"5 LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALi: THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA '. BEQUEST OF }firs9 .Itoian Hooker I The Story of Florence T!he ^Mediceval Towns Series ASSIST. By Lina Duff Gordon, [Qth Edition. AVIGNON, By Thomas Okey. BRUGES. By Ernest Gilliat-Smixh. U^/i Edition. BRUSSELS. By E. Gilliat-Smith. CAIRO. By Stanley Lane-Poole. [yd Edition. CAMBRIDGE. By C. W. Stubbs, D.D, [yd Edition. CANTERBURY. By G. R. Stirling Taylor. CHARTRES. By Cecil Headlam, M.A, [2nd Edition. CONSTANTINOPLE. By W. H. Hutton. [^th Edition. COVENTRY. By Mary Dormer Harris. DUBLIN. By D. A. Chart, M.A. EDINBURGH. By O. Smeaton, M.A. FERRARA, By Ella Noyes. FLORENCE. By Edmund G. Gardner, M.A. [10th Edition. JERUSALEM. By Col. Sir C. M. Watson, K.C.M.G., C.B. [zfid Edition. LONDON. By H. B. Wheatley. [yd Edition. LUCCA, Written by Janet Ross and Nelly Erich- sen, and Illustrated by Nelly Erichsen. MILAN, By Ella Noyes. MOSCOW. By Wirt Gerrare. [yd Edition. NUREMBERG. By Cecil Headlam, M.A. [6th Edition. OXFORD. By Cecil Headlam, M.A. [yd Edition. PADUA. By C. Foligno. PARIS. By Thomas Okey. [^th Edition. PERUGIA. By Margaret Symonds and Lina Duff Gordon, [7th Edition. PISA. By Janet Ross. Illustrated by Nelly Erich- sen. PRAGUE. By Count LGtzow. [yd Edition. ROME. By Norwood Young. [7th Edition. ROUEN. By Theodore A. Cook. [^th Edition. SANTIAGO (SPAIN). By C. Gascoigne Hartley. SEVILLE. By W. M. Gallichan. [znd Edition. SIENA. By Edmund G. Gardner, M.A. Uth Edition. TOLEDO. By Hannah Lynch, [yd Edition. VENICE. By Thomas Okey. [^th Edition. VERONA. By Aletuea Wiel, [yd Edition. (THE TRIUMPH OF LORENZO.) The Story ./ Florciice by Edmund G. Gardner Illustrated by Nelly Erichsen Revised Edition London^ 1920 y. M. Dent ^ Sons, Ltd. New Tork: E. P. Button ?ff Co. All rights reservea First Edition, Septemhey 1900 Second Edition, December 1900 Third Edition, October 1901 Fourth Edition, September 1902 l^ifth Edition, February 1903 Sixth Edition, July 1903 Seventh Edition, March 1905 Eighth Edition, February 1908 Ninth Edition {Revised), June 1910 Tenth Edition, August 1920 MONICA MARY GARDNER PREFACE 'T^HE present volume is intended to supply a popular history of the Florentine Republic, in such a form that it can also be used as a guide-book. It has been my endeavour, while keeping within the necessary limits of this series of Mediaval Townsy to point out briefly the most salient features in the story of Florence, to tell again the tale of those of her streets and buildings, and indicate those of her artistic treasures, which are either most intimately connected with that story or most beautiful in themselves. Those who know best what an intensely fascinating and many-sided history that of Florence has been, who have studied most closely the work and characters of those strange and wonderful personalities who have lived within (and, in the case of the greatest, died without) her walls, will best appreciate my difficulty in compressing even a portion of all this wealth and profusion into the narrow bounds enjoined by the aim and scope of this book. Much has necessarily been curtailed over which it would have been tempting to linger, much inevitably omitted which the historian could not have passed over, nor the compiler of a guide-book failed to mention. In what I have se- lected for treatment and what omitted, I have usually let myself be guided by the remembrance of my own needs when I first commenced to visit Florence and to study her arts and history. It is needless to say that the number of books, old and new, is very considerable indeed, to which anyone venturing in these days to write yet another book on Florence must have had recourse, and to whose authors he is bound to be indebted — from the earliest Florentine chroniclers down to the most recent bio- graphers of Lorenzo the Magnificent, of Savonarola, vii PreJ ace of Mlcliclangelo— from Vasari down to ©ur modern scientific art critics— from Riclia and Moreni down to the Misses Horner. My obligations can hardly be acknowledged here in detail ; but, to mention a few modern works alone, I am most largely indebted to Capponi's Storia della Repuhhl'tca di Firenze, to various writings of Professor Pasquale Villari, and to Mr Arm- strong's Lorenzo de* Medici ; to the works of Ruskin and J. A. Symonds, of M. Reymond and Mr Berenson; and, in the domains of topography, to Baedeker's Hand Book. In judging of the merits and the authorship of individual pictures and statues, I have usually given more weight to the results of modern criticism than to the pleasantness of old tradition. Carlyle's translation of the Inferno and Mr Wick- steed's of the Paradiso are usually quoted. If this little book should be found helpful in initiat- ing the EngHsh-speaking visitor to the City of Flowers, into more of the historical atmosphere of Florence and her monuments than guide-books and catalogues can supply, it will amply have fulfilled its object. May 1900. E. G. G. This Ninth Edition has been largely revised, the sections dealing with the picture-galleries, in particular, having been completely rewritten and brought up to date. The author would express his indebtedness to Miss Cruttwell's two excellent Guides to the Paintings in the Florentine Galleries and the Paintings in the Churches and Minor Museums of Florence. May 1910. NOTE TO TENTH EDITION The position of many of the works of art, in the Galleries and elsewhere, has been considerably altered. Owing to the difficulties of the present time, it has not been possible to bring the book up to date in these particulars, but a complete revision will be made in the next edition. yiii CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE The Commune and People of Florence • i i CHAPTER II The Times of Dante and Boccaccio , • • 3 j CHAPTER III The Media and the Quattrocento , • « CHAPTER IV From Fra Girolamo to Duke Cosimo • , III CHAPTER V The Pala%%o Vecchio — The Piazza della Sisnoria — The Uffizi . . , .146 CHAPTER VI Or San Michele and the Sesto di San Piero , 184 CHAPTER VII From the Bargello past Santa Croce . . 214 ix Contents CHAPTER VIII FAGl The Bapi'uUry, the Campanile, and the Duomo . 246 CHAPTER IX The Palazzo RiccarcR-^an Lorenzo — San Marco 283 CHAPTER X The Accademia delle Belle Arti, the Santisslma Annunziata, and other Buildings , • 314 CHAPTER XI The Bridges — Ihe Quarter of Santa Maria Novella , . . . .340 CHAPTER XII Across the Arno . . . . . '374 CHAPTER XIII Beyond the City ...... 4O9 Genealogical Table of the Me£ci • • • 423 Chronological Index oj Architects^ Sculptors and Painters . , . . . .424 General Index ..... • 430 Z ILLUSTRATIONS Pallas taming a Cefiiaur {^Photogravure) Frontispiece Florence from the Boholl Gardens • 3 The Buondelmonte Tower 20 The Palace of the Parte Guelfa 29 Arms of Parte Guelfa . • • 31 Florentine Families , p « 33 Corso Donatt^s Toiver , . • 40 Across the Ponte Vecchio • • 47 Mercato Nuovoy the Flower Market 51 The Campanile .... 63 Cross of the Florentine People 70 Florence In the Days of Lorenzo the Magnificent 80 The Badla of Fie sole . ^3 *''In the Sculptors IVork-shop'' (A ^annl di Banco) . • . • 97 Arms of the Pazzl no * 7 he Death of Savonarola . 13s * " The Dawn " ( Michelangelo) . 144 The Palazzo Fecchlo . 147 * *< Fmus " {Sandro Botticelli) . 178 Orcagnas Tabernacle, Or San Mlchcle 185 XI Illustrations Window of Or San Michele , Tower of the Arte della Lana House of Dante . Petrine Keys adopted by the Guelfs Bargello Courtyard and Staircase Santa Croce . . . Old Houses on the Arno • The Baptistery . • • The Bigallo Porta della Mandorla^ Duomo Stalueof Boniface Fill. Arms of the Medici from the Badia at Fie sole * Tomb of Giovanni and Piero dei Medici The Well of S, Marco , Looking through Vasari s Loggia^ Uffi%i . The Cloister of the Innoccnti A Florentine Suburb The Ponte Vecchio The Tower of San Zenobio Arms of the Strozzi In the Green Cloisters^ S. Maria Novella In the Boboli Gardens . • . . The Fortifications of Michelangelo . Porta San Giorgio .... Map of Florence . • * f^^^'^^S * ^^ The Fronth piece and the Illustrations facing pages 97, 135, 1 44 J 178 and 288 are reproduce J.^ hij permission, /rom photographs by Messrs Alinari of Florence.^^ The Story of Florence CHAPTER I I'he People and Commune of Florefice B "La bellissima e famosissima figlia di Roma. Fiorenza." — Dante. EFORE the imagination of a thirteenth century poet, one of the sweetest singers of the dolce stil novoy there rose a phantasy of a transfigured city, trans- formed into a capital of Fairyland, with his lady and himself as fairy queen and king ; "Amor, eo chero mea donna in domino, I'Arno balsamo fino, le mura di Fiorenza inargentate, le rughe di cristallo lastricate, fortezze alte e merlate, mio fedel fosse ciaschedun Latino."* But is not the reality even more beautiful than the dreamland Florence of Lapo Gianni's fancy? We stand on the heights of San Miniato, either in front of the BasiHca itself or lower down in the Piazzalc Michelangelo. Below us, on either bank of the 1 "Love, I demand to have my lady in fee, Fine balm let Arno be, The walls of Florence all of silver rear'd, And crystal pavements in the public way ; With castles make me fear'd, Till every Latin soul have owned my sway." — Lapo Gianni {Rossett't), A I The Story of Florence silvery Arno, lies outstretched Dante's " most famous and most beauteous daughter of Rome," once the Queen of Etruria and centre of the most wonderful culture that the world has known since Athens, later the first capital of United Italy, and still, though shorn of much of her former splendour and beauty, one of the loveliest cities of Christendom. Opposite to us, to the north, rises the hill upon which stands Etruscan Fiesole, from which the people of Florence originally came: "that ungrateful and malignant people," Dante once called them, " who of old came down from Ficsolc." Behind us stand the fortifications which mark the death of the Republic, thrown up or at least strengthened by Michelangelo in the city's last agony, when she barred her gates and defied the united power of Pope and Emperor to take the State that had once chosen Christ for her king. " O foster-nurse of man's abandoned glory Since Athens, its great mother, sunk in splendour; Thou shallowest forth that mighty shape in story, As ocean its wrecked fanes, severe yet tender : The light-invested angel Poesy Was drawn from the dim world to welcome thee. -* And thou in painting didst transcribe all taught By loftiest meditations ; marble knew The sculptor's fearless soul — and as he wrought, The grace of liis own power and freedom grew." Between Fiesole and San Miniato, then, the story of the Florentine Republic may be said to be written. The beginnings of Florence are lost in cloudy legend, and her early chroniclers on the slenderest foundations have reared for her an unsubstantial, if imposing, fabric of fables — the tales which the women of old Florence, in the Paradiso, told to their house- holds — '' dei Troiani, di Fiesole, e di Roma." 1 FLORENCE KROM THE BOBOLI GARDENS People and Commune of Florence Setting aside the Trojans ("Priam" was medineval for "Adam," as a modern novelist has remarked), there is no doubt that both Etruscan Fiesole and Imperial Rome united to found the "great city on the banks of the Arno." Fiesole or Faesulac upon its hill was an important Etruscan city, and a place of consequence in the days of the Roman Republic ; fallen though it now is, traces of its old greatness remain. Behind the Romanesque cathedral are considerable remains of Etruscan walls and of a Roman theatre. Opposite it to the west we may ascend to enjoy the glorious view from the Convent of the Franciscans, where once the old citadel of Faesulae stood. Faesulae was ever the centre of Italian and democratic discontent against Rome and her Senate [sempre riheU'i di Roma^ says Villani of its inhabitants) ; and it was here, In October B.C. 62, that Caius Manlius planted the Eagle of revolt — an eagle which Marius had borne in the war against the Cimbri — and thus commenced the Catilinarian war, which resulted in the annihilation of Catiline's army near Pistoia. This, according to Villani, was the origin of Florence. According to him, Fiesole, after enduring the stupendous siege, was forced to surrender to the Romans under Julius Coesar, and utterly razed to the ground. In the second sphere of Paradise, Justinian reminds Dante of how the Roman Eagle " seemed bitter to that hill beneath which thou wast born." Then, in order that Fiesole might never raise its head again, the Senate oidained that the greatest lords of Rome, who had been at the siege, should join with Csesar in building a jiew city on the banks of the Arno. Florence, thus founded by Ccesar, was popu- lated by the noblest citizens of Rome, who received into their number those of the inhabitants of fallen Fiesole who wished to live there. " Note then," says 5 The Story of Florence the old chronicler, " that it is not wonderful that the Florentines are always at war and in dissensions among themselves, being drawn and born from two peoples, so contrary and hostile and diverse in habits, as were the noble and virtuous Romans, and the savage and con- tentious folk of Ficsole." Dante similarly, in Canto XV. of the Inftrno^ ascribes the injustice of the Florentines towards himself to this mingling of the people of Fiesole with the true Roman nobility (with special reference, however, to the union of Florence with conquered Fiesole in the twelfth century) : — " che tra li lazzi sorbi si disconvlen fruttare al dolce fico."! And Brunetto LatinI bids him keep himself free from their pollution : — " Faccian le bestie Fiesolane strame cli lor medesine, e non tocchin la pianta, s'alcuna surge ancor nel lor letame, in cui riviva la semente santa di quei Roman che vi rimaser quando fu fatto il niJo di malizia tanta."^ The truth appears to be that Florence was originally founded by Etruscans from Fiesole, who came down from their mountain to the plain by the Arno for com- mercial purposes. This Etruscan colony was probably destroyed during the wars between Marius and Sulla, and a Roman military colony established here — prob- ably in the time of Sulla, and augmented later by Cxsar and by Augustus. It has. Indeed, been urged of late that tlie old Florentine story has some truth In It, and ^ " For amongst the tart sorbs, it befits not the sweet fig to fructify." 2 "Let the beasts of Fiesole make litter of themselves, and not touch the plant, if any yet springs up amid their ranlc- ness, in which the holy seed revives of those Romans who remained there when it became the nest of so much malice " People and Commime of Florence that Cassar, not only in legend but in fact, may be regarded as the true first founder of Florence. Thus the Roman colony of Florentia gradually grew into a little city — come una altra p'lccola Roma, declares her patriotic chronicler. It had its capitol and its forum in the centre of the city, where the Mercato Vecchio once stood ; it had an amphitheatre outside the walls, somewhere near where the Borgo dei Greci and the Piazza Peruzzi are to-day. It had baths and temples, though doubtless on a small scale. It had the shape and form of a Roman camp, which (together with the Roman walls in which it was inclosed) it may be said to have retained down to the middle of the twelfth century, in spite of legendary demolitions by Attila and Totila, and equally legendary reconstructions by Charlemagne. Above all, it had a grand temple to Mars, which almost certainly occupied the site of the present Baptistery, if not actually identical with it. Giovanni Villani tells us — and we shall have to return to his statement — that the wonderful octagonal building, now known as the Baptistery or the Church of St John, was consecrated as a temple by the Romans in honour of Mars, for their victory over the Fiesolans, and that Mars was the patron of the Florentines as long as paganism lasted. Round the equestrian statue that was supposed to have once stood in the midst of this temple, numberless legends have gathered. Dante refers to it again and again. In San ta Maria Novella you shall see how a great painter of the early Renais- sance, Filippino Lippi, conceived of his city's first patron. When Florence changed him for the Baptist, and the people of Mars became the sheepfold of St John, this statue was removed from the temple and set upon a tower by the side of the Arno : — " The Florentines took up their idol which they called the God Mars, and set him upon a high tower 7 The Story of Florence near the river Arno ; and they would not break or shatter it, seeing that in their ancient records they found that the said idol of Mars had been con- secrated under the ascendency of such a planet, that if it should be broken or put in a dishonourable place, the city would suffer danger and damage and great mutation. And although the Florentines had newly become Christians, they still retained many customs of paganism, and retained them for a long time ; and they greatly feared their ancient idol of Mars ; so little perfect were they as yet in the Holy Faith." This tower is said to have been destroyed hke the rest of Florence by the Goths, the statue falling into the Arno, where it lurked in hiding all the time that the city lay in ruins. On the legendary rebuilding of Florence by Charlemagne, the statue, too — or rather the mutilated fragment that remained — was restored to light and honour. Thus Villani : — " It is said that the ancients held the opinion that there was no power to rebuild the city, if that marble image, consecrated by necromancy to Mars by the first Pagan builders, was not first found again and drawn out of the Arno, in which it had been from the de- struction of Florence down to that time. And, when found, they set it upon a pillar on the bank of the said river, where is now the head of the Pontc Vecchio. This we neither aflirm nor believe, inasmuch as it ap- pearcth to us to be the opinion of augurers and pagans, and not reasonable, but great folly, to hold that a statue so made could work thus ; but commonly it was said by the ancients that, if it were changed, our city would needs suffer great mutation." I'hus it became queJla pletra scema che guarda il ponle^ in Dantesque phrase; and we shall see what terrible sacrifice its clients unconsciously paid to it. Here it remained, much honoured by the Florentines ; street 8 People and Commune of Florence boys were solemnly warned of the fearful judgments that fell on all who dared to throw mud or stones at it; until at last, in 1333, a great flood carried away bridge and statue alike, and it was seen no more. It has recently been suggested that the statue was, in reality, an equestrian monument in honour of some barbaric king, belonging to the fifth or sixth century. Florence, however, seems to have been — in spite of Villani's describing it as the Chamber of the Empire and the like — a place of very slight importance under the Empire. Tacitus mentions that a deputation was sent from Florentia to Tiberius to prevent the Chiana being turned into the Arno. Christianity is said to have been first introduced in the days of Nero ; the Decian persecution raged here as elsewhere, and the soil was hallowed with the blood of the martyr, Miniatus. Christian worship is said to have been first offered up on the hill where a stately eleventh century Basilica now bears his name. When the greater peace of the Church was established under Constantine, a church dedicated to the Baptist on the site of the Martian temple and a basilica outside the walls, where now stands San Lorenzo, were among the earliest churches in Tuscany. In the year 405, the Goth leader Rhadagaisus, omnium antlquorum praesent'iumque hostium longe immanis- simus, as Orosius calls him, suddenly inundated Italy with more than 200,000 Goths, vowing to sacrifice all the blood of the Romans to his gods. In their terror the Romans seemed about to return to their old paganism, since Christ had failed to protect them. Fervent iota urbe blasphemiae^ writes Orosius. They advanced towards R.ome through the Tuscan Ap- ennines, and are said to have besieged Florence, though there is no hint of this in Orosius. On the approach of Stilicho, at the head of thirty legions with 9 I'he Story of Florence a large force of barbarian auxiliaries, Rhadagaisus and liis hordes — miraculously struck helpless with terror, as Orosius implies — let themselves be hemmed in in the mountains behind Ficsole, and ail perished, by famine and exhaustion rather than by the sword. Villani ascribes the salvation of Florence to the prayers of its bishop, Zenobius, and adds that as this victory of "the Romans and Florentines " took place on the feast of the virgin martyr Reparata, her name was given to the church afterwards to become the Cathedral of Florence. Zenobius, now a somewhat misty figure, is the first great Florentine of history, and an impressive personage in Florentine an. We dimly discern in him an ideal bishop and father of his people ; a man of great aus- terity and boundless cliarity, almost an earlier Anton- inus. Perhaps the fact that some of the intervening Florentine bishops were anything but edifying, has made these two — almost at the beginning and end of the Middle Ages — stand forth in a somewhat ideal light. He appears to have lived a monastic life out- side the wails in a small church on the site of the present San Lorenzo, with two young ecclesiastics, trained by him and St Ambrose, Eugcnius and Cres- centius. They died before him and are commonly united with him by the painters. Here he was fre- quently visited by St Ambrose — here he dispensed his charities and worked his miracles (according to the legend, he had a special gift of raising children to life) — here at length he died in the odour of sanctity, a.d. 424. The beautiful legend of his trans- lation should be familiar to every student of Italian painting. I give it in the words of a monkish writer of the fourteenth century : — "About five years after he had been buried, there W3S made bishop one naaied Andrew, and this holy 10 People and Commune of Florence bishop summoned a great chapter of bishops and clerics, and said in the chapter that it was meet to bear the body of St Zenobius to the Cathedral Church of San Salvatore ; and so it was ordained. Wherefore, on the 26th of January, he caused him to be unburied and borne to the Church of San Salvatore by four bishops ; and these bishops bearing the body of St Zenobius were so pressed upon by the people that they fell near an elm, the which was close unto the Church of St John the Baptist ; and when tliey fell, the case where the body of St Zenobius lay was broken, so that the body touched the elm, and gradually, as the elm was touched, it brought forth flowers and leaves, and lasted all that year with the flowers and leaves. The people, seeing the miracle, broke up all the elm, and with devotion carried the branches away. And the Floren- tines, beholding what was done, made a column of marble with a cross where the elm had been, so that the miracle should ever be remembered by the people." Like the statue of Mars, this column was destroyed by the flood of 1333, ^nd the one now standing to the north of the Baptistery was set up after that year. It was at one time the custom for the clergy on the feast of the translation to go in procession and fasten a green bough to this column. Zenobius now stands with St Reparata on the cathedral facade. Domen- ico Ghirlandaio painted him, together with his puj^ils Eugenius and Cresccntius, in the Sala dei Gigli of the Palazzo della Signoria ; an unknown follower of Orcagna had painted a similar picture for a pillar in the Duomo. Ghiberti cast his miracles in bronze for the shrine in the Chapel of the Sacrament ; Verrocchio and Lorenzo di Credi at Pistoia placed him and the Baptist on either side of Madonna's throne. In a picture by some other follower of Verrocchio's in the II 'The Story of Florence Uffizi he IS seen offering up a model of his city to the Blessed Virgin. Two of the most famous of his mir- acles, the raising of a child to life and the flowering of the elm tree at his translation, are superbly rendered in two pictures by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio. On May 2 5th the people still throng the Duomo with bunches of roses and other flowers, which they press to the reliquary which contains his head, and so obtain the " benedizione di San Zenobio." Thus'docs his mem- ory live fresh and green among the people to whom he so faithfully ministered. Another barbarian king, the last Gothic hero Totila, advancing upon Rome in 542, took the same shorter but more difficult route across the Apennines. Accord- ing to the legend, he utterly destroyed all Florence, with the exception of the Church of San Giovanni, and rebuilt Fiesole to oppose Rome and prevent Flor- ence from being restored. The truth appears to be that he did not personally attack Florence, but sent a portion of his troops under his lieutenants. They were successfully resisted by Justin, who commanded the imperial garrison, and, on the advance of reinforce- ments from Ravenna, they drew oflT into the valley of the Mugello, where they turned upon the pursuing " Romans " (whose army consisted of worse barbar- ians than Goths) and completely routed them. Fiesole, which had apparently recovered from its old destruction, was probably too difficult to be assailed ; but it :!pj)cars to have been gradually growing at the expense of Florence — tlie citizens of the latter emigrating to it for greater safety. This was especially the case during the Lombard invasion, when the fortunes of F'lorence were at their lowest, and, indeed, in the second half of the eighth century, Florence almost sank to being a suburb of Fiesole. With the advent of Charlemagne and the restoration People and Commune of Florence of the Empire, brighter days commenced for Florcncej — so much so that the story ran that he had renewed the work of Julius Caesar and founded the city again. In 786 he wintered here with his court on his third visit to Rome ; and, according to legend, he was here again in great wealth and pomp in 805, and founded the Church of Santissimi Apostoli — the oldest existing Florentine building after the Baptistery. Upon its facade you may still read a pompous inscription con- cerning the Emperor's reception in Florence, and hov/ the Church was consecrated by Archbishop Turpin in the presence of Oliver and Roland, the Paladins ! Flor- ence was becoming a power in Tuscany, or at least beginning to see more of Popes and Emperors. The Ottos stayed within her walls on their way to be crowned at Rome ; Popes, flying from their rebellious subjects, found shelter here. In 1055 Victor II. held a council in Florence. Beautiful Romanesque churches began to rise — notably the SS. Apostoli and San Miniate, both probably dating from the eleventh century. Great churchmen appeared among her sons, as San Giovanni Gualberto — the "merciful knight" of Burne-Jones' unforgettable picture — the reformer of the Benedictines and the founder of Vallombrosa. The early reformers, while Hildebrand was still " Archdeacon of the Roman Church," were specially active in Florence ; and one of them, known as Peter Igneus, in 1068 endured the ordeal of fire and is said to have passed unhurt through the flames, to convict the Bishop of Florence of simony. This, with other matters relating to the times of Gio- vanni Gualberto and the struggles of the reformers of the clergy, you may see in the Bargello in a series of noteworthy marble bas-reliefs (terribly damaged, it is true), from the hand of Benedetto da Rovezzano. Although we already begin to hear of the " Florentine people" and the "Florentine citizens," Florence wa8 13 T^he Story oj Florence at this time subject to the Margraves of Tuscany. One of tliem, Hugh the Great, who is said to have acted as vicar of the Emperor Oito III., and who died at the beginning of the eleventh century, lies buried in the Badia which had been founded by his mother, the Countess Willa, in 978. His tomb, one of the most noteworthy monuments of the fifteenth century, by Mino da Fiesole, may still be seen, near Filippino Li])pi'3 Vision of St Bernard. It was while Florence was nominally under the sway of Hugo's most famous successor, the Countess Ma- tilda of Tuscany, that Dante's ancestor Cacciaguida was born ; and, in the fifteenth and sixteenth cantos of the Paradlso, he draws an ideal picture of that austere old Florence, dentro dalla cerchia anticdy still within her Roman walls. We can still partly trace and partly conjecture the position of these walls. The city stood a little way back from the river, and had four master gates ; the Porta San Piero on the east, the Porta del Duomo on the north, the Porta San Pancrazio on the west, the Porta Santa Maria on the south (towards the Ponte Vccchio). The heart of the city, the Forum or, as it came to be called, the Mercato Vecchio, has indeed been destroyed of late years to make way for the cold and altogether hideous Piazza Vittorio Emanuele ; but we can still perceive tliat at its south-east corner the two main streets of this old Floreni'ia qundrata intersected, — Calimara, running from the Porta Santa Maria to the Porta del Duomo, south to north, and the Corso, running east to west from the Porta San Piero to the Porta San Pancrazio, along the lines of the present Corso, Via degli Speziali, and Via degli Strozzi. The Porta San Piero probably stood about where the Via del Corso joins the Via del Proconsolo, and there was a suburb reaching out to the Church of San Piero Magglorc. Then the walls 14 People and Commune of Florence ran along the lines of the present Via del Proconsolo and Via dci Balcstrieri, inclosing Santa Reparata and the Baptistery, to the Duomo Gate beyond the Bishop's palace — probably somewhere near the opening of the modern Borgo San Lorenzo. Then along the Via Cerrctani, Piazza Antinori, Via Tornabuoni, to the Gate of San Pancrazio, which was somewhere near the present Palazzo Strozzi ; and so on to where the Church of Santa Trinita now stands, near which there was a postern gate called the Porta Rossa. Then they turned east along the present Via delle Terme to the Porta Santa Maria, which was somewhere near the end of the Mercato Nuovo, after which their course back to the Porta San Piero is more uncertain. Outside the walls were churches and ever-increasing suburbs, and Florence was already becoming an important com- mercial centre. Matilda's beneficent sway left it in practical independence to work out its own destinies ; she protected it from imperial aggressions, and curbed the nobles of the contado, who were of Teutonic descent and who, from their feudal castles round, looked with hostility upon the rich burgher city of pure Latin blood that was gradually reducing their power and territorial sway. At intervals the great Countess entered Florence, and either in person or by her deputies and judges (members of the chief Floren- tine families) administered justice in the Forum. In- deed she played the part of Dante's ideal Emperor in the De Monarchta ; made Roman law obeyed through her dominions ; established peace and curbed disorder ; and therefore, in spite of her support of papal claims for political empire, when the Di-vina Commedta came to be written, Dante placed her as guardian of the Earthly Paradise to which the Emperor should guide man, and made her the type of the glorified active life. Her praises, la lauda di Matelda, were long sung in the 15 The Story of Florence Florentine churches, as may be gathered from a passage in Boccaccio. It is from the death of Matilda in 1115 that the history of the Commune dates. During her lifetime she seems to have gradually, especially while engaged in her conflicts with the Emperor Henry, delegated her powers to the chief Florentine citizens themselves ; and in her name they made war upon the aggressive nobility in the country round, in the interests of their commerce. For Dante the first half of this twelfth century represents the golden age in which his ancestor lived, when the great citizen nobles — Bellincion Berti, Ubertino Donati, and the heads of the Nerli and Vec- chietti and the rest— lived simple and patriotic lives, filled the offices of state and led the troops against the foes of the Commune. In a grand burst of triumph that old Florentine crusader, Cacciaguida, closes the sixteenth canto of the Paracliso i ♦* Con queste genti, e con altre con esse, vid'io Fiorenza in si fatto riposo, che non avea cagion onde piangesse ; con queste genti vid'io glorioso, e giusto il popol suo tanto, che'l giglio non era ad asta mai posto a ritroso, ne per division fatto vermiglio." ^ When Matilda died, and the Popes a.id Emperors prepared to struggle for her legacy (which thus initiated the strifes of Guelfs and Ghibellines), the Florentine Republic asserted its independence : the citizen nobles who had been her delegates and judges now became the Consuls of the Commune and the leaders of the republican forces in war. In 11 19 the Florentines ^ '' With these folk, and with others with them, did I see Florence in such full repose, she had not cause for wailing ; With these folk I saw her people so glorious and so just, ne'er was the lily on the shaft reversed, nor yet by faction dyed vermilion." — Wicksteed's translation. 16 People and Coinmuue of Florence assailed the castle of Monte Cascioli, and killed the imperial vicar who defended it ; in 1 1 2 5 they took and destroyed Fiesole, which had always been a refuge for robber nobles and all who hated the Republic. But already signs of division were seen in the city itself, though it was a century before it came to a head ; and the great family of the Uberti — who, like the nobles of the contadoj were of Teutonic descent — was pro- minently to the front, but soon to be dhfatti per la lor superbia. Scarcely was Matilda dead than they appear to have attempted to seize on the supreme power, and to have only been defeated with much bloodshed and burning of houses. Still the Republic pursued its vic- torious course through the twelfth century — putting down the feudal barons, forcing them to enter the city and join the Commune, and extending their commerce and influence as well as their territory on all sides. And already these nobles within and without the city were beginning to build their lofty towers, and to associate themselves into Societies of the Towers ; while the people were grouped into associations which afterwards became the Greater and Lesser Arts or Guilds. Villahi sees the origin of future contests in the mingling of races, Roman and Fiesolan ; modern writers find it in the distinction, mentioned already, between the nobles, of partly Teutonic origin and imperial sympathies, and. the burghers, who were the true Italians, the descendants of those over whom suc- cessive tides of barbarian conquest had swept, and to whom the ascendency of the nobles would mean an alien yoke. This struggle between a landed military -^ and feudal nobility, waning in power and authority, and a commercial democracy of more purely Latin descent, ever increasing in wealth and importance, is what lies at the bottom of the contest between Florentine Guelfs and Ghibcllincs; and the rival B 17 The Story of Florence claims of Pope and Emperor are of secondary im- portance, as far as Tuscany is concerned. In 1 173 (as the most recent historian of Florence has shown, and not in the eleventh century as formerly supposed), the second circle of walls was built, and included a much larger tract of city, though many ot the churches which we have been wont to consider the most essential things in Florence stand outside them. A new Porta San Piero, just beyond the present fa9ade of the ruined church of San Piero Maggiore, enclosed the Borgo di San Piero ; thence the walls passed round to the Porta di Borgo San Lorenzo, just to the north of the present Piazza, and swept round, with two gates of minor importance, past the chief western Porta San Pancrazio or Porta San Paolo, beyond which the present Piazza di Santa Maria Novella stands, down to the Arno where there was a Porta alia Carraia, at the point where the bridge was built later. Hence a lower wall ran along the Arno, taking in the parts excluded from the older circuit down to the Ponte Vecchio. About half-way between this and the Ponte Rubaconte, the walls turned up from the Arno, with several small gate?, until they reached the place where the present Piazza di Santa Croce lies— which was outside. Plere, just beyond the old site of the Amphitheatre, there was a gate, after which they ran straight without gate or postern to San Piero, where they had commenced. Instead of the old Quarters, named from the gates, the city was now divided into six corresponding Sesti or sextaries ; the Sesto di Porta San Piero, the Sesto still called from the old Porta del Duomo, the Sesto di Porta Pancrazio, the Sesto di San Piero Scheraggio (a church near the Palazzo Vecchio, but now totally destroyed), and the Sesto di Borgo Santissimi Apostoli — these two replacing the old Quarter of Porta Santa Maria. Across the river lay the Sesto d'Oltrarno — • People and Commune of Florence then for the most part unfortified. At that time the inhabitants of Oltrarno were mostly the poor and the lower classes, but not a few noble families settled there later on. The Consuls, the supreme officers of the state, were elected annually, two for each scsto, usually nobles of popular tendencies ; there was a council of a hundred, elected every year, its members being mainly chosen from the Guilds as the Consuls from the Towers ; and a Parliament of the people could be summoned in the Piazza. Thus the popular govern- ment was constituted. Hardly had the new walls risen when t!ie Uberti in 1177 attempted to overthrow the Consuls and seize the government of the city ; they were partially suc- cessful, in that they managed to make the administration more aristocratic, after a prolonged civil struggle of two years' duration. In 1185 Frederick Barbarossa took away the privileges of the Ilepublic and deprived it of its contado ; but his son, Henry VI., apparently gave it back. With the beginning of the thirteenth cen- tury v/e find the Consuls replaced by a Podesta, a foreign noble elected by the citizens thcm.selvcs : and the Florentines, not content with having back their contado, beginning to make wars of conquest upon their neighbours, especially the Sicnesc, from whom they exacted a cession of territory in 1208. In 1 2 1 5 there v/as enacted a deed in wliich poets and chroniclers have seen a turning point in the history of Florence. Buondelmonte dci Buondelmonti, "a rlgiit winsome and comely knight," as Villani calls him, had ji'edged himself for political reasons to marry a maiden of the Amidei family — the kinsmen of the proud Uberti and Fifanti. But, at the instigation of Gualdrada Donati, he deserted his betrothed and mar- ried Gualdrada's own daughter, a girl of great beauty. Upon this the nobles of the kindred of the deserted 19 7he Story of Florence girl held a council together to decide what vengeance to take, in which " Mosca del Lamberti spoke the evil word : Cosa falta, capo ha ; to wit, that he should be slain ; and so it was done." On Easter Sunday the Amidei and their associates assembled, after hearing mass in San Stefano, in a palace of the Amidei, which was on the Lungarno at the opening of the present Via For Santa Maria; and they watched young Buondelmonte coming from Oltrarno, riding over the Ponte Vecchio " dressed nobly in a new robe all white and on a white palfrey," crowned with a garland, making his way towards the palaces of his kindred in 9^. : "-■ ''■''^;':~^ Jf= Borgo Santissimi Apos- ^:v^.' " ^^ ■ ':^ - _ - toH. As soon as he had ?