About the same time, Michelozzo executed for Piero the marble tabernacle destined to contain a figure of Christ in the nave of the basilica of San Miniato. It consists of a canopy supported on composite marble columns and pilasters, the interior richly decorated with rose-coloured ornaments of glazed earth in square panels. On the frieze is the Medicean device, the three feathers with the diamond ring and the motto Semper, on the arch the escutcheon of the Calimala guild, in relief. Inside the tabernacle stands the altar with painting and predella.[127] For Giovanni, Cosimo’s younger son, Michelozzo built on the heights of Fiesole a villa, visible from a great distance, which afterwards passed to the Mozzi family. The architect was also employed by connections of the Medici. For Giovanni Tornabuoni he built the great palace near Sta. Trinità, which still gives its name to the street. To gain more space, it afterwards became necessary to demolish the front part of this palace, which, with its ground floor of rustic-work and its plain arched windows, had a somewhat sombre effect.
While Michelozzo’s time was chiefly taken up by the Medici, Brunelleschi was active in other quarters. The progress and final completion of his great work, the dome of the cathedral, has already been mentioned. On August 30, 1436, the roofing-in was celebrated by the pealing of all the bells in the city and the chanting of a Te Deum. Eight years later the scaffolding was raised for building the lantern, which was begun in 1446, shortly before the death of the great master, who was succeeded by Michelozzo.[128] His beautiful arcade at the Foundling Hospital has been mentioned. The similar loggia of San Paolo was placed opposite Sta. Maria Novella, at the southern end of the piazza. He built a chapel for the Pazzi family in the front court of the convent of Sta. Croce. Its walls are covered with Corinthian pilasters, high niches, and terra-cotta alto-rilievos; the cupola rests on two side-arches richly panelled and decorated with designs in glazed earth; the pendants being ornamented with terra-cotta rilievos of the Evangelists. Decoration and colour are here kept just within the limits of good taste. Andrea de’ Pazzi began the building, which was finished by his son Jacopo, so that Brunelleschi can hardly have lived to see its completion.[129] The official residence of the Capitani di parte Guelfa in the Via delle Terme, rebuilt by Brunelleschi, still exists, though with many alterations. The architect saw only the beginnings of his second greatest work, the palace of Luca Pitti. In Vasari’s time, when Eleonora di Toledo, Duchess of Florence, purchased the unfinished building—appropriately called, by an art-writer of those days, muraglia—the original plan was no longer to be found. Many alterations were made in succeeding centuries down to the present, when the extensive wings, intended as halls, were built. But the façade has kept its original stamp, and Vasari’s words remain true—that Tuscan architecture has produced no richer or grander creation. This grandeur is united with the greatest simplicity; and it is the absence of all ornament upon the three stages of rustic-work, with their gigantic bow-windows, crowned with galleries, which gives the building its peculiar character. The palace is said to have been begun in 1440, long before the time of Luca Pitti’s ephemeral greatness.[130] His villa at Rusciano was begun about the time of Brunelleschi’s death, so that the great artist saw little of the execution of his plan, which was carried on by Luca Fancelli. While Brunelleschi here aimed at attaining the whole effect by the majesty and harmony of the proportions, in the palace of Jacopo de’ Pazzi he allowed more play to decoration.
