Christmas in Dolcedorme

 Edward Hutton interrupted his tour of Umbria to spend the winter in Rome. But he did take time to visit Ulisse, his young traveling  companion, in the boy's hometown of Dolcedorme where they attending the Christmas Midnight Mass. Hutton's charming account is a unique historical document.

 

Ah! That Midnight Mass! … I am not likely to forget it. I had gone with Ulisse, who guided me through the dark and narrow ways, up to the Collegiata, enthroned above the city, under those enormous and precipitous rocks, like giant’s teeth, which distinguish Dolcedorme.

 

It is a large church, rebuilt after an earthquake, in the seventeenth century; but large and spacious though it was, it was full. And not only of the faithful, not only of the women and the poveri. The whole city seemed to be there when the bell sounded for the third time.

 

In their own place sat the women, young and old, devout enough, and for the most part already on their knees. Behind and about, against the pillars and side-altars, stood the men, a vast crowd. And the noise! The whole church was filled with it, and the air was already stifling.

 

Over all the tumult came at last the organ. In the cora they began to sing Te Deum. It was the end of Matins. Mass was about to begin.

 

Still the people came in under the heavy leather curtains. The church was packed. More candles were lighted: more music poured from the organ. Finally, in procession, behind the great Byzantine cross, came Sua Ecclenzia—the whole concourse bent like a field of corn under a wind—blessing as he came. He was to sing Mass. Over the Crucifix on the high altar his single candle shone.

 

Ulisse and I stood before a pillar on the Epistle side, half-way down the great nave. Mass began. Domine dixit ad me … Kyrie eleison … Christie eleison … Kyrie eleison.

 

Monsignor intoned the Gloria in excelsis. The organ burst out into a great peal of music, the bells rang, everyone sang or whistled. …Most whistled.

 

Whistled!

 

Not with the lips only as one whistles an air, but with the fingers in the mouth to make a noise, as much noise as possible. Still others had brought whistles with them, and were using them with all their might. 

 

I was astonished. I was scandalized. Surely my ears deceived me. It was so hot and the odour.…

 

But no, the whistling continued. There was Ulisse with both his fists at his mouth, whistling for all he was worth.

 

Ma come! Was this a theatre or a church? Was this some piece being hooted off the stage or the first Mass of Christmas? I turned to Ulisse.

 

“Ma si, signore, di qua e di la si fischia.”

 

“They’re whistling all over the place!” But why?

 

There was a little silence; the Gloria had finished itself.

 

Surely Monsignor would not continue? But no, the Mass proceeded as usual. The great Epistle proclaimed Him qui dedit semetipsium pro nobis, ut nos redimeret ab omni iniquitate….

 

The Gospel, known from childhood, unfolded itself from the edict of Caesar Augustus to the peace born on earth to men of good will.

 

Slowly we came to the Christmas Preface, the Christmas Sanctus, sung here to a strange dancing measure as in the picture of Botticelli. I had forgotten the unseemly interruption at the Gloria. I had forgotten everything.…

 

There it was again! Suddenly, at the Elevation! But worse than before, more exulting, more joyous, more insolently enthusiastic and rejoicing. It was beyond all possible bounds. In England….

 

“But what is it then?” I leant to Ulisse.

 

“Ma signore, it is the shepherds! E un pio ricordo dei suoni pastorali quando necque nostro Signore.” “A pious remembrance of the shepherds’ music when Our Lord was born.” But I… I, too, would whistle. I … I, too, whistled—only the sounds would not come. What could be the matter with my throat?

 

“Peccato!” whispered Ulisse, that one cannot hear also the voice of the ox and the ass.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 124-125.

Monza: The Iron Crown

   

 

 

 

 

After leaving Pavia, Edward Hutton travelled to Monza to view its relics, the most famous of which was the "Iron Crown of Lombardy," originally conferred on Queen Theodolinda, the Apostle to the Lombards, by Pope Gregory I around the year 600.

