In the Roman streets, wherever you turn, the facade of a church in more
or less degenerate flamboyance is the principal feature of the scene;
and if, in the absence of purer motives, you are weary of aesthetic
trudging over the corrugated surface of the Seven Hills, a system of
pavement in which small cobble-stones anomalously endowed with angles
and edges are alone employed, you may turn aside at your pleasure and
take a reviving sniff at the pungency of incense. In Florence, one soon
observes, the churches are relatively few and the dusky house-fronts
more rarely interrupted by specimens of that extraordinary architecture
which in Rome passes for sacred. In Florence, in other words,
ecclesiasticism is less cheap a commodity and not dispensed in the same
abundance at the street-corners. Heaven forbid, at the same time, that
I should undervalue the Roman churches, which are for the most
part treasure-houses of history, of curiosity, of promiscuous and
associational interest. It is a fact, nevertheless, that, after St.
Peter’s, I know but one really beautiful church by the Tiber, the
enchanting basilica of St. Mary Major. Many have structural character,
some a great _allure_, but as a rule they all lack the dignity of
the best of the Florentine temples. Here, the list being immeasurably
shorter and the seed less scattered, the principal churches are all
beautiful. And yet I went into the Annunziata the other day and sat
there for half-an-hour because, forsooth, the gildings and the marbles
and the frescoed dome and the great rococo shrine near the door, with
its little black jewelled fetish, reminded me so poignantly of Rome.
Such is the city properly styled eternal--since it is eternal, at least,
as regards the consciousness of the individual. One loves it in its
sophistications--though for that matter isn’t it all rich and precious
sophistication?--better than other places in their purity.
Coming out of the Annunziata you look past the bronze statue of the
Grand Duke Ferdinand I (whom Mr. Browning’s heroine used to watch
for--in the poem of “The Statue and the Bust”--from the red palace near
by), and down a street vista of enchanting picturesqueness. The street
is narrow and dusky and filled with misty shadows, and at its opposite
end rises the vast bright-coloured side of the Cathedral. It stands up
in very much the same mountainous fashion as the far-shining mass of the
bigger prodigy at Milan, of which your first glimpse as you leave your
hotel is generally through another such dark avenue; only that, if we
talk of mountains, the white walls of Milan must be likened to snow and
ice from their base, while those of the Duomo of Florence may be the
image of some mighty hillside enamelled with blooming flowers. The big
bleak interior here has a naked majesty which, though it may fail of
its effect at first, becomes after a while extraordinarily touching.
Originally disconcerting, it soon inspired me with a passion.
Externally, at any rate, it is one of the loveliest works of man’s
hands, and an overwhelming proof into the bargain that when elegance
belittles grandeur you have simply had a bungling artist.
Santa Croce within not only triumphs here, but would triumph anywhere.
“A trifle naked if you like,” said my irrepressible companion, “but
that’s what I call architecture, just as I don’t call bronze or marble
clothes (save under urgent stress of portraiture) statuary.” And indeed
we are far enough away from the clustering odds and ends borrowed from
every art and every province without which the ritually builded thing
doesn’t trust its spell to work in Rome. The vastness, the lightness,
the open spring of the arches at Santa Croce, the beautiful shape of the
high and narrow choir, the impression made as of mass without weight and
the gravity yet reigning without gloom--these are my frequent delight,
and the interest grows with acquaintance. The place is the great
Florentine Valhalla, the final home or memorial harbour of the native
illustrious dead, but that consideration of it would take me far. It
must be confessed moreover that, between his coarsely-imagined statue
out in front and his horrible monument in one of the aisles, the author
of _The Divine Comedy_, for instance, is just hereabouts rather an
extravagant figure. “Ungrateful Florence,” declaims Byron. Ungrateful
indeed--would she were more so! the susceptible spirit of the great
exile may be still aware enough to exclaim; in common, that is, with
most of the other immortals sacrificed on so very large a scale to
current Florentine “plastic” facility. In explanation of which remark,
however, I must confine myself to noting that, as almost all the old
monuments at Santa Croce are small, comparatively small, and interesting
and exquisite, so the modern, well nigh without exception, are
disproportionately vast and pompous, or in other words distressingly
vague and vain. The aptitude of hand, the compositional assurance, with
which such things are nevertheless turned out, constitutes an anomaly
replete with suggestion for an observer of the present state of the arts
on the soil and in the air that once befriended them, taking them all
together, as even the soil and the air of Greece scarce availed to do.
But on this head, I repeat, there would be too much to say; and I find
myself checked by the same warning at the threshold of the church in
Florence really interesting beyond Santa Croce, beyond all others. Such,
of course, easily, is Santa Maria Novella, where the chapels are lined
and plated with wonderful figured and peopled fresco-work even as most
of those in Rome with precious inanimate substances. These overscored
retreats of devotion, as dusky, some of them, as eremitic caves swarming
with importunate visions, have kept me divided all winter between the
love of Ghirlandaio and the fear of those seeds of catarrh to which
their mortal chill seems propitious till far on into the spring. So
I pause here just on the praise of that delightful painter--as to
the spirit of whose work the reflections I have already made are but
confirmed by these examples. In the choir at Santa Maria Novella, where
the incense swings and the great chants resound, between the gorgeous
coloured window and the florid grand altar, he still “goes in,” with
all his might, for the wicked, the amusing world, the world of faces and
forms and characters, of every sort of curious human and rare material
thing.
{Illustration: BOBOLI GARDEN, FLORENCE.}