Parma and Correggio

For some reason that he could not fully explain, Parma was one of the few little cities in Italy that he "had never been able to love." Still there was the "Duomo in its noble piazza," and the magnificent work of Correggio. 

 

 

The church is a cruciform building under an open octagon surmounted by a dome; the choir is raised above a crypt, and from the outside the arcaded apse is, I think, its most beautiful feature. But the church as seen from the street is arcaded everywhere: on the façade we have a triple columnar gallery; each which ends with a quadrilateral, itself arcaded, to which is added a semicircular apse again arcaded. Nothing more noble, rich and charming can be imagined. …

The great spectacle of the church, however, is of course the overwhelming frescoes of Correggio in the dome, which everyone who comes at all to Parma comes to see. For myself, they are beyond anything else to be found in Parma, and indeed among the most astonishing things in all Lombardy. 

 

Correggio’s first frescoes had been painted  for the Camera di S. Paulo, fortunate and lovely works, and later he had decorated the cupola of S. Giovanni Evangelista. It was therefore with a full knowledge of his work that in 1522 he began to cover the dome of the Cathedral with these frescoes of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, to whom the church was dedicated, while below stand the Apostles and the four patron saints of Parma.

 

Nothing else, I suppose, in European art has quite the sense we find here, the sense of flight. Madonna caught up from death, from the earth and all earthly things, is borne in an ecstasy, her arms stretching open wide, by a glad crowd of angels and cherubs, one of whom, laughing for joy, nestles in her bosom, into the heaven of heavens, a vast dome of light, built of angels, circle after circle, up to the brightness which is the smile of God. And out of that dazzling firmament one peerless archangel, Gabriel, god’s messenger, has hurled him down, trembling for joy, to meet her and welcome her, the Queen of all. Nothing else in Europe, I think, expressed so fully and so unreservedly that sense of flight—the eagerness, the joy, and the confident, radiant power of flight—as does this matchless fresco. It is impossible to look upon it without emotion or to doubt for a moment that the painter had seen a vision. One simply disregards the painter’s foibles and weaknesses; the thing is a rhapsody more wonderful than a Magnificat by Marenzio, almost inarticulate, if you like, for joy; a musical rapture that is beyond music, hat is the expression once and for all of the highest religious emotion. And to those who would criticize it, I would give the reply Titian, who had also painted an Assumption, gave; “Turn it upside down and fill it with gold, and you will still come short of its proper price.” It has been tended with careless hands, and it is to-day but a wreck of what it once was. Yet in colour still, as in gesture and delight, it remains something beyond the power of words to express, something that never was in the world or is here in no satisfying quantity.

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 273-274. 

Piacenza

When Edward Hutton crossed the Po river to get to Piacenza, he was no longer in Lombardy proper. As usual he discussed the history of the city, part of the famed Duchy of Parma, but noted that the most famous thing in the city was its Piazza de' Cavalli.

It is but twenty-two miles, less than an hour’s journey in the train from Lodi, through Caesale Pusterlengo and Codegno, and so across the Po for the first time in our journey, into Piacenza, an old and a famous city of the Romans. Even though one comes by train that crossing of the Po impresses itself upon the mind, while by road the passage is never to be forgotten, for you make it by a bridge of boats, with the swirling, cruel river within a few feet of you, and horribly strong and overwhelming. And it is well that this should be so; for, by crossing the Po, we leave Lombardy proper and come into that part of the new province of Emilia, which, since the sixteenth century, has been known as the Duchy of Parma, over which ruled the House of Farnese. …

 

Piacenza can never claim to be, I think, one of the most beautiful cities of Lombardy, yet it is one of the most picturesque by reason of its colouring and its vast, empty piazzas, churches and palaces, the beautiful vistas of its streets and the sense of space and bigness everywhere.

 

The most famous thing in it is its great Piazza—Piazza de’ Cavalli—which seems so large, so romantic and so like something on the stage, or in a dream, with its magnificent Palazzo del Comune thrust out into it on one side, the modern Palazzo delle Preture on another, the weirdly uncompromising façade of S. Francesco on a third, and everywhere long vistas of streets opening out of it on all sides, and at every angle and corner. Nor is this all. The Palazzo del Comune is perhaps the finest palace of the sort in Italy: yet how much its effect here in this Piazza is enlarged  and added to by the great bronze equestrian statues which rear before the great façade—“insignificant men, exaggerated horses, flying drapery”—yes, as baroque as you please, but splendid here, both in gesture and in colour—vivid green against the terra-cotta—and placed there by a master. 

