are not at all necessary to produce effect in architecture. The Loggia
de Lanzi, that gem of the Place of the Grand Duke, consists of a portico
composed of four arcades, three on the façade, one in return on the
gallery of the offices. It is a miniature of a monument; but the harmony
of its proportions is so perfect that the eye in contemplating it
experiences a sense of satisfaction. The nearness of the Palace of the
Seigneurie, with its compact mass, admirably sets off the elegant
slenderness of its arches and columns. The Loggia is a species of Museum
in the open air. The "Perseus" of Benvenuto Cellini, the "Judith" of
Donatello, the "Rape of the Sabines" of John of Bologna, are framed in
the arcades. Six antique statues--the cardinal and monastic virtues--by
Jacques, called Pietro, a Madonna by Orgagna adorn the interior wall.
Two lions, one antique, the other modern, by Vacca, almost as good as
the Greek lions of the arsenal at Venice, complete the decoration.
The Perseus may be regarded as the masterpiece of Benvenuto Cellini, an
artist so highly spoken of in France, without scarcely anything being
known about him. This statue, a little affected in its pose, like all
the works of the Florentine school, has a juvenile grace which is very
attractive.
THE ORIGINS OF THE CITY[29]
BY GRANT ALLEN
Only two considerable rivers flow from the Apennines westward into the
Mediterranean. The Tiber makes Rome; the Arno makes Florence. In
prehistoric and early historic times, the mountainous region which forms
the basin of these two rivers was occupied by a gifted military race,
the Etruscans, who possest a singular assimilative power for Oriental
and Hellenic culture. Intellectually and artistically, they were the
pick of Italy. Their blood still runs in the veins of the people of
Tuscany. Almost every great thing done in the Peninsula, in ancient or
modern times, has been done by Etruscan hands or brains. The poets and
painters, in particular, with few exceptions, have been, in the wide
ethnical sense, Tuscans.
The towns of ancient Etruria were hill-top strongholds. Florence was not
one of these; even its neighbor, Fiesole (Faesulue), did not rank among
the twelve great cities of the Etruscan league. But with the Roman
conquest and the Roman peace, the towns began to descend from their
mountain peaks into the river valleys; roads grew important, through
internal trade; and bridges over rivers assumed a fresh commercial
value. Florence (Florentia), probably founded under Sulla as a Roman
municipium, upon a Roman road, guarded the bridge across the Arno, and
gradually absorbed the population of Fiesole. Under the later empire,
it was the official residence of the "Corrector" of Tuscany and Umbria.
During the Middle Ages, it became, for all practical purposes, the
intellectual and artistic capital of Tuscany, inheriting in full the
remarkable mental and esthetic excellences of the Etruscan race.
The valley of the Arno is rich and fertile, bordered by cultivable
hills, which produce the famous Chianti wine. It was thus predestined by
nature as the seat of the second city on the west slope of Italy.
Florence, however, was not always that city. The seaport of Pisa (now
silted up and superseded by Leghorn) first rose into importance; possest
a powerful fleet; made foreign conquests; and erected the magnificent
group of buildings just outside the town which still form its chief
claim upon the attention of tourists. But Florence with its bridge
commanded the inland trade, and the road to Rome from Germany. After the
destruction of Fiesole in 1125, it grew rapidly in importance; and, Pisa
having sustained severe defeats from Genoa, the inland town soon rose to
supremacy in the Arno basin. Nominally subject to the Emperor, it became
practically an independent republic, much agitated by internal quarrels,
but capable of holding its own against neighboring cities. Its chief
buildings are thus an age or two later than those of Pisa; it did not
begin to produce splendid churches and palaces, in emulation of those of
Pisa and Siena, till about the close of the 13th century. To the same
period belongs the rise of its literature under Dante, and its painting
under Giotto. This epoch of rapid commercial, military, and artistic
development forms the main glory of early Florence.
