Florence: Hill of Gardens and S. Miniato

After crossing the Arno, Edward Hutton climbed the lovely Hill of Gardens, and then came to the beautiful ancient church of S. Miniato where he paused to describe a beautiful tomb.

 Then, turning into Via Romana, you come, past the gardens of S. Piero in Gattolino. To the Porta Romano, 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--… 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.”…

 

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, Citta dei Fiori, Firenze la Bella Belissima, 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. [

 

Church of S. Miniato.

 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. Miniatio 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…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…. 

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 Lucca 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 this 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 in spring, that rightly, though not without sadness, passes into silence, into night, in which shine only the eternal stars. 

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 270-4.

Florence: Oltr'arno Churches

Edward Hutton's tour of the Oltr'arno, the section of Florence across the Arno river, took him to two of its most famous churches, the Carmine with its Brancacci chapel, and S. Spirito. 

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. …

 

Church of the Carmine:

 

“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 this 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.

 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….

In Masaccio’s work you will find a more splendid style, the real majesty of the creator, a strangely sure generalization and expression… 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.…

 

Church of S. Spirito:

 The church was begun in 1433, and was burned down in 1471… 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. 

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 264-269.

Florence: Perugino

Edward Hutton could be called a Pre-Raphaelite, an admirer of those painters who came before Raphael. One of those painters was Perugino, one of Raphael's teachers, whose work was largely excised by his great student. Hutton especially admired Perugino's Crucifixion that can still be found in the church of S. Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi. 

 

It is to another desecrated Benedictine convent you come when, passing through Via dei Pilastrati and turning into Via Farina, you come at last in Via della Colonna to S. Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi. This too is now a barracks and a school. It was not, however, the nuns who commissioned Perugino to paint for them his masterpiece, the Crucifixion, in the refectory, but some Cistercian monks who had acquired the convent in the thirteenth century. Perugino was painting there in 1496. …

 There, in 1496, as I have said, Perugino finished the fresco of the Crucifixion that he had begun some years before in the chapter-house of the old S. Maria Maddalena. In almost perfect preservation still, this fresco on the wall of that quiet and empty room is perhaps the most perfect expression of the art of Perugino—those dreams of the country and of certain ideal people he has seen there; Jesus and His disciples, Madonna and Mary Magdalen, sweet, smiling, and tearful ghosts passing in the sunshine, less real than the hills, all perhaps that the world was able to bear by way of remembrance of those it had worshipped once, but was beginning to forget. And here at last, in this fresco, the landscape has really become of more importance than the people, who breathe there so languidly. The Crucifixion has found something of the expressiveness, the unction of a Christian hymn, something of the quiet beauty of the Mass that was composed to remind us of it; already it has passed away from reality, is indeed merely a memory in which the artist has seen something less and something more than the truth.

 

Divided into three compartments, we see through the beautiful round arches of some magic casement, as it were, the valleys and hills of Italy, the delicate trees, the rivers and the sky of a country that is holy, which man has taken particularly too himself. And then, as though summoned back from forgetfulness by the humanism of that landscape where the toil and endeavour of mankind is so visible in the little city far away, the cultured garden of the world, a dream of the Crucifixion comes to us, a vision of all that man has suffered for man, summed up, as it were, naturally enough by that supreme sacrifice of love; and we see not an agonised Christ or the brutality of the priests and the soldiers,, but Jesus, who loved us, hanging on the Cross, with Mary Magdalen kneeling at his feet, and on the one side Madonna and St. Bernard, and on the other St. John and St. Benedict. And though, in a sort of symbolism, Perugino has placed above the Cross the sun and the moon eclipsed, the whole world is full of the serene and perfect light of late afternoon, and presently we know that vision of the Crucifixion will fade away, and there will be left to us only that which we really know, and have heard and seen, the valleys and the hills, the earth from which we are sprung.

 

There are but six figures in the whole picture, and it is just this spaciousness, perhaps, earth and sky counting for so much, that makes this work so delightful. For it is not from the figures at all that we receive the profoundly religious expression that this picture makes upon all who look unhurriedly upon it; but from the earth and sky, where in the infinite space God dwells, no longer hanging upon a Cross tortured by men who have unthinkably made so terrible a mistake, but joyful in His heaven, moving in every living thing that He has made; visible only in the invisible wind that passes over the streams suddenly at evening, or subtly makes musical the trees at dawn, walking as of old in His garden, where one day maybe we shall meet Him face to face. 

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 257-259.

