Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Straying through the city, after leaving the gallery, we went into the Church of Or San Michele, and saw in its architecture the traces of its transformation from a market into a church. In its pristine state it consisted of a double row of three great open arches, with the wind blowing through them, and the sunshine falling aslantwise into them, while the bustle of the market, the sale of fish, flesh, or fruit went on within, or brimmed over into the streets that enclosed them on every side. But, four or five hundred years ago, the broad arches were built up with stone-work; windows were pierced through and filled with painted glass; a high altar, in a rich style of pointed Gothic, was raised; shrines and confessionals were set up; and here it is, a solemn and antique church, where a man may buy his salvation instead of his dinner. At any rate, the Catholic priests will insure it to him, and take the price. The sculpture within the beautifully decorated niches, on the outside of the church, is very curious and interesting. The statues of those old saints seem to have that charm of earnestness which so attracts the admirers of the Pre-Raphaelite painters.

It appears that a picture of the Virgin used to hang against one of the pillars of the market-place while it was still a market, and in the year 1291 several miracles were wrought by it, insomuch that a chapel was consecrated for it. So many worshippers came to the shrine that the business of the market was impeded, and ultimately the Virgin and St. Michael won the whole space for themselves. The upper part of the edifice was at that time a granary, and is still used for other than religious purposes. This church was one spot to which the inhabitants betook themselves much for refuge and divine assistance during the great plague described by Boccaccio.

July 2d.—We set out yesterday morning to visit the Palazzo Buonarotti, Michael Angelo's ancestral home. . . . . It is in the Via Ghibellina, an ordinary-looking, three-story house, with broad-brimmed eaves, a stuccoed front, and two or three windows painted in fresco, besides the real ones. Adown the street, there is a glimpse of the hills outside of Florence. The sun shining heavily directly upon the front, we rang the door-bell, and then drew back into the shadow that fell from the opposite side of the street. After we had waited some time a man looked out from an upper window, and a woman from a lower one, and informed us that we could not be admitted now, nor for two or three months to come, the house being under repairs. It is a pity, for I wished to see Michael Angelo's sword and walking-stick and old slippers, and whatever other of his closest personalities are to be shown. . . . .

We passed into the Piazza of the Grand Duke, and looked into the court of the Palazzo Vecchio, with its beautifully embossed pillars; and, seeing just beyond the court a staircase of broad and easy steps, we ascended it at a venture. Upward and upward we went, flight after flight of stairs, and through passages, till at last we found an official who ushered us into a large saloon. It was the Hall of Audience. Its heavily embossed ceiling, rich with tarnished gold, was a feature of antique magnificence, and the only one that it retained, the floor being paved with tiles and the furniture scanty or none. There were, however, three cabinets standing against the walls, two of which contained very curious and exquisite carvings and cuttings in ivory; some of them in the Chinese style of hollow, concentric balls; others, really beautiful works of art: little crucifixes, statues, saintly and knightly, and cups enriched with delicate bas-reliefs. The custode pointed to a small figure of St. Sebastian, and also to a vase around which the reliefs seemed to assume life. Both these specimens, he said, were by Benvenuto Cellini, and there were many others that might well have been wrought by his famous hand. The third cabinet contained a great number and variety of crucifixes, chalices, and whatever other vessels are needed in altar service, exquisitely carved out of amber. They belong to the chapel of the palace, and into this holy closet we were now conducted. It is large enough to accommodate comfortably perhaps thirty worshippers, and is quite covered with frescos by Ghirlandaio in good preservation, and with remnants enough of gilding and bright color to show how splendid the chapel must have been when the Medicean Grand Dukes used to pray here. The altar is still ready for service, and I am not sure that some of the wax tapers were not burning; but Lorenzo the Magnificent was nowhere to be seen.

The custode now led us back through the Hall of Audience into a smaller room, hung with pictures chiefly of the Medici and their connections, among whom was one Carolina, an intelligent and pretty child, and Bianca Capella.

There was nothing else to show us, except a very noble and most spacious saloon, lighted by two large windows at each end, coming down level with the floor, and by a row of windows on one side just beneath the cornice. A gilded framework divides the ceiling into squares, circles, and octagons, the compartments of which are filled with pictures in oil; and the walls are covered with immense frescos, representing various battles and triumphs of the Florentines. Statues by Michael Angelo, John of Bologna, and Bandinello, as well historic as ideal, stand round the hall, and it is really a fit theatre for the historic scenes of a country to be acted in. It was built, moreover, with the idea of its being the council-hall of a free people; but our own little Faneuil, which was meant, in all simplicity, to be merely a spot where the townspeople should meet to choose their selectmen, has served the world better in that respect. I wish I had more room to speak of this vast, dusky, historic hall. [This volume of journal closes here.]

