Old dragons and monsters and wide-mouthed cherubim leer down from the gray sepulchres. From under the pointed arches, blossoming with palm-leaves and sweet stone child-faces, young painted angels, soft-eyed, long-haired, in pink and blue robes, smile down from the gold background, with emblems of resurrection in their hands, like flowers springing from the dust beneath. Here and there, high up under the cornice of some old Gothic tomb, is a round-eyed frescoed Madonna watching the slumbers of an old knight whose bed-curtain is upheld by long-armed saints. Pompous and grim and fantastic and sullen by turns, these tombs would make the heart of the stranger ache with their mockery, but that the living sunlight streams athwart the hard stone faces and the monster heads, and in the quadrangle of the cloister the lilies are standing like white-robed heavenly hosts, and a well upheld by angels rises up from the rank meadow-space. The purple clover runs riot among the grass. There is humming of bees about the golden lily-hearts, and a red butterfly loses its way now and then among the graves.
There is the rustle of ghostly garments in the silent air—the fall of shadowy feet upon the grave-lined pavements. A white-robed, shining multitude of philosophers and sages is for ever pacing up and down the sunny gallery discoursing of great and high things, like the blessed in the Paradise of Dante. A goodly company were they who walked there of old. Here came Giotto, pale-browed and thoughtful, discoursing with his friend, old Pietro di Abano, wizard, astrologer and learned physician, of the designs he was to give him for the frescoing of the new Palace of Reason that the city was erecting. With them, perchance, walked the great Tuscan, for he knew and loved them both, and all three, the seer, the poet and the painter, brooded over the inner forces of Nature and bared their souls to revelation. Hither came Petrarch, worn with the pomp of courts, yet flushed with modest pride at the new clerical dignity conferred upon him by his friend the Carrara, looking back upon his past life with philosophic calm, bidding no man judge the day till the evening be past, yet now and again feeling the old waves of passion surge through his heart, breathing a prayer for the repose of his dead love and a sigh for those sweet, far-off days of his youth. Here Tasso, the beautiful young dreamer, escaping from the dull round of the university, threw himself down in the clover beside the angels of the well, and saw fair white women with golden hair wreathing their arms about him, while the bees and the butterflies laughed aloud and cried, "Poor fool! he does not know they are only lilies." And Galileo, teaching the while the dull youth of the school, came to gather strength in the thought of the great finality that was to lay him low beyond the reach of the Inquisition, and yet lift him far above all human grandeur to mate with the stars that had been his comfort through long years of pain. Great Paolo Sarpi, when he came down from Venice in his monk's dress to discourse with the learned men of Padua, wandered here with his mind intent on the mighty problems of the universe, all unthinking of the assassin's knife that was to ease the jealousy of the Roman cardinals. Here wandered the apprentice-boy Mantegna, poor and humble, stealing timidly in behind the furred gowns and the gilded chains to feast his poor little artist-soul upon the frightened young Madonnas and wide-eyed angels that look out timidly from the arches of the sepulchres. What grand old phantoms glide on by the side of the laughing student-lads, and the old market-women in red kerchiefs who tell their beads in corners, and the young girls who gather the long stalks of seed-grass from the quadrangle and whisper to them timid questions concerning their absent lovers!
On the great square in front of the church were booths filled with bright flowers and early fruit and cheap sweetmeats, at which the peasants were haggling and chaffering and filling their blue handkerchiefs. The saints and prophets raised their hands in blessing from the blossoming spires. Over the way, in the inn of the "Two White Crosses," the farmers were dining. The laughter floated out through the open windows, and a man appeared at the door and scattered cherries to the crowd. By the side of the church was a great sepulchre, horrible with demon-heads and pictures of the sinners in Purgatory. Above the heads of the crowd, high on a pedestal, sat a bronze warrior on a fiery charger. It is old Gattamelata, the condottiere of the Venetian forces in the long wars with Padua. His body lies within the church, and his effigy is the work of one Donatello, famous in Tuscan art.
We followed the crowd along the white-walled street to the great market-square the people call the Prato della Valle. In the middle was a circular space of meadow, with trees above it, surrounded by a moat, above which stand life-size statues of warriors and poets and nobles and philosophers, blackened with the damp and mould of centuries, the folds of their gowns battered and grass-grown, their noses missing, their eyes put out by stones in the well-nerved hands of riotous youth, their swords and sceptres broken short, their pointed beards snapped off into bluntness. All around the great piazza are arches with caffès and shops under them. Off at one end rises the massive front of Santa Giustina.
