Part 21

She was, in brief, a Magnificent One, and if the Magnificent Ones are, as a rule, less monstrous when they are women, at the best they are a seamy shady lot, grinding the faces of the poor, that their babes may lie in foolish cradles of gold, and building themselves lordly pleasure-houses designed by hirelings of genius. Even Da Vinci prostituted his genius to plan a bathroom for that minx of a Beatrice, and a pavilion with a round cupola for the castle-labyrinth of his Most Illustrious Prince, Signor Lodovico. Yet Lodovico must be commended for his taste, which is more than can be said for the Magnificent Ones of to-day, who are apt to combine the libertine with the Philistine. Save for the mad King of Bavaria, I can recall no modern monarch who has had a man of genius at his Court. The late King Leopold exacted gold and executed evil on a scale beyond the dreams of the Moro, but where were his Leonardos and Bramantes? Burckhardt tells us that the Renaissance Despot, whose sway was nearly always illegitimate, gathered a Court of genius and learning to give himself a standing; the pompous dulness of our modern Courts shows that Gibbon’s plea for stability of succession failed to reckon with the stagnation of security.

Prosaic compared with the fate of the Palace at Mantua is the fate of the Castle of Ferrara, the cradle of Isabella d’Este. ’Tis one of those gloomy massive four-towered structures that recall the fables of the giants, with its moat still two yards deep and its drawbridge intact—a barbarous mediæval pile, forbidding by daylight and sinister in the moon, with a great clock that has so much leisure that it strikes the hour before every quarter.

Yet this grim fortress, originally built by a despot as a refuge from his subjects, is merely the seat of telegraph and other civic offices; like some antediluvian dragon tamed and harnessed, instead of wastefully slain, by the St. George who gleams above the portcullis.

In the piazza before the castle, where I saw only a cab-rank of broken-down horses, the _festa_ of this patron-saint of Ferrara was wont to set Barbary horses racing for the pallium, and splendid battle-chargers ramped in that great tournament which was held by Duke Ercole, Isabella’s father, in honour of his son-in law, the Moro, and which was won by Galeazzo di Sanseverino, the model of the _Cortigiano_. Isabella d’Este in her glad virginal youth walked her palfrey up and down the great equine staircase, now given over to messenger boys and clerks. Under the sportive ceilings and adipose angels of Dosso Dossi, or within that girdling frieze of _putti_ driving their teams of birds, beasts, snakes or fishes, pragmatic councillors hold debate. In the castle ball-room are held—charity dances!

But infinitely the saddest relic of the Magnificent Moro is his former palace in Ferrara. Why he needed a palace in Ferrara I do not know, unless to accommodate the overflowings of his suite when he visited his ducal father-in-law. Of this palace the excellent Baedeker discourses thus: “To the S. of S. Maria in Vado, in the Corso Porta Romana, is the former Palazzo Costabili or Palazzo Scrofa, now known as the Palazzo Beltrami-Calcagnini. It was erected for Lodovico il Moro, but is uncompleted. Handsome court. On the ground-floor to the left are two rooms with excellent ceiling-frescoes, by Ercole Grandi; in the first, prophets and Sybils; in the second, scenes from the Old Testament in grisaille.”

It could not have been done better by an auctioneer. Here is the reality. A courtyard with arches, dirty, refuse-littered, surrounded by a barrack of slum-dwellings. The first room I penetrated into was palatial in size but occupied by three beds, and a stove replaced the old hearth. The floor was of bare brick. Sole touch of colour, a canary sang in a cage, as cheerfully as to a Magnificent One. The crone whose family inhabited this room conducted me at my request to the chamber with the ceilings by Ercole Grandi. She opened the door, and—like _Maria_ of Sicily—entered crying, “_È permesso?_” with retrospective ceremoniousness, and I followed her into a vast lofty room, dingy below, but glorious above, though more to faith than to sight, for the firmament of fresco was difficult to see clearly in the gloom. The floor was of stone, and held two beds, a chair or two, a cradle, a stout dwarfish old woman and a sprawl of children with unkempt heads. In the adjoining room sat a sickly and silent woman working a sewing machine under the hovering Sybils and Prophets, dim and faded as herself.

For those who covet a Renaissance chamber, even after this exposure of the auctioneer, let me say that the rent of this last room was thirty-two scudi a year, Sybils and Prophets thrown in.

