Part 19
Here have I been in Italy half a book, and scarcely a page about the Pictures or the “National Monuments.” _Ci vuol pazienza._ I fear you will soon cry “hold enough,” as I have cried many a time in these endless galleries congested with bad pictures, yet apparently never to be weeded. For the bad Masters were just as prolific as the good, besides having the advantage of numbers. Civerchio, Crespi, Garofalo, the Caracci, Penni, Guercino, Domenichino—the very names recall acres of vast glaring canvases, and the memory of Pistoja with only one picture to see—and that a Lorenzo di Credi—is as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. Berenson, that prince of connoisseurs and creative critics, has done brave service both in dethroning and uplifting. Yet am I convinced there is still a wilderness of invaluable pictures by unvalued artists, who, to-day obscure, shall to-morrow be exalted in glory. Mutations of taste are not yet foreclosed: Michelangelo himself with his Super-statues, may recede and rejoin the mellifluous Raphael, while Siena replaces Florence. The art of Japan may win further victories, or we may follow the great expounder of Renaissance painting to his Chinese Canossa. Or the revolt against anecdote may spread to sacred anecdote, and disestablish the bulk of Christian art. I can imagine a newer Pre-Raphaelitism ruling the vogue, and Stefano da Zevio’s _St. Catherine in the Rose-Garden_ becoming the centre of the world’s desire. I have a weakness myself for this Veronese picture, just because it is so frankly free from so many artistic virtues, so unpretentious of reality, so candidly a pattern, a reverie in roses and birds and angels and gold, a poem, a melting music. I like this new chord of roses and haloes, it is a rare harmony, a lovely marriage of heaven and earth. I can well imagine a visual art arising which will repudiate realities altogether. The cinematograph has come to complete the lesson of the camera, and to throw back the artist on his own soul.
But whatever revolutions in taste await us, my peregrinations have convinced me that there is no single consciousness in the world that holds a knowledge of the treasure of art, even though we limited the art to Italian, nay though we omitted sculpture and architecture and tapestries, and the delicious terra-cottas of Luca della Robbia, and ivories and bronzes and goldsmiths’ work, and the majolicas of Urbino and Pesaro, and cameos and medallions and glass-work, and book-binding and furniture, and the _intarsiatura_ of _cassoni_ and pulpits and choir-stalls and lecterns, and the pavement art of the graffiti, and everything save drawing and painting. For when every church, house, and gallery in the world had been ransacked for every trace of Italian brush or pencil on plaster, canvas or paper, and all this registered in the one poor human brain, there would still remain the unexplored ocean of illumination—the manuscript books and missals, and decrees and charters of guilds and confraternities and Monti di Pietà, and lists of monks and rules of monasteries, and matricular books of Drapers and Mercers, and even decorative wills and deeds of gift—all that realm of beauty so largely extinguished by printing.
Upon which fathomless ocean embarking, we may well behold without too much of awe or envy the sails of the master-mariners. Sufficient to drift and anchor at the first enchanted isle.
Less enchanted, however, are even the galleries of masterpieces than the quiet bowers one finds for oneself—like that chapel in Arona where, unveiling an altar-picture in despite of a tall candle-stick, I caught my breath at the sudden serene beauty of Gaudenzio Ferrari’s _Holy Family_; or like that reclusive Venetian church, where the luminous unity of Bellini’s _Madonna and Saints_ pierces the religious gloom. Pictures in collections are as unreal as objects in museums, less so perhaps to-day than when each was painted for a definite altar, refectory, wall or ceiling, yet none the less destroying one another’s beauties. ’Tis only in the visual arts that we surrender ourselves to a chaos of impressions; imagine Beethoven, Wagner, Verdi, Rossini, Gounod, sounding simultaneously. I could have wept to see how Simone Martini’s _Annunciation_ in the Uffizi had suffered by being transplanted to more gilded society. Gone was that golden and lilied purity which used to illumine the corridor.
And yet to see a picture in its own place is often equally heartbreaking. Some of the greatest pictures have carefully selected the most sombre and inaccessible situations.
