LOMBARDY FROM NEOLITHIC MAN TO ICING HUMBERT.*
IT is a pleasure to think that this charming book on the northern regions of the bel paese which, as Petrarch says, the Apennines divide, and the sea and Alps surround, is written by a woman of English birth. The author's scholarship and descriptive powers are established by her chapters on the Lake of Garda, the ancient Benacus, whose beauties of water, plain, gardens, rocks, and moun- tain have been the cynosure of so many poetic eyes, from Virgil and Catullus to Dante and Carducci. There is the island-promontory of Sirmium, the home of Catullus, which inspired him with the sonnet which is one of the gems of lyrical art. Catullus's hymn of praise to his Venusta Sirmio, written after his return from an Eastern journey, contains a geographical expression which has been a conundrum to scholars. Calverley and others, we must here explain, have translated the cryptic adjective in question— viz., the word " Lydii " in the phrase Lydii laces undae—by our "L-olden," on the assumption that in this epithet the poet was alluding to the sands of the Pactolus, which he might have seen in Asia. Other critics, like Scaliger, adopt a variant of the received text, on which they build the guess that the queried word " Lydian" signifies " rippling." Giving an accurate but pedestrian version of the sonnet in the original metre, the Countess identifies the poet's meaning with that attached by Dryden to the " softly sweet in Lydian measures" of "Alexander's Feast," and says that Catullus adopted his epithet as a synonym for " musical." Tennyson's visit to the modern Sermione inspired him with the ode, "Hail, Brother, and Farewell," a duplicate of the " Ave atque Vale " in which his Latin predecessor lamented a loss similar to his own.
Neither in the so-called " Chiesa di Catullo," nor in the olive-grown ruins of the island, has the Roman poet left any visible memento. A Veronese nobleman lately ruined himself by excavations which led to the discovery neither of the yacht of Catullus nor of the bones of his Lesbia or her sparrow. The existence of a boiling lacustrine sulphurous spring has enabled the modern Sermione to support a Surhaus and its appendages, where Germans do mostly congregate. The waters on whose banks all the fruits of the earth, and nearly all its flowers, grow to perfection is a beloved resort of the visitors of the nation in whose language the lake is appro- priately called the Garten See : in one of the villas which dot their margin the composer Boito has sought inspiration for the unfinished score of his Nero.
On the Brescia side of the lake is Sara, where Gaspard, the first Italian maker of the violin, plied his trade. Near the water's edge stands the palazzo, a vast straggling building of no special architectural lines bought from a Pallavicino in the seicento by the head of the Cesaresoo • Lombard Studies. By the Countess Evelyn Martinengo Cesaresco. With Illustrations. London : T. Fisher Unwin. [lie.] branch of the Martinenghi A photograph seems flatly to contradict Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who talks of the place as if it put Versailles, Blenheim, and the Boboli Gardens to shame. Applying her usual multiplier to the realities of the case, she says that, rising from the water at the foot of a mountain amphitheatre covered with orange trees, lemons, citrons, and pomegranates, amidst terraced parterres embellished by flower-beds, fountains, cascades, statues, marble balustrades and fish-ponds, the house, with its surrounding paradise of natural and artistic beauties, has not its like in Europe. Our accurate pre- sent authoress explains that the interior was sumptuously fitted with decorations, furniture, and pictures, but that thanks to " decay's effacing fingers," and to various incidents of battle, bombardment, and pillage in the Napoleonic Wars, with its occupation by a Garibaldian garrison, the palazzo is now but a shadow of its former self. Here our countrywoman resides : the place was renovated for her reception twenty years ago by the Count Giuseppe of the time, the hero of the "ten days" of Brescia of 1849, when that civic" lioness of Italy" showed that she was still, as in the time of Dante, "armed more with valour than with steel." What with her judicious admixture of objective description, rhetorical phrase, and historical allusion, the writer's pictures of the landscape woods of Sale and other Lombard localities remind us of Taine or Gregorovius. Be the subject a hail-storm on the Monte Baldo, or a prospect illuminated by Dante's color d'oriental zaffir, or a whirl of fireflies, or a concert of birds and cicadas, or a " praying " beetle or a scorpion on the path, the image conveyed is always truthful and picturesque. When, however, Dante is made to apply to Peschiera the prjcieux adjective "well-equipped," and oranges and cypresses are called an Italian landscape's " dominant note," such discords jar on the cultivated ear. Furthermore, so completely does the authoress boycott geographical explanation that we never know, unless otherwise informed, the situation of the places named.
