Florence: Duomo

Before describing the interior and dome of S. Maria del Fiore, Edward Hutton tried to put Florence's Duomo in architectural and historical perspective.

 

In turning now to the Duomo we come to one of the great buildings of the world. Standing on the site of the old church of S. Salvatore, of S. Reparata, it is a building of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, begun in 1298 from the designs of Arnolfo; and it is dedicated to S. Maria del Fiore. Coming to us without the wonderful romantic interest, the mysticism and exaltation of such a church as Notre Dame d’Amiens, without the more resolute and heroic appeal of such a stronghold as the Cathedral of Durham, it is more human than either, the work of a man who, as it were, would thank God that he was alive and glad in the world. And it will never bring us delight if we ask of it all the consummate mystery, awe, and magic of the great Gothic churches of the North. The Tuscans have certainly never understood the Christian religion as we have contrived to do in Northern Europe. It came to them really as a sort of divine explanation of a paganism which entranced but bewildered them. Behind it lay the Roman empire; and its temples became their churches, its halls of justice their cathedrals, its tongue the only language understood of the gods. It is unthinkable that a people who were already in the twelfth century the possessors of a marvellous decadent art in the painting of the byzantine school, who finding again the statues of the gods, created in the thirteenth century a new art of painting, a Christian art that was the child of imperial Rome as well as of the Christian church, who re-established sculpture and produced the only sculptor of the first rank in the modern world, should have failed altogether in architecture. Yet everywhere we may hear it said that the Italian churches, spoken of with scorn by those who remember the strange, subtle exaltation of Amiens, the extraordinary intricate splendour of such a church as the Cathedral of Toledo, are mere barns. But it is not so. An Italian painting is a profound and natural development from Greek and Roman art, certainly influenced by life, but in no doubt of its parentage; so are the Italian churches a very beautiful and subtle development of pagan architecture, influenced by life not less profoundly than painting has been, but certainly as sure of their parentage, and, as we shall see, not less assured of their intention. Just as painting as soon as it may be, becomes human, becomes pagan in Signorelli and Botticelli, and yet contrives to remain true to its new gods, so architecture as soon as it is sure of itself moves with joy, with endless delight and thanksgiving, towards that goal of the old builders…

What then, we may ask ourselves, were the aim and desire of the Italian builders, which it seems have escaped us for so long?... we shall find that the intention of the Italian in building his churches is exactly that of the Roman in building his basilica: he desires above all things space and light, partly because they seem to him necessary for the purpose of the church, and partly because he thinks them the two most splendid and majestic things in the world….

 

Remember his aim was not the aim of the Gothic builder. He did not wish to impress you with the awfulness of God, like the builder of Barcelona; or with the mystery of the Crucifixion, like the builders of Chartres; he wished to provide for you in his practical Latin way a temple where you might pray, where the whole city might hear Mass or applaud a preacher…. He has never believed… in the mysterious awfulness of our far-away God. He prays as a man should pray, without self-consciousness and not without self-respect. He is without sentiment; he believes in largeness, grandeur, splendour, and sincerity; and he has known the gods for three thousand years.  

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 174-6. 

Florence: Ghibeti's Gates of Paradise

Before leaving Florence's Baptistery, Edward Hutton described Ghiberti's famous doors and their great significance on the art of the Renaissance.

 

There, amid a framework of exquisite foliage, leaves, birds, and all kinds of life, he has set the gospel story in twenty panels, beginning with the Annunciation and ending with the Pentecost; and around the gate he has set the four Evangelists and the doctors of the Church and the prophets….

In looking on these beautiful and serene works, we may already notice an advance on the work of Andrea Pisano in a certain ease and harmony, a richness and variety, that were beyond the older master. Ghiberti has already begun to change with his genius the form that has come down to him, to expand it, to break down its limitations so that he may express himself, may show us the very vision he has seen. And the success of these gates with the people certainly confirmed him in the way he was going. In the third door, that facing the Duomo, which Michelangelo has said was worthy to be the gate of Paradise, it is really a new art we come upon, the subtle rhythms and perspectives of a sort of pictorial sculpture, that allows him to carve here in such low relief that it is scarcely more than painting, there in the old manner, the old manner but changed, full of a sort of exuberance which here at any rate is beauty. The ten panels which Ghiberti thus made in his own way are subjects from the Old Testament: the Creation of Adam and Eve, the story of Cain and Abel, of Noah, of Abraham and Isaac, of Jacob and Esau, of Joseph, of Moses on Sinai, of Joshua before Jericho, of David and Goliath, of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. 

 

Ghiberti: Abraham and Isaac *

 

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*Note: Looking carefully at the panel of Abraham and Isaac, at the bottom left we see Abraham offering hospitality to three visitors (angels) who return the favor by promising that his elderly wife, Sara, will finally bear him an heir. Sara looks on behind a curtain and laughs at the idea. At the upper right we see Abraham about to follow the Lord's bidding and sacrifice the heir, Isaac. At the last moment, an angel from above stops Abraham from plunging the knife into Isaac. At the bottom left, we see Isaac reconciled with his step-brother Ishmael, the son of Sara's slavegirl, Hagar.

 

 

Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 171-2.

Florence: Piazza del Duomo and Baptistery

 

Edward Hutton began his account of the Piazza del Duomo with a discussion of the ancient Baptistery. Even today, if you attend the early daily Mass, you can get in before the crowds. 

