The Makers of Florence The Cathedral Builders

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: . CHAFFER VI. A PEACEFUL CITIZEX. TI7E have said that it is very difficult to ' understand how ordinary existence could go on, and fortunes be made, and families founded, and art cultivated, among all the turbulence and agitation of such a life as that of Florence. Internal conflicts, which showed not only in the public square and public palace, but which convulsed every petty alley and made a fortress of every street corner; and external assault by neighbouring cities, by marauding emperors, by now one now another, league of belligerent towns, backed up by bands of mercenaries, kept up such a continual coin- motion that the existence of the shop, the manufactory, or the studio behind, seems almost incredible. Yet that background of calm to all these fierce contentions seemsto have appeared entirely natural to the Florentines. Trade flourished among them, not only as it does among ourselves, underneath the brilliant surface on which the great and wealthy and non-labouring keep up a princely show, but in the hands of the very men who formed the surface of Florentine life; the same men who negotiated with princes, and led armies, and had a share in all the imperial affairs of Europe, yet returned to their banking-houses or their woollen manufactories unchanged, talking of the bottega, the business which gave them their standing, with the most perfect satisfaction and content in that source of their fortune. The life and prosperity of the simple citizen in these circumstances is almost more extraordinary than that of the artist, for the latter knew that his art was a passport with men of all factions, and that whatever party was uppermost in Florence, the progress of the Cathedral or its decoration would always be of the first importance. But the good man in his shop, who thr...