Chapter VI (1)

“Come, go with me. Go, sirrah, trudge about
Through fair Verona.”
_Romeo and Juliet_, act i. scene 2.

Verona: Campanile of the Palazzo dei Signori--Sta.
Anastasia--Monuments--Piazza dell’ Erbe--The Duomo--The
Baptistery--Sta. Maria l’Antica--Cemetery and Palace of the
Scaligers--Domestic Architecture--Piazza di Brà--The
Austrians--Ponte di Castel-Vecchio--San Zenone--San Fermo
Maggiore--Chapel near the Duomo--Romeo and Juliet--Dwarfs--Wells.

We reached Verona in the evening, and were up early on the next morning, anxious to get a general idea of the city. But I was no sooner out of my bed than I saw from my window, over the roofs of the opposite buildings, the campanile of the Palazzo dei Signori, a lofty, simple, and almost unbroken piece of brickwork, rising, I suppose, at least three hundred feet into the air, and pierced with innumerable scaffold-holes, in and out of which, as I looked, flew countless beautiful doves, whose choice of a home in the walls of this tall Veronese tower will make me think kindly of putlog-holes for the future. Certainly, if the Italian and English principles of tower-building are to be compared with one another, the Italian need give no fairer example of its power than this simple and grand erection.

It rises, as we found afterwards, out of a large pile of buildings, and for a short distance above their roofs is built in alternate courses of brick and a very warm-coloured stone,

and then entirely with brick, pierced with only one or two small openings, and terminating with a simple belfry-stage; the belfry windows, with their arches formed without mouldings, and with the sharp edges only of brick and stone used alternately, are divided into three lights by shafts of shining marble; the shafts, being coupled one behind the other, give strength with great lightness, and are very striking in their effect. These windows have, too, remarkably large balconies, but without balustrading of any kind. The upper and octangular stage of the campanile is comparatively modern, but rather improves the whole effect than otherwise.

I could hardly tear myself away from this noble work; but much more was to be seen, so I dallied not long before I set forth on a journey of discovery, giving myself up gladly to sketching and ecclesiology.

The hotels in Verona are both of them near Sta. Anastasia, and at the eastern end of the long and at first narrow and picturesque Corso. The Adige separates the city from its eastern suburb, and from the hills crowned by the Castel San Felice and the picturesquely stepped city walls. Its yellow waves wash with an angry rush the foundations of the houses which overhang it all along its course, but the only views of it are to be obtained from the bridges, and from the open space near the Castel Vecchio. At the extreme north-western angle of the town stands the church of San Zenone. One soon finds one’s self constantly on the Corso, and to the north of this lie the cathedral, Sta. Eufemia, the Castel Vecchio, and San Zenone, whilst to the south of it are the tombs of the Scaligers, San Fermo Maggiore, the Roman Amphitheatre, and the Palazzo Publico. Without further attempt to describe the map let us visit the buildings, of which the list I have given, though by no means exhaustive, includes the finest.

The Veronese architects in the Middle Ages were certainly some of the best in Italy. San Zenone is by very much the finest church of its kind that I know; Sta. Anastasia is on the whole one of the best churches of a later date; and San Fermo Maggiore affords some of the best detail of brickwork, and the tombs of the Scaligers the best examples of monuments in all Italy.

The first thing seen on turning out of the hotel is the west front of the church of Sta. Anastasia, looking so beautiful at the end of the narrow street, whose dark shade contrasts with the bright sunshine which plays upon its lofty arched marble doorway and frescoed tympanum, and lights up by some kind of magic the rough brickwork with which the unfinished church has been left so brightly, that, as you gaze, thoughts pass across your mind of portions of some lovely painting or some sweeter dream; you feel as though Fra Angelico might have painted such a door in a Paradise, and as though it were too fair to be real. There, however, it is, rich and delicate in colour, shining with all the delicate tints of the marbles of Verona, pure and simple in its softly-shadowed mouldings, beautiful in its proportions, and on a nearer approach revealing through the dark shade of its opening, and over and beyond the people who early and late throng in and out, the vague and misty forms of the solemn interior.

Sta. Anastasia is one of the most complete and representative pointed churches in the North of Italy, and deserves, therefore, a rather detailed description. Its date is about 1260 to 1290. The ground-plan is very simple--a nave of six bays, then one which is the crossing of the transepts, a very short choir of one bay finished with an apse and two chapels on the east side of each transept. The nave aisles fire narrow, and the whole design is characterized by intense simplicity of detail and arrangement. The width of the nave, and the height of the columns and arches, give, on entering, an idea of vast space and size. The columns are very simple, cylindrical in section, and support arches built of brick, and only chamfered at the edge; from the caps of the columns flat pilasters run up to the commencement of the groining, and above the nave arcades there are two small circular openings, one in the place of a triforium, opening into the roof of the aisle, the other above it and larger, filled in with plate tracery in stone, and forming the clerestory.

