FLORENCE

INSERT FRONTISPIECE

PANORAMA OF FLORENCE

FLORENCE

ITS HISTORY—THE MEDICI—THE HUMANISTS

LETTERS—ARTS

BY

CHARLES YRIARTE

NEW EDITION, REVISED AND COMPARES WITH THE LATEST

AUTHORITIES BY

MARIA HORNOR LANSDALE

ILLUSTRATED

PHILADELPHIA

HENRY t. Coates & co,

1897

COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY

HENRY T. COATES & CO.

CONTENTS

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               PAGE

INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………1

CHAPTER I.         HISTORY, ………………………………………………………   11

II.     THE MEDICI…………………………………………………….   27

III.  THE RENAISSANCE,…………………………………………121

IV.  ILLUSTRIOUS FLORENTINES, ……………………………..139

V.    ETRUSCAN ART,……………………………………………..266

VI.  CHRISTIAN ART,……………………………………………..280

VII.            ARCHITECTURE,……………………………………………..285

VIII.         SCULPTURE,…………………………………………………..348

IX.  PAINTING,……………………………………………………..417

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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PHOTOGRAVURES BY W. H. GILBO, NEW YORK

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FLORENCE

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INTRODUCTION

            Italy in the thirteenth century carried on and brought to its crowning point the work of civilization which France in the twelfth century had started by means of the crusades, the establishment of communal franchises, and the foundation of the University of Paris.  The symbol created by the genius of Lucretius, where the successive labor of generations is represented by running-men passing their torches from hand to hand, had never been realized with so much grandeur; the sacred torches had fallen from French hands, and had been picked up by Italy, in whose grasp they emitted a light which dazzled the whole world. 

          Rome, notwithstanding the Barbarian invasion, the schism, and the exile of the Papacy, still retained the recollection of her glorious past, brought even more vividly before her by the superb monuments which had withstood the ravages of time and of man.  But even Rome, like the rest of Italy, acknowledged the superiority of Florence comparable to Athens itself, and all the cities of Italy did homage to her genius,

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for she, together with Siena, had been the first to make the onward move.  In the course of a century from Dante and Giotto to the first of the Medici, from the two Pisani to Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Alberti, Florence

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GIOVANNI VILLANI

(1270-1348)

The history of Florence may be said to have commenced with two writers, Dino Compagni and Giovanni Villani, both born in the second half of the thirteenth century.

          Villani was a merchant by profession, and, like Dante and so many others, he went to Rome in the year 1300, at the time of the indulgence which had been decreed by Boniface VIII.  He was so impressed by what he saw that he determined to write a book about his native city, and in the preface he says that “the city of Florence, the daughter and handmaid of Rome, being destined for great fame, it is meet to set forth all that relates to her origin, and

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thus, by the grace of Jesus Christ, in this year 1300, I, safely returned from Rome, did begin to compile this book in the fear of God, and of the blessed John, by patron (saint).”

          Villani was the director of the mint (La Zecca) at Florence, and he had three times been a member of the Signoria, and five times ambassador to different states.  He had occupied all kinds of posts, having had the superintendence of the erection of the ramparts of Florence, and having been selected to negotiate peace between Florence and Pisa, and afterwards between Lucca and his native city; while; when fighting against the famous Castruccio, he was made prisoner and detained as a hostage by Martino della Scala.  He was a partisan of the Guelphs and a devoted son of the Church, though at the same time an advocate for communal rights; but he was less successful as a banker-merchant, his house, like those of the Acciaiuoli, the Bonaccorsi, the Cocchi, and the Corsini, having been involved in the disasters caused by the failures of the Peruzzi and the Bardi.  He was completely ruined, and, in accordance with the corporation laws then in force, underwent a long term of imprisonment at Florence.

          His chronicles throw no little light upon the economic side of Florence during the fourteenth century, and he may be described as the first of the political economists, one passage in his works telling us of his wish “to let posterity have some conception of the

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wealth of the community, and of the causes which led up to it, so that in future men of knowledge may be able to increase the prosperity of Florence.”  He died of the plague in 1348, and his brother Matteo, an economist like himself, went on with his history. *

á        Matteo also died of the plague in the year 1368, and the history was continued by his son Filippo, the precise date of whose death is not known.

PASSAVANTI.

(1297-1357)

          “Specchio della Vera Penitenza” (“Mirror of the True Penitence”)—such is the singular title of Jacopo Passavanti’s work, which became, from a philological point of view, one of the most remarkable exemplars of the Italian language.  It has nothing to recommend it in the way of imagination, for it is little more than a compilation from the Fathers of the Church, but it was no small achievement, in the first part of the fourteenth century, to express in the scarcely formed vulgar tongue the various shades of thought in a style at once pure, elegant, and graceful.  These are the saving qualities of Passavanti’s work.

