Rome: St. Peter's Monuments

 

 

Despite his lack of enthusiasm for St. Peter's both as a building and a church, Edward Hutton believed that it contained some beautiful monuments, especially the one to the last of the Stuart Kings.

Justice and Prudence

The work of Michelangelo, so disastrous to his disciples, might seem to have been understood, with a certain fineness and success for once, by Gugliemo della Porta, who built and carved the tomb of Paul III, which Cardinal Alessandro Farnese ordered in 1550. The bronze statue of the Pope, splendid in the energy of its pose, vested in the cope and pallium, the right hand raised in benediction, is seated above the tomb. Beneath, two figures, Prudence and Justice, half sit, half lie in the manner of the figures in the Medici tombs in Florence. Prudence, as one might suppose, is represented  as a veiled matron. Imposing and modest, she holds a book or a mirror in her hands, gazing only at herself, as it were, on her own soul. The Justice, however, is radiant and lovely, altogether desirable, her beautiful head full of provocation, her splendid and supple body, half naked once, stretched luxuriously, yes, beside the dead. It was Cardinal Edoardo Farnese who, with all the beastly modesty of the Catholic reaction…obliged the son of Guglielmo della Porta to clothe the Justice in the impossible chemise of lead that we see today. This at least should have involved the Papacy suddenly so shamefaced in the universal laughter of the world, the immense ridicule which is the fate of all hypocrisies. … (191)

 

Something of the old humanity stirred now and then certainly…in the work of Canova for instance, to be found here not only in the beautiful architectural work of the tomb of Clement XIII, but especially in that exquisite monument which commemorates the last of that unfortunate race which once ruled in merry England and with whose passing, with the advent of the Dutchman, the continuance of the German, she is merry no more. Yes, the most touching and human monument after all in the great church commemorates a tragedy of our race, the passing of the Stuarts, reminding of the rightful kings of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, James III, Charles III, and Henry IX, Cardinal York. Their ashes lie in the crypt, and this monument, where two English boys weep beside a tomb, was erected by that royal blackguard George IV, who having all his life played the part of Pimp and Pander to our English kings, tried to deceive the world with a sentimentality and an hypocrisy truly German by erecting this monument to one of those he and his wretched alien race had so unfortunately supplanted. And though for nothing else, S. Peter’s church should have the love and respect of Englishmen, since it gave a refuge to those kings of our race to whom we denied even the solace of a last resting place in English earth. (192)

 

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Edward Hutton, Rome, 1922.

Rome: St. Peter's

 Edward Hutton did not like St. Peter's. He was disappointed and disconcerted by its largeness. "Nothing is so feeble as largeness if it be not ordered and contrived with beauty." I can agree with much of what he says, but every time I am in Rome, I try to attend Mass in St. Peter's and it is always something special. Maybe it is just the feeling you get in the midst of a small congregation of worshippers gathered from all over the world while crowds of tourists walk through the vast interior. 

   

 

 

The Popes, themselves, who, vandals as they have ever been, were never guilty of an act more barbarous than the destruction of the most famous church in Christendom, one thousand one hundred and fifty years old at the time Nicholas V pulled it down in order to build—well the beautiful and sumptuous failure we see, which, though it has been too much decried, is in fact without a sense of reverence. It is a little blatant in its pride and a stranger to humility. It seems to praise God in the language one might use to a king for the sake of impressing the populace, but not sincerely…. (181)

 

S. Peter’s seems vulgar in a compromise between beauty and ostentation…. The whole place is blasphemous in the confusion of its intention. It is not Greek, nor Latin, but Barbarian, and what beauty it has, and it has much, is by reason of that confusion a barbarian beauty, fundamentally insane and romantic. The richness of the material is lost in the largeness of the church, the precious in a multitude of riches. One’s attention wanders, nothing there can hold it. the place is less a church than a city in whose streets one may wander all day long searching in vain for God…. (185)

 

Michelangelo was already seventy years old when he became capo-maestro. Refusing all payment, he worked, he said, ‘for the love of God, the Blessed Virgin, and S. Peter.’ Bound though he was by the plans and achievements of his predecessors, he was able to discard the design of Sangallo, which besides filling the church with darkness would have involved the destruction of the Sistine chapel. He took up again the plan of Bramante, a Greek Cross under a dome. “I will throw the Pantheon there up into the sky,’ he is reported to have said. Every effort was made by the disciples of Sangallo and Giulio Romano to displace him, but the Pope not only confirmed him in his office, but also gave him even greater power than before. When he died in 1564 he had finished the drum and made the plans for the dome which Giacomo della Porta finished in 1590.It remains the only perfectly beautiful part of the church…. (182-3)

In 1640 della Porta died, and Paul V appointed Carlo Maderna architect. At the order of the Pope he abandoned both Bramante’s and Michelangelo’s designs, adopting Rossellino’s, namely a Latin Cross; for it had become necessary to impress the North with that long nave at the head of which the altar might gleam and the faithful be edified. … (182)

 

Maderna finished the façade in 161. Fifty-three years later Bernini completed the Piazza with its beautiful colonnades and fountains… (1830

 

