Edward Hutton: Volterra

Edward Hutton's Siena and Southern Tuscany was published in 1910, over a hundred years ago. Walking from S. Gimignano to Volterra he encountered what he called "traveller's fear" before arriving at the gate of that ancient and storied city. Most of the chapter on Volterra deals with its long history.

 

The road for Volterra—for it was thither I was bound one fine October morning at dawn—descends from S. Gimignano into the valley, and climbing again through that quiet and delicate country that marks all the Val d’Elsa, joins the high road from Colle…Thence the way lies over vast and barren watersheds, across an uplifted wilderness of sterile clay hills, past blue-grey chasms of volcanic tufa, till at evening “lordly Volterra” rears itself up suddenly against the sky, haggard with loneliness and age like the dreadful spirit of this strange country so full of a sinister desolation. No traveler can, I think, approach this outraged stronghold of old time without a certain hesitation, a certain apprehension and anxiety. The way is difficult, precipitous, and threatening, full of dangers that cannot be named or realized; and long ere you climb the last great hill into the city an eerie dread has seized your heart. As far as the eye can reach that battered and tortured world rolls away in billow after billow of grey earth scantily covered with a thin dead herbiage that seems to have even burned with fire. On either side the way vast cliffs rise over immense crevices seamed and tortured into the shapes of raped and ruined cities: yonder a dreadful tower set with broken turrets totters on the edge of sheer nothing; here a tremendous gate leads into darkness, there a breached wall yawns over an abyss. If there is such a thing as traveller’s fear, it is here you will meet it, it is here it will make your heart a prize. As for me, I was horribly afraid, nor would any prayer I know bring my soul back into my keeping.

And if the way is so full of fear, what of that lofty city that stands at the high summit of that narrow road winding between the precipices? It too is a city of dread—a city of bitterness, outraged and very old. Seven hundred years before the fall of Troy it had already suffered siege. Surrounded in those days by walls forty feet high, 12 feet thick, and eight thousand yards in circumference, that have worn out three civilizations, and still in part remain, Volterra was one of the great cities of the Etruscan League. Like vast fortresses her gates were held impregnable. Enemy after enemy, army after army broke against those tremendous bastions; she scattered them, and they were lost in the desolation in which she is still entrenched. From the lower valley of the Arno to the forgotten citadel of “sea-girt Populonia,” which the Maremma has destroyed, she reigned supreme.... (39-40)

 

Encamped within these ruins he will find the debris of more than one later civilization—Roman, Medieval, and Renaissance—cheek by jowl with the fugitive and impermanent work of to-day. Still enthroned and guarded by the wall of the Etruscans, and entered by their gate, the shrunken medieval city of Volterra waits for him among the ruins of four different ages, like some herb hidden in a crevice of the temples of Karnak. (41)

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, New York, 1910.  

Edward Hutton: S. Gimignano

 

Edward Hutton's tour of  southern Tuscany continued with S. Gimignano, the hill town still famous for its many towers. 

If we would know what a Tuscan hill town was like in the fourteenth century, we must go on foot or by carriage to S. Gimignano delle belle Torri, on the hills on the other side of the Elsa. There it is true, we shall find no remembrance of Boccaccio, but we shall be treading in the footsteps of Dante, and we shall find there, too, the memory of one of those little saints who once made sweet our world, but who, alas! Come no more down the long valleys at evening, singing of the love of God. Nevertheless, there are few refuges in all of Tuscany more secure from the rampages of our time that S. Gimignano.

 

To reach this wonder, to behold this banner of a lost cause, still valiant upon the hills, that is a good way which leaves Certaldo by crossing the river, and so climbs over the hills till the city “of the beautiful towers” rises before you like a vision, and you come at last, as to a forgotten shrine, into her quiet and shadowy gates….

 

The road from Certaldo, which was the way I took, is as lovely as any in the world. You climb hill after hill between the olives and the vines, where the grain and the grapes grow together. Often you descend into delicious valleys, where the vineyards are still with summer, and the silence is only broken by the faraway voice of some peasant singing stornelli; often, too, you look back on Val d’Elsa, where Certaldo smiles on its steep hill over the river, till suddenly at a turning of the way S. Gimignano rises before you on a lonely hill-top, covered with the silver of the olives, the gold of the corn, the green mantle of the vines, like a city out of a missal, crowned with her trophy of thirteen towers….

