If Florence built the Baptistery, the Duomo, and the Campanile for the
glory of the whole city, that there might be one place, in spite of all
the factions, where without difference all might enter the kingdom of
heaven, one temple in which all the city might wait till Jesus passed
by, one tower which should announce the universal Angelus, she built
other churches too, more particular in their usefulness, less splendid
in their beauty, but not less necessary in their hold on the life of the
city, or their appeal to us to-day. You may traverse the city from east
to west without forsaking the old streets, and a little fantastically,
perhaps, find some hint in the buildings you pass of that old far-away
life, so restless and so fragile, so wanting in unity, and yet, as it
seems to us, with but one really profound intention in all its work, the
resurrection of life among men. In the desolate but beautiful Piazza of
S. Maria Novella, at the gates of the old city, you find a Dominican
convent, and before it the great church of that Order, S. Maria Novella
herself, the bride of Michelangelo. Then, following Via dei Fossi, you
enter the old city at the foot of the Carraja bridge, following Via di
Parione past an old Medici palace into Via Porta Rossa and so into Via
Calzaioli, where you came upon that strange and beautiful church so like
a palace, Or San Michele, built by the merchants, the Church of the
Guilds of the city. Passing thence into Piazza Signoria, and so into Via
de' Gondi, in the Proconsolo you find the Church of the great monastic
Order the Badia of the Benedictines, having passed on your way Palazza
Vecchio, the Palace of the Republic, afterwards of the Medici; and the
Bargello, the Palace of the Podestà, afterwards a prison; coming later
through Borgo de' Greci to the Church of S. Croce, the convent of the
Franciscans. Thus, while beyond the old west gate of the city there
stood the house of the Dominicans, the Franciscans built their convent
on the east, just without the city; and between them in the heart of
Florence dwelt the oldest Order of all, the Benedictines, busy with
manuscripts. Again, if the tower of authority throws its shadow over the
Bargello, it is the tower of liberty that rises over Palazzo Vecchio,
and the whole tragedy of the beautiful city seems to be expressed for us
in the fact that while the one became a prison the other came to house
the gaoler.
So this city of warm brick, with its churches of marble, its old ways,
its palaces of stone, its convents at the gates, comes to hold for us,
as it were, the very dream of Italy, the dream that was too good to
last, that was so soon to be shattered by the barbarian. Yet in that
little walk through the narrow winding ways from the west to the east of
the city, all the eloquence and renown, the strength and beauty of Italy
seem to be gathered for you, as in a nosegay you may find all the beauty
of a garden. And of all the broken blossoms that you may find by the
way, not one is more fragrant and fair than the sweet bride of
Michelangelo, S. Maria Novella.
Standing in a beautiful Piazza, itself the loveliest thing therein,
dressed in the old black and white habit, it dreams of the past: it is
full of memories too, for here Boccaccio one Tuesday morning, just after
Mass in 1348, amid the desolation of the city, found the seven beloved
ladies of the _Decamerone_ talking of death; here Martin V, and Eugenius
IV, fugitives from the Eternal City, found a refuge; here Beata Villana
confessed her sins; here Vanna Tornabuoni prayed and the Strozzi made
their tombs. Full of memories--and of what else, then, but the past
can she dream? For her there is no future. Her convent is suppressed,
the great cloister has become a military gymnasium. What has she, then,
in common with the modern world, with the buildings of Piazza Vittorio
Emmanuele, for instance?--the past is all that we have left her.
