The Story of Florence

by Edmund G. Gardner

Within the palace a large room, with a remarkably fine ceiling by Giuliano da San Gallo, is decorated with a series of frescoes from Roman history intended to be typical of events in the lives of Cosimo the Elder and Lorenzo the Magnificent. Vasari says that, for a villa, this is la più bella sala del mondo. The frescoes, ordered by Pope Leo X. and the Cardinal Giulio, under the direction of Ottaviano dei Medici, were begun by Andrea dei Sarto, Francia Bigio and Jacopo da Pontormo, left unfinished for more than fifty years, and then completed by Alessandro Allori for the Grand Duke Francesco. The Triumph of Cicero, by Francia Bigio, is supposed to typify the return of Cosimo from exile in 1434; Caesar receiving tribute from Egypt, by Andrea del Sarto, refers to the coming of an embassy from the Soldan to Lorenzo in 1487, with magnificent gifts and treasures. Andrea's fresco is full of curious beasts and birds, including the long-eared sheep which Lorenzo naturalised in the grounds of the villa, and the famous giraffe which the Soldan sent on this occasion and which, as Mr Armstrong writes, "became the most popular character in Florence," until its death at the beginning of 1489. The Regent of France, Anne of Beaujeu, made ineffectual overtures to Lorenzo to get him to make her a present of the strange beast. This fresco was left unfinished on the death of Pope Leo in 1521, and finished by Alessandro Allori in 1582. The charming mythological decorations between the windows are by Jacopo da Pontormo. The two later frescoes by Alessandro Allori, painted about 1580, represent Scipio in the house of Syphax and Flamininus in Greece, which typify Lorenzo's visit to Ferrante of Naples, in 1480, and his presence at the Diet of Cremona in 1483, on which latter occasion, as Mr Armstrong puts it, "his good sense and powers of expression and persuasion gave him an importance which the military weakness of Florence denied to him in the field"–but the result was little more than a not very honourable league of the Italian powers against Venice. The Apples of the Hesperides, and the rest of the mythological decorations in continuation of Pontormo's lunette, are also Allori's. The whole has an air of regal triumph without needless parade.

The road should be followed beyond the villa, in order to ascend to the left to the little church among the hills. A superb view is obtained over the plain to Florence beyond the Villa Reale lying below us. Behind, we are already among the Apennines. A beautiful glimpse of Prato can be seen to the left, four miles away.

Prato itself is about twelve miles from Florence. It was a gay little town in the fifteenth century, when it witnessed "brother Lippo's doings, up and down," and heard Messer Angelo Poliziano's musical sighings for the love of Madonna Ippolita Leoncina. A few years later it listened to the voice of Fra Girolamo Savonarola, and at last its bright day of prosperity ended in the horrible sack and carnage from the Spanish soldiery under Raimondo da Cardona in 1512. Its Duomo–dedicated to St. Stephen and the Baptist–a Tuscan Romanesque church completed in the Gothic style by Giovanni Pisano, with a fine campanile built at the beginning of the fourteenth century, claims to possess a strange and wondrous relic: nothing less than the Cintola or Girdle of the Blessed Virgin, delivered by her–according to a pious and poetical legend–to St. Thomas at her Assumption, and then won back for Christendom by a native of Prato, Michele Dagonari, in the Crusades. Be that as it may, what purports to be this relic is exhibited on occasions in the Pulpito della Cintola on the exterior of the Duomo, a magnificent work by Donatello and Michelozzo, in which the former master has carved a wonderful series of dancing genii hardly, if at all, inferior to those more famous bas-reliefs executed a little later for the cantoria of Santa Maria del Fiore. Within, over the entrance wall, is a picture by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio of the Madonna giving the girdle to the Thomas who had doubted. And in the chapel on the left (with a most beautifully worked bronze screen, with a lovely frieze of cupids, birds and beasts–the work of Bruno Lapi and Pasquino di Matteo, 1444-1461), the Cintola is preserved amid frescoes by Agnolo Gaddi setting forth the life of Madonna, her granting of Prato's treasure to St Thomas at the Assumption, and its discovery by Michele Dagonari.