 

This little valiant town, so lonely on the hills, was once the centre of a vigorous life, civil and religious, even intellectual and artistic. It produced and employed painters; a poet was born here, little S. Fina stood for it among the blessed in heaven. Now the place is less than nothing, a curiosity for strangers; it has no life of its own, and is incapable of producing anything but a few labourers for the fields. As you pass through its narrow ways and look on the monuments of the Middle Age and the Renaissance, you find everything deserted and a cruel poverty the only tyrant left. Some virtue is gone out of it. Why?... (31)

 

S. Fina
Benozzo Gozzoli

She is poor, and her ways are quiet: how hospitable is her inn! She has the inevitable humility of those who have given up the struggle for pre-eminence, the inevitable grace of all those who have learned how to wait in meditation. Indeed, I have not told one-half of her sweetness, nor numbered the half of her treasures, nor told of her country byways, nor altogether understood why I love her so. Yet this I know: she has nothing to do with machinery or the getting of wealth. Come and see. (38)

 

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Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, New York, 1910. 

Edward Hutton: Certaldo and Boccaccio

 Edward Hutton's chapter on Certaldo is mainly taken up with an extended account of the life of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), Certaldo's most famous resident. In 1909, a year before he published Siena and Southern Tuscany, Hutton had written a biography of Boccaccio, a writer famous for his own life as well as for his Decameron, a collection of stories told by men and women trying to escape the ravages of the plague.

 

Long before you come to Certaldo on its great hill over the narrowing valley of the Elsa, which in fact it holds and closes, the Castello shines before you, still very far off, a rugged cluster of houses and towers against the sky. When at last you find yourself on that great and beautiful road beside the river, at the foot of the beautiful hill, it is to discover a town very like Castel-Fiorentino in this at least, that the Castello, the walled and ancient town, is on the hill and the modern borgo in the plain. But as you soon realise, Certaldo is more splendid, more rugged, and more ancient than her sister, though, as you see her from the north, you have the worst view of her, her true splendor looking southward. 

 

Most of us who in the modern hurry stay here, perhaps for a few hours on our way to Siena or to Florence, come not for any ancient loveliness she may have kept for us, but for Boccaccio’s sake, for he died here in the ancient house of his family still to be seen in the Castello….

 

Boccaccio:

 

That great and heroic man who has entranced the whole world with his stories, who gave Homer back to us, and was the first defender of Dante Alighieri, the devoted friend of Petrarch, the lover of Fiammetta; who remained poor his whole life long for the sake of learning, and who indeed is the most human and the most modest and heroic spirit of the earliest Renaissance…. (13-14)

 

In his fiftieth year he began to regret the irresponsibility of his past life. On the threshold of old age, poor and alone, he thought to love God with the same enthusiasm with which he had loved woman. He was not capable of it; his whole life rose up to deny him that impassioned consolation….

 

Boccaccio’s days of creation were, however, over. He retired to Certaldo to the house of his ancestors, and there read without ceasing the works of antiquity, annotating as he read…

 

In addition to all his other reading Boccaccio had never ceased to study the “Divine Comedy,” nor did he till his death… *

 

In 1373 he was called from his retirement in Certaldo to lecture publicly on the “Divine Comedy” in Florence. He began to read on 23 October, 1373, in the church of S. Stefano alla Badia, and continued on each succeeding day that was not a festival. He had got so far as the sixtieth lezione, when he was taken ill and had to cease. This was no sudden disease; he had never really recovered from his “conversion.” Really ill, he retired to Certaldo, where, utterly miserable and suffering from his disease, but more from the ignorance of doctors, he groped about far from Petrarch, looking for more certainty. He had thought he might find it in the monastic life, and it was in a solitude almost as profound that he came to die at last on this hill in Val d’Elsa in the house of his ancestors—a magician, as was said, like Virgil or Ovid to the folk of Naples and Sulmona, knowing all the secrets of nature. He must often have passed slowly, because of failing health, up and down the picturesque streets of the old town, which holds as many sudden peeps as Assisi; and at sunset, perhaps he lingered by the gates as we do, for they are wonderfully placed for beauty. From his room he looked over a world as fair as any in Tuscany—a land of hills about a quiet valley where the olives are tossed to silver in the wind and the grapes are kissed by the sun into gold and purple, where the corn whispers between the vines; till for him, too, at last the grasshopper became a burden.

 

There, on 21 December, 1375, he died, and was buried, as he had desired above the quiet waters of the Elsa which puts all to sleep. In passing through the old streets of Certaldo to-day, it is part of our heritage to remember him. (24-25).

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 Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, New York, 1910. 

*Note: Click on this link to watch a seven minute video of Roberto Benigni, Italy's most famous modern comedian, reading the first canto of Dante's Divine Comedy. 

Edward Hutton: Castel Fiorentino

Edward Hutton devoted at least two books to Tuscany. We will deal with Florence and Northern Tuscany in a future series but today we turn to Siena and Southern Tuscany, published in 1910. He began his tour at Castle-Fiorentino.