The entire Palace Beltrami-Calcagnini is, I imagine, to be acquired for a song. When I first read in Ruskin’s “A Joy for Ever,” his exhortation to Manchester manufacturers to purchase palaces in Verona so as to safeguard stray Titians and Veroneses, I felt that the Anglo-Saxon aspiration to play Atlas had reached its culminating grotesquerie. But now that I have seen the state of the Ercole Grandi frescoes, I feel that the Anglo-Saxon might do worse than step in, and I cannot understand why Italy, so rigid against the exportation of her treasures, is so callous to their extinction.

And this is the Palace built by the great Moro, who “boasted that the Pope Alexander was his chaplain, the Emperor Maximilian his condottiere, Venice his chamberlain, and the King of France his courier”; for whose wedding procession, which was preceded by a hundred trumpeters, Milan draped itself in satins and brocades; who patronised the immortals of Art; and who wore to death in an underground dungeon in France.

An older than Virgil hath spoken the final word: _Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas_.

OF DEAD SUBLIMITIES, SERENE MAGNIFICENCES, AND GAGGED POETS

There are few livelier expressions of vitality than tombs, especially tombs designed or commissioned by their occupants. These be projections of personality beyond the grave, extensions of egotism beyond the body. The Magnificent Ones have invariably the mausolean habit. It is another of their humilities. The majesty of death, they know, is not enough to cover their nakedness. Moses, the true Superman, had his sepulchre hidden that none might worship at it. The false Superman ostentates his sepulchre in the hope that some one may worship at it. His Magnificence is only Serene in his tomb: his life passes in uneasy tiptoeings after greatness. Sometimes his mortuary tumefactions are softened by his spouse being made co-tenant of his tomb, as in the Taj Mahal of Agra, or in that beautiful monument ordered by Lodovico of Milan for himself and Beatrice d’Este. And sometimes when “the Bishop orders his tomb” it may be with an extenuating design to beautify his church—“ad ornatum ecclesiae” as “Leo Episcopus” says of the monument he designed for himself in Pistoja Cathedral. Unfortunately Bishop Leo’s worthy object is scarcely attained by the two fat angels leaning sleepily against his sarcophagus, or by the skull and the shell-work over it, though in comparison with Verrocchio’s adjacent monument of Cardinal Forteguerra—or rather the bust and the black sarcophagus superimposed upon the original marble—the Bishop’s tomb is a thing of beauty.

But it is only when the corpse has not commanded the monument that I am able to endure its magnificence. The Cardinal of Portugal in San Miniato, the poisoned Pope Benedict in Perugia, St. Dominic in Bologna, St. Agatha in Venice, and even the mysterious Lazaro Papi, “Colonel for the English in Brazil,” the “esteemed writer of verses and history,” whose friends raised him so elaborate a memorial in the cathedral of Lucca in 1835, all lie as guiltless of their monumental follies as Mausolus himself, who, it will be remembered, was the victim of his designing widow. Nor could the _Ossa Dantis_ well escape that domed mausoleum at Ravenna, though they lay low for a century and a half.

Still further removed from responsibility for his own posthumous pomp is St. Augustine, who with all his inspiration could not foresee the adventures of his corpse; how from Hippo it should come to rest at Pavia, by way of Sardinia, and there, a thousand years after his death, have that marvellous Arca erected over it by the Eremitani. Nor could St. Donato, when he slew the water-dragon of Arezzo by spitting into its mouth, foresee the great shrine embodying this and other miracles of his which the millennial piety of the town would rear over his desiccated dust.

But the Medici, the magnificent Medici! Not their chapel in Santa Croce, full though it be of the pomp of marble and majolica; not their San Marco monastery with their doctor-saints—St. Cosmo and St. Damian—not their Medici Palace, despite that joyous Benozzo fresco with its gay glamour of landscape and processions; not the Pitti with its incalculable treasures; not the Villa Medici, nor even the Venus herself, so reeks with the pride of life as all that appertains to their tombs. When I gaze upon the monuments of these serene Magnificences in the Old Sacristy of Florence, with the multiple allusions to the family and its saints—in marble and terra-cotta, in stucco and bronze, in fresco and frieze, in high-relief and low-relief—I feel a mere grave-worm. And when I crawl into the Capella dei Principi where stand the granite sarcophagi of the Grand Dukes, there glances at me from every square inch of the polished walls and the pompous crests and rich mosaics a glacial radiation of the pride of life—nay, the _hubris_ of life. That hushed spaciousness is yet like an elaborate funeral mass perpetually performed by an orchestra opulently over-paid.

