Having Protestant and inconvenient memories, we had our thoughts respecting the reception the discovery, to which the Virgin helped her protégé, had from her other faithful sons. But we liked the story all the same. We were still more pleased when he deserted us to escort two German priests, the only other persons present beside ourselves, to the contemplation of a large picture of the birth of Our Lady. There are many paintings in the Cathedral and some good ones. Ninety-nine and a half per cent. are in honor of the Virgin Mary. The Madonna and Child over the bénitier near the entrance are attributed to Michael Angelo.
We saw all these things while waiting for our juniors; then, went back to our bench and our contemplation of the lamp, until they rejoined us.
The Campo Santo is a quadrangle enclosed by chapels, with corridors open toward the burial-ground, and paved with flat tomb-stones. When the Crusaders of the thirteenth century lost the Holy Land, a pious archbishop of Pisa had between fifty and sixty ship-loads of earth brought hither from Mount Calvary, and made into a last bed for those who loved Jerusalem and mourned her loss. The sacred soil had the property of converting bodies laid within it into dust so quickly and thoroughly that others could follow them within a short time without inconvenience to dead or living. The Campo Santo became tremendously fashionable, and graves were bought at terrifically high prices when one considers the dubious character of the privilege connected with the situation. No interments have been made here for so long that the quadrangle is a smooth lawn edged with flower-borders.
The frescoes of chapels or corridors are the leading curiosity of the place. Guide-books and local inventories, without a gleam of humor, write these down as “remarkable,” “admirable,” “celebrated.” Only by beholding them can one bring himself to believe in the horrible grotesqueness of these Biblical and allegorical scenes. Hideous and blasphemous as they were to me, I bought several photographs that my home-friends might credit my story of mediæval religious art. The lower part of one I draw, at random, from my collection, represents the Creation of Adam. The Creator, a figure with a nimbus about his head, a train of attendants similarly crowned, behind him,—lifts a nude, inert man from the earth. A toothed parapet separates this scene in the Drama of Life from one above, where the same crowned Figure, in the presence of a larger retinue, draws Eve from the side of sleeping Adam. She stares about her in true feminine curiosity, clasping her hands in a gesture of amazement, or delight, designed, no doubt, to contrast strongly, as it does, with the stupid, half-awake air with which Adam comes into the world. The sleeping bridegroom is disturbed by the extraction of his rib, for, without awaking, he puts his hand under his arm, touching Eve’s toe as it leaves his side. The gravest Puritan cannot but see that he is tickled by the operation. The lower section of this panel has Adam, clothed in skins, digging with a rude hoe, in the parallelograms and circles of an Italian garden. The sequence of the narrative is interrupted here to put the curse of labor in more significant juxtaposition with the gift of a wife. At the right-hand corner of the photograph appears what properly belongs to the third place in the series;—the guilty pair crouching together, after the transgression, amid the trees of the garden, and betrayed in their covert by a darting ray of light from heaven. Below this are Adam and Eve, driven by two angels in knight’s armor through the Norman-Gothic door of a machicolated tower. Cain and Abel, quarreling beside an altar modeled after the pulpit of the Pisan Baptistery, are crowded into the background.
The lack of room for the amplification of subjects and the artist’s conceptions of these, led to a terrific “mix” upon the walls, which are literally loaded with frescoes. The entire Book of Genesis is illustrated upon the surface of the North wall, my photograph being a fair specimen of the style of the decorations. The partisans of Pietro di Paccio and of Buffalmacco claim for their respective masters the honor of the upper line of scenes. A Florentine, Benozzo Gozzoli, began with Noah’s drunkenness,—a favorite theme in wine-growing countries—and ran the Jewish history down to the interview of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. To him was awarded the distinction of a grave beneath the history of Joseph.
The two German priests were going into convulsions of merriment before a monstrous spectacle of the Last Judgment and Hell, in which devils in green, red and yellow, are fighting over souls of equivocal reputation, with angels in blue-and-white liveries. The spirits in dispute have so dire a time between them that the terrors of the fate which befall them, when relinquished by the angels, must be materially mitigated by recollections of the escaped horrors of dismemberment. The Inferno of Dante’s countryman the artist, whose name is unknown, is a huge chaldron, crammed with heretics, apostates and Jews. The Chief Cook, his very horns a-tingle with delight, is ramming down some and stirring up others with a big pudding-stick. The priests laughed themselves double over our dumb disgust. Probably they credited the fidelity of the representation less than even we.
The Baptistery is a four-storied rotunda. The lower story is set around with half-columns; the second, with smaller whole pillars. Above this rise two tiers of pointed arches, the first row enclosing niches in which are half-length figures of saints. The upper arches are windows. A fine dome covers all. An octagonal font occupies the centre of the one vaulted chamber whose ceiling is the roof. It is raised by two steps from the floor, and is of white marble carved into patterns as delicate and intricate as the richest lace-work. The pulpit is scarcely less lovely, being adorned with bas-reliefs descriptive of the Life of our Lord from the Annunciation to the Last Judgment. It is a hexagon and there are five of these panels, the sixth side opening upon the steps. The reticulated marble is singularly pure in quality and wrought into elaborateness of finish that has never been excelled.
We were examining it and objurgating the ubiquitous Goth who has mutilated several of the finest figures, when the custodian, standing a little apart from us, sounded three notes in a sonorous baritone. Angel-voices caught them up and repeated them in every variety of harmonious intonation; then, a loftier choir echoed the strains; another and another, and still another until the rejoicings were lost in the heaven of heavens.
We sank upon the steps of the font, and listened, as, in obedience to our wordless gesture, the man, once and again, gave the signal for the unearthly chorus. The voices were human, if human tones are ever perfect in sweetness, roundness and harmony, the transition of the theme from each band of singers to a higher, a complete illusion of the enchained senses. The responses, clear, tender, thrilling, invoked such images as we had seen in the Uffizi and Pitti galleries—concentric circles of cherubim and seraphim and rapturous redeemed ones, with uplifted faces and glad, eager eyes, reflecting the effulgence of the Great White Throne and Him that sat thereon.
Carlo Dolci knew how to paint such, and Raphael, and Fra Angelico. We had heard their quiring while looking upon the pictured canvas. We saw them as we hearkened to the hymning that ascended to the stars.