Something of the eager, restless desire for beauty, for antique beauty,
so characteristic of the fifteenth century--for the security and
strength of just that, may be found in S. Lorenzo and S. Spirito, those
two churches which we owe to the genius of Brunellesco, and in them we
seem to find the negation, as it were, of the puritan spirit, of all
that the Convent of S. Marco had come to mean: as though when, one day
at dawn, the peasants ploughing in some little valley in the hills, had
come upon the gleaming white body of the witch Venus, in burning the
precious statue which had lain so long in the earth, they had not been
able altogether to destroy the spirit, free at last, which in the cool
twilight had escaped them to wander about the city. It is the spirit of
Rome you come upon in S. Lorenzo, the old Rome of the Basilicas, that
were but half Christian after all, and, still in ruin, seem to remember
the Gods.
A church has stood where S. Lorenzo stands certainly since pagan times,
for at the beginning of the fourth century, one Giuliana, who had three
daughters but no son, vowed a church to St. Laurence if he would grant
her a son; and a son being born to her she founded S. Lorenzo, and
called the child Laurence for praise. St. Ambrose is said to have come
from Milan to consecrate the place, bringing with him certain relics,
the bones of S. Agnola and S. Vitale, victims of the pagans which he had
found in Bologna; while for sixty years, till 490, the body of S.
Zenobio lay here. In those days, and until the last years of the
eleventh century, S. Lorenzo stood without the walls, and when Cosimo
came back to Florence, the old church, which had fallen into decay, was
already being rebuilt, Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici, with others, having
given the work to Brunellesco. Filippo Brunellesco, however, had got no
farther, it seems, than the Sagrestia Vecchia when he died, while
Antonio Manetti, who succeeded him as architect, changed somewhat his
design. The church was consecrated at last in 1461, some three years
before the death of Cosimo, who lies before the high altar.
It is really as the resting-place of the Medici that we have come to
consider S. Lorenzo, for here lie not only Giovanni di Bicci and
Piccarda, the parents of Cosimo Pater Patriae, and Cosimo himself, but
Piero and Giovanni his sons, while in the new sacristy lie Giuliano and
Lorenzo il Magnifico his grandsons, and their namesakes Giuliano Duc de
Nemours and Lorenzo Due d'Urbino; and in the Cappella dei Principi,
built in 1604 by Matteo Nigetti, lie the Grand Dukes from Cosimo I to
Cosimo III, the rulers of Florence and Tuscany from the sixteenth to the
beginning of the eighteenth centuries.
The church itself is in the form of a Latin cross, consisting of nave
and aisles and transepts, the nave being covered with a flat coffered
ceiling, though the aisles are vaulted. Along the aisles are square
chapels, scarcely more than recesses, and above the great doors is a
chapel supported by pillars, a design of Michelangelo, who was to have
built the façade for Leo X, but, after infinite thought and work in the
marble mountains, the Pope bade him abandon it in 1519. For many years a
single pillar, the only one that ever came to Florence of all those hewn
for the church in Pietrasanta, lay forlorn in the Piazza.
Those chapels that flank the aisles have to-day but little interest for
us, here and there a picture or a piece of sculpture, but nothing that
will keep us for more than a moment from the chapels of the transept,
the work of Desiderio da Settignano, of Verrocchio, and, above all, of
Donatello. It is all unaware to the tomb of this the greatest sculptor,
and in many ways the most typical artist, Florence ever produced, that
we come, when, standing in front of the high altar, we read the
inscription on that simple slab of stone which marks the tomb of Cosimo
Vecchio; for Donatello lies in the same vault with his great patron. A
modern monument in the Martelli Chapel, where the beautiful Annunciation
by Lippo Lippi hangs under a crucifix by Cellini, in the left transept,
commemorates him; but he needs no such reminder here, for about us is
his beautiful and unforgetable work: not perhaps the two ambones, which
he only began on his return from Padua when he was sixty-seven years
old, and which were finished by his pupils Bertoldo and Bellano, but the
work in the old sacristy built in 1421 by Brunellesco. How rough is the
modelling in the ambone reliefs, as though really, as Bandinelli has
said, the sight of the old sculptor was failing; and yet, in spite of
age and the intervention of his pupils, how his genius asserts itself in
a certain rhythm and design in these tragic panels, where, under a
frieze of dancing _putti_,--loves or angels I know not,--of bulls and
horses, he has carved the Agony in the Garden, Christ before Pilate, and
again before Caiaphas, the Crucifixion, the Deposition, in the southern
ambone; while in the northern we find the Descent into Hades, where John
Baptist welcomes our Lord, who draws forth Adam, and, as Dante records,
Abel too, and Noah, Moses, Abraham, and David, Isaac and Jacob and his
sons, not without Rachel, _E altri molti, e fecegli beati_, the
Resurrection and the Ascension, the Maries at the Tomb, the Pentecost.
