The Story of Florence

It cannot suffer more.
Then, going, I implore
That this my soul thou take
(Nay, do so for my sake),
When my heart sets it free."[9 - Rossetti's translation of the ripresa and second stanza of the Ballata Perch'i' no spero di tornar giammai.]

And at the end of August, when Dante had left office, Guido returned to Florence with the rest of the Bianchi, only to die. For more than a year the "white" burghers were supreme, not only in Florence, but throughout a greater part of Tuscany; and in the following May they procured the expulsion of the Blacks from Pistoia. But Corso Donati at Rome was biding his time; and, on November 1st, 1301, Charles of Valois, brother of King Philip of France, entered Florence with some 1200 horsemen, partly French and partly Italian,–ostensibly as papal peacemaker, but preparing to "joust with the lance of Judas." In Santa Maria Novella he solemnly swore, as the son of a king, to preserve the peace and well-being of the city; and at once armed his followers. Magnates and burghers alike, seeing themselves betrayed, began to barricade their houses and streets. On the same day (November 5th) Corso Donati, acting in unison with the French, appeared in the suburbs, entered the city by a postern gate in the second walls, near S. Piero Maggiore, and swept through the streets with an armed force, burst open the prisons, and drove the Priors out of their new Palace. For days the French and the Neri sacked the city and the contrada at their will, Charles being only intent upon securing a large share of the spoils for himself. But even he did not dare to alter the popular constitution, and was forced to content himself with substituting "black" for "white" burghers in the Signoria, and establishing a Podestà of his own following, Cante de' Gabbrielli of Gubbio, in the Palace of the Commune. An apparently genuine attempt on the part of the Pope, by a second "peacemaker," to undo the harm that his first had done, came to nothing; and the work of proscription commenced, under the direction of the new Podestà. Dante was one of the first victims. The two sentences against him (in each case with a few other names) are dated January 27th, 1302, and March 10th–and there were to be others later. It is the second decree that contains the famous clause, condemning him to be burned to death, if ever he fall into the power of the Commune. At the beginning of April all the leaders of the "white" faction, who had not already fled or turned "black," with their chief followers, magnates and burghers alike, were hounded into exile; and Charles left Florence to enter upon an almost equally shameful campaign in Sicily.

Dante is believed to have been absent from Florence on an embassy to the Pope when Charles of Valois came, and to have heard the news of his ruin at Siena as he hurried homewards–though both embassy and absence have been questioned by Dante scholars of repute. His ancestor, Cacciaguida, tells him in the Paradiso:–

"Tu lascerai ogni cosa diletta
più caramente, e questo è quello strale
che l'arco dello esilio pria saetta.
Tu proverai sì come sa di sale
lo pane altrui, e com'è duro calle
lo scendere e il salir per l'altrui scale."[10 - "Thou shall abandon everything beloved most dearly; this is the arrow which the bow of exile shall first shoot."Thou shalt make trial of how salt doth taste another's bread, and how hard the path to descend and mount upon another's stair."– Wicksteed's translation.]

The rest of Dante's life was passed in exile, and only touches the story of Florence indirectly at certain points. "Since it was the pleasure of the citizens of the most beautiful and most famous daughter of Rome, Florence," he tells us in his Convivio, "to cast me forth from her most sweet bosom (in which I was born and nourished up to the summit of my life, and in which, with her good will, I desire with all my heart to rest my weary soul and end the time given me), I have gone through almost all the parts to which this language extends, a pilgrim, almost a beggar, showing against my will the wound of fortune, which is wont unjustly to be ofttimes reputed to the wounded."

