ASSISI.
From a drawing by the Author.
Everything on our way seems to tell the same story of departed grandeur; the city is almost as deserted as one of those we read of in the Arabian Nights. A beautiful arcade, each capital of whose pillars is carved to represent a different species of vegetation, incloses nothing; the house of the poet Metastasio is falling into ruins, and scarcely can one decipher his coat of arms sculptured above the door. No dogs bark, nor children scream, nor loungers stare as the unwonted stranger passes through the market-place; the very café has been fain to part with its chairs and little tables, and now is only a gaunt, bare room, in a corner of which sits, in half obscurity, a melancholy woman sewing slowly. The market-place is certainly the most gloomy part of the town, were it only from its contrast to the market-places we are accustomed to see; and so let us hurry down the long, grass-grown street, till at last a sudden breadth of light opens before us, and straight in front, across a patch of green meadow, rises the Church of St. Francis, while a little to the left a steep incline leads down to the entrance of the Lower Church, called incorrectly, in some works, the crypt, as the real crypt is beneath this lower edifice. The Lower Church stands upon a shelf of rock, the side of which slopes abruptly upward, against which one end of the church is built. The position of the two churches may perhaps be understood by thinking of them as situated upon two successive steps of a staircase, the floor of the Upper Church being merely a continuation of the upper step, and being thus immediately above the roof of the Lower Church.
Let us pause before entering the church, and cast our eyes over the scene before us. We stand on a little terrace half-way up the town, looking down upon tiled roofs, grey walls, and greyer olive groves, interspersed with some brighter greens of acacia and poplar. Beneath us, winding away in long perspective, is the road to the station, with the tall dome of St. Mary of the Angels forming a prominent blot upon the landscape, and breaking the level monotony of the plain. On the right a broad river-bed, nearly dry at the present season, stretches a snake-like course towards Perugia, the towers of which are just visible in the distance. In front of us, the valley of the Tiber stretches away for miles and miles, broken only by long lines of poplars and tiny villages, which, from the height at which we stand, only show as gleaming spots in the sunshine. In the extreme distance, purple mountains enclose the valley on every side, and immediately behind us rises the mountain on which Assisi is built, crowned with a ruined citadel, and black against the sky, the sharp pinnacles of cypress-trees. Whichever way one turns, there is beauty—in the quaint architecture of the old town, in the wild growth of the ancient olive-trees, and their delicate tints of greyish-green and silver; in the brighter colours of the plain, with its broad stretches of sunshine and little shadows of cloud; in the ranges of mountains, the darkness of the cypresses, and the brightness of the sky. And so murmuring within ourselves that the old monk was no bad judge of scenery, after all, we turn in beneath the broad portico of the church.
It is not known when this church first began to receive pictorial adornment; but it is probably true that Giunta Pisano painted there in 1236, though there can be little doubt that anterior to this period there were paintings the authorship of which is unknown, and whose date is uncertain. The whole question of the authorship of the frescoes at Assisi is discussed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle;[66] but it is difficult to extract their real conclusion from the mass of verbiage in which it is enveloped, and the limitations with which it is encumbered. Nor can I attach much importance to the conclusion which these authors have drawn from frescoes in such a terrible state of decay, as those in the northern and southern transepts of the Upper Church. But I do not propose to enter here upon the question of the authorship of any of these frescoes, except such as are attributed to Giotto; and even this had better be deferred till I have given my readers some idea of the general appearance of the church. Its shape is the usual Latin cross formed by a nave and transepts, without chapels or side aisles. From the entrance, which is at the east end of the church, to the choir, the building is divided into four portions by grouped shafts, five in number, only half of which project from the walls from the capitals; from each group spring to right and left pointed arches, in the centre of each of which is a long narrow window reaching from the ceiling to within about twenty-four feet of the ground, and from the capitals there also spring arches which cross the building diagonally, and intersect at the summit of the ceiling, thus forming triangular openings with curved bases, each of which is filled with a fresco, most of them greatly obliterated. The shafts and capitals have all been painted in various colours, as have also the spaces within the side arches on each side of the narrow windows above mentioned, and so have the faces and sides of each arch. The four main portions, into which the ceiling is thus divided, are alternately painted blue with golden stars, or filled with medallions and figure subjects. The painting of the arches is in imitation of marble mosaic. The intersecting arches of the roof are round (as in the Lower Church), not pointed like the side arches, and on the sides of the latter, which are double in width of the centre arches, there are busts of various saints and martyrs of the church connected by rich ornament and involved geometrical design. On either side of the windows, in the second row from the roof, are the frescoes ascribed to Cimabue, all of which are considerably defaced; above these are the ones assigned by Vasari and Lord Lindsay to Giunta Pisano. The roof was, while I was there, in process of utter destruction (by restoration), and its ruin is by this time probably completed.
