United States or Bermuda ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
We now visit San Gemignano in order to study some fading frescoes of Gozzoli and Ghirlandajo, or else for the sake of its strange feudal towers, tall pillars of brown stone, crowded together within the narrow circle of the town walls.
The old painter answered trembling, that he had never seen him with his eyes, never having gone down alive into Hell, like Messer Dante Alighieri; but that, in depicting him as he had done, he was for expressing in visible lines and colours the hideousness of sin. Lucifer shrugged his shoulders, and the hill of San Gemignano seemed of a sudden to heave and stagger.
It includes nearly the whole of Lorenzetti's work in the Sala della Pace, much of Giotto, the Gozzoli frescoes at S. Gemignano, frescoes of the Veronese masters and of the Paduan Baptistery, a great deal of Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, Luini, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Pinturicchio, Masolino, &c.
Who could then have guessed that beneath the cowl of the harsh-voiced Dominican, his rival, burned thoughts that in a few years would inflame Florence with a conflagration powerful enough to destroy the fabric of the Medicean despotism? From Florence, where he had met with no success, Savonarola was sent to San Gemignano, a little town on the top of a high hill between Florence and Siena.
Having so said, the good Buffalmacco returned to his inn, in great vexation. He ate his supper without appetite and went to bed in a very dismal frame of mind. Then the Lord Bishop's ape appeared to him in a dream, not a mere mannikin as he was in reality, but as tall as Monte San Gemignano, cocking up a prodigious tail and tickling the moon.
He is honourably known in the history of Tuscan sculpture by his reliefs upon the façade of the Duomo at Modena, describing episodes in the life of S. Gemignano, by the romantically charming reliefs in marble, with terracotta settings, on the Oratory of S. Bernardino at Perugia, and by a large amount of excellent surface-work in stone upon the chapels of S. Francesco at Rimini.
These at first were gaunt and unsightly; how overcrowded with tall bare towers a mediaeval Italian city could be, is still shown by San Gemignano, the only existing instance where the torroni have been left untouched. In course of time, when the aristocracy came to be fused with the burghers, and public order was maintained by law in the great cities, these forts made way for spacious palaces.
Those who think her life was unpractical need only think of the victories upon Poggibonsi, San Gemignano, Volterra, Siena itself all gained through the invocation of her name; they need only look at the church which rose over her grave. The grand schemes for a marble facade were never carried out, and it is brown unfinished stone until this day.
The old painter answered, trembling, that he had never seen him with his eyes, never having gone down alive into Hell, like Messer Dante Alighieri; but that, in depicting him as he had done, he was for expressing in visible lines and colours the hideousness of sin. Lucifer shrugged his shoulders, and the hill of San Gemignano seemed of a sudden to heave and stagger.
Word Of The Day