Florence too has its “season,” not less than Rome, and I have been
rejoicing for the past six weeks in the fact that this comparatively
crowded parenthesis hasn’t yet been opened. Coming here in the first
days of October I found the summer still in almost unmenaced possession,
and ever since, till within a day or two, the weight of its hand has
been sensible. Properly enough, as the city of flowers, Florence mingles
the elements most artfully in the spring--during the divine crescendo of
March and April, the weeks when six months of steady shiver have still
not shaken New York and Boston free of the long Polar reach. But the
very quality of the decline of the year as we at present here feel it
suits peculiarly the mood in which an undiscourageable gatherer of the
sense of things, or taster at least of “charm,” moves through these
many-memoried streets and galleries and churches. Old things, old
places, old people, or at least old races, ever strike us as giving out
their secrets most freely in such moist, grey, melancholy days as have
formed the complexion of the past fortnight. With Christmas arrives the
opera, the only opera worth speaking of--which indeed often means in
Florence the only opera worth talking through; the gaiety, the gossip,
the reminders in fine of the cosmopolite and watering-place character to
which the city of the Medici long ago began to bend her antique temper.
Meanwhile it is pleasant enough for the tasters of charm, as I say, and
for the makers of invidious distinctions, that the Americans haven’t all
arrived, however many may be on their way, and that the weather has a
monotonous overcast softness in which, apparently, aimless contemplation
grows less and less ashamed. There is no crush along the Cascine, as
on the sunny days of winter, and the Arno, wandering away toward the
mountains in the haze, seems as shy of being looked at as a good picture
in a bad light. No light, to my eyes, nevertheless, could be better
than this, which reaches us, all strained and filtered and refined,
exquisitely coloured and even a bit conspicuously sophisticated, through
the heavy air of the past that hangs about the place for ever.
I first knew Florence early enough, I am happy to say, to have heard the
change for the worse, the taint of the modern order, bitterly lamented
by old haunters, admirers, lovers--those qualified to present a picture
of the conditions prevailing under the good old Grand-Dukes, the two
last of their line in especial, that, for its blest reflection of
sweetness and mildness and cheapness and ease, of every immediate boon
in life to be enjoyed quite for nothing, could but draw tears from
belated listeners. Some of these survivors from the golden age--just the
beauty of which indeed was in the gold, of sorts, that it poured into
your lap, and not in the least in its own importunity on that head--have
needfully lingered on, have seen the ancient walls pulled down and
the compact and belted mass of which the Piazza della Signoria was the
immemorial centre expand, under the treatment of enterprising syndics,
into an ungirdled organism of the type, as they viciously say, of
Chicago; one of those places of which, as their grace of a circumference
is nowhere, the dignity of a centre can no longer be predicated.
Florence loses itself to-day in dusty boulevards and smart _beaux
quartiers_, such as Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann were to set the
fashion of to a too mediæval Europe--with the effect of some precious
page of antique text swallowed up in a marginal commentary that smacks
of the style of the newspaper. So much for what has happened on this
side of that line of demarcation which, by an odd law, makes us, with
our preference for what we are pleased to call the picturesque, object
to such occurrences even _as_ occurrences. The real truth is that
objections are too vain, and that he would be too rude a critic here,
just now, who shouldn’t be in the humour to take the thick with the
thin and to try at least to read something of the old soul into the new
forms.
There is something to be said moreover for your liking a city (once it’s
a question of your actively circulating) to pretend to comfort you more
by its extent than by its limits; in addition to which Florence was
anciently, was in her palmy days peculiarly, a daughter of change and
movement and variety, of shifting moods, policies and régimes--just
as the Florentine character, as we have it to-day, is a character that
takes all things easily for having seen so many come and go. It saw the
national capital, a few years since, arrive and sit down by the Arno,
and took no further thought than sufficed for the day; then it saw, the
odd visitor depart and whistled her cheerfully on her way to Rome. The
new boulevards of the Sindaco Peruzzi come, it may be said, but they
don’t go; which, after all, it isn’t from the æsthetic point of view
strictly necessary they should. A part of the essential amiability of
Florence, of her genius for making you take to your favour on easy terms
everything that in any way belongs to her, is that she has already flung
an element of her grace over all their undried mortar and plaster. Such
modern arrangements as the Piazza d’ Azeglio and the _viale_ or Avenue
of the Princess Margaret please not a little, I think--for what they
are!--and do so even in a degree, by some fine local privilege just
because they are Florentine. The afternoon lights rest on them as if to
thank them for not being worse, and their vistas are liberal where
they look toward the hills. They carry you close to these admirable
elevations, which hang over Florence on all sides, and if in the
foreground your sense is a trifle perplexed by the white pavements
dotted here and there with a policeman or a nursemaid, you have only to
reach beyond and see Fiesole turn to violet, on its ample eminence, from
the effect of the opposite sunset.
