In the central chapel of the left or northern transept is the famous wooden Crucifix by Donatello, which gave rise to the fraternal contest between him and Brunelleschi. Brunelleschi told his friend that he had put upon his cross a contadino and not a figure like that of Christ. "Take some wood then," answered the nettled sculptor, "and try to make one thyself." Filippo did so; and when it was finished Donatello was so stupefied with admiration, that he let drop all the eggs and other things that he was carrying for their dinner. "I have had all I want for to-day," he exclaimed; "if you want your share, take it: to thee is it given to carve Christs and to me to make contadini." The rival piece may still be seen in Santa Maria Novella, and there is not much to choose between them. Donatello's is, perhaps, somewhat more realistic and less refined.
The first two chapels of the left transept (fifth and fourth from the choir, respectively,) contain fourteenth century frescoes; a warrior of the Bardi family rising to judgment, the healing of Constantine's leprosy and other miracles of St. Sylvester, ascribed to Maso di Banco; the martyrdom of St. Lawrence and the martyrdom of St. Stephen, by Bernardo Daddi (the painter to whom it is attempted to ascribe the famous Last Judgment and Triumph of Death in the Pisan Campo Santo). All these imply a certain Dantesque selection; these subjects are among the examples quoted for purposes of meditation or admonition in the Divina Commedia. The coloured terracotta relief is by Giovanni della Robbia. The frescoes of the choir, by Agnolo Gaddi, are among the finest works of Giotto's school. They set forth the history of the wood of the True Cross, which, according to the legend, was a shoot of the tree of Eden planted by Seth on Adam's grave; the Queen of Sheba prophetically adored it, when she came to visit Solomon during the building of the Temple; cast into the pool of Bethsaida, the Jews dragged it out to make the Cross for Christ; then, after it had been buried on Mount Calvary for three centuries, St. Helen discovered it by its power of raising the dead to life. These subjects are set forth on the right wall; on the left, we have the taking of the relic of the Cross by the Persians under Chosroes, and its recovery by the Emperor Heraclius. In the scene where the Emperor barefooted carries the Cross into Jerusalem, the painter has introduced his own portrait, near one of the gates of the city, with a small beard and a red hood. Vasari thinks poorly of these frescoes; but the legend of the True Cross is of some importance to the student of Dante, whose profound allegory of the Church and Empire in the Earthly Paradise, at the close of the Purgatorio, is to some extent based upon it.
The two Gothic chapels to the right of the choir contain Giotto's frescoes–both chapels were originally entirely painted by him–rescued from the whitewash under which they were discovered, and, in part at least, most terribly "restored." The frescoes in the first, the Bardi Chapel, illustrating the life of St. Francis, have suffered most; all the peculiar Giottesque charm of face has disappeared, and, instead, the restorer has given us monotonous countenances, almost deadly in their uniformity and utter lack of expression. Like all mediæval frescoes dealing with St. Francis, they should be read with the Fioretti or with Dante's Paradiso, or with one of the old lives of the Seraphic Father in our hands. On the left (beginning at the top) we have his renunciation of the world in the presence of his father and the Bishop of Assisi–innanzi alla sua spirital corte, et coram patre, as Dante puts it; on the right, the confirmation of the order by Pope Honorius; on the left, the apparition of St. Francis to St. Antony of Padua; on the right, St. Francis and his followers before the Soldan–nella presenza del Soldan superba–in the ordeal of fire; and, below it, St. Francis on his death-bed, with the apparition to the sleeping bishop to assure him of the truth of the Stigmata. Opposite, left, the body is surrounded by weeping friars, the incredulous judge touching the wound in the side, while the simplest of the friars, at the saint's head, sees his soul carried up to heaven in a little cloud. This conception of saintly death was, perhaps, originally derived from Dante's dream of Beatrice in the Vita Nuova: "I seemed to look towards heaven, and to behold a multitude of Angels who were returning upwards, having before them an exceedingly white cloud; and these Angels were singing together gloriously." It became traditional in early Italian painting. On the window wall are four great Franciscans. St. Louis the King (one whom Dante does not seem to have held in honour), a splendid figure, calm and noble, in one hand the sceptre and in the other the Franciscan cord, his royal robe besprinkled with the golden lily of France over the armour of the warrior of the Cross; his face absorbed in celestial contemplation. He is the Christian realisation of the Platonic philosopher king; "St. Louis," says Walter Pater, "precisely because his whole being was full of heavenly vision, in self banishment from it for a while, led and ruled the French people so magnanimously alike in peace and war." Opposite him is St. Louis of Toulouse, with the royal crown at his feet; below are St. Elizabeth of Hungary, with her lap full of flowers; and, opposite to her, St. Clare, of whom Dante's Piccarda tells so sweetly in the Paradiso–that lady on high whom "perfected life and lofty merit doth enheaven." On the vaulted roof of the chapel are the glory of St. Francis and symbolical representations of the three vows–Poverty, Chastity, Obedience; not rendered as in Giotto's great allegories at Assisi, of which these are, as it were, his own later simplifications, but merely as the three mystical Angels that met Francis and his friars on the road to Siena, crying "Welcome, Lady Poverty." The picture of St. Francis on the altar, ascribed by Vasari to Cimabue, is probably by some unknown painter at the close of the thirteenth century.
