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 rarest things of an earlier year were as rare as

ever. To enumerate these felicities 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 beguiled me more; 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 canvases and panels 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 enclosed 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 don’t 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, the elegant Andrea becomes deeply effective. Before long he

has drawn you close. 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 clearest,

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--it seemed

to me more than ever that if one really had to choose one couldn’t do

better than choose here. You may rest at your ease 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 masterful though 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 pure enough for the

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

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

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

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

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

suppressed religious houses; 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 odious 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 call at these places, in a manner, from the

window of the train; even if you didn’t stop, as you probably couldn’t,

every time you passed, the immensely interesting way in which, like a

loosened belt on an aged and shrunken person, their ample walls held

them easily together was something well worth noting. Now, however,

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

consequence... In consequence what? What is the result of the stop of

an express train at Orvieto? As I glibly wrote that sentence I suddenly

paused, aware 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

hang about is a fact over which, as he records it, an inveterate, a

perverse cherisher of the sense of the past order, the order still

largely prevailing at the time of his first visit to Italy, 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 without scruple of both of

these occasions, having formerly neglected to drive to the place in a

post-chaise. But frankly, the railway-station being in the plain and the

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

the puffing indiscretion while you wind upwards to the city-gate. The

position of Orvieto is superb--worthy of the “middle distance” of an

eighteenth-century landscape. But, as every one knows, the splendid

Cathedral is the proper attraction of the spot, 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 took in the charming

church. I gave it my best attention, though on the whole I fear I found

it inferior to its fame. A high concert of colour, however, is the

densely carved front, richly covered with radiant 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 glorious weather. Very striking and interesting the theological

frescoes of Luca Signorelli, though I have seen compositions of this

general order that appealed to me more. Characteristically fresh,

finally, 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.

Yet 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 the applied devotion of a people of which an American

scholar has written an admirable account.{1}

1877.

{1} Charles Eliot Norton, _Notes of Travel and Study in Italy_.