The Sesto Oltr'arno, the Quartiere di S. Spirito as it was called later,
was never really part of the city proper, but rather a suburb
surrounded, as Florence itself was, by wall and river. The home for the
most part of the poor, though by no means without the towers and palaces
of the nobles, it seems always to have lent itself readily enough to the
hatching of any plot against the Government of the day. Here in 1343 the
nobles made their last stand, here the signal was given for the Ciompi
rising, and here Luca Pitti built his palace to outdo the Medici. If you
cross Arno by the beautiful bridge of S. Trinità, the first street to
your left will be Borgo S. Jacopo, the first palace that of the
Frescobaldi, whom the Duke of Athens brought into Florence after their
exile. This palace, as well as the Church of S. Jacopo close by, where
Giano della Bella's death was plotted, were given in 1529 to the
Franciscans of S. Salvatore, whose convent had suffered in the siege. S.
Jacopo, which still retains a fine romanesque arcade, was originally a
foundation of the eleventh century. It seems to have been entirely
rebuilt for the friars and the palace turned into a convent in 1580, and
again to have suffered restoration in 1790. Close by is a group of old
towers, still picturesque and splendid. Turning thence back into Via
Maggio, and passing along Via S. Spirito and Via S. Frediano, you come
at last on the left into Piazza del Carmine, before the great church of
that name. The church of the Carmine and the monastery now suppressed
of the Carmelites across Arno were originally built in 1268, with the
help of the great families whose homes were in this part of the
city,--the Soderini, the Nerli, the Serragli; it remained unfinished for
more than two centuries, and in 1771 it was unhappily almost wholly
destroyed by fire, only the sacristy and the Brancacci Chapel escaping.
Famous now because there Fra Lippo Lippi lived, and there Masolino and
Masaccio painted, it is in itself one of the most meretricious and
worthless buildings of the eighteenth century, full of every sort of
flamboyant ornament and insincere, uncalled-for decoration; and yet, in
spite of every vulgarity, how spacious it is, as though even in that
evil hour the Latin genius could not wholly forget its delight in space
and light. It is then really only the Brancacci Chapel in the south
transept that has any interest for us, since there, better than anywhere
else, we may see the work of two of the greatest masters of the first
years of the Quattrocento.
[Illustration: PONTE VECCHIO]
Masolino, according to Mr. Berenson, was born in 1384, and died after
1423, while his pupil Masaccio was born in 1401, and died, one of the
youngest of Florentine painters, in 1428. Here in the Brancacci Chapel
it might seem difficult to decide what may be the work of Masolino and
what of his pupil, and indeed Crowe and Cavalcaselle have denied that
Masolino worked here at all. Later criticism, however, interested in
work that marks a revolution in Tuscan painting, has made it plain that
certain frescoes here are undoubtedly from his hand, and Mr. Berenson
gives him certainly the Fall of Adam, the Raising of Tabitha, and the
Miracle at the Golden Gate, above on the right, as well as the Preaching
of St. Peter, above to the left on the altar wall. Masaccio's work is
more numerous, consisting of the Expulsion from the Temple and the
Payment of the Tribute, above on the right, part of the fresco below the
last; St. Peter Baptizing, above to the left on the altar wall, as well
as the two frescoes, St. Peter and St. John healing the Sick, and St.
Peter and St. John giving Alms, below on either side of the altar. The
rest of the frescoes, the St. Paul visiting St. Peter in Prison, below
on the left, part of the fresco next to it, the Liberation of St. Peter
opposite, and the St. Peter and St. Paul before Nero, and the
Crucifixion of St. Peter, below on the right, are the work of Filippino
Lippi.
