The Story of Florence

by Edmund G. Gardner

The church itself, striped tiger-like in black and white marble, was constructed from the designs of three Dominican friars, Fra Ristoro da Campi, Fra Sisto, and Fra Giovanni da Campi. Fra Giovanni was a scholar or imitator of Arnolfo di Cambio, and the two former were the architects who restored the Ponte alla Carraia and the Ponte Santa Trinità after their destruction in 1269. The façade (with the exception of the lower part, which belongs to the fourteenth century) was designed by Leo Battista Alberti, whose friends the Rucellai were the chief benefactors of this church; the lovely but completely restored pointed arcades on the right, with niches for tombs and armorial bearings, were designed by Brunelleschi. On the left, though in part reduced to vile usage, there is a bit comparatively less altered. The interior was completed soon after the middle of the fourteenth century, when Fra Jacopo Passavanti–the author of that model of pure Tuscan prose, Lo Specchio della vera Penitenza–was Prior of the convent. The campanile is said to have been designed by another Dominican, Fra Jacopo Talenti, the probable architect of the so-called Spanish Chapel in the cloisters on the left of the church, of which more presently.

During the great siege of Florence the mantle of Savonarola seemed to have fallen upon the heroic Prior of Santa Maria Novella, Fra Benedetto da Foiano. When the news of the alliance between Pope and Emperor came to Florence, while all Bologna was in festa for the coronation of the Emperor, Varchi tells us that Fra Benedetto delivered a great sermon in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, which was thrown open to all who would come to hear; in which sermon he proved from passages in the Old and New Testaments that Florence would be delivered from all dangers, and then enjoy perpetual perfect felicity in the liberty she so desired. With such grace and eloquence did he speak, that the vast audience was moved to tears and to joy by turns. At the end, "with ineffable gestures and words," he gave to the Gonfaloniere, Raffaello Girolami, a standard upon one side of which was a Christ victorious over the hostile soldiery, and upon the other the red Cross of the Florentine Commune, saying: Cum hoc et in hoc vinces. After the capitulation Malatesta Baglioni seized the friar and sent him to Rome, where he was slowly starved to death in the dungeon of Sant' Angelo.

The interior was thus not quite finished, when Boccaccio's seven maidens met here on a Wednesday morning in early spring in that terrible year of pestilence, 1348; yet we may readily picture to ourselves the scene described in the introduction to the Decameron; the empty church; the girls in their dark mourning garb, after hearing Mass, seated together in a side chapel and gradually passing from telling their beads to discussing more mundane matters; and then, no sooner do three members of the other sex appear upon the scenes than a sudden gleam of gladness lights up their faces, and even the plague itself is forgotten. One of them, indeed, blushed; "she became all crimson in the face through modesty," says Boccaccio, "because there was one of their number who was beloved by one of these youths;" but afterwards found no difficulty in rivalling the others in the impropriety of her talk.

Entering the western portal, we find ourselves in a nave of rather large proportions, somewhat dark but not without a glow from the stained glass windows–adapted above all for preaching. As in Santa Croce, it is cut across by a line of chapels, thus giving the whole a T shape, and what represents the apse is merely a deeper and taller recess behind the high altar. There is nothing much to interest us here in the nave or aisles, save, by the side of the central door, one of the very few extant works of Masaccio, a fresco representing the Blessed Trinity adored by the Madonna and St. John, with two kneeling donors–portraits of which no amount of restoration can altogether destroy the truth and grandeur. The Annunciation, on the opposite side of the door, is a mediocre fresco of the fourteenth century. The Crucifix above is one of several works of the kind ascribed to Giotto.

It will be best to take the chapels at the end of the nave and in the transepts in the order into which they fall, as illustrating the development of Florentine art.

On the right a flight of steps leads up into the Rucellai chapel where, half concealed in darkness, hangs the famous picture once supposed to mark the very birthday of Florentine painting. That Cimabue really painted a glorious Madonna for this church, which was worshipped by a king and hailed with acclamation by a rejoicing people, is to be most firmly and devoutly held. Unfortunately, it seems highly probable that this picture is not Cimabue's Madonna. It is decidedly Sienese in character, and, as there is documentary evidence that Duccio of Siena painted a Madonna for Santa Maria Novella, and as the attendant Angels are in all respects similar to those in Duccio's authenticated works, the picture is probably his. It deserves all veneration, nevertheless, for it is a noble picture in the truest sense of the word. In the same chapel is the monument of the Dominican nun, the Beata Villana, by Bernardo Rossellino.

