In the summer of 1785, Hester Piozzi left Florence with considerable regret: ‘But I must bid adieu to beautiful Florence’, she wrote, ‘where the streets are kept so clean one is afraid to dirty them, and not one's self, by walking in them: where the public walks are all nicely weeded, as in England, and the gardens have a homeish and Bath-like look, that is excessively cheering to an English eye.’Footnote 1 Piozzi's strong attachment to Florence was far from being unique amongst English-speaking visitors, and as the quotation above suggests, was not simply based upon admiration of the ducal collections. Rather, it grew out of a sense that Florence was mercifully free of those qualities which rendered Italian cities, for all the magnificence of their art and antiquities, an alien and unfamiliar environment. Florence appeared to offer an oasis of home-like comfort in the midst of lengthy peregrinations in foreign lands: one of the most frequently repeated commonplaces of British travellers in Italy was the recommendation of Florence as a base for prolonged residence.
Piozzi's comments are interesting, then, for indicating those qualities of urban life which were regarded as characteristically ‘English’ and for reminding us of the alienation and homesickness that could afflict the tourist even in the promised land of Italy.Footnote 2 But it is worth examining the nature of this ‘English’ attachment to and interest in Florence rather further. The responses of English and, indeed, British travellers in Italy to the cities and sights which they encountered show remarkable continuity in many aspects over the eighteenth century, which is one of the factors that gives the ‘Grand Tour’ any kind of heuristic value as a concept.Footnote 3 However, the standardization of the tourist itinerary and the formulaic nature of so much of the published and unpublished literature of the Grand Tour should not be allowed to obscure the fact that perceptions of and responses to the cities through which visitors travelled were constantly evolving over the eighteenth century. To generalize broadly: at the start of the eighteenth century the standard account of Florence by British visitors would present it simply in terms of the Medici dukedom. Florence's identity and fame rested upon its place as the showpiece of the grand dukes' patronage, taste, and power. The art and architecture that drew the admiration of the tourist was overwhelmingly that of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The city's republican past, along with the commercial wealth and artistic culture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were of minor interest. But by the end of the eighteenth century, we find a richer and more diverse range of responses to the city. The term ‘Renaissance’ had not yet been coined, but British travellers were now beginning to attach much more importance to Florence's role in fostering the early revival of the arts and to appreciate how its commercial and manufacturing wealth had permitted patronage on a scale which even the wealthiest of the landed elite were bound to admire.Footnote 4 Florence acquired a new set of associations for the British visitor, which in turn transformed the way in which it was viewed, experienced, and described as a city.
Symptomatic of these changing attitudes was William Roscoe's best seller, The life of Lorenzo de' Medici, first published in 1795, which in itself was responsible for enthusing a whole generation of British travellers with admiration for the achievement of Lorenzo de' Medici and Florence.Footnote 5 The influence of Roscoe's volume may have been overrated, but it was certainly representative of changing cultural values amongst those who travelled to Italy. Roscoe was dazzled by the character and style of il Magnifico, but he also contributed to, and helped to reify, a perceptual shift in the image of Florence, away from the Medici dukes to the Medici bankers of the fifteenth-century republic: a republic with a flourishing cultural life based upon wealth derived from manufactures and commerce. Roscoe did not himself draw direct comparisons between Florence and Liverpool, although he was one of the prime movers in attempting to develop the artistic and cultural reputation of his native city. But the parallels were there to be drawn in the nineteenth century.Footnote 6
The objectives of this article are, therefore, to establish why Florence was so often preferred above Italian cities; to elucidate the shifting patterns in the representation of Florence through the eighteenth century and to evaluate the extent to which these would have been determined by cultural developments at home. In doing so, the eighteenth-century foundations upon which the nineteenth-century admiration for Renaissance Florence could be built will be established. The material upon which this article is based comes from a miscellaneous range of sources: printed tours and guides, unpublished journals and correspondence, itself coming from an equally varied range of writers. The classic image of the Grand Tourist is that of the young aristocratic male, attended by his clerical bearleader, but this should not blind us to the fact that the Grand Tour was never, and particularly not from around 1740, the preserve of the youth of the British aristocracy. As the century progressed the age range and the social background of travellers to Italy became increasingly varied, as older men, family groups, merchants, and professionals, and even single women, travelled to Italy in rising numbers, following the same route and visiting the same sights as their younger counterparts.Footnote 7 The English were the most numerous amongst British travellers, but there was always a substantial minority from Scotland and Ireland (many attracted to the Pretender's court) and a scattering of Welsh gentry. From the perspective of the Italians, however, they were all milordi inglesi.
In concentrating on a single city, the intention here is to direct attention away from more traditional areas of inquiry – such as the influence of Italy upon the development of domestic art and architecture, or its role in shaping the contemporary canon of taste – and to focus instead upon how British travellers reacted to a particular place. Whilst other centres of the Grand Tour, such as Rome and Venice, have attracted considerable attention, the experience of visiting the city of Florence itself, as opposed to the collections in the Uffizi, has never been considered at any length.Footnote 8 Furthermore, despite the fact that the Grand Tour was an inherently urban experience, comparatively little attention has been directed towards considering how visitors responded to and described a city such as Florence, in which they would normally expect to spend a minimum of two weeks.
