The collected prose, p.12
The Collected Prose, page 12
Sienese art, though rarely reflecting immediate reality, was closely connected with social life. Siena had no great patrons like the Medici, but interest in art was more popular and democratic than anywhere else. A rich guild of clothiers ordered a polyptych from expensive Sassetta; bakers and butchers were customers of Mattea di Giovanni33; but one of the poorer guilds, the lathers’, had to content itself with what Andrea Niccolò offered to paint for them. A rare, happy example of the marriage of bureaucracy and art was the custom of asking outstanding artists to illustrate the wooden covers of the Biccherna’s account books.
The beginning of the Quattrocento sees the emergence of one of the most charming painters in the history of art: Sassetta. His paintings are dispersed throughout the world, but the Pinacoteca holds a few that well represent this illustrator of the life of St. Francis. Sassetta captured the essence of the Franciscan legend with magnificent accuracy because he himself was up to his ears in the miraculous. In the story about St. Francis and the poor knight, a tower uprooted like an oak soars above the town, the angels, and other participants of the drama; and we are not offended by the surrealist effect, so much does Sassetta mix the material with the impossible. And in fact the surrealists could learn from him the art of endowing miracles with physical reality. It is often said that Sassetta and his colleagues were anachronistic and did not understand the Renaissance. In fact, they entered the new world of the Renaissance without breaking the Gothic tradition, just as the Gothic Duccio did not break with the Byzantine tradition. Sassetta’s art is not mannerist, it is the rethinking of the tradition of his great predecessors.
He was a prolific painter and often left Siena. He was in touch with old and new sources of art. Contemporary art historians stress his connections with Domenico Veneziano34 and his influence on the great Piero della Francesca.
He died on April 1, 1450, having contracted pneumonia during his work on a fresco that adorned the Porta Romana till 1944. The course of his posthumous fame is very instructive. At the end of the nineteenth century he was counted among the third-rate painters. Berenson brought him out of oblivion by ascribing to him a number of works considered anonymous. More recently, Alberto Graziani “deprived” Sassetta of some paintings by creating a new hypothetical figure called Maestro dell’Osservanza (the name of a monastery near Siena). Graziani acted like an astronomer who calculates the existence of a new star long before observing it. One of the most beautiful paintings of this master is St. Anthony’s Meeting with St. Paul. A road leads among forested hills. First one sees the small figure of the saint with a tiny stick on his back entering the forest. Later, or in the center of the painting, he talks with a faun; both interlocutors are well-mannered and must be avoiding questions of dogma, as the conversation is held in an obviously friendly atmosphere. Finally, on the very rim of the painting, the two saints embrace warmly in front of a hermit’s cave.
Sassetta’s brush was inherited by his pupil, Sano di Pietro35, who ran the largest atelier in Siena. He could not equal his master (being less subtle and more sentimental), but what a marvelous teller of anecdotes! He is well represented in the Pinacoteca. From Sassetta he inherited his love of reds, and he played them con brio. The narrative passion was shared by all Sienese painters, but Sano di Pietro was the storyteller of storytellers. One of his paintings tells the story of Pope Calixtus III’s vision of the Madonna. The two figures occupy three-quarters of the painting. The artist also painted a muleteer with burdened donkeys. One of the floppy-eared creatures is just disappearing behind the pink gate of Siena. Contrasted with the grave solemnity of the main themes, this detail is overwhelmingly comic, like a witty Zwischenruf36 dropped casually in the middle of a ceremonial speech.
One of the most seductive painters of the Sienese Quattrocento was Neroccio37, an artist of delicate color and Chinese precision of line; perhaps the last artist whose work still echoed the linear precision of Simone Martini.
And here we enter the declining period of the Sienese school; with Vecchietta38 and Sodoma39—the latter appeared suddenly, seemingly without introduction—we step into the fading Renaissance.
