Part 6
Now the sentiment that Correggio embodied is one which, from the present point of view, seems to lack the preserving essence of sincerity. It is true that recent taste has returned with a certain passion to the brilliant mannerisms of the eighteenth century; but it is because they are voluntary mannerisms, as frankly factitious as the masquerading of children, that they have retained their hold on the fancy. As there is a soul in the games of children, or in any diversion entered into with conviction, so there is a soul, if only an inconsequent spoiled child’s soul, in the laughing art of the eighteenth century. It is the defect of Correggio’s art that it expresses no conviction whatever. He offers us no clue to the _état d’âme_ of his celestial gymnasts. They do not seem to be honestly in love with this world or the next, or to take any personal part in the transactions in which the artist has engaged them. In fact, they are simply models, smirking and attitudinizing at so much an hour, and so well trained that even their individuality as models remains hidden behind the fixed professional smile. The conclusion is that if they are only models to the spectator, it is because they were only models to Correggio; that his art had no transmuting quality, and that he was always conscious of the wires which held on the wings.
It may, indeed, be argued that devotional painting in Italy had assumed, in the sixteenth century, a stereotyped form from which a stronger genius than Correggio’s could hardly have freed it; and that the triumphs of that day should be sought rather in the domain of decorative art, where conventionality becomes a strength, and where the æsthetic imagination finds expression in combinations of mere line and colour. Many of the decorative paintings of the sixteenth century are indeed among the most delightful products of Italian art; and it might have been expected that Correggio’s extraordinary technical skill and love of rhythmically whirling lines would have found complete development in this direction. It is, of course, permissible to the artist to regard the heavenly hosts as mere factors in a decorative composition; and to consider Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers only in their relation to the diameter of a dome or to the curve of a spandril; but to the untechnical spectator such a feat is almost impossible, and in judging a painter simply as a decorator, the public is more at its ease before such frankly ornamental works as the famous frescoes of the convent of Saint Paul. It might, in fact, have been expected that Correggio would be at his best in executing the commission of the light-hearted Abbess, who had charged him to amplify the symbolism of her device (the crescent moon) by adorning her apartments with the legend of Diana. There is something delightfully characteristic of the period in this choice of the Latmian goddess to typify the spirit of monastic chastity; and equally characteristic is Correggio’s acceptance of the commission as an opportunity to paint classic bas-reliefs and rosy flesh and blood, without much attempt to express the somewhat strained symbolism of the myth.
The vaulted ceiling of the room is treated as a trellised arbour, through which rosy loves peep down on the blonde Diana emerging from grey drifts of evening mist: a charming composition, with much grace of handling in the figure of the goddess and in the _grisailles_ of the lunettes below the cornice; yet lacking as a whole just that ethereal quality which is supposed to be the distinctive mark of Correggio’s art. Compared with the delicate trellis-work and flitting cupids of Zucchero’s frescoes at the Villa di Papa Giulio, Correggio’s design is heavy and dull. The masses of foliage are too uniform and the _putti_ too fat and stolid for their skyey task. This failure of the decorative sense is rendered more noticeable by the happy manner in which Araldi, a generation earlier, had solved a similar problem in the adjoining room. Here the light arabesques and miniature divinities of the ceiling, and the biblical and mythological scenes of the frieze, are presented with all that earnest striving after personal truth of expression that is the ruling principle of fifteenth-century art. It is this faculty of personal interpretation, always kept in strict abeyance to the laws of decorative fitness, which makes the mural painting of the fifteenth century so satisfying that, compared with the Mantegna room at Mantua, the Sala del Cambio at Perugia, the Sala degli Angeli at Urbino, and the frescoed room at the Schifanoia at Ferrara, all the later wall-decorations in Italy (save perhaps the Moretto room at Brescia) seem to fall a little short of perfection.
Of a much earlier style of mural painting, Parma itself contains one notable example. The ancient octagon of the Baptistery, with its encircling arcade and strange frieze of leaping, ramping and running animals, is outwardly one of the most interesting buildings in Italy; while its interior has a character of its own hardly to be matched even in that land of fiercely competing individualism. Downward from the apex of the dome the walls are frescoed in successive tiers with figures of saints in rigid staring attitudes, interspersed with awkward presentments of biblical story. All these designs are marked by a peculiar naïveté of composition and great vehemence of gesture and expression. Those in the dome and between the windows are attributed to the thirteenth century, while the lower frescoes are of the fourteenth; but so crude in execution are the latter that they combine with the upper rows in producing an effect of exceptional decorative value, to which a note of strangeness is given by the introduction, here and there, of high-reliefs of saints and angels, so placed that the frescoes form a background to their projecting figures. The most successful of these sculptures is the relief of the flight into Egypt: a solemn procession led by a squat square-faced angel with unwieldy wings and closed by two inscrutable-looking figures in Oriental dress.
