Amongst the famous gardens of the world, the Orti Oricellari[D] must
take a foremost place, alike for sylvan beauty and for intellectual
tradition. Second only to the marvellous gardens of Rome, they were
first, for loveliness and for association, amongst the many great and
carefully-cultured gardens which once adorned Tuscany. Under the
Rucellai their superb groves and glades sheltered the most intellectual
meetings which Florence has ever seen. The Società Oricellari (which
continued that imitation of the Platonic Academy created by Cosimo and
Lorenzo) assembled here under the shade of the great forest trees. Here
Machiavelli read aloud his Art of War, and here Giovanni Rucellai
composed his Rosamunda. The house built for Bernardo Rucellai by Leon
Battista Alberti was a treasure-house of art, ancient and contemporary;
and learning, literature and philosophy found their meet home under the
ilex and cedar shadows, and in the fragrant air of the orange and myrtle
boughs. High thoughts and scholarly creation were never more fitly
housed than here. Their grounds, covered with trees, plants, fruits and
flowers, were then known as the Selva dei Rucellai, and must have been
of much larger extent in the time of Machiavelli than they had become
even in the eighteenth century; for when Palla Rucellai fled in fear of
being compromised in the general hatred of all the Medici followers and
friends, he left the Selva by a little postern door in its western wall
which opened on to the Porta Prato and the great meadow then surrounding
that gateway. Therefore they must then have covered all the space now
occupied by the detestable modern streets called Magenta, Solferino,
Montebello, Garibaldi, etc., and I have myself indeed conversed with
persons who remember, in their youth, the orchards appertaining to these
gardens existing where there are now the ugly boulevards and the dirt
and lumber of the railway and tramway works.
-----
Footnote D:
Since this was written, one-half of these gardens have been destroyed;
the other half bought by the Marchese Ginori.
-----
On this unfortunate flight of Palla in 1527, the populace broke into the
gardens, and destroyed the statues, obelisks and temples which
ornamented them, but the woods and orchards they appear to have spared;
for, some thirty years later, the park seems to have been in its full
perfection still, when Ferdinand, in the height of a violent and devoted
passion, gave it to his Venetian mistress as her _casin de piacere_, and
Bianca brought a mode of life very unlike that of the grave and
scholarly Rucellai into its classic groves; for although her fate was
tragic, and her mind must have been ever apprehensive of foul play, she
was evidently of a gay, mirthful, pleasure-loving temperament.
The jests and pranks, the sports and pastimes, the conjuring and comedy,
the mirth and music, the dances and mummeries, which pleased the taste
of Bianca and her women, replaced the ‘noble sessions of free thought’
and the illustrious fellowship of the Academicians. The gravity and
decorum of the philosophical society departed, but the floral and sylvan
beauty remained. At the time when she filled its glades with laughter
and song and the beauty of her women, the Selva was what was even then
called an English garden, with dense woods, wide lawns, deep shade, and
mighty trees which towered to the skies. But when it passed into the
hands of Giancarlo de’ Medici that Cardinal decorated it with a grotto,
a giant, and other _gentilezze_, and changed it into an Italian garden,
with many sculptural and architectural wonders, and plants and flowers
from foreign countries, employing in his designs Antonio Novelli, who,
amongst other feats, brought water to it from the Pitti, and built up an
artificial mountain in its midst. He must have done much to disfigure
it, more than the mob of 1527 had done; but soon after these
ill-considered works were completed the gardens passed to the Ridolfi,
who, preserving the rare flowers and fruits, with which the Cardinal had
planted it, allowed the woodland growth to return to its freedom and
luxuriance. Of him who ultimately restricted the park to its present
limits, and robbed the house of all its treasures of art and admirable
ornament, there is, I believe, no record. From the Ridolfi it went to a
family of Ferrara, of the name of Canonici, and from them to the
Stiozzi, who sold it in our own time to Prince Orloff, by whose heir it
has once more been put up for sale. Amidst all these changes the beauty
of the park, though impaired, has existed much as it was when it was
celebrated in Latin and Italian prose and verse, although diminished in
size and shorn of its grandeur, invaded on all sides by bricks and
mortar, and cruelly violated, even in its inmost precincts. The house
has been miserably modernised, and the gardens and glades miserably
lopped, yet still there is much left; and many of their historic trees
still lift their royal heads to morning dawn and evening stars. Enough
remains to make a green oasis in the desert of modern bricks and stucco;
enough remains for the student to realise that he stands beneath boughs
of cedar and ilex which once sheltered the august brows of Leone X. and
cast their shade on the gathered associates of that literary society of
which no equal has ever since been seen. The gardens, even in their
shrunken and contracted space and verdure, are still there, priceless in
memories and invaluable to the artist, the student and the lover of
nature and of history.
