A Wanderer in Florence
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Title: A Wanderer in Florence
Author: E. V. Lucas
Release date: January 1, 2004 [eBook #10769]
Most recently updated: October 28, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A WANDERER IN FLORENCE ***
A WANDERER IN FLORENCE
By E.V. Lucas
Preface
A sentence from a "Synthetical Guidebook" which is circulated in the
Florentine hotels will express what I want to say, at the threshold
of this volume, much better than could unaided words of mine. It runs
thus: "The natural kindness, the high spirit, of the Florentine people,
the wonderful masterpieces of art created by her great men, who in
every age have stood in the front of art and science, rivalize with
the gentle smile of her splendid sky to render Florence one of the
finest towns of beautiful Italy". These words, written, I feel sure,
by a Florentine, and therefore "inspirated" (as he says elsewhere) by
a patriotic feeling, are true; and it is my hope that the pages that
follow will at once fortify their truth and lead others to test it.
Like the synthetical author, I too have not thought it necessary
to provide "too many informations concerning art and history," but
there will be found a few, practically unavoidable, in the gathering
together of which I have been indebted to many authors: notably Vasari,
Symonds, Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Ruskin, Pater, and Baedeker. Among
more recent books I would mention Herr Bode's "Florentine Sculptors of
the Renaissance," Mr. F.M. Hyett's "Florence," Mr. E.L.S. Horsburgh's
"Lorenzo the Magnificent" and "Savonarola," Mr. Gerald S. Davies'
"Michelangelo," Mr. W.G. Waters' "Italian Sculptors," and Col. Young's
"The Medici".
I have to thank very heartily a good English Florentine for the
construction of the historical chart at the end of the volume.
E.V.L.
May, 1912
Contents
Preface
Chapter I The Duomo I: Its Construction
Chapter II The Duomo II: Its Associations
Chapter III The Duomo III: A Ceremony and a Museum
Chapter IV The Campanile and the Baptistery
Chapter V The Riccardi Palace and the Medici
Chapter VI S. Lorenzo and Michelangelo
Chapter VII Or San Michele and the Palazzo Vecchio
Chapter VIII The Uffizi I: The Building and the Collectors
Chapter IX The Uffizi II: The First Six Rooms
Chapter X The Uffizi III: Botticelli
Chapter XI The Uffizi IV: Remaining Rooms
Chapter XII "Aèrial Fiesole"
Chapter XIII The Badia and Dante
Chapter XIV The Bargello
Chapter XV S. Croce
Chapter XVI The Accademia
Chapter XVII Two Monasteries and a Procession
Chapter XVIII S. Marco
Chapter XIX The SS. Annunziata and the Spedale Degli
Innocenti
Chapter XX The Cascine and the Arno
Chapter XXI S. Maria Novella
Chapter XXII The Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele to S. Trinità
Chapter XXIII The Pitti
Chapter XXIV English Poets in Florence
Chapter XXV The Carmine and San Miniato
Historical Chart of Florence and Europe, 1296-1564
List of Illustrations
In Colour
The Duomo and Campanile, From the Via Pecori
The Cloisters of San Lorenzo, Showing the Windows of the Biblioteca
Laurenziana
The Via Calzaioli, from the Baptistery, Showing the Bigallo and the
Top of Or San Michele
The Palazzo Vecchio
The Loggia of the Palazzo Vecchio and the Via de' Leoni
The Loggia de' Lanzi, the Duomo, and the Palazzo Vecchio, from the
Portico of the Uffizi
Fiesole, from the Hill under the Monastery
The Badia and the Bargello, from the Piazza S. Firenze
Interior of S. Croce
The Ponte S. Trinità
The Ponte Vecchio and Back of the Via de' Bardi
S. Maria Novella and the Corner of the Loggia di S. Paolo
The Via de' Vagellai, from the Piazza S. Jacopo Trafossi
The Piazza Della Signoria on a Wet Friday Afternoon
View of Florence at Evening, from the Piazzale Michelangelo
Evening at the Piazzale Michelangelo, Looking West
In Monotone
A Cantoria.
By Donatello, in the Museum of the Cathedral
Cain and Abel and Abraham and Isaac.
By Ghiberti, from his second Baptistery Doors
The Procession of the Magi.
By Benozzo Gozzoli, in the Palazzo Riccardi
Tomb of Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino.
By Michelangelo, in the New Sacristy of S. Lorenzo
Christ and S. Thomas.
By Verrocchio, in a niche by Donatello and Michelozzo in the wall of
Or San Michele
Putto with Dolphin.
By Verrocchio, in the Palazzo Vecchio
Madonna Adoring.
Ascribed to Filippino Lippi, in the Uffizi
The Adoration of the Magi.
By Leonardo da Vinci, in the Uffizi
Madonna and Child.
By Luca Signorelli, in the Uffizi
†The Birth of Venus.
By Botticelli, in the Uffizi
The Annunciation.
By Botticelli, in the Uffizi
San Giacomo.
By Andrea del Sarto, in the Uffizi
The Madonna del Cardellino.
By Raphael, in the Uffizi
The Madonna del Pozzo.
By Franciabigio, in the Uffizi
Monument to Count Ugo.
By Mino da Fiesole, in the Badia
David.
By Donatello, in the Bargello
By Verrocchio, in the Bargello
St. George.
By Donatello, in the Bargello
Madonna and Child.
By Verrocchio, in the Bargello
Madonna and Child.
By Luca della Robbia, in the Bargello
Bust of a Boy.
By Luca or Andrea della Robbia, in the Bargello
*Monument to Carlo Marzuppini.
By Desiderio da Settignano, in S. Croce
David.
By Michelangelo, in the Accademia
The Flight into Egypt.
By Fra Angelico, in the Accademia
The Adoration of the Shepherds.
By Ghirlandaio, in the Accademia
The Vision of S. Bernard.
By Fra Bartolommeo, in the Accademia
Virgin and Child Enthroned, with Saints.
By Botticelli, in the Accademia
Primavera.
By Botticelli, in the Accademia
The Coronation of the Virgin.
By Fra Angelico, in the Convent of S. Marco
The Annunciation.
By Luca della Robbia, in the Spedale degli Innocenti
The Birth of the Virgin.
By Ghirlandaio, in S. Maria Novella
The Madonna del Granduca.
By Raphael, in the Pitti
The Madonna della Sedia.
By Raphael, in the Pitti
The Concert.
By Giorgione, in the Pitti
Madonna Adoring.
By Botticini, in the Pitti
The Madonna and Children.
By Perugino, in the Pitti
*A Gipsy.
By Boccaccio Boccaccini, in the Pitti
All the illustrations are from photographs by G. Brogi, except those
marked †, which are by Fratelli Alinari, and that marked *, which is
by R. Anderson.
A WANDERER IN FLORENCE
CHAPTER I
The Duomo I: Its Construction
The City of the Miracle--The Marble Companions--Twilight and
Immensity--Arnolfo di Cambio--Dante's seat--Ruskin's "Shepherd"--Giotto
the various--Giotto's fun--The indomitable Brunelleschi--Makers of
Florence--The present façade.
All visitors to Florence make first for the Duomo. Let us do the same.
The real name of the Duomo is the Cathedral of S. Maria del Fiore, or
St. Mary of the Flowers, the flower being the Florentine lily. Florence
herself is called the City of Flowers, and that, in the spring and
summer, is a happy enough description. But in the winter it fails. A
name appropriate to all the seasons would be the City of the Miracle,
the miracle being the Renaissance. For though all over Italy traces
of the miracle are apparent, Florence was its very home and still
can point to the greatest number of its achievements. Giotto (at the
beginning of this quickening movement) may at Assisi have been more
inspired as a painter; but here is his campanile and here are his
S. Maria Novella and S. Croce frescoes. Fra Angelico and Donatello
(in the midst of it) were never more inspired than here, where they
worked and died. Michelangelo (at the end of it) may be more surprising
in the Vatican; but here are his wonderful Medici tombs. How it came
about that between the years 1300 and 1500 Italian soil--and chiefly
Tuscan soil--threw up such masters, not only with the will and spirit
to do what they did but with the power too, no one will ever be able
to explain. But there it is. In the history of the world two centuries
were suddenly given mysteriously to the activities of Italian men of
humane genius and as suddenly the Divine gift was withdrawn. And to see
the very flower of these two centuries it is to Florence we must go.
It is best to enter the Piazza del Duomo from the Via de' Martelli,
the Via de' Cerretani, the Via Calzaioli, or the Via Pecori, because
then one comes instantly upon the campanile too. The upper windows--so
very lovely--may have been visible at the end of the streets, with
Brunelleschi's warm dome high in the sky beside them, but that was
not to diminish the effect of the first sight of the whole. Duomo and
campanile make as fair a couple as ever builders brought together: the
immense comfortable church so solidly set upon the earth, and at its
side this delicate, slender marble creature, all gaiety and lightness,
which as surely springs from roots within the earth. For one cannot
be long in Florence, looking at this tower every day and many times a
day, both from near and far, without being perfectly certain that it
grows--and from a bulb, I think--and was never really built at all,
whatever the records may aver.
The interior of the Duomo is so unexpected that one has the
feeling of having entered, by some extraordinary chance, the wrong
building. Outside it was so garish with its coloured marbles, under
the southern sky; outside, too, one's ears were filled with all the
shattering noises in which Florence is an adept; and then, one step,
and behold nothing but vast and silent gloom. This surprise is the more
emphatic if one happens already to have been in the Baptistery. For the
Baptistery is also coloured marble without, yet within it is coloured
marble and mosaic too: there is no disparity; whereas in the Duomo
the walls have a Northern grey and the columns are brown. Austerity
and immensity join forces.
When all is said the chief merit of the Duomo is this immensity. Such
works of art as it has are not very noticeable, or at any rate do
not insist upon being seen; but in its vastness it overpowers. Great
as are some of the churches of Florence, I suppose three or four of
them could be packed within this one. And mere size with a dim light
and a savour of incense is enough: it carries religion. No need for
masses and chants or any ceremony whatever: the world is shut out,
one is on terms with the infinite. A forest exercises the same spell;
among mountains one feels it; but in such a cathedral as the Duomo one
feels it perhaps most of all, for it is the work of man, yet touched
with mystery and wonder, and the knowledge that man is the author of
such a marvel adds to its greatness.
The interior is so dim and strange as to be for a time sheer terra
incognita, and to see a bat flitting from side to side, as I have
often done even in the morning, is to receive no shock. In such a
twilight land there must naturally be bats, one thinks. The darkness
is due not to lack of windows but to time. The windows are there,
but they have become opaque. None of the coloured ones in the aisle
allows more than a filtration of light through it; there are only the
plain, circular ones high up and those rich, coloured, circular ones
under the dome to do the work. In a little while, however, one's eyes
not only become accustomed to the twilight but are very grateful for
it; and beginning to look inquiringly about, as they ever do in this
city of beauty, they observe, just inside, an instant reminder of the
antiseptic qualities of Italy. For by the first great pillar stands a
receptacle for holy water, with a pretty and charming angelic figure
upon it, which from its air of newness you would think was a recent
gift to the cathedral by a grateful Florentine. It is six hundred
years old and perhaps was designed by Giotto himself.
The emptiness of the Duomo is another of its charms. Nothing is allowed
to impair the vista as you stand by the western entrance: the floor
has no chairs; the great columns rise from it in the gloom as if they,
too, were rooted. The walls, too, are bare, save for a few tablets.
The history of the building is briefly this. The first cathedral of
Florence was the Baptistery, and S. John the Baptist is still the
patron saint of the city. Then in 1182 the cathedral was transferred
to S. Reparata, which stood on part of the site of the Duomo, and in
1294 the decision to rebuild S. Reparata magnificently was arrived
at, and Arnolfo di Cambio was instructed to draw up plans. Arnolfo,
whom we see not only on a tablet in the left aisle, in relief, with
his plan, but also more than life size, seated beside Brunelleschi
on the Palazzo de' Canonici on the south side of the cathedral,
facing the door, was then sixty-two and an architect of great
reputation. Born in 1232, he had studied under Niccolo Pisano, the
sculptor of the famous pulpit at Pisa (now in the museum there),
of that in the cathedral in Siena, and of the fountain at Perugia
(in all of which Arnolfo probably helped), and the designer of many
buildings all over Italy. Arnolfo's own unaided sculpture may be seen
at its best in the ciborium in S. Paolo Fuori le Mura in Rome; but
it is chiefly as an architect that he is now known. He had already
given Florence her extended walls and some of her most beautiful
buildings--the Or San Michele and the Badia--and simultaneously he
designed S. Croce and the Palazzo Vecchio. Vasari has it that Arnolfo
was assisted on the Duomo by Cimabue; but that is doubtful.
The foundations were consecrated in 1296 and the first stone laid
on September 8th, 1298, and no one was more interested in its early
progress than a young, grave lawyer who used to sit on a stone seat
on the south side and watch the builders, little thinking how soon
he was to be driven from Florence for ever. This seat--the Sasso di
Dante--was still to be seen when Wordsworth visited Florence in 1837,
for he wrote a sonnet in which he tells us that he in reverence sate
there too, "and, for a moment, filled that empty Throne". But one
can do so no longer, for the place which it occupied has been built
over and only a slab in the wall with an inscription (on the house
next the Palazzo de' Canonici) marks the site.
Arnolfo died in 1310, and thereupon there seems to have been a
cessation or slackening of work, due no doubt to the disturbed
state of the city, which was in the throes of costly wars and
embroilments. Not until 1332 is there definite news of its progress,
by which time the work had passed into the control of the Arte della
Lana; but in that year, although Florentine affairs were by no means
as flourishing as they should be, and a flood in the Arno had just
destroyed three or four of the bridges, a new architect was appointed,
in the person of the most various and creative man in the history
of the Renaissance--none other than Giotto himself, who had already
received the commission to design the campanile which should stand
at the cathedral's side.
Giotto was the son of a small farmer at Vespignano, near Florence. He
was instructed in art by Cimabue, who discovered him drawing a lamb
on a stone while herding sheep, and took him as his pupil. Cimabue,
of whom more is said, together with more of Giotto as a painter, in the
chapter on the Accademia, had died in 1302, leaving Giotto far beyond
all living artists, and Giotto, between the age of fifty and sixty, was
now residing in Cimabue's house. He had already painted frescoes in the
Bargello (introducing his friend Dante), in S. Maria Novella, S. Croce,
and elsewhere in Italy, particularly in the upper and lower churches
at Assisi, and at the Madonna dell' Arena chapel at Padua when Dante
was staying there during his exile. In those days no man was painter
only or architect only; an all-round knowledge of both arts and crafts
was desired by every ambitious youth who was attracted by the wish to
make beautiful things, and Giotto was a universal master. It was not
then surprising that on his settling finally in Florence he should be
invited to design a campanile to stand for ever beside the cathedral,
or that he should be appointed superintendent of the cathedral works.
Giotto did not live to see even his tower completed--it is the unhappy
destiny of architects to die too soon--but he was able during the
four years left him to find time for certain accessory decorations,
of which more will be said later, and also to paint for S. Trinità
the picture which we shall see in the Accademia, together with a few
other works, since perished, for the Badia and S. Giorgio. He died in
1336 and was buried in the cathedral, as the tablet, with Benedetto
da Maiano's bust of him, tells. He is also to be seen full length,
in stone, in a niche at the Uffizi; but the figure is misleading,
for if Vasari is to be trusted (and for my part I find it amusing to
trust him as much as possible) the master was insignificant in size.
Giotto has suffered, I think, in reputation, from Ruskin, who took
him peculiarly under his wing, persistently called him "the Shepherd,"
and made him appear as something between a Sunday-school superintendent
and the Creator. The "Mornings in Florence" and "Giotto and his Works
in Padua" so insist upon the artist's holiness and conscious purpose
in all he did that his genial worldliness, shrewdness, and humour, as
brought out by Dante, Vasari, Sacchetti, and Boccaccio, are utterly
excluded. What we see is an intense saint where really was a very
robust man. Sacchetti's story of Giotto one day stumbling over a
pig that ran between his legs and remarking, "And serve me right;
for I've made thousands with the help of pigs' bristles and never
once given them even a cup of broth," helps to adjust the balance;
while to his friend Dante he made a reply, so witty that the poet
could not forget his admiration, in answer to his question how was
it that Giotto's pictures were so beautiful and his six children so
ugly; but I must leave the reader to hunt it for himself, as these
are modest pages. Better still, for its dry humour, was his answer
to King Robert of Naples, who had commanded him to that city to paint
some Scriptural scenes, and, visiting the artist while he worked, on
a very hot day, remarked, "Giotto, if I were you I should leave off
painting for a while". "Yes," replied Giotto, "if I were you I should."
To Giotto happily we come again and again in this book. Enough at
present to say that upon his death in 1336 he was buried, like Arnolfo,
in the cathedral, where the tablet to his memory may be studied,
and was succeeded as architect, both of the church and the tower,
by his friend and assistant, Andrea Pisano, whose chief title to
fame is his Baptistery doors and the carving, which we are soon to
examine, of the scenes round the base of the campanile. He, too,
died--in 1348--before the tower was finished.
Francesco Talenti was next called in, again to superintend both
buildings, and not only to superintend but to extend the plans of the
cathedral. Arnolfo and Giotto had both worked upon a smaller scale;
Talenti determined the present floor dimensions. The revised façade
was the work of a committee of artists, among them Giotto's godson
and disciple, Taddeo Gaddi, then busy with the Ponte Vecchio, and
Andrea Orcagna, whose tabernacle we shall see at Or San Michele. And
so the work went on until the main structure was complete in the
thirteen-seventies.
Another longish interval then came, in which nothing of note in the
construction occurred, and the next interesting date is 1418, when a
competition for the design for the dome was announced, the work to
be given eventually to one Filippo Brunelleschi, then an ambitious
and nervously determined man, well known in Florence as an architect,
of forty-one. Brunelleschi, who, again according to Vasari, was small,
and therefore as different as may be from the figure which is seated
on the clergy house opposite the south door of the cathedral, watching
his handiwork, was born in 1377, the son of a well-to-do Florentine of
good family who wished to make him a notary. The boy, however, wanted
to be an artist, and was therefore placed with a goldsmith, which was
in those days the natural course. As a youth he attempted everything,
being of a pertinacious and inquiring mind, and he was also a great
debater and student of Dante; and, taking to sculpture, he was one
of those who, as we shall see in a later chapter, competed for the
commission for the Baptistery gates. It was indeed his failure in that
competition which decided him to concentrate on architecture. That
he was a fine sculptor his competitive design, now preserved in the
Bargello, and his Christ crucified in S. Maria Novella, prove; but
in leading him to architecture the stars undoubtedly did rightly.
It was in 1403 that the decision giving Ghiberti the Baptistery
commission was made, when Brunelleschi was twenty-six and Donatello,
destined to be his life-long friend, was seventeen; and when
Brunelleschi decided to go to Rome for the study of his new branch of
industry, architecture, Donatello went too. There they worked together,
copying and measuring everything of beauty, Brunelleschi having always
before his mind the problem of how to place a dome upon the cathedral
of his native city. But, having a shrewd knowledge of human nature
and immense patience, he did not hasten to urge upon the authorities
his claims as the heaven-born architect, but contented himself with
smaller works, and even assisted his rival Ghiberti with his gates,
joining at that task Donatello and Luca della Robbia, and giving
lessons in perspective to a youth who was to do more than any man
after Giotto to assure the great days of painting and become the
exemplar of the finest masters--Masaccio.
It was not until 1419 that Brunelleschi's persistence and belief
in his own powers satisfied the controllers of the cathedral works
that he might perhaps be as good as his word and was the right man
to build the dome; but at last he was able to begin. [1] For the
story of his difficulties, told minutely and probably with sufficient
accuracy, one must go to Vasari: it is well worth reading, and is a
lurid commentary on the suspicions and jealousies of the world. The
building of the dome, without scaffolding, occupied fourteen years,
Brunelleschi's device embracing two domes, one within the other,
tied together with stone for material support and strength. It is
because of this inner dome that the impression of its size, from
within the cathedral, can disappoint. Meanwhile, in spite of all the
wear and tear of the work, the satisfying of incredulous busy-bodies,
and the removal of such an incubus as Ghiberti, who because he was a
superb modeller of bronze reliefs was made for a while joint architect
with a salary that Brunelleschi felt should either be his own or no
one's, the little man found time also to build beautiful churches
and cloisters all over Florence. He lived to see his dome finished
and the cathedral consecrated by Pope Eugenius IV in 1436, dying ten
years later. He was buried in the cathedral, and his adopted son and
pupil, Buggiano, made the head of him on the tablet to his memory.
Brunelleschi's lantern, the model of which from his own hand we shall
see in the museum of the cathedral, was not placed on the dome until
1462. The copper ball above it was the work of Verrocchio. In 1912
there are still wanting many yards of stone border to the dome.
Of the man himself we know little, except that he was of iron
tenacity and lived for his work. Vasari calls him witty, but gives
a not good example of his wit; he seems to have been philanthropic
and a patron of poor artists, and he grieved deeply at the untimely
death of Masaccio, who painted him in one of the Carmine frescoes,
together with Donatello and other Florentines.
