THAT we think of Medicean Florence as the artistic epicentre of the Renaissance world owes much to the writing of the sixteenth-century artist-cum-propagandist Giorgio Vasari. But Florence’s greatest writers, Dante and Boccaccio, lived before the banking dynasty rose from obscurity, and the city had a long history. Strategically placed beside the river Arno, Florentia was a major Roman city; she came to prominence again in the eleventh century and was subsequently at the heart of the long struggle between papacy and empire, between Guelf and Ghibelline, its respective adherents. The commune was succeeded by a republic. Commerce and banking greatly enriched the city, although the Black Death of 1348 dramatically affected growth. Political divisions and aristocratic rivalries were assiduously exploited by the Medici, and from 1434 Cosimo il Vecchio effectively controlled Florence. His grandson Lorenzo il Magnifico consolidated the family’s position, exercising a tight control over the expanding territory that Florence controlled. Lorenzo’s successors were driven out in 1494 and again in 1527, only to return in 1530. Lorenzo’s illegitimate great-grandson Alessandro became duke in 1531, and his cousin and heir Cosimo I was elevated as Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1569. On the death of his descendant Gian Gastone in 1737, the grand duchy passed to Francis, Duke of Lorraine, consort of the Empress Maria Theresa. Ferdinand III was expelled by the French in 1799, but recovered Tuscany in 1815; he and his son Leopold II were the most enlightened Italian rulers of their time. The grand duchy was in 1860 absorbed in the new kingdom of Italy, of which in 1865–71 Florence was the capital. Despite losing this status to Rome, Florence long continued to be the most cosmopolitan city of Italy, with a large number of expatriate residents, many of whom left their mark on her institutions and monuments.
When I first was in Italy, in 1966, Ester Bonacossa pronounced that May was the month for Florence – and for fireflies. Alas, except perhaps in deep November or early February, the tourist cannot now hope to escape his kind. A queue snakes outside the Uffizi, and even now that a more sensible ticketing system has been introduced, the obvious highpoints of the collection – the early Florentine pictures, the extraordinary Botticellis and the two early Leonardos – are under constant siege. Moreover, the new galleries do less than justice to celebrated masterpieces by Raphael and the great Florentines of the High Renaissance, and the choice of background colours is bizarre. At the Accademia groups surround Michelangelo’s David although almost no one looks at the early altarpieces. The same goes for the Museo Archeologico, which houses such treasures as the Chimera of Arezzo and an outstanding collection of Attic black-figure vases. By contrast, the steps of the Duomo are crowded and a long line leads to the visitors’ entrance. If you wish to study the bronze doors of the Baptistery that remain in situ, on the south with reliefs by Andrea Pisano of 1330 and their counterpart to the north of 1403–24 by Lorenzo Ghiberti, go at dawn, when you may also share the Piazza della Signoria with the pigeons who breakfast on the last night’s horse droppings. If you wish to examine the incredible sixteenth-century sculptures in the piazza, Donatello’s heroic Judith or Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabines, you will have to ignore the exhausted tourists who settle round these.
Yet with a little patience, the magic of the city exerts itself. My favourite approach is from Pian dei Giullari to the south. The narrow Via San Leonardo twists between the unyielding walls of a sequence of villas, some more modest than others. At length the Forte Belvedere looms on the left; ahead is the Porta San Giorgio, to the east of which is a well-preserved section of the medieval city wall. Within the gate, the Costa San Giorgio descends steeply. As it curves there are changing views towards the centre of the city on the further bank of the Arno. Make to the left for the church of Santa Felicita, in a small piazza stepped back from the Via Guicciardini. Nothing quite prepares one for the Capponi Chapel immediately to the right of the entrance. The altarpiece, the Deposition by Pontormo (1528), is the most distinguished picture of the period in Florence to remain in its intended setting, and thus to be seen at the level the artist intended. The body of Christ has been taken from the Cross, and is borne by two youths as the Maries grieve; the emotional conviction of the design is given a deeper poignancy by Pontormo’s hauntingly beautiful colours, his idiosyncratic range of blues and reds and pinks: colours which, if the eye is given time to adjust, sing more surely by the filtered daylight than when artificially illuminated, and must have been yet more eloquent in flickering candlelight.
