Romola (12 page)

“Nay, go on, Cennini,” said the middle-aged man, seated at the window, “which means triumph of the fat
popolani
over the lean, which again means triumph of the fattest
popolano
over those who are less fat.”

“Cronaca, you are becoming sententious,” said the printer; “Fra Girolamo's preaching will spoil you, and make you take life by the wrong handle. Trust me, your cornices will lose half their beauty if you begin to mingle bitterness with them; that is the
maniera Tedesca
which you used to declaim against when you came from Rome. The next palace you build we shall see you trying to put the Frate's doctrine into stone.”

“That is a goodly show of cavaliers,” said Tito, who had learned by this time the best way to please Florentines; “but are there not strangers among them? I see foreign costumes.”

“Assuredly,” said Cennini; “you see there the Orators from France, Milan, and Venice, and behind them are English and German nobles; for it is customary that all foreign visitors of distinction pay their tribute to San Giovanni in the train of that gonfalon. For my part, I think our Florentine cavaliers sit their horses as well as any of those cut-and-thrust northerners, whose wits lie in their heels and saddles; and for yon Venetian, I fancy he would feel himself more at ease on the back of a dolphin. We ought to know something of horsemanship, for we excel all Italy in the sports of the
Giostra
, and the money we spend on them. But you will see a finer show of our chief men by-and-by, Melema; my brother himself will be among the officers of the Zecca.”

“The banners are the better sight,” said Piero di Cosimo, forgetting the noise in his delight at the winding stream of colour as the tributary standards advanced round the piazza. “The Florentine men are so-so; they make but a sorry show at this distance with their patch of sallow flesh-tint above the black garments; but those banners with their velvet, and satin, and minever, and brocade, and their endless play of delicate light and shadow!—
Va!
your human talk and doings are a tame jest; the only passionate life is in form and colour.”

“Ay, Piero, if Satanasso could paint, thou wouldst sell thy soul to learn his secrets,” said Nello. “But there is little likelihood of it, seeing the blessed angels themselves are such poor hands at chiaroscuro, if one may judge from their
capo-d'opera
, the Madonna Nunziata.”

“There go the banners of Pisa and Arezzo,” said Cennini. “Ay, Messer Pisano, it is no use for you to look sullen; you may as well carry your banner to our San Giovanni with a good grace. ‘Pisans false, Florentines blind'—the second half of that proverb will hold no longer. There come the ensigns of our subject towns and
signories
, Melema; they will all be suspended in San Giovanni until this day next year, when they will give place to new ones.”

“They are a fair sight,” said Tito; “and San Giovanni will surely be as well satisfied with that produce of Italian looms as Minerva with her
peplos
, especially as he contents himself with so little drapery. But my eyes are less delighted with those whirling towers, which would soon make me fall from the window in sympathetic vertigo.”

The “towers” of which Tito spoke were a part of the procession esteemed very glorious by the Florentine populace; and being perhaps chiefly a kind of hyperbole for the all-efficacious wax taper, were also called
ceri
. But inasmuch as hyperbole is impracticable in a real and literal fashion, these gigantic
ceri
, some of them so large as to be of necessity carried on wheels, were not solid but hollow, and had their surface made not solely of wax, but of wood and pasteboard, gilded, carved, and painted, as real sacred tapers often are, with successive circles of figures—warriors on horseback, foot-soldiers with lance and shield, dancing maidens, animals, trees and fruits, and in fine, says the old chronicler, “all things that could delight the eye and the heart;” the hollowness having the further advantage that men could stand inside these hyperbolic tapers and whirl them continually, so as to produce a phantasmagoric effect, which, considering the towers were numerous, must have been calculated to produce dizziness on a truly magnificent scale.

“
Pestilenza!
” said Piero di Cosimo, moving from the window, “those whirling circles one above the other are worse than the jangling of all the bells. Let me know when the last taper has passed.”

“Nay, you will surely like to be called when the
contadini
come carrying their torches,” said Nello; “you would not miss the country-folk of the Mugello and the Casentino, of whom your favourite Leonardo would make a hundred grotesque sketches.”

