S. Maria Novella
The great churches of Florence--A Dominican cathedral--The "Decameron"
begins--Domenico Ghirlandaio--Alessio Baldovinetti--The Louvre--The
S. Maria Novella frescoes--Giovanni and Lorenzo Tornabuoni--Ruskin
implacable--Cimabue's Madonna--Filippino Lippi--Orcagna's "Last
Judgment"--The Cloisters of Florence--The Spanish Chapel--S. Dominic
triumphant--Giotto at his sweetest--The "Wanderer's" doom--The Piazza,
as an arena.
S. Maria Novella is usually bracketed with S. Croce as the most
interesting Florentine church after the Duomo, but S. Lorenzo has of
course to be reckoned with very seriously. I think that for interest
I should place S. Maria Novella fifth, including also the Baptistery
before it, but architecturally second. Its interior is second in
beauty only to S. Croce. S. Croce is its immediate religious rival,
for it was because the Dominicans had S. Maria Novella, begun in
1278, that several years later the Franciscans determined to have an
equally important church and built S. Croce. The S. Maria Novella
architects were brothers of the order, but Talenti, whom we saw at
work both on Giotto's tower and on San Michele, built the campanile,
and Leon Battista Alberti the marble façade, many years later. The
richest patrons of S. Maria Novella--corresponding to the Medici at
S. Lorenzo and the Bardi at S. Croce--were the Rucellai, whose palace,
designed also by the wonderful versatile Alberti, we have seen.
The interior of S. Maria Novella is very fine and spacious, and
it gathers and preserves an exquisite light at all times of the
day. Nowhere in Florence is there a finer aisle, with the roof
springing so nobly and masterfully from the eight columns on either
side. The whole effect, like that of S. Croce, is rather northern,
the result of the yellow and brown hues; but whereas S. Croce has a
crushing flat roof, this one is all soaring gladness.
The finest view of the interior is from the altar steps looking back
to the beautiful circular window over the entrance, a mass of happy
colour. In the afternoon the little plain circular windows high up
in the aisle shoot shafts of golden light upon the yellow walls. The
high altar of inlaid marble is, I think, too bright and too large. The
church is more impressive on Good Friday, when over this altar is built
a Calvary with the crucifix on the summit and life-size mourners at its
foot; while a choir and string orchestra make superbly mournful music.
I like to think that it was within the older S. Maria Novella that
those seven mirthful young ladies of Florence remained one morning
in 1348, after Mass, to discuss plans of escape from the city during
the plague. As here they chatted and plotted, there entered the church
three young men; and what simpler than to engage them as companions in
their retreat, especially as all three, like all seven of the young
women, were accomplished tellers of stories with no fear whatever of
Mrs. Grundy? And thus the "Decameron" of Giovanni Boccaccio came about.
S. Maria Novella also resembles S. Croce in its moving groups of
sight-seers each in the hands of a guide. These one sees always and
hears always: so much so that a reminder has been printed and set up
here and there in this church, to the effect that it is primarily the
house of God and for worshippers. But S. Maria Novella has not a tithe
of S. Croce's treasures. Having almost no tombs of first importance,
it has to rely upon its interior beauty and upon its frescoes, and
its chief glory, whatever Mr. Ruskin, who hated them, might say, is,
for most people, Ghirlandaio's series of scenes in the life of the
Virgin and S. John the Baptist. These cover the walls of the choir
and for more than four centuries have given delight to Florentines
and foreigners. Such was the thoroughness of their painter in his
colour mixing (in which the boy Michelangelo assisted him) that,
although they have sadly dimmed and require the best morning light,
they should endure for centuries longer, a reminder not only of
the thoughtful sincere interesting art of Ghirlandaio and of the
pious generosity of the Tornabuoni family, who gave them, but also
of the costumes and carriage of the Florentine ladies at the end
of the fifteenth century when Lorenzo the Magnificent was in his
zenith. Domenico Ghirlandaio may not be quite of the highest rank
among the makers of Florence; but he comes very near it, and indeed,
by reason of being Michelangelo's first instructor, perhaps should
stand amid them. But one thing is certain--that without him Florence
would be the poorer by many beautiful works.