It is doubtful whether Cosimo de’ Medici employed the most learned artist of the time, Leon Batista Alberti. His chief works in Florence, with one exception, were executed for the Rucellai. Among them may be mentioned the palace, the loggia, the upper part of the façade of Sta. Maria Novella, finished in 1470; and the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre at San Pancrazio, an imitation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem.[131] The Rucellai palace, in which are retained the bow-windows divided by small columns, points to the days of Bramante. It exhibits a combination of flat decorative pilasters of various orders with smooth rustic-work, antique ornaments on the rectangular doors, and traces of the square form in the bow-windows. Alberti also made designs for another work, which has given occasion to so many objections that its defects have been attributed to alterations by another hand. This is the choir of the Annunziata, commenced in 1451 by Lodovico Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, who, as victorious commander-in-chief of the Republic, desired to found a memorial at once of his piety and his thankfulness. A quarter of a century elapsed before the building was finished by Luca Fancelli. The exterior is octagonal, the interior round, with several chapels in irregular order, and numerous windows round the base of the large cupola, which is closed, and was ornamented in the seventeenth century with figures in fresco. In our own day redecoration has given to the choir as well as the rest of this dazzlingly-gilt church a thoroughly modern appearance.[132]
Sculpture, no less than architecture, was in full activity. Here also we find in the foremost rank those artists whom the Medici had attached to themselves; among whom Donatello stood first, while his pupils benefited by the favour shown to him. The Medici mansion was full of Donatello’s works. Over the arches in the front court are eight medallions by him, with reliefs in marble; and he restored many of the antique heads over the doors. His other works are all scattered. During Cosimo’s exile, the bronze David with his foot on the head of Goliath was taken away and set up in the palace-yard of the Signoria. The owner seems to have been shy of reclaiming it, and finally, in May 1476, his grandsons sold it to the municipality.[133] During the second exile of the Medici, another work of Donatello’s was taken from their house and placed at the great gate of the same palace, with an inscription recalling the events of 1494.[134] This is the group of Judith and Holofernes, full of expression, but forced and offending against the rules of plastic composition. A loss to be regretted is that of the bronze bust of Madonna Contessina, which Donatello executed for her husband.
San Lorenzo still contains many of his works, placed there by the indefatigable benefactor of this church. Besides the decorations of the sacristy, &c., there are the reliefs on the pulpits; artistically they are in fault by their superabundance and want of repose, but the fault is one of a man of talent. In point of technical execution, they show a distinct retrogression when compared with contemporary works. It was not only in works of this kind that Donatello displayed an extravagance that belies the sense of beauty. He did so even in the dancing children executed in marble relief for the organ at Sta. Maria del Fiore.
Vespasiano da Bisticci describes Cosimo’s attachment to this man. ‘He was,’ says he,[135] ‘a great friend of Donatello, and of all painters and sculptors. Finding there was little work for the latter, and not liking Donatello to remain inactive, he entrusted to him the pulpits and the doors of the sacristy at San Lorenzo; giving orders that whatever he needed for his own requirements and those of his four assistants should be paid to him weekly from the Medici bank.’ As Donatello did not dress to Cosimo’s liking, the latter presented him with a cloak and hood, an upper garment to wear under the cloak, and a whole suit, sending all this to him on the morning of a feast day. Donatello put the new things on a few times only, declining to wear them any longer, lest ‘people should think he had grown effeminate.’ How thoroughly Donatello was regarded as belonging to the Medici household is shown by the fact that the Marquis Ludovico Gonzaga once asked Cosimo to send the artist to Mantua to execute a shrine modelled in 1450, to be set up during the expected visit of Pope Pius II.[136] Many other artists were on confidential terms with Cosimo and his family. Michelozzo’s two sons belonged almost to the family circle. In the last years of Cosimo, Donatello could no longer work, so his generous patron maintained him, and recommended him to his son Piero. The latter gave him a farm, as he said, ‘to provide him with bread and wine.’ The artist, however, gave back the gift in legal form, not wishing to embitter his life with household cares; whereupon Piero had the value of the produce assigned to him at the bank. In 1462 Piero granted him space for a vault in San Lorenzo, near the sacristy; and here, where so many of his works are to be seen, he was buried in 1468, not far from those who had so valued him during life.[137]
