The Story of Siena and San Gimignano

CHAPTER X

Some Famous Convents and Monasteries FONTE SAN MAURIZIO Ventura; the frescoed Coronation of the Madonna is by Taddeo di Bartolo and Sano di Pietro; the distich in her honour was written later by Niccolò Borghesi. It is thus the same gate through which Enea Piccolomini led the French deliverers in 1552, and that witnessed these French march out in 1555, with the long line of republican exiles, and the triumphant entry of the Marchese di Marignano. A short way beyond the gate is the church of Sta. Maria degli Angioli, a building of the latter part of the Quattrocento; the altar-piece (in a rich frame by Antonio Barili), the Madonna and Child with four Saints, a lunette and predella, is signed and dated 1502, by Raffaello di Carlo, a Florentine painter, by whom there are also works in the Palazzo Corsini and Santo Spirito at Florence. In the sacristy is a standard painted with an Assumption by Riccio. The other south-eastern gate, the Porta Pispini, has the remains of a frescoed Nativity by Bazzi. According to the legend, the name Pispini is derived from “Il Santo viene,” “the Saint cometh,”—the cry raised by the people when the relics of St Ansanus were brought to the city. Outside the gate, a little to the left, is the modernised remnant of one of the bastions erected by Baldassare Peruzzi, as architect to the Republic. Santo Spirito, in the Via Pispini, is the chief church of the Dominicans in Siena, and its convent was one of those reformed by Savonarola. It was built about the year 1498; the cupola was designed by Giacomo Cozzarelli and built for Pandolfo Petrucci in 1508, the façade designed in 1519 by Peruzzi for Girolamo Piccolomini, Bishop of Pienza. The first chapel on the left, the Borghesi Chapel, has a glorified Madonna worshipped by St Francis and St Catherine, with child angels, and two beautiful little winged genii standing at the tomb; it is the finest of all Matteo Balducci’s works, thoroughly Umbrian in feeling. On the right is the Cappella degli Spagnuoli, decorated with frescoes (circa 1530), painted in the days of the first Spanish occupation of Siena by Bazzi; the Madonna investing St Alphonso with the episcopal robes, in the presence of two radiantly beautiful virgin martyrs and Angels; St James, represented as a Spanish knight in full armour, superbly mounted, slaying Saracens; St Thomas and St Michael, St Sebastian and St Antony. The single figures are of the utmost beauty. The large terra-cotta group is by Ambrogio della Robbia. The statues of St Vincent Ferrer and St Catherine (the two followers of St Dominic who were found on opposite sides in the schism), in the second chapels, are ascribed to Giacomo Cozzarelli. The Coronation of the Madonna, over the third altar on the left, is by Girolamo del Pacchia. The Crucifixion on the entrance wall is ascribed to Sano di Pietro. There is a Coronation by Beccafumi in the sacristy, and in the cloisters a frescoed Crucifixion painted by Fra Bartolommeo’s pupil, Fra Paolino da Pistoia. The church of San Giorgio in the Via Ricasoli is, in its present form, a work of the eighteenth century. But it occupies the site of a most ancient church, which was rebuilt in honour of the Battle of Montaperti; its curious campanile, best seen from below the walls, still dates from 1260, and its windows are supposed to represent the different companies of the Sienese who took part in the battle. Near the house of the liberal theological thinkers of the Cinquecento, Lelio and Fausto Sozzini (the founders of the Socinians), which was afterwards a palace of the Malavolti, the Via di Follonica leads to the church of San Giovanni Battista in Pantaneto, which possesses a terra-cotta statue of the Baptist, ascribed to Giacomo Cozzarelli, and several pictures of scenes from his life by Rutilio Manetti. Lower down to the right is one of Siena’s characteristic mediaeval fountains, the Fonte di Follonica, probably constructed in the early years of the thirteenth century. Opposite the Palazzo del Governo, is the Studio, the famous and still flourishing University of Siena. It contains a characteristically Sienese sepulchral monument of the later Trecento, representing the professor, Niccolò Aringhieri, lecturing to his pupils. In the Via Sallustio Bandini is the graceful brick palace that Francesco di Giorgio built for Messer Sallustio, the father of Mario and Francesco, and ancestor of the celebrated man of science. On the left are the remains of one of the castellacce , or private fortresses, of the thirteenth century. It is a curious turn of fortune that he of whom “all Tuscany sounded” after Montaperti, and of whom “they hardly whispered in Siena” after his fall at Colle, [151] should have given his name to the most conspicuous modern church in his native city. The Madonna of Provenzano was raised to the Blessed Virgin as Protectress of Siena at the end of the sixteenth century. As an inscription to the left of the church bears witness (and there is a most unsavoury novella of Pietro Fortini’s to the same effect), this part of the city was notorious for its evil living, mainly given up to houses of ill-fame, especially in the days of the Spanish occupation. According to the legend, St Catherine had set up a little shrine with an image of the Madonna here, which was rediscovered by Brandano, who declared that here was the greatest treasure of Siena, and that “hither all the most honoured ladies of the nation shall one day come.” In 1594 the image began to work miracles, and the present sanctuary was built in consequence. [152] The pictures that it contains are naturally by later Sienese masters, such as Francesco Vanni and Rustichino. In the sacristy there is what purports to be a portrait of Brandano. The great church of San Francesco was mainly built in the second quarter of the fourteenth century, from the designs of Agostino di Giovanni and Agnolo di Ventura. It was outside the walls and there was a gate of San Francesco, under the arch of which we still pass to-day. When Pius II. came to Siena, he stayed in the convent and the gate had to be kept open at night for the convenience of his numerous visitors [153] —which induced the Concistoro to decree that it should henceforth be included within the walls. Over the door of the church is a statue of St Francis, by Ramo di Paganello of about 1288. Ruined by fire in the seventeenth century, abandoned to military purposes in the nineteenth and recently restored, the building is but the shadow of its former self. Still, in spite of the modern stained-glass windows from Munich, it remains the most simple and severe, the most typical and austerely Franciscan of all the Italian Gothic churches of Tuscany. The paintings and sculptures that it contains are mere fragments of its original