Florentine school

“ But in the case of the Florentines, the distinction is of vital consequence, for they have been the artists in Europe who have most resolutely set themselves to work upon the specific problems of the art of figure-painting, and have neglected, more than any other school, to call to their aid the secondary pleasures of association. ”

“ Speaking of the Veronese school Layard says of it: “No school in Italy, except the Florentine, shows so regular and uninterrupted a development, and none is consequently more deserving of the attention of the student who seeks in art a phase of the human intellect, influenced by local and special circumstances. Nowhere can this school be better studied and understood than in the public gallery and churches of Verona.” ”

“ He had been educated, as a Gentile, in the public schools of Berytus, where he attained to great proficiency in profane science. But, on his conversion, he became desirous of acquiring a knowledge of the Sacred Scriptures, and for this purpose placed himself under the tuition of Pierius, the successor of Origen in the catechetical school of Alexandria. On his return to Syria he was ordained priest, and devoted the rest of his life, and his wealth, to the creation of a Christian school and library. No Florentine scholar in the age of the Renaissance had a more passionate love of books than he. ”

“ Several great artists formed such a marked era in their schools, that their names and those of their schools are often used synonymously by many writers; thus, when they speak of the Roman school, they mean that of Raffaelle; of the Florentine, that of Michael Angelo; of Parma or Lombardy, that of Correggio; of Bologna, that of the Caracci; but not so of the Venetian and Neapolitan schools, because the Venetian school produced several splendid colorists, and that of Naples as many, distinguished by other peculiarities. ”

“ Almost at the same time the two Dominican artists, Fra Sisto, and Fra Ristoro, were initiating an architectural reform in Italy, and it was the Greek paintings that decorated their beautiful church of Sta. Maria Novella, at Florence, that gave the first impulse to the genius of Cimabue. That great man, the father of Italian art, was a pupil of the Florentine Dominicans. The friars, “in order to carry out that portion of their rule which commands them to be useful,” says Marchese, “had opened a grammar school for the instruction of the Florentine youth, as well as for their own novices. ”

“ But the gem of the whole room is Lippo Lippi's Coronation of the Madonna (62) , one of the masterpieces of the early Florentine school, which he commenced for the nuns of Sant' Ambrogio in 1441. The throngs of boys and girls, bearing lilies and playing at being Angels, are altogether delightful, and the two little orphans, that are being petted by the pretty Florentine lady on our right, are characteristic of Fra Filippo's never failing sympathy with child life. On the left two admirably characterised monks are patronised by St. ”

“ Accordingly, the greater number of modern, and especially of foreign students neither examined nor understood the precise period in which all the noblest qualities of the Florentine nature had been formed, and during which were evolved and trained the intellectual powers afterwards expressed in art and letters to the admiration of the whole world. ”

“ In the fifteenth century political science was chiefly a study of human nature, while at this day it is mainly a study of institutions. Modern history aims at the examination of mankind and society in every form, and from every point of view. That is why we have had to so often re-fashion the work that, nevertheless, had been splendidly performed by writers of old.
Leaving aside all compilers of those fables and legends on the origin of Florence found repeated in even later works, Florentine historians may be divided into two great schools. ”

“ He might handle his pike at Caprona or Campaldino one day, and be at home among his books the next. Then, again, the society was a cultivated and quick-witted one, with many interests. Arts and letters were in high esteem, and eminence in them as sure a road to fame as warlike prowess or political distinction. From all this it is clear that the Florentine of the thirteenth century had points of contact with life on every side; every gate of knowledge lay open to him, and he could explore, if he pleased, every one of its paths. ”

“ We see that they all took a continuous and eager share in political life, inasmuch as every guild was an independent, self-ruling institution, with separate magistrates, laws, statutes, and councils, and that it became a centre of industrial, intellectual, and political activity. Thanks to this freedom of circulation, the pulse of the Florentine people was quickened to redoubled strength, and every faculty of the human mind, all moral and political energy of which man is capable, suddenly rose to a prodigious height in Florence. ”

“ For whatever art may be elsewhere, in Florence it was fruitful only as it was intellectualized. Good theory, good practice—such was the creed imposed by the early realists and later formulated by their great scion, Leonardo. I do not offer it as a universal formula, but in these days when pure spontaneity—that is no theory—and false theory divide the field, the old Florentine credo is at least worthy of consideration by all who produce art and by all who love it. ”

“ The time was ripe for raising the new studies to a somewhat higher level by the exercise of a keener criticism, such as is generated by the play of mind upon mind within a limited social circle, to which the only passport is a recognised standard of attainment or genius. The age of Academies was at hand. Florence, the metropolis of humanism, was the place where the earliest of such societies arose. We have seen that the visit of Gemistos Plethon in 1438 had stimulated the Florentine study of Plato, and had impelled Cosmo de' Medici to found his Platonic Academy. ”

“ The Florentines in fact did exercise their will upon their art more than any other modern artists, more, perhaps, than any other artists known to us, and their painting and sculpture were the greatest of the modern world. Yet the fact remains that Florentine art declined suddenly and irresistibly, and that all the Florentine intellect, which still remained remarkable and produced men of science like Galileo, could not arrest that decline. ”

“ And the purer the government of Florence could become—the more secure from the designs of men who saw their own advantage in the moral debasement of their fellows—the nearer would the Florentine people approach the character of a pure community, worthy to lead the way in the renovation of the Church and the world. ”

