Category Archives: Italy

The tragedy of Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico

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Among the fragrant pines of the Adriatic island of Lokrum, a short boat ride away from the old town of Dubrovnik, stands a complex of buildings that began life as a votive chapel, founded by Richard the Lionheart in thanksgiving for his survival when he was shipwrecked here on his way home from the Crusades. That chapel expanded into a Benedictine monastery, which was dissolved by Napoleon and later transformed into a residence by Archduke Maximilian of Austria, younger brother of the emperor Franz Joseph. Maximilian used the building—and indeed the entire island—as a summer retreat, laying out ornamental gardens with glades of cypress and oleander. He came here with his beautiful young bride, Charlotte of Belgium. Entranced by the sea breeze and the scent of jasmine, he is said to have carved a love heart pierced with his own and his wife’s initials into the bark of one of Lokrum’s ilex trees. Local people were less enchanted. Their tongues wagged disapprovingly, calling what Maximilian had done to the old monastery an act of sacrilege and predicting dire consequences. Little did they know it, but their words were to turn prophetic…

The island of Lokrum with a view of the monastery-turned-summer-retreat

The Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, born at Schönbrunn in 1832, was good-hearted and idealistic. After a career as Commander-in-Chief of the Austrian navy, he was given the title of Governor General of Lombardy, part of a strategy of Franz Joseph’s to make Austrian rule more popular in northern Italy. It didn’t work. Nationalist fever was running high and despite the fact that Maximilian was a just and benevolent overlord, Lombardy didn’t want him. Instead they looked to Napoleon III of France to liberate them. Austria went to war with France and lost Lombardy at the Battle of Solferino in 1859. Maximilian retreated to his castle on the bay of Trieste, and there he remained, until in 1863 he elected to accept an offer that had been made to him by a clerical minority faction in Mexico: to become their emperor. Maximilian was encouraged in this by Napoleon III. Franz Joseph was greatly troubled. He knew that this was pure political gerrymandering by France, whose ambitions in the New World were considerable. But Maximilian wanted to go. He was ambitious and he also had grand ideas, ideas that were very different from those of his reactionary brother. While Franz Joseph’s main concern was to preserve the status quo, Maximilian, equally fatally, wanted to ‘make a difference’.

Maximilian did his best in Mexico, but he had as many enemies there as he had had in Italy. The country was in a state of guerilla war between the monarchist faction and the troops of Benito Juárez, whom the liberals supported and wanted as their president. Although Maximilian enjoyed the support of the conservatives at first, he alienated them by decreeing freedom of religion and by his instinctive personal sympathy for some of Juárez’s ideas. Pope Pius IX withdrew his support, and when the United States gave diplomatic recognition to Juárez, France withdrew likewise, being also under pressure at home from a rising Prussia. Maximilian was left friendless and unprotected. His wife Charlotte began to exhibit signs of paranoia. She returned to Europe to plead with both the pope and Napoleon, but after a series of hysterical and embarrassing scenes in the Vatican, she was sent to Trieste (Miramare castle)  and kept there under house arrest by Maximilian’s family. Maximilian was captured by the republicans and sentenced to death. Despite many pleas for clemency, including one from Garibaldi, Juárez refused to relent. On the morning of 19th June 1867, Maximilian faced the firing squad.

The emperor Maximilian in his coffin

Glimmering pearly white on the foreshore, just outside the city of Trieste and clearly visible from its waterfront and docks, stands the castle of Miramare. It was completed for Maximilian in 1860, and it is here, in 1866, that Charlotte took up residence when she returned from Mexico in her attempt to rally support for her beleaguered husband. Charlotte suffered a severe nervous breakdown after Maximilian’s death, from which she never fully recovered. She returned to Belgium, where she died in 1927. Miramare is now open to the public a museum.

