BLIND GUIDES
Amongst the famous gardens of the world, the Orti Oricellari[D]must take a foremost place, alike for sylvan beauty and for intellectual tradition. Second only to the marvellous gardens of Rome, they were first, for loveliness and for association, amongst the many great and carefully-cultured gardens which once adorned Tuscany. Under the Rucellai their superb groves and glades sheltered the most intellectual meetings which Florence has ever seen. The Società Oricellari (which continued that imitation of the Platonic Academy created by Cosimo and Lorenzo) assembled here under the shade of the great forest trees. Here Machiavelli read aloud his Art of War, and here Giovanni Rucellai composed his Rosamunda. The house built for Bernardo Rucellai by Leon Battista Alberti was a treasure-house of art, ancient and contemporary; and learning, literature and philosophy found their meet home under the ilex and cedar shadows, and in the fragrant air of the orange and myrtle boughs. High thoughts and scholarly creation were never more fitly housed than here. Their grounds, covered with trees, plants, fruits and flowers, were then known as the Selva deiRucellai, and must have been of much larger extent in the time of Machiavelli than they had become even in the eighteenth century; for when Palla Rucellai fled in fear of being compromised in the general hatred of all the Medici followers and friends, he left the Selva by a little postern door in its western wall which opened on to the Porta Prato and the great meadow then surrounding that gateway. Therefore they must then have covered all the space now occupied by the detestable modern streets called Magenta, Solferino, Montebello, Garibaldi, etc., and I have myself indeed conversed with persons who remember, in their youth, the orchards appertaining to these gardens existing where there are now the ugly boulevards and the dirt and lumber of the railway and tramway works.
On this unfortunate flight of Palla in 1527, the populace broke into the gardens, and destroyed the statues, obelisks and temples which ornamented them, but the woods and orchards they appear to have spared; for, some thirty years later, the park seems to have been in its full perfection still, when Ferdinand, in the height of a violent and devoted passion, gave it to his Venetian mistress as hercasin de piacere, and Bianca brought a mode of life very unlike that of the grave and scholarly Rucellai into its classic groves; for although her fate was tragic, and her mind must have been ever apprehensive of foul play, she was evidently of a gay, mirthful, pleasure-loving temperament.
The jests and pranks, the sports and pastimes, the conjuring and comedy, the mirth and music, the dances and mummeries, which pleased the taste ofBianca and her women, replaced the ‘noble sessions of free thought’ and the illustrious fellowship of the Academicians. The gravity and decorum of the philosophical society departed, but the floral and sylvan beauty remained. At the time when she filled its glades with laughter and song and the beauty of her women, the Selva was what was even then called an English garden, with dense woods, wide lawns, deep shade, and mighty trees which towered to the skies. But when it passed into the hands of Giancarlo de’ Medici that Cardinal decorated it with a grotto, a giant, and othergentilezze, and changed it into an Italian garden, with many sculptural and architectural wonders, and plants and flowers from foreign countries, employing in his designs Antonio Novelli, who, amongst other feats, brought water to it from the Pitti, and built up an artificial mountain in its midst. He must have done much to disfigure it, more than the mob of 1527 had done; but soon after these ill-considered works were completed the gardens passed to the Ridolfi, who, preserving the rare flowers and fruits, with which the Cardinal had planted it, allowed the woodland growth to return to its freedom and luxuriance. Of him who ultimately restricted the park to its present limits, and robbed the house of all its treasures of art and admirable ornament, there is, I believe, no record. From the Ridolfi it went to a family of Ferrara, of the name of Canonici, and from them to the Stiozzi, who sold it in our own time to Prince Orloff, by whose heir it has once more been put up for sale. Amidst all these changes the beauty of the park, though impaired, has existed much as it was when it wascelebrated in Latin and Italian prose and verse, although diminished in size and shorn of its grandeur, invaded on all sides by bricks and mortar, and cruelly violated, even in its inmost precincts. The house has been miserably modernised, and the gardens and glades miserably lopped, yet still there is much left; and many of their historic trees still lift their royal heads to morning dawn and evening stars. Enough remains to make a green oasis in the desert of modern bricks and stucco; enough remains for the student to realise that he stands beneath boughs of cedar and ilex which once sheltered the august brows of Leone X. and cast their shade on the gathered associates of that literary society of which no equal has ever since been seen. The gardens, even in their shrunken and contracted space and verdure, are still there, priceless in memories and invaluable to the artist, the student and the lover of nature and of history.
