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 Hutton's charming account is a unique historical document.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.

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.

Note: This post originally appeared on this site on 6/20/23.

Gubbio

Edward Hutton concluded his tour of Assisi and Umbria with a visit to Gubbio. He discussed its history at length and noted that it was not altogether insignificant in the history of Umbrian art. In particular, he praised the Madonna del Belvedere, a painting by Ottaviano Nelli in the Church of S. Maria Nuova.

 

It was on another early summer day that I set out from Perugia by the Porta Pesa for Gubbio, across the mountains. The way was musical with streams, for there had been rain in the night, and the world was refreshed and beautiful. Downhill into the valley of the Tiber I went, past the olives and the willows, whose leaves were dancing gravely in the wind, watching their own beauty in the shallows of the great river. Then when I had crossed the Tiber and had begun to climb, after about five miles I came on the left to the Franciscan convent of Farneto. …

 

I now came, as I climbed, into a desolate land of mountains and bare hill-sides, utterly forlorn and without the fellowship of trees or flowers. The wind was dismal and lonely, wandering over the moorland as if in search of companions. Now and again a shepherd clad in goatskins towered in silhouette against the farthest sky—a magnificent figure, simple and antique, keeping the world sweet; and sometimes a little group of trees, scarcely sufficient for a copse, whispered together as though in fear of the indestructible silence. Far away, the beautiful valleys of Umbria led me down innumerable vistas towards Subasio, and many a little city, full even yet of lovely things—the dreams made material of the great artists, or the lives of the saints. And all day the uplifted Apennine towered in the sunlight, with brows even yet white with snow that the sun dazzled with glory. …

\

I continued on my way. Presently, as I topped the ascent, a stupendous panorama rose before me over Gubbio and its valley, dominated by the five mountain peaks, the most formidable of which are Monte Catria, Monte Ingino and Monte Calvo. After another climb the road began its descent into the Eugubian plain and, crossing it in magical evening light, so tender and grave and serene, I entered Gubbio.

 

Gubbio is the dream of some medieval miniaturist; it must be, I thought, the only extant work of that most famous artist, Oderisi. Built on the lower slopes of Monte Calvo, the little city, now too small for its great old walls, lies in terraces one after another, where cypresses behind and among the palaces and churches point their joined hands ever upwards in that long life which is an everlasting prayer. … 

 

Leaving the cathedral and descending to the Via Venti Settembre or the Via Savelli della Porta, which runs parallel to it, and following either eastward towards the Porta Romana, at the end of Via Savelli stands the church of Santa Maria Nuova, which contains Ottaviano Nelli’s masterpiece, the Madonna del Belvedere. This is a mural painting, executed in tempera, not in fresco, and is one of the loveliest pieces of colour in all Umbrian painting, astonishingly fresh, and for the most part intact. The Virgin is seated in the centre, the Divine Child on her lap; she is looking at the spectator while the Child is blessing the donor, a woman, presented by an angel. About the Virgin, as though part of her court, are two musical angels, and two other angels hold aside a flowered curtain. Above, God the Father, among the cherubim and angels, crowns her. Two full-length figures of saints, SS. John Evangelist and Antony Abbot, who presents a kneeling donor, perhaps the husband of the woman on the other side, frame the idyllic scene within two spiral columns ornamented with Renaissance, even pagan figures. … This exquisite work is the best and most charming painting left in Gubbio.

                

            

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 220-221, 229.

Perugia: Pinacoteca Vannucci

Edward Hutton devoted a lengthy chapter to the Pinacoteca Vannucci, Perugia'a picture gallery of Umbrian painting. He especially liked two famous altarpieces taken from their original locations. Looking at these magnificent paintings, it is hard to imagine what ordinary parishioners thought while attending Mass.

The Pinacoteca Vannucci, the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, on the top floor of the Palazzo Communale of Perugia, contains the most complete and representative collection of Umbrian pictures that has anywhere been brought together, as well as a number of early Sienese paintings and a few outstanding masterpieces of various schools; a Madonna and Child by Duccio di Buoninsegna, an altarpiece by Fra Angelico, and one by his pupil Benozzo Gozzoli, an altarpiece by Piero della Francesca and another by Luca Signorelli.