The church is rich in works of Florentine art–a pulpit by Mino da Fiesole and Antonio Rossellino; the Madonna dell' Ulivo by Giuliano da Maiano; frescoes said to be in part by Masolino's reputed master Starnina in the chapel to the right of the choir. But Prato's great artistic glory must be sought in Fra Lippo Lippi's frescoes in the choir, painted between 1452 and 1464. These are the great achievements of the Friar's life. On the left is the life of St. Stephen, on the right that of the Baptist. They show very strongly the influence of Masaccio, and make us understand why the Florentines said that the spirit of Masaccio had entered into the body of Fra Filippo. Inferior to Masaccio in most respects, Filippo had a feeling for facial beauty and spiritual expression, and for a certain type of feminine grace which we hardly find in his prototype. The wonderful figure of the dancing girl in Herod's banquet, and again her naïve bearing when she kneels before her mother with the martyr's head, oblivious of the horror of the spectators and merely bent upon showing us her own sweet face, are characteristic of Lippo, as also, in another way, his feeling for boyhood shown in the little St. John's farewell to his parents. The Burial of St. Stephen is full of fine Florentine portraits in the manner of the Carmine frescoes. The dignified ecclesiastic at the head of the clergy is Carlo dei Medici, the illegitimate son of Cosimo. On the extreme right is Lippo himself. Carlo looks rather like a younger, more refined edition of Leo X.

It was while engaged upon these frescoes that Lippo Lippi was commissioned by the nuns of Santa Margherita to paint a Madonna for them, and took the opportunity of carrying off Lucrezia Buti, a beautiful girl staying in the convent who had sat to him as the Madonna, during one of the Cintola festivities. Lippo appears to have been practically unfrocked at this time, but he refused the dispensation of the Pope who wished him to marry her legally, as he preferred to live a loose life. Between the station and the Duomo you can see the house where they lived and where Filippino Lippi was born. Opposite the convent of Santa Margherita is a tabernacle containing a wonderfully beautiful fresco by Filippino, a Madonna and Child with Angels, adored by St. Margaret and St. Catherine, St. Antony and St. Stephen. All the faces are of the utmost loveliness, and the Catherine especially is like a foretaste of Luini's famous fresco at Milan. In the town picture gallery there are four pictures ascribed to Lippo Lippi–all four of rather questionable authenticity–and one by Filippino, a Madonna and Child with St. Stephen and the Baptist, which, although utterly ruined, appears to be genuine. The Protomartyr and the Precursor seem always inseparable throughout the faithful little city of the Cintola.

Prato can likewise boast some excellent terracotta works by Andrea della Robbia, both outside the Duomo and in the churches of Our Lady of Good Counsel and Our Lady of the Prisons. This latter church, the Madonna delle Carceri, reared by Giuliano da San Gallo between 1485 and 1491, is perhaps the most beautiful and most truly classical of all Early Renaissance buildings in Tuscany.

Ten miles beyond Prato lies Pistoia, at the very foot of the Apennines, the city of Dante's friend and correspondent, Messer Cino, the poet of the golden haired Selvaggia, he who sang the dirge of Caesar Henry; the centre of the fiercest faction struggles of Italian history. It was the Florentine traditional policy to keep Pisa by fortresses and Pistoia by factions. It lies, however, beyond the scope of the present book, with the other Tuscan cities that owned the sway of the great Republic. San Gemignano, that most wonderful of all the smaller towns of Tuscany, the city of "the fair towers," of Santa Fina and of the gayest of mediæval poets, Messer Folgore, comes into another volume of this series.

