VI

It was very charming, in the bright, warm days, to wander from one

corner of Florence to another, paying one's respects again to remembered

masterpieces. It was pleasant also to find that memory had played no

tricks, and that the beautiful things of an earlier year were as

beautiful as ever. To enumerate these beautiful things would take a

great deal of space; for I never had been more struck with the mere

quantity of brilliant Florentine work. Even giving up the Duomo and

Santa Croce to Mr. Ruskin as very ill-arranged edifices, the list of the

Florentine treasures is almost inexhaustible. Those long outer galleries

of the Uffizi had never seemed to me more delectable; sometimes there

were not more than two or three figures standing there, Baedeker in

hand, to break the charming perspective. One side of this

upstairs-portico, it will be remembered, is entirely composed of glass;

a continuity of old-fashioned windows, draped with white curtains of

rather primitive fashion, which hang there till they acquire a

perceptible "tone." The light, passing through them, is softly filtered

and diffused; it rests mildly upon the old marbles--chiefly antique

Roman busts--which stand in the narrow intervals of the casements. It is

projected upon the numerous pictures that cover the opposite wall, and

that are not by any means, as a general thing, the gems of the great

collection; it imparts a faded brightness to the old ornamental

arabesques upon the painted wooden ceiling, and it makes a great soft

shining upon the marble floor, in which, as you look up and down, you

see the strolling tourists and the motionless copyists almost reflected.

I don't know why I should find all this very pleasant, but, in fact, I

have seldom gone into the Uffizi without walking the length of this

third-story cloister, between the (for the most part) third-rate

pictures and the faded cotton curtains. Why is it that in Italy we see a

charm in things in regard to which in other countries we always take

vulgarity for granted? If in the city of New York a great museum of the

arts were to be provided, by way of decoration, with a species of

verandah inclosed on one side by a series of small-paned windows, draped

in dirty linen, and furnished on the other with an array of pictorial

feebleness, the place being surmounted by a thinly-painted wooden roof,

strongly suggestive of summer heat, of winter cold, of frequent leakage,

those amateurs who had had the advantage of foreign travel would be at

small pains to conceal their contempt. Contemptible or respectable, to

the judicial mind, this quaint old loggia of the Uffizi admitted me into

twenty chambers where I found as great a number of ancient favourites. I

do not know that I had a warmer greeting for any old friend than for

Andrea del Sarto, that most touching of painters who is not one of the

first. But it was on the other side of the Arno that I found him in

force, in those dusky drawing-rooms of the Pitti Palace, to which you

take your way along the tortuous tunnel that wanders through the houses

of Florence, and is supported by the little goldsmiths' booths on the

Ponte Vecchio. In the rich, insufficient light of these beautiful rooms,

where, to look at the pictures, you sit in damask chairs and rest your

elbows on tables of malachite, Andrea del Sarto becomes peculiarly

effective. Before long you feel a real affection for him. But the great

pleasure, after all, was to revisit the earlier masters, in those

specimens of them chiefly that bloom so unfadingly on the big, plain

walls of the Academy. Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, and

Lorenzo di Credi are the sweetest and best of all painters; as I sat for

an hour in their company, in the cold great hall of the institution I

have mentioned--there are shabby rafters above and an immense expanse of

brick tiles below, and many bad pictures as well as good ones--it seemed

to me more than ever that if one really had to choose one could not do

better than choose here. You may sit very quietly and comfortably at the

Academy, in this big first room--at the upper end, especially, on the

left--because more than many other places it savours of old Florence.

More for instance, in reality, than the Bargello, though the Bargello

makes great pretensions. Beautiful and picturesque as the Bargello is,

it smells too strongly of restoration, and, much of old Italy as still

lurks in its furbished and renovated chambers, it speaks even more

distinctly of the ill-mannered young kingdom that has (as unavoidably as

you please) lifted down a hundred delicate works of sculpture from the

convent-walls where their pious authors placed them. If the early Tuscan

painters are exquisite, I can think of no praise generous enough for the

sculptors of the same period, Donatello and Luca della Robbia, Matteo

Civitale and Mino da Fiesole, who, as I refreshed my memory of them,

seemed to me to leave absolutely nothing to be desired in the way of

purity of inspiration and grace of invention. The Bargello is full of

early Tuscan sculpture, most of the pieces of which have come from

suppressed convents; and even if the visitor be an ardent liberal, he is

uncomfortably conscious of the rather brutal process by which it has

been collected. One can hardly envy young Italy the number of

disagreeable things she has had to do.

The railway journey from Florence to Rome has been altered both for the

better and for the worse; for the better, in that it has been shortened

by a couple of hours; for the worse, inasmuch as, when about half the

distance has been traversed, the train deflects to the west, and leaves

the beautiful old cities of Assisi, Perugia, Terni, Narni, unvisited. Of

old, it was possible to visit these places, in a manner, from the window

of the train; even if you did not stop, as you probably could not, every

time you passed, the picturesque fashion in which, like a loosened belt

on an aged and shrunken person, their old red walls held them easily

together was something well worth noting. Now, however, by way of

compensation, the express-train to Rome stops at Orvieto, and in

consequence... In consequence what? What is the consequence of an

express train stopping at Orvieto? As I glibly wrote that sentence I

suddenly paused, with a sense of the queer stuff I was uttering. That an

express train would graze the base of the horrid purple mountain from

the apex of which this dark old Catholic city uplifts the glittering

front of its cathedral--that might have been foretold by a keen observer

of contemporary manners. But that it would really have the grossness to

stop there, this is a fact over which, as he records it, a sentimental

chronicler may well make what is vulgarly called an ado. The train does

stop at Orvieto, not very long, it is true, but long enough to let you

out. The same phenomenon takes place on the following day, when, having

visited the city, you get in again. I availed myself of both of these

occasions, having formerly neglected to drive to Orvieto in a

post-chaise. And really, the railway-station being in the plain, and the

town on the summit of an extraordinary hill, you have time to forget all

about the triumphs of steam, while you wind upwards to the city-gate.

The position of Orvieto is superb; it is worthy of the "middle distance"

of a last-century landscape. But, as every one knows, the beautiful

cathedral is the proper attraction of the place, which, indeed, save for

this fine monument, and for its craggy and crumbling ramparts, is a

meanly arranged and, as Italian cities go, not particularly impressive

little town. I spent a beautiful Sunday there, and I looked at the

charming church. I looked at it a great deal--a great deal considering

that on the whole I found it inferior to its fame. Intensely brilliant,

however, is the densely carved front; densely covered with the

freshest-looking mosaics. The old white marble of the sculptured

portions is as softly yellow as ancient ivory; the large, exceedingly

bright pictures above them flashed and twinkled in the splendid weather.

Very beautiful and interesting are the theological frescoes of Luca

Signorelli, though I have seen pictures that struck me as more

attaching. Very enchanting, finally, are the clear-faced saints and

seraphs, in robes of pink and azure, whom Fra Angelico has painted upon

the ceiling of the great chapel, along with a noble sitting figure--more

expressive of movement than most of the creations of this pictorial

peace-maker--of Christ in judgment. But the interest of the cathedral of

Orvieto is mainly not the visible result, but the historical process

that lies behind it; those three hundred years of devoted popular labour

of which an American scholar has written an admirable account.[1]

[Footnote 1: Charles Eliot Norton: _Study and Travel in Italy._]