The Story of Siena and San Gimignano

It was, as we have seen, in the very year of the Emperor’s death in Buonconvento below, 1313, that Bernardo fled to this solitude. The son of Messer Mino Tolomei (the head of the Ghibelline section of that normally Guelf house) and Fulvia Tancredi, he was born in 1272, and christened Giovanni. After a boyhood of piety and study, he was made doctor by the Studio of Siena and knight of the Holy Roman Empire by Albert of Hapsburg – which latter event was seized by the Tolomei as an occasion for displaying all the wealth and splendour of their clan. He had a dazzling career as leader of the social and intellectual life of the city, though the stories told by his ecclesiastical biographers, of his becoming practically ruler of the Republic, are obviously nonsense; such things did not happen to noblemen while the Monte de’ Nove held sway. Then came his conversion. He had been going to deliver a philosophical discourse in the Studio, so runs the legend, when he was suddenly stricken with blindness. In the darkness he saw visions, prayed to the Blessed Virgin and recovered his sight at her intercession. Instead of his promised lecture, he poured out an impassioned homily upon the contempt of the world.169 He distributed all that he had to the poor, retaining only a little land in this desert of Accona, to which he now went forth with two noble companions, Patrizio Patrizi and Ambrogio Piccolomini. The three began by raising with their own hands a little chapel to St Scholastica. Giovanni now dressed in the roughest hermit attire, and took the name of Bernardo. Men began to flock to him, and certain Guelfs, suspecting a Ghibelline plot, are said to have attempted to take his life by poison. Praying at the spot where now is the great portal of the church, Bernardo beheld a silver ladder stretching up to Paradise, with Angels leading white-robed men upwards to Christ and the Madonna. Accused of heresy, Bernardo and Ambrogio were summoned to Avignon, where Pope John XXII. received them kindly and recommended them to Guido Tarlati, the warrior bishop of Arezzo, who (in accordance with a special communication from the Madonna, says the legend) gave them a rule of life, armorial bearings and the white habit.

Thus the Order was founded and Bernardo began to build the church and convent, over which the Archangel Michael and the fiends renewed the war that they had waged in Heaven before the creation of the world. After having been frequently sent by the Pope to heal the factions of Guelfs and Ghibellines in many towns of Italy, at last in 1348, when the terrible Black Death was ravaging the peninsula, Bernardo assembled his monks, bade them leave the convent, going two and two to every town and city to tend the plague-stricken, and all to assemble once more in Siena, two days before the Feast of the Assumption, in the convent that he had founded outside the Porta Tufi. All arrived safely, as he had promised them. On the vigil of the Assumption, he addressed them for the last time. Then, a few days later, he died; the rest took the pestilence, and the greater part of them passed away with the people they had come to tend.

At present the Olivetani have been almost everywhere suppressed. Here a few monks remain, their superior being regarded as merely the custode for the government, and there are a certain number of students. The Abbate Generale of the Order resides at Settignano.

The frescoes of the greater cloister were painted in the days of the Abbate Generale Fra Domenico Airoldi of Lecco. They illustrate the legend of St Benedict, as told by Pope Gregory the Great in the second book of his Dialogues. They were begun by Luca Signorelli in 1497, who painted eight frescoes beginning in the middle of the story, and then went away to undertake greater work in the Duomo of Orvieto. In 1505 and 1506 Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, who had known Fra Domenico in Lombardy, took up the tale, and, while he told it in line and colour, kept the whole convent in an uproar with his japery. “It would be impossible to describe,” says Vasari, “the fun that, while he worked in that place, those fathers got out of him, for they called him the big lunatic (Il Mattaccio), nor the mad pranks he played there.”

