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.  

Masolino in Castiglione d'Olana

 Walking south along the beautiful route from Como to Milan, Edward Hutton stopped at Castiglione d'Olana to view frescoes by Masolino, the great Tuscan painter of the quattrocento whose most famous work is in Florence's Brancacci chapel.

 

Castiglione

There are many other happy places about Varese, but the traveller, already anxious for Milan, will scarcely linger here, more especially as the best of all lies on his way. That best is the road to Castiglione d’Olana, and Castiglione itself. You go, if you are wise, through Bizzozero, climbing the hills, with wonderful views of the Alps and the lakes all the way, and then descend through delicious woods by Lozza to the little town of Castiglione, partly in the valley of the Olana, a pleasant stream, and partly on the steep hill above it. 

The Castello, which belonged to the noble family of Castiglione, on the hill above the little town, or rather village, had by the beginning of the fifteenth century become ruined, and there Cardinal Branda da Castiglione built the church we see dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary, to S. Lorenzo and to S. Stefano, together with a little Baptistery separate from the church and to the north of it. Here by the utmost good fortune one of the greatest Tuscan painters of that day was employed to adorn that building in fresco. Branda da Castiglione was Cardinal of S. Clemente, and it was there, doubtless, he had seen the work of Masolino and liked it. So he bade him paint his own church of the Rosary with some of the joyful and glorious mysteries which that crown of prayers celebrates, and today we find in the choir the result of this commission. There we see the Marriage of the Blessed Virgin, the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, the Assumption and the Coronation of Our Lady in six compartments with Our Lord in Benediction in the midst …. In the Baptistery close by we find many scenes far better preserved than those in the church, of the life of S. John Baptist, master-works of the great Tuscan whom Cardinal Branda da Castiglione found at work in the S. Clemente in Rome. The first modern critics to write of these paintings  were the almost infallible Crowe and Cavalcaselle. Vasari does not mention them, and, as it seems, they were quite unknown when in the end of the eighteenth century, the church being very dark, they were covered with whitewash and were only uncovered in 1843.

It has been reserved for a critic of our own time to make a further discovery. For, as it happened, Mr. Berenson came to Castiglione not long ago and found in the Palazzo Castiglione here a great frieze running round the great hall consisting of four frescoes from the master’s hand. Three of these had been whitewashed, but in that which had escaped he found one of the finest and one of the most surprising things in all Tuscan art of the quattrocento: “nothing less than a vast landscape, a sort of panorama of the Alps, with a broad torrent rushing down to the plain.” Was it Cardinal Branda who so loved these great hills he could see from his house, or Masolino himself, who, Tuscan as he was, looking upon them for the first time, gave himself suddenly to them and recorded here forever his sudden and overwhelming joy? We shall never know: only, as Mr. Berenson says, “let us cease talking about the late date at which in Italy landscape began to be treated on its own account.” *

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 54-55.

*Bernard Berenson, an acquaintance of Hutton's, was a connoisseur and prolific writer on the art of the Italian Renaissance. 

Lake Como

 Although my wife and I visited Lake Como more than a dozen years ago, the memory is still fresh in our minds. I will never forget entering our room at the aptly named Hotel Belvedere in Argegno, and opening the large shutters to reveal a truly fantastic vision of the beautiful blue water and the surrounding hills. Here are excerpts from Edward Hutton's description of Lago di Como.

 

Hotel Belvedere, Argegno

Men have fruitlessly discussed for ages which is the most beautiful of the lakes in this paradise that lies at the gates of Lombardy, among the mountains. One might as well consider whether Winchester Cathedral were more beautiful than Salisbury, or Wells than either. For no one is like another, save that all are to be enjoyed. Lago Maggiore has the gift of the wind, of the wideness of some inland sea and of distance; Lago Lugano has the gift of shadow, of great hills and of many secret places; Lago di Como has the joy of richness and of colour, the mystery of woods and the surprise of the snow, and of far-away great mountains; Lago d’Orta has flowers and silence. But of all the lakes, I love best the Larian, Lago di Como, because it is wholly Latin and there I can tread in the ways that are from of old, I can behold places that have always been sacred and remember the history of Europe. …[30]

 

But delightful though the lake is between Bellaggio and Colico and between Bellaggio and Lecco, there can be no doubt that its most beautiful, and its most frequented and famous part, is that which lies between Bellaggio and the city of Como—the lake of Como proper. The special and enchanted beauty of the Italian lakes is here at its best, and all that is most characteristic  in the strange lavishness of their beauty seems here to have found its best expression. And to add to our pleasure it is here, too, that the historical interest of this part of Lombardy reaches its climax. Here the Latin world is secure and we feel ourselves in the country of Pliny and Virgil…. [45]

 

Opposite Lezzono we see the only island on the lake, the Isola Comacina. The name of this island takes our thoughts back over a thousand years and more of history.

