Piacenza: Pordenone and St. Columban

 

 

 

At Piacenza's S. Maria di Campagna, Edward Hutton found a veritable shrine to Pordenone, the great Renaissance master. Then, he told the story of S. Roch, "one of the true patrons and benefactors of Piacenza." Finally, he took a short but arduous trip to nearby Bobbio to see the famous Abbey associated with S. Columban. 

 

Pordenone:

The younger contemporary of Lotto, always impetuous, full of aristocratic prejudices and worldly, was his complete opposite both in his life and in his art. Born at Pordenone in 1483, he died at Ferrara in 1539. He has been compared with Rubens, both on account of the vivacity of his temperament, and his love of colossal and well-developed forms. But as Morelli rightly reminds us, while the Fleming was prolific, prudent and calculating, the Italian was “passionate, excitable, ill-regulated and swayed by pride and ambition.” It is certain that he never attained the position of ease and luxury which Rubens won, but at the same time he never sunk into conventionality. “Original, highly gifted at times, even strikingly grand, he at one period sought, not unsuccessfully, to rival Titian.” His great strength lay in fresco painting, and his most interesting frescoes are, I think, these in Piacenza; at any rate they are more accessible than those near Conegliano and those at Treviso.

We see something of his gifts in the curious figure of S. Augustine by the entrance, and more in that splendid Adoration of the Magi in the first chapel on the north side of the church, in the Nativity in the lunette, and on the wall the birth of the Blessed Virgin, and above it the Flight into Egypt; and again in the Chapel of S. Catherine, which he entirely painted, even the altarpiece of the Marriage of S. Catherine being from his hand. But what are we to say of those marvellous Prophets and Sibyls on the cupola, but that there fresco painting actually passes into a kind of glorious music, into movement, colour and light.

 

Hard to see as these works are, badly as they have been treated, they remain masterpieces that we come back to again and again, that return to the mind when one is far away, as indeed do all his admirable works in this church. Piacenza is to be loved for them; and because of them we are not too sorrowful that the church of S. Sisto here no longer holds that “Sistine” Madonna which Raphael painted for it in 1515, and which was sold in 1753 for 20,000 ducats to the King of Poland, who was also Elector of Saxony, and which remains in Dresden….

 

Whatever else one does at Piacenza, one should not omit to visit that most famous shrine of a great British or rather Irish saint at the old and splendid Abbey of Bobbio….

But what the reader may ask, is Bobbio, and why should one go there? After all, the British Isles are full of forgotten shrines of early British saints and no one marks them; indeed, these same early British saints are more utterly neglected and forgotten than any other sort of beings. All the same, if you care anything for holiness, if you care at all for great achievement, if you have any reverence for learning, and the old great masters of letters, you must go to Bobbio, for there S. Columban had his home and thence “all the palimpsests known in the world have emerged.” I wish in three words, I could make known to you this Irishman who was as it were S. Benedict and S. Francis and S. Bernard all in one. I wish in three hundred words, or even in three thousand, I could tell you the man he was, and the great Abbot and leader, and above all the great Saint….

 

That Bobbio which he had founded became the most famous and the most intellectual of the monasteries of Italy; it was the hope of the seventh century, and may be said to have achieved as much in the salvation of Europe as any other place whatsoever. When that was accomplished in the eleventh century it began to decline, later its precious library was distributed, and in the seventeenth century it was but a shadow of itself….

 

Yet Bobbio is a place to linger in, to remember our Saint, and to search out the mountains as he did, and stray about the woods where the dawn is all yours and the sunset and the night, and where one day telleth another of the ancient glory of God.

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 252-261. 

Parma and Correggio

For some reason that he could not fully explain, Parma was one of the few little cities in Italy that he "had never been able to love." Still there was the "Duomo in its noble piazza," and the magnificent work of Correggio. 

 

 

The church is a cruciform building under an open octagon surmounted by a dome; the choir is raised above a crypt, and from the outside the arcaded apse is, I think, its most beautiful feature. But the church as seen from the street is arcaded everywhere: on the façade we have a triple columnar gallery; each which ends with a quadrilateral, itself arcaded, to which is added a semicircular apse again arcaded. Nothing more noble, rich and charming can be imagined. …

The great spectacle of the church, however, is of course the overwhelming frescoes of Correggio in the dome, which everyone who comes at all to Parma comes to see. For myself, they are beyond anything else to be found in Parma, and indeed among the most astonishing things in all Lombardy. 