-B , -^Ji.'': "^ :ir V reached this side, at the ^^in™i^''^^ '/f^f '^^ ^°^ °^ ^^^ pillar on y^^f^l^l |. l|i^ which stood the statue ^^iiiv- /^l " of Mars, they rushed out ^ ^^ upon him. Schiatta degli THE BuoxDF.LMONTE TOWER Ubcrti struck him from his horse with a mace, and Mosca dei Lamberti, Lambertuccio dcgli Amidei, Oderigo FIfanti, and one of the Gangalandi, stabbed him to death with their daggers at the foot of the statue. " Verily is it shown," writes Villani, " that the enemy of human nature by reason of the sins of the Florentines had power in this idol of Mars, which the pagan Florentines adored of old ; for at the foot of his figure was this murder committed, whence such great 20 People and Commune of Florence evil followed to die city of Florence." I'lic body was placed upon a bier, and, with the young bride sup- porting the dead head of her bridegroom, carried through the streets to urge tlie people to vengeance. Headed by the Ubcrti, the older and more aristocratic families took up the cause of the Amidei ; the burghers and the democratically inclined nobles supported the Buondel- monti, and from this the chronicler dates the beginning of the Guelfs and Ghibelhnes in Florence. But it was only the names that were tlicn introduced, to intensify a struggle which had in reahty commenced a century before this, in i i i 5, on the death of Matilda. As far as Guelf and Ghibelline meant a struggle of the commune of burghers and traders with a military aris- tocracy of Teutonic descent and feudal imperial tenden- cies, the thing is already clearly defined in the old contest between the Ubcrti and the Consuls. This, however, precipitated matters, and initiated fifty years of perpetual conflict. Dante, through Cacciaguida, touches upon the tragedy in his great way in Parad'iso XVI., where he calls it the ruin of old Florence. " La casa di clic nacque il vostro fleto, per lo giusto disdegno die v'ha morti e posto fine al vostro viver lieto, era onorata ed essa e suoi consorti. O Buondelmonte, quanto mal fuggisti le nozze sue per gli ahrui conforti 1 Molti sarebbon lieti, che son tristi, se Die t'avesse conceduto ad Ema la prima volta che a citta venisti. Ma conveniasi a quella pietra scema che guarda il ponte, che Fiorenza fesse vittima iiella sua pace postrenia. "^ ^ " The house fiom which your walling sprang, because of the just anger wliich hath slain you and placed a term upon your joyous life, «* was honoured, it and its associates. Oh Buondelmonte, 21 The Story of Florence And again, in the Hell of the sowers of discord, where they are horribly mutilated by the devil's sword, he meets the miserable Mosca. « Ed un, ch'avea Tuna e I'altra man mozza, levando i moncherin per I'aura fosca, si che il sangue facea la faccia sozza, grido : Ricorderaiti anche del Mosca, che dissi, lasso I ' Capo ha cosa fatta/ che fu il mal seme per la gente tosca." ^ For a time the Commune remained Guelf and powerful, in spite of dissensions ; it adhered to the Pope against Frederick II., and waged successful wars with its GhibeUine rivals, Pisa and Siena. Of the other Tuscan cities Lucca was Guelf, Pistoia Ghibel- line. A religious feud mingled with the political dissensions ; heretics, the Paterini, Epicureans and other sects, were multiplying in Italy, favoured by Frederick II. and patronised by the Ghibellines. Fra Pietro of Verona, better known as St Peter Martyr, organised a crusade, and, with his white-robed captains of the Faith, hunted them in arms through the streets of Florence ; at the Croce al Trebbio, near Santa Maria Novella, and in the Piazza di Santa Felicita over the Arno, columns still mark the j^lace where he fell furiously upon them, con Vuficio apostolic o. But in how ill didst thou flee its nuptials at the prompting ol anotlier I "Joyous had many been who novf are sad, had God com- mitted thee unto the Ema the first time that thou camest to the city. " But to that mutilated stone which guardeth the bridge 'twas meet that Florence should give a victim in her last time of peace." 1 " And one who had both hands cut off, raising the stumps through the dim air so that their blood defiled his face, cried: 'Thou wilt recollect the Mosca too, ah me I who said, "A thing don ehas an end 1 " which was the seed of evil to the Tuscan people.'" (Inf. xxviJi.) 32 People and Commune of Florence 1249, at the instigation of Frederick 11. , the Uberti and GhibeUine nobles rose in arms ; and, after a desperate conflict with the Guelf magnates and the people, gained possession of the city, with the aid of the Emperor's German troops. And, on the night of February 2nd, the Guelf leaders with a great fol- lowing of people armed and bearing torches buried Rustico Marlgnolli, who had fallen in defending the banner of the Lily, with military honours in San Lorenzo, and then sternly passed into exile. Their palaces and towers were destroyed, while the Uberti and their allies with the Emperor's German troops held the city. This lasted not two years. In 1250, on the death of Frederick IL, the Republic threw off the yoke, and the first democratic constitution of Florence was established, the Primo Popohy in which, the People were for the first time regularly organised both for peace and for war under a new officer, the Captain of the People, whose appointment was in- tended to outweigh the Podesta, the head of the Commune and the leader of the nobles. The Captain was intrusted with the white and red Gonfalon of the People, and associated with the central govern- ment of the Ancients of the people, who to some extent corresponded to the Consuls of olden time. This Primo Popolo ran a victorious course of ten years, years of internal prosperity and almost continuous external victory. It was under it that the banner of the Commune was changed from a white Hly on a red field to a red lily on a white field — per division fatto vermiglioy as I^ante puts it — after the Uberti and Lambert! with the turbulent Ghibellines had been expelled. Pisa was humbled ; Pistoia and Volterra forced to submit. But it came to a terrible end, illuminated only by the heroism of one of its con- querors. A conspiracy on the- part of the Uberti to 23 The Story of Florence take the government from the people and subject the city to the great Ghibelline prince, Manfredi, King of Apulia and Sicily, son of Frederick II., was dis- covered and severely punished. Headed by Farinata degli Ubcrti and aided by King Manfredi*s German mercenaries, the exiles gathered at Siena, against which the Florentine Republic declared war. In 1260 the Florentine army approached Siena. A pre- liminary skirmish, in which a band of German horse- men was cut to pieces and the royal banner captured, only led a few months later to the disastrous defeat of Montaperti, chcfece V Arh'ia colorala in rosso ; in which, after enormous slaughter and loss of the Carroccio, or battle car of the Republic, "the ancient people of Florence was broken and annihilated " on September 4th, 1260. Without waiting for the armies of the conqueror, the Guelf nobles with their families and many of the burghers fled the city, mainly to Lucca ; and, on the i6th of September, the Germans under Count Giordano, Manfredi's vicar, with Farinata and the exiles, entered Florence as conquerors. All liberty was destroyed, the houses of Guelfs razed to the ground, the Count Guido Novello — the lord of Poppi and a ruthless Ghibelline — made Podest'a. The Via Ghibellina is his record. It was finally proposed in a great Ghibelline council at Empoli to raze Florence to the ground ; but the fiery eloquence of Farinata degli Uberti, who declared that, even if he stood alone, he would defend her sword in hand as long as life lasted, saved his city. Marked out with all his house for the relentless hate of the Florentine people, Dante has secured to him a lurid crown of glory even in Hell. Out of the burning tombs of the heretics he rises, come avesse V Infer no in gran disp'itlOy still the un vanquished hero who, when all consented to destroy Florence, "alone with open face defended her." People and Commu?te of Florence For nearly six years the life of the Florentine people was suspended, and lay crushed beneath an oppressive despotism of Ghibelline nobles and German soldiery under Guido Novello, the vicar of King Manfrcdi. Excluded from all political interests, the people im- perceptibly organised their greater and lesser guilds, and waited the event. During this gloom Farinata degli UbcrtI died in 1264, and in the following year, 1265, Dante Alighieri was born. That same year, 1265, Charles of Anjou, the champion of the Church, invited by Clement IV. to take the crown of the kingdom of Naples and Sicily, entered Italy, and in February 1266 annihilated the army of Manfredi at the battle of 13enevento. Foremost in the ranks of the crusaders — for as such the French were regarded — fought the Guelf exiles from Florence, under the Papal banner specially granted them by Pope Clement — a red eagle clutching a green dragon on a white field. This, with the addition of a red lily over the eagle's head, became the arms of the society known as the Parte Guelfa ; you may see it on the Porta San Niccolo and in other parts of the city between the cross of the People and the red lily of the Conmiune. Many of the noble Florentines were knighted by the hand of King Charles before tlie battle, and did great deeds of valour upon the field. " These men cannot lose to- day," exclaimed Manfredi, as he watched their advance ; and when the silver eagle of the house of Suabia fell from Manfredi's helmet and he died in the melee crying Hoc est signum Da, the triumph of the Guelfs was complete and German rule at an end in Italy. Of Manfredi's heroic death and the dishonour done by the Pope's legate to his body, Dante has sung in the Purgatorio. When the news reached Florence, the Ghibellines trembled for their safety, and the people prepared to 25 The Story of Florence win back their own. An attempt at compromise was first made, under the auspices of Pope Clement. Two Frat't Gaudenti or " Cavalieri di Maria," members of an Older of warrior monks from Bologna, were made Podcstks, one a Guelf and one a GhibeHInc, to come to terms with the burghers. You may still trace the place where the Bottega and court of the Calimala stood in Mercato Nuovo (the Calimala being the Guild of dressers of foreign cloth — panni franceschi, as Villani calls it), near where the Via Porta Rossa now enters the present Via Calzaioli. Here the new council of thirty-six of the best citizens, burghers and artlzans, with a few trusted members of the nobility, met every day to settle the affairs of the State. Dante has branded these two warrior monks as hypocrites, but, as Capponi says, from this Bottega issued at once and al- most spontaneously the Republic of Florence. Their great achievement was the thorough organisation of the seven greater Guilds, of which more presently, to each of which were given consuls and rectors, and a gonfalon or ensign of its own, around which its followers might assemble in arms in defence of People and Commune. To counteract this, Guido Novcllo brought in more troops from the Ghibelline cities of Tuscany, and increased the taxes to pay his Germans ; until he had fifteen hundred horsemen in the city under his com- mand. With their aid the nobles, headed by the Lamberti, rushed to arms. The people rose en masse and, headed by a Ghibelline noble, Gianni dei \ Soldanieri, who apparently had deserted his party in order to get control of the State (and who is placed by Dante in the Hell of traitors), raised barricades in the Piazza di Santa Trinlta and in the Borgo SS. Apostoli, at the foot of the Tower of the Girolami, which still stands. The Ghibellincs and Germans gathered in the Piazza di San Giovanni, held all the a6 People and Commune cf Florence north-east of the town, and swept down upon the people's barricades under a heavy fire of darts and stones from towers and windows. But tlie street fight- ing put the horsemen at a hopeless disadvantage, and, repulsed in the assault, the Count and his followers evacuated the town. This was on St Martin's day, November iith, 1266. The next day a half-hearted attempt to re-enter the city at the gate near the Ponte alia Carraia v/as made, but easily driven off; and for two centuries and more no foreigner set foot as con- queror in Florence. Not that Florence either obtained or desired absolute independence. The first step was to choose Charles of Anjou, the new King of Naples and Sicily, for their suzerain for ten years ; but, cruel tyrant as he was elsewhere, he showed himself a true friend to the Florentines, and his suzerainty seldom weighed upoc them oppressively. The Uberti and others were ex- pelled, and some, who held cut among the castles, were put to death at his orders. But the government became truly democratic. There was a central administration of twelve Ancients, elected annually, two for each sesto ; with a council of one hundred " good men of the People, without whose deliberation no great thing or expense could be done " ; and, nominally at least, a parliament. Next came the Captain of the People (usually an alien noble of democratic sympathies), with a special council or credenza^ called the Council of the Captain and Capctudini (the Capetudini composed of the consuls of the Guilds), of 80 members ; and a general council of 300 (including the 80), all popolam and Guelfs. Next came the Podesta, always an alien noble (appointed at first by King Charles), with the Council of the Podesta of 90 members, and the general Council of the Commune of 300 — in both of which nobles could sit as well as popolani. Measures pre- *7 T'he Story of Flore ?ic€ senied by the I2 to the lOO were then submiitcd successively to the two councils of the Captiin, and then, on the next day, to the councils of the I'odesta and the Commune. Occasionally measures were con- certed between the magistrates and a specially summoned council of richiestt^ without the formalities and delays of these various councils. Each of the seven greater Arts ^ was further organised with Its own officers and councils and banners, like a miniature republic, and Its consuls (forming the Capetudlnl) always sat In the Captain's council and usually In that of the Podesta likewise. There was one dark spot. A new organisation was set on foot, under the auspices of Pope Clement and King Charles, known as the Parte Guelfa — another miniature republic within the republic — with six cap- tains (three nobles and three popolani) and two councils, mainly to persecute the GhlbeUInes, to manage confis- cated goods, and uphold Guelf principles In the State. In later days these Captains of the Guelf Party became exceedingly powerful and oppressive, and were the cause of much dissension. They met at first In the Church of S. Maria sopra la Porta (now the Church of S. Biagio), and later had a special palace of their own— which still stands, partly in the Via dclle Terme, as you pass up It from the Via Por Santa Maria on the right, and partly in the Piazza di San Biagio. It is an Imposing and somewhat threatening mass, partly of 1 The Arte di Callmala, or of the Mercatanti di Calimala, the dressers of foreign cloth; the Arte della Lana, or wool ; the Arte dei Giudici e Notai, judges and notaries, also called the Arte del Proconsolo ; the Arte del Cambio or dei Canibiatori, money-changers ; the Arte dei Medici e Speziali, physicians and apotliecaries ; the Arte della Seta, or silk, also called the Arte di Por Santa Maria ; and the Arte dei Vaiai e Pellicciai, the furriers. The Miner Arts were organised later. 28 iJin^rK^^ THE PALACE OF THE PARTE GUELFA 29 People and Covimune of Florence the thirteenth and partly of the early fifteenth century. The church, which retains in j>ait its structure of the thirteenth century, had been a place of secret meeting for the Guelfs during Guido Novello's rule ; it still stands, but converted into a barracks for the firemen of Florence. Thus was the greatest and most triumphant Republic of the Middle Ages organised — the constitution under which the most glorious culture and art of the modern world was to flourish. The great Guilds were hence- forth a power in the State, and the Secondo Popolo had arisen — the democracy that Dante and Boccaccio were to know. feSr^S OF PARTE GUEi-fA 31 CHAPTER il The Tunes of Dante and Boccaccio " Godi, Fiorenza, poi die sei si grande che per mare e per terra batti I'ali, e per rinferno il tuo nome si spande." —Bjnte. T^HE century that passed from the birth of Danie ^ in 1265 to the deaths of Petrarch and Boccaccio, in 1374 and 1375 respectively, may be styled the Trecento^ although it includes the last quarter of the thirteenth century and excludes the closing years of the fourteenth. In general Italian history, it runs from the downfall of the German Imperial power at the battle of Benevento, in i 266, to the return of the Popes from Avignon in 1377. In art, it is the epoch of the completion of Italian Gothic in architecture, of the tbllowers and successors of Niccolo and Giovanni Pisano in sculpture, of the school of Giotto in painting. In letters, it is the great period of pure Tuscan prose and verse. Dante and Giovanni Villani, Dino Compagni, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Sacchetti, paint the age for us in all its aspects ; and a note of mysticism is heard at the close (though not from a Florentine) in the Epistles of St. Catherine of Siena, of whom a living Italian poet has written — Nel Giardino del conoscimento d'l se ella e come una rosa difuoco. But at the same time it is a century full of civil war and sanguinary factions, in ?vhich every Italian city was divided against itself; and 5M\-t7/X<^' 'Q.Ee2-^=?a\ -JLJ_^ FLORENTINE F^VMILIES, EARLY THIRTEENTH CENTURY, WITH A PORTION OF THE SECOND WALLS INDICATED (TempU Clatticj : Paradiso). (The representation is approxi- mate only: the Cerchi Palace near the Corso degli Adimari should be more to the right.) c 33 Times of D ante and Boccaccio nowhere were ihcsc divisions more notable or more bitterly fought out than in Florence. Yet, in spite of of it all, the Republic proceeded majestically on its triumphant course. Machiavelli lays much stress upon this in the Proem to his IstorU Florentine. " In Flor- ence," he says, " at first the nobles were divided against each other, then the people against the nobles, and lastly the people against the populace ; and it ofttimes happened that when one of these parties got the upper hand, it split into two. And from these divisions there resulted so many deaths, so many banishments, so many destruc- tions of families, as never befell in any other city of which we have record. Verily, in my opinion, nothing manifests more clearly the power of our city than the result of these divisions, which would have been able to destroy every great and most potent city. Never- theless ours seemed thereby to grow ever greater ; such was the virtue of those citizens, and the power of their genius and disposition to make themselves and their country great, that those who remained free from these evils could exalt her with their virtue more than the malignity of those accidents, which had diminished them, had been able to cast her down. And without doubt, if only Florence, after her liberation from the Empire, had had the felicity of adopting a form of government which would have kept her united, I know not what republic, whether modern or ancient, would have surpassed her — with such great virtue in war and in peace would she have been filled." The first thirty-four years of this epoch are among the brightest in Florentine history, the years that ran from the triumph of the Guelfs to the sequel to the Jubilee of 1300, from the establishment of the Secondo Popolo to its split Into Neri and Blanchi, into Black Guelfs and White Guelfs. Externally Florence be- came the chief power of Tuscany, and all the nelgh- 35 The Story of Florence bouring towns gradually, to a greater or less extent, acknowledged her sway ; Internally, in spite of growing friction between the burghers and the new Guelf nobility, between popolant and grandi or magnates, she was daily advancing in wealth and prosperity, in beauty and artistic power. The exquisite poetry of the dolce stil novo was heard. Guido Cavalcanti, a noble Guelf who had married the daughter of Farinata dcgli Uberti, and, later, the notary Lapo Gianni and Dante Alighieri, showed the Italians what true lyric song was ; philo- sophers like Brunetto Latini served the state ; modern history was born with Giovanni Villani. Great palaces were built for the officers of the Republic ; vast Gothic churches arose. Women of rare beauty, eternalised as Beatrice, Giovanna, Lagia and the like, passed through the streets and adorned the social gatherings in the open loggias of the palaces. Splendid pageants and proces- sions hailed the Calends of May and the Nativity of the Baptist, and marked the civil and ecclesiastical festivities and state solemnities. The people advanced more and more in power and patriotism ; while the magnates, in their towers and palace-fortresses, were partly forced to enter the life of the guilds, partly held aloof and plotted to recover their lost authority, but were always ready to officer the burgher forces In time of war, or to extend Florentine influence by serving as Podestas and Captains in other Italian cities. Dante was born In the Sesto dl San Piero Magglore in May 1265, some eighteen months before the libera- tion of the city. He lost his mother In his infancy, and his father while he was still a boy. This father appears to have been a notary, and came from a noble but decadent family, who were probably connected with the Ellsel, an aristocratic house of supposed Roman descent, who had by this time almost entirely disappeared. The Alighieri, who were Guelfs, do 3« Times of Dante and Boccaccio not seem to have ranked officially as grandi or mag- nates ; one of Dante's uncles had fought heroically at Montaperti. Almost all the families connected with the story of Dante's life had their houses in the Sesto di San Piero Maggiore, and their sites may in some instances still be traced. Here were the Cerchi, with whom he was to be politically associated in after years ; the Donati, from whom sprung one of his dearest friends, Forcse, with one of his deadliest foes, Messer Corso, and Dante's own wife, Gemma ; and the Porti- nari, the house according to tradition of Beatrice, the " giver of blessing " of Dante's Fila Nuova, the mystical lady of the Paradtso, Guido Cavalcanti, the first and best of all his friends, lived a little apart from this Sesto dl Scandali — as St Peter's section of the town came to be called — between the Mercato Nuovo and San Michele in Orto. Unlike the Alighieri, though not of such ancient birth as theirs, the Cavalcanti were exceedingly rich and powerful, and ranked officially among the grandi, the Guelf mag- nates. At this epoch, as Signor Carocci observes in his F'iren%e scomparsa, Florence must have presented the aspect of a vast forest of towers. These towers rose over the houses of powerful and wealthy families, to be used for offence or defence, when the faction fights raged, or to be dismantled and cut down when the people gained the upj;er hand. The best idea of such a mediccval city, on a smaller scale, can still be got at San Gemignano, " the fair town called of the Fair Towers," where dozens of these iorrt still stand ; and also, though to a less extent, at Gubbio. A few have been preserved here in Florence, and there are a number of narrow streets, on both sides of the Arno, which still retain some of their medixval characteristics. In the Borgo Santisslmi Apostoli, for instance, and In the Via Lambertcsca. there are several striking towers 37 TJje Story of Florence of this kind, with remnants of palaces of the graruli ; and, on the other side of the river, especially in the Via dci Bardi and the Borgo San Jacopo. When one family, or several associated families, had palaces on either side of a narrow street defended by such towers, and could throw chains and barricades across at a moment's notice. It will readily be understood that in times of popular tumult Florence bristled with fortresses in every direction. In 1282, the year before that in which Dante re- ceived the " most sweet salutation," (lolcisshno salutarsy of **the glorious lady of my mind who was called by many Beatrice, that knew not how she was called," and saw the vision of the Lord of terrible aspect in the mist of the colour of fire (the vision which inspired the first of his sonnets which has been preserved to us), the democratic government of the Sccondo Popolo was confirmed by being placed entirely in the hands of the Jlrt'i Alaggtorl or Greater Guilds. The Signoria was henceforth to be composed of the Priors of the Arts, chosen from the chief members of the Greater Guilds, who now became the supreme magistrates of the State. They were, at this epoch of Florentine history, six in number, one to represent each Scsto, and held office for two months only ; on leaving office, they joined with the Capctudini, and other citizens summoned for the purpose, to elect their successors. At a later period this was done, ostensibly at least, by lot instead of election. The glorious Palazzo Vecchio had not yet been built, and the Priors met at first in a house be- longing to the monks of the Badia, defended by the Torre della Castagna ; and afterwards in a palace be- longing to t]:!e Cerchi (both tower and palace are still standing). Of the seven Greater Arts — the Calimohi^ the Money-changers, the Wool-merchants, the Silk- merchants, the Physicians and Apothecaries, the trader? 38 Times of Danie attd Boccaccio in furs and skins, the Judges and Notaries — the latter alone do not seem at first to have been represented in the Priorate ; but to a certain extent they exercised control over all the Guilds, sat in all their tribunals, and had a Proconsul, who came next to the Signoria in all state processions, and had a certain jurisdiction over all the Arts. It was thus essentially a govern- ment of those who were actually engaged in industry and commerce. " Henceforth," writes Pasquale Villari, " the Republic is properly a republic of merchants, and only he who is ascribed to the Arts can govern it : every grade of nobility, ancient or new, is more a loss than a privilege." The double organisation of the People under the Captain with his two councils, and the Commune under the Podcsta with his special council and the general council (in these two latter alone, it will be remembered, could nobles sit and vote) still remained ; but the authority of the Podesta was naturally diminished. Florence was now the predominant power in central Italy ; the cities of Tuscany looked to her as the head of the Guclfic League, although, says Dino Compagni, "they love her more in discord than in peace, and obey her more for fear than for love." A protracted war against Pisa and Arezzo, carried on from 1287 to 1292, drew even Dante from his poetry and his study ; it is believed that he took part in the great battle of Can^paldino in 1289, in which the last efforts of the old Tuscan Ghibellinism were shattered by the Floren- tines and their allies, fighting under the royal banner oi" the House of Anjou. Amerigo di Narbona, one of the captains of King Charles II. of Naples, was in command of tlie Guclfic forces. From many points of view, this is one of the more interesting battles ol the Middle Ages. It is said to have been almost the last Italian battle in v/hich the burgher forces, and not the 39 I'he Story of Florence mercenary soldiery of tlie Condottleri, carried the day. Corso Donati and Vieri dci Cerchi, soon to be in deadly feud in tlie political arena, were among the captains of the Florentine host ; and Dante himself is said to have served in the front rank of the cavalry. In a fragment of a letter ascribed to him by one of his earlier bio- graphers, Dante speaks of this battle of Cam- paldino ; " wherein I had much dread, and at the end the greatest gladness, by reason of the varying chances of that battle." One of the Ghibelline leaders, Buouconte da Monte- fcltro, who was mor- tally wounded and died m the rout, meets the divine poet on the shores of the Moun- tain of Purgation, and, m lines of almost in- effable pathos, tells him the whole story of his last moments. Villani, ever mindful of Florence being the daughter of Rome, assures us that the news of the great victory was miraculously brought to the Priors in the Cerchi Palace, in much the same way as the tidings of Lake Rcgilius to the expectant Fathers at the gate of Jlome. Several of the exiled Uberti had fallen in the ranks of the enemy, fighting against their own country. In the cloisters of the Annunziata you will find a contemporary monument of tlie battle, let 40 CORSO DONATI b TOWER Times of Da fit e and Boccaccio Into the west wall of the cliurch near the ground ; the marble figure of an armed knight on horseback, with the golden lilies of France over his surcoat, charging down upon the foe. It is the tomb of the French cavalier, Guglielmo Berardi, " balius " of Amerigo di Narbona, who fell upon the field. The eleven years that follow Campaldino, culminat- ing in the Jubilee of Pope Boniface VIII. and the opening of the fourteenth century, are the years of Dante's political life. They witnessed the great political reforms which confirmed the democratic character of the government, and the marvellous artistic embellishment of the city under Arnolfo di Cambio and his contemporaries. During these years the Palazzo Vecchio, the Duomo, and the grandest churches of Florence were founded ; and the Third Walls, whose gates and some scanty remnants are with us to-day, were begun. Favoured by the Popes and the Angevin sovereigns of Naples, now that the old Ghibclline nobility, save in a few valleys and mountain fortresses, was almost extinct, the new nobles, the grand'i or Guelf magnates, proud of their exploits at Campaldino, and chafing against the burgher rule, began to adopt an overbearing line of conduct towards the people, and to be more factious than ever among themselves. Strong measures were adopted against them, such as the complete enfranchisement of the peasants of the contrada in 1289 — measures which culminated in the famous Ordinances of Justice, passed in 1293, by which the magnates were completely excluded from the administration, severe laws made to restrain their rough usage of the people, and a special magistrate, the Gonfalomere or " Standard- bearer of Justice," added to the Priors, to hold office like them for two months in rotation from each sesto of the city, and to rigidly enforce the laws against the 41 The Story of Florence magnates. This Gonfalonierc became practically the head of the Signoria, and was destined to become the supreme head of the State in the latter days of the F'orentine Republic ; to him was publicly assigned the great Gonfalon of the People, with its red cross on a white field ; and he had a large force of armed popolani under his command to execute these or- dinances, against which there was no appeal allowed.^ These Ordinances also fixed the number of the Guilds at tvcnty-onc — seven Arti Maggiori, mainly engaged in wholesale commerce, exportation and importation , fourteen Arti Minori, which carried on the retail traffic and internal trade of the city — and renewed their statutes. The hero of this Magna Charta of Florence is a certain Giano d.Ha Bella, a noble who had fought at Campaldino and had now joined the people ; a man of untractable temper, who knew not how to make con- cessions ; somewhat anti-clerical and obnoxious to the Pope, but consumed by an intense and savage thirst for justice, upon which the craftier politicians of both sides played. " Let the State perish, rather than such things be tolerated," was his constant political formula: Perisca innanzi la ci/(ij, che tante opere r'u si sostengano. But the magnates, from whom he was endeavouring to snatch their last political refuge, the Parte Guelfa, muttered, *' Let us smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered " ; and at length, after an ineffectual con- 1 Some years later a new officer, the Executor of Justice, was instituted to carry out these ordinances instead of leav- ing them to the Gonfaloniere. This Executor of Justice was associated with the Captain, but was usually a foreign Guelf burglier; later he developed into the Bargello, head of police and governor of the gaol. It will, of course, be seen that wliile Podesta, Captain, Executore (the Rettori), were aliens, the Gonfaloniere and Priors (the Si^norP) were neces- sarily Florentines and popolani. 42 Times of Dante and Boccaccio spiracy against his life, Giano was driven out of the city, on March 5th, 1295, ^7 ^ temporary alliance of the burghers and magnates against him. The popolo minuto and artizans, upon whom he had mainly relied and whose interests he had sustained, deserted him ; and the government remained licnceforth in the hands of the wealthy burghers, the popolo grosso^ Already a cleavage was becoming visible between these Arti Maggiori, wlio ruled the State, and the Arti Minori whose gains lay in local merchandise and traffic,- partly dependent upon the magnates. And a butcher, nicknamed Pecora, or, as we may call him, Lambkin, appears prominently as a would-be politician ; he cuts a quaintly fierce figure in Dino Compngni's chronicle. In this same year, 1295, I^^nte Alighieri entered public life, and, on July 6th, he spoke in the General Council of the Commune in support of certain modifications in the Ordinances of Justice, Avhereby nobles, by leaving their order and matriculating in one or other of tlie Arts, even without exercising it, could be free from their disabilities, and could share in the government of the State, and hold office in the Signoria. He him- self, in this same year, matriculated in the Arte dei Medici e Speziali, the great guild which included the painters and the book-sellers. IMie growing dissensions in the Guelf Republic came to a head in 1300, the famous year of jubilee in which the Pope was said to have declared that the Florentines were the " fifth element." The rival factions of Bianchi and Neri, White Guelfs and Black Guelfs, which were now to divide the whole city, arose partly from the deadly hostility of two families each with a large follow- ing, the Cerchi and the Donati, headed respectively by Vieri dei Cerchi and Corso Donati, the two heroes ofCampaldino ; partly from an analogous feud in Pistoia, v.'hich was governed from Florence ; partly from the 43 The Story of Florence political discord between that party in the State that clung to the (modified) Ordinances of Justice and sup- })orted the Signoria, and another party that hated the Ordinances and loved the tyrannical Parte Guelfa. They were further com])Iicated by the intrigues of the "black" magnates with Pope Boniface VIII., who apparently hoped by their means to repress the burgher government and unite the city in obedience to himself. With this end in view, he had been endeavouring to obtain from Albert of Austria the renunciation, in favour of the Holy See, of all rights claimed by the Emperors over Tuscany. Dante himself, Guido Cavalcanti, and most of the best men In Florence either directly adhered to, or at least favoured, the Ccrchi and the Whites ; the pojulace, on the other hand, was taken with the dash and display of the more aristocratic Blacks, and would gladly have seen Messer Corso — • " il Barone," as they called him — lord of the city. Rioting, in which Guido Cavalcanti played a wild and fantastic part, was of daily occurrence, especially in the Sesto dl San Piero. The adherents of the Signoria had their head-quarters in the CerchI Palace, in the Via della Condotta: the Blacks found their legal fortress in that of the C:]ptalns of tlie Parte Guelfa in the Via delle Tcrnie. At last, on May ist, the two factions "came to blood*' in the Piazza di Santa Trinita on the occasion of a dance of girls to usher in the May. On June i 5th Dante was elected one of the six Priors, to hold ofhce till August i 5th, and he at once took a strong line in resisting all interference from Rome, and in maintaining order within the city. In consequence of an assault upon the officers of the Guilds on St. John's Eve, the Signoria, probably on Dante's initia- tive, put under hounds a certain number of factious magnates, chosen impartially from both parties, includ- ing Corso Donati and Guido Cavalcanti. From hia ^4 Times of Dante and Boccaccio place of banishment at Sarzana, Guido, sick to death, wrote the most pathetic of all his lyrics : — <* Because I think not ever to return, Ballad, to Tuscany, — Go therefore thou for me Straight to my lady's face, Who, of her noble grace, Shall show thee courtesy. ■ • • ■ f '* Surely tliou knowest, Ballad, how that Death Assails me, till my life is almost sped : Thou knowest how my heart still travaileth Through the sore pangs which in my soul are bred :— > My body being now so nearly dead, It cannot suffer more. Then, going, I implore That this my soul thou take (Nay, do so for my sake), When my heart sets it free."! And at the end of August, when Dante had left office, Guido returned to Florence with the rest of the Bianchi, only to die. For more than a year the " white " burghers were supreme, not only in Florence, but throughout a greater part of Tuscany ; and in the fol- lowing May they procured the expulsion of the Blacks from Pistoia. But Corso Donati at Rome was biding his time; and, on November ist, 13CI, Charles of Valois, brother of King Philip of France, entered Florence with some 1200 horsemen, partly French and partly Italian, ~ ostensibly as papal peacemaker, but preparing to "joust with the lance of Judas/' In Santa Maria Novella he solemnly swore, as the son of a king, to preserve the peace and well-being of the city ; and at once armed his followers. Magnates and burghers alike, seeing themselves betrayed, began to * Rossetti's translation of the ripresa and second stanza of the Ballata PerchU i' no ipero dt tornar giammai. 45 The Story of Florence barricade their houses and streets. On the same day (November 5th) Corso Donati, acting in unison with the French, appeared in the suburbs, entered the city by a postern gate in the second walls, near S. Piero Maggiore, and swept through the streets with an armed force, burst open the prisons, and drove the Priors out of their new Palace. For days the French and the Ncri sacked the city and the contrada at their will, Charles being only intent upon securing a large share of the spoils for himself. But even he did not dare to alter the popular constitution, and was forced to con- tent himself with substituting "black" for "white" burghers in the Signoria, and establishing a Podcstk o! his own following, Cante de* Gabbrielli of Gubbio, in the Palace of the Commune. An apparently genuine attempt on the part of the Pope, by a second " peace- maker," to undo the harm that his first had done, came to nothing ; and the work of proscription commenced, under the direction of the new Podesta. Dante was one of the first victims. The two sentences against him (in each case vWth a few other names) are dated January 27th, 1302, and March loth — and there were to be others later. It is the second decree that con- tains the famous clause, condemning him to be burned to death, if ever he fall into the power of the Com- mune. At the beginning of April all the leaders of the "white" faction, who had not already fled or turned " black," with their chief followers, magnates and burghers alike, were hounded into exile ; and Charles" left Florence to enter upon an almost equally shameful campaign in Sicily. Dante is believed to have been absent from Florence on an embassy to the Pope when Charles of Valois came, and to have heard the news of his ruin at Siena as he hurried homewards — though both embassy and absence have been questioned by Dante scholars of 46 ACROSS THE PONTE VECCHIO 47 Times of Dante a?id Boccaccio repute. His ancestor, Cacciaguida, tells him in the Paradiso : — "Tu lascerai ogni cosa diletta piii caramente, e questo e quelle strale che I'arco dello esilio pria saetta. Tu provcrai si come sa di sale lo pane altrui, e com' e dure calle lo scendere e il salir per 1' altrui scale."