Beginning from the side of the cloister adjoining the monastery church, we have first nineteen scenes by Bazzi. We see Benedict as a youth leaving his father’s house at Norcia to go to study humanities at Rome, his faithful nurse (who plays the same part in the original legend) riding with him on a donkey; and then, his leaving the Roman schools, “instructed with learned ignorance and furnished with unlearned wisdom” as Pope Gregory has it, because scandalised at the dissolute lives of his fellow-students. These two frescoes show that Bazzi had been impressed by Pinturicchio’s work at Siena; they recall Enea Silvio setting out from Genoa and the Congress of Mantua. In the third, Benedict mends the borrowed sieve that his nurse had broken, and the townsmen hang it up at their church door, “to the end that not only men then living, but also their posterity, might understand how greatly God’s grace did work with him upon his first renouncing of the world.” Here we see Bazzi himself, a fine piece of self portraiture, surrounded by his pet birds and beasts, wearing the knightly robes and sword that had been discarded by a gentleman of Milan who had just entered the Order, and which the Abbot gave him in part payment for his work. Next, Benedict meets Romanus on the way to Subiaco. Then, while Romanus lets down a loaf of bread to Benedict in his cave, the devil, “envying at the charity of the one and the refection of the other,” hurls a stone and breaks the bell with which Romanus used to signal to his young friend; the painter’s pet badger calmly drinks at a pond the while. Next, a certain priest, by divine inspiration, brings a dinner to Benedict on Easter Day. In the seventh fresco, Benedict instructs the shepherds who found out his retreat; “and for corporal meat, which they brought him, they carried away spiritual food for their souls.” Then he rolls among thorns, to overcome a temptation of the flesh that the devil put into his mind by the representation of “a certain woman which some time he had seen.” After that, certain monks, by their persistence, induce him against his will to become their abbot. Finding him too austere, they attempt to poison him; but when he makes the sign of the Cross over the cup, it breaks in pieces, and he goes back unharmed to his solitude. Bazzi has made the ill-favoured monk, who was most insistent in urging Benedict to be abbot, the one to offer him the poisoned cup. Then, as many flock to him, he builds the twelve monasteries at Subiaco. In the twelfth fresco, one of the finest of the series, Benedict receives Maurus and Placidus, the young sons of the Roman nobles Equitius and Tertullus, who are accompanied by a splendid troop of retainers. Next, he beats the devil out of a monk who would not say his prayers; he makes a fountain spring forth on the top of a mountain; he makes the iron head of a bill that had slipped into the water return to its handle again. Now Placidus has fallen into the lake and Maurus, at the bidding of the man of God, runs upon the water and delivers him, after which “he both marvelled and was afraid at that which he had done,” but Benedict ascribes it entirely to his obedience. This is a particularly attractive picture, with the sweet boyish faces of the two young monks. After another miracle (of which the subject is not quite obvious), on either side of the door, we come to the attempt made by the priest Florentius to kill Benedict by a poisoned loaf; the Saint’s tamed crow, somewhat unwillingly, takes it away where no man can find it, to return presently for his own usual allowance. In the nineteenth fresco, Florentius tries to corrupt the monks by sending a band of young and beautiful women to the convent, to inflame their minds by dancing and singing. This was a subject far more after Bazzi’s own heart than were the trivial miracles of monastic legend, and in the exquisite group of women, with their Leonardesque faces, their subtle suggestion of rhythmic movement, he has produced a masterpiece. Vasari tells us that the painter originally shocked the worthy Abbot by representing this scene in a more realistic fashion (in which, we may add, he would only be following St Gregory’s own version of what happened), and that he was afterwards compelled to drape the figures.

Beyond this last fresco, there stood originally a door that led to the great refectory. It was closed between 1530 and 1541,170 after which Bazzi’s son-in-law, Bartolommeo Neroni or Il Riccio, painted upon the new wall the fresco we now see. It represents St Benedict sending out Maurus and Placidus as missionaries, the one to France, the other to Sicily.

The eight frescoes that follow are Luca Signorelli’s, but they hardly rank among his best works and are, in addition, in a bad state of preservation. In the first is the punishment of Florentius; the devils have thrown down his chamber upon him and are carrying off his soul; while Benedict, hearing what has happened, laments greatly, “both because his enemy died in such sort, and also for that one of his monks rejoiced thereat.” In the second, he converts the inhabitants of Monte Cassino from their worship of Apollo. In the third, he exorcises the devil who sat upon the stone and prevented the monks from raising it, and the idol of brass, which they dug up upon the spot and which seemed to set the convent on fire. In the fourth, he raises to life the young monk upon whom the devil had thrown a wall. The fifth is an admirable piece of genre-painting, intended to illustrate St Benedict’s discovery by revelation that some of his monks had disobeyed him and eaten out of the monastery. Two monks are eating and drinking in a primitive diningroom of the epoch (not an inn, as usually stated, but what St Gregory calls “the house of a religious woman”), waited upon by women – fine robust daughters of the people; the Saint is just seen, discovering to them their fault, on the right in the section of the wall. In the sixth scene, we have the story of the devout layman, the brother of Valentinian the monk, who was induced by a companion to break his fast on a journey. The two remaining frescoes, the last that Signorelli painted here, are of a far higher order and more characteristic of his grand manner. They represent Totila, King of the Goths, testing Benedict’s supernatural wisdom by sending one of his officers to him, disguised as himself; and then, when the Saint recognises the deceit and rebukes the man, Totila comes in person with his army, falls down before him and listens meekly to his words. In both, Signorelli gives us a superb representation of the fierce mercenary soldiery of his own day, and the work is full of his characteristic vigour and delight in powerful, strenuous manhood. Here, alone in the series, do we begin to recognise the future author of those unapproachable masterpieces at Orvieto.