Some ten miles to the north of Milan, still in the plain but within sight of the hills, stands Monza, which in its immortal, its beautiful relics, its thirteenth century Broletto, recalls for us the earliest Lombardy, for it was here from the eleventh century, in the first city within the Italian border, that the emperors-elect were crowned kings with the “iron crown of Lombardy,” still holy and still preserved over the high altar of the Duomo, before they set out on that long march to Rome, there to receive the Imperial title and consecration of the Pope. …

Standing on both banks of the Lambro, … Monza is a fair city. If the ancients knew her not, for she is a city of the Fall, to the men of the Middle Age she was as famous as any town in Italy, and the great church which Theodolinda, the Apostle of the Lombards, built beside her own palace remained through all its rebuildings the one true coronation church that has ever been erected south of the alps. …

In the chapel to the left of the choir in a large monstrance in the shape of a cross is preserved the holy and famous Iron Crown of Lombardy, which it is said Gregory the Great gave to Theodolinda. It consists of an inner circlet of iron beaten out of one of the nails of the Cross: this precious relic is encased in a circle of gold and jewels. It is one of the most sacred and priceless treasures—even from a merely historical point of view—to be found in Italy, for it has circled the brows of Theodolinda, of Charlemagne, of Frederick Barbarossa, of Charles V, and of Napoleon I. In itself it seems to bind Europe indissolubly into one; and if ever the Empire be re-erected it is with this majestic and holy symbol we shall crown our Emperor. Not with it has the modern Italian kingdom been consecrated, a newer and a more brittle ring of gold suffices it. This symbol of iron, as old and as indestructible as Europe, awaits, let us believe it, him who shall make us one. 

 

And here in this holy place under the  crown lies she who brought light and strength to her kingdom, the Apostle of the Lombards, Queen Theodolinda, the friend of Gregory. Her tomb, a sarcophagus resting upon four pillars of marble, is a work of the fourteenth century, and the four frescoes of scenes from her life are from the fifteenth, restored in our own day. More interesting are her gifts to the church—the few that remain—in the treasury: a hen with seven chickens of silver-gilt, her crown and comb of gold filigree and fan of painted leather, and best of all, the “precious Gospel book” and cross which Gregory gave her when her son was baptized; it was his last gift before his death.

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 162-.

Pavia: Treasures

 

 

 

 

Two of the treasures that Edward Hutton saw in Pavia were its famed University, and the tomb of Saint Augustine. 

From the cathedral one proceeds up the Corso to the Piazza d’Italia and the University, which it is said Charlemagne founded in 774. However that may be, the University of Pavia owes almost everything to Gian Galeazzo Visconti, who endowed it with many privileges in 1390 and is regarded as its founder. Nevertheless, Pavia was able to boast of learning and philosophy before the Visconti were thought of. Is not Boethius her son, and did he not write here in his captivity the De Consolazione Philosophiae that our King Alfred loved? And was not Lanfranc, Norman William’s Archbishop of Canterbury, born here, and did he not make the legal and philosophical school of Pavia famous through all Europe? To Giovanni Visconti we owe, however, the presence here of Petrarch, who was so often his guest; and the Visconti foundation can at least boast of a name famous through the world, for in 1447 Christopher Columbus was at the University.*** …

The great treasure of Pavia, however, is to be found in that church close to the Castello which is called S. Pietro in Ciel d’Oro, which with its magnificent west front and polygonal tower is itself a wonder, but is altogether glorious because it is the casquet—as far as the body of the church goes a poor one—of one of the five great shrines of Italy—that of S. Augustine—comparable in splendour with those of S. Peter Martyr in S. Eustorgio in Milan, of S. Domenico at Bologna, of S. Donato at Arezzo, and of Our Lady in Or S. Michele at Florence…. 

 

The body of S. Augustine, with the fall of the Roman Empire, was brought in 430 from Hippo in the province of Africa, then in the hands of the Vandals, to Cagliari in Sardinia… where it remained for more than two centuries, till indeed Sardinia was overrun by the Saracens… Then the great Liutprand, King of the Lombards, bought the body of the infidel for 60,000 golden crowns. And in 710 had it borne to his church of S. Pietro in Ciel d’Oro in Pavia…

In appearance the shrine is a vast oblong tomb covered by a canopy borne by square piers. The whole is of marble and in every part is elaborately carved and niched and set above with statues and reliefs. On the top of the tomb, beneath the gabled canopy, the marble effigy of the Saint lies in a linen pall upheld by angels….it is in itself a monument, an everlasting witness to the nobility of the age which produced, and to the men who desired and loved such a work as this.