It seems scarcely credible, yet such is the fact, that these treasures
of natural beauty and storehouses of historical association should have
already once been invaded to build the ordinary modern house called
Palazzo Sonnino, and that now the municipality is about to purchase half
of them—for what purpose?—_to cut the trees down and cover the ground
with houses for the use of its own office-holders_, those multitudinous
and pestilent _impiegati_ who are the curse of the public all over
Italy, and feed on it like leeches upon flesh. That the destruction of
such gardens as these for such a purpose can even be for an instant
spoken of is proof enough of the depths of degradation to which public
indifference and municipal vandalism have sunk in the city of Lorenzo.
It can only be equalled by the destruction of the Farnesina and Ludovisi
gardens. Few places on earth have such intellectual memories as the
Oricellari gardens; yet these are disregarded as nought, and the cedars
and elms which shaded the steps of philosophers and poets, of scholarly
princes and mighty Popes, are to be felled, as though they were of no
more value than worm-eaten mill-posts.
That a people can be _en masse_ so utterly dead to memory, to greatness,
to beauty, and to sense, makes any serious thinker despair of its
future. There are waste grounds (grounds already deliberately laid
waste) yawning by scores already, in the town and around it, on which
any new buildings which may be deemed necessary might be raised. There
is not one thread or shadow of excuse for the abominable action now
contemplated by the Florence Municipality, and certain to be consummated
unless some opposition, strong and resolute, arise. Even were the Orti
Oricellari a mere ordinary park, without tradition, without heritage,
without association, it would be imbecility to cover the site with
bricks and mortar, for Maxime du Camp has justly written that whoever
fells a tree in a city commits a crime. ‘Chaque fois qu’un arbre tombe
dans une ville trop peuplée cela équivaut à un meurtre et parfois à une
épidémie. On a beau multiplier les squares, ils ne remplaceront jamais
la ceinture de forêt qui devrait entourer toute capitale et lui verser
l’oxygène, la force, et la santé.‘ These are words salutary and true,
which would be well inscribed in letters of gold above the council
chamber of every municipality. When towns are desperately pinched for
space, hemmed in on every side, and at their wits’ end for lodging-room,
there may be some kind of credible excuse for the always mistaken
destruction of gardens, trees and groves. But in all the cities of Italy
there is no such excuse; there are vast unoccupied lands all around
them; and in their midst more, many more, houses than are occupied. In
Rome and Florence the latter may be counted by many thousands. There is
not the feeblest, flimsiest pretext for such execrable destruction as
has already overtaken so many noble gardens in the former city, and now
menaces the Orti Oricellari in the latter.
Nor is this Selva, although the most famous, the only garden which is
being destroyed in Florence, whilst many beautiful glades and lawns have
been, in the last ten years, ruthlessly ruined and effaced that the
wretched and trumpery structures of the jerry-builders may arise in
their stead. The Riccardi garden in Valfonda was once like that of the
Oricellari, a marvel of loveliness; and its lawns, its avenues, its
marbles, its deep, impenetrable shades, its sunlit orange-walks and
perfumed pergolate, surrounded a house which was a temple of art and
contained many choice statues of ancient and contemporary masters.
Talleyrand once said that no one who had not lived before the great
revolution could ever know how perfect life could be. I would say that
none can know how perfect it can be who did not live in the Italy of the
Renaissance. Take the life of this one man, Riccardo, Marchese Riccardi,
who spent most of his existence in this exquisite pleasure-place, which
he inherited from its creator, the great scholar and _dilettante_,
Romolo Riccardi, and where he resided nearly all the year round. In the
contemporary works of Cinelli on the _Bellezze di Firenze_, his house
and gardens are described; they are alluded to by Redi,—
‘Nel bel giardino
Nei bassi di gualfondo inabissato
Dove tieni il Riccardi alto domino.’
They are spoken of in admiration by Baldinucci, and, in the description
of the festival of Maria de’ Medici’s marriage by proxy to Henri Quatre,
they are enthusiastically praised by the younger Buonarotti. The court
of the Casino was filled with ancient marbles, busts, statues and
inscriptions, Latin and Greek; the exterior was decorated in fresco and
tempera, with many rare sculptures and paintings and objects of art,
whilst, without, a number of avenues led in all directions from the
house to the gardens and the woods, where, in shade of ilex and cypress,
marble seats and marble statues gave a sense of refreshing coolness in
the hottest noon. Here this elegant scholar and accomplished noble
passed almost all his time, receiving all that was most learned and
illustrious in the society of his epoch; and occasionally giving
magnificent entertainments like that with which he bade farewell to
Maria de’ Medici. Of this delicious retreat a few trees alone remain
now; a few trees, which raise their sorrowful heads amongst the bricks
and mortar, the theatres and photographic studios, around them, are all
that are left of the once beautiful and poetic retreat of the scholars
and courtiers, the ambassadors and _illuminati_, of the family of the
Riccardi. Why has not such a place as this once was been religiously
preserved through all time, for the joy, health and beauty of the city?
