A fallen woman flying on a devil’s back, one of the images by Signorelli that so stimulated Freud

Freud, Orvieto and Signorelli

 Freud, Orvieto, Signorelli: the Renaissance frescoes by Luca Signorelli had a profound effect upon Freud. In the entrance hall of Freud’s last home in London, on the right, is a picture of Tivoli, a reminder that Italy was his favourite holiday destination and his spiritual home.

Gardens of Villa Este, Tivoli

50 years after his death in London a collection of black and white Italian postcards was found in a drawer. Purchased during his first of three visits to Orvieto in 1897 they depict frescoes by Luca Signorelli from the San Brizio Chapel in Orvieto cathedral. His encounter with the Renaissance artist from Cortona had a profound effect upon him that profoundly influenced his life and work.

When Freud arrived in Orvieto 120 years ago in 1897 he was going through a turbulent period for several reasons: he was mourning his father who had died in December; partly as a result of this he was in the process of jettisoning his conclusion that hysteria was caused by paternal seduction in childhood turning instead towards the idea of infant sexuality; curiously, the man who sought the source of almost everything in sex had recently set out on a life of celibacy after siring six children in nine years.  Furthermore, two years before he had embarked upon self analysis, then an uncharted journey into the unknown, and in 1896 coined the term psychoanalysis.

Orvieto Duomo and Stars of David

The wonders that Freud saw when he walked into the San Brizio Chapel in Orvieto Cathedral. The Fra Angelico frescoes on the ceiling, the Signorelli on the walls.

The frescoing of the walls was undertaken by Luca Signorelli in 1499 aged about 54. Signorelli’s vision is apocalyptic.

The Antichrist panel left and the Elect in paradise right. Fra Angelico frescoes above on the vaulted ceiling.

On the left is the preaching of the Antichrist followed by the elect cavorting, largely naked, in paradise.

Antichrist left and the Elect in Paradise right. Bottom left corner are Signorelli himself left with hat and Fra Angelico behind, both in black.

Other walls and lunettes show scenes of angels smiting the ungodly with death rays – in fact there is a lot of smiting going on all over the chapel, a veritable orgy of sex and violence.

the wicked smitten by death rays from on high

On the wall opposite are two tableau, both a riot of eroticism and naked flesh, not perhaps what what one would expect in a church, the damned thrown into inferno by devils followed by the saved hauling themselves up from their graves to eternal life.

The damned thrown into hell.

The resurrection of the dead

The tableau that seems to have exerted the greatest fascination upon Freud is the Antichrist. An unusual subject, it was commissioned by the powerful Monaldeschi, a Guelf family, always close to the papacy and in opposition to the Ghibellines who supported the Emperor; the scene is a polemic against heresy, especially the Cathars who had been particularly bothersome in Orvieto, but also against Jews.

The devil whispers to Antichrist, probably based on Savonarola. On left the usurious Jew bribes a blonde.

Freud had been aware of antisemitism since his childhood in Moravia when his father had told his young son that he had humbly turned the other cheek when accosted by an aggressive antisemite on the street. Ever since, Freud had admired more martial father-figures like Cromwell, Hannibal and significantly, Moses.

A spectator watches the mayhem above. He is surrounded by ‘grotesques’, painted just after the recent discovery of the grottoes of Nero’s Domus Aurea in Rome.

The Catholic Church at the time saw Jews not merely as infidels, but Jesus-killing heretics. Freud, who was suffering emotional and intellectual turmoil after his father’s death, stood surrounded by Signorelli’s apocalyptic maelstrom and saw the son, Christ, effectively slaying the father, Judaism.

A smitten Dante figure

Self-portrait of Luca Signorelli surrounded by mayhem looks out of the frame. Behind him stands Fra Angelico or perhaps not – it could be the Archdeacon.