He was born in 1449, twenty-one years after the death of Masaccio and
three before Leonardo, twenty-six before Michelangelo, and thirty-four
before Raphael. His full name was Domenico or Tommaso di Currado di
Doffo Bigordi, but his father Tommaso Bigordi, a goldsmith, having
hit upon a peculiarly attractive way of making garlands for the hair,
was known as Ghirlandaio, the garland maker; and time has effaced
the Bigordi completely.
The portraits of both Tommaso and Domenico, side by side, occur in the
fresco representing Joachim driven from the Temple: Domenico, who is to
be seen second from the extreme right, a little resembles our Charles
II. Like his father, and, as we have seen, like most of the artists of
Florence, he too became a goldsmith, and his love of the jewels that
goldsmiths made may be traced in his pictures; but at an early age he
was sent to Alessio Baldovinetti to learn to be a painter. Alessio's
work we find all over Florence: a Last Judgment in the Accademia, for
example, but that is not a very pleasing thing; a Madonna Enthroned,
in the Uffizi; the S. Miniato frescoes; the S. Trinità frescoes;
and that extremely charming although faded work in the outer court of
SS. Annunziata. For the most delightful picture from his hand, however,
one has to go to the Louvre, where there is a Madonna and Child (1300
a), in the early Tuscan room, which has a charm not excelled by any
such group that I know. The photographers still call it a Piero della
Francesca, and the Louvre authorities omit to name it at all; but it
is Alessio beyond question. Next it hangs the best Ghirlandaio that
I know--the very beautiful Visitation, and, to add to the interest
of this room to the returning Florentine wanderer, on the same wall
are two far more attractive works by Bastiano Mainardi (Ghirlandaio's
brother-in-law and assistant at S. Maria Novella) than any in Florence.
Alessio, who was born in 1427, was an open-handed ingenious man who
could not only paint and do mosaic but once made a wonderful clock for
Lorenzo. His experiments with colour were disastrous: hence most of his
frescoes have perished; but possibly it was through Alessio's mistakes
that Ghirlandaio acquired the use of such a lasting medium. Alessio
was an independent man who painted from taste and not necessity.
Ghirlandaio's chief influences, however, were Masaccio, at the Carmine,
Fra Lippo Lippi, and Verrocchio, who is thought also to have been
Baldovinetti's pupil and whose Baptism of Christ, in the Accademia,
painted when Ghirlandaio was seventeen, must have given Ghirlandaio
the lines for his own treatment of the incident in this church. One
has also only to compare Verrocchio's sculptured Madonnas in the
Bargello with many of Ghirlandaio's to see the influence again;
both were attracted by a similar type of sweet, easy-natured girl.
When he was twenty-six Ghirlandaio went to Rome to paint the Sixtine
library, and then to San Gimignano, where he was assisted by Mainardi,
who was to remain his most valuable ally in executing the large
commissions which were to come to his workshop. His earliest Florentine
frescoes are those which we shall see at Ognissanti; the Madonna della
Misericordia and the Deposition painted for the Vespucci family and
only recently discovered, together with the S. Jerome, in the church,
and the Last Supper, in the refectory. By this time Ghirlandaio and
Botticelli were in some sort of rivalry, although, so far as I know,
friendly enough, and both went to Rome in 1481, together with Perugino,
Piero di Cosimo, Cosimo Rosselli, Luca Signorelli and others, at
the command of Pope Sixtus IV to decorate the Sixtine chapel, the
excommunication of all Florentines which the Pope had decreed after
the failure of the Pazzi Conspiracy to destroy the Medici (as we saw
in chapter II) having been removed in order to get these excellent
workmen to the Holy City. Painting very rapidly the little band had
finished their work in six months, and Ghirlandaio was at home again
with such an ambition and industry in him that he once expressed the
wish that every inch of the walls of Florence might be covered by
his brush--and in those days Florence had walls all round it, with
twenty-odd towers in addition to the gates. His next great frescoes
were those in the Palazzo Vecchio and S. Trinita. It was in 1485
that he painted his delightful Adoration, at the Accademia, and in
1486 he began his great series at S. Maria Novella, finishing them
in 1490, his assistants being his brother David, Benedetto Mainardi,
who married Ghirlandaio's sister, and certain apprentices, among them
the youthful Michelangelo, who came to the studio in 1488.
