On the Old Road Volume Ii Part 11

233. After dilating on the magnificent landscape viewed from the top of this promontory, embracing the blue plain of Lombardy and its cities"

Mr. Ruskin said:--

"I do not think that there is any other rock in all the world from which the places and monuments of so complex and deep a fragment of the history of its ages can be visible as from this piece of crag with its blue and p.r.i.c.kly weeds. For you have thus beneath you at once the birthplaces of Virgil and of Livy--the homes of Dante and Petrarch, and the source of the most sweet and pathetic inspiration to your own Shakespeare--the spot where the civilization of the Gothic kingdoms was founded on the throne of Theodoric; and there whatever was strongest in the Italian race redeemed itself into life by its league against Barbarossa; the beginning of the revival of natural science and medicine in the schools of Padua; the center of Italian chivalry, in the power of the Scaligers; of Italian cruelty, in that of Ezzelin; and, lastly, the birthplace of the highest art; for among those hills, or by this very Adige bank, were born Mantegna, t.i.tian, Correggio, and Veronese."

234. Mr. Ruskin then referred to a series of drawings and photographs taken at Verona by himself and his a.s.sistants, Mr. Burgess and Mr.

Bunney, which he had divided into three series, and of which he had furnished a number of printed catalogues ill.u.s.trated with notes.[13]

I. "Lombard, extending to the end of the twelfth century, being the expression of the introduction of Christianity into barbaric minds; Christianization.

II. "The Gothic period. Dante's time, from 1200 to 1400 (Dante beginning his poem exactly in the midst of it, in 1300); the period of vital Christianity, and of the development of the laws of chivalry and forms of imagination which are founded on Christianity.

III. "The first period of the revival, in which the arts of Greece and some of its religion return and join themselves to Christianity; not taking away its sincerity or earnestness, but making it poetical instead of practical. In the following period even this poetical Christianity expired; the arts became devoted to the pursuit of pleasure, and in that they persist except where they are saved by a healthy naturalism or domesticity.

235. I. "The Lombardic period is one of savage but n.o.ble life gradually subjected to law. It is the forming of men, not out of clay but wild beasts. And art of this period in all countries, including our own Norman especially, is, in the inner heart of it, the subjection of savage or terrible, or foolish and erring life, to a dominant law. It is government and conquest of fearful dreams. There is in it as yet no germ of true hope--only the conquest of evil, and the waking from darkness and terror. The literature of it is, as in Greece, far in advance of art, and is already full of the most tender and impa.s.sioned beauty, while the art is still grotesque and dreadful; but, however wild, it is supreme above all others by its expression of governing law, and here at Verona is the very center and utmost reach of that expression.

"I know nothing in architecture at once so exquisite and so wild and so strange in the expression of self-conquest achieved almost in a dream.

For observe, these barbaric races, educated in violence--chiefly in war and in hunting--cannot feel or see clearly as they are gradually civilized whether this element in which they have been brought up is evil or not. They _must_ be good soldiers and hunters--that is their life; yet they know that killing is evil, and they do not expect to find wild beasts in heaven. They have been trained by pain, by violence, by hunger and cold. They know there is a good in these things as well as evil: they are perpetually hesitating between the one and the other thought of them. But one thing they see clearly, that killing and hunting, and every form of misery, pleasure, and of pa.s.sion, must somehow at last be subdued by law, which shall bring good out of it all, and which they feel more and more constraining them every hour. Now, if with this sympathy you look at their dragon and wild beast decoration, you will find that it now tells you about these Lombards far more than they could know of themselves.... All the actions, and much more the arts, of men tell to others, not only what the worker does not know, but what he can never know of himself, which you can only recognize by being in an element more advanced and wider than his.... In deliberate symbolism, the question is always, not what a symbol meant first or meant elsewhere, but what it means now and means here. Now, this dragon symbol of the Lombard is used of course all over the world; it means good here, and evil there; sometimes means nothing; sometimes everything. You have always to ask what the man who here uses it means by it. Whatever is in his mind, that he is sure partly to express by it; nothing else than that can he express by it."

236. II. In the second period Mr. Ruskin said was to be found "the highest development of Italian character and chivalry, with an entirely believed Christian religion; you get, therefore, joy and courtesy, and hope, and a lovely peace in death. And with these you have two fearful elements of evil. You have first such confidence in the virtue of the creed that men hate and persecute all who do not accept it. And worse still, you find such confidence in the power of the creed that men not only can do anything that is wrong, and be themselves for a word of faith pardoned, but are even sure that after the wrong is done G.o.d is sure to put it all right again for them, or even make things better than they were before. Now, I need not point out to you how the spirit of persecution, as well as of vain hope founded on creed only, is mingled in every line with the lovely moral teaching of the 'Divina Conmedia,'

nor need I point out to you how, between the persecution of other people's creeds and the absolution of one's own crimes, all Christian error is concluded."

