The Story of Siena and San Gimignano

The steep Via Benincasa – once the Via de’ Tintori – leads up from Fontebranda into the town. It is the headquarters of the most typical and vivacious of the Sienese contrade – the “Nobile Contrada dell’Oca.” A few houses up the street, on the left, is a graceful building in the style of the early Renaissance, which now occupies the site of the house of Giacomo Benincasa: the Oratorio di Santa Caterina in Fontebranda. “Many from beyond the mountains,” so runs an entry in the Libro dei decreti di Concistoro, at the time when Catherine’s canonisation was in progress at Rome, “French, Venetians, Romans and of other nations who have come to your city, have with great diligence asked for the house where dwelt in your city the blessed Catherine of Siena; and they have gone to it with great reverence and devotion, kneeling down in many places and kissing the walls and the door, saying with many tears: Here she stood and touched, that precious vessel and gift of God, blessed Catherine of Siena, who in her life did so many miracles. And many have wondered that the Commune of Siena in that place has not made some temple to the praise of God and honour of that Spouse of Christ.”107 The house had passed through many hands since the death of St Catherine (who, during the latter part of her life, lived with her mother in another house in the present Via Romana), and was then in a ruinous condition, as the document just quoted goes on to state. But in 1464 the inhabitants of the Costa Fontebranda petitioned the Signoria to buy the house, offering themselves to pay all the rest of the expenses for the building and adornment of the chapel or oratory, “the which they are disposed to do in such form and so well adorned, that it will be to the honour of God and St Catherine of Siena and of your Magnificent Signory, and the consolation of all your city.” The oratory was begun in the same year and finished in 1473, after several appeals from the Esecutori di Gabella to the Signoria for aid in money. In one of these, they remind the Signoria that “it pertains to the Republic to study that spiritual devotions and divine temples should increase in the city; especially in yours, because of the celestial gift of the sweetest liberty which we enjoy among very few cities in the world.” And in another they set forth that, with the aid of their Magnificent Lordships, the oratory has been built, “which has been a thing very devout and honourable, especially by reason of the great concourse of citizens and strangers who go there on the days of her feast”; but that they need some more things to make it complete – such as a picture for the altar, candlesticks, an image of the Saint in high relief, and a sacristy – for which they want three hundred gold florins.108

The lower chapel – now the church of the Contrada – is the one referred to in these documents, the upper oratories being the result of later acts of devotion. It is uncertain who was the architect; a certain Francesco di Duccio del Guasta, as well as Antonio Federighi and other masters, seems to have had a hand in it. Over the door is a relief of St Catherine with Angels – an unworthy work by Urbano da Cortona – and on the façade are the four shields: the Libertas and the balzana between the Lion of the People and the Goose of the Contrada. The church was the workshop of Giacomo Benincasa and his sons. Over the altar is a statue in coloured wood of their glorious daughter and sister, by Neroccio. The five frescoed putti above and the scene of the reception of the Stigmata are probably by Girolamo del Pacchia. On the right wall are two admirable frescoes by Girolamo who, like all true Sienese, was never so truly inspired as when painting Catherine. In the first, she is saving two Dominican friars from a band of robbers by her intercession. In the second, she is visiting the convent of Santa Agnese of Montepulciano, and when she stoops to kiss the foot of the dead virgin it moves itself to meet her lips, while “a very white manna falling like heavenly dew” descends upon her. Here the painter has combined two different legends about her visits to Montepulciano. The two girls kneeling on the left are Catherine’s two nieces (Lisa’s daughters) whom she placed in the convent; the young man in the foreground is apparently Neri di Landoccio. On the left wall we see her raising up Messer Matteo di Cenni, the Rector of the Casa della Misericordia, “a notable servant of God and very devout to this Virgin,” when he lay dying of the pestilence; her figure is full of wonderful dignity and sweetness. This also is by Girolamo del Pacchia. The fresco representing the Saint at Florence, assailed by the Ciompi, is by Ventura Salimbeni.

