Prato is like a flower that has fallen by the wayside that has faded in
the dust of the way. She is a little rosy city, scarcely more than a
castello, full of ruined churches; and in the churches are ruined
frescoes, ruined statues, broken pillars, spoiled altars. You pass from
one church to another--from S. Francesco, with its façade of green and
white, its pleasant cloister and old frescoes, to La Madonna delle
Carceri, to S. Niccolò da Tolentino, to S. Domenico--and you ask
yourself, as you pass from one to another, what you have come to see:
only this flower fallen by the wayside.
But in truth Prato is the child of Florence, a rosy child among the
flowers--in the country, too, as children should be. Her churches are
small. What could be more like a child's dream of a church than La
Madonna delle Carceri? And the Palazzo Pretorio--it is a toy palace
wonderfully carved and contrived, a toy that has been thrown aside. In
the Palazzo Comunale the little daughter of Florence has gathered all
her broken treasures: here a discarded Madonna, there a Bambino long
since forgotten; flowers, too, flowers of the wayside, faded now, such
as a little country girl will gather and toss into your vettura at any
village corner in Tuscany; a terra-cotta of Luca della Robbia, and that
would be a lily; a Madonna by Nero di Bicci, and that might have been a
rose; a few panels by Lippo Lippi, and they were from the convent
garden. In Via S. Margherita you come still upon a nosegay of such
country blossoms, growing still by the wayside--Madonna with St.
Anthony, S. Margherita, S. Costanza, and S. Stefano about her, painted
by Filippino Lippo, a very lovely shrine, such as you cannot find in
Florence, but which Prato seems glad to possess, on the way to the
country itself.
And since Prato is a child, there are about her many children;
mischievous, shy, joyful little people, who lurk round the coppersmiths,
or play in the old churches, or hide about the corridors of Palazzo
Comunale. And so it is not surprising that the greatest treasures of
Prato are either the work of children--the frescoes, for instance, of
Lippo Lippi and Lucrezia Buti in the Duomo--or the presentment of them,
yes, in their happiest moments; some dancing, while others play on
pipes, or with cymbals full of surprising sweetness, in the open-air
pulpit of Donatello; a pulpit from which five times every year a
delightful and wonderful thing is shown, not without its significance,
too, in this child-city of children--Madonna's Girdle, the Girdle of the
Mother of them all, shown in the open air, so that even the tiniest may
see.
The Duomo itself, simple and small, so that you may not lose your way
there, however little you may be, was built in 1317, though a church has
stood there apparently since about 750, while the façade, all in ivory
and green, is a work of the fifteenth century. Donatello's pulpit, for
which a contract was made in 1425 which named Michelozzo with him as one
of those _industriosi maestri_ intent on the work, is built into the
south-west corner of the church overlooking the Piazza. Almost a
complete circle in form, it is separated, unfortunately we may think,
into seven panels divided by twin pilasters, where on a mosaic ground
groups, crowds almost, of children dance and play and sing. It is the
very spirit of childhood you see there, a naïve impetuosity that
occasionally almost stumbles or forgets which way to turn; and if these
panels have not the subtler rhythm of the Cantoria at Florence, they are
more frankly just children's work, so that any day you may see some
little maid of Prato gazing at those laughing babies, babies who dance
really not without a certain awkwardness and simplicity, as though they
were her own brothers, as indeed they are. Under the pulpit, Michelozzo
has forged in bronze a relief of one face of a capital, where other
children gaze with all the serious innocence of childhood at the
pleasant world of the Piazza.
Passing under the terra-cotta of Madonna with St. Stephen and St.
Laurence, made by Andrea della Robbia in 1489, you enter the church
itself, a little dim and mysterious, and full of wonderful or precious
things, those pillars, for instance, of green serpentine or the Sacra
Cintola, the very Girdle of Madonna herself, in its own chapel there on
the left behind the beautiful bronze screen of Bruno di Ser Lapo. There,
too, you will always find a group of children, and surely it was for
them that Agnolo Gaddi painted those frescoes of the life of Madonna and
the gift of her Girdle to St. Thomas. For it seems that doubting Thomas
was doubting to the last; he alone of all the saints was the least a
child. How they wonder at him now, for first he could not believe that
Jesus was risen from the dead, when the flowers rise, when the spring
like Mary wanders to-day in tears in the garden. Was she not, indeed,
the spring, who at break of day stood trembling on the verge of the
garden, looking for the sun, the sun that had been dead all winter long?
"They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him."
