The next stage is later, and has three arches with traceries carried upon chevroned and twisted shafts, with a statue of the Virgin and Child in the centre. This stage forms a sort of balcony. The upper stages are covered with sculpture. In the gable is Our Lord as Judge in a vesica-shaped aureole; around and above Him are saints and angels, and below a group of angels dividing the good from the bad. The subject is continued on to the wall on each side of the porch, where on one side are represented the souls of the just in the lap of God, and on the other the descent of the wicked into the jaws of Hell. The whole scheme is a picturesque and unusually disposed treatment of the Last Judgment. There is, however, not much merit in the sculpture as a work of art, though as an enrichment of the buildings it is most effective. The statue in the centre is said to be by Nicola Pisano. The south front of the cathedral has a long range of arcading carried on engaged columns, each arch inclosing a small arcade of three divisions. Above this, below the eaves, is a very fine arcade of later date all carried on groups of shafts, and treated in the Venetian manner with ogee-arched labels above round arches. This stage is built of red marble; the lower part of the wall, of brick and stone.
A large font of white marble is the only relic of the original church which is still to be seen inside.
There is not much more to see here. The castle is remarkable as standing surrounded by its moat in the very midst of the city. The old portions of it are much like the castle at Mantua, and present the same boldly battered base, and the same heavy machicoulis and battlements. I saw also two or three old churches here, but of no interest; they were of the latest phase of Gothic—bordering on Renaissance—and very poor in their detail.
The picture-gallery is in a rather magnificent palace of the D’Este family. Garofalo—the best of Ferrarese painters—is represented by a fine Adoration of the Magi, and other works. But the collection generally is not interesting. There are also in the churches a great number of works of other Ferrarese painters, and most travellers go also to see the house of Ariosto and the prison of Tasso. But on the whole the attractions of the city are not great. The streets are grass-grown and deserted, lined with palaces of coarse and bold but uninteresting design, and I was in no way sorry to leave it for Bologna, expecting to find there much more to interest and occupy me.
The drive from one city to the other was very wearisome. The land was rich with vines, mulberry-trees, and rice-fields. The grapes were being gathered, and everywhere along the road we met vast casks borne in grand waggons drawn by white oxen, carrying home the grapes to the wine-press. These waggons have an elaborately carved tree from back to front, and the wheels and casks are also similarly adorned. They are really very handsome, and quite carry one back to those old times when even in utilitarian England the adornment of a carriage was not thought beneath the notice of an artist.
On the road we changed horses at Altedo, where I sketched the good brick campanile of the church, which has windows much like the example figured at page 262.
Bologna is, I fear, only known to many Englishmen at the present day as the one station in Italy at which you may always depend on getting some food, and not less as a station which seems to be on the road to and from every part of the peninsula. There is no excuse, therefore, for not visiting it; and if the general feeling is not one of enthusiasm for what one sees, there is still very much that is worth seeing, and in San Petronio a fragment of a church which, had it been completed on the scale intended, would have been one of the finest and, I suppose, almost the largest in Italy.