Attempts of the exiles to win their return to Florence by force of arms, with aid from the Ubaldini and the Tuscan Ghibellines, were easily repressed. But the victorious Neri themselves now split into two factions; the one, headed by Corso Donati and composed mainly of magnates, had a kind of doubtful support in the favour of the populace; the other, led by Rosso della Tosa, inclined to the Signoria and the popolo grosso. It was something like the old contest between Messer Corso and Vieri dei Cerchi, but with more entirely selfish ends; and there was evidently going to be a hard tussle between Messer Corso and Messer Rosso for the possession of the State. Civil war was renewed in the city, and the confusion was heightened by the restoration of a certain number of Bianchi, who were reconciled to the Government. The new Pope, Benedict XI., was ardently striving to pacify Florence and all Italy; and his legate, the Cardinal Niccolò da Prato, took up the cause of the exiles. Pompous peace-meetings were held in the Piazza di Santa Maria Novella, for the friars of St Dominic–to which order the new Pope belonged–had the welfare of the city deeply at heart; and at one of these meetings the exiled lawyer, Ser Petracco dall'Ancisa (in a few days to be the father of Italy's second poet), acted as the representative of his party. Attempts were made to revive the May-day pageants of brighter days–but they only resulted in a horrible disaster on the Ponte alla Carraia, of which more presently. The fiends of faction broke loose again; and in order to annihilate the Cavalcanti, who were still rich and powerful round about the Mercato Nuovo, the leaders of the Neri deliberately burned a large portion of the city. On July 20th, 1304, an attempt by the now allied Bianchi and Ghibellines to surprise the city proved a disastrous failure; and, on that very day (Dante being now far away at Verona, forming a party by himself), Francesco di Petracco–who was to call himself Petrarca and is called by us Petrarch–was born in exile at Arezzo.

This miserable chapter of Florentine history ended tragically in 1308, with the death of Corso Donati. In his old age he had married a daughter of Florence's deadliest foe, the great Ghibelline champion, Uguccione della Faggiuola; and, in secret understanding with Uguccione and the Cardinal Napoleone degli Orsini (Pope Clement V. had already transferred the papal chair to Avignon and commenced the Babylonian captivity), he was preparing to overthrow the Signoria, abolish the Ordinances, and make himself Lord of Florence. But the people anticipated him. On Sunday morning, October 16th, the Priors ordered their great bell to be sounded; Corso was accused, condemned as a traitor and rebel, and sentence pronounced in less than an hour; and with the great Gonfalon of the People displayed, the forces of the Commune, supported by the swordsmen of the Della Tosa and a band of Catalan mercenaries in the service of the King of Naples, marched upon the Piazza di San Piero Maggiore. Over the Corbizzi tower floated the banner of the Donati, but only a handful of men gathered round the fierce old noble who, himself unable by reason of his gout to bear arms, encouraged them by his fiery words to hold out to the last. But the soldiery of Uguccione never came, and not a single magnate in the city stirred to aid him. Corso, forced at last to abandon his position, broke through his enemies, and, hotly pursued, fled through the Porta alla Croce. He was overtaken, captured, and barbarously slain by the lances of the hireling soldiery, near the Badia di San Salvi, at the instigation, as it was whispered, of Rosso della Tosa and Pazzino dei Pazzi. The monks carried him, as he lay dying, into the Abbey, where they gave him humble sepulchre for fear of the people. With all his crimes, there was nothing small in anything that Messer Corso did; he was a great spirit, one who could have accomplished mighty things in other circumstances, but who could not breathe freely in the atmosphere of a mercantile republic. "His life was perilous," says Dino Compagni sententiously, "and his death was blame-worthy."

A brief but glorious chapter follows, though denounced in Dante's bitterest words. Hardly was Corso dead when, after their long silence, the imperial trumpets were again heard in the Garden of the Empire. Henry of Luxemburg, the last hero of the Middle Ages, elected Emperor as Henry VII., crossed the Alps in September 1310, resolved to heal the wounds of Italy, and to revive the fading mediæval dream of the Holy Roman Empire. In three wild and terrible letters, Dante announced to the princes and peoples of Italy the advent of this "peaceful king," this "new Moses"; threatened the Florentines with the vengeance of the Imperial Eagle; urged Cæsar on against the city–"the sick sheep that infecteth all the flock of the Lord with her contagion." But the Florentines rose to the occasion, and with the aid of their ally, the King of Naples, formed what was practically an Italian confederation to oppose the imperial invader. "It was at this moment," writes Professor Villari, "that the small merchant republic initiated a truly national policy, and became a great power in Italy." From the middle of September till the end of October, 1312, the imperial army lay round Florence. The Emperor, sick with fever, had his head-quarters in San Salvi. But he dared not venture upon an attack, although the fortifications were unfinished; and, in the following August, the Signoria of Florence could write exultantly to their allies, and announce "the blessed tidings" that "the most savage tyrant, Henry, late Count of Luxemburg, whom the rebellious persecutors of the Church, and treacherous foes of ourselves and you, called King of the Romans and Emperor of Germany," had died at Buonconvento.

