Florence: Bargello

Before entering the Bargello, Florence's museum of sculpture, Hutton reflected on what his own age had lost. Writing in 1908 he could hardly have imagined the catastrophe that would ensue six years later with the First World War.

 

Often as I wander through these rooms or loiter in the shadow under the cloisters of the beautiful courtyard, perhaps the most lovely court in Tuscany, the remembrance of that old fierce life which desired beauty so passionately and was so eager for every superiority, comes to me, but I ask myself how the dream which that world pursued with so much simplicity and enthusiasm can have led us  at last to the world of today, with its orderly disorder, its trams and telegraphs and steam engines, its material comfort which how strangely, we have mistaken for civilization. In all London there is no palace so fine as this old prison, nor a square so beautiful as Piazza della Signoria…. Our craftsmen have become machine minders, our people, on the verge of starvation, as we admit,  without order, with restraint, without the discipline of service, having lost the desire of beauty or splendour, have become serfs because they are ignorant and fear to die.  And it is we who have claimed half the world  and thrust upon it an all but universal domination. In thus bringing mankind under our rule, it is ever of our civilization that we boast, that immense barbarism which in its brutality and materialism first tried to destroy the Latin Church and then the Latin world, which alone could have saved us from ourselves. … and today, half dead with our own smoke, herded together like wild beasts, slaves of our own inventions, ah, blinded by our unthinkable folly, before the statues that they made, before the pictures that they painted, before the palaces that they built, in the churches where they still pray, stupefied by our own stupidity, brutalized by our own barbarism, we boast of a civilization that has already made us ridiculous, and of which we shall surely die. Here in the Bargello, the ancient palace of the Podesta of a Latin city, let us be silent and forget our madness before the statues of the Gods, the images of the great and beautiful people of old…. [277]

The panels of the Sacrifice of Isaac submitted by Brunelleschi and Ghiberti in the famous early fifteenth century contest to win the commission for the Baptistry doors are preserved in the Bargello. Here is Hutton's comparison. [click on image to enlarge] 

Looking on those two panels where both artists have carved the Sacrifice of Isaac, you see Ghiberti at his best, the whole interest not divided, as it is in Brunellesco’s panel, between the servants and the sacrifice, but concentrated altogether on the scene which is about to become so tragical. Yet with what energy Brunellesco had conceived an act that in his hands  seems really to have happened. How swiftly the angel has seized the hand of Abraham; how splendidly he stands, the old man who is about to kill his only son for the love of God. And then consider the beauty of Isaac, that naked body which in Brunellesco’s hands is splendid with life, really living and noble, with a truth and loveliness far in advance of the art of his time. Ghiberti has felt none of the joy of a creation such as this; his Isaac is sleepy, a little surprised and altogether docile; he has not sprung up from his knees as in Brunellesco’s panel, but looks up at the angel as though he had never understood that his very life was at stake. Yet it was in those gates which, Brunellesco, as it is said, retiring from the contest, the Opera then gave into his hands, that we shall find the best work of Ghiberti….All the rest of his work seems to me lacking in conviction, to be frankly almost an experiment….It was not to the disciples of Ghiberti that the future belonged, but to those who have studied with Brunellesco. His crucifix in S. Maria Novella, his Evangelists in the Pazzi chapel, are among the finest work of that age, full of life and remembrance of it in their strength and beauty. [282-3]

 

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 277-283.