Chapter VI (2)

At about two-thirds of the length of the church between the west door and the apse it is cut in two, so to speak, by that which perhaps is now the greatest charm of the interior--the crypt. When I first visited San Zenone this crypt existed, but its existence was not realized from the nave. The only access to it was from the aisles, and even here the arches were partially blocked up. A flight of steps across the whole east end of the nave led up to the choir and concealed the old entrance to it. This, it has lately been found, was originally formed by three open arches from the nave with a flight of steps descending under them to the level of the crypt, whilst two arches on either side of these gave access to it from the aisles. This is the old scheme, and the only possible approach to the raised choir must originally have been that which has now been restored, viz., two narrow flights of steps against the side walls, so contrived as not to interfere with or conceal any part of the sculpture or other decorations on the western face of the arches to the crypt. The church as now restored yields to few with which I am acquainted in the solemn effect which is the result of mysterious light and shade, multiplied vistas of columns and arches, and picturesque originality of design. It is evidently rather a result of growth than of first intentions. The crypt--like our own remarkable example at Wimborne--seems to be an insertion. The columns and piers of the choir pass on into the crypt, whose piers and vaults are built against them. There is an obvious difference too in the style of the church and of the crypt, showing that at least a hundred years must have elapsed between the erection of the former and the insertion of the latter. The choir now occupies the three eastern arches of the old constructional nave, and beyond this has a square bay and a five sided apse, the two last divisions being groined and decorated with a good deal of colour. The apse is of the fourteenth century, but all its windows have been modernized. The crypt follows exactly the dimensions of the choir, but is divided into no less than nine bays in width, and six bays in length, exclusive of the apse. The red marble columns which support its groined roof are all monoliths, delicate in their proportions, and many of them probably antique. The vaulting is quadripartite, and there are considerable remains of wall paintings, which appear to be nearly coëval with the crypt. In the centre of this crypt is the shrine of San Zeno, half concealed by the gloomy but effective lighting, and surrounded by a metal railing made of quatrefoils, buckled or tied together, very much in the same style as the railings round the Scaligeri monuments. The altar in this crypt is worth notice on account of its sculptured front. This has in the centre a small crucifix with SS. Mary and John, and on either side, under arches, figures of the Evangelists. The face towards the nave of the seven arches which form the western part of the crypt is decorated with extreme care and finish. They are admirable examples of the really polished work of the Italian artists of the end of the twelfth century. The arches from the north aisle deserve special notice. They are carried on coupled shafts which, as well as their capital, are of red Veronese marble, the archivolt being of stone. The section of both shafts is circular, but one of them is delicately twisted to a spiral curve on its upward course. The refinement of this treatment of shafts is very characteristic of the best Italian work, and this coupled shaft, simple as its treatment is, and common as are the elements of its design, is so beautiful that it makes a real sunshine in a shady place. Not less are the arches above it worthy of admiration. The sculpture here, of a trailing branch of foliage, is very slightly relieved, but its outline is so graceful, its imitation of nature so close without being merely realistic, and its fitness for its position so complete, that I think I have never seen anything in its way more satisfactory, and certainly never anything really ornamental in the best sense, the elements of which were more severely simple.[22]

The colour of the whole interior is, to my mind, charming. It was first of all built in alternate and very irregularly divided courses of brick and stone. On this warm-coloured ground, one pious man after another came and painted what seemed to him best--a Madonna, a crucifixion, a saint, or a group of figures--with not much thought beyond that of making the particular work in which he was interested tell its own story well and produce its own effect. So little did he think of other men’s previous work that the same subjects are not unfrequently repeated. The result is that the walls were here sober and there gorgeous, but everywhere coloured, and everywhere more or less interesting. Yet the materials of which they are built are just those which we see every day of our lives, and it was the skill of the workman, not the richness of his materials, which made his work so worthy of our admiration.

Only one portion of the church is decorated upon a regular system; this is the eastern part of the choir and the apse, which has part of its walls and its groining very elaborately painted, though with but little gold; the groining ribs are richly coloured, and on each side of them is a wide border, generally subdivided into regular geometrical figures, and the spaces between these borders are painted blue and powdered with gold stars. In the south aisle is an altar under a baldachin, supported at the angles by four clustered shafts knotted together in mid height--a capricious custom of which Italians seem to have been especially fond, and the only excuse for which, so far as I can see, is that it proves that all the shafts were cut out of one block, and therefore of more value than four plain detached shafts cut out of separate blocks could be. There is perhaps, also, a relief to the mind, after looking at a long series of similar shafts, to come at last upon some one or two marked by capricious singularity such as this. Be this, however, as it may, the eye certainly always feels inclined to admire them, though the reason is never quite satisfied; and perhaps some better excuse does exist for their use than I have as yet been able to discover. It is probable that these columns belonged originally to the baldachin over the high altar. The canopy which they now support is not old.