The paintings by Sodoma shown in the Pinacoteca cannot win one over, even though one knows that he was a disciple of Leonardo, and that his career was often fortunate. Here we see him fat and vulgar; his forms suffer from dropsy. The composition of The Swoon of St. Catherine is heavy and pretentious; its sandy coloring is insipid. Christ Tied to a Column has the hefty torso of an ancient gladiator; but the painting is devoid of power and expression, though Enzo Carli claims that in spite of everything this is the finest and most sensitive interpretation of Leonardo’s sfumato and chiaroscuro. Sodoma was a prolific painter, oscillating between the styles of the young Perugino and the young Raphael; but one rather agrees with Berenson that “his oeuvre as a whole is pitifully weak.”
I console myself that Sodoma was not a Sienese, for he was born in Lombardy. He was ennobled by the Pope and settled in Siena, where he became an official painter. Vasari, a gossip it is true, gives him bad credits as artist and man. He was an eccentric, a bohemian in the fin-de-siècle style. It is rumored that he had a domesticated, talking jackdaw, three parrots, and as many shrewish wives. He adored horses like a native Sienese, and this passion cost him large sums. In one of his paintings he portrayed himself near Raphael, an indication that he held an exaggerated opinion of his own talent. His end, in a Sienese hospital, is said to have been miserable. Before his death he wrote a testament in the manner of Villon.
The last of the Sienese painters was Beccafumi. One looks at him with real regret. Of the once magnificent school only colorful smoke is left. And that was the end of the Sienese Republic. The civilization of the city of the she-wolf was sinking like an island. Beccafumi locks up Sienese art and tosses the key into the abyss of time.
I go out into a town preparing for its daily passeggiata, but I cannot stop thinking about painters dead for centuries. I suddenly recall a figure from Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico. It was an allegory of Peace: a casually seated woman in a white robe, her form defined by a single line, which stays forever under your eyelids. Where did I see women painted like that? Of course, in the canvases of Henri Matisse. Matisse—the last Sienese?
I speak of paintings but I’m also thinking about poetry. The Sienese school was an example of how to develop individual talent without breaking with the past. It achieved what Eliot writes about when he analyzes the concept of tradition which we Poles associate, not only in theory but also in practice, with academicism.
“It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.” Also, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone,…you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.”
A small trattoria fills with a crowd of regular customers. They enter, take their own serviettes from a shelf under a clock, sit at their own places among their own companions. They eat spaghetti, drink wine, chat, play cards and throw dice with an expertise and gusto which seems to have been intensifying from generation to generation. Their conversation is animated. Italian is probably the most exclamatory of all languages and those via, veh, ahi, ih explode like firecrackers. I guess that the subject is the Palio. The Palio is a week from now.
The name comes from a piece of painted silk, the annual prize for the horse race around the Campo. Every year on June 2nd and August 16th the town turns into a great historical theater which would have delighted Chesterton. Three city districts, the so-called terzi—Città, San Martino, and Camollia—delegate their own riders. It is a relic of a medieval military organization which divided the city into seventeen contrade, small military communities, each one with its commander, its church, its banner and seal. Twice a year emotions soar, high bets are made, complicated plots are woven around the probable winner, and all this is for real, not just for tourists. The feast is colorful, full of tumult, horses, and confusion. Yes, history has been reduced to a costume and war, a cavalcade around the marketplace.
I ask the padrone of the trattoria for a better wine. He brings last year’s Chianti from his own vineyard, saying that his family has owned this vineyard for four hundred years and this is the best Chianti in Siena. And now he watches me from behind the counter to see what I will do with this noble vintage.
One has to swirl the glass gently to see how the wine flows down its walls, if it leaves any traces. Next, one has to raise it and—to use the words of a French gourmand—sink one’s eyes into the live rubies and contemplate them like a Chinese sea full of corals and algae. The third gesture: bring the rim of the glass to the lower lip and inhale the mammola—the bouquet of violets announcing to the nostrils that the chianti is good. Inhale it to the bottom of your lungs, as if to ingest the fragrance of ripe grapes and earth. Finally—without barbarian haste—take a little sip and spread the dark, chamois taste on your palate.
I smile at the padrone with approbation. A great lamp of joyful pride lights above his head. Life is beautiful and people are good. For the main course I order bistecca alla Bismarck. It is leathery. No wonder—it goes way back.
