Part 10 (1/2)

Next the sacristy. Italian priests apparently have no resentment against inquisitive foreigners who are led into their dressing-rooms while sumptuous and significant vestments are being donned; but I must confess to feeling it for them, and if my impressions of the S. Croce sacristy are meagre and confused it is because of a certain delicacy that I experienced in intruding upon their rites. For on both occasions when I visited the sacristy there were several priests either robing or disrobing. Apart from a natural disinclination to invade privacy, I am so poor a Roman Catholic as to be in some doubt as to whether one has a right to be so near such a mystery at all. But I recollect that in this sacristy are treasures of wood and iron--the most beautiful intarsia wainscotting I ever saw, by Giovanni di Michele, with a frieze of wolves and foliage, and fourteenth-century iron gates to the little chapel, pure Gothic in design, with a little rose window at the top, delicate beyond words: all which things once again turn the thoughts to this wonderful Italy of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, when not even the best was good enough for those who built churches, but something miraculous was demanded from every craftsman.

At the end of the pa.s.sage in which the sacristy is situated is the exquisite little Cappella Medici, which Michelozzo, the architect of S. Marco and the Palazzo Medici, and for a while Donatello's partner, built for his friend Cosimo de' Medici, who though a Dominican in his cell at S. Marco was a Franciscan here, but by being equally a patron dissociated himself from partisans.h.i.+p. Three treasures in particular does this little temple hold: Giotto's ”Coronation of the Virgin”; the della Robbia altar relief, and Mino da Fiesole's tabernacle. Giotto's picture, which is signed, once stood as altar-piece in the Baroncelli chapel of the church proper. In addition to the beautiful della Robbia altar-piece, so happy and holy--which Alfred Branconi boldly calls Luca--there is over the door Christ between two angels, a lovely example of the same art. For a subtler, more modern and less religious mind, we have but to turn to the tabernacle by Mino, every inch of which is exquisite.

On the same wall is a curious thing. In the eighteen-sixties died a Signor Lombardi, who owned certain reliefs which he believed to be Donatello's. When his monument was made these ancient works were built into them and here and there gilded (for it is a wicked world and there was no taste at that time). One's impulse is not to look at this encroaching piece of novelty at all; but one should resist that feeling, because, on examination, the Madonna and Children above Signor Lombardi's head become exceedingly interesting. Her hands are the work of a great artist, and they are really holding the Child. Why this should not be an early Donatello I do not see.

The cloisters of S. Croce are entered from the piazza, just to the right of the church: the first, a little ornate, by Arnolfo, and the second, until recently used as a barracks but now being restored to a more pacific end, by Brunelleschi, and among the most perfect of his works. Brunelleschi is also the designer of the Pazzi chapel in the first cloisters. The severity of the facade is delightfully softened and enlivened by a frieze of mischievous cherubs' heads, the joint work of Donatello and Desiderio. Donatello's are on the right, and one sees at once that his was the bolder, stronger hand. Look particularly at the laughing head fourth from the right. But that one of Desiderio's over the middle columns has much charm and power. The doors, from Brunelleschi's own hand, in a doorway perfect in scale, are n.o.ble and worthy. The chapel itself I find too severe and a little fretted by its della Robbias and the multiplicity of circles. It is called Brunelleschi's masterpiece, but I prefer both the Badia of Fiesole and the Old Sacristy at S. Lorenzo, and I remember with more pleasure the beautiful doorway leading from the Arnolfo cloisters to the Brunelleschi cloisters, which probably is his too. The della Robbia reliefs, once one can forgive them for being here, are worth study. Nothing could be more charming (or less conducive to a methodical literary morning) than the angel who holds S. Matthew's ink-pot. But I think my favourite of all is the pensive apostle who leans his cheek on his hand and his elbow on his book. This figure alone proves what a sculptor Luca was, apart altogether from the charm of his mind and the fascination of his chosen medium.