It seems scarcely credible, yet such is the fact, that these treasures of natural beauty and storehouses of historical association should have already once been invaded to build the ordinary modern house called Palazzo Sonnino, and that now the municipality is about to purchase half of them—for what purpose?—to cut the trees down and cover the ground with houses for the use of its own office-holders, those multitudinous and pestilentimpiegatiwho are the curse of the public all over Italy, and feed on it like leeches upon flesh. That the destruction of such gardens as these for such a purpose can even be for an instant spoken of is proof enough of the depths of degradation to which public indifference and municipalvandalism have sunk in the city of Lorenzo. It can only be equalled by the destruction of the Farnesina and Ludovisi gardens. Few places on earth have such intellectual memories as the Oricellari gardens; yet these are disregarded as nought, and the cedars and elms which shaded the steps of philosophers and poets, of scholarly princes and mighty Popes, are to be felled, as though they were of no more value than worm-eaten mill-posts.
That a people can been masseso utterly dead to memory, to greatness, to beauty, and to sense, makes any serious thinker despair of its future. There are waste grounds (grounds already deliberately laid waste) yawning by scores already, in the town and around it, on which any new buildings which may be deemed necessary might be raised. There is not one thread or shadow of excuse for the abominable action now contemplated by the Florence Municipality, and certain to be consummated unless some opposition, strong and resolute, arise. Even were the Orti Oricellari a mere ordinary park, without tradition, without heritage, without association, it would be imbecility to cover the site with bricks and mortar, for Maxime du Camp has justly written that whoever fells a tree in a city commits a crime.‘Chaque fois qu’un arbre tombe dans une ville trop peuplée cela équivaut à un meurtre et parfois à une épidémie. On a beau multiplier les squares, ils ne remplaceront jamais la ceinture de forêt qui devrait entourer toute capitale et lui verser l’oxygène, la force, et la santé.‘These are words salutary and true, which would be well inscribed in letters of gold above the council chamber of every municipality. When towns aredesperately pinched for space, hemmed in on every side, and at their wits’ end for lodging-room, there may be some kind of credible excuse for the always mistaken destruction of gardens, trees and groves. But in all the cities of Italy there is no such excuse; there are vast unoccupied lands all around them; and in their midst more, many more, houses than are occupied. In Rome and Florence the latter may be counted by many thousands. There is not the feeblest, flimsiest pretext for such execrable destruction as has already overtaken so many noble gardens in the former city, and now menaces the Orti Oricellari in the latter.
Nor is this Selva, although the most famous, the only garden which is being destroyed in Florence, whilst many beautiful glades and lawns have been, in the last ten years, ruthlessly ruined and effaced that the wretched and trumpery structures of the jerry-builders may arise in their stead. The Riccardi garden in Valfonda was once like that of the Oricellari, a marvel of loveliness; and its lawns, its avenues, its marbles, its deep, impenetrable shades, its sunlit orange-walks and perfumed pergolate, surrounded a house which was a temple of art and contained many choice statues of ancient and contemporary masters. Talleyrand once said that no one who had not lived before the great revolution could ever know how perfect life could be. I would say that none can know how perfect it can be who did not live in the Italy of the Renaissance. Take the life of this one man, Riccardo, Marchese Riccardi, who spent most of his existence in this exquisite pleasure-place, which he inherited from its creator, the great scholar anddilettante, Romolo Riccardi, and where he resided nearly all the year round. In the contemporary works of Cinelli on theBellezze di Firenze, his house and gardens are described; they are alluded to by Redi,—
‘Nel bel giardinoNei bassi di gualfondo inabissatoDove tieni il Riccardi alto domino.’
‘Nel bel giardinoNei bassi di gualfondo inabissatoDove tieni il Riccardi alto domino.’
‘Nel bel giardinoNei bassi di gualfondo inabissatoDove tieni il Riccardi alto domino.’
‘Nel bel giardino
Nei bassi di gualfondo inabissato
Dove tieni il Riccardi alto domino.’
They are spoken of in admiration by Baldinucci, and, in the description of the festival of Maria de’ Medici’s marriage by proxy to Henri Quatre, they are enthusiastically praised by the younger Buonarotti. The court of the Casino was filled with ancient marbles, busts, statues and inscriptions, Latin and Greek; the exterior was decorated in fresco and tempera, with many rare sculptures and paintings and objects of art, whilst, without, a number of avenues led in all directions from the house to the gardens and the woods, where, in shade of ilex and cypress, marble seats and marble statues gave a sense of refreshing coolness in the hottest noon. Here this elegant scholar and accomplished noble passed almost all his time, receiving all that was most learned and illustrious in the society of his epoch; and occasionally giving magnificent entertainments like that with which he bade farewell to Maria de’ Medici. Of this delicious retreat a few trees alone remain now; a few trees, which raise their sorrowful heads amongst the bricks and mortar, the theatres and photographic studios, around them, are all that are left of the once beautiful and poetic retreat of the scholars and courtiers, the ambassadors andilluminati, of the family of the Riccardi. Why has not such a place as this oncewas been religiously preserved through all time, for the joy, health and beauty of the city?
