BY EDMUND   G.   GARDNER ILLUSTRATED BY HELEN   M.   JAMES AND MANY REPRODUCTIONS FROM THE WORKS OF PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS colophon 1902 LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO. ALDINE HOUSE, W.C.     To THE MEMORY OF HELEN M. JAMES    ...

T HIS present volume is intended to provide a popular history of the great Republic of Siena, in such a form that it can also serve as a guide-book to that most fascinating of Tuscan cities and its neighbourhood. San Gimignano has been included, because no visitor to Siena leaves the “fair town called of the Fair Towers” unvisited; I have made special reference to it in the title of the book, to lay stress upon the point that, although for administrative purposes San Gimignano is included in the

S IENA remains the most perfectly mediaeval of all the larger cities of Tuscany. Its narrow streets, its spacious Gothic palaces and churches, the three hills upon which it rises enthroned, with the curiously picturesque valleys between them, are still inclosed in frowning walls of the fourteenth century. The Renaissance came to it late, gave it its enduring epithet of “soft Siena,” and blended harmoniously, almost imperceptibly, with its mediaeval spirit. According to the more picturesque of th

T HE closing years of this great republican epoch are lit up by the genius and the inspiration of one of the most wonderful women in the history of Italy: Caterina Benincasa, now more generally known as St Catherine of Siena. She was born on March 25th, 1347, the youngest of a large family of sons and daughters that Monna Lapa bore to her husband, Giacomo Benincasa, a dyer of the contrada of Fontebranda. The family of the Benincasa belonged to the Monte de’ Dodici. Until the death of Giacomo in

A FTER the expulsion of the Riformatori in March 1385, a new supreme magistracy was instituted to rule the Republic. It was composed of ten citizens—the “Signori Priori, Governatori della Città di Siena”—who held office for two months. Four of these priors were of the Nine, four of the Twelve, and two of the People. A new order—the Monte del Popolo —was formed to include those plebeians, or Popolani of the Greater Number, who had not shared in the government of the Riformatori; and it gradually

W E may conveniently begin the story of Sienese art with the coming of Niccolò Pisano to Siena in 1266, the year after Dante’s birth, for the work of the great marble pulpit of the Duomo. Niccolò’s son, Giovanni, became a citizen of Siena, and was chief architect of the Duomo during the two closing decades of the century. Stimulated by their presence and example, there rose an independent school of Sienese sculptors, which flourished from the end of the thirteenth to the middle of the fourteenth

A T the heart of Siena, where its three hills meet, is the famous Piazza upon which so many of the stormiest scenes in the history of the city have been enacted: the Campo, now known officially as the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. It is a semicircular space, the central portion paved with brick and curiously resembling the concavity of a shell bordered by a stone pavement, surrounded with what were once aristocratic palaces. It is entered by narrow streets, which in stormy times could be securely he

R ISING majestically above Siena, crowned with the mosaic of the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin in Paradise, as though to make her seem still floating in air over the city that had chosen her for Queen, is the vast Duomo. Tradition has it that a temple of Minerva once stood upon this hill, and that upon its ruins was built the first fane to Maria Assunta , Our Lady of the Assumption. Some such building had existed from the end of the tenth century; but the present “tiger-striped cathedral,” th

“I N the name of God, Amen. To the honour and praise and reverence of God, and of His Mother, Madonna Holy Mary Virgin, and of all the Saints of God, and to the honour and exaltation of the Holy Roman Church, and of the Commune and of the People of the City of Siena, and to the good and pacific state and to the increase of the Spedale of Madonna Holy Mary Virgin of Siena, which is placed in front of the chief church of the said City, and of the Rector and Brothers of the Chapter of the said Sped

F ABIO DI PANDOLFO PETRUCCI had been expelled from Siena in September 1524, by a temporary alliance of all factions in the State. Of the three chief leaders in the revolution, Giovanni Martinozzi belonged to the Monte de’ Nove, Giovanni Battista Piccolomini to the Gentiluomini, while Mario Bandini was a grandson of Andrea Todeschini Piccolomini and therefore associated to the Monte del Popolo. Mario, who was a young man of about twenty-three, was at the head of the Libertini , an association of

