VII.  ROSES OF PAESTUM BY EDWARD MCCURDY

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ROSES OF PAESTUM.

“EGYPT in her pride had sent thee, Caesar, winter roses as a rare gift. But as the sailor from Memphis came near to thy city he thought scorn of the gardens of the Pharaohs, so beautiful was Spring and odorous Flora’s grace, and the glory of our Paestum country, so sweetly did the pathway blush with trailing garlands wherever his glance or step might fall in his wandering.”

And Martial asks that Egypt should rather henceforth send grain and take roses, seeing that in these she must yield the palm to the Roman winter.

The Roman winter hast still its eulogists, — it is hard to overstate its perennial beauty; but the supply of Paestum roses can no longer be accounted in its praise.

The glory of the Paestan country is still a thing to wonder at. The city is set between the mountains and the sea. Behind it the wild glens wind steeply to the huge amphitheatre of the Apennines, whose jagged peaks strain upwards to the deep-blue dome of the Calabrian sky. To the north the Gulf of Salerno is broken in tiny bays, in 200 which nestle Positano and Amalfi, and above the latter Ravello is seen gleaming proudly on its height. A meadow lies between the city and the sea, and across the bay the eye rests on the islands of the Sirens, and Capri.

The city was founded by Greek colonists from Sybaris in about 600 B. C. It remained practically a Greek city after becoming subject to the native Lucanians, and we are told that the inhabitants were wont to assemble every year to lament their captivity and recall the memory of their greatness. Posidonia became Paestum, and flourished under Roman rule. Her legions took part in the Punic wars, but her famed arts were ever those of peace. Virgil as well as Martial tells of her flowery gardens, and of the roses that bloomed both in spring and autumn “biferique Rosaria Paesti”; and whenever Roman poets singing of the rose were minded that she should be known of local habitation, it was for the most part in Paestan gardens that they gathered her; so that the roses of Paestum became known as emblems of her beauty. Life receded from the city in the latter days of the Empire, and finally the Saracens sacked and 201 devastated it, and the Normans, a century later, under Robert Guiscard carried off all that they could carry of its sculpture to Salerno and Amalfi, thee founding cathedrals with marble from its temples. The mouth of the river Silarus meanwhile had silted up, and the plain had become a marsh, stagnant, and miasmal.

The city now is a solitude. A few fragments of the ancient walls and the lower part of one of the gates remain; — yet the little that is left of what the Romans built seems new, and, like the few modern houses of Pesto, seems to shrink away in timidity before the three Greek temples whose huge colonnades tower majestically to the horizon. They lie facing the sea and the sunset robed in the awful beauty of desolation and decay, — timeless monuments of an immemorial past. Of the three, the temple of Poseidon is at once the oldest, the largest, and the most complete.

“New Gods are crowned in the city” — or were in the years before the city became a solitude peopled only by marbles and memories. New temples of strange worship were set beside this temple of Poseidon; 202 and from these, too, the flame of human veneration has passed, and the altars have been bared of sacrifice and votive offering, and they have passed away with the passing of the life that dwelt beneath their shadow. Immutable, the temple of the sea-god has been witness of their coming and departing, and by its contrast with their transience it would seem that beneath the surges that murmur to the meadow, the god still lies in power, potent as of old to guard his sanctuary.

There is a fascination and a sense of content in the scene which is in itself a recognition of the supreme, the inevitable beauty with which nature has encompassed the desolate temples.

The sunlight is as a wand of enchantment wonder-working; the air quivers golden to the alchemy of its touch; the smitten facets of the marble gleam and glister with hues iridescent. Wild flowers spring luxuriant from the crevices of the columns; lizards slumber on the stones; all around incessantly the dry chirp chirp of the cicalas; and in the meadow to seaward herds of oxen wrench the long coarse grasses. Sun-steeped nature 203 covers the footprints of the past, yet her beauty hides not — rather enforces — that they are footprints and they are desolate. Cicalas sing where once was the music of many voices; acanthus now where once grew roses; and of the rose-gardens whereof the Roman poets sang no vestige remains.