This is my last evening in Siena. I go to the Campo to throw a few lire into the Fonte Gaia, though to tell the truth, I have little hope of returning. Later I say “addio” to the Palazzo Pubblico and the Torre del Mangia, for who else do I have to say it to. “Auguri, Siena, tanti auguri.”
Returning to the “Tre Donzelle,” I have a great desire to wake the maid to tell her I am leaving tomorrow and that I had a good time here. If I were not afraid of the word, I would say that I was happy. But I do not know if she would understand me.
I go to bed with Ungaretti’s40 poems. In one I find a very appropriate farewell:
Again I see your slow mouth
(The sea flows to meet it in the night)
And the mare of your loins
Hurling you in agony
Into my singing arms,
And a sleep retrieving you
To colored things and new deaths
And the cruel solitude
That every lover finds within himself,
Now an endless grave,
Divides me from you for ever.
Dear one, distant as in a mirror…
A STONE FROM THE CATHEDRAL
THE TRAIN PULLED up at the Gare du Nord just before midnight. At the exit I was accosted by a little man offering me a hotel. But it seemed sacrilege to spend my first night in Paris in bed. Besides, the little man was red-haired, and therefore suspect. “Il y a du louche dans cette affaire1,” I thought. I deposited my suitcase in the left-luggage office and ventured into the city equipped with a French-Polish dictionary and The Guide to Europe (second edition, revised and expanded by the Academic Touring Club, Lvov 1909).
This invaluable publication from my father’s library was my introduction to the mysteries of Paris. It was written when the city’s transportation consisted of omnibuses drawn by three white horses, the Polish pension of pani Pióro still prospered on rue de l’Estrapade, and the “Institute of Honor and Bread2,” founded in 1862, still conducted its charitable activities under the presidency of Zamojski3. The cultural information in the guide was scarce, but to the point. For instance: theaters are numerous, but prices steep, and one should not invite ladies to the gallery. Under “Museums and Curiosities” the guide reserved first place for Les Égouts, the sewers, especially since free tickets were issued at the Town Hall. The most tantalizing item was a recommendation to visit the morgue near Notre-Dame. “Unidentified bodies are displayed there. Frozen, they can be preserved for up to three months.”
I walked straight ahead, along the Boulevard Sébastopol dazed by the commotion of people, vehicles, and lights. I wanted to reach the Seine at all costs. The experience of a man from the provinces whispered to me that it should be quieter on the other side of the river. I crossed a bridge and found myself on the Île de la Cite. And indeed, it was dark and peaceful. It started raining. I passed the Conciergerie, a gloomy edifice, like an illustration from Victor Hugo, and reached a square facing the illuminated Cathedral of Notre-Dame. Then it happened. I realized that I would never write my dissertation on Paul Valéry and that, to the despair of my literary friends I would return home unaware of what the most fashionable French poet of the season was like.
I found quarters near the cathedral, on the Île Saint-Louis. After a few days, taking advantage of the reduced fares on Sundays, I went to Chartres. Here my fate as a lover of the Gothic was sealed. From that moment I used every opportunity to realize my insane plan of visiting all the French cathedrals. Naturally the project remained uncompleted, but I managed to see the most important ones: Senlis, Tours, Noyon, Laon, Lyon, Châlons-sur-Marne, Reims, Rouen, Beauvais, Amiens, Bourges. After these excursions, I returned to Paris as if from mountain expeditions and dug into books at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. Naively I first searched for a formula which would explain the Gothic in its totality, the thing that is at once its construction, symbolism, and metaphysics. But prudent scholars did not provide an unequivocal answer.
The idea of this sketch came in Chartres when I stood on a stone porch of the so-called Clocher Neuf. The passing clouds overhead gave an illusion of flight. Under my feet was a huge, mossy sandstone block with a small arrow—the mark of a mason. Perhaps instead of writing about stained glass modulating light as Gregorian chant modulates silence, about mysterious chimeras meditating above the abyss of time, it would be worth ruminating on how these stones were raised; and hence about bricklayers, stonemasons, and architects. Not about what possessed their souls when they erected this cathedral but about the materials they used, their tools and tricks and how much they earned. A humble aim, an accountant’s view of the Gothic, but the Middle Ages also teach modesty.