decorations, and for the most part transferred from other parts of the church and convent. The ruined fresco of the Visitation, on the right of the entrance, is ascribed by Mr Berenson to Taddeo di Bartolo. In the second chapel on the right of the choir is the monument of Cristoforo Felici (one of the Operai of the Duomo) of 1462, one of the best works of Urbano da Cortona. In the choir are marble half-length portraits of Silvio Piccolomini and Vittoria Forteguerri, the only remains of the sumptuous monument that their son, Pope Pius II., raised to their memory in 1458. In the first chapel on the left is a frescoed Crucifixion by Pietro Lorenzetti, and in the third chapel are two scenes from the history of the Franciscan order—St Francis before the Pope and the Martyrdom of Franciscan Missionaries—by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Ruined and repainted, these latter appear to be the remains of a series of frescoes which Ghiberti saw and admired in the cloisters here. The chapel opposite was formerly that of the nephews of Pius II., the Todeschini Piccolomini and Piccolomini d’Aragona; it was restored and modernised by a noble lady of the Saracini a few years ago. The Cardinal Virtues on the pavement were originally executed by Lorenzo di Mariano. In the cloisters, outside the Seminary chapel, there is a Madonna Lattante, entitled Sedes Sapientiae , by Giacomo Cozzarelli. The chapel itself contains a most beautiful Madonna and Child by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and a large fresco, of uncertain authorship, of the same epoch. The Seminary further possesses several good early Sienese paintings. Under the shadow of San Francesco rises the little oratory of his great Sienese follower, San Bernardino. On the ground floor is a Madonna and Child with St Ansanus and St Bartholomew, a beautiful early work of Andrea del Brescianino. On the upper floor, in an antechapel, are a Madonna by Sano di Pietro and a marble bas-relief, the Madonna with Angels, signed by Agostino di Giovanni. The oratory itself is the “Siena’s Art-laboratory” of Robert Browning’s Pacchiarotto poem. Its walls are covered by a series of frescoes by Bazzi, Girolamo del Pacchia and Beccafumi, painted between 1518 and 1532, among the finest achievements of these three masters, under a richly decorated roof of the end of the Quattrocento by Giuliano Turapilli. On the left wall are: St Louis of Anjou by Bazzi; the Nativity of the Madonna, by Pacchia, showing Florentine influence; the Presentation in the Temple, by Bazzi; the Sposalizio by Beccafumi; San Bernardino by Pacchia. On the altar wall, between the Archangel and the Virgin of the Annunciation by Pacchia, is a grandiose fresco by Beccafumi (painted in 1537, nearly twenty years later than his other works here), representing the Madonna and Child enthroned with Apostles, Franciscans, and Angels. On the right wall are: St Antony of Padua, now ascribed to Pacchia; the Visitation by Bazzi; the Death of the Blessed Virgin, with Angels and Apostles clustering round, Christ rushing down from Heaven to receive her soul, by Beccafumi; the Assumption and St Francis by Bazzi. Between the windows is the Coronation of Mary in Heaven by the Blessed Trinity, with the Baptist and Adam as assessors, also by Bazzi. The little church of San Pietro Ovile contains two good early Sienese paintings. On the right is the Annunciation with, above, the Crucifixion between St Peter and St Paul; the central scene is a copy, with variations and some change of sentiment, from the well-known picture by Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi in the Uffizi. Opposite to it is a Madonna and Child by Pietro Lorenzetti, between San Bernardino and the Baptist by Matteo di Giovanni. “Before you, magnificent and potent Lords, Lords Priors, Governors of the Commune, and Captain of the People of Siena,”—thus begins a petition of February 25th, 1465 ( i.e. 1466)—“the least of your children and servants, the Officers over the Adornment of your City, with due reverence set forth that they are continually thinking how to do what may be to the adorning of the city, especially on the Strada Romana where pass the strangers who give praise to all the city.” [154] This PIAZZA AND PALAZZO TOLOMEI Strada Romana is the present Via Cavour, still the busiest in the city. Passing up it towards Camollia, from the Croce del Travaglio, we come to the Piazza Tolomei, in which the people assembled on the eve of Montaperti. The great grey stone Palazzo Tolomei, its portals guarded by two lions and surmounted by the armorial bearings, the three crescent moons, of that great Guelf House, was begun in 1208; it is the oldest, perhaps the most imposing of all the private palaces in Siena. The councils of the State occasionally met here in the first days of Guelf preponderance after the battle of Colle, and it was here that King Robert of Naples was entertained in 1310. In earlier times—those eventful days that preceded Montaperti—the General Council met in San Cristofano opposite. The column with the Lupa—though the present wolf only dates from the seventeenth century—was originally erected in 1260, after Montaperti, in token of this. The church itself was modernised in the eighteenth century. It contains some tombs of the Tolomei and a good picture by Girolamo del Pacchia, representing the Madonna and Child between St Luke and the Blessed Bernardo. It was in this church in 1376 that St Catherine effected a reconciliation between the Maconi, headed by Stefano and his father Corrado, and the Tolomei and Rinaldini. Behind it, round and about the Via del Re, there are a number of picturesque old houses of that epoch standing and several towers that once belonged to the Tolomei. [155] On the left, next to the Gothic Palazzo Tolomei, is a graceful little palace in the style of the fifteenth century, decorated above with the Lily of Florence. Further on, on the right, is the Palazzo Bichi, rebuilt in 1520 for the unfortunate Alessandro. At the corner of the Piazza Salimbeni is the Palazzo Spannocchi, begun in 1473 for Messer Ambrogio Spannocchi, the treasurer of Pius II. It is a perfect type of the massive, yet graceful domestic architecture of the Florentine Quattrocento. Formerly ascribed to Bernardino Rossellino, Signor Lisini has recently discovered reason for believing that it (as well as the palace in the Via Romana of the Abbot of San Galgano) was built under the direction of Giuliano da Maiano. [156] The vast Gothic Palazzo Salimbeni, a compromise between a castle and a palace, was mainly constructed in the thirteenth, but modernised in the nineteenth century. The back of it should be surveyed from the Piazza dell’ Abbadia, where it is frequently mistaken by tourists and other casual persons (including one