Volume Ii Part 5 (1/2)

It is no wonder that the knife is a tradition in Trastevere. Even now it is the means of settling difficulties, but less often by treachery than in the other regions. For when two young men have a difference it is usual for them to go together into some quiet inner court or walled garden, and there they wind their handkerchiefs round their right wrists and round the hilt of the knife to get a good hold, and they m.u.f.fle their left arms in their jackets for a s.h.i.+eld, and face each other till one is dead. If it be barbarous, it is at least braver than stabbing in the dark.

Raphael is remembered in Trastevere for the beautiful little palace of the Farnesina, which he decorated for the great and generous banker, Agostino Chigi, and for the Fornarina, whose small house with its Gothic window stands near the Septimian gate, where the old Aurelian wall crosses Trastevere and the Lungara to the Tiber. And he has made Trastevere memorable for the endless types of beauty he found there, besides the one well-loved woman, and whom he took as models for his work. He lived at the last, not in the house on the Roman side, which belonged to him and is still called his, but in another, built by Bramante, close to the old Accoramboni Palace, in the Piazza Rusticucci, before Saint Peter's, and that one has long been torn down.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HOUSE BUILT FOR RAPHAEL BY BRAMANTE, NOW TORN DOWN]

We know little enough of that Margaret, called the Fornarina from her father's profession; but we know that Raphael loved her blindly, pa.s.sionately, beyond all other thoughts; as Agostino Chigi loved the magnificent Imperia for whom the Farnesina was built and made beautiful.

And there was a time when the great painter was almost idle, out of love for the girl, and went about languidly with pale face and shadowed eyes, and scarcely cared to paint or draw. He was at work in the Vatican then, or should have been, and in the Farnesina, too; but each day, when he went out, his feet led him away from the Pope's palace and across the square, by the Gate of the Holy Spirit and down the endless straight Lungara towards the banker's palace; but when he reached it he went on to the Fornarina's house, and she was at the window waiting for him. For her sake he refused to marry the great Cardinal Bibbiena's well-dowered niece, Maria, and the world has not ceased to believe that for too much love of the Fornarina he died. But before that, as Fabio Chigi tells, Pope Leo the Tenth, being distressed by the painter's love sickness, asked Agostino Chigi if there were not some way to bring him back to work. And the great banker, as anxious for his Farnesina as the Pope was for his Vatican, spirited away the lovely girl for a time, she consenting for her lover's sake. And Chigi then pretended to search for her, and comforted Raphael with news of her and promises of her return, so that after being half mad with anxiety he grew calmer, and worked for a time at his painting. But soon he languished, and the cure was worse than the evil; so that one day Chigi brought the girl back to him unawares and went away, leaving them together.

Of the end we know nothing, nor whether Margaret was with him when he died; we know nothing, save that she outlived him, and died in her turn, and lies in a grave which no one can find. But when all Rome was in sorrow for the dead man, when he had been borne through the streets to his grave, with his great unfinished Transfiguration for a funeral banner, when he had been laid in his tomb in the Pantheon, beside Maria Bibbiena, who had died, perhaps, because he would not love her, then the pale Margaret must have sat often by the little Gothic window near the Septimian gate, waiting for what could not come any more. For she had loved a man beyond compare; and it had been her whole life.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MONASTERY OF SANT' ONOFRIO

From an old engraving]

If one comes from the Borgo by the Lungara, and if one turns up the steep hill to the right, there is the place where Ta.s.so died, seventy-five years after Raphael was gone. The small monastery of Sant'

Onofrio, where he spent the last short month of his life, used to be a lonely and beautiful place, and is remembered only for his sake, though it has treasures of its own--the one fresco painted in Rome by Lionardo da Vinci, and paintings by Domenichino and Pinturicchio in its portico and little church, as well as memories of Saint Philip Neri, the Roman-born patron saint of Rome. All these things barely sufficed to restrain the government from turning it into a barrack for the city police a few years ago, when the name of one of Italy's greatest poets should alone have protected it. It was far from the streets and thoroughfares in older times, and the quiet sadness of its garden called up the infinite melancholy of the poor poet who drew his last breath of the fresh open air under the old tree at the corner, and saw Rome the last time, as he turned and walked painfully back to the little room where he was to die. It is better to think of it so, when one has seen it in those days, than to see it as it is now, standing out in vulgar publicity upon the modern avenue.

