Théophile Gautier
Travels in Italy (Voyage en Italie, 1850)
Parts XXVI to XXXI - Padua, Ferrara, Florence
Translated by A. S. Kline © Copyright 2025 All Rights Reserved
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Contents
- Part XXVI: Details concerning Venetian Customs and Habits.
- Part XXVII: Padua.
- Part XXVIII: Ferrara and Bologna.
- Part XXIX: Florence.
- Part XXX: The Piazza della Signoria.
- Part XXXI: Foreigners and Florentines.
Part XXVI: Details concerning Venetian Customs and Habits
The season was advancing. Our stay in Venice had been prolonged beyond the limits that we had set in the general plan for our trip. We had delayed our departure from week to week, from day to day, and had always found some good reason to stay. Despite the light mists that began to hover in the morning over the lagoon, despite the sudden downpours that forced us to take refuge under the arcades of the Procuracies or the porch of a church, despite the fact that when we travelled by moonlight on the Grand Canal, the cold night air sometimes forced one to raise the window of the gondola, and unroll the black cloth of the felze, we nonetheless turned a deaf ear to the threat of autumn.
We were forever remembering a palazzo, church, or painting we had not seen. It was indeed essential, before leaving Venice, to visit the white church of Santa Maria Formosa, containing the famous Saint Barbara Polyptych, the work of Palma il Vecchio in which the saint is so well-portrayed, so heroically beautiful; and the house of Bianca Cappello, to which is linked the memory of a Venetian love-story full of a romantic charm which is scarcely dispelled on seeing the signboard of a French milliner, Madame Adèle Torchère, who sells hoods and hats in the room where, leaning nonchalantly on the balcony, the beautiful Bianca dreamed; and then the strange and superb church of San Zaccaria, where there is a wonderful altar painting, gleaming with gold, by Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni d’Alemagna, commissioned by Abbess Elena Foscari and Prioress Marina Donato, and the tomb of the great sculptor Alessandro Vittoria,
Qui vivens vivos duxit de marmore vultus: who when alive brought life from the solid marble
a magnificent conceit of an epitaph justified however, in this case, by a host of statues.
Or something else delayed us, a forgotten island, Mazorbo, or Torcello where there is an interesting Byzantine Basilica, and Roman antiquities; or a picturesque facade on a little frequented canal, of which it was necessary to take a sketch; a thousand reasons of this kind, all reasonable, all excellent, yet none of which was the true reason, although we pretended to believe in them. We had yielded, despite ourselves, to that melancholy which grips the heart of even the most determined traveller, when leaving, perhaps forever, a longed-for country, a place where one spent beautiful days and more beautiful nights.
There are certain cities from which we separate as from a beloved mistress, our heart full, and tears in our eyes; they are a species of elective homeland where we are far happier than elsewhere, to which we dream of returning to die, and which appear to us in the midst of the sadness and complications of life like an oasis, an Eldorado, a divine city to which trouble is denied access, and the memories of which return on soaring wings. Granada, for me, has been one of these celestial Jerusalems that shine under a golden sun in the distant azure, like a mirage. I had been dreaming of it since childhood; I departed with tears, and with endless regret. Venice will be for me another Granada, regretted perhaps even more.
Has it ever happened to you that you have only a few days left to stay with a loved one? We gaze at them for a long time, fixedly, painfully, to engrave their features clearly in our memory; we saturate ourselves with their features, we study them every day, we notice their little unique markings, the mole near the mouth, the dimple in the cheek, or palm; we note the inflections and melodies of their voice, we try to retain as much as we can of the adored image that absence will steal from us, and that we will be able to see again only in our heart; we remain beside them, we seek to enjoy their presence till last second of the last minute; even sleep seems to us a theft committed on those precious hours, and endless conversations, conducted hand in hand, prolong themselves, without our noticing that the lamplight has faded, and the blue glow of dawn is filtering through the curtains.
We felt this in regard to Venice. As the moment of departure approached, she became more valuable to us. Her worth was revealed at the moment of loss. We blamed ourselves for having taken poor advantage of our stay, and bitterly regretted a few hours of idleness, cowardly concessions to the annoying influence of the sirocco. It seemed to us that we might have seen more, taken more notes, made more sketches, relied less on our memories: and yet, God knows, we had consciously carried on our profession of traveller; one found us in the churches, galleries, at the Accademia, in Saint Mark’s Square, at the Doge’s Palace, at Sansovino’s Library. Our exhausted gondoliers begged for mercy; we barely took time to swallow an iced coffee at Florian’s, a bowl of sea-lice soup and polenta pasticcio at the Gasthof San-Gallo or at the Capello-Nero tavern. In six weeks, we had worn out three eye-glasses, damaged a pair of binoculars, and lost a telescope. Never did any two people indulge in such visual debauchery. We were gazing for fourteen hours a day without cease. If we had dared, we would have continued our sessions by torchlight.
In our last few days there, we were possessed by a true fever. We made a general tour, at racing pace, recapitulating our visits, with the clear swift glance of those who know what they are looking at, and go straight to the object they seek. Like those painters who retrace in ink the drawings done with a lead pencil that they fear will fade, we defined with a firmer stroke the thousand lineaments pencilled in our memory. We viewed once more the beauty of the Doge’s Palace, made expressly for the set of a drama or an opera, with its great pink walls, its white serrations, its double register of columns, its Arabian quatrefoils; that Hagia Sophia of the West, the prodigious Saint Mark’s Basilica, a colossal reliquary of vanished civilisations, its golden cavern variegated with mosaic, and immense columns of jasper, porphyry, alabaster, and ancient marble, a pirates’ cathedral enriched with the spoils of the world; the Campanile which bears its golden angel so far aloft in the azure, as protector of Venice, and guards Sansovino’s Loggetta, sculpted like a jewel, at its foot; the Clock Tower, on whose large gold and blue dial the hours parade in black and white; the Library, of a truly Athenian elegance, crowned with slender mythological statues, a smiling memory of neighbouring Greece; and the Grand Canal bordered by its double row of palaces, Gothic, Moorish, Renaissance, Rococo, whose diverse facades amaze with their inexhaustible fantasy and perpetual invention of detail that a lifetime would not be long enough to study, that splendid gallery of works on which the genius of Jacopo Sansovino, Vincenzo Scamozzi, Pietro Lombardo, Andrea Palladio, Baldassare Longhena, Guglielmo Bergamasco, Giovanni de’ Rossi, Alessandro Tremignon, and other wonderful architects was deployed, without counting the anonymous, humble masons of the Middle Ages whose efforts are no less admirable.
We took a ride in a gondola, from the point of the Dogana to the tip of Quintavalle, to fix forever in our mind that magical spectacle, that painting which speech is powerless to render, and allowed out eyes to devour, with desperate attention, that mirage, that Fata-Morgana, close to disappearing forever from our sight.
Now, as I am nearing the end of my tale, perhaps already too long, whose pages the impatient reader will have quickly turned, it seems to me that I have said nothing, that I have only feebly expressed my enthusiasm and depicted my superb models badly. Every monument, every church, every gallery demanded a volume where I could barely supply a chapter, and yet I have only talked about what is visible; I was careful not to disturb the dust of old chronicles, revive extinct memories, repopulate the deserted palaces with their former inhabitants because that would be the work of a lifetime, and I have had to be content to draw, on plain paper, photographic impressions which have no other merit than their sincerity.
Often the temptation seized me, to summon the patricians and grandees from their portraits by Titian, Bonifazio Veronese, or Paris Bordone, and to call from their carved frames the beautiful women, with brocaded dresses and hair of burnt gold, depicted by Giorgione and Paolo Veronese and to animate the décor which has remained intact and which is only missing the actors. The magic names of Dandolo, Foscari, Loredan, Marino Faliero, and Queen Catherine Cornaro, have more than once excited my imagination. But I wisely resisted. What is the point of recreating admirable poems in prose?
My task was a humbler one. Reading the tales of travellers, we wished for more exact, more familiar details, noted on the spot, for more precise remarks regarding the thousand small differences which tell us we have exchanged countries. General descriptions and historical overviews, in a pompous style, repeat for us, more or less adequately, what we already know, but yield paucity of information about the shape of hats, the cut of dresses, the qualities and names of local dishes, in such or such a city. I have garnered my spoils from all this and described houses, taverns, thoroughfares, landing-stages, theatre-posters, marionettes, Chinese shadow-puppets, cafes, street-musicians, children, old men, and young girls, everything that is usually disdained.
Is it not of more interest to know how a Venetian grisette dresses, and how her shawl’s folds lie on her shoulders, than to hear told, for the hundredth time, of the beheading of doge Marino Faliero on the Giants Staircase, which, incidentally, was only built a century or two after his death? Do you think it a matter of indifference to learn if the coffee is filtered, or heated with pomace brandy in the oriental fashion, at Florian’s and La Costanza? This little cup of dark coffee made in the Turkish-style, does that not say everything about Venice’s past? And if I copy for you, here, quite foolishly, a list of names gathered from the shop signs and walls, whose unique character announces that we are neither in Paris nor London, names such as Ermacora, Zamoro, Fogazzo, Zenobio, Dario, Paternian, Farsetti, Erizzo, Mangilli, Valmarana, Zorzi, Condulmer, Valcamonica, and Corner Zaguri, among others, will you not be amused and delighted by the form and euphony of these appellations so local, so romantic, so fluid, and so soft on the ear? Will not this litany bring you some echo of Venetian harmony?
I am a long way still from having fulfilled this program, however restricted it may be. The architecture I have rushed through, without needing to follow Nicolas Boileau’s precept (See Boileau’s poem ‘Tout doit tendre au bon sens’ advising restraint) in neglecting the festoon and the astragal The streets, with their ever-renewed spectacle, have many times prevented us entering the houses, which is not always easy to achieve for travellers, we inconstant birds of flight, that like swallows arrive and depart with the summer. The manners and morals of Venetian society gain perhaps too little space in these sketches, and the portrait often hides the man. But, in this century of hypocritical cant, I lack the joyful, masculine freedom of Charles des Brosses’ Italian letters, and it is difficult to speak of morals without being immoral.
To recount one’s own adventures is to appear conceited; to relate those of others indiscreet. How can one, moreover, betray the intimate secrets to which one has been cordially admitted, and repeat in a book what one was told in a whisper? The external forms of life are today the same almost everywhere, especially in good company. Is it really necessary to say that cicisbeos (cavalieri serventi) no longer exist, and that Venetian women take lovers like the women of Paris, London or any other place? If one desires a more local observation, let us add that they often take one, but rarely two, a moral trait which extends to all of Italy; furthermore, it is not in good taste for the lover to be an Austrian; which is a way of resisting oppression and isolating the enemy.
Ancient families who are ruined live in retirement, and poorly, the owner of a palazzo dining, in a room lined with paintings by the great masters, on a dish of polenta, fried-food, or shellfish that his sole remaining valet has purchased from the inn.
In the summer, Venetians spend their holiday in country houses festooned with vines, on the banks of the Brenta, or on small rural farms in Friuli, and return to winter in Venice, like we Parisians. Aristocrats who no longer have country homes and cannot travel due to lack of resources, cloister themselves throughout the season and only reappear when it is acceptable to frequent Saint Mark’s Square. To all this, naturally, there are exceptions: there are Venetian women lacking a lover, and the wealthy. Here the opposite to what I have said applies. Parties, balls, and dinners are rare. Fear of spies and informers makes for a very reserved form of society. Such folk only entertain themselves behind closed doors, and among those they trust. Luxury hides itself, and pleasure is muted, which makes it difficult to observe their manners on the wing.
Perhaps those who are kind enough to read this will criticise the myriads of artists’ names piled up here, as if on whim. Truly, I have not done so to parade, in vain, my erudition: the Venetian school is of such fabulous richness that my prolixity seems to me more like laconicism and ingratitude. The tree of art formed, in this fertile city, branches so fully, so luxuriantly, is so loaded with fruit, that one has as much difficulty in following its ramifications as those of the genealogical tree of the Virgin in Saint Mark’s Basilica, which simply displays kings, saints, patriarchs and prophets.
Beyond the four greatest names who personify Venetian art, Giorgione, Titian, Paolo Veronese, and Tintoretto, there are entire families of admirable painters. From Anthony Vivarini of Murano, to Tiepolo in whom the line was extinguished, a thousand-leafed Golden Book would be needed. to write the unknown names worthy of glory. The least of these artists would find fame today as a great genius, and those who currently pride themselves on their fame would make a poor showing among that mass of talents.
In reporting on the Accademia, I expressed my complete admiration for the wonderful Gothic school of Vivarini, Marco Basaiti, Carpaccio, and Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, who, to all the feeling of Andrea Mantegna, Pietro Perugino and Albrecht Dürer, joined a use of colour which anticipates Giorgione. But among the painters of that decadence which appeared following the death of Titian, what fertility, what ease, what a riot of invention, spirit, and colour!
Transcribing their names, here, would not stir any fresh thoughts; it would be necessary to add an analysis of their immense and innumerable works, to characterise their diverse styles, reconstruct their biographies, and recompose them in every aspect. It is a task that I might yet undertake, and which I have often attempted; but for that I would need a ten-year stay in Venice; which alone might tempt me to try. In the churches, and palazzos, they covered every surface with frescoes and paintings; they took advantage of every space Tintoretto left free.