Facing again then to Florence proper you have local colour enough and
to spare--which you enjoy the more, doubtless, from standing off to get
your light and your point of view. The elder streets abutting on all
this newness bore away into the heart of the city in narrow, dusky
perspectives that quite refine, in certain places, by an art of their
own, on the romantic appeal. There are temporal and other accidents
thanks to which, as you pause to look down them and to penetrate the
deepening shadows that accompany their retreat, they resemble little
corridors leading out from the past, mystical like the ladder in Jacob’s
dream; so that when you see a single figure advance and draw nearer
you are half afraid to wait till it arrives--it must be too much of the
nature of a ghost, a messenger from an underworld. However this may be,
a place paved with such great mosaics of slabs and lined with palaces of
so massive a tradition, structures which, in their large dependence
on pure proportion for interest and beauty, reproduce more than other
modern styles the simple nobleness of Greek architecture, must ever have
placed dignity first in the scale of invoked effect and laid up no great
treasure of that ragged picturesqueness--the picturesqueness of large
poverty--on which we feast our idle eyes at Rome and Naples. Except in
the unfinished fronts of the churches, which, however, unfortunately,
are mere ugly blankness, one finds less of the poetry of ancient
over-use, or in other words less romantic southern shabbiness, than
in most Italian cities. At two or three points, none the less, this
sinister grace exists in perfection--just such perfection as so often
proves that what is literally hideous may be constructively delightful
and what is intrinsically tragic play on the finest chords of
appreciation. On the north side of the Arno, between Ponte Vecchio and
Ponte Santa Trinita, is a row of immemorial houses that back on the
river, in whose yellow flood they bathe their sore old feet. Anything
more battered and befouled, more cracked and disjointed, dirtier,
drearier, poorer, it would be impossible to conceive. They look as if
fifty years ago the liquid mud had risen over their chimneys and then
subsided again and left them coated for ever with its unsightly slime.
And yet forsooth, because the river is yellow, and the light is yellow,
and here and there, elsewhere, some mellow mouldering surface, some hint
of colour, some accident of atmosphere, takes up the foolish tale and
repeats the note--because, in short, it is Florence, it is Italy, and
the fond appraiser, the infatuated alien, may have had in his eyes, at
birth and afterwards, the micaceous sparkle of brown-stone fronts no
more interesting than so much sand-paper, these miserable dwellings,
instead of suggesting mental invocations to an enterprising board of
health, simply create their own standard of felicity and shamelessly
live in it. Lately, during the misty autumn nights, the moon has
shone on them faintly and refined their shabbiness away into something
ineffably strange and spectral. The turbid stream sweeps along without
a sound, and the pale tenements hang above it like a vague miasmatic
exhalation. The dimmest back-scene at the opera, when the tenor is
singing his sweetest, seems hardly to belong to a world more detached
from responsibility.