The 14th century is chiefly interesting at Florence as the period of
Giottesque art, finding its final crown in Fra Angelico. With the
beginning of the 15th, we get the dawn of the Renaissance--the age when
art set out once more to recover the lost perfection of antique
workmanship. In literature, this movement took the form of humanism; in
architecture and sculpture, it exhibited itself in the persons of
Alberti, Ghiberti, Della Robbia, and Donatello; in painting, it showed
itself in Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, and Verrocchio....
We start, then, with the fact that up to nearly the close of the 13th
century (1278), Florence was a comparatively small and uninteresting
town, without any buildings of importance, save the relatively
insignificant Baptistery; without any great cathedral, like Pisa and
Siena; without any splendid artistic achievement of any kind. It
consisted at that period of a labyrinth of narrow streets, enclosing
huddled houses and tall towers of the nobles, like the two to be seen to
this day at Bologna. In general aspect, it could not greatly have
differed from Albenga or San Gimignano in our own time. But commerce was
active; wealth was increasing; and the population was seething with the
intellectual and artistic spirit of its Etruscan ancestry. During the
lifetime of Dante, the town began to transform itself and to prepare for
becoming the glorious Florence of the Renaissance artists. It then set
about building two immense and beautiful churches--Santa Croce and
Santa Maria Novella--while, shortly after, it grew to be ashamed of its
tiny San Giovanni (the existing Baptistery), and girded itself up to
raise a superb cathedral, which should cast into the shade both the one
long since finished at maritime Pisa and the one then still rising to
completion on the height of Siena.
Florence at that time extended no further than the area known as Old
Florence, which means from the Ponte Vecchio to the Cathedral in one
direction, and from the Ponte alla Carraja to the Grazie in the other.
Outside the wall lay a belt of fields and gardens, in which one or two
monasteries had already sprung up. But Italy at that moment was filled
with religious enthusiasm by the advent of the Friars both great orders
of whom, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, had already established
themselves in the rising commercial city of Florence. Both orders had
acquired sites for monastic buildings in the space outside the walls and
soon began to erect enormous churches. The Dominicans came first, with
Santa Maria Novella, the commencement of which dates from 1278; the
Franciscans were a little later in the field, with Santa Croce, the
first stone not being placed till 1294.
THE CATHEDRAL[30]
BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE
Desirous of seeing the beginnings of this Renaissance we go from the
Palazzo-Vecchio to the Duomo. Both form the double heart of Florence,
such as it beat in the Middle Ages, the former for politics, and the
latter for religion, and the two so well united that they formed but
one. Nothing can be nobler than the public edict passed in 1294 for the
construction of the national cathedral.
"Whereas, it being of sovereign prudence on the part of a people of high
origin to proceed in its affairs in such a manner that the wisdom no
less than the magnanimity of its proceedings can be recognized in its
outward works, it is ordered that Arnolfo, master architect of our
commune, prepare models or designs for the restoration of Santa Maria
Reparata, with the most exalted and most prodigal magnificence, in order
that the industry and power of men may never create or undertake
anything whatsoever more vast and more beautiful; in accordance with
that which our wisest citizens have declared and counselled in public
session and in secret conclave, to wit, that no hand be laid upon the
works of the commune without the intent of making them to correspond to
the noble soul which is composed of the souls of all its citizens united
in one will."
[FLORENCE: BRIDGE ACROSS THE ARNO
Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]
[FLORENCE: THE OLD PALACE
Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]
[FLORENCE: THE LOGGIA DI LANZI
Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]
[FLORENCE: CLOISTER OF SANTA MARIA NOVELLA
Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]
[FLORENCE: CLOISTER OF SAN MARCO
Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]
[FLORENCE: THE PITTI PALACE
Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]
[FLORENCE: THE HOUSE OF DANTE
Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]
[FRONT OF ST. MARK'S, VENICE
Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]
[INTERIOR OF ST. MARK'S, VENICE
Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]
[THE DUCAL PALACE, VENICE
Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]
[VENICE: PIAZZA OF ST. MARK'S, DUCAL PALACE ON THE LEFT
Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]
[VIEW OF VENICE FROM THE CAMPANILE
Illustration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]
In this ample period breathes the grandiose pride and intense patriotism
of the ancient republics. Athens under Pericles, and Rome under the
first Scipio cherished no prouder sentiments. At each step, here as
elsewhere, in texts and in monuments, is found, in Italy, the traces,
the renewal and the spirit of classic antiquity.