The strong and spiritual art of Florence, of the Tuscan realists, passes at last into absolute beauty only perhaps, here at any rate, in the early work of Michelangelo, of which S. Peter’s holds the most precious example. The Madonna della Pieta, in the first chapel of the south aisle, remains the most beautiful as it is the most perfect of the many works which came from that strong and ruthless hand, so marvelously tender for once. It was carved for the Cardinal di San Dionigi, called the Cardinal Rovano, not long after the Bacchus of the Bargello in Florence. Madonna is seated on the stone where the Cross was raised, her dead Son in her lap. ‘He is of so great and so rare a beauty,’ says Condivi, ‘that no one beholds Him but is moved to pity. It is a figure truly worthy of the humanity which belonged to the Son of God and to such a Mother; nevertheless, some there be who complain that the Mother is too young compared to the Son. One day as I was talking to Michelangelo of this objection: “Do you know,” he said, “that chaste women retain their fresh looks much longer than those who are not chaste? How much more, therefore, a virgin in whom not even the least unchaste desire ever arose?" ... Michelangelo was about twenty-four or twenty-five years old when he had finished that work. It brought him fame and a great reputation, and there, alone in all his work, on the hem of Mary’s robe, he has carved her name. (189-190)

 

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Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

Roman Churches: St. John Lateran

 

 

Hutton was disappointed with some of the more famous basilicas in Rome believing what original beauty and function they had once possessed had been spoiled by renovations and embellishments.

I came at last into the vestibule of S. Giovanni in Laterano before the five doors of the nave, and passing the statue of Constantine, entered the basilica. And indeed the test was too hard. My first impression, yes, in spite of a certain largeness, space, and majesty in the church, was of something lacking in simplicity. The infinite and artless detail, often vulgar enough, seemed to spoil the place—how shall I say it?—of a certain seriousness and nobility. One cannot deny the spaciousness of these five naves broken by a wide transept, beyond which rises the great tribune splendid with mosaics, nor the beauty and richness of the soffitto roof, all of purple and gold; but its dignity and repose are spoiled by the pretentious baroque statues, the ridiculous reliefs on the enormous pillars and pilasters which have hidden the ancient columns from our sight… (145)

 

So, little by little my visit resolved itself into a search for certain treasures that, as I knew, still remained there from one or other of the older basilicas…But all other treasures are as nothing beside the mosaic of the Tribune, which, restored though it be, remains in great part a fourth century work, repaired by Fra Jacobus Torriti in the thirteenth century.

 

There, under a bust of our Lord, surrounded by a glory of angels singing among the clouds, above which God the Father shines like a sign in heaven, stands a great Cross, founded upon a rock, while above hovers the snow white Dove of the Holy Spirit, and below, about the rock at the foot of the Cross, two harts and four sheep bow their heads, while within, as it seems, an angel stands before the tomb of Jesus. On either side the Cross waits a group of saints; to the left the Blessed Virgin stands in the attitude of worship, her hands raised, while the tiny figure of Pope Nicholas IV kneels, humbly clinging to her skirts. Behind him, as his guardian, S. Francis lifts his hands in prayer, while s. Peter and S. Paul come after, bearing scrolls. To the right of the Cross are S. John Baptist, S. John Evangelist, and S. Andrew, and behind S. John Baptist stands the tiny figure of S. Antonio. And at the feet of the saints flows a great river, on which cupids sail in little boats among the swans, while on the banks the peacocks strut among the flowers.

 

Much of this work, the beautiful head of Christ, for instance, might seem to be of the fourth century, so fine it is and so close to the antique, in contrast with the figures of Nicholas IV, S. Francis, and S. Antonio, which are obviously of the thirteenth century and Fra Jacobus’s own. (146)

 

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Edward Hutton: Rome, 1922.

Rome: Pantheon

 In his book on Rome Edward Hutton devoted a chapter to the Pantheon.

The continuity of the life, of the political life of the City that is so well expressed by the Capitol is found too, in its religious aspect certainly, in the Pantheon, which since the time of its foundation, has always been sacred to the gods, to the saints, those Dive—Divinities, as both pagans and Christians have agreed to call them. If we need then, a witness to the continuity of the religious life of the City, of the slow and after all so gentle passing of Paganism into Christianity, in the hearts of men, at any rate, with many a strange and beautiful conservation of old things, old customs, old ways of thinking, we shall find it best, perhaps, in the Pantheon, which, sacred once as we may suppose, to the protecting divinities of Caesar, now holds the dust of the last conquerors from Piedmont. … (76)

The Pantheon…remains the most perfect ancient building in Rome, the only one, indeed, whose walls and arches have been completely preserved….built with all the solidity, boldness and splendor of the Roman genius, and remains one of the wonders of the world….The tremendous walls of the rotunda, a perfect circle, are divided into two stories by ring courses, while above them springs the most wonderful thing in Rome, that cupola of concrete, covered over with tiles of gilded bronze, which was once the greatest dome in the world….(77)

And today the Pantheon is like a sudden revelation, as though in an unexpected moment we had come into a legion of Caesar’s army, or in the quiet sunlight, amid the ruins of the Forum, had heard the persistent voice of Cato in the senate House: Delenda est Carthago... Phocas, the tyrant, in the exile of the gods, presented it to Pope Boniface IV, who on May 13, 609, consecrated it to S. Mary of the Martyrs… (79)

So the Pantheon became S. Maria ad Martyres, and to ensure its sanctity the Pope caused to be buried there twenty-eight wagon loads of the bones of the martyrs brought hither from the catacombs….