English writer of repute!) for a Gothic abbey; the name of the piazza really refers to San Donato, which was formerly an abbey and the family church of the Salimbeni, as San Cristofano was that of their rivals, the Tolomei. The great Ghibelline family that played so turbulent a part in the early history of Siena gradually died out; “to-day,” wrote Bargagli, in the latter part of the Cinquecento, “it is utterly extinguished; besides their arms and their palaces, nought else remains of them save the name.” We may take their palace as the background for two of the best and most beautiful love stories of old Siena. In one, Anselmo di Messer Salimbene Salimbeni, one of the richest young nobles of the city, is secretly enamoured of Angelica Montanini, whose brother Carlo is the last of a noble but now ruined house, between which and the Salimbeni there is a deadly feud. Thrown into prison on a trumped-up charge of plotting against the popular regime, a price is set upon Carlo’s life; he refuses to pay, lest his sister should be reduced to beggary, and is about to perish on the scaffold when Anselmo steps in and pays the fine to excess. The expedient by which Carlo and Angelica attempt to repay their debt to Anselmo is somewhat repugnant to our modern code of ethics or conventions—it appears again in the underplot of Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness —but it ends in the marriage of Anselmo and Angelica in San Donato to the great delight of all the city. In the other story, Ippolito Saracini has fallen passionately in love with Cangenova, the youngest of the three orphan daughters of Messer Reame Salimbeni, and his love is returned. But the mother, anxious first to marry her other daughters, will not suffer his addresses, and keeps Cangenova in strict seclusion. Pretending to leave Siena as a pilgrim to St James of Compostella, Ippolito lurks in a little house near San Lorenzo, which is next door to the garden in which the lady and her daughters walk. He watches Cangenova at sunrise, watering her lilies and violets in the balcony or playing with the little goldfinch that has its nest in the mulberry tree outside her window. Then one night he takes advantage of her mother’s absence to climb the tree, and draws her to the window by frightening her goldfinch. A sudden fright brings their meeting to a premature end, and presently she is dying. Disguised as a pilgrim, Ippolito visits her on her death-bed, and they interchange professions of unalterable love; he joins her funeral procession as a member of one of the confraternities, carrying a torch, and falls dead in San Francesco when the tomb is closed. [157] In the Via delle Belle Arti, next to the picture gallery which has already been described, is the Biblioteca Comunale, once the meeting-place of the most famous of the Sienese academies—the Intronati . Among its treasures are two of the original letters sent by St Catherine from Rome to Stefano Maconi; they are not, however, in her own handwriting but appear, from internal evidence, to have been dictated by her to Barduccio Canigiani. Further on in the Via Cavour, to the left, is the exquisite little early Renaissance church of Sta. Maria delle Nevi, built shortly after 1470 for Giovanni de’ Cinughi, Bishop of Pienza, probably from the designs of Francesco di Giorgio. The altar-piece, representing Our Lady as Queen of the Snows, with a predella illustrating the legend of the building of Sta. Maria Maggiore at Rome, was painted by Matteo di Giovanni in 1477; a most poetically conceived work and one of the most beautiful pictures of the Sienese Quattrocento. This part of the Terzo di Camollia was originally the famous Poggio Malavolti, where that great family had their towers and houses in a regular fortress as far as the recently demolished convent of the Cappuccine; it was surrounded with walls and had a gate near where Sta. Maria delle Nevi now stands. On the right the steep and picturesque Via Vallerozzi leads down the Costa d’Ovile, the scene of the massacre of 1371, to the Porta Ovile. Half way down is the oratory of San Rocco, the church of the Contrada of the Lupa, with frescoes by Manetti and Rustichino. The Fonte Nuova, a little off the street to the left, was built by Tino di Camaino in the fourteenth century. In the Via Garibaldi, on the way to the railway station, is the Casa della Consuma , the palace in which the brigata spendereccia , the extravagant young club of Sienese nobles recorded by Dante in canto xxix. of the Inferno , ran through their fortunes. There has been much throwing about of brains upon the question whether this notorious brigata spendereccia is, or is not, to be identified with the brigata nobile e cortese of which Folgore da San Gimignano sung, and whether Dante’s “Niccolò who first discovered the rich usage of the clove”—who is usually said to have been either a Salimbeni or a Buonsignori—is the Niccolò di Nisi to whom Folgore dedicated his corona . However that may be, the present aspect of the Casa della Consuma is prosaic and modern. In the same street is the oratory of the Brotherhood of St Sebastian, for which Bazzi painted that most wonderful of banners now in the Uffizi. It has early seventeenth century frescoes, illustrating the life of the martyr. Following up the Via Camollia towards the gate, we have on the right the Campansi, a former convent of Franciscan nuns, now a poor-house. Most of its artistic treasures have been removed to the picture gallery, but a certain number of frescoes have been preserved. In the cloisters is a large Assumption, mingling Sienese and Umbrian influences, the work of Matteo Balducci and (according to Mr Berenson) in part of Pietro di Domenico. On the first floor are: an Annunciation by Sano di Pietro; a Madonna and Child with St Anne, attended by the Magdalene and St Ursula (poetical in conception, but rather poorly executed) by Beccafumi; a Resurrection by Benvenuto di Giovanni. From a window in the women’s department a beautiful view is obtained of San Francesco. The Madonna of Fontegiusta was built in 1479, as a thanks-offering for the victory of Poggio Imperiale, by Francesco Fedeli and Giacomo di Giovanni of Como. Over the outer portal is a beautiful Madonna and Child with Angels, of 1489, by Neroccio Landi. In the sixteenth century the fashionable thing was to hear vespers in this church on Sunday afternoons. In Pietro Fortini’s Novelle de’ Novizi , his five “right honest but most facetious ladies” attend vespers here, and at the holy water basin (the work still of Pacchia’s father, Giovanni delle Bombarde) they join company with their “two winsome youths, most disposed to the service of love,” and walk out with them in the cool as far as the Palazzo de’ Diavoli. [158] The marble high altar, with the Pietà and