Castello di Miramare viewed from Trieste docks

City Picks: Verona

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Verona is a lovely city. It is just the right size for exploration on foot, and there lots to see. Many of its restaurants are justly famous. It is amply stocked with comfortable places to stay. Its Roman theatre, whose tiers of seats rise high above the river Adige, must have commanded one of the finest views of any ancient theatre in Italy. Its churches are magnificent. And then there is the Museo del Castelvecchio.

This fortress of art displays an astonishingly rich collection of sculpture and painting in the rooms of the old brick-built, Ghibelline-battlemented stronghold of the Scaligeri, or della Scala, who were overlords of Verona in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, until overthrown by the Visconti of Milan. At dead of night, the last of the Scaligeri fled this castle, across the bridge over the boiling river, and melted away, fading out of history.

Castelvecchio has one of the finest collections of paintings in Italy. Architecturally the building is interesting too, because its museum space was remodelled by Carlo Scarpa in 1959–73. Concrete now vies with brick. Once so cutting-edge, Scarpa’s arrangements now seem a bit quaint. The equestrian statue of Cangrande I (ruled from 1311) stands on an elevated concrete platform which has all the stateliness of a lift-shaft in a multi-storey carpark. But this means the paintings really have to speak for themselves–and many of them eloquently do. The Pisanello and Stefano da Zevio are of course outstanding. There are some interesting paintings by Francesco Morone. Giovanni Francesco Caroto, the teacher of Veronese, is well represented. His Boy with a Drawing (c. 1515) is wonderfully modern: a grinning, red-headed lad holding up a scribble of a stick man. Any parent who has been called upon to admire a proud child’s not terribly brilliant masterpiece will warm to it.

And what about where to eat? Well, it was pouring with rain when I was last in Verona, so I didn’t spend a long time searching. Sometimes the tried and tested are just what one needs. An Aperol in one of the Listòn cafés overlooking the Arena and then lunch in Antica Bottega del Vino. The lamb with rosemary was excellent. The Amarone even better.

Find Verona in Blue Guide Venice & The Veneto and Blue Guide Concise Italy.

International Gothic at the Uffizi

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International Gothic in Florence, 1375–1440 (and Paolo Uccello’s “Battle of San Romano” restored). Alta Macadam reports on an exhibition at the Galleria degli Uffizi, open until 4th November.

This large exhibition is a sequel to one held in 2008 entitled “The Legacy of Giotto. Art in Florence, 1340–75” and, given the longer time span that it covers, is perhaps rather less coherent than the previous show. Many artists have been included in an attempt to bring together different strands of artistic development in the city, and at times the sequence is rather confusing. The greatest artists usually connected to the movement known as International Gothic—Lorenzo Monaco and Gentile da Fabriano—are represented with only one work each. However, the exhibition has provided the opportunity for some important loans from abroad and it also gives prominence to many works in Florence and its environs little known to the general public, or not generally on view.

The earliest works include a Madonna and Child by Niccolò di Pietro Gerini from the lovely church of San Martino a Mensola (a few hundred metres below Villa I Tatti), which is displayed with its original side panels of four saints from the nearby church of San Lorenzo beside the castle of Vincigliata (the Italian state purchased them for the Uffizi last year). In the same room are two delightful wooden reliquary busts dating from the 1380s, one of St Andrew, also from the church of San Martino a Mensola (but up until now not on view there) and the other of a companion of St Ursula from the (little-visited) Museo di Santa Maria Novella. Another early piece of sculpture from the same period is a charming little sitting lion inpietra forte which was once just one of some twenty lions in the Loggia della Signoria, but for years has been hidden away in the over-crowded rooms of the Museo di Firenze Antica in the convent of San Marco. Another piece of early sculpture which has never before been prominently displayed is the very fine statuette of a prophet made for the Duomo by Lorenzo di Giovanni and which now belongs to the Bargello. Lorenzo’s father, Giovanni d’Ambrogio, is also well represented by two statues of the Annunciation made for the tympanum of the Porta della Mandorla of the Duomo (uncovered just a few months ago after many years of restoration). The virile classical head of the Madonna is particularly striking, showing the influence of Humanism. Also in a transitional style from the Gothic is the fine Annunciation from the Galleria dell’Accademia by the Master of the Straus Madonna (here tentatively identified with Ambrogio di Baldese). It has an unusual background with an open door as well as an interesting frame.