Let us, accordingly, look at the celebrated Duomo--but, the difficulty
is to see it. It stands upon flat ground, and, in order that the eye
might embrace its mass it would be necessary to level three hundred
buildings. Herein appears the defect of the great medieval structure;
even to-day, after so many openings, effected by modern demolishers,
most of the cathedrals are visible only on paper. The spectator catches
sight of a fragment, some section of a wall, or the façade; but the
whole escapes him; man's work is no longer proportioned to his organs.
It was not thus in antiquity; temples were small or of mediocre
dimensions, and were almost always erected on an eminence; their general
form and complete profile could be enjoyed from twenty different points
of view.
After the advent of Christianity, men's conceptions transcended their
forces, and the ambition of the spirit no longer took into account the
limitations of the body. The human machine lost its equilibrium. With
forgetfulness of the moderate there was established a love of the odd.
Without either reason or symmetry campaniles or bell-towers were
planted, like isolated posts, in front or alongside of cathedrals; there
is one of these alongside of the Duomo, and this change of human
equipoise must have been potent, since even here, among so many Latin
traditions and classic aptitudes, it declares itself.
In other respects, save the ogive arcades, the monument is not Gothic,
but Byzantine, or, rather, original; it is a creature of a new and mixed
form like the new and mixed civilization of which it is the offspring.
You feel power and invention in it with a touch of quaintness and fancy.
Walls of enormous grandeur are developed or expanded without the few
windows in them happening to impair their massiveness or diminish their
strength. There are no flying buttresses; they are self-sustaining.
Marble panels, alternately yellow and black, cover them with a
glittering marquetry, and curves of arches let into their masses seem to
be the bones of a robust skeleton beneath the skin.
The Latin cross, which the edifice figures, contracts at the top, and
the chancel and transepts bubble out into rotundities and projections,
in petty domes behind the church in order to accompany the grand dome
which ascends above the choir, and which, the work of Brunnelleschi,
newer and yet more antique than that of St. Peter, lifts in the air to
an astonishing height its elongated form, its octagonal sides and its
pointed lantern. But how can the physiognomy of a church be conveyed by
words? It has one nevertheless; all its portions appearing together are
combined in one chord and in one effect. If you examine the plans and
old engravings you will appreciate the bizarre and captivating harmony
of these grand Roman walls overlaid with Oriental fancies; of these
Gothic ogives arranged in Byzantine cupolas; of these light Italian
columns forming a circle above a bordering of Grecian caissons; of this
assemblage of all forms, pointed, swelling, angular, oblong, circular
and octagonal. Greek and Latin antiquity, the Byzantine and Saracenic
Orient, the Germanic and Italian middle-age, the entire past, shattered,
amalgamated and transformed, seems to have been melted over anew in the
human furnace in order to flow out in fresh forms in the hands of the
new genius of Giotto, Arnolfo, Brunnelleschi and Dante.
Here the work is unfinished, and the success is not complete. The façade
has not been constructed; all that we see of it is a great naked,
scarified wall similar to a leper's plaster.[31] There is no light
within. A line of small round bays and a few windows fill the immensity
of the edifice with a gray illumination; it is bare, and the
argillaceous tone in which it is painted depresses the eye with its wan
monotony. A "Pieta" by Michael Angelo and a few statues seem like
spectres; the bas-reliefs are only vague confusion. The architect,
hesitating between medieval and antique taste, fell only upon a lifeless
light, that between a pure light and a colored light.
The more we contemplate architectural works the more do we find them
adapted to express the prevailing spirit of an epoch. Here, on the flank
of the Duomo, stands the Campanile by Giotto, erect, isolated, like St.