The arrangement of the plan is in several respects unlike that of northern Gothic buildings, and as most complete Gothic churches in Italy are very much of the same type, it is as well here to point out the peculiarity. The most marked features are first the shortness of the choir, and next, the fact that whereas in northern Europe it is usually the aisle vaulting bay which is square, whilst the nave bay is oblong from north to south, here the nave groining bay is square, and the bays of the aisle oblong in the direction of east and west. The difference of effect is great, simple as the statement seems. In these Italian churches there is much greater space between the columns of the nave arcades, the groining is consequently divided into much larger bays, and the whole interior has a largeness of treatment which is not common in the North. On the other hand there is much less of the complexity and intricacy which are so charming in our interiors, and you see at a glance the whole of the church.

In Sta. Anastasia the apses on each side of the choir have an even number of sides, as has also the sacristy, which is a room on a magnificent scale, to the north of the church. This is a peculiar feature, producing as it does an angle in the centre of the apse, which we shall see again at Venice and Vicenza, and which is seldom seen out of Italy.[13]

The whole is so simple in design and construction that it depends for its rich effect on the painting which covers almost every part of it, and which harmonizes well with the architectural lines. The decorations appear to have been done, or at any rate commenced, within a short period of the completion of the church, and are therefore very valuable. The ground of the painting is white, many of the patterns of borders being very elaborate compositions of flowers and foliage. The main arches are painted to represent voussoirs of red brick and stone, but I am inclined to think that they are really entirely of brick; their soffeits, which are very broad and flat, are all painted with large scroll patterns of foliage. In the groining the diagonal ribs are painted at the intersection with stripes of colour alternating with white, and on each side of all the ribs a wide border of foliage is painted, whilst in the centre of each groining-cell some large device is painted in a medallion, some of these being merely ornamental, others having figures. The detail of much of the painting is cinquecento in its character, and not valuable as an example to be literally copied,[14] but its general effect is certainly very beautiful, and it is worthy of all praise in respect of the strictness with which it is kept subservient to the architecture, and in some respects, indeed,

Pavements. Page 89.]

even serves to atone for its deficiencies, as, e.g., in the broad painted horizontal borders, which take the place, very successfully, of brick or stone string-courses, which in the construction are entirely omitted.

It surprised me, I confess, very much, to find a church painted throughout without any use of gold, and yet with good result; so it is, however; the effect is most solemn and religious, and there is a very rich effect of colour; the fact is, that the white ground answers the same purpose in a degree, though of course not to the full extent, that gold would.

But if the walls are beautiful in their colour, not less so is the pavement, which, from one end of the church to the other, remains to this day to all appearance just as it was on the day that the church was finished. The nave and transepts are all in one pattern; the spaces between the columns in a variety of beautiful designs, and divided from the nave and aisle pavements by a strip of white marble on each side; and the aisles again are on the same scheme throughout. The colours of the marble used are white, red, and bluish grey, and the patterns very simple and generally geometrical in outline, and there is a quiet richness of effect in their arrangement which is exceedingly beautiful. Such a pavement must unhappily be for ever Italian, and we in England can scarce hope ever to attain to anything so exquisite; but we do not well to forget that by the mixture of a small quantity only of marble with our encaustic tiles we should attain to much greater beauty of effect than we can by the use of tiles alone, and there are many towns--as, e.g., Plymouth--the very pavement of whose streets is of a material which might most advantageously be introduced, more often than it has yet been, inside the walls of our sanctuaries, as well as under the feet of every passer along the streets.

There are some monuments and paintings here quite worth looking at. The Pellegrini Chapel, next to the choir, has two fine trefoil-headed monuments in red marble with the background painted with subjects of about the same age (circa 1392); and in the Cavalli Chapel there is an admirably painted wall, against which has been put a monument which, though somewhat rude and coarse in its sculpture, nevertheless produces a very fine effect of colour and architecture combined.[15]

The window tracery of Sta. Anastasia is rather singular plate tracery, consisting of mere piercings through the stone with very little moulding; most of the windows are of two very lofty trefoiled lights with circles and trefoils pierced above, very simple and severe, and remarkable for the quaint way in which the cusping is arranged, not with some reference to vertical lines, as is ordinarily the case with us, but just as fancy or chance seems to have dictated. The clerestory windows are circular openings cusped.

