Umbria

“ But we were back in Umbria, mystical Umbria, where ancient gods walk hand in hand with saints along the banks of gently flowing streams; where life goes slowly to the tune of bells slung round the dewlaps of snow-white oxen, bred by the waters of Clitumnus and praised by Virgil, Pliny and Propertius ”

“ Looking at cities and villages so purely Umbrian, some spread among cornfields close to a swift clear river, others set upon heights which nearly touch the sky on stormy days, we forget that beyond these hills and mountains encircling the big valley of Umbria stretch other lands as fair. We forget, because it is a little world which during long centuries has been set apart from all else, and where man has but completed the work of nature herself. ”

“ Siena or Florence, Pisa or Lucca, any of the flowery cities of Tuscany would have been its proper setting. It is too gay for Umbria, whose hills are bathed in the serene, ineffable calm of a mystic holiness, who, remembering her many saints, still keeps the low estate of a handmaiden of the Lord. It is like a golden iris plucked from some Tuscan garden, and transplanted upon the bosom of this sombre precipice of tufa upheaved by Nature in primeval struggles. For chance and the Papacy have grafted the most exotic bloom of Italian Gothic architecture upon the rock of Orvieto. ”

“ In no country perhaps are these facts more strongly marked than in Umbria, where even the smallest hamlet is perched upon a high hill-side as though to provoke attention, and where the larger cities glare at each other from commanding eminences, seeming, even in this peaceful nineteenth century, to challenge one another by the mere aspect of their mighty walls. ”

“ All is peaceful and very solemn, more so than after sunset in other places, in this sweet and austere Umbria, the fit home of the Christian revival of the early Middle Ages. And it makes us think, this beautiful and solemn evening, of the little book which epitomises all the emotions of this new birth, of this charming new childhood of humanity, when the feelings of men seem to have somewhat of the dewy freshness of dawn. ”

“ We made our discoveries, saw much, learned not a little philosophy. And, most of all, we caught a glimpse of the heart of Umbria—Umbria of the saints. We watched the gathering of the golden maize in the plain below Assisi while [viii] we walked with St. Francis among the vines and olives; we saw the vintage being brought home with song and thanksgiving at Orvieto and Viterbo. We dwelt among beautiful simple-hearted men and women, living in little farms far from the toil of the modern world, who still worship God in the gladness of their hearts and the spirit of the ardent thirteenth century ”

“ As the night gloom deepens, and the moon ascends the sky, these buildings seem to form the sombre foreground to some French etching. Beyond them spreads the misty moon-irradiated plain of Umbria. Over all rise shadowy Apennines, with dim suggestions of Assisi, Spello, Foligno, Montefalco, and Spoleto on their basements. Little thin whiffs of breezes, very slight and searching, flit across, and shiver as they pass from Apennine to plain. The slowly moving population—women in veils, men winter-mantled—pass to and fro between the buildings and the grey immensity of sky. ”

“ Memory had clothed her with antique grace, had peopled her with Emperors and Popes, had filled her winding streets with mediaeval palaces, her piazzas with the gay Renaissance. But coming from Umbria, where the Middle Ages still linger, and that older, simpler life of the Beginning of the World is pictured in her vineyards and olive gardens, we found Rome little more than a modern city, full of unrest and noise. Everywhere there was scaffolding and masonry, and we feared to look for our familiar landmarks lest the great god of change should have swallowed them up. ”

“ Spoleto, it is little wonder that you are proud to-day, that your bells ring so joyously down the valleys, that you hold high festival to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of United Italy. What does it profit Perugia that her name was splendid in the Middle Ages, and that she is still the Queen of Umbria, 'the Empress of hill-set cities'? ”

“ Before them there were around Perugia only phantoms: stiff saints on panels and on parchment, without dates, ghosts of unattained, though dimly felt, ideals—a scattered flock of “primitives,” left here and there on chapel walls or psalters. Then gradually, all through Umbria and her border lands, in a steady circle of glory, like the stars on a summer night, the lights arose and burned. At Gubbio, Camerino, Foligno, Gualdo, Fabriano, and Urbino we trace their steady progress through the work of men like Nelli, Piero della Francesca, Gentile da Fabriano, Niccolò Alunno, and many others. ”

