Of all the minor disadvantages of travel which have accompanied the substitution of the locomotive for the coach, perhaps none is so real an evil as the very partial impression an ordinary traveller derives from a short visit to some interesting land. When Rome and Florence, for instance, are brought within the compass of a day's journey, the tourist is little likely to care to break his journey for comparatively obscure cities, much less villages, scurries past "reedy Thrasymene" without recognition, and scarce notices the towers and churches of Perugia, rising green and grey on the mountain side. Still less likely is our tourist to arrest his comet-like progression at a rough country station, some fourteen miles from the old Etruscan city, a station where very obviously, neither guard nor porter expects him to alight, and which he has some difficulty in identifying by the help of a nearly illegible inscription, as Assisi. And yet there was a time when this forgotten town played no inconsiderable part in the world's history, and was the central seat of an Order that reckoned princes among its followers, and practically divided with the Dominicans the spiritual sovereignty of Europe.[64] And even now, if any very strong-minded traveller should be able to defy the ominous silence of Bradshaw,[65] and the neglect of Cook, and more regardful of what has been, than what is, spend a few days in the home of poverty, he will not regret, we think, in after years his deviation from the accustomed routine of travel; nay, if he gain no other advantage, he will at least have had a brief space in which to take quiet breath, ere the red-books and the valet de place are again in requisition, ere St. Peter's becomes No. 17 in the often consulted plan, and Rome takes "at least a week to see properly." For at Assisi there is no hurry, and so strong is the spirit of the place that the most energetic tourist quickly succumbs to it; even those who rush over here from Perugia for a day's excursion, treading softly ere they have been a couple of hours in the city of St. Francis. And now we will suppose that "our uncommercial traveller" has safely escaped the clutches of the three or four inn touts whom his arrival has roused into unwonted energy, and consigning his bag to the least ill-favoured, has set out manfully along the dusty road leading from the station to the town; for be it noted that Assisi is not strong in equipages, and the solitary rough wooden box denominated omnibus, is hardly an attractive conveyance at first sight, though ere long the traveller begins to look upon it as an old friend, as it is to be found during the greater part of the day, standing about in various unexpected parts of the town, being apparently left wherever it has taken a passenger. One further violence we must do to the mind of the well-instructed tourist, namely, to beg that he will not accept guidance, nor torment himself with details, archÆological or otherwise, but simply open his eyes to all the quiet influences of past devotion and present beauty which he will find around him. And first, he will see by the side of the road a vast church, in the most uninteresting style of Renaissance architecture, not unlike a small edition of St. Peter's. This is St. Mary of the Angels, little notable, save for its size, and a small chapel it contains, where St. Francis first assembled his few followers. In it there is only to be seen—a spoilt fresco, by Perugino; walls dark with age, save where, here and there, the dim lamplight falls upon the silver offerings of penitence and thanksgiving; and some carved doors, more curious than beautiful. These need not delay us much from the steep ascent to the town. Another dusty mile of road, and Assisi lies before and above us, rising a confused mass of tiled roofs and massive walls, from the grey depths of the olive-groves which surround it. Not only on a mountain, but of the mountain, does the town seem to be built, the ponderous blocks of dim red and dusty yellow stone, scarcely seeming to have more the characteristics of houses than of the cliffs above, save where, here and there, a square tower of church or fortification lifts itself into clear pre-eminence of definition from the tumbled confusion of roofs, walls, and buttresses. Another turn in the long, winding road, and the great attraction of the few sightseers who visit Assisi, the Convent of St. Francis—with what Bradshaw calls its "three superb churches," which are, in fact, two—stands revealed. Picture to yourself a long mass of building, standing upon a double range of tall arches, and pierced with a multitude of small windows. This is the convent building itself; beyond it, on a level with its roof, rises the Church of St. Francis, with its square campanile. Of the same dull-yellowish colour as the other buildings of the town, there is little beauty in the church from this point of view, save that of massive strength, and a certain simplicity of design which, when carried out upon so large a scale, almost amounts to grandeur. So, leaving the convent on our left, we enter beneath a massive square tower the first street of the city. It is difficult to say whence comes the sense of extreme desolation which oppresses us, not from the absence of life certainly, for at this point there are commonly a few of the villagers and townspeople chatting round an old fountain, and on every side resounds the squeaking of the pigs, that every well-to-do inhabitant of Assisi keeps tethered on the ground-floor of his house. Nor is it that there are no signs of commercial enterprise, for we notice the hammered brass and copper jars and cauldrons glimmering dimly in the recesses of one of the dark shops, and some strings of onions and other vegetables in another. Is it something, we wonder, in the construction of the town itself, in its rough-hewn blocks of dusty stone, its huge buttresses, its blocked-up arches, its weather-beaten tiles, the defacement of its ruined fountains, and the general appearance of enormous toil with which the city must have been constructed? Or is it still more the case, that even at the first glance we connect the appearance of the town with the state of the superstition to which it owes its existence; whose power changed the small Etrurian village into a shrine of the deepest sanctity and proudest priesthood, and having done its work for good and evil, faded gradually away, and now finds voice only on the trembling lips of the half-dozen monks who are all that remain at Assisi of the famous Brotherhood? For whatever reason, the place is desolate—desolate as no place can be which has not once been great; and as we ascend the street, the impression deepens. Few of the houses have glass to their windows; the old arched entrances are blocked up with rough stone, and low, square doorways supply their place; the ground-floor of the house is commonly used as a store-room, a stable, or a piggery. The upper windows show us nothing within that we are accustomed to connect with ideas of domestic comfort. Even the massive ironwork seems to partake of the general desolation, and is coated with the grey dust of centuries. Here and there we pass a fountain, generally situated in a small grass-grown open space, with a couple of earthen pitchers left to fill themselves leisurely; and over all there is still the sense of death in life, needing a vigorous effort on our part to endure. We begin to think there was some sense in that philistine American we met at Florence, who smiled so scornfully at our determination to visit Assisi, and to have thoughts of the next train to a more lively spot. However, food and wine at the modest little hotel quickly dissipate our loneliness; our musings on St. Francis and his monks assume a more pleasant complexion, and by the time we find our way down the long street to the convent, we are in a fit mood to appreciate any beauty or pleasure which we may chance to find there. And indeed he would be hard to please who could be discontented with the enjoyment here provided, for whether it be Nature or Art for which his "thirsty soul doth pine," here he may satiate himself at leisure.