exquisitely worked setting, is the masterpiece of Lorenzo di Mariano, executed in 1517 and, according to the legend, sent to Rome on mules for the edification of Leo X. The frescoed Assumption, in the lunette above the altar, is by Girolamo di Benvenuto. On the right wall is a Coronation of the Madonna by Fungai. On the left wall is the fresco of the Sibyl revealing the mystery of the Incarnation to Augustus, by Baldassare Peruzzi. It has been damaged and badly restored, and is one of the painter’s latest and less satisfactory works, showing a mannered and unsuccessful attempt to imitate the style of Michelangelo. The Madonna commending Siena to her Divine Son is by Bazzi’s pupil and son-in-law, Il Riccio. The shield and whalebones over the door are said by tradition to have been sent here as a votive offering by Christopher Columbus. The Porta Camollia bears the famous and characteristic Sienese greeting to all that enter: Cor magis tibi Sena pandit , “Siena opens to thee her heart more than her gate.” When Pius II., on January 31st, 1460, returned to Siena from the fruitless congress at Mantua, he passed through this gate and found all the streets as far as the Duomo gorgeously decorated. Inside the gate there was a structure to look like a Paradise with a choir of boys dressed as angels; when the Pope drew near, one of them descended from his place and sung so sweetly, commending the city to him, that Pius burst into tears. When Charles VIII. of France entered here in May 1495, accompanied by the Signoria who had met him at the Antiporto, he had a similar reception, a boy dressed to represent the Madonna as Queen of the city singing a Latin welcome to the sound of music. The present gate was built in 1604, in honour of the Grand Duke Ferdinand I., from the design of Alessandro Casolani. Outside the gate is the Piazza d’Armi or Prato di Camollia, where the Spanish soldiers mustered in 1552 on the surrender of the citadel. Here is the column that marks the place where Enea Silvio Piccolomini introduced the Emperor to his bride, Leonora of Portugal. The Antiporto or Portone was many times destroyed and rebuilt, the present structure dating from the seventeenth century. A short way further on, on the road towards Florence, is the Palatium Turcorum , the palace of the Turchi (a family of the Noveschi who were connected with the Piccolomini), a red brick structure with a fine tower. It has been popularly called, from the fifteenth century downwards, the Palazzo de’ Diavoli. The chapel is a fine piece of Renaissance architecture by Antonio Federighi, with a frieze somewhat recalling that of the chapel of the Campo; in the interior are tasteful terra-cotta mouldings and an Assumption with a multitude of Angels, St Jerome and St Thomas—like a Sienese picture of the Quattrocento in terra-cotta—also by Federighi. It was little beyond this palace that the Sienese pursued the routed Florentines and papalini in 1526—but they fled for ten miles without stopping. We retrace our steps through the Porta Camollia to the Lizza, that favourite promenade of the Sienese which now covers the site of Don Diego’s citadel, where the nightingales are loud at evening among the trees at the entrance to Santa Barbara, the Medicean fortress of Duke Cosimo thrown open to the citizens by an Austrian Grand Duke. The church of San Stefano, on the Lizza, contains over the high altar the masterpiece of St Catherine’s painter disciple, the reformer Andrea di Vanni, painted about 1400. It is a typical Sienese picture, but of no surpassing merit; the Madonna and Child are enthroned in the central panel, with the Annunciation above; at the sides are the Baptist and St Bartholomew, St Stephen and St James, with the four Evangelists above them and other saints in the cuspidi and pinnacles. The faces of the virgin martyrs have something of the characteristic Sienese gentle sweetness. The predella is obviously later, being probably the work of Giovanni di Paolo. At the older circuit of the walls CHAPTER X Some Famous Convents and Monasteries B EYOND the Porta Ovile, on the hill known as the Capriola , rises the convent of the Osservanza, one of the chief houses of the Osservanti —San Bernardino’s followers of the strict observance of the rule of St Francis, who have recently been united with the Riformati and others of their spiritual kindred to form one body, under what Mr Montgomery Carmichael, our chief lay authority on matters Franciscan, appropriately calls “the glorious and primitive style and title of the Friars Minor.” From the earliest Middle Ages, there stood upon this spot a little chapel dedicated to the hermit St Onuphrius. Bernardino passed this way in June 1406, and found that a crowd of people had come out from the city, to celebrate the hermit’s feast. Before the young Franciscan’s eyes lay stretched that noble panorama of Siena that we see from the convent to-day. Suddenly fired, he climbed up into a tree and addressed them in words so inflamed with divine love that, while many wept, there were some that deemed him mad. A few years later the Spedale of Sta. Maria della Scala, to which the place belonged, made it over to him, and he founded the present convent upon the site of the chapel. The present convent and church were rebuilt by Fountain outside Porta Ovile Pandolfo Petrucci, but were considerably altered and enlarged in the latter part of the seventeenth century. The church is said to have been designed by Giacomo Cozzarelli, shortly before that master reared for Pandolfo his own sumptuous palace near the Duomo, and to have been actually built by four friars of the Order—Filippo and Leone of Florence, Leonardo da Potenza, and Leone da San Gimignano. [159] It is full of terra-cotta work and early Sienese pictures. In the first chapel on the left is a perfect little gem by Sano di Pietro; the Madonna and Child enthroned, with Angels clad in the green and red of hope and love, winged with the white of faith. In the next chapel is the Coronation of the Madonna, perhaps the most divinely beautiful of all the works of Andrea della Robbia, with the Annunciation, Nativity and Assumption in the predella; the motive of St Francis, with his hand upon the head of the kneeling St Clare, is especially happy. This is surely the kind of sculpture in which Dante saw the examples of humility on the wall of the first terrace of Purgatory. The altar-piece of the third chapel is also by Sano di Pietro, representing the Madonna and Child between Bernardino and St Jerome; while in the fourth is a picture of Saints by Taddeo di Bartolo, with a predella by Sano. In the chapels opposite are a Madonna and Child, with St Ambrose and St Jerome, the Annunciation above, a meritorious work by Stefano di Giovanni, and the Crucifixion, the masterpiece of Bazzi’s son-in-law, Il