There are a few other frescoes by Bazzi in the convent. Between the cloister and the church are Christ at the Column and Christ bearing the Cross, works of intense spiritual expression, and another variously described as Benedict giving his rule and Bernardo founding his order of Monte Oliveto. On the stairs leading to the dormitories are the Coronation of the Madonna and a Pietà, and, at the rooms of the Abbate Generale, over the door, a Madonna and Child with St Michael and St Peter. Outside the church a striking Madonna and Child in marble, ascribed to Fra Giovanni da Verona, watches over the tombs of the brethren. The church itself has been modernised. An old picture of the three founders is said to mark the place where Bernardo saw the Archangel Michael descend from Heaven in flashing armour to drive away the devils who were threatening to destroy the foundations of the building. It contains excellent intarsia by Giovanni da Verona, especially on the reading desk and choir stalls, and there is similar work by him in the library of the monastery.
Pope Pius II. came here in 1463, and in his Memoirs (those famous Commentarii Rerum Memorabilium) we are given an account of his visit.[172] He marvelled at the situation of the place and the wonderful industry by which the monks had reclaimed so much of the desert soil, on the very brink of the precipice, and at the excellent architecture of the monastery. He found the woods and gardens as delightful to linger in, as we do to-day, and struck the keynote of the feeling of every modern visitor to these monastic houses of the past; “pleasant places of refreshment for the monks, more pleasant still for those to whom, after they have seen, it is lawful to depart.” On the second evening of his stay, the Pope supped with the monks in the refectory; while they were at table he bade his choristers come in, who sang the new hymn that his Holiness had composed in honour of St Catherine of Siena, “with such soft harmony that they drew sweet tears from all the monks.”
CHAPTER XI
San Gimignano
“La nobile più Città che Terra di San Gimignano.”
San Gimignano of the Beautiful Towers is a place of frowning grey and brown walls and towers, of mysterious alleys, of shimmering olive-trees and fields of flowers that lie beyond, of flaming skies at sunrise, of clamorous bells at nightfall. Hardly, indeed, would he be pressed who should be called upon to award the crown of beauty to any one, rather than another, of the smaller towns of central Italy, though San Gimignano would perhaps deserve it. “No other town or castle in Tuscany,” wrote Gino Capponi, “retains more of the Middle Ages and was less invaded by the ages that followed; in those towers, and in the churches and in the houses of massive stone, is still something that cannot be covered up by the thin plastering of modern times; ancient memories keep their possession of it, the new life has hardly entered in.”[173] High up on the side of one of the hills of the Val d’Elsa—
“The hill-side’s crown where the wild hill brightens,”
as Mr Swinburne sings of it—it watches the fertile valley of the Elsa spread below, while to the north, beyond Certaldo (haunted still by the spirit of him who wrote the Human Comedy of the Middle Ages), the