But in the Empyrean Heaven of Heavens, in the mystical convent of white stoles, Beatrice shows Dante the throne of glory prepared for the soul of the noble-hearted Cæsar:–

"In quel gran seggio, a che tu gli occhi tieni
per la corona che già v'è su posta,
prima che tu a queste nozze ceni,
sederà l'alma, che fia giù agosta,
dell'alto Enrico, ch'a drizzare Italia
verrà in prima che ella sia disposta."[11 - "On that great seat where thou dost fix thine eyes, for the crown's sake already placed above it, ere at this wedding feast thyself do sup,"Shall sit the soul (on earth 'twill be imperial) of the lofty Henry, who shall come to straighten Italy ere she be ready for it."]

After this, darker days fell upon Florence. Dante, with a renewed sentence of death upon his head, was finishing his Divina Commedia at Verona and Ravenna,–until, on September 14th, 1321, he passed away in the latter city, with the music of the pine-forest in his ears and the monuments of dead emperors before his dying eyes. Petrarch, after a childhood spent at Carpentras, was studying law at Montpellier and Bologna–until, on that famous April morning in Santa Chiara at Avignon, he saw the golden-haired girl who made him the greatest lyrist of the Middle Ages. It was in the year 1327 that Laura–if such was really her name–thus crossed his path. Boccaccio, born at Certaldo in 1313, the year of the Emperor Henry's death, was growing up in Florence, a sharp and precocious boy. But the city was in a woeful plight; harassed still by factious magnates and burghers, plundered by foreign adventurers, who pretended to serve her, heavily taxed by the Angevin sovereigns–the Reali– of Naples. Florence had taken first King Robert, and then his son, Charles of Calabria, as overlord, for defence against external foes (first Henry VII., then Uguccione della Faggiuola, and then Castruccio Interminelli); and the vicars of these Neapolitan princes replaced for a while the Podestàs; their marshals robbed and corrupted; their Catalan soldiers clamoured for pay. The wars with Uguccione and Castruccio were most disastrous to the Republic; and the fortunate coincidence of the deaths of Castruccio and Charles of Calabria, in 1328, gave Florence back her liberty at the very moment when she no longer needed a defender. Although the Florentines professed to regard this suzerainty of the Reali di Napoli as an alliance rather than a subjection,–compagnia e non servitù as Machiavelli puts it–it was an undoubted relief when it ended. The State was reorganised, and a new constitution confirmed in a solemn Parliament held in the Piazza. Henceforth the nomination of the Priors and Gonfaloniere was effected by lot, and controlled by a complicated process of scrutiny; the old councils were all annulled; and in future there were to be only two chief councils–the Council of the People, composed of 300 popolani, presided over by the Captain, and the Council of the Commune, of 250, presided over by the Podestà, in which latter (as in former councils of the kind) both popolani and grandi could sit. Measures proposed by the Government were submitted first to the Council of the People, and then, if approved, to that of the Commune.