{Illustration: ON THE ARNO, FLORENCE.}
What it is that infuses so rich an interest into the general charm is
difficult to say in a few words; yet as we wander hither and thither in
quest of sacred canvas and immortal bronze and stone we still feel the
genius of the place hang about. Two industrious English ladies, the
Misses Horner, have lately published a couple of volumes of “Walks” by
the Arno-side, and their work is a long enumeration of great artistic
deeds. These things remain for the most part in sound preservation, and,
as the weeks go by and you spend a constant portion of your days among
them the sense of one of the happiest periods of human Taste--to put it
only at that--settles upon your spirit. It was not long; it lasted, in
its splendour, for less than a century; but it has stored away in the
palaces and churches of Florence a heritage of beauty that these three
enjoying centuries since haven’t yet exhausted. This forms a clear
intellectual atmosphere into which you may turn aside from the modern
world and fill your lungs as with the breath of a forgotten creed. The
memorials of the past here address us moreover with a friendliness, win
us by we scarcely know what sociability, what equal amenity, that we
scarce find matched in other great esthetically endowed communities and
periods. Venice, with her old palaces cracking under the weight of their
treasures, is, in her influence, insupportably sad; Athens, with her
maimed marbles and dishonoured memories, transmutes the consciousness of
sensitive observers, I am told, into a chronic heartache; but in one’s
impression of old Florence the abiding felicity, the sense of saving
sanity, of something sound and human, predominates, offering you a
medium still conceivable for life. The reason of this is partly, no
doubt, the “sympathetic” nature, the temperate joy, of Florentine art
in general--putting the sole Dante, greatest of literary artists, aside;
partly the tenderness of time, in its lapse, which, save in a few cases,
has been as sparing of injury as if it knew that when it should have
dimmed and corroded these charming things it would have nothing so sweet
again for its tooth to feed on. If the beautiful Ghirlandaios and Lippis
are fading, this generation will never know it. The large Fra Angelico
in the Academy is as clear and keen as if the good old monk stood
there wiping his brushes; the colours seem to _sing_, as it were, like
new-fledged birds in June. Nothing is more characteristic of early
Tuscan art than the high-reliefs of Luca della Robbia; yet there isn’t
one of them that, except for the unique mixture of freshness with its
wisdom, of candour with its expertness, mightn’t have been modelled
yesterday.
But perhaps the best image of the absence of stale melancholy or wasted
splendour, of the positive presence of what I have called temperate joy,
in the Florentine impression and genius, is the bell-tower of Giotto,
which rises beside the cathedral. No beholder of it will have forgotten
how straight and slender it stands there, how strangely rich in the
common street, plated with coloured marble patterns, and yet so far from
simple or severe in design that we easily wonder how its author, the
painter of exclusively and portentously grave little pictures, should
have fashioned a building which in the way of elaborate elegance, of the
true play of taste, leaves a jealous modern criticism nothing to
miss. Nothing can be imagined at once more lightly and more pointedly
fanciful; it might have been handed over to the city, as it stands,
by some Oriental genie tired of too much detail. Yet for all that
suggestion it seems of no particular time--not grey and hoary like
a Gothic steeple, not cracked and despoiled like a Greek temple;
its marbles shining so little less freshly than when they were laid
together, and the sunset lighting up its cornice with such a friendly
radiance, that you come at last to regard it simply as the graceful,
indestructible soul of the place made visible. The Cathedral,
externally, for all its solemn hugeness, strikes the same note of
would-be reasoned elegance and cheer; it has conventional grandeur, of
course, but a grandeur so frank and ingenuous even in its _parti-pris_.
It has seen so much, and outlived so much, and served so many sad
purposes, and yet remains in aspect so full of the fine Tuscan
geniality, the feeling for life, one may almost say the feeling for
amusement, that inspired it. Its vast many-coloured marble walls become
at any rate, with this, the friendliest note of all Florence; there
is an unfailing charm in walking past them while they lift their great
acres of geometrical mosaic higher in the air than you have time or
other occasion to look. You greet them from the deep street as you greet
the side of a mountain when you move in the gorge--not twisting back
your head to keep looking at the top, but content with the minor
accidents, the nestling hollows and soft cloud-shadows, the general
protection of the valley.