It would be scarcely possible for so beautiful and precious a life as
this of the Riccardi to be led in our times, because it is scarcely
possible, lock our gates as we may, to escape from the detestable
atmosphere of excitation and worry which is everywhere around. The mania
of senseless movement is now in the human race, as the saltatory
delirium seized on the Neapolitan peasants and hurried them in crowds
into the sea.
Riccardo Riccardi living now would be ashamed to dwell the whole year
round in his retreat of Valfonda; would waste his time over morning
newspapers, cigars and ephemeral telegraphic despatches; would probably
spend his money on horse-racing; would send his blackletter folios, his
first copies, and his before-letter prints to the hammer, and would make
over his classic marbles to the Louvre, the Hermitage, or to his own
government. He and his contemporaries had the loveliness of leisure and
the wisdom of meditation; they knew that true culture is to be gained in
the library, not in the rush of a _pérégrinomanie_; and being great,
noble and rich, judged aright that the best gifts given by high position
and large fortune are the liberty which they allow for repose, and the
power which such repose confers to enjoy reflection and possession. In
modern life this faculty is almost wholly lost, and the wit and the fool
are shaken together in the vibration of railway trains, and jostled
together in the eating-houses of the world, till, if the fool thus
obtain a varnish of sharpness, the wit has lost all individuality and
grace.
Not long since, I said to an Englishman who has filled high posts and
attained high honours, whilst public life is always repugnant to his
tastes and temperament, that he would have been wiser to have led his
own life in his own way, under his own ancestral roof-tree in England;
and he answered, ‘I would willingly have done so, but they would have
said that I had nothing in me!’ Characteristic nineteenth century reply!
Romolo and Riccardo Riccardi did not trouble themselves in their
different generations what their contemporaries thought of them. They
led their own lives in their own leafy solitude, and only called their
world about them when they were themselves disposed to entertain it.
The gardens of the Gaddi were equally and still earlier renowned, and in
them the descendants of Taddeo Gaddi had a pleasure-house wondrous and
lovely to behold, while the rich gallery of pictures annexed to it was
situated next to the Valfonda, and covered what is now the new Piazza di
S. M. Novello. These descendants had become great people and eminent in
the church, many cardinals and monsignori amongst them, and also
celebrated _letterati_, of whom Niccolo, son of Senibaldo, was the most
illustrious. He, as well as a scholar and patron of letters and arts,
was, like the Riccardi, a botanist, and, as may be seen in the pages of
Scipione Ammirato, was foremost for his culture of sweet herbs and of
lemons and citrons. Whilst he filled worthily the post of ambassador and
of collector of works of art for the Medici, he never forgot his garden
and his herb-garden, and was the first to make general in Tuscany the
Judas-tree, the gooseberry, the strawberry, the Spanish myrtle, the
northern fir and other then rare fruits and shrubs. So fragrant and so
fair were his grounds, that the populace always called them, and the
vicinity perfumed by them, Il Paradiso dei Gaddi. This beautiful retreat
has for centuries been entirely destroyed and forgotten; and all which
is left of the rich collections of the Gaddi are those thousand
manuscript folios which Francis I. of Austria purchased and gave to the
libraries of Florence, where to this day they remain and can be read.
The director of the Gaddi gardens bore the delightful name of Messer
Giuseppe Benincasa Fiammingo; and a contented life indeed this worthy
and accomplished student must have led, working for such a patron, and
passing the peaceful seasons and fruitful years amidst the cedar-shadows
and the lemon-flower fragrance of this abode of the Muses and of Flora
and Pomona.
We dwell too much upon the strife and storm, the bloodshed and the
internecine feuds of the passed centuries; we forget too often the many
happy and useful lives led in them, which were spent untroubled and
consecrated to fair studies and pursuits, and which let the clangour of
battle go by unheard, and mingled not with camp or court or council.
We forget too often the placid life of Gui Patin under his cherry trees
by the river, or of the Etiennes, in the learned and happy seclusion of
their classic studies and noble work, even their women speaking Latin as
their daily and most natural tongue; we only have ear for the fusillades
of the Fronde, or the war-cries of Valois and Guise. In like manner we
are too apt only to dwell upon the daggers and poison powders, the
factions and feuds, the conspiracies and the city riots of the Moyenage
and Renaissance, and forget the many quiet, useful, happy persons clad
in doublet and hose, like Messer Benincasa, and the many learned and
noble gentlemen clothed in velvet and satin, like Niccolo Gaddi, his
master, who passed peacefully from their cradle to their grave.