It is another and very different work you come upon in the Cantoria,
which, lovely though it be, seems to be rather for a sermon than for
singing, so cold it is, and yet full enough of his perfect feeling for
construction, for architecture. It has a rhythm of its own, but it is
the rhythm of prose, not of poetry.
The old sacristy, which is full of him--for indeed all the decorative
work seems to be his--is one of the first buildings of the Renaissance,
the beautiful work of Filippo Brunelleschi. Covered by a polygonal dome,
the altar itself stands under another dome, low and small; and
everywhere Donatello has added beauty to beauty, the two friends for
once combining to produce a masterpiece, though not, as it is said,
without certain differences between them. "Donatello undertook to
decorate the sacristy of S. Lorenzo in stucco for Cosimo de' Medici,"
Vasari tells us. "In the angles of the ceiling he executed four
medallions, the ornaments of which were partly painted in perspective,
partly stories of the Evangelists[108] in basso-relievo. In the same
place he made two doors of bronze in basso-relievo of most exquisite
workmanship: on these doors he represented the apostles, martyrs, and
confessors, and above these are two shallow niches, in one of which are
S. Lorenzo and S. Stefano; in the other, S. Cosimo and S. Damiano." The
sacristy, according to Vasari, was the first work proceeded with in the
church. Cosimo took so much pleasure in it that he was almost always
himself present, and such was his eagerness, that while Brunellesco
built the sacristy, he made Donatello prepare the ornaments in stucco,
"with the stone decorations of the small doors and the doors of bronze."
And it is in these bronze doors that, as it seems to me, you have Donato
at his best, full of energy and life, yet never allowing himself for a
moment to forget that he was a sculptor, that his material was bronze
and had many and various beauties of its own, which it was his business
to express. There are two doors, one on each side of the altar, and
these doors are made in two parts, and each part is divided into five
panels. With a loyalty and apprehension of the fitness of things really
beyond praise, Donatello has here tried to do nothing that was outside
the realm of sculpture. It was not for him to make the Gates of
Paradise, but the gates of a sacristy in S. Lorenzo. His work is in
direct descent from the work of the earliest Italian sculptors, a
legitimate and very beautiful development of their work within the
confines of an art which was certainly sufficient to itself. Consider,
then, the naturalism of that figure who opens his book on his knees so
suddenly and with such energy; or again, the exquisite reluctance of him
who in the topmost panel turns away from the preaching of the apostle.
Certainly here you have work that is simple, sincere, full of life and
energy, and is beautiful just because it is perfectly fitting and
without affectation.[109] In one of the two small rooms which are on
each side of the sacristy, having the altar between them, Brunellesco by
Cosimo's orders made a well. Here, Vasari tells us later, Donato placed
a marble lavatory, on which Andrea Verrocchio also worked; but the
Lavabo we find there to-day seems very doubtfully Donatello's.
In the centre of the sacristy itself, Vasari tells us, Cosimo caused the
tomb of his father Giovanni to be made beneath a broad slab of marble,
supported by four columns; and in the same place he made a sepulchre for
his family, wherein he separated the tombs of the men from those of the
women. But again this work too seems, in spite of Vasari, to belong
rather uncertainly to Donatello. It is very rare to find a detached tomb
in Italy, and rarer still to find it under a table, where it is very
difficult to see it properly, and the care and beauty that have been
spent upon it might seem to be wasted. It is perhaps rather Buggiano's
hand than Donato's we see even in so beautiful a thing as this, which
Donatello may well have designed. The beautiful bust of S. Lorenzo over
the doorway is, however, the authentic work of Donato himself. Full of
eagerness, S. Lorenzo looks up as though to answer some request, and to
grant it.