What is insufficiently recognised is that Venice is full of sculptures, bas-reliefs, marble and bronze figures of the rarest merit, works of statuary equal to its paintings, but of which we never speak, and which we unreasonably ignore. We have named some of these artists; but anyone wanting a complete list would be faced with a very long litany. Human fame is capricious! Who now speaks of Alessandro Vittoria, of Tiziano Aspetti, of Alessandro Leopardi, of Jacopo Sansovino and so many other sculptors?
Part XXVII: Padua
Now, at whatever cost, we were obliged to depart. Padua, the city of Ezzelino (Ezzolino II da Romano) and Angelo (see Victor Hugo’s play ‘Angelo, Tyrant of Padua’) called us. Farewell, dear Campo San Moisè, where we spent such sweet hours; farewell to the sunsets framing the Salute, the effects of moonlight on the Grand Canal, beautiful blondes in the public gardens, cheerful dinners under the vines of Quintavalle; farewell to the beautiful art and splendid painting, the romantic palaces of the Middle Ages, and the Greek facades by Palladio; farewell to the doves of Saint Mark’s; farewell to the gulls over the lagoon, bathing on the Lido beach, our journeys by gondola; Venice, ‘fare thee well, and if forever, still forever, fare thee well!’ in the words uttered by Lord Byron, from the height of his disdain, regarding an altogether different relationship.
The railway carries us off, and already the Venus of the Adriatic has plunged her pink and white form, once more, beneath the azure of the sea.
Disembarking from the gondola to take one’s seat in a railway carriage is a discordant action. The two seem unsuited to being experienced together. One, expresses the memory of romance; the other, prosaic reality. Zorzi de Cataro, the gondolier, delivers you, abruptly, to George Stephenson, the engineer. You were in Venice, now you are in England or America. O Titian! O Paolo Veronese! Who would have thought that your turquoise sky would one day be stained by the smoke from a British engine, and the azure of your lagoons would reflect the arches of a viaduct? So, the world changes; but here the contrast is more acute, for the forms of a vanished age have remained otherwise intact, and the present still wears the skin of the past.
We had already travelled this road, but in the reverse direction, when passing from Verona to Venice. A storm, bursting upon us with thunder, lightning, and rain, revealed to us a landscape of a particularly fierce and fantastic character, a landscape which, seen in normal weather, offers a series of well-cultivated stretches, traversed by canals, garlanded with vines climbing happily from one tree to another, its lovely horizons rising to blue hills and dotted with villas, whose whiteness stands out against the green of the gardens; a rich aspect, abundant and fertile.
For travelling companions, in the railway carriage, we had two or three monks of a pleasant disposition, and some young priests tall, thin, and of a youthful gracefulness, with oval blissful faces, of that uniform pallor, that deathlike hue, beloved by the Italian masters, and who resembled Gothic angels from Fiesole, plucked of their wings, their golden nimbus replaced by a tricorn or Basel hat. One of them was exactly reminiscent of Raphael’s portrait; but the dull eye lacked a spark, and the mouth opened vaguely in a foolish smile; otherwise, his looks would have been perfect. The sight of these seminarians made me reflect that adolescence does not exist in France. That charming transition from childhood to youth is totally absent at home. Between the hideous middle-school gamin, with large red hands, and lanky appearance, and the gaillard who shaves or sports a beard, there is nothing. The Greek ephebe, the Algerian yalouled, the Italian ragazzo, the Spanish muchacho, fill, with a young grace, and a beauty still hovering between the sexes, the gap which separates the child from the man. It would be interesting to research the reasons why we are deprived of this nuance; especially since there are plenty of English adolescents who are beautiful, though a little awkward perhaps because of the sailor-suits they are condemned to wear.
While reflecting on this problem of physiology, we arrived at the station: ten leagues are soon devoured, even on an Italian railway. There, a crowd of rascally coachmen were waiting for us, as we disembarked to their shouts and fierce gesticulations; they fought over the travellers and their luggage, like the cochers de coucou (cabriolet drivers) on the Place de la Concorde in Paris, or the robeïroou in Avignon on the Quai du Rhône. One seizes your arm, another a leg; you are lifted from the ground, and, if you are not robust enough to calm their ardour with a few good blows, you run the risk of being quartered like a regicide and dragged away by four porters.
About twenty carriages, cabriolets, berlingots, and other vehicles, were parked at the gate to the station. It surprised and delighted us to see horses and carriages. It was almost two months since, if we except that lone horse on the isle of Murano, that the sight had presented itself. We rented a carriage to bear us and our trunk as far as Padua, which is some way from the railway station. Unaccustomed as we were to all noise of this kind by our silent locomotion through Venice, the sound of the wheels, and the trampling of the horses deafened us, and seemed unbearable; we needed several days for it to become familiar.
Padua is an ancient city, standing proud on the horizon, with its bell-towers, domes, and old walls, over which many a lizard scampers, wriggling about in the sun. Placed too close to the larger city which draws all life to itself, Padua is dead, with a well-nigh deserted air. Its streets, lined with twin rows of low arcades, seemed sad, and nothing there recalled the elegant graceful architecture of Venice. Its massive, heavy buildings, bear a somewhat serious frown, and the deep dark porches of the houses looked like mouths yawning from boredom.
We were taken to a large inn, probably established in some ancient palazzo, whose large rooms, debased by vulgar use, had once kept better company. It was a long journey from the vestibule to our room via host of stairs and corridors; it needed a map, or Ariadne’s clue, to find one’s way around.
Our windows opened onto quite a pleasant view: a river flowed at the foot of the wall, the Brenta or the Bacchiglione, I am not sure which, since both provide water to Padua. The banks of this watercourse were lined with old houses and long walls above which trees projected; picturesque embankments, from which fishermen cast their lines with a patience which characterises them in all countries, and huts with nets and cloths hanging from the windows to dry, formed, beneath scratchy rays of light, a charming motif for a watercolour.
After dinner, we visited Caffè Pedrocchi, famous throughout Italy for its magnificence. Nothing is more monumentally classic. Nothing but pillars, columns, ovals, and palmettes, in the neoclassical style of Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, all very grand and heavy with marble. What was most interesting were immense geographical maps, forming a tapestry of sorts, representing the various parts of the world on an enormous scale. This somewhat pedantic ornamentation gave the room an academic air, and we were surprised not to see a pulpit instead of a counter, and a professor in his robes instead of a master lemonade -maker. As to that, since Padua is a university town, it is good that the students can continue their studies while enjoying their iced-drinks or coffee.
Padua - Palace of the Royal University
The University of Padua was once famous. In the thirteenth century, eighteen thousand young people, a whole army of scholars, followed the lessons of its learned teachers among whom Galileo later figured; one of his vertebrae is retained as a relic, that of a martyr who suffered for the truth. The facade of the University is very beautiful; four Doric columns grant it a severe and monumental look; but solitude has established itself in many of the lecture rooms, in the rest of which, today, scarcely a thousand students are taught.
The theatre posters announced Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, and a traditional ballet: we had found our evening’s entertainment. The stage was very simple; the set seemed to have been painted by a maker of stained-glass on a spree, and recalled the cardboard cut-out scenery that children love to employ. But the actors had lively voices and that natural taste which characterises the least of Italian singers. Rosina was young and charming, and Basilio reminded me of Antonio Tamburini, as regards the depth of his baritone voice.
The aria La calunnia was sung as well as it might have been sung in a first-rate theatre. But the ballet was truly strange, composed in the most entertaining fossilised, antediluvian style in all the world; one found oneself transported, as if by magic, to the heyday of classical melodrama, to the world of Guilbert de Pixérécourt and Louis-Charles Caigniez in all its purity; the scenario was reminiscent of Les Aqueducs de Cosenza; Robert, Chef des Brigands; Le Pont du Torrent, and other masterpieces neglected by the current generation. It was a tale of a traveller lost in the woods, of an inn of cutthroats, of a sensitive young girl, of bandits dressed as Cossacks, with voluminous red trousers, formidable beards, and an arsenal of cutlasses and pistols in their belts, all involved in dances and regular fights with sabres and axes, as in the ancient and most glorious days of the Théâtre des Funambules, in Paris, before Champfleury (Jules Fleury-Husson) introduced literature to that naive form of theatricals.
A handsome officer underwent terrible events with the obligatory heroism of all young leaders, followed about by a wretched Jocrisse (comedy valet). By a singular act of the imagination, this Jocrisse was played as a soldier of the Old Guard, dressed in a ragged uniform, made up like a macaque, adorned with a red nose which emerged from a bush of moustaches and grey sideburns, and possessing piercing eyes buried beneath crow’s-foot wrinkles traced out in charcoal. The comedy depended on his perpetual fright at the slightest stirring of leaves, and his chattering teeth and colic nature of a soldier of the Old Guard, crazed by terror and cowardice. Transforming a model of bravery into an example of cowardice, and representing a curmudgeon of the Grande Armée as prone to the anxieties of a pantomime Pierrot, seemed to us a risky and fantastic idea in poor taste. My chauvinism was aroused, and I was obliged to reflect on the role in which the Cirque Olympique has cast the Prussians to calm my mind.
The next day we went to visit the cathedral dedicated to Saint Anthony, who enjoys in Padua the same adoration as Saint Januarius in Naples. He is the Genius loci (spirit of the place), the saint venerated above all others. He performed no less than thirty miracles per day, if Giacomo Casanova is to be believed. He well deserved his nickname of the miracle worker; his prodigious zeal slowed somewhat, yet the saint’s credit was nonetheless undiminished, and so many masses are ordered at the altar, that the powers of the cathedral priests and the number of days in the year are inadequate to satisfying the demand. To liquidate the account, the Pope allows Masses to be conducted at the end of each year, every one of which carries a thousandfold value; in that manner, Saint Anthony avoids bankrupting the faithful.
Padua - The cathedral
In the square which borders the cathedral, stands a beautiful bronze equestrian statue by Donatello, the first to be cast since antiquity, representing the condottieri leader, Gattamelata (Erasmo da Narni), a brigand who certainly did not deserve that honor. But the artist rendered him with a proud attitude and presence, and with a Roman Emperor’s baton, and that fully sufficed.
The Basilica of St. Anthony consists of an aggregation of domes and pinnacles, and a large facade in brick, with a triangular pediment, beneath which reigns a gallery with ribs and columns; three small doors,
pierced below high arches, front the three naves. The interior is excessively rich, cluttered with chapels and tombs of different styles. We saw examples there of the art of every era, from the naive religious and delicate art of the Middle Ages, to the excessive crumpled fantasies of the rococo style. We noted a most gallant chapel in the Pompadour manner; angels in wigs play dancing master’s violins, and perform an avant-deux (line dance) in the clouds. They lack only rouge and beauty-spots. What was more curious, was a black and white marble tomb, in the same playful and excessive taste. There Death plays the coquette, and smiles with bared teeth like Marie Guimard after a pirouette. Death presents an amorous appearance and gracefully advances fleshless shins. We had never imagined a skeleton could be so playful.
Fortunately, Giotto’s Genealogy of Jesus Christ, and a Madonna by the same painter, donated by Petrarch, correct this untimely cheerfulness somewhat, and Catholic seriousness regains its rights over tombs of the fourteenth and the fifteenth century, on which stiffened statues lie, gravely, with clasped hands. The cloister which adjoins the church is paved with funeral slabs, and its walls vanish under the mass of sepulchral monuments with which they are adorned; we read a number of the epitaphs, which were very beautiful. The Italians retain their ancestral secret as regards lapidary Latin.
The Abby of St. Justina is a huge basilica with a bare façade, and tediously sober and impoverished interior architecture. Good taste is always essential, but not when taken to such a point, and I prefer the wild exuberance and excessive contortions of rococo to such nothingness. A beautiful altar painting by Paolo Veronese (The Martyrdom of Saint Justina), highlights this poverty. If the church is dull and without character, one cannot say the same for the two gigantic monsters that guard it, lying on its stairs like faithful mastiffs. Japanese chimera never possessed a more frightening and dreadful appearance than those fantastic animals, a species of hideous griffin, with the rump of a lion, and the wings of an eagle, the foolish yet ferocious head, ending in a blunt beak pierced by oblique nostrils like that of the turtle. The monstrous creatures hold tight to their chests, beneath their claws, a warrior on horseback, caparisoned in medieval armour, whom they crush with a slow pressure, while gazing vaguely at something like the cow of which Victor Hugo speaks (see Hugo’s poem ‘La Vache’), and otherwise unconcerned by the convulsive efforts of the myrmidon crushed thereby.
What does the knight, caught with his mount in the relentless claws of these crouching monsters, signify? What myth is concealed in that dark sculptural fantasy? Do the pair of creatures illustrate some legend or are they simply sinister hieroglyphics indicating Fate? We could not guess, and no one knew or wished to tell us. The other day, in leafing through the album that Prince Alexey Soltykov brought back from India, we found an illustration showing, in the propylaea of a Hindu pagoda, an identical monster, also in the process of suffocating an armed man against its chest.
Whatever the meaning of these fearful creatures, I divine, there, vague confused memories of cosmogonic antagonism, and the struggle between the principles of good and evil: it is Ahriman conquering Ahura Mazda, or Shiva battling with Vishnu. Later, under the porch of the Cathedral of Ferrara, we saw two of these Chimeras, this time crushing lions.
One thing that should not be overlooked, when in Padua, is to visit the ancient Arena chapel, located at the bottom of a garden amidst dense and luxuriant vegetation, where one would certainly not expect it unless one were so advised.
