Seeing Europe with Famous Authors Volume VII Part 6

THE ORIGINS OF THE CITY[29]

BY GRANT ALLEN

Only two considerable rivers flow from the Apennines westward into the Mediterranean. The Tiber makes Rome; the Arno makes Florence. In prehistoric and early historic times, the mountainous region which forms the basin of these two rivers was occupied by a gifted military race, the Etruscans, who possest a singular a.s.similative power for Oriental and h.e.l.lenic culture. Intellectually and artistically, they were the pick of Italy. Their blood still runs in the veins of the people of Tuscany. Almost every great thing done in the Peninsula, in ancient or modern times, has been done by Etruscan hands or brains. The poets and painters, in particular, with few exceptions, have been, in the wide ethnical sense, Tuscans.

The towns of ancient Etruria were hill-top strongholds. Florence was not one of these; even its neighbor, Fiesole (Faesulue), did not rank among the twelve great cities of the Etruscan league. But with the Roman conquest and the Roman peace, the towns began to descend from their mountain peaks into the river valleys; roads grew important, through internal trade; and bridges over rivers a.s.sumed a fresh commercial value. Florence (Florentia), probably founded under Sulla as a Roman municipium, upon a Roman road, guarded the bridge across the Arno, and gradually absorbed the population of Fiesole. Under the later empire, it was the official residence of the "Corrector" of Tuscany and Umbria.

During the Middle Ages, it became, for all practical purposes, the intellectual and artistic capital of Tuscany, inheriting in full the remarkable mental and esthetic excellences of the Etruscan race.

The valley of the Arno is rich and fertile, bordered by cultivable hills, which produce the famous Chianti wine. It was thus predestined by nature as the seat of the second city on the west slope of Italy.

Florence, however, was not always that city. The seaport of Pisa (now silted up and superseded by Leghorn) first rose into importance; possest a powerful fleet; made foreign conquests; and erected the magnificent group of buildings just outside the town which still form its chief claim upon the attention of tourists. But Florence with its bridge commanded the inland trade, and the road to Rome from Germany. After the destruction of Fiesole in 1125, it grew rapidly in importance; and, Pisa having sustained severe defeats from Genoa, the inland town soon rose to supremacy in the Arno basin. Nominally subject to the Emperor, it became practically an independent republic, much agitated by internal quarrels, but capable of holding its own against neighboring cities. Its chief buildings are thus an age or two later than those of Pisa; it did not begin to produce splendid churches and palaces, in emulation of those of Pisa and Siena, till about the close of the 13th century. To the same period belongs the rise of its literature under Dante, and its painting under Giotto. This epoch of rapid commercial, military, and artistic development forms the main glory of early Florence.

The 14th century is chiefly interesting at Florence as the period of Giottesque art, finding its final crown in Fra Angelico. With the beginning of the 15th, we get the dawn of the Renaissance--the age when art set out once more to recover the lost perfection of antique workmanship. In literature, this movement took the form of humanism; in architecture and sculpture, it exhibited itself in the persons of Alberti, Ghiberti, Della Robbia, and Donatello; in painting, it showed itself in Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, and Verrocchio....

We start, then, with the fact that up to nearly the close of the 13th century (1278), Florence was a comparatively small and uninteresting town, without any buildings of importance, save the relatively insignificant Baptistery; without any great cathedral, like Pisa and Siena; without any splendid artistic achievement of any kind. It consisted at that period of a labyrinth of narrow streets, enclosing huddled houses and tall towers of the n.o.bles, like the two to be seen to this day at Bologna. In general aspect, it could not greatly have differed from Albenga or San Gimignano in our own time. But commerce was active; wealth was increasing; and the population was seething with the intellectual and artistic spirit of its Etruscan ancestry. During the lifetime of Dante, the town began to transform itself and to prepare for becoming the glorious Florence of the Renaissance artists. It then set about building two immense and beautiful churches--Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella--while, shortly after, it grew to be ashamed of its tiny San Giovanni (the existing Baptistery), and girded itself up to raise a superb cathedral, which should cast into the shade both the one long since finished at maritime Pisa and the one then still rising to completion on the height of Siena.