A T the famous Croce del Travaglio, where the Bohemian Caesar learned to respect the might of a free people and Giovanni Martinozzi routed the hireling soldiery of the last of the Petrucci, the three chief streets of Siena lead off into the three Terzi: the Via Cavour into the Terzo di Camollia, the Via Ricasoli into the Terzo di San Martino, the Via di Città into the Terzo di Città. “In every good city,” so runs a report of a commission of the Council of the People in 1398, “provision is made f

B EYOND the Porta Ovile, on the hill known as the Capriola , rises the convent of the Osservanza, one of the chief houses of the Osservanti —San Bernardino’s followers of the strict observance of the rule of St Francis, who have recently been united with the Riformati and others of their spiritual kindred to form one body, under what Mr Montgomery Carmichael, our chief lay authority on matters Franciscan, appropriately calls “the glorious and primitive style and title of the Friars Minor.” From

San Gimignano of the Beautiful Towers is a place of frowning grey and brown walls and towers, of mysterious alleys, of shimmering olive-trees and fields of flowers that lie beyond, of flaming skies at sunrise, of clamorous bells at nightfall. Hardly, indeed, would he be pressed who should be called upon to award the crown of beauty to any one, rather than another, of the smaller towns of central Italy, though San Gimignano would perhaps deserve it. “No other town or castle in Tuscany,” wrote Gin

S AN GIMIGNANO is still surrounded by its second circuit of walls, built to inclose the Castello Nuovo at the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century. The five massive towers that strengthen the walls were raised by the Florentines in the fifteenth century, and the whole town is surmounted by the Florentine castle, the Rocca di Montestaffoli. The three main gates have been preserved; the Porta San Matteo to the north, the Porta San Giovanni to the south, the Porta della Fonte t

Orlando Malavolti, Historia de’ Fatti e Guerre dei Senesi, così esterne come civili, seguite dall’ origine della lor Città, fino all’ anno M.D. LV. Venice, 1599. Giovanni Antonio Pecci, Memorie storico-critiche della Città di Siena . Four volumes. Siena, 1755-1760. Taking its start from La vita civile di Pandolfo Petrucci , this work tells the whole history of Siena from 1480 to 1559. The Cronica Senese in Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores , vol. xv. Milan, 1729. A series of chronicles by An

Miscellanea Storica Senese. Siena, from 1893 onwards. Bullettino Senese di Storia Patria. Siena....

J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle, A new History of Painting in Italy from the second to the sixteenth century . Three volumes. London, 1864. (A new edition is announced in preparation by Mr Langton Douglas.) G. B. Cavalcaselle and J. A. Crowe, Storia della pittura in Italia dal Secolo II. al Secolo XVI. Eight volumes. Florence, 1886-1898. Vasari, Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori; con nuove annotazioni e commenti di Gaetano Milanesi. Eight volumes. Florence, 1878-188

Girolamo Gigli, L’opere della Serafica Santa Caterina da Siena . Vol. i. La Vita , translated by Bernardino Pecci from the Latin Leggenda of the Beato Raimondo da Capua (referred to in the present work as Leggenda ); the letter describing her life from Stefano Maconi to Tommaso Nacci Caffarini, and the letter describing her death from Barduccio Canigiani to Suor Caterina Petriboni. Siena, 1707. Vol. ii. and vol. iii. L’Epistole della Serafica Vergine Santa Caterina . Lucca, 1721, and Siena, 1713

Siena e il suo Territorio. Siena, 1862. E. A. Brigidi, La Nuova Guida di Siena e dei suoi aintorni . Siena, 1901, etc. Girolamo Gigli, Diario Senese, in cui si veggono alla giornata tutti gli avvenimenti più ragguardevoli spettanti sì allo Spirituale sì al Temporale della Città e Stato di Siena . Two volumes. Lucca, 1723. Girolamo Gigli, La città diletta di Maria . Rome, 1716. Giovanni Antonio Pecci, Storia del Vescovado della città di Siena . Lucca, 1748. Scipione Bargagli, I Trattenimenti dove

Giovanni Francesco Coppi, Annali, memorie ed huomini illustri ai San Gimignano . Florence, 1695. Luigi Pecori, Storia della Terra di San Gimignano . Florence, 1853. Matteo Villani, Istorie Fiorentine (in continuation of those of his brother Giovanni). In Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores . Vol. xiv. Milan, 1729; and elsewhere. Cronachetta di San Gimignano composta da Fra Matteo Ciaccheri Fiorentino, l’anno MCCCLV . Bologna, 1865. Fra Matteo was a native of San Gimignano; he calls himself a F