At Certaldo, the birthplace of Boccaccio, where the train left us one April morning, we found an archaic little carriage, with a coachman who entered sympathetically into our plan for eluding our cicerone. He told us that he knew a road which led in about four hours across the mountains from San Gimignano to San Vivaldo; and in his charge we were soon crossing the poplar-fringed Elsa and climbing the steep ascent to San Gimignano, where we were to spend the night.
The next morning, before sunrise, the little carriage awaited us at the inn door; and as we dashed out under the gateway of San Gimignano we felt the thrill of explorers sighting a new continent. It seemed, in fact, an unknown world which lay beneath us in the early light. The hills, so definitely etched at midday, at sunset so softly modelled, had melted into a silver sea of which the farthest waves were indistinguishably merged in billows of luminous mist. Only the near foreground retained its precision of outline, and that too had assumed an air of unreality. Fields, hedges and cypresses were tipped with an aureate brightness which recalled the golden ripples running over the grass in the foreground of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.” The sunshine had the density of gold-leaf: we seemed to be driving through the landscape of a missal.
At first we had this magical world to ourselves, but as the light broadened groups of labourers began to appear under the olives and between the vines; shepherdesses, distaff in hand, drove their flocks along the roadside, and yokes of white oxen with scarlet fringes above their meditative eyes moved past us with such solemn deliberateness of step that fancy transformed their brushwood-laden carts into the sacred carroccio of the past. Ahead of us the road wound through a district of vineyards and orchards, but to the north and east the panorama of the Tuscan hills unrolled range after range of treeless undulations, outlined one upon the other, as the sun grew high, with the delicately-pencilled minuteness of a mountain background of Sebald Beham’s. Behind us the fantastic towers of San Gimignano dominated each bend of the road like some persistent mirage of the desert; to the north lay Castel Fiorentino, and far away other white villages gleamed like fossil shells embedded in the hill-sides.
The elements composing the foreground of such Tuscan scenes are almost always extremely simple—slopes trellised with vine and mulberry, under which the young wheat runs like green flame; stretches of ash-coloured olive orchard; and here and there a farm-house with projecting eaves and open loggia, guarded by its inevitable group of cypresses. These cypresses, with their velvety-textured spires of rusty black, acquire an extraordinary value against the neutral-tinted breadth of the landscape; distributed with the sparing hand with which a practised writer uses his exclamation-points, they seem to emphasize the more intimate meaning of the scene; calling the eye here to a shrine, there to a homestead, or testifying by their mere presence to the lost tradition of some barren knoll. But this significance of detail is one of the chief charms of the mid-Italian landscape. It has none of the purposeless prodigality, the extravagant climaxes, of what is called “fine scenery”; nowhere is there any obvious largesse to the eye; but the very reticence of its delicately-moulded lines, its seeming disdain of facile effects, almost give it the quality of a work of art, make it appear the crowning production of centuries of plastic expression.
For some distance the road from San Gimignano to San Vivaldo winds continuously upward, and our ascent at length brought us to a region where agriculture ceases and the way lies across heathery undulations, with a scant growth of oaks and ilexes in the more sheltered hollows. As we drove on, these copses gave way to stone-pines, and presently we dipped over the yoke of the highest ridge and saw below us another sea of hills, with a bare mountain-spur rising from it like a scaly monster floating on the waves, its savage spine bristling with the walls and towers of Volterra.
For nearly an hour we skirted the edge of this basin of hills, in sight of the ancient city on its livid cliff; then we turned into a gentler country, through woods starred with primroses, with a flash of streams in the hollows; and presently a murmur of church-bells reached us through the woodland silence. At the same moment we caught sight of a brick campanile rising above the trees on a slope just ahead of us, and our carriage turned from the high-road up a lane with scattered chapels showing their white façades through the foliage. This lane, making a sudden twist, descended abruptly between mossy banks and brought us out on a grass-plot before a rectangular monastic building adjoining the church of which the bells had welcomed us. Here was San Vivaldo, and the chapels we had passed doubtless concealed beneath their cupolas “more neat than solemn” the terra-cottas of which we were in search.