Riccio, but badly restored. The terra-cottas on the vaults are ascribed to Francesco di Giorgio. In the choir are statues of Mary and Gabriel of the Annunciation, of the school of the Della Robbia; and a contemporary portrait of San Bernardino, said to have been painted in 1439 by Pietro di Giovanni Pucci. Certain of his relics are preserved beneath the high altar in a silver reliquary of 1472, the work of Francesco di Antonio. Pandolfo Petrucci is buried in the sacristy, which contains a Pietà questionably ascribed to Giacomo Cozzarelli. Among the numerous sepulchres in the crypt is that of Celia Petrucci, a fashionable beauty of the sixteenth century. Under the church is a little chapel formed of the original cell of San Bernardino—transported bodily from the older convent—with the same wooden door wherewith he shut himself out, for brief intervals, from the turbulent world for which he laboured. Thus are the memories and relics of Siena ’s great apostle of peace curiously linked with those of her first tyrant. Somewhat more than a mile beyond the Porta San Marco is the Abbey of Sant’ Eugenio, usually known simply as Il Monastero . This is the castle-like building that is so conspicuous in the foreground to the south, in the view from the ramparts of Santa Barbara. It is reached from the gate through pleasant lanes, lined with vineyards and olive plantations, that in spring and summer swarm with that noblest of European butterflies, the tiger-striped Papilio Podalirius . It was originally a monastery of the Benedictines of Monte Cassino and was founded in the eighth century; Piero Strozzi fortified it in 1554, but it was soon occupied by the imperial forces. At present it is the property of a Sienese family, the Griccioli, and has been completely modernised. From one of the former cloisters there is a fine view of the mountains to the south. The best of the pictures have gone from the church, and those that remain have been repainted. There is a much damaged Bearing of the Cross, belonging to the series of frescoes that Bazzi painted for the Compagnia di Santa Croce. Two frescoes by Benvenuto di Giovanni—the Resurrection and the Crucifixion—are among that painter’s better works. In the chapel to the right of the choir is a Madonna and Child with two Angels by Francesco di Giorgio, and, in the chapel to the left, a Madonna and Child, an authentic work by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. The famous Assumption of the Madonna—somewhat too enthusiastically praised in England—by Matteo di Giovanni, which once adorned the high altar, is now in the National Gallery of London, and a Madonna by Duccio, which was formerly in the sacristy, appears recently to have followed it beyond the Alps—unless it has made a longer voyage and, like other Italian pictures, crossed the Atlantic. “Superficially,” writes John Addington Symonds, “much of the present charm of Siena consists in the soft opening valleys, the glimpses of long blue hills and fertile country-side, framed by irregular brown houses stretching along the slopes on which the town is built, and losing themselves abruptly in olive fields and orchards. This element of beauty, which brings the city into immediate relation with the country, is indeed not peculiar to Siena. We find it in Perugia, in Assisi, in Montepulciano, in nearly all the hill towns of Umbria and Tuscany. But their landscape is often tragic and austere, while this is always suave. City and country blend here in delightful amity. Neither yields that sense of aloofness which stirs melancholy.” [160] We leave Siena by the Porta Fontebranda, along the way by which the returning Noveschi crept up to the city walls on that fateful night between July 21st and 22nd, 1487, turning back at intervals for the varied glimpses of San Domenico with its huge red bulk and tower, or the gleaming marbles of the Duomo. At the antimony works, where the road divides, we take the way to the right, westwards. Presently we mount up again, through lanes on either side that might almost be English—only, when these break away, the silvery olives, the convents on the hills, Siena’s towers and the distant mountains remind us that we are in Tuscany. “The most charming district in the immediate neighbourhood of Siena,” to quote Symonds once more, “lies westward, near Belcaro, a villa high up on a hill. It is a region of deep lanes and golden-green oak woods, with cypresses and stone-pines, and little streams in all directions flowing over the brown sandstone. The country is like some parts of rural England—Devonshire or Sussex. Not only is the sandstone here, as there, broken into deep gullies; but the vegetation is much the same. Tufted spleenwort, primroses, and broom tangle the hedges under boughs of hornbeam and sweet-chestnut.” The view of Siena behind us gradually expands, as we mount up. When the little chapel is passed, we keep to the right; presently an avenue of oaks and ilex-trees leads to the villa, or castello, of Belcaro. Belcaro, superbly situated and thickly clothed round with a magnificent grove of rich, dark-green ilex-trees, was a strongly fortified place in the early days of the Republic, and in the fourteenth century it belonged to the Savini. At the beginning of 1377 it was much decayed, and Nanni di Ser Vanni Savini gave it to St Catherine, with the consent of the government, to be made into a convent of “religious women who shall continually pray for the city and inhabitants of Siena.” She called it Santa Maria degli Angeli, and several of her letters are addressed from it. Later on, the convent became a fortress once more, and at one time belonged to the Bellanti; in 1525 it came into the hands of the Turamini, a rich family of bankers. Crescenzio Turamini had the present palace, loggia and chapel built from the designs of Baldassare Peruzzi, and employed the master himself to decorate them with frescoes. On the ceiling of a hall on the ground floor is the Judgment of Paris, which has caught not a little of the Raphaelesque grace and charm of the decorations of the Farnesina. It has been repainted. A loggia is likewise covered with decorative work, mythological scenes and arabesques, which have been so modernised by restoration that nothing really remains of Peruzzi’s original work save the invention and design. In the chapel there are a Madonna and Saints behind the altar from his hand, with Evangelists and Saints on the walls, and the arms of the Turamini above. These are practically Peruzzi’s last works, and were finished at the beginning of 1535, but have all been more or less ruined by the restorers. In a room in the villa there is a Madonna and Child with St Catherine and San Bernardino—a lovely little picture by Matteo di Giovanni. There is a typical inclosed Italian garden of