On coming into the Piazza del Duomo, perhaps from the light and space of the Lung’ Arno from the largeness of the Piazza della Signoria, one is apt to think of it as too small for the buildings which it holds, as wanting in a certain spaciousness such as the Piazza of St. Peter at Rome certainly possesses, or in the light of the meadow of Pisa; and yet this very smallness, only smallness when we consider the great buildings set there so precisely, gives it an element of beauty lacking in the great Piazza of Rome and in Pisa too—a certain delicate colour and shadow and a sense of nearness, of homeliness almost; for the shadow of the dome falls right across the city itself every morning and evening. And indeed the Piazza del Duomo of Florence is still the centre of the life of the city… 

 

This enduring vitality of a place so old, so splendid, and so beloved, is, I think, particularly manifest in the Church of S. Giovanni Battista, the Baptistery. It is the oldest building in Florence, built probably with the stones from the Temple of Mars about which Villani tells us, and almost certainly in its place; every Florentine child, fortunate at least in this, is still brought there for baptism, and received its name in the place where Dante was christened, where Ippolito Buondelmonti first saw Dianora de’ Bardi, where Donatello has laboured, which Michelangelo has loved….

 

The mere form, those octagonal walls which, so it is said, the Lombards brought into Italy, go to show that the church was used as a Baptistery from the first, though Villani speaks of it as the duomo; and indeed till 1550 it had the aspect of such a church as the Pantheon of Rome, in that it was open to the sky, so that the rain and the sunlight have fallen on the very floor trodden by so many generations. Humble and simple enough as we see it to-day before the gay splendour of the new façade of the Duomo, it has yet those great treasures which the Duomo cannot boast, the bronze doors of Andrea Pisano and of Ghiberti….

 

It is strange to find Ghiberti’s work thus completing that of Andrea Pisano, who, as it is said, had Giotto to help him, till we understand that these southern gates stood where now are the “Gates of Paradise” before the Duomo. Standing there as they used to do before Ghiberti moved them, they won for Andrea not only the admiration of the people, but the freedom of the city. To-day we come to them with the praise of Ghiberti ringing in our ears, so that in our hurry to see everything we almost pass them by; but in their simpler, and, as some may think, more sincere way, they are as lovely as anything Ghiberti ever did, and in comparing them with the great gates that supplanted them, it may be well to remind ourselves that each has its own merit in its own fashion.

 

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 169-171.

Florence: Loggia de' Lanzi

Edward Hutton regarded the Loggia de' Lanzi as a gay and charming spot among the imposing Palazzo of the Signoria, and the stern statues like Cellini's Perseus that brought back memories of the past

 

As you enter the Loggia de’ Lanzi, gay with children now, once the lounge of the Swiss guard, whose barracks were not far away, you wonder who can have built so gay, so happy a place beside the fortress of the Signoria. …Even now, in spite of forgotten greatness, it is still a garden of statues. Looking over the Piazza stands the Perseus of Cellini, with the head of Medusa held up to the multitude, the sword still gripped in his hand. It is the masterpiece of one who, like all the greatest artists of the Renaissance… did not confine himself to one art, but practiced many. And though it would be unjust to compare such a man as Cellini with the greatest of all, yet he was great not only as a sculptor and a goldsmith, but as a man of letters and as a man of the world. His Perseus, a little less than a demigod, is indeed not so lovely as the wax model he made for it, which is now in the Bargello; but in the gesture with which he holds out the severed head from him, in the look of secret delight that is already half remorseful for all that dead beauty, in the heroic grace with which he stands there after the murder, the dead body marvellously fallen at his feet, Cellini has proved himself the greatest sculptor of his time. (165-6)…

 

The great fountain which plays beside the Palazzo, where of old the houses of the Uberti stood, is rich and grandiose perhaps, but in some unaccountable way adds much to the beauty of the Piazza. How gay and full of life it is even yet, that splendid and bitter place, that in its beauty and various, everlasting life seems to stand as the symbol of the city, so scornful even in the midst of the overwhelming foreigner who has turned her into a museum, a vast cemetery of art….

 

It was past midnight when once more I came out of the narrow ways, almost empty at that hour,  when every footfall resounds between the old houses, into the old Piazza to learn this secret. Far away in the sky the moon swung like a censer, filling the place with a fragile and lovely light…. 

 

In the Loggia de’ Lanzi the moonlight fell among the statues, and in that fairy light I seemed to see in those ghostly still figures of marble and bronze some strange fantastic parable, the inscrutable 

prophecy of the scornful past. Gian Bologna’s Sabine woman, was she not Florence struggling in the grip of the modern vandal; Cellini’s Perseus with Medusa’s head, has it not in truth turned the city to stone?

The silence was broken; something had awakened in the Piazza: perhaps a bird fluttered from the battlements of the Palazzo, perhaps it was the city that turned in her sleep. No, there it was again. It was a human voice close beside me: it seemed to be weeping.

 

I looked around: all was quiet. I saw nothing, only there at the corner a little light flickered before a shrine; and yes, something was moving there, someone who was weeping. Softly, softly over the stones I made my way to that little shrine of Madonna at the street corner, and I found, ah! no proud and scornful noble mourning over dead Florence, but an old woman, ragged and alone, prostrate under some unimaginable sorrow, some unappeasable regret.

 

Did she hear as of old—that Virgin with half-open eyes and the sidelong look? God, I know not if she heard or no. Perhaps I alone have heard in all the world.

 

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