July 4th [1858]
Yesterday forenoon we went to see the church of Santa Maria Novella. We found the piazza, on one side of which the church stands, encumbered with the amphitheatrical ranges of wooden seats that had been erected to accommodate the spectators of the chariot-races, at the recent Feast of St. John. The front of the church is composed of black and white marble, which, in the course of the five centuries that it has been built, has turned brown and yellow. On the right hand, as you approach, is a long colonnade of arches, extending on a line with the facade, and having a tomb beneath every arch. This colonnade forms one of the enclosing walls of a cloister. We found none of the front entrances open, but on our left, in a wall at right angles with the church, there was an open gateway, approaching... -which, we saw, within the four-sided colonnade, an enclosed green space of a cloister. This is what is called the Chiostro Verde, so named from the prevailing colour of the frescoes with which the walls beneath the arches are adorned.
This cloister is the reality of what I used to imagine when I saw the half-ruinous colonnades connected with English cathedrals, or endeavoured to trace out the lines along the broken wall of some old abbey. Not that this extant cloister, still perfect and in daily use for its original purposes, is nearly so beautiful as the crumbling ruin which has ceased to be trodden by monkish feet for more than three centuries. The cloister of Santa Maria has not the; seclusion that is desirable, being open, by its gateway, to the public square, and several of the neighbours, women as well as men, were loitering within its precincts. The convent, however, has another and larger cloister, which I suppose is kept free from interlopers. The Chiostro Verde is a walk round the four sides of a square, beneath an arched and groined roof. One side of the walk looks upon an enclosed green space with a fountain or a tomb (I forget which) in the centre; the other side is ornamented all along with a succession of ancient frescoes, representing subjects of Scripture history. In the days when the designs were more distinct than now, it must have been a very effective way for a monk to read Bible history, to see its personages and events thus passing visibly beside him in his morning and evening walks. Beneath the frescoes on one side of the cloistered walk, and along the low stone parapet that separates it from the grass-plat on the other, are inscriptions to the memory of the dead who are buried underneath the pavement. The most of these were modern, and recorded the names of persons of no particular note. Other monumental slabs were inlaid with the pavement itself. Two or three Dominican monks, belonging to the convent, passed in and out while we were there in their white habits.
After going round three sides, we came to the fourth, formed by the wall of the church, and heard the voice of a priest behind a curtain that fell down before a door. Lifting it aside, we went in, and found ourselves in the ancient chapter-house, a large interior formed by two great pointed arches crossing one another in a groined roof. The broad spaces of the walls were entirely covered with frescoes that are rich even now, and must have glowed with an inexpressible splendour, when fresh from the artists' hands, five hundred years ago. There is a long period, during which frescoes illuminate a church or a hall in a way that no other adornment can; when this epoch of brightness is past, they become the dreariest ghosts of perished magnificence... This chapter-house is the only part of the church that is now used for the purposes of public worship. There are several confessionals, and two chapels or shrines, each with its lighted tapers. A priest performed mass while we were there, and several persons, as usual, stepped in to do a little devotion, either praying on their own account, or uniting with the ceremony that was going forward. One man was followed by two little dogs, and in the midst of his prayers, as one of the dogs was inclined to stray about the church, he kept snapping his fingers to call him back. The cool, dusky refreshment of these holy places, affording such a refuge from the hot noon of the streets and piazzas, probably suggests devotional ideas to the people, and it may be, when they are praying, they feel a breath of Paradise fanning them. If we could only see any good effects in their daily life, we might deem it an excellent thing to be able to find incense and a prayer always ascending, to which every individual may join his own. I really wonder that the Catholics are not better men and women.
When we had looked at the old frescoes .... we emerged into the cloister again, and thence ventured into a passage which would have led us to the Chiostro Grande, where strangers, and especially ladies, have no right to go. It was a secluded corridor, very neatly kept, bordered with sepulchral monuments, and at the end appeared a vista of cypress trees, which indeed were but an illusory perspective, being painted in fresco. While we loitered along .... the sacristan appeared and offered to show us the church, and led us into the transept on the right of the high altar, and ushered us into the sacristy, where we found two artists copying some of Fra Angelico's pictures. These were painted on the three wooden leaves of a tryptich, and, as usual, were glorified with a great deal of gilding, so that they seemed to float in the brightness of a heavenly element. Solomon speaks of "apples of gold in pictures of silver." The pictures of Fra Angelico, and other artists of that age, are really pictures of gold; and it is wonderful to see how rich the effect, and how much delicate beauty is attained (by Fra Angelico at least) along with it. His miniature-heads appear to me much more successful than his larger ones. In a monkish point of view, however, the chief value of the tryptich of which I am speaking does not lie in the pictures, for they merely serve as the framework of some reliques, which are set all round the edges of the three leaves. They consist of little bits and fragments of bones, and of packages carefully tied up in silk, the contents of which are signified in Gothic letters appended to each parcel. The sacred vessels of the church are likewise kept in the sacristy...