The church interior was painted throughout by Giotto. No column, no rib, no architectural division interrupts the vast tapestry of frescoes; the general appearance is soft, azure, starry akin to a beautiful calm sky; ultramarine dominates, and sets the local tone; thirty large compartments, indicated by simple borders, contain the life of the Virgin and that of her divine Son, in extensive detail: one might describe them as illustrations, in miniature, to a gigantic missal. The characters, in one of those naive anachronisms so dear to history, are dressed in the fashions of Giotto’s day.
Below these compositions, of a charming sweetness and exhibiting the purest religious feeling, a painted plinth shows the seven deadly sins, and other allegorical figures, symbolised in an ingenious way, in a very accomplished style; a paradise and a hell, subjects which preoccupied many artists of this era, complete this wonderful group. There are odd touching details in these paintings; children come out of their tiny coffins so as to ascend to heaven with joyful alacrity, and race off to play on the flowery lawns of the celestial garden; others extend their hands to their half-resurrected mothers. We might also note that all the devils and vices are obese, while the angels and virtues are long and slender. The painter thus marks the preponderance of matter in some, and the spirit in others.
I must record here a remark of a picturesque and physiological nature. The female Paduan type differs greatly from that of the Venetian, despite the proximity of the two cities; the women’s beauty is more severe and more classical: dense brown hair, marked eyebrows, dark eyes and a serious gaze, a pale olive complexion, and a slightly matt oval face, recall the main features of the Lombard race; the black bautas which frame these beautiful girls’ faces, gives them, as they file in silence along the deserted arcades, a proud and fierce air, which contrasts with the vague smile and easy grace of the Venetians.
View, in Piazza Salone, the Palace of Justice (Palazzo della Ragione), a vast building in Moorish style, with galleries, columns, and denticulated battlements, which contains the largest room, perhaps, in the world, and recalls the architecture of the Doge’s Palace in Venice; and in the Scuola del Santo, the glorious frescoes by Titian, the only ones we know of produced by that great artist; and you will avoid major regret on leaving Padua.
They still display there, the instruments of torture, easels, straps, pliers, pincers, boots, toothed wheels, saws, and cleavers, which Ezzelino, most famous among tyrants, used on his victims and beside whom Angelo is nothing but an angel of kindness. I bore a letter to the enthusiast who preserves this bizarre collection, fit for an executioner's museum. We could not locate him, to my great regret, and we left the same evening for Rovigo, tearing ourselves away with difficulty from that sweet Lombardo-Venetian kingdom, which lacks nothing, except, alas, liberty!
Part XXVIII: Ferrara and Bologna
A horse-drawn omnibus takes a few hours to travel from Padua to Rovigo, at which we arrived in the evening. While awaiting our supper, we wandered through the streets of the city, lit by silvery moonlight which made it possible to discern the silhouettes of monuments; low arcades like those of the old Place Royale in Paris run along the sides of the streets, and with their alternating light and shadow form long cloisters which, that evening, recalled the effect of the stage-set of Act III of Meyerbeer’s Robert Le Diable with its Ballet of the Nuns.
Rare pedestrians passed by silently like shadows; a few plaintive dogs barked at the moon, and the city already seemed asleep, the windows everywhere unilluminated, with the exception of a few brightly-lit cafes, where the regulars, looking bored and sleepy, consumed an iced drink, a half-cup, or a glass of water in small spoonfuls, sipping slowly, wisely, and methodically, raising their heads now and then to read an insignificant article in the censored Diario, like people who have many hours to endure, and await the time when they can depart for bed.
In the morning, at dawn, we were obliged to climb into a sort of guimbarde (two-wheeled carriage) holding the middle ground between a French patache and a Valencian tartane. Delicate travellers may set here an elegy, filled with pathos, on the discomfort offered by these kinds of vehicles; but the Spanish galera (covered cart) and postal wagon, driven on the most abominable tracks in the world, had rendered me extremely philosophical as regards such small inconveniences. Besides, those who wish for all their home comforts only need to remain there. An Erler coupé on the macadam of the Champs-Élysées gives an infinitely softer ride, and it is indisputable that we dine better at the Freres-Provençaux (in the Palais Royale) than in some hotel on the main road.
The journey from Rovigo to Ferrara is not very picturesque: flat land, cultivated fields, Northern trees; one could believe oneself in a department of France.
We crossed the River Po, its waters yellowish; its low, bare banks vaguely recalling those of the Guadalquivir below Seville. The fiery Eridanus, deprived of its tribute of melting snow, looked quite calm and good-natured for the moment.
The River Po separates Romagna from the Lombardo-Venetian states, and Customs awaits you on exit from the ferry. One tends to complain a great deal about the Italian Customs and the endless vexations associated with them. I confess they have always leafed through our meagre luggage with less meticulousness, certainly, than would have been shown by the French Customs on such occasions; it is true that we always rendered up the keys with graceful insouciance and displayed our passport, whenever we were requested to do so, with the celerity and politeness of the monkey Pacolet (See Gérard de Nerval’s tale, ‘La Main Enchantée’)
The Romagnola Customs, after having carelessly rumpled our shirts and socks, and finding that we carried no literature other than a Guide Richard (travel guide), a superlatively benign and scarcely subversive book, closed our trunk with magnanimity, and permitted us in the most lenient manner possible, to continue our journey.
In the carriage we had the company of two rather elderly priests, large, fat, short, with oily yellow complexions, and shaved beards whose bluish tones rose to the cheekbones, and who unknowingly wore the costume of Basilio in Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro, as exaggerated a caricature as those the theatre-directors choose to present on stage. Among us ecclesiastical dress has almost disappeared. Priests in France secularise themselves as much as is possible; very few, since the revolutions of July 1830 and February 1848, wear a cassock, openly, in the street. A wide-brimmed hat, clothes of a black antique cut, long frock coats, a cape of a sombre colour, produce a mixed appearance, somewhere between religious and modern dress, like to that of a Quaker, or a serious fellow carefully attired. They are priests only by stealth, and it is only in church that they don priestly regalia. In Italy, on the contrary, they sit back and relax in character, take the upper hand, and are everywhere at home, flourishing their handkerchiefs amply, blowing their noses and coughing loudly, as people to whom all respect is due, and who must not be interfered with.
They had taken the best seats in the carriage, which we had yielded to them with the deference owed to their age and condition, and spread themselves generously, even though they had usurped them without the slightest word of apology and the slightest concern for our pleasure and comfort. It is true that we were in the Papal Sates, where the priest reigns as an absolute master, possessing the keys to both heaven and earth, to the other world and this one, and able to damn you, hang you, and destroy you, body and soul. The awareness of this enormous power, the greatest ever wielded, grants the priests of that country a security, poise, and masterful and sovereign ease of which we have no idea in the countries of the North.
Our two priests, for that was probably their rank in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, exchanged rare and mysterious words with each other with that reserve and prudence which a priest never abandons before secularists; or they slept; or muttered the Latin of their breviary from volumes with brown covers, the red-lettered sections separated by bookmarks; I cannot believe that, throughout the whole journey, they chose even once to look at the landscape beyond the carriage; did they know and fear the distractions of the outside world, the charm of eternal Nature behind which hides the great god Pan of antiquity, whom the Catholics of the Middle Ages persisted in viewing as the Devil?
These companions, certainly respectable but whose dull chill froze us, we parted from at Ferrara. Those pale faces, those black clothes made our vehicle resemble something like a funeral carriage, and we watched them leave with pleasure.
Ferrara rises alone, amidst a level tract of countryside which is prosperous rather than picturesque. When ones enter via the main street which leads to the square, the appearance of the city is imposing and monumental. A palace with a grand staircase occupies a corner of its vast terrain; it must serve as courthouse or town house, because people of all classes enter and exit its wide doors.
As we wandered the street, satisfying our curiosity at the expense of our appetite, and stealing from the time allotted to our lunch forty minutes in which to feast our eyes and fulfil our duties as a traveller, a strange apparition suddenly appeared before us, as unexpected as a phantom at midday ever is: it was a kind of spectre, masked in black, its head engulfed in a black hood, the body draped in a cloak, or rather a purple domino bordered with red, and with a red cross on the shoulder, a yellow copper crucifix hanging from its neck, and a red belt round its waist; this figure was silently shaking a small wooden box, a portable chest, which emitted the clinking of coins.
This scarecrow, whose eyes alone, seen shining through the holes in the mask, were alive, rattled its treasury in front of us a few times, into which, terrified, we let a handful of loose change flow, without knowing for what charity this lugubrious beggar was collecting. He continued on his way without saying a word, accompanied by a sinister, funereal, and metallic tinkle of coins, holding out his box into which everyone hastened to bury a handful of pennies.
We asked what Order this ghost, more frightening than the monks and ascetics of Francisco de Zurbarán’s paintings, belonged to, who thus brought the terror of nocturnal visions to the pure light of day and realised in the street a nightmare of troubled sleep. We were told that he was a penitent of the Confraternity of Death, begging in order to fund masses and biers for those poor devils who were going to be executed by firing squad that day; brigands, or republicans, of that we learnt no more. Such penitents take upon themselves the sad and charitable mission of accompanying the tortured and condemned to their death, supporting them in their supreme anguish, removing their mutilated bodies from the scaffold, laying them in their coffins, and providing them with Christian burial. They are citizens who dedicate themselves, out of feelings of pity, to these painful functions and thus bring a tender element, though veiled and masked, to the implacable and cold immolations of justice. These spectres defend the victims, to some extent, from sight of the executioner. It is a timid protest on behalf of Humanity. Often these charitable attendants on the scaffold feel the pain of the condemned, and are more troubled than the victims themselves.
This is not the place to discuss the legitimacy of the death penalty; voices which gain more attention than mine have developed, with great eloquence, the logical reasons for and against. But, given that this dreadful legal tragedy is to be upheld, it seems to me that the staging (please forgive the word) must be as fearsome as possible. It is not a matter of skilfully preventing the culprit comprehending their immediate fate, an operation which in no way improves the business, but a matter of setting a terrible example which will act on the imagination and deter crime. Whatever dismal spectacle can increase the effect of this bloody drama and impress it on the depths of the spectators’ memories in formidable form, must, in my opinion, be implemented. It is necessary that physical terror combine with moral terror.
Imagine for a moment these purple-robed Claude Frollos (see Victor Hugo’s ‘Notre Dame de Paris’) holding burning candles in their hands, walking in double line beside the ashen-faced condemned! ‘That’s out of an Ann Radcliffe novel, it’s pure melodrama’, serious thinkers will say: possibly so. But then what is the point of cutting off heads, if it terrifies no one? One must avoid hiding from realities, if one wishes them to produce the desired effect; a torment that terrifies is less hideous than a ‘civilised’ torment deprived, by mechanics and philanthropy, of its dreadful poetry. But enough of this unpleasant subject; let us return to less sombre matters.
Italy has largely retained the methods of Doctor Sangrado (see Alain-René Lesage’s novel ‘Gil Blas’), and the ilk, whose system, developed in kitchen-Latin in Molière’s play The Imaginary Illness, has not yet been done away with; this I say without disrespect to true medical talent. There are in the Peninsula quite numerous examples of Moliere’s doctors, Purgon, Diafoirus, Macroton, and Desfonandrès, and many another in the style of Molière; one is bled white for the slightest indisposition; these operations are carried out by barbers; one sees, on their shop signs, paintings of the most delightful surgical fantasies: here, one views a bare arm whose opened vein launches a purple jet as ample as those spurts of harmless beer pouring into the glasses of hussars or young girls on village inn-signs; there, chubby Cupids, crossing a deep blue sky, bear a dish which will receive the blood of a young woman in an interesting state, who is smiled upon tenderly by a husband dressed in the costume of the days of the Directory. In these bloodthirsty subjects, the verve of the sign-painters called to create these works does not shy away from a violence of tone and a use of contrast amazing to the colourist.
It was market-day, which produced a degree of excitement in a city which is usually so dreary. We saw nothing characteristic in terms of costume; uniformity pervades everything. The country folk around Ferrara were quite similar to ours, except for the southern brilliance of their black eyes, and a certain pride in their appearance which reminded us that we were in the land of the classics; autumn produce, grapes, pumpkins, peppers, tomatoes, along with coarse pottery, and rustic household utensils, were piled high in the square, where groups of customers and buyers were stationed, along with a few ox-carts much less primitive than those of Spain; a few donkeys loaded with packs of wood waited with patient melancholy for their masters to conclude their business and return; oxen knelt while ruminating peacefully; donkeys tugged, with the tips of their grey lips, at blades of grass springing from cracks in the pavement.
One detail peculiar to Italy was the presence of open-air money changers. Their stalls are of the simplest nature consisting of a stool and a small table where piles of scudi, baiocchi (one hundredth of a scudo), and other coins are stored. The money-changer, crouched like a dragon, looks at his little undefended heap of treasure with a worried and yellow eye, filled as he is with the incessant fear of thieves.
Let me note one more very Italian detail: a sonnet in praise of a doctor who had cured his patient of illness had been posted by the thankful convalescent on one of the most visible walls in the square. This sonnet, very flowery and full of mythological references, explained that the Fates had wished to cut the thread of the patient’s days, but that the doctor, accompanied by Aesculapius, the god of medicine, and Hygeia, the goddess of health, had descended into Hades to deflect Atropos’ scissors, and replenish Clotho’s spindle, Lachesis having since then spun a length of thread. We quite liked this ancient and naive way of expressing gratitude.
The cathedral, whose facade overlooks the square, is in that Italian Gothic style so inferior to our Northern Gothic. The porch offers curious details. Its pillars, instead of resting on bases like ordinary columns, are borne by chimeras, in the style of those beside the portal of the Basilica of Santa Justina in Padua, which the columns half-crush, and who take revenge for their pain by tearing captive Ninevite-style lions in their paws. These caryatid monsters seemed to writhe horribly beneath the enormous pressure, their eyes full of pain.