By the later eighteenth century, as this article shows, British tourists were displaying a better informed and more wide-ranging interest in the city of Florence and its history. Much of the information upon which they drew had always been available: the change in content was not so much the result of the discovery of new material, but rather a question of making better use of sources that had always existed, either in English or Italian. But it should also be recognized that the ‘re-evaluation’ of Florence that can be identified in the later eighteenth century coincided with a stronger sense of civic patriotism and a revival of interest in the Florentine republic that was developing within Florence itself at the same time. This article also considers, therefore, the extent to which British visitors' perceptions of the city drew upon information derived from the printed guides and histories which they would have encountered in Italy, and the degree to which the changing sensibilities of the British were determined by the Florentine view of the city and its past.
I
British responses to Florence are remarkable for the consistency of their approbation. Rome, Venice, and Naples, the other major centres of the Italian tour, evoked much more equivocal reactions. Whilst there were many who admired Venice's beauty and wondered at its extraordinary topography, there was equally a well-established tradition that complained of the ‘filthy heaps and nasty lakes’.Footnote 9 Conventional taste in architecture was offended by the ‘awkward and irregular’ appearance of San Marco and the Doge's palace.Footnote 10 Once the novelty of the floating city had worn off, visitors often complained that they felt oppressed by a sense of claustrophobia: penned up within the confines of the city and surrounded by the sea, they longed to be able to stretch their legs on dry land, with a view of wide open spaces. For the first week, wrote James Boswell, he was charmed by the novelty and beauty of the city, ‘but I soon wearied of travelling continually by water, shut up in those lugubrious gondolas’.Footnote 11 Rome was the ultimate goal of the Grand Tourist, but the ruins aside, British visitors were frequently unimpressed, or at least claimed to be unimpressed, by the modern city, not least because most observers were locked into a system of thought whereby papal absolutism could not be admitted to be capable of good government or benign rule.Footnote 12 St Peter's was impressive, but the baroque curves of Bernini and Borromini did not appeal to British tastes, whilst the social life and the entertainments on offer were often found wanting. Naples, whither the tourists repaired to escape the rigours of a Roman Lent, offered a livelier social scene, a benign climate, and a wealth of curiosities, geological and antiquarian, in the surrounding campagna. But Naples as a city failed to captivate the British imagination to the extent that Florence did. The architecture was too florid; the Catholicism too overt; the lazzaroni too idle.Footnote 13
The tradition of writing favourably about Florence was established early in the institutional development of the Grand Tour. Travellers in the late seventeenth century always remarked upon the extent to which Grand Duke Cosimo III was particularly well disposed towards the British and how he welcomed them more warmly to Florence than any other nation, dispensing gifts of wine and fruit to all new arrivals.Footnote 14 Whilst it was clearly in his interests to maintain a friendly relationship with Britain, if only with regard to the trading interests of the port of Livorno, whose prosperity was heavily dependent upon the English factory, the English at least chose to believe the friendly reception was in recognition of the hospitality which Cosimo had himself received when he visited England as a young man in 1668–9.Footnote 15 The warmth of his reception did much to temper the criticism which travellers were wont to level against an absolute ruler such as Cosimo, who kept cannons trained upon the city in the event of any unrest and oppressed his subjects with high levels of taxation.Footnote 16 More trenchant criticism was directed against his successors, who did not enjoy the buffer of being thought a particular friend of Britain, but the sense of affinity with Florence was not eradicated.
The end of the Medici dynasty in 1737 ushered in the absentee rule of Francis Stephen, later Holy Roman Emperor, and the British could no longer expect such preferential treatment from the ruler or his representatives. They still contrived to find common ground, however: British visitors were ready to believe that the archduke and his nobility encouraged trade (they noted the custom amongst the nobility of selling wine from their own palazzi) and this, they argued, tempered both the absolutism and the poverty of the country.Footnote 17 But Count Richecourt, Francis Stephen's plenipotentiary, definitely did not favour the British: he was responsible, amongst other policies, for revoking the immunities of the British merchants at Livorno.Footnote 18 This hostility from the ducal court was, however, less significant than it might have been because from 1740 British travellers could find a home from home at the house of Sir Horace Mann, who had assumed the role of British Resident in Florence. Mann's boundless hospitality and courtesy to British visitors of all descriptions is well documented, both in his own correspondence and that of the tourists themselves, and does not need reiteration. According to the earl of Cork, he was the only person he had ever known, whom ‘all Englishmen agreed in praising’.Footnote 19 Mann died in 1786, but his successor, John, Lord Hervey, similarly appreciated the importance of hospitality, even if he won fewer golden opinions from the tourists whom he entertained.Footnote 20 The unusual longevity of Mann's tenure provided a remarkable element of continuity in the experience of British travellers. Young men who enjoyed his hospitality in the 1740s were followed by their offspring a generation later, leading to some touching scenes, such as the occasion when Mann introduced the young Thomas Pelham, heir to the future earl of Chichester, to the Countess Acciaioli, to whom his father had acted as cavaliere servente twenty-five years before.Footnote 21
By the time that Thomas Pelham was making small talk with his father's former mistress in 1777, there had been a change of ruler. Francis Stephen was succeeded by Peter Leopold in 1765, who embarked upon a project of implementing the precepts of enlightened absolutism within the dukedom of Tuscany.Footnote 22 British tourists generally warmed to Duke Leopold, as he was generally known: with his agricultural reforms, suppression of monasteries, codification of the law, abolition of excessive ceremonial and ritual, he was credited with bringing prosperity and progress to Tuscany. He appeared to be introducing the kind of enlightened tolerance and economic progress which the British associated with their own country. Unlike the Roman or Neapolitan campagna, which invariably gave rise to reflections on alternatively the pernicious effects of corrupt and absolutist government or the dead hand of feudalism on the affluence of a country, the prosperity which travellers claimed to detect throughout Tuscany, and the flourishing commerce at the free port of Livorno, vindicated their own belief in the benign effects of free trade, toleration, and enlightened principles.Footnote 23 Of more practical concern to the tourists was the fact that he opened up the Laurentian Library to visitors and abolished the custom of giving perquisites to the guides and servants.