Re-entering the transept, our guide showed us the chapel of the Strozzi family, which is accessible by a flight of steps from the floor of the church. The walls of this chapel are covered with frescoes by Orgagna, representing around the altar the Last Judgment, and on one of the walls heaven and the assembly of the blessed, and on the other, of course, hell. I can not speak as to the truth of the representation; but, at all events, it was purgatory to look at it...
We next passed into the choir, which occupies the extreme end of the church behind the great square mass of the high altar, and is surrounded with a double row of ancient oaken seats of venerable shape and carving. The choir is illuminated by a threefold Gothic window, full of richly-painted glass, worth all the frescoes that ever stained a wall or ceiling; but these walls, nevertheless, are adorned with frescoes by Ghirlandaio, and it is easy to see must once have made a magnificent appearance. I really was sensible of a sad and ghostly beauty in many of the figures; but all the bloom, the magic of the painter's touch, his topmost art, have long ago been rubbed off, the white plaster showing through the colours in spots, and even in large spaces. Any other sort of ruin acquires a beauty proper to its decay, and often superior to that of its pristine state ; but the ruin of a picture, especially of a fresco, is wholly unredeemed; and, moreover, it dies so slowly that many generations are likely to be saddened by it.
We next saw the famous picture of the Virgin by Cimabue, which was deemed a miracle in its day, ....and still brightens the sombre walls with the lustre of its gold ground. As to its artistic merits, it seems to me that the Babe Jesus has a certain air of state and dignity; but I could see no charm whatever in the broad-faced Virgin, and it would relieve my mind and rejoice my spirit if the picture were borne out of the church in another triumphal procession (like the one which brought it there), and reverently burnt. This should be the final honour paid to all human works that have served a good office in their day, for when their day is over, if still galvanised into false life, they do harm instead of good The interior of Santa Maria Novella is spacious and in the Gothic style, though differing from English churches of that order of architecture. It is not now kept open to the public, nor were any of the shrines and chapels, nor even the high altar itself, adorned and lighted for worship. The pictures that decorated the shrines along the side aisles have been removed, leaving bare, blank spaces of brickwork, very dreary and desolate to behold. This is almost worse than a black oil-painting or a faded fresco. The church was much injured by the French, and afterwards by the Austrians, both powers having quartered their troops within the holy precincts. Its old walls, however, are yet stalwart enough to outlast another set of frescoes, and to see the beginning and the end of a new school of painting as long-lived as Cimabue's. I should be sorry to have the church go to decay, because it was here that Boccaccio's dames and cavaliers encountered one another, and formed their plan of retreating into the country during the plague...
At the door we bought a string of beads, with a small crucifix appended, in memory of the place. The beads seem to be of a greyish, pear-shaped seed, and the seller assured us that they were the tears of St. Job. They were cheap, probably because Job shed so many tears in his lifetime.
It being still early in the day, we went to the Uffizi gallery, and after loitering a good while among the pictures, were so fortunate as to find the room of the bronzes open. The first object that attracted us was John of Bologna's Mercury, poising himself on tiptoe, and looking not merely buoyant enough to float, but as if he possessed more than the eagle's power of lofty flight. It seems a wonder that he did not absolutely fling himself into the air when the artist gave him the last touch. No bolder work was ever achieved ; nothing so full of life has been done since. I was much interested, too, in the original little wax model, two feet high, of Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus. The wax seems to be laid over a wooden framework, and is but roughly finished off...
In an adjoining room are innumerable specimens of Roman and Etruscan bronzes, great and small. A bronze Chimera did not strike me as very ingeniously conceived, the goat's head being merely an adjunct, growing ou of the back of the monster, without possessing any original and substantive share in its nature. The snake's head is at the end of the tail. The object most really interesting was a Roman eagle, the standard of the Twenty -fourth Legion, about the size of a blackbird.
