It is dreadful to say, but the first glimpse we had of the Duomo, with its striped wall of black and white
marble, reminded us of good old Sarah Battles—“now with God”—and her cribbage-board, which Charles Lamb tells us was made of the finest Sienese marble, and brought by her uncle from Italy. But on coming nearer to it every trivial thought vanishes before its grandeur and expressive richness of detail. The impression it makes on the mind is so profound, M. Taine says, that “what we feel on entering St. Peter’s at Rome cannot be compared to it.” He calls it “a most admirable Gothic flower, but of a new species that has blossomed in a more propitious clime, the production of minds of greater cultivation and genius, more serene, more beautiful, more religious, and yet healthy; and which is to the cathedrals of France what the poems of Dante and Petrarch are to the chansons of the French trouvères.”
On the pavement before the entrance is represented the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican who went up into the Temple to pray—a lesson to ponder over as we enter the house of prayer. The façade is of marvellous workmanship. Amid angels and prophets and symbolic sculpture, delicate as lace-work, are St. Ansano, St. Catharine, and San Bernardin—the special patrons of Siena. On entering the church you are at first dazzled by its richness. The pavement is unrivalled in the world, with its pictures in niello, by an art now lost, where we find page after page from the Scriptures, some written by the powerful hand of Beccafumi, whose cartoons are to be seen at the Belle Arti; sibyls noble as goddesses; Trismegistus, who received his knowledge from Zoroaster, offering the Pimandra in which is written: “The God who
created all things, the maker of the earth and starry heavens, so greatly loved his Son that he made him his Holy Word”; and Socrates climbing the mountain of Virtue, who sits on its summit, holding forth a palm to him, while with the other hand she offers the book of wisdom to Crates, who empties a casket of jewels to receive it. The walls are covered with paintings, by Duccio, of twenty-six scenes of the Passion, full of life and power, dramatic and yet strictly Scriptural, forming a book one is never weary of studying as Christian or artist. The stalls by Fra Giovanni, the Olivetan monk, are the very perfection of intarsia work, which here, as Marchese says, “almost rises to the dignity of painting.” The wondrous pulpit, with its nine columns resting on lions, its sides covered with scenes from the life of Christ by Nicholas of Pisa, and the seven sciences on the central octagonal pillar, is a prodigy of richness and elegance.
The frieze around the nave is adorned with the heads of the popes down to Alexander III. Among these, strange to say, was once Pope Joan, such hold had that popular error on the public mind. It was Florimond de Raymond, a counsellor of the parliament of Bordeaux, and a friend of Montaigne and Justus Lipsius, who, in the sixteenth century, protested against such an insult to the Papacy, and by his efforts had it effaced. He wrote to the Sovereign Pontiff himself: “Avenge the injury done to your predecessors. Order this monster to be removed from the place where Satan, the father of lies, has had it set up. Do not suffer an image to remain of that which never existed. If there was no body, let there be no shadow”; and he calls upon the pope to destroy
this idol, raised to the disgrace of the church. Besides this, he wrote a book, now rare, completely exploding the fable, showing by incontestable documents there was not the least place for Joan in the succession of popes. This work, together with his appeal, produced such an effect as to procure the removal of her portrait from the cathedral of Siena. The illustrious Cardinal Baronius wrote to him in 1600 that it had just been removed by order of the Grand Duke of Tuscany according to his wishes, and he congratulated him in magnificent terms on such a triumph.
On an altar in the left nave is the crucifix borne by the Sienese at the battle of Monte Aperti, and beneath the arches are still suspended, after so many centuries, the long flag-poles captured from the Florentines Sept. 4, 1260, the most glorious day in the history of Siena.
At the right is the chapel of the Madonna del Voto, built by Alexander VII., a Sienese pope (Fabio Chigi), with its Byzantine-looking Virgin amid paintings, bronzes, mosaics, and precious stones.
The family of Piccolomini is glorified in this church. To it belonged
the great Æneas Silvius, as well as Pius III., also a lover of the arts, and Ascanio Piccolomini, Archbishop of Siena, a friend of Galileo, to whom he gave hospitality when he came forth from what people are pleased to call the dungeons of the Inquisition at Rome—that is, from pleasant apartments in the delightful palace of the Tuscan ambassador on the Trinità de’ Monti, now the French Academy. The Piccolomini chapel has five statues sculptured by Michael Angelo, and the beautiful hall, known as the Library, is world-famous for its frescoes of the life of Pius II. by Pinturicchio.