 

Happy Castel-Fiorentino! She was able and content to till her fields always as she does today, to tend her vineyards, to sow the corn under the olives, and to gather it in with songs, while the armies of Germany, the companies of adventure, the gay chivalry of France thundered by to destruction. Is not her story, which will never be told, one of those which should console us most in a world so busy about resounding trifles? She has no history; but in her untold story the romance of Europe lies hid—the story of men like ourselves going up and down day by day about their business, laboring in the fields in a hard partnership with Nature, chafering in the market-place, rising at dawn, resting at midday, singing at evening, loving a little and weeping much—if we could but read it!

 

But if Castel-Fiorentino is without a history, if she never produced a great man or a great artist, she is by no means devoid of the consolation of beauty. She herself is as charming and picturesque as can be; her churches are spacious and full of light, and there, too, you may find many a picture of a rare and exquisite country grace that only her lovers have discovered. 

 

Among those churches was the Convent of S. Chiara.

 

To-day, however, the convent is in the occupation of the Osservanti. It was one of them— “a friar of orders grey,” who seemed, indeed, to have stepped out of the song, so jovial and fat was he—who, in answer to my call, came out of his siesta to show me the church. The church is delightful, filled with a country peace and scattered with sun and shade. Over an altar on the left I found one of those things I love best—a splendid Giotto-esque Crucifix into which the love and faith of the thirteenth century seem immediately to have passed….

 

The quiet beauty of the church, the eager chatter of Fra Lorenzo, caused me to linger here, and that was my good fortune. For just as I was about to leave, as I said farewell to Fra Lorenzo at the church door, a woman came towards us, and greeting the friar, at once knelt down on the threshold, just under the lintel of the door, and prepared herself to be churched. With her came two ragged urchins and a little black dog. In the great shady nave the children played with the dog, quite at home in the house of their Father, while Fra Lorenzo, excusing himself, went into the sacristy and brought forth a great taper, which he placed in the good woman’s hand, and a large book, all in Latin, out of which he proceeded to read some prayers. I cannot tell you what a charming and old world picture this made, recalling happier days. The children in the shadow playing with the little black dog; the good woman who had just brought forth a child kneeling in the sunshine holding her taper carefully, on the threshold of the church; Fra Lorenzo in his surplice, unctuous and sleek, reciting the Office—it was as though by some good fortune certain centuries had never happened and we were back in those scarcely remembered days when everything could be accounted for, when there was still a unity in Europe, and we accepted the love of God and the offices of the Church as matters of course. Only I seemed to be out of the picture. And so quietly I slipped away without so much as “thank you” to Fra Lorenzo, to whom I owed this consoling glimpse of life in Tuscany.

 

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Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, New York, 1910. Pp. 4-8. 

Edward Hutton's Rome: the Campagna

 

Edward Hutton ended his book on Rome with a chapter on the Campagna, the desolate countryside outside the hills of Rome. Here is his paean to the Campagna. I suspect that he would be shocked today by the belt-ways and urban sprawl that have overtaken what he called "the soul of Rome." I add some images from nineteenth century painters who saw the Campagna as Hutton saw it.

George Inness: View of the Campagna

Rome possesses nothing half so lovely, half so precious, half so venerable, as the Campagna, in which she lies like a ship in the midst of the sea, now just visible over the billows, now lost altogether in that vast solitude of which, for the most part, she is oblivious. My happiest hours during all my sojourn in Rome have been spent in the Campagna, at all hours of the day, at every season of the year.

 

The immense and universal thing which lies unregarded at the gates of the Eternal City is the one Roman thing that I have been able to love absolutely without reserve or any after thought. I loved it at first sight, and to leave it still brings tears to my eyes. And yet, I have felt no intimacy with it, as I have with the Umbrian valleys, and the moorlands, the hills and the sea of the west Country whence I am sprung. It is too vast and too silent for intimacy but it has my fear and love as God has them, because it is greater than I, and in some sort has produced me. It has, too, the indefinite beauty of all supernatural things. One may find there always all that is in one’s heart, and each will find what he brings and the reward of which he is worthy. It is too beautiful to praise and too mysterious, too holy, to explain or to describe…. For, as the sea is the secret of England, so the Campagna is the secret of Rome; it haunts the City, and the majesty and largeness of its silence are the springs of its immortality. Nor may you long escape it, for all the great ways lead to it at last, and it surges against every gate….

 

Corot: View of the Campagna

From wherever you first see it, it calls you instantly in its solemn immensity, its vast indwelling strength, its ruined splendor, across which the broken arches of the aqueducts stagger still, and the vague white roads, lined with empty and rifled tombs, wander aimlessly, losing themselves in the silence and vastness that only the mountains may contain. And it is the mountains which hem in the Campagna, the most beautiful mountains in the world.

 

Wherever you may go in Rome, after that first revelation, whatever you may see, before whatever shrines you may kneel, it is the Campagna which is in your heart, for you have discovered Rome, the soul of Rome…. 