The Via Guicciardi to the left leads to the Piazza Pitti with, on the east, the vast, partly rusticated façade of the Palazzo Pitti, seat of the Medici and their successors. The grand ducal collections were by any standard prodigious, and the Galleria Palatina in the series of staterooms with outstanding Seicento frescoes and stucco is a remarkable survival: an early nineteenth-century arrangement of pictures in a traditional hierarchical tiered hang. The Medici would be astonished by how little attention is now paid to the two breathtakingly beautiful altarpieces of the Assumption of the Virgin by Andrea del Sarto, which they bought in 1602 and 1639 respectively. Other masterpieces, not least the portraits by Raphael, his Madonna della Sedia and the wonderful Titian portraits, still keep their place in those contemporary halls of fame – the postcard stalls – but some former stars, Cristofano Allori’s intent Judith or the Carlo Dolcis for example, are the preserve now of the art historian.
Baptistery, South Door: Andrea Pisano, Hope (left) and Humility (right), gilt-bronze, 1330.
Santa Felicita: Pontormo, Deposition (detail).
Happily the descendants of the Medicis’ subjects continue to enjoy the Boboli Gardens that stretch behind the palace to the city wall. Begun for Eleanora of Toledo, so familiar to us from Bronzino’s portrait in the Uffizi, to a design of 1550 by Niccolò Tribolo, these were developed over the following hundred years as successive waves of grand ducal taste demanded. There is much sculpture, including an explicit Cinquecento masterpiece, Vincenzo de’Rossi’s Paris and Helen of 1560, and Giambologna’s Venus rising from the Bath in the Grotta di Buontalenti.
Opposite the Pitti narrow streets cut westwards towards the church of Santo Spirito, which is in some ways the most characteristic religious building of Quattrocento Florence. The architect was Filippo Brunelleschi – most famed, of course, for his astounding dome of the Duomo that is in so many ways the symbol of the Florentine Renaissance and floats majestically above the city. Santo Spirito is of traditional cruciform plan with subsidiary aisles. The exterior is of sober stucco, a honeyed cream. Within, one is struck by the visual coherence of the architecture and of the many late Quattrocento altarpieces and altar-fronts still in place round the transepts. Patrons and painters compete, but on strictly complementary terms. The later altarpieces – of which the most memorable are by that narrator of near genius Aurelio Lomi – are more ambitious in scale.
Boboli Gardens, Grottoes of Buontalenti: Vincenzo de’Rossi, Paris and Helen, marble, 1560.
Santa Trinita: Lorenzo Monaco, Flight into Egypt.
Two blocks to the west is another celebrated church, Santa Maria del Carmine. The Corsini Chapel in the left transept is perhaps the most completely satisfying monument of baroque Florence. But it is not for this that the tourist-pilgrim comes. Your objective is the Brancacci Chapel opposite, which alas can no longer be entered from the body of the church, with the revolutionary frescoes of the short-lived Masaccio that heralded the Tuscan Renaissance in painting, their softer, more lyrical counterparts by his associate Masolino, and the courageous scenes by Filippino Lippi that completed the cycle.
