Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa: With Sixteen Illustrations in Colour by William Parkinson and Sixteen Other Illustrations, Second EditionHutton, Edward
History
Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa: With Sixteen Illustrations in Colour by William Parkinson and Sixteen Other Illustrations, Second Edition
Hutton, Edward
Art -- Italy -- Florence; Genoa (Italy) -- History; Tuscany (Italy) -- Description and travel
she should have remembered one of her old heroes, for in the convent
garden Giano della Bella, who fought at Campaldino, and was
anti-clerical too and hateful to the Pope, the hero of the Ordinances of
Justice, used to walk with his friends. _Perisca innanzi la citta_, say
I, _che tante opere rie si sostengano_. By this let even Venetian Jews,
to say nothing of Switzer princes, know how they are like to be
remembered when their little day is over.
[Illustration: OGNISSANTI]
It was in 1256 that the Humiliati founded here in Borgo Ognissanti the
Church of S. Caterina, and carved their arms, a woolpack fastened with
ropes, over the door. Originally founded by certain Lombard exiles in
Northern Germany, the Humiliati were at first at any rate a lay
brotherhood, which had learned in exile the craft of weaving wool. Such
wool as was to be had in Tuscany, a land of olives and vines, almost
without pasture, was poor enough, and it seems to have been only after
the advent of the Humiliati that the great Florentine industry began to
assert itself, foreign wools being brought in a raw state to the city
and sold, dressed and woven into cloth, in all the cities of Europe and
the East. This brotherhood, however, in 1140 formed itself into a
Religious Order under a Bull of Innocent III, and though from that time
the brethren seem no longer to have worked at their craft themselves,
they directed the work of laymen whom they enrolled and employed,
busying themselves for the most part with new inventions and the
management of what soon became an immense business. Their fame was
spread all over Italy, for, as Villari tells us,[111] "wherever a house
of their Order was established, the wool-weaving craft immediately made
advance," so that in 1239 the Commune of Florence invited them to
establish a house near the city, as they did in S. Donato a Torri, which
was given them by the Signoria. By 1250 we read that the Guild Masters
were already grumbling at their distance from the city, so that they
removed to S. Lucia sul Prato, under promise of exemption from all
taxes; and in 1256 they founded a church and convent in Borgo
Ognissanti. The Church of S. Lucia sul Prato still stands, but the
Humiliati were robbed of it in 1547 by Cosimo I, who, strangely enough,
had taken the old convent of S. Donato a Torri from the friars who had
acquired it, in order to build a fortification, and now wished to give
them the Church of S. Lucia sul Prato. It is said that the friars began
to build their convent, but four years later abandoned the work,
removing to S. Jacopo on the other side Arno. However this may be, the
Franciscans certainly succeeded the Humiliati in their convent in Borgo
Ognissanti about this time, and in 1627 they rebuilt S. Caterina,
renaming it S. Salvadore. To-day there is but little worth seeing in
this seventeenth-century church,--a St. Augustine by Botticelli, a St.
Jerome and two large frescoes by Domenico Ghirlandajo,--but in the old
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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