Within the next few years, in spite of famine, disease, and a terrible inundation of the Arno in 1333, the Republic largely extended its sway. Pistoia, Arezzo, and other places of less account owned its signory; but an attempt to get possession of Lucca–with the incongruous aid of the Germans–failed. After the flood, the work of restoration was first directed by Giotto; and to this epoch we owe the most beautiful building in Florence, the Campanile. The discontent, excited by the mismanagement of the war against Lucca, threw the Republic into the arms of a new and peculiarly atrocious tyrant, Walter de Brienne, Duke of Athens, a French soldier of fortune, connected by blood with the Reali of Naples. Elected first as war captain and chief justice, he acquired credit with the populace and the magnates by his executions of unpopular burghers; and finally, on September 8th, 1342, in the Piazza della Signoria, he was appointed Lord of Florence for life, amidst the acclamations of the lowest sections of the mob and the paid retainers of the treacherous nobles. The Priors were driven from their palace, the books of the Ordinances destroyed, and the Duke's banner erected upon the People's tower, while the church bells rang out the Te Deum. Arezzo, Pistoia, Colle di Val d'Elsa, San Gemignano, and Volterra acknowledged his rule; and with a curious mixture of hypocrisy, immorality, and revolting cruelty, he reigned as absolute lord until the following summer, backed by French and Burgundian soldiers who flocked to him from all quarters. By that time he had utterly disgusted all classes in the State, even the magnates by whose favour he had won his throne and the populace who had acclaimed him; and on the Feast of St. Anne, July 26th, 1343, there was a general rising. The instruments of his cruelty were literally torn to pieces by the people, and he was besieged in the Palazzo Vecchio, which he had transformed into a fortress, and at length capitulated on August 3rd. The Sienese and Count Simone de' Conti Guidi, who had come to mediate, took him over the Ponte Rubaconte, through the Porta San Niccolò and thence into the Casentino, where they made him solemnly ratify his abdication.

"Note," says Giovanni Villani, who was present at most of these things and has given us a most vivid picture of them, "that even as the Duke with fraud and treason took away the liberty of the Republic of Florence on the day of Our Lady in September,[12 - i. e. The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin.] not regarding the reverence due to her, so, as it were in divine vengeance, God permitted that the free citizens with armed hand should win it back on the day of her mother, Madonna Santa Anna, on the 26th day of July 1343; and for this grace it was ordained by the Commune that the Feast of St. Anne should ever be kept like Easter in Florence, and that there should be celebrated a solemn office and great offerings by the Commune and all the Arts of Florence." St. Anne henceforth became the chief patroness and protectoress of the Republic, as Fra Bartolommeo painted her in his great unfinished picture in the Uffizi; and the solemn office and offerings were duly paid and celebrated in Or San Michele. One of Villani's minor grievances against the Duke is that he introduced frivolous French fashions of dress into the city, instead of the stately old Florentine costume, which the republicans considered to be the authentic garb of ancient Rome. That there was some ground for this complaint will readily be seen, by comparing the figure of a French cavalier in the Allegory of the Church in the Spanish Chapel at Santa Maria Novella (the figure formerly called Cimabue and now sometimes said to represent Walter de Brienne himself), with the simple grandeur and dignity of the dress worn by the burghers on their tombs in Santa Croce, or by Dante in the Duomo portrait.

Only two months after the expulsion of the Duke of Athens, the great quarrel between the magnates and the people was fought to a finish, in September 1343. On the northern side of the Arno, the magnates made head at the houses of the Adimari near San Giovanni, at the opening of the present Via Calzaioli, where one of their towers still stands, at the houses of the Pazzi and Donati in the Piazza di San Pier Maggiore, and round those of the Cavalcanti in Mercato Nuovo. The people under their great gonfalon and the standards of the companies, led by the Medici and Rondinelli, stormed one position after another, forcing the defenders to surrender. On the other side of the Arno, the magnates and their retainers held the bridges and the narrow streets beyond. The Porta San Giorgio was in their hands, and, through it, reinforcements were hurried up from the country. Repulsed at the Ponte Vecchio and the Ponte Rubaconte, the forces of the people with their victorious standards at last carried the Ponte alla Carraia, which was held by the Nerli; and next, joined by the populace of the Oltrarno, forced the Rossi and Frescobaldi to yield. The Bardi alone remained; and, in that narrow street which still bears their name, and on the Ponte Vecchio and the Ponte Rubaconte, they withstood single-handed the onslaught of the whole might of the people, until they were assailed in the rear from the direction of the Via Romana. The infuriated populace sacked their houses, destroyed and burned the greater part of their palaces and towers. The long struggle between grandi and popolani was thus ended at last. "This was the cause," says Machiavelli, "that Florence was stripped not only of all martial skill, but also of all generosity." The government was again reformed, and the minor arts admitted to a larger share; between the popolo grosso and them, between burghers and populace, lay the struggle now, which was to end in the Medicean rule.

