On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2)

The structure, first of wool and cotton, of fur, and hair, and down, of hemp, flax, and silk:—microscope permissible if any cause can be shown why wool is soft, and fur fine, and cotton downy, and down downier; and how a flax fiber differs from a dandelion stalk, and how the substance of a mulberry leaf can become velvet for Queen Victoria's crown, and clothing of purple for the housewife of Solomon.

Then the phase of its dyeing. What azures, and emeralds, and Tyrians scarlets can be got into fibers of thread.

214. Then the phase of its spinning. The mystery of that divine spiral, from finest to firmest, which renders lace possible at Valenciennes—anchorage possible, after Trafalgar—if Hardy had but done as he was bid.

Then the mystery of weaving. The eternal harmony of warp and woof, of all manner of knotting, knitting, and reticulation, the art which makes garment possible, woven from the top throughout, draughts of fishes possible, miraculous enough in any pilchard or herring shoal, gathered into companionable catchableness;—which makes, in fine, so many Nations possible, and Saxon and Norman beyond the rest.

215. And finally, the accomplished phase of needlework, the Acu Tetigisti of all time, which does, indeed, practically exhibit what mediæval theologists vainly tried to conclude inductively—How many angels can stand on a needle-point. To show the essential nature of a stitch—drawing the separate into the inseparable, from the lowly work of duly restricted sutor, and modestly installed cobbler, to the needle-Scripture of Matilda, the Queen.

All the acicular Art of Nations, savage and civilized, from Lapland boot, letting in no snow-water—to Turkey cushion bossed with pearl—to valance of Venice gold in needlework -to the counterpanes and samplers of our own lovely ancestresses, imitable, perhaps, once more, with good help from Whiteland's College—and Girton.

216. It was but yesterday, my own womankind were in much wholesome and sweet excitement delightful to behold, in the practice of some new device of remedy for rents (to think how much of evil there is in the two senses of that four-lettered word! as in the two methods of intonation of its synonym tear!) whereby they might be daintily effaced, and with a newness which would never make them worse. The process began beautifully, even to my uninformed eyes, in the likeness of herring-bone masonry, crimson on white, but it seemed to me marvelous that anything should yet be discoverable in needle process, and that of so utilitarian character.

All that is reasonable, I say of such work is to be in our first museum room. All that Athena and Penelope would approve. Nothing that vanity has invented for change, or folly loved for costliness; but all that can bring honest pride into homely life, and give security to health—and honor to beauty.

    J. Ruskin.

MINOR WRITINGS UPON ART

A. PARLIAMENTARY EVIDENCE

NATIONAL GALLERY SITE COMMISSION 1857

SELECT COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS 1860

THE ROYAL ACADEMY COMMISSION 1863

B. LETTERS ON A MUSEUM OR PICTURE GALLERY

(Art Journal, June and August, 1880.)

THE CAVALLI MONUMENTS IN THE CHURCH OF ST. ANASTASIA, VERONA.[9 - Published by the Arundel Society (1872), together with a chromo-lithograph after a drawing by Herr Gnauth.—Ed.]

217. The tomb of Federigo and Nicola Cavalli is in the southernmost chapel of the five which form the east end of the church of St. Anastasia at Verona.

The traveler in Italy is so often called upon to admire what he cannot enjoy, that it must relieve the mind of any reader intending to visit Verona to be assured that this church deserves nothing but extraordinary praise; it has, however, some characters which a quarter of an hour's attention will make both interesting and instructive, and which I will note briefly before giving an account of the Cavalli chapel. This church "would, if the font were finished, probably be the most perfect specimen in existence of the style to which it belongs," says a critic quoted in "Murray's Guide." The conjecture is a bold one, for the font is not only unfinished, and for the most part a black mass of ragged brickwork, but the portion pretending to completion is in three styles; approaches excellence only in one of them; and in that the success is limited to the sides of the single entrance door. The flanks and vaults of this porch, indeed, deserve our almost unqualified admiration for their beautiful polychrome masonry. They are built of large masses of green serpentine alternating with red and white marble, and the joints are so delicate and firm that a casual spectator might pass the gate with contempt, thinking the stone was painted.

