Part 16

Duke Frederick began the palace at Urbino in 1454, when he was still only Count. The architect was Luziano of Lauranna, a Dalmatian, and the beautiful white limestone, hard as marble, used in the construction, was brought from the Dalmatian coast. This stone, like the Istrian stone of Venetian buildings, takes and retains the chisel mark with wonderful precision. It looks as though, when fresh, it must have had the pliancy of clay, so delicately are the finest curves in scroll or foliage scooped from its substance. And yet it preserves each cusp and angle of the most elaborate pattern with the crispness and the sharpness of a crystal. When wrought by a clever craftsman, its surface has neither the waxiness of the Parian, nor the brittle edge of Carrara marble; and it resists weather better than marble of the choicest quality. This may be observed in many monuments of Venice, where the stone has been long exposed to sea-air. These qualities of the Dalmatian limestone, no less than its agreeable creamy hue and smooth dull polish, adapt it to decoration in dull relief. The most attractive details in the palace at Urbino are friezes carved of this material in choice designs of early Renaissance dignity and grace. One chimney-piece in the Sala degli Angeli deserves special comment. A frieze of dancing Cupids, with gilt hair and wings, their naked bodies left white on a ground of ultramarine, is supported by broad flat pilasters. These are engraved with children holding pots of flowers; roses on one side, carnations on the other. Above the frieze another pair of angels, one at each end, hold lighted torches; and the pyramidal cap of the chimney is carved with two more, flying, and supporting the eagle of the Montefeltri on a raised medallion. Throughout the palace we notice emblems appropriate to the Houses of Montefeltro and Della Rovere: their arms, three golden bends upon a field of azure: the Imperial eagle, granted when Montefeltro was made a fief of the Empire: The Garter of England, worn by the Dukes Federigo and Guidobaldo: The ermine of Naples: the _ventosa_, or cupping-glass, adopted for a private badge by Frederick: the golden oak-tree on an azure field of Della Rovere: the palm-tree, bent beneath a block of stone, with its accompanying motto, _Inclinata Resurgam_: the cipher, FE DX. Profile medallions of Federigo and Guidobaldo, wrought in the lowest possible relief, adorn the staircases. Round the great courtyard runs a frieze of military engines and ensigns, trophies, machines, and implements of war, alluding to Duke Frederick’s profession of Condottiere. The doorways are enriched with scrolls of heavy-headed flowers, acanthus foliage, honey-suckles, ivy-berries, birds and boys and sphinxes, in all the riot of Renaissance fancy.

This profusion of sculptured _rilievo_ is nearly all that remains to show how rich the palace was in things of beauty. Castiglione, writing in the reign of Guidobaldo, says that “in the opinion of many it is the fairest to be found in Italy; and the Duke filled it so well with all things fitting its magnificence, that it seemed less like a palace than a city. Not only did he collect articles of common use, vessels of silver, the trappings for chambers of rare cloths of gold and silk, and such-like furniture, but he added multitudes of bronze and marble statues, exquisite pictures, and instruments of music of all sorts. There was nothing but was of the finest and most excellent quality to be seen there. Moreover, he gathered together at a vast cost a large number of the best and rarest books on Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, all of which he adorned with gold and silver, esteeming them the chiefest treasure of his spacious palace.” When Cesare Borgia entered Urbino as conqueror in 1502, he is said to have carried off loot to the value of 150,000 ducats, or perhaps about a quarter of a million sterling.

