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His talk is really very fine, and he prides himself greatly on his cultivated tone, to which he calls my attention. He has very little good to say about the Sienese nobility. They are "proprio d'origine egoista" whatever that may be and there are many who can't write their names.
How interesting in this respect is the Sienese Gallery! Here the restorer has been stayed, and we find the pictures genuine as time itself, and more precious by far to the student than the most glaring and "refreshed" surfaces of those works in other galleries which are the wonder and admiration of superficial observers.
The biography of one of these may serve as prelude to an account of the Sienese monastery of Oliveto Maggiore. The family of Tolomei was among the noblest of the Sienese aristocracy.
No other painters of their age in Italy employed such glowing colours, or showed a more marked predilection for the imitation of fruits, rich stuffs, architectural canopies, jewels, and landscape backgrounds. Their piety, unlike the mysticism of the Sienese and the deep thought of the Florentine masters, is somewhat superficial and conventional.
S. Bernardino, the great preacher and peace-maker of the Middle Ages; S. Catherine, the worthiest of all women to be canonised; the blessed Colombini, who founded the Order of the Gesuati or Brothers of the Poor in Christ; the blessed Bernardo, who founded that of Monte Oliveto; were all Sienese. Few cities have given four such saints to modern Christendom.
The plague of 1348 stalked across Tuscany, and the chill of thirty thousand Sienese graves numbed the hand of master and workman, sweeping away the architect who planned, the masons who built, the magistrates who ordered, it left but the yellowed parchment in the archives which conferred upon Maestro Lorenzo Maitani the superintendence of the works.
But after some months at Siena, where his thoughts had been entirely absorbed in the literary projects which he discussed with his new friend, the grave and good and serious-minded Gori, and one or two Sienese professors, after that first feeling of attraction had died away, and he felt himself covered, as it were, with an impenetrable armour of poetic interests, Alfieri decided, on his return to Florence, that he was quite sufficiently of a new man to expose himself without any danger to such a lady as the Countess of Albany.
I am grateful to the old Sienese for having used stone so largely in their domestic architecture, and thereby rendered their city so grimly picturesque, with its black palaces frowning upon one another from arched windows, across narrow streets, to the height of six stories, like opposite ranks of tall men looking sternly into one another's eyes. October 11th.
The fact and the consideration that he was an Italian in no degree stirred his sympathies or moved his imagination, but that he was a Venetian, a Florentine, a Pisan, or even that he was an Aretine, a Bolognese, a Comasque, a Sienese or a Perugian, was all in all to him.
A careless servant had left the outer shutters open, and the sun was beating on the window-panes. Ralph pushed open the windows, shut the shutters, and wandered toward his arm-chair. Beads of perspiration stood on his forehead: the temperature of the room reminded him of the heat under the ilexes of the Sienese villa where he and Undine had sat through a long July afternoon.
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