Monza and the Iron Crown

  

 

 

 

 

After leaving Pavia, Edward Hutton travelled to Monza to view its relics, the most famous of which was the "Iron Crown of Lombardy," originally conferred on Queen Theodolinda, the Apostle to the Lombards, by Pope Gregory I around the year 600.

Some ten miles to the north of Milan, still in the plain but within sight of the hills, stands Monza, which in its immortal, its beautiful relics, its thirteenth century Broletto, recalls for us the earliest Lombardy, for it was here from the eleventh century, in the first city within the Italian border, that the emperors-elect were crowned kings with the “iron crown of Lombardy,” still holy and still preserved over the high altar of the Duomo, before they set out on that long march to Rome, there to receive the Imperial title and consecration of the Pope. …

Standing on both banks of the Lambro, … Monza is a fair city. If the ancients knew her not, for she is a city of the Fall, to the men of the Middle Age she was as famous as any town in Italy, and the great church which Theodolinda, the Apostle of the Lombards, built beside her own palace remained through all its rebuildings the one true coronation church that has ever been erected south of the alps. …

In the chapel to the left of the choir in a large monstrance in the shape of a cross is preserved the holy and famous Iron Crown of Lombardy, which it is said Gregory the Great gave to Theodolinda. It consists of an inner circlet of iron beaten out of one of the nails of the Cross: this precious relic is encased in a circle of gold and jewels. It is one of the most sacred and priceless treasures—even from a merely historical point of view—to be found in Italy, for it has circled the brows of Theodolinda, of Charlemagne, of Frederick Barbarossa, of Charles V, and of Napoleon I. In itself it seems to bind Europe indissolubly into one; and if ever the Empire be re-erected it is with this majestic and holy symbol we shall crown our Emperor. Not with it has the modern Italian kingdom been consecrated, a newer and a more brittle ring of gold suffices it. This symbol of iron, as old and as indestructible as Europe, awaits, let us believe it, him who shall make us one. 

 

And here in this holy place under the  crown lies she who brought light and strength to her kingdom, the Apostle of the Lombards, Queen Theodolinda, the friend of Gregory. Her tomb, a sarcophagus resting upon four pillars of marble, is a work of the fourteenth century, and the four frescoes of scenes from her life are from the fifteenth, restored in our own day. More interesting are her gifts to the church—the few that remain—in the treasury: a hen with seven chickens of silver-gilt, her crown and comb of gold filigree and fan of painted leather, and best of all, the “precious Gospel book” and cross which Gregory gave her when her son was baptized; it was his last gift before his death.

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 162-.

Pavia: Treasures

  

 

 

 

 

Two of the treasures that Edward Hutton saw in Pavia were its famed University, and the tomb of Saint Augustine. 

From the cathedral one proceeds up the Corso to the Piazza d’Italia and the University, which it is said Charlemagne founded in 774. However that may be, the University of Pavia owes almost everything to Gian Galeazzo Visconti, who endowed it with many privileges in 1390 and is regarded as its founder. Nevertheless, Pavia was able to boast of learning and philosophy before the Visconti were thought of. Is not Boethius her son, and did he not write here in his captivity the De Consolazione Philosophiae that our King Alfred loved? And was not Lanfranc, Norman William’s Archbishop of Canterbury, born here, and did he not make the legal and philosophical school of Pavia famous through all Europe? To Giovanni Visconti we owe, however, the presence here of Petrarch, who was so often his guest; and the Visconti foundation can at least boast of a name famous through the world, for in 1447 Christopher Columbus was at the University.*** …

The great treasure of Pavia, however, is to be found in that church close to the Castello which is called S. Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, which with its magnificent west front and polygonal tower is itself a wonder, but is altogether glorious because it is the casquet—as far as the body of the church goes a poor one—of one of the five great shrines of Italy—that of S. Augustine—comparable in splendour with those of S. Peter Martyr in S. Eustorgio in Milan, of S. Domenico at Bologna, of S. Donato at Arezzo, and of Our Lady in Or S. Michele at Florence…. 

