Foiano, Bettolle, and Signorelli

 On his tour of southern Tuscany, Edward Hutton visited some of his favorite  small towns. In Foiano he came upon a masterpiece by Luca Signorelli. Nearby Bettolle was a masterpiece in itself, unspoiled by the modern world.

Fine though Foiano is and girdled with olives and golden with corn and joyful with fruitful vineyard, it is rather by reason of its wonderful views, for the ever delectable landscape that lies at its feet, that one would come to it, but that in the Collegiata is hidden away a signed and dated picture by Luca Signorelli of the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin. This grand and noble picture was painted in 1523 the year of Signorelli’s death, and was, in fact, the last he set his hand to. The Madonna, in a splendid robe of rose with a mantle of blue, fairer than the angels who attend her, kneels before our Lord Christ, who crowns her Regina virginem. On either side two angels play for joy, while St. Joseph, her guardian, still stands beside her, and S. Gabriel, who was her messenger, waits lest she should speak again and he not hear. Before her in the foreground kneels S. Martino, whose altarpiece this is, dressed in a golden cope, and that he won in exchange for the poor coat he gave the beggar for Christ’s sake. On his left hand stands S. Jerome and three monks, and behind him S. Mary Magdalene; and again, on the other side some fine old saint introduces the donor, Angelo Massarelli.

Signorelli was an old man when he conceived this majestic work, which has the unction of a canticle almost and we may be sure that he received some assistance, for not only were the figures of S. Gabriel and S. Mary Magdalen too feeble to have come from his wise hand, even though it trembled then, but in the predella only two of the four scenes are his. The four scenes represent the life of S. Martin and in the two Signorelli has given us with all his boldness and mastery of composition we see S. Martin in armour on his great white war-horse with his men-at-arms about him dividing his cloak with the beggar. In the other we see the saint kneeling before a Bishop with his two acolytes—a beautiful picture. 

 

Having seen this splendour after Mass, I do not see why the traveller should not make his way southward and walk back across the valley to Torrita, which may be reached directly from Foiano by road through Bettolle. It is a walk or drive of some ten or, maybe, twelve miles….

 

Bettolle…is a garden—a garden of chestnuts and vineyards and olives. I do not know that Bettolle is famous among Italians, if indeed it be famous at all for anything but its fairs; but for me it is one of the fairest of all villages, with a fine wine and a courteous people, and I wish it every sort of good there is to be had in this damnable age we live in, and that is the same thing as to repeat the old commandment to keep itself unspotted from the world. 

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Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, 1910, pp. 213-4.

Umbertide and Montone: Two Masterpieces

Edward Hutton visited Umbertide and nearby Montone to see two masterpieces, the first, Luca Signorelli's Descent from the Cross, and the other a gonfalon or processional banner that he attributed to Bartolommeo Caporali. He saw them in churches but now they are in local museums.

 

It was for the sake of Luca Signorelli that one early summer day, I set out from Perugia in the morning by train for Umbertide. The way is fair enough, as all ways are in Umbria, and before long I came into the characteristic upper valley of the Tiber, and passing up-stream to Umbertide, I found there a majestic octagonal domed church of the sixteenth century, Santa Maria della Regia, of lovely portion and full of light, which was rebuilt in the middle of the seventeenth century…

It was in Santa Croce, near the bridge over the Tiber, however, that I found the picture of Signorelli, the Descent from the Cross, which I had set out to see. The great old painter was seventy-five when he painted this picture, yet his vigour was not abated. He seems, indeed, to have painted this fine work himself and to have left little or nothing to assistants. The church is small and dark and the picture has been half spoiled by restoration, but it is still a beautiful and noble work, and if some of the figures are perhaps life-studies, especially the figure in the foreground on the left, the composition is wonderful, and there can be no doubt about the sincerity of the emotion. They have just loosed the divine body from the Cross, a rainbow-coloured scarf of Umbria supports it and is caught round the crutch and held by one of the Apostles. The others are mounted on ladders, and gently, slowly, they are trying to lower the body of the Son of God that it may rest for three days in the tomb. Others of the Apostles hold the ladders, and at the foot of the Cross itself the Virgin Mother has swooned away. Two of the women look upon her, while the Magdalen, half mad with tears, places her hand under the wounded feet of her Lord and, grasping the Cross to save herself from falling, seems about to gather her Saviour into her arms almost as one might a child. In the foreground, on the right, St. John seems to be praying. And then suddenly into this picture, so solemn and tragic, steels the beautiful and only half-sorrowful figure of a girl splendidly dressed, her hands clasped before her. She seems just to have halted for a moment at the sight, and to have lowered her eyes as Madonna, swaying like a lily, has fallen softly to the ground. Who is this figure that passes by? …