 

It is this one comes to realise at last, as day after day, week after week, one passes along that ancient Appian Way, between the crumbling tombs. Here and there we may find them still, the likeness of our brother carved in relief, some thought of his about it all, a few Latin words, part of an inscription, half hidden with the grass and the flowers. And as night overtakes one on that marvelous road, when the splendor of sunset is faded, and the stars one by one have scattered the heavens with hope, our thoughts turn almost in self defence, in that solemn loneliness, from death to resurrection. In the immense silence that nothing may break our imagination sinks beneath the lonely majesty of that desert, littered with the monsters of old forgotten religions, full of the dead things of Paganism and Christianity, the bones of Saints, the mighty trunks of forgotten gods.

 

What more is there to come out of that vast grave, that marvelous solitude?

 

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Edward Hutton: Rome's Borghese Gallery

Edward Hutton's discussion of the Roman villas and their gardens included a tour of the Borghese Gallery and its wonderful art collection, the highlight of which was Titian's Sacred and Profane Love.***

But if the palaces are, in spite of their size and splendor, a little dull, a little lacking in interest and beauty, so that nowhere in Rome may we find one that moves us as the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena does, or as many of these wonderful buildings on the Grand Canal in Venice contrive to do, it is quite otherwise with the Villas. Rome is unique among the cities of the world in possessing them, and they are unique in their loveliness and charm. They have nothing in common with anything in England, but one might feel something of their charm if Hampton Court Palace with its gardens were suddenly to be found in the midst of London….

The Roman villa garden…has an air of the eighteenth century; it is full of silence. The cypresses are set thickly in a half-circle about a statue, or in long alley-ways that lead to a fountain; vista passes into vista, till you are led to lose yourself in the twilight of the bosco, in the midst of which you find yourself suddenly at the foot of a magical staircase of stone, wide and spacious and beautiful, and passing up it, you come at last to a little summer-house of marble, just above the tree-tops, and there, far below you, is Rome….

But of all these villas with their marvelous gardens which were once the glory of Rome, but few remain. Of these which are still left to us, perhaps the best known are the Villa Pamphili, the Villa Medici, and the Villa Borghese. The first is of an incomparable loveliness, the second of an incomparable mystery, the third is less rare, and of late has become one of the playgrounds of Rome, larger, and more spaciously beautiful but less fashionable than the Pincio. But in truth the Villa Borghese, with its gardens and park, is still one of the most enchanting things in the City… and then it adds to its other delights a treasure of art, a collection of pictures that is the finest in the City after that of the Vatican….

But the real glory of the gallery consists not only, or even chiefly, in the work of Raphael, but in three works by the greatest master of that or any other period, Titian, who is represented by three pictures, the first belonging to his youth, the others to his old age.

The Sacred and Profane Love, painted about 1512 for Niccolo Aurelio, Grand Chancellor of Venice, is the highest achievement of Titian’s art at the end of its Giorgionesque period…. In fact, the name it now bears, which has so puzzled the world, does not occur till the end of the eighteenth century, when it seems to have been given it by the Germans. For us, at least, it can have no authority, the subject of the picture being merely a moment of beauty, --a moment gone, but for Titian’s genius, while we try to apprehend it, in the golden summer heat, under the trees by a fountain of water….

But, after all, what we have come here to see is the Sacred and Profane Love, by Titian, and that will lead us, not from picture to picture in a sudden enthusiasm for painting, but most certainly back again into the gardens, where the world is so sleepily golden in the heat, and the shade so cool and grateful. There we shall linger till, from the far-away city, the Ave Mary rings from all the cupolas, and we must return down the long alleys in the softly fading light, stealing softly, half-reluctantly, out of the world of dreams back into the streets and the ways of man. 

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*** Note: Hutton rejected the accepted title of Titian's painting and saw the subject as "merely a moment of beauty." Almost a hundred years later, I stood in front of the famous painting and had an intuition that the two women were actually Mary Magdalen before and after her conversion. Research confirmed this intuition and my interpretation can be found on my website, MyGiorgione.



Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922. Pp. 327-335.

Edward Hutton: The Fountains of Rome

 

No one can visit Rome without falling in love with its fountains. In his chapter on the fountains, Edward Hutton traced their origins back to ancient Rome, described their destruction during the Dark Ages, and then their revival by the Papacy in the Renaissance. He then took his readers on a walking tour of his favorites.

Horace tells us somewhere that he is the friend of fountains, and, indeed, no true Roman whether of the ancient or the modern world, can ever have been without some sentiment for them, since, in fact, they are the joy of Rome, her voice, as it were, a pleasant and a joyful voice; for no city in Europe is so truly a city of running waters. All day long they waken in the heart some mystery of delight and refreshment; -- the slender jets of water wavering between the cypresses in the shadow, flashing in the sun, splashing among the statues on the cold marble. And their song in the cool, diaphanous mornings of spring is a song of life, of joy, of the brief joy of life…. 

