That he might paint them).”
Yet he was, in religious phrase, the “dear brother” of Savonarola, and, for long in daily companionship with him.
Fra Benedetto, the brother, according to the flesh, of John of Fiesole, was, likewise, an artist. In the library of the convent, together with many other illuminated missals, are the Gospels, exquisitely embellished by him, with miniatures of apostles and saints. A smaller hall, near the library, is lined with an imposing array of flags of all the towns and corporations of Italy, collected here after the Dante Festival, May 14th, 1865.
Dante’s monument, inaugurated at that date, on the six hundredth anniversary of his birth, stands in the Piazza S. Croce, facing the church. A lordly pile in his honor, on the summit of which he sits in sombre sovereignty, takes up much space in the right aisle of this famous fane—“the Pantheon of Modern Italy.” His remains are at Ravenna. The epitaph on his tomb-stone, dictated by himself, styles Florence the “least-loving of all mothers.” She exiled him, setting a price upon his head; made him for nineteen years, he says, “a vessel without sail or rudder, driven to divers ports, estuaries and shores by that hot blast, the breath of grievous poverty.” When she relaxed her persecutions so far as to recall him upon condition of confession and fine, he refused to enter her gates. Upon bended knee, Florence prayed Ravenna to surrender his remains to his “Mother-city” less than a century after he died, a petition oft and piteously renewed. But the plucky little town holds him yet to her heart, and Florence accounts as holy, for his sake, such things as the dirty bench fastened in the wall of a house opposite the Campanile and Cathedral, whereon he used to sit day after day to watch the building of the latter.
The centuries through which this work was dragged were a woful drawback to its external comeliness. Since we saw it, as we learn from the indignant outcries of art-critics, it has been “cleaned.” “A perfectly uninjured building,” wails one, “with every slenderest detail fine and clear as the sunshine that streams on it in mid-summer—is drenched in corrosive liquids until all the outer shell of the delicate outlines is hacked and chipped away, the laborers hammering on at all these exquisite and matchless sculptures as unconcernedly as they would hammer at the blocks of macigno with which they would repave the streets!” I confess—albeit, as I have intimated before,—not an art-critic, that in perusing the above, the “corrosive liquids” ate into my finest sensibilities, and the “hammering” was upon my very heart. But my recollection of the condition of the building in 1877 is not of harmony, or such fineness and clearness as our plaintiff describes. These existed unquestionably in form and proportion. But the walls of black and white marble were “streaky,” soiled and clean portions, fitted together without intervening shading, denoting where the builders of one age left off and those of the next began anew. An attempt to cleanse it, set on foot some years previous, had marred the Duomo yet more. The effect was that of a “half-and-half” penitentiary garment. Those who know edifices like this and the Milan Cathedral, and that one of the “Seven Lamps of Architecture,” Giotti’s Campanile, from photographs, have one advantage over bona fide travelers. The stains and cracks of time are softened into mellow uniformity in the sun-picture that yet preserves faithfully each grace of design and workmanship. He who dreams over the stereoscopic view which brings out carvings and angles, and the expression of the whole building with magic accuracy, is spared the pain of seeing that the miracle of architectural genius in marble or bronze is undeniably and vulgarly dirty. This is especially true of the Baptistery. The bronze doors (I am not going to repeat Michael Angelo’s remark touching them upon the thousandth part of a chance that one man or woman in the United States may not have heard it) are so encrusted with the dust of as many ages as they have hung in their present place that one cannot distinguish between Noah drunk and Noah sober; between Cain slaying his brother and Adam tilling the ground. The interior would be vastly improved, not by hammering workmen, and corrosive liquids, but by a genuine New England house-cleaning. A hogshead of disinfectants would not dispel the mouldy, sickly odor that clings to the walls and unclean floor. All the children born in Florence of Roman Catholic parents are brought hither for baptism. We never peeped in at the mighty door without seeing one or more at the font. After one closer view of the parties to the ceremony, we refrained from approaching that part of the building while it was thus occupied.
We had been for a long drive in the Cascine—the Central Park of the Florentines—extended into the country, and, our hands full of wild flowers, the odors of field and hedge and garden lingering in our senses, alighted at the Baptistery, attracted by the spectacle of a group dimly visible from the sunlit street. It had seemed a pretty fancy to us, this gathering all the lambs of Firenze into one visible earthly fold, and one that peopled the dusky Rotunda with images of innocence and beauty. We would make these definite and lasting by witnessing the solemn rite. A priest in a dirty gown mumbled prayers from a dog-eared book; a grimy-faced boy in a dirtier white petticoat and a dirtiest short-gown, trimmed with cotton-lace, swung a censer too indolently to disturb the foul air. A woman in clothes that were whole, but not clean, held the bambino. I do not like to call it a baby. It was wound from feet to arm-pits, as are all the Italian children of the lower classes, in swaddling-linen, fold upon fold, until the lower part of the body is as stiff as that of a corpse. These wrappings are never loosened during the day. I cannot answer for the fashion of their night-gear. The unhappy little mummy in question was, in complexion, a livid purple, and gasped, all the while, as in the article of death. The cradle-bands had apparently come down to it through a succession of brother and sister bambini, with scanty interference on the part of washerwomen, and bade fair to become its winding-sheet if not soon removed. The priest made the sign of the cross in holy water on the forehead, wrinkled like that of an old man, never pausing in his Latin rattle and swing; the acolyte gave a last, lazy toss to the censer, drawling, “A-a-men!” The woman, as nonchalant as they, covered in the child from the May air with a wadded quilt, wrapping it over the face as Hazael laid the wet cloth upon his master’s, possibly to the same end. The touching rite was disposed of, and the priest shuffled out of one door, the acolyte went whistling out of another.
The accomplished author of “Roba di Roma,” says of swaddling-bands—“There are advantages as well as disadvantages in this method of dressing infants. The child is so well-supported that it can be safely carried anyhow, without breaking its back, or distorting its limbs. It may be laid down anywhere, and even be borne on the head in its little basket without danger of its wriggling out.”
He doubts, moreover, whether the custom be productive of deformity. Perhaps not. But, our attention having been directed by the ceremony just described to what was, to our notion, a barbarous invention for the promotion of infanticide, we noted, henceforward, the proportion of persons diseased and deformed in the lower limbs among the Florentine street population. The result amazed and shocked us. On the afternoon of which I speak, we counted ten cripples upon one block, and the average number of these unfortunates upon others was between seven and eight. Join to the tight bands about their trunks and legs the close linen, or cotton or woollen caps, worn upon their heads, and the lack of daily baths and fresh clothing, and it is easy to explain why cutaneous diseases should be likewise prevalent.
The mural tablets of Florence are a study,—sometimes, a thrilling one. As when, for example, in driving or walking through the old street, neither wide, light, nor picturesque, of S. Martino, we came upon a tall, stone house with queer latticed windows very high up in the thick walls,—and deciphered above the doorway these words:—
“In questa casa degli Alighieri nacque il divina poeta.”
(“In this house of the Alighieri was born the divine poet.”)