The vestry on the north side of the choir is worth a visit, if only for the sake of its prettily panelled and painted ceiling. Here the panels are very small, and left in the natural colour of the pine, and the ribs are decorated with white, red, and black. There is also in this room a very good fourteenth-century marble cistern and lavatory under an arch in the wall; and lastly, in the wardrobes, among many things not worth seeing, a finely embroidered bishop’s mitre of the twelfth century, wrought in gold on linen. In front is a figure of Our Lord, at the back one of the Blessed Virgin, with emblems of two Evangelists on each, and a band below with figures of the Apostles, the stoles also being adorned with figures.

The arrangement of the choir shows the common Italian plan of stalls round the apse behind the altar. They are of early Renaissance character, with some relic of Gothic feeling in the traceries of the backs and elbows. There is also a good example of a square choir lectern, with a large base to contain books, and a revolving gabled desk.

Until the beginning of this century, there were only two altars in this church, one in the choir the other in the crypt. The verger told me that his father remembered the other altars being brought from a suppressed church, and erected here.

The campanile is well seen from the cloister, where it composes finely with the coursed walls of the church, and the many-shafted arcades of the cloister. It is a lofty square tower of several stages, with small pinnacles, and a low circular brick spire crowning it.

I must not leave San Zenone without mentioning the construction of the exterior, which--with the exception of the west end, which is of stone and marble--is entirely of red brick and very warm-coloured stone. The courses of stone are, as a general rule, of about the same height, whilst those of brick are very varied, some only of one course, others of four or five. The cornices at the tops of the walls, too, are very good, supported upon corbel-tables with round arches resting upon corbels, and much improved in their effect by the judicious introduction of thin deep-red bricks between the courses of carved stone, which are thus thrown out forcibly. It is in this use of red brick, and in the bold and successful way in which brick and stone are shown in the interior, that this church is so full of instruction to an English eye; and I could not see such a work without regretting bitterly the insane prejudice which some people indulge against anything but the cold, walls, chilling respectability of our English plastered walls, which to me seems to be fit only for occupation by savages.

Every time I visit this noble church, I leave it with greater regret; its exceeding grandeur appears to deserve a better fate than the spare use to which it seems now to be abandoned. To see all these painted or coloured walls, all these marble piers, and all this vast expanse of wall and roof waste and desolate, apparently not half used and never filled with a throng of worshippers, reminds me too strongly of the sad and similar fate of some of our own English churches not to awaken a sigh as I look at it. To some men it is a comfort to find that their neighbours are no better than themselves in these matters, but I confess that to my mind a great church disused is a subject only for mournful recollection, just as a noble church much used and filled with crowds of worshippers is an object for emulation and admiration. Here, in good truth, I know not where the worshippers are to come from, so decayed and forlorn is the neighbourhood.

On the way back from San Zenone into the city a small church is passed--the oratory of the same Saint--where his body is said to have rested for a time before it was taken to the Basilica. The only architectural features are of a long subsequent period, a very good circular window in the west gable, and a doorway with a pointed canopy supported on shafts above it, under which of old no doubt there was a painting.

Beside San Zenone I think the only very grand church as yet unmentioned is that of San Fermo Maggiore--a vast Romanesque basilica without aisles, but with small transepts, and a chancel and north and south chancel-aisles opening into the nave by three arches, which exactly correspond with its vast width; a not very beautiful arrangement, which we shall meet with again in the church of the Eremitani at Padua, and in others of the great churches of the preaching orders of monks.

The fabric of the east end, and the eastern half of the nave appears to be of very early date--I should be disposed to say the end of the tenth, or beginning of the eleventh century. A lofty crypt is constructed under the whole of this part, all the columns of which are square; some of them mere masses of masonry, others slender monoliths. The mouldings here are rather Roman in character than Lombard. The groining is all of brick, and very extensive remains of paintings are still to be seen throughout, the large columns having single figures painted on them, one on each face. Access to the crypt is obtained (by the clergy) from the cloister, south of the church, and by the people through a very spacious staircase entered from the outside by a door just west of the north porch. So good indeed are the means of access, that no doubt the crypt was once extensively used by the laity, for whom these stairs were specially intended. It is now not used at all--just as is the case with old crypts all over Europe--but then it is fair to say that the church is no longer served by the Regular Clergy by whom it was built, and that their conventual buildings were when first I saw them occupied by Austrian soldiers, and are now still turned, I believe, to some equally secular use. I think we may fairly assume that in 1313, when the church was restored and in part reconstructed, the old crypt was retained partly on account of its associations, and partly because of its convenience for those who might at first not quite sympathize with the novel arrangements of the church above, a great unbroken area built and contrived for the use and convenience of an order of preachers, and not for receiving a number of altars.