Everything on our way seems to tell the same story of departed grandeur; the city is almost as deserted as one of those we read of in the Arabian Nights. A beautiful arcade, each capital of whose pillars is carved to represent a different species of vegetation, incloses nothing; the house of the poet Metastasio is falling into ruins, and scarcely can one decipher his coat of arms sculptured above the door. No dogs bark, nor children scream, nor loungers stare as the unwonted stranger passes through the market-place; the very cafÉ has been fain to part with its chairs and little tables, and now is only a gaunt, bare room, in a corner of which sits, in half obscurity, a melancholy woman sewing slowly. The market-place is certainly the most gloomy part of the town, were it only from its contrast to the market-places we are accustomed to see; and so let us hurry down the long, grass-grown street, till at last a sudden breadth of light opens before us, and straight in front, across a patch of green meadow, rises the Church of St. Francis, while a little to the left a steep incline leads down to the entrance of the Lower Church, called incorrectly, in some works, the crypt, as the real crypt is beneath this lower edifice. The Lower Church stands upon a shelf of rock, the side of which slopes abruptly upward, against which one end of the church is built. The position of the two churches may perhaps be understood by thinking of them as situated upon two successive steps of a staircase, the floor of the Upper Church being merely a continuation of the upper step, and being thus immediately above the roof of the Lower Church.