This chapel was once the scene of a gruesome ceremony. Old Jacopo Pazzi, the head of the family at the time of the Pazzi conspiracy against the Medici, after being hanged from a window of the Palazzo Vecchio, was buried here. Some short while afterwards Florence was inundated by rain to such an extent that the vengeance of G.o.d was inferred, and, casting about for a reason, the Florentines decided that it was because Jacopo had been allowed to rest in sacred soil. A mob therefore rushed to S. Croce, broke open his tomb and dragged his body through the streets, stopping on their way at the Pazzi palace to knock on the door with his skull. He was then thrown into the swollen Arno and borne away by the tide.

In the old refectory of the convent are now a number of pictures and fragments of sculpture. The ”Last Supper,” by Taddeo Gaddi, on the wall, is notable for depicting Judas, who had no shrift at the hands of the painters, without a halo. Castagno and Ghirlandaio, as we shall see, under similar circ.u.mstances, placed him on the wrong side of the table. In either case, but particularly perhaps in Taddeo's picture, the answer to Christ's question, which Leonardo at Milan makes so dramatic, is a foregone conclusion. The ”Crucifixion”

on the end wall, at the left, is interesting as having been painted for the Porta S. Gallo (in the Piazza Cavour) and removed here. All the gates of Florence had religious frescoes in them, some of which still remain. The great bronze bishop is said to be by Donatello and to have been meant for Or San Michele; but one does not much mind.

One finds occasion to say so many hard things of the Florentine disregard of ancient art that it is peculiarly a pleasure to see the progress that is being made in restoring Brunelleschi's perfect cloisters at S. Croce to their original form. When they were turned into barracks the Loggia was walled in all round and made into a series of rooms. These walls are now gradually coming away, the lovely pillars being again isolated, the chimneys removed, and everything lightly washed. Gra.s.s has also been sown in the great central square. The crumbling of the decorative medals in the spandrels of the cloisters cannot of course be restored; but one does not complain of such natural decay as that.

CHAPTER XVI

The Accademia

Michelangelo--The David--The tomb of Julius--A contrast--Fra Angelico--The beatific painter--Cimabue and Giotto--Masaccio--Gentile da Fabriano--Domenico Ghirlandaio--Fra Angelico again--Fra Bartolommeo--Perugino--Botticelli--The ”Primavera”--Leonardo da Vinci and Verrocchio--Botticelli's sacred pictures--Botticini--Tapestries of Eden.

The Accademia delle Belle Arti is in the Via Ricasoli, that street which seen from the top of the Campanile is the straightest thing in Florence, running like a ruled line from the Duomo to the valley of the Mugnone. Upstairs are modern painters: but upstairs I have never been. It is the ground-floor rooms that are so memorable, containing as they do a small but very choice collection of pictures ill.u.s.trating the growth of Italian art, with particular emphasis on Florentine art; the best a.s.semblage of the work of Fra Angelico that exists; and a large gallery given up to Michelangelo's sculpture: originals and casts. The princ.i.p.al magnets that draw people here, no doubt, are the Fra Angelicos and Botticelli's ”Primavera”; but in five at least of the rooms there is not an uninteresting picture, while the collection is so small that one can study it without fatigue--no little matter after the crowded Uffizi and Pitti.

It is a simple matter to choose in such a book as this the best place in which to tell something of the life-story of, say, Giotto and Brunelleschi and the della Robbias; for at a certain point their genius is found concentrated--Donatello's and the della Robbias'

in the Bargello and those others at the Duomo and Campanile. But with Michelangelo it is different, he is so distributed over the city--his gigantic David here, the Medici tombs at S. Lorenzo, his fortifications at S. Miniato, his tomb at S. Croce, while there remains his house as a natural focus of all his activities. I have, however, chosen the Medici chapel as the spot best suited for his biography, and therefore will here dwell only on the originals that are preserved about the David. The David himself, superb and confident, is the first thing you see in entering the doors of the gallery. He stands at the end, white and glorious, with his eyes steadfastly measuring his antagonist and calculating upon what will be his next move if the sling misdirects the stone. Of the objection to the statue as being not representative of the Biblical figure I have said something in the chapter on the Bargello, where several Davids come under review. Yet, after all that can be said against its dramatic fitness, the statue remains an impressive and majestic yet strangely human thing. There it is--a sign of what a little Italian sculptor with a broken nose could fas.h.i.+on with his mallet and chisel from a ma.s.s of marble four hundred and more years ago.