July 4th 1858.—Yesterday forenoon we went to see the Church of Santa Maria Novella. We found the piazza, on one side of which the church stands, encumbered with the amphitheatrical ranges of wooden seats that had been erected to accommodate the spectators of the chariot-races, at the recent Feast of St. John. The front of the church is composed of black and white marble, which, in the course of the five centuries that it has been built, has turned brown and yellow. On the right hand, as you approach, is a long colonnade of arches, extending on a line with the facade, and having a tomb beneath every arch. This colonnade forms one of the enclosing walls of a cloister. We found none of the front entrances open, but on our left, in a wall at right angles with the church, there was an open gateway, approaching which, we saw, within the four-sided colonnade, an enclosed green space of a cloister. This is what is called the Chiostro Verde, so named from the prevailing color of the frescos with which the walls beneath the arches are adorned.

This cloister is the reality of what I used to imagine when I saw the half-ruinous colonnades connected with English cathedrals, or endeavored to trace out the lines along the broken wall of some old abbey. Not that this extant cloister, still perfect and in daily use for its original purposes, is nearly so beautiful as the crumbling ruin which has ceased to be trodden by monkish feet for more than three centuries. The cloister of Santa Maria has not the seclusion that is desirable, being open, by its gateway, to the public square; and several of the neighbors, women as well as men, were loitering within its precincts. The convent, however, has another and larger cloister, which I suppose is kept free from interlopers. The Chiostro Verde is a walk round the four sides of a square, beneath an arched and groined roof. One side of the walk looks upon an enclosed green space with a fountain or a tomb (I forget which) in the centre; the other side is ornamented all along with a succession of ancient frescos, representing subjects of Scripture history. In the days when the designs were more distinct than now, it must have been a very effective way for a monk to read Bible history, to see its personages and events thus passing visibly beside him in his morning and evening walks. Beneath the frescos on one side of the cloistered walk, and along the low stone parapet that separates it from the grass-plat on the other, are inscriptions to the memory of the dead who are buried underneath the pavement. The most of these were modern, and recorded the names of persons of no particular note. Other monumental slabs were inlaid with the pavement itself. Two or three Dominican monks, belonging to the convent, passed in and out, while we were there, in their white habits.

After going round three sides, we came to the fourth, formed by the wall of the church, and heard the voice of a priest behind a curtain that fell down before a door. Lifting it aside, we went in, and found ourselves in the ancient chapter-house, a large interior formed by two great pointed arches crossing one another in a groined roof. The broad spaces of the walls were entirely covered with frescos that are rich even now, and must have glowed with an inexpressible splendor, when fresh from the artists' hands, five hundred years ago. There is a long period, during which frescos illuminate a church or a hall in a way that no other adornment can; when this epoch of brightness is past, they become the dreariest ghosts of perished magnificence. . . . . This chapter-house is the only part of the church that is now used for the purposes of public worship. There are several confessionals, and two chapels or shrines, each with its lighted tapers. A priest performed mass while we were there, and several persons, as usual, stepped in to do a little devotion, either praying on their own account, or uniting with the ceremony that was going forward. One man was followed by two little dogs, and in the midst of his prayers, as one of the dogs was inclined to stray about the church, he kept snapping his fingers to call him back. The cool, dusky refreshment of these holy places, affording such a refuge from the hot noon of the streets and piazzas, probably suggests devotional ideas to the people, and it may be, when they are praying, they feel a breath of Paradise fanning them. If we could only see any good effects in their daily life, we might deem it an excellent thing to be able to find incense and a prayer always ascending, to which every individual may join his own. I really wonder that the Catholics are not better men and women.

When we had looked at the old frescos, . . . . we emerged into the cloister again, and thence ventured into a passage which would have led us to the Chiostro Grande, where strangers, and especially ladies, have no right to go. It was a secluded corridor, very neatly kept, bordered with sepulchral monuments, and at the end appeared a vista of cypress-trees, which indeed were but an illusory perspective, being painted in fresco. While we loitered along the sacristan appeared and offered to show us the church, and led us into the transept on the right of the high altar, and ushered us into the sacristy, where we found two artists copying some of Fra Angelico's pictures. These were painted on the three wooden leaves of a triptych, and, as usual, were glorified with a great deal of gilding, so that they seemed to float in the brightness of a heavenly element. Solomon speaks of "apples of gold in pictures of silver." The pictures of Fra Angelico, and other artists of that age, are really pictures of gold; and it is wonderful to see how rich the effect, and how much delicate beauty is attained (by Fra Angelico at least) along with it. His miniature-heads appear to me much more successful than his larger ones. In a monkish point of view, however, the chief value of the triptych of which I am speaking does not lie in the pictures, for they merely serve as the framework of some relics, which are set all round the edges of the three leaves. They consist of little bits and fragments of bones, and of packages carefully tied up in silk, the contents of which are signified in Gothic letters appended to each parcel. The sacred vessels of the church are likewise kept in the sacristy. . . . .