 

Unlike Florence and Siena, Umbria had no Giotto nor Duccio to point out the road she should follow in her art. Umbrian painting, which is not solely centered in Perugia, but which had several centres—Gubbio, Foligno, to name no others—in which it flourished, was really provincial in the true sense of the of the word. And it was from beginning to end the handmaid of the Church, and remained Christian when almost everywhere else art had become pagan. …

 

The two major single treasures of the gallery are the altarpiece by Fra Angelico and the altarpiece by Piero della Francesca.

Fra Angelico

The altarpiece by Fra Angelico is a masterpiece, indeed he never surpassed in feeling and quality some of the smaller figures. The Madonna and Child are enthroned under a baldacchino.  On either side are two angels, the foremost two offering baskets of roses. On panels at the sides are various full-length figures of saints: on the left S. Dominic and S. Nicholas, and these are the most exquisite; on the right S. John Baptist and S. Catherine of Alexandria, perhaps the work of an assistant. … Unfortunately, the face of the Virgin has been damaged; otherwise it seems to be in an excellent state, surprisingly bright in colour, and some of the figures of saints are of such beauty that I do not think Angelico ever surpassed them.

The large polyptych by Piero della Francesco is the other great single treasure of the gallery. It is a puzzling work. In the midst of a late Gothic altarpiece, the Madonna and Child enthroned in the centre with four full-length saints, SS. Anthony, John Baptist, Francis and Elisabeth at the sides, much in the form of Fra Angelico’s altarpiece here. Above in a seven-sided pediment, is the Annunciation; below are two rounds with figures of S. Clare and S. Agatha, and below in the predella three scenes: a miracle of S. Anthony, S. Francis receiving the Stigmata and a miracle of S. Elizabeth of Hungary. …

I find the main part of the altarpiece disappointing, as indeed are the predella scenes. But the Annunciation I find one of the most enchanting of Piero’s works. I can never leave it without returning again and again. And then how characteristic it is of the artistic moment dominated by perspective and the theories of Alberti and the practice of Brunelleschi, Laurana, Uccello and Masaccio! What that gracious and formidable angel is announcing to the Madonna, so classical in her monumentality and repose, is not the birth of Christ. but the rebirth, the renaissance, of Antiquity. It may well be that this is a work of Piero’s old age, but if so, your old men shall see visions.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 179, 184-186.

Perugia: Cathedral and Fountain

Below find Edward Hutton's description of Perugia's Cathedral and famous fountain. Apparently, the uppermost part of the fountain with its dragons has since been moved to a museum.

So the splendour and the terror of the past have sunk into the mediocrity of today. Beauty such as once belonged to Florence or Venice or Rome was perhaps never hers. She was a scarped crag on the mountains, burnt with fire, beaten by the wind, ringing with cold in the winter, splendid with the sun. Her Palazzo Communale was one of the most fierce and majestic in Italy and even her Cathedral was as relentless as a fortress, at least in appearance, but the destroying centuries have perhaps lent it something of their tolerance, giving the clinkered brick the surface and the colour almost of a precious stone. It is not beauty but strength and passion that you find in its brown walls that have been splashed with blood and washed with wine. A greater than any Baglioni has lain there. “There is no one,” says Thomas of Eccleston, “who dies as solitary and neglected as a Pope.” So it was with the greatest of them, Innocent III, who died in Perugia in 1216. The coffin still open, the body of the Pope was carried to the Cathedral, where the funeral was to take place. “It was then,” says Jacques de Vitry, who had just come to Perugia where the Papal court was in villegiatura, “it was then I really understood the nothingness of grandeur here below. The night preceding the funeral robbers broke into the Cathedral and despoiled the Pope of everything precious upon him. I saw with my own eyes his body, half naked, lying in the midst of the church already stinking.”

Indeed, within the Cathedral there is scarcely beauty at all, only silence, and space and a softer and more sombre light than is usual in an Italian church. And yet in its homely, if bare aspect it attracts you where a more splendid building might leave you cold. Its most precious possession, the wedding or betrothal ring of the Blessed Virgin, is kept under many locks in many caskets in the chapel to the left of the west door, and may be seen but four or five times during the year. Made from some agate stone, it is popularly believed to change its colour according to the hearts of those who look on it. … 