Due to the presence of the English factory at Livorno, supplies of English food and other goods were more readily available in Florence than elsewhere – a matter of no small importance for travellers who often found normal Italian fare hard to stomach. John Swinton, a naval chaplain, who visited Florence during a sojourn in Livorno in 1731, was pleased to discover that the Florentine nobility had acquired a taste for English beer: ‘The Italian nobility and Cavaliers’, he noted, ‘make nothing of drinking 3 or 4 Bottles of the strongest English Beer in a Morning, but ys [this] is no Prejudice to them, their heads being in capable of suffering thereby.’Footnote 24 In addition to beer, as numbers of tourists found, the shops were better stocked than elsewhere in Italy, with imported luxuries such as Reading sauce and Woodstock gloves, whilst Mariana Starke, whose special concern was the care of travelling invalids, was pleased to reassure her readers that ‘Dr. James Fever Powders’ were readily available in Florence.Footnote 25 By the second half of the eighteenth century, there were several well-established hostelries which were famous amongst the British for being run by their own countrymen. One such was run by Charles Hadfield, who had determined upon establishing a hotel in Florence after his own negative experiences of travel in Italy.Footnote 26 He ran his business, which eventually amounted to three different establishments in and around Florence, for thirty years. After his death, one of the hotels was acquired in 1779 by another Englishman, Meggit, who had been servant to Lord Maynard.Footnote 27 Meggit continued to cater to the needs of the English for nearly twenty years. Vanini's was run by Widow Vanini, an Englishwoman who had married an Italian and made a profitable living out of catering to the needs of visitors, such as Lady Miller, who relished the ‘true English elegance, civility and cleanliness’.Footnote 28 Hester Piozzi revelled in the soft clean pillows, currant tarts, beans, and bacon,Footnote 29 and Mrs Flaxman was delighted to be served good English fare of roast beef and plum pudding.Footnote 30 Male travellers tended to be less specific about the creature comforts that they found at these places, but the clean beds and familiar food were as welcome to them as to women. There is a palpable sense of relief evident in their letters and journals as they found themselves amidst more familiar surroundings after the strains of travel.Footnote 31 As the artist Thomas Jones remarked with relief on his arrival at Hadfield's: ‘I could hardly help fancying myself in England and that increasing phantom – distance from home which continually haunted my Mind at every Other Stage, vanished an Instant.’Footnote 32 Comments such as these bring home the sense of estrangement and alienation which was as much a part of the Grand Tour as the emotional transports enjoyed on seeing the Venus de Medici.Footnote 33
II
Florence, then, offered perhaps a higher degree of physical comfort than other Italian cities. But Piozzi's remark, quoted at the outset of this article, reminds us that it was as much the physical appearance of the town that she found so ‘cheering’ as the quality of the accommodation. What impressed the British visitor in Florence was the ‘good figure’ made by the houses and buildings,Footnote 34 the breadth of the main streets (beyond which few tourists penetrated), and the quality of the pavements and the cleanliness. For many tourists, the last place in which they would have made any extended stay in Italy – particularly those who had come by sea from the south of France – would have been Genoa. Here, the streets were notoriously narrow; so much so that they were impassable to carriages, and the elaborately decorated façades could barely be seen from the street. Florence, however, had the kind of broad avenues and spacious squares that were widely appreciated, both for their aesthetic qualities and the freer circulation of air and traffic that they allowed. Moreover, these thoroughfares were paved and cleansed, mitigating the perennial complaint of British visitors to Italy about the filthy state of the streets. ‘It is so perfectly clean’, the countess of Pomfret told the countess of Hertford in 1740, ‘that there is not the least ill smell in the streets all the year round.’Footnote 35 Even after a shower, noted Ann Flaxman, the streets were clean and dry enough for walking.Footnote 36 With respect to architecture, British visitors, who found the baroque curves and columns of Rome and Naples in poor taste, were more in sympathy with the simpler Florentine aesthetic. The façades of the palazzi and other buildings built in the ‘Tuscan’ or ‘rustic’ order were in general widely admired, not least for their perceived similarity to the Palladian style made fashionable in Britain by the earl of Burlington.Footnote 37 French visitors, by contrast, were less impressed: Charles de Brosses found the buildings' façades excessively flat, lacking the relief and movement of columns which he admired in the architecture of Borromini and Bernini.Footnote 38 Whilst there were no architectural glories to match St Peter's or antiquities to compete with the Coliseum, the prevailing impression of Florence was of a city that was uniquely pleasant and agreeable. Even Samuel Sharp, one of the most critical and disaffected observers amongst the British travellers in Italy, judged Florence to be preferred to all other cities in Italy as a place of residence.Footnote 39