The frescoes in the following, the Chapel of the Peruzzi, are very much better preserved, especially in the scene of Herod's feast. Like all Giotto's genuine work, they are eloquent in their pictorial simplicity of diction; there are no useless crowds of spectators, as in the later work of Ghirlandaio and his contemporaries. On the left is the life of St. John the Baptist–the Angel appearing to Zacharias, the birth and naming of the Precursor, the dance of the daughter of Herodias at Herod's feast. This last has suffered less from restoration than any other work of Giotto's in Florence; both the rhythmically moving figure of the girl herself and that of the musician are very beautiful, and the expression on Herod's face is worthy of the psychological insight of the author of the Vices and Virtues in the Madonna's chapel at Padua. Ruskin talks of "the striped curtain behind the table being wrought with a variety and fantasy of playing colour which Paul Veronese could not better at his best." On the right wall is the life of the Evangelist, John the Divine, or rather its closing scenes; the mystical vision at Patmos, the seer dormendo con la faccia arguta, like the solitary elder who brought up the rear of the triumphal pageant in Dante's Earthly Paradise; the raising of Drusiana from the dead; the assumption of St. John. The curious legend represented in this last fresco–that St. John was taken up body and soul, con le due stole, into Heaven after death, and that his disciples found his tomb full of manna–was, of course, based upon the saying that went abroad among the brethren, "that that disciple should not die"; it is mentioned as a pious belief by St. Thomas, but is very forcibly repudiated by Giotto's great friend, Dante; in the Paradiso St. John admonishes him to tell the world that only Christ and the Blessed Virgin rose from the dead. "In the earth my body is earth, and shall be there with the others, until our number be equalled with the eternal design."
In the last chapel of the south transept, there are two curious frescoes apparently of the beginning of the fourteenth century, in honour of St. Michael; they represent his leading the Angelic hosts against the forces of Lucifer, and the legend of his apparition at Monte Gargano. The frescoes in the chapel at the end of the transept, the Baroncelli chapel, representing scenes in the life of the Blessed Virgin, are by Giotto's pupil, Taddeo Gaddi; they are similar to his work at Assisi. The Assumption opposite was painted by Sebastiano Mainardi from a cartoon by Domenico Ghirlandaio. In the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament there are more frescoed lives of saints by Taddeo's son, Agnolo Gaddi, less admirable than his work in the choir; and statues of two Franciscans, of the Della Robbia school. The monument of the Countess of Albany may interest English admirers of the Stuarts, but hardly concerns the story of Florence.
From the right transept a corridor leads off to the chapel of the Noviciate and the Sacristy. The former, built by Michelozzo for Cosimo, contains some beautiful terracotta work of the school of the Della Robbia, a tabernacle by Mino da Fiesole, and a Coronation of the Blessed Virgin ascribed to Giotto. This Coronation was originally the altar piece of the Baroncelli chapel, and is an excellent picture, although its authenticity is not above suspicion; the signature is almost certainly a forgery; this title of Magister was Giotto's pet aversion, as we know from Boccaccio, and he never used it. Opening out of the Sacristy is a chapel, decorated with beautiful frescoes of the life of the Blessed Virgin and St. Mary Magdalene, now held to be the work of Taddeo Gaddi's Lombard pupil, Giovanni da Milano. There is, as has already been said, very little individuality in the work of Giotto's followers, but these frescoes are among the best of their kind.
