Read The Stones of Florence for Free Online

down the room is the Marzocco.
    The statuary of Florence is its genius or attendant spirit, compelling awe not only because it is better than any other statuary done since ancient Greece, a categorical statement, but because, good and bad alike, it is part of the very fabric of the city—the respublica or public thing. It belongs to a citizenry, stubborn and independent, and to a geography, like that of Athens, of towering rock and stone. The Florentine sculptors of the quattrocento sprang from the quarries of the neighbouring hills, where the macigno or grey pietra serena was cut. Desiderio da Settignano, Benedetto da Maiano, Mino da Fiesole, Benedetto da Rovezzano—these were village boys brought up among stone-cutters. Michelangelo was put out to nurse in Settignano, and he used to say that he imbibed his genius from his wet nurse’s limy milk. Green marble, used chiefly for facing churches in geometric designs, came from the hills near Prato; the famed white marble of Florentine sculpture came from Carrara, in that eerie mountain range, the Apuan Alps, that runs above the coast north of Pisa, near where Shelley drowned, at Viareggio, and where there is now an ugly string of beach resorts. Michelangelo, like some strange Ibsen hero, spent years in the Carrara mountains, quarrying marble for his statuary amid peaks that appear snow-streaked because of their gleaming white fissures. The great white blocks, ‘free from cracks and veins’, as the contracts promised, were loaded onto barges and floated, along green waterways, to Florence or Rome. This marble was already known in the days of Augustus, and the art of carving beautiful marbles was first mastered by the Pisans, as early as the duecento, three centuries before Michelangelo, in sculptures that were already Renaissance or still classical. Workmen from Pisa brought the art to Florence; the Florentine habit of casting in bronze is thought to go back to the Etruscans.
    White, black, grey, dun, and bronze are the colours of Florence—the colours of stone and metal, the primitive elements of Nature out of which the first civilizations were hammered—the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age. The hammer and the chisel strike the sombre music of Florentine art and architecture, of the Florentine character. Those huge iron gratings on the windows of Florentine palaces, the iron rings and the clamps for torches that are driven into the rough bosses of stone came from the gloomy iron mines of Elba, a Tuscan possession. You can still hear the sound of the forge in the workshops of the Oltrarno, and the biggest industry of modern Florence is a metallurgical works.
    The Florentines of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when they went into battle, carried statuary with them. Savonarola, though he was supposedly an enemy of art, had a Donatello Infant Jesus borne in procession on the day of the Bonfire of Vanities, when so many secular paintings were burnt, including the studies from life of Fra Bartolomeo. Among the people, it was believed, as late as the present century, that spirits were imprisoned in statues. The statue of Neptune by Ammannati in the fountain of the Piazza della Signoria is called ‘Il Biancone’ or ‘The Great White Man’ by the poor people, who used to say that he was the mighty river god of the Arno turned into a statue because, like Michelangelo, he spurned the love of women. When the full moon shines on him, so the story goes, at midnight, he comes to life and walks about the Piazza conversing with the other statues. Michelangelo’s ‘David’, before it became a statue, used to be known as ‘The Giant’. It was a great block of marble eighteen feet high that had been spoiled by Agostino di Duccio; personified by popular fancy, it lay for forty years in the workshops of the Cathedral, until Michelangelo made the Giant into the Giant-Killer, that is, into a patriotic image of the small country defeating its larger foes. Giants, it was