218. The capitals on these two sides, the carved central shaft, and the horizontal lintel of this door are also excellent examples of Veronese thirteenth century sculpture, and have merits of a high order, but of which the general observer cannot be cognizant. I do not mean, in saying this, to extol them greatly; the best art is pleasing to all, and its virtue, or a portion of its virtue, instantly manifest. But there are some good qualities in every earnest work which can only be ascertained by attention; and in saying that a casual observer cannot see the good qualities in early Veronese sculpture, I mean that it possesses none but these, nor of these many.

219. Yet it is worth a minute's delay to observe how much the sculpture has counted on attention. In later work, figures of the size of life, or multitudinous small ones, please, if they do not interest, the spectator who can spare them a momentary glance. But all the figures on this door are diminutive, and project so slightly from the stone as scarcely to catch the eye; there are none in the sides and none in the vault of the gate, and it is only by deliberate examination that we find the faith which is to be preached in the church, and the honor of its preacher, conclusively engraved on the lintel and door-post. The spiral flutings of the central shaft are uninterrupted, so as to form a slight recess for the figure of St. Dominic, with, I believe, St. Peter Martyr and St. Thomas Aquinas, one on each side with the symbols of the sun and moon. At the end of the lintel, on the left, is St. Anastasia; on the right, St. Catherine (of Siena); in the center, on the projecting capital, the Madonna; and on the lintel, the story of Christ, in the four passages of the Annunciation, Nativity, Crucifixion, and Resurrection.

220. This is the only part of the front of the church which is certainly part of the first structure in 1260. The two statues of St. Anastasia and St. Catherine are so roughly joined to the lateral capitals as to induce a suspicion that even these latter and the beautiful polychrome vault are of later work, not, however, later than 1300. The two pointed arches which divide the tympanum are assuredly subsequent, and the fresco which occupies it is a bad work of the end of the fourteenth century; and the marble frieze and foundations of the front are at least not earlier than 1426.

Of this portion of the building the foundation is noble, and its color beautifully disposed, but the sculpture of the paneling is poor, and of no interest or value.

221. On entering the church, and turning immediately to the left, there will be seen on the inner side of the external wall a tomb under a boldly trefoiled canopy. It is a sarcophagus with a recumbent figure on it, which is the only work of art in the church deserving serious attention. It is the tomb of Gerard Bolderius "sui temporis physicorum principi," says his epitaph,[10 - D.M.Gerardo Bolderiosui temporisPhysicorum PrincipiFranciscus etMatthaeus NepotesP.P.] not, as far as I can discover, untruly. On the front of the sarcophagus is the semi-figure of Christ rising from the tomb, used generally at the period for the type of resurrection, between the Virgin and St. John; and two shields, bearing, one the fleur-de-lys, the other an eagle. The recumbent figure is entirely simple and right in treatment, sculptured without ostentation of skill or exaggeration of sentiment, by a true artist, who endeavors only to give the dead due honor, and his own art subordinate and modest scope.

This monument, being the best in St. Anastasia, is, by the usual spite of fortune, placed where it is quite invisible except on bright days. On the opposite side of the church, the first monument on the right, well lighted by the tall western window, should be looked at next to the physician's; for as that is the best, this is essentially the worst, piece of sculptured art in the building; a series of academy studies in marble, well executed, but without either taste or invention, and necessarily without meaning, the monument having been erected to a person whose only claim to one was his having stolen money enough to pay for it before he died. It is one of the first pieces extant of entirely mechanical art workmanship, done for money; and the perfection of its details may justify me in directing special attention to it.