Seen after the Baptistery, the Cathedral is perhaps something of a disappointment; yet to pass from its weather-beaten front, between the worn red lions of the ancient porch, into the dusky magnificence of the interior, is to enjoy one of those contrasts possible only in a land where the humblest wayside chapel may disclose the stratified art of centuries. In the great cupola, Correggio lords it with the maelstrom of his heavenly host; and the walls of the nave are covered with frescoes by Mazzola and Gambara, to which time has given a golden-brown tone, as of sumptuous hangings, that atones for the pretentious insignificance of their design. There is a venerable episcopal throne attributed to Benedetto Antelami, that strangely dramatic sculptor to whom the reliefs of the Baptistery are also ascribed, and one of the chapels contains a magnificent Descent from the Cross with his signature; but except for these works the details of the interior, though including several fine sepulchral monuments and a ciborium by Alberti, are not exceptional enough to make a lasting impression.
On almost every Italian town, whatever succession of masters it may have known, some one family has left its dominant mark; and Parma is distinctively the city of the Farnesi. Late-comers though they were, their lilies are everywhere, over gateways, on palace-fronts and in the aisles of churches; and they have bequeathed to the town a number of its most characteristic buildings, from the immense unfinished Palazzo della Pilotta to the baroque fountain of parti-coloured marbles which enlivens with its graceful nymphs and river-gods the grassy solitude of the palace-square. It is to Rannuccio I, the greatest of these ducal builders, that Parma owes the gigantic project of the Pilotta, as well as the Farnese theatre and the University. To this group Duke Ottavio, at a later date, added the charming “Little Palace of the Garden,” of which the cheerful yellow façade still overlooks the pleached alleys of a formal pleasance adorned, under the Bourbon rulers who succeeded him, with groups of statuary by the court sculptor, a Frenchman named Jean Baptiste Boudard. Ottavio commissioned Agostino Carracci to decorate the interior of the ducal villa, and even now, after years of incredible neglect and ill-usage, the walls of several rooms show remains of the work executed, as the artist’s pious inscription runs, _sub umbra liliorum_. The villa has been turned into barracks, and it is difficult to gain admission; but the persistent sight-seer may succeed in seeing one room, where large-limbed ruddy immortals move, against a background of bluish summer landscape, through the slow episodes of some Olympian fable. This apartment shows the skill of the Carracci as decorators of high cool ceremonious rooms, designed to house the midsummer idleness of a court still under the yoke of Spanish etiquette, and living in a climate where the linear vivacities of Tiepolo might have been conducive to apoplexy.
The most noteworthy building which arose in Parma under the shadow of the lilies is, however, the famous theatre built by Aleotti for Duke Rannuccio, and opened in 1620 to celebrate the marriage of Odoardo Farnese with Margaret of Tuscany. Externally it is a mere outgrowth of the palace; but to those who feel a tenderness for the vivacious figures of the _commedia dell’ arte_ and have followed their picturesque wanderings through the pages of Gozzi and Goldoni, the interior is an immediate evocation of the strolling theatrical life of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--that strange period when players were passed on from duchy to principality to perform at wedding-feasts and to celebrate political victories; when kings and princes stood sponsors to their children, and the Church denied them Christian burial.
The Farnese theatre is one of those brilliant improvisations in wood and plaster to which Italian artists were trained by centuries of hurriedly-organized _trionfi_, state processions, religious festivals, returns from war, all demanding the collaboration of sculptor, architect and painter in the rapid creation of triumphal arches, architectural perspectives, statuary, chariots, flights of angels, and galleons tossing on simulated seas: evanescent visions of some _pays bleu_ of Boiardo or of Ariosto, destined to crumble the next day like the palace of an evil enchanter. To those who admire the peculiarly Italian gift of spontaneous plastic invention, the art of the _plasticatore_, to borrow an untranslatable term, such buildings are of peculiar interest, since, owing to the nature of their construction, so few have survived; and of these probably none is as well preserved as Aleotti’s theatre. The ceiling of painted canvas is gone, and the splendid Farnese dukes bestriding their chargers in lofty niches on each side of the proscenium are beginning to show their wooden anatomy through the wounds in their plaster sides; but the fine composition of the auditorium, and the throng of stucco divinities attitudinizing in the niches and on the balustrades, and poised above the arch of the proscenium, still serve to recall the original splendour of the scene. The dusty gloom of the place suggests some impending transformation, and when fancy has restored to the roof the great glass chandeliers now hanging in the neighbouring museum, their light seems to fall once more on boxes draped with crimson velvet and filled with lords and ladies in the sumptuous Spanish habit, while on the stage, before a gay perspective of colonnades and terraces, Isabel and Harlequin and the Capitan Spavento, _plasticatori_ of another sort, build on the scaffolding of some familiar intrigue the airy superstructure of their wit.