Let us pause before entering the church, and cast our eyes over the scene before us. We stand on a little terrace half-way up the town, looking down upon tiled roofs, grey walls, and greyer olive groves, interspersed with some brighter greens of acacia and poplar. Beneath us, winding away in long perspective, is the road to the station, with the tall dome of St. Mary of the Angels forming a prominent blot upon the landscape, and breaking the level monotony of the plain. On the right a broad river-bed, nearly dry at the present season, stretches a snake-like course towards Perugia, the towers of which are just visible in the distance. In front of us, the valley of the Tiber stretches away for miles and miles, broken only by long lines of poplars and tiny villages, which, from the height at which we stand, only show as gleaming spots in the sunshine. In the extreme distance, purple mountains enclose the valley on every side, and immediately behind us rises the mountain on which Assisi is built, crowned with a ruined citadel, and black against the sky, the sharp pinnacles of cypress-trees. Whichever way one turns, there is beauty—in the quaint architecture of the old town, in the wild growth of the ancient olive-trees, and their delicate tints of greyish-green and silver; in the brighter colours of the plain, with its broad stretches of sunshine and little shadows of cloud; in the ranges of mountains, the darkness of the cypresses, and the brightness of the sky. And so murmuring within ourselves that the old monk was no bad judge of scenery, after all, we turn in beneath the broad portico of the church.

It is not known when this church first began to receive pictorial adornment; but it is probably true that Giunta Pisano painted there in 1236, though there can be little doubt that anterior to this period there were paintings the authorship of which is unknown, and whose date is uncertain. The whole question of the authorship of the frescoes at Assisi is discussed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle;[66] but it is difficult to extract their real conclusion from the mass of verbiage in which it is enveloped, and the limitations with which it is encumbered. Nor can I attach much importance to the conclusion which these authors have drawn from frescoes in such a terrible state of decay, as those in the northern and southern transepts of the Upper Church. But I do not propose to enter here upon the question of the authorship of any of these frescoes, except such as are attributed to Giotto; and even this had better be deferred till I have given my readers some idea of the general appearance of the church. Its shape is the usual Latin cross formed by a nave and transepts, without chapels or side aisles. From the entrance, which is at the east end of the church, to the choir, the building is divided into four portions by grouped shafts, five in number, only half of which project from the walls from the capitals; from each group spring to right and left pointed arches, in the centre of each of which is a long narrow window reaching from the ceiling to within about twenty-four feet of the ground, and from the capitals there also spring arches which cross the building diagonally, and intersect at the summit of the ceiling, thus forming triangular openings with curved bases, each of which is filled with a fresco, most of them greatly obliterated. The shafts and capitals have all been painted in various colours, as have also the spaces within the side arches on each side of the narrow windows above mentioned, and so have the faces and sides of each arch. The four main portions, into which the ceiling is thus divided, are alternately painted blue with golden stars, or filled with medallions and figure subjects. The painting of the arches is in imitation of marble mosaic. The intersecting arches of the roof are round (as in the Lower Church), not pointed like the side arches, and on the sides of the latter, which are double in width of the centre arches, there are busts of various saints and martyrs of the church connected by rich ornament and involved geometrical design. On either side of the windows, in the second row from the roof, are the frescoes ascribed to Cimabue, all of which are considerably defaced; above these are the ones assigned by Vasari and Lord Lindsay to Giunta Pisano. The roof was, while I was there, in process of utter destruction (by restoration), and its ruin is by this time probably completed.

Underneath the windows there is a third row of paintings, thirty-six in number, commonly supposed to be the work of Giotto, and beneath this again painted bands of mosaic, and so to the floor, which is alternately inlaid with squares and octagons of marble originally red and white, but which has worn into the warm dusty yellow which seems to overspread the whole of Assisi.

The choir is built and decorated in a similar manner, and its centre occupied by a very elaborately worked iron screen (once bronzed and gilt) erected upon a marble daÏs, inlaid with glass mosaic, the patterns of each step being different, but all intricate and beautiful. The daÏs is about ten feet high and thirty-eight feet long, and the screen about nine feet high. Surmounting the screen there is a narrow marble canopy, supported upon twelve marble pillars, with capitals of acanthus leaves richly gilt, the convex side of the leaves in the upper portion of each capital being very deeply cut and painted vermilion. The screen surrounds a plain marble altar.