The story of the frescoes is this. Ghirlandaio when in Rome had
met Giovanni Tornabuoni, a wealthy merchant whose wife had died
in childbirth. Her death we have already seen treated in relief by
Verrocchio in the Bargello. Ghirlandaio was first asked to beautify
in her honour the Minerva at Rome, where she was buried, and this
he did. Later when Giovanni Tornabuoni wished to present S. Maria
Novella with a handsome benefaction, he induced the Ricci family,
who owned this chapel, to allow him to re-decorate it, and engaged
Ghirlandaio for the task. This meant first covering the fast fading
frescoes by Orcagna, which were already there, and then painting over
them. What the Orcagnas were like we cannot know; but the substitute,
although probably it had less of curious genius in it was undoubtedly
more attractive to the ordinary observer.
The right wall, as one faces the window (whose richness of coloured
glass, although so fine in the church as a whole, is here such a
privation), is occupied by scenes in the story of the Baptist; the
left by the life of the Virgin. The left of the lowest pair on the
right wall represents S. Mary and S. Elizabeth, and in it a party of
Ghirlandaio's stately Florentine ladies watch the greeting of the two
saints outside Florence itself, symbolized rather than portrayed,
very near the church in which we stand. The girl in yellow, on the
right of the picture, with her handkerchief in her hand and wearing a
rich dress, is Giovanna degli Albizzi, who married Lorenzo Tornabuoni
at the Villa Lemmi near Florence, that villa from which Botticelli's
exquisite fresco, now in the Louvre at the top of the main staircase,
in which she again is to be seen, was taken. Her life was a sad
one, for her husband was one of those who conspired with Piero di
Lorenzo de' Medici for his return some ten years later, and was
beheaded. S. Elizabeth is of course the older woman. The companion
to this picture represents the angel appearing to S. Zacharias, and
here again Ghirlandaio gives us contemporary Florentines, portraits
of distinguished Tornabuoni men and certain friends of eminence
among them. In the little group low down on the left, for example,
are Poliziano and Marsilio Ficino, the Platonist. Above--but seeing
is beginning to be difficult--the pair of frescoes represent, on the
right, the birth of the Baptist, and on the left, his naming. The birth
scene has much beauty, and is as well composed as any, and there is
a girl in it of superb grace and nobility; but the birth scene of the
Virgin, on the opposite wall, is perhaps the finer and certainly more
easily seen. In the naming of the child we find Medici portraits once
more, that family being related to the Tornabuoni; and Mr. Davies,
in his book on Ghirlandaio, offers the interesting suggestion, which
he supports very reasonably, that the painter has made the incident
refer to the naming of Lorenzo de' Medici's third son, Giovanni (or
John), who afterwards became Pope Leo X. In that case the man on the
left, in green, with his hand on his hip, would be Lorenzo himself,
whom he certainly resembles. Who the sponsor is is not known. The
landscape and architecture are alike charming.
Above these we faintly see that strange Baptism of Christ, so curiously
like the Verrocchio in the Accademia, and the Baptist preaching.