 

Nothing in Piacenza is half so well worth seeing as this Piazza seemed to me to be on an autumn evening after rain. It then literally is a vision that slowly vanishes away in the twilight, from glory down to glory into the blue night: and this once seen can never be forgotten. But when we return in the morning sunlight, though the Piazza still remains magnificent, it is no longer a vision : all its poor details stand out in the harsh glitter of light, that nevertheless, I think, alone can reunite us with those affected equestrian statues of the dukes Alessandro and Ranuccio Farnese, seventeenth century work from Tuscany, all but the colour of which and gesture of which is veiled by the evening. …

 

From the ridiculous statues of the Farnese we turn to the noble Palazzo del Comune. This was built when Piacenza was a free city. It dates from 1281, and is one of the earliest and noblest Gothic buildings in Italy. Below is an open arcade, in which pillars of marble, supporting pointed arches, support the palace proper, consisting of brick with six round-arched windows of terra-cotta, and over all a marble cornice and battlements, with a tower at the angles.

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 243-250. 

Crema

   

 

 

Edward Hutton described Crema as "a little place, no one goes there" even though it was easy to go from Cremona there and back by train in a day. He gave a brief description of the Cathedral, "no church more beautiful in all Lombardy," but devoted more attention to a church outside the walls.*

When one does pluck up courage to leave Cremona at last, to forgo quietness for the noise of the railway, and the sunshine and delight of that exquisite town for the chances of travel, it must, of course, be for Crema that one sets out—Crema that has almost no history worth knowing, but remains one of the dearest and most hidden places in all this wide and beautiful Lombard country.

 

I often wonder now I am set down to write about Lombardy, as I did when I made my way along the Lombard roads, whether we who go our ways up and down from city to city, from church to church, from one building to another, ever really are aware how beautiful a countryside Lombardy is under its wide incomparable sky, half lost in its own vastness…. But Lombardy is hard to see, difficult to find out and impossible to possess oneself of, without much fatigue, weariness, mud and dust. The roads are all endless there, the cities always far away, and often when they are but market towns, worse than nothing—places from which one hurries away in the first train that comes by, places that one tries to forget…. But the country: I think, indeed, no one ever sees that in the great plain. It is too big, too vague, too empty to allure us from the security and curiosity of the towns; yet it is a background full of peace to all those peaceful and lovely places: Cremona in the green meadows, Mantua amid the quietness of the lagoons, and last but not least Crema, where the white oxen gather in the streets at evening, drawing their great creaking carts laden with all the wealth of the purple vintage that shall presently, by the winepress, stain the streets and perfume the whole city. …

 

If there is little for the mere tourist in the streets of Crema…there is undoubtedly a church without her walls that will astonish him. I mean the round church of S. Maria della Croce, which is rather polygonal than round after all, and built of brick in the true Renaissance manner, and reminds one of nothing so much as of that heavenly building Raphael saw in the background of his picture in the Brera. It is a work by Giovanni Battagio of Lodi, a disciple of Bramante’s. I say it reminds one of nothing so much as of Raphael’s there in his picture of the Sposalizio. Well, it has just the tranquillity, the lightness, and the graceful dignity of that visionary building and it stands under its clustered domes and cupolas really like something in a dream, something not made with hands, that would actually be impossible  in any other land but this. And if it be true, as Pater has told us, that “all art aspires toward the condition of music,” here, I think, for once it has been completely successful. For it is as though suddenly as we listened. Some Magnificat by Palestrina or Marenzio had taken visible shape and “materialized itself,” as we say, before our eyes in a temple not made with hands, in which it might please the Queen of the angels a little to abide our coming.

Raphael: Sposalizio. Brera, Milan

 

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*There is no church more beautiful in all Lombardy than the cathedral of Crema…it is a thing to love and be proud of, and the people of Crema justly hold it high in their affections, for it is not only beautiful and full of daring, it is also unique: there is nothing like it in all the world.

 

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 234-237.