“But thou, Clitumnus! in thy sweetest waveOf the most living crystal that was e’erThe haunt of river nymph, to gaze and laveHer limbs where nothing hid them, thou dost rearThy grassy banks whereon the milk-white steerGrazes; the purest god of gentle waters!And most serene of aspect, and most clear;Surely that stream was unprofaned by slaughters—A mirror and a bath for Beauty’s youngest daughters!“And on thy happy shore a Temple still,Of small and delicate proportion, keeps,Upon a mild declivity of hill,Its memory of thee; beneath it sweepsThy current’s calmness; oft from out it leapsThe finny darter with the glittering scales,Who dwells and revels in thy glassy deeps;While, chance, some scattered water-lily sailsDown where the shallower wave still tells its bubbling tales.“Pass not unblest the Genius of the place!If through the air a zephyr more sereneWin to the brow, ’tis his; and if ye traceAlong his margin a more eloquent green,If on the heart the freshness of the sceneSprinkle its coolness, and from the dry dustOf weary life a moment lave it cleanWith Nature’s baptism,—’tis to him ye mustPay orisons for this suspension of disgust.”See “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Canto IV., stanza lxvi., etc.
“But thou, Clitumnus! in thy sweetest waveOf the most living crystal that was e’erThe haunt of river nymph, to gaze and laveHer limbs where nothing hid them, thou dost rearThy grassy banks whereon the milk-white steerGrazes; the purest god of gentle waters!And most serene of aspect, and most clear;Surely that stream was unprofaned by slaughters—A mirror and a bath for Beauty’s youngest daughters!“And on thy happy shore a Temple still,Of small and delicate proportion, keeps,Upon a mild declivity of hill,Its memory of thee; beneath it sweepsThy current’s calmness; oft from out it leapsThe finny darter with the glittering scales,Who dwells and revels in thy glassy deeps;While, chance, some scattered water-lily sailsDown where the shallower wave still tells its bubbling tales.“Pass not unblest the Genius of the place!If through the air a zephyr more sereneWin to the brow, ’tis his; and if ye traceAlong his margin a more eloquent green,If on the heart the freshness of the sceneSprinkle its coolness, and from the dry dustOf weary life a moment lave it cleanWith Nature’s baptism,—’tis to him ye mustPay orisons for this suspension of disgust.”See “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Canto IV., stanza lxvi., etc.
“But thou, Clitumnus! in thy sweetest waveOf the most living crystal that was e’erThe haunt of river nymph, to gaze and laveHer limbs where nothing hid them, thou dost rearThy grassy banks whereon the milk-white steerGrazes; the purest god of gentle waters!And most serene of aspect, and most clear;Surely that stream was unprofaned by slaughters—A mirror and a bath for Beauty’s youngest daughters!
“And on thy happy shore a Temple still,Of small and delicate proportion, keeps,Upon a mild declivity of hill,Its memory of thee; beneath it sweepsThy current’s calmness; oft from out it leapsThe finny darter with the glittering scales,Who dwells and revels in thy glassy deeps;While, chance, some scattered water-lily sailsDown where the shallower wave still tells its bubbling tales.
“Pass not unblest the Genius of the place!If through the air a zephyr more sereneWin to the brow, ’tis his; and if ye traceAlong his margin a more eloquent green,If on the heart the freshness of the sceneSprinkle its coolness, and from the dry dustOf weary life a moment lave it cleanWith Nature’s baptism,—’tis to him ye mustPay orisons for this suspension of disgust.”
See “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Canto IV., stanza lxvi., etc.
Late in the light of a thundery evening we drove into the town of Spoleto. As our weary horses dragged us through the city gates, and up and under the walls of the silent town, a sort of terror and of gloom possessed our spirits. Here was something new and big and strange. What did it mean? Gradually we became accustomedto the spirit of the place, and seemed to realise the reason of its grim impression.