Ferrara - The cathedral
The castle of the former Dukes of Ferrara (Castello Estense), which can be found a little further on, has a fine feudal appearance. It is a vast cluster of towers, linked by high walls and crowned with lookout-points forming a cornice, emerging from a large moat full of water over which one passes by a well-defended bridge.
Ferrara - View of Castello Estense from the Bell-Tower of Saint Benedict
Regarding what I have just said, let none imagine a burg like those which bristle on cliffs along the Rhine. A stage-set in the Théâtre Italien, that of Federico Ricci’s Corrado d’Altamura, or Rossini’s Tancredi or some other chivalresque opera, would give a fair idea of the castle. The Gothic in Italy has by no means the same physiognomy as at home. No greenish stones, mossy sculptures, or mantles of ivy falling from old broken balconies; no trace of the rust of time, inseparable for us from a building of the Middle Ages: it is a Gothic which, despite its date, seems brand new; a white and pink Gothic, more pretty than serious, somewhat reminiscent, to be honest, of those feudal, troubadour mantelpiece clocks of the Restoration period. The castle of the Dukes of Ferrara, everywhere built from bricks or stones reddened by the sun, shows the vermilion hue of youth which detracts from its attempt at an imposing effect. It looks too much like a setting from melodrama.
In this castle lived the famous Lucrezia Borgia, whom Victor Hugo portrays as a monster, and Ariosto depicts as a model of chastity, grace and virtue; the blonde Lucrezia, who wrote letters breathing the purest love, and of whom Byron possessed a few strands of hair, fine as silk and gleaming like gold. This is where plays by Tasso, Ariosto and Giovanni Guarini were played; where those glittering orgies took place, full of poison and assassination, which characterise that period of learned, artistic Italy, refined and yet villainous.
It is customary to visit, piously, the dungeon where Tasso, mad with love and pain, passed so many years, according to the dubious poetic legend springing from his misfortunes. We lacked the time, and regretted it little. This dungeon, of which I have before me a very accurate drawing, has only its four walls, capped by a low vault. In the background is a grilled window with thick bars and an iron door with large bolts. It is most improbable that, in this dark hole covered with cobwebs, Tasso was able to work and rework his epic, compose his sonnets, and occupy himself with minor details of his clothing, such as the quality of the velvet used to produce his hat and the silk to make his breeches, and of his cuisine, such as the kind of sugar with which he wanted to sprinkle his salad, that which he was given not being fine enough for his liking; nor did we see Ariosto’s dwelling, another station on the obligatory pilgrimage. Besides my placing little faith in such inauthentic traditions, such characterless relics, I prefer to seek Ariosto in his Orlando Furioso, Tasso in his Gerusalemme Liberata or in Goethe’s fine dramatic work (Torquato Tasso).
Activity in Ferrara is concentrated on the Plaza Nueva, in front of the church and around the castle. Life has not yet abandoned the heart of the city; but as one moves further away, the pulse weakens, paralysis begins, death approaches; silence, solitude and grass invade the streets; one feels that one is wandering in a Thebaid populated by the shades of the past and from which the living flow away in a failing stream. Nothing is sadder than to see the corpse of a city slowly fall to dust beneath the sun and rain. At least we bury human corpses.
After a few hastily-swallowed mouthfuls, we returned to our berline, and headed for Bologna at a moderate pace that was further reduced by the ox-carts, piled high with cut reeds, obstructing the road: they looked like haystacks ambling along, a green wall receding before us, since the oxen completely disappeared beneath their mass. We had to wait until the path widened before overtaking them.
We halted at a vast inn with an arcade open to every breeze, in a place whose name I cannot exactly remember, it being a detail of little significance, but which, in all probability must have been Cento, and we ate a modest repast there, since we were due to arrive in Bologna in the early evening.
Of the route I can scarcely recall anything other than a vast horizon of crops and trees lacking the slightest interest. Perhaps the shadows of evening, which brought on a state of drowsiness and left me less light than the spark of my cigar, hid some beautiful scene from view; but that is unlikely, given the nature of that countryside.
Bologna is a city with arcaded streets, like most of the towns in that part of Italy. These porticos provide convenient shelter from the rain and sun; but they transform the streets into long cloisters, absorb the light, and make the cities look chilly and monastic. One may judge from the Rue de Rivoli, in Paris, the success of this system.
We descended at an inn, where by means of a most moving pantomime we obtained our supper, which included, for our benefit, salami (a cured meat, usually pork, sausage), mortadella (a large sausage of finely ground pork), bondiola (shoulder of pork), and Bologna sausage (its contents similar to bondiola), required to provide local colour.
After supper we went for a walk; a droll character, pale and greasy-faced, with a moustache brushing his teeth, decorations in cheap alloy, and a frock coat with loop fastenings, reminiscent of the type worn by Cavalcanti senior in Dumas’ novel (The Count of Monte Cristo), began to dog our footsteps and followed our every change of pace and direction whenever he detected that same. Bored with this manoeuvre, we told him to walk elsewhere, and did so in a rather brutal way, taking him for a police informer; but he refused to quit us, his claim, and his right, being that of acting as a guide to travellers. Moreover, in that capacity, we belonged to him, and he found it indelicate of us to seek to avoid the royalties he levied on such as ourselves. We were thieves who defrauded him of his revenue, who took the very bread from his mouth, and the coins from his pocket. He had counted on us for the enjoyment of a bottle of Picolit or Aleatico, to buy a scarf for his wife and a ring for his mistress. We were infamous scoundrels for disturbing his plans of ease and domestic happiness. We were setting a bad example to all future travellers, and he was resolved not to back down one iota. He wished to lead us to the diligence, whose lantern shone two steps in front of us, and to Via Galleria where we were. I had never seen a more obstinate and more stupidly opiniated fool. After the most energetic cursing, and cries of: ‘To the Devil with you!’ fiercely accented on our part, he recommenced his proposal as if we had said not a word, feigning that we would infallibly lose our way, and that he would not suffer it for anything in the world.
Realising that extreme action was required, I took a few steps back, and invoking, mentally, the memory of Hubert Lecour, our teacher of savate (street fighting) and how to wield a stick, I began to execute a beautiful arabesque with my cane that would have made Corporal Trimm (see Lawrence Sterne’s ‘Tristram Shandy’) envious of the complexities of its arcs and knots, and which, in that art, is termed the rose couverte.
When the scoundrel saw the rod flash by like lightning, and heard it hiss like a snake, three inches from his nose and ears, he leaned back muttering, and saying that it was not natural for proper travellers to refuse the services of an educated and considerate guide who had led the English about Bologna to their great satisfaction.
Remorse for not having broken his pate returns sometimes, on sleepless nights; but perhaps I would have regretted the good deed, and paid for harming that pumpkin-head. I ask forgiveness of all those travellers whom he may subsequently have annoyed, for not having knocked him senseless. It is an error I will repair, if I ever pass through Bologna again.
We had a letter of recommendation for Giacomo Rossini who, unfortunately, was absent and was not due to return for a few days. It is embarrassing not to have viewed the living face or heard the voice of a great contemporary genius. One should strive as much as is possible, to witness the external forms of beautiful spirits, and when we hear Semiramide, The Barber of Seville, or William Tell, it is painful to me to be able to add no more to my idea of Rossini than the engraving of him by Ary Scheffer, and the statue in marble, with under-straps, which clutters the box-office in the Opéra vestibule (there is a small bronze copy by Antoine Etex in the Louvre).
A puerile remark perhaps, but one that I have already made in my travels, is that one can judge the state of advancement of a civilisation by how small the number of barbers is in a given town or city. In Paris, there are very few; in London, there are none not at all. That home of razors shaves its own beard. Without wanting to accuse Romagna of barbarism, it is fair to say that nowhere have I seen a greater number of barbers than in Bologna; one street alone contained more than twenty in a very limited area, and, what is most amusing, is that the Bolognese city dwellers are frequently bearded.
It is the people of the countryside who form the barber-shops’ clientele, the barbers having a very light hand, as our skin can bear witness, without however possessing the dexterity of the Spaniards, the premier barbers in the world since the appearance of Figaro.
Leaving the barber’s shop, we chose and followed a street at random which led us, suddenly, to the square (Piazza di Porta Ravegnana) in which the Torre degli Asinelli and the Torre della Garisenda, have been tottering for many centuries already, without falling; towers which had the honor of providing Dante with an image. The great poet compares Antaeus bending towards the earth to the Garisenda (Inferno Canto XXXI), which proves that its inclination began before the fourteenth century.
These towers, viewed by moonlight, seem the most fantastic in the world; their strange deviation, belying all the laws of statics and perspective, makes one dizzy, and makes all the neighbouring buildings appear out of true. The Torre degli Asinelli is three hundred feet high; its inclination is three and a half feet. This extreme elevation makes it appear spindly, and can only be compared to one of those huge factory chimneys in Manchester or Birmingham. It rises from a crenelated base and has two further crenelated stages, the second less pronounced; an iron chain runs from the pinnacle which surmounts it to the base of the building.
La Garisenda, which is only half the height of the Torre degli Asinelli, is dreadfully out of true and from certain directions seems almost to touch its neighbour on the right. Although it has been standing for more than six hundred years, I preferred not to linger on the side towards which it inclines. It seemed to me that the instant of its ruin had arrived, and I would be crushed beneath the rubble; a moment of childish fear which it is hard for one to escape.
A bizarre and grotesque idea, which illustrates perfectly the extravagant effect of these towers, came to me while looking at them, which I shared with my travelling companion: they are two monuments which drank themselves into intoxication outside the barrier, and have returned home drunk, leaning against each other.
If the glow of the moon allowed us to see the towers of Asinelli and Garisenda, it was insufficient for us to examine the paintings in the museum, which according to the guide-book, include works by the three Carracci (Annibale, Agostino and Ludovico), Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri), Francesco Albani, and other great masters of the Bolognese school, and we returned, much to our great regret, to lie down on one of those enormous Italian beds, which would easily hold Hop-o’-My-Thumb’s six brothers, and the seven daughters of the Ogre, along with their fathers and mothers; you can rest there, pointed in all directions, up, down, or diagonally, without ever falling into the street below.
At four o’clock in the morning we rose, still half-asleep, to mount the Florence stagecoach, and we noticed a gathering of troops. They were preparing to execute some twenty people for political reasons. We left Bologna with the painful impression we had already experienced in Verona, and Ferrara, and which was awaiting us in Rome: but the thought of crossing the Apennines on a beautiful September day soon dispelled the gloomy feeling!
Part XXIX: Florence
The Armida (see Tasso’s ‘Gerusalemme Liberata’) of the Adriatic having detained us among her enchanted canals beyond the end of our intended stay, we were finally obliged to leave, despite the non-appearance of Ubalde the knight to make us blush at our tardiness by revealing the magical shield of diamond to our eyes; after our brief halts in Padua and Bologna, whose gloominess seemed more so having left Canaletto’s enchanted city behind, we headed as directly as possible towards Florence, the Athens of Italy.
We very much regretted not being able to visit, in passing, the Sanctuary of the Madonna of San Luca, near Bologna, a singular building, located on a hill, Monte della Guardia, and to which a corridor leads with, on the one side, a wall that is well over two miles long, and, on the other, six hundred and sixty-six arches framing a marvellous landscape. This immense portico, raised by Bolognese piety, climbs the side of the mountain in over five hundred steps, and conducts travellers and the devout, from the gates of the city to the sanctuary; but, in travelling as in everything else, one has to know how to make sacrifices; if one wants to arrive, one has to choose a course and follow it, while casting a look of regret at what escapes one. To wish to see everything results in seeing nothing; it is enough merely to see something.
The road from Bologna to Florence traverse the Apennines, the backbone of Italy; a backbone, indeed, of which each fleshless mound forms a vertebra. Even on the most seasoned of travellers, those well-accustomed to disappointment, there are certain names which exert a magical influence, that of the Apennines being one; it is a name found in Horace and the ancient authors, which one’s study of the classics includes among our first impressions, and it is difficult not to possess a ready-made idea of the Apennines, which viewing the reality singularly contradicts and amends.
The Apennine chain is made up of a series of arid, crumbling, excoriated hillocks; rough mounds, of scabby hills that look like piles of gravel and rubble; none of those gigantic cliffs, arduous peaks clothed with pine-trees, cloudy summits, silvery with snow, glaciers with a thousand glittering crystals, waterfalls where the rainbow reveals its bow, blue lakes like pieces of turquoise where chamois come to drink, or eagles soaring in great arcs against the light; nothing but Nature, poor, dull, and sterile, and seeming even more petty after the Olympian majesties of the Swiss Alps and the romantic horrors of the Gondo gorge of so picturesque and fearful a grandeur.
Certainly, our mania for comparisons is a quirk of the mind, and it is unfair to ask one place to be like another; but I could not help thinking, from the height of my imperial bench-seat atop the coach, which I had imprudently exchanged an interior corner for, so as to be able to examine the country more at ease, of the beautiful Spanish sierras, which no one speaks of and whose neglected beauties are far superior to the Italian slopes, which are vaunted perhaps to excess; I recalled the journey from Granada to Vélez-Málaga, through the mountains, by a forgotten track over which perhaps not two travellers a year pass, yet which exceeds all one could possibly imagine as regards accidents of form, light and colour.
