Edward Hutton Bibliography

Last weeks post on Edward Hutton's Italy was the last in a series that began  on March 19, 2020. On that date I began transcribing passages that I thought were the best from his many books on Italian towns and regions. Most were written early in the twentieth century when the Englishman found his second home in Italy. Now, old age and poor eyesight prevent me from continuing to transcribe passages from his other volumes. 

However, I intend to continue by repeating past posts starting from the beginning. Hopefully, new readers who were not around three years ago will appreciate seeing Italy through Hutton's eyes, and older readers might also enjoy re-reading these passages. I find it always a pleasure to read Hutton's descriptions of Italian art, culture, religion, history, and scenery over and over again.

Below is a list of books from which I have excerpted passages over the past three years. These books and others can still be purchased on the web, or even read online. Next week we begin again with Venice.

Edward Hutton, Venice and Venetia, London, third edition, 1929, first published 1911.

    Edward Hutton: The Cities of Romagna and the Marches. NY, 1925.

Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

Edward Hutton: Siena and Southern Tuscany, New York, 1910.

     Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition,                                      London, 1908. 

    Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912.

    Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953.

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Gubbio: St. Francis

                                                                                                                                      

 

 

Edward Hutton concluded Assisi and Umbria Revisited in Gubbio. As usual, he related the history of the town, and visited the various churches. He also quoted at length the familiar story of the taming of a ferocious wolf by St. Francis. But here is a less familiar story as well as the ending of Hutton's book.  I also include two end notes that might be of interest to followers of Hutton. 

Just before I crossed the watershed I came on the hill-top to a mass of building with tower and bell-turret which proved to be the Badia di Vallengegno, but of old was the monastery of San Verecondo, where it is said S. Francis was employed as a scullion after he had been thrown into a ditch full of snow by brigands on his first wandering to Gubbio. He was thus employed, according to Thomas of Celano, for several days, “wearing nothing but a wretched shirt and desired to be filled at least with broth. But when, meeting with no pity there, he could not even get any old clothing, he left the place (not moved by anger but by need) and came to the city of Gubbio, where he got him a small tunic from a former friend of his. But afterwards,” says Thomas, “when the fame of the man of God was spreading everywhere, and his name was noised abroad among the people, the prior of the aforesaid monastery, remembering and realizing how the man of God had been treated, came to him and humbly begged forgiveness for himself, and his monks.” …

 

It is said of S. Francis that death, which is to all men terrible, and hateful, he praised, calling her by name: “Death, my sister, welcome be thou”; and that one of those best-loved brothers saw his soul pass to heaven in the manner of a star, “like to the moon in quantity, and to the sun in clearness”. And however we may think of him, whether he is to us the most beloved saint in all the calendar, or whether he is merely a delightful figure, a little ailing, a little mad from the Middle Age, he went honourably upon the stones, as Voragine reminds us. “He gadryd the wormes out of the ways, by cause they should not be trodden with the feet of them that passed by.” He called the beasts his brethren; and in all that age of passion and war, of immense ambition and brutal hate, he loved us as Christ has done, and was content if he might be an imitation of Him. “He beheld the Sonne, the Mone, and the Starres, and summoned them to the Love of their Maker.”

 

As we pass up and down the Umbrian ways, it is his figure which goes ever before us.

 

                                         Que pacis crescit oliva

                               Regnat amor, concors, gratia, vera fides.*

 

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*           Where the olive tree of peace grows

           Love, concord, grace, and true faith reign.

 

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 221,233-234.

Note 1: In his introduction to the above volume, Hutton alluded to one of his first books, The Cities of Umbria, written in 1907.

"When I was a young man I wrote a book, Cities of Umbria, which went into eight or more editions and finally fell out of print in the war of 1939-45. I have not thought to reprint it. Since it was written I have wandered about Umbria many times and most recently spent some months of spring, summer and autumn in that country where one cannot go a mile but one finds oneself in the footsteps of Saint Francis. and now that my life has nearly completed its circle, the pages which follow recount these fortunate wanderings and recall those happier still, of earlier days."

Note 2: I would also like to mention that Hutton included in this volume an appendix in which he discussed the controversy surrounding the frescoes in the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi. In the course of that discussion he mentioned that before the First World War, he and his friend, F. Mason Perkins had been working on a critical edition of Vasari's Lives of the Painters.

"Mr. Perkins and the present writer were engaged on a critical edition of the Lives of Vasari. The new English translation of the text was made by Mr. De Vere and was published by the Medici Society. It was to be followed by three or four volumes of critical notes by Mr. Perkins, but though the first volume of these notes was set up and printed, the war of 1914 prevented publication and the type was distributed."