I wonder how in their life-time men dared to apply to these Magnificent Ones the common Italian words for the body and its operations and why there was not evolved for them—as for the bonzes of the Cambodgians—a specific vocabulary to differentiate their eating and drinking from the munching and lapping of such as I. And yet in the New Sacristy I find consolation. For, inasmuch as the genius of Michelangelo was harnessed to the funeral car of his patrons, I perceive that here at last they are truly buried. They are buried beneath the majestic sculptures of Day and Night, Evening and Dawn, and ’tis Michelangelo that lives here, not they. Peace to their gilded dust.

Far more reposeful, at least for the spectator, is Michelangelo’s own burial place in Santa Croce, which is the most satisfactory church the Franciscans have produced, and in its empty spaciousness an uplifting change from the stuffy, muggy atmosphere, the tawdry profusion of overladen chapels, which make up one’s general sense of an Italian church. It is not free from poor pictures and monuments, and only some of the coloured glass is good, but the defects are lost in the noble simplicity of the whole under its high wooden roof. Michelangelo’s monument is unfortunately impaired by one of the few errors of overcrowding, for the frescoes above it make it look inferior to the Dante cenotaph, though it is really rather superior. Curiously enough the line anent the “great poet”

“Ingenio cujus non satis orbis erat,”

does not come from Dante’s monument, but from that of a certain Karolus, presumably Carlo Marsuppini!

I have spoken of the museum as the mausoleum of reality. But mausolea too, turn into museums; in losing their dead they, too, die and become a mere spectacle. Such is the melancholy fate of the Mausoleum of Theodoric the Great outside Ravenna, robbed of its imperial heretical bones by avenging Christian orthodoxy. Infinitely dreary this dead tomb when I saw it in the centre of its desolate plain, to which I had trudged through sodden marshland that would have been malarious in summer; snowbound it lay, its arched substructure flooded, its upper chamber only just accessible by a snow-crusted marble staircase: a bare rotundity, a bleak emptiness, robbed even of its coffin, uncheered even by its corpse. O magnificent Ostrogoth, conqueror of Italy, O most Christian Emperor, when you turned from the splendour of your court at Ravenna to build your last home, you with your imperial tolerance could hardly foresee that because you held Christ an originated being, as Arius had gone about singing, a Christian posterity would scatter you to the four winds. And that rival gigantic tomb in the Appian Way at Rome, does Cæcilia Metella still inhabit it, I wonder? I mourn to see such spacious tombs stand empty when there are so many living Magnificences whom they would fit to a span. Very proper was it to bury Beatrice, the mother of Matilda, in the sarcophagus of a Pagan hero. Mausolea no more than palaces should remain untenanted. Let them be turned into orts and castles, an you will, like Hadrian’s Tomb into Sant’ Angelo, or into circuses, like the Mausoleum of Augustus—sweet are the uses of Magnificence—but to keep them standing idle when there must be so many Magnificences in quest of a family sepulchre is a crime against America. The tomb of Theodoric is, I fear, too secluded for American taste, but the Exarch Isaac’s in such cheerful contiguity with town and church may arride the millionaire more. For a consideration the Exarch’s own sarcophagus might be had from the Museum, and the Exarch scrapped. Or there is Galla Placidia’s Mausoleum, with its Byzantine mosaics thrown in. Come! Who bids for these rare curios, one of the few links between Antiquity and the Renaissance, with their grotesque mediæval sincerity. Remark, _Signori_, that prefiguration of the Index Expurgatorius, that bearded Christ or S. Lorenzo (you pay your money and you take the choice) who is casting into a crate of serpentine flames one of those Pagan volumes for which the Cinquecento will go hunting madly. No, that cabinet does not contain cigar-boxes—what did the saints know of cigars?—nor are Marcus, Lucas, Matteus, Joannes, the names of brands. Those apparent cigar-boxes, as you might have seen from the strings, are holy manuscripts triumphant over the Pagan volume. This naïve draughtsmanship, _Signora_, is just what makes them so precious and your petty bids so amazing. What is that you say, _Signorina_? Galla Placidia is still in possession? And two Roman Emperors with her? Nay, nay, a nine hundred and ninety-nine years’ lease is all that a reasonable ghost may desire; after that, every tomb must be esteemed a cenotaph; unless indeed the heirs will pay the unearned increment. Choose your sarcophagus, _Signori_, an Emperor’s sarcophagus is not in the market every day.

