Cremona Center

  

 

 Edward Hutton's visit to Cremona started at the City Center, moved on to see a beautiful painting by Perugino, and ended with an appreciation of the renowned violin makers of the city.

All roads in Cremona lead at last to the centre of the city, the beautiful Piazza del Duomo, about which are grouped the great buildings which lend to Cremona her special charm and character: the Cathedral and Baptistry, the Torrazzo and the Palazzo Comunale opposite to them. Let us begin with the Cathedral which is one of the most remarkable buildings in Lombardy. 

 

The Cathedral of S. Maria Assunta in Cremona, like the cathedrals of Modena, Parma, and Piacenza, with which it should be compared, is a magnificent and austere basilica in the Lombard style, flanked by the Torrazzo, the noblest tower in all this country….This church was undoubtedly a pure basilica, the nave being vaulted, but not the aisles, which were added later; the northern about 1288, the southern later still; the vaults we see are of the fourteenth century…. 

 

The façade of the church, one of the most striking anywhere to be seen, was in its origins of pure Lombard style, such as we see in the intarsias of the choir, or on medals conserved in the Museo Civico. But it was divided into three compartments corresponding to the three naves, the loggia to the left, under the Torrazzo, being added in the end of the fifteenth century from the design of Lorenzo Trutti. It was at this time that the façade of the cathedral was largely modified by Alberto Severo di Carrara, who, being a Tuscan, with little understanding of the Lombard style, spoilt it as a work in that manner, but made of it the picturesque thing we see.

 

All one’s time in Cremona seems to be spent in and about the Piazza and the Cathedral, and rightly so. For whether you come there by day or by night, at dawn when the first light catches the lovely lantern of the Torrazzo, or at evening when the whole city resounds and thrills to the ringing of the Ave Maria, there is nothing at once  so spacious and ordered and as picturesquely delightful as this square, in which the whole story of old Cremona seems to have been gathered and to live….

 

But the most delightful and simple shrine left to us in Cremona is to be found in the fourteenth-century Church of S. Agostino, a building of rosy brick with a grass grown piazza before it. Here, in the first chapel on the right, is a Pieta by Giolio Campi, and on the last chapel but one on the same side of the church a miracle indeed, a Madonna and Child with S. James and S. Augustine painted in 1494 by Pietro Perugino. On the throne is inscribed: PETRUS PERVSISVS PINXIT MCCCC LXXXXIIII. Crowe and Cavalcaselle believe this picture to have been painted in Florence, but there is just a chance that the Umbrian master may have painted it in Cremona itself, for in 1494 he was in Venice, as we know, and Cremona is but a little way thence. The picture is one of great beauty. Within one of the arches of the Palazzo Comunale, as it were, Madonna sits enthroned, perhaps before her own beautiful Cathedral, her divine Child in her lap. On either side stand S. James and S. Augustine, S. James with a pen in his hand and a book, S. Augustine with Crozier and mitre. Nothing more surprising and more welcome is to be seen in all this country....

 It is impossible to leave Cremona without reminding oneself what an harmonious and musical city it is; that it is the birthplace of the Amati, the great Stradivarius and of Guarnerius, who here made their violins, the necks of which were like the necks of rare and lovely birds, and which even to-day are softer and sweeter than any other instruments. 

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 225-233.