* The rest of Dante's life was passed in exile, and only touches the story of Florence indirectly at certain points. *' Since it was the pleasure of the citizens of the most beautiful and most famous daughter of Rome, Florence," he tells us in his Convivto, " to cast me forth from her most sweet bosom (in which I was born and nourished up to the summit of my life, and in which, with her good will, I desire with all my heart to rest my weary soul and end the time given me), I have gone through almost all the parts to which this language extends, a pilgrim, almost a beggar, showing against my will the wound of fortune, which is wont unjustly to be oft- times reputed to the wounded." Attempts of the exiles to win their return to Floicncc by force of arms, with aid from the Ubaldini and the Tuscan Ghibellincs, were easily repressed. But the victorious Neri themselves now split into two factions ; the one, headed by Corso Donati and composed mainly of niagnates, had a kind of doubtful support in the favour of the populace ; the other, led by Rosso della Tosa, inclined to the Signoria and the popolo grosso. It was something like the old contest between Messer Corso and Vieri dei Cerchi, but with more entirely 1 "Thou shalt abandon everything beloved most dearly; this is the arrow which the bow of exile shall first shoot. <* Thou shalt make trial of how salt doth taste another's bread, and how hard the path to descend and mount upon another's stair." Wicksteed's translation. D 49 l^he Story of Florence selfish ends ; and there was evidently going to be a hard tussle between Messer Corso and Messer Rosso for the possession of the State. Civil war was renewed in the city, and the confusion was heightened by the restoration of a certain number of Bianchi, who were reconciled to the Government. The new Pope, Bene- dict XI., was ardently striving to pacify Florence and all Italy ; and his legate, the Cardinal Niccolo da Prato, took up the cause of the exiles. Pompous peace-meet- ings were held in the Piazza di Santa Maria Novella, for the friars of St Dominic — to which order the new Pope belonged — had the welfare of the city deeply at heart ; and at one of these meetings the exiled lawyer, Ser Petracco dall' Ancisa (in a few days to be the father of Italy's second poet), acted as the representa- tive of his party. Attempts were made to revive the May-day pageants of brighter days — but they only resulted in a horrible disaster on the Ponte alia Carraia, of which more presently. The fiends of faction broke loose again ; and in order to annihilate the Cavalcanti, who were still rich and powerful round about the Mercato Nuovo, the leaders of the Neri deliberately burned a large portion of the city. On July 20th, 1304, an attempt by the now allied Bianchi and Ghibellines to surprise the city proved a disastrous failure ; and, on that very day (Dante being now far away at Verona, forming a party by himself), Francesco di Petracco — who was to call himself Petrarca and is called by us Petrarch — was born in exile at Arezzo. This miserable chapter of Florentine history ended tragically in 1308, with the death of Corso Donati. In his old age he had married a daughter of Florence's deadliest foe, the great Ghibelline champion, Uguccione della Faggiuola ; and, in secret understanding with Uguccione and the Cardinal Napoleone degli Orsini (Pope Clement V. had already transferred the papal 50 MERCATO NUOVO, THE FLOWER MARKET Times of Dante and Boccaccio chair to Avignon and commenced the Babylonian cap- tivity), he was preparing to overthrow the Signoria, abolish the Ordinances, and make himself Lord of Florence. But the people anticipated him. On Sun- day morning, October i6th, the Priors ordered their great bell to be sounded ; Corso was accused, con- demned as a traitor and rebel, and sentence pronounced in less than an hour ; and with tlie great Gonfalon of the People disj-layed, the forces of the Commune, sup- ported by the swordsmen of the Delia Tosa and a band of Catalan mercenaries in the service of the King of Naples, marched upon the Piazza di San Piero Maggiore. Over the Corbizzi tower floated the banner of the Donati, but only a handful of men gathered round the fierce old noble who, himself unable by reason of his gout to bear arms, encouraged them by his fiery words to hold out to the last. But the soldiery of Uguccione never came, and not a single magnate in the city stirred to aid him. Corso, forced at last to abandon his posi- tion, broke through his enemies, and, hotly pursued, fled through the Porta alia Croce. He was overtaken, captured, and barbarously slain by the lances of the hireling soldiery, near the Badia di San Salvi, at the instigation, as it was whispered, of Rosso della Tosa and Pazzino dci Pazzi. The monks carried him, as he lay dying, into the Abbey, where they gave him humble sepulchre for fear of the people. With all his crimes, there was nothing small in anything that Messer Corso did ; he was a great spirit, one who could have accom- plished mighty things in other circumstances, but who could not breathe freely in the atmosphere of a mer- cantile republic. " His life was perilous," says Dino Compagni sentcntiously, " and his death was blame- worthy." A brief but glorious chapter follows, though de- nounced in Dante's bitterest words. Hardly was S3 ^he Story of Florence Corso dead v/hcn, after their long silence, the imperial trumpets were again heard in the Garden of the Empire. Henry of Luxemburg, the last hero of the Middle Ages, elected Emperor as Henry VI I. , crossed the Alps in September 13 lO, resolved to heal the wounds of Italy, and to revive the fading mediaeval dream of the Holy Roman Empire. In three wild and terrible letters, Dante announced to the princes and peoples of Italy the advent of this "peaceful king," this " new Moses " ; threatened the Floren- tines with the vengeance of the Imperial Eagle ; urged Cassar on against the city — " the sick sheep that infecteth all the flock of the Lord with her contagion." But the Florentines rose to the occasion, and with the aid of their ally, the King of Naples, formed what was practically an Italian confederation to oppose the imperial invader. " It was at this moment," writes Professor Villari, "that the small merchant republic initiated a truly national policy, and became a great power in Italy." From the middle of September till the end of October, 13 12, the imperial army lay round Florence. The Emperor, sick with fever, had his head-quarters in San Salvi. But he dared not venture upon an attack, although the fortifi- cations were unfinished ; and, in the following August, the Signoria of Florence could write exultantly to their allies, and announce "the blessed tidings " that "the most savage tyrant, Henry, late Count of Luxemburg, whom the rebellious persecutors of the Church, and treacherous foes of ourselves and you, called King of the Romans and Emperor of Germany," had died at Buonconvcnto. But in the Empyrean Heaven of Heavens, in the mystical convent of white stoles, Beatrice shows Danre the throne of glory prepared for the soul of the noble- hearted Caesar : — - 54 T^imes of Dante and Boccaccio " In quel gran seggio, a che tu gli occhi tieni per la corona che gia v' e su posta, prima che tu a queste nozze ceni, sedera 1' alma, che fia giu agosta, deir alto Enrico, ch' a ilrizzare Italia verra in prima che ella sia disposta."^ After this, darker days fell upon Florence. Dante, with a renewed sentence of death upon his head, was finishing his Dtv'tna Commedia at Verona and Ravenna, — until, on September 14th, 132 i, he passed away in the latter city, with the music of the pine-forest in liis ears and the monuments of dead emperors before his dying eyes. Petrarch, after a childhood spent at Carpentras, was studying law at Montpeilier and Bologna — until, on that famous April morning in Santa Chiara at Avignon, he saw the golden-haired girl who made him the greatest lyrist of the Middle Ages. It was in the year 1327 that Laura — if such was really her name — thus crossed his path. Boccaccio, born probably at Paris in 13 13, the year of the Emperor's death, was growing up at Settlgnano, a lonely and unhappy boy. The Republic was in a woeful plight ; harassed still by factious magnates and burghers, plundered by foreign adventurers, who pre- tended to serve her, heavily taxed by the Angevin sovereigns — the Real'i — of Naples. Florence had taken first King Robert, and then his son, Charles of Calabria, as overlord, for defence against external foes (first Henry VII., then Uguccione dclla Faggiuola, and then Castruccio Interminclli) ; and the vicars of 1 •' On that great seat where thou dost fix thine eyes, for the crown's sake already placed above it, ere at this wed- ding feast thyself do sup, " Shall sit the soul (on earth 'twill be imperial) of the lofty Henry, who shall come to straighten Italy ere she be ready for it." 55 7he Story of Florence these Neapolitan princes replaced for a while the Podestks ; their marshals robbed and corrupted ; their Catalan soldiers clamoured for pa5^ The wars with Uguccione and Castruccio were most disastrous to the Republic ; and the fortunate coincidence of the deaths of Castruccio and Charles of Calabria, in 1328, gave Florence back her liberty at the very moment when she no longer needed a defender. Although the Florentines professed to regard this suzerainty of the Reali di Napoli as an alliance rather than a subjection, — compagnia e non servilu, as Machiavelli puts it — it was an undoubted relief when it ended. The State was reorganised, and a new constitution confirmed in a solemn Parliament held in the Piazza. Henceforth the nomination of the Priors and Gonfaloniere was effected by lot, and controlled by a compHcated pro- cess of scrutiny ; the old councils were all annulled ; and in future there were to be only two chief councils — the Council of the People, composed of ^^OO popolani, presided over by the Captain, and the Council of the Commune, of 250, presided over by the Podesta, in which latter (as in former councils of the kind) both popolani and grandi could sit. Measures proposed by the Government were submitted first to the Council of the People, and then, if approved, to that of the Commune. Within the next few years, in spite of famine, disease, and a terrible inundation of the Arno in 1333, the Republic largely extended its sway. Pistoia, Arezzo, and other places of less account owned its signory ; but an attempt to get possession of Lucca — with the incongruous aid of the Germans — failed. After the flood, the work of restoration was first directed by Giotto ; and to this epoch we owe the most beautiful building in Florence, the Campanile. The discontent, excited by the mismanagement of the 56 Times of Dante and Boccaccio war against Lucca, threw the Republic into the arni3 of a new and peculiarly atrocious tyrant, Walter de Brienne, Duke of Athens, a French soldier of fortune, connected by blood with the /^t-^// of Naples. Elected first as war captain and chief justice, he acquired credit with the populace and the magnates by his executions of unpopular burghers ; and finally, on September 8th, 1342, in the Piazza della Signoria, he was appointed Lord of Florence for life, amidst the acclamations of the lowest sections of the mob and the paid retainers of the treacherous nobles. The Priors were driven from their palace, the books of the Ordinances destroyed, and the Duke's banner erected upon the People's tower, while the church bells rang out the Te Deum. Arezzo, Pistoia, Colle di Val d'Elsa, San Gemignano, and Volterra acknowledged his rule ; and with a curious mixture of hypocrisy, immorality, and revolting cruelty, he reigned as absolute lord until the following summer, backed by French and Burgundian soldiers who flocked to him from all quarters. By that time he had utterly disgusted all classes in the State, even the magnates by whose favour he had won his throne and the populace who had acclaimed him ; and on the Feast of St. Anne, July 26th, 1 343, there was a general rising. The instruments of his cruelty were literally torn to pieces by the people, and he was besieged in the Palazzo Vecchio, which he had trans- formed into a fortress, and at length capitulated on August 3rd. The Sienese and Count Simone de' Conti Guidi, who had come to mediate, took him over the Ponte Rubaconte, through the Porta San Niccolo and thence into the Casentino, where they made him solemnly ratify his abdication. *' Note," says Giovanni Villani, who was present at most of these things and has given us a most vivid picture of them, *' that even as the Duke with fraud 57 Jhe Story of Florence and treason took away the liberty of the Republic of Florence on the day of Our Lady in September,^ not regarding the reverence due to her, so, as it were in divine vengeance, God permitted that the free citizens with armed hand should win it back on the day of her mother, Madonna Santa Anna, on the 26th day of July 1343 ; and for this grace it was ordained by the Commune that the Feast of St. Anne should ever be kept like Easter in Florence, and that there should be celebrated a solemn office and great offerings by the Commune and all the Arts of Florence." St. Anne henceforth became the chief patroness and protectoress of the Republic, as Fra Bartolommeo painted her in his great unfinished picture in the Uffizi ; and the solemn office and offerings were duly paid and cele- brated in Or San Michele. One of Villani's minor grievances against the Duke is that he introduced frivolous French fashions of dress into the city, instead of the stately old Florentine costume, which the re- publicans considered to be the authentic garb of ancient Rome. That there was some ground for this com- plaint will readily be seen, by comparing the figure of a French cavalier in the Allegory of the Church in the Spanish Chapel at Santa Maria Novella (the figure formerly called Cimabue and now sometimes said to represent Walter de Brienne himself), with the simple grandeur and dignity of the dress worn by the burghers on their tombs in Santa Croce, or by Dante in the Duomo portrait. Only two months after the expulsion of the Duke of Athens, the great quarrel between the magnates and the people was fought to a finish, in September 1343. On the northern side of the Arno, the magnates made head at the houses of the Adimari near San Giovanni, at the opening of the present Via Calzaioli, where one 1 i.e. The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin. 58 Times of Dante aitd Boccaccio of their towers still stands, at the houses of the Pazzi and Donati in the Piazza di San Pier Maggiore, and round those of the Cavalcanti in Mercato Nuovo. The people under their great gonfalon and the standards of the companies, led by the Medici and Rondinelli, stormed one position after another, forcing the de- fenders to surrender. On the other side of the Arno, the magnates and their retainers held the bridges and the narrow streets beyond. The Porta San Giorgio was in their hands, and, through it, reinforcements were hurried up from the country. Repulsed at the Ponte Vecchio and the Ponte Rubaconte, the forces of the people with their victorious standards at last carried the Ponte alia Carraia, which was held by the NerU ; and next, joined by tlie populace of the Oltrarno, forced the Rossi and Frescobaldi to yield. The Bardi alone remained ; and, in that narrow street which still bears their name, and on the Ponte Vecchio and the Ponte Rubaconte, they withstood single- handed the onslaught of the whole might of the people, until they were assailed in the rear from the direction of the Via Romana. The infuriated populace sacked their houses, destroyed and burned the greater part of their palaces and towers. The long struggle between grand'i and popolani was thus ended at last. " This was the cause," says Machiavelli, " that Florence was stripped not only of all martial skill, but also of all generosity." The government was again reformed, and the minor arts admitted to a larger share ; be- tween the popolo grosso and them, between burghers and populace, lay the struggle now, which was to end in the Medicean rule. But on all these perpetual changes in the form of the government of Florence the last word had, perhaps, been said in Dante's sarcastic outburst a quarter of a century before : — 59 The Story of Florence ♦' Atene e Lacedemone, che fenno r antiche leggi, e furon si civili, lecero al viver bene un picciol cenno verso di te, che fai tanto sottili provvedimenti, che a mezzo novembre non giuiige quel che tu d'ottobre fili. Quante volte del tempo che rimembre, legge, moneta, offizio, e costume hai tu mutato, e rinnovato membre? E se ben ti ricordi, e vedi lume, vedrai te simigliante a quella inferma, che non puo trovar posa in su le piume, ma con dar volta sue dolore scherma."^ The terrible pestilence, known as the Black Death, swept over Europe in 1348. During the five monihs In which it devastated Florence three-fifths of the population perished, all civic life was suspended, and the gayest and most beautiful of cities seemed for a while to be transformed into the dim valley of disease and sin that lies outstretched at the bottom of Dante's Malebolge. It has been described, in all Its horrors, in one of the most famous passages of modern prose — that appalling Introduction to Boccaccio's Decameron, From the city in her agony, Boccaccio's three noble youths and seven " honest ladies " fied to the villas of 1 Purg. VI.— "Athens and Lacedamon, they who made The ancient laws, and were so civilised, Made towards living well a little sign Compared witli thee, who makest such fine-spun Provisions, that to middle of November Reaches not what thou in October spinnest. How oft, within the time of thy remembrance, Laws, money, offices and usages Hast thou remodelled, and renewed thy members? And if thou mind thee v/ell. and see the light, Thou shalt behold thyself like a sick woman, Who cannot find repose upon her down, But by her tossing wardeth off her pain." — Long fellotu 60 Times oj Dante and Boccaccio Scttlgnano and Ficsolc, where they strove to drown the horror of the time by their music and dancing, their feasting and too often sadly obscene stories. Giovanni Villani was among the victims in Florence, and Petrarch's Laura at Avignon. The first canto of Petrarch's Triumph of Death appears to be, in part, an allegorical representation — written many years later — of this fearful year. During the third quarter of this fourteenth century — the years which still saw the Popes remaining in their Babylonian exile at Avignon — the Florentines gradually regained their lost supremacy over the cities of Tuscany: Colle di Val d'Elsa, San Gemignano, Prato, Pistoia, Volterra, San Miniato dei Tedeschi. They carried on a war with the formidable tyrant of Milan, the Archbishop Giovanni Visconti, whose growing power was a perpetual menace to the liberties of the Tuscan communes. They made good use of the descent of the feeble emperor, Charles IV., into Italy ; waged a new war with their old rival, Pisa ; and readily accommodated themselves to the baser conditions of warfare that prevailed, now that Italy was the prey of the companies of mercenaries, ready to be hired by whatever prince or republic could afford the largest pay, or to fall upon whatever city seemed most likely to yield the heaviest ransom. Within the State itself the popolo m'lnuto and the Minor Guilds were advancing in power ; Florence was now divided into four quarters (San Giovanni, Santa Maria Novella, Santa Croce, Santo Spirito), instead of the old Sesti ; and the Signoria was now composed of the Gonfaloniere and eight Priors, two from each quarter (instead of the former six), of whom two belonged to the Minor Arts. These, of course, still held office for only two months. Next came the tv/elve Buonuomini, who were the counsellors of the Signoria, and held office for three 6i The Story of Florence months ; and the sixteen Gonfaloniers of the city companies, four from each quarter, holding office for four months. And there were, as before, the two great Councils of the People and the Commune ; and still the three great officers who carried out their decrees, the Podesta, the Captain, the Executor of Justice. The feuds of Ricci and Albizzi kept up tlie inevitable factions, much as the Buondelmonti and Uberti, Cerchi and Donati had done of old ; and an iniquitous system of " admonishing " those who were suspected of Ghibelline descent (the ammoniti being excluded from office under heavy penalties) threw much power into the hands of the captains of the Parte Guelfa, whose oppressive conduct earned them deadly hatred. " To such arrogance," says Machia- velli, " did the captains of the Party mount, that they were feared more that the members of the Signoria, and less reverence was paid to the latter than to the former ; the palace of the Party was more esteemed than that of the Signoria, so that no ambassador came to Florence without having commissions to the captains." Pope Gregory XL preceded his return to Rome by an attempted rcconquest of the States of the Church, by means of foreign legates and hireling soldiers, of whom the worst were Bretons and English ; although St. Catherine of Siena implored him, in the name of Christ, to come with the Cross in hand, like a meek lamb, and not with armed bands. The horrible atro- cities committed in Romagna by these mercenaries, especially at Faenza and Cesena, stained what might have been a noble pontificate. Against Pope Gregory and his legates, the Florentines carried on a long and disastrous war ; round the Otto della Guerra, the eight magistrates to whom the management of the war was intrusted, rallied those who hated the Parte Guclfa. 62 „„.,„f.,»i:ig, ^t;.--^ •mjnuu^' .sa^^ ill ~- A 'Ij^/f^"^-^^ THE CAMPANILE 63 Times of Dante and Boccaccio The return of Gregory to Rome in 1377 opens a new epoch in Italian history. Echoes of this unnatural struggle between Florence and the Pope reach us in the letters of St Catherine and the canzoni of Franco Sacchctti ; in the latter is some faint sound of Dante's saeva indignalio against the unwortliy pastors of the Church, but in the former we are lifted far above the miserable realities of a conflict carried on by political intrigue and foreign mercenaries, into the mystical realms of pure faith and divine charity. In 1376, the Loggia dei Priori, now less pleasantly known as the Loggia dei Lanzi, was founded; and in 1378 the bulk of the Duomo was practically completed. This maybe taken as the close of the first or " heroic " epoch of Florentine Art, which runs simultaneously with the great democratic period of Florentine history, repre- sented in literature by Dante and Boccaccio. The Duomo, the Palace of the Podesta, the Palace of the Priors, Santa Maria Novella, Santa Croce, Or San Michele, the Loggia of the Bigallo, and the Third Walls of the City (of which, on the northern side of the Arno, the gates alone remain), are its supreme monuments in architecture. Its heroes of greatest name are Arnolfo di Cambio, Giotto di Bondone, Andrea Pisano, Andrea di Clone or Orcagna (the "Archangel "), and, lastly and but recently recognised, Francesco Talenti. "No Italian architect," says Addington Symonds, " has enjoyed the proud privilege of stamping his own individuality more strongly on his native city than Arnolfo." At present, the walls of the city (or what remains of them) — le mura di Fiorenza which Lapo Gianni would fain see tnargentate — and the bulk of the Palazzo Vecchio and Santa Croce, alone represent Arnolfo's work. But the Duomo (mainly, in its present form, due to Francesco Talenti) probably still retains E 65 The Story of Florence in part his design ; and the glorious church of Or San Michele, of which the actual architect is not certainly known, stands on the site of his Loggia. Giovanni Cimabue, the father of Florentine painting as Arnolfo of Florentine architecture, has been reduced to a shadow by modern art-criticism. His supposed portrait in the cloisters of Santa Maria Novella is now held to be that of a French knight ; the famous picture of the Madonna and Child with their angelic ministers, in the Rucellai Chapel, may be, as is thought, the work of a Sienese artist. But certain frescoes at Assisi, and, here in Florence, the stately Madonna Enthroned of the Accademia, can with some confi- dence be accepted as his ; the Borgo Allegro still bears its title from the rejoicings that hailed his master- piece ; and his name must live for ever in an immortal terziria of Dante's Purgatorio : — " Credette Cimabue nella pittura tener lo campo, ed ora ha Giotto il grido, si che la fama di cohii e oscura."^ Of Cimabue's great pupil, Dante's friend and con- temporary, Giotto, we know and possess much more. Through him mediaeval Italy first spoke out through painting, and with no uncertain sound. He was born some ten years later than Dante. Cimabue — or so the legend runs, which is told by Leonardo da Vinci amongst others — found him among the mountains, guarding his father's flocks and drawing upon the stones the movements of the goats committed to his care. He was a typical Florentine craftsman ; favoured by popes, admitted to the familiarity of kings, he re- mained to the end the same unspoilt shepherd whom Cimabue had found. Many choice and piquant tales * ** In painting Cimabue thought that he Should hold the field, now Giotto has the cry, So that the other's fame is growing dim." 66 Times of Dante and Boccaccio are told by the novelists about his ugly j)rescncc and rare personality, his perpetual good humour, his sharp and witty answers to kmg and rustic alike, his hatred of all pretentiousness, carried to such an extent that he conceived a rooted objection to hearing himself called maestro, Padua and Assisi possess some of his very best work ; but Florence can still show much. Two chapels in Santa Croce are painted by his hand ; of the smaller pictures ascribed to him in churches and gal- leries, there is one authentic — the Madonna in the Accadcmia ; and, perhaps most beautiful of all, the Campanile which he designed and commenced still rises in the midst of the city. Giotto died in 1336 ; his work was carried on by Andrea Pisano and practically finished by Francesco Talenti. Andrea di Ugolino Pisano (i 270-1 348), usually simply called Andrea Pisano, is similarly the father of Florentine sculpture. Vasari's curiously inaccurate account of him has somewhat blurred his real figure in the history of art. His great achievements are the casting of the first gate of the Baptistery in bronze, his work — apparently from Giotto's designs — in the lower series of marble reliefs round the Campanile, and his continuation of the Campanile itself after Giotto's death. He is said by Vasari to have built the Porta di San Frediano. There is little individuality in the followers of Giotto, who carried on his tradition and worked in his manner. They are very much below their master, and are often surpassed by the contemporary painters of Siena, such as Simone Martini and Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Taddeo Gaddi and his son, Agnolo, Giovanni di Milano, Bernardo Daddi, are their leaders ; the chief title to fame of the first-named being the renowned Ponte Vecchio. But their total achieve- ment, in conjunction with the Sienese, was of heroic 67 The Story of Florence magnitude. They covered the walls of churches and chapels, especially those connected with the Fran- ciscans and Dominicans, with the scenes of Scripture, with the lives of the Madonna and her saints ; they set forth in all its fullness the whole Gospel story, for those who could neither read nor write ; they con- ceived vast allegories of human life and human destinies ; they filled the palaces of the republics with painted parables of good government. " By the grace of God," says a statute of Sienese painters, " wc arc the men who make manifest to the ignorant and un- lettered the miraculous things achieved by the power and virtue of the Faith." At Siena, at Pisa and at Assisi, are perhaps the greatest works of this school ; but here, in Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella, there is much, and of a very noble and characteristic kind. Spinello Aretino (1333-1410) may be re- garded as the last of the Giotteschi ; you may see his best series of frescoes in San Miniato, setting forth with much skill and power the life of the great Italian monk, whose face Dante so earnestly prayed to behold unveiled in Paradise. This heroic age of sculpture and painting culminated in Andrea Orcagna (1308-1368), Andrea Pisano's great pupil. Painter and sculptor, architect and poet, Orcagna is at once the inheritor of Niccolo and Giovanni Pisano, and of Giotto. The famous frescoes in the Pisan Campo Santo are now known to be the work of some other hand ; his paintings in Santa Croce, with their priceless portraits, have perished ; and, although frequently consulted in the construction of the Duomo, it is tolerably certain that he was not the architect of any of the Florentine buildings once ascribed to him. The Strozzi chapel of St Thomas in Santa Maria Novella, the oratory of the Madonna in Or San Michele, contain all his unquestioned works; 68 Times of Dante and Boccaccio and they are sufficient to prove him, next to Giotto, the greatest painter of his century, with a feeling for grace and beauty even above Giotto's, and only less excellent in marble. Several of his poems have been preserved, mostly of a slightly satirical character ; one, a sonnet on the nature of love, Molu 'volendo d'lr che fosse Amore^ has had tlie honour of being ascribed to Dante. With the third quarter of the century, the first great epoch of Italian letters closes also. On the overthrow of the House of Suabia at Benevento, the centre of culture had shifted from Sicily to Tuscany, from Palermo to Florence. The prose and poetry of this epoch is almost entirely Tuscan, although the second of its greatest poets, Francesco Petrarca, comparatively seldom set foot within its boundaries. " My old nest is restored to me," he wrote to the Signoria, when they sent Boccaccio to invite his friend to return to Florence, " I can fly back to it, and I can fold there my wandering wings." But, save for a few flying visits, Petrarch had little inclination to attach himself to one city, when he felt that all Italy was his country. Dante had set forth all that was noblest in medixval thought in imperishable form, supremely in his D'liy'ina Commed'ia, but appreciably and nobly in his various minor works as well, both verse and prose. Villani had started historical Italian prose on its triumphant course. Petrarch and Boccaccio, besides their great gifts to Italian literature, in the ethereal poetry of the one, painting every varying mood of the human soul, and the licentious prose of the other, hymning the triumph of the flesh, stand on the threshold of the Renaissance. Other names crowd in upon us at each stage of this epoch. Apart from his rare personality, Guido Cavalcanti*s lallate are his chief title to poetic fame, but, even so, less than the monu- ment of glory that Dante has reared to him in the 69 The Story of Florence Ftta Nuovay in the De Vulgar't FAoqueniia^ in the D'iv'ina Commedta, Dino Compagni, the chronicler of the Whites and Blacks, was only less admirable as a patriot than as a historian. Matteo Villani, the brother of Giovanni, and Matteo's son, Filippo, carried on the great chronicler's work. Fra Jacopo Passavanti, the Dominican prior of Santa Maria Novella, in the middle of the century, showed how the purest Floren- tine vernacular could be used for the purpose of simple religious edification. Franco Sacchetti, politician, novelist and poet, may be taken as the last Florentine writer of this period ; he anticipates the popular lyrlsm of the Quattrocento, rather in the same way as a group of scholars who at the same time gathered round the Augustinian, Lulgi Marsili, in his cell at Santo Splrito heralds the coming of the humanists. It fell to Franco Sacchetti to sing the dirge of this heroic period of art and letters, in his elegiac canzoni on the deaths of Petrarch and Boccaccio : — " Sonati sono i corni d'ogni parte a ricolta ; la stagione e rivolta ; se tornera non so, ma credo tardi." CROSS OF TliE FLORENTINE PEOPLE ("from old house UN NORTH SIDE OF DUOMO) 70 CHAPTER III The Medici and the Qjiattrocento ** Tiranno e nome di uomo di mala vita, e pessimo fra tutti gli altri uomini, che per forza sopra tiitti vuol reg- nare, massime quello che di cittadino e fatto tiranno." — Savonarola. '< The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was in many things great, ratlier by what it designed or aspired to do, than by what it actually achieved." — Walter Pater. ATON g'la Sahestro ma Sahalor mundi, " thou that with noble wisdom hast saved thy country.'' Thus in a sonnet does Franco Sacchetti hail Salvestro dei Medici, the originator of the greatness of his house. In 1378, while the hatred between the Parte Guelfa and the adherents of the Otto della Guerra — the livalry between the Palace of the Party and the Palace of the Signory — was at its height, the Captains of the Party conspired to seize upon the Palace of the Priors and take possession of the State. Their plans were frus- trated by Salvestro dei Medici, a rich merchant and head of his ambitious and rising family, who was then Gonfaloniere of Justice. He proposed to restore the Ordinances against the magnates, and, when this peti- tion was rejected by the Signoria and the Colleges,^ he ^ The "Colleges" were the twelve Buonuomini and the sixteen Gonfaloniers of the Companies. Measures proposed by the Signoria had to be carried in the Colleges before being submitted to the Council of the People, and afterwards to the Council of the Commune. 7» The Story of Florence appealed to the Council of the People. The result was a riot, followed by a long series of tumults throughout the city ; the Arti Minor'i came to the front in arms ; and, finally, the bloody revolution known as the Tumult of the Ciompi burst over Florence. These Ciompi, the lowest class of artizans and all those who were not represented in the Arts, headed by those who were subject to the great Arte della Lana, had been much favoured by the Duke of Athens, and had been given consuls and a standard with an angel painted upon it. On the fall of the Duke, these Ciompi, or popolo m'mutOy had lost these privileges, and were probably much oppressed by the consuls of the Arte della Lana. Secretly instigated by Salvestro — who thus initiated the Medicean policy of undermining the Republic by means of the populace — they rose en masse on July 20th, captured the Palace of the Podesta, burnt the houses of their enemies and the Bottega of the Arte della Lana, seized the standard of the people, and, with it and the banners of the Guilds displayed, came into the Piazza to demand a share in the government. On July 22nd they burst into the Palace of the Priors, headed by a wool-comber, Michele di Lando, carrying in his hands the great Gonfalon ; him they acclaimed Gonfaloniere and lord of the city. This rough and half-naked wool-comber, whose mother made pots and pans and whose wife sold greens, is one of the heroes of Florentine history ; and his noble simplicity throughout the whole affair is in striking contrast with the self-seeking and intrigues of the rich aristocratic merchants whose tool, to some extent, he appears to have been. The pious historian, Jacopo Nardi, likens him to the heroes of ancient Rome, Curius and Fabricius, and ranks him as a patriot and deliverer of the city, far above even Farinata degli Ubcrti. The next day the Parliament 7^ The Medici and the Qjiattrocento v/as duly summoned in the Piazza, Michele confirmed in his office, and a Balia (or commission) given to him, together with the Eight and the Syndics of the Arts, to reform the State and elect the new Signoria — in which the newly constituted Guilds of the populace were to have a third with those of the greater and minor Arts. But, before Michele's term of office was over, the Ciompi were in arms again, fiercer than ever and with more outrageous demands, following the standards of the Angel and some of the minor Arts (who appear to have in part joined them). From Santa Maria Novella, their chosen head-quarters, on the last day of August they sent two representatives to overawe the Signoria. But Michele di Lando, answering tlieir insolence with violence, rode through the city with the standard of Justice floating before him, while the great bell of the Priors' tower called the Guilds to arms ; and by evening the populace had melted away, and the government of the people was re-established. The new Signoria was greeted in a canzone by Sacchetti, in which he declares that Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Tem- perance are once more reinstated in the city. For the next few years the Minor Arts pre- dominated in the government. Salvestro dei Medici kept in the background, but was presently banished. Michele di Lando seemed contented to have saved the State, and took little further share in the politics of the city. He appears later on to have been put under bounds at Chioggia ; but to have returned to Florence before his death in 1401, when he was buried in Santa Croce. There were still tumults and conspiracies, resulting in frequent executions and banishments ; while, without, inglorious wars were carried on by the com- panies of mercenary soldiers. This is the epoch m which the great English captain, Hawkwood, entered the service of the Florentine State. In 1382, after 73 ^he Story of Florence the execution of Giorgio Scali and the banishment of Tommaso Strozzi (noble burghers who headed the populace), the newly constituted Guilds were abolished, and the government returned to the greater Arts, who now held two-thirds of the offices — a proportion which was later increased to three-quarters. The period which follows, from 1382 to 1434, sees the close of the democratic government of Florence. The Republic, nominally still ruled by the greater Guilds, is in reality sustained and swayed by the nobili popolani or Ott'imati^ members of wealthy families risen by riches or talent out of these greater Guilds into a new kind of burgher aristocracy. The struggle is now no longer between the Palace of the Signory and the Palace of the Party — for the days of the power of the Parte Guelfa are at an end — but between the Palace and the Piazza. The party of the Minor Arts and the Populace is repressed and ground down with war taxes ; but behind them the Medici lurk and wait — first Vieri, then Giovanni di Averardo, then Cosimo di Giovanni — ever on the watch to put themselves at their head, and through them overturn the State. The party of the Ottimati is first led by Maso degli Albizzi, then by Niccolo da Uzzano, and lastly by Rinaldo degli Albizzi and his adherents — illustrious citizens not altogether un- worthy of the great Republic that they swayed — the sort of dignified civic patricians whose figures, a little later, were to throng the frescoes of Masaccio and Ghirlandaio. But they were divided among them- selves, persecuted their adversaries with proscription and banishment, thus making the exiles a perpetual source of danger to the State, and they were hated by the populace because of the war taxes. These wars were mainly carried on by mercenaries — who were now more usually Italians than foreigners — and, in 74 The Medici and the Q^uattrocento spite of frequent defeats, generally ended well for Florence. Arezzo was purchased in 1384. A fierce struggle was carried on a few years later (i 390-1 402) with the "great serpent," Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti, who hoped to make himself King of Italy by violence as he had made himself Duke of Milan by treachery, and intended to be crowned in Florence. Pisa was finally and cruelly conquered in 1406 ; Cortona was obtained as the result of a prolonged war with King Ladislaus of Naples in 141 4, in which the Repubhc had seemed once more in danger of falling into the hands of a foreign tyrant; and in I421 Leghorn was sold to the Florentines by the Genoese, thus opening the sea to their merchandise. The deaths of Giovanni Galeazzo and Ladislaus freed the city from her most formidable external foes ; and for a while she became the seat of the Papacy, the centre of Christendom. In 1419, after the schism. Pope Martin V. took up his abode in Florence ; the great condottiere, Braccio, came with his victorious troops to do him honour ; and the deposed John XXIII. humbled himself before the new Pontiff, and was at last laid to rest among the shadows of the Baptistery. In his Storia Florentina Guicciardini de- clares that the government at this epoch was the wisest, the most glorious and the happiest that the city had ever had. It was the dawn of the Renais- sance, and Florence was already full of artists and scholars, to whom these noh'd'i popolani were as generous and as enlightened patrons as their successors, the Medici, were to be. Even Cosimo's fervent admirer, the librarian Vespasiano Bisticci, endorses Guicciar- dini's verdict: *' In that time," he says, "from 1422 to 1433, the city of Florence was in a most blissful state, abounding with excellent men in every faculty, and it was full of adm.irablc citizens." 