Nearly opposite the Palazzo Pitti is the Casa Guidi, where the Brownings lived and wrote. Here Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in June 1861, she who "made of her verse a golden ring linking England to Italy"; these were the famous "Casa Guidi windows" from which she watched the liberation and unification of Italy:–
"I heard last night a little child go singing
'Neath Casa Guidi windows, by the church,
O bella libertà, O bella!–stringing
The same words still on notes he went in search
So high for, you concluded the upspringing
Of such a nimble bird to sky from perch
Must leave the whole bush in a tremble green,
And that the heart of Italy must beat,
While such a voice had leave to rise serene
'Twixt church and palace of a Florence street."
The church in question, San Felice, contains a good picture of St. Anthony, St. Rock and St. Catherine by some follower of Botticelli and Filippino Lippi; also a Crucifixion of the school of Giotto. Thence the Via Mazzetta leads into the Piazza Santo Spirito, at the corner of which is the Palazzo Guadagni, built by Cronaca at the end of the Quattrocento; with fine iron work, lantern holders and the like, on the exterior.
The present church of Santo Spirito–the finest Early Renaissance church in Florence–was built between 1471 and 1487, after Brunelleschi's designs, to replace his earlier building which had been burned down in 1471 on the occasion of the visit of Galeazzo Maria Sforza to Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother. It is a fine example of Brunelleschi's adaptation of the early basilican type, is borne upon graceful Corinthian columns and nobly proportioned. The octagonal sacristy is by Giuliano da San Gallo and Cronaca, finished in 1497, and the campanile by Baccio d'Agnolo at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
The stained glass window over the entrance was designed by Perugino. In the right transept is an excellent picture by Filippino Lippi; Madonna and Child with the little St. John, St. Catherine and St. Nicholas, with the donor, Tanai de' Nerli, and his wife. Also in the right transept is the tomb of the Capponi; Gino, the conqueror of Pisa and historian of the Ciompi; Neri, the conqueror of the Casentino; and that great republican soldier and hero, Piero Capponi, who had saved Florence from Charles of France and fell in the Pisan war. The vision of St. Bernard is an old copy from Perugino. None of the other pictures in the church are more than school pieces; there are two in the left transept ascribed to Filippino's disappointing pupil, Raffaellino del Garbo–the Trinità with St. Mary of Egypt and St. Catherine, and the Madonna with Sts. Lawrence, Stephen, John and Bernard. The latter picture is by Raffaellino di Carlo.
During the last quarter of the fourteenth century the convent of Santo Spirito–which is an Augustinian house–was the centre of a circle of scholars, who represent an epoch intermediate between the great writers of the Trecento and the humanists of the early Quattrocento. Prominent among them was Coluccio Salutati, who for many years served the Republic as Chancellor and died in 1406. He was influential in founding the first chair of Greek, and his letters on behalf of Florence were so eloquent and powerful that the "great viper," Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti, declared that he dreaded one of them more than many swords. Also Filippo Villani, the nephew of the great chroniclers, Giovanni and Matteo, who had succeeded Boccaccio as lecturer on Dante. They met here with other kindred spirits in the cell of Fra Luigi Marsili, a learned monk and impassioned worshipper of Petrarch, upon whose great crusading canzone–O aspettata in ciel, beata e bella–he wrote a commentary which is still extant. Fra Luigi died in 1394. A century later, the monks of this convent took a violent part in opposition to Savonarola; and it was here, in the pulpit of the choir of the church, that Landucci tells us that he heard the bull of excommunication read "by a Fra Leonardo, their preacher, and an adversary of the said Fra Girolamo,"–"between two lighted torches and many friars," as he rather quaintly puts it.
"The Carmine's my cloister: hunt it up," says Browning's Lippo Lippi to his captors; and the Via Mazzetta and the Via Santa Monaca will take us to it. This church of the Carmelites, Santa Maria del Carmine, was consecrated in 1422; and, almost immediately after, the mighty series of frescoes was begun in the Brancacci Chapel at the end of the right transept–frescoes which were to become the school for all future painting. In the eighteenth century the greater part of the church was destroyed by fire, but this chapel was spared by the flames, and the frescoes, though terribly damaged and grievously restored, still remain on its walls.
This Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine plays the same part in the history of painting as the bronze gates of the Baptistery in that of sculpture. It was in that same eventful year, 1401, of the famous competition between Ghiberti and Brunelleschi, that the new Giotto was born–Tommaso, the son of a notary in Castello San Giovanni di Valdarno. With him, as we saw in chapter iii., the second great epoch of Italian painting, the Quattrocento, or Epoch of Character, opens. His was a rare and piquant personality; persona astrattissima e molto a caso, says Vasari, "an absent-minded fellow and very casual." Intent upon his art, he took no care of himself and thought nothing of the ordinary needs and affairs of the world, though always ready to do others a good turn. From his general negligence and untidiness, he was nicknamed Masaccio–"hulking Tom"–which has become one of the most honourable names in the history of art. The little chapel in which we now stand and survey his handiwork, or what remains of it, is nothing less than the birthplace of modern painting. Sculpture had indeed preceded painting in its return to nature and in its direct study of the human form, and the influence of Donatello lies as strongly over all the painters of the Quattrocento. Vasari even states that Masolino da Panicale (Masolino = "dear little Tom"), Masaccio's master, had been one of Ghiberti's assistants in the casting of the bronze gates, but this is questionable; it is possible that he had been Ghiberti's pupil, though he learned the principles of painting from Gherardo Starnina, one of the last artists of the Trecento. It was shortly after 1422 that Masolino commenced this great series of frescoes setting forth the life of St. Peter; within the next few years Masaccio continued his work; and, more than half a century later, in 1484, Filippino Lippi took it up where Masaccio had left off, and completed the series.
Masolino's contribution to the whole appears to be confined to three pictures: St. Peter preaching, with Carmelites in the background to carry his doctrines into fifteenth century Florence, on the left of the window; the upper row of scenes on the right wall, representing St. Peter and St. John raising the cripple at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple, and the healing of Tabitha (according to others, the resuscitation of Petronilla); and the narrow fresco of the Fall of Adam and Eve, on the right of the entrance. Some have also ascribed to him the striking figure of St. Peter enthroned, attended by Carmelites, while the faithful approach to kiss his feet–the picture in the corner on the left which, in a way, sets the keynote to the whole–but it is more probably the work of Masaccio (others ascribe it to Filippino). Admirable though these paintings are, they exhibit a certain immaturity as contrasted with those by Masaccio: in the Raising of Tabitha, for instance, those two youths with their odd headgear might almost have stepped out of some Giottesque fresco; and the rendering of the nude in the Adam and Eve, though wonderful at that epoch, is much inferior to Masaccio's opposite. Nevertheless, Masolino's grave and dignified figures introduced the type that Masaccio was soon to render perfect.
From the hand of Masaccio are the Expulsion from Paradise; the Tribute Money; the Raising of the Dead Youth (in part); and (probably) the St. Peter enthroned, on the left wall; St. Peter and St. John healing the sick with their shadow, under Masolino's Peter preaching (and the figure behind with a red cap, leaning on a stick, is Masaccio's pious portrait of his master Masolino himself); St. Peter baptising, St. Peter and St. John giving alms, on the opposite side of the window. Each figure is admirably rendered, its character perfectly realised; Masaccio may indeed be said to have completed what Giotto had begun, and freed Italian art from the mannerism of the later followers of Giotto, even as Giotto himself had delivered her from Byzantine formalism. "After Giotto," writes Leonardo da Vinci, "the art of painting declined again, because every one imitated the pictures that were already done; thus it went on from century to century until Tommaso of Florence, nicknamed Masaccio, showed by his perfect works how those who take for their standard any one but Nature–the mistress of all masters–weary themselves in vain."[54] This return to nature is seen even in the landscape, notably in the noble background to the Tribute Money; but above all, in his study of man and the human form. "For the first time," says Kugler, "his aim is the study of form for itself, the study of the external conformation of man. With such an aim is identified a feeling which, in beauty, sees and preserves the expression of proportion; and in repose or motion, the expression of an harmonious development of the powers of the human frame." For sheer dignity and grandeur there is nothing to compare with it, till we come to the work of Raphael and Michelangelo in the Vatican; the composition of the Tribute Money and the Healing of the Sick initiated the method of religious illustration that reached its ultimate perfection in Raphael–what has been called giving Greek form to Hebrew thought. The treatment of the nude especially seemed a novel thing in its day; the wonderful modelling of the naked youth shivering with the cold, in the scene of St. Peter baptising, was hailed as a marvel of art, and is cited by Vasari as one of the cose rarissime of painting. In the scene of the Tribute Money, the last Apostle on our right (in the central picture where our Lord and His disciples are confronted by the eager collector) whose proud bearing is hardly evangelical, is Masaccio himself, with scanty beard and untidy hair. Although less excellent than the Baptism as a study of the nude, the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden is a masterpiece of which it is impossible to speak too highly. Our primi parenti, weighed down with the consciousness of ineffable tragedy, are impelled irresistibly onward by divine destiny; they need not see the Angel in his flaming robe on his cloud of fire, with his flashing sword and out-stretched hand; terrible in his beauty as he is to the spectator, he is as nothing to them, compared with the face of an offended God and the knowledge of the tanto esilio. Surely this is how Dante himself would have conceived the scene.