In the fifteenth century, according to Benedetto Varchi, who himself saw
them, there were no less than a hundred and thirty of these magnificent
demesnes in the city; and whatever may have been the sins of the earlier
and the follies of the later Medici, that family, one and all, loved
flowers, woods and lawns, and fostered tenderly ‘il gusto del
giardinaggio’ in their contemporaries. This taste in their descendants
has entirely disappeared. They are bored by such of the magnificent
gardens of old as still exist in their towns and around their villas;
they abandon them without regret, grudging the care of keeping them up,
and letting them out to nursery gardeners or to mere peasants whose only
thought is, of course, to make profit out of them.
The Latins were at all times celebrated for their beautiful gardens; all
classic records and all archæological discoveries prove it. The Romans
and the Tuscans, the Venetians and the Lombards, in later mediæval
times, inherited this elegant taste, this art, which is twin child
itself with Nature; but in our immediate epoch it has vanished; the
glorious legacies of it are supported with indifference or done away
with without regret. How is this to be explained? I know not unless the
reason be that there has come from without a contagion of vulgarity,
avarice and bad taste which the Italian temperament has been too weak to
resist, and with which it has become saturated and debased. The modern
Italian will throw money away recklessly on the Bourses or at the
gaming-tables; he will spend it frivolously at foreign baths and
fashionable seaports; he will let himself be ruined by a pack of idle
and good-for-nothing hangers-on whom he has not the courage to shake
off; but he grudges every penny which is required for the maintenance of
woodland and garden, and he will allow his trees to be felled, his
myrtles, bays and laurels to vanish, his fountains to be choked up by
sand or weed, and his lawns to degenerate into rough pasture, without
shame or remorse.
Almost all these noble gardens enumerated by Varchi still existed in
Florence before 1859. Now but few remain. Even the Torrigiani gardens
(which for many reasons one would have supposed would have been kept
intact by that family) have been almost entirely destroyed within the
last year, and the site of them is being rapidly covered with mean and
ugly habitations. The magnificent Capponi garden, so dear to the blind
statesman and scholar, Gino Capponi, has been more than half broken up
by his heirs. The renowned Serristori garden was cut in two and shorn of
half of its beauty when the first half of the Via dei Bardi was
destroyed. The Guadagni garden is advertised as building ground. The
Guicciardini gardens are still standing, but as they and their palace
have been given over to amalgamated railway companies, the respite
accorded to them will probably be of brief duration. The bead roll of
these devastated pleasure-grounds and historic groves could be continued
in an almost endless succession of names and memories, and the immensity
of their irreparable loss to the city is scarcely to be estimated. When
we reflect, moreover, that before 1859 the whole of the ground from the
Carraia Bridge westward was pasture and garden and avenue, where now
there are only bricks and mortar and a network of ugly streets, we shall
more completely comprehend the senseless folly which built over such
green places, or, where it did not build, made in their stead such
barren, dusty, featureless, blank spaces as the Piazza degli Zuavi and
its congeners.
Ubaldino Peruzzi (who has been buried with pomp in Santa Croce!) was the
chief promoter and leader of this mania of demolition. It was at his
instigation that the Ponte alle Grazie and the chapel of the Alberti
were pulled down; that the Tetto dei Pisani was destroyed to make way
for an ugly bank; that the noble trees at the end of the Cascine were
felled to make way for a gaudy, gingerbread bust and a hideous
guardhouse; that the beautiful Stations of the Cross leading to San
Miniato al Monte were destroyed to give place to vulgar eating-houses
and trumpery villas; and that old palaces, old gardens and old churches
were laid waste to create the bald and monotonous quays called severally
the Lung Arno Serristori and Torrigiani. Peruzzi began, and for many
years directed, the destruction of the beauties of the city, and only
stopped when, having brought the town to the verge of bankruptcy, funds
failed him, and he retired perforce from municipal office.
But if it may be feared that the good we do does perish with us, it is
certain that the evil we do does long survive us, and flourishes and
multiplies when we are dust. The lessons which Peruzzi taught his
fellow-citizens in speculation and spoliation will long remain, whilst
his bones crumble beneath a lying epitaph. His dead hand still directs
the scrambling haste with which the historic centre of the city is being
torn down, in order that glass galleries, brummagem shops, miserable
statues, and a general reign of stucco and shoddy, may, as far as in
them lies, bring the Athens of Italy to a level with some third-rate
American township.
