IN 1898, when Evelyn Underhill was 22, she and her mother began what would become an annual series of spring holidays in France and Italy. Underhill wrote in her travel journal most days, as they made their way from place to place, ensuring that cathedrals, churches, and art galleries were at the heart of their ambitious yearly itineraries.
In their travels through Italy, Underhill and her mother got into as many places off the beaten track as they could, and Underhill describes kind monks and willing guides who allowed them into sacristies and spaces behind the scenes.
She filled many sketchbooks along the way. Her watercolours of hilltop landscapes, the twists and turns of small medieval city streets, and, above all the wide, range of sacred sites that they visited are a diverse and intimate aspect of her early life. They are palpable expressions of how the world of not only art and architecture but also theology and spirituality was opening up in front of her, one sacred site at a time.
As Charles Williams wrote in an early biography of Underhill, “She was becoming aware that the inner diagram of that particular art was not only art but religion.” In 1949, Underhill’s travel journals from 1901-07 were published posthumously by Lucy Menzies, with permission from her husband, Hubert Stuart Moore. This material is now in the extensive Evelyn Underhill archives held at King’s College, London.
Siena, Florence, Assisi, and Venice were places of enduring interest for both sacred encounter and art-historical study for Underhill in these early years. She visited Siena twice, in 1904 and 1907, and the differences in her impressions and interpretations between these visits is an enduring microcosm of how her inner spiritual life and experiences of God and prayer were beginning to emerge.
Between these years, she was seeking spiritual insight of many kinds, not only within Christianity, but also in experimental and esoteric communities, including the Golden Dawn. Her focus on mysticism and immersion in spiritual experience was offered to readers with a pragmatically earthed quality, and, ultimately, “the business and method of mysticism is love.”
THE earliest mention of Assisi in her journal is 1902, beginning with a love for the city’s “soul”: “Her churches are the only ones I have seen this trip which are perfect within and without.” The frescoes in the lower church “glow with a rich, sombre majesty which covers its walls”.
She returned to Assisi in 1907 as the final destination of a trip devoted to Franciscan shrines in Tuscany. She visited the bed of St Francis in the rocks of Monte Subiaso, reflecting on how he prayed with a sixth-century painting of the Madonna and Child. Underhill explained: “the wild, rough, hermit life ‘only possible by Extraordinary Grace’ said the frate who showed it to me — these things make vivid the freshness and wonderfulness of that life and the lives which it was able to inspire.”
In the journal collection Shrines and Cities, this description is on the same page as Underhill’s sketch of the exterior of Santa Chiara, in Assisi, looking up at it from the bottom of a hill, with a gentle path on the right inviting the viewer to make their way towards the church’s prominent tower and Gothic simplicity.
Underhill’s descriptions of Assisi are closely focused on intimacy with St Francis. She saw the relics in the sacristy of San Francesco, and was particularly moved by seeing the “rough, clumsy shoes” and socks provided by St Clare so the wounds in his feet would hurt less as he walked along the road, as well as the wooden “pad” he placed over the wound in his side.
The pain and the simplicity of Francis’s life came to her most vividly through her encounters with these objects, as well as her experiences of Giotto’s frescoes of the life of St Francis. In these, Underhill felt that “the whole of the spirit of Catholic life and worship seems to find an almost rapturous expression.” Spending time with the Blessed Sacrament in the Upper Church, she reflected that its “silent Presence seems to permeate this lovely place and give it dignity and meaning”.
Gazing closely at the works of art, she was disconcerted by Cimabue’s approach to the “imperial aspect of religion”, which she associates with “the remoteness of the whole from the common life of man, which is difficult to combine with any spiritual idea”. It is neither down to earth nor expressive of Francis’s own values and theology, as well as Underhill’s herself. In St Francis’s expression within this painting, she interprets that he, like her, is “rather bewildered by this pensive, highly bred and loveless Paradise”.
UNDERHILL wrote: “I love the early Sienese; there is a mingling of mysticism and voluptuousness about them which wins my heart.” On 10 April 1904, she arrived in Siena for the procession of the relic of the head of St Catherine of Siena for the first time in 50 years. She meticulously described the procession of clergy, vestments, banners, and the reliquary containing “the thin white face” among the procession’s “tossing sea of colour and light”. She felt the whole experience was a manifestation of the “radiance which shines in her mystical painters and her saints”.
When she returned to Siena in 1907, she wrote that it was “far lovelier than before”, and she described the city not so much as a place, but a friend. “She has a way of surprising one at street corners, offering sudden new aspects of herself, which no other Italian city possesses to the same extent.” Her time there deliberately coincided with the feast of St Catherine again.
This time, she attended as a worshipper rather than an observer. At the chapel with the relic of Catherine’s head, “a young priest came specially in his stole and cotta and blessed my medals and rosaries before the crucifix from which Catherine had received the stigmata”.
Later that afternoon, Underhill made her way down a dimly lit staircase in the hospital where St Catherine had been a nurse. There she found a tiny, dark oratory glowing with candlelight, and an altar with a relic. She knelt at the “mere slit in the thickness of the wall”. This was where Catherine slept. It was full of blessed flowers, and each pilgrim was invited to take one.
Her descriptions are warm and devotional, but by no means saccharine. She described a hymn as “doggerel”, and the Confraternity’s members were dressed in robes “of dubious whiteness”. As in much of Underhill’s writing, the radiance of the divine and the everyday simplicity of human beings are unpretentiously interlinked.
