Grand Tour

The taste for precious artifacts seems to have faded to some extent in the 18th century. Instead the focus shifted to classical statuary and the great masters of the 16th century, in particular Raphael and the Venetian painters, as is clear from the fact that the most copied picture was Titian’s Venus of Urbino (Kanceff, 1993).

The phenomenon that had the greatest effect on the European view of Florence as well as on the life of the city itself – an enduring phenomenon that can be said to have lasted right down to our own time – was the establishment of a large and highly influential English colony, the base of a cosmopolitan and cultured society that was even more numerous than the one in Rome, capital of the tour. The importance and at the same time the drawbacks of the English presence were to become a leitmotiv and myth of historical writing that is still very much alive today. Foreign observers were acutely aware of it and the Frenchman Richard (1761) has been identified by Kanceff as the originator of a series of moralistic allusions: «[the English] are very numerous and think of nothing but amusing themselves and spending their money, contributing not a little to the change in customs (Kanceff, 1993)».

The “tutelary genius” of the British in Florence was, for over half a century, the consul Horace Mann, a wealthy and amiable man of refined tastes. His official residence, Casa Manetti, became the hub of fashionable life in the city (Brilli, 1993).

But it was the Romantics who chose the city (and the region) as their ideal place. The unique blend of art and nature, the love of culture and the secular character of thought made the city a perfect destination for Romantic and post-Romantic flights from industrial civilization. The colony in Florence numbered some outstanding personalities who broadened the description of the city to take in some of its less superficial aspects, as is demonstrated by the many pictures, pictorial and literary, painted from “rooms with a view”. The predominance of the British, by now rampant, is aptly caught in an anecdote related by Brilli (1993): «the English have arrived,» shouted the doorman of the hotel, «but I don’t know whether they are Russian or German!».

Under the heading of art, always predominant, came the “discovery” of the primitives, the previously much despised painters of the 14th and 15th centuries who were to serve as a model for the Pre-Raphaelites. But more dominant still was the category of the picturesque, fruit of an ever growing fascination with the peculiar, the unusual and the exotic that was typical of the Romantic attitude. The penchant for sketch writing of which Charles Dickens was such a champion was complemented by an ardor and excess of feelings. Thus Samuel Roger (1821) seems to have been turned to stone at the sight of Michelangelo's statue of Lorenzo Duke of Urbino: «I am no longer my own master. I have become the slave of a demon. I sit for days and days with my eyes fixed on that terrible phantom, the Duke of Urbino... it bewitches like the basilisk... ».

Later in the century the first cracks began to appear in the British enamorment with the city, hitherto seen as an ideal microcosm because it was steeped in a harmonious and rare equilibrium of art and nature. The most celebrated and rancorous disappointment was the one expressed by Ruskin (1840), who could not bear the negligence and sloppiness shown by the city toward its monuments, a city that was ready to clutter up the square of the cathedral with a station for omnibuses and public carriages. But the pars destruens was not the only thing to make an impression on the traveler: noteworthy in fact are his “rediscoveries” or “reinterpretations” of cities like Lucca and Siena.