XVI. FLORENCE

S. MARIA NOVELLA

If Florence built the Baptistery, the Duomo, and the Campanile for the glory of the whole city, that there might be one place, in spite of all the factions, where without difference all might enter the kingdom of heaven, one temple in which all the city might wait till Jesus passed by, one tower which should announce the universal Angelus, she built other churches too, more particular in their usefulness, less splendid in their beauty, but not less necessary in their hold on the life of the city, or their appeal to us to-day. You may traverse the city from east to west without forsaking the old streets, and a little fantastically, perhaps, find some hint in the buildings you pass of that old far-away life, so restless and so fragile, so wanting in unity, and yet, as it seems to us, with but one really profound intention in all its work, the resurrection of life among men. In the desolate but beautiful Piazza of S. Maria Novella, at the gates of the old city, you find a Dominican convent, and before it the great church of that Order, S. Maria Novella herself, the bride of Michelangelo. Then, following Via dei Fossi, you enter the old city at the foot of the Carraja bridge, following Via di Parione past an old Medici palace into Via Porta Rossa and so into Via Calzaioli, where you came upon that strange and beautiful church so like a palace, Or San Michele, built by the merchants, the Church of the Guilds of the city. Passing thence into Piazza Signoria, and so into Via de’ Gondi, in the Proconsolo you find the Church of the great monastic Order the Badia of the Benedictines, having passed on your way Palazza Vecchio, the Palace of the Republic, afterwards of the Medici; and the Bargello, the Palace of the Podestà, afterwards a prison; coming later through Borgo de’ Greci to the Church of S. Croce, the convent of the Franciscans. Thus, while beyond the old west gate of the city there stood the house of the Dominicans, the Franciscans built their convent on the east, just without the city; and between them in the heart of Florence dwelt the oldest Order of all, the Benedictines, busy with manuscripts. Again, if the tower of authority throws its shadow over the Bargello, it is the tower of liberty that rises over Palazzo Vecchio, and the whole tragedy of the beautiful city seems to be expressed for us in the fact that while the one became a prison the other came to house the gaoler.

So this city of warm brick, with its churches of marble, its old ways, its palaces of stone, its convents at the gates, comes to hold for us, as it were, the very dream of Italy, the dream that was too good to last, that was so soon to be shattered by the barbarian. Yet in that little walk through the narrow winding ways from the west to the east of the city, all the eloquence and renown, the strength and beauty of Italy seem to be gathered for you, as in a nosegay you may find all the beauty of a garden. And of all the broken blossoms that you may find by the way, not one is more fragrant and fair than the sweet bride of Michelangelo, S. Maria Novella.

Standing in a beautiful Piazza, itself the loveliest thing therein, dressed in the old black and white habit, it dreams of the past: it is full of memories too, for here Boccaccio one Tuesday morning, just after Mass in 1348, amid the desolation of the city, found the seven beloved ladies of the Decamerone talking of death; here Martin V, and Eugenius IV, fugitives from the Eternal City, found a refuge; here Beata Villana confessed her sins; here Vanna Tornabuoni prayed and the Strozzi made their tombs. Full of memories—and of what else, then, but the past can she dream? For her there is no future. Her convent is suppressed, the great cloister has become a military gymnasium. What has she, then, in common with the modern world, with the buildings of Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele, for instance?—the past is all that we have left her.

