Edward Hutton: 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 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.

From Bergamo to Brescia

  

 

 

 

 

Edward Hutton provided an almost innumerable list of the pictures to be found in Bergamo and Brescia but the scenery surrounding these hill towns pleased him most.

Accademia Carrara: Bergamo

The Accademia Carrara of Bergamo, just outside the Porta Santa Caterina, consists of three collections, one of which is very famous. These three collections are the Galleria Carrara, the Galleria Luchis and the Galleria Morelli…. [176]

 

These two collections, the Carrara and Luchis galleries, would be enough to bring renown to any city half as lovely as Bergamo. But, as it happens, they are but the smaller part of her dowry. In the year 1891, the great art critic and connoisseur, Giovanni Morelli, died at Milan, and bequeathed his magnificent collection of pictures to his native city. These three collections, well arranged by the Director Signor Frizzoni, were, till the year 1911, the delight of every traveller who entered Bergamo. In that year a rearrangement of the three collections was entered upon, and the gallery was closed for a time. What the new arrangement may be  we cannot say, but it is to be hoped that the Morelli collection will still be shown as a thing apart; for it is fully characteristic of the great critic and of his triumphs of connoisseurship….[178]

 

When all is said, however, the true delight of Bergamo will always be found in Bergamo herself: in her winding steep streets, her narrow ways, her windy piazzas, her shady ramparts and marvellous views of blue far-away mountains, so often covered with snow, and of the valleys and the plain, green and silver and gold, and the glory of the setting sun. [182]

There is no more delightful and consoling road in all North Italy, south of the mountains, than that which leads at last from Bergamo to Brescia. This book does not propose to deal with the mountains, the Bergamesque and Brescian Alps, for they deserve and shall have a book to themselves; therefore I say nothing of such places as Alzano and its Lottos; it is the plain with which we are concerned, the true Cisalpine Gaul and the true Lombardy, and I know not where in all that vast country you will better the thirty miles that lie between Bergamo and Brescia. For the way is by no means a monotony of flatness, but is broken by low hills and downs, and little passes and valleys about the feet of the mountains, and there, on the hill-tops or beside the rivers, stands many a fair town worthy of remembrance, to say nothing of the castles, shrines and churches which are often worthy of Tuscany, and of Tuscany at its best. And this is especially the reward of him who will go slowly, loitering by the way….  [183]

The city of Brescia, which has thus known so many agonies, is a quiet little place, crouched like a mouse, hid under its Castello at the foot of the great hills. and, if we except the Roman ruins, and the old cathedral and the Broletto, the town for us is really just a delightful picture gallery, where one wanders at random from church to church in search of the painters of the native school of painting. [187]

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 176-187.

Bergamo

 

 

 

 

Edward Hutton believed that there was nothing in Lombardy "more beautiful and lovely" than Bergamo. 

 

There is a corner of Italy—let us confess it, it is only a corner—where that accursed disease of Industrialism, the cancer that is eating away our virility, has unfortunately taken root: that corner I seemed to leave behind me at Monza. At least, I know I was altogether in another country when one autumn evening I came to the beautiful city of Bergamo, on the hills, over against the mountains, upon which the snow was lying far away, very pure and white; against which, in her girdle of ancient walls, the city stood up lofty and splendid, her towers all shining in the setting sun.

 

Bergamo, as we know it, consists of two separate parts which might seem to have nothing in common: there is the Citta Bassa, anciently the Borgo, in the illimitable plain at the foot of the hills, an almost completely modern town, and quite separate from it the true Bergamo, the old Etruscan, Gaulish, Roman and Italian city, on the hill-top, the Citta Alta, as beautiful a place as is to be found in all Lombardy, and almost completely of the Middle Age and the Renaissance….Apart from these churches, the Citta Bassa has little interest, and is indeed a rather miserable place…

 

It is far different with the Citta Alta. There everything is old and beautiful, full of honour, virility, and endurance. Unsuited to the modern restlessness and hurry, unapproachable by the railway, the true Bergamo still dreams on her fair hill-top of all we in our foolishness have forgotten, and, deserted by the Gadarene herd, who long since have rushed down her steep hillside into the mire of the plain, she still keeps her dreams about her, content to wait every even the curfew from the Torre Comunale, and to ask for the protection of her two patrons, S. Alessandro and the Blessed Virgin, at sunset

I have said enough to tell the traveller that something unique and lovely awaits him in Bergamo, but no amount of description can hope to convince him of all the virile beauty of the place, the magical beauty of the Piazza Maggiore to which all these steep, narrow, winding ways lined with great palaces, seem to lead, the picturesque and virile beauty of the grand old tower that rises over it, the charm of the Broletto built upon arches, as at Como, through which one has glimpses of the splendour beyond. Here in Bergamo there is nothing frowning, miserable, or unhappy; she is gay and yet stately, bright, noble and sure of herself. There is nothing in all Lombardy better and lovelier than she. …

She gives you herself utterly at that moment when, emerging from the narrow ways between the tall, rugged houses, you come into the Piazza Maggiore, paved with brick, with a ruined fountain in the midst, and on one side the stateliness and beauty of the Broletto on its arcade of columns, on the other the Palazzo della Ragione, which Scamozzi left unfinished. Through the arches of the Broletto you catch glimpses of the magnificent portal of S. Maria Maggiore and the façade of the Capella Colleoni; but it is never by this way I prefer to approach these wonders, but by a devious way from the east past the Palazzo dell’ Ateneo, with its early Renaissance façade and flights of steps, so that what I see first may be the apse of S. Maria with its lovely semicircular open arcade, its flight after flight of roof and gallery and tower up to the pointed steeple which crowns the whole.

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 169-172.