Italian Hours

The Autumn in Florence

Florence too has its "season," not less than Rome, and I have

been rejoicing for the past six weeks in the fact that this

comparatively crowded parenthesis hasn't yet been opened. Coming

here in the first days of October I found the summer still in

almost unmenaced possession, and ever since, till within a day or

two, the weight of its hand has been sensible. Properly enough,

as the city of flowers, Florence mingles the elements most

artfully in the spring--during the divine crescendo of March and

April, the weeks when six months of steady shiver have still not

shaken New York and Boston free of the long Polar reach. But the

very quality of the decline of the year as we at present here

feel it suits peculiarly the mood in which an undiscourageable

gatherer of the sense of things, or taster at least of "charm,"

moves through these many-memoried streets and galleries and

churches. Old things, old places, old people, or at least old

races, ever strike us as giving out their secrets most freely in

such moist, grey, melancholy days as have formed the complexion

of the past fortnight. With Christmas arrives the opera, the only

opera worth speaking of--which indeed often means in Florence the

only opera worth talking through; the gaiety, the gossip, the

reminders in fine of the cosmopolite and watering-place character

to which the city of the Medici long ago began to bend her

antique temper. Meanwhile it is pleasant enough for the tasters

of charm, as I say, and for the makers of invidious distinctions,

that the Americans haven't all arrived, however many may be on

their way, and that the weather has a monotonous overcast

softness in which, apparently, aimless contemplation grows less

and less ashamed. There is no crush along the Cascine, as on the

sunny days of winter, and the Arno, wandering away toward the

mountains in the haze, seems as shy of being looked at as a good

picture in a bad light. No light, to my eyes, nevertheless, could

be better than this, which reaches us, all strained and filtered

and refined, exquisitely coloured and even a bit conspicuously

sophisticated, through the heavy air of the past that hangs about

the place for ever.

I first knew Florence early enough, I am happy to say, to have

heard the change for the worse, the taint of the modern order,

bitterly lamented by old haunters, admirers, lovers--those

qualified to present a picture of the conditions prevailing under

the good old Grand-Dukes, the two last of their line in especial,

that, for its blest reflection of sweetness and mildness and

cheapness and ease, of every immediate boon in life to be

enjoyed quite for nothing, could but draw tears from belated

listeners. Some of these survivors from the golden age--just the

beauty of which indeed was in the gold, of sorts, that it poured

into your lap, and not in the least in its own importunity on

that head--have needfully lingered on, have seen the ancient

walls pulled down and the compact and belted mass of which the

Piazza della Signoria was the immemorial centre expand, under the

treatment of enterprising syndics, into an ungirdled organism of

the type, as they viciously say, of Chicago; one of those places

of which, as their grace of a circumference is nowhere, the

dignity of a centre can no longer be predicated. Florence loses

itself to-day in dusty boulevards and smart beaux

quartiers, such as Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann were to

set the fashion of to a too medi*** Europe--with the effect of

some precious page of antique text swallowed up in a marginal

commentary that smacks of the style of the newspaper. So much for

what has happened on this side of that line of demarcation which,

by an odd law, makes us, with our preference for what we are

pleased to call the picturesque, object to such occurrences even

as occurrences. The real truth is that objections are too

vain, and that he would be too rude a critic here, just now, who

shouldn't be in the humour to take the thick with the thin and to

try at least to read something of the old soul into the new

forms.

There is something to be said moreover for your liking a city

(once it's a question of your actively circulating) to pretend to

comfort you more by its extent than by its limits; in addition to

which Florence was anciently, was in her palmy days peculiarly,

a daughter of change and movement and variety, of shifting

moods, policies and r*****--just as the Florentine character,

as we have it to-day, is a character that takes all things easily

for having seen so many come and go. It saw the national capital,

a few years since, arrive and sit down by the Arno, and took no

further thought than sufficed for the day; then it saw, the odd

visitor depart and whistled her cheerfully on her way to Rome.

