“With all its sinful doings, I must sayThat Italy’s a pleasant place to me,Who love to see the sun shine every day,And vines (not nail’d to walls) from tree to treeFestoon’d.”Beppo.
“With all its sinful doings, I must sayThat Italy’s a pleasant place to me,Who love to see the sun shine every day,And vines (not nail’d to walls) from tree to treeFestoon’d.”Beppo.
“With all its sinful doings, I must sayThat Italy’s a pleasant place to me,Who love to see the sun shine every day,And vines (not nail’d to walls) from tree to treeFestoon’d.”Beppo.
Venice to Verona—Verona to Mantua—Villa Franca—Mantua: its Churches and Palaces—The Theatre—Montenara—Campitello—Casalmaggiore—Longadore—Cremona: the Cathedral—Churches and Public Buildings—Lodi—Pavia: its Churches—Castle of the Visconti—The Certosa—Drive to Milan.
Venice to Verona—Verona to Mantua—Villa Franca—Mantua: its Churches and Palaces—The Theatre—Montenara—Campitello—Casalmaggiore—Longadore—Cremona: the Cathedral—Churches and Public Buildings—Lodi—Pavia: its Churches—Castle of the Visconti—The Certosa—Drive to Milan.
OURgondolier, anxious not to be too late for us in the morning, slept in his gondola beneath our windows, and did his best, when the sun rose, to rouse the sleepy porter of our hotel, but in vain; and at last, when I awoke, I found we should have a very narrow escape, if indeed we did not absolutely lose our train. The thing was, however, to be done, and was done. We shot rapidly—only too rapidly for the last time—along the smooth waters on which we had been so pleasantly loitering before, and soon found ourselves at the railway station. Our journey was much like what such journeys usually are: as far as Verona we were only retracing our steps, but now the hot sun had quite cleared away the clouds which, when we passed before, hid the Tyrolese Alps from our sight, and these, whenever the high acacia hedges which line the railway allowed us a sight of them, made the journey so far beautiful.
The names of the engines on this railway are very unlike the kind of nomenclature indulged in at home; we were drawn to Verona, I believe, by the Titian, and saw, as we rushed along, engines named after Dante, Sansovino, and other artistic and literary celebrities.
We reached Verona at ten o’clock; the station, however, is so much out of the town, and the day was so intensely hot, that we gave up the idea of again going into it, and, contenting ourselves with the general view of its quaint and picturesque walls rising over the rugged hills which girt the city on its northern side, we sat down to a breakfast of iced lemonade and some of those deliciously light cakes which are never had in such perfection as in Italy, and amused ourselves by watching the way in which the guards and drivers of the train by which we had travelled proceeded to solace themselves with a game at billiards, upon a table provided, I suppose, by the very considerate directors of the railway company.
The railway from Verona to Mantua crosses a country which is thoroughly uninteresting in point of scenery; it carried us on well into the great plain of Lombardy, rich, teemingly rich, in its produce, but flat, arid, and sultry to a degree. This was altogether one of our hottest days, and took us fairly into a kind of district in which the heat is most oppressively felt.
On the road we passed Villa Franca, a small town which has a rather striking castle, with battlemented walls and a good many square towers, still very fairly perfect; the whole built in brick, and with battlements finished square at the top, and not forked like those at Verona.
We reached the station at Mantua by twelve o’clock, but, as this was very far from the city, it was nearly an hour later before we were fairly landed at one—I forget which—of the abominably dirty and bad inns to which sojourners
39.—DUCAL PALACE, MANTUA. Page 255.39.—DUCAL PALACE, MANTUA.Page 255.
within its walls have to submit with the best grace that they can.
Mantua is nearly surrounded by water; two large shallow and unwholesome-looking lakes giving it this far from pleasant kind of isolation. Over a long mediæval bridge between these waters the way into the city from the terminus lies. One of the lakes is higher than the other, and accordingly twelve mills, each adorned with a statue of an apostle, are formed upon the bridge, and give it its name of Ponte Mulina.
The general aspect of Mantua is very dreary and unpleasing, not less forlorn in its appearance than Padua, and possessing but little attraction for an architect. The chief architectural feature of the city is the Ducal Palace, which contains, in the midst of a mass of Renaissance work of the poorest and most unsatisfactory kind, some very good remains of pointed architecture.
The finest portion is a long building of vast height, and retaining more or less of Gothic work throughout, but especially remarkable for the range of windows in its upper stage. Its front faces on one side towards the Piazza di San Pietro, and on the other with a very nearly similar elevation towards the Piazza del Pallone, one of the courts in the vast palace of the Gonzagas, of which it forms a part. This building is said to have been commenced aboutA.D.1302 by Guido Buonacolsi, surnamed Bottigella, third sovereign of Mantua, and this date quite agrees with the character of all the detail. The interior has been completely modernized, mainly by Ginlio Romano, who carried out very extensive works in other parts of the palace. The windows in the upper stage of this portion of the palace deserve notice as being about the most exquisite examples of their class that I anywhere met with, though those in the campanile of Sant’Andrea, hard by, are only second to them. The main arch is of purepointed form, and executed in brick with occasional voussoirs of stone—one of which forms a key-stone—and over it there is a label of brick effectively notched into a kind of nail-head. The same kind of label is carried round the arches of the window-openings, and down the jamb as a portion of the jamb-mould, and again round a pierced and cusped circle of brick in the tympanum. In the sub-arches the key-stones and cusps are formed of stone. The whole of the jambs are of brick, but instead of a monial there is a circular stone shaft, with square capital and band and base. The whole is so exceedingly simple as to be constructed with ease of ordinary materials, and it is quite equal in effect to any stone window of the same size that I have ever seen.
The accompanying drawings will, I trust, sufficiently explain the merit of this magnificent piece of brickwork. The arcading upon which it rests, and the perfectly unbroken face of the whole, are very characteristic of Italian work.
