Val d'Arno Part 4

I never saw anything so impudent on the walls of any exhibition, in any country, as last year in London. It was a daub professing to be a "harmony in pink and white" (or some such nonsense;) absolute rubbish, and which had taken about a quarter of an hour to scrawl or daub--it had no pretence to be called painting. The price asked for it was two hundred and fifty guineas.

80. In order to complete your broad view of the elements of social power in the thirteenth century, you have now farther to understand the position of the country people, who maintained by their labour these three cla.s.ses, whose action you can discern, and whose history you can read; while, of those who maintained them, there is no history, except of the annual ravage of their fields by contending cities or n.o.bles;--and, finally, that of the higher body of merchants, whose influence was already beginning to counterpoise the prestige of n.o.blesse in Florence, and who themselves const.i.tuted no small portion of the n.o.blesse of Venice.

The food-producing country was for the most part still possessed by the n.o.bles; some by the ecclesiastics; but a portion, I do not know how large, was in the hands of peasant proprietors, of whom Sismondi gives this, to my mind, completely pleasant and satisfactory, though, to his, very painful, account:--

"They took no interest in public affairs; they had a.s.semblies of their commune at the village in which the church of their parish was situated, and to which they retreated to defend themselves in case of war; they had also magistrates of their own choice; but all their interests appeared to them enclosed in the circle of their own commonality; they did not meddle with general politics, and held it for their point of honour to remain faithful, through all revolutions, to the State of which they formed a part, obeying, without hesitation, its chiefs, whoever they were, and by whatever t.i.tle they occupied their places."

81. Of the inferior agricultural labourers, employed on the farms of the n.o.bles and richer ecclesiastics, I find nowhere due notice, nor does any historian seriously examine their manner of life. Liable to every form of robbery and oppression, I yet regard their state as not only morally but physically happier than that of riotous soldiery, or the lower cla.s.s of artizans, and as the safeguard of every civilized nation, through all its worst vicissitudes of folly and crime. Nature has mercifully appointed that seed must be sown, and sheep folded, whatever lances break, or religions fail; and at this hour, while the streets of Florence and Verona are full of idle politicians, loud of tongue, useless of hand and treacherous of heart, there still may be seen in their market-places, standing, each by his heap of pulse or maize, the grey-haired labourers, silent, serviceable, honourable, keeping faith, untouched by change, to their country and to Heaven. [1]

[Footnote 1: Compare "Sesame and Lilies," sec. 38, p. 58. (P. 86 of the small edition of 1882.)]

82. It is extremely difficult to determine in what degree the feelings or intelligence of this cla.s.s influenced the architectural design of the thirteenth century;--how far afield the cathedral tower was intended to give delight, and to what simplicity of rustic conception Quercia or Ghiberti appealed by the fascination of their Scripture history. You may at least conceive, at this date, a healthy animation in all men's minds, and the children of the vineyard and sheepcote crowding the city on its festa days, and receiving impulse to busier, if not n.o.bler, education, in its splendour. [1]

[Footnote 1: Of detached abbeys, see note on Education of Joan of Arc, "Sesame and Lilies," sec. 82, p. 106. (P. 158 of the small edition of 1882.)]

83. The great cla.s.s of the merchants is more difficult to define; but you may regard them generally as the examples of whatever modes of life might be consistent with peace and justice, in the economy of transfer, as opposed to the military license of pillage.

They represent the gradual ascendancy of foresight, prudence, and order in society, and the first ideas of advantageous national intercourse.

Their body is therefore composed of the most intelligent and temperate natures of the time,--uniting themselves, not directly for the purpose of making money, but to obtain stability for equal inst.i.tutions, security of property, and pacific relations with neighbouring states.

Their guilds form the only representatives of true national council, unaffected, as the landed proprietors were, by merely local circ.u.mstances and accidents.

84. The strength of this order, when its own conduct was upright, and its opposition to the military body was not in avaricious cowardice, but in the resolve to compel justice and to secure peace, can only be understood by you after an examination of the great changes in the government of Florence during the thirteenth century, which, among other minor achievements interesting to us, led to that destruction of the Tower of the Death-watch, so ingeniously accomplished by Niccola Pisano.

This change, and its results, will be the subject of my next lecture.

I must to-day sum, and in some farther degree make clear, the facts already laid before you.