We go up the stairs – which, without unduly stretching a point, we may surely imagine to be those up which Monna Lapa saw her little daughter ascending without touching the ground. On the left, we enter a small oratory, which was one of the rooms of the Benincasa family – probably that in which they took their meals together. The frescoes, by the modern Sienese painter, Alessandro Franchi, represent legendary scenes of Catherine’s childhood and life in the family, and her earliest visions before her public life began. They are at least unpretentious and devout in sentiment, and the one in which the worthy dyer finds his daughter at prayer, with the mystical dove hovering over her head, is decidedly pretty. The picture over the altar, of her receiving the Stigmata, is perhaps by Girolamo di Benvenuto. The little cell beyond is the chamber which was made over to her as her own, when her father was convinced that she was following a supernatural call. Under the wooden covering of the floor is the very pavement upon which her feet trode, and, shown beneath bars and glass, is the hard pillow of bricks upon which her head rested when she slept. Out of the little window above it, she gave food to the poor – for these rooms are practically on a level with the upper street. In a glass case certain relics of hers are preserved; her scent-bottle for the sick; the lantern which she carried when she visited the plague-stricken or went to the hospital after dark; the handle of the stick with which she walked – the stick we see sometimes in her pictures; her veil and a piece of her hair-shirt; and the covering in which her head was brought from Rome to Siena.

At the head of the stairs, on the right, is the door opening out upon the little side street that runs off from the steep Costa Sant’ Antonio, by which the house is more usually entered. It bears the inscription “The house of Catherine, the Spouse of Christ,” and when we mount up into the little court and loggia, we may read another hard saying on our left: “Living, I beheld Him whom I loved.” The design of the court and loggia is ascribed to Baldassare Peruzzi. Here are two oratories. The first – which is said to have been Monna Lapa’s kitchen – is now somewhat gorgeously decorated in the style of the Renaissance; the ceiling and pavement (which latter is kept covered) belong to the end of the sixteenth century. Over the altar, the picture representing the reception of the Stigmata – which we find repeated in one form or another in each of these chapels – is by Fungai. The pictures – with fine Renaissance pilasters between – date from the latter part of the sixteenth century onwards, and represent scenes from St Catherine’s life, with other Saints and Beati of Siena. In contrast with those in the lower oratory, they are largely concerned with her later life and with her public actions; her saving the souls of the tortured felons; her freeing a woman from an evil spirit (by Pietro Sorri); her persuading the Roman People to submit to Pope Urban (by Alessandro Casolani); and her inducing Gregory to return to Rome. The more artistically important of the series are her mystical marriage with Christ, by Arcangiolo Salimbeni, and her canonisation by Pope Pius II. (with the Blessed Bernardo and the Blessed Nera of the Tolomei below), by Francesco Vanni. The second oratory – the Oratorio del Crocifisso– was built in the sixteenth century on the site of the garden of the family. Over the altar is the sacred Crucifix from Santa Cristina at Pisa – a painting ascribed to Giunta Pisano – praying before which, on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, 1375, in that little church on the banks of the Arno, Catherine is said, like Francis of Assisi, to have received in her flesh the ultimo sigillo. “I saw,” she told Frate Raimondo, “our Crucified Lord coming down upon me surrounded by a great light. Thereat by the force of my spirit, that desired to go forth and meet its Creator, my body was constrained to rise. Then from the marks of His most sacred wounds I saw descend upon me five bloody rays, which were directed towards the hands, the feet and the heart of my body. Wherefore, knowing the mystery, I cried out suddenly, ‘Ah, my Lord God, I beseech you, let not these wounds appear outwardly in my body; it is enough for me to have them internally.’ Then whilst I was yet speaking, before those rays reached me, their blood-red colour changed to a marvellous brightness, and in the semblance of pure light they came to the five parts of my body, to wit, the hands, the feet, and the heart.”109

In the Via Benincasa to the right of the door of the church – over which is a bust of Catherine by Giacomo Cozzarelli, who is said to have designed the loggia – are the rooms belonging to the “Nobile Contrada dell’Oca.” In the Sala delle Adunanze, you may see the trophies that their fantini, or jockeys, have won in the race for the Palio.