 

It is easy to measure the enormous abyss which separates our time from theirs, and us from them, when we realise that nowhere in the world could such a work as this  be carried out today; but then we no longer hold the Christian philosophy and have so far ceased to be European. It is little wonder, then, that when we would build a monument we erect such a vulgarity as the Victoria Memorial, or such a heavy ineptitude as the Admiralty Arch at Charing Cross, and this though no saint that has ever existed is capable of exciting in us the love and reverence we had for Queen Victoria. Nor are we alone in this; industrialism has set its loathsome seal upon all our hearts, that without love or speech or sight or hearing we may pass gloomily through a gloomy and unhappy world without hope and without beauty.

 

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*** A rare mistake. Columbus was born in 1451 and said he went to sea at the age of 14.

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 157-161. 

Pavia: S. Michele

  

 

 

 

In Pavia Edward Hutton reflected on the significance of the eleventh century church of S. Michele.

All along the Via Aemilia, between Venetia on the north and Tuscany and the Apennines on the south, between the Alps and the Adriatic, there may be found a whole series of buildings, certainly of the North, belonging to a style of architecture which we call Lombard, but which it would be an error to merge altogether  in the larger title of Romanesque. Perhaps the most remarkable of these buildings, among which we may name Borgo S. Donnino, the monastic church of Chiaravalle and S. Fedele at Como, is the church of S. Michele at Pavia, which is certainly one of the earliest, dating as it does from the last years of the eleventh century. … the whole is at once massive, savage, and restless, a true barbarian work—that is to say, the work of a barbarian who has been brought in contact with Latin work and has been unable to use or assimilate it. Something rude and uncouth we find in all this, of course, for that is the fundamental nature of it, but how full of energy and life it is, too, how restless, daring and unhappy. And indeed the whole building seems to express a sort of disappointment, most of all with itself, as though the builders had seen a vision which they could not recall, or had heard some sudden good news which they could not remember. It is well to remember that the church is dedicated to S. Michael, and that everywhere it speaks of deliverance—deliverance perhaps from the helpless misery and disorderliness of the forests, of the roadless lands hidden in the twilight of the North, that here on the sunny side of the great mountains had been left behind forever, but still remained as a kind of an uneasy and ever recurrent dream. The souls of men who built these churches were haunted by an unconscious recollection of barbarism, from which suddenly and by a kind of miracle their fathers and they themselves had been delivered….

This haunting dread, and an overwhelming sense of deliverance from it, are expressed not only in these carvings over the doors, but everywhere in S. Michele. The belts of carving along the walls, the medallions, and the figures on the jambs of the arches represent dragons, griffins, sphinxes, centaurs, snakes and eagles, a whole menagerie of doubtful creatures from whose power here in Italy one has escaped, that Christianity certainly once and for all disposed of. It is the same within the church, and indeed here in S. Michele Christianity appears in the eleventh century as it appeared to the men of the primitive Church, as a refuge from a whole world of danger, disorder and ennui, as a refuge, most of all, perhaps, from oneself; a philosophy, a faith, a revelation upon acquiring or receiving which depended the safety of the whole world and of one’s own soul. It is possible here in this strange and lonely church to understand that ultimately there is no such thing as Europe, that there is only Christendom, since it is upon what is in the mind and the soul the present and the future of man depends.

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 154-156. 

Pavia: Certosa

   

 

 

 

Leaving Milan, Edward Hutton passed through Chiaravalle, and proceeded to visit the famous Certosa of Pavia, a monument, he believed, not to Medieval faith but to the crimes not only of the Dukes of Milan but also of the new Italian Monarchy.

The monasteries of the Carthusians are found in all countries, and are known in France as Chartreuses, in Italy as Certose, in Spain as Cartuje, and in England as Charterhouses.

 

It is, then, in a house of this Order, and that the most sumptuous and splendid in the world, that we come when, on our way from Milan to Pavia, we leave the train at the wayside station of Certosa. All the greater Carthusian houses look like walled villages, but the Certosa of Pavia looks like a city, and it is indeed different in many ways from every other monastery of the Order.

