The Story of Siena and San Gimignano

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 visitors153– 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 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.

CHAPTER X

Some Famous Convents and Monasteries

BEYOND 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 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.