Glimpses Of Tuscany.
Santa Maria Del Fiore—The Duomo.
I.
We are approaching Florence by rail from Pisa, a dismal, dripping February morning. It is twelve years since I first saw that famous Duomo of Santa Maria del Fiore. I came suddenly upon it, as I was trying to find my way alone to the opera at the Pergola, the first night I got to Florence. I shall never forget the impression it made on me—an honest, original impression, for I had never read or heard of the Piazza and its wonders. I only knew Giotto by his "O." Orgagna, Arnolfo, Brunelleschi, were names utterly unknown. But the beauty and immensity of that mighty square, asleep in the starlight, overwhelmed me. It was like a step, unawares, from time into eternity. No Pergola that night for me. I crept back to the hotel, bewildered and awed into something like earnestness; for the Lord seemed enthroned in that consecrated place, and I was afraid of him as he sat there, stern, conscious, omnipotent.
But I was younger then; disposed to go into raptures over everything artistic, especially Italian art. The decade between thirty and forty diminishes one's enthusiasm dreadfully. I am almost afraid to meet my old favorite now, lest the spell of a fine remembrance should be broken for ever. But the train is rushing on, the road curves, and there's the same Duomo, looking as if Our Lady of Flowers herself had settled down on the city, with Giotto's campanile, like an archangel, standing guard beside her. There she sits in her gray mantle, grayer through the mist and snow, queen of all the landscape—grander, lighter, lovelier than ever.
Here we are at the station, and now driving past the baptistery; but, far or near, that cupola ever full in view like a guardian presence. You do not wonder here, as before Saint Peter's, what has become of the cupola; you are not obliged to fall back a league to see what is nearly overhead. Nave, transept, and tribune go swelling up, with buttress and demi-cupola diminishing as they ascend, and all converging into one enormous drum from which springs the central dome. Dante could see it from his chair in its very shadow. Arnolfo and Brunelleschi may see it from their seats of marble scarce twenty yards from the foundation-stone. Angelo may see it from his home in Santa Croce. The masons of Fiesole can see it from their hills, the peasants of San Casciano from their vineyards; and, far down the Arno, the boatmen from Pisa look up to it as they plod wearily along.
I am domesticated in Florence; the slow Tuscan spring is passing into summer; and, from being simply a joy, this great cathedral has become a study. Arnolfo, son of Lapo, or Cambio, was the great stone-poet who traced that ground-plan, itself an epic. He was commissioned by those wonderful republicans to construct a church, as worthy as man could make it of the glory of God and the dignity of the city of Florence. The inclination of Arnolfo's genius was toward the Gothic; but he was a many-sided and myriad-minded man. His walls of Florence suggest the Egyptian, his court of the Bargello the Saracenic, his Palazzo Vecchio a perfectly new idea. He has all the versatility of Shakespeare. Arnolfo's first conception of Santa Maria del Fiore may still be seen in fresco, copied from the last wooden model, in the Spanish Cloister of Santa Maria Novella. Up to the first cornice, the cathedral, as it now stands, is almost as purely Gothic as the campanile; and, by reference to the fresco, you will perceive that Arnolfo's original idea was to carry this Gothic treatment up to the very cross that crowns the lantern. For instance, the lantern in the fresco is without either ball or scroll, the clerestory buttressed, and with pointed instead of circular lights, the windows of the cupola pointed. Yet, as it is certain that Arnolfo lived to finish the clerestory, and to unite (serrare) the smaller cupolas and tribunes, it is clear these variations in his plan, these departures from the pointed, these approximations to the round, were deliberately made by Arnolfo himself, or by his direction. As the work advanced, he felt that something more must be conceded to the coming cupola. It was not enough to have it octagonal instead of spherical, and enrich its eight marble ribs with Gothic tracery; the antagonism between the two styles must be met and softened from the start. See how gradually this is done, and at what an early stage these concessions begin. In the fresco, the blind arches, both over the lower tribunal windows and just under the lower tribunal cornice, are slightly pointed; in the building itself they are round; the niches above the cornice, also, are pointed in the picture and round-topped in the stone. It is more than probable that these concessions were dictated by the greater prominence which the cupola was assuming in Arnolfo's new vision of his temple. Now is it impossible, that he might have nearly anticipated the exact plan of the heir of his inspiration and partner of his glory? The tendency is that way. But, with the completion of the clerestory and the unification of the smaller cupolas, Arnolfo departs, and, after an interval of a century and a quarter, Brunelleschi enters.