The beautiful fountain which stands in the midst of the piazza was built in 1277 from designs, it is said, by a Perugian artist, Fra Bevignate. The lovely statuettes and bas-reliefs which adorn it were designed and sculptured by Giovanni Pisano. On an august circular base of steps rest a many-sided basin with groups of columns to strengthen it at the corners. Above this rises a second basin, many-sided too, with statues at the corners, and from the midst of this is upreared a bronze bowl from which rises a magnificent group of nymphs and dragons; together they form one of the most exquisite designs ever achieved by the sculptors of the thirteenth century. This superb crown rises from a short pedestal and the writhing dragons rearing up with beating wings and each with one paw uplifted seem to beat time for their fantastic dance. Nowhere else has Giovanni Pisano shown such an ardour of imagination, such a unity of upward leaping rhythm.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 162-163, 165.

Perugia

 

 

 

Edward Hutton had high praise for the beauty of Perugia and its location but did not fail to mention its terrible and often bloody history. 

Perugia stands on her great isolated hills absolute queen of all this country, of old towered and terrible of aspect for all her beauty, ever at attention and with great anger ever searching out her enemies.

 

Of Etruscan origins, being indeed one of the principal cities of that mysterious people, we know nothing of Perugia till she submitted to Rome in 309 B.C. That is but the first of many surrenders—to the Popes, to many tyrants, to her own terrible sons, to the brutality of the mob, to Italy and the modern world. The hand of the Emperor Augustus has rested on her throat as certainly as that of the later tyrants, Baglioni or Pope. … Yet in spite of capitulation and outward obedience, she has ever nursed in her soul a fierce spirit of liberty, which has made her story one of the bloodiest in Italy. In the heyday of her power she owned no temporal sovereign and brooked no interference, but treated Pope and Emperor as mere pawns in her game for the Lordship of Umbria.

 

Though Perugia, Perusia Turrita, has, at least as you approach her today from the south and west, lost her imperial aspect, for not only have her towers vanished, but upon the very forehead of the city rises the huge modern Prefettura and the banal Grand Hotel Brufani, yet she is still the queen of hill cities, is still fiercely beautiful within and without her Etruscan walls on which Rome and the Middle Age and the Renaissance have not forgotten to leave their marks as beautiful if not as indestructible. … Within her palaces is some of the serenest work of Perugino, and Bonfigli, and Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, and her prospect is of a thousand hills and valleys. Far away to the north and west lie the bare mountains of the Senese, while to the south the hills are crowned with famous and lovely cities where Monte Subasio looks toward Rome with the city of S. Francis kneeling on its skirts, a religious, in the homely brown habit, vowed to God. Like a lily in the vale beneath hovers S. Mary of the Angels, delicate with the colour of the day—white, or almost rosy, or sombre under the sky. And far away to the west rise the mountains above Todi and Orvieto, and all between, the sweet Umbrian plain, the valley of Spoleto. And though in early morning this exquisite landscape is delicate and fragile and half-hidden in mist, at sunset it is filled with the “largeness of the evening earth,” and a serenity of silence and repose that is, as it were, suggested by the gesture of the mountains. It is, above all this perfection, absolute queen from horizon to horizon that Perugia stands regnant. …

Close to the statue of Pope Julius, where it now stands against the Cathedral wall, is the little pulpit from which S. Bernardino used to preach so passionately. … But S. Bernardino, with all his eloquence, preached in vain. The people wept to hear him, burnt their books and pictures and finery on the stones before the beautiful fountain, and then in a few days passionately cut each other’s throats in the very place where they had listened to the good saint, and even in the Duomo itself. And was it not here, too, that the dead body of Astorre Baglioni lay in state during two days, together with that of his murderer and cousin, Grifonetto. 

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 158-159, 165.

Todi: S. Maria della Consolazione

  

 

 

Edward Hutton had high praise for Todi's church of Santa Maria della Consolazione, begun in 1508 at the height of the Renaissance. I must confess that on our brief visit, my wife and I admired its exterior beauty but the interior left us cold even when we heard Mass. Perhaps, as he says, it is more a temple than a church.

 

Santa Maria della Consolazione is one of the most lovely, if not the loveliest, of high Renaissance churches in Italy—that is to say, in the world; energy and identity within formal limits. No mysterious vistas here, no forests of columns lost in twilight, nothing but perfect order, space, proportion. Here the spirit and the mind take flight.