222. There are no other monuments, still less pictures, in the body of the church deserving notice. The general effect of the interior is impressive, owing partly to the boldness and simplicity of the pillars which sustain the roof; partly to the darkness which involves them: these Dominican churches being, in fact, little more than vast halls for preaching in, and depending little on decoration, and not at all on light. But the sublimity of shadow soon fails when it has nothing interesting to shade; and the chapel or monuments which, opposite each interval between the pillars, fill the sides of the aisles, possess no interest except in their arabesques of cinque-cento sculpture, of which far better examples may be seen elsewhere; while the differences in their ages, styles, and purposes hinder them from attaining any unity of decorative effect, and break the unity of the church almost as fatally, though not as ignobly, as the incoherent fillings of the aisles at Westminster. The Cavalli chapel itself, though well deserving the illustration which the Arundel Society has bestowed upon it, is filled with a medley of tombs and frescoes of different dates, partly superseding, none illustrating, each other, and instructive mainly as showing the unfortunate results of freedom and "private enterprise" in matters of art, as compared with the submission to the design of one ruling mind which is the glory of all the chapels in Italy where the art is entirely noble.

223. Instructive, thus, at least, even if seen hastily; much better teaching may be had even from the unharmonious work, if we give time and thought to it. The upper fresco on the north wall, representing the Baptism of Christ, has no beauty, and little merit as art; yet the manner of its demerit is interesting. St. John kneels to baptize. This variation from the received treatment, in which he stands above the Christ, is enough in itself to show that the poor Veronese painter had some intelligence of his subject; and the quaint and haggard figure, grim-featured, with its black hair rising in separate locks like a crown of thorns, is a curious intermediate type between the grotesque conception which we find in earlier art (or, for instance, on the coins of Florence) and the beautiful, yet always melancholy and severe figures of St. John painted by Cima da Conegliano at Venice. With this stern figure, in raiment of camel's hair, compare the Magdalen in the frescoes at the side of the altar, who is veiled from head to foot with her own, and sustained by six angels, being the type of repentance from the passions, as St. John of resistance to them. Both symbols are, to us, to say the very least, without charm, and to very few without offense; yet consider how much nobler the temper of the people must have been who could take pleasure in art so gloomy and unadorned, than that of the populace of to-day, which must be caught with bright colors and excited by popular sentiment.

224. Both these frescoes, with the others on the north wall of the chapel, and Madonna between four saints on the south side, by the Cavalli tomb, are evidently of fourteenth century work, none of it good, but characteristic; and the last-named work (seen in the plate) is so graceful as to be quite worth some separate illustration. But the one above it is earlier, and of considerable historical interest. It was discovered with the other paintings surrounding the tomb, about the year 1838, when Persico published his work, "Verona, e la sua Provincia," in which he says (p. 13), "levatane l'antica incrostatura, tornarono a vita novella."

It would have been more serviceable to us if we could have known the date of the rough cast, than of its removal; the period of entire contempt for ancient art being a subject of much interest in the ecclesiastical history of Italy. But the tomb itself was an incrustation, having been raised with much rudeness and carelessness amidst the earlier art which recorded the first rise of the Cavalli family.

225. It will be seen by reference to the plate that the frescoes round the tomb have no symmetrical relation to it. They are all of earlier date, and by better artists. The tomb itself is roughly carved, and coarsely painted, by men who were not trying to do their best, and could not have done anything very well, even if they had tried: it is an entirely commonplace and dull work, though of a good school, and has been raised against the highest fresco with a strange disregard of the merit of the work itself, and of its historical value to the family. This fresco is attributable by Persico to Giotto, but is, I believe, nothing more than an interesting example of the earnest work of his time, and has no quality on which I care to enlarge; nor is it ascertainable who the three knights are whom it commemorates, unless some evidence be found of the date of the painting, and there is, yet, none but that of its manner. But they are all three Cavallis, and I believe them to represent the three first founders of the family, Giovanni, "che fioriva intorno al 1274," his son Nicola (1297), and grandson Federigo, who was Podesta of Vicenza under the Scaligers in 1331, and by whom I suppose the fresco to have been commanded. The Cavallis came first from Germany into the service of the Visconti of Milan, as condottieri, thence passing into the service of the Scaligers. Whether I am right in this conjecture or not, we have, at all events, record in this chapel of seven knights of the family, of whom two are named on the sarcophagus, of which the inscription (on the projecting ledge under the recumbent figure) is:—

S. (Sepulchrum) nobilis et egregii viri Federici et egregii et strenui viri domini Nicolai de Cavalis suorunique heredum, qui spiritum redidit astris Ano Dni MCCCLXXXX.

