Part 24 (1/2)
Dante tell us--
”I did not mark Through all the gloomy circles of the abyss, Spirit that swelled so proudly 'gainst his G.o.d.”[142]
It is in Pistoja better almost than anywhere else in Italy that these early sculptors--men who were at work here before Niccol Pisano came from Apulia--may be studied. Rude enough as we may think, they are yet in their subtle beauty, if we will but look at them, the marvellous product of a time which many have thought altogether barbarous.
Consider, then, the reliefs over the door of S. Giovanni Fuorcivitas, or the sculptures on the f.a.gade of S. Bartolommeo in Pantano, the work of Rodolfinus and Guido Bigarelli of Como: they are all works of the twelfth century, and it is, as I think, no nave beginning we see, but the last hours of an art that is already thousands of years old, about to be born again in the work of Pisano. And indeed we may trace very happily the rise of Tuscan sculpture in Pistoja. Though she possesses no work of Niccol himself, his influence is supreme in the pulpit of S.
Giovanni Fuorcivitas, and it is the beautiful work of his son Giovanni we see in the great pulpit of S. Andrea, where you enter by a door carved in 1166 by Gruamonte with the Adoration of the Magi. Unlike the work of Fra Guglielmo in S. Giovanni, the pulpit of S. Andrea is hexagonal, and there Giovanni has carved in high relief the Birth of Our Lord, the Adoration of the Magi, the Murder of the Innocents, the Crucifixion, and the Last Judgment. They were carved in 1301, before Giovanni began the Pisan pulpit now in the Museo in that city. And if we see here the first impulse of the Gothic, the Romantic spirit, in Italian art, as in Niccol's work we have seen the cla.s.sic inspiration, it is the far result of these panels that we may discover in the terra-cotta frieze on the vestibule of the Ospedale del Ceppo. That is a work of the sixteenth century, and thus the fifteenth-century work, ever present with us in Florence, is missing here. It is not, however, to any member of the della Robbia clan that we owe this beautiful work, I think, but to some unknown sculptor with whom Buglioni may have worked.
For the seven reliefs representing works of Charity and divided by figures of the Virtues are of a surprising splendour, a really cla.s.sic beauty, and Burckhardt wishes to compare them with the frescoes of Andrea del Sarto and his companions rather than with the sculpture of that time.
One wanders about this quiet, alluring city, where the sculptures are scattered like flowers on every church porch and munic.i.p.al building, without the weariness of the sightseer. One day you go by chance to S.
Francesco al Prato, a beautiful and s.p.a.cious church in a wilderness of Piazza, built in 1294. And there suddenly you come upon the little flowers of St. Francis, faded and fallen--here a brown rose, there a withered petal; here a lily broken short, there a nosegay drooped and dead: and you realise that here you are face to face with something real which has pa.s.sed away, and so it is with joy you hurry out into the sun, which will always s.h.i.+ne with splendour and life, the one thing perhaps that, if these dead might rise from their tombs in S. Francesco, they would recognise as a friend, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.
Other churches too there are in Pistoja: S. Piero Maggiore, where, as in Florence, so here, the Bishop, coming to the city, was wedded in a lovely symbol to the Benedictine Abbess--there too are the works of Maestro Bono the sculptor; S. Salvadore, which stands in the place where, as it is said, they buried Cataline; S. Domenico, where you may find the beautiful tombs of Andrea Franchi and of Filippo Lazzeri the humanist--this made by Rossellino in 1494. Pistoja is a city of churches; one wanders into them and out again always with new delight; and indeed, they lend a sort of gravity to a place that is light-hearted and alluring beyond almost any other in this part of Tuscany certainly.
Thinking thus of her present sweetness, one is glad to find that one poet at least has thought Dante too hard with men. It is strange that it should be Cino who sings--
”This book of Dante's, very sooth to say, Is just a poet's lovely heresy, Which by a lure as sweet as sweet can be Draws other men's concerns beneath its sway; While, among stars' and comets' dazzling play, It beats the right down, let's the wrong go free, Shows some abased, and others in great glee, Much as with lovers is Love's ancient way.
Therefore his vain decrees, wherein he lied, Fixing folks' nearness to the Fiend their foe, Must be like empty nutsh.e.l.ls flung aside.
Yet through the vast false witness set to grow, French and Italian vengeance on such pride May fall, like Antony's on Cicero.”[143]
FOOTNOTES:
[136] Cf. Dino Campagni, _Cronica Fiorentina_, Book 1, p. 62. When appointed Podesta of Pistoja, Giano rather raised strife than pacified the factions. Cf. also Villari, _History of Florence_, p. 445.