Except with a few rare exceptions, Italians are wholly unable to
comprehend the indignation with which their callousness fills the
cultured observer of every other nationality. Anxiety to get
ready-money, an ignorance of their true interests, and a babyish love of
new things, however vulgar or barbarous, have completely extinguished,
in the aristocracy and bureaucracy, all sentiment for the arts and all
reverence for their inheritance and for the beauty of Nature. It would
seem as if a kind of paralysis of all perception had fallen on the whole
nation. A prince of great culture, refinement and reputed taste having
occasion this year to repair his palace, has stuccoed and coloured it
all over a light ochre yellow! A great noble sold his ancestral gardens
last year to a building company, and his family clapped their hands with
delight as the first ilex trees fell beneath the axe! To make a _paven_
street in Venice, unneeded, incongruous, vulgar, abhorrent to every
educated eye and mind, Byzantine windows, Renaissance doorways,
admirable scrollworks, enchanting façades, marbles, and mosaics, of hues
like the sea-shell and the sea-mouse, are ruthlessly torn down and
pushed out of sight for ever. Ruskin in vain protests, his tears
scorched up by his rage, and both alike powerless. Gregorovius died
recently, his last years embittered and tortured by the daily
destruction of the Rome so sublime and sacred to him. I remember well
the day when the axe was first laid to the immemorial groves of the
Farnesina: a barbarous and venal act, done to gratify private spleen and
greed, leaving a mere mass of mud and dirt where so late had been the
gracious gardens which had seen Raffaelle and Petrarca pace beneath
their shade. The Spanish Duke, Ripalda, whose passionate love for his
Farnesina was known to all Rome, died of the sorrow and fever brought on
by seeing its desecration, died actually of a broken heart. ‘I shall not
long survive them,’ he said to me, the tears standing in his proud eyes,
as he looked on the ruin of his avenues and lawns, which had so late
been the chief beauty of the Tiber, facing their sponsor and neighbour,
the majestic Farnese Palace.
To the student, the artist, the archæologist, to live in Rome now is to
suffer inexpressibly every hour, in mind and heart.
Who does not know the piazza of San Giovanni Laterano as it was? The
most exquisite scene of earth stretched around the most beautiful
basilica of the world! Go there now: the horizon is closed and the
landscape effaced, vile modern erections, crowded, paltry, monstrous in
their impudence and in their degradation, shut out the green plains, the
azure hills, the divine, ethereal distance, and close around the
spiritual beauty of the great church, like bow-legged ban-dogs round a
stag at bay. The intolerable outrage of it, the inconceivable shame of
it, the crass obstinacy and stupidity which make such havoc possible,
should fill the dullest soul with indignation. Yet such things are being
done yearly, daily, hourly, ceaselessly, and with impunity all over
Italy, and no voice is raised in protest. Whenever any such voice is
raised, it is seldom that of an Italian; it is that of Ruskin, Story,
Yriarte, Taine, Vernon Lee, Augustus Hare, or it is my own, to the
begetting of ten thousand enemies, to the receiving of twice ten
thousand maledictions.
Nor is it only in the great cities that such ruin is wrought. In every
little hamlet, on every hill and plain there is the same process of
destruction going on, which I have before compared to the growth of
lupus on a human face. Rapidly, in every direction, the beauty, the
marvellous, the incomparable, natural, and architectural beauty of the
country is being destroyed by crass ignorance and still viler greed.
Along those famous hillsides, which rise above Careggi, there was, until
a few months ago, a landmark dear to all the countryside, a line of
colossal cypresses which had been planted there by the hand of the Pater
Patriæ, Cosimo de’ Medici himself. These grand and noble trees were
lately sold, with the ground on which they stood, to a native doctor of
Florence, who _immediately felled them_. Yet if before this unpardonable
action, in looking on the fallen giants, anyone is moved to see the pity
of it and curse the stupid greed which set the axe at their sacred
trunks, he who does so mourn is never the prince, the noble, the banker,
the merchant, the tradesman; it is some foreign painter or scholar, or
some peasant of the soil who remembers the time when one vast avenue
connected Florence and Prato.
Within one mile of each other there are, near Florence, a green knoll,
crowned with an ancient church, and a river, shaded by poplar trees; the
beauty of the hill was an historic tower, dating from the year 1000,
massive, mighty, very strong, having withstood the wars of eight
centuries; at its foot was a stately and aged stone pine. The beauty of
the river was a wide bend, where the trees and the hills opened out from
the water, and a graceful wooden bridge spanned it, chiefly used by the
millers’ carts and the peasants’ mules. In the gracious spring-time of
last year, the old tower was pulled down to be used for building
materials, for which it was found that it could not be used, and the
stone pine was felled, because its shade prevented a few beans to the
value of, perhaps, two francs growing beneath it. On the river the white
wooden bridge has been pulled down, and a huge, red, brick structure,
like a ponderous railway bridge, hideous, grotesque, and shutting out
all the sylvan view up stream, has been erected in its stead, altogether
unfitted for the slender rural traffic which alone passes there, and
costing a heavy price, levied by taxation from a rural, and far from
rich, community. Thus are two exquisite landscapes wantonly ruined; no
one who has known those scenes, as they were a year ago, can endure to
look at them as they are. There was no plea or pretext of necessity for
such a change; the one was due to private greed, the other to municipal
brutishness and speculation; some persons are a few pounds the heavier
in purse, the country is for ever so much the poorer.
There is, within another mile, an old castellated villa with two mighty
towers, one at either end, and within it chambers panelled with oak
carvings of the Quattro Cento, of great delicacy and vigour of
execution; it stands amidst a rich champagne country, abounding in vine
and grain and fruits, and bears one of the greatest names of history.
