September 3rd
We walked into Florence, yesterday, betimes after breakfast, it being comfortably cool, and a grey, English sky; though, indeed, the clouds had a tendency to mass themselves more than they do on an overcast English day. We found it warmer in Florence, but not inconveniently so, even in the sunniest streets and squares.
We went to the Uffizi gallery, the whole of which, with its contents, is now familiar to us, except the rooms containing drawings ; and our to-day's visit was especially to them. The door giving admittance to them is the very last in the gallery; and the rooms, three in number, are, I should judge, over the Loggia de Lanzi, looking on the Grand Ducal Piazza. The drawings hang on the walls, framed and glazed; and number, perhaps, from one to two hundred in each room; but this is only a small portion of the collection, which amounts, it is said, to twenty thousand, and is reposited in portfolios. The sketches on the walls are changed, from time to time, so as to exhibit all the most interesting ones in turn. Their whole charm is artistic, imaginative, and intellectual, and in no degree of the upholstery kind; their outward presentment being, in general, a design hastily shadowed out, by means of coloured crayons, on tinted paper, or perhaps scratched rudely in pen and ink; or drawn in pencil or charcoal, and half rubbed out; very rough things, indeed, in many instances, and the more interesting on that account, because it seems as if the artist had bestirred himself to catch the first glimpse of an image that did but reveal itself and vanish. The sheets, or sometimes scraps of paper, on which they are drawn, are discoloured with age, creased, soiled ; but yet you are magnetised by the hand of Raphael, Michel Angelo, Leonardo, or whoever may have jotted down those rough-looking master-touches. They certainly possess a charm that is lost in the finished picture; and I was more sensible of forecasting thought, skill, and prophetic design in these sketches than in the most consummate works that have been elaborated from them. There is something more divine in these; for I suppose the first idea of a picture is real inspiration, and all the subsequent elaboration of the master serves but to cover up the celestial germ with something that belongs to himself. At any rate, the first sketch is the more suggestive, and sets the spectator's imagination at work ; whereas, the picture, if a good one, leaves him nothing to do; if bad, it confuses, stupefies, disenchants, and disheartens him. First thoughts have an aroma and fragrance in them, that they do not lose in three hundred years ; for so old, and a good deal more, are some of these sketches.
None interested me more than some drawings, on separate pieces of paper, by Perugino, for his picture of the mother and friends of Jesus round his dead body, now at the Pitti Palace. The attendant figures are distinctly made out, as if the Virgin, and John, and Mary Magdalen had each favoured the painter with a sitting; but the body of Jesus lies in the midst, dimly hinted with a few pencil marks.
There were several designs by Michel Angelo, none of which made much impression on me: the most striking was a very ugly demon, afterwards painted in the Sistine Chapel. Raphael shows several sketches of Madonnas, one of which has flowered into the Grand Duke's especial Madonna at the Pitti Palace, but with a different face. His sketches were mostly very rough in execution; but there were two or three designs for frescoes, I think
in the Vatican, very carefully executed; perhaps because these works were mainly to be done by other lands than his own. It seems to me that the preRaphaelite artists made more careful drawings than the later ones; and it rather surprised me to see how much science they possessed.
We looked at few other things in the gallery; and, indeed, it was not one of the days when works of art find me impressible. We stopped a little while in the Tribune, but the Venus di Medici seemed to me to-day little more than any other piece of yellowish white marble. How strange that a goddess should stand before us absolutely unrecognised, even when we know by previous revelations that she is nothing short of divine ! It is also strange that, unless when one feels the ideal charm of a statue, it becomes one of the most tedious and irksome things in the world. Either it must be a celestial thing or an old lump of stone, dusty and time-soiled, and tiring out your patience with eternally looking just the same. Once in a while you penetrate through the crust of the old sameness, and see the statue for ever new and immortally young.