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Near Orvieto on a ridge looking over a deep valley into Southern Tuscany stands a sinister looking castle in the mock-Gothic style of the late nineteenth century. It once belonged to the immensely rich Cahen family, still remembered in Orvieto where a square is named after them. The castle was intended to be the country home of Conte (later Marquess) Edoardo Cahen and his beautiful Anglo-Greek wife Christine, but neither of them were ever to live there. Édouard Cahen d’Anvers died in Rome in 1894 before the castle was completely refurbished; she separated from him and died in Meran in 1884. Now Castle Cahen in Torre Alfina is uninhabited, used only for private functions.

Creepy Places to photograph in Tuscany: Cahen Castle, Torre Alfina, Orvieto, Italy

Edoardo Cahen, scion of the Cahens d’Anvers, belonged to the cosmopolitan Jewish European aristocracy – akin to royalty but with a lot more cash – that moved effortlessly from one country to another, spoke several languages fluently, had branches of the same family in several capitals, and having made their fortunes in banking, commerce and insurance were happy to devote themselves to cultural pursuits rather than huntin’, shootin and fishin’ which were the most common pastimes amongst the older established aristocracies around Europe. The Cahens d’Anvers became rich through the novel idea of using the pigeon post between Antwerp and Amsterdam to steal a march on their stock market rivals. Edoardo Cahen was granted a concession to build part of the Prati neighbourhood of Rome after the Unification of Italy.

Alice (L) and Elisabeth Cahen (R) by Renoir. Elisabeth was murdered in Auschwitz.

Edoardo’s three nieces were painted by Renoir. However, his brother Louis disliked the painting of Alice and Elisabeth so much it was hung in the servant’s quarters; what is more he quibbled and stalled over paying the bill, 1,500 francs (about 10-15,000 Euros today), arousing a previously un-manifested anti-Semitism in the artist. The Cahens may have been notable patrons of the arts, but this incident perhaps demonstrates that their taste was possibly rather arriviste.

Irène’s daughter Béatrice along with her husband and two young children died in Auschwitz as did her sister Elisabeth and other members of the family. The painting became part of Herman Göring’s illicit collection.

Irène Cahen, Eduardo’s neice by Renoir

Edoardo’s father Joseph Mayer Cahen d’Anvers had lent considerable funds to finance the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy, and a grateful nation bestowed upon him the title of Conte. The influence of capital on the fate of nations is often underestimated. Edoardo Cahen then developed a large area of Rome, even before it became the capital of Italy, near the Vatican an area that was to be known as Prati.

After these exertions, he decided to retire with his wife to a tumbledown castle near Orvieto in the wilds of the Umbria-Latium borders. She was Christine Spartali the younger of two highly educated and beautiful sisters who moved in the artistic beau-monde of 1860s London. Christine’s sister Marie was considered by the Pre-Raphaelites, ‘one of the most beautiful women of her generation’. Indeed the poet Algernon Swinburne was so smitten he exclaimed, ‘She is so beautiful I feel as if I could sit down and cry.’ It has to be said however that he was quite wont to weeping.

La Principesse, now in the Peacock Room, Freer Collection, Washington D.C.

Marie Spartali had been painted by Rossetti and went on to become a notable professional painter for the rest of her long life, whilst Christine modelled for Whistler in 1864 – she was the ‘Principesse du Pays de la Porcellaine’ possibly his most famous painting. She was photographed by the most famous portrait photographer of her day, Julia Margaret Cameron sometime between 1865 and 70 probably in the Isle of White where they were neighbours. Exposures were long in those days so it was hard to manifest unbridled joy, but there is no denying that she has a more than usual Pre-Raphelite mournfulness about her.

The long exposures required by Cameron’s photography were as of naught compared with posing for Whistler: twice a week for 6 months till eventually Christine fell ill and had to be replaced with a stand-in to finish the picture. Besides the Whistler picture (which Spartali père did not like and refused to purchase) many of Marie Spartali’s paintings of typically Pre-Raphaelite subjects seem to portray her younger sister. This obsessive interest in one model was common amongst the Pre-Raphaelites.