Yesterday forenoon we went to see the church of Santa Maria Novella. We found the piazza, on one side of which the church stands, encumbered with the amphitheatrical ranges of wooden seats that had been erected to accommodate the spectators of the chariot-races, at the recent Feast of St. John. The front of the church is composed of black and white marble, which, in the course of the five centuries that it has been built, has turned brown and yellow. On the right hand, as you approach, is a long colonnade of arches, extending on a line with the facade, and having a tomb beneath every arch. This colonnade forms one of the enclosing walls of a cloister. We found none of the front entrances open, but on our left, in a wall at right angles with the church, there was an open gateway, approaching... -which, we saw, within the four-sided colonnade, an enclosed green space of a cloister. This is what is called the Chiostro Verde, so named from the prevailing colour of the frescoes with which the walls beneath the arches are adorned.
This cloister is the reality of what I used to imagine when I saw the half-ruinous colonnades connected with English cathedrals, or endeavoured to trace out the lines along the broken wall of some old abbey. Not that this extant cloister, still perfect and in daily use for its original purposes, is nearly so beautiful as the crumbling ruin which has ceased to be trodden by monkish feet for more than three centuries. The cloister of Santa Maria has not the; seclusion that is desirable, being open, by its gateway, to the public square, and several of the neighbours, women as well as men, were loitering within its precincts. The convent, however, has another and larger cloister, which I suppose is kept free from interlopers. The Chiostro Verde is a walk round the four sides of a square, beneath an arched and groined roof. One side of the walk looks upon an enclosed green space with a fountain or a tomb (I forget which) in the centre; the other side is ornamented all along with a succession of ancient frescoes, representing subjects of Scripture history. In the days when the designs were more distinct than now, it must have been a very effective way for a monk to read Bible history, to see its personages and events thus passing visibly beside him in his morning and evening walks. Beneath the frescoes on one side of the cloistered walk, and along the low stone parapet that separates it from the grass-plat on the other, are inscriptions to the memory of the dead who are buried underneath the pavement. The most of these were modern, and recorded the names of persons of no particular note. Other monumental slabs were inlaid with the pavement itself. Two or three Dominican monks, belonging to the convent, passed in and out while we were there in their white habits.
After going round three sides, we came to the fourth, formed by the wall of the church, and heard the voice of a priest behind a curtain that fell down before a door. Lifting it aside, we went in, and found ourselves in the ancient chapter-house, a large interior formed by two great pointed arches crossing one another in a groined roof. The broad spaces of the walls were entirely covered with frescoes that are rich even now, and must have glowed with an inexpressible splendour, when fresh from the artists' hands, five hundred years ago. There is a long period, during which frescoes illuminate a church or a hall in a way that no other adornment can; when this epoch of brightness is past, they become the dreariest ghosts of perished magnificence... This chapter-house is the only part of the church that is now used for the purposes of public worship. There are several confessionals, and two chapels or shrines, each with its lighted tapers. A priest performed mass while we were there, and several persons, as usual, stepped in to do a little devotion, either praying on their own account, or uniting with the ceremony that was going forward. One man was followed by two little dogs, and in the midst of his prayers, as one of the dogs was inclined to stray about the church, he kept snapping his fingers to call him back. The cool, dusky refreshment of these holy places, affording such a refuge from the hot noon of the streets and piazzas, probably suggests devotional ideas to the people, and it may be, when they are praying, they feel a breath of Paradise fanning them. If we could only see any good effects in their daily life, we might deem it an excellent thing to be able to find incense and a prayer always ascending, to which every individual may join his own. I really wonder that the Catholics are not better men and women.
When we had looked at the old frescoes .... we emerged into the cloister again, and thence ventured into a passage which would have led us to the Chiostro Grande, where strangers, and especially ladies, have no right to go. It was a secluded corridor, very neatly kept, bordered with sepulchral monuments, and at the end appeared a vista of cypress trees, which indeed were but an illusory perspective, being painted in fresco. While we loitered along .... the sacristan appeared and offered to show us the church, and led us into the transept on the right of the high altar, and ushered us into the sacristy, where we found two artists copying some of Fra Angelico's pictures. These were painted on the three wooden leaves of a tryptich, and, as usual, were glorified with a great deal of gilding, so that they seemed to float in the brightness of a heavenly element. Solomon speaks of "apples of gold in pictures of silver." The pictures of Fra Angelico, and other artists of that age, are really pictures of gold; and it is wonderful to see how rich the effect, and how much delicate beauty is attained (by Fra Angelico at least) along with it. His miniature-heads appear to me much more successful than his larger ones. In a monkish point of view, however, the chief value of the tryptich of which I am speaking does not lie in the pictures, for they merely serve as the framework of some reliques, which are set all round the edges of the three leaves. They consist of little bits and fragments of bones, and of packages carefully tied up in silk, the contents of which are signified in Gothic letters appended to each parcel. The sacred vessels of the church are likewise kept in the sacristy...
