CHAPTER X

_Some Famous Convents and Monasteries_

Beyond the Porta Ovile, on the hill known as the _Capriola_, rises the convent of the Osservanza, one of the chief houses of the _Osservanti_--San Bernardino's followers of the strict observance of the rule of St Francis, who have recently been united with the _Riformati_ and others of their spiritual kindred to form one body, under what Mr Montgomery Carmichael, our chief lay authority on matters Franciscan, appropriately calls "the glorious and primitive style and title of the Friars Minor." From the earliest Middle Ages, there stood upon this spot a little chapel dedicated to the hermit St Onuphrius. Bernardino passed this way in June 1406, and found that a crowd of people had come out from the city, to celebrate the hermit's feast. Before the young Franciscan's eyes lay stretched that noble panorama of Siena that we see from the convent to-day. Suddenly fired, he climbed up into a tree and addressed them in words so inflamed with divine love that, while many wept, there were some that deemed him mad. A few years later the Spedale of Sta. Maria della Scala, to which the place belonged, made it over to him, and he founded the present convent upon the site of the chapel.

The present convent and church were rebuilt by

Pandolfo Petrucci, but were considerably altered and enlarged in the latter part of the seventeenth century. The church is said to have been designed by Giacomo Cozzarelli, shortly before that master reared for Pandolfo his own sumptuous palace near the Duomo, and to have been actually built by four friars of the Order--Filippo and Leone of Florence, Leonardo da Potenza, and Leone da San Gimignano.[159] It is full of terra-cotta work and early Sienese pictures. In the first chapel on the left is a perfect little gem by Sano di Pietro; the Madonna and Child enthroned, with Angels clad in the green and red of hope and love, winged with the white of faith. In the next chapel is the Coronation of the Madonna, perhaps the most divinely beautiful of all the works of Andrea della Robbia, with the Annunciation, Nativity and Assumption in the predella; the motive of St Francis, with his hand upon the head of the kneeling St Clare, is especially happy. This is surely the kind of sculpture in which Dante saw the examples of humility on the wall of the first terrace of Purgatory. The altar-piece of the third chapel is also by Sano di Pietro, representing the Madonna and Child between Bernardino and St Jerome; while in the fourth is a picture of Saints by Taddeo di Bartolo, with a predella by Sano. In the chapels opposite are a Madonna and Child, with St Ambrose and St Jerome, the Annunciation above, a meritorious work by Stefano di Giovanni, and the Crucifixion, the masterpiece of Bazzi's son-in-law, Il Riccio, but badly restored. The terra-cottas on the vaults are ascribed to Francesco di Giorgio. In the choir are statues of Mary and Gabriel of the Annunciation, of the school of the Della Robbia; and a contemporary portrait of San Bernardino, said to have been painted in 1439 by Pietro di Giovanni Pucci. Certain of his relics are preserved beneath the high altar in a silver reliquary of 1472, the work of Francesco di Antonio.

Pandolfo Petrucci is buried in the sacristy, which contains a Pietà questionably ascribed to Giacomo Cozzarelli. Among the numerous sepulchres in the crypt is that of Celia Petrucci, a fashionable beauty of the sixteenth century. Under the church is a little chapel formed of the original cell of San Bernardino--transported bodily from the older convent--with the same wooden door wherewith he shut himself out, for brief intervals, from the turbulent world for which he laboured. Thus are the memories and relics of Siena's great apostle of peace curiously linked with those of her first tyrant.

Somewhat more than a mile beyond the Porta San Marco is the Abbey of Sant' Eugenio, usually known simply as _Il Monastero_. This is the castle-like building that is so conspicuous in the foreground to the south, in the view from the ramparts of Santa Barbara. It is reached from the gate through pleasant lanes, lined with vineyards and olive plantations, that in spring and summer swarm with that noblest of European butterflies, the tiger-striped _Papilio Podalirius_. It was originally a monastery of the Benedictines of Monte Cassino and was founded in the eighth century; Piero Strozzi fortified it in 1554, but it was soon occupied by the imperial forces. At present it is the property of a Sienese family, the Griccioli, and has been completely modernised. From one of the former cloisters there is a fine view of the mountains to the south. The best of the pictures have gone from the church, and those that remain have been repainted. There is a much damaged Bearing of the Cross, belonging to the series of frescoes that Bazzi painted for the Compagnia di Santa Croce. Two frescoes by Benvenuto di Giovanni--the Resurrection and the Crucifixion--are among that painter's better works. In the chapel to the right of the choir is a Madonna and Child with two Angels by Francesco di Giorgio, and, in the chapel to the left, a Madonna and Child, an authentic work by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. The famous Assumption of the Madonna--somewhat too enthusiastically praised in England--by Matteo di Giovanni, which once adorned the high altar, is now in the National Gallery of London, and a Madonna by Duccio, which was formerly in the sacristy, appears recently to have followed it beyond the Alps--unless it has made a longer voyage and, like other Italian pictures, crossed the Atlantic.

