The Story of Perugia

by Margaret Symonds; Lina Duff Gordon

S. Domenico.

The gigantic church of S. Domenico towers above the street to the left. It is one of those desolate unfinished Gothic buildings which one finds so often in Italian cities—a great idea dwarfed, not by want of inspiration, but by the need of money to complete it. The church as we now see it is merely a patchwork of the first architect’s original conception. It was begun early in the fourteenth century from designs by Giovanni Pisano, but it was not finished till 1459. The building owed much of its splendour to a young man of Perugia, Cristiano Armanni, who, whilst studying at Bologna, had been converted to the faith by the preaching of S. Domenico. Cristiano returned from the university in the society of a certain S. Niccolò of Calabria, and induced his parents and his friends to give him money for the new church which was about to be built to honour S. Domenico. The magistrates of Perugia contributed a banner to the cause, and they decided that wherever S. Niccolò might place this banner, there the new church should be built. He planted it near the church of S. Stefano, and on that site the present church of S. Domenico now stands. Through the fault of inferior masons, part of the choir and the middle nave fell through in 1614, but Bishop Comitoli determined to rebuild it on the original design. He spent more than 4000 scudi on this generous act and was as ill-rewarded as the most patient builder of card-castles ever was, for the whole of his work collapsed for the second time. It was finally rebuilt on the designs of Carlo Maderno, in 1632. But all this tinkering has left very sorry scars, and even the tower outside has not been spared. It was begun later than the rest of the church and was not finished till about the end of the fourteenth century, when Paul III. at once had the top of it knocked off because he declared that the monks of S. Domenico could, from their campanile, look down and spy upon the building of his fortress!

One or two relics alone remain of the many beautiful bits of art with which the church was rich in early days. Of these the tomb of Pope Benedict XI. is the most fascinating.

Of the life of Benedict there is not much to say; his reign covered a period of only eight months, and perhaps his greatest glory is in his tomb. He was a native of Treviso and belonged to the Dominican order. In 1304 he, like other popes and tired people, came to Perugia in search of the peace he could not find in Rome, and there, in that same year, he died. When in Perugia his mother came to see him—a thing which had only once happened to a pope before.

“Moved by a desire to see her son,” says Mariotti, “Filomarina came to Perugia, and here having had herself nobly dressed by the people of Perugia, as befitted the mother of the Pope, she presented herself to her son. But he, seeing her so beautifully clad, pretended that he did not know her, saying that this was not his mother, because she was a poor old woman and not a lady like this one. And his mother hearing this thing, and being a good and holy woman, took off those rich adornments, and putting on her own again, she returned to the Pope, who recognising her as his mother, received her with all tenderness.”

Pope Benedict was anxious to make peace between the Bianchi and Neri of Florence, and received from some of the heads of the Guelph factions a visit of state in his residence at Perugia. Twelve of them, headed by Corso Donato, came with all their suite behind them: one hundred and fifty horses we hear, and many friends and relatives. No satisfactory agreement was arranged, and shortly afterwards this holy but powerless Pope passed into his rest.

It was supposed that Benedict died of poison, and the older stories run, like the modern one of Zola, on the subject of a basket of poisoned figs.

“In the year of Christ 1304, on the 27th of the month of June,” says Villani, “Pope Benedict died in the city of Perugia, and it was said that he died of poison. As the Pope sat eating at his table a young man came to him dressed and veiled in the guise of a woman, and as a servant of S. Petronilla, with a basin of silver in which were many beautiful figs and flowers which he presented to the Pope in the name of the faithful Abbess of the convent. The Pope received the figs with very great delight, and because he loved them, he made no enquiry concerning them, seeing moreover that they came from a woman, and he ate a great quantity, whereupon he immediately fell ill, and after a few days he died, and was buried with great honours by the Preaching Friars who belonged to the Dominican order at Perugia. Benedict was a good and an honest man, but it is said that because of the envy of certain of his cardinals, they had him poisoned in this fashion.”

Some say that Benedict was poisoned because of the ill-feeling of the Florentines towards him, and others that he died by the jealous hand of Philippe le Bel of France. The historians of the present day deny the fact of poison at all. Be these matters as they may, the fact of the dead pope’s tomb remains—an entrancing bit of human workmanship. It was made by Giovanni Pisano, son of the great Niccola, “who first breathed life, with the breath of genius, into the dead forms of plastic art.” Pope Benedict lies asleep; stretched out quite flat and thin in his exquisitely folded robes; there is a canopy over him with curtains strung across it and two angels have drawn the curtain back to gaze at the figure of the dead man. The columns of the tomb were filled up once with precious mosaics, but during Napoleon’s occupation of Perugia, a regiment of men and horse were quartered in the church of S. Domenico, and the French soldiers are said to have employed their leisure hours in picking out these treasures with their pen-knives. Perhaps it was these same thoughtless beings who wilfully mutilated the exquisite figures of children, fragments of which are still left clinging to the spiral curves.

The terra-cotta decorations in the chapel of the Rosario are the work of Agostino Ducci—the Florentine sculptor who made the lovely front of S. Bernardino, (see chapter viii.), and they would be interesting if only for that reason. Though mutilated in parts, and spoilt by careless white-wash, much of the detail is still charming; notably the three little angels over the central arch. As for the rest of the church it has but little interest now-a-days. The immense Gothic window of the choir is said to be the largest in Italy, but the original glass is entirely gone from its frame. The whole has been carefully restored by Signor Moretti of Perugia. The stalls are covered with good intarsia work, but they have been greatly spoiled by careless restoration, and have a naked and forsaken look about them. S. Domenico is one of those pathetic buildings which leave upon one’s mind the feeling of arrested decay, and one hurries gladly from it and out into the sunlight of the street.