The Contrada should be visited on the Sunday after the feast of Santa Caterina. The whole Via Benincasa is decorated —ammaiata, as they say in Siena – with bunting, with the flags of their own and the allied contrade, with brackets to hold lights and with white wooden geese in every form of flight or rest, but always combined with a green perch and a red bracket to give the Italian tricolour which is also the divisa of the Contrada. The corners of the streets that lead into the Via Benincasa are guarded by larger wooden geese of this type, set upon the walls of the houses, while at the bottom of the street, at the church, the way is closed by a temporary tabernacle and altar. From earliest morning, Mass is offered up unceasingly in the three oratories, while the figurino (the gaily decked representative of the Contrada) and the alfieri, waving their banners and preceded by a band, march through the city, to pay honour in this fashion to the houses of their friends and the headquarters of the allied contrade. All through the day the throng moves unceasingly through the street and the sacred house, until in the evening there is the procession. Starting from the parish church of Sant’ Antonio, it makes its way down the steep, densely packed Via Benincasa. Following the band, comes the figurino; then a long train of little children dressed as saints and angels – foremost among them being a group of three, a little boy, a little girl, and an elder girl, representing the Sposalizio of Caterina with the divine Bambino under the patronage of the Madonna. The brothers of the Company of St Catherine follow, bearing the silver bust of their patroness, with the priest of the Contrada. The end of the procession is brought up by the picturesque young Ancients, waving and tossing up their banners in the approved Sienese fashion, until all the steep, crowded Via Benincasa seems a whirling mass of colour.

And St Catherine’s power of healing factions in her native city has not yet ceased. In this present year of grace, 1902, on the day in which the popolani of the Oca celebrated the feast of their glorious patroness, there was a solemn reconciliation between them and the rival Contrada of the Torre, the healing of the famous feud of many years’ standing. I am writing too soon after the event to know whether the peace has proved durable!

Upon the hill above Fontebranda rises the great red brick church of San Domenico – after the Duomo the most important Gothic ecclesiastical building in Siena. It dates almost from the very beginning of the Dominican order, being begun shortly after 1220, though not finished until the middle of the fifteenth century. St Dominic himself may be said to have presided over its beginning, and the Angelical Doctor has walked in the cloisters where once the convent was. The soaring Campanile was raised in 1340. Though considerably altered – in the sixteenth century it was used as a fortress from which the Spanish soldiery might command the city – it is always the same building that St Catherine knew, and that is so intimately connected with the events of her life; presumably there are few buildings in Italy so quick with the living spirit of one woman. Her beloved Dominicans, alas, are here no longer; the convent was suppressed by the French invaders at the beginning of last century, and, after the restoration of the Austrian Grand Dukes, the Benedictines were substituted for the Dominicans. The black monks have gone too – leaving a few to serve the church – and the convent has been transformed into barracks for the cavalry of modern Italy.