Over the centuries the Gothic has been humiliated, belittled like no other great style in the history of art. People didn’t understand it, so they hated it. Critics bombarded it with derisive epithets, in the way Napoleon’s soldiers bombarded the face of the Sphinx. The wigs of the classicists stood on end at the sight of these insane edifices. “Everywhere windows, rosettes, spikes; the stones seem to be cut like cardboard; everything is riddled with holes, everything hangs in the air.”
The matter did not end in verbal polemics. Napoleon III had scores of Gothic churches recklessly dismantled in the very heart of Paris. Barbaric demolition plans started at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Their only concern was to get rid of these “masterpieces of bad taste” as cheaply as possible. In the eighteenth century one of the most beautiful Gothic churches, St. Nicaise, was torn down, as well as the cathedral in Cambrai and many others. There was no mercy for “the style of the Goths,” which “had been governed by whimsicality devoid of nobility and poisoned the fine arts”—in the words of the encyclopedist chevalier de Jaucourt4.
Millions, millions of tons of stone. Between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries more stone was excavated in France than in ancient Egypt. The eighty cathedrals and five hundred big churches built in this period, taken together, would form a mountain range erected by human hands.
In one of my books I saw a drawing of the façade of a Greek temple imposed on the façade of a Gothic cathedral. From that drawing you could deduce that many an Acropolis could be contained, as in a suitcase, inside cathedrals like Amiens or Reims. However, little results from such comparisons, at least little that would tell us about the functions of sacred buildings in such different periods. The templum of antiquity housed the gods; cathedrals house the faithful. The immortals are always less numerous than the believers.
The surface of a great cathedral is about four to five thousand square meters; therefore it could easily contain the inhabitants of an entire town, including pilgrims. Since such an undertaking demanded immense expenditures, one should start with the finances.
NO WRITTEN SOURCES SUGGEST that these large-scale works proceeded according to an estimated budget. The romantic principle of measuring one’s forces after one’s plans dominated medieval book-keeping. Besides, in the beginning there was plenty of money, thanks to the colossal enthusiasm of the faithful for whom a cathedral was also the focus of local patriotism. Later there were ups and downs.
This explains why so few cathedrals were maintained in a uniform style and built in one sweep. Let us add one more thing. The costs exceeded the means at the disposal of any individual, even if he were the sovereign. In order to secure a regular supply of money, the popes of the thirteenth century demanded that churches contribute a quarter of their income to construction work. However, this order was not always obeyed. Thus rulers like Johann of Bohemia transferred revenues from the royal silver mines. City councils did not want to be left behind. In 1292 a census was conducted in Orvieto and a graduated income tax imposed to finance the construction of the Duomo. The register of donors for Milan Cathedral has been preserved. It covers all professions and social strata, courtesans included. The donations were often in kind. The Queen of Cyprus, for example, endowed one of the Italian cathedrals with a magnificent cloth of gold. Charitable fever was occasionally the cause of family feuds. A certain Italian citizen demanded the return of his gold buttons, donated by his wife for construction work.
Near church entrances, great stalls were opened in which donations could be purchased, from precious stones to hens.
Charity collectors traveled to distant lands to secure building funds. To erect their abbey in Sylvanès the Cistercians sought assistance from the Emperor of Constantinople, the King of Sicily, and the Duke of Champagne. Believers established brotherhoods to help finance work in progress. The most picturesque of these was probably the “brotherhood of bowlers” from Xanten, as one might translate “confrèrie des joueurs de boule.” The membership must have been quite respectable, as the fraternity included a bishop. And one should not overlook the income from the sale of spiritual values. Indulgences, in other words. In 1487 one-third of the expenses of St. Victor’s Collegiate church in Xanten was covered by this merchandise. The right to grant indulgences was not free either. In 1397 the citizens of Milan bought “unam bonam indulgentiam” from the Pope for five hundred florins.
