Italian Cities

K ITALIAN CITIES CECIL FAIRFIELD IAVELL. CHAUTAUQUA HOME READING SEK1ES fc* Wibri Anna E. i»umn?r LORENZO DE' MEDICI rah bv Vasari Uffizi Gallerv, Florcm Italian Cities BY CECIL FAIRFIELD LAVELL, M. A. PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN BATES COLLEGE, LEWISTON, MAINE; LATE STAFF LECTURER FOR THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY EXTENSION SOCIETY, PHILADELPHIA; SOMETIME FELLOW OF QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY, KINGS- TON, CANADA. CHAUTAUQUA, N. Y. MCMV Copyright, igo5 BY THE POPULAR EDUCATION PUBLISHING COMPANY Cfie ILafusiSc ^Jrtss DONNELLEY Si SONS COMPANY CHICAGO Ufci. CONTENTS CHAPTER LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE Lorenzo de' Medici. (Portrait by Vasari, Uffizi Gal- - lery, Florence) ... Frontispiece Civic Forum, Pompeii - - - - - u The Roman Forum, Looking towards the Palatine and the Colosseum - - - - ig St. Francis Casting Forth the Devils from Arez- zo. (Fresco by Giotto in Church of S. Francesco, Assisi) ------- 54 Detail from the "Triumph of Death." (Fresco by Andrea Orcagna in the Campo Santo of Pisa) - - 72 A Street in Siena, with the Mangia Tower - 76 Cloisters of Santa Maria Novella, Florence - 104 Angels in Paradise, from Fra Angelico's "Last Judgment." (Academy of Fine Arts, Florence) - 106 Lorenzo de' Medici at the Age of Fifteen. (De- tail from Benozzo Gozzoli's Fresco in the Riccardi Palace, Florence) - - - - - - 113 The "Primavera" of Botticelli. (Academy, Florence) 123 "Madonna of the Rose Garden." (Filippino Lippi(?), - - - Pitti Palace, Florence) - - 123 The Creation of Man. (Fresco by Michelangelo, Ceil- ing of the Sistine Chapel, Rome) - 142 The Madonna of the Chair. (Raphael, Pitti Palace, Florence) - - - - - - 147 St. George and the Dragon (Carpaccio, in church of S. Giorgio Maggiore, Venice) - - - - 162 Angel. (Detail from Bellini's Madonna and Saints, in the Church of S. Zaccaria, Venice) - 165 Mole and Piazzetta, Venice - 168 The Last Supper (Leonardo da Vinci, in old refectory of - - - S. Maria delle Grazie, Milan) - 184 PREFACE This little book is neither a history of Italy nor a record of travel. It is simply an introduction to the study of a great people. Countries like England or France may doubtless be better approached in some other way. Their history is infinitely more unified and their genius far simpler than that of Italy. Indeed, so far is this true that the effort is seldom made to trace the fortunes and the development of the Italian people as a whole, infinite as has been the time and energy spent on phases of that development, ancient Rome, the Empire, the Papacy, the Renaissance, the modern movement for unification—all of these have had devoted to them a whole literature. Yet innumerable reading and thinking people who would not dream of suggesting that Alfred the Great, John Wiclif, and Alfred Tennyson were not all Englishmen, never realize that Julius Caesar, Innocent III., Raphael, and Garibaldi were all Italians. In the one case national growth has been so mighty, so uninterrupted, that all the world may see it. In the other case the genius of the race was thrown for centuries into directions other than national development, and missing the thread of continu- ous political history we lose sight of the real continuity of race and spirit. In these chapters the attempt is made to introduce the to student the spirit of Italy, past and present. Many pages are, of necessity, simply descriptive, for often a church, a picture, or a statue interprets the message and VI Preface life of an age as adequately as a revolution, a battle, or even a book. Many are directly historical. But whether in history or description the effort of the writer throughout is to prepare the reader for the study of any phase of Italian achievement that may be undertaken in future with a larger background, a truer understanding of the unity of Italian history in the broadest sense. My sole co-worker has been my wife, who has shared my Italian studies throughout in Italy and America, and whose assistance in suggestion, in criticism, and in the actual preparation of the book for the press I wish warmly to acknowledge. The friends who first interested me in the art of Italy, Mr. Edward Howard Griggs, Mr. Earl Barnes, and even more, Mr. John Nolen, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, have been too far away for consultation or direct aid, but I may at least salute them and very heartily acknowledge my debt. Cecil Fairfield Lavell. Lewiston, Maine, April 17, 1905. INTRODUCTION You are sitting on the steps of an old Greek temple, looking across a little stretch of grass to a still older one, and thinking. Since that dawn, not many weeks ago, when you saw from your port-hole a mountain rearing its dark mass against the ruddy eastern sky, and knew that it was