 

To begin with, the Certosa of Pavia, for all its appearance of solitude, is not built in a waste or desert place like the Grande Chartreuse…it is established within a few miles of the city of Pavia, one of the most important and famous capitols of Lombardy… In the second place, it has nothing about it of the harsh simplicity of the Grande Chartreuse or the rural seclusion of modern Parkminster… Lastly, it owes its foundation, as I have said, not to a saint but to a murderer, a man with a monstrous crime upon his soul, the worldly benefits of which he was then enjoying, Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti.…

 It is a national monument, and of all the robberies the Italian Government has perpetuated under the cloak of justice and popular government this seems to me to be the most justified. At least, I think we resent it less than we do the shameful theft of S. Francesco at Assisi, or any of the thousand crimes that have left the convents of Italy desolate and turned them into barracks or post offices or worse. For the Certosa of Pavia might seem never to have been a true monastery at all. Its fame and its incomparable and lavish beauty have almost nothing to do with religion. It is not the house of God and of His servants we see there, but the magnificent, proud and boastful mausoleum of the Visconti lords and of their more pretentious successors the Sforza. Pathetically insolent even in death, they lie there in all their painted splendour uncontrite and unashamed, … Nowhere in the world has the pride of men—and of such men—faced God out with so strange an effrontery; not at the Escorial, where the Spanish kings for all their cruel pride, frozen into silence among those peaks, have laid themselves down at last in all humility; certainly not at S. Denis or Westminster, where in the whispering aisles men still pray and the dead are a little beloved, for they were our own. But these were kings and their royalty demands of us at least the splendour of beauty. At the Certosa, more sumptuous by far, men have interred in marbles so precious that they can never be broken a succession of bandits who knew no faith, and who get no reverence, whom no one ever thinks of with kindness, enthusiasm or pride, whose crimes are all that they have written on the page of history. Here in unregarded splendour lies unremembered till the Day of Judgment il Gian Biscione, Gian Galeazzo, murderer and coward, the founder of this mausoleum; here is quenched the blood-thirst of Gian Maria of the same house; here, in the remorseless locked marble, Filippo has hidden his vices and his cunning; Francesco Sforza and his treason are imprisoned here, and Galeazzo Maria with his vanities and his lusts; and over them all hovers the dread they had of the assassin’s knife, the terror of their end, the pestilence, the cruelty, the oppression, the fraud, the labyrinthian plots, the murder and the broken faith by which they lived and died. In all this cold and cruel and sumptuous place, where art seems for all its joy and health and wealth and willingness to have died on the threshold and worked with ghostly and inhuman hands, you will not find a touch of human dignity; these bourgeois, with commonplace, vicious and cunning faces, bloated and stupid, these are their kings in Lombardy, and all the genius of Italy has not sufficed to make them noble.

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 136-140. 

Milan: the Brera

 

 

 

Edward Hutton believed that Milan produced no school of painting but that its art galleries, especially the Brera, contained many fine works from all over Italy. He provided brief listings of the holdings in the Brera's rooms. Below find some highlights from his account.

 

But happily for the traveller, the works of the North Italian schools by no means fill the Brera and the other public galleries of Milan. Many a masterpiece is to be found there of the true Italian schools, as well as a few pictures from the North, and to these we shall now turn our attention.

We pass at once to a painter, Borgognone (1450-1523), Foppa’s pupil a man excellent as an artist and full of subtle harmonies in his landscape, and yet not without a strength and almost country roughness found in his figures.

 

 Borgognones work in Milan is extraordinarily plentiful…. Little by little, I think as we get to know him better, the study of his work becomes a study of backgrounds. These delicate and delightful little scenes he would paint perhaps from real life or from a wonderful memory of some glimpse he had had of a city street, or the reach of a canal, or a byway in the country, and his certainty of vision as of touch in these things is magical and beyond praise, something that Mr. Berenson compares with Whistler. 

 

But with Borgognone the school of Milan, if it can be said ever to have existed, comes suddenly to an end. Bramante appears, and after Bramante Leonardo. They were only not an utter disaster for Milan because there was really nothing to destroy. The native artistic genius that they might have killed had never existed, and their schools consist, as we might suppose, of copyists and prettifiers… (122)

 

A whole room is given over to the Late Bolognese masters, but these will not detain us, though our fathers would have spent much time there. We turn with a real eagerness that they would have failed to understand to the pictures of Gentile da Fabriano, Piero della Francesca, Luca Signorelli, Giovanni Santi, Benozzo Gozzoli and, once more at one with our ancestors, Raphael….