In relation to this Mr. Ruskin referred to the history of the founder of the power of the Scalas, Mastino, a simple citizen, chosen first to be podesta and then captain of Verona, for his justice and sagacity, who, although wise and peaceful in his policy, employed the civil power in the persecution of heresy, burning above two hundred persons; and he also related how Can Signorio della Scala on his death-bed, after giving a pious charge to his children, ordered the murder of his brother--examples of the boundless possibility of self-deception. One of these children killed the other, and was himself driven from the throne, so ending the dynasty of the Scalas. Referring to his ill.u.s.trations, Mr.

Ruskin pointed out the expressions of hope, in the conquest of death, and the rewards of faith, apparent in the art of the time. The Lombard architecture expresses the triumph of law over pa.s.sion, the Christian, that of hope over sorrow.

Mr. Ruskin concluded his remarks on this period by commenting on the history and the tomb of Can Grande della Scala, a good knight and true, as busy and bright a life as is found in the annals of chivalry.

237. III. "The period when cla.s.sical literature and art were again known in Italy, and the painters and sculptors, who had been gaining steadily in power for two hundred years--power not of practice merely, but of race also--with every circ.u.mstance in their favor around them, received their finally perfect instruction, both in geometrical science, in that of materials, and in the anatomy and action of the human body. Also the people about them--the models of their work--had been perfected in personal beauty by a chivalric war; in imagination by a transcendental philosophy; in practical intellect by stern struggle for civic law; and in commerce, not in falsely made or vile or unclean things, but in lovely things, beautifully and honestly made. And now, therefore, you get out of all the world's long history since it was peopled by men till now--you get just fifty years of perfect work. Perfect. It is a strong word; it is also a _true_ one. The doing of these fifty years is unaccusably Right, as art; what its sentiment may be--whether too great or too little, whether superficial or sincere--is another question, but as artists' work it admits no conception of anything better.

"It is true that in the following age, founded on the absolutely stern rect.i.tude of this, there came a phase of gigantic power and of exquisite ease and felicity which possess an awe and a charm of their own. They are more inimitable than the work of the perfect school. But they are not _perfect_." ...

238. This period Mr. Ruskin named "the 'Time of the Masters,' Fifty Years, including Luini, Leonardo, John Bellini, Vitto Carpaccio, Andrea Mantegna, Andrea Verrocchio, Cima da Conegliano, Perugino, and in date, though only in his earlier life, belonging to the school, Raphael....

The great fifty years was the prime of life of three men: John Bellini, born 1430, died at 90, in 1516; Mantegna, born 1430, died at 76, in 1506; and Vittor Carpaccio, who died in 1522."

"The object of these masters is wholly different from that of the former school. The central Gothic men always want chiefly to impress you with the facts of their subject; but the masters of this finished time desire only to make everything dainty and delightful. We have not many pictures of the cla.s.s in England, but several have been of late added to the National Gallery, and the Perugino there, especially the compartment with Raphael and Tobit, and the little St. Jerome by John Bellini, will perfectly show you this main character--pictorial perfectness and deliciousness--sought before everything else. You will find, if you look into that St. Jerome, that everything in it is exquisite, complete, and pure; there is not a particle of dust in the cupboards, nor a cloud in the air; the wooden shutters are dainty, the candlesticks are dainty, the saint's scarlet hat is dainty, and its violet ta.s.sel, and its ribbon, and his blue cloak and his spare pair of shoes, and his little brown partridge--it is all a perfect quintessence of innocent luxury--absolute delight, without one drawback in it, nor taint of the Devil anywhere." ...

239. After dilating on several other pictures of this cla.s.s, giving evidence of the entire devotion of the artists of the period to their art and work, Mr. Ruskin adverted to the second part of his discourse, the rivers of Verona. "There is but one river at Verona, nevertheless Dante connects its name with that of the Po when he says of the whole of Lombardy,--

'In sul paese, ch' Adice e Po riga, Solea valore e cortesia trovarsi Prima che Federigo avesse briga.'

I want to speak for a minute or two about those great rivers, because in the efforts that are now being made to restore some of its commerce to Venice precisely the same questions are in course of debate which again and again, ever since Venice was a city, have put her senate at pause--namely, how to hold in check the continually advancing mora.s.s formed by the silt brought down by the Alpine rivers. Is it not strange that for at least six hundred years the Venetians have been contending with those rivers at their _mouths_--that is to say, where their strength has become wholly irresistible--and never once thought of contending with them at their sources, where their infinitely separated streamlets might be, and are meant by Heaven to be, ruled as easily as children? And observe how sternly, how constantly the place where they are to be governed is marked by the mischief done by their liberty.

Consider what the advance of the delta of the Po in the Adriatic signifies among the Alps. The evil of the delta itself, however great, is as nothing in comparison of that which is in its origin.