Florence: The Medici and the Laurentian Library

Edward Hutton concluded his tour of the church of S. Lorenzo, the resting place of the Medici, with a reflection on that famous family, and a visit to the famed Laurentian Library.

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 partially destroyed by the vandalism and futile stupidity of Savonarola and his puritans in 1494…

 

Perhaps the most precious thing here is the Pandects of Justinian, taken by the Pisans from Amalfi in 1335, and seized by the Florentines when they took Pisa in 1406. Amalfi prized them 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 civilization 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 recognize 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 civilization of the world…. 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. …

 

It is not, however, this humble and almost nameless grave that draws us to-day to the Segresta 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….It is this Giuliano and Lorenzo de Medici that Michelangelo has immortalized 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 realized 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. … 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? ###

 

 

 

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 244-248.

Florence: S. Lorenzo and Donatello

 

After recounting the history and background of the church of S. Lorenzo, “the resting place of the Medici,” Edward Hutton proceeded to the chapels in the transept, and the old sacristy where he found the incomparable work of Donatello.

 Three chapels that flank the aisles have to-day but little interest for us…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 unforgettable work: not the two ambones, which he only began on his return from Padua when he was sixty-seven years old…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…the Resurrection and the Ascension, the Maries at the tomb, the Pentecost….

 

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. … 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 of 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.

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 242-243.

Florence: S, Croce

To Edward Hutton, Florence's Piazza di S. Croce had the aspect of  cemetery, but my wife and I loved to visit and found it to be teeming with life. We also found it difficult to view the work of Giotto in the Peruzzi chapel that he described so well.

 

The Piazza di S. Croce, in which stands the great Franciscan church of Florence, is still almost as it was in the sixteenth century when the Palazzo del Borgo on the southern side was painted in fresco by the facile brush of Passignano; but whatever charm so old and storied a place might have had for us…it is altogether spoiled and ruined, not only by the dishonouring statue of Dante, which for some unexplained reason has here found a resting place, but by the crude and staring façade of the church itself, a pretentious work of modern Italy, which lends to what was of old the gayest Piazza in the city, the very aspect of a cemetery.

(228)…

And indeed the very real beauty of the church consists in just that splendour of space and light which so few seem too have cared for, but which seems to me certainly in Italy the most precious thing in the world. And then S. Croce is really the Pantheon, as it were, of the city; the golden twilight of S. Maria Novella even would seem too gloomy for the resting place of heroes. Already before the sixteenth century it had been here  that Florence had set up the banners of those she delighted to honour….(229)

The Peruzzi chapel was built by the powerful family of that name, who had already done much for S. Croce, when about 1307 they employed Giotto to decorate these walls with frescoes of the story of St. John Baptist and St. John the Divine. In 1714…Bartolommeo di Simone Peruzzi caused the place to be restored, and it was then, as we may suppose, that the work of Giotto was covered with whitewash….In their original brightness they formed probably “the finest series of frescoes which Giotto ever produced”, but the hand of the restorer has spoiled them utterly, so that only the shadow of their former beauty remains, amid much that is hard or unpleasing…. (234)

 

But it is in the frescoes on the right wall that Giotto is seen at his highest; it is the story of St. John the divine; above he dreams on Patmos, below he raises Drusiana at the gate of Ephesus, and is himself received into heaven. Damaged though they be, there is nothing in all Italian art more fundamental, more simple, or more living than these frescoes. It is true that the Dream of St. John is almost ruined, and what we see today is very far from being what Giotto painted, but in the raising of Drusiana, and in the ascension of St. John we find a grandeur and force that are absent from painting till Giotto’s time, and for many years after his death. The restorer has done his best to obliterate all trace of Giotto’s achievement, especially in the fresco of Drusiana, but in spite of him we may see here Giotto’s very work, the essence of it at any rate, its intention and the variety of his powers of expressing himself. (235)

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 228-235.

Florence: S. Maria Novella

 

On his tour of Florence’s S. Maria Novella, Edward Hutton admired Leon Alberti’s façade, “one of the most beautiful in the world,” and the Rucellai chapel with its famed image of the Madonna, but I particularly liked his description of the frescoes of Domenico Ghirlandajo.