The splendid porphyry sarcophagus set in bronze before a bronze screen
of great beauty, by Verocchio, is certainly one of the finest things
here. Every leaf and curl of the foliage seem instinct with some
splendid life, seem to tremble almost with the fierceness of their
vitality. There lie Giovanni and Piero de' Medici, the uncle and father
of Lorenzo il Magnifico. Close by you may see a relief of Cosimo
Vecchio, their father.
The cloisters, where Lorenzo walked often enough, are beautiful, and
then from them one passes so easily into the Laurentian Library, founded
by Cosimo Vecchio, and treasured and added to by Piero and Lorenzo il
Magnifico, but scattered and partly destroyed by the vandalism and
futile stupidity of Savonarola and his puritans in 1494. Savonarola,
however, was a cleverer demagogue than our Oliver (it is well to
remember that he was a Dominican), for he persuaded the Signoria to let
him have such of the MSS. as he could find for the library of S. Marco.
The honour of such a person is perhaps not worth discussing, but we may
remind ourselves what Cosimo had done for S. Marco, and how he had built
the library there. In 1508 the friars turned these stolen goods into
money, selling them back to Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, who was soon
to be Leo X, who carried them to Rome. Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, later
Clement VII, presented Leo's collection to the Laurentian Library, which
he had bidden Michelangelo to rebuild. This was interrupted by the
unfortunate business of 1527, and it was not till Cosimo I came that the
library was finished. Perhaps the most precious thing here is the
Pandects of Justinian, taken by the Pisans from Amalfi in 1135, and
seized by the Florentines when they took Pisa in 1406. Amalfi prized
these above everything she possessed, Pisa was ready to defend them with
her life, Florence spent hundreds of thousands of florins to possess
herself of them--for in them was thought to lie the secret of the law of
Rome. Who knows what Italy, under the heel of the barbarian, does not
owe to these faded pages, and through Italy the world? They were, as it
were, the symbol of Latin civilisation in the midst of German barbarism.
Here too is that most ancient Virgil which the French stole in 1804.
Here is Petrarch's Horace and a Dante transcribed by Villani; and, best
of all, the only ancient codex in the world of what remains to us of
Aeschylus, of what is left of Sophocles. It is in such a place that we
may best recognise the true greatness of the abused Medici. Tyrants
they may have been, but when the mob was tyrant it satisfied itself with
destroying what they with infinite labour had gathered together for the
advancement of learning, the civilisation of the world. What, then, was
that Savonarola whom all have conspired to praise, whose windy
prophecies, whose blasphemous cursings men count as so precious? In
truth in his fashion he was but a tyrant too--a tyrant, and a poor one,
and therefore the more dangerous, the more disastrous. To the Medici we
owe much of what is most beautiful in Florence--the loveliest work of
Botticelli, of Brunellesco, of Donatello, of Lippo Lippi, of
Michelangelo, and the rest, to say nothing of such a priceless
collection of books and MSS. as this. Is, then, the work of Marsilio
Ficino nothing, the labours of a thousand forgotten humanists? What do
we owe to Savonarola? He burnt the pictures which to his sensual mind
suggested its own obscenity; he stole the MSS., and no doubt would have
destroyed them too, to write instead his own rhetorical and
extraordinary denunciations of what he did not understand. Who can deny
that when he proposed to give freedom to Florence he was dreaming of a
new despotism, the despotism, if not of himself, of that Jesus whom he
believed had inspired him, and on whom he turned in his rage? That he
was brave we know, but so was Cataline; that he believed in himself we
like to believe, and so did Arius of Alexandria; that he carried the
people with him is certain, and so did they who crucified Jesus; but
that he was a turbulent fellow, a puritan, a vandal, a boaster, a
wind-bag, a discredited prophet, and a superstitious failure, we also
know, as he doubtless did at last, when the wild beast he had roused had
him by the throat, and burnt him in the fire he had invoked. His
political ideas were beneath contempt; they were insincere, as he
proved, and they were merely an excuse for riot. He bade, or is said to
have bidden, Lorenzo restore her liberty to Florence. When, then, had
Florence possessed this liberty, of which all these English writers who
sentimentalise over this unique and unfortunate Ferrarese traitor speak