But on all these perpetual changes in the form of the government of Florence the last word had, perhaps, been said in Dante's sarcastic outburst a quarter of a century before:–

"Atene e Lacedemone, che fenno
l'antiche leggi, e furon sì civili,
fecero al viver bene un picciol cenno
verso di te, che fai tanto sottili
provvedimenti, che a mezzo novembre
non giunge quel che tu d'ottobre fili.
Quante volte del tempo che rimembre,
legge, moneta, offizio, e costume
hai tu mutato, e rinnovato membre?
E se ben ti ricordi, e vedi lume,
vedrai te simigliante a quella inferma,
che non può trovar posa in su le piume,
ma con dar volta suo dolore scherma."[13 - Purg. VI.–"Athens and Lacedæmon, they who madeThe ancient laws, and were so civilised,Made towards living well a little signCompared with thee, who makest such fine-spunProvisions, that to middle of NovemberReaches not what thou in October spinnest.How oft, within the time of thy remembrance,Laws, money, offices and usagesHast thou remodelled, and renewed thy members?And if thou mind thee well, and see the light,Thou shalt behold thyself like a sick woman,Who cannot find repose upon her down,But by her tossing wardeth off her pain."– Longfellow.]

The terrible pestilence, known as the Black Death, swept over Europe in 1348. During the five months in which it devastated Florence three-fifths of the population perished, all civic life was suspended, and the gayest and most beautiful of cities seemed for a while to be transformed into the dim valley of disease and sin that lies outstretched at the bottom of Dante's Malebolge. It has been described, in all its horrors, in one of the most famous passages of modern prose–that appalling introduction to Boccaccio's Decameron. From the city in her agony, Boccaccio's three noble youths and seven "honest ladies" fled to the villas of Settignano and Fiesole, where they strove to drown the horror of the time by their music and dancing, their feasting and too often sadly obscene stories. Giovanni Villani was among the victims in Florence, and Petrarch's Laura at Avignon. The first canto of Petrarch's Triumph of Death appears to be, in part, an allegorical representation–written many years later–of this fearful year.

During the third quarter of this fourteenth century–the years which still saw the Popes remaining in their Babylonian exile at Avignon–the Florentines gradually regained their lost supremacy over the cities of Tuscany: Colle di Val d'Elsa, San Gemignano, Prato, Pistoia, Volterra, San Miniato dei Tedeschi. They carried on a war with the formidable tyrant of Milan, the Archbishop Giovanni Visconti, whose growing power was a perpetual menace to the liberties of the Tuscan communes. They made good use of the descent of the feeble emperor, Charles IV., into Italy; waged a new war with their old rival, Pisa; and readily accommodated themselves to the baser conditions of warfare that prevailed, now that Italy was the prey of the companies of mercenaries, ready to be hired by whatever prince or republic could afford the largest pay, or to fall upon whatever city seemed most likely to yield the heaviest ransom. Within the State itself the popolo minuto and the Minor Guilds were advancing in power; Florence was now divided into four quarters (San Giovanni, Santa Maria Novella, Santa Croce, Santo Spirito), instead of the old Sesti; and the Signoria was now composed of the Gonfaloniere and eight Priors, two from each quarter (instead of the former six), of whom two belonged to the Minor Arts. These, of course, still held office for only two months. Next came the twelve Buonuomini, who were the counsellors of the Signoria, and held office for three months; and the sixteen Gonfaloniers of the city companies, four from each quarter, holding office for four months. And there were, as before, the two great Councils of the People and the Commune; and still the three great officers who carried out their decrees, the Podestà, the Captain, the Executor of Justice. The feuds of Ricci and Albizzi kept up the inevitable factions, much as the Buondelmonti and Uberti, Cerchi and Donati had done of old; and an iniquitous system of "admonishing" those who were suspected of Ghibelline descent (the ammoniti being excluded from office under heavy penalties) threw much power into the hands of the captains of the Parte Guelfa, whose oppressive conduct earned them deadly hatred. "To such arrogance," says Machiavelli, "did the captains of the Party mount, that they were feared more than the members of the Signoria, and less reverence was paid to the latter than to the former; the palace of the Party was more esteemed than that of the Signoria, so that no ambassador came to Florence without having commissions to the captains."