75 The Story of Florence Maso degli Albizzi died in 1 4 1 7 ; and his suc- cessors in the oligarchy — the aged Niccolo da Uzznno, who stood throughout for moderation, and the tiery but less competent Rinaldo degli Albizzi— were no match for the rising and unscrupulous Medici. With the Albizzi was associated the noblest and most generous Florentine of the century, Palla Strozzi. The war with Filippo Visconti, resulting in the dis- astrous rout of Zagonara, and an unjust campaign against Lucca, in which horrible atrocities were com- mitted by the Florentine commissioner, Astorre Gianni, shook their government. Giovanni dei Medici, the richest banker in Italy, was now the acknowledged head of the opposition ; he had been Gonfaloniere in 1 42 1, but would not put himself actively forward, although urged on by his sons, Cosimo and Lorenzo. He died in I429; Niccolo da Uzzano followed him to the grave in 1432 ; and the final struggle between the fiercer spirits, Rinaldo and Cosimo, was at hand. "All these citizens," said Niccolo, shortly before his death, " some through ignorance, some through malice, are ready to sell this republic ; and, thanks to their good fortune, they have found the purchaser." Shortly before this date, Masaccio painted all the leading spirits of the time in a fresco in the cloisters of the Carmine. This has been destroyed, but you may see a fine contemporary portrait of Giovanni in the Uffizi. The much admired and famous coloured bust in the Bargcllo, called the portrait of Niccolo da Uzzano by Donatello, has probably nothing to do either with Niccolo or with Donatello. Giovanni has the air of a prosperous and unpretending Florentine tradesman, but with a certain obvious parade of his lack of pushfulness. In 1 43 3 the storm broke. A Signory hostile to Cosimo being elected, he was sunmioned to the Palace 76 The Medici and the Qjiattrocento and imprisoned in an apartment high up in tlic Tower, a place known as the Alberghettino. Rinaldo degli Albizzi held the Piazza with his soldiery, and Cosimo heard the great bell ringing to call the people to Parliament, to grant a Balia to reform the government and decide upon his fate. But he was too powerful at home and abroad ; his popularity with those whom he had raised from low estate, and those whom he had relieved by his wealth, his influence with the foreign powers, such as Venice and Ferrara, were so great that his foes dared not take his life ; and, indeed, they were hardly the men to have attempted such a crime. Banished to Padua (his brother Lorenzo and other members of his family being put under bounds at different cities), he was received everywhere, not as a fugitive, but as a prince ; and the library of the Benedictines, built by Michelozzo at his expense, once bore witness to his stay in Venice. Hardly a year had passed when a new Signory was chosen, favourable to the Medici ; Rinaldo degli Albizzi, after a vain show of resistance, laid down his arms on the intervention of Pope Eugenius, who was then at Santa Maria Novella, and was banished for ever from the city with his principal adherents. And finally, in a triumphant progress from Venice, " carried back to his country upon the shoulders of all Italy," as he said, Cosimo and his brother Lorenzo entered Florence on October 6th, 1434, rode past the deserted palaces of the Albizzi to the Palace of the Priors, and next day returned in triumph to their own house in the Via Larga. The Republic had practically fallen ; the head of the Medici was virtually prince of the city and of her fair dominion. But Florence was not Milan or Naples, and Cosimo's part as tyrant was a peculiar one. The forms of the government v/ere, with modificationvS, preserved ; but by means of a Balia empov/ered to 77 The Story of Florence elect the chief magistrates for a period of five years, and then renewed every five years, he secured that the Signoria should always be in his hands, or in those of his adlierents. The grand Palace of the Priors was still ostensibly the seat of government ; but, in reality, the State was in the firm grasp of the thin, dark-faced merchant in the Palace in the Via I^arga, which we now know as the Palazzo Riccardi. Although in the earlier part of his reign he was occasionally elected Gonfaloniere, he otherwise held no ofRce ostensibly, and affected the republican manner of a mere wealthy citizen. His personality, combined with the widely ramifying banking relations of the Medici, gave him an almost European influence. His popularity among the mountaineers and in the country districts, from which armed soldiery v/ere ever ready to pour down into the city in his defence, made him the fitting man for the ever increasing external sway of Florence. The forms of the Republic were preserved, but he consolidated his power by a general levelling and disintegration, by severing the nerves of the State and breaking the power of the Guilds. He had certain hard and cynical maxims for guidance : " Better a city ruined than a city lost," " States are not ruled by Pater-Nosters,'' " New and worthy citizens can be made by a few ells of crimson cloth." So he elevated to wealth and power men of low kind, devoted to and dependent on himself; crushed the families opposed to him, or citizens who seemed too powerful, by wholesale banishments, or by ruining them with fines and taxation, although there was comparatively little blood shed. He was utterly ruth- less in all this, and many of the noblest Florentine citizens fell victims. One murder must be laid to his charge, and it is one of peculiar, for him, unusual atrocity. Baldaccio d' Anghiari, a young captain of infantry, who promised fair to take a high place among the condottieri 78 T^he Medici and the Qjuattrocento of the da}'', was treacherously invited to speak with the Gonfaloniere in the Palace of the Priors, and there stabbed to death by hireling assassins from the hills, and his body flung ignominiously into the Piazza. Cosimo's motive is said to have been partly jealousy of a possible rival, Neri Capponi, who had won popu- larity by his conquest of the Casentino for Florence in 1440, and who was intimate with Baldaccio ; and partly desire to gratify Francesco Sforza, whose treacherous designs upon Milan he was furtliering by the gold wrung from his over-taxed Florentines, and to v/hosc plans Baldaccio was prepared to offer an obstacle. Florence was still for a time the seat of the Papacy. In January 1439, the Patriarch Joseph of Constanti- nople, and the Emperor of the East, John Paleologus, came to meet Pope Eugenius for the Council of Florence, which was intended to unite the Churches of Christendom. The Patriarch died here, and is buried in Santa Maria Novella. In the Riccardi Palace you may see him and the Emperor, forced, as it were, to take part in the triumph of the Medici in Benozzo Gozzoli's fresco — riding with them in the gorgeous train, that sets out ostensibly to seek the Babe of Bethlehem, and evidently has no intention of finding Him. Pope Eugenius returned to Rome in 1444 ; and in 1453 Mahomet II. stormed Constantinople, and Greek exiles thronged to Rome and Florence. In 1459, marvellous pageants greeted Pius II. in the city, on his way to stir up the Crusade that never went. In his foreign policy Cosimo inaugurated a totally new departit'-e for Florence ; he commenced a line of action which was of the utmost importance in Italian politics, and which his son and grandson carried still further. The long wars with which the last of the 79 The Story of Florence Visconti, Filippo Maria, harassed Italy and pressed Florence hard (in the last of these Rinaldo degli Albizzi and the exiles approached near enough to catch a distant glimpse of the city from which they were relentlessly shut out), ended with his death in T447. Cosimo dei Medici now allied himself with the great condottierc, Francesco Sforza, and aided him with money to make good his claims upon the Duchy of Milan. Henceforth this new alliance between Florence and Milan, between the Medici and the Sforza, although most odious in the eyes of the Florentine people, became one of the chief factors in the balance of power in Italy. Soon afterwards Alfonso, the Aragonese ruler of Maples, entered into this triple alliance ; Venice and Rome to some extent being regarded as a double alliance to counterbalance this. To these foreign princes Cosimo was almost as much prince of Florence as they of their dominions ; and by what was practically a coup d'etat in 1459, Cosimo and his son Piero forcibly overthrew the last attempt of their opponents to get the Signoria out of their hands, and, by means of the creation of a new and permanent Council of a hundred of their chief adherents, more firmly than ever secured their hold upon the State. In his private life Cosimo was the simplest and most unpretentious of tyrants, and lived the life of a wealthy merchant-burgher of the day in its nobler aspects. He was an ideal father, a perfect man of business, an apparently kindly fellow-citizen to all. Above all things he loved the society of artists and men of letters ; Brunelleschi and Michelozzo, Donatello and Fra Lippo Lippi — to name only a few more intimately connected with him — found in him the most generous and discerning of patrons ; many of the noblest Early Renaissance churches and convents in Florence and its 80 I^HMMMMMh '^mi ^^. i^ FLORENCE IN IHE DAYS Ol- LORENZO THE MAGNinCENT [From an ni^r.nin^, oj abiul I ^(^0, in ihl tiirlm Munum) The Medici atid the Qjiattrocento neighbourhood are due to his munificence — San Lorenzo and San Marco and the Badia of Fiesole arc the most typical — and he even founded a hospital in Jerusalem. To a certain extent this was what we should now call "conscience money." His friend and biographer, Vcspasiano Bisticci, writes : " He did these things because it appeared to him that he held money, not over well acquired ; and he was wont to say that to God he had never given so much as to find Him on his books a debtor. And likewise he said : I know the humours of this city ; fifty years will not pass before we are driven out ; but the buildings will remain." The Greeks, who came to the Council of Florence or fled from the in-coming Turk, stimulated the study of their language and philosophy — though this had really commenced in the days of the Republic, before the deaths of Petrarch and Boccaccio — and found in Cosimo an ardent supporter. He founded great libraries in San Marco and in the Badia of Fiesole, the former with part of the codices collected by the scholar Niccolo Niccoli ; although he had banished the old Palla Strozzi, the true renovator of the Florentine University, into hopeless exile. Into the Neo-Platonism of the Renais- sance Cosimo threw himself heart and soul. " To Cosimo," writes Burckhardt, " belongs the special glory of recognising in the Platonic philosophy the fairest flower of the ancient world of thought, of in- spiring his friends with the same belief, and thus of fostering within humanistic circles themselves another and a higher resuscitation of antiquity." In a youth of Figlinc, Marsilio Ficino, the son of a doctor, Cosimo found a future high priest of this new religion of love and beauty ; and bidding him minister to the minds of men rather than to their bodies, brought him into his palace, and gave him a house in the city and a beauti- ful farm near Careggi. Thus was founded the famous F 8 1 ne Medici and the Qjiattrocento neighbourhood are due to his munificence — San Lorenzo and San Maico and the Badia of Ficsole arc the most typical — and he even founded a hospital in Jerusalem. To a certain extent this was what we should now call "conscience money." His friend and biographer, ;y Vcspasiano Bisticci, writes : " He did these things because it appeared to him that he held money, not over well acquired ; and he was wont to say that to God he had never given so much as to find Him on his books a debtor. And likewise he said ; I know the humours of this city ; fifty years will not pass before we are driven out ; but the buildings will remain." The Greeks, who came to the Council of Florence or ficd from the in-coming Turk, stimulated the study of their language and philosophy — though this had really commenced in the days of the Republic, before the deaths of Petrarch and Boccaccio — and found in Cosimo an ardent supporter. He founded great libraries in San Marco and in the Badia of Fiesole, the former with part of the codices collected by the scholar Niccolo Niccoli ; although he had banished the old Palla Strozzi, the true renovator of the Florentine University, into hopeless exile. Into the Neo-Platonism of the Renais- sance Cosimo threw himself heart and soul. " To Cosimo," writes Burckhardt, " belongs the special glory of recognising in the Platonic philosophy the fairest flower of the ancient world of thought, of in- spiring his friends with the same belief, and thus of fostering wlihin humanistic circles themselves another and a higher resuscitation of antiquity." In a youth of Figlinc, Marsilio Ficino, the son of a doctor, Cosimo found a future high priest of this new religion of love and beauty ; and bidding him minister to the minds of men rather than to their bodies, brought him Into his palace, and gave him a house in the city and a beauti- ful farm near Careggi. Thus was founded the famou? F 8i The Story of Florence Platonic Academy, the centre of the richest Itahan thought of the century. As his end drew near, Cosimo turned to the consolations of reHgion, and would pass long hours in his chosen cell in San Marco, communing with the Dominican Archbishop, Antonino, and Fra Angelico, the painter of medigsval Paradise. And with these thoughts, mingled with the readings of Marsilio's growing translation of Plato, he passed away at his villa at Careggi in 1464, on the first of August. Shortly before his death he had lost his favourite son, Giovanni ; and had been carried through his palace, in the Via Larga, sighing that it was now too large a house for so small a family. Entitled by public decree Pater Patriae, he was buried at his own request without any pompous funeral, beneath a simple marble in front of the high altar of San Lorenzo. Cosimo was succeeded, not without some opposition from rivals to the Medici within their own party, by his son Piero. Piero's health was in a shattered con- dition — il Gottoso, he was called — and for the most part he lived in retirement at Careggi, occasionally carried into Florence in his litter, leaving his brilliant young son Lorenzo to act as a more ornamental figure- head for the State. The personal appearance of Piero is very different to that of his father or son ; in his portrait bust by Mino da Fiesole in the Bargello, and in the picture by Bronzino in the National Gallery, there is less craft and a certain air of frank and manly resolution. In his daring move in support of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, when, on the death of Francesco, it seemed for a moment that the Milanese dynasty was tottering, and his promptness in crushing the formidable conspiracy of the " mountain '* against himself, Piero showed that sickness had not destroyed his faculty of energetic action at the critical moment. He com- "plctcly followed out his father's policy, drawing still 82 /..- ' ^ ^^^i>.-^ ^,^ ' M^ ^^4^^ .,--.3a;"Z'-^"_~i. "■fT^^ THE BADIA OF FIESOLE 83 The Medici and the Qjuittrocento tighter the bonds which united Florence with Milan and Naples, lavishing money on the decoration of the city and the corruption of the people. The opposition was headed by Luca Pitti, Agnolo Acciaiuoli, Die- tisalvi Neroni and others, who had been reckoned as Cosimo's friends, but who were now intriguing with Venice and Ferrara to overthrow his son. Hoping to eclipse the Medici in their own special field of artistic display and wholesale corruption, Luca Pitti com- menced that enormous palace which still bears the name of his family, filled it with bravos and refugees, resorted to all means fair or foul to get money to build and corrupt. It seemed for a moment that the adher- ents of the Mountain (as the opponents of the Medici were caUed, from this highly situated Pitti Palace) and the adherents of the Plain (where the compara- tively modest Mcdicean palace — now the Palazzo Riccardi — stood in the Via Larga) might renew the old factions of Blacks and Whites. But in the late summer of 1466 the parly of the Mountain was finally crushed ; they were punished with more mercy than the Medici generally showed, and Luca Pitti was practically pardoned and left to a dishonourable old age in the unfinished palace, which was in after years to become the residence of the successors of his foes. About the same time Filippo Strozzi and other exiles were allowed to return, and another great palace began to rear its walls in the Via Tornabuoni, in after years to be a centre of anti-Medicean intrigue. The brilliancy and splendour of Lorenzo's youth — he who was hereafter to be known in history as the Magnificent — sheds a rich glow of colour round the closing mionilis of Piero's pain-haunted life. Piero him- self had been content with a Florentine wife, Lucrezia dei Tornabuoni, and he had married his daughters to Florentine citizens, Guglielmo Pazzi and Bernardo «5 The Story of Florence Rucellai ; but Lorenzo must make a great foreign match, and was therefore given Clarice Orsini, the daughter of a great Roman noble. The splendid pageant in the Piazza Santa Croce, and the even more gorgeous marriage festivities in the palace in the Via Larga, were followed by a triumphal progress of the young bridegroom through Tuscany and the Riviera to Milan, to the court of that faithful ally of his house, but most abominable monster, Giovanni Maria Sforza. Piero died on December 3rd, 1469, and, like Cosimo, desired the simple burial which his sons piously gave him. His plain but beautiful monument designed by Verrocchio is in the older sacristy of San Lorenzo, where he lies with his brother Giovanni. " The second day after his death," writes Lorenzo in his diary, *' 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 per- suade me to take upon myself the charge of the govern- ment 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 oi wealth without control of the government." ^ These two youths, Lorenzo and Giuliano, were now, to all intents and purposes, lords and masters of Flor- ence. Lorenzo was the ruling spirit ; outwardly, in spite of his singularly harsh and unprepossessing appear- ance, devoted to the cult of love and beauty, delighting in sport and every kind of luxury, he was inwardly as hard and cruel as tempered steel, and firmly fixed from the outset upon developing the hardly defined prepot- 1 From Mr Armstrong's Lorenzo de Medici 86 The Medici and the Qjtattrocento ency of his house into a complete personal despotism. You may see him as a gallant boy in Benozzo Goz- zoli's fresco in the palace of his father and grandfather, riding under a bay tree, and crowned with roses ; and then, in early manhood, in Botticelli's famous Adora- tion of the Magi ; and lastly, as a fully developed, omniscient and all-embracing tyrant, in that truly ter- rible picture by Vasari in the Uffizi, constructed out of contemporary materials — surely as eloquent a sermon against the iniquity of tyranny as the pages of Savona- rola's Regg'imento di Ftrenze. Giuliano was a kindlier and gentler soul, completely given up to pleasure and athletics ; he lives for us still in many a picture from the hand of Sandro Botticelli, sometimes directly por- trayed, as in the painting which Morelli bequeathed to Bergamo, more often idealised as Mars or as Hermes ; his love for the fair Simonetta inspired Botticellian allegories and the most finished and courtly stanzas of Poliziano. The sons of both these brothers were destined to sit upon the throne of the Fisherman. A long step in despotism was gained in 1470, when the two great Councils of the People and the Commune were deprived of all their functions, which were now invested in the thoroughly Medicean Council of the Hundred. The next year Lorenzo's friend and ally, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, with his Duchess and courtiers, came to Florence. They were sumptuously received in the Medicean palace. The licence and wantonness of these Milanese scandalised even the lax Florentines, and largely added to the growing corruption of the city. The accidental burning of Santo Spirito during the performance of a miracle play was regarded as a certain sign of divine wrath. During his stay in Florence the Duke, in contrast with whom the worst of the Medici seems almost a saint, sat to one of the Pollaiuoli for the portrait still seen in the Uffizi; by 87 Tloe Story of Florence comparison with him even Lorenzo looks charming; at the back of the picture there is a figure of Charity — but the Duke has very appropriately driven it to the wall. Unpopular though this Medicean-Sforza alliance was in Florence, it was undoubtedly one of the safe- guards of the harmony which, superficially, still existed between the five great powers of Italy. When Galc- azzo Maria met the fate he so richly deserved, and was stabbed to death in the Church of San Stefano at Milan on December 26th, 1476, Pope Sixtus gave solemn utterance to the general dismay : Oggt e morta la pace d^ Italia. But Sixtus and his nephews did not in their hearts desire peace in Italy, and were plotting against Lorenzo v/ith the Pazzi, who, although united to the Medici by marriage, had secret and growing grievances against them. On the morning of Sunday April 26th, 1478, the conspii-ators set upon the two brothers at Mass in the Duomo ; Giuliano perished beneath nineteen dagger-stabs ; Lorenzo escaped with a slight wound in the neck. The Archbishop Salviati of Pisa in the meantime attempted to seize the Palace of the Priors, but was arrested by the Gonfaloniere, and promptly hung out of the window for his trouble. Jacopo Pazzi rode madly through the streets with an armed force, calling the people to arms, with the old shout ot Popolo e Libertay but was only answered by the ringing cries of Palle^ Pallet The vengeance taken by the people upon the conspirators was so prompt and terrible that Lorenzo had little left him to do (though that little he did to excess, punishing the innocent with the guilty) ; and the result of the plot simply was to leave him alone in the government, securely enthroned above 1 The Falle^ it will be remembered, were the red balls on the Medicean arms, and hence the rallying cry of their adherents. 88 The Medici and the Qjiattj'ocento the splash of blood. The Pope appears not to have been actually privy to the murder, but he promptly took up the cause of the murderers. It was followed by a general break-up of the Italian peace and a disastrous war, carried on mainly by mercenary soldiers, in which all the powers of Italy were more or less engaged ; and Florence was terribly hard pressed by the allied forces of Naples and Rome. The plague broke out in the city ; Lorenzo was practically deserted by his allies, and on the brink of financial ruin. Then v/as it tliat he did one of the most noteworthy, perhaps the noblest, of the actions of his life, and saved himself and the State by voluntarily going to Naples and putting him- self in the power of King Ferrante, an infamous tyrant, who would readily have murdered his guest, if it had seemed to his advantage to do so. But, like all the Italians of the Renaissance, Ferrante was open to reason, and the eloquence of the Magnifico won him over to grant an honourable peace, with which Lorenzo returned to Florence in March 1480. "If Lorenzo was great when he left Florence," v/rites Machiavelli, "he re- turned much greater than ever ; and he was received with such joy by the city as his great qualities and his fresh merits deserved, seeing that he had exposed his own life to restore peace to his country." Botticelli's noble allegory of the olive-decked Medicean Pallas, taming the Centaur of war and disorder, appears to have been painted in commemoration of this event. In the following August the Turks landed in Italy and stormed Otranto, and the need of union, in the face of "the common enemy Ottoman," reconciled the Pope to Florence, and secured for the time an uneasy peace among the powers of Italy. Lorenzo's power in Florence and influence through- out Italy was now secure. By the institution in 1480 of a Council of Seventy, a permanent council to manage 89 The Story of Florence and control the election of the Signoria (with two special committees drawn from the Seventy every six months, the Otto di pratica for foreign affairs and the Dod'ic't Procuratori for internal), the State was firmly established in his hands — the older councils still remaining, as was usual in every Florentine refor- mation of government. Ten years later, in 1 490, this council showed signs of independence; and Lorenzo therefore reduced the authority of electing the Signoria to a small committee with a reforming Balia of seven- teen, of which he was one. Had he lived longer, he would undoubtedly have crowned his policy either by being made Gonfaloniere for life, or by obtaining some similar constitutional confirmation of his position as head of the State. Externally his influence was thrown into the scale for peace, and, on the death of Sixtus IV. in 1 484, he estabUshed friendly rela- tions and a family alliance with the new Pontiff, Innocent VIII. Sarzana with Pietrasanta were won back for Florence, and portions of the Sienese territory which had been lost during the war with Naples and the Church ; a virtual protectorate was established over portions of Umbria and Romagna, where the daggers of assassins daily emptied the thrones of minor tyrants. Two attempts on his life failed. In the last years of his foreign policy and diplomacy he showed himself truly the magnificent. East and West united to do him honour ; the Sultan of the Turks and the Soldan of Egypt sent ambassadors and presents ; the rulers of France and Germany treated him as an equal. Soon the torrent of foreign invasion v/as to sweep over the Alps and inundate all the " Ausonian '^ land ; Milan and Naples were ready to rend each other ; Ludovico Sforza was plotting his own rise upon the ruin of Italy, and already intriguing with France ; but, for the present, Lorenzo succeeded in 90 The Medici and the Qjiattrocento maintaining the balance of power between the five great Italian states, which seemed as though they might present a united front for mutual defence against the coming of the barbarians. Sarebhe Imposs'ibue avesse avuto un tiranno miglwre e p'lu piacevoldy writes Guicciardini : " Florence could not have had a better or more delightful tyrant.'' The externals of life were splendid and gorgeous indeed in the city where Lorenzo ruled, but everything was in his hands and had virtually to proceed from him. His spies were everywhere ; marriages might only be arranged and celebrated according to his good plea- sure ; the least sign of independence was promptly and severely repressed. By perpetual festivities and splendid shows, he strove to keep the minds of the citizens contented and occupied ; tournaments, page- ants, masques and triumphs filled the streets ; and the strains of licentious songs, of which many were Lorenzo's own composition, helped to sap the morality of that people which Dante had once dreamed of as sobria e pudica. But around the Magnifico were grouped the greatest artists and scholars of the age, tvho found in him an enlightened Maecenas and most charming companion. Amava maravtgliosamente qua- lunque era in una arte eccellente^ writes Machiavelli of him ; and that word — marav'igliosamente — so entirely characteristic of Lorenzo and his ways, occurs again and again, repeated with studied persistence, in the chapter which closes Machiavelli's History. He was said to have sounded the depths of Platonic philo- sophy ; he was a true poet, within certain limitations ; few men have been more keenly alive to beauty in all its manifestations, physical and spiritual alike. Though profoundly immoral, nelle cose veneree maravigliosamente invo/io, he was a tolerable husband, and the fondest of fathers with his children, whom he adored. The 9> The Story of Florence delight of his closing days was the elevation of his favourite son, Giovanni, to the Cardinalate at the age of fourteen ; it gave the Medici a voice in the Curia like the other princes of Europe, and pleased all Florence ; but more than half Lorenzo's joy pro- ceeded from paternal pride and love, and the letter of advice which he wrote for his son on the occasion shows both father and boy in a very amiable, even edifying light. And yet this same man had ruined the happiness of countless homes, and had even seized upon the doweries of Florentine maidens to fill his own coifers and pay his mercenaries. But the bel viver ttaliano of the Quattrocento, with all its loveliness and all its immorality — more lovely and far less immoral in Florence than anywhere else — was drawing to an end. A new prophet had arisen, and, from the pulpits of San Marco and Santa Maria del Fiore, the stern Dominican, Fra Girolamo Savonarola, denounced the corruption of the day and announced that speedy judgment was at hand ; the Church should be chastised, and that speedily, and renovation sliould follow. Prodigies were seen. The lions tore and rent each other in their cages ; lightning struck the cupola of the Duomo on the side towards the Medicean palace ; while in his villa at Careggi the Magnifico lay dying, watched over by his sister Bianca and the poet Poliziano. A visit from the young Pico della Mirandola cheered his last hours. He received the Last Sacraments, with every sign of contrition and humility. Then Savonarola came to his bedside. There are two accounts of what happened between these two terrible men, the corruptor of Florence and the prophet of renovation, and they are altogether inconsistent. The ultimate source of the one is ap- parently Savonarola's fellow-martyr, Fra Silvestro, an utterly untrustworthy witness ; that of the 92 The Medici and the Quattrocento other, Lorenzo's intimate, Poliziano. According to Savonarola's biographers and adherents, Lorenzo, overwhelmed with remorse and terror, had sent for the Frate to give him the absolution which his courtly confessor dared not refuse [to non ho mat trovato uno che s'ta vero frate, se non lui) ; and when the Dominican, seeming to soar above his natural height, bade him restore liberty to Florence, the Magnifico sullenly turned his back upon him and shortly after- wards died in despair.^ According to Poliziano, an eyewitness and an absolutely whole-hearted adherent of the Medici, Fra Girolamo simply spoke a few words of priestly exhortation to the dying man ; then, as he turned away, Lorenzo cried, " Your blessing, father, before you depart" [Heus, benediction em, Pater, priusquam a nobis projicisceris), and the two together repeated word for word the Church's prayers for the departing ; then Savonarola returned to his convent, and Lorenzo passed away in peace and consolation. Reverently and solemnly the body was brought from Careggi to Florence, rested for a while in San Marco, and was then buried, with all external simplicity, with his murdered brother in San Lorenzo. It was the beginning of April 1492, and the Magnifico was only in his forty-fourth year. The words of old Sixtus must have risen to the lips of many : Oggi e morta la pace d^ Italia. " This man," said Ferrante of Naples, ** lived long enough to make good his own title to immoitality, but not long enough for Italy." Lorenzo left three sons — Piero, who virtually suc- ceeded him in the same rather undefined princedom ; ^ The familiar legend that Lorenzo told Savonarola that the three sins wliicli lay heaviest on his conscience were the sack of Volterra, the robbery of the Monte delle Doti, and the vengeance he had taken for tiie Pazzi conspiracy, is only valuable as showing what were popularly supposed by the Florentines to be his greatest crimes. 93 The Story of Florence the youDg Cardinal Giovanni ; and Giuliano. Their father was wont to call Piero the " mad/' Giovanni the " wise," Giuliano the " good " ; and to a certdln extent their after-lives corresponded with his charac- terisation. There was also a boy Giulio, Lorenzo's nephew, an illegitimate child of Giuliano the elder by a girl of the lower class ; him Lorenzo left to the charge of Cardinal Giovanni — the future Pope Clement to the future Pope Leo. Piero had none of his father's abilities, and was not the man to guide the ship of State through the storm that was rising ; he was a wild licentious young fellow, devoted to sport and athletics, with a great shock of dark hair ; he was practically the only handsome member of his family, as you may see in a pecuHarly fascinating Botticellian portrait in the Uffizi, where he is holding a medallion of his great grandfather Cosimo, and gazing out of the picture with a rather pathetic expression, as if the Florentines who set a price upon his head had misunderstood him. Piero's folly at once began to undo his father's work. A part of Lorenzo's policy had been to keep his family united, including those not belonging to the reigning branch. There were two young Medici then in the city, about Piero's own age ; Lorenzo and Giovanni di Pier Francesco, the grandsons of Cosimo's brother Lorenzo (you may see Giovanni with his father in a picture by Filippino Lippi in the Uffizi). Lorenzo the Magnificent had made a point of keeping on good terms with them, for they were beloved of the people. Giovanni was destined, in a way, to play the part of Banquo to the Magnificent's Macbeth, had there been a Florentine prophet to tell him, " Thou shalt get kings though thou be none." But Piero disliked the two ; at a dance he struck Giovanni, and then, when the brothers showed resentment, he arrested both and, not daring to take their lives, confined them to their villas. 94 The Medici and the nattrocento And these were times when a stronger head than Piero^s might well have reeled. Italy's day had ended, and she was now to be the battle-ground for the gigantic forces of the monarchies of Europe. That same year in which Lorenzo died, Alexander VI. was elected to the Papacy he had so shamelessly bought. A mysterious terror fell upon the people ; an agony of apprehension consumed their rulers through- out the length and breadth of the land. In 1494 the crash came. The old King Ferrante of Naples died, and his successor Alfonso prepared to meet the torrent of French arms which Ludovico Sforza, the usurping Duke of Milan, had invited into Italy. In art and in letters, as well as in life and general conduct, this epoch of the Quattrocento is one of the most marvellous chapters in the history of human thought ; the Renaissance as a wave broke over Italy, and from Italy surged on to the bounds of Europe. And of this ** discovery by man of himself and of the world," Florence was the centre ; in its hothouse of learning and culture the rarest personalities flourished, and its strangest and most brilliant flower, in whose hard brilliancy a suggestion of poison lurked, was Lorenzo the Magnificent himself. In both art and letters, the Renaissance had fully commenced before the accession of the Medici to power. Ghiberti's first bronze gates of the Baptistery and Masaccio's frescoes in the Carmine were executed under the regime of the nohiJ't popolan'i^ the Albizzi and their allies. Many of the men whom the Medici swept relentlessly from their path were in the fore- front of the movement, such as the noble and generous Palla Strozzi, one of the reformers of the Florentine Studio, who brought the Greek, Emanuel Chrysolaras, at the close of the fourteenth century, to make Florence 95 The Story of Florence the centre of Italian Hellenism. Palla lavished his wealth in the hunting of codices, and at last, when banished on Cosimo's return, died in harness at Padua at the venerable age of ninety-two. His house had always been full of learned men, and his reform of the university had brought throngs of students to Florence. Put under bounds for ten years at Padua, he lived the life of an ancient philosoplicr and of exemplary Christian virtue. Persecuted at the end of every ten years with a new sentence, the last — of ten more years — when he was eighty-two ; robbed by death of his wife and sons ; he bore all with the utmost patience and fortitude, until, in Vespasiano's words, "arrived at the age of ninety-two years, in perfect health of body and of mind, he gave up his soul to his Redeemer like a most faithful and good Christian." In 1 40 1, the first year of the fifteenth century, the competition was announced for the second gates of the Baptistery, which marks the beginning of Renaissance sculpture ; and the same year witnessed the birth of Masaccio, v/ho, in the words of Leonardo da Vinci, "showed with iiis perfect work how those painters who follow aught but Nature, the mistress of the masters, laboured in vain." Morelli calls this Quattro- cento the epoch of " character " ; " that is, the period when it was the principal aim of art to seize and represent the outward appearances of persons and things, determined by inward and moral conditions." The intimate connection of arts and crafts is char- acteristic of the Quattrocento, as also the mutual interaction of art with art. Sculpture was in advance of painting in the opening stage of the century, and, indeed, influenced it profoundly throughout ; about the middle of the century they met, and ran henceforth hand in hand. Many of the painters and sculptors, as, 96 ^ ^ X", The Medici and the Qjiattrocento notably, Ghiberti and Botticelli, had been apprentices in the workshops of the goldsmiths ; nor would the greatest painters disdain to undertake the adornment of a cassone, or chest for wedding presents, nor the most illustrious sculptor decline a commission for the button of a prelate's cope or some mere trifle of household furniture. The medals in the National Museum and the metal work on the exterior of the Strozzi Palace are as typical of the art of Renaissance Florence as the grandest statues and most elaborate altar-pieces. With the work of the individual artists we shall become better acquainted in subsequent chapters. Here we can merely name their leaders. In archi- tecture and sculpture respectively, Filippo Brunelleschi ( 1 377-1446) and Donatello (1386- 1466) are the ruling spirits of the age. Their mutual friendship and brotherly rivalry almost recall the loves of Dante and Cavalcanti in an earlier day. Although Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455) justly won the competition for the second gates of the Baptistery, it is now thought that Filippo ran his successful rival much more closely than the critics of an earlier day supposed. Mr Perkins remarks that " indirectly Brunelleschi was the master of all the great painters and sculptors of his time, for he taught them how to apply science to art, and so far both Ghiberti and Donatello were his pupils, but the last was almost literally so, since the great architect was not only his friend, but also his counsellor and guide.'' Contemporaneous with these three spiriti magni in their earlier works, and even to some extent anticipating them, is Nanni di Banco (died in 1421), a most excellent master, both in large monumental statues and in bas-reliefs, whose \vorks are to be seen and loved outside and inside the Duomo, and in the niches round San Michele in Orto. A pleasant friendship united him with Donatello, although G 97 Ihe Story of Florence to regard him as that supreme master's pupil and follower, as Vasari does, is an anachronism. To this same earlier portion of the Quattrocento belong Leo Battista Alberti (1405-1472), a rare genius, but a wandering stone who, as an architect, accomplished comparatively little; Michelozzo Michelozzi (1396- 1472), who worked as a sculptor with Ghiberti and Donatello, but is best known as the favoured architect of the Medici, for whom he built the palace so often mentioned in these pages, and now known as the Palazzo Riccardi, and the convent of San Marco ; and Luca della Robbia (1399- 1482), that beloved master of marble music, whose enamelled terra-cotta Madonnas are a perpetual fund of the purest delight. To Michelozzo and Luca in collaboration we owe the bronze gates of the Duomo sacristy, a work only inferior to Ghiberti's "Gates of Paradise." Slightly later come Donatello's great pupils, Dc- siderio da Settignano (142 8- 1464), Andrea Vcr- rocchio (1435-1488), and Antonio Pollaiuolo (1432- 1498). The two latter are almost equally famous as painters. Contemporaneous with them are Mino da Fiesole, Bernardo and Antonio Rossellino, Giuliano da San Gallo, Giuliano and Benedetto da Maiano, of whom the last-named was the first architect of the Strozzi Palace. The last great architect of the Quattrocento is Simonc del Pollaiuolo, known as Cronaca (1457- 1508); and its last great sculptor is Andrea della Robbia, Luca's nephew, who was born in 1435, and lived on until 1525. Andrea's best works — and they are very numerous indeed, in the same enamelled terra- cotta — hardly yield in charm and fascination to those of Luca himself; in some of them, devotional art seems to reach its last perfection in sculpture. Giovanni, Andrea's son, and others of the family carried on the tradition — with cruder colours and less delicate feeling. 