The broad paved space between the arcades and the moat of the statues was the scene of a horse-fair. The most miserable animals that the imagination can conjure up, all the gaunt, ghostly steeds that graze in the pastures of legend and fable, were gathered there, neighing and pawing as impatiently as their half-starved spirits would allow. Be sure Petruchio bought his famous steed at the horse-fair of Padua, and that he tried the beast's speed, as these peasants do, by driving him round and round the statues, raising a cloud of white dust and scattering crowds of girls and children, who screamed with terror and prayed that the curse of Sant' Antonio might ever follow him.
Suddenly, a sound as of kettledrums and cymbals and squeaking violins rose above the neighing and braying of the fair. In front of Santa Giustina were a circus and a wild-beast show and a crowd of lesser jugglers and charlatans. Outside the circus-booth, high up on a platform, stood the clowns in their dingy fleshings and faded scarlet trunks. They blew furiously on great brass trumpets until their cheeks were purple and nigh to bursting under all the ghastly chalk. There were ballerine in draggled pink tarletan petticoats and low white bodices that made their bony necks and brawny arms still browner by contrast. They had honest, unpainted faces, and wore their hair screwed up tightly on the tops of their heads. They bore traces of exposure to wind and rain. Their eyes had a kind of wistful look, as though they were tired of all this noise and foolery, and wished themselves back again on the old olive-farms with their toiling mothers. There was something in their dogged mouths and the resolute manner in which they thumped the big drums and clashed the great brass cymbals that told of the threshing of grain and the treading of the winepress. There were gorgeous matrons in threadbare velvet and tattered lace head-dresses who cast glances of sweetness upon the unresponsive crowd, and cheered on the panting clowns to cry out at the top of their poor strained lungs, "Avanti, signori! avanti!" Small lithe children clothed in pink tights, with jewelled crowns on their heads, darted in and out among the curtains of the tent, and gazed with a royal air upon the open-eyed, wondering little peasants, rough-shod and clothed in homespun, who stood and worshipped them.
Not far from the circus, under a wooden tent, a half score of monsters were whirling round and round in mad rivalry—fishes with enormous mouths and mighty fins, like the terrible "Orco" of Ariosto; wild steeds whose legs blossomed out into acanthus-leaves, like the old grotesques that lurk under the ferns about the basins of the village fountains; great mysterious birds, with big eyes, and golden chains about their necks; beasts with the heads of cats and the bodies of dogs, as monstrous and fantastic a crew, full of high-colored, confused images, as ever rioted in the high-strung brain of some old cinque-cento poet. Each of these terrible monsters had its rider—some little golden-curled child, who clung about the neck of a cat-headed dolphin and shrieked with delight at the danger. Some pale sewing-girl, with a turret of powdered hair above her soft face and her black shawl thrown like a habit around her, sat erect on her white palfrey, and for a moment held herself the equal of the great ladies of other times whose faces looked down upon her from the corridors of the palaces to which she went to carry home her work, and haunted her as she sat alone in her little chamber high up among the red roofs. Some straight-limbed peasant-boy, with a clear-cut face and a red flower in his hat, bestriding the black charger with fiery nostrils, felt his heart swell with noble longing at some dim memory of the glorious deeds of the old warriors of Padua that his grandmother had related to him many a winter's night when the chestnuts were roasting on the hearth and the rain was rustling through the dead vine-stalks. To him every note of the cracked trumpet was full of intoxication: it meant war and love and glory and heroic deeds.
There are brown-faced women in tarnished spangles tumbling on squares of carpet, with their children crouching patiently on the blue handkerchiefs that contain the family wardrobe, waiting for their dinner to be earned. They are assisted by white curly poodles, with pink shaven legs, solemn faces and long ears, which make them look like old Paduan marchesi in powdered wigs. They make the circuit of the carpet on their hind legs, and jump through hoops, and pass the hat among the bystanders, and watch the sleeping babies, and carry the weight of the whole family upon their meditative shoulders.
There are tame magpies that tell the peasant-girls' fortunes by choosing printed slips of paper from a box, and others that predict the winning numbers of next week's lottery. Now and then an old magician passes who has horse-hair curls reaching to his waist, a green shade over his eyes, and carries slung about his neck a board on which sits a drugged cock or a great black cat. He consults his familiar for answers to the questions that are put to him. The peasants form groups about the charlatans and tumblers and ring-throwers, and the sunlight streams over the happy, careless crowd with a blessing. How many of them know that where they stand the early Christians met their death with psalms upon their lips and the palm of martyrdom in their hands?