It is noticeable that some of the most positive commendations of Florence emanate from female travellers such as Pomfret, Miller, Flaxman, and Piozzi who have already been quoted. Their enthusiasm, and that of other women, seems to suggest that Florence was particularly attractive to the female traveller.Footnote 40 There was more to this preference than simply feminine concerns with hygiene and domestic comfort. In other ways, too, Florence offered a more congenial atmosphere in which women could spend time than did Rome, for example, where the principal objective was supposed to be the study of antiquities. This is not to say that women did not admire antiquities or take an interest in them – for that was patently not the case. They were, however, generally at a disadvantage compared to men in the appreciation of antiquities, simply by virtue of their education. Rarely did they have the same level of familiarity with Roman history and the classical texts which framed the responses and determined the agenda of sightseeing for their male counterparts. Moreover, in Rome, many of the antiquities were in the disabatio (the areas within the city walls which were no longer inhabited) and less easily accessible to women, whose social position did not allow them to undertake the kind of lengthy expeditions on foot and horseback in variable weather which were part and parcel of a comprehensive course of antiquities.Footnote 41 In Florence, however, the object was not so much the pursuit of antiquity, but the appreciation of art and the cultivation of polite sociability in the conversazione, the theatres, and the opera houses. Florence lent itself particularly well to the female visitor who, armed with a copy of Jonathan Richardson's An account of some of the statues, bas-reliefs, drawings and pictures in Italy, with remarks (1722) or Charles Nicholas Cochin's Voyage d'Italie (1758), could pronounce judgements on works of art as readily as any man – and frequently did.Footnote 42 Zoffany's conversation piece of Grand Tourists leering over the Venus de Medici, the Venus d'Urbino, and other choice specimens has helped to create a perception of the Grand Tour as a largely masculine experience.Footnote 43 Zoffany, however, deployed considerable artistic licence in inserting many objects of virtù which did not normally reside in the tribuna; his representation of the space as the preserve of male connoisseurs was hardly any more accurate. Lady Miller, for one, provided a blow by blow account of how she and her husband measured every part of the Venus de Medici's anatomy: ‘round her shoulders, passing the string under her arms across her breast, three feet’.Footnote 44
There was also a well-established social life in which women, and men, could participate: Sir Horace Mann was attentive and assiduous in entertaining British travellers, even to the extent of rigging up lamps on green poles wrapped with vine branches in order to create the effect of Vauxhall Gardens.Footnote 45 ‘I believe there is no place in Europe, where the nobility and gentry pass their time more agreeably than they do here’, wrote one visitor in 1756.Footnote 46 In Venice, Rome, and Naples, the British found that the majority of the resident nobility were reluctant to entertain at home, preferring to exchange visits in the boxes of the theatre and the opera house. The Florentine nobility were similarly reticent, but the centrality of Mann's entertainments to the Florentine social scene – to which Italians as well as British were invited – allowed for greater levels of social intercourse than visitors found in other major centres. Mann's efforts were supplemented by the presence of other long-term English residents, such as the third Earl Cowper, Lord Tylney, and the countess of Orford, who similarly extended hospitality, although on a less inclusive basis.Footnote 47 Perceptions were, perhaps, also influenced by the anglophile tone of Florentine culture: by the 1770s Italian histories of England, translations of Hume, Robertson, and Smollett were available, along with English grammars for those who wished to learn the language themselves.Footnote 48 ‘I must own’, confessed the earl of Winchelsea to his mother, ‘it gives me great pleasure to see the French a little humbled as it is very evident how much the preference is given to the English’.Footnote 49 The air of ‘cheerfulness and gaiety’ was still being offered as a defining characteristic of the city in the guides of the early nineteenth century.Footnote 50 Hester Piozzi's lament on leaving Florence illustrates the value that was placed upon the sociability and entertainment on offer: ‘Florence’ was, she wrote, ‘still the residence of sweetness, grace and the fine arts particularly; of these kind friends too, so amiable, so hospitable, where I had the choice of four boxes in each theatre.’Footnote 51
III
Voltaire's description of Florence as a second Athens quickly became a clichéd observation amongst travellers.Footnote 52 Florence was, as Piozzi said, above all the ‘residence of the fine arts’, and the places where these were to be appreciated were chiefly the duke's gallery and the Palazzo Pitti. The Medici collections were the principal attraction drawing visitors to Florence and were likewise the justification for spending an extended period of time there. Florence was both described, and experienced, chiefly as a gallery of paintings and sculptures, rather than as an urban space of streets, piazzas, and buildings. Travellers' diaries show that visitors went straight to the gallery before any other sight upon arrival in Florence, and once at the gallery, it was the treasures of the tribuna, and above all the Venus de Medici, which elicited the most extravagant praise. Two weeks were not enough, it was said, to appreciate the glories of that collection alone: Edward Gibbon found that he needed fourteen separate visits fully to appreciate its riches.Footnote 53 Philip Yorke, anxious to impress his uncle (who was bankrolling his trip) with his seriousness of purpose, opined that there was sufficient in the gallery to occupy one for a couple of months. In the event, he tired of paintings after only two weeks.Footnote 54