It would be scarcely possible for so beautiful and precious a life as this of the Riccardi to be led in our times, because it is scarcely possible, lock our gates as we may, to escape from the detestable atmosphere of excitation and worry which is everywhere around. The mania of senseless movement is now in the human race, as the saltatory delirium seized on the Neapolitan peasants and hurried them in crowds into the sea.
Riccardo Riccardi living now would be ashamed to dwell the whole year round in his retreat of Valfonda; would waste his time over morning newspapers, cigars and ephemeral telegraphic despatches; would probably spend his money on horse-racing; would send his blackletter folios, his first copies, and his before-letter prints to the hammer, and would make over his classic marbles to the Louvre, the Hermitage, or to his own government. He and his contemporaries had the loveliness of leisure and the wisdom of meditation; they knew that true culture is to be gained in the library, not in the rush of apérégrinomanie; and being great, noble and rich, judged aright that the best gifts given by high position and large fortune are the liberty which they allow for repose, and the power which such repose confers to enjoy reflection and possession. In modern life this faculty is almost wholly lost, and the wit and the fool are shaken together in the vibration of railway trains, and jostled together in the eating-houses of the world, till, if the fool thus obtain a varnish of sharpness, the wit has lost all individuality and grace.
Not long since, I said to an Englishman who hasfilled high posts and attained high honours, whilst public life is always repugnant to his tastes and temperament, that he would have been wiser to have led his own life in his own way, under his own ancestral roof-tree in England; and he answered, ‘I would willingly have done so, but they would have said that I had nothing in me!’ Characteristic nineteenth century reply! Romolo and Riccardo Riccardi did not trouble themselves in their different generations what their contemporaries thought of them. They led their own lives in their own leafy solitude, and only called their world about them when they were themselves disposed to entertain it.
The gardens of the Gaddi were equally and still earlier renowned, and in them the descendants of Taddeo Gaddi had a pleasure-house wondrous and lovely to behold, while the rich gallery of pictures annexed to it was situated next to the Valfonda, and covered what is now the new Piazza di S. M. Novello. These descendants had become great people and eminent in the church, many cardinals and monsignori amongst them, and also celebratedletterati, of whom Niccolo, son of Senibaldo, was the most illustrious. He, as well as a scholar and patron of letters and arts, was, like the Riccardi, a botanist, and, as may be seen in the pages of Scipione Ammirato, was foremost for his culture of sweet herbs and of lemons and citrons. Whilst he filled worthily the post of ambassador and of collector of works of art for the Medici, he never forgot his garden and his herb-garden, and was the first to make general in Tuscany the Judas-tree, the gooseberry, the strawberry, the Spanish myrtle, the northern fir and other then rare fruits and shrubs. Sofragrant and so fair were his grounds, that the populace always called them, and the vicinity perfumed by them, Il Paradiso dei Gaddi. This beautiful retreat has for centuries been entirely destroyed and forgotten; and all which is left of the rich collections of the Gaddi are those thousand manuscript folios which Francis I. of Austria purchased and gave to the libraries of Florence, where to this day they remain and can be read.
The director of the Gaddi gardens bore the delightful name of Messer Giuseppe Benincasa Fiammingo; and a contented life indeed this worthy and accomplished student must have led, working for such a patron, and passing the peaceful seasons and fruitful years amidst the cedar-shadows and the lemon-flower fragrance of this abode of the Muses and of Flora and Pomona.
We dwell too much upon the strife and storm, the bloodshed and the internecine feuds of the passed centuries; we forget too often the many happy and useful lives led in them, which were spent untroubled and consecrated to fair studies and pursuits, and which let the clangour of battle go by unheard, and mingled not with camp or court or council.
We forget too often the placid life of Gui Patin under his cherry trees by the river, or of the Etiennes, in the learned and happy seclusion of their classic studies and noble work, even their women speaking Latin as their daily and most natural tongue; we only have ear for the fusillades of the Fronde, or the war-cries of Valois and Guise. In like manner we are too apt only to dwell upon the daggers and poison powders, the factions and feuds, the conspiracies and the city riots of the Moyenage and Renaissance, andforget the many quiet, useful, happy persons clad in doublet and hose, like Messer Benincasa, and the many learned and noble gentlemen clothed in velvet and satin, like Niccolo Gaddi, his master, who passed peacefully from their cradle to their grave.