After Donatello, most closely connected with the Medici, father and son, were two masters who, while fairly admitting the claims of the realistic principle, carried it out in a different spirit and in more ideal forms. Lorenzo Ghiberti, who finished the second door of the Baptistery in 1452, with the help of his son Vettorio, and in spite of his seventy-two years, undertook the commission for a third. He continued till the later years of Cosimo busily engaged on the rich silver reredos, in which Michelozzo, Verocchio, Bernardo Cennini, Antonio Pollaiuolo, and others, had a share. He also designed the great rose-window of Sta. Maria del Fiore, at which Francesco di Domenico Livi of Gambassi, who learned glass-painting in Germany, was working in 1436, and Bernardo di Francesco in 1443. Glass-painting in the true sense of the word was then just beginning to flourish; until that time coloured windows had been produced by simply putting variously tinted glass together in mosaic patterns. Many trod in the steps of Francesco Livi: notably Ser Guasparre da Volterra, who worked in the cathedral at Siena; while in Florence, Pisa, and Arezzo, the art was practised by the Jesuates of the order of the B. Giovanni Colombini, who were established in Florence in 1438, in the convent of San Giusto before Porta Pinti, and there built the great church which was pulled down in 1529. It was chiefly by them that Sta. Maria del Fiore, Sta. Croce, San Michele, and other buildings, were glazed with coloured windows.[138]
In 1440 Ghiberti finished for the cathedral the shrine of St. Zanobi, one of his finest works. To Piero de’ Medici he furnished goldsmith’s work which brought him great admiration and commissions from Pope Eugene IV. Besides this master, now growing old, the Medici employed a younger one, Luca della Robbia. His style is graceful rather than grand; full of tender and lively expression of feeling, and pleasing execution in drapery and grouping. His works in the cathedral show equal fertility of invention and technical skill. One is the marble relief for the organ gallery, representing a boy and girl playing and dancing, executed in 1438 as a companion-piece to that of Donatello;[139] and the other, not so good, is the door of the sacristy, finished in 1463, with its bronze reliefs of the Madonna, the Evangelists, and the Fathers of the Church.[140] The monument to Benozzo Federighi, Bishop of Fiesole[141] (who died in 1450), with the figure lying on the bier, displays his capabilities in this direction. But Luca della Robbia is less distinguished by his sculptures in marble and brass than by the reliefs in glazed earth which, called after him, were supplied by his descendants for 100 years. They still abound in Florence and the whole of Tuscany, even to the mountain convents of the Apennines and the modest churches of remote towns, while numbers of them have wandered into foreign lands. Anyone taking a walk in Florence may enjoy these charming creations: lunettes or groups above the doors of churches and houses, medallions of infants on the portico of the Foundling Hospital, heads of saints, tabernacles, heraldic escutcheons, some plain white on a blue ground, some with a judicious mixture of colours and a rich border of entwined leaves and fruit. These works form an almost inexhaustible treasury, with a marked character of graceful earnestness and truth to nature; a help to architecture as long as the decorative element kept its place in the old manner, which in the fourteenth century employed both glass and colour. But they were invaluable for interior decoration, for which Brunelleschi used work in ‘Terra della Robbia’ in the Pazzi chapel. Luca himself decorated for Cosimo de’ Medici a room in his palace and the buildings in Sta. Croce, and for Piero the tabernacle in San Miniato; in the latter church he also assisted in giving to the chapel of the Cardinal of Portugal the charm of harmonious perfection.
In the last years of Cosimo de’ Medici grew up a whole generation of younger sculptors. Their most important works are sepulchral monuments, which became richer and grander as time went on. Formerly people had, as a rule, been content with sarcophagi more or less decorated, like that of Noferi, the father of Palla Strozzi, who died in 1418 and is buried in the sacristy of Sta. Trinità, beneath an arch resting on elegant corbels, and on the edges of which are seen pretty genii playing. Twenty or thirty years later these simple monuments were still the most usual, even for men of importance. Neri Capponi lies in the church of the Santo Spirito in a marble coffin bearing on the front his portrait in relief between two genii; Orlando de’ Medici rests in that of the SS. Annunziata in a sarcophagus ornamented with his coat of arms, and occupying with rich architectural accessories the whole side of a chapel. These were both works of Simone, whom tradition makes a brother of Donatello.