With the exception of the chapel, the interior of the Palazzo Riccardi
is not very suggestive of the old Medicean glories of the days of
Lorenzo the Magnificent. There is a fine court, surrounded with
sarcophagi and statues, including some of the old tombs which stood
round the Baptistery and among which Guido Cavalcanti used to linger,
and some statues of Apostles from the second façade of the Duomo.
Above the arcades are eight fine classical medallions by Donatello,
copied and enlarged from antique gems. The rooms above have been
entirely altered since the days when Capponi defied King Charles, and
Madonna Clarice taunted Alessandro and Ippolito; the large gallery,
which witnessed these scenes, is covered with frescoes by Luca
Giordano, executed in the early part of the seventeenth century. The
Chapel--still entirely reminiscent of the better Medici--was painted
by Benozzo Gozzoli shortly before the death of Cosimo the Elder, with
frescoes representing the Procession of the Magi, in a delightfully
impossible landscape. The two older kings are the Patriarch Joseph of
Constantinople, and John Paleologus, Emperor of the East, who had
visited Florence twenty years before on the occasion of the Council
(Benozzo, it must be observed, was painting them in 1459, after the
fall of Constantinople); the third is Lorenzo dei Medici himself, as a
boy. Behind follow the rest of the Medicean court, Cosimo himself and
his son, Piero, content apparently to be led forward by this mere lad;
and in their train is Benozzo Gozzoli himself, marked by the signature
on his hat. The picture of the Nativity itself, round which Benozzo's
lovely Angels--though very earthly compared with Angelico's--seem
still to linger in attendance, is believed to have been one by Lippo
Lippi, now at Berlin.
In the chapter _Of the Superhuman Ideal_, in the second volume of
_Modern Painters_, Ruskin refers to these frescoes as the most
beautiful instance of the supernatural landscapes of the early
religious painters:--
"Behind the adoring angel groups, the landscape is governed by the
most absolute symmetry; roses, and pomegranates, their leaves drawn to
the last rib and vein, twine themselves in fair and perfect order
about delicate trellises; broad stone pines and tall cypresses
overshadow them, bright birds hover here and there in the serene sky,
and groups of angels, hand joined with hand, and wing with wing, glide
and float through the glades of the unentangled forest. But behind the
human figures, behind the pomp and turbulence of the kingly procession
descending from the distant hills, the spirit of the landscape is
changed. Severer mountains rise in the distance, ruder prominences
and less flowery vary the nearer ground, and gloomy shadows remain
unbroken beneath the forest branches."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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