I thought also about my excursion to Kabylia (in Algeria), its mountains gilded by the African sun, its valleys full of oleanders, mimosas, arbutus, and mastic trees, its streams inhabited by little turtles, its Kabyle villages surrounded by fences of cacti, and its horizon of varied serrations dominated ever by the imposing silhouette of the Djurdjura range, after which the Apennines seemed truly mediocre, despite their Classical reputation.
I am not given to repeating that famous paradox uttered in Marseille: ‘Freezing in Africa, burning in Russia.’ However, I must admit that we were shivering from the cold in our aerial position, despite layers of overcoats and pea-coats to rouse the envy of Joseph Méry, the chilly poet. I had never in Paris, during the most rigorous of winters, clad myself, at any one time, in such a mass of clothing, and yet it was only mid-September, a season we are accustomed to think of as warm and charming under the gentle Tuscan sky; it is true that the elevation of the land cools the air, and that the cold of hot countries feels particularly unpleasant due to the sudden contrast.
It is not with the aim of erecting a monument to our frozen fingers, and chattering teeth, that I record the remark. Whether we were hot or cold on the top of a stagecoach was a matter of small account to the universe; but the observation might prevent some naive and over-confident Parisian quitting Guiseppe Tortoni’s Café de Paris on the Boulevard Italiens for Florence, in August, in cotton trousers and a striped cotton hunting-jacket, and encourage him to include in his luggage a tartan plaid, a pilot’s overcoat, and a muffler, thus preventing various head and chest colds. The description of our suffering is therefore not personal; it is wholly philanthropic.
The violence of the wind is so great on those bare, peeled slopes, which alternately receive the cool breath of the Mediterranean breezes and those of the Adriatic, that the Grand Duke of Tuscany had a stone wall built, at the highest point of the road, to protect travellers from the icy gusts which might otherwise pierce and overcome them. Those who have felt the mistral at work, at the foot of the Castle of the Popes in Avignon, will understand the usefulness of such a wall. An inscription in the style of a hospice notes this kind attention bestowed by Leopold II, an attention for which we thank him from the bottom of our hearts.
At that point, one leaves Romagna and enters Tuscany; another Customs visit, an inconvenience of such States as these divided into small principalities. One spends one’s life opening and closing one’s trunk, a monotonous occupation, which ends up infuriating the most phlegmatic of travellers. Fortunately, we had developed a philosophical system prior to this, in response to the Romagnola Customs officers. We threw our key to whoever wished to take it, or left it in the lock, and went off to contemplate the landscape in peace, a facility that the implacable diligence does not always allow. From this point of view, it is perhaps to be regretted that there are not more Customs stations.
Although the road never achieves the abrupt escarpments, and impossible roller-coaster rides, of the passes of Sierra de las Salinas and the Col de la Descarga, in the Pyrenees, the slopes are often steep enough to require the help of oxen. We always viewed, with pleasure, the arrival of the ox-team, heads bowed beneath the yoke, with their damp muzzles, large peaceful eyes, and powerfully outstretched legs; firstly, they are picturesque in themselves and, secondly, they are always accompanied by a wild and rustic herdsman, often of great stature, with straggling hair, a pointed hat, a brown jacket, and a goad borne aloft like an ancient sceptre; however, there was a further reason for our delight.
I once asked Louis Cabat, the grand-master of our wonderful school of young landscape artists, how, during his excursions, he determined on the choice of the site that he wanted to paint. ‘I wander at random’, he replied,’ till I hear the frogs croaking. Where there are frogs, the scene is always attractive; frogs mean a pond, fresh grass, green reeds, osiers and willows.’
Our frogs were the oxen. Their appearance means a harsh summit, a high plateau, from which an immense view is suddenly revealed; an azure panorama of plains, mountains, valleys; a horizon strewn with towns and villas, shimmering in shadow and light. Our oxen no more failed us than the frogs did Cabat.
As the slopes of the Apennines begin to tilt towards Florence, the landscape acquires a greater beauty. The herpetic, warty hillsides disappear or are clothed with vegetation.
Villas begin to appear beside the road, cypresses elevate their black spires, Italian pines display their rounded green parasols; a warmer gentler breeze allows one to half-open one’s coat; the olive trees face the air without their sad and gloomy foliage trembling; one senses the stir of pedestrians, horses, carriages, the approach of a great living city, a rare thing in Italy, that ossuary of dead ones.
Night had fallen when we arrived at the San Gallo gate. Our rather meagre lunch, though washed down with passable wine contained in large glass flasks braided with white esparto grass, swallowed on the border of Tuscany, made us strongly desire, despite our usual sobriety, the sign of the Black Eagle, Red Lion, Golden Sun, or Maltese Cross, so as to attend, as Rabelais says, ‘à cette réparation de dessous le nez: to that reparation of what’s below the nose’ which so worried the good Panurge (see ‘Gargantua and Pantagruel’ Book II: ‘Comment Panurge gagnait les pardons’). Our eyes had consumed the meal for good or ill; but our stomachs had received only one, and then, again, a very meagre one!
Florence is corseted by a girdle of fortifications, and makes difficulties when one comes knocking on her door in the evening. We had to wait a full hour, before the gate, for I know not what meticulous police formalities to conclude, till, at last, the wooden barrier, a kind of peacetime portcullis which blocked the archway, was raised, and the carriage was able to traverse the cyclopean paving stones of Florence. I say cyclopean because, like walls which bear that name, the stones were of unequal shape, arranged at angles, like Chinese-puzzle pieces.
For a city of feasting and pleasure, whose name is perfumed like a bouquet, Florence offered us a strange reception, which might have made more superstitious people recoil at its ill-omened appearance.
In the first street that the coach navigated, we met with an apparition more fearful than that of the cart of the ‘Parliament of Death’ encountered by the resourceful knight of La Mancha near El Toboso (see Cervantes’ ‘Don Quixote’ Part II Chapter XI); only, here, it was not a question of the enactment of a piece of auto-sacramental theatre, but of a dreadful reality.
Two black lines of masked spectres, carrying resinous torches, from which streams of reddish light escaped amidst thick smoke, were walking, or rather running, before and behind a catafalque carried aloft, which could be vaguely distinguished through the brown fog of that funereal light; one of them was ringing a bell, and all were chanting a prayer for the dead beneath their breath, through bocca chiusa (closed mouths) behind their masks, in a stifled panting rhythm. Sometimes another black spectre emerged from a house, and hastily joined the dark herd, which quickly vanished at the crossroads. They were a brotherhood of black penitents who, as customary, escorted the coffin.
This dismal vision reminded of me of a poem by Auguste Brizeux, the poet of Marie and Les Bretons, a Celt naturalised in Florence, which proves to me that he had met like me with an unexpected spectacle of this kind and gained an impression similar to my own. Let me transcribe it here as a complement to my nocturnal sketch:
With blows, the Bargello’s bell resounds.
My pale neighbour quits the café.
Now ever-louder the tocsin sounds.
Another departs... ‘What is happening, pray?
Dear sir, we are lodged at the very same inn.
Why are these people masked, shrouded, in black?’
‘To bear candles, and carry the dead within.’
‘Their hands are so white! I’m taken aback.’
‘Dear traveller, none can know whom they see;
These men are shrouded, and masked, to do good:
A labourer, or the Grand Duke it may be.
Everyone is a Christian, under the hood!’
(Auguste Brizeux: ‘Les Frères de la Miséricorde’)
The people of the South, although brooding about death much less than those of the north, since they are constantly distracted by the pleasure of the climate, the spectacle of nature’s beauty, and the effects of hotter blood and hotter and livelier emotions, love these processions of dominoed ghosts; for they are seen throughout Italy. The Italians feel the need to give everything physical form, and to stir the imagination through dramatic spectacle. Not long since, the dead were borne along their faces uncovered; the appearance of those livid, immobile corpses under the cosmetics applied to hide a grimace frozen in agony and the initial process of decomposition, added a further sinister and fantastic effect to those funerals. Now there are only the monks who appear in this manner with robes to shroud them.
A strange thing! In England, the country of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, the country where Shakespeare’s gravedigger tosses Yorick’s skull in the air like a ball; the native land of spleen and suicide; the dead are removed surreptitiously, almost in secret, in a sort of black upholstered carriage at an hour when the streets are deserted, and by circuitous paths; during four or five trips to London, I failed to encounter a single funeral. We fall from life to non-being without transition, and our useless remains are packaged up and hidden away with the greatest possible alacrity. Catholics present their staging of death in a superior manner, and a firm belief in the immortality of the soul diminishes their dread of funeral ceremonies.
We were directed to the hotel New York, on the lungarno, near the Carraia bridge, as providing a sufficiently comfortable stay. In fact, we found it to be a large house, run in a more or less English style, where one ate in a civilised fashion, something we had not done for a while. Travellers from other nations are not grateful enough to the English, those great educators of innkeepers, those brave islanders who transport their homeland with them everywhere, in compartmentalised trunks, and who, living in the wealthiest parts of London, such as the City or the West End, have, by deploying their powerful guineas, exclamations of surprise, and opiniated judgements, established rump-steak, chops, salmon, boiled vegetables, Indian curries, and a small pharmacy of spicy condiments, such as Guyanese red peppers, West Indian pimentos, Harvey’s sauce, anchovy sauce, and candied palm buds in vinegar, throughout the globe. Thanks to them, there is no desert island in the most unknown archipelago of Oceania where one cannot find, at any time of day or night, tea, sandwiches, and brandy, as at any tavern in Greenwich.
The meal over, we wandered the city for a while without a guide, according to our usual custom, trusting ourselves to an instinct as regards local topography which prevents our getting lost, even in places only known from a map or a quick glance; we traversed the lungarno as far as Ponte Santa Trinita; went down a street, and found ourselves in front of Caffè Doni, Florence’s equivalent to Tortoni’s in Paris; the carriages stop there when returning from the Cascine promenade, the city’s Champs-Élysées, to which folk take iced drinks in their vehicles.
Two tall girls, a little dark of complexion, but quite beautiful, dressed with a sort of elegance, and wearing those Italian straw hats, with fine braid, which one sees so frequently in Paris, and which are so expensive there, rushed towards us with a happy boldness, their hands full of flowers, and soon had made flowerbeds of our vests; every buttonhole of our clothing found itself starred, in the blink of an eye and without our being able to defend ourselves from their assault, with a carnation or a rose. Never was a page-boy at a wedding more adorned. The flower-girls, having spotted a novice, as they say in college, had seized upon their prey and greeted our arrival in their own way. Florence is the city of flowers; there is an enormous market for them; on outings, the seats of the carriages are cluttered with bouquets, flowers rain on them, the houses are full of flowers, and one climbs the stairways between flowery hedges. They say that in spring the countryside is enamelled with a thousand colours like a Persian carpet. That sight I can only mention as hearsay, since it was autumn.
While in the hands of these girls, we found ourselves addressed by three or four friendly voices as if we had been on the Boulevard des Italians, in Paris.
The friend (Eugène Piot) with whom I had made our long and beautiful trip to Spain, in 1840, still one of my dearest memories, was in Florence, where was preparing the material for his superb photographic album, L’Italie monumentale (The Monuments of Italy, 1851-53), of which we were able to admire the first prints delivered to the publisher, Goupil and Vibert, and he cordially shook our hands between the relentless pair of flower girls. Émile Loubon, the painter from Marseille; Strürler, a German artist of the Friedrich Overbeck school, whose painting, exhibited at the Salon a few years ago, you will certainly not have forgotten, representing the death of Sweyn Forkbeard, the work recalling the paintings, in tempera, of the twelfth century triptychs; and G. the philologist, scholar, and mysterious well of knowledge, who had garnered for himself alone a Benedictine erudition; greeted us cheerfully, offered us cigars, and suggested iced drinks.
We were amidst a sea of knowledge, and, elbows on table, noses in a dense cloud of smoke, began one of those conversations which can only be held from the Rue de la Grange Batelière to the Rue du Mont-Blanc (now the Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin), amongst people who, like artists, critics, philosophers, and poets, have travelled the whole world of art. However beautiful the climate, however rich a country may be in palaces, paintings, and statues, nothing replaces those serendipitous conversations, full of ellipses and innuendoes, in which a single word raises swarms of ideas, truth becomes acute paradox, everything is touched on without seeming effort, and a joke has unknown depths, which are the despair of strangers, overhearing them, who had thought that they understood French.
They all advised on the best method of viewing Florence, one saying that a few days were sufficient, another claiming, on the contrary, that it took more than a year to see only a fraction of the riches contained in that city, the cradle of Tuscan art. To this we replied that our time was limited, that we needed to visit Rome and Naples before the weather turned adverse, and that our intention was not to create a work of erudition, but to ‘take’ with the pen a few ‘daguerreotype’ views of the objects, sites, monuments, works of art, costumes and oddities, which struck our attention most forcefully, and that our talents were insufficient for more, since, in this hour of conversation, tasks were outlined whose accomplishment would require a whole lifetime.
We returned to the hotel New York, and as soon as day broke, we set our noses to the window for a while to study the perspective that unfolded before our eyes.
Between two stone quays, flowed the River Arno, clouded and yellow, barely covering half of its bed, whose muddy bottom appeared in places, studded with rubble, shards, and rubbish of all kinds. The magic of those Italian names which we find enshrined in the verses of the poets, is such that their sonorous syllables always awaken in the mind an idea other than that which reality presents. We imagined the Arno, despite ourselves, as a river with clear water, and flowery green shores, towards which marble stairs descended, and which boats, starred with lanterns, traversed back and forth at evening, trailing Turkish tapestries in the current, sheltering madly amorous couples beneath their silk canopies, as musicians roused the waters.