Christine Spartali, Julia Margaret Cameron about the time she met Cahen

Both Spartali girls were exceptionally tall (Marie was 190cm) and highly educated, but whereas the elder sister studied painting under Ford Maddox Brown and became a noted painter for the rest of her long life, Christine never pursued a career. Marie fascinated Edward Burne Jones who portrayed her in his Cupid Delivering Psyche – in both male and female roles; he was known for his exotic sexual tastes.

Cupid and Psyche, Burne-Jones

Christine married Cahen in 1869 in Chelsea despite the opposition of her Greek Orthodox father, the Greek consul general in London. How did they meet? Did Cahen move in the arty world of the Pre-Raphaelites and their like? We have no picture of him and I cannot find any account of his time in London. One of his brothers, Albert, was a reasonably well-known composer in France who studied under César Franck.

Path leading to the Cahen mausoleum through The Sasseto wood

At first they had enjoyed the cosmopolitan life in Naples, Rome and Paris where their 2 boys were born, but it seems in Rome the marriage began to go wrong and by 1880 she was attempting – unsuccessfully – to divorce Cahen. Her health deteriorated, possibly owing to the depressing prospect of a chatelaine’s life in darkest Umbria, but at least this illness brought about a partial reconciliation with her father. She took to chloral hydrate and alcohol. According to Rossetti’s brother Michael she died miserable and alone in Tirol of catalepsy in 1884, though it is more likely that the chloral carried her off aged just 37.

Edoardo Cahen, lover of Greco Roman art, took the bizarre decision to build himself a mock gothic mausoleum which would not have looked out of place in Highgate Cemetery.

Cahen bought Torre Alfina in 1881, but it took 20 years to make it truly habitable by which time Cahen and his wife were both dead and there was practically nothing left of the original mediaeval building – what we see today is a mock gothic pile.

Cahen Mausoleum

Cahen Mausoleum in Sasseto Wood

Rather like the fictional Moisè Finzi-Contini who built a monstrous sepulchre looking like a set from Aida that all Ferrara’s Jewish community found absurd, Edoardo Cahen lover of Greco Roman art took the bizarre decision to build himself a mock gothic mausoleum which would not have looked out of place in Highgate Cemetery (where incidentally Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Sidall is buried).

It lies in the forest a kilometre or so below the mock Gothic castle which he never lived to see completed – he died in 1894 aged 62.

Peeking through the door to the open tomb

The earthly remains of Édouard Cahen d’Anvers, Born 1832 died, Rome, 3 May 1894 in the 62nd year of his life as it says on the coffin.

His body was embalmed by the Vatican’s own undertaker; his coffin placed on the top shelf in a vault designed to host generations of Cahens, it lies alone. The sons never brought their mother’s remains to the sepulcher. She was buried in the Spartali vault in London. The two sons left Italy with the introduction of the racial laws in 1938 when Jews were banned from owning property amongst other restrictions.

Edoardo Cahen’s coffin amongst on the top of otherwise empty shelves in the Mausoleum

photographer Patrick Nicholas is reflected in the water

The Writing on the Wall

The two Cahen sons left Italy following The Racial Manifesto of 1938 when Jews were stripped of their citizenship, barred from the professions, excluded from banking, education and the civil service; they were also liable to have their property confiscated. Italian Jewry had been emancipated during the process of the unification of Italy between 1860 and 1870, but now Mussolini determined to cement the Berlin Rome Axis by bringing Italian racial laws into line with Germany’s. 6,000 Jews emigrated 1938-1943. Of those that stayed something over 6,000  perished out of a pre-1938 population of  46,500.

Racial Laws in cartoon form with evident racialist stereoptypes in a fascist paper.

Rome Berlin Axis, Castiglione del Lago station, Trasimene

In 1943-4 the castle was used by the Germans as a command centre and suffered bomb damage as a result. The contents were auctioned off in 1969. Neither Cahen sons had children.

