It was so strange to find driven home to me,—even more here than in Rome, that illimitable gulf that divides ideality of thought and illusion from reality. Men painted the illusions of Christianity concerning the saints and the miracles at this time better than ever before or since, and they believed something else. A Cosimo Medici who could patronize the Papacy with one hand and make a cardinal into a pope, could murder a rival with the other; and Andrea del Castagno, who was seeking to shine as a painter of religious art—madonnas, transfigurations, and the like—could murder a Domenico Veneziano in order to have no rival in what he considered to be a permanent secret of how to paint in oils. The same munificence that could commission Michelangelo to design and execute a magnificent façade for San Lorenzo (it was never done, of course) could suborn the elective franchise of the people and organize a school on the lines of Plato’s Academy. In other words, in Florence as in the Court of Alexander VI at Rome, we find life stripped of all sham in action, in so far as an individual and his conscience were concerned, and filled with the utmost subtlety in so far as the individual and the public were concerned. Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici, Andrea del Castagno, Machiavelli, the Pazzi, the Strozzi,—in fact, the whole “kit and kaboodle” of the individuals comprising the illustrious life that foregathered here, were cut from the same piece of cloth. They were, one and all, as we know, outside of a few artistic figures, shrewd, calculating, relentless and ruthless seekers after power and position; lust, murder, gormandizing, panoplizing, were the order of the day. Religion,—it was to be laughed at; weakness,—it was to be scorned. Poverty was to be misused. Innocence was to be seized upon and converted. Laughing at virtue and satisfying themselves always, they went their way, building their grim, dark, almost windowless palaces; preparing their dungeons and erecting their gibbets for their enemies. No wonder Savonarola saw “a black cross over Rome.” They struck swiftly and surely and smiled blandly and apparently mercifully; they had the Asiatic notion of morality,—charity, virtue, and the like, combined with a ruthless indifference to them. Power was the thing they craved—power and magnificence; and these were the things they had. But, oh, Florence! Florence! how you taught the nothingness of life itself; its shams; its falsehoods; its atrocities; its uselessness. It has never been any wonder to me that the saddest, darkest, most pathetic figure in all art, Michelangelo Buonarroti, should have appeared and loved and dreamed and labored and died at this time. His melancholy was a fit commentary on his age, on life, and on all art. Oh, Buonarroti, loneliest of figures: I think I understand how it was with you.
Bear with me while I lay a flower on this great grave. I cannot think of another instance in art in which indomitable will and almost superhuman energy have been at once so frustrated and so successful.
I never think of the great tomb for which the Moses in San Pietro in Vincoli—large, grave, thoughtful; the man who could walk with God—and the slaves in the Louvre were intended without being filled with a vast astonishment and grief to think that life should not have permitted this design to come to fulfilment. To think that a pope so powerful as Julius should have planned a tomb so magnificent, with Michelangelo to scheme it out and actually to begin it, and then never permit it to reach completion. All the way northward through Italy this idea of a parallelogram with forty figures on it and covered with reliefs and other ornaments haunted me. At Florence, in the Belle Arti, I saw more of the figures (casts), designed for this tomb—strange, unfolding thoughts half-hewn out of the rock, which suggest the source from which Rodin has drawn his inspiration,—and my astonishment grew. Before I was out of Italy, this man and his genius, the mere dreams of the things he hoped to do, enthralled me so that to me he has become the one great art figure of the world. Colossal is the word for Michelangelo,—so vast that life was too short for him to suggest even a tithe of what he felt. But even the things that he did, how truly monumental they are.
