Val d'Arno Part 5

104. Hubert of Lucca--How came they, think you, to choose _him _out of a stranger city, and that a poorer one than their own? Was there no Florentine then, of all this rich and eager crowd, who was fit to govern Florence?

I cannot find any account of this Hubert, Bright mind, of Ducca; Villani says simply of him, "Fu il primo capitano di Firenze."

They hung a bell for him in the Campanile of the Lion, and gave him the flag of Florence to bear; and before the day was over, that 20th of October, he had given every one of the twenty companies their flags also. And the bearings of the said gonfalons were these. I will give you this heraldry as far as I can make it out from Villani; it will be very useful to us afterwards; I leave the Italian when I cannot translate it:--

105. A. Sesto, (sixth part of the city,) of the other side of Arno.

Gonfalon 1. Gules; a ladder, argent.

2. Argent; a scourge, sable.

3. Azure; (una piazza bianca con nicchi vermigli).

4. Gules; a dragon, vert.

B. Sesto of St. Peter Scheraggio.

1. Azure; a chariot, or.

2. Or; a bull, sable.

3. Argent; a lion rampant, sable.

4. (A lively piece, "pezza gagliarda") Barry of (how many?) pieces, argent and sable.

You may as well note at once of this kind of bearing, called 'gagliarda'

by Villani, that these groups of piles, pales, bends, and bars, were called in English heraldry 'Restrial bearings,' "in respect of their strength and solid substance, which is able to abide the stresse and force of any triall they shall be put unto." [1] And also that, the number of bars being uncertain, I a.s.sume the bearing to be 'barry,' that is, having an even number of bars; had it been odd, as of seven bars, it should have been blazoned, argent; three bars, sable; or, if so divided, sable, three bars argent.

[Footnote 1: Guillim, sect. ii., chap. 3.]

This lively bearing was St. Pulinari's.

C. Sesto of Borgo.

1. Or; a viper, vert.

2. Argent; a needle, (?) (aguglia) sable.

3. Vert; a horse unbridled; draped, argent, a cross, gules.

D. Sesto of St. Brancazio.

1. Vert; a lion rampant, proper.

2. Argent; a lion rampant, gules.

3. Azure; a lion rampant, argent.

E. Sesto of the Cathedral gates.

1. Azure; a lion (pa.s.sant?) or.

2. Or; a dragon, vert.

3. Argent; a lion rampant, azure, crowned, or.

F. Sesto of St. Peter's gates.

1. Or; two keys, gules.

2. An Italian (or more definitely a Greek and Etruscan bearing; I do not know how to blazon it;) concentric bands, argent and sable. This is one of the remains of the Greek expressions of storm; hail, or the Trinacrian limbs, being put on the giant's shields also. It is connected besides with the Cretan labyrinth, and the circles of the Inferno.

3. Parted per fesse, gules and vai (I don't know if vai means grey--not a proper heraldic colour--or vaire).

106. Of course Hubert of Lucca did not determine these bearings, but took them as he found them, and appointed them for standards; [1] he did the same for all the country parishes, and ordered them to come into the city at need. "And in this manner the old people of Florence ordered itself; and for more strength of the people, they ordered and began to build the palace which is behind the Badia,--that is to say, the one which is of dressed stone, with the tower; for before there was no palace of the commune in Florence, but the signory abode sometimes in one part of the town, sometimes in another.

[Footnote 1: We will examine afterwards the heraldry of the trades, chap, xi., Villani.]

107. "And as the people had now taken state and signory on themselves, they ordered, for greater strength of the people, that all the towers of Florence--and there were many 180 feet high [1]--should be cut down to 75 feet, and no more; and so it was done, and with the stones of them they walled the city on the other side Arno."

[Footnote: 120 braccia.]

108. That last sentence is a significant one. Here is the central expression of the true burgess or townsman temper,--resolute maintenance of fortified peace. These are the walls which modern republicanism throws down, to make boulevards over their ruins.

109. Such new order being taken, Florence remained quiet for full two months. On the 13th of December, in the same year, died the Emperor Frederick II.; news of his death did not reach Florence till the 7th January, 1251. It had chanced, according to Villani, that on the actual day of his death, his Florentine vice-regent, Rinieri of Montemerlo, was killed by a piece of the vaulting [1] of his room falling on him as he slept. And when the people heard of the Emperor's death, "which was most useful and needful for Holy Church, and for our commune," they took the fall of the roof on his lieutenant as an omen of the extinction of Imperial authority, and resolved to bring home all their Guelphic exiles, and that the Ghibellines should be forced to make peace with them. Which was done, and the peace really lasted for full six months; when, a quarrel chancing with Ghibelline Pistoja, the Florentines, under a Milanese podesta, fought their first properly communal and commercial battle, with great slaughter of Pistojese. Naturally enough, but very unwisely, the Florentine Ghibellines declined to take part in this battle; whereupon the people, returning flushed with victory, drove them all out, and established pure Guelph government in Florence, changing at the same time the flag of the city from gules, a lily argent, to argent, a lily gules; but the most ancient bearing of all, simply parted per pale, argent and gules, remained always on their carroccio of battle,--"Non si muto mai."

