Santo Spirito is not as well known to strangers as the other large churches of Florence. It is on the south, or less frequented, side of the river, and is so hemmed in, hidden away, and thrust out of sight, by compact masses of tall dwellings and old palaces, that, although just round the corner from the Pitti, it was a month before I found it out. Indeed, I was only then apprised of its existence by the drums of the Sixth grenadiers beating for military Mass.
A piazza in Florence means an acre, more or less, of oblong, open, flat, macadamized, unornamented ground; without tree, or shrub, or flower, or even the picturesque grasses of the deader Italian towns. The Piazza of Santo Spirito is peculiarly bald and insipid. The exterior of the church itself is dreadful; shabbiness and dilapidation unrelieved by a single line of beauty. The cupola, for which Brunelleschi is responsible, is mean almost to vulgarity; almost as mean as the cupola of San Lorenzo. Two such cupolas would ruin any other reputation than his who vaulted Santa Maria del Fiore. The only redeeming feature in the whole quadrilateral is the charming Campanile, or belfry of Baccio d'Agnolo's, which hovers like the dream of a poet over Ser Filippo's prose. The facade of the church is unfinished, and, what is worse, disfigured by the introduction of the scroll, that poorest, falsest, shallowest of architectural devices. The scroll is properly the symbol of the fleeting; a line described through air or water with wand or wheel; the scriptural type of evanescence: "And the heavens shall be rolled away like a scroll." (Isaiah.) "And the heaven withdrew, as a scroll rolled up together." (Revelation.)
How monstrous a violation of all fitness to adopt it as part of the fixed form and outline of an edifice—to fasten the sign of the transient on the front of mansions dedicated to the service of the Eternal! The front is the weakest elevation of the basilica, but the scroll only makes it worse. See how well the matter can be mended by the gold mosaic and linear grace of San Miniato, by the arched colonnades of Pisa, by the pointed buttresses—not the wretched windows—of Milan. You are in a rage with Ser Filippo and the Renaissance at once.
But enter; push the green baize aside; step fairly in. Heaven, how beautiful! What breadth, what calm, what repose! Round-arched aisles of dark Corinthian columns, not stopping at the choir, but running clean round transepts and apsis, traversing a Latin cross of more than three hundred by nearly two hundred feet. No stained glass—all in transparent shadow, like the heart of a forest. A church built for use, not show; yet lofty, spacious, beautiful, with an atmosphere of its own which is luxury to breathe. Not the gloom of the Duomo, nor the glow of St. Peter's, nor yet the gray of San Lorenzo; the place is haunted by a dim, mysterious gladness. Although in the round style, and comparatively barren of detail, it looks larger even than it is; larger than Santa Maria Novella or Santa Croce. Its real magnitude is enhanced by its perfect proportions; a fact which should keep us from flippantly imputing to the same cause the illusive littleness of St. Peter's.
But the grenadiers are marching in, "fifty score strong;" their bayonets are flashing in nave and aisle. You would think the church would never hold them all; yet there is room beneath those brown arches for thrice as many more. As soon as the men are formed, the officers march down the nave amidst complete silence—their breasts covered with decorations won at Magenta and Solferino—and range themselves before the choir. In the transept on their right is stationed their band, much the best in Florence—some forty instruments, admirably led, and nearly as good as the Austrian. Just as the music begins, the chaplain, a handsome, grave young ecclesiastic—followed by two tall grenadiers who serve his Mass—advances from Cronaca's beautiful sacristy; and, without the least appearance of haste, and with the utmost dignity, Mass is said in fifteen minutes. No noise, no shuffling, no whispering, none of the effort and formality of a festa; the charm is that of a ceremony first beheld just as the celebrants are first at home in their parts. The cavalry Mass at Santa Maria Novella is far less imposing; dismounted troopers are always awkward, and their band, in this instance, is a poor one. But it was very fine at La Novella—the two dragoons flanking the altar with naked sabres, else motionless at their sides, flashed forward in swift salute at the elevation.
As soon as Mass was over, the troops dispersed and I was at liberty to explore the church. What a relief to find the pictures covered! it almost reconciled me to Lent. What a delight to find all the details unobtrusive—all the chapels modestly in the background, instead of parading their comparative insignificances. Nothing blank or bald: a broad, single effect like the Sistine Sibyls and Prophets, or the Madonna of the Fish, or the Idylls of the King.
