It is difficult to say who first formulated the idea of the Grand Tour. There is a choice between Thomas Coryat and Richard Lassels, both English travelers of the seventeenth century. Certainly, this initiatory journey for Europe and for Italy in particular would have become a necessary undertaking for the intellectual aristocracy of the late eighteenth century and of the entire nineteenth century. Without disturbing Lord Byron’s exasperated dandy acrobatics, we cannot fail to remember illustrious travelers such as Stendhal, Madame de Staël, Goethe and the unforgettable note in his Journey to Italy: “On 23 morning 1786, at ten according to our clock, we emerged from the Apennine mountains and we glimpsed Florence lying in a wide valley of unlikely fertility and scattered as far as the eye can see with houses and villas ».
One Season
Great season for travelers in the 19th century: the English landed in Genoa if they came by sea or reached Turin through the Mont Cenis, the German came from the Brenner Pass, passed through Venice and then from Bologna to Florence. Then, for the English the places of Palladio were obligatory, which they managed to introject to the point of appropriating and spreading Palladianism in their home and in the Americas; but Florence always remained an obligatory stop, consolidating over time, as the Anglo-Beca community settled on the hills. Thus it was that the monuments of Florence were increasingly understood for their double connotation, artistic and meta-historical, capital testimonies of civilization. IS very soon it was well understood, becoming a must for the cultured visitor, that climbing towards San Miniato al Monte, even before a physical journey was a metaphor of the spirit, religious and secular together. “Haec est porta Coeli” was and is engraved on the threshold of the left door of the Basilica, consolidating an approach itinerary, a surrender to the “holy” door to enter and enjoy one of the most summarizing spectacles of artistic civilization and faith in the humanity.
Moreover, that facade on top of the hill is like a compass towards the east, which can be clearly seen from the riversides, from the loggias, from the terraces of the city buildings; it can be seen and excelled and is enjoyed especially at sunset, when it remains one of the brightest spots around Florence; almost a fixed star which, certainly Galileo too had to visit for a long time and love. And it is not just a literary exercise to imagine who, starting from Piazza dei Signori or from San Marco or from the Arno river, was about to go up with a very different and much more tortuous road network than the current one, made all too convenient by the interventions of Poggi in the season of Florence capital. Just look at the plan of the Capitani di Parte, that of Bonsignori (1584), that of Werner (1705) or that of Fantozzi (1843), to understand how the “terrace” of San Miniato (part of the sixteenth-century fortress on which Michelangelo worked ), you were to earn with not easy dirt roads. Moreover, the beautiful view by Burci (1811-1879) is significant, faithfully returning to us the condition of romantic abandonment of the arrival at the basilica, with a road network in the countryside and with poor conservation conditions of the containment walls of the Fortress. And again the view of Terreni, in his pictorial journey of Tuscany; Finally, the view by Borbottoni from the old Ponte alle Grazie (still with seven arches) is very suggestive.
The flowery terrace
Of course, John Ruskin’s drawing of the “garden” of San Miniato (1845) remains a unique document, where the “terrace” is a field with flowering hedges looking downstream, interrupted by a central gate that can be guessed with two masonry pillars and a small wooden gabled roof. The young Oxfordian had to stop enchanted on the terrace, as can be seen from the diaries of John Hobbs, his servant who records whole days in San Miniato; it is curious that he does not mention it in his Mornings in Florence, but indirect testimony is the watercolor of a detail of the facade of the basilica. The architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879) also stopped in San Miniato, designing the façade, a beautiful interior, the details of the plutei and the “zodiac” on the floor. Of course, the interventions that definitively canceled the charm of the extra-moenia rurality of San Miniato were that of Mariano Falcini for the Monumental Cemetery (designed in 1864) and the new layout given by Giuseppe Poggi in the Plan for Monte alle Croci which, through the contiguity with the new Viale dei Colli and the drafting of the monumental Scalee, they ended up “urbanizing” the fragile settlement system, cutting a good stretch of the ramparts of the Fortress and proposing an approach “in axis”, orthogonal to the facade of the Basilica. The asphalt and gravel did the rest, bringing us up to date.
The incredible facade
But of this monument of beauty it is enough to read the incredible facade, trying to grasp how and from where this “geometry” and this “polychromy” have their roots and have come up here. And so, we cannot fail to start from the pediment of this one which ends with an Eagle (of gilded bronze) which places its claws on the “torsello” to mark the Art of Calimala. We must then go back to a more general phenomenon, defined as “polychromism”: one of the most suggestive components of medieval architecture. Polychromism, sacred iconology, symbolism, geometry, constitute the peculiar aspects of this “factory”; and we must follow them bearing in mind that the very first phenomenon is already well present since the tenth century in Isfhahan in the Friday mosque and even earlier in the mosque of Cordoba, started by Abd al-Rahman I; even if, and this is perhaps the difference, in those architectures the chromatic differences are entrusted more to polychrome tiles than to actual lithoid materials.
Symbols
In terms of iconology, symbolism and geometry, you are spoiled for choice! And perhaps, precisely from the coexistence of different cultures, aniconic and figurative, classicistic and Byzantine, that the “universal code” of the façade’s drafting can be grasped. Three “registers” in height correspond to the severe architectural score that suggests the three-nave layout: the five base arches, the central body (with the “classic” window, the “wheels of the sun” and the mosaic of the blessing Christ), the terminal triangle of the fastigium (with the two caryatids on the side) and, finally, the Eagle of Calimala. But something must be said about each register, remembering how the geometric motifs, the intertwining, the floral motifs, the zoomorphic and anthropomorphic motifs refer to those of the Collegiate Church of Empoli and the Badia Fiorentina. Let’s start again from the Eagle which is also a symbol of “dominion and legality” as it was for the insignia of the Roman Empire; the base opens and concludes the geometric layout, where “wind roses”, “leafy spirals”, “candelabra”, “griffins”, “zodiacal loans” saturate the marble surfaces, in a sort of horror vacui (almost true and proper fear of emptiness) which, in the end, translates into an anthology of Christian symbology from the 11th-12th century. So that the caryatids of the tympanum and the lions at the base of the columns of the classic window in the center, the wall fabrics and the gold-background mosaic, are formed in an uninterrupted journey between Roman, Byzantine, Islamic and Christian-medieval cultures: image of a harmonica civil and religious coexistence without equal. Therefore, this becomes the nature of the gaze to approach and enjoy the “urban reciprocity” between the city and the hill of the Holy Doors. A meta-historical condition echoed by an inscription inside the basilica, according to which «In this place, time and death no longer have power».
May 9, 2021 | 09:16
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