Here, as is supposed, Caninius Rufus, one of Pliny’s correspondents had a villa. “How is Como looking,” Pliny writes to him, “your darling spot and mine? And that most charming villa of yours, what of it, and its portico where it is always spring, its shady plane trees, its fresh crystal canal and the lake below that gives so lovely a view? [47]…

 

Who shall describe the way from Isola Comacina to Como:  is it not one of the most luxurious beauties in the world? Argegno with the Val d’Intelvi, Nesso with its waterfall, what can be said of them?... [47]

From Argegno, indeed, to Como it is villa and garden and grove all the way. Who is there that knows Como that has not floated at evening under those balconies heavy with roses, those terraces stately with cypresses and myrtles, those hanging gardens of azaleas and lilies and geraniums, where the magnolias shine in the twilight and the night is heavy with sweetness? [49]…

 

No one, I suppose, comes to Como, that shining city under the Brunate at the lake’s head, for history. There is plenty of it if one does; but…the olive-clad hills, the entrancing byways and the lake itself, entice one to be ever up and about, what time one can save from these is given, and I think without hesitation, to the Duomo, which Street so unaccountably failed to appreciate, but which has plenty of lovers nevertheless.

The Duomo and the Broletto, an earlier work of black and white marble, beside it, make up a group of buildings as picturesquely lovely as any in Lombardy, and few there be who do not straightway fall in love with them. As for the church, it is, I suppose, one of the finest examples of married Gothic and Renaissance—a Gothic yet perfectly developed and yet without fantastic excess, a Renaissance sober and sweet and without stiffness—anywhere to be found in Italy. [49-50]

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 30-50.

Mt. Generoso and the Lakes

 Edward Hutton began his tour of Lombardy atop Monte Generoso at an inn appropriately named Bellavista. The spectacular panoramic views especially of the beautiful lakes, Lugano, Como, and Maggiore, filled him with a sense of awe even danger at the enchantment of their beauty.   

 

Now if a man would see with his bodily eyes, and as it were in a single glance, the country of Cisalpine Gaul whose history I have tried to set forth in the preceding chapter, let him enter Italy from the town of Lugano, and, taking boat from there to Capolago, and climbing thence a-foot or by funicular the mountain called Generoso, let him stay a day or two in the woods of Bellavista. Nowhere else that I know will he get all at once so full a possession of the lie of the land. The Monte Generoso stands on the modern frontier of Switzerland and Italy, and the view from Bellavista, just an inn in the chestnut woods, where the wild flowers most abound, and still more from the summit, is not only one of the most splendid in Europe, but one of the widest and most interesting. To the north and west stand the great ramparts of the Alps, and beyond, that tremendous bundle of upreared peaks we call the Bernese Oberland; in the south lies the vast Italian plain as far as Bologna where the Apennines close its southern border, and on the east as far as Verona where the Alps shut it in. At one’s feet, like so many jewels cast down before one, lie the lakes of Maggiore, Lugano, Como, and the rest, among the foothills of the great mountains. To see and to consider this view is to understand the secret and the history not of Cisalpine Gaul alone, but in a very real sense of Italy and of Europe, and I can imagine no more propitious and delightful seclusion for such a contemplation of the past and the future of all that Europe stands for than this great thirsty mountain, which in spite of the lack of water, is shrouded so wonderfully in woods and scattered with wild flowers. And then when one is weary of thought, there lie the Italian lakes for our recreation and delight: and yet not all delight.

