Renaissance an almost involuntary habit. In certain places where only
decay has altered things from what they were four centuries ago,
Perugia, Orvieto, S. Gimignano, in the older quarters of Florence,
Venice, and Verona, but nowhere I think so much as in this city of Siena
(as purely mediaeval as the suits of rusted armour which its townsfolk
patch up and bury themselves in during their August pageants), we are
subjected to receive impressions of the past so startlingly lifelike as
to get quite interwoven with our impressions of the present; and from
that moment the past must share, in a measure, some of the everyday
thoughts which we give to the present. In such a city as this, the
sudden withdrawal, by sacristan or beggar-crone, of the curtain from
before an altar-piece is many a time much more than the mere displaying
of a picture: it is the sudden bringing us face to face with the real
life of the Renaissance. We have ourselves, perhaps not an hour before,
sauntered through squares and dawdled beneath porticos like those which
we see filled with the red-robed and plumed citizens and patricians, the
Jews and ruffians whom Pinturicchio's parti-coloured men-at-arms are
dispersing to make room for the followers of AEneas Sylvius; or clambered
up rough lanes, hedged in between oak woods and oliveyards, which we
might almost swear were the very ones through which are winding Sodoma's
cavalcades of gallantly dressed gentlemen, with their hawks and hounds,
and negro jesters and apes and beautiful pages, cantering along on
shortnecked little horses with silver bits and scarlet trappings, on the
pretence of being the Kings from the East, carrying gold and myrrh to
the infant Christ. It seems as if all were astoundingly real, as if, by
some magic, we were actually going to mix in the life of the past. But
it is in reality but a mere delusion, a deceit like those dioramas which
we have all been into as children, and where, by paying your shilling,
you were suddenly introduced into an oasis of the desert, or into a
recent battle-field: things which surprised us, real palm trunks and
Arabian water jars, or real fascines and cannon balls, lying about for
us to touch; roads opening on all sides into this simulated desert,
through this simulated battle-field. So also with these seeming
realities of Renaissance life. We can touch the things scattered on the
foreground, can handle the weapons, the furniture, the books and musical
ins