Masolino da Panicale of Valdelsa was, according to Vasari, a pupil of
Lorenzo Ghiberti, and had been in his younger days a very good
goldsmith. He was the best among those who helped Ghiberti in the
labours of the doors of S. Giovanni, but when about nineteen years of
age he seems to have devoted himself to painting, forsaking the art of
the goldsmith, and placing himself under Gherardo della Starnina, the
first master of his day. He is said to have gone to Rome, and some works
of his in S. Clemente would seem to prove this story; but finding his
health suffer from the air of the Eternal City, he returned to Florence,
and began to paint here in the Church of S. Maria del Carmine, the
figure of S. Piero beside the "Chapel of the Crucifixion," which was
destroyed in the fire of 1771. This S. Piero, Vasari tells us, was
greatly commended by the painters of the time, and brought Masolino the
commission for painting the Chapel of the Brancacci family in the same
church. Among the rest mentioned by Vasari, he speaks of the Four
Evangelists on the roof here, which have now been ruined by
over-painting and restoration. A man of an admirable genius, his study
and fatigues, Vasari tells us, so weakened him that he was always
ailing, till he died at the age of thirty-seven. Yet in looking on his
work to-day, beside that of Masaccio, one thinks less, I fancy, of his
"study and fatigues," of his structure and technique, than of the
admirable beauty of his work. Consider then those splendid young men in
the Raising of Tabitha, who pass by almost unconcerned, though one has
turned his head to see; the sheer loveliness of Eve and Adam, really for
the first time born again here naked and unashamed; or the easy and
beautiful gesture of the angel, who bids them begone out of the gate of
Paradise. In Masaccio's work you will find a more splendid style, the
real majesty of the creator, a strangely sure generalisation and
expression; but in Masolino's work there still lingers something of the
mere beauty of Gentile da Fabriano, the particular personal loveliness
of things which you may know he has touched with a caress or seen always
with joy.
Masaccio was born at Castello S. Giovanni, on the way to Arezzo. He was
the son of a notary, Ser Giovanni di Simone Guidi, called della
Scheggia, and his first labours in art, Vasari tells us, were begun at
the time when Masolino was working at this chapel in the Carmine. He had
evidently been much impressed by the work of Donato, and, indeed,
something of the realism of sculpture has passed into his work, in the
St. Peter Baptizing, for instance, where he who stands by the side of
the pool, awaiting his turn, has much of the reality of a statue. And
then with a magical sincerity Masaccio has understood the mere
discomfort of such a delay in the cool air, and a shiver seems about to
pass over that body, which is as real to us as any figure in the work of
Michelangelo. Or again, in the fresco of the Tribute Money, how real and
full of energy these people are,--the young man with his back to us, who
has been interrupted; Jesus Himself, who has just interposed; Peter, who
is protesting. How full of a real majesty is this composition, admirably
composed, too, and original even in that. Here, it might seem, we have
the end of merely decorative painting, the beginning of realism, of the
effect of reality, and it is therefore with surprise we see so facile a
master as Filippino Lippi set to finish work of such elemental and
tremendous genius. How pretty his work seems beside these realities.
Coming out into the Piazza again, and turning to the left down Via S.
Frediano, you come almost at once, on the right, to the Church of S.
Frediano in Castello. You may enter it from Lung' Arno, but it would
scarcely be worth a visit, for it is a late seventeenth-century
building, save that in the convent may still be found the cell of S.
Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi; for it was this convent that the Carmelite
nuns exchanged with the Cistercians for the house in Via di Pinti,
called to-day S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, where Perugino painted his
beautiful fresco of the Crucifixion.
Just across the way is the Mercato di S. Frediano and the suppressed
monastery of the Camaldolese, now a school; and by this way you come to
Porta S. Frediano, by which Charles VIII of France entered Florence and
Rinaldo degli Albizzi left it. The whole of this quarter is given up to
the poor and to the Madonna of the street corner, for here her children
dwell, the outcasts and refuse of civilisation who work that we may
live. It is always with reluctance, in spite of the children that I come
by this way, so that if possible I always return by Lung' Arno, past
Torrino di S. Rosa and the barracks of S. Friano and the grain store of
Cosimo III, past the houses of the Soderini to Ponte alla Carraia, which
fell on Mayday 1304, sending so many to that other world they had come
out to see, and so past the house of Piero Capponi, the hero of 1494 who
kept the Medici at bay, and threatened Charles VIII in the council; then
turning down Via Coverelli one comes to Santo Spirito.