On the opposite side of the Piazza di San Pietro is the cathedral, the only ancient portion of which is a small part of the south aisle. It is of very elaborate character, entirely built in brick, and so far as it remains appears to have been part of an aisle finished with a succession of gables, one to each bay, a common arrangement in German and French churches, where additional aisles are so frequently met with, but uncommon in Italy, where, as in England, churches have seldom more than one aisle on either side of the nave.[60]The brickwork in this small fragment of the cathedral, though elaborate, was not pleasing, being of rather late date.
On the same side of the Piazza as the cathedral is the Vescovato, a large pile of ancient building, but very much modernized. There still remain, however, some good three-light windows in the upper stage, inclosed within a circular arch, without tracery, and divided by marble shafts. Some
40. MANTUA Window in Ducal Palace.40. MANTUAWindow in Ducal Palace.
41.—CASTELLO DI CORTE, MANTUA. Page 25741.—CASTELLO DI CORTE, MANTUA.Page 257
old arches remain also in the lowest stage, which, though now built up, are still valuable as examples of the best mode of treating brickwork. They consist of three orders—the two inner formed of alternate voussoirs of brick and stone, carefully and regularly counterchanged, and the outer of a moulded terra-cotta ornament. Between each of these lines a brick of deep red colour is set edgeways, shewing a dark line of little more than an inch and a half in width, and valuable as very clearly defining the lines of the arch. All these courses are on the same plane; and probably another rim of the arch is concealed by the walling which has been filled in underneath.[61]
Going on from the Piazza San Pietro, and passing under an archway, we came upon the Castello di Corte, also a part of the ancient palace of the Gonzaga family, who were for a long time lords of Mantua. It is certainly a very remarkable piece of mediæval fortification, but its effect is much damaged by the erection of walls between the battlements, which in my view I have thought it much better to shew in their original state, which is evident enough upon careful inspection. The heavy machicolations which run round the main building have a peculiar and rather grand effect, particularly in the flanking towers. This portion of the palace is said to have been erected just at the close of the fourteenth century.
Close to the Castello di Corte is the Ponte di San Giorgio, one of the entrances to the city, and built between the Lago di Mezzo and the Lago Inferiore.
Retracing our steps, we soon found ourselves at the great Palazzo della Ragione, or town-hall. It has been very much altered, but one gateway remains in a very perfect state, and is quite worthy of illustration. The marble shafts in the upper stage of the building are coupled one behind the other with very beautiful effect. Brick and stoneare used alternately in the main arch of this gateway, with thin dividing lines of brick, as in the Vescovato. In a wall close to the gate is a sitting figure, intended, it is said, to represent Virgil, of whom the Mantuans are still, as in duty bound, very proud. I cannot say much for the figure or its canopy, both of which are, however, mediæval.
BRICK WINDOW—SANT’ANDREA, MANTUA.BRICK WINDOW—SANT’ANDREA, MANTUA.
We found nothing else worthy of notice in this building; but close to it stands the church of Sant’Andrea, a hideous Renaissance edifice tacked on to a most beautiful brick campanile.
The detail of this is throughout very fine. The tracery
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is all of a kind of plate-tracery, consisting, that is to say, of cusped circles pierced in a tympanum within an inclosing arch; the shafts between the lights are of polished marble, and coupled one behind the other. The relative proportion of the cusps in this and in most other Italian buildings is very good. In trefoils, for instance, the upper cusp is usually smaller than the lower; and in all good cusping it must be so. Modern men generally reverse the order, and, at the present day, so little is the subject really understood that at least ninety-nine out of every hundred cusped window-openings are designed without feeling, and quite unlike the best old examples; and this, though apparently a point of very small importance, is really of great consequence to the perfection of any pointed work.
The faulty portions of this campanile are the elaborate arcadings in brick beneath the string-courses, and the awkward and abrupt manner in which the octagonal stage and the round tile spire are set upon the square tower. The present appreciation of the building by the good people of Mantua is shewn by the opening pierced in its lower stage, in front of which the modestly withdrawn folds of a green curtain disclose the interior devoted to a barber’s shop, and in which the patient, seated in the middle of the shop, and looking into the Piazza, submits to the painful operation of shaving—a common picture in almost every street of an Italian town, but not pleasant when the place is a portion of a church.
BRICK WINDOW—SANT’ANDREA, MANTUA.BRICK WINDOW—SANT’ANDREA, MANTUA.
The guide-books speak of the church of Sant’Andrea as “among the finest existing specimens of an interior in the revived Roman style.” If it really is so, I advise all architects interested in the failure of the said style to venture, notwithstanding the forbidding west front, into the nave, when they will perhaps find comfort in seeing how miserable a building “one of the finest” of its class may nevertheless be!
The people at Mantua seemed to be excessively disturbed by my attempts at sketching, and at Sant’Andrea they mobbed me so thoroughly that I was really beginning to think of giving up the attempt in despair, when a kindly-disposed hatmaker, seeing my distress, came down to the rescue, and gave me and my party seats in a balcony on the first floor of his house, in which, sitting at my ease above my persecutors and listening to the good man’s wife and daughters, I finished my sketch with great comfort.
In Mantua there are two or three other churches with brick campanili, but they are very inferior in their character to that of Sant’Andrea, and hardly worth special notice. We owe it to the French that there are not more interesting churches, for, having succeeded in capturing the city after a very prolonged siege, they sacked it, and are said to have destroyed no less than about fifty of them.
Here, as elsewhere in this part of Italy, most of the streets are arcaded on either side, affording pleasant shelter from the hot sun, but every twenty yards we come upon one of an unpleasant class of shops, in which cheese, oil, and the like comestibles are sold, with most objectionable effects on all people blessed with noses.