The arrangement of the choir is similar to that of the body of the church, each of the transepts being similar in size and arrangement to one of the four divisions already spoken of; the only difference is in the size of the windows, which are exactly double of those in the nave, though of identical shape, each having one pointed archivault; but at the choir end of the church the window is treble in size. The two sides of the choir which have no windows, are ornamented with small galleries of tre-foiled Gothic arches supporting canopies. Underneath these galleries are a row of paintings corresponding with the lowest row of frescoes in the nave. There is a recess of about two feet running the whole length of the church between the groups of shafts just above the lowest row of frescoes, which serves to measure the depth of the side arches, and also as a domain to the two lower rows of frescoes. The colour on the shafts, and on the lowest portion of the side walls, has almost entirely disappeared, and the whole of the paintings in the church are much injured by damp. So much is this the case, that it makes me doubt whether it is worth while going very deeply into the question of their authorship, though this is a favourite battleground with the biographers of early Italian painters.

Vasari boldly ascribes the whole upper portion of the church to Cimabue, and the lower to Giotto: Lindsay asserts that Giunta Pisano had painted the upper, Cimabue the middle, and Giotto the lower range of compartments: Kugler, though somewhat indefinite, holds that he worked out his apprenticeship in the Upper Church of Assisi, and afterwards came again and laboured in the Lower one.

To sum up then the discussion of this matter, which is hardly an interesting one to the general reader, my explanation of the probable authorship of the lower row of frescoes would be the following. That they have been painted by a pupil of Giotto's at the same time that the master himself was at work on the frescoes in the Lower Church, and that the only frescoes by Giotto in the Upper Church, are the two almost monochrome compositions that are placed one on each side of the principal entrance. It should be noted that these two are far more conspicuous, owing to their isolated position, than any other frescoes in the church, which may well have been the reason for their execution by the master himself. And it is somewhat curious to observe that they are both painted in little more than two shades of colour, and are the only frescoes in the church so painted, as if Giotto were purposely restraining his hand, so as not to spoil by contrast the cruder work of his pupil. This pupil I believe to have been Taddeo Gaddi; but I have not seen sufficient undoubted works by his hand, to render this more than a mere conjecture, and there is no evidence on the subject whatever, save such as may be inferred from the fact that Gaddi was almost certainly present with Giotto at the time he painted in the Lower Church.

Leaving the question of the actual authorship undecided just now, notice how far this hypothesis, besides having strong internal evidence in its favour, goes to solve the difficulties of this matter; by it we account easily and naturally for the Giottesque qualities which we find in these works, and also for their comparative feeble significance. And by the effort to combine the Byzantine manner of Cimabue with the simplicity of Giotto, we account for all the very inferior architecture with which these pictures are crowded: architecture which is to a certain extent Giottesque in form, but seems to be wholly conventional in colouring and arrangement.

Giotto would naturally say to his pupil something of this sort: "Look here, Gaddi, this a great chance for you to distinguish yourself; mind you make the most of it. Don't forget that what you have to do is to complete Cimabue's work; you must not make his compositions look more absurd and unnatural than you can help; above all, your work must be in keeping with his in colour, or you'll spoil the church. Mind you preserve the character of the architecture, and keep it uniform throughout; and if you let your work be a little conventional, it will be all the better."

So we may imagine Giotto talking to his pupil; and the compositions are exactly such as might have been produced after such an exhortation, by an earnest, but not very brilliant pupil, in attempting to combine as much as possible of the character of Giotto's work, with the form of Cimabue's compositions.

Indeed, these frescoes frequently fall between the two stools of naturalism and conventionalism, and have the merits of neither. The architecture is throughout utterly absurd, worse, because not so refined as that of the Byzantine, and quite without the beauty of Giotto; an effort towards the simplicity of the buildings in the frescoes of the Arena Chapel being nevertheless observable, though it results only in a toy-shop architecture of the lowest order, yellow and blue towers being stuck one against another.

