In every ancient city of the world, cities that in themselves for the
most part have been nations, one may find some spot holy or splendid
that instantly evokes an image of that of which it is a symbol,--which
sums up, as it were, in itself all the sanctity, beauty, and splendour
of her fame, in whose name there lives even yet something of the glory
that is dead. It is so no longer; in what confused street or shapeless
square shall I find hidden the soul of London, or in what name then
shall I sum up the lucid restless life of Paris? But if I name the
Acropolis, all the pale beauty of Athens will stir in my heart; and when
I speak the word Capitolium, I seem to hear the thunder of the legions,
to see the very face of Caesar, to understand the dominion and majesty
of Rome.
Something of this power of evocation may still be found in the Piazza
della Signoria of Florence: all the love that founded the city, the
beauty that has given her fame, the immense confusion that is her
history, the hatred that has destroyed her, lingers yet in that strange
and lovely place where Palazzo Vecchio stands like a violated fortress,
where the Duke of Athens was expelled the city, where the Ciompi rose
against the Ghibellines, where Jesus Christ was proclaimed King of the
Florentines, where Savonarola, was burned, and Alessandro de' Medici
made himself Duke.
It is not any great and regular space you come upon in the Piazza della
Signoria, such as the huge empty Place de la Concorde of Paris, but one
that is large enough for beauty, and full of the sweet variety of the
city; it is the symbol of Florence--a beautiful symbol.
In the morning the whole Piazza is full of sunlight, and swarming with
people: there, is a stall for newspapers; here, a lemonade merchant
dispenses his sweet drinks. Everyone is talking; at the corner of Via
Calzaioli a crowd has assembled, a crowd that moves and seems about to
dissolve, that constantly re-forms itself without ever breaking up. On
the benches of the loggia men lie asleep in the shadow, and children
chase one another among the statues. Everywhere and from all directions
cabs pass with much cracking of whips and hallooing. There stand two
Carabinieri in their splendid uniforms, surveying this noisy world; an
officer passes with his wife, leading his son by the hand; you may see
him lift his sword as he steps on the pavement. A group of tourists go
by, urged on by a gesticulating guide; he is about to show them the
statues in the loggia; they halt under the Perseus. He begins to speak
of it, while the children look up at him as though to catch what he is
saying in that foreign tongue.
And surely the Piazza, which has seen so many strange and splendid
things, may well tolerate this also; it is so gay, so full of life. Very
fair she seems under the sunlight, picturesque too, with her buildings
so different and yet so harmonious. On the right the gracious beauty of
the Loggia de' Lanzi; then before you the lofty, fierce old Palazzo
Vecchio; and beside it the fountains play in the farther Piazza. Cosimo
I rides by as though into Siena, while behind him rises the palace of
the Uguccioni, which Folfi made; and beside you the Calzaioli ebbs and
flows with its noisy life, as of old the busiest street of the city.
The Palazza Vecchio, peaceful enough now, but still with the fierce
gesture of war stands on one side, facing the Piazza, a fortress of huge
stones four storeys high--the last, thrust out from the wall and
supported by arches on brackets of stone, as though crowning the
palace itself. It stands almost four-square, and above rises the
beautiful tower, the highest tower in the city, with a gallery similar
to the last storey of the palace, and above a loggia borne by four
pillars, from which spring the great arches of the canopy that supports
the spire; and whereas the battlements of the palazzo are square and
Guelph, those of the tower are Ghibelline in the shape of the tail of
the swallow. Set, not in the centre of the square, nor made to close it,
but on one side, it was thus placed, it is said, in order to avoid the
burned houses of the Uberti, who had been expelled the city. However
this may be, and its position is so fortunate that it is not likely to
be due to any such chance, Arnolfo di Cambio began it in February 1299,
taking as his model, so some have thought, the Rocca of the Conti Guidi
of the Casentino, which Lapo his father had built. Under the arches of
the fourth storey are painted the coats of the city and its gonfaloni.
And there you may see the most ancient device of Florence, the lily
argent on a field gules; the united coats gules and argent of Florence
and Fiesole in 1010; the coat of Guelph Florence, a lily gules on a
field argent; and, among the rest, the coat of Charles of Anjou, the
lilies or on a field azure.
