View from Assisi

  

 

 

For Edward Hutton no visit to Assisi could be complete without a trek to the old Rocca Maggiore with its spectacular views.

 

There is one other visit, easier but quite as rewarding, to be paid at Assisi. I mean the climb up to the Rocca Maggiore, high above the Cathedral and the old ramshackle windy convent of San Lorenzo. Wandering about those ruined walls and turrets or lying in their shade you have before you, but in its fullness, the great view with which the loggias, balconies and windows of the Hotel Subasio have already delighted you on your first evening, only from here what is perhaps the loveliest and certainly the most serenely spacious of landscapes is more widespread under a greater breadth of sky. From here, before you lies the whole wide valley from Perugia to Spoleto—Umbria verde—they say, Umbria Santa rather, for your impression, in early morning or at sunset, is one of ineffable benediction. Under the great bank of Subasio and on the other side of the wide valley stand the little cities:  on this side under the cypresses Spello and pyramided Trevi, with the castle of Spoleto under the ilex-woods of Monteluco beyond. Foligno in the plain scarce visible, Montefalco clear above Foligno’s roof-tops and the Topino-misted  Bevagna with Cannara beside it and Bettona above on the long ridge of mountain, behind the dome of S. Mary of the Angels, where the Tescio stream winds away to Bastia, and the Topino and Chiascio meet and Torgiano stands with its towers, and at evening maybe one may catch a glimpse of amethystine Amiata on the verge of the Senese. Nothing more lovely, nothing more serene and full of a Franciscan peace could be imagined.

 

No, but now look northwards: the great bare mountains rise in a formidable rampart, seemingly impassable save where cut and gashed by precipitous gorges and ravines. It is a landscape of a nightmare, as tragic and bitter as that on the south is peaceful and serene. It was through these ravines that his companions, under the guard sent from Assisi, bore the dying saint by night in the glare of torches on his way home by that circuitous route from Siena, for fear of the Perugians. One has not really possessed oneself of Assisi and what it stands for till one has seen and considered both these views, not only the view over the valley of Spoleto, but this, too, over the gaunt mountains to the north. For in the life of S. Francis there was not only the serenity and  peace of Rivetorto and the Portiuncula, there was also the despair and bitterness of Poggio Bustone and Ponte Colombo. Those landscapes seem to sum up, as it were, the life of the little poor man, who, at so great a cost, saved the Church and civilization in the thirteenth century, and who remains in our minds, as Renan has said, as “after Jesus the only perfect Christian.”

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 18-19. 

Assisi: Cimabue and Giotto

 

 

 

Edward Hutton regarded the Church of San Francesco as the source of all the Italian art to come. Below he discusses Cimabue and Giotto, even though many of the frescoes attributed to Giotto may have been done by his followers.  First, the lower church. 

 

In the right-hand transept is the grandly impressive work of Cimabue, a great fresco of the Madonna enthroned with angels and with St. Francis himself standing there. Though not painted in the saint’s lifetime, it is, one might think, a fine portrait and well preserved, whereas the figures of Virgin and Child have suffered much from restoration. …

The other frescoes in this right transept are the work of the assistants of Giotto and are for the most part concerned with the life of Our Lord. They are of great beauty; the frescoes of the Birth of Christ, and of the Flight into Egypt, are among the sweetest and loveliest things in the Lower Church….As one looks at these frescoes, one realizes, perhaps more easily than in the works in the vaults over the high altar, to what splendour Italian art was being called. And yet, if we compare them with that early picture of the Madonna and Child, by Cimabue, we are aware that, after all, something has been lost. How lovely that fresco of the Madonna and Child is, how sacred and noble, and how surely it marks for us the change that is coming from the Byzantine manner, to the manner of Giotto. [8-9]…

On to the Upper Church.

