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.

Spoleto and Filippo Lippi

  

 

 

Edward Hutton regarded Spoleto as a very special city, a treasure full of treasures.

 

Spoleto is a beautiful city of rose colour set on the slope of Monteluco. In a bend of the Tissino torrent, amid a cluster of  mountains which crown her with their exquisite grace. In her silent streets I began to understand her beauty and her joy, and, indeed, it is in a kind of sudden and overwhelming  joy that her towers pierce up into the sky—those rosy towers that at dawn and midday and sunset are musical with soft bells, and that fade away into the night from rose colour to violet and deep purple under a heaven of innumerable stars. Behind her rise, higher and higher, forests of primeval ilex, the sacred tree of the Latin race, shrouding her, as it were, in a mantle most rare of darkest green. Over her head, far away above the forests, a Franciscan convent soars like a brown bird floating on the wind, whose bells are not heard, but only seem to ring, or heard only in the most fortunate days when their sound is little more than the piping of those crested larks that sang S. Francis to heaven.

 

It was here in this valley, luminous beyond our northern dreams, that Blessed Angela of Foligno heard those breathless words of Christ: “I love thee more than any woman in the valley of Spoleto.” So in the vineyards and the valleys of Umbria of old, men and women talked with God, and indeed the whole land, even to the most superficial observer, seems blessed. Climb up to the great aqueduct that spans the profound ravine which isolates Spoleto on her round hill, and at evening  look across the valleys to the hills and the mountains, that luminous softness, a delicacy so magical that you had thought only the genius of Raphael or Perugino could imagine and express it, is just reality. With light, with fragile glory, with the wide and tender glance of the sky, every delicious form of hill and cloud and mountain is embraced. It is amidst these perfect hills that Spoleto sings for joy….

But on first coming to Spoleto it is to the Cathedral we climb, breathless, for her ways are steep and rough, to see the frescoes of one of the most delightful of the Florentine painters, Filippo Lippo. They are his last masterpieces, and tell the story in brief of the Blessed Virgin in her own Cathedral, Santa Maria Assunta. The chief fresco is that of her Coronation. Pale from the encounter with death, in which but a moment ago she has proved victorious, tall and slight, Regina Angelorum is crowned, not by Christ her Son, but by God the Father, in a heaven delicate as the petals of the flags in the valleys full of corn, powdered with stars that seem to have risen just out of the sea. The sun and the moon beneath her feet are lesser glories where she is. About her a company of angels sings, and dances for joy, since heaven is by so much richer than our earth. A few with a shy and timid grace, magically charming,  hand her a few flowers from the meadows of the woods of heaven, as though to ask her if they might be sweeter than the lilies she loved as a girl, or the wild flowers of Palestine. The rest of the frescoes—the Annunciation, in which she stands so surprised, so agitated, that she twists her fingers together and is not sure how to answer; the Nativity, a magnificent composition, now but a shadow; and the Death of the Virgin, where Christ Himself with a tenderness, but with a tenderness and love, bears His Mother to heaven—are much over-painted, and by a lesser hand, yet we catch some shadow of Filippo in them all, so that even in their ruin they are not the least among the precious things of Spoleto.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp.70-71, 74-75.

Trevi and the Temple of Clitumnus

  

 

 

In the vicinity of Trevi Edward Hutton visited the Temple of the ancient river god, Clitumnus.* In this brief chapter he quoted the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, as well as Roman authors Pliny and Virgil.

 

 

The way from Foligno to Trevi takes one at once almost into Virgilian country, the valley of the Clitumnus. If the night is spent at Montefalco—not so daring an adventure as it seems—one must drive to Trevi by a way as pleasant as any in the world, following the river as it flows, and crossing both river and railway to climb up to Trevi. But the way by San Martino is beautiful exceedingly, and the torrents after the rain only add to the charm of the road. All travellers have wondered at Trevi since she perched herself on the top of her precipitous hill, and though few of them visited her on her lonely height, she impressed her memory upon them even from a distance….

 

Well, I was tired, too, when I came to Trevi at sunset, and the inn was poor even for an Umbrian albergo. But I forgot the poverty of my room in the relief of being able to sleep; and, indeed, the bed was soft and clean, things common in Italy even in the poorest places….

 

In this Virgilian country, Hutton quoted eight lines from Virgil's second Georgic that mentioned snowy flocks and sacred bulls bathing in the river.