Yet it was the Pope himself who did his best to destroy it, for Urban VIII, stole the brazen tubes on which the roof of the vestibule rested, to convert them into the twisted columns of the baldacchino of S. Peter…And if of old it excited the wonder and awe of the City, and in the Middle Age guarded the dust of the Martyrs, certainly then, more precious than silver or gold, in the Renaissance it became the very model of the greatest buildings of that time. The Baptistry of Florence was certainly meant to be as like it as it might be; it inspired the dome of S. Maria del Fiori, and Michelangelo swore to build it, as it were aloft, over S. Peter’s, an oath which he contrived to keep; while it was there that Raphael preferred to lie, with his betrothed beside him and his disciples at his feet, pursuing the dream of beauty, which, as was said, had ravished him from our world. (80)

Raphael's Tomb

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Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

Roman Catacombs

 After the brutality of the Colosseum, and the languor of the Roman baths, Edward Hutton found something very different in the Catacombs.

The Catacombs—the place by the tombs, in which to the curious philologist every symbol of Christianity seems to lie hid, the cup of the Holy Grail, the ship of the Church, was indeed the very cradle of Christianity, of Catholicism, where Love lay helpless, a little child… Born, as it were, in the desert, in the stony silence of Judea, Christianity, by an act of Love, had at once solved the great mystery; it was in itself a denial of Death, of the power of Death, and as though to prove its sincerity, its belief in the hope it alone had dared to offer mankind, it made its first home in the Catacombs, those cemeteries of the dead. They too are our company, it seemed to say, for Death is not death but a sleep; and so it refused to be separated from them, waiting patiently beside their resting place, really in communion with them, who had slept and wakened. The Christian alone in Rome found hope in his heart…. (97)

 

 

There in the darkness, lighted only by occasional lumenaria, they celebrated their mysteries, even in the time of the Apostles, the Mass, the Commendatio Animae, the Funeralia, refusing always to speak of the departing brother or sister as dying, but rather as of one summoned or called away, accertitus, as the beautiful Roman inscription has it, assercitus ab angelis—summoned by angels…. (98)

 

These cemeteries, later to bear the names of Saints, … stretched really for miles outside the Wall on the left bank of the Tiber. And beside them were the gardens—horti—those cemeteries in the open air… these gardens were, however, comparatively few and were too public to be used for worship. It was in the Catacombs, so many of which still remain unexplored, that the Christian Church spent its childhood… (98)

 

Equanimity, a bold and confident gladness, grave and yet by no means without its more joyful moments, would seem to have been the most striking characteristic of the Catacombs. Expressing itself in many a beautiful or graceful custom accommodated to the human heart…especially in a wonderful new music and poetry… (99)

 

The Mass indeed would seem to have been said always, even in the Apostolic age, though not as we have it today; … A ritual, altogether expressive and full of meaning—a meaning often obscure to us in its detail at any rate—grew little by little about it in those early times really for the sake of expressing some profound mystery that could only thus be made plain, which it was not lawful to speak. And for the Christians of the Minor Peace certainly, the ritual of the Mass, its action namely, was altogether indicative, not hiding but expressing the very ‘heart of the mystery,’ which for them, as for us was often rather obscured than made plain by the words, then in the Greek language, the people answering in their own vulgar tongue, that colloquial or base Latin into which, though without any more popular success, the whole of the Liturgy had gradually passed… (100)

 

It was then as a dramatic action, a tragic drama, as we might say, that the Mass from the earliest times presented itself to those who in the subterranean oratories of the Catacombs were gathered together not merely in a common act of worship to hear the words of life, to be made partakers with Christ of the Kingdom of Heaven, but chiefly to remind themselves of the great deliverance won for them by that mournful and heroic Figure who passed before them in the words of the drama, the actions of the priest, from birth to death, to resurrection, into His Heaven. (102)

 

And so one’s first impression on entering one of these catacombs today is altogether of serenity and peace; a kind of ecstatic happiness, temperate and still fresh with a hope that has never quite passed away. On the walls one reads words of quiet expectation, full of light, confidence, and repose; Pax, you read, Pax tibi, in Pace Christi or Vivas in Deo; and then sometimes as though to sum up all contentment, Vivas in Christo, in Bono. And the scenes painted there are serene and glad. In those days at any rate they do not seem to have been very preoccupied with the Crucifixion, the death of Christ; they thought only of the resurrection. A certain Latin sanity and quietness are expressed in the work we find there; and indeed there is no hatred or contempt at all of Pagan thought or religion, not even a complete repudiation of it, for it remains, yes, a real thing, seen with new eyes as we might say, seen really for the first time, and drawn gently into the service of Christ, so that Orpheus becomes as it were but a prophecy of Him there in S. Calisto, and the Good Shepherd bears the lamb on his shoulders precisely as Hermes had been wont to do, but with a new tenderness….(105)

 

It was indeed a new ‘state of soul,’ really a new morality that one came upon suddenly in these dark obscure ways…Side by side they lay down to sleep, the rich beside the poor, the bond by the free, all whom Christ had made equal, to await in perfect confidence the promised resurrection. (106)

Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

 

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The Roman Colosseum

In his chapter on the Colosseum, Edward Hutton described how that huge open air theater, originally an arena for contests between professional gladiators, degenerated into savage brutality and cruelty that eventually led to the transformation of the Roman world.