The left wall is perhaps the favourite. We begin with Joachim being
driven from the Temple, one of the lowest pair; and this has a peculiar
interest in giving us a portrait of the painter and his associates--the
figure on the extreme right being Benedetto Mainardi; then Domenico
Ghirlandaio; then his father; and lastly his brother David. On the
opposite side of the picture is the fated Lorenzo Tornabuoni, of whom
I have spoken above, the figure farthest from the edge, with his hand
on his hip. The companion picture is the most popular of all--the
Birth of the Virgin--certainly one of the most charming interiors in
Florence. Here again we have portraits--no doubt Tornabuoni ladies--and
much pleasant fancy on the part of the painter, who made everything as
beautiful as he could, totally unmindful of the probabilities. Ruskin
is angry with him for neglecting to show the splashing of the water
in the vessel, but it would be quite possible for no splashing to
be visible, especially if the pouring had only just begun; but for
Ruskin's strictures you must go to "Mornings in Florence," where poor
Ghirlandaio gets a lash for every virtue of Giotto. Next--above, on
the left--we have the Presentation of the Virgin and on the right
her Marriage. The Presentation is considered by Mr. Davies to be
almost wholly the work of Ghirlandaio's assistants, while the youthful
Michelangelo himself has been credited with the half-naked figure on
the steps, although Mr. Davies gives it to Mainardi. Mainardi again
is probably the author of the companion scene. The remaining frescoes
are of less interest and much damaged; but in the window wall one
should notice the portraits of Giovanni Tornabuoni and Francesca di
Luca Pitti, his wife, kneeling, because this Giovanni was the donor
of the frescoes, and his sister Lucrezia was the wife of Piero de'
Medici and therefore the mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, while
Francesca Tornabuoni, the poor lady who died in childbirth, was the
daughter of that proud Florentine who began the Pitti palace but
ended his life in disgrace.
And so we leave this beautiful recess, where pure religious feeling
may perhaps be wanting but where the best spirit of the Renaissance
is to be found: everything making for harmony and pleasure; and on
returning to London the visitor should make a point of seeing the
Florentine girl by the same hand in our National Gallery, No. 1230,
for she is very typical of his genius.
On the entrance wall of the church is what must once have been a fine
Masaccio--"The Trinity"--but it is in very bad condition; while in
the Cappella Rucellai in the right transept is what purports to be
a Cimabue, very like the one in the Accademia, but with a rather
more matured Child in it. Vasari tells us that on its completion
this picture was carried in stately procession from the painter's
studio to the church, in great rejoicing and blowing of trumpets,
the populace being moved not only by religious ecstasy but by pride in
an artist who could make such a beautiful and spacious painting, the
largest then known. Vasari adds that when Cimabue was at work upon it,
Charles of Anjou, visiting Florence, was taken to his studio, to see
the wonderful painter, and a number of Florentines entering too, they
broke out into such rejoicings that the locality was known ever after
as Borgo Allegro, or Joyful Quarter. This would be about 1290. There
was a certain fitness in Cimabue painting this Madonna, for it is said
that he had his education in the convent which stood here before the
present church was begun. But I should add that of Cimabue we know
practically nothing, and that most of Vasari's statements have been
confuted, while the painter of the S. Maria Novella Madonna is held
by some authorities to be Duccio of Siena. So where are we?
The little chapel next the choir on the right is that of Filippo
Strozzi the elder who was one of the witnesses of the Pazzi outrage in
the Duomo in 1478. This was the Filippo Strozzi who began the Strozzi
palace in 1489, father of the Filippo Strozzi who married Lorenzo
de' Medici's noble grand-daughter Clarice and came to a tragic end
under Cosimo I. Old Filippo's tomb here was designed by Benedetto da
Maiano, who made the famous Franciscan pulpit in S. Croce, and was
Ghirlandaio's friend and the Strozzi palace's first architect. The
beautiful circular relief of the Virgin and Child, with a border of
roses and flying worshipping angels all about it, behind the altar, is
Benedetto's too, and very lovely and human are both Mother and Child.