Most visitors did, of course, visit more than the gallery and the Palazzo Pitti and took in a number of churches and other palazzi during their visit, but the tourist itinerary was a highly partial and selective one, which sought out monuments and buildings associated with a few key figures and the works of those artists only who were admired according to conventional eighteenth-century canons of taste. Amongst the Florentine artists, Raphael, Michelangelo, Andrea del Sarto, and Fra Bartolommeo were held in particular esteem, whilst Giotto and Cimabue deserved acknowledgement, if not admiration, as the first revivers of the art of painting. The duomo, along with the campanile and the baptistery, occupied almost as important a position on the tourist itinerary as did the Medici collections. It was Brunelleschi's octagonal dome, renowned for being the forerunner to Michelangelo's greater effort at St Peter's, which was chiefly admired. The marble clad exterior, by contrast, evinced very mixed responses and only qualified admiration.Footnote 55 Inside, the tomb of Giovanni Acuto, the English condottieri (mercenary captain) Sir John Hawkwood, was one of the few objects of notice in an interior which was generally deemed disappointingly drear. Few visitors missed San Lorenzo where they would marvel at the unfinished riches of the Medici chapel and Michelangelo's Medici tomb in the sacristy. In Santa Croce, Giotto's frescos were invisible in the eighteenth century and its soaring gothic proportions failed to impress, but the tombs of Galileo and Aretino, as well as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, made the church a site of pilgrimage, even before Byron gave Santa Croce and the ‘all Etruscan three’ literary immortality in Childe Harold's pilgrimage. The conscientious tourist would go also to Santo Spirito to admire Brunelleschi's architecture; to Santa Trinità, famous for having been Michelangelo's favourite church; and to Santissima Annunziata, noted for the frescos of Andrea del Sarto in the cloisters. With the exception of the baptistery (which was persistently, but erroneously, said to have been originally a Roman temple to Mars) and Giotto's campanile, few buildings erected before the era of Brunelleschi attracted any notice at all.
To a certain extent, this narrowness of vision was determined early on by the nature of the guide books that became principal reference works for years to come. Richardson's Account of some of the statues, bas-reliefs, drawings and pictures in Italy was one of the most influential works on art appreciation and art theory amongst the English reading public, but it covered only the duomo and San Lorenzo amongst all the Florentine churches in any detail. Subsequent visitors, therefore, found themselves bereft of guidance when viewing other fabrics, and their comments were correspondingly limited. Richardson's preferences were perpetuated by other widely used guides: Edward Wright and Thomas Martyn, for example, whose published observations were separated by nearly sixty years, both confined their comments on Florence to little more than a description of the duomo, the gallery, and San Lorenzo.Footnote 56
In all these comments on the art and architecture of Florence, it is easy to detect the influence of Vasari. Much of what Richardson conveyed to his readers was in fact a condensed summary of the Lives of the artists. It is for this reason, one may assume, that the campanile was so widely admired, given that its pink and white marble design owed nothing to the classical orders of architecture that normally determined the parameters of good taste. Vasari's opinions were filtered through into travellers' observations in varying degrees of attenuation, but in the process of translation and transmission, the expression of Florentine pride in the artistic achievements of his native city was diluted and lost, along with the anecdotes that enlivened his biographies. Whilst visitors were willing to accept Vasari's overall argument that the recovery of art began in Florence and was largely the work of Florentine artists, they showed little interest in the stages by which that recovery took place. They largely ignored those artists whose work preceded that of the great masters Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, and showed no interest in the world in which they lived or the patrons for whom they worked. Their sights were focused instead upon the patronage of the Medici dukes.Footnote 57
Thus many tourists never recorded anything in Florence beyond their visit to the gallery and the tribuna. There were, of course, lengthy guides published to take them through the collection and to structure their subsequent observations.Footnote 58 But there were also plenty of guides to the city of Florence as a whole available for the visitor to purchase.Footnote 59 Based upon the same text and published by Florence's single printing house, the guide was repackaged and expanded in various editions through the eighteenth century. Those who read it would have been alerted to a city which comprised more than the collections of art and virtù of the Medici family. Even the versions produced in the earlier part of the century, at a time when Medici absolutism had effectively dampened Florentines' interest in their own past, offered the visitor something more than a city which was simply a showcase for Medici patronage and collecting. The visitor was taken through a comprehensive tour of the churches, palazzi, and charitable institutions of the city. The guides divided the city up into quarters, and documented every church and building of significance within each area. Not only did British tourists ignore the majority of these buildings, but they showed a complete disregard for the topography and the history of the city.