85. We have seen that the inhabitants of every great Italian state may be divided, and that very stringently, into the five cla.s.ses of knights, priests, merchants, artists, and peasants. No distinction exists between artist and artizan, except that of higher genius or better conduct; the best artist is a.s.suredly also the best artizan; and the simplest workman uses his invention and emotion as well as his fingers. The entire body of artists is under the orders (as shopmen are under the orders of their customers), of the knights, priests, and merchants,--the knights for the most part demanding only fine goldsmiths' work, stout armour, and rude architecture; the priests commanding both the finest architecture and painting, and the richest kinds of decorative dress and jewellery,--while the merchants directed works of public use, and were the best judges of artistic skill. The compet.i.tion for the Baptistery gates of Florence is before the guild of merchants; nor is their award disputed, even in thought, by any of the candidates.

86. This is surely a fact to be taken much to heart by our present communities of Liverpool and Manchester. They probably suppose, in their modesty, that lords and clergymen are the proper judges of art, and merchants can only, in the modern phrase, 'know what they like,' or follow humbly the guidance of their golden-crested or flat-capped superiors. But in the great ages of art, neither knight nor pope shows signs of true power of criticism. The artists crouch before them, or quarrel with them, according to their own tempers. To the merchants they submit silently, as to just and capable judges. And look what men these are, who submit. Donatello, Ghiberti, Quercia, Luca! If men like these submit to the merchant, who shall rebel?

87. But the still franker, and surer, judgment of innocent pleasure was awarded them by all cla.s.ses alike: and the interest of the public was the _final _rule of right,--that public being always eager to see, and earnest to learn. For the stories told by their artists formed, they fully believed, a Book of Life; and every man of real genius took up his function of ill.u.s.trating the scheme of human morality and salvation, as naturally, and faithfully, as an English mother of to-day giving her children their first lessons in the Bible. In this endeavour to teach they almost unawares taught themselves; the question "How shall I represent this most clearly?" became to themselves, presently, "How was this most likely to have happened?" and habits of fresh and accurate thought thus quickly enlivened the formalities of the Greek pictorial theology; formalities themselves beneficent, because restraining by their severity and mystery the wantonness of the newer life. Foolish modern critics have seen nothing in the Byzantine school but a barbarism to be conquered and forgotten. But that school brought to the art-scholars of the thirteenth century, laws which had been serviceable to Phidias, and symbols which had been beautiful to Homer: and methods and habits of pictorial scholarship which gave a refinement of manner to the work of the simplest craftsman, and became an education to the higher artists which no discipline of literature can now bestow, developed themselves in the effort to decipher, and the impulse to re-interpret, the Eleusinian divinity of Byzantine tradition.

88. The words I have just used, "pictorial scholarship," and "pictorial theology," remind me how strange it must appear to you that in this sketch of the intellectual state of Italy in the thirteenth century I have taken no note of literature itself, nor of the fine art of Music with which it was a.s.sociated in minstrelsy. The corruption of the meaning of the word "clerk," from "a chosen person" to "a learned one,"

partly indicates the position of literature in the war between the golden crest and scarlet cap; but in the higher ranks, literature and music became the grace of the n.o.ble's life, or the occupation of the monk's, without forming any separate cla.s.s, or exercising any materially visible political power. Masons or butchers might establish a government,--but never troubadours: and though a good knight held his education to be imperfect unless he could write a sonnet and sing it, he did not esteem his castle to be at the mercy of the "editor" of a ma.n.u.script. He might indeed owe his life to the fidelity of a minstrel, or be guided in his policy by the wit of a clown; but he was not the slave of sensual music, or vulgar literature, and never allowed his Sat.u.r.day reviewer to appear at table without the c.o.c.k's comb.

89. On the other hand, what was n.o.blest in thought or saying was in those times as little attended to as it is now. I do not feel sure that, even in after times, the poem of Dante has had any political effect on Italy; but at all events, in his life, even at Verona, where he was treated most kindly, he had not half so much influence with Can Grande as the rough Count of Castelbarco, not one of whose words was ever written, or now remains; and whose portrait, by no means that of a man of literary genius, almost disfigures, by its plainness, the otherwise grave and perfect beauty of his tomb.

LECTURE IV.

PARTED PER PALE.

