Todi: S. Maria della Consolazione

  

 

 

Edward Hutton had high praise for Todi's church of Santa Maria della Consolazione, begun in 1508 at the height of the Renaissance. I must confess that on our brief visit, my wife and I admired its exterior beauty but the interior left us cold even when we heard Mass. Perhaps, as he says, it is more a temple than a church.

 

Santa Maria della Consolazione is one of the most lovely, if not the loveliest, of high Renaissance churches in Italy—that is to say, in the world; energy and identity within formal limits. No mysterious vistas here, no forests of columns lost in twilight, nothing but perfect order, space, proportion. Here the spirit and the mind take flight.

 

In Santa Maria della Consolazione we have at last a really fine realization of the high Renaissance ideal in architecture. It is not a perfect realization, but it is the best we possess. In looking on this church we may discern what St. Peter’s in Rome might have been but for the Reformation. The idea of Bramante, it will be remembered, was to build S. Peter’s as a Greek cross under a dome. It was an effect of space he aimed at, light and space confined, and so not confined within a perfectly proportioned building. Well, the Reformation came and spoiled all that. Rome remembered the pilgrims from the north, and how important it was to impress them, and so decided to build the long nave which obscures and obstructs the dome; and the dream of Bramante vanished. Coming into Santa Maria della Consolazione we realize, for the first time perhaps what we have lost.

Image by David Orme

 It is not a church, it is a magical space in the heavens between the sun and moon, and the light is level and beautiful. It is strange this effect of space—absolute space, flight almost, in what is really so small a building. And it is right that this ideal should have been achieved, if anywhere then in Umbria, where the beauty of the whole country is really that sense of serenity, of light and spacious air. It is the secret that Umbria has strived to confide to the world through her painters: through Perugino best of all, and at last through the lucid and tranquil genius of Raphael. These men composed with space as a musician composes with sound, and indeed the effect is very like. You seem suddenly to have stepped out of our world into a pure and clear sunlight, not terrifying by its infinity, but enfolding you with security and a kind of perfection. You gaze upwards. That dome borne on the wings of clouds on clouds of angels, soars in its beauty and its perfection like a splendid and irresistible thought in the mind of man. There is no uncertainty, no dimness, no tricks of shadow, no self-accusation, no deceit, no fear, no shame at all, but the clear light of the sky that is the most lovely and precious thing in the world. And it is thus that the men of the Renaissance chose to meet their God. You think there is no mysticism in that, no mystery? But you do not know the mystical power—strange and more wonderful than the spirit of the forests of the north, of the cathedrals of the Gaul and the Goth—to be found in the unappeasable sunlight of a still, hot day. That silence is more profound than the whispering depths of the most ancient forest, or the echoing intricate splendours, the dim unseen vaultings of the great Gothic churches of the north. If in the already worshipped sun there be mystery, or in the unpierced heaven there be angels, though we may not see; if in silence surrounded by light and the immense loneliness of space, God dwells so that that I may find Him always near, then Latin genius, which has taught us all the arts as a mother teaches her children, and to which we owe everything that is precious in the world, has not made this unthinkable failure in architecture of which we accuse her so easily, but has comprehended there too more than she has ever been able to lead us so much as to apprehend; and we in our gloomy, miserable lands preferring now even darkness before light in our trumpery cities, must acknowledge at last with what grace we may the indestructible  untiring genius of Latin blood, that it has become the fashion to scoff at and to despise.

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 151-153.

Todi

 

 

 

On Edward Hutton's suggestion my wife and I drove to the hill town of Todi a few years ago and found it as lovely as he described it.  I can still remember standing behind the Cathedral and taking in the spectacular view of the countryside.

The motor run of some thirty miles from Orvieto to Todi is one of the finest in Umbria and far more worth while than the usual approach to the little city through the Tiber valley from Perugia.

 

The road crosses the Paglia, the torrent that flows below Orvieto to join the Tiber to the south, by the Ponte dell’Adunata and soon begins to climb, zigzagging as it rises into the mountain, giving you wonderful views of Orvieto on its isolated Tufa bastion, over the olives and the oaks, till presently the whole of central Italy, from the Monte Sibillini in the Marches to Mount Amiata in the Senese, is spread out before you, with here Cetona, there the whole of the Cimino range with the beautiful cone of Monte Venere, and Montefiascone on its hill over the lake of Bolsena south-westward, and due south the lonely, defined form, as of a wave about to break, of Monte Soracte on the verge of the Campania. Then, as you begin to descend from these lonely and silent heights, the valley of the Tiber opens beneath you and presently you pass the picturesque village of Prodo, and a little later you catch a glimpse of Todi, most beautiful, crowning her hill. You lose her to find her again and soon, crossing the Tiber at Pontecuti with its triangular walls by a mighty great bridge of seven arches and a fine towered gate, you see the great Renaissance church—or temple is it?—of Santa Maria della Consolazione in its wide Piazzale, and climb up from it into the little ancient city where Iacopone da Todi, the author of the Stabat Mater, was born.

Todi is one of the most ancient cities in Umbria; it boasts of a foundation older than Rome. Its walls are certainly in part Etruscan, patched by the Romans, and again by the Middle Age and Renaissance, that have both left their mark, how splendidly, on the little city built on so precipitous a hill. In its day, surely, it was a place of some renown and greatness, seeing that there is so much beauty even now within its walls. And I for one find it today one of the great surprises in Umbria. … But for those who are not in a hurry Todi holds much—a great and beautiful piazza, more than one very lovely church and silence.

It is in such silence that we begin to understand those things which the world of today has forgotten, and so disastrously. Here surrounded by the Umbrian hills and valleys, serene and spacious, under the shadow of the laurels and the roses, one watches the giant cypresses, each solitary as a god, count the innumerable hours, and thus one may, perhaps, understand something of that troubadour of God who wept because “love is not loved:, who died, as it was believed, not so much conquered by his malady, though that was grave, as from an extraordinary “excess of love”, and who beheld as it were in a vision the beauty and tragedy of our world and told it in his rude but immortal verses. ***

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***Note: Hutton provided an admiring account of the tragic life and death of Iacopone da Todi, “the greatest of the Franciscan poets, certainly the most fruitful in the vernacular, and the author of his stately, immortal Latin sequence: 

 Stabat Mater dolorosa…”

 

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 148-149, 155.