The Story of Florence

From the north transept, the cloisters are entered. Here, over the door, is the Madonna del Sacco, an exceedingly beautiful fresco by Andrea del Sarto, painted in 1525. St. Joseph, leaning upon the sack which gives the picture its name, is reading aloud the Prophecies to the Mother and Child whom they concern. In this cloister–which was built by Cronaca–is the monument of the French knight slain at Campaldino in 1289 (see chapter ii.), which should be contrasted with the later monuments of condottieri in the Duomo. Here also is the chapel of St. Luke, where the Academy of Artists, founded under Cosimo I., used to meet.

A good view of the exterior of the rotunda can be obtained from the Via Gino Capponi. At the corner of this street and the Via del Mandorlo is the house which Andrea del Sarto bought for himself and his Lucrezia, after his return from France, and here he died in 1531, "full of glory and of domestic sorrows." Lucrezia survived him for nearly forty years, and died in 1570. Perhaps, if she had not made herself so unpleasant to her husband's pupils and assistants, good Giorgio Vasari–the youngest of them–might not have left us so dark a picture of this beautiful Florentine.

The rather picturesque bit of ruin in the Via degli Alfani, at the corner of the Via del Castellaccio, is merely a part of an oratory in connection with Santa Maria degli Angioli, which Brunelleschi commenced for Filippo Scolari, but which was abandoned. Santa Maria degli Angioli itself, a suppressed Camaldolese house, was of old one of the most important convents in Florence. The famous poet, Fra Guittone d'Arezzo, of whom Dante speaks disparagingly in the Commedia and in the De Vulgari Eloquentia, was instrumental in its foundation in 1293. It was sacked in 1378 during the rising of the Ciompi. This convent in the earlier portion of the fifteenth century was a centre of Hellenic studies and humanistic culture, under Father Ambrogio Traversari, who died at the close of the Council of Florence. In the cloister there is still a powerful fresco by Andrea del Castagno representing Christ on the Cross, with Madonna and the Magdalene, the Baptist, St. Benedict and St. Romuald. The Romuald especially, the founder of the order, is a fine life-like figure.

The Spedale di Santa Maria Nuova was originally founded by Messer Folco Portinari, the father of the girl who may have been Dante's "Giver of Blessing," in 1287. Folco died in 1289, and is buried within the church, which contains one of Andrea della Robbia's Madonnas. Over the portal is a terracotta Coronation of the Madonna by Bicci di Lorenzo, erected in 1424. The two frescoes, representing scenes in the history of the hospital, are of the early part of the fifteenth century; the one on the right was painted in 1424 by Bicci di Lorenzo. In the Via Bufalini, Ghiberti had his workshop; in what was once his house is now the picture gallery of the hospital. Here is the fresco of the Last Judgment, commenced by Fra Bartolommeo in 1499, before he abandoned the world, and finished by Mariotto Albertinelli. Among its contents are an Annunciation by Albertinelli, Madonnas by Cosimo Rosselli and Rosso Fiorentino, and a terracotta Madonna by Verrocchio. The two pictures ascribed to Angelico and Botticelli are not authentic. But in some respects more interesting than these Florentine works is the triptych by the Fleming, Hugo Van der Goes, painted between 1470 and 1475 for Tommaso Portinari, Messer Folco's descendant; in the centre is the "Adoration of the Shepherds," with deliciously quaint little Angels; in the side wings, Tommaso Portinari with his two boys, his wife and their little girl, are guarded by their patron saints. Tommaso Portinari was agent for the Medici in Bruges; and, on the occasion of the wedding of Charles the Bold of Burgundy with Margaret of York in 1468, he made a fine show riding in the procession at the head of the Florentines.