Europe has perhaps no more melancholy chamber than that art-shrine in Rome in which the pleasure-pilgrims of the world crick their necks or catch bits of frescoed ceiling in hand-mirrors. ’Tis not merely the bad light—for even in the best morning light the Sistine Chapel is fuscous—nor the sombre effect of the discoloured and chaotic _Last Judgment_, with its bluish streakiness and dark background—nor the dull painted hangings, nor the overcrowding of the ceiling with its Titanic episodes and figures, nor even the Signorellis and Botticellis round the walls, though all contribute to the stuffy sublimity.
The oppressiveness is partially due to the fact that the architectural ceiling that Michelangelo painted—as artificial as the hangings—has faded rather more than the frescoes themselves, so that the figures seem to droop higgledy-piggledy upon the spectator’s head instead of standing out statuesque in their panels and spandrils. I dismiss the specious theory of a painting friend that they thus only hover the better, as prophets and patriarchs should. I refuse to be crushed even by Michelangelo. I know that a ceiling can soar, not menace, for have I not expanded under the gay lightness of the Pintoricchio ceiling in the Borgia apartments! Even the heavy and gilded ceiling of the Scuola di San Rocco at Venice, sombre enough in all conscience, by preserving architectural plausibility, and resting on painted pillars, escapes seeming to fall upon one’s head. Yet at best a ceiling is a poor place for any save the most simple design. Michelangelo, or rather his papal employer, went against the principle of decoration. A room with such massive masterpieces on its ceiling could not but be top-heavy. Moreover the art feeling can only be received in comfort. If we are to be transported outside our bodies, we must not be distressfully reminded of them by the straining of neck muscles. How foolish and provoking of Correggio to put his finest soaring figures not only into a cathedral cupola, but into a cupola lit only by a few round windows. And his frescoes in the other dome at Parma are equally invisible. One is reduced to enjoying them in the copies. Michelangelo himself undertook the dizzying task of vault-painting with vast reluctance, and complained in a sonnet that he had grown a goitre, and that his belly had been driven close beneath his chin. He achieved a miracle of art—in the wrong place. Perhaps Julius II was not so Philistine in thinking more ultramarine and gold-leaf would have brightened it up.
II
A prophet is never without honour in his own country after his fame has been recognised by the world; indeed, his own country will cling piously to him after the tide of his larger reputation has receded, being as slow to unlearn as to learn. Particularly is this true of painters. And when the artist has achieved the feat of substituting himself for a town in the popular imagination, like Bassano, Garofalo, Luini, Sassoferrato, Correggio, the town thus snubbed is usually prudent enough to identify itself with his glory. But it must be humiliating for a town like Correggio, once the capital of a principality, to owe its only hold upon the present to a painter who did not live there, and of whom it does not possess a single picture. Let arrogant cities take warning: the time may come when their only niche in history will be provided by some obscure citizen now neglected, if not ill-treated or repudiated.
Once arrived, then, the Old Masters are not to be shaken off, even after they have departed again. Their birthplace or their working centre makes a cult of them, and it is touching to see them at home, each presiding over a _sala_ at least of his works, and though depreciated abroad, yet still at an exorbitant premium in his local shrine, like some obscure paterfamilias basking and burgeoning at the family hearth. Guercino is still a god at Cento, his statue in the piazza, his pictures in the gallery. Possagno has a shrine with casts of all Canova. With what a gusto did the cicerones of Mantua talk of Giulio Romano! How the name rolled from the tongue, how it brightened a dingy fresco and glorified a dubious canvas. _Si! Si! Tutto di Giulio Romano!_ Poor Giulio Romano! Not that those giants of yours tumbling on their heads in the Palazzo Te are as detestable as Dickens said. Those of David and Goliath in the great courtyard are even charming. And more fortunate than poor Guido, who must share his Bologna with Francia, you have a town to yourself. Even in his own _sala_ poor Guido is put in the shade by the poetry of Niccolò da Foligno.
Moretto is properly the hero of Brescia, though not born there, and he dominates the Palazzo Martinengo with his charming _St. Nicholas presenting the School Children to the Virgin_, and a dozen other pictures, as he dominates the bishop’s palace and the churches. It is rare that so large a proportion of a painter’s work should remain at home, even when the painter himself is as homekeeping as was Moretto.