But I do not think that even the vulgarest millionaire would desire his ashes to dispossess the Doges of Venice, or at least not Giovanni Pesaro. The most romantic auctioneer might despair of disposing of that portal wall of the Frari which is sacred to the Gargantuan grotesquerie of his colossal memorial. Does the whole world hold a more baroque monument? Going, going—and how I wish I could say gone!—that portal upheld by bowed negro giants on gargoyled pedestals, with patches of black flesh gleaming through holes in their trousers. Item, one black skeleton surmounted by other unique curios, including two giraffes. Item, His Sublimity, the Doge himself, sitting up on his sarcophagus, holding up his hands as if in expostulation, gentlemen, against your inadequate bids. Item, a wealth of heroic figures, and an array of virtues and vices, all life-size. (Could be sold separately as absolutely incongruous with the negro portions of the monument.) Also, in the same lot if desired, two hovering angelets, holding a wreath, suitable for any Christian celebrity.

Alas, Barnum is no more and bidding languishes. And yet I do not see why the lot should not be knocked down. Who was this Pesaro that he should have the right to impose this horror on posterity? Why should generations of worshippers at the Frari be obsessed by this nightmare? There can be no sacredness in such demented mural testaments. And Time, who preserved this, while he has destroyed so many precious things, who shattered Leonardo’s horse and melted Michelangelo’s bronze Pope, is hereby shown of taste most abominable. History must get a better curator.

The black skeleton—I had not thought before that skeletons could be negro—flourishes a scroll which ascribes to the Doge the wisdom of Solomon and an implacable hostility against the foes of Christ, while a tablet held by one of the giant negroes announces

“Aureum inter optimos principes vides.”

_Aureum_ indeed! Doubtless only some faint sense that sheen and death are discrepant held back the Doges from being buried in golden caskets. The Doge lives again in this monument, boasts the Latin, and one can only reflect that if the dogal taste reached this depravity by the middle of the seventeenth century, _actum est de republicâ_ might have been written long before Napoleon. Fortunately for the memory of the Pesaro family it finds a nobler, if no less bombastic expression, in the great Titian altar-piece, the Madonna di Casa Pesaro, in which the Queen of Heaven bends from her throne to beam at its episcopal representative, and St. Francis and St. Anthony grace by their presence the symbols of its victory over the Turk, while St. Peter pauses in his pious lection.

But the dead Doges lie mostly in S. S. Giovanni e Paolo, where their funeral service was performed. It is the very church for Their Sublimities—floods of light, pillared splendour, imposing proportions. Their tombs protrude from the walls, and their sculptured forms lie on their backs, their heads on pillows, their feet comfortably on cushions. Even when we are reminded of the finer things for which the Republic stood, there is an echo of material opulence.

“Steno, olim Dux Venetiorum, amator Justitiæ, Pacis, et Ubertatis anima.”

_Ubertatis_ anima! The soul of prodigal splendour! Even spiritual metaphor must harp on images of Magnificence.

But not every dead Doge consents to be couchant. Horatio Baleono, who died in 1617, “hostes post innumeros stratos,” has for monument a cavalier (of course, gilded) riding rough-shod over writhing forms and a broken-down cannon, and Pietro Mocenigo, whose mausoleum vaunts itself “ex hostium manubiis,” stands defiant on the summit of his sarcophagus, which is upborne by a trinity of figures.

What a family this Casa Mocenigo, with its record of Doges! Remove their memorials and mausolea from this church and you would half empty it of monuments. Tintoretto, no less than Titian, was dragged at their triumphal car. There is an _Adoration of the Saviour_ at Vicenza, which might just as well be the adoration of the Doge, Alvise Mocenigo, who is in the centre of the picture. For though he is kneeling, he has all the air of sitting, and all the other figures—the worshippers, the angel flying towards him, and the Christ flying down to him—converge towards him like a stage-group towards the limelit hero. Compare all this posthumous self-assertion with the oblivion fallen on Marino Faliero, the decapitated Doge of Byron’s drama, whose dubious sarcophagus was shown to the poet in the outside wall of this church.

