But daily, before he painted, Sandro knelt in a dark
chapel in Santa Croce, while a blue-chinned priest
said mass for the repose of Simonetta’s soul.
THE BURDEN OF NEW TYRE
For a short time in her motley history, an old-clothesman,
one Domenico— he and his “Compagnia
del Bruco,” his Company of the Worm[1]—
reigned over Siena and gave to her people a taste for
blood. It was bloodshed on easy terms they had;
for surely no small nation (except that tiger-cat
Perugia) has achieved so much massacre with so little
fighting. Massacre considered as one of the Fine
Arts? No indeed; but massacre as a viaticum,
as “title clear to mansions in the skies”;
for, with more complacency than discrimination, these
sated citizens chose to dedicate their most fantastic
blood-orgies by a Missa de Spiritu Sancto in
the Cathedral Church. The old-clothesman, who
by some strange oversight died in his bed, was floated
up on the incense of this devout service to show his
hands, and—marvel!—Saint Catherine,
the “amorosa sposa” of Heaven, reigned
in his stead. Certainly, for unction spiced with
ferocity, for a madness which alternately kissed the
Crucifix and trampled on it, for mandragora and fleurs
de lys, saints and succubi, churches and lupanars—commend
me to Siena the red.
[Footnote 1: This was one of the Contrade
into which the City was divided, and of which each
had its totem-sign.]
You are not to suppose that she has not paid for all
this, the red Siena. None of it is absolved;
it is there floating vaguely in the atmosphere.
It chokes the gully-trap streets in August when the
air is like a hot bath; it wails round the corners
on stormy nights and you hear it battling among the
towers overhead, buffeting the stained walls of criminal
old palaces and churches grown hoary in iniquity—so
many half-embodied centuries of deadly sin gnawing
their spleens or shrieking their infamous carouse over
again. So at least I found it. Without baring
myself to the charge of any sneaking kindness for
bloodshedding, I may own to the fascination of the
precipitous fortress-town huddled red and grey on its
three red crags, and of its suggestion of all the
old crimes of Italy from Ezzelino’s to Borgia’s,
of all unhappy deaths from Pia de’ Tolomei’s
to Vittoria’s, the White Devil of Italy.
Its air seemed “blood-boltered” (like the
shade of the hunted Banquho), its stones, curiously
slippery for such dry weather, cried “Haro!”
or “Out! Havoc!” And above it all
shone a marble church, white as a bride; while now
and again on a favourable waft of wind came the fragrant
memory of Saint Catherine. It is the peak of earth
most charged with wayward emotions—pity
and terror blent together into a poignant beauty,
a sorcery. Imagine yourself one of those old Popes—Linus
or Anaclete or Damasius—whose heads spike
the clerestory of the Duomo, you would look down upon