[Illustration: S. MARIA NOVELLA]
Begun in 1278, as some say, from the design of Fra Ristoro and Fra
Sisto, the façade, one of the most beautiful in the world, is really the
fifteenth-century work of Leon Alberti working to the order of Giovanni
Rucellai--you may see their blown sail everywhere--with that profound
and unifying genius which involved everything he touched in a sort of
reconciliation, thus prophesying to us of Leonardo da Vinci. For Alberti
has here very fortunately made the pointed work of the Middle Age
friends with Antiquity, Antiquity seen with the eyes of the Renaissance,
full of a new sort of eagerness and of many little refinements. In the
fagade of his masterpiece, the Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini, that
beautiful unfinished temple where the gods of Greece seem for once to
have come to the cradle of Jesus with something of the wonder of the
shepherds who left their flocks to worship Him, Leon Alberti has taken
as his model the arch of Augustus, that still, though broken, stands on
the verge of the city in the Flaminian Way; but as though aware at last
of the danger of any mere imitation of antiquity such as that, he has
here contrived to express the beauty of Roman things, just what he
himself had really felt concerning them, and has combined that very
happily with the work of the age that was just then passing away; thus,
as it were, creating for us one of the most perfect buildings of the
fifteenth century, very characteristic too, in its strange beauty, as of
the dead new risen. And then how subtly he has composed this beautiful
façade, so that somehow it really adds to the beauty of the Campanile,
with its rosy spire, in the background.
Within, the church is full of a sort of twilight, in which certainly
much of its spaciousness is lost; those chapels in the nave, for
instance, added by Vasari in the sixteenth century have certainly
spoiled it of much of its beauty. Built in the shape of a tau cross--a
Latin cross that is almost tau, in old days it was divided, where still
there is a step across the nave into two parts, one of which was
reserved for the friars, while the other was given to the people. There
is not much of interest in this part of the church: a crucifix over the
great door, attributed to Giotto; a fresco of the Holy Trinity, with
Madonna and St. John, by Masaccio, that rare strong master; the altar,
the fourth in the right aisle, dedicated to St. Thomas of
Canterbury,--almost nothing beside. It is in the south transept, where a
flight of steps leads to the Rucellai Chapel, that we came upon one of
the most beautiful and mysterious things in the city, the Madonna, so
long given to Cimabue, but now claimed for Duccio of Siena.[102]
Vasari describes for us very delightfully the triumph of this picture,
when, so great was the admiration of the people for it that "it was
carried in solemn procession, with the sound of trumpets and other
festal demonstrations, from the house of Cimabue to the church,--he
himself being highly rewarded and honoured for it"; while, as he goes on
to tell us, when Cimabue was painting it, in a garden as it happened
near the gate of S. Pietro, King Charles of Sicily, brother of St.
Louis, saw the picture, and praising it, "all the men and women of
Florence hastened in great crowds to admire it, making all possible
demonstrations of delight. The inhabitants of the neighbourhood,
rejoicing in this occurrence, ever after called that place Borgo
Allegri,"--the name it bears to this day. However reluctant we may be to
find Vasari, that divine gossip, at fault, it might seem that Cimabue's
Triumph is a fable, or if, indeed, it happened, was stolen, for the
Rucellai Madonna is apparently the work of Duccio the Sienese.[103] Of
the works of Cimabue not one remains to us; we do not know, we have
certainly no means of knowing, whether he was, as Ghiberti tells us, a
painter in the old Greek manner, or whether, as Vasari suggests, he was
the true master of Giotto, in that to him was owing the impulse of life
which we find so moving in Giotto's work. And then Vasari, it seems, is
wrong in his account of Borgo Allegri, for that place was named not
after happiness, the happiness of that part of the city in their great
neighbour, but from a family who in those days lived thereabout and bore
that name.