Very proud are they in Forli of Melozzo, exhibiting engravings of all his works, and even a rescued shop sign of his representing a pepper-brayer banging with his pestle. Marco Palmezzani, too, is high in honour in Forli. Correggio, who made his home in Parma, has been adopted by that city, and it is one of the few things to the credit of Marie Louise that she inspired this sacrosanct treatment of his work, in rich pilastered frames, under sculptured and vaulted ceilings, with two pictures to a room, or in the case of the _Madonna della Scodella_ a room to itself. Poor Parmigiano, the real native of Parma, is thrown into the shade, though there is a Parmigiano room in the Pinacoteca and a Parmigiano statue in the Piazza della Steccata.
Urbino, a city as dead as Correggio, except for the fame of its ancient majolica, resembles it further in not possessing a single example of the work of its greatest son, so that Raphael’s father, who had the talent which so often sires a genius, pathetically holds the place of honour with his _Santa Chiara_ and other more or less mediocre pictures. And yet there were five years at least in which Guidobaldo Montefeltro might have summoned Raphael to that famous Court which Castiglione depicted as a model. To-day, of course, the steep cobbled old city is all Raphael, with the exception of Polidoro Virgili, “the most learned man of letters of the fifteenth century,” and Gianleone Semproni, “Epic Poet”(!). A Contrada Raffaello, and a bronze bust, and a monument 36 ft. high, all attest his glory. But it would have been far wiser to have perpetuated his exclusion from the Montefeltro Palace than to represent him by a hideous complete set of cheap tiny photographs of his works, all set side by side in a large frame which stands in the chapel, together with his skull in a glass case! At least, it is not really his skull—it has not even that excuse—it is merely a cast in clay, though the clay was taken from his skeleton, from the cavity where once the heart that loved all beauty had pulsed. And here, looking upon the scenes his youthful eye had dwelt on; here, where one would wish to surrender oneself to memories of his magical creations, this skull with its perfect teeth is set to grin its mockery of art and life.
An anthropologist, we are told by an eminent historian of art, supposed this cast to be that of a woman, and we are invited to see in it the explanation of Raphael’s suavity. But I had been satisfactorily explaining this suavity myself by the amenities of the tame landscape—olives, poplars, hawthorn, a half-dried river, pairs of white oxen—as I trudged the forty kilometres from Pesaro to Urbino, till to my chagrin the character of the country changed and grew wilder and wilder as I approached his birthplace.
At dusk I was climbing up to an Urbino towering romantically above me with its few twinkling lights and wafting down the music of its vesper bells. My persuasion that I had explained Raphael dwindled with every painful step up the “Contrada Raffaello,” probably the steepest and worst-paved street in the world, and vanished altogether by the time I had climbed one of the gigantic stone staircases of the rock-hewn fortress city. And next morning I looked from the loggia of the great hook-nosed Duke upon wonderful rolling mountains, range upon range, snow-capped at the last, and winding paths twisting among them in a great poetry of space. Ha! Poetry of space! Was not that now set down as Raphael’s one real claim to greatness? And it was here no doubt he had found it, just as Piero dei Franceschi had found it, when here at the Duke’s invitation. But a hundred thousand other people—I suddenly remembered—have been born or have lived at Urbino, and why—I asked myself—were they not inspired to paint like Raphael? And a hundred thousand other men have had feminine skulls (not to mention women), and why have they not produced _Transfigurations_ and _Schools of Athens_? Alas! I fear the Taine method has its limitations. Rousselot in his “_Histoire de l’Évangile Éternel_” talks as if Calabria with its solitary mountains and valleys could not help producing Joachim of Flora, nor Assisi St. Francis. But why do these places not go on producing saints and mystics?
