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Yesterday afternoon William Story called on me, he being on a day or two's excursion from Siena, where he is spending the summer with his family. He was very entertaining and conversative, as usual, and said, in reply to my question whether he were not anxious to return to Cleopatra, that he had already sketched out another subject for sculpture, which would employ him during next winter.
His wall-paintings in the library of the cathedral of Siena are so well preserved that we need not seek elsewhere for better specimens of the decorative art most highly prized in the first years of the sixteenth century . These frescoes have a richness of effect and a vivacity of natural action, which, in spite of their superficiality, render them highly charming.
Catherine turned without difficulty from public cares to the needs and problems of the little group of disciples in the restricted life of Siena. To her eyes, there was no great nor small; the one drama was as important as the other, since both were God's appointed schools of character. She was, as we have already seen, wise in the lore of Christian friendship.
Then, having gone to Siena, he stayed there for months and even years with Pandolfo Petrucci, in whose house he painted many rooms, which, from their being very well designed and coloured in a pleasing manner, were rightly admired and praised by all the people of Siena, and particularly by the above-named Pandolfo, by whom he was always looked upon with great favour and cherished most dearly.
There are many facades of palaces in this city, in white and black, by Baltesar di Siena, architect, and by Marturino and by Polidoro, a man who in that manner of working magnificently enriched Rome.
As yet the plains of Pisa had not been reduced to marsh-lands by the combined negligence and jealousy of the Florentine Republic, neither had the rich country that lay around Rome been converted into a barren desert by the wars of the Colonna and Orsini families; not yet had the Marquis of Marignan razed to the ground a hundred and twenty villages in the republic of Siena alone; and though the Maremma was unhealthy, it was not yet a poisonous marsh: it is a fact that Flavio Blando, writing in 1450, describes Ostia as being merely less flourishing than in the days of the Romans, when she had numbered 50,000 inhabitants, whereas now in our own day there are barely 30 in all.
It was the moment when painting was beginning to claim for the figures of real men and women the walls and vaulted spaces whence had hitherto glowered, with vacant faces and huge ghostlike eyes, mosaic figures, from their shimmering golden ground; the moment when the Pisan artists had sculptured solemnly draped madonnas and kings not quite unworthy of the carved sarcophagi which stood around them; the moment when, merging together old Byzantine traditions and Northern examples, the architects of Florence, Siena, and Orvieto conceived a style which made cathedrals into marvellous and huge reliquaries of marble, jasper, alabaster, and mosaics.
This he executed in chiaroscuro, in oils, a method that he much delighted to use for all his works, sketching them in the manner of a cartoon, with ink or with bitumen, before colouring them; as may still be seen from many beginnings of pictures and panels, which he left unfinished on account of his death, and as may also be perceived from many drawings by his hand, executed in chiaroscuro, of which the greater part are now in the Monastery of S. Caterina da Siena on the Piazza di S. Marco, in the possession of a nun who paints, and of whom record will be made in the proper place; while many made in the same way adorn our book of drawings, honouring his memory, and some are in the hands of Messer Francesco del Garbo, a most excellent physician.
In the fourteenth century the interest taken by women in the conventual life increased, and one of the most powerful influences in the religious life of the time was Catherine of Siena, a creature of light in the midst of the dark turmoil and strife which characterize this portion of Italian history.
And by this alone, that it has given us an Eckhart, a Seuse, a Tauler, a Ruysbroek, a Juan de la Cruz, a Catherine of Siena, an Angela of Foligno, a Teresa de Jesús, is the cloister justified. I shall certainly be reminded that the reform of the contemplative Order of the Carmelites which Teresa de Jesús undertook was a Spanish work. Yes, Spanish it was, and in it men sought liberty.
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