AREZZO: THE PRISON.
It is the Middle Ages which have set their crown upon Arezzo. Knowing her courage, and how it outweighed her strength so that she dared to offer battle to her great neighbour Florence through many stormy centuries, it is a marvel that anything of value should be left. And in fact Arezzo boasts few civic buildings—the palace of the Podestà or del Governo, now the prison, whose façade is covered with the stemme of her many rulers, and the Palazzo Comunale or dei Priori, with its picturesque clock tower, are all that remain of the mediaeval city, except some streets of fifteenth-century dwelling-houses. But she has several noble churches—the Gothic Duomo, majestically simple within and without, which crowns her hill-top; the Pieve, Santa Maria di Gradi, with its wonderful Pisan-Romanesque façade, hoary with antiquity; the great bare church of San Francesco, enriched by Piero della Francesca's Story of the True Cross; and Santa Maria delle Grazie in the vineyards outside the walls.
It is the same all over Italy. What little town is there, however broken, but has ancient churches and palaces to crown its hill and keep troth through the ages with its vanished greatness? Arezzo is particularly rich. The most expectant pilgrim to Italy's shrines of art, even though he come straight from Florence, will be thrilled by the golden church which soars from the crest of Arezzo's hill between the gracious old Palazzo Comunale and the public gardens, gay in July with the flame-coloured pennons of a flowering tree, which Mr. Markino tells me is called Urushi in Japan. For the Aretines have lavished wealth upon their cathedral, and the Ark of San Donato, which is one of the most beautiful mediaeval shrines in Italy, a rival to Orcagna's masterpiece in Or San Michele, is alone worth the long hot climb. The exquisitely wrought marble is yellowing with age; it is as finely carved as Oriental ivories; the trefoils and the edges of its panels are set with lapis lazuli. And here we have the reverence of the Trecento, with its rude handiwork redeemed by its ardent sincerity. For the sculptors saw nothing strange or irreverent in filling their scenes of the lives of Madonna and San Donato with all the incongruous details of their own day, so that we have at the same time jesters and angels, knights a-horseback and heavy-headed saints, and the queer beasts of mediaeval imaginings.
Close at hand is the tomb of the splendid old fighting Bishop of Arezzo, Guido Tarlati, who crowned the Emperor Lewis of Bavaria with the Iron Crown of Lombardy in defiance of the excommunications of John XXII., and who led his people to battle against the Pope as readily as he led their prayers to God. A great man this, who has a worthy tomb, for Agostino and Agnolo of Siena carved the history of his stirring life below his recumbent form when he was laid to rest, and have shown us incidentally the life of the Trecento in all its vigour and humour. Two angels draw back the curtains of his bier, revealing him as he lies asleep, with folded hands and an air of extreme piety and humility, belied by the long recital of his little wars, and the story of his triumphs, from his Consecration as a Bishop to the Coronation of Lewis, and his death in 1327.
A Street in Arezzo.
There are many other treasures in the Duomo, besides the column upon which San Donato had his head cut off, 'without any regard for the axe,' as the custode explained, pointing out a deep gash in the marble to remove the lingering doubts of any sceptic; there is an exquisite relief by Rossellino in the Chapter House, and many Della Robbias have set their seal of piety and graciousness on altar and tomb in the Chapel of the Madonna. But it was not any of these things which claimed our thoughts the first time that we entered the dim aisles of Margheritone's soaring Gothic church. After the glare and heat of the piazza, where the sunlight reflected from the yellow walls of the cathedral dazzled our eyes, we found the darkness of the nave, illuminated by a solitary altar lamp, and threaded with shafts of jewelled light filtering through painted glass, as grateful as the shade of some primeval forest formed by the interlacing branches of giant trees. For, within, the Cathedral of Arezzo is like the Gothic churches of the north, and it may be that the grim Margheritone, whose agonised crucifixions adorn so many chapels in Tuscany and Umbria, was himself inspired by northern architecture. He returned to his native town from Florence in the train of Gregory X., fresh from the Council of Lyons; and Gregory, who left 30,000 scudi to the Comune for the erection of the new cathedral, may well have made some suggestions as to the style of architecture which was to be employed. He died in the neighbourhood some months later, early in the year 1276, and his beautiful thirteenth-century tomb by Margheritone is one of the chief ornaments of the cathedral which he helped to endow.