Spoleto: Churches and Shrines

  

 

 

Edward Hutton visited many churches in Spoleto but his favorite was the Basilica of San Salvatore built on the remains of an ancient Roman temple.

 

It is, however, something quite different we find in San Salvatore, which has been built from the ruins of a Roman temple. From a picturesque and historical point of view, it delights me, as I have said, beyond any other piece of architecture in Spoleto. Today its façade guards the Campo Santo, with its hard white crosses and beady flowers, and all the frippery of modern death. Magnificent columns, Roman and pagan, group themselves round the choir and chancel; and the nave is ennobled by the remains of other shafts, now ruinous, that once bore the weight of some splendid roof. Pagan gods, not dead but living in exile, perhaps in the ilex woods that crown the city and envelop her in their sombre mantle, seem to creep into the warm sunshine that floods the church from the open door. They knock at our hearts; and gazing at the feeble and terrible “decorations” of the Christian altar between the majestic pillars of an alien religion, it is rather of the nobility of the past, which is so present everywhere in Italy—of its beauty and its sufficiency—that we think, than of its Christian successor.

And yet who here in Spoleto can resist the touching appeal of that little ugly shrine that greets the traveller on his way to San Paolo, that old thirteenth-century church? It is a picture of S. Maria Immacolata and bears the legend: Et macula originalis non est in Te. As I passed by at evening some children  were decking the shrine with wild flowers, gathered on the Umbrian hills. The cage that guarded the picture was starred with buttercups as lovely in their shining yellow as those which doubtless in old days sprang up beneath the white footsteps of Persephone as she crossed the rivers of Sicily on her way to Demeter, after her unwilling exile from our world. Will she not know and smile and understand, this Virgin that is the one goddess left to a sorrowful world? Be sure, if she is not mindful of the flowers of the maidens and children, if in that heaven where she is she does not smile to her Son upon His Throne of chrysoprase and jasper to see these, simple of heart, bringing the flowers of the field for her Festa—then Persephone never trod our world, nor was Demeter bereft and sorrowful; all is a lie—the beautiful, austere gods, the terrible love of Christ, the very Fatherhood of God, since even these so simple of heart may deceive themselves on their lovely way to death….

 

It was Holy Week when for the first time I came to Spoleto; a certain silence and wistful sadness, I remember, seemed to invest the city; the streets were very quiet, the churches sombre. At evening I watched the processions, with their torches and innumerable tapers, wind along the roads; all night as I lay in my bed I seemed to hear the melancholy chants that accompanied them up the Via Crucis. In reality it would seem that Christ had died that afternoon; now at last mankind was desolate. The tones of the Vexilla Regis seemed to wave like long streamers  from the church towers, and one heard the Mother, heart-broken, and weeping sigh to the world spread at our feet:

 

O vos omnes qui transitis per viam, attendite 

     et videte, si est dolor, sicut dolor meus.

 

Then there was silence. Spoleto, with finger on her lip, awaited the dawn of Easter. At last it broke, very cool and sweet and full of promises. An immense hope seemed to have swept over the world. In the churches they sang again Alleluia, and I, with the whole city went to the Cathedral to greet the Christ, new risen from the  tomb, in the Easter Mass.

 

Out of my window, as I write, I can see S. Mary of the Angels gleaming in the sunlight beneath the mass of Subasio. It is only the mountains that hide Orvieto from me, and even perhaps Rome herself. Innumerable roads over plain and mountain to half a hundred cities that the world has forgotten. I seem to see them all in the soft lucidity of evening, that is the  most precious part of the day in this land where, every evening, God paints for us those pictures which taught Perugino all he knew—the magnificent spaciousness, his sense of luminous light.

 

Before the sunset Spoleto, like a tall and sweet maiden, kneels on her hill and seems to pray. Ever she has the attitude of prayer; and after dark when her little lights gleam far over the plain, I seem to know that they burn before the shrines of many saints whose prayers she has desired, simple  of heart as she is, kneeling at the head of her long valley under the soft sky.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 77-78, 79-80.

Florence: Or San Michele

In his account of the church of Or San Michele, Edward Hutton's described the sculptures placed in the exterior niches by the various guilds of Florence with emphasis on Verrocchio's Christ with St. Thomas.  On entering the church he turned to the magnificent shrine of the Madonna by Andrea Orcagna. *

 

Or San Michele, S. Michele in Orto, was till the middle of the thirteenth century a little church belonging, as it is said, to the Cistercians, who certainly claimed the patronage of it. About 1260, however, the commune of Florence began to dispute this right with the Order, and at last pulled down the church, building there, thirty years later, a loggia of brick… This loggia was the corn market of the city, a shelter, too, for the contadini who came to show their samples and to talk, gossip, and chaffer, as they do everywhere in Italy even to-day. And, as was the custom, they made a shrine of Madonna there, hanging on one of the brick pillars a picture (tavola) of Madonna that, as it is said, was the work of Ugolino da Siena. This shrine soon became famous for the miracles Madonna wrought there….

