IV

I went the other day to the secularised Convent of San Marco, paid my

franc at the profane little wicket which creaks away at the door--no

less than six custodians, apparently, are needed to turn it, as if it

may have a recusant conscience--passed along the bright, still cloister

and paid my respects to Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion, in that dusky

chamber in the basement. I looked long; one can hardly do otherwise. The

fresco deals with the pathetic on the grand scale, and after taking

in its beauty you feel as little at liberty to go away abruptly as

you would to leave church during the sermon. You may be as little of

a formal Christian as Fra Angelico was much of one; you yet feel

admonished by spiritual decency to let so yearning a view of the

Christian story work its utmost will on you. The three crosses rise high

against a strange completely crimson sky, which deepens mysteriously

the tragic expression of the scene, though I remain perforce vague as to

whether this lurid background be a fine intended piece of symbolism or

an effective accident of time. In the first case the extravagance quite

triumphs. Between the crosses, under no great rigour of composition,

are scattered the most exemplary saints--kneeling, praying, weeping,

pitying, worshipping. The swoon of the Madonna is depicted at the left,

and this gives the holy presences, in respect to the case, the strangest

historical or actual air. Everything is so real that you feel a vague

impatience and almost ask yourself how it was that amid the army of his

consecrated servants our Lord was permitted to suffer. On reflection you

see that the painter’s design, so far as coherent, has been simply to

offer an immense representation of Pity, and all with such concentrated

truth that his colours here seem dissolved in tears that drop and drop,

however softly, through all time. Of this single yearning consciousness

the figures are admirably expressive. No later painter learned to render

with deeper force than Fra Angelico the one state of the spirit he could

conceive--a passionate pious tenderness. Immured in his quiet convent,

he apparently never received an intelligible impression of evil; and his

conception of human life was a perpetual sense of sacredly loving

and being loved. But how, immured in his quiet convent, away from the

streets and the studios, did he become that genuine, finished, perfectly

professional painter? No one is less of a mere mawkish amateur. His

range was broad, from this really heroic fresco to the little trumpeting

seraphs, in their opaline robes, enamelled, as it were, on the gold

margins of his pictures.

I sat out the sermon and departed, I hope, with the gentle preacher’s

blessing. I went into the smaller refectory, near by, to refresh my

memory of the beautiful Last Supper of Domenico Ghirlandaio. It would be

putting things coarsely to say that I adjourned thus from a sernlon to

a comedy, though Ghirlandaio’s theme, as contrasted with the blessed

Angelico’s, was the dramatic spectacular side of human life. How keenly

he observed it and how richly he rendered it, the world about him of

colour and costume, of handsome heads and pictorial groupings! In his

admirable school there is no painter one enjoys--_pace_ Ruskin--more

sociably and irresponsibly. Lippo Lippi is simpler, quainter,

more frankly expressive; but we retain before him a remnant of the

sympathetic discomfort provoked by the masters whose conceptions were

still a trifle too large for their means. The pictorial vision in their

minds seems to stretch and strain their undeveloped skill almost to a

sense of pain. In Ghirlandaio the skill and the imagination are equal,

and he gives us a delightful impression of enjoying his own resources.

Of all the painters of his time he affects us least as positively not

of ours. He enjoyed a crimson mantle spreading and tumbling in curious

folds and embroidered with needlework of gold, just as he enjoyed a

handsome well-rounded head, with vigorous dusky locks, profiled in

courteous adoration. He enjoyed in short the various reality of things,

and had the good fortune to live in an age when reality flowered into a

thousand amusing graces--to speak only of those. He was not especially

addicted to giving spiritual hints; and yet how hard and meagre they

seem, the professed and finished realists of our own day, with the

spiritual _bonhomie_ or candour that makes half Ghirlandaio’s richness

left out! The Last Supper at San Marco is an excellent example of the

natural reverence of an artist of that time with whom reverence was

not, as one may say, a specialty. The main idea with him has been the

variety, the material bravery and positively social charm of the

scene, which finds expression, with irrepressible generosity, in the

accessories of the background. Instinctively he imagines an opulent

garden--imagines it with a good faith which quite tides him over the

reflection that Christ and his disciples were poor men and unused to sit

at meat in palaces. Great full-fruited orange-trees peep over the wall

before which the table is spread, strange birds fly through the air,

while a peacock perches on the edge of the partition and looks down

on the sacred repast. It is striking that, without any at all intense

religious purpose, the figures, in their varied naturalness, have a

dignity and sweetness of attitude that admits of numberless reverential

constructions. I should call all this the happy tact of a robust faith.