"Superficially," writes John Addington Symonds, "much of the present charm of Siena consists in the soft opening valleys, the glimpses of long blue hills and fertile country-side, framed by irregular brown houses stretching along the slopes on which the town is built, and losing themselves abruptly in olive fields and orchards. This element of beauty, which brings the city into immediate relation with the country, is indeed not peculiar to Siena. We find it in Perugia, in Assisi, in Montepulciano, in nearly all the hill towns of Umbria and Tuscany. But their landscape is often tragic and austere, while this is always suave. City and country blend here in delightful amity. Neither yields that sense of aloofness which stirs melancholy."[160]

We leave Siena by the Porta Fontebranda, along the way by which the returning Noveschi crept up to the city walls on that fateful night between July 21st and 22nd, 1487, turning back at intervals for the varied glimpses of San Domenico with its huge red bulk and tower, or the gleaming marbles of the Duomo. At the antimony works, where the road divides, we take the way to the right, westwards. Presently we mount up again, through lanes on either side that might almost be English--only, when these break away, the silvery olives, the convents on the hills, Siena's towers and the distant mountains remind us that we are in Tuscany. "The most charming district in the immediate neighbourhood of Siena," to quote Symonds once more, "lies westward, near Belcaro, a villa high up on a hill. It is a region of deep lanes and golden-green oak woods, with cypresses and stone-pines, and little streams in all directions flowing over the brown sandstone. The country is like some parts of rural England--Devonshire or Sussex. Not only is the sandstone here, as there, broken into deep gullies; but the vegetation is much the same. Tufted spleenwort, primroses, and broom tangle the hedges under boughs of hornbeam and sweet-chestnut." The view of Siena behind us gradually expands, as we mount up. When the little chapel is passed, we keep to the right; presently an avenue of oaks and ilex-trees leads to the villa, or castello, of Belcaro.

Belcaro, superbly situated and thickly clothed round with a magnificent grove of rich, dark-green ilex-trees, was a strongly fortified place in the early days of the Republic, and in the fourteenth century it belonged to the Savini. At the beginning of 1377 it was much decayed, and Nanni di Ser Vanni Savini gave it to St Catherine, with the consent of the government, to be made into a convent of "religious women who shall continually pray for the city and inhabitants of Siena." She called it Santa Maria degli Angeli, and several of her letters are addressed from it. Later on, the convent became a fortress once more, and at one time belonged to the Bellanti; in 1525 it came into the hands of the Turamini, a rich family of bankers. Crescenzio Turamini had the present palace, loggia and chapel built from the designs of Baldassare Peruzzi, and employed the master himself to decorate them with frescoes. On the ceiling of a hall on the ground floor is the Judgment of Paris, which has caught not a little of the Raphaelesque grace and charm of the decorations of the Farnesina. It has been repainted. A loggia is likewise covered with decorative work, mythological scenes and arabesques, which have been so modernised by restoration that nothing really remains of Peruzzi's original work save the invention and design. In the chapel there are a Madonna and Saints behind the altar from his hand, with Evangelists and Saints on the walls, and the arms of the Turamini above. These are practically Peruzzi's last works, and were finished at the beginning of 1535, but have all been more or less ruined by the restorers. In a room in the villa there is a Madonna and Child with St Catherine and San Bernardino--a lovely little picture by Matteo di Giovanni.

There is a typical inclosed Italian garden of romance, with its lemon-trees and pomegranates; but the chief charm of Belcaro is its noble view. Upon all sides, as we wander along its terraces and parapets, the mountains and the valleys of the Sienese dominion lie outstretched before us, Siena herself _l'amorosa madre di dolcezza_ away to the east, the grove of ilex-trees at our feet. A trophy of canon balls records the great siege of the city. At the beginning of the war, Belcaro was held by the forces of the Republic. On April 4th, 1554, it was attacked by the imperialists in force, 2000 infantry and 50 horsemen, with two pieces of artillery. A mere handful of French soldiers, eight in number, under a Beaufort, held out till noon, when their officer was killed and the rest surrendered. Afterwards, the Marchese di Marignano had his headquarters here. Beneath Peruzzi's fresco or among the trees of the garden, he may have drunk wine with his captains while the hapless victims, the "useless mouths," lay perishing between the walls of the city and the trenches of his soldiery. Here, in April 1555, he received the two Sienese ambassadors, Girolamo Malavolti and Alessandro Guglielmi, who came to make the necessary arrangements for the surrender of the city, after the terms of the capitulation had been decided in Florence.