The impression left upon the mind after traversing this palace in its length and breadth is one of weariness and disappointment. How shall we reconstruct the long-past life which filled its rooms with sound, the splendour of its pageants, the thrill of tragedies enacted here? It is not difficult to crowd its doors and vacant spaces with liveried servants, slim pages in tight hose, whose well-combed hair escapes from tiny caps upon their silken shoulders. We may even replace the tapestries of Troy which hung one hall, and build again the sideboards with their embossed gilded plate. But are these chambers really those where Emilia Pia held debate on love with Bembo and Castiglione; where Bibbiena’s witticisms and Fra Serafino’s pranks raised smiles on courtly lips; where Bernardo Accolti, “the Unique,” declaimed his verses to applauding crowds? Is it possible that into yonder hall, where now the lion of S. Mark looks down alone on staring desolation, strode the Borgia in all his panoply of war, a gilded glittering dragon, and from the daïs tore the Montefeltri’s throne, and from the arras stripped their ensigns, replacing those with his own Bull and Valentinus Dux? Here Tasso tuned his lyre for Francesco Maria’s wedding-feast and read _Aminta_ to Lucrezia d’Este. Here Guidobaldo listened to the jests and whispered scandals of the Aretine. Here Titian set his easel up to paint; here the boy Raphael, cap in hand, took, signed and sealed credentials from his Duchess to the Gonfalonier of Florence. Somewhere in these huge chambers, the courtiers sat before a torch-lit stage, when Bibbiena’s _Calandria_ and Castiglione’s _Tirsi_, with their miracles of masques and mummers, whiled the night away. Somewhere, we know not where, Guiliano de’Medici made love in these bare rooms to that mysterious mother of ill-fated Cardinal Ippolito; somewhere, in some darker nook, the bastard Alessandro sprang to his strange-fortuned life of tyranny and license, which Brutus-Lorenzino cut short with a traitor’s poignard-thrust in Via Larga. How many men, illustrious for arts and letters, memorable by their virtues or their crimes, have trod these silent corridors, from the great Pope Julius down to James III., self-titled King of England, who tarried here with Clementina Sobieski through some twelve months of his ex-royal exile! The memories of all this folk, flown guests and masters of the still-abiding palace-chambers, haunt us as we hurry through. They are but filmy shadows. We cannot grasp them, localize them, people surrounding emptiness with more than withering cobweb forms.

It is easier to conjure up the past of this great palace, strolling round it in free air and twilight; perhaps because the landscape and the life still moving on the city streets bring its exterior into harmony with real existence. The southern façade, with its vaulted balconies and flanking towers, takes the fancy, fascinates the eye, and lends itself as a fit stage for puppets of the musing mind. Once more imagination plants trim orange-trees in giant jars of Gubbio ware upon the pavement where the garden of the Duchess lay--the pavement paced in these bad days by convicts in grey canvas jackets--that pavement where Monsignor Bembo courted “dear dead women” with Platonic phrase, smothering the Menta of his natural man in lettuce culled from Academe and thyme of Mount Hymettus. In yonder loggia, lifted above the garden and the court, two lovers are in earnest converse. They lean beneath the coffered arch, against the marble of the balustrade, he fingering his dagger under the dark velvet doublet, she playing with a clove carnation, deep as her own shame. The man is Giannandrea, broad-shouldered bravo of Verona, Duke Guidobaldo’s favourite and carpet-count. The lady is Madonna Maria, daughter of Rome’s Prefect, widow of Venanzio Verano, whom the Borgia strangled. On their discourse a tale will hang of a woman’s frailty and a man’s boldness--Camerino’s Duchess yielding to a low-born suitor’s stalwart charms. And more will follow, when that lady’s brother, furious Francesco Maria della Rovere, shall stab the bravo in torch-litten palace-rooms with twenty poignard strokes ’twixt waist and throat, and their Pandarus shall be sent down to his account by a varlet’s _coltellata_ through the midriff. Imagination shifts the scene, and shows in that same loggia Rome’s warlike Pope, attended by his cardinals and all Urbino’s chivalry. The snowy beard of Julius flows down upon his breast, where jewels clasp the crimson mantle, as in Raphael’s picture. His eyes are bright with wine; for he has come to gaze on sunset from the banquet-chamber and to watch the line of lamps which soon will leap along that palace cornice in his honour. Behind him lies Bologna humbled. The Pope returns, a conqueror to Rome. Yet once again imagination is at work. A gaunt, bold man, close-habited in Spanish black, his spare, fine features carved in purest ivory, leans from that balcony. Gazing with hollow eyes, he tracks the swallows in their flight, and notes that winter is at hand. This is the last Duke of Urbino, Francesco Maria II., he whose young wife deserted him, who made for himself alone a hermit-pedant’s round of petty cares and niggard avarice and mean brained superstition. He drew a second consort from the convent, and raised up seed unto his line by forethought, but beheld his princeling fade untimely in the bloom of boyhood. Nothing is left but solitude. To the mortmain of the Church reverts Urbino’s lordship, and even now he meditates the terms of devolution. Jesuits cluster in the rooms behind, with comfort for the ducal soul and calculations for the interests of Holy See.

Filippo Visconti, with a smile on his handsome face, is waiting for us at the inn. His horses sleek, well-fed, and rested, toss their heads impatiently. We take our seats in the carriage, open wide beneath a sparkling sky, whirl past the palace and its ghost-like recollections, and are half-way on the road to Fossombrone in a cloud of dust and whir of wheels before we think of looking back to greet Urbino. There is just time. The last decisive turning lies in front. We stand bareheaded to salute the grey mass of buildings ridged along the sky. Then the open road invites us with its varied scenery and movement.