“No,” said Piero, resolutely, “I will see nothing till the car of the Zecca comes. I have seen clowns enough holding tapers aslant, both with and without cowls, to last me for my life.”

“Here it comes, then, Piero—the car of the Zecca,” called out Nello, after an interval during which towers and tapers in a descending scale of size had been making their slow transit.

“
Fediddio!
” exclaimed Francesco Cei, “that is a well-tanned San Giovanni! some sturdy Romagnole beggar-man, I'll warrant. Our Signoria plays the host to all the Jewish and Christian scum that every other city shuts its gates against, and lets them fatten on us like Saint Anthony's swine.”

The car of the Zecca or Mint, which had just rolled into sight, was originally an immense wooden tower or
cero
adorned after the same fashion as the other tributary
ceri
, mounted on a splendid car, and drawn by two mouse-coloured oxen, whose mild heads looked out from rich trappings bearing the arms of the Zecca. But the latter half of the century was getting rather ashamed of the towers with their circular or spiral paintings, which had delighted the eyes and the hearts of the other half, so that they had become a contemptuous proverb, and any ill-painted figure looking, as will sometimes happen to figures in the best ages of art, as if it had been boned for a pie, was called a
fantoccio da cero
, a tower-puppet; consequently improved taste, with Cecca to help it, had devised for the magnificent Zecca a triumphal car like a pyramidal catafalque, with ingenious wheels warranted to turn all corners easily. Round the base were living figures of saints and angels arrayed in sculpturesque fashion; and on the summit, at the height of thirty feet, well bound to an iron rod and holding an iron cross also firmly infixed, stood a living representative of Saint John the Baptist, with arms and legs bare, a garment of tiger-skins about his body, and a golden nimbus fastened on his head—as the Precursor was wont to appear in the cloisters and churches, not having yet revealed himself to painters as the brown and sturdy boy who made one of the Holy Family. For where could the image of the patron saint be more fitly placed than on the symbol of the Zecca? Was not the royal prerogative of coining money the surest token that a city had won its independence? and by the blessing of San Giovanni this “beautiful sheepfold” of his had shown that token earliest among the Italian cities. Nevertheless, the annual function of representing the patron saint was not among the high prizes of public life; it was paid for with something like ten
lire
, a cake weighing fourteen pounds, two bottles of wine, and a handsome supply of light eatables; the money being furnished by the magnificent Zecca, and the payment in kind being by peculiar “privilege” presented in a basket suspended on a pole from an upper window of a private house, whereupon the eidolon of the austere saint at once invigorated himself with a reasonable share of the sweets and wine, threw the remnants to the crowd, and embraced the mighty cake securely with his right arm through the remainder of his passage. This was the attitude in which the mimic San Giovanni presented himself as the tall car jerked and vibrated on its slow way round the piazza to the northern gate of the Baptistery.

“There go the Masters of the Zecca, and there is my brother—you see him, Melema?” cried Cennini, with an agreeable stirring of pride at showing a stranger what was too familiar to be remarkable to fellow-citizens. “Behind come the members of the Corporation of Calimara,[
16
] the dealers in foreign cloth, to which we have given our Florentine finish; men of ripe years, you see, who were matriculated before you were born; and then comes the famous Art of Money-changers.”

“Many of them matriculated also to the noble art of usury before you were born,” interrupted Francesco Cei, “as you may discern by a certain fitful glare of the eye and sharp curve of the nose which manifest their descent from the ancient Harpies, whose portraits you saw supporting the arms of the Zecca. Shaking off old prejudices now, such a procession as that of some four hundred passably ugly men carrying their tapers in open daylight, Diogenes-fashion, as if they were looking for a lost
quattrino
, would make a merry spectacle for the Feast of Fools.”

“Blaspheme not against the usages of our city,” said Pietro Cennini, much offended. “There are new wits who think they see things more truly because they stand on their heads to look at them, like tumblers and mountebanks, instead of keeping the attitude of rational men. Doubtless it makes little difference to Maestro Vaiano's monkeys whether they see our Donatello's statue of Judith with their heads or their tails uppermost.”

