From the Oak to the Olive: A Plain record of a Pleasant Journey

by Julia Ward Howe

A hot week, but a happy one. To be overcome in a good cause is glorious, and our failure, we trust, was quantitative, not qualitative. Good friends helped us, took away all little troubles and responsibilities; took us about in carriages of dignity and ease, and landed us before royal, imperial works of art. With all their aid and cherishing, Florence was too many for us. So, of her garment of splendors, we were able only to catch at and hold fast a shred here and there, and whether these fragments are worth weaving into a chapter at all, will better appear when we shall have made the experiment of so combining them.

Our first view of her was by night; when, wearied with a day's shaking, a hot and a long one, we tumbled out of railroad car into arms of philanthropic friend, who received us and our bundles, selected our luggage, conquered our porter and hackman, pointed to various interesting quadrangles of lamps, and said, "This is Florence." But we had seen such things before, and gave little heed—our thought machinery being quite run down for lack of fuel. The aspect which we first truly perceived, and still remember, was that of a clean and friendly interior, a tea-table set, a good lamp bright with American petrolio (O shade of Downer!), and, behind an alcove, the dim, inviting perspective of a comfortable bed, which seemed to say, "Come hither, weary ones. I have waited long enough, and so have you."

PALAZZO PITTI.

The second aspect of Florence was the Pitti Palace, brown and massive; and the bridges numerously spanning the bright river; and the gay, busy streets, shady in lengths and sunny only in patches; the picturesque mélange of business and of leisure, artisans, country people, English travellers and dressed-up Americans; the jeweller's bridge, displaying ropes of pearls and flashes of diamonds, with endless knottings and perplexities of gold and mosaic; alabaster shops, reading-rooms, book-stores, fashions, cabinets of antiquities—all leading to a welcome retirement within the walls of the Palazzo Pitti.

Well content was the Medici to live in it, ill content to exchange it, even for the promised threshold of Paradise. A good little sermon here suggests itself, of which the text was preached long ago, "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." And Medici's investments had been large in Pitti, and trifling in Paradise; hence the difficulty of realizing in the latter. Within the Pitti Palace are things that astonish the world, and have a right to do so, as have all the original results of art. The paintings are all—so to speak—set on doors that open into new avenues of thought and speculation for mankind. The ideal world, of which the real is but a poor assertion, has, in these glimpses, its truest portraiture. Their use and dignity have also limits which the luxury and enthusiasm of mankind transgress. But indispensable were they in the world's humanization and civilization: that is enough to say of them.

O, unseen in twenty-three years, and never to be seen again with the keen relish of youth. What have I kept of you? What good seed from your abundant harvest has ripened in my stony corner of New England? Your forms have filled and beautified the blank pages of life, for every life has its actual blanks, which the ideal must fill up, or which else remain bare and profitless forever. And you are here, my Seggiola, and you, my Andreas and Peruginos and Raphael; and Guercino's woman in red still tenderly clasps the knees of the dead Savior. But O! they have restored this picture, and daubed the faded red with savage vermilion.

Scarcely less ungrateful than the restoration of a beautiful picture is the attempt to restore, after the busy intervals of travelling, the precious impressions made by works and wonders of art. The incessant labor of sight-seeing in Florence left little time for writing up on the spot, and that little was necessarily given to recording the then recent recollections of Naples and Rome. It was in Venice that I first tried to overtake the subject of Florence. It is in Trieste that I sit down and despair of doing the poorest justice to either. My meagre notes must help me out; but, in setting them down, I forgot how rapidly and entirely the material, of which they gave the outline, would disappear. I thought that I held it, so far as mind possession goes, forever. At the feast of the gods we think our joys eternal.

On reference to the notes, then, I find that the best Andreas and Fra Bartolomeos are to be found here, and quite a number of them in the Pitti. Some of the first Raphaels also are here, and some Titians. The Seggiola looked to me a little dim under her glass. The Fates of Michael Angelo were strong and sincere. Two of the Andreas are the largest I remember, and very finely composed. Each represents some modification of the Madonna and Saints, subjects of which we grow very weary. Yet one perceives the necessity of these pictures at the time in which they were painted. The æsthetic platform of the time would have them, and accepted little else. A much smaller picture shows us the heads of Andrea and his beautiful wife, the Lucia, made famous by Browning. The two heads look a little dim now, both with age, and one with sorrow. Raphael's pictures, seen here in copious connection with those of his predecessors, appear as the undoubted culmination of the Florentine school, grandly drawn, and conceived with the subtlest grace and spirit. The Florentine school, as compared with others, has a great weight of æsthetic reason behind it. It reminds me of some rare writing in which what is given you represents much besides itself. The best Peruginos share this merit, so do, in a different manner, the works of Beato Angelico, whose wonderful faces deserve their gold background. How to overtake these supreme merits in the regions of prose and of verse, one scarcely knows. By combining bold and immediate conception with untiring energy, unflinching criticism, and a nicety that stops before no painfulness, one might do it. Life runs like a centiped; one dreams of being an artist, and dies.

Here it may not be amiss for me to recur to the form of my diary, whose inartistic jottings will best give the order of my days and movements.

Wednesday, May 29.—Walked to Santa Croce, hearing that a mass was to be celebrated there for the Florentine victims of '48. When I arrived, the mass was nearly over; the attendance had been very numerous, and we found many people still there. Near the high altar were wreaths and floral trophies. I should be glad to know whether the priests who celebrated this mass did so with a good will. The ideas of '48 are the deadly enemies of the absolute and unbounded assumptions of the Roman papacy and priesthood. I hear that many of the priests desire a more liberal construction of their office. Would to God it might be so. It is most mournful that those who stand, in the public eye, for the religion of the country, should be pledged to a course utterly out of equilibrium with the religious ideas of the age. Thus religious forms contradict the spirit and essence of religion, and the established fountain-heads of improvement shut the door against social and moral amelioration.