Cremona

Leaving Mantua, Hutton took the road to Cremona. On the way to that "beautiful and harmonious city," he stopped at the unique  shrine of S. Maria delle Grazie.

 

About three and a half miles from Mantua stands one of the most astonishing pilgrimage churches in all Italy. S. Maria delle Grazie was first built in 1399 by Francesco Gonzaga, who wished to render thanks to the Madonna for having freed the city of Mantua from the plague…. In 1419 the place was enlarged and became one of the most important religious houses in Lombardy. The whole place is a shrine of the Madonna, full of every sort of votive offering, from cannon balls that fell harmless into Mantua in the famous siege of 1322…to piles of crutches, shoes, wax arms, and legs, silver hearts and the usual litter of a shrine. More amazing is it that  not so much the worshipped as the worshipper is represented here in effigy. For, on coming into the church, you find yourself in an avenue of figures, life-size, and dressed in every sort of costume, in niches along the walls. These are they whom the Madonna has heard and answered here in the Church of the Graces. Among these favored petitioners we find figures of Pope Pius II.,  the Emperor Charles V, and the pillager of Rome, the Constable Bourbon, whom Cellini swears he shot. Beneath each figure the story of his petition is told in rude verse, evidently of local manufacture. Here, amid all this amazement, lie the princes of the House of Gonzaga: and among them the pattern of courtiers, Baldassare Castiglione, the author of Il Cortigiano, which in those happier days was as eagerly read in the best and most cultured society throughout Europe as the French novel is on the Continent, or the Daily Mail newspaper in England to-day. For the tomb of this man, who was literally the first gentleman in Europe, Bembo composed this epitaph, for the body of Castiglione had been brought at his own desire all the way from Toledo, where he died, in order that it might be laid here on the tomb of his young wife.[220]

 

Non ego nunc vivo, quae in ambiguo reliquit, utrum

Corpore namquae  tuo fate meum abstulerunt;

Sed vitam, tumulo cum tecum condar in isto,

Jungenturque tuis ossibus ossa mea. ***

 

I can never make up my mind which is the most beautiful city in Lombardy, whether it be Bergamo, Mantua or Cremona, but I know that I love Cremona best. Picture to yourself a city like a pale rose growing in the midst of the great green plain, that, when the mulberry flowers, is all a sea of white blossom. You enter this city and find it silent, but not forlorn, smiling through the grass grown in its beautiful great Piazza and the wide streets which the sun fills with gold; the great palaces are often deserted, the tall and beautiful towers that here and there rise to watch the plain are crumbling and make no sign, for Cremona is very old, the oldest Roman town in all the plain, and, in truth, here in Cisalpine Gaul she seems in her nobility like a stranger, some old centurion still on guard amid the dykes and the endless ways, in the service of the Senate and the Roman people.

 

   *** Note: Below is a rough translation from Google.

 

I am not living now, which has left me in doubt whether

For with your body they took away my destiny;

But life, I will build a grave with you in this,

And my bones shall be joined to your bones.

 

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 220-221.

 

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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. 

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.