 

The white, the snowy flocks of Clitumnus, where are they now? And the bull that bathed in the sacred stream before it was led the chiefest victim to the temples of the gods, the triumphs of Rome; and those temples, are they quite gone from our world? Let us see.

 

As you set out for Spello, if you are wise enough to go by road--it is but twelve miles--when you have passed a third of the way you come to a tiny Temple high over the stream, which here among the trees and the grass has its source. And it is the Temple of the river god that you look on, in all its little splendour of silence and ruin. At least, I hope it is; but some speak of a Christian building and will not listen to Pliny. But however that may be, it is a place too beautiful for any to pass by. I confess that, following the advice of the younger Pliny, I bathed there beneath the glancing, whispering poplars, and found, as he had said, the water as cold as snow. But in vain, in vain, I looked for the god Clitumnus and could not find him, though Pliny said that he was there, “not naked but adorned with the toga”. And then in the shade, within sound of the beautiful river, I read again in Virgil. Is it not thus one might desire to spend endless days?

But for the traveller by road the sun is ever something of a god; imperious as he is, he commands our days. He was slanting down the sky, reminding me that Spello was still far and I alone, and night would follow him. So I set out at last with regret; and later I came to San Giacomo in Poseta, where I saw some of the finest Lo Spagnas in Italy, especially a Coronation of the Blessed Virgin, his masterpiece, though stolen from Filippo Lippi. And so I came to the gates of Spoleto.

 

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*Note. The river is now called the Clitunno and flows into a tributary of the Tiber.

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 67-69.

Montefalco

  

 

 

Montefalco is noted for its spectacular views of the surrounding countryside, as well as for its fine wines, but Edward Hutton visited the mountain of falcons to view the famous fresco cycle of the life of S. Francis by Benozzo Gozzoli.

 So the summer days passed, and when it was too hot in the valley I went up to Montefalco and found there coolness and silence.

 

The road to Montefalco is beautiful with views of the ever-changing valley and the mountains; and the little city herself stands high on her hill. Her unfrequented streets are still as of old, and she seems to look across the wide valley to Assisi as a daughter towards her mother. It is not Giotto who has clothed her with glory while telling the legend of S. Francis, but Benozzo Gozzolli, the pupil of Fra Angelico, with his simple literalism and delightful sense of the loveliness of such natural things as flowers and animals, who has painted for her the same immortal story—not in vain, for his influence is found again and again in such men as Bonfigli, Niccolo da Foligno, whose work one has learned to care for in Foligno and Assisi, and in Fiorenzo di Lorenzo.  Nor, as it seems to me, did Pintoricchio wholly escape his charm; much of his delight in these natural beauties which crowd his pictures is, it may well be, owing to the work of this Tuscan painter.

 It is in the little church of San Francesco—desecrated now and used as a picture-gallery—in which was once the choir, that we find the frescoes of the life of S. Francis, painted in the middle of the fifteenth century by Benozzo Gozzoli. It is here for the first time almost we come upon the growth, that development into some half-apprehended ideal, which every legend seems to follow. S. Francis was a man so like to Christ as almost to be mistaken for Him; it is therefore certain that he too, like the Prince of Life, was born in a stable. And even as old Simeon and Anna had prophesied of Christ, so a pilgrim tells of S. Francis, and a poor man spreads his coat for the saint to tread on. Thus gradually in the minds of men S. Francis became even in lesser things, a kind of imitation of Jesus of Nazareth….The frescoes continue the life of the saint almost as in the upper church at Assisi, where the traditional works of Giotto were doubtless known to Benozzo Gozzoli. These Montefalco frescoes are particularly interesting as the early work of a man who, brought by Fra Angelico to Rome and Orvieto—where, as here, his work is really an imitation of his master—was later to develop a more individual style, as in the frescoes in the Riccardi chapel, or at San Gimignano, or in his ruined masterpieces at Pisa, where he painted from 1469 to 1487. Here in Montefalco he is strictly the pupil of Fra Angelico. But in that attitude of the scholar to one who was so worthy of his allegiance, it may well be, we find his work really finer than when he had become himself a little master. … In his early work, however, under the influence of Angelico, he, having had a glimpse of heaven, turning to the earth he found it every whit as fair. … He tells the story of S. Francis, here in Montefalco, like a romantic almost, in which the spirit of adventure, the call of the road, the magical persistence of tomorrow blend very happily with the lovely life of the little poor man. Looking on these frescoes… his work is so boyish, as it were, as almost to disarm criticism, and in that very freshness, without ulterior ideas about art, he comes nearer perhaps than Giotto to realizing for us the romantic beauty of S. Francis’s life. He certainly realizes that, and strives to make us realise it as no other painter of the Franciscan legend has been able to do, before the far more exquisite and spiritual work of Sasseta. And so, though for no other cause yet for this, I return to Montefalco again and again.