Almost all the beauty which had in the time of our grandfathers made of the Colosseum the most mysterious and the most astounding ruin in Rome, contriving out of its mere size something monstrous, spellbound, has departed from it, perhaps for ever, since it has come within the radius of action, so unfortunately wide, of the improver and the restorer of ruins. While the destruction of those trees that grew along the broken arches, waving ‘dark in the blue midnight’, and with the passing of the flowers, the Flavian Amphitheatre has become almost absurd in it rueful nakedness; a sort of inadequate monstrosity, a mighty heap of patched and ordered debris on the lower slopes of the Esquiline Hill. Stripped and ashamed, with all its wounds exposed, to say nothing of the horrible patchwork of the archaeologist, it is now just a vast and empty shell, that indeed scarcely impresses us, mere size being, after all but a poor claim upon our notice.… (66)

It was this monstrous colossus that overthrew paganism and the empire and served as the stage on which Christianity was at last to meet them both in combat and defeat them.

It might seem that no people save the Romans…have made of agony and death a spectacle to amuse the populace. They alone were ignorant of pity…. Beginning, perhaps, with a genuine indifference to suffering, a certain hardness that was part of their strength, little by little this insensibility to suffering…encroached on the soul, till cruelty, a kind of joy in speculating on the endurance of others, less indifferent certainly, put to the most dreadful of tests, came to be with them  a kind of delight, which secretly at first, but altogether openly at last, involved all their pleasures, their public entertainments in its marvelous horror….

It was there in the awful din and horror, under the cruel eyes of those who had failed to understand, that our soul was born, that soul which was to make such a spectacle as that forever impossible….

All the fate of the world was decided in the arena of the Flavian Amphitheatre. It was Rome who stood there at the tribunal of humanity and heard the verdict—guilty. In passing through the Forum, or among the ruins of the Palatine Hill, and remembering the disastrous story of her days since then, we may well ask—for are we not of her company—is her punishment harder than she can bear?

Yes; it was on the bloody floor of the Colosseum that Rome contrived her own slavery and our freedom. It was there that Christianity met the world and overthrew it, there the martyrs won for Christ His kingdom in the hearts of men—and certain poor folk, almost nameless, men, women, and children, weak too, weeping and afraid overthrew forever the despotism of Rome. (73-74).

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Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922, pp. 66-74 

Roman Forum

 In his book on Rome Edward Hutton devoted a whole chapter to a tour of the remains in the Roman Forum. Despite his love of ancient Rome, its philosophy, laws, and poetry, he saw in the art of these monuments the cruelty at the core of pagan Rome.

Arch of Titus

How different is this hard and realistic Roman art from the work of the Greeks in the frieze of the Parthenon! There, with a perfect feeling for animals, Pheidias has carved the bull led to sacrifice, the victim of the Gods, amid the chanting of the priests, the songs of the people; but the Roman artist seems to have understood nothing and to have seen after all only with his bodily eyes. It is before such work as this that we seem to realize almost for the first time the limitations of Rome, the immense gulf that—yes, we must admit it at last—separates us from her. Her artists lacked a certain delicacy and clairvoyance and were without spirituality or finesse. They seem, here at least, to have been mere copycats of Nature without insight or sensibility. We seem to understand at last, before such work as this, how even Aurelius* could sit through all the brutality of the amphitheatre, and drag, even he in his Triumph, along the Sacred Way that little German family, the father and mother in chains, their child crying in her arms, on the threshold of a home brought bodily over the mountains ‘to make a Roman holiday,’ for the enjoyment of the Roman people.Yes, that explains too, the failure of Rome, not in art only, but in life, in government. To the heart which would refuse to look on just that with indifference—that and the rest—the future belonged. Yet we may well ask ourselves, if only to avoid a kind of vulgar self-complacency, what latent cruelty we still entertain…which in certain circumstances might induce us to do the like… (41-2)

There is one splendor in the forum which might seem to sum up, as it were, the whole significance of the place. I mean the Triumphal Arches…. Of the two which are left to us the Arch of Titus is the earlier. Set up in his honour by the Senate, to commemorate the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70…Consisting of a single arch supported by composite pillars, it is decorated with fine reliefs. In the tympana are set winged Victories bearing palms and crowns, while beneath the inscription is carved a sacrificial procession as a frieze. Within, under the arch, are two marble reliefs in which we see Titus crowned by Victory proceeding along the Sacred Way to the Capitol in a chariot driven by Roma. Opposite is another relief of a Triumphal procession with the captives and the spoils; the table with the showbread, and the seven-branched candlestick from the temple at Jerusalem; while in the vault the divine Emperor is borne to heaven by the bird of Jove. Carved some twenty years before the balustrades of the Rostra, these reliefs have much of their character and as little feeling or sense of beauty as they. The work of those who were always the victors, they celebrate a strength and persistence which have suffered neither a love of beauty nor a love of truth to cheat them of reality. It is as though we saw an indomitable tyranny, already a little weary of itself marching once more, how uselessly, over the humble and meek. Rome was already incapable of any sort of expression save that of government. For her, life no longer had illusions or promises; one not only died at the word of command, one lived by it also. (44-45)

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Edward Hutton: Rome. 1922, fourth edition. First edition, 1907.

* Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher Emperor.

Roman Vision

 Edward Hutton began his book on Rome with a retrospective account of a personal vision that came to him as he looked over the city from the Janiculum. 