Florence at that time extended no further than the area known as Old Florence, which means from the Ponte Vecchio to the Cathedral in one direction, and from the Ponte alla Carraja to the Grazie in the other.

Outside the wall lay a belt of fields and gardens, in which one or two monasteries had already sprung up. But Italy at that moment was filled with religious enthusiasm by the advent of the Friars both great orders of whom, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, had already established themselves in the rising commercial city of Florence. Both orders had acquired sites for monastic buildings in the s.p.a.ce outside the walls and soon began to erect enormous churches. The Dominicans came first, with Santa Maria Novella, the commencement of which dates from 1278; the Franciscans were a little later in the field, with Santa Croce, the first stone not being placed till 1294.

THE CATHEDRAL[30]

BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE

Desirous of seeing the beginnings of this Renaissance we go from the Palazzo-Vecchio to the Duomo. Both form the double heart of Florence, such as it beat in the Middle Ages, the former for politics, and the latter for religion, and the two so well united that they formed but one. Nothing can be n.o.bler than the public edict pa.s.sed in 1294 for the construction of the national cathedral.

"Whereas, it being of sovereign prudence on the part of a people of high origin to proceed in its affairs in such a manner that the wisdom no less than the magnanimity of its proceedings can be recognized in its outward works, it is ordered that Arnolfo, master architect of our commune, prepare models or designs for the restoration of Santa Maria Reparata, with the most exalted and most prodigal magnificence, in order that the industry and power of men may never create or undertake anything whatsoever more vast and more beautiful; in accordance with that which our wisest citizens have declared and counselled in public session and in secret conclave, to wit, that no hand be laid upon the works of the commune without the intent of making them to correspond to the n.o.ble soul which is composed of the souls of all its citizens united in one will."

[FLORENCE: BRIDGE ACROSS THE ARNO Ill.u.s.tration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]

[FLORENCE: THE OLD PALACE Ill.u.s.tration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]

[FLORENCE: THE LOGGIA DI LANZI Ill.u.s.tration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]

[FLORENCE: CLOISTER OF SANTA MARIA NOVELLA Ill.u.s.tration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]

[FLORENCE: CLOISTER OF SAN MARCO Ill.u.s.tration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]

[FLORENCE: THE PITTI PALACE Ill.u.s.tration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]

[FLORENCE: THE HOUSE OF DANTE Ill.u.s.tration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]

[FRONT OF ST. MARK'S, VENICE Ill.u.s.tration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]

[INTERIOR OF ST. MARK'S, VENICE Ill.u.s.tration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]

[THE DUCAL PALACE, VENICE Ill.u.s.tration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]

[VENICE: PIAZZA OF ST. MARK'S, DUCAL PALACE ON THE LEFT Ill.u.s.tration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]

[VIEW OF VENICE FROM THE CAMPANILE Ill.u.s.tration: Courtesy John C. Winston Co.]

In this ample period breathes the grandiose pride and intense patriotism of the ancient republics. Athens under Pericles, and Rome under the first Scipio cherished no prouder sentiments. At each step, here as elsewhere, in texts and in monuments, is found, in Italy, the traces, the renewal and the spirit of cla.s.sic antiquity.

Let us, accordingly, look at the celebrated Duomo--but, the difficulty is to see it. It stands upon flat ground, and, in order that the eye might embrace its ma.s.s it would be necessary to level three hundred buildings. Herein appears the defect of the great medieval structure; even to-day, after so many openings, effected by modern demolishers, most of the cathedrals are visible only on paper. The spectator catches sight of a fragment, some section of a wall, or the facade; but the whole escapes him; man's work is no longer proportioned to his organs.

It was not thus in antiquity; temples were small or of mediocre dimensions, and were almost always erected on an eminence; their general form and complete profile could be enjoyed from twenty different points of view.

After the advent of Christianity, men's conceptions transcended their forces, and the ambition of the spirit no longer took into account the limitations of the body. The human machine lost its equilibrium. With forgetfulness of the moderate there was established a love of the odd.