 

The body of S. Augustine, with the fall of the Roman Empire, was brought in 430 from Hippo in the province of Africa, then in the hands of the Vandals, to Cagliari in Sardinia… where it remained for more than two centuries, till indeed Sardinia was overrun by the Saracens… Then the great Liutprand, King of the Lombards, bought the body of the infidel for 60,000 golden crowns. And in 710 had it borne to his church of S. Pietro in Ciel d’Oro in Pavia…

In appearance the shrine is a vast oblong tomb covered by a canopy borne by square piers. The whole is of marble and in every part is elaborately carved and niched and set above with statues and reliefs. On the top of the tomb, beneath the gabled canopy, the marble effigy of the Saint lies in a linen pall upheld by angels….it is in itself a monument, an everlasting witness to the nobility of the age which produced, and to the men who desired and loved such a work as this.

 

It is easy to measure the enormous abyss which separates our time from theirs, and us from them, when we realise that nowhere in the world could such a work as this  be carried out today; but then we no longer hold the Christian philosophy and have so far ceased to be European. It is little wonder, then, that when we would build a monument we erect such a vulgarity as the Victoria Memorial, or such a heavy ineptitude as the Admiralty Arch at Charing Cross, and this though no saint that has ever existed is capable of exciting in us the love and reverence we had for Queen Victoria. Nor are we alone in this; industrialism has set its loathsome seal upon all our hearts, that without love or speech or sight or hearing we may pass gloomily through a gloomy and unhappy world without hope and without beauty.

 

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*** A rare mistake. Columbus was born in 1451 and said he went to sea at the age of 14.

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 157-161.

Pavia: Church of S. Michele

 

 

 

 

In Pavia Edward Hutton reflected on the significance of the eleventh century church of S. Michele.

All along the Via Aemilia, between Venetia on the north and Tuscany and the Apennines on the south, between the Alps and the Adriatic, there may be found a whole series of buildings, certainly of the North, belonging to a style of architecture which we call Lombard, but which it would be an error to merge altogether  in the larger title of Romanesque. Perhaps the most remarkable of these buildings, among which we may name Borgo S. Donnino, the monastic church of Chiaravalle and S. Fedele at Como, is the church of S. Michele at Pavia, which is certainly one of the earliest, dating as it does from the last years of the eleventh century. … the whole is at once massive, savage, and restless, a true barbarian work—that is to say, the work of a barbarian who has been brought in contact with Latin work and has been unable to use or assimilate it. Something rude and uncouth we find in all this, of course, for that is the fundamental nature of it, but how full of energy and life it is, too, how restless, daring and unhappy. And indeed the whole building seems to express a sort of disappointment, most of all with itself, as though the builders had seen a vision which they could not recall, or had heard some sudden good news which they could not remember. It is well to remember that the church is dedicated to S. Michael, and that everywhere it speaks of deliverance—deliverance perhaps from the helpless misery and disorderliness of the forests, of the roadless lands hidden in the twilight of the North, that here on the sunny side of the great mountains had been left behind forever, but still remained as a kind of an uneasy and ever recurrent dream. The souls of men who built these churches were haunted by an unconscious recollection of barbarism, from which suddenly and by a kind of miracle their fathers and they themselves had been delivered….

This haunting dread, and an overwhelming sense of deliverance from it, are expressed not only in these carvings over the doors, but everywhere in S. Michele. The belts of carving along the walls, the medallions, and the figures on the jambs of the arches represent dragons, griffins, sphinxes, centaurs, snakes and eagles, a whole menagerie of doubtful creatures from whose power here in Italy one has escaped, that Christianity certainly once and for all disposed of. It is the same within the church, and indeed here in S. Michele Christianity appears in the eleventh century as it appeared to the men of the primitive Church, as a refuge from a whole world of danger, disorder and ennui, as a refuge, most of all, perhaps, from oneself; a philosophy, a faith, a revelation upon acquiring or receiving which depended the safety of the whole world and of one’s own soul. It is possible here in this strange and lonely church to understand that ultimately there is no such thing as Europe, that there is only Christendom, since it is upon what is in the mind and the soul the present and the future of man depends.

