Val d'Arno

But the towers in Florence, shattered to fragments by this ingenious engineer, and the tombs in Perugia, which his son will carve, only that they also may be so well destroyed that only a few relics remain, scattered up and down the church,—are these, also, only the iron towers, and the red-hot tombs, of the city of Dis?

Let us see.

47. In order to understand the relation of the tradesmen and working men, including eminently the artist, to the general life of the thirteenth century, I must lay before you the clearest elementary charts I can of the course which the fates of Italy were now appointing for her.

My first chart must be geographical. I want you to have a clearly dissected and closely fitted notion of the natural boundaries of her states, and their relations to surrounding ones. Lay hold first, firmly, of your conception of the valleys of the Po and the Arno, running counter to each other—opening east and opening west,—Venice at the end of the one, Pisa at the end of the other.

48. These two valleys—the hearts of Lombardy and Etruria—virtually contain the life of Italy. They are entirely different in character: Lombardy, essentially luxurious and worldly, at this time rude in art, but active; Etruria, religious, intensely imaginative, and inheriting refined forms of art from before the days of Porsenna.

49. South of these, in mid-Italy, you have Romagna,—the valley of the Tiber. In that valley, decayed Rome, with her lust of empire inextinguishable;—no inheritance of imaginative art, nor power of it; dragging her own ruins hourly into more fantastic ruin, and defiling her faith hourly with more fantastic guilt.

South of Romagna, you have the kingdoms of Calabria and Sicily,–Magna Graecia, and Syracuse, in decay;–strange spiritual fire from the Saracenic east still lighting the volcanic land, itself laid all in ashes.

50. Conceive Italy then always in these four masses: Lombardy, Etruria, Romagna, Calabria.

Now she has three great external powers to deal with: the western, France—the northern, Germany—the eastern, Arabia. On her right the Frank; on her left the Saracen; above her, the Teuton. And roughly, the French are a religious chivalry; the Germans a profane chivalry; the Saracens an infidel chivalry. What is best of each is benefiting Italy; what is worst, afflicting her. And in the time we are occupied with, all are afflicting her.

What Charlemagne, Barbarossa, or Saladin did to teach her, you can trace only by carefullest thought. But in this thirteenth century all these three powers are adverse to her, as to each other. Map the methods of their adversity thus:–

51. Germany, (profane chivalry,) is vitally adverse to the Popes; endeavouring to establish imperial and knightly power against theirs. It is fiercely, but frankly, covetous of Italian territory, seizes all it can of Lombardy and Calabria, and with any help procurable either from robber Christians or robber Saracens, strives, in an awkward manner, and by open force, to make itself master of Rome, and all Italy.

52. France, all surge and foam of pious chivalry, lifts herself in fitful rage of devotion, of avarice, and of pride. She is the natural ally of the church; makes her own monks the proudest of the Popes; raises Avignon into another Rome; prays and pillages insatiably; pipes pastoral songs of innocence, and invents grotesque variations of crime; gives grace to the rudeness of England, and venom to the cunning of Italy. She is a chimera among nations, and one knows not whether to admire most the valour of Guiscard, the virtue of St. Louis or the villany of his brother.

53. The Eastern powers—Greek, Israelite, Saracen—are at once the enemies of the Western, their prey, and their tutors.

They bring them methods of ornament and of merchandise, and stimulate in them the worst conditions of pugnacity, bigotry, and rapine. That is the broad geographical and political relation of races. Next, you must consider the conditions of their time.

54. I told you, in my second lecture on Engraving, that before the twelfth century the nations were too savage to be Christian, and after the fifteenth too carnal to be Christian.

The delicacy of sensation and refinements of imagination necessary to understand Christianity belong to the mid period when men risen from a life of brutal hardship are not yet fallen to one of brutal luxury. You can neither comprehend the character of Christ while you are chopping flints for tools, and gnawing raw bones for food; nor when you have ceased to do anything with either tools or hands, and dine on gilded capons. In Dante's lines, beginning

"I saw Bellincion Berti walk abroad
In leathern girdle, with a clasp of bone,"

you have the expression of his sense of the increasing luxury of the age, already sapping its faith. But when Bellincion Berti walked abroad in skins not yet made into leather, and with the bones of his dinner in a heap at his door, instead of being cut into girdle clasps, he was just as far from capacity of being a Christian.

