The collected prose, p.8
The Collected Prose, page 8
The question of the Duomo’s authorship is as pointless as the question who designed a town (a town, not a factory settlement) which grew through the centuries. After the mythical Fra Bevignate, the hand of Lorenzo Maitani had a deciding influence on the cathedral’s conception, but after him followed Andrea Pisano2, Orcagna3, Sanmicheli4, and these great names are like golden nuggets in the sand, for over the centuries the cathedral was worked on by more than thirty architects, one hundred and fifty sculptors, seventy painters, and almost one hundred mosaic specialists.
The muses were not silent, though the times were by no means peaceful. The town was one of the hotbeds of heresy, but it was at the same time, by virtue of historical irony and thick walls, the frequent refuge of popes. The Guelph clan of the Monaldeschi fought against its Ghibelline faction, the fans of empire who were expelled from the town while the sculptors were illustrating Genesis. According to a reliable witness, the author of The Divine Comedy, both families suffer in Purgatory along with the kin of Romeo and Juliet. There were prolonged battles for power in the town, and Orvieto was also occupied by the Viscontis. In a word, it shared the fate of other Italian towns—in Dante’s words, the fate of dolore ostello, “the inn of suffering.”
The only restaurant with a view of the cathedral is as expensive as anything that neighbors on monuments, since you pay double for the shadow of a masterpiece on your spaghetti. The proprietor is thin, talkative, with a long turkey neck.
He: a lei Piace? (pointing towards the cathedral)
I: Molto.
He: (con fuoco) La facciata questo Figlio del cielo e della terra.
I: Si.
He: Qual miracolo di concentrazione…qual magistro d’arte!
I: Ecco!!!
Thus we talked about art.
On the menu I find a wine named after the town. The padrone praises it more warmly than the cathedral. Drinking “Orvieto” can be considered a cognitive act. It comes in a small fiasco with a cold haze, brought by a young girl with an Etruscan smile—a smile that resides in the eyes and the corners of the mouth, bypassing the rest of the face.
It is more difficult to describe a wine than a cathedral. It is the color of straw and has a strong, elusive aroma. The first sip is rather unimpressive. The effect starts after a moment. The well-like chill flows down, freezing the intestines and heart while the head blazes—quite contrary to the recommendation of a certain classicist. The sensation is enchanting; and I now understand why Lorenzo Maitani stayed in Orvieto, became a citizen; and not an honorary one, for he was obliged to race across the wooded Umbrian hills with a lance in defense of his adopted patria.
To enter the cathedral is yet another surprise, so much does the façade differ from the interior—as if the gate of life full of birds and colors led into a cold, austere eternity. The Duomo is a three-nave basilica with the accent on the main nave, leading to a massive apse. Powerful columns joined by cradle arches support an architecture in which sparse Gothic ornament is set in a Romanesque design, without the combination of entwining arcs so prevalent in the French school. The vault is almost flat, so the soaring walls of the façade are nothing but a mask. To the right of the altar there is another chapel, of the Madonna di San Brizio, containing frescoes painted by Fra Angelico and Luca Signorelli5.
The art of the fresco is ancient and noble by virtue of tradition and technique. The cave paintings of southern France, painted when herds of reindeer wandered across the country, are really frescoes too.
The technique, as though following intrinsic rules, has not substantially changed from Antiquity to our time. Bound to architecture, a fresco shares the fate of walls. It is organic like a house or tree. Subject to life’s natural law, it is consumed by senility.
The decoration of walls must be permeated with a sober craftsmanship. In the preparation of mortar, the knowledge of walls is as important as the right process of painting. The lime base must set for a long time before it is mixed with washed river sand. At the same time, the sun must warm the lime in which the colors will be mixed: the black of carbonized wine shoots, soil, vermilion, cadmium. The chemical chain runs from the dampened wall to the air through three layers of mortar. The surface is varnished with salt.