It was on an April evening in my earliest manhood, as I stood on the vast bastion of the Janiculum in the sudden silence of the hour after the sunset—Rome was looking terrible as a crater under the conflagration of the sky—that I seemed to realise for the first time the true aspect of a place so augustly familiar, which, as Dante has perceived, nature herself has formed for universal dominion… and out of which has risen all Europe and our Faith, all that is really worth having in the world.

It was my last evening in Rome. On the morrow I was to return to the North. All day I had wandered aimlessly about looking for my lost illusions, till, weary at last, I had come towards evening to sit beside the parapet of the Janiculum, turning all things over in my heart as I watched the sun set over the City. How will I remember it?

It seems to me that I was but a child then, that I had believed in everything, and was altogether discouraged and dismayed, for Rome had been like a stranger to me. With an incredible loyalty I had dreamed of her in the North (shall I confess it?) as the city of Horatius, of the Gracchi, of Scipio Africanus, of Sulla and Marius, of Caesar, of that spiritual Caesar, too, who for so many ages has appointed there his dwelling, communing with the eternal in an eternal place. And I had found there a new city, spoiled by old things, full of all the meanness and ugliness of modern life, the rush and noise of electric trams, even in the oldest and narrowest ways, a place of change and destruction.

Take heart, I had continually told myself, even on the first morning beside the imprisoned Tiber bridged with iron, among the new slums about the Vatican, in the brickfield of the Forum: take heart, the Capitol remains. Therefore, not without thankfulness… I had made my way along the ruined Corso to the Piazza Venezia.

Well, I had rejoiced too soon. I was prepared for destruction…but for destruction heaped on destruction, for a rascal impudence that might put Phocas to shame, I confess it at once, I was not prepared…. For there, where long and long ago the Temple of Juno passed into the gentler dominion of the Madonna Mary, the modern barbarian had raised indeed a fitting monument to his king, who resembles great Caesar in this alone that in the heaven of the populace he has become divine. Was it a temple or a tomb, that ghastly erection of ghostly stone, that, standing on a ruined convent, seemed to bellow like Behemoth… It has remained, however, I told myself, for the kingdom of Italy to surpass both Caesar and Popes in vulgarity, rapacity, and insolence…

It was these things, I remember, that rose before me at the close of my last day in the City as I waited for the sunset by the parapet of the Janiculum. So that I said in my heart: Rome is not any more immortal; all that is gone for ever. It is finished. Let us pass by and be silent.

Nevertheless, it was in this moment of despair, of denial, that I began to understand.

An incredible majesty had descended upon the City and the hills…. the City loomed out of the night like some mysterious and lovely symbol, a visible gesture of the infinite, decisive and affirmative, never to be recalled or modified.

The material world, that close, impassable prison, seemed just then to be dissolving before my eyes, and it was as though in the silence, I had heard again these words, so full of assurance and all gladness: Sed confidite, Ego vici mundum: be of good cheer, I have overcome the world. And all my heart was changed suddenly, and in a moment I was comforted.

But that was long ago. Today as I look down on Rome in the long summer that is so quiet still within her walls—is it that I have grown wiser, or may be only older? —I find her immortality not alone in the continuity of Nature or in such a vision as that of which I have spoken, but in the City herself, in the life of the City I have come in some dim way to understand and to reconcile with my dreams…. I feel the eternity of Rome as I feel the brief sweetness of every passing moment there; she seems to me as eternal and persistent as life, as strangely various, as mysteriously secret.

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Edward Hutton: Rome. 1922, fourth edition, pp. 1-4. The first edition appeared in October 1907. 

Urbino

 Urbino was the last stop on Edward Hutton's tour of Romagna and the Marches. It was not the most beautiful city he had seen but it had a fabled past.

Of Urbino, who can speak as he should or conjure up in words, for the pleasure of him who has not seen it, that dark and gaunt city crouched upon its double hill, never venturing to tower up into the sky, but stooping there gazing over the tangled valleys to S. Marino, to S. Leo, to Pesaro, to the great peaks of the Apennines and to the sea? Bleak and rain-sodden, battered by the wind, burnt by the sun, Urbino seems the last place in Italy to have nourished a court renowned for its grace and courtesy. … 

For, astonishing though it may seem, civilization, the ritual of life—life itself being, as some of those great candid minds of the Renaissance were not slow to observe, a kind of religious service-- was very punctually and strictly observed at Urbino in the sixteenth century.  Here on the hills, in this rain-swept, sun-baked place, the Renaissance in all its liberty, beauty and splendor, was played out in its curious medley of contrasts, almost like a play. The most learned and refined of all the courts of Italy, the court of Urbino gathered to itself all the wit and genius of this imperishable Latin people, filled itself with the finest scholars and the noblest gentlemen of Italy, while its Duke and Duchess lived a life that reads almost like a fairy tale, till Cesare Borgia blasted the place like a lightning flash and nothing was ever really quite the same again…. (276-7)

The Duke and Duchess named by Hutton are Federigo da Montefeltro (1422-1482) and his wife, Battista Sforza both pictured in this famous painting by Piero della Francesca that now hangs in the Uffizi. Federigo was succeeded by his son, Guidobaldo (1472-1508) who though driven out by Cesare Borgia returned to continue the courtly tradition. * (See Note)