There died the man who had sung, and wandered, and loved; who had been slighted, and imprisoned for a madman; who had escaped and hidden himself, and had yet been glorious; who had come to Rome at last to receive the laureate's crown in the Capitol, as Petrarch had been crowned before him. His life is a strange history, full of discordant pa.s.sages that left little or no mark in his works, so that it is a wonder how a man so torn and hara.s.sed could labour unceasingly for many years at a work so perfectly harmonious as 'Jerusalem Freed'; and it seems strange that the hot-headed, changeable southerner should have stood up as the determined champion of the Epic Unity against the school of Ariosto, the great northern poet, who had believed in diversity of action as a fundamental principle of the Epic; it is stranger still and a proof of his power that Ta.s.so should have earned something like universal glory against the long-standing supremacy of Ariosto in the same field, in the same half-century, and living at the same court. Everything in Ta.s.so's life was contradictory, everything in his works was harmonious. Even after he was dead, the contrasts of glory and misery followed his bones like fate. He died in the arms of Cardinal Aldobrandini, the Pope's nephew, almost on the eve of his intended crowning in the Capitol; he was honoured with a magnificent funeral, and his body was laid in an obscure corner, enclosed in a poor deal coffin.

It was six years before the monks of Sant' Onofrio dug up the bones and placed them in a little lead box 'out of pity,' as the inscription on the metal lid told, and buried them again under a poor slab that bore his name, and little else; and when a monument was at last made to him in the nineteenth century, by the subscriptions of literary societies, it was so poor and unworthy that it had better not have been set up at all. A curious book might be written upon the vicissitudes of great men's bones.

Opposite the Farnesina stands the great Palazzo Corsini, once the habitation of the Riario family, whose history is a catalogue of murders, betrayals, and all possible crimes, and whose only redeeming light in a long history was that splendid and brave Catherine Sforza, married to one of their name, who held the fortress of Forl so bravely against Caesar Borgia, who challenged him to single combat, which he refused out of shame, who was overcome by him at last, and brought captive to the Vatican in chains of gold, as Aurelian brought Zen.o.bia.

In the days of her power she had lived in the great palace for a time.

It looks modern now; it was once a place of evil fame, and is said to have been one of the few palaces in Rome which contained one of those deadly shafts, closed by a balanced trap door that dropped the living victim who stepped upon it a hundred and odd feet at a fall, out of hearing and out of sight for ever. From the Riario it was bought at last, in 1738, by the Corsini, and when they began to repair it, they found the bones of the nameless dead in heaps far down among the foundations.

There also lived Christina, Queen of Sweden, of romantic and execrable memory, for twenty years; and here she died, the strangest compound of greatness, heroism, vanity and wickedness that ever was woman to the destruction of man; ending her terrible life in an absorbing pa.s.sion for art and literature which attracted to itself all that was most delicate and refined at the end of the seventeenth century; dabbling in alchemy, composing verses forgotten long ago, discoursing upon art with Bernini, dictating the laws of verse to the poet Guidi, collecting together a vast library of rare books and a great gallery of great pictures, and of engravings and medals and beautiful things of every sort--the only woman, perhaps, who was ever like Lucrezia Borgia, and outdid her in all ways.

Long before her time, a Riario, the Cardinal of Saint George, had like tastes and drew about him the thinkers and the writers of his age, when the Renascence was at its climax and the Constable of Bourbon had not yet been shot down at the walls a few hundred yards from the Corsini palace, bequeathing the plunder of Rome to his Spaniards and Germans.

Here Erasmus spent those hours of delight of which he eloquently wrote in after years, and here, to this day, in the grand old halls whence the Riario sent so many victims to their deaths below, a learned and literary society holds its meetings. Of all palaces in Rome in which she might have lived, fate chose this one for Queen Christina, as if its destiny of contrasts past and future could best match her own.

Much more could be told of Trastevere and much has been told already; how Beatrice Cenci lies in San Pietro in Montorio, how the lovely Farnesina, with all its treasures, was bought by force by the Farnese for ten thousand and five hundred scudi,--two thousand and one hundred pounds,--how the Region was swept and pillaged again and again by Emperors and n.o.bles, and people and Popes, without end.

But he who should wander through the Regions in their order, knowing that the greatest is last, would tire of lingering in the long Lungara and by the Gate of the Holy Spirit, while on the other side lies the great Castle of Sant' Angelo, and beyond that the Vatican, and Saint Peter's church; and for that matter, a great part of what has not been told here may be found in precise order and ready to hand in all those modern guide books which are the traveller's first leading-strings as he learns to walk in Rome.