 

In Santa Maria della Consolazione we have at last a really fine realization of the high Renaissance ideal in architecture. It is not a perfect realization, but it is the best we possess. In looking on this church we may discern what St. Peter’s in Rome might have been but for the Reformation. The idea of Bramante, it will be remembered, was to build S. Peter’s as a Greek cross under a dome. It was an effect of space he aimed at, light and space confined, and so not confined within a perfectly proportioned building. Well, the Reformation came and spoiled all that. Rome remembered the pilgrims from the north, and how important it was to impress them, and so decided to build the long nave which obscures and obstructs the dome; and the dream of Bramante vanished. Coming into Santa Maria della Consolazione we realize, for the first time perhaps what we have lost.

Image by David Orme

 It is not a church, it is a magical space in the heavens between the sun and moon, and the light is level and beautiful. It is strange this effect of space—absolute space, flight almost, in what is really so small a building. And it is right that this ideal should have been achieved, if anywhere then in Umbria, where the beauty of the whole country is really that sense of serenity, of light and spacious air. It is the secret that Umbria has strived to confide to the world through her painters: through Perugino best of all, and at last through the lucid and tranquil genius of Raphael. These men composed with space as a musician composes with sound, and indeed the effect is very like. You seem suddenly to have stepped out of our world into a pure and clear sunlight, not terrifying by its infinity, but enfolding you with security and a kind of perfection. You gaze upwards. That dome borne on the wings of clouds on clouds of angels, soars in its beauty and its perfection like a splendid and irresistible thought in the mind of man. There is no uncertainty, no dimness, no tricks of shadow, no self-accusation, no deceit, no fear, no shame at all, but the clear light of the sky that is the most lovely and precious thing in the world. And it is thus that the men of the Renaissance chose to meet their God. You think there is no mysticism in that, no mystery? But you do not know the mystical power—strange and more wonderful than the spirit of the forests of the north, of the cathedrals of the Gaul and the Goth—to be found in the unappeasable sunlight of a still, hot day. That silence is more profound than the whispering depths of the most ancient forest, or the echoing intricate splendours, the dim unseen vaultings of the great Gothic churches of the north. If in the already worshipped sun there be mystery, or in the unpierced heaven there be angels, though we may not see; if in silence surrounded by light and the immense loneliness of space, God dwells so that that I may find Him always near, then Latin genius, which has taught us all the arts as a mother teaches her children, and to which we owe everything that is precious in the world, has not made this unthinkable failure in architecture of which we accuse her so easily, but has comprehended there too more than she has ever been able to lead us so much as to apprehend; and we in our gloomy, miserable lands preferring now even darkness before light in our trumpery cities, must acknowledge at last with what grace we may the indestructible  untiring genius of Latin blood, that it has become the fashion to scoff at and to despise.

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 151-153.

Todi

 

 

 

On Edward Hutton's suggestion my wife and I drove to the hill town of Todi a few years ago and found it as lovely as he described it.  I can still remember standing behind the Cathedral and taking in the spectacular view of the countryside.

The motor run of some thirty miles from Orvieto to Todi is one of the finest in Umbria and far more worth while than the usual approach to the little city through the Tiber valley from Perugia.

 

The road crosses the Paglia, the torrent that flows below Orvieto to join the Tiber to the south, by the Ponte dell’Adunata and soon begins to climb, zigzagging as it rises into the mountain, giving you wonderful views of Orvieto on its isolated Tufa bastion, over the olives and the oaks, till presently the whole of central Italy, from the Monte Sibillini in the Marches to Mount Amiata in the Senese, is spread out before you, with here Cetona, there the whole of the Cimino range with the beautiful cone of Monte Venere, and Montefiascone on its hill over the lake of Bolsena south-westward, and due south the lonely, defined form, as of a wave about to break, of Monte Soracte on the verge of the Campania. Then, as you begin to descend from these lonely and silent heights, the valley of the Tiber opens beneath you and presently you pass the picturesque village of Prodo, and a little later you catch a glimpse of Todi, most beautiful, crowning her hill. You lose her to find her again and soon, crossing the Tiber at Pontecuti with its triangular walls by a mighty great bridge of seven arches and a fine towered gate, you see the great Renaissance church—or temple is it?—of Santa Maria della Consolazione in its wide Piazzale, and climb up from it into the little ancient city where Iacopone da Todi, the author of the Stabat Mater, was born.

