Siena: Duomo

  Edward Hutton did not admire the facade of Siena's Duomo but he did find much to admire in the interior. Many thanks to my friend David Orme for the images.

In so many of the cathedrals of Italy, the façade has little or no relation to the church which lies behind it; and here in Siena it might seem we have the most flagrant example of this fault. The façade of the Duomo of Orvieto, it is true, errs in the same way, though not so manifestly, for there at least the noble central door, so much larger than its fellows on either side, emphasizes the importance of the nave over the aisles, while here the three doors are of equal height. But this is by no means the only cause of Siena’s inferiority. As a façade pure and simple, that of Orvieto is noble and lovely in design, in decoration, and in colour. That of Siena is feeble in design, it suffers from too much decoration, and this is of a mean sort, and who but a fanatic can admire its colour? It fails everywhere in comparison with the work of Orvieto—it fails in order and in beauty. And if in its completeness it may not be compared with its sister at Orvieto, it fails, too, in its detail. At Orvieto sculpture has, with very happy effect, been more sparingly used, but what there is, is of a better and nobler kind. … (105)

If one is always disappointed with the façade of the Cathedral, what is one’s final impression of the interior? At first certainly you are bewildered and confused by those bands of black and white marble which so unfortunately diminish the spaciousness of what is, after all, a very spacious building; they halve its height and breadth and rob it of its dignity. But when, if ever, you have become accustomed to this oddity, you recognize that what charms you in a building full of contradictions is that in it which carries out the idea of all Latin building, an effect, yes, in spite of every sort of handicap, an effect of light and space, not so splendid certainly as you will find in such masterpieces as the Cathedrals of Pisa and Lucca or in the church of S. Croce in Florence, but light and space nevertheless, here where the fundamental feeling is rather Romanesque than Gothic, the predominating lines horizontal rather than perpendicular; and the decorations of the church, mainly of the Renaissance as they are, confirm the impression we receive from the building itself. … (111)

 But the finest and most interesting work of art in the Cathedral is the pulpit by Niccolo Pisano.… The plan is the same as that for the pulpit in the Baptistry of Pisa, but the work is richer and more clairvoyant. Octagonal in form, it possesses two more bas-reliefs than the pulpit of the Pisan baptistry, namely, the Massacre of the Innocents and a second scene of the Last Judgment. But in every relief, we find a more dramatic life and an art more naturalistic than in the earlier work. It is a masterpiece a little uncertain of itself, perhaps, but full of a new promise of joy.… (115)

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, New York, 1910

Siena

 

Siena was one of Edward Hutton's favorite cities despite its often tragic history that he spent many pages recounting. But it was the city and its people that most impressed him as well as the spectacular views both within and without. Below find his descriptions of the famous Piazza and Palazzo Pubblico, as well as his impression of the view from the Torre.

What the Piazza Signoria is to Florence, that, and something more, the Piazza del Campo is to Siena: it is at once the most beautiful and the most characteristic thing in the city. However one approaches it—and since it is set at the junction of the three hills on which Siena lies there are many ways to approach—it is always suddenly, with surprise that one looks across that vast and beautiful space shaped like an open fan, enclosed on all sides by palaces, and radiating as it were from what one is often tempted, there at least, to proclaim the most beautiful palace in Tuscany, the Palazzo Pubblico, with its marvellous bell-tower soaring so adventurously, so confidently into the blue sky.

 

This piazza so spacious in form, so strange in its colour and loveliness, is, as it always has been, the heart of Siena. For work or for play, for council or for pleasure, in time of foreign war or civil riot, here the Sienese have always assembled. It was the market-place, the true piazza, the universal meeting-place of the city. But to-day it is almost deserted. One by one it has lost its uses till now but one remains to it; it is still a playground when, in August, on the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, the Palio is run there over the smooth bricks round the central space enclosed by its great pavement…. (93)

 

A quietness but seldom broken now fills the Piazza with an exquisite peace. It is the only silent place, I think, in a city full of little noises beyond any other in Tuscany: the clang of metal on metal, the hammers of the coppersmiths that wake you so early, the plaintive cries high up among the old houses of innumerable swallows, the shouts of the hawkers, the shrill voices of children, the songs and laughter and endless loud, free talk of a Latin people not yet dominated by the stupefying thunder of machines…. (95)

 

There is something in the Torre del Mangia that is peculiarly Sienese. Whereas in looking at Giotto’s tower in Florence, like a tall lily beside the Duomo, we do in fact “consider the lilies of the field,” their candid beauty and humility, here we are reminded of something fearless, daring, and adventurous, as though into this one perfectly expressive thing the very soul of Siena had passed—that soul which, mystical as it was beyond any other Tuscan city, was so often boastful too and unstable, a little hysterical in its strange spiritual loveliness, so that it too easily came to naught. Something of all this we find almost everywhere in the city, and especially perhaps in the great unfulfilled boast of the Duomo, but nowhere so subtilely and completely expressed as in this rose-coloured tower soaring over the roofs of Siena…. (96)

 

Hence we climb to the top floor of the Palace, where after all the best of all awaits us… the very world itself, the vast contado of Siena, hill and valley and desert stretching away to where, in the evening mist, maybe, the pure, serene outline of Mont’ Amiata rises into the sky on the verge of the Patrimony, on the confines of Umbria, on the road to Rome. He who has once seen that majesty will never forget it. It seems to seal every one of the days one spends in Siena, or in the little cities of the south that were once her vassals. From here you may count them all: only you will not. You will look only on that mountain whose crest, shaped like the crescent moon, bears as of right the symbol of Mary, and in silence you will await the sunset. And as the bells once more, as of old, ring the Angelus, you will remind yourself, perhaps after many days of forgetfulness, of those things which alone have any reality—

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Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, 1910.