In the fifteenth century, according to Benedetto Varchi, who himself saw them, there were no less than a hundred and thirty of these magnificent demesnes in the city; and whatever may have been the sins of the earlier and the follies of the later Medici, that family, one and all, loved flowers, woods and lawns, and fostered tenderly ‘il gusto del giardinaggio’ in their contemporaries. This taste in their descendants has entirely disappeared. They are bored by such of the magnificent gardens of old as still exist in their towns and around their villas; they abandon them without regret, grudging the care of keeping them up, and letting them out to nursery gardeners or to mere peasants whose only thought is, of course, to make profit out of them.
The Latins were at all times celebrated for their beautiful gardens; all classic records and all archæological discoveries prove it. The Romans and the Tuscans, the Venetians and the Lombards, in later mediæval times, inherited this elegant taste, this art, which is twin child itself with Nature; but in our immediate epoch it has vanished; the glorious legacies of it are supported with indifference or done away with without regret. How is this to be explained? I know not unless the reason be that there has come from without a contagion of vulgarity, avarice and bad taste which the Italian temperament has been too weak to resist, and with which it has become saturated and debased. The modern Italian willthrow money away recklessly on the Bourses or at the gaming-tables; he will spend it frivolously at foreign baths and fashionable seaports; he will let himself be ruined by a pack of idle and good-for-nothing hangers-on whom he has not the courage to shake off; but he grudges every penny which is required for the maintenance of woodland and garden, and he will allow his trees to be felled, his myrtles, bays and laurels to vanish, his fountains to be choked up by sand or weed, and his lawns to degenerate into rough pasture, without shame or remorse.
Almost all these noble gardens enumerated by Varchi still existed in Florence before 1859. Now but few remain. Even the Torrigiani gardens (which for many reasons one would have supposed would have been kept intact by that family) have been almost entirely destroyed within the last year, and the site of them is being rapidly covered with mean and ugly habitations. The magnificent Capponi garden, so dear to the blind statesman and scholar, Gino Capponi, has been more than half broken up by his heirs. The renowned Serristori garden was cut in two and shorn of half of its beauty when the first half of the Via dei Bardi was destroyed. The Guadagni garden is advertised as building ground. The Guicciardini gardens are still standing, but as they and their palace have been given over to amalgamated railway companies, the respite accorded to them will probably be of brief duration. The bead roll of these devastated pleasure-grounds and historic groves could be continued in an almost endless succession of names and memories, and the immensity of their irreparable loss to the city isscarcely to be estimated. When we reflect, moreover, that before 1859 the whole of the ground from the Carraia Bridge westward was pasture and garden and avenue, where now there are only bricks and mortar and a network of ugly streets, we shall more completely comprehend the senseless folly which built over such green places, or, where it did not build, made in their stead such barren, dusty, featureless, blank spaces as the Piazza degli Zuavi and its congeners.
Ubaldino Peruzzi (who has been buried with pomp in Santa Croce!) was the chief promoter and leader of this mania of demolition. It was at his instigation that the Ponte alle Grazie and the chapel of the Alberti were pulled down; that the Tetto dei Pisani was destroyed to make way for an ugly bank; that the noble trees at the end of the Cascine were felled to make way for a gaudy, gingerbread bust and a hideous guardhouse; that the beautiful Stations of the Cross leading to San Miniato al Monte were destroyed to give place to vulgar eating-houses and trumpery villas; and that old palaces, old gardens and old churches were laid waste to create the bald and monotonous quays called severally the Lung Arno Serristori and Torrigiani. Peruzzi began, and for many years directed, the destruction of the beauties of the city, and only stopped when, having brought the town to the verge of bankruptcy, funds failed him, and he retired perforce from municipal office.
But if it may be feared that the good we do does perish with us, it is certain that the evil we do does long survive us, and flourishes and multiplies when we are dust. The lessons which Peruzzi taught hisfellow-citizens in speculation and spoliation will long remain, whilst his bones crumble beneath a lying epitaph. His dead hand still directs the scrambling haste with which the historic centre of the city is being torn down, in order that glass galleries, brummagem shops, miserable statues, and a general reign of stucco and shoddy, may, as far as in them lies, bring the Athens of Italy to a level with some third-rate American township.