Without either reason or symmetry campaniles or bell-towers were planted, like isolated posts, in front or alongside of cathedrals; there is one of these alongside of the Duomo, and this change of human equipoise must have been potent, since even here, among so many Latin traditions and cla.s.sic apt.i.tudes, it declares itself.

In other respects, save the ogive arcades, the monument is not Gothic, but Byzantine, or, rather, original; it is a creature of a new and mixed form like the new and mixed civilization of which it is the offspring.

You feel power and invention in it with a touch of quaintness and fancy.

Walls of enormous grandeur are developed or expanded without the few windows in them happening to impair their ma.s.siveness or diminish their strength. There are no flying b.u.t.tresses; they are self-sustaining.

Marble panels, alternately yellow and black, cover them with a glittering marquetry, and curves of arches let into their ma.s.ses seem to be the bones of a robust skeleton beneath the skin.

The Latin cross, which the edifice figures, contracts at the top, and the chancel and transepts bubble out into rotundities and projections, in petty domes behind the church in order to accompany the grand dome which ascends above the choir, and which, the work of Brunnelleschi, newer and yet more antique than that of St. Peter, lifts in the air to an astonishing height its elongated form, its octagonal sides and its pointed lantern. But how can the physiognomy of a church be conveyed by words? It has one nevertheless; all its portions appearing together are combined in one chord and in one effect. If you examine the plans and old engravings you will appreciate the bizarre and captivating harmony of these grand Roman walls overlaid with Oriental fancies; of these Gothic ogives arranged in Byzantine cupolas; of these light Italian columns forming a circle above a bordering of Grecian caissons; of this a.s.semblage of all forms, pointed, swelling, angular, oblong, circular and octagonal. Greek and Latin antiquity, the Byzantine and Saracenic Orient, the Germanic and Italian middle-age, the entire past, shattered, amalgamated and transformed, seems to have been melted over anew in the human furnace in order to flow out in fresh forms in the hands of the new genius of Giotto, Arnolfo, Brunnelleschi and Dante.

Here the work is unfinished, and the success is not complete. The facade has not been constructed; all that we see of it is a great naked, scarified wall similar to a leper's plaster.[31] There is no light within. A line of small round bays and a few windows fill the immensity of the edifice with a gray illumination; it is bare, and the argillaceous tone in which it is painted depresses the eye with its wan monotony. A "Pieta" by Michael Angelo and a few statues seem like spectres; the bas-reliefs are only vague confusion. The architect, hesitating between medieval and antique taste, fell only upon a lifeless light, that between a pure light and a colored light.

The more we contemplate architectural works the more do we find them adapted to express the prevailing spirit of an epoch. Here, on the flank of the Duomo, stands the Campanile by Giotto, erect, isolated, like St.

Michael's tower at Bordeaux, or the tower of St. Jacques at Paris; the medieval man, in fact, loves to build high; he aspires to heaven, his elevations all tapering off into pointed pinnacles; if this one had been finished a spire of thirty feet would have surmounted the tower, itself two hundred and fifty feet high. Hitherto the northern architect and the Italian architect are governed by the same instinct, and gratify the same penchant; but while the northern artist, frankly Gothic, embroiders his tower with delicate moldings, and complex flower-work, and a stone lacework infinitely multiplied and intersected, the southern artist, half-Latin through his tendencies and his reminiscences, erects a square, strong and full pile, in which a skilful ornamentation does not efface the general structure, which is not frail sculptured bijou, but a solid durable monument, its coating of red, black and white marble covering it with royal luxuriance, and which, through its healthy and animated statues, its bas-reliefs framed in medallions, recalls the friezes and pediments of an antique temple.