In the adjoining palace no such revival is possible. Most museums in Italy are dead palaces, and none is more inanimate than that of Parma. Many of the ducal treasures are still left--family portraits by Suttermans and Sir Antony Mor, Bernini-like busts of the Bourbon dukes of Parma, with voluminous wigs and fluttering steinkerks; old furniture, old majolica, and all those frail elaborate trifles that the irony of fate preserves when brick and marble crumble. All these accessories of a ruined splendour, catalogued, numbered and penned up in glass cases, can no more revive the life of which they formed a part than the contents of an herbarium can renew the scent and murmur of a summer meadow. The transient holders of all that pomp, from the great Alexander to the Duchess Marie Louise of Austria, his last unworthy successor, look down with unrecognizing eyes on this dry alignment of classified objects; and one feels, in passing from one room to another, as though some fanciful heroic poem, depicting the splendid vanities of life, and depending for its effect on a fortunate collocation of words, had been broken up and sorted out into the different parts of speech.
This is the view of the sentimentalist; but from that of the student of art the museum of Parma is perhaps more interesting than the palace could ever have been. The Correggios are in themselves an unmatched possession; the general collection of pictures is large and varied, and the wealth of bronzes and marbles, of coins, medals and architectural fragments of different schools and periods, would be remarkable in any country but Italy, where the inexhaustible richness of the small towns is a surprise to the most experienced traveller.
On the whole, the impression carried away from Parma is incomplete and confusing. The name calls forth as many scattered images as contradictory associations. It is doubtful if the wanderer reviewing from a distance his Italian memories will be able to put any distinct picture of the place beside the concrete vision of Siena, Mantua or Vicenza. It will not hang as a whole in the gallery of his mental vignettes; but in the mosaic of detached impressions some rich and iridescent fragments will represent his after-thoughts of Parma.
MARCH IN ITALY
I
March is in some respects the most exquisite month of the Italian year. It is the month of transitions and surprises, of vehement circling showers with a golden heart of sunlight, of bare fields suffused overnight with fruit-blossoms, and hedgerows budding as suddenly as the staff of Tannhäuser. It is the month in which the northern traveller, grown distrustful of the promised clemency of Italian skies, and with the winter bitterness still in his bones, lighting on a patch of primroses under a leafless bank, or on the running flame of tulips along the trenches of an olive orchard, learns that Italy _is_ Italy, after all, and hugs himself at thought of the black ultramontane March.
It must be owned, however, that it is not, even in Italy, the safest month for excursions. There are too many _voltes-face_ toward winter, too many moody hesitating dawns, when the skies will not declare themselves for or against rain, but hanging neutral till the hesitating traveller sets forth, seem then to take a cruel joy in proving that he should have stayed at home. Yet there are rare years when some benign influence tames the fitfulness of March, subduing her to a long sequence of golden days, and then he who has trusted to her promise receives the most exquisite reward. It takes faith in one’s luck to catch step with such a train of days, and fare with them northward across the wakening land; but now and then this fortune befalls the pilgrim, and then he sees a new Italy, an Italy which discovery seems to make his own. The ancient Latin landscape, so time-furrowed and passion-scarred, lies virgin to the eye, fresh-bathed in floods of limpid air. The scene seems recreated by the imagination, it wears the pristine sparkle of those
_Towers of fables immortal fashioned from mortal dreams_
which lie beyond the geographer’s boundaries, like the Oceanus of the early charts; it becomes, in short, the land in which anything may happen, save the dull, the obvious and the expected.
II
It was, for instance, on such a March day that we rowed across the harbour of Syracuse to the mouth of the Anapus.
Our brown rowers, leaping overboard, pushed the flat-bottomed boat through the line of foam where bay and river meet, and we passed over to the smooth current which slips seaward between flat banks fringed with arundo donax and bamboo. The bamboo grows in vast feathery thickets along these Sicilian waters, and the slightly angular precision of its stem and foliage allies itself well with the classic clearness of the landscape--a landscape which, in spite of an occasional excess of semi-tropical vegetation, yet retains the Greek quality of producing intense effects with a minimum of material. There is nothing tropical about the shores of the Anapus; but as the river turns and narrows, the boat passes under an arch of Egyptian papyrus, that slender exotic reed, brought to Sicily, it is supposed, by her Arabian colonizers, and thriving, strangely enough, in no other European soil. This plumy tunnel so enclosed us as we advanced, that for long stretches of our indolent progress we saw only the face of the stream, the summer insects flickering on it, and the continuous golden line of irises along its edge. Now and then, however, a gap in the papyrus showed, as through an arch in a wall, a prospect of flat fields with grazing cattle, or a solitary farm-house, low, brown, _tassée_, with a date-palm spindling against its well-curb, or the white flank of Etna suddenly thrust across the sky-line.