Bazzi now takes up the tale in the seven remaining frescoes. In the first, Benedict foretells the destruction of Monte Cassino. The Saint himself is barely seen in a corner, the picture representing the event that he foretold. Monte Cassino is burning, while in the foreground is the Lombard host, superb groups of horsemen in every attitude, which recall Leonardo’s famous Battle of the Standard which, however, it seems probable that Bazzi could not then have known.171 After this, we are back in the region of petty miracles. Meal is miraculously brought to the monks in time of famine. Benedict appears in vision to the abbot and prior, whom he has sent to build an abbey near Terracina, and shows them how it is to be done. Two nuns, whom he threatened with excommunication because they would not bridle their tongues, cannot rest after death, but are seen to rise from their graves and leave the church at the time of the Communion, until he makes an oblation for them and (apparently) gives communion in some mystical way to their unquiet ghosts. A young monk, “loving his parents more than reason would,” cannot be buried after death, until Benedict bids them lay the Sacred Host upon his breast. Another monk, wishing to forsake the abbey, finds a terrible dragon in the way. A poor countryman, fallen into the hands of the Goth Zalla, “an Arian heretic who, in the time of King Totila, did with monstrous cruelty persecute religious men,” is marvellously loosed from his bonds at the sight of the man of God and Zalla himself moved to repentance. This closes the series of Benedict’s life. “Certainly,” says Peter to Gregory in the Dialogues, “they be wonderful things which you report, and such as may serve for the edification of many: for mine own part, the more that I hear of his miracles, the more do I still desire.” And we may feel disposed to say the same, if we have a Signorelli or a Bazzi to paint them.

There are a few other frescoes by Bazzi in the convent. Between the cloister and the church are Christ at the Column and Christ bearing the Cross, works of intense spiritual expression, and another variously described as Benedict giving his rule and Bernardo founding his order of Monte Oliveto. On the stairs leading to the dormitories are the Coronation of the Madonna and a Pietà, and, at the rooms of the Abbate Generale, over the door, a Madonna and Child with St Michael and St Peter. Outside the church a striking Madonna and Child in marble, ascribed to Fra Giovanni da Verona, watches over the tombs of the brethren. The church itself has been modernised. An old picture of the three founders is said to mark the place where Bernardo saw the Archangel Michael descend from Heaven in flashing armour to drive away the devils who were threatening to destroy the foundations of the building. It contains excellent intarsia by Giovanni da Verona, especially on the reading desk and choir stalls, and there is similar work by him in the library of the monastery.

Pope Pius II. came here in 1463, and in his Memoirs (those famous Commentarii Rerum Memorabilium) we are given an account of his visit.172 He marvelled at the situation of the place and the wonderful industry by which the monks had reclaimed so much of the desert soil, on the very brink of the precipice, and at the excellent architecture of the monastery. He found the woods and gardens as delightful to linger in, as we do to-day, and struck the keynote of the feeling of every modern visitor to these monastic houses of the past; “pleasant places of refreshment for the monks, more pleasant still for those to whom, after they have seen, it is lawful to depart.” On the second evening of his stay, the Pope supped with the monks in the refectory; while they were at table he bade his choristers come in, who sang the new hymn that his Holiness had composed in honour of St Catherine of Siena, “with such soft harmony that they drew sweet tears from all the monks.”

CHAPTER XI

San Gimignano

“La nobile più Città che Terra di San Gimignano.”