90. The chart of Italian intellect and policy which I have endeavoured to put into form in the last three lectures, may, I hope, have given you a clear idea of the subordinate, yet partly antagonistic, position which the artist, or merchant,--whom in my present lecture I shall cla.s.s together,--occupied, with respect to the n.o.ble and priest. As an honest labourer, he was opposed to the violence of pillage, and to the folly of pride: as an honest thinker, he was likely to discover any latent absurdity in the stories he had to represent in their nearest likelihood; and to be himself moved strongly by the true meaning of events which he was striving to make ocularly manifest. The painter terrified himself with his own fiends, and reproved or comforted himself by the lips of his own saints, far more profoundly than any verbal preacher; and thus, whether as craftsman or inventor, was likely to be foremost in defending the laws of his city, or directing its reformation.

91. The contest of the craftsman with the pillaging soldier is typically represented by the war of the Lombard League with Frederick II.; and that of the craftsman with the hypocritical priest, by the war of the Pisans with Gregory IX. (1241). But in the present lecture I wish only to fix your attention on the revolutions in Florence, which indicated, thus early, the already established ascendancy of the moral forces which were to put an end to open robber-soldiership; and at least to compel the a.s.sertion of some higher principle in war, if not, as in some distant day may be possible, the cessation of war itself.

The most important of these revolutions was virtually that of which I before spoke to you, taking place in mid-thirteenth century, in the year l250,--a very memorable one for Christendom, and the very crisis of vital change in its methods of economy, and conceptions of art.

92. Observe, first, the exact relations at that time of Christian and Profane Chivalry. St. Louis, in the winter of 1248-9, lay in the isle of Cyprus, with his crusading army. He had trusted to Providence for provisions; and his army was starving. The profane German emperor, Frederick II., was at war with Venice, but gave a safe-conduct to the Venetian ships, which enabled them to carry food to Cyprus, and to save St. Louis and his crusaders. Frederick had been for half his life excommunicate,--and the Pope (Innocent IV.) at deadly spiritual and temporal war with him;--spiritually, because he had brought Saracens into Apulia; temporally, because the Pope wanted Apulia for himself.

St. Louis and his mother both wrote to Innocent, praying him to be reconciled to the kind heretic who had saved the whole crusading army.

But the Pope remained implacably thundrous; and Frederick, weary of quarrel, stayed quiet in one of his Apulian castles for a year.

The repose of infidelity is seldom cheerful, unless it be criminal.

Frederick had much to repent of, much to regret, nothing to hope, and nothing to do. At the end of his year's quiet he was attacked by dysentery, and so made his final peace with the Pope, and heaven,--aged fifty-six.

93. Meantime St. Louis had gone on into Egypt, had got his army defeated, his brother killed, and himself carried captive. You may be interested in seeing, in the leaf of his psalter which I have laid on the table, the death of that brother set down in golden letters, between the common letters of ultramarine, on the eighth of February.

94. Providence, defied by Frederick, and trusted in by St. Louis, made such arrangements for them both; Providence not in anywise regarding the opinions of either king, but very much regarding the facts, that the one had no business in Egypt, nor the other in Apulia.

No two kings, in the history of the world, could have been happier, or more useful, than these two might have been, if they only had had the sense to stay in their own capitals, and attend to their own affairs.

But they seem only to have been born to show what grievous results, under the power of discontented imagination, a Christian could achieve by faith, and a philosopher by reason. [1]

[Footnote 1: It must not be thought that this is said in disregard of the n.o.bleness of either of these two glorious Kings. Among the many designs of past years, one of my favorites was to write a life of Frederick II. But I hope that both his, and that of Henry II. of England, will soon be written now, by a man who loves them as well as I do, and knows them far better.]

95. The death of Frederick II. virtually ended the soldier power in Florence; and the mercantile power a.s.sumed the authority it thenceforward held, until, in the hands of the Medici, it destroyed the city.

We will now trace the course and effects of the three revolutions which closed the reign of War, and crowned the power of Peace.

96. In the year 1248, while St. Louis was in Cyprus, I told you Frederick was at war with Venice. He was so because she stood, if not as the leader, at least as the most important ally, of the great Lombard mercantile league against the German military power.