 

When at Umbertide I proposed to myself to go to Montone, a little lofty town some eight miles away in the mountains to the north. It was for the sake of a Bonfigli I set out, for, as I was told, he had painted a gonfalon for that very place, a thing so splendid and lovely that to see it was worth all the weariness of the way, for the road is steep and long. It was not, however, any work of Bonfigli I saw, when just after Mass on Sunday morning I entered the church of San Francesco.

Montone has many traditions … The magnificent Standard, which a place once so famous was able to command, was painted in 1482, and, if we judge from its style, by Bartolommeo Caporali, certainly Bonfigli can have had no hand in it. In the midst the Madonna rises like a flower, her arms spread a little wearily, supporting her cloak over the people of Montone and their city, above which she stands. Her hands, which S. Francis and S. Bernardino seem about to kiss, are more delicate and fair than the petals of the lilies, and her body, clothed in a marvellous patterned cloak, as delicate as the calix of a flower, rises like the hope of the world from the midst of the people. … In truth this gonfalon is worth all the trouble of the way, since it is without doubt the most beautiful Standard in the world.

                                              

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 214-216.

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.

Foiano and Bettolle: Signorelli's Coronation of the Virgin

 

On his tour of southern Tuscany, Edward Hutton visited some of his favorite  small towns. In Foiano he came upon a masterpiece by Luca Signorelli. Nearby Bettolle was a masterpiece in itself, unspoiled by the modern world.

Fine though Foiano is and girdled with olives and golden with corn and joyful with fruitful vineyard, it is rather by reason of its wonderful views, for the ever delectable landscape that lies at its feet, that one would come to it, but that in the Collegiata is hidden away a signed and dated picture by Luca Signorelli of the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin. This grand and noble picture was painted in 1523 the year of Signorelli’s death, and was, in fact, the last he set his hand to. The Madonna, in a splendid robe of rose with a mantle of blue, fairer than the angels who attend her, kneels before our Lord Christ, who crowns her Regina virginem. On either side two angels play for joy, while St. Joseph, her guardian, still stands beside her, and S. Gabriel, who was her messenger, waits lest she should speak again and he not hear. Before her in the foreground kneels S. Martino, whose altarpiece this is, dressed in a golden cope, and that he won in exchange for the poor coat he gave the beggar for Christ’s sake. On his left hand stands S. Jerome and three monks, and behind him S. Mary Magdalene; and again, on the other side some fine old saint introduces the donor, Angelo Massarelli.

Signorelli was an old man when he conceived this majestic work, which has the unction of a canticle almost and we may be sure that he received some assistance, for not only were the figures of S. Gabriel and S. Mary Magdalen too feeble to have come from his wise hand, even though it trembled then, but in the predella only two of the four scenes are his. The four scenes represent the life of S. Martin and in the two Signorelli has given us with all his boldness and mastery of composition we see S. Martin in armour on his great white war-horse with his men-at-arms about him dividing his cloak with the beggar. In the other we see the saint kneeling before a Bishop with his two acolytes—a beautiful picture. 

 

Having seen this splendour after Mass, I do not see why the traveller should not make his way southward and walk back across the valley to Torrita, which may be reached directly from Foiano by road through Bettolle. It is a walk or drive of some ten or, maybe, twelve miles….

 

Bettolle…is a garden—a garden of chestnuts and vineyards and olives. I do not know that Bettolle is famous among Italians, if indeed it be famous at all for anything but its fairs; but for me it is one of the fairest of all villages, with a fine wine and a courteous people, and I wish it every sort of good there is to be had in this damnable age we live in, and that is the same thing as to repeat the old commandment to keep itself unspotted from the world. 

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Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, 1910, pp. 213-4.