 

I do not know, nor shall I ever understand precisely what it is  that lends to the lakes of Lombardy their unnatural and shining beauty, their air of enchantment, of sorcery. They are a vision of lovely and untroubled youth, of youth that is without conscience and without thought, and they have upon the soul the effect of a singular and half-remembered  music. To come upon them veiled in the midst of dawn, or shining in the glory of the morning, to watch them drowsily in the drowsy noon, to see them fade into the silent and blue and gold of the evening, into the violet of the still night is to experience a fullness of joy that only music is commonly able to bring us: and yet that joy is far removed from happiness. Something forbidden, a sense of spell or sorcery, something too sweet, something too brief, that terrifies us because it is so lovely involves this paradise in disaster, and we are  as full of fear as we should be if by chance we had come upon Dionysus himself on a still noon in the shadow of the vines, or Aphrodite  in the long summer dawn on the fringe of the Cyprian sea.  

 

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 29-30.

Cities of Lombardy

 Edward Hutton's book on Lombardy, published in 1912, was the first of his Italian guides that I ever read. My Aunt Nan gave it to me on the death of her husband, Joseph Foppiani, over 30 years ago. His mother must have given it to him when he was young with this inscription, "Joseph, know thy country." Hutton began his tour with a discussion of the early history of Cisalpine Gaul, the name of the region during Roman times.

 

When I think of Lombardy, there comes back into my mind a country wide and gracious, watered by many a great river, and lying, a little vaguely, between always far-away mountains, a world that is all a garden, where one passes between fair hedgerows, from orchard to orchard, among the vines, where the fields are green with promise or shining with harvest, and there are meadows on the lower slopes of the mountains. And the whole of this wide garden seems to me, as is no other country in the world, to be subject to the sun, the stars and the great and beautiful clouds of an infinite sky; every landscape is filled with them, and beneath them the cities seem but small things, not cities truly, but rather sanctuaries, hidden in that garden for our delight, reverence and meditation, at the end of the endless ways, where only the restless poplars tell the ceaseless hours.

 

It is my purpose in this book to consider the nature and the history of this country, to recapture and to express as well as I may my delight in it, so that something of its beauty and its genius may perhaps disengage itself from my pages, and the reader feel what I have felt about it though he never stir ten miles from his own home. … (1)

 

The Pax Romana: it is the work of the Empire; a thing in our Europe hard to conceive of, but proper to Christendom, and perhaps if we could but see it to-day only awaiting our recognition. 

 

Those first four centuries of our era in which Christendom was founded  and Europe appeared, not as we know it to-day as a mosaic of hostile nationalities, but as one perfect whole, have never been rightly understood; they still lack an historian, and the splendour of their achievement, their magnitude and importance are wholly misconceived or ignored. In our modern self-conceit we are ignorant both of what they were  in themselves and of what we owe to them; and largely through the collapse of Europe in the sixteenth century and its appalling results both in thought and in politics we are led, too often by the wilful lying of our historians, to regard them rather as the prelude to the decline and fall of the Empire than as the great and indestructible foundation of all that is worth having in the world.

 

For rightly understood, these first four centuries gave us not only our culture, our constitutions,  our civilization, and our Faith, but ensured  them to us that they should always endure. They established for ever the great  lines upon which our art was to develop, to change, and yet not to suffer annihilation or barrenness. They established the supremacy of the idea, so that it might always renew our lives, our culture, and our polity, and that we might judge everything by it and fear neither revolution, defeat, nor decay. They, and they alone, established us in the secure possession of our own souls, so that we alone in the world develop from within to change but never to die and to be--yes alone in the world—Christians. 

 

And if the whole empire then took on a final and heroic form in those years of the Empire and the peace, Cisalpine Gaul more than any other province then came to fruition….and if we turn to the province itself, there is scarcely a town in that wide plain that did not expand and increase in a fashion almost miraculous during that period. It was then the rivers were embanked, the canals and our communications established for ever. There is no industry that did not grow incredibly in strength, there is not a class that did not increase in well-being beyond our dreams of progress.  There is scarcely anything that is really fundamental in our lives and in our politics  that was not then created that it might endure. It was then that our religion, the soul of Europe, was born, and little absorbed us so that it became the energy and the cause of all that undying but changeful principle of life and freedom which, rightly understood is Europe. Our ideas of justice, our ideas of law, our conception of human dignity and the structure of our society were then conceived and with such force that while we endure they can never die. (17-19)

 

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