          He was of a noble Florentine family, and at the age of twenty joined the Dominican order at Santa Maria Novella, and soon gained a celebrity for learning and virtue.  So high were the hopes entertained of him that the fathers sent him, in accordance with

Insert Picture

The Great Cloister, Church of S. Maria Novella

Fra Giovanni da Carpi.

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the custom of the day, to complete his studies at the University of Paris; Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch being among the foreign celebrities who sojourned there.  Passavanti, on his return from Paris, taught theology at Pisa, Siena, and Rome, and after attaining to the highest dignities in his order, and becoming in succession Vicar-General of Florence and Bishop of Monte Cassino, he died on the 15^th of June, 1357.

          He was best known to the Florentines as Prior of Santa Maria Novella, and he it was who commissioned Memmi and Gaddi to paint the famous frescoes in the church of that monastery where his bones are laid.  An interesting quotation, as showing the place which Passavanti’s “Specchio” occupied in the literary history of the sixteenth century, is extracted from the writings of the critics who were called in 1573 “the deputies for the revision of Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’”  These remarks are as follow (Susan note):  “There was a certain Jacopo, a brother of Santa Maria Novella, about ten years Boccaccio’s junior, who, in 1351, that is, about the same time as the ‘Decameron,’ published a treatise on ‘Penitence’ in the Latin tongue, which treatise he translated himself, and party recomposed, into the vulgar tongue.  His manner is very similar to that of Boccaccio; and though he does not seem to make any attempt to be playful or amusing, the style is not devoid of delicacy.  The language, too, is, for the time, pure, appropriate, sedate, and ornate, without

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being pretentious, and the work is unquestionably calculated to charm those who read it.”

          Passavanti, like so many other authors, is no longer read; but it is astonishing to find how many of his ideas have been appropriated by the most eminent writers, and his “Specchio” is more amusing, in the ordinary sense of the word, than the title would lead one to infer.  Most of the anecdotes with which it abounds refer to events in Paris, and there is much good-humor about the worthy monk, who urges upon his readers an introspective examination of their consciences.

PETRARCH

          Vaucluse, to use Petrarch’s own expression, is the “Transalpine Parnassus” of the poet; and the recollection of him is still as vivid in the ancient “county” of Avignon as in his native Tuscany.  He was born at Arezzo, which, small as it is, has given birth to so many men of genius, on the 20^th of July, 1304, and he came into the world at a time when his country was torn by faction, and when several of her most illustrious children were in exile.  His father, who held the appointment of Notary in the Florentine Rolls Court, was a friend of Dante, and, proscribed like the latter, took refuge at Pisa, where he sent his son to study at the University.  The death of Henry VII., which put an end to the last hopes of the exiles and inspired Dante with so splendid a canzone, led to

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the final exile of Petrarch’s father, who took up his residence at Avignon with the Papal Court of Clement V.

          While the University of Montpelier was already celebrated, the south could boast at that time of those Courts of Love at which the ProvenŤal poets met in friendly rivalry.  Petrarch’s father looked upon the study of law as the surest road to fortune for his son, and it is said that finding him on one occasion absorbed in Cicero, he took the book and cast it into the fire.  Those who are predestined to be famous in letters are not, however, to be thus deterred, and Petrarch drank so deeply of the ancient writers that in his “Triumph of Fame” he calls Virgil, Cicero, and Seneca “the eyes of our language” (questi son gli occhi de la lingua nostra).

          A brief sketch of his life will not come amiss before explaining by what strands he is connected with the genius of Florence, and fixing his place in the history of her literature: below Dante and above Boccaccio.  His father, adhering to his resolve to make a lawyer of him, sent him from Montpellier, where he had spent four years, to the University of Bologna; here he studied first under Giacomo Andrea, and then under Cino da Pistoia.  He was left an orphan at twenty, and his fortune having been squandered by his executors, he was obliged to return to Avignon, where he then gave himself up to his favorite studies.

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          He was twenty-three when he made the acquaintance of Colonna, Bishop of Lombez, whose affection for him exercised a very great influence upon the whole of his future career; and it is at this period, too, that began to dawn the passion which directed the course of his whole life, and inspired him with the sonnets by which he is known to us.  Petrarch remains for posterity “the lover of Laura,” and the fountain of Vaucluse has become the shrine of this affection, not less touching and ill-starred than that inspired by Beatrice, but more real and more vivid.  It was under the influence of this stormy passion that Petrarch made his way through the south of France to Paris, Flanders, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, exhaling in all directions his amorous burden, like a bird stricken by a dart; and scattering his verses by the wayside.

          Petrarch, however, was a citizen of the world, and he was of too practical a turn of mind to isolate himself in the ethereal Platonism which animates some of his writings.  Pope John XXII. was intent upon restoring Rome