Instead of turning up at the chapel to go to Belcaro, we turn down to the right and then again down through the flowery lanes to the left, where huge white or grey oxen drawing wains block the way at intervals, and a dark-eyed boy, leading two beautiful white goats, greets us in his pleasant musical Tuscan. Suddenly the landscape changes. The lanes end and woods appear--we are approaching the great _Selva del Comune_. Above

the forest ground, over the scantier trees to the left, rises, solitary and austere, the convent of the Augustinian hermits, San Salvatore di Lecceto: "a blessed place," writes Ambrogio Landucci, "in which the Most High chose to work so many wonders." According to tradition, the disciples of St Ansanus fled to these woods when the Roman persecutors discovered their hiding-places in the city; St Augustine found hermits here in the fourth century, and gave them a rule of life. St Monica and St Jerome are said to have visited the place, and William of Aquitaine (this, at least, seems a historical fact), whom Dante afterwards saw among the warriors of the Cross in the rosy sphere of Mars. "Our ancient hermitage," says Landucci, "was ever a sweet attraction for sanctity." Francis, the Seraphic Father of Assisi, came here too, and plucked from one of its ilexes the stick which he afterwards stuck into the ground at Capraia, and which grew up into a goodly tree. The place was originally known as the _Convento di Selva_, the Convent of the Wood, which was also called the _Selva di Lago_, because of the lake or swamp (afterwards drained) that lay at the foot of the hill. The name Lecceto is derived from the abundant ilex-trees which, though much reduced in numbers, are still one of the glories of the district. The golden age of the convent begins after 1256, when Pope Alexander IV. united all the Augustinian hermits into one order, and Lecceto became the head house of Tuscany. It produced an enormous number of _beati_, of whom Fra Filippo Agazzari, the pious novelist, and William Flete, St Catherine's correspondent, an Englishman who had settled here, are the only ones whose fame has penetrated beyond the boundaries of Tuscany.

Wonderful legends linger round the convent and the forest, told with much vividness and simplicity by Fra Filippo, with much unction by Landucci. Angels are said to have descended in human form, to eat with the hermits in their refectory or to succour them in their needs; the flowers of this forest, when sent to other places, healed the sick and worked miracles, "all evident signs that here flourished a continual spring of Paradise." The Dominican Ambrogio Sansedoni, then a young knight, coming from Siena up through the wood to the convent (the very way in which we are treading now), was assailed by the fiend in the guise of a beautiful girl whom two ruffians had bound to a tree. The pious historian assures us that the knots had been tied by the Gordius of Hell to entangle Ambrogio's soul, but that, while he laboured to untie them, he discovered the snare and repulsed the foe by the sign of the Cross.[161]

Very sweet and pleasant are the pictures that Fra Filippo gives us of the priors of Lecceto in his day; for "the friars who had to choose them, always put in that convent for prior the best friar and the one of most holy life that there was in the province." He tells us of Frate Bandino de' Balzetti, who was so strict in the rules that when he saw a thief taking away the convent donkey at the time of silence, rather than break the silence or cause the friars to break it, he let him lead it off, while he himself went into the church to pray for the redemption of that thief's soul. Of course the thief was miraculously moved to repentance, and the prior sent him away in peace with a plenteous alms.[162] He tells in full the life of Frate Niccolò Tini, a friar of the convent of Sant' Agostino in Siena, young in years but old in wisdom and sanctity, who was made Prior of Lecceto in 1332 and ruled it until his death in 1388. It was under him that Filippo himself entered as a novice in 1353, and he records with enthusiastic love and admiration the man's boundless humility and meekness, patience and charity. Suffering agonies from two horrible complaints, the Prior was always bright and kind, though his face would show sometimes the agony he endured. He loved to tend the sick with his own hands, to distribute all that the convent had of bread and wine to the poor--himself going to the gate to do it, because he knew that they would not fare so well at the hands of the other brethren. "His joyous face seemed that of Moses, so burned his heart with love and charity, and with such gladness did he receive strangers, especially the servants of God." Many times during his priorate the friars had to fly from the place, when the wandering companies of mercenaries were ravaging the contado. "One morning," says Fra Filippo, "I arrived there with a companion at the dinner hour, in the days when a company was expected, and already all the place was cleared, and we found the Prior alone, for the other friars had fled with the goods from the place. And as soon as he saw us, that blessed Prior received us with so much love and charity and with such gladness, that it was a wondrous thing. And in all the place there remained nothing to eat, save only two rolls which he had kept for himself, very small, and some wine and some leeks. And with a holy charity he constrained us to eat with him, and he set those two rolls on a table without a cloth, and the wine and the leeks. God knoweth that I do not lie, but I never found myself at feasts nor at weddings nor at any banquet, where I seemed to myself to fare so well and so abundantly or where the food did me so much good; and the like befell my companion. For the sweetness of the words of God that were on his lips was meat above all the meats of the world."

