Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, Volume 2

I do not know whether there be any populace in Florence, but I saw none that I recognized as such, on this occasion. All the people were respectably dressed and perfectly well behaved; and soldiers and priests were scattered abundantly among the throng. On my way home, I saw the Teatro Goldoni, which is in our own street, lighted up for a representation this Sunday evening. It shocked my New England prejudices a little.

Thus forenoon, my wife and I went to the Church of Santa Croce, the great monumental deposit of Florentine worthies. The piazza before it is a wide, gravelled square, where the liberty of Florence, if it really ever had any genuine liberty, came into existence some hundreds of years ago, by the people's taking its own rights into its hands, and putting its own immediate will in execution. The piazza has not much appearance of antiquity, except that the facade of one of the houses is quite covered with ancient frescos, a good deal faded and obliterated, yet with traces enough of old glory to show that the colors must have been well laid on.

The front of the church, the foundation of which was laid six centuries ago, is still waiting for its casing of marbles, and I suppose will wait forever, though a carpenter's staging is now erected before it, as if with the purpose of doing something.

The interior is spacious, the length of the church being between four and five hundred feet. There is a nave, roofed with wooden cross-beams, lighted by a clere-story and supported on each side by seven great pointed arches, which rest upon octagonal pillars. The octagon seems to be a favorite shape in Florence. These pillars were clad in yellow and scarlet damask, in honor of the Feast of St. John. The aisles, on each side of the nave, are lighted with high and somewhat narrow windows of painted glass, the effect of which, however, is much diminished by the flood of common daylight that comes in through the windows of the clere-story. It is like admitting too much of the light of reason and worldly intelligence into the mind, instead of illuminating it wholly through a religious medium. The many-hued saints and angels lose their mysterious effulgence, when we get white light enough, and find we see all the better without their help.

The main pavement of the church is brickwork; but it is inlaid with many sepulchral slabs of marble, on some of which knightly or priestly figures are sculptured in bas-relief. In both of the side aisles there are saintly shrines, alternating with mural monuments, some of which record names as illustrious as any in the world. As you enter, the first monument, on your right is that of Michael Angelo, occupying the ancient burial-site of his family. The general design is a heavy sarcophagus of colored marble, with the figures of Sculpture, Painting, and Architecture as mourners, and Michael Angelo's bust above, the whole assuming a pyramidal form. You pass a shrine, within its framework of marble pillars and a pediment, and come next to Dante's monument, a modern work, with likewise its sarcophagus, and some huge, cold images weeping and sprawling over it, and an unimpressive statue of Dante sitting above.

Another shrine intervenes, and next you see the tomb of Alfieri, erected to his memory by the Countess of Albany, who pays, out of a woman's love, the honor which his country owed him. Her own monument is in one of the chapels of the transept.

Passing the next shrine you see the tomb of Macchiavelli, which, I think, was constructed not many years after his death. The rest of the monuments, on this side of the church, commemorate people of less than world-wide fame; and though the opposite side has likewise a monument alternating with each shrine, I remember only the names of Raphael Morghen and of Galileo. The tomb of the latter is over against that of Michael Angelo, being the first large tomb on the left-hand wall as you enter the church. It has the usual heavy sarcophagus, surmounted by a bust of Galileo, in the habit of his time, and is, of course, duly provided with mourners in the shape of Science or Astronomy, or some such cold-hearted people. I wish every sculptor might be at once imprisoned for life who shall hereafter chisel an allegoric figure; and as for those who have sculptured them heretofore, let them be kept in purgatory till the marble shall have crumbled away. It is especially absurd to assign to this frozen sisterhood of the allegoric family the office of weeping for the dead, inasmuch as they have incomparably less feeling than a lump of ice, which might contrive to shed a tear if the sun shone on it. But they seem to let themselves out, like the hired mourners of an English funeral, for the very reason that, having no interest in the dead person, nor any affections or emotions whatever, it costs them no wear and tear of heart.