Begun in 1278, as some say, from the design of Fra Ristoro and Fra Sisto, the façade, one of the most beautiful in the world, is really the fifteenth-century work of Leon Alberti working to the order of Giovanni Rucellai—you may see their blown sail everywhere—with that profound and unifying genius which involved everything he touched in a sort of reconciliation, thus prophesying to us of Leonardo da Vinci. For Alberti has here very fortunately made the pointed work of the Middle Age friends with Antiquity, Antiquity seen with the eyes of the Renaissance, full of a new sort of eagerness and of many little refinements. In the fagade of his masterpiece, the Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini, that beautiful unfinished temple where the gods of Greece seem for once to have come to the cradle of Jesus with something of the wonder of the shepherds who left their flocks to worship Him, Leon Alberti has taken as his model the arch of Augustus, that still, though broken, stands on the verge of the city in the Flaminian Way; but as though aware at last of the danger of any mere imitation of antiquity such as that, he has here contrived to express the beauty of Roman things, just what he himself had really felt concerning them, and has combined that very happily with the work of the age that was just then passing away; thus, as it were, creating for us one of the most perfect buildings of the fifteenth century, very characteristic too, in its strange beauty, as of the dead new risen. And then how subtly he has composed this beautiful façade, so that somehow it really adds to the beauty of the Campanile, with its rosy spire, in the background.

Within, the church is full of a sort of twilight, in which certainly much of its spaciousness is lost; those chapels in the nave, for instance, added by Vasari in the sixteenth century have certainly spoiled it of much of its beauty. Built in the shape of a tau cross—a Latin cross that is almost tau, in old days it was divided, where still there is a step across the nave into two parts, one of which was reserved for the friars, while the other was given to the people. There is not much of interest in this part of the church: a crucifix over the great door, attributed to Giotto; a fresco of the Holy Trinity, with Madonna and St. John, by Masaccio, that rare strong master; the altar, the fourth in the right aisle, dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury,—almost nothing beside. It is in the south transept, where a flight of steps leads to the Rucellai Chapel, that we came upon one of the most beautiful and mysterious things in the city, the Madonna, so long given to Cimabue, but now claimed for Duccio of Siena. [102]

Vasari describes for us very delightfully the triumph of this picture, when, so great was the admiration of the people for it that “it was carried in solemn procession, with the sound of trumpets and other festal demonstrations, from the house of Cimabue to the church,—he himself being highly rewarded and honoured for it”; while, as he goes on to tell us, when Cimabue was painting it, in a garden as it happened near the gate of S. Pietro, King Charles of Sicily, brother of St. Louis, saw the picture, and praising it, “all the men and women of Florence hastened in great crowds to admire it, making all possible demonstrations of delight. The inhabitants of the neighbourhood, rejoicing in this occurrence, ever after called that place Borgo Allegri,”—the name it bears to this day. However reluctant we may be to find Vasari, that divine gossip, at fault, it might seem that Cimabue’s Triumph is a fable, or if, indeed, it happened, was stolen, for the Rucellai Madonna is apparently the work of Duccio the Sienese. [103] Of the works of Cimabue not one remains to us; we do not know, we have certainly no means of knowing, whether he was, as Ghiberti tells us, a painter in the old Greek manner, or whether, as Vasari suggests, he was the true master of Giotto, in that to him was owing the impulse of life which we find so moving in Giotto’s work. And then Vasari, it seems, is wrong in his account of Borgo Allegri, for that place was named not after happiness, the happiness of that part of the city in their great neighbour, but from a family who in those days lived thereabout and bore that name.

It is, however, of comparatively little importance who painted the picture. The controversy, which is not yet finished, serves for the most part merely to obscure the essential fact that here is the picture still in its own place, and that it is beautiful. Very lovely, indeed, she is, Madonna of Happiness, and still at her feet the poor may pray, and still on her dim throne she may see day come and evening fall. Far up in the obscure height she holds Christ on her knees. Perhaps you may catch the faint dim loveliness of her face in the early dawn amid the beauty of the angels kneeling round her throne when the light steals through the shadowy windows across the hills; or perhaps at evening in the splendour of some summer sunset you may see just for a moment the whiteness of her delicate hands; but she is secret and very far away, she has withdrawn herself to hear the prayers of the poor in spirit who come when the great church is empty, when the tourists have departed, when the workmen have returned to their homes. And beside her in that strange, mysterious place Beata Villana sleeps, where the angels draw back the curtain, in a tomb by Desiderio da Settignano. She was not of the great company whose names we falter at our altars and whisper for love over and over again in the quietness of the night; but of those who are weary. Born to a wealthy Florentine merchant, Andrea di Messer Lapo by name, little Vanna went her ways with the children, yet with a sort of naïve sincerity after all, so that when she heard Saint Catherine praised or Saint Francis, she believed it and wished to be of that company; but the world, full of glamour and laughter in those days, and now too, caught her by the waist and bore her away, in the person of a noble youth of the Benintendi, who loved her well enough; yet it was love she loved rather than her husband; and life calling sweetly enough down the long narrow streets, she followed, yes, till she was a little weary. So she would question her beauty, and, looking in her glass, see not herself but the demon love that possessed her; and again in another mirror she found a devil, she said, like a faun prick-eared and with goat’s feet, peering at her with frightening eyes. So she stripped off her fair gay dresses, and took instead the rough hair-shirt, and came at evening across the Piazza to confess in S. Maria Novella; and gave herself to the poor, and forgot the sun till weary she fled away. Her grandson, as it is said, built this tomb to her memory, and they wrote above, Beata Villana.

