The most striking feature of Mesocco is the castle, which, as I have said, occupies a rock in the middle of the valley, and is one of the finest ruins in Switzerland. More interesting than the castle, however, is the church of S. Cristoforo. Before I entered it I was struck with the fresco on the facciata of the church, which, though the facciata bears the date 1720, was painted in a style so much earlier than that of 1720 that I at first imagined I had found here another old master born out of due time; for the fresco was in such a good state of preservation that it did not look more than 150 years old, and it was hardly likely to have been preserved when the facciata was renovated in 1720. When, however, my friend Jones joined me, he blew that little romance away by discovering a series of names with dates scrawled upon it from “1481. viii. Febraio” to the present century. The lowest part of the fresco must be six feet from the ground, and it must rise at least ten or a dozen feet more, so the writings upon it are not immediately obvious, but they will be found on looking at all closely.
It is plain, therefore, that when the facciata paired the original fresco was preserved; it cannot be, as I had supposed, the work of a local painter who had taken his ideas of rocks and trees from the frescoes inside the church. That I am right in supposing the curious blanc-mange-mould-looking objects on either side St. Christopher’s legs to be intended for rocks will be clear to any one who has seen the frescoes inside the church, where mountains with trees and towns upon them are treated on exactly the same principle. I cannot think the artist can have been quite easy in his mind about them.
On entering the church the left-hand wall is found to be covered with the most remarkable series of frescoes in the Italian Grisons. They are disposed in three rows, one above the other, occupying the whole wall of the church as far as the chancel. The top row depicts a series of incidents prior to the Crucifixion, and is cut up by the pulpit at the chancel end. These events are treated so as to form a single picture.
The second row is in several compartments. There is a saint in armour on horseback, life-size, killing a dragon, and a queen who seems to have been leading the dragon by a piece of red tape buckled round its neck—unless, indeed, the dragon is supposed to have been leading the queen. The queen still holds the tape and points heavenward. Next to this there is a very nice saint on horse-back, who is giving a cloak to a man who is nearly naked. Then comes St. Michael trampling on the dragon, and holding a pair of scales in his hand, in which are two little souls of a man and of a woman. The dragon has a hook in his hand, and thrusting this up from under St. Michael, he hooks it on to the edge of the scale with the woman in it, and drags her down. The man, it seems, will escape. Next to this there is a compartment in which a monk is offering a round thing to St. Michael, who does not seem to care much about it; there are other saints and martyrs in this compartment, and St. Anthony with his pig, and Sta. Lucia holding a box with two eyes in it, she being patroness of the eyesight as well as of mariners. Lastly, there is the Adoration, ruined by the pulpit.
Below this second compartment are twelve frescoes, each about three and a half feet square, representing the twelve months—from a purely secular point of view. January is a man making and hanging up sausages; February, a man chopping wood; March, a youth proclaiming spring with two horns to his mouth, and his hair flying all abroad; April is a young man on horseback carrying a flower in his hand; May, a knight, not in armour, going out hawking with his hawk on one finger, his bride on a pillion behind him, and a dog beside the horse; June is a mower; July, another man reaping twenty-seven ears of corn; August, an invalid going to see his doctor; October, a man knocking down chestnuts from a tree and a woman catching them; November is hidden and destroyed by the pulpit; December is a butcher felling an ox with a hatchet.