Pope Gregory XI preceded his return to Rome by an attempted reconquest of the States of the Church, by means of foreign legates and hireling soldiers, of whom the worst were Bretons and English; although St. Catherine of Siena implored him, in the name of Christ, to come with the Cross in hand, like a meek lamb, and not with armed bands. The horrible atrocities committed in Romagna by these mercenaries, especially at Faenza and Cesena, stained what might have been a noble pontificate. Against Pope Gregory and his legates, the Florentines carried on a long and disastrous war; round the Otto della Guerra, the eight magistrates to whom the management of the war was intrusted, rallied those who hated the Parte Guelfa. The return of Gregory to Rome in 1377 opens a new epoch in Italian history. Echoes of this unnatural struggle between Florence and the Pope reach us in the letters of St Catherine and the canzoni of Franco Sacchetti; in the latter is some faint sound of Dante's saeva indignatio against the unworthy pastors of the Church, but in the former we are lifted far above the miserable realities of a conflict carried on by political intrigue and foreign mercenaries, into the mystical realms of pure faith and divine charity.

In 1376, the Loggia dei Priori, now less pleasantly known as the Loggia dei Lanzi, was founded; and in 1378 the bulk of the Duomo was practically completed. This may be taken as the close of the first or "heroic" epoch of Florentine Art, which runs simultaneously with the great democratic period of Florentine history, represented in literature by Dante and Boccaccio. The Duomo, the Palace of the Podestà, the Palace of the Priors, Santa Maria Novella, Santa Croce, Or San Michele, the Loggia of the Bigallo, and the Third Walls of the City (of which, on the northern side of the Arno, the gates alone remain), are its supreme monuments in architecture. Its heroes of greatest name are Arnolfo di Cambio, Giotto di Bondone, Andrea Pisano, Andrea di Cione or Orcagna (the "Archangel"), and, lastly and but recently recognised, Francesco Talenti.

"No Italian architect," says Addington Symonds, "has enjoyed the proud privilege of stamping his own individuality more strongly on his native city than Arnolfo." At present, the walls of the city (or what remains of them)–le mura di Fiorenza which Lapo Gianni would fain see inargentate– and the bulk of the Palazzo Vecchio and Santa Croce, alone represent Arnolfo's work. But the Duomo (mainly, in its present form, due to Francesco Talenti) probably still retains in part his design; and the glorious Church of Or San Michele, of which the actual architect is not certainly known, stands on the site of his Loggia.

Giovanni Cimabue, the father of Florentine painting as Arnolfo of Florentine architecture, survives only as a name in Dante's immortal verse. Not a single authentic work remains from his hand in Florence. His supposed portrait in the cloisters of Santa Maria Novella is now held to be that of a French knight; the famous picture of the Madonna and Child with her angelic ministers, in the Rucellai Chapel, is shown to be the work of a Sienese master; and the other paintings once ascribed to him have absolutely no claims to bear his name. But the Borgo Allegro still bears its title from the rejoicings that hailed his masterpiece, and perhaps it is best that his achievement should thus live, only as a holy memory:–

"Credette Cimabue nella pittura
tener lo campo, ed ora ha Giotto il grido,
sì che la fama di colui è oscura."[14 - "In painting Cimabue thought that heShould hold the field, now Giotto has the cry,So that the other's fame is growing dim."]

