For the Pistolesi were there beside foul weather, and splashed about under green umbrellas with prodigious jokes to cut at each other's expense, of a sort we reserve for Spring or early June. For them, with a vintage none too good to be garnered, it might have been the finest weather in the world: but I am bound to add my belief that they would have laughed were it the worst. With no money, no weather, and taxes intolerable, Pistoja laughed and looked handsome. Was not Boccaccio a Pistolese? I was reminded of his book at every turn of the road: life is a wanton story there, or, say, a Masque of Green Things, enacted by a splendid fairy rout. They were still the well-favoured race Dino Compagni described them far back in the fourteenth century--"formati di bella statura oltre a' Toscani," he says. The words hold good of their grandsons--the men leaner and longer, hardier and keener than you find them in Lucca or Siena; and the women carry their heads high, and when they smile at you (as they will) you think the sun must be shining. They are mountaineers, a strong race. At _pallone_ one day, I saw muscles "all a-ripple down the back," arms and shoulders, which would have intoxicated the great old "amatore del persona" himself. For their vivacity, it is racial; I think all Tuscans, more or less, retain the buoyant spirits, the alertness as of birds, which crowned Italy with Florence instead of Rome or Milan. Tuscan Art is a proof of that, and Tuscan Art can be studied at its roots in Pistoja: you see there the naked thing itself with none of the wealth of Florence to make the head swim. If Florence had stopped short at the death of Giuliano de' Medici, you might say Pistoja was Florence seen through the diminishing-glass. Is not that ribbed dome, with its purple mass domineering over the huddled roofs, Brunelleschi's? It is a faithful copy of Vasari's hatching; but no matter. So with the Baptistery, the towers, the grim old corniced palaces, the _sdruccioli_ and gloomy clefts which serve for streets. But you would be wrong. Pisa is the real parent of Pistoja, as indeed she is of Florence-Dante's Florence. Pisa's magnificent building repeats to itself here: Gothic with a touch of Latin sanity, a touch of the genuine Paganism which loves the ddal earth and cannot bring itself to be out of touch with it. San Giovanni _fuoricivitas_, what a rock-hewn church it is! A rigid oblong, dark as the twilight, running with the street without belfry or window or faade. Three tiers of shallow arcades on spiral columns, never a window to be seen, and the whole of solemn black marble narrowly striped with white. Is there such a beast as a black tiger--a tiger where the tawny and black change places? San Giovanni is modelled after that fashion. It is very old--twelfth century at latest--very shabby and weather-beaten, dusty and deserted. But it will outlive Pistoja; and that is probably what Pistoja desired.
This black and white, which is so reminiscent of early Florence, is carried out with more fidelity to the model in the Piazza. The octagonal Baptistery is, no doubt, a copy of Dante's beloved church; but it is much better placed, does not "shun to be admired" like its beautiful yellowed sister. The Duomo is of Pisa again, and has a tower, half belfry, half fortress, which once the Podest seized and held while the plucky little town endured a siege. The Brown Bear stood out long against the Lily. But Lorenzo showed his teeth: and the Wolf prevailed at last. Sculpture apart, the resemblance to Florence stops here. None of her Cinque-cento bravery and little of her earlier and finer Renaissance came this way. But one thing came; one clean breath from "that solemn fifteenth century" did blow to this verge of Tuscan soil, a breath from Luca della Robbia and his men. They may flower more exuberantly in Florence, those broad, blue-eyed platters of theirs; nowhere is their purpose more explicit, their charm more exquisitely appreciable than here. There is a chance of considering the art on its own merits; better, you can see it more truly as it was at home, since Florence has caught some little of Haussmannism and is not as Luca left it. So here, perhaps best of all, you may try to plumb the depths of the Della Robbia soul,--through its purity and limpid candour, through its shining, sweetly wholesome homeliness, down to the crystal sincerity burning recessed in the shrine. It is the fashion to say of Angelico da Fiesole that his was a navet which amounted to genius: a thin phrase, which may nevertheless pass to qualify the inspired miniaturist. The religiosity of the Della