 

Gubbio

Edward Hutton concluded his tour of Assisi and Umbria with a visit to Gubbio. He discussed its history at length and noted that it was not altogether insignificant in the history of Umbrian art. In particular, he praised the Madonna del Belvedere, a painting by Ottaviano Nelli in the Church of S. Maria Nuova.

 

It was on another early summer day that I set out from Perugia by the Porta Pesa for Gubbio, across the mountains. The way was musical with streams, for there had been rain in the night, and the world was refreshed and beautiful. Downhill into the valley of the Tiber I went, past the olives and the willows, whose leaves were dancing gravely in the wind, watching their own beauty in the shallows of the great river. Then when I had crossed the Tiber and had begun to climb, after about five miles I came on the left to the Franciscan convent of Farneto. …

 

I now came, as I climbed, into a desolate land of mountains and bare hill-sides, utterly forlorn and without the fellowship of trees or flowers. The wind was dismal and lonely, wandering over the moorland as if in search of companions. Now and again a shepherd clad in goatskins towered in silhouette against the farthest sky—a magnificent figure, simple and antique, keeping the world sweet; and sometimes a little group of trees, scarcely sufficient for a copse, whispered together as though in fear of the indestructible silence. Far away, the beautiful valleys of Umbria led me down innumerable vistas towards Subasio, and many a little city, full even yet of lovely things—the dreams made material of the great artists, or the lives of the saints. And all day the uplifted Apennine towered in the sunlight, with brows even yet white with snow that the sun dazzled with glory. …

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I continued on my way. Presently, as I topped the ascent, a stupendous panorama rose before me over Gubbio and its valley, dominated by the five mountain peaks, the most formidable of which are Monte Catria, Monte Ingino and Monte Calvo. After another climb the road began its descent into the Eugubian plain and, crossing it in magical evening light, so tender and grave and serene, I entered Gubbio.

 

Gubbio is the dream of some medieval miniaturist; it must be, I thought, the only extant work of that most famous artist, Oderisi. Built on the lower slopes of Monte Calvo, the little city, now too small for its great old walls, lies in terraces one after another, where cypresses behind and among the palaces and churches point their joined hands ever upwards in that long life which is an everlasting prayer. … 

 

Leaving the cathedral and descending to the Via Venti Settembre or the Via Savelli della Porta, which runs parallel to it, and following either eastward towards the Porta Romana, at the end of Via Savelli stands the church of Santa Maria Nuova, which contains Ottaviano Nelli’s masterpiece, the Madonna del Belvedere. This is a mural painting, executed in tempera, not in fresco, and is one of the loveliest pieces of colour in all Umbrian painting, astonishingly fresh, and for the most part intact. The Virgin is seated in the centre, the Divine Child on her lap; she is looking at the spectator while the Child is blessing the donor, a woman, presented by an angel. About the Virgin, as though part of her court, are two musical angels, and two other angels hold aside a flowered curtain. Above, God the Father, among the cherubim and angels, crowns her. Two full-length figures of saints, SS. John Evangelist and Antony Abbot, who presents a kneeling donor, perhaps the husband of the woman on the other side, frame the idyllic scene within two spiral columns ornamented with Renaissance, even pagan figures. … This exquisite work is the best and most charming painting left in Gubbio.

                

            

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 220-221, 229.

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.

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. 

 

Perugia: Pinacoteca Vannucci

Edward Hutton devoted a lengthy chapter to the Pinacoteca Vannucci, Perugia'a picture gallery of Umbrian painting. He especially liked two famous altarpieces taken from their original locations. Looking at these magnificent paintings, it is hard to imagine what ordinary parishioners thought while attending Mass.

The Pinacoteca Vannucci, the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, on the top floor of the Palazzo Communale of Perugia, contains the most complete and representative collection of Umbrian pictures that has anywhere been brought together, as well as a number of early Sienese paintings and a few outstanding masterpieces of various schools; a Madonna and Child by Duccio di Buoninsegna, an altarpiece by Fra Angelico, and one by his pupil Benozzo Gozzoli, an altarpiece by Piero della Francesca and another by Luca Signorelli.

 

Unlike Florence and Siena, Umbria had no Giotto nor Duccio to point out the road she should follow in her art. Umbrian painting, which is not solely centered in Perugia, but which had several centres—Gubbio, Foligno, to name no others—in which it flourished, was really provincial in the true sense of the of the word. And it was from beginning to end the handmaid of the Church, and remained Christian when almost everywhere else art had become pagan. …

 

The two major single treasures of the gallery are the altarpiece by Fra Angelico and the altarpiece by Piero della Francesca.

