THE MAKERS OF FLORENCE
With all the treasures of my historic reading in mind from the lives of
the Medici and Savonarola to that of Michelangelo and the Florentine
school of artists, I was keen to see what Florence would be like. Mrs.
Q. had described it as the most individual of all the Italian cities
that she had seen. She had raved over its narrow, dark, cornice-shaded
streets, its fortress-like palaces, its highly individual churches
and cloisters, the way the drivers of the little open vehicles plied
everywhere cracking their whips, until, she said, it sounded like
a Fourth of July in Janesville. I was keen to see how large the
dome of the cathedral would look and whether it would really tower
conspicuously over the remaining buildings of the city, and whether
the Arno would look as picturesque as it did in all the photographs.
The air was so soft and the sun so bright, although sinking low in the
west, as the train entered the city, that I was pleased to accept,
instead of the ancient atmosphere which I had anticipated, the wide
streets and rows of four- and six-family apartment houses which
characterize all the newer sections. They have the rich browns and
creams of the earlier portion of Florence; but they are very different
in their suggestion of modernity. The distant hills, as I could see
from the car windows, were dotted with houses and villas occupying
delightful positions above the town. Suddenly I saw the Duomo; and
although I knew it only from photographs I recognized it in an instant.
It spoke for itself in a large, dignified way. Over the housetops it
soared like a great bubble; and some pigeons flying in the air gave it
the last touch of beauty. We wound around the city in a circle--I could
tell this by the shifting position of the sun--through great yards of
railway-tracks with scores of engines and lines of small box-cars;
and then I saw a small stream and a bridge,--nothing like the Arno,
of course,--a canal; and the next thing we were rolling into a long
crowded railway-station, the guards calling Firenze. I got up, gathered
my overcoat and bags into my arms, signaled a _facino_ and gave them
to him; and then I sought a vehicle that would convey me to the hotel
for which I was bound--the Hotel de Ville on the Arno. I sat behind
a fat driver while he cracked his whip endlessly above the back of a
lazy horse, passing the while the showy façade of Santa Maria Novella,
striped with strange bands of white and bluish gray or drab,--a
pleasing effect for a church. I could see at once that the Florence of
the Middle Ages was a much more condensed affair than that which now
sprawls out in various directions from the Loggia dei Lanzi and the
place of the cathedral.
The narrow streets were alive with people; and the drivers of vehicles
everywhere seemed to drive as if their lives depended on it. Suddenly
we turned into a _piazza_ very modern and very different from that
of Santa Maria Novella; and then we were at the hotel door. It was a
nice-looking square, as I thought, not very large,--clean and gracious.
To my delight I found that my room opened directly upon a balcony which
overlooked the Arno, and that from it, sitting in a chair, I could
command all of that remarkable prospect of high-piled medieval houses
hanging over the water’s edge. It was beautiful. The angelus bells
were ringing; there was a bright glow in the west where the sun was
going down; the water of the stream was turquoise blue, and the walls
of all the houses seemingly brown. I stood and gazed, thinking of
the peculiarly efficient German manager I had encountered, the German
servants who were in charge of this hotel, and the fact that Florence
had long since radically changed from what it was. A German porter
came and brought my bags; a German maid brought hot water; a German
clerk took my full name and address for the register, and possibly for
the police; and then I was at liberty to unpack and dress for dinner.
Instead I took a stroll out along the stream-banks to study the world
of jewelry shops which I saw there, and the stands for flowers, and the
idling crowd.
