Sometimes It
Was Touching, Sometimes It Was Revolting; And In Italy It Is Not
Otherwise.
The Campo Santo of San Miniato at Florence, the Campo Santo
at Bologna, the Campo Santo wherever else you find it, you find of one
quality with the Campo Santo at Genoa.
It makes you the helpless
confidant of family pride, of bruised and lacerated love, of fond
aspiration, of religious longing, of striving faith, of foolish vanity
and vulgar pretence, but, if the traveller would read the local
civilization aright, he cannot do better than go to study it there.
My third experience of the Genoese Campo Santo was different only in
quantity from the first and second. There seemed more of the things,
better and worse, but the increasing witness was of the art which
rendered the fact with unsparing realism, sometimes alloyed with
allegory and sometimes not, but always outright, literal, strong, rank.
The hundreds of groups, reliefs, statues, busts; the long aisles where
the dead are sealed in the tableted shelves of the wall, like the dead
in the catacombs, the ample space of open ground enclosed by the
cloisters and set thick with white crosses, are all dominated by a
colossal Christ which, in my fancy, remains of very significant effect.
It is as if no presence less mighty and impressive could centre in
itself the multitudinous passions, wills, and hopes expressed in those
incongruous monuments and reduce them to that unity of meaning which one
cannot deny them.
The Campo Santo of Genoa is a mortuary gloss of Genoese history: of the
long succession of civic strifes and foreign wars common to all the
Italian republics, now pacified at last by a spirit of unity, of
brotherhood. At Genoa, more than anywhere else in Italy except Milan,
you are aware of the North - its strenu-ousness, its enterprise, its
restless outstretching for worlds beyond itself. Columbus came with the
gift of a New World in his hand, and, in the fulness of time, Mazzini
came with the gift of a Newer World in his hand: the realization of
Christ in the ideal of duties without which the old ideal of rights is
heathen and helpless. Against the rude force of Genoa, the aristocratic
beauty of such a place as Pisa was nothing; only Florence and Venice
might vie with her. But she had not the inspiration of Florence, her
art, her literature; the dialect in which she uttered herself is harsh
and crabbed, and no poet known beyond it has breathed his soul into it;
her architecture was first the Gothic from over the Alps, and then of
the Renaissance which built the palaces of her merchants in a giant bulk
and of a brutal grandeur. She had not the political genius of Venice,
the oligarchic instinct of self-preservation from popular misgovernment
and princely aggression. Her story is the usual Italian story of a
people jealous of each other, and, in their fear of a native tyrant,
impatiently calling in one foreign tyrant after another and then
furiously expelling him.
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