[137] Strictly speaking, she never conquered Siena; Charles V did that.
[138] In the Middle Age, Cortona and Arezzo were not on the road to Rome, but so far as Florence was concerned, Siena, her holding that she acquired these cities to keep Via Aretina open. Cf. Repetti, v. 715.
[139] That Pistoja was not on the great Via Francesca goes for nothing, she threatened it.
[140] There is a most excellent little book, _Nuova Guida di Pistoja_, by Cav. Prof. Giuseppe Tigri (Pistoja, 1896), which I strongly recommend to the reader's notice. I wish to acknowledge my debt to it. Unlike so many guides, it is full of life itself, and makes the city live for us also.
[141] Bestia, probably a nickname of Vanni Fucci's; cf. _Inferno_, xxiv, 125.
[142] _Inferno_, xxiv. 125, 126; xxv. 13, 14.
[143] ”Cino impugns the verdicts of Dante's _Commedia_,” a sonnet translated by D.G. Rossetti.
_Note_.--No English writers have written well of Pistoja, for first they always write from a Florentine point of view, and then they quit too soon. I plead guilty too. The key-note to Pistoja is given in that saying of Macchiavelli's, that the Florentine people ”per fuggire il nome di crudele lascio distruggere Pistoia.” Il Principe, cap. xvii. Cf.
also Discorsi iii. 27. It is, of course, all a matter of Panciatichi and Cancellieri. Cf. Zdekauer Statuti Pistoiesi dei Secoli xii. e xiii.
XXIX. LUCCA
Who that has ever seen the Pistojese the Val di Lima, the country of S.
Marcello, the Val di Reno, the country about Pracchia, does not love it--the silent ways through the chestnut woods, the temperance of the hill country after the heat of the cities, the country ways after the ways of the town? And there are songs there too. But to-day my way lies through the valley, Val di Nievole, towards Lucca, lost in the plain at the gate of the Garf.a.gnana. Serravalle, with its old gateway and high Rocca, which fell to Castruccio Castracani; Monsummano, far on the left, with its old church in the valley; Montecatini, with its mineral springs; Buggiano, and Pescia with its mulberries, where the Church of S. Francesco hides and keeps its marvellous portrait of S.
Francesco--these are the towns at the foot of the mountains that I shall pa.s.s before I turn into the plain between the island hills and come at last to Lucca, Lucca l'Ombrosa, round whose high ramparts that have stood a thousand sieges now in whispering ranks there stand the cool planes of the valley, the shadowy trees that girdle the city with a cintola of green and gold.
Lucca is the city of a great soldier, of one of the most charming of Tuscan sculptors, and of Santa Zita. Lucca l'Ombrosa I call her, but she is the city of light too--Luce, light; it is the patriotic derivation of her name. For One came to her with a star in His bosom, the Star of Bethlehem, that heralded the sweet dawn which crept through the valleys and filled them with morning; so Lucca was the first city in Italy, as they say, to receive the light of the gospel.
The foundation of this city, which alone of all the cities of Tuscany was to keep in some sort her independence till Napoleon wrested it from her, is obscure. She was not Etruscan, but possibly a Ligurian settlement that came into the power of Rome about 200 B.C., and by 56 B.C. we have certain news of her, for it was here that Caesar, Pompeius, and Cra.s.sus formed the triumvirate. Overwhelmed by the disasters that befell the Empire, we hear something of her in the sixth century, when S. Frediano came from Ireland, from Galway, and after a sojourn in Rome became a hermit in the Monti Pisani, till in 565 John III made him Bishop of Lucca. It seems to have been about this time that Lucca began to be of importance, after the fall of the Lombard rule, governed by her own Dukes. And then the Bishops of Lucca, those Bishop Counts who governed her so long, had a jurisdiction which extended to the confines of the Patrimony of St. Peter. The same drama no doubt was played in Lucca as in Pisa or Florence, a struggle betwixt n.o.bles of foreign descent and the young commune of the Latin population. We find Lucca on the papal side in 1064, but in 1081 she joins the Emperor with Siena and Ferrara; but for the most part after Pisa became Ghibelline Lucca was Guelph, for her friends were the enemies of Pisa. Thus the fight went on, a fight really of self-preservation, of civic liberty as it were, each city prizing its ego above every consideration of justice or unity.