A monument close to the entrance of the crypt is worth notice. It represents a professor with his pupils sitting each at a desk. The books have inscriptions on them. The professor’s has “Vita brevis;” a pupil, “Ars longā;” another, “judicium difficile;” and another, “tēpus fugit.”

In the interior of the nave we have, as has been observed, a work which has been so much altered that it is in fact, as we now see it, a work of the fourteenth century. It is about fifty feet in width, and covered with a timber roof, constructed so as to form a ceiling of a number of cusps boarded and panelled on the under side, and tied with iron ties in place of collar-beams. Two vertical divisions of the panelling are arcaded, and filled with paintings of saints, and the whole roof is darkly stained, and richly painted. Beyond this the only very striking feature is the pulpit, which is corbelled out from the south wall about midway in its length. It is old and picturesque, and is surmounted by a delicately carved and lofty canopy--the whole in marble. It is surrounded by wall paintings of about the same age, and presents a fairly unchanged example of what such combined works of the painter and the architect were in the palmy days of the fourteenth century. These paintings are of much interest. Behind the pulpit are the four doctors and the four Evangelists seated, the ascent of Elisha in a chariot of fire, and twelve prophets with scrolls. Under the canopy is the Crucifixion.

Going to the exterior one finds on the north side two transepts, and north of the chancel a tower. East of the eastern transept and of the tower are small apsidal projections of Romanesque character, both of them in ruins and unused. The masonry here is different from that of the later work, being of alternate courses of single brick, and of stone.

The exterior of the principal apse is very remarkable, and belongs to the fourteenth century. Each side has a steep gable with elaborate cornices, mouldings, and pinnacles, partly of stone and partly of brick. The gables are built with circular bricks, and there is a cusped circular window in each gable. Seen from the bridge which crosses the Adige close to the church, this picturesque east end is one

of the most picturesque things in Verona. Unfortunately the campanile does not equal in importance the church to which it belongs.

The west end will be best understood by the accompanying sketch. It is constructed entirely in red brick and warm-coloured stone, and I confess that it impressed me most pleasantly, as having in its four delicate lancet windows some sort of affinity to our own English work. The north porch is very fine of its kind, and the jambs of its doorway are constructed of black, white, and red marble, used alternately. The arcading against the walls is noticeable as shewing the use of thin courses of red brick for the purpose of defining the lines of the stonework.

The monuments on each side of the west door are good simple examples of a favourite Italian type. They are, as we shall see, of all dates, and even when developed to a great size, are still corbelled in the same way out of the walls. In the North of Europe, we have no analogous treatment of monumental memorials, and this rather enhances their value. The arch to the monument on the left of the west doorway is painted in a charmingly simple Giottesque style, and there is a painting also behind a modern statue in the door-arch, of Our Lord surrounded by angels. In the arcades above the monuments there were figures of saints painted, with imitations of mosaic. All these details are worth mentioning in order to give some idea to those who have not seen Verona, of the extent to which everywhere the eye is feasted with remains of early art. Indeed, one feasts uninterruptedly there on all that can delight the eye in form and in colour!

With the mention of one more church I believe I may bring my notes in Verona to an end, and this is a small chapel which stands just opposite the south side of the Duomo, and whose name I could not learn. It is much like San Pietro Martire in its general arrangement, but remarkable for the exquisite beauty of its windows, the arrangement of the bricks and stonework in which is beyond all praise. These windows are constructed with trefoiled heads of stone, enclosed within an arch of mixed stone and brick, round whose outer edge runs a band of delicate terra-cotta ornament. The spandrels of the trefoils are filled in with refined sculpture, instead of being pierced with the dark eye usually found in northern Gothic. There is, too, an entire absence of mouldings, yet, notwithstanding this, the general effect is one of combined delicacy and richness of no common kind, so much does carefully-arranged and contrasted colour do for architecture. A third window is entirely of brick, save the trefoil head of the opening. The side elevation of this little chapel is very singular in its whole arrangement; there are three bays divided by pilasters, which finish at the top in an arcaded cornice of brick; in each of the two western bays is a lancet window, and the centre bay has in addition a doorway, and a corbelled out monument above it; in the eastern bay the window looks just like one of those curious English low side windows, as to the use of which we have had so many ingenious theories; the east end has no trace of any window, and is finished with a flat-pitched roof, and a brick corbel-table running up the pediment. There is no stone used except in the window-heads and arches.

