The Story of Siena and San Gimignano

by Edmund G. Gardner

The steps and entrance to the pulpit were added in the latter part of the Cinquecento, designed by Bartolommeo Neroni. Against the two last pillars of the nave are the poles of the Carroccio of the Sienese at Montaperti. Beneath the cupola are gilded statues of Siena’s patrons with indifferent late fifteenth century frescoes. Until Baldassare Peruzzi altered the arrangement, the high altar stood here, under the cupola, with Duccio’s great picture—which is now in the Opera del Duomo—upon it. Thence six bronze Angels, by Francesco di Giorgio and Giovanni di Stefano, marshal us to the new high altar—designed by Peruzzi—upon which rests the famous bronze tabernacle, executed between 1465 and 1472, by Vecchietta. The two Angels against the pillars on either side of the altar are by Beccafumi, who practised casting in bronze in the latter part of his life. The frescoes in the niche behind the choir were originally by Beccafumi, painted in 1544, but have been completely repainted and altered; the Assumption is an unimportant Bolognese work. The other frescoes, representing the fall of Manna and the story of Esther, as also the two groups of Saints and Beati of Siena at the sides, were painted by Ventura Salimbeni, between 1608 and 1611. The choir stalls are partly the work of Fra Raffaello da Brescia in 1520, partly from the designs of Bartolommeo Neroni half a century later. The intarsia is the work of Fra Giovanni da Verona of 1503, the organ-loft over the sacristy was executed by the two Barili in 1511. There are several old Sienese paintings in the chapter-house beyond the sacristy, especially two of San Bernardino preaching in the Campo and in front of San Francesco. Above the choir there is a fine circular stained-glass window, representing the Death, Assumption, and Coronation of the Blessed Virgin, with the four Evangelists and four chief early patrons of Siena; it was executed by Giacomo di Castello in 1369, according to a document recently discovered in the Archivio dell’Opera del Duomo.[88]

The left aisle is mainly devoted to the honour and glory of the House of the Piccolomini. Enea Silvio Piccolomini held the bishopric from 1449 to 1458. After his elevation to the papacy he raised the See to an archbishopric, and until 1597 it was always in the hands of one of his own family. We have, in fact, a continuous series of Piccolomini Archbishops of Siena; Antonio Piccolomini, 1458 to 1459; Francesco di Nanni Todeschini, 1460 to 1501 (when he resigned), afterwards Pius III.; the two nephews of Pius III., Giovanni di Andrea Todeschini Piccolomini, 1501 to 1529, and Francesco di Salustio Bandini, 1529 to 1588; Ascanio di Enea Piccolomini, 1588 to 1597. After the third altar (from the entrance), over which is an Epiphany by Pietro Sorri which is almost Venetian in colour, is the monument of Alessandro Piccolomini, Archbishop of Patras and afterwards coadjutor to Archbishop Bandini; philosopher, poet, and dramatist, Alessandro is, unfortunately for his moral reputation, best known by his early Dialogo della Bella Creanza delle Donne, which in later life he retracted. The next altar, that of the Piccolomini, was ordered by the Cardinal Francesco di Nanni Todeschini, who, never contemplating the possibility of being destined to sit in the papal chair, and therefore to rest in the Eternal City, intended to be buried here, as the inscription on the steps states: “Francesco, Cardinal of Siena, whilst still living had this sepulchre made for himself”; and over the arch, as his sole title to fame, he has “Francesco Piccolomini, Cardinal of Siena, nephew of the Supreme Pontiff Pius II.” He was a good and learned man, who, as we have seen, played a pacific and moderating part in the turbulent politics of his native city; he was prematurely aged and utterly broken down in health when, on the death of the infamous Alexander VI., he was elected Pope in September 1503 (much to his own dismay) by a sort of compromise between the rival factions in the conclave, none of whom could secure the elevation of its own candidate, but all hoping that there was no prospect of him surviving the election very long. “God be thanked,” wrote the General of the Camaldolese, “that the government of the Church has been intrusted to such a man, who is so manifestly a storehouse of all virtues, and the abode of the Holy Spirit of God. Under his care the Lord’s vineyard will no more bring forth thorns and thistles, but will stretch out its fruitful branches to the ends of the earth.”[89] He took the name of Pius III., in memory of his uncle, and declared his intention of reforming the Church, beginning with the Pope and the Cardinals, and of restoring peace to Christendom. But the weight of the great mantle of popedom crushed him, and he died in the following month, “not deceiving,” writes Guicciardini cynically, “the hopes that had been formed at his election.” The altar is in the main the work of Andrea Fusina of Milan, and was begun in 1485. In 1501 Michelangelo undertook to make fifteen statues for the Cardinal, sua manu et opere. On the death of the Pope in 1503, he consigned four of these fifteen to his heirs—his brothers Giacomo and Andrea Todeschini Piccolomini—to the mutual satisfaction of both parties, and undertook to finish the eleven that remained to do within two years, unless prevented by accident or illness, or by the war concerning Pisa hindering the transport of marble from the mountains of Carrara to Florence. These four statues are apparently the four Saints in the niches on the outer framework of the altar, fine figures somewhat in the style of Donatello’s saints outside Or San Michele. Of the remaining eleven, the only one that Michelangelo ever executed is that placed on the top to the left—which is more in his later style. He was somewhat troubled in his mind on the subject in his old age. “Lionardo,” he wrote to his nephew, on September 20th, 1561, “I should like you to search among the papers of your father Lodovico, for the copy of a contract in forma camerae made concerning certain figures that I promised to continue for Pope Pius II. [sic] after his death; and because the said work, owing to certain differences, remained suspended about fifty years ago, and because I am old, I should like to settle the matter, in order that you may not be troubled about it unjustly after I am gone.” In another letter from Rome, on the last day of November, he tells him that the Archbishop of Siena has volunteered to put the thing right for him, “and because he is an excellent and skilful man, I believe that it will end satisfactorily.”[90] To the right of the altar is a Risen Christ, with two adoring Angels, over the monument to the Bandini raised by this Archbishop, Francesco Bandini Piccolomini; these figures are also, with some plausibility, ascribed to Michelangelo.