The frescoes in this chapel, by Filippino Lippi, are interesting,
particularly that one on the left, depicting the Resuscitation of
Drusiana by S. John the Evangelist, at Rome, in which the group of
women and children on the right, with the little dog, is full of
life and most naturally done. Above (but almost impossible to see)
is S. John in his cauldron of boiling oil between Roman soldiers and
the denouncing Emperor, under the banner S.P.Q.R.--a work in which
Roman local colour completely excludes religious feeling. Opposite,
below, we see S. Philip exorcising a dragon, a very florid scene,
and, above, a painfully spirited and realistic representation of the
Crucifixion. The sweetness of the figures of Charity and Faith in
monochrome and gold helps, with Benedetto's tondo, to engentle the air.
We then come again to the Choir, with Ghirlandaio's urbane Florentine
pageant in the guise of sacred history, and pass on to the next chapel,
the Cappella Gondi, where that crucifix in wood is to be seen which
Brunelleschi carved as a lesson to Donatello, who received it like
the gentleman he was. I have told the story in Chapter XV.
The left transept ends in the chapel of the Strozzi family, of which
Filippo was the head in his day, and here we find Andrea Orcagna and
his brother's fresco of Heaven, the Last Judgment and Hell. It was
the two Orcagnas who, according to Vasari, had covered the Choir with
those scenes in the life of the Virgin which Ghirlandaio was allowed
to paint over, and Vasari adds that the later artist availed himself
of many of the ideas of his predecessors. This, however, is not
very likely, I think, except perhaps in choice of subject. Orcagna,
like Giotto, and later, Michelangelo, was a student of Dante, and
the Strozzi chapel frescoes follow the poet's descriptions. In the
Last Judgment, Dante himself is to be seen, among the elect, in the
attitude of prayer. Petrarch is with him.
The sacristy is by Talenti (of the Campanile) and was added in
1350. Among its treasures once were the three reliquaries painted
by Fra Angelico, but they are now at S. Marco. It has still rich
vestments, fine woodwork, and a gay and elaborate lavabo by one of
the della Robbias, with its wealth of ornament and colour and its
charming Madonna and Child with angels.
A little doorway close by used to lead to the cloisters, and a
mercenary sacristan was never far distant, only too ready to unlock for
a fee what should never have been locked, and black with fury if he got
nothing. But all this has now been done away with, and the entrance
to the cloisters is from the Piazza, just to the left of the church,
and there is a turnstile and a fee of fifty centimes. At S. Lorenzo the
cloisters are free. At the Carmine and the Annunziata the cloisters
are free. At S. Croce the charge is a lira and at S. Maria Novella
half a lira. To make a charge for the cloisters alone seems to me
utterly wicked. Let the Pazzi Chapel at S. Croce and the Spanish
Chapel here have fees, if you like; but the cloisters should be open
to all. Children should be encouraged to play there.
Since, however, S. Maria Novella imposes a fee we must pay it,
and the new arrangement at any rate carries this advantage with it,
that one knows what one is expected to pay and can count on entrance.
The cloisters are everywhere interesting to loiter in, but their
chief fame is derived from the Spanish Chapel, which gained that name
when in 1566 it was put at the disposal of Eleanor of Toledo's suite
on the occasion of her marriage to Cosimo I. Nothing Spanish about
it otherwise. Both structure and frescoes belong to the fourteenth
century. Of these frescoes, which are of historical and human interest
rather than artistically beautiful, that one on the right wall as
we enter is the most famous. It is a pictorial glorification of the
Dominican order triumphant; with a vivid reminder of the origin of
the word Dominican in the episode of the wolves (or heretics) being
attacked by black and white dogs, the Canes Domini, or hounds of the
Lord. The "Mornings in Florence" should here be consulted again, for
Ruskin made a very thorough and characteristically decisive analysis
of these paintings, which, whether one agrees with it or not, is
profoundly interesting. Poor old Vasari, who so patiently described
them too and named a number of the originals of the portraits, is now
shelved, and from both his artists, Simone Martini and Taddeo Gaddi,
has the authorship been taken by modern experts. Some one, however,
must have done the work. The Duomo as represented here is not the
Duomo of fact, which had not then its dome, but of anticipation.