 

If Florence built the Baptistery, the Duomo, and the Campanile for the glory of the whole city, that there might be one place, in spite of all the factions, where without difference all might enter the kingdom of heaven… she built other churches too, more particular in their usefulness, less splendid in their beauty, but not less necessary in their hold on the life of the city, or their appeal to us to-day. … In the desolate but beautiful  Piazza of S. Maria Novella, at the gates of the old city, you find a Dominican convent, and before it the great church of that Order, S. Maria Novella herself, the bride of Michelangelo. …(219)

Ghirlandajo: Birth of Mary

But it is in the choir behind the high altar…that we come upon the simple serious work of Domenico Ghirlandajo, whom all the critics have scorned. Born in 1449, the pupil of Alessio Baldovinetti, Ghirlandajo is not a great painter perhaps, but rather a craftsman, a craftsman with a wonderful power of observation, of noting truly the life of his time. He seems to have asked of art rather truth than beauty. Almost wholly, perhaps, without the temperament of the artist, his success lies in his gift for expressing not beauty but the life of his time, the fifteenth century in Florence, which lives still in all his work….He has seen the fashions, he has noted the pretty faces of the women, he has watched the naïve homely life of the Medici ladies, for instance, and has painted not his dreams about Madonna, but his dreams of Vanna Tornabuoni, of Clarice de’ Medici, and the rest. And he was right; almost without exception his frescoes are the most interesting and living work left in Florence. He has understood or divined  that one cannot represent exactly that which no longer exists; and it is to represent something with exactitude that he is at work. So he contents himself very happily with painting the very soul of his century. It is a true and sincere art this realistic, unimpassioned, impersonal work of Ghirlandajo’s, and in its result, for us at any rate, it has a certain largeness and splendour. Consider this “Birth of the Virgin.” It is full of life and homely observation. You see the tidy dusted room where St. Anne is lying on the bed, already, as in truth she was, past her youth, but another painter would have forgotten it. She is just a careful Florentine housewife, thrifty too, not flurried by her illness, for she has placed by her bedside, all ready for her need, two pomegranates and some water. Then, again, they are going to wash the little Mary. She lies quite happily sucking her fingers in the arms of her nurse, the basin is in the middle of the floor, a servant has just come in briskly, no doubt as St. Anne has always insisted, and pours the water quickly into the vessel. It is not difficult to find all sorts of faults, of course, as the critics have not hesitated to do….the lady in the foreground, how unmoved she seems; it is as though the whole scene has been arranged for the sake of her portrait; and indeed, it is a portrait, for the richly dressed visitor is Ginevra de’ Benci*, who stands too in the fresco of the Birth of St. John. Again in the fresco of the angel appearing to Zacharias in the Temple, there are some thirty portraits of famous Florentines, painted with much patience, and no doubt with an extraordinary truth of likeness. (224-226)

 

Ghirlandajo: Birth of St. John

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*Note: Here is Leonardo's portrait of Ginevra de' Benci.

 

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. 

Florence: S. Marco and Fra Angelico

In discussing the Dominican convent of S. Marco in Florence, Edward Hutton quoted Vasari who claimed that the convent is "the most perfectly arranged, the most beautiful and most convenient building of its kind that can be found in Italy." Hutton's own description showed his love for the work of Fra Angelico.

 

Fra Angelico was nearly fifty years old when his Order took possession of S. Marco. Already he had painted three choir books, which Cosimo so loved that he wished nothing else to be used in the convent, for, as Vasari tells us, their beauty was such that  no words can do justice to it. Born in 1387, he had entered the Order of St. Dominic in 1408 at Fiesole.  The convent into which he had come had only been founded in 1406… he had early been a traveller, going with the brethren to Foligno and later to Cortona, returning to Fiesole in 1418. Who amid these misfortunes could have been his master? It might seem that in the silence of the sunny cloister in the long summer days of Umbria, some angel passing up the long valleys stayed for a moment beside him, so that for ever after he could not forget that vision….It is certainly some divinity that we find in those clouds of saints and angels, those marvellously sweet Madonnas, those majestic and touching crucifixions, that with a simplicity and sincerity beyond praise, Angelico has left up and down Italy, and not least in the convent of S. Marco.