Once whilst Frate Niccolò was prior--it must have been a few years after Filippo entered the convent--Lecceto was threatened by the Sienese themselves. Shortly after the fall of the Nine in 1355, when Massa and Casole and other places were in arms against the new regime of the Twelve, a son of Messer Ranieri da Casole was seen to come into the wood with certain foot soldiers. The rumour spread that the Prior of Lecceto was sheltering outlaws, who came to do evil to the city of Siena. More than four hundred armed contadini threatened the convent, captured three of the men in the wood and sent them to the Podesta, while in Siena there uprose an uproar in the Campo, and the people shouted to go to Lecceto and burn the place down. The friars of Sant' Agostino sent a warning to the Prior, that the people were already on their way to waste the place. While the armed crowd of peasants broke into the convent and rang the bells _a martello_, the Prior shut himself into the chapel and prayed earnestly before the image of the Saviour. At once a sudden rain fell; the three prisoners, whom the mob had been going to hang, were led back to the Podesta and proved innocent; the armed forces of the people turned back, the contadini went quietly home, "so that in a short while all the Place was cleared of folk, and that blessed Prior remained in peace with his friars."[163]

Perhaps, St Catherine preferred saints of a more robust temper. It is somewhat curious that she appears to have had no intercourse with Frate Niccolò, though we have several letters of hers addressed to other friars of Lecceto, especially Antonio da Nizza and William Flete. They were among the men of holy life whom Pope Urban summoned to Rome, to assist in the reformation of the Church, and neither wished to leave their beloved solitude. "I shall see," she wrote to them, "if we really have conceived love for the Reformation of holy Church. For if it is really so, you will follow the will of God and of His Vicar, you will leave the wood and come to enter upon the field of battle. But if you do not do it, you will be disregarding the will of God. And, therefore, I pray you, by the love of Christ crucified, that you come soon, without delay, at the demand that the Holy Father makes of you. And do not fear that you will not have a wood; for here there are woods and forests."[164]

We pass up through the oaks and ilex-trees--the latter, scanty in parts and freshly planted round the convent buildings, are grand and dense enough further on to make a real forest still--until we reach the _Eremo_, with its small church and castle-like square tower of the monastery. The present buildings, though restored, date from the fourteenth century, and the tower was built in 1404, when Filippo himself was Prior. The place is silent and deserted now, left in the charge of a family of contadini, save for a month or so in the year, when the students of the Archbishop's seminary of Siena come here for their _villeggiatura_.

Outside the church, in the portico, are frescoes painted about 1343 by a certain Paolo di Maestro Neri, a follower of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, somewhat recalling the style and spirit of those of the master himself in the Sala de' Nove, or those by that other unknown pupil of his in the Campo Santo of Pisa. The whole portico in front of the church is covered with them, mainly in monochrome; partly obliterated, they originally formed one of those vast allegories of human life in which the painters of the Trecento--above all the Sienese--delighted. The artist here is as severely ascetical and monastic in spirit as the unknown master of the "Triumph of Death." On the one side is Paradise; on the other side is Hell. The long wall between them sets forth the life of the cloister and the life of the world, the one leading to Heaven, the other to Hell. In the one, we have peace and war; love-making and dancing; feasting and dicing, the loser seizing the winner by the throat; the car of pleasure, over which Cupid flies, while youths and ladies are with musicians within; a great boar-hunt; money-changing; a court of law; travellers waylaid by robbers. The devils are in it all; they wait by the gaming-table, they sit on the horse that draws the car of pleasure, they watch the hunting and all man's ordinary business, they pounce upon the soul of the murdered, they preside over the death-bed of the impenitent. War is raging in earnest; a grim sea-fight is in progress, the devils are blowing on the ships and urging them against each other; there is the storming of a castle--the demons sound the trumpets for the onslaught, and carry off through the air the souls of those that fall. But above, behind the city from whose gates the pleasure-seeking crowd of worldlings has passed out, is Christ with the banner of the Resurrection--ready to save, if only they will turn to Him.[165] And in the other fresco to our left, a number of men of all ages and conditions have taken their crosses upon their shoulders, to carry them after Christ. We are shown the Works of Mercy and the life of the Evangelical Counsels. The devil is here too--but only to be vanquished and put to flight. Then we have the death of the just--in the corner, to match the death of the impenitent sinner at the end of the other fresco. And after that, comes only the Paradise.

The frescoed Christ over the door of the church is probably by the same painter. In the second cloister there are a number of frescoes originally painted at the beginning of the Quattrocento. They are greatly damaged, obliterated in parts, completely restored in others; we get a vague general impression of hermits doing works of mercy and seeing visions, of St Augustine giving his rule, of holy deaths in convents and hermitages. Further on are five better preserved. The first is the story of Giovanni di Guccio, told by Fra Filippo.[166] Giovanni di Guccio, who belonged to a wealthy family of the Monte de' Nove, entered Lecceto as a boy, but in the noviciate found the coarse food so trying that he thought that he would have to leave the Order. In the wood he met "an ancient man of right venerable aspect," who confirmed him in his vocation. "And suddenly He showed him the wounds of His side and of His hands and feet, from which there issued such great splendour that that of the Sun is nothing in comparison with it, and they all seemed bleeding. Then, straightway, He vanished." This Giovanni was prior in 1323 and often told this story as an example, as of another person, and not until his death did the brethren know that he spoke of himself. In the other frescoes, we see an abbot preaching in front of the convent, a painted ideal of penitential life and pious death, the monks journeying with a sainted prior in their midst, and the return of the lost sheep to the fold. The whole cloister, with the well in the middle, is picturesque. There is little to see in the church, where a few frescoed saints seem striving to emerge from the whitewash.