[Footnote 1: "Una volta ch' era sopra la camera."]

110. "Non si muto mai." Villani did not know how true his words were.

That old shield of Florence, parted per pale, argent and gules, (or our own Saxon Oswald's, parted per pale, or and purpure,) are heraldry changeless in sign; declaring the necessary balance, in ruling men, of the Rational and Imaginative powers; pure Alp, and glowing cloud.

Church and State--Pope and Emperor--Clergy and Laity,--all these are partial, accidental--too often, criminal--oppositions; but the bodily and spiritual elements, seemingly adverse, remain in everlasting harmony,

Not less the new bearing of the shield, the red fleur-de-lys, has another meaning. It is red, not as ecclesiastical, but as free. Not of Guelph against Ghibelline, but of Labourer against Knight. No more his serf, but his minister. His duty no more 'servitium,' but 'ministerium,'

'mestier.' We learn the power of word after word, as of sign after sign, as we follow the traces of this nascent art. I have sketched for you this lily from the base of the tower of Giotto. You may judge by the subjects of the sculpture beside it that it was built just in this fit of commercial triumph; for all the outer bas-reliefs are of trades.

111. Draw that red lily then, and fix it in your minds as the sign of the great change in the temper of Florence, and in her laws, in mid-thirteenth century; and remember also, when you go to Florence and see that mighty tower of the Palazzo Vecchio (n.o.ble still, in spite of the calamitous and accursed restorations which have smoothed its rugged outline, and effaced with modern vulgarisms its lovely sculpture)--terminating the shadowy perspectives of the Uffizii, or dominant over the city seen from Fesole or Bellosguardo,--that, as the tower of Giotto is the notablest monument in the world of the Religion of Europe, so, on this tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, first shook itself to the winds the Lily standard of her liberal,--because honest,--commerce.

LECTURE V.

PAX VOBISc.u.m.

112. My last lecture ended with a sentence which I thought, myself, rather pretty, and quite fit for a popular newspaper, about the 'lily standard of liberal commerce.' But it might occur, and I hope did occur, to some of you, that it would have been more appropriate if the lily had changed colour the other way, from red to white, (instead of white to red,) as a sign of a pacific const.i.tution and kindly national purpose.

113. I believe otherwise, however; and although the change itself was for the sake of change merely, you may see in it, I think, one of the historical coincidences which contain true instruction for us.

Quite one of the chiefest art-mistakes and stupidities of men has been their tendency to dress soldiers in red clothes, and monks, or pacific persons, in black, white, or grey ones. At least half of that mental bias of young people, which sustains the wickedness of war among us at this day, is owing to the prettiness of uniforms. Make all Hussars black, all Guards black, all troops of the line black; dress officers and men, alike, as you would public executioners; and the number of candidates for commissions will be greatly diminished. Habitually, on the contrary, you dress these destructive rustics and their officers in scarlet and gold, but give your productive rustics no costume of honour or beauty; you give your peaceful student a costume which he tucks up to his waist, because he is ashamed of it; and dress your pious rectors, and your sisters of charity, in black, as if it were _their_ trade instead of the soldier's to send people to h.e.l.l, and their own destiny to arrive there.

114. But the invest.i.ture of the lily of Florence with scarlet is a symbol,--unintentional, observe, but not the less notable,--of the recovery of human sense and intelligence in this matter. The reign of war was past; this was the sign of it;--the red glow, not now of the Towers of Dis, but of the Carita, "che appena fora dentro al fuoco nota." And a day is coming, be a.s.sured, when the kings of Europe will dress their peaceful troops beautifully; will clothe their peasant girls "in scarlet, with other delights," and "put on ornaments of gold upon _their_ apparel;" when the crocus and the lily will not be the only living things dressed daintily in our land, and the glory of the wisest monarchs be indeed, in that their people, like themselves, shall be, at least in some dim likeness, "arrayed like one of these."

115. But as for the immediate behaviour of Florence herself, with her new standard, its colour was quite sufficiently significant in that old symbolism, when the first restrial bearing was drawn by dying fingers dipped in blood. The Guelphic revolution had put her into definite political opposition with her nearest, and therefore,--according to the custom and Christianity of the time,--her hatefullest, neighbours,--Pistoja, Pisa, Siena, and Volterra. What glory might not be acquired, what kind purposes answered, by making pacific mercantile states also of those benighted towns! Besides, the death of the Emperor had thrown his party everywhere into discouragement; and what was the use of a flag which flew no farther than over the new palazzo?

116. Accordingly, in the next year, the pacific Florentines began by ravaging the territory of Pistoja; then attacked the Pisans at Pontadera, and took 3000 prisoners; and finished by traversing, and eating up all that could be ate in, the country of Siena; besides beating the Sienese under the castle of Montalcino. Returning in triumph after these benevolent operations, they resolved to strike a new piece of money in memory of them,--the golden Florin!