ILARIA DEL CARRETTO
Head of the Effigy by Jacopo della Quercia in Lucca Cathedral
The very year he built his castle he tempted away the greatest sculptor of the age from his native town and thronging engagements to carve her a tomb. Jacopo della Quercia came to Lucca in 1413, and six years later left after finishing this and other sculptures there. He could hardly have known Ilaria; he must have worked from very insufficient materials in getting her portrait, and it must have been a tiresome and delicate business to satisfy his patron, his tyrant. But then Quercia was "a most amiable and modest man," and he had the secret of noble portraiture, "Truth lovingly told." The sort of critics who do not gush say of this work that it is the first masterpiece of the Early Renaissance. It has all the best qualities of mediæval art—its severe symbolism and decorative effect, with all the best of the later classicism—its reality, softness and sweetness.
Paolo's enemies before long drove him out of Lucca, and the city wreaked vengeance on the tyrant by shattering his wife's tomb, this masterpiece. Somehow the effigy itself was spared, and set up again with bits of the wreck against the bare church wall. It was this dead lady, this marble lady, with browned, translucent cheeks, and little nose just bruised away at the tip, that took Ruskin's imagination in his youth. In his age he wrote, "It is forty years since I first saw it, and I have never found its like."
For a month, with an interval at Florence, he kept me pretty closely at work drawing Ilaria—side-face, full-face, three-quarters, every way; together with bits of detail from the early thirteenth-century porch of St. Martin's and other churches, and some copies in the picture gallery. He painted hard himself, and never did better work in his life. Two studies, "half-imperial," of the façade of St. Martin's are especially well known; one was at the Academy (winter 1901) and one at the same time at the Royal Water-colour Society's Exhibition. He used to sit in quaint attitudes on his camp-stool in the square, manipulating his drawing-board with one hand and his paint-brush with the other; Baxter, his valet, holding the colour-box up for him to dip into, and a little crowd of chatterers looking on. He rather enjoyed an audience, and sometimes used to bring back odd gleanings of their remarks when he came in to luncheon. One ragged boy, personally conducting a friend from the country, was overheard enumerating the strangers' meals at the hotel: "They eat much, much, these English!" Of course, most in the crowd knew him, or about him. The dean and chapter came to approve, the choir to grin, and the gendarmes to patronise; a few French tourists hovered round, but no English that I remember.
After these long mornings of work—inside when it rained, outside when it shone—we always went for a ramble or a drive. One venturesome start in a thunderstorm I recollect, for Ruskin was not the least timid, as you might expect from his highly-strung temperament. He used to walk planks and look down precipices, too, like a regular steeple-jack, and handle all sorts of animals fearlessly. This thunderstorm gave us grand Turneresque effects, of which I have a sketch, but no description; but I have borrowed an old letter of the time which gives a fair sample of an afternoon with Ruskin. It is dated October 28, 1882.
"A biting scirocco was blowing, but we started in the usual carriage driven by the boy with the red tie. As we left the hotel an army of beggars hailed the Professor, who solemnly distributed pence, to lighten his pocket and his mind. Then we scampered through the streets, which are all pavement, and none broader than Hanway Street; but everybody drives furiously in them as a point of Lucchese and Tuscan honour, and nobody seems to be run over.
"Out through the city walls you are in the country at once. Indeed, I can't help thinking of the town as a garden where houses are bedded out instead of flowers; they are so close packed, so varied and pretty. But out at the gate it is a wide stretch of plain with mountains all round, and bright cottages, cadmium-yellow in the stubble-fields and cane-brakes, for they thatch the maize-heads over the roofs by way of storage. Out of one quite decent-looking farm-house a decent-looking woman came rushing and gesticulating after the carriage. The Professor called on the driver to stop; and the woman, out of breath, declared she was the mother of five and wanted charity. He gave her a note; notes, you know, can be a good deal less than five pounds in Italy.