Except with a few rare exceptions, Italians are wholly unable to comprehend the indignation with which their callousness fills the cultured observer of every other nationality. Anxiety to get ready-money, an ignorance of their true interests, and a babyish love of new things, however vulgar or barbarous, have completely extinguished, in the aristocracy and bureaucracy, all sentiment for the arts and all reverence for their inheritance and for the beauty of Nature. It would seem as if a kind of paralysis of all perception had fallen on the whole nation. A prince of great culture, refinement and reputed taste having occasion this year to repair his palace, has stuccoed and coloured it all over a light ochre yellow! A great noble sold his ancestral gardens last year to a building company, and his family clapped their hands with delight as the first ilex trees fell beneath the axe! To make apavenstreet in Venice, unneeded, incongruous, vulgar, abhorrent to every educated eye and mind, Byzantine windows, Renaissance doorways, admirable scrollworks, enchanting façades, marbles, and mosaics, of hues like the sea-shell and the sea-mouse, are ruthlessly torn down and pushed out ofsight for ever. Ruskin in vain protests, his tears scorched up by his rage, and both alike powerless. Gregorovius died recently, his last years embittered and tortured by the daily destruction of the Rome so sublime and sacred to him. I remember well the day when the axe was first laid to the immemorial groves of the Farnesina: a barbarous and venal act, done to gratify private spleen and greed, leaving a mere mass of mud and dirt where so late had been the gracious gardens which had seen Raffaelle and Petrarca pace beneath their shade. The Spanish Duke, Ripalda, whose passionate love for his Farnesina was known to all Rome, died of the sorrow and fever brought on by seeing its desecration, died actually of a broken heart. ‘I shall not long survive them,’ he said to me, the tears standing in his proud eyes, as he looked on the ruin of his avenues and lawns, which had so late been the chief beauty of the Tiber, facing their sponsor and neighbour, the majestic Farnese Palace.
To the student, the artist, the archæologist, to live in Rome now is to suffer inexpressibly every hour, in mind and heart.
Who does not know the piazza of San Giovanni Laterano as it was? The most exquisite scene of earth stretched around the most beautiful basilica of the world! Go there now: the horizon is closed and the landscape effaced, vile modern erections, crowded, paltry, monstrous in their impudence and in their degradation, shut out the green plains, the azure hills, the divine, ethereal distance, and close around the spiritual beauty of the great church, like bow-legged ban-dogs round a stag at bay. The intolerable outrageof it, the inconceivable shame of it, the crass obstinacy and stupidity which make such havoc possible, should fill the dullest soul with indignation. Yet such things are being done yearly, daily, hourly, ceaselessly, and with impunity all over Italy, and no voice is raised in protest. Whenever any such voice is raised, it is seldom that of an Italian; it is that of Ruskin, Story, Yriarte, Taine, Vernon Lee, Augustus Hare, or it is my own, to the begetting of ten thousand enemies, to the receiving of twice ten thousand maledictions.
Nor is it only in the great cities that such ruin is wrought. In every little hamlet, on every hill and plain there is the same process of destruction going on, which I have before compared to the growth of lupus on a human face. Rapidly, in every direction, the beauty, the marvellous, the incomparable, natural, and architectural beauty of the country is being destroyed by crass ignorance and still viler greed.
Along those famous hillsides, which rise above Careggi, there was, until a few months ago, a landmark dear to all the countryside, a line of colossal cypresses which had been planted there by the hand of the Pater Patriæ, Cosimo de’ Medici himself. These grand and noble trees were lately sold, with the ground on which they stood, to a native doctor of Florence, whoimmediately felled them. Yet if before this unpardonable action, in looking on the fallen giants, anyone is moved to see the pity of it and curse the stupid greed which set the axe at their sacred trunks, he who does so mourn is never the prince, the noble, the banker, the merchant, thetradesman; it is some foreign painter or scholar, or some peasant of the soil who remembers the time when one vast avenue connected Florence and Prato.
Within one mile of each other there are, near Florence, a green knoll, crowned with an ancient church, and a river, shaded by poplar trees; the beauty of the hill was an historic tower, dating from the year 1000, massive, mighty, very strong, having withstood the wars of eight centuries; at its foot was a stately and aged stone pine. The beauty of the river was a wide bend, where the trees and the hills opened out from the water, and a graceful wooden bridge spanned it, chiefly used by the millers’ carts and the peasants’ mules. In the gracious spring-time of last year, the old tower was pulled down to be used for building materials, for which it was found that it could not be used, and the stone pine was felled, because its shade prevented a few beans to the value of, perhaps, two francs growing beneath it. On the river the white wooden bridge has been pulled down, and a huge, red, brick structure, like a ponderous railway bridge, hideous, grotesque, and shutting out all the sylvan view up stream, has been erected in its stead, altogether unfitted for the slender rural traffic which alone passes there, and costing a heavy price, levied by taxation from a rural, and far from rich, community. Thus are two exquisite landscapes wantonly ruined; no one who has known those scenes, as they were a year ago, can endure to look at them as they are. There was no plea or pretext of necessity for such a change; the one was due toprivate greed, the other to municipal brutishness and speculation; some persons are a few pounds the heavier in purse, the country is for ever so much the poorer.