Its history is curious. In 1501, when Michelangelo was twenty-six and had just returned to Florence from Rome with a great reputation as a sculptor, the joint authorities of the cathedral and the Arte della Lana offered him a huge block of marble that had been in their possession for thirty-five years, having been worked upon clumsily by a sculptor named Baccellino and then set aside. Michelangelo was told that if he accepted it he must carve from it a David and have it done in two years. He began in September, 1501, and finished in January, 1504, and a committee was appointed to decide upon its position, among them being Leonardo da Vinci, Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi, Filippino Lippi, Botticelli, and Andrea della Robbia, There were three suggested sites: the Loggia de' Lanzi; the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio, where Verrocchio's little boudoir David then stood (now in the Bargello) and where his Cupid and dolphin now are; and the place where it now stands, then occupied by Donatello's Judith and Holofernes. This last was finally selected, not by the committee but by the determination of Michelangelo himself, and Judith and Holofernes were moved to the Loggia de' Lanzi to their present position. The David was set up in May, 1504, and remained there for three hundred and sixty-nine years, suffering no harm from the weather but having an arm broken in the Medici riots in 1527. In 1878, however, it was decided that further exposure might be injurious, and so the statue was moved here to its frigid niche and a replica in marble afterwards set up in its place. Since this glorious figure is to be seen thrice in Florence, he may be said to have become the second symbol of the city, next the fleur-de-lis.

The Tribuna del David, as the Michelangelo salon is called, has among other originals several figures intended for that tomb of Pope Julius II (whose portrait by Raphael we have seen at the Uffizi) which was to be the eighth wonder of the world, and by which the last years of the sculptor's life were rendered so unhappy. The story is a miserable one. Of the various component parts of the tomb, finished or unfinished, the best known is the Moses at S. Pietro in Vincoli at Rome, reproduced in plaster here, in the Accademia, beneath the bronze head of its author. Various other parts are in Rome too; others here; one or two may be at the Bargello (although some authorities give these supposed Michelangelos to Vincenzo Danti); others are in the grotto of the Boboli Gardens; and the Louvre has what is in some respects the finest of the ”Prisoners”.

The first statue on the right of the entrance of the Tribuna del David is a group called ”Genio Vittorioso”. Here in the old man we see rock actually turned to life; in the various ”Prisoners” near we see life emerging from rock; in the David we forget the rock altogether. One wonders how Michelangelo went to work. Did the shape of the block of marble influence him, or did he with his mind's eye, the Rontgen rays of genius, see the figure within it, embedded in the midst, and hew and chip until it disclosed? On the back of the fourth statue on the left a monkish face has been incised: probably some visitor to the studio. After looking at these originals and casts, and remembering those other Michelangelo sculptures elsewhere in Florence--the tombs of the Medici, the Brutus and the smaller David--turn to the bronze head over the cast of Moses and reflect upon the author of it all: the profoundly sorrowful eyes behind which so much power and ambition and disappointment dwelt.

It is peculiarly interesting to walk out of the Michelangelo gallery into the little room containing the Fra Angelicos: to pa.s.s from a great melancholy saturnine sculptor, the victim of the caprice of princes temporal and spiritual, his eyes troubled with world knowledge and world weariness, to the child-like celebrant of the joy of simple faith who painted these gay and happy pictures. Fra Angelico--the sweetest of all the Florentine painters--was a monk of Fiesole, whose real name was Guido Petri da Mugello, but becoming a Dominican he called himself Giovanni, and now through the sanct.i.ty and happiness of his brush is for all time Beato Angelico. He was born in 1390, nearly sixty years after Giotto's death, when Chaucer was fifty, and Richard II on the English throne. His early years were spent in exile from Fiesole, the brothers having come into difficulties with the Archbishop, but by 1418 he was again at Fiesole, and when in 1436 Cosimo de'