ALNWICK CASTLE

CUTHBERT BEDE

Alnwick is built on the summit of the southern bank of the Aln, on a plateau of five acres of ground, walled round with strong fortifications, defended by sixteen towers, and divided into two large courtyards, with the Keep in the midst. The Keep is polygonal in form, faced by nine towers, and is built round a third, or inner court. We have the northern side of the second courtyard, with the Round (or Record) Tower; next to that is the abutment, called the Ravine Tower, in whose recess is the stone seat called “Hotspur’s Chair,” and between which and the Record Tower is “the Bloody Gap,”--a name given to that part of the curtain-wall from a breach being there made by the Scots during some Border war, in a vain effort to capture the castle. Three hundred Scots are said to have fallen there, and the extent of “the Bloody Gap” is plainly to be discerned from the variations in the masonry. We then come to the Constable’s Tower, and the Postern Tower, or Sally Port, and then to the Keep itself, which was protected by a low curtain-wall, carried in a semicircle to the Armourer’s Tower and the Falconer’s Tower. These are the two towers lately swept away (together with their curtain-wall) in order to accommodate the arrangements consequent upon the erection of the Prudhoe Tower, for which also the two north-western round towers of the Keep were also destroyed. One of these towers contains the ancient banqueting-hall of the Percies; and the successive sacrifice of these four towers with their many interesting evidences of feudal times, in order that the modern Italian interior of the castle might not be interfered with, has raised a storm of discussion among such distinguished architects as Scott, Cockerell, Donaldson, Godwin, Pocock, Ferguson, and Salvin, under whom the recently completed works have been carried out, chiefly from the designs of Commendatore Canina. These works have been hailed with applause, and hailed upon with disapprobation. It is an example of one of those Sir Roger de Coverley cases, where much may be said on both sides. In the last six years these works have magically transformed the interior of the feudal castle of the chivalrous Earls of Northumberland (much debased, it is true, by Batty-Langley and Strawberry-Hill Gothic) into a Roman palazzo, with the most gorgeous and costly decorations of the Renaissance. For six years have two hundred workmen been employed in these alterations; much has been done at Rome, and much on the spot, especially by the twenty-seven native wood-carvers. There are no shams in the decorations; the ceilings and cornices are carved, and not cast or moulded: the walnut and maple-woods are what they pretend to be; and, to such an extent has this Ruskinism “conscientiousness of art” been carried that, in this age of _papier-mâché_, _carton-pierre_, gutta-percha, and the like, there are several _miles_ of the egg-ornament laboriously carved by hand, while a door panel has occupied its carver four months, and a shutter-panel, a twelvemonth. This modern sumptuousness of decoration is a remarkable contrast to that peculiar species of economy imposed upon the proud Percies of three centuries back, when Clarkson’s report (in 1567) advised the taking out of the glass windows whenever my lord and his friends were not there, and laying them up in safety until their return, justifying this economical act by the “decaye and waste” of the windows “throwe extreme winds.”

[Illustration: ALNWICK CASTLE, ENGLAND.]

Next to these now destroyed Armourer’s and Falconer’s Towers, comes the Abbot’s Tower (the large corner one), where the abbot had apartments, whenever choice or necessity caused him to leave his abbey, snugly situated down in the wooded valley by the river-side. Beyond this is seen the West Garret, and the outer of “Utter Ward,” with its square and octagonal towers, and its advanced barbican, forming a picturesque mass of great size and strength, and a noble entrance to a noble castle.

Walking along the parapets from the Round Tower, we pass East Garret. Beginning at the left hand, we first come to the Guard House, and the Auditor’s Tower, which flank the southern gate. The south wall is then continued to the Middle Ward, which, as being the second great entrance to the castle, is a building of great size and strength. Over it was the chapel, approached from the library,--a noble room that occupied the greater part of this block of building--but which has now been converted into the private apartments of the Duke and Duchess. This block of building divides the two courtyards, and is terminated in the Keep, whose two semi-octagonal towers were added, in advance, to the old square Norman tower, by the second Lord Percy, about the year 1350.

A series of escutcheons on the upper part of the towers helps us to the date of their erection; and though we know not their architect, we have full proof that he did his work well, for the towers have not needed repairs up to this day, and even a rector’s legal adviser would experience some difficulty in awarding dilapidations. The moat and drawbridge that guarded the entrance to the Keep have long since passed away; but, at the time of my visit, a field-piece, backed up by a pyramidal pile of cannon balls, did harmless duty on either side of the gateway, and playfully menaced the Auditor’s Tower and the Guard House on the opposite side of the courtyard.

