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.