Suddenly, almost as suddenly as Cesare Borgia had leapt upon Urbino, Alexander VI died. In a moment Cesare’s magical empire departed from him, and he himself was a fugitive. Guidobaldo returned to Urbino, and… passed the rest of his life among his treasures in the retirement of his court. It was then that the Golden Age began for Italy which in its expression and production has never since been equaled. Every sort of scholar came to Urbino; great poets, painters, sculptors, architects, engineers, doctors, priests, quacks of every kind, fools and nobles, dancing-masters and beautiful women, musicians and preachers flocked to the court of one of the most humane princes Italy had ever seen. It was then that Castiglione wrote his Cortegiano and his life of Guidobaldo; it was then that Santi entertained Piero della Francesca, that Melozzo da Forli came to court, and Luca Signorelli painted his work in San Spirito. … (284)

But who could hope to sum up the riches of this stormy, wind-battered, rain-sodden, sun-baked acropolis? This, at least, should not be forgotten. I mean the church of S. Bernardino. This is a little convent of the Zoccolanti which stands at the end of a dusty road on a hill-top opposite Urbino, from which there is a notable view of the city, but not of the palace. S. Bernardino stands under the cypress-ringed Campo Santo of the Urbanati. It has itself always been a graveyard, and here, in the little cruciform church under its blind, round lantern, a truly Bramantesque dream of a church all in rosy brick, the Dukes Federigo and Guidobaldo lie….

Church of San Bernardino**

It was there I took farewell of Urbino, before I set out down the long road for Pesaro, the railway, and home. All that way was pleasantly filled, as I came into the valleys, with great bullock wagons piled up with vast barrels or boxes with the family sitting on top, for it was the time of vintage. The happiness of all that!

At evening, my head full of songs, I came into Pesaro by the Rimini gate, thronged today with bullock-waggons loaded with grapes….and when a few days later I set out for home, it was in the new bubbling wine my health was pledged, and in the new pressed grapes I, too, drank to all my friends. (295)

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Romagna and the Marches, NY, 1925.

*Note: When he was still young, Federigo, who was destined to attain to so much splendor, was sent as a kind of hostage to Venice. It was while in that city that he came under the influence of Vittorino de' Ramboldoni da Feltre, the learned professor of Mantua. This great man was a Greek scholar of no mean attainment, and his ideal of education soon took possession of the greatest princes in Italy. He taught Greek, Latin, Grammar, Philosophy, Mathematics, Logic, music, and Dancing at the Casa Goija, the "House of Joy," where he had settled in 1425 at the invitation of Gianfrancesco II of Mantua.... such scholars as could not afford to pay him he taught for the "love of God." His pupils included the noblest names in Italy; all the children of the Gonzaga house were educated at Casa Goija, and no doubt met the Duke Federigo in the lecture rooms and the meadows. Later, Duke Federigo placed the great scholars portrait in his palace at Urbino with this inscription: "In honor of his saintly master Vittorino da Feltre, who by word and example instructed him in all human excellence, Federigo has set this here."

**Image courtesy of David Orme.

Cagli and the Furlo Pass

 

Toward the end of his tour of Romagna and the Marches Edward Hutton stopped in little Cagli where he saw something perhaps more beautiful than all the lovely landscapes and paintings he had seen on his journey. 

Now Cagli is the most delightful of all these little towns between Fabriano and Urbino, a shady, cool, quiet little place full of interesting buildings and beautiful pictures. ...

I shall not easily forget my arrival in Cagli. I had waited for the evening to set out on account of the heat, so that when I arrived at Cagli which is some distance from the station, it was quite dark. There was little or nothing near the house in the dark street where the posta put me down to indicate that here was an inn, and it was with some misgiving that I made my way up a dark staircase to the first floor. There, however, all my fears forsook me, for I was greeted by one of the most beautiful women it has ever been my good fortune to meet, and, what is rarer than physical beauty in Italy, she had one of the softest and most delicious voices I have ever heard anywhere. It was a great pleasure all the time I was in Cagli to be greeted every morning by this beautiful creature, and ‘twixt sleeping and waking, while the sun came in little daggers through the closed shutters, to hear her say “acqua, Signore.” I don’t think I had ever realized before what a language of liquid music Italian is, nor how true the old saying that “the devil tempted Eve in Italian.” This beautiful lady really managed the whole business of the inn, and with so glorious a dignity and so consummate a tact that even the Italian commercial travelers, about as horned a beast as flourished in the peninsula, forgot his vulgarity when she was by, mended his flamboyant manners, and tried to look like a man. Beauty herself never had a more wonderful power over the Beast; and indeed, the power of this young woman was an effect of sheer beauty in which, yes, even in hers, which was provocative enough, there was something of holiness…. (268-9)

After a pleasant stay, Hutton left Cagli and walked to Urbino, the last stop on his tour. He had to go through the spectacular Furlo Pass.

It was still very hot, and therefore, very early one summer morning when I set out from Cagli. Before me stretched the great white road, Via Flaminia, and above me presently rose the Furlo, its white brows just kissed by the sun in the dawn I could not see. It was not long before I was in the midst of a fantastic fairyland and of strange and horrid cliffs, threatening crags, changing lights, and tremendous gateways. I cannot hope to describe the enormous grandeur of those gates, eyries for eagles, as indeed they are. Presently I came to the remarkable tunnel or gallery which Rome hewed through the living rock to make a way for her armies, and which she knew as Petra Pertusa…. The work was achieved under Vespasian according to the inscription cut into the rock and was constructed in A.D. 75. …

Nothing in Italy is more amazing that this great Roman thing, which seems almost awful in its achievement, and curiously enough ends as suddenly and dramatically as it begins. One goes down towards Fossombrone through a smiling and delicious country of oak woods out of all that loneliness and silence, through which—yes, even through the impassable rock—Rome near two thousand years ago forged a way. (274-5)

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Image by David Orme

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Romagna and the Marches, NY, 1925.