San Gimignano of the Beautiful Towers is a place of frowning grey and brown walls and towers, of mysterious alleys, of shimmering olive-trees and fields of flowers that lie beyond, of flaming skies at sunrise, of clamorous bells at nightfall. Hardly, indeed, would he be pressed who should be called upon to award the crown of beauty to any one, rather than another, of the smaller towns of central Italy, though San Gimignano would perhaps deserve it. “No other town or castle in Tuscany,” wrote Gino Capponi, “retains more of the Middle Ages and was less invaded by the ages that followed; in those towers, and in the churches and in the houses of massive stone, is still something that cannot be covered up by the thin plastering of modern times; ancient memories keep their possession of it, the new life has hardly entered in.”173 High up on the side of one of the hills of the Val d’Elsa —

“The hill-side’s crown where the wild hill brightens,”

as Mr Swinburne sings of it – it watches the fertile valley of the Elsa spread below, while to the north, beyond Certaldo (haunted still by the spirit of him who wrote the Human Comedy of the Middle Ages), the Apennines bar the eyes’ further progress. Behind it, to the west, are hills that command a view of Volterra and the distant Mediterranean. The woods that once gave the little town its picturesque name – “Il Castello della Selva,” the “Castle of the Wood” – have almost disappeared. In their place it is surrounded with olive plantations, which temper with their silvery softness the austerity of the towers and the walls: —

“Of the breached walls whereon the wallflowers ranCalled of Saint Fina, breachless now of man,Though time with soft feet break them stone by stone,Who breaks down hour by hour his own reign’s span.”174

The people are mediaeval still. You may see them throng the churches as in the old days of simple faith, or hear them among the vineyards and in the beanfields answer each other in the rispetti and strambotti of a more primitive Tuscany. The place is miserably poor, in marked contrast to the smug prosperity of its neighbours, Poggibonsi and Certaldo. Living is exceedingly cheap, but there is no trade, and what little work there is, is but scantily paid. Yet the people are full of old-world dignity and courtesy, and seem cheerful in spite of it all, even down to the little beggar bambini who pursue the foreign visitor with insatiable demands for foreign stamps and soldi, or pester him with unseasonable offers to serve as guide.175

Like most other small Italian towns, the origin of San Gimignano —il nobile castello, or il florido castello di San Gimignano– is hidden in legendary clouds. There is, of course, a tradition of a Roman foundation, a castle built by Silvius, a young Roman patrician involved in Catiline’s rebellion, of Attila’s hordes of Huns hurled back by a sudden apparition of St Geminianus the martyred Bishop of Modena (whence the change of name from Silvia to San Gimignano), of a great palace built by Desiderius King of the Lombards, of privileges granted by Charlemagne. All these things are presumably mere fables. Luigi Pecori, the historian of his native town, supposes that in the sixth or seventh century, when the devotion to St Geminianus was widely spread, a church was built to his honour here, that people gradually gathered round it, until by the beginning of the eighth century there was a regular town, which was fortified by a castle; and as it was then surrounded and defended by woods, it was called the Castello di San Gimignano or the Castello della Selva. Be that as it may, the first authentic mention of the place is in a document of the early part of the tenth century.

From the tenth to the twelfth century, San Gimignano was subject to Volterra and more particularly to the Bishop of that city; but in the course of the twelfth century, its people were gradually winning their way to virtual independence and self-government, like the other communes of Tuscany, and like them beginning to exert supremacy and authority over the petty nobles of the small castles in the vicinity. By the year 1200, they had practically attained their liberty. At this time they had consuls, three or four elected annually, with a special council of fifty and a larger general council “which met only in cases of peace or war, usually in the Pieve, and always at the sound of the bell, as though Religion with her solemn voice invited the citizens into her own sanctuary to provide for the public weal.”176 Hitherto the Bishop of Volterra had appointed two rectors, rettori, in whom the judiciary power was vested; but in 1199, instead of these rectors, we begin to find a Podestà, elected by the Council of the Commune, the first being Messer Maghinardo Malavolti of Siena. At first, a native of the place was sometimes elected; but after 1220 the Podestà was always a foreign noble (usually, but not invariably, from Siena or Florence), who judged civil and criminal cases, presided over the meetings of the General Council and led the forces of the Commune in war; he brought with him a judge and a notary with a certain number of attendants, berrovieri, and was not allowed to entertain nor to receive hospitality from the citizens. All this was more or less the same, on a smaller scale, as what took place at this epoch in Florence or Siena; but here in San Gimignano the effect of the appointment of a Podestà was not to reduce the authority of the consuls, but rather to abolish that of the rectors of the Bishop of Volterra, and we find him exercising his magistracy side by side with the consuls for a longer period here than in the larger communes. For the rest, his term of office was originally one year, but it was afterwards reduced to six months; the same Podestà, however, was frequently re-elected.