Down among the vines (on the left of the entrance as you face the convent) is the famous holy well, the "Poggio Santo," now dilapidated. According to the legend, piously recorded by Landucci, there was at first no water to be had, but one of the hermits, _novella Moisè_ "novello" Moisè, struck the arid soil with a rod, and at once a spring of limpid water gushed out, with miraculous powers of curing those stricken with fever. One of the original hermits is said to have been buried in this field, and our pious historian even discovers some hidden mystery of divine things in the colours of the stones that lie around.

In a clearing in the wood on the eminence opposite the convent is the little chapel, now restored, of San Pio. In November 1460, the friars of the chapter and convent of San Salvatore, otherwise Lecceto, presented a petition to the Signoria of Siena, to the effect that they wanted to build an oratory under the name of San Pio and could find no place more suited to their purpose than the hill opposite the Place of Lecceto, "the which hill belongs to the magnificent city of Siena, and is a woody and stony place, from which no fruit can be got." They therefore beg the Magnificent Signoria to give them enough land on the said hill to build their chapel: "which thing will be acceptable to our Lord God, and also will greatly please the Holiness of our Lord Pope Pius the Second, who has many times been to the said place. And your petitioners undertake ever to pray to God for your Magnificent Signoria, that it may prosper and increase in a good and pacific state." The name of "the Holiness of our Lord Pope Pius" was at that time one with which to conjure, and their petition was approved successively by the _Concistoro_, the Council of the People, and the General Council.[167]

At the bridge below Belcaro, we keep to the right and then turn off to the left, skirting the wood, to San Leonardo al Lago, the remains of a hermitage in the forest which was connected with Lecceto. Here Agostino Novello, who had been Manfred's minister, lived in his austere old age and died. A few picturesque ruins of the hermitage remain, with the woods rising up behind them, but the rest are farm buildings. The church contains, in the choir, a beautiful series of frescoes: the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin in the Temple, the Annunciation, the Sposalizio; with, on the four segments of the vault, four choirs of Angels, singing and making music, gazing down on the sacred scenes on the walls or assisting at the Mass on the altar below. They appear to be works of some later follower of the Lorenzetti, but are ascribed to a certain Pietro di Lorenzo, a mediocre painter of the early Quattrocento. Four small miracles of St Leonard, on the left, almost obliterated, are of no artistic importance, but one of them gives a most vivid representation of the torture of the _corda_ or strappado, with the scribe taking down the confession; in this case, the Saint is upholding the victim. In the crypt is the original burial-place of Agostino Novello.

The Abbazia di San Galgano, a long drive from the Porta San Marco, was a Cistercian house whose monks at one epoch regularly served the Republic as Camarlinghi di Biccherna. According to the legend, Galgano Guidotti came hither in 1180, and on Monte Siepi, above the Merse, struck his sword into the rock. Here he died in 1181. A few years later the Bishop of Volterra, Ugo dei Saladini, built a round chapel over the hermitage and founded a small house of Cistercians. This chapel still remains. The great Cistercian monastery and abbey-church of San Galgano, in the plain of the Merse, were built in the thirteenth century, being probably begun in 1220 and 1224 respectively. Of the monastery, only a few ruins remain. The abbey-church, magnificent still in its ruin, is one of the purest and noblest pieces of Gothic architecture in Italy; it is a typical building of the Cistercians, whose churches and convents, purer in style and earlier in date than those of the Friars Minor and Friars Preachers, have caught more of the true spirit of northern Gothic than have theirs.[168]

The most famous, and perhaps still the most interesting, of all the monastic houses in the State of Siena is that of Monte Oliveto Maggiore. It can be reached either from Asciano, a picturesque little town with a number of paintings of the Sienese school in its churches, or by driving all the way from Siena by Buonconvento. Pedestrians, if they do not intend to spend the night at the convent, should take the morning diligence to Buonconvento, and walk down to Asciano from Monte Oliveto in the afternoon to catch the evening train back to Siena. We drive out of the Porta Romana, Siena gradually growing more distant behind us, Monte Amiata rising nearer and more distinctly in front. About two miles from Buonconvento we cross the Arbia, and then again by an old bridge outside the gate.