The new boulevards of the Sindaco Peruzzi come, it may be said,

but they don't go; which, after all, it isn't from the ************** of view strictly necessary they should. A part of the

essential amiability of Florence, of her genius for making you

take to your favour on easy terms everything that in any way

belongs to her, is that she has already flung an element of her

grace over all their undried mortar and plaster. Such modern

arrangements as the Piazza d' Azeglio and the viale or

Avenue of the Princess Margaret please not a little, I think--for

what they are!--and do so even in a degree, by some fine local

privilege just because they are Florentine. The afternoon lights

rest on them as if to thank them for not being worse, and their

vistas. are liberal where they look toward the hills. They carry

you close to these admirable elevations, which hang over

Florence on all sides, and if in the foreground your sense is a

trifle perplexed by the white pavements dotted here and there

with a policeman or a nursemaid, you have only to reach beyond

and see Fiesole turn to violet, on its ample eminence, from the

effect of the opposite sunset.

Facing again then to Florence proper you have local colour enough

and to spare--which you enjoy the more, doubtless, from standing

off to get your light and your point of view. The elder streets

abutting on all this newness bore away into the heart of the city

in narrow, dusky perspectives that quite refine, in certain

places, by an art of their own, on the romantic appeal. There are

temporal and other accidents thanks to which, as you pause to

look down them and to penetrate the deepening shadows that

accompany their retreat, they resemble little corridors leading

out from the past, mystical like the ladder in Jacob's dream; so

that when you see a single figure advance and draw nearer you are

half afraid to wait till it arrives--it must be too much of the

nature of a ghost, a messenger from an underworld. However this

may be, a place paved with such great mosaics of slabs and lined

with palaces of so massive a tradition, structures which, in

their large dependence on pure proportion for interest and

beauty, reproduce more than other modern styles the simple

nobleness of Greek architecture, must ever have placed dignity

first in the scale of invoked effect and laid up no great

treasure of that ragged picturesqueness--the picturesqueness of

large poverty--on which we feast our idle eyes at Rome and

Naples. Except in the unfinished fronts of the churches, which,

however, unfortunately, are mere ugly blankness, one finds less

of the poetry of ancient over-use, or in other words less

romantic southern shabbiness, than in most Italian cities. At two

or three points, none the less, this sinister grace exists in

perfection--just such perfection as so often proves that what is

literally hideous may be constructively delightful and what is

intrinsically tragic play on the finest chords of appreciation.

On the north side of the Arno, between Ponte Vecchio and Ponte

Santa Trinita, is a row of immemorial houses that back on the

river, in whose yellow flood they bathe their sore old feet.

Anything more battered and befouled, more cracked and disjointed,

dirtier, drearier, poorer, it would be impossible to conceive.

They look as if fifty years ago the liquid mud had risen over

their chimneys and then subsided again and left them coated for

ever with its unsightly slime. And yet forsooth, because the

river is yellow, and the light is yellow, and here and there,

elsewhere, some mellow mouldering surface, some hint of colour,

some accident of atmosphere, takes up the foolish tale and

repeats the note--because, in short, it is Florence, it is Italy,

and the fond appraiser, the infatuated alien, may have had in his

eyes, at birth and afterwards, the micaceous sparkle of brown-

stone fronts no more interesting than so much sand-paper, these

miserable dwellings, instead of suggesting mental invocations to

an enterprising board of health, simply create their own standard

of felicity and shamelessly live in it. Lately, during the misty

autumn nights, the moon has shone on them faintly and refined

their shabbiness away into something ineffably strange and

spectral. The turbid stream sweeps along without a sound, and the

pale tenements hang above it like a vague miasmatic exhalation.

The dimmest back-scene at the opera, when the tenor is singing

his sweetest, seems hardly to belong to a world more detached

from responsibility.

[Illustration: ON THE ARNO, FLORENCE.]

What it is that infuses so rich an interest into the general

charm is difficult to say in a few words; yet as we wander hither

and thither in quest of sacred canvas and immortal bronze and

stone we still feel the genius of the place hang about. Two

industrious English ladies, the Misses Horner, have lately

published a couple of volumes of "Walks" by the Arno-side, and

their work is a long enumeration of great artistic deeds. These

things remain for the most part in sound preservation, and, as

the weeks go by and you spend a constant portion of your days

among them the sense of one of the happiest periods of human

Taste--to put it only at that--settles upon your spirit. It was

not long; it lasted, in its splendour, for less than a century;