55. The following passage, from Carlyle's "Chartism," expresses better than any one else has done, or is likely to do it, the nature of this Christian era, (extending from the twelfth to the sixteenth century,) in England,—the like being entirely true of it elsewhere:—

"In those past silent centuries, among those silent classes, much had been going on. Not only had red deer in the New and other forests been got preserved and shot; and treacheries[9 - Perhaps not altogether so, any more than Oliver's dear papa Carlyle. We may have to read him also, otherwise than the British populace have yet read, some day.] of Simon de Montfort, wars of Red and White Roses, battles of Crecy, battles of Bosworth, and many other battles, been got transacted and adjusted; but England wholly, not without sore toil and aching bones to the millions of sires and the millions of sons of eighteen generations, had been got drained and tilled, covered with yellow harvests, beautiful and rich in possessions. The mud-wooden Caesters and Chesters had become steepled, tile-roofed, compact towns. Sheffield had taken to the manufacture of Sheffield whittles. Worstead could from wool spin yarn, and knit or weave the same into stockings or breeches for men. England had property valuable to the auctioneer; but the accumulate manufacturing, commercial, economic skill which lay impalpably warehoused in English hands and heads, what auctioneer could estimate?

"Hardly an Englishman to be met with but could do something; some cunninger thing than break his fellow-creature's head with battle-axes. The seven incorporated trades, with their million guild-brethren, with their hammers, their shuttles, and tools, what an army,—fit to conquer that land of England, as we say, and hold it conquered! Nay, strangest of all, the English people had acquired the faculty and habit of thinking,—even of believing; individual conscience had unfolded itself among them;—Conscience, and Intelligence its handmaid.[10 - Observe Carlyle's order of sequence. Perceptive Reason is the Handmaid of Conscience, not Conscience hers. If you resolve to do right, you will soon do wisely; but resolve only to do wisely, and you will never do right.] Ideas of innumerable kinds were circulating among these men; witness one Shakspeare, a wool-comber, poacher or whatever else, at Stratford, in Warwickshire, who happened to write books!—the finest human figure, as I apprehend, that Nature has hitherto seen fit to make of our widely Teutonic clay. Saxon, Norman, Celt, or Sarmat, I find no human soul so beautiful, these fifteen hundred known years;—our supreme modern European man. Him England had contrived to realize: were there not ideas?

"Ideas poetic and also Puritanic, that had to seek utterance in the notablest way! England had got her Shakspeare, but was now about to get her Milton and Oliver Cromwell. This, too, we will call a new expansion, hard as it might be to articulate and adjust; this, that a man could actually have a conscience for his own behoof, and not for his priest's only; that his priest, be he who he might, would henceforth have to take that fact along with him."

56. You observe, in this passage, account is given you of two things—(A) of the development of a powerful class of tradesmen and artists; and, (B) of the development of an individual conscience.

In the savage times you had simply the hunter, digger, and robber; now you have also the manufacturer and salesman. The ideas of ingenuity with the hand, of fairness in exchange, have occurred to us. We can do something now with our fingers, as well as with our fists; and if we want our neighbours' goods, we will not simply carry them off, as of old, but offer him some of ours in exchange.

57. Again; whereas before we were content to let our priests do for us all they could, by gesticulating, dressing, sacrificing, or beating of drums and blowing of trumpets; and also direct our steps in the way of life, without any doubt on our part of their own perfect acquaintance with it,—we have now got to do something for ourselves—to think something for ourselves; and thus have arrived in straits of conscience which, so long as we endeavour to steer through them honestly, will be to us indeed a quite secure way of life, and of all living wisdom.

58. Now the centre of this new freedom of thought is in Germany; and the power of it is shown first, as I told you in my opening lecture, in the great struggle of Frederick II. with Rome. And German freedom of thought had certainly made some progress, when it had managed to reduce the Pope to disguise himself as a soldier, ride out of Rome by moonlight, and gallop his thirty-four miles to the seaside before summer dawn. Here, clearly, is quite a new state of things for the Holy Father of Christendom to consider, during such wholesome horse-exercise.

