Yes indeed, my Lorenzo. But enough! Let
us take shelter in the Duomo.
Barred like a tiger, glistening snow and rose and
gold, topped by a flaunting angel, her door flanked
by the lean Roman wolf; paved with pictures, hemmed
with the Popes from Peter to Pius, encrusted with marbles
and gemmy frescoes, it is a casket of delights this
church, and the quintessence of Siena—molles
Senae as Beccadelli, himself of this Tyre, dubbed
his native town. Voluptuous as she was, tigerish
Siena was more consistent than you would think.
True, Saints Catherine and Bernardine consort oddly
with the old-clothesman saying mass with wet hands,
and Beccadelli the soft singer of abominations, just
as the “Madones aux longs regards” of
the Primitives—pious creatures of slim
idle fingers and desirous eyes, pining in brocade and
jewels—seem in a different sphere (as indeed
they are) from Pinturricchio’s well-found Popes
and Princesses, and Sodoma’s languishing boys
or half-ripe Catherines dying of love. Have I
not said this was once a city of pleasure? And
whether the pleasure was a blood-feast or an Agape,
or a Platonic banquet where the flute-players and wine-cups
and crowns crushed out the high disquisition and philosophic
undercurrent—it was all one to soft Siena
drowsing the days out on her hills. Her pleasures
were fierce, and beautiful as fierce. But the
burden of Tyre is always the same. And so the
memories of a thousand ancient wrongs unpurged howl
over the red city, as once howled the ships of Tarshish.
IX
ILARIA, MARIOTA, BETTINA
(Studies in Translation from Stone)
Greatest of great ladies is Ilaria, potens Luccae,
sleeping easily, with chin firmly rounded to the vault,
where she has slept for five hundred years, and still
a power in Lucca of the silver planes. It was
a white-hot September day I went to pay my devotions
to her shrine. Lucca drowsed in a haze, her bleached
arcades of trees lifeless in the glare of high noon;
all the valley was winking, the very bells had no strength
to chime: and then I saw Ilaria lie in the deep
shade waiting for the judgment. Ilaria was a
tall Tuscan—the girls of Lucca are out of
the common tall, and straight as larches—of
fine birth and a life of minstrels and gardens.
Pompous processions, trapped horses, emblazonings,
were hers, and all refinements of High Masses and Cardinals.
So she lived once a life as stately-ordered as old
dance-music, in the airy corridors of a great marble
palace, swept hourly by the thin, clear air of the
Lucchesan plain; and her lord, went out to war with
Pisa or Pescia, or even further afield, following
Emperor or Pope to that Monteaperti which made Arbia
run colour of wine, or shrill Benevento, or Altopasdo
which cost the Florentines so dear.[1] But Ilaria
stayed at home to trifle with lap-dogs and jongleurs
under the orange trees: heard boys make stammering
Copyrights
Earthwork out of Tuscany from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