 

Correggio’s first frescoes had been painted  for the Camera di S. Paulo, fortunate and lovely works, and later he had decorated the cupola of S. Giovanni Evangelista. It was therefore with a full knowledge of his work that in 1522 he began to cover the dome of the Cathedral with these frescoes of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, to whom the church was dedicated, while below stand the Apostles and the four patron saints of Parma.

 

Nothing else, I suppose, in European art has quite the sense we find here, the sense of flight. Madonna caught up from death, from the earth and all earthly things, is borne in an ecstasy, her arms stretching open wide, by a glad crowd of angels and cherubs, one of whom, laughing for joy, nestles in her bosom, into the heaven of heavens, a vast dome of light, built of angels, circle after circle, up to the brightness which is the smile of God. And out of that dazzling firmament one peerless archangel, Gabriel, god’s messenger, has hurled him down, trembling for joy, to meet her and welcome her, the Queen of all. Nothing else in Europe, I think, expressed so fully and so unreservedly that sense of flight—the eagerness, the joy, and the confident, radiant power of flight—as does this matchless fresco. It is impossible to look upon it without emotion or to doubt for a moment that the painter had seen a vision. One simply disregards the painter’s foibles and weaknesses; the thing is a rhapsody more wonderful than a Magnificat by Marenzio, almost inarticulate, if you like, for joy; a musical rapture that is beyond music, hat is the expression once and for all of the highest religious emotion. And to those who would criticize it, I would give the reply Titian, who had also painted an Assumption, gave; “Turn it upside down and fill it with gold, and you will still come short of its proper price.” It has been tended with careless hands, and it is to-day but a wreck of what it once was. Yet in colour still, as in gesture and delight, it remains something beyond the power of words to express, something that never was in the world or is here in no satisfying quantity.

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 273-274. 

Piacenza

When Edward Hutton crossed the Po river to get to Piacenza, he was no longer in Lombardy proper. As usual he discussed the history of the city, part of the famed Duchy of Parma, but noted that the most famous thing in the city was its Piazza de' Cavalli.

It is but twenty-two miles, less than an hour’s journey in the train from Lodi, through Caesale Pusterlengo and Codegno, and so across the Po for the first time in our journey, into Piacenza, an old and a famous city of the Romans. Even though one comes by train that crossing of the Po impresses itself upon the mind, while by road the passage is never to be forgotten, for you make it by a bridge of boats, with the swirling, cruel river within a few feet of you, and horribly strong and overwhelming. And it is well that this should be so; for, by crossing the Po, we leave Lombardy proper and come into that part of the new province of Emilia, which, since the sixteenth century, has been known as the Duchy of Parma, over which ruled the House of Farnese. …

 

Piacenza can never claim to be, I think, one of the most beautiful cities of Lombardy, yet it is one of the most picturesque by reason of its colouring and its vast, empty piazzas, churches and palaces, the beautiful vistas of its streets and the sense of space and bigness everywhere.

 

The most famous thing in it is its great Piazza—Piazza de’ Cavalli—which seems so large, so romantic and so like something on the stage, or in a dream, with its magnificent Palazzo del Comune thrust out into it on one side, the modern Palazzo delle Preture on another, the weirdly uncompromising façade of S. Francesco on a third, and everywhere long vistas of streets opening out of it on all sides, and at every angle and corner. Nor is this all. The Palazzo del Comune is perhaps the finest palace of the sort in Italy: yet how much its effect here in this Piazza is enlarged  and added to by the great bronze equestrian statues which rear before the great façade—“insignificant men, exaggerated horses, flying drapery”—yes, as baroque as you please, but splendid here, both in gesture and in colour—vivid green against the terra-cotta—and placed there by a master. 

 

Nothing in Piacenza is half so well worth seeing as this Piazza seemed to me to be on an autumn evening after rain. It then literally is a vision that slowly vanishes away in the twilight, from glory down to glory into the blue night: and this once seen can never be forgotten. But when we return in the morning sunlight, though the Piazza still remains magnificent, it is no longer a vision : all its poor details stand out in the harsh glitter of light, that nevertheless, I think, alone can reunite us with those affected equestrian statues of the dukes Alessandro and Ranuccio Farnese, seventeenth century work from Tuscany, all but the colour of which and gesture of which is veiled by the evening. …

 

From the ridiculous statues of the Farnese we turn to the noble Palazzo del Comune. This was built when Piacenza was a free city. It dates from 1281, and is one of the earliest and noblest Gothic buildings in Italy. Below is an open arcade, in which pillars of marble, supporting pointed arches, support the palace proper, consisting of brick with six round-arched windows of terra-cotta, and over all a marble cornice and battlements, with a tower at the angles.