As one walks about Florence, visiting this church and that, and
peering into cool cloisters, one's mind is always intent upon the
sculpture or paintings that may be preserved there for the delectation
of the eye. The tendency is to think little of the architect who made
the buildings where they are treasured. Asked to name the greatest
makers of this beautiful Florence, the ordinary visitor would
say Michelangelo, Giotto, Raphael, Donatello, the della Robbias,
Ghirlandaio, and Andrea del Sarto: all before Brunelleschi, even if
he named him at all. But this is wrong. Not even Michelangelo did
so much for Florence as he. Michelangelo was no doubt the greatest
individualist in the whole history of art, and everything that he did
grips the memory in a vice; but Florence without Michelangelo would
still be very nearly Florence, whereas Florence without Brunelleschi
is unthinkable. No dome to the cathedral, first of all; no S. Lorenzo
church or cloisters; no S. Croce cloisters or Pazzi chapel; no Badia
of Fiesole. Honour where honour is due. We should be singing the
praises of Filippo Brunelleschi in every quarter of the city.
After Brunelleschi the chief architect of the cathedral was Giuliano da
Maiano, the artist of the beautiful intarsia woodwork in the sacristy,
and the uncle of Benedetto da Maiano who made the S. Croce pulpit.
The present façade is the work of the architect Emilio de Fabris,
whose tablet is to be seen on the left wall. It was finished in 1887,
five hundred and more years after the abandonment of Arnolfo's original
design and three hundred and more years after the destruction of the
second one, begun in 1357 and demolished in 1587. Of Arnolfo's façade
the primitive seated statue of Boniface VIII (or John XXII) just inside
the cathedral is, with a bishop in one of the sacristies, the only
remnant; while of the second façade, for which Donatello and other
early Renaissance sculptors worked, the giant S. John the Evangelist,
in the left aisle, is perhaps the most important relic. Other statues
in the cathedral were also there, while the central figure--the Madonna
with enamel eyes--may be seen in the cathedral museum. Although not
great, the group of the Madonna and Child now over the central door
of the Duomo has much charm and benignancy.
The present façade, although attractive as a mass of light, is not
really good. Its patterns are trivial, its paintings and statues
commonplace; and I personally have the feeling that it would have
been more fitting had Giotto's marble been supplied rather with
a contrast than an imitation. As it is, it is not till Giotto's
tower soars above the façade that one can rightly (from the front)
appreciate its roseate delicacy, so strong is this rival.
CHAPTER II
The Duomo II: Its Associations
Dante's picture--Sir John Hawkwood--Ancestor and Descendant--The Pazzi
Conspiracy--Squeamish Montesecco--Giuliano de' Medici dies--Lorenzo's
escape--Vengeance on the Pazzi--Botticelli's cartoon--High
Mass--Luca della Robbia--Michelangelo nearing the end--The Miracles
of Zenobius--East and West meet in splendour--Marsilio Ficino and
the New Learning--Beautiful glass.
Of the four men most concerned in the structure of the Duomo I have
already spoken. There are other men held in memory there, and certain
paintings and statues, of which I wish to speak now.
The picture of Dante in the left aisle was painted by command of
the Republic in 1465, one hundred and sixty-three years after his
banishment from the city. Lectures on Dante were frequently delivered
in the churches of Florence during the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, and it was interesting for those attending them to have
a portrait on the wall. This picture was painted by Domenico di
Michelino, the portrait of Dante being prepared for him by Alessio
Baldovinetti, who probably took it from Giotto's fresco in the chapel
of the Podestá at the Bargello. In this picture Dante stands between
the Inferno and a concentrated Florence in which portions of the
Duomo, the Signoria, the Badia, the Bargello, and Or San Michele are
visible. Behind him is Paradise. In his hand is the "Divine Comedy". I
say no more of the poet here, because a large part of the chapter on
the Badia is given to him.
Near the Dante picture in the left aisle are two Donatellos--the
massive S. John the Evangelist, seated, who might have given ideas
to Michelangelo for his Moses a century and more later; and, nearer
the door, between the tablets to De Fabris and Squarciaparello, the
so-called Poggio Bracciolini, a witty Italian statesman and Humanist
and friend of the Medici, who, however, since he was much younger than
this figure at the time of its exhibition, and is not known to have
visited Florence till later, probably did not sit for it. But it is
a powerful and very natural work, although its author never intended
it to stand on any floor, even of so dim a cathedral as this. The
S. John, I may say, was brought from the old façade--not Arnolfo's,
but the committee's façade--where it had a niche about ten feet from
the ground. The Poggio was also on this façade, but higher. It was
Poggio's son, Jacopo, who took part in the Pazzi Conspiracy, of which
we are about to read, and was very properly hanged for it.
Of the two pictures on the entrance wall, so high as to be imperfectly
seen, that on the right as you face it has peculiar interest to
English visitors, for (painted by Paolo Uccello, whose great battle
piece enriches our National Gallery) it represents Sir John Hawkwood,
an English free-lance and head of the famous White Company, who
after some successful raids on Papal territory in Provence, put his
sword, his military genius, and his bravoes at the service of the
highest bidder among the warlike cities and provinces of Italy, and,
eventually passing wholly into the employment of Florence (after
harrying her for other pay-masters for some years), delivered her
very signally from her enemies in 1392. Hawkwood was an Essex man,
the son of a tanner at Hinckford, and was born there early in the
fourteenth century. He seems to have reached France as an archer under
Edward III, and to have remained a free-booter, passing on to Italy,
about 1362, to engage joyously in as much fighting as any English
commander can ever have had, for some thirty years, with very good
pay for it. Although, by all accounts, a very Salomon Brazenhead,
Hawkwood had enough dignity to be appointed English Ambassador to Rome,
and later to Florence, which he made his home, and where he died in
1394. He was buried in the Duomo, on the north side of the choir, and
was to have reposed beneath a sumptuous monument made under his own
instructions, with frescoes by Taddeo Gaddi and Giuliano d'Arrigo;
but something intervened, and Uccello's fresco was used instead,
and this, some sixty years ago, was transferred to canvas and moved
to the position in which it now is seen.
Hawkwood's life, briskly told by a full-blooded hand, would make a fine
book. One pleasant story at least is related of him, that on being
beset by some begging friars who prefaced their mendicancy with the
words, "God give you peace," he answered, "God take away your alms";
and, on their protesting, reminded them that such peace was the last
thing he required, since should their pious wish come true he would
die of hunger. One of the daughters of this fire-eater married John
Shelley, and thus became an ancestress of Shelley the poet, who,
as it chances, also found a home for a while in this city, almost
within hailing distance of his ancestor's tomb and portrait, and here
wrote not only his "Ode to the West Wind," but his caustic satire,
"Peter Bell the Third".
Hawkwood's name is steeped sufficiently in carnage; but we get to the
scene of bloodshed in reality as we approach the choir, for it was
here that Giuliano de' Medici was assassinated, as he attended High
Mass, on April 26th, 1478, with the connivance, if not actually at the
instigation, of Christ's Vicar himself, Pope Sixtus IV. Florentine
history is so eventful and so tortuous that beyond the bare outline
given in chapter V, I shall make in these pages but little effort to
follow it, assuming a certain amount of knowledge on the part of the
reader; but it must be stated here that periodical revolts against
the power and prestige of the Medici often occurred, and none was
more desperate than that of the Pazzi family in 1478, acting with
the support of the Pope behind all and with the co-operation of
Girolamo Riario, nephew of the Pope, and Salviati, Archbishop of
Pisa. The Pazzi, who were not only opposed to the temporal power
of the Medici, but were their rivals in business--both families
being bankers--wished to rid Florence of Lorenzo and Giuliano in
order to be greater both civically and financially. Girolamo wished
the removal of Lorenzo and Giuliano in order that hostility to his
plans for adding Forli and Faenza to the territory of Imola, which
the Pope had successfully won for him against Lorenzo's opposition,
might disappear. The Pope had various political reasons for wishing
Lorenzo's and Giuliano's death and bringing Florence, always headstrong
and dangerous, to heel. While as for Salviati, it was sufficient that
he was Archbishop of Pisa, Florence's ancient rival and foe; but he
was a thoroughly bad lot anyway. Assassination also was in the air,
for Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan had been stabbed in church in 1476,
thus to some extent paving the way for this murder, since Lorenzo
and Sforza, when acting together, had been practically unassailable.
In 1478 Lorenzo was twenty-nine, Giuliano twenty-five. Lorenzo had
been at the head of Florentine affairs for nine years and he was
steadily growing in strength and popularity. Hence it was now or never.
The conspirators' first idea was to kill the brothers at a banquet
which Lorenzo was to give to the great-nephew of the Pope, the
youthful Cardinal Raffaello Riario, who promised to be an amenable
catspaw. Giuliano, however, having hurt his leg, was not well enough to
be present, but as he would attend High Mass, the conspirators decided
to act then. That is to say, it was then, in the cathedral, that the
death of the Medici brothers was to be effected; meanwhile another
detachment of conspirators under Salviati was to rise simultaneously to
capture the Signoria, while the armed men of the party who were outside
and inside the walls would begin their attacks on the populace. Thus,
at the same moment Medici and city would fall. Such was the plan.
The actual assassins were Francesco de' Pazzi and Bernardo Bandini,
who were nominally friends of the Medici (Francesco's brother Guglielmo
having married Bianca de' Medici, Lorenzo's sister), and two priests
named Maffeo da Volterra and Stefano da Bagnone. A professional bravo
named Montesecco was to have killed Lorenzo, but refused on learning
that the scene of the murder was to be a church. At that, he said,
he drew the line: murder anywhere else he could perform cheerfully,
but in a sacred building it was too much to ask. He therefore did
nothing, but, subsequently confessing, made the guilt of all his
associates doubly certain.
When High Mass began it was found that Giuliano was not present,
and Francesco de' Pazzi and Bandini were sent to persuade him to
come--a Judas-like errand indeed. On the way back, it is said, one
of them affectionately placed his arm round Giuliano--to see if he
wore a shirt of mail--remarking, to cover the action, that he was
getting fat. On his arrival, Giuliano took his place at the north
side of the circular choir, near the door which leads to the Via de'
Servi, while Lorenzo stood at the opposite side. At the given signal
Bandini and Pazzi were to stab Giuliano and the two priests were to
stab Lorenzo. The signal was the breaking of the Eucharistic wafer,
and at this solemn moment Giuliano was instantly killed, with one stab
in the heart and nineteen elsewhere, Francesco so overdoing his attack
that he severely wounded himself too; but Lorenzo was in time to see
the beginning of the assault, and, making a movement to escape, he
prevented the priest from doing aught but inflict a gash in his neck,
and, springing away, dashed behind the altar to the old sacristy,
where certain of his friends who followed him banged the heavy bronze
doors on the pursuing foe. Those in the cathedral, mean-while, were in
a state of hysterical alarm; the youthful cardinal was hurried into
the new sacristy; Guglielmo de' Pazzi bellowed forth his innocence
in loud tones; and his murderous brother and Bandini got off.
Order being restored, Lorenzo was led by a strong bodyguard to
the Palazzo Medici, where he appeared at a window to convince the
momentarily increasing crowd that he was still living. Meanwhile
things were going not much more satisfactorily for the Pazzi at
the Palazzo Vecchio, where, according to the plan, the gonfalonier,
Cesare Petrucci, was to be either killed or secured. The Archbishop
Salviati, who was to effect this, managed his interview so clumsily
that Petrucci suspected something, those being suspicious times,
and, instead of submitting to capture, himself turned the key on his
visitors. The Pazzi faction in the city, meanwhile, hoping that all
had gone well in the Palazzo Vecchio, as well as in the cathedral
(as they thought), were running through the streets calling "Viva la
Libertà!" to be met with counter cries of "Palle! palle!"--the palle
being the balls on the Medici escutcheon, still to be seen all over
Florence and its vicinity and on every curtain in the Uffizi.
The truth gradually spreading, the city then rose for the Medici and
justice began to be done. The Archbishop was handed at once, just as
he was, from a window of the Palazzo Vecchio. Francesco de' Pazzi,
who had got home to bed, was dragged to the Palazzo and hanged too. The
mob meanwhile were not idle, and most of the Pazzi were accounted for,
together with many followers--although Lorenzo publicly implored them
to be merciful. Poliziano, the scholar-poet and friend of Lorenzo,
has left a vivid account of the day. With his own eyes he saw the
hanging Salviati, in his last throes, bite the hanging Francesco de
Pazzi. Old Jacopo succeeded in escaping, but not for long, and a day
or so later he too was hanged. Bandini got as far as Constantinople,
but was brought back in chains and hanged. The two priests hid in
the Benedictine abbey in the city and for a while evaded search,
but being found they were torn to pieces by the crowd. Montesecco,
having confessed, was beheaded in the courtyard of the Bargello.
The hanging of the chief conspirators was kept in the minds of the
short-memoried Florentines by a representation outside the Palazzo
Vecchio, by none other than the wistful, spiritual Botticelli; while
three effigies, life size, of Lorenzo--one of them with his bandaged
neck--were made by Verrocchio in coloured wax and set up in places
where prayers might be offered. Commemorative medals which may be
seen in the Bargello, were also struck, and the family of Pazzi was
banished and its name removed by decree from the city's archives. Poor
Giuliano, who was generally beloved for his charm and youthful spirits,
was buried at S. Lorenzo in great state.
I have often attended High Mass in this Duomo choir--the theatre of
the Pazzi tragedy--but never without thinking of that scene.
Luca della Robbia's doors to the new sacristy, which gave the young
cardinal his safety, had been finished only eleven years. Donatello was
to have designed them, but his work at Padua was too pressing. The
commission was then given to Michelozzo, Donatello's partner,
and to Luca della Robbia, but it seems likely that Luca did nearly
all. The doors are in very high relief, thus differing absolutely
from Donatello's at S. Lorenzo, which are in very low. Luca's work
here is sweet and mild rather than strong, and the panels derive
their principal charm from the angels, who, in pairs, attend the
saints. Above the door was placed, at the time of Lorenzo's escape,
the beautiful cantoria, also by Luca, which is now in the museum of
the cathedral, while above the door of the old sacristy was Donatello's
cantoria. Commonplace new ones now take their place. In the semicircle
over each door is a coloured relief by Luca: that over the bronze doors
being the "Resurrection," and the other the "Ascension"; and they are
interesting not only for their beauty but as being the earliest-known
examples in Luca's newly-discovered glazed terra-cotta medium,
which was to do so much in the hands of himself, his nephew Andrea,
and his followers, to make Florence still lovelier and the legend
of the Virgin Mary still sweeter. But of the della Robbias and their
exquisite genius I shall say more later, when we come to the Bargello.
As different as would be possible to imagine is the genius of that
younger sculptor, the author of the Pietà at the back of the altar,
near where we now stand, who, when Luca finished these bronze doors,
in 1467, was not yet born--Michelangelo Buonarroti. This group, which
is unfinished, is the last the old and weary Titan ever worked at,
and it was meant to be part of his own tomb. Vasari, to whose "Lives
of the Painters" we shall be indebted, as this book proceeds, for so
much good human nature, and who speaks of Michelangelo with peculiar
authority, since he was his friend, pupil, and correspondent, tells us
that once when he went to see the sculptor in Rome, near the end, he
found him at work upon this Pietà, but the sculptor was so dissatisfied
with one portion that he let his lantern fall in order that Vasari
might not see it, saying: "I am so old that death frequently drags
at my mantle to take me, and one day my person will fall like this
lantern". The Pietà is still in deep gloom, as the master would have
liked, but enough is revealed to prove its pathos and its power.
In the east end of the nave is the chapel of S. Zenobius, containing a
bronze reliquary by Ghiberti, with scenes upon it from the life of this
saint, so important in Florentine religious history. It is, however,
very hard to see, and should be illuminated. Zenobius was born at
Florence in the reign of Constantine the Great, when Christianity
was by no means the prevailing religion of the city, although the
way had been paved by various martyrs. After studying philosophy
and preaching with much acceptance, Zenobius was summoned to Rome
by Pope Damasus. On the Pope's death he became Bishop of Florence,
and did much, says Butler, to "extirpate the kingdom of Satan". The
saint lived in the ancient tower which still stands--one of the few
survivors of Florence's hundreds of towers--at the corner of the Via
Por S. Maria (which leads from the Mercato Nuovo to the Ponte Vecchio)
and the Via Lambertesca. It is called the Torre de' Girolami, and
on S. Zenobius' day--May 25th--is decorated with flowers; and since
never are so many flowers in the city of flowers as at that time, it
is a sight to see. The remains of the saint were moved to the Duomo,
although it had not then its dome, from S. Lorenzo, in 1330, and the
simple column in the centre of the road opposite Ghiberti's first
Baptistery doors was erected to mark the event, since on that very
spot, it is said, stood a dead elm tree which, when the bier of the
saint chanced to touch it, immediately sprang to life again and burst
into leaf; even, the enthusiastic chronicler adds, into flower. The
result was that the tree was cut completely to pieces by relic hunters,
but the column by the Baptistery, the work of Brunelleschi (erected on
the site of an earlier one), fortunately remains as evidence of the
miracle. Ghiberti, however, did not choose this miracle but another
for representation; for not only did Zenobius dead restore animation,
but while he was himself living he resuscitated two boys. The one was a
ward of his own; the second was an ordinary Florentine, for whom the
same modest boon was craved by his sorrowing parents. It is one of
these scenes of resuscitation which Ghiberti has designed in bronze,
while Ridolfo Ghirlandaio painted it in a picture in the Uffizi. We
shall see S. Zenobius again in the fresco by Ridolfo's father, the
great Ghirlandaio, in the Palazzo Vecchio; while the portrait on the
first pillar of the left aisle, as one enters the cathedral is of
Zenobius too.
The date of the Pazzi Conspiracy was 1478. A few years later the
same building witnessed the extraordinary effects of Savonarola's
oratory, when such was the terrible picture he drew of the fate of
unregenerate sinners that his listeners' hair was said actually to
rise with fright. Savonarola came towards the end of the Renaissance,
to give it its death-blow. By contrast there is a tablet on the right
wall of the cathedral in honour of one who did much to bring about the
paganism and sophistication against which the impassioned reformer
uttered his fiercest denunciations: Marsilio Ficino (1433-1491),
the neo-Platonist protegé of Cosimo de' Medici, and friend both
of Piero de' Medici and Lorenzo. To explain Marsilio's influence
it is necessary to recede a little into history. In 1439 Cosimo de'
Medici succeeded in transferring the scene of the Great Council of the
Church to Florence. At this conference representatives of the Western
Church, centred in Rome, met those of the Eastern Church, centred
in Constantinople, which was still Christian, for the purpose of
discussing various matters, not the least of which was the protection
of the Eastern Church against the Infidel. Not only was Constantinople
continually threatened by the Turks, and in need of arms as well
as sympathy, but the two branches of the Church were at enmity over
a number of points. It was as much to heal these differences as to
seek temporal aid that the Emperor John Palaeologus, the Patriarch
of Constantinople, and a vast concourse of nobles, priests, and
Greek scholars, arrived in Italy, and, after sojourning at Venice
and Ferrara, moved on to Florence at the invitation of Cosimo. The
Emperor resided in the Peruzzi palace, now no more, near S. Croce;
the Patriarch of Constantinople lodged (and as it chanced, died, for
he was very old) at the Ferrantini palace, now the Casa Vernaccia,
in the Borgo Pinti; while Pope Eugenius was at the convent attached
to S. Maria Novella. The meetings of the Council were held where we
now stand--in the cathedral, whose dome had just been placed upon it
all ready for them.
The Council failed in its purpose, and, as we know, Constantinople
was lost some years later, and the great empire of which John
Palaeologus was the last ruler ceased to be. That, however, at the
moment is beside the mark. The interesting thing to us is that among
the scholars who came from Constantinople, bringing with them numbers
of manuscripts and systems of thought wholly new to the Florentines,
was one Georgius Gemisthos, a Greek philosopher of much personal
charm and comeliness, who talked a bland and beautiful Platonism that
was extremely alluring not only to his youthful listeners but also
to Cosimo himself. Gemisthos was, however, a Greek, and Cosimo was
too busy a man in a city of enemies, or at any rate of the envious,
to be able to do much more than extend his patronage to the old man
and despatch emissaries to the East for more and more manuscripts;
but discerning the allurements of the new gospel, Cosimo directed
a Florentine enthusiast who knew Greek to spread the serene creed
among his friends, who were all ripe for it, and this enthusiast was
none other than a youthful scholar by name Marsilio Ficino, connected
with S. Lorenzo, Cosimo's family church, and the son of Cosimo's own
physician. To the young and ardent Marsilio, Plato became a god and
Gemisthos not less than divine for bringing the tidings. He kept a lamp
always burning before Plato's bust, and later founded the Platonic
Academy, at which Plato's works were discussed, orations delivered,
and new dialogues exchanged, between such keen minds as Marsilio,
Pulci, Landini, Giovanni Cavalcanti, Leon Battista Alberti, the
architect and scholar, Pico dell a Mirandola, the precocious disputant
and aristocratic mystic, Poliziano, the tutor of Lorenzo's sons, and
Lorenzo the Magnificent himself. It was thus from the Greek invasion
of Florence that proceeded the stream of culture which is known as
Humanism, and which, no doubt, in time, was so largely concerned in
bringing about that indifference to spiritual things which, leading
to general laxity and indulgence, filled Savonarola with despair.