The frescoes in the chapel of Madonna di San Brizio were begun by Fra Angelico, who came with three disciples to Orvieto in 1447. He stayed only three and a half months before being summoned to Rome by Pope Nicolas V. For some years the ambitious city council tried to persuade Pinturicchio6 or Perugino7 to complete the work. Finally in 1499, after fifty years of attempts, they reached an agreement with Luca Signorelli, a disciple of Piero della Francesca, a sixty-year-old painter at the height of his fame who came to Orvieto to sign the contract for the major work of his life. The Latin agreement shows a slightly awkward but beautiful managerial concern for the job: “omnes colores mittendos per ipsum magistrum Lucam, mittere bonos, perfectos et pulchros” (“the master himself will apply all the colors—good, perfect and beautiful”) and Luca is obliged “facere figuras meliores aut pares, similes et conformes aliis figuris existentibus nunc in dicta capella nove” (“to make the figures better or equal, similar to other figures already existing in the said chapel”). At the end, a commission is appointed to appraise the artistic result.
At the top of the vault, Fra Angelico left a seated Christ and his Apostles. Both compositions are rather stiff and hieratic, as though the painter (or his disciples) overused the compass and lead wire which measured the perspective. Signorelli filled a similar space with an equal number of figures according to his predecessor’s design, but his coro dei dottori8 promises a drama. The draperies hold nerves and muscles, not dead fibres. This detail reveals Master Luca’s primary passion: the representation of the human body in action, and he accomplished this fully in the vast planes between the arches of the vault. The Coming of the Antichrist, The Story of the End of the World, The Saved and the Damned, are told in a severe and somber language worthy of Dante. That must be why a British art historian, by no means of spinsterish tastes, calls that great master “virile but somewhat harsh and unsympathetic.”
The favorite disciple of Piero della Francesca was not a great colorist. On the walls of St. Francis’s church in Arezzo his master inscribed a transparent world permeated with light. Signorelli elevates sharp accents, chiaroscuro, and volume above the space of gently sifted planes, and his light always comes from the outside. Objects and men are vessels of darkness.
Predicazione del Anticristo (“whose coming is after the working of Satan, with all power and signs and lying wonders”) is set in Jerusalem, but the background architecture is Renaissance, as if designed by Bramante9. Under distant arcades there are black figures with lances, like rats walking on their tails. In the foreground, he “who will come in secret and by treason obtain the Kingdom.” He has Christ’s face, but a demon hides behind his back. He stands amidst a crowd in which the iconologists have discovered Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Raphael, Cesare Borgia, Bentivoglia10, and Columbus.
To the right, one step forward (as if on a proscenium) stands the narrator, master Luca. His hat is crammed on his head, a loose coat and black stockings on muscular legs. His face is strong, as if taken from Breughel’s peasant portraits. His eyes are firmly fixed upon reality. One can easily believe Vasari, who said that Luca followed his son’s coffin without shedding a tear. Beside him Fra Angelico dressed in a cassock gazes inward. Two glances: one of a visionary, the other an observer, and to strengthen the characterization, Luca’s hands are clasped tightly, while the Angelic Brother’s delicate hand gestures hesitation, fingers in dubio. Their shoulders touch in San Brizio Chapel though they are divided by half a century. We are in the times when solidarity was the rule. It was not an accepted practice to portray an artistic predecessor as a fool.
The Resurrection of the Flesh takes place on a plain as flat as a tabletop. Above, two handsome angels, their feet firmly resting on air, blow their trumpets: “And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters.” The second birth, the exit from the womb of the Great Mother, is painful. The scene is flavored with eschatological humor, the laughter of skeletons watching a man assume his body. A surprising detail: Signorelli, who was a master of the nude, seems to have a rather fantastic notion of osteology—the pelvis resembles a wide belt with four holes in the front.
Finimondo is a fresco of immense dramatic power. On the right, the doctors dispute while the sky already blazes. “And the angels took the censer, and filled it with the fire of the altar, and cast it into the earth: and there were voices, and thunder, and lightning and an earthquake.” On the other side of the arch where the fresco unfolds are gathered men and women with children in their arms. The first victims lie on the ground; their bodies have the final stillness of objects. Overhead rise the frayed gestures of the fugitives.