The figures, too, show the attempt to depict emotion, but without success; and lastly, the colouring, as at present seen, is crude, to the verge of discordancy; but upon this last it would be unsafe to lay much stress, as it is impossible to say what deterioration may not have resulted from the damp, which in some places has actually obliterated the composition altogether. This execution by a pupil would also account for Giotto having restricted himself to shades of grey, green, and blue in the two frescoes at the end of the chapel to which I have above referred. The subjects of these are St. Francis preaching to the Birds, and St. Francis' Dream; and amongst all the Giottos I have seen, there is no more harmonious piece of colouring than in the last named of these works.[67]

There is one piece of corroborative evidence in favour of these works being by Taddeo Gaddi that I may quote for what it is worth, which is, that in the series of panels in the Gallery at Berlin which formerly were part of the frescoes in the Santa Croce of Florence, and which are certainly, according to Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the work of Gaddi; "the subjects are, in fact, more or less repetitions of those in the Upper Church of Assisi." Now it seems more probable that Gaddi should have repeated his own compositions than that he should have repeated those of some unknown master, especially one of such comparatively feeble powers.

Here I must leave the consideration of the authorship of these frescoes; as I said in the beginning, it is a much vexed question, and one that there is at present no positive evidence for deciding; the one thing that is certain is that in a very short time, if it has not happened already, the frescoes will, to all intents and purposes, have entirely vanished.

Crowe and Cavalcaselle hold that there were a series of painters who worked at the Upper Church, and that the whole history of the revival of early Italian art is comprised and explained in these paintings, and seem to hold that Giotto painted only one or two of these frescoes; while, lastly, in one of Dr. Dohme's German series of biographies, which is the latest work issued on this subject, we have the author maintaining the thesis that Giotto painted all these frescoes (in the lower row), and that when he had finished this series he began again upon those of the Lower Church.

Of the various opinions, those of Vasari and Lindsay can, I think, be shown to be wrong from a comparison of the dates of Giotto's works. In the first place there is no evidence whatever to hint at two visits to Assisi, except Vasari's statement that Giotto was invited to Assisi by Fra Mure. Now Fra Mure, who was general of the Franciscan order, only held that post between 1296 and 1302, and therefore if he invited Giotto to complete the frescoes of the Upper Church, it must have been between those years; but from a register preserved in the Vatican, the famous Navicella mosaic was executed by Giotto in 1298, and that he was still at Rome in 1300, is proved by a portion of a fresco representing Pope Boniface announcing the opening of the Jubilee, which took place 1300, and upon the completion of which work Giotto betook himself to Florence, and painted the famous frescoes in the Bargello, in one of which the portrait of Dante occurs. Dante was exiled in 1302, and this, and many minor considerations, point to the date 1301-2 for the execution of these frescoes. It is therefore easy to see that Giotto could not have had the possibility of accepting Fra Mure's invitation between the dates of 1296 and 1302. The question remains whether the lower row of frescoes were executed by Giotto at any subsequent period?

Now there is a consensus of testimony that in Florence, in the year 1303, Giotto executed the designs for the faÇade of the Duomo, afterwards carried out by Andrea Pisano; and that in the same year he married. What happened during the next two years is matter of conjecture: Vasari states that he proceeded to Avignon, which is contradicted by Crowe and Cavalcaselle on the authority of Abertini; and we can find nothing certain till we discover our painter at Padua between 1305-6 painting in the Chapel of the Arena.

If the frescoes in the Upper Church be compared at all carefully with those of the Arena Chapel, it is at once evident that if they be the work of the same hand, it must have worked in a far earlier stage of progress, and it is equally evident, that the transition from the frescoes of the Upper Church to those of the Lower, is marked by an abrupt interval of time.

It is impossible that Giotto could have so far fallen away in skill as to execute the frescoes in the Upper Church subsequent to his painting of the Arena Chapel at Padua; and it is nearly impossible from the dates of his work that he could have found time to do them before. The only hypothesis that seems to be left, if we wish to believe that Giotto executed this series in the upper church, is that Giotto accompanied Cimabue when he worked at Assisi, and painted the lower row of frescoes under the direction of his master.

