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.

 

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