with all the treasures of my historic reading in mind from the lives of the medici and savonarola to that of michelangelo and the florentine school of artists, i was keen to see what florence would be like. mrs. q. had described it as the most individual of all the italian cities that she had seen. she had raved over its narrow, dark, cornice-shaded streets, its fortress-like palaces, its highly individual churches and cloisters, the way the drivers of the little open vehicles plied everywhere cracking their whips, until, she said, it sounded like a fourth of july in janesville. i was keen to see how large the dome of the cathedral would look and whether it would really tower conspicuously over the remaining buildings of the city, and whether the arno would look as picturesque as it did in all the photographs. the air was so soft and the sun so bright, although sinking low in the west, as the train entered the city, that i was pleased to accept, instead of the ancient atmosphere which i had anticipated, the wide streets and rows of four- and six-family apartment houses which characterize all the newer sections. they have the rich browns and creams of the earlier portion of florence; but they are very different in their suggestion of modernity. the distant hills, as i could see from the car windows, were dotted with houses and villas occupying delightful positions above the town. suddenly i saw the duomo; and although i knew it only from photographs i recognized it in an instant. it spoke for itself in a large, dignified way. over the housetops it soared like a great bubble;372 and some pigeons flying in the air gave it the last touch of beauty. we wound around the city in a circle—i could tell this by the shifting position of the sun—through great yards of railway-tracks with scores of engines and lines of small box-cars; and then i saw a small stream and a bridge,—nothing like the arno, of course,—a canal; and the next thing we were rolling into a long crowded railway-station, the guards calling firenze. i got up, gathered my overcoat and bags into my arms, signaled a facino and gave them to him; and then i sought a vehicle that would convey me to the hotel for which i was bound—the hotel de ville on the arno. i sat behind a fat driver while he cracked his whip endlessly above the back of a lazy horse, passing the while the showy façade of santa maria novella, striped with strange bands of white and bluish gray or drab,—a pleasing effect for a church. i could see at once that the florence of the middle ages was a much more condensed affair than that which now sprawls out in various directions from the loggia dei lanzi and the place of the cathedral.
the narrow streets were alive with people; and the drivers of vehicles everywhere seemed to drive as if their lives depended on it. suddenly we turned into a piazza very modern and very different from that of santa maria novella; and then we were at the hotel door. it was a nice-looking square, as i thought, not very large,—clean and gracious. to my delight i found that my room opened directly upon a balcony which overlooked the arno, and that from it, sitting in a chair, i could command all of that remarkable prospect of high-piled medieval houses hanging over the water’s edge. it was beautiful. the angelus bells were ringing; there was a bright glow in the west where the sun was going down; the water of the stream was turquoise blue, and the walls of all the houses seemingly brown. i stood373 and gazed, thinking of the peculiarly efficient german manager i had encountered, the german servants who were in charge of this hotel, and the fact that florence had long since radically changed from what it was. a german porter came and brought my bags; a german maid brought hot water; a german clerk took my full name and address for the register, and possibly for the police; and then i was at liberty to unpack and dress for dinner. instead i took a stroll out along the stream-banks to study the world of jewelry shops which i saw there, and the stands for flowers, and the idling crowd.