The little townlet of Buonconvento itself, where Henry VII. died in 1313 and Alfonso of Calabria had his headquarters in 1480, is inclosed in well-preserved walls of the fourteenth century, with the _balzana_ and lion of Siena's Commune and People over the gate. In the one street, which is practically all the place, is an old tower with armorial bearings of generations of Podestàs. The church of San Pietro and San Paolo, near the gate, deserves a visit for a most beautiful little Madonna and Child by Matteo di Giovanni, over the high altar. To the left of the altar are pictures by Sano di Pietro (the Madonna with St Catherine and San Bernardino) and Pacchiarotti (an early work according to Mr Berenson). There are also a frescoed Coronation of the Madonna ascribed to Sano, on the right wall, an Annunciation with the Magdalene and St Antony by Girolamo di Benvenuto, on the left, and a Madonna in glory with Saints in the manner of Pacchia.

From Buonconvento we gradually mount upwards, partly through oak woods, to Monte Oliveto. Long before we reach it, the great red-brick convent becomes visible, with the curious little townlet of Chiusure, once

a place of some slight importance, high up on the hill above it, looking like a part of the bleak mountain side. This whole region, the desert of Accona, is wild and barren in the extreme, save where the strenuous labour of these Olivetan monks has effected some cultivation; the convent itself appears as an oasis in a wilderness of cretaceous precipices, or _balze_. As we mount, it gets wilder and more bare in front, while round and behind us an ever grander and more spacious outlook opens; Siena is dimly seen in the distance, Monte Amiata rising higher and higher to the south, and, more westward, that loftily placed last home and refuge of the battered Republic, heroic Montalcino with its towers. At last we reach the monastery portal, guarded with a machicolated tower like a fortress; a long avenue of cypresses leads down to the church with its massive square tower and the convent buildings, built into the ravines. They are built of a rich red brick which, as Addington Symonds notes, "contrasts not unpleasantly with the lustrous green of the cypresses, and the glaucous sheen of olives."

It was, as we have seen, in the very year of the Emperor's death in Buonconvento below, 1313, that Bernardo fled to this solitude. The son of Messer Mino Tolomei (the head of the Ghibelline section of that normally Guelf house) and Fulvia Tancredi, he was born in 1272, and christened Giovanni. After a boyhood of piety and study, he was made doctor by the Studio of Siena and knight of the Holy Roman Empire by Albert of Hapsburg--which latter event was seized by the Tolomei as an occasion for displaying all the wealth and splendour of their clan. He had a dazzling career as leader of the social and intellectual life of the city, though the stories told by his ecclesiastical biographers, of his becoming practically ruler of the Republic, are obviously nonsense; such things did not happen to noblemen while the Monte de' Nove held sway. Then came his conversion. He had been going to deliver a philosophical discourse in the Studio, so runs the legend, when he was suddenly stricken with blindness. In the darkness he saw visions, prayed to the Blessed Virgin and recovered his sight at her intercession. Instead of his promised lecture, he poured out an impassioned homily upon the contempt of the world.[169] He distributed all that he had to the poor, retaining only a little land in this desert of Accona, to which he now went forth with two noble companions, Patrizio Patrizi and Ambrogio Piccolomini. The three began by raising with their own hands a little chapel to St Scholastica. Giovanni now dressed in the roughest hermit attire, and took the name of Bernardo. Men began to flock to him, and certain Guelfs, suspecting a Ghibelline plot, are said to have attempted to take his life by poison. Praying at the spot where now is the great portal of the church, Bernardo beheld a silver ladder stretching up to Paradise, with Angels leading white-robed men upwards to Christ and the Madonna. Accused of heresy, Bernardo and Ambrogio were summoned to Avignon, where Pope John XXII. received them kindly and recommended them to Guido Tarlati, the warrior bishop of Arezzo, who (in accordance with a special communication from the Madonna, says the legend) gave them a rule of life, armorial bearings and the white habit.

Thus the Order was founded and Bernardo began to build the church and convent, over which the Archangel Michael and the fiends renewed the war that they had waged in Heaven before the creation of the world. After having been frequently sent by the Pope to heal the factions of Guelfs and Ghibellines in many towns of Italy, at last in 1348, when the terrible Black Death was ravaging the peninsula, Bernardo assembled his monks, bade them leave the convent, going two and two to every town and city to tend the plague-stricken, and all to assemble once more in Siena, two days before the Feast of the Assumption, in the convent that he had founded outside the Porta Tufi. All arrived safely, as he had promised them. On the vigil of the Assumption, he addressed them for the last time. Then, a few days later, he died; the rest took the pestilence, and the greater part of them passed away with the people they had come to tend.

At present the Olivetani have been almost everywhere suppressed. Here a few monks remain, their superior being regarded as merely the _custode_ for the government, and there are a certain number of students. The Abbate Generale of the Order resides at Settignano.