Michael's tower at Bordeaux, or the tower of St. Jacques at Paris; the
medieval man, in fact, loves to build high; he aspires to heaven, his
elevations all tapering off into pointed pinnacles; if this one had been
finished a spire of thirty feet would have surmounted the tower, itself
two hundred and fifty feet high. Hitherto the northern architect and the
Italian architect are governed by the same instinct, and gratify the
same penchant; but while the northern artist, frankly Gothic, embroiders
his tower with delicate moldings, and complex flower-work, and a stone
lacework infinitely multiplied and intersected, the southern artist,
half-Latin through his tendencies and his reminiscences, erects a
square, strong and full pile, in which a skilful ornamentation does not
efface the general structure, which is not frail sculptured bijou, but a
solid durable monument, its coating of red, black and white marble
covering it with royal luxuriance, and which, through its healthy and
animated statues, its bas-reliefs framed in medallions, recalls the
friezes and pediments of an antique temple.
In these medallions Giotto has symbolized the principal epochs of human
civilization; the traditions of Greece near those of Judea; Adam,
Tubal-Cain, and Noah, Daedalus, Hercules, and Antaeus, the invention of
plowing, the mastery of the horse, and the discovery of the arts and the
sciences; laic and philosophic sentiment live freely in him side by side
with a theological and religious sentiment. Do we not already see in
this renaissance of the fourteenth century that of the sixteenth? In
order to pass from one to another, it will suffice for the spirit of the
first to become ascendant over the spirit of the second; at the end of a
century we are to see in the adornment of the edifice, in these statues
of Donatello, in their baldness so expressive, in the sentiment of the
real and natural life displayed among the goldsmiths and sculptors,
evidence of the transformation begun under Giotto having been already
accomplished.
Every step we take we encounter some sign of this persistency or
precocity of a Latin and classic spirit. Facing the Duomo is the
baptistery, which at first served as a church, a sort of octagonal
temple surmounted by a cupola, built, doubtless, after the model of the
Pantheon of Rome, and which, according to the testimony of a
contemporary bishop, already in the eighth century projected upward the
pompous rotundities of its imperial forms. Here, then, in the most
barbarous epoch of the Middle Ages, is a prolongation, a renewal, or, at
least, an imitation of Roman architecture. You enter, and find that the
decoration is not all Gothic; a circle of Corinthian columns of precious
marbles with, above these, a circle of smaller columns surmounted by
loftier arcades, and, on the vault, a legion of saints, and angels
peopling the entire space, gathering in four rows around a grand, dull,
meager, melancholy Byzantine Christ. On these three superposed stories
the three gradual distortions of antique art appear; but, distorted or
intact, it is always antique art. A significant feature, this,
throughout the history of Italy; she did not become Germanic. In the
tenth century the degraded Roman still subsisted distinct and intact
side by side with the proud barbarian....
Sculpture, which, once before under Nicholas of Pisa, had anticipated
painting, again anticipated it in the fifteenth century; these very
doors of the baptistery enable one to see with what sudden perfection
and brilliancy. Three men then appeared, Brunelleschi, the architect of
the Duomo, Donatello, who decorated the Campanile with statues, and
Ghiberti, who cast the two gates of the baptistery, all three friends
and rivals, all three having commenced with the goldsmith's art and a
study of the living model, and all three passionately devoted to the
antique; Brunelleschi drawing and measuring Roman monuments, Donatello
at Rome copying statues and bas-reliefs and Ghiberti importing from
Greece torsos, vases and heads which he restored, imitated and
worshiped.
AN ASCENT OF THE GREAT DOME[32]
BY MR. AND MRS. EDWIN H. BLASHFIELD
The traveler who, turning his back to the gates of Ghiberti, passes, for
the first time, under the glittering new mosaics and through the main
doors of Santa Maria Del Fiore experiences a sensation. He leaves behind
him the façade, dazzling in its patterns of black and white marble, all
laced with sculpture, he enters to dim, bare vastness--surely, never was
bleaker lining to a splendid exterior. Across a floor that seems
unending, he makes long journeys, from monument to monument; to gigantic
condottieri, riding ghost-like in the semi-darkness against the upper
walls; to Luca's saints and angels in the sacristies; to Donatellos's
Saint John, grand and tranquil in his niche, and to Michelangelo's
group, grand and troubled in its rough-hewn marble.