The interior has been completely restored, but its original austere simplicity is still preserved. The picture over the third altar on the right in the nave, representing the Assassination of St Peter Martyr, and painted by Arcangiolo Salimbeni in 1579, is one of the most meritorious works of the later school of Sienese painters. Over the last altar on the right the altar-piece is formed of three different pictures by different artists and without the slightest connection with each other, save that they were all painted in the latter part of the fifteenth century; the Nativity of the Saviour is by Francesco di Giorgio, one of his best works, showing a curious imitation of Luca Signorelli in the adoring Angels and shepherds; above, the Pietà with Angels, St Michael and the Magdalene, is by Matteo di Giovanni; the predella – representing St Catherine’s visions, the Martyrdom of St Sebastian, the Massacre of the Innocents, St Dominic preaching, St Mary of Egypt – is ascribed to Fungai. Over the high altar the beautiful marble Ciborium, with the risen Christ above and the four Evangelists below, is the work of one of the chief Florentine sculptors of the latter half of the Quattrocento, Benedetto da Maiano. The two marble Angels, kneeling on either side of the altar, are also his. There is a fine view of the Duomo from the back of the choir. In the second chapel, to the left of the choir, is one of the loveliest and most characteristic pictures of the Sienese school – the “Santa Barbara” painted by Matteo di Giovanni in 1479. The Virgin Martyr of the Tower sits enthroned, in robes gorgeous with gold and embroidery, accompanied by St Mary Magdalene and St Catherine of the Wheels; two Angels crown her, two more make melody behind her throne. The faces of the three women – particularly the golden-haired maidens, Catherine and Barbara – are full of pensive sweetness; they have dreamed among the lilies all day and all night of love, such passionless love as that of which the Vita Nuova tells, while the faction fights have splashed Siena’s streets with blood, and in her palace chambers the things have been done of which her novelists speak. And, surely, when the Angels sing to their lutes or viols, it will be no hymn, but some such amorous canzone as that with which Casella refreshed Dante’s soul on the shores of Purgatory. The lunette above represents the Adoration of the Magi, and was especially stipulated for by the worthy bakers who gave Matteo the commission. The bright picture opposite shows a trace of the influence of Benozzo Gozzoli; it represents the Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels, with the Pietà and four Angels in the lunette, and was painted by Benvenuto di Giovanni in 1483. In the chapel beyond there is another Matteo di Giovanni: the Madonna and Child with Angels, St Jerome and the Baptist, in three divisions, with a rocky landscape background, damaged and neglected. In the chapel on the right of the choir, the Madonna of the Rosary – or rather the Deity with Saints, surrounding an old votive picture of the Madonna – is by Bazzi, the predella of the fifteen mysteries being by one of his pupils. The second chapel on the right belonged to the “German Nation” of the University of Siena, and is full of tombstones of noble young German students, who came to the famous Studio to acquire wisdom, and found a grave. One epitaph begins, Svevia me genuit, Senae rapuere sed ossa. The chapel has the pathos that inevitably clings to the thought of hopes cut short, of untimely death in a foreign land.

It is not for these things that we visit San Domenico to-day, but for the glorious chapel of St Catherine. Over it we read another of those hard sayings that sum up, mystically, the story of her inner life: “This chapel holds the head of Catherine. Dost thou seek her heart? Nay, that Christ bears inclosed in His breast.” The shrine itself, over the altar, which contains this sacred relic – sacred, surely, to all lovers of the noblest things in the literature of mysticism no less than to Roman Catholics – is a work of the third quarter of the fifteenth century, and is probably by Giovanni di Stefano. The frescoes on either side of it – representing the Svenimento, St Catherine fainting into the arms of her two attendant nuns, Alessia and Francesca, overcome by the glory of the vision of her celestial Bridegroom, and St Catherine miraculously fed with the Food of Angels in the Sacred Host – are by Bazzi, and were painted in 1526. Hardly elsewhere (save, perhaps, in the St Sebastian of the Uffizi painted in the previous year) has the wayward painter of Vercelli touched such a height of inspiration; in conception and execution alike, they are among the supreme triumphs of Italian art. The fresco on the left – representing the execution of Niccolò di Toldo, St Catherine ecstatically following the upward flight of the soul she has saved – is also Bazzi’s, but less excellent. It is overcrowded and badly composed, carelessly executed in parts; the brawny figure and bearded head of the victim hardly suggest the delicate young nobleman, the agnello of the Leggenda minore whose blood has been unjustly shed;110 but nothing could be more beautiful than the kneeling figure of the Saint herself. The beautiful pilasters between the frescoes, and the Angels and Prophets under the arch, are likewise Bazzi’s. Bazzi left the work unfinished, and some fifty years after his death Francesco Vanni took it up, in 1593. By Vanni (who, of course, will not be confused with Andrea di Vanni, Catherine’s contemporary and friend) is the picture on the right, painted in oil colours, where she is seen liberating a possessed woman from a demon; by him, too, are the figures of her two first biographers, the Blessed Raimondo da Capua and Frate Tommaso Nacci Caffarini, the authors of the Leggenda and the Leggenda minore respectively. Beautiful as the shrine is – and it would have been perfect in its harmony had only Bazzi completed the decorations – it is impossible at times not to feel that there is something more melodramatic in its treatment than quite accords with the simpler spirit of the dyer’s daughter of Fontebranda. The graffito work in coloured marble on the pavement represents Aesculapius among wild beasts. It is doubtful whether this is connected with the fact that several physicians of the Benzi family were buried in the chapel, or a part of the decorations in honour of the Saint.

