Cremona Center

 

 Edward Hutton's visit to Cremona started at the City Center, moved on to see a beautiful painting by Perugino, and ended with an appreciation of the renowned violin makers of the city.

All roads in Cremona lead at last to the centre of the city, the beautiful Piazza del Duomo, about which are grouped the great buildings which lend to Cremona her special charm and character: the Cathedral and Baptistry, the Torrazzo and the Palazzo Comunale opposite to them. Let us begin with the Cathedral which is one of the most remarkable buildings in Lombardy. 

 

The Cathedral of S. Maria Assunta in Cremona, like the cathedrals of Modena, Parma, and Piacenza, with which it should be compared, is a magnificent and austere basilica in the Lombard style, flanked by the Torrazzo, the noblest tower in all this country….This church was undoubtedly a pure basilica, the nave being vaulted, but not the aisles, which were added later; the northern about 1288, the southern later still; the vaults we see are of the fourteenth century…. 

 

The façade of the church, one of the most striking anywhere to be seen, was in its origins of pure Lombard style, such as we see in the intarsias of the choir, or on medals conserved in the Museo Civico. But it was divided into three compartments corresponding to the three naves, the loggia to the left, under the Torrazzo, being added in the end of the fifteenth century from the design of Lorenzo Trutti. It was at this time that the façade of the cathedral was largely modified by Alberto Severo di Carrara, who, being a Tuscan, with little understanding of the Lombard style, spoilt it as a work in that manner, but made of it the picturesque thing we see.

 

All one’s time in Cremona seems to be spent in and about the Piazza and the Cathedral, and rightly so. For whether you come there by day or by night, at dawn when the first light catches the lovely lantern of the Torrazzo, or at evening when the whole city resounds and thrills to the ringing of the Ave Maria, there is nothing at once  so spacious and ordered and as picturesquely delightful as this square, in which the whole story of old Cremona seems to have been gathered and to live….

 

But the most delightful and simple shrine left to us in Cremona is to be found in the fourteenth-century Church of S. Agostino, a building of rosy brick with a grass grown piazza before it. Here, in the first chapel on the right, is a Pieta by Giolio Campi, and on the last chapel but one on the same side of the church a miracle indeed, a Madonna and Child with S. James and S. Augustine painted in 1494 by Pietro Perugino. On the throne is inscribed: PETRUS PERVSISVS PINXIT MCCCC LXXXXIIII. Crowe and Cavalcaselle believe this picture to have been painted in Florence, but there is just a chance that the Umbrian master may have painted it in Cremona itself, for in 1494 he was in Venice, as we know, and Cremona is but a little way thence. The picture is one of great beauty. Within one of the arches of the Palazzo Comunale, as it were, Madonna sits enthroned, perhaps before her own beautiful Cathedral, her divine Child in her lap. On either side stand S. James and S. Augustine, S. James with a pen in his hand and a book, S. Augustine with Crozier and mitre. Nothing more surprising and more welcome is to be seen in all this country....

 It is impossible to leave Cremona without reminding oneself what an harmonious and musical city it is; that it is the birthplace of the Amati, the great Stradivarius and of Guarnerius, who here made their violins, the necks of which were like the necks of rare and lovely birds, and which even to-day are softer and sweeter than any other instruments. *

 

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*Note: here is a link to a street version of "Winter" from Vivaldi's Four Seasons. It is not played on a Stradivarius but still fine. 

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 225-233. 

Florence: Perugino's Crucifixion

 Edward Hutton could be called a Pre-Raphaelite, an admirer of those painters who came before Raphael. One of those painters was Perugino,  Raphael's teacher, whose fame was largely exceeded by his great student. Hutton especially admired Perugino's Crucifixion that can still be found in the church of S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi. 

