Perugia: Pinacoteca Vannucci

Edward Hutton devoted a lengthy chapter to the Pinacoteca Vannucci, Perugia'a picture gallery of Umbrian painting. He especially liked two famous altarpieces taken from their original locations. Looking at these magnificent paintings, it is hard to imagine what ordinary parishioners thought while attending Mass.

The Pinacoteca Vannucci, the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, on the top floor of the Palazzo Communale of Perugia, contains the most complete and representative collection of Umbrian pictures that has anywhere been brought together, as well as a number of early Sienese paintings and a few outstanding masterpieces of various schools; a Madonna and Child by Duccio di Buoninsegna, an altarpiece by Fra Angelico, and one by his pupil Benozzo Gozzoli, an altarpiece by Piero della Francesca and another by Luca Signorelli.

 

Unlike Florence and Siena, Umbria had no Giotto nor Duccio to point out the road she should follow in her art. Umbrian painting, which is not solely centered in Perugia, but which had several centres—Gubbio, Foligno, to name no others—in which it flourished, was really provincial in the true sense of the of the word. And it was from beginning to end the handmaid of the Church, and remained Christian when almost everywhere else art had become pagan. …

 

The two major single treasures of the gallery are the altarpiece by Fra Angelico and the altarpiece by Piero della Francesca.

Fra Angelico

The altarpiece by Fra Angelico is a masterpiece, indeed he never surpassed in feeling and quality some of the smaller figures. The Madonna and Child are enthroned under a baldacchino.  On either side are two angels, the foremost two offering baskets of roses. On panels at the sides are various full-length figures of saints: on the left S. Dominic and S. Nicholas, and these are the most exquisite; on the right S. John Baptist and S. Catherine of Alexandria, perhaps the work of an assistant. … Unfortunately, the face of the Virgin has been damaged; otherwise it seems to be in an excellent state, surprisingly bright in colour, and some of the figures of saints are of such beauty that I do not think Angelico ever surpassed them.

The large polyptych by Piero della Francesco is the other great single treasure of the gallery. It is a puzzling work. In the midst of a late Gothic altarpiece, the Madonna and Child enthroned in the centre with four full-length saints, SS. Anthony, John Baptist, Francis and Elisabeth at the sides, much in the form of Fra Angelico’s altarpiece here. Above in a seven-sided pediment, is the Annunciation; below are two rounds with figures of S. Clare and S. Agatha, and below in the predella three scenes: a miracle of S. Anthony, S. Francis receiving the Stigmata and a miracle of S. Elizabeth of Hungary. …

I find the main part of the altarpiece disappointing, as indeed are the predella scenes. But the Annunciation I find one of the most enchanting of Piero’s works. I can never leave it without returning again and again. And then how characteristic it is of the artistic moment dominated by perspective and the theories of Alberti and the practice of Brunelleschi, Laurana, Uccello and Masaccio! What that gracious and formidable angel is announcing to the Madonna, so classical in her monumentality and repose, is not the birth of Christ. but the rebirth, the renaissance, of Antiquity. It may well be that this is a work of Piero’s old age, but if so, your old men shall see visions.

 

###

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 179, 184-186.

Perugia: Cathedral and Fountain

Below find Edward Hutton's description of Perugia's Cathedral and famous fountain. Apparently, the uppermost part of the fountain with its dragons has since been moved to a museum.

So the splendour and the terror of the past have sunk into the mediocrity of today. Beauty such as once belonged to Florence or Venice or Rome was perhaps never hers. She was a scarped crag on the mountains, burnt with fire, beaten by the wind, ringing with cold in the winter, splendid with the sun. Her Palazzo Communale was one of the most fierce and majestic in Italy and even her Cathedral was as relentless as a fortress, at least in appearance, but the destroying centuries have perhaps lent it something of their tolerance, giving the clinkered brick the surface and the colour almost of a precious stone. It is not beauty but strength and passion that you find in its brown walls that have been splashed with blood and washed with wine. A greater than any Baglioni has lain there. “There is no one,” says Thomas of Eccleston, “who dies as solitary and neglected as a Pope.” So it was with the greatest of them, Innocent III, who died in Perugia in 1216. The coffin still open, the body of the Pope was carried to the Cathedral, where the funeral was to take place. “It was then,” says Jacques de Vitry, who had just come to Perugia where the Papal court was in villegiatura, “it was then I really understood the nothingness of grandeur here below. The night preceding the funeral robbers broke into the Cathedral and despoiled the Pope of everything precious upon him. I saw with my own eyes his body, half naked, lying in the midst of the church already stinking.”