Berenson rightly attributes the Renaissance fondness for the nude not only to the love of touch, movement, but also to the requirements of expression. Naked bodies evoke emotion like nothing else. The Damned burns our skin, makes us taste ashes on our tongue and fills our nostrils with the yellow odor of sulphur.
The scene is crowded and lacks perspective like Matejko’s Battle of Grunwald11. Naked bodies are squashed together as in a cellar during an air-raid. They are not separate entities but the mass entanglement of opposing actions, the blows of the henchmen, countered by the defensive gestures of the victims. Fascinated by movement, Signorelli understood its physical and metaphysical consequences. He knew that every action contains the seed of death and that the world’s end is a final explosion and consummation of accumulated energy. Many years before Galileo and Newton, the Quattrocento painter’s dry and objective brush defined the laws of gravity.
The sky over the damned is a study of various states of equilibrium. The three angels are balanced triangles with wings. Two bodies are deformed by a free fall. Satan with a hefty woman on his back glides down like a bird struggling in the wind. A true history of science must not neglect the studies of space, movement, and matter in fifteenth-century painting.
Finally, one must fling this blasphemy against the authors of handbooks: the Orvieto frescoes are much more impressive than Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo was undoubtedly familiar with and influenced by the San Brizio paintings, but his vision is marked with overripe beauty, and his too flexible and unrestrained language entwines objects rather than lends them expression.
Great poets seldom find their match in illustrators. Dante found an adequate interpreter in Luca Signorelli. San Brizio Chapel contains eleven small frescoes relating to The Divine Comedy, in addition to several portraits of poets and, significantly, Empedocles, emerging from a medallion’s black background as if from the depths of Etna. Reliable scholars have discovered that they illustrate fragments of the first eleven cantos of the Purgatorio. Not without trouble and doubt. For example, the first illustration portrays Dante kneeling in front of a figure in a flowing robe. The corresponding verse refers to l’uccel divino, the divine bird or angel. But the image is without wings, causing the sober-minded iconologist Franz Xaver Kraus to mutter a troubled “Zweifelhaft12.” By the way, jokes about iconographers are suited to our times (form has expelled meaning).
The bus twists its way towards the station and the town disappears from sight just beyond its gate. You don’t see it again until you’re on the train. Il Duomo rises over everything like the raised hand of a prophet. For the time being, The Last Judgment is imprisoned under the vault of the San Brizio Chapel and will not be visited upon the town. In the honeyed air Orvieto sleeps peacefully, like a lizard.
SIENA
for Konstanty Jeleski—the Alexandrian
FROM MY WINDOW in the Tre Donzelle* the view of Siena is limited to dark courtyards, a cat on a parapet, and a display of washed linen. I go out early to see if Suarez was right when he wrote that Siena smells of boxwood in the morning. Unfortunately, it smells of car excrement. What a pity there are no conservers of smells. What a pleasure it would be to stroll around Siena, the most medieval of Italian towns, in a cloud of Trecento.
If the gods protect one from organized tours (through insufficient funds or strong character), one should spend the first hours in a new city traipsing around, following the rule: straight ahead, third left, straight ahead, third right. One can also follow the curve of a sickle. There are many systems, all of them good.
Now I am walking down a narrow street; it falls rapidly, then all of a sudden starts to climb. A leap of stones—a moment of balance—then another fall. I have been walking for over half an hour without coming across any historical monument.
Siena is a difficult town, justly compared to creations of nature—a jelly-fish or a star-fish. The pattern of its streets shares nothing with the “modern” monotony and tyranny of the right angle.
