The Story of Florence

The famous Concert (185), representing a passionate-faced monk of the Augustinian order at the harpsichord, while an older and more prosaic ecclesiastic stands behind him with a viol, and a youthful worldling half carelessly listens, was formerly taken as the standard of Giorgione's work; it is now usually regarded as an early Titian. Although much damaged and repainted, it remains one of the most beautiful of Venetian painted lyrics.

Andrea del Sarto's two Assumptions, one (225) painted before 1526 for a church at Cortona, the other (191) left unfinished in 1531, show the artist ineffectually striving after the sublime, and helplessly pulled down to earth by the draperies of the Apostles round the tomb. Of smaller works should be noticed: an early Titian, the Saviour (228); two portraits by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio (224, 207), of which the latter, a goldsmith, has been ascribed to Leonardo; a lady known as La Gravida (229), probably by Raphael early in his Florentine period; Daniele Barbaro by Paolo Veronese (216); Titian's Philip II. of Spain (200); a male portrait by Andrea del Sarto (184), said, with little plausibility, to represent himself; a Holy Family (235) by Rubens.

In the Sala di Saturno

Here are some of the choicest pictures in the collection, including a whole series of Raphael's. Raphael's Madonna del Gran Duca (178)–so called from its modern purchaser, Ferdinand III.–was painted in 1504 or 1505, either before leaving Urbino or shortly after his arrival in Florence; it is the sweetest and most purely devotional of all his Madonnas. Morelli points out that it is strongly reminiscent of Raphael's first master, Timoteo Viti. The portraits of Angelo Doni and Maddalena Doni (61 and 59) also belong to the beginning of Raphael's Florentine epoch, about 1505 or 1506, and show how much he felt the influence of Leonardo; Angelo Doni, it will be remembered, was the parsimonious merchant for whom Michelangelo painted the Madonna of the Tribuna. The Madonna del Baldacchino (165) was commenced by Raphael in 1508, the last picture of his Florentine period, ordered by the Dei for Santo Spirito; it shows the influence of Fra Bartolommeo in its composition, and was left unfinished when Pope Julius summoned the painter to Rome; in its present state, there is hardly anything of Raphael's about it. The beautiful Madonna della Seggiola (151) is a work of Raphael's Roman period, painted in 1513 or 1514. The Vision of Ezekiel (174) is slightly later, painted in 1517 or thereabout, and shows that Raphael had felt the influence of Michelangelo; one of the smallest and most sublime of all his pictures; the landscape is less conventional than we often see in his later works. Neither of the two portraits ascribed to Raphael in this room (171, 158) can any longer be accepted as a genuine work of the master.

Andrea del Sarto and Fra Bartolommeo are likewise represented by masterpieces. The Friar's Risen Christ with Four Evangelists (159), beneath whom two beautiful putti hold the orb of the world, was painted in 1516, the year before the painter's death; it is one of the noblest and most divine representations of the Saviour in the whole history of art. Andrea's so-called Disputa (172), in which a group of Saints is discussing the mystery of the Blessed Trinity, painted in 1518, is as superbly coloured as any of the greatest Venetian triumphs; the Magdalene is again the painter's own wife. Perugino's Deposition from the Cross (164), painted in 1495, shows the great Umbrian also at his best.

Among the minor pictures in this room may be noted a pretty little trifle of the school of Raphael, so often copied, Apollo and the Muses (167), questionably ascribed to Giulio Romano; and a Nymph pursued by a Satyr (147), supposed by Morelli to be by Giorgione, now assigned to Dosso Dossi of Ferrara.

In the Sala di Giove

The treasure of this room is the Velata (245), Raphael's own portrait of the woman that he loved, to whom he wrote his sonnets, and whom he afterwards idealised as the Madonna di San Sisto; her personality remains a mystery. Titian's Bella (18), a rather stolid rejuvenation of Eleonora Gonzaga, is chiefly valuable for its magnificent representation of a wonderful Venetian costume. Here are three works of Andrea del Sarto–the Annunciation (124), the Madonna in Glory, with four Saints (123), and St John the Baptist (272); the first is one of his most beautiful paintings. The picture supposed to represent Andrea and his wife (118) is not by the master himself. Bartolommeo's St Mark (125) was painted by him in 1514, to show that he could do large figures, whereas he had been told that he had a maniera minuta; it is not altogether successful. His Deposition from the Cross (64) is one of his latest and most earnest religious works. The Three Fates (113) by Rosso Fiorentino is an undeniably powerful and impressive picture; it was formerly ascribed to Michelangelo. The Three Ages (110), ascribed to Lorenzo Lotto here, was by Morelli attributed to Giorgione, and is now assigned by highly competent critics to a certain Morto da Feltre, of whom little is known save that he is said to have been Giorgione's successful rival for the favours of a ripe Venetian beauty; the picture itself, though injured by restoration, belongs to the same category as the Concert. "In such favourite incidents of Giorgione's school," writes Walter Pater, "music or music-like intervals in our existence, life itself is conceived as a sort of listening–listening to music, to the reading of Bandello's novels, to the sound of water, to time as it flies."