A little more to the east are the church and suppressed convent of Santa Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi. In the church, which has a fine court designed by Giuliano da San Gallo, is a Coronation of the Madonna by Cosimo Rosselli; in the chapter-house of the convent is a Crucifixion by Perugino, painted in the closing years of the Quattrocento, perhaps the grandest of all his frescoes. In Ruskin's chapter on the Superhuman Ideal, in the second volume of Modern Painters, he cites the background of this fresco (together with Benozzo Gozzoli's in the Palazzo Riccardi) as one of the most perfect examples of those ideal landscapes of the religious painters, in which Perugino is supreme: "In the landscape of the fresco in Sta. Maria Maddalena at Florence there is more variety than is usual with him: a gentle river winds round the bases of rocky hills, a river like our own Wye or Tees in their loveliest reaches; level meadows stretch away on its opposite side; mounds set with slender-stemmed foliage occupy the nearer ground, and a small village with its simple spire peeps from the forest at the bend of the valley."

Beyond is the church of Sant' Ambrogio, once belonging to the convent of Benedictine nuns for whom Fra Lippo Lippi painted his great Coronation of Madonna. The church is hardly interesting at present, but contains an Assumption by Cosimo Rosselli, and, in the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament, a marble tabernacle by Mino da Fiesole and a fresco by Cosimo Rosselli painted in 1486, representing the legend of a miraculous chalice with some fine Florentine portrait heads, altogether above the usual level of Cosimo's work.

The Borgo la Croce leads hence to the Porta alla Croce, in the very prosaic and modern Piazza Beccaria. This Porta alla Croce, the eastern gate of Florence in the third walls, was commenced by Arnolfo di Cambio in 1284; the frescoed Madonna in the lunette is by one of the later followers of Ghirlandaio. Through this gate, on October 6th 1308, Corso Donati fled from Florence, after his desperate attempt to hold the Piazza di San Piero Maggiore against the forces of the Signoria. Following the Via Aretina towards Rovezzano, we soon reach the remains of the Badia di San Salvi, where he was slain by his captors–as Dante makes his brother Forese darkly prophesy in the twenty-fourth canto of the Purgatorio. Four year later, in October 1312, the Emperor Henry VII. lay sick in the Abbey, while his army ineffectually besieged Florence. Nothing remains to remind us of that epoch, although the district is still called the Campo di Marte or Campo di Arrigo. We know from Leonardo Bruni that Dante, although he had urged the Emperor on to attack the city, did not join the imperial army like many of his fellow exiles had done: "so much reverence did he yet retain for his fatherland." In the old refectory of the Abbey is Andrea del Sarto's Last Supper, one of his most admirable frescoes, painted between 1525 and 1527, equally excellent in colour and design. "I know not," writes Vasari, "what to say of this Cenacolo that would not be too little, seeing it to be such that all who behold it are struck with astonishment." When the siege was expected in 1529, and the defenders of the city were destroying everything in the suburbs which could give aid or cover to the enemy, a party of them broke down a wall in the convent and found themselves face to face with this picture. Lost in admiration, they built up a portion of what they had destroyed, in order that this last triumph of Florentine painting might be secure from the hand of war.

On this side of the river, those walls of Florence which Lapo Gianni would fain have seen inargentate– the third circle reared by Arnolfo and his successors–have been almost entirely destroyed, and their site marked by the broad utterly prosaic Viali. Besides the Porta alla Croce, the Porta San Gallo and the Porta al Prato still stand, on the north and west respectively. The Porta San Gallo was begun from Arnolfo's design in 1284, but not finished until 1327; the fresco in the lunette is by Michele di Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, Ridolfo's adopted son. On July 21, 1304, the exiled Bianchi and Ghibellines made a desperate attempt to surprise Florence through this gate, led by the heroic young Baschiera della Tosa. In 1494, Piero dei Medici and his brother Giuliano fled from the people through it; and in 1738 the first Austrian Grand Duke, Francis II., entered by it. The triumphant arch beyond, at which the lions of the Republic, to right and left of the gate, appear to gaze with little favour, marked this latter event.