Robbia, while no less nave, is really far other. It is not Gothic at all, nor ascetic, nor mystic. It would be Latin, were it not blithe enough to be Greek. It speaks of what is and must be, and is well content; not of what should, or might be, if one could but tear off this crust. It seems probable that it speaks as pure a Paganism--just that very Paganism which Pisan building represents-- as has been seen since the workmen of Tanagra fashioned their little clay familiars for the tombs, slim Greek girls in their reedy habit as they lived, or chattering matrons like those you read of in Theocritus. Much fine phrasing has been spent upon the effort to analyse the sthetics of Delia Robbia ware. Its inexhaustible charm is unquestionable; but just where does it catch one's breath? Not altogether in the clean colouring, like nothing so much as that of a cool, glazed dairy at home,--"milky- blue," "cream-white," "butter-yellow," "parsley-green," all the dairy names come pat to pen--; not necessarily in the sheer, April loveliness of form and expression, though that would count for much; nor, I believe, as Mr. Pater would have us acknowledge, in the evanescent delicacy of each motive and sentiment,--the arresting of a single sigh, a single wave of desire, a single stave of the Magnificat. All this is true, and true only of Luca, and yet the whole charm is not there. Rather, I think, you will find it in the fusing of humble material--the age-old clay of the potter (of the Master-Potter, for that matter)--and fine art, whereby the wayside shrine is linked to the high altar, and _contadino_ and Vicar- Apostolic can hail a common ideal. Every lane, every cottage, has its Madonna-shrine here; lumped in clay or daubed in raw colour, nothing can obliterate the sweet sentiment of these poor weeds of art, these tawdry little appeals to the better part of us. Madonna cries with a bared red heart; she supports a white Christ; suave she stoops to enfold a legion of children in her mantle. She is as Tuscan as the brownest of them; but a Tuscan of the rarest mould, they would have you to see, of a cleanliness quite unapproachable, of a benignity wholly divine. One learns the secret of devotional art best of all in such ephemeral sanctuaries. And since Fine Art is the flower of these shabby roots, Italy only, where Cincinnatus worked in his garden, can furnish so wonderful a harmony of opposites. Surely it is the most democratic country in Europe. I saw a Colonel the other day, in Bologna, carrying a newspaper parcel. He was in full uniform. It was the secret of Saint Francis that he knew how to bridge the gulf on either side of which we, prisoners in feudal holds, have cried to each other in vain. It was the secret of the Delia Robbia too. The god shall sink that we may rise to meet him in the way. Why not? Here in Pistoja are some precious pieces--a _Visitation_ in San Giovanni, a pearly _Madonna Incoronata_ on the big door of San Giacopo, concerning which it would be difficult to account to one's self for the added zest given by the mantle of fine dust which has settled down on the pale folds of the drapery and outlined the square blue panels of the background. After all, is it not one more touch of the hedgerow, a symbol of the hedgerow-faith not quite dead in the byeways of Italy?
But I know I shall never convey the spontaneity with which Fra Paolino's _Visitation_ strikes quick for the heart. The thing is so momentary, a mere quiver of emotion passing from one woman to another. The pair of them have looked in to the deeps. Then the older stumbles forward to her knees, and the girl stoops down to raise her. One guesses the rest. They will be sobbing together in a minute, the girl's face buried in the other's shoulder. All you are to see is just the wistfulness,--"My dear! my dear!" And then the Virgin, full of Grace, but a shy girl in her teens for all that, hides her hot cheeks and cries her little wild heart to quietness. Some of it is in Albertinelli's fine picture, but not all. All of it--and here's the point--is to be seen in the street among these clear-eyed Tuscan women, just as Fra Paolino (himself of Pistoja) saw it before our time, and then fixed it for ever in blue and white.
And now cross the Piazza and come down the steep incline by the Palazzo Commune, turn to the left, and behold the crown of Pistoja, the Spedale del Ceppo. Everybody knows Luca's masterpiece at Florence, the Foundling Hospital on whose front are some twenty _bambini_ in pure white on blue: babies or flowers, one does not know which. In 1514 the Pistolesi remodelled their own hospital, and called in