In the Sala di Marte

The most important pictures of this room are: Titian's portrait of a young man with a glove (92); the Holy Family, called of the Impannata or "covered window" (94) a work of Raphael's Roman period, painted by his scholars, perhaps by Giulio Romano; Cristofano Allori's Judith (96), a splendid and justly celebrated picture, showing what exceedingly fine works could be produced by Florentines even in the decadence (Allori died in 1621); Andrea del Sarto's scenes from the history of Joseph (87, 88), panels for cassoni or bridal chests, painted for the marriage of Francesco Borgherini and Margherita Acciaiuoli; a Rubens, the so-called Four Philosophers (85), representing himself with his brother, and the scholars Lipsius and Grotius; Andrea del Sarto's Holy Family (81), one of his last works, painted in 1529 for Ottaviano dei Medici and said to have been finished during the siege; Van Dyck's Cardinal Giulio Bentivoglio (82). It is uncertain whether this Julius II. (79) or that in the Tribuna of the Uffizi is Raphael's original, but the present picture appears to be the favourite; both are magnificent portraits of this terrible old warrior pontiff, who, for all his fierceness, was the noblest and most enlightened patron that Raphael and Michelangelo had. It was probably at his bidding that Raphael painted Savonarola among the Church's doctors and theologians in the Vatican.

In the Sala di Apollo and Sala di Venere

Here, first of all, is Raphael's celebrated portrait of Pope Julius' unworthy successor, Leo X. (40), the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent; on the left–that is, the Pope's right hand–is the Cardinal Giulio dei Medici, afterwards Pope Clement VII.; behind the chair is the Cardinal Luigi dei Rossi, the descendant of a daughter of Piero il Gottoso. One of Raphael's most consummate works.

Andrea del Sarto's Pietà (58) was painted in 1523 or 1524 for a convent of nuns in the Mugello, whither Andrea had taken his wife and household while the plague raged in Florence; it is one of his finest works. Titian's Magdalene (67) has been called by Ruskin a "disgusting" picture; as a pseudo-religious work, it would be hard to find anything more offensive; but it has undeniably great technical qualities. His Pietro Aretino (54), on the other hand, is a noble portrait of an infamous blackguard. Noteworthy are also Andrea del Sarto's portrait (66), apparently one of his many representations of himself, and Murillo's Mother and Child (63).

In the Sala di Venere, are a superb landscape by Rubens (14), sometimes called the Hay Harvest and sometimes the Return of the Contadini; also a fine female portrait, wrongly ascribed to Leonardo (140); the Triumph of David by Matteo Rosselli (13). It should be observed that the gems of the collection are frequently shifted from room to room for the benefit of the copyist.

The Sala dell' Educazione di Giove and following rooms

A series of smaller rooms, no less gorgeously decorated, adjoins the Sala dell' Iliade. In the Sala dell' Educazione di Giove are: Fra Bartolommeo's Holy Family with St. Elizabeth (256), over the door; the Zingarella or Gipsy Girl (246), a charming little idyllic picture by Boccaccino of Cremona, formerly ascribed to Garofalo; Philip IV. of Spain (243) by Velasquez. Carlo Dolci's St Andrew (266) is above his usual level; but it is rather hard to understand how Guido Reni's Cleopatra (270) could ever be admired.