In the evening we found an Italian performance going on at the theatre, and so thither we went, anxious to see how far Italian comedy might be amusing. I fear our inquiry was not much to our edification, for the favouriteperformers were mainly remarkable for the prodigious rapidity with which they uttered their facetious sayings, and so we lost more than half the dialogue. The theatre was almost entirely filled with Austrians, but still there was a sprinkling of Italians among them, which did away with the absurdly martial appearance of the only other theatre we had been into—that at Verona.
The next day was Sunday, but we were obliged to push on; and so, resigning ourselves to the diligence which left Mantua at about nine, we booked ourselves for Cremona, under the promise that we should be delivered there punctually by five o’clock.
We lost sight of Mantua almost immediately, for, travelling along a dead flat and by roads whose sides are lined with high hedges of acacia or orchards thickly planted, you never see any place or building until you have absolutely arrived at it. There was not much to interest me on the road, and the weather, at first cloudy only and sultry, gradually became worse, and, before we had gone far, settled into a steady pouring rain; so we read, wrote, and occupied the many hours in the rumbling diligence as best we might.
At Montenara, which we passed on our road, the church has a brick campanile, with pilasters at the angles, and in the belfry two-light windows, with marble central shafts and round arches. It has one of the usual brick conical spires, with small angle-pinnacles—a finish to these campanili which certainly does not improve upon acquaintance. They are constructed of bricks with semicircular ends laid side by side, the joints being broken in each course, and so making a very jagged kind of cone.
The only noticeable point about the church at Montenara is that it has been lately rebuilt in the very worst taste, and at an angle of forty-five degrees with the old steeple!
At Campitello there are several remains of interest.
There is a small domestic building, with four pointed windows of two lights at the side; the windows have central shafts of stone, but are otherwise entirely of rough brickwork. The church has a kind of double belfry-stage, arcaded similarly in each stage with round arches. There are also here the remains of a castle by the river, with a fine tower of the same type as the angle-towers of the Castello di Corte at Mantua, and covered with a very flat-pitched roof.
BRICK WINDOW—CAMPITELLO.BRICK WINDOW—CAMPITELLO.
BRICK WINDOW—NEAR CASALMAGGIORE.BRICK WINDOW—NEAR CASALMAGGIORE.
At Casalmaggiore, a town of some importance on the Po, we stopped for dinner; but it was too wet to attempt to look at the river, and the only note I made was of a large new church now in course of erection, Renaissance in style, and with a large dome, and a choir and transepts, all terminated with circular ends. The redeeming feature about it was that it was entirely constructed in brick with considerable care, though probably ere long this will be covered with a coat of plaster, of which modern Italians are not one whit less enamoured than are modern Englishmen.
At a village, the name of which I did not learn, between Casalmaggiore and Cremona, the church had a remarkably good simple brick campanile. The belfry windows werepointed, of two lights, with a small pierced circle in the head, the shafts being of stone of course. Beneath the string-courses there was arcading, and the tower was finished with three forked battlements of the Veronese type on each face, and behind these rose a circular brick spire. This tower was to the south-east of the church.
At Longadore we saw another church with a good early campanile, of which I made a sketch. This was Romanesque, with angle pilasters, and a central pilaster carried up as high as the belfry-stage. The belfry windows were of three lights and shafted. The battlement was most peculiar—a quarter circle at each angle and a half circle in the centre of each side, with a narrow space between them; the whole executed in brick and covered in with a flat modern roof. The angle pilasters finished under arcaded string-courses. Generally speaking, in these churches the only ancient features seem to be the campanili, and these are always of brick and nearly similar in their general design, with pilasters at the angles, a succession of string-courses—generally arcaded underneath—and windows in the belfry-stage only.
It was quite six by the time we reached Cremona, and, depositing our passports at the gate, we trotted on along the smooth granite (which in these towns is always laid in strips between the rough ordinary paving for the wheels to travel on), and after traversing a long tortuous street, and getting a glimpse only of the cathedral as we passed near its east end, we were soon deposited at the Albergo del Capello. a comfortable hostelry, which we enjoyed the more by contrast with the miserable quarters with which we had to put up at Mantua.
Cremona is a city full of interest. The piazza in front of the cathedral is equal in effect to almost any small piazza I know of. On one side is the great marble west front of the Duomo, backed by its immense brick campanile, whosewide fame is proved by the old rhyme, of which the Cremonese are still so proud—
“Unus Petrus est in Roma,Una turris in Cremona.”
“Unus Petrus est in Roma,Una turris in Cremona.”
“Unus Petrus est in Roma,Una turris in Cremona.”
On another side is the Lombard baptistery, a grand polygonal building; on the third, a most interesting domestic building—the palace of the Jurisconsults—and the Gothic Palazzo Publico; whilst on the fourth, a narrow, busy street makes up, by the diversity of colour and costume of the crowd which is always passing along it, for what it wants in architectural beauty.
The cathedral must be first described, and it is rather difficult to do this clearly; but so far as can now be made out it seems much as though it had at first been built upon a simple plan, with nave, north and south aisles, and three semicircular eastern apses; and that then to this, in the fourteenth century, had been added, with hardly any disturbance of the original fabric, immense transepts, loftier even than the nave, and so long and large as to give the impression now that two naves have been placed by some mistake across each other. The groining of the nave is original in its outline, but barbarously painted in sham panelling so as entirely to spoil its effect, but otherwise there is little to notice in the interior, the whole of the church having been converted with the plasterers’ help into Renaissance in the most approved manner. The walls are covered with painting, and round the columns, when we were there, were hung great tapestries, all of which gave the building a rich though rather gloomy colour.
