X
A MONUMENT of the old magnanimity of Siena is that Capella di Piazza in front of the palace, at the foot of the tower, which the tourist goes to see for the sake of Sodoma’s fresco in it, but which deserves to be also revered as the memorial of the great pest of 1348; it was built in 1352, and thrice demolished and thrice rebuilt before it met with public approval. This and the beautiful Fonte Gaja — as beautiful in its way as the tower — make the piazza a place to linger in and come back to at every chance. The fountain was designed by Giacomo della Quercia, who was known thereafter as Giacomo della Fonte, and it was called the Gay Fountain in memory of the festivities with which the people celebrated the introduction of good water into their city in 1419. Seven years the artist wrought upon it, and three thousand florins of gold the republic paid for the work, which after four hundred years has been restored in all its first loveliness by Tito Sarocchi, an admirable Sienese sculptor of our day.
There are six fountains in all, in different quarters of the city; and of these, the finest are the two oldest — Fonte Branda of the twelfth century, and Fonte Nuova of the fourteenth. Fonte Branda I will allow to be the more famous, but never so beautiful as Fonte Nuova. They are both as practicable now as when they were built, and Fonte Nuova has a small house atop of its arches, where people seem to live. The arches are Gothic, and the delicate carved brick-work of Siena decorates their sharp spring. Below, in the bottom of the four-sided structure, is the clear pool from whose affluent pipes the neighbourhood come to draw its water (in buckets hammered from solid copper into antique form), and in which women seem to be always rinsing linen, or beating it with wooden paddles in the Latin fashion.
Fonte Branda derives a world-wide celebrity from being mentioned by Dante and then having its honours disputed by a small stream of its name elsewhere. It, too, is a lovely Gothic shape, and whenever I saw it wash-day was in possession of it. The large pool which the laundresses had whitened with their suds is used as a swimming-vat in summer; and the old fountain may therefore be considered in very active use still, so many years after Dante dedicated the new fountain to disputed immortality with a single word. It was one of those extremely well-ventilated days of March when I last visited Fonte Branda; and not only was the linen of all Siena blowing about from balconies and house tops, but, from a multitude of galleries and casements, hides of leather were lustily flapping and giving out the pungent aroma of the tan. It is a region of tanneries, and some of them are of almost as august a presence as the Fonte Branda itself. We had not come to see either, but to pay our second visit to the little house of St Catherine of Siena, who was born and lived a child in this neighbourhood, the good Contrada dell’ Oca, or Goose Ward, which took this simple name while other wards of Siena called themselves after the Dragon, the Lion, the Eagle, and other noble beasts and birds. The region has therefore the odour of sanctity as well as of leather, and is consecrated by the memory of one of the best and bravest and meekest woman’s lives ever lived. Her house here is much visited by the curious and devout, and across a chasmed and gardened space from the fountain rises high on the bluff the high-shouldered bulk of the church of San Domenico, in which Catherine was first rapt in her beatific visions of our Lord, conversing with Him, and giving Him her heart for His in mystical espousals.
XI
FEW strangers in Siena fail to visit the house where that great woman and saint, Caterina Benincasa, was born in 1347. She was one of a family of thirteen or fourteen children, that blessed the union of Giacomo and Lapa, who were indeed well-in-the-house as their name is, being interpreted; for with the father’s industry as a dyer, and the mother’s thrift, they lived not merely in decent poverty, but in sufficient ease; and it was not from a need of her work nor from any want of piety in themselves that her parents at first opposed her religious inclination, but because (as I learn from the life of her written by that holy man, G. B. Francesia), hearing on every side the praises of her beauty and character, they hoped to make a splendid marriage for her. When she persisted in her prayers and devotions, they scolded and beat her, as good parents used to do, and made her the household drudge. But one day while the child was at prayer the father saw a white dove hovering over her head, and though she said she knew nothing of it, he was struck with awe and ceased to persecute her. She was now fourteen, and at this time she began her penances, sleeping little on the hard floor where she lay, scourging herself continually, wearing a hair shirt, and lacerating her flesh with chains. She fell sick, and was restored to health only by being allowed to join a sisterhood, under the rule of St Dominic, who were then doing many good works in Siena. After that our Lord began to appear to her in the Dominican church; she was likewise tempted of the devil; but Christ ended by making her His spouse. While her ecstasies continued she not only visited the sick and poor, but she already took an interest in public affairs, appealing first to the rival factions in Siena to mitigate their furies, and then trying to make peace between the Ghibellines of that city and the Guelphs of Florence. She pacified many family feuds; multitudes thronged to see her and hear her; and the Pope authorised her to preach throughout the territory of Siena. While she was thus dedicated to the salvation of souls, war broke out afresh between the Sienese and Florentines, and in the midst of it the terrible pest appeared. Then the saint gave herself up to the care of the sick, and performed miracles of cure, at the same time suffering persecution from the suspicions of the Sienese, among whom question of her patriotism arose.