romance, with its lemon-trees and pomegranates; but the chief charm of Belcaro is its noble view. Upon all sides, as we wander along its terraces and parapets, the mountains and the valleys of the Sienese dominion lie outstretched before us, Siena herself l’amorosa madre di dolcezza away to the east, the grove of ilex-trees at our feet. A trophy of canon balls records the great siege of the city. At the beginning of the war, Belcaro was held by the forces of the Republic. On April 4th, 1554, it was attacked by the imperialists in force, 2000 infantry and 50 horsemen, with two pieces of artillery. A mere handful of French soldiers, eight in number, under a Beaufort, held out till noon, when their officer was killed and the rest surrendered. Afterwards, the Marchese di Marignano had his headquarters here. Beneath Peruzzi’s fresco or among the trees of the garden, he may have drunk wine with his captains while the hapless victims, the “useless mouths,” lay perishing between the walls of the city and the trenches of his soldiery. Here, in April 1555, he received the two Sienese ambassadors, Girolamo Malavolti and Alessandro Guglielmi, who came to make the necessary arrangements for the surrender of the city, after the terms of the capitulation had been decided in Florence. Instead of turning up at the chapel to go to Belcaro, we turn down to the right and then again down through the flowery lanes to the left, where huge white or grey oxen drawing wains block the way at intervals, and a dark-eyed boy, leading two beautiful white goats, greets us in his pleasant musical Tuscan. Suddenly the landscape changes. The lanes end and woods appear—we are approaching the great Selva del Comune . Above THE CORONATION OF THE MADONNA ( Andrea Della Robbia. Osservanza, Siena ) Alinari, Florence the forest ground, over the scantier trees to the left, rises, solitary and austere, the convent of the Augustinian hermits, San Salvatore di Lecceto: “a blessed place,” writes Ambrogio Landucci, “in which the Most High chose to work so many wonders.” According to tradition, the disciples of St Ansanus fled to these woods when the Roman persecutors discovered their hiding-places in the city; St Augustine found hermits here in the fourth century, and gave them a rule of life. St Monica and St Jerome are said to have visited the place, and William of Aquitaine (this, at least, seems a historical fact), whom Dante afterwards saw among the warriors of the Cross in the rosy sphere of Mars. “Our ancient hermitage,” says Landucci, “was ever a sweet attraction for sanctity.” Francis, the Seraphic Father of Assisi, came here too, and plucked from one of its ilexes the stick which he afterwards stuck into the ground at Capraia, and which grew up into a goodly tree. The place was originally known as the Convento di Selva , the Convent of the Wood, which was also called the Selva di Lago , because of the lake or swamp (afterwards drained) that lay at the foot of the hill. The name Lecceto is derived from the abundant ilex-trees which, though much reduced in numbers, are still one of the glories of the district. The golden age of the convent begins after 1256, when Pope Alexander IV. united all the Augustinian hermits into one order, and Lecceto became the head house of Tuscany. It produced an enormous number of beati , of whom Fra Filippo Agazzari, the pious novelist, and William Flete, St Catherine’s correspondent, an Englishman who had settled here, are the only ones whose fame has penetrated beyond the boundaries of Tuscany. Wonderful legends linger round the convent and the forest, told with much vividness and simplicity by Fra Filippo, with much unction by Landucci. Angels are said to have descended in human form, to eat with the hermits in their refectory or to succour them in their needs; the flowers of this forest, when sent to other places, healed the sick and worked miracles, “all evident signs that here flourished a continual spring of Paradise.” The Dominican Ambrogio Sansedoni, then a young knight, coming from Siena up through the wood to the convent (the very way in which we are treading now), was assailed by the fiend in the guise of a beautiful girl whom two ruffians had bound to a tree. The pious historian assures us that the knots had been tied by the Gordius of Hell to entangle Ambrogio’s soul, but that, while he laboured to untie them, he discovered the snare and repulsed the foe by the sign of the Cross. [161] Very sweet and pleasant are the pictures that Fra Filippo gives us of the priors of Lecceto in his day; for “the friars who had to choose them, always put in that convent for prior the best friar and the one of most holy life that there was in the province.” He tells us of Frate Bandino de’ Balzetti, who was so strict in the rules that when he saw a thief taking away the convent donkey at the time of silence, rather than break the silence or cause the friars to break it, he let him lead it off, while he himself went into the church to pray for the redemption of that thief’s soul. Of course the thief was miraculously moved to repentance, and the prior sent him away in peace with a plenteous alms. [162] He tells in full the life of Frate Niccolò Tini, a friar of the convent of Sant’ Agostino in Siena, young in years but old in wisdom and sanctity, who was made Prior of Lecceto in 1332 and ruled it until his death in 1388. It was under him that Filippo himself entered as a novice in 1353, and he records with enthusiastic love and admiration the man’s boundless humility and meekness, patience and charity. Suffering agonies from two horrible complaints, the Prior was always bright and kind, though his face would show sometimes the agony he endured. He loved to tend the sick with his own hands, to distribute all that the convent had of bread and wine to the poor—himself going to the gate to do it, because he knew that they would not fare so well at the hands of the other brethren. “His joyous face seemed that of Moses, so burned his heart with love and charity, and with such gladness did he receive strangers, especially the servants of God.” Many times during his priorate the friars had to fly from the place, when the wandering companies of mercenaries were ravaging the contado. “One morning,” says Fra Filippo, “I arrived there with a companion at the dinner hour, in the days when a company was expected, and already all the place was cleared, and we found the Prior alone, for the other friars had fled with the goods from the place. And as soon as he saw us, that blessed Prior received us with so much love and charity and with such gladness, that it was a wondrous thing. And in all the place there remained nothing to eat, save only two rolls which he had kept for himself, very small, and some wine and some leeks. And with a holy charity