The Story of Florence

by Edmund G. Gardner

In the rising of the Ciompi, July 1378, the palace was forced to surrender to the insurgents after an assault of two hours. They let the Podestà escape, but burnt all books and papers, especially those of the hated Arte della Lana. At night as many as the palace could hold quartered themselves here.

BARGELLO COURTYARD AND STAIRCASE

The beautiful court and stairway, surrounded by statues and armorial bearings, the ascent guarded by the symbolical lion of Florence and leading to an open loggia, is the work of Benci di Cione and Neri di Fioraventi, 1333-1345. The palace is now the National Museum of Sculpture and kindred arts and crafts. Keeping to the left, round the court itself, we see a marble St. Luke by Niccolò di Piero Lamberti, of the end of the fourteenth century, from the niche of the Judges and Notaries at Or San Michele; a magnificent sixteenth century portalantern in beaten iron; the old marble St. John Evangelist, contemporaneous with the St. Luke, and probably by Piero di Giovanni Tedesco, from the niche of the Arte della Seta at Or San Michele; some allegorical statues by Giovanni da Bologna and Vincenzo Danti, in rather unsuccessful imitation of Michelangelo; a dying Adonis, questionably ascribed to Michelangelo. And, finally (numbered 18), there stands Michelangelo's so-called "Victory," the triumph of the ideal over outworn tyranny and superstition; a radiant youth, but worn and exhausted by the struggle, rising triumphantly over a shape of gigantic eld, so roughly hewn as to seem lost in the mist from which the young hero has gloriously freed himself.[35]

Also on the ground floor, to the left, are two rooms full of statuary. The first contains nothing important, save perhaps the Madonna and Child with St. Peter and St. Paul, formerly above the Porta Romana. In the second room, a series of bas-reliefs by Benedetto da Rovezzano, begun in 1511 and terribly mutilated by the imperial soldiery during the siege, represent scenes connected with the life and miracles of St. Giovanni Gualberto, including the famous trial of Peter Igneus, who, in order to convict the Bishop of Florence of simony, passed unharmed through the ordeal of fire. Here is the unfinished bust of Brutus (111) by Michelangelo, one of his latest works, and a significant expression of the state of the man's heart, when he was forced to rear sumptuous monuments for the new tyrants who had overthrown his beloved Republic. Then a chimney-piece by Benedetto da Rovezzano from the Casa Borgherini, one of the most sumptuous pieces of domestic furniture of the Renaissance; a very beautiful tondo of the Madonna and Child with the little St. John (123) by Michelangelo, made for Bartolommeo Pitti early in the Cinquecento; the mask of a grinning faun with gap-teeth, traditionally shown as the head struck out by the boy Michelangelo in his first visit to the Medici Gardens, when he attracted the attention of Lorenzo the Magnificent–but probably a comparatively modern work suggested by Vasari's story; a sketch in marble for the martyrdom of St. Andrew, supposed to be a juvenile work of Michelangelo's, but also doubtful. Here too is Michelangelo's drunken Bacchus (128), an exquisitely-modelled intoxicated vine-crowned youth, behind whom a sly little satyr lurks, nibbling grapes. It is one of the master's earliest works, very carefully and delicately finished, executed during his first visit to Rome, for Messer Jacopo Galli, probably about 1497. Of this statue Ruskin wrote, while it was still in the Uffizi: "The white lassitude of joyous limbs, panther-like, yet passive, fainting with their own delight, that gleam among the Pagan formalisms of the Uffizi, far away, separating themselves in their lustrous lightness as the waves of an Alpine torrent do by their dancing from the dead stones, though the stones be as white as they." Shelley, on the contrary, found it "most revolting," "the idea of the deity of Bacchus in the conception of a Catholic." Near it is a tondo of the Virgin and Child with the Baptist, by Andrea Ferrucci.

At the top of the picturesque and richly ornamented staircase, to the right of the loggia on the first floor, opens a great vaulted hall, where the works of Donatello, casts and originals, surround a cast of his great equestrian monument to Gattamelata at Padua–a hall of such noble proportions that even Gattamelata looks insignificant, where he sits his war-horse between the Cross of the People and the Lily of the Commune. Here the general council of the Commune met–the only council (besides the special council of the Podestà) in which the magnates could sit and vote, and it was here, on July 6th, 1295, that Dante Alighieri first entered public life; he spoke in support of the modifications of the Ordinances of Justice–which may have very probably been a few months before he definitely associated himself with the People by matriculating in the Arte dei Medici e Speziali. Among the casts and copies that fill this room, there are several original and splendid works of Donatello; the Marzocco, or symbolical lion of Florence protecting the shield of the Commune, which was formerly in front of the Palace of the Priors; the bronze David, full of Donatello's delight in the exuberance of youthful manhood just budding; the San Giovannino or little St. John; the marble David, inferior to the bronze, but heralding Michelangelo; the bronze bust of a youth, called the son of Gattamelata; Love trampling upon a snake (bronze); St. George in marble from Or San Michele, an idealised condottiere of the Quattrocento; St. John the Baptist from the Baptistery; and a bronze relief of the Crucifixion. The coloured bust is now believed by many critics to be neither the portrait of Niccolò da Uzzano nor by Donatello; it is possibly a Roman hero by some sculptor of the Seicento.