98 The Medici and the Qjiattrocento Masaccio (i 401 -142 8), one of "the Inheritors of unfulfilled renown," is the first great painter of the Renaissance, and bears much the same relation to the fifteenth as Giotto to the fourteenth century. Vasari's statement that Masaccio's master, Masolino, was Ghiberti's assistant appears to be incorrect ; but it illustrates the dependence of the painting of this epoch upon sculpture. Masaccio's frescoes in the Carmine, which became the school of all Italian painting, were entirely executed before the Medicean regime. The Dominican, Fra Angelico da Fiesole (1387-1455), seems in his San Marco frescoes to bring the denizens of the Empyrean, of which the mediaeval mystics dreamed, down to earth to dwell among the black and white robed children of St Dominic. The Car- melite, Fra Lippo Lippi (i 406- 1469), the favourite of Cosimo, inferior to the angelical painter in spiritual insight, had a keener eye for the beauty of the external world and a surer touch upon reality. His buoyant humour and excellent colouring make " the glad monk's gift " one of the most acceptable that the Quattrocento has to offer us. Andrea del Castagno (died in 1457) and Domenico Vencziano (died in 1 461), together with Paolo Uccello (died in 1475), were all absorbed in scientific researches with an eye to the extension of the resources of their art ; but the two former found time to paint a few masterpieces in their kind — especially a Cenacolo by Andrea in Santa Apollonia, which is the grandest representation of its sublime theme, until the time that Leonardo da Vinci painted on the walls of the Dominican convent at Milan. Problems of the anatomical construction of the human frame and the rendering of move- ment occupied Antonio Pollaiuolo (1432-1498) and Andrea Verrocchio (1435-1488); their work was taken up and completed a litilc later by two greater 99 The Story of Florence men, Luca SIgnorelll of Cortona and Leonardo da Vinci. The Florentine painting of this epoch culminates in the work of two men — Sandro di Mariano Filipcpi, better known as Sandro Botticelli ( 1447-1510), and Domenico Ghirlandaio (i 449-1 494). If the greatest pictures were painted poems, as some have held, then Sandro Botticelli's masterpieces would be among the greatest of all time. In his rendering of religious themes, in his intensely poetic and strangely wistful attitude towards the fair m3'ths of antiquity, and in his Neo-Platonic mingling of the two, he is the most com- plete and typical exponent of the finest spirit of the Quattrocento, to which, in spite of the date of his death, his art entirely belongs. Domenico's function, on the other hand, is to translate the external pomp and circumstance of his times into the most uninspired of painted prose, but with enormous technical skill and with considerable power of portraiture ; this he effected above all in his ostensibly religious frescoes in Santa Maria Novella and Santa Trinita. Elsewhere he shows a certain pathetic sympathy with humbler life, as in his Santa Fina frescoes at San Gcmignano, and in the admirable Adoration of the Shepherds in the Accademiaj but this is a less characteristic vein. Filip- pino Lippi (i 457-1 504), the son of the Carmelite and the pupil of Botticelli, has a certain wayward charm, . especially in his earlier works, but as a rule falls much below his master. He may be regarded as the last direct inheritor of the traditions of Masaccio. As- sociated with these are two lesser men, who lived con- siderably beyond the limits of the fifteenth century, but whose artistic methods never went past it ; Picro di Cosimo ( 1462-152 1 ) and Lorenzo di Credi (1459- M37)* The former (called after Cosimo Rosselli, his master) was one of the most piquant personalities in 100 Ihe Medici and the Qjiattrocento tlie art world of Florence, as all readers of Romola know. As a painter, he has been very much over- estimated ; at his best, he is a sort of Botticelli, with tlie Botticellian grace and the Botticellian ])oetry almost all left out. He was magnificent at designing pageants ; and of one of his exploits in this kind, we shall hear more presently. Lorenzo di Crcdi, Verrocchio's fav- ourite pupil, was later, like Botticelli and others, to fall under the spell of Fra Girolamo ; his pictures breathe a true religious sentiment and are very carefully finished ; but for the most part, though there are exceptions, they lack virility. Before this epoch closed, the two greatest heroes of Florentine art had appeared upon the scenes, but their great work lay still in the future. Leonardo da Vinci (born in 1452) had learned to paint in the school of Verrocchio ; but painting was to occupy but a small portion of his time and labour. His mind roamed freely over every field of human activity, and plunged deeply into every sphere of human thought ; nor is he adequately represented even by the greatest of the pictures that he has left. There is nothing of him now in Florence, save a few drawings in the Uffizi and an unfinished picture of the Epiphany. Leonardo finished little, and, with that little, time and man have dealt hardly. Michelangelo Buonarroti was born in the Casentino in 1475, ^"^^ nurtured among the stone quarries of Settignano. At the age of thirteen, his father apprenticed him to the Ghirlandaii, Domenico and his brother David ; and, with his friend and fellow- student, Francesco Granacci, the boy began to frequent the gardens of the Medici, near San Marco, where in the midst of a rich collection of antiquities Donatello's pupil and successor, Bertoldo, directed a kind of Aca- demy. Here Michelangelo attracted the attention of Lorenzo himself, by the head of an old satyr which he IQI The Story of Florence had hammered out of a piece of marble that fell to his hand; and the Magnifico took him into his household. This youthful period in the great master's career was occupied in absorbing culture from the Medicean circle, in studying the antique and, of the moderns, especially the works of Donatello and Masaccio. But, with the exception of a few early fragments from his hand, Michelangelo's work only began with his first visit to Rome, in 1496, and belongs to the following epoch. Turning from art to letters, the Quattrocento is an intermediate period between the mainly Tuscan literary movement of the fourteenth century and the general Italian literature of the sixteenth. The first part of this century is the time of the discovery of the old authors, of the copying of manuscripts (printing was not introduced into Florence until 1471), of the eager search for classical relics and antiquities, the comparative neglect of Italian when Latlnlty became the test of all. Florence was the centre of the Humanism of the Renaissance, the revival of Grecian culture, the blending of Christianity and Paganism, the aping of antiquity in theory and in practice. In the pages of Vespasiano we are given a series of lifelike portraits of the scholars of this epoch, who thronged to Florence, served the State as Secretary of the Republic or occupied chairs in her newly reorganised university, or basked In the sun of Strozzian or Medicean patron- age. NIccolo Niccoli, who died in 1437, is one of the most typical of these scholars ; an ardent collector of ancient manuscripts, his library, purchased after his death by Cosimo del Medici, forms the nucleus of the BIblloteca Laurenziana. His house was adorned with all that was held most choice and precious ; he always wore long sweeping red robes, and had his table covered with ancient vases and precious Greek cuj)3 102 The Medici and the Qjmttrocento and the like. In fact he played the ancient sage to such perfection that simply to watch him eat his dinner was a liberal education in itself! A vederlo in tavola^ cost ant'ico come era, era una gentilezza. Vespasiano tells a delightful yarn of how one fine day this Niccolo Niccoli, " who was another Socrates or another Cato for continence and virtue," was taking a constitutional round the Palazzo del Podesta, when he chanced to espy a youth of most comely aspect, one who was entirely devoted to worldly pleasures and delights, young Picro Pazzi. Calling him and learn- ing his name, Niccolo proceeded to question him as to his profession. "Having a high old time," answered the ingenuous youth : attendo a darmi huon tempo. '* Being thy father's son and so handsome," said the Sage severely, "it is a shame that thou dost not set thyself to learn the Latin language, v/hich would be a great ornament to thee ; and if thou dost not learn it, thou wilt be esteemed of no account ; yea, when the flower of thy youth is past, thou shalt find thyself without any vir/u." Messer Plero was converted on the spot ; Niccolo straightway found him a master and provided him with books ; and the pleasure-loving youth became a scholar and a patron of scholars. Vespasiano assures us that, if he had lived, /o incon- veniente che seguito — so he euphoniously terms the Pazzi conspiracy — would never have happened. Leonardo Bruni is the nearest approach to a really great figure in the Florentine literary world of the first half of the century. His translations of Plato and Aristotle, especially the former, mark an epoch. His Latin history of Florence shows genuine critical insight ; but he is, perhaps, best known at the present day by his little Life of Dante in Italian, a charming and valuable sketch, which has preserved for us some fragments of Dantesque letters and several bits of 103 The Story of Florence really precious information about the divine poet, which seem to be authentic and which we do not find elsewhere. Leonardo appears to have undertaken it as a kind of holiday task, for recreation after the work of composing his more ponderous history. As Secre- tary of the Republic he exercised considerable political influence ; his fame was so great that people came to Florence only to look at iiim ; on his death in 1444, he was solemnly crowned on the bier as poet laureate, and buried in Santa Croce with stately pomp and applauded funeral orations. Leonardo's successors. Carlo Marsuppini (like him, an Aretine by birth) and Poggio Bracciolini — the one noted for his frank paganism, the other for the foulness of his literary invective — are less attractive figures ; though the latter was no less famous and influential in his day. Gian- nozzo Manetti, who pronounced Bruni's funeral oration, was noted for his eloquence and incorrupti- bility, and stands out prominently amidst the scholars and humanists by virtue of his nobleness of character ; like that other hero of the new learning, Palla Strozzi, he was driven into exile and persecuted by the Mediceans. Far more interesting are the men of light and learning who gathered round Lorenzo dei Medici in the latter half of the century. This is the epoch of the Platonic Academy, which Marsilio Ficino had founded under the auspices of Cosimo. The dis- cussions held in the convent retreat among the forests of Camaldoli, the meetings in the Badia at the foot of Fiesolc, the mystical banquets celebrated in Lorenzo's villa at Careggi in honour of the anniversary of Plato's birth and death, may have added little to the sum of man's philosophic thought ; but the Nco-PIatonic re- ligion of love and beauty, which was there proclaimed to the modern world, has left eternal traces in the 104 The Medici and the Qjiattrocento poetic literature both of Italy and of England. Spenser and Shelley might have sat with the nine guests, whose number honoured the nine Muses, at the famous Platonic banquet at Careggi, of which Marsilio Ficino himself has left us an account in his com- mentary on the Symposium. You may read a later Italian echo of it, when Marsilio Ficino had passed away and his academy was a thing of the past, in the impassioned and rapturous discourse on love and beauty poured forth by Pietro Bembo, at that wonderful day- break which ends the discussions of Urbino's courtiers in Castiglionc's treatise. In a creed that could fmd one formula to cover both the reception of the Stigmata by St Francis and the mystical flights of the Platonic Socrates and Plotinus ; that could unite the Sibyls and Uiotima v/ith the Magdalene and the Virgin Martyrs ; many a perplexed Italian of that epoch might fmd more than temporary rest for his soul. Simultaneously with this new Platonic movement there came a great revival of Italian literature, alike in poetry and in prose ; what Carducci calls // rinas- cimenio della 'o'lta ital'iana nella forma classica. The earlier humanists had scorned, or at least neglected the language of Dante ; and the circle that surrounded Lorenzo v/as undoubtedly instrumental in this Italian reaction. Cristoforo Landini, one of the principal members of the Platonic Academy, now wrote the first Renaissance commentary upon the Divlna Corn- media ; Leo Battista Alberti, also a leader in these Platonic disputations, defended the dignity of the Italian language, as Dante himself had done in an earlier day. Lorenzo himself compiled the so-called Raccolta Aragonese of early Italian lyrics, and sent them to Frederick of Aragon, together with a letter full of enthusiasm for tiie Tuscan tongue, and with critical remarks on the individual poets of the thirteenth I OS The Story of Florence and fourteenth centuries. Upon the i)opular poetry of Tuscany Lorenzo himself, and his favourite Angelo Ambrogini of Montepulciano, better known as Poliziano, founded a new school of Italian song. Luigi Pulci, the gay scoffer and cynical sceptic, entertained the festive gatherings in the Medicean palace with his wild tales, and, in his Morgante Maggiore, was practically the first to work up the popular legends of Orlando and the Paladins into a noteworthy poem — a poem of which Savonarola and his followers were afterwards to burn every copy that fell into their hands. Poliziano is at once the truest classical scholar, and, v/ith the possible exception of Boiardo (who belongs to Ferrara, and does not come within the scope of the present volume), the greatest Italian poet of the fifteenth century. He is, indeed, the last and most perfect fruit of Florentine Humanism. His father, Benedetto Ambrogini, had been murdered in Monte- pulciano by the faction hostile to the Medici ; and the boy Angelo, coming to Florence, and studying under Ficino and his colleagues, was received into Lorenzo's household as tutor to the younger Piero. His lectures at the Studio attracted students from all Europe, and his labours in the field of textual criticism won a fame that has lasted to the present day. In Italian he wi'ote the Orfeo in two days for performance ^^ Mantua, when he was eighteen, a lyrical tragedy which stamps him as the fithcr of Italian dramatic opera ; the scene of the descent of Orpheus into Hades contains lyrical passages of great melodiousness. Shortly before the Pazzi conspiracy, he composed his famous Stan%e in celebration of a tournament given by Giuliano dei Medici, and in honour of the hella Shnonetta. There is absolutely no " fundamental brain work " about these exquisitely finished stanzas ; but they are full of dainty mythological pictures quite in the Botticellian style, 1 06 7 be Medici and the Qjiattrocento overladen, perhaps, with adulation of the reigning house and its hen nato Lauro. In his lyrics he gave artistic form to the nspetti and stramhotti of the people, and wrote exceedingly musical ballate, or can%oni a hallo, which are the best of their kind in the whole range of Italian poetry. There is, however, little genuine passion in his love poems for his lady. Madonna Ippolita Leoncina of Prato ; though in all that he wrote there is, as Villari puts it, "a fineness of taste that was almost Greek." Lorenzo dei Medici stands second to his friend as a poet ; but he is a good second. His early affection for the fair Lucrezia Donati, with its inevitable sonnets and a commentary somewhat in the manner of Dante's Vita Nttovn, is more fanciful than earnest, although Poliziano assures us of *' La lunga fedeUa del franco Lauro." But Lorenzo's intense love of external nature, his power of close observation and graphic description, are more clearly shown in such poems as the Caccia col Falcone and the Amhra, written among the woods and hills in the country round his new villa of Poggio a Caiano. Elsewhere he gives free scope to the animal side of his sensual nature, and in his famous Cant'i carnascialeschty songs to be sung at carnival and in masquerades, he at times revelled in pruriency, less for its own sake than for the deliberate corruption of the Florentines. And, for a time, their music drowned the impassioned voice of Savonarola, whose Btern cry of warning and exhortation to repentance had for the nonce passed unheeded. There is extant a miracle play from Lorenzo's hand, the acts of the martyrs Giovanni and Paolo, who suffered in the days of the emperor Julian. Two sides oi" Tvorenzo's nature are ever in conflict — the Lorenzo 1 07 T!he Story of Florence of the ballate and the carnival songs — the Lorenzo of the laucJe and spiritual poems, many of which have the unmistakable ring of sincerity. And, in the story of his last days and the summoning of Savonarola to his bed-side, the triumph of the man's spiritual side is seen at the end ; he is, indeed, in the position of the dying Julian of his own play : — " Fallace vita ! O nostra vana cura I Lo spirto e gia fuor del mio petto spinto: O Cristo Galileo, tu hai vinto." Such was likewise the attitude of several members of the Mcdicean circle, when the crash came. Poliziano followed his friend and patron to the grave, in Sep- tember 1494; his last hours received the consolations of religion from Savonarola's most devoted follower, Fra Domenico da Pcscia (of whom more anon) ; after death, he was robed in the habit of St Dominic and buried in San Marco. Pico dclla Mirandola, too, had been present at the Magnifico's death-bed, though not there when the end actually came ; he too, in 1494, received the Dominican habit in death, and was buried by Savonarola's friars in San Marco. Marsilio Ficino outlived his friends and denied Fra Girolamo ; he died in 1499, ^"""i ^^^^ ^^ ^^^^ ^" ^'^^ Duomo. Of all these Medicean Platonists, Pico dclla Miran- dola is the most fascinating. A young Lombard noble of almost feminine beauty, full of the pride of having mastered all the knowledge of his day, he first came to Florence in 1480 or 1482, almost at the very moment in which Marsilio Ficino finished his translation of Plato. He became at once the chosen friend of all the choicest spirits of Lorenzo's circle. Not only classical learning, but the mysterious East and the sacred lore of the Jews had rendered up their treasures for his intellectual feast ; his mysticism shot far beyond 108 l^he Medici and the Qjiattrocento even Ficino ; all knowledge and all religions were to him a revelation of the Deity. Not only to Lorenzo and his associates did young Pico seem a phoenix of earthly and celestial wisdom, iiomo quasi divino as Machiavelli puts it ; but even Savonarola in his Tr'iumphus Crucis, written after Pico's death, declares that, by reason of his loftiness of intellect and the sub- limity of his doctrine, he should be numbered amongst the miracles of God and Nature. Pico had been much beloved of many women, and not always a Platonic lover, but, towards the close of his short flower-like life, he burnt "fyve bokes that in his youthe of wanton versis of love with other lyke fantasies he had made," and all else seemed absorbed in the vision of love Divine. " The substance that I have left," he told his nephew, " I intend to give out to ])Oor people, and, fencing myself with the crucifix, barefoot walking about the world, in every town and castle I purpose to preach of Christ." Savonarola, to whom he had confided all the secrets of his heart, was not the only martyr who revered the memory of the man whom Lorenzo the Magnificent had loved. Thomas More translated his life and letters, and reckoned him a saint. He would die at the time of the lilies, so a lady had told Pico ; and he died indeed on the very day that the golden lilies on the royal standard of France were borne into Florence through the Porta San Frediano — consoled with wondrous visions of the Queen of Heaven, and speaking as though he beheld the heavens opened. A month or two earlier, the pen had dropped from the hand of Matteo Maria Boiardo, as he watched the French army descending the Alps ; and he brought his unfinished Orlando Innamoralo to an abrupt close, too sick at heart to sing of the vain love of Fiordespina for Brandiamante ; — 109 The Story of Florence *'Mentre che io canto, o Dio Redentore, Vedo ritalia tutta a fiamma e foco, Per questi Galli, che con gran valore Vengon, per disertar non so che loco." ** Whilst I sing, Oh my God, I see all Italy in flame and flic, through these Gauls, who with great valour come, to lay waste I know not what place." On this note of vague terror, in the onrush of the barbarian hosts, the Quattrocento closes. ARMS OF THE PAZZJ 110 CHAPTER IV From Fra Girolamo to Duke Cosimo " Vcdendo lo omnipotente Dio multiplicare ii peccati della Italia, maxime nelli capi cosi ecclesiastici come seciilaii, non potendo piu sostenere, determino purgare la Chiesa sua per uno gran flagello. Et perche come e scripto in Amos propheta, Non faciet Dominus Deus verbum nisi revelaverit secretum suum ad servos suos prophetas : volse per la salute dcUi suoi electi accio che inanzi al flagello si prepaiassino ad sofferire, che nella Italia questo flagello fussi prenuntiato. Et essendo Firenze in mezzo la Italia come il core in mezzo il corpo, s'e dignato di eleggere questa citta; nella quale siano tale cose prenuntiate : accio che per lei si sparghino negli altri luoghi." — Savonarola. ^LADIUS Domini super terram cito et veiocifer, "the Sword of the Lord upon the earth soon and speedily. '^ These words rang ever in the ears of the Dominican friar who was now to echpse the Medicean rulers of Florence. Girolamo Savonarola, the grandson of a famous Paduan physician who had settled at the court of Ferrara, had entered the order of St Dominic at Bologna in 1474, moved by the great misery of the world and the wickedness of men, and in T481 had been sent to the convent of San Marco at Florence. The corruption of the Church, the vicious lives of her chief pastors, the growing immorality of the people, the tyranny and oppression of their rulers, had entered into his very soul — had found utterance in allegorical poetry, in an ode De Ruina Mund'i, written whilst still in the world, in another, De Ruina Ecclesiaef composed in the silence III The Story of Florence of his Bolognese cloister — that cloister which, in better days, had been hallowed by the presence of St Dominic and the Angelical Doctor, Thomas Aquinas. And he believed himself set by God as a watchman in the centre of Italy, to announce to the people and princes that the sword was to fall upon them: "If the sword come, and thou hast not announced it," said the spirit voice that spoke to him in the silence as the dxmon to Socrates, "and they perish unwarned, I will require their blood at thy hands and thou shalt bear the penalty." But at first the Florentines would not hear him ; the gay dancings and the wild carnival songs of their rulers drowned his voice ; courtly preachers like the Augustinian of Santo Spirito, Fra Mariano da Genna- zano, laid more flattering unction to their souls. Other cities were more ready ; San Gemlgnano first heard the word of prophecy that was soon to resound beneath the dome of Santa Maria del Fiorc, even as, some two hundred years before, she had listened to the speech of Dante Alighieri. At the beginning of 1490, the Friar returned to Florence and San Marco; and, on Sunday, August ist, expounding the Apocalypse in the Church of San Marco, he first set forth to the Florentines the three cardinal points of his doctrine ; first, the Church was to be renovated ; secondly, before this renovation, God would send a great scourge upon all Italy ; thirdly, these things would come speedily. He preached the following Lent in the Duomo ; and thenceforth his great work of reforming Florence, and announcing the impending judgments of God, went on its inspired way. " Go to Lorenzo dei Medici," he said to the five citizens who came to him, at the Magnifico's instigation, to urge him to let the future alone in his sermons, " and bid him do penance for his sins, for God intends to punish him and his " ; and when elected Prior of San 112 Fro77i Fra Girolamo to Duke Cosimo Marco in this same year, 1491, he would neither enter Lorenzo's palace to salute the patron of the convent, nor welcome him when he walked among the friars in the garden. Fra Girolamo was preaching the Lent in San Lorenzo, when the Magnifico died ; and, a few days later, he saw a wondrous vision, as he himself tells us in the Compendium Revelationum. "In 1 492," he says, "while I was preaching the Lent in San Lorenzo at Florence, I saw, on the night of Good Friday, two crosses. First, a black cross in the midst of Rome, whereof the head touched the heaven and the arms stretched forth over all the earth ; and above it were written these words. Crux irae Del. After I had beheld it, suddenly I saw the sky grow dark, and clouds fly through the air ; winds, flashes of lightning and thunderbolts drove across, hail, fire and swords rained down, and slew a vast multitude of folk, so that few remained on the earth. And after this, there came a sky right calm and bright, and I saw another cross, of the same greatness as the first but of gold, rise up over Jerusalem ; the which was so resplendent that it illumined all the world, and filled it all with flowers and joy ; and above it was written. Crux miser I- cordiae Dei. And I saw all generations of men and women come from all parts of the world, to adore it and embrace it." In the following August came the simoniacal election of Rodcrigo Borgia to the Papacy, as Alexander VI. ; and in Advent another vision appeared to the prophet in his cell, which can only be told in Fra Girolamo's own words : — " I saw then in the year 1 492, the night before the last sermon which I gave that Advent in Santa Reparata, a hand in Heaven with a sword, upon the which was written : The sivord of the Lord upon the H 113 The Story of Florence earthy soon and speedily ; and over the hand was written, True and just are the judgments of the Lord, And it seemed that the arm of that hand proceeded from three faces in one hght, of which the first said ; The iniquity of my sanctuary crieth to me from the earth. The second repHed : Therefore nvill I visit ^r//3 di mezzo opposite the Duomo), was assigned by them to Andrea Pisano on January 9th, 1 330; he made the models in the same year, as the inscription on the gate itself shows ; the casting was finished in 1336. Vasari's statement that Giotto furnished the designs for Andrea is now entirely discredited. These gates set before us, in twenty- eight reliefs, twenty scenes from the life of the Baptist with eight symbolical virtues below — all set round with lions* heads. Those who know the work of the earlier Pisan masters, Niccolo and Giovanni, will at once perceive how completely Andrea has freed him- self from the traditions of the school of Pisa ; instead of filling the whole available space with figures on different planes and telling several stories at once, Andrea composes his relief of a few figures on the same plane, and leaves the background free. There are never any unnecessary figures or mere spectators ; the bare essentials of the episode are set before us as simply as possible, whether it be Zacharias writing the name of John or the dance of the daughter of Herodias, which may well be compared with Giotto's frescoes in Santa Croce. Most perfect of all are the eight figures of the Virtues in the eight lower panels, and they should be compared with Giotto's allegories at Padua. We have Hope winged and straining upwards towards a crown. Faith with cross and sacra- mental cup, Charity and Prudence, above ; Fortitude, Temperance and Justice below; and then, to complete the eight, Dante's favourite virtue, the maiden Humi- lity. The Temperance, with Giotto and Andrea Pisano, is not the mere opposite of Gluttony, with pitcher of water and cup (as we may see her presently in Santa Maria Novella) ; but it is the cardinal virtue which, St. Thomas says, includes " any virtue what- *54 The Baptistery soever that puts in practice moderation in any matter, and restrains appetite in its tendency in any direction." Andrea Pisano's Temperance sits next to his Justice, with the sword and scales ; she too has a sword, even as Justice has, but she is either sheathing it or drawing it with reluctance. The lovely and luxuriant decorative frieze that runs round this portal was executed by Ghiberti's pupils in the middle of the fifteenth century. Over the gate is the beheading of St. John the Baptist — two second-rate figures by Vincenzo Danti. The second or northern gate is more than three- quarters of a century later, and it is the result of that famous competition which opened the Quattrocento. It was assigned to Lorenzo Ghiberti in 14C3, and he had with him his stepfather Bartolo di Michele, and other assistants (including possibly Donatello). It was finished and set up gilded in April 1424, at the main entry between the two porphyry columns, opposite the Duomo, whence Andrea's gate was removed. It will be observed that each new gate was first put in this place of honour, and then translated to make room for its better. The plan of Ghiberti's is similar to that of Andrea's gate — in fact it is his style 01 work brought to its ultimate perfection. Twenty- eight reliefs represent scenes from the New Testament, from the Annunciation to the Descent of the Holy Spirit, while in eight lower compartments are the four Evangelists and the four great Latin Doctors. The scene of the Temptation of the Saviour is particularly striking, and the figure of the Evangelist John, the Eagle of Christ, has the utmost grandeur. Over the door are three finely modelled figures representing St. John the Baptist disputing with a Levite and a Pharisee—or, perhaps, the Baptist between two Pro- phets — by Giovanni Francesco Rustici (i 506-151 1), 255 The Story of Florence a pupil of Verrocchlo's, who appears to have been influenced by Leonardo da Vinci. But in the third or eastern gate, opposite the Duomo, Ghiberti was to crown the whole achieve- ment of his life. Mr Perkins remarks : " Had he never lived to make the second gates, which to the world in general are far superior to the first, he would have been known in history as a continuator of the school of Andrea Pisano, enriched with all those added graces which belonged to his ov/n style, and those refinements of technique which the progress made in bronze casting had rendered perfect." ^ In the meantime the laws of perspective had been under- stood, and their science set forth by Brunelleschi ; and when Ghiberti, on the completion of his first gates, was in January 142 5 invited by the consuls of the Guild (amongst whom was the great anti-Medicean politician, Niccolo da Uzzano) to model the third doors, he was full of this new knowledge. ** I strove," he says in his commentaries, "to imitate nature to the uttermost." The subjects were selected for him by Leonardo Bruni — ten stories from the Old Testament which, says Leonardo in his letter to Niccolo da Uzzano and his colleagues, " should have tv/o things : first and chiefly, they must be illustrious ; and secondly, they must be significant. Illustrious, I call those which can satisfy the eye with variety of design ; significant, those which have importance worthy of memory." For the rest, their main in- structions to him were that he should make the whole the richest, most perfect and most beauteous work imaginable, regardless of time and cost. The work took more than twenty-five years. The stories were all modelled in wax by 1440, when the 1 By these " second gates " are of course meant Ghiberti's second gates ; in reality the " third gates " of the Baptistery. 256 The Baptistery casting of the bronze was begun ; the whole was finished in 1447, gilded in 1452 — the gilding has happily worn off from all the gates — and finally set up in June 1452, in the place where Ghiberti's other gate had been. Among his numerous assistants were again his stepfather Bartolo, his son Vittorio, and, among the less important, the painters Paolo Uccello and Benozzo Gozzoli. The result is a series of most magnificent pictures in bronze. Ghiberti worked upon his reliefs like a painter, and lavished all the newly-discovered scientific resources of the painter's art upon them. Whether legitimate sculpture or not, it is, beyond a doubt, one of the most beautiful things in the world. "I sought to understand,'* he says in his second commentary, that book which excited Vasari's scorn, " how forms strike upon the ej^e, and how the theoretic part of graphic and pictorial art should be managed. Working with the utmost diligence and care, I intro- duced into some of my compositions as many as a hundred figures, which I modelled upon different planes, so that those nearest the eye might appear larger, and those more remote smaller in proportion." It is a triumph of science wedded to the most ex- quisite sense of beauty. Each of the ten bas-reliefs contains several motives and an enormous number of these figures on different planes ; which is, in a sense, going back from the simplicity of Andrea Pisano to glorify the old manner of Niccolo and Giovanni. In the first, the creation of man, the creation of woman, and the expulsion from Eden are seen ; in the second, the sacrifice of Abel, in which the ploughing of Cain's oxen especially pleased Vasari ; in the third, the story of Noah ; in the fourth, the story of Abraham, a return to the theme in which Ghiberti had won his first laurels, — the three Angels appearing to Abraham R 257 ^the Story of Florence have Incomparable grace and loveliness, and the land- scape in bronze is a marvel of skill. In the fifth and sixth, we have the stories of Jacob and Joseph, re- spectively ; in the seventh and eighth, of Moses and Joshua ; in the ninth and tenth, of David and Solo- mon. The latter is supposed to have been imitated by Raphael, in his famous fresco of the School of Athens in the Vatican. The architectural back- grounds — dream palaces endowed with permanent life in bronze — ^are as marvellous as the figures and landscapes. Hardly less beautiful are the minor ornaments that surround these masterpieces, — the wonderful decorative frieze of fruits and birds and beasts that frames the whole, the statuettes alternating with busts in the double border round the bas-reliefs. It is the ultimate perfection of decorative art. Among the statuettes a figure of Miriam, recalling an Angel of Angelico, is of peculiar loveliness. In the middle of the whole, in the centre at the lower corners of the Jacob and Joseph respectively, are portrait busts of Lorenzo Ghiberti himself and Bartolo di Michele. Vasari has said the last word : — " And in very truth can it be said that this work hath its perfection in all things, and that it is the most beautiful work of the world, or that ever was seen amongst ancients or moderns. And verily ought Lorenzo to be truly praised, seeing that one day Michelangelo Buonarroti, when he stopped to look at this work, being asked what he thought of it and if these gates were beautiful, replied : * They are so beautiful that they would do well for the Gates of Paradise.* Praise verily proper, and spoken by one who could judge them." The Baptism of Christ over the portal is an un- attractive work by Andrea Sansovino (circa 1505), 258 ^be Baptistery finished by Vincenzo Danti. The Angel is a seven- teenth century addition. More interesting far, are the scorched porphyry columns on either side of the gate ; these were part of the booty carried off by the Pisan galleys from Majorca in 1117, and presented to the Florentines in gratitude for their having guarded Pisa during the absence of the troops. Villani says that the Pisans offered their allies the choice between these porphyry columns and some metal gates, and that, on their choosing the columns, they sent them to Florence covered with scarlet, but that some said that they scorched them first for envy. It was be- tween these columns that Cavalcanti was lingering and musing when the gay cavalcade of Betto Brunel- leschi and his friends, in Boccaccio's novel, swooped down upon him through the Piazza di Santa Reparata: "Thou, Guido, wilt none of our fellow- ship ; but lo now ! when thou shalt have found that there is no God, what wilt thou have done ? '* From the gate which might have stood at the doors of Paradise, or at least have guarded that sacred threshold by which Virgil and Dante entered Purgatory, we cross to the tower which might fittingly have sounded tierce and nones to the valley of the Princes. This " Shepherd's Tower," accord- ing to Ruskin, is "the model and mirror of perfect architecture." The characteristics of Power and Beauty, he writes in the Seven Lamps of Architecture, *' occur more or less in different buildings, some in one and some in another. But all together, and all in their highest possible relative degrees, they exist, as far as I know, only in one building in the world, the Campanile of Giotto." Like Ghiberti's bronze gates, this exquisitely lovely tower of marble has beauty beyond words : " That bright, smooth, sunny surface of glowing jasper, those 259 The Story of Florence spiral shafts and fairy traceries, so white, so faint, so crystalHne, that iheir shght shapes are hardly traced in darkness on the pallor of the eastern sky, that serene height of mountain alabaster, coloured like a morning cloud, and chased like a sea-shell. '* It was com- menced by Giotto himself in 1334, when the first stone was solemnly laid. When Giotto died in 1336, the work had probably not risen above the stage of the lower series of reliefs. Andrea Pisano was chosen to succeed him, and he carried it on from ^337 ^o '342> finishing the first story and bringing it up to the first of the three stories of windows ; it will be observed that Andrea, who was primarily a sculptor, unlike Giotto, made provision for the pre- sence of large monumental statues as well as reliefs in his decorative scheme. Through some misunder- standing, Andrea was then deprived of the work, which was intrusted to Francesco Talenti. Fran- cesco Talenti carried it on until 1387, making a general modification in the architecture and decora- tion ; the three most beautiful windows, increasing in size as we ascend, with their beautiful Gothic tracery, are his work. According to Giotto's original plan, the whole was to have been crowned v/ith a pyramidical steeple or spire ; Vasari says that it was abandoned "because it was a German thing, and of antiquated fashion." All around the base of the tower runs a wonderful series of bas-rehefs on a very small scale, setting forth the whole history of human skill under divine guid- ance, from the creation of man to the reign of art, science, and letters, in twentj^-seven exquisitely "inlaid jewels of Giotto's." At each corner of the tower are three shields, the red Cross of the People between the red lilies of the Commune. " This smallness of scale," says Ruskin of these reliefs 260 The Campanile "enabled the master workmen of the tower to execute them with their own hands ; and for the rest, in the very finest architecture, the decoration of the most precious kind is usually thought of as a jewel, and set with space round it — as the jewels of a crown, or the clasp of a girdle." These twenty -seven subjects, with the possible exception of the last five on the northern side, were designed by Giotto himself; and are, together with the first bronze door, the greatest Florentine work in sculpture of the first half of the fourteenth century. The execution is, in the main, Andrea Pisano's ; but there is a constant tradition that some of the reliefs are from Giotto's own hand. Antonio Pucci, in the eighty-fifth canto of his Centiloquioj distinctly states that Giotto carved the earlier ones, i prlmi intagl't fe con hello stile ^ and Pucci was almost Giotto's contemporary. ** Pastoral life," "Jubal," "Tubal Cain," "Sculpture," "Painting," are the special subjects which it is most plausible, or perhaps most attractive, to ascribe to him. On the western side we have the creation of Man, the creation of Woman ; and then, thirdly, Adam and Eve toiling, or you may call it the dignity of labour, if you will — Giotto's rendering of the thought which John Ball was to give deadly meaning to, or ever the fourteenth century closed — When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman i Then come pastoral life, Jabal with his tent, his flock and dog ; Jubal, the maker of stringed and wind instruments ; Tubal Cain, the first worker in metal \ the first vintage, represented by the story of Noah. On the southern side comes first Astronomy, repre- sented by either Zoroaster or Ptolemy. Then follow Building, Pottery, Riding, Weaving, and (according a6i The Story of Florence to Ruskin) the Giving of Law. Lastly Daedalus, symbolising, according to Ruskin, " the conquest of the element of air " ; or, more probably, here as in Dante (Paradiso viii.), the typical mechanician. Next, on the eastern side, comes Rowing, symbol- ising, according to Ruskin, *' the conquest of the sea " — very possibly intended for Jason and the Argo, a type adopted in several places by Dante. The next relief, " the conquest of the earth," pro- bably represents the slaying of Antasus by Hercules, and symbolises the " beneficent strength of civilisation, crushing the savageness of inhumanity.'' Giotto uses his mythology much as Dante does — as something only a little less sacred, and of barely less authority than theology — and the conquest of Antaeus by Hercules was a solemn subject with Dante too ; besides a reference in the Inferno, he mentions it twice in the De Monarchia as a special revelation of God's judg- ment by way of ordeal, and touches upon it again in the Convivio, secondo le testimonianze delle scrltture. Here Hercules immediately follows the " conquest of the sea," as having, by his columns, set sacred limits to warn men that they must pass no further {^Inferno xxvi.). Brutality be.ng thus overthrown, we are shown agriculture and trade, — represented by a splendid team of ploughing bulls and a horse-chariot, respectively. Then, over the door of the tower, the Lamb with the symbol of Resurrection, perhaps, as Ruskin thinks, to *' express the law of Sacrifice and door of ascent to Heaven " ; or, perhaps, merely as being the emblem of the great Guild of wool merchants, the Arte della Lana, who had charge of the cathedral works. Then follow the representations of the arts, commencing with the relief at the corner : Geometry, regarded as the foundation of the others to follow, as being senza maatla d^errore r certtssima. Turning 26a The Campajiile the corner, the first and second, on the northern side, represent Sculpture and Painting, and were possibly carved by Giotto himself. The remaining five are all later, and from the hand of Luca della Robbia, who perhaps worked from designs left by Giotto — Grammar, which may be taken to represent Literature in general, Arithmetic, the science of numbers (in its great medi- aeval sense). Dialectics; closing with Music, in some respects the most beautiful of the series, symbolised in Orpheus charming beasts and birds by his strains, and Harmony. "Harmony of song,'' writes Ruskin, "in the full power of it, meaning perfect education in all art of the Muses and of civilised life; the mystery of its concord is taken for the symbol of that of a perfect state; one day, doubtless, of the perfect world." Above this fundamental series of bas-reliefs, there runs a second series of four groups of seven. They were probably executed by pupils of Andrea Pisano, and are altogether inferior to those below — the seven Sacraments on the northern side being the best. Above are a series of heroic statues in marble. Of these the oldest are those less easily visible, on