Todi is one of the most ancient cities in Umbria; it boasts of a foundation older than Rome. Its walls are certainly in part Etruscan, patched by the Romans, and again by the Middle Age and Renaissance, that have both left their mark, how splendidly, on the little city built on so precipitous a hill. In its day, surely, it was a place of some renown and greatness, seeing that there is so much beauty even now within its walls. And I for one find it today one of the great surprises in Umbria. … But for those who are not in a hurry Todi holds much—a great and beautiful piazza, more than one very lovely church and silence.

It is in such silence that we begin to understand those things which the world of today has forgotten, and so disastrously. Here surrounded by the Umbrian hills and valleys, serene and spacious, under the shadow of the laurels and the roses, one watches the giant cypresses, each solitary as a god, count the innumerable hours, and thus one may, perhaps, understand something of that troubadour of God who wept because “love is not loved:, who died, as it was believed, not so much conquered by his malady, though that was grave, as from an extraordinary “excess of love”, and who beheld as it were in a vision the beauty and tragedy of our world and told it in his rude but immortal verses. ***

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***Note: Hutton provided an admiring account of the tragic life and death of Iacopone da Todi, “the greatest of the Franciscan poets, certainly the most fruitful in the vernacular, and the author of his stately, immortal Latin sequence: 

 Stabat Mater dolorosa…”

 

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 148-149, 155.

Orvieto Miracle

 

 

 

Often in his books Edward Hutton liked to describe personal encounters. One of the most unusual occurred early in his career in the Cappella del Corporale in Orvieto's Cathedral.

 

It happened that one summer morning, long ago, Padre Bernardino and I were standing together in the Cappella del Corporale in the Cathedral looking at that marvellous reliquary of silver-gilt goldsmith’s work with its twelve scenes of the miracle of Bolsena in translucent enamels, the work of Ugolino di Maestro Vieri of Siena in 1338. We had been visiting some Franciscan sanctuaries in the neighbourhood and had come to Orvieto because Padre Bernardino, who had a friend in the Cathedral, hoped to be able to show me the great reliquary without my having to pay the very large fee demanded for a sight of it. In this he had been successful.

 

As we examined this masterpiece of medieval art… we were joined by two of my fellow countrymen, in appearance Dons of some University. They stood there looking at the reliquary, till one of them, shutting his guidebook, turned to me and asked:

 

“What is the miracle of Bolsena?”

 

When I had told him as briefly as I could, I went on to explain how fortunate we were, owing to Padre Bernardino’s kindness, to see this great masterpiece of goldsmithery of its shrine of marble mosaic. 

 

[A long conversation ensued that continued in a nearby café. The two Englishmen were skeptical about the miracle of Bolsena, about miracles in general, and even about Catholic doctrines like transubstantiation, and the Resurrection which they regarded as unnatural. Finally, Padre Bernardino mentioned that he himself had performed a miracle.]

 

“It may surprise you caro signore,” he said, “when I tell you that through the infinite power and grace of God, I have myself performed a miracle. Oh, only a little one, a mere bagatelle. Permit me to tell you how it happened.”

 

“But I thought,” said the first stranger, “it was only saints who were supposed to work miracles.”

 

“You are mistaken caro signore. Even the simplest and rudest of the faithful may sometimes. though rarely, by the power of Christ’s grace, perform these wonders. But let me tell you of my own experience.

 

“It befell in one of our smallest and most humble santuarii, with but half a dozen frati in occupation. I was on a visit there and very uncomfortable I found it, for the place was subject to a diabolical infestation, and within the limits permitted by God, was all but uninhabitable. Everything possible had been tried, the whole place had been washed out with holy water, scrubbed with soap, even lime-washed, and it stank of paraffin, but still it swarmed—swarmed with bugs, hundreds,  thousands, myriads of bugs. As one lay on one’s bed they came over the pillow in mass formation, as one sat at table they were climbing up the table legs and dropping from the ceiling.

 

“What to do? I conferred with the Padre Guardiano; we considered the house to be diabolically possessed and I decided—the powers having been duly accorded me—to resort to Exorcism.

 

“I prepared holy water, salt and oil, and very early in the morning after a sleepless night I began the rite.