The truth is that the Arno is rather a stream than a river, flowing intermittently according to the amount of rain or not, sometimes dry, sometimes overflowing and, in Florence itself, resembles the Seine between the Pont de l’Hôtel Dieu and the Pont Neuf, more than anything else.
A few fishermen, in the water up to their knees, alone animated the scene, since the river, because of its shallow and variable depth, only carries punts, which is all the more annoying given that the sea is not far off, the Arno entering it after traversing Pisa.
The houses facing us on the opposite quay were tall, sober, and not particularly interesting from an architectural point of view; a few domes and towers of distant churches alone broke their horizontal line; one could see, beyond the roofs of the buildings, the hill of San Miniato, with its church and cypress trees, a name which had lodged in my mind, though I had never been to Florence, through reading Alfred de Musset’s play Lorenzaccio, in which the fifth scene’s opening stage instruction reads: Before the Church of San Miniato at Mount Olivet. Why did this insignificant detail remain in my memory after so many years, when I had forgotten so many more important things? Let those say who are able to unfold the mysterious convolutions of our poor human brains.
To our right the beautiful Ponte Santa Trinita, designed by the architect Bartolomeo Ammannati, spanned the river, its three slender elliptical arches offering less of an obstacle to the water during serious flooding. It is adorned with statues of the four seasons, which, from a distance, produce a fairly monumental effect.
To our left was the Ponta alla Carraia, the oldest bridge in Florence, since its foundations date back to the twelfth century. Carried away a number of times by flooding, it was rebuilt by Ammannati, whom I mentioned above, in 1557.
A rather odd legend is attached to this bridge. In May 1504, news of a strange proclamation spread throughout Florence, informing the inhabitants that ‘those who desire news of the other world need only visit the Carraia bridge.’
This singular invitation, equal to the vaunted attractions, in our age, of all the English advertising posters combined, attracted a huge crowd to the bridge, whose piers were of stone and arches of wood.
The idea of Hell presented years earlier in Dante’s great poem (the ‘Divina Commedia’) occupied all minds; artists had covered the walls of churches and cloisters with diabolical compositions; fantastic images which Michelangelo later summarised, with supreme mastery, in his Last Judgment.
It was thus a representation of the Inferno which was staged on the river after the fanciful and extravagant designs of Buonamico Buffalmacco. The Arno, temporarily burdened like the rivers Phlegethon and Cocytus of myth, was furrowed with black boats in the style of Charon’s barge, which displayed the shades of the dead being welcomed by devils with horns, claws, wings, and coiled tails, in the attire required for their task, with great blows of their pitchforks, along with a blend of pagan and Christian torments, boiling cauldrons, griddles, wheels, pincers, strappadoes, and blazing pyres, presenting every variety of torture, believable and unbelievable, amidst fierce flames, smoke, Greek fire, and other devices. Huge hellish faces in the fashion of the Middle Ages opened and closed, revealing, through a reddish glow, a host of the damned, taunted and abused by demons.
This bizarre spectacle was given by the inhabitants of the village of San Frediano, for the entertainment of the townspeople of Florence, who paid dearly for it, since the bridge broke under the crowd’s weight; a large number of spectators fell into the water and the flames, at once drowning or burning themselves to death, and obtained, as the announcement had promised, direct news of the other world by travelling there themselves.
I am told that an event of this kind almost occurred in Paris, during the Empire, with regard to a firework display from the Pont Royal. At the moment when the first rockets were fired, the crowd stationed on the Pont des Arts all leaned towards the balustrade, and the floor of the bridge lifted; a huge leap backwards was executed by the gathering, with an agility caused by fear, restoring the deck’s balance, the Parisians of 1810 faring far better than the Florentines of 1304. After the disaster in Florence, the bridge was rebuilt entirely in stone, and almost in the form seen today (the bridge was destroyed in 1944, and subsequently rebuilt in stone, in traditional style).
The general aspect of Florence, contrary to the prior idea we had of it, was gloomy. The streets are narrow; the houses, tall and with dark facades, lack the bright southern cheerfulness we expected to find there. This city of pleasure, to which wealthy and elegant Europe makes its summer retreat, has a sullen and reticent appearance; its palazzos resemble prisons or fortresses; each house seems to be entrenching itself, or defending itself against the street; massive, serious, solid architecture, with sombre arches, retained all the mistrust of the Middle Ages and seem to be awaiting some attack at the hands of the Pazzi or the Strozzi.
Thus, Florence, in which we had imagined ourselves reclining, beneath an azure sky, before a backcloth of white buildings, while nonchalantly breathing the fragrance of the red lily of its coat of arms, proved rather to be an austere matron, half hidden in her black veil, like one of the three Fates, as depicted by Michelangelo.
Part XXX: The Piazza della Signoria
The Greeks had a particular word to designate the central and most important location in a country or city: ὀφθαλμός (ophthalmós, the eye). Does not the eye, indeed, give life, intelligence and meaning to the human face, expressing our thoughts and seducing us by its luminous magnetism. Transferring this idea from living nature to unliving nature, by a bold but just metaphor, is there not in every city a place that is its summation, where its movement and life culminate, where the scattered features comprising its particular character are clearer, and more readily evident, where its historical memories solidify in monumental form, so as to produce a striking, and unique ensemble, like an eye in the city’s visage?
Every great capital has its eye; in Rome, it is the Campo Vaccino; in Paris, the Boulevard des Italiens; in Venice, St. Mark’s Square; Madrid, the Prado; London, the Strand; Naples, the Via Toledo. Rome is more Roman, Paris more Parisian, Venice more Venetian, Madrid more Spanish, London more English, Naples more Neapolitan, in that privileged place than anywhere else. The eye of Florence is the Piazza della Signoria: a most beautiful eye!
Indeed, remove that square, and Florence no longer makes sense; Florence would be another city. It is therefore with the piazza that every traveller must begin their visit; and, even if that was not one’s previous intention, the waves of pedestrians would carry one there, and the streets lead one there, of their own accord.
One’s first sight of the Piazza della Signoria, which produces an effect so graceful, so picturesque, and so complete, leads one to understand immediately the error that modern capitals like London, Paris, and Saint Petersburg perpetrate, which present, under the pretext of being squares with their compact dimensions, immense empty spaces, where all possible modes of adornment fail. I touch on the very reason why the Carrousel and the Place de la Concorde are merely large vacant fields which absorb in vain their fountains, statues, triumphal arches, obelisks, iron candelabra, and gardens. All these embellishments, very pretty on paper, and doubtless very pleasant when seen from the basket of a balloon, are well-nigh lost to the spectator who can in no way grasp the whole, their height being a mere five or six feet from the ground.
A square, to produce a beautiful effect, must not be too large; for beyond a certain limit the gaze becomes diffuse and the effect is lost. It must also be lined with varied buildings, of differing elevation. The construction must be of an elegant height and circumscribe, advantageously, the space; one can then view all its details. That is the difference between it and a plateau, dressed like a plateau, mere flat ground over which one has to walk to discover the nature of the place.
Florence’s Piazza della Signoria, fulfils all the correct conditions of architectural picturesqueness, effective layout, and variety; lined with buildings regular in themselves but different from one another, it pleases the eye, without boring one by possessing a coldly symmetrical appearance.
The Palazzo della Signoria, or the Palazzo Vecchio, the old palace, which, attracts immediate attention by its imposing mass and severe elegance, occupies a corner of the square, instead of the centre. This unusual, though happy, situation in our opinion, even if it is a matter of regret to those who only find beauty in architecture of geometric regularity, is not fortuitous; it has a very Florentine reason.
Florence - The Palazzo Vecchio
To obtain perfect symmetry, would have obviated building on the ruins of houses once owned by those rebellious and proscribed Ghibellines, the Uberti; which the Guelph faction, then all-powerful, desired the architect Arnolfo di Cambio to do, so that the houses might never be rebuilt in that place. Scholars dispute this tradition; I do not, but will not discuss the value of their objections here. What is certain, is that the Palazzo Vecchio gains much from the singularity of its placement, in leaving space for the large fountain of Neptune, and the equestrian statue of Cosimo I de’ Medici.
The word fortress is more applicable to the Palazzo Vecchio than any other; it is a large mass in stone, devoid of columns, and pediment, and of no particular architectural order, shaped like an enormous keep, elongated widthwise to a rectangle, serrated with crenelations, and topped by a lookout-storey projecting outwards; on the lower levels, ogival windows pierce, like loopholes, the thick walls of the massive building, while on the right, like a turret at the centre of a citadel, rises a high bell-tower also crenelated, bearing a clock-dial on the side facing the square.
Time has gilded the walls with beautiful red and vermilion tones which are highlighted wonderfully against the pure blue of the sky, and the whole building has a fierce, proud, romantic look which agreed well with the idea I had formed of this old palace of the Signoria, witness, since the fourteenth century, when it was constructed, to so many intrigues, tumultuous and violent events, and crimes. The battlements of the palazzo, square cut, show the height it was raised to by the Guelph faction; the bifurcated battlements of the belfry indicate a turnaround in their fortunes and the coming to power of the Ghibelline faction. The Guelphs and Ghibellines hated each other so violently that they broadcast their factional allegiance everywhere, in the style of their clothes, the cut of their hair, their weapons, and the design of their fortifications, fearing nothing so much as being confused with one another, and differentiating themselves as much as they could; their members had particular signs when greeting each other, like the Freemasons, and the members of the Medieval Guilds. Thus, one can recognise, by the characteristic denticulation of the old palaces of Florence, the faction to which their ancient owners belonged; the city walls are wholly crenelated in the Guelf manner, while the tower on the ramparts, opposite the post road, has Ghibelline crenelations cut in dovetails.
Within the long row of arches which support the summit of the Palazzo Vecchio are frescoed the coats of arms of the people of the city and republic of Florence. After the expulsion of the Duke of Athens (Walter VI, Count of Brienne, in 1343), whose romantic title recalls Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Florence was divided into four districts under sixteen banners (gonfaloni), four per district, which each bore arms, of which the heraldic description follows: the Sante Spirito district bore a silver dove above rays of gold on an azure field; its standards were emblazoned thus: Gonfalone Nicchio, two sets of emblems both on an azure field; the upper, in chief, that of the citizens, being a label gules of fleurs-de-lys or on an azure field, the same label being repeated on the banners of all four districts; the lower, in base, being five red scallop shells on a field argent; Drago, a dragon vert on a field gules; Scala, a ladder argent on a field gules; Sferza, a scourge sable on a field argent. The Santa Croce neighbourhood was represented by a cross or on a field argent; its standards bore: Gonfalone Carro, a wheel or on an azure field; Ruote, a cross gules within three circles sable; Bue, a bull sable on a field or; Leone Nero, a lion sable on a field argent. The Santa Maria Novella district had for its badge a sun in splendour on a field azure; its banners bore the following coats of arms: Leone Blanco, a lion rampant argent on a field azure; Vipera, a viper vert on a field or; Leone Rosso, a lion rampant gules on a field argent; Leocorno, a unicorn-lion or on an azure field. The San Giovanni district was symbolised by an octagonal temple, similar to the Florence Baptistery, or on a field azure, with a key or to right and left; the gonfaloni bore: Chiavi, two keys gules on a field or; Vaio, in chief gules, in base vair argent and azure: the downward pointing vair-bells argent, the upward azure; Draco, a dragon vert on a field or; Leone Doro, a lion or on a field azure.
One can see that all these charges form what one might call visual equivalents of the names (known as canting arms). The Middle Ages loved these rebuses, of which, in France, the heraldic wild cherry-tree (créquier) of Créquy, the apple-tree (pommier) of Pommereuil, and the walnut-tree (noyer) of Nogaret may give one an idea.
May the reader forgive me this litany of blazons; but I thought it necessary to historicise my description of the Palazzo Vecchio, and set them down, as they are to be seen, beneath the little arches of the upper level, with all their charges and colours; they are, moreover, one of the characteristic features of the appearance, part-communal, part-feudal of this palace, town hall, and fortress.
The building has at its base, a few steps which formerly formed a kind of platform from the top of which magistrates and agitators harangued the people.
Two marble colossi, Hercules, slayer of Cacus, by Baccio Bandinelli, and David, conqueror of Goliath, by Michelangelo (the sculpture is now a copy, the original having been removed to the Accademia), display their secular victories by the doorway, like two gigantic sentinels that the authorities have neglected to relieve of their duty.
Bandinelli’s Hercules and Michelangelo’s David have been the object of criticism and admiration respectively, which has seemed to me a little unfair. In my opinion, the Bandinelli has been undervalued and the Michelangelo over-praised.
There is a haughty pride to the Hercules, a fierce energy, an air of grandeur, which denotes the first-rate artist; Florentine exaggeration never exceeded that grandiloquent violence and extravagant anatomy. The bent neck of Cacus and the network of muscles that lift his monstrous shoulders show amazing strength and power, and Michelangelo himself, when he viewed these carved pieces separately, could not help but give his approval. The torso of Hercules was much criticised by the artists and public of the time. All the details, it is true, are excessively pronounced: the deltoids, the pectorals, the mastoid bones, the serratus muscle, and the projections of the ribs stand out in extreme relief; the torso is stripped down to the last degree; the artist neglected to cover the projections and bumps, or rather chose not to do so. It has been compared to a bag full of pine cones. This reproach, which has some truth to it, could be directed at many other Florentine artists, not excluding the great Buonarotti.