the north opposite the Duonio, representing David and Solomon, with two Sibyls ; M. Reymond ascribes them to Andrea Pisano. Those opposite the Misericordia are also of the four- teenth century. On the east are Habakkuk and Abra- ham, by Donatello (the latter in part by a pupil), between two Patriarchs probably by Niccolo d'Arezzo, the chief sculptor of the Florentine school at the end of the Trecento. Three of the four statues opposite the Baptistery are by Donatello ; figures of marvellous strength and vigour. It is quite uncertain whom they are intended to represent (the ** Solomon" and " David," below the two in the centre, refer to the older statues which once stood here), but the two younger are said to be the Baptist and Jeremiah. The 261 The Story of Florence •headed prophet, irreverently called the Zuccone d-head," is one of Donatello's masterpieces, 'm% old bald. 01- "Bald and is said to have been the sculptor*s own favourite creation. Vasari tells us that, while working upon it, Donatello used to bid it talk to him, and, when he wanted to be particularly believed, he used to swear by it : " By the faith that I bear to my Zuccone." At the end of the Via Calzaioli, op- posite the Baptistery, is that little Gothic gem, the Loggia called the Blgallo, erected between 1352 and 1358, for the ** Captains of Our Lady of Mercy," while Orcagna was rear- ing his more gorge- ous tabernacle for the ^'Captains of Our Lady of Or San Michele." Its architect is un- his manner resembles Orcagna's, to whom the work has been erroneously ascribed. The Madonna is by Alberto Arnoldi (1361). The Bigallo was in- tended for the public functions of charity of the found- ling hospital, which was founded under the auspices of the Confraternity of the Misericordia, whose oratory is on the other side of the way. These Brothers of Mercy, in their mysterious black robes hiding their 264 THE BIGALLO known The Campanile faces, are familiar enough even to tlie most casual visitor to Florence ; and their work of succour to the sick and injured has gone on uninterruptedly throughout the whole of Florentine history. In the last decade of the thirteenth century, when the People and Commune of Florence were in an un- usually peaceful state, after the tumults caused by the reforms and expulsion of Giano della Bella had sub- sided, the nev/ Cathedral was commenced on the site of the older church of Santa Reparata. The first stones and foundations were blessed with great solemnity in 1296 ; and, in this golden age of the democracy, the work proceeded apace, until in a document of April 1299, concerning the exemption of Arnolfo di Cambio from all taxation, it is stated that **by reason of his industry, experience and genius, the Commune and People of Florence from the magnificent and visible beginning of the said work of the said church, com- menced by the same Master Arnolphus, hope to have a more beautiful and more honourable temple than any other which there is in the regions of Tuscany." But although the original design and beginning were undoubtedly Arnolfo's, the troublous times that fell upon Florence appear to have interrupted the work ; and it was almost abandoned for lack of funds until 1334, v/hen Giotto was appointed capo-maestro of the Commune and of the work of Santa Reparata, as it was still called. The Cathedral was now in charge of the Arte della Lana, as the Baptistery was in that of the Arte di Calimala. It is not precisely known what Giotto did with it ; but the work languished again after his death, until Francesco Talenti was appointed capo-maestro, and, in July 1357, the foundations were laid of the present church of Santa Maria del Fiore, on a larger and more magnificent scale. Arnolfo's 26; T*he Story of Florence work appears to have been partly destroyed, partly enlarged and extended. Other capo-maestri carried on what Francesco Talenti had commenced, until, in 1378, just at the end of mediaeval Florence, the fourth and last great vault was closed, and the main work finished. The completion of the Cathedral belongs to that in- termediate epoch which saw the decline of the great democracy and the dawn of the Renaissance, and ran from 1378 to 1 42 1, in which latter year the third tribune was finished. Filippo Brunelleschi's dome or cupola, raised upon a frieze or drum high above the three great semi-domes, with a large window in each of the eight sides, was commenced in 1420 and finished in 1434, the year which witnessed the establishment of the Medicean regime in Florence. Vasari waxes most enthusiastic over this work. ** Heaven willed,'' he writes, " after the earth had been for so many years without an excellent soul or a divine spirit, that Filippo should leave to the world from himself the greatest, the most lofty and the most beauteous construction of all others made in the time of the moderns and even in that of the ancients." And Michelangelo imitated it in St Peter's at Rome, turning back, as he rode away from Florence, to gaze upon Filippo's work, and de- claring that he could not do anything more beautiful. Some modern writers have passed a very different judgment. Fergusson says : — " The plain, heavy, simple outlined dome of Brunelleschi acts like an extinguisher, crushing all the lower part of the com- position, and both internally and externally destroy- ing all harmony between the parts." Brunelleschi also designed the Lantern, which was commenced shortly before his death (1446) and finished in 1461. The palla or ball, which crowns the whole, was added by Andrea Verrocchio. In the fresco in the Spanish 266 '[;•;; '-^j^ j^r^^SS^^ In The Duomo Chapel of Santa Maria Novella, you shall see the Catholic Church symbolised by the earlier church of Santa Reparata ; and, as the fresco was executed before the middle of the fourteenth century, it apparently represents the designs of Arnolfo and Giotto. Vasari, indeed, states that it was taken from Arnolfo's model in wood. *'From this painting," he says, "it is obvious that Arnolfo had proposed to raise the dome immedi- ately over the piers and above the first cornice, at that point namely where Filippo di Ser Brunellesco, de- siring to render the building less heavy, interposed the whole space wherein we now see the windows, before adding the dome." ^ The Duomo has had three facades. Of the first facade, the fagade of Arnolfo's church before 1357, only two statues remain which probably formed part of it; one of Boniface VITI. within the Cathedral, of which more presently, and a statue of a Bishop in the sacristy. The second facade, commenced in 1357, and still in progress in 1420, was left unfinished, and bar- barously destroyed towards the end of the sixteenth century. A fresco by Poccetti in the first cloister of San Marco, the fifth to the right of the entrance, re- presenting the entrance of St. Antoninus into Florence to take possession of his see, shows this second fa9ade. Some of the statues that once decorated it still exist. The Boniface reappeared upon it from the first fagade, between St. Peter and St. Paul ; over the principal gate was Our Lady of the Flower herself, presenting her Child to give His blessing to the Florentines — and this is still preserved in the Opera del Duomo — by an un- *" There is only one point from which the size of the Cathedral of Florence is felt ; and that is from the corner of the Via de' Balestrieri, opposite the south-east angle, where it happens that the dome is seen rising instantly above the apse and transepts " (Seven Lamps). 269 The Story of Florence known artist of the latter half of the fourteenth cen- tury; she was formerly attended by Zcnobius and Reparata, while Angels held a canopy over her — these are lost. Four Doctors of the Church, now mutilated and trans- formed into poets, arc still to be seen on the way to Poggio Imperiale — by Niccolo d'Arezzo and Piero di Giovanni Tedesco (1396); some Apostles, probably bj the latter, and very fine works, are in the court of the Riccardi Palace. The last statues made for the fa9ade, the four Evangelists, of the first fifteen years of the Quattrocento, are now within the present church, in the chapels of the Tribune of St. ) Zenobius. There is a curious tradition that Donatello placed Fari- nata degli Uberti on the facade ; and few men would have deserved the :c:;^:^i:::ri:;!:!;i honour better. After the sixteenth century the STATUE OF BONIFACE vHi. fa9ade remained a de- 270 The Duomo fiolate waste down to our own times. The present facade, gorgeous but admirable in its way, was de- signed by De Fabris, and finished between 1875 and 1887; the first stone was laid by Victor Emmanuel in i860. Thus has the United Italy of to-day completed the work of the great Republic of the Middle Ages. The four side gates of the Duomo are among the chief artistic monuments of Florentine sculpture in the epoch that intervened between the setting of Andrea Pisano and Orcagna, and the rising of Dona- tello and Ghiberti. Nearer the facade, south and north, the two plainer and earlier portals are always closed ; the two more ornate and later, the gate of the canons on the south and the gate of the Mandorla on the north, are the ordinary entrances into the aisles of the catheral. Earliest of the four is the minor southern portal near the Campanile, over which the pigeons cluster and coo. Our Lady of the Pigeons, in the tympanum, is an excellent work of the school of Nino Pisano (Andrea's son), rather later than the middle of the Trecento. The northern minor portal is similar in style, with sculpture subordinated to polychromatic decoration, but with beautiful twisted columns, of which the two outermost rest upon grand mediaeval lions, who are helped to bear them by delicious little winged putti. Third in order of construction comes the chief southern portal, the Porta dei Canonici, belonging to the last decade of the fourteenth century. The pilasters are richly decorated with sculptured foliage and figures of animals in the intervals between the leaves. In the tympanum above, the Madonna and Child with two adoring Angels — statues of great grace and beauty — are by Lorenzo di Giovanni d'Ambrogio, 1402. Above are Angels bearing a tondo of the Pieta. 271 The Story of Florence The Porta della Mandorla is one of the most perfect examples of Florentine decorative sculpture that exists. M. Reymond calls it *' le produit le plus pur du genie ilorentin dans toute I'independancc de sa pensee." It was commenced by Giovanni di Ambrogio, the chief master of the canons' gate ; and finished by Niccolo da Arezzo, in the early years of the fifteenth century. The decorations of its pilasters, with nude figures amidst the conventional foliage between the angels with their wings and scrolls, are already almost in the spirit of the Renaissance. The mosaic over the door, representing the Annun- ciation, was executed by Domenico Ghirlandaio in 1490. "Amongst modern masters of mosaic," says Vasari, "nothing has yet been seen better than this. Domenico was wont to say that painting is mere design, and that the true painting for eternity is mosaic." The two small statues of Prophets are the earliest works of Donatello, 1405-1406. Above is the famous relief which crowns the whole, and from which the door takes its name — the glorified Madonna of the Mandorla. Formerly ascribed to Jacopo della Quercia, it is now recognised as the work of Nanni di Banco, whose father Antonio collaborated with Niccolo da Arezzo on the door. It represents the Madonna borne up in the Mandorla surrounded by Angels, three of whom above are hymning her triumph. With a singularly sweet yet majestic maternal gesture, she consigns her girdle to the kneeling Thomas on the left ; on the right among the rocks, a bear is either shaking or climbing a tree. This work, ex- ecuted slightly before 1420, is the best example of the noble manner of the fourteenth century united to the technical mastery of the fifteenth. Though matured late, it is the most perfect fruit of the school of Orcagna. Nanni died before it was quite com- 272 The Duomo pleted. The precise symbolism of the bear is not easy to determine ; it occurs also in Andrea Pisano's relief of Adam and Eve labouring, on the Campanile. According to St. Buonaventura, the bear is an emblem of Lust ; according to the Bestiaries, of Violence. The probability is that here it merely represents the evil one, symbolising the Fall in the Adam and Eve relief, and now Implying that Mary healed the wound that Eve had dealt the human race — la p'laga chc Maria richiuse ed unse. The interior is somewhat bare, and the aisles and vaults arc so proportioned and constructed as to destroy much of the effect of the vast size both of the whole and of the parts. The nave and aisles lead to a great octagonal space beneath the dome, where the choir is placed, extending into three polygonal apses, those to right and left representing the tran- septs. Over the central door is a fine but restored mosaic, the Coronation of the Madonna, by Giotto's friend and contemporary, Gaddo Gaddi, which is highly praised by Vasari. On either side stand two great equestrian portraits in fresco of condotticri, who served the Republic in critical times ; by Andrea del Castagno is Niccolo da Tolentino, who fought in the Florentine pay with average success and more than average fidelity, and died in 143 5, a prisoner in the hands of Filippo Maria Visconti ; by Paolo Uccello is Giovanni Aguto, or John Hawk wood, a greater captain, but of more dubious character, who died in 1394. Let it stand to Hawkwood's credit that St Catherine of Siena once wrote to him, cartsslmo e dolcisshno fratello in Crista Gesii. By the side of the entrance is the famous statue, mutilated but extraordina?ily im- pressive, of Boniface VIIL, ascribed by Vasari to Andrea Pisano, but which is certainly earlier, and s 273 The Story of Florence may possibly, according to M. Reymond, be assigned to Arnolfo di Cambio himself. It represents the terrible Pontiff in the flower of his age ; hardly a por- trait, but an idealised rendering of a Papal politician, a papa re of the Middle Ages. Even 80 might he have looked when he received Dante and his fellow- ambassadors alone, and addressed to them the words recorded by Dino Compagni : " Why are ye so obstinate ? Humble yourselves before me. I tell you in very truth that I have no other intention, save for your peace. Let two of you go back, and they shall have my benediction if they bring it about that my will be obeyed." As though in contrast with this worldly Pope, on the first pillars in the aisles are pictures of two ideal pastors ; on the left, St Zenobius enthroned with Eugenius and Crescentius, by a painter of the school of Orcagna ; on the right, a sixteenth century picture, by Francesco da Poppi, of St. Antoninus giving his blessing. In the middle of the nave, is the original resting-place of the body of Zenobius ; here the pic- turesque blessing of the roses takes place on his feast- day. The right and left aisles contain some striking statues and interesting monuments. First on the right is a statue of a Prophet (sometimes called Joshua), an early Donatello, said to be the portrait of Gian- nozzo Manetti, between the monuments of Brunei- leschi and Giotto ; the bust of the latter is by Bene- detto da Maiano, and the inscription by Poliziano. Opposite these, in the left aisle, is a most life-like and realistic statue of a Prophet by Donatello, said to be the portrait of Poggio Bracciolini, between modem medallions of De Fabris and Arnolfo. Further on, on the right, are Hezckiah by Nanni di Banco, and a fine portrait bust of Marsilio Ficino by Andrea Ferrucci (152c) — the mystic dreamer caught in a rare 274 The Duomo moment of inspiration, as on that wonderful day when he closed his finished Plato, and saw young Pico della Mirandola before him. Opposite them, on the left, are David by Ciuffagni, and a bust of the musician Squarcialupi by Benedetto da Maiano. On the last pillars of the nave, right and left, stand later statues of the Apostles — St Matthew by Vincenzo de' Rossi, and St James by Jacopo Sansovino. Under Brunelleschi's vast dome — the effect of which is terribly marred by miserable frescoes by Vasari and Zuccheri — are the choir and the high altar. The stained glass in the windows in the drum is from designs of Ghiberti, Donatello (the Coronation), and Paolo Uccello. Behind the high altar is one of the most solemn and pathetic works of art in existence — Michelangelo^s last effort in sculpture, the unfinished Deposition from the Cross; "the strange spectral wreath of the Florence Pieta, casting its pyramidal, distorted shadow, full of pain and death, among the faint purple lights that cross and perish under the obscure dome of Santa Maria del Fiore." i It is a group of four figures more than life-size ; the body of Christ is received in the arms of His mother, who sustains Him with the aid of St Mary Magdalene and the standing Nicodemus, v/ho bends over the group at the back with a countenance full of unutterable love and sorrow. Although, in a fit of impatience, Michel- angelo damaged the work and allowed it to be patched up by others, he had intended it for his own sepulchre, and there is no doubt that the Nicodemus — whose features to some extent are modelled from his own — represents his own attitude as death approached. His sonnet to Giorgio Vasari is an expression of the same temper, and the most precious commentary upon his work :— 1 Modern Painters, vol. ii. " Of Imagination Penetrative." 275 The Story of Florence Now hath my life across a stormy sea. Like a frail bark reached that wide port where all Are bidden, ere the final reckoning fall Of good and evil for eternity. Now know I well how that fond phantasy, Which made my soul the worshipper and thrall Of earthly art, is vain ; how criminal Is that which all men seek unwillingly. Those amorous thoughts which were so lightly dressed, What are they wlien the double death is nigh ? The one I know for sure, the other dread. Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest My soul that turns to His great Love on high, Whose arms, to clasp us, on the Cross were spread. (^Addington Syvionds* translation.^ The apse at the cast end, orTribuna di San Zenobio, ends in the altar of the Blessed Sacrament, which is also the shrine of Saint Zenobius. The reliquary which contains his remains is the work of Lorenzo Ghiberti, and was finished in 1446 ; the bronze reliefs set forth his principal miracles, and there is a most exquisite group of those flying Angels which Ghiberti realises so wonder- fully. Some of the glass in the windows is also from his design. The seated statues in the four chapels, representing the four Evangelists, were originally on the fa9ade ; the St. Luke, by Nanni di Banco, in the first chapel on the right, is the best of the four ; then follow St. John, a very early Donatello, and, on the other side, St. Matthew by CiufFagni and St. Mark by Niccolo da Arezzo (slightly earlier than the others). [These four statues have recently been removed to the aisles.]] The two Apostles standing on guard at the entrance of the tribune, St. John and St. Peter, are by Benedetto da Rovezzano. Over the door of the southern sacristy is a very beautiful bas-relief by Luca della Robbia, representing the Ascension (1446), like a Fra Angelico in enamelled terracotta ; within the sacristy are two kneeling Angels also by Luca (1448), 276 The Duomo practically his only isolated statues, of the greatest beauty and harmony ; and also a rather IndifFerent St. Michael, a late work of Lorenzo di Credl. Over the door of the nortliern sacristy is the Resurrection by Luca della Robbia (1443), perhaps his earliest extant work in this enamelled terracotta. The bronze doors of this northern sacristy are by Michelozzo and Luca della Robbia, assisted by Maso and Giovanni di Barto- lommeo, and were executed between 1446 and 1467. They are composed of ten reliefs with decorative heads at the corners of each, as in Lorenzo Ghiberti's work : above, the Madonna and Child with two Angels ; the Baptist with two Angels ; in the centre the four Evan- gelists, each with two Angels ; and below, the four Doctors, each with two Angels. M. Reymond has shown that the four latter are the work of Michelozzo. Of Luca's work, the four Evangelists are later than the two topmost reliefs, and are most beautiful ; the Angels are especially lovely, and there are admirable decorative heads between. Within, are some charac- teristic putti by Donatello. The side apses, which represent the right and left transepts, guarded by sixteenth century Apostles, and with frescoed Saints and Prophets in the chapels by Bicci di Lorenzo, are quite uninteresting. By the door that leads out of the northern aisle into the street, is a wonderful picture, painted in honour of Dante by order of the State in 1465, by Domenico di MIchelino, a pupil of Fra Angelico, whose works, with this exception, are hardly identified. At the time that this was painted, the authentic portrait of Dante still existed in the (now lost) fresco at Santa Croce, so we may take this as a fairly probable like- ness ; it is, at the same time, one of the earliest efforts to give pictorial treatment to the Purgatorio, Outside the gates of Florence stands Dante in spirit, clothed 277 The Story of Florence in the simple red robe of a Florentine citizen, and wearing the laurel wreath which was denied to him in lite ; in his left hand he holds the open volume of the Divina Commedia, from which rays of burning light proceed and illumine all the city. But it is not the mediaeval Florence that the divine singer had known, which his ghost now revisits, bat the Florence of the Quattrocento — with the completed Cathedral and the cupola of Brunelleschi rising over it, with the Cam- panile and the great tower of the Palazzo della Signoria completed — the Florence which has just lost Cosimo dei Medici, Pater Patriae, and may need fresh guid- ance, now that great mutations are at hand in Italy. With his right hand he indicates the gate of Hell and its antechamber; but it is not the torments of its true inmates that he would bid the Florentines mark, but the shameful and degrading lot of the cowards and neutrals, the trimmers, who would follow no standard upon earth, and are now rejected by Heaven and Hell alike ; " the crew of caitiffs hateful to God and to his enemies," who now are compelled, goaded on by hornets and wasps, to rush for ever after a devil- carried ensign, " which whirling ran so quickly that it seemed to scorn all pause." Behind, among the rocks and precipices of Hell, the monstrous fiends of schism, treason and anarchy glare through the gate, preparing to sweep down upon the City of the Lily, if she heeds not the lesson. In the centre of the picture, in the distance, the Mountain of Purgation rises over the shore of the lonely ocean, on the little island where rushes alone grow above the soft mud. The Angel at the gate, seated upon the rock of diamond, above the three steps of contrition, confession, and satisfaction, marks the brows of the penitent souls with his dazzling eword, and admits them into the terraces of the mountain, where Pride, Anger, Envy, Sloth, Avarice, 278 The Duo77io Gluttony, and Lust (the latter, in the purifying fire of the seventh terrace, merely indicated by the flames on the right) are purged away. On the top of the mountain Adam and Eve stand in the Earthly Para- dise, which symbolises blessedness of this life, the end to which an ideal ruler is to lead the human race, and the state of innocence to which the purgatorial pains restore man. Above and around sweep the spheres of the planets, the lower moving heavens, from which the angelic influences are poured down upon the Universe beneath their sway. Thirteen years after this picture was painted, the Duomo saw Giuliano dei Medici fall beneath the daggers of the Pazzi and their confederates on Sunday, April 26th, 1478. The bell that rang for the Eleva- tion of the Host was the signal. Giuliano had been moving round about the choir, and was standing not far from the picture of Dante, when Bernardo Baroncelli and Francesco Pazzi struck the first blows. Lorenzo, who was on the opposite side of the choir, teat off his assailants with his sword and then fled across into the northern sacristy, through the bronze gates of Michel- ozzo and Luca della Robbia, which Poliziano and the Cavalcanti now closed against the conspirators. The boy cardinal, Rafl^aello Sansoni, whose visit to the Medicean brothers had furnished the Pazzi with their chance, fled in abject terror into the other sacristy. Fran- cesco Nori, a faithful friend of the Medici, was murdered by Baroncelli in defending his masters' lives ; he is very probably the bare-headed figure kneeling behind Giuliano in Botticelli's Adoration of the Magi in the Uflizi.^ ^ The Duomo has fairer memories of the Pazzi, than this deed of blood and treachery. Their ancestor at the Crusades had carried the sacred fire from Jerusalem to Florence, and still, on Easter Eve, an artificial dove sent from the high altar lights the car of fireworks in the Piazza — the Carro dei Pazzi —in front of the church, in honour of their name. 279 7he Story of Florence But of all the scenes that have passed beneath Brunelleschi's cupola, the most in accordance with the spirit of Dante's picture are those connected with Savonarola. It was here that his most famous and most terrible sermons were delivered ; here, on that fateful September morning v/hen the French host was sweeping down through Italy, he gazed in silence upon the expectant multitude that thronged the build- ing, and then, stretching forth his hands, cried aloud in a terrible voice the ominous text of Genesis : " Behold I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth ;" and here, too, the fatal riot commenced which ended with the storming of the convent. And here, in a gentler vein, the children of Florence were wont to await the coming of their father and prophet. " The children," writes Simone Filipepi, " were placed all together upon certain steps made on purpose for them, and there were about three thousand of them ; they came an hour or two before the sermon ; and, in the meanwhile, some read psalms and others said the rosary, and often choir by choir they sang lauds and psalms most devoutly ; and when the Father appeared, to mount up into the pulpit, the said children sang the jive Marts Stella, and likewise the people answered back, in such wise that all that time, from early morn- ing even to the end of the sermon, one seemed to be verily in Paradise." The Opera del Duomo or Cathedral Museum con- tains, besides several works of minor importance (including the Madonna from the second facade), three of the great achievements of Florentine sculpture during the fifteenth century ; the two cantorle, or organ galleries, of Donatello and Luca della Robbia ; the silver altar for the Baptistery, with the statue of the Baptist by Michelozzo, and reliefs in silver by Antonio Pollaiuolo and Andrea Verrocchic, rcpre- a8o opera del Duomo senting the Nativity of the Baptist by the former, the dance of the daughter of Herodias and the Decollation of the Saint by the latter. The two organ galleries, facing each other and finished almost simultaneously (about 1440), are an utter contrast both in spirit and in execution. There is nothing specially angelic or devotional about Dona- tello's wonderful frieze of dancing genii, winged boys that might well have danced round Venus at Psyche's wedding-feast, but would have been out of place among the Angels who, as the old mystic puts it, " rejoiced exceedingly when the most Blessed Virgin entered the Heavenly City." The beauty of rhythmic movement, the joy of living and of being young, exultancy, haldan%a — these are what they express for us. Luca della Robbia's boys and girls, singing together and playing musical instruments, have less exuberance and motion, but more grace and repose ; they illustrate in ten high reliefs the verses of the psalm, Laudate Dominum in Sanctis ejus, which is in- scribed upon the Cantoria ; and those that dance are more chastened in their joy, more in the spirit of David before the Ark. But all are as wrapt and absorbed in their music, as are Donatello's in their wild yet harmonious romp. In detail and considered separately, Luca's more perfectly finished groups, with their exquisite purity of line, are perhaps more lovely than Donatello's more roughly sketched, lower and flatter bas-reliefs; but, seen from a distance and raised from the ground, as they were originally intended, Donatello's are decidedly more effective as a whole. It is only of late years that the reliefs have been remounted and set up in the way we now see ; and it is not quite certain whether their present arrangement, in all respects, exactly corresponds to what was originally intended by the masters. 281 The Story of Florence Under the two cantor'ie is placed a set of embroideries for church vestments, begun in 1 470 for the Baptistery from the designs of Antonio Pollaiuolo, by Paolo di Bartolommeo da Verona and four other workers. They represent the life of the Baptist in twenty-seven scenes, in which, says Vasari, " the figures are repre- sented with the needle as excellently as if Antonio had painted them with his brush." The designs are full of Pollaiuolo's characteristic vigour and vitality. It was m this building, the Opera del Duomo, that Donatello at one time had his school and studio ; and it was here, in the early years of the Cinquecento, that Michelangelo worked upon the shapeless mass of marble which became the gigantic David. CROSS OF The Florentine people (from old house on north side of duomo^ %H ARMS OF THE MEDia FROM THE BADIA AT FltSOLE. CHAPTER IX. The Palaz%o Riccardi — San Loren%o San Marco. Per molti, donna, anzi per mille amantl, creata fusti, e d'angelica forma. Or par che'n ciel si dorma, s'un sol s'appropria quel ch e dato a tanti. {Michelangelo Buonarroti), T^HE Via dei Martelli leads from the Baptistery into the Via Cavour, formerly the historical Via Larga. Here stands the great Palace of the Medici, now called the Palazzo Riccardi from the name of the family to whom the Grand Duke Ferdinand IL sold it in the seventeenth century. 384 The Story of Florence The palace was begun by Michelozzo for Cosimo the Elder shortly before his exile, and completed after his return, when it became in reality the seat of government of the city, although the Signoria still kept up the pretence of a republic in the Palazzo Vecchio. Here Lorenzo the Magnificent was born on January ist, 1449, and here the most brilliant and cultured society of artists and scholars that the world had seen gathered round him and his family.^ Here, too, after the expulsion of Lorenzo's mad son, Piero, in 1494, Charles VHL of France was spendidly lodged ; here Piero Capponi tore the dishonourable treaty and saved the Republic, and here Fra Girolamo a few days later admonished the fickle king. On the return of the Medici, the Cardinal Giovanni, the younger Lorenzo, and the Cardinal Giulio successively governed the city here ; until in 1527 the people drove out the young pretenders, Alessandro and Ippolito, with their guardian, the Cardinal Passerini. It was on this latter occasion that Piero's daughter, Madonna Clarice, the wife of the younger Filippo Strozzi, was carried hither in her litter, and literally slanged these boys and the Cardinal out of Florence. She Is re- ported, with more vehemence than delicacy, to have told her young kinsmen that the house of Lorenzo dei Medici was not a stable for mules. During the siege, the people wished to entirely destroy the palace and rename the place the Piazza dei Muli. After the restoration Alessandro carried on his abominable career here, until, on January 5th, 1537, the dagger of another Lorenzo freed the world from an infamous monster. Some months before, Benvenuto 1 It should be observed that Lorenzo was not specially called the "Magnificent" by his contemporaries. All themore prominent members of the Medicean family were styled Mag- nifiio in the same way. a84 The Palazzo Riccardi Cellini came to the palace, as he tells us in his auto- biography, to show the Duke the wax models for his medals which he was making. Alessandro was lying on his bed, indisposed, and with him was only this Lorenzino or Lorenzaccio, quel pazzo mal'mconico filosafo d't Lorenzinoy as Benvenuto calls him elsewhere. " The Duke," writes Benvenuto, "several times signed to him that he too should urge me to stop ; upon which Lorenzino never said anything else, but: * Benvenuto, you would do best for yourself to stay.' To which I said that I wanted by all means to return to Rome. He said nothing more, and kept con- tinually staring at the Duke with a most evil eye. Having finished the medal and shut it up in its case, I said to the Duke ; * My Lord, be content, for I will make you a much more beautiful medal than I made for Pope Clement; for reason wills that I should do better, since that was the first that ever I made ; and Mcsser Lorenzo here will give me some splendid subject for a reverse, like the learned person and magnificent genius that he is.* To these words the said Lorenzo promptly answered : * I was thinking of nothing else, save how to give thee a reverse that should be worthy of his Excellency.' The Duke grinned, and, looking at Lorenzo, said : * Lorenzo, you shall give him the reverse, and he shall make it here, and shall not go away.' Lorenzo replied hastily, saying : * I will do it as quickly as I possibly can, and I hope to do a thing that will astonish the world.' The Duke, who sometimes thought him a madman and sometimes a coward, turned over in his bed, and laughed at the words which he had said to him. I went away without other ceremonies of leave- taking, and left them alone together." On the fatal night Lorenzino lured the Duke into his own roomsj in what was afterwards called the 285 71)6 Story of Florence Strada del Traditore, which was incorporated into the palace by the Riccardi. Alessandro, tired out with the excesses of the day, threw himself upon a bed ; Lorenzino went out of the room, ostensibly to fetch his kinswoman, Caterina Ginori, whose beauty had been the bait; and he returned with the bravo Scoroncocolo, with whose assistance he assassinated him. Those who saw Sarah Bernhardt in the part of " Lorenzaccio," will not easily forget her rendering of this scene. Lorenzino published an Apologia, in which he enumerates Alessandro's crimes, declares that he was no true offspring of the Medici, and that his own single motive was the liberation of Florence from tyranny. He fled first to Constantinople, and then to Venice, where he was murdered in i 547 by the agents of Alessandro's successor, Cosimo I., who transferred the ducal residence from the present palace first to the Palazzo Vecchio, and then across the river to the Pitti Palace. With the exception of the chapel, the interior of the Palazzo Riccardi is not very suggestive of the old Medicean glories of the days of Lorenzo the Mag- nificent. There is a fine court, surrounded with sarcophagi and statues, including some of the old tombs which stood round the Baptistery and among which Guido Cavalcanti used to linger, and some statues of Apostles from the second fagade of the Duomo. Above the arcades are eight fine classical medallions by Donatello, copied and enlarged from antique gems. The rooms above have been entirely altered since the days when Capponi defied King Charles, and Madonna Clarice taunted Alessandro and Ippolito ; the large gallery, which witnessed these scenes, is covered with frescoes by Luca Giordano, executed in the early part of the seventeenth century. The Chapel — still entirely reminiscent of the better 286 The Pala%'zo Rtccardi Medici — was painted by Benozzo Gozzoli sliortjy before the death of Cosimo the Elder, with frescoes representing the Procession of the Magi, in a dehght- fully impossible landscape. The two older kings are the Patriarch Joseph of Constantinople, and John Paleo- logus, Emperor of the East, who had visited Florence twenty years before on the occasion of the Council (Benozzo, it must be observed, was painting them in 1459, after the fall of Constantinople) ; the third is Lorenzo dei Medici himself, as a boy. Behind follow the rest of the Medicean court, Cosimo himself and his son, Piero, content apparently to be led forward by this mere lad ; and in their train is Benozzo Gozzoli himself, marked by the signature on his hat. The picture of the Nativity itself, round which Benozzo's lovely Angels — though very earthly compared with Angelico's — seem still to linger in attendance, is believed to have been one by Lippo Lippi, now at Berlin. In the chapter Of the Superhuman Ideal, in the second volume of Modem Painters, Ruskin refers to these frescoes as the most beautiful instance of the supernatural landscapes of the early religious painters :-^ ** Behind the adoring angel groups, the landscape is governed by the most absolute symmetry ; roses, and pomegranates, their leaves drawn to the last rib and vein, twine themselves in fair and perfect order about delicate trellises ; broad stone pines and tall cypresses overshadow them, bright birds hover here and there in the serene sky, and groups of angels, hand joined with hand, and wing with wing, glide and float through the glades of the unentangled forest. But behind the human figures, behind the pomp and turbulence of the kingly procession descending from the distant hills, the spirit of the landscape is changed. Severer mountains rise in the distance, ruder prominences and 287 The Story of Florence less flowery yary the nearer ground, and gloomy shadows remain unbroken beneath the forest branches." Among the manuscripts in the Biblioteca R'tccardlana, which is entered from the Via Ginori at the back of the palace, is the most striking and plausible of all existing portraits of Dante. It is at the beginning of a codex of the Canzoni (numbered 1040), and appears to have been painted about 1436. From the palace where the elder Medici lived, we turn to the church where they, and their successors of the younger line, lie in death. In the Piazza San Lorenzo there is an inane statue of the fatlier of Cosimo I., Giovanni delle Bande Nere, by Baccio Bandinelli. Here, in June 1865, Robert Browning picked up at a stall the "square old yellow Book" with "the crumpled vellum covers," which gave him the story of The Ring and the Book: — '* I found this book, Gave a lira for it, eightpence English just, (Mark the predestination !) when a Hand, Always above my shoulder, pushed me once, One day still fierce 'mid many a day struck calm, Across a square in Florence, crammed with booths, Buzzing and blaze, noon-tide and market-time, Toward Baccio's marble — ay, tlie basement ledge O' the pedestal where sits and menaces John of the Black Bands with the upright spear, 'Twixt palace and church — Riccardi where they lived, His race, and San Lorenzo where they lie. " That memorable day, (June was the month, Lorenzo named the Square) 1 leaned a little and overlooked my prize By the low railing round the fountain-source Close to the statue, where a step descends : While clinked the cans of copper, as stooped and rose Thick-ankled girls who brimmed them, and made place For market men glad to pitch basket down, Dip a broad melon-leaf that holds the wet, And whisk their faded fresh." 