During wartime the mausoleum sacrificed its iron railings and recently the tomb was broken into, the grave stone smashed, the coffin desecrated.

The castle until recently belonged to an absentee landlord, the uncouth, corpulent, criminal bankrupt, Luciano Gaucci who starting from humble beginnings with a cleaning business in Rome, graduated to money laundering on a grand scale and onto wholesale corruption in the football business. He lists his enthusiasms as sex, horses and football.

The castle is now in the hands of a trust and is visitable.

The Cahen mausoleum

The abandoned swimming pool in the Sasseto grounds near the castle. Neither of the two Cahen sons had children.

Garden sculpture, the grinning faun in the Hermetic garden

The Hermetic garden

For those who have a taste for the sinister, we can include in our tour of places to photograph in Tuscany, the creepy Castle Cahen and its mock Gothic tomb in the woods.

Contact me for more info.

The post Creepy Places to photograph in Tuscany: Castle Cahen, a Mock-Gothic Style Mansion of the Late Nineteenth Century in Italy. appeared first on Camera Etrusca Photography Holidays & Workshops in Italy.

Castelluccio di Norcia is well known the world over amongst photographers for its picturesque vales of wild flowers at all times of the year – except when it is under snow which at 1500m is for most of the winter.

It is a bit of a trek to get there from Orvieto (around 2.5 hours) but we do pass through some of the most spectacular scenery in Italy not to mention the beautiful Umbrian city of Spoleto, home of the Two Worlds Festival every July.

Castellucio on the hill in the distance

The gentle slopes and olive groves of lower Umbria give way to furious rivers beloved of rafters rushing through deep limestone gorges flanked by mysterious dark forests worthy of Dante. This is the Umbria of Renaissance artists and pious people, saints …….and swine, after all the town of Norcia (Nursia) is famous all over Italy for its pork products known popularly as norcineria.

Spoleto Porta Fuga from which Hannibal’s army was repulsed in 217 BC

Brancaleone da Norcia pork-butcher’s shop

Curiously Norcia was once famous all over Europe since mediaeval times for its itinerant surgeons.  Surgery was prohibited amongst the clergy so the pig farmers of Norcia and nearby Preci who were already experienced castrators of livestock, turned their hands to gall bladder and cataract surgery and after 1588 with Pope Sisto’s ban on female opera singers, castration of boys. In fact the history of castration may go back much further into prehistory when ritual castration was carried out in these Sibilline Mountains as part of the cult of Cibele.

Gall stones were excruciatingly painful and extremely common amongst populations given to eating predominantly vegetables and pulses. Even a highly experienced surgeon was unlikely to achieve a success rate of 30% in gall stone removal.

It was a Norcia surgeon who operated successfully on the cataracts of Elizabeth I of England.

Siculo Coronation of the Virgin 1541

Surgery and butchery, not necessarily combined, brought wealth to the area and one of the delights of Italy is the way Italians even in out of the way places invested that money, not in the equivalent of BMWs and fancy watches, but in magnificent works of art. We opened the door of a church and there above the altar was Siculo’s Coronation of the Virgin. Absent for 25 years after the ruinous 1979 earthquake, it was restored only in 2005 by which time the locals had despaired of ever seeing it again.

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St John the Baptist’s Church, San Lorenzo Vecchio, Lake Bolsena, from afar

Until the 1920s malaria was the scourge of the Italy. Often entire communities were decimated because the origins of the disease were unknown. The name Malaria comes from the belief that bad air (lit. mal aria) was the cause. In English it was commonly called the Ague.

Church of San Lorenzo Vecchio

One solution was to move the town away from the pestilential air to higher ground, often to a healthy area called piano sano, the healthy plateau.   In the XVIII century much of the lakeside town of San Lorenzo was demolished, its stones transported to the heights above Lake Bolsena and re-erected as San Lorenzo Nuovo with an octagonal piazza. The church of St John the Baptist, however, was spared, though its roof has fallen in.