In the ages of faith, the monk, the noble, and the state went hand in hand in erecting and adorning the house of God—in making it gigantic, beautiful, imperishable, complete. Not only in Italy, but throughout Europe, there was a silent compact between the present and the future—an assurance that the inspiration of to-day would remain the inspiration of tomorrow—an abiding conviction that the creed of the sire would remain for ever precisely the creed of the son. In this belief, the founders of the great churches cut out work for three centuries with less misgiving than we should now have in projecting for as many years. The builders of the English abbeys foresaw not the day when the torch and sword and hammer of the descendant would be uplifted to burn, to stain, to shatter a repudiated inheritance; when the rites of new and hostile doctrines would affront the few ancestral temples that were spared. The architects of St. Peter's foresaw not the large revolt for which they were unconsciously paving the way in Germany. Like ourselves, to be sure, they had the record of the past before them. They knew, as well as we, that naught was left of Corinth, and next to nothing of Athens, and little of ancient Rome save her Colosseum and her Pantheon; that the temple of Solomon was ashes; that the obelisks were pilgrims to the West; that the tented sepulchres of the shepherd kings stood solitary and meaningless in the desert. But, in spite of all this panorama of mutation and decay, they could not subdue the sacred instinct of building for eternity. Christianity was so charged with promise, triumph, and immortality that they fancied her tabernacles as indestructible as herself. There was a joyous trust, too, that "the time was at hand," a confident expectation that those domes and spires would abide till the coming of the Son of man in the glory of his Father with his angels.
But the English Reformation, the French Revolution, and Italian Unification have taught us that the monuments of the new faith, instead of being specially exempt from injury, are peculiarly liable to insult and mutilation. Men and nations have measurably ceased to care or expect to perpetuate themselves through the temple and the tomb. The soul of architecture has received a shock. Her throne is the solitude or the waste. She lurks amidst ruins and relics, the very Hagar of art. She that seemed mightiest has proved weakest; her daintier sisters, sculpture and song, have triumphed where she failed. The statues that adorned her porticoes are upright still, but the porticoes themselves are overthrown. The lay, the legend, the chronicle, committed with plying finger to paper or parchment, are living, while the forms of beauty and grandeur entrusted to marble are broken or beneath the sands. Here and there you meet her skeleton in the wilderness, her white arm upraised in sublime self-assertion; but though the story of Zenobia is immortal, there is scarcely a column of Palmyra standing. The very mummy, with his dry papyrus which a spark might annihilate, may chance to survive his pyramid! Nature has turned against her; matter has played her false. She has toiled a thousand years in granite, iron, cedar—in all that seemed solidest, hardest, firmest: her back is bent with honest toil, her hands are roughened with mallet and chisel; yet the dream of a poet traced on calfskin outlasts the vision embodied in travertine or porphyry. If an earthquake shook the Val d'Arno, the canvas of Giotto would survive his campanile.
What mockery, then, to persist in attempting the indestructible when dissolution or disintegration is the inevitable doom of the material! Time has demonstrated that the more ponderous the instrument of expression, the less easy of perpetuation the art. The obliterated manuscript can be forced to reappear, but no chemistry can reproduce the vanished temple. The greatest forces of the universe are precisely those which are subtlest and least substantial. Steam and electricity are well-nigh impalpable and invisible. It is the spirit, not the body, save as purged and spiritualized by decay, that exists for ever. Away, then, with the unattainable! Away with a miscalled real! If it, too, is a cheat, may it not be counterfeited with impunity? Away with column of stone, with lacework of fretted marble, with blazonry in oak and walnut! Away with all stubborn, difficult truth, and welcome brick and mortar, lath and plaster, paint and whitewash, gilt and varnish. If the cheap will look as well or nearly as well as the dear, why not use it? It is no falser, only sooner falser. When it wears out or burns up or tumbles down, try it again. Be done with the tower of Babel: its curse clings faster to architecture than to speech. And as for the gigantic, drop it! It is always a disappointment—a disappointment in nature and art, in minster, mountain, stream—a disappointment in all things save the broad dome of the empyrean with its floor of emerald, its ceiling of unfathomed blue or studded bronze, its draperies of shifting, winged, ethereal cloudland.
Yes, art, like the artist, must encounter death. But shall we embrace the mean because sooner or later we must relinquish the great? Shall we forsake the permanent for the transient because the enduring falls short of the everlasting? Shall we inaugurate a reign of sham because the real is not always the perpetual?