 

 

In the fifteenth century the Popes of the Renaissance, wishing to return to her the leadership of the world, gave her back her waters, and suddenly, in a moment, as though by enchantment, she arose once more out of the wilderness and the ruins, healed and whole at the sound of that song. 

 

Often very early in those spring mornings which are so fair in Rome, or maybe on an autumn evening, under a moon great and golden as the sun, I have wandered through the city of fountains for the sake of their song. It begins with the strange artificial voice of Bernini’s Barcaccia in the Piazza di Spagna, where the Acqua Vergine falls humbly at the feet of Madonna, that gallery of war shooting forth from her guns, not death, but refreshment. Then, as I pass into the silence  up the beautiful Scala di Spagna, and turn towards the Pincio, presently, still far off, I hear the most beautiful voice in Rome, the single melody, languid and full of mystery, and all enchantment, of the fountain before the Villa Medici, where, under the primeval ilex, a single jet of water towers like some exquisite slender lily, to droop, to fall in unimagined loveliness into the brimming vase of marble, so admirably simple and in place under these sacred trees, before that lofty villa, which, in some sort, dominates the whole City, and whence one may look across the towers and domes to the Capitol, to S. Peter’s, to the Campagna stretching away to the sea.

 

No other fountain in Rome is at once so simple and so beautiful as this, nor is there another which commands so wide and so majestic a prospect. And yet, if one passes down the slope of the Pincio into the Piazza del Popolo, and so crosses the Ponte Margherita, and passes at last under the height of the Vatican, comes at last into the Piazza di S. Pietro, one finds there…two fountains, quite as beautiful in their way, though truly less simple, singing ever before the threshold of the shrine of the Apostle. Rising in the shape, as it were, of fleurs de lys, the water harmonises perfectly, not only with the fountains themselves, but with the beautiful piazza in which they are so marvelously placed, forming together with it the masterpiece of Bernini. 

 

                                              

We come to the Piazza Navona, where stands the most extraordinary, perhaps of all Bernini’s works, the brilliant but bizarre fountain with its obelisk and statues personifying the four great rivers of the world.

 

It is again to a work of Bernini we come, as, passing on through the City, we stand at last before the fountain of Trevi, which resembles the Acqua Paolina, and which may be heard above all the noise of the piazza. And it is fitting that, since Rome is the city of fountains, to make sure of one’s return to her, it should be necessary to make an offering, not at the grave of Romulus, nor at the shrine of s. Peter, but to the greatest and most famous of her fountains, for it is said, whoever, at the hour of departure, drinks a cup of the water of Trevi and pays for it, has not looked on Rome for the last time. ### 

  

Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922, pp. 318-323.

Edward Hutton: Aventine Hill Churches

Edward Hutton's description of Rome's Aventine Hill and its churches is typical of his unique mixture of history, art, religion, and folklore. On one of our visits to Rome we stayed at a small hotel in a lovely tree-lined neighborhood right around the block from the churches he described. One of the things he did not mention was the spectacular view of St. Peter's one gets by peering through the large keyhole in the gate of the headquarters of the Knights of Malta.

 

Of all the hills of Rome the Aventine alone, precipitous and almost uninhabited as it is, still impresses us with its own beauty and serenity. It is as though the ancient curse of the Patricians were still heavy upon it. Something certainly of those far-off days seems to linger even yet about its shadowy, deserted ways, among the gardens there, where in spring the almond trees are so strangely lovely and in summer the cicada wearies us with its song; where many an ancient church still counts the Ave Maria through the centuries, half-forgotten in a world of silence and flowers…. Later there were temples there, too, for the shadowy Aventine had always been, as was supposed, the abode of some deity…. ‘God is there,’ said the noisy Roman world, awed by the silence of the woods, and so the hill was crowned with temples, the most renowned and splendid being that of Diana, which stood on its very summit in the midst of a grove where that pale goddess seems to have been worshipped from the time of Servius Tullius to the time of Alaric the Goth.

 

As we pass today from S. Maria in Cosmedin, where the shadow of the Aventine mixes with that of the Palatine hill…we come presently between the long poderi walls to the very place sacred once to Diana, but now to a lesser virgin, S. Sabina, whose church stands in the ruins of the ancient temple…. (270-1)

 

What remains to us of ancient beauty, however, belongs to the doors of Cyprus wood, which are not only the most beautiful things in the church, but among the most precious remains of primitive Christian art. Carved in the fifth century, they are divided into twenty-six panels representing scenes from the Old and New Testaments, and though these are no longer in their proper order…they remain representative work of the fifth century, the time of the foundation of the church. There we see Elijah borne to heaven in the fiery chariot accompanied by an angel, like a Roman Victory. Then Pharoah crosses the Red Sea, which recalls the great horsemen, the treasures of Monte Cavallo; Christ is adored by the wise kings in Phrygian dress; S. Peter denies his Lord to a damsel like a Roman Empress…. (272-3)

 

Click on image to enlarge

But amid so many diverse memories we are like to forget S. Sabina altogether. And truly we know little about her. Converted, as it is said, by her Greek slave, Seraphia, she was one of Hadrian’s martyrs. She lies now with Seraphia in the Confession before the high altar, the two bodies having been brought hither from the catacombs of Alexandria. (273)

  Hutton liked to hear Mass at  S. Anselmo, a modern church, for the chant or plainsong of the Benedictine monks.