 

Yes, it is a divine world he has dreamed of, peopled by saints and martyrs, where the flowers are quickly woven into crowns and the light streams from the gates of Paradise, and every breeze whispers the sweet sibilant name of Jesus, and there, on the bare but beautiful roads, Christ meets His disciples, or at the convent gate welcomes a traveller, and if He be not there, He has but just passed by, and if He has not just passed by He is to come. It is for Him the sun is darkened, to lighten His footsteps the moon shall rise; because His love has lightened the world men go happily, and because He is here the world is a garden. In all that convent of S. Marco you cannot turn a corner but Christ is awaiting you, or enter a room but His smile changes your heart, or linger in the threshold, but He bids you enter in, or eat at midday but you see Him on the Cross, and hear, “Take, eat; this is My Body, which was given for you.”…                                                                      

 

Pass into the Refectory and He is there; go into the Capitolo and He is there also, the Prince of life between two malefactors, hanging on a cross for love of the world, and in His face all the beauty and sweetness of the earth have been gathered and purged of their dross, and between His arms is the kingdom of Heaven. In that room the name of Jesus continually vibrates with an intense and passionate life, more wonderful, more beautiful, and more terrible than the tremor of all the sea. And it has brought together in adoration not the world…but those who above the tumult of their hearts have caught some faint far echo of that supernal concord which has bound together the whispering universe; for there beneath the Cross of Jesus are none but saints…

Pass into the dormitories, and in every cell you enter Jesus is there before you; on the threshold the angel announces His advent, and little by little, scene by scene, you are involved in the beauty and tragedy of His life….It is the spirit of Christianity that we see here, blossoming everywhere, haphazard like the wild flowers that are the armies of spring.

 

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Note: Image of the Annunciation by David Orme.

 

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 208-210.

Florence: Ricciardi Palace and Chapel

Edward Hutton's discussion of the Medici Ricciardi Palace focussed on the famed chapel where Benozzo Gozzoli depicted the Journey of the Magi. The three Magi are usually depicted as old, middle-aged, and young and Hutton saw that Gozzoli depicted more than the Magi.

 

It is, however, the palace in the Via Larga that recalls to us most vividly the lives and times of these first Medici, Cosimo Vecchio, Piero the gouty, Lorenzo il Magnifico. Michelozzo, Vasari tells us, deserves infinite credit for this building, since it was the first palace built in Florence after modern rules in which the rooms were arranged with a view to convenience and beauty…. It is not, however, the splendour of the palace, fine as it is, or the memory of Cosimo even that brings us to that beautiful house to-day, but the work of Donatello in the courtyard, those marble medallions copied from eight antique gems, and that little chapel on the second floor, almost an afterthought you might think, since in a place full of splendidly proportioned rooms, it is so cramped and cornered under the staircase, where Benozzo Gozzoli has painted in fresco quite round the walls, the Journey of the Three Kings, in which Cosimo himself, Piero his soon, and Lorenzo his grandson, then a golden-haired youth, ride among the rest, in a procession that never finds the manger at Bethlehem, is indeed not concerned with it, but is altogether occupied with its own light-hearted splendour, and the beauty of the fair morning among the Tuscan hills. Is it the pilgrimage of the Magi to the lowly cot of Jesus that we find in that tiny dark chapel, or the journey of man, awake now on the first morning of spring in quest of beauty? Over the grass scattered with flowers, that gay company passes at dawn by little white towns and grey towers, through woods where for a moment is heard the song of some marvellous bird, past running streams, between hedges of pomegranates and clusters of roses; and by the wayside rise the stone-pine and the cypress, while over all is the far blue sky, full of the sun, full of the wind, which is so soft that not a leaf has trembled in the woods, nor the waters stirred in a single ripple. Truly they have come to Tuscany where beauty is, and are far from Bethlehem, where Love lies sleeping. There on a mule, a black slave beside his stirrup, rides Cosimo Pater Patriae, and beside him comes Piero his son, attended too, and before them on a white horse stepping proudly, with jewels in his cap, rides the golden-haired Lorenzo, the youngest of the three kings, already magnificent, the darling of this world of hills and streams, which one day he will sing better than anyone of his time…. And so it is before an empty shrine that those clouds of angels sing; Madonna has fled away, and the children are singing a new song, surely the Trionte of Lorenzo, it is the first time perhaps that we hear—

 

                Quant’ e’ bella giovinezza.

 

Ah, if they had known how tragically that day would close.*

 

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*Note: Hutton concluded this chapter with Lorenzo’s words from his Memoir. 

 

“although I, Lorenzo, was very young, in fact only in my twenty-first year, the leading men of the city and of the ruling party came to our house to express their sorrow for our misfortune, and to persuade me to take upon myself the charge of the government of the city as my grandfather and father had already done. This proposal being contrary to the instincts of my age, and entailing great labour and danger, I accepted against my will, and only for the sake of protecting my friends and our own fortunes, for in Florence one can ill live in the possession of wealth without control of the government.” (205)

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 201-202.