The Town Hall Square (if one can use this slighting term for the seat of government) called the Campo, has an organic contour resembling the concave of a seashell. It is one of the world’s most beautiful squares, unlike any other and for that reason difficult to describe. It is surrounded by a semi-circle of palaces and houses whose ancient red bricks appear a faded purple. The Town Hall consists of three perfectly harmonized blocks, with its middle section raised one story higher than the others. It is austere and would resemble a fortress, were it not for the musical rhythm of the Gothic windows with their two small, white columns. The spire is tall,* its top white as a flower—so the sky appears saturated with blue blood. When the sun is behind the hall, over the Piazza del Mercato, an immense shadow like the hand of a clock sweeps across the Campo. The spire is familiarly called Mangia, after the nickname of the medieval bell-ringer who was later replaced by a mechanical device. From its top one can survey the town with the perspective of a swallow or an historian.
In aristocratic times powerful families sought mythological antecedents; later this habit was inherited by democratic towns, who invented their illustrious founders. The rich imagination of the Sienese made them claim descent from Senius, son of Remus, who was said to have sheltered here to avoid the wrath of his uncle, the founder of Rome. To this legend Siena owes its emblem: a she-wolf. The bolzana or banner of the town is black and white; these heraldic colors perfectly represent the impetuous temperament and contradictory character of the Sienese.
Because the surrounding soil does not contain Etruscan remains, it is assumed that the town was founded as a Roman colony about thirty years B.C. Governed in the Middle Ages by the Longobards and Franks, the town flourished under the patronage of bishops, and later during the increasingly open resistance of its citizens to the feudal descendants of the invaders, who camped in fortified Tuscan hawks’ nests like Monte Amiata, Santa Fiore, and Campagniatico. They were ruthless pillagers; it is no wonder that Dante cast Umberto from the Aldobrandeschi family to wail in one of the cave mouths of Purgatory.
City councils grew in force so quickly that by the thirteenth century the Sienese podestà threatened to chain a mighty representative of the Ardengheschi family in the market-place “like a butcher’s dog” if the nobleman failed to halt his violence.
Nevertheless, it would be incorrect to imagine that the Republic of Siena was the embodiment of democratic ideals. The aristocracy possessed great influence and, highly unusually, the milites et mercatores sieneses1 were of aristocratic origin. Members of the Tolomei family claimed, with Tuscan megalomania, to be the offspring of Ptolemy. In fact, the most powerful bourgeois families—Buonsignori, Cacciaconti, and Squarcialupi—descended from the German invaders. Liberated from the pressure of helmets, their heads adapted well to accountancy; the warriors’ bronze soon yielded to the precious metals of bankers. These demilitarized merchants undertook long expeditions throughout Europe, surpassing even the Jews in the silver trade. They became the Pope’s bankers, which brought them large revenues and useful church sanctions against recalcitrant debtors.
So was Siena siding with the papacy? No. To explain, one must go to history: the struggle between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, of course.
At first (in the twelfth century), these names signified two German political factions: the Guelphs stood by the princes of Saxony and Bavaria, while the Ghibellines supported the Hohenstaufen. Carried over to Italy, the rivalry kept its name but changed its meaning. From a local conflict it grew into a problem of universal significance: the struggle between the papacy and the Emperor.
At the beginning of the twelfth century Siena faced its destiny: a choice between submission or difficult independence. Florence became its chief adversary, not only because of historical intricacies but also geo-political position); from this time onward both communities hated each other and “fought with sword and word in refined ferocity, harassed each other in stories, legends and poetry.” The map of Italy tells us that this confrontation was inevitable. The city of the she-wolf blocked Florence off from the Via Francigena—the shortest route to Rome. Both cities fought for access to the sea. In Tuscany there was no room for a powerful Florence and a powerful Siena.
An historian justly notes that as Florence officially sided with the Guelphs, Siena had no choice but to side with the Ghibellines. But this is just a scholarly distinction. In fact the names of medieval parties were as misleading as are the names of contemporary ones. Guelphic Florence often participated in anti-papal leagues; and Sienese bankers could not be very serious Ghibellines, being tied to Rome through golden threads of interest. When Charles IV, officially an ally, threatened Siena’s independence, he was promptly taught a lesson despite his imperial titles.