Of Cimabue's great pupil, Dante's friend and contemporary, Giotto, we know and possess much more. Through him mediæval Italy first spoke out through painting, and with no uncertain sound. He was born some ten years later than Dante. Cimabue–or so the legend runs, which is told by Leonardo da Vinci amongst others–found him among the mountains, guarding his father's flocks and drawing upon the stones the movements of the goats committed to his care. He was a typical Florentine craftsman; favoured by popes, admitted to the familiarity of kings, he remained to the end the same unspoilt shepherd whom Cimabue had found. Many choice and piquant tales are told by the novelists about his ugly presence and rare personality, his perpetual good humour, his sharp and witty answers to king and rustic alike, his hatred of all pretentiousness, carried to such an extent that he conceived a rooted objection to hearing himself called maestro. Padua and Assisi possess some of his very best work; but Florence can still show much. Two chapels in Santa Croce are painted by his hand; of the smaller pictures ascribed to him in churches and galleries, there is one authentic–the Madonna in the Accademia; and, perhaps most beautiful of all, the Campanile which he designed and commenced still rises in the midst of the city. Giotto died in 1336; his work was carried on by Andrea Pisano and practically finished by Francesco Talenti.

Andrea di Ugolino Pisano (1270-1348), usually simply called Andrea Pisano, is similarly the father of Florentine sculpture. Vasari's curiously inaccurate account of him has somewhat blurred his real figure in the history of art. His great achievements are the casting of the first gate of the Baptistery in bronze, his work–apparently from Giotto's designs–in the lower series of marble reliefs round the Campanile, and his continuation of the Campanile itself after Giotto's death. He is said by Vasari to have built the Porta di San Frediano.

There is little individuality in the followers of Giotto, who carried on his tradition and worked in his manner. They are very much below their master, and are often surpassed by the contemporary painters of Siena, such as Simone Martini and Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Taddeo Gaddi and his son, Agnolo, Giovanni di Milano, Bernardo Daddi, are their leaders; the chief title to fame of the first-named being the renowned Ponte Vecchio. But their total achievement, in conjunction with the Sienese, was of heroic magnitude. They covered the walls of churches and chapels, especially those connected with the Franciscans and Dominicans, with the scenes of Scripture, with the lives of Madonna and her saints; they set forth in all its fullness the whole Gospel story, for those who could neither read nor write; they conceived vast allegories of human life and human destinies; they filled the palaces of the republics with painted parables of good government. "By the grace of God," says a statute of Sienese painters, "we are the men who make manifest to the ignorant and unlettered the miraculous things achieved by the power and virtue of the Faith." At Siena, at Pisa and at Assisi, are perhaps the greatest works of this school; but here, in Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella, there is much, and of a very noble and characteristic kind. Spinello Aretino (1333-1410) may be regarded as the last of the Giotteschi; you may see his best series of frescoes in San Miniato, setting forth with much skill and power the life of the great Italian monk, whose face Dante so earnestly prayed to behold unveiled in Paradise.

This heroic age of sculpture and painting culminated in Andrea Orcagna (1308-1368), Andrea Pisano's great pupil. Painter and sculptor, architect and poet, Orcagna is at once the inheritor of Niccolò and Giovanni Pisano, and of Giotto. The famous frescoes in the Pisan Campo Santo are now known to be the work of some other hand; his paintings in Santa Croce, with their priceless portraits, have perished; and, although frequently consulted in the construction of the Duomo, it is tolerably certain that he was not the architect of any of the Florentine buildings once ascribed to him. The Strozzi chapel of St Thomas in Santa Maria Novella, the oratory of the Madonna in San Michele in Orto, contain all his extant works; and they are sufficient to prove him, next to Giotto, the greatest painter of his century, with a feeling for grace and beauty even above Giotto's, and only less excellent in marble. Several of his poems have been preserved, mostly of a slightly satirical character; one, a sonnet on the nature of love, Molti volendo dir che fosse Amore, has had the honour of being ascribed to Dante.

With the third quarter of the century, the first great epoch of Italian letters closes also. On the overthrow of the House of Suabia at Benevento, the centre of culture had shifted from Sicily to Tuscany, from Palermo to Florence. The prose and poetry of this epoch is almost entirely Tuscan, although the second of its greatest poets, Francesco Petrarca, comparatively seldom set foot within its boundaries. "My old nest is restored to me," he wrote to the Signoria, when they sent Boccaccio to invite his friend to return to Florence, "I can fly back to it, and I can fold there my wandering wings." But, save for a few flying visits, Petrarch had little inclination to attach himself to one city, when he felt that all Italy was his country.

