Italian Hours/Italy Revisited, part VI
It was very charming, in the bright, warm days, to wander from
one corner of Florence to another, paying one's respects again to
remembered masterpieces. It was pleasant also to find that memory
had played no tricks and that the rarest things of an earlier
year were as rare as ever. To enumerate ,these felicities would
take a great deal of space; for I never had been more struck with
the mere quantity of brilliant Florentine work. Even giving up
the Duomo and Santa Croce to Mr. Ruskin as very ill-arranged
edifices, the list of the Florentine treasures is almost
inexhaustible. Those long outer galleries of the Uffizi had never
beguiled me more; sometimes there were not more than two or three
figures standing there, Baedeker in hand, to break the charming
perspective. One side of this upstairs portico, it will be
remembered, is entirely composed of glass; a continuity of old-
fashioned windows, draped with white curtains of rather primitive
fashion, which hang there till they acquire a perceptible tone.
The light, passing through them, is softly filtered and diffused;
it rests mildly upon the old marbles--chiefly antique Roman
busts--which stand in the narrow intervals of the casements. It
is projected upon the numerous pictures that cover the opposite
wall and that are not by any means, as a general thing, the gems
of the great collection; it imparts a faded brightness to the old
ornamental arabesques upon the painted wooden ceiling, and it
makes a great soft shining upon the marble floor, in which, as
you look up and down, you see the strolling tourists and the
motionless copyists almost reflected. I don't know why I should
find all this very pleasant, but in fact, I have seldom gone into
the Uffizi without walking the length of this third-story
cloister, between the (for the most part) third-rate canvases and
panels and the faded cotton curtains. Why is it that in Italy we
see a charm in things in regard to which in other countries we
always take vulgarity for granted? If in the city of New York a
great museum of the arts were to be provided, by way of
decoration, with a species of verandah enclosed on one side by a
series of small-paned windows draped in dirty linen, and
furnished on the other with an array of pictorial feebleness, the
place being surmounted by a thinly-painted wooden roof, strongly
suggestive of summer heat, of winter cold, of frequent leakage,
those amateurs who had had the advantage of foreign travel would
be at small pains to conceal their contempt. Contemptible or
respectable, to the judicial mind, this quaint old loggia of the
Uffizi admitted me into twenty chambers where I found as great a
number of ancient favourites. I don't know that I had a warmer
greeting for any old friend than for Andrea del Sarto, that most
touching of painters who is not one of the first. But it was on
the other side of the Arno that I found him in force, in those
dusky drawing-rooms of the Pitti Palace to which you take your
way along the tortuous tunnel that wanders through the houses of
Florence and is supported by the little goldsmiths' booths on the
Ponte Vecchio. In the rich insufficient light of these beautiful
rooms, where, to look at the pictures, you sit in damask chairs
and rest your elbows on tables of malachite, the elegant Andrea
becomes deeply effective. Before long he has drawn you close. But
the great pleasure, after all, was to revisit the earlier
masters, in those specimens of them chiefly that bloom so
unfadingly on the big plain walls of the Academy. Fra Angelico
and Filippo Lippi, Botticelli and Lorenzo di Credi are the
clearest, the sweetest and best of all painters; as I sat for an
hour in their company, in the cold great hall of the institution
I have mentioned--there are shabby rafters above and an immense
expanse of brick tiles below, and many bad pictures as well as
good--it seemed to me more than ever that if one really had to
choose one couldn't do better than choose here. You may rest at
your ease at the Academy, in this big first room--at the upper
end especially, on the left--because more than many other places
it savours of old Florence. More for instance, in reality, than
the Bargello, though the Bargello makes great pretensions.
Beautiful and masterful though the Bargello is, it smells too
strongly of restoration, and, much of old Italy as still lurks in
its furbished and renovated chambers, it speaks even more
distinctly of the ill-mannered young kingdom that has--as
"unavoidably" as you please--lifted down a hundred delicate works
of sculpture from the convent-walls where their pious authors
placed them. If the early Tuscan painters are exquisite I can
think of no praise pure enough for the sculptors of the same
period, Donatello and Luca della Robbia, Matteo Civitale and Mina
da Fiesole, who, as I refreshed my memory of them, seemed to me
to leave absolutely nothing to be desired in the way of
straightness of inspiration and grace of invention. The Bargello
is full of early Tuscan sculpture, most of the pieces of which
have come from suppressed religious houses; and even if the
visitor be an ardent liberal he is uncomfortably conscious of the
rather brutal process by which it has been collected. One can
hardly envy young Italy the number of odious things she has had
to do.
The railway journey from Florence to Rome has been altered both for the better and for the worse; for the better in that it has been shortened by a couple of hours; for the worse inasmuch as when about half the distance has been traversed the train deflects to the west and leaves the beautiful old cities of Assisi, Perugia, Terni, Narni, unvisited. Of old it was possible to call at these places, in a manner, from the window of the train; even if you didn't stop, as you probably couldn't, every time you passed, the immensely interesting way in which, like a loosened belt on an aged and shrunken person, their ample walls held them easily together was something well worth noting. Now, however, for compensation, the express train to Rome stops at Orvieto, and in consequence... In consequence what? What is the result of the stop of an express train at Orvieto? As I glibly wrote that sentence I suddenly paused, aware of the queer stuff I was uttering. That an express train would graze the base of the horrid purple mountain from the apex of which this dark old Catholic city uplifts the glittering front of its cathedral-- that might have been foretold by a keen observer of contemporary manners. But that it would really have the grossness to hang about is a fact over which, as he records it, an inveterate, a perverse cherisher of the sense of the past order, the order still largely prevailing at the time of his first visit to Italy, may well make what is vulgarly called an ado. The train does stop at Orvieto, not very long, it is true, but long enough to let you out. The same phenomenon takes place on the following day, when, having visited the city, you get in again. I availed myself without scruple of both of these occasions, having formerly neglected to drive to the place in a post-chaise. But frankly, the railway-station being in the plain and the town on the summit of an extraordinary hill, you have time to forget the puffing indiscretion while you wind upwards to the city-gate. The position of Orvieto is superb--worthy of the "middle distance" of an eighteenth-century landscape. But, as every one knows, the splendid Cathedral is the proper attraction of the spot, which, indeed, save for this fine monument and for its craggy and crumbling ramparts, is a meanly arranged and, as Italian cities go, not particularly impressive little town. I spent a beautiful Sunday there and took in the charming church. I gave it my best attention, though on the whole I fear I found it inferior to its fame. A high concert of colour, however, is the densely carved front, richly covered with radiant mosaics. The old white marble of the sculptured portions is as softly yellow as ancient ivory; the large exceedingly bright pictures above them flashed and twinkled in the glorious weather. Very striking and interesting the theological frescoes of Luca Signorelli, though I have seen compositions of this general order that appealed to me more. Characteristically fresh, finally, the clear-faced saints and seraphs, in robes of pink and azure, whom Fra Angelico has painted upon the ceiling of the great chapel, along with a noble sitting figure--more expressive of movement than most of the creations of this pictorial peace-maker--of Christ in judgment. Yet the interest of the cathedral of Orvieto is mainly not the visible result, but the historical process that lies behind it; those three hundred years of the applied devotion of a people of which an American scholar has written an admirable account.[1]
1877.
Footnotes[edit]
- ↑ Charles Eliot Norton, Notes of Travel and Study in Italy.