 

It is to another desecrated Benedictine convent you come when, passing through Via dei Pilastrati and turning into Via Farina, you come at last in Via della Colonna to S. Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi. This too is now a barracks and a school. It was not, however, the nuns who commissioned Perugino to paint for them his masterpiece, the Crucifixion, in the refectory, but some Cistercian monks who had acquired the convent in the thirteenth century. Perugino was painting there in 1496. …

 There, in 1496, as I have said, Perugino finished the fresco of the Crucifixion that he had begun some years before in the chapter-house of the old S. Maria Maddalena. In almost perfect preservation still, this fresco on the wall of that quiet and empty room is perhaps the most perfect expression of the art of Perugino—those dreams of the country and of certain ideal people he has seen there; Jesus and His disciples, Madonna and Mary Magdalen, sweet, smiling, and tearful ghosts passing in the sunshine, less real than the hills, all perhaps that the world was able to bear by way of remembrance of those it had worshipped once, but was beginning to forget. And here at last, in this fresco, the landscape has really become of more importance than the people, who breathe there so languidly. The Crucifixion has found something of the expressiveness, the unction of a Christian hymn, something of the quiet beauty of the Mass that was composed to remind us of it; already it has passed away from reality, is indeed merely a memory in which the artist has seen something less and something more than the truth.

 

Divided into three compartments, we see through the beautiful round arches of some magic casement, as it were, the valleys and hills of Italy, the delicate trees, the rivers and the sky of a country that is holy, which man has taken particularly too himself. And then, as though summoned back from forgetfulness by the humanism of that landscape where the toil and endeavour of mankind is so visible in the little city far away, the cultured garden of the world, a dream of the Crucifixion comes to us, a vision of all that man has suffered for man, summed up, as it were, naturally enough by that supreme sacrifice of love; and we see not an agonised Christ or the brutality of the priests and the soldiers,, but Jesus, who loved us, hanging on the Cross, with Mary Magdalen kneeling at his feet, and on the one side Madonna and St. Bernard, and on the other St. John and St. Benedict. And though, in a sort of symbolism, Perugino has placed above the Cross the sun and the moon eclipsed, the whole world is full of the serene and perfect light of late afternoon, and presently we know that vision of the Crucifixion will fade away, and there will be left to us only that which we really know, and have heard and seen, the valleys and the hills, the earth from which we are sprung.

 

There are but six figures in the whole picture, and it is just this spaciousness, perhaps, earth and sky counting for so much, that makes this work so delightful. For it is not from the figures at all that we receive the profoundly religious expression that this picture makes upon all who look unhurriedly upon it; but from the earth and sky, where in the infinite space God dwells, no longer hanging upon a Cross tortured by men who have unthinkably made so terrible a mistake, but joyful in His heaven, moving in every living thing that He has made; visible only in the invisible wind that passes over the streams suddenly at evening, or subtly makes musical the trees at dawn, walking as of old in His garden, where one day maybe we shall meet Him face to face. 

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 257-259.

Città della Pieve: Perugino

Edward Hutton wrote a little book on Perugino, the fifteenth century painter has been eclipsed by later masters like his pupil Raphael. Hutton's great admiration for Perugino led him to visit his birthplace, Citta della Pieve.

 

I went from Perugia to Citta della Pieve—it is but six miles—for the sake of Perugino, who was born there. I stayed there for its own sake. It is a little towered city, some miles from the railway, set on a hill 1,600 feet above sea-level.

 

The Peruginos which remain there are not the best works of the master. It would seem that for the most part they are the work of his pupils, or of his old age. But the city itself, with its views of the lakes of Trasimeno and Chiusi and the valley southward towards Rome, the quiet peace of the place, the magnificent woods beneath it, are in themselves more valuable than the faint and fading beauty of the mediocre work of the great painter who was born there; for they remain for ever in the memory and seem worth everything else in the world because of the sun—the sun which is the smile of God.

And so it is perhaps to the sun, which robes this little city, too, in a mantle of splendid colour all through the day, and at evening adorns her with bright fire and radiant glory, that we owe the curious fascination of this towered place, so small, so poor, so desolate, so forlorn….

 

This was the little city in which Perugino received his first impressions of the world. Here he spent his childhood. This was the landscape he first looked on. It was to this, it might seem, … it was to this he returned in his age and these hills and valleys were what his eyes last rested on. The impressions one receives as a child, are they ever lost? Might one not hope then, among these hills and valleys, to discover the secret of his landscapes, so full of golden air and serene light and space, where the hills are almost transparent—the trees, those “trees of heaven”, so delicate and ethereal? Might one not hope here to surprise the secret of the first realistic landscape painter in Italian art?

