“And, arrived in Genoa,” Vernazza “revealed the secret of his heart to the Doge, and his Lordship gave him seven thousand lire and the Privilege,”—the latter being necessary, “since no one cared to have the Lazaretto” (for this was Vernazza’s project) “in proximity to their villas,” and hence the Government had to insist upon its foundation upon the least inconvenient of the various possible sites. And Vernazza in consequence “began to construct a great building for the poor victims of the Plague, and presented it with an endowment of one hundred shares of St. George’s, leaving them to multiply, so that at his death they had increased by eleven shares; and now” (in 1581) “they have reached a great number of thousands of pounds.” And after continuing with an account of his further Bank dispositions, and of his early attempts to help the poor (already given by us), Battista finishes up this part of her account by declaring: “he was wont to go about saying, with conviction and great confidence, that he hoped all things from God; and that, whenever he put his hand to anything, God put the yeast into that paste.”[326]
And her mention of the Lazaretto then leads her on to the final, still vivid and yet self-restrained, account of her father’s death. “The Plague being very severe (calda) in Genoa,”—it was past mid-June 1524,—“he came to visit me, and said to me: ‘What do you think I had better do? I am determined in no manner to forsake the poor. Do you think I had better go about on horseback or on foot? In which way do you think I would be safest from infection?’ ‘Oh, Father,’ I said, ‘here we are coming to the Feast of the Baptist, and are at the highest of the heat; and you are determined to go amongst them?’ And he: ‘And is it my fate, to hear such things from you? How truly happy should I be, if I were to die for the poor!’ Then I, seeing so much fortitude in that holy soul, said to him: ‘Father, go.’ But he was not content with looking after the Lazaretto: I think that he scoured the country far and wide. And hence he caught the infection. And on the” (Eve of) “the Feast of the Nativity of St. John Baptist,” June 23, “he confessed and communicated. And in three days he quietly fell asleep in the Lord.”[327]
Surely rarely has so noble a finish been so nobly told! And two things in particular are deserving of special notice. First, there is here again that characteristic combination of quiet reflective common-sense and self-oblivious devotedness. Who could anticipate that the man who so carefully weighed the respective risks of different methods of visiting the sick, would, at the same time, be full of a glad willingness, indeed desire, to die for them? Yet not only does this rich soul exhibit such a living paradox, with an apparent ease and spontaneity, but it is this very extraordinary variety in unity that is an operative cause and element both of the greatness of the act and of its appealingness.
And secondly, it is, I think, not far-fetched to find in this heroic death-ride, if not a direct or even a conscious effect, yet at all events an impressive illustration of, and practical parallel to, Catherine’s teaching as to Heaven being already present everywhere where pure love energizes, and to her picture of the soul’s glad Purgatorial plunge. We know that it was Vernazza himself who, say in 1497, drew forth from her that teaching; and we shall find that it was predominantly he who so carefully registered for us in writing those numerous, vivid picturings of the soul’s joyously voluntary self-dedication to suffering and apparent death. And whether at the moment fully conscious of this or not, his act of some twenty years later illustrates and embodies that teaching; and that teaching again universalizes and brings home to us this action. High on horseback he goes forth, the strong, sound-bodied, whole-hearted man, deliberately sure of finding and of bringing Heaven, wheresoever pure love may be wanted and may joyously appear: joyously fruitful, amidst the very ghastliness of death. And he is rapidly brought low, first on to his bed of sickness, and in a few days into the grave. Indeed he himself had, by his own act, gladly accepted, we may say willed, all this: he himself had cast himself down and away into that deep common fosse, amongst the many thousands of his ever-obscure and now disfigured friends and fellow-dead.
3. His posthumous fame; its unlikeness to Catherine’s celebrity.
For so it was indeed. Instead of burial in the Pammatone Church, under the same roof with his saintly inspirer, the poor pestilential body was buried away, amongst the whole army of others who, like himself, had died of the Plague, without a stone or token of any kind, to mark where this simple hero lay. Nor was it till 1633, over a century later, that a statue was erected to him at his Lazaretto. For the bust in the rooms of his “Compagnia del Mandiletto” is hardly older; and the hideous gaunt plaster statue in the Albergo dei Poveri is no doubt much younger still.
Only in 1867, on June 23, the anniversary of the day on which he prepared himself to die, was a memorial erected to him which is truly worthy of the man. Santo Varni’s more than life-size marble statue, which represents Vernazza seated, a strongly built man still in his years of vigour, with a head and countenance striking because of their lofty brow, powerful chin, spiritual, mobile lips, large, keen, far-outward-looking eyes; and with thoroughly individual, operative yet sensitive hands, the left extended open, as though to give and ever again to give, and the right reposing upon the case containing the Chart of the Hospital’s foundation: stands, a striking symbol, in the vestibule of the Hospital for Incurables which he founded, where for fifteen years he lived, and where he died.[328] One would be glad to think that the likeness of this admirable work of art reposed upon grounds more direct than one or other of the very late and unworthy representations that preceded it; the authentic portrait of his daughter Battista,[329] who may, after all, have been unlike him in looks; and the sympathetic imagination of a great artist. It was Vernazza himself who prevented any contemporary representation of his own features. For Battista tells us, in her letter of 1581, “he also mortified himself in any inclination to honour. Thus, as is well known, when the Lazaretto had been erected, and he was asked to have his portrait painted to be placed there, he answered: ‘I do not want smoke,’ and refused to act as he was bidden.”[330]
Now here we cannot but find a contrast between Catherine and Ettore; yet it only concerns their posthumous earthly fate and fame. A picture of Catherine was, no doubt, no more painted in her lifetime with her knowledge than was a portrait of Ettore. Yet we know that, in her case, a picture was painted, if not secretly during her lifetime, in any case by some eyewitness, and not more than eighteen months after her death; and a popular religious Cultus to her sprang up and grew, on occasion of that early opening of her coffin. But Ettore has to wait over a century for his first artistic embodiment, and of religious Cultus there was never any question.[331] Whence this difference? Have we any kind of reason for suspecting Ettore’s heroism, indeed sanctity of life and death? Was he indeed clearly much the lesser in the Kingdom of God than was his friend?
The question, it will be noted, does not imply any criticism of the Church’s wise requirement of a previous Cultus, as one of the conditions for the introduction of any and every Process; still less is there any disposition to call in question the choice of Catherine for saintly honours, a choice which this whole book would hope to demonstrate as particularly courageous, wise and indeed providential. The point raised concerns simply the psychology of popular devotion, and the human reason why, given that one was certainly a Saint and the other was presumably another one, there is this marked contrast in the posthumous history of these two lives.