There is a curious but not very happily treated arrangement inside--a step all round the inside walls, projecting some three or four feet from them, and panelled all round against the riser with a small trefoil arcading--the whole in red marble.

Externally the church is almost entirely built in red brick with rich cornices and rather ungainly buttresses and pinnacles of brick; the windows have brick jambs with stone tracery, and on the north side of the choir is a fine lofty campanile, finished at the top with a low, very plain, and octangular capping, and unpierced with openings, except in the belfry-stage. Of the west front only the doorway has been completed; this is in courses of red, grey, and white marble, and most effective; the rest of the front is left in brick, finished exceedingly roughly, with a view to leaving a key for the marbles with which, no doubt, it was intended to veneer the entire front. The wooden framework of this door, of which I give a detail, is very curious; it is of deal, coëval with the doorway, and the framework is external, not internal.

The west front of the church stands in a small piazza, on the north side of which is the little church of San Pietro Martire, between the east end of which and Sta. Anastasia is a wall dividing a small burial-ground from the Piazzetta; on the top of this wall, and supported upon corbels, is one of those monuments peculiarly associated with Verona, because so numerous there, though they are often met with elsewhere in Italy; they are either large pyramidal

canopies supported upon trefoiled arches resting on four marble shafts, with a kind of sarcophagus or an effigy beneath; or else, when attached to a wall, they have two detached shafts supporting the same kind of trefoiled arch and surmounted by a flattish pediment. Their effect is almost invariably beautiful in the extreme, and their only defect is, that they all require to be held together by rods of iron connecting the capitals of the columns. This, however, is soon forgotten when one feels that there is no pretence ever or anywhere at its concealment; and notwithstanding this slight defect, one cannot help loving and admiring them; for there is a grace and beauty about the form and proportion of the Veronese trefoiled arch, such as is never seen, I think, elsewhere, and the very flatness of the carving and the absence of deep moulding seem all adopted in order that nothing may interfere with the simple beauty of the outline of the arch. In this case the monument is supported on a large slab of stone corbelled forward and balanced upon the top of a thin wall over the archway which leads into the churchyard of San Pietro. Four shafts with sculptured capitals, resting on the angles of this slab, support four trefoiled arches, (those at the ends narrower than the others), which are almost destitute of moulding save that the outer line of the arch has a broad band of delicate sculpture all round it. The arch terminates in a small cross, and above on each side is a very flat pediment, moulded and finished on the under side with one of the favourite Italian arcaded corbel-tables; the finish is a heavy pyramidal mass of stone rising from behind the pediments. The four bearing-shafts are of white marble, all the rest of the monument of red. Within the four supporting shafts stands a sarcophagus, supported on the backs of couchant lions, very plain, but ornamented at the angles in very Classic fashion, and bearing a recumbent effigy.

The church of San Pietro has three or four smaller monuments enclosed within its small courtyard; two of them are on the ground and have round arches on detached shafts with an Agnus Dei carved in the centre. The third is corbelled out from the wall, and the face of the monument is covered with sculpture, that of the figures being very inferior in style to that of the foliage enrichments. This little group of monuments, varying in date from 1283 to 1392, is well worth study, and I found it more than usually interesting owing to its entire unlikeness to any English work. The church against which these monuments are built is small but deserves notice; it is of brick with a stone canopy on shafts corbelled out above the west door; the buttresses are mere pilasters, and run up without any weathering till they finish in an arcaded corbel-table at the eaves; the windows have wide brick splays outside, and trefoil heads of stone without any chamfer or moulding; on the south side, the church--in point of size a mere chapel--is divided into four bays, one of which has a monument corbelled out by the side of the window. It is built entirely of red brick, not relieved in any way, except that the window arches are in alternate voussoirs of brick and stone. The wooden framework of the west door deserves notice as being very unlike the English mode of door-framing, and very good in its effect. The accompanying sketch will best explain it: and it must be understood that, instead of being internal, as such framing would usually be in England, in this example it is external, just as in the somewhat similar door of Sta. Anastasia, of which I have already made mention.

Turning back from the Piazzetta of Sta. Anastasia, and traversing again the narrow and gratefully shady street by which we reached it, we soon found ourselves at the end of the Piazza dell’ Erbe, the most picturesque square in the city, and at an early hour in the morning quite a sight to be seen. The whole open space was as full as it could be of dealers in vegetables and fruits, all of them protecting themselves and their stores from the intense glare of the sun under the shade of prodigious umbrellas, at least five times as large as any of ordinary size, and certainly five times as bright in their colours, the prevailing colour being a very bright red. Altogether it was a thoroughly foreign scene. The houses, some ancient, but all picturesque and irregular, surrounding the irregularly-shaped Piazza, the magnificent campanile of the Scaligeri Palace rising proudly behind the houses on the left, the fountain in the centre, and the great column of red Veronese marble rising close to us, which at one time bore the winged lion--mark of the dominion of the Venetians--all combined to produce a very striking picture. An hour or two later in the day when we passed, the people, the umbrellas, and the fruit were all gone, and somewhat of the charm of the place was gone with them.