Indeed, within the Cathedral there is scarcely beauty at all, only silence, and space and a softer and more sombre light than is usual in an Italian church. And yet in its homely, if bare aspect it attracts you where a more splendid building might leave you cold. Its most precious possession, the wedding or betrothal ring of the Blessed Virgin, is kept under many locks in many caskets in the chapel to the left of the west door, and may be seen but four or five times during the year. Made from some agate stone, it is popularly believed to change its colour according to the hearts of those who look on it. … 

The beautiful fountain which stands in the midst of the piazza was built in 1277 from designs, it is said, by a Perugian artist, Fra Bevignate. The lovely statuettes and bas-reliefs which adorn it were designed and sculptured by Giovanni Pisano. On an august circular base of steps rest a many-sided basin with groups of columns to strengthen it at the corners. Above this rises a second basin, many-sided too, with statues at the corners, and from the midst of this is upreared a bronze bowl from which rises a magnificent group of nymphs and dragons; together they form one of the most exquisite designs ever achieved by the sculptors of the thirteenth century. This superb crown rises from a short pedestal and the writhing dragons rearing up with beating wings and each with one paw uplifted seem to beat time for their fantastic dance. Nowhere else has Giovanni Pisano shown such an ardour of imagination, such a unity of upward leaping rhythm.

 

###

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 162-163, 165.

Perugia

 

 

 

Edward Hutton had high praise for the beauty of Perugia and its location but did not fail to mention its terrible and often bloody history. 

Perugia stands on her great isolated hills absolute queen of all this country, of old towered and terrible of aspect for all her beauty, ever at attention and with great anger ever searching out her enemies.

 

Of Etruscan origins, being indeed one of the principal cities of that mysterious people, we know nothing of Perugia till she submitted to Rome in 309 B.C. That is but the first of many surrenders—to the Popes, to many tyrants, to her own terrible sons, to the brutality of the mob, to Italy and the modern world. The hand of the Emperor Augustus has rested on her throat as certainly as that of the later tyrants, Baglioni or Pope. … Yet in spite of capitulation and outward obedience, she has ever nursed in her soul a fierce spirit of liberty, which has made her story one of the bloodiest in Italy. In the heyday of her power she owned no temporal sovereign and brooked no interference, but treated Pope and Emperor as mere pawns in her game for the Lordship of Umbria.

 

Though Perugia, Perusia Turrita, has, at least as you approach her today from the south and west, lost her imperial aspect, for not only have her towers vanished, but upon the very forehead of the city rises the huge modern Prefettura and the banal Grand Hotel Brufani, yet she is still the queen of hill cities, is still fiercely beautiful within and without her Etruscan walls on which Rome and the Middle Age and the Renaissance have not forgotten to leave their marks as beautiful if not as indestructible. … Within her palaces is some of the serenest work of Perugino, and Bonfigli, and Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, and her prospect is of a thousand hills and valleys. Far away to the north and west lie the bare mountains of the Senese, while to the south the hills are crowned with famous and lovely cities where Monte Subasio looks toward Rome with the city of S. Francis kneeling on its skirts, a religious, in the homely brown habit, vowed to God. Like a lily in the vale beneath hovers S. Mary of the Angels, delicate with the colour of the day—white, or almost rosy, or sombre under the sky. And far away to the west rise the mountains above Todi and Orvieto, and all between, the sweet Umbrian plain, the valley of Spoleto. And though in early morning this exquisite landscape is delicate and fragile and half-hidden in mist, at sunset it is filled with the “largeness of the evening earth,” and a serenity of silence and repose that is, as it were, suggested by the gesture of the mountains. It is, above all this perfection, absolute queen from horizon to horizon that Perugia stands regnant. …

Close to the statue of Pope Julius, where it now stands against the Cathedral wall, is the little pulpit from which S. Bernardino used to preach so passionately. … But S. Bernardino, with all his eloquence, preached in vain. The people wept to hear him, burnt their books and pictures and finery on the stones before the beautiful fountain, and then in a few days passionately cut each other’s throats in the very place where they had listened to the good saint, and even in the Duomo itself. And was it not here, too, that the dead body of Astorre Baglioni lay in state during two days, together with that of his murderer and cousin, Grifonetto. 