It was the Augustinian Hermits who, coming to Florence about 1260,
bought a vineyard close to where Via Maggio, an abbreviation of Via
Maggiore, now is, from the Vellati family. Here they built a monastery
and a church, and dedicated them to the Santo Spirito, so that when the
city was divided into quartieri this Sestiere d'Oltrarno became
Quartiere di S. Spirito. In 1397, as it is said, they determined to
rebuild the place on a bigger scale, and to this end appointed
Brunellesco their architect. The church was begun in 1433, and was
burned down in 1471, during the Easter celebrations, which were
particularly splendid in that year owing to the visit of Galeazzo Maria
Sforza. It was rebuilt, however, in the next twenty years from the
designs of Brunellesco, and is to-day the most beautiful
fifteenth-century church in Florence, full of light and sweetness, very
spacious, too, and with a certain fortunate colour about it that gives
it an air of cheerfulness and serenity beyond anything of the kind to be
found in the Duomo or S. Lorenzo. And then, the Florentines have been
content to leave it alone,--at any rate, so far as the unfinished façade
is concerned. It is in the form of a Latin cross, and suggests even yet
in some happy way the very genius of the Latin people in its temperance
and delight in the sun and the day. The convent, it is true, has been
desecrated, and is now a barracks; most of the altars have been robbed
of their treasures; but the church itself remains to us a very precious
possession from that fifteenth century, which in Italy certainly was so
fortunate, so perfect a dawn of a day that was a little disappointing,
and at evening so disastrous.
Of the works of art remaining in the nave, that spacious nave where one
could wander all day long, only the copy of Michelangelo's Pietà in St.
Peter's will, I think, detain us for more than a moment. What is left to
us of that far-away flower-like beauty of fifteenth-century painting and
sculpture will be found in the great transept, that makes of the church
a cross of light, a temple of the sun. Here, amid many works of that
time given to Fra Lippo Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, Donatello, and
others, in the south transept there is a Madonna with the family of de'
Nerli by Filippino Lippi, and in the Capponi Chapel a fine portrait of
Neri Capponi, while in the next chapel Perugino's Vision of St. Bernard,
now in Berlin, used to stand. Here, too, is a Statue of St. Sebastian,
nearly always invisible, said to be from the hand of Donatello; in the
choir is a Madonna enthroned by Lorenzo di Credi. The sacristy is
beautiful, built by Giovanni da Sangallo, and the cloisters now spoiled
are the work of Ammanati. And then, here Niccolò Niccoli is buried, that
great book-collector and humanist; while the barbarians are represented,
if only by the passing figure of Martin Luther, not then forsworn, who
is said to have preached here on his way to Rome. It is strange to think
that these beautiful pillars have heard his rough eloquence, an
eloquence that was so soon to destroy the spirit that had conceived
them.
Close by in Piazza S. Spirito is Palazzo Guadagni, built for Ranieri Dei
at the end of the fifteenth century by Cronaca. It was not, however,
till 1684 that the Guadagni family came into possession of it. Bernardo
Guadagni, it will be remembered, was Gonfaloniere of Justice when Cosimo
de' Medici was expelled the city in 1433. Passing this palace and
turning to the right into Via Mazzetta, you pass at the corner the
Church of S. Felice, which has been so often a refuge,--for at first the
Sylvestrians had it, and held it till the fourteenth century, when it
passed to the Camaldolese, from whom it passed again to a congregation
of Dominican nuns and became a sort of refuge for women who had fled
away from their husbands. Within, you may find a few old pictures, a
Giottesque Crucifixion, and a Madonna and Saints, a fifteenth-century
work. Then, turning into Via Romana, you come, past the gardens of S.
Piero in Gattolino, to the Porta Romana, the great gate of the Via
Romana, the way to Rome, and before you is the Hill of Gardens, and
behind you is the garden of the Pitti Palace, Giardino di Boboli, and
farther still, across Via Romana, the Giardino Torrigiani.
The Boboli Gardens, with their alley ways of ilex, their cypresses and
broken statues, their forgotten fountains, are full of sadness--
"Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur,
L'amour vainqueur et la vie opportune,
Ils n'ont pas l'air de croire à leur bonheur,
Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,
"Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,
Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres,
Et sangloter d'extase les jets d'eau,
Les grands jets d'eau sveltes parmi les marbres."
But the gardens of the Viale are in spring, at any rate, full of the joy
of roses, banks, hedges, cascades of roses, armsful of them, drowsy in
the heat and heavy with sweetness.
"I'mi trovai, fanciulle, un bel mattino
Di mezzo maggio, in un verde giardino."