I dare not imagine what the interest of Florence would be to any one
who did not know her strange and variegated history, but I should
think, outside of the surrounding scenic beauty, it would be little
or nothing. Unless one had a fondness for mere quaintness and gloom
and solidity, it would in a way be repulsive, or at best dreary. But
lighted by the romance, the tragedy, the lust, the zealotry, the
brutality and the artistic idealism that surrounds such figures as
Dante, the Medici, Savonarola, Donatello, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi,
and the whole world of art, politics, trade, war, it takes on a strange
luster to me, that of midnight waters lighted by the fitful gleams of
distant fires. I never think of it without seeing in my mind’s eye
the Piazza della Signoria as it must have looked on that day in 1494
when that famous fiasco, in regard to “the test by fire,” entered
into between Savonarola and the Franciscan monks, took place,--those
long, ridiculous processions of Dominicans and Franciscans, Savonarola
bearing the chalice aloft; or that other day when Charles VIII of
France at the instance of Savonarola paraded the street in black
helmet with mantle of gold brocade, his lance leveled before him,
his retainers gathered about him, and then disappointed the people
by getting off his horse and showing himself to be the insignificant
little man that he was, almost deformed and with an idiotic expression
of countenance. Neither can I forget the day that Savonarola was
beheaded and burnt for his religious zealotry in this same Piazza della
Signoria; nor all the rivals of the Medici hung from the windows of
the Palazzo Vecchio or beheaded in the Bargello. Think of the tonsured
friars and grave citizens of this medieval city, under Savonarola’s
fiery incitement, their heads garlanded with flowers, mingling with the
overwrought children called to help in purifying the city, dancing like
David before the ark and shouting “Long live Christ and the Virgin,
our rulers”; of the days when Alessandro Medici and his boon companion
and cousin, Lorenzo, rode about the city on a mule together, defiling
the virtue of innocent girls, roistering in houses of ill repute,
and drinking and stabbing to their hearts’ content; of Fra Girolamo
preaching to excited crowds in the Duomo and of his vision of a black
cross over Rome, a red one over Jerusalem; of Machiavelli writing his
brochure “The Prince”; and of Michelangelo defending the city walls
as an engineer. Can any other city match this spectacular, artistic,
melodramatic progress in so short a space of time, or present the
galaxy of artists, the rank company of material masters such as the
Medici, the Pazzi, the Strozzi, plotting and counter-plotting to the
accompaniment of lusts and murders? Other cities have had their amazing
hours, all of them, from Rome to London. But Florence! It has always
seemed to me that the literary possibilities of Florence, in spite of
the vast body of literature concerning it, have scarcely been touched.
The art section alone is so vast and so brilliant that one of the art
merchants told me while I was there that at least forty thousand of
the city’s one hundred and seventy thousand population is foreign
(principally English and American), drawn to it by its art merits, and
that the tide of travel from April to October is amazing. I can believe
it. You will hear German and English freely spoken in all the principal
thoroughfares.
Because of a gray day and dull, following the warmth and color and
light of Perugia and Rome, Florence seemed especially dark and somber
to me at first; but I recovered. Its charm and beauty grew on me by
degrees so that by the time I had done inspecting Santa Maria Novella,
Santa Croce, San Marco, the Cathedral group and the Bargello, I was
really desperately in love with the art of it all, and after I had
investigated the galleries, the Pitti, Uffizi, Belle Arti, and the
Cloisters, I was satisfied that I could find it in my heart to live
here and work, a feeling I had in many other places in Europe.
Truly, however, there is no other city in Europe just like Florence;
it has all the distinction of great individuality. My mood changed
about, at times, as I thought of the different periods of its history,
the splendor of its ambitions or the brutality of its methods; but
when I was in the presence of some of its perfect works of art, such
as Botticelli’s “Spring” in the Belle Arti, or Michelangelo’s “Tombs
of the Medici” in San Lorenzo, or Titian’s “Magdalen,” or Raphael’s
“Leo X” in the Pitti, or Benozzo Gozzoli’s fresco (the journey of the
three kings to Bethlehem) in the old Medici Palace, then I was ready to
believe that nothing could be finer than Florence. I realized now that
of all the cities in Europe that I saw Florence was possessed of the
most intense art atmosphere,--something that creeps over your soul in a
grim realistic way and causes you to repeat over and over: “Amazing men
worked here--amazing men!”
It was so strange to find driven home to me,--even more here than in
Rome, that illimitable gulf that divides ideality of thought and
illusion from reality. Men painted the illusions of Christianity
concerning the saints and the miracles at this time better than ever
before or since, and they believed something else. A Cosimo Medici who
could patronize the Papacy with one hand and make a cardinal into a
pope, could murder a rival with the other; and Andrea del Castagno,
who was seeking to shine as a painter of religious art--madonnas,
transfigurations, and the like--could murder a Domenico Veneziano in
order to have no rival in what he considered to be a permanent secret
of how to paint in oils. The same munificence that could commission
Michelangelo to design and execute a magnificent façade for San Lorenzo
(it was never done, of course) could suborn the elective franchise of
the people and organize a school on the lines of Plato’s Academy. In
other words, in Florence as in the Court of Alexander VI at Rome, we
find life stripped of all sham in action, in so far as an individual
and his conscience were concerned, and filled with the utmost subtlety
in so far as the individual and the public were concerned. Cosimo and
Lorenzo de’ Medici, Andrea del Castagno, Machiavelli, the Pazzi, the
Strozzi,--in fact, the whole “kit and kaboodle” of the individuals
comprising the illustrious life that foregathered here, were cut
from the same piece of cloth. They were, one and all, as we know,
outside of a few artistic figures, shrewd, calculating, relentless and
ruthless seekers after power and position; lust, murder, gormandizing,
panoplizing, were the order of the day. Religion,--it was to be laughed
at; weakness,--it was to be scorned. Poverty was to be misused.