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 243-250. 

Crema

   

 

 

Edward Hutton described Crema as "a little place, no one goes there" even though it was easy to go from Cremona there and back by train in a day. He gave a brief description of the Cathedral, "no church more beautiful in all Lombardy," but devoted more attention to a church outside the walls.*

When one does pluck up courage to leave Cremona at last, to forgo quietness for the noise of the railway, and the sunshine and delight of that exquisite town for the chances of travel, it must, of course, be for Crema that one sets out—Crema that has almost no history worth knowing, but remains one of the dearest and most hidden places in all this wide and beautiful Lombard country.

 

I often wonder now I am set down to write about Lombardy, as I did when I made my way along the Lombard roads, whether we who go our ways up and down from city to city, from church to church, from one building to another, ever really are aware how beautiful a countryside Lombardy is under its wide incomparable sky, half lost in its own vastness…. But Lombardy is hard to see, difficult to find out and impossible to possess oneself of, without much fatigue, weariness, mud and dust. The roads are all endless there, the cities always far away, and often when they are but market towns, worse than nothing—places from which one hurries away in the first train that comes by, places that one tries to forget…. But the country: I think, indeed, no one ever sees that in the great plain. It is too big, too vague, too empty to allure us from the security and curiosity of the towns; yet it is a background full of peace to all those peaceful and lovely places: Cremona in the green meadows, Mantua amid the quietness of the lagoons, and last but not least Crema, where the white oxen gather in the streets at evening, drawing their great creaking carts laden with all the wealth of the purple vintage that shall presently, by the winepress, stain the streets and perfume the whole city. …

 

If there is little for the mere tourist in the streets of Crema…there is undoubtedly a church without her walls that will astonish him. I mean the round church of S. Maria della Croce, which is rather polygonal than round after all, and built of brick in the true Renaissance manner, and reminds one of nothing so much as of that heavenly building Raphael saw in the background of his picture in the Brera. It is a work by Giovanni Battagio of Lodi, a disciple of Bramante’s. I say it reminds one of nothing so much as of Raphael’s there in his picture of the Sposalizio. Well, it has just the tranquillity, the lightness, and the graceful dignity of that visionary building and it stands under its clustered domes and cupolas really like something in a dream, something not made with hands, that would actually be impossible  in any other land but this. And if it be true, as Pater has told us, that “all art aspires toward the condition of music,” here, I think, for once it has been completely successful. For it is as though suddenly as we listened. Some Magnificat by Palestrina or Marenzio had taken visible shape and “materialized itself,” as we say, before our eyes in a temple not made with hands, in which it might please the Queen of the angels a little to abide our coming.

Raphael: Sposalizio. Brera, Milan

 

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*There is no church more beautiful in all Lombardy than the cathedral of Crema…it is a thing to love and be proud of, and the people of Crema justly hold it high in their affections, for it is not only beautiful and full of daring, it is also unique: there is nothing like it in all the world.

 

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 234-237.

Cremona Center

 

 Edward Hutton's visit to Cremona started at the City Center, moved on to see a beautiful painting by Perugino, and ended with an appreciation of the renowned violin makers of the city.

All roads in Cremona lead at last to the centre of the city, the beautiful Piazza del Duomo, about which are grouped the great buildings which lend to Cremona her special charm and character: the Cathedral and Baptistry, the Torrazzo and the Palazzo Comunale opposite to them. Let us begin with the Cathedral which is one of the most remarkable buildings in Lombardy. 

 

The Cathedral of S. Maria Assunta in Cremona, like the cathedrals of Modena, Parma, and Piacenza, with which it should be compared, is a magnificent and austere basilica in the Lombard style, flanked by the Torrazzo, the noblest tower in all this country….This church was undoubtedly a pure basilica, the nave being vaulted, but not the aisles, which were added later; the northern about 1288, the southern later still; the vaults we see are of the fourteenth century…. 