 

By 1353 Andrea Orcagna had been chosen to build the shrine of the Madonna, which is still one of the wonders of the city. It seems to have been in a sort of recognition of the splendour and beauty of Orcagna’s work that the Signoria, between 1355 and 1359, removed the corn market elsewhere, and thus gave up the whole loggia to the shrine of Madonna. Thus the loggia became a church, the great popular church of Florence, built by the people for their own use, in what had once been the corn-market of the city. The architect of this strange and secular building, more like a palace than a church, is unknown….

 

 

The masterpiece, certainly, of these Tuscan sculptures is the bronze group of Christ and St. Thomas by Verrocchio, which I have so loved. All the work of this master is full of eagerness and force; something of that strangeness without which there is no excellent beauty, that later was so characteristic of the work of his pupil Leonardo, …. How perfectly, and yet 

 not altogether without affectation, he has composed that difficult scene, so that St. Thomas stands a little out of the setting, and places his finger—yes, almost as a child might do—in the wounded side of Jesus, who stands majestically fair before him. It is true the drapery is complicated, a little heavy even, but with what care he has remembered everything! Consider the grace of those beautiful folds, the beauty of the hair, the loveliness of the hands; and then as Burckhardt reminds us, as a piece of work founded and cast in bronze, it is almost inimitable. 

 

Within, the church is strange and splendid. It is as though one stood in a loggia in deep shadow, at the end of the day in the last gold of the sunset; and there, amid the ancient fading glory of the frescoes, is the wonderful shrine that Orcagna made for the picture of the Madonna, who had turned the Granary of S. Michele into the Church of the People. Finished in 1358, this tabernacle is the loveliest work of its kind in Italy, an unique masterpiece, and perhaps the most beautiful example of the Italian Gothic manner in existence. Orcagna seems to have been at work on it for some ten years covering it with decoration and carving those reliefs of the Life of the Virgin in that grand style which he had found in Giotto and learned perhaps from Andrea Pisano. To describe the shrine itself would be impossible and useless. It is like some miniature and magic church, a casquet made splendid not with jewels but with beauty, where the miracle picture of the Madonna—not that ancient and wonderful picture by Ugolino da Siena, but a work, it is said, of Bernardo Daddi—glows under the lamps. …

Some who have seen the shrine so loaded with ornament, so like some difficult and complicated canticle, have gone away disappointed…. Yet I think it is rather the fault of Or San Michele than of the shrine itself, that it does not certainly vanquish any possible objection and assure us at once of its perfection and beauty. If it could be seen in the beautiful spacious transept of S. Croce, or even in the Santo Spirito across Arno, that sense as of something elaborate and complicated would perhaps not be felt; but here in Or San Michele one seems to have come upon a priceless treasure in a cave. 

 

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 Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 185-193.

*Note: For a more up to date description of the Orsanmichele see the post by my English friend, David Orme. 

Edward Hutton: S. Zaccaria, Bellini Madonna

The church of S. Zaccaria in Venice is situated not far behind S. Marco and the Doge's Palace. As Hutton noted it is gloomy inside but when you drop a coin in a box, Giovanni Bellini's masterpiece lights up in dazzling splendor. It is wonderful to see a painting where it was originally meant to be. Notice how Bellini's faux columns match the real columns. Here is Edward Hutton's description.

The present church, with its beautiful façade, dates from the fifteenth century, and is a spacious though rather gloomy building. Eight Doges lie therin, but its great treasure is the famous altarpiece by Giovanni Bellini of the Madonna and Child enthroned with four saints. It is one of the finest of his works. Completed in 1505, it is in the new manner which came to Bellini in his age as a new vision of the world, caught perhaps from the enthusiasm of his young disciples, who were to revolutionize painting. Our Lady and the Holy child are still enthroned in that niche with which we are so familiar, but there is something new in the picture which assures us, as it did Vasari, that it is a work in the “modern” manner. Perhaps we find it in the figure of S. Lucia, who stands on the right of the throne, her fair hair lying all gold across her shoulders, the lighted lamp in her hand, the curved palm branch, too, the sign of her martyrdom. Beside her is S. Jerome, his Bible open before him, the father of monasticism. To the left stand S. Catherine of Alexandria and S. Peter. *

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*Edward Hutton: Venice and Venetia, New York, 1911, p. 96.