Well, that is over now. But the curse of the Prophet Isaiah seems to have fallen upon the papal City of Refuge. 'In that day shall her strong cities be as a forsaken bough, and an uppermost branch ... and there shall be desolation.' So that it was with a kind of wonder, as though we too had assisted at a miracle, that we came suddenly upon the Duomo of Orvieto with its rare marbles and brazen beasts of the Evangelists, its glittering mosaics, and gilded pinnacles soaring to the heavens. For this great cathedral, built to commemorate the triumph of the dogma of the Roman Church over northern intelligence in the Miracle of Bolsena, is a bird of strange plumage to find nesting on the melancholy rock of Orvieto.
Siena or Florence, Pisa or Lucca, any of the flowery cities of Tuscany would have been its proper setting. It is too gay for Umbria, whose hills are bathed in the serene, ineffable calm of a mystic holiness, who, remembering her many saints, still keeps the low estate of a handmaiden of the Lord. It is like a golden iris plucked from some Tuscan garden, and transplanted upon the bosom of this sombre precipice of tufa upheaved by Nature in primeval struggles. For chance and the Papacy have grafted the most exotic bloom of Italian Gothic architecture upon the rock of Orvieto.
But look closer. Behind the aerial grace of the façade with its bewildering embroidery of yellowing marbles, rarely carved, its jewelled canopies of mosaic, its Lombard colonnades and soaring pinnacles, not even Time, the great artist who puts the crown of beauty upon all the works of man, can veil the ugly nudity of nave and transept. If the pride of the Orvietans had only left him a freer hand upon the façade it would have been immeasurably more beautiful. But the mosaics which should gleam from their rich setting with the subdued brilliance of a peacock's feather, have been restored so garishly by a local artist that they rob the cathedral of half her wonder. Their glitter sears like a burning glass: only on a rainy day, or by moonlight, could we look on them with equanimity.
It was not for these that we stayed so long outside the portal of Santa Maria, but to study the exquisite carvings which Lorenzo Maitani or Niccolò Pisano traced on the bases of the four pilasters. When two such scholars as John Addington Symonds and Mr. Langton Douglas fall out over the authorship of these sculptures it is useless to offer any opinion on the subject. But there is a pretty legend concerning Niccolò Pisano and his work at Orvieto; and because the reading of it gave me much pleasure as I sat on the stone bench below the Opera del Duomo, marvelling over the glories of the Miracle Church, I will give it in a quotation from Mr. Symonds' delightful essay:—'Nicola Pisano, before Cimabue, before Duccio, even before Dante, opened the gates of beauty, which for a thousand years had been shut up and overgrown with weeds. As Dante invoked the influence of Virgil when he began to write his mediaeval poem, and made a heathen bard his hierophant in Christian mysteries, just so did Nicola Pisano draw inspiration from a Græco-Roman sarcophagus. He studied the bas-relief of Phaedra and Hippolytus, which may still be seen upon the tomb of Countess Beatrice in the Campo Santo, and so learned by heart the beauty of its lines and the dignity expressed in its figures that in all his subsequent works we trace the elevated tranquillity of Greek sculpture.'[28]
A Street in Orvieto.
And, indeed, there is a curious and unexpected beauty in these naïve reliefs telling the ancient story of the Creation and the Fall, the Old Testament up to the Birth of Christ, the life of Jesus, and the Last Judgement. For though they are a typically mediaeval expression of faith, yet they are astonishingly free from the bizarre design and crude workmanship of mediaeval imaginings. Lofty in conception, they tell the solemn history of Christianity in a series of scenes divided the one from the other by the Vine, of which it has been written, 'I am the Vine and ye are the branches.' But here for the first time in Mediaeval Art we see treatment worthy of the nobility of the Theme. For whether the sculptor did really become enamoured of the antique by the study of an ancient tomb, or whether some fire of genius within himself bade him struggle forth from the swaddling bands of Byzantium and the grotesqueries of the North, he has inscribed a new chapter in the history of Art upon the walls of the Cathedral of Orvieto.
Forsaking the crowded imagery of Mediaevalism, he has made manifest the dignity and beauty of the human form. And something else as well. For looking on the reliefs of the Creation, we can almost hear the rustling wings of the two guardian angels as they hover in the silent dawn above the garden where God creates man in His own Image. And we see the germs of that poetic imagery which was later to bear fruit in the genius of Ghiberti and Donatello, even, it may be, in the frescoes of the Sixtine Chapel where Michelangelo completed the great epic of the Human Form, whose prologue we may read upon the stones of Orvieto Cathedral.