From the Piazza dell’ Erbe we went to the cathedral, anxious to see and hear somewhat of a service which we found was to take place. There was a great throng of people, and we had some difficulty in finding even standing room among them; we were not at all sorry, however, to have gone, for we came in for a sermon most energetically preached, and enforcing in very powerful language the necessity of repentance. The pulpit was very large, and as the preacher delivered his sermon he walked from side to side, and often repeated again to those on his left the substance of what he had already said to those on his right. The people, who crowded every available place within hearing, were exceedingly silent and attentive; and at intervals the preacher stopped for a minute to cough and use his handkerchief, which was a signal for an immediate general blowing of noses and coughing all over the church. The “_Ebben infelici!_” with which he commenced his sermon, was a good index to its whole tone, and makes me remember with pleasure the vast crowd listening to Christian doctrine in the grand nave of the Duomo. Would that we could see any prospect of the day when in England our larger churches may be used in this way, when, with pews and all their concomitant evils swept away, we may see a vast crowd standing and sitting, leaving no passage-way and no waste room, anxious only that they may, by pressing near, join in the services at the altar, and hear every word of warning and of advice! The nave of Westminster, so thronged, would soon show how great has been our mistake in leaving our large churches so long unused.[16]

The Duomo is a really fine church, Romanesque in its shell, but altered completely internally in the fourteenth century. It has only five bays in length, but the dimensions are so large that the nave and aisles alone measure about 225 feet × 97 feet inside. There are slightly recessed Romanesque apses in the side walls, and a great tomb or shrine of S. Agatha, which is worth looking at. The columns in the interior are very lofty, of red marble, and, instead of being plain and cylindrical, as at Sta. Anastasia, are moulded with very good effect. Their capitals are, however, heavy, and the carving of the foliage on them not at all satisfactory. The whole interior is very solemn, and specially beautiful on this bright September day, with almost all the light excluded by thick curtains--here and there a stray gleam of the most intensely bright light finding its way through some chink, lighting up with sudden brilliancy the deep cool shade, and--reflected from the bright surface of some great marble shaft--suggesting the grandeur which can hardly really be seen.

The choir is divided from the nave by a screen of marble, consisting of detached columns with Ionic capitals and a continuous cornice, the whole screen semi-circular in plan, and coming forward into the nave. This, the work of Sanmichele, is certainly about the most effective work of this kind and age that I have seen.

The west front of the Duomo is still in the main in its original state. It has a rich porch supported on shafts (whose bases rest on the backs of lions), and of two stages in height, a flat pediment surmounting the upper stage. Another flat pedimental cornice is carried over the whole front at the same level; but out of this a wall rises above the central portion the width of the nave and height of the clerestory, which is again surmounted by a third flat pediment--a confused and not very graceful arrangement, which found an imitator in Palladio, when he built that ugliest of fronts, the west end of San Giorgio Maggiore at Venice.

The windows at the ends of the aisles are very Italian in their character. They are insertions in the wall of two narrow lights within an enclosing arch, which is again surrounded by a square line of moulding. The effect of this not uncommon Italian arrangement is exceedingly unsatisfactory, as it appears to make the window with its arch and tracery quite independent, constructively, of the wall in which it is placed; it appears in fact to be merely veneered on to the face of the wall.

On the north side of the cathedral is a cloister of good detail, which was originally of two stages in height, but is now considerably altered in parts. It is exceedingly similar to the cloister of San Zenone, which we shall see presently, consisting of a long arcade of pointed arches carried on marble shafts; it is now in a very ruinous condition.

The Baptistery--San Giovanni in Fonte--is a detached church near the east end of the cathedral, which does not look as if it had been at first intended for its present use. It is a building of the twelfth century, with nave and aisles ending in three apses, lighted by a small clerestory, and with some columns which are probably Roman. The font, which stands in the centre, is of enormous size, and is sculptured with eight subjects beginning with the Annunciation and finishing with the Baptism of Our Lord. These sculptures are very rude. The bason of the font is almost seven feet in diameter, and in its centre is another smaller bason of graceful shape. I do not happen to have seen an explanation of these inner basons in the fonts in Italian baptisteries. They look as if they were meant for the priest to stand in whilst he immersed the catechumens around him.

