In every ancient city of the world, cities that in themselves for the most part have been nations, one may find some spot holy or splendid that instantly evokes an image of that of which it is a symbol,—which sums up, as it were, in itself all the sanctity, beauty, and splendour of her fame, in whose name there lives even yet something of the glory that is dead. It is so no longer; in what confused street or shapeless square shall I find hidden the soul of London, or in what name then shall I sum up the lucid restless life of Paris? But if I name the Acropolis, all the pale beauty of Athens will stir in my heart; and when I speak the word Capitolium, I seem to hear the thunder of the legions, to see the very face of Caesar, to understand the dominion and majesty of Rome.
Something of this power of evocation may still be found in the Piazza della Signoria of Florence: all the love that founded the city, the beauty that has given her fame, the immense confusion that is her history, the hatred that has destroyed her, lingers yet in that strange and lovely place where Palazzo Vecchio stands like a violated fortress, where the Duke of Athens was expelled the city, where the Ciompi rose against the Ghibellines, where Jesus Christ was proclaimed King of the Florentines, where Savonarola, was burned, and Alessandro de’ Medici made himself Duke.
It is not any great and regular space you come upon in the Piazza della Signoria, such as the huge empty Place de la Concorde of Paris, but one that is large enough for beauty, and full of the sweet variety of the city; it is the symbol of Florence—a beautiful symbol.
In the morning the whole Piazza is full of sunlight, and swarming with people: there, is a stall for newspapers; here, a lemonade merchant dispenses his sweet drinks. Everyone is talking; at the corner of Via Calzaioli a crowd has assembled, a crowd that moves and seems about to dissolve, that constantly reforms itself without ever breaking up. On the benches of the loggia men lie asleep in the shadow, and children chase one another among the statues. Everywhere and from all directions cabs pass with much cracking of whips and hallooing. There stand two Carabinieri in their splendid uniforms, surveying this noisy world; an officer passes with his wife, leading his son by the hand; you may see him lift his sword as he steps on the pavement. A group of tourists go by, urged on by a gesticulating guide; he is about to show them the statues in the loggia; they halt under the Perseus. He begins to speak of it, while the children look up at him as though to catch what he is saying in that foreign tongue.
And surely the Piazza, which has seen so many strange and splendid things, may well tolerate this also; it is so gay, so full of life. Very fair she seems under the sunlight, picturesque too, with her buildings so different and yet so harmonious. On the right the gracious beauty of the Loggia de’ Lanzi; then before you the lofty, fierce old Palazzo Vecchio; and beside it the fountains play in the farther Piazza. Cosimo I rides by as though into Siena, while behind him rises the palace of the Uguccioni, which Folfi made; and beside you the Calzaioli ebbs and flows with its noisy life, as of old the busiest street of the city.
The Palazza Vecchio, peaceful enough now, but still with the fierce gesture of war stands on one side, facing the Piazza, a fortress of huge stones four storeys high—the last, thrust out from the wall and supported by arches on brackets of stone, as though crowning the palace itself. It stands almost four-square, and above rises the beautiful tower, the highest tower in the city, with a gallery similar to the last storey of the palace, and above a loggia borne by four pillars, from which spring the great arches of the canopy that supports the spire; and whereas the battlements of the palazzo are square and Guelph, those of the tower are Ghibelline in the shape of the tail of the swallow. Set, not in the centre of the square, nor made to close it, but on one side, it was thus placed, it is said, in order to avoid the burned houses of the Uberti, who had been expelled the city. However this may be, and its position is so fortunate that it is not likely to be due to any such chance, Arnolfo di Cambio began it in February 1299, taking as his model, so some have thought, the Rocca of the Conti Guidi of the Casentino, which Lapo his father had built. Under the arches of the fourth storey are painted the coats of the city and its gonfaloni. And there you may see the most ancient device of Florence, the lily argent on a field gules; the united coats gules and argent of Florence and Fiesole in 1010; the coat of Guelph Florence, a lily gules on a field argent; and, among the rest, the coat of Charles of Anjou, the lilies or on a field azure.