I am not concerned to enter deeply into the subject of the
Renaissance. But this must be said--that the new painting and
sculpture, particularly the painting of Masaccio and the sculpture
of Donatello, had shown the world that the human being could be made
the measure of the Divine. The Madonna and Christ had been related
to life. The new learning, by leading these keen Tuscan intellects,
so eager for reasonableness, to the Greek philosophers who were so
wise and so calm without any of the consolations of Christianity,
naturally set them wondering if there were not a religion of Humanity
that was perhaps a finer thing than the religion that required all the
machinery and intrigue of Rome. And when, as the knowledge of Greek
spread and the minute examination of documents ensued, it was found
that Rome had not disdained forgery to gain her ends, a blow was struck
against the Church from which it never recovered;--and how much of this
was due to this Florentine Marsilio, sitting at the feet of the Greek
Gemisthos, who came to Florence at the invitation of Cosimo de' Medici!
The cathedral glass, as I say, is mostly overladen with grime; but the
circular windows in the dome seem to be magnificent in design. They
are attributed to Ghiberti and Donatello, and are lovely in colour. The
greens in particular are very striking. But the jewel of these circular
windows of Florence is that by Ghiberti on the west wall of S. Croce.
And here I leave the Duomo, with the counsel to visitors to Florence
to make a point of entering it every day--not, as so many Florentines
do, in order to make a short cut from the Via Calzaioli to the Via de'
Servi, and vice versâ, but to gather its spirit. It is different every
hour in the day, and every hour the light enters it with new beauty.
CHAPTER III
The Duomo III: A Ceremony and a Museum
The Scoppio del Carro--The Pazzi beneficent--Holy Saturday's
programme--April 6th, 1912--The flying palle--The nervous
pyrotechnist--The influence of noon--A little sister of the
Duomo--Donatello's cantoria--Luca della Robbia's cantoria.
In the last chapter we saw the Pazzi family as very black sheep,
although there are plenty of students of Florentine history who
hold that any attempt to rid Florence of the Medici was laudable. In
this chapter we see them in a kindlier situation as benefactors to
the city. For it happened that when Pazzo de' Pazzi, a founder of
the house, was in the Holy Land during the First Crusade, it was his
proud lot to set the Christian banner on the walls of Jerusalem, and,
as a reward, Godfrey of Boulogne gave him some flints from the Holy
Sepulchre. These he brought to Florence, and they are now preserved
at SS. Apostoli, the little church in the Piazza del Limbo, off the
Borgo SS. Apostoli, and every year the flints are used to kindle
the fire needed for the right preservation of Easter Day. Gradually
the ceremony enlarged until it became a spectacle indeed, which the
Pazzi family for centuries controlled. After the Pazzi conspiracy
they lost it and the Signoria took it over; but, on being pardoned,
the Pazzi again resumed.
The Carro is a car containing explosives, and the Scoppio is its
explosion. This car, after being drawn in procession through the
streets by white oxen, is ignited by the sacred fire borne to it by
a mechanical dove liberated at the high altar of the Duomo, and with
its explosion Easter begins. There is still a Pazzi fund towards the
expenses, but a few years ago the city became responsible for the
whole proceedings, and the ceremony as it is now given, under civic
management, known as the Scoppio del Cairo, is that which I saw on
Holy Saturday last and am about to describe.
First, however, let me state what had happened before the proceedings
opened in the Piazza del Duomo. At six o'clock mass began at
SS. Apostoli, lasting for more than two hours. At its close the
celebrant was handed a plate on which were the sacred flints, and these
he struck with a steel in view of the congregation, thus igniting a
taper. The candle, in an ancient copper porta fuoco surmounted by a
dove, was then lighted, and the procession of priests started off for
the cathedral with their precious flame, escorted by a civic guard
and various standard bearers. Their route was the Piazza del Limbo,
along the Borgo SS. Apostoli to the Via Por S. Maria and through
the Vacchereccia to the Piazza della Signoria, the Via Condotta, the
Via del Proconsolo, to the Duomo, through whose central doors they
passed, depositing the sacred burden at the high altar. I should add
that anyone on the route in charge of a street shrine had the right
to stop the procession in order to take a light from it; while at
SS. Apostoli women congregated with tapers and lanterns in the hope
of getting these kindled from the sacred flame, in order to wash
their babies or cook their food in water heated with the fire.
Meanwhile at seven o'clock the four oxen, which are kept in the
Cascine all the year round and do no other work, had been harnessed to
the car and had drawn it to the Piazza del Duomo, which was reached
about nine. The oxen were then tethered by the Pisano doors of the
Baptistery until needed again.
After some haggling on the night before, I had secured a seat on a
balcony facing Ghiberti's first Baptistery doors, for eleven lire, and
to this place I went at half-past ten. The piazza was then filling up,
and at a quarter to eleven the trams running between the Cathedral and
the Baptistery were stopped. In this space was the car. The present
one, which dates from 1622, is more like a catafalque, and unless one
sees it in motion, with the massive white oxen pulling it, one cannot
believe in it as a vehicle at all. It is some thirty feet high, all
black, with trumpery coloured-paper festoons (concealing fireworks)
upon it: trumpery as only the Roman Catholic Church can contrive. It
stood in front of the Duomo some four yards from the Baptistery gates
in a line with the Duomo's central doors and the high altar. The
doors were open, seats being placed on each side of the aisle the
whole distance, and people making a solid avenue. Down this avenue
were to come the clergy, and above it was to be stretched the line
on which the dove was to travel from the altar, with the Pazzi fire,
to ignite the car.
The space in front of the cathedral was cleared at about eleven,
and cocked hats and red-striped trousers then became the most
noticeable feature. The crowd was jolly and perhaps a little cynical;
picture-postcard hawkers made most of the noise, and for some reason
or other a forlorn peasant took this opportunity to offer for sale two
equally forlorn hedgehogs. Each moment the concourse increased, for it
is a fateful day and every one wants to know the issue: because, you
see, if the dove runs true, lights the car, and returns, as a good dove
should, to the altar ark, there will be a prosperous vintage and the
pyrotechnist who controls the sacred bird's movements will receive his
wages. But if the dove runs defectively and there is any hitch, every
one is dismayed, for the harvest will be bad and the pyrotechnist will
receive nothing. Once he was imprisoned when things went astray--and
quite right too--but the Florentines have grown more lenient.
At about a quarter past eleven a procession of clergy emerged from the
Duomo and crossed the space to the Baptistery. First, boys and youths
in surplices. Then some scarlet hoods, waddling. Then purple hoods,
and other colours, a little paunchier, waddling more, and lastly the
archbishop, very sumptuous. All having disappeared into the Baptistery,
through Ghiberti's second gates, which I never saw opened before, the
dove's wire was stretched and fastened, a matter needing much care;
and the crowds began to surge. The cocked hats and officers had the
space all to themselves, with the car, the firemen, the pyrotechnist
and the few privileged and very self-conscious civilians who were
allowed inside.
A curious incident, which many years ago might have been magnified
into a portent, occurred while the ecclesiastics were in the Artistry.
Some one either bought and liberated several air balloons, or the
string holding them was surreptitiously cut; but however it happened,
the balls escaped and suddenly the crowd sent up a triumphant yell. At
first I could see no reason for it, the Baptistery intervening,
but then the balls swam into our ken and steadily floated over
the cathedral out of sight amid tremendous satisfaction. And the
portent? Well, as they moved against the blue sky they formed
themselves into precisely the pattern of the palle on the Medici
escutcheon. That is all. But think what that would have meant in the
fifteenth century; the nods and frowns it would have occasioned; the
dispersal of the Medici, the loss of power, and all the rest of it,
that it would have presaged!
At about twenty to twelve the ecclesiastics returned and were
swallowed up by the Duomo, and then excitement began to be acute. The
pyrotechnist was not free from it; he fussed about nervously; he tested
everything again and again; he crawled under the car and out of it;
he talked to officials; he inspected and re-inspected. Photographers
began to adjust their distances; the detached men in bowlers looked
at their watches; the cocked hats drew nearer to the Duomo door. And
then we heard a tearing noise. All eyes were turned to the great door,
and out rushed the dove emitting a wake of sparks, entered the car
and was out again on its homeward journey before one realized what had
happened. And then the explosions began, and the bells--silent since
Thursday--broke out. How many explosions there were I do not know;
but they seemed to go on for ten minutes.
This is a great moment not only for the spectator but for all Florence,
for in myriad rooms mothers have been waiting, with their babies
on their knees, for the first clang of the belfries, because if a
child's eyes are washed then it is unlikely ever to have weak sight,
while if a baby takes its first steps to this accompaniment its legs
will not be bowed.
At the last explosion the pyrotechnist, now a calm man once more
and a proud one, approached the car, the firemen poured water on
smouldering parts, and the work of clearing up began. Then came
the patient oxen, their horns and hooves gilt, and great masses of
flowers on their heads, and red cloths with the lily of Florence
on it over their backs--much to be regretted since they obliterated
their beautiful white skins--and slowly the car lumbered off, and,
the cocked hats relenting, the crowd poured after it and the Scoppio
del Carro was over.
The Duomo has a little sister in the shape of the Museo di Santa
Maria del Fiore, or the Museo dell' Opera del Duomo, situated in the
Piazza opposite the apse; and we should go there now. This museum,
which is at once the smallest and, with the exception of the Natural
History Museum, the cheapest of the Florentine museums, for it
costs but half a lira, is notable for containing the two cantorie,
or singing galleries, made for the cathedral, one by Donatello and
one by Luca della Robbia. A cantoria by Donatello we shall soon see in
its place in S. Lorenzo; but that, beautiful as it is, cannot compare
with this one, with its procession of merry, dancing children, its
massiveness and grace, its joyous ebullitions of gold mosaic and blue
enamel. Both the cantorie--Donatello's, begun in 1433 and finished
in 1439, and Luca's, begun in 1431 and finished in 1438--fulfilled
their melodious functions in the Duomo until 1688, when they were
ruthlessly cleared away to make room for large wooden balconies to
be used in connexion with the nuptials of Ferdinand de' Medici and
the Princess Violante of Bavaria. In the year 1688 taste was at a low
ebb, and no one thought the deposed cantorie even worth preservation,
so that they were broken up and occasionally levied upon for cornices
and so forth. The fragments were collected and taken to the Bargello
in the middle of the last century, and in 1883 Signer del Moro, the
then architect of the Duomo (whose bust is in the courtyard of this
museum), reconstructed them to the best of his ability in their present
situation. It has to be remembered not only that, with the exception
of the figures, the galleries are not as their artists made them,
lacking many beautiful accessories, but that, as Vasari tells us,
Donatello deliberately designed his for a dim light. None the less,
they remain two of the most delightful works of the Renaissance and
two of the rarest treasures of Florence.
The dancing boys behind the small pillars with their gold chequering,
the brackets, and the urn of the cornice over the second pair
of pillars from the right, are all that remain of Donatello's own
handiwork. All else is new and conjectural. It is supposed that bronze
heads of lions filled the two circular spaces between the brackets
in the middle. But although the loss of the work as a whole is to be
regretted, the dancing boys remain, to be for ever an inspiration and
a pleasure. The Luca della Robbia cantoria opposite is not quite so
triumphant a masterpiece, but from the point of view of suitability it
is perhaps better. We can believe that Luca's children hymn the glory
of the Lord, as indeed the inscription makes them, whereas Donatello's
romp with a gladness that might easily be purely pagan. Luca's design
is more formal, more conventional; Donatello's is rich and free and
fluid with personality. The two end panels of Luca's are supplied in
the cantoria by casts; the originals are on the wall below and may
be carefully studied. The animation and fervour of these choristers
are unforgettable.
It is well, while enjoying Donatello's work, to remember that Prato
is only half an hour from Florence, and that there may be seen
the open-air pulpit, built on the corner of the cathedral, which
Donatello, with Michelozzo, his friend and colleague, made at the
same time that the cantoria was in progress, and which in its relief
of happy children is very similar, although not, I think, quite so
remarkable. It lacks also the peculiarly naturalistic effect gained
in the cantoria by setting the dancing boys behind the pillars, which
undoubtedly, as comparison with the Luca shows, assists realism. The
row of pillars attracts the eye first and the boys are thus thrown
into a background which almost moves.
Although the cantorie dominate the museum they must not be allowed to
overshadow all else. A marble relief of the Madonna and Children by
Agostino di Duccio (1418-1481) must be sought for: it is No. 77 and
the children are the merriest in Florence. Another memorable Madonna
and Child is No. 94, by Pagno di Lapo Portigiani (1406-1470), who has
interest for us in this place as being one of Donatello's assistants,
very possibly on this very cantoria, and almost certainly on the Prato
pulpit. Everything here, it must be remembered, has some association
with the Duomo and was brought here for careful preservation and that
whoever has fifty centimes might take pleasure in seeing it; but the
great silver altar is from the Baptistery, and being made for that
temple is naturally dedicated to the life of John the Baptist. Although
much of it was the work of not the greatest modellers in the second
half of the fourteenth century, three masters at least contributed
later: Michelozzo adding the statue of the Baptist, Pollaiuolo the
side relief depicting his birth, and Verrocchio that of his death,
which is considered one of the most remarkable works of this sculptor,
whom we are to find so richly represented at the Bargello. Before
leaving this room, look for 100^3, an unknown terra-cotta of the
Birth of Eve, which is both masterly and amusing, and 110^4, a very
lovely intaglio in wood. I might add that among the few paintings,
all very early, is a S. Sebastian in whose sacred body I counted no
fewer than thirty arrows; which within my knowledge of pictures of
this saint--not inconsiderable--is the highest number.
The next room is given to models and architectural plans and
drawings connected with the cathedral, the most interesting thing
being Brunelleschi's own model for the lantern. On the stairs are a
series of fine bas-reliefs by Bandinelli and Giovanni dell' Opera from
the old choir screen of the Duomo, and downstairs, among many other
pieces of sculpture, is a bust of Brunelleschi from a death-mask and
several beautiful della Robbia designs for lunettes over doors.
CHAPTER IV
The Campanile and the Baptistery
A short way with Veronese critics--Giotto's missing spire--Donatello's
holy men--Giotto as encyclopaedist--The seven and twenty
reliefs--Ruskin in American--At the top of the tower--A sea of
red roofs--The restful Baptistery--Historic stones--An ex-Pope's
tomb--Andrea Pisano's doors--Ghiberti's first doors--Ghiberti's second
doors--Michelangelo's praise--A gentleman artist.
It was in 1332, as I have said, that Giotto was made capo-maestro,
and on July 18th, 1334, the first stone of his campanile was laid, the
understanding being that the structure was to exceed "in magnificence,
height, and excellence of workmanship" anything in the world. As
some further indication of the glorious feeling of patriotism then
animating the Florentines, it may be remarked that when a Veronese
who happened to be in Florence ventured to suggest that the city
was aiming rather too high, he was at once thrown into gaol, and,
on being set free when his time was done, was shown the treasury as
an object lesson. Of the wealth and purposefulness of Florence at
that time, in spite of the disastrous bellicose period she had been
passing through, Villani the historian, who wrote history as it was
being made, gives an excellent account, which Macaulay summarizes in
his vivid way. Thus: "The revenue of the Republic amounted to three
hundred thousand florins; a sum which, allowing for the depreciation of
the precious metals, was at least equivalent to six hundred thousand
pounds sterling; a larger sum than England and Ireland, two centuries
ago, yielded to Elizabeth. The manufacture of wool alone employed two
hundred factories and thirty thousand workmen. The cloth annually
produced sold, at an average, for twelve hundred thousand florins;
a sum fully equal in exchangeable value to two millions and a half of
our money. Four hundred thousand florins were annually coined. Eighty
banks conducted the commercial operations, not of Florence only but of
all Europe. The transactions of these establishments were sometimes
of a magnitude which may surprise even the contemporaries of the
Barings and the Rothschilds. Two houses advanced to Edward III of
England upwards of three hundred thousand marks, at a time when the
mark contained more silver than fifty shillings of the present day,
and when the value of silver was more than quadruple of what it now
is. The city and its environs contained a hundred and seventy thousand
children inhabitants. In the various schools about ten thousand
children were taught to read; twelve hundred studied arithmetic;
six hundred received a learned education."
Giotto died in 1386, and after his death, as I have said, Andrea
Pisano came in for a while; to be followed by Talenti, who is said
to have made considerable alterations in Giotto's design and to
be responsible for the happy idea of increasing the height of the
windows with the height of the tower and thus adding to the illusion
of springing lightness. The topmost ones, so bold in size and so
lovely with their spiral columns, almost seem to lift it.
The campanile to-day is 276 feet in height, and Giotto proposed to
add to that a spire of 105 feet. The Florentines completed the façade
of the cathedral in 1887 and are now spending enormous sums on the
Medici chapel at S. Lorenzo; why should they not one day carry out
their greatest artist's intention?
The campanile as a structure had been finished in 1387, but not for
many years did it receive its statues, of which something must be said,
although it is impossible to get more than a vague idea of them, so
high are they. A captive balloon should be arranged for the use of
visitors. Those by Donatello, on the Baptistery side, are the most
remarkable. The first of these--that nearest to the cathedral and
the most striking as seen from the distant earth--is called John the
Baptist, always a favourite subject with this sculptor, who, since
he more than any at that thoughtful time endeavoured to discover
and disclose the secret of character, is curiously unfortunate in
the accident that has fastened names to these figures. This John,
for example, bears no relation to his other Baptists; nor does the
next figure represent David, as is generally supposed, but owes that
error to the circumstance that when the David that originally stood
here was moved to the north side, the old plinth bearing his name was
left behind. This famous figure is stated by Vasari to be a portrait of
a Florentine merchant named Barduccio Cherichini, and for centuries it
has been known as Il Zuccone (or pumpkin) from its baldness. Donatello,
according to Vasari, had a particular liking for the work, so much that
he used to swear by it; while, when engaged upon it, he is said to
have so believed in its reality as to exclaim, "Speak, speak! or may
a dysentery seize thee!" It is now generally considered to represent
Job, and we cannot too much regret the impossibility of getting near
enough to study it. Next is the Jeremiah, which, according to Vasari,
was a portrait of another Florentine, but which, since he bears his
name on a scroll, may none the less be taken to realize the sculptor's
idea of Jeremiah. It is (according to the photographs) a fine piece
of rugged vivacity, and the head is absolutely that of a real man. On
the opposite side of the tower is the magnificent Abraham's sacrifice
from the same strong hand, and by it Habakkuk, who is no less near
life than the Jeremiah and Job, but a very different type. At both
Or San Michele and the Bargello we are to find Donatello perhaps in
a finer mood than here, and comfortably visible.
For most visitors to Florence and all disciples of Ruskin, the chief
interest of the campanile ("The Shepherd's Tower" as he calls it)
is the series of twenty-seven reliefs illustrating the history of
the world and the progress of mankind, which are to be seen round the
base, the design, it is supposed, of Giotto, executed by Andrea Pisano
and Luca della Robbia. To Andrea are given all those on the west (7),
south (7), east (5), and the two eastern ones on the north; to Luca the
remaining five on the north. Ruskin's fascinating analysis of these
reliefs should most certainly be read (without a total forgetfulness
of the shepherd's other activities as a painter, architect, humorist,
and friend of princes and poets), but equally certainly not in the
American pirated edition which the Florentine booksellers are so ready
(to their shame) to sell you. Only Ruskin in his best mood of fury
could begin to do justice to the misspellings and mispunctuations of
this terrible production.
Ruskin, I may say, believes several of the carvings to be from
Giotto's own chisel as well as design, but other and more modern
authorities disagree, although opinion now inclines to the belief
that the designs for Pisano's Baptistery doors are also his. Such
thoroughness and ingenuity were all in Giotto's way, and they certainly
suggest his active mind. The campanile series begins at the west side
with the creation of man. Among the most attractive are, I think,
those devoted to agriculture, with the spirited oxen, to astronomy, to
architecture, to weaving, and to pottery. Giotto was even so thorough
as to give one relief to the conquest of the air; and he makes Noah
most satisfactorily drunk. Note also the Florentine fleur-de-lis
round the base of the tower. Every fleur-de-lis in Florence is
beautiful--even those on advertisements and fire-plugs--but few are
more beautiful than these.
I climbed the campanile one fine morning--417 steps from the
ground--and was well repaid; but I think it is wiser to ascend the
tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, because one is higher there and, since
the bulk of the dome, which intrudes from the campanile, is avoided,
one has a better all-round view. Florence seen from this eminence
is very red--so uniformly so that many towers rise against it almost
indistinguishably, particularly the Bargello's and the Badia's. One
sees at once how few straight streets there are--the Ricasoli standing
out among them as the exception; and one realizes how the city has
developed outside, with its boulevards where the walls once were,
leaving the gates isolated, and its cincture of factories. The
occasional glimpses of cloisters and verdure among the red are very
pleasant. One of the objects cut off by the cathedral dome is the
English cemetery, but the modern Jewish temple stands out as noticeably
almost as any of the ancient buildings. The Pitti looks like nothing
but a barracks and the Porta Ferdinando has prominence which it gets
from no other point. The roof of the Mercato Centrale is the ugliest
thing in the view. While I was there the midday gun from the Boboli
fortress was fired, instantly having its punctual double effect of
sending all the pigeons up in a grey cloud of simulated alarm and
starting every bell in the city.