In the largest room in the exhibition no fewer than three of the huge original statues from the exterior of Orsanmichele are displayed. The curators had the good idea to add to the explanatory panel here that these are normally on show, together with all the other original statues from the exterior tabernacles, in the Museo di Orsanmichele (open every Monday), since this remains unjustly one of Florence’s least visited museums. The Orsanmichele statues chosen for the exhibition include the St Peter made for the guild of butchers, which has represented one of the most puzzling problems of attribution for generations of art historians. On this occasion both Ciuffagni and Donatello have been discarded in favour of a tentative suggestion that Brunelleschi’s hand may be detected, but in the end it has simply been attributed to an anonymous master called the “Maestro di San Pietro di Orsanmichele”. Also for some reason displayed in this room is one of the most lovely paintings in the entire exhibition, the littleAnnunciation from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Formerly thought to be by the Sienese artist Pietro di Giovanni d’Ambrogio, it is here firmly attributed to Paolo Uccello. Gothic in spirit with a gold ground, this is a fascinating work, with the Madonna elegantly dressed in a robe matching the bright blue colour of the loggia. Another beautiful painting here, which is much better known, is Lorenzo Monaco’s Adoration of the Magi from the Uffizi. The exquisite fresco from Empoli of Christ in Pietà by Masolino is very well chosen, and this very important artist is also represented in a later room in the exhibition with his splendid painting of St Julian, dressed in crimson, from the Museo Diocesano di Santo Stefano a Ponte in Florence (a marvellous opportunity to see this work, as the museum is almost always closed).

A small room is devoted to the desert fathers known as the Thebaids (they lived in the desert around Thebes in Egypt), a subject which fascinated the painters of the time. Here the nine fragments from the Kunsthaus in Zurich by a Camaldolese monk called Giuliano Amadei are particularly interesting. However, the better known painting from the Uffizi collection of the lives of these early ascetics is displayed here without an author, and indeed the suggestion that it could even have been painted as late as the 18th century.

In the section entitled “The Sumptuary Arts”, there is a remarkable reliquary from the Badia di San Salvatore a Settimo, on the banks of the Arno west of Florence. Also from outside Florence, and little known to the general public, there is a very beautiful Madonna and Child enthroned with six Angels, dating from around 1424 by Arcangelo di Cola da Camerino (from the church of Santi Ippolito e Donato in Bibbiena in the Casentino).

Another room displays a very rare miniature portable altar from a private collection. In the form of a little shrine, it is simply decorated outside with green and white geometrical forms which recall the exterior of the Baptistery and San Miniato al Monte, and inside has paintings in watercolour on paper of the Madonna and Child with angels and (on the doors) the two patron saints of travellers (St Nicholas and St Julian). Given its size and fragility, it is extraordinary that it has survived for nearly six hundred years. It is attributed to the Master of the Sherman Predella, an anonymous master named from a small panel in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts which is fittingly displayed here beside it. This exquisite work is not in fact a predella but a panel with three scenes (the Martyrdom of St Agnes, the Flagellation of Christ with the Virgin swooning, and the penitent St Jerome) against a particularly remarkable background of dunes with a rough sea beyond, beneath a night sky. It includes a loggia which has decorations similar to the green lozenges painted on the exterior of the little portable altar.