[142] But talented artists soon attempted greater things. Desiderio da Settignano (so called after the pleasantly situated little village, two miles east of the city, where Michel Angelo was nursed by a stonemason’s wife) was a pupil of Donatello, and thus came into contact with the Medici, who employed him in San Lorenzo. In the Strozzi palace may be seen his fine thoughtful marble bust of Marietta, daughter of Filippo Strozzi the elder and Fiammetta Adimari. His masterpiece is the monument of Carlo Marsuppini in Sta. Croce, a figure of the dead man resting on the sarcophagus in a niche crowned by a lunette, with a Madonna in relief.[143] Notwithstanding some overloading in the accessories, it shows what he might have become had he not died in 1464, at the early age of thirty-six. The sarcophagus, resting on lions’ claws and richly adorned with flowers, leaves, and streaming ribands, is one of the most beautiful productions of decorative sculpture. Desiderio had many emulators, to whom we owe some of the finest monuments of this kind. Among them were the brothers Bernardo and Antonio Rossellino. The former, who worked a good deal out of Florence as architect to the Popes, does not seem to have been employed by the Medici. The only thing he is said to have done for them is a marble fountain, decorated with children and dolphins, in one of the courts of their palace; and of its fate nothing is known. But the city contains excellent works by both, exhibiting a similarity to Della Robbia’s style. Two of Bernardo’s works are the graceful monument to Beata Villana in Sta. Maria Novella, and that of Leonardo Bruni in Sta. Croce.[144] The conception, proportions, and technical finish of these works entitle them to rank among the best productions of a period rich in monuments. The most perfect work of the kind, however, is that by Antonio Rossellino to the Cardinal of Portugal, in San Miniato al Monte. James of Portugal, nephew of King Alfonso V., had come in bad health to Florence, where he died in 1459 aged twenty-six. In the basilica, then belonging to the Olivetans, where he was buried, was built a chapel, unrivalled in symmetry of form and beauty of detail. The roof is set off with reliefs in glazed earth, the walls are inlaid with marble, the altar, the bishop’s throne, and the floor of opus Alexandrinum are admirable. What was formerly the altar-piece—by Pollaiuolo—is now in the Uffizi. The monument stands in a large niche, with a curtain slightly drawn back. The sarcophagus is an imitation of the coffer afterwards used for the tomb of Pope Clement XII. in the Lateran. The figure of the departed, wearing his mitre, rests on a pall held by two seated boys; an architectural wall-drapery is terminated by a cornice, at each end of which is a kneeling angel bearing a crown and a palm-branch; in the arch above are the Virgin and Child surrounded by a rich garland and upheld by angels in relief. The figure of the cardinal surpasses all else of its kind in grace, dignity, and beauty, while in technical work it is perfection. The head and the folded hands were modelled from nature.[145] A blessed peace seems diffused over the whole figure, which realizes what Vespasiano da Bisticci says of the departed, whom he had known in life: ‘He was outwardly handsome, but his soul was more beautiful than his body; and by the holiness of his life and conversation he was fitted to stand beside the saints of old.’[146]
To these artists must be added Mino da Fiesole, who, though a pupil of Desiderio da Settignano—his senior only by a few years—seemed to have formed himself more on the model of Donatello. His groups of figures in relief, of which the chief are at Rome, are not always happy; his monumental statues, of which the two most remarkable in Florence are of later date, have great dignity and beauty. In his portrait-heads there is a peculiar delicacy and truth, indicating careful study of nature, and of which the bust of Bishop Leonardo Salutati, in the cathedral of Fiesole, is an excellent example.[147] In the Medici house were busts by him of Piero and his wife, the former of which is now in the Uffizi. In ornamentation, particularly in arabesque, Mino is inferior to none; and it is impossible to mistake his influence in this respect at Rome, where, from the time of Nicolas V., the number of monuments rapidly increased. The works of Giuliano da Majano in Florence, where he was occupied in 1463-1465 with inlaid woodwork for San Domenico, near Fiesole, and the sacristy of Sta. Maria del Fiore, are of much less importance. Neither he nor Antonio Filarete, founder of the great door of St. Peter’s, are known to have done any work for the Medici. That the latter was one of their protégés, however, may be seen not only by the dedication to Piero of his treatise on architecture, but also by a letter addressed by him to Piero from Milan, December 20, 1451, thanking him for a recommendation to Francesco Sforza: ‘I am at your service for whatever I can do. Dispose of me as you please. Commend me to his Excellency your father, and your brother Giovanni. With God’s help, I hope to do honour here both to myself and you; I say to you, because for your sake and in consequence of your recommendation his Lordship shows me great favour. He thinks of appointing me chief architect to the cathedral, which naturally meets with opposition, I being a stranger; but I hope they will yield to their lord’s desire.’[148]