She now began also to preach a new crusade against the Saracens, and for this purpose appeared in Pisa.
She went later to Avignon to beseech the Pope to remove an interdict laid upon the Florentines, and then she prevailed with him to remove his court to the ancient seat of St Peter.
The rest of her days were spent in special miracles; in rescuing cities from the plague; in making peace between the different Italian states and between all of them and the Pope; in difficult journeys; in preaching and writing. “And two years before she died,” says her biographer, “the truth manifested itself so clearly in her, that she prayed certain scriveners to put in writing what she should say during her ecstasies. In this manner there was soon composed the treatise on Obedience and Prayer, and on Divine Providence, which contains a dialogue between a Soul and God. She dictated as rapidly as if reading, in a clear voice, with her eyes closed and her arms crossed on her breast and her hands opened; her limbs became so rigid that, having ceased to speak, she remained a long hour silent; then, holy water being sprinkled on her face, she revived.” She died in Rome in 1380; but even after her death she continued to work miracles; and her head was brought amidst great public rejoicings to her native city. A procession went out to receive it, led by the Senate, the Bishop of Siena, and all the bishops of the state, with all the secular and religious orders. “That which was wonderful and memorable on this occasion,” says the Diario Senese, “was that Madonna Lapa, mother of our Seraphic Compatriot — who had many years before restored her to life, and liberated her from the pains of hell — was led to the solemn encounter.”
It seems by all accounts to have been one of the best and strongest heads that ever rested on a woman’s shoulders — or a man’s, for the matter of that; apt not only for private beneficence, but for high humane thoughts and works of great material and universal moment; and I was willing to see the silken purse, or sack, in which it was brought from Rome, and which is now to be viewed in the little chamber where she used to pillow the poor head so hard. I do not know that I wished to come any nearer the saint’s mortal part, but our Roman Catholic brethren have another taste in such matters, and the body of St Catherine has been pretty well dispersed about the world to supply them with objects of veneration. One of her fingers, as I learn from the Diario Senese of Girolamo Gigli (the most confusing, not to say stupefying, form of history Î ever read, being the collection under the three hundred and sixty-five several days of the year of all the events happening on eac
h in Siena since the time of Remus’s son), is in the Certosa at Pontignano, where it has been seen by many, to their great advantage, with the wedding-ring of Jesus Christ upon it. Her right thumb is in the church of the Dominicans at Camporeggi; one of her ribs is in the cathedral at Siena; another in the church of the Company of St Catherine, from which a morsel has been sent to the same society in the city of Lima, in Peru; her cervical vertebra and one of her slippers are treasured by the Nuns of Paradise; in the monastery of Saints Dominic and Sixtus at Rome is her right hand; her shoulder is in the convent of St Catherine at Magnanopoli; and her right foot is in the church of San Giovanni e Paolo at Venice. In St Catherine at Naples are a shoulder-bone and a finger; in other churches there are a piece of an arm and a rib; in San Bartolomeo at Salerno there is a finger; the Predicatori at Colonia have a rib; the Canons of Eau-Court in Artois have a good-sized bone (osso di giusta grandezza); and the good Gigli does not know exactly what bone it is they revere in the Chapel Royal at Madrid. But perhaps this is enough, as it is.
XII
THE arched and pillared front of St Catherine’s house is turned toward a street on the level of Fonte Branda, but we reached it from the level above, whence we clambered down to it by a declivity that no carriage could descend. It has been converted, up stairs and down, into a number of chapels, and I suppose that the ornate façade dates from the ecclesiastic rather than the domestic occupation. Of a human home there are indeed few signs, or none, in the house; even the shop in which the old dyer, her father, worked at his trade has been turned into a chapel and enriched, like the rest, with gold and silver, gems and precious marbles.
From the house we went to the church of San Domenico, hard by, and followed St Catherine’s history there through the period of her first ecstasies, in which she received the stigmata and gave her heart to her heavenly Spouse in exchange for his own. I do not know how it is with other Protestants, but for myself I will confess that in the place where so many good souls for so many ages have stood in the devout faith that the miracles recorded really happened there, I could not feel otherwise than reverent. Illusion, hallucination as it all was, it was the error of one of the purest souls that ever lived, and of one of the noblest minds. “Here,” says the printed tablet appended to the wall of the chapel, “here she was invested with the habit of St Dominic; and she was the first woman who up to that time had worn it. Here she remained withdrawn from the world, listening to the divine services of the church, and here continually in divine colloquy she conversed familiarly with Jesus Christ, her Spouse. Here, leaning against this pilaster, she was rapt in frequent ecstasies; wherefore this pilaster has ever since been potent against the infernal furies, delivering many possessed of devils.” Here Jesus Christ appeared before her in the figure of a beggar, and she gave Him alms, and He promised to own her before all the world at the Judgment Day. She gave Him her robe, and He gave her an invisible garment which for ever after kept her from the cold. Here once He gave her the Host Himself, and her confessor, missing it, was in great terror till she told him. Here the Lord took His own heart from His breast and put it into hers.