Those wishing to make either the campanile or Duomo ascents must
remember to do it early. The closing hour for the day being twelve,
no one is allowed to start up after about a quarter past eleven: a
very foolish arrangement, since Florence and the surrounding Apennines
under a slanting sun are more beautiful than in the morning glare,
and the ascent would be less fatiguing. As it was, on descending, after
being so long at the top, I was severely reprimanded by the custodian,
who had previously marked me down as a barbarian for refusing his offer
of field-glasses. But the Palazzo Vecchio tower is open till five.
The Baptistery is the beautiful octagonal building opposite the
cathedral, and once the cathedral itself. It dates from the seventh
or eighth century, but as we see it now is a product chiefly of the
thirteenth. The bronze doors opposite the Via Calzaioli are open every
day, a circumstance which visitors, baffled by the two sets of Ghiberti
doors always so firmly closed, are apt to overlook. All children born
in Florence are still baptized here, and I watched one afternoon an old
priest at the task, a tiny Florentine being brought in to receive the
name of Tosca, which she did with less distaste than most, considering
how thorough was his sprinkling. The Baptistery is rich in colour
both without and within. The floor alone is a marvel of intricate
inlaying, including the signs of the zodiac and a gnomic sentence which
reads the same backwards and forwards--"En gire torte sol ciclos et
roterigne". On this very pavement Dante, who called the church his
"beautiful San Giovanni," has walked. Over the altar is a gigantic
and primitive Christ in mosaic, more splendid than spiritual. The
mosaics in the recesses of the clerestory--grey and white--are the
most soft and lovely of all. I believe the Baptistery is the most
restful place in Florence; and this is rather odd considering that it
is all marble and mosaic patterns. But its shape is very soothing,
and age has given it a quality of its own, and there is just that
touch of barbarism about it such as one gets in Byzantine buildings
to lend it a peculiar character here.
The most notable sculpture in the Baptistery is the tomb of the ex-Pope
John XXIII, whose licentiousness was such that there was nothing for
it but to depose and imprison him. He had, however, much money, and on
his liberation he settled in Florence, presented a true finger of John
the Baptist to the Baptistery, and arranged in return for his bones
to repose in that sanctuary. One of his executors was that Niccolò
da Uzzano, the head of the noble faction in the city, whose coloured
bust by Donatello is in the Bargello. The tomb is exceedingly fine,
the work of Donatello and his partner Michelozzo, who were engaged
to make it by Giovanni de' Medici, the ex-pontiff's friend, and the
father of the great Cosimo. The design is all Donatello's, and his
the recumbent cleric, lying very naturally, hardly as if dead at
all, a little on one side, so that his face is seen nearly full;
the three figures beneath are Michelozzo's; but Donatello probably
carved the seated angels who display the scroll which bears the
dead Pope's name. The Madonna and Child above are by Donatello's
assistant, Pagno di Lapo Portigiani, a pretty relief by whom we saw
in the Museum of the Cathedral. Being in red stone, and very dusty,
like Ghiberti's doors (which want the hose regularly), the lines of
the tomb are much impaired. Donatello is also represented here by a
Mary Magdalene in wood, on an altar at the left of the entrance door,
very powerful and poignant.
In the ordinary way, when visitors to Florence speak of the Baptistery
doors they mean those opposite the Duomo, and when they go to the
Bargello and look at the designs made by Ghiberti and Brunelleschi in
competition, they think that the competition was for those. But that
is wrong. Ghiberti won his spurs with the doors on the north side,
at which comparatively few persons look. The famous doors opposite
the Duomo were commissioned many years later, when his genius was
acknowledged and when he had become so accomplished as to do what
he liked with his medium. Before, however, coming to Ghiberti,
we ought to look at the work of an early predecessor but for whom
there might have been no Ghiberti at all; for while Ghiberti was at
work with his assistants on these north doors, between 1403 and 1424,
the place which they occupy was filled by those executed seventy years
earlier by Andrea Pisano (1270-1348), possibly from Giotto's designs,
which are now at the south entrance, opposite the charming little
loggia at the corner of the Via Calzaioli, called the Bigallo. These
represent twenty scenes in the life of S. John the Baptist, and below
them are eight figures of cardinal and Christian virtues, and they
employed their sculptor from 1330 to 1336. They have three claims to
notice: as being admirably simple and vigorous in themselves; as having
influenced all later workers in this medium, and particularly Ghiberti
and Donatello; and as being the bronze work of the sculptor of certain
of the stone scenes round the base of Giotto's campanile. The panel
in which the Baptist is seen up to his waist in the water is surely
the very last word in audacity in bronze. Ghiberti was charged with
making bronze do things that it was ill fitted for; but I do not know
that even he moulded water--and transparent water--from it.
The year 1399 is one of the most notable in the history of modern art,
since it was then that the competition for the Baptistery gates was
made public, this announcement being the spring from which many rivers
flowed. In that year Lorenzo Ghiberti, a young goldsmith assisting
his father, was twenty-one, and Filippo Brunelleschi, another
goldsmith, was twenty-two, while Giotto had been dead sixty-three
years and the impulse he had given to painting had almost worked
itself out. The new doors were to be of the same shape and size as
those by Andrea Pisano, which were already getting on for seventy
years old, and candidates were invited to make a specimen relief to
scale, representing the interrupted sacrifice of Isaac, although
the subject-matter of the doors was to be the Life of S. John the
Baptist. Among the judges was that Florentine banker whose name
was beginning to be known in the city as a synonym for philanthropy,
enlightenment, and sagacity, Giovanni de' Medici. In 1401 the specimens
were ready, and after much deliberation as to which was the better,
Ghiberti's or Brunelleschi's--assisted, some say, by Brunelleschi's
own advice in favour of his rival--the award was given to Ghiberti,
and he was instructed to proceed with his task; while Brunelleschi,
as we have seen, being a man of determined ambition, left for Rome to
study architecture, having made up his mind to be second to no one
in whichever of the arts and crafts he decided to pursue. Here then
was the first result of the competition--that it turned Brunelleschi
to architecture.
Ghiberti began seriously in 1408 and continued till 1424, when the
doors were finished; but, in order to carry out the work, he required
assistance in casting and so forth, and for that purpose engaged among
others a sculptor named Donatello (born in 1386), a younger sculptor
named Luca della Robbia (born in 1400), and a gigantic young painter
called Masaccio (born in 1401), each of whom was destined, taking
fire no doubt from Ghiberti and his fine free way, to be a powerful
innovator--Donatello (apart from other and rarer achievements) being
the first sculptor since antiquity to place a statue on a pedestal
around which observers could walk; Masaccio being the first painter
to make pictures in the modern use of the term, with men and women
of flesh and blood in them, as distinguished from decorative saints,
and to be by example the instructor of all the greatest masters,
from his pupil Lippo Lippi to Leonardo and Michelangelo; and Luca
della Robbia being the inspired discoverer of an inexpensive means of
glazing terra-cotta so that his beautiful and radiant Madonnas could
be brought within the purchasing means of the poorest congregation in
Italy. These alone are remarkable enough results, but when we recollect
also that Brunelleschi's defeat led to the building of the cathedral
dome, the significance of the event becomes the more extraordinary.
The doors, as I say, were finished in 1424, after twenty-one years'
labour, and the Signoria left the Palazzo Vecchio in procession to see
their installation. In the number and shape of the panels Pisano set
the standard, but Ghiberti's work resembled that of his predecessor
very little in other ways, for he had a mind of domestic sweetness
without austerity and he was interested in making everything as easy
and fluid and beautiful as might be. His thoroughness recalls Giotto
in certain of his frescoes. The impression left by Pisano's doors is
akin to that left by reading the New Testament; but Ghiberti makes
everything happier than that. Two scenes--both on the level of the
eye--I particularly like: the "Annunciation," with its little, lithe,
reluctant Virgin, and the "Adoration". The border of the Pisano doors
is, I think, finer than that of Ghiberti's; but it is a later work.
Looking at them even now, with eyes that remember so much of the
best art that followed them and took inspiration from them, we
can understand the better how delighted Florence must have been
with this new picture gallery and how the doors were besieged by
sightseers. But greater still was to come. Ghiberti at once received
the commission to make two more doors on his own scale for the south
side of the Baptistery, and in 1425 he had begun on them. These were
not finished until 1452, so that Ghiberti, then a man of seventy-four,
had given practically his whole life to the making of four bronze
doors. It is true that he did a few other things besides, such as the
casket of S. Zenobius in the Duomo, and the Baptist and S. Matthew
for Or San Michele; but he may be said justly to live by his doors,
and particularly by the second pair, although it was the first pair
that had the greater effect on his contemporaries and followers.
Among his assistants on these were Antonio Pollaiuolo (born in
1429), who designed the quail in the left border, and Paolo Uccello
(born in 1397), both destined to be men of influence. The bald head
on the right door is a portrait of Ghiberti; that of the old man
on the left is his father, who helped him to polish the original
competition plaque. Although commissioned for the south side they
were placed where they now are, on the east, as being most worthy of
the position of honour, and Pisano's doors, which used to be here,
were moved to the south, where they now are.
On Ghiberti's workshop opposite S. Maria Nuova, in the Via Bufalini,
the memorial tablet mentions Michelangelo's praise--that these doors
were beautiful enough to be the Gates of Paradise. After that what is
an ordinary person to say? That they are lovely is a commonplace. But
they are more. They are so sensitive; bronze, the medium which Horace
has called, by implication, the most durable of all, has become in
Ghiberti's hands almost as soft as wax and tender as flesh. It does
all he asks; it almost moves; every trace of sternness has vanished
from it. Nothing in plastic art that we have ever seen or shall see
is more easy and ingratiating than these almost living pictures.
Before them there is steadily a little knot of admirers, and on
Sundays you may always see country people explaining the panels to each
other. Every one has his favourite among these fascinating Biblical
scenes, and mine are Cain and Abel, with the ploughing, and Abraham
and Isaac, with its row of fir trees. It has been explained by the
purists that the sculptor stretched the bounds of plastic art too
far and made bronze paint pictures; but most persons will agree to
ignore that. Of the charm of Ghiberti's mind the border gives further
evidence, with its fruits and foliage, birds and woodland creatures,
so true to life, and here fixed for all time, so naturally, that if
these animals should ever (as is not unlikely in Italy where every
one has a gun and shoots at his pleasure) become extinct, they could
be created again from these designs.
Ghiberti, who enjoyed great honour in his life and a considerable
salary as joint architect of the dome with Brunelleschi, died three
years after the completion of the second doors and was buried in
S. Croce. His place in Florentine art is unique and glorious.
The broken porphyry pillars by these second doors were a gift from
Pisa to Florence in recognition of Florence's watchfulness over Pisa
while the Pisans were away subduing the Balearic islanders.
The bronze group over Ghiberti's first doors, representing John
the Baptist preaching between a Pharisee and a Levite, are the
work (either alone or assisted by his master Leonardo da Vinci)
of an interesting Florentine sculptor, Giovanni Francesco Rustici
(1474-1554), who was remarkable among the artists of his time in
being what we should call an amateur, having a competence of his own
and the manners of a patron. Placing himself under Verrocchio, he
became closely attached to Leonardo, a fellow-pupil, and made him his
model rather than the older man. He took his art lightly, and lived,
in Vasari's phrase, "free from care," having such beguilements as a
tame menagerie (Leonardo, it will be remembered, loved animals too and
had a habit of buying small caged birds in order to set them free),
and two or three dining clubs, the members of which vied with each
other in devising curious and exotic dishes. Andrea del Sarto, for
example, once brought as his contribution to the feast a model of this
very church we are studying, the Baptistery, of which the floor was
constructed of jelly, the pillars of sausages, and the choir desk of
cold veal, while the choristers were roast thrushes. Rustici further
paved the way to a life free from care by appointing a steward of his
estate whose duty it was to see that his money-box, to which he went
whenever he wanted anything, always had money in it. This box he never
locked, having learned that he need fear no robbery by once leaving
his cloak for two days under a bush and then finding it again. "This
world," he exclaimed, "is too good: it will not last." Among his pets
were a porcupine trained to prick the legs of his guests under the
table "so that they drew them in quickly"; a raven that spoke like a
human being; an eagle, and many snakes. He also studied necromancy,
the better to frighten his apprentices. He left Florence in 1528,
after the Medici expulsion, and, like Leonardo, took service with
Francis the First. He died at the age of eighty.
I had an hour and more exactly opposite the Rustici group, on the same
level, while waiting for the Scoppio del Carro, and I find it easy
to believe that Leonardo himself had a hand in the work. The figure
of the Baptist is superb, the attitude of his listeners masterly.
CHAPTER V
The Riccardi Palace and the Medici
An evasion of history--"Il Caparra"--The Gozzoli frescoes--Giovanni
de' Medici (di Bicci)--Cosimo de' Medici--The first banishment--Piero
de' Medici--Lorenzo de' Medici--Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici--The
second banishment--Giuliano di Lorenzo de' Medici--Leo X--Lorenzo di
Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici--Clement VII--Third banishment of the
Medici--The siege of Florence--Alessandro de' Medici--Ippolito de'
Medici--Lorenzino de' Medici--Giovanni delle Bande Nere--Cosimo I--The
Grand Dukes.
The natural step from the Baptistery would be to the Uffizi. But for
us not yet; because in order to understand Florence, and particularly
the Florence that existed between the extreme dates that I have chosen
as containing the fascinating period--namely 1296, when the Duomo was
begun, and 1564, when Michelangelo died--one must understand who and
what the Medici were.
While I have been enjoying the pleasant task of writing this
book--which has been more agreeable than any literary work I have ever
done--I have continually been conscious of a plaintive voice at my
shoulder, proceeding from one of the vigilant and embarrassing imps
who sit there and do duty as conscience, inquiring if the time is not
about ripe for introducing that historical sketch of Florence without
which no account such as this can be rightly understood. And ever I
have replied with words of a soothing and procrastinating nature. But
now that we are face to face with the Medici family, in their very
house, I am conscious that the occasion for that historical sketch
is here indeed, and equally I am conscious of being quite incapable
of supplying it. For the history of Florence between, say the birth
of Giotto or Dante and the return of Cosimo de' Medici from exile,
when the absolute Medici rule began, is so turbulent, crowded, and
complex that it would require the whole of this volume to describe
it. The changes in the government of the city would alone occupy a
good third, so constant and complicated were they. I should have to
explain the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, the Neri and the Bianchi,
the Guilds and the Priors, the gonfalonieri and the podesta, the
secondo popolo and the buonuomini.
Rather than do this imperfectly I have chosen to do it not at all;
and the curious must resort to historians proper. But there is at
the end of the volume a table of the chief dates in Florentine and
European history in the period chosen, together with births and deaths
of artists and poets and other important persons, so that a bird's-eye
view of the progress of affairs can be quickly gained, while in this
chapter I offer an outline of the great family of rulers of Florence
who made the little city an aesthetic lawgiver to the world and with
whom her later fame, good or ill, is indissolubly united. For the rest,
is there not the library?
The Medici, once so powerful and stimulating, are still ever in the
background of Florence as one wanders hither and thither. They are
behind many of the best pictures and most of the best statues. Their
escutcheon is everywhere. I ought, I believe, to have made them
the subject of my first chapter. But since I did not, let us without
further delay turn to the Via Cavour, which runs away to the north from
the Baptistery, being a continuation of the Via de' Martelli, and pause
at the massive and dignified palace at the first corner on the left.
For that is the Medici's home; and afterwards we will step into
S. Lorenzo and see the church which Brunelleschi and Donatello made
beautiful and Michelangelo wonderful that the Medici might lie there.
Visitors go to the Riccardi palace rather to see Gozzoli's frescoes
than anything else; and indeed apart from the noble solid Renaissance
architecture of Michelozzo there is not much else to see. In the
courtyard are certain fragments of antique sculpture arranged against
the walls, and a sarcophagus is shown in which an early member of the
family, Guccio de' Medici, who was gonfalonier in 1299, once reposed.
There too are Donatello's eight medallions, but they are not very
interesting, being only enlarged copies of old medals and cameos and
not notable for his own characteristics.
Hence it is that, after Gozzoli, by far the most interesting
part of this building is its associations. For here lived Cosimo
de' Medici, whose building of the palace was interrupted by his
banishment as a citizen of dangerous ambition; here lived Piero
de' Medici, for whom Gozzoli worked; here was born and here lived
Lorenzo the Magnificent. To this palace came the Pazzi conspirators
to lure Giuliano to the Duomo and his doom. Here did Charles
VIII--Savonarola's "Flagellum Dei"--lodge and loot, and it was here
that Capponi frightened him with the threat of the Florentine bells;
hither came in 1494 the fickle and terrible Florentine mob, always
passionate in its pursuit of change and excitement, and now inflamed
by the sermons of Savonarola, to destroy the priceless manuscripts
and works of art; here was brought up for a year or so the little
Catherine de' Medici, and next door was the house in which Alessandro
de' Medici was murdered.
It was in the seventeenth century that the palace passed to the
Riccardi family, who made many additions. A century later Florence
acquired it, and to-day it is the seat of the Prefect of the
city. Cosimo's original building was smaller; but much of it remains
untouched. The exquisite cornice is Michelozzo's original, and the
courtyard has merely lost its statues, among which are Donatello's
Judith, now in the Loggia de' Lanzi, and his bronze David, now in the
Bargello, while Verrocchio's David was probably on the stairs. The
escutcheon on the corner of the house gives us the period of its
erection. The seven plain balls proclaim it Cosimo's. Each of
the Medici sported these palle, although each had also his private
crest. Under Giovanni, Cosimo's father, the balls were eight in number;
under Cosimo, seven; under Piero, seven, with the fleur-de-lis of
France on the uppermost, given him by Louis XI; under Lorenzo, six;
and as one walks about Florence one can approximately fix the date of
a building by remembering these changes. How many times they occur on
the façades of Florence and its vicinity, probably no one could say;
but they are everywhere. The French wits, who were amused to derive
Catherine de' Medici from a family of apothecaries, called them pills.
The beautiful lantern at the corner was added by Lorenzo and was
the work of an odd ironsmith in Florence for whom he had a great
liking--Niccolò Grosso. For Lorenzo had all that delight in character
which belongs so often to the born patron and usually to the born
connoisseur. This Grosso was a man of humorous independence and
bluntness. He had the admirable custom of carrying out his commissions
in the order in which they arrived, so that if he was at work upon a
set of fire-irons for a poor client, not even Lorenzo himself (who as
a matter of fact often tried) could induce him to turn to something
more lucrative. The rich who cannot wait he forced to wait. Grosso
also always insisted upon something in advance and payment on
delivery, and pleasantly described his workshop as being the Sign
of the Burning Books,--since if his books were burnt how could he
enter a debt? This rule earned for him from Lorenzo the nickname of
"Il Caparra" (earnest money). Another of Grosso's eccentricities was
to refuse to work for Jews.
Within the palace, up stairs, is the little chapel which Gozzoli made
so gay and fascinating that it is probably the very gem among the
private chapels of the world. Here not only did the Medici perform
their devotions--Lorenzo's corner seat is still shown, and anyone
may sit in it--but their splendour and taste are reflected on the
walls. Cosimo, as we shall see when we reach S. Marco, invited Fra
Angelico to paint upon the walls of that convent sweet and simple
frescoes to the glory of God. Piero employed Fra Angelico's pupil,
Benozzo Gozzoli to decorate this chapel.
In the year 1439, as chapter II related, through the instrumentality
of Cosimo a great episcopal Council was held at Florence, at which
John Palaeologus, Emperor of the East, met Pope Eugenius IV. In that
year Cosimo's son Piero was twenty-three, and Gozzoli nineteen,
and probably upon both, but certainly on the young artist, such
pomp and splendour and gorgeousness of costume as then were visible
in Florence made a deep impression. When therefore Piero, after
becoming head of the family, decided to decorate the chapel with
a procession of Magi, it is not surprising that the painter should
recall this historic occasion. We thus get the pageantry of the East
with more than common realism, while the portraits, or at any rate
representations, of the Patriarch of Constantinople (the first king)
and the Emperor (the second king) are here, together with those of
certain Medici, for the youthful third king is none other than Piero's
eldest son Lorenzo. Among their followers are (the third on the left)
Cosimo de' Medici, who is included as among the living, although,
like the Patriarch of Constantinople, he was dead, and his brother
Lorenzo (the middle one of the three), whose existence is forgotten
so completely until the accession of Cosimo I, in 1537, brings his
branch of the family into power; while on the right is Piero de'
Medici himself. Piero's second son Giuliano is on the white horse,
preceded by a negro carrying his bow. The head immediately above
Giuliano I do not know, but that one a little to the left above it
is Gozzoli's own. Among the throng are men of learning who either
came to Florence from the East or Florentines who assimilated their
philosophy--such as Georgius Gemisthos, Marsilio Ficino, and perhaps
certain painters among them, all protégés of Cosimo and Piero, and
all makers of the Renaissance.
The assemblage alone, apart altogether from any beauty and charm
that the painting possesses, makes these frescoes valuable. But the
painting is a delight. We have a pretty Gozzoli in our National
Gallery--No. 283--but it gives no indication of the ripeness and
richness and incident of this work; while the famous Biblical
series in the Campo Santo of Pisa has so largely perished as to be
scarcely evidence to his colour. The first impression made by the
Medici frescoes is their sumptuousness. When Gozzoli painted--if the
story be true--he had only candle light: the window over the altar
is new. But think of candle light being all the illumination of these
walls as the painter worked! A new door and window have also been cut
in the wall opposite the altar close to the three daughters of Piero,
by vandal hands; and "Bruta, bruta!" says the guardian, very rightly.
