them being a group of three, a little boy, a little girl, and an elder girl, representing the Sposalizio of Caterina with the divine Bambino under the patronage of the Madonna. The brothers of the Company of St Catherine follow, bearing the silver bust of their patroness, with the priest of the Contrada. The end of the procession is brought up by the picturesque young Ancients, waving and tossing up their banners in the approved Sienese fashion, until all the steep, crowded Via Benincasa seems a whirling mass of colour.
And St Catherine’s power of healing factions in her native city has not yet ceased. In this present year of grace, 1902, on the day in which the popolani of the Oca celebrated the feast of their glorious patroness, there was a solemn reconciliation between them and the rival Contrada of the Torre, the healing of the famous feud of many years’ standing. I am writing too soon after the event to know whether the peace has proved durable!
Upon the hill above Fontebranda rises the great red brick church of San Domenico—after the Duomo the most important Gothic ecclesiastical building in Siena. It dates almost from the very beginning of the Dominican order, being begun shortly after 1220, though not finished until the middle of the fifteenth century. St Dominic himself may be said to have presided over its beginning, and the Angelical Doctor has walked in the cloisters where once the convent was. The soaring Campanile was raised in 1340. Though considerably altered—in the sixteenth century it was used as a fortress from which the Spanish soldiery might command the city—it is always the same building that St Catherine knew, and that is so intimately connected with the events of her life; presumably there are few buildings in Italy so quick with the living spirit of one woman. Her beloved Dominicans, alas, are here no longer; the convent was suppressed by the French invaders at the beginning of last century, and, after the restoration of the Austrian Grand Dukes, the Benedictines were substituted for the Dominicans. The black monks have gone too—leaving a few to serve the church—and the convent has been transformed into barracks for the cavalry of modern Italy.
The interior has been completely restored, but its original austere simplicity is still preserved. The picture over the third altar on the right in the nave, representing the Assassination of St Peter Martyr, and painted by Arcangiolo Salimbeni in 1579, is one of the most meritorious works of the later school of Sienese painters. Over the last altar on the right the altar-piece is formed of three different pictures by different artists and without the slightest connection with each other, save that they were all painted in the latter part of the fifteenth century; the Nativity of the Saviour is by Francesco di Giorgio, one of his best works, showing a curious imitation of Luca Signorelli in the adoring Angels and shepherds; above, the Pietà with Angels, St Michael and the Magdalene, is by Matteo di Giovanni; the predella—representing St Catherine’s visions, the Martyrdom of St Sebastian, the Massacre of the Innocents, St Dominic preaching, St Mary of Egypt—is ascribed to Fungai. Over the high altar the beautiful marble Ciborium, with the risen Christ above and the four Evangelists below, is the work of one of the chief Florentine sculptors of the latter half of the Quattrocento, Benedetto da Maiano. The two marble Angels, kneeling on either side of the altar, are also his. There is a fine view of the Duomo from the back of the choir. In the second chapel, to the left of the choir, is one of the loveliest and most characteristic pictures of the Sienese school—the “Santa Barbara” painted by Matteo di Giovanni in 1479. The Virgin Martyr of the Tower sits enthroned, in robes gorgeous with gold and embroidery, accompanied by St Mary Magdalene and St Catherine of the Wheels; two Angels crown her, two more make melody behind her throne. The faces of the three women—particularly the golden-haired maidens, Catherine and Barbara—are full of pensive sweetness; they have dreamed among the lilies all day and all night of love, such passionless love as that of which the Vita Nuova tells, while the faction fights have splashed Siena’s streets with blood, and in her palace chambers the things have been done of which her novelists speak. And, surely, when the Angels sing to their lutes or viols, it will be no hymn, but some such amorous canzone as that with which Casella refreshed Dante’s soul on the shores of Purgatory. The lunette above represents the Adoration of the Magi, and was especially stipulated for by the worthy bakers who gave Matteo the commission. The bright picture opposite shows a trace of the influence of Benozzo Gozzoli; it represents the Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels, with the Pietà and four Angels in the lunette, and was painted by Benvenuto di Giovanni in 1483. In the chapel beyond there is another Matteo di Giovanni: the Madonna and Child with Angels, St Jerome and the Baptist, in three divisions, with a rocky landscape background, damaged and neglected. In the chapel on the right of the choir, the Madonna of the Rosary—or rather the Deity with Saints, surrounding an old votive picture of the Madonna—is by Bazzi, the predella of the fifteen mysteries being by one of his pupils. The second chapel on the right belonged to the “German Nation” of the University of Siena, and is full of tombstones of noble young German students, who came to the famous Studio to acquire wisdom, and found a grave. One epitaph begins, Svevia me genuit, Senae rapuere sed ossa. The chapel has the pathos that inevitably clings to the thought of hopes cut short, of untimely death in a foreign land.
It is not for these things that we visit San Domenico to-day, but for the glorious chapel of St Catherine. Over it we read another of those hard sayings that sum up, mystically, the story of her inner life: “This chapel holds the head of Catherine. Dost thou seek her heart? Nay, that Christ bears inclosed in His breast.” The shrine itself, over the altar, which contains this sacred relic—sacred, surely, to all lovers of the noblest things in the literature of mysticism no less than to Roman Catholics—is a work of the third quarter of the fifteenth century, and is probably by Giovanni di Stefano. The frescoes on either side of it—representing the Svenimento, St Catherine fainting into the arms of her two attendant nuns, Alessia and Francesca, overcome by the glory of the vision of her celestial Bridegroom, and St Catherine miraculously fed with the Food of Angels in the Sacred Host—are by Bazzi, and were painted in 1526. Hardly elsewhere (save, perhaps, in the St Sebastian of the Uffizi painted in the previous year) has the wayward painter of Vercelli touched such a height of inspiration; in conception and execution alike, they are among the supreme triumphs of Italian art. The fresco on the left—representing the execution of Niccolò di Toldo, St Catherine ecstatically following the upward flight of the soul she has saved—is also Bazzi’s, but less excellent. It is overcrowded and badly composed, carelessly executed in parts; the brawny figure and bearded head of the victim hardly suggest the delicate young nobleman, the agnello of the Leggenda minore whose blood has been unjustly shed;[110] but nothing could be more beautiful than the kneeling figure of the Saint herself. The beautiful pilasters between the frescoes, and the Angels and Prophets under the arch, are likewise Bazzi’s. Bazzi left the work unfinished, and some fifty years after his death Francesco Vanni took