 

So on a Sunday morning in the marvelous Roman summer I would often pass from church to church on my way to hear Mass at S. Anselmo close by.

The great Benedictine College of S. Anselmo, great for Italy at any rate, stands in the midst of its gardens and poderi just opposite S. Alessio. Begun in 1892 and finished in 1896, S. Anselmo was built by Leo XIII, as a college for black Benedictines of all nations. And, here, truly better than anywhere else in Rome, one may hear the very song of the early Church, that long drawn-out, sweet melody, that might seem to have been born with the mystery of the Mass, but is really more universal and more ancient, the very tunes, indeed, instinctive with beauty and humility in which man has always spoken with the gods. For the plainsong is by no means an exclusively Christian music, it seems to have been used by all peoples and all religions, it is indeed an universal hymn of praise, of assurance, plaintive, too, and full of the repetitions of love, the expression of an universal joy, an universal weariness in which man seems about to cast himself for the last time on the earth at the feet of the gods among the flowers.

Coming to us from the East, full of the mystery of the desert, the song indeed of a nomad people often alone with God, the plainsong, as we call it, was first caught up and, as it were, confined by rules for Christian use by the Greek Pope Gregory (not as is generally supposed by Gregory the Great) who contrived out of its mysterious beauty the ‘Gregorian tones,’ thus confiding to it the fundamental truths of the new religion, so that if the creeds and the Gospels should be swept away, still from the assurance of that music in which all the sorrow of the world has found utterance, one might reconstruct the dogmas of the Christian faith resolved into an endless melody…. (274-5)

Note 2: What the plainsong was before it was formed for us by Gregory we may hear any day in Cairo or Tangier or in the desert. Much of it, used for another purpose, remains in the Malagueras of Malaga; and there is the root of it in the Scotch and Irish folk-tunes which can never die. This chant became the music of Italy, the only music really worth hearing or preserving in the Rispetti and Stornelli of the peasants. That it was the music of Greece and Rome, I think, might easily be proved; for to what other tunes and with what other intervals would we have sung so late a thing as the Pervigilium? The Greek songs were doubtless written for it, or under its influence in some less rugged and untutored form that we meet with today in Morocco—where I have heard as it were the Wrath of Achilles chanted as I must suppose Homer once sung. (275)

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Vatican: Sistine Chapel and Stanze della Segnatura

I agree with Edward Hutton that Michelangelo's work in the Sistine Chapel is difficult to comprehend or take in. It's not just the crowds of tourists but the sheer monumentality is overwhelming. I also prefer the relatively small and intimate Stanze della Segnatura where, despite a room full of people, you are free to linger and explore the four walls at leisure before being swept into the Sistine Chapel.

 

Above these, supported by marvelous and gigantic images of sybyls, of prophets, of slaves, and athletes, stretches the roof of Michelangelo, that new heaven which is the old earth, beautiful with the life of man, his love which brought disaster and all joy, the wild story of the world, which ends on that vast wall above the altar where he has painted not the Last Judgment, it might seem, but the Resurrection.

 

This ceiling, so heavy with life that it always seems to crush us under the weight of its tremendous story, was painted for Pope Julius II., the condotierre, between the years 1506 and 1512…. (216)

 

But this profound and wonderful vision of life by no means decorates the chapel of the Popes; it dwarfs it. The air is so full of shapes that we can see nothing.  In this space… Michelangelo, whose spirit always seems to be brooding over some immense sorrow, has created a tremendous and a terrible crowd of figures, each one of which seems to accuse the Papacy and God Himself of some tragic crime committed upon mankind….  Here we are devoured by insatiable dreams—and how should we answer and satisfy them? (222-223)

 

Raphael: School of Athens.