These Austrian Grand Dukes were decidedly better rulers than the Medici, to whom, by an imperial usurpation, they succeeded on the death of Gian Gastone. Leopold I., Ferdinand III., Leopold II., were tolerant and liberal-minded sovereigns, and under them Tuscany became the most prosperous state in Italy: "a Garden of Paradise without the tree of knowledge and without the tree of life." But, when the Risorgimento came, their sway was found incompatible with the aspirations of the Italians towards national unification; the last Grand Duke, after wavering between Austria and young Italy, threw in his lot with the former, and after having brought the Austrians into Tuscany, was forced to abdicate. Thus Florence became the first capital of Victor Emmanuel's kingdom.

In the Via di San Gallo is the very graceful Palazzo Pandolfini, commenced in 1520 from Raphael's designs, on the left as we move inwards from the gate. From the Via 27 Aprile, which joins the Via di San Gallo, we enter the former convent of Sta. Appollonia. In what was once its refectory is a fresco of the Last Supper by Andrea del Castagno, with the Crucifixion, Entombment, and Resurrection. Andrea del Castagno impressed his contemporaries by his furious passions and savage intractability of temper, his quality of terribilità; although we now know that Vasari's story that Andrea obtained the secret of using oil as a vehicle in painting from his friend, Domenico Veneziano, and then murdered him, must be a mere fable, since Domenico survived Andrea by nearly five years. Rugged unadorned strength, with considerable power of characterisation and great technical dexterity, mark his extant works, which are very few in number. This Cenacolo in the finest of them all; the figures are full of life and character, although the Saviour is unpleasing and the Judas inclines to caricature. The nine figures from the Villa Pandolfini, frescoes transferred to canvas, are also his; Filippo Scolari, known as Pippo Spano (a Florentine connected with the Buondelmonti, but Ghibelline, who became Count of Temesvar and a great Hungarian captain), Farinata degli Uberti, Niccolò Acciaiuoli (a Florentine who became Grand Seneschal of the kingdom of Naples and founded the Certosa), the Cumæan Sibyl, Esther, Queen Tomyris, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The two poets and Boccaccio are the least successful, since they were altogether out of Andrea's line, but there must have been something noble in the man to enable him so to realise Farinata degli Uberti, as he stood alone at Empoli when all others agreed to destroy Florence, to defend her to the last: Colui che la difese a viso aperto.

A Cenacolo of a very different character may be seen in the refectory of the suppressed convent of Sant' Onofrio in the Via di Faenza. Though showing Florentine influence in its composition, this fresco is mainly Umbrian in character; from a half deciphered inscription on the robe of one of the Apostles (which appears to have been altered), it was once attempted to ascribe it to Raphael. It is now believed to be partly the work of Perugino, partly that of some pupil or pupils of his–perhaps Gerino da Pistoia or Giannicola Manni. It has also been ascribed to Giovanni Lo Spagna and to Raffaellino del Garbo. Morelli supposed it to be the work of a pupil of Perugino who was inspired by a Florentine engraving of the fifteenth century, and suggested Giannicola Manni. In the same street is the picturesque little Gothic church of San Jacopo in Campo Corbolini.

At the end of the Via Faenza–where once stood one of Arnolfo's gates–we are out again upon the Viale, here named after Filippo Strozzi. Opposite rises what was the great Medicean citadel, the Fortezza da Basso, built by Alessandro dei Medici to overawe the city. Michelangelo steadfastly refused, at the risk of his life, to have anything to do with it. Filippo Strozzi is said to have aided Alessandro in carrying out this design, and even to have urged it upon him, although he was warned that he was digging his own grave. After the unsuccessful attempt of the exiles to overthrow the newly-established government of Duke Cosimo, while Baccio Valori and the other prisoners were sent to be beheaded or hanged in the Bargello, Filippo Strozzi was imprisoned here and cruelly tortured, in spite of the devoted attempts of his children to obtain his release. Here at length, in 1538, he was found dead in his cell. He was said to have left a paper declaring that, lest he should be more terribly tortured and forced to say things to prejudice his own honour and inculpate innocent persons, he had resolved to take his own life, and that he commended his soul to God, humbly praying Him, if He would grant it no other good, at least to give it a place with that of Cato of Utica. It is not improbable that the paper was a fabrication, and that Filippo had been murdered by orders of the Duke.