The west front (if you can forget that it is a great mask only to the real structure) is rather grand from its large plain surface of arcaded wall; it has been grievously damaged by alterations, but the old design is still not difficult to trace. The doorway is very noble, and the openporch in front of it is carried up with a second stage, in which, under open arches, stand a very fine figure of the Blessed Virgin, and figures of other saints of more modern character on either side of her; above this is a great circular window, whilst the wall on either side of the porch and window is nearly covered with small arcading. The marbles in the wall, where the arcading does not occur, are arranged very regularly in horizontal lines alternately of red and white, each course being about ten inches or a foot high, and divided from the next by a strip of white marble about two or three inches in height. The great rose window is all of red marble, with the exception of one line of moulding which looks like green serpentine. There are some round windows in the lower stage on each side of the entrance, but they are quite modern.
On the north side of the nave rises the Torrazzo, as the campanile is called here—the “una turris in Cremona”—rising about four hundred feet from the pavement of the piazza. Its design is much like that of all the other brick campanili in this district—a succession of stages of nearly equal height, divided by arcaded string-courses, and marked with perpendicular lines by small pilasters, and almost without windows until near the summit. The dark red outline of this magnificent tower tells well against the deep blue Italian sky, which shone brightly behind it when we saw it; and the effect of its immense and almost unbroken outline, rising to such an extraordinary height, is so utterly unlike that of any of our Northern steeples that we need not trouble ourselves to compare them. Both are fine in their way; but the Italian campanili are made up of the reiteration of features so simple and so generally similar that we cannot fairly class their builders with the men who raised in England such a multitude of steeples, all varying one from another, and yet all so lovely.
A door in the east wall of the north transept leads into a small courtyard, sacred now to the cathedral clergy, from which the original scheme of the eastern part of the church may be fairly well seen. It appears to have been a stone building treated in the common fashion of Lombard churches, but with buttresses and a passage through them round the apse in front of the windows. There is a modernized crypt under the choir. The side walls of the north transept are seen very well from the same courtyard; they are well arcaded in brick, and entirely concealed from sight elsewhere by the enormous false transept-fronts, the backs of which as seen from here are certainly among the most ungainly works ever erected for the mere sake of being beautiful.
The rest of the exterior of the Duomo is almost all of brick. The most remarkable features are the two transept fronts, which are certainly magnificent in their detail, though most unreal and preposterous as wholes; they are, both of them, vast sham fronts, like the west front, in that they entirely conceal the structure of the church behind them, and pierced with numbers of windows which from the very first must have been built but to be blocked up. They have in fact absolutely nothing to do with the building against which they are placed, and in themselves, irrespective of this very grave fault, are, I think, positively ugly in their outline and mass. And yet there is a breadth and grandeur of scale about them which does somewhat to redeem their faults, and a beauty about much of their detail which I cannot but admire extremely. Both transepts are almost entirely built of brick and very similar in their general idea; but, whilst only the round arch is used in the south transept, nothing but the pointed arch is used in the northern, and it is quite curious to notice how very much more beautiful the latter looks than does the
44.—NORTH TRANSEPT, CATHEDRAL, CREMONA. Page 266.44.—NORTH TRANSEPT, CATHEDRAL, CREMONA.Page 266.
former. The filling-in of stilted round-arched windows with ogee pointed tracery and much delicate cusping gives the south transept a singularly Eastern look, and it is impossible not to feel that some such influence has been exercized throughout its design. It would indeed be most interesting to find out what this was, but I am not aware that there is likely to be any clue to it. The date of the work is in all probability somewhere about the latter part of the fourteenth century. The detail and management of the whole of the brickwork are exceedingly delicate and effective, surpassing in their way anything I have yet seen.
BRICK WINDOW—CREMONA CATHEDRAL.BRICK WINDOW—CREMONA CATHEDRAL.
The putlog-holes are left unfilled, as they almost always are in Italy. The only stone used is in the doorway and the window-shafts, and these last are almost always coupled in depth. The windows are elaborately moulded, and courses of chevrons, quatrefoils, and other ornaments are introduced occasionally as a relief to what might otherwise be the tedious succession of mouldings which are necessarily rather similar. The cusping of brick arches is always managed in the same way; the bricks all radiate with the arch (not from the centre of the cusp), and look as though they might have been built, allowing plenty of length of brick for the cusps, and then cut to the proper outline, the edges of the cusps being almost invariably left square. Some of the terra-cotta arch ornaments and diapers are exceedingly good of their kind. The most remarkable feature, however, about these transepts is the prodigiously heavy open arcadewhich runs up the gables under the eaves-cornice—so heavy and so rude-looking, that, taken by itself, it would probably be put down as being of much earlier date than it really is. The façade finishes with three heavy pinnacles arcaded all round, and finished with conical caps.
To the north transept very nearly the same description would apply, save that the doorway is much finer, and entirely of marble.[62]It is part of the original Lombard church, and has no doubt been taken down and rebuilt where we now see it. The tracery of the rose windows is all finished in brick, and the detail generally is better and more delicate in its character than that of the south transept. In both the bricks are all of a pale red colour, and no dark bricks are anywhere used.
ROSE WINDOW—CREMONA CATHEDRAL.ROSE WINDOW—CREMONA CATHEDRAL.
The baptistery—which, as has been said, stands south-west of the Duomo—is entered by a doorway with a projecting porch, whose shafts rest on the backs of animals. It is
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octagonal in its plan, built of brick with the exception of the side in which the door is placed, this being of marble, and is very simple in all its detail. There are three altars in it, and an immense erection of masonry in the centre, which, though not open, is evidently a font, amply large for immersion. Each side has three recessed arches on marble columns, above which the whole is of red brick with stone string-courses between the stages. These have corbel-tables under them, which are the only enrichments in the building. All the brickwork is left to view inside, and the light is admitted by a pierced arcade very high up in the walls. The whole is domed over with an octagonal vault of brick, in the centre of which is a small lantern, and the effect is exceedingly fine and solemn, and enhanced very much by the grave sombre colour of the bricks.