On the platform or ringhiera before the great door, the priori watched the greater festas, and made their proclamations, before the Loggia de’ Lanzi was built in 1387; and here in 1532 the last Signoria of the Republic proclaimed Alessandro de’ Medici first Duke of Florence, in front of the Judith and Holofernes of Donatello, whose warning went unheeded. And indeed, that group, part of the plunder that the people found in Palazzo Riccardi, in the time of Piero de’ Medici, who sought to make himself tyrant, once stood beside the great gate of Palazzo Vecchio, whence it was removed at the command of Alessandro, who placed there instead Bandinelli’s feeble Hercules and Cacus. Opposite to it Michelangelo’s David once stood, till it was removed in our own time to the Accademia, where it looks like a cast.
Over the great door where of old was set the monogram of Christ, you may read still REX REGUM ET DOMINUS DOMINANTIUM, and within the gate is a court most splendid and lovely, built after the design of Arnolfo, and once supported by his pillars of stone, but now the columns of Michelozzo, made in 1450, and covered with stucco decoration in the sixteenth century, form the cortile in which, over the fountain of Vasari, Verrocchio’s lovely Boy Playing with the Dolphin ever half turns in his play. Altogether lovely in its naturalism, its humorous grace, Verrocchio made it for Lorenzo Magnifico, who placed it in his gardens at Careggi, whence it was brought here by Cosimo I.
Passing through that old palace, up the great staircase into the Salone del Cinquecento, where Savonarola was tried, with the Cappella di S. Bernardo, where he made his last communion, and at last up the staircase into the tower, where he was tortured and imprisoned, it is ever of that mad pathetic figure, self-condemned and self-murdered, that you think, till at last, coming out of the Palazzo, you seek the spot of his awful death in the Piazza. Fanatic puritan as he was, vainer than any Medici, it is difficult to understand how he persuaded the Florentines to listen to his eloquence, spoiled as it must have been for them by the Ferrarese dialect. How could a people who were the founders of the modern world, the creators of modern culture, allow themselves to be baffled by a fanatic friar prophesying judgment? Yet something of a peculiar charm, a force that we miss in the sensual and almost devilish face we see in his portrait, he must have possessed, for it is said that Lorenzo desired his company; and even though we are able to persuade ourselves that it was for other reasons than to enjoy his friendship, we have yet to explain the influence he exercised over Sandro Botticelli and Pico della Mirandola, whose lives he changed altogether. In the midst of a people without a moral sense he appears like the spirit of denial. He was kicking against the pricks, he was guilty of the sin against the light, and whether his aim was political or religious, or maybe both, he failed. It is said he denied Lorenzo absolution, that he left him without a word at the brink of the grave but when he himself came to die by the horrible, barbaric means he had invoked in a boast, he did not show the fortitude of the Magnificent. Full of every sort of rebellion and violence, he made anarchy in Florence, and scoffed at the Holy See, while he was a guest of the one and the officer of the other. His bonfires of “vanities,” as he called them, were possibly as disastrous for Florence as the work of the Puritan was for England; for while he burned the pictures, they sold them to the Jews. He is dead, and has become one of the bores of history; and while Americans leave their cards on the stone that marks the place of his burning, the Florentines appear to have forgotten him. Peace to his ashes!
As you enter the Loggia de’ Lanzi, gay with children now, once the lounge of the Swiss Guard, whose barracks were not far away, you wonder who can have built so gay, so happy a place beside the fortress of the Signoria. Yet, in truth, it was for the Priori themselves that loggia was built, though not by Orcagna as it is said, to provide, perhaps, a lounge in summer for the fathers of the city, and for a place of proclamation that all Florence might hear the laws they had made. Yes, and to-day, too, do they not proclaim the tombola where once they announced a victory? Even now, in spite of forgotten greatness, it is still a garden of statues. Looking ever over the Piazza stands the Perseus of Cellini, with the head of Medusa held up to the multitude, the sword still gripped in his hand. It is the masterpiece of one who, like all the greatest artists of the Renaissance—Giotto, Orcagna, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael—did not confine himself to one art, but practised many. And though it would be unjust to compare such a man as Cellini with the greatest of all, yet he was great not only as a sculptor and a goldsmith, but as a man of letters and as a man of the world. His Perseus, a little less than a demigod, is indeed not so lovely as the wax model he made for it, which is now in the Bargello; but in the gesture with which he holds out the severed head from him, in the look of secret delight that is already half remorseful for all that dead beauty, in the heroic grace with which he stands there after the murder, the dead body marvellously fallen at his feet, Cellini has proved himself the greatest sculptor of his time. That statue cost him dear enough, as he tells you in his Memoirs, but, as Gautier said, it is worth all it cost.