Leaving the gallery we walked towards the Duomo, and on our way stopped to look at the beautiful Gothic niches hollowed into the exterior walls of the church of San Michele. They are now in the process of being cleaned, and each niche is elaborately inlaid with precious marbles, and some of them magnificently gilded; and they are all surmounted with marblecanopies as light and graceful as frost-work. Within stand statues, St. George, and many other saints, by Donatello and others, and all taking a hold upon one's sympathies, even if they be not beautiful. Classic statues escape you with their slippery beauty, as if they were made of ice. Rough and ugly things can be clutched. This is nonsense, and yet it means something... The streets were thronged and vociferative with more life and outcry than usual. It must have been market-day in Florence, for the commerce of the streets was in great vigour, narrow tables being set out in them, and in the squares, burdened with all kinds of small merchandise, such as cheap jewellery, glistening as brightly as what we had just seen in the gem-room of the Uffizi ;crockery ware; toys; books, Italian and French; silks; slippers; old iron; all advertised by the dealers with terribly loud and high voices, that reverberated harshly from side to side of the narrow streets. Italian street-cries go through the head, not that they are so very sharp, but exceedingly hard, like a blunt iron bar.
We stood at the base of the Campanile, and looked at the bas-reliefs which wreathe it round; and, above them, a row of statues ; and from bottom to top a marvellous minuteness of inlaid marbles, filling up the vast and beautiful design of this heaven-aspiring tower. Looking upward to its lofty summit where angels might alight, lapsing downward from heaven, and gaze curiously at the bustle of men below I could not but feel that there is a moral charm in this faithful minuteness of Gothic architecture, filling up its outline with a million of beauties that perhaps may never be studied out by a single spectator. It is the very process of nature, and no doubt produces an effect that we know not of. Classic architecture is nothing but an outline, and affords no little points, no interstices where human feelings may cling and overgrow it like ivy. The charm, as I said, seems to be moral rather than intellectual; for in the gem-room of the Uffizi you may see fifty designs, elaborated on a small scale, that have just as much merit as the design of the Campanile. If it were only five inches long, it might be a case for some article of the toilet; being two hundred feet high, its prettiness develops into grandeur as well as beauty, and it becomes really one of the wonders of the world. The design of the Pantheon, on the contrary, would retain its sublimity on whatever scale it might be represented.
Returning homewards,we crossed the Ponte Vecchio, and went to the Museum of Natural History, where we gained admittance into the rooms dedicated to Galileo. They consist of a vestibule, a saloon, and a semicircular tribune, covered with a frescoed dome, beneath which stands a colossal statue of Galileo, long bearded, and clad in a student's gown, or some voluminous garb of that kind. Around the tribune, beside and behind the statue, are six niches, in one of which is preserved a forefinger of Galileo, fixed on a little gilt pedestal, and pointing upward, under a glass cover. It is very much shrivelled and mummylike, of the colour of parchment, and is little more than a finger-bone, with the dry skin or flesh flaking away from it; on the whole, 'not a very delightful relic ; but Galileo used to point heavenward with this finger, and I hope has gone whither he pointed. Another niche contains two telescopes, wherewith he made some of his discoveries: they are perhaps a yard long, and of very small calibre. Other astronomical instruments are displayed in the glass cases that line the rooms; but I did not understand their use any better than the monks, who wished to burn Galileo for his heterodoxy about the planetary system....
After dinner I climbed the tower... Florence lay in the sunshine, level, compact, and small of compass. Above the tiled roofs rose the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the loftiest and the most picturesque, though built, I suppose, with no idea of making it so. But it attains, in a singular degree, the end of causing the imagination to fly upward and alight on its airy battlements. Near it I beheld the square mass of San Michele, and farther to the left the bulky Duomo and the Campanile close beside it, like a slender bride or daughter; the dome of San Lorenzo too. The Arno is nowhere visible. Beyond, and on all sides of the city, the hills pile themselves lazily upward in ridges, here and there developing into a peak; towards their bases white villas were strewn numerously, but the upper region was lonely and bare.
As we passed under the arch of the Porta Romana this morning, on our way into the city, we saw a queer object. It was what we at first took for a living man, in a garb of light reddish or yellowish red colour, of antique or priestly fashion, and with a cowl falling behind. His face was of the same hue, and seemed to have been powdered, as the faces of masquers sometimes are. He sat in a cart, which he seemed to be driving into the city with a load of earthen jars and pipkins, the colour of which was precisely like his own. On closer inspection, this priestly figure proved to be likewise an image of earthenware, but his life-likeness had a very strange and rather ghastly effect. Adam, perhaps, was made of just such red earth, and had the complexion of this figure.
