In the Roman streets, wherever you turn, the facade of a church
in more or less degenerate flamboyance is the principal feature
of the scene; and if, in the absence of purer motives, you are
weary of aesthetic trudging over the corrugated surface of the
Seven Hills, a system of pavement in which small cobble-stones
anomalously endowed with angles and edges are alone employed, you
may turn aside at your pleasure and take a reviving sniff at the
pungency of incense. In Florence, one soon observes, the churches
are relatively few and the dusky house-fronts more rarely
interrupted by specimens of that extraordinary architecture which
in Rome passes for sacred. In Florence, in other words,
ecclesiasticism is less cheap a commodity and not dispensed in
the same abundance at the street-corners. Heaven forbid, at the
same time, that I should undervalue the Roman churches, which are
for the most part treasure-houses of history, of curiosity, of
promiscuous and associational interest. It is a fact,
nevertheless, that, after St. Peter's, I know but one really
beautiful church by the Tiber, the enchanting basilica of St.
Mary Major. Many have structural character, some a great
allure, but as a rule they all lack the dignity of the
best of the Florentine temples. Here, the list being immeasurably
shorter and the seed less scattered, the principal churches are
all beautiful. And yet I went into the Annunziata the other day
and sat there for half-an-hour because, forsooth, the gildings
and the marbles and the frescoed dome and the great rococo shrine
near the door, with its little black jewelled fetish, reminded me
so poignantly of Rome. Such is the city properly styled eternal--
since it is eternal, at least, as regards the consciousness of
the individual. One loves it in its sophistications--though for
that matter isn't it all rich and precious sophistication?--
better than other places in their purity.
Coming out of the Annunziata you look past the bronze statue of the Grand Duke Ferdinand I (whom Mr. Browning's heroine used to watch for--in the poem of "The Statue and the Bust"--from the red palace near by), and down a street vista of enchanting picturesqueness. The street is narrow and dusky and filled with misty shadows, and at its opposite end rises the vast bright- coloured side of the Cathedral. It stands up in very much the same mountainous fashion as the far-shining mass of the bigger prodigy at Milan, of which your first glimpse as you leave your hotel is generally through another such dark avenue; only that, if we talk of mountains, the white walls of Milan must be likened to snow and ice from their base, while those of the Duomo of Florence may be the image of some mighty hillside enamelled with blooming flowers. The big bleak interior here has a naked majesty which, though it may fail of its effect at first, becomes after a while extraordinarily touching. Originally disconcerting, it soon inspired me with a passion. Externally, at any rate, it is one of the loveliest works of man's hands, and an overwhelming proof into the bargain that when elegance belittles grandeur you have simply had a bungling artist.
Santa Croce within not only triumphs here, but would triumph anywhere. "A trifle naked if you like," said my irrepressible companion, "but that's what I call architecture, just as I don't call bronze or marble clothes (save under urgent stress of portraiture) statuary." And indeed we are far enough away from the clustering odds and ends borrowed from every art and every province without which the ritually builded thing doesn't trust its spell to work in Rome. The vastness, the lightness, the open spring of the arches at Santa Croce, the beautiful shape of the high and narrow choir, the impression made as of mass without weight and the gravity yet reigning without gloom--these are my frequent delight, and the interest grows with acquaintance. The place is the great Florentine Valhalla, the final home or memorial harbour of the native illustrious dead, but that consideration of it would take me far. It must be confessed moreover that, between his coarsely-imagined statue out in front and his horrible monument in one of the aisles, the author of The Divine Comedy, for instance, is just hereabouts rather an extravagant figure. "Ungrateful Florence," declaims Byron. Ungrateful indeed--would she were more so! the susceptible spirit of the great exile may be still aware enough to exclaim; in common, that is, with most of the other immortals sacrificed on so very large a scale to current Florentine "plastic" facility. In explanation of which remark, however, I must confine myself to noting that, as almost all the old monuments at Santa Croce are small, comparatively small, and interesting and exquisite, so the modern, well nigh without exception, are disproportionately vast and pompous, or in other words distressingly vague and vain. The aptitude of hand, the compositional assurance, with which such things are nevertheless turned out, constitutes an anomaly replete with suggestion for an observer of the present state of the arts on the soil and in the air that once befriended them, taking them all together, as even the soil and the air of Greece scarce availed to do. But on this head, I repeat, there would be too much to say; and I find myself checked by the same warning at the threshold of the church in Florence really interesting beyond Santa Croce, beyond all others. Such, of course, easily, is Santa Maria Novella, where the chapels are lined and plated with wonderful figured and peopled fresco-work even as most of those in Rome with precious inanimate substances. These overscored retreats of devotion, as dusky, some of them, as eremitic caves swarming with importunate visions, have kept me divided all winter between the love of Ghirlandaio and the fear of those seeds of catarrh to which their mortal chill seems propitious till far on into the spring. So I pause here just on the praise of that delightful painter--as to the spirit of whose work the reflections I have already made are but confirmed by these examples. In the choir at Santa Maria Novella, where the incense swings and the great chants resound, between the gorgeous coloured window and the florid grand altar, he still "goes in," with all his might, for the wicked, the amusing world, the world of faces and forms and characters, of every sort of curious human and rare material thing.
[Illustration omitted: BOBOLI GARDEN, FLORENCE.]