Nor could Padua, Venice’s neighbour, fall behind her in mortuary magnificence.

“Nequidque patavino splendore deesset”

says a monument to Alessandro Contarini in the nave of the cathedral, a monument supported by six slaves and embracing a bas-relief of the fleet. Another in the worst dogal style exhibits Caterino Cornaro, a hero of the Cretan War (who died in 1674) in a full-bottomed wig and baggy knee-breeches, holding a scroll as if about to smack the universe with it. Sad is it to see so many “eternal monuments” of faded fames.

The Scaliger street-tombs in Verona are at least artistically laudable, however ironically their Christian ostensiveness compares with the record of the Family of the Ladder, whose rungs were murdered relatives. But even had Can Signorio lived the life of a saint, it would have needed a considerable conquest of his Christian humility before he could have commissioned that portentous tomb of his from Bonino da Campiglione. Knowing the Magnificent One, Bonino gave him solidity and superfluity, a plethora of niched and statued minarets of saints and virtues armed warriors, and bewildering pinnacles clothed with figures, all resting on six red marble columns springing from a base which supports the tomb, and is itself upborne by angels at each corner and adorned with pious bas-reliefs. And while the dead man lies in stone above his tomb, guarded by angels at head and foot, he also bestrides his horse and sports his spear on the uttermost pinnacle of his ladder-crested memorial, as though making the best of both worlds; which was indeed the general habit of the Magnificent, who desired likewise the beatitudes of the Meek, and often shed tears of sincere repentance when they could sin no more. Mastino della Scala’s tomb is more gilded and elegant than Can Signorio’s, though not less assertive and bi-worldly. And as for the tomb of Can Grande—“Dog the Great,” as Byron translated him in “The Age of Bronze,”—which is perched over the church door and soars up into a turret, it was—on the day I first saw it—provided with a long and dirty ladder for repairing purposes. So that I say Father Time—if he be a poor curator—is at least a fellow of infinite jest. One of his jests is to hound the Magnificent dead from pillar to post, from church to monastery, from crypt to chapel. In the grave there is rest? Fiddle-faddle! No body is safe from these chances of mortality. Stone walls do not a coffin make, nor iron bars a tomb. Call no body happy until it is burnt. After five centuries of rest Matilda of Tuscany was carried off from Mantua in a sort of mortuary elopement by her great admirer, Pope Urban VIII, and hidden away in the castle of S. Angelo, till she could be inhumed in St. Peter’s, and it was only the pride of Spoleto that saved Lippo Lippi from being sold to Florence. Napoleon, in suppressing churches, disestablished many an ancient corpse, and the pious families of Verona hastened to transport their sarcophagi to the church of S. Zeno on the outskirts. Hither must ride the dead Cavalli with their equine scutcheons, flying before the World-Conqueror on his white horse.

Dismemberment, too, befalls tombs at the hands of the merry jester. The friars of S. Maria delle Grazie who owed so much to the great Sforza Duke, broke up his monument and offered his effigy and his wife’s for sale. The more loyal Carthusians snapped up Cristoforo Solari’s beautiful sculptures for the beggarly price of thirty-eight ducats, and Lodovico and Beatrice in marble must leave their dust and make a last journey to Pavia. A last journey? _Chi sa?_

“Iterum et iterum translatis,” sighs the monument over the bones of Cino in Pistoja Cathedral, and who knows that the “pax tandem ossibus” is more than a sanguine aspiration? Cino was not the only Italian poet to be thus “translated,” though neither Petrarch nor Ariosto was “translated” so often. Petrarch indeed was rather pirated than “translated,” for his right arm was stolen from his sepulchre at Arquà for the Florentines, and the rest of him is now supposed to be in Madrid—a town which also holds that monarch of sanctity, Francesco di Borja, likewise minus an arm, for the Gesù of Rome kept back that precious morsel of the Duke who had entered the kingdom of heaven by the rare gate of abdication.