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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.
While Bernardo Tolomei was founding the Order of Monte Oliveto, Dante penned his letter to the cardinals of Italy: Quomodo sola sedet civitas plena populo: facta est quasi vidua domino gentium. Bernardo and his friends hollowed with their own hands grottos in the rock, and strewed their stone beds with withered chestnut-leaves.
He seemed to be looking over the hill-side, over the city glowing afar off gold and purple in the hot air, to Mont' Oliveto and the heights, where a line of black cypresses stood about a low white building. At one angle of the building was a little turret with a belvedere of round arches. The tallest cypress just topped the windows, There his eyes seemed to rest.
Now, since the Duke doubted that Battista would not finish in time, the undertaking being very great, he sent for Giorgio Vasari who at that time was painting at Rimini, for the White Friars of Scolca, of the Order of Monte Oliveto, a large chapel in fresco and an altar-piece in oils for their high-altar to the end that he might go to the aid of Genga and Battista in those preparations.
He also illuminated some books of plain-song for the Duomo of that city, where he would have remained longer, executing many works that he had in hand; but, being driven away by envy and persecution, he set off to return to Verona, with eight hundred crowns that he had earned, which he lent afterwards to the Monks of Monte Oliveto at S. Maria in Organo, from whom he drew interest to support him from day to day.
On a sunny autumn afternoon three ladies left Siena in a light wagon, and drove over the gray upland, which was shrouded in a pale blue mist, through the picturesque hamlet of Buonconvento. Here they changed their horse and left the Roman highway for the road cut in the rocks five centuries ago by the monks of Monte Oliveto.
The tarsia, or inlaid wood of different kinds and colours, is among the best in this kind of art to be found in Italy, though perhaps it hardly deserves to rank with the celebrated choir-stalls of Bergamo and Monte Oliveto. Hard by is a chapel, adorned, like the lower one, with excellent reliefs.
Benozzo Gozzoli had begged for it; Perugino, it is said, had refused it; and now, in 1499, perhaps influenced to the choice by the success of the Monte Oliveto frescoes, they entrusted the work to Signorelli.
When Shelley compared the poetry of the Theocritean amourists to the perfume of the tuberose, and that of the earlier Greek poets to "a meadow-gale of June, which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field," he supplied us with critical images which may not unfairly be used to point the distinction between Sodoma at Monte Oliveto and Luini at Saronno.
When Shelley compared the poetry of the Theocritean amourists to the perfume of the tuberose, and that of the earlier Greek poets to 'a meadow-gale of June, which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field, he supplied us with critical images which may not unfairly be used to point the distinction between Sodoma at Monte Oliveto and Luini at Saronno.
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