All round both transepts of the church there is a series of chapels, into most of which we went, and generally found an inscrutably dark picture over the altar, and often a marble bust or two, or perhaps a mediaeval statue of a saint or a modern monumental bas-relief in marble, as white as new-fallen snow. A chapel of the Bonapartes is here, containing memorials of two female members of the family. In several chapels, moreover, there were some of those distressing frescos, by Giotto, Cimabue, or their compeers, which, whenever I see them, – poor, faded relics, looking as if the Devil had been rubbing and scrubbing them for centuries, in spite against the saints, – my heart sinks and my stomach sickens. There is no other despondency like this; it is a new shade of human misery, akin to the physical disease that comes from dryrot in a wall. These frescos are to a church what dreary, old remembrances are to a mind; the drearier because they were once bright: Hope fading into Disappointment, Joy into Grief, and festal splendor passing into funereal duskiness, and saddening you all the more by the grim identity that you find to exist between gay things and sorrowful ones. Only wait long enough, and they turn out to be the very same.

All the time we were in the church some great religious ceremony had been going forward; the organ playing and the white-robed priests bowing, gesticulating, and making Latin prayers at the high altar, where at least a hundred wax tapers were burning in constellations. Everybody knelt, except ourselves, yet seemed not to be troubled by the echoes of our passing footsteps, nor to require that we should pray along with them. They consider us already lost irrevocably, no doubt, and therefore right enough in taking no heed of their devotions; not but what we took so much heed, however, as to give the smallest possible disturbance. By and by we sat down in the nave of the church till the ceremony should be concluded; and then my wife left me to go in quest of yet another chapel, where either Cimabue or Giotto, or both, have left some of their now ghastly decorations. While she was gone I threw my eyes about the church, and came to the conclusion that, in spite of its antiquity, its size, its architecture, its painted windows, its tombs of great men, and all the reverence and interest that broods over them, it is not an impressive edifice. Any little Norman church in England would impress me as much, and more. There is something, I do not know what, but it is in the region of the heart, rather than in the intellect, that Italian architecture, of whatever age or style, never seems to reach.

Leaving the Santa Croce, we went next in quest of the Riccardi Palace. On our way, in the rear of the Grand Ducal Piazza, we passed by the Bargello, formerly the palace of the Podesta of Florence, and now converted into a prison. It is an immense square edifice of dark stone, with a tall, lank tower rising high above it at one corner. Two stone lions, symbols of the city, lash their tails and glare at the passers-by; and all over the front of the building windows are scattered irregularly, and grated with rusty iron bars; also there are many square holes, which probably admit a little light and a breath or two of air into prisoners' cells. It is a very ugly edifice, but looks antique, and as if a vast deal of history might have been transacted within it, or have beaten, like fierce blasts, against its dark, massive walls, since the thirteenth century. When I first saw the city it struck me that there were few marks of antiquity in Florence; but I am now inclined to think otherwise, although the bright Italian atmosphere, and the general squareness and monotony of the Italian architecture, have their effect in apparently modernizing everything. But everywhere we see the ponderous Tuscan basements that never can decay, and which will look, five hundred years hence, as they look now; and one often passes beneath an abbreviated remnant of what was once a lofty tower, perhaps three hundred feet high, such as used to be numerous in Florence when each noble of the city had his own warfare to wage; and there are patches of sculpture that look old on houses, the modern stucco of which causes them to look almost new. Here and there an unmistakable antiquity stands in its own impressive shadow; the Church of Or San Michele, for instance, once a market, but which grew to be a church by some inherent fitness and inevitable consecration. It has not the least the aspect of a church, being high and square, like a mediaeval palace; but deep and high niches are let into its walls, within which stand great statues of saints, masterpieces of Donatello, and other sculptors of that age, before sculpture began to be congealed by the influence of Greek art.