There is, within another mile, an old castellated villa with two mighty towers, one at either end, and within it chambers panelled with oak carvings of the Quattro Cento, of great delicacy and vigour of execution; it stands amidst a rich champagne country, abounding in vine and grain and fruits, and bears one of the greatest names of history.It is now about to be turned into a candle manufactory!In vain do the agriculturists around protest that the filthy stench of the offal which will be brought there, and the noxious fumes of the smoke, which will pour from the furnace chimney about to be erected amongst its fir-trees, will do infinite harm to the vineyards and orchards around. No one gives ear to their lament. Private cupidity and communal greed run hand in hand; and the noble building is doomed beyond hope. Who can hold their soul in patience or seal their lips to silence before such impiety and imbecility as this?
When this kind of destruction is going on everywhere, in every city, town, village, province, commune, all over Italy, who can measure the ultimate effects upon the face of the country? What, in ten years’ time, will be left of it as Eustace and Stendahl saw it? What, in twenty years’ time, will be left of it as we now know it? Every day some architectural beauty, some noble avenue, some court or loggia or gateway, some green lawn, or shadowy ilex grove, or sculptured basin, musical with falling water, and veiled with moss and maidenhair, is swept away for everthat some jerry-builder may raise his rotten walls or some tradesman put up his plate-glass front, or some dreary desert of rubble and stones delight the eyes of wise modernity.
It is impossible to imagine any kind of building more commonplace, more ugly, and less suitable to the climate than the modern architecture, or rather masons’ work, which has become dear to the modern Italian mind. It is the kind of house which was built in London twenty or thirty years ago, and now in London is despised and detested. The fine old hospital of Santa Lucia, strong as a rock, and sound as an oak, has recently been knocked down by a man who, returning with a fortune made in America, desired to be able to name a street after himself. (Streets used to be named after heroes who dwelt in them; they are now named afterrastaqouères, who pull them down and build them up again.) Instead of the hospital, there are erected some houses on the model of London houses of thirty years ago, with narrow, ignoble windows and façades of the genuine Bayswater and Westbourne Grove type. There has not been one opposing voice to their erection, and any censure of them is immediately answered by a reference to the brand-new dollars of their builder. In the suburbs it is the hideous cottage (here calledvillino), which, having disgraced the environs of London and Paris, is now rapturously set up in the neighbourhood of Italian towns. Both these types of house-building (for architecture it is absurd to call it) are as degraded as they can possibly be; and, whereas the London and Paris suburban cottages have frequently the redeeming feature of long windows downto the ground, modern Italian houses have narrow windows of the meanest possible kind, affording no light in winter and no air in summer. The horrible English fashion of putting a window on each side of a narrow doorway is considered beautiful in Italy, and slavishly followed everywhere, whilst the climbing roses and evergreen creepers which in England and France so constantly cover the poorness of modern houses, are, in Italy, only conspicuous by their absence. The noble loggias, and balconies, and colonnades of old Italian mansions were in the old time run over with the tea rose, the glycine and the banksia; but the wretched modern Italian ‘villino’ is, in all its impudence, naked and not ashamed.
These dreadful modern constructions, with flimsy walls, slate roof, pinched doorway, mean windows, commonness, cheapness and meanness staring from every brick in their body, are disgracing the approach of every Italian city; they are met with climbing the slope of Bellosguardo, beside the hoary walls of Signa, behind the cypresses of the Poggio Imperiale, on the road to the Ponte Nomentana, outside the Porta Salara, on the way to the baths of Caracalla, close against the walls of the Colosseum, above the green canal water of Venice, in front of the glad blue sea by Santa Lucia, anywhere, everywhere, insulting the past, making hideous the present, suited to no season and absurd in every climate, the rickety offspring of a century incapable of artistic procreation.
It is impossible to enter into the minds of men who actually consider it a finer thing, a prouder thing, to be a third-rate, mediocre, commercial city than to be the first artistic, or the noblest historic, city of theworld. Yet this is what the modern Italian, the Italian who governs in ministry, bureaucracy, municipality, and press, deliberately does prefer. He thinks it more glorious, and worthier, to be a feeble imitation of a shoddy American city than to be supreme in historic, artistic and natural beauty. He will sell his Tiziano, his Donatello, his Greek and Roman marbles, and his Renaissance tapestries without shame; and he will pant and puff with pride because he has secured a dirty tramway coaling-yard, has befouled his atmosphere with mephitic vapours and coal-tar gas, and has reduced his lovelyverzaja, so late green with glancing foliage and fresh with rippling water, into a howling desert of iron rails, shot rubbish, bricks and mortar, unsightly sheds, and smoke-belching chimneys. To the educated observer the choice is as piteous and as grotesque as that of the South Sea Islander greedily exchanging his pure, pear-shaped, virgin pearl for the glass and pinchbeck of a Birmingham brooch.
