They Did Not Realize That This Was Often
The Thing Best Worth Showing Them, For Our Feeble Aesthetic Instincts
Found Their First Expression In The Attempt To Dignify Or Beautify The
Homes Of The Dead.
Each mourner grieved in marble as fitly as he knew
how, and, if there was sometimes a rivalry in vaults and shafts, the
effect was of a collective interest which all could feel.
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.
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