Medici, returned from exile at Venice, set his friend Michelozzo upon building the convent of S. Marco, Fra Angelico was fetched from Fiesole to decorate the walls. There, and here, in the Accademia, are his chief works a.s.sembled; but he worked also at Fiesole, at Cortona, and at Rome, where he painted frescoes in the chapel of Nicholas V in the Vatican and where he died, aged sixty-eight, and was buried. It was while at Rome that the Pope offered him the priors.h.i.+p of S. Marco, which he declined as being unworthy, but recommended Antonio, ”the good archbishop”.--That practically is his whole life. As to his character, let Vasari tell us. ”He would often say that whosoever practised art needed a quiet life and freedom from care, and he who occupies himself with the things of Christ ought always to be with Christ. . . . Some say that Fra Giovanni never took up his brush without first making a prayer. . . . He never made a crucifix when the tears did not course down his cheeks.” The one curious thing--to me--about Fra Angelico is that he has not been canonized. If ever a son of the Church toiled for her honour and for the happiness of mankind it was he.

There are examples of Fra Angelico's work elsewhere in Florence; the large picture in Room I of this gallery; the large altar-piece at the Uffizi, with certain others; the series of mural paintings in the cells of S. Marco; and his pictures will be found not only elsewhere in Florence and Italy but in the chief galleries of the world; for he was very a.s.siduous. We have an excellent example at the National Gallery, No. 663; but this little room gives us the artist and rhapsodist most completely. In looking at his pictures, three things in particular strike the mind: the skill with which he composed them; his mastery of light; and--and here he is unique--the pleasure he must have had in painting them. All seem to have been play; he enjoyed the toil exactly as a child enjoys the labour of building a house with toy bricks. Nor, one feels, could he be depressed. Even in his Crucifixions there is a certain underlying happiness, due to his knowledge that the Crucified was to rise again and ascend to Heaven and enjoy eternal felicity. Knowing this (as he did know it) how could he be wholly cast down? You see it again in the Flagellation of Christ, in the series of six scenes (No. 237). The scourging is almost a festival. But best of all I like the Flight into Egypt, in No. 235. Everything here is joyous and (in spite of the terrible cause of the journey) bathed in the sunny light of the age of innocence: the landscape; Joseph, younger than usual, brave and resolute and undismayed by the curious turn in his fortunes; and Mary with the child in her arms, happy and pretty, seated securely on an amiable donkey that has neither bit nor bridle. It is when one looks at Fra Angelico that one understands how wise were the Old Masters to seek their inspiration in the life of Christ. One cannot imagine Fra Angelico's existence in a pagan country. Look, in No. 236, at the six radiant and rapturous angels cl.u.s.tering above the manger. Was there ever anything prettier? But I am not sure that I do not most covet No. 250, Christ crucified and two saints, and No. 251, the Coronation of the Virgin, for their beauty of light.

In the photographs No. 246--a Deposition--is unusually striking, but in the original, although beautiful, it is far less radiant than usual with this painter. It has, however, such feeling as to make it especially memorable among the many treatments of this subject. What is generally considered the most important work in this room is the Last Judgment, which is certainly extraordinarily interesting, and in the hierarchy of heaven and the company of the blest Fra Angelico is in a very acceptable mood. The benignant Christ Who divides the sheep and the goats; the healthy ripe-lipped Saints and Fathers who a.s.sist at the tribunal and have never a line of age or experience on their blooming cheeks; the monks and nuns, just risen from their graves, who embrace each other in the meads of paradise with such fervour--these have much of the charm of little flowers. But in delineating the d.a.m.ned the painter is in strange country. It was a subject of which he knew nothing, and the introduction among them of monks of the rival order of S. Francis is mere party politics and a blot.