The Riccardi Palace is at the corner of the Via Larga. It was built by the first Cosmo de' Medici, the old banker, more than four centuries ago, and was long the home of the ignoble race of princes which he left behind him. It looks fit to be still the home of a princely race, being nowise dilapidated nor decayed externally, nor likely to be so, its high Tuscan basement being as solid as a ledge of rock, and its upper portion not much less so, though smoothed into another order of stately architecture. Entering its court from the Via Larga, we found ourselves beneath a pillared arcade, passing round the court like a cloister; and on the walls of the palace, under this succession of arches, were statues, bas-reliefs, and sarcophagi, in which, first, dead Pagans had slept, and then dead Christians, before the sculptured coffins were brought hither to adorn the palace of the Medici. In the most prominent place was a Latin inscription of great length and breadth, chiefly in praise of old Cosino and his deeds and wisdom. This mansion gives the visitor a stately notion of the life of a commercial man in the days when merchants were princes; not that it seems to be so wonderfully extensive, nor so very grand, for I suppose there are a dozen Roman palaces that excel it in both these particulars. Still, we cannot but be conscious that it must have been, in some sense, a great man who thought of founding a homestead like this, and was capable of filling it with his personality, as the hand fills a glove. It has been found spacious enough, since Cosmo's time, for an emperor and a pope and a king, all of whom have been guests in this house. After being the family mansion of the Medici for nearly two centuries, it was sold to the Riccardis, but was subsequently bought of then by the government, and it is now occupied by public offices and societies.

After sufficiently examining the court and its antiquities, we ascended a noble staircase that passes, by broad flights and square turns, to the region above the basement. Here the palace is cut up and portioned off into little rooms and passages, and everywhere there were desks, inkstands, and men, with pens in their fingers or behind their ears. We were shown into a little antique chapel, quite covered with frescos in the Giotto style, but painted by a certain Gozzoli. They were in pretty good preservation, and, in fact, I am wrong in comparing them to Giotto's works, inasmuch as there must have been nearly two hundred years between the two artists. The chapel was furnished with curiously carved old chairs, and looked surprisingly venerable within its little precinct.

We were next guided into the grand gallery, a hall of respectable size, with a frescoed ceiling, on which is represented the blue sky, and various members of the Medici family ascending through it by the help of angelic personages, who seem only to have waited for their society to be perfectly happy. At least, this was the meaning, so far as I could make it out. Along one side of the gallery were oil-pictures on looking-glasses, rather good than otherwise; but Rome, with her palaces and villas, takes the splendor out of all this sort of thing elsewhere.

On our way home, and on our own side of the Ponte Vecchio, we passed the Palazzo Guicciardini, the ancient residence of the historian of Italy, who was a politic statesman of his day, and probably as cruel and unprincipled as any of those whose deeds he has recorded. Opposite, across the narrow way, stands the house of Macchiavelli, who was his friend, and, I should judge, an honester man than he. The house is distinguished by a marble tablet, let into the wall, commemorative of Macchiavelli, but has nothing antique or picturesque about it, being in a continuous line with other smooth-faced and stuccoed edifices.

June 30th. – Yesterday, at three o'clock P. M., I went to see the final horse-race of the Feast of St. John, or rather to see the concourse of people and grandees whom it brought together. I took my stand in the vicinity of the spot whence the Grand Duke and his courtiers view the race, and from this point the scene was rather better worth looking at than from the street-corners whence I saw it before. The vista of the street, stretching far adown between two rows of lofty edifices, was really gay and gorgeous with the silks, damasks, and tapestries of all bright hues, that flaunted from windows and balconies, whence ladies looked forth and looked down, themselves making the liveliest part of the show. The whole capacity of the street swarmed with moving heads, leaving scarce room enough for the carriages, which, as on Sunday, passed up and down, until the signal for the race was given. Equipages, too, were constantly arriving at the door of the building which communicates with the open loggia, where the Grand Ducal party sit to see and to be seen. Two sentinels were standing at the door, and presented arms as each courtier or ambassador, or whatever dignity it might be, alighted. Most of them had on gold-embroidered court-dresses; some of them had military uniforms, and medals in abundance at the breast; and ladies also came, looking like heaps of lace and gauze in the carriages, but lightly shaking themselves into shape as they went up the steps. By and by a trumpet sounded, a drum beat, and again appeared a succession of half a dozen royal equipages, each with its six horses, its postilion, coachman, and three footmen, grand with cocked hats and embroidery; and the gray-headed, bowing Grand Duke and his nodding Grand Duchess as before. The Noble Guard ranged themselves on horseback opposite the loggia; but there was no irksome and impertinent show of ceremony and restraint upon the people. The play-guard of volunteer soldiers, who escort the President of the United States in his Northern progresses, keep back their fellow-citizens much more sternly and immitigably than the Florentine guard kept back the populace from its despotic sovereign.