Yet here, on the threshold of that Region which contains many of the world's most marvellous treasures of art--at the Gate of the Holy Spirit, through which Raphael so often pa.s.sed between love and work--I shall say a few words about that development in which Italy led the world, and something of the men who were leaders in the Renascence.

Art is not dependent on the creations of genius alone. It is also the result of developing manual skill to the highest degree. Without genius, works of art might as well be turned out by machinery; without manual skill, genius could have no means of expression. As a matter of fact, in our own time, it is the presence of genius, without manual skill, or foolishly despising it, that has produced a sort of school called the impressionist.

To go back to first principles, the word Art, as every child knows, is taken directly from the Latin ars, artis, which the best Latin dictionary translates or defines: 'The faculty of joining anything corporeal or spiritual properly or skilfully,' and therefore: 'skill, dexterity, art, ability,' and then: 'skill or faculty of the mind or body that shows itself in performing any work, trade, profession, art, science.' From the meaning of the Latin word we may eliminate what refers to spiritual things; not because literature, for instance, is not art, as well as music and the rest, but because we have to do with painting, sculpture, architecture, metal working, and the like, in which actual manual skill is a most integral element.

Now it is always admitted that art grew out of handicraft, when everything was made by hand, and when the compet.i.tion between workers was purely personal, because each man worked for himself and not for a company in which his individuality was lost. That is nowhere more clear than in Italy, though the conditions were similar throughout Europe until the universal introduction of machinery. The transition from handicraft to art was direct, quick and logical, and at first it appeared almost simultaneously in all the trades. The Renascence appears to us as a sort of glorious vision in which all that was beautiful suddenly sprang into being again, out of all that was rough and chaotic and barbarous. In real fact the Renascence began among carpenters, and blacksmiths, and stone masons, and weavers, when they began to take pride in their work, when they began to try and ornament their own tools, when the joiner who knew nothing of the Greeks began to trace a pattern with a red-hot nail on the clumsy wooden chest, when the smith dinted out a simple design upon the head of his hammer, when the mason chipped out a face or a leaf on the corner of the rough stone house, and when the weaver taught himself to make patterns in the stuff he wove.

The true beginning of the Renascence was the first improvement of hand-work after an age in which everything people used had been rougher and worse made than we can possibly imagine. Then one thing suggested another, and each generation found some new thing to do, till the result was a great movement and a great age. But there never was, and never could have been, any art at all without hand-work. Progress makes almost everything by machinery, and dreams of abolis.h.i.+ng hand-work altogether, and of making Nature's forces do everything, and provide everything for everybody, so that n.o.body need work at all, and everybody may have a like share in what is to cost n.o.body anything. Then, in the dream, everybody will be devoted to what we vaguely call intellectual pursuits, and the human race will be raised to an indefinitely high level. In reality, if such things were possible, we should turn into oysters, or into something about as intelligent. It is the experience of all ages that human beings will not work unless they are obliged to, and degenerate rapidly in idleness, and there have not been many exceptions to the rule. Art grew out of hand-work, but it grew in it, too, as a plant in the soil; when there is no more hand-work, there will be no more art. The two belong to each other, and neither can do without the other.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FORUM

Looking West]

Of course, I do not mean to say that there was a succession of centuries, or even one century, during which no pictures were painted in Italy, or no sculptures carved. The tradition of the arts survived, like the tradition of Latin poetry, with the same result, that rude works were produced in the early churches and convents. But there was no life in those things; and when, after a long time, after the early Crusades, Byzantine artists came to Italy, their productions were even worse than those of the still ignorant Italians, because they were infinitely more pretentious, with their gildings and conventionalities and expressionless types, and were not really so near the truth. What I mean is that the revival of real art came from a new beginning deep down and out of sight, among humble craftsmen and hard-working artisans, who found out by degrees that their hands could do more than they had been taught to do, and that objects of daily use need not be ugly or merely plain in order to be strong and well made and serviceable. And as this knowledge grew among them with practice and by experiment, they rose to the power of using for new purposes of beauty the old methods of painting and sculpture, which had survived, indeed, but which were of no value to the old-fas.h.i.+oned artists who had learned them from generation to generation, without understanding and without enthusiasm.