WINDOW-JAMB—PALACE OF JURISCONSULTS, CREMONA.WINDOW-JAMB—PALACE OF JURISCONSULTS, CREMONA.
Close to the baptistery is a building, called in Murray’s Handbook the Palace of the Jurisconsults, turned when I first saw it into a school for a not very polite set of children and teachers, who all apparently felt the most lively interest
CHIMNEY AND BATTLEMENT—CREMONA.CHIMNEY AND BATTLEMENT—CREMONA.
in my architectural pursuits. It was originally open below, but the arches on which it stood are now filled up. This upper stage is very simple and beautiful, and the whole is finished at the top with a cornice and parapet, with battlements pointed at the top like those in the Torrazzo, and not forked as we have been lately so accustomed to see them. At one end of this parapet a chimney rises above the battlement, which is, so far as I have seen, a unique example of the ancient Italian contrivance for this very necessary appendage.[63]It is exceedingly good in its detail, and coeval with the rest of the work. There is a simplicity and truthfulness of construction about this little buildingwhich make it especially pleasing after the unreal treatment of the great transept-fronts of the Duomo.[64]By its side stands the Palazzo Publico, out of one side of which rises one of those singular and very tall brick towers, without any openings whatever in its walls, which give such peculiar character to some Italian cities, and of which we afterwards saw good store at Pavia. The whole of the building shews either traces of arcades or perfect arcades upon which the upper walls are supported; they are, however, so much modernized as to be comparatively uninteresting, though enough remains to shew that their detail was once very good. The building incloses a quadrangle, which is rather small, but arcaded on three sides, and opens from the piazza by open arches under the principal façade, and probably dates from the middle of the thirteenth century, the date 1245 being given in an inscription in the courtyard.
There are many churches in Cremona, all more or less appearing to be founded upon the work in the transepts of the cathedral, but generally very inferior to them in merit.
San Domenico has a west front singularly like theirs, but debased in its detail. It has, however, a very fine campanile, lofty, very simple, and pierced with pointed windows in each stage, one above the other. The interior is completely modernized, and not worth notice.
SS. Agostino and Giacomo in Breda is another church of the same class, with a west front which is again a very bad second edition of the cathedral, and which has been horribly mutilated and modernized inside. It is, however, to be remembered gratefully for a most lovely picture by Perugino, representing the Blessed Virgin with Our Lordseated, with SS. Augustine and James on either side. The Virgin is very calm, dignified, unearthly, and very simple and stately. Our Blessed Lord, in her arms, has perhaps rather too much the character of an ordinary infant; and the two saints have more than is quite pleasant of the bend in their figures of which he was so fond; the heads stooping forward, and the knees considerably bent, are a little too evidently straining towards a reverential posture. Such a criticism is a bold one to venture upon with the recollection of so glorious a picture fresh in my mind—one from which I really derived intense pleasure. The date of this very fine work isA.D.1494.
Sta. Agata is another church which still has its old campanile intact, with round-arched windows, very simple and not large. The church which has been built against it tells its story so well, that at first we all mistook it for a theatre! So much for Classic symbolism.
Another church, dedicated in honour of Sta. Margherita, is a very poor erection of brick, with a simple campanile. One or two other churches we saw with fair brick campanili, which were not otherwise remarkable; and one there was, San Luca, close to the Milan gate, which seemed to be very singular in its arrangements. It had a projecting western porch, with its columns supported on beasts; and at the north-west angle an octagonal building of brick, of exceedingly late date, which appeared to be a baptistery.
I enjoyed the architectural remains in Cremona very much indeed: its rich array of buildings in elaborate brick-work is very striking; and the campanile of the cathedral, towering up high above the many other steeples, combines well with them in the general views, and helps to convert into a fine-looking city what is, perhaps, in its streets and houses generally, very far from being anything of thekind. The way in which the old walls and towers of the Palazzo Publico combine with the steeple of the cathedral is extremely fine, a large piazza a short distance to the west of the palazzo affording perhaps the best point of view.
From Cremona we went to Lodi, on our way to Pavia, and had a very pleasant drive. The heat was intense when we started, and the drivers of all the carts we passed were prudently ensconcing themselves in the baskets swung beneath their carts, to escape its effects. Throughout the Lombardo-Venetian territory there is a great traffic always going on, and there is a much nearer approach to English arrangements, in the way of harness and tackle, than it is at all usual to see on the Continent; though, indeed, it ought in fairness to be said, that their carts are much more scientific than ours generally are. Any vehicle with more than two wheels is rarely if ever seen; and these two wheels are sometimes of prodigious size—I should say quite ten feet in diameter—whilst the length of the cart from end to end is immense. The extent to which they are loaded is almost incredible, and of course it requires great care in order to make the trim exact; but when loaded, the draught must be light for the weight. It is impossible to talk about horses and carts without thinking of the magnificent cream-coloured oxen which are everywhere doing hard work on the roads and in the fields. They have most magnificent, large, calm eyes; and this, with their great size and slow and rather dignified motion, makes them look very grand. They are always yoked to a pole, which rises up above their heads at the end, and has a carved crosspiece attached to it, against which they press their foreheads.
At Pizzighettone we crossed the Adda, here a very fine and full stream, and then, changing horses, went on rapidly towards Lodi. Leaving the main road, we travelled along a less frequented byroad, infinitely more pleasant,and in many places very pretty indeed. We followed the course of a small river, which was turned to good account for irrigation; its stream being at times divided into no less than three channels, in order to water the pasture-land on which are fed the cows whose milk is to produce the far-famed Parmesan cheese. Some part of the road reminded us pleasantly of English lanes and English scenery, but here and there a distant glimpse of the Apennines far behind us, and of the Alps beyond Milan before us, made us aware that we were indeed in Italy.
