From my window au troisième, in the Piazza del Duomo, the look-out this gray April afternoon cannot be called altogether gay. The sellers of flowers and oranges have withdrawn well into the shelter of their little awnings, through which the rain slowly trickles upon the bright mass of fruit; in the great square, the restless population of Florence move aimlessly to and fro with cloaks muffling their faces; there are five close cabs stationed just beneath my window, the drivers of which sit on their respective boxes, beneath the shelter of four large green umbrellas and one blue one; behind them the Baptistery lifts its conical roof by the side of the scaffolding which marks the restoration of the cathedral, and beyond and above everything the Campanile[74] in the square of the Signoria raises its grim castellated head, dark and threatening. One building alone refuses to succumb to the influences of cloud and rain, refuses to lose its beauty or be deprived of its colours; its delicate traceries, and its shades of red, yellow, black, white, and green marble still standing out clearly perceptible through the heavy atmosphere. This is the building with the account of which closes the story of Giotto's life; this is the last and greatest achievement of that great genius who joined to his skill of hand a heart tender enough to enter into every human weakness, and sympathies which extended to the animal and vegetable creation, and drew, with as much simple fidelity and honest enjoyment the dog watching the sheep and the oxen drawing the wain, as the sufferings of the Saviour, or the faith of the disciples.
In shape the Campanile is a square tower without buttress of any kind, rising 292 feet straight from the pavement of the piazza. It has four stories, but does not diminish towards the top, the only difference being that the windows increase in size, and in this way an appearance of superior lightness is gained by the upper stories. The style of the architecture is Gothic in so far as it makes use of the pointed arch, but can hardly be described as such without giving a false impression to those who are accustomed to the Gothic of the north; and who think of that style as one of varied, if somewhat gloomy, masses, of irregular arches, pinnacles, and buttresses; colourless save for the lichen that grows between the grey stones, and owing their beauty more to the unwearied inventiveness of their builders' fancy than to any symmetrical unity of design.
It seems to me that this Campanile, as does the cathedral, partakes much more of the Lombardic element than the Gothic, especially in its use of coloured marbles, which are here employed throughout the whole surface of the tower. One thing is certain, that whatever be the style of the architecture it has a character of its own which renders it a thing apart. In the course of many years' travel in every quarter of the globe, I have come upon but one building which had at all the same sort of power over the imagination which is possessed by this tower of Giotto. That structure was the Taj, at Agra, which in its exquisiteness of finish, its delicacy of involved ornament, its perfectly unsullied whiteness, and above all, in its completeness of design, resembled the Florentine Campanile, though for beauty of proportion, no less than for that of colour, the Indian tomb must yield precedence to the Italian bell-tower. The Taj, too, owes much of its effect to the beauty of its surroundings; to the stately entrance, the long paved approach of white marble, the great daïs of the same, on which the tomb stands, and last, not least, to thick rows of dark cypress trees which surround it to right and left, and toss their fretted spires towards the sky, a hundred feet below the great dome. The Campanile has no such proud surroundings, no such adventitious helps to its beauty, but stands in simple strength, in the busiest square in Florence, in the midst of the fruit-sellers and flower-sellers, where the street boys can play at hide-and-seek round its base, and wonder idly perhaps at the inlaid marbles. In either case the surroundings are such as one should be loth to change; for the tomb which marks the pride and love of an Eastern monarch, the quiet inclosed garden, with its marble terraces and clustering groups of cypress; and for the Campanile—which was the last gift of a great artist to his native city—the busy square, the thronging people, the hundred cries of Florence sounding about its base, and fading into a faint scarce-heard murmur long ere they reach the great overhanging battlements, round whose massive sculpture resound only the whispering of the breeze and the fluttering of white-winged birds.
The building is in four stories, the two lowest of which are entirely without windows, the first being adorned with bas-reliefs by Giotto, and with statues by Donatello and others. Intermediate between the lowest series of bas-reliefs and the statues, are four series of bas-reliefs, each seven in number, representing the beatitudes, the works of mercy, the virtues, and the sacraments.
