Letters from Italy/Chapter 5

Siena is an uncommonly nice little town, planted on three hills and smiling, whether warm rain pours across its back or the sun shines; it has a few fragments of famous memorials, but is in itself an entirely dear little old memorial. It is of good, rightly constructed tiled Gothic set with a few raisins of early Renaissance; but not defiant, belligerent Gothic nor the fortress-like, firm, unattainable Renaissance of some Strozzi palace; all is more intimate, joyous, and graceful than elsewhere. I went specially to Siena to see the Duccio di Buoninsegna, the Giotto of Siena; but for a wonder the sober and pleasantly monumental Giotto would be more appropriate to Siena than the more naturalistic and temperate Duccio. It is most charming to roam about the streets, which run hither and thither like some exuberant slide, and look on that streak of blue sky amid the red pinnacles of old houses and the green waves of Tuscan hills all around. The Tuscan landscape there is especially like a pretty landscape in Bohemia; but here vines grow instead of potatoes, and every hillock is most attractively crowned with some towered hamlet or old fortified castle. Here, at Siena, was the ​place of origin of Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini,^[1] who in his day had business with George of Poděbrad^[2] and afterwards became Pope. In the cathedral is a library where Pinturicchio painted his achievements; the extolled Siena has preserved these frescoes in such freshness, as though old Pinturicchio had only yesterday cast the last variegated arabesque round the window. And there is the Gothic town hall, of which the interior is embroidered with frescoes from crown to base, and the cathedral, within and without, laid out with marble of various colours, an over-decorated façade and a floor all sgraffito, fine gigantic squares, the Fonte Gaja, the “Peace” by Lorenzetti, and a whole mass of agreeable, cheerful things: all these are there and more besides.

But all this is nothing in comparison with Orvieto. Orvieto is a still smaller town, and is entirely situated on the area of a rocky table-land, which is as though it had crept vertically up from the ground to a huge height. One must ascend either by a serpentine path, which must be taken into consideration by the most pugnacious enemy of this inaccessible townlet, or by a wirerope railway on which one’s head will spin. At length we are at the summit, at a height of about fifteen hundred years, not meters: for all Orvieto is ​ ​terribly old, all of unworked square stones, all of bare stone cubes. The Orvietans have only permitted themselves a single jewel, and that is the cathedral. I have never indeed been captivated by the decorative lacework and embroidery in which the old Italians set their Gothic, but Luca Signorelli, a wonderful and established great painter, has adorned the interior of an entire chapel with ideal representations of the human frame. He is not satisfied with the Last Judgment, with a whole flood of gloriously modelled muscular activity; he has framed the entire chapel with medallions, each of which is like an illustration to Dante’s Inferno, and surrounded them with arabesques which again are garlands of human bodies in the most wonderful positions and attitudes. It seems as though he could not be satiated with the human body in motion inebriated and at the same time remarkably clear, passionately excited and powerfully correct. He is a painter for whom it is worth abandoning the regular Italian tracks and climbing the rock of Orvieto. Over and above, you can reach two large chapels literally strewn about with frescoes of the good Quattrocento.

If my acquaintances knew the joy I provided for Orvieto boys by distributing Czech postage stamps among them, they would have written to me oftener. The youngsters crowded round immediately and wanted foreign stamps from me: I gave them what I had and they gasped in ​enthusiastic delight, “Czechoslovakia!” When I collected stamps in my day, I should have received one from Afghanistan or Bolivia with similar glee. For the boys of Orvieto, Bohemia is something decidedly exotic. And while I mention distant lands I must relate that at Orvieto I met with the first woman of actually enchanting beauty. She was a young Japanese lady. I never imagined that a Japanese could be so lovely. She glanced at Signorelli, and I also glanced at Signorelli and then at her. Then she departed and Signorelli remained. He is an astounding painter; but I never thought it possible that Japanese ladies could be so perfectly charming.