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These peasants whom we see in tidy kilted tunics and leathern gaiters, driving their barrel-laden bullock carts, or riding their mules up to the red city gates in many a Florentine and Sienese painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were in many respects better off than the small artizans of the city, heaped up in squalid houses, and oppressed by the greater and smaller guilds.
The delight and exultation of those who minister to the new-born infant are expressed with the most graceful naïveté. This beautiful composition should be compared with those of Ghirlandajo and Andrea del Sarto in the Annunziata at Florence; it yields to neither as a conception and is wholly different. It is the work of a Sienese painter little known Girolamo del Pacchio.
But on the very summit of the two hills, crested by their great civic fortresses, and in the centres of their circuit of walls, rose the two guided wells; each in basin of goodly marble, sculptured at Perugia, by John of Pisa, at Siena, by James of Quercia. The Sienese, a little while since, tore it down, and put up a model of it by a modern carver.
I followed her round the cloister, and when the coast was clear, said, 'Hist, Madonna. She turned and looked at me with her eyes wide open. They are handsome eyes for a Sienese woman. That I allow. She said, 'Do you call me? Says I, 'I do. She says, 'Well? I reply, 'He is well if you are. 'Who, then? says she. I say, 'Your lover. This makes her jump like a flea on the bed.
Her answer was more disastrous than any battle; she took her trade from the port of Pisa to the Sienese port Talamone.
Catherine," the great Sienese heroine, at San Domenico seems to me the author's finest accomplishment. His frescoes have all the same almost appealing evasion of difficulty, and a kind of mild melancholy which I am inclined to think the sincerest part of them, for it strikes me as practically the artist's depressed suspicion of his own want of force.
The contrast between their rude life and the delicate nurture of Sienese nobles, in an age when Siena had become a by-word for luxury, must have been cruel. But it fascinated the mediæval imagination, and the three anchorites were speedily joined by recruits of a like temper. As yet the new-born order had no rules; for Bernardo, when he renounced the world, embraced humility.
She is like a painted statue, making us wonder whether the artist had not copied her from the "Aphrodite" of Lysippus, ere the Sienese destroyed this statue in their dread of paganism . In the other two panels of this hall Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted the contrast of good and bad government, harmony and discord.
Even in this London air they spoke of the spring the spring which already in happier lands was drawing veils of peach and cherry blossom, over the red Sienese earth or the green terraces of Como. The fire crackled in the grate. The pretty, old-fashioned room was fragrant with hyacinth and narcissus; Julie's books lay on the tables; Julie's hand and taste were already to be felt everywhere.
Among other objects we note, 396, a fine bust of Filippo Strozzi by Benedetto da Maiano. We enter Room VI. The excellent bust of the Baptist, 383, by Desiderio da Settignano is officially assigned to Donatello, and the coloured Virgin and Child in wood to the Sienese Jacopo della Quercia.
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