With all Dante’s stippling and geometric chart-drawing, his conception of the after-world is not really clear. The sinners are able to deliver long monologues, amid all their agony; they foreknow things terrestrial, exactly like the Manes of Paganism; they quarrel with one another; there are even high jinks in Hell, which according to Burckhardt show an Aristophanic humour. (But then Burckhardt is a German.) Moreover, a certain free will reigns. The undefined powers of the demons import into Dante’s excursion through their dominions a deal of breathlessness and terror from which one should be exempt who travels with a “safe-conduct” acquired by the interposition of powerful personages in Paradise.
Such are the nebulous rings hovering round Dante’s Mappamondo Infernale. But the circles of his Mappamondo Terrestre are clear and resplendent. ’Twas within the illumination of these circles—unnecessarily narrowing though they were—that the Middle Ages, and even Ages later, built their sublime cathedrals, painted their lovely Madonnas, and wrote their great poems. For though doubtless much sacred art is merely splendid sensuous decoration, and some even of that which is indubitably spiritual may have been the work of free-thinking and free-living artists, it remains true that the Dark Ages had a light which electricity cannot replace.
But is our modern Mappamondo as scientific as we think it? Can we girdle it with no circles amid which to sail securely again through the infinities?
ST. GIULIA AND FEMALE SUFFRAGE
Vastly strange are the wanderings of saints and pictures. When a Magnificent One ordered for his gilded sala a Madonna—even with himself and his consort superadded—he was, for aught he knew, helping to decorate Hampton Court in Inghilterra, or the mansion of a master-butcher in undiscovered and unchristened Pennsylvania. And when a saint was born, an equal veil hid the place of his death or of his ultimate patronage. The fate of St. Francis, to live and die and be canonised in his birthplace, was of the rarest. His pendant, St. Dominic, came from Old Castile, and was buried in Bologna.
It is no surprise, therefore, to find St. Giulia, of Carthage, in possession of Brescia, though I must confess that until I stumbled upon the frescoes consecrated to her in the church of S. Maria del Solario her name and fame were unknown to me. Luini painted these frescoes, the sacristan said, though the connoisseurs omit to chronicle them and will doubtless repudiate the attribution. The date of 1520 appended to the somewhat free and easy Latin epigraph beneath does indeed bring them well within Luini’s working period, but their authenticity interests me less than the story they tell.
St. Giulia, it would appear, was born in the seventh century of a noble Carthaginian family, and was endowed with holy learning and every spiritual grace.
“Stemate præsignis Carthagine nata libellos
Docta sacros, anima, corpus gestuque pudica,
Curatu patiens, humilis, jejuniaque pollens.”