Florence: Or San Michele

In his account of the church of Or San Michele, Edward Hutton's described the sculptures placed in the exterior niches by the various guilds of Florence with emphasis on Verrocchio's Christ with St. Thomas.  On entering the church he turned to the magnificent shrine of the Madonna by Andrea Orcagna. *

 

Or San Michele, S. Michele in Orto, was till the middle of the thirteenth century a little church belonging, as it is said, to the Cistercians, who certainly claimed the patronage of it. About 1260, however, the commune of Florence began to dispute this right with the Order, and at last pulled down the church, building there, thirty years later, a loggia of brick… This loggia was the corn market of the city, a shelter, too, for the contadini who came to show their samples and to talk, gossip, and chaffer, as they do everywhere in Italy even to-day. And, as was the custom, they made a shrine of Madonna there, hanging on one of the brick pillars a picture (tavola) of Madonna that, as it is said, was the work of Ugolino da Siena. This shrine soon became famous for the miracles Madonna wrought there….

 

By 1353 Andrea Orcagna had been chosen to build the shrine of the Madonna, which is still one of the wonders of the city. It seems to have been in a sort of recognition of the splendour and beauty of Orcagna’s work that the Signoria, between 1355 and 1359, removed the corn market elsewhere, and thus gave up the whole loggia to the shrine of Madonna. Thus the loggia became a church, the great popular church of Florence, built by the people for their own use, in what had once been the corn-market of the city. The architect of this strange and secular building, more like a palace than a church, is unknown….

 

 

The masterpiece, certainly, of these Tuscan sculptures is the bronze group of Christ and St. Thomas by Verrocchio, which I have so loved. All the work of this master is full of eagerness and force; something of that strangeness without which there is no excellent beauty, that later was so characteristic of the work of his pupil Leonardo, …. How perfectly, and yet 

 not altogether without affectation, he has composed that difficult scene, so that St. Thomas stands a little out of the setting, and places his finger—yes, almost as a child might do—in the wounded side of Jesus, who stands majestically fair before him. It is true the drapery is complicated, a little heavy even, but with what care he has remembered everything! Consider the grace of those beautiful folds, the beauty of the hair, the loveliness of the hands; and then as Burckhardt reminds us, as a piece of work founded and cast in bronze, it is almost inimitable. 

 

Within, the church is strange and splendid. It is as though one stood in a loggia in deep shadow, at the end of the day in the last gold of the sunset; and there, amid the ancient fading glory of the frescoes, is the wonderful shrine that Orcagna made for the picture of the Madonna, who had turned the Granary of S. Michele into the Church of the People. Finished in 1358, this tabernacle is the loveliest work of its kind in Italy, an unique masterpiece, and perhaps the most beautiful example of the Italian Gothic manner in existence. Orcagna seems to have been at work on it for some ten years covering it with decoration and carving those reliefs of the Life of the Virgin in that grand style which he had found in Giotto and learned perhaps from Andrea Pisano. To describe the shrine itself would be impossible and useless. It is like some miniature and magic church, a casquet made splendid not with jewels but with beauty, where the miracle picture of the Madonna—not that ancient and wonderful picture by Ugolino da Siena, but a work, it is said, of Bernardo Daddi—glows under the lamps. …

Some who have seen the shrine so loaded with ornament, so like some difficult and complicated canticle, have gone away disappointed…. Yet I think it is rather the fault of Or San Michele than of the shrine itself, that it does not certainly vanquish any possible objection and assure us at once of its perfection and beauty. If it could be seen in the beautiful spacious transept of S. Croce, or even in the Santo Spirito across Arno, that sense as of something elaborate and complicated would perhaps not be felt; but here in Or San Michele one seems to have come upon a priceless treasure in a cave. 

 

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 Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 185-193.

*Note: For a more up to date description of the Orsanmichele see the post by my English friend, David Orme. 

Florence: Museum of the Duomo

More than a hundred years ago Edward Hutton expressed his great chagrin at the fate of Italian devotional works of art  that were stripped from their original sites and stored in museums. Today, they still make up a majority of the world's great art. I can understand his sentiment but since so many churches and monasteries were vandalized or suppressed, I can only be thankful for what we can see in museums today, even if it takes a great deal of imagination to see these masterpieces as their original viewers saw them.

 

I speak of Donatello elsewhere in this book, but you will find one of his best works among much curious, interesting litter from the Duomo in the Opera del Duomo, the Cathedral Museum in the old Falconieri Palace just behind the apse of the cathedral… It is, however, in a room on the first floor that you will find the great organ lofts, one by Donatello and the other by Luca della Robbia, which I suppose are among the best known works of art in the world. Made for the Cathedral, these galleries for singers seem to be imprisoned in a museum.

