Siena, in Gubbio and Orvieto, the great revivalists Bernardine, Catherine, Fra Roberto, held absolute rule over body and soul. For the moment Baglione and Oddi kissed each other; all feuds were stayed; a man might climb the black alleys of a night without any fear of a knife to yerk him (the Ancient’s word) under the ribs or noose round his neck to swing him up to the archway withal. So Catherine brought back Boniface (and much trouble) from Avignon, and Da Lecce wrote out a new constitution for some rock-bound hive of the hills, whose crowd wailing in the market-place knew the ecstasy of repentance, and ran riot in religious orgies very much after the fashion of the Greater Dionysia or, say, the Salvation Army. And how Niccolo Alunno would have painted the Salvation Army!
So it does seem that the two great passions of Umbria burnt themselves out together. They were, indeed, the two ends of the candle. When the Baglioni fell in the black work of two August nights, only one escaped. And with them died the love of the old lawless life and the infinite relish there was for some positive foretaste of the life of the world to come. Both lives had been lived too fast: from that day Perugia fell into a torpor, as Perugino, the glass of his time and place, also fell. Perugino, we know, had his doubts concerning the immortality of the soul, but painted on his beautiful cloister-dreams, and knocked down his saints to the highest bidder.[1] Vasari assures me that the chief solace of the old prodigal in his end of days was to dress his young wife’s hair in fantastic coils and braids. A prodigal he was–true Peruginese in that– prodigal of the delicate meats his soul afforded. His end may have been unedifying; it must at least have been very pitiful. Nowadays his name stands upon the Corso Vannucci of the town he uttered, and in the court wall of a little recessed and colonnaded house in the Via Deliziosa. Meantime his frescos drop mildewed from chapel walls or are borne away to a pauper funeral in the Palazzo Communale.
[Footnote 1: See, however, what he has to say for himself in Chapter V. _ante._]
In his finely studied _Sensations_ M. Paul Bourget, it seems to me, flogs the air and fails to climb it when he struggles to lay open the causes of poor Vannucci’s embittering. If ever painting took up the office of literature it was in the fifteenth century. The _quattrocentisti_ stand to Italy for our Elizabethan dramatists. This may have produced bad painting: Mr. George Moore will tell you that it did. I am not sure that it very greatly matters, for, failing a literature which was really dramatic, really poetical, really in any sense representative, it was as well that there led an outlet somewhere. At any rate Lippi and Botticelli, to those who know them, are expressive of the Florentine temper when Pulci and Politian are distorted echoes of another; Perugino leads us into the recesses of Perugia while Graziani keeps us fumbling at the lock. And Perugino’s languorous boys and maids are the figments of a riotous erotic, of a sensuous fancy without imagination or intelligence or humour. His Alcibiades, or Michael Archangel, seems green-sick with a love mainly physical; his Socrates has the combed resignation of his Jeromes and Romualds–smoothly ordered old men set in the milky light of Umbrian mornings and dreaming out placid lives by the side of a moonfaced Umbrian beauty, who is now Mary and now Luna as chance motions his hand. How penetrating, how distinctive by the side of them seems Sandro’s slim and tearful Anima Mundi shivering in the chill dawn! With what a strange magic does Filippino usher in the pale apparition of the Mater Dolorosa to his Bernard, or flush her up again to a heaven of blue-green and a glory of burning cherubim! This he does, you remember, with rocket-like effect, in a chapel of the Minerva in Rome. But it is the unquenchable thirst of the Umbrians for some spiritual nutriment, some outlet for their passion to be found only in bloodshed or fainting below the Cross, some fierce and untameable animal quality such as you see to-day in the torn gables, the towers and bastions of Perugia, it is the spirit which informed and made these things you get in Perugino’s pictures–in the hot sensualism of their colour-scheme, the ripeness and bloom of physical beauty encasing the vague longing of a too-rapid adolescence. The desire could never be fed and the bloom wore off. Look at Duccio’s work on the facade of San Bernardino, Duccio was a Florentine, but where in Florence would you see his like? What a revel of disproportion in these long-legged nymphs, full- lipped and narrow-eyed as any of Rossetti’s curious imaginings. Take the Poverta, a weedy girl with the shrinking paps of a child. Here again (exquisite as she is in modelling and intensity of expression) you get the enticement of a malformation which is absolutely un-Greek–unless you are to count Phrygia within the magic ring-fence–and only to be equalled by the luxury of Beccadelli. You get that in Sodoma too, the handy Lombard; you have it in Perugino and all the Umbrians (in some form or other); but never, I think, in the genuine Tuscan–not even in Botticelli–and never, of course, in the Venetians, Duccio modelled these things while the Delia Robbia were at their Hellenics; and a few years after he did them came the end of the Baglioai and all such gear. The end of real Umbrian art was not long. Perugino awoke to have his doubts of the soul’s immortality. No great wonder there, perhaps, given he acknowledged a merciful heaven….
