Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 125.djvu/519

Rh "St. Mauro and St. Placido brought to St. Benedict as children and dedicated by their parents to God." Some of the heads are ennobled under the influence of Da Vinci, others confess to consanguinity with Perugino, Pinturicchio, and even with Raffaelle. The infirmity of the master seems to have been that he slided too easily into eclecticism; like the mocking-bird in his notorious menagerie, he simulated the notes he heard floating in the air around him, so that his own voice became merged and lost. Yet had he a fine sense of beauty, especially in the female form; his manner was ever bland and gracious; his pencil is peculiarly persuasive; such a painter could not fail of popularity. Bazzi, in common with his contemporary Luini, is fitted every way for the art of fresco; he was so facile that he painted impromptu; his inventions had off-hand readiness even to a fault; his brush was so rapid that it ran ahead of guiding intention. The life of this wayward genius within the monastery was to say the least of it, eccentric; ugly stories are rife which for the honour of art we are glad to discredit, but at all events he brought with him for his retinue a motley crew of birds and animals, so that his abode became, according to Vasari, "like the very ark of Noah;" this way of going on grew so extraordinary that the monks gave him the nickname of "Mattaccio" or "the arch-fool." And the scandal obtains currency that Bazzi here painted in the simple nude the women who are said to have come to tempt St. Benedict and his brethren; and the story is in some measure borne out by the fresco itself; the superior insisted that draperies should be added for the sake of decency, and some of the clothing seems as if it might have been an afterthought. The artist has written his character unmistakably in his own portrait painted on these walls, with his raven, baboon, and other brute companions around; the head might pass for that of a ferocious bandit, yet it is not without a certain wild force. Bazzi, although he made himself at home within the monastery, was not altogether comfortable. It is not pleasant to think of the bickerings over payments which marred the friendly relations between the artist and the ecclesiastics. Bazzi, like Signorelli, was ill paid; accordingly he slighted his work, and in a fit of temper exclaimed that his pencil danced only in tune with the chick of the coins. The monks have not shown themselves wise even according to their generation; they first of all screwed down the artist, and then did their utmost to ruin his works. These frescoes have suffered cruel injury; the surfaces are scratched and scrawled over, and there is actually now to be seen a wall-painting in the upper part of the monastery which was rescued from beneath nine coats of whitewash.

The scenery and the accompanying stratification of Monte Oliveto have exceptional attractions for the artist and the geologist. In the midst of that light alluvial deposit which gives the fertility as of a garden to the hills and the valleys of the Apennines are here thrust barren deposits of marl, arid as lava-streams, which make inroad on vineyards and olive-groves. These clayey tracts, forming the high promontory whereon the monastery is planted, are subjected in the rainy season to an annually recurring deluge that ploughs the surface with torrents which rush wildly as water down a house-roof, breaking away roads, undermining woods, and devastating the fields whereon scanty harvests are reaped and stunted trees obtain precarious footing. The path to the monastery itself is subject to disintegration and disaster; it may be compared to the backbone of some antediluvian monster of rugged vertebrae, with a bare skeleton of ribs outstretching on either side. The whole scene is eminently Dantesque; here Gustave Doré might have made his sketches for the horrors of "L'Inferno" or for the exploits of the "Wandering Jew;" here, too, our own Martin could have caught ideas for the illustration of "Paradise Lost;" the scene indeed is as of a paradise into which demons have entered. Such were the waste places which the Benedictines loved to colonize — "places," to quote the words of the late Mr. Mailland, "chosen because they were waste and solitary, and such as could be reclaimed only by the incessant labour of those who were willing to work hard and live hard." The present superior points to plots barren within his memory now brought under cultivation; the vine mantles the rock, the cypress crowns the precipice, and golden corn adds colour to the grey shadowy landscape. So true are the words of M. Guizot, that "wherever the Benedictines carried the cross they also carried the plough; wherever they placed a book they painted a picture. Here we see the last survivors of the reformed order at 