Camerino and Matelica

 This post is longer than usual because it offers Hutton's contrasting view of two towns: lofty Camerino, a shell despite its spectacular views, and lowly Matelica which still retained its soul.   

Camerino

But Camerino is worth all the labours it costs to reach her. Of all the March cities she is the most characteristic, with the most to offer us, at any rate in the way of natural beauty. For even in a country which can boast of such a place as Fermo or Macerata she is easily queen—a noble, dark, medieval city set on the top of a mighty hill nearly two thousand feet over the sea, commanding a view of unsurpassed splendor and beauty, towering over her world. (244) …

No one who has ever looked out from the road beyond Porta Giulia at evening will ever forget what he has seen. It is as though all those dreams of landscape, which were all that Perugino really cared about, had suddenly been translated into a reality more beautiful and more wonderful than anything of which he had been able to conceive… (245)

Wandering about Camerino recalling these things to mind, one is touched by the melancholy of the city from which everything except the beauty of the world in which it stands seems to have fallen away. How empty are all these churches of which there are so many; all the pictures have gone, and the fragments only remain and these not in places for which they were painted, but gathered into another empty and desecrated church, now a museum…. (250)

The curious poverty of Camerino, that noble city, in works of art, cannot but strike every traveler; happily, not far away at the foot of that prodigious hill upon which Camerino stands, there is a little city in the valley of the Esina which is as rich in paintings as Camerino is poor; its name is Matelica…. (254)

I came as a stranger into Matelica, I took lunch at the inn, the Aquila d’Oro, a not very brilliant hostelry, and after lunch, in the very hour of the siesta, I demanded of all and sundry the way to the Museo expecting to see everything there was to see in an hour or two. The Museo was closed and I was directed by the barber, who had courteously accompanied me, to apply to Father Bigiaretti, the director. I did as I was bid. I found Father Bigiaretti, like any other decent and sane person at that hour of a summer day, taking his siesta. But do you think he sent me away? Not at all. Cheerfully and without complaint he brought his siesta to an end and issued out of his cool house into the appalling heat because a stranger wanted to see his beautiful city. Without a thought he devoted the whole of his leisure to showing me not only the Museo, but everything he thought I would care for in Matelica, and this not for the sake of my book, of which he was quite unaware, but because I was a stranger. (255)

Matelica Piazza

And now as to Matelica. I have said that no one who travels through the Marches should miss it… It is a little gay town, as gay as Camerino is melancholy, set about a fine open Piazza, where is a double loggia, a fountain of 1590, the great palazzo del Municipio and the church of S. Soffragio. This charming Piazza is the centre of Matelica; all of the churches, which are the great feature of Matelica, are to be sought from it, the Museo and the Duomo being but a few steps away. …. (256)

The soul of a city, the genius loci, least of all of such a quiet and retiring place as Matelica, cannot be taken by surprise… how often it escapes the assiduous and him who possesses no patience, but would see all in a moment, and pry into secrets that belong to the ages… His mind is a whirlwind and he has lost the command of his own heart. What are the flowers by the wayside to him, and what are the works of Lorenzo da Sanseverino, Crivelli, Palmezzano and the rest of the pictures which hide shyly in these little churches, but flowers? Just because these beautiful things have not been collected into a museum for those who come by railway, they are living still by their wayside, filling the little churches  with their beauty and their pageants, shining in the love of the lowly and the meek, who kneel shyly and silently before them, offering up their petitions and watching with a new wonder every morning the priest make Christ out of bread and wine—things they know, of which we are ignorant, things they find precious, for they are poor, and more precious still because they are the instruments of a Sacrament and a Sacrifice which has given a new meaning to life, which has involved even the hills in its mystery and lifted up forever the souls of men... let us tread softly by these peasants as they kneel with free hearts and bowed heads before Him who has made all that was so worthless most precious, in Whose honour and for Whose glory every picture in Matelica was painted…

Here, in Matelica, how the children linger in the churches, so that, though they be but peasants, they are acquainted with all that the highest culture can give as a reward alter long years—sweetness and light; so that from their earliest years they are used to the ways of a great court, the greatest court in the world, the sanctuary of the King of kings, with its beautiful ceremonies, precious robes and elaborate ritual. ... But because of this, which even in the humblest village, and assuredly in Matelica, the smallest and the poorest children may follow and love, there is about them a graciousness which one misses altogether in the north, that four hundred years ago was ours also, and is visible, for instance, in every gesture of Chaucer’s pilgrims, but that we have missed and shall perhaps never have again. (260-262)

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Romagna and the Marches, NY, 1925.

Sanseverino

In Sanseverino Edward Hutton found a beautiful work of art but more than anything else it was the city and its people, living things that a guide book could never express, that impressed him. 