The great work in Siena of Pius III. is the famous Libreria, which he built as Cardinal for the books and MSS. that his uncle had left him. Probably realising that he had little time left him to live, he wished to erect this monument to his uncle’s memory, and indirectly to his own. Above the entrance at the end of the aisle is a fresco of his own elevation to the papacy, painted after his death and after the subsequent completion of the work, by Bernardino Pinturicchio. The Pope’s own figure is partly in relief; on either side of him are the Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, who has taken off his mitre, and the Cardinal Giovanni Antonio di San Giorgio, who is placing the papal tiara upon his head. The whole lacks composition, and there is little, if any, attempt at portraiture; but the crowd in the piazza includes some beautiful figures and well rendered motives. A youth in the foreground is evidently Raphael. Under the fresco are Francesco’s arms as Cardinal and as Pope. The marble work is by Lorenzo di Mariano, the admirable bronze doors were executed by Antonio Ormanni.[91]

On entering we are at once struck by the dazzling profusion of gold and colour, the splendid and opulent decorative effect of the whole. In the contract between “the most reverend Lord Cardinal of Siena” and “Messer Bernardino called Il Pinturicchio, painter of Perugia,” dated June 29th, 1502, “to paint a Library placed in the Duomo of Siena,” almost as much stress is laid upon the “gold, azure, ultramarine, enamel-blue, azure-greens and other pleasing colours” as upon the ten histories in which he has to paint “the life of the Holy Memory of Pope Pius.”[92] Francesco was probably led to intrust the work to Pinturicchio, rather than to a Sienese, because of the splendid work that he had just completed in the Vatican for the reigning Pontiff (who was hardly destined to leave a santa memoria), Alexander VI. The frescoes were begun in 1503, interrupted by the death of Francesco as Pius III. (he probably saw none of them), and resumed about the beginning of 1506.