[Illustration: LOGGIA DE' LANZI]
On the platform or ringhiera before the great door, the priori watched
the greater festas, and made their proclamations, before the Loggia de'
Lanzi was built in 1387; and here in 1532 the last Signoria of the
Republic proclaimed Alessandro de' Medici first Duke of Florence, in
front of the Judith and Holofernes of Donatello, whose warning went
unheeded. And indeed, that group, part of the plunder that the people
found in Palazzo Riccardi, in the time of Piero de' Medici, who sought
to make himself tyrant, once stood beside the great gate of Palazzo
Vecchio, whence it was removed at the command of Alessandro, who placed
there instead Bandinelli's feeble Hercules and Cacus. Opposite to it
Michelangelo's David once stood, till it was removed in our own time to
the Accademia, where it looks like a cast.
Over the great door where of old was set the monogram of Christ, you
may read still REX REGUM ET DOMINUS DOMINANTIUM, and within the gate is
a court most splendid and lovely, built after the design of Arnolfo, and
once supported by his pillars of stone, but now the columns of
Michelozzo, made in 1450, and covered with stucco decoration in the
sixteenth century, form the cortile in which, over the fountain of
Vasari, Verrocchio's lovely Boy Playing with the Dolphin ever half turns
in his play. Altogether lovely in its naturalism, its humorous grace,
Verrocchio made it for Lorenzo Magnifico, who placed it in his gardens
at Careggi, whence it was brought here by Cosimo I.
Passing through that old palace, up the great staircase into the Salone
del Cinquecento, where Savonarola was tried, with the Cappella di S.
Bernardo, where he made his last communion, and at last up the staircase
into the tower, where he was tortured and imprisoned, it is ever of that
mad pathetic figure, self-condemned and self-murdered, that you think,
till at last, coming out of the Palazzo, you seek the spot of his awful
death in the Piazza. Fanatic puritan as he was, vainer than any Medici,
it is difficult to understand how he persuaded the Florentines to listen
to his eloquence, spoiled as it must have been for them by the Ferrarese
dialect. How could a people who were the founders of the modern world,
the creators of modern culture, allow themselves to be baffled by a
fanatic friar prophesying judgment? Yet something of a peculiar charm, a
force that we miss in the sensual and almost devilish face we see in his
portrait, he must have possessed, for it is said that Lorenzo desired
his company; and even though we are able to persuade ourselves that it
was for other reasons than to enjoy his friendship, we have yet to
explain the influence he exercised over Sandro Botticelli and Pico della
Mirandola, whose lives he changed altogether. In the midst of a people
without a moral sense he appears like the spirit of denial. He was
kicking against the pricks, he was guilty of the sin against the light,
and whether his aim was political or religious, or maybe both, he
failed. It is said he denied Lorenzo absolution, that he left him
without a word at the brink of the grave but when he himself came to
die by the horrible, barbaric means he had invoked in a boast, he did
not show the fortitude of the Magnificent. Full of every sort of
rebellion and violence, he made anarchy in Florence, and scoffed at the
Holy See, while he was a guest of the one and the officer of the other.
His bonfires of "vanities," as he called them, were possibly as
disastrous for Florence as the work of the Puritan was for England; for
while he burned the pictures, they sold them to the Jews. He is dead,
and has become one of the bores of history; and while Americans leave
their cards on the stone that marks the place of his burning, the
Florentines appear to have forgotten him. Peace to his ashes!
As you enter the Loggia de' Lanzi, gay with children now, once the
lounge of the Swiss Guard, whose barracks were not far away, you wonder
who can have built so gay, so happy a place beside the fortress of the
Signoria. Yet, in truth, it was for the Priori themselves that loggia
was built, though not by Orcagna as it is said, to provide, perhaps, a
lounge in summer for the fathers of the city, and for a place of
proclamation that all Florence might hear the laws they had made. Yes,
and to-day, too, do they not proclaim the tombola where once they
announced a victory? Even now, in spite of forgotten greatness, it is
still a garden of statues. Looking ever over the Piazza stands the
Perseus of Cellini, with the head of Medusa held up to the multitude,
the sword still gripped in his hand. It is the masterpiece of one who,
like all the greatest artists of the Renaissance--Giotto, Orcagna,
Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael--did not confine himself to one art, but
practised many. And though it would be unjust to compare such a man as
Cellini with the greatest of all, yet he was great not only as a
sculptor and a goldsmith, but as a man of letters and as a man of the
world. His Perseus, a little less than a demigod, is indeed not so
lovely as the wax model he made for it, which is now in the Bargello;
but in the gesture with which he holds out the severed head from him, in
the look of secret delight that is already half remorseful for all that
dead beauty, in the heroic grace with which he stands there after the
murder, the dead body marvellously fallen at his feet, Cellini has
proved himself the greatest sculptor of his time. That statue cost him
dear enough, as he tells you in his Memoirs, but, as Gautier said, it is
worth all it cost.
