The Story of Siena and San Gimignano

by Edmund G. Gardner

treading in the steps of St Catherine. Here, in her sixth year, she was returning with her brother from a visit to their sister Bonaventura, whose husband had a house near the Tower of St Ansanus, and had reached the turning at which the great red brick mass of San Domenico first becomes fully visible—rising up grandly on the brow of the opposite hill, over the humble valley of the tanners and dyers. A shrine and a faded fresco on the left at the corner still mark the spot of her first vision. “She saw in the air, above the church of the Friars Preachers of Siena, our Saviour seated on a wondrous throne, robed as Sovereign Pontiff, accompanied by the Holy Apostles. He gazed lovingly and smilingly upon her, and with His holy hand making the sign towards her of the most holy Cross, He blessed her.”[105]

At the foot of the hill is the famous Fontebranda, with its colonnade of three arches and its four lions’ heads. Although the first certain mention of it is in a document of 1081, and in its present form it only dates from the middle of the thirteenth century, the fountain has been famous throughout Tuscany from time immemorial. Possibly, when Siena was the Roman colony of the Sena Julia, the soldiery of the legions drank from its waters; before them, the fair-haired Senonian Gauls—if we accept that form of the legend of the foundation of the city—may have lingered a moment by it as they followed Brennus in his march to Rome. It hardly needs the adventitious fame that has accrued to it from the supposition—stated as a fact by the earliest commentators, but at present generally rejected by scholars—that it is the Fonte Branda recorded by Dante in the thirtieth canto of the Inferno, for whose waters, even to cool the burning thirst of Hell’s foulest circle, Maestro Adamo would not have given the sight of his aristocratic seducers sharing his agony. There is a curious tradition that certain streets of Siena were—or possibly still are—infested by were-wolves, who rush through the city at night, and throw themselves into Fontebranda to recover human form.[106] Be that as it may, Fontebranda gives its name to the whole of the picturesque district—“il Rione di Fontebranda”—below the two hills upon which the Duomo and San Domenico respectively stand. The valley is still, as in St Catherine’s days, the haunt of the tanners and the dyers, and redolent of that peculiar odour of the curing of hides that ever after haunts the lover of Siena.

The steep Via Benincasa—once the Via de’ Tintori—leads up from Fontebranda into the town. It is the headquarters of the most typical and vivacious of the Sienese contrade—the “Nobile Contrada dell’Oca.” A few houses up the street, on the left, is a graceful building in the style of the early Renaissance, which now occupies the site of the house of Giacomo Benincasa: the Oratorio di Santa Caterina in Fontebranda. “Many from beyond the mountains,” so runs an entry in the Libro dei decreti di Concistoro, at the time when Catherine’s canonisation was in progress at Rome, “French, Venetians, Romans and of other nations who have come to your city, have with great diligence asked for the house where dwelt in your city the blessed Catherine of Siena; and they have gone to it with great reverence and devotion, kneeling down in many places and kissing the walls and the door, saying with many tears: Here she stood and touched, that precious vessel and gift of God, blessed Catherine of Siena, who in her life did so many miracles. And many have wondered that the Commune of Siena in that place has not made some temple to the praise of God and honour of that Spouse of Christ.”[107] The house had passed through many hands since the death of St Catherine (who, during the latter part of her life, lived with her mother in another house in the present Via Romana), and was then in a ruinous condition, as the document just quoted goes on to state. But in 1464 the inhabitants of the Costa Fontebranda petitioned the Signoria to buy the house, offering themselves to pay all the rest of the expenses for the building and adornment of the chapel or oratory, “the which they are disposed to do in such form and so well adorned, that it will be to the honour of God and St Catherine of Siena and of your Magnificent Signory, and the consolation of all your city.” The oratory was begun in the same year and finished in 1473, after several appeals from the Esecutori di Gabella to the Signoria for aid in money. In one of these, they remind the Signoria that “it pertains to the Republic to study that spiritual devotions and divine temples should increase in the city; especially in yours, because of the celestial gift of the sweetest liberty which we enjoy among very few cities in the world.” And in another they set forth that, with the aid of their Magnificent Lordships, the oratory has been built, “which has been a thing very devout and honourable, especially by reason of the great concourse of citizens and strangers who go there on the days of her feast”; but that they need some more things to make it complete—such as a picture for the altar, candlesticks, an image of the Saint in high relief, and a sacristy—for which they want three hundred gold florins.[108]

The lower chapel—now the church of the Contrada—is the one referred to in these documents, the upper oratories being the result of later acts of devotion. It is uncertain who was the architect; a certain Francesco di Duccio del Guasta, as well as Antonio Federighi and other masters, seems to have had a hand in it. Over the door is a relief of St Catherine with Angels—an unworthy work by Urbano da Cortona—and on the façade are the four shields: the Libertas and the balzana between the Lion of the People and the Goose of the Contrada. The church was the workshop of Giacomo Benincasa and his sons. Over the altar is a statue in coloured wood of their glorious daughter and sister, by