Milan: St. Lorenzo and a Gothic Romance

 

Edward Hutton's visit to Milan's church of S. Lorenzo included an account of the amazing story of the fifth century Gothic King Ataulphus, and the Roman princess Galla Placidia. 

 

But when all is said, S. Lorenzo remains in many ways the loveliest and certainly the most characteristic building of still Roman Milan. And the power of Rome and Roman things, in spite of every disaster, remained instinct and living here, in its tremendous appeal to the imagination and in the mind of man. We find nearly all the greater architects of the Renaissance to have studied and to have been influenced by the church. Sangallo inspires himself here. Leonardo da Vinci studies it, and it is, after all we find, this church of S. Lorenzo which engenders in the mind of the greatest builder of that period, Bramante, the divine plan, the most beautiful design of modern architecture, that for S. Peter’s in Rome, which the Reformation ruined and brought to nothing. [92]

 

S. Lorenzo is octagonal in form and is covered by a dome; the four main sides are closed by semi-cupolas borne by two stories of colonnades consisting each of four columns. Nothing at once more serene and more joyful can be imagined: the church is full of the sun, and the eye is continually and irresistibly drawn upward to the height of the dome.

 

Interesting, however, as S. Lorenzo is, in its architecture recalling the Pantheon and in its spirit the spirit of the Empire, its chief attraction for us lies perhaps in the Capella di S. Aquilino, which stands in the right of the church and is quite the most ancient part of it. …

 But this chapel of S. Aquilino contains something that for the merely human traveller, apart from the artist, puts S. Lorenzo at once on the same level sentimentally with S. Ambrogio. For it is in S. Ambrogio we seemed to find, in the memory and presence of S. Ambrose there, something of the glory and the nobility of those great Roman days of the fourth century, here is S. Lorenzo we may perhaps understand the Fall as we stand beside the great stone tomb of Ataulphus, king of the Goths, the successor of Alaric. For there in a Roman and Christian sarcophagus has the barbarian who had made the great raid with Alaric, had thundered at the gates of Rome, had partaken of his glory and had stood beside the monstrous and inviolate tomb, whose secret was kept by the murder of a multitude….

 

As King of the Goths, the barbarian who lies so securely now within sound of the modern life of Milan had a career not less astonishing than he had enjoyed before Alaric’s death. After a courtship as barbarous, as astonishing and as romantic as any recorded in the history of the world, the savage married the daughter of the great Theodosius. And just as Alaric had been awed by the majesty even of the Rome he violated, so Ataulphus, with the astounding prize of the daughter of the Emperor, the sister of Honorius, in his hands, quailed and bowed his head. For we read that when the day of their nuptials was celebrated in Narbonne in Gaul, “the bride, attired and adorned like a Roman Empress, was placed on a throne of state; the king of the Goths, who assumed on this occasion the Roman habit, contented himself with a less honourable seat by her side.” Ataulphus was in 425 assassinated in the palace of Barcelona, and Galla Placidia, whom he had so much loved and honoured, “confounded among a crowd of vulgar captives,” was compelled to march on foot before the horse of the barbarian who had murdered her husband. Her marvellous alabaster tomb, empty now, stands under the night-blue of the mosaics at Ravenna, but Ataulphus lies here in the chapel of S. Aquilino in Milan.

 

Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. Ravenna

###

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 92-94. 

Florence: Church of S. Lorenzo

 

 

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.

 

###

 

 

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

Milan: S. Lorenzo and a Gothic Romance

 

Edward Hutton's visit to Milan's church of S. Lorenzo included an account of the amazing story of the fifth century Gothic King Ataulphus, and the Roman princess Galla Placidia. 

 

But when all is said, S. Lorenzo remains in many ways the loveliest and certainly the most characteristic building of still Roman Milan. And the power of Rome and Roman things, in spite of every disaster, remained instinct and living here, in its tremendous appeal to the imagination and in the mind of man. We find nearly all the greater architects of the Renaissance to have studied and to have been influenced by the church. Sangallo inspires himself here. Leonardo da Vinci studies it, and it is, after all we find, this church of S. Lorenzo which engenders in the mind of the greatest builder of that period, Bramante, the divine plan, the most beautiful design of modern architecture, that for S. Peter’s in Rome, which the Reformation ruined and brought to nothing. [92]

 

S. Lorenzo is octagonal in form and is covered by a dome; the four main sides are closed by semi-cupolas borne by two stories of colonnades consisting each of four columns. Nothing at once more serene and more joyful can be imagined: the church is full of the sun, and the eye is continually and irresistibly drawn upward to the height of the dome.

 

Interesting, however, as S. Lorenzo is, in its architecture recalling the Pantheon and in its spirit the spirit of the Empire, its chief attraction for us lies perhaps in the Capella di S. Aquilino, which stands in the right of the church and is quite the most ancient part of it. …

 But this chapel of S. Aquilino contains something that for the merely human traveller, apart from the artist, puts S. Lorenzo at once on the same level sentimentally with S. Ambrogio. For it is in S. Ambrogio we seemed to find, in the memory and presence of S. Ambrose there, something of the glory and the nobility of those great Roman days of the fourth century, here is S. Lorenzo we may perhaps understand the Fall as we stand beside the great stone tomb of Ataulphus, king of the Goths, the successor of Alaric. For there in a Roman and Christian sarcophagus has the barbarian who had made the great raid with Alaric, had thundered at the gates of Rome, had partaken of his glory and had stood beside the monstrous and inviolate tomb, whose secret was kept by the murder of a multitude….

 

As King of the Goths, the barbarian who lies so securely now within sound of the modern life of Milan had a career not less astonishing than he had enjoyed before Alaric’s death. After a courtship as barbarous, as astonishing and as romantic as any recorded in the history of the world, the savage married the daughter of the great Theodosius. And just as Alaric had been awed by the majesty even of the Rome he violated, so Ataulphus, with the astounding prize of the daughter of the Emperor, the sister of Honorius, in his hands, quailed and bowed his head. For we read that when the day of their nuptials was celebrated in Narbonne in Gaul, “the bride, attired and adorned like a Roman Empress, was placed on a throne of state; the king of the Goths, who assumed on this occasion the Roman habit, contented himself with a less honourable seat by her side.” Ataulphus was in 425 assassinated in the palace of Barcelona, and Galla Placidia, whom he had so much loved and honoured, “confounded among a crowd of vulgar captives,” was compelled to march on foot before the horse of the barbarian who had murdered her husband. Her marvellous alabaster tomb, empty now, stands under the night-blue of the mosaics at Ravenna, but Ataulphus lies here in the chapel of S. Aquilino in Milan.

 

Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. Ravenna

###

 

Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 92-94.

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.

 

###

 

 

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