At the end of her time in the city, she wrote: “I see Siena now as a warmly red town, Gothic and brick-built for the most part and green-shuttered and only Renaissance by mistake. The narrow red streets clamber up from the Campo, and above all sits the black and white cathedral, magical against the blue sky, like Siena’s Dominican saint.” The city, its art, and its sacred architecture were one with the medieval mystic and saint herself.
UNDERHILL visited Florence in 1904, just a few days after her first trip to Siena. Her writing focuses on San Miniato, which she analyses in architectural historical detail, attentive to different ways of perceiving style, period, and aesthetics. From her vantage point in the nave, she looks up to the sanctuary, describing the sensation as “strange and affecting”.
The church’s Romanesque “sense of gravity and spaciousness” is, Underhill believes, similar to Gregorian chant, because “it is monotonous, but then it is perfectly adapted to its use.” In Venice the following year, she found an entirely different experience of sacred space and multi-sensory worship. The trip was planned to coincide with Holy Week, and Underhill participated in the whole of the Triduum at St Mark’s. She described its interior as “astonishing and intoxicating”, and as expressing a “mystic theology” rather than a “passionate, groping faith”.
It was at once richly immersive and uncannily serene. The carved capitals and stone reliefs are so “perfect, technically and aesthetically, that each comes on one as a separate shock”. Her time in Venice is among the most intensely described throughout her journals, and this is rooted in the interaction between the visual arts and the liturgies. Recalling the liturgy of the Pre-Sanctified on Good Friday, she wrote, “the verses sung during the Adoration of the Cross are deeply touching — and the cry of the Sub-deacon ‘Bend the knee! Rise up!’ is very Eastern. Altogether a grander and more mystical rite than the Anglican Three Hours.”
When Underhill makes her way through Venetian visual art within both churches and museums, her writing takes on a staccato quality, moving across what, she observes, are three significant “spiritual periods” of art: San Marco, Bellini, and Titian and Tintoretto. Underhill’s impression of Bellini’s Madonna and Child imagery is that he interprets “our Lady as an excellent wife and mother but not virginal in the least. More love, less worship: a lowering of the heavens rather than a raising of the earth.”
AS AN artist documenting and interpreting her journeys, Underhill’s sketchbooks provide a guide to the way in which she gazed, and where she took time to be attentive. Landscapes, gardens, city skylines, and church interiors share pages with brass hinges, architectural details, stone saints, and medieval thuribles. Whether abroad, in cathedrals across the UK, or at home in London, her eye, heart, and soul were interconnected with clarity and curiosity.
In these years of annual travel, she had novels published, including The Grey World and The Lost Word. A turning point in the narrative of The Grey World takes place in front of a Renaissance Italian painting by the Florentine artist Verrocchio, in the National Gallery.
Her character, Willie, sits in front of the painting and looks at it “steadily, intently, without conscious thought. In the face of Our Lady was infinite promise, infinite peace. As he watched her, something unearthly, something remote from life, laid its quieting hand upon him. These things had not been conceived in the petty agitations of ordinary life. The Beyond had been at their birth, and left token of its presence.”
Through the painting, he contemplates God. Elsa, the character who encourages Willie to experience art as a spiritual portal, believes that “prie-dieux ought to be placed before the masterpieces of devotional art. The National Gallery, she said, always made her want to say her prayers.”
Underhill’s writing’s most consistent mode is as the art-historically educated observer, noticing differences between periods, schools, painters, and styles. She knows what she is talking about as an amateur with art-historical training; she writes confidently; and her work, even when not meant for the public eye, combines the keen attention of a connoisseur with a historically informed way of describing iconography and symbolism.
With affection and wonder, she described the uncanny quality that Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti share in their depictions of Mary the Mother of God: “the same flat linear rendering of the features and dreamy, ineffable look. It is an intensely static art, gentle in its unearthliness.” The cathedral was “tiger-striped”, and the ringing bell calling the people to reverence the relic of St Catherine of Siena’s head was “at once serious, ecstatic, and picturesque”.
Her interest in the medieval mystic and Doctor of the Church St Catherine is evident, too. Underhill remarked that, “If levitation be credible of any, it must be of Catherine, who seems always to live with her feet barely touching the earth, in a life of which the fringe only was sensual.” She speaks of how difficult — impossible, even — it was for Italian artists of any period to capture the saint’s radical spirituality.
There is another mode, too: the Underhill who is moved and affirmed when she enters into the liturgical and worshipping life of the people, and sees the images and sacred spaces as integrated with a life of faith and mystical wonder.
Throughout her journals, Underhill gives sustained and tender attention to how local communities responded to religion and liturgy. These works of art, sacred spaces, and city streets, are alive with God’s divine presence, and Underhill keenly expresses local manifestations of this phenomenon. Whether identifying herself as a travelling observer on the outside looking in, or as a participant and pilgrim who is part of the patterns of devotion which demarcate the spiritual life of a place and its festivals, Underhill is always on the lookout for seeing how the past and present intersect, and what spiritual as well as art and architectural treasures abound in Siena and beyond.
Reflecting on the insight that she has gained by travelling in and around Florence, she writes: “Once you have found it out (what the Italian painters are really trying to paint) you must love them to the end of your days. . . This place has taught me more than I can tell you. It is a sort of unconscious growing into an understanding of things.”
Far more than a curious traveller or scholarly observer, Underhill was transformed into the theologian and author that she became partly by her interpretations of these places and their traditions.
The Revd Dr Ayla Lepine is Associate Rector of St James’s, Piccadilly, in London, and an art historian.