And now that we have visited two of the great churches, we must no longer delay our visit to the church of Sta. Maria l’Antica, whose small burial-ground is fenced from the busy thoroughfares, which on two sides bound it, by an iron railing of most exquisite design, divided at intervals by piers of stone on whose summits stand gazing upward as in prayer, or downwards as in warning to those who pass below, a beautiful series of saintly figures. Within, a glorious assemblage of monuments meets the eye--one over the entrance doorway, the others either towering up in picturesque confusion above the railing which has been their guardian from all damage for so many centuries, or meekly hiding their humility behind the larger masses of their companions.

The monuments are all to the members of one family--the Scaligeri--who rose to power in the thirteenth century, and held sway in Verona until almost the end of the fourteenth. In this space of time it was, therefore, that these monuments were erected, and they are consequently of singular interest, not only for the excessive beauty of the group of marble and stone which, in the busiest highway of the city, among tall houses and crowds of people, has made this churchyard, for some five hundred years, the central point of architectural interest, but because they give us dated examples of the best pointed work during nearly the whole time of its prevalence in Verona. In the monument of the first Duke we see the elements of that beauty which, after ascending to perfection in that of another, again descends surely and certainly in the monument of Can Signorio, the largest and most elaborate of all, and, therefore, I am afraid, the most commonly admired, but the one which shows most evidence of the rise of the Renaissance spirit, and the fall of true art. Nor is it, I think, to be forgotten, as an evidence of the kind of moral turpitude which so often precedes or accompanies the fall of art, that this Can Signorio first murdered his own brother Cangrande II. that he might obtain his inheritance, and then, before he died, erected his own monument, and adorned it with effigies of SS. Quirinus, Valentine, Martin, George, Sigismund, and Louis, together with allegorical figures of the Virtues with whom he of all men had least right to associate himself in death, when in life he had ever despised them. The inscription, which records the name of the architect on this monument, does but record the vanity of him who was content thus to pander to the wretched Can Signorio’s desire to excuse the memory of his atrocious life by the sight of an immense cenotaph.[17]

The tomb of Cangrande I. forms the portal of the church as well as the monument of the first and greatest of the family. It is perhaps altogether the finest of all; the shafts which bear the pyramidal canopy are supported on corbels; between them is a simple sarcophagus sculptured with a bas-relief, and upon it lies Cangrande with his arms crossed in token of his resignation and faith. At the top of the pyramidal covering is the figure of the brave knight riding forth to war on his gaily caparisoned steed.

Next to this monument in date, as in merit, is that of Mastino II., wanting perhaps in some of the severe simplicity of the other, but even more striking, as it stands at the angle of the cemetery. It is a thoroughly grand and noble erection of two stages in height, the lower unimportant, and only serving as a means of raising the monument sufficiently high to be well seen from the exterior; upon this stand four shafts, between which, and supported upon four much smaller shafts, is the sarcophagus on which lies the recumbent effigy, at whose head stand angels with expanded wings[18] guarding the deceased. The sarcophagus is adorned with bas-reliefs--that on the west side being the Crucifixion--and has engaged angle-shafts. The four main bearing-shafts at the angles of the monument have finely carved caps with square abaci from which rise simple trefoiled arches with steep pediments on each side filled with sculpture in relief, and between these are exquisitely simple niches, each a miniature reproduction of the entire monument, and containing between their delicate detached shafts figures of saints. The whole is finished with a heavy pyramidal capping, crocketed at the angles with crockets so abominable in their shape and carving that they go far to spoil the entire work, and surmounted by the figure of the Capitano del Popolo, spear in hand, riding on his war-horse; the horse and horseman riding with their faces towards the setting sun, as all in life must ever ride; the effigy below lying so that at the last day the beams of the day-star in the East may first meet its view, and awaken him that sleepeth here in peace.

This contrary position of the figure in life and in death, observed also in others of these monuments, is an evidence of the care and thoughtfulness with which every detail of these noble works was wrought out.

The monument of Can Signorio is not worthy of so long a description; it is octagonal in its plan, and in many respects below the idea shadowed out so beautifully in the others; the reduplication of niches and gables, far from improving, only perplexes the design: and when to this is added that the carving throughout, as well as the other details, show strong signs of a leaning towards Renaissance, one may see some reason why this, the most elaborate and complicated of all the monuments, is after all far from being the most successful.