To the fortunes of some of the leading personages of the illustrious Brescian family, called by Brantome " ceste bonne et brave race des Martinengues," the writer devotes many pages. When she writes of " three Martinenghi having espoused three daughters of the great Condottiere, Bartolomeo Colleoni," we are puzzled. The usual tradi- tion gives the Venetian mercenary a single daughter, Medea, whose remains are said to repose in the sepulchral chapel at Bergamo which holds her father. Of the heroes of that fighting family none had a more striking or tragical career than the Count Sciarra Martinengo, whose portrait by Moretto is one of the chief ornaments of the National Gallery. The lady does not seem to know that in the latter days of the Bizorgimento this work, then the property of Mr. Henfrey, was banging in the main room of our Turin Legation, where the superb Titianesque dignity and silver tone of the tippeted nobleman excited the frequent admiration of the writer, soldier, amateur painter,. Massimo d'Azeglio, of that last of great Italian statesmen, Minghetti, and of other conoscenti who were amongst Sir James Hudson's intimate guests. In those pre-Morelli times no one fussed about names, and the picture was ascribed on vague traditional grounds to Morone, whose place in art is some degrees below that of Moretto,- witness the portrait in question, and the superb Santa Giustina with her white unicorn of the Vienna gallery. That the Trafalgar Square canvas actually represents, not, as some have pretended, a Piedmontese lawyer, but a Martinengo, seems more or less proved by the circum- stance that in a garret of the family residence at Sale the Countess " found a battered copy or duplicate of this identical picture,"—an argument which would have delighted Morelli. The great painter did much pictorial and decorative work in the Martinengo houses, and gave lessons to a damsel of the family. This volume has a photogravure of a picture of two daughters of the house the original of which must be a rare compound of architectural beauty, atmosphere, portraiture, and landscape background,—half Velasquez, half Lorenzo di Credi. A portrait of another Martinengo girl is a beautiful combination of face and costume.
After dealing with the popular Lombard stage, past and present, the Countess relates various interesting episodes in the history of the opera-house of La Scala, which the Socialists
of Milan lately tried to extinguish by voting the withdrawal of the municipal subvention. Many of our critics have dipped into Le Rouge et le Noir : not one of them is aware that the novelist Stendhal wrote two admirable musical biographies of Mozart and Rossini. The Countess Evelyn Martinengo Cesaresco is less ignorant, and she draws from Arrigo Begle Milanese a charming sketch of the Italian experiences of Maria Theresa's pet, the jocular and naughty little Wolfgang Mozart, whose devotion to jokes and pranks did not prevent him from producing the compositions with which he took the town by storm. This is followed by notes of the Milanese adventures of the so-called Helios of Italy, Rossini, and of his successors, from Donizetti to Verdi. Writing of the bel canto like a contemporary of Malibran and Rubini; the authoress stamps on the modern notion that with the vocalists of the golden age singing was a mere gargle of pleasant sounds. She rightly says that " Mario's cultivated, pointed, and distinct delivery had almost as much to do with making him facile princeps of Almavivas as his never-to-be- forgotten acting."
A chapter on modern Romagnol life is followed by elucidations of the annals of Rimini, from Augustus to Murat, which dwell on the various versions of the stories of Paolo and Francesca, as exhibited in romance, poetry, the drama, painting, and music, from Dante downwards. Not forgetting the classical canvas of Ary Scheffer or our own Watts and the verse of Stephen Phillips, the author rightly contends that above all other presentments of the legend, that of the Diving Commedia, with its mixed majesty, simplicity, and melody, towers alone. But is not the poet's art undervalued by the statement that the intense actuality and unequalled pathos of the picture of the colombe dal desio chiamate proceed from the fact that herein are reflected "the hates, the hopes, the tears of a whole people " ? The circumstance that the subject of our Webster's " White Devil," Vittoria Accoramboni, was sheltered during a perilous parenthesis of her life at Sale leads the writer to analyse the riddle of the existence of that "Dreyfus of the day. " After a dissection of Webster's lurid tragedy she practically concludes with the ignoramus, ignorabimus, which is the only available reply of intelligent criticiom to the charge of stabbing, strangling, poisoning, or worse which every Italian of the cinquecento was always ready to bring against his neighbour.
The writer's daily avocations have familiarised her with local agricultural questions like the mezzeria tenure (in which owner and cultivator divide the produce) : emigra- tion : the merits of polenta compared with wheaten bread : the reasons why the Lombard Corydon and Phillis " at their rustic dinner met" have to be satisfied with a meal of horse-flesh, hedgehogs, frogs, and snails instead of that un- known luxury, butcher's meat. As with ourselves, the physical stamina and moral energies of the contadino have degenerated, and we read that while of late he has been im- poverished by hail-storms, the wine blight, and the silkworm decrease, his purse has been further depleted by the usurer, the advocate, and the tax-gatherers of the State and the commune. A rainbow of hope is, however, presented by the development to his advantage of various new assets, such as co-operative dairy farms and country horticulture schools. The personal opinions of the authoress regarding this and other economical matters are veiled in a certain reserve ; her bucolics close with the optimist remark of Verdi, himself a farmer, that " while she has her sun, Italy will not starve." A smeary picture after Corot excepted, which suggests a Barbizon pond more than the Lake of Garda, the illustrations of rusticity are delightful. Two photogravures accurately reproduce the ploughing ox of Lombardy—to our mind, a very different animal from the vulgarian bovine individuals painted by Cuyp and Rosa Bonheur—with the looking-glass depths of affectionate, appealing eyes which, says the Countess, inspired the modern poet with the Virgilian inspiration, t'arno o pio bone. To ourselves, these cattle recall the pious, loving expression of the oxen worshipping at the holy child's image in Ghirlandajo's "Adoration of the Magi."
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