It is, however, of comparatively little importance who painted the
picture. The controversy, which is not yet finished, serves for the most
part merely to obscure the essential fact that here is the picture still
in its own place, and that it is beautiful. Very lovely, indeed, she is,
Madonna of Happiness, and still at her feet the poor may pray, and still
on her dim throne she may see day come and evening fall. Far up in the
obscure height she holds Christ on her knees. Perhaps you may catch the
faint dim loveliness of her face in the early dawn amid the beauty of
the angels kneeling round her throne when the light steals through the
shadowy windows across the hills; or perhaps at evening in the splendour
of some summer sunset you may see just for a moment the whiteness of her
delicate hands; but she is secret and very far away, she has withdrawn
herself to hear the prayers of the poor in spirit who come when the
great church is empty, when the tourists have departed, when the workmen
have returned to their homes. And beside her in that strange, mysterious
place Beata Villana sleeps, where the angels draw back the curtain, in a
tomb by Desiderio da Settignano. She was not of the great company whose
names we falter at our altars and whisper for love over and over again
in the quietness of the night; but of those who are weary. Born to a
wealthy Florentine merchant, Andrea di Messer Lapo by name, little Vanna
went her ways with the children, yet with a sort of naïve sincerity
after all, so that when she heard Saint Catherine praised or Saint
Francis, she believed it and wished to be of that company; but the
world, full of glamour and laughter in those days, and now too, caught
her by the waist and bore her away, in the person of a noble youth of
the Benintendi, who loved her well enough; yet it was love she loved
rather than her husband; and life calling sweetly enough down the long
narrow streets, she followed, yes, till she was a little weary. So she
would question her beauty, and, looking in her glass, see not herself
but the demon love that possessed her; and again in another mirror she
found a devil, she said, like a faun prick-eared and with goat's feet,
peering at her with frightening eyes. So she stripped off her fair gay
dresses, and took instead the rough hair-shirt, and came at evening
across the Piazza to confess in S. Maria Novella; and gave herself to
the poor, and forgot the sun till weary she fled away. Her grandson, as
it is said, built this tomb to her memory, and they wrote above, Beata
Villana.
It is always with reluctance, I think, that one leaves that dim chapel
of the Rucellai, and yet how many wonderful things await us in the
church. In the second chapel of the transept, the Chapel of Filippo
Strozzi, who is buried behind the altar, Filippino Lippi, the son of Fra
Lippo, the pupil of Botticelli, has painted certain frescoes,--a little
bewildering in their crowded beauty, it is true, but how good after all
in their liveliness, their light and shadow, the pleasant, eager faces
of the women--where St. John raises Drusiana from the grave, or St.
Philip drives out the Dragon of Hierapolis; while above St. John is
martyred, and St. Philip too. But it is in the choir behind the high
altar, where for so long the scaffolding has prevented our sight, that
we come upon the simple serious work of Domencio Ghirlandajo, whom all
the critics have scorned. Born in 1449, the pupil of Alessio
Baldovinetti, Ghirlandajo is not a great painter perhaps, but rather a
craftsman, a craftsman with a wonderful power of observation, of noting
truly the life of his time. He seems to have asked of art rather truth
than beauty. Almost wholly, perhaps, without the temperament of an
artist, his success lies in his gift for expressing not beauty but the
life of his time, the fifteenth century in Florence, which lives still
in all his work. Consider, then, the bright facile mediocre work of
Benozzo Gozzoli, not at its best, in the Campo Santo of Pisa, remember
how in the dark chapel of the Medici palace he lights up the place
almost as with a smile, in the gay cavalcade that winds among the hills.
There is much fancy there, much observation too; here a portrait, there
a gallant fair head, and the flowers by the wayside. Well, it is in much
the same way that Ghirlandajo has painted here in the choir of S. Maria
Novella. He has seen the fashions, he has noted the pretty faces of the
women, he has watched the naïve homely life of the Medici ladies, for
instance, and has painted not his dreams about Madonna, but his dreams
of Vanna Tornabuoni, of Clarice de' Medici, and the rest. And he was
right; almost without exception his frescoes are the most interesting
and living work left in Florence. He has understood or divined that one
cannot represent exactly that which no longer exists; and it is to
represent something with exactitude that he is at work. So he contents
himself very happily with painting the very soul of his century. It is a
true and sincere art this realistic, unimpassioned, impersonal work of
Ghirlandajo's, and in its result, for us at any rate, it has a certain
largeness and splendour. Consider this "Birth of the Virgin." It is full
of life and homely observation. You see the tidy dusted room where St.