This morning J – and I have been to the Uffizi gallery. It was his first visit there, and he passed a sweeping condemnation upon everything he saw, except a fly, a snail-shell, a caterpillar, a lemon, a piece of bread, and a wineglass, in some of the Dutch pictures. The Venus de' Medici met with no sort of favor. His feeling of utter distaste reacted upon me, and I was sensible of the same weary lack of appreciation that used to chill me through, in my earlier visits to picture-galleries; the same doubt, moreover, whether we do not bamboozle ourselves in the greater part of the admiration which we learn to bestow. I looked with some pleasure at one of Correggio's Madonnas in the Tribune, – no divine and deep-thoughted mother of the Saviour, but a young woman playing with her first child, as gay and thoughtless as itself. I looked at Michael Angelo's Madonna, in which William Ware saw such prophetic depth of feeling; but I suspect it was one of the many instances in which the spectator sees more than the painter ever dreamed of.

Straying through the city, after leaving the gallery, we went into the Church of Or San Michele, and saw in its architecture the traces of its transformation from a market into a church. In its pristine state it consisted of a double row of three great open arches, with the wind blowing through them, and the sunshine falling aslantwise into them, while the bustle of the market, the sale of fish, flesh, or fruit went on within, or brimmed over into the streets that enclosed them on every side. But, four or five hundred years ago, the broad arches were built up with stone-work; windows were pierced through and filled with painted glass; a high altar, in a rich style of pointed Gothic, was raised; shrines and confessionals were set up; and here it is, a solemn and antique church, where a man may buy his salvation instead of his dinner. At any rate, the Catholic priests will insure it to him, and take the price. The sculpture within the beautifully decorated niches, on the outside of the church, is very curious and interesting. The statues of those old saints seem to have that charm of earnestness which so attracts the admirers of the Pre-Raphaelite painters.

It appears that a picture of the Virgin used to hang against one of the pillars of the market-place while it was still a market, and in the year 1291 several miracles were wrought by it, insomuch that a chapel was consecrated for it. So many worshippers came to the shrine that the business of the market was impeded, and ultimately the Virgin and St. Michael won the whole space for themselves. The upper part of the edifice was at that time a granary, and is still used for other than religious purposes. This church was one spot to which the inhabitants betook themselves much for refuge and divine assistance during the great plague described by Boccaccio.

July 2d. – We set out yesterday morning to visit the Palazzo Buonarotti, Michael Angelo's ancestral home… It is in the Via Ghibellina, an ordinary-looking, three-story house, with broad-brimmed eaves, a stuccoed front, and two or three windows painted in fresco, besides the real ones. Adown the street, there is a glimpse of the hills outside of Florence. The sun shining heavily directly upon the front, we rang the door-bell, and then drew back into the shadow that fell from the opposite side of the street. After we had waited some time a man looked out from an upper window, and a woman from a lower one, and informed us that we could not be admitted now, nor for two or three months to come, the house being under repairs. It is a pity, for I wished to see Michael Angelo's sword and walking-stick and old slippers, and whatever other of his closest personalities are to be shown..