The frescoes of the greater cloister were painted in the days of the Abbate Generale Fra Domenico Airoldi of Lecco. They illustrate the legend of St Benedict, as told by Pope Gregory the Great in the second book of his _Dialogues_. They were begun by Luca Signorelli in 1497, who painted eight frescoes beginning in the middle of the story, and then went away to undertake greater work in the Duomo of Orvieto. In 1505 and 1506 Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, who had known Fra Domenico in Lombardy, took up the tale, and, while he told it in line and colour, kept the whole convent in an uproar with his japery. "It would be impossible to describe," says Vasari, "the fun that, while he worked in that place, those fathers got out of him, for they called him the big lunatic (Il Mattaccio), nor the mad pranks he played there."

Beginning from the side of the cloister adjoining the monastery church, we have first nineteen scenes by Bazzi. We see Benedict as a youth leaving his father's house at Norcia to go to study humanities at Rome, his faithful nurse (who plays the same part in the original legend) riding with him on a donkey; and then, his leaving the Roman schools, "instructed with learned ignorance and furnished with unlearned wisdom" as Pope Gregory has it, because scandalised at the dissolute lives of his fellow-students. These two frescoes show that Bazzi had been impressed by Pinturicchio's work at Siena; they recall Enea Silvio setting out from Genoa and the Congress of Mantua. In the third, Benedict mends the borrowed sieve that his nurse had broken, and the townsmen hang it up at their church door, "to the end that not only men then living, but also their posterity, might understand how greatly God's grace did work with him upon his first renouncing of the world." Here we see Bazzi himself, a fine piece of self portraiture, surrounded by his pet birds and beasts, wearing the knightly robes and sword that had been discarded by a gentleman of Milan who had just entered the Order, and which the Abbot gave him in part payment for his work. Next, Benedict meets Romanus on the way to Subiaco. Then, while Romanus lets down a loaf of bread to Benedict in his cave, the devil, "envying at the charity of the one and the refection of the other," hurls a stone and breaks the bell with which Romanus used to signal to his young friend; the painter's pet badger calmly drinks at a pond the while. Next, a certain priest, by divine inspiration, brings a dinner to Benedict on Easter Day. In the seventh fresco, Benedict instructs the shepherds who found out his retreat; "and for corporal meat, which they brought him, they carried away spiritual food for their souls." Then he rolls among thorns, to overcome a temptation of the flesh that the devil put into his mind by the representation of "a certain woman which some time he had seen." After that, certain monks, by their persistence, induce him against his will to become their abbot. Finding him too austere, they attempt to poison him; but when he makes the sign of the Cross over the cup, it breaks in pieces, and he goes back unharmed to his solitude. Bazzi has made the ill-favoured monk, who was most insistent in urging Benedict to be abbot, the one to offer him the poisoned cup. Then, as many flock to him, he builds the twelve monasteries at Subiaco. In the twelfth fresco, one of the finest of the series, Benedict receives Maurus and Placidus, the young sons of the Roman nobles Equitius and Tertullus, who are accompanied by a splendid troop of retainers. Next, he beats the devil out of a monk who would not say his prayers; he makes a fountain spring forth on the top of a mountain; he makes the iron head of a bill that had slipped into the water return to its handle again. Now Placidus has fallen into the lake and Maurus, at the bidding of the man of God, runs upon the water and delivers him, after which "he both marvelled and was afraid at that which he had done," but Benedict ascribes it entirely to his obedience. This is a particularly attractive picture, with the sweet boyish faces of the two young monks. After another miracle (of which the subject is not quite obvious), on either side of the door, we come to the attempt made by the priest Florentius to kill Benedict by a poisoned loaf; the Saint's tamed crow, somewhat unwillingly, takes it away where no man can find it, to return presently for his own usual allowance. In the nineteenth fresco, Florentius tries to corrupt the monks by sending a band of young and beautiful women to the convent, to inflame their minds by dancing and singing. This was a subject far more after Bazzi's own heart than were the trivial miracles of monastic legend, and in the exquisite group of women, with their Leonardesque faces, their subtle suggestion of rhythmic movement, he has produced a masterpiece. Vasari tells us that the painter originally shocked the worthy Abbot by representing this scene in a more realistic fashion (in which, we may add, he would only be following St Gregory's own version of what happened), and that he was afterwards compelled to drape the figures.

Beyond this last fresco, there stood originally a door that led to the great refectory. It was closed between 1530 and 1541,[170] after which Bazzi's son-in-law, Bartolommeo Neroni or Il Riccio, painted upon the new wall the fresco we now see. It represents St Benedict sending out Maurus and Placidus as missionaries, the one to France, the other to Sicily.