 

The first realistic landscape painter in Italian art: but others before him had put landscapes in their pictures even in the fourteenth century, but there was nothing realistic about them. … It is true that Piero della Francesca, a whole generation younger than Perugino, in his Baptism of Christ, in the National Gallery, and in his portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino in the Uffizi, was a master of landscape; but beautiful though these landscapes are, they are “distance” landscapes … they have no middle distance, they are all background and are really experiments, beautiful experiments, in perspective.

Giovanni Bellini: Agony in the Garden

The greatest gift of the true landscape painter is an “emotional response to light”. This response to light is to be found, perhaps for the first time, in the pictures of Giovanni Bellini, a greater master than Perugino. In an early work of his, the Agony in the Garden in the National Gallery, the landscape is marvelously beautiful, most moving and tragically lovely in the light of dawn, but it is dramatic rather than realistic. Who has ever seen such a landscape, even in the Veneto? The painter has conceived it, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the subject of his picture. …

With Perugino it seems the exact opposite is true. The landscape is the subject of his pictures, it is an end in itself, and the figures are there to emphasize or express the emotion of the landscape. Not only is the landscape inspired with light and full of spacious air, it is realistic, as we say, just what his eyes had seen first as a child, what had most filled them with delight all his life long and what he last looked upon as he lay dying, not, it seems, in this little city of Citta della Pieve, his birthplace, but at Fontignano half-way between it and Perugia. …

In an age when all the arts were becoming more and more pagan, his art, at any rate remains wholly and unmistakably Christian, but it is our business to discover what it is that moves us in his pictures, what they really mean to us. The artist who painted the marvellous portraits in the Uffizi was certainly not without ability to represent life, but his large achievement had little to do with life, contenting itself, as it did, with a sort of music; the effect of music, at any rate, composed with space; so that what we see in his pictures, that exquisite grave and serene landscape of Umbria, quite apart from the figures there, moves us as the plainsong does, quite apart from the words which accompany it, to a real religious emotion in which we become partakers of that universal life whose rhythm we seem to have overheard for a moment during an interval of particular silence, when our souls suddenly seem attuned to the movement of eternity. What in fact we see, what in fact he paints, is Umbria Santa.    

 

                                              

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 209, 210-212. 

 

Cremona Center

  

 

 Edward Hutton's visit to Cremona started at the City Center, moved on to see a beautiful painting by Perugino, and ended with an appreciation of the renowned violin makers of the city.

All roads in Cremona lead at last to the centre of the city, the beautiful Piazza del Duomo, about which are grouped the great buildings which lend to Cremona her special charm and character: the Cathedral and Baptistry, the Torrazzo and the Palazzo Comunale opposite to them. Let us begin with the Cathedral which is one of the most remarkable buildings in Lombardy. 

 

The Cathedral of S. Maria Assunta in Cremona, like the cathedrals of Modena, Parma, and Piacenza, with which it should be compared, is a magnificent and austere basilica in the Lombard style, flanked by the Torrazzo, the noblest tower in all this country….This church was undoubtedly a pure basilica, the nave being vaulted, but not the aisles, which were added later; the northern about 1288, the southern later still; the vaults we see are of the fourteenth century…. 

 

The façade of the church, one of the most striking anywhere to be seen, was in its origins of pure Lombard style, such as we see in the intarsias of the choir, or on medals conserved in the Museo Civico. But it was divided into three compartments corresponding to the three naves, the loggia to the left, under the Torrazzo, being added in the end of the fifteenth century from the design of Lorenzo Trutti. It was at this time that the façade of the cathedral was largely modified by Alberto Severo di Carrara, who, being a Tuscan, with little understanding of the Lombard style, spoilt it as a work in that manner, but made of it the picturesque thing we see.

 

All one’s time in Cremona seems to be spent in and about the Piazza and the Cathedral, and rightly so. For whether you come there by day or by night, at dawn when the first light catches the lovely lantern of the Torrazzo, or at evening when the whole city resounds and thrills to the ringing of the Ave Maria, there is nothing at once  so spacious and ordered and as picturesquely delightful as this square, in which the whole story of old Cremona seems to have been gathered and to live….