Not many years ago there was in these gardens of the Oricellari of which I have spoken a neglected statue lying unnoticed in a darksome place. It was the Cupid of Michaelangelo, which, being discovered by the sculptor Santerelli, there and then was sold to the South Kensington Museum, where it may be seen to-day. This will ere long be the fate of all the sculptures and statues of Italy, and the ‘modern spirit’ now prevailing in the country will consider it best that it should be so.
The empty word of ‘progress’ which is repeated by all nations in this day, as if they were parrots, and has as much meaning in it as if it were only ‘poorpoll,’ is continually used to cover, or feign to excuse, all these barbarous enormities; but most insincerely, most vainly. To turn a rich agricultural country into a fourth-rate manufacturing one can claim neither sagacity nor prudence as its defence. To demolish noble, ancient and beautiful things, in order to reproduce the modern mushroom-growths of a dreary and dusty ‘western township,’ can allege neither sense nor shrewdness as its excuse; it is simply extremely silly; even if inspired by greed it is both silly and short-sighted. Yet it is the only thing which the Italian municipal councils consider it excellent to do; they have, after their manner, sufficiently paid tribute to the arts when they have chipped a Luca Della Robbia medallion out of an ancient wall and put it away in a glass case in some gallery, or when they have taken an altar (as they have just taken the silver altar out of San Giovanni) and locked it up in some museum where nobody goes.[E]
To the arguments of common sense that an altar is as safe, and as visible, in the baptistery as in a museum, and that five centuries have passed over Luca’s out-of-door work without wind or weather, heat or frost, impairing it in the least, no one in the municipal council of any town would for a moment attend. They do not want reason or fitness; they only want the vaporous, fussy, greedy, braggart ‘modern tone.’
Everyone who has visited Florence knows the house fronting the gate of San Pier Gattolino (Porta Romana), on the front of which are found remnantsof an almost wholly damaged fresco, through which a window has been cut. The house was once radiant with the frescoes of Giovanni di San Giovanni, which Cosimo dé Medici caused to be painted on its façade, because fronting the gateway by which all travellers came from Rome, ‘it was to be desired, for the honour of the city, that the first impression of all such travellers should be one of joy and beauty, to the end that such strangers might receive pleasure therein and tarry willingly.’ This wise and hospitable reasoning has been utterly lost sight of by those who rule our modern cities, and the approaches to all of them are defiled and disfigured, so that the heart of the traveller sinks within his breast. Instead of Cosimo’s gay and gracious fresco-pageantry upon the walls, there are only now, by the Romano gate, a steam tramway belching filthy smoke, a string of carts waiting to be taxed, and a masons’ scaffolding where lately towered the Torrigiani trees!
Reflect for a moment what the rule of—we will not say an Augustus, but merely of a Magnifico, of a Francois Premier—might have made in these thirty years of modern Italy. Marvellous beauty, incomparable grandeur of form, surpassing loveliness of Nature, entire sympathy of the cultured world and splendour immeasurable of tradition and example, all these after the peace of Villafranca, as after the breach of Porta Pia, lay ready to the hand of any ruler of the land who could have comprehended their meaning and their magnificence, their assured opportunity and their offered harmony.
But there was no one; and the moment has long passed.
The country has been guided instead into the trumpery and ephemeral triumphs of what is called modern civilisation, and an endless expenditure has gone hand in hand with a mistaken policy.
Whenever a royal visit is made to any Italian town, the preparations for it invariably include some frightful act of demolition, as when at Bologna, on the occasion of the late state visit of the sovereigns, the noble Communal Palace of that city was bedaubed all over with a light colouring, and its exquisitely picturesque and irregular casements were altered, enlarged, and cut about into the mathematical monotony dear to the municipal mind, no one present having sense to see that all the harmony and dignity of its architecture were ruthlessly obliterated. Some similar action is considered necessary in every town, big or little, before the reception of any prince, native or foreign. The results are easily conceived. It is said that William of Germany did not conceal his ridicule of the colossal equestrian statues inpasteboardwhich were set up in the station entrance at Rome in his honour; but as a rule the royal persons in Europe appear not to have any artistic feeling to offend. The only two who had any were hurled in their youth, by a tragic fate, out of a world with which they had little affinity. Those who remain have no sympathy for tradition or for the arts. The abominations done daily in their names and before their eyes leave them wholly unmoved. Nay, it is no secret that they do constantly approve and urge on the vandalism of their epoch.