Mastino II. died in the year 1351, and we may therefore, I think, look upon his monument as a fair enough example of Italian architecture just at the period at which in England it had reached its culminating point, and a careful examination of it cannot, therefore, be thrown away. In the first place, I must notice that the sculpture, which has the air of being rather sparingly used as too sacred a thing to be idly or profusely employed, is exceedingly good. The foliage is almost always very closely copied from natural forms, is very thin and delicate in its texture, and thus really present to the gazer that idealized petrifaction of nature which it ought always to be the sculptor’s effort to give, and not, as is, I fear, sometimes the case, even in good English work, so profusely scattered over the whole surface as to give one a sense of its lack of great value. The worst part of the carving is, as I have before said, that of the crockets, which are as bad as the worst modern Gothic could be. The sculpture of the human figure is throughout very good; remarkable for simple, bold, deep folds in the draperies, quite Gothic in spirit, and much more akin to our best fourteenth-century work than to any Classic examples.

As an example of the science of moulding this work is however valueless; there is absolutely no moulding upon it; and why should there be? Would it have been well that the lovely marble, whose brilliant white gloss was sure ere long to be stained with dark streaks of black by the beating of rain and the staining of age, whilst here and there the white would stand out more brilliantly than ever,--would it have been well, I say, that this should have been still further streaked with deep lines of many mouldings? Most assuredly not: the architect had to deal with a material which best takes its polish and exhibits its beauty and purity when used in flat surfaces and in shallow carving, and he did right therefore in not moulding it as he would have moulded stone.

There is a sharpness and hardness about the lines of the arches, however, which perhaps almost verges upon rudeness, and, though I can see that it may be fairly defended, I could yet wish that it might have been softened.

But the points in which such work is a grand example to us are, first, the value which it shows that we ought to place upon the simple detached circular shaft, and, next, the beauty and strength of effect which the cusping of a large arch in a proper manner gives. In these two points this monument and most of its class teach us lessons which we ought not to be unwilling to learn, and which, if we at all wish to develope beyond the point at which our own ancestors ever arrived, we must not fail to attend to in our own work.

And now I must bid farewell to this lovely spot, the most attractive certainly, to me, in Verona. The situation of the monuments, rather huddled together, with the old church behind them, the archway into the Piazza dei Signori on the other side, and the beautiful iron grille[19] which surrounds them, the number of saintly and warlike figures and the confused mass of pinnacle and shaft, half obscured by the railing, do, I verily believe, make the cemetery of Sta. Maria l’Antica one of the best spots in the world for the study of Christian art in perfection. What either Köln or Regensburg Cathedral, or the Wiesen-Kirche at Söest is to Germany, the Choir of Westminster Abbey or the Chapter-House at Southwell to England, Amiens Cathedral or the Sainte Chapelle of Paris to France, such is the Cemetery of the Scaligeri in Verona to Italy--the spot where at a glance the whole essence of the system of a school of artists may be comprehended, lavished on a small but most stately effort of their genius.

Close to their burial-place stands also the Palace of the Scaligers. The old portion of this fronts towards the Piazza dei Signori, a small square used only by foot-passengers, and surrounded by elaborate Renaissance work. The buildings surround a quadrangle--the Mercato Vecchio--out of one angle of which rises the immense campanile which I have already noticed, and which is said to have been erected by Can Signorio about A.D. 1368, though I should have thought that a rather earlier date would have tallied better with its style. Besides this the most striking feature is the external staircase in the courtyard, whose treatment, of a kind not uncommon in ancient Italian architecture, is very beautiful, though I fear very weak and unstable, if I may judge by the number of the iron bars by which it is held together. There are many windows here of very good detail, and an arcaded cornice all round the courtyard, and close by and also facing the Piazza dei Signori there is another fine lofty battlemented tower.

In a street close to the monuments of the Scaligers, whose name I have forgotten, but in a line with the Viccolo Cavaletto, I found a most valuable example of domestic work in a very fairly perfect state. As far as I could make it out, it consisted originally of three sides of a quadrangle, the fourth side towards the street being enclosed by a wall and arched gateway. The buildings all had arcades on the ground-level, forming a kind of cloister, and the staircase to the first floor was external, and built against the wall on the road side. A great many alterations have been made in the

house at various times, but in the sketch which I give I have shewn so much only of it as appeared to belong to the original foundation. In its construction pointed and round arches have been used quite indiscriminately, and in some of the arches the depth of the voussoirs increases towards the centre of the arch. This is a rather favourite Italian device, and I was always as much pleased as at the first with the effect of strength and good proportion which it produces. Most of the arches are built with alternate voussoirs of brick and stone, but beyond the outside line of the brick and stone arch there is invariably a line of very thin bricks laid all round the arch, delicately defining without pretending to strengthen the main arch, just as a label does with us. I noticed too, generally, that this thin brick was of a deeper, better colour than the other bricks, which are seldom any better than the common English bricks, and are always built with very coarse joints. This house is finished at the top with the quaint forked or swallow-tailed Ghibelline battlement, so characteristic of Verona, and which, as we found afterwards, was in use at Mantua, Cremona, and for some distance south of Verona, but which I first met with in Verona.