The eight frescoes that follow are Luca Signorelli's, but they hardly rank among his best works and are, in addition, in a bad state of preservation. In the first is the punishment of Florentius; the devils have thrown down his chamber upon him and are carrying off his soul; while Benedict, hearing what has happened, laments greatly, "both because his enemy died in such sort, and also for that one of his monks rejoiced thereat." In the second, he converts the inhabitants of Monte Cassino from their worship of Apollo. In the third, he exorcises the devil who sat upon the stone and prevented the monks from raising it, and the idol of brass, which they dug up upon the spot and which seemed to set the convent on fire. In the fourth, he raises to life the young monk upon whom the devil had thrown a wall. The fifth is an admirable piece of genre-painting, intended to illustrate St Benedict's discovery by revelation that some of his monks had disobeyed him and eaten out of the monastery. Two monks are eating and drinking in a primitive diningroom of the epoch (not an inn, as usually stated, but

what St Gregory calls "the house of a religious woman"), waited upon by women--fine robust daughters of the people; the Saint is just seen, discovering to them their fault, on the right in the section of the wall. In the sixth scene, we have the story of the devout layman, the brother of Valentinian the monk, who was induced by a companion to break his fast on a journey. The two remaining frescoes, the last that Signorelli painted here, are of a far higher order and more characteristic of his grand manner. They represent Totila, King of the Goths, testing Benedict's supernatural wisdom by sending one of his officers to him, disguised as himself; and then, when the Saint recognises the deceit and rebukes the man, Totila comes in person with his army, falls down before him and listens meekly to his words. In both, Signorelli gives us a superb representation of the fierce mercenary soldiery of his own day, and the work is full of his characteristic vigour and delight in powerful, strenuous manhood. Here, alone in the series, do we begin to recognise the future author of those unapproachable masterpieces at Orvieto.

Bazzi now takes up the tale in the seven remaining frescoes. In the first, Benedict foretells the destruction of Monte Cassino. The Saint himself is barely seen in a corner, the picture representing the event that he foretold. Monte Cassino is burning, while in the foreground is the Lombard host, superb groups of horsemen in every attitude, which recall Leonardo's famous Battle of the Standard which, however, it seems probable that Bazzi could not then have known.[171] After this, we are back in the region of petty miracles. Meal is miraculously brought to the monks in time of famine. Benedict appears in vision to the abbot and prior, whom he has sent to build an abbey near Terracina, and shows them how it is to be done. Two nuns, whom he threatened with excommunication because they would not bridle their tongues, cannot rest after death, but are seen to rise from their graves and leave the church at the time of the Communion, until he makes an oblation for them and (apparently) gives communion in some mystical way to their unquiet ghosts. A young monk, "loving his parents more than reason would," cannot be buried after death, until Benedict bids them lay the Sacred Host upon his breast. Another monk, wishing to forsake the abbey, finds a terrible dragon in the way. A poor countryman, fallen into the hands of the Goth Zalla, "an Arian heretic who, in the time of King Totila, did with monstrous cruelty persecute religious men," is marvellously loosed from his bonds at the sight of the man of God and Zalla himself moved to repentance. This closes the series of Benedict's life. "Certainly," says Peter to Gregory in the _Dialogues_, "they be wonderful things which you report, and such as may serve for the edification of many: for mine own part, the more that I hear of his miracles, the more do I still desire." And we may feel disposed to say the same, if we have a Signorelli or a Bazzi to paint them.

There are a few other frescoes by Bazzi in the convent. Between the cloister and the church are Christ at the Column and Christ bearing the Cross, works of intense spiritual expression, and another variously described as Benedict giving his rule and Bernardo founding his order of Monte Oliveto. On the stairs leading to the dormitories are the Coronation of the Madonna and a Pietà, and, at the rooms of the Abbate Generale, over the door, a Madonna and Child with St Michael and St Peter. Outside the church a striking Madonna and Child in marble, ascribed to Fra Giovanni da Verona, watches over the tombs of the brethren. The church itself has been modernised. An old picture of the three founders is said to mark the place where Bernardo saw the Archangel Michael descend from Heaven in flashing armour to drive away the devils who were threatening to destroy the foundations of the building. It contains excellent intarsia by Giovanni da Verona, especially on the reading desk and choir stalls, and there is similar work by him in the library of the monastery.

Pope Pius II. came here in 1463, and in his Memoirs (those famous _Commentarii Rerum Memorabilium_) we are given an account of his visit.[172] He marvelled at the situation of the place and the wonderful industry by which the monks had reclaimed so much of the desert soil, on the very brink of the precipice, and at the excellent architecture of the monastery. He found the woods and gardens as delightful to linger in, as we do to-day, and struck the keynote of the feeling of every modern visitor to these monastic houses of the past; "pleasant places of refreshment for the monks, more pleasant still for those to whom, after they have seen, it is lawful to depart." On the second evening of his stay, the Pope supped with the monks in the refectory; while they were at table he bade his choristers come in, who sang the new hymn that his Holiness had composed in honour of St Catherine of Siena, "with such soft harmony that they drew sweet tears from all the monks."