They are in thought fair to dwell upon, and they call a fair picture before us, the long festoons of roses trailing around balconies or gardens. Nestling amid their fragrance, lovers would sit at nightfall and listen to some singer from Syracuse. Perhaps as the singing ceased they would wander together in the moonlight down the long colonnades and look over the sea to the isles of the Sirens dark and tremulous in the evening air; and stay awhile, silently, hearing the murmur of the stillest wave, the one pitying all those mariners who had been lured to death, the other thinking of that strange mastering music which had drawn all men unto it until Ulysses’ ship passed by unheedingly and the singers perished and the rocks were silent, wondering, maybe, if the sea had memory and in its voice lived their song imperishable; and then they would turn and 204 wander back among the roses and think no more upon death.

Fantasies — woven of dream! Imaginings — of days that are dead to memory! Yet the Greek city by the bay of Salerno must have witnessed many such scenes in the days of the roses’ flowering.

As the ivy round the oak so legend twines its tendrils around history, clinging to and supported by its strength, yet chapleting it with leaves undying after that its sap has departed, disdaining or denying the touch of death. So when legend drawn by the grandeur of their deeds has twined her tendrils around the names of kings and warriors, her contest with death is not for their memory alone, she tells rather that they are not dead but fallen asleep, and that in the fulness of time they will awaken. So Arthur “Rex quondam Rexque futurus” abides in Avilion to be healed of his wound, and “men say that he shall come again and he shall win the holy cross”; so Charlemagne, and Barbarossa, sleeping in his mountain fastness — they will awaken, legends say, in the hour of need.

As with kings above their compeers in prowess exalted, so with the flower of flowers, 205

“Ut Rosa flos florum
  Sic Arthurus rex regum,”

and the roses of Paestum, the roses of Greek beauty growing on Italian soil, in Virgil “the rose twice-flowering,” “biferique Rosaria Paesti,” passed not into memory when their gardens were forsaken. They were upgathered of the immortal spirit of beauty, and lay in slumber until the fulness of the time of reflowering, when in the valley of the Arno all the arts resurgent were one harmony of joy and thanksgiving.

To consider the second flowering of the roses, we must leave the Greek city, deserted and finally despoiled by the Normans, and pass to Pisa.

Pisa in the twelfth century was the mistress of the Tyrrhene sea. Her supremacy extended along the coast from Spezia to the port of Rome. Her grandeur in its zenith is perhaps only comparable in its conditions to that of Venice two centuries later. She took part in the Crusades and had great trade with the East. She had won from the Saracens Sardinia and the Balearic Isles, and had defeated their fleets off Tunis and Palermo.

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Ever Ghibelline, ready to fight the Emperor’s feuds as well as her own, she warred with all her neighbours and especially with the other maritime republics. “The mad little sea-falcon never caught sight of another water-bird on the wing but she must hawk at it; and after the fall of the Hohenstaufen she was at last subdued on the sea by her inveterate and often defeated foe Genoa, at the battle of Meloria.

Her fleets returning in the days of her triumph, brought back spoil and art treasure: the Pandects of Justinian from Amalfi, earth from Palestine that her dead might rest in her Campo Santo, marble sculpture from the East, from Sicily, and from various parts of the peninsula to adorn her cathedral, which she had built in memory of her victory over the Saracens off Palermo.

Among this sculpture was a sarcophagus with two scenes in bas-relief from the story of Phaedra and Hippolytus, which for many centuries stood beside one of the doors of the Cathedral. It there served as the tomb of Beatrice of Lorraine, the mother of the Countess Matilda of Tuscany who has been by some identified with the Matelda whom 207 Dante saw beyond the stream of the Lethe walking in a meadow singing and gathering flowers, and who became his guide through the Terrestrial Paradise.

The custom of using these sarcophagi as Christian tombs was not infrequent, and there are similar sculptured sarcophagi in the Cathedrals of Amalfi and Salerno.