Dante had set forth all that was noblest in mediæval thought in imperishable form, supremely in his Divina Commedia, but appreciably and nobly in his various minor works as well, both verse and prose. Villani had started historical Italian prose on its triumphant course. Petrarch and Boccaccio, besides their great gifts to Italian literature, in the ethereal poetry of the one, painting every varying mood of the human soul, and the licentious prose of the other, hymning the triumph of the flesh, stand on the threshold of the Renaissance. Other names crowd in upon us at each stage of this epoch. Apart from his rare personality, Guido Cavalcanti's ballate are his chief title to poetic fame, but, even so, less than the monument of glory that Dante has reared to him in the Vita Nuova, in the De Vulgari Eloquentia, in the Divina Commedia. Dino Compagni, the chronicler of the Whites and Blacks, was only less admirable as a patriot than as a historian. Matteo Villani, the brother of Giovanni, and Matteo's son, Filippo, carried on the great chronicler's work. Fra Jacopo Passavanti, the Dominican prior of Santa Maria Novella, in the middle of the century, showed how the purest Florentine vernacular could be used for the purpose of simple religious edification. Franco Sacchetti, politician, novelist and poet, may be taken as the last Florentine writer of this period; he anticipates the popular lyrism of the Quattrocento, rather in the same way as a group of scholars who at the same time gathered round the Augustinian, Luigi Marsili, in his cell at Santo Spirito heralds the coming of the humanists. It fell to Franco Sacchetti to sing the dirge of this heroic period of art and letters, in his elegiac canzoni on the deaths of Petrarch and Boccaccio:–

"Sonati sono i corni
d'ogni parte a ricolta;
la stagione è rivolta:
se tornerà non so, ma credo tardi."

CHAPTER III

The Medici and the Quattrocento

"Tiranno è nome di uomo di mala vita, e pessimo fra tutti gli altri uomini, che per forza sopra tutti vuol regnare, massime quello che di cittadino è fatto tiranno."–Savonarola.

"The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was in many things great, rather by what it designed or aspired to do, than by what it actually achieved."–Walter Pater.

NON già Salvestro ma Salvator mundi, "thou that with noble wisdom hast saved thy country." Thus in a sonnet does Franco Sacchetti hail Salvestro dei Medici, the originator of the greatness of his house. In 1378, while the hatred between the Parte Guelfa and the adherents of the Otto della Guerra–the rivalry between the Palace of the Party and the Palace of the Signory–was at its height, the Captains of the Party conspired to seize upon the Palace of the Priors and take possession of the State. Their plans were frustrated by Salvestro dei Medici, a rich merchant and head of his ambitious and rising family, who was then Gonfaloniere of Justice. He proposed to restore the Ordinances against the magnates, and, when this petition was rejected by the Signoria and the Colleges,[15 - The "Colleges" were the twelve Buonuomini and the sixteen Gonfaloniers of the Companies. Measures proposed by the Signoria had to be carried in the Colleges before being submitted to the Council of the People, and afterwards to the Council of the Commune.] he appealed to the Council of the People. The result was a riot, followed by a long series of tumults throughout the city; the Arti Minori came to the front in arms; and, finally, the bloody revolution known as the Tumult of the Ciompi burst over Florence. These Ciompi, the lowest class of artizans and all those who were not represented in the Arts, headed by those who were subject to the great Arte della Lana, had been much favoured by the Duke of Athens, and had been given consuls and a standard with an angel painted upon it. On the fall of the Duke, these Ciompi, or popolo minuto, had lost these privileges, and were probably much oppressed by the consuls of the Arte della Lana. Secretly instigated by Salvestro–who thus initiated the Medicean policy of undermining the Republic by means of the populace–they rose en masse on July 20th, captured the Palace of the Podestà, burnt the houses of their enemies and the Bottega of the Arte della Lana, seized the standard of the people, and, with it and the banners of the Guilds displayed, came into the Piazza to demand a share in the government. On July 22nd they burst into the Palace of the Priors, headed by a wool-comber, Michele di Lando, carrying in his hands the great Gonfalon; him they acclaimed Gonfaloniere and lord of the city.