Anne is lying on the bed, already, as in truth she was, past her youth,
but another painter would have forgotten it. She is just a careful
Florentine housewife, thrifty too, not flurried by her illness, for she
has placed by her bedside, all ready for her need, two pomegranates and
some water. Then, again, they are going to wash the little Mary. She
lies quite happily sucking her fingers in the arms of her nurse, the
basin is in the middle of the floor, a servant has just come in briskly,
no doubt as St. Anne has always insisted, and pours the water quickly
into the vessel. It is not difficult to find all sorts of faults, of
course, as the critics have not hesitated to do. That perspective, for
instance, how good it is: almost as good as Verrocchio's work,--and
those dancing _angiolini_; yes, Verrocchio might have thought of them
himself. But the lady in the foreground, how unmoved she seems; it is as
though the whole scene had been arranged for the sake of her portrait;
and, indeed it is a portrait, for the richly dressed visitor is Ginevra
de' Benci, who stands too in the fresco of the Birth of St. John. Again
in the fresco of the angel appearing to Zacharias in the Temple, there
are some thirty portraits of famous Florentines, painted with much
patience, and no doubt with an extraordinary truth of likeness. In the
left corner you may see Marsilio Ficino dressed as a priest; Gentile de'
Becchi turns to him, while Cristoforo Landini in a red cloak stands by,
and Angelo Poliziano lifts up his hands.
Does one ever regret, I wonder, after looking at these realistic
fifteenth-century works, that the frescoes of Orcagna--for he painted
the whole choir--were destroyed in a storm, it is said, in 1358.
Fragments of his work, however, we are told, remained for more than a
hundred years, till, indeed, Ghirlandajo was employed to replace them.
We find his work, however, sadly damaged it is true, and really his
perhaps only in outline, in the Strozzi chapel here, the lofty chapel
of north transept, where he has painted on the wall facing the entrance
the Last Judgment, while to the left you may see Paradise, to the right
the Inferno. The pupil of Giotto and of Andrea Pisano, Orcagna is the
most important artist of his time, the one vital link in the chain that
unites Masolino with Giotto. He was a universal artist, practising as an
architect and goldsmith no less than as a painter. In the Last Judgment
in this chapel he seems not only to have absorbed the whole art of his
time, but to have advanced it; for to the grandeur and force of his work
he added a certain visionary loveliness that most surely already
foretells Beato Angelico. If in the Paradise and the Inferno we are less
moved by the greatness of his achievement, we remind ourselves how
terribly they have suffered from damp, from neglect, from the restorer.
In the altar-piece itself we have perhaps the only "intact painting" of
his remaining to us, and splendid as it is in colour and form, it lacks
something of the rhythm of the frescoes that like some slow and solemn
chant fill the chapel with their sincere unforgetable music.
As you pass, beckoned by a friar, into the half-ruined cloisters below
S. Maria Novella, you come on your right into a little alley of tombs,
behind which, on the wall, you may find two bits of fresco by Giotto,
the Meeting of S. Joachim and S. Anna at the Golden Gate, and the Birth
of the Virgin. On your left you pass into the Chiostro Verde, where
Paolo Uccello has painted scenes from the Old Testament in a sort of
green monotone, for once without enthusiasm. Above you and around you
rises the old convent and the great tower; there, in the far corner,
perhaps a friar plays with a little cat, here a pigeon flutters under
the arches about the little ruined space of grass, the meagre grass of
the south, where now and then the shadow of a white cloud passes over
the city, whither who knows. For a moment in that silent place you
wonder why you have come, you feel half inclined to go back into the
church, when shyly the friar comes towards you, and, leading you round
the cloister, enters the Cappellina degli Spagnuoli.
How much has been written in praise of the frescoes in the Spanish
chapel of S. Maria Novella, where Eleonora of Toledo, the wife of Grand
Duke Cosimo, used to hear Mass; yet how disappointing they are. In so
simple a building, some great artist, you might think, in listening to
Ruskin, had really expressed himself, his thoughts about Faith and the
triumph of the Church. But the work which we find there is the work of
mediocrities, poor craftsmen too, the pupils and imitators of the
Sienese and Florentine schools of their time, having nothing in common
with the excellent work of Taddeo Gaddi, the beautiful work of Simone
Martini of Siena. These figures, so pretty and so ineffectual, which
have been labelled here the Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas, there the
Triumph of the Church, have no existence for us as painting; they have
passed into literature, and in the pages of Ruskin have found a new
beauty that for the first time has given them some semblance of life.