 

The façade of the church, one of the most striking anywhere to be seen, was in its origins of pure Lombard style, such as we see in the intarsias of the choir, or on medals conserved in the Museo Civico. But it was divided into three compartments corresponding to the three naves, the loggia to the left, under the Torrazzo, being added in the end of the fifteenth century from the design of Lorenzo Trutti. It was at this time that the façade of the cathedral was largely modified by Alberto Severo di Carrara, who, being a Tuscan, with little understanding of the Lombard style, spoilt it as a work in that manner, but made of it the picturesque thing we see.

 

All one’s time in Cremona seems to be spent in and about the Piazza and the Cathedral, and rightly so. For whether you come there by day or by night, at dawn when the first light catches the lovely lantern of the Torrazzo, or at evening when the whole city resounds and thrills to the ringing of the Ave Maria, there is nothing at once  so spacious and ordered and as picturesquely delightful as this square, in which the whole story of old Cremona seems to have been gathered and to live….

 

But the most delightful and simple shrine left to us in Cremona is to be found in the fourteenth-century Church of S. Agostino, a building of rosy brick with a grass grown piazza before it. Here, in the first chapel on the right, is a Pieta by Giolio Campi, and on the last chapel but one on the same side of the church a miracle indeed, a Madonna and Child with S. James and S. Augustine painted in 1494 by Pietro Perugino. On the throne is inscribed: PETRUS PERVSISVS PINXIT MCCCC LXXXXIIII. Crowe and Cavalcaselle believe this picture to have been painted in Florence, but there is just a chance that the Umbrian master may have painted it in Cremona itself, for in 1494 he was in Venice, as we know, and Cremona is but a little way thence. The picture is one of great beauty. Within one of the arches of the Palazzo Comunale, as it were, Madonna sits enthroned, perhaps before her own beautiful Cathedral, her divine Child in her lap. On either side stand S. James and S. Augustine, S. James with a pen in his hand and a book, S. Augustine with Crozier and mitre. Nothing more surprising and more welcome is to be seen in all this country....

 It is impossible to leave Cremona without reminding oneself what an harmonious and musical city it is; that it is the birthplace of the Amati, the great Stradivarius and of Guarnerius, who here made their violins, the necks of which were like the necks of rare and lovely birds, and which even to-day are softer and sweeter than any other instruments. *

 

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*Note: here is a link to a street version of "Winter" from Vivaldi's Four Seasons. It is not played on a Stradivarius but still fine. 

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 225-233. 

Cremona

Leaving Mantua, Hutton took the road to Cremona. On the way to that "beautiful and harmonious city," he stopped at the unique  shrine of S. Maria delle Grazie.

 

About three and a half miles from Mantua stands one of the most astonishing pilgrimage churches in all Italy. S. Maria delle Grazie was first built in 1399 by Francesco Gonzaga, who wished to render thanks to the Madonna for having freed the city of Mantua from the plague…. In 1419 the place was enlarged and became one of the most important religious houses in Lombardy. The whole place is a shrine of the Madonna, full of every sort of votive offering, from cannon balls that fell harmless into Mantua in the famous siege of 1322…to piles of crutches, shoes, wax arms, and legs, silver hearts and the usual litter of a shrine. More amazing is it that  not so much the worshipped as the worshipper is represented here in effigy. For, on coming into the church, you find yourself in an avenue of figures, life-size, and dressed in every sort of costume, in niches along the walls. These are they whom the Madonna has heard and answered here in the Church of the Graces. Among these favored petitioners we find figures of Pope Pius II.,  the Emperor Charles V, and the pillager of Rome, the Constable Bourbon, whom Cellini swears he shot. Beneath each figure the story of his petition is told in rude verse, evidently of local manufacture. Here, amid all this amazement, lie the princes of the House of Gonzaga: and among them the pattern of courtiers, Baldassare Castiglione, the author of Il Cortigiano, which in those happier days was as eagerly read in the best and most cultured society throughout Europe as the French novel is on the Continent, or the Daily Mail newspaper in England to-day. For the tomb of this man, who was literally the first gentleman in Europe, Bembo composed this epitaph, for the body of Castiglione had been brought at his own desire all the way from Toledo, where he died, in order that it might be laid here on the tomb of his young wife.[220]

 

Non ego nunc vivo, quae in ambiguo reliquit, utrum

Corpore namquae  tuo fate meum abstulerunt;

Sed vitam, tumulo cum tecum condar in isto,

Jungenturque tuis ossibus ossa mea. ***

 

I can never make up my mind which is the most beautiful city in Lombardy, whether it be Bergamo, Mantua or Cremona, but I know that I love Cremona best. Picture to yourself a city like a pale rose growing in the midst of the great green plain, that, when the mulberry flowers, is all a sea of white blossom. You enter this city and find it silent, but not forlorn, smiling through the grass grown in its beautiful great Piazza and the wide streets which the sun fills with gold; the great palaces are often deserted, the tall and beautiful towers that here and there rise to watch the plain are crumbling and make no sign, for Cremona is very old, the oldest Roman town in all the plain, and, in truth, here in Cisalpine Gaul she seems in her nobility like a stranger, some old centurion still on guard amid the dykes and the endless ways, in the service of the Senate and the Roman people.

