Edward Hutton visited Umbertide and nearby Montone to see two masterpieces, the first, Luca Signorelli's Descent from the Cross, and the other a gonfalon or processional banner that he attributed to Bartolommeo Caporali. He saw them in churches but now they are in local museums.
It was for the sake of Luca Signorelli that one early summer day, I set out from Perugia in the morning by train for Umbertide. The way is fair enough, as all ways are in Umbria, and before long I came into the characteristic upper valley of the Tiber, and passing up-stream to Umbertide, I found there a majestic octagonal domed church of the sixteenth century, Santa Maria della Regia, of lovely portion and full of light, which was rebuilt in the middle of the seventeenth century…
It was in Santa Croce, near the bridge over the Tiber, however, that I found the picture of Signorelli, the Descent from the Cross, which I had set out to see. The great old painter was seventy-five when he painted this picture, yet his vigour was not abated. He seems, indeed, to have painted this fine work himself and to have left little or nothing to assistants. The church is small and dark and the picture has been half spoiled by restoration, but it is still a beautiful and noble work, and if some of the figures are perhaps life-studies, especially the figure in the foreground on the left, the composition is wonderful, and there can be no doubt about the sincerity of the emotion. They have just loosed the divine body from the Cross, a rainbow-coloured scarf of Umbria supports it and is caught round the crutch and held by one of the Apostles. The others are mounted on ladders, and gently, slowly, they are trying to lower the body of the Son of God that it may rest for three days in the tomb. Others of the Apostles hold the ladders, and at the foot of the Cross itself the Virgin Mother has swooned away. Two of the women look upon her, while the Magdalen, half mad with tears, places her hand under the wounded feet of her Lord and, grasping the Cross to save herself from falling, seems about to gather her Saviour into her arms almost as one might a child. In the foreground, on the right, St. John seems to be praying. And then suddenly into this picture, so solemn and tragic, steels the beautiful and only half-sorrowful figure of a girl splendidly dressed, her hands clasped before her. She seems just to have halted for a moment at the sight, and to have lowered her eyes as Madonna, swaying like a lily, has fallen softly to the ground. Who is this figure that passes by? …
When at Umbertide I proposed to myself to go to Montone, a little lofty town some eight miles away in the mountains to the north. It was for the sake of a Bonfigli I set out, for, as I was told, he had painted a gonfalon for that very place, a thing so splendid and lovely that to see it was worth all the weariness of the way, for the road is steep and long. It was not, however, any work of Bonfigli I saw, when just after Mass on Sunday morning I entered the church of San Francesco.
Montone has many traditions … The magnificent Standard, which a place once so famous was able to command, was painted in 1482, and, if we judge from its style, by Bartolommeo Caporali, certainly Bonfigli can have had no hand in it. In the midst the Madonna rises like a flower, her arms spread a little wearily, supporting her cloak over the people of Montone and their city, above which she stands. Her hands, which S. Francis and S. Bernardino seem about to kiss, are more delicate and fair than the petals of the lilies, and her body, clothed in a marvellous patterned cloak, as delicate as the calix of a flower, rises like the hope of the world from the midst of the people. … In truth this gonfalon is worth all the trouble of the way, since it is without doubt the most beautiful Standard in the world.
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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 214-216.
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