On the staircase leading up to the little painted cells of the Beato

Angelico, however, I suddenly faltered and paused. Somehow I had grown

averse to the intenser zeal of the Monk of Fiesole. I wanted no more of

him that day. I wanted no more macerated friars and spear-gashed sides.

Ghirlandaio’s elegant way of telling his story had put me in the humour

for something more largely intelligent, more profanely pleasing.

I departed, walked across the square, and found it in the Academy,

standing in a particular spot and looking up at a particular high-hung

picture. It is difficult to speak adequately, perhaps even intelligibly,

of Sandro Botticelli. An accomplished critic--Mr. Pater, in his _Studies

on the History of the Renaissance_--has lately paid him the tribute

of an exquisite, a supreme, curiosity. He was rarity and distinction

incarnate, and of all the multitudinous masters of his group

incomparably the most interesting, the one who detains and perplexes

and fascinates us most. Exquisitely fine his imagination--infinitely

audacious and adventurous his fancy. Alone among the painters of his

time he strikes us as having invention. The glow and thrill of expanding

observation--this was the feeling that sent his comrades to their

easels; but Botticelli’s moved him to reactions and emotions of which

they knew nothing, caused his faculty to sport and wander and explore

on its own account. These impulses have fruits often so ingenious and so

lovely that it would be easy to talk nonsense about them. I hope it is

not nonsense, however, to say that the picture to which I just alluded

(the “Coronation of the Virgin,” with a group of life-sized saints

below and a garland of miniature angels above) is one of the supremely

beautiful productions of the human mind. It is hung so high that

you need a good glass to see it; to say nothing of the unprecedented

delicacy of the work. The lower half is of moderate interest; but the

dance of hand-clasped angels round the heavenly couple above has a

beauty newly exhaled from the deepest sources of inspiration. Their

perfect little hands are locked with ineffable elegance; their blowing

robes are tossed into folds of which each line is a study; their

charming feet have the relief of the most delicate sculpture. But, as

I have already noted, of Botticelli there is much, too much to

say--besides which Mr. Pater has said all. Only add thus to his

inimitable grace of design that the exquisite pictorial force driving

him goes a-Maying not on wanton errands of its own, but on those of some

mystic superstition which trembles for ever in his heart.