 

We come into the real Umbrian indeed with the work of Giovanni Santi, the father of Raphael, who has here a charming picture of the Annunciation; and to the most perfect expression of that school in the glorious picture by Raphael, one of his few really successful subject panels in the Sposalizio. It is a priceless treasure that cannot be matched, but it is so well known that to describe it would be absurd.

Raphael: Sposalizio

 

Two works, at any rate, by Northern masters, the great and beautiful Rembrandt, so rare a thing in Italy, a portrait of his sister, an early work, and the portrait of the Princess Amalie by Vandyck, should not be missed. While our eyes rest upon the Rembrandt all Milan seems to be nothing but make-believe, and all but three of the works here in the Brera, the merest pretence. The great Dutchman comes among these Italians even in Milan, like an emperor, and it is they who seem to be as strangers. [126-127]

 

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 122-127.  

Milan: Duomo

 

 Edward Hutton disliked the exterior of Milan's famous Duomo but had nothing but praise for its spacious interior. Fifty years earlier the young Mark Twain had a much different opinion. I append a brief excerpt from his "The Innocents Abroad."*

The Duomo of Milan, the most famous and the greatest Gothic building in Italy, was projected and built by the Visconti, and first by Gian Galeazzo Visconti in 1386, and therefore at a time when the Gothic style had already begun to show signs of decadence and exhaustion. It is in no sense an Italian building. It was not Milan which built it, as Florence and Siena built their cathedrals, but the tyrant Visconti. It was not a Latin idea or a Latin enthusiasm which conjured this vast and astonishing thing out of the mountains and the soil of Italy: the Duomo of Milan is the result of a particular, probably foreign, and certainly belated fancy for Northern work. It was conceived by Gian Galeazzo Visconti, who had been a great traveller.

 

All-powerful in Lombardy, the ambition of this strong and unscrupulous tyrant was to place upon his head the crown of Italy and to dominate the whole peninsula. With this hope in his heart, he undertook the building of the greatest of all Italian churches, and he fashioned it after the manner of those he had seen in the monarchies of the North.

 

As we see it to-day, the Cathedral of Milan is the result of a collaboration between German, probably south German, architects and Italian engineers…and, as we shall see, what is chiefly to be admired and loved in the building is due to what these Latins were able to make of German work….

 

For if a cathedral is to live, it must be an expression of national consciousness, not of individual desire. That the Cathedral of Milan is a living thing we owe to the Italian engineers who followed the German architects. …

As we see it, the Cathedral has five naves, and this, as I understand it, is necessary to the fundamental  Latin desire that makes of the church, in spite of the Germans and the style, a really Latin and a living thing: the desire for space….

 

So much for the plan and the building itself. The gothic detail and ornament are very different matters.  These are quite inanimate, without expression or charm, as dead everywhere as the work of our own day, and indeed they might be the very work of our hands….What saves the Cathedral from barbarism is not the profuseness of its weakness, but the nobility and splendour of its spaciousness, and the beauty and spiritual effect of just that….

 

The effect of the Cathedral without is in fact altogether false, vulgar, and disappointing…. If without, the Cathedral of Milan, lost in its confusion of detail, its thousands of statues, its restless fretwork and innumerable pinnacles, fails to win from us  anything but wonder, within, lets us confess it at once, it overwhelms us altogether by its sheer grandeur and nobility. The true height of the roof is not only at once apparent and even exaggerated by the fact that it is upheld by giant pillars which rise unbroken to the vaults, without either triforium or clerestory; but the vast size of the church is understood at once, its nobility not of height only  but of breadth and spaciousness. …The church covers an area of 14,000 square yards and will hold 40,000 people. Thus it is, I suppose, the largest Gothic church in existence. Its contents, however, save for a few tombs and the works collected in the sacristy, are of meagre interest, and in this respect, it is probably the poorest cathedral in the world.

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 98-101.

*Mark Twain: The Innocents Abroad. Milan's Duomo

 

What a wonder it is! So grand, so solemn, so vast! And yet so delicate, so airy, so graceful! A very world of solid weight, and yet it seems in the soft moonlight a fairy delusion of frostwork that might vanish with a breath! How sharply its pinnacled angles, and its wilderness of spires were cut against the sky, and how richly their shadows fell upon the snowy roof! It was a vision! –-a miracle—an anthem sung in stone, a poem wrought in marble!