For days we had been steeped in Umbrian landscape as one expects to know it nowadays, in gentle fields, in lanes, and hills and sunny pastures—in those same things which gave to the Umbrian saints and painters the spirit of peace. Spoleto had none of these. Spoleto is purely Umbrian, as far as geography goes, she was at one time the head of Umbrian matters, but the town was always independent, a thing apart, or rather, perhaps, influenced by the influence of larger rules and kingdoms. Hers is a stirring history,[121]and the sense of her wars and of her dukes lives on within her stones, and is stamped upon her houses and her church walls. There was a smell of dukes and cardinals, of pomposity and vastness, even in the rooms of our inn[122]; and the verylandscape round seemed throttled by the passing of imperial people. It was as though a great emperor had taken a peasant girl and dressed her up in gorgeous clothes and given her a splendid palace for a home. The girl (the gentle spirit of Umbria) withered, but the palace built for her remained, and the best thing about it—its grand supply of freshest water from the hills above, brought down in great Roman aqueducts—has never been removed.
As we pondered these things we remembered the brown roofs and the square of S. Lorenzo at Perugia, and we thought them better than all the grandeur of imperial powers stuffed into a narrow creek of the Umbrian hills.
Yet Spoleto is a place which excites a strong and lasting fascination. Its situation is magnificent. The citadel of Theodoric soars above it: a mighty block of masonry; at its feet the Duomo and the town, and at its back the towering crags, covered here and there with a dense growth of ilex, box, and oak. Town and mountain are divided by a deep gorge, but this is spanned by the Roman aqueduct, 266 feet in height, and the most remarkable point of the whole town. To get a full impression of Spoleto one should cross the aqueduct and walk or ride to Monte Luco, a convent built immediately above the city, in the midst of the ilex woods. Thence, on a broad bastion, outside the cell where S. Francis came to pray, one’s eye wanders over a magnificent stretch of plain and hill and river, backed by a land of barren mountain tops and gorges.
Very few treasures of art are left in the town itself,and these are as bruised, as scattered, and unsatisfactory as those of any city whose history is one of fighting and perpetual sieges rather than of artists or of fame. Lo Spagna lived at Spoleto, and worked there largely; but the gentle style of his colouring, the peace and often affectation of his figures seems out of place on the altars of half barbaric or barocco churches. Everywhere there are bits of Roman building picked up and stuck about on pavements and façades: a painful mixture, lacking care and order. Several of the churches have good Lombard fronts; the Chiesa del Crocifisso is built from the ruins of a Roman temple, but the place is only a pain to see in its dilapidation.
The Duomo is a really impressive building, with a splendid Lombard front—a broad balcony supported by columns, and eight rose windows above it. The roof of the choir is painted by Filippo Lippi.
Filippo Lippi died at Spoleto in 1489. He was poisoned, some say, this Florentine monk, because of his loves with an Umbrian lady. Lorenzo de’ Medici tried to get his body back that they might bury it in Florence, but the Spoletans refused, pleading that they possessed so few objects of interest of their own that they must needs keep the bones of this great painter for an ornament. So Lorenzo caused his tomb to be built in the cathedral of Spoleto. As we turned from the long Latin inscription written above it we felt that Browning’s lines would have served the purpose just as well, and much more shortly:
“Flower o’ the clove,All the Latin I construe is, ‘amo’ I love!”
“Flower o’ the clove,All the Latin I construe is, ‘amo’ I love!”
“Flower o’ the clove,All the Latin I construe is, ‘amo’ I love!”
Leaving Trevi and its cataracts to the left we passed in the train to Narni. We came there for an hour, we stayed a whole day and a night, fascinated by themarvellous view which met us from the windows of the inn.[123]Part of the city of Narni is built immediately upon the steep crags which overhang the gorge of the Nar. From this side the position of the city may be practically called inaccessible, and over it our windows looked. We had seen the Umbrian plains and valleys, we had seen Spoleto; Narni again was a fresh surprise, it seemed to represent to us the Umbrian Alps. The place has a tempestuous history. There is a certain beaten look about its walls which reminded us of Perugia, and, indeed, the cities are alike in many ways. Both were practically in the power of the Popes whilst considering themselves as independent republics, both fostering perpetual feuds between the neighbouring cities.[124]But whereas Perugia has kept an ample record of her past, that of Narni is almost obliterated. Through a piece of misguided policy she laid herself open to a horrible siege in 1527 (see pamphlet by Giuseppe Terrenzi). The Bourbons entered the town, sacked the houses, butchered her inhabitants, destroyed her considerable treasures of art, and finally, made an end of nearly all her archives.