The monastery of San Vivaldo, at one time secularized by the Italian government, has now been restored to the Franciscan order, of which its patron saint was a member. San Vivaldo was born at San Gimignano in the latter half of the thirteenth century, and after joining in his youth the Tertiary Order of Saint Francis, retired to a hollow chestnut-tree in the forest of Camporeno (the site of the present monastery), in which cramped abode he passed the remainder of his life “in continual macerations and abstinence.” After his death the tree which had been sanctified in so unusual a manner became an object of devotion among the neighbouring peasantry, who, when it disappeared, raised on the spot an oratory to the Virgin. It is doubtful, however, if this memorial, which fell gradually into neglect, would have preserved San Vivaldo from oblivion, had not that Senancour of a saint found a Matthew Arnold in the shape of a Franciscan friar, a certain Fra Cherubino of Florence, who, early in the sixteenth century, was commissioned by his order to watch over and restore the abandoned sanctuary. Fra Cherubino, with his companions, took possession of the forest of Camporeno, and proceeded to lay the foundation-stone of a monastery which was to commemorate the hermit of the chestnut-tree. The forgotten merits of San Vivaldo were speedily restored to popular favour by the friar’s eloquence, and often, after one of his sermons, three thousand people were to be seen marching in procession to the river Evola to fetch building-materials for the monastery. Meanwhile Fra Tommaso, another of the monks, struck by the resemblance of the hills and valleys of Camporeno to the holy places of Palestine, began the erection of the “devout chapels” which were to contain the representations of the Passion; and thus arose the group of buildings now forming the monastery of San Vivaldo.
As we drove up we saw several monks at work in the woods and in the vegetable-gardens below the monastery. These took no notice of us, but in answer to our coachman’s summons there appeared another, whose Roman profile might have emerged from one of those great portrait-groups of the sixteenth century, where grave-featured monks and chaplains are gathered about a seated pope. This monk, whose courteous welcome betrayed as little surprise as though the lonely glades of San Vivaldo were daily invaded by hordes of sight-seers, informed us that it was his duty to conduct visitors to the various shrines. The chapels of the Passion are about twenty in number, and as many more are said to have perished. They are scattered irregularly through the wood adjoining the monastery, and our guide, who showed a deep interest in the works of art committed to his charge, assured us that the terra-cotta groups were undoubtedly due to Giovanni Gonnelli, Il Cieco di Gambassi, for whose talent he seemed to entertain a profound admiration. Some of the master’s work, he added, had been destroyed, or replaced by that of “qualche muratore”; but he assured us that in the groups which had been preserved we should at once recognize the touch of an eminent hand. As he led the way he smilingly referred to Giovanni Gonnelli’s legendary blindness, which plays a most picturesque part in the artist’s biography. The monk explained to us that Gonnelli was blind of only one eye, thus demolishing Baldinucci’s charming tradition of portrait-busts executed in total darkness to the amazement of popes and princes. Still, we suspected our guide of adapting his hero’s exploits to the incredulity of the unorthodox, and perhaps secretly believing in the anecdotes over which he affected to smile. On the threshold of the first chapel he paused to explain that some of the groups had been irreparably injured during the period of neglect and abandonment which followed the suppression of the monastery. The government, he added, had seized the opportunity to carry off from the church the Presepio in high relief which was Gonnelli’s masterpiece, and to strip many of the chapels of the escutcheons in Robbia ware that formerly ornamented the ceilings. “Even then, however,” he concluded, “our good fathers were keeping secret watch over the shrines, and they saved some of the escutcheons by covering them with whitewash; but the government has never given us back our Presepio.”
Having thus guarded us against possible disillusionment, he unlocked the door of the first chapel on what he declared to be an undoubted work of the master—the Descent of the Holy Ghost upon the Disciples.
This group, like all the others at San Vivaldo, is set in a little apsidal recess at the farther end of the chapel. I had expected, at best, an inferior imitation of the seventeenth-century groups in the more famous Via Crucis of Varallo, but to my surprise I found myself in the presence of a much finer, and apparently a much earlier, work. The figures, which are of life-size, are set in a depressed arch, and fitted into their allotted space with something of the skill which the Greek sculptors showed in adapting their groups to the slope of the pediment. In the centre, the Virgin kneels on a low column or pedestal, which raises her partially above the surrounding figures of the disciples. Her attitude is solemnly prayerful, with a touch of nun-like severity in the folds of the wimple and in the gathered plaits of the gown beneath her cloak. Her face, furrowed with lines of grief and age, is yet irradiated by an inner light; and her hands, like those of all the figures hitherto attributed to Gonnelli, are singularly graceful and expressive. The same air of unction, of what the French call recueillement, distinguishes the face and attitude of the kneeling disciple on the extreme left; and the whole group breathes that air of devotional simplicity usually associated with an earlier and less worldly period of art.