After all, is it not the cry of our very hearts often enough at Easter,
when the summer for which we have waited too long seems never to be
coming at all? It came at last, and St. Thomas, like to us maybe, but
unlike the children, would not believe it till he had touched the very
dayspring with his hands, and felt the old sweetness of the sunshine.
And so, when the sun was set and the world desolate, Madonna too came to
die, and was received into heaven amid a great company of angels, and
they were the flowers, and there she is eternally. Now, when all this
came to pass, St. Thomas was not by, and when he came and saw Winter in
the world he would not believe that Madonna was dead, nor would he be
persuaded that she was crowned Queen of Angels in heaven. And Mary, in
pity of his sorrow, sent him by the hands of children "the girdle with
which her body was girt,"--just a strip of the blue sky sprinkled with
stars,--"and therefore he understood that she was assumpt into heaven."
And if you ask how comes this precious thing in Prato, I ask where else,
then, could it be but in this little city among the children, where the
promise of Spring abides continually, and the Sun is ever in their
hearts. Ah, Rose of the world, dear Lily of the fields, you will return;
like Spring you will come from that heaven where you are, and in every
valley the flowers will run before you and the poppies will stray among
the corn, and the proud gladiolus will bow its violet head; then on the
hillside I shall hear again the silver laughter of the olives, and in
the wide valleys I shall hear all the rivers running to the sea, and the
sweet wind will wander in the villages, and in the walled cities I shall
find the flowers, and I too, with the children, shall wait on the hills
at dawn to see you pass by with the Sun in your arms because it is
spring--Stella Matutina, Causa nostrae laetitiae.
It was a certain lad of Prato, Michele by name, who, wandering in the
wake of the great army in Palestine in 1096 at evening, by one of the
wells of the desert, kissed the little daughter of a great priest, who
gave him the Girdle of Madonna for love. Returning to Prato with this
precious thing, and having nowhere to hide it, he put it, as a child
might do, under his bed, and every night the angels for fear mounted
guard about it. He died, and it came into the hands of a certain Uberto,
a priest of the city; then, one tried to steal it, but he was put to
death, and after, the Girdle was placed in the Duomo in a casket of
ivory in a chapel of marble between the pillars of serpentine and lamps
of gold. And Andrea Pisano carved a statue of Madonna, and they dressed
her in silk and placed her on an altar, in which lay hidden the promise
of spring. Then Ridolfo Ghirlandajo painted a fresco over the west door,
of Madonna with her Girdle, and indeed they did all they knew in honour
of their treasure: so that Mino da Fiesole and Rossellino made a pulpit
and set it there in the nave, and there, too, you may see Madonna
giving her Girdle to St. Thomas, and St. Stephen, the boy martyr, stoned
to death, and other remembrances. In the south transept Benedetto da
Maiano carved a Madonna and Child, while his brothers carved a Pietà;
but it is not such work as this which calls you to the Duomo to-day, but
certainly the Girdle itself, which, however, you can only see on certain
occasions.[135] And then there is the work of those two children, Fra
Lippo Lippi and the little girl who ran away from her convent for love
of him, Lucrezia Buti; for though it was Lippo Lippi who painted, it was
Lucrezia who served him for model, and since with him painting, for the
first time perhaps, came to need life to inspire it, Lucrezia has her
part in his work which it would be ungenerous to ignore.
Filippo Lippi was born in 1406 in a by-street of Florence called
Ardiglione, behind the convent of the Carmelites, where he painted his
first frescoes. His mother, poor soul, died in giving him life, and his
father died too before he was three years old. For some time he lived in
the care of a certain Mona Lapaccia, his aunt, who hardly brought him up
till he was eight years old, when, as Vasari tells us, no longer able to
support the burden of his maintenance, she took him to the Carmelites,
who promised to make a friar of him. Florence was at the moment of its
all too brief spring, in which painting and sculpture were to grow
almost like flowers at every street corner, with a delicate beauty that
is characteristic of wild flowers, which yet are hardy enough in
reality. Reality, it is just that which is so touching in the work of
this naïve, observant painter, whose work has much of the beauty of a
folk-song, one of those rispetti which on every Tuscan hill you may hear
any summer day above the song of the cicale. He went about, like the
child he was his whole life long, looking at things out of curiosity,
and remembering them for love. His adventures, those marvellous
adventures of his childhood so carefully related by Vasari,--his capture
by pirates on the beach of Ancona, his sojourn in Barbary, his escape
hardly won by the astonishment of his art, are tales which, whether true
or not, have a real value for us because they are indicative of his
life, his view of the world: his life was in itself so daring, so
delightful an adventure, that nothing that could have happened to him
can seem marvellous beside it. For he has for the first time in Italy
seen the things we have seen, and loved them: the children at the street
corner, the flowers by the wayside, the girls grouped in a doorway
looking sideways up the street, a mother nursing her little struggling
son. In 1421 he had taken the habit, and then Masaccio had come to the
convent to paint in the Brancacci Chapel, and Fra Filippo watched him,
helping him perhaps, certainly fired by his work, till he who had played
in the streets of Florence decided that he must be a painter. It is
characteristic of his whole method that from the very beginning the
cloister was too strait for him; he had the passion for seeing things,
people, the life of the city, of strange cities too, for we hear of him
vaguely in Naples, but soon in Florence again, where he painted in S.