_It is now about to be turned into a candle manufactory!_ In vain do the
agriculturists around protest that the filthy stench of the offal which
will be brought there, and the noxious fumes of the smoke, which will
pour from the furnace chimney about to be erected amongst its fir-trees,
will do infinite harm to the vineyards and orchards around. No one gives
ear to their lament. Private cupidity and communal greed run hand in
hand; and the noble building is doomed beyond hope. Who can hold their
soul in patience or seal their lips to silence before such impiety and
imbecility as this?
When this kind of destruction is going on everywhere, in every city,
town, village, province, commune, all over Italy, who can measure the
ultimate effects upon the face of the country? What, in ten years’ time,
will be left of it as Eustace and Stendahl saw it? What, in twenty
years’ time, will be left of it as we now know it? Every day some
architectural beauty, some noble avenue, some court or loggia or
gateway, some green lawn, or shadowy ilex grove, or sculptured basin,
musical with falling water, and veiled with moss and maidenhair, is
swept away for ever that some jerry-builder may raise his rotten walls
or some tradesman put up his plate-glass front, or some dreary desert of
rubble and stones delight the eyes of wise modernity.
It is impossible to imagine any kind of building more commonplace, more
ugly, and less suitable to the climate than the modern architecture, or
rather masons’ work, which has become dear to the modern Italian mind.
It is the kind of house which was built in London twenty or thirty years
ago, and now in London is despised and detested. The fine old hospital
of Santa Lucia, strong as a rock, and sound as an oak, has recently been
knocked down by a man who, returning with a fortune made in America,
desired to be able to name a street after himself. (Streets used to be
named after heroes who dwelt in them; they are now named after
_rastaqouères_, who pull them down and build them up again.) Instead of
the hospital, there are erected some houses on the model of London
houses of thirty years ago, with narrow, ignoble windows and façades of
the genuine Bayswater and Westbourne Grove type. There has not been one
opposing voice to their erection, and any censure of them is immediately
answered by a reference to the brand-new dollars of their builder. In
the suburbs it is the hideous cottage (here called _villino_), which,
having disgraced the environs of London and Paris, is now rapturously
set up in the neighbourhood of Italian towns. Both these types of
house-building (for architecture it is absurd to call it) are as
degraded as they can possibly be; and, whereas the London and Paris
suburban cottages have frequently the redeeming feature of long windows
down to the ground, modern Italian houses have narrow windows of the
meanest possible kind, affording no light in winter and no air in
summer. The horrible English fashion of putting a window on each side of
a narrow doorway is considered beautiful in Italy, and slavishly
followed everywhere, whilst the climbing roses and evergreen creepers
which in England and France so constantly cover the poorness of modern
houses, are, in Italy, only conspicuous by their absence. The noble
loggias, and balconies, and colonnades of old Italian mansions were in
the old time run over with the tea rose, the glycine and the banksia;
but the wretched modern Italian ‘villino’ is, in all its impudence,
naked and not ashamed.
These dreadful modern constructions, with flimsy walls, slate roof,
pinched doorway, mean windows, commonness, cheapness and meanness
staring from every brick in their body, are disgracing the approach of
every Italian city; they are met with climbing the slope of
Bellosguardo, beside the hoary walls of Signa, behind the cypresses of
the Poggio Imperiale, on the road to the Ponte Nomentana, outside the
Porta Salara, on the way to the baths of Caracalla, close against the
walls of the Colosseum, above the green canal water of Venice, in front
of the glad blue sea by Santa Lucia, anywhere, everywhere, insulting the
past, making hideous the present, suited to no season and absurd in
every climate, the rickety offspring of a century incapable of artistic
procreation.
It is impossible to enter into the minds of men who actually consider it
a finer thing, a prouder thing, to be a third-rate, mediocre, commercial
city than to be the first artistic, or the noblest historic, city of the
world. Yet this is what the modern Italian, the Italian who governs in
ministry, bureaucracy, municipality, and press, deliberately does
prefer. He thinks it more glorious, and worthier, to be a feeble
imitation of a shoddy American city than to be supreme in historic,
artistic and natural beauty. He will sell his Tiziano, his Donatello,
his Greek and Roman marbles, and his Renaissance tapestries without
shame; and he will pant and puff with pride because he has secured a
dirty tramway coaling-yard, has befouled his atmosphere with mephitic
vapours and coal-tar gas, and has reduced his lovely _verzaja_, so late
green with glancing foliage and fresh with rippling water, into a
howling desert of iron rails, shot rubbish, bricks and mortar, unsightly
sheds, and smoke-belching chimneys. To the educated observer the choice
is as piteous and as grotesque as that of the South Sea Islander
greedily exchanging his pure, pear-shaped, virgin pearl for the glass
and pinchbeck of a Birmingham brooch.