In the Sala di Prometeo are some earlier paintings; but those ascribed to Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Ghirlandaio are merely school-pieces. Fra Filippo Lippi's Madonna and Child with the Pomegranate (343) is a genuine and excellent work; in the background are seen the meeting of Joachim and Anne, with the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin. Crowe and Cavalcasella observe that "this group of the Virgin and Child reminds one forcibly of those by Donatello or Desiderio da Settignano," and it shows how much the painters of the Quattrocento were influenced by the sculptors; the Madonna's face, for no obvious reason, is said to be that of Lucrezia Buti, the girl whom Lippo carried off from a convent at Prato. A curious little allegory (336) is ascribed by Morelli to Filippino Lippi. We should also notice the beautiful Madonna with Angels adoring the Divine Child in a rose garden (347), a characteristic Florentine work of the latter part of the Quattrocento, once erroneously ascribed to Filippino Lippi; an Ecce Homo in fresco by Fra Bartolommeo (377); a Holy Family by Mariotto Albertinelli (365); and a tondo by Luca Signorelli (355), in which St. Catherine is apparently writing at the dictation of the Divine Child. But the two gems of this room are the head of a Saint (370) and the portrait of a man in red dress and hat (375) by one of the earlier painters of the Quattrocento, probably Domenico Veneziano; "perhaps," writes Mr Berenson, "the first great achievements in this kind of the Renaissance." Here, too, is a fine portrait by Lorenzo Costa (376) of Giovanni Bentivoglio.

In the Sala del Poccetti, Sala della Giustizia, Sala di Flora, Sala dei Putti, the pictures are, for the most part, unimportant. The so-called portrait of the bella Simonetta, the innamorata of Giuliano dei Medici (353), is not authentic and should not be ascribed to Sandro Botticelli. There are some fairly good portraits; a Titian (495), a Sebastiano del Piombo (409), Duke Cosimo I. by Bronzino (403), Oliver Cromwell by Lely (408). Calumny by Francia Bigio (427) is curious as a later rendering of a theme that attracted the greatest masters of the Quattrocento (Botticelli, Mantegna, Luca Signorelli all tried it). Lovers of Browning will be glad to have their attention called to the Judith of Artemisia Gentileschi (444): "a wonder of a woman painting too."

A passage leads down two flights of steps, with occasional glimpses of the Boboli Gardens, through corridors of Medicean portraits, Florentine celebrities, old pictures of processions in piazza, and the like. Then over the Ponte Vecchio, with views of the Arno on either hand as we cross, to the Uffizi.

Behind the Pitti Palace are the delicious Boboli Gardens, commenced for Duke Cosimo I., with shady walks and exquisitely framed views of Florence. In a grotto near the entrance are four unfinished statues by Michelangelo; they are usually supposed to have been intended for the tomb of Julius II., but may possibly have been connected with the projected façade of San Lorenzo.

Nearly opposite the Palazzo Pitti is the Casa Guidi, where the Brownings lived and wrote. Here Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in June 1861, she who "made of her verse a golden ring linking England to Italy"; these were the famous "Casa Guidi windows" from which she watched the liberation and unification of Italy:–

"I heard last night a little child go singing'Neath Casa Guidi windows, by the church,O bella libertà, O bella!– stringingThe same words still on notes he went in searchSo high for, you concluded the upspringingOf such a nimble bird to sky from perchMust leave the whole bush in a tremble green,And that the heart of Italy must beat,While such a voice had leave to rise serene'Twixt church and palace of a Florence street."

The church in question, San Felice, contains a good picture of St. Anthony, St. Rock and St. Catherine by some follower of Botticelli and Filippino Lippi; also a Crucifixion of the school of Giotto. Thence the Via Mazzetta leads into the Piazza Santo Spirito, at the corner of which is the Palazzo Guadagni, built by Cronaca at the end of the Quattrocento; with fine iron work, lantern holders and the like, on the exterior.

The present church of Santo Spirito–the finest Early Renaissance church in Florence–was built between 1471 and 1487, after Brunelleschi's designs, to replace his earlier building which had been burned down in 1471 on the occasion of the visit of Galeazzo Maria Sforza to Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother. It is a fine example of Brunelleschi's adaptation of the early basilican type, is borne upon graceful Corinthian columns and nobly proportioned. The octagonal sacristy is by Giuliano da San Gallo and Cronaca, finished in 1497, and the campanile by Baccio d'Agnolo at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

The stained glass window over the entrance was designed by Perugino. In the right transept is an excellent picture by Filippino Lippi; Madonna and Child with the little St. John, St. Catherine and St. Nicholas, with the donor, Tanai de' Nerli, and his wife. Also in the right transept is the tomb of the Capponi; Gino, the conqueror of Pisa and historian of the Ciompi; Neri, the conqueror of the Casentino; and that great republican soldier and hero, Piero Capponi, who had saved Florence from Charles of France and fell in the Pisan war. The vision of St. Bernard is an old copy from Perugino. None of the other pictures in the church are more than school pieces; there are two in the left transept ascribed to Filippino's disappointing pupil, Raffaellino del Garbo–the Trinità with St. Mary of Egypt and St. Catherine, and the Madonna with Sts. Lawrence, Stephen, John and Bernard. The latter picture is by Raffaellino di Carlo.