There is little to be seen in Lodi. It has a large and rather shabby-looking piazza, at one corner of which is the cathedral, whose only good feature is its doorway, which is, however, very inferior to the western doorway of the cathedral at Cremona, to which it bears some little resemblance.
Another church has a Gothic brick front. The real roof is one of flat pitch, spanning nave and aisles; but in the façade the central portion is considerably higher than the sides, so as to give the idea of a clerestory. This is a foolish sham, and unhappily only too common in late Gothic work in Italy. The centre division of the front is divided into three by pilasters, which are semicircular in plan. In the central division are a door and a circular window, in each side division is a pointed window, and a brick cornice finishes the gable, crowned with five circular brick pinnacles.
Another church in Lodi has a very beautifully painted ceiling; this has been engraved by Mr. Grüner, but unluckily I did not know of its existence until I returned home; it seems to be an admirable piece of colour, and to be well worth careful study.
There seemed to be nothing else worthy of notice in Lodi; but, as in duty-bound we walked down to the bridge,—a rough, unstable-looking wooden erection over the broadrapid Adda, with nothing about it to recall to mind the great event in its history, its passage by Napoleon in 1796.
We left very early in the morning for Pavia: our way led us through a country most elaborately cultivated, and irrigated with a great display of science and labour; every field seemed to have some two or three streams running rapidly in different directions, and the grass everywhere was most luxuriant. No view, however, was to be had on either side, as the road found its way through a very flat line of country, and all the hedges were lined with interminable rows of Lombardy poplars. It was a country which would have done more good to the heart of a Lincolnshire farmer than to that of an architect!
The only remarkable building passed on the road was a castle at Sant’Angelo; a great brick building, with square towers set diagonally at the angles. The walls were finished with a battlement of the Veronese kind, and there were several very good early pointed brick windows with brick monials in place of shafts. A campanile, detached near one angle, has fine machicolations in stone, now, however, partly destroyed. The effect of the whole building was very grand.
We soon reached Pavia, and were, as we expected to be, well rewarded by its churches. The general aspect of the city is singular, owing to the number of tall slender brick towers which seem to have formed a necessary appendage to almost every house in the Middle Ages. They are entirely without openings or ornaments of any kind beyond the scaffold-holes, and one can compare them to nothing that I know so well as to the great shot-tower at Waterloo Bridge, save that they are always square and not circular.
We did our best to see the cathedral, but were unsuccessful; it was being repaired, and was so full of scaffolding that we could see nothing. It contains a shrine said tocontain the body of S. Augustine, which I much wanted to see, but seemed in most respects to be an unprepossessing church.
From the cathedral we found our way to San Michele, a very celebrated church, and as interesting to an antiquary in search of curiosities as to an architect in search of the beautiful. The west end is very curious, and has a succession of sculptures, introduced in the most eccentric manner, and with but little method in their arrangement. There are three western doorways, and all of them are elaborately ornamented with carvings, the central door having above it a very singular figure of S. Michael.
San Michele, together with San Teodoro and San Pietro, seem all to be of about the same date, and are of the same character; the most remarkable feature being in each case the octagonal cupola, which rises above the crossing of the nave, choir, and transepts: externally these cupolas are arcaded all round under the eaves, and roofed with flat-pitched roofs, and are far from being graceful; open arcades are introduced under the eaves and up the gables, and everywhere there is a profusion of carving. It is likely enough that this Lombard-Romanesque style, as we see it at Pavia and elsewhere, did, as has been supposed, set the example which was very soon after followed in the great churches at Köln and elsewhere along the borders of the Rhine. In size, however, the children far exceeded their parents, for San Michele is not remarkable for its dimensions, except in the width of the transept.
The church consists of a nave and aisles of four bays, a transept of great length, a central lantern, and a short choir with circular eastern apse; small apses are also built in the east walls of the transepts. A fine crypt is formed under the whole of the eastern arm of the cross, and is entered by steps on each side of the thirteen steps which lead up to
46. SAN MICHELE, PAVIA. p. 276.46. SAN MICHELE, PAVIA.p. 276.
47. CASTLE OF THE VISCONTI, PAVIA.47. CASTLE OF THE VISCONTI, PAVIA.
the choir. The nave aisles have a second stage or triforium, groined throughout; and the whole of the church is vaulted, the transepts having barrel vaults and the three apses semi-domes. The internal effect of the lantern is extremely good; the pendentives under the angles are very simple, and low windows are introduced in a stage between them and the octagonal cupola or vault. The whole church is still left in its original state with red brick walls and stone piers and arches, save where, as in the eastern apse, the vault is painted with a Coronation of the Blessed Virgin, executed in the fifteenth century. It is very seldom, consequently, that a church of this age is seen to so much advantage; and undoubtedly the fine, simple, but well-ordered arrangement of the plan, and the dignified character of the raised choir and the central lantern, would, even if the colour were not as picturesque and agreeable as it is, make this interior one of extreme interest. One of the best portions of the exterior is the east end. Its extreme loftiness is enhanced by the groups of shafts which divide it into bays, and rise from the plinth to the cornice. This part of the building is mainly of stone, except in the fine gallery below the eaves-cornice, where brick and stone are used together. In addition to the west door already mentioned, there are two very elaborate doorways north and south of the nave in the bay next to the transepts.