I am sure I am not mistaken when I say that there is a profound sadness, too, running through all that he ever did. His works are large, Gargantuan, and profoundly melancholy; witness the Moses that I have been talking of, to say nothing of the statues on the tombs of the Medici in San Lorenzo at Florence. I saw them in Berlin, reproduced there in plaster in the Kaiser-Friederich-Museum, and once more I was filled with the same sense of profound, meditative melancholy. It is present in its most significant form here in Florence, in San Lorenzo, the façade of which he once prepared to make magnificent, but here he was again frustrated. I saw the originals of these deep, sad figures that impressed me as no other sculptural figures ever have done. “Dawn and Dusk”; “Day and Night.” How they dwell with me constantly. I was never able to look at any of his later work—the Sistine Chapel frescoes, the figures of slaves in the Louvre, the Moses in San Pietro in Vincoli, or these figures here in Florence, without thinking how true it was that this great will had rarely had its way and how, throughout all his days, his energy was so unfortunately compelled to war with circumstance. Life plays this trick on the truly great if they are not ruthless and of material and executive leanings. Art is a pale flower that blooms only in sheltered places and to drag it forth and force it to contend with the rough usages of the world is to destroy its perfectness. It was so in this man’s case who at times, because of unlucky conjunctions, was compelled to fly for his life, or to sue for the means which life should have been honored to bestow upon him, or else to abandon great purposes.
Out of such a mist of sorrow, and only so, however, have come these figures that now dream here year after year in their gray chapel, while travelers come and go, draining their cup of wonder,—rising ever and anon to the level of the beauty they contemplate. I can see Browning speculating upon the spirit of these figures. “Night” with her heavy lids, lost in great weariness; and “Day” with his clear eyes. I can see Rodin gathering substance for his “Thinker,” and Shelley marveling at the suggestions which arise from these mighty figures. There is none so great as this man who, in his medieval gloom and mysticism, inherited the art of Greece.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
A NIGHT RAMBLE IN FLORENCE
Whatever the medieval atmosphere of Florence may have been, and when I was there the exterior appearance of the central heart was obviously somewhat akin to its fourteenth- and fifteenth-century predecessor, to-day its prevailing spirit is thoroughly modern. If you walk in the Piazza della Signoria or the Piazza del Duomo or the Via dei Calzaioli, the principal thoroughfare, you will encounter most of the ancient landmarks—a goodly number of them, but they will look out of place, as in the case of the palaces with their windowless ground floors, built so for purposes of defense, their corner lanterns, barricaded windows, and single great entrances easily guarded. To-day these regions have, if not the open spacing of the modern city, at least the commercial sprightliness and matter-of-fact business display and energy which is characteristic of commerce everywhere.
I came to the Piazza della Signoria, the most famous square of the city, quite by accident, the first night following a dark, heavily corniced street from my hotel and at once recognized the Palazzo Vecchio, with its thin angular tower; the Loggia dei Lanzi, where in older times public performances were given in the open; and the equestrian statue of Cosimo I. I idled long here, examining the bronze slab which marks the site of the stake at which Savonarola and two other Dominicans were burned in 1498, the fountain designed by Bartolommeo Ammanati; the two lions at the step of the Loggia and Benvenuto Cellini’s statue of “Perseus” with the head of Medusa. A strange genius, that. This figure is as brilliant and thrilling as it is ghastly.
It was a lovely night. The moon came up after a time as it had at Perugia and Assisi and I wandered about these old streets, feeling the rough brown walls, looking in at the open shop windows, most of them dark and lighted by street lamps, and studying always the wide, overhanging cornices. All really interesting cities are so delightfully different. London was so low, gray, foggy, heavy, drab, and commonplace; Paris was so smart, swift, wide-spaced, rococo, ultra-artistic, and fashionable; Monte Carlo was so semi-Parisian and semi-Algerian or Moorish, with sunlight and palms; Rome was so higgledy-piggledy, of various periods, with a strange mingling of modernity and antiquity, and over all blazing sunlight and throughout all cypresses; and now in Florence I found the compact, dark atmosphere, suggestive of what Paris once was, centuries before, with this distinctive feature, that the wide cornice is here an essential characteristic. It is so wide! It protrudes outward from the building line at least three or four feet and it may be much more, six or seven. One thing is certain, as I found to my utter delight on a rainy afternoon, you can take shelter under its wide reach and keep comparatively dry. Great art has been developed in making it truly ornamental and it gives the long narrow streets a most individual and, in my judgment, distinguished appearance.