San Domenico should be visited on the day of St Catherine’s Feast, which in Siena is kept on April 29th. The nave is hung with the bright banners of the contrade; Mass after Mass is offered up without intermission throughout the morning at the shrine, while crowds of the devout humbly and silently approach the altar, to be fed with that Bread of the Angels, “which,” says the collect for that day, “sustained even the temporal life of the blessed Virgin Catherine.” The curtain is raised, and behind the gilded bars of the shrine the pale, strange face appears, its features still recognisable. The altar blazes with candles and glares with artificial lilies, while natural flowers, lilies of the valley and white roses – more fitting tribute to her who so loved the simple flowers of the field – are offered up at the chapel rails. And, in this sudden advent of reality, Bazzi’s beautiful melodrama palls.

In the sacristy, on this day, are shown certain other relics – her discipline; her portable altar-stone; the sacramental cloths which she made for it with her own hands; the bull from Pope Gregory at Avignon granting her the dispensation to have Mass upon it wherever she went; and one of her fingers. The latter relic is – somewhat unfittingly – carried in procession through the church at sunset. The sacristy contains a banner painted with the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin by Bazzi.

The chapel on the right of the entrance, the Cappella delle Volte, over which is a large painted Crucifix of the fifteenth century, was not separated from the rest of the church in the days of St Catherine, as it is now. It was the chapel in which she habitually prayed, and by one of its pillars she knelt always, to hear Mass in the church below. Here her visions came to her, here had she those strange mystical revelations of the Divine Word. “Disposing wondrous ascensions in her heart, Catherine went up these steps, to pray in the chapel to Christ her Spouse.” Thus runs the writing over the original steps, piously preserved and guarded by bars, on the left, by which Catherine mounted into the cell of mystery; not those modern ones by which we now go up into the little chapel that witnessed this wondrous union of a woman’s mind and heart with the suprasensible.

It is somewhat bare to-day, painfully coated with modern paint and whitewash. It is hung with paintings representing scenes from her life and death, of little value from an artistic point of view, though one – that of her walking with her Master and Spouse – has a certain pathos and sweetness. Two narrow pictures over the entrance – representing her giving the cross of her rosary, and clothing the Divine Beggar with her robe – are earlier and better than the larger canvasses. But over the altar is a priceless treasure, the famous portrait of her by her friend and correspondent Andrea di Vanni, perhaps painted in her life-time and in any case her authentic likeness, in which the mantellata is giving her hand to kiss to a kneeling follower of her own sex – in the way to which (when men were concerned) such exception was taken during her life. In the centre of the chapel a piece of the old pavement where she trode – walked with Christ, in the phrase of the legend – is religiously preserved. Elsewhere, marble tablets on the floor are marked with heart, cross or robe, and inscribed: “Christ changeth heart with Catherine”; “Catherine bestoweth her cross on Christ”; “Catherine clothes Christ with her robe.” For into this chapel, as into others, the beggars came – and among them the disguised Spouse of her soul. Still may we see the pillar against which she leaned in her ecstasies – the pillar that is idealised in Bazzi’s two frescoes on either side of the shrine below – though now it is covered and modernised like the rest of the chapel. An inscription hung upon it – a seventeenth century copy of one of much older date (but not earlier than her canonisation) – strikes the keynote of the whole chapel, and I will therefore translate it in full: —

“In this chapel, there befell many wonderful actions to St Catherine of Siena, among the which are those set down below, as the blessed Raimondo her confessor telleth, and they are also known by ancient tradition, besides the many others that befell in this present church.

“Here she was clothed in the habit of St Dominic, and she was the first virgin who up to that time had been thus clothed.

“Here she stayed apart to hear the divine offices, and here continually had she divine colloquies, conversing familiarly with Jesus Christ her Spouse. Here she said the divine office, she had frequent ecstasies, and for the most part in these she used to lean against this pilaster, in one of which ecstasies she was zealously portrayed by a painter on the wall outside of this chapel.111 And from that time this pilaster has been, and still is formidable to the furies of Hell, and many persons possessed of devils have been delivered thereby.