Hitherto San Gimignano had consisted of the Castello Vecchio, surrounded by the old walls and with those grim antique gates, of which the remains stand to-day in the shape of the two portoni, with a suburb outside. But now, at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centuries, the new circle of walls was built to inclose the Castello Nuovo, as it was called; this is the seconda cinta, the second circuit of walls that still surround the place.

With the thirteenth century begins the series of the wars of the Sangimignanesi. In 1202, under their Podestà, they sent a force to relieve Semifonte, then besieged by the Florentines, but ended by helping to subject the castle to their formidable neighbours. They amplified their own dominion, destroyed the fortresses of the lords of various little castles in the contado, forcing them to enter San Gimignano, and obtained Castelvecchio (which no longer exists) in 1210 from the Bishop of Volterra. They carried on a long intermittent struggle with Volterra, sometimes for the possession of Monte Voltraio, sometimes in alliance with the warrior bishop, Pagano de’ Pannocchieschi, whom his people expelled at intervals. Occasionally, Florence or Siena would intervene and compel the two small communes to keep the peace. San Gimignano even sent men to the Crusades, and two of these, Bene Trainelli and a certain Gradalone, are said to have won great honour. Within the city, there were the usual struggles between the magnates and the people, the grandi and the popolani, which came to a head in 1233, when the houses of the Knights Templars were burned, and a number of popolani, chosen from each of the then four contrade, with the rectors of the Arts, were appointed to sit with the consuls in the councils of the State. There was another tumult in 1236, which the Bishop Pagano came in person from Volterra to appease, after which the two Councils appear to have been reduced to one. In the days of Frederick II., San Gimignano was Ghibelline, took its Podestàs “by the grace of God and of the Emperor,” and sent horse and foot to serve in the imperial army. But the factions raged here, as everywhere else in Tuscany. In 1246, irritated by an unusually heavy tax upon the churches, the Guelfs rose. Headed by the sons of Guido Ardinghelli, they assailed the houses of the Ghibellines, especially those of the sons of Messer Salvuccio. The Podestà was absent at Certaldo; but he gathered troops in the contado, and entered the town while the uproar in the streets was at its height; he assailed the Guelfs who, under this combined attack and the rain of bolts and arrows from the towers, were forced to retire. There were numbers banished on both sides. Thus began the feud between the houses of the Ardinghelli and Salvucci, that was to bring San Gimignano into servitude.

Shortly after the middle of the thirteenth century, a more democratic form of government was established. Instead of the consuls, the supreme authority was vested in a magistracy of twelve, elected annually – the twelve “Captains and Rectors of the People,” two captains and one rector being elected from each quarter of the town. There was the one Council of the Commune, usually sixty in number. A special magistracy of eight presided over the public expenses (the Otto delle Spese), and the Podestà, of course, had a special council, which in San Gimignano consisted of sixteen citizens.

But in the years in which this reformation was effected, immediately after the death of Frederick II., the factions grew more furious. In June 1251 the Guelfs rose, headed by the Twelve, expelled the Ghibelline Podestà, Neri degli Uberti of Florence, and made themselves masters of the town. Then in September 1252, the Ghibellines rose, headed by Michele Buonfigliuoli. The Guelfs made their stand at the houses of the Cini and Cici in the quarter of San Matteo, where after a desperate battle – the Podestà vainly spreading the red and yellow banner of the Commune and calling upon the combatants to lay down their arms – the Ghibellines got the upper hand, sacked the houses and massacred their opponents. The Guelfs appealed to the Bishop of Volterra, Ranieri de’ Pannocchieschi, who came to San Gimignano and patched up a sort of peace between the two factions – apparently to the advantage of the Guelfs. The Ghibellines rose again in January 1253; the gates were broken down and a portion of the walls destroyed, until at last the men of San Miniato interposed and assisted in expelling the leading Ghibellines.