We passed into the Piazza of the Grand Duke, and looked into the court of the Palazzo Vecchio, with its beautifully embossed pillars; and, seeing just beyond the court a staircase of broad and easy steps, we ascended it at a venture. Upward and upward we went, flight after flight of stairs, and through passages, till at last we found an official who ushered us into a large saloon. It was the Hall of Audience. Its heavily embossed ceiling, rich with tarnished gold, was a feature of antique magnificence, and the only one that it retained, the floor being paved with tiles and the furniture scanty or none. There were, however, three cabinets standing against the walls, two of which contained very curious and exquisite carvings and cuttings in ivory; some of them in the Chinese style of hollow, concentric balls; others, really beautiful works of art: little crucifixes, statues, saintly and knightly, and cups enriched with delicate bas-reliefs. The custode pointed to a small figure of St. Sebastian, and also to a vase around which the reliefs seemed to assume life. Both these specimens, he said, were by Benvenuto Cellini, and there were many others that might well have been wrought by his famous hand. The third cabinet contained a great number and variety of crucifixes, chalices, and whatever other vessels are needed in altar service, exquisitely carved out of amber. They belong to the chapel of the palace, and into this holy closet we were now conducted. It is large enough to accommodate comfortably perhaps thirty worshippers, and is quite covered with frescos by Ghirlandaio in good preservation, and with remnants enough of gilding and bright color to show how splendid the chapel must have been when the Medicean Grand Dukes used to pray here. The altar is still ready for service, and I am not sure that some of the wax tapers were not burning; but Lorenzo the Magnificent was nowhere to be seen.

The custode now led us back through the Hall of Audience into a smaller room, hung with pictures chiefly of the Medici and their connections, among whom was one Carolina, an intelligent and pretty child, and Bianca Capella.

There was nothing else to show us, except a very noble and most spacious saloon, lighted by two large windows at each end, coming down level with the floor, and by a row of windows on one side just beneath the cornice. A gilded framework divides the ceiling into squares, circles, and octagons, the compartments of which are filled with pictures in oil; and the walls are covered with immense frescos, representing various battles and triumphs of the Florentines. Statues by Michael Angelo, John of Bologna, and Bandinello, as well historic as ideal, stand round the hall, and it is really a fit theatre for the historic scenes of a country to be acted in. It was built, moreover, with the idea of its being the council-hall of a free people; but our own little Faneuil, which was meant, in all simplicity, to be merely a spot where the townspeople should meet to choose their selectmen, has served the world better in that respect. I wish I had more room to speak of this vast, dusky, historic hall. [This volume of journal closes here.]

July 4th 1858. – Yesterday forenoon we went to see the Church of Santa Maria Novella. We found the piazza, on one side of which the church stands, encumbered with the amphitheatrical ranges of wooden seats that had been erected to accommodate the spectators of the chariot-races, at the recent Feast of St. John. The front of the church is composed of black and white marble, which, in the course of the five centuries that it has been built, has turned brown and yellow. On the right hand, as you approach, is a long colonnade of arches, extending on a line with the facade, and having a tomb beneath every arch. This colonnade forms one of the enclosing walls of a cloister. We found none of the front entrances open, but on our left, in a wall at right angles with the church, there was an open gateway, approaching which, we saw, within the four-sided colonnade, an enclosed green space of a cloister. This is what is called the Chiostro Verde, so named from the prevailing color of the frescos with which the walls beneath the arches are adorned.

This cloister is the reality of what I used to imagine when I saw the half-ruinous colonnades connected with English cathedrals, or endeavored to trace out the lines along the broken wall of some old abbey. Not that this extant cloister, still perfect and in daily use for its original purposes, is nearly so beautiful as the crumbling ruin which has ceased to be trodden by monkish feet for more than three centuries. The cloister of Santa Maria has not the seclusion that is desirable, being open, by its gateway, to the public square; and several of the neighbors, women as well as men, were loitering within its precincts. The convent, however, has another and larger cloister, which I suppose is kept free from interlopers. The Chiostro Verde is a walk round the four sides of a square, beneath an arched and groined roof. One side of the walk looks upon an enclosed green space with a fountain or a tomb (I forget which) in the centre; the other side is ornamented all along with a succession of ancient frescos, representing subjects of Scripture history. In the days when the designs were more distinct than now, it must have been a very effective way for a monk to read Bible history, to see its personages and events thus passing visibly beside him in his morning and evening walks. Beneath the frescos on one side of the cloistered walk, and along the low stone parapet that separates it from the grass-plat on the other, are inscriptions to the memory of the dead who are buried underneath the pavement. The most of these were modern, and recorded the names of persons of no particular note. Other monumental slabs were inlaid with the pavement itself. Two or three Dominican monks, belonging to the convent, passed in and out, while we were there, in their white habits.