Of which, I think, the force may be best given thus in modern terms:—

"The tomb of the noble and distinguished Herr Frederic, and of the distinguished and energetic Herr the Lord Nicholas of the house of the Horse, and of their heirs, who gave back his soul to the stars in the year of our Lord 1390."

226. This Frederic and Nicolas Cavalli were the brothers of the Jacopo Cavalli who is buried at Venice, and who, by a singular fatality, was enrolled among the Venetian nobles of the senate in the year in which his brother died at Verona (for I assume the "spiritum redidit" to be said of the first-named brother). Jacopo married Constance della Scala, of Verona, and had five sons, of whom one, Giorgio, Conte di Schio, plotted, after the fall of the Scaligers, for their restoration to power in Verona, and was exiled, by decree of the Council of Ten, to Candia, where he died. From another son, Conrad, are descended the Cavallis of Venice, whose palace has been the principal material from which recent searchers for the picturesque in Venice compose pictures of the Grand Canal. It forms the square mass of architecture on the left, in the continually repeated view of the Church of the Salute seen from the steps of the Academy.

The genealogy of the family, from the thirteenth century, when they first appeared in Italy, to the founder of this Venetian lordship, had better be set before the reader in one view.[11 - I am indebted for this genealogy to the research and to the courtesy of Mr. J. Stefani. The help given me by other Venetian friends, especially Mr. Rawdon Brown, dates from many years back in matters of this kind.]

Founds Venetian family.

227. Now, as above stated, I believe that the fresco of the three knights was commanded by the Podesta of Vicenza, on his receiving that authority from the Scaligers in 1331, and that it represents Giovanni, Nicola, and himself; while the tomb of Federigo and Nicola would be ordered by the Venetian Cavallis, and completed without much care for the record of the rise of the family at Verona.

Whether my identification of the figures seen kneeling in the fresco be correct or not, the representation of these three Cavalli knights to the Madonna, each interceded for by his patron saint, will be found to receive a peculiar significance if the reader care to review the circumstances influencing the relation of the German chivalry to the power of the Church in the very year when Giovanni Cavalli entered the ranks of the Visconti.

228. For the three preceding centuries, Milan, the oldest archbishopric of Lombardy, had been the central point at which the collision between the secular and ecclesiastical power took place in Europe. The Guelph and Ghibelline naturally met and warred throughout the plain of Lombardy; but the intense civic stubbornness and courage of the Milanese population formed a kind of rock in their tide-way, where the quarrel of burgher with noble confused itself with, embittered, and brought again and again to trial by battle, that of pope with emperor. In 1035 their warrior archbishop, heading their revolt against Conrad of Franconia, organized the first disciplined resistance of foot-soldiers to cavalry by his invention and decoration of the Carroccio; and the contest was only closed, after the rebuilding of the walls of ruined Milan, by the wandering of Barbarossa, his army scattered, through the maize fields, which the traveler now listlessly crosses at speed in the train between Milan and Arona, little noting the name of the small station, "Legnano," where the fortune of the Lombard republic finally prevailed. But it was only by the death of Frederick II. that the supremacy of the Church was secured; and when Innocent IV., who had written, on hearing of that death, to his Sicilian clergy, in words of blasphemous exultation, entered Milan, on his journey from Lyons to Perugia, the road, for ten miles before he reached the gates, was lined by the entire population of the city, drawn forth in enthusiastic welcome; as they had invented a sacred car for the advance of their standard in battle, they invented some similar honor for the head of their Church as the harbinger of peace: under a canopy of silk, borne by the first gentlemen of Milan, the Pope received the hosannas of a people who had driven into shameful flight their Caesar-king; and it is not uninteresting for the English traveler to remember, as he walks through the vast arcades of shops, in the form of a cross, by which the Milanese of to-day express their triumph in liberation from Teutonic rule, that the "Baldacchino" of all mediæval religious ceremony owed its origin to the taste of the milliners of Milan, as the safety of the best knights in European battle rested on the faithful craftsmanship of her armorers.