 

But, after all, what strikes us most in this picture dealing so easily and surely with the greatest matters, is its value as just a picture, its decorative value, that is, its marvelously lovely expression, not of any profound or subtle thought but of its own element, a certain spaciousness, confined as we perceive at last, within very narrow material limits, but that seems infinite. It is the very triumph of decorative art, come at last to perfection in one who had been the pupil of Pietro Perugino. The difficulty of such an achievement, greater here by far than in the ‘Disputa.’ For there all heaven lay open to our eyes, is scarcely felt till in an effort to understand what is really consummate in the art of Raphael—and no man has been praised so much for the wrong things—we perceive here his real triumph. That palace or temple, all of earth, full of the measured beauty of the work of man, is not less infinite in its spaciousness after all than the whole circuit of the world, the limitless kingdom, light on light, of the sky. And this is the real triumph of Raphael, not that he has summed up the ancient and the medieval world and expressed them in the terms of the Renaissance, but that into that narrow, cramped room he has brought an infinite beauty. (227)

 

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 Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

Vatican: Chapel of Pope Nicholas

 

Although he disliked the pomp and splendor of the Vatican, Edward Hutton loved the chapel of Pope Nicholas V with its frescoes by Far Angelico. ***

Amid all the dying pomp of the Vatican, the Oratory of Nicholas V stands like a little country chapel, as simple as that, and gay as it were with the wildflowers of Tuscany. Of all the sanctuaries of the Eternal City, it alone keeps about it something of the mysticism and charm of the early Renaissance—of S. Francis, for instance. After the material splendor of S.  Peter’s, the cold magnificence of the great palace of the Popes, it offers you a marvelous repose, in which it is possible to forget even the papacy and to pray to God. And, indeed, in all the Vatican it alone is a place of perfect happiness full of sweetness and light. One finds there nothing of Roman somberness and solemnity, but, as it were, an intimate silence and joy. And to cross the threshold unexpectedly in the midst of the immense ghostly palace, so full of unreal and material things, is to come suddenly out of a dream into the sanctuary of home…. 196

 

Fra Angelico;

 

It was in 1445 that Pope Eugenius had invited Fra Giovanni da Fiesole to Rome, where he remained till, Eugenius dying in 1447, Nicholas V besought him to decorate the new chapel he was building at the Vatican…. 

 

There on the walls Angelico has painted the life and death of SS. Stephen and Laurence….

 

As one looks at these living and exquisite pictures, the work of an old man of sixty three, one is chiefly struck, I think, by their freshness, as though the influence of Rome had revealed to a mind, enclosed till then by a country cloister among the wildflowers, the realities of the world, of life, that contemporary life which was about to become so splendid. The gentle friar, who has dreamed his life away among the saints and has walked hand in hand with Jesus, as it were, has become, under the influence of the Eternal City, the most perfect and most satisfying of naturalists, not copying life but creating it, out of a profound realization of it.  Some joy always secretly in his heart has led him, suddenly so observant of men, to just this realism, as we might say, which is so new and so charming a feature of his work here in the Vatican. Consider then that woman who in the ministration of S. Stephen, lightly, lightly holds her child’s hand, oblivious of everything but the emotion which the saint’s words have suddenly awakened in her heart: or that blind man, who, when S. Laurence distributes alms, approaches with so uncertain a step, one hand stretched out before him, the other holding firmly, blindly to the friendly staff: It is as though we had really seen these people, so surely has Angelico drawn them from the mere details of life in the Eternal City. How well they must have loved one another, these two, the Pope who was the greatest humanist in Italy…and the artist who had, long and long ago, mistaken earth for heaven in his joy at its perfection, only to find here at last, it might seem, that it was in some sort the only truth he might really apprehend. (201-202)

 

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 Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

*** A reader directed me to a virtual tour of the Nicholas chapel. 

Edward Hutton: St. Peter's Monuments

 

Despite his lack of enthusiasm for St. Peter's as a church, Hutton believed that it contained some beautiful monuments, especially the one to the last of the Stuarts.

The work of Michelangelo, so disastrous to his disciples, might seem to have been understood, with a certain fineness and success for once, by Gugliemo della Porta, who built and carved the tomb of Paul III, which Cardinal Alessandro Farnese ordered in 1550. The bronze statue of the Pope, splendid in the energy of its pose, vested in the cope and pallium, the right hand raised in benediction, is seated above the tomb. Beneath, two figures, Prudence and Justice, half sit, half lie in the manner of the figures in the Medici tombs in Florence. Prudence, as one might suppose, is represented  as a veiled matron. Imposing and modest, she holds a book or a mirror in her hands, gazing only at herself, as it were, on her own soul. The Justice, however, is radiant and lovely, altogether desirable, her beautiful head full of provocation, her splendid and supple body, half naked once, stretched luxuriously, yes, beside the dead. It was Cardinal Edoardo Farnese who, with all the beastly modesty of the Catholic reaction…obliged the son of Guglielmo della Porta to clothe the Justice in the impossible chemise of lead that we see today. This at least should have involved the Papacy suddenly so shamefaced in the universal laughter of the world, the immense ridicule which is the fate of all hypocrisies. … (191)

 