There are many other churches in Verona on both sides of the river, and into several of them we went, but without finding any of equal merit to those which I have already noticed. Santa Eufemia has a fair west front, of late pointed, and we found one or two good cloisters just like those mentioned at Brescia. Other churches have fronts built, and interiors remodelled, by Sanmichele and his successors, in a style which by no means approved itself to me; others

1. 2. Windows at Verona.
3. Cornice S. Ambrogio, Milan.
4. Cornice Broletto Brescia.
5. Windows in Broletto, Monza.
6. Wall Arcade S. Fermo Maggiore.]

there which I did not succeed in reaching,[23] and there is one dedicated in honour of S. Thomas of Canterbury, which is not, however, otherwise of any interest; it has a very late Gothic west front, of poor character.

It is impossible to walk about Verona without meeting at every turn with windows whose design is similar to those so often seen in Venice, but the execution and arrangement are generally so inferior here to what they are there, that I shall defer saying much about them until I am describing the palaces and ancient buildings of Venice. They are almost always finished with ogeed trefoils at the top, and are arranged singly, or in couples or more together, and one above the other, the same in each story of the house; their mouldings are thin and reedy, and the carving of their finials, when they have any, is very poor. Examples of these windows will be seen by most travellers in the rooms of the Albergo delle Due Torre.

The views from the bridges across the Adige are very striking. The main part of the city is on the right bank, and the river describes nearly a semi-circle round it. The opposite bank is only partially built over, and has a largish suburb, upon rather rapidly rising ground; beyond this the walls of the city are seen with occasional towers, and marked all the way by their serrated battlements climbing the irregular outline of the hills in the boldest fashion. Then crossing over to the other side and turning round, you see the thickly-built city full of towers and churches rising far above the turmoil of the crowd below into the pure sky, and, by their number and size, making Verona one of the most striking old cities I know.

Of course no one goes to Verona without thinking of Romeo and Juliet. I fear, however, that when I was shown the Casa de’ Cappelletti, a small inn in a narrow street, and asked to connect it in any way for the future with the creation of Shakespeare’s brain, my fancy refused to be sufficiently lively to perform the required feat. The simple fact is that, real relics not existing, the good people of Verona have wisely met the demand which Shakespeare has created, and have discovered a tomb for Juliet, and other reminiscences of the fair Veronese, which I dare say satisfy very well the majority of travellers.

At Verona, as in the other towns through which we passed in Italy, we were quite astonished at the number of misshapen dwarfs that we saw; we could not account for this at first, but I suppose it is because children, until they can walk, are tied up in rolls of linen so stiffly as to deprive them of all power of motion. The only wonder is how any of these unfortunate children ever manage to walk at all.

In the courts of the houses at Verona there are generally wells, with ingeniously contrived arrangements for enabling the occupants of the various surrounding houses and balconies to let down their buckets for water without themselves going down to the wells. There are guide-ropes to the well from each angle of the courts round which the houses are usually built, along which the buckets run, suspended by rings and held by ropes from the balconies, until they reach the iron-work over the well, and then fall perpendicularly down to the water.

I have visited Verona many times, and each visit seems to me to give greater pleasure than the last. I fear I have given but a faint idea of the indescribable charm which it has to all who are fond of early art. There is little which one can compare with the situation and surroundings of such cities as Venice and Florence, and yet I suppose most travellers would agree with me in reckoning the interest of these three towns as not far from equal, and greater in very many ways than that of any other Italian cities.

On this first journey we were driven away by bad weather which, when it sets in, generally continues for several days, and we left, inwardly resolving that no long time should elapse before we returned--a resolution which has been abundantly and often fulfilled--and as the waiter at our hotel honestly told us that we should be very likely to find fine weather at Padua, whither we were next to journey, we took his advice, and then, getting into an omnibus contrived to hold thirty persons, and I should say at least twenty feet long, with four horses harnessed with long drawn-out traces to increase the already prodigious length, we were soon at the terminus of the Verona and Venice railway.