he constrained us to eat with him, and he set those two rolls on a table without a cloth, and the wine and the leeks. God knoweth that I do not lie, but I never found myself at feasts nor at weddings nor at any banquet, where I seemed to myself to fare so well and so abundantly or where the food did me so much good; and the like befell my companion. For the sweetness of the words of God that were on his lips was meat above all the meats of the world.” Once whilst Frate Niccolò was prior—it must have been a few years after Filippo entered the convent—Lecceto was threatened by the Sienese themselves. Shortly after the fall of the Nine in 1355, when Massa and Casole and other places were in arms against the new regime of the Twelve, a son of Messer Ranieri da Casole was seen to come into the wood with certain foot soldiers. The rumour spread that the Prior of Lecceto was sheltering outlaws, who came to do evil to the city of Siena. More than four hundred armed contadini threatened the convent, captured three of the men in the wood and sent them to the Podesta, while in Siena there uprose an uproar in the Campo, and the people shouted to go to Lecceto and burn the place down. The friars of Sant’ Agostino sent a warning to the Prior, that the people were already on their way to waste the place. While the armed crowd of peasants broke into the convent and rang the bells a martello , the Prior shut himself into the chapel and prayed earnestly before the image of the Saviour. At once a sudden rain fell; the three prisoners, whom the mob had been going to hang, were led back to the Podesta and proved innocent; the armed forces of the people turned back, the contadini went quietly home, “so that in a short while all the Place was cleared of folk, and that blessed Prior remained in peace with his friars.” [163] Perhaps, St Catherine preferred saints of a more robust temper. It is somewhat curious that she appears to have had no intercourse with Frate Niccolò, though we have several letters of hers addressed to other friars of Lecceto, especially Antonio da Nizza and William Flete. They were among the men of holy life whom Pope Urban summoned to Rome, to assist in the reformation of the Church, and neither wished to leave their beloved solitude. “I shall see,” she wrote to them, “if we really have conceived love for the Reformation of holy Church. For if it is really so, you will follow the will of God and of His Vicar, you will leave the wood and come to enter upon the field of battle. But if you do not do it, you will be disregarding the will of God. And, therefore, I pray you, by the love of Christ crucified, that you come soon, without delay, at the demand that the Holy Father makes of you. And do not fear that you will not have a wood; for here there are woods and forests.” [164] We pass up through the oaks and ilex-trees—the latter, scanty in parts and freshly planted round the convent buildings, are grand and dense enough further on to make a real forest still—until we reach the Eremo , with its small church and castle-like square tower of the monastery. The present buildings, though restored, date from the fourteenth century, and the tower was built in 1404, when Filippo himself was Prior. The place is silent and deserted now, left in the charge of a family of contadini, save for a month or so in the year, when the students of the Archbishop’s seminary of Siena come here for their villeggiatura . Outside the church, in the portico, are frescoes painted about 1343 by a certain Paolo di Maestro Neri, a follower of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, somewhat recalling the style and spirit of those of the master himself in the Sala de’ Nove, or those by that other unknown pupil of his in the Campo Santo of Pisa. The whole portico in front of the church is covered with them, mainly in monochrome; partly obliterated, they originally formed one of those vast allegories of human life in which the painters of the Trecento—above all the Sienese—delighted. The artist here is as severely ascetical and monastic in spirit as the unknown master of the “Triumph of Death.” On the one side is Paradise; on the other side is Hell. The long wall between them sets forth the life of the cloister and the life of the world, the one leading to Heaven, the other to Hell. In the one, we have peace and war; love-making and dancing; feasting and dicing, the loser seizing the winner by the throat; the car of pleasure, over which Cupid flies, while youths and ladies are with musicians within; a great boar-hunt; money-changing; a court of law; travellers waylaid by robbers. The devils are in it all; they wait by the gaming-table, they sit on the horse that draws the car of pleasure, they watch the hunting and all man’s ordinary business, they pounce upon the soul of the murdered, they preside over the death-bed of the impenitent. War is raging in earnest; a grim sea-fight is in progress, the devils are blowing on the ships and urging them against each other; there is the storming of a castle—the demons sound the trumpets for the onslaught, and carry off through the air the souls of those that fall. But above, behind the city from whose gates the pleasure-seeking crowd of worldlings has passed out, is Christ with the banner of the Resurrection—ready to save, if only they will turn to Him. [165] And in the other fresco to our left, a number of men of all ages and conditions have taken their crosses upon their shoulders, to carry them after Christ. We are shown the Works of Mercy and the life of the Evangelical Counsels. The devil is here too—but only to be vanquished and put to flight. Then we have the death of the just—in the corner, to match the death of the impenitent sinner at the end of the other fresco. And after that, comes only the Paradise. The frescoed Christ over the door of the church is probably by the same painter. In the second cloister there are a number of frescoes originally painted at the beginning of the Quattrocento. They are greatly damaged, obliterated in parts, completely restored in others; we get a vague general impression of hermits doing works of mercy and seeing visions, of St Augustine giving his rule, of holy deaths in convents and hermitages. Further on are five better preserved. The first is the story of Giovanni di Guccio, told by Fra Filippo. [166] Giovanni di Guccio, who belonged to a wealthy family of the Monte de’ Nove, entered Lecceto as a boy, but in the noviciate found the coarse food so trying that he thought that he would have to leave the Order. In the wood he met “an ancient man of right venerable aspect,” who confirmed him in his vocation. “And suddenly He showed him the wounds of His side and of His hands and feet, from which there issued such great splendour that that of the Sun is