There are two other rooms here, but Fra Angelico spoils us for them. Four panels by another Frate, but less radiant, Lippo Lippi, are remarkable, particularly the figure of the Virgin in the Annunciation; and there is a curious series of scenes ent.i.tled ”L'Albero della Croce,” by an Ignoto of the fourteenth century, with a Christ crucified in the midst and all Scripture in medallions around him, the tragedy of Adam and Eve at the foot (mutilated by some chaste pedant) being very quaint. And in Angelico's rooms there is a little, modest Annunciation by one of his school--No. 256--which shows what a good influence he was, and to which the eye returns and returns. Here also, on easels, are two portraits of Vallombrosan monks by Fra Bartolommeo, serene, and very sympathetically painted, which cause one to regret the deterioration in Italian ecclesiastic physiognomy; and Andrea del Sarto's two pretty angels, which one so often finds in reproduction, are here too.

Let us now enter the first room of the collection proper and begin at the very beginning of Tuscan art, for this collection is historical and not fortuitous like that of the Pitti. The student may here trace the progress of Tuscan painting from the level to the highest peaks and downwards again. The Accademia was established with this purpose by that enlightened prince, Peter Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, in 1784. Other pictures not wholly within his scheme have been added since, together with the Michelangelo statues and casts; but they do not impair the original idea. For the serious student the first room is of far the most importance, for there he may begin with Cimabue (? 1240-? 1302), and Giotto (1267-? 1337), and pa.s.s steadily to Luca Signorelli (? 1450-1523). For the most part the pictures in this room appeal to the inquirer rather than the sightseer; but there is not one that is without interest, while three works of extraordinary charm have thoughtfully been enisled, on screens, for special attention--a Fra Angelico, a Fabriano, and a Ghirlandaio. Before reaching these, let us look at the walls.

The first large picture, on the left, the Cimabue, marks the transition from Byzantine art to Italian art. Giovanni Cimabue, who was to be the forerunner of the new art, was born about 1240. At that time there was plenty of painting in Italy, but it was Greek, the work of artists at Constantinople (Byzantium), the centre of Christianity in the eastern half of the Roman Empire and the fount of ecclesiastical energy, and it was crude workmans.h.i.+p, existing purely as an accessory of wors.h.i.+p. Cimabue, of whom, I may say, almost nothing definite is known, and upon whom the delightful but casual old Vasari is the earliest authority, as Dante was his first eulogist, carried on the Byzantine tradition, but breathed a little life into it. In his picture here we see him feeling his way from the unemotional painted symbols of the Faith to humanity itself. One can understand this large panel being carried (as we know the similar one at S. Maria Novella was) in procession and wors.h.i.+pped, but it is nearer to the icon of the Russian peasant of today than to a Raphael. The Madonna is above life; the Child is a little man. This was painted, say, in 1280, as an altar-piece for the Badia of S. Trinita at Florence.

Next came Giotto, Cimabue's pupil, born about 1267, whom we have met already as an architect, philosopher, and innovator; and in the second picture in this room, from Giotto's brush, we see life really awakening. The Madonna is vivifying; the Child is nearer childhood; we can believe that here are veins with blood in them. Moreover, whereas Cimabue's angels brought masonry, these bring flowers. It is crude, no doubt, but it is enough; the new art, which was to counterfeit and even extend nature, has really begun; the mystery and glory of painting are a.s.sured and the door opened for Botticelli.

But much had to happen first, particularly the mastery of the laws of perspective, and it was not (as we have seen) until Ghiberti had got to work on his first doors, and Brunelleschi was studying architecture and Uccello sitting up all night at his desk, that painting as we know it--painting of men and women ”in the round”--could be done, and it was left for a youth who was not born until Giotto had been dead sixty-four years to do this first as a master--one Tommaso di Ser Giovanni Guido da Castel San Giovanni, known as Masaccio, or Big Tom. The three great names then in the evolution of Italian painting, a subject to which I return in chapter XXV, on the Carmine, are Cimabue, Giotto, Masaccio.