Opposite, we see a representation of the triumph of the greatest of the
Dominicans, after its founder, S. Thomas Aquinas, the author of the
"Summa Theologiae," who died in 1274. The painter shows the Angelic
Doctor enthroned amid saints and patriarchs and heavenly attendants,
while three powerful heretics grovel at his feet, and beneath are the
Sciences and Moral Qualities and certain distinguished men who served
them conspicuously, such as Aristotle, the logician, whom S. Thomas
Aquinas edited, and Cicero, the rhetorician. In real life Aquinas was
so modest and retiring that he would accept no exalted post from the
Church, but remained closeted with his books and scholars; and we can
conceive what his horror would be could he view this apotheosis. On the
ceiling is a quaint rendering of the walking on the water, S. Peter's
failure being watched from the ship with the utmost closeness by the
other disciples, but attracting no notice whatever from an angler,
close by, on the shore. The chapel is desolate and unkempt, and those
of us who are not Dominicans are not sorry to leave it and look for
the simple sweetness of the Giottos.
These are to be found, with some difficulty, on the walls of the niche
where the tomb of the Marchese Ridolfo stands. They are certainly
very simple and telling, and I advise every one to open the "Mornings
in Florence" and learn how the wilful magical pen deals with them;
but it would be a pity to give up Ghirlandaio because Giotto was so
different, as Ruskin wished. Room for both. One scene represents
the meeting of S. Joachim and S. Anna outside a mediaeval city's
walls, and it has some pretty Giottesque touches, such as the man
carrying doves to the Temple and the angel uniting the two saints
in friendliness; and the other is the Birth of the Virgin, which
Ruskin was so pleased to pit against Ghirlandaio's treatment of the
same incident. Well, it is given to some of us to see only what we
want to see and be blind to the rest; and Ruskin was of these the
very king. I agree with him that Ghirlandaio in both his Nativity
frescoes thought little of the exhaustion of the mothers; but it is
arguable that two such accouchements might with propriety be treated
as abnormal--as indeed every painter has treated the birth of Christ,
where the Virgin, fully dressed, is receiving the Magi a few moments
after. Ruskin, after making his deadly comparisons, concludes thus
genially of the Giotto version--"If you can be pleased with this,
you can see Florence. But if not, by all means amuse yourself there,
if you can find it amusing, as long as you like; you can never see it."
The S. Maria Novella habit is one to be quickly contracted by the
visitor to Florence: nearly as important as the S. Croce habit. Both
churches are hospitable and, apart from the cloisters, free and
eminently suited for dallying in; thus differing from the Duomo,
which is dark, and S. Lorenzo, where there are payments to be made
and attendants to discourage.
An effort should be made at S. Maria Novella to get into the old
cloisters, which are very large and indicate what a vast convent it
once was. But there is no certainty. The way is to go through to the
Palaestra and hope for the best. Here, as I have said in the second
chapter, were lodged Pope Eugenius and his suite, when they came
to the Council of Florence in 1439. These large and beautiful green
cloisters are now deserted. Through certain windows on the left one
may see chemists at work compounding drugs and perfumes after old
Dominican recipes, to be sold at the Farmacia in the Via della Scala
close by. The great refectory has been turned into a gymnasium.
The two obelisks, supported by tortoises and surmounted by beautiful
lilies, in the Piazza of S. Maria Novella were used as boundaries in
the chariot races held here under Cosimo I, and in the collection of
old Florentine prints on the top floor of Michelangelo's house you
may see representations of these races. The charming loggia opposite
S. Maria Novella, with della Robbia decorations, is the Loggia di
S. Paolo, a school designed, it is thought, by Brunelleschi, and
here, at the right hand end, we see S. Dominic himself in a friendly
embrace with S. Francis, a very beautiful group by either Luca or
Andrea della Robbia.
In the loggia cabmen now wrangle all day and all night. From it
S. Maria Novella is seen under the best conditions, always cheerful
and serene; while far behind the church is the huge Apennine where
most of the weather of Florence seems to be manufactured. In mid
April this year (1912) it still had its cap of snow.