Volterra

 Edward Hutton's Siena and Southern Tuscany was published in 1910, over a hundred years ago. Walking from S. Gimignano to Volterra he encountered what he called "traveller's fear" before arriving at the gate of that ancient and storied city. Most of the chapter on Volterra deals with its long history.

 

The road for Volterra—for it was thither I was bound one fine October morning at dawn—descends from S. Gimignano into the valley, and climbing again through that quiet and delicate country that marks all the Val d’Elsa, joins the high road from Colle…Thence the way lies over vast and barren watersheds, across an uplifted wilderness of sterile clay hills, past blue-grey chasms of volcanic tufa, till at evening “lordly Volterra” rears itself up suddenly against the sky, haggard with loneliness and age like the dreadful spirit of this strange country so full of a sinister desolation. No traveler can, I think, approach this outraged stronghold of old time without a certain hesitation, a certain apprehension and anxiety. The way is difficult, precipitous, and threatening, full of dangers that cannot be named or realized; and long ere you climb the last great hill into the city an eerie dread has seized your heart. As far as the eye can reach that battered and tortured world rolls away in billow after billow of grey earth scantily covered with a thin dead herbiage that seems to have even burned with fire. On either side the way vast cliffs rise over immense crevices seamed and tortured into the shapes of raped and ruined cities: yonder a dreadful tower set with broken turrets totters on the edge of sheer nothing; here a tremendous gate leads into darkness, there a breached wall yawns over an abyss. If there is such a thing as traveller’s fear, it is here you will meet it, it is here it will make your heart a prize. As for me, I was horribly afraid, nor would any prayer I know bring my soul back into my keeping.

And if the way is so full of fear, what of that lofty city that stands at the high summit of that narrow road winding between the precipices? It too is a city of dread—a city of bitterness, outraged and very old. Seven hundred years before the fall of Troy it had already suffered siege. Surrounded in those days by walls forty feet high, 12 feet thick, and eight thousand yards in circumference, that have worn out three civilizations, and still in part remain, Volterra was one of the great cities of the Etruscan League. Like vast fortresses her gates were held impregnable. Enemy after enemy, army after army broke against those tremendous bastions; she scattered them, and they were lost in the desolation in which she is still entrenched. From the lower valley of the Arno to the forgotten citadel of “sea-girt Populonia,” which the Maremma has destroyed, she reigned supreme.... (39-40)

 

Encamped within these ruins he will find the debris of more than one later civilization—Roman, Medieval, and Renaissance—cheek by jowl with the fugitive and impermanent work of to-day. Still enthroned and guarded by the wall of the Etruscans, and entered by their gate, the shrunken medieval city of Volterra waits for him among the ruins of four different ages, like some herb hidden in a crevice of the temples of Karnak. (41)

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, New York, 1910. 

S. Gimignano

Edward Hutton's tour of  southern Tuscany continued with S. Gimignano, the hill town still famous for its many towers. 

If we would know what a Tuscan hill town was like in the fourteenth century, we must go on foot or by carriage to S. Gimignano delle belle Torri, on the hills on the other side of the Elsa. There it is true, we shall find no remembrance of Boccaccio, but we shall be treading in the footsteps of Dante, and we shall find there, too, the memory of one of those little saints who once made sweet our world, but who, alas! come no more down the long valleys at evening, singing of the love of God. Nevertheless, there are few refuges in all of Tuscany more secure from the rampages of our time that S. Gimignano.

 

To reach this wonder, to behold this banner of a lost cause, still valiant upon the hills, that is a good way which leaves Certaldo by crossing the river, and so climbs over the hills till the city “of the beautiful towers” rises before you like a vision, and you come at last, as to a forgotten shrine, into her quiet and shadowy gates….

 

The road from Certaldo, which was the way I took, is as lovely as any in the world. You climb hill after hill between the olives and the vines, where the grain and the grapes grow together. Often you descend into delicious valleys, where the vineyards are still with summer, and the silence is only broken by the faraway voice of some peasant singing stornelli; often, too, you look back on Val d’Elsa, where Certaldo smiles on its steep hill over the river, till suddenly at a turning of the way S. Gimignano rises before you on a lonely hill-top, covered with the silver of the olives, the gold of the corn, the green mantle of the vines, like a city out of a missal, crowned with her trophy of thirteen towers….

 

This little valiant town, so lonely on the hills, was once the centre of a vigorous life, civil and religious, even intellectual and artistic. It produced and employed painters; a poet was born here, little S. Fina stood for it among the blessed in heaven. Now the place is less than nothing, a curiosity for strangers; it has no life of its own, and is incapable of producing anything but a few labourers for the fields. As you pass through its narrow ways and look on the monuments of the Middle Age and the Renaissance, you find everything deserted and a cruel poverty the only tyrant left. Some virtue is gone out of it. Why?... (31)

 

S. Fina
Benozzo Gozzoli

She is poor, and her ways are quiet: how hospitable is her inn! She has the inevitable humility of those who have given up the struggle for pre-eminence, the inevitable grace of all those who have learned how to wait in meditation. Indeed, I have not told one-half of her sweetness, nor numbered the half of her treasures, nor told of her country byways, nor altogether understood why I love her so. Yet this I know: she has nothing to do with machinery or the getting of wealth. Come and see. (38)

 

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Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, New York, 1910.