These, together with the numerous marble columns of atrium and campanile, were undoubtedly taken from Paestum; and it is perhaps permissible — theorizing where record can neither substantiate nor confute — to assign to the relief of Phaedra and Hippolytus the same place of origin. The Pandects were in all probability not the only trophy which the Pisans carried away after their victory over Amalfi, and we know that sculptured reliefs from Paestum were there ready to their hand.

The sarcophagus, whether from Paestum or elsewhere, is carved in the classical Greek manner, and Vasari tells us that as it stood by the door of the Cathedral it drew the attention of Niccola Pisano, who was working there under some Byzantine masters. “Niccola was attracted by the excellence of 208 this work, in which he greatly delighted, and which he studied diligently, with the many other valuable sculptures of the relics around him, imitating the admirable manner of these works with so much success, that no long time had elapsed before he was esteemed the best sculptor of his time.”

There is nothing sensational about this statement, and its moderation may incline us to accept it wihout cavil on the much vexed question of Vasari’s inaccuracies.

Niccola Pisano was destined to be the founder of a new school of sculputre, but he was then an apprentice, and like Cimabue in his youth, was studying his art under Byzantine masters, who were then the best exponents of the arts of design; and this is invariably the way in which genius prepares itself for active service, — there is no rupture in tradition, the old is assimilated and then the step forward is made.

He saw in the Greek reliefs a precision of touch, a feeling of dignity and beauty which surpassed anything that his Byzantine masters had attained to in their works.

Still working we presume with the Byzantines, he added a new teacher, and served a 209 new apprenticeship to the work of this unknown Greek. Athena issued forth from the head of Zeus fully armed and equipped, but the votaries of her arts know no such perfection of birth — for them toil ever precedes achievement. So after studying the reliefs diligently, he began to try to copy bits of them, at first probably with no success at all, still he kept on, for he knew there was something to learn from this carving if he could only learn it; and his attempts at imitation grew a little bit like, and then more like, until finally he found he could carve heads quite like those on the sarcophagus if he wanted to, and vary them a bit if he didn’t, although if he varied them the faces were still Greek and not Pisan, and they probably looked altogether nicer than the originals because they were not weather-stained or lacking any hands or noses through the mischances of time and travel.

When the Pisans saw what Niccola could do they employed him to make a pulpit for the Baptistery, and this he completed in 1260, being then about 55 years of age. It is perhaps the most beautiful work of its kind in Italy, and has for rival only Niccola’s own 210 subsequent work at Siena. It is hexagonal, built entirely of white marble, the angles resting on Corinthian pillars which alternately descend to the ground or are carried on the backs of lions; from their capitals spring trefoiled arches, and above these, on five of the sides of the hexagon, are bas-reliefs of the Nativity, the Adoration of the Kings, the Presentation in the Temple, the Crucifixion and the Last Judgment.

Dignified in conception, restrained in manner, antique in the stateliness of its beauty, it seems rather the work of one on whose ears echoes of the past have fallen so that he seeks to reawaken and recreate her lost delight, than of one whose work was destined to be a guide and an ensample to future generations; and yet it would be hard to point to any statue or painting executed in the whole extent of Italy, from the Alpine valleys of Piedmont to the sun-steeped plains of Calabria, which can vie with this sculptured pulpit of Niccola Pisano, standing now in the Baptistery of Pisa as is has stood for over six hundred years, in its claim to be considered as the first completed endeavour of renascent Italian art.

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For in these bas-reliefs, five years before the birth of Dante, sixteen years before the birth of Giotto, were exemplified the principles which the genius of both was to illustrate, — that the study of the antique was to win back the beauty of its ideal to the service of the present, — that fidelity to nature — the spirits in the Antepurgatory perceiving from Dante’s breath that he was alive, gathering round in wonder as the multitude flock round a herald to hear what news he brings: or the hind in the fresco at Assisi, who on hands and knees and with all the eagerness of thirst is drinking the water that springs from the rock: or the goat scratching his ear, in the bas-relief of the Nativity, — that this fidelity to nature, this truth in common things, was as an open sesame to win for the arts entrance in the minds of men, and that the first fruits were dedicate to the service of God.

Comparing Niccola’s work with his models, we see that the Phaedra of the sarcophagus has suggested the Madonna in the Adoration of the Kings, and that the high priest in the Presentation is the Bacchus of an antique sculptured vase in the Campo Santo. In 212 these metamorphoses we may see a forecast of how the later exuberance of the quest for beauty was to blend unheedingly things incongruous, — things pertaining to Christ and things pertaining to Diana — grouping reliefs of the story of the Fall and of Hercules and the Centaur around the same baptismal font; and they are a forecast, too, of how, when art was netted in the toils of her own magnificence, and the wings of aspiration no longer strained up to heaven, Phaedra and Bacchus came back as witnesses of her abasement to leer and make revel among the ruins, tempting Josephs and Susannahs on the canvases of Bronzino and Biliverti.

Were it not for the resemblances and for the history attaching to them, we should not perhaps linger long to look at the Greek marbles in Pisa. They would be passed by almost unnoticed among the treasures of the Vatican or the Capitoline; but these for the most part the Roman earth still covered.

Two hundred years and more of unabated effort were to elapse, the impulse given by Niccola Pisano was to animate his successors, and to win new attainment of beauty and truth under Ghiberti and Donatello, and then 213 in the fulness of time, in the dawn of the golden age of the Renaissance, the master works of Greek sculpture which lay buried beneath Rome or in the ruins of the Campagna were uncovered, and to Michael Angelo, studying the Laocoön, the Apollo Belvedere, and the Dying Gladiator, something of their sublime mastery was revealed, even as Niccola Pisano had learnt his simpler lesson from the Phaedra and Hippolytus.

Like spring’s first harbingers, which, bursting the sod too early, are nipped by winter’s chill, yet in their brief coming are a token and a promise, — so the golden age of Pisa was a precursor of the glory of the Renaissance.

The sceptre of the arts passed from her while her fleets and armies were still potent, and Florence became the heir of her traditions, as at a later period of her sovereignty.

The immediate followers of Niccola Pisano had no succession among her children, and when the structure of the Campo Santo was completed by Giovanni Pisano in 1283 she was constrained to invite artists from Florence and Siena to paint the cloisters in fresco.

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In Niccola’s pulpit we see the transplanting of the roses of Greek beauty, the establishing of a rose-garden by the banks of the Arno, the fresh green of leaves budding, but it is in Florence that we must seek the second flowering, — the bloom of the perfected rose.

Entering the gallery of the Uffizi, and passing down the Eastern and Southern Corridors amidst Byzantine and Tuscan Madonnas, antique reliefs and busts of Emperors, you reach the hall of Lorenzo Monaco, so named as containing the “Coronation of the Virgin” of Don Lorenzo, monk of the Camaldoline monastery of the Angeli, and forerunner of Fra Angelico in simplicity and grace.

There are also a tabernacle by Fra Angelico of Madonna and Saints surrounded as by a nimbus by angels playing musical instruments; a panel of saints by Gentile da Fabriano, and a few Quattrocento Florentine pictures, amongst them two by Botticelli, — “The Adoration of the Magi,” and “The Birth of Venus.” The latter of these let us attempt to consider in detail. It represents Venus rising from the sea off the island of Cythera.

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A pale green sea — faintly tremulous with wind-ripples. To the left of the picture, hovering in the air with long wings outspread, are two spirits symbolic of the winds. The cheeks of Eolus are distent, and his breath, visible as a pale shaft of light, is impelling Venus to shore. Her feet are resting on the gold-prank’d edge of a scallop shell, and the waves are dancing before it as it moves onward. She is tall, fair, virginal, undraped, save for the clinging folds of her long, yellow hair. The mythological details might lead us to expect a nymph or nereid, — soulless, elemental, looking out on mankind with something of that expression, half of mockery, half of delight, which Arnold Böcklin’s nymphs possess: — but the face is tender and pensive as ever was that of Madonna. But the tenderness of Madonna is tenderness of love revealed, arms encircling the child and eyes lit with the holy light of motherhood, and this is the tenderness of expectancy, the tenderness of dawn such as must have been upon the face of just-awakened Eve,

“Beneath her Maker’s finger, when the fresh
  First pulse of life shot brightening the snow.”

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for Venus, elemental and a goddess, is like Eve coming to earth and vernal delight. It is the garden of earth where she is landing. The receding line of distance where the sea meets the shore is fretted with tiny bays, and verdant with sloping hills. On the right is a laurel grove, and before it a lady, symbolic of Spring, hastens to meet the goddess, holding in outstretched hands a red robe richly enwrought with daisies which gleam upon its folds in white emblazonry. The robe is fluttering in the breath of the wind that wafts the goddess to shore.

In the foreground to the left a few bulrushes are swaying. The stems of the laurels are sparkling with gold, and the sward gleams golden where Venus’ feet will tread. Spring is clad in a white robe worked with cornflowers, a spray of olive lies lightly on her breast, and her waist is girdled with roses.

To the left of the picture there are many roses falling. Pale pink roses of hue scarce deeper than the lilied flesh of Venus, some upturned with the heart of the rose laid bare, some the winds have tilted over and they make a Narcissus’ mirror of the sea, 217 roses full blown and buds half-opened, they cling to the wings and streaming raiment of the winds, they lie upon their limbs, they flutter softly downwards, they are wafted to the shore, some hurrying joyously, wantonly, some dallying with the ripples of the air. A rain of roses, and the very air that attends their falling seems to murmur of it.

They are the roses of Paestum coming back again; this is the manner of their second flowering. For the delight of the antique world in the presentment of loveliness, — a delight

           “not yet dead
But in old marbles ever beautiful”

slept prisoned in marble no longer, but issued forth in newness of life in the Renaissance, and it was in the pictures of Botticelli that it found expression at once most joyous and most complete. Mantegna is indeed in a sense more classical, but in Botticelli this delight is a living reality. For he was the only painter of Italy, who, as Ruskin says, “understood the thoughts of Heathens and Christians equally, and could in a measure paint both Aphrodite and the Madonna.” 218 And understanding the thoughts of both, there is in him no attempt to blend things incongruous. To each their gifts are rendered — unto Cæsar and unto God. Myths from Politian by his art made palaces of enchantment of the villas of the Medici, and from Lucian’s lines he recreated the “Calumny” of Apelles. Sixtus IV. sent for him to Rome, and in the Sistine Chapel he painted with Perugino, Pinturicchio, Signorelli, and others of his contemporaries, scenes from the lives of Moses and of Christ.

As all the greatest of artists, alike in painting and in poetry, when of an age he was of his own age, — when local, then of his own city, Florence, — when he needed bystanders, then these, as in the “Adoration of the Magi,” Florentines, — his contemporaries and himself among them; but the Madonna of the “Magnificat” and alike seaborn Venus are neither Jewish nor Greek nor yet Florentine, but timeless according to the measure of his ability to paint the faiths that were in him, and to us in the measure of our faiths — realities.

In the later years of his life he gave up painting Venus and the Spring, and finally 219 gave up the use of the brush altogether, though still for a time, as we shall see, drawing roses. After completing his work in the Sistine Chapel, he returned to Florence, and there, says Vasari, “being whimsical and eccentric, he occupied himself with commenting on a certain part of Dante, illustrating the ‘Inferno,’ and executing prints over which he wasted much time, and, neglecting his proper occupation, he did no work, and thereby caused infinite disorder in his affairs.” Yet despite Vasari not altogether idle, nor assuredly the less great of spirit in that he thus stood outside his art’s achievement and would fain “put to proof art alien to the artist’s” in utterance of his thought. Even so “Rafael made a century of sonnets,” and “Dante once prepared to paint an angel.” His rarer utterance is as theirs extinguished. He was taunted, Vasari tell us, with his unfitness, in that he “without a grain of learning, scarcely knowing how to read, had undertaken to make a commentary on Dante.” Yet we would gladly, if we could, barter with time the writings of a good many of Dante’s commentators in exchange for this same volume.

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We are told that he afterwards became one of the followers of Savonarola, and as such totally abandoned the practice of his art and became a Piagnone (a mourning brother), and in his old age in poverty and a cripple he lived on the charity of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and of others who had known him in the days of his prosperity.

Time, while robbing us of his commentary on Dante, has dealt with us more kindly as regards the illustrations. They relate not only to the “Inferno,” as Vasari would lead us to suppose, but to the whole of the “Divine Comedy” with the exception of a few cantos, and have a unique interest as being the only surviving illustrations of Dante by an artist of the Renaissance. Michael Angelo is said to have made a similar book of drawings, which was lost at sea in a storm in the Gulf of Lyon.

One of these drawings seems reminiscent in certain likenesses and contrasts of the picture in the Uffizi.

The subject is Beatrice appearing to Dante in Canto XXX. of the “Purgatorio.”

Dante and Statius have reached the Terrestrial Paradise, and are walking beside 221 the stream of Lethe conversing with Matelda in the meadow beyond. The mystical Procession of the Church approaching amid the forest heralded by gleaming light and melody has unfolded before them. The triumphal car of the church drawn by the Gryphon has halted. The twenty -four elders have turned to face it. They are crowned with lilies and are bearing aloft the books of their testimony. One of them, Dante tells us, chants “Veni Sponsa de Libano,” and the rest take up the strain, and a hundred angels’ voices are heard singing “Benedictus qui venis,” and “Manibus o date lilia plenis” as they scatter flowers about the car. Behind the elders are the bearers of the seven candlesticks, and the long tongues of flame lie in the air as bands of light, and between them rise the upward sweeping wings of the Gryphon. Around the car the seven virtues are as maidens dancing, and behind it walk seven elders, their temples crowned with roses, among whom walks S. John in the ecstasy of sleep. In the car stands Beatrice,

    “In white veil with olive wreathed
A virgin in my view appeared, beneath
Green mantle, robed in hue of living flame.”

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The car is the scallop shell; the elders and the virtues are the attendant spirits, and they too are ministrant upon a lady of love; but her brows are touched by the fadeless olive emblem of wisdom and of peace.

The scallop shell is wafted by the winds to shore, but here the river divides, and it is we who must make the passage. Dante is standing with hands clasped together and eyes downcast. He has looked down in the depths of the river, but from thence his eyes recoil in shame seeing his own image, and seek rather the grasses at his feet; for it is the river of the forgetting of sin, and his eyes are heavy and laden with memories, and cannot as yet endure to meet the vision of the radiance. Beyond the river all around the car, flowers are falling. “Manibus o date lilia plenis,” — (scatter ye lilies with hands unsparing) — by a strange but beautiful transition the words uttered by Anchises over the bier of the young Marcellus are sung by angels’ voices as they scatter flowers upon the car of Beatrice. Not death this but life, says Botticelli in his drawing, nor alone the pale white of purity, but the fervour of love divine and eternal, and the 223 flowers which the angels are scattering are not lilies alone, but also roses, roses — not of Paestum but of Paradise.

Of the falling roses in the picture in the Uffizi of the “Birth of Venus” some will flutter to shore, and as they die the seed of beauty will break from the heart of the rose, and the wind will bear it to a soil where it may live. So the roses that were blown to shore on Eolus’ breath have given the seeds of many roses; and changed a little by change of environment, they flowered for long in Italy, and some who have visited the garden of their second flowering have gathered the seed and carried it, so that it has flowered in Northern climes and is still flowering. Yet withal, their beauty seems never so supreme as in this the first season of their second flowering in that perfect freshness of the just-awakened rose, and so Botticelli has painted them as spirits in attendance on Love, so that coming to earth she may be reconciled.

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