“ In the garden of Umbria there are only God and Nature, the Soul of Things is at ease.
So, with our hearts attuned to her simplicity, we came to Todi on the top of her hill, with her towers and walls, and her winds and clouds. We caught her asleep in the siesta hour. There was no one astir when we drove into her beautiful golden piazza, where the Middle Ages have never been forgotten: even to-day it is full of mediaeval grace, with its two great palaces and its exquisite cathedral. ”

“ Thus, by the advance of the Gauls from the north and the Picentes from the south, the Umbrians were shut off from the seaboard, and confined to the district known as Umbria in historical times. When Rome began the consolidating of Italy, Umbria consisted of the region bounded by the Ager Gallicus on the N., by Etruria (the Tiber) on the W., by Picenum on the E., and by the Sabines on the S. The Umbrians kept a desperate hold of this district, which lies between the two arms of the Apennines. This position indicates of itself that they had been driven before stronger foes. ”

“ Leighton, humanity craves the concrete. All the universe is God's temple, yet the chill breath of the abstract freezes our hearts; and we pray best in some pillared niche consecrated and set apart, I recall a day in Umbria, when the wonderful light of sunset fell on ilex and olive, on mountain snows, on valleys billowing between vine-mantled hills, on creamy marble walls, on columned campaniles ”

“ Perugia, if one ignores her history, is not so much a town as an eccentric freak of nature. All the winds and airs of heaven play and rush around her walls in summer and in winter. The sun beats down upon her roofs; one seems to see more stars at night, above her ramparts, than one sees in any other town one knows of. All Umbria is spread like a great pageant at her feet, and the pageant is never one day or one hour like the other. ”

“ They are a splendid people, these country priests of Umbria, with their ambition to beautify their little churches, and their merry good-nature in the face of hardships. We met so many of them in Foligno,—one who had written a book about his church, and toiled to rescue the faded frescoes veiled in plaster on its walls, taking the same pleasure in their beauty as a gardener in the first blossoms of the year; another who had made a museum of his sacristy and cloisters. ”

“ Under the darkness of the clouds, soaring high as a glorious vision above the miserable houses—a peacock in a hen-coop, a miracle of marbles and mosaics—the Duomo of Orvieto!... No one who has ever seen the building can forget it, for it is like a great surprise; it startles and astounds one in the midst of the decay around it. Here, if anywhere in Umbria, the power of the Pope or of the Church was sealed on the rebellious souls of its inhabitants ”

“ For in that Umbria of the dying fifteenth century—where the old cities, their old freedom and industry and commerce well-nigh dwindled to nothing, had shrunk each on its mountain-side into mere huge barracks of mercenary troopers or strongholds of military bandit nobles, continually besieged and sacked and heaped with massacre by rival families and rival factions ”

“ Francis." Wonders and miracles are in every page, it is true, but then the peasants will tell you all things are possible in Umbria; the taming of wild beasts, the silencing of garrulous swallows who chattered so loudly while he preached, do not seem stranger to them than the conversion of brigands and murderers, for did not the very angels obey his wishes and play and sing to him one night when he lay ill in a lonely hermitage, longing for the sound of sweet strains to break the awful stillness round him? ”

“ I met dismantled walls still blushing with the stains of fresco—a saint's robe, the limp burden of the Addolorata;—I met texts innumerable, shrines fly-ridden and, often as not, mocked with dead flowers. And now, as I see these grey towers and the grand purple line of the hills hemming in the Tiber Valley, I know I am come down to the sated South, to the confines of Umbria, the country of dead churches, and of Rome the metropolis of such deplorable broken toys. ”

“ The many scattered towns of Umbria led to a far greater variety of type, individuality was more frequently maintained, influences spread more fitfully and partially than in those parts of Italy where all studied together, and practice and theory flew like wildfire from one to the other, emulations flourished, traditions were quickly formed and earnestly followed. ”