That league consisted essentially of Venice, Milan, Bologna, and Genoa, in alliance with the Pope; the Imperial or Ghibelline towns were, Padua and Verona under Ezzelin; Mantua, Pisa, and Siena. I do not name the minor towns of north Italy which a.s.sociated themselves with each party: get only the main localities of the contest well into your minds. It was all concentrated in the furious hostility of Genoa and Pisa; Genoa fighting really very piously for the Pope, as well as for herself; Pisa for her own hand, and for the Emperor as much as suited her. The mad little sea falcon never caught sight of another water-bird on the wing, but she must hawk at it; and as an ally of the Emperor, balanced Venice and Genoa with her single strength. And so it came to pa.s.s that the victory of either the Guelph or Ghibelline party depended on the final action of Florence.

97. Florence meanwhile was fighting with herself, for her own amus.e.m.e.nt.

She was nominally at the head of the Guelphic League in Tuscany; but this only meant that she hated Siena and Pisa, her southern and western neighbours. She had never declared openly against the Emperor. On the contrary, she always recognized his authority, in an imaginative manner, as representing that of the Caesars. She spent her own energy chiefly in street-fighting,--the death of Buondelmonti in 1215 having been the root of a series of quarrels among her n.o.bles which gradually took the form of contests of honour; and were a kind of accidental tournaments, fought to the death, because they could not be exciting or dignified enough on any other condition. And thus the manner of life came to be customary, which you have accurately, with its consequences, pictured by Shakspeare. Samson bites his thumb at Abraham, and presently the streets are impa.s.sable in battle. The quarrel in the Canongate between the Leslies and Seytons, in Scott's 'Abbot,' represents the same temper; and marks also, what Shakspeare did not so distinctly, because it would have interfered with the domestic character of his play, the connection of these private quarrels with political divisions which paralyzed the entire body of the State.--Yet these political schisms, in the earlier days of Italy, never reached the bitterness of Scottish feud, [1]

because they were never so sincere. Protestant and Catholic Scotsmen faithfully believed each other to be servants of the devil; but the Guelph and Ghibelline of Florence each respected, in the other, the fidelity to the Emperor, or piety towards the Pope, which he found it convenient, for the time, to dispense with in his own person. The street fighting was therefore more general, more chivalric, more good-humoured; a word of offence set all the n.o.blesse of the town on fire; every one rallied to his post; fighting began at once in half a dozen places of recognized convenience, but ended in the evening; and, on the following day, the leaders determined in contended truce who had fought best, buried their dead triumphantly, and better fortified any weak points, which the events of the previous day had exposed at their palace corners. Florentine dispute was apt to centre itself about the gate of St. Peter, [2] the tower of the cathedral, or the fortress-palace of the Uberti, (the family of Dante's Bellincion Berti and of Farinata), which occupied the site of the present Palazzo Vecchio. But the streets of Siena seem to have afforded better barricade practice. They are as steep as they are narrow--extremely both; and the projecting stones on their palace fronts, which were left, in building, to sustain, on occasion, the barricade beams across the streets, are to this day important features in their architecture.

[Footnote 1: Distinguish always the personal from the religious feud; personal feud is more treacherous and violent in Italy than in Scotland; but not the political or religious feud, unless involved with vast material interests.]

[Footnote 2: Sismondi, vol. ii., chap. ii.; G. Villani, vi., 33.]

98. Such being the general state of matters in Florence, in this year 1248, Frederick writes to the Uberti, who headed the Ghibellines, to engage them in serious effort to bring the city distinctly to the Imperial side. He was besieging Parma; and sent his natural son, Frederick, king of Antioch, with sixteen hundred German knights, to give the Ghibellines a.s.sured preponderance in the next quarrel.

The Uberti took arms before their arrival; rallied all their Ghibelline friends into a united body, and so attacked and carried the Guelph barricades, one by one, till their antagonists, driven together by local defeat, stood in consistency as complete as their own, by the gate of St. Peter, 'Scheraggio.' Young Frederick, with his German riders, arrived at this crisis; the Ghibellines opening the gates to him; the Guelphs, nevertheless, fought at their outmost barricade for four days more; but at last, tired, withdrew from the city, in a body, on the night of Candlemas, 2nd February, 1248; leaving the Ghibellines and their German friends to work their pleasure,--who immediately set themselves to throw down the Guelph palaces, and destroyed six-and-thirty of them, towers and all, with the good help of Niccola Pisano,--for this is the occasion of that beautiful piece of new engineering of his.