[Illustration: THE BOBOLI]
And if it be not the very place of which Poliziano sang in the most
beautiful verses he ever wrote, certainly to-day there is nothing more
lovely in Florence in spring, and in autumn too, than this Hill of
Gardens. In autumn too; for then the way that winds there about the
hills is an alley of gold, strewn with the leaves of the plane-trees
that the winds have scattered in countless riches under your feet; that
whisper still in golden beauty over your head. There, as you walk in
spring, while the city unfolds herself before you, a garden of roses in
which a lily has towered, or in the autumn afternoons when she is caught
in silver mist, a city of fragile and delicate beauty, that is soon lost
in the twilight, you may see Florence as she remains in spite of every
violation, Città dei Fiori, Firenze la Bella Bellissima, the sweet
Princess of Italy. And, like the way of life, this road among the
flowers ends in a graveyard, the graveyard of S. Miniato al Monte, under
which nestles S. Salvatore, that little brown bird among the cypresses,
over the grey olives.
The story of S. Miniato makes one of the more quiet chapters of Villani.
"Our city of Florence,"[113] he tells you, returning from I know not
what delightful digression, "was ruled long time under the government
and lordship of the Emperors of Rome, and oft-times the Emperors came to
sojourn in Florence, when they were journeying into Lombardy and into
Germany and into France to conquer provinces. And we find that Decius
the Emperor, in the first year of his reign, which was in the year of
Christ 270, was in Florence, the treasure-house and chancelry of the
empire, sojourning there for his pleasure; and the said Decius cruelly
persecuted the Christians wheresoever he could hear of them or find them
out, and he heard tell how the blessed S. Miniato was living as a
hermit, near to Florence, with his disciples and companions, in a wood
which was called Arisbotto di Firenze, behind the place where now stands
his church, above the city of Florence. This blessed Miniato was
first-born son to the King of Armenia, and having left his kingdom for
the faith of Christ, to do penance and to be far away from his kingdom,
he went over-seas to gain pardon at Rome, and then betook himself to the
said wood, which was in those days wild and solitary, forasmuch as the
city of Florence did not extend, and was not settled beyond Arno but was
all on this side,--save only there was one bridge across Arno, not,
however, where the bridges now are. And it is said by many that it was
the ancient bridge of the Fiesolans which led from Girone to Candegghi,
and this was the ancient and direct road and way from Rome to Fiesole
and to go into Lombardy and across the mountains. The said Emperor
Decius caused the said blessed Miniato to be taken, as his story
narrates. Great gifts and rewards were offered him, as to a king's son,
to the end he should deny Christ; and he, constant and firm in the
faith, would have none of his gifts, but endured divers martyrdoms. In
the end the said Decius caused him to be beheaded, where now stands the
Church of S. Candida alla Croce at Gorgo; and many faithful followers of
Christ received martyrdom in this place. And when the head of the
blessed Miniato had been cut off, by a miracle of Christ, with his hands
he set it again upon his trunk, and on his feet passed over Arno, and
went up the hill where now stands his church, where at that time there
was a little oratory in the name of the blessed Peter the Apostle, where
many bodies of holy martyrs were buried. And when S. Miniato was come to
that place, he gave up his soul to Christ, and his body was there
secretly buried by the Christians; the which place, by reason of the
merits of the blessed S. Miniato, was devoutly venerated by the
Florentines after they were become Christians, and a little church was
built there in his honour. But the great and noble church of marble
which is there now in our times, we find to have been built later by the
zeal of the venerable Father Alibrando, Bishop and citizen of Florence
in the year of Christ 1013, begun on the 26th day of April, by the
commandment and authority of the Catholic and holy Emperor, Henry II of
Bavaria, and of his wife, the holy Empress Gunegonda, which was
reigning in those times; and they presented and endowed the said church
with many rich possessions in Florence and in the country, for the good
of their souls, and caused the said church to be repaired and rebuilt of
marble, as it is now. And they caused the body of the blessed Miniato to
be translated to the altar, which is beneath the vaulting of the said
church, with much reverence and solemnity, by the said bishop and the
clergy of Florence, with all the people, both men and women of the city
of Florence; but afterwards the said church was completed by the
commonwealth of Florence, and the stone steps were made which lead down
by the hill; and the consuls of the Art of the Calimala were put in
charge of the said work of S. Miniato, and were to protect it."