At length, in the north transept, he comes to a small door, and entering
there, he may, if legs and wind hold out, climb five hundred and fifteen
steps to the top of the mightiest dome in the world, the widest in span,
and the highest from spring to summit. For the first one hundred and
fifty steps or so, there are square turnings, and the stone looks sharp,
and new, and solid; a space vaulted by a domical roof follows, and is
apparently above one of the apsidal domes to the church; then a narrow
spiral staircase leads to where a second door opens upon a very narrow,
balustraded walk that runs around the inner side of the dome.
He is at an altitude of sixty-seven meters, exactly at the spring of the
cupola and the beginning of the Vasari frescoes; the feet are at an
elevation of one meter less than is that of the lower tops of Notre Dame
de Paris, and yet the dome follows away overhead, huge enough, high
enough to contain a second church piled, Pelion-like upon the first.
Before, in the dimness, is the vastest roof-covered void in the world;
it is terrific, and if the visitor is susceptible, his knees shake, and
his diaphragm seems to sink to meet them.
The impression is tremendous; no wonder that the Tuscans felt
Brunelleschi to be the central figure of the Renaissance. Again and
again, whether in the gallery or between the walls of the dome, the
thought comes; men built this, and one man dared it and planned it. Not
even the Pyramids impress more strongly; for if Brunelleschi built a
lesser pyramid, he hollowed his and hung it in the air.
On the other side of the space, a small black spot becomes a door when
the traveler has giddily circled half the dome; it opens upon another
staircase, up which he climbs between the two skins of the cupola, or
rather between two of the three, like a parasite upon a monster.
Sometimes the place suggests a ship, with the oculi as gunports,
piercing to the outer day, or else, his mind fresh from that red inferno
of Vasari's frescoes, the traveler is tunneling up through a volcanic
crater with a whole Typhonic Enceladus buried below.
To right and left, the smooth, cemented surface curves away and upward,
brick buttresses appear constantly, but always with the courses of brick
laid slanting to the earth's level, and perpendicular to the thrust of
the dome. Every possible effect of light and obscurity makes the strange
vistas yet more weird, and, now and then, there is a feeling of standing
upon the vast, rounding slope of some planet that shines at one's feet,
then gradually falls away into the surrounding blackness.
The famous "oaken chain" of Vasari's life of Brunelleschi is there,
bolted together in successive beams. Last of all, a long, straight
staircase, straight because without turn to right or left, curves upward
like an unradiant, bowed Valhalla-bridge to a great burst of daylight,
and the climber is upon the top of the dome.
He is as completely cut off from the immediately surrounding earth as
upon a cloud girdled mountain, for the dome swells so vastly below that
the piazza can not be seen about transept or choir, and not one of the
apsidal domes shows a tile of its covering, while the nave, that huge
and tremendous nave of Santa Maria, looks but a narrow, and a distant
roof. At one's back, the marble of the lantern is handsome and creamy in
color, but battered and broken; its interior is curious--a narrow funnel
of marble, little wider than a man's body, set with irons on either
side, is the only ladder, so that the climb up is a close squeeze. There
is a familiar something gone from the surroundings, and that something
is soon remembered to be Dante's baptistery, which does not exist from
Brunelleschi's dome, being blotted out by the façade of Santa Maria. One
hundred feet below, showing its upper and richer portion gloriously from
this novel point of view, is what from the piazza is the soaring bell
tower, the Campanile of Giotto.
ARNOLFO, GIOTTO, BRUNELLESCHI[33]
BY MRS. OLIPHANT
Arnolfo, sometimes called di Cambio and sometimes di Lapi, was the first
of the group of Cathedral builders in Florence. Who Arnolfo was seems to
be scarcely known, tho few architects after him have left greater works
or more evidence of power. His first authentic appearance in history is
among the band of workmen engaged upon the pulpit in the Duomo at Siena,
as pupil or journeyman of Niccolo Pisano, the great reviver of the art
of sculpture--when he becomes visible in company with a certain Lapo,
who is sometimes called his father (as by Vasari) and sometimes his
instructor, but who appears actually to have been nothing more than his
fellow-workman and associate....