Marco Lastri, the author of L'Osservatore Fiorentino (1776) wrote of how the stones and buildings of which the city was built could only come to life if connected to the historical events which gave rise to them and which took place within their walls.Footnote 60 British visitors, however, preferred to remain oblivious to the history of the Florentine republic which was often dismissed simply as a series of revolutions. Florence had none of the enviable stability of the Venetian Republic whose buildings elicited rather more interest. Important republican structures such as the Piazza della Signoria (the Piazza del Gran Duca as it was then known), the Palazzo Vecchio, and its cycle of frescos celebrating the major events of Florentine history (always described in detail by the Florentines) seldom received anything more than a passing comment. When the frescos were mentioned, it was by virtue of having been painted by Vasari, rather than in recognition of the interest of their subject matter. The Palazzo Vecchio itself was almost universally condemned as an ugly gothic building, and its tower, extolled by various Florentine writers as a structure of outstanding beauty, was condemned as the clumsy ineptitude of a rude, uncultivated age.Footnote 61 Even John Breval, one of the most sympathetic of English writers on Florence, found it ‘bold’, but ‘somewhat shocking to the Eye, from a Projection, in which the Builder made a Shew of his art at the Expence of his Judgment’.Footnote 62 An appreciation of Florence as a picturesque city of ‘domes and turrets’ did not come until the nineteenth century.Footnote 63
Florentine pride in their city's artistic achievement and the contribution of Florence to the development of the arts throughout the civilized world (in effect a distillation of Vasari's argument) did not impress the British.Footnote 64 Whilst the importance of Giotto and Cimabue in the narrative of the restoration of civilization was always acknowledged, this never extended to admiration for their works of art themselves. Their paintings, if described at all, were deemed dry, hard, and unpleasant. Typically British visitors would decline even to identify artists before the late quattrocento and the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici. Had they consulted Italian guides they could have discovered considerably more about the works of art to be found in the city's churches and monastic foundations. It was not that the Florentine guides were celebrating the merits of early Renaissance artists in any great detail – the Florentines shared the same standards of taste and expectations as the British – but these guides provided considerably more information about the subject matter and design of such paintings. Whilst acknowledging the deficiencies in perspective, drawing, and composition of the early Renaissance artists, they also lauded them for having transcended the barbarity of i tempi bassi.Footnote 65
The short tourist guides were hardly espousing full blown Florentine civic republicanism in defiance of Medici absolutism, but the sense of Florentine superiority, civic identity, and pride, which looked back to the fifteenth-century traditions of civic republicanism, was never eliminated.Footnote 66 There was a strong tradition of chronicling and history writing, ranging from the fourteenth-century chronicles of Villani to the sixteenth-century histories of Guiccardini and Machiavelli. Eighteenth-century Florentines were deeply conscious of this tradition which also provided the historical basis for the guidebooks. Florentines, like the citizens of any other city, attached considerable importance to the antiquity of its foundation, its fortunes under the Romans and decline of the Empire and the city's resurgence under Charlemagne during i bassi tempi.Footnote 67 Most British visitors to Florence, however, were content simply to accept Machiavelli's view that Florence had been founded by a colony of Romans under the triumvirate. Florence, noted the antiquary Francis Drake laconically, ‘is of a very modern date’.Footnote 68 The efforts of Florentine antiquaries such as Giovanni Lami or the Academy of Cortona to establish claims for an Etruscan civilization in Florence that preceded that of the Romans were of little concern to the British.Footnote 69 Edward Gibbon's interest in the Etruscan antiquities in the ducal collections and his keen admiration for the Florentine antiquaries, Lami and Anton Francesco Gori, was highly unusual.Footnote 70 The British were similarly unmoved by the role of Charlemagne in refounding the city. What is more surprising, perhaps, is the muted interest in Florence's history as a republic.Footnote 71 The British were unimpressed by the traditions of republican freedom in Florence: the Florentines took great pride in this era of their history, it was said, but the general verdict was that they had allowed themselves to be enslaved by the Medici. The tendency was to be sternly dismissive of specious arguments that had failed to prevent the Florentine people from sinking into servile submission.Footnote 72 Nor did they buy into the Florentine re-invention of themselves as the heirs of republican Rome. Whilst guidebooks claimed that the Florentines were the descendants of the best sorts of Romans, had the noblest spirits, and that in the fifteenth century the ottimi cittadini exceeded the senators of Rome in public virtue, British observers found that they had not a ‘trace of Roman spirit left in them’.Footnote 73
The mercantile past and the prosperity of the Florentine republic similarly commanded little notice, particularly when compared with interest in, and awareness of, the rise of the Venetian or even the Genoese republics.Footnote 74 Given the emphasis on overseas trade in eighteenth-century perceptions of national identity, the fact that Florence was not a sea-going city state may have retarded appreciation of the city as a centre of trade and commerce.Footnote 75 None of the Florentine guides, of course, offered anything approaching an analysis of the economic history of the city, but they did draw attention to the wealth that ‘must have’ existed in the city in order to fund the massive building projects of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They also highlighted the role of the guilds as patrons of art and sources of funding for the architectural embellishment of the city. None of this influenced British perceptions of Florence. The rise of the republic and the late thirteenth-century flowering of wealth, during which many of the major churches were constructed and when the city clearly assumed its modern form, was not recognized by British tourists until late in the eighteenth century.
IV
These patterns did not, however, hold good for the entire eighteenth century. In the last two decades of the century, British perceptions of Florence became less narrowly concerned with the art and antiquities of the Medici. Instead they began to encompass rather more of the city's history and its specifically urban qualities. As interest grew in the city before the period of the Medici dukedom, the British began to perceive new affinities between Florence – a city where liberty, commerce, and the arts flourished – and Britain.
