Val d'Arno: Ten Lectures on the Tuscan Art Directly Antecedent to the Florentine Year of Victories; Given Before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1873Ruskin, John
History
Val d'Arno: Ten Lectures on the Tuscan Art Directly Antecedent to the Florentine Year of Victories; Given Before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1873
Ruskin, John
Art -- Italy -- Tuscany
Fons est supremus Aldobrandino amoenus.
Ottoboni natus, a bono civita datus.
Only I suppose the pretty word 'amoenus' may be taken as marking the
delightfulness and sweetness of character which had won all men's love,
more, even, than their gratitude.
130. It failed of its effect, however, on the Tuscan aristocratic mind.
For, when, after the battle of the Arbia, the Ghibellines had again
their own way in Florence, though Ottobuoni had been then dead three
years, they beat down his tomb, pulled the dead body out of it, dragged
it--by such tenure as it might still possess--through the city, and
threw the fragments of it into ditches. It is a memorable parallel to
the treatment of the body of Cromwell by our own Cavaliers; and indeed
it seems to me one of the highest forms of laudatory epitaph upon a man,
that his body should be thus torn from its rest. For he can hardly have
spent his life better than in drawing on himself the kind of enmity
which can so be gratified; and for the most loving of lawgivers, as of
princes, the most enviable and honourable epitaph has always been
[Greek: "_oide plitai anton emisoun anton_."
131. Not but that pacific Florence, in her pride of victory, was
beginning to show unamiableness of temper also, on her so equitable
side. It is perhaps worth noticing, for the sake of the name of
Correggio, that in 1257, when Matthew Correggio, of Parma, was the
Podesta of Florence, the Florentines determined to destroy the castle
and walls of Poggibonzi, suspected of Ghibelline tendency, though the
Poggibonzi people came with "coregge in collo," leathern straps
round their necks, to ask that their cattle might be spared. And the
heartburnings between the two parties went on, smouldering hotter
and hotter, till July, 1258, when the people having discovered secret
dealings between the Uberti and the Emperor Manfred, and the Uberti
refusing to obey citation to the popular tribunals, the trades ran to
arms, attacked the Uberti palace, killed a number of their people, took
prisoner, Uberto of the Uberti, Hubert of the Huberts, or Bright-mind
of the Bright-minds, with 'Mangia degl' Infangati, ('Gobbler [1] of
the dirty ones' this knight's name sounds like,)--and after they had
confessed their guilt, beheaded them in St. Michael's corn-market; and
all the rest of the Uberti and Ghibelline families were driven out of
Florence, and their palaces pulled down, and the walls towards Siena
built with the stones of them; and two months afterwards, the people
suspecting the Abbot of Vallombrosa of treating with the Ghibellines,
took him, and tortured him; and he confessing under torture, "at the cry
of the people, they beheaded him in the square of St. Apollinare."
For which unexpected piece of clangorous impiety the Florentines were
excommunicated, besides drawing upon themselves the steady enmity of
Pavia, the Abbot's native town; "and indeed people say the Abbot was
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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