satire against the liberty upon which the Commonwealth prided itself. Florence banished and would have burned her poet. The poet banished and burned Florence in the great hell which his imagination created and peopled. His ashes,—so often and so vainly implored for by the repentant and sorrowing mother, who had driven him from her bosom with curses, to wander and to starve, "to eat the bitter bread of exile, and to feel that sharpest arrow in the bow of exile, the going up and down in another's house,"—his ashes are not the property of the Republic. Are his laurels? Yes. The "Divina Commedia" is a splendid proof of the vitality which pervades a republican atmosphere. There was little of justice perhaps, and less of security and comfort; but there was at any rate life, intellectual development, thought, pulsation, fierce collision of mind with mind, attrition of human passions and divine faculties, out of which an elemental fire was created which flamed over the civilized world, and has lighted the torches of civilization for centuries. He who would study the artes humaniores must turn of necessity to two fountain heads; and he finds them in the trampled marketplaces of two noisy, turbulent, unreasonable, pestilent little democratic cities,—Athens and Florence. Extinguish the architecture and the sculpture, the poetry and the philosophy of Attica; obliterate from the sum of civilization the names of Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli,—of Cimabue, Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Michel Angelo,—of Brunetto, Ficino, Politian; and how much diminished will be the remainder!
Nevertheless, it is in vain to look for any special seal set by the spirit of liberty upon the artistic productions of the earlier age in Florence. The works of the great painters bear the impress of the Church. If the spirit of liberty be present at all, it is veiled and hooded by monastic garments. But it should never be forgotten, that, in this age, the Church embodied an element of liberty. The keys of Saint Peter were brandished against the universal sceptre of the Suabians; cultivated intellect was matched, and often successfully, against brutal violence. The Pope was the rival of Cæsar.
The first great painting in the Academy—to return from this digression—is the famous Madonna of Cimabue. This picture is astonishing. Although considered by many critics to manifest lingering traces of the Byzantine bandages, it seems to us, on the contrary, to be wonderfully free from stiffness and conventionality. The genius of Cimabue extricates itself at a bound from the trammels of preceding systems, and flies vigorously towards nature.
The Madonna is colossal. She wears a hood, and holds her child in her arms. There is a strong human, yet spiritualized expression upon the face. The drapery is gracefully arranged, not folded like mummy cloths; and the color is strong and liberally laid on, without any attempt, however, at transparency of shadow. There is little indication of the technical glories of succeeding centuries. Perhaps the best part of the picture is in the lower margin. Here are four heads of saints, painted with a breadth and energy absolutely startling, when one recollects by whom and when they were executed. Dominic Ghirlandaio, two hundred years later, could hardly have put more masculine expression into a quartet of heads.
Giotto's Madonna is the pendant to that of Cimabue; but although painted twenty-five years later, it shows less progress in art than might be expected. Giotto's triumphs are to be found in the frescos of the Santa Croce. In that unequalled series, the art-student recognizes, almost at a glance, the power of the master. Largeness, rhythm, and harmony of composition,—dramatic movement, and individual beauty of expression,—heads which have brains, eyes which can smile, lips which can speak, fluent limbs which can move, or remain in natural repose,—the whole surrounded and inspired by that atmosphere of piety, that effluence of religious ecstasy, which can never be imitated, and which came from the unquestioning faith of the artist;—such wonders were for the first time revealed by Giotto. The shepherd boy, whom Cimabue found drawing pictures upon a stone in the open field, nobly repaid his patron and master, by extending still farther the domain of art,—by throwing its doors wide open to the cool breath of nature and the liberal sunshine. To pass from the Byzantines into the school of Giotto is to come out from the catacombs into the warm precincts of the cheerful day.
Of the pictures of the early part of the fifteenth century, none are more worthy of attention in this collection than those of Fra Angelico of Fiesole. (1387-1455.) Nevertheless, it seems no great progress from Cimabue, Giotto, and Orgagna, whose compositions are so full of energetic life and human passion, to these careful, gentle miniatures upon an expanded scale. The Fra was a miniatore, after all,—a manuscript illuminator of the first class. His effort to represent a descent from the cross in a large and dramatic manner is feeble and flat. This flight seems beyond his strength; and his waxy little wings, which sustained him so well within his own sphere, melted at once in this higher region.
Far better is an exquisite little picture in his very best manner, a work which hangs in the apartment De' Piccoli Quadri. This is a Judgment Day, and a cheerful painting of its class. There is an old conceit, very cleverly carried out through the whole composition, of representing all the just made perfect as actually converted into little children. Kings with crowns, popes, bishops, cardinals in hats and mitres, monks cowled and robed in conventual habiliments, are all philandering together through gardens of amaranth and asphodel towards the Grecian portico of heaven; and all these fortunate personages, whether monarchs, priests, fine ladies, or beggars, are depicted with perfectly infantine faces. To do this well lay exactly in the quaint, delicate nature of the angelic Frater; and this portion of the picture is most exquisitely handled. The other moiety, where devils with rabbits' ears, tiger faces, and monkeys' tails, are forking over the damned into frying-pans, while Satan devours them as fast as cooked, is common-place and vulgar. At the same time, it is certain that the whole composition shows much poetry of invention and delicacy of finish.
Andrew Castagno's Magdalen, like Donatello's Wooden Statue of the same penitent in the Baptistery, seems a female Robinson Crusoe,—hirsute, cadaverous, fleshless, uncombed and uncomely,—certainly a more edifying spectacle than the voluptuous, Titianesque exhibitions of fair frailty which became the fashion afterwards.
Of Gentile da Fabriano, a very rare master, there hangs an Adoration of the Magi, marked May, 1423. One always feels grateful to such of the Quattrocentisti as enlarged the sphere of artistic action, by going out of the conventional circle of holy families, nativities, and entombments. There is a dash about Gentile, a fresh, cavalier-like gentility, quite surprising, and altogether his own. A showy, flippant frivolity in several of the figures enlivens and refreshes us with its mundane sparkle and energy. One of the three kings, in particular,—a young, well-dressed, vivacious, goguenard-looking personage, with a very glittering pair of spurs, which his groom is just unbuckling, while another holds a highly bedizened war-horse, who is throwing up his head, showing all his teeth, and crying ha, ha, with all his might,—has a very dramatic effect.
Of the Lippo Lippis, the Lorenzo di Credis, the Ghirlandaios, the Peruginos, and the other great masters of the fifteenth century, of whom are many masterpieces in this collection, there shall, for the present, not a word be said.
There is also a portrait of Savonarola, by Fra Bartolommeo. The face is neither impressive nor attractive. The head is shorn, except the monastic coronal, and shows a small organ of benevolence, and a very large one of self-esteem. The profile is not handsome,—the nose being regularly aquiline, while the mouth is heavy with a projecting upper lip. A strong, blue beard, closely shaven, but very visible, darkens and improves the physiognomy.
IV
SANTA MARIA NOVELLA
This church was so beloved by Michel Angelo as to be called his bride. It must be confessed that the great artist was determined in his choice less by the external charms than by the interior excellence of his sposa; for although she has now got herself a new front and vamped herself up a little, thus looking a trifle younger than she must have done three hundred years ago, still she has any thing but a bridal or virginal aspect.
This church and monastery belong to the earlier German period of Italy, if such a thing as Italian Gothic can be said to have ever existed. The truth is, that with the exception of Milan