The landscape behind the procession is hardly less interesting than the
procession itself; but it is when we come to the meadows of paradise,
with the angels and roses, the cypresses and birds, in the two chancel
scenes, that this side of Gozzoli's art is most fascinating. He has
travelled a long way from his master Fra Angelico here: the heaven
is of the visible rather than the invisible eye; sense is present
as well as the rapturous spirit. The little Medici who endured the
tedium of the services here are to be felicitated with upon such an
adorable presentment of glory. With plenty of altar candles the sight
of these gardens of the blest must have beguiled many a mass. Thinking
here in England upon the Medici chapel, I find that the impression
it has left upon me is chiefly cypresses--cypresses black and comely,
disposed by a master hand, with a glint of gold among them.
The picture that was over the altar has gone. It was a Lippo Lippi
and is now in Berlin.
The first of the Medici family to rise to the highest power was
Giovanni d'Averardo de' Medici (known as Giovanni di Bicci), 1360-1429,
who, a wealthy banker living in what is now the Piazza del Duomo,
was well known for his philanthropy and interest in the welfare of
the Florentines, but does not come much into public notice until
1401, when he was appointed one of the judges in the Baptistery door
competition. He was a retiring, watchful man. Whether he was personally
ambitious is not too evident, but he was opposed to tyranny and was the
steady foe of the Albizzi faction, who at that time were endeavouring
to obtain supreme power in Florentine affairs. In 1419 Giovanni
increased his popularity by founding the Spedale degli Innocenti,
and in 1421 he was elected gonfalonier, or, as we might now say,
President of the Republic. In this capacity he made his position
secure and reduced the nobles (chief of whom was Niccolò da Uzzano)
to political weakness. Giovanni died in 1429, leaving one son, Cosimo,
aged forty, a second, Lorenzo, aged thirtyfour, a fragrant memory
and an immense fortune.
To Lorenzo, who remained a private citizen, we shall return in time;
it is Cosimo (1389-1464) with whom we are now concerned. Cosimo de'
Medici was a man of great mental and practical ability: he had been
educated as well as possible; he had a passion both for art and
letters; he inherited his father's financial ability and generosity,
while he added to these gifts a certain genius for the management
of men. One of the first things that Cosimo did after his father's
death was to begin the palace where we now are, rejecting a plan by
Brunelleschi as too splendid, and choosing instead one by Michelozzo,
the partner of Donatello, two artists who remained his personal
friends through life. Cosimo selected this site, in what was then
the Via Larga but is now the Via Cavour, partly because his father
had once lived there, and partly because it was close to S. Lorenzo,
which his father, with six other families, had begun to rebuild,
a work he intended himself to carry on.
The palace was begun in 1430 abd was still in progress in 1433 when
the Albizzi, who had always viewed the rise of the Medici family
with apprehension and misgiving, and were now strengthened by the
death of Niccolò da Uzzano, who, though powerful, had been a very
cautious and temperate adviser, succeeded in getting a majority
in the Signoria and passing a sentence of banishment on the whole
Medici tribe as being too rich and ambitious to be good citizens of
a simple and frugal Republic. Cosimo therefore, after some days of
imprisonment in the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, during which he
expected execution at any moment, left Florence for Venice, taking
his architect with him. In 1434, however, the Florentines, realizing
that under the Albizzi they were losing their independence, and what
was to be a democracy was become an oligarchy, revolted, and Cosimo
was recalled, and, like his father, was elected gonfalonier. With this
recall began his long supremacy; for he returned like a king and like
a king remained, quickly establishing himself as the leading man in
the city, the power behind the Signoria. Not only did he never lose
that position, but he made it so naturally his own that when he died
he was able to transmit it to his son.
Cosimo de' Medici was, I think, the wisest and best ruler that Florence
ever had and ranks high among the rulers that any state ever had. But
he changed the Florentines from an independent people to a dependent
one. In his capacity of Father of his Country he saw to it that his
children lost their proud spirit. He had to be absolute; and this
end he achieved in many ways, but chiefly by his wealth, which made
it possible to break the rich rebel and to enslave the poor. His
greatest asset--next his wealth--was his knowledge of the Florentine
character. To know anything of this capricious, fickle, turbulent
folk even after the event was in itself a task of such magnitude that
almost no one else had compassed it; but Cosimo did more, he knew what
they were likely to do. By this knowledge, together with his riches,
his craft, his tact, his business ramifications as an international
banker, his open-handedness and air of personal simplicity, Cosimo
made himself a power. For Florence could he not
do enough. By inviting the Pope and the Greek Emperor to meet there
he gave it great political importance, and incidentally brought
about the New Learning. He established the Platonic Academy and
formed the first public library in the west. He rebuilt and endowed
the monastery of S. Marco. He built and rebuilt other churches. He
gave Donatello a free hand in sculpture and Fra Lippo Lippi and Fra
Angelico in painting. He distributed altogether in charity and churches
four hundred thousand of those golden coins which were invented by
Florence and named florins after her--a sum equal to a million pounds
of to-day. In every direction one comes upon traces of his generosity
and thoroughness. After his death it was decided that as Pater Patriae,
or Father of his Country, he should be for ever known.
Cosimo died in 1464, leaving an invalid son, Piero, aged forty-eight,
known for his almost continuous gout as Il Gottoso. Giovanni and Cosimo
had had to work for their power; Piero stepped naturally into it,
although almost immediately he had to deal with a plot--the first for
thirty years--to ruin the Medici prestige, the leader of which was that
Luca Pitti who began the Pitti palace in order to have a better house
than the Medici. The plot failed, not a little owing to young Lorenzo
de' Medici's address, and the remaining few years of Piero's life were
tranquil. He was a quiet, kindly man with the traditional family love
of the arts, and it was for him that Gozzoli worked. He died in 1469,
leaving two sons, Lorenzo (1449-1492) and Giuliano (1453-1478).
Lorenzo had been brought up as the future leading citizen of Florence:
he had every advantage of education and environment, and was rich in
the aristocratic spirit which often blossoms most richly in the second
or third generation of wealthy business families. Giovanni had been
a banker before everything, Cosimo an administrator, Piero a faithful
inheritor of his father's wishes; it was left for Lorenzo to be the
first poet and natural prince of the Medici blood. Lorenzo continued
to bank but mismanaged the work and lost heavily; while his poetical
tendencies no doubt distracted his attention generally from affairs.
Yet such was his sympathetic understanding and his native splendour and
gift of leadership that he could not but be at the head of everything,
the first to be consulted and ingratiated. Not only was he the first
Medici poet but the first of the family to marry not for love but
for policy, and that too was a sign of decadence.
Lorenzo came into power when only twenty, and at the age of forty-two
he was dead, but in the interval, by his interest in every kind of
intellectual and artistic activity, by his passion for the greatness
and glory of Florence, he made for himself a name that must always
connote liberality, splendour, and enlightenment. But it is beyond
question that under Lorenzo the Florentines changed deeply and for
the worse. The old thrift and simplicity gave way to extravagance and
ostentation; the old faith gave way too, but that was not wholly the
effect of Lorenzo's natural inclination towards Platonic philosophy,
fostered by his tutor Marsilio Ficino and his friends Poliziano and
Pico della Mirandola, but was due in no small measure also to the
hostility of Pope Sixtus, which culminated in the Pazzi Conspiracy of
1478 and the murder of Giuliano. Looking at the history of Florence
from our present vantage-point we can see that although under
Lorenzo the Magnificent she was the centre of the world's culture
and distinction, there was behind this dazzling front no seriousness
of purpose. She was in short enjoying the fruits of her labours as
though the time of rest had come; and this when strenuousness was more
than ever important. Lorenzo carried on every good work of his father
and grandfather (he spent £65,000 a year in books alone) and was as
jealous of Florentine interests; but he was also "The Magnificent,"
and in that lay the peril. Florence could do with wealth and power,
but magnificence went to her head.
Lorenzo died in 1492, leaving three sons, of whom the eldest, Piero
(1471-1503), succeeded him. Never was such a decadence. In a moment
the Medici prestige, which had been steadily growing under Cosimo,
Piero, and Lorenzo until it was world famous, crumbled to dust. Piero
was a coarse-minded, pleasure-loving youth--"The Headstrong" his
father had called him--whose one idea of power was to be sensual and
tyrannical; and the enemies of Florence and of Italy took advantage
of this fact. Savonarola's sermons had paved the way from within
too. In 1494 Charles VIII of France marched into Italy; Piero pulled
himself together and visited the king to make terms for Florence,
but made such terms that on returning to the city he found an order
of banishment and obeyed it. On November 9th, 1494, he and his family
were expelled, and the mob, forgetting so quickly all that they owed
to the Medici who had gone before, rushed to this beautiful palace and
looted it. The losses that art and learning sustained in a few hours
can never be estimated. A certain number of treasures were subsequently
collected again, such as Donatello's David and Verrocchio's David,
while Donatello's Judith was removed to the Palazzo Vecchio, where
an inscription was placed upon it saying that her short way with
Holofernes was a warning to all traitors; but priceless pictures,
sculpture, and MSS. were ruthlessly demolished.
In the chapter on S. Marco we shall read of what experiments in
government the Florentines substituted for that of the Medici,
Savonarola for a while being at the head of the government, although
only for a brief period which ended amid an orgy of lawlessness; and
then, after a restless period of eighteen years, in which Florence
had every claw cut and was weakened also by dissension, the Medici
returned--the change being the work of Lorenzo's second son, Giovanni
de' Medici, who on the eve of becoming Pope Leo X procured their
reinstatement, thus justifying the wisdom of his father in placing
him in the Church. Piero having been drowned long since, his admirable
but ill-starred brother Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, now thirty-three,
assumed the control, always under Leo X; while their cousin, Giulio,
also a Churchman, and the natural son of the murdered Giuliano,
was busy, behind the scenes, with the family fortunes.
Giuliano lived only till 1516 and was succeeded by his nephew
Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, a son of Peiro, a young man of no more
political use than his father, and one who quickly became almost
equally unpopular. Things indeed were going so badly that Leo X sent
Giulio de' Medici (now a cardinal) from Rome to straighten them out,
and by some sensible repeals he succeeded in allaying a little of
the bitterness in the city. Lorenzo had one daughter, born in this
palace, who was destined to make history--Catherine de' Medici--and
no son. When therefore he died in 1519, at the age of twenty-seven,
after a life of vicious selfishness (which, however, was no bar
to his having the noblest tomb in the world, at S. Lorenzo), the
succession should have passed to the other branch of the Medici
family, the descendants of old Giovanni's second son Lorenzo,
brother of Cosimo. But Giulio, at Rome, always at the ear of the
indolent, pleasure-loving Leo X, had other projects. Born in 1478,
the illegitimate son of a charming father, Giulio had none of the
great Medici traditions, and the Medici name never stood so low as
during his period of power. Himself illegitimate, he was the father
of an illegitimate son, Alessandro, for whose advancement he toiled
much as Alexander VI had toiled for that of Caesar Borgia. He had not
the black, bold wickedness of Alexander VI, but as Pope Clement VII,
which he became in 1523, he was little less admirable. He was cunning,
ambitious, and tyrannical, and during his pontificate he contrived not
only to make many powerful enemies and to see both Rome and Florence
under siege, but to lose England for the Church.
We move, however, too fast. The year is 1519 and Lorenzo is dead,
and the rightful heir to the Medici wealth and power was to be
kept out. To do this Giulio himself moved to Florence and settled
in the Medici palace, and on his return to Rome Cardinal Passerini
was installed in the Medici palace in his stead, nominally as the
custodian of little Catherine de' Medici and Ippolito, a boy of ten,
the illegitimate son of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours. That Florence
should have put up with this Roman control shows us how enfeebled
was her once proud spirit. In 1521 Leo X died, to be succeeded, in
spite of all Giulio's efforts, by Adrian of Utrecht, as Adrian VI,
a good, sincere man who, had he lived, might have enormously changed
the course not only of Italian but of English history. He survived,
however, for less than two years, and then came Giulio's chance,
and he was elected Pope Clement VII.
Clement's first duty was to make Florence secure, and he therefore
sent his son Alessandro, then about thirteen, to join the others
at the Medici palace, which thus now contained a resident cardinal,
watchful of Medici interests; a legitimate daughter of Lorenzo, Duke
of Urbino (but owing to quarrels she was removed to a convent); an
illegitimate son of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, the nominal heir and
already a member of the Government; and the Pope's illegitimate son,
of whose origin, however, nothing was said, although it was implied
that Lorenzo, Duke of Nemours, was his father.
This was the state of affairs during Clement's war with the Emperor
Charles V, [2] which ended with the siege of Rome and the imprisonment
of the Pope in the Castle of S. Angelo for some months until he
contrived to escape to Orvieto; and meanwhile Florence, realizing his
powerlessness, uttered a decree again banishing the Medici family, and
in 1527 they were sent forth from the city for the third time. But even
now, when the move was so safe, Florence lacked courage to carry it
out until a member of the Medici family, furious at the presence of the
base-born Medici in the palace, and a professed hater of her base-born
uncle Clement VII and all his ways--Clarice Strozzi, née Clarice de'
Medici, granddaughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent--came herself to this
house and drove the usurpers from it with her extremely capable tongue.
To explain clearly the position of the Florentine Republic at this
time would be too deeply to delve into history, but it may briefly be
said that by means of humiliating surrenders and much crafty diplomacy,
Clement VII was able to bring about in 1529 peace between the Emperor
Charles V and Francis I of France, by which Charles was left master
of Italy, while his partner and ally in these transactions, Clement,
expected for his own share certain benefits in which the humiliation
of Florence and the exaltation of Alessandro came first. Florence,
having taken sides with Francis, found herself in any case very badly
left, with the result that at the end of 1529 Charles V's army, with
the papal forces to assist, laid siege to her. The siege lasted for
ten months, in which the city was most ably defended by Ferrucci,
that gallant soldier whose portrait by Piero di Cosimo is in our
National Gallery--No. 895--and then came a decisive battle in which
the Emperor and Pope were conquerors, a thousand brave Florentines
were put to death and others were imprisoned.
Alessandro de' Medici arrived at the Medici palace in 1531, and
in 1532 the glorious Florentine Republic of so many years' growth,
for the establishment of which so much good blood had been spilt, was
declared to be at an end. Alessandro being proclaimed Duke, his first
act was to order the demolition of the great bell of the Signoria which
had so often called the citizens to arms or meetings of independence.
Meanwhile Ippolito, the natural son of Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, and
therefore the rightful heir, after having been sent on various missions
by Clement VII, to keep him out of the way, settled at Bologna and took
to poetry. He was a kindly, melancholy man with a deep sense of human
injustice; and in 1535, when, after Clement VII's very welcome demise,
the Florentine exiles who either had been banished from Florence by
Alessandro or had left of their own volition rather than live in the
city under such a contemptible ruler, sent an embassy to the Emperor
Charles V to help them against this new tyrant, Ippolito headed it;
but Alessandro prudently arranged for his assassination en route.
It is unlikely, however, that the Emperor would have done anything,
for in the following year he allowed his daughter Margaret to become
Alessandro's wife. That was in 1536. In January, 1537, Lorenzino de'
Medici, a cousin, one of the younger branch of the family, assuming
the mantle of Brutus, or liberator, stabbed Alessandro to death while
he was keeping an assignation in the house that then adjoined this
palace. Thus died, at the age of twenty-six, one of the most worthless
of men, and, although illegitimate, the last of the direct line of
Cosimo de' Medici, the Father of his Country, to govern Florence.
The next ruler came from the younger branch, to which we now turn. Old
Giovanni di Bicci had two sons, Cosimo and Lorenzo. Lorenzo's son, Pier
Francesco de' Medici, had a son Giovanni de' Medici. This Giovanni,
who married Caterina Sforza of Milan, had also a son named Giovanni,
born in 1498, and it was he who was the rightful heir when Lorenzo,
Duke of Urbino, died in 1519. He was connected with both sides of
the family, for his father, as I have said, was the great grandson
of the first Medici on our list, and his wife was Maria Salviati,
daughter of Lucrezia de' Medici--herself a daughter of Lorenzo the
Magnificent--and Jacopo Salviati, a wealthy Florentine. When, however,
Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, died in 1519, Giovanni was a young man of
twenty-one with an absorbing passion for fighting, which Clement VII
(then Giulio) was only too keen to foster, since he wished him out of
the way in order that his own projects for the ultimate advancement
of the base-born Alessandro, and meanwhile of the catspaw, the
base-born Ippolito, might be furthered. Giovanni had already done
some good service in the field, was becoming famous as the head of
his company of Black Bands, and was known as Giovanni delle Bande
Nere; and his marriage to his cousin Maria Salviati and the birth
of his only son Cosimo in 1519 made no difference to his delight
in warfare. He was happy only when in the field of battle, and the
struggle between Francis and Charles gave him ample opportunities,
fighting on the side of Charles and the Pope and doing many brave and
dashing things. He died at an early age, only twenty-eight, in 1526,
the idol of his men, leaving a widow and child in poverty.
Almost immediately afterwards came the third banishment of the Medici
family from Florence. Giovanni's widow and their son Cosimo got
along as best they could until the murder of Alessandro in 1537,
when Cosimo was nearly eighteen. He was a quiet, reserved youth,
who had apparently taken but little interest in public affairs, and
had spent his time in the country with his mother, chiefly in field
sports. But no sooner was Alessandro dead, and his slayer Lorenzino
had escaped, than Cosimo approached the Florentine council and claimed
to be appointed to his rightful place as head of the State, and this
claim he put, or suggested, with so much humility that his wish was
granted. Instantly one of the most remarkable transitions in history
occurred: the youth grew up almost in a day and at once began to exert
unsuspected reserves of power and authority. In despair a number of
the chief Florentines made an effort to depose him, and a battle was
fought at Montemurlo, a few miles from Florence, between Cosimo's
troops, fortified by some French allies, and the insurgents. That
was in 1537; the victory fell to Cosimo; and his long and remarkable
reign began with the imprisonment and execution of the chief rebels.
Although Cosimo made so bloody a beginning he was the first imaginative
and thoughtful administrator that Florence had had since Lorenzo the
Magnificent. He set himself grimly to build upon the ruins which the
past forty and more years had produced; and by the end of his reign he
had worked wonders. As first he lived in the Medici palace, but after
marrying a wealthy wife, Eleanora of Toledo, he transferred his home
to the Signoria, now called the Palazzo Vecchio, as a safer spot, and
established a bodyguard of Swiss lancers in Orcagna's loggia, close
by. [3] Later he bought the unfinished Pitti palace with his wife's
money, finished it, and moved there. Meanwhile he was strengthening
his position in every way by alliances and treaties, and also by the
convenient murder of Lorenzino, the Brutus who had rid Florence of
Alessandro ten years earlier, and whose presence in the flesh could
not but be a cause of anxiety since Lorenzino derived from an elder
son of the Medici, and Cosimo from a younger. In 1555 the ancient
republic of Siena fell to Cosimo's troops after a cruel and barbarous
siege and was thereafter merged in Tuscany, and in 1570 Cosimo assumed
the title of Cosimo I, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and was crowned at Rome.
Whether or not the common accusation against the Medici as a
family, that they had but one motive--mercenary ambition and
self-aggrandisement--is true, the fact remains that the crown did
not reach their brows until one hundred and seventy years from the
first appearance of old Giovanni di Bicci in Florentine affairs. The
statue of Cosimo I in the Piazza della Signoria has a bas-relief of
his coronation. He was then fifty-one; he lived but four more years,
and when he died he left a dukedom flourishing in every way: rich,
powerful, busy, and enlightened. He had developed and encouraged
the arts, capriciously, as Cellini's "Autobiography" tells us, but
genuinely too, as we can see at the Uffizi and the Pitti. The arts,
however, were not what they had been, for the great period had passed
and Florence was in the trough of the wave. Yet Cosimo found the best
men he could--Cellini, Bronzino, and Vasari--and kept them busy. But
his greatest achievement as a connoisseur was his interest in Etruscan
remains and the excavations at Arezzo and elsewhere which yielded
the priceless relics now at the Archaeological Museum.
With Cosimo I this swift review of the Medici family ends. The
rest have little interest for the visitor to Florence to-day,
for whom Cellini's Perseus, made to Cosimo I's order, is the last
great artistic achievement in the city in point of time. But I may
say that Cosimo I's direct descendants occupied the throne (as it
had now become) until the death of Gian Gastone, son of Cosimo III,
who died in 1737. Tuscany passed to Austria until 1801. In 1807 it
became French, and in 1814 Austrian again. In 1860 it was merged in
the Kingdom of Italy under the rule of the monarch who has given his
name to the great new Piazza--Vittorio Emmanuele.