III
If a painter’s skull is so offensive artistically and so futile scientifically, what shall we say of a poet’s heart? “Look into thy heart and write” may be a sound maxim, but to look into somebody else’s heart, is another matter. Separate sepulture for the poet’s heart is not unknown. But the exhibition of a poet’s heart as a literal literary asset, or library decoration, is, I imagine, only to be seen in the University of Ferrara. ’Tis the heart of the poet Monti who died in 1828, after having frequently resided in Ferrara, as a local tablet to “the sovereign poet of his age” testifies. Be it known that to Ferrara’s University turn the hearts of all poets, inasmuch as hither were transported the bones of Ariosto—and here a beautifully bound Ariosto album by all the poets of the day still awaits Napoleon’s promised attendance at the osseous installation, side by side with a lonely phalange of Ariosto that was equally belated for the ceremony. Monti could not resist the desire to bequeath his heart to this shrine of the Muses, and lo! there I beheld it, in a sort of air-tight hour-glass, a little brown heart, preserved in alcohol like a physiological specimen. Could anything be more prosaic of a poet, nay, more heartless? Fie upon you, Vincenzo! Was it not enough that your side-whiskers are perpetuated in the bust in the Ambrosian library? Are you an Arab that you should hold the heart the centre of the soul? Would you persuade us that this quaint ounce of flesh was the heart that contracted and dilated with tragic passion as you wrote your “Aristodemo,” the heart that beat out the music of “_Bella Italia, amate sponde_,” the heart that swelled with the tropes of the Professor of Eloquence at Pavia? Was it with these auricles and ventricles that you pumped up your poetry, was it these cardiac muscles that wrested the laureateship from Foscolo and Pindemonte? Was this “the official organ” of Napoleon?
Go to! Wear your heart on your sleeve, if you will, so long as it throbs with your life, but foist not upon us this butcher’s oddment as the essential you. Is it that you would abase us like Hamlet’s gravedigger with abject reminders of our mortality? Pooh! a lock of your hair during your lifetime were no more distressing. Not with this key did Shakespeare unlock his heart. And if we wish to behold your heart, we shall turn to your poems, and see it divided among many loves, equally susceptible to Dante and Homer. But this offal—let it be buried with Ariosto’s phalange!
Indeed, in justice to Italian taste, it should be stated that this heart has already been buried once. The courteous librarian of the University informed me that at Monti’s death in 1828, it was sent to the library by a beloved friend who had placed it in a pot of alcohol. But Cardinal Della Genga vetoed its exhibition and it was interred in the Certosa, under the poet’s monument. There it remained till 1884, when it was decided to carry the lead case in which the heart was buried to the library. In 1900 the case was opened in the presence of the authorities and the heart found splendidly preserved. It was therefore placed on view in a chest belonging to the poet, and containing papers of his. But the sooner it is removed again the better. That sort of “literary remains” scarce goes with the atmosphere of libraries.
IV
But from the heart in a more romantic sense the most learned atmosphere is not safe, and I am reminded of another University affair of the heart which I stumbled upon in Bologna.
As we know from old coins, _Bononia docet_. But somewhere about 1320 Bologna ceased to teach. For there was a strike of students. An old stone relief in the Museo Civico, representing a crowned figure holding a little scholar in his lap and stretching his hands to a kneeling group, celebrates the reconciliation of the Rector with his scholars and sets down in Latin a record of the episode. “The scholars of our University being reconciled with the city, from which they had departed in resentment at the capital punishment inflicted upon their colleague Giacomo da Valenza, for the ravishing of Constanzia Zagnoni, by him beloved, the Church of Peace was erected in the year 1322, in the Via S. Mamolo and this memorial was placed there.”
What a tragic romance! What a story for a novelist, the Church, the World, and the University all intermingled, what a riot of young blood all stilled six hundred years ago!
The Doctors of that day still sit in carven state beside this memorial; learned petrifactions, holding their stone chairs for a term of centuries, Bartoluzzo de’ Preti, Reader of Civil Law, who died in 1318, and Bonandrea de’ Bonandrei, Reader of Decretals, who died in 1333. The “pleasant” Doctor this Bonandrea is styled; seasoning, no doubt, his erudition with graces of style. I figure him deeply versed in the decisions published by Gregory IX in 1234, and a profound expounder of the Isidorian Decretals.
