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The lateral façades on the exterior are monotonous; the cupola within is a reversed funnel of a peculiar and disagreeable form. The junction of the two arms of the cross is unsatisfactory and so many modernized chapels dispel the charm due to purity, as at Sienna. At the second glance however all this is forgotten, and we again regard it as a complete whole.
I therefore waited its abatement in a darkened room, packed up our coach without waiting to copy over the verses my admiration of the place had prompted, and drove forward to Sienna, through Pisa again, where our friends told us of the damages done by the tempest; and shewed us a pretty little church just out of town, where the officiating priest at the altar was saved almost by miracle, as the lightning melted one of the chalices completely, and twisted the brazen-gilt crucifix quite round in a very astonishing manner.
She was not unlike a Sir Joshua, he decided; and yet in the refinement of every feature, and a certain sweetness and tranquillity of expression she reminded him of a Donatello that he had seen in one of his later visits to Florence or Sienna.
At Sienna, a small cloak had been given to him, which was very necessary for his infirmities; but, in leaving the town, he met a poor person, whose wretched state excited his pity, and he said to his companion: "Let us restore this cloak to him, for it belongs to him; we have only borrowed it, until such time as we should see some one poorer than ourselves."
He had called together a council, which was first convened at Pavia, and afterwards removed, first to Sienna, and then to Basle. But before he could him self join the assembly, death overtook him. Worn out with his indefatigable labours for the welfare of Christendom, he went to receive his reward at an unadvanced age, in the month of February of the year 1431.
The Corinthian columns of the colonnades are ochre and on each side of the archway, they are of Sienna marble. The sculptured figures by John Flanagan, crowning the columns above the arch, represent in four successive types the men who made Western America the adventurer, the priest, the philosopher, the soldier.
There are pink and yellow roses to show all the processes of this particular scope of progress; some still too much pink, other roses have fallen by the way into lemon and ochre and sienna; there are roses that have reverted to the reds again; roses that have been caught in a sort of fleshly lust and have piled on petals upon petals as the Holland maidens pile on petticoats, losing themselves to form and texture and colour, for the gross illusion of size.
And all the while she would be singing hymns in the vulgar tongue to the praise of Jesus and Mary His Mother. In those mournful times, when the city of Sienna was a hostel of sorrow, and a house of joy to boot, Catherine was ever visiting the unhappy prisoners, and telling the prostitutes: "My sisters, how fain would I hide you in the loving wounds of the Saviour!"
This is a curious fact, for as a rule these bargellos are spies, liars, traitors, cheats, and misanthropes, for a man despised hates his despisers. At Sienna I was shewn a Count Piccolomini, a learned and agreeable man.
When the duke of Calabria, after the war of 1478, had left the country, the distractions of Sienna became more frequent, and after many changes, in which, first the plebeians, and then the nobility, were victorious, the latter and length maintained the superiority, and among them Pandolfo and Jacopo Petrucci obtained the greatest influence, so that the former being distinguished for prudence and the latter for resolution, they became almost princes in the city.
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