Yet this grim fortress, originally built by a despot as a refuge from his subjects, is merely the seat of telegraph and other civic offices; like some antediluvian dragon tamed and harnessed, instead of wastefully slain, by the St. George who gleams above the portcullis.
In the piazza before the castle, where I saw only a cab-rank of broken-down horses, the festa of this patron-saint of Ferrara was wont to set Barbary horses racing for the pallium, and splendid battle-chargers ramped in that great tournament which was held by Duke Ercole, Isabella’s father, in honour of his son-in law, the Moro, and which was won by Galeazzo di Sanseverino, the model of the Cortigiano. Isabella d’Este in her glad virginal youth walked her palfrey up and down the great equine staircase, now given over to messenger boys and clerks. Under the sportive ceilings and adipose angels of Dosso Dossi, or within that girdling frieze of putti driving their teams of birds, beasts, snakes or fishes, pragmatic councillors hold debate. In the castle ball-room are held—charity dances!
But infinitely the saddest relic of the Magnificent Moro is his former palace in Ferrara. Why he needed a palace in Ferrara I do not know, unless to accommodate the overflowings of his suite when he visited his ducal father-in-law. Of this palace the excellent Baedeker discourses thus: “To the S. of S. Maria in Vado, in the Corso Porta Romana, is the former Palazzo Costabili or Palazzo Scrofa, now known as the Palazzo Beltrami-Calcagnini. It was erected for Lodovico il Moro, but is uncompleted. Handsome court. On the ground-floor to the left are two rooms with excellent ceiling-frescoes, by Ercole Grandi; in the first, prophets and Sybils; in the second, scenes from the Old Testament in grisaille.”
It could not have been done better by an auctioneer. Here is the reality. A courtyard with arches, dirty, refuse-littered, surrounded by a barrack of slum-dwellings. The first room I penetrated into was palatial in size but occupied by three beds, and a stove replaced the old hearth. The floor was of bare brick. Sole touch of colour, a canary sang in a cage, as cheerfully as to a Magnificent One. The crone whose family inhabited this room conducted me at my request to the chamber with the ceilings by Ercole Grandi. She opened the door, and—like Maria of Sicily—entered crying, “È permesso?” with retrospective ceremoniousness, and I followed her into a vast lofty room, dingy below, but glorious above, though more to faith than to sight, for the firmament of fresco was difficult to see clearly in the gloom. The floor was of stone, and held two beds, a chair or two, a cradle, a stout dwarfish old woman and a sprawl of children with unkempt heads. In the adjoining room sat a sickly and silent woman working a sewing machine under the hovering Sybils and Prophets, dim and faded as herself.
For those who covet a Renaissance chamber, even after this exposure of the auctioneer, let me say that the rent of this last room was thirty-two scudi a year, Sybils and Prophets thrown in.
The entire Palace Beltrami-Calcagnini is, I imagine, to be acquired for a song. When I first read in Ruskin’s “A Joy for Ever,” his exhortation to Manchester manufacturers to purchase palaces in Verona so as to safeguard stray Titians and Veroneses, I felt that the Anglo-Saxon aspiration to play Atlas had reached its culminating grotesquerie. But now that I have seen the state of the Ercole Grandi frescoes, I feel that the Anglo-Saxon might do worse than step in, and I cannot understand why Italy, so rigid against the exportation of her treasures, is so callous to their extinction.
And this is the Palace built by the great Moro, who “boasted that the Pope Alexander was his chaplain, the Emperor Maximilian his condottiere, Venice his chamberlain, and the King of France his courier”; for whose wedding procession, which was preceded by a hundred trumpeters, Milan draped itself in satins and brocades; who patronised the immortals of Art; and who wore to death in an underground dungeon in France.
An older than Virgil hath spoken the final word: Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas.
OF DEAD SUBLIMITIES, SERENE MAGNIFICENCES, AND GAGGED POETS
There are few livelier expressions of vitality than tombs, especially tombs designed or commissioned by their occupants. These be projections of personality beyond the grave, extensions of egotism beyond the body. The Magnificent Ones have invariably the mausolean habit. It is another of their humilities. The majesty of death, they know, is not enough to cover their nakedness. Moses, the true Superman, had his sepulchre hidden that none might worship at it. The false Superman ostentates his sepulchre in the hope that some one may worship at it. His Magnificence is only Serene in his tomb: his life passes in uneasy tiptoeings after greatness. Sometimes his mortuary tumefactions are softened by his spouse being made co-tenant of his tomb, as in the Taj Mahal of Agra, or in that beautiful monument ordered by Lodovico of Milan for himself and Beatrice d’Este. And sometimes when “the Bishop orders his tomb” it may be with an extenuating design to beautify his church—“ad ornatum ecclesiae” as “Leo Episcopus” says of the monument he designed for himself in Pistoja Cathedral. Unfortunately Bishop Leo’s worthy object is scarcely attained by the two fat angels leaning sleepily against his sarcophagus, or by the skull and the shell-work over it, though in comparison with Verrocchio’s adjacent monument of Cardinal Forteguerra—or rather the bust and the black sarcophagus superimposed upon the original marble—the Bishop’s tomb is a thing of beauty.