{Illustration: PLATE IV.—NORMAN IMAGERY.}

59. Again; the refinements of new art are represented by France—centrally by St. Louis with his Sainte Chapelle. Happily, I am able to lay on your table to-day—having placed it three years ago in your educational series—a leaf of a Psalter, executed for St. Louis himself. He and his artists are scarcely out of their savage life yet, and have no notion of adorning the Psalms better than by pictures of long-necked cranes, long-eared rabbits, long-tailed lions, and red and white goblins putting their tongues out.[11 - I cannot go to the expense of engraving this most subtle example; but Plate IV. shows the average conditions of temper and imagination in religious ornamental work of the time.] But in refinement of touch, in beauty of colour, in the human faculties of order and grace, they are long since, evidently, past the flint and bone stage,—refined enough, now,—subtle enough, now, to learn anything that is pretty and fine, whether in theology or any other matter.

60. Lastly, the new principle of Exchange is represented by Lombardy and Venice, to such purpose that your Merchant and Jew of Venice, and your Lombard of Lombard Street, retain some considerable influence on your minds, even to this day.

And in the exact midst of all such transition, behold, Etruria with her Pisans—her Florentines,—receiving, resisting, and reigning over all: pillaging the Saracens of their marbles—binding the French bishops in silver chains;—shattering the towers of German tyranny into small pieces,—building with strange jewellery the belfry tower for newly-conceived Christianity;—and, in sacred picture, and sacred song, reaching the height, among nations, most passionate, and most pure.

I must close my lecture without indulging myself yet, by addition of detail; requesting you, before we next meet, to fix these general outlines in your minds, so that, without disturbing their distinctness, I may trace in the sequel the relations of Italian Art to these political and religious powers; and determine with what force of passionate sympathy, or fidelity of resigned obedience, the Pisan artists, father and son, executed the indignation of Florence and fulfilled the piety of Orvieto.

LECTURE III. SHIELD AND APRON

61. I laid before you, in my last lecture, first lines of the chart of Italian history in the thirteenth century, which I hope gradually to fill with colour, and enrich, to such degree as may be sufficient for all comfortable use. But I indicated, as the more special subject of our immediate study, the nascent power of liberal thought, and liberal art, over dead tradition and rude workmanship.

To-day I must ask you to examine in greater detail the exact relation of this liberal art to the illiberal elements which surrounded it.

62. You do not often hear me use that word "Liberal" in any favourable sense. I do so now, because I use it also in a very narrow and exact sense. I mean that the thirteenth century is, in Italy's year of life, her 17th of March. In the light of it, she assumes her toga virilis; and it is sacred to her god Liber.

63. To her god Liber,—observe: not Dionusos, still less Bacchus, but her own ancient and simple deity. And if you have read with some care the statement I gave you, with Carlyle's help, of the moment and manner of her change from savageness to dexterity, and from rudeness to refinement of life, you will hear, familiar as the lines are to you, the invocation in the first Georgic with a new sense of its meaning:—

"Vos, O clarissima mundi
Lumina, labentem coelo quae ducitis annum,
Liber, et alma Ceres; vestro si munere tellus
Chaoniam pingui glandem mutavit arista,
Poculaqu' inventis Acheloia miscuit uvis,
Munera vestra cano."

These gifts, innocent, rich, full of life, exquisitely beautiful in order and grace of growth, I have thought best to symbolize to you, in the series of types of the power of the Greek gods, placed in your educational series, by the blossom of the wild strawberry; which in rising from its trine cluster of trine leaves,—itself as beautiful as a white rose, and always single on its stalk, like an ear of corn, yet with a succeeding blossom at its side, and bearing a fruit which is as distinctly a group of seeds as an ear of corn itself, and yet is the pleasantest to taste of all the pleasant things prepared by nature for the food of men,[12 - I am sorry to pack my sentences together in this confused way. But I have much to say; and cannot always stop to polish or adjust it as I used to do.]—may accurately symbolize, and help you to remember, the conditions of this liberal and delightful, yet entirely modest and orderly, art, and thought.

64. You will find in the fourth of my inaugural lectures, at the 98th paragraph, this statement,—much denied by modern artists and authors, but nevertheless quite unexceptionally true,—that the entire vitality of art depends upon its having for object either to state a true thing, or adorn a serviceable one. The two functions of art in Italy, in this entirely liberal and virescent phase of it,—virgin art, we may call it, retaining the most literal sense of the words virga and virgo,—are to manifest the doctrines of a religion which now, for the first time, men had soul enough to understand; and to adorn edifices or dress, with which the completed politeness of daily life might be invested, its convenience completed, and its decorous and honourable pride satisfied.