229. But at the date when the Cavalli entered the service of the great Milanese family, the state of parties within the walls had singularly changed. Three years previously (1271) Charles of Anjou had drawn together the remnants of the army of his dead brother, had confiscated to his own use the goods of the crusading knights whose vessels had been wrecked on the coast of Sicily, and called the pontifical court to Viterbo, to elect a pope who might confirm his dominion over the kingdoms of Sicily and Jerusalem.

On the deliberations of the Cardinals at Viterbo depended the fates of Italy and the Northern Empire. They chose Tebaldo Visconti, then a monk in pilgrimage at Jerusalem. But, before that election was accomplished, one of the candidates for the Northern Empire had involuntarily withdrawn his claim; Guy de Montfort had murdered, at the altar foot, the English Count of Cornwall, to avenge his father, Simon de Montfort, killed at Evesham. The death of the English king of the Romans left the throne of Germany vacant. Tebaldo had returned from Jerusalem with no personal ambition, but having at heart only the restoration of Greece to Europe, and the preaching of a new crusade in Syria. A general council was convoked by him at Lyons, with this object; but before anything could be accomplished in the conclave, it was necessary to balance the overwhelming power of Charles of Anjou, and the Visconti (Gregory X.) ratified, in 1273, the election of Rudolph of Hapsburg.

230. But Charles of Anjou owed his throne, in reality, to the assistance of the Milanese. Their popular leader, Napoleone della Torre, had facilitated his passage through Lombardy, which otherwise must have been arrested by the Ghibelline states; and in the year in which the Visconti pope had appointed the council at Lyons, the Visconti archbishop of Milan was heading the exiled nobles in vain attempts to recover their supremacy over the popular party. The new Emperor Rudolph not only sent a representative to the council, but a German contingent to aid the exiled archbishop. The popular leader was defeated, and confined in an iron cage, in the year 1274, and the first entrance of the Cavalli into the Italian armies is thus contemporary with the conclusive triumph of the northern monarchic over the republican power, or, more literally, of the wandering rider, Eques, or Ritter, living by pillage, over the sedentary burgher, living by art, and hale peasant, living by labor. The essential nature of the struggle is curiously indicated in relation to this monument by the two facts that the revolt of the Milanese burghers, headed by their archbishop, began by a gentleman's killing an importunate creditor, and that, at Venice, the principal circumstance recorded of Jacopo Cavalli (see my notice of his tomb in the "Stones of Venice," Vol. III. ch. ii. § 69) is his refusal to assault Feltre, because the senate would not grant him the pillage of the town. The reader may follow out, according to his disposition, what thoughts the fresco of the three kneeling knights, each with his helmet-crest, in the shape of a horse's head, thrown back from his shoulders, may suggest to him on review of these passages of history: one thought only I must guard him against, strictly; namely, that a condottiere's religion must necessarily have been false or hypocritical. The folly of nations is in nothing more manifest than in their placid reconciliation of noble creeds with base practices. But the reconciliation, in the fourteenth as in the nineteenth century, was usually foolish only, not insincere.

VERONA AND ITS RIVERS.[12 - Report (with extracts) of a paper entitled "A Talk respecting Verona and its Rivers," read by Mr. Ruskin at the Weekly Evening Meeting of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Feb. 4th, 1870. See Proceedings of the Royal Institution, vol. vi., p. 55.—Ed.]