“ Thus from a Tuscany, pagan, kindly, exuberant and desponding by turns, but always ready with that long slow smile you first meet in the Lorenzetti of Siena and afterwards find so tenderly expressed in its different manifestations in the Delia Robbia and Botticelli—a smile where patience and wistfulness struggle together and finally kiss,—I came down to Umbria and a people dying of what M. Huysmans grandiosely calls "our immense fatigue." Here is a people that has loved asceticism not wisely. ”

“ Greek and Roman writers never wearied of celebrating the excellence of its harbors, the beauty of its landscape, the exuberant richness of its soil, and the enchanting softness of its air. The coast is varied by the isolated cone of Vesu ́vius and a range of volcanic hills, including the now extinct crater of Solfata ́ra. Umbria was a mountainous country east of Etruria. Before the coming of the Gauls, it extended northward to the Ru ́bicon and eastward to the Adriatic; but its coast was wholly conquered by that people, who drove the Umbrians beyond the mountains. ”

“ It has already been said that to understand Perugino it is absolutely necessary to visit Umbria. The dictum can be made even more definite. It is needful to see not only Umbria but Perugia, and not only Perugia but the Cambio, in order to have an adequate idea of the artist's power. The quaint little room must be visited again and again if the student is to really understand its beauty. When at first one steps from the brilliant sunshine of the street into this dark chamber, it is not easy to realise the rich decoration which covers its walls. ”

“ Assisi is full of forgotten charms. No other city in Umbria, except proud Spoleto, can boast as many traces of her Roman greatness. Though her amphitheatre has vanished underground, its lines are clearly preserved by the houses which are built above it; there is a wonderful Roman cistern below the cathedral; there are fragments of a theatre, and a drain of excellent masonry in the Canon's garden; and in the Piazza Vittore Emanuele is the exquisite portico of the Temple of Minerva, which, legend says, was built by Dardanus of Troy. ”

“ See how her loggia'd towers frame the heavens, and how she stretches out her lovely arms to welcome us!'
We came to Perugia from Cortona. In an hour we slipped from that austere Tuscan citadel into the heart of an enchanted land—Umbria Mystica—the home [25] of saints, where Beauty and Romance walk in the valleys with the gentle Gods of Arcady; where brooding peace hangs in the luminous air, and on whose aerial hills great memories dwell in the little cities full of dreams that men have built for them. ”

“ Besides this, Umbria spoke about many other large townships in the neighbourhood of Mexico, and of a province on the confines, called Matlaltzinco. We could well perceive that Umbria and his companions had not forgotten themselves, for they had well stuffed their pockets with gold. This Cortes had readily foreseen, and purposely selected Umbria for that journey, to regain his friendship, and that he might forget the severe sentence which he had passed upon him. ”

“ There was no Giotto, no Duccio even, in Umbria. Painting for its own sake, or for the sake of beauty or life, never seems to have taken root in that mystical soil; it is ever with a message of the Church that she comes to us, very simply and sweetly for the most part, it is true, but except in the work of Piero della Francesca, who was not really an Umbrian at all, and in that of his pupil Melozzo da Forli, the work of the school is sentimental and illustrative, passionately beautiful for a moment with Gentile da Fabriano; clairvoyant almost in the best work of Perugino ”

“ The Umbrian School of painters includes a group of men born in the hill towns of Umbria, to be credited, therefore, to more than a single city, but their greatness is sufficient for the glory of any number of cities,--Gentile da Fabriano, Bonfigli, Perugino and his pupils, Pinturicchio, Lo Spagna, and many others, above all Raphael. ”

“ In these comparatively quiet times of ours we go about in foreign towns and look for art, and art alone. We seem to forget that art is but a small affair—a little landmark in the history of nations. There is an art in Umbria, an art so pure, so sweet, so tender that thinking of it we may easily forget the history of her men, or, if remembering, we seem to dream a dual dream. The art of Perugia was, maybe, the outcome of her almost fanatical religion, but the wars of her inhabitants have{92} always been her life-blood. ”