Part of this is attributable to changes in the social background of those travelling to Italy. Over the course of the century, the profile of visitors, whilst still wealthy, grew steadily less aristocratic: by the 1780s it included many from a commercial or professional background. Indeed, in the last two decades, visitors from gentry, professional and other ‘middle-class’ backgrounds appear to have outnumbered their aristocratic counterparts.Footnote 76 One such was the agricultural writer, Arthur Young, who travelled to Italy in 1789. Young was not a typical tourist, of course. He was in search of economic information rather than virtù (although that did not mean that he was immune to the charms of the Venus de Medici or any of the other set pieces of the Grand Tour). It did mean, however, that he took a notably more informed interest in the state of the economy, and in particular that of Tuscany, which had seen significant improvements under the rule of Leopold. He noted that income from land was now far more important than that derived from trade, and that the major source of employment was domestic service, rather than manufactures. But he was also acutely aware of the former importance of trade for Florence as the basis of her splendour and magnificence. Young drew an explicit connection between the grandeur of the palazzi and the churches and the flourishing state of the Florentine economy from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Rather than simply alluding to the Pitti Palace, for example, as yet another sign of Medici splendour or as the palace of a nobleman, which was the conventional description, he pointed out that the Pitti, and all the other palaces, had been built by private merchants, and marvelled at the wealth that must have sustained such conspicuous display. Merchants in London, he observed, might make a yearly profit of £20,000–30,000, but they just lived in brick cottages with a few daubed portraits and earthenware figures on their chimney pieces: they were, he admitted, contemptible in comparison.Footnote 77 J. E. Smith was similarly impressed by the scale of the private mercantile wealth which lay behind the construction of the palazzi.Footnote 78 The comments of other tourists offered comparable shifts in emphasis, so that buildings such as the Palazzo Strozzi or Palazzo Riccardo Medici were being described as a merchant's, rather than a nobleman's, house in the 1790s.Footnote 79 Their observations were no doubt influenced by contemporary discussion of the relationship between wealth and virtue which had been encouraged under the auspices of Leopold, but as visitors contemplated the civilization of republican Florence and the contribution of private individuals in sustaining that culture, the conclusions to be drawn were obvious.Footnote 80 Taste, genius, literature, and the arts fled Rome, to reappear in the Florentine and other Italian republics, and thence they passed to Holland. Their present sole abode, as Charlotte Waldie Eaton was to claim a few years later, was England.Footnote 81
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The burgeoning interest in the history of Florence before the cinquecento was to some extent part of a much more general interest in the middle ages as a period of historical inquiry which was characteristic of the later eighteenth century.Footnote 82 It was identified as a crucial stage in the development of society and the progress towards civilization, and in the emergence of the nation state. In his introductory essay to his History of the reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769), for example, William Robertson showed how, in the centuries following the end of the Crusades, feudalism was eroded, a spirit of industry revived, and commerce began to flourish; towns, and particularly the Italian cities, grew in population, wealth, and prosperity.Footnote 83 Of more particular concern here, however, was the re-evaluation of the period's art and literature and a recognition of its inherent interest as an era of singular cultural development and achievement. Abolitionism aside, William Roscoe is also notable for having shown a precocious taste in the collection of Italian primitives; an interest which stemmed not so much from an aesthetic appreciation of their distinctive qualities as from an ambition to illustrate the rise and progress of the arts.Footnote 84 Not that he was the first to show this kind of interest: in the last three decades of the eighteenth century, a number of connoisseurs were beginning to direct attention towards the historical evolution of painting from the first ‘revival’ to what they perceived as the perfection of the cinquecento, and were building up collections accordingly.Footnote 85 This new direction in interest can be seen in part as a response to Winckelmann's historical analysis of the stylistic development of Greek art: its rise to perfection and subsequent decline.Footnote 86 There were also parallels with the antiquarian movement within Great Britain, with its interest in the developments of gothic art and architecture, which had likewise been regarded by the majority as rude and barbaric.Footnote 87 But the Florentines themselves were also setting an example. In 1775, for example, Leopold had a room in his gallery hung with specimens of the first restorers of art arranged in chronological order: the Gabinetto de Antichi Quadri. As successive editions of the Florentine guides became more and more detailed, one of the areas where additional information was most likely to be found was on the early Renaissance paintings and the central role played by Florence in the revival of arts and learning. Civic patriotism, which was beginning to blossom once more under the benign authority of Leopold, drew strength from the traditions of Florence's artistic heritage in the centuries before the establishment of the Medici dukedom.Footnote 88
Architectural observation of late medieval and early Renaissance architecture likewise became more perceptive and acute. This is not to say that there was a rejection of the aesthetics of classicism, but tourists became somewhat more discriminating in their vocabulary of architectural description, more attentive in their description and more precise with regard to dates, architects, and patrons. Sir Richard Colt Hoare, visiting Florence in 1789, delighted in the ‘simplicity and grandeur’ of the gothic architecture and the slender arches which were ‘so far asunder that they appear scarce strong enough to support their weight’.Footnote 89 Travelling amidst the political and military uncertainties of 1815, Robert Finch singled out the side doors and lancet windows for their ‘Greco-Gothic’ taste.Footnote 90 Not everyone found the architecture attractive: it seemed to many eyes a muddle of different styles: the duomo was described in one publication in 1800 as a mix of ‘Moorish’ or ‘lower Greek’ with ‘German gothic’.Footnote 91 But the fact that visitors were now struggling to find adjectives to describe such buildings, rather than simply treating them with silent dismissal, is in itself indicative of changing sensibilities.Footnote 92 Moreover visitors began explicitly to associate a particular style of architecture with the republican period, rather than merely as undistinguished specimens of an unenlightened age.Footnote 93 Palaces, by the early nineteenth century, were being described as monuments to republican dignity.Footnote 94 The contemporary Florentine interest in their own republican past was clearly a factor here, but it is also important to remember that at this time the British reading public – precisely the sorts of people who could afford to go to Italy – were becoming much better informed about the gothic style of architecture, its historical evolution, and the debates over its origins.Footnote 95