 

The beautiful youths of Luca, the children of Donatello, for all their seeming vigour and joy, sing and dance no more; they are in as evil a case as the Madonnas of the Uffizi, who, in their golden frames behind the glass, under the vulgar, indifferent eyes of the multitude, envy Madonna of the street-corner the love of the lowly. So it is with the beautiful Cantorie made for God’s praise by Donatello and Luca della Robbia. Before the weary eyes of the sight-seer, the cold eyes of the scientific critic, in the horrid silence of the museum, amid so much that is dead… some shadow has fallen upon them, and though they keep still the gesture of joy, they are really dead or sleeping. Is it only sleep? Do they perhaps at night, when all the doors of their prisons are barred and their gaolers are gone, praise God in his Holiness, even in such a hell as this? Who knows? They were made for a world so different, for a time that out of the love of God had seen arise the very beauty of the world, and were glad therefor. Ah, of how many beautiful things have we robbed God in our beggary? We have imprisoned the praise of the artists in the museums that Science may pass by and sneer, we have arranged the saints in order, and Madonna we have carefully hidden under the glass, because now we never dream of God or speak with Him at all. Art is dying, Beauty is become a burden, Nature a thing for science and not for love. They are become too precious, the old immortal things; we must hide them away lest they fade and God take them from us:… 

 

Thus they have stolen away the silver altar of the Baptistery, that miracle of the fourteenth century silversmiths, Betto di Geri, Leonardo di Ser Giovanni, and the rest, that it may be a cause of wonder in a museum. So a flower looks between the cold pages of a botanist’s album, so a bird sings in his cage: for life is to do that for which we were created, and if that be the praise of God in His sanctuary, to stand impotently by under the gaze of innumerable unbelievers in a museum is to die. And truly that is the shame of Italy that so many fair and lovely things have been torn out of their places to be catalogued in a gallery. It were a thousand times better that they were allowed to fade quietly on the walls of the church where they were born. 

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 182-3.

Florence: Art of the Duomo

In his tour of Florence's Duomo, Edward Hutton paid tribute to Brunelleschi's dome, and to an often overlooked sculpture of the Madonna and St. Thomas on the facade of the church.

 

Above, the dome soars into heaven; that mighty dome, higher than St. Peter’s, the despair of Michelangelo, one of the beauties of the world. One wanders about the church looking at the bronze doors of the Segrestia Nuova, or the terra-cottas of Luca della Robbia, always to return to that miracle of Brunellesco’s. Not far away in the south aisle you come upon his monument with his portrait in marble by Buggiano. The indomitable persistence of the face! Is it any wonder that, impossible as his dream appeared, he had his way with Florence at last—yes, and with himself too? As you stand at the corner of Via del Proconsolo, and, looking upward, see that immense dome soaring into the sky over that church of marble, something of the joy and confidence and beauty that were immortal in him came come to you too from his work. Like Columbus, he conquered a New World. His schemes, which the best architects in Europe laughed at, were treated with scorn by the Consiglio, yet he persuaded them at last…. In 1421 he won over the Consiglio. He began at once. What his agonies may have been, what profound difficulties he discovered and conquered, we do not know, but by 1434, when Eugenius IV was in Florence and the Duomo was consecrated, his dome was finished, wanting only the lantern and the ball. These he began in 1437, but died too soon to see, for the lantern was not finished till 1458, and it was only in 1471 that Verrocchio cast the bronze ball.

 

The Facade:

It is not, however, in such merely competent work as this that we shall find ourselves interested, but rather in the beautiful door on the north, just before the transept, over which, in an almond-shaped glory, Madonna gives her girdle to St. Thomas. Given now to Nanni di Banco, a sculptor of the end of the fourteenth century, whom Vasari tells us was the pupil of Donatello, it long passed as the work of Jacopo della Quercia. Certainly one of the loveliest works of the early Renaissance, it is full of life and gracious movement, so natural and so noble, that everything else in the Cathedral, save the work of Donatello, is forgotten beside it. Madonna enthroned among the cherubim in her oval mandorla, upheld by four puissant fair angels, turns with a gesture most natural and lovely to St. Thomas, who kneels to her, his drapery in beautiful folds about him, lifting his hands in prayer. Above, three angels play on pipes and reeds; while in a corner a great bear gnaws at the bark of an oak in full leaf. 

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 178-180.