Crossing the church to the chapel in the left transept, the Strozzi Chapel, we mount into the true atmosphere of the Middle Ages–into one of those pictured theatres which set before us in part what Dante gave in full in his Commedia. The whole chapel is dedicated to St. Thomas Aquinas, the glory of the philosophy of the mediæval world and, above all, of the Dominican order, whose cardinal virtues are extolled in allegorical fashion on the ceiling; but the frescoes are drawn from the work of his greatest Florentine disciple, Dante Alighieri, in whose poem Thomas mainly lives for the non-Catholic world. It contains all Orcagna's extant work in painting. The altar piece, executed by Andrea Orcagna in 1357, is the grandest of its kind belonging to the Giottesque period. Its central motive, of the Saviour delivering the keys to St. Peter and the Summa to St. Thomas, the spiritual and philosophical regimens of the mediæval world, is very finely rendered; while the angelic choir is a foretaste of Angelico. Madonna presents St. Thomas; the Baptist, St. Peter; Michael and Catherine are in attendance upon the Queen of Heaven, Lawrence and Paul upon the Precursor. The predella represents St. Peter walking upon the waves, with on either side an episode in the life of St. Thomas and a miracle of St. Lawrence. The frescoes are best seen on a very bright morning, shortly before noon. The Last Judgment, by Andrea, shows the traditional representation of the Angels with trumpets and with the emblems of the Passion, wheeling round the Judge; and the dead rising to judgment, impelled irresistibly to right or left even before the sentence is pronounced. Above the one band, kneels the white-robed Madonna in intercession–type of the Divine Mercy as in Dante; over the others, at the head of the Apostles, is the Baptist who seems appealing for judgment–type of the Divine Justice. This placing Mary and St John opposite to each other, as in Dante's Rose of Paradise, is typical of Florentine art; Santa Maria del Fiore and San Giovanni are, as it were, inseparable. Among the blessed is Dante, gazing up in fixed adoration at the Madonna, as when following St Bernard's prayer at the close of his Vision; on the other side some of the faces of the lost are a miracle of expression. The Hell on the right wall, by Andrea's brother Leonardo, is more immediately taken from the Commedia. The Paradise on the left, or, rather, the Empyrean Heaven–with the faces suadi di carità, Angels and Saints absorbed in vision and love of God–is by Andrea himself, and is more directly pictorial than Dante's Paradiso could admit. Christ and the Madonna are enthroned side by side, whereas we do not actually see Him in human form in the Commedia,–perhaps in accordance with that reverence which impels the divine poet to make the name Cristo rhyme with nothing but itself. For sheer loveliness in detail, no other fourteenth century master produced anything to compare with this fresco; it may be said to mark the advent of a new element in Italian art.

Thence we pass into the early Renaissance with Brunelleschi and Ghiberti, with Ghirlandaio and Filippino Lippi. In the chapel to the left of the choir hangs Filippo Brunelleschi's famous wooden Crucifix, carved in friendly rivalry with Donatello. The rival piece, Donatello's share in this sculptured tenzone, has been seen in Santa Croce.

In the choir are frescoes by Domenico Ghirlandaio, and a fine brass by Lorenzo Ghiberti. These frescoes were begun in 1486, immediately after the completion of the Santa Trinità series, and finished in 1490; and, though devoid of the highest artistic qualities, are eminently characteristic of their epoch. Though representing scenes from the life of the Madonna and the Baptist, this is entirely subordinated to the portrait groups of noble Florentines and their ladies, introduced as usually utterly uninterested spectators of the sacred events. As religious pictures they are naught; but as representations of contemporary Florentine life, most valuable. Hardly elsewhere shall you see so fine a series of portraits of the men and women of the early Renaissance; but they have other things to think of than the Gospel history. Look at the scene of the Angel appearing to Zacharias. The actual event is hardly noticed; hidden in the throng of citizens, too busily living the life of the Renaissance to attend to such trifles; besides, it would not improve their style to read St. Luke. In the Visitation, the Nativity of the Baptist, the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, a fashionable beauty of the period sweeps in with her attendants–and it is hardly uncharitable to suppose that, if not herself, at least her painter thought more of her fine clothes than of her devotional aspect. The portraits of the donors, Giovanni Tornabuoni and his wife, are on the window wall. In the scene of the expulsion of Joachim from the Temple, a group of painters stands together (towards the window); the old cleanly-shaven man in a red hat is Alessio Baldovinetti, Ghirlandaio's master; next to him, with a lot of dark hair, dressed in a red mantle and blue vest, is Domenico Ghirlandaio himself; his pupil and brother-in-law, Sebastiano Mainardi, and his brother, David Ghirlandaio, are with him–the latter being the figure with shoulder turned and hat on head. In the apparition to Zacharias, among the numerous portraits, a group of four half figures discussing at the foot of the history is of special interest; three of them are said to represent Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landini, and Angelo Poliziano (in the middle, slightly raising his hand); the fourth, turned to speak to Landini, is said by Vasari to be a famous teacher of Greek, Demetrius, but now supposed to be Gentile Becchi, a learned bishop of Arezzo. The stained glass was designed by Filippino Lippi. Under the high altar rests the body of the Blessed John of Salerno, the "Apostle of Florence," who brought the first band of Dominicans to the city.

Less admired, but in some respects more admirable, are the frescoes by Filippino Lippi in the chapel on the right of the choir, almost his last works, painted about 1502, and very much injured by restoration. The window is also from his design. The frescoes represent scenes from the lives of St. John and St. Philip, and are remarkable for their lavish display of Roman antiquities, in which they challenge comparison with Andrea Mantegna. The scene of St. Philip exorcising the dragon is especially fine. Observe how the characteristic intensity of the school of Botticelli is shown in the way in which the very statues take part in the action. Mars flourishes his broken spear, his wolves and kites cower to him for protection from the emissaries of the new faith, whose triumph is further symbolised in the two figures above of ancient deities conquered by Angels. An analogous instance will be found in Botticelli's famous Calumny in the Uffizi. In this statue of Mars is seen the last rendering of the old Florentine tradition of their primo padrone. Thus, perhaps, did the new pagans of the Renaissance lovingly idealise "that mutilated stone which guards the bridge."