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This interest in the art and architecture of the middle ages – the term ‘Renaissance’ was not yet in usage – was also manifest in a more informed interest in Florence's claims to be the cradle of the revival of literature as well as painting, sculpture, and architecture. Florentine pride in the city's literary heritage had always been closely linked to the origins of the artistic revival through the friendship between Dante and Giotto made famous in Vasari's Lives of the artists. But amongst British travellers, interest in Dante had been muted to say the least. Of those who had read Dante's verse there were many who could not overcome their aversion to what they perceived as his barbarism and impropriety.Footnote 96 Interest in Dante, and also Boccaccio, was largely antiquarian. Petrarch, by contrast, had always commanded more respect due to his efforts to revive classical antiquity, his composition of Latin verse, and his invention of the Petrarchan sonnet.Footnote 97 Yet around mid-century, interest in Dante and his near contemporaries began to revive, with a noticeable quickening amongst the broader reading public from the 1780s.Footnote 98 The poetry of Dante, in particular, was made more accessible through translation and given greater immediacy through texts such as Thomas Warton's History of English poetry (1774–81), which discussed Dante's influence on English poets from Chaucer to Milton.Footnote 99 Dante's poetic debt to the troubadours of Provence meant that he could be rediscovered as a poet of the age of chivalry and as such, an enthusiasm for Dante was part of the more general European discovery of the chivalry and romance of the middle ages.Footnote 100 In 1778, Philip Yorke was eager to tell his uncle that his Italian master, Abbé Pellori, had set him on reading the Inferno, well aware that this was a demanding and unusual text to study.Footnote 101 It was not until 1782 that the first full English translation of the Inferno was published, to be followed by another in 1785 by Henry Boyd, who thereafter produced the first complete translation of the Divine comedy in 1802. In the introduction to the Inferno Boyd, a clergyman, offered a riposte to Edward Gibbon, arguing that, rather than being destructive of arts and learning, the religious disputes between the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy in the middle ages had liberated minds and led to a revival of learning. But Boyd also placed considerable emphasis upon the Florentine republic as an oasis of liberty; on its prosperity which had arisen from trade; and how this, in turn, provided the conditions in which the arts could flourish.Footnote 102 The translation was discussed and reviewed in literary periodicals and journals such as the Monthly Review and the Annual Register. Consequently, more people were at least familiar with the tenor of the Divine comedy and the broad outlines of its narrative, even if they were hardly Dante scholars. This much is apparent in the comments of visitors and in the tour guides themselves – references to set pieces from Inferno such as the story of the doomed love affair of Paolo and Francesca, as well as the macabre horror of Count Ugolino's cannibalism (made famous by Reynolds's painting exhibited in 1773) become more common. Dante's portrait in the duomo was pointed out with greater frequency; and the white stone where he used to sit in the Piazza del Duomo became a site of reflection and veneration.Footnote 103
In 1819, the poet Samuel Rogers travelled from Florence to Rome: it was both a physical and historical journey, and one which took him from the world of Lorenzo de' Medici to that of antiquity. Rogers, like most other early nineteenth-century travellers to Italy, was familiar with Roscoe's idealization of the Medicean Florence: a city where a spirit of industry, the pursuit of wealth, and the extension of commerce were fully compatible with the cultivation of literature, the arts, and philosophy; where the favourable effects of freedom had strengthened the mind and allowed the arts to flourish.Footnote 104 The Florentine history of internal dissensions, far from being evidence of fatal factionalism which would open the way for Medici tyranny, was rather presented as the active spirit of liberty.Footnote 105 Roscoe's evocation clearly influenced Rogers's own perceptions as the latter observed: ‘at Florence we thought only of Modern Italy & of its golden age – As we approach Rome, Antient Italy rushes on the Imagination. Italy has had two lives! Can it be said of any other Country?’Footnote 106 This reference to Italy's ‘two lives’ recognized the fifteenth century, and its physical embodiment in the city of Florence, not as a pale shadow of antique grandeur, but as a vibrant, dynamic, and creative era which could command admiration and inspire emulation in its own right. It is in clear anticipation of the subsequent Victorian idealization of Florence and the civilization of the Florentine republic. The sense of special affinity with Florence, to which commercial and manufacturing cities such as Manchester made claim through their architecture and their cultural ambition, was a distinctive nineteenth-century phenomenon, but one which can only be understood fully in terms of the particular admiration and favour with which Florence was regarded in the eighteenth century and which this article has explored. But as we have seen, the specific reasons why Florence was found so ‘cheering to the English eye’ were not immutable. Travellers' perceptions of Florence underwent a significant reorientation during the long eighteenth century, in keeping with changes in the composition of the tourist body and the different intellectual and social agendas of both the travellers and those who represented the city to them as guides and hosts. More broadly, Rogers's recognition of Italy's ‘two lives’ is highly significant as being indicative of a shift in the way in which European history was understood: the classical past was no longer the sole locus of authority and civilization and this had powerful implications for the way in which the history of towns and cities was viewed. The middle ages and the ‘Renaissance’ could equally demand attention and the historical process by which the culture of the Renaissance came about had also to be understood.Footnote 107 Thus an analysis of the literature produced by the Grand Tour may illuminate not just contemporary reactions to a particular city – in this case Florence – but also the process by which cities came to be described and represented, less as aggregations of individual buildings or collections, but as the products of historical processes.Footnote 108