I am not pretending to journalize regularly, but rather

to note down the remarkable points of the various buildings as they occur to me, and, before I forget that it was Sunday when I was first looking at the Veronese churches, I must mention that in the evening we found our way to the great Piazza di Brà, surrounded by barracks and public buildings, and containing the vast Roman amphitheatre for which Verona is so celebrated. Its size is prodigious, and, except in the outer circuit of wall, it is nearly perfect; indeed, it is impossible to look upon such a vast structure without a great admiration for the men who ventured to conceive and carry it into execution.

It is difficult now to conceive how the audience could be found who would fill so vast a space; and certainly the modern efforts in this direction are mainly serviceable as shewing the immensity of the theatre. When I was last in Verona a theatre had been erected in the arena, and a performance was in progress. The audience might have been tolerably large in an enclosed theatre, but here it seemed to be the merest handful; and when we stood on the highest attainable part of the walls, we found ourselves so far from the stage as to be unable to hear a single word that was said. There is no need to describe here so well-known a building as this; suffice it to say, that though the detail of the architecture is poor, the general design and execution of the structural arrangements, and the magnificence of the whole scheme cannot fail to strike one with the same wonder that one feels in the presence of many of these great Roman works; and it is striking indeed, to see one of them so perfect as to be still capable of use, and really used.

All the Austrian portion of the inhabitants of Verona crowded the Piazza di Brà on Sunday evening to hear an Austrian military band, and we enjoyed not a little a stroll among a crowd of uniforms of all shapes, kinds, and colours. Verona more than most towns, even in Austrian Lombardy, seems to be sacrificed entirely to Austrian soldiery. It is quite melancholy to walk along a street of palaces, some of them converted into old-furniture stores, others going to ruin; and when suddenly you do come upon a flourishing and smart palace, if you look in you are sure to see an Austrian sentinel, and find that it is an officer’s quarters; and equally when you meet a conveyance, if it is smart and dashing, with good horses and a stylish coachman, it is quite certain to be occupied by some dignified-looking military man. So, too, on the Monday evening, when we went to the French opera (a very pretty, tastefully got-up theatre by the way) there were absolutely none but Austrians in the house--in the boxes, officers and their wives, in the pit, subordinate officers and privates. Who can see this immense staff of foreigners in occupation of a city like Verona without feeling sadly for the people who live under such a rule, and for the ruler who is compelled to maintain such a force to keep his subjects in order?[20]

This, however, is a digression, and I must go on to describe the remaining architectural features of the old city.

On the way to San Zenone Maggiore, which is quite on the extreme western verge of the city, one passes the Castello Vecchio, a very grand pile of simple mediæval fortifications erected in the fourteenth century by Cangrande II. There are several towers and lofty walls, all topped with the forked Veronese battlement; and connected with it is the magnificent Ponte di Castel-Vecchio, a great bridge across the rushing Adige, built entirely of brick, the parapet of the regular Veronese type, and the piers between the arches rather large and angular, and finishing with battlements rather above those of the bridge. The main arch is of great size--it is said to be not less than one hundred and sixty feet--and one of the most remarkable points in its appearance is, that, instead of being in the centre, it is on the side of the river next the castle, while the other two arches, descending rapidly to the north bank of the river, give the bridge an odd, irregular, and down-hill kind of look. The architectural features of this bridge are, however, not the only objects of interest on this spot; for just after passing the castle the road bends down to the side of the river, and presents an admirable view of the campanili, steeples, and spires, with the steep hills on the opposite bank of the stream, and the mountains in the distance, with the rapid, turgid, white-looking Adige flowing strongly at one’s feet.

A longish walk through squalid suburbs leads us to the open space in front of the noble basilica of San Zenone; it is a desolate waste-looking space, and the poor, old, uncared-for church looks now as though its day was well-nigh past; as if neglect and apathy were all that men could give now where once they were wont to lavish so much of their treasure, and love, and art.

The church, as it now stands, seems to have been entirely rebuilt in the course of the eleventh or twelfth century, and its proportions are so very grand, and its detail generally so perfect, that I think it may certainly be regarded as on the whole the noblest example of its class; indeed, except the very best Gothic work of the best period, I doubt whether any work of the Middle Ages so much commands respect and admiration as this Lombard work. There is a breadth and simplicity about it, and an expression of such deep thought in the arrangement of materials and in the delicate sculpture, which with a sparing hand is introduced, that one cannot sufficiently admire the men who planned and executed it. Beyond this, the constructive science was so excellent and so careful, that with ordinary care such a church as San Zenone would seem still likely to last for ages.