Not many years ago there was in these gardens of the Oricellari of which
I have spoken a neglected statue lying unnoticed in a darksome place. It
was the Cupid of Michaelangelo, which, being discovered by the sculptor
Santerelli, there and then was sold to the South Kensington Museum,
where it may be seen to-day. This will ere long be the fate of all the
sculptures and statues of Italy, and the ‘modern spirit’ now prevailing
in the country will consider it best that it should be so.
The empty word of ‘progress’ which is repeated by all nations in this
day, as if they were parrots, and has as much meaning in it as if it
were only ‘poor poll,’ is continually used to cover, or feign to excuse,
all these barbarous enormities; but most insincerely, most vainly. To
turn a rich agricultural country into a fourth-rate manufacturing one
can claim neither sagacity nor prudence as its defence. To demolish
noble, ancient and beautiful things, in order to reproduce the modern
mushroom-growths of a dreary and dusty ‘western township,’ can allege
neither sense nor shrewdness as its excuse; it is simply extremely
silly; even if inspired by greed it is both silly and short-sighted. Yet
it is the only thing which the Italian municipal councils consider it
excellent to do; they have, after their manner, sufficiently paid
tribute to the arts when they have chipped a Luca Della Robbia medallion
out of an ancient wall and put it away in a glass case in some gallery,
or when they have taken an altar (as they have just taken the silver
altar out of San Giovanni) and locked it up in some museum where nobody
goes.[E]
-----
Footnote E:
This altar has been since, at the entreaty of the people, replaced in
San Giovanni.
-----
To the arguments of common sense that an altar is as safe, and as
visible, in the baptistery as in a museum, and that five centuries have
passed over Luca’s out-of-door work without wind or weather, heat or
frost, impairing it in the least, no one in the municipal council of any
town would for a moment attend. They do not want reason or fitness; they
only want the vaporous, fussy, greedy, braggart ‘modern tone.’
Everyone who has visited Florence knows the house fronting the gate of
San Pier Gattolino (Porta Romana), on the front of which are found
remnants of an almost wholly damaged fresco, through which a window has
been cut. The house was once radiant with the frescoes of Giovanni di
San Giovanni, which Cosimo dé Medici caused to be painted on its façade,
because fronting the gateway by which all travellers came from Rome, ‘it
was to be desired, for the honour of the city, that the first impression
of all such travellers should be one of joy and beauty, to the end that
such strangers might receive pleasure therein and tarry willingly.’ This
wise and hospitable reasoning has been utterly lost sight of by those
who rule our modern cities, and the approaches to all of them are
defiled and disfigured, so that the heart of the traveller sinks within
his breast. Instead of Cosimo’s gay and gracious fresco-pageantry upon
the walls, there are only now, by the Romano gate, a steam tramway
belching filthy smoke, a string of carts waiting to be taxed, and a
masons’ scaffolding where lately towered the Torrigiani trees!
Reflect for a moment what the rule of—we will not say an Augustus, but
merely of a Magnifico, of a Francois Premier—might have made in these
thirty years of modern Italy. Marvellous beauty, incomparable grandeur
of form, surpassing loveliness of Nature, entire sympathy of the
cultured world and splendour immeasurable of tradition and example, all
these after the peace of Villafranca, as after the breach of Porta Pia,
lay ready to the hand of any ruler of the land who could have
comprehended their meaning and their magnificence, their assured
opportunity and their offered harmony.
But there was no one; and the moment has long passed.
The country has been guided instead into the trumpery and ephemeral
triumphs of what is called modern civilisation, and an endless
expenditure has gone hand in hand with a mistaken policy.
Whenever a royal visit is made to any Italian town, the preparations for
it invariably include some frightful act of demolition, as when at
Bologna, on the occasion of the late state visit of the sovereigns, the
noble Communal Palace of that city was bedaubed all over with a light
colouring, and its exquisitely picturesque and irregular casements were
altered, enlarged, and cut about into the mathematical monotony dear to
the municipal mind, no one present having sense to see that all the
harmony and dignity of its architecture were ruthlessly obliterated.
Some similar action is considered necessary in every town, big or
little, before the reception of any prince, native or foreign. The
results are easily conceived. It is said that William of Germany did not
conceal his ridicule of the colossal equestrian statues in _pasteboard_
which were set up in the station entrance at Rome in his honour; but as
a rule the royal persons in Europe appear not to have any artistic
feeling to offend. The only two who had any were hurled in their youth,
by a tragic fate, out of a world with which they had little affinity.
Those who remain have no sympathy for tradition or for the arts. The
abominations done daily in their names and before their eyes leave them
wholly unmoved. Nay, it is no secret that they do constantly approve and
urge on the vandalism of their epoch.