Underneath the windows there is a third row of paintings, thirty-six in number, commonly supposed to be the work of Giotto, and beneath this again painted bands of mosaic, and so to the floor, which is alternately inlaid with squares and octagons of marble originally red and white, but which has worn into the warm dusty yellow which seems to overspread the whole of Assisi.
The choir is built and decorated in a similar manner, and its centre occupied by a very elaborately worked iron screen (once bronzed and gilt) erected upon a marble daïs, inlaid with glass mosaic, the patterns of each step being different, but all intricate and beautiful. The daïs is about ten feet high and thirty-eight feet long, and the screen about nine feet high. Surmounting the screen there is a narrow marble canopy, supported upon twelve marble pillars, with capitals of acanthus leaves richly gilt, the convex side of the leaves in the upper portion of each capital being very deeply cut and painted vermilion. The screen surrounds a plain marble altar.
The arrangement of the choir is similar to that of the body of the church, each of the transepts being similar in size and arrangement to one of the four divisions already spoken of; the only difference is in the size of the windows, which are exactly double of those in the nave, though of identical shape, each having one pointed archivault; but at the choir end of the church the window is treble in size. The two sides of the choir which have no windows, are ornamented with small galleries of tre-foiled Gothic arches supporting canopies. Underneath these galleries are a row of paintings corresponding with the lowest row of frescoes in the nave. There is a recess of about two feet running the whole length of the church between the groups of shafts just above the lowest row of frescoes, which serves to measure the depth of the side arches, and also as a domain to the two lower rows of frescoes. The colour on the shafts, and on the lowest portion of the side walls, has almost entirely disappeared, and the whole of the paintings in the church are much injured by damp. So much is this the case, that it makes me doubt whether it is worth while going very deeply into the question of their authorship, though this is a favourite battleground with the biographers of early Italian painters.
Vasari boldly ascribes the whole upper portion of the church to Cimabue, and the lower to Giotto: Lindsay asserts that Giunta Pisano had painted the upper, Cimabue the middle, and Giotto the lower range of compartments: Kugler, though somewhat indefinite, holds that he worked out his apprenticeship in the Upper Church of Assisi, and afterwards came again and laboured in the Lower one.
To sum up then the discussion of this matter, which is hardly an interesting one to the general reader, my explanation of the probable authorship of the lower row of frescoes would be the following. That they have been painted by a pupil of Giotto's at the same time that the master himself was at work on the frescoes in the Lower Church, and that the only frescoes by Giotto in the Upper Church, are the two almost monochrome compositions that are placed one on each side of the principal entrance. It should be noted that these two are far more conspicuous, owing to their isolated position, than any other frescoes in the church, which may well have been the reason for their execution by the master himself. And it is somewhat curious to observe that they are both painted in little more than two shades of colour, and are the only frescoes in the church so painted, as if Giotto were purposely restraining his hand, so as not to spoil by contrast the cruder work of his pupil. This pupil I believe to have been Taddeo Gaddi; but I have not seen sufficient undoubted works by his hand, to render this more than a mere conjecture, and there is no evidence on the subject whatever, save such as may be inferred from the fact that Gaddi was almost certainly present with Giotto at the time he painted in the Lower Church.