It is always with reluctance, I think, that one leaves that dim chapel of the Rucellai, and yet how many wonderful things await us in the church. In the second chapel of the transept, the Chapel of Filippo Strozzi, who is buried behind the altar, Filippino Lippi, the son of Fra Lippo, the pupil of Botticelli, has painted certain frescoes,—a little bewildering in their crowded beauty, it is true, but how good after all in their liveliness, their light and shadow, the pleasant, eager faces of the women—where St. John raises Drusiana from the grave, or St. Philip drives out the Dragon of Hierapolis; while above St. John is martyred, and St. Philip too. But it is in the choir behind the high altar, where for so long the scaffolding has prevented our sight, that we come upon the simple serious work of Domencio Ghirlandajo, whom all the critics have scorned. Born in 1449, the pupil of Alessio Baldovinetti, Ghirlandajo is not a great painter perhaps, but rather a craftsman, a craftsman with a wonderful power of observation, of noting truly the life of his time. He seems to have asked of art rather truth than beauty. Almost wholly, perhaps, without the temperament of an artist, his success lies in his gift for expressing not beauty but the life of his time, the fifteenth century in Florence, which lives still in all his work. Consider, then, the bright facile mediocre work of Benozzo Gozzoli, not at its best, in the Campo Santo of Pisa, remember how in the dark chapel of the Medici palace he lights up the place almost as with a smile, in the gay cavalcade that winds among the hills. There is much fancy there, much observation too; here a portrait, there a gallant fair head, and the flowers by the wayside. Well, it is in much the same way that Ghirlandajo has painted here in the choir of S. Maria Novella. He has seen the fashions, he has noted the pretty faces of the women, he has watched the naïve homely life of the Medici ladies, for instance, and has painted not his dreams about Madonna, but his dreams of Vanna Tornabuoni, of Clarice de’ Medici, and the rest. And he was right; almost without exception his frescoes are the most interesting and living work left in Florence. He has understood or divined that one cannot represent exactly that which no longer exists; and it is to represent something with exactitude that he is at work. So he contents himself very happily with painting the very soul of his century. It is a true and sincere art this realistic, unimpassioned, impersonal work of Ghirlandajo’s, and in its result, for us at any rate, it has a certain largeness and splendour. Consider this “Birth of the Virgin.” It is full of life and homely observation. You see the tidy dusted room where St. Anne is lying on the bed, already, as in truth she was, past her youth, but another painter would have forgotten it. She is just a careful Florentine housewife, thrifty too, not flurried by her illness, for she has placed by her bedside, all ready for her need, two pomegranates and some water. Then, again, they are going to wash the little Mary. She lies quite happily sucking her fingers in the arms of her nurse, the basin is in the middle of the floor, a servant has just come in briskly, no doubt as St. Anne has always insisted, and pours the water quickly into the vessel. It is not difficult to find all sorts of faults, of course, as the critics have not hesitated to do. That perspective, for instance, how good it is: almost as good as Verrocchio’s work,—and those dancing angiolini; yes, Verrocchio might have thought of them himself. But the lady in the foreground, how unmoved she seems; it is as though the whole scene had been arranged for the sake of her portrait; and, indeed it is a portrait, for the richly dressed visitor is Ginevra de’ Benci, who stands too in the fresco of the Birth of St. John. Again in the fresco of the angel appearing to Zacharias in the Temple, there are some thirty portraits of famous Florentines, painted with much patience, and no doubt with an extraordinary truth of likeness. In the left corner you may see Marsilio Ficino dressed as a priest; Gentile de’ Becchi turns to him, while Cristoforo Landini in a red cloak stands by, and Angelo Poliziano lifts up his hands.

