DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61902#0280
260
THE MAKERS OE ELORKNCE.
new home with hopeful and happy anticipations, pleased
with the fair country, the purer language, the higher
civilization of the people, and with the saintly associations
which the blessed Antonino had left so fresh and fragrant.
It is easy indeed to believe that after toiling across the
rugged Apennines, when the Dominican, still young and
full of natural fervor, came suddenly out from among the
folds of the hills upon that glorious landscape ; when he
saw the beautiful vision of Florence, seated in the rich
garden of her valley, with flowers and olive-trees, and
everything that is beautiful in nature, encircling that
proud combination of everthing that is noble in art;
his heart must have risen at the sight, and some dilation
of the soul, some sense of coming greatness have been
permitted to him, in face of the fate he was to accomplish
there.
The state of Florence at this period was very remarkable.
The most independent and tumultuous of towns was spell-
bound under the sway of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the grandson
of the Cosimo who built San Marco; and scarcely seemed
even to recollect its freedom, so absorbed was it in the
present advantages conferred by “a strong government,”
and solaced by shows, entertainments, festivals, pomp, and
display of all kinds. It was the very height of that classic
revival so famous in the later history of the world, and the
higher classes of society, having shaken themselves apart
with graceful contempt from the lower, had begun to frame
their lives according to a pagan model, leaving the other
and much bigger half of the world to pursue its super-
stitions undisturbed. Florence was as near a pagan city
as it was possible for its rulers to make it. Its intellectual
existence was entirely given up to the past; its days were
spent in that worship of antiquity which has no power of
discrimination, and deifies not only the wisdom but the
trivialities of its golden epoch. Lorenzo reigned in the
THE MAKERS OE ELORKNCE.
new home with hopeful and happy anticipations, pleased
with the fair country, the purer language, the higher
civilization of the people, and with the saintly associations
which the blessed Antonino had left so fresh and fragrant.
It is easy indeed to believe that after toiling across the
rugged Apennines, when the Dominican, still young and
full of natural fervor, came suddenly out from among the
folds of the hills upon that glorious landscape ; when he
saw the beautiful vision of Florence, seated in the rich
garden of her valley, with flowers and olive-trees, and
everything that is beautiful in nature, encircling that
proud combination of everthing that is noble in art;
his heart must have risen at the sight, and some dilation
of the soul, some sense of coming greatness have been
permitted to him, in face of the fate he was to accomplish
there.
The state of Florence at this period was very remarkable.
The most independent and tumultuous of towns was spell-
bound under the sway of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the grandson
of the Cosimo who built San Marco; and scarcely seemed
even to recollect its freedom, so absorbed was it in the
present advantages conferred by “a strong government,”
and solaced by shows, entertainments, festivals, pomp, and
display of all kinds. It was the very height of that classic
revival so famous in the later history of the world, and the
higher classes of society, having shaken themselves apart
with graceful contempt from the lower, had begun to frame
their lives according to a pagan model, leaving the other
and much bigger half of the world to pursue its super-
stitions undisturbed. Florence was as near a pagan city
as it was possible for its rulers to make it. Its intellectual
existence was entirely given up to the past; its days were
spent in that worship of antiquity which has no power of
discrimination, and deifies not only the wisdom but the
trivialities of its golden epoch. Lorenzo reigned in the