 

Howsoever you look at the great cathedral, it is noble, it is beautiful! Wherever you stand in Milan or within seven miles of Milan, it is visible—and when it is visible, no other object can claim your whole attention. Leave your eyes unfettered by your will but a single instant and they will surely turn to seek it. It is the first thing you look for when you rise in the morning, and the last your lingering gaze rests upon at night. Surely it must be the princeliest creation that ever brain of man conceived. ###  

Milan: St. Lorenzo and a Gothic Romance

 

Edward Hutton's visit to Milan's church of S. Lorenzo included an account of the amazing story of the fifth century Gothic King Ataulphus, and the Roman princess Galla Placidia. 

 

But when all is said, S. Lorenzo remains in many ways the loveliest and certainly the most characteristic building of still Roman Milan. And the power of Rome and Roman things, in spite of every disaster, remained instinct and living here, in its tremendous appeal to the imagination and in the mind of man. We find nearly all the greater architects of the Renaissance to have studied and to have been influenced by the church. Sangallo inspires himself here. Leonardo da Vinci studies it, and it is, after all we find, this church of S. Lorenzo which engenders in the mind of the greatest builder of that period, Bramante, the divine plan, the most beautiful design of modern architecture, that for S. Peter’s in Rome, which the Reformation ruined and brought to nothing. [92]

 

S. Lorenzo is octagonal in form and is covered by a dome; the four main sides are closed by semi-cupolas borne by two stories of colonnades consisting each of four columns. Nothing at once more serene and more joyful can be imagined: the church is full of the sun, and the eye is continually and irresistibly drawn upward to the height of the dome.

 

Interesting, however, as S. Lorenzo is, in its architecture recalling the Pantheon and in its spirit the spirit of the Empire, its chief attraction for us lies perhaps in the Capella di S. Aquilino, which stands in the right of the church and is quite the most ancient part of it. …

 But this chapel of S. Aquilino contains something that for the merely human traveller, apart from the artist, puts S. Lorenzo at once on the same level sentimentally with S. Ambrogio. For it is in S. Ambrogio we seemed to find, in the memory and presence of S. Ambrose there, something of the glory and the nobility of those great Roman days of the fourth century, here is S. Lorenzo we may perhaps understand the Fall as we stand beside the great stone tomb of Ataulphus, king of the Goths, the successor of Alaric. For there in a Roman and Christian sarcophagus has the barbarian who had made the great raid with Alaric, had thundered at the gates of Rome, had partaken of his glory and had stood beside the monstrous and inviolate tomb, whose secret was kept by the murder of a multitude….

 

As King of the Goths, the barbarian who lies so securely now within sound of the modern life of Milan had a career not less astonishing than he had enjoyed before Alaric’s death. After a courtship as barbarous, as astonishing and as romantic as any recorded in the history of the world, the savage married the daughter of the great Theodosius. And just as Alaric had been awed by the majesty even of the Rome he violated, so Ataulphus, with the astounding prize of the daughter of the Emperor, the sister of Honorius, in his hands, quailed and bowed his head. For we read that when the day of their nuptials was celebrated in Narbonne in Gaul, “the bride, attired and adorned like a Roman Empress, was placed on a throne of state; the king of the Goths, who assumed on this occasion the Roman habit, contented himself with a less honourable seat by her side.” Ataulphus was in 425 assassinated in the palace of Barcelona, and Galla Placidia, whom he had so much loved and honoured, “confounded among a crowd of vulgar captives,” was compelled to march on foot before the horse of the barbarian who had murdered her husband. Her marvellous alabaster tomb, empty now, stands under the night-blue of the mosaics at Ravenna, but Ataulphus lies here in the chapel of S. Aquilino in Milan.

 

Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. Ravenna

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 92-94. 

Milan: Church of St. Ambrose

 After providing a brief life of St. Ambrose, Edward Hutton entered into an extended discussion of the outstanding features of the church founded by the great saint. 