Thus far Villani: to-day S. Miniato, the church, and the great palace
built in 1234 by Andrea Mozzi, Bishop of Florence, come to us with
memories, not of S. Miniato alone, that somewhat shadowy martyr of so
long ago, but of S. Giovanni Gualberto also, of the Benedictines too,
and of the Olivetans, of the siege of 1529, when Michelangelo fortified
the place in defence of Florence, saving the tower from destruction, as
it is said, by swathing it in mattresses; of Cosimo I, who from here
held the city in leash. It is the most beautiful of the
Tuscan-Romanesque churches left to us in Florence; built in 1013 in the
form of a basilica, with a great nave and two aisles, the choir being
raised high above the rest of the church on twenty-eight beautiful red
ancient pillars, over a crypt where, under the altar, S. Miniato sleeps
through the centuries. The fading frescoes of the aisles, the splendour
and quiet of this great and beautiful church that has guarded Florence
almost from the beginning, that has seen Buondelmonte die at the foot of
the Statue of Mars, that has heard the voice of Dante and watched the
flight of Corso Donati, have a peculiar fascination, almost ghostly in
their strangeness, beyond anything else to be found in the city. And if
for the most part the church is so ancient as to rival the Baptistery
itself, the Renaissance has left there more than one beautiful thing.
For between the two flights of steps that lead out of the nave into the
choir, Michelozzo built in 1448, for Piero de' Medici a chapel to hold
the crucifix, now in S. Trinità, which bowed to S. Giovanni Gualberto
when he forgave his brother's murderer,[114] and in the left aisle is
the chapel, built in 1461 by Antonio Rossellino, where the young
Cardinal Jacopo of Portugal lies in one of the loveliest of all Tuscan
tombs, and there Luca della Robbia has placed some of his most charming
terracottas, and Alessio Baldovinetti has painted in fresco. In all
Tuscany there is nothing more lovely than that tomb carved in 1467 by
Antonio Rossellino for the body of the young Cardinal, but twenty-six
years old when he died, "having lived in the flesh as though he were
freed from it, an Angel rather than a man." Over the beautiful
sarcophagus, on a bed beside which two boy angels wait, the young
Cardinal sleeps, his delicate hands folded at rest at last. Above, two
angels kneel, about to give him the crown of glory which fadeth not
away, and Madonna, borne from heaven by the children, comes with her Son
to welcome him home. There, in the most characteristic work of the
fifteenth century, you find man still thinking about death, not as a
trance out of which we shall awaken to some terrible remembrance, but as
sleep, a sweet and fragile slumber, that has something of the drooping
of the flowers about it, in a certain touching beauty and regret that is
never bitter, but, like the ending of a song or the close of a fair day
of spring, that rightly, though not without sadness, passes into
silence, into night, in which shine only the eternal stars.
It is strange that of all the difficult hills of Italy, it is the steep
way hither from Porto S. Niccola, of old, in truth Via Crucis, that
comes into Dante's mind when, in the Twelfth Purgatorio, he sees the
ascent to the second cornice, where is purged the sin of envy. Something
of the immense sadness of that terrible hill seems to linger to-day
about the Monti alle Croci: it is truly a hill of the dead, over which
hovers, pointing the way, some angel
"la creatura bella
Bianco vestita, e nella faccia quale
Per tremolando mattutina Stella."
The Convent of S. Salvatore--S. Francesco al Monte, as it was called of
old--was built in 1480 after a design by Cronaca. Hesitating among the
cypresses on the verge of the olives gardens, Michelangelo called it La
bella Villanella, and truly in its warm simplicity and shy loveliness it
is just that, a beautiful peasant girl among the vines in a garden of
olives. But she has been stripped of her treasures, her trinkets of
silver, her pretty gold chains, her gown of taffetas, her kerchief of
silk (do you not remember the verses of Lorenzo), and all these you will
find to-day, fading out of use in the Uffizi, where, in a palace that
has become a museum, they are most out of place: thus they have robbed
the peasants for the sake of the gold of the tourists, the sterile
ejaculations of the critics.
It is well not to return to the city by the tramway, which rushes
through the trees of the Viale Michelangelo like I know not what hideous
and shrieking beast of prey, but to wander down towards the Piazzale,
and then, just before you came to it, on your left, by S. Salvatore, to
go down to Porta S. Miniato, that "gap in the wall," and then to pass by
the old wall itself up the hill to Porta di S. Giorgio among the olives
between the towers under the Belvedere. It is the most beautiful of all
the gates of the city, little, too, and still keeps its fresco of the
fourteenth century.