 

###

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 158-159, 165.

Todi: S. Maria della Consolazione

  

 

 

Edward Hutton had high praise for Todi's church of Santa Maria della Consolazione, begun in 1508 at the height of the Renaissance. I must confess that on our brief visit, my wife and I admired its exterior beauty but the interior left us cold even when we heard Mass. Perhaps, as he says, it is more a temple than a church.

 

Santa Maria della Consolazione is one of the most lovely, if not the loveliest, of high Renaissance churches in Italy—that is to say, in the world; energy and identity within formal limits. No mysterious vistas here, no forests of columns lost in twilight, nothing but perfect order, space, proportion. Here the spirit and the mind take flight.

 

In Santa Maria della Consolazione we have at last a really fine realization of the high Renaissance ideal in architecture. It is not a perfect realization, but it is the best we possess. In looking on this church we may discern what St. Peter’s in Rome might have been but for the Reformation. The idea of Bramante, it will be remembered, was to build S. Peter’s as a Greek cross under a dome. It was an effect of space he aimed at, light and space confined, and so not confined within a perfectly proportioned building. Well, the Reformation came and spoiled all that. Rome remembered the pilgrims from the north, and how important it was to impress them, and so decided to build the long nave which obscures and obstructs the dome; and the dream of Bramante vanished. Coming into Santa Maria della Consolazione we realize, for the first time perhaps what we have lost.

Image by David Orme

 It is not a church, it is a magical space in the heavens between the sun and moon, and the light is level and beautiful. It is strange this effect of space—absolute space, flight almost, in what is really so small a building. And it is right that this ideal should have been achieved, if anywhere then in Umbria, where the beauty of the whole country is really that sense of serenity, of light and spacious air. It is the secret that Umbria has strived to confide to the world through her painters: through Perugino best of all, and at last through the lucid and tranquil genius of Raphael. These men composed with space as a musician composes with sound, and indeed the effect is very like. You seem suddenly to have stepped out of our world into a pure and clear sunlight, not terrifying by its infinity, but enfolding you with security and a kind of perfection. You gaze upwards. That dome borne on the wings of clouds on clouds of angels, soars in its beauty and its perfection like a splendid and irresistible thought in the mind of man. There is no uncertainty, no dimness, no tricks of shadow, no self-accusation, no deceit, no fear, no shame at all, but the clear light of the sky that is the most lovely and precious thing in the world. And it is thus that the men of the Renaissance chose to meet their God. You think there is no mysticism in that, no mystery? But you do not know the mystical power—strange and more wonderful than the spirit of the forests of the north, of the cathedrals of the Gaul and the Goth—to be found in the unappeasable sunlight of a still, hot day. That silence is more profound than the whispering depths of the most ancient forest, or the echoing intricate splendours, the dim unseen vaultings of the great Gothic churches of the north. If in the already worshipped sun there be mystery, or in the unpierced heaven there be angels, though we may not see; if in silence surrounded by light and the immense loneliness of space, God dwells so that that I may find Him always near, then Latin genius, which has taught us all the arts as a mother teaches her children, and to which we owe everything that is precious in the world, has not made this unthinkable failure in architecture of which we accuse her so easily, but has comprehended there too more than she has ever been able to lead us so much as to apprehend; and we in our gloomy, miserable lands preferring now even darkness before light in our trumpery cities, must acknowledge at last with what grace we may the indestructible  untiring genius of Latin blood, that it has become the fashion to scoff at and to despise.

 

 

###

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 151-153.