On the pedestal you may see the deliverance of Andromeda; but the finest of these reliefs has been taken to the Bargello. The only other bronze here is the work of Donatello—a Judith and Holofernes, under the arch towards the Uffizi. It is Donatello’s only large bronze group, and was probably designed for the centre piece of a fountain, the mattress on which Holofernes has fallen having little spouts for water. Judith stands over her victim, who is already dead, her sword lifted to strike again; and you may see by her face that she will strike if it be necessary. Beneath you read—“Exemplum salut. publ. cives posuere, MCCCCXV.” Poor as the statue appears in its present position, the three bronze reliefs of the base gain here what they must lose in the midst of a fountain, yet even they too are unfortunate. Indeed, very few statues of this sort were made by the sculptors of the Renaissance; for the most part they confined themselves to single figures and to groups in relief: even Michelangelo but rarely attempted the “freestanding group.” It is, however, to such a work we come in the splendidly composed Rape of the Sabines by Giovanni da Bologna in the Loggia itself. Spoiled a little by its too laboured detail, its chief fault lies in the fact that it is top-heavy, the sculptor having placed the mass of the group so high that the base seems unsubstantial and unbalanced. Bologna’s other group here, Hercules and Nessus, which once stood at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio, is dramatic and well composed, but the forms are feeble and even insignificant. The antique group of Ajax dragging the body of Patrocles, is not a very important copy of some great work, and it is much restored: it was found in a vineyard near Rome.
The great fountain which plays beside the Palazzo, where of old the houses of the Uberti stood, is rich and grandiose perhaps, but in some unaccountable way adds much to the beauty of the Piazza. How gay and full of life it is even yet, that splendid and bitter place, that in its beauty and various, everlasting life seems to stand as the symbol of this city, so scornful even in the midst of the overwhelming foreigner who has turned her into a museum, a vast cemetery of art. Only here you may catch something of the old life that is not altogether passed away. Still, in spite of your eyes, you must believe there are Florentines somewhere in the city, that they are still as in Dante’s day proud and wise and easily angry, scornful too, a little turbulent, not readily curbed, but full of ambition—great nobles, great merchants, great bankers. Does such an one never come to weep over dead Florence in this the centre of her fame, the last refuge of her greatness, in the night, perhaps, when none may see his tears, when all is hushed that none may mark his sorrow?
It was past midnight when once more I came out of the narrow ways, almost empty at that hour, when every footfall resounds between the old houses, into the old Piazza to learn this secret. Far away in the sky the moon swung like a censer, filling the place with a fragile and lovely light. Standing there in the Piazza, quite deserted now save for some cloaked figure who hurried away up the Calzaioli, and two Carabinieri who stood for a moment at the Uffizi corner and then turned under the arches, I seemed to understand something of the spirit that built that marvellous fortress, that thrust that fierce tower into the sky;—yes, surely at this hour some long dead Florentine must venture here to console the living, who, for sure, must be gay so sadly and with so much regret.
In the Loggia de’ Lanzi the moonlight fell among the statues, and in that fairy light I seemed to see in those ghostly still figures of marble and bronze some strange fantastic parable, the inscrutable prophecy of the scornful past. Gian Bologna’s Sabine woman, was she not Florence struggling in the grip of the modern vandal; Cellini’s Perseus with Medusa’s head, has it not in truth turned the city to stone?
The silence was broken; something had awakened in the Piazza: perhaps a bird fluttered from the battlements of the Palazzo, perhaps it was the city that turned in her sleep. No, there it was again. It was a human voice close beside me: it seemed to be weeping.
I looked around: all was quiet. I saw nothing, only there at the corner a little light flickered before a shrine; and yes, something was moving there, someone who was weeping. Softly, softly over the stones I made my way to that little shrine of Madonna at the street corner, and I found, ah! no proud and scornful noble mourning over dead Florence, but an old woman, ragged and alone, prostrate under some unimaginable sorrow, some unappeasable regret.
Did she hear as of old—that Virgin with narrow half-open eyes and the sidelong look? God, I know not if she heard or no. Perhaps I alone have heard in all the world.