We walked into Florence, yesterday, betimes after breakfast, it being comfortably cool, and a grey, English sky; though, indeed, the clouds had a tendency to mass themselves more than they do on an overcast English day. We found it warmer in Florence, but not inconveniently so, even in the sunniest streets and squares.
We went to the Uffizi gallery, the whole of which, with its contents, is now familiar to us, except the rooms containing drawings ; and our to-day's visit was especially to them. The door giving admittance to them is the very last in the gallery; and the rooms, three in number, are, I should judge, over the Loggia de Lanzi, looking on the Grand Ducal Piazza. The drawings hang on the walls, framed and glazed; and number, perhaps, from one to two hundred in each room; but this is only a small portion of the collection, which amounts, it is said, to twenty thousand, and is reposited in portfolios. The sketches on the walls are changed, from time to time, so as to exhibit all the most interesting ones in turn. Their whole charm is artistic, imaginative, and intellectual, and in no degree of the upholstery kind; their outward presentment being, in general, a design hastily shadowed out, by means of coloured crayons, on tinted paper, or perhaps scratched rudely in pen and ink; or drawn in pencil or charcoal, and half rubbed out; very rough things, indeed, in many instances, and the more interesting on that account, because it seems as if the artist had bestirred himself to catch the first glimpse of an image that did but reveal itself and vanish. The sheets, or sometimes scraps of paper, on which they are drawn, are discoloured with age, creased, soiled ; but yet you are magnetised by the hand of Raphael, Michel Angelo, Leonardo, or whoever may have jotted down those rough-looking master-touches. They certainly possess a charm that is lost in the finished picture; and I was more sensible of forecasting thought, skill, and prophetic design in these sketches than in the most consummate works that have been elaborated from them. There is something more divine in these; for I suppose the first idea of a picture is real inspiration, and all the subsequent elaboration of the master serves but to cover up the celestial germ with something that belongs to himself. At any rate, the first sketch is the more suggestive, and sets the spectator's imagination at work ; whereas, the picture, if a good one, leaves him nothing to do; if bad, it confuses, stupefies, disenchants, and disheartens him. First thoughts have an aroma and fragrance in them, that they do not lose in three hundred years ; for so old, and a good deal more, are some of these sketches.
None interested me more than some drawings, on separate pieces of paper, by Perugino, for his picture of the mother and friends of Jesus round his dead body, now at the Pitti Palace. The attendant figures are distinctly made out, as if the Virgin, and John, and Mary Magdalen had each favoured the painter with a sitting; but the body of Jesus lies in the midst, dimly hinted with a few pencil marks.
There were several designs by Michel Angelo, none of which made much impression on me: the most striking was a very ugly demon, afterwards painted in the Sistine Chapel. Raphael shows several sketches of Madonnas, one of which has flowered into the Grand Duke's especial Madonna at the Pitti Palace, but with a different face. His sketches were mostly very rough in execution; but there were two or three designs for frescoes, I think
in the Vatican, very carefully executed; perhaps because these works were mainly to be done by other lands than his own. It seems to me that the preRaphaelite artists made more careful drawings than the later ones; and it rather surprised me to see how much science they possessed.
We looked at few other things in the gallery; and, indeed, it was not one of the days when works of art find me impressible. We stopped a little while in the Tribune, but the Venus di Medici seemed to me to-day little more than any other piece of yellowish white marble. How strange that a goddess should stand before us absolutely unrecognised, even when we know by previous revelations that she is nothing short of divine ! It is also strange that, unless when one feels the ideal charm of a statue, it becomes one of the most tedious and irksome things in the world. Either it must be a celestial thing or an old lump of stone, dusty and time-soiled, and tiring out your patience with eternally looking just the same. Once in a while you penetrate through the crust of the old sameness, and see the statue for ever new and immortally young.