{Illustration: THE GREAT EAVES, FLORENCE}

V

The more I look at the old Florentine domestic architecture the more I

like it--that of the great examples at least; and if I ever am able to

build myself a lordly pleasure-house I don’t see how in conscience I can

build it different from these. They are sombre and frowning, and look

a trifle more as if they were meant to keep people out than to let

them in; but what equally “important” type--if there be an equally

important--is more expressive of domiciliary dignity and security and

yet attests them with a finer æesthetic economy? They are impressively

“handsome,” and yet contrive to be so by the simplest means. I don’t say

at the smallest pecuniary cost--that’s another matter. There is money

buried in the thick walls and diffused through the echoing excess of

space. The merchant nobles of the fifteenth century had deep and full

pockets, I suppose, though the present bearers of their names are glad

to let out their palaces in suites of apartments which are occupied by

the commercial aristocracy of another republic. One is told of fine old

mouldering chambers of which possession is to be enjoyed for a sum not

worth mentioning. I am afraid that behind these so gravely harmonious

fronts there is a good deal of dusky discomfort, and I speak now simply

of the large serious faces themselves as you can see them from the

street; see them ranged cheek to cheek, in the grey historic light of

Via dei Bardi, Via Maggio, Via degli Albizzi. The force of character,

the familiar severity and majesty, depend on a few simple features: on

the great iron-caged windows of the rough-hewn basement; on the noble

stretch of space between the summit of one high, round-topped window

and the bottom of that above; on the high-hung sculptured shield at the

angle of the house; on the flat far-projecting roof; and, finally, on

the magnificent tallness of the whole building, which so dwarfs our

modern attempts at size. The finest of these Florentine palaces are, I

imagine, the tallest habitations in Europe that are frankly and

amply habitations--not mere shafts for machinery of the American

grain-elevator pattern. Some of the creations of M. Haussmann in Paris

may climb very nearly as high; but there is all the difference in the

world between the impressiveness of a building which takes breath, as

it were, some six or seven times, from storey to storey, and of one that

erects itself to an equal height in three long-drawn pulsations. When

a house is ten windows wide and the drawing-room floor is as high as a

chapel it can afford but three floors. The spaciousness of some of those

ancient drawing-rooms is that of a Russian steppe. The “family circle,”

gathered anywhere within speaking distance, must resemble a group of

pilgrims encamped in the desert on a little oasis of carpet. Madame

Gryzanowska, living at the top of a house in that dusky, tortuous old

Borgo Pinti, initiated me the other evening most good-naturedly, lamp in

hand, into the far-spreading mysteries of her apartment. Such quarters

seem a translation into space of the old-fashioned idea of leisure.

Leisure and “room” have been passing out of our manners together, but

here and there, being of stouter structure, the latter lingers and

survives.

Here and there, indeed, in this blessed Italy, reluctantly modern in

spite alike of boasts and lamentations, it seems to have been preserved

for curiosity’s and fancy’s sake, with a vague, sweet odour of the

embalmer’s spices about it. I went the other morning to the Corsini

Palace. The proprietors obviously are great people. One of the ornaments

of Rome is their great white-faced palace in the dark Trastevere and

its voluminous gallery, none the less delectable for the poorness of

the pictures. Here they have a palace on the Arno, with another large,

handsome, respectable and mainly uninteresting collection. It contains

indeed three or four fine examples of early Florentines. It was not

especially for the pictures that I went, however; and certainly not for

the pictures that I stayed. I was under the same spell as the inveterate

companion with whom I walked the other day through the beautiful private

apartments of the Pitti Palace and who said: “I suppose I care for

nature, and I know there have been times when I have thought it the

greatest pleasure in life to lie under a tree and gaze away at blue

hills. But just now I had rather lie on that faded sea-green satin sofa

and gaze down through the open door at that retreating vista of gilded,

deserted, haunted chambers. In other words I prefer a good ‘interior’

to a good landscape. The impression has a greater intensity--the thing

itself a more complex animation. I like fine old rooms that have been

occupied in a fine old way. I like the musty upholstery, the antiquated

knick-knacks, the view out of the tall deep-embrasured windows at garden

cypresses rocking against a grey sky. If you don’t know why, I’m afraid

I can’t tell you.” It seemed to me at the Palazzo Corsini that I did

know why. In places that have been lived in so long and so much and in

such a fine old way, as my friend said--that is under social conditions

so multifold and to a comparatively starved and democratic sense so

curious--the past seems to have left a sensible deposit, an aroma, an

atmosphere. This ghostly presence tells you no secrets, but it prompts

you to try and guess a few. What has been done and said here through so

many years, what has been ventured or suffered, what has been dreamed or

despaired of? Guess the riddle if you can, or if you think it worth

your ingenuity. The rooms at Palazzo Corsini suggest indeed, and seem

to recall, but a monotony of peace and plenty. One of them imaged such

a noble perfection of a home-scene that I dawdled there until the old

custodian came shuffling back to see whether possibly I was trying

to conceal a Caravaggio about my person: a great crimson-draped

drawing-room of the amplest and yet most charming proportions; walls

hung with large dark pictures, a great concave ceiling frescoed and

moulded with dusky richness, and half-a-dozen south windows looking out

on the Arno, whose swift yellow tide sends up the light in a cheerful

flicker. I fear that in my appreciation of the particular effect so

achieved I uttered a monstrous folly--some momentary willingness to be

maimed or crippled all my days if I might pass them in such a place. In

fact half the pleasure of inhabiting this spacious saloon would be that

of using one’s legs, of strolling up and down past the windows, one by

one, and making desultory journeys from station to station and corner

to corner. Near by is a colossal ball-room, domed and pilastered like

a Renaissance cathedral, and super-abundantly decorated with marble

effigies, all yellow and grey with the years.