Letters from Italy/Chapter 2

While Venice is distinguished by its abundant canals, gondolas, and tourists, Padua is characterised by arcades and bicycles; Ferrara again by bicycles, brick-built palaces and Romanesque style. I leave the bicycles alone, and hope they will also do the same to me. As regards Padua, learn this, that to see in one morning the most beautiful work of Giotto, Mantegna, and Donatello is a special favour, a gift of God, and a joy resembling a dream. It is only a tiny, bare church, this S. Maria dell’ Arena, but Giotto has adorned the interior from crown to base, not omitting the smallest space, and replenished it with his stately, simple logic of painter and Christian, for Giotto was a genius thoroughly sensible, devout, and brilliant. But Mantegna, a steel designer, hard, keen—I do not know what to say: a terrible formalist—but concealed behind a veil of heaven knows what, astonishing, graceful, and severe melancholy. And Donatello, passionate grief incarnate, silent, gnawed by the bitterness of a too perfect spirit. All three are the most masculine of artists. It is a holy day, when one has made the acquaintance of these three.

Having ended this holy day at a point and then ​had supper (not at Padua, however, but at Ferrara), I had, after writing the above, an experience which I want to relate at once: beware on your travels through Italy of the so-called vino di paese (wine of the country). It is cheap enough, looks innocent, and is served in bottles the cubic capacity of which you will certainly underestimate at first sight. When you have finally disposed of it—it is, of course, surprisingly good—you are seized with a kind of exaltation, pugnacity, lust for song, elevation, and similar feelings. If at that moment I had before me a certain . . . who among you, in Bohemia, writes such frightful nonsense about the theatre, I should fell him to the ground: such was my frame of mind. I should also fell many others who write on art, for instance . . . and other esteemed personages,^[1] and then, sprinkled with their blood, singing lustily, magnifying Giotto, Mantegna, and Donatello, I should have retired to rest and in dreams have gazed on the little church dell’ Arena, the altar at Santo, and the Eremitani chapel, reproached myself, bowed before the endless magnificence of art, and then slumbered with a grateful memory of the vino di paese.

However, the blood of those remote is out of ​reach, I cannot continue my holy fervour, I shall never succeed in sketching for you the frescoes which I have to-day adopted for myself. To-day I went through all the churches of Padua and Ferrara do not ask me how many there were. And now I maintain that Christianity perished in the south with the Romanesque style, and in the north with the Gothic; and that with High Renaissance, and especially Baroque, begins something new and entirely unsympathetic, viz., Catholicism. Christianity can only speak to us in the primitive, severe, holy language of the early styles: it is earnest, pure, and in some degree simple. Beside it, the Renaissance is heathen, and Baroque idolatrous, fetishistic, Catholic in short; there is something culturally, amazingly mean in contrast with early, pious purity. All this maniacal pomp, marble ornamentation, brocade, stucco-work, gold, altars with little towers, all this chilly splendour conveys to you nothing of piety or the least fragment of what is uttered in unbounded solemnity and purity from the Giotto chapel.

If this morning it was a dream to be in the Eremitani or the Giotto chapel, in the afternoon it was another dream to walk Ferrara streets. They say—see Naples and then die.^[2] I should not care to die at Ferrara but to live there for some weeks; to live in a certain brick-built palace, which externally resembles an unscoured barn, ​but through the courtyard of which you pass into a splendid, tranquil loggia looking on the magnificent Ferrara gardens. In a delicious spring shower, trees of violet and yellow hues, unknown to me by name, droop over the brick walls. Level streets with coloured window-shutters—red, yellow, green; little Romanesque columns; red palaces; red churches; and through it all surges, forces itself, and blooms vigorously, the fresh green of moist spring. One strolls aimlessly, since he lives in a dream. In a dream one desires nothing: but when he beholds a magnificent garden beyond the marble loggia, which I have seen and shall see again, there is a longing to be able to remain there, to cease flight through space and time, and to abide in the midst of this dream.