Florentine

“ Just as they expected, Florentine came to receive them, evidently in great agitation, and embraced them, even with more than usual affection. “A fine morning for our excursion!” said Amelia, trying to assume a tone of pleasantry; “How have you got through that awful night?” “Not very tranquilly, as you may suppose,” said Florentine; “this house, you are aware, is none of the best; the situation too is exposed; and I thought every moment it would have been blown down about our ears.” “It is well then that you are not to remain in it long,” said Maria, smiling rather archly. “Aye, very true!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Fiesolani are not Florentines, people of the valley, but Etruscans, people of the hills, and that you may see in half an hour any day in their windy piazzas and narrow climbing ways. Rough, outspoken, stark men little women keen and full of salt, they have not the assured urbanity of the Florentine, who, while he scorns you in his soul as a barbarian, will trade with you, eat with you, and humour you, certainly without betraying his contempt. ”

“ And now, here is a simple but most useful test of your capacity for understanding Florentine sculpture or painting. If you can see that the lines of that cap are both right, and lovely; that the choice of the folds is exquisite in its ornamental relations of line; and that the softness and ease of them is complete,—though only sketched with a few dark touches,—then you can understand Giotto's drawing, and Botticelli's;—Donatello's carving and Luca's. But if you see nothing in this sculpture, you will see nothing in theirs, of theirs. ”

“ In these, sadly as they too have suffered from time and wholesale repair, there can nevertheless be discerned the unmistakable spirit of the young Florentine master as we know him in his other works—his shrewd realistic and dramatic vigour, the deep sincerity and humanity of feeling which he knows how to express in every gesture of his figures without breaking up the harmony of their grouping or the grandeur of their linear design, qualities inherited from the earlier schools of impressive but lifeless hieratic decoration. ”

“ The young Florentine, who had met in a miserable hour the funeral of her who was to have been his bride, rushed like a mad man through the city gates, and took his course in reckless haste through wood and wold. When he found himself in the open country, many were the bitter curses he poured forth against the world and his own fate ”

“ As a Florentine painter he seems ever among strangers: it is as an exiled Venetian, one who had been forced by some irony of circumstances to forego his birthright in that invigorating and worldly city, which might have revealed to him just the significance of life which we miss in his pictures, that he appears to us; a failure difficult to explain, a weak but beautiful nature spoiled by mediocrity. ”

“ After a long silence, Vivian Bell extended her hand toward the horizon.
“Darling, I do not know how to say what I wish. But look, darling, look again. What you see there is unique in the world. Nature is nowhere else so subtle, elegant, and fine. The god who made the hills of Florence was an artist. Oh, he was a jeweller, an engraver, a sculptor, a bronze-founder, and a painter; he was a Florentine. He did nothing else in the world, darling. ”

“ By day a bird, by night a prince, I will always be by your side."
So they were married in secret and lived happily in the castle and no one knew that every night Coo-my-dove became Prince Florentine. And every year a little son came to them as bonny as bonny could be. But as each son was born Prince Florentine carried the little thing away on his back over the sea to where the queen his mother lived and left the little one with her. ”

“ In this young lady I recognized the Florentine who had disguised himself as a girl, and looked a very beautiful one.
Armelline thought she would not appear a dupe, and said she recognized him.
“You are making a mistake,” said he, calmly. “I have a brother who is very like me, just as you have a sister who is your living portrait. My brother had the pleasure of exchanging a few words with her at the Capronica.” The Florentine’s cleverness made the marchioness laugh, and I had to join in her mirth, though I felt little inclination to do so. ”

“ The Florentine school proposed to itself the perfect expression of human emotion—the showing of the effects of passion in the human face and gesture. I call this the Florentine school, because, whether you take Raphael for the culminating master of expressional art in Italy, or Leonardo, or Michael Angelo, you will find that the whole energy of the national effort which produced those masters had its root in Florence; not at Urbino or Milan. I say, then, this Florentine or leading Italian school proposed to itself human expression for its aim in natural truth ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ No art, it would seem at first, is further away than his from all the Florentine traditions, and yet in the decorative colour values, which give distinction to his finest works, he is the child of Florence. The Renaissance attitude towards life itself was highly imaginative, so into visionary art reality was carried. Consulting the origin of all their visions, the Florentines returned imaginatively to what was real. It is the beauty of reality which is the fervour of their great designs, and as a humanist, Sargent is their descendant. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The name of this artist brings to a fair conclusion the series of Florentine painters, which has been continued for little less than six centuries, in an uninterrupted succession of native artists, without the intervention of one foreign master in this school, at least one so eminent as to mark an era. With the exception of the last years, in which art was on the decline throughout Italy, the Florentine school, with all its merit, and that is undoubtedly very great, owes its progress to native genius. ”

“ All Florentine work of the finest kind—Luca della Robbia's, Ghiberti's, Donatello's, Filippo Lippi's, Botticelli's, Fra Angelico's—is absolutely pure Etruscan, merely changing its subjects, and representing the Virgin instead of Athena, and Christ instead of Jupiter. Every line of the Florentine chisel in the fifteenth century is based on national principles of art which existed in the seventh century before Christ ”

“ A genuine Florentine Madonna is distinguished by a certain elegance and stateliness, and well becomes her throne. As patroness of Florence, in her own right, the Virgin bears the title of Santa Maria del Fiore, and in this character she holds a flower, generally a rose, or is in the act of presenting it to the Child. She is often attended by St. John the Baptist, as patron of Florence; but he is everywhere a saint of such power and importance as an attendant on the divine personages, that his appearance in a picture does not stamp it as Florentine. ”

“ Florentine, “but how many hopes of this life are, unawares, blighted in the bud!” “Dearest Florentine!” said Maria, again embracing her, “for a long time already, my sister and I have been perplexing ourselves in vain, to find out what could have thus destroyed the wonted high spirits of our beloved friend? To say the truth, we have tormented ourselves with the thought, that perhaps some family considerations might have constrained you to this marriage with the Count, and that it is quite against your own wishes.” “Family considerations!” answered Florentine; alas! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Under such lofty patronage, this genial conception, so entirely in consonance with the intellectual tendencies of the age, attracted to its support every Florentine who aspired to a reputation for culture, at a time when culture was fashionable. ”

“ Here we see a mediaeval Florentine palace precisely as it was when its Florentine owner lived his uncomfortable life there. For say what one may, there is no question that life must have been uncomfortable. In early and late summer, when the weather was fine and warm, these stone floors and continuous draughts may have been solacing; but in winter and early spring, when Florentine weather can be so bitterly hostile, what then? That there was a big fire we know by the smoky condition of Michelozzo's charming frieze on the chimney piece ”

“ Yet the Florentine burgess of the fifteenth century, the very man whose simple and hard common-sense got him wealth, or at least a fine competence, and, as he has told us, a good housewife, and made him one of the toughest traders in Europe, would become almost a poet in his country house. ”