65. That pride was, among the men who gave its character to the century, in honourableness of private conduct, and useful magnificence of public art. Not of private or domestic art: observe this very particularly.

"Such was the simplicity of private manners,"—(I am now quoting Sismondi, but with the fullest ratification that my knowledge enables me to give,)—"and the economy of the richest citizens, that if a city enjoyed repose only for a few years, it doubled its revenues, and found itself, in a sort, encumbered with its riches. The Pisans knew neither of the luxury of the table, nor that of furniture, nor that of a number of servants; yet they were sovereigns of the whole of Sardinia, Corsica, and Elba, had colonies at St. Jean d'Acre and Constantinople, and their merchants in those cities carried on the most extended commerce with the Saracens and Greeks."[13 - Sismondi; French translation, Brussels, 1838; vol. ii., p. 275.]

66. "And in that time," (I now give you my own translation of Giovanni Villani,) "the citizens of Florence lived sober, and on coarse meats, and at little cost; and had many customs and playfulnesses which were blunt and rude; and they dressed themselves and their wives with coarse cloth; many wore merely skins, with no lining, and all had only leathern buskins;[14 - I find this note for expansion on the margin of my lecture, but had no time to work it out:—'This lower class should be either barefoot, or have strong shoes—wooden clogs good. Pretty Boulogne sabot with purple stockings. Waterloo Road—little girl with her hair in curlpapers,—a coral necklace round her neck—the neck bare—and her boots of thin stuff, worn out, with her toes coming through, and rags hanging from her heels,—a profoundly accurate type of English national and political life. Your hair in curlpapers—borrowing tongs from every foreign nation, to pinch you into manners. The rich ostentatiously wearing coral about the bare neck; and the poor—cold as the stones and indecent.'] and the Florentine ladies, plain shoes and stockings with no ornaments; and the best of them were content with a close gown of coarse scarlet of Cyprus, or camlet girded with an old-fashioned clasp-girdle; and a mantle over all, lined with vaire, with a hood above; and that, they threw over their heads. The women of lower rank were dressed in the same manner, with coarse green Cambray cloth; fifty pounds was the ordinary bride's dowry, and a hundred or a hundred and fifty would in those times have been held brilliant, ('isfolgorata,' dazzling, with sense of dissipation or extravagance;) and most maidens were twenty or more before they married. Of such gross customs were then the Florentines; but of good faith, and loyal among themselves and in their state; and in their coarse life, and poverty, did more and braver things than are done in our days with more refinement and riches."

67. I detain you a moment at the words "scarlet of Cyprus, or camlet."

Observe that camelot (camelet) from kamaelotae, camel's skin, is a stuff made of silk and camel's hair originally, afterwards of silk and wool. At Florence, the camel's hair would always have reference to the Baptist, who, as you know, in Lippi's picture, wears the camel's skin itself, made into a Florentine dress, such as Villani has just described, "col tassello sopra," with the hood above. Do you see how important the word "Capulet" is becoming to us, in its main idea?

68. Not in private nor domestic art, therefore, I repeat to you, but in useful magnificence of public art, these citizens expressed their pride:—and that public art divided itself into two branches—civil, occupied upon ethic subjects of sculpture and painting; and religious, occupied upon scriptural or traditional histories, in treatment of which, nevertheless, the nascent power and liberality of thought were apparent, not only in continual amplification and illustration of scriptural story by the artist's own invention, but in the acceptance of profane mythology, as part of the Scripture, or tradition, given by Divine inspiration.

69. Nevertheless, for the provision of things necessary in domestic life, there developed itself, together with the group of inventive artists exercising these nobler functions, a vast body of craftsmen, and, literally, manufacturers, workers by hand, who associated themselves, as chance, tradition, or the accessibility of material directed, in towns which thenceforward occupied a leading position in commerce, as producers of a staple of excellent, or perhaps inimitable, quality; and the linen or cambric of Cambray, the lace of Mechlin, the wool of Worstead, and the steel of Milan, implied the tranquil and hereditary skill of multitudes, living in wealthy industry, and humble honour.

70. Among these artisans, the weaver, the ironsmith, the goldsmith, the carpenter, and the mason necessarily took the principal rank, and on their occupations the more refined arts were wholesomely based, so that the five businesses may be more completely expressed thus: