I Needed Such Eyes, And Even Some Such Powerful
Glasses As Would Have Pierced Through The Faded And Wasted Pictures And
Shown Them At Least As I Had First Seen Them.
They were then in such
reasonable disrepair as one might expect after three or four centuries,
but in the
Last thirty years a ruinous waste has set in before which not
only the colors have faded, but the surfaces have crumbled under the
colors; and as yet no man knows how to stop the ravage. I think I have
read that it is caused by a germ; but, if not, the loss is the same, and
until a parasite for the germ is found the loss must go on, and the work
of Giotto, of Be-nozzo Gozzoli, of Memmi, must perish with that of the
Orgagnas, which may indeed go, for all me. Bible stories, miracles,
allegories - they are all hasting to decay, and it can be but a few years
until they shall vanish like the splendors of the dawn which they typify
in art.
In some things the ruin is not altogether to be regretted. It has
softened certain loathsome details of the charnel facts portrayed, and
in other pictures the torment and anguish of the lost souls are no
longer so painful as the old painters ascertained them. Hell in the
Campo Santo is not now the hell of other days, just as the hell of
Christian doctrine is not the hell it used to be. Death and the world
are indeed immitigable; the corpses in their coffins are as terrifying
to the gay lords and ladies who come suddenly upon them as ever they
were, though doubtless of no more lasting effect with such sinners than
they would be nowadays. But what one must chiefly lament is the waste of
the whole quaint and charming series of Scripture incidents by Benozzo
Gozzoli. This is indeed most lamentable, and after realizing the loss
one is only a little heartened by the gayety of certain grieving widows,
sitting in marble for monuments to their husbands at several points
under the arcades. What cheer they might have brought us was impaired by
the sight of the sarcophaguses and the other antiques against the walls,
which inflicted an inappeasable ache for the city where such things
abound, and brought our refluent Romesickness back full tide upon us.
More than once Pisa elsewhere did us the like involuntary unkindness;
she, too, is yellow and mellow like Rome, and she had moments of the
Piazza Navona and the Piazza di Spagna which were poignant. But she had
moments of her own when Rome could not rival her - such, for instance, as
that when she invited us from the perishing frescos of her Campo Santo
to turn our eyes on the flower-strewn field of death which the cloisters
surrounded, and where in the hallowed earth which her galleys brought
from Jerusalem her children, in their several turns, used to sleep so
sweetly and safely.
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