This theory does not seem to me likely for many reasons; first, it would have been most probable that had Giotto and Cimabue visited Assisi together, some evidence of such a visit would have been discovered; secondly, it seems improbable that Cimabue would have allowed his apprentice such license in composition and incident as is here shown; and thirdly, the manner of the pictures is not as was Giotto's early manner, semi-Byzantine, but rather errs in the opposite direction, and seems a coarse imitation of Giotto's natural method of depicting events. It will be noticed, in careful examination of these works, that, as far as can be judged from the damaged state in which they at present exist, the composition, and what artists call motive, of the pictures are, as a rule, very superior to their execution, which is blundering and unmasterly. I am led by this, and other considerations of style and time, to come to the conclusion that these works are not from the hand of Giotto himself, but were probably executed by his pupils, while the master himself was painting in the Lower Church. The likelihood of this hypothesis will be greater if we remember that there are in the Castellani Chapel of Santa Croce, frescoes which are undoubtedly by the hand of Agnolo Gaddi, which betray many of the so-called Giottesque traits that we find in these frescoes; and indeed the wonder would rather be demanded if this were not the case, and if the inaugurator of a new style of painting did not have his merits imitated by the students working under his tuition.

Again, it seems to be a gratuitous assumption on the part of Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle to hold that this lower row of scenes from the life of St. Francis must be the work of successive artists merely because they exhibit differences of merit. We should rather expect that the same workman, or workmen, would improve in the course of so long a series, especially if they were painted more or less under the direction of a master like Giotto. In any case, a comparison of dates renders it excessively improbable that Giotto paid two visits to Assisi, and if this be so, we are, I think, justified in concluding that the utmost connection he had with the frescoes of the Upper Church was through the medium of his pupils.

Whether or no Crowe and Cavalcaselle are right in believing that other painters besides Giunta and Cimabue had a hand in the upper rows of frescoes, and, if so, who those painters were, are questions which are just now beyond our subject; and very soon they will be beyond any one's interest or power to answer, for the last traces of colour yet remaining in these works are rapidly fading away. It is, however, impossible to imagine with Vasari that all these upper rows of pictures were executed by one hand, for the very strongest differences in style, composition, and even (traces of) colour exists between them.

Thus in the fresco of the Creation, there is not the slightest approach to naturalism of treatment; the Almighty stands within a circle of vermilion and gold surrounded by a halo, which is apparently intended to represent the sun; beneath him is the moon, with a man's face in it, so that there should be no mistaking what it was intended for; beneath the moon, floating in the air in a lozenge-shaped patch of red, is Adam, while beneath him again are some sheep, and an animal that may be either ox, dog, or fox, for it partakes of the character of all three; and to the right of the picture is the sea, with several gigantic fishes half in, half out of the water. The only other fresco in this compartment which is yet decipherable, represents the building of the ark, and is of like character. Compare, however, with these the picture in the next compartment eastwards, representing the sacrifice of Isaac. Large portions of the left-hand side of this work are destroyed, but sufficient are left to show an attempt, rough, it is true, but quite unmistakable, to represent a mountain landscape, with a temple in the distance. Turn to the right hand of the picture: Isaac is half sitting, half lying on the sacrificial altar, and Abraham stands beside him with one hand upon the child's head, his left foot firmly planted on the step of the altar, and his right arm swung up to its fullest height above his head. Seldom have I seen a more vivid bit of arrested motion depicted in any work of art; the painter has actually caught the pause caused by the sudden appearance of the angel, bidding the father to stay his hand. The action of all the limbs is most remarkable in its intensity, even Abraham's long robes fly out wildly behind his outstretched arm. It is impossible that these two pictures can belong to the same hand, or even to the same school—the first is entirely Byzantine in manner, and might have been copied from a fifth century MS.; the latter lacks nothing but a certain amount of fuller detail and a little more anatomical knowledge, to stand as a faithful representation of the event it depicts.

We now come to the question of whether this fresco be one of the works of Giotto, and again must answer it in the negative. In none of the undoubted works by this master is there so advanced a naturalism as here, especially in the treatment of the drapery, which is far nearer to that of the Renaissance period than that of the Byzantine. It will be found on a careful examination of the works in the Arena Chapel at Padua, that the main lines of the drapery are either straight (or very slightly curved), and in some measure stiff; it would have been almost folly to expect that this should be otherwise, remembering that anterior to Giotto the treatment of drapery had been exclusively founded upon the formal parallel lines of the Byzantine mosaics.

In all probability the Renaissance painters have here supplied the place of a vacant or faded fresco with one of their own compositions, and this is rendered the more likely as there are in the Lower Churches several wretchedly bad Renaissance pictures.