Pictures in Umbria

by Katharine S. Macquoid

The authorities of the city were eager to show their appreciation of the wonderful reformation effected in its morals by the preaching of San Bernardino; only a few years after his death, the building of this beautiful memorial was begun, and seems to have been completed about 1462.

Bernardino's father was governor of Massa; in the year 1380, when Saint Catherine died in Siena, the future preacher was born in the little town. Early left an orphan, he was tenderly reared by three aunts, all excellent women. He, unlike his great prototype, seems not to have shared the fashionable vices of other youths of the period; he was from an early age bent on following, so far as he could, the example left him two hundred years earlier by Saint Francis of Assisi.

He spent some time in that convent of Fiesole which educated Fra Angelico and others, ardent to revive in their generation the work of St. Francis, which had suffered eclipse. Various reasons have been given for this, chief among them being the pagan tendency of the Renaissance teaching, and also the frequent visitations of plague, which seem almost to have emptied the convents, sweeping off the monks and nuns who gave up their lives to tend the sick in hospitals. In most of the Italian states and cities the descendants of devout Christians had become fierce and brutal, as unrestrained in appetite as they were murderous and lawless in deeds. Some of these have already been narrated. Princes and nobles strove to surpass the citizens in evil-doing by the hideous tragedies they enacted. This had been especially the case for many years in Perugia, whose inhabitants had come to be designated by the epithet "ferocious": they were so given up to every sort of crime.

Bernardino was deeply stirred by the evil report that reached him from all parts of the country; he had already been received into the Minor Conventual Order of San Francis, and had signalised his courage by nursing and ministering to the plague-stricken inmates of the hospital in Siena. This had injured his health, but he gladly obeyed the commission given by his superior, to journey through a certain part of Italy, preaching as he went.

Already the evangelising movement was in the air: in France, a Spaniard, San Vincent Ferrier, had reaped a bountiful harvest of souls. Bernardino determined by God's help to evangelise his country, and to rescue souls from evil by the winning power of love. He decided to begin his crusade in Umbria, in the powerful city of Perugia, so notorious for the crimes of its bloodstained nobles and the frivolity and vanity of their women.

Bernardino lodged in a convent outside the city gate, and went every morning to preach in the Piazza Pubblico. Crowds had flocked to hear his first sermon, but he had a consciousness that this was mere excitement, and that the souls of his listeners were yet to be won. One day he told his congregation that he proposed before long to show them the Evil One. This announcement sent the multitude crazy with excitement; the throngs of his listeners were doubled. But for some days after Bernardino preached only in an ordinary fashion.

Still the people believed he would keep faith with them, and each day brought a larger crowd of expectant listeners. At last, one morning, Bernardino said, "I am now going to fulfil my promise; I will show you not one devil only, for there are several here." Then, raising his voice, "Look at one another, you will each see Satan in your neighbour's face; every one of you does that Evil One's bidding." He then pointed out seriously, and with much pathos, the sins that reigned among them, and implored his hearers to renounce their evil practices. The effect of his words was wonder-striking. Families who had lived in hatred of their fellow-citizens for more than a generation, hurried forward, and, clasping the hands of their once-detested foes, begged forgiveness for wrongs committed; in more than one instance, with halters round their necks, they besought pardon for the evil they had wrought. Bernardino saw that the devotion of the city was roused, and, turning to the women, he commanded them to cause two huge fires to be lighted on the Piazza.

"Set a pattern to your men," he exclaimed; "prove the reality of your penitence; cast into the flames the gauds by which Satan tempts you to ensnare mankind to their ruin; bring hither your cosmetics, your perfumes, your false tresses, and the garlands with which you deck them, your sumptuous robes, all the vanities you possess, and cast them into the flames."

Sobbing and weeping, the women rushed off to obey him; they soon returned laden with the vanities denounced by the preacher, and, like the Florentines many years later, they cast their prized adornments into the huge fires.

An old chronicler relates that one noble dame cherished a long false tress of singular beauty, which had always commanded admiration; she felt that this would prove a worthy offering. Taking it from its casket, she was about to hurry with it to the Piazza; she again looked at it.