Franciscan convent

“ In the sacristy are a Venetian lavabo, some embroideries, and a fine fifteenth-century processional cross. An iron grille round a side altar bears the Visconti arms, which are also those of Mezzo. The "biscione" (serpent) in these arms gives its name to the bay, and so to the church. The church of the deserted Franciscan convent is now used as the parish church. It is a building of the latter part of the fifteenth century, and contains some fine carved stalls of the usual type, and a fine altar-piece by Nicolaus Raguseus, 9 ft. high, and with an arched top. ”

“ When, in 1504, at the age of 17, she entered the Franciscan convent of Santa Isabel de los Angeles of Córdova, she was already regarded as a vessel overflowing with divine grace, a belief confirmed by a series of ecstasies, trances, visions, revelations and miracles. Space is lacking to recount the varied series of marvels, many of which do infinite credit to her imaginative invention, while some of them required confederates, who seem not to have been lacking, in view of the benefit to the convent accruing from its containing so saintly a person. ”

“ There is one Franciscan convent, which generally contains four priests and seven or eight brethren, counting the teacher and the novitiates. The Society of Jesus has also a professed house, with its father superior, three priests, and three brethren. There is a royal hospital for the Spaniards, and another for the Indians, under charge of two Franciscan lay-brethren. The number of paid soldiers is generally about two hundred, besides their officers. ”

“ They certainly cause distractions by the number of people who come to see the sculpture, which makes this small church almost like a Glyptotheke. After this, Mrs. Amherst took me to the Redemptorists, where Father Prost talks English, and received me most cordially, and presented me to the Rector. I then went to the Franciscan convent, where, as at Munich, I saw the fathers at supper, and recommended England to the Provincial, who promised to convey my wishes to the 300 subjects of the 10 houses of his province. In this little house there are eight priests. ”

“ The Franciscans, in addition to the usual vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, laid special stress upon preaching and ministry to the soul and body. After the conversion was complete, she was taken by Saint Francis and his brother, each one bearing a lighted taper, to the nearest convent, and there, in the dimly lighted chapel, the glittering garments of her high estate were laid upon the altar as she put on the sombre Franciscan garb and cut her beautiful hair. ”

“ This Franciscan church continued for nearly one hundred years a cherished devotional resort of the faithful, till, in Elizabeth's reign, its fathers were dispersed, and the convent reduced to a heap of ruins. The chronicler of the order, when registering the destruction of this ancient sanctuary, dwells particularly on the barbarity of the Protestant soldiers, who deliberately smashed its rich stained glass windows, and tore to shreds the costly pictures which adorned it. ”

“ Animals are sacred, says Saint Francis. Animals are sacred, but cats have kittens; and so it comes about that the people who agree with Saint Francis have to suffer for the people who don't.
The Canons of San Lorenzo agree with Saint Francis, and it seems to me that they must suffer a good deal. The convent is large; it has a great mildewed cloister with a covered-in walk all round it built on arches. In the middle is a green garth with cypresses and yews dotted about; and when you look up you see the blue sky cut square, and the hot tiles of a huge dome staring up into it. ”

“ It is Brother Elias, not Francis, whom we meet in these dim rich chapels; and the fabric of the great church and convent is a monument to human frailty rather than to individual holiness. But it is so completely lovely, so full of memories, with its unbroken chain of faith and prayer to link it to the thirteenth century, that I would not have one jot or tittle of it altered. It is one of the chief gems in Italy's crown of beauty, an inexhaustible treasure-house.
Every day, although we were living at the other end of Assisi, our feet wandered down the hillside to San Francesco. ”

“ Convents in the Middle Ages were the retreats of multitudes of natures who did not wish to live in a state of perpetual warfare and offence, and all the elegant arts flourished under their protecting shadows. Ornamental gardening, pharmacy, drawing, painting, carving in wood, illumination, and calligraphy were not unfrequent occupations of the holy fathers, and the convent has given to the illustrious roll of Italian Art some of its most brilliant names. No institution in modern Europe had a more established reputation in all these respects than the Convent of San Marco in Florence. ”

“ That house, which now-a-days is thrown open during the Octave of the Feast of San Francesca, where young women come with their little children, and point out to them the room which they inhabited in their own childhood, when under the gentle care of the Oblates of Mary. It is no gloomy abode, the Convent of Tor di Specchi even in the eyes of those who cannot understand the happiness of a nun. It is such a place which one loves to see children in; where religion is combined with every thing that pleases the eye and recreates the mind. ”

“ A conventual rigor, which was never relaxed, gave to this haven a special place in the thoughts and history of the Catholic world. The purity of its rule drew to its shelter from different parts of Europe sad women, whose souls, deprived of human ties, longed for the death in life which they found here in the bosom of God. No other convent was so fitted to wean the heart and teach it that aloofness from the things of this world which the religious life imperatively demands. On the Continent may be found a number of such Houses, nobly planned to meet the wants of their sacred purpose. ”

“ Admirable as is the church in its general structure, and in the detail and execution of its ornamentation, it is garish and ostentatious. There is a superabundance of light and luxury. Here{136} there is no dim religious light, no suggestion of mystery or devotion. Prayer would seem incompatible with the whole character of the edifice. More favourable was the opinion of Théophile Gautier, who declared that “Gothic art never produced anything more suave, more elegant, or more fine.”
Attached to the church is the convent, bestowed on the Franciscans, and pillaged by the French in 1808. ”