Does one ever regret, I wonder, after looking at these realistic fifteenth-century works, that the frescoes of Orcagna—for he painted the whole choir—were destroyed in a storm, it is said, in 1358. Fragments of his work, however, we are told, remained for more than a hundred years, till, indeed, Ghirlandajo was employed to replace them. We find his work, however, sadly damaged it is true, and really his perhaps only in outline, in the Strozzi chapel here, the lofty chapel of north transept, where he has painted on the wall facing the entrance the Last Judgment, while to the left you may see Paradise, to the right the Inferno. The pupil of Giotto and of Andrea Pisano, Orcagna is the most important artist of his time, the one vital link in the chain that unites Masolino with Giotto. He was a universal artist, practising as an architect and goldsmith no less than as a painter. In the Last Judgment in this chapel he seems not only to have absorbed the whole art of his time, but to have advanced it; for to the grandeur and force of his work he added a certain visionary loveliness that most surely already foretells Beato Angelico. If in the Paradise and the Inferno we are less moved by the greatness of his achievement, we remind ourselves how terribly they have suffered from damp, from neglect, from the restorer. In the altarpiece itself we have perhaps the only “intact painting” of his remaining to us, and splendid as it is in colour and form, it lacks something of the rhythm of the frescoes that like some slow and solemn chant fill the chapel with their sincere unforgetable music.

As you pass, beckoned by a friar, into the half-ruined cloisters below S. Maria Novella, you come on your right into a little alley of tombs, behind which, on the wall, you may find two bits of fresco by Giotto, the Meeting of S. Joachim and S. Anna at the Golden Gate, and the Birth of the Virgin. On your left you pass into the Chiostro Verde, where Paolo Uccello has painted scenes from the Old Testament in a sort of green monotone, for once without enthusiasm. Above you and around you rises the old convent and the great tower; there, in the far corner, perhaps a friar plays with a little cat, here a pigeon flutters under the arches about the little ruined space of grass, the meagre grass of the south, where now and then the shadow of a white cloud passes over the city, whither who knows. For a moment in that silent place you wonder why you have come, you feel half inclined to go back into the church, when shyly the friar comes towards you, and, leading you round the cloister, enters the Cappellina degli Spagnuoli.

How much has been written in praise of the frescoes in the Spanish chapel of S. Maria Novella, where Eleonora of Toledo, the wife of Grand Duke Cosimo, used to hear Mass; yet how disappointing they are. In so simple a building, some great artist, you might think, in listening to Ruskin, had really expressed himself, his thoughts about Faith and the triumph of the Church. But the work which we find there is the work of mediocrities, poor craftsmen too, the pupils and imitators of the Sienese and Florentine schools of their time, having nothing in common with the excellent work of Taddeo Gaddi, the beautiful work of Simone Martini of Siena. These figures, so pretty and so ineffectual, which have been labelled here the Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas, there the Triumph of the Church, have no existence for us as painting; they have passed into literature, and in the pages of Ruskin have found a new beauty that for the first time has given them some semblance of life.

FOOTNOTES:

[102] Mysterious no longer. For in the autumn of 1907 the chapel was destroyed by fools and the Madonna—just an old panel picture after all—set up in the cold daylight (1908).

[103] Crowe and Cavalcaselle, op. cit. vol. i, 187.