but it has stored away in the palaces and churches of Florence a

heritage of beauty that these three enjoying centuries since

haven't yet exhausted. This forms a clear intellectual atmosphere

into which you may turn aside from the modern world and fill your

lungs as with the breath of a forgotten creed. The memorials of

the past here address us moreover with a friendliness, win us by

we scarcely know what sociability, what equal amenity, that we

scarce find matched in other great esthetically endowed

communities and periods. Venice, with her old palaces cracking

under the weight of their treasures, is, in her influence,

insupportably sad; Athens, with her maimed marbles and

dishonoured memories, transmutes the consciousness of sensitive

observers, I am told, into a chronic heartache; but in one's

impression of old Florence the abiding felicity, the sense of

saving sanity, of something sound and human, predominates,

offering you a medium still conceivable for life. The reason of

this is partly, no doubt, the "sympathetic" nature, the temperate

joy, of Florentine art in general--putting the sole Dante,

greatest of literary artists, aside; partly the tenderness of

time, in its lapse, which, save in a few cases, has been as

sparing of injury as if it knew that when it should have dimmed

and corroded these charming things it would have nothing so sweet

again for its tooth to feed on. If the beautiful Ghirlandaios and

Lippis are fading, this generation will never know it. The large

Fra Angelico in the Academy is as clear and keen as if the good

old monk stood there wiping his brushes; the colours seem to

sing, as it were, like new-fledged birds in June. Nothing

is more characteristic of early Tuscan art than the high-reliefs

of Luca della Robbia; yet there isn't one of them that, except

for the unique mixture of freshness with its wisdom, of candour

with its expertness, mightn't have been modelled yesterday.

But perhaps the best image of the absence of stale melancholy or

wasted splendour, of the positive presence of what I have called

temperate joy, in the Florentine impression and genius, is the

bell-tower of Giotto, which rises beside the cathedral. No

beholder of it will have forgotten how straight and slender it

stands there, how strangely rich in the common street, plated

with coloured marble patterns, and yet so far from simple or

severe in design that we easily wonder how its author, the

painter of exclusively and portentously grave little pictures,

should have fashioned a building which in the way of elaborate

elegance, of the true play of taste, leaves a jealous modern

criticism nothing to miss. Nothing can be imagined at once more

lightly and more pointedly fanciful; it might have been handed

over to the city, as it stands, by some Oriental genie tired of

too much detail. Yet for all that suggestion it seems of no

particular time--not grey and hoary like a Gothic steeple, not

cracked and despoiled like a Greek temple; its marbles shining so

little less freshly than when they were laid together, and the

sunset lighting up its cornice with such a friendly radiance,

that you come at last to regard it simply as the graceful,

indestructible soul of the place made visible. The Cathedral,

externally, for all its solemn hugeness, strikes the same note of

would-be reasoned elegance and cheer; it has conventional

grandeur, of course, but a grandeur so frank and ingenuous even

in its parti-pris. It has seen so much, and outlived so

much, and served so many sad purposes, and yet remains in aspect

so full of the fine Tuscan geniality, the feeling for life, one

may almost say the feeling for amusement, that inspired it. Its

vast many-coloured marble walls become at any rate, with this,

the friendliest note of all Florence; there is an unfailing charm

in walking past them while they lift their great acres of

geometrical mosaic higher in the air than you have time or other

occasion to look. You greet them from the deep street as you

greet the side of a mountain when you move in the gorge--not

twisting back your head to keep looking at the top, but content

with the minor accidents, the nestling hollows and soft cloud-

shadows, the general protection of the valley.