After going round three sides, we came to the fourth, formed by the wall of the church, and heard the voice of a priest behind a curtain that fell down before a door. Lifting it aside, we went in, and found ourselves in the ancient chapter-house, a large interior formed by two great pointed arches crossing one another in a groined roof. The broad spaces of the walls were entirely covered with frescos that are rich even now, and must have glowed with an inexpressible splendor, when fresh from the artists' hands, five hundred years ago. There is a long period, during which frescos illuminate a church or a hall in a way that no other adornment can; when this epoch of brightness is past, they become the dreariest ghosts of perished magnificence… This chapter-house is the only part of the church that is now used for the purposes of public worship. There are several confessionals, and two chapels or shrines, each with its lighted tapers. A priest performed mass while we were there, and several persons, as usual, stepped in to do a little devotion, either praying on their own account, or uniting with the ceremony that was going forward. One man was followed by two little dogs, and in the midst of his prayers, as one of the dogs was inclined to stray about the church, he kept snapping his fingers to call him back. The cool, dusky refreshment of these holy places, affording such a refuge from the hot noon of the streets and piazzas, probably suggests devotional ideas to the people, and it may be, when they are praying, they feel a breath of Paradise fanning them. If we could only see any good effects in their daily life, we might deem it an excellent thing to be able to find incense and a prayer always ascending, to which every individual may join his own. I really wonder that the Catholics are not better men and women.

When we had looked at the old frescos… we emerged into the cloister again, and thence ventured into a passage which would have led us to the Chiostro Grande, where strangers, and especially ladies, have no right to go. It was a secluded corridor, very neatly kept, bordered with sepulchral monuments, and at the end appeared a vista of cypress-trees, which indeed were but an illusory perspective, being painted in fresco. While we loitered along the sacristan appeared and offered to show us the church, and led us into the transept on the right of the high altar, and ushered us into the sacristy, where we found two artists copying some of Fra Angelico's pictures. These were painted on the three wooden leaves of a triptych, and, as usual, were glorified with a great deal of gilding, so that they seemed to float in the brightness of a heavenly element. Solomon speaks of "apples of gold in pictures of silver." The pictures of Fra Angelico, and other artists of that age, are really pictures of gold; and it is wonderful to see how rich the effect, and how much delicate beauty is attained (by Fra Angelico at least) along with it. His miniature-heads appear to me much more successful than his larger ones. In a monkish point of view, however, the chief value of the triptych of which I am speaking does not lie in the pictures, for they merely serve as the framework of some relics, which are set all round the edges of the three leaves. They consist of little bits and fragments of bones, and of packages carefully tied up in silk, the contents of which are signified in Gothic letters appended to each parcel. The sacred vessels of the church are likewise kept in the sacristy..

Re-entering the transept, our guide showed us the chapel of the Strozzi family, which is accessible by a flight of steps from the floor of the church. The walls of this chapel are covered with frescos by Orcagna, representing around the altar the Last Judgment, and on one of the walls heaven and the assembly of the blessed, and on the other, of course, hell. I cannot speak as to the truth of the representation; but, at all events, it was purgatory to look at it..

We next passed into the choir, which occupies the extreme end of the church behind the great square mass of the high altar, and is surrounded with a double row of ancient oaken seats of venerable shape and carving. The choir is illuminated by a threefold Gothic window, full of richly painted glass, worth all the frescos that ever stained a wall or ceiling; but these walls, nevertheless, are adorned with frescos by Ghirlandaio, and it is easy to see must once have made a magnificent appearance. I really was sensible of a sad and ghostly beauty in many of the figures; but all the bloom, the magic of the painter's touch, his topmost art, have long ago been rubbed off, the white plaster showing through the colors in spots, and even in large spaces. Any other sort of ruin acquires a beauty proper to its decay, and often superior to that of its pristine state; but the ruin of a picture, especially of a fresco, is wholly unredeemed; and, moreover, it dies so slowly that many generations are likely to be saddened by it.