An artist, it is true, might often thank his stars for those old houses,
so picturesquely time-stained, and with the plaster falling in blotches
from the ancient brick-work. The prison-like, iron-barred windows, and
the wide arched, dismal entrance, admitting on one hand to the stable,
on the other to the kitchen, might impress him as far better worth
his pencil than the newly painted pine boxes, in which--if he be an
American--his countrymen live and thrive. But there is reason to suspect
that a people are waning to decay and ruin the moment that their life
becomes fascinating either in the poet's imagination or the painter's
eye.
As usual on Italian waysides, the wanderers passed great, black crosses,
hung with all the instruments of the sacred agony and passion: there
were the crown of thorns, the hammer and nails, the pincers, the spear,
the sponge; and perched over the whole, the cock that crowed to St.
Peter's remorseful conscience. Thus, while the fertile scene showed the
never-failing beneficence of the Creator towards man in his transitory
state, these symbols reminded each wayfarer of the Saviour's infinitely
greater love for him as an immortal spirit. Beholding these consecrated
stations, the idea seemed to strike Donatello of converting the
otherwise aimless journey into a penitential pilgrimage. At each of them
he alighted to kneel and kiss the cross, and humbly press his forehead
against its foot; and this so invariably, that the sculptor soon learned
to draw bridle of his own accord. It may be, too, heretic as he was,
that Kenyon likewise put up a prayer, rendered more fervent by the
symbols before his eyes, for the peace of his friend's conscience and
the pardon of the sin that so oppressed him.
Not only at the crosses did Donatello kneel, but at each of the many
shrines, where the Blessed Virgin in fresco--faded with sunshine and
half washed out with showers--looked benignly at her worshipper; or
where she was represented in a wooden image, or a bas-relief of plaster
or marble, as accorded with the means of the devout person who built,
or restored from a mediaeval antiquity, these places of wayside worship.
They were everywhere: under arched niches, or in little penthouses with
a brick tiled roof just large enough to shelter them; or perhaps in
some bit of old Roman masonry, the founders of which had died before the
Advent; or in the wall of a country inn or farmhouse; or at the midway
point of a bridge; or in the shallow cavity of a natural rock; or high
upward in the deep cuts of the road. It appeared to the sculptor that
Donatello prayed the more earnestly and the more hopefully at these
shrines, because the mild face of the Madonna promised him to intercede
as a tender mother betwixt the poor culprit and the awfulness of
judgment.