Leaving the gallery we walked towards the Duomo, and on our way stopped to look at the beautiful Gothic niches hollowed into the exterior walls of the church of San Michele. They are now in the process of being cleaned, and each niche is elaborately inlaid with precious marbles, and some of them magnificently gilded; and they are all surmounted with marblecanopies as light and graceful as frost-work. Within stand statues, St. George, and many other saints, by Donatello and others, and all taking a hold upon one's sympathies, even if they be not beautiful. Classic statues escape you with their slippery beauty, as if they were made of ice. Rough and ugly things can be clutched. This is nonsense, and yet it means something... The streets were thronged and vociferative with more life and outcry than usual. It must have been market-day in Florence, for the commerce of the streets was in great vigour, narrow tables being set out in them, and in the squares, burdened with all kinds of small merchandise, such as cheap jewellery, glistening as brightly as what we had just seen in the gem-room of the Uffizi ;crockery ware; toys; books, Italian and French; silks; slippers; old iron; all advertised by the dealers with terribly loud and high voices, that reverberated harshly from side to side of the narrow streets. Italian street-cries go through the head, not that they are so very sharp, but exceedingly hard, like a blunt iron bar.
We stood at the base of the Campanile, and looked at the bas-reliefs which wreathe it round; and, above them, a row of statues ; and from bottom to top a marvellous minuteness of inlaid marbles, filling up the vast and beautiful design of this heaven-aspiring tower. Looking upward to its lofty summit where angels might alight, lapsing downward from heaven, and gaze curiously at the bustle of men below I could not but feel that there is a moral charm in this faithful minuteness of Gothic architecture, filling up its outline with a million of beauties that perhaps may never be studied out by a single spectator. It is the very process of nature, and no doubt produces an effect that we know not of. Classic architecture is nothing but an outline, and affords no little points, no interstices where human feelings may cling and overgrow it like ivy. The charm, as I said, seems to be moral rather than intellectual; for in the gem-room of the Uffizi you may see fifty designs, elaborated on a small scale, that have just as much merit as the design of the Campanile. If it were only five inches long, it might be a case for some article of the toilet; being two hundred feet high, its prettiness develops into grandeur as well as beauty, and it becomes really one of the wonders of the world. The design of the Pantheon, on the contrary, would retain its sublimity on whatever scale it might be represented.
Returning homewards,we crossed the Ponte Vecchio, and went to the Museum of Natural History, where we gained admittance into the rooms dedicated to Galileo. They consist of a vestibule, a saloon, and a semicircular tribune, covered with a frescoed dome, beneath which stands a colossal statue of Galileo, long bearded, and clad in a student's gown, or some voluminous garb of that kind. Around the tribune, beside and behind the statue, are six niches, in one of which is preserved a forefinger of Galileo, fixed on a little gilt pedestal, and pointing upward, under a glass cover. It is very much shrivelled and mummylike, of the colour of parchment, and is little more than a finger-bone, with the dry skin or flesh flaking away from it; on the whole, 'not a very delightful relic ; but Galileo used to point heavenward with this finger, and I hope has gone whither he pointed. Another niche contains two telescopes, wherewith he made some of his discoveries: they are perhaps a yard long, and of very small calibre. Other astronomical instruments are displayed in the glass cases that line the rooms; but I did not understand their use any better than the monks, who wished to burn Galileo for his heterodoxy about the planetary system....
After dinner I climbed the tower... Florence lay in the sunshine, level, compact, and small of compass. Above the tiled roofs rose the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the loftiest and the most picturesque, though built, I suppose, with no idea of making it so. But it attains, in a singular degree, the end of causing the imagination to fly upward and alight on its airy battlements. Near it I beheld the square mass of San Michele, and farther to the left the bulky Duomo and the Campanile close beside it, like a slender bride or daughter; the dome of San Lorenzo too. The Arno is nowhere visible. Beyond, and on all sides of the city, the hills pile themselves lazily upward in ridges, here and there developing into a peak; towards their bases white villas were strewn numerously, but the upper region was lonely and bare.
As we passed under the arch of the Porta Romana this morning, on our way into the city, we saw a queer object. It was what we at first took for a living man, in a garb of light reddish or yellowish red colour, of antique or priestly fashion, and with a cowl falling behind. His face was of the same hue, and seemed to have been powdered, as the faces of masquers sometimes are. He sat in a cart, which he seemed to be driving into the city with a load of earthen jars and pipkins, the colour of which was precisely like his own. On closer inspection, this priestly figure proved to be likewise an image of earthenware, but his life-likeness had a very strange and rather ghastly effect. Adam, perhaps, was made of just such red earth, and had the complexion of this figure.
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