nothing in comparison with it, and they all seemed bleeding. Then, straightway, He vanished.” This Giovanni was prior in 1323 and often told this story as an example, as of another person, and not until his death did the brethren know that he spoke of himself. In the other frescoes, we see an abbot preaching in front of the convent, a painted ideal of penitential life and pious death, the monks journeying with a sainted prior in their midst, and the return of the lost sheep to the fold. The whole cloister, with the well in the middle, is picturesque. There is little to see in the church, where a few frescoed saints seem striving to emerge from the whitewash. Down among the vines (on the left of the entrance as you face the convent) is the famous holy well, the “Poggio Santo,” now dilapidated. According to the legend, piously recorded by Landucci, there was at first no water to be had, but one of the hermits, novella Moisè “novello” Moisè, struck the arid soil with a rod, and at once a spring of limpid water gushed out, with miraculous powers of curing those stricken with fever. One of the original hermits is said to have been buried in this field, and our pious historian even discovers some hidden mystery of divine things in the colours of the stones that lie around. In a clearing in the wood on the eminence opposite the convent is the little chapel, now restored, of San Pio. In November 1460, the friars of the chapter and convent of San Salvatore, otherwise Lecceto, presented a petition to the Signoria of Siena, to the effect that they wanted to build an oratory under the name of San Pio and could find no place more suited to their purpose than the hill opposite the Place of Lecceto, “the which hill belongs to the magnificent city of Siena, and is a woody and stony place, from which no fruit can be got.” They therefore beg the Magnificent Signoria to give them enough land on the said hill to build their chapel: “which thing will be acceptable to our Lord God, and also will greatly please the Holiness of our Lord Pope Pius the Second, who has many times been to the said place. And your petitioners undertake ever to pray to God for your Magnificent Signoria, that it may prosper and increase in a good and pacific state.” The name of “the Holiness of our Lord Pope Pius” was at that time one with which to conjure, and their petition was approved successively by the Concistoro , the Council of the People, and the General Council. [167] At the bridge below Belcaro, we keep to the right and then turn off to the left, skirting the wood, to San Leonardo al Lago, the remains of a hermitage in the forest which was connected with Lecceto. Here Agostino Novello, who had been Manfred’s minister, lived in his austere old age and died. A few picturesque ruins of the hermitage remain, with the woods rising up behind them, but the rest are farm buildings. The church contains, in the choir, a beautiful series of frescoes: the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin in the Temple, the Annunciation, the Sposalizio; with, on the four segments of the vault, four choirs of Angels, singing and making music, gazing down on the sacred scenes on the walls or assisting at the Mass on the altar below. They appear to be works of some later follower of the Lorenzetti, but are ascribed to a certain Pietro di Lorenzo, a mediocre painter of the early Quattrocento. Four small miracles of St Leonard, on the left, almost obliterated, are of no artistic importance, but one of them gives a most vivid representation of the torture of the corda or strappado, with the scribe taking down the confession; in this case, the Saint is upholding the victim. In the crypt is the original burial-place of Agostino Novello. The Abbazia di San Galgano, a long drive from the Porta San Marco, was a Cistercian house whose monks at one epoch regularly served the Republic as Camarlinghi di Biccherna. According to the legend, Galgano Guidotti came hither in 1180, and on Monte Siepi, above the Merse, struck his sword into the rock. Here he died in 1181. A few years later the Bishop of Volterra, Ugo dei Saladini, built a round chapel over the hermitage and founded a small house of Cistercians. This chapel still remains. The great Cistercian monastery and abbey-church of San Galgano, in the plain of the Merse, were built in the thirteenth century, being probably begun in 1220 and 1224 respectively. Of the monastery, only a few ruins remain. The abbey-church, magnificent still in its ruin, is one of the purest and noblest pieces of Gothic architecture in Italy; it is a typical building of the Cistercians, whose churches and convents, purer in style and earlier in date than those of the Friars Minor and Friars Preachers, have caught more of the true spirit of northern Gothic than have theirs. [168] The most famous, and perhaps still the most interesting, of all the monastic houses in the State of Siena is that of Monte Oliveto Maggiore. It can be reached either from Asciano, a picturesque little town with a number of paintings of the Sienese school in its churches, or by driving all the way from Siena by Buonconvento. Pedestrians, if they do not intend to spend the night at the convent, should take the morning diligence to Buonconvento, and walk down to Asciano from Monte Oliveto in the afternoon to catch the evening train back to Siena. We drive out of the Porta Romana, Siena gradually growing more distant behind us, Monte Amiata rising nearer and more distinctly in front. About two miles from Buonconvento we cross the Arbia, and then again by an old bridge outside the gate. The little townlet of Buonconvento itself, where Henry VII. died in 1313 and Alfonso of Calabria had his headquarters in 1480, is inclosed in well-preserved walls of the fourteenth century, with the balzana and lion of Siena’s Commune and People over the gate. In the one street, which is practically all the place, is an old tower with armorial bearings of generations of Podestàs. The church of San Pietro and San Paolo, near the gate, deserves a visit for a most beautiful little Madonna and Child by Matteo di Giovanni, over the high altar. To the left of the altar are pictures by Sano di Pietro (the Madonna with St Catherine and San Bernardino) and Pacchiarotti (an early work according to Mr Berenson). There are also a frescoed Coronation of the Madonna ascribed to Sano, on the right wall, an Annunciation with the Magdalene and St Antony by Girolamo di Benvenuto, on the left, and a Madonna in glory with Saints in the manner of Pacchia. From Buonconvento we gradually mount upwards, partly through oak woods, to Monte Oliveto. Long before we reach it, the great red-brick convent becomes visible, with the curious little townlet of Chiusure, once

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