 

Then S. Ambrose founded his new church and dedicated it to SS. Gervasius and Protasius. It was, of course, a building of the fourth century. Nothing would seem to remain of the  building which Uraias the Goth probably destroyed. The present church, under the dedication of S. Ambrose, who lies there between S. Gervasius and S. Protasius, under the high altar, dates in part from the ninth century, when it was refounded by another Archbishop of Milan, Aspertus: much of the building, however, would seem to belong to the twelfth century. Nevertheless, we have in S. Ambrogio not only the oldest ecclesiastical building in Milan, but a church which, in spite of rebuilding and the restoration of Cardinal Federigo Borromeo and of our own time, recalls us in its plan certainly to very early times, and remains one of the most beautiful and interesting buildings in Italy. …

 

It is a simple basilica upheld by vast round arches of brick carried by great pillars between which galleries are set borne by other round arches of brickwork….The nave is thrice crossed by great arches which divide the roof as it were into three blind domes. Beyond these the sanctuary is covered by an exquisite open lantern, so that a flood of light falls upon the beautiful baldacchino and high altar and is thrown upon the mosaics in the half gloom of the tribune. Here, high above a crypt the choir is set in the semicircle of the apse….

 

The lovely marble screen of the choir might seem, too, very early work, while the exquisite baldacchino upheld by four Roman pillars of red porphyry… is probably of the twelfth century. This baldacchino, perhaps the loveliest thing in the church, is exquisitely carved in the Byzantine manner… I have said that perhaps the baldacchino was perhaps the loveliest thing in the church. I had forgotten—had I forgotten?—the palliotto of gold and of silver which enclose the altar and is itself enclosed in a case or safe of steel, locked by twelve keys, two for each door, and so precious that it costs no less then five lire even to see it. It was made more than a thousand years ago by the goldsmith Vuolvinio, and given to the church by the Archbishop Angilbertus II. The front of the marvelous casket is of solid gold; it covers the whole front of the altar, and is held by a frame of moulding of pure silver: it is covered with enamels and set with precious jewels uncut. In the midst in a mandorla is Our Lord, and above, below and on either side as in a cross, are set the beasts of the Four Evangelists; on either side of the cross thus formed  are four compartments in each of which are three apostles…. Nothing, I suppose, left to us in the world of the work of the goldsmith is half so precious as this astounding and lovely casket.

Beneath the high altar, so marvelously cased and adorned, lie in a modern shrine of silver in the crypt the bones of the great archbishop and saint between those of S. Gervasius and S. Protasius. *

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*Image provided by David Orme. Hutton provided an excerpt from a 1872 letter to Cardinal Newman from a correspondent who had been present at a close examination of the three skeletons. The bones of the two martyrs showed signs of a horrible execution, but the bones of S. Ambrose were "wholly uninjured."

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 87-90.

Milan: St. Ambrose

Edward Hutton prefaced his  visit to Milan's church of S. Ambrogio with a discussion of the great man whose shrine it is. In his writings on Italy, Hutton included a number of biographies of saints, most of them not well known outside of their localities. But S. Ambrogio (St. Ambrose) was a different story. Born in 340 the son of a Roman patrician, his own achievements were so great that he became Bishop of Milan by popular acclamation even before he was baptized. As Bishop of Milan he went on to have a profound effect on history.*

 

And yet I must confess that the one certain and enduring impression I always receive in Milan does not come to me from these beautiful and lonely columns, but from a church, the Church of S. Ambrogio, which for all that it is a building of the ninth century and of the twelfth, carries me back at once to what often seems to me the most wonderful, as it is certainly the most fundamental, of those three centuries upon which Christendom has stood so strong; I mean the last century before the Barbarian invasion, the fourth of our era.

 

That wonderful and so fruitful age, so strangely neglected and so wilfully misjudged by our historians, is here in Milan, and especially in S. Ambrogio, brought vividly before us by the memory of the great Saint who dominated it, and whose shrine, rightly understood, the beautiful Church of S. Ambrogio, remains to this day.

 I suppose that to most men S. Ambrogio appears if at all, first as one of the Four doctors of the Latin Church, and then as a divine poet, the author for instance of the lovely Christmas hymn, Jesu Redemptor Omnium, which coming to us faintly in the early twilight on Christmas Eve, presently in the midnight hour fills all the sky and mingles itself with the song of the angels.  One remembers him, too, as the author of the ritual which bears his name, and of a certain manner of chanting named after him, and more especially perhaps as the Bishop who received S. Augustine into the Church, who baptized him, and, as it is said, composed with him an antiphon  the most wonderful of those proses which are wholly Christian in their origin, the Te Deum.

