“Florence, April 29th.– Magnificent, cloudless weather. But, oh! what a wearisome journey we had, the train crawling from one station to another and stopping at each such a time, whilst we baked in the cushioned carriage and couldn’t even have lovely things to look at, surrounded by the usual railway eyesores. We passed close by the Pisan Campo Santo, and had a very good view of the Leaning Tower and the Duomo. Such hurrying and struggling at the Pisa station to get into the train for Florence, having, of course, to carry all our small baggage ourselves. Railway travelling in Italy is odious. It was very lovely to see Florence in the distance, with those domes and towers I know so well by heart from pictures, but we were very limp indeed, the wearisome train having taken all our enthusiasm away. Everything as we arrived struck us as small, and I am still so dazzled by the splendour of Genoa that my eyes cannot, as it were, comprehend the brown, grey and white tones of this quiet-coloured little city. I must Florentine myself as fast as I can. This hotel is on the Lung’ Arno, and charming was it to look out of the windows in the lovely evening and see the river below and the dome of the Carmine and tower of Santo Spirito against the clear sky with, further off, the hills with their convents (alas! empty now) and clusters of cypresses. No greater contrast to Genoa could be than Florence in every way. Oh! may this city of the arts see me begin (and finish) my first regular picture. April 30th.– I and Papa strolled about the streets to get a general impression of ‘Firenze la gentile,’ and looked into the Duomo, which is indeed bare and sad-coloured inside except in its delicious painted windows over the altars, the harmonious richness of which I should think could not be exceeded by any earthly means. The outside is very gay and cheerful, but some of the marble has browned itself into an appearance of wood. Oh! dear Giotto’s Tower, could elegance go beyond this? Is not this an example of the complete savoir faire of those true-born artists of old? And the ‘Gates of Paradise’! The delight of seeing these from the street is great, instead of in a museum. But Michael Angelo’s enthusiastic exclamation in their praise rather makes one smile, for we know that it must have been in admiration of their purely technical beauties, as the gates are by no means large and grand as gates, and the bronze is rather dark for an entrance into Paradise! I reverently saluted the Palazzo Vecchio, and am quite ready to get very much attached to the brown stone of Florence in time.
“Villa Lamporecchi, May 1st.– We two and Papa had a good spell at the Uffizi in the morning, and in the afternoon we took possession of this pleasing house, which is so cool and has far-spreading views, one of Florence from a terrace leading out of what I shall make my studio. A garden and vineyards sloping down to the valley where Brunelleschi’s brown dome shows above the olives.”
Our mother did many lovely water colours, one especially exquisite one of Fiesole seen in a shimmering blue midsummer light. That, and one done on the Lung’ Arno, to which Shelley’s line
“The purple noon’s transparent might”
could justly be applied, are treasured by me. She understood sunshine and how to paint it.
“May 3rd.– I already feel Florence growing upon me. I begin to understand the love English people of culture and taste get for this most interesting and gentle city. The ground one treads on is all historic, but it is in the artistic side of its history that I naturally feel the greatest interest, and it is a delightful thing to go about those streets and be reminded at every turn of the great Painters, Architects, Sculptors I have read so much of. Here a palace designed by Raphael, there a glorious row of windows carved by Michael Angelo, there some exquisite ironwork wrought by some other born genius. I think the style of architecture of the Strozzi Palace, the Ricardi, and others, is perfection in its way, though at first, with the brilliant whites, yellows and pinks of Genoa still in my eye, I felt rather depressed by the uniform brown of the huge stones of which they are built. No wonder I haunt the well-known gallery which runs over the Ponte Vecchio, lined with the sketches, studies, and first thoughts of most of the great masters. One delights almost more in these than in many of the finished pictures. They bring one much more in contact, as it were, with the great dead, and make one familiar with their methods of work. One sees what little slips they made, how they modified their first thoughts, over and over again, before finally fixing their choice. Very encouraging to the struggling beginner to see these evidences of their troubles!
“I have never, before I came here where so many of them have lived, realised the old masters as our comrades; I have never been so near them and felt them to be mortals exactly like ourselves. This city and its environs are so little changed, the greater part of them not at all, since those grand old Michael Angelesque days that one feels brought quite close to the old painters, seeing what they saw and walking on the very same old pavement as they walked on, passing the houses where they lived, and so forth.”
I was at that time bent on achieving my first “great picture,” to be taken from Keats’s poem “The Pot of Basil”; Lorenzo riding to his death between the two brothers:
So the two brothers and their murdered man
Rode past fair Florence,
but, fortunately, I resolved instead to put in further training before attacking such a canvas, and I became the pupil of a very fine academic draughtsman, though no great colourist, Giuseppe Bellucci. On alternate days to those spent in his studio I copied in careful pencil some of the exquisite figures in Andrea del Sarto’s frescoes in the cloisters of the SS. Annunziata.
The heat was so great that, as it became more intense, I had to be at Bellucci’s, in the Via Santa Reparata, at eight o’clock instead of 8.30, getting there in the comparative cool of the morning, after a salutary walk into Florence, accompanied by little Majolina, no signorina being at liberty to walk alone. What heat! The sound of the ceaseless hiss of the cicale gave one the impression of the country’s undergoing the ordeal of being frizzled by the sun. I record the appearance of my first fire-fly on the night of May 6th. What more pleasing rest could one have, after the heat and work of the day, than by a stroll through the vineyards in the early night escorted by these little creatures with their golden lamps?
The cloisters were always cool, and I enjoyed my lonely hours there, but the Bellucci studio became at last too much of a furnace. My master had already several times suggested a rest, mopping his brow, when I also began to doze over my work at last, and the model wouldn’t keep his eyes open. I record mine as “rolling in my head.”
I see in memory the blinding street outside, and hear the fretful stamping of some tethered mule teased with the flies. The very Members of Parliament in the Palazzo Vecchio had departed out of the impossible Chamber, and, all things considered, I allowed Bellucci to persuade me to take a little month of rest – “un mesetto di riposo” – at home during part of July and August. That little month of rest was very nice. I did a water colour of the white oxen ploughing in our podere; I helped (?) the contadini to cut the wheat with my sickle, and sketched them while they went through the elaborate process of threshing, enlivened with that rough innocent romping peculiar to young peasants, which gave me delightful groups in movement. I love and respect the Italian peasant. He has high ideas of religion, simplicity of living, honour. I can’t say I feel the same towards his betters (?) in the Italian social scale.
The grapes ripened. The scorched cicale became silent, having, as the country people declared, returned to the earth whence