The 14th century is chiefly interesting at Florence as the period of Giottesque art, finding its final crown in Fra Angelico. With the beginning of the 15th, we get the dawn of the Renaissance—the age when art set out once more to recover the lost perfection of antique workmanship. In literature, this movement took the form of humanism; in architecture and sculpture, it exhibited itself in the persons of Alberti, Ghiberti, Della Robbia, and Donatello; in painting, it showed itself in Lippi, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, and Verrocchio....
We start, then, with the fact that up to nearly the close of the 13th century (1278), Florence was a comparatively small and uninteresting town, without any buildings of importance, save the relatively insignificant Baptistery; without any great cathedral, like Pisa and Siena; without any splendid artistic achievement of any kind. It consisted at that period of a labyrinth of narrow streets, enclosing huddled houses and tall towers of the nobles, like the two to be seen to this day at Bologna. In general aspect, it could not greatly have differed from Albenga or San Gimignano in our own time. But commerce was active; wealth was increasing; and the population was seething with the intellectual and artistic spirit of its Etruscan ancestry. During the lifetime of Dante, the town began to transform itself and to prepare for becoming the glorious Florence of the Renaissance artists. It then set about building two immense and beautiful churches—Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella—while, shortly after, it grew to be ashamed of its tiny San Giovanni (the existing Baptistery), and girded itself up to raise a superb cathedral, which should cast into the shade both the one long since finished at maritime Pisa and the one then still rising to completion on the height of Siena.
Florence at that time extended no further than the area known as Old Florence, which means from the Ponte Vecchio to the Cathedral in one direction, and from the Ponte alla Carraja to the Grazie in the other. Outside the wall lay a belt of fields and gardens, in which one or two monasteries had already sprung up. But Italy at that moment was filled with religious enthusiasm by the advent of the Friars both great orders of whom, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, had already established themselves in the rising commercial city of Florence. Both orders had acquired sites for monastic buildings in the space outside the walls and soon began to erect enormous churches. The Dominicans came first, with Santa Maria Novella, the commencement of which dates from 1278; the Franciscans were a little later in the field, with Santa Croce, the first stone not being placed till 1294.
THE CATHEDRAL[30]
BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE
Desirous of seeing the beginnings of this Renaissance we go from the Palazzo-Vecchio to the Duomo. Both form the double heart of Florence, such as it beat in the Middle Ages, the former for politics, and the latter for religion, and the two so well united that they formed but one. Nothing can be nobler than the public edict passed in 1294 for the construction of the national cathedral.
"Whereas, it being of sovereign prudence on the part of a people of high origin to proceed in its affairs in such a manner that the wisdom no less than the magnanimity of its proceedings can be recognized in its outward works, it is ordered that Arnolfo, master architect of our commune, prepare models or designs for the restoration of Santa Maria Reparata, with the most exalted and most prodigal magnificence, in order that the industry and power of men may never create or undertake anything whatsoever more vast and more beautiful; in accordance with that which our wisest citizens have declared and counselled in public session and in secret conclave, to wit, that no hand be laid upon the works of the commune without the intent of making them to correspond to the noble soul which is composed of the souls of all its citizens united in one will."