly voluptuous within. Under the brow of the sheer sandstone walls you are dwarfed to a pigmy. Before and beneath the great gateway stands a double curtain of loophole and machicolation and tower: you go in through cavernous guard-houses, up a ramp between sky-closing walls. Only thus do you reach the real entrance--the great Elephant Gate--two jutting octagon towers supporting spacious chambers thrown across the passage. On the lower storey all is closed, and only white plaster designs relieve the savage masses of the sandstone; in the upper balconies are windows and recesses, all decked with white, and above all runs a gallery crowned with cupolas.
Under this arch you go, a dome above, deep and lofty recesses on either hand; now you are past the sternness. Shah Jehan is soldier no longer but artist and amorist at large. You come to the Pearl Mosque. There is a Pearl Mosque at Delhi, sandstone slabs without, marble within, as this is; but the Delhi mosque is a bauble to this. This is a broad court, paved with slabs of marble, veined with white and blue, gray and yellow. This is all marble--marble walls with moulded panels, marble cloisters of multifoliate arches, marble gateways breaking three walls of the square, marble columns supporting bell-cupolas above them and at each corner, a marble basin in the centre of the court, a marble sundial beside it. Along the west side of the court shines the glorious face of the mosque itself--only a roofed quarter of the whole space, a mere portico, but colonnaded with three rows of seven pillars apiece, each branching to right and left, to front and back, with eight-pointed, nine-leaved arches. Along the entablature above runs a Persian inscription in mosaic of black marble; on the roof, over each pillar of the front row is a cupola with four columns, and at each corner a cupola with eight columns. Three domes fold their broad white wings behind and above all.
Three steps for the mullah to preach from, and that is all the catalogue. No altar or shrine or image: there is no god but God. No carving or lattice-work: but the simple pillars and arches, the few cupolas and domes, are yet the richest of ornamentation. No paint or gems--only the clear harmonious veining of the marble. Only space and proportion, form and whispers of colour--and it is so beautiful that you can hardly breathe for rapture. The radiant marble ripples from shade to shade--snow-white, pearl-white, ivory-white--till it seems half alive. The bells and pinnacles are so light that they seem to float in the air. It cannot be a building, you whisper: it is enchantment.
But now go on to the palace. It has been battered and sacked--the Jats of Bhurtpur carried away the precious stones from the walls; but through the restorations you can dream of some of its delights when it held the houris of Shah Jehan. Dream this and it is all enchantment; you have arrived at last--at last, after so many years, after so many leagues--in the dear country of your earliest dreams, and the Arabian nights are come to life. Under this pillared hall the ambassadors of Shiraz and Samarkand are making their obeisance and displaying rich gifts. Above, in the marble alcove festooned with flowers and tendrils in pietra dura, reclines the Sultan of the Indies on a couch of white marble. Up the stairs--and here, enclosed by a colonnade of two storeys, is the fish-pond; on the upper terrace under that canopy, which is one block of creamy marble embossed with flowers, sits the lovely favourite Schemselnihar, and makes believe to angle. She rises and follows the other lights of the harem into the little square court and portico that miniature the great Pearl Mosque without. But some of the beauties turn aside to the gallery, where, below, is an enclosed bazaar; handsome young merchants of Baghdad tempt them with silks and brocades--and with looks that sigh and languish. They had best be prudent: eyes as fathomless as theirs have grown dim in the dungeons under the terraces, below the water. From lust to cruelty is only a step; and when the Sultan raised the marble and the gems he sank the dungeon, remote in a labyrinth of tunnels. Across it is a beam with a noose for soft necks and a shoot for frail bodies that tumbles them into the Jumna.
The Sultan has risen from his audience: he walks round the terrace, through the delicious Hall of Private Audience, whose walls are marble, whose pillars are festooned with creepers in agate and jasper, jade and cornelian, whose ends are profound and graceful recesses, half-arch, half-dome. He passes to the heavy slab of the black marble throne on the riverside brink of the quadrangle; in the pit below they let out buffaloes and tigers to fight before him; on the white seat behind him sits the court jester to make him merry.
And now--it is the full moon that rises from an arch of the pavilion to the right--the full moon, though it is still broad day? It is the Sultaness-in-Chief looking out at the fight from her abode in the Jasmine Tower. She has grown tired of throwing the dice, while her handmaidens stand for pieces on the pachisi-board that is let into her marble pavement--there, behind those duenna screens, the gauze of lattice-work that encloses her courtyard. She has grown tired of dabbling in the fountain that tinkles on the shallow basin of figured marble, weary of her bower of marble inlaid with gems. The Sultan rises, and it is the signal for the bath--the bath in the dark Mirror Palace, lighted with a score of flambeaux and walled with a million tiny mirrors, that reflect.... No; we must not think of it--nor of the feast in the Private Palace, under the ceiling emblazoned with blue and crimson and gold--nor yet of the disrobing in the Golden Pavilion, where the ladies thrust their jewels into holes in the wall too narrow for a man’s arm to follow them.... No; you should not listen to what the Jester is saying now.
But if you envy Shah Jehan, look again later into the tiny Gem Mosque and the cupboard at the side, too small to turn in, where he is the uncrowned prisoner of his son. No Mirror Palace now; the ceiling is black where they heat the water for his bath, in a hole of a cistern where he cannot stretch out his limbs. Look again into the little gilt-domed cupola, where he lies dying, and Jehanara’s voice sounds suddenly far away; and the very Taj, though he knows every angle and curve of it, swims in a grey-white blur; and nothing is left clear save the voice and face of the beautiful Persian, Arjmand Banu, whose palankeen followed all his campaigns in the days when empire was still a-winning, whose children called him father--Arjmand Banu, silent and unseen now for four-and-thirty years, the wife of his youth.
Now follow him to the Taj. Under the great gateway of strong sandstone ribbed with delicate marble, its vaulted red arch cobwebbed with white threads, and then before you--then the miracle of miracles, the final wonder of the world. In chaste majesty it stands suddenly before you, as if the magical word had called it this moment out of the earth. On a white marble platform it stands exactly four-square, but that the angles are cut off; nothing so rude as a corner could find place in its soft harmonies. Seen through the avenue, it looks high rather than broad; seen from the pavement below it, it looks broad rather than high; you doubt, then conclude that its proportions are perfect. Above its centre rises a full white dome, at each corner of whose base nestles a smaller dome, upheld on eight arches. The centre of each face is a lofty-headed gateway rising above the line of the roof; within it is again a pointed caving recess, half arch, half dome; within this, again, a screen of latticed marble. On each flank of these, and on the facets of the cut-off angles, are pairs of smaller, blind recesses of the same design, one above the other. From each junction of facets rises a slim pinnacle. Everywhere it is embellished with elaborate profusion. Moulding, sculpture, inlaid frets and scrolls of coloured marbles, twining branches and garlands of jade and agate and cornelian--here is every point of lavish splendour you saw in the palace combined in one supreme embodiment--superb dignity matched with graceful richness.