Ambrogio for the nuns the Coronation of the Virgin, now in the
Accademia. It was this picture which Cosimo came upon, and, finding the
painter, took him into his house. And truly, it was something very
different from the holy work of Angelico, a painter Cosimo loved so
well, that he found in that picture of the Coronation. That Virgin, was
she Queen of Angels or some Florentine girl?--and then those angels, are
they not the very children of the City of Flowers? But Lippo was not
content; he who had found the convent too narrow for him in his
insatiable desire for life, was not likely to be content with any
burgher's palace. Cosimo ordered pictures, Lippo laughed in the streets,
so they locked him in, and he knotted the sheets of the bed together and
let himself out of the window, and for days he lived in the streets. So
Cosimo let him alone, "labouring to keep him at his work by kindness,"
understanding, perhaps that it was a child with whom he had to deal, a
child full of the wayward impulses of children, the naïve genius of
youth, the happiness of all that;--the passions, too, a passion, in
Filippo's case, for kisses. He was never far from a girl's arms; and
then how he has painted them, shy, roguish, wanton daughters of
Florence, with their laughing, obstinate, kicking babies, half laughing,
half smiling, altogether serious too, while Lippo paints them with a
kiss for payment.
He spent some months in Prato with his friend Fra Diamante, who had been
his companion in novitiate. The nuns of S. Margherita commissioned him
to paint a picture for their high altar, and it was while at work there
that he caught sight of Lucrezia Buti. "Fra Filippo," says Vasari,
"having had a glance at the girl, who was very beautiful and graceful,
so persuaded the nuns that he prevailed upon them to permit him to make
a likeness of her for the figure of their Virgin." The picture, now in
Paris, was finished, not before Filippo had fallen in love with Lucrezia
and she with him, so that he led her away from the nuns; and on a
certain day, when she had gone forth to do honour to the Cintola, he
bore her from their keeping. "Take us the foxes, the little foxes that
spoil the vineyards; for our vineyards have tender grapes."
Vasari tells us that Lucrezia never returned, but remained with Filippo,
bearing him a son,--that Filippino "who eventually became a most
excellent and very famous painter like his father."
And it is said that not Lucrezia alone was involved in that adventure,
for she had a sister not less lovely than herself, called Spinetta; she
also fled away, and this again brought disgrace on the nuns, so that the
Pope himself was compelled to interfere, for they were all living in
Prato, not in disgrace but happily, children in a city of children.
Cosimo, however, befriended them, and would laugh till the tears came in
telling the tale, till Pius II, not altogether himself guiltless of the
love of women, at his request unfrocked Filippo and authorised his union
with Lucrezia. However this may be, and however strange it may seem,
this wolf, who had stolen the lamb from the fold of Holy Church, was
engaged by the Duomo authorities in this very city of the theft to
paint in fresco there in the choir the story of St. John Baptist and of
St. Stephen. It is a masterpiece. As we look to-day on the faded beauty
of his work, it is with surprise we ask ourselves why he has signed the
fresco of the death of St. Stephen, for instance, Frater Filippus;
surely he was frater no longer, but Sponsus. He worked for four years at
those frescoes, Fra Diamante coming from Florence to help him. He was a
child, and the children of Prato understood him--the Medici too; for
when the work in Prato was finished, Piero de' Medici roused himself to
find him work, again in a church, the Duomo of Spoleto, where he has
painted very sweetly the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Shepherds,
the Coronation of the Virgin. Could these things have happened in any
other city save Prato, or to any other than a child in the days not so
long before Savonarola was burned? No; Fra Lippo played among the
children of Italy, and has told us of them with simplicity and
sweetness,--little stumbling fellows of the house doors, the laughing
children about the fountains, the slim, pale girls who walk arm-in-arm,
smiling faintly, in every Tuscan city at sunset, the flowers by the
wayside, the shepherds of the hills. And he has made Jesus in the image
of his little son; and Madonna is but Lucrezia Buti, whom he kissed into
the world. You may see them to-day if you will go to Prato.