Innocence was to be seized upon and converted. Laughing at virtue and
satisfying themselves always, they went their way, building their
grim, dark, almost windowless palaces; preparing their dungeons and
erecting their gibbets for their enemies. No wonder Savonarola saw
“a black cross over Rome.” They struck swiftly and surely and smiled
blandly and apparently mercifully; they had the Asiatic notion of
morality,--charity, virtue, and the like, combined with a ruthless
indifference to them. Power was the thing they craved--power and
magnificence; and these were the things they had. But, oh, Florence!
Florence! how you taught the nothingness of life itself; its shams;
its falsehoods; its atrocities; its uselessness. It has never been
any wonder to me that the saddest, darkest, most pathetic figure in
all art, Michelangelo Buonarroti, should have appeared and loved
and dreamed and labored and died at this time. His melancholy was a
fit commentary on his age, on life, and on all art. Oh, Buonarroti,
loneliest of figures: I think I understand how it was with you.
Bear with me while I lay a flower on this great grave. I cannot think
of another instance in art in which indomitable will and almost
superhuman energy have been at once so frustrated and so successful.
I never think of the great tomb for which the Moses in San Pietro in
Vincoli--large, grave, thoughtful; the man who could walk with God--and
the slaves in the Louvre were intended without being filled with a vast
astonishment and grief to think that life should not have permitted
this design to come to fulfilment. To think that a pope so powerful as
Julius should have planned a tomb so magnificent, with Michelangelo
to scheme it out and actually to begin it, and then never permit it
to reach completion. All the way northward through Italy this idea of
a parallelogram with forty figures on it and covered with reliefs and
other ornaments haunted me. At Florence, in the Belle Arti, I saw more
of the figures (casts), designed for this tomb--strange, unfolding
thoughts half-hewn out of the rock, which suggest the source from
which Rodin has drawn his inspiration,--and my astonishment grew.
Before I was out of Italy, this man and his genius, the mere dreams
of the things he hoped to do, enthralled me so that to me he has
become the one great art figure of the world. Colossal is the word for
Michelangelo,--so vast that life was too short for him to suggest even
a tithe of what he felt. But even the things that he did, how truly
monumental they are.
I am sure I am not mistaken when I say that there is a profound
sadness, too, running through all that he ever did. His works are
large, Gargantuan, and profoundly melancholy; witness the Moses that
I have been talking of, to say nothing of the statues on the tombs of
the Medici in San Lorenzo at Florence. I saw them in Berlin, reproduced
there in plaster in the Kaiser-Friederich-Museum, and once more I was
filled with the same sense of profound, meditative melancholy. It is
present in its most significant form here in Florence, in San Lorenzo,
the façade of which he once prepared to make magnificent, but here he
was again frustrated. I saw the originals of these deep, sad figures
that impressed me as no other sculptural figures ever have done.
“Dawn and Dusk”; “Day and Night.” How they dwell with me constantly.
I was never able to look at any of his later work--the Sistine Chapel
frescoes, the figures of slaves in the Louvre, the Moses in San Pietro
in Vincoli, or these figures here in Florence, without thinking how
true it was that this great will had rarely had its way and how,
throughout all his days, his energy was so unfortunately compelled to
war with circumstance. Life plays this trick on the truly great if they
are not ruthless and of material and executive leanings. Art is a pale
flower that blooms only in sheltered places and to drag it forth and
force it to contend with the rough usages of the world is to destroy
its perfectness. It was so in this man’s case who at times, because of
unlucky conjunctions, was compelled to fly for his life, or to sue for
the means which life should have been honored to bestow upon him, or
else to abandon great purposes.
Out of such a mist of sorrow, and only so, however, have come these
figures that now dream here year after year in their gray chapel, while
travelers come and go, draining their cup of wonder,--rising ever and
anon to the level of the beauty they contemplate. I can see Browning
speculating upon the spirit of these figures. “Night” with her heavy
lids, lost in great weariness; and “Day” with his clear eyes. I can see
Rodin gathering substance for his “Thinker,” and Shelley marveling at
the suggestions which arise from these mighty figures. There is none so
great as this man who, in his medieval gloom and mysticism, inherited
the art of Greece.