The Story of Siena and San Gimignano

by Edmund G. Gardner

Once whilst Frate Niccolò was prior—it must have been a few years after Filippo entered the convent—Lecceto was threatened by the Sienese themselves. Shortly after the fall of the Nine in 1355, when Massa and Casole and other places were in arms against the new regime of the Twelve, a son of Messer Ranieri da Casole was seen to come into the wood with certain foot soldiers. The rumour spread that the Prior of Lecceto was sheltering outlaws, who came to do evil to the city of Siena. More than four hundred armed contadini threatened the convent, captured three of the men in the wood and sent them to the Podesta, while in Siena there uprose an uproar in the Campo, and the people shouted to go to Lecceto and burn the place down. The friars of Sant’ Agostino sent a warning to the Prior, that the people were already on their way to waste the place. While the armed crowd of peasants broke into the convent and rang the bells a martello, the Prior shut himself into the chapel and prayed earnestly before the image of the Saviour. At once a sudden rain fell; the three prisoners, whom the mob had been going to hang, were led back to the Podesta and proved innocent; the armed forces of the people turned back, the contadini went quietly home, “so that in a short while all the Place was cleared of folk, and that blessed Prior remained in peace with his friars.”[163]

Perhaps, St Catherine preferred saints of a more robust temper. It is somewhat curious that she appears to have had no intercourse with Frate Niccolò, though we have several letters of hers addressed to other friars of Lecceto, especially Antonio da Nizza and William Flete. They were among the men of holy life whom Pope Urban summoned to Rome, to assist in the reformation of the Church, and neither wished to leave their beloved solitude. “I shall see,” she wrote to them, “if we really have conceived love for the Reformation of holy Church. For if it is really so, you will follow the will of God and of His Vicar, you will leave the wood and come to enter upon the field of battle. But if you do not do it, you will be disregarding the will of God. And, therefore, I pray you, by the love of Christ crucified, that you come soon, without delay, at the demand that the Holy Father makes of you. And do not fear that you will not have a wood; for here there are woods and forests.”[164]

We pass up through the oaks and ilex-trees—the latter, scanty in parts and freshly planted round the convent buildings, are grand and dense enough further on to make a real forest still—until we reach the Eremo, with its small church and castle-like square tower of the monastery. The present buildings, though restored, date from the fourteenth century, and the tower was built in 1404, when Filippo himself was Prior. The place is silent and deserted now, left in the charge of a family of contadini, save for a month or so in the year, when the students of the Archbishop’s seminary of Siena come here for their villeggiatura.

Outside the church, in the portico, are frescoes painted about 1343 by a certain Paolo di Maestro Neri, a follower of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, somewhat recalling the style and spirit of those of the master himself in the Sala de’ Nove, or those by that other unknown pupil of his in the Campo Santo of Pisa. The whole portico in front of the church is covered with them, mainly in monochrome; partly obliterated, they originally formed one of those vast allegories of human life in which the painters of the Trecento—above all the Sienese—delighted. The artist here is as severely ascetical and monastic in spirit as the unknown master of the “Triumph of Death.” On the one side is Paradise; on the other side is Hell. The long wall between them sets forth the life of the cloister and the life of the world, the one leading to Heaven, the other to Hell. In the one, we have peace and war; love-making and dancing; feasting and dicing, the loser seizing the winner by the throat; the car of pleasure, over which Cupid flies, while youths and ladies are with musicians within; a great boar-hunt; money-changing; a court of law; travellers waylaid by robbers. The devils are in it all; they wait by the gaming-table, they sit on the horse that draws the car of pleasure, they watch the hunting and all man’s ordinary business, they pounce upon the soul of the murdered, they preside over the death-bed of the impenitent. War is raging in earnest; a grim sea-fight is in progress, the devils are blowing on the ships and urging them against each other; there is the storming of a castle—the demons sound the trumpets for the onslaught, and carry off through the air the souls of those that fall. But above, behind the city from whose gates the pleasure-seeking crowd of worldlings has passed out, is Christ with the banner of the Resurrection—ready to save, if only they will turn to Him.[165] And in the other fresco to our left, a number of men of all ages and conditions have taken their crosses upon their shoulders, to carry them after Christ. We are shown the Works of Mercy and the life of the Evangelical Counsels. The devil is here too—but only to be vanquished and put to flight. Then we have the death of the just—in the corner, to match the death of the impenitent sinner at the end of the other fresco. And after that, comes only the Paradise.