In Narni, however, we did not look for art. We came there almost unexpectedly, and unexpectedly we stayed, wandering through its streets, discovering with delight the rare and lovely bits of Lombard tracery on house and church door, and passing in and out between the Roman gateways.[125]At night we sat in the quiet rooms
NARNI (WITH ANGELO INN IN FOREGROUND)NARNI (WITH ANGELO INN IN FOREGROUND)
of the Angelo inn, and listened to the nightingales which sang with their habitual vehemence deep in the ilex woods across the river Nar. They had sung, no doubt, in just this fashion hundreds of years ago, when the Bourbons broke into the town and half destroyed her people.
In the dull light of coming rain we turned our backs on Narni and took the train for Orte. We left the sun at the same time as we left the green and wooded hills and valleys. The rain came down in sheets at Orte; and we found ourselves in the deadly land—the land of grey volcanic strata, bare like a bone, in the valley of the Paglia. Dreary enough was the outlook when we came to Orvieto. The city seemed as though it had been drenched in the ink of a wounded sepia; the streets were black and foul, the houses low and closely packed; walls without towers, dwindled and decayed rather than bombarded, and people with fever-stricken faces huddled in the square.
Heavy drenching rain of spring. Under the darkness of the clouds, soaring high as a glorious vision above the miserable houses—a peacock in a hen-coop, a miracle of marbles and mosaics—the Duomo of Orvieto!... No one who has ever seen the building can forget it, for it is like a great surprise; it startles and astounds one in the midst of the decay around it. Here, if anywhere in Umbria, the power of the Pope or of the Church was sealed on the rebellious souls of its inhabitants; here to commemorate a dubious miracle men made a dream in stone.[126]To describe its splendourswere in this small sketch a mere impertinence. But if we wish to see what is perhaps the finest bit of Gothic work in Italy, if we wish to learn the power of Signorelli’s painting, it is certain that we must come hither and study at Orvieto.
As we turned our back on the cathedral we wondered what it was about her people which had allowed them to foster such a mighty piece of purest art throughout a turbulent history. Certainly the popes had power in the city.[127]They made it a mighty church, they made for it an almost mightier well! When Clement VII. fled from Rome in 1527 he took refuge in Orvieto, and, haunted by the fear of drought in case of siege, conceived the extraordinary idea of building a colossal well, for which purpose he employed the same architect as Paul III. employed to build his fortress at Perugia.
Signorelli painted a picture of the Inferno for Orvieto, Sangallo built for it an Inferno in bricks! Feathery mosses, sombre ferns have grown across the inside walls of the greatpozzo(which was built on a scale to suit a train of ascending and descending elephants); they seemed to seethe like sulphurous smoke in the dark and fetid air and we hurried from it gladly into the rain of the street....
From Orvieto we went to Chiusi. The rain wentwith us too, and of the town itself we saw but little, only all around us in the dense woods, in the silent soaking air of night, the nightingales were singing their piercing penetrating songs of love and May. The air was full of the strong sweet voices and of the scent of growing leaves, of privet, and wet earth. Chiusi is a centre of interest to students of Etruscan history, and although the little town exports its treasures to every museum in Europe its own is full of beauties still. We lingered long among them, fascinated by the goblin birds which are perched upon the vases and the pent roof of the tombs, fascinated by the excellence and the variety of the greater part of all the objects in the cases. The rain poured pitilessly upon the streets of Chiusi; it swept in sheets across the lake and over the towers of Montepulciano, and we abandoned all hopes of going to the tombs themselves and drove away across the marshes and up the wooded hills to Città della Pieve.[128]
... “j’étais tout de même persuadé que Città della Pieve reste la ville la plus merveilleuse de l’Ombrie,” says M. Broussole; and we ourselves in many ways agreed with him. The charm of the town consists firstly, in its situation, and secondly, in its association. It commands wide views northwards over the lakes of Chiusi and of Trasimene, and southwards towards Rome. The hill on which it stands is densely wooded, there is perpetual peace in its streets, it is the birth-place of Pietro Peruginoand contains some faint fair bits of the master’s later work. All day we wandered through the town, and when the evening came we found ourselves at service in the church of Santa Maria dei Servi.