“ I went the other day to the secularised Convent of San Marco, paid my franc at the profane little wicket which creaks away at the door—no less than six custodians, apparently, are needed to turn it, as if it may have a recusant conscience—passed along the bright, still cloister and paid my respects to Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion, in that dusky chamber in the basement. I looked long; one can hardly do otherwise. The fresco deals with the pathetic on the grand scale, and after taking in its beauty you feel as little at liberty to go away abruptly as you would to leave church during the sermon. ”

“ Women are now forbidden entrance into the choir, and so Mrs. Ambrose had to stay in the body of the church, while we, with other people who had come to see it, saw the rich high altar and many of the finest things. There are not many precious stones, like rubies, emeralds, &c., but a profusion of altar-fronts of Pietra-dura, beautiful alto relievos in marble, and many fine pictures. The convent is but lately reinhabited. Count Mellerio was the means of replacing monks there. They are all French. ”

“ It is in the 269form of a Latin cross, and suggests even yet in some happy way the very genius of the Latin people in its temperance and delight in the sun and the day. The convent, it is true, has been desecrated, and is now a barracks; most of the altars have been robbed of their treasures; but the church itself remains to us a very precious possession from that fifteenth century, which in Italy certainly was so fortunate, so perfect a dawn of a day that was a little disappointing, and at evening so disastrous. ”

“ They play the organ of the chapel, which is a public one, though they themselves are entirely invisible; and they are not even allowed to see the altar, which is concealed by a heavy black curtain drawn across the grating looking into the church. They have an image of their great foundress, the size of life, dressed in the habit of the order, and to her they go night and morning and salute her, as to a mother. Their convent is rich in relics, beautiful pictures, and crucifixes, brought in by different religious, especially the Duchesse de Bega, who became a Carmelite about fifty years ago. ”

“ The earnest wishes of the saint are to this day carried out by faithful friars who, even through the terrible winter months, live at La Vernia, suffering privation and cold with cheerfulness. At midnight a bell calls them to sing matins in the chapel of the Stigmata connected with the convent by an open colonnade, down which the procession files, following a crucifix and lanterns. When the service has ceased, the monks flit like ghosts behind the altar while the lights are extinguished and in the gloom comes the sound of clashing chains. ”

“ Right below the road as we slowly descend are the plain, unmistakable buildings of a large convent with its church. It is that of the Franciscans, serving to-day as a barracks, bordering the greensward and avenues of the Alameda of the Varzea Grande or cultivated plain.
Further away across the river stands out a square tower, and close to it the brown façade of a church, in which an immense rose window is conspicuous from afar. This is the mother church of the district, S. Maria dos Olivaes, built in the twelfth century, upon ruins of a Benedictine monastery of Gothic times. ”

“ The rain beats against the windows of the convent as if it would force an entrance, flashes of lightning illuminate the night, and the thunder shakes the old building in its fury, as if it would uproot its very foundations.
Before a convent altar stands a bridal pair. The bridegroom places the nuptial ring on the bride's hand; kneeling they receive the priest's blessing, the young wife rises Frau von Kirchberg, and after remaining some days in concealment in the convent, she escapes in the disguise of a monk to Schloss Staufenburg. ”

“ Francis had been laid in a coffin, and the long line of friars, priests and townsmen turned to climb the hill, they took a path skirting just below the town, through the vineyards and olive groves, to the convent of San Damiano. The sound of chanting must have warned the watchers of their approach long before they came in sight. An artist has pictured the nuns like a flock of timid sheep in his fresco, trooping out of an exquisitely marbled chapel, with St. Clare endeavouring to suppress her grief as she bends over the dead Francis, while the sisters press close behind her. ”

“ Passing on not unawed, I followed some flights of steps, which terminate in the neat cloisters of the convent, in perfect preservation, but totally deserted. Ranges of citron and aloes fill up the quadrangle, whose walls are hung with superstitious pictures most singularly fancied. The Jesuits were the last tenants of this retirement, and seem to have had great reason for their choice. Its peace and stillness delighted me. ”

“ The confraternities of the most Holy Name of Jesus, of the Nazarenes, and of the Solitude of our Lady, are established in the convents of St. Augustine, the Recollects, and St. Dominic. They have no incomes, except alms that the brethren gather. That is spent in wax and ornaments by the said convents, each convent buying one day every week during Lent the wax for the sermons [241] that are preached, and the floats of the passion that are carried in the processions of the discipline during Holy Week, in which the brethren and others take part. ”

“ The good people here, being very tenacious of right, as well as the tradition of their ancestors, thought it doing God a service to burn a Catholic convent, because of Catholic religion was different from their own. ”

“ A prosaic, profane old man in a coat and trousers serves you, however, as custodian. The melancholy friars have not even the privilege of doing you the honours of their dishonour. One must imagine the pathetic effect of their former silent pointings to this and that conventual treasure under stress of the feeling that such pointings were narrowly numbered. The convent is vast and irregular--it bristles with those picture-making arts and accidents which one notes as one lingers and passes, but which in Italy the overburdened memory learns to resolve into broadly general images. ”

“ Instances of enthusiasm are so rare, even in the most austere orders, that there is strong ground to suspect its seeds are destroyed by a pervading corruption of morals. The Observant Franciscans, the most numerous community in this town, have not been able to set up a living saint after the death, which happened four or five years since, of the last in the series of servants to the order, who, for time immemorial, have been a source of honour and profit to that convent. ”

“ The church is wedded to monasticism; one supports the other, and both make a unity exceedingly efficient in the Middle Ages. The communication between the church and the convent is effected by a cloister, a vaulted gallery surrounding a square, open space, where the brothers walk and meditate, but do not talk, except in undertone or whisper; for all the precincts are sacred, made for contemplation and silence,—a retreat from the noisy, barbaric world. Connected with the cloisters is a court opening into the refectory, where all the brothers dine. ”