Masolino in Castiglione d'Olana

Walking south along the beautiful route from Como to Milan, Edward Hutton stopped at Castiglione d'Olana to view frescoes by Masolino, the great Tuscan painter of the quattrocento whose most famous work is in Florence's Brancacci chapel.

 

Castiglione

There are many other happy places about Varese, but the traveller, already anxious for Milan, will scarcely linger here, more especially as the best of all lies on his way. That best is the road to Castiglione d’Olana, and Castiglione itself. You go, if you are wise, through Bizzozero, climbing the hills, with wonderful views of the Alps and the lakes all the way, and then descend through delicious woods by Lozza to the little town of Castiglione, partly in the valley of the Olana, a pleasant stream, and partly on the steep hill above it. 

The Castello, which belonged to the noble family of Castiglione, on the hill above the little town, or rather village, had by the beginning of the fifteenth century become ruined, and there Cardinal Branda da Castiglione built the church we see dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary, to S. Lorenzo and to S. Stefano, together with a little Baptistery separate from the church and to the north of it. Here by the utmost good fortune one of the greatest Tuscan painters of that day was employed to adorn that building in fresco. Branda da Castiglione was Cardinal of S. Clemente, and it was there, doubtless, he had seen the work of Masolino and liked it. So he bade him paint his own church of the Rosary with some of the joyful and glorious mysteries which that crown of prayers celebrates, and today we find in the choir the result of this commission. There we see the Marriage of the Blessed Virgin, the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, the Assumption and the Coronation of Our Lady in six compartments with Our Lord in Benediction in the midst …. In the Baptistery close by we find many scenes far better preserved than those in the church, of the life of S. John Baptist, master-works of the great Tuscan whom Cardinal Branda da Castiglione found at work in the S. Clemente in Rome. The first modern critics to write of these paintings  were the almost infallible Crowe and Cavalcaselle. Vasari does not mention them, and, as it seems, they were quite unknown when in the end of the eighteenth century, the church being very dark, they were covered with whitewash and were only uncovered in 1843.

It has been reserved for a critic of our own time to make a further discovery. For, as it happened, Mr. Berenson came to Castiglione not long ago and found in the Palazzo Castiglione here a great frieze running round the great hall consisting of four frescoes from the master’s hand. Three of these had been whitewashed, but in that which had escaped he found one of the finest and one of the most surprising things in all Tuscan art of the quattrocento: “nothing less than a vast landscape, a sort of panorama of the Alps, with a broad torrent rushing down to the plain.” Was it Cardinal Branda who so loved these great hills he could see from his house, or Masolino himself, who, Tuscan as he was, looking upon them for the first time, gave himself suddenly to them and recorded here forever his sudden and overwhelming joy? We shall never know: only, as Mr. Berenson says, “let us cease talking about the late date at which in Italy landscape began to be treated on its own account.” *

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 54-55.

*Bernard Berenson, an acquaintance of Hutton's, was a connoisseur and prolific writer on the art of the Italian Renaissance.