As I walked about this city, lingering in its doorways, brooding over its pictures, reconstructing for myself the life of the Middle Ages, I could not help thinking how soon it must all go. No doubt the churches, palaces, and museums will be retained in their present form for hundreds of years, and they should be, but soon will come wider streets and newer houses even in the older section (the heart of the city) and then farewell to the medieval atmosphere. In all likelihood the wide cornices, now such a noticeable feature of the city, will be abandoned and then there will be scarcely anything to indicate the Florence of the past. Already the street cars were clang-clanging their way through certain sections.
The Arno here is so different from the Tiber at Rome; and yet so much like it, for it has in the main the same unprepossessing look, running as it does through the city between solid walls of stone but lacking the spectacles of the castle of St. Angelo, Saint Peter’s, the hills and the gardens of the Aventine and the Janiculum. There are no ancient ruins on the Arno,—only the suggestive architecture of the Middle Ages, the wonderful Ponte Vecchio and the houses adjacent to it.
Indeed the river here is nothing more than a dammed stream—shallow before it reaches the city, shallow after it leaves it, but held in check here by great stone dams which give it a peculiarly still mass and depth. The spirit of the people was not the same as that of those in Rome or other cities; the spirit of the crowd was different. A darker, richer, more phlegmatic populace, I thought. The people were slow, leisurely, short and comfortable. I sated myself on the house fronts or backs below the Ponte Vecchio and on the little jewelry shops of which there seemed to be an endless variety; and then feeling that I had had a taste of the city, I returned to larger things. The Duomo, the palaces of the Medici, the Pitti Palace, and that world which concerned the Council of Florence, and the dignified goings to and fro of old Cosimo Pater and his descendants were the things that I wished to see and realize for myself if I could.
I think we make a mistake when we assume that the manners, customs, details, conversation, interests and excitements of people anywhere were ever very much different from what they are now. In three or four hundred years from now people in quite similar situations to our own will be wondering how we took our daily lives; quite the same as our ancestors, I should say, and no differently from our descendants. Life works about the same in all times. Only exterior aspects change. In the particular period in which Florence, and all Italy for that matter, was so remarkable, Italy was alive with ambitious men—strong, remarkable, capable characters. They made the wonder of the life, it was not the architecture that did it and not the routine movements of the people. Florence has much the same architecture to-day, better in fact; but not the men. Great men make great times—and only struggling, ambitious, vainglorious men make the existence of the artist possible, however much he may despise them. They are the only ones who in their vainglory and power can readily call upon him to do great things and supply the means. Witness Raphael and Michelangelo in Italy, Rubens in Holland, and Velasquez in Spain.
CHAPTER XXXIX
FLORENCE OF TO-DAY
It was while I was in Florence that a light was thrown on an industry of which I had previously known little and which impressed me much.
Brooding over the almost endless treasures of the city, I ambled into the Strozzi Palace one afternoon, that perfect example of Florentine palatial architecture, then occupied by an exposition of objects of art, reproductions and originals purporting to be the work of an association of Italian artists. After I had seen, cursorily, most of the treasures in the Palazzo Strozzi, I encountered a thing which I had long heard of but never seen,—an organization for the reproduction, the reduplication, of all the wonders of art, and cheaply, too. The place was full of marbles of the loveliest character, replicas of famous statues in the Vatican, the Louvre, the Uffizi, and elsewhere; and in many instances, also, copies of the great pictures. There was beautiful furniture imitated, even as to age, from many of the Italian palaces, the Riccardi, Albizzi, Pazzi, Pitti, Strozzi, and others; and as for garden-fittings—fountains, fauns, cupids, benches, metal gateways, pergolas, and the like, they were all present. They were marvelous reproductions from some of the villas, with the patina of age upon them, and I thought at first that they were original. I was soon undeceived, for I had not been there long, strolling about, when an attendant brought and introduced to me a certain Prof. Ernesto Jesuram, a small, dark, wiry man with clear, black, crowlike eyes who made clear the whole situation.
The markets of the world, according to Mr. Jesuram, a Jew, were being flooded with cheap imitations of every truly worthy object of art, from Italian stone benches to landscapes by Corot or portraits by Frans Hals—masquerading as originals; and it had been resolved by this Association of Italian Artists that this was unfair, not only to the buyer and the art-loving public generally, but also to the honest craftsman who could make an excellent living reproducing, frankly, copies of ancient works of merit at a nominal price, if only they were permitted to copy them. Most, in fact all of them, could make interesting originals but in many cases they would lack that trait of personality which makes all the difference between success and failure; whereas they could perfectly reproduce the masterpieces of others and that, too, for prices with which no foreigner could compete. So they had banded themselves together, determined to do better work, and sell more cheaply than the fly-by-night rascals who were confounding and degrading all good art and to say frankly to each and all: “Here is a perfect reproduction of a very lovely thing. Do you want it at a very low cost?” or, “We will make for you an exact copy of anything that you see and admire and wish to have and we will make it so cheaply that you cannot afford to dicker with doubtful dealers who sell you imitations as originals and charge you outrageous prices.”
I have knocked about sufficiently in my time in the showy chambers of American dealers and elsewhere to know that there is entirely too much in what was told me.