I chanced to meet an old woman the other day in a country omnibus. We journeyed together from Prato to Florence and became very friendly. Your dry old woman, who hath had losses, who has become, in fact, world-worn and very wise, or like one of Shakespeare’s veterans–the Grave-digger, or the Countryman in _Antony and Cleopatra_–has probed the ball and found it hollow; such a battered and fortified soul in petticoats is peculiar to Italy, and countries where the women work and the men, pocketing their hands, keep sleek looks. We had just passed a pleasant little procession. It was Sunday, the hour Benediction. A staid nun was convoying a party of school-girls to church; whereupon I remarked to my neighbour on their pretty bearing, a sort of artless piety and of attention for unknown but not impossible blessings which they had about them. But my old woman took small comfort from it. She knew those cattle, she said: Capuchins, Jacobins, Black, White and Grey,–knew them all. Well! Everybody had his way of making a living: hers was knitting stockings. A hard life, _via_, but an honest. Here it became me to urge that the religious life might have its compensations, without which it would perhaps be harder than knitting stockings; that one needed relaxation and would do well to be sure that it was at least innocent. Relaxation of a kind, said she, a man must have. Snuff now! She was inveterate at the sport. The view was very dry; but I think its reasoned limitations also very Tuscan, and by no means exclusive of a tolerable amount of piety and honest dealing. Foligno, by mere contrast reminds me of it–busy Foligno huddled between the mighty knees of a chalk down, city of fallen churches and handsome girls, just now parading the streets with their fans a-flutter and a pretty turn to each veiled head of them.
As I write the light dies down, the wind drops, huge inky clouds hang over the west; the sun, as he falls behind them, sets them kindling at the edge. The worn old bleached domes, the bell-towers and turrets looming in the blue dusk, seem to sigh that the century moves so slowly forward. How many more must they endure of these?
It is the hour of Ave Maria. But only two cracked bells ring it in.
ENVOY: TO ALL YOU LADIES
Lovely and honourable ladies, it is, as I hold, no mean favour you have accorded me, to sit still and smiling while I have sung to your very faces a stave verging here and there on the familiar. You have sat thus enduring me, because, being wrought for the most part out of stone or painter’s stuff, your necessities have indeed forbidden retirement. Yet my obligations should not on that account be lighter. He would be a thin spirit who should gain a lady’s friendly regard, and then vilipend because she knew no better, or could not choose. I hope indeed that I have done you no wrong, _gentildonne_, I protest that I have meant none; but have loved you all as a man may, who has, at most, but a bowing acquaintance with your ladyships. As I recall your starry names, no blush hinting unmannerliness suspect and unconfessed hits me on the cheek:– Simonetta, Ilaria, Nenciozza, Bettina; you too, candid Mariota of Prato; you, flinching little Imola; and you, snuff-taking, wool-carding ancient lady of the omnibus–scorner of monks, I have kissed your hands, I have at least given our whole commerce frankly to the world; and I know not how any shall say we have been closer acquainted than we should. You, tall Ligurian Simonetta, loved of Sandro, mourned by Giuliano and, for a seasons by his twisted brother and lord, have done well to utter but one side of your wild humour? The side a man would take, struck, as your Sandro was, by a nympholepsy, or, as Lorenzo was, by the rhymer’s appetite for wherewithal to sonnetteer? If I understand you, it was never pique or a young girl’s petulance drove you to Phryne’s one justifiable act of self-assertion. It was honesty. Madonna, or I have read your grey eyes in vain; it was enthusiasm–that flame of our fire so sacred that though it play the incendiary there shall be no crime–or where would be now the “Vas d’elezione”?–nor though it reveal a bystander’s grin, any shame at all. I shall live to tell that story of thine, Lady Simonetta, to thy honour and my own respect; for, as a poet says,
“There is no holier flame
Than flatters torchwise in a stripling heart, … a fire from Heaven
To ash the clay of us, and wing the God.”
