Edward Hutton had his own favorite travel guide. He quoted him as an introduction to his visit to Cortona. but when he got there, his interests differed from those of his guide. He preferred a magnificent Annunciation by Far Angelico, and then spent most of this chapter on a life and appreciation of Cortona's St. Margaret.
“Traveller, thou art approaching Cortona! Dost thou reverence age—that fullness of years which as Pliny says, ‘in man is venerable, in cities sacred’? Here is that which demands thy reverence. Here is a city, compared to which Rome is but of yesterday—to which most other cities of ancient renown are fresh and green. Thou mayest have wandered far and wide through Italy—nothing hast thou seen more venerable than Cortona. Ere the days of Hector and Achilles, ere Troy itself arose—Cortona was…. Hast thou respect for fallen greatness? Yon solemn city was once the proudest and mightiest in the land, the metropolis of Etruria and now—but enter its gates and look around.”
Dear Dennis, companion of my boyhood, I have done thy bidding, and if I have forsaken what thou hast loved so eloquently for things that were hidden from thee—forgive me, master. It was thy hand led me thither, and in thy name I went. Also I did thy bidding. I “looked around,” and it seemed to me that Corythus was nothing to me, but Frate Elias very much, and as for heaven-born Dardanus, what was he after all beside S. Margaret, Sister of the Seraphs, Lily of the Fields? …
Nothing, I think, in all Tuscany will impress and astonish the traveller more than his walks up and down Cortona through that maze of narrow precipitous streets between the sombre palaces founded on the naked tock, and cliffs and boulders that a hundred generations have been powerless to wear away. Cortona is indeed, as Dennis says, the most ancient of cities, nor is there any city in Italy that has kept so medieval an aspect. …
It will thus be seen that Cortona has much to offer us, a wall of immense antiquity, streets narrow and precipitous, palaces and buildings of the Middle Age. Happily, too, she possesses many of those more human works which smile at us from the early Renaissance. …
Opposite the Duomo is the Church of Il Gesu, the baptistry built in 1505, and here, in fact, are preserved the great treasures of Cortona.
The finest of these is the exquisite Annunciation from S. Domenico, which under a delicate loggia just without the house at sunset in the cool of the day Madonna has been reading, when suddenly over the flowers Gabriel has come to her with his Ave Gratia Plena, and she has crossed her white hands on her bosom, and, the book still open on her knee, has leaned a little breathlessly forward as though to escape, And indeed as the angel has said, the Lord is with her, the Dove hovers sweetly over her bright head, and God the Father Himself overhears His own message passing down under the arches. In the background, as though to show us quite clearly what is happening, we see as in a vision our first parents expelled from Paradise, that Eden to which Mary is about to win for us admission again ….
It is strange that Cortona should have held almost at that same time two such different Franciscans as Frate Elias and S. Margaret—the one a great statesman who abhorred poverty, the other a poor woman who loved it. Elias built here in the city a vast palace full of every sort of splendour that later became the Vescovado, Margarita built the hospital and restored the church which, after being rebuilt, was to bear her name. And it is she who is the victor, not he, for all his power and wealth and greatness of mind. He is forgotten by all men save a few historians, while her name is still familiarly dear on the lips of the peasants and children, who invoke her, their all-powerful friend, as we may any day in the fields or the byways about her home:--
“O Lily of the fields,
O violet of humility,
O little Sister of the Seraphs,
Ora pro nobis”
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Edward Hutton, Siena and Southern Tuscany, 1910, pp. 281-294.
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