 

   *** Note: Below is a rough translation from Google.

 

I am not living now, which has left me in doubt whether

For with your body they took away my destiny;

But life, I will build a grave with you in this,

And my bones shall be joined to your bones.

 

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 220-221.

 

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Mantua and Isabella d'Este

  

Edward Hutton devoted a chapter to Mantua, "forlorn upon her lakes," but I would just single out his comments on Isabella d'Este, Marchioness of Mantua, the famed Renaissance art patron and collector.

 

By far the largest and by far the most interesting building in the Piazza is the vast Reggia or Palazzo Ducale, which stretches away from here to the Lago Superiore….The façade, with its portal, is in the Gothic style, but within we find the Renaissance, in the splendid apartments of Isabella d’ Este, which have largely escaped the vandalism of the Austrians… We see what the extraordinary barbarism of these foreigners achieved almost at once on entering the Reggia. For there on the ground-floor only the so-called Scalcheria remains, with its pagan hunting scenes and grotesques by Giulio Romano, of all the Appartamento della Grotta which that extraordinary craftsman decorated for Isabella. Here, ‘in the fair Cortile della Grotta, with its slender marble columns and pavement of majolica tiles, each with a separate device and meaning,” as Bembo described it to the Duchess of Urbino, Isabella had gathered all her treasures of sculpture and painting. Here were the grisailles of Mantegna, as well as his Parnassus, one of the glories of the Louvre to-day. Here were the allegories of Correggio, the works of Costa, the old court painter, a Holy Family of Giovanni Bellini, a Romance by Dosso Dossi, and some wonderful Titians, more than one Holy Family and some marvellous portraits. Here were the antique sculptures that Isabella had collected with so much pains, and the putto which Michelangelo had carved and Cesare Borgia had sent her. Nor was this all. For in the Grotta Isabella had placed the alabaster organ which Castiglione had sent her from Rome, cases of Murano glass chosen by Leonardo from the collection of Lorenzo de Medici, mirrors of crystal, cabinets of porphyry and lapis lazuli, and lutes inlaid with ivory, ebony and mother-of-pearl, and viols by Lorenzo da Pavia.

 

Here too, was her library, the precious manuscripts we shall never see, Aldines tall and clean and new from the press, French and Spanish romances, an illuminated Boccaccio, the very book of verses Petrarch had left behind him.

From the Scalcheria one is led up a great seventeenth century staircase to the upper floor, and so through the vast series of state apartments. How mysteriously lovely they are in the falling light of late afternoon! One feels like a ghost among ghosts, and expects at every moment the clouded mirrors to give up some vision of the beauty they have reflected and cannot altogether have lost. … And if this is so in all these great shadowy rooms with their fading mirrors, their emptiness and silence, it is a feeling almost impossible to describe that assails one in the Appartamento del Paradiso, those four little rooms that were Isabella’s own, with their early Renaissance decoration, the work of her time, still fit to be seen. How graceful they are, and since she loved them and spoke of them so much and always with a smile, how lovely they appear? They were her home, the most present thing and perhaps the dearest in all that long and vital existence…. How often did she stand, I wonder, in that inner room looking over the garden and the lake, gay enough then, so hopeless now, and waiting there perhaps for the cool evening, question herself of this and of that and of her thoughts about it all. They are all gone into that deep pool where she watched one evening when the moon shone, the petals of her lilies heavy with perfume, falling and sinking one by one, till one of her dwarfs called her to play, and she passed through the Hall of the Mirrors to watch the masques in the great room where hung Mantegna’s cartoons for the triumph of Julius Caesar, and to greet her guests. But later, as we see, that assurance was eclipsed, and in another room we read the very secret of the indecision of her heart graven everywhere, “Forse che Si, Forse che No,” many times. ***

 

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*** Maybe Yes, Maybe No.   

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 213-215.