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 154-156. 

Pavia: Certosa

  

 

 

 

Leaving Milan, Edward Hutton passed through Chiaravalle, and proceeded to visit the famous Certosa of Pavia, a monument, he believed, not to Medieval faith but to the crimes not only of the Dukes of Milan but also of the new Italian Monarchy.

The monasteries of the Carthusians are found in all countries, and are known in France as Chartreuses, in Italy as Certose, in Spain as Cartuje, and in England as Charterhouses.

 

It is, then, in a house of this Order, and that the most sumptuous and splendid in the world, that we come when, on our way from Milan to Pavia, we leave the train at the wayside station of Certosa. All the greater Carthusian houses look like walled villages, but the Certosa of Pavia looks like a city, and it is indeed different in many ways from every other monastery of the Order.

 

To begin with, the Certosa of Pavia, for all its appearance of solitude, is not built in a waste or desert place like the Grande Chartreuse…it is established within a few miles of the city of Pavia, one of the most important and famous capitols of Lombardy… In the second place, it has nothing about it of the harsh simplicity of the Grande Chartreuse or the rural seclusion of modern Parkminster… Lastly, it owes its foundation, as I have said, not to a saint but to a murderer, a man with a monstrous crime upon his soul, the worldly benefits of which he was then enjoying, Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti.…

 It is a national monument, and of all the robberies the Italian Government has perpetuated under the cloak of justice and popular government this seems to me to be the most justified. At least, I think we resent it less than we do the shameful theft of S. Francesco at Assisi, or any of the thousand crimes that have left the convents of Italy desolate and turned them into barracks or post offices or worse. For the Certosa of Pavia might seem never to have been a true monastery at all. Its fame and its incomparable and lavish beauty have almost nothing to do with religion. It is not the house of God and of His servants we see there, but the magnificent, proud and boastful mausoleum of the Visconti lords and of their more pretentious successors the Sforza. Pathetically insolent even in death, they lie there in all their painted splendour uncontrite and unashamed, … Nowhere in the world has the pride of men—and of such men—faced God out with so strange an effrontery; not at the Escorial, where the Spanish kings for all their cruel pride, frozen into silence among those peaks, have laid themselves down at last in all humility; certainly not at S. Denis or Westminster, where in the whispering aisles men still pray and the dead are a little beloved, for they were our own. But these were kings and their royalty demands of us at least the splendour of beauty. At the Certosa, more sumptuous by far, men have interred in marbles so precious that they can never be broken a succession of bandits who knew no faith, and who get no reverence, whom no one ever thinks of with kindness, enthusiasm or pride, whose crimes are all that they have written on the page of history. Here in unregarded splendour lies unremembered till the Day of Judgment il Gian Biscione, Gian Galeazzo, murderer and coward, the founder of this mausoleum; here is quenched the blood-thirst of Gian Maria of the same house; here, in the remorseless locked marble, Filippo has hidden his vices and his cunning; Francesco Sforza and his treason are imprisoned here, and Galeazzo Maria with his vanities and his lusts; and over them all hovers the dread they had of the assassin’s knife, the terror of their end, the pestilence, the cruelty, the oppression, the fraud, the labyrinthian plots, the murder and the broken faith by which they lived and died. In all this cold and cruel and sumptuous place, where art seems for all its joy and health and wealth and willingness to have died on the threshold and worked with ghostly and inhuman hands, you will not find a touch of human dignity; these bourgeois, with commonplace, vicious and cunning faces, bloated and stupid, these are their kings in Lombardy, and all the genius of Italy has not sufficed to make them noble.

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 136-140.