The ground-floor of the octagonal towers of the Keep is lighted by long arrow slits that admit a thin wedge of light to the wine-cellar, on the left hand, and to the chief dungeon, on the right. Each of the lodges at the various gates was furnished with dungeons; but this was the chief dungeon for the State offenders. Its size is eleven feet four inches, by ten feet four inches. In the floor is an iron grating, over a pit; and, a light being lowered into this for the depth of eleven feet, discloses a horrible grave (worthy of Naples and the dark ages) nine feet by eight, into which the wretched prisoner was lowered, or shot like a sack of coals. Let us thank Heaven that such a place can now only be shown as a curiosity. The breakfast-room was over the gateway: we see one of its windows over the mound of the Keep. The windows in the first round tower, and the windows in the flat wall to the left, lighted the old dining-room. The next round tower contained the old drawing-room whose interior shape was that of the ace of clubs. A portion of the low curtain-wall is seen at the base of the Keep mound; and then, immediately on the right is the postern tower, or sally-port. In the lower part was a laboratory; in the upper part, a collection of old armour, and a museum of miscellaneous antiquities; Roman remains; small cannon, used at the first invention of gunpowder; and the old standard bushel of Northumberland, and a chain of several links, that could be bound around an arm, like an iron chain, and was carved out of a solid block of stone.

Let us now pass between those two great octagonal towers, and up the long dark tunnel that will lead us into the heart of the Keep, the third, or inner court; the carriages rattle under that dark archway with a peculiar dull sound, for its pavement is of wood, as is also the pavement of the inner court. It is a polygon, having nine sides of various dimensions, besides other little angles, and it is about a hundred feet across from the one side to the other; and, as it is walled in with high towers on every side, it has somewhat of a well-like aspect. Its two great architectural and antiquarian curiosities are the Saxon (or Norman, if you are a great stickler for this point) mouldings on the inner face of the archway, presenting a great diversity of enrichments--and the old draw-well, for the use of the castle during a siege. This is built in the thickness of the wall, with three pointed arches, surmounted by one large discharging arch, on the point of which is a humorous-looking corbel, supporting the figure of a priest, who is in the attitude of blessing the water. The old axle, with its pegged hand-wheels, still remains, and this interesting draw-well has not been interfered with in the recent alterations, though the aspect of the Inner Court has been altered by the addition of the covered drive.

The limits of this paper do not allow me to say more of Alnwick Castle, or to touch upon the varied events that have befallen it and its owners, from those early Percy days when--

“in the Conqueror’s fleet Lord William shipp’d his powers,”

(as one of the family has told us in his ballad of the _Hermit of Warkworth_) down to those later times of handsome Hugh Smithson, the London apothecary, and his descendants, when, as the American poet Halleck sings in that ballad, which is not so well known (in its entirety) as it deserves to be:--

“The present representatives Of Hotspur and his gentle Kate, Are some half-dozen serving-men, In the drab coats of William Penn--”

who will bow you

“From donjon vault, to turret wall, For ten-and-sixpence sterling.”

I have not space to dwell upon these matters, although there is very much to interest us in the records of the Castle and its owners, and much for salient anecdote and gossip, not only as to the people but also their manners and customs. As, for example, that curious manuscript book, dated 1512, which tells us how the fifth Earl and his family lived; they had fresh meat from Midsummer to Michaelmas, and salt meat for all the rest of the year; how the servants rarely had anything else than salt meat, with few or no vegetables (the roast beef of Old England being a mere Jack-o’-Lantern to them); how my lord and lady had no sheets to their bed, and only washed their tablecloths once a month; how they rose at six, breakfasted at seven on a quart of beer, a quart of wine, two pieces of salt fish, six red herrings, four white herrings, and a dish of sprats--half a chyne of mutton and a chyne of boiled beef being added on flesh days; how they dined at ten and supped at four, and went to bed at nine; how there were only two cooks, with two assistants to provide for a household of two hundred and twenty-three, and how the head cook was so great a monarch that when he gives an order for the making of mustard it bears this preamble: “It seemeth good to us and our council;” how the players at Christmas had twenty-pence for every play, and the rockers in the nursery had as many shillings each year; how, in the winter, only a peck of coals were allowed for each fire, and no fires after Lady-day, except half-fires for my lord and lady, and the nursery. There is all this, and very much more, that is both curious and interesting, but space, and not material, fails me.