i dare not imagine what the interest of florence would be to any one who did not know her strange and variegated history, but i should think, outside of the surrounding scenic beauty, it would be little or nothing. unless one had a fondness for mere quaintness and gloom and solidity, it would in a way be repulsive, or at best dreary. but lighted by the romance, the tragedy, the lust, the zealotry, the brutality and the artistic idealism that surrounds such figures as dante, the medici, savonarola, donatello, michelangelo, brunelleschi, and the whole world of art, politics, trade, war, it takes on a strange luster to me, that of midnight waters lighted by the fitful gleams of distant fires. i never think of it without seeing in my mind’s eye the piazza della signoria as it must have looked on that day in 1494 when that famous fiasco, in regard to “the test by fire,” entered into between savonarola and the franciscan monks, took place,—those long, ridiculous processions of dominicans and franciscans, savonarola bearing the chalice aloft; or that other day when charles viii of france at the instance of savonarola paraded the street in black helmet with mantle of gold brocade, his lance leveled before him, his retainers gathered about him, and then disappointed the374 people by getting off his horse and showing himself to be the insignificant little man that he was, almost deformed and with an idiotic expression of countenance. neither can i forget the day that savonarola was beheaded and burnt for his religious zealotry in this same piazza della signoria; nor all the rivals of the medici hung from the windows of the palazzo vecchio or beheaded in the bargello. think of the tonsured friars and grave citizens of this medieval city, under savonarola’s fiery incitement, their heads garlanded with flowers, mingling with the overwrought children called to help in purifying the city, dancing like david before the ark and shouting “long live christ and the virgin, our rulers”; of the days when alessandro medici and his boon companion and cousin, lorenzo, rode about the city on a mule together, defiling the virtue of innocent girls, roistering in houses of ill repute, and drinking and stabbing to their hearts’ content; of fra girolamo preaching to excited crowds in the duomo and of his vision of a black cross over rome, a red one over jerusalem; of machiavelli writing his brochure “the prince”; and of michelangelo defending the city walls as an engineer. can any other city match this spectacular, artistic, melodramatic progress in so short a space of time, or present the galaxy of artists, the rank company of material masters such as the medici, the pazzi, the strozzi, plotting and counter-plotting to the accompaniment of lusts and murders? other cities have had their amazing hours, all of them, from rome to london. but florence! it has always seemed to me that the literary possibilities of florence, in spite of the vast body of literature concerning it, have scarcely been touched.
the art section alone is so vast and so brilliant that one of the art merchants told me while i was there that at least forty thousand of the city’s one hundred and seventy375 thousand population is foreign (principally english and american), drawn to it by its art merits, and that the tide of travel from april to october is amazing. i can believe it. you will hear german and english freely spoken in all the principal thoroughfares.
because of a gray day and dull, following the warmth and color and light of perugia and rome, florence seemed especially dark and somber to me at first; but i recovered. its charm and beauty grew on me by degrees so that by the time i had done inspecting santa maria novella, santa croce, san marco, the cathedral group and the bargello, i was really desperately in love with the art of it all, and after i had investigated the galleries, the pitti, uffizi, belle arti, and the cloisters, i was satisfied that i could find it in my heart to live here and work, a feeling i had in many other places in europe.
truly, however, there is no other city in europe just like florence; it has all the distinction of great individuality. my mood changed about, at times, as i thought of the different periods of its history, the splendor of its ambitions or the brutality of its methods; but when i was in the presence of some of its perfect works of art, such as botticelli’s “spring” in the belle arti, or michelangelo’s “tombs of the medici” in san lorenzo, or titian’s “magdalen,” or raphael’s “leo x” in the pitti, or benozzo gozzoli’s fresco (the journey of the three kings to bethlehem) in the old medici palace, then i was ready to believe that nothing could be finer than florence. i realized now that of all the cities in europe that i saw florence was possessed of the most intense art atmosphere,—something that creeps over your soul in a grim realistic way and causes you to repeat over and over: “amazing men worked here—amazing men!”