Jesu Redemptor Omnium
See Below for brief video

 

But S. Ambrose was something beside a poet, he was a very great man of action and a Saint. On his lips we hear not only the loveliest lines of Christian poetry, then at last come to perfection, but the most significant words of an age at least as subtle as our own. Rightly understood, the whole of S. Ambrose’s life was devoted to the establishment of Europe, of Christendom, that it might endure. He was not only sure of himself, he was sure of what he achieved. As the great enemy of Arianism, he was not merely combating what our indifferent age would consider a matter of pure opinion in an incomprehensible theology, he was laying with the utmost forethought and intention the indestructible foundations of European society and civilization, that the flood which was about to sweep all else away might not overwhelm them. Out of the ruins of the Empire we have constructed Europe, because he and the Church he served secured those foundations which are the vast monoliths of the Nicene Creed….

 

It is impossible to give any real impression of what the rule of Ambrose was in Milan, or even in such a book as this, of the Milan of that day. The most gentle of men, full of charity, learned and wise, he was yet a great statesman and a saint: his government passes before our eyes to the constant clash of arms, amid innumerable tumults, as when barricaded in the Portian Basilica, surrounded by thousands of the people of Milan, he is compelled to face  and to resist the demands of Justina the Empress, who with her young son Valentinian were Arians, and therefore the enemies  not of Ambrose only but of the Commonwealth. They demanded a church in that Milan which Ambrose had purged of heresy. He was adamant. “ My gold and my silver, nay my life, ask and they are yours; but the churches of God are not mine to give.” Such was his invariable answer.

Note: Here is a link to a brief rendition of Jesu Redemptor Omnium composed almost 1700 years ago..

 

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*His brother and sister are also regarded as saints.

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 82-86. 

Overview of Milan

Edward Hutton visited Milan over a hundred years ago. He began his tour of this city of contrasts with an overview.

I suppose that in all Italy there is no other city so essentially un-Italian as Milan: which yet at every turn continually reminds you of her Latin origin. The true explanation of the paradox might seem to be that Milan is the only town in Italy which, in the modern sense, is a great city at all: she alone is so thoroughly alive, so full of business, as miserable and as restless as the great cities of the North; she alone is wholly without a sense of ancient order and peace; she alone is inexhaustible, a monstrous confusion of old and new, of wretchedness and prosperity, of vulgar wealth and extreme poverty; she alone, in her hurried success, her astonishing movement, her bewilderment and her melancholy, has given herself without an afterthought to the modern world.

 

With this modern city, then, whose sound is the sound of iron upon iron, whose skies are a battlefield, and whose name everywhere in Italy is a synonym for “progress,” this book, and rightly, will have nothing to do. There is so little to be said of any abiding moment for the traveller concerning it, as there would be, for one who was bent on exploring England, concerning Manchester: as little and as much. For both are experiments in a new sort of life, which the best philosophers happily assure us is but a transition to another and certainly a better; they are the creation of what we know as Industrialism, and neither the one  nor the other has yet a hundred years behind it.

 

Milan, however, --and therefore it figures in this book,--unlike Manchester, holds half forgotten within its modern confusion many abiding and a few  beautiful things that have already endured for more than a thousand years. These are our friends; they are in a very real sense a part of us, a part of our spiritual inheritance, and if our civilisation is to endure, whatever changes it may suffer, it seems to me these can never utterly pass away….

 Of the capital of Maximian Hercules, of Constantine, of S. Ambrose, of Valentinian and of Honorius almost nothing remains but these sixteen columns of white marble in the midst of the Corso di Porta Ticinese, which come to us, perhaps, from the third century, and are all that is left of the giant Baths of Mediolanum, or, as some would have it, but with less assurance, of the Palace of the Emperor.

 

I suppose no one can pass these giant columns to-day, in all the hurry of the street, without emotion; they stand there in the midst of modern meanness more eloquent than any pyramid, or the giant and deserted  towns of the plateau of Africa. Those have remembered and borne within only in a solitude, but these in the midst of life and the face of the conqueror. Nor can anything anywhere in Italy bring home to one with a more painful conviction the contrast between the majesty and endurance that were of old and the trumpery and ephemeral contrivances of to-day than those pillars constantly do as one passes them, well, in a tramcar on our way, let us say, to the famous Galleria Vittoria Emanuele.

 

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 80-82.