A mournful view of the church of St John the Baptist

The old town lay astride the pilgrims’ road to Rome known as the Via Francigena, the Frankish Road, which until the Reformation led all the way from Canterbury.

Surviving fresco

The church designed by Pietro Tartarino, and completed in 1590 is unusual. It is octagonal, and occupies a site once sacred to the Etruscan and  for whom Lake Bolsena was the centre of their cult, the Omphalos, the navel of their world. The XVIII century piazza in San Lorenzo Nuovo is also octagonal.

St John the Baptist’s church

Catholic miracles abound in places where the old religion proved particularly hard to eradicate. Nearby Bolsena has not one , but two miracles associated with the town, a sign that adherence to the old religion was particularly obdurate. This church in Val di Lago, close by the Etruscan city of Tyre, may mark the site of the miracle of Santa Cristina. Though not the case here, a church raised on the site of a miraculous defeat of paganism is often dedicated to St Michael and the pagan power is represented as a dragon. However, the octagonal shape, the preferred form of Templar churches, could be significant.

Chancel of St John’s church with surviving roof

The roof over the chancel has survived, as have some frescoes and even some stucco sculpture. There even seems to be some blast damage, a reminder that the war passed through here in 1944. All in all the church of San Lorenzo Vecchio is a miracle in itself, of survival.

The charm of the place lies in its desolate remoteness among the swamps near Lake Bolsena. However a quite useless fence was erected in 2012, and mock cast-iron lamp-posts were scattered about. A case of European Union largesse being sprinkled  on ostensibly worthy projects perhaps? It would not surprise me if some over enthused local politician were to raise European Union funds to erect a concrete roof, re-stucco the building and spray paint it his mistresses’ favourite colour of tasteful pork pink. It would not be the first time.

St John the Baptist’s has a lugubrious beauty in winter

May Patrick Nicholas’ photographic workshop: Tuscany, Orvieto, Lake Bolsena and Barabbata festival.

May festival at Lake Bolsena, Italy

 Start the summer with Camera Etrusca’s Barabbata Festival Workshop with led by patrick Nicholas. Held every year on May 14 on the shores of Lake Bolsena. This joyous festival with pagan origins has colourful floats drawn by men and animals through the picturesque fishing village (the womenfolk just cast blossom from the balconies) is held to mark the beginning of summer.
As usual we would like to offer a discount to all the people that want to start the summer season with us.

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Orso Orsini was a prince of wild ways. Wayward brother of the cultured condottiero Niccolò, he married the beautiful Eleanora degli Atti di Morlupo, whose name was long but her life short. He strangled her in a fit of unfounded jealousy in 1575 on the bridge outside Pitigliano and threw her body into the ravine.

Bower sculpted from the volcanic rock

The recently completed Parco Orsini  thus came to be known as the lugubrious Parco degli Strozzoni, Stranglers Park.

Crumbling thrones overlooking the valley in the Orsini Park, Pitigliano.

And yet the park had been planned as a place of quiet contemplation, a ‘locus amoenus’ along the lines of the nearby  Bosco Sacro or Sacred Wood of Bomarzo (below), built about the same time in 1552.

Bomarzo, “Ogni Pensiero Vola” (“Every Thought Flies”, but games, even hide and seek, picnics, photography – all forbidden)

This had been laid out with grotesque and massive sculpture on the orders of Vicino Orsini, a distant cousin of Orso and Niccolò. Vicino had had the garden designed on Hermetic principles by Pirro Ligorio,

Bomarzo

architect of genius (he was responsible for the water works at Villa Este in Tivoli and was also the first Italian to design buildings specifically to resist earthquakes).

The sculpture was designed to amaze, and it still does though the garden is not what it was and the water element is now completely missing; Bomarzo also has the stroppiest, most belligerent and gratuitously discourteous custodians I have ever encountered, anywhere. Bomarzo is now a major tourist attraction visited by the likes of Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalì and Antonioni. It even featured in  film version of ‘Alice in Wonderland’.

not perhaps what you might think but the remains of a reclining goddess

Parco Orsini on the other hand has no custodians at all, is difficult to find and what is more the statuary is largely overgrown, crumbling and un-cared for – it is just like stumbling upon an enchanted secret garden.

the reclining goddess from the other side

The statue of the Orsini family in Pitigliano, Tuscany.