The Italian people would have been easily led into a higher and wiser form of life. (I speak of the Italianpeople as distinguished from the Italian bureaucracy and borghesia, which are both of a crass and hopeless philistinism.) The country people especially have an artistic sense still latent in them, and they remain often artistic in their attire, despite the debasing temptations of cheap and vulgar modern clothing. Their ear for music is generally perfect, they detect instantly the false note or the faulty chord which many an educated hearer might let pass unnoticed. Their national songs, serenades, and poems are admirable in purity and grace, and although now, alas! comparatively rarely heard on hillside and by seashore, they remain essentially the verse of the people. Unfortunately this part of the nation is absolutely unrepresented. The noisy agitator, the greedy office-seeker, the unscrupulous politician, the pert, unhealthy lawyer crowd to the front and screech and roar until they are esteemed both at home and abroad to be the sole and indivisible ‘public,’ whilst their influence, by intrigue and bustle, does most unhappily predominate in all spheres municipal and political; and the entire press, subsidised by them, justifies them in all they do and pushes their selfish and soulless speculations down the throats of unwilling and helpless men.
‘Mi son meco,’says Benedetto Varchi,‘molte volte stranamente maravigliato com’ esser posso che in quelli uomini i quali son usati per piccolissimo prezzo, insino della prima fanciullezza loro, a portare le balle della Lana in guisi di facchini, e le sporte della Seta a uso di zanaiuoli, ed in somma a star poco meno che schiavi tutto il giorno, e gran pezza della notte alla Caviglia e al fuso, si ritrovi poi in molti diloro, dove e quando bisogna, tanta grandezza d’anima e cosi nobili e alti pensieri, che sappiamo, e osino non solo di dire ma di fare quelle tante e si belle cose, ch’ eglino parte dicono, e parte fanno.’[F]
A people of whom this was essentially, and not merely rhetorically, true, would have been with little difficulty kept within the fair realm of art and guided to a fine ideal, in lieu of being given for their guides the purchased quill-men of a venal journalism, and bidden to worship a dirty traction-engine, a plate-glass shop front, and a bridge of cast-iron, painted red.
If through the last thirty years a sovereign with the cultured tastes of a Leonello d’Este or a Lorenzo del Moro, had been dominant in the councils of Italy, he would have made his influence and his desires so felt that the municipalities and ministries would not have dared to commit the atrocities they have done. Constitutional monarchs may be powerless in politics, but in art and taste their power for good and for evil is vast. Alas! in no country in Europe is any one of them a scholar or aconnoisseurconnoisseur. They have no knowledge of the one field in which alone their influence would be unhampered, and might be salutary. They think themselves forced to pat andpraise the modern playthings of war and science, and of beauty they have no conception, of antiquity they have merely jealousy.
It is to be deplored, not only as a national, but as a world-wide, loss that Modern Italy has entirely missed and misconceived the way to true greatness and to true prosperity. In other centuries she was the light of the world; in this she deliberately prefers to be the valet of Germany and the ape of America. Had there been men capable of comprehending her true way to a new life, and capable of leading her varied populations in that way, she might have seen a true and a second Renaissance. But those men are not existing, have not existed, within recent times for her; her chiefs have all been men who, on the contrary, knew nothing of art and cared nothing for nature; a statesman like Cavour, a conspirator like Mazzini, a free-lance like Garibaldi, a soldier like Victor Emmanuel were none of them men to understand, much less to re-create, the true genius of the nation; their eyes were fixed on political troubles, on social questions, on acquisition of territory, on quarrels with the Pope, and alliances with reigning houses. Since their death lesser people have taken their places, but have all followed in the same tracks, have all misled the nation to imagine that herrisorgimentolies in copying American steam-engines and keeping ironclads ready for a signal from the potentate of Berlin.
Italy might be now, as she was in the past, the Muse, the Grace, the Artemis and the Athene of the world; she thinks it a more glorious thing to be only one amongst a sweating mob of mill-hands.
Italy, beautiful, classic, peaceful, wise with the wisdom inherited from her fathers, would have been the garden of the world, the sanctuary of pure art and of high thought, the singer of immortal song. Instead, she has deliberately chosen to be the mere imitator of a coarse and noisy crowd on the other side of the Atlantic, and the mere echo of the armed bully who dictates to her from the banks of the Spree.