Fra Angelico

The altarpiece by Fra Angelico is a masterpiece, indeed he never surpassed in feeling and quality some of the smaller figures. The Madonna and Child are enthroned under a baldacchino.  On either side are two angels, the foremost two offering baskets of roses. On panels at the sides are various full-length figures of saints: on the left S. Dominic and S. Nicholas, and these are the most exquisite; on the right S. John Baptist and S. Catherine of Alexandria, perhaps the work of an assistant. … Unfortunately, the face of the Virgin has been damaged; otherwise it seems to be in an excellent state, surprisingly bright in colour, and some of the figures of saints are of such beauty that I do not think Angelico ever surpassed them.

The large polyptych by Piero della Francesco is the other great single treasure of the gallery. It is a puzzling work. In the midst of a late Gothic altarpiece, the Madonna and Child enthroned in the centre with four full-length saints, SS. Anthony, John Baptist, Francis and Elisabeth at the sides, much in the form of Fra Angelico’s altarpiece here. Above in a seven-sided pediment, is the Annunciation; below are two rounds with figures of S. Clare and S. Agatha, and below in the predella three scenes: a miracle of S. Anthony, S. Francis receiving the Stigmata and a miracle of S. Elizabeth of Hungary. …

I find the main part of the altarpiece disappointing, as indeed are the predella scenes. But the Annunciation I find one of the most enchanting of Piero’s works. I can never leave it without returning again and again. And then how characteristic it is of the artistic moment dominated by perspective and the theories of Alberti and the practice of Brunelleschi, Laurana, Uccello and Masaccio! What that gracious and formidable angel is announcing to the Madonna, so classical in her monumentality and repose, is not the birth of Christ. but the rebirth, the renaissance, of Antiquity. It may well be that this is a work of Piero’s old age, but if so, your old men shall see visions.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 179, 184-186.

Perugia: Cathedral and Fountain

Below find Edward Hutton's description of Perugia's Cathedral and famous fountain. Apparently, the uppermost part of the fountain with its dragons has since been moved to a museum.

So the splendour and the terror of the past have sunk into the mediocrity of today. Beauty such as once belonged to Florence or Venice or Rome was perhaps never hers. She was a scarped crag on the mountains, burnt with fire, beaten by the wind, ringing with cold in the winter, splendid with the sun. Her Palazzo Communale was one of the most fierce and majestic in Italy and even her Cathedral was as relentless as a fortress, at least in appearance, but the destroying centuries have perhaps lent it something of their tolerance, giving the clinkered brick the surface and the colour almost of a precious stone. It is not beauty but strength and passion that you find in its brown walls that have been splashed with blood and washed with wine. A greater than any Baglioni has lain there. “There is no one,” says Thomas of Eccleston, “who dies as solitary and neglected as a Pope.” So it was with the greatest of them, Innocent III, who died in Perugia in 1216. The coffin still open, the body of the Pope was carried to the Cathedral, where the funeral was to take place. “It was then,” says Jacques de Vitry, who had just come to Perugia where the Papal court was in villegiatura, “it was then I really understood the nothingness of grandeur here below. The night preceding the funeral robbers broke into the Cathedral and despoiled the Pope of everything precious upon him. I saw with my own eyes his body, half naked, lying in the midst of the church already stinking.”

Indeed, within the Cathedral there is scarcely beauty at all, only silence, and space and a softer and more sombre light than is usual in an Italian church. And yet in its homely, if bare aspect it attracts you where a more splendid building might leave you cold. Its most precious possession, the wedding or betrothal ring of the Blessed Virgin, is kept under many locks in many caskets in the chapel to the left of the west door, and may be seen but four or five times during the year. Made from some agate stone, it is popularly believed to change its colour according to the hearts of those who look on it. … 

The beautiful fountain which stands in the midst of the piazza was built in 1277 from designs, it is said, by a Perugian artist, Fra Bevignate. The lovely statuettes and bas-reliefs which adorn it were designed and sculptured by Giovanni Pisano. On an august circular base of steps rest a many-sided basin with groups of columns to strengthen it at the corners. Above this rises a second basin, many-sided too, with statues at the corners, and from the midst of this is upreared a bronze bowl from which rises a magnificent group of nymphs and dragons; together they form one of the most exquisite designs ever achieved by the sculptors of the thirteenth century. This superb crown rises from a short pedestal and the writhing dragons rearing up with beating wings and each with one paw uplifted seem to beat time for their fantastic dance. Nowhere else has Giovanni Pisano shown such an ardour of imagination, such a unity of upward leaping rhythm.

 

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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 162-163, 165.