Sanseverino, in the narrow valley of the Potenza, under the steep hill upon which its Castello still stands, wins you at once by its beauty, its smiling aspect, its air of the Middle Age, of whose works it is full, and of which it might well stand as an example in its picturesque and daring loveliness. The days one spends there wandering from the beautiful long Piazza so happily arcaded on the south, from church to church up to the old Castello, entered by that prodigious gateway, Porta S. Francesco, on the hill, are all days of delight and happiness. There can be no one who has ever wandered through these long valleys, or climbed these great hills, but has rejoiced to enter Sanseverino and regretted to depart, though it be for a city so marvelous as Camerino, or so hospitable and delicious as Matelica. For Sanseverino, in some wonderful way known only to itself, renews one’s youth and one’s first careless delight in Italy—in these beautiful hill cities always so surprising to an Englishman, who is wont to build his towns and villages anywhere rather than upon a hill; but, then, how much that is left to us in England is as old as Sanseverino? (235)

Madonna Pacis

This is the beautiful work of Pintoricchio, and it probably dates from about 1496. It represents in a beautiful landscape—a valley with far-away mountains and curious rocks beneath woods—Madonna seated with her little Son standing on a rich cushion on her knee, as He blesses the donor, a priest…who kneels humbly, his hands pointed in prayer. In Our Lord’s left hand is a crystal ball surmounted by a little cross; and on either side of Madonna is an angel. Above, in the lunette, appears God the Father, surrounded by the cherubim. This very noble work is called the Madonna of Peace, Madonna Pacis, and its effect upon one is just that; it is as though all the softness of Umbria had suddenly crept, on some summer afternoon, into this harder and more violent country of narrow, broken valleys, and precipitous mountains, and had left here for ever this much of its own beatitude…. (239)

When the traveler has seen these things he has seen perhaps the finer sights of Sanseverino, but no one should forget that the city remains—remains to be loved and for our delight. Anyone can follow a guide book, if he can find one, from church to church and picture to picture, but let not such an one deceive himself; when he has seen everything that is there set down there must always remain the city itself with its by-ways, shrines and, above all, its people and the life and happiness of the place. These, in such a book as this, I have not the space nor perhaps the skill to speak of, as they should be spoken of. They remain, when all is said, not merely what is best worth seeing in Sanseverino, but are rightly understood Sanseverino itself. For all that we look for and search out with so much industry is dead, after all, but these are living, and by our pleasure in them, ourselves may judge ourselves. (242)

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Romagna and the Marches, NY, 1925.

Note: Hutton's books usually come with excellent maps that help to follow his travels.  I can't reproduce them here, but below find a map of the Marches that may be useful. You will find Sanseverino near to Tolentino. 

Tolentino and St. Nicholas

Before the unification of Italy, Romagna and the Marches had been part of the Papal States for about a thousand years. Hutton viewed unification as a conquest of the South by the northern Kingdom of Piedmont, a conquest in which he believed more was lost than gained by cities like Tolentino.

St. Nicholas Basilica, Tolentino

The truth would seem to be that the cities under the Papal dominion enjoyed a far greater measure of real freedom than those subject to a mere Signore, and that the difference between being actually independent and being subject to the Pope was a negligible one. Says an historian of Tolentino: “The Accoramboni were never lords in Tolentino. It is false to assert it. We were always free under the Church. The people of Tolentino would never endure tyranny. The men of Camerino—yes; but we were made of different stuff.” And this feeling, which we may be sure was based on substantial fact, was really universal throughout the Romagna and the Marches. When the Piedmontese came in, in 1860, “the people of Ravenna,” we read, “were forced to the polling booth at the point of the bayonet.” And this new liberty was recommended to those who enjoyed the reality for ages! (229)

[The most famous citizen of Tolentino was St. Nicholas (1245-1305), an Augustinian monk] 

Tolentino, it may be thought, as the birthplace of a great saint, may have been more Papal than her neighbors, but in fact this is not so. The great figure of S. Nicholas is not in any sense of the word political; its appeal is altogether human and universal…. 

Perugino: S. Nicholas

It might seem that in S. Nicholas of Tolentino we have an example of that rare sweetness of character which is perhaps in greater or lesser degree the portion of all the saints, but which in him was so overwhelming that men and women followed him, flocked to his Masses, or sought him in the confessional for no other reason. As a preacher, no doubt, he was amazingly successful, but rather by reason of some inward sweetness and charm than of the victorious eloquence of his mere words. For thirty years he lived in Tolentino in the Augustinian convent there, a star in the March, something which men could not explain or dismiss from their minds, women knelt to kiss his robe, and even those in the flower of their age gladly heard his voice, as though it had been some sweet far-away music. By the very beauty of his nature he drew thousands from the half-brutal worldliness in which they lived, and seems indeed to have brought to them something of the strange incomprehensible beauty of his own vision. (229-230)

[On the way to Tolentino Hutton passed through tiny Monte San Giusto and mentioned a painting by Lorenzo Lotto.]

Beyond Pausula, by a rough and hilly road across the Cremone valley, we come to the little walled town of Monte San Giusto, and there in the church of S. Maria is a Crucifixion by Lotto, painted in 1531. (227)

I wonder if he actually saw this magnificent painting by the Venetian master. The small church of S. Maria in Telusiano is hard to find and the painting would have been difficult to see before the invention of coin-operated lighting. A few years ago my wife and I visited Monte San Giusto to see the painting. Here is a link to my account.

Lorenzo Lotto: Crucifixion detail

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Romagna and the Marches, NY, 1925.