“Nequidque patavino splendore deesset”
says a monument to Alessandro Contarini in the nave of the cathedral, a monument supported by six slaves and embracing a bas-relief of the fleet. Another in the worst dogal style exhibits Caterino Cornaro, a hero of the Cretan War (who died in 1674) in a full-bottomed wig and baggy knee-breeches, holding a scroll as if about to smack the universe with it. Sad is it to see so many “eternal monuments” of faded fames.
The Scaliger street-tombs in Verona are at least artistically laudable, however ironically their Christian ostensiveness compares with the record of the Family of the Ladder, whose rungs were murdered relatives. But even had Can Signorio lived the life of a saint, it would have needed a considerable conquest of his Christian humility before he could have commissioned that portentous tomb of his from Bonino da Campiglione. Knowing the Magnificent One, Bonino gave him solidity and superfluity, a plethora of niched and statued minarets of saints and virtues armed warriors, and bewildering pinnacles clothed with figures, all resting on six red marble columns springing from a base which supports the tomb, and is itself upborne by angels at each corner and adorned with pious bas-reliefs. And while the dead man lies in stone above his tomb, guarded by angels at head and foot, he also bestrides his horse and sports his spear on the uttermost pinnacle of his ladder-crested memorial, as though making the best of both worlds; which was indeed the general habit of the Magnificent, who desired likewise the beatitudes of the Meek, and often shed tears of sincere repentance when they could sin no more. Mastino della Scala’s tomb is more gilded and elegant than Can Signorio’s, though not less assertive and bi-worldly. And as for the tomb of Can Grande—“Dog the Great,” as Byron translated him in “The Age of Bronze,”—which is perched over the church door and soars up into a turret, it was—on the day I first saw it—provided with a long and dirty ladder for repairing purposes. So that I say Father Time—if he be a poor curator—is at least a fellow of infinite jest. One of his jests is to hound the Magnificent dead from pillar to post, from church to monastery, from crypt to chapel. In the grave there is rest? Fiddle-faddle! No body is safe from these chances of mortality. Stone walls do not a coffin make, nor iron bars a tomb. Call no body happy until it is burnt. After five centuries of rest Matilda of Tuscany was carried off from Mantua in a sort of mortuary elopement by her great admirer, Pope Urban VIII, and hidden away in the castle of S. Angelo, till she could be inhumed in St. Peter’s, and it was only the pride of Spoleto that saved Lippo Lippi from being sold to Florence. Napoleon, in suppressing churches, disestablished many an ancient corpse, and the pious families of Verona hastened to transport their sarcophagi to the church of S. Zeno on the outskirts. Hither must ride the dead Cavalli with their equine scutcheons, flying before the World-Conqueror on his white horse.
Dismemberment, too, befalls tombs at the hands of the merry jester. The friars of S. Maria delle Grazie who owed so much to the great Sforza Duke, broke up his monument and offered his effigy and his wife’s for sale. The more loyal Carthusians snapped up Cristoforo Solari’s beautiful sculptures for the beggarly price of thirty-eight ducats, and Lodovico and Beatrice in marble must leave their dust and make a last journey to Pavia. A last journey? Chi sa?
“Iterum et iterum translatis,” sighs the monument over the bones of Cino in Pistoja Cathedral, and who knows that the “pax tandem ossibus” is more than a sanguine aspiration? Cino was not the only Italian poet to be thus “translated,” though neither Petrarch nor Ariosto was “translated” so often. Petrarch indeed was rather pirated than “translated,” for his right arm was stolen from his sepulchre at Arquà for the Florentines, and the rest of him is now supposed to be in Madrid—a town which also holds that monarch of sanctity, Francesco di Borja, likewise minus an arm, for the Gesù of Rome kept back that precious morsel of the Duke who had entered the kingdom of heaven by the rare gate of abdication.
But stranger than these mutations of mortality is the fact that Italy holds the ashes of our Shelley and Keats, as it held so much of the life of Byron and Browning. As if Rome had not riches and memories to super-satiety! A Protestant cemetery seems indeed out of key as much with these poets as with Rome, but that overshadowing Pyramid of Cestius restores the exotic touch, and violets and daisies blot out all but the religion of beauty, so that Shelley could write: “It might make me in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.” It is pleasant to think that only a year later Shelley, however exiguous his ashes, found in that sweet place the rest and re-union for which his cor cordium yearned.
“’Tis Adonais calls! oh hasten thither,
No more let life divide what Death can join together.”
With what a wonderful coast Shelley has mingled his memory—fig-trees, olives, palms, cactus, hawthorn, pines bent seaward, all running down the steep cliff. What enchanting harmonies they make with the glimpses of sea deep below, the white villages and campaniles, seen through their magic tangle. As you pass through the sunny dusty village roads, the girls seem to ripen out of the earth like grapes, both white and black, for there are golden-haired blondes as well as sun-kissed brunettes. They walk bare-footed, with water-jars poised on their heads, sometimes balancing great russet bundles of hay. And the old peasant women with Dantesque features sit spinning or lace-making at the doors of their cottages, as they have sat these three thousand years, without growing a wrinkle the more, if indeed there was ever room for another wrinkle on their dear corrugated faces. What earth lore as of aged oaks they must have sucked in during all these centuries!
It is here that one understands the Paganism of d’Annunzio, whose soul lies suffused in these sparkling infinities of sun and sea and sky, whose marmoreal language is woven from the rhythmic movement and balance of these sculptural bodies.