The second and third stories have each two pointed-arched windows of the same size and design, each of which is divided in the usual Gothic manner by a centre shaft. This shaft is of exquisite delicacy, in design a richly carved spiral, ending in a capital, from which spring two trefoiled arches. The sides of these windows are also enriched with a similar shaft, then a rich border of mosaic, inclosed again by a spiral, terminating in a second pointed arch which forms the outer border to the window, above which is a triangular canopy thickly carved. The whole of these windows, with the exception of the mosaic band, are executed in white marble, and surrounded by slabs of green serpentine and red porphyry.
The fourth story has but one window, rather larger than both those in the second or third story, and divided by two spirals instead of one. It is noticeable that the sides and canopy of this highest aperture are comparatively simple in form and devoid of sculpture, which practically ceases with the third story. Giotto was too thorough an artist to put elaborate sculpture at a height where it could not be seen, and preferred, instead of substituting coarser work, to depend for the beauty of this upper story, almost entirely upon the effect of boldly designed mosaic. Instead, therefore, of a single narrow band of mosaic above the arch of the window, there are in the fourth story four comparatively wide ones, and above this the triangular space beneath the plain arch is filled with the same work, as are also the spaces beside and above the canopy. Above the canopy is a still broader band of mosaic, on which the jagged arches of the battlements seem to rest; and above these again, a last band of mosaic is surmounted by a gallery of white marble about six feet high, pierced with quartre-foils along its whole length.
It is wholly impossible to describe the delicacy and finish which the crest of this campanile possesses; the eye is led on from story to story, the mosaic being used more and more freely, the sculpture more sparingly, as the ascent is made, till at last the sculpture ends in one perfectly shaped window, and the mosaic blossoms forth like a flower into fullest beauty. Gradually the massive base, with its dark bas-reliefs, changes into lighter sculpture, with backgrounds of blue marble, then into figures of the saints, prophets, and patriarchs, breaking the uniformity of which are two long vertical pierced panels of quartre-foils in circles, serving to give light to the interior, but not telling as windows, then two rich bands of mosaic carry on the effect up to the first range of windows. There is no difference between the first and second stories, except that the lower one has a rich band of sculpture beneath the window, which is replaced by plain marble in the second; but above the second, as I have said, the sculpture ceases to be the main feature, the mosaic takes its place, and succeeds in carrying out the unison of rich work and lightness of effect in a way which is as novel as it is beautiful.
A few words must be said of the famous range of bas-reliefs, the lowest, all of which were designed by Giotto, though he only lived to execute two. This series is twenty-eight in number, exclusive of those on the small half towers which form the corners of the Campanile. They represent first the creation of man and woman, then the gradual development of knowledge, the gradual increase of man's power over nature, and discovery of his own capacities. Of three of these, illustrations are given which may be relied upon for fidelity to the main points of the design, though they do little justice to the exquisite delicacy of the work.
These bas-reliefs are in lozenge form, about eighteen inches in height and slightly less in breadth, and entirely surround the tower; nearly the whole of these were sculptured by Luca della Robbia and Andrea Pisano, to whom was entrusted the carrying out of Giotto's designs.
I shall not endeavour here to classify these reliefs according to their authorship for two reasons; one, that the carrying out of Giotto's design, whether by Andrea Pisano, Luca della Robbia, or any other sculptor, is as to each special relief a pure matter of conjecture, and is besides little connected with the subject I have in hand; and the other reason is that this classification, though attempted with great ingenuity, and after close investigation by Mr. Ruskin, in his pamphlet on the "Shepherd's Tower," appears to me to have yielded no satisfactory results, but rather to have involved the subject in further obscurity, insomuch as it has led him to attribute various reliefs in the series to Giotto's own hand, wholly on internal evidence, and that moreover in my judgment of a most unsatisfactory nature. I content myself, therefore, with observing that the three first frescoes of the series and the one representing the drunkenness of Noah are almost certainly the work of a different hand to that of the rest of the bas-reliefs, and that that hand has probably modified Giotto's original design to a considerable extent in the relative importance of the landscape portions of the composition.