288 THE TOMB OF GIOVANNI AND PIERO DEI MEDICI By Andrea Verrocchto (In San Lorenzo) San Lorenzo The unsightly bare front of San Lorenzo represents several fruitless and miserable years of Michelangelo's life. Pope Leo X. and the Cardinal Giulio dei Medici commissioned him to make a new facade, in 1516, and for some years he consumed his time labouring among the quarries of Carrara and Pietrasanta, getting the marble for it and for the statues with which it was to be adorned. In one of his letters he says : *' I am perfectly disposed (« me hasta V antmo) to make this work of the facade of San Lorenzo so that, both in architecture and in sculpture, it shall be the mirror of all Italy ; but the Pope and the Cardinal must decide quickly, if they want me to do it or not" ; and again, some time later : " What I have promised to do, I shall do by all means, and I shall make the most beautiful work that was ever made in Italy, if God helps me.'' But nothing came of it all ; and in after years Michelangelo bitterly declared that Leo had only pretended that he wanted the facade finished, in order to prevent him working upon the tomb of Pope Julius. " The ancient Ambrosian Basilica of St. Lawrence," founded according to tradition by a Florentine widow nam.ed Giuliana, and consecrated by St. Ambrose in the days of Zenobius, was entirely destroyed by fire early in the fifteenth century, during a solemn service ordered by the Signoria to invoke the protection of St. Ambrose for the Florentines in their v/ar against Filippo Maria Visconti. Practically the only relic of this Basi- lica is the miraculous image of the Madonna in the right transept. The present church was erected from the designs of Filippo Brunelleschi, at the cost of the Medici (especially Giovanni di Averardo, who may be regarded as its chief founder) and seven other Floren- tine families. It is simple and harmonious in structure ; the cupola, which is so visible in distant views of Flor- T 289 The Story of Florence cnce, looking like a smaller edition of the Duomo, unlike the latter, rests directly upon the cross. This appears to be one of the modifications from what Bru- nelleschi had intended. The two pulpits with their bronze reliefs, right and left, are the last works of Donatello ; they were exe- cuted in part and finished by his pupil, Bertoldo. The marble singing gallery in the left aisle (near a fresco of the martyrdom of St. Lawrence, by Bronzino) is also the joint work of Donatello and Bertoldo. In the right transept is a marble tabernacle by DonatelIo*s great pupil, Desiderio da Settignano. Beneath a por- phyry slab in front of the choir, Cosimo the Elder, the Pater Patriae, lies ; Donatello is buried in the same vault as his great patron and friend. In the Martelli Chapel, on the left, is an exceedingly beautiful An- nunciation by Fra Filippo Lippi, a fine example of his colouring (in which he is decidedly the best of all the early Florentines) ; Gabriel is attended by two minor Angels, squires waiting upon this great Prince of the Archangelic order, who are full of that peculiar mixture of boyish high spirits and religious sentiment which gives a special charm of its own to all that Lippo does. The Sagrestia Vecch'ia^ founded by Giovanni di Averardo, was erected by Brunelleschi and decorated by Donatello for Cosimo the Elder. In the centre is the marble sarcophagus, adorned with putt't and festoons, containing the remains of Giovanni and his wife Piccarda, Cosimo's father and mother, by Dona- tello. The bronze doors (hardly among his best works), the marble balustrade before the altar, the stucco medallions of the Evangelists, the reliefs of patron saints of the Medici and the frieze of Angels' heads are all Donatello's ; also an exceedingly beauti- ful terracotta bust of St. Lawrence, which is one of his most attractive creations. In the niche on the left 290 San Lorenzo of the entrance is the simple but very beautifiil tomb of the two sons of Cosimo, Piero and Giovanni — who are united also in Botticelli's Adoration of the Magi as the two kings — and it serves also as a monument to Cosimo himself; it was made by Andrea Verrocchio for Lorenzo and Giuliano, Piero's sons. The remains of Lorenzo and Giuliano rested together in this sacristy until they were translated in the sixteenth century. In spite of a misleading modern inscription, they were apparently not buried in their father's grave, and the actual site of their former tomb is unknown. They now lie together in the Sagrestla Nuova. The sim- plicity of these funereal monuments and the pietas which united the members of the family so closely, in death and in life alike, are very characteristic of these earlier Medicean rulers of Florence. The cloisters of San Lorenzo, haunted by needy and destitute cats, were also designed by Brunelleschi. To the right, after passing Francesco da San Gallo's statue of Paolo Giovio, the historian, who died in 1559, is the entrance to the famous Biblioteca Laurenziana. The nucleus of this library was the collection of codices formed by Niccolo Niccoli, which were afterwards purchased by Cosimo the Elder, and still more largely increased by Lorenzo the Magnificent ; after the expulsion of Piero the younger, they were bought by the Friars of San Marco, and then from them by the Cardinal Giovanni, who trans- ferred them to the Medicean villa at Rome. In ac- cordance with Pope Leo's wish, Clement VII. (then the Cardinal Giulio) brought them back to Florence, and, when Pope, commissioned Michelangelo to design the building that was to house them. The portico, vestibule and staircase were designed by him, and, in judging of their effect, it must be remembered that Michelangelo professed that architecture was not his 291 l!he Story of Florence business, and also that the vestibule and staircase were intended to have been adorned with bronzes and statues. It was commenced in 1524, before the siege. Of the numberless precious manuscripts which this collection contains, we will mention only two classical and one mediaeval ; the famous Pandects of Justinian which the Pisans took from Amalfi, and the Medicean Virgil of the fourth or fifth century ; and Boccaccio's autograph manuscript of Dante's Eclogues and Epistles. This latter codex, shown under the glass at the entrance to the Rotunda, is the only manuscript in existence which contains Dante's Epistles to the Italian Cardinals and to a Florentine Friend. In the first, he defines his attitude towards the Church, and declares that he is not touching the Ark, but merely turning to the kicking oxen who are dragging it out of the right path ; in the second, he proudly proclaims his innocence, rejects the amnesty, and refuses to return to Florence under dishonourable conditions. Although undoubtedly in Boccaccio's handwriting, it has been much disputed of late years as to whether these two letters are really by Dante. There is not a single autograph manuscript, nor a single scrap of Dante's handwriting extant at the present day. Fromthe Piazza Madonna, at the back of San Lorenzo, we enter a chilly vestibule, the burial vault of less impor- tant members of the families of the Medicean Grand Dukes, and ascend to the Sagrestia Nuova^, where the last male descendants of Cosimo the Elder and Lorenzo the Magnificent lie. Although the idea of adding some such mausoleum to San Lorenzo appears to have origi- nated with Leo X., this New Sacristy was built by Michelangelo for Clement VII., commenced while he was still the Cardinal Giulio and finished in 1524, 292 San Lore7iv:>o before the Library was constructed. Its form was intended to correspond with that of Brunelleschi's Old Sacristy, and it was to contain four sepulchral monu- ments. Two of these, the only two that were actually constructed, were for the younger Lorenzo, titular Duke of Urbino (who died in 15 19, the son of Piero and nephew of Pope Leo), and the younger Giuliano, Duke of Nemours (who died in 1516, the third son of the Magnificent and younger brother of Leo). It is not quite certain for whom the other two monuments were to have been, but it is most probable that they were for the fathers of the two Medicean Popes, Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother the elder Giuliano, whose remains were translated hither by Duke Cosimo I. and rediscovered a few years ago. Michelangelo commenced the statues before the third expulsion of the Medici, worked on them in secret while he was fortifying Florence against Pope Clement before the siege, and returned to them, after the downfall of the Republic, as the condition of obtaining the Pope's pardon. He resumed work, full of bitterness at the treacherous overthrow of the Republic, tormented by the heirs of Pope Julius II., whose tomb he had been forced to abandon, suffering from insomnia and shattered health, threatened with death by the tyrant Alessandro. When he left Florence finally in 1534, just before the death of Clement, the statues had not even been put into their places. Neither of the ducal statues is a portrait, but they appear to represent the active and contemplative lives, like the Leah and Rachel on the tomb of Pope Julius II. at Rome. On the right sits Giuliano, holding the baton of command as Gonfaloniere of the Church. His handsome sensual features to some extent recall those of the victorious youth in the allegory in the Bargello. He holds his baton somewhat loosely, as 293 The Story of Florence though he half realised the baseness of the historical part he was doomed to play, and had not got his heart in it. Opposite is Lorenzo, immersed in profound thought, "ghastly as a tyrant's dream/' What visions are haunting him of the sack of Prato, of the atrocities of the barbarian hordes in the Eternal City, of the doom his house has brought upon Florence ? Does he already smell the blood that his daughter will shed, fifty years later, on St. Bartholomew's day ? Here he sits, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning puts it: — " With everlasting shadow on his face, While the slow dawns and twilights disapprove The ashes of his long extinguished race, Which never more shall clog the feet of men." " It fascinates and is intolerable," as Rogers wrote of this statue. It Is, probably, not due to Michel- angelo that the niches in which the dukes sit are too narrow for them ; but the result is to make the tyrants seem as helpless as their victims, in the fetters of destiny. Beneath them are four tremendous and terrible allegorical figures : " those four ineffable types," writes Ruskin, " not of darkness nor of day — not of morning nor evening, but of the departure and the resurrection, the twilight and the dawn of the souls of men." Beneath Lorenzo are Dawn and Twilight ; Dawn awakes in agony, but her most horrible dreams are better than the reahty which she must face ; Twilight has worked all day in vain, and, like a helpless Titan, is sinking now into a slumber where is no repose. Beneath Giuliano are Day and Night : Day is captive and unable to rise, his mighty powers are uselessly wasted and he glares defiance ; Night is buried in torturing dreams, but Michelangelo has forbidden us to wake her ; — 294 San Lorenzo " Grato rni e il sonno, e piu I'esser di sasso ; mentre che il danno e la vergogna dura, non veder, non sentir, m'e gran ventura ; pero non mi destar ; deh, parla basso I " ^ It will be remembered that it was for these two young men, to whom Michelangelo has thus reared the noblest sepulchral monuments of the modern world, that Leo X. desired to build kingdoms and that Machiavelli wrote one of the masterpieces of Italian prose — the Principe. Giuliano was the most respect- able of the elder Mediccan line ; in Castiglione's Cortigiano he is an attractive figure, the chivalrous champion of women. It is not easy to get a definite idea of the character of Lorenzo, who, as we saw in chapter iv., was virtually tyrant of Florence during his uncle's pontificate. The Venetian ambassador once wrote of him that he was fitted for great deeds, and only a little inferior to Caesar Borgia — which was in- tended for very high praise ; but there was nothing in him to deserve either Michelangelo's monument or Machiavelli's dedication. He usurped the Duchy of Urbino, and spent his last days in fooling with a jester. His reputed son, the foul Duke Alessandro, lies buried with him here in the same coffin. Opposite the altar is the Madonna and Child, by Michelangelo. The Madonna is one of the noblest and most beautiful of all the master's works, but the Child, whom Florence had once chosen for her King, has turned His face away from the city. A few years later, and Cosimo I. will alter the inscription which Niccolo Capponi had set up on the Palazzo Vecchio. The patron saints of the Medici on either side, Sts. Cosmas and Damian, are by Michelangelo's 1 " Grateful to me is sleep, and more the being stone ; while ruin and shame last, not to see, not to feel, is great good fortune to me. Therefore wak-e me not ; ah, speak low I " 295 The Story of Florence pupils and assistants, Fra Giovanni Angiolo da Mont- orsoli and Raffaello da Montelupo. Beneath these statues lie Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother, the elder Giuliano. Their bodies were removed hither from the Old Sacristy in 1559, and the ques- tion as to their place of burial was finally set at rest, in October 1895, by the discovery of their bodies. It is probable that Michelangelo had originally in- tended the Madonna for the tomb of his first patron, Lorenzo. In judging of the general effect of this Sagrestia Nuova, which is certainly somewhat cold, it must be remembered that Michelangelo intended it to be full of statues and that the walls were to have been covered with paintings. " Its justification," says Addington Symonds, "lies in the fact that it demanded statuary and colour for its completion." The vault was frescoed by Giovanni da Udine, but is now whitewashed. In 1562, Vasari wrote to Michelangelo at Rome on behalf of Duke Cosimo, telling him that "the place is being now used for religious services by day and night, according to the intentions of Pope Clement," and that the Duke was anxious that all the best sculptors and painters of the newly instituted Academy should work upon the Sacristy and finish it from Michelangelo's designs. " Ke intends," writes Vasari, " that the new Academicians shall complete the whole imperfect scheme, in order that the world may see that, while so many men of genius still exist among us, the noblest work which was ever yet conceived on earth has not been left unfinished." And the Duke wants to know what Michelangelo's own idea is about the statues and paintings ; *' He is particularly anxious that you should be assured of his determination to alter nothing you have already done or planned, but, on the contrary, to carry out the whole work according to your conception. 296 San Lorenzo The Academicians, too, are unanimous in their hearty desire to abide by this decision.'' i In the Cappella dei Priticipt^ gorgeous with its marbles and mosaics, lie the sovereigns of the younger line, the Medicean Grand Dukes of Tuscany, the descendants of the great captain Giovanni delle Bande Nere, Here are the sepulchral monuments of Cosimo I. (1537-1574); of his sons, Francesco (1574- 1587) and Ferdinand I. (i 587-1609) ; and of Fer- dinand's son, grandson and great-grandson, Cosimo II. (1609- 1 621), Ferdinand II. ( 1621-1670), Cosimo III. (1670-1723). The statues are those of Fer- dinand I. and Cosimo II. Cosimo I. finally transformed the republic into a monarchy, created a new aristocracy and established a small standing army, though he mainly relied upon foreign mercenaries. He obtained Siena as a fief from the King of Spain in 1557, and received the grand ducal crown in 1570 from Pius V. — a rank which the Emperor granted to his successor. Although the tragedy which tradition has hung round the end of the Duchess Eleonora and her two sons has not stood the test of historical criticism, there are plenty of bloody deeds to be laid to Duke Cosimo's account during his able and ruthless reign. Towards the close of his life he married his mistress, Cammilla Martelli, and made over the government to his son. This son, Francesco, the founder of the Uffizi Gallery and of the modern city of Leghorn, had more than his father's vices and hardly any of his ability ; his intrigue with the beautiful Venetian, Bianca Cappello, whom he afterwards married, and who died with him, has excited more interest than it deserves. The Cardinal Ferdinand, who succeeded him and renounced the cardinalate, was incomparably the best of the house- — a man of mag- 1 Given in Adding tcwi Symonds' lAfe 0/ Michelangelo, 297 The Story of Florence nanlmous character and an enlightened ruler. He shook off the influence of Spain, and built an excellent navy to make war upon the Turks and Barbary corsairs. Cosimo II. and Ferdinand II. reigned quietly and benevolently, with no ability but with plenty of good intentions. Chiabrera sings their praises with rather unnecessary fervour. But the wealth and prosperity of Tuscany was waning, and Cosimo III., a luxurious and selfish bigot, could do nothing to arrest the decay. On the death of his miserable and contemptible successor, Gian Gastone dei Medici, in 1737, the Medicean dynasty was at an end. Stretching along a portion of the Via Larga, and near the Piazza di San Marco, were the famous gardens of the Medici, which the people sacked in 1494 on the expulsion of Piero. The Casino Mediceo, built by Buontalenti in 1576, marks the site. Here were placed some of Lorenzo's antique statues and curios ; and here Bertoldo had his great art school, where the most famous painters and sculp- tors came to bask in the sun of Medicean patronage, and to copy the antique. Here the boy Michel- angelo came with his friend Granacci, and here Andrea Verrocchio first trained the young Leonardo. In this garden, too, Angelo Poliziano walked with his pupils, and initiated Michelangelo into the newly re- vived Hellenic culture. There is nothing now to recall these past glories. The church of San Marco has been frequently altered and modernised, and there is little now to remind us that it was here on August i, 1489, that Savonarola began to expound the Apocalypse. Over the entrance is a Crucifix ascribed by Vasari to Giotto. The frescoed Annunciation on the right is the work of his Roman contemporary, Pietro Cavallini, 298 THE WELL OF S, MARCO 299 San Marco by whom probably are also the remains of fourteenth century frescoes on the left wall. On the second altar to the right is a damaged Madonna and Saints by Fra Bartolommeo. Between the second and third altars, on the left, lie Pico della Mirandola with his friend Girolamo Benivieni, and Angelo Poliziano. The left transept contains the tomb of St. Antoninus, the good Dominican Archbishop of Florence. In a chapel outside he is portrayed adoring the crucified Saviour, in a picture attributed to Baldovinetti ; and in the sacristy, which was designed by Brunelleschi, there is a fine bronze recumbent statue of him. Antoninus was Prior of San Marco in the days of Angelico, and Vasari tells us that when Angelico went to Rome, to paint for Pope Eugenius, the Pope wished to make the painter Archbishop of Florence : ** When the said friar heard this, he besought his Holiness to find somebody else, because he did not feel himself apt to govern people ; but that since his Order had a friar who loved the poor, who was most learned and fit for rule, and who feared God, this dignity would be much better conferred upon him than on himself. The Pope, hearing this, and bethinking him that what he said was true, granted his request freely ; and so Fra Antonino was made Archbishop of Florence, of the Order of Preachers, a man truly most illustrious for sanctity and learning." It was in the church of San Marco that Savonarola celebrated Mass on the day of the Ordeal ; here the women waited and prayed, while the procession set forth ; and hither the Dominicans returned at evening, amidst the howls and derision of the crowd. Here, on the next evening, the fiercest of the fighting took place. The attempt of the enemy to break into the church by the sacristy door was repulsed. One of the Panciatichi, a mere boy, mortally wounded, joy- 301 T^be Story of Florence fully received the laRt sacraments from Fra Domenico on the steps of the altar, and died in such bliss, that the rest envied him. Finally the great door of the church was broken down ; Fra Enrico, a German, mounted the pulpit and fired again and again into the midst of the Compagnacci, shouting with each shot, Salvum fac populum tuum, Domine. Driven from the pulpit, he and other friars planted their arquebusses beneath the Crucifix on the high altar, and continued to fire. The church was now so full of smoke that the friars could hardly continue the defence, until Fra Giovacchino della Robbia broke one of the windows with a lance. At last, when the Signoria threatened to destroy the whole convent with artillery, Savonarola ordered the friars to go in procession from the church to the dormitory, and himself, taking the Blessed Sacrament from the altar, slowly followed them. The convent itself, now officially the Museo d't San Marco, originally a house of Silvestrine monks, was made over to the Dominicans by Pope Eugenius IV., at the instance of Cosimo dei Medici and his brother Lorenzo. They solemnly took possession in 1436, and Michelozzo entirely rebuilt the whole convent for them, mainly at the cost of Cosimo, between 1437 and 1452. ** It is believed," says Vasari, "to be the best conceived and the most beautiful and commodious convent of any in Italy, thanks to the virtue and industry of Michelozzo." Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, as the Beato Angelico v/as called, came from his Fiesolan convent, and worked simultaneously with Michelozzo for about eight or nine years (until the Pope summoned him to Rome in 1445 to paint in the Vatican), covering with his mystical dreams the walls that his friend designed. That other artistic glory of the Dominicans, Fra Bartolommeo, took the habit here in 1500, though there are now 302 San Marco only a few unimportant works of his remaining in the convent. Never was there such a visible outpouring of the praying heart in painting, as in the work of these two friars. And Antoninus and Savonarola strove to make the spirit world that they painted a living reality, for Florence and for the Church. The first cloister is surrounded by later frescoes, scenes from the life of St. Antoninus, partly by Bernardino Poccetti and Matteo Rosselli, at the be- ginning of the seventeenth century. They are not of great artistic value, but one, the fifth on the right of the entrance, representing the entry of St. Antoninus into Florence, shows the old fa9ade of the Duomo. Like gems in this rather indifferent setting, are five exquisite frescoes by Angelico in lunettes over the doors ; St. Thomas Aquinas, Christ as a pilgrim received by two Dominican friars, Christ in the tomb, St. Dominic (spoilt), St. Peter Martyr; also a larger fresco of St. Dominic at the foot of the Cross. The second of these, symbolising the hospitality of the convent rule, is one of Angelico's masterpieces ; be- neath it is the entrance to the Foresteria, the guest- chambers. Under the third lunette we pass into the great Refectory, with its customary pulpit for the novice reader : here, instead of the usual Last Supper, is a striking fresco of St. Dominic and his friars miraculously fed by Angels, painted in 1 536 by Giovanni Antonio Sogliani (a pupil of Lorenzo di Credi) ; the Crucifixion above, with St. Catherine of Siena and St. Antoninus, is probably by Fra Bartolommeo. Here, too, on the right is the original framework by Jacopo di Bartolommeo da Sete and Simone da Fiesole, executed in T433, for Angelico's great tabernacle now in the Uffizi. Angelico's St. Dominic appropriately watches over the Chapter House, which contains the largest of Fra T'he Story of Florence Giovanni's frescoes and one of the greatest master- pieces of religious art : the Crucifixion with the patron saints of Florence, of the convent, and of the Medici, the founders of the reHgious orders, the representatives of the zeal and learning of the Dominicans, all gathered and united in contemplation around the Cross of Christ. It was ordered by Cosimo dei Medici, and painted about 1441. On our left are the Madonna, supported by the Magdalene, the other Mary, and the beloved Disciple ; the Baptist and St. Mark, representing the city and the convent ; St. Lawrence and St. Cosmas (said by Vasari to be a portrait of Nanni di Banco, who died twenty years before), and St. Damian. On our right, kneeling at the foot of the Cross, is St. Dominic, a masterpiece of expression and sentiment ; behind him St. Augustine and St. Albert of Jerusalem represent Augustinians and Carmelites ; St. Jerome, St. Francis, St. Bernard, St. John Gualbert kneel ; St. Benedict and St. Rom- uald stand behind them, while at the end are St. Peter Martyr and St. Thomas Aquinas. All the male heads are admirably characterised and discriminated, unlike Angelico's women, who are usually either merely conventionally done or Idealised into Angels. Round the picture is a frieze of prophets, culminating In the mystical Pelican ; below is the great tree of the Dominican order, spreading out from St. Dominic himself in the centre, with Popes Innocent V. and Benedict XI. on either hand. The St. Antoninus was added later, Vasari tells us that, in this tree, the brothers of the order assisted Angelico by obtaining portraits of the various personages represented from different places ; and they may therefore be regarded as the real, or traditional, likenesses of the great Dominicans. The same probably applies to the wonderful figure of Aquinas in the picture itself. 304 San Marco Beyond is a second and larger cloister, surrounded by very inferior frescoes of the life of St. Dominic, full of old armorial bearings and architectural frag- ments arranged rather incongruously. Some of the lunettes over the cells contain frescoes of the school of Fra Bartolommco. The Academy of the Crusca is established here, in what was once the dormitory of the Novices. Connected with this cloister was the convent garden. " In the summer time," writes Simone Filipepi, ** in the evening after supper, the Father Fra Girolamo used to walk with his friars in the garden, and he would make them all sit round him with the Bible in his hand, and here he expounded to them some fair passage of the Scriptures, sometimes questioning some novice or other, as occasion arose. At these meetings there gathered also some fifty or sixty learned laymen, for their edification. When, by reason of rain or other cause, it was not possible in the garden, they went into the hospitium to do the same ', and for an hour or two one seemed verily to be in Paradise, such charity and devotion and simplicity appeared in all. Blessed was he who could be there." Shortly before the Ordeal of Fire, Fra Girolamo was walking in the garden with Fra Placido Cinozzi, when an exceedingly beautiful boy of noble family came to him with a ticket upon which was written his name, offering himself to pass through the flames. And thinking that this might not be sufficient, he fell upon his knees, begging the Friar that he might be allowed to undergo the ordeal for him. " Rise up, my son," said Savonarola, " for this thy good will is wondrously pleasing unto God " ; and, when the boy had gone, he turned to Fra Placido and said : " From many persons have I had these ap- plications, but from none have I received so much joy as from this child, for which may God be praised." u 305 The Story of Florence To the left of the staircase to the upper floor, is the smaller refectory with a fresco of the Last Supper by Domenico Ghirlandaio, a well-preserved work with beautiful details. On the top of the stairs we are initiated into the spirit of the place by Angelico's most beautiful An- nunciation, with its inscription, Vtrg'ims intacte cum veneris ante Jiguram, pretercundo cave nc sileatur Ave^ " When thou shalt have come before the image of the spotless Virgin, beware lest by negligence the Ave be silent." On the left of the stairway a double series of cells on either side of the corridor leads us to Savon* arola's room. At the head of the corridor is one of those representations that Angelico repeated so often, usually with modifications, of St. Dominic at the foot of the Cross. Each of the cells has a painted lyric of the life of Christ and His Mother, from Angelico's hand; almost each scene with Dominican witnesses and auditors introduced, — Dominic, Aquinas, Peter Martyr, as the case may be. In these frescoes Angelico was undoubtedly assisted by pupils, from whom a few of the less excellent scenes may come ; some were probably executed by his brother, Fra Benedetto da Mugello, who took the Dominican habit at the same time, was prior of the convent at Fiesole, and predeceased him by about seven years. Taking the cells on the left first, we see the Noll me tangere (i), the Entombment (2), the Annunciation (3), the Crucifixion (4), the Nativity (5), the Transfiguration (6), a most wonderful picture. Opposite the Transfiguration, on the right wall of the corridor, is a Madonna and Saints, painted by the Friar somewhat later than the frescoes in the cells (which, it should be observed, appear to have been painted on 306 San Marco tlie walls before the cells were actually partitioned off) — St. John Evangelist and St. Mark, the three great Dominicans, and the patrons of the Medici. Then, on the left, the following cells contain the Mocking of Christ (7), the Resurrection with the Maries at the tomb (8), the Coronation of the Madonna (9), one of the grandest of the whole scries, with St. Dominic and St. Francis kneeling below, and behind them St. Benedict and St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Peter Martyr and St. Paul the Hermit. The Presentation in the Temple (10), and the Madonna and Child with Aquinas and Augustine (11), are inferior to the rest. The shorter passage now turns to the cells occupied by Fra Girolamo Savonarola ; one large cell leading into two smaller ones (12-14). ^^ '^he larger are placed three frescoes by Fra Bartolommec ; Christ and the two disciples at Emmaus, formerly over the door- way of the refectory, and two Madonnas — one from the Dominican convent in the Mugnone being especi- ally beautiful. Here are also modern busts of Savona- rola by Dupre and Benivieni by Bastianini. In the first inner cell are Savonarola's portrait, apparently copied from a medal and attributed to Fra Barto- lommeo, his Crucifix and his relics, his manuscripts and books of devotion, and, in another case, his hair- shirt and rosary, his beloved Dominican garb which he gave up on the day of his martyrdom. In the inmost cell are the Cross which he is said to have carried, and a copy of the old (but not contemporary) picture of his death, of which the original is in the Corsini Palace. The seven small cells on the right (15-21) were assigned to the Juniors, the younger friars who had just passed through the Noviciate. Each contains a fresco by Angelico of St. Dominic at the foot of the Cross, now scourging himself, now absorbed in con- The Story of Florence templation, now covering his face with his hands, but in no two cases identical. Into one of these cells a divine apparition was said to have come to one of these youths, after hearing Savonarola's " most fervent and most wondrous discourse *' upon the mystery of the Incarnation. The story is told by Simone Filipepi :— *' On the night of the most Holy Nativity, to a young friar in the convent, who had not yet sung Mass, had appeared visibly in his cell on the little altar, whilst he was engaged in prayer. Our Lord in the form of a little infant even as when He was born in the stable. And when the hour came to go into the choir for matins, the said friar commenced to debate in his mind whether he ought to go and leave here the Holy Child, and deprive himself of such sweetness, or not. At last he resolved to go and to bear It with him ; so, having wrapped It up in his arms and under his cowl as best he could, all trembling with joy and with fear, he went down into the choir without telling anyone. But, when it came to his turn to sing a lesson, whilst he approached the reading-desk, the Infant vanished from his arms ; and when the friar was aware of this, he remained so overwhelmed and almost beside himself that he commenced to wander through the choir, like one who seeks a thing lost, so that it was necessary that another should read that lesson." Passing back again down the corridor, we see in the cells two more Crucifixions (22 and 23) ; the Baptism of Christ with the Madonna as witness (24), the Cruci- fixion (25); then, passing the great Madonna fresco, the Mystery of the Passion (26), in one of those symbolical representations which seem to have origi- nated with the Camaldolese painter, Don Lorenzo ; Christ bound to the pillar, with St. Dominic scourging himself and the Madonna appealing to us (27, perhaps by a pupil) ; Christ bearing the Cross (28) ; two more 308 Safi Marco Crucifixions (29 and 30), apparently executed by Fra Benedetto. At the side of Angelico's Annunciation opposite the stairs, we enter the cell of St. Antoninus (31). Here is one of Angelico's most beautiful and charac- teristic frescoes, Christ's descent into Hades : " the intense, fixed, statue-like silence of ineffable adoration upon the spirits in prison at the feet of Christ, side by side, the hands lifted and the knees bowed, and the lips trembling together," as Ruskin describes it. Here, too, is the death mask of Antoninus, his portrait perhaps drawn from the death mask by Bartolommeo, his manu- scripts and relics ; also a tree of saintly Dominicans, Savonarola being on the main trunk, the third from the root. The next cell on the right (32) has the Sermon on the Mount and the Temptation in the Wilderness. In the following (33), also double, besides the frescoed Kiss of Judas, are two minute pictures by Fra Angelico, belonging to an earlier stage of his art than the frescoes, intended for reliquaries and formerly in Santa Maria Novella. One of them, the Madonna della Siella^ is a very perfect and typical example of the Friar's smaller works, in their ** purity of colour almost shadowless." The other, the Coronation of the Madonna, is less excel- lent and has suffered from retouching. The Agony in the Garden (in cell 34) contains a curious piece of mediae- val symbolism in the presence of Mary and Martha, contemplation and action, the Mary being here the Blessed Virgin. In the same cell is another of the reliquaries from Santa Maria Novella, the Annuncia- tion over the Adoration of the Magi, with the Madonna and Child, the Virgin Martyrs, the Magdalene and St. Catherine of Siena below ; the drawing is rather faulty. In the following cells are the Last Supper {35), conceived mystically as the institution of the 309 7 he Story of Florence Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, with the Madonna alone as witness ; the Deposition from the Cross (36) ; and the Crucifixion (37)1 in which Dominic stands with out-stretched arms. Opposite on the right (38-39) is the great cell where Pope Eugenius stayed on the occasion of the consecration of San Marco in 1442 ; here Cosimo the Elder, Pater Patriae, spent long hours of his closing days, in spiritual intercourse with St. Antoninus and after the latter's death. In the outer compartment the Medicean saint, Cosmas, joins the Madonna and Peter Martyr at the foot of the Cross. Within are the Adoration of the Magi and a Pieta, both from Angelico's hand, and the former, one of his latest masterpieces, probably painted with reference to the fact that the convent had been consecrated on the Feast of the Epiphany. Here, too, is an old terra- cotta bust of Antoninus, and a splendid but damaged picture of Cosimo himself by Jacopo da Pontormo, incomparably finer than that artist's similarly con- structed work in the Uffizi. Between two smaller cells containing Crucifixions, both apparently by Fra B.nedetto (42-43 — the former with the Mary and Martha motive at the foot of the Cross), is the great Greek Library, built by Michelozzo for Cosimo. Here Cosimo deposited a portion of the manuscripts which had been collected by Niccolo Niccoli, with additions of his own, and it became the first public library in Italy. Its shelves are now empty and bare, but it contains a fine collection of illuminated ritual books from suppressed convents, several of which are, rather doubtfully, ascribed to Angelico's brother, Fra Benedetto da Mugello. It was in this library that Savonarola exercised for the last time his functions of Prior of San Marco, and surrendered to the commissioners of the Signoria, on 310 San Marco the night of Palm Sunday, 1498. What happened had best be told in the words of the Padre Pacifico Burlamacchi of the same convent, Savonarola's con- temporary and follower. After several fictitious sum- monses had come : — '' They returned at last with the decree of the Signoria in writing, but with the open promise that Fra Girolamo should be restored safe and sound, together with his companions. When he heard this, he told them that he would obey. But first he retired with his friars into the Greek Library, where he made them in Latin a most beautiful sermon, exhorting them to follow onwards in the way of God with faith, prayer, and patience ; telling them that it was neces- sary to go to heaven by the way of tribulations, and that therefore they ought not in any way to be terrified; alleging many old examples of the ingratitude of the city of Florence in return for the benefits received from their Order. As that of St. Peter Martyr who, after doing so many marvellous things in Florence, was slain, the Florentines paying the price of his blood. And of St. Catherine of Siena, whom many had sought to kill, after she had borne so many labours for them, going personally to Avignon to plead their cause before the Pope. Nor had less happened to St. Antoninus, their Archbishop and excellent Pastor, whom they had once wished to throw from the win- dows. And that it was no marvel, if he also, after such sorrows and labourings, was paid at the end in the same coin. But that he was ready to receive every- thing with desire and happiness for the love of his Lord, knowing that in nought else consisted the Christian life, save in doing good and suffering evil. And thus, while all the bye-standers wept, he finished his sermon. Then, issuing forth from the library, he said to those laymen who awaited him : * I will say to you what The Story of Florence Jeremiah said : This thing I expected, but not so soon nor so suddenly.' He exhorted them further to live well and to be fervent in prayer. And having con- fessed to the Father Fra Domenico da Pescia, he took the Communion in the first library. And the same did Fra Domenico. After eating a little, he was somewhat refreshed ; and he spoke the last words to his friars, exhorting them to persevere in religion, and kissing them all, he took his last departure from them. In the parting one of his children said to him : * Father, why dost thou abandon us and leave us so desolate ? ' To which he replied : * Son, have patience, God will help you ' ; and he added that he would either see them again alive, or that after death he would appear to them without fail. Also, as he departed, he gave up the common keys to the brethren, with so great humility and charity, that the friars could not keep themselves from tears ; and many of them wished by all means to go with him. At last, recommending him- self to their prayers, he made his way towards the door of the library, where the first Commissioners all armed were awaiting him ; to whom, giving himself into their hands like a most meek lamb, he said : ' I recommend to you this my flock and all these other citizens.' And when he was in the corridor of the library, he said : * My friars, doubt not, for God will not fail to perfect His work ; and although I be put to death, I shall help you more than I have done in life, and I will return without fail to console you, either dead or alive.' Arrived at the holy water, which is at the exit of the choir, Fra Domenico said to him : * Fain would I too come to these nuptials.' Certain of the laymen, his friends, were arrested at the command of the Signoria. When the Father Fra Girolamo was in the first cloister, Fra Benedetto, the miniaturist, strove ardently to go with him ; and, when the officers thrust him 3^2 San Marco back, he still insisted that he would go. But the Father Fra Girolamo turned to him, and said : ' Fra Benedetto, on your obedience come not, for I and Fra Domenico have to die for the love of Christ.' And thus he was torn away from the eyes of his children.'^ A.