OTHER Italian cities cling to ridges; Volterra straddles a mountain top, dominating the cascading ridges and balze of the hinterland. The site perfectly fulfilled the requirements of the Etruscans, whose city of Velathri was defended by walls, some seven kilometres in circuit, that enclosed both the high ground, which would be occupied by the medieval town, and the three ridges descending to the north. Stretches of the walls survive. Roman Volaterrae was also a place of some consequence, as the theatre tucked under the medieval wall near the Porta Fiorentina reminds us. The medieval commune contended with neighbouring San Gimignano and was first briefly occupied by the Florentines in 1254. But it was only in 1472 that Volterra became a Florentine dependency, of which the formidable fortress at the east angle of the city is only the most obvious statement.
Why Volterra mattered to Lorenzo il Magnifico and his successors is self-evident however Volterra is approached. On the road up from Pentedera there are tantalizing glimpses. While it may be easier to park near the Porta Fiorentina, I prefer to enter from the west at the Porta San Francesco. Just within the gate, to the left, is the Franciscan church, austere and bare, but to the right is the large Cappella della Croce di Giorno, frescoed in 1410 by Cenni di Francesco with scenes from the life of Christ and the story of the True Cross. Cenni was little more than an efficient follower of Agnolo Gaddi, but he rose to the challenge; we are left in no doubt that the Innocents were massacred and that Saint Helena did find the right Cross.
San Francesco: Cenni di Francesco, Massacre of the Innocents, fresco (detail).
The Via San Lino rises steeply to the heart of the city. At an obvious fork, take the right-hand street for the irregular Piazza San Giovanni. The fine Romanesque façade of the Duomo masks a very successful sixteenth-century internal reconstruction. Albertinelli’s Annunciation apart – memorable for what is perhaps the most beautiful of his landscapes – the lateral altarpieces are by later sixteenth-century masters, including a gifted local man, Niccolò Circignani, a suave Florentine, Santi di Tito, and a gifted northerner, Pieter de Witte, il Candido. Opposite the Duomo is the thirteenth-century octagonal Baptistery, with a font by Andrea Sansovino. Some way behind the Duomo is the Piazza dei Priori, most notable for the Palazzo dei Priori, completed in 1254, ironically the year of the first Florentine occupation.
The best views of the palazzo’s tower and the campanile of the Duomo are from the Parco Archeologico at the high point of the hill, with the eroded remains of the Etruscan acropolis. The immense accumulation of Etruscan material excavated at Volterra is shown in the Museo Etrusco on the Via Don Minzoni in the shadow of the Fortezza.
Guaranteed by that emphatic complex, the prosperity of Medicean rule is implied by the many palaces of the city. That of the Inghilrami, patrons of Raphael, is just below the archaeological park, but there are many more. One, the Palazzo Viti in the Via dei Sarti, is now open to the public. Near this is the former Palazzo Minucci, which now houses the Pinacoteca Comunale. There are fine late Gothic altarpieces by Taddeo di Bartolo, the most forceful Sienese master of the early Quattrocento, and his near contemporary, Alvaro Portoghese, who adapted to Florentine taste. The late Quattrocento Sienese Benvenuto di Giovanni responds to the balze west of the town in the grey and white landscape of his Nativity. Of the three altarpieces supplied for the town by the Cortonese Luca Signorelli, two are here – the third is in London. No Italian of his time painted books with greater enthusiasm, so it is entirely characteristic that the Virgin in his chromatically charged Annunciation has dropped hers. To modern taste Signorelli is outshone by Rosso Fiorentino, whose deeply emotional Deposition can be read as an inspired rejection of the altarpiece recently supplied by Signorelli’s erstwhile associate, Perugino, for Santissima Annunziata in Florence, where Rosso had worked in the atrium. After looking at a great masterpiece it is difficult to attend to less clamant pictures. But do not pass by the Deposition or the Nativity by Pietro Candido: both perfectly express the pyrotechnical brilliance as a colourist that were to stand him in such stead as a designer of tapestries at the court in Munich in the late sixteenth century.
Pinacoteca Civica: Luca Signorelli, Annunciation (detail), 1491.