Baccio Bandinelli had an amusing dispute, before the Grand Duke, with the boastful Benvenuto Cellini, a great bully as regards other artists, a Captain Fracasse (see Gautier’s novel of that title) of the goldsmiths. ‘Find another world, for I’ll hound you out of this one,’ cried Benvenuto, hand on hip, like Capitan Spaventa of the Commedia dell Arte, ‘Let me know beforehand, so I’ve time to confess and make a will; because I don’t want to die a mere brute, like you,’ replied Bandinelli. Their dialogue, consisting of insults alternating between those of the knave and the scholar, entertained the Grand Duke greatly. Such displays of animosity are, ultimately, better for art than the sycophantic hypocrisies employed by modern artists. Passion is good and endorses belief; moreover, Benvenuto Cellini does justice in his Memoirs to Bandinelli’s talent, granting him an honorable place among contemporary celebrities.
Michelangelo’s David, apart from the disadvantage that it represents in gigantic form a Biblical hero who was notoriously small in stature, seemed to me a little heavy and commonplace, a rare defect in an artist of such rigorous elegance; here one has a tall, strong, stocky, fleshy, and healthy youth, bastioned by strong pectoral muscles, equipped with monstrous biceps, a strong fellow out of the market waiting for a bag to be set on his back. The treatment of the marble is remarkable and, all in all, it is a good study that would do credit to any other sculptor than Michelangelo; but it lacks the Olympian and formidable mastery which characterises the work of that well-nigh superhuman artist; though it should be said that he was not entirely free to create as he wished: he carved the David from an enormous block of Carrara marble, extracted years earlier by Francesco di Simone da Fiesole, who had tried to carve a colossus without success. Michelangelo, then aged twenty-nine, resumed the work, and readily found a gigantic form within Francesco’s ill-shaped efforts; some defects of proportion in the limbs, and the paucity of marble and visible striations on the shoulders, indicate the difficulties the great sculptor must have experienced in accomplishing the singular tour de force of producing a statue from another’s leavings; Michelangelo alone could dream of doing so.
Two other carved statues in the form of herms, one by Bandinelli, the other by his pupil Vicenzo de Rossi, served formerly as posts from which the chain was suspended which barred the doorway; that by Vicenzo represents a man whose legs are sheathed in the trunk of an oak tree, symbolising Tuscan strength and magnanimity; that by Bandinelli represents a woman, her head topped by a crown, her legs sheathed in a laurel-tree, symbolizing the supremacy in the arts and graces of that fortunate realm. Vandalism, perpetrated by bored sentries, has sculpted with bayonets the sexes of these two Hermes.
Above the door, two lions support a radiant cartouche, with this inscription (concealed in 1851 by modifications):
JESUS CHRISTUS, REX FLORENTINI POPULI,
S. P. DECRETO ELECTUS.
(Jesus Christ, King of the Florentine populace,
So elected by decree of the Senate and People)
Christ was, in fact, elected king of Florence on the proposal of Niccolò Capponi of the Grand Council, with the idea of ensuring public tranquillity, since Christ could not be supplanted or replaced by any other. This ideal presidency did not prevent the Republic from being overthrown.
The courtyard which one enters through this door was brought to its current state by Michelozzo di Bartolommeo. The Renaissance style is evident in his design. Elegant columns supporting arches form a patio like those in the midst of Spanish houses; a fountain constructed to Giorgio Vasari’s design by the sculptor Francesco del Tadda, by command of Cosimo I de Medici, occupies the centre and completes the resemblance; the basin is of porphyry; water gushes from the snout of a dolphin strangled by a beautiful child, a bronze by Andra del Verrocchio; the arches above are frescoed with depictions of trophies, the spoils of victory, weapons of war, and prisoners chained to medallions bearing the coat of arms of Florence and the Medici.
One of the most curious rooms of the Palazzo Vecchio is the large salon, a room of enormous size with which a legend is associated. When the Medici were driven out of Florence in 1494, Fra Girolamo Savonarola, who led a popular movement, had the idea of building an immense room in which a council of a thousand citizens would elect the magistrates and would regulate the affairs of the Republic. The architect Simone del Pollaiolo, known as Il Cronaca, was charged with this task and acquitted it with such marvellous celerity that Brother Savonarola spread a rumour that angels of heaven descended at night to aid the masons, and continued the efforts which had been interrupted. The idea of these angels plastering, and carrying hods, is quite in accord with the style of legends of the Middle Ages, and would provide a charming subject for some naive painter of the school of Johann Overbeck, or Kaspar Hauser. In this rapid construction, Cronaca deployed, if not all his genius, at least all his skill; the structure and combined strength of the framework which supports this large ceiling, of enormous weight, are rightly admired, and the result has often been consulted by other architects.
When the Medici returned and transferred their residence to their palazzo in Via Larga (Via Camillo Cavour), which they occupied, Cosimo wanted to change the council room in the Palazzo della Signoria into a courtroom, and charged the presumptuous Baccio Bandinelli, whose drawings had seduced him, with the various important arrangements and rearrangements; but the sculptor had assumed too much; despite his unquestioned talent as an architect, and despite the help of Baccio d’Agnolo, whom he called to his aid, he laboured for ten years without being able to escape from the difficulties he had himself created. It was Vasari who raised the ceiling, completed the work and decorated the walls with a series of frescoes which can still be viewed there, representing different episodes in the history of Florence, the battles, and the defeats in which the city fell, all clothed in the dress of antiquity, and interspersed with allegories. These frescoes, created with intrepid and learned mediocrity, offer all the usual commonplaces of bulging muscles and anatomical tours de force, in use at that time among the troupe of contemporary artists. Though it is the story of Florence, you would think you were seeing ancient Romans laying siege to Veii, or some other primitive city of ancient Latium, and the frescoes seem like gigantic illustrations from De Viris Illustribus. This false style is shocking. What do classical helmets, breastplates with straps, and naked warriors have to do with Florence’s wars against Pisa and Siena?
A large number of statues alone or in groups set in niches, or on pedestals, decorate this room; I will refrain from describing them one after the other, an endless task; but I will mention the Adam and Eve, by Baccio Bandinelli, one of the best works of that master; the Giovanni de’ Medici and the Alessandro, he being the first Duke of Florence assassinated by that Lorenzaccio (Lorenzino de’ Medici) who provided the poet Alfred de Musset with a wholly Shakespearean subject for his play of that name, both being works by that same Baccio; the Virtue Triumphant Over Vice, created by Giovanni da Bologna, known as Giambologna; and especially the Genius of Victory, by Michelangelo, intended for the mausoleum of Pope Julius II, of such sublime pride, so grandiose an attitude, such superb disdain, that it makes all the other sculptures appear flat, ugly, commonplace, bourgeois, trivial, almost abject, however fine they might be. The Alessandro and the Giovanni de’ Medici, despite their fierce and imperious air, appear much like the figures of little boys before this terrible and triumphant statue. Michelangelo’s creations possess the power to eclipse all works of art that venture near them, and reduce them to nothingness.
I noted, in passing, a pair of beautiful marquetry doors by Benedetto de Maiano, who framed, in exquisitely tasteful panels, portraits of Dante and Petrarch, executed in wood of different hues: it is a masterwork of difficulties vanquished.
A motif that often recurs in the ornamentation of ceilings and cornices, is that of children who play with a racket and red balls, an allusion to the coat of arms of the Medici, which is, as we know: or, five balls in orle gules, with, in chief, a larger roundel of the arms of France (azure, three fleurs-de-lis or). Those mischievous folk, who would like to see the balls as pills, because of the name Medici (doctor), are wrong: they are balls, an interpretation that suffices to explain the motto: Percussa resiliunt (‘When struck they rebound’). This is pretty much all you can see of the Palazzo della Signoria; the ancient rooms to which historic memories are attached are cluttered with administrative paperwork and no longer offer anything interesting to the eye.
I spoke, earlier, of the fact that colossal dimensions are scarcely necessary to produce an effect in architecture. The Loggia dei Lanzi, that jewel of the Piazza della Signoria, consists of a portico composed of four arches three on the front, one on the side facing the Uffizi Gallery. It is a monument in miniature; but the harmony of the proportions is so perfect that one experiences a feeling of well-being on viewing it. The neighbouring Palazzo della Signoria, with its compact mass and robust construction, admirably highlights the elegant slenderness of its arches and columns. Despite the opinion of Michelangelo, when responding to the Grand Duke who consulted him on the matter, that, in order to adorn the square, it would be best to continue the Loggia d’Orcagna, or d’Orgagna since that is the Italian spelling of the name, I think that the Loggia is fine as it is, and would in no way benefit from being repeated like the arcades of the Rue de Rivoli. Its principal charm is that, itself symmetrical, it observes the rule of varied sequencing amidst the buildings which accompany it, and with which it contrasts; this diversity gives the square a cheerful appearance which would swiftly induce boredom if its arches had been repeated on all sides.
Orcagna (Andrea di Cione di Arcangelo), like Giotto, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and all the great polymaths of those blissful times when bourgeois envy did not restrict genius to one narrow specialty, pursued with equal facility, the triple career of architect, painter and sculptor. The Loggia, the frescoes of the Camposanto in Pisa, the statue of the Virgin, and various tombs in the churches of Florence, demonstrate his superiority in each of these roles (the attribution of a number of these works is in doubt). Thus, with legitimate and naive pride he placed at the foot of his paintings the inscription: Orgagna sculptor, and, at the base of his sculptures: pictor.
The columns of the Loggia possess capitals of a Gothic, and somewhat fanciful, Corinthian order, where the regularities advised by Vitruvius are not observed; which detracts not at all from their grace and happy proportions. A pierced balustrade, akin to that surrounding a terrace, crowns the building, in a delicate and light manner. The name Loggia dei Lanzi comes from an old barracks of the lansquenets (German mercenaries), not far distant from it at the time when the foundations were laid, during the Duke of Athens’ tyrannical rule. The purpose of the building was to shelter the citizens during sudden downpours, and to allow them to discuss their affairs or those of the State under cover. It was beneath this gallery, raised a few feet above the surface of the square, that the magistrates were invested with their powers, knights were dubbed, and government decrees were announced, and from which the people were harangued, as if from the heights of a tribune.
The authorities would do well to raise, in our rainy cities of the North, where passers-by are exposed twenty times a day, and at all seasons, to sudden bad weather, buildings akin to Florence’s Loggia dei Lanzi, La Lonja de la Seda in Valencia, or the Forum Boarium in Rome and the former Graecostasis there; in addition to pedestrians, these porticos could house, like that of Orcagna, masterpieces of ancient or modern sculpture, and provide work for sculptors as well as architects.
The Loggia is a kind of open-air museum: the Perseus by Benvenuto Cellini, the Judith by Donatello, and The Rape of the Sabine Woman by Giambologna, are framed by its arches. Six Roman statues of women line the rear wall. Within hexafoils on the front façade, are statues representing the cardinal virtues, designed by Agnolo Gaddi, and executed by Giovanni d’Ambrogio (Justic and Prudence), and Jacopo di Piero Guidi and Giovanni Fetti (Fortitude and Temperance). On the side facing the Palazzo Vecchio, are the three monastic virtues, again designed by Gaddi, carved by Jacopo di Piero Guidi (Faith and Hope), and by that same artist with Piero di Giovanni Tedesco (Charity). Two lions, one ancient, the other modern and carved by Flaminio Vacca, which are almost as fine as the Greek lions of the Arsenale of Venice, adorn the steps.
The Perseus may be regarded as Benvenuto Cellini’s masterpiece, he being an artist about whom we talk so much in France, while knowing almost nothing about him. The bronze statue, a little mannered in its pose, like all the works of the Florentine school, which pursued to excess its search for the sense of line and for interesting novelties of movement, possesses a most seductive and youthful grace. Its composed attitude, doubtless inferior to the simplicity of the ancients, still offers great charm; it is both elegant and haughty.
The young hero has just sliced the head from the unfortunate Medusa, whose crumpled body, with artistic boldness, makes a platform for the victor of its bundle of limbs convulsed by final agony. Perseus, turning away his face, in which compassion mingles with horror, holds his sword, with its curved hook, in one hand, and with the other raises that head which turned the living to stone, lifeless and immobile amidst its hair full of writhing serpents.
The pedestal, another masterpiece, is adorned with bas-reliefs relating to the story of Andromeda, with figurines and foliage in which the talent of Benvenuto, the sculptor, reappears. Below the figure of a standing Jupiter brandishing his thunderbolt, this threatening inscription may be read:
TE, FILI, SI QUIS LÆSERIT, ULTOR ERO
(Should any hurt you, youth, I shall avenge you)
which applies as well to the artist as to his Perseus. This inscription carrying a double-meaning legend seems a warning from the sword-wielding engraver directed at his critics, the act as easily done as said. Without letting oneself be influenced by the threat, one may freely admire the Perseus for its heroic grace and delicate slenderness of form. It is a charming statue and a delightful jewel; it is worth all the trouble it cost.