You may also see in this chapel, framed and covered with a grating in the floor, a piece of the original pavement on which Christ stood and walked. The whole church is full of memories of her; and there is another chapel in it, painted in fresco by Sodoma with her deeds and miracles, which in its kind is almost incomparably rich and beautiful. It is the painter’s most admirable and admired work, in which his genius ranges from the wretch decapitated in the bottom of the picture to the soul borne instantly aloft by two angels in response to St Catherine’s prayers. They had as much nerve as faith in those days, and the painter has studied the horror with the same conscience as the glory. It would be interesting to know how much he believed of what he was painting, — just as it would be now to know how much I believe of what I am writing: probably neither of us could say.
What impresses St Catherine so vividly upon the fancy that has once begun to concern itself with her is the double character of her greatness. She was not merely an ecstatic nun: she was a woman of extraordinary political sagacity, and so great a power among statesmen and princes that she alone could put an end to the long exile of the popes at Avignon, and bring them back to Rome. She failed to pacify her country because, as the Sienese historian Buonsignore confesses, “the germs of the evil were planted so deeply that it was beyond human power to uproot them.” But, nevertheless, “she rendered herself for ever famous by her civic virtues,” her active beneficence, her perpetual striving for the good of others, all and singly; and even so furious a freethinker as the author of my “New Guide to Siena” thinks that, setting aside the marvels of legend, she has a right to the reverence of posterity, the veneration of her fellow-citizens. “St Catherine, an honour to humanity, is also a literary celebrity: the golden purity of her diction, the sympathetic and affectionate simplicity of expression in her letters, still arouse the admiration of the most illustrious writers. With the potency of her prodigious genius, the virgin stainlessness of her life, and her great heart warm with love of country and magnanimous desires, inspired by a sublime ideal even in her mysticism, she, born of the people, meek child of Giacomo the dyer, lifted herself to the summit of religious and political grandeur.... With an overflowing eloquence and generous indignation she stigmatized the crimes, the vices, the ambition of the popes, their temporal power, and the scandalous schism of the Roman Church.”
In the Communal Library at Siena, I had the pleasure of seeing many of St Catherine’s letters in the MS. in which they were dictated: she was not a scholar like the great Socinus, whose letters I also saw, and she could not even write.
XIII
A HUNDRED years after St Catherine’s death there was born in the same “noble Ward of the Goose” one of the most famous and eloquent of Italian reformers, the Bernardino Ochino, whose name commemorates that of his native Contrada dell’ Oca. He became a Franciscan, and through the austerity of his life, the beauty of his character, and the wonder of his eloquence, he became the General of his Order in Italy, and then he became a Protestant. “His words could move stones to tears,” said Charles V.; and when he preached in Siena, no space was large enough for his audience except the great piazza before the Public Palace, which was thronged even to the house-tops. Ochino escaped by flight the death that overtook his sometime fellow-denizen of Siena, Aonio Paleario, whose book, “II Beneficio di Cristo,” was very famous in its time and potent for reform throughout Italy. In that doughty little Siena, in fact, there has been almost as much hard thinking as hard fighting, and what with Ochino and Paleario, with Socinus and Bandini, the Reformation, Rationalism, and Free Trade may be said almost to have been invented in the city which gave one of the loveliest and sublimest saints to the Church. Let us not forget, either, that brave archbishop of Siena, Ascanio Piccolomini, one of the ancient family which gave two popes to Rome, and which, in this archbishop, had the heart to defy the Inquisition and welcome Galileo to the protection of an inviolable roof.
XIV
It is so little way off from Fonte Branda and St Catherine’s house, that I do not know but the great cathedral of Siena may also be in the “Ward of the Goose but I confess that I did not think of this when I stood before that wondrous work.
There are a few things in this world about whose grandeur one may keep silent with dignity and advantage, as St Mark’s, for instance, and Nôtre Dame, and Giotto’s Tower, and the curve of the Arno at Pisa, and Niagara, and the cathedral at Siena. I am not sure that one has not here more authority for holding his peace than before any of the others. Let the architecture go, then: the inexhaustible treasure of the sculptured marbles, the ecstasy of Gothic invention, the splendour of the mosaics, the quaintness, the grotesqueness, the magnificence of the design and the detail. The photographs do well enough in suggestion for such as have not seen the church, but these will never have the full sense of it which only long looking and co
ming again and again can impart. One or two facts, however, may be imagined, and the reader may fancy the cathedral set on the crest of the noble height to which Siena clings, and from which the streets and houses drop all round from the narrow level expressed in the magnificent stretch of that straight line with which the cathedral-roof delights the eye from every distance. It has a pre-eminence which seems to me unapproached, and this structure, which only partially realises the vast design of its founders, impresses one with the courage even more than the piety of the little republic, now so utterly extinct. What a force was in men’s hearts in those days! What a love of beauty must have exalted the whole community!
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1241
