The Story of Siena and San GimignanoGardner, Edmund G.
History
The Story of Siena and San Gimignano
Gardner, Edmund G.
Art -- Italy -- Siena; San Gimignano (Italy) -- History; Siena (Italy) -- History
The frescoed Christ over the door of the church is probably by the same
painter. In the second cloister there are a number of frescoes
originally painted at the beginning of the Quattrocento. They are
greatly damaged, obliterated in parts, completely restored in others; we
get a vague general impression of hermits doing works of mercy and
seeing visions, of St Augustine giving his rule, of holy deaths in
convents and hermitages. Further on are five better preserved. The first
is the story of Giovanni di Guccio, told by Fra Filippo.[166] Giovanni
di Guccio, who belonged to a wealthy family of the Monte de' Nove,
entered Lecceto as a boy, but in the noviciate found the coarse food so
trying that he thought that he would have to leave the Order. In the
wood he met "an ancient man of right venerable aspect," who confirmed
him in his vocation. "And suddenly He showed him the wounds of His side
and of His hands and feet, from which there issued such great splendour
that that of the Sun is nothing in comparison with it, and they all
seemed bleeding. Then, straightway, He vanished." This Giovanni was
prior in 1323 and often told this story as an example, as of another
person, and not until his death did the brethren know that he spoke of
himself. In the other frescoes, we see an abbot preaching in front of
the convent, a painted ideal of penitential life and pious death, the
monks journeying with a sainted prior in their midst, and the return of
the lost sheep to the fold. The whole cloister, with the well in the
middle, is picturesque. There is little to see in the church, where a
few frescoed saints seem striving to emerge from the whitewash.
Down among the vines (on the left of the entrance as you face the
convent) is the famous holy well, the "Poggio Santo," now dilapidated.
According to the legend, piously recorded by Landucci, there was at
first no water to be had, but one of the hermits, _novella Moisè_
"novello" Moisè, struck the arid soil with a rod, and at once a spring
of limpid water gushed out, with miraculous powers of curing those
stricken with fever. One of the original hermits is said to have been
buried in this field, and our pious historian even discovers some hidden
mystery of divine things in the colours of the stones that lie around.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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