Something of the old humanity stirred now and then certainly…in the work of Canova for instance, to be found here not only in the beautiful architectural work of the tomb of Clement XIII, but especially in that exquisite monument which commemorates the last of that unfortunate race which once ruled in merry England and with whose passing, with the advent of the Dutchman, the continuance of the German, she is merry no more. Yes, the most touching and human monument after all in the great church commemorates a tragedy of our race, the passing of the Stuarts, reminding of the rightful kings of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, James III, Charles III, and Henry IX, Cardinal York. Their ashes lie in the crypt, and this monument, where two English boys weep beside a tomb, was erected by that royal blackguard George IV, who having all his life played the part of Pimp and Pander to our English kings, tried to deceive the world with a sentimentality and an hypocrisy truly German by erecting this monument to one of those he and his wretched alien race had so unfortunately supplanted. And though for nothing else, S. Peter’s church should have the love and respect of Englishmen, since it gave a refuge to those kings of our race to whom we denied even the solace of a last resting place in English earth. (192)

 

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Edward Hutton, Rome, 1922.

Rome: St. Peter's Basilica

Edward Hutton did not like St. Peter's. He was disappointed and disconcerted by its largeness. "Nothing is so feeble as largeness if it be not ordered and contrived with beauty." I can agree with much of what he says, but every time I am in Rome, I try to attend Mass in St. Peter's and it is always something special. Maybe it is just the feeling you get in the midst of a small congregation of worshippers gathered from all over the world while crowds of tourists walk through the vast interior. 

   

 

S. Peter’s

 

The Popes, themselves, who, vandals as they have ever been, were never guilty of an act more barbarous than the destruction of the most famous church in Christendom, one thousand one hundred and fifty years old at the time Nicholas V pulled it down in order to build—well the beautiful and sumptuous failure we see, which, though it has been too much decried, is in fact without a sense of reverence. It is a little blatant in its pride and a stranger to humility. It seems to praise God in the language one might use to a king for the sake of impressing the populace, but not sincerely…. (181)

 

S. Peter’s seems vulgar in a compromise between beauty and ostentation…. The whole place is blasphemous in the confusion of its intention. It is not Greek, nor Latin, but Barbarian, and what beauty it has, and it has much, is by reason of that confusion a barbarian beauty, fundamentally insane and romantic. The richness of the material is lost in the largeness of the church, the precious in a multitude of riches. One’s attention wanders, nothing there can hold it. the place is less a church than a city in whose streets one may wander all day long searching in vain for God…. (185)

 

Michelangelo was already seventy years old when he became capo-maestro. Refusing all payment, he worked, he said, ‘for the love of God, the Blessed Virgin, and S. Peter.’ Bound though he was by the plans and achievements of his predecessors, he was able to discard the design of Sangallo, which besides filling the church with darkness would have involved the destruction of the Sistine chapel. He took up again the plan of Bramante, a Greek Cross under a dome. “I will throw the Pantheon there up into the sky,’ he is reported to have said. Every effort was made by the disciples of Sangallo and Giulio Romano to displace him, but the Pope not only confirmed him in his office, but also gave him even greater power than before. When he died in 1564 he had finished the drum and made the plans for the dome which Giacomo della Porta finished in 1590.It remains the only perfectly beautiful part of the church…. (182-3)

In 1640 della Porta died, and Paul V appointed Carlo Maderna architect. At the order of the Pope he abandoned both Bramante’s and Michelangelo’s designs, adopting Rossellino’s, namely a Latin Cross; for it had become necessary to impress the North with that long nave at the head of which the altar might gleam and the faithful be edified. … (182)

 

Maderna finished the façade in 161. Fifty-three years later Bernini completed the Piazza with its beautiful colonnades and fountains… (1830

 

The strong and spiritual art of Florence, of the Tuscan realists, passes at last into absolute beauty only perhaps, here at any rate, in the early work of Michelangelo, of which S. Peter’s holds the most precious example. The Madonna della Pieta, in the first chapel of the south aisle, remains the most beautiful as it is the most perfect of the many works which came from that strong and ruthless hand, so marvelously tender for once. It was carved for the Cardinal di San Dionigi, called the Cardinal Rovano, not long after the Bacchus of the Bargello in Florence. Madonna is seated on the stone where the Cross was raised, her dead Son in her lap. ‘He is of so great and so rare a beauty,’ says Condivi, ‘that no one beholds Him but is moved to pity. It is a figure truly worthy of the humanity which belonged to the Son of God and to such a Mother; nevertheless, some there be who complain that the Mother is too young compared to the Son. One day as I was talking to Michelangelo of this objection: “Do you know,” he said, “that chaste women retain their fresh looks much longer than those who are not chaste? How much more, therefore, a virgin in whom not even the least unchaste desire ever arose?... Michelangelo was about twenty-four or twenty-five years old when he had finished that work. It brought him fame and a great reputation, and there, alone in all his work, on the hem of Mary’s robe, he has carved her name. (189-190)

 

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Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.