Part 50 (1/2)
Catherine do more than carry into the vividness of actual hallucination what had been the poetic rapture of many less ecstatic, but not less ardent, souls. They desired to be _literally_ 'crucified with Christ;' they were not satisfied with metaphor or sentiment, and it seemed to them that their Lord had really vouchsafed to them the yearning of their heart. We need not here raise the question whether the stigmata had ever been actually self-inflicted by delirious saint or hermit: it was not pretended that the wounds of S. Catherine were visible during her lifetime.
After her death the faithful thought that they had seen them on her corpse, and they actually appeared in the relics of her hands and feet. The pious fraud, if fraud there must have been, should be ascribed, not to the saint herself, but to devotees and relic-mongers.[1] The order of S. Dominic would not be behind that of S. Francis. If the latter boasted of their stigmata, the former would be ready to perforate the hand or foot of their dead saint.
Thus the ecstasies of genius or devotion are brought to earth, and rendered vulgar by mistaken piety and the rivalry of sects. The people put the most material construction on all tropes and metaphors: above the door of S. Catherine's chapel at Siena, for example, it is written--
Haec tenet ara caput Catharinae; corda requiris?
Haec imo Christus pectore clausa tenet.
The frequent conversations which she held with S. Dominic and other patrons of the Church, and her supernatural marriage, must be referred to the same category. Strong faith, and constant familiarity with one order of ideas, joined with a creative power of fancy, and fostered by physical debility, produced these miraculous colloquies. Early in her career, her injured const.i.tution, resenting the violence with which it had been forced to serve the ardours of her piety, troubled her with foul phantoms, haunting images of sin and seductive whisperings, which clearly revealed a morbid condition of the nervous system. She was on the verge of insanity. The reality of her inspiration and her genius are proved by the force with which her human sympathies, and moral dignity, and intellectual vigour triumphed over these diseased hallucinations of the cloister, and converted them into the instruments for effecting patriotic and philanthropic designs. There was nothing savouring of mean pretension or imposture in her claim to supernatural enlightenment.
Whatever we may think of the wisdom of her public policy with regard to the Crusades and to the Papal Sovereignty, it is impossible to deny that a holy and high object possessed her from the earliest to the latest of her life--that she lived for ideas greater than self-aggrandis.e.m.e.nt or the saving of her soul, for the greatest, perhaps, which her age presented to an earnest Catholic.
[1] It is not impossible that the stigmata may have been naturally produced in the person of S. Francis or S.
Catherine. There are cases on record in which grave nervous disturbances have resulted in such modifications of the flesh as may have left the traces of wounds in scars and blisters.
The abuses to which the indulgence of temperaments like that of S.
Catherine must in many cases have given rise, are obvious.
Hysterical women and half-witted men, without possessing her abilities and understanding her objects, beheld unmeaning visions, and dreamed childish dreams. Others won the reputation of sanct.i.ty by obstinate neglect of all the duties of life and of all the decencies of personal cleanliness. Every little town in Italy could show its saints like the Santa Fina of whom San Gemignano boasts--a girl who lay for seven years on a back-board till her mortified flesh clung to the wood; or the San Bartolo, who, for hideous leprosy, received the t.i.tle of the Job of Tuscany. Children were encouraged in blasphemous pretensions to the special power of Heaven, and the nerves of weak women were shaken by revelations in which they only half believed. We have ample evidence to prove how the trade of miracles is still carried on, and how in the France of our days, when intellectual vigour has been separated from old forms of faith, such vision-mongering undermines morality, encourages ignorance, and saps the force of individuals. But S. Catherine must not be confounded with those sickly shams and make-believes. Her enthusiasms were real; they were proper to her age; they inspired her with unrivalled self-devotion and unwearied energy; they connected her with the political and social movements of her country.
Many of the supernatural events in S. Catherine's life were founded on a too literal acceptation of biblical metaphors. The Canticles, perhaps, inspired her with the belief in a mystical marriage. An enigmatical sentence of S. Paul's suggested the stigmata. When the saint bestowed her garment upon Christ in the form of a beggar and gave Him the silver cross of her rosary, she was but realising His own words: 'Inasmuch as ye shall do it unto the least of these little ones, ye shall do it unto Me.' Charity, according to her conception, consisted in giving to Christ. He had first taught this duty; He would make it the test of all duty at the last day.
Catherine was charitable for the love of Christ. She thought less of the beggar than of her Lord. How could she do otherwise than see the aureole about His forehead, and hear the voice of Him who had declared, 'Behold, I am with you, even to the end of the world.'
Those were times of childlike simplicity when the eye of love was still unclouded, when men could see beyond the phantoms of this world, and stripping off the accidents of matter, gaze upon the spiritual and eternal truths that lie beneath. Heaven lay around them in that infancy of faith; nor did they greatly differ from the saints and founders of the Church--from Paul, who saw the vision of the Lord, or Magdalen, who cried, 'He is risen!' An age accustomed to veil thought in symbols, easily reversed the process and discerned essential qualities beneath the common or indifferent objects of the outer world. It was therefore Christ whom S.