San Michele is, on the whole, the most interesting building in the town, but is hardly superior to the grand remains of the old fortified castle of the Visconti, which stands just on the outskirts of the city, close to the Milan gate. This is only a portion of the original erection, only three sides of a great quadrangle which is inclosed by the building now remaining. The plan originally was a vast square with lofty square towers projecting at the angles, and of these only two remain. The whole front is still very nearly perfect, andis not far from five hundred feet in length, the main building of two stories in height and the towers of four, and all the old windows more or less intact. The whole is crowned with a forked battlement, and the old bridge still remains opposite the entrance with its outer gate, though the drawbridge has given way to a fixture. This grand pile is now used as a barrack; its most valuable architectural features are all towards the internal quadrangle, which is of grand dimensions, more than three hundred feet in the clear. Towards this court there is the same sort of arrangement throughout (though many modifications of detail)—an open arcade of pointed arches below, and a series of fine windows lighting a corridor above. The lower arches are of stone, everything else of brick, and the details everywhere are refined and delicate almost beyond those of any brickwork that I know elsewhere. The original scheme is best seen on the south side of the quadrangle, of which I give an illustration. This work dates, I suppose, from aboutA.D.1300, but it was soon found to be inconvenient to have open traceries for the upper corridor, and the arches on the other two sides were filled in before the middle of the fourteenth century with very good two-light windows. Fortunately the whole of this work is still in very excellent preservation, and deserves much more notice and study than it has ever, I believe, received.[65]The ordinary bricks used here measure 10½ in. × 5 in. and are 3 in. high, whilst in San Pantaleone they are 3½ in. high and as much as 15 in. long. Here (as generally in the centre of Italy) the bricks have all been dressed with a chisel, with which diagonal lines have been marked all over the face. I can only assume that this has been done to improve the texture
48. CASTLE. PAVIA. p. 278.48. CASTLE. PAVIA.p. 278.
49.—WEST FRONT, S. PANTALEONE, PAVIA. Page 279.49.—WEST FRONT, S. PANTALEONE, PAVIA.Page 279.
of the bricks in appearance, and, perhaps where two bricks are side by side on the same plane, to make a little distinction between them by tooling the bricks in opposite directions. Two other features of Pavian brickwork may also here be mentioned: one, that the depth of the arch-bricks is almost always increased from the springing line to the centre—the intrados and extrados not being concentric; the other, that the arch-bricks do not radiate from a centre, but are arranged so as to obtain a vertical joint in the centre. The first is a very defensible practice, the second seems to me to be the contrary.
There are several other churches to be noticed here. The most interesting to me after San Michele is that of Sta. Maria del Carmine, or San Pantaleone (for it seems to rejoice in a double dedication), which, in some respects, is more akin to our northern Gothic work than any other Italian church I have as yet described. The plan and all the details of the interior are exceedingly simple. The nave is divided into four groining bays, each of which has two arches into the aisles; the transept takes one bay and the choir one, and there are an aisle and a row of chapels on either side of the nave, and chapels on the east side of the transept. The only openings between the arches and the groining are small circles by way of clerestory, ludicrously small as compared with the immense space of blank wall below them, which seems to call loudly for decorative painting. The whole of the interior is executed in red brick, which has, however, been much daubed with a coloured wash; its effect is, notwithstanding, very fine and well worthy of imitation. As in Italian churches generally, the choir is very short as compared to the length of the nave. The exterior is even better worth examination than the interior; the design of the west end is an exaggerated example of the mode of finishing west fronts not uncommonin Italian Gothic; it is to some extent a sham, and therefore bad, but there is much which is of value in its detail, as it is even more than usually elaborate; and apart from the general outline of the mass, which pinnacles and pilasters cannot redeem from ugliness, there is considerable beauty in the group of windows and doors arranged so as to rise gradually to the centre. The cornices are very heavy and elaborate, and the whole front may be looked at as a masterpiece of terra-cotta and brick architecture. It is purely Italian in its great breadth and general arrangement, and, I confess, very far from being to my taste, though I could wish that we had more often some of the same breadth and simplicity in our own elevations.
It is very curious that this west end is the only elevation in this church which is at all distinctly Italian in its design; for those of the transepts and choir might much more reasonably be put down as imitations of Northern work; they are very similar, and a description of the latter will therefore suffice. It is flanked by massive buttresses, and has two large and lofty trefoiled lancets, surmounted by a circular window of great size; the whole is very richly moulded and executed entirely in brick. The buttresses and roof finish at the top in a rude temporary-looking manner, and it is therefore impossible to solve the interesting question of their original terminations, which must, I imagine, have been pinnacles. The ordinary bricks used here are about 10 in. × 3 in. in size, and laid with very wide joints of mortar; those used for window-jambs and arches are of much deeper colour and finer clay than the others. There is something quite refreshing in coming suddenly and unexpectedly upon such a simple and English-looking elevation, after the multitude of thoroughly Italian fronts it has been our fate to see lately.
50.—WEST END, S. FRANCESCO, PAVIA. Page 281.50.—WEST END, S. FRANCESCO, PAVIA.Page 281.
On the north side of the nave there seems to have been a fine row of pointed windows, but they have been all destroyed to make way for Renaissance improvements. There are very large buttresses dividing the bays in this aisle—a feature which is unusual in Italy, and which, in addition to the design of the choir and transepts, would seem to show that this church was not entirely the work of an Italian. In the plan, too, it is remarkable that, though the general arrangement is quite that of the large Italian churches, such as the Frari at Venice and Sta. Anastasia at Verona, in one particular it is unlike them. The groining bays of the aisles are square, and not oblong; and as two of the aisle arches make one bay of the nave, the groining compartments in both are as nearly as possible square. This is an arrangement which occurs often in German Romanesque, but is not seen so often in Italy.
There is a fine campanile between the south transept and the choir; it has four stages above the roof of the church, and scarcely any opening below the belfry windows: these are exceedingly good, of three trefoiled lights under an inclosing arch, with two plain circles pierced in the tympanum, the monials being shafts of white marble. A low spire of circular bricks finishes, but does not improve, this very beautiful belfry.