The first Gothic cloisters belong to the epoch of the foundation of the church, and were probably designed by Arnolfo himself; the second, early Renaissance, are Brunelleschi's. The Refectory, which is entered from the first cloisters, contains a fresco of the Last Supper–one of the earliest renderings of this theme for monastic dining-rooms–which used to be assigned to Giotto, and is probably by one of his scholars. This room had the invidious honour of being the seat of the Inquisition, which in Florence had always–save for a very brief period in the thirteenth century–been in the hands of the Franciscans, and not the Dominicans. It never had any real power in Florence–the bel viver fiorentino, which, even in the days of tyranny, was always characteristic of the city, was opposed to its influence. The beautiful chapel of the Pazzi was built by Brunelleschi; its frieze of Angels' heads is by Donatello and Desiderio; within are Luca della Robbia's Apostles and Evangelists. Jacopo Pazzi had headed the conspiracy against the Medici in 1478, and, after attempting to raise the people, had been captured in his escape, tortured and hanged. It was said that he had cried in dying that he gave his soul to the devil; he was certainly a notorious gambler and blasphemer. When buried here, the peasants believed that he brought a curse upon their crops; so the rabble dug him up, dragged the body through the streets, and finally with every conceivable indignity threw it into the Arno.
Behind Santa Croce two streets of very opposite names and traditions meet, the Via Borgo Allegri (which also intersects the Via Ghibellina) and the Via dei Malcontenti; the former records the legendary birthday of Italian painting, the latter the mournful processions of poor wretches condemned to death.
According to the tradition, Giovanni Cimabue had his studio in the former street, and it was here that, in Dante's words, he thought to hold the field in painting: Credette Cimabue nella pittura tener lo campo. Here, according to Vasari, he was visited by Charles the Elder of Anjou, and his great Madonna carried hence in procession with music and lighted candles, ringing of bells and waving of banners, to Santa Maria Novella; while the street that had witnessed such a miracle was ever after called Borgo Allegri, "the happy suburb:" "named the Glad Borgo from that beauteous face," as Elizabeth Barrett Browning puts it. Unfortunately there are several little things that show that this story needs revision of some kind. When Charles of Anjou came to Florence, the first stone of Santa Maria Novella had not yet been laid, and the picture now shown there as Cimabue's appears to be a Sienese work. The legend, however, is very precious, and should be devoutly held. The king in question was probably another Angevin Charles–Carlo Martello, grandson of the elder Charles and titular King of Hungary, Dante's friend, who was certainly in Florence for nearly a month in the spring of 1295, and made himself exceedingly pleasant. Vasari has made a similar confusion in the case of two emperors of the name of Frederick. The picture has doubtless perished, but the Joyous Borgo has not changed its name.
The Via dei Malcontenti leads out into the broad Viale Carlo Alberto, which marks the site of Arnolfo's wall. It formerly ended in a postern gate, known as the Porta della Giustizia, beyond which was a little chapel–of which no trace is left–and the place where the gallows stood. The condemned were first brought to a chapel which stood in the Via dei Malcontenti, near the present San Giuseppe, and then taken out to the chapel beyond the gate, where the prayers for the dying were said over them by the friars, after which they were delivered to the executioner.[37] In May 1503, as Simone Filipepi tells us, a man was beheaded here, whom the people apparently regarded as innocent; when he was dead, they rose up and stoned the executioner to death. And this was the same executioner who, five years before, had hanged Savonarola and his companions in the Piazza, and had insulted their dead bodies to please the dregs of the populace. The tower, of which the mutilated remains still stand here, the Torre della Zecca Vecchia, formerly called the Torre Reale, was originally a part of the defences of a bridge which it was intended to build here in honour of King Robert of Naples in 1317, and guarded the Arno at this point. After the siege, during which the Porta della Giustizia was walled up, Duke Alessandro incorporated the then lofty Torre Reale into a strong fortress which he constructed here, the Fortezza Vecchia. In later days, offices connected with the Arte del Cambio and the Mint were established in its place, whence the present name of the Torre della Zecca Vecchia.