At Piazenza's S. Maria di Campagna, Edward Hutton found a veritable shrine to Pordenone, the great Renaissance master. Then, he told the story of S. Roch, "one of the true patrons and benefactors of Piacenza." Finally, he took a short but arduous trip to nearby Bobbio to see the famous Abbey associated with S. Columban.
The younger contemporary of Lotto, always impetuous, full of aristocratic prejudices and worldly, was his complete opposite both in his life and in his art. Born at Pordenone in 1483, he died at Ferrara in 1539. He has been compared with Rubens, both on account of the vivacity of his temperament, and his love of colossal and well-developed forms. But as Morelli rightly reminds us, while the Fleming was prolific, prudent and calculating, the Italian was “passionate, excitable, ill-regulated and swayed by pride and ambition.” It is certain that he never attained the position of ease and luxury which Rubens won, but at the same time he never sunk into conventionality. “Original, highly gifted at times, even strikingly grand, he at one period sought, not unsuccessfully, to rival Titian.” His great strength lay in fresco painting, and his most interesting frescoes are, I think, these in Piacenza; at any rate they are more accessible than those near Conegliano and those at Treviso.
We see something of his gifts in the curious figure of S. Augustine by the entrance, and more in that splendid Adoration of the Magi in the first chapel on the north side of the church, in the Nativity in the lunette, and on the wall the birth of the Blessed Virgin, and above it the Flight into Egypt; and again in the Chapel of S. Catherine, which he entirely painted, even the altarpiece of the Marriage of S. Catherine being from his hand. But what are we to say of those marvellous Prophets and Sibyls on the cupola, but that there fresco painting actually passes into a kind of glorious music, into movement, colour and light.
Hard to see as these works are, badly as they have been treated, they remain masterpieces that we come back to again and again, that return to the mind when one is far away, as indeed do all his admirable works in this church. Piacenza is to be loved for them; and because of them we are not too sorrowful that the church of S. Sisto here no longer holds that “Sistine” Madonna which Raphael painted for it in 1515, and which was sold in 1753 for 20,000 ducats to the King of Poland, who was also Elector of Saxony, and which remains in Dresden….
Whatever else one does at Piacenza, one should not omit to visit that most famous shrine of a great British or rather Irish saint at the old and splendid Abbey of Bobbio….
But what the reader may ask, is Bobbio, and why should one go there? After all, the British Isles are full of forgotten shrines of early British saints and no one marks them; indeed, these same early British saints are more utterly neglected and forgotten than any other sort of beings. All the same, if you care anything for holiness, if you care at all for great achievement, if you have any reverence for learning, and the old great masters of letters, you must go to Bobbio, for there S. Columban had his home and thence “all the palimpsests known in the world have emerged.” I wish in three words, I could make known to you this Irishman who was as it were S. Benedict and S. Francis and S. Bernard all in one. I wish in three hundred words, or even in three thousand, I could tell you the man he was, and the great Abbot and leader, and above all the great Saint….
That Bobbio which he had founded became the most famous and the most intellectual of the monasteries of Italy; it was the hope of the seventh century, and may be said to have achieved as much in the salvation of Europe as any other place whatsoever. When that was accomplished in the eleventh century it began to decline, later its precious library was distributed, and in the seventeenth century it was but a shadow of itself….
Yet Bobbio is a place to linger in, to remember our Saint, and to search out the mountains as he did, and stray about the woods where the dawn is all yours and the sunset and the night, and where one day telleth another of the ancient glory of God.
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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 252-261.
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