So, after a long dreamy lapse of time, we came to the source of the river, the azure bowl of the nymph Cyane, who pours her pure current into the broader Anapus. The haunt of the nymph is a circular reed-fringed pool, supposedly so crystalline that she may still be seen lurking on its pebbly bed; but the recent spring rains had clouded her lair, and though, in this legend-haunted land, one always feels the nearness of
_The faun pursuing, the nymph pursued_,
the pool of Cyane revealed no sign of her presence.
Disappointed in our quest, we turned back and glided down the Anapus again to visit her sister-nymph, the more famed but less fortunate Arethusa, whose unhappy fate it is to mingle her wave with the brackish sea-tide in the very harbour of Syracuse, where, under the wall of the quay, the poor creature languishes in a prison of masonry, her papyrus wreath sending up an anæmic growth from the slimy bottom filled with green.
We were glad to turn from this desecrated fount to the long russet-coloured town curving above its harbour. Syracuse, girt with slopes of flowering orchard-land, lies nobly against the fortified ridge of Epipolæ. But the city itself--richer in history than any other on that crowded soil, and characteristically symbolized by its Greek temple welded into the masonry of a mediæval church--even the thronging associations of the city could not, on a day so prodigal of sunlight, hold us long within its walls. These walls, the boundaries of the Greek Ortygia, have once more become the limits of the shrunken modern town, and crossing the moat beyond them, we found ourselves at once in full country. There was a peculiar charm in the sudden transition from the old brown streets saturated with history to this clear smiling land where only the spring seemed to have written its tale--its ever-recurring, ever-fresh record of blossom and blade miraculously renewed. The country about Syracuse is peculiarly fitted to be the exponent of this gospel of renewal. The land stretches away in mild slopes laden with acre on acre of blossoming fruit-trees, and of old olive orchards under which the lilac anemones have room to spread in never-ending sheets of colour. The open pastures are plumed with silvery asphodel, and every farm-house has its glossy orange-grove fenced from the road by a rampart of prickly pear.
The highway itself, as we drove out toward Epipolæ, was thronged with country-folk who might have been the descendants of Theocritan nymphs and mortal shepherds, brown folk with sidelong agate eyes, trudging dustily after their goats and asses, or jogging townward in their little blue or red carts painted with legends of the saints and stories from Ariosto. After a mile or two the road curved slowly upward and we began to command a widening prospect. At our feet lay Syracuse, girt by the Plemmyrian marsh, and by the fields and orchards which were once the crowded Greek suburbs of Neapolis, Tyche and Achradina; and beyond the ridge of Epipolæ and the nearer hills, Etna rose white and dominant against the pale Calabrian coast-line.
The fortress of Euryalus, on the crest of Epipolæ, might be called the Greek Carcassonne, since it is the best-preserved example of ancient military architecture in Europe. Archways, galleries, massive flights of stairs and long subterranean passages may still be traced by the archæologically minded in the mass of fallen stones marking the site of the ruin; and even the idler unversed in military construction will feel the sudden nearness of the past when he comes upon the rock-hewn sockets to which the cavalry attached their horses.
Euryalus, however, more fortunate than Carcassonne, has escaped the renovating hand of a Viollet-le-Duc, and its broken ramparts lie in mellow ruin along the backbone of the ridge, feathered with those delicate growths which, in the Mediterranean countries, veil the fallen works of man without concealing them. That day, indeed, the prodigal blossoming of the Sicilian March had covered the ground with a suffusion of colour which made even the mighty ruins of the fortress seem a mere background for the triumphant pageant of the spring. From the tall silhouette of the asphodel, classic in outline as in name, to the tendrils of scarlet and yellow vetch capriciously fretting the ancient stones with threads of richest colour, every inch of ground and every cleft of masonry was overrun with some delicate wild tracery of leaf and blossom.
But to those who first see Syracuse in the month of March--the heart of the Sicilian spring--it must appear pre-eminently as one vast unbounded garden. The appeal of architecture and history pales before this vast glory of the loosened soil. The walls and towers will remain--but this transient beauty must be caught upon the wing. And so from the flowered slopes of Euryalus we passed to the richer profusion of the gardens that adjoin the town. Fringing the road by which we descended, a hundred spring flowers--anemones, lupins, sweet alyssum, herb-Robert, snapdragon and the fragrant wild mignonette--linked the uncultivated country-side to the rich horticulture of the suburbs; and in the suburbs the vegetation reached so tropical an excess that the spring pilgrim’s memory of Syracuse must be a blur of golden-brown ruins immersed in a sea of flowers.