I have seen all memorials of you left behind to be pondered by him who played Dante to your Beatrice, Sandro the painting poet,–the proud clearness of you as at the marriage feast of Nastagio degli Onesti; the melting of the sorrow that wells from you in a tide, where you hold the book of your overmastering honour and read _Magnificat Anima Mea_ with a sob in your throat; your acquaintance, too, with that grief which was your own hardening; your sojourn, wan and woebegone as would become the wife of Moses (maker of jealous gods); all these guises of you, as well as the presentments of your innocent youth, I have seen and adored. But I have ever loved you most where you stand a wistful Venus Anadyomene– “Una donzella non con uman volto,” as Politian confessed; for I know your heart, Madonna, and see on the sharp edge of your threatened life, Ardour look back to maiden Reclusion, and on (with a pang of foreboding) to mockery and evil judgment. Never fear but I brave your story out to the world ere many days. And if any, with profane leer and tongue in the cheek, take your sorrow for reproach or your pitifulness for a shame, let them receive the lash of the whip from one who will trouble to wield it: _non ragioniam di lor_. For your honourable women I give you Ilaria, the slim Lucchesan, and my little Bettincina, a child yet with none of the vaguer surmises of adolescence when it flushes and dawns, but likely enough, if all prosper, to be no shame to your company. As yet she is aptest to Donatello’s fancy: she will grow to be of a statelier bevy. I see her in Ghirlandajo’s garden, pacing, still-eyed, calm and cold, with Ginevra de’ Benci and Giovanna of the Albizzi, those quiet streets on a visit to the mother of John Baptist.
Mariota, the hardy wife of the metal-smith, is not for one of your quality, though the wench is well enough now with her baby on her arm and the best of her seen by a poet and made enduring. He, like our Bernardo, had motherhood in such esteem that he held it would ransom a sin. A sin? I am no casuist to discuss rewards and punishments; but if Socrates were rightly informed and sin indeed ignorance, I have no whips for Mariota’s square shoulders. Her baby, I warrant, plucked her from the burning. I am not so sure but you might find in that girl a responsive spirit, and–is the saying too hard?–a teacher. Contentment with a few things was never one of your virtues, madam.
There is a lady whose name has been whispered through my pages, a lady with whom I must make peace if I can. Had I known her, as Dante did, in the time of her nine-year excellence and followed her (with an interlude, to be sure, for Gentucca) through the slippery ways of two lives with much eating of salt bread, I might have grown into her favour. But I never did know Monna Beatrice Portinari; and when I met her afterwards as my Lady Theologia I thought her something imperious and case-hardened. Now here and there some words of mine (for she has a high stomach) may have given offence. I have hinted that her court is a slender one in Italy, the service paid her lip-service; the lowered eyes and bated breath reserved for her; but for Fede her sister, tears and long kisses and the clinging. Well! the Casa Cattolica is a broad foundation: I find Francis of Umbria at the same board with Sicilian Thomas. If I cleave to the one must I despise the other? Lady Fede has my heart and Lady Dottrina must put aside the birch if she would share that little kingdom. _Religio habet_, said Pico; _theologia autem invenit_. Let her find. But she must be speedy, for I promise her the mood grows on me as I become _italianato_; and I cannot predict when the other term of the proposition may be accomplished. For one thing, Lady Theologia, I praise you not. Sympathy seems to me of the essence, the healing touch an excellent thing in woman. But you told Virgil,
“Io son fatta da Dio, sua merce, tale, Che la vostra miseria non mi tange.”
Sympathy, Madonna? And Virgil hopeless! On these terms I had rather gloom with the good poet (whose fault in your eyes was that he knew in what he had believed) than freeze with you and Aquinas on your peak of hyaline. And as I have found you, Donna Beatrice, so in the main have they of whom I pitch my pipe. Here and there a man of them got exercise for his fingers in your web; here and there one, as Pico the young Doctor of yellow hair and nine hundred heresies, touched upon the back of your ivory dais that he might jump from thence to the poets out beyond you in the Sun. Your great Dante, too, loved you through all. But, Madonna, he had loved you before when you were–
Donna pietosa e di novella etade,
and, as became his lordly soul, might never depart from the faith he had in you. For me, I protest I love Religion your warm-bosomed mate too well to turn from her; yet I would not on that account grieve her (who treats you well out of the cup of her abounding charity) by aspersing you. And if I may not kiss your foot as you would desire, I may bow when I am in the way with you; not thanking God I am not as you are, but, withal, wishing you that degree of interest in a really excellent world with which He has blessed me and my like, the humble fry.
Lastly, to the Spirits which are in the shrines of the cities of Tuscany, I lift up my hands with the offering of my thin book. To Lucca dove-like and demure, to Prato, the brown country-girl, to Pisa, winsome maid-of- honour to the lady of the land, to Pistoja, the ruddy-haired and ample, and to Siena, the lovely wretch, black-eyed and keen as a hawk; even to Perugia, the termagant, with a scar on her throat; but chiefest to the Lady Firenze, the pale Queen crowned with olive–to all of you, adored and adorable sisters, I offer homage as becomes a postulant, the repentance of him who has not earned his reward, thanksgiving, and the praise I have not been able to utter. And I send you, Book, out to those ladies with the supplication of good Master Cino, schoolman and poet, saying,
E se tu troverai donne gentile,
Ivi girai; che la ti vo mandare;
E dono a lor d’ audienza chiedi.
Poi di a costor: Gittatevi a lor piedi, E dite, chi vi manda e per che fare,
Udite donne, esti valletti umili.