Christopher carried in the shape of a child; Christ whom Fra Angelico's Dominicans received in pilgrim's garb at their convent gate; Christ with whom, under a leper's loathsome form, the flower of Spanish chivalry was said to have shared his couch.
In all her miracles it will be noticed that S. Catherine showed no originality. Her namesake of Alexandria had already been proclaimed the spouse of Christ. S. Francis had already received the stigmata; her other visions were such as had been granted to all fervent mystics; they were the growth of current religious ideas and unbounded faith. It is not as an innovator in religious ecstasy, or as the creator of a new kind of spiritual poetry, that we admire S.
Catherine. Her inner life was simply the foundation of her character, her visions were a source of strength to her in times of trial, or the expression of a more than usually exalted mood; but the means by which she moved the hearts of men belonged to that which she possessed in common with all leaders of mankind--enthusiasm, eloquence, the charm of a gracious nature, and the will to do what she designed. She founded no religious order, like S. Francis or S. Dominic, her predecessors, or Loyola, her successor. Her work was a woman's work--to make peace, to succour the afflicted, to strengthen the Church, to purify the hearts of those around her; not to rule or organise. When she died she left behind her a memory of love more than of power, the fragrance of an unselfish and gentle life, the echo of sweet and earnest words. Her place is in the heart of the humble; children belong to her sisterhood, and the poor crowd her shrine on festivals.
Catherine died at Rome on the 29th of April 1380, in her thirty-third year, surrounded by the most faithful of her friends and followers; but it was not until 1461 that she received the last honour of canonisation from the hands of Pius II., aeneas Sylvius, her countryman. aeeneas Sylvius Piccolomini was perhaps the most remarkable man that Siena has produced. Like S. Catherine, he was one of a large family; twenty of his brothers and sisters perished in a plague. The licentiousness of his early life, the astuteness of his intellect, and the worldliness of his aims, contrast with the singularly disinterested character of the saint on whom he conferred the highest honours of the Church. But he accomplished by diplomacy and skill what Catherine had begun. If she was instrumental in restoring the Popes to Rome, he ended the schism which had clouded her last days. She had preached a crusade; he lived to a.s.semble the armies of Christendom against the Turks, and died at Ancona, while it was still uncertain whether the authority and enthusiasm of a pope could steady the wavering counsels and vacillating wills of kings and princes. The middle ages were still vital in S. Catherine; Pius II. belonged by taste and genius to the new period of Renaissance. The hundreds of the poorer Sienese who kneel before S.
Catherine's shrine prove that her memory is still alive in the hearts of her fellow-citizens; while the gorgeous library of the cathedral, painted by the hand of Pinturicchio, the sumptuous palace and the Loggia del Papa designed by Bernardo Rossellino and Antonio Federighi, record the pride and splendour of the greatest of the Piccolomini. But honourable as it was for Pius to fill so high a place in the annals of his city; to have left it as a poor adventurer, to return to it first as bishop, then as pope: to have a chamber in its mother church adorned with the pictured history of his achievements for a monument, and a triumph of Renaissance architecture dedicated to his family, _gentilibus suis_--yet we cannot but feel that the better part remains with S. Catherine, whose prayer is still whispered by children on their mother's knee, and whose relics are kissed daily by the simple and devout.
Some of the chief Italian painters have represented the incidents of S. Catherine's life and of her mystical experience. All the pathos and beauty which we admire in Sodoma's S. Sebastian at Florence, are surpa.s.sed by his fresco of S. Catherine receiving the stigmata. This is one of several subjects painted by him on the walls of her chapel in San Domenico. The tender unction, the sweetness, the languor, and the grace which he commanded with such admirable mastery, are all combined in the figure of the saint falling exhausted into the arms of her attendant nuns. Soft undulating lines rule the composition; yet dignity of att.i.tude and feature prevails over mere loveliness.
Another of Siena's greatest masters, Beccafumi, has treated the same subject with less pictorial skill and dramatic effect, but with an earnestness and simplicity that are very touching. Colourists always liked to introduce the sweeping lines of her white robes into their compositions. Fra Bartolommeo, who showed consummate art by tempering the ma.s.ses of white drapery with mellow tones of brown or amber, painted one splendid picture of the marriage of S. Catherine, and another in which he represents her prostrate in adoration before the mystery of the Trinity. His gentle and devout soul sympathised with the spirit of the saint. The fervour of her devotion belonged to him more truly than the leonine power which he unsuccessfully attempted to express in his large figure of S. Mark. Other artists have painted the two Catherines together--the princess of Alexandria, crowned and robed in purple, bearing her palm of martyrdom, beside the nun of Siena, holding in her hand the lantern with which she went about by night among the sick. Ambrogio Borgognone makes them stand one on each side of Madonna's throne, while the infant Christ upon her lap extends His hands to both, in token of their marriage.