 

Exerciso vos immundissimi…

Adjure vos per judicem vivorum et mortuorum…

 

At the third Exorcismus—

 

Adjure ergo vos omnes immundissimi …

 

There was seen to be a long dark line like some five or six inches in width, like the serpens antiquus of the exorcism, winding and undulating and throbbing along the passage-way out of the door into the olive garden. It consisted of thousands, myriads of bugs. Under the olives they went, through the grove and up over the rough wall of stones, out of the convent podere. That night we slept, that day we ate, in peace.”

 

But this was too much for our hosts, who suddenly seemed to have had enough of Padre Bernardino. They rose, paid for our refreshment and departed. We both watched them as they went.

 

Then I turned to that triumphant fountain of irony and remembering past admonitions wickedly said:

 

“Humility is rare, is it not, among the learned?”

 

He caught my eye. Then gazing after the strangers now almost out of sight, Padre Bernardino murmured:

 

“And even rarer among the ignorant.” 

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 142-145.

Orvieto Duomo: Luca Signorelli

  

 

 

The facade of Orvieto's Duomo is justly famous but Edward Hutton found much to admire in the interior, especially the magnificent frescoes by Luca Signorelli in the S. Brisio chapel.

Within, the great church is generally found to be a disappointment. Of course, the glorious façade has no co-ordination with it, but this great bare Romanesque interior, full of light as it is, spacious too, recommends itself to me, and I have come to love it for just these two Latin qualities—spaciousness and light. It is 260 feet long and nearly 100 feet wide, divided into three naves by ten columns and two piers, black and white in colour, with fine capitals. The ten chapels along the nave are semicircular and there is a door in both aisles. The choir and the sanctuary are higher than the nave and the two transept chapels are later additions. The simple coloured roof is unpretentious, even charming. …

The great chapel on the left, which with the equally large chapel on the right forms a sort of transept, is the Cappella del Corporale. The chapel is covered with frescoes by Ugolino di Prete Ilario, telling the story of the miracle of Bolsena. In a magnificent reliquary over the altar is venerated the Corporal of the miracle stained with Christ’s blood, and for this the chapel was built in 1350. The reliquary, which is not easy to see, is perhaps the finest example in Italy of medieval goldsmith’s work, covered with enamel by Ugolino di Maestro Vieri. It is of silver-gilt repousse and chased, architectural in the form of the façade of the Cathedral, with a wealth of translucent enamels which tell the story of the miracle of Bolsena. …

On the opposite side of the church, forming as it were the right transept, is the large Cappella Nuova, now called the Cappella della Madonna di San Brisio, from the fourteenth century altarpiece of the Madonna and Child enthroned with angels. …

 

In the last year but one of the fifteenth century Luca Signorelli was appointed to decorate the chapel, and he filled it with the greatest and most dramatic works even he was ever to create; indeed, except in the Sistine Chapel, no such work is to be found in Italy for imaginative power and technical excellence. “These masterpieces,” wrote Morelli, “appear to me unequalled in the art of the fifteenth century, for to no other contemporary painter was it given to endow the human frame with a like degree of passion, vehemence and strength.”

Image by David Orme

Signorelli filled the vaulting left vacant by Angelico and Benozzo Gozzoli with figures of the Apostles, the symbols of the Passion, the Fathers of the Church, and so forth, but below he has painted in seven frescoes of the end of the world: the Coming of the antichrist, the Crowning of the Elect, the resurrection, the Judgment, Heaven, Hell and the Destruction of the World. …

Image by David Orme

Nothing more extraordinarily thoughtful and subtle, nothing more masterly than the antichrist is to be found in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. So like to Christ as indeed always to be mistaken for Him from a distance, Antichrist has all the beauty, all the cynical hatred of mankind, which listens to him in adoration that, after Luca has suggested it to us, we might expect. It is hardly necessary, one might say, for the devil to whisper to him; in his heart all the cruelty and villainy of the universe have been sown and have come to flower. Opposite the fresco of the Resurrection, with its huge naked angels sounding their death-destroying trumpets, decked with the banner of the Cross, crushes us beneath its tremendous power. Visions as splendid as those of Dante dawn upon him—the Punishment of the Wicked, the Reward of the Blessed, and Paradise, Heaven, and Hell. With his overwhelming vision as our companion, we walk the streets of Orvieto, ever finding it necessary to return again the Cappella della Madonna di S. Brisio, where above the poets of Greece and Rome and Italy we see the tragedy of our world, the drama of the soul of man.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 135-138.