During the last quarter of the fourteenth century the convent of Santo Spirito–which is an Augustinian house–was the centre of a circle of scholars, who represent an epoch intermediate between the great writers of the Trecento and the humanists of the early Quattrocento. Prominent among them was Coluccio Salutati, who for many years served the Republic as Chancellor and died in 1406. He was influential in founding the first chair of Greek, and his letters on behalf of Florence were so eloquent and powerful that the "great viper," Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti, declared that he dreaded one of them more than many swords. Also Filippo Villani, the nephew of the great chroniclers, Giovanni and Matteo, who had succeeded Boccaccio as lecturer on Dante. They met here with other kindred spirits in the cell of Fra Luigi Marsili, a learned monk and impassioned worshipper of Petrarch, upon whose great crusading canzone–O aspettata in ciel, beata e bella– he wrote a commentary which is still extant. Fra Luigi died in 1394. A century later, the monks of this convent took a violent part in opposition to Savonarola; and it was here, in the pulpit of the choir of the church, that Landucci tells us that he heard the bull of excommunication read "by a Fra Leonardo, their preacher, and an adversary of the said Fra Girolamo,"–"between two lighted torches and many friars," as he rather quaintly puts it.

"The Carmine's my cloister: hunt it up," says Browning's Lippo Lippi to his captors; and the Via Mazzetta and the Via Santa Monaca will take us to it. This church of the Carmelites, Santa Maria del Carmine, was consecrated in 1422; and, almost immediately after, the mighty series of frescoes was begun in the Brancacci Chapel at the end of the right transept–frescoes which were to become the school for all future painting. In the eighteenth century the greater part of the church was destroyed by fire, but this chapel was spared by the flames, and the frescoes, though terribly damaged and grievously restored, still remain on its walls.

This Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine plays the same part in the history of painting as the bronze gates of the Baptistery in that of sculpture. It was in that same eventful year, 1401, of the famous competition between Ghiberti and Brunelleschi, that the new Giotto was born–Tommaso, the son of a notary in Castello San Giovanni di Valdarno. With him, as we saw in chapter iii., the second great epoch of Italian painting, the Quattrocento, or Epoch of Character, opens. His was a rare and piquant personality; persona astrattissima e molto a caso, says Vasari, "an absent-minded fellow and very casual." Intent upon his art, he took no care of himself and thought nothing of the ordinary needs and affairs of the world, though always ready to do others a good turn. From his general negligence and untidiness, he was nicknamed Masaccio– "hulking Tom"–which has become one of the most honourable names in the history of art. The little chapel in which we now stand and survey his handiwork, or what remains of it, is nothing less than the birthplace of modern painting. Sculpture had indeed preceded painting in its return to nature and in its direct study of the human form, and the influence of Donatello lies as strongly over all the painters of the Quattrocento. Vasari even states that Masolino da Panicale (Masolino = "dear little Tom"), Masaccio's master, had been one of Ghiberti's assistants in the casting of the bronze gates, but this is questionable; it is possible that he had been Ghiberti's pupil, though he learned the principles of painting from Gherardo Starnina, one of the last artists of the Trecento. It was shortly after 1422 that Masolino commenced this great series of frescoes setting forth the life of St. Peter; within the next few years Masaccio continued his work; and, more than half a century later, in 1484, Filippino Lippi took it up where Masaccio had left off, and completed the series.

Masolino's contribution to the whole appears to be confined to three pictures: St. Peter preaching, with Carmelites in the background to carry his doctrines into fifteenth century Florence, on the left of the window; the upper row of scenes on the right wall, representing St. Peter and St. John raising the cripple at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, and the healing of Tabitha (according to others, the resuscitation of Petronilla); and the narrow fresco of the Fall of Adam and Eve, on the right of the entrance. Some have also ascribed to him the striking figure of St. Peter enthroned, attended by Carmelites, while the faithful approach to kiss his feet–the picture in the corner on the left which, in a way, sets the keynote to the whole–but it is more probably the work of Masaccio (others ascribe it to Filippino). Admirable though these paintings are, they exhibit a certain immaturity as contrasted with those by Masaccio: in the Raising of Tabitha, for instance, those two youths with their odd headgear might almost have stepped out of some Giottesque fresco; and the rendering of the nude in the Adam and Eve, though wonderful at that epoch, is much inferior to Masaccio's opposite. Nevertheless, Masolino's grave and dignified figures introduced the type that Masaccio was soon to render perfect.