Florence is richer in pictures than we really know till we have begun to
look for them in outlying corners. Then, here and there, one comes upon
lurking values and hidden gems that it quite seems one might as a good
New Yorker quietly “bag” for the so aspiring Museum of that city without
their being missed. The Pitti Palace is of course a collection of
masterpieces; they jostle each other in their splendour, they perhaps
even, in their merciless multitude, rather fatigue our admiration. The
Uffizi is almost as fine a show, and together with that long serpentine
artery which crosses the Arno and connects them, making you ask
yourself, whichever way you take it, what goal can be grand enough to
crown such a journey, they form the great central treasure-chamber
of the town. But I have been neglecting them of late for love of the
Academy, where there are fewer copyists and tourists, above all fewer
pictorial lions, those whose roar is heard from afar and who strike
us as expecting overmuch to have it their own way in the jungle. The
pictures at the Academy are all, rather, doves--the whole impression is
less pompously tropical. Selection still leaves one too much to say, but
I noted here, on my last occasion, an enchanting Botticelli so obscurely
hung, in one of the smaller rooms, that I scarce knew whether most to
enjoy or to resent its relegation. Placed, in a mean black frame, where
you wouldn’t have looked for a masterpiece, it yet gave out to a good
glass every characteristic of one. Representing as it does the walk of
Tobias with the angel, there are really parts of it that an angel might
have painted; but I doubt whether it is observed by half-a-dozen persons
a year. That was my excuse for my wanting to know, on the spot, though
doubtless all sophistically, what dishonour, could the transfer be
artfully accomplished, a strong American light and a brave gilded frame
would, comparatively speaking, do it. There and then it would, shine
with the intense authority that we claim for the fairest things--would
exhale its wondrous beauty as a sovereign example. What it comes to
is that this master is the most interesting of a great band--the only
Florentine save Leonardo and Michael in whom the impulse was original
and the invention rare. His imagination is of things strange, subtle and
complicated--things it at first strikes us that we moderns have reason
to know, and that it has taken us all the ages to learn; so that we
permit ourselves to wonder how a “primitive” could come by them. We soon
enough reflect, however, that we ourselves have come by them almost only
_through_ him, exquisite spirit that he was, and that when we enjoy, or
at least when we encounter, in our William Morrises, in our
Rossettis and Burne-Joneses, the note of the haunted or over-charged
consciousness, we are but treated, with other matters, to repeated doses
of diluted Botticelli. He practically set with his own hand almost all
the copies to almost all our so-called pre-Raphaelites, earlier and
later, near and remote.
Let us at the same time, none the less, never fail of response to
the great Florentine geniality at large. Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi,
Ghirlandaio, were not “subtly” imaginative, were not even riotously so;
but what other three were ever more gladly observant, more vividly and
richly true? If there should some time be a weeding out of the world’s
possessions the best works of the early Florentines will certainly
be counted among the flowers. With the ripest performances of the
Venetians--by which I don’t mean the over-ripe--we can but take them for
the most valuable things in the history of art. Heaven forbid we should
be narrowed down to a cruel choice; but if it came to a question of
keeping or losing between half-a-dozen Raphaels and half-a-dozen things
it would be a joy to pick out at the Academy, I fear that, for myself,
the memory of the Transfiguration, or indeed of the other Roman relics
of the painter, wouldn’t save the Raphaels. And yet this was so far from
the opinion of a patient artist whom I saw the other day copying the
finest of Ghirlandaios--a beautiful Adoration of the Kings at the
Hospital of the Innocenti. Here was another sample of the buried
art-wealth of Florence. It hangs in an obscure chapel, far aloft, behind
an altar, and though now and then a stray tourist wanders in and puzzles
a while over the vaguely-glowing forms, the picture is never really
seen and enjoyed. I found an aged Frenchman of modest mien perched on a
little platform beneath it, behind a great hedge of altar-candlesticks,
with an admirable copy all completed. The difficulties of his task had
been well-nigh insuperable, and his performance seemed to me a real feat
of magic. He could scarcely move or turn, and could find room for his
canvas but by rolling it together and painting a small piece at a time,
so that he never enjoyed a view of his _ensemble_. The original is
gorgeous with colour and bewildering with decorative detail, but not
a gleam of the painter’s crimson was wanting, not a curl in his gold
arabesques. It seemed to me that if I had copied a Ghirlandaio in such
conditions I would at least maintain for my own credit that he was the
first painter in the world. “Very good of its kind,” said the weary old
man with a shrug of reply for my raptures; “but oh, how far short of
Raphael!” However that may be, if the reader chances to observe this
consummate copy in the so commendable Museum devoted in Paris to such
works, let him stop before it with a due reverence; it is one of the
patient things of art. Seeing it wrought there, in its dusky nook, under
such scant convenience, I found no bar in the painter’s foreignness to
a thrilled sense that the old art-life of Florence isn’t yet extinct. It
still at least works spells and almost miracles.
1873.