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 57-58

Spello: S. Francis and S. Clare.

  

 

After visiting some churches outside Spello's walls, Edward Hutton concluded his brief account of the town with a touching story about S. Francis and S. Clare.

It is delightful to walk to San Girolamo under the olives outside Porta Montanara with its frescoes, a Nativity by Perugino and others by followers of Pintoricchio and Mezzastris. Or to wander out of Porta Fontevecchia to Santa Maria della Rotunda, a fine Renaissance church, a Greek cross under an octagonal dome dating from 1517. Or to go to San Claudio, a small Romanesque and curiously asymmetrical  church of the twelfth century and to the Roman amphitheatre.

 

They say it was one day at Spello, when S. Francis and S. Clare were walking together and came to some osteria or other where they were given a morsel of bread, that as they sat there on the stones the people began to point at them with diffidenza and no little suggestion of evil and bisbigli malevoli, indirect allusions and jokes.

 

They went away in silence.

 

It was a winter’s day and the ground was covered with snow. Evening came on under the grey sky as they went. Presently S. Francis said:

 

“Sister Clare, hast thou understood what they were saying to us?”

 

S. Clare did not reply, for her heart was sorrowful, and she felt, if she had spoken, she could not have restrained her tears.

 

     “We must never do this again,” said, S. Francis at last.

 

S. Clare knelt down in the path on the desolate countryside.

 

     “What, never, Father? When then shall we meet again?”

 

     “When?” said S. Francis. “When the roses bloom in January.”

 

Marvellous and divine miracle! In a moment, a second of time, the whole mountainside was covered with roses, so that the air was filled with their perfume.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 48-9.

Spello and Pintoricchio

  

 

 

 

Leaving Assisi, Edward Hutton visited Spello to see the work of the Renaissance painter Pintoricchio in the Baglioni chapel of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore.

 

Spello is so near to Assisi, and the way thither by the old road of Porta Nuova is so pleasant, that all save those who are desperate with hurry should walk or drive thither from the city of S. Francis. There is but little to be seen: a few Roman remains, an ampitheatre, a triumphal arch in ruin, two gateways, Porta Veneris and Porta Urbica, over which lean the heads of two men and a woman; and, save for a sculpture here and there, that is all that is left of the Roman Hispellum. It was not, however, to find Roman things that I came to Spello on her little hill, but to see the work of the great and exquisite sentimentalist, Pintoricchio. Nowhere save in Siena or Rome can you see him so well as in this small clambering city, where in 1501—the year in which Perugino was painting in the Cambio—he was busy with his dainty modish stories, in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. A painter who delighted in beauty, you might be tempted to say, as you look on his charming decorative work of 1501 in the Baglioni chapel here, with its original majolica pavement of Deruta tiles. Nor, after all, would you be wrong. Beauty conceived as he conceived it, was his conscious aim. I do not know in all his work a woman who is not surpassingly pretty. He pleases us by the lightness of his touch, the daintiness of his perfect handling, the nicety of his finish. He is so much greater in the Sistine Chapel than anywhere else that we are always startled to find so much promise, after all, merely talent. He seems to have been so susceptible to influence that in the company of great men he becomes almost one of them, just as when left to himself, or with the subtle and scornful Perugino, he becomes—well, just a painter of “out of doors”, a “space composer”, as Mr. Berenson has said, but so much less great than his master....

In the Baglioni chapel, one sees on the left the Annunciation, in front the Nativity, and on the right Christ among the Doctors, with an elaborate Renaissance temple in the background. The best of these is, to my mind, the Annunciation. For once Pintoricchio seems to have been possessed, really captured, by the vision of Mary. She, that beautiful maid, blessed among women, wearied but listening to our devotion, is still in the dawn of her simplicity, reading her Book of Hours, when suddenly, before she can turn the page, God has sent His messenger, a kind of spiritual knight, to tell her of her destiny. So it is in the midst of her dream that she is interrupted, and suddenly confronted with Love Himself, whose Mother, in a less happy way than in the old Greek world, but with a new tenderness and refinement, she, scarcely wakened to life as yet, is to be. Here is the story as it has been told to us in our childhood, not actually as it came to us then, but as we remember it now when we are older. In the Nativity, Pintoricchio is less fine, is, indeed, what we have come to regard him—a mere pupil of Perugino, without that master’s magical spaciousness and splendour of proportion. It is the same with the Christ among the Doctors, and yet the picture strikes one. This man might surely have been a great painter had he been brought up in the intellectual Florentine tradition. But Umbria, with her light and space and gentle landscapes, soft hills and wide valleys full of sunshine, was too enervating for a personality so facile as to be susceptible to every influence. In contact with Rome, he achieved a kind of greatness, but here it was otherwise; if he understood the achievement of Perugino, he was yet unable to express himself through the same medium of perfect spaciousness and light.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 46-47.