it was so strange to find driven home to me,—even more here than in rome, that illimitable gulf that divides376 ideality of thought and illusion from reality. men painted the illusions of christianity concerning the saints and the miracles at this time better than ever before or since, and they believed something else. a cosimo medici who could patronize the papacy with one hand and make a cardinal into a pope, could murder a rival with the other; and andrea del castagno, who was seeking to shine as a painter of religious art—madonnas, transfigurations, and the like—could murder a domenico veneziano in order to have no rival in what he considered to be a permanent secret of how to paint in oils. the same munificence that could commission michelangelo to design and execute a magnificent façade for san lorenzo (it was never done, of course) could suborn the elective franchise of the people and organize a school on the lines of plato’s academy. in other words, in florence as in the court of alexander vi at rome, we find life stripped of all sham in action, in so far as an individual and his conscience were concerned, and filled with the utmost subtlety in so far as the individual and the public were concerned. cosimo and lorenzo de’ medici, andrea del castagno, machiavelli, the pazzi, the strozzi,—in fact, the whole “kit and kaboodle” of the individuals comprising the illustrious life that foregathered here, were cut from the same piece of cloth. they were, one and all, as we know, outside of a few artistic figures, shrewd, calculating, relentless and ruthless seekers after power and position; lust, murder, gormandizing, panoplizing, were the order of the day. religion,—it was to be laughed at; weakness,—it was to be scorned. poverty was to be misused. innocence was to be seized upon and converted. laughing at virtue and satisfying themselves always, they went their way, building their grim, dark, almost windowless palaces; preparing their dungeons and erecting their gibbets for their enemies. no wonder377 savonarola saw “a black cross over rome.” they struck swiftly and surely and smiled blandly and apparently mercifully; they had the asiatic notion of morality,—charity, virtue, and the like, combined with a ruthless indifference to them. power was the thing they craved—power and magnificence; and these were the things they had. but, oh, florence! florence! how you taught the nothingness of life itself; its shams; its falsehoods; its atrocities; its uselessness. it has never been any wonder to me that the saddest, darkest, most pathetic figure in all art, michelangelo buonarroti, should have appeared and loved and dreamed and labored and died at this time. his melancholy was a fit commentary on his age, on life, and on all art. oh, buonarroti, loneliest of figures: i think i understand how it was with you.
bear with me while i lay a flower on this great grave. i cannot think of another instance in art in which indomitable will and almost superhuman energy have been at once so frustrated and so successful.
i never think of the great tomb for which the moses in san pietro in vincoli—large, grave, thoughtful; the man who could walk with god—and the slaves in the louvre were intended without being filled with a vast astonishment and grief to think that life should not have permitted this design to come to fulfilment. to think that a pope so powerful as julius should have planned a tomb so magnificent, with michelangelo to scheme it out and actually to begin it, and then never permit it to reach completion. all the way northward through italy this idea of a parallelogram with forty figures on it and covered with reliefs and other ornaments haunted me. at florence, in the belle arti, i saw more of the figures (casts), designed for this tomb—strange, unfolding thoughts half-hewn out of the rock, which suggest the source from which rodin has drawn his inspiration,—and378 my astonishment grew. before i was out of italy, this man and his genius, the mere dreams of the things he hoped to do, enthralled me so that to me he has become the one great art figure of the world. colossal is the word for michelangelo,—so vast that life was too short for him to suggest even a tithe of what he felt. but even the things that he did, how truly monumental they are.
i am sure i am not mistaken when i say that there is a profound sadness, too, running through all that he ever did. his works are large, gargantuan, and profoundly melancholy; witness the moses that i have been talking of, to say nothing of the statues on the tombs of the medici in san lorenzo at florence. i saw them in berlin, reproduced there in plaster in the kaiser-friederich-museum, and once more i was filled with the same sense of profound, meditative melancholy. it is present in its most significant form here in florence, in san lorenzo, the façade of which he once prepared to make magnificent, but here he was again frustrated. i saw the originals of these deep, sad figures that impressed me as no other sculptural figures ever have done. “dawn and dusk”; “day and night.” how they dwell with me constantly. i was never able to look at any of his later work—the sistine chapel frescoes, the figures of slaves in the louvre, the moses in san pietro in vincoli, or these figures here in florence, without thinking how true it was that this great will had rarely had its way and how, throughout all his days, his energy was so unfortunately compelled to war with circumstance. life plays this trick on the truly great if they are not ruthless and of material and executive leanings. art is a pale flower that blooms only in sheltered places and to drag it forth and force it to contend with the rough usages of the world is to destroy its perfectness.379 it was so in this man’s case who at times, because of unlucky conjunctions, was compelled to fly for his life, or to sue for the means which life should have been honored to bestow upon him, or else to abandon great purposes.
out of such a mist of sorrow, and only so, however, have come these figures that now dream here year after year in their gray chapel, while travelers come and go, draining their cup of wonder,—rising ever and anon to the level of the beauty they contemplate. i can see browning speculating upon the spirit of these figures. “night” with her heavy lids, lost in great weariness; and “day” with his clear eyes. i can see rodin gathering substance for his “thinker,” and shelley marveling at the suggestions which arise from these mighty figures. there is none so great as this man who, in his medieval gloom and mysticism, inherited the art of greece.