LACHRYMÆ RERUM AT MANTUA: WITH A DENUNCIATION OF D’ANNUNZIO
Befitting was it at Mantua to feel so poignantly the _lachrymæ rerum_. I should perhaps have felt it at Virgil’s own tomb at Naples, had that not been so vague and rambling a site that no moment of concentration or even of conviction was possible. But the ancient Ducal Palace of the Gonzagas in the Piazza Sordello had the pathos of the unexpected. Nothing in its exterior suggested ruin and desolation, nay the scaffolding across the façade spoke rather of restoration and repair. The tall red brick arches of the portico beneath, the double row of plain straight windows in the middle, and the top tier of ornamental arched windows, surmounted by the battlements, conveyed an impression of Gothic solidity and moderate spaciousness. It was not till I had walked for many minutes through an endless series of dilapidated chambers and mutilated magnificences—propped-up ceilings and walled-up windows and rotting floors, and marble and gold and rich-dyed woods and gorgeous ceilings, and mouldering tapestries and paintings, and musty grandeurs multiplied in specked mirrors, and faded hangings and forlorn frescoes, and chandeliers without candles, and fly-blown gilding and broken furniture and beautiful furniture and whitewash and blackened plaster and bare brick and a vast unpeopled void—that there began to grow upon my soul the sense of a colossal tragedy of ruin, a monstrous and melancholy desolation, an heroic grandeur of disarray, a veritable poem of decay and destruction. Not the Alhambra itself is so dumbly eloquent of the passing of the Magnificent Ones.
“Babylon is fallen, is fallen.”
For the interior answers not to the exterior, whether in preservation or in character. It is renaissance and ruin, with a minor note of the Empire; all the splendours of the world fallen upon evil days. Only by remembering the mutations of Mantua can one account for this hybrid Cortile Reale of dishevelled grandeurs, whose face so belies its character and its fortunes.
The Palace was begun under the dynasty which preceded the Gonzagas, it saw all the glories of the Renaissance, saw Mantua sacked by the Germans, and the Gonzaga dynasty extinguished by the Austrians, and the city fallen to the French, and re-fallen to Austria, and caught up into the Cisalpine Republic, and then into the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, and then Austrian again till the yoke was broken by Victor Emmanuel and the stable dulness of to-day established. It is in fact a microcosm of Mantuan history from the day Guido Bonacolsi laid the first stone somewhere near the year 1300. The building had not proceeded very far before the Gonzagas came into power in 1328, in time to stamp the apartments with their character, and it is with Isabella d’Este that its most inventive features are associated.
A hundred and eighty rooms, said the janitor, and when one remembers the crowd of resident courtiers and the great trains with which the Magnificent Ones travelled, one should not be astonished at the resemblance of an ancient Palace to a modern Grand Hotel. Isabella d’Este’s brother-in-law, Lodovico the Moro, once visited her here with a suite of a thousand persons, and that was only half the number with which Lodovico’s brother, Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, descended upon Florence in 1471. But no modern hotel could keep open a week with such apartments. I do not refer merely to their dearth of conveniences, but to their mutual accessibility, their comparative scarcity of corridors. I do not see how a man could go to bed without passing through another man’s bedroom. Grandeur without comfort, art without privacy, such was the Palace in its peopled prime. Think of it to-day—grandeur in rags, art torn from its sockets, and a lonely scribe trailing through vaulted and frescoed emptiness.
The portraits of the Gonzagas are still in the Hall of the Dukes, but when I ascended the beautiful staircase to the vast armoury, I found an aching void. The weapons had been carried off in the sack of Mantua—a sack so complete that Duke Carlo on his return had to accept a few sticks of furniture from the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The Hall of the Caryatides preserves its paintings but the Apartment of the Tapestry is a chandeliered vacancy. The Apartment of the Empress (for Maria Theresa crossed Mantua’s line of life) is in yellow silk upholstery with gilded ceilings and an antique chandelier from Murano, but one wall is relapsed to rough brick, in sharp contrast with the white medallioned ceiling. The Refectory or Hall of the Rivers survives, a curious symphony in brown, a long vaulted room with frescoes of Father Po and his brother-rivers and lakes, with grottoes, and caryatides, and marmoreal mosaics, its windows looking on a hanging garden—yea, Babylon is fallen!—with a piazza of Tuscan columns and a central temple.