The exhibition continues in the opposite wing of the Uffizi. The paintings here include a curious very small portrait of a young man from the Alana collection in New York attributed doubtfully to Masaccio, and two panels from the Quaratesi polyptch of St Nicholas in the Vatican by Gentile da Fabriano who is, perhaps surprisingly, not otherwise present in the exhibition. A fresco by the little-known painter Francesco d’Antonio di Bartolomeo from the church of San Niccolò Oltrarno representing St Ansanus is particularly delightful. An unusual painting which used to serve as the front of a wedding-chest representing an allegory of the Seven Liberal Arts by Giovanni del Ponte has been lent by the Prado in Madrid. There is also a Madonna and Child with saints and angels by the same artist from the little-visited church of San Salvatore al Monte, in its original frame. Numerous illuminated liturgical and devotional books, including a missal from Milan illustrated by Fra Angelico, accompany the paintings and sculptures. Two wooden Crucifixes are displayed opposite each other, one by Donatello from the convent of Bosco ai Frati in the Mugello and the other by Michelozzo from the church of San Niccolò Oltrarno.

The glorious conclusion of the exhibition is the Uffizi’s Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello, just restored. Now called The Unhorsing of Bernardino Ubaldini della Carda, Commander of the Sienese Troops (and illustrated at the top of this piece), it was the central one of the three famous panels commissioned by Ludovico Bartolini Salimbeni to commemorate the battle fought in the lower Valdarno in 1432 in which the Florentines were victorious over the Sienese (the other two panels are in the National Gallery of London and the Louvre). Lorenzo the Magnificent confiscated all three paintings from Salimbeni’s sons in 1484 so that he could enjoy them in his bedroom in Palazzo Medici. The original colours, with oranges and reds dominating, have been restored and the entire painting is now much more legible in all its extraordinary details. Multi-media supports and a video explain all its intricacies and the play of perspective used by Uccello, who was one of the last great painters in the Gothic style but whose works also show that he fully understood the significance of the arrival of the new Renaissance spirit in painting.

Celebrating Santa Rosalia, patron of Palermo

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The Sanctuary of Santa Rosalia on Monte Pellegrino. An extract from Blue Guide Sicily by Ellen Grady.

Interior of the sanctuary

The most direct approach to Mt Pellegrino from Palermo is from Piazza Generale Cascino, near the fair and exhibition ground (Fiera del Mediterraneo). From here Via Pietro Bonanno ascends to the sanctuary of St Rosalia, crossing and recrossing the shorter footpath used by pilgrims making the annual pilgrimage on 3–4 September (often barefoot or on their knees). A flight of steps zig-zags up the Scala Vecchia (17th century) between the Primo Pizzo (344m; left) and the Pizzo Grattarola (276m). The terrace of the rosy-pink Castello Utveggio (built as a hotel in 1932, now used as a congress venue), provides the best view of Palermo.

A small group of buildings marks the Santuario di Santa Rosalia, at 428m, a cavern converted into a chapel in 1625 (open summer 7.30–8, winter 7.30–6, T: 091 540326). It contains a statue of the saint by Gregorio Tedeschi, and a bas-relief of her coronation, by Nunzio La Mattina. The water trickling down the walls is held to be miraculous and is carefully captured by Futuristic-looking metal conduits. The outer part of the cave is filled with an extraordinary variety of ex-votos.

Rosalia, daughter of Duke Sinibald and niece of William II, lived here as a hermit until her death in 1166. She is supposed to have appeared to a hunter on Mt Pellegrino in 1624 to show him the cave where her remains were, since she had never received a Christian burial. When found, her relics were carried in procession through Palermo and a terrible plague, then raging in the town, miraculously ceased. She was declared patron saint of Palermo and the annual procession in her honour (14–15 July), with a tall and elaborate float drawn through the streets by oxen, became a famous spectacle.

A steep road on the farther side of the adjoining convent climbs up to the summit, from which there is a wonderful panorama extending from Ustica and the Aeolian Islands to Etna. Another road from the sanctuary leads to a colossal 19th-century statue of St Rosalia by Benedetto de Lisi, high on the cliff edge.