All three doors are fine with their quaint ornaments of birds and beasts and flowers, but upon the central one Giovanni expended all his art. It is framed in by a double pattern of water-lilies and leaves, of human faces, beasts, penguins and other birds with a colour in their wings like tarnished gold. The red marble lions which guard the entrance, with long arched necks and symmetrical curls, a human figure between their paws, may belong to an even earlier period, and perhaps were taken by Giovanni da Gubbio from the Chiesa Ugonia to decorate his façade, together with the etruscan-looking figures of God the Father, the Virgin and St. Rufino in the lunette above. Just below the windows a long row of animals, such pre-historic beasts as may have walked upon Subasio when no man was there to interrupt their passage, seem to move in endless procession, and look down with faces one has seen in dreams.
DOOR OF SAN RUFINO
The interior of the cathedral is a disappointment; at first we accuse the great Maestro Giovanni for this painful collection of truncated lines and inharmonious shapes, until we find how utterly his work was ruined in the sixteenth century by Galeazzo Alessi of Perugia. To understand what the church was five centuries before Alessi came, it is necessary to climb the campanile (only those who are attracted by ricketty ladders and dizzy heights are advised to make the trial), and when nearly half way up step out on to Alessi's roof, whence we can view the havoc he has made. But he could not spoil Giovanni's rose-windows, and through one of them we see the castle on its green hill and the town below, cut into sections as though we were looking at the Umbrian world through a kaleidoscope.
The outside of San Rufino is so lovely that we should be inclined to advise none to enter, and thus spoil the impression it makes, were it not for the triptych by Niccolò da Foligno, "the first painter in whom the emotional, now passionate and violent, now mystic and estatic, temperament of St. Francis' countrymen was revealed."[103] Here we find a dreamy Madonna with flaxen hair, surrounded by tiny angels even fairer than herself in crimson and golden garments folded about their hips. The lunettes above are studded with patches of jewel-colour, angels spreading their pointed wings upwards as they seem to be wafted to and fro by a breeze. Four tall and serious saints stand round the Virgin like columns; to the right St. Peter Damian busily writing in a book, and St. Marcello, an Assisan martyr of the fourth century who might pass for a typical Italian priest of the present day. On the left is St. Rufino in the act of giving his pastoral blessing, and St. Esuberanzio, another of Assisi's early martyrs, holding a missal. They stand in a meadow thickly overgrown with flowers drawn with all Niccolò's firm outline and love of detail. Fine as the picture is, it cannot compare with the charming predella where the artist has worked with the delicacy of a miniature painter. It represents the martyrdom of St. Rufino; in the first small compartment the Roman soldiers on horseback, their lances held high in the air, followed by a group of prying boys, watch the Bishop's tortures as the flames shoot up around him; and in the distance are two small hill-towns with the towers of Costano in the plain. Then follows the scene where two young Assisan Christians have come down to the Chiaggio to rescue the body of their saint from the river. He lies stiffly in their arms, attired in his episcopal vestments, and the water has sucked the long folds of his cope below its surface. The last represents the procession of citizens led by Bishop Basileo bringing St. Rufino's body from Costano, and is one of the most exquisite bits of Umbrian painting. Niccolò has placed the scene in early morning, the air is keen among the mountains, the sun has just reached Assisi, seen against the white slopes of Subasio, and turns its houses to a rosy hue, while the tiny wood in the plain is still in deepest shadow. The white-robed acolytes mount the hill in the sunlight followed by the people and the heifers which ought, Niccolò has forgotten, according to the legend, to have led the way. The picture is signed Opus Nicholai De Fuligneo MCCCCLX.
The only other fine things in the cathedral are the stalls of intarsia work of carved wood, by Giovanni di Pier Giacomo da San Severino (1520), a pupil of the man who executed the far finer stalls in San Francesco. In the chapel of the Madonna del Pianto is a curious wooden statue of the Pietà, how old and whether of the Italian or French school it is difficult to say. A tablet records that in 1494 because of the great dissensions in the town this Madonna was seen to weep, for which she has been much honoured, as is shown by the innumerable ex-votos hung by the faithful round her altar.
THE DOME AND APSE OF SAN RUFINO FROM THE CANON'S GARDEN