The ten histories on the wall make up an ideal representation of the career of a hero of the Renaissance. We see Enea Silvio in the first scene, a youth riding a white horse, starting for Basle to seek his fortunes in the great world away from the petty turmoils of his little Italian republic, as secretary to the Cardinal Domenico Capranica, the dignified ecclesiastic who heads the cortège mounted upon a mule. In the background is the western side of the bay of Genoa, from which they made the journey by land to Basle. In the second, riper in years and in worldly wisdom (but less successfully realised by the painter) he is at Edinburgh before King James I. of Scotland, to whom he had been sent by his new employer, the powerful and influential Cardinal of Santa Croce, Niccolò d’Albergata, to persuade him to threaten the Border and so prevent our Henry VI. from interfering with the continental peace that had been concluded at Arras. This was in 1435. In the third, Enea Silvio has mounted a step higher in the social scale, being crowned poet laureate by the Emperor-elect, Frederick III., who made him one of his imperial secretaries in 1442. Hitherto there had been an antipapal tendency in the poet’s movements; he had been involved in the more or less schismatical Council, had been friendly with and on the point of entering the service of the Savoyard antipope Felix. But Frederick professed neutrality, and the next fresco, the fourth, shows us his astute secretary’s conversion to the papal side. We see him in Rome, in 1445, at the feet of Eugenius IV., to whom he had been sent as envoy by the Emperor or, as it would be more accurate to call him at this epoch, the King of the Romans. The two Cardinals in the foreground are said to be his two friends in the Sacred College, the Cardinal of Amiens and the Cardinal of Como, while the bearded prelate, the third on our left, is the famous platonist, Johannes Bessarion of Trebizond. This marks a turning point in Piccolomini’s career; he turned away from his pagan, licentious life to the study of theology, definitely entered the Church, and set before his eyes two great objects: the unity of Roman Catholicism, the rolling back of the tide of Turkish invasion.[93] There can be little question that hope of advancement was his chief motive in this conversion, but his after life as an ecclesiastic seems to show that the nobler spiritual impulse was not altogether lacking. “To him,” writes Dean Kitchin, “more than to any man is due the successful healing of the schism of the West.” In the next, the fifth fresco, which after the first is the most beautiful of the series, he is Bishop of Siena, presiding at the meeting of the Emperor and his bride Leonora of Portugal outside the Porta Camollia, on February 24th, 1452. Behind the Emperor stand Duke Albert of Austria and the young King Ladislaus of Hungary and Bohemia. We read that the Emperor showed considerable nervousness as he waited for his bride, whom he had never seen before. “At first,” writes Enea Silvio himself in his History of Frederick, “the Caesar turned pale, when he saw his bride coming in the distance. But when she drew near, and he beheld more and more her beautiful face and her royal bearing, he became himself again and his colour returned, and he waxed merry, for he found his lovely bride was even more lovely than report had made her, and he perceived that he had not been deceived by words, as often happens to princes who contract marriages by procurators.”[94] The fall of Constantinople in 1453 gave Bishop Enea the opportunity of coming forward as the champion of the cause of Christendom against the Moslem, the eloquent advocate of a new crusade. In the sixth history, he receives the Cardinal’s hat from Calixtus III. in 1456; two Greek prelates stand conspicuously in the foreground, while Bessarion appears again on our right; though not very like his authentic portrait by Pinturicchio in the Vatican, the Cardinal standing at the Pope’s right hand is probably intended for his abominable nephew Roderigo Borgia, afterwards Alexander VI., with whom Enea at this time was on friendly terms. Then, in the seventh, the hero has reached the goal of his earthly ambition, and becomes Pope Pius II. on September 3rd, 1458. He is being carried in procession to give his benediction to the City and the World, while the Master of the Ceremonies burns a piece of tow before him, with the traditional warning: Sancte Pater, sic transit gloria mundi. Two Orientals are there to represent the Eastern Question, that the new Pontiff had made his own. The eighth fresco represents the opening of Congress of Mantua, in 1459, where Pius in vain strove to rouse the powers of Christendom to concerted action; as the fresco appropriately lets us perceive, the Pope himself and the suppliant Christians of the East are the only people in earnest in the matter. Then, in the ninth, he gratifies alike his national pride for the glory of Siena and his own heart by the canonisation of St Catherine, whose crusading zeal had anticipated his own. There is an interesting group of portraits below on our left, the two most conspicuous figures being Raphael and Pinturicchio himself, holding lighted tapers, while the two beyond Pinturicchio, with their backs turned to us, are probably his assistants, Eusebio di San Giorgio and Bembo Romano. Last of all, in the tenth fresco, Pius is at Ancona, come to head the crusade. He was dying, kept alive only by his indomitable enthusiasm, when he reached the city in July 1464, only to find that there were none to support him. In August the fleet of Venice appeared upon the scene. The Pope was then on his death-bed; but the painter, departing from historical fact, has represented him carried down to the harbour to meet the Doge, Cristofero Moro, who is shown kneeling