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.

Orvieto and Its Cathedral

  

 

 

Edward Hutton tells the story of Orvieto and its Cathedral in great detail. Here is the first of two posts.

Image by David Orme

D’Annunzio has well described Orvieto: “Imagine a rock in the middle of a melancholy valley, and on the top of the rock a city, so deathly silent as to give the impression of being uninhabited—every window closed—grass growing in the dusty grey streets—a Capuchin friar crosses a piazza—a priest descends from a closed carriage in front of a hospital, all in black, and with a decrepit old servant to open the door; here a tower against the rain-sodden clouds—there a clock slowly striking the hour, and suddenly at the end of a street, a miracle—the Duomo!”

 

Peace and silence: that is what the traveller will find in Orvieto, for far from the contemporary uproar she still dreams of the miracle of Bolsena which her Cathedral was built to commemorate. …

Image by David Orme

The Cathedral … is the most beautiful in Umbria, and the flaming façade is perhaps the loveliest in Italy. The church stands on a marble platform in a wide piazza. Facing it are the Palazzo Faina and the Palazzo dell’ Opera del Duomo, founded in 1359, with a great Baroque façade of the seventeenth century, then the Ospedale. 

 

The glory of the Duomo is of course the façade, which was perhaps first imagined by Arnolfo di Cambio with but a single and central pediment or gable, but in 1310 the Sienese master, Lorenzo Maitani, gave it the three triangular pediments we see, and its marvellous colour and decoration in mosaic and sculpture, between 1327 and 1337; and his work was continued by Andrea Pisani, Orcagna and others till 1388. The uppermost story was added by Antonio Federighi of Siena (1444-90). 

 

The sculptures in bas-relief on the façade were executed between 1310 and 1327, in part by Lorenzo Maitani and in part under his supervision. They belong therefore to the golden age of the art of Siena, the age of Duccio, Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti. They are perhaps the greatest achievement of the Sienese school of sculpture and are among the most lovely things in Italy. …

The whole story of the Creation and the Fall of Man is represented on this façade.  A little conventionally, you might say, these Sienese artists deal with their art, and yet what pathos in that figure of Adam whom God approaches so eagerly, so graciously in the garden. The astonished angels wait, with how profound an agitation, for this new thing. And again, when that deep sleep fell upon our father, and God with blessing—for He does bless her—draws woman from his side, and two angels hesitate in the garden among the trees, the one seeming to tell the other of all that has gone before, when Adam lay a marvellous shape of dust waiting the touch of the finger of God; as you look on the sublime scene the picture of Michelangelo comes to you as he painted this very thing on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. There Adam, half alive, lies over the world and stretches out his finger—how languidly—to touch the finger of God; he is almost unconscious, still wrapped round by dreams, yet a touch of the finger-tips will suffice to awaken him to life itself, and all that God holds, woman and the future, in the fold of His garment. But here Christ is the chief figure in that act of creation, God the Father being represented by a hand, while the Holy Spirit in the form of a Dove with outspread wings hovers over the waters and the earth and the stars.

Sienese work though this is, there is energy and realism in that figure of Adam where he stands with Eve for a moment beneath the Tree of Knowledge, and God, with a kind of severity, forbids them to eat of that fruit. Eve listens with a curious meekness, an easy acquiescence. But Adam stands at his full height and looks God in the eyes as a beloved son, and really understands that this tree which he touched with his fingers bears the forbidden fruit. Here is a poem as noble as Milton’s Paradise Lost.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 131-134.

From Narni to Orvieto

  

 

 

Edward Hutton returned to Narni in the spring to complete his tour of Umbria

Narni

 

I had spent most of the winter in Rome, but when April came I returned to Narni, for I wanted to make the journey to Orvieto through Amelia and Lugnano across the uplands which lie between the Nera and the Tiber.

It was a fine spring morning, when I set out from Narni, and as I went, there came singing into my mind those lines which open the most beautiful of all the Odes of Horace:

 

          Diffugere nives, reduent jam gramine campis,

                 arboresque comae;

          mutat terra vices et decresentia ripas

                 flumina praetereunt;

          Gratia cum Nymphis geminiesque sororibus audit

                 ducere nuda choros.

          Immortalia ne speres, monet annus et almum

                 quae rapit hora diem… *

 

* Hutton's translation: The snows have fled away, already the grass returns to the fields and the leaves to the trees, the earth is going through her changes and the rivers with declining floods past their banks. The Grace ventures nude to lead the choir with the Nymphs and her twin sisters. The Seasons and the hour that robs us of the gracious day warn us not to look for an unending life.”

 

How is it that line Latin or Greek hammered into one at school, which meant less than nothing to us then, come back to us later with such a rush of emotion, so poignant a meaning as to bring tears to the eyes? Learned mechanically as part of a form “repetition” without a hint of their beauty and forgotten as soon as learned, suddenly they “come home to us”, as Newman says, and pierce the heart as nothing in our own tongue, familiar and beloved though it be, is able to do. Is this the secret of something we call classical? Does it explain why, when we first see the Parthenon, the great Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Age, all that has been built since antiquity, seem a mistake?

 

So I went on over the hills, Horace’s Ode in my heart and on my lips, often looking back on towered Narni and the broken bridge of Augustus. Yes, the snows were all fled away, already the grass was shining in the fields, the trees were green with the young leaf. … And presently, between the immense horizons here Monte Soracte rose, there the cone of Mount of Monte Cimino, and then before me I saw Amalia towering up on her hill, crowned by her Cathedral and surrounded by her magnificent walls….

Amalia

 

Yes, Amalia is poor in pictures, but in the church of San Francesco there is the tomb of Matteo and Elisabetta Geraldini which might be by Agostino di Duccio so lovely is it, while the church itself, which dates from the thirteenth century, has a fine ruddy façade, with a double rose, and a beautiful double cloister of the fifteenth century. 

Amalia Duomo

 

Nor is the Duomo, reconstructed though it has been in the eighteenth century, to be neglected, crowning the little city as it does with  its majestic twelve sided campanile, of the eleventh century still, as was once the church which it overshadows….

 

I went on over the mountains along the same wonderful road, through a richly cultivated or wooded country, to Lugnano. …

 

But it was the road that enchanted me. There, as from a lofty terrace over the Tiber valley, I could survey the world from Monte Soracte in the Campagna on the verge of the Patrimony to Mont’ Amiata in the Senese. That was what lay before me along the twenty miles  or so between Lugnano and Orvieto, till I descended into the Paglia valley and the evening light struck the mosaics of the Cathedral of Orvieto on its isolated pedestal of tufa and I went up to the city by its so long drawn our approach in the twilight.

Orvieto

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 126-130.