After Gian Gastone's death one other Medici remained alive: Anna
Maria Ludovica, daughter of Cosimo III. Born in 1667, she married
the Elector Palatine of the Rhine, and survived until 1743. It was
she who left to the city the priceless Medici collections, as I have
stated in chapter VIII. The earlier and greatest of the Medici are
buried in the church of S. Lorenzo or in Michelangelo's sacristy; the
later Medici, beginning with Giovanni delle Bande Nere and his wife,
and their son Cosimo I, are in the gorgeous mausoleum that adjoins
S. Lorenzo and is still being enriched with precious marbles.
Such is an outline of the history of this wonderful family, and we
leave their ancient home, built by the greatest and wisest of them,
with mixed feelings of admiration and pity. They were seldom lovable;
they were often despicable; but where they were great they were
very great indeed. A Latin inscription in the courtyard reminds the
traveller of the distinction which the house possesses, calling it
the home not only of princes but of knowledge herself and a treasury
of the arts. But Florence, although it bought the palace from the
Riccardi family a century and more ago, has never cared to give it
back its rightful name.
CHAPTER VI
S. Lorenzo and Michelangelo
A forlorn façade--The church of the Medici--Cosimo's
parents' tomb--Donatello's cantoria and pulpits--Brunelleschi's
sacristy--Donatello again--The palace of the dead Grand Dukes--Costly
intarsia--Michelangelo's sacristy--A weary Titan's life--The victim
of capricious pontiffs--The Medici tombs--Mementi mori--The Casa
Buonarroti--Brunelleschi's cloisters--A model library.
Architecturally S. Lorenzo does not attract as S. Croce and S. Maria
Novella do; but certain treasures of sculpture make it unique. Yet it
is a cool scene of noble grey arches, and the ceiling is very happily
picked out with gold and colour. Savonarola preached some of his most
important sermons here; here Lorenzo the Magnificent was married.
The façade has never yet been finished: it is just ragged brickwork
waiting for its marble, and likely to wait, although such expenditure
on marble is going on within a few yards of it as makes one gasp. Not
very far away, in the Via Ghibellina, is a house which contains some
rough plans by a master hand for this façade, drawn some four hundred
years ago--the hand of none other than Michelangelo, whose scheme
was to make it not only a wonder of architecture but a wonder also
of statuary, the façade having many niches, each to be filled with
a sacred figure. But Michelangelo always dreamed on a scale utterly
disproportionate to the foolish little span of life allotted to us
and the S. Lorenzo façade was never even begun.
The piazza which these untidy bricks overlook is now given up to stalls
and is the centre of the cheap clothing district. Looking diagonally
across it from the church one sees the great walls of the courtyard
of what is now the Riccardi palace, but was in the great days the
Medici palace; and at the corner, facing the Borgo S. Lorenzo, is
Giovanni delle Bande Nere, in stone, by the impossible Bandinelli,
looking at least twenty years older than he ever lived to be.
S. Lorenzo was a very old church in the time of Giovanni de' Medici,
the first great man of the family, and had already been restored
once, in the eleventh century, but it was his favourite church,
chosen by him for his own resting-place, and he spent great sums
in improving it. All this with the assistance of Brunelleschi, who
is responsible for the interior as we now see it, and would, had he
lived, have completed the façade. After Giovanni came Cosimo, who also
devoted great sums to the glory of this church, not only assisting
Brunelleschi with his work but inducing Donatello to lavish his genius
upon it; and the church was thus established as the family vault of
the Medici race. Giovanni lies here; Cosimo lies here; and Piero;
while Lorenzo the Magnificent and Giuliano and certain descendants
were buried in the Michelangelo sacristy, and all the Grand Dukes in
the ostentatious chapel behind the altar.
Cosimo is buried beneath the floor in front of the high altar,
in obedience to his wish, and by the special permission of the
Roman Church; and in the same vault lies Donatello. Cosimo, who
was buried with all simplicity on August 22nd, 1464, in his last
illness recommended Donatello, who was then seventy-eight, to his son
Piero. The old sculptor survived his illustrious patron and friend
only two and a half years, declining gently into the grave, and his
body was brought here in December, 1466. A monument to his memory
was erected in the church in 1896. Piero (the Gouty), who survived
until 1469, lies close by, his bronze monument, with that of his
brother, being that between the sacristy and the adjoining chapel,
in an imposing porphyry and bronze casket, the work of Verrocchio, one
of the richest and most impressive of all the memorial sculptures of
the Renaissance. The marble pediment is supported by four tortoises,
such as support the monoliths in the Piazza S. Maria Novella. The
iron rope work that divides the sacristy from the chapel is a marvel
of workmanship.
But we go too fast: the church before the sacristy, and the glories of
the church are Donatello's. We have seen his cantoria in the Museum of
the Cathedral. Here is another, not so riotous and jocund in spirit,
but in its own way hardly less satisfying. The Museum cantoria has
the wonderful frieze of dancing figures; this is an exercise in
marble intarsia. It has the same row of pillars with little specks
of mosaic gold; but its beauty is that of delicate proportions and
soft tones. The cantoria is in the left aisle, in its original place;
the two bronze pulpits are in the nave. These have a double interest
as being not only Donatello's work but his latest work. They were
incomplete at his death, and were finished by his pupil Bertoldo
(1410-1491), and since, as we shall see, Bertoldo became the master of
Michelangelo, when he was a lad of fifteen and Bertoldo an old man of
eighty, these pulpits may be said to form a link between the two great
S. Lorenzo sculptors. How fine and free and spirited Bertoldo could
be, alone, we shall see at the Bargello. The S. Lorenzo pulpits are
very difficult to study: nothing wants a stronger light than a bronze
relief, and in Florence students of bronze reliefs are accustomed
to it, since the most famous of all--the Ghiberti doors--are in the
open air. Only in course of time can one discern the scenes here. The
left pulpit is the finer, for it contains the "Crucifixion" and the
"Deposition," which to me form the most striking of the panels.
The other piece of sculpture in the church itself is a ciborium
by Desiderio da Settignano, in the chapel at the end of the
right transept--an exquisite work by this rare and playful and
distinguished hand. It is fitting that Desiderio should be here, for
he was Donatello's favourite pupil. The S. Lorenzo ciborium is wholly
charming, although there is a "Deposition" upon it; the little Boy is
adorable; but one sees it with the greatest difficulty owing to the
crowded state of the altar and the dim light. The altar picture in
the Martelli chapel, where the sympathetic Donatello monument (in the
same medium as his "Annunciation" at S. Croce) is found--on the way to
the Library--is by Lippo Lippi, and is notable for the pretty Virgin
receiving the angel's news. There is nice colour in the predella.
As I have said in the first chapter, we are too prone to ignore the
architect. We look at the jewels and forget the casket. Brunelleschi is
a far greater maker of Florence than either Donatello or Michelangelo;
but one thinks of him rather as an abstraction than a man or forgets
him altogether. Yet the S. Lorenzo sacristy is one of the few perfect
things in the world. What most people, however, remember is its tombs,
its doors, and its reliefs; the proportions escape them. I think its
shallow easy dome beyond description beautiful. Brunelleschi, who had
an investigating genius, himself painted the quaint constellations in
the ceiling over the altar. At the Pazzi chapel we shall find similar
architecture; but there extraneous colour was allowed to come in. Here
such reliefs as were admitted are white too.
The tomb under the great marble and porphyry table in the centre is
that of Giovanni di Bicci, the father, and Piccarda, the mother, of
Cosimo Pater, and is usually attributed to Buggiano, the adopted son
of Brunelleschi, but other authorities give it either to Donatello
alone or to Donatello with Michelozzo: both from the evidence of
the design and because it is unlikely that Cosimo would ask any one
else than one of these two friends of his to carry out a commission
so near his heart. The table is part of the scheme and not a chance
covering. I think the porphyry centre ought to be movable, so that
the beautiful flying figures on the sarcophagus could be seen. But
Donatello's most striking achievement here is the bronze doors, which
are at once so simple and so strong and so surprising by the activity
of the virile and spirited holy men, all converting each other, thereon
depicted. These doors could not well be more different from Ghiberti's,
in the casting of which Donatello assisted; those in such high relief,
these so low; those so fluid and placid, and these so vigorous.
Donatello presides over this room (under Brunelleschi). The vivacious,
speaking terra-cotta bust of the young S. Lorenzo on the altar is
his; the altar railing is probably his; the frieze of terra-cotta
cherubs may be his; the four low reliefs in the spandrels, which it
is so difficult to discern but which photographs prove to be wonderful
scenes in the life of S. John the Evangelist--so like, as one peers up
at them, plastic Piranesis, with their fine masonry--are his. The other
reliefs are Donatello's too; but the lavabo in the inner sacristy is
Verrocchio's, and Verrocchio's tomb of Piero can never be overlooked
even amid such a wealth of the greater master's work.
From this fascinating room--fascinating both in itself and in its
possessions--we pass, after distributing the necessary largesse to
the sacristan, to a turnstile which admits, on payment of a lira,
to the Chapel of the Princes and to Michelangelo's sacristy. Here is
contrast, indeed: the sacristy, austere and classic, and the chapel
a very exhibition building of floridity and coloured ornateness,
dating from the seventeenth century and not finished yet. In paying
the necessary fee to see these buildings one thinks again what the
feelings of Giovanni and Cosimo and Lorenzo the Magnificent, and
even of Cosimo I, all such generous patrons of Florence, would be,
if they could see the present feverish collection of lire in their
beautiful city.
Of the Chapel of the Princes I have little to say. To pass from
Michelangelo's sacristy to this is an error; see it, if see it you
must, first. While the façade of S. Lorenzo is still neglected and the
cornice of Brunelleschi's dome is still unfinished, this lapidary's
show-room is being completed at a cost of millions of lire. Ever since
1888 has the floor been in progress, and there are many years' work
yet. An enthusiastic custodian gave me a list of the stones which were
used in the designs of the coats of arms of Tuscan cities, of which
that of Fiesole is the most attractive:--Sicily jasper, French jasper,
Tuscany jasper, petrified wood, white and yellow, Corsican granite,
Corsican jasper, Oriental alabaster, French marble, lapis lazuli,
verde antico, African marble, Siena marble, Carrara marble, rose agate,
mother of pearl, and coral. The names of the Medici are in porphyry
and ivory. It is all very marvellous and occasionally beautiful; but...
This pretentious building was designed by a natural son of Cosimo
I in 1604, and was begun as the state mausoleum of the Grand Dukes;
and all lie here. All the Grand Duchesses too, save Bianca Capella,
wife of Francis I, who was buried none knows where. It is strange to
realize as one stands here that this pavement covers all those ladies,
buried in their wonderful clothes. We shall see Eleanor of Toledo,
wife of Cosimo I, in Bronzino's famous picture at the Uffizi, in an
amazing brocaded dress: it is that dress in which she reposes beneath
us! They had their jewels too, and each Grand Duke his crown and
sceptre; but these, with one or two exceptions, were stolen during
the French occupation of Tuscany, 1801-1814. Only two of the Grand
Dukes have their statues--Ferdinand I and Cosimo II--and the Medici
no longer exist in the Florentine memory; and yet the quiet brick
floor is having all this money squandered on it to superimpose costly
marbles which cannot matter to anybody.
Michelangelo's chapel, called the New Sacristy, was begun for Leo X
and finished for Giulio de' Medici, illegitimate son of the murdered
Giuliano and afterwards Pope Clement VII. Brunelleschi's design
for the Old Sacristy was followed but made more severe. This, one
would feel to be the very home of dead princes even if there were no
statues. The only colours are the white of the walls and the brown
of the pillars and windows; the dome was to have been painted, but
it fortunately escaped.
The contrast between Michelangelo's dome and Brunelleschi's is
complete--Brunelleschi's so suave and gentle in its rise, with its
grey lines to help the eye, and this soaring so boldly to its lantern,
with its rigid device of dwindling squares. The odd thing is that
with these two domes to teach him better the designer of the Chapel
of the Princes should have indulged in such floridity.
Such is the force of the architecture in the sacristy that one is
profoundly conscious of being in melancholy's most perfect home;
and the building is so much a part of Michelangelo's life and it
contains such marvels from his hand that I choose it as a place
to tell his story. Michelangelo Buonarroti was born on March 6th,
1475, at Caprese, of which town his father was Podestà. At that time
Brunelleschi had been dead twenty-nine years, Fra Angelico twenty
years, Donatello nine years, Leonardo da Vinci was twenty-three years
old, and Raphael was not yet born. Lorenzo the Magnificent had been
on what was virtually the throne of Florence since 1469 and was a
young man of twenty-six. For foster-mother the child had the wife
of a stone-mason at Settignano, whither the family soon moved, and
Michelangelo used to say that it was with her milk that he imbibed
the stone-cutting art. It was from the air too, for Settignano's
principal industry was sculpture. The village being only three miles
from Florence, from it the boy could see the city very much as we see
it now--its Duomo, its campanile, with the same attendant spires. He
was sent to Florence to school and intended for either the wool or silk
trade, as so many Florentines were; but displaying artistic ability,
he induced his father to apprentice him, at the age of thirteen, to
a famous goldsmith and painter of Florence who had a busy atelier--no
other than Domenico Ghirlandaio, who was then a man of thirty-nine.
Michelangelo remained with him for three years, and although his
power and imagination were already greater than his master's, he
learned much, and would never have made his Sixtine Chapel frescoes
with the ease he did but for this early grounding. For Ghirlandaio,
although not of the first rank of painters in genius, was pre-eminently
there in thoroughness, while he was good for the boy too in spirit,
having a large way with him. The first work of Ghirlandaio which
the boy saw in the making was the beautiful "Adoration of the Magi,"
in the Church of the Spedale degli Innocenti, completed in 1488, and
the S. Maria Novella frescoes, and it is reasonable to suppose that
he helped with the frescoes in colour grinding, even if he did not,
as some have said, paint with his own hand the beggar sitting on the
steps in the scene representing the "Presentation of the Virgin". That
he was already clever with his pencil, we know, for he had made some
caricatures and corrected a drawing or two.
The three years with Ghirlandaio were reduced eventually to one, the
boy having the good fortune to be chosen as one of enough promise to be
worth instruction, both by precept and example, in the famous Medici
garden. Here he was more at home than in a painting room, for plastic
art was his passion, and not only had Lorenzo the Magnificent gathered
together there many of those masterpieces of ancient sculpture which we
shall see at the Uffizi, but Bertoldo, the aged head of this informal
school, was the possessor of a private collection of Donatellos and
other Renaissance work of extraordinary beauty and worth. Donatello's
influence on the boy held long enough for him to make the low relief
of the Madonna, much in his style, which is now preserved in the
Casa Buonarroti, while the plaque of the battle of the Centaurs and
Lapithae which is also there shows Bertoldo's influence.
The boy's first encounter with Lorenzo occurred while he was modelling
the head of an aged faun. His magnificent patron stopped to watch him,
pointing out that so old a creature would probably not have such a
fine set of teeth, and Michelangelo, taking the hint, in a moment had
not only knocked out a tooth or two but--and here his observation
told--hollowed the gums and cheeks a little in sympathy. Lorenzo
was so pleased with his quickness and skill that he received him
into his house as the companion of his three sons: of Piero, who
was so soon and so disastrously to succeed his father, but was now a
high-spirited youth; of Giovanni, who, as Pope Leo X many years after,
was to give Michelangelo the commission for this very sacristy; and
of Giuliano, who lies beneath one of the tombs. As their companion
he enjoyed the advantage of sharing their lessons under Poliziano,
the poet, and of hearing the conversation of Pico della Mirandola,
who was usually with Lorenzo; and to these early fastidious and
intellectual surroundings the artist owed much.
That he read much, we know, the Bible and Dante being constant
companions; and we know also that in addition to modelling and copying
under Bertoldo, he was assiduous in studying Masaccio's frescoes at
the church of the Carmine across the river, which had become a school
of painting. It was there that his fellow-pupil, Pietro Torrigiano,
who was always his enemy and a bully, broke his nose with one blow
and flew to Rome from the rage of Lorenzo.
It was when Michelangelo was seventeen that Lorenzo died, at the early
age of forty-two, and although the garden still existed and the Medici
palace was still open to the youth, the spirit had passed. Piero, who
succeeded his father, had none of his ability or sagacity, and in two
years was a refugee from the city, while the treasures of the garden
were disposed by auction, and Michelangelo, too conspicuous as a Medici
protégé to be safe, hurried away to Bologna. He was now nineteen.
Of his travels I say nothing here, for we must keep to Florence,
whither he thought it safe to return in 1495. The city was now governed
by the Great Council and the Medici banished. Michelangelo remained
only a brief time and then went to Rome, where he made his first Pietà,
at which he was working during the trial and execution of Savonarola,
whom he admired and reverenced, and where he remained until 1501,
when, aged twenty-six, he returned to Florence to do some of his most
famous work. The Medici were still in exile.
It was in August, 1501, that the authorities of the cathedral asked
Michelangelo to do what he could with a great block of marble on
their hands, from which he carved that statue of David of which I
tell the story in chapter XVI. This established his pre-eminence as
a sculptor. Other commissions for statues poured in, and in 1504 he
was invited to design a cartoon for the Palazzo Vecchio, to accompany
one by Leonardo, and a studio was given him in the Via Guelfa for
the purpose. This cartoon, when finished, so far established him
also as the greatest of painters that the Masaccios in the Carmine
were deserted by young artists in order that this might be studied
instead. The cartoon, as I relate in the chapter on the Palazzo
Vecchio, no longer exists.
The next year, 1505, Michelangelo, nearing his thirtieth birthday,
returned to Rome and entered upon the second and tragic period of his
life, for he arrived there only to receive the order for the Julius
tomb which poisoned his remaining years, and of which more is said
in the chapter on the Accademia, where we see so many vestiges of it
both in marble and plaster. But I might remark here that this vain
and capricious pontiff, whose pride and indecision robbed the world
of no one can ever say what glorious work from Michelangelo's hand,
is the benevolent-looking old man whose portrait by Raphael is in
the Pitti and Uffizi in colour, in the Corsini Palace in charcoal,
and again in our own National Gallery in colour.
Of Michelangelo at Rome and Carrara, whither he went to superintend
in person the quarrying of the marble that was to be transferred to
life and where he had endless vexations and mortifications, I say
nothing. Enough that the election of his boy friend Giovanni de'
Medici as Pope Leo X in 1513 brought him again to Florence, the Pope
having a strong wish that Michelangelo should complete the façade of
the Medici family church, S. Lorenzo, where we now are. As we know,
the scheme was not carried out, but in 1520 the Pope substituted
another and more attractive one: namely, a chapel to contain the
tombs not only of his father the Magnificent, and his uncle, who had
been murdered in the Duomo many years before, but also his nephew
Piero de' Medici, Duke of Urbino, who had just died, in 1519, and
his younger brother (and Michelangelo's early playmate) Giuliano de'
Medici, Duke of Nemours, who had died in 1516. These were not Medici
of the highest class, but family pride was strong. It is, however,
odd that no memorial of Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici, who had been
drowned at the age of twenty-two in 1503, was required; perhaps it
may have been that since it was Piero's folly that had brought the
Medici into such disgrace in 1494, the less thought of him the better.
Michelangelo took fire at once, and again hastened to Carrara to
arrange for marble to be sent to his studio in the Via Mozzi, now the
Via S. Zenobi; while the building stone was brought from Fiesole. Leo
X lived only to know that the great man had begun, the new patron
being Giulio de' Medici, natural son of the murdered Giuliano,
now a cardinal, and soon, in 1523, to become Pope Clement VII. This
Pope showed deep interest in the project, but wished not only to add
tombs of himself and Pope Leo X, but also to build a library for the
Laurentian collection, which Michelangelo must design. A little later
he had decided that he would prefer to lie in the choir of the church,
and Leo X with him, and instead therefore of tombs Michelangelo might
merely make a colossal statue of him to stand in the piazza before the
church. The sculptor's temper had not been improved by his many years'
experience of papal caprice, and he replied to this suggestion with
a letter unique even in the annals of infuriated artists. Let the
statue be made, of course, he said, but let it be useful as well as
ornamental: the lower portion to be also a barber's shop, and the
head, since it would be empty, a greengrocer's. The Pope allowed
himself to be rebuked, and abandoned the statue, writing a mild and
even pathetic reply.
Until 1527 Michelangelo worked away at the building and the tombs,
always secretly, behind impenetrable barriers; and then came the
troubles which led to the siege of Florence, following upon the
banishment of Alessandro, Duke of Urbino, natural son of the very
Lorenzo whom the sculptor was to dignify for all time. By the Emperor
Charles V and Pope Clement VII the city was attacked, and Michelangelo
was called away from Clement's sacristy to fortify Florence against
Clement's soldiers. Part of his ramparts at S. Miniato still remain,
and he strengthened all the gates; but, feeling himself slighted and
hating the whole affair, he suddenly disappeared. One story is that he
hid in the church tower of S. Niccolò, below what is now the Piazzale
dedicated to his memory. Wherever he was, he was proclaimed an outlaw,
and then, on Florence finding that she could not do without him,
was pardoned, and so returned, the city meanwhile having surrendered
and the Medici again being restored to power.
The Pope showed either fine magnanimity or compounded with facts
in the interest of the sacristy; for he encouraged Michelangelo to
proceed, and the pacific work was taken up once more after the martial
interregnum, and in a desultory way he was busy at it, always secretly
and moodily, until 1533, when he tired completely and never touched
it again. A year later Clement VII died, having seen only drawings
of the tombs, if those.