The frescoed Christ over the door of the church is probably by the same painter. In the second cloister there are a number of frescoes originally painted at the beginning of the Quattrocento. They are greatly damaged, obliterated in parts, completely restored in others; we get a vague general impression of hermits doing works of mercy and seeing visions, of St Augustine giving his rule, of holy deaths in convents and hermitages. Further on are five better preserved. The first is the story of Giovanni di Guccio, told by Fra Filippo.[166] Giovanni di Guccio, who belonged to a wealthy family of the Monte de’ Nove, entered Lecceto as a boy, but in the noviciate found the coarse food so trying that he thought that he would have to leave the Order. In the wood he met “an ancient man of right venerable aspect,” who confirmed him in his vocation. “And suddenly He showed him the wounds of His side and of His hands and feet, from which there issued such great splendour that that of the Sun is nothing in comparison with it, and they all seemed bleeding. Then, straightway, He vanished.” This Giovanni was prior in 1323 and often told this story as an example, as of another person, and not until his death did the brethren know that he spoke of himself. In the other frescoes, we see an abbot preaching in front of the convent, a painted ideal of penitential life and pious death, the monks journeying with a sainted prior in their midst, and the return of the lost sheep to the fold. The whole cloister, with the well in the middle, is picturesque. There is little to see in the church, where a few frescoed saints seem striving to emerge from the whitewash.

Down among the vines (on the left of the entrance as you face the convent) is the famous holy well, the “Poggio Santo,” now dilapidated. According to the legend, piously recorded by Landucci, there was at first no water to be had, but one of the hermits, novella Moisè “novello” Moisè, struck the arid soil with a rod, and at once a spring of limpid water gushed out, with miraculous powers of curing those stricken with fever. One of the original hermits is said to have been buried in this field, and our pious historian even discovers some hidden mystery of divine things in the colours of the stones that lie around.

In a clearing in the wood on the eminence opposite the convent is the little chapel, now restored, of San Pio. In November 1460, the friars of the chapter and convent of San Salvatore, otherwise Lecceto, presented a petition to the Signoria of Siena, to the effect that they wanted to build an oratory under the name of San Pio and could find no place more suited to their purpose than the hill opposite the Place of Lecceto, “the which hill belongs to the magnificent city of Siena, and is a woody and stony place, from which no fruit can be got.” They therefore beg the Magnificent Signoria to give them enough land on the said hill to build their chapel: “which thing will be acceptable to our Lord God, and also will greatly please the Holiness of our Lord Pope Pius the Second, who has many times been to the said place. And your petitioners undertake ever to pray to God for your Magnificent Signoria, that it may prosper and increase in a good and pacific state.” The name of “the Holiness of our Lord Pope Pius” was at that time one with which to conjure, and their petition was approved successively by the Concistoro, the Council of the People, and the General Council.[167]

At the bridge below Belcaro, we keep to the right and then turn off to the left, skirting the wood, to San Leonardo al Lago, the remains of a hermitage in the forest which was connected with Lecceto. Here Agostino Novello, who had been Manfred’s minister, lived in his austere old age and died. A few picturesque ruins of the hermitage remain, with the woods rising up behind them, but the rest are farm buildings. The church contains, in the choir, a beautiful series of frescoes: the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin in the Temple, the Annunciation, the Sposalizio; with, on the four segments of the vault, four choirs of Angels, singing and making music, gazing down on the sacred scenes on the walls or assisting at the Mass on the altar below. They appear to be works of some later follower of the Lorenzetti, but are ascribed to a certain Pietro di Lorenzo, a mediocre painter of the early Quattrocento. Four small miracles of St Leonard, on the left, almost obliterated, are of no artistic importance, but one of them gives a most vivid representation of the torture of the corda or strappado, with the scribe taking down the confession; in this case, the Saint is upholding the victim. In the crypt is the original burial-place of Agostino Novello.

The Abbazia di San Galgano, a long drive from the Porta San Marco, was a Cistercian house whose monks at one epoch regularly served the Republic as Camarlinghi di Biccherna. According to the legend, Galgano Guidotti came hither in 1180, and on Monte Siepi, above the Merse, struck his sword into the rock. Here he died in 1181. A few years later the Bishop of Volterra, Ugo dei Saladini, built a round chapel over the hermitage and founded a small house of Cistercians. This chapel still remains. The great Cistercian monastery and abbey-church of San Galgano, in the plain of the Merse, were built in the thirteenth century, being probably begun in 1220 and 1224 respectively. Of the monastery, only a few ruins remain. The abbey-church, magnificent still in its ruin, is one of the purest and noblest pieces of Gothic architecture in Italy; it is a typical building of the Cistercians, whose churches and convents, purer in style and earlier in date than those of the Friars Minor and Friars Preachers, have caught more of the true spirit of northern Gothic than have theirs.[168]

The most famous, and perhaps still the most interesting, of all the monastic houses in the State of Siena is that of Monte Oliveto Maggiore. It can be reached either from Asciano, a picturesque little town with a number of paintings of the Sienese school in its churches, or by driving all the way from Siena by Buonconvento. Pedestrians, if they do not intend to spend the night at the convent, should take the morning diligence to Buonconvento, and walk down to Asciano from Monte Oliveto in the afternoon to catch the evening train back to Siena. We drive out of the Porta Romana, Siena gradually growing more distant behind us, Monte Amiata rising nearer and more distinctly in front. About two miles from Buonconvento we cross the Arbia, and then again by an old bridge outside the gate.