George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers

by George Edmund Street

This south transept is quite unfinished though very considerably advanced. Its south wall shows that the vaulting was to have been semicircular in section like that of the nave. The proportions of the whole are very bold and fine.... The rest of the exterior has been much modernized. The west front is much like that of Orvieto but I don’t know how much is original. There is very little in it which I should accept as really pointed architecture. The foliage and the feeling of the whole is very Renaissance and the steep gables are all sham and are very unpleasantly conspicuous in a distant general view of the church. The campanile, coursed in black and white in nearly even proportions (two courses of white material for one course of colours), is Romanesque, of very great height, and follows the usual rule of increasing its number of openings in each stage. It is capped with square spirelets at the angles, and a low octagon spire, I think of stone—this I thought had crockets, but I found they were only some arrangements for illumination in honour of the Pope’s visit.... Internally the church has been painfully modernized; a row of Popes’ heads—about as artistic as a row of barber’s blocks—is ranged all round above the nave arcade, and the whole of the church has been plastered and painted in the most abominable manner. The walls are striped in exactly equal courses (about eight and a half inches in height) of black and white. The effect is certainly too bizarre. There are no good specimens of carving, and the detail of groining ribs, arches, etc., is hopelessly bad. All of the pavements are covered with subjects formed by inlaying and incising the marbles which compose them. There is a certain grandeur in the completeness of the idea but the effect is not good....

We spent some hours to great advantage in the Accademia. The collection of pictures of the early Sienese school is wonderfully rich and gave me a very high idea of the power of some of the men whose names one does not often hear.

There are three or four tondos similar to that at San Domenico and a considerable number of reredoses of various sizes. A favorite subject is the B. V. M., surrounded by saints in the outer compartments. Nothing can exceed the beauty of some of the angels. In all, the wood seems to have had canvas laid on it which was prepared with a thick layer of size, and on this gold was laid all over preparatory to painting. In some the colour has peeled off and left the gold with lines for the outline of the figures scratched on it. Generally speaking the preservation of the colours in these pictures is something quite marvellous, not a crack being visible anywhere; may this be attributed to the gold ground?

The later pictures are not so interesting nor is the collection of them so complete as it is of the others. Room III is that in which the work is most beautiful. There were several students at work drawing from the life, and in one of the rooms all the designs submitted in competition for prizes were exhibited. The architectural designs were generally very commonplace but one or two for a holy-water stoup showed power of drawing and some fancy. Renaissance is the only style thought of....

September 2.

The view from Cortona is very fine, over the broad Val de Chiana with the end of Lake Thrasimene full in view, and the irregular mountain outlines of Monte Cortona and other heights filling up the whole of the background.

We left after only two hours’ pause and soon reached the head of the lake. We were busy making out all the sites of the battle (which may be done with great vividness), when we reached the Papal dogana. There were two difficulties—first, my passport was improperly viséd but this I got over; and second, our driver had no visé at all, and it was half an hour before he was allowed to take us on as far as the next village under strict promise to come back again at once. It rained heavily as we started and we lost some of the beauty of this the best part of our drive. Thrasimene is a grand sheet of water but wants some striking feature on its banks, some jutting out rocks or mighty hills plunging perpendicularly into its depths, to make it thoroughly attractive. Now it has a deserted look: its banks are not grand and yet no houses or villages show there and one gets a rather gloomy impression. The place at which we changed our horse, Pasignano, is a miserable Italian village,—and how miserable that is I can hardly say—with its fair proportion of beggars, i.e., every one whose eye you catch holds out a hand immediately for a mezzo baioccho. It is prettily situated, and, as one of the places at which vetturini stop on the road to Rome, ought to be rather better favoured as to an inn. The only one did not look promising and we preferred fasting to trying it. A few miles more and we left the lake, and aided by two bullocks climbed a steep hill above its banks, reached the cathedral and village of Magione, and drove the rest of the way by moonlight to Perugia where we were heartily glad to find ourselves at 10.30 P.M. very ready for something to eat.

September 4.

Lucca in its flat, surrounded by mountains, Pisa grand with water and hills, Genoa with the blue Mediterranean at its feet, Siena on its lofty though arid hills, and Arezzo with its fine prospect of cultivated valley girt with hills, must all, lovely as they are, give way to Perugia, seated on the irregular summit of a mountain, looking one way toward Thrasimene and Monte Cortona, another toward the irregular peaks of the Appenines, a third down the rich flat valley of the Tiber, and last of all toward the noble mountain against whose streaked side stands whitely shining in the distance the object of many an artistic as well as many a religious aspiration, the shrine of the great saint of Assisi. Add to this beauty of situation a beauty of atmosphere which we never dream of in England, and the picture is complete.

Certainly since we have been here this has been no land of cloudless blue skies. We have had glorious weather, and yet without any doubt the most glorious cloud scenery we have ever known anywhere. Sometimes a violent storm in the distance and another close at hand, sunsets short in duration but brilliant to excess while they last, and in midday a purple, blue or violet tint over every portion of the wonderful landscape....