From the hand of Masaccio are the Expulsion from Paradise; the Tribute Money; the Raising of the Dead Youth (in part); and (probably) the St. Peter enthroned, on the left wall; St. Peter and St. John healing the sick with their shadow, under Masolino's Peter preaching (and the figure behind with a red cap, leaning on a stick, is Masaccio's pious portrait of his master Masolino himself); St. Peter baptising, St. Peter and St. John giving alms, on the opposite side of the window. Each figure is admirably rendered, its character perfectly realised; Masaccio may indeed be said to have completed what Giotto had begun, and freed Italian art from the mannerism of the later followers of Giotto, even as Giotto himself had delivered her from Byzantine formalism. "After Giotto," writes Leonardo da Vinci, "the art of painting declined again, because every one imitated the pictures that were already done; thus it went on from century to century until Tommaso of Florence, nicknamed Masaccio, showed by his perfect works how those who take for their standard any one but Nature–the mistress of all masters–weary themselves in vain."53 This return to nature is seen even in the landscape, notably in the noble background to the Tribute Money; but above all, in his study of man and the human form. "For the first time," says Kugler, "his aim is the study of form for itself, the study of the external conformation of man. With such an aim is identified a feeling which, in beauty, sees and preserves the expression of proportion; and in repose or motion, the expression of an harmonious development of the powers of the human frame." For sheer dignity and grandeur there is nothing to compare with it, till we come to the work of Raphael and Michelangelo in the Vatican; the composition of the Tribute Money and the Healing of the Sick initiated the method of religious illustration that reached its ultimate perfection in Raphael–what has been called giving Greek form to Hebrew thought. The treatment of the nude especially seemed a novel thing in its day; the wonderful modelling of the naked youth shivering with the cold, in the scene of St. Peter baptising, was hailed as a marvel of art, and is cited by Vasari as one of the cose rarissime of painting. In the scene of the Tribute Money, the last Apostle on our right (in the central picture where our Lord and His disciples are confronted by the eager collector) whose proud bearing is hardly evangelical, is Masaccio himself, with scanty beard and untidy hair. Although less excellent than the Baptism as a study of the nude, the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden is a masterpiece of which it is impossible to speak too highly. Our primi parenti, weighed down with the consciousness of ineffable tragedy, are impelled irresistibly onward by divine destiny; they need not see the Angel in his flaming robe on his cloud of fire, with his flashing sword and out-stretched hand; terrible in his beauty as he is to the spectator, he is as nothing to them, compared with the face of an offended God and the knowledge of the tanto esilio. Surely this is how Dante himself would have conceived the scene.

Masaccio died at Rome in 1428, aged twenty-seven years. In his short life he had set modern painting on her triumphant progress, and his frescoes became the school for all subsequent painters, "All in short," says Vasari, "who have sought to acquire their art in its perfection, have constantly repaired to study it in this chapel, there imbibing the precepts and rules necessary to be followed for the command of success, and learning to labour effectually from the figures of Masaccio." If he is to rank among "the inheritors of unfulfilled renown," Masaccio may be said to stand towards Raphael as Keats towards Tennyson. Masolino outlived his great pupil for several years, and died about 1435.

The fresco of the Raising up of the dead Youth, left unfinished by Masaccio when he left Florence for Rome, was completed by Filippino Lippi (the son of that run-a-way Carmelite in whom the spirit of Masaccio was said to have lived again), in 1484. The five figures on the left appear to be from Filippino's hand (the second from the end is said to be Luigi Pulci, the poet), as also the resuscitated boy (said to be Francesco Granacci the painter, who was then about fifteen years old) and the group of eight on the right. Under Masaccio's Adam and Eve, he painted St. Paul visiting St. Peter in prison; under Masolino's Fall, the Liberation of Peter by the Angel, two exceedingly beautiful and simple compositions. And, on the right wall of the chapel, St. Peter and St. Paul before the Proconsul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter are also by Filippino. In the Crucifixion scene, which is inferior to the rest, the last of the three spectators on our right, wearing a black cap, is Filippino's master, Sandro Botticelli. In the presence of the Proconsul, the elderly man with a keen face, in a red cap to the right of the judge, is Antonio Pollaiuolo; and, on our right, the youth whose head appears in the corner is certainly Filippino himself–a kind of signature to the whole.