231. The discourse began with a description of the scenery of the eastern approach to Verona, with special remarks upon its magnificent fortifications, consisting of a steep ditch, some thirty feet deep by sixty or eighty wide, cut out of the solid rock, and the precipice-like wall above, with towers crested with forked battlements set along it at due intervals. The rock is a soft and crumbling limestone, containing "fossil creatures still so like the creatures they were once, that there it first occurred to the human brain to imagine that the buried shapes were not mockeries of life, but had indeed once lived; and, under those white banks by the roadside, was born, like a poor Italian gypsy, the modern science of geology." … "The wall was chiefly built, the moat entirely excavated, by Can Grande della Scala; and it represents typically the form, of defense which rendered it possible for the life and the arts of citizens to be preserved and practiced in an age of habitual war. Not only so, but it is the wall of the actual city which headed the great Lombard league, which was the beginner of personal and independent power in the Italian nation, and the first banner-bearer, therefore, of all that has been vitally independent in religion and in art throughout the entire Christian world to this day." At the upper angle of the wall, looking down the northern descent, is seen a great round tower at the foot of it, not forked in battlements, but with embrasures for guns. "The battlemented wall was the cradle of civic life. That low circular tower is the cradle of modern war and of all its desolation. It is the first European tower for artillery; the beginning of fortification against gunpowder—the beginning, that is to say, of the end of all fortification."

232. After noticing the beautiful vegetation of the district, Mr. Ruskin described the view from the promontory or spur, about ten miles long, of which the last rock dies into the plain at the eastern gate of Verona. "This promontory," he said, "is one of the sides of the great gate out of Germany into Italy, through which the Goths always entered, cloven up to Innspruck by the Inn, and down to Verona by the Adige. And by this gate not only the Gothic armies came, but after the Italian nation is formed, the current of northern life enters still into its heart through the mountain artery, as constantly and strongly as the cold waves of the Adige itself." … "The rock of this promontory hardens as we trace it back to the Alps, first into a limestone having knots of splendid brown jasper in it as our chalk has flints, and in a few miles more into true marble, colored by iron into a glowing orange or pale warm red—the peach-blossom marble, of which Verona is chiefly built—and then as you advance farther into the hills into variegated marbles very rich and grotesque in their veinings."

233. After dilating on the magnificent landscape viewed from the top of this promontory, embracing the blue plain of Lombardy and its cities" Mr. Ruskin said:—

"I do not think that there is any other rock in all the world from which the places and monuments of so complex and deep a fragment of the history of its ages can be visible as from this piece of crag with its blue and prickly weeds. For you have thus beneath you at once the birthplaces of Virgil and of Livy—the homes of Dante and Petrarch, and the source of the most sweet and pathetic inspiration to your own Shakespeare—the spot where the civilization of the Gothic kingdoms was founded on the throne of Theodoric; and there whatever was strongest in the Italian race redeemed itself into life by its league against Barbarossa; the beginning of the revival of natural science and medicine in the schools of Padua; the center of Italian chivalry, in the power of the Scaligers; of Italian cruelty, in that of Ezzelin; and, lastly, the birthplace of the highest art; for among those hills, or by this very Adige bank, were born Mantegna, Titian, Correggio, and Veronese."

234. Mr. Ruskin then referred to a series of drawings and photographs taken at Verona by himself and his assistants, Mr. Burgess and Mr. Bunney, which he had divided into three series, and of which he had furnished a number of printed catalogues illustrated with notes.[13 - This catalogue (London: Queen Street Printing-Office, 1870) is printed below, p. 109, § 242 seqq.—Ed.]

I. "Lombard, extending to the end of the twelfth century, being the expression of the introduction of Christianity into barbaric minds; Christianization.

II. "The Gothic period. Dante's time, from 1200 to 1400 (Dante beginning his poem exactly in the midst of it, in 1300); the period of vital Christianity, and of the development of the laws of chivalry and forms of imagination which are founded on Christianity.