But though left unfinished, the sacristy is wholly satisfying--more
indeed than satisfying, conquering. Whatever help Michelangelo may
have had from his assistants, it is known that the symbolical figures
on the tombs and the two seated Medici are from his hand. Of the two
finished or practically finished tombs--to my mind as finished as they
should be--that of Lorenzo is the finer. The presentment of Lorenzo in
armour brooding and planning is more splendid than that of Giuliano;
while the old man, whose head anticipates everything that is considered
most original in Rodin's work, is among the best of Michelangelo's
statuary. Much speculation has been indulged in as to the meaning
of the symbolism of these tombs, and having no theory of my own to
offer, I am glad to borrow Mr. Gerald S. Davies' summary from his
monograph on Michelangelo. The figure of Giuliano typifies energy
and leadership in repose; while the man on his tomb typifies Day and
the woman Night, or the man Action and the woman the sleep and rest
that produce Action. The figure of Lorenzo typifies Contemplation,
the woman Dawn, and the man Twilight, the states which lie between
light and darkness, action and rest. What Michelangelo--who owed
nothing to any Medici save only Lorenzo the Magnificent and had seen
the best years of his life frittered away in the service of them and
other proud princes--may also have intended we shall never know; but
he was a saturnine man with a long memory, and he might easily have
made the tombs a vehicle for criticism. One would not have another
touch of the chisel on either of the symbolical male figures.
Although a tomb to Lorenzo the Magnificent by Michelangelo would
surely have been a wonderful thing, there is something startling and
arresting in the circumstance that he has none at all from any hand,
but lies here unrecorded. His grandfather, in the church itself,
rests beneath a plain slab, which aimed so consciously at modesty
as thereby to achieve special distinction: Lorenzo, leaving no such
directions, has nothing, while in the same room are monuments to
two common-place descendants to thrill the soul. The disparity is in
itself monumental. That Michelangelo's Madonna and Child are on the
slab which covers the dust of Lorenzo and his brother is a chance. The
saints on either side are S. Cosimo and S. Damian, the patron saints
of old Cosimo de' Medici, and are by Michelangelo's assistants. The
Madonna was intended for the altar of the sacristy. Into this work the
sculptor put much of his melancholy and, one feels, disappointment. The
face of the Madonna is already sad and hopeless; but the Child is
perhaps the most splendid and determined of any in all Renaissance
sculpture. He may, if we like, symbolize the new generation that is
always deriving sustenance from the old, without care or thought of
what the old has to suffer; he crushes his head against his mother's
breast in a very passion of vigorous dependence. [4]
Whatever was originally intended, it is certain that in Michelangelo's
sacristy disillusionment reigns as well as death. But how beautiful
it is!
In a little room leading from the sacristy I was shown by a smiling
custodian Lorenzo the Magnificent's coffin, crumbling away, and
photographs of the skulls of the two brothers: Giuliano's with one
of Francesco de' Pazzi's dagger wounds in it, and Lorenzo's, ghastly
in its decay. I gave the man half a lira.
While he was working on the tombs Michelangelo had undertaken now and
then a small commission, and to this period belongs the David which we
shall see in the little room on the ground floor of the Bargello. In
1534, when he finally abandoned the sacristy, and, leaving Florence for
ever, settled in Rome, the Laurentian library was only begun, and he
had little interest in it. He never saw it again. At Rome his time was
fully occupied in painting the "Last Judgment" in the Sixtine Chapel,
and in various architectural works. But Florence at any rate has two
marble masterpieces that belong to the later period--the Brutus in
the Bargello and the Pietà in the Duomo, which we have seen--that
poignantly impressive rendering of the entombment upon which the old
man was at work when he died, and which he meant for his own grave.
His death came in 1564, on February 23rd, when he was nearly
eighty-nine, and his body was brought to Florence and buried amid
universal grief in S. Croce, where it has a florid monument.
Since we are considering the life of Michelangelo, I might perhaps
say here a few words about his house, which is only a few minutes'
distant--at No. 64 Via Ghibellina--where certain early works and
personal relics are preserved. Michelangelo gave the house to his
nephew Leonardo; it was decorated early in the seventeenth century with
scenes in the life of the master, and finally bequeathed to the city
as a heritage in 1858. It is perhaps the best example of the rapacity
of the Florentines; for notwithstanding that it was left freely in
this way a lira is charged for admission. The house contains more
collateral curiosities, as they might be called, than those in the
direct line; but there are architectural drawings from the wonderful
hand, colour drawings of a Madonna, a few studies, and two early pieces
of sculpture--the battle of the Lapithae and Centaurs, a relief marked
by tremendous vigour and full of movement, and a Madonna and Child,
also in relief, with many marks of greatness upon it. In a recess
in Room IV are some personal relics of the artist, which his great
nephew, the poet, who was named after him, began to collect early in
the seventeenth century. As a whole the house is disappointing.
Upstairs have been arranged a quantity of prints and drawings
illustrating the history of Florence.
The S. Lorenzo cloisters may be entered either from a side door in
the church close to the Old Sacristy or from the piazza. Although an
official in uniform keeps the piazza door, they are free. Brunelleschi
is again the architect, and from the loggia at the entrance to the
library you see most acceptably the whole of his cathedral dome and
half of Giotto's tower. It is impossible for Florentine cloisters--or
indeed any cloisters--not to have a certain beauty, and these are
unusually charming and light, seen both from the loggia and the ground.
Michelangelo's Biblioteca Laurenziana, which leads from them,
is one of the most perfect of sombre buildings, the very home of
well-ordered scholarship. The staircase is impressive, although perhaps
a little too severe; the long room could not be more satisfying to
the eye. Michelangelo died before it was finished, but it is his in
design, even to the ceiling and cases for MSS. in which the library
is so rich, and the rich red wood ceiling. Vasari, Michelangelo's
pupil and friend and the biographer to whom we are so much indebted,
carried on the work. His scheme of windows has been upset on the
side opposite the cloisters by the recent addition of a rotunda
leading from the main room. If ever rectangular windows were more
exquisitely and nobly proportioned I should like to see them. The
library is free for students, and the attendants are very good in
calling stray visitors' attention to illuminated missals, old MSS.,
early books and so forth. One of Galileo's fingers, stolen from his
body, used to be kept here, in a glass case, and may be here still;
but I did not see it. I saw, however, the portraits, in an old volume,
of Petrarch and his Laura.
This wonderful collection was begun by Cosimo de' Medici; others
added to it until it became one of the most valuable in the world,
not, however, without various vicissitudes incident to any Florentine
institution: while one of its most cherished treasures, the Virgil
of the fourth or fifth century, was even carried to Paris by Napoleon
and not returned until the great year of restoration, 1816. Among the
holograph MSS. is Cellini's "Autobiography". The library, in time,
after being confiscated by the Republic and sold to the monks of
S. Marco, again passed into the possession of a Medici, Leo X, son
of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and then of Clement VII, and he it was
who commissioned Michelangelo to house it with dignity.
An old daily custom in the cloisters of S. Lorenzo was the feeding of
cats; but it has long since been dropped. If you look at Mr. Hewlett's
"Earthwork out of Tuscany" you will find an entertaining description
of what it used to be like.
CHAPTER VII
Or San Michele and the Palazzo Vecchio
The little Bigallo--The Misericordia--Or San Michele--Andrea
Orcagna--The Tabernacle--Old Glass--A company of stone
saints--Donatello's S. George--Dante conferences--The Guilds of
Florence--The Palazzo Vecchio--Two Towers--Bandinelli's group--The
Marzocco--The Piazza della Signoria--Orcagna's Loggia--Cellini
and Cosimo--The Perseus--Verrocchio's dolphin--The Great Council
Hall--Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo's cartoons--Bandinelli's
malice--The Palazzo Vecchio as a home--Two cells and the bell of
independence.
Let us now proceed along the Via Calzaioli (which means street of
the stocking-makers), running away from the Piazza del Duomo to
the Piazza della Signoria. The fascinatingly pretty building at
the corner, opposite Pisano's Baptistery doors, is the Bigallo,
in the loggia of which foundling children used to be displayed in
the hope that passers-by might pity them sufficiently to make them
presents or even adopt them; but this custom continues no longer. The
Bigallo was designed, it is thought, by Orcagna, and it is worth the
minutest study.
The Company of the Bigallo, which is no longer an active force, was
one of the benevolent societies of old Florence. But the greatest
of these societies, still busy and merciful, is the Misericordia,
whose head-quarters are just across the Via Calzaioli, in the piazza,
facing the campanile, a company of Florentines pledged at a moment's
notice, no matter on what they may be engaged, to assist in any
charitable work of necessity. For the most part they carry ambulances
to the scenes of accident and perform the last offices for the dead
in the poorer districts. When on duty they wear black robes and
hoods. Their headquarters comprise a chapel, with an altar by Andrea
della Robbia, and a statue of the patron saint of the Misericordia,
S. Sebastian. But their real patron saint is their founder, a common
porter named Pietro Borsi. In the thirteenth century it was the custom
for the porters and loafers connected with the old market to meet
in a shelter here and pass the time away as best they could. Borsi,
joining them, was distressed to find how unprofitable were the hours,
and he suggested the formation of a society to be of some real use,
the money to support it to be obtained by fines in payment for oaths
and blasphemies. A litter or two were soon bought and the machinery
started. The name was the Company of the Brothers of Mercy. That was
in 1240 to 1250. To-day no Florentine is too grand to take his part,
and at the head of the porter's band of brethren is the King.
Passing along the Via Calzaioli we come on the right to a noble square
building with statues in its niches--Or San Michele, which stands on
the site of the chapel of San Michele in Orto. San Michele in Orto,
or more probably in Horreo (meaning either in the garden or in the
granary), was once part of a loggia used as a corn market, in which
was preserved a picture by Ugolino da Siena representing the Virgin,
and this picture had the power of working miracles. Early in the
fourteenth century the loggia was burned down but the picture was
saved (or quickly replaced), and a new building on a much larger and
more splendid scale was made for it, none other than Or San Michele,
the chief architect being Taddeo Gaddi, Giotto's pupil and later
the constructor of the Ponte Vecchio. Where the picture then was, I
cannot say--whether inside the building or out--but the principal use
of the building was to serve as a granary. After 1348, when Florence
was visited by that ravaging plague which Boccaccio describes in
such gruesome detail at the beginning of the "Decameron" and which
sent his gay company of ladies and gentlemen to the Villa Palmieri
to take refuge in story telling, and when this sacred picture was
more than commonly busy and efficacious, it was decided to apply
the enormous sums of money given to the shrine from gratitude in
beautifying the church still more, and chiefly in providing a casket
worthy of holding such a pictorial treasure. Hence came about the
noble edifice of to-day.
A man of universal genius was called in to execute the tabernacle:
Andrea Orcagna, a pupil probably of Andrea Pisano, and also much
influenced by Giotto, whom though he had not known he idolized,
and one who, like Michelangelo later, was not only a painter and
sculptor but an architect and a poet. Orcagna, or, to give him his
right name, Andrea di Cione, for Orcagna was an abbreviation of
Arcagnolo, flourished in the middle of the fourteenth century. Among
his best-known works in painting are the Dantesque frescoes in the
Strozzi chapel at S. Maria Novella, and that terrible allegory of
Death and Judgment in the Campo Santo at Pisa, in which the gay riding
party come upon the three open graves. Orcagna put all his strength
into the tabernacle of Or San Michele, which is a most sumptuous,
beautiful and thoughtful shrine, yet owing to the darkness of the
church is almost invisible. Guides, it is true, will emerge from the
gloom and hold lighted tapers to it, but a right conception of it is
impossible. The famous miraculous picture over the altar is notable
rather for its properties than for its intrinsic beauty; it is the
panels of the altar, which contain Orcagna's most exquisite work,
representing scenes in the life of the Virgin, with emblematical
figures interspersed, that one wishes to see. Only the back, however,
can be seen really well, and this only when a door opposite to it--in
the Via Calzaioli--is opened. It should always be open, with a grille
across it, that passers-by might have constant sight of this almost
unknown Florentine treasure. It is in the relief of the death of the
Virgin on the back that--on the extreme right--Orcagna introduced
his own portrait. The marble employed is of a delicate softness, and
Orcagna had enough of Giotto's tradition to make the Virgin a reality
and to interest Her, for example, as a mother in the washing of Her
Baby, as few painters have done, and in particular, as, according
to Ruskin, poor Ghirlandaio could not do in his fresco of the birth
of the Virgin Herself. It was Orcagna's habit to sign his sculpture
"Andrea di Cione, painter," and his paintings "Andrea di Cione,
sculptor," and thus point his versatility. By this tabernacle, by
his Pisan fresco, and by the designs of the Loggia de' Lanzi and the
Bigallo (which are usually given to him), he takes his place among
the most interesting and various of the forerunners of the Renaissance.
Within Or San Michele you learn the secret of the stoned-up windows
which one sees with regret from without. Each, or nearly each, has
an altar against it. What the old glass was like one can divine from
the lovely and sombre top lights in exquisite patterns that are left;
that on the centre of the right wall of the church, as one enters,
having jewels of green glass as lovely as any I ever saw. But blues,
purples, and reds predominate.
The tabernacle apart, the main appeal of Or San Michele is the statuary
and stone-work of the exterior; for here we find the early masters
at their best. The building being the head-quarters of the twelve
Florentine guilds, the statues and decorations were commissioned by
them. It is as though our City companies should unite in beautifying
the Guildhall. Donatello is the greatest artist here, and it was
for the Armourers that he made his S. George, which stands now, as
he carved it in marble, in the Bargello, but has a bronze substitute
in its original niche, below which is a relief of the slaying of the
dragon from Donatello's chisel. Of this glorious S. George more will
be said later. But I may remark now that in its place here it instantly
proves the modernity and realistic vigour of its sculptor. Fine though
they be, all the other statues of this building are conventional;
they carry on a tradition of religious sculpture such as Niccolò
Pisano respected, many years earlier, when he worked at the Pisan
pulpit. But Donatello's S. George is new and is as beautiful as a
Greek god, with something of real human life added.
Donatello (with Michelozzo) also made the exquisite border of the
niche in the Via Calzaioli façade, in which Christ and S. Thomas now
stand. He was also to have made the figures (for the Merchants' Guild)
but was busy elsewhere, and they fell to Verrocchio, of whom also we
shall have much to see and say at the Bargello, and to my mind they
are the most beautiful of all. The John the Baptist (made for the
Cloth-dealers), also on this façade, is by Ghiberti of the Baptistery
gates. On the façade of the Via de' Lamberti is Donatello's superb
S. Mark (for the Joiners), which led to Michelangelo's criticism that
he had never seen a man who looked more virtuous, and if S. Mark
were really like that he would believe all his words. "Why don't
you speak to me?" he also said to this statue, as Donatello had
said to the Zuccone. Higher on this façade is Luca della Robbia's
famous arms of the Silk-weavers, one of the perfect things. Luca
also made the arms of the Guild of Merchants, with its Florentine
fleur-de-lis in the midst. For the rest, Ghiberti's S. Stephen,
and Ghiberti and Michelozzo's S. Matthew, on the entrance wall,
are the most remarkable. The blacksmith relief is very lively and
the blacksmith's saint a noble figure.
The little square reliefs let into the wall at intervals
are often charming, and the stone-work of the windows is very
lovely. In fact, the four walls of this fortress church are almost
inexhaustible. Within, its vaulted roof is so noble, its proportions
so satisfying. One should often sit quietly here, in the gloom,
and do nothing.
The little building just across the way was the Guild House of the
Arte della Lana, or Wool-combers, and is now the head-quarters of
the Italian Dante Society, who hold a conference every Thursday
in the large room over Or San Michele, gained by the flying
buttress-bridge. The dark picture on the outer wall is the very
Madonna to which, when its position was at the Mercato Vecchio,
condemned criminals used to pray on their way to execution.
Before we leave Or San Michele and the Arte della Lana, a word on
the guilds of Florence is necessary, for at a period in Florentine
history between, say, the middle of the thirteenth century and the
beginning of the fifteenth, they were the very powerful controllers
of the domestic affairs of the city; and it is possible that it would
have been better for the Florentines had they continued to be so. For
Florence was essentially mercantile and the guilds were composed of
business men; and it is natural that business men should know better
than noblemen what a business city needed. They were divided into
major guilds, chief of which were the woollen merchants--the Arte
della Lana--and the silk merchants--the Calimala--and it was their
pride to put their riches at the city's service. Thus, the Arte della
Lana had charge of the building of the cathedral. Each of the major
guilds provided a Prior, and the Priors elected the Signoria, who
governed the city. It is one of the principal charges that is brought
against Cosimo de' Medici that he broke the power of the guilds.
Returning to the Via Calzaioli, and turning to the right, we come
very quickly to the Piazza della Signoria, and see before us,
diagonally across it, the Loggia de' Lanzi and the Palazzo Vecchio,
with the gleaming, gigantic figure of Michelangelo's David against
the dark gateway. This, more than the Piazza del Duomo, is the centre
of Florence.
The Palazzo Vecchio was for centuries called the Signoria, being the
home of the Gonfalonier of Florence and the Signoria who assisted
his councils. It was begun by Arnolfo, the architect of the Duomo and
S. Croce, at the end of the thirteenth century, that being, as we have
seen, a period of great prosperity and ambition in Florence, but many
alterations and additions were made--by Michelozzo, Cronaca, Vasari,
and others--to bring it to what it now is. After being the scene
of many riots, executions, and much political strife and dubiety,
it became a ducal palace in 1532, and is now a civic building and
show-place. In the old days the Palazzo had a ringhiera, or platform,
in front of it, from which proclamations were made. To know what
this was like one has but to go to S. Trinità on a very fine morning
and look at Ghirlandaio's fresco of the granting of the charter to
S. Francis. The scene, painted in 1485, includes not only the Signoria
but the Loggia de' Lanzi (then the Loggia dell' Orcagna)--both before
any statues were set up.
Every façade of the Palazzo Vecchio is splendid. I cannot say which
I admire more--that which one sees from the Loggia de' Lanzi, with
its beautiful coping of corbels, at once so heavy and so light, with
coloured escutcheons between them, or that in the Via de' Gondi, with
its fine jumble of old brickwork among the stones. The Palazzo Vecchio
is one of the most resolute and independent buildings in the world;
and it had need to be strong, for the waves of Florentine revolt were
always breaking against it. The tower rising from this square fortress
has at once grace and strength and presents a complete contrast to
Giotto's campanile; for Giotto's campanile is so light and delicate and
reasonable and this tower of the Signoria so stern and noble. There
is a difference as between a beautiful woman and a powerful man. In
the functions of the two towers--the dominating towers of Florence--is
a wide difference also, for the campanile calls to prayer, while for
years the sombre notes of the great Signoria bell--the Vacca--rang out
only to bid the citizens to conclave or battle or to sound an alarm.
It was this Vacca wich (with others) the brave Piero Capponi
threatened to ring when Charles VIII wished, in 1494, to force a
disgraceful treaty on the city. The scene was the Medici Palace in
the Via Larga. The paper was ready for signature and Capponi would
not sign. "Then I must bid my trumpets blow," said Charles. "If you
sound your trumpets," Capponi replied, "we will ring our bells;"
and the King gave way, for he knew that his men had no chance in this
city if it rose suddenly against them.
But the glory of the Palazzo Vecchio tower--afer its proportions--is
that brilliant inspiration of the architect which led him, so to
speak, to begin again by setting the four columns on the top of the
solid portion. These pillars are indescribably right: so solid
and yet so light, so powerful and yet so comely. Their duty was
to support the bells, and particularly the Vacca, when he rocked
his gigantic weight of green bronze to and fro to warn the city.
Seen from a distance the columns are always beautiful; seen close
by they are each a tower of comfortable strength. And how the wind
blows through them from the Apennines!
The David on the left of the Palazzo Vecchio main door is only a copy.
The original stood there until 1873, when, after three hundred and
sixty-nine years, it was moved to a covered spot in the Accademia,
as we shall there see and learn its history. If we want to know what
the Palazzo Vecchio looked like at the time David was placed there,
a picture by Piero di Cosimo in our National Gallery tells us, for
he makes it the background of his portrait of Ferrucci, No. 895.
The group on the right represents Hercules and Cacus, [5] and
is by Baccio Bandinelli (1485-1560), a coarse and offensive man,
jealous of most people and particularly of Michelangelo, to whom,
but for his displeasing Pope Clement VII, the block of marble from
which the Hercules was carved would have been given. Bandinelli in
his delight at obtaining it vowed to surpass that master's David,
and those who want to know what Florence thought of his effort should
consult the amusing and malicious pages of Cellini's Autobiography.
On its way to Bandinelli's studio the block fell into the Arrio, and
it was a joke of the time that it had drowned itself to avoid its fate
at the sculptor's hands. Even after he had half done it, there was a
moment when Michelangelo had an opportunity of taking over the stone
and turning it into a Samson, but the siege of Florence intervened,
and eventually Bandinelli had his way and the hideous thing now on
view was evolved.
The lion at the left end of the façade is also a copy, the original
by Donatello being in the Bargello, close by; but the pedestal is
Donatello's original. This lion is the Marzocco, the legendary guardian
of the Florentine republic, and it stood here for four centuries and
more, superseding one which was kissed as a sign of submission by
thousands of Pisan prisoners in 1364. The Florentine fleur-de-lis on
the pediment is very beautiful. The same lion may be seen in iron on
his staff at the top of the Palazzo Vecchio tower, and again on the
Bargello, bravely flourishing his lily against the sky.