There is another brick pointed church at Pavia—San Francesco—which has a fine west front redeemed from the common Italian character by the grand window-arch in its central division; and though this has been filled in with later and barbarous work, to the entire concealment of the tracery, its effect upon the whole front is astonishingly good. The detail is very elaborate, and in the arch a great number of terra-cotta ornaments are introduced. The front is divided by large pilasters into a centre and wings corresponding with the nave and aisles, but these are again subdivided by smaller pilasters, each of which is composed ofthree circles on plan, and finished rather nicely with a kind of finial at the top.
San Francesco is lighted by a succession of small clerestory windows, and the aisles have large buttresses, the greater part of the upper portion of the west front being a mere mask to make out the desired outline. I begin really to wonder whether I shall see a west front before I leave Italy which is not a purely unnecessary and unprepossessing sham!
Pavia is a busy and a pleasant city, and one that improves on acquaintance; it is true that it was very hot and sultry, but to this I have been fairly acclimatized, and so rather enjoyed it, except when a piazza had to be crossed in the sun, or a walk to be taken along a street unprotected by arcading, which by the way is much rarer here than in Padua, Mantua, and other cities which I have been describing. The main street of the city is very picturesque, with somewhat of a fall towards the south, so that just a glimpse is obtained between the houses of the distant Apennines.
From Pavia we went, on our road to Milan, to pay a visit to the renowned Certosa. The road thither, which is also that to Milan, pursues a monotonously straight course by the side of a canal, or canalized river, and between rows of stiff trees, until, about four miles from Pavia, a turning at right angles out of the main road soon leads to the gateway of the monastery, and through this—which stands open apparently rather through carelessness than out of hospitality—we drove into the courtyard in front of the church. This, grown all over with weeds, looked certainly very desolate and wretched, and but a poor preface to the polished marbles of the west front, and the riches and paintings of the interior of the church.
The west front is of great magnificence of material,though a kind of design which seems to have proceeded upon the principle of setting all established architectural styles and customs entirely at defiance. This indeed may be said of the whole church, which is a kind of mixture of Lombard-Romanesque features with some Gothic, and no slight dash of the Renaissance spirit; altogether a most magnificent hybrid, but certainly a hybrid. The doors stand wide open, and from the decaying and desolate court in front of the church we enter into the nave, full of everything that is magnificent in material, and all preserved with jealous care and in admirable order; we look up to the lofty vault which spans the grand width of the nave, and find the groining ribs arched overhead in pure pointed form, and cannot help marvelling how far this one pointed feature harmonizes—I had almost said sanctifies—the whole interior, though in fact, save this one point, there is scarcely a single detail throughout the church which would ever pass muster as really being of Gothic character.
I think it is hardly possible to scan or criticize the architecture of such a building; it is better to follow the guidance of the cicerone, and look at the pictures behind the many altars set around with precious stones, and inclosed within reredoses made of such an infinite variety of marbles, that, with some degree of envy, one thinks how precious such an array would be on this side of the Alps, even if spread through fifty churches.
The nave and aisles are divided from the side chapels and from the transepts by high metal grilles, and the transept is again divided by another screen from the choir: this produces a very singular and unusual effect, and makes the transept appear somewhat like a nave placed at right angles to the choir. All the chapels on either side of the nave communicate with one another, so that the monks are able, without entering the nave, to obtain access to allof them, whilst females are carefully excluded both from the chapels and from the transepts and choir. Except a Perugino in one of the chapels on the north side of the nave, and one picture in the sacristy, there seemed to be no pictures of any very great value; in fact, travellers are asked rather to admire the value of the stones which are used in the altars, and the marbles in the reredoses behind them, than the paintings which they inclose. The groining of the church, enhanced as it is in effect by the way in which it is painted—with a blue ground, powdered very richly with gold stars—conduces more than anything else to the very fine effect of colour which the nave produces; and the beautiful pavements, composed mainly of red and white marbles, laid in elaborate geometrical patterns, increase not a little the general effect. This is an instance of the superiority of decorative painting over pictures as far as improvement of architectural effect is concerned.
South of the church are two cloisters; that nearest to the church of ordinary size, but the other, to which it leads, prodigious in its dimensions, and very singular in its effect, being surrounded at regular intervals by the houses of the monks rising out of and above the regular line of the cloister roof. I went into one of these houses, and found its accommodation exceedingly ample; three rooms, closets, and a garden being provided for each monk. The arches of the cloisters are exceedingly rich in terra-cotta ornaments, and throughout the exterior of the church and other buildings it is remarkable how very elaborate these ornamental mouldings are; they are left in the natural reddish colour, and, as the walls are whitewashed, they have a very singular effect. We found here, as at other places, men busily engaged in making casts for the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, whose managers certainly seemed to have ordered casts of everything that could be modelled throughout Europe!
51.—CERTOSA OF PAVIA. Page 284.51.—CERTOSA OF PAVIA.Page 284.
There are now[66]twenty-five monks at the Certosa, and the number appears to have been gradually on the increase since the reconstitution of the monastery in 1844; it was certainly very gratifying to see that, whilst all the rest of the buildings looked forlorn and dilapidated the church itself was most scrupulously well preserved, presenting in this respect a great contrast to the fate of monastic churches generally in the North of Italy.
A tedious drive by the side of a long straight canal, passing on our way large well-managed farms and other signs of uncommon agricultural activity, took us from the Certosa to Milan; and long before we arrived there the white pinnacles of the Duomo, with the Alps in the far distance, came in sight; certainly, seen thus, the Duomo is one of the least satisfactory or imposing great churches I have ever seen, and does but little in the way of imparting character—as most cathedrals do—to the city which lies at its foot. At last we reached Milan, and entering through a triumphal arch—the Ticinese Gate—and passing the front of Sant’Eustorgio, we threaded our way down a very long narrow street, by the side in one place of a row of Roman columns, still standing tolerably perfect in the midst of the crowded highway, until at last we found ourselves housed in a more luxurious hotel than it has been our fortune to meet with for some days.