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Updated: May 23, 2025
The apartments containing pictures and sculptures are fifteen in number, and run quite round the court in the first piano, all the rooms, halls, and galleries of beautiful proportion, with vaulted roofs, some of which glow with frescos; and all are colder and more comfortless than can possibly be imagined without having been in them. The pictures, most of them, interested me very little.
There is a long period, during which frescos illuminate a church or a hall in a way that no other adornment can; when this epoch of brightness is past, they become the dreariest ghosts of perished magnificence. . . . This chapter-house is the only part of the church that is now used for the purposes of public worship.
They belong to the chapel of the palace, and into this holy closet we were now conducted. It is large enough to accommodate comfortably perhaps thirty worshippers, and is quite covered with frescos by Ghirlandaio in good preservation, and with remnants enough of gilding and bright color to show how splendid the chapel must have been when the Medicean Grand Dukes used to pray here.
"I see he has not yet commenced it." The old man looked troubled, and, turning from the table, went on: "These carved depositories for the choral-books, and the frescos at the head of the stairs, are about all you can admire here now, except the architecture of the hall." The padre was very silent at dinner. He only said, noticing that the signora ate nothing, "This will not do, my daughter.
I know that even Pompeii could not have been joyous that sunless afternoon, for what there was to see of mournful Herculaneum was as brilliant with colors as any thing in the former city. Nay, I believe that the tints of the frescos and painted columns were even brighter, and that the walls of the houses were far less ruinous than those of Pompeii.
Be that as it may, their arms consist of a simple column, used on a shield, or as a crest, or as the badge of the family, and it is found in many a threadbare tapestry, in many a painting, in the frescos and carved ornaments of many a dim old church in Rome.
The Dutch and Flemish painters were in the habit of using their neighbours as models. Ghirlandajo is classed among religious painters, but let us compare some of his "religious" paintings with those of Raphael or Murillo, and see the result. He painted seven frescos on the walls of the Santa Maria Novella in Florence, all scenes of Biblical history, as Ghirlandajo imagined them.
"I will see that through," you must say, "with out turning my head"; or you won't see the trick of it at all. And the most significant thing in all his work, you will find hereafter, is his choice of moments. I will give you at once two instances in a picture which, for other reasons, you should quickly compare with these frescos.
We found none of the front entrances open, but on our left, in a wall at right angles with the church, there was an open gateway, approaching which, we saw, within the four-sided colonnade, an enclosed green space of a cloister. This is what is called the Chiostro Verde, so named from the prevailing color of the frescos with which the walls beneath the arches are adorned.
It now being past twelve, and all the churches closing from twelve till two, we had not time to pay much attention to the frescos, oil-pictures, and statues, by Raphael and other famous men, which are to be seen here.
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