Vesuvius, you have been gaining your first bewildering impressions of Italy. Naples, odorous and noisy perhaps, but charged with picturesque life, —its bay and its hill, and even its streets, full of glorious color, —has been entirely the Italy of your dreams—joyous, sunny, and quite uncrushed by its too obvious poverty. At Bains you have had the shock and thrill of your first per- sonal contact with Rome. And now you have come to Poestum. Before you, in a deserted field carpeted with grass and lovely flowers, stands a Doric temple, raised by ! Greeks in this Greater Greece before the Parthenon yet crowned the Acropolis of Athens. The bright stucco that once covered the rough, reddish stone is quite gone. There is no roof. Some of the columns are broken, and all are scarred by the weather of twenty-five centuries. There is no bright-colored frieze, and the lizard and the barbarian with like freedom may pass where once stood the image of earth-shaking Poseidon. Yet the scars seem to matter wonderfully little. It is not like an intri- cate piece of carving or painting, not like Leonardo's Southern Italy was called in Roman times Magna Gntcia, Great or Greater Greece. The British Colonies have thus been called in modern times Greater Britain. viii Introduction 1 ruined masterpiece, where every stain and blotch is a dead loss. Here what is left is of infinitely greater significance than what is gone. The harmony, the simplicity, the perfect lines, the restfulness of all Greek work are still there untouched; the wrinkles and scars only add the quiet pathos of age; and before one's imagination easily rises the perfect temple as it was in its prime. In some ways, though, it is hard to believe that any- thing here can be really Greek—that this soil was as truly Hellas to the worshipers in the temple as Argos or Achaia. Greek stones they are—Greek stones bearing witness to Greek builders—and yet, had these worshipers of a Greek god no sons that Greek tradition and the Greek language have vanished so completely? Here, alas, as in Sicily, the race has disappeared. The tongue of Pythagoras and Theocritus has faded from memory long ages ago, and if Balaustion could now tell the story of Alcestis to the descendants of the people of Syracuse, they would listen in ignorant amazement to words that their fore- fathers spoke in Corinth. Indeed the decline must have begun here quite early. The decay of power in the mother cities, the drying up of the great parent streams of Hellenic life, the corrupting presence of masterful barbarian neighbors, all helped to sap the vitality of the Greek cities of southern Italy. Athens, even though a shadow of her old self, might yet remain a center of light to the world, and Athene might be worshiped in the Parthenon by Greeks and Romans, side by side. But the Italian colonies were too far away. Italy became Rome, and though the Romans might themselves do reverence to the Greek spirit and turn to the study of Homer and " ' The Last Supper," at Milan. Introduction ix Sophocles, yet the impulse came from Corinth and Athens, not from Magna Graecia. Barbarian neighbors and alien soil proved too strong for the cities of Greater Greece, and Poseidon had to look sadly down from his desolate fane over a world that had forgotten him. Greeks and gods are alike ghosts in this quiet plain where once was Poseidonia. But they were not always ghosts. It is perhaps just as well before going on to study the power and glory of Rome or the ideals and fruits of the Renaissance that you come here to contemplate these remains of a genius as mighty as the Roman, far greater indeed outside of the fields of law and politics, and even more subtle and potent in its message to us of to-day than that of Florence her- self. These offshoots in Italy cf the Greek race were an anticipation and a symbol of the ages to come. To every generation of Italians for twenty-five hundred years this temple has preached the Greek message of simplicity and harmony. To every generation of the civilized world during the same time have Homer, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Plato been quietly teaching freedom and strength of thought, symmetry and beauty of character, nobility, balance, self-restraint in conduct, calm joyousness and spontaneity in heart and outlook on life. All of us, from the Romans of Cato's day to the Americans of the twen- tieth century, look back to the Greeks as our teachers. Yet it is strange and tragic to see how fatally the one great defect of the Hellenic genius, its lack of moral sound- ness, seems to have corrupted the colonists and Hellenized Italians of Sicily and South Italy. Instead of carrying on the message of their fathers, and expanding it to yet fur- ther grandeur, they gradually lost their hold on the great things of life.

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