 

But the most delightful and simple shrine left to us in Cremona is to be found in the fourteenth-century Church of S. Agostino, a building of rosy brick with a grass grown piazza before it. Here, in the first chapel on the right, is a Pieta by Giolio Campi, and on the last chapel but one on the same side of the church a miracle indeed, a Madonna and Child with S. James and S. Augustine painted in 1494 by Pietro Perugino. On the throne is inscribed: PETRUS PERVSISVS PINXIT MCCCC LXXXXIIII. Crowe and Cavalcaselle believe this picture to have been painted in Florence, but there is just a chance that the Umbrian master may have painted it in Cremona itself, for in 1494 he was in Venice, as we know, and Cremona is but a little way thence. The picture is one of great beauty. Within one of the arches of the Palazzo Comunale, as it were, Madonna sits enthroned, perhaps before her own beautiful Cathedral, her divine Child in her lap. On either side stand S. James and S. Augustine, S. James with a pen in his hand and a book, S. Augustine with Crozier and mitre. Nothing more surprising and more welcome is to be seen in all this country....

 It is impossible to leave Cremona without reminding oneself what an harmonious and musical city it is; that it is the birthplace of the Amati, the great Stradivarius and of Guarnerius, who here made their violins, the necks of which were like the necks of rare and lovely birds, and which even to-day are softer and sweeter than any other instruments. 

 

###

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 225-233.

Florence: Perugino

Edward Hutton could be called a Pre-Raphaelite, an admirer of those painters who came before Raphael. One of those painters was Perugino, one of Raphael's teachers, whose work was largely excised by his great student. Hutton especially admired Perugino's Crucifixion that can still be found in the church of S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi. 

 

It is to another desecrated Benedictine convent you come when, passing through Via dei Pilastrati and turning into Via Farina, you come at last in Via della Colonna to S. Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi. This too is now a barracks and a school. It was not, however, the nuns who commissioned Perugino to paint for them his masterpiece, the Crucifixion, in the refectory, but some Cistercian monks who had acquired the convent in the thirteenth century. Perugino was painting there in 1496. …

 There, in 1496, as I have said, Perugino finished the fresco of the Crucifixion that he had begun some years before in the chapter-house of the old S. Maria Maddalena. In almost perfect preservation still, this fresco on the wall of that quiet and empty room is perhaps the most perfect expression of the art of Perugino—those dreams of the country and of certain ideal people he has seen there; Jesus and His disciples, Madonna and Mary Magdalen, sweet, smiling, and tearful ghosts passing in the sunshine, less real than the hills, all perhaps that the world was able to bear by way of remembrance of those it had worshipped once, but was beginning to forget. And here at last, in this fresco, the landscape has really become of more importance than the people, who breathe there so languidly. The Crucifixion has found something of the expressiveness, the unction of a Christian hymn, something of the quiet beauty of the Mass that was composed to remind us of it; already it has passed away from reality, is indeed merely a memory in which the artist has seen something less and something more than the truth.

 

Divided into three compartments, we see through the beautiful round arches of some magic casement, as it were, the valleys and hills of Italy, the delicate trees, the rivers and the sky of a country that is holy, which man has taken particularly too himself. And then, as though summoned back from forgetfulness by the humanism of that landscape where the toil and endeavour of mankind is so visible in the little city far away, the cultured garden of the world, a dream of the Crucifixion comes to us, a vision of all that man has suffered for man, summed up, as it were, naturally enough by that supreme sacrifice of love; and we see not an agonised Christ or the brutality of the priests and the soldiers,, but Jesus, who loved us, hanging on the Cross, with Mary Magdalen kneeling at his feet, and on the one side Madonna and St. Bernard, and on the other St. John and St. Benedict. And though, in a sort of symbolism, Perugino has placed above the Cross the sun and the moon eclipsed, the whole world is full of the serene and perfect light of late afternoon, and presently we know that vision of the Crucifixion will fade away, and there will be left to us only that which we really know, and have heard and seen, the valleys and the hills, the earth from which we are sprung.

 

There are but six figures in the whole picture, and it is just this spaciousness, perhaps, earth and sky counting for so much, that makes this work so delightful. For it is not from the figures at all that we receive the profoundly religious expression that this picture makes upon all who look unhurriedly upon it; but from the earth and sky, where in the infinite space God dwells, no longer hanging upon a Cross tortured by men who have unthinkably made so terrible a mistake, but joyful in His heaven, moving in every living thing that He has made; visible only in the invisible wind that passes over the streams suddenly at evening, or subtly makes musical the trees at dawn, walking as of old in His garden, where one day maybe we shall meet Him face to face. 

 

 

 ###

 

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 257-259.