[136]. The Elsa flows from the Apennines by Colle and Castelfiorentino to join the Arno by S. Miniato, halfway between Florence and Pisa. The valley was the birthplace of Cennino Cennini, the author of the Trattato.
[137]. Monte Morello, 3065 ft., is the conspicuous height to the north of Florence, which serves the populace for a weather-glass.
‘Quando Monte Morello
Ha il cappello
Prendi l’ombrello.’
[138]. A few miles to the north west of Florence.
[139]. These fanciful conceits have a significance for the history of ornament which they hardly seem to deserve. Artificial grottoes of the kind Vasari describes were very popular in the France of the eighteenth century, and pleased the taste of the sophisticated society of the time with an artificial ‘nature,’ that corresponded to the affected pastoral style in literature. From the shell and stalactite decoration of these grottoes was evolved the ornamental style characteristic of the age of Louis XV, the shell-like forms of which betray its origin. The name commonly given to this ornament, that consists in little but a graceful play of curved forms, is ‘rococo,’ and this word is connected with ‘rocaille,’ a regular French term for fantastic grotto-work of the kind here under notice.
[140]. The well-known ‘Villa Madama.’
[141]. One of the best existing examples of these ‘rustic’ grottoes and fountains is that constructed by Buontalenti in the Boboli Gardens near the eastern entrance. As part of its decoration there are built in four marble figures, supposed to have been sketched out by Michelangelo for the tomb of Julius. A view of the interior of this grotto is given on Plate IV. The statue in the corner is one of the four noticed above, while a little above it and to the left is one of the grotesque figures incrusted with odds and ends, which Vasari praises as so fascinating.
[142]. The ultimate derivation of the word ‘mosaic’ is a difficult problem. Its immediate parent is the late-Latin ‘musivum’ which is generally connected with the Greek μουσεῖον, meaning a ‘place of the Muses.’ With this significance, the Greek word in its Latinized form ‘museum’ is suitably applied to collections of works of art and similar objects of aesthetic interest and value. A ‘place of the Muses’ may however be of a different kind. The Muses, like other nymphs, were worshipped in grottoes as guardian genii of fountains, and Pliny, Hist. Nat., XXXVI, 21, writes of ‘erosa saxa in aedificiis, quae musaea vocant, dependentia ad imaginem specus arte reddendam,’ where the suggestion is of a rustic grotto like that in the Boboli Gardens. Such grottoes, natural or artificial, might fittingly be decked with shells and coloured stones and any bright inlay that offered itself. If incrustations of the kind we call mosaic were actually met with in these haunts of the Muses, the work might readily be called by a name suggestive of these same nymphs, and this might be applied later on to tesselated work in general. There is however no proof, either in Pliny or elsewhere, that what we call mosaic was actually so used, and it has been questioned by more than one authority whether there is really any connection between the word ‘mosaic,’ in its various forms, and the Muses. An oriental derivation has even been suggested for the term.