The next room is the audience chamber of the Podestà. Besides the Cross and the Lilies on the windows, its walls and roof are covered with the gold lion on azure ground, the arms of the Duke of Athens. They were cancelled by decree of the Republic in 1343, and renewed in 1861; as a patriotically worded tablet on the left, under the window, explains. Opening out of this is the famous Chapel of the Podestà–famous for the frescoes on its walls–once a prison. From out of these terribly ruined frescoes stands the figure of Dante (stands out, alas, because completely repainted–a mere rifacimento with hardly a trace of the original work left) in what was once a Paradiso; the dim figures on either side are said to represent Brunette Latini and either Corso Donati or Guido Cavalcanti. In spite of a very pleasant fable, it is absolutely certain that this is not a contemporaneous portrait of Dante (although it may be regarded as an authentic likeness, to some extent) and was not painted by Giotto; the frescoes were executed by some later follower of Giotto (possibly by Taddeo Gaddi, who painted the lost portraits of Dante and Guido in Santa Croce) after 1345. The two paintings below on either side, Madonna and Child and St. Jerome, are votive pictures commissioned by pious Podestàs in 1490 and 1491, the former by Sebastiano Mainardi, the brother-in-law of Domenico Ghirlandaio.

The third room contains small bronze works by Tuscan masters of the Quattrocento. In the centre, Verrocchio's David (22), cast for Lorenzo dei Medici, one of the masterpieces of the fifteenth century. Here are the famous trial plates for the great competition for the second bronze gates of the Baptistery, announced in 1401, the Sacrifice of Abraham, by Brunelleschi and Ghiberti respectively; the grace and harmony of Ghiberti's composition (12) contrast strongly with the force, almost violence, the dramatic action and movement of Brunelleschi's (13). Ghiberti's, unlike his rival's, is in one single piece; but, until lately, there has been a tendency to underrate the excellence of Brunelleschi's relief. Here, too, are Ghiberti's reliquary of St. Hyacinth, executed in 1428, with two beautiful floating Angels (21); several bas-reliefs by Bertoldo, Donatello's pupil and successor; the effigy of Marino Soccino, a lawyer of Siena, by the Sienese sculptor Il Vecchietta (16); and, in a glass case, Orpheus by Bertoldo, Hercules and Antæus by Antonio Pollaiuolo, and Love on a Scallop Shell by Donatello. The following room contains mostly bronzes by later masters, especially Cellini, Giovanni da Bologna, Vincenzo Danti. The most noteworthy of its contents are Daniele Ricciarelli's striking bust of Michelangelo (37); Cellini's bronze sketch for Perseus (38), his bronze bust of Duke Cosimo I. (39), his wax model for Perseus (40), the liberation of Andromeda, from the pedestal of the statue in the Loggia dei Lanzi (42); and above all, Giovanni da Bologna's flying Mercury (82), showing what exceedingly beautiful mythological work could still be produced when the golden days of the Renaissance were over. It was cast in 1565, and, like many of the best bronzes of this epoch, was originally placed on a fountain in one of the Medicean villas.

On the second floor, first a long room with seals, etc., guarded by Rosso's frescoed Justice. Here, and in the room on the left, is a most wonderful array of the works in enamelled terra cotta of the Della Robbias–Luca and Andrea, followed by Giovanni and their imitators. In the best work of Luca and Andrea–and there is much of their very best and most perfect work in these two rooms–religious devotion received its highest and most perfect expression in sculpture. Their Madonnas, Annunciations, Nativities and the like, are the sculptural counterpart to Angelico's divinest paintings, though never quite attaining to his spiritual insight and supra-sensible gaze upon life. Andrea's work is more pictorial in treatment than Luca's, has less vigour and even at times a perceptible trace of sentimentality; but in sheer beauty his very best creations do not yield to those of his great master and uncle. Both Luca and Andrea kept to the simple blue and white–in the best part of their work–and surrounded their Madonnas with exquisite festoons of fruit and leaves: "wrought them," in Pater's words, "into all sorts of marvellous frames and garlands, giving them their natural colours, only subdued a little, a little paler than nature."