It was May, the month of Mary. The people from the town came pouring in for benediction. They were nearly all of them very poor people, the men haggard with perpetual labour in the fields,[129]quiet and eager even when very old; the girls fair, slim, colourless, their shawls too well defining the slender slope of their thin shoulders; the children brown and fascinating, and the older women lost in prayer. (We have noticed that the veriest hags in Umbria seem to pray as though they fully realised the sins of their forefathers, and felt the present generation needed all their prayers.) Peace and poverty were the two things which were stamped most clearly on the faces of the congregation. The priests themselves looked poor and worn, shorn of their fat homes and privileges. There were not many candles on the altar and these they lighted slowly one by one. Then they begun to sing a long low wailing chaunt in praise of Mary.
It had thundered and rained since morning. The day died out in an orange glow which filtered through the hedges on the road outside and fell through the door of the church, gilding, as though with the softness of a vision, the groups of tired people. It rested with a wonderful radiance on the faded fresco above the chapel where we sat.[130]
In all the country round, it would have been difficult to find a scene more steeped in the spirit of pastoral Umbria than this one: the half-ruined church, the graceful tired people, the thin priests, and the faded fresco of Perugino; the whole saved from squalor by the splendour of the sunlight on the land outside the door.
We opened a book which we had carried with us on our journey and read the following lines:
“Oh! qui nous délivrera du mal de science! N’est-ce point folie d’avoir étouffé à grand peine tous les meilleurs instincts de notre être, pour obéir à la mode du jour et nous faire une âme critique! Adieu les beaux enthousiasmes! On n’ose plus aimer la vérité d’aujourd’hui depuis qu’on ne sait jamais qu’elle sera celle de demain! Il y, a des erreurs dont on ne peut se consoler. Quelle pitié de s’être prosterné tant de fois avec toutes les tendresses de son âme croyante devant un escalier vermoulu que des moines trompeurs exhibaient depuis des siècles comme ayant abrité la sainte pénitence d’un saint Alexis qui n’a jamais existé! Ne donnons plus jamais notre cœur à la vérité! Promenons sur les choses et les hommes l’eternel sourire de notre indifférence moqueuse. C’est là qu’ est le plaisir et le charme de la saine critique. Tout sera parfait quand les histoires commenceront et finiront par ce gai refrainChi lo sa.”[131]
“Oh! qui nous délivrera du mal de science! N’est-ce point folie d’avoir étouffé à grand peine tous les meilleurs instincts de notre être, pour obéir à la mode du jour et nous faire une âme critique! Adieu les beaux enthousiasmes! On n’ose plus aimer la vérité d’aujourd’hui depuis qu’on ne sait jamais qu’elle sera celle de demain! Il y, a des erreurs dont on ne peut se consoler. Quelle pitié de s’être prosterné tant de fois avec toutes les tendresses de son âme croyante devant un escalier vermoulu que des moines trompeurs exhibaient depuis des siècles comme ayant abrité la sainte pénitence d’un saint Alexis qui n’a jamais existé! Ne donnons plus jamais notre cœur à la vérité! Promenons sur les choses et les hommes l’eternel sourire de notre indifférence moqueuse. C’est là qu’ est le plaisir et le charme de la saine critique. Tout sera parfait quand les histoires commenceront et finiront par ce gai refrainChi lo sa.”[131]
* * * * * * * *
Chi lo sa.—The words brought up before our eyes a host of images: hedges and fields, woods and plains, green with the green of the May-time: white roads and poppy fields, the oak woods under Trevi, the ilexgroves of Spoleto, the long low lines of shining Trasimene, the marshy shores of Chiusi; and still more fair and more romantic, the cool green stream of the Clitumnus flowing beneath the pagan temple of a Roman river god.... That was the vision we had learned to love and know, with no attempt to criticise, and it was all composed of natural things. Dimly in the past we saw another vision: our study at Perugia. Piles and piles of manuscripts were there; books and maps, and guides, pamphlets, chronicles and histories—the records of men’s doings, one and all.
