Befitting was it at Mantua to feel so poignantly the lachrymæ rerum. I should perhaps have felt it at Virgil’s own tomb at Naples, had that not been so vague and rambling a site that no moment of concentration or even of conviction was possible. But the ancient Ducal Palace of the Gonzagas in the Piazza Sordello had the pathos of the unexpected. Nothing in its exterior suggested ruin and desolation, nay the scaffolding across the façade spoke rather of restoration and repair. The tall red brick arches of the portico beneath, the double row of plain straight windows in the middle, and the top tier of ornamental arched windows, surmounted by the battlements, conveyed an impression of Gothic solidity and moderate spaciousness. It was not till I had walked for many minutes through an endless series of dilapidated chambers and mutilated magnificences—propped-up ceilings and walled-up windows and rotting floors, and marble and gold and rich-dyed woods and gorgeous ceilings, and mouldering tapestries and paintings, and musty grandeurs multiplied in specked mirrors, and faded hangings and forlorn frescoes, and chandeliers without candles, and fly-blown gilding and broken furniture and beautiful furniture and whitewash and blackened plaster and bare brick and a vast unpeopled void—that there began to grow upon my soul the sense of a colossal tragedy of ruin, a monstrous and melancholy desolation, an heroic grandeur of disarray, a veritable poem of decay and destruction. Not the Alhambra itself is so dumbly eloquent of the passing of the Magnificent Ones.
“Babylon is fallen, is fallen.”
For the interior answers not to the exterior, whether in preservation or in character. It is renaissance and ruin, with a minor note of the Empire; all the splendours of the world fallen upon evil days. Only by remembering the mutations of Mantua can one account for this hybrid Cortile Reale of dishevelled grandeurs, whose face so belies its character and its fortunes.
The Palace was begun under the dynasty which preceded the Gonzagas, it saw all the glories of the Renaissance, saw Mantua sacked by the Germans, and the Gonzaga dynasty extinguished by the Austrians, and the city fallen to the French, and re-fallen to Austria, and caught up into the Cisalpine Republic, and then into the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, and then Austrian again till the yoke was broken by Victor Emmanuel and the stable dulness of to-day established. It is in fact a microcosm of Mantuan history from the day Guido Bonacolsi laid the first stone somewhere near the year 1300. The building had not proceeded very far before the Gonzagas came into power in 1328, in time to stamp the apartments with their character, and it is with Isabella d’Este that its most inventive features are associated.
A hundred and eighty rooms, said the janitor, and when one remembers the crowd of resident courtiers and the great trains with which the Magnificent Ones travelled, one should not be astonished at the resemblance of an ancient Palace to a modern Grand Hotel. Isabella d’Este’s brother-in-law, Lodovico the Moro, once visited her here with a suite of a thousand persons, and that was only half the number with which Lodovico’s brother, Galeazzo, Duke of Milan, descended upon Florence in 1471. But no modern hotel could keep open a week with such apartments. I do not refer merely to their dearth of conveniences, but to their mutual accessibility, their comparative scarcity of corridors. I do not see how a man could go to bed without passing through another man’s bedroom. Grandeur without comfort, art without privacy, such was the Palace in its peopled prime. Think of it to-day—grandeur in rags, art torn from its sockets, and a lonely scribe trailing through vaulted and frescoed emptiness.
The portraits of the Gonzagas are still in the Hall of the Dukes, but when I ascended the beautiful staircase to the vast armoury, I found an aching void. The weapons had been carried off in the sack of Mantua—a sack so complete that Duke Carlo on his return had to accept a few sticks of furniture from the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The Hall of the Caryatides preserves its paintings but the Apartment of the Tapestry is a chandeliered vacancy. The Apartment of the Empress (for Maria Theresa crossed Mantua’s line of life) is in yellow silk upholstery with gilded ceilings and an antique chandelier from Murano, but one wall is relapsed to rough brick, in sharp contrast with the white medallioned ceiling. The Refectory or Hall of the Rivers survives, a curious symphony in brown, a long vaulted room with frescoes of Father Po and his brother-rivers and lakes, with grottoes, and caryatides, and marmoreal mosaics, its windows looking on a hanging garden—yea, Babylon is fallen!—with a piazza of Tuscan columns and a central temple.
A sense of passing through a fantastic dream-world began to steal upon me as I wandered through the Hall of the Zodiac with its great blue roof of stars and celestial signs and ships drawn by dogs, and its walls gay with figures in green and gold, and came to a bed with tall green curtains, in which the inevitable Napoleon had once slept. He was not, I mused, of those who could not sleep in a new bed. Followed a suite of three rooms of the Emperor, decorated with painted tapestry, the real removed to Vienna.
And the nightmare continued—one long succession of cold stone floors below and crystal chandeliers on high, bleakly glittering. There was a Hall of the Popes, bare as a barrack. There was a long shiny gallery of bad pictures, which was once a shrine of the Masters. There was a Ducal Apartment modernised, but with the old gilded and bossed ceiling, and dark cobwebbed canvases of the Flemish school. There was the Hall of the Archers, picturesque with the great wooden rafters of its ruined roof and still painted with illusive white pillars, statues, and scenes. Most monstrous of all was the many mirrored, many chandeliered Ball-room—its rows of mirrors reflecting what dead faces, its gold frieze of putti still echoing what madrigals and toccatas, the gods of Olympus looking down from its frescoed ceiling, Apollo driving his chariot and four, and the Arts, the Sciences, Parnassus, Virgil, Sordello, peeping from every arch and lunette. And from the Hall of the Archers my nightmare led me through Ducal Halls and still other Ducal Halls, till I had passed through seven—vasty Halls of Death, with marvellous gilded ceilings and unplastered walls, or with plaster or whitewash over frescoes, or with a sixteenth-century ceiling swearing at an elegant Austrian bathroom (hot and cold). Vivid, even in this strange dream, stood out a ceiling intaglioed with a labyrinth of gilded wood recording the victory of Vincenzo over the Turks:
“Contra Turcos pugnavit
Vincenzo Gonzaga”