On the pedestal you may see the deliverance of Andromeda; but the finest
of these reliefs has been taken to the Bargello. The only other bronze
here is the work of Donatello--a Judith and Holofernes, under the arch
towards the Uffizi. It is Donatello's only large bronze group, and was
probably designed for the centre piece of a fountain, the mattress on
which Holofernes has fallen having little spouts for water. Judith
stands over her victim, who is already dead, her sword lifted to strike
again; and you may see by her face that she will strike if it be
necessary. Beneath you read--"Exemplum salut. publ. cives posuere,
MCCCCXV." Poor as the statue appears in its present position, the three
bronze reliefs of the base gain here what they must lose in the midst of
a fountain, yet even they too are unfortunate. Indeed, very few statues
of this sort were made by the sculptors of the Renaissance; for the most
part they confined themselves to single figures and to groups in relief:
even Michelangelo but rarely attempted the "freestanding group." It is,
however, to such a work we come in the splendidly composed Rape of the
Sabines by Giovanni da Bologna in the Loggia itself. Spoiled a little by
its too laboured detail, its chief fault lies in the fact that it is
top-heavy, the sculptor having placed the mass of the group so high that
the base seems unsubstantial and unbalanced. Bologna's other group here,
Hercules and Nessus, which once stood at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio,
is dramatic and well composed, but the forms are feeble and even
insignificant. The antique group of Ajax dragging the body of Patrocles,
is not a very important copy of some great work, and it is much
restored: it was found in a vineyard near Rome.
The great fountain which plays beside the Palazzo, where of old the
houses of the Uberti stood, is rich and grandiose perhaps, but in some
unaccountable way adds much to the beauty of the Piazza. How gay and
full of life it is even yet, that splendid and bitter place, that in its
beauty and various, everlasting life seems to stand as the symbol of
this city, so scornful even in the midst of the overwhelming foreigner
who has turned her into a museum, a vast cemetery of art. Only here you
may catch something of the old life that is not altogether passed away.
Still, in spite of your eyes, you must believe there are Florentines
somewhere in the city, that they are still as in Dante's day proud and
wise and easily angry, scornful too, a little turbulent, not readily
curbed, but full of ambition--great nobles, great merchants, great
bankers. Does such an one never come to weep over dead Florence in this
the centre of her fame, the last refuge of her greatness, in the night,
perhaps, when none may see his tears, when all is hushed that none may
mark his sorrow?
[Illustration: WAX MODEL FOR THE PERSEUS IN THE BARGELLO
_Benvenuto Cellini_
_Alinari_]
It was past midnight when once more I came out of the narrow ways,
almost empty at that hour, when every footfall resounds between the old
houses, into the old Piazza to learn this secret. Far away in the sky
the moon swung like a censer, filling the place with a fragile and
lovely light. Standing there in the Piazza, quite deserted now save for
some cloaked figure who hurried away up the Calzaioli, and two
Carabinieri who stood for a moment at the Uffizi corner and then turned
under the arches, I seemed to understand something of the spirit that
built that marvellous fortress, that thrust that fierce tower into the
sky;--yes, surely at this hour some long dead Florentine must venture
here to console the living, who, for sure, must be gay so sadly and with
so much regret.
In the Loggia de' Lanzi the moonlight fell among the statues, and in
that fairy light I seemed to see in those ghostly still figures of
marble and bronze some strange fantastic parable, the inscrutable
prophecy of the scornful past. Gian Bologna's Sabine woman, was she not
Florence struggling in the grip of the modern vandal; Cellini's Perseus
with Medusa's head, has it not in truth turned the city to stone?
The silence was broken; something had awakened in the Piazza: perhaps a
bird fluttered from the battlements of the Palazzo, perhaps it was the
city that turned in her sleep. No, there it was again. It was a human
voice close beside me: it seemed to be weeping.
I looked around: all was quiet. I saw nothing, only there at the corner
a little light flickered before a shrine; and yes, something was moving
there, someone who was weeping. Softly, softly over the stones I made my
way to that little shrine of Madonna at the street corner, and I found,
ah! no proud and scornful noble mourning over dead Florence, but an old
woman, ragged and alone, prostrate under some unimaginable sorrow, some
unappeasable regret.
Did she hear as of old--that Virgin with narrow half-open eyes and the
sidelong look? God, I know not if she heard or no. Perhaps I alone have
heard in all the world.