“ The Florentines are the most polished people under the sun. The Parisians claim this proud pre-eminence, but it can not be maintained. Amid the brilliancies of Parisian life there are fearful memories of bloody revolutions, brutal fights, and blood-thirsty cruelties. No such events as these mar the fair pages of later Florentine history. In fact, the forbearance and gentleness of the people have been perhaps to their disadvantage. Life in Florence is joy. The sensation of living is of itself a pleasure. Life in that delicious atmosphere becomes a higher state of being. ”

“ Cosmo I., Duke of Florence, by the grace of Charles V., was a most able practitioner in this line. He founded the Florentine Academy, and regulated its studies and duties in accordance with the great discovery, that the exercise of men's minds on words might be quite safe and harmless, if carefully disjoined from any application of their thoughts to things; nay, might even not only be harmless, but positively useful in promoting all those qualities which make men good subjects. ”

“ What, (though but feebly felt and dimly seen) —what do we yet owe to Thee if Knowledge be now a Power; if MIND be a Prophet and a Fate, foretelling and foredooming the things to come! From the greatest to the least of us, to whom the pen is at once a sceptre and a sword, the low-born Florentine has been the arch-messenger to smooth the way and prepare the welcome. Yes! even the meanest of the aftercomers—even he who now vents his gratitude,—is thine everlasting debtor! Thine, how largely is the honour, if his labours, humble though they be, find an audience wherever literature is known ”

“ But the History of Florence is not a mere political pamphlet. It is the first example in Italian literature of a national biography, the first attempt in any literature to trace the vicissitudes of a people’s life in their logical sequence, deducing each successive phase from passions or necessities inherent in preceding circumstances, reasoning upon them from general principles, and inferring corollaries for the conduct of the future. In point of form the Florentine History is modelled upon Livy. ”

“ She was, however, immensely interested in the beauty and romance of Florence. The street crowds, so vivacious, so good-humored, the vivid Florentine faces, enchanted her. More astonishing than storied buildings, or even imperishable art, were the figures that moved across the red-and-gold background of the city's history,—figures like Dante, Lorenzo the Magnificent, and that great prior of San Marco whose "soul went out in fire." ”

“ Their number and importance from 1460 to 1490 is not alone due to the fact that art education toward the beginning of this epoch was mainly naturalistic, but also to the real needs of a rapidly advancing craft, and even more to the character of the Florentine mind, the dominant turn of which was to science and not to art. ”

“ He has also to relate how these rich merchants founded modern poetry with their Dante, painting with their Giotto; how with the aid of their Arnolfo and Brunellesco, and of their Michelangelo, who was poet, painter, sculptor, and architect in one, they raised the stupendous buildings which the world will lastingly admire. The first and subtlest of European diplomatists were Florentines; political science and civil history were born in Florence with Machiavelli. Towards the end of the Middle Ages this narrow township seems a small point of fire shedding light over the whole world. ”

“ In Florence, too, this impulse was undoubtedly felt, but it is the great distinction of the Florentine artists that, however much their curiosity about particular forms may have been excited, their high intellectual passion for abstract ideas impelled them more to the study of some general principles underlying all appearance. They refused to admit the given facts of nature except in so far as they could become amenable to the generalising power of their art. ”

“ Among the Florentines it was a very common practice to keep a daily register of events, and in this wise their splendid store of historic literature was continually enlarged. But, nevertheless, no history bristles with so many difficulties as that of Florence, nor offers so many apparently insurmountable contradictions. Events pass before our eyes, well described, vividly coloured; they flit past in a rapid and uninterrupted whirl, never resting, subject to no law, and seemingly obedient to chance alone. ”

“ According to Passerini it was to the wise administration of Maso, Piero’s nephew, that the prosperity and the greatness of Florence, feared and respected by the other Italian Republics, were due. “He formed political relations apt to preserve the prosperity of the Republic, built great public edifices, protected nascent studies and arts and promoted the foundation of the18 Florentine University, the basis of the literary glory afterwards culled by the Medici family. The wars against the Visconti were prosecuted with constancy and without losses ”

“ From such a result the Florentine masters of the fifteenth century were saved by their high Italian dignity and culture, and still more by their tender pity for the thing itself. They must often have leaned over the lifeless body, when all was at length quiet and smoothed out. ”

“ There is something to be said moreover for your liking a city (once it’s a question of your actively circulating) to pretend to comfort you more by its extent than by its limits; in addition to which Florence was anciently, was in her palmy days peculiarly, a daughter of change and movement and variety, of shifting moods, policies and régimes—just as the Florentine character, as we have it to-day, is a character that takes all things easily for having seen so many come and go. ”

“ With continual wars on her hands, the101 Countess Matilda could seldom afford any help, and consequently the Florentines, although fighting in her name, were practically left to their own resources. It was this alliance of all classes of citizens, united by identity of interests and singleness of purpose against a common foe, that then constituted the strength of that Florentine people whose loyalty, purity, and valour were so fervently praised by Dante and the chroniclers. This was the moment when virtue laid the foundations of the Commune's future freedom and wealth. ”

“ The Florentine Commune was the centre of so much culture because it was also the seat of the largest freedom compatible with the times. Of this culture the best and loveliest fruits are owed to the democracy; for we find in Arnolfo's towers and churches, in the paintings of Cimabue and Giotto, as also in Dante's verse, the special stamp and characteristic of the Florentine people. ”