The nave, choir and both transepts were painted by Cimabue, according to Mr. Berenson, between 1277 and 1280, and at any rate by 1296, the date we find inscribed in the apse. These frescoes, ruined though they be, are Cimabue’s most important work and the most important series of medieval wall-paintings in Italy. The finest of these is the great Crucifixion on the left wall of the left transept, most tragic in its majesty, and the arch-angels and angels above. [11]

Death of Lord of Celano

 

Giotto or others, working on the long spaces below these marvellous  works, could not have escaped their authority. Day by day as they worked on the frescoes of the life of St. Francis, which it may well be are not from Giotto’s own hand, these frescoes of the earlier masters, in all their noble beauty, no doubt told many a secret.  There are twenty-eight frescoes…. All taken from the Legends of S. Bonaventura…They are among the best known works of art in the world and have been written about again and again. Though there might seem to be little if anything of the work of Giotto himself in these frescoes how magnificent is the gesture of Pietro Bernadone in the fresco where S. Francis has been taken before the bishop only to renounce his father for ever; how naturally, in another fresco—that of the death of the Lord of Celano—the saint rises in haste from the table where he is sitting; how lovely are those angels who bear him to heaven, clothed in light, in the ruined picture of his death. Designed or not by the young Giotto, these frescoes are, in their simplicity and naturalness, the centre of the movement that was soon to excite all Italy to enthusiasm. They are earlier than the work attributed to him in the Lower Church, and they remain among the most precious things in Italy, strewn though she is with the triumphs of art. [12-13]

I am indebted to my English friend David Orme for the images above. Here is a link to his excellent online tour of San Francesco and its artworks.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 8-13. 

Assisi: Simone Martini

  

 

 

Edward Hutton believed that in the upper and lower churches of San Francesco "the beginnings of Italian art can be studied." He began with the work of Simone Martini in the Chapel of San Martino.

 

As one passes into the nave of the great church the darkness is deeper. The walls are decorated with much destroyed frescoes by the Maestro di S. Francesco. The first chapel on the left, of San Martino, is painted in fresco by Simone Martini with scenes from the life of S. Martin. Simone Martini, born probably in Siena in 1283 was the pupil of Duccio, and not, so far as his work tells us, much influenced by Giotto. He has been called “the most lovable of all the Italian artists before the Renaissance”, and, indeed, looking on the strange beauty of his work here, who can doubt it? He is more aristocratic and refined than Giotto, has, indeed a sense of beauty subtler, though, perhaps less profound, than his. Is there anything in all pre-Renaissance art more lovely than these frescoes where S. Martin divides his cloak with a beggar, and later, as he lies asleep, has a vision of Christ wearing that same cloak? And best of all, perhaps, is that in which the young S. Martin girded with the sword and all the accoutrements of knighthood, his hands clasped in prayer. The gaiety of all that—the beauty of the young men who look on, the splendour and magnificence of the emperor, the charm of the thought, the perfection of the craft! A great master, you might say, and then you think of the life-enhancing work of Giotto, and all it meant to Italy, and means to us. And yet Simone Martini is a great painter, though scarcely an original painter, as Giotto is. He was content to carry out more exquisitely the ideas of his master, Duccio, by whom he seems always to have been overshadowed. There is nothing of the immense vitality of the Florentine. When his young men stretch out their arms, as in this fresco, you do not feel as though they might embrace you, as you do with Giotto over and over again.  Yet in his equestrian portrait of Guidoriccio da Fogliano, in Siena, he has created a captain who moves as surely and irresistibly towards his enemy as the Colleoni of Verrocchio or the Gattamelata of Donatello. It might be said that he was the most beautiful illustrator of the book of life in all the pre-Renaissance, the whole vitality and reality of life being in the text. One looks on these frescoes always with new joy, but never with the sense of life with which one gazes at Giotto’s work in Padua. S. Martin, in the upper line of the frescoes, is ordained, and retires to Albenga; he preaches in some city, possibly Tours; he restores a child to life, and at last dies. In all this work, too detailed to describe, one finds the same grace and entrancing beauty. The jambs of the windows are frescoed with fine busts and the entrance arch has beautiful full-length figures of saints. Even the glass in the windows here was also probably designed by Simone.

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 5-6.