99. It is the first interference of the Germans in Florentine affairs which belongs to the real cycle of modern history. Six hundred years later, a troop of German riders entered Florence again, to restore its Grand Duke; and our warmhearted and loving English poetess, looking on from Casa Guidi windows, gives the said Germans many hard words, and thinks her darling Florentines entirely innocent in the matter. But if she had had clear eyes, (yeux de lin [1] the Romance of the Rose calls them,) she would have seen that white-coated cavalry with its heavy guns to be nothing more than the rear-guard of young Frederick of Antioch; and that Florence's own Ghibellines had opened her gates to them.

Destiny little regards cost of time; she does her justice at that telescopic distance just as easily and accurately as close at hand.

[Footnote 1: Lynx.]

100. "Frederick of _Antioch_." Note the t.i.tular coincidence. The disciples were called Christians first in Antioch; here we have our lieutenant of Antichrist also named from that town. The anti-Christian Germans got into Florence upon Sunday morning; the Guelphs fought on till Wednesday, which was Candlemas;--the Tower of the Death-watch was thrown down next day. It was so called because it stood on the Piazza of St John; and all dying people in Florence called on St. John for help; and looked, if it might be, to the top of this highest and best-built of towers. The wicked anti-Christian Ghibellines, Nicholas of Pisa helping, cut the side of it "so that the tower might fall on the Baptistery. But as it pleased G.o.d, for better reverencing of the blessed St. John, the tower, which was a hundred and eighty feet high, as it was coming down, plainly appeared to eschew the holy church, and turned aside, and fell right across the square; at which all the Florentines marvelled, (pious or impious,) and the _people_ (anti-Ghibelline) were greatly delighted."

101. I have no doubt that this story is apocryphal, not only in its attribution of these religious scruples to the falling tower; but in its accusation of the Ghibellines as having definitely intended the destruction of the Baptistery. It is only modern reformers who feel the absolute need of enforcing their religious opinions in so practical a manner. Such a piece of sacrilege would have been revolting to Farinata; how much more to the group of Florentines whose temper is centrally represented by Dante's, to all of whom their "bel San Giovanni" was dear, at least for its beauty, if not for its sanct.i.ty. And Niccola himself was too good a workman to become the instrument of the destruction of so n.o.ble a work,--not to insist on the extreme probability that he was also too good an engineer to have had his purpose, if once fixed, thwarted by any tenderness in the conscience of the collapsing tower. The tradition itself probably arose after the rage of the exiled Ghibellines had half consented to the destruction, on political grounds, of Florence itself; but the form it took is of extreme historical value, indicating thus early at least the suspected existence of pa.s.sions like those of the Cromwellian or Garibaldian soldiery in the Florentine n.o.ble; and the distinct character of the Ghibelline party as not only anti-Papal, but profane.

102. Upon the castles, and the persons of their antagonists, however, the pride, or fear, of the Ghibellines had little mercy; and in their day of triumph they provoked against themselves nearly every rational as well as religious person in the commonwealth. They despised too much the force of the newly-risen popular power, founded on economy, sobriety, and common sense; and, alike by impertinence and pillage, increased the irritation of the civil body; until, as aforesaid, on the 20th October, 1250, all the rich burgesses of Florence took arms; met in the square before the church of Santa Croce, ("where," says Sismondi, "the republic of the dead is still a.s.sembled today,") thence traversed the city to the palace of the Ghibelline podesta; forced him to resign; named Uberto of Lucca in his place, under the t.i.tle of Captain of the People; divided themselves into twenty companies, each, in its own district of the city, having its captain [1] and standard; and elected a council of twelve ancients, const.i.tuting a seniory or signoria, to deliberate on and direct public affairs.

[Footnote 1: 'Corporal,' literally'.]

103. What a perfectly beautiful republican movement! thinks Sismondi, seeing, in all this, nothing but the energy of a mult.i.tude; and entirely ignoring the peculiar capacity of this Florentine mob,--capacity of two virtues, much forgotten by modern republicanism,--order, namely; and obedience; together with the peculiar instinct of this Florentine mult.i.tude, which not only felt itself to need captains, but knew where to find them.