“Your solemnity will allow some quarter to playful fancy, I hope,” said Cei, with a shrug, “else what becomes of the ancients, whose example you scholars are bound to revere, Messer Pietro? Life was never anything but a perpetual see-saw between gravity and jest.”

“Keep your jest then till your end of the pole is uppermost,” said Cennini, still angry, “and that is not when the great bond of our Republic is expressing itself in ancient symbols, without which the vulgar—the
popolo minuto—
would be conscious of nothing beyond their own petty wants of back and stomach, and never rise to the sense of community in religion and law. There has been no great people without processions, and the man who thinks himself too wise to be moved by them to anything but contempt, is like the puddle that was proud of standing alone while the river rushed by.”

No one said anything after this indignant burst of Cennini's till he himself spoke again.

“Hark! the trumpets of the Signoria: now comes the last stage of the show, Melema. That is our Gonfaloniere in the middle, in the starred mantle, with the sword carried before him. Twenty years ago we used to see our foreign
Podesta
, who was our judge in civil causes, walking on his right-hand; but our Republic has been over-doctored by clever
Medici
. That is the
Proposto
[
17
] of the
Priori
on the left; then come the other seven
Priori
; then all the other magistracies and officials of our Republic. You see your patron the Segretario?”

“There is Messer Bernardo del Nero also,” said Tito; “his visage is a fine and venerable one, though it has worn rather a petrifying look towards me.”

“Ah,” said Nello, “he is the dragon that guards the remnant of old Bardo's gold, which, I fancy, is chiefly that virgin gold that falls about the fair Romola's head and shoulders; eh, my Apollino?” he added, patting Tito's head.

Tito had the youthful grace of blushing, but he had also the adroit and ready speech that prevents a blush from looking like embarrassment. He replied at once—

“And a very Pactolus it is—a stream with golden ripples. If I were an alchemist—”

He was saved from the need for further speech by the sudden fortissimo of drums and trumpets and fifes, bursting into the breadth of the piazza in a grand storm of sound—a roar, a blast, and a whistling, well befitting a city famous for its musical instruments, and reducing the members of the closest group to a state of deaf isolation.

During this interval Nello observed Tito's fingers moving in recognition of someone in the crowd below, but not seeing the direction of his glance he failed to detect the object of this greeting—the sweet round blue-eyed face under a white hood—immediately lost in the narrow border of heads, where there was a continual eclipse of round
contadina
cheeks by the harsh-lined features or bent shoulders of an old spadesman, and where profiles turned as sharply from north to south as weathercocks under a shifting wind.

But when it was felt that the show was ended—when the twelve prisoners released in honour of the day, and the very
barberi
or racehorses, with the arms of their owners embroidered on their cloths, had followed up the Signoria, and been duly consecrated to San Giovanni, and everyone was moving from the window—Nello, whose Florentine curiosity was of that lively canine sort which thinks no trifle too despicable for investigation, put his hand on Tito's shoulder and said—

“What acquaintance was that you were making signals to, eh,
giovane mio
?”

“Some little
contadina
who probably mistook me for an acquaintance, for she had honoured me with a greeting.”

“Or who wished to begin an acquaintance,” said Nello. “But you are bound for the Via de' Bardi and the feast of the Muses: there is no counting on you for a frolic, else we might have gone in search of adventures together in the crowd, and had some pleasant fooling in honour of San Giovanni. But your high fortune has come on you too soon: I don't mean the professor's mantle—
that
is roomy enough to hide a few stolen chickens, but—Messer Endymion minded his manners after that singular good fortune of his; and what says our Luigi Pulci?

“‘
Da quel giorno in qua ch'amor m'accese
Per lei son fatto e gentile e cortese
.'”

“Nello,
amico mio
, thou hast an intolerable trick of making life stale by forestalling it with thy talk,” said Tito, shrugging his shoulders, with a look of patient resignation, which was his nearest approach to anger: “not to mention that such ill-founded babbling would be held a great offence by that same goddess whose humble worshipper you are always professing yourself.”