The view of the west front is certainly very striking. The whole church has been singularly little modernized. By its side to the north is a fine simple red brick tower, I suppose originally belonging to the city walls; behind and near the east end of the church, but visible here, the tall and much-arcaded campanile; and on the other side the little church of San Procolo with a fourteenth-century painting of Our Lord under a gabled canopy overhanging the doorway. The west front of San Zenone is simple but dignified. The nave and aisles are finished with cornices following the flat pitch of the roofs. The walls are divided by many vertical lines of pilasters which rise from the plinth to the eaves-cornice. The main part of this front is stone, but a good deal of marble is used, e.g., the rose window has tracery of red marble enclosed within an order of white marble; the doorway and sculpture are in white marble, once much enriched with colour, and the arcaded band all across the front is of red marble. Add to this that the stone used is all of an extremely warm yellow colour, and an idea may be formed of the effort that was made here in the principal front (as often in Italian churches) to shew that God’s house was the noblest that could be built.

The doorway well deserves a chapter to itself. Its lintel has illustrations of the labours of the twelve months, its jambs subjects on the right from the Old Testament, on the left from the New. In front of this door there are detached shafts standing on monsters and supporting a low canopy. An inscription on the façade “Salvet in eternum qui sculpsit ista Guglielmus,” gives the name of the sculptor, the same man probably who about the middle of the twelfth century sculptured the western doorway of the cathedral at Modena.

No less worthy of study are the bronze doors of this doorway. Here, as is so often the case in mediæval Italian works, we have the names of the artists employed--Guglielmo and Nicola da Figarola--with the pious expression of hope that he who sculptured the work might be saved eternally. The subjects are very rude in their detail; they illustrate subjects from the Old Testament, and are executed in thin plates of bronze nailed on to the wooden doors. A row of small windows, one in each of the many divisions of the front, extends all across near the top of the porch; whilst above is a large circular window, filled in with wheel tracery, and treated as was not uncommon as an illustration of the Wheel of Fortune. Round this window is an inscription explaining its symbolism.

We went first into the cloister on the north side of the nave. The arches are very small, and of brick, supported on coupled shafts of red Veronese marble, which have marble caps and bases, and rest on a dwarf wall of stone capped with a thin course of marble. The arch bricks are of a rich red colour, and contrast well with the brickwork of the ordinary kind above them; they are used without any kind of moulding or ornament--and yet I doubt whether I have ever seen a more lovely cloister than this. The arcades on the north and south sides have round arches; those on the east and west are pointed; and on the north is a projecting arcade of the same detail, which once formed the lavatory. The whole of this cloister is in a very sad state of filth, neglected and unused, and will, I fear, ere long become ruinous.[21]

From the cloister you enter by a side door into the north aisle of the choir; much better, however, would it always be to enter from the west, for it is there, when standing at the top of the flight of ten or twelve steps which leads down from the door to the floor of the nave, looking down the great length of the church, scanning its singular perspective of timber roofing, the great height and simplicity of its walls, and the mysterious view down into the crypt under the choir through the recently opened arches, that one feels most deeply the great and religious effect of the church. To an eye used to northern Gothic there is something very new in such a building. Its shape, its material, its arrangement, are all unlike what an English eye is used to, but I cannot say that I paused for an instant in doubt as to whether I might really admire or not; for I felt at once how very good the work was, not only in its general effect, but as much in the treatment of the details, in its colour, and in its arrangement.

The general plan is very simple--a great parallelogram, divided into a nave of vast width with northern and southern aisles; the aisles terminated with square east ends, the choir with an apse of five bays, which is, however, of later date than the rest of the church. The chief singularity in the design is the division of the piers of the main arcades into primary and secondary--the first being large heavy piers supporting great arches spanning the nave and aisles, which are finished in a line with the top of the walls; and the latter more delicate circular marble columns of very Classical character, with finely carved capitals, and looking almost too slight to support the vast height of clerestory wall which towers up above the arcade which they carry. The timber roof, or ceiling, is curious; the framing is all concealed, with the exception of the collar-beams, which connect the points of the trefoil which forms the internal line of ceiling. This trefoil outline is all boarded, divided into panels, and painted. The effect of this great length of panelled roofing, partly concealed by the great arches which

cross the nave, is certainly fine. The wooden roofs of the aisles, too, are original, and their beams are painted very much like the Austrian sentry-boxes, in zigzag lines of black and buff. Much of this painting, however, did not appear to me to be old.