There they are, seated side by side in marble, close to the stone that marks where Dante, too, sat gazing at their Duomo. Arnolfo looks more like a dreamer than a doer, although he was both; in Ser Brunelleschi's face there is more of the mathematician than the poet. He could never have traced that ground-plan, never have dreamed that shining archangel called the campanile; but he did what neither the pupil of Cimabue nor the son of Cambio could perhaps have managed as well, he built that matchless cupola. Brunelleschi had his one great dream, the solution of a vast and novel architectural difficulty. What Arnolfo had hinted became his grand ideal. He nursed his dream for years at Rome, communing with the spirit of classic art; at last he told his dream in Florence, and with infinite difficulty got leave to act it out. Since that noble carte blanche to Arnolfo, Florence had declined; she was no longer up to the proud standard of that earlier day. The superintendents are slippery and slow in engaging Filippo; and Filippo himself must finesse more than a little to secure the engagement. There is this difference, to be sure, that the Duomo was the culmination of Arnolfo's professional career and but the beginning of his successor's; that the latter, like all gallant adventurers, had to win his spurs before he could be fully trusted. Still, the two inseparable elements of self and gain are more conspicuous here than in the purer Christian ages, whose architects disdained or forbore to register their names; whose works preserve no personal memorial of their masters; "so that," says Vasari, "I cannot but marvel at the simplicity and indifference to glory exhibited by the men of that period." There is, unfortunately, no such simplicity to marvel at now.
As early as 1407, Filippo submitted an opinion to the superintendents of the works of Santa Maria del Fiore, and to the syndics of the guild of wool-workers, (powerful gentlemen in those days,) that the edifice above the roof must be constructed, not after the design of Arnolfo; but that a frieze, thirty feet high, must be erected with a large window in each of its sides. This suggestion, together with the additional thirty feet for the gallery, comprised the single, sublime conception to which the Duomo owes its crowning beauty; the rest of the task is chiefly mechanical. But such immense mechanics require immense genius. Filippo had supplied the idea, but there was no one found wise enough to execute it. The wardens and syndics were much perplexed; and Filippo, after laughing at them in his sleeve, returned to Rome. He had hardly gone before they wrote him to return. He came; and after patiently listening to the long array of difficulties which mediocrity always opposes to the inspiration of genius, admitted that the most enormous dome of ancient or modern times must present certain difficulties in its erection, like other great enterprises; that he was confounded no less by the breadth than by the height of the edifice; that if the tribune could be vaulted in a circular form, one might pursue the method adopted by the Romans in erecting the Pantheon; but that following up the eight sides of the building to a convergence, thus dove-tailing, and, so to speak, enchaining the stones, would be a most difficult and novel undertaking. "Yet"—and this touch is worthy of Arnolfo's age or any other—"yet, remembering that this is a temple consecrated to God and the Virgin, I confidently trust that, for a work executed in their honor, they will not fail to infuse knowledge where it is now wanting, and bestow strength, wisdom, and genius on him who shall be the author of such a project." Nothing can shake Filippo's joyous trust in himself; he acts as if he carries a divine commission in his pocket to finish what Arnolfo began, and can therefore afford to laugh at all human appointments or interference. With amazing confidence and magnanimity, he concludes his interview with their worships by exhorting them to assemble, on a fixed day within a year, as many architects as they can get together; not Tuscans and Italians only, but Germans, French, and all other nations, "to the end that the work may be commenced and intrusted to him who shall give the best evidence of capacity." The syndics and wardens liked Filippo's advice, and would also have liked him to prepare a model for their edification. But with all his piety and self-reliance, Ser Brunelleschi was a Florentine like their worships, and therefore keen enough to keep his model to himself. It then suddenly occurred to these grave gentlemen that money might be an object to Filippo, as it occasionally is to other men; and so they voted him a sum, not stated by Vasari, but not large enough to justify his remaining in Florence. So back to Rome once more marches the Ser Brunelleschi.