Brick and Marble in the Middle Ages: Notes of Tours in the North of Italy. George Edmund Street
and adorned with a forked battlement, which is common everywhere in old buildings between this and Vicenza, and with four square corner towers, of which one larger than the others has a very bold and fine overhanging machicolated parapet. In the centre of the south front the drawbridge still remains in use, and was lowered for our exit from the castle. Outside the square castle was a space, and then a low wall again furnished with the forked battlement. This must have been a very picturesque arrangement; but unfortunately its real character is now only intelligible to the skilled eye. For the great Colleoni, finding himself in possession of a castle which gave him insufficient space for his magnificence, built up walls on the top of the old battlemented outer wall, and created his state rooms in the space between this new wall and the old external wall of the castle.[9] These rooms of his have much damaged the effect of the outside of the castle; but internally they are still interesting, owing to the sumptuous character of the painted decorations with which he had them adorned. These were executed at about the time of the visit of Christian II. of Denmark to Colleoni, and are interesting if not great works of art. The old courtyard though small is very fine in its effect. The upper walls are carried on pointed arches and are covered with fresco or distemper paintings, said to have been executed by Giovanni Cariani of Bergamo, or by Girolamo Romanino of Brescia, extremely striking and attractive in their general style of colour and drawing. The most picturesque incidents are illustrations of Colleoni’s career—the Doge of Venice giving Colleoni his bâton in the presence of the Pope, and a fine battle subject.
A squalid area for rubbish, children, pigs, cats, and what not, is left all round the moat, and beyond this are all the farm buildings and labourers’ residences, which go to make up the tout ensemble of a great Lombard farmyard. The surroundings are not clean nor very picturesque, but the castle itself has so great an interest, that no one who visits Bergamo should pass it by unseen.
CHAPTER V.
“Am I in Italy? Is this the Mincius?
Are those the distant turrets of Verona?
And shall I sup where Juliet at the masque
Saw her loved Montague, and now sleeps by him?”
Rogers.
Palazzuolo—Coccaglio—Brescia: new and old Cathedrals, Broletto—Churches—Donato—Desenzano—Lago di Garda—Riva—Trent—Verona.
OUR drive from Bergamo to Brescia was strikingly unlike what we had hitherto been so much enjoying. Mile after mile of straight roads, between fields so closely planted with fruit-trees that one never sees more than the merest glimpse of anything beyond them, are certainly not pleasant; and the hot sun above us, and the thirsty and dry beds of rivers which we crossed on our way, made us feel glad when evening drew on, and we found ourselves rapidly nearing Brescia.
I made notes at two or three places on the way. At Palazzuolo is a great circular belfry, ornamented with a large figure at the top and divers others about its base, built of brick rusticated to look like stone, and altogether about as base a piece of architecture as could well be found, but pardoned here because of the pure blue of the sky I saw behind it, and partly on account of the view which it commands, reaching, it is said, as far as Milan, and including the great plain out of which, upon a slight hill, it rises. Palazzuolo is nicely situated, and upon the first of the many rivers which we had passed from Bergamo which had any water in its bed. The houses, too, were almost all supported on arcades, giving pleasant shelter from the sun.
Beyond this we came to Coccaglio, a small village with a wretchedly bad modern church, glorying in a glaringly sham front, and faced on the opposite side of the street by the remains of a mediæval church—whose place it has taken—and which is now shut up and rapidly going to ruin. The new church is built north and south—the old one orientating properly; but then the west front was the great feature of the new church, and therefore it was necessary, of course, to place it towards the road!
Coccaglio still has, however, some very valuable remains of mediæval domestic work in its houses, of which I was able
to obtain some sketches. They were entirely executed in brick and terra-cotta, except, of course, the capitals and shafts of the windows, and appeared to be of the fourteenth century.
The upper portion of the house of which I give a sketch remains very fairly perfect, though its lower story has been entirely modernized. It will be seen that it is very uniform in its design, the large and small windows alternating regularly; and that semi-circular arches are used in the windows in connection with ogee trefoils. This is one of the apparent inconsistencies which occur in almost all Italian Gothic work; and might seem to give us ancient authority for any amount of licence in our combination of the elements of what we ordinarily consider to be thoroughly different styles. The windows are marked by the same elaboration of their sills which we noticed in the Broletto at Bergamo, and the detail of these, as also of the corbelling out from the wall of several chimney-breasts, is exceedingly good.
In a back street in the village I found a house the balconies around which were corbelled forward on finely moulded beams, which, judging by the moulding, could hardly be of later date than the commencement of the fourteenth century.
Wooden mouldings of this kind are much rarer in Italy than they are in the North, and I particularly notice this little relic, therefore, which still remains to show how well the science of moulding was sometimes understood even there.
Such a village as Coccaglio is, as I found afterwards, a place to be made much of; for generally, except in public or important buildings in large towns, one sees very little trace of any mediæval domestic work beyond the perpetually recurring arcading under the houses which is so general a feature in all the towns in the North of Italy.
There is nothing further of any interest on the road, and just after sunset we reached Brescia, too late to see anything of the general effect of the city.
Brescia is mainly famous, I believe, first for its connection with a story of the generosity of Bayard, the “chevalier sans peur et sans reproche,” and next for the large discoveries of Roman remains which have from time to time been made there. It is one of those towns, moreover, of which guide-books, with an immense list of churches and the pictures they contain, give perhaps too grand an idea before they have been seen. It is, however, undoubtedly a place of much interest, not only for the antiquary, but also for the student of mediæval art, since, though its churches are generally uninteresting, it has in the Broletto, sadly mutilated and modernized as it is, the remains of one of the most extensive and grand of these buildings, and to a considerable extent executed in very excellent