Italian Hours/Florentine Notes, part VI
In the Carthusian Monastery outside the Roman Gate, mutilated
and profaned though it is, one may still snuff up a strong if
stale redolence of old Catholicism and old Italy. The road to it
is ugly, being encumbered with vulgar waggons and fringed with
tenements suggestive of an Irish-American suburb. Your interest
begins as you come in sight of the convent perched on its little
mountain and lifting against the sky, around the bell-tower of
its gorgeous chapel, a coronet of clustered cells. You make your
way into the lower gate, through a clamouring press of deformed
beggars who thrust at you their stumps of limbs, and you climb
the steep hillside through a shabby plantation which it is proper
to fancy was better tended in the monkish time. The monks are not
totally abolished, the government having the grace to await the
natural extinction of the half-dozen old brothers who remain, and
who shuffle doggedly about the cloisters, looking, with their
white robes and their pale blank old faces, quite anticipatory
ghosts of their future selves. 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. I rather
deplore its position at the gates of a bustling city--it ought
rather to be lodged in some lonely fold of the Apennines. And yet
to look out from the shady porch of one of the quiet cells upon
the teeming vale of the Arno and the clustered towers of Florence
must have deepened the sense of monastic quietude.
The chapel, or rather the church, which is of great proportions and designed by Andrea Orcagna, the primitive painter, refines upon the consecrated type or even quite glorifies it. The massive cincture of black sculptured stalls, the dusky Gothic roof, the high-hung, deep-toned pictures and the superb pavement of verd- antique and dark red marble, polished into glassy lights, must throw the white-robed figures of the gathered friars into the highest romantic relief. All this luxury of worship has nowhere such value as in the chapels of monasteries, where we find it contrasted with the otherwise so ascetic economy of the worshippers. The paintings and gildings of their church, the gem-bright marbles and fantastic carvings, are really but the monastic tribute to sensuous delight--an imperious need for which the fond imagination of Rome has officiously opened the door. One smiles when one thinks how largely a fine starved sense for the forbidden things of earth, if it makes the most of its opportunities, may gratify this need under cover of devotion. Nothing is too base, too hard, too sordid for real humility, but nothing too elegant, too amiable, too caressing, caressed, caressable, for the exaltation of faith. The meaner the convent cell the richer the convent chapel. Out of poverty and solitude, inanition and cold, your honest friar may rise at his will into a Mahomet's Paradise of luxurious analogies.
There are further various dusky subterranean oratories where a number of bad pictures contend faintly with the friendly gloom. Two or three of these funereal vaults, however, deserve mention. In one of them, side by side, sculptured by Donatello in low relief, lie the white marble effigies of the three members of the Accaiuoli family who founded the convent in the thirteenth century. In another, on his back, on the pavement, rests a grim old bishop of the same stout race by the same honest craftsman. Terribly grim he is, and scowling as if in his stony sleep he still dreamed of his hates and his hard ambitions. Last and best, in another low chapel, with the trodden pavement for its bed, shines dimly a grand image of a later bishop--Leonardo Buonafede, who, dying in 1545, owes his monument to Francesco di San Gallo. I have seen little from this artist's hand, but it was clearly of the cunningest. His model here was a very sturdy old prelate, though I should say a very genial old man. The sculptor has respected his monumental ugliness, but has suffused it with a singular homely charm--a look of confessed physical comfort in the privilege of paradise. All these figures have an inimitable reality, and their lifelike marble seems such an incorruptible incarnation of the genius of the place that you begin to think of it as even more reckless than cruel on the part of the present public powers to have begun to pull the establishment down, morally speaking, about their ears. They are lying quiet yet a while; but when the last old friar dies and the convent formally lapses, won't they rise on their stiff old legs and hobble out to the gates and thunder forth anathemas before which even a future and more enterprising régime may be disposed to pause?
Out of the great central cloister open the snug little detached dwellings of the absent fathers. When I said just now that the Certosa in Val d'Ema gives you a glimpse of old Italy I was thinking of this great pillared quadrangle, lying half in sun and half in shade, of its tangled garden-growth in the centre, surrounding the ancient customary well, and of the intense blue sky bending above it, to say nothing of the indispensable old white-robed monk who pokes about among the lettuce and parsley. We have seen such places before; we have visited them in that divinatory glance which strays away into space for a moment over the top of a suggestive book. I don't quite know whether it's more or less as one's fancy would have it that the monkish cells are no cells at all, but very tidy little appartements complets, consisting of a couple of chambers, a sitting-room and a spacious loggia, projecting out into space from the cliff- like wall of the monastery and sweeping from pole to pole the loveliest view in the world. It's poor work, however, taking notes on views, and I will let this one pass. The little chambers are terribly cold and musty now. Their odour and atmosphere are such as one used, as a child, to imagine those of the school-room during Saturday and Sunday.