“The church is built on a slope, and the porch, whose entrance is on a lower level than that of the floor of the church, contains a flight of steps leading up to the church door. The porch is there to shelter the steps, on and around which the people congregate and gossip before and after service, especially in bad weather. They also sometimes overflow picturesquely, and kneel praying on the steps while service is going on inside.” (Memoir, I. 284-5.)
In Alps and Sanctuaries, ch. iv., is an illustration showing the people kneeling on the steps while “there came a sound of music through the open door—the people lifting up their voices and singing, as near as I can remember, something which on the piano would come thus:” and then follow a few bars of chords.
In the list which appeared in The Eagle, vol. xxxix., no. 175, March 1918, writing of no. 38: “Rossura: the altar by the porch of the church, 1878,” I said that it had been removed. On reconsideration, I am not sure that it has been removed; but I have not been to Rossura for thirty years or more and cannot now say for certain. I believe, however, that it is still there, and that when I said it had been removed I was thinking of the alteration of an opening which there was formerly in the west wall of the porch, under the portrait of S. Carlo Borromeo, which hangs between the two windows. This opening is mentioned in ch. iv. of Alps and Sanctuaries, and Butler says that it had to be closed because the wind blew through it and made the church too cold. It is shown with the portrait and the two windows in another illustration in ch. iv.
The first illustration in ch. iv. of Alps and Sanctuaries shows how the chapel with the altar in it (no. 38) is placed in relation to the porch. This is the chapel he was thinking of when he wrote:
“The church has been a good deal restored during the last few years, and an interesting old chapel—with an altar in it—at which Mass was said during a time of plague, while the people stood some way off in a meadow, has just been entirely renovated; but, as with some English churches, the more closely a piece of old work is copied, the more palpably does the modern spirit show through it, so here the opposite occurs, for the old-worldliness of the place has not been impaired by much renovation, though the intention has been to make everything as modern as possible.”
In 1878, the first time I was with Butler in Italy and in the Canton Ticino, he talked a great deal about the porch of Rossura; there is a passage in ch. xvi. of the Memoir about it. For him it was the work of a man who did it because he sincerely wanted to do it, and who learnt how to do by doing; it was not the work of one who first attended lectures by a professor in an academy, learnt the usual tricks in an art school, and then, not wanting to do, gloried in the display of his technical skill. That is to say, it was done in the right spirit. The result of doing things in this way will sometimes appear incompetent; this never embarrassed Butler, provided that he could detect the sincerity; for where sincerity is incompetence may be forgiven; but the incompetence must not be so great as to obscure the artist’s meaning. At Rossura the sincerity is obvious, and the building is so perfect an adaptation of the means to the end that there is no suggestion of incompetence.
Rossura porch was thus an illustration of what he says in Alps and Sanctuaries in the chapter “Considerations on the Decline of Italian Art.” It was more than merely a piece of architecture. When Butler contemplated it he saw also the chapel with its altar and the people standing in the meadow during the plague; he saw the same people, after the pestilence had been stayed, kneeling on the steps in the dimness, the sky bright through the arch beyond them and the distant mountains blue and snowy, while the music floated out through the open church door; he saw through the windows the gleaming slopes about Cornone and Dalpe, and, hanging on the wall between them, the picture of austere old S. Carlo with his hands joined in prayer. All these things could be written about in Alps and Sanctuaries, but they could not be brought into the illustrations apart from the text; and anyone who looks at Butler’s sketches of Rossura may be disappointed. If he does not bear these things in mind he will not understand what Butler meant by saying that he knew of few things more touching in their way than the porch of Rossura church. He will be like a man listening to programme-music and knowing nothing of the programme.
40. Pencil sketch inscribed: “Handel when a boy. Pencil sketch from an old picture sold at Puttick and Simpson’s and sketched by me while on view. Dec. 15th, 1879. S.B.”
On the same mount with the sketch-portrait of Robert Doncaster, no. 56.
41. Water-colour: Otford, Kent; from inside the church looking out through the porch. 1879.