Herbert Vaughan - A History of the Medici Popes

~

FROM THE FRIGHTFUL SPECTACLE OF poverty, barbarity and ignorance, from the oppression of illiterate masters, and the sufferings of a degraded peasantry, which the annals of England and France present to us, it is delightful to turn to the opulent and enlightened states of Italy, to the vast and magnificent cities, the ports, the arsenals, the villas, the museums, the libraries, the marts filled with every article of comfort or luxury, the factories swarming with artisans.... With peculiar pleasure every cultivated mind must repose on the fair, the happy, the glorious Florence, the halls which rang with the mirth of Pulci, the cell where twinkled the midnight lamp of Politian, the statues on which the young eye of Michelangelo glared with the frenzy of a kindred inspiration, the gardens in which Lorenzo meditated some sparkling song for the May-Day dance of the Etrurian virgins (Lord Macaulay, Essay on Machiavelli).

IN our efforts to realise the leading events of our own history we experience no small difficulty from the fact that so much of the face of England has completely altered its outward appearance under the stress of modern development, so that we find it particularly hard to picture to ourselves their original setting. Our overgrown yet ever-spreading capital owns scarcely a feature to-day in common with the London of the Tudors or Plantagenets; the relentless pushing of industrial enterprise has turned whole shires from green to black, from verdant countryside to smoke-grimed scenes of commerce. It is therefore well-nigh impossible for us in many cases to conjure up the old-world conditions of Merrie England. But in writing of Italian annals we are confronted by no such problem: altered to a certain extent no doubt is the present aspect of Italy, yet in Florence, Venice, Siena and most of her cities we still possess the empty stages of the pageants and deeds of long ago, all ready prepared for us to people with the famous figures of the historic past.

Standing on the airy heights of San Miniato, where the golden mosaics of its venerable church have caught the passing glories of the sunset for nigh upon a thousand years, or strolling amongst the ilex alleys of Bobolis ducal bowers, we can still gaze below upon the Florence of the Medici, the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent and of Savonarola, the Florence of Popes Leo and Clement, of Michelangelo and Machiavelli. For beneath us swift Arno still shoots under the arches of Taddeo Gaddis ancient bridge piled high with its load of tiny shops that Florentine goldsmiths have inhabited for the past six centuries. There still dominates the red-roofed city Brunelleschis huge cupola, and beside it still springs aloft into blue aether that no clouds oercast the delicate parti coloured campanile of the Shepherd-Painter. Nearer to us the graceful yet sturdy belfry of the old civic palace soars majestically into the clear atmosphere, and hard by we note the fantastic spire of the Badia, and alongside it the severe outline of the turret that adjoins the grim castle of the Podest. Westward the slender pinnacle of Santa Maria Novella greets our eyes, whilst amidst this varied group of towers there obtrudes on our sight the square mass of Or San Michele, that sacred citadel of the Florentine guilds. Oltr Arno nestling at our feet remains wholly unchanged, and of a truth the only conspicuous objects that can interrupt our mental retrospect of the city of Lorenzo and Leo are the mean tower of Santa Croce, the long colonnades of the Uffizi, and the clumsy-dome that surmounts the gorgeous charnel-house of the Medicean Grand-Dukes. To make the picture perfect, we must blind our eyes to these excrescences of a later age, and by another slight effect of the imagination we must behold the modern raw suburbs and their smoke-belching factories sink into the soil of the Florentine plain to give place to tracts of garden and orchard, to shady groves and smiling vineyards, that lie outside the broad coronal of towered walls, wherewith Arnolfo di Cambio endowed his native city for her protection. We must next conceive the steep hillside of Fiesole less populous than at the present day, less marred by quarries and mean houses, yet freely besprinkled with ample villas. Amidst this radiant scenery the practised eye can easily detect the chief Medicean residences;that sheltered pleasaunce with its long terraces below the crest of ancient Faesulae; the favourite retreat of the sickly Piero and the Magnificent Lorenzo, with its broad roof peeping forth from bosky thickets of elm and cypress at sunny Careggi; and again by directing our glance across the fertile plain towards Prato, we seem to discover the whereabouts of Sangallos stately palace at low-lying Cajano, where the luckless Clement VII. spent much of his childhood. No stretch of the imagination is however required on our part to realise the eternal hills which form the northern background to the City of the Lily; forever unchanged and unchangeable remain the stony stretches of familiar Monte Morello, the green and russet slopes of the heights that rise in endless succession eastward of Fiesole, and the barren violet-tinted mountains bounding the plain above Prato and Pistoja. How exquisite, and also how unaltered even to-day, is the distant aspect of Florence, la bellissima e famosissima figlia di Roma, as one of her most famous sons thus addressed his ancient mother ! With so superb a setting, amid such glorious surroundings, the past history of Florence becomes a living thing, which it needs no striving to quicken, for the true Medicean city of the Italian Renaissance stands before us to-day sharply defined in the crystal-clear air of Tuscany

Dove l humano spirito si purga

E di salir al Ciel diventa degno.

In the heart of the town itself, almost beneath the shadow of the vast dome, out of sight of which no true-born son of Florence is said ever to feel happy, rises that group of buildings which is so closely associated with the origin and fortunes of the House of Medici. Here lies the great basilica of San Lorenzo with its pitiful naked faade, that Medicean popes and princes were always intending to convert into a costly thing of beauty; at its transepts up-rear the rival sacristies of Brunelleschi and Michelangelo, above which looms the red cupola of the Grand-Ducal mausoleum. eside the church extends the long window-pierced form of the Laurentian Library, overlooking the quiet cloister in a dark angle of which sits eternally the robed and mitred figure of the grim-visaged Paolo Giovio, the venal Plutarch of his age and the earliest biographer of Pope Leo X. Upon the little piazza before the church, nowadays the busy scene of a daily market of cheap or tawdry goods, abuts the massive palace which was the cradle of the Medicean race. Much changed in outward aspect is the mansion that Michelozzi constructed for Cosimo il Vecchio, for the Riccardi, who bought this historic building in after years, must needs spoil its original proportions by adding largely to the structure. The statue-set garden wherein Cosimo and Lorenzo were wont to stroll has wholly disappeared, but the central courtyard with its antique friezes and its stone medallions remains intact. A most precious relic of its former owners it still retains in the exquisite little chapel covered with Benozzo Gozzolis renowned frescoes, wherein are portrayed in glowing colours and in gleaming gold Cosimo the Elder, his son Piero, his grandchildren, and his Imperial guests from distant Byzantium, all riding with their trains of richly-clad attendants, with hawk and hound, and even with trained leopard, amidst a landscape of marvellous but fantastic beauty. The old Medicean mansion, lying between Piazza San Lorenzo and the broad curve of Via Larga, cannot perhaps aspire to the symmetry and rich decoration of Palazzo Strozzi hard by, nor can it vie in bulk and majesty with Messer Pittis vast palace on the slopes of Oltr Arno; nevertheless it is a goodly building, well-proportioned and imposing, and withal suitably contrived for defence.