The great fountain with its bronze figures at this corner is by
Bartolommeo Ammanati, a pupil of Bandinelli, and the statue of Cosimo
I is by Gian Bologna, who was the best of the post-Michelangelo
sculptors and did much good work in Florence, as we shall see at the
Bargello and in the Boboli Gardens. He studied under Michelangelo
in Rome. Though born a Fleming and called a Florentine, his great
fountain at Bologna, which is really a fine thing, has identified his
fame with that city. Had not Ammanati's design better pleased Cosimo
I, the Bologna fountain would be here, for it was designed for this
piazza. Gian's best-known work is the Flying Mercury in the Bargello,
which we have seen, on mantelpieces and in shop windows, everywhere;
but what is considered his masterpiece is over there, in the Loggia de'
Lanzi, the very beautiful building on the right of the Palazzo, the
"Rape of the Sabines," a group which, to me, gives no pleasure. The
bronze reliefs under the Cosimo statue--this Cosimo being, of course,
far other than Cosimo de' Medici, Father of his Country: Cosimo
I of Tuscany, who insisted upon a crown and reigned from 1537 to
1575--represents his assumption of rule on the death of Alessandro in
1537; his triumphant entry into Siena when he conquered it and absorbed
it; and his reception of the rank of Grand Duke. Of Cosimo (whom we
met in Chapter V) more will be said when we enter the Palazzo Vecchio.
Between this statue and the Loggia de' Lanzi is a bronze tablet let
into the paving which tells us that it was on this very spot, in 1498,
that Savonarola and two of his companions were put to death. The
ancient palace on the Duomo side of the piazza is attributed in
design to Raphael, who, like most of the great artists of his time,
was also an architect and was the designer of the Palazzo Pandolfini
in the Via San Gallo, No. 74. The Palazzo we are now admiring for
its blend of massiveness and beauty is the Uguccione, and anybody
who wishes may probably have a whole floor of it to-day for a few
shillings a week. The building which completes the piazza on the
right of us, with coats of arms on its façade, is now given to the
Board of Agriculture and has been recently restored. It was once
a Court of Justice. The great building at the opposite side of the
piazza, where the trams start, is a good example of modern Florentine
architecture based on the old: the Palazzo Landi, built in 1871 and
now chiefly an insurance office. In London we have a more attractive
though smaller derivative of the great days of Florentine building,
in Standen's wool shop in Jermyn Street.
The Piazza della Signoria has such riches that one is in danger of
neglecting some. The Palazzo Vecchio, for example, so overpowers
the Loggia de' Lanzi in size as to draw the eye from that perfect
structure. One should not allow this to happen; one should let
the Palazzo Vecchio's solid nobility wait awhile and concentrate
on the beauty of Orcagna's three arches. Coming so freshly from his
tabernacle in Or San Michele we are again reminded of the versatility
of the early artists.
This structure, originally called the Loggia de' Priori or Loggia
d'Orcagna, was built in the fourteenth century as an open place for
the delivery of proclamations and for other ceremonies, and also as
a shelter from the rain, the last being a purpose it still serves. It
was here that Savonarola's ordeal by fire would have had place had it
not been frustrated. Vasari also gives Orcagna the four symbolical
figures in the recesses in the spandrels of the arches. The Loggia,
which took its new name from the Swiss lancers, or lanzi, that Cosimo
I kept there--he being a fearful ruler and never comfortable without a
bodyguard--is now a recognized place of siesta; and hither many people
carry their poste-restante correspondence from the neighbouring post
office in the Uffizi to read in comfort. A barometer and thermometer
are almost the only novelties that a visitor from the sixteenth
century would notice.
The statuary is both old and new; for here are genuine antiques once
in Ferdinand I's Villa Medici at Rome, and such modern masterpieces
as Donatello's Judith and Holofernes, Cellini's Perseus, and Gian
Bologna's two muscular and restless groups. The best of the antiques
is the Woman Mourning, the fourth from the end on the left, which is
a superb creation.
Donatello's Judith, which gives me less pleasure than any of his work,
both in the statue and in the relief, was commissioned for Cosimo
de' Medici, who placed it in the courtyard or garden of the Medici
palace--Judith, like David, by her brave action against a tyrant,
being a champion of the Florentine republic. In 1495, after Cosimo's
worthless grandson Piero de' Medici had been expelled from Florence
and the Medici palace sacked, the statue was moved to the front of the
Palazzo Vecchio, where the David now is, and an inscription placed
on it describing it as a warning to all enemies of liberty. This
position being needed for Michelangelo's David, in 1506, Judith was
moved to the Loggia to the place where the Sabine group now is. In
1560 it took up its present position.
Cellini's Perseus will not quite do, I think, after Donatello and
Verrocchio; but few bronzes are more famous, and certainly of none
has so vivacious and exciting a story been written as Cellini's own,
setting forth his disappointments, mortifications, and pride in
connexion with this statue. Cellini, whatever one may think of his
veracity, is a diverting and valuable writer, and the picture of
Cosimo I which he draws for us is probably very near the truth. We
see him haughty, familiar, capricious, vain, impulsive, clear-sighted,
and easily flattered; intensely pleased to be in a position to command
the services of artists and very unwilling to pay. Cellini was a blend
of lackey, child, and genius. He left Francis I in order to serve
Cosimo and never ceased to regret the change. The Perseus was his
greatest accomplishment for Cosimo, and the narrative of its casting
is terrific and not a little like Dumas. When it was uncovered in its
present position all Florence flocked to the Loggia to praise it; the
poets placed commendatory sonnets on the pillars, and the sculptor
peacocked up and down in an ecstasy of triumph. Then, however, his
troubles once more began, for Cosimo had the craft to force Cellini
to name the price, and we see Cellini in an agony between desire for
enough and fear lest if he named enough he would offend his patron.
The whole book is a comedy of vanity and jealousy and Florentine
vigour, with Courts as a background. It is good to read it; it is
good, having read it, to study once again the unfevered resolute
features of Donatello's S. George. Cellini himself we may see among
the statues under the Uffizi and again in the place of honour (as a
goldsmith) in the centre of the Ponte Vecchio. Looking at the Perseus
and remembering Donatello, one realizes that what Cellini wanted was
character. He had temperament enough but no character. Perseus is
superb, commanding, distinguished, and one doesn't care a fig for it.
On entering the Palazzo Vecchio we come instantly to one of the most
charming things in Florence--Verrocchio's fountain--which stands
in the midst of the courtyard. This adorable work--a little bronze
Cupid struggling with a spouting dolphin--was made for Lorenzo de'
Medici's country villa at Careggi and was brought here when the
palazzo was refurnished for Francis I, Cosimo I's son and successor,
and his bride, Joanna of Austria, in 1565. Nothing could better
illustrate the accomplishment and imaginative adaptability of the great
craftsmen of the day than the two works of Verrocchio that we have
now seen: the Christ and S. Thomas at Or San Michele, in Donatello
and Michelozzo's niche, and this exquisite fountain splashing water
so musically. Notice the rich decorations of the pillars of this
courtyard and the rich colour and power of the pillars themselves. The
half-obliterated frescoes of Austrian towns on the walls were made to
prevent Joanna from being homesick, but were more likely, one would
guess, to stimulate that malady. In the left corner is the entrance
to the old armoury, now empty, with openings in the walls through
which pieces might be discharged at various angles on any advancing
host. The groined ceiling could support a pyramid.
The Palazzo Vecchio's ground floor is a series of thoroughfares in
which people are passing continually amid huge pillars and along
dark passages; but our way is up the stone steps immediately to the
left on leaving the courtyard where Verrocchio's child eternally
smiles, for the steps take us to that vast hall designed by Cronaca
for Savonarola's Great Council, which was called into being for the
government of Florence after the luckless Piero de' Medici had been
banished in 1494. Here much history was made. As to its structure
and its architect, Vasari, who later was called in to restore it,
has a deal to say, but it is too technical for us. It was built
by Simone di Pollaiuolo, who was known as Cronaca (the Chronicler)
from his vivid way of telling his adventures. Cronaca (1454-1508),
who was a personal friend and devotee of Savonarola, drew up his plan
in consultation with Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo (although then
so young: only nineteen or twenty) and others. Its peculiarity is that
it is one of the largest rooms in existence without pillars. From the
foot of the steps to the further wall I make it fifty-eight paces,
and thirty wide; and the proportions strike the eye as perfect. The
wall behind the steps is not at right angles with the other--and this
must be as peculiar as the absence of pillars.
Once there were to be paintings here by the greatest of all, for
masters no less than Leonardo and Michelangelo were commissioned to
decorate it, each with a great historical painting: a high honour
for the youthful Michelangelo. The loss of these works is one of
the tragedies of art. Leonardo chose for his subject the battle of
Anghiari, an incident of 1440 when the Florentines defeated Piccinino
and saved their Republic from the Milanese and Visconti. But both
the cartoon and the fresco have gone for ever, and our sense of loss
is not diminished by reading in Leonardo's Thoughts on Painting the
directions which he wrote for the use of artists who proposed to paint
battles: one of the most interesting and exciting pieces of writing in
the literature of art. Michelangelo's work, which never reached the
wall of the room, as Leonardo's had done, was completed as a cartoon
in 1504 to 1506 in his studio in the hospital of the dyers in Sant'
Onofrio, which is now the Via Guelfa. The subject was also military:
an incident in the long and bitter struggle between Florence and Pisa,
when Sir John Hawkwood (then in the pay of the Pisans, before he came
over finally to the Florentines) attacked a body of Florentines who
were bathing in the river. The scene gave the young artist scope both
for his power of delineating a spirited incident and for his drawing
of the nude, and those who saw it said of this work that it was finer
than anything the painter ever did. While it was in progress all
the young artists came to Sant' Onofrio to study it, as they and its
creator had before flocked to the Carmine, where Masaccio's frescoes
had for three-quarters of a century been object-lessons to students.
What became of the cartoon is not definitely known, but Vasari's
story is that Bandinelli, the sculptor of the Hercules and Cacus
outside the Palazzo, who was one of the most diligent copyists of the
cartoon after it was placed in a room in this building, had the key
of the door counterfeited, and, obtaining entrance during a moment
of tumult, destroyed the picture. The reasons given are: (1, and a
very poor one) that he desired to own the pieces; (2) that he wished
to deprive other and rival students of the advantage of copying it;
(3) that he wanted Leonardo to be the only painter of the Palazzo to
be considered; and (4, and sufficient) that he hated Michelangelo. At
this time Bandinelli could not have been more than eighteen. Vasari's
story is uncorroborated.
Leonardo's battle merely perished, being done in some fugitive medium;
and the walls are now covered with the works of Vasari himself
and his pupils and do not matter, while the ceiling is a muddle
of undistinguished paint. There are many statues which also do not
matter; but at the raised end is Leo X, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent,
and the first Medici Pope, and at the other a colossal modern statue
of Savonarola, who was in person the dominating influence here for
the years between 1494 and 1497; who is to many the central figure
in the history of this building; and whose last night on earth was
spent with his companions in this very room. But to him we come in
the chapter on S. Marco.
Many rooms in the Palazzo are to be seen only on special occasions,
but the great hall is always accessible. Certain rooms upstairs,
mostly with rich red and yellow floors, are also visible daily, all
interesting; but most notable is the Salle de Lys, with its lovely blue
walls of lilies, its glorious ceiling of gold and roses, Ghirlandaio's
fresco of S. Zenobius, and the perfect marble doorway containing
the wooden doors of Giuliano and Benedetto da Maiano, with the heads
of Dante and Petrarch in intarsia. Note the figures of Charity and
Temperance in the doorway and the charming youthful Baptist.
In Eleanor of Toledo's dining-room there are some rich and elaborate
green jugs which I remember very clearly and also the ceiling of her
workroom with its choice of Penelope as the presiding genius. Both
Eleanor's chapel and that in which Savonarola prayed before his
execution are shown.
But the most popular room of all with visitors--and quite naturally--is
the little boudoiresque study of Francis I, with its voluptuous
ladies on the ceiling and the secret treasure-room leading from it,
while on the way, just outside the door, is a convenient oubliette
into which to push any inconvenient visitor.
The loggia, which Mr. Morley has painted from the Via Castellani,
is also always accessible, and from it one has one of those pleasant
views of warm roofs in which Florence abounds.
One of the most attractive of the smaller rooms usually on view is
that one which leads from the lily-room and contains nothing but
maps of the world: the most decorative things conceivable, next to
Chinese paintings. Looking naturally for Sussex on the English map,
I found Winchelsey, Battel, Rye, Lewes, Sorham, Arônde, and Cicestra.
From the map-room a little room is gained where the debates in
the Great Council Hall might be secretly overheard by interested
eavesdroppers, but in particular by Cosimo I. A part of the cornice
has holes in it for this purppse, but on regaining the hall itself
I found that the disparity in the pattern was perfectly evident even
to my eye, so that every one in those suspicious days must have been
aware of the listener.
The tower should certainly be ascended--not only for the view
and to be so near the bells and the pillars, but also for historic
associations. After a little way we come to the cell where Cosimo de'
Medici, later to be the Father of his Country, was imprisoned, before
that exile which ended in recall and triumph in 1433. This cell,
although not exactly "a home from home," is possible. What is to be
said of that other, some thousands of steps (as it seems) higher,
where Savonarola was kept for forty days, varied only by intervals
of torture? For Savonarola's cell, which is very near the top, is
nothing but a recess in the wall with a door to it. It cannot be
more than five feet wide and eight feet long, with an open loophole
to the wind. If a man were here for forty days and then pardoned his
life would be worth very little. A bitter eyrie from which to watch
the city one had risked all to reform. What thoughts must have been
his in that trap! What reviews of policy! What illuminations as to
Florentine character!
CHAPTER VIII
The Uffizi I: The Building and the Collectors
The growth of a gallery--Vasari's Passaggio--Cosimo I--Francis
I--Ferdinand I--Ferdinand II--Cosimo III--Anna Maria Ludovica de'
Medici--Pietro-Leopoldo--The statues of the façade--Art, literature,
arms, science, and learning--The omissions--Florentine rapacity--An
antique custom--Window views--The Uffizi drawings--The best picture.
The foreigner should understand at once that any inquiries into the
history of the Uffizi family--such as for example yield interesting
results in the case of the Pazzi and the Albizzi--are doomed to
failure; because Uffizi merely means offices. The Palazzo degli
Uffizi, or palace of offices, was built by Vasari, the biographer of
the artists, for Cosimo I, who having taken the Signoria, or Palazzo
Vecchio, for his own home, wished to provide another building for the
municipal government. It was begun in 1560 and still so far fulfils
its original purpose as to contain the general post office, while it
also houses certain Tuscan archives and the national library.
A glance at Piero di Cosimo's portrait of Ferrucci in our National
Gallery will show that an ordinary Florentine street preceded the
erection of the Uffizi. At that time the top storey of the building,
as it now exists, was an open terrace affording a pleasant promenade
from the Palazzo Vecchio down to the river and back to the Loggia
de' Lanzi. Beneath this were studios and workrooms where Cosimo's
army of artists and craftsmen (with Bronzino and Cellini as the most
famous) were kept busy; while the public offices were on the ground
floor. Then, as his family increased, Cosimo decided to move, and the
incomplete and abandoned Pitti Palace was bought and finished. In 1565,
as we have seen, Francis, Cosimo's son, married and was installed in
the Palazzo Vecchio, and it was then that Vasari was called upon to
construct the Passaggio which unites the Palazzo Vecchio and the Pitti,
crossing the river by the Ponte Vecchio--Cosimo's idea (borrowed it
is said from Homer's description of the passage uniting the palaces of
Priam and Hector) being not only that he and his son might have access
to each other, but that in the event of danger on the other side of the
river a body of soldiers could be swiftly and secretly mobilized there.
Cosimo I died in 1574, and Francis I (1574-1587) succeeded him not only
in rule but in that patronage of the arts which was one of the finest
Medicean traditions; and it was he who first thought of making the
Uffizi a picture gallery. To do this was simple: it merely meant the
loss of part of the terrace by walling and roofing it in. Ferdinand
I (1587-1609) added the pretty Tribuna and other rooms, and brought
hither a number of the treasures from the Villa Medici at Rome. Cosimo
II (1609-1621) did little, but Ferdinand II (1621-1670) completed
the roofing in of the terraces, placed there his own collection of
drawings and a valuable collection of Venetian pictures which he
had bought, together with those that his wife Vittoria della Rovere
had brought him from Urbino, while his brothers, Cardinal Giovanni
Carlo de' Medici and Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici (the extremely
ugly man with the curling chin, at the head of the Uffizi stairs),
added theirs. Giovanni Carlo's pictures, which mostly went to the
Pitti were varied; but Leopold's were chiefly portraits of artists,
wherever possible painted by themselves, a collection which is steadily
being added to at the present time and is to be seen in several rooms
of the Uffizi, and those miniature portraits of men of eminence which
we shall see in the corridor between the Poccetti Gallery and Salon of
Justice at the Pitti. Cosimo III (1670-1723) added the Dutch pictures
and the famous Venus de' Medici and other Tribuna statuary.
The galleries remained the private property of the Medici family until
the Electress Palatine, Anna Maria Ludovica de' Medici, daughter of
Cosimo III and great niece of the Cardinal Leopold, bequeathed all
these treasures, to which she had greatly added, together with bronzes
now in the Bargello, Etruscan antiquities now in the Archaeological
Museum, tapestries also there, and books in the Laurentian library,
to Florence for ever, on condition that they should never be removed
from Florence and should exist for the benefit of the public. Her
death was in 1743, and with her passed away the last descendant of
that Giovanni de' Medici (1360-1429) whom we saw giving commissions
to Donatello, building the children's hospital, and helping Florence
to the best of his power: so that the first Medici and the last were
akin in love of art and in generosity to their beautiful city.
The new Austrian Grand Dukes continued to add to the Uffizi,
particularly Pietro-Leopoldo (1765-1790), who also founded the
Accademia. To him was due the assembling, under the Uffizi roof,
of all the outlying pictures then belonging to the State, including
those in the gallery of the hospital of S. Maria Nuova, which owned,
among others, the famous Hugo van der Goes. It was he also who
brought together from Rome the Niobe statues and constructed a room
for them. Leopold II added the Iscrizioni.
It was as recently as 1842 to 1856 that the statues of the great
Florentines were placed in the portico. These, beginning at the Palazzo
Vecchio, are, first, against the inner wall, Cosimo Pater (1389-1464)
and Lorenzo the Magnificent (1450-1492); then, outside: Orcagna;
Andrea Pisano, of the first Baptistery doors; Giotto and Donatello;
Alberti, who could do everything and who designed the façade of
S. Maria Novella; Leonardo and Michelangelo. Next, three poets, Dante
(1265-1321), Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), and Giovanni Boccaccio
(1313-1375). Then Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), the statesman,
and Francesco Guicciardini (1482-1540), the historian. That completes
the first side.
At the end are Amerigo Vespucci (1451-1516), the explorer, who gave
his name to America, and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), the astronomer;
and above is Cosimo I, the first Grand Duke.
On the Uffizi's river façade are four figures only--and hundreds of
swallows' nests. The figures are Francesco Ferrucci, who died in 1530,
the general painted by Piero di Cosimo in our National Gallery, who
recaptured Volterra from Pope Clement VII in 1529; Giovanni delle Bande
Nere (1500-1527), father of Cosimo I, and a great fighting man; Piero
Capponi, who died in 1496, and delivered Florence from Charles VIII in
1494, by threatening to ring the city bells; and Farinata degli Uberti,
an earlier soldier, who died in 1264 and is in the "Divina Commedia"
as a hero. It was he who repulsed the Ghibelline suggestion that
Florence should be destroyed and the inhabitants emigrate to Empoli.
Working back towards the Loggia de' Lanzi we find less-known names:
Pietro Antonio Michele (1679-1737), the botanist; Francesco Redi
(1626-1697), a poet and a man of science; Paolo Mascagni (1732-1815),
the anatomist; Andrea Cesalpino (1519-1603), the philosopher;
S. Antonio (died 1461), Prior of the Convent of S. Marco and Archbishop
of Florence; Francesco Accorso (1182-1229), the jurist; Guido Aretino
(eleventh century), musician; and Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1572),
the goldsmith and sculptor. The most notable omissions are Arnolfo
and Brunelleschi (but these are, as we have seen, on the façade of
the Palazzo de' Canonici, opposite the south side of the cathedral),
Ghiberti, Fra Angelico, and Savonarola. Personally I should like to
have still others here, among them Giorgio Vasari, in recognition
of his enthusiastic and entertaining biographies of the Florentine
artists, to say nothing of the circumstance that he designed this
building.
Before we enter any Florentine gallery let me say that there is only
one free day and that the crowded Sabbath. Admittance to nearly all is
a lira. Moreover, there is no re-admission. The charge strikes English
visitors, accustomed to the open portals of their own museums and
galleries, as an outrage, and it explains also the little interest in
their treasures which most Florentines display, for being essentially
a frugal people they have seldom seen them. Visitors who can satisfy
the authorities that they are desirous of studying the works of art
with a serious purpose can obtain free passes; but only after certain
preliminaries, which include a seance with a photographer to satisfy
the doorkeeper, by comparing the real and counterfeit physiognomies,
that no illici
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