Donatello’s Judith shows the severed head of Holofernes to the Palazzo della Signoria with a forbidding and quite alarming pride, and fulfils, beneath the Loggia’s arcade, the same role as Denis Foyatier’s Spartacus, opposite the Tuileries Palace, in Paris. Except that Spartacus’ protest is mute, while to ensure that of the Judith was wholly unambiguous, the plinth was engraved with this not very reassuring inscription: Exemplum salut publ. cives posuere MCCCCXV (set here by the citizens for the public good, 1415). Both statues are in bronze and Benvenuto, in his Memoirs, recounts in a dramatic and moving manner all the events involved in casting his Perseus and the dreadful anguish he experienced before success crowned his endeavours. To liquefy the metal, which solidified in the crucible and refused to pour, the artist threw therein all his dishes, increasing the fire’s heat with the addition of broken furniture, as, exhausted, panting, consumed with anxious fever, and thinking of his rivals’ delight if the operation failed, he prepared to throw himself into the furnace if the mould should burst under the pressure of the bronze. He recounts, also, the rapture, delirium, and triumph he enjoyed at a cordial meal with his students and friends, after the work had emerged radiant and intact from all its trials! They still point out the house in Florence where the Perseus was cast.
Benvenuto, who, in his capacity as a goldsmith and sculptor had often laboured for kings, princesses and lords, desired his Perseus to win popular applause, so he sealed it firmly to its base to thwart the whim of the Grand Duchess, who wished it to adorn her apartment, he preferring to that sanctuary of wealth its perpetual public exhibition.
The Rape of the Sabine Woman gave Giambologna an admirable pretext to deploy his scientific approach to the nude form, and to show human beauty in three different aspects, a beautiful young woman, a vigorous young man, and a superb older man. This fine marble group recalls Boreas Abducting Orythia, in the Tuileries gardens (by Gaspard Marsy and Anselme Flamen); it possesses the same casual elegance, the same ingenious ease in its organisation. On the plinth, a bas-relief explains whatever is doubtful or unintelligible regarding its subject.
The monumental Fountain of Neptune, designed by Bandinelli and executed by Bartolommeo Ammannati, which was raised at the corner of the Palazzo della Signoria in the space left vacant by the razing of the Uberti’s property, has a rich and grandiose appearance, although it is an inferior work to those of the other artists, redounding to the benefit of that favourite architect of Grand Duke Cosimo I. The marine god, of colossal size, stands on a conch drawn by four sea-horses, two in white marble, two veined; three tritons disport themselves at his feet, and the water falls in numerous jets into an octagonal basin four angles of which are decorated with bronze statues representing Thetis, Doris, various sea gods, children playing with shells, corals, polyps, and other marine features; eight satyrs also of bronze, masks, and cornucopias complete the abundant ornamentation, in which that sumptuous mythological taste exhibited in the fountains of the park at Versailles, that one believes to be French but which merely displays Italian decadence, is already present.
The equestrian statue of Cosimo de Medici, the finest of the four that Giambologna had the rare happiness of creating in his life as an artist, displays great ease and nobility. The horse is posed well in a light trot; the man sits well in the saddle; he is not too historically anomalous, wears a costume half-real, half the Grand Duke’s fancy, and produces a strong monumental effect. This statue is in bronze and presented a fair degree of difficulty in its casting; bas-reliefs relevant to Cosimo’s life adorn the four faces of the pedestal. There is also a portrait of a dwarf, a court jester beloved of the duke.
Also worth noting, in this richly adorned square, are the Palazzo Uguccioni, the design of which is attributed to Raphael, because of its suave and pure style, which is indeed that of the master; and the roof attributed to the Pisans, the historic framework of which the Florentines had their Pisan prisoners execute as a sign of Pisan subjection and Florentine contempt, and which tops the post office, to the counters of which throng, beneath their straw hats, a large crowd of visitors seeking their letters, filed in alphabetical order according to the recipient’s name. Also, in a corner of the square is located the coach station, with its perpetual arrival and departure of carriages.
But enough of this describing of statues and palazzos; let us take a carriage and go to the Cascine, the Champs-Élysées of Florence, to view human beings, and rest from the viewing of marble, stone and bronze.
Part XXXI: Foreigners and Florentines
The Florentine type is essentially different to the Lombard and Venetian types. There are no longer those pure and regular lines, that broadish oval face, those wide shoulders, that happy serenity of form, and that healthy display of beauty, which strikes you on the streets of Milan, where, as Balzac said so aptly, the daughter of a porter looks like a princess. In Florence they would not understand the superb pagan epitaph of some count, whose name I forget, whose tomb bore the sole inscription: Fu bello e Milanese (he was handsome, he was Milanese); the grace, voluptuousness, and spirited cheerfulness of Venice are absent from Florence.
In Florence, the figures lack the antique character which still remains in the rest of Italy, despite the many centuries gone by, the successive invasions, and so radical an alteration to manners and religion; they are visibly more modern; while there can be no mistaking a Neapolitan, or a purebred Roman, on the Boulevard de Gand (Boulevard des Italiens), Florentines would pass unnoticed among our Parisians; the fierce southern stamp by which other Italians are recognised would not betray them. There is no longer a sign of caprice, or inattention, in the features of the men and women of Florence; thoughtfulness, and moral concern leave appreciable furrows on the brow, and add irregularity to the planes of the face, which thereby gains in expressiveness.
These Russian great ladies display, in their elegance, something of the sumptuous and barbaric, and in their pose, an imperious calm, a serene nonchalance, which they acquire from their reigning over serfs, and grants them an appearance of their own, easily recognisable under the English or French veneer with which they seek to conceal themselves. This particular one would have possessed the look of a Greek Panagia if, instead of the green trees of the Cascine, against which her immobile head was posed, one might have set there the gilded, embossed panels of a triptych. Her long slim fingers, burdened with enormous rings, gleamed, ungloved, on the carriage rim, as though a relic studded with precious stones were being extended for the faithful to kiss. In the corner of the car sat, pitifully hunched, a friend or lady’s companion of neutral figure and dress, a shade resigned to her part in this glittering picture. In the past, blonde Venetian ladies were followed about by an African. It was a livelier arrangement, and produced a better effect, from the point of view of colour.
Florence - Promenade of the Cascine
In an English carriage, drawn by English horses, harnessed with English harness, sat an Englishwoman, surrounded by that English atmosphere brought from Hyde-Park by a process that we cannot claim to understand; the Cascine vanished before our eyes, our bluish view of the Apennines faded in a sudden mist, and the Serpentine replaced the Arno.
Instantly, a tempest whirled us from Florence to London, and we felt, dressed only in our thin clothing, a bitter blast of northern wind. I searched, mechanically, on the cushions of our car, for my absent overcoat, and yet this woman was as beautiful as a prosperous Englishwoman is beautiful. Never did a whiter swan preen her snowy down on Virginia Water, in some magical keepsake engraving; she was one of those ideal, vaporous, graceful creatures, as tall and slender as the subject of a Thomas Lawrence portrait, or a design by Richard Westall; a thin and flexible neck, golden hair in languid spirals, weeping like willow branches around a face kneaded from cold-cream and rose petals; eyelashes gleaming like silken threads above vaguely azure pupils. Gazing, at this transparent shade (who was perhaps in the process of digesting a large rump steak sprinkled with cayenne pepper, and drizzled with sherry) I could not help but think of Cymbeline, Perdita, Cordelia, Miranda; indeed, of all Shakespeare’s poetic heroines. Two adorable infants, a proud and dreamy-eyed little boy like the portrait of young Lambton (see Lawrence’s painting, known as ‘The Red Boy’, of Charles William Lambton), and a little girl who had escaped without doubt from the frame of some Joshua Reynolds painting, in which Lady Londonderry’s children are represented with artificial wings in the manner of cherubs against a backcloth of blue sky (compare Reynolds’ ‘Angels’ Heads’ depicting five views of the five-year old Frances Gordon), occupied the front of the carriage, toying, gravely, with the ears of a King Charles spaniel as purebred as the ones that Anthony Van Dyck painted in his portrait of Henrietta of England (compare Van Dyck’s ‘Three Eldest Children of Charles I’).
A horseman, as stiff as a post, irreproachably clad, gentleman and dandy both, mounted on a plum-coloured blood bay gleaming like satin, the reins gathered in his hand, the pommel of his crop between his lips, hovered near the carriage, in the most bored and splenetic manner in the world; he seemed to be ruminating on some madrigal which failed to emerge, and which the young woman awaited with an indulgently distracted air.
Not far away, a Sicilian prince was in conversation with another Englishwoman of a completely different type, almost Italianised and gilded by the warm sun of Florence; she possessed a fine and intelligent face, a lovely smooth brow beneath black hair, and a slim waist fit for a lady’s dress or an Amazon’s tunic; she was a kind of delicate Clorinda (see Tasso’s ‘Gerusalemme Liberata’), an angel, wavering between a young girl and an ephebe, of the species that the sculptress Félicie de Fauveau likes to pose above some font from the Middle Ages.
A queenly hand, on a magnificent arm that sculpture has made famous, allowed us to recognise, in the depths of her carriage, one of our old Parisian friends who retains, in Florence, despite her long exile, all the spirit and all the grace that made her Wednesdays in the Rue du Mont-Blanc (Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin) so sought after; we went to greet her, happy to find a friendly face among those beautiful strangers, and many a question fluttered madly on our lips, she speaking of Paris, we of Florence.
Regarding Florence, I realize that, in this gallery of portraits, I have neglected the Florentine ladies. There are, in fact, very few in Florence, and their appearance, of which I have tried to sketch the general idea, lacks that kind of theatrical beauty which one can admire from afar; I shall note, only, that they dressed then in very tight long low-waisted corsets of a specific form very close to that of the old French style, which imprinted on their movements a certain stiff awkwardness, conflicting with the Italian customary lack of constraint. Some had their hair parted at one side like the men; is it a local fashion, or the need to hide strands abraded by the comb? That I could not discover. This disturbing oddity troubles one, without at first noting the reason, and greatly alters their appearance; however, one becomes accustomed to it, and in the end finds it adds a certain grace.
To repair this omission to my gallery, let me sketch the beautiful head of Signora ***, a Florentine blue-blood, who was pointed out to us, at the centre of the Cascine circle, surrounded by a court of worshippers. Her large, calm eyes, her well-nigh fixed gaze, her strong pure features, her well-defined mouth, and the correct and powerful line of her neck, recalled Lucrezia del Fede so loved by André del Sarto (whose wife she became), and those striking Bronzino portraits (compare Bronzino’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’, that of Lucrezia Panciatichi, in the Uffizi), which once seen are never forgotten, and which reflect the Florentine type in its noblest aspect. Why must those great artists lie asleep there in the grave! They might have left one more immortal image to the world.
We were etching this pure image on our memory when we saw every head turn to the same side. This unusual movement was produced by the entrance of the young Count ***, who appeared from the main alley, driving his phaeton himself, with grace and incomparable precision, which was drawn by two wonderful and elegant little black horses, of extraordinary agility and docility; this charming team made a round of the sand of the Cascine circle that a compass could not have imitated with more exactitude; the Count, throwing the reins to his groom, leapt, lightly, to the ground and went to pay his dues to the beautiful Florentine, the figure of whom I have just sketched.
He was a young Hungarian, of twenty-two or twenty-three years old, of an Apollonian beauty, so flexible, so clear, so slender, so virile in his feminine grace, that the most robust of onlookers would have lowered their weapons before him. Moreover, he was the lion of Florence – lacking any hint of the poorly-executed engraving so named (of Donatello’s sculpture, known as the Mazocco)! He was dressed in the most wondrous national costume: a braided dolman, a jacket stiff with gold embroidery, leather boots strewn with pearls, and a hat studded with diamonds and topped by egret plumes; a costume that he wore with charming complacency at intimate evening gatherings to satisfy female curiosity, and doubtless also out of coquetry; a coquetry rightly allowed, since the Hungarian costume, despite its profusion of ornaments, is one of heroic and martial elegance, dispelling any ridiculous notion of it exemplifying mere dandyism.
Defeated, the women admitted, with pleasure, that they seemed ugly next to the handsome Hungarian, and that their richest ball gowns were only rags compared to his splendid garments glittering with gold and precious stones.
A mysterious appearance, at that time, much intrigued the cosmopolitan curiosity of those in Florence: a woman, unaccompanied, and of the noblest looks, appeared at the Cascine, reclining in the depths of a brown carriage, and draped with a large white crepe-de-chine shawl the fringes of which reached almost to her feet. Her Parisian hat, in the signature style of Madame Royer, gave a fresh halo to her fine and pure profile, carved like that in some antique cameo, and contrasting, in its Grecian form, with her outfit’s modern elegance and almost English look of calm distinction. Her neck, bluish being so white, the smooth pinkness of her cheeks, and her light blue eyes, seemed to denote a northern beauty; but the gleam in those pale sapphire eyes was so vivid that it must surely have been sparked beneath some southern sky; her hair, raised by a crepe headband, possessed the gilded tones and lively quality which characterises blondes native to hot countries; one of her arms was buried in the folds of her shawl like Mnemosyne (the goddess of Memory), the other, circled by a bracelet to trenchant effect, emerged half-bared from the flow of lace about her sabot sleeve as she toyed at a dark-purple camellia, with the tip of her small gloved hand; the distracted gesture of an habitual dreamer. Was she English, Italian or French? This was what none could say, because none knew her. She toured the Cascine, stopped for a moment on the circle, seemingly neither occupied with nor surprised by a spectacle which appeared to be new to her, and took the road back to the city.
Next day, we waited for her in vain; she failed to reappear. What was the secret behind that single visit? Had the unknown woman arrived there, from the ends of Europe, for a mysterious meeting? Had she wanted to confirm the presence of her rival accompanied by her unfaithful lover? I was never able to ascertain. But I have not yet forgotten that fleeting vision, which appeared to me, in Florence.
The End of Parts XXVI-XXXI, and of Gautier’s Travels in Italy