Assisi: Portiuncula

  

The huge cathedral of St. Mary of the Angels was built to house the Portiuncula, the birthplace of the Franciscan order, and the last resting place of St. Francis. Below is Edward Hutton's moving description of the death of St. Francis.

Santa Maria degli Angeli, the Portiuncula, was, S. Bonaventura tells us, the spot on earth most beloved by S. Francis. Today the half-industrialized village which bears this name, in the plain about two miles below Assisi, close to the railway station, will, it may be, disappoint the traveller. In the midst of rather squalid surroundings he sees an enormous basilica, originally of the sixteenth century, under a dome which is said to have been designed by Vignola and which covers like a casket the little sacred chapel, the Portiuncula. But in the time of S. Francis the valley hereabouts was wooded and the little chapel of the Portiuncula was lonely among the trees, and until some wattle huts were built about it by his companions, nothing encroached upon its solitude….

As to S. Francis’s death: he had for long lain sick in the bishop’s palace within the walls of Assisi, but presently he asked to be borne to S. Mary of the Little Portion that he might yield up the breath of life in the place he had so much loved and in which he had received the breath of grace. When he had been borne thither, he lay on the ground, here in what is now the Transito chapel, his habit laid aside, naked in honour of Lady Poverty, while his companions wept, and one of them, divining his wish, took a habit with the cord and brought it, saying, “There I lend thee as unto a beggar and do thou receive them under holy obedience.” And at this he rejoiced, for in his zeal for poverty he was minded to possess not even a habit unless it were lent him by another. As at the outset of his conversion he had stood naked before the bishop, as in the ending of his life he was minded to quit the world naked. He recommended to his brethren the beloved Portiuncula. “This place is holy,” he told them, “hold it ever in veneration and never abandon it. If you are driven out by one door, return by another, for it is here the Lord has multiplied us and has shown us His Light and poured out His love in our hearts.”

 

He did not forget Sister Clare and sent her a message forbidding her to give way to sadness and promising that she and her daughters should see him again, which came to pass when his body was borne to Assisi by way of San Damiano. He remembered, too, the noble Roman Lady “Frate Jacoba”, as he called her. She too would be sad to learn that he had left the world without warning her, and he was already dictating a letter to her when the noise of a cavalcade was heard and the Lady Jacoba was herself come from Rome with her two sons. “the Lord be praised,” he said, “let the door be opened for the Rule is not for Brother Jacoba.” She had come furnished with all that was needed for the burial of the Poverello, a veil for his face, a cushion for his head, a sheet of haircloth for his body and wax for the funeral ceremonies. She had brought, too, some of the sweetmeats made of almonds which he loved. * He could but taste it; it was Bernard of Quintavalle, his first companion, who ate it.

 

Then turning to those about him, he told them to lay him on the ground and after he was dead to let him lie there for the space in which one may gently walk a mile. As his desire the Canticle of the Sun was constantly heard in the hut with the verse in praise of our sister the Death of the body which he had so recently made. He asked for bread, and having blessed it, distributed it to the brethren in imitation of Christ at the Last Supper.

 

The next day, his last, the Passion according to St. John was read to him, and at dusk of October 3, 1226, she to whom no one willingly opens the door entered. He saw her, received her courteously, “Be welcome, my Sister Death.” They placed him on the ground, ashes on his head, ashes and dust. Then with failing voice he intoned a Psalm with those about him: Voce mea ad Dominum clamavi: “Bring my soul out of prison that I may give thanks unto thy name…. **

 

Evening had stolen into the hut. There was a great silence. He seemed to be sleeping.

 

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*Note. She was a Frangipani and the sweetmeat bears her name to this day.

**Note. Psalm 141 (A.V. 142). 

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 23,  28-30.