Orso Orsini who quite apart from strangling his luckless wife also had a neighbour of his Galeazzo Farnese murdered during a hunting party. He got his comeuppance when he was himself slain on a bridge by Prospero Colonna.

The model is trying the pose for  “Carpe Diem” on one of the several thrones looking over the Lente valley

At the end of the escarpment there is a belvedere carved out of the rock with a fine view across the Lente Valley towards Sorano. I have used this enchanted wood in two my pictures  This Autumn Evening and Carpe Diem (in which you may notice a transposed Orsini bear).

an out-take from the This Autumn Evening shoot

Rather optimistically the local municipality, at considerable expense, built a recreation area with scores of wooden picnic tables. However in true municipal style they neglected to create access or a parking area, so now it is as overgrown, out of sight and unknown as the Orsini Park itself – which does not exactly break my heart.

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“Sunrise glowed red as I climbed along the gorge; when I reached the grove, I saw the altar slab all scattered with brightness, like the harper’s robe. I put down my load, and prayed to Apollo.”

Poggio Conte will appear immediately familiar to anyone who has read Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, a novel based on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, in which she describes in detail a Sacred Glade.

The Sacred Glade, the cliff church is just visible top left.

Poggio Conte is in a remote corner of northern Latium on the borders of Tuscany.

It is quicker……………. and easier in the Land Rover

Most visitors must leave their cars by the road (where the signpost is usually absent) about 5km from the site, walk along the Fiora valley through a bucolic idyl of grazing cattle amongst scarlet poppies.

The last stretch before the wood, the glade is among the trees ahead beneath the cliff

With the Land Rover we can however get much closer before having to leave the vehicle to follow a footpath along a cutting through the cliffs. As we approach the glade we begin to hear an enchanting sound, the tinkle of water cascading onto a blue-black pointed rock.

Sacred Glade cascade

There are Etruscan tombs cut into the cliffs though most have disappeared as the sides of the ravine have collapsed over millennia. However, the cliff church though losing it’s portal to erosion by flood-waters, has survived in the cliff above the concave dell.

Etruscan tombs in the ravine leading to the glade.

Patrick Nicholas has used this location in several of his pictures in the Belle series , for example Lilith.

More about the sacred glade and the hermitage church of San Colomba in the next blog coming up soon.

This is one of the several Photo excursion location that we normally include in our photo workshops and photo tours .

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Much of what is now known as northern Latium north of Rome on the borders of Tuscany was until the 1930s a veritable wilderness.

The cliff dwellings of Ripatonna on the Tuscan Latium marches, a veritable wilderness until fairly recently.

Saracen pirates had scourged the area and malaria had done the rest.

The Roman single span bridge over the river Fiora. The arch, an Etruscan invention, is still standing with absolutely no maintenance.

Not surprisingly the region was infested with bandits and outlaws, but also with hermits, lepers, outcasts, monks and nuns. Many of latter led a troglodyte existence hollowing out dwellings in the soft tufa cliffs along the river Fiora.

a picnic in the Selva Lamone forest before we set off.

Ripatonna Cicognina was inhabited by a community of about 200  between XV and XVII centuries. There was a church which once had frescoes by the Sienna School depicting Sant’Antonio Abate, the first Christian hermit.

Archana from Bangalore photographs the interior which still has most of its plaster  embellished by generations of graffiti.

It is a steep but not a hard climb up to the cliff dwelling. The tufa volcanic rock is soft and easy to excavate but then oxidises and hardens, an ideal building material.

The hermitage probably is an enlargement of an Etruscan necropolis going back about 2500 years.

A great place for kids to explore

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