^^ rc^ r--A'-Jt -yf>^^H^ I ^^' ■^ LOOKING THRCUOH VASARl S LOGGIA. UFFIZI 31s CHAPTER X l^he Accademia delle Belle Arti — The Sant'issinia Annun%iata — And other Buildings " In Firenze, piu che altrove, venivano gli uomini perfetti in tutte I'arti, e specialmente nella pittura." — Vasari. T^URNING southwards from the Piazza di San Marco into the Via Ricasoli, we come to the Accademia delle Belle Art't^ with its collection of Tuscan and Umbrian pictures, mostly gathered from suppressed churches and convents. In the central hall, the Tribune of the David, Michelangelo's gigantic marble youth stands under the cupola, surrounded by casts of the master's other works. Tiie young hero has just caught sight of the approaching enemy, and is all braced up for the im- mortal moment. Commenced in 1501 and finished at the beginning of 1504, out of a block of marble over which an earlier sculptor had bungled, it v/as originally set up in front of the Palazzo Vecchio on the Ringhiera, as though to defend the great Palace of the People. It is supposed to have taken five days to move the statue from the Opera del Duomo, where Michelangelo had chiselled it out, to the Palace. When the simple-minded Gonfaloniere, Piero Soder- ini, saw it, he told the artist that the nose appeared to T^he Accademia delh Belle Arti him to be too large ; whereupon Michelangelo mounted a ladder, pretended to work upon it for a few moments, dropping a little marble dust all the time, which he had taken up with him, and then turned round for approval to the Gonfaloniere, who assured him that he had now given the statue life. This gtgante di F'loren'z.a^ as it was called, was considerably damaged during the third expulsion of the Medici in 1527, but retained its proud position before the Palace until 1873. On the right, as we approach the giant, are two Sale del Beato AngeTico^ containing a lovely array of Fra Angclico's smaller paintings. Were we to attempt to sum up Angelico's chief characteristics in one word, that word v/ould be onesta, in its early mediaeval sense as Dante uses it in the Vita Nuova^ signifying not merely purity or chastity, as it came later to mean, but the outward manifestation of spiritual beauty, — the honesias of which Aquinas speaks. A supreme ex- pression of this may be found in the Paradise of his Last Judgment (266), the mystical dance of saints and Angels in the celestial garden that blossoms undei the rays of the Sun of Divine Love, and on all the faces of the blessed beneath the Queen of Mercy on the Judge's right. The Hell is, naturally, almost a failure. In many of the sm.all scenes from the lives of Christ and His Mother, which are not all by Angelico's own hand, some of the heads are absolute miracles of expression ; notice, for instance, the Judas receiving the thirty pieces of silver, and all the faces in the Betrayal (237), and, above all perhaps, the Peter In the Entry into Jerusalem (252), on every line of whose face seems written : <* Lord, why can I not follow thee now ? I will lay down my life for thy sake." The Deposition from the Cross {246), con- templated by St. Dominic, the Beata Villana and St. Catherine of Alexandria, appears to be an earlier work The Story of Florence of Angelico's. Here, also, are three great Madonnas painted by the Friar as altar-pieces for convent churches ; the Madonna and Child surrounded by Angels and saints, while Cosmas and Damian, the patrons of the Medici, kneel at her feet (281), was executed in 1438 for the high altar of San Marco, and, though now terribly injured, was originally one of his best pictures; the Madonna and Child, with two Angels and six saints, Peter Martyr, Cosmas and Damian, Francis, Anthony of Padua, and Louis of Toulouse (265), was painted for the convent of the Osservanza near Mugello, — hence the group of Fran- ciscans on the left; the third (227), in which Cosmas and Damian stand with St. Dominic on the right of the Madonna, and St. Francis with Lawrence and John the Divine on her left, is an inferior work from his hand. Also here are four delicious little panels of the school of Fra Lippo Lippi (264 and 263), repre- senting the Annunciation divided into two compart- ments, St. Anthony Abbot and the Ba])tist ; a fine triptych by Giovanni da Milano (259) ; and two charming scenes of mediasval university life from San Marco, the School of Albertus Magnus (231) and the School of St. Thomas Aquinas (247]. These two latter appear to be by some pupil of Fra Angelico, and may possibly be very early works of Benozzo Gozzoli. In the first, Albert is lecturing to an audience, partly lay and partly clerical, amongst whom is St. Thomas, then a youthful novice but already distinguished by the halo and the sun upon his breast ; in the second, Thomas himself is now holding the professorial chair, surrounded by pupils listening or taking notes, while Dominicans throng the cloisters behind. On his right sits the King of France ; below his seat the discomforted Averroes humbly 316 I The Accademia delle Belle Arti places himself on the Jowesl step, between the heretics — William of St. Amour and Sabellius. From the left of the David's tribune, we turn into three rooms containing masterpieces of the Quattrocento (with a few Jater works), and appropriately named after Botticelli and Perugino. In the Sala prima del Botticelli is Sandro's famous Prlmavera, the Allegory of Spring or the Kingdom of Venus (80). Inspired in part by Poliziano's stanze in honour of Giuliano dei Medici and his Bella Simonetta, Botticelli nevertheless has given to his strange -~ not altogether decipherable — allegory, a vague mysterious poetry far beyond anything that Messer Angelo could have suggested to him. Through this weirdly coloured garden of the Queen of Love, in " the light that never was on sea or land,'' blind Cupid darts upon his little wings, shooting, apparently at random, a flame-tipped arrow which will surely pierce the heart of the central maiden of those three, who, in their thin clinging white raiment, personify the Graces. The eyes of Simonetta — for it is clearly she — rest for a moment in the dance upon the stalwart Hermes, an idealised Giuliano, who has turned away carelessly from the scene. Flora, ** pranked and pied for birth," advances from our right, scattering flowers rapidly as she approaches ; while behind her a wanton Zephyr, borne on his strong wings, breaks through the wood to clasp Fertility, from whose mouth the flowers are starting. Venus herself, the mistress of nature, for whom and by whom all these things are done, stands somewhat sadly apart in the centre of the picture ; this is only one more of the numberless springs that have passed over her since she first rose from the sea, and she is somewhat weary of it all : — '« Te, dea, te fugiunt venti, te nubila caeli Adventumque tuum, tibi suavis daedala tellus The Story of Florence Summittit flores, tibi rident aequora ponti Placatumque nitet difTuso lumine caelum." ^ This was painted for Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de' Medici. Botticelli's other picture in this room, the large Coronation of the Madonna (73) with its predella (74), was commissioned by the Arte di For Sta. Maria, the Guild of Silk-merchants, for an altar in San Marco ; the ring of festive Angels, encircling their King and Queen, is in one of the master's most characteristic moods, and the predella scenes are very delicately executed. Here are two early works by Lippo Lippi; the Madonna adoring the Divine Child in a rocky landscape, with the little Baptist and St. Ronuialdus (79) ; and the Nativity (82), with Angels and shepherds, Jerome, the Magdalene and Hilarion. Andrea del Sarto's Four Saints (76) is one of his latest works, painted for the monks of Vallombrosa in 1528. There is a tradition, based on Vasari, that one of the two Angels in Andrea Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ (71) was painted by his great pupil, Leonardo, in his youth ; but both, though painted later and in oil, are now held to be from Verrocchio's own hand. The three small pictures (72), the Nativity, the martyrdom of Sts. Cosmas and Damian, St. Anthony of Padua finding a stone in the place of the dead miser's heart, by Francesco Pesellino, the predella of a picture (55) by his master, Lippo Lippi, are fine examples of a painter who normally only worked on this small scale, and whose works are very rare indeed. Francesco Granacci, who painted the Assumption (68), is chiefly interesting 1 "Before thee, goddess, flee the winds, the clouds of heaven; before thee and thy advent ; for thee earth manifold in works puts forth sweet-smelling flowers ; for thee the levels of the sea do laugh and heaven propitiated shines with outspread light " (Munro's Lucretius'). 318 'The Accademia delle Belle Arti as having been Michelangelo's friend and fellow pupil under Ghirlandaio. The Sala del Perugino takes its name from the works of that master which it contains : the great Assumption (57), painted for the convent of Vallom- brosa in i 500, one of Perugino's finest altar-pieces, but much damaged by restoration ; the two donors of the picture, Don Baldassare (241), abbot of the convent, and Don Biagio (242), general of the Order; the Deposition from the Cross (56) ; and the Agony in the Garden (53). But the gem of the whole room is Lippo Lippi's Coronation of the Madonna (62), one of the masterpieces of the early Florentine school, which he painted for the nuns of Sant' Ambrogio. The throngs of boys and girls, bearing lilies and playing at being Angels, are altogether delighiful, and the two little orphans, that are being petted by the pretty Florentine lady on our right, are character- istic of Fra Filippo's never failing sympathy with child life. On the left two admirably characterised monks are patronised by St. Ambrose, and in the right corner the jolly Carmelite himself, under the wing of the Baptist, is welcom.ed by a little Angel with the scroll. Is perfecit opus. It will be observed that "poor brother Lippo" has dressed himself with greater care for his celestial visit, than he announced his intention of doing in Robert Browning's poem: — " Well, all these Secured at their devotion, up shall come Out of a corner when you least expect, As one by a dark stair into a great light. Music and talking, who but Lippo I I ! — Mazed, motionless and moon-struck — I'm the man ! Back I shrink — what is this I see and hear? I, caught up with my monk's things by mistake My old serge gown and rope that goes all round I, in this presence, this pure company 1 Where's a hole, where's a corner for escape ? T^he Story of Florence Then steps a sweet angelic slip of a thing Forward, puts out a soft palm — * Not so fast I ' Addresses the celestial presence, 'Nay — ' He made you and devised you, after all, * Though he's none of you 1 Could Saint John theredraw — * His camel-hair make up a painting-brush ? ^-"^g^^^r^'^^ £^ Republic. After hav- i^Vl L0 ing been the most in- "^"^ timate associate of his , , . , , ARMS OF THE STROZZI brother - m - law, the younger Lorenzo, he was instrumental first in the expulsion of Ippolito and Alessandro, then in the establishment of Alessandro^s tyranny ; and finally, finding himself cast by the irony of fate for the part of the last Republican hero, he took the field against Duke Cosimo, only to find a miserable end in a dungeon. One of his daughters, Luisa Capponi, was believed to have been poisoned by order of Ales- sandro ; his son, Piero, became the bravest Italian captain of the sixteenth century and carried on a heroic contest with Cosimo's mercenary troops. Down the Via della Vigna Nuova is another of these Renaissance palace?, built for a similar noble family associated with the Medici, — the Palazzo Rucellai. Bernardo Rucellai — who was not origi- nally of noble origin, but whose family had acquired z 353 The Story of Florence what in Florence was the real title to nobility, vast wealth in commerce — married Nannina, the younger sister of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and had this palace begun for him in 1460 by Bernardo Rocsellino from the design of I.eo Battista Alberti, — to whom also the Rucellai loggia opposite is due. More of Alberti's work for the Rucellai may be seen at the back of the palace, in the Via della Spada, where in the former church of San Pancrazio (which gave its name to a sesto in old Florence) is the chapel which he built for Bernardo Rucellai in imitation of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. The Via delle Belle Donne — most poetically named of Florentine streets — leads hence into the Piazza di Santa Maria Novella. On the way, where five roads meet, is the Croce al Trebbio, with symbols of the four Evangelists below the Crucifix. It marks the site of one of St Peter INIartyr's fiercest triumphs over the Paterini, one of those 'Mnarvellous works" for which Savonarola, in his last address to his friars, complains that the Florentines had been so ungrateful towards his Order. But the story of the Dominicans of Santa Maria Novella is not one of persecution, but of peace-making. They played at times as noble a part in mediaeval Florence as their brethren of San Marco were to do in the early Renaissance ; and later, during the great siege, they took up the work of Fra Girolamo, and inspired the people to their last heroic defence of the Republic. Opposite Santa Maria Novella ip the Loggia di San Paolo, designed by Branelleschi, and erected in 145 1, shortly after his death. The coloured terracotta reliefs, by Andrea della Robbia, include tv/o fine portraits of governors of the hospital (not of the Della Robbia themselves, as frequently stated). The relief in a lunette over the door on the right, repre- 354 The Quarter of Santa Maria Novella senting the meeting of St Francis and St Dominic, is one of Andrea's best works : — "L'un fu tutto serafico in ardore, I'altro per sapienza in terra fue di cherubica luce uno splendore. DeU'un diro, pero che d'ambedue si dice I'un pregiando, qual ch'uom prende, perche ad un fine fur I'opere sue."^ In 1212, three years before the murder of Buondel- monte, the first band of Franciscans had come to Florence, sent thither by St Francis himself from Assisi. A few years later, at the invitation of a Florentine merchant Diodato, who had built a chapel and house as an act of restitution, St Dominic, from Bologna, sent the Blessed John of Salerno with twelve friars to occupy this mission at Ripoli, about three miles beyond where now stands the Gate of S. Niccolo. Thence they extended their apostolic labours into the city, and when St Dominic came, at the end of 12 19, they had already made progress. Finally they moved into the city—first to San Pan- crazio, and at length settled at Santa Maria tra le Vigne, a little church then outside the walls, where B. Giovanni was installed by the Pope's legate and the bishop in 1221. Before the church, in the present piazza, St Peter Martyr, the " hammer of the heretics," fought the Paterini with both spiritual and material arms. At last, the growth of the order requiring larger room, on St Luke's day, 1279, Cardinal Latino do' Frangipani laid here the first stone of the present church of Santa Maria Novella. ^ " I'he one was all seraphic in his ardour, the other by his wisdom was on earth a splendour of cherubic light. *' Of one will I discourse, because of both the two he speaketh who doth either praise, which so he will ; for to one end their works." — Wicksteed's translation, Paradho xi. 355 T*he Story of Florence Where once the little church of Our Lady among the Vines stood outside the second circuit of the city's walls, rises now the finest Italian Gothic church in Florence. In November 1279 the same Dominican Cardinal summoned a parliament in the Piazza, and obtained authority to pacify the city ; a solemn assembly was held here in the following January, at which he effected a temporary peace between Guelfs and Ghibellines, and among the Guelf magnates themselves. Cardinal Latino left a memory revered in Florence, and Fra Angelico, in the picture now in our National Gallery, placed him among the glorified saints attending upon the resurrection of Our Lord. Some twenty years later, in November 1301, a parliament was held within the still unfinished church, at which another Papal peacemaker, the infamous Charles of Valols, in the presence of the Priors of the Republic, the Podesta and the Captain, the bishop and chief citizens, received the haUa to guard Florence and pacify the Guelfs, and swore on the faith of the son of a king to pre- serve the city in peace and prosperity. We have seen how he kept his word. Santa Maria Novella, in 1304, was the centre of the sincere and devoted attempts made by Boniface's successor, the sainted Benedict XL, to heal the wounds of Florence ; at- tempts in which, throughout Italy, the Dominicans were his " angels of peace," as he called his missioners. When the Repubhc finally fell into the hands of Cosimo dei Medici in 1434, the exiled Pope Eugenius IV. was staying in the adjoining monastery ; it was here that he made his unsuccessful attempt to mediate, and heard the bitter farewell words of Rinaldo degli Albizzi : " I blame myself most of all, because I believed that you, who had been hunted out of your own country, could keep me in mine." Tiie church itself, striped tiger-like in blick and 356 IN THE GREEN CLOISTERS, S. MARIA NOVELLA 357 "The Qjiarter of Santa Maria Novella white marble, was constructed from the designs of two Dominican friars, Fra Ristoro da Campi and Fra Sisto, the architects who restored the Ponte alia Carraia and the Ponte Santa Trinita after their de- struction in 1269. Their work was continued by Fra Borghese and Fra Giovanni da Campi, of whom the latter was a scholar of Arnolfo. The fa9ade (with the exception of the lower part, which belongs to the fourteenth century) was designed by Leo Battista Alberti, whose friends the Rucellai were the chief benefactors of this church ; the lovely but completely restored pointed arcades on the right, with niches for tombs and armorial bearings, were designed by Brunel- leschi. On the left, though in part reduced to vile usage, there is a bit comparatively less altered. The interior was completed soon after the middle of the fourteenth century, when Fra Jacopo Passavanti — the author, of that model of pure Tuscan prose, Lo Specchio della 'vera Peniten%a — was head of the convent. The campanile is said to have been designed by another Dominican, Fra Jacopo Talenti, the architect of the so-called Spanish Chapel in the cloisters on the left of the church, of which more presently. During the great siege of Florence the mantle of Savonarola seemed to have fallen upon the heroic Prior of Santa Maria Novella, Fra Benedetto da Foiano. When the news of the alliance between Pope and Emperor came to Florence, while all Bologna was in festa for the coronation of the Emperor, Varchi tells us that Fra Benedetto delivered a great sermon in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, which was thrown open to all who would come to hear ; in which sermon he proved from passages in the Old and New Testa- ments that Florence would be delivered from all dangers, and then enjoy perpetual perfect felicity in the liberty she so desired. With such grace and 359 The Story of Florence eloquence did he speak, that the vast audience was moved to tears and to joy by turns. At the end, " with ineffable gestures and words," he gave to the Gonfaloniere, Raffaello Girolami, a standard upon one side of which was a Christ victorious over the hostile soldiery, and upon the other the red Cross of the Florentine Commune, saying : Cum hoc et in hoc v'tnces. After the capitulation Maiatesta Baglioni seized the friar and sent him to Rome, where he was slowly starved to death in the dungeon of Sant' Angelo. The interior was thus not quite finished, when Boccaccio's seven maidens met here on a Wednesday morning in early spring in that terrible year of pesti- lence, 1348; yet we may readily picture to ourselves the scene described in the introduction to the Dt- Cameron ; the empty church ; the girls in their dark mourning garb, after hearing Mass, seated together in a side chapel and gradually passing from telling tiieir beads to discussing more mundane matters ; and then, no sooner do three members of the other sex appear upon the scenes than a sudden gleam of glad- ness lights up their faces, and even the plague itself is forgotten. One of them, indeed, blushed ; " she became all crimson in the face through modesty," says Boccaccio, " because there was one of their number who was beloved by one of these youths ; *' but after- wards found no diflkulty in rivalling the others in the impropriety of her talk. Entering the western portal, we find ourselves in a nave of rather large proportions, somewhat dark but not without a glow from the stained glass windows — adapted above all for preaching. As in Santa Croce, it is cut across by a line of chapels, thus giving the whole a T shape, and v/hat represents the apse is merely a deeper and taller recess behind the high altar. The whole was modernised by Vasari in the sixteenth 360 The Qjiarter of Saiita Maria Novella century. By the side of the central door is one of the very few extant works of Masaccio, a fresco re- presenting the Blessed Trinity adored by the Madonna and St. John, with two kneeling donors — portraits of which no amount of restoration can altogether destroy the truth and grandeur. The Annunciation, on the opposite side of the door, is a mediocre fresco of the fourteenth century. The Crucifix above seems to be an authentic work of Giotto. It will be best to take the chapels at the end of the nave and in the transepts in the order into which they fall, as illustrating the development of Florentine art. On the right a flight of steps leads up into the Rucellai chapel where, half concealed in darkness, hangs the famous picture once supposed to mark the very birthday of Florentine painting. That Cimabue really painted a glorious Madonna for this church, which was worshipped by a king and hailed with acclamation by a rejoicing people, is to be most firmly and devoutly held. Unfortunately, it seems highly doubtful whether this picture is Cimabue's Madonna. There is documentary evidence that Duccio di Buonin- segna painted a Madonna for Santa Maria Novella in 1285, and, as the present picture closely resembles Duccio's authenticated works at Siena, it is now thought to be his. But there are still defenders of the old tradition. In any case, it is a noble picture in the truest sense of the v/ord. In the same chapel is the monument of the Dominican nun, the Beata Villana, by Bernardo Rossellino. Crossing the church to the chapel in the left tran- sept, the Strozzi Chapel, we mount into the true atmosphere of the Middle Ages — into one of those pictured theatres which set before us in part what Dante gave in full in his Commed'ia. The whole chapel is dedicated to St. Thomas Aquinas, the glory 361 The Story of Florence of the philosophy of the meuiceval v/orld and, above all, of the Dominican order, whose cardinal virtues are extolled in allegorical fashion on the ceiling ; but the frescoes are drawn from the v/ork of his greatest Florentine disciple, Dante Alighieri, in whose poem Thomas mainly lives for the non-Cailiolic world. It contains all Orcagna's extant work in painting. The altar-piece, executed by Andrea Orcagna in 1357, is the grandest of its kind belonging to the Giottesque period. Its central motive, of the Saviour ceiivering the keys to St. Peter and the Summa to St. Thomas, the spiritual and philosophical regimens of the mediaeval world, is very finely rendered ; while the angelic choir is a foretaste of Angelico. The Madonna presents St. Thomas ; the Baptist, St. Peter ; Michael and Catherine are in attendance upon the Queen of Heaven, Lawrence and Paul upon the Precursor. The predella represents St. Peter v/alking upon the waves, with on either side an episode in the life of St. Thomas and a miracle of St. Lawrence. The frescoes are best seen on a very bright morning, shortly before noon. The Last Judgment, by Andrea, shows the traditional representation of the Angels with trumpets and with the emblems of the Passion, wheeling round the Judge ; and the dead rising to judgment, impelled irresistibly to right or left even before the sentence is pronounced. Above the one band, kneels the white- robed Madonna in intercession — type of the Divine Mercy as in Dante ; over the others, at the head of the Apostles, is the Baptist who seems appealing for judgment — type of the Divine Justice. This placing Mary and St John opposite to each other, as in Dante's Rose of Paradise, is typical of Florentine art ; Santa Maria del Fiore and San Giovanni are, as it were, inseparable. Among the blessed is Dante, gazing up in fixed adoration at the Madonna, as when 362 The Qjiarter of Santa Maf^ia Novella following St Bernard's prayer at the close of his V^ision ; on the other side some of the faces of the lost are a miracle of expression. The Hell on the right wall, by Andrea's brother Leonardo, is more immediately taken from the Commedia. The Paradise on the left, or, rather, the Empyrean Heaven — with the faces suadi di caritUy Angels and Saints absorbed in vision and love of God — is by Andrea himself, and is more directly pictorial than Dante's Paradiso could admit. Christ and the Madonna are enthroned side by side, whereas we do not actually see Him in human form in the Commedia^ — perhaps in accordance with that reverence which impels the divine poet to make the name Cristo rhyme with nothing but itself. For sheer loveliness in detail, no other fourteenth century master produced anything to compare with this fresco ; it may be said to mark the advent of a nev/ element in Italian art. Thence we pass into the early Renaissance with Brunelleschi and Ghiberti, with Ghirlandaio and FiHppino Lippi. In the chapel to the left of the choir hangs Filippo Brunelleschi's famous wooden Crucifix, carved in friendly rivalry with Donatello. The rival piece, Donatello's share in this sculptured ienzonef has been seen in Santa Croce. In the choir are frescoes by Domenico Ghirlandaio, and a fine brass by Lorenzo Ghiberti. These frescoes were begun in i486, immediately after the completion of the Santa Trinita series, and ^nished in 1490 ; and, though devoid of the highest artistic qualities, are emi- nently characteristic of their epoch. Though repre- senting scenes from the life of the Madonna and the Baptist, this is entirely subordinated to the portrait groups of noble Florentines and their ladies, intro- duced as usually utterly uninterested spectators of the sacred events. As religious pictures they are naught ; 363 The Story of Florence but as representations of contemporary Florentine life, most valuable. Hardly elsewhere shall you see so fine a series of portraits of the men and women of the early Renaissance ; but they have other things to think ol than the Gospel history. Look at the scene of the Angel appearing to Zacharias. The actual event is hardly noticed ; hidden in the throng of citizens, too busily living the life of the Renaissance to attend to such trifles ; besides, it would not improve their style to read St. Luke. In the Visitation, the Nativity of the Baptist, the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, a fashionable beauty of the period sweeps in v/ith her attendants — and it is hardly uncharitable to suppose that, if not herself, at least her painter thought more of her fine clothes than of her devotional aspect. The portraits of the donors, Giovanni Tornabuoni and his wife, are on the window wall. In the scene of the expulsion of Joachim from the Temple, a group of painters stands together (towards tlie window) ; the old cleanly-shaven man in a red hat is Alessio Baldovinetti, Ghirlandaio's master ; next to him, with a lot of dark hair, dressed in a red mantle and blue vest, is Domenico Ghirlandaio himself; his pupil and brother-in-law, Sebastiano Mainardi, and his brother, David Ghir- landaio, are with him — the latter being the figure with shoulder turned and hat on head. In the apparition to Zacharias, among the numerous portraits, a group of four half figures discussing at the foot of the history is of special interest ; three of them are said to represent Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landini, and Angelo Poli- ziano (in the middle, slightly raising his hand) ; the fourth, turned to speak to Landini, is said by Vasari to be a famous teacher of Greek, Demetrius, but now supposed to be Gentile Becchi, a learned bishop of Arezzo. The stained glass was designed by Filippino Lippi. Under the high altar rests the body of the 364 The Qjuarter of Santa Maria Novella Blessed John of Salerno, the ** Apostle of Florence," v/ho brought the first band of Dominicans to the city. Less admired, but in some respects more admirable, are the frescoes by Filippino Lippi in the chapel on the right of the choir, almost his last works, painted about 1502, and very much injured by restoration. The window is also from his design. The frescoes represent scenes from the lives of St. John and St. Philip, and are remarkable for their lavish display of Roman antiquities, in which they challenge comparison with Andrea Mantegna. The scene of St. Philip exor- cising the dragon is especially fine. Observe how the characteristic intensity of the school of Botticelli is shown in the way in which the very statues take part in the action. Mars flourishes his broken spear, his wolves and kites cower to him for protection from the emissaries of the new faith, whose triumph is further symbolised in the two figures above of ancient deities conquered by Angels. An analogous instance will be found in Botticelli's famous Calumny in the Uffizi. In this statue of Mars is seen the last rendering of the old Florentine tradition of their primo padrone. Thus, per- haps, did the new pagans of the Renaissance lovingly ideahse ** that mutilated stone which guards the bridge." The monument of the elder Filippo Strozzi, in the same chapel, is a fine piece of v/ork by Benedetto da Maiano, with a lovely tondo of the Madonna and Child attended by Angels. And we should also notice Gio- vanni della Robbia's fountain in the sacristy, before passing into the cloisters. Here in the cloisters we pass back again into more purely mediaeval thought. Passing some early frescoes of the life of the Madonna- — the dream of Joachim, his meeting St. Anne, the Birth and Presentation of the Blessed Virgin — which Ruskin believed to be by 365 The Story of Florence Giotto himself — we enter to the left the delicious Green Cloisters ; a pleasant lounging place in summer. In the lunettes along the walls are frescoed scenes from Genesis in terra verde, of which the most notable are by Paolo Uccello — the Flood and the Sacrifice of Noah. Uccello's interests were scientific rather than artistic. These frescoes are amazingly clever exercises in the new art of perspective, the doke cosa as he called it when his wife complained of his absorption ; but are more curious than beautiful, and hardly inspire us with more than mild admiration at the painter's cleverness in poising the figure — -which, v/e regret to say, he intends for the Almighty — so ingeniously in mid air. But out of these cloisters, on the right, opens the so-called Spanish Chapel — the Cappella degli Spag- nuoli — one of the rarest buildings in Italy for the student of mediaeval doctrine. Here, as in the Strozzi Chapel, we are in the grasp of the same mighty spirit that inspired the D'tvina Commedla and the De Monarchta, although the execution falls below the con- ception. It was built for a private citizen, Buonamico Guidalotti, by Fra Jacopo Talenti, as the chapter-house of the convent with a chapel of the Blessed Sacra- ment ; the title of Spanish Chapel dates from the time of Cosimo I., when the Spaniards in Florence held festival here on St. James' day. The frescoes were completed shortly after Guidalotti's death in 1355. Their general design is probably due to his friend, Fra Jacopo Passavanti (d. 1357), to whom he had in- trusted them. According to Vasari, they were painted by Simone Martini and Taddeo Gaddi, but this is doubtful. They set forth the Dominican ideal, the Church and the world as the Friars Preachers conceived of them, even as Giotto's famous allegories at Assisi show us the same through Franciscan glasses. While Orcagna 366 T*he Quarter of Santa Maria Novella painted the world beyond the grave in honour of the Angelical Doctor, these artists set forth the present world as it should be under his direction and that of his brothers, the "hounds of the Lord," domini canes, who defended the orto cattolico. The vaulted roof is divided into four scgn:ients ; and the picture in each segment corresponds to a great fresco on the wall below. On the wall opposite, as we enter, is represented the supienie event of the world's history, from which all the rest starts and upon which the whole hinges, the Passion of Christ, leading up to the Resurrection on the roof above it. On the segm.ent of the roof over the door is the Ascension, and on the wall below was shown (now much damaged) how the Dominicans received and carried out Christ's last injunction to His disciples. In the left segment of the roof is the Descent of the Holy Spirit ; and beneath it, on the wail, the result of this outpouring upon the world of intellect is shown in the triumph of Philosophy in the person of Aquinas, its supreme mediceval exponent. In the right segment is the Ship of Peter ; and, on the wall below, is seen how Peter becomes a fisher of men, the triumph of his Church under the guidance of the Dominicans. These two great allegorical frescoes — the triumph of St. Thomas and the civil hriga of the Church — are thus a more complete working out of the scheme set forth more simply by Orcagna in his altar piece in the Strozzi Chapel above — the functions delegated by Christ to Peter and St. Thomas — the power of the Keys and the doctrine of the Summa Theologica. In the centre of the philosophical allegory, St. Thomas Aquinas is seated on a Gothic throne, with an open book in his hands bearing the text from the Book of Wisdom with which the Church begins her lesson in his honour : Opiavi, et datus est mihi sensus. T.lje Story of Florence Invocavt, et ven'tt in me spirit us sapientiae ; et praeposui illam regnis et sedibus.'^ Over his head hover seven Angels, invested with the emblems of the three theo- logical and four cardinal virtues ; around him are seated the Apostles and Prophets, in support of his doctrine ; beneath his feet heresiarchs are humbled — Sabellius and Arius, to wit — and even Averroes, who ** made the great comment/' seems subdued. Below, in fourteen little shrines, are allegorical figures of the fourteen sciences which meet and are given ultimate form in his work, and at the feet of each maiden sits some great exponent of the science. From right to left, the seven liberal arts of the Trivium and Quadri- vium lead up to the Science of Numbers, represented on earth by Pythagoras ; from left to right, the earthly and celestial sciences lead up to Dogmatic Theology, represented by Augustine. ^ On the opposite wall is the Church militant and triumphant. Before Santa Maria del Fiore, here symbolising the Church militant, sit the two ideal guides of man, according to the dual scheme of Dante's ^ " I desired, and understanding was given me. I prayed, and the spirit of Wisdom came upon me ; and I preferred her before kingdoms and thrones." 3 The identification of each science and its representative is rather doubtful, especially in the celestial series. From altar to centre. Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic are represented by Aelius Donatus, Cicero and Aristotle (or Zeno) ; Music, Astronomy, Geometry, Arithmetic by Tubal Cain, Zoroaster (or Ptolemy), Euclid and Pythagoras. From w^indow to centre, Civil Lawr is represented by Justinian, Canon Law by Innocent III., Philosophy apparently by Boethius ; the next four seem to be Contemplative, Moral, Mystical and Dogmatic Theology, and their representatives Jerome, John of Damascus, Basil and Augustine — but, with the exception of St. Augustine, the identification is quite arbitrary. Possibly if the Logician is Zeno, the Philosopher is not Boethius but Aristotle ; the figure above, representing Philosophy, holds a mirror which seems to symbolise the divine creation of the cosmic Universe. 368 The Qjmrter of Santa Maria Novella De Monarchta — the Pope and the Emperor. On cither side are seated in a descending line the great dignitaries of the Church and the Empire ; Cardinal and Abbot, King and Baron ; v/hile all around are gathered the clergy and the laity, religious of every order, judges and nobles, merchants and scholars, with a few ladies kneeling on the right, one of whom is said to be Petrarch's Laura. Many of these figures are apparently portraits, but the attempts at identifica- tion — such as that of the Pope with Benedict XL, the Emperor with Kenry VII. — are entirely untrust- worthy. The Bishop, however, standing at the head of the clergy, is apparently Agnolo Acciaiuoli, Bishop of Florence ; and the French cavalier, in short tunic and hood, standing opposite to him at the head of the laity (formerly called Cimabue), is said — very ques- tionably — to be the Duke of Athens. At the feet of the successors of Peter and Csesar are gathered the sheep and lambs of Christ's fold, watched over by the black and white hounds that symbolise the Dominicans, On the right, Dominic urges on his watchdogs against the heretical wolves who are carrying off the lambs of the flock ; Peter Martyr hammers the unbelievers with the weapon of argument alone ; Aquinas convinces them with the light of his philosophic doctrine. But beyond is Acrasia's Bower of Bliss, a mediaeval rendering of what Spenser hereafter so divinely sung in the second book of the Faerie Queene. Figures of vice sit enthroned ; while seven damsels, Acrasia's handmaidens, dance before them ; and youth sports in the shade of the forbidden myrtles. Then come repentance and the confessional ; a Dominican friar (not one of the great Saints, but any humble priest of the order) absolves the penitents ; St Dominic appears again, and shows them the way to Paradise ; and then, becoming as little children, they are crowned by the 2 A 369 The Story of Florence Angels, and St. Peter lets them through the gate to join the Church Triumphant. Above in the Empyrean is the Throne of the Lord, with the Lamb and the four mystical Beasts, and the Madonna herself standing up at the head of the Angelic Hierarchies. In the great cloisters beyond, the Ciompi made their headquarters in 1378, under their Eight of Santa Maria Novella ; and, at the request of their leaders, the prior of the convent sent some of his preachers to furnish them with spiritual consolation and advice. Passing through the Piazza — where ir. able obelisks resting on tortoises mark the goals of the chariot races held here under Cosimo L and his successors, on the Eve of St. John — and down the Via della Scala, we come to the former Spezeria of the convent, still a flourishing manufactory of perfumes, liqueurs and the like, though no longer in the hands of the friars. In what was once its chapel, are frescoes by Spinello Aretino and his pupils, painted at the end of the Trecento, and representing the Passion of Christ, They are inferior to Spinello's work at Siena and on San Miniato, but the Christ bearing the Cross has much majesty, and, in the scene of the washing of the feet, the nervous action of Judas as he starts up is finely conceived. The famous Orti Oricellari, the gardens of the Rucellai, lie further down the Via della Scala. Here in the early days of the Cinquecento the most brilliant literary circles of Florentine society met ; and there was a sort of revival of the old Platonic Academy, which had died out with Marsilio Ficino. Machia- velli wrote for these gatherings his discourses on Livy and his Art of War. Although their meetings were mainly frequented by Mediceans, some of the younger members were ardent Republicans ; and it wns here that a conspiracy was hatched against the life of the 370 The Qjiartcr of Safita Maria Novella Cardinal Giulio dei Medici, for which Jacopo da Diacceto' and one of the Alamanni died upon the scaffold. In later days these Orti belonged to Bianca j' Cappello. At the corner of the adjoining palace is a little Madonna by Luca della Robbia ; and further on, in a lunette on the right of the former church of San Jacopo in Ripoli, there is a group of the Madonna and Child with St. James and St. Dominic, probably by Andrea della Robbia. In the Via di Palazzuolo, the little church of San Francesco dei Vanchetoni ■/ contains two small marble busts of children, exceed- ingly delicately modelled, supposed to represent the Gesil Bambino and the boy Baptist ; they are ascribed to Donatello, but recent writers attribute them to Desiderio or Rossclllno. In the Borgo Ognissanti, where the Swiss of Charles VIII. in 1494, forcing their way into the city from the Porta al Prato, were driven back by the inhabitants, are the church of Ognissanti and the Franciscan convent of San Salvadore. The church and convent originally belonged to the Frati Umiliati, who settled here in 1251, were largely influential in | promoting the Florentine wool trade, and exceedingly democratic in their sympathies. Their convent was a great place for political meetings in the days of Giano della Bella, who used to walk in their garden taking counsel with his friends. After the siege they were expelled from Florence, and the church and convent made over to the Franciscans of the Osservanza, who are said to have brought hither the habit which St. Francis wore when he received the Stigmata. The present church was built in the first half of the seventeenth century, but contains some ex- cellent pictures and frescoes belonging to the older edifice. Over the second altar to the right is a frescoed Pietk, one of the earliest works of Domenico 371 The Story of Florence Ghirlandaio, with above it the Madonna taking the Vespucci family under her protection — among them Amerigo, who was to give his name to the new continent of America. Further on, over a con- fessional, is Sandro Botticelh's St. Augustine, the only fresco of his still remaining in Florence ; opposite to it, over a confessional on the left, is St. Jerome by Domenico Ghirlandaio ; both apparently painted in 1 480. In the left transept is a Crucifix ascribed to Giotto ; Vasari tells us that it was the original of the numerous works of this kind which Puccio Capanna and others of his pupils multiplied through Italy. In the sacristy is a much restored fresco of the Crucifixion, belonging to the Trecento. Sandro Botticelli was buried in this church in 1510, and, two years later, Amerigo Vespucci in 1512. In the former Refectory of the convent is a fresco of the Last Supper, painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio in 1480, resembling that in San Marco, but injured by restoration. In the lunette over the portal of the church is represented the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin, by Gioviinni della Robbia. The Borgo Ognissanti leads lience westward into the Via del Prato, and through the Porta al Prato, one of the four gates of the third wall of the city, begun by Arnolfo in 1284; now merely a mutilated torso of Arnolfo's stately structure, left stranded in the prosaic wilderness of the modern Viale. The fresco in the lunette is by Michele di Ridolfo Ghir- landaio. Down towards the Arno a single tower remains from the old walls, mutilated, solitary and degraded so as to look a mere modern bit of masonry. Beyond are the Cascine Gardens, stretching for some two miles between the Arno and the Mugnone, delicious to linger in, and a sacred place to all lovers of English poetry. For here, towards the close of 1819, <