From the Piazza del Carmine it is a short walk to the Arno. The view from the south bank as one makes for the Ponte Santa Trinita has not materially changed since it was depicted by Zocchi and Patch in the eighteenth century, although traffic has deserted the river for the lungarni – and motorcycles are noisier than boats. Across the bridge is the church of the same name, an ancient foundation that remains a convincing place of prayer. Behind a grill in its original setting on the right is a haunting masterpiece by the last great painter of Gothic Florence, the Annunciation by Don Lorenzo Monaco, with the Angel and Virgin in profile and, between, a stand of trees with trunks silhouetted against the gold ground of the panel; below, the Christmas narrative is continued in predella panels of almost unprecedented delicacy. Nearby is the Sassetti Chapel with Ghirlandaio’s altarpiece and the admirably controlled fresco cycle which explain why he was so dominant an influence in late fifteenth-century Florence. Like his Medici masters, Francesco Sassetti knew what he wanted.
San Marco: Fra Angelico, Annunciation, fresco (detail).
The visitor with time will want to see more of the great churches that now, like the Duomo, charge for admission: Santa Maria Novella, with its wonderfully arrogant façade, for Masaccio, Orcagna and Ghirlandaio; San Lorenzo for Donatello, Verrocchio and, above all, Michelangelo, whose expression of a personal architectural language in the adjacent Laurentian Library is arguably as remarkable as the Medici tombs in the New Sacristy; cold Franciscan Santa Croce, that Valhalla of the Florentines, for Giotto and the Gaddi, Taddeo and Agnolo, not to mention Donatello’s relief of the Annunciation and the chaste tomb of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s widow, the Countess of Albany, and that incomparably pure masterpiece of the Quattrocento, Brunelleschi’s Pazzi Chapel. Then find your way to the medieval Bargello, which with its prodigious holdings of Tuscan sculpture has been, except where Michelangelo is concerned, spared the tyranny of trendy display. The concentration of works by Donatello and his successors has no equal, but is most nearly rivaled in the Museo del Opera del Duomo, where the justly famous cantorie by Donatello and Luca della Robbia complement earlier sculpture from the cathedral, and have now been joined by Ghiberti’s celebrated reliefs from the Porta del Paradiso of the Baptistery and by Michelangelo’s late Pietà.
It is in quieter places that it is more easy to understand the successive waves of Florentine taste: at Orsanmichele, where Daddi’s altarpiece glows by candlelight in Orcagna’s massive tabernacle of 1349–59; in the Convento di San Marco, where the genius of Fra Angelico is seen in the museum but most perfectly expressed in the frescoes of the cells – I must declare an interest as it was a Christmas card of the upright Annunciation that opened my eyes at the age of nearly six; in the Badia, with its monuments by Mino da Fiesole and Filippino Lippi’s beautiful Vision of Saint Bernard; at Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi, where Perugino’s silent Crucifixion (accessible only on Tuesdays and Thursdays) remains so compelling a religious image; in the Ognisanti, where Botticelli and Ghirlandaio contend; in the Annunziata, where Andrea del Sarto and his contemporaries continued the decoration of the atrium and he returned to fresco his overdoor of the Madonna del Sacco in the cloister; or the Chiostro dello Scalzo, with Sarto’s admirably inventive grisaille frescoes of the life of Saint John the Baptist.
One of the pleasures of sightseeing in Florence is the way that the city, as if unwittingly, discloses its past. Tourists searching for a fashionable gelateria may sense that the curving walls of a huddle of buildings represent the line of the Roman amphitheatre west of the Piazza Santa Croce; a maze of narrow streets and the Palazzo della Signoria tell of the medieval republic already rich from banking, and the façades of the many Renaissance palaces in, for example, the Borgo degli Albizi still demonstrate the prosperity of Medici rule. Moreover, we can survey the city from certain viewpoints, Bellosguardo or the walk up to San Miniato al Monte, which glows in the evening sun.
Our understanding of what Florence meant to earlier generations of visitors is enhanced in the Museo Horne, formed by Herbert Horne, whose monograph on Botticelli has had no rival in English for over a century. Across the Arno the Museo Bardini, with the collection assembled by the leading Florentine dealer of the same period, has a complementary message. Florence can seem a forbidding city of uncompromising grey stone, but despite the depredations of Bardini and his predecessors her treasures are literally inexhaustible.