What about all this history, these interminable records of building and of quarrelling, of burying and strife? What in fact about all these Perugian P’s:—Persecuzione,Protezione,Processione; Popes, people, painters, andPriori? What had all these persons done to touch or trammel permanently the eternal smile of Umbrian nature through which we had been passing? Surely there were lovers who, amongst the savage bands of men who skirmished down the hill across the plains in order to insult or to offend their neighbours, stopped to snatch a white rose from the hedges where they grew in thousands? And there were women, young and pure and peaceful, ignorant of the Pope, indifferent to the Baglioni, who waited for them in their homes—women with the faces of Bonfigli’s angels, Bonfigli’s roses, maybe, twisted in their hair?...
With dim delight we realised that whatever the doings of the past may have been in Umbria as elsewhere, the microscopic scratches made by him through centuries upon the calm smooth breast of Nature have now all turned to a delicate adornment. The war and the strife, the hurrying and skurrying to power have vanished utterly. Man’s work is there: wonderful little cities of men made one with Naturenow; frescoes fading into death around the quiet altars of forgotten churches, fortresses and wells and city walls, bridges and the tombs of vanished nations; new buildings rising here and there upon the old, new people praying or parading, where the old had fought and prayed. But above them all the balm of sun and rain, of rivers, lakes and water-courses doing their work.
* * * * * * * *
As the twilight fell we left the church. Early the following morning we turned our faces northward on Perugia, but took a last long look at Perugino’s altar-piece in the church of the Disciplinati. Faint golds, faint greens, a quiet landscape, with low hills falling peacefully on a low stretch of valley. No harsh shadows, no high lights, the shepherds crossing down the paths behind their browsing sheep. The Virgin, a type of purest girlhood with just enough of the woman in the way she holds the Child to show it is her own; young men, for kings, with angel faces, and the smile of saints; no touch of passion, no glimmer of pain ... that was the sense of the picture.
As we looked at it the people from the town came in to see it too, the baker and the smith, the driver and the local painter. “You see,” said the smith, “it is a very beautiful thing this picture of ours; and when we hear it is uncovered we come to see it too. We particularly like that white dog in the background, and the shepherds are exactly like the life. We often come to look at it—how should we do otherwise?”
The smith was tall and slim and very gentle. His face was like that of the youthful king who holds the chalice in Pietro’s fresco, it merely lacked the affectation, and his perfectly simple comments seemed to us more genuine and impressive than many books of critics. We listened to them gladly, but as we turned our faceshomewards, we remembered certain other subtle and delightful phrases written by Alinda Brunamonti upon a work of Perugino. With these calm words we close a book which opened with the clash of swords and the conflicts of the Umbrian people:
“Sorrow does not disturb serenity; pain is at enmity with joy but not with peace. This Christian law is incarnated within our art. Peace and not joy is in her idylls; peace in the landscapes which are so utterly our own, and so serenely beautiful. How often—even whilst my vision wandered into the infinitude of sky behind our blue green hills, and further again beyond the outposts of the Apennines, and further still away into the depths of the azure-laden air—have I not said unto myself; ‘This vision surely is of an insuperable loveliness! How therefore could our artists fail to be above all thingsidealwhen Nature of herself had trained them in schools of such an exquisite perfection?’ ”
{250kb}{1.4mb}PLAN OF PERUGIA
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