But it is impossible to conclude even the briefest study of Florence without a word upon that Tuscan Earthly Paradise, the Casentino and upper valley of the Arno, although it lies for the most part not in the province of Florence but in that of Arezzo. It is best reached by the diligence which runs from Pontassieve over the Consuma Pass–where Arnaldo of Brescia, who lies in the last horrible round of Dante's Malebolge, was burned alive for counterfeiting the golden florins of Florence–to Stia.[57] A whole chapter of Florentine history may be read among the mountains of the Casentino, writ large upon its castles and monasteries. If the towers of San Gemignano give us still the clearest extant picture of the life led by the nobles and magnates when forced to enter the cities, we can see best in the Casentino how they exercised their feudal sway and maintained for a while their independence of the burgher Commune. The Casentino was ruled by the Conti Guidi, that great clan whose four branches–the Counts of Romena, the Counts of Porciano, the Counts of Battifolle and Poppi, the Counts of Dovadola (to whom Bagno in Romagna and Pratovecchio here appear to have belonged)–sprang from the four sons of Gualdrada, Bellincion Berti's daughter. Poppi remains a superb monument of the power and taste of these "Counts Palatine of Tuscany"; its palace on a small scale resembles the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence. Romena and Porciano, higher up stream, overhanging Pratovecchio and Stia, have been immortalised by the verse and hallowed by the footsteps of Dante Alighieri. Beneath the hill upon which Poppi stands, an old bridge still spans the Arno, upon which the last of the Conti Guidi, the Count Francesco, surrendered in 1440 to the Florentine commissary, Neri Capponi. After the second expulsion of the Medici from Florence, Piero and Giuliano for some time lurked in the Casentino, with Bernardo Dovizi at Bibbiena.

Throughout the Casentino Dante himself should be our guide. There is hardly another district in Italy so intimately connected with the divine poet; save only Florence and Ravenna, there is, perhaps, none where we more frequently need to have recourse to the pages of the Divina Commedia. With the Inferno in our hands, we seek out Count Alessandro's castle of Romena and what purports to be the Fonte Branda, below the castle to the left, for whose waters–even to cool the thirst of Hell–Maestro Adamo would not have given the sight of his seducer sharing his agony. With the Purgatorio we trace the course of the Arno from where, a mere fiumicello, it takes its rise in Falterona, and runs down past Porciano and Poppi to sweep away from the Aretines, "turning aside its muzzle in disdain." There is a tradition that Dante was imprisoned in the castle of Porciano. We know that he was the guest of various members of the Conti Guidi at different times during his exile; it was from one of their castles, probably Poppi, that on March 31st and April 16th, 1311, he directed his two terrible letters to the Florentine government and to the Emperor Henry. It was in the Casentino, too, that he composed the Canzone Amor, dacchè convien pur ch'io mi doglia, "Love, since I needs must make complaint," one of the latest and most perplexing of his lyrics.

The battlefield of Campaldino lies beyond Poppi, on the eastern side of the river, near the old convent and church of Certomondo, founded some twenty or thirty years before by two of the Conti Guidi to commemorate the great Ghibelline victory of Montaperti, but now to witness the triumph of the Guelfs. The Aretines, under their Bishop and Buonconte da Montefeltro, had marched up the valley along the direction of the present railway to Bibbiena, to check the ravages of the Florentines who, with their French allies, had made their way through the mountains above Pratovecchio and were laying waste the country of the Conti Guidi. It was on the Feast of St. Barnabas, 1289, that the two armies stood face to face, and Dante riding in the Florentine light cavalry, if the fragment of a letter preserved to us by Leonardo Bruni be authentic, "had much dread and at the end the greatest gladness, by reason of the varying chances of that battle." There are no relics of the struggle to be found in Certomondo; only a very small portion of the cloisters remains, and the church itself contains nothing of note save an Annunciation by Neri di Bicci. But about an hour's walk from the battlefield, perhaps a mile from the foot of the hill on which Bibbiena stands, is a spot most sacred to all lovers of Dante. Here the stream of the Archiano, banked with poplars and willows, flows into the Arno; and here, at the close of that same terrible and glorious day, Buonconte da Montefeltro died of his wounds, gasping out the name of Mary. At evening the nightingales are loud around the spot, but their song is less sweet then the ineffable stanzas in the fifth canto of the Purgatorio in which Dante has raised an imperishable monument to the young Ghibelline warrior.