with so much feeling and awe? Florence had never possessed political
liberty of any sort whatever; she was ruled by the great families, by
the guilds, by an oligarchy, by a despot. She was never free till she
lost herself in Italy in 1860. Socially she was freer under the Medici
than she was before or has been since.[110] In the production of unique
personalities a sort of social freedom is necessary, and Florence under
the earlier Medici might seem to have produced more of such men than any
other city or state in the history of the world, saving Athens in the
time of the despot Pericles. The happiest period in the history of
Athens was that in which he was master, even as the greatest and most
fortunate years in the history of the Florentine state were those in
which Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo ruled in Florence. And when at last
Lorenzo died, the Pope saw very clearly that on that day had passed away
"the peace of Italy." It is to the grave of this great and unique man
you come when leaving the cloisters of S. Lorenzo, and passing round the
church into Piazza Madonna, you enter the Cappella Medicea, and,
ascending the stairs on the left, find again on the left the new
sacristy, built in 1519 by Michelangelo. Lorenzo lies with his murdered
brother Giuliano, who fell under the daggers of the Pazzi on that Easter
morning in the Duomo, between the two splendid and terrible tombs of his
successors, under an unfinished monument facing the altar; a beautiful
Madonna and Child, an unfinished work by Michelangelo, and the two
Medici Saints, S. Damian by Raffaello da Montelupo, and S. Cosmas by
Montorsoli. It is not, however, this humble and almost nameless grave
that draws us to-day to the Sagrestia Nuova, but the monument carved by
Michelangelo for two lesser and later Medici: Giuliano, Duc de Nemours,
who died in 1516, and Lorenzo, Duc d'Urbino, who died in 1519. When
Lorenzo il Magnifico died at Careggi in April 1492, he left seven
children: Giovanni, who became Leo X; Piero, who succeeded him and went
into exile; Giuliano, who returned; Lucrezia, who married Giacomo
Salviati, and was grandmother of Cosimo I; Contessina, who married
Piero Ridolfi; Maddalena, who married Francesco Cibo; and Maria, whom
Michelangelo is said to have loved. Lorenzo's successor, Piero, did not
long retain the power his father had left him; he was vain and
impetuous, and, trying to rule without the Signoria, placed Pisa and
Livorno in the hands of Charles VIII of France, who was on his carnival
way to Naples. Savonarola chased him out, and sacked the treasures of
his house. He died in exile. It was his brother Giuliano who returned,
Savonarola being executed in 1512. Giuliano was a better ruler than his
brother, but he behaved like a despot till his brother Giovanni became
Pope, when he resigned the government of Florence to his nephew Lorenzo,
the son of Piero, and while he became Gonfaloniere of Rome and
Archbishop, Lorenzo became Duke of Urbino and father of Catherine de'
Medici of France. It is this Giuliano and Lorenzo de Medici that
Michelangelo has immortalised with an everlasting gesture of sorrow and
contempt. On the right is the tomb of Giuliano, and over it he sits for
ever as a general of the Church; on the left is Lorenzo's dust, coffered
in imperishable marble, over which he sits plotting for ever. The
statues that Michelangelo has carved there have been called Night and
Day, Twilight and Dawn; but indeed these names, as I have said, are far
too definite for them: they are just a gesture of despair, of despair of
a world which has come to nothing. They are in no real sense of the word
political, but rather an expression, half realised after all, of some
immense sadness, some terrible regret, which has fallen upon the soul of
one who had believed in righteousness and freedom, and had found himself
deceived. It is not the house of Medici that there sees its own image of
despair, but rather Florence, which had been content that such things
should be. Some obscure and secret sorrow has for a moment overwhelmed
the soul of the great poet in thinking of Florence, of the world, of the
hearts of men, and as though trying to explain to himself his own
melancholy and indignation, he has carved these statues, to which men
have given the names of the most tremendous and the most sweet of
natural things--Night and Day, Twilight and Dawn; and even as in the
Sistine Chapel Michelangelo has thought only of Life,--of the Creation
of Man, of the Judgment of the World, which is really the
Resurrection,--so here he has thought only of Death, of the death of the
body, of the soul, and of the wistful life of the disembodied spirit
that wanders disconsolate, who knows where?--that sleeps uneasily, who
knows how long?