The traditional type of countenance which may be traced in all these pictures is not without a real foundation. Not only does there exist at Siena, in the Church of San Domenico, a contemporary portrait of S. Catherine, but her head also, which was embalmed immediately after death, is still preserved. The skin of the face is fair and white, like parchment, and the features have more the air of sleep than death. We find in them the breadth and squareness of general outline, and the long, even eyebrows which give peculiar calm to the expression of her pictures. This relic is shown publicly once a year on the 6th of May. That is the Festa of the saint, when a procession of priests and acolytes, and pious people holding tapers, and little girls dressed out in white, carry a splendid silver image of their patroness about the city. Banners and crosses and censers go in front; then follows the shrine beneath a canopy: roses and leaves of box are scattered on the path. The whole Contrada d'Oca is decked out with such finery as the people can muster: red cloths hung from the windows, branches and garlands strewn about the doorsteps, with brackets for torches on the walls, and altars erected in the middle of the street. Troops of country-folk and townspeople and priests go in and out to visit the cell of S. Catherine; the upper and the lower chapel, built upon its site, and the hall of the _confraternita_ blaze with lighted tapers. The faithful, full of wonder, kneel or stand about the 'santi luoghi,' marvelling at the relics, and repeating to one another the miracles of the saint. The same bustle pervades the Church of San Domenico. Ma.s.ses are being said at one or other chapel all the morning, while women in their flapping Tuscan hats crowd round the silver image of S. Catherine, and say their prayers with a continual undercurrent of responses to the nasal voice of priest or choir. Others gain entrance to the chapel of the saint, and kneel before her altar. There, in the blaze of sunlight and of tapers, far away behind the gloss and gilding of a tawdry shrine, is seen the pale, white face which spoke and suffered so much, years ago. The contrast of its rigid stillness and half-concealed corruption with the noise and life and light outside is very touching. Even so the remnant of a dead idea still stirs the souls of thousands, and many ages may roll by before time and oblivion a.s.sert their inevitable sway.
_MONTE OLIVETO_
I
In former days the traveller had choice of two old hostelries in the chief street of Siena. Here, if he was fortunate, he might secure a prophet's chamber, with a view across tiled houseroofs to the distant Tuscan champaign--glimpses of russet field and olive-garden framed by jutting city walls, which in some measure compensated for much discomfort. He now betakes himself to the more modern Albergo di Siena, overlooking the public promenade La Lizza. Horse-chestnuts and acacias make a pleasant foreground to a prospect of considerable extent. The front of the house is turned toward Belcaro and the mountains between Grosseto and Volterra. Sideways its windows command the brown bulk of San Domenico, and the Duomo, set like a marble coronet upon the forehead of the town. When we arrived there one October afternoon the sun was setting amid flying clouds and watery yellow s.p.a.ces of pure sky, with a wind blowing soft and humid from the sea. Long after he had sunk below the hills, a fading chord of golden and rose-coloured tints burned on the city. The cathedral bell tower was glistening with recent rain, and we could see right through its lancet windows to the clear blue heavens beyond. Then, as the day descended into evening, the autumn trees a.s.sumed that wonderful effect of luminousness self-evolved, and the red brick walls that crimson afterglow, which Tuscan twilight takes from singular transparency of atmosphere.
It is hardly possible to define the specific character of each Italian city, a.s.signing its proper share to natural circ.u.mstances, to the temper of the population, and to the monuments of art in which these elements of nature and of human qualities are blended.
The fusion is too delicate and subtle for complete a.n.a.lysis; and the total effect in each particular case may best be compared to that impressed on us by a strong personality, making itself felt in the minutest details. Climate, situation, ethnological conditions, the political vicissitudes of past ages, the bias of the people to certain industries and occupations, the emergence of distinguished men at critical epochs, have all contributed their quota to the composition of an individuality which abides long after the locality has lost its ancient vigour.
Since the year 1557, when Gian Giacomo de' Medici laid the country of Siena waste, levelled her luxurious suburbs, and delivered her famine-stricken citizens to the tyranny of the Grand Duke Cosimo, this town has gone on dreaming in suspended decadence. Yet the epithet which was given to her in her days of glory, the t.i.tle of 'Fair Soft Siena,' still describes the city. She claims it by right of the gentle manners, joyous but sedate, of her inhabitants, by the grace of their pure Tuscan speech, and by the unique delicacy of her architecture. Those palaces of brick, with finely moulded lancet windows, and the lovely use of sculptured marbles in pilastered colonnades, are fit abodes for the n.o.bles who reared them five centuries ago, of whose refined and costly living we read in the pages of Dante or of Folgore da San Gemignano. And though the necessities of modern life, the decay of wealth, the dwindling of old aristocracy, and the absorption of what was once an independent state in the Italian nation, have obliterated that large signorial splendour of the Middle Ages, we feel that the modern Sienese are not unworthy of their courteous ancestry.
Superficially, much of the present charm of Siena consists in the soft opening valleys, the glimpses of long blue hills and fertile country-side, framed by irregular brown houses stretching along the slopes on which the town is built, and losing themselves abruptly in olive fields and orchards. This element of beauty, which brings the city into immediate relation with the country, is indeed not peculiar to Siena. We find it in Perugia, in a.s.sisi, in Montepulciano, in nearly all the hill towns of Umbria and Tuscany.
But their landscape is often tragic and austere, while this is always suave. City and country blend here in delightful amity.