An impressive work long attributed to him but now ascribed to Andrea da Firenze shows how, in this first century of the Renaissance, Italy was still medieval. In the Capella degli Spagnuoli, or Chapel of the Spaniards, in the church of Santa Maria Novella, the Dominican friars set up about 1370 a pictorial apotheosis of their famous philosopher. St. Thomas Aquinas, comfortably substantial but too devoted to be proud, stands in triumph, with the heretics Arius, Sabellius, and Averroes groveling at his feet; around him Moses, Paul, John the Evangelist, and other saints seem but accessories; below them fourteen figures symbolize seven sacred and seven profane sciences—Donatus grammar, Cicero rhetoric, Justinian law, Euclid geometry, and so on. The thought is still completely medieval; only the art, in design and color, shows the emergence of a new age from the old. The transition was so gradual that not for a century yet would men feel themselves to be in a different world.
The advance in technique is clearer in Orcagna, who stands second only to Giotto among the Italian artists of the fourteenth century. Named originally Andrea di Cione, he was called Arcagnolo—Archangel—by his admiring contemporaries, and lazy tongues shortened the appellation to Orcagna. Though often listed among Giotto’s followers, he was rather a pupil of the sculptor Andrea Pisano. Like the greatest geniuses of the Renaissance he was a master of many arts. As a painter he made a colorful altarpiece of Christ Enthroned for the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, while his elder brother Nardo executed on the walls vivid frescoes of heaven and hell (1354–7). As an architect he designed the Certosa or Carthusian monastery near Florence, famous for its graceful cloisters and its Acciaiuoli tombs. As architects and sculptors he and his brother executed the ornate tabernacle in the Or(atory) San Michele in Florence. A picture of the Virgin there was believed to work miracles; after the Black Death of 1348 the votive offerings of survivors enriched the fraternity that managed the building, and it was decided to house the picture in a sumptuous shrine of marble and gold. The Cioni designed it as a miniature Gothic cathedral, with columns, pinnacles, statues, reliefs, precious metal, and costly stone; it is a jewel of trecento decoration.* Andrea, acclaimed for it, was appointed capomaestro at Orvieto, and shared in designing the façade of the cathedral. In 1362 he returned to Florence, and worked there on the great duomo till his death.
The immense fame of Santa Maria del Fiore—the largest church that had as yet been built in Italy—had been begun by Arnolfo di Cambio in 1296. A succession of masters—Giotto, Andrea Pisano, Francesco Talenti, and many others—labored on it till our time; its present façade dates from 1887; even now the cathedral is incomplete, and must in good measure be rebuilt by every century. Architecture was the least successful of the arts in Renaissance Italy; it took half-heartedly from the north some elements of Gothic like the pointed arch, combined them with classic columns, and sometimes, as in Florence, topped the whole with a Byzantine dome. The mixture was incongruous and—barring some small churches by Bramante—lacked unity and grace. The façade of Orvieto and Siena were superb displays of sculpture and mosaic rather than honest architecture; and the accentuation of horizontal lines by the alternating strata of black and white marble in the walls depresses eye and soul, when the very meaning of the church should have been a prayer or paean rising to the skies. Santa Maria del Fiore—as the Florentine cathedral was called after 1412 from the lily in the heraldic emblem of the city—is hardly a flower; it is, but for Brunellesco’s illustrious dome, a cavern, whose dark vacuity might be the mouth of Dante’s Inferno instead of a vestibule to God.
It was the inexhaustible Arnolfo di Cambio who in 1294 began the Franciscan church of Santa Croce, or the Holy Cross, and in 1298 the loveliest structure in Florence, the Palazzo della Signoria, known to later generations as the Palazzo Vecchio. The church was finished in 1442 except for the façade (1863); the Palace of the Signory, or Old Palace, was completed in its main features by 1314. Those were the years that saw the banishment of Dante and Petrarch’s father; factional strife was in its heyday; so Arnolfo built for the Signory a fortress rather than a palace, and designed its roof with machicolated battlements; while the unique campanile, by the diverse ringing of its bell, served to call the citizens to parliament or to arms. Here the city fathers (priori, signori) not only governed but lived; and the temper of the time appears in the law that during their two months of office they were not to leave the building on any pretext whatever. In 1345 Neri di Fioravante spanned the Arno with one of the world’s famous bridges, the Ponte Vecchio, now cracked with age and many wars, but still precariously bearing impatient traffic and twenty-two shops. Around these proud achievements of the Florentine civic spirit, in the narrow streets that led from the cathedral and Signoria squares, rose the as yet modest mansions of the worried rich, the noble churches that transmuted merchants’ gold into art, the noisy shops of traders and artisans, and the crowded tenements of an industrious, rebellious, excitable, intelligent populace. In that frenzy of egos the Renaissance was born.
VII. “THE DECAMERON”
It was in Florence that Italian literature achieved its first and greatest triumphs. There Guinizelli and Cavalcanti, in the late thirteenth century, gave the sonnet its finished form; not there, but longing for it, Dante the Florentine struck the first and last true note of Italian epic poetry; there Boccaccio composed the supreme work of Italian prose, and Giovanni Villani wrote the most modern of medieval chronicles. Visiting Rome for the jubilee of 1300, and moved like Gibbon by the ruins of a mighty past, Villani thought for a while of recording its history; then, judging that Rome had been sufficiently commemorated, he turned back to his native haunts, and resolved “to bring into this volume… all the events of the city of Florence… and give in full the deeds of the Florentines, and briefly the notable affairs of the rest of the world.”36
He began with the Tower of Babel and ended on the verge of the Black Death, in which he died; his brother Matteo and his nephew Filippo continued the story to 1365. Giovanni was well prepared; he came of a prosperous mercantile family, commanded a pure Tuscan speech, traveled in Italy, Flanders, and France, served thrice as prior and once as master of the mint. He had for those times an uncommon sense of the economic bases and influences of history; and he was the first to salt his narrative with statistics of social conditions. The first three books of his Croniche Fiorentine are mostly legend; but in later books we learn that in 1338 Florence and its hinterland had 105,000 inhabitants, of whom seventeen thousand were beggars and four thousand were on public relief; that there were six primary schools, teaching ten thousand boys and girls, and four high schools, in which six hundred boys and a few girls studied “grammar” (literature) and “logic” (philosophy). Unlike most historians Villani included notices of new books, paintings, buildings; seldom has a city been so directly described in all the departments of its life. Had Villani brought all these phases and details into one united narrative of causes, phenomena, personalities, and effects he would have transformed his chronicle into history.