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
Beginning from the side of the cloister adjoining the monastery church,
we have first nineteen scenes by Bazzi. We see Benedict as a youth
leaving his father's house at Norcia to go to study humanities at Rome,
his faithful nurse (who plays the same part in the original legend)
riding with him on a donkey; and then, his leaving the Roman schools,
"instructed with learned ignorance and furnished with unlearned wisdom"
as Pope Gregory has it, because scandalised at the dissolute lives of
his fellow-students. These two frescoes show that Bazzi had been
impressed by Pinturicchio's work at Siena; they recall Enea Silvio
setting out from Genoa and the Congress of Mantua. In the third,
Benedict mends the borrowed sieve that his nurse had broken, and the
townsmen hang it up at their church door, "to the end that not only men
then living, but also their posterity, might understand how greatly
God's grace did work with him upon his first renouncing of the world."
Here we see Bazzi himself, a fine piece of self portraiture, surrounded
by his pet birds and beasts, wearing the knightly robes and sword that
had been discarded by a gentleman of Milan who had just entered the
Order, and which the Abbot gave him in part payment for his work. Next,
Benedict meets Romanus on the way to Subiaco. Then, while Romanus lets
down a loaf of bread to Benedict in his cave, the devil, "envying at the
charity of the one and the refection of the other," hurls a stone and
breaks the bell with which Romanus used to signal to his young friend;
the painter's pet badger calmly drinks at a pond the while. Next, a
certain priest, by divine inspiration, brings a dinner to Benedict on
Easter Day. In the seventh fresco, Benedict instructs the shepherds who
found out his retreat; "and for corporal meat, which they brought him,
they carried away spiritual food for their souls." Then he rolls among
thorns, to overcome a temptation of the flesh that the devil put into
his mind by the representation of "a certain woman which some time he
had seen." After that, certain monks, by their persistence, induce him
against his will to become their abbot. Finding him too austere, they
attempt to poison him; but when he makes the sign of the Cross over the
cup, it breaks in pieces, and he goes back unharmed to his solitude.
Bazzi has made the ill-favoured monk, who was most insistent in urging
Benedict to be abbot, the one to offer him the poisoned cup. Then, as
many flock to him, he builds the twelve monasteries at Subiaco. In the
twelfth fresco, one of the finest of the series, Benedict receives
Maurus and Placidus, the young sons of the Roman nobles Equitius and
Tertullus, who are accompanied by a splendid troop of retainers. Next,
he beats the devil out of a monk who would not say his prayers; he makes
a fountain spring forth on the top of a mountain; he makes the iron head
of a bill that had slipped into the water return to its handle again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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