In these medallions Giotto has symbolized the princ.i.p.al epochs of human civilization; the traditions of Greece near those of Judea; Adam, Tubal-Cain, and Noah, Daedalus, Hercules, and Antaeus, the invention of plowing, the mastery of the horse, and the discovery of the arts and the sciences; laic and philosophic sentiment live freely in him side by side with a theological and religious sentiment. Do we not already see in this renaissance of the fourteenth century that of the sixteenth? In order to pa.s.s from one to another, it will suffice for the spirit of the first to become ascendant over the spirit of the second; at the end of a century we are to see in the adornment of the edifice, in these statues of Donatello, in their baldness so expressive, in the sentiment of the real and natural life displayed among the goldsmiths and sculptors, evidence of the transformation begun under Giotto having been already accomplished.

Every step we take we encounter some sign of this persistency or precocity of a Latin and cla.s.sic spirit. Facing the Duomo is the baptistery, which at first served as a church, a sort of octagonal temple surmounted by a cupola, built, doubtless, after the model of the Pantheon of Rome, and which, according to the testimony of a contemporary bishop, already in the eighth century projected upward the pompous rotundities of its imperial forms. Here, then, in the most barbarous epoch of the Middle Ages, is a prolongation, a renewal, or, at least, an imitation of Roman architecture. You enter, and find that the decoration is not all Gothic; a circle of Corinthian columns of precious marbles with, above these, a circle of smaller columns surmounted by loftier arcades, and, on the vault, a legion of saints, and angels peopling the entire s.p.a.ce, gathering in four rows around a grand, dull, meager, melancholy Byzantine Christ. On these three superposed stories the three gradual distortions of antique art appear; but, distorted or intact, it is always antique art. A significant feature, this, throughout the history of Italy; she did not become Germanic. In the tenth century the degraded Roman still subsisted distinct and intact side by side with the proud barbarian....

Sculpture, which, once before under Nicholas of Pisa, had antic.i.p.ated painting, again antic.i.p.ated it in the fifteenth century; these very doors of the baptistery enable one to see with what sudden perfection and brilliancy. Three men then appeared, Brunelleschi, the architect of the Duomo, Donatello, who decorated the Campanile with statues, and Ghiberti, who cast the two gates of the baptistery, all three friends and rivals, all three having commenced with the goldsmith's art and a study of the living model, and all three pa.s.sionately devoted to the antique; Brunelleschi drawing and measuring Roman monuments, Donatello at Rome copying statues and bas-reliefs and Ghiberti importing from Greece torsos, vases and heads which he restored, imitated and worshiped.

AN ASCENT OF THE GREAT DOME[32]

BY MR. AND MRS. EDWIN H. BLASHFIELD

The traveler who, turning his back to the gates of Ghiberti, pa.s.ses, for the first time, under the glittering new mosaics and through the main doors of Santa Maria Del Fiore experiences a sensation. He leaves behind him the facade, dazzling in its patterns of black and white marble, all laced with sculpture, he enters to dim, bare vastness--surely, never was bleaker lining to a splendid exterior. Across a floor that seems unending, he makes long journeys, from monument to monument; to gigantic condottieri, riding ghost-like in the semi-darkness against the upper walls; to Luca's saints and angels in the sacristies; to Donatellos's Saint John, grand and tranquil in his niche, and to Michelangelo's group, grand and troubled in its rough-hewn marble.

At length, in the north transept, he comes to a small door, and entering there, he may, if legs and wind hold out, climb five hundred and fifteen steps to the top of the mightiest dome in the world, the widest in span, and the highest from spring to summit. For the first one hundred and fifty steps or so, there are square turnings, and the stone looks sharp, and new, and solid; a s.p.a.ce vaulted by a domical roof follows, and is apparently above one of the apsidal domes to the church; then a narrow spiral staircase leads to where a second door opens upon a very narrow, bal.u.s.traded walk that runs around the inner side of the dome.

He is at an alt.i.tude of sixty-seven meters, exactly at the spring of the cupola and the beginning of the Vasari frescoes; the feet are at an elevation of one meter less than is that of the lower tops of Notre Dame de Paris, and yet the dome follows away overhead, huge enough, high enough to contain a second church piled, Pelion-like upon the first.

Before, in the dimness, is the vastest roof-covered void in the world; it is terrific, and if the visitor is susceptible, his knees shake, and his diaphragm seems to sink to meet them.