240. "The gradual destruction of the harborage of Venice, the endless cost of delaying it, the malaria of the whole coast down to Ravenna, nay, the raising of the bed of the Po, to the imperiling of all Lombardy, are but secondary evils. Every acre of that increasing delta means _the devastation of part of an Alpine valley, and the loss of so much fruitful soil and ministering rain_. Some of you now present must have pa.s.sed this year through the valleys of the Toccia and Ticino. You know therefore the devastation that was caused there, as well as in the valley of the Rhone, by the great floods of 1868, and that ten years of labor, even if the peasantry had still the heart for labor, cannot redeem those districts into fertility. What you have there seen on a vast scale takes place to a certain extent during every summer thunderstorm, and from the ruin of some portion of fruitful land the dust descends to increase the marshes of the Po. But observe further--whether fed by sudden melting of snow or by storm--every destructive rise of the Italian rivers signifies the loss of so much power of irrigation on the south side of the Alps. You must all well know the look of their chain--seen from Milan or Turin late in summer--how little snow is left, except on Monte Rosa, how vast a territory of brown mountain-side heated and barren, without rocks, yet without forest. There is in that brown-purple zone, and along the flanks of every valley that divides it, another Lombardy of cultivable land; and every drift of rain that swells the mountain torrents if it were caught where it falls is literally rain of gold. We seek gold beneath the rocks; and we will not so much as make a trench along the hillside to catch it where it falls from heaven, and where, if not so caught, it changes into a frantic monster, first ravaging hamlet, hill, and plain, then sinking along the sh.o.r.es of Venice into poisoned sleep.

Think what that belt of the Alps might be--up to four thousand feet above the plain--if the system of terraced irrigation which even half-savage nations discovered and practiced long ago in China and in Borneo, and by which our own engineers have subdued vast districts of farthest India, were but in part also practiced here--here, in the oldest and proudest center of European arts, where Leonardo da Vinci--master among masters--first discerned the laws of the coiling clouds and wandering streams, so that to this day his engineering remains unbettered by modern science; and yet in this center of all human achievements of genius no thought has been taken to receive with sacred art these great gifts of quiet snow and flying rain. Think, I repeat, what that south slope of the Alps might be: one paradise of lovely pasture and avenued forest of chestnut and blossomed trees, with cascades docile and innocent as infants, laughing all summer long from crag to crag and pool to pool, and the Adige and the Po, the Dora and the Ticino, no more defiled, no more alternating between fierce flood and venomous languor, but in calm clear currents bearing s.h.i.+ps to every city and health to every field of all that azure plain of Lombard Italy....

241. "It has now become a most grave object with me to get some of the great pictures of the Italian schools into England; and that, I think, at this time--with good help--might be contrived. Further, without in the least urging my plans impatiently on anyone else, I know thoroughly that this, which I have said _should_ be done, _can_ be done, for the Italian rivers, and that no method of employment of our idle able-bodied laborers would be in the end more remunerative, or in the beginnings of it more healthful and every way beneficial than, with the concurrence of the Italian and Swiss governments, setting them to redeem the valleys of the Ticino and the Rhone. And I pray you to think of this; for I tell you truly--you who care for Italy--that both her pa.s.sions and her mountain streams are n.o.ble; but that her happiness depends not on the liberty, but the right government of both."[14]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: Report (with extracts) of a paper ent.i.tled "A Talk respecting Verona and its Rivers," read by Mr. Ruskin at the Weekly Evening Meeting of the Royal Inst.i.tution of Great Britain, Feb. 4th, 1870. See _Proceedings_ of the Royal Inst.i.tution, vol. vi., p.

55.--ED.]

[Footnote 13: This catalogue (London: Queen Street Printing-Office, 1870) is printed below, p. 109, - 242 _seqq._--ED.]

[Footnote 14: See _Arrows of the Chace_.]

CATALOGUE.

(_See ante,_ p. 101.--ED.)

_Drawings and Photographs, ill.u.s.trative of the Architecture of Verona, shown at the Royal Inst.i.tution, Feb. 4th, 1870._

SECTION I. NOS. 1 TO 7. LOMBARD.

242. (1.) _Porch of the Church of St. Zeno._ (Photograph.)

Of the 12th century.

(2.) _Porch of the South Entrance of the Duomo._

Probably of the 10th or 11th century, and highly remarkable for the wildness of its grotesque or monstrous sculpture, which has been most carefully rendered by the draughts-man, Mr. Bunney.

It will save s.p.a.ce to note that the sketches by my two most skillful and patient helpers, Mr. A. Burgess and Mr. Bunney, will be respectively marked (A) and (B), and my own (R).

(3.) _Porch of the Western Entrance of the Duomo._ (Photograph.)

Later in date--but still of 12th or very early 13th century.

Details of it are given in the next drawings.

243. (4.) _Griffin_ (I keep the intelligible old English spelling), _sustaining the Pillar on the North Side of the Porch seen in No. 3._ (R.)

Painted last summer.

I engraved his head and breast, seen from the other side, in the plate of "True and False Griffins," in "Modern Painters." Only the back of the head and neck of the small dragon he holds in his fore-claws can be seen from this side.

(5.) _Capital of the Pillar sustained by the Griffin, of which the base is seen in No. 4._ (A.)

First-rate sculpture of the time, and admirably drawn.

(6.) _Portion of decorative Lombardic molding from the South Side of the Duomo._ (A.)

Showing the peculiar writhing of the branched tracery with a serpentine flexure--altogether different from the springing lines of Gothic ornament. It would be almost impossible to draw this better; it is much more like the real thing than a cast would be.