Florence is richer in pictures than we really know till we have

begun to look for them in outlying corners. Then, here and there,

one comes upon lurking values and hidden gems that it quite seems

one might as a good New Yorker quietly "bag" for the so aspiring

Museum of that city without their being missed. The Pitti Palace

is of course a collection of masterpieces; they jostle each other

in their splendour, they perhaps even, in their merciless

multitude, rather fatigue our admiration. The Uffizi is almost as

fine a show, and together with that long serpentine artery which

crosses the Arno and connects them, making you ask yourself,

whichever way you take it, what goal can be grand enough to crown

such a journey, they form the great central treasure-chamber of

the town. But I have been neglecting them of late for love of the

Academy, where there are fewer copyists and tourists, above all

fewer pictorial lions, those whose roar is heard from afar and

who strike us as expecting overmuch to have it their own way in

the jungle. The pictures at the Academy are all, rather, doves--

the whole impression is less pompously tropical. Selection still

leaves one too much to say, but I noted here, on my last

occasion, an enchanting Botticelli so obscurely hung, in one of

the smaller rooms, that I scarce knew whether most to enjoy or to

resent its relegation. Placed, in a mean black frame, where you

wouldn't have looked for a masterpiece, it yet gave out to a good

glass every characteristic of one. Representing as it does the

walk of Tobias with the angel, there are really parts of it that

an angel might have painted; but I doubt whether it is observed

by half-a-dozen persons a year. That was my excuse for my wanting

to know, on the spot, though doubtless all sophistically, what

dishonour, could the transfer be artfully accomplished, a strong

American light and a brave gilded frame would, comparatively

speaking, do it. There and then it would, shine with the intense

authority that we claim for the fairest things--would exhale its

wondrous beauty as a sovereign example. What it comes to is that

this master is the most interesting of a great band--the only

Florentine save Leonardo and Michael in whom the impulse was

original and the invention rare. His imagination is of things

strange, subtle and complicated--things it at first strikes us

that we moderns have reason to know, and that it has taken us all

the ages to learn; so that we permit ourselves to wonder how a

"primitive" could come by them. We soon enough reflect, however,

that we ourselves have come by them almost only through

him, exquisite spirit that he was, and that when we enjoy, or at

least when we encounter, in our William Morrises, in our

Rossettis and Burne-Joneses, the note of the haunted or over-

charged consciousness, we are but treated, with other matters, to

repeated doses of diluted Botticelli. He practically set with his

own hand almost all the copies to almost all our so-called pre-

Raphaelites, earlier and later, near and remote.

Let us at the same time, none the less, never fail of response to

the great Florentine geniality at large. Fra Angelico, Filippo

Lippi, Ghirlandaio, were not "subtly" imaginative, were not even

riotously so; but what other three were ever more gladly

observant, more vividly and richly true? If there should some

time be a weeding out of the world's possessions the best works

of the early Florentines will certainly be counted among the

flowers. With the ripest performances of the Venetians--by which

I don't mean the over-ripe--we can but take them for the most

valuable things in the history of art. Heaven forbid we should be

narrowed down to a cruel choice; but if it came to a question of

keeping or losing between half-a-dozen Raphaels and half-a-dozen

things it would be a joy to pick out at the Academy, I fear that,

for myself, the memory of the Transfiguration, or indeed of the

other Roman relics of the painter, wouldn't save the Raphaels.

And yet this was so far from the opinion of a patient artist whom

I saw the other day copying the finest of Ghirlandaios--a

beautiful Adoration of the Kings at the Hospital of the

Innocenti. Here was another sample of the buried art-wealth of

Florence. It hangs in an obscure chapel, far aloft, behind an

altar, and though now and then a stray tourist wanders in and

puzzles a while over the vaguely-glowing forms, the picture is

never really seen and enjoyed. I found an aged Frenchman of

modest mien perched on a little platform beneath it, behind a

great hedge of altar-candlesticks, with an admirable copy all

completed. The difficulties of his task had been well-nigh

insuperable, and his performance seemed to me a real feat of

magic. He could scarcely move or turn, and could find room for

his canvas but by rolling it together and painting a small piece

at a time, so that he never enjoyed a view of his

ensemble. The original is gorgeous with colour and

bewildering with decorative detail, but not a gleam of the

painter's crimson was wanting, not a curl in his gold arabesques.

It seemed to me that if I had copied a Ghirlandaio in such

conditions I would at least maintain for my own credit that he

was the first painter in the world. "Very good of its kind," said

the weary old man with a shrug of reply for my raptures; "but oh,

how far short of Raphael!" However that may be, if the reader

chances to observe this consummate copy in the so commendable

Museum devoted in Paris to such works, let him stop before it

with a due reverence; it is one of the patient things of art.

Seeing it wrought there, in its dusky nook, under such scant

convenience, I found no bar in the painter's foreignness to a

thrilled sense that the old art-life of Florence isn't yet

extinct. It still at least works spells and almost miracles.

1873.