Re-entering the transept, our guide showed us the chapel of the Strozzi family, which is accessible by a flight of steps from the floor of the church. The walls of this chapel are covered with frescoes by Orgagna, representing around the altar the Last Judgment, and on one of the walls heaven and the assembly of the blessed, and on the other, of course, hell. I can not speak as to the truth of the representation; but, at all events, it was purgatory to look at it...
We next passed into the choir, which occupies the extreme end of the church behind the great square mass of the high altar, and is surrounded with a double row of ancient oaken seats of venerable shape and carving. The choir is illuminated by a threefold Gothic window, full of richly-painted glass, worth all the frescoes that ever stained a wall or ceiling; but these walls, nevertheless, are adorned with frescoes by Ghirlandaio, and it is easy to see must once have made a magnificent appearance. I really was sensible of a sad and ghostly beauty in many of the figures; but all the bloom, the magic of the painter's touch, his topmost art, have long ago been rubbed off, the white plaster showing through the colours in spots, and even in large spaces. Any other sort of ruin acquires a beauty proper to its decay, and often superior to that of its pristine state ; but the ruin of a picture, especially of a fresco, is wholly unredeemed; and, moreover, it dies so slowly that many generations are likely to be saddened by it.
We next saw the famous picture of the Virgin by Cimabue, which was deemed a miracle in its day, ....and still brightens the sombre walls with the lustre of its gold ground. As to its artistic merits, it seems to me that the Babe Jesus has a certain air of state and dignity; but I could see no charm whatever in the broad-faced Virgin, and it would relieve my mind and rejoice my spirit if the picture were borne out of the church in another triumphal procession (like the one which brought it there), and reverently burnt. This should be the final honour paid to all human works that have served a good office in their day, for when their day is over, if still galvanised into false life, they do harm instead of good The interior of Santa Maria Novella is spacious and in the Gothic style, though differing from English churches of that order of architecture. It is not now kept open to the public, nor were any of the shrines and chapels, nor even the high altar itself, adorned and lighted for worship. The pictures that decorated the shrines along the side aisles have been removed, leaving bare, blank spaces of brickwork, very dreary and desolate to behold. This is almost worse than a black oil-painting or a faded fresco. The church was much injured by the French, and afterwards by the Austrians, both powers having quartered their troops within the holy precincts. Its old walls, however, are yet stalwart enough to outlast another set of frescoes, and to see the beginning and the end of a new school of painting as long-lived as Cimabue's. I should be sorry to have the church go to decay, because it was here that Boccaccio's dames and cavaliers encountered one another, and formed their plan of retreating into the country during the plague...
At the door we bought a string of beads, with a small crucifix appended, in memory of the place. The beads seem to be of a greyish, pear-shaped seed, and the seller assured us that they were the tears of St. Job. They were cheap, probably because Job shed so many tears in his lifetime.
It being still early in the day, we went to the Uffizi gallery, and after loitering a good while among the pictures, were so fortunate as to find the room of the bronzes open. The first object that attracted us was John of Bologna's Mercury, poising himself on tiptoe, and looking not merely buoyant enough to float, but as if he possessed more than the eagle's power of lofty flight. It seems a wonder that he did not absolutely fling himself into the air when the artist gave him the last touch. No bolder work was ever achieved ; nothing so full of life has been done since. I was much interested, too, in the original little wax model, two feet high, of Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus. The wax seems to be laid over a wooden framework, and is but roughly finished off...
In an adjoining room are innumerable specimens of Roman and Etruscan bronzes, great and small. A bronze Chimera did not strike me as very ingeniously conceived, the goat's head being merely an adjunct, growing ou of the back of the monster, without possessing any original and substantive share in its nature. The snake's head is at the end of the tail. The object most really interesting was a Roman eagle, the standard of the Twenty -fourth Legion, about the size of a blackbird.
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