The Italian people would have been easily led into a higher and wiser
form of life. (I speak of the Italian people as distinguished from the
Italian bureaucracy and borghesia, which are both of a crass and
hopeless philistinism.) The country people especially have an artistic
sense still latent in them, and they remain often artistic in their
attire, despite the debasing temptations of cheap and vulgar modern
clothing. Their ear for music is generally perfect, they detect
instantly the false note or the faulty chord which many an educated
hearer might let pass unnoticed. Their national songs, serenades, and
poems are admirable in purity and grace, and although now, alas!
comparatively rarely heard on hillside and by seashore, they remain
essentially the verse of the people. Unfortunately this part of the
nation is absolutely unrepresented. The noisy agitator, the greedy
office-seeker, the unscrupulous politician, the pert, unhealthy lawyer
crowd to the front and screech and roar until they are esteemed both at
home and abroad to be the sole and indivisible ‘public,’ whilst their
influence, by intrigue and bustle, does most unhappily predominate in
all spheres municipal and political; and the entire press, subsidised by
them, justifies them in all they do and pushes their selfish and
soulless speculations down the throats of unwilling and helpless men.
‘Mi son meco,’ says Benedetto Varchi, ‘molte volte stranamente
maravigliato com’ esser posso che in quelli uomini i quali son usati per
piccolissimo prezzo, insino della prima fanciullezza loro, a portare le
balle della Lana in guisi di facchini, e le sporte della Seta a uso di
zanaiuoli, ed in somma a star poco meno che schiavi tutto il giorno, e
gran pezza della notte alla Caviglia e al fuso, si ritrovi poi in molti
di loro, dove e quando bisogna, tanta grandezza d’anima e cosi nobili e
alti pensieri, che sappiamo, e osino non solo di dire ma di fare quelle
tante e si belle cose, ch’ eglino parte dicono, e parte fanno.’[F]
-----
Footnote F:
‘I have in myself wondered strangely many a time how it is possible
that in men who from their earliest youth have been used at the lowest
price to bear bales of wool as porters and baskets of silk as
carriers, and in a word to be little better than slaves all the day
long, and to spend a great part of the night at carding and spinning,
can in so many cases display, when there is opportunity and need, so
much greatness of soul and such high and noble thoughts, and cannot
only say but do such beautiful things as are said and done by them.’
_Zanaiuoli_ means, literally, ‘whoever carries a basket’; there is no
exact English equivalent.
-----
A people of whom this was essentially, and not merely rhetorically,
true, would have been with little difficulty kept within the fair realm
of art and guided to a fine ideal, in lieu of being given for their
guides the purchased quill-men of a venal journalism, and bidden to
worship a dirty traction-engine, a plate-glass shop front, and a bridge
of cast-iron, painted red.
If through the last thirty years a sovereign with the cultured tastes of
a Leonello d’Este or a Lorenzo del Moro, had been dominant in the
councils of Italy, he would have made his influence and his desires so
felt that the municipalities and ministries would not have dared to
commit the atrocities they have done. Constitutional monarchs may be
powerless in politics, but in art and taste their power for good and for
evil is vast. Alas! in no country in Europe is any one of them a scholar
or a connoisseur. They have no knowledge of the one field in which alone
their influence would be unhampered, and might be salutary. They think
themselves forced to pat and praise the modern playthings of war and
science, and of beauty they have no conception, of antiquity they have
merely jealousy.
It is to be deplored, not only as a national, but as a world-wide, loss
that Modern Italy has entirely missed and misconceived the way to true
greatness and to true prosperity. In other centuries she was the light
of the world; in this she deliberately prefers to be the valet of
Germany and the ape of America. Had there been men capable of
comprehending her true way to a new life, and capable of leading her
varied populations in that way, she might have seen a true and a second
Renaissance. But those men are not existing, have not existed, within
recent times for her; her chiefs have all been men who, on the contrary,
knew nothing of art and cared nothing for nature; a statesman like
Cavour, a conspirator like Mazzini, a free-lance like Garibaldi, a
soldier like Victor Emmanuel were none of them men to understand, much
less to re-create, the true genius of the nation; their eyes were fixed
on political troubles, on social questions, on acquisition of territory,
on quarrels with the Pope, and alliances with reigning houses. Since
their death lesser people have taken their places, but have all followed
in the same tracks, have all misled the nation to imagine that her
_risorgimento_ lies in copying American steam-engines and keeping
ironclads ready for a signal from the potentate of Berlin.
Italy might be now, as she was in the past, the Muse, the Grace, the
Artemis and the Athene of the world; she thinks it a more glorious thing
to be only one amongst a sweating mob of mill-hands.
Italy, beautiful, classic, peaceful, wise with the wisdom inherited from
her fathers, would have been the garden of the world, the sanctuary of
pure art and of high thought, the singer of immortal song. Instead, she
has deliberately chosen to be the mere imitator of a coarse and noisy
crowd on the other side of the Atlantic, and the mere echo of the armed
bully who dictates to her from the banks of the Spree.