The Stones of Florence (12 page)

Space, with its dimension of depth, was a grave matter for the analytic Florentines. For the Venetians, trompe l’œil, which they learned from the Florentine pioneers, was a game—a game they continued to play for centuries, never tiring of the deception of feigned marble, feigned brocade, fictive doors and windows, false vistas. Their city of masks was itself a painted toyland, a gay counterfeit of ‘real life’. In Florence, after the Hawkwood monument, three others were commissioned—one by Andrea del Castagno, in honour of Nicolò da Tolentino, another mercenary, which stands next to the Uccello in the Duomo, and two of less interest which stand across the church, on the other wall. This was the end of perspective jests and trompe l’œil (trumpery), as far as the Renaissance Florentines were concerned. Their civic halls, churches, and dwellings were too real for games of make-believe.

A state based on paintings, to quote a modern historian, would be a flimsy affair, and state painting, as such, did not enter Florentine history until after the fall of the Republic, when Vasari, a poor hack, became the official artist to Cosimo I. In the last days of the Republic, Leonardo and Michelangelo, it is true, were called upon to fresco battle scenes in the big hall of Palazzo Vecchio, yet neither of these frescoes was ever finished, and the very cartoons for them perished. Michelangelo’s are thought to have been destroyed by the Medici soldiers quartered in the room in 1512. Up to this time, sculpture and architecture had been relied on by the Florentines to affirm the strength of the Republic. That is why the Uffizi, beautiful as many of its paintings are, is only a picture gallery, while the Bargello and the Museum of the Works of the Duomo are Florence. Secular painting, as it developed here in the Renaissance, under the influence of the collector, became more and more private, even enigmatic and riddling, while religious painting, starting with Fra Filippo Lippi and continuing with Ghirlandaio and his workshop, became more and more a species of genre—that is, a study of interiors, manners, dress, furniture, local customs. The painters who resisted this tendency towards genre (and these were, on the whole, the best) began to treat their art as a secretive pursuit, like alchemy, half immersed in science and half in magic. A picture, a painted likeness, has by its very nature something of sorcery attached to it. Unlike the statue, which grew out of a column or massy tree trunk, the picture was a mere figment, a deceptive thin image of the real. Florentine painting was, from early-times, conscious of a need for stability; hence you find the pillar placed in the centre of so many Florentine ‘Annunciations’, between the Angel Gabriel and the Virgin, as though it were holding the picture up.

The early wonder-working ikons of the Madonna (many of them supposedly painted by Saint Luke) are usually kept veiled in Italian churches, being shown only on a special feast day; this seems to be an acknowledgment of the strong magic they are believed to possess. The miraculous fresco of the Annunciation in Santissima Annunziata in Florence, which is renowned throughout Italy for its curative powers, is housed in a little marble temple designed by Michelozzo; it is shut off by a silver screen and hidden by a curtain of rich stuff that is raised once a year, on the Feast of the Annunciation. Like most of the wonder-working ikons, this is fancied to have been the work of a supernatural agency or Magic Helper: a thirteenth-century monk, entrusted with painting the fresco, had finished everything but the head of the Madonna; he then fell into a deep sleep, and while he slept an angel painted the head. No earthly power, in other words, could have caught the likeness, and the shrouding of the image (if it were a question of protecting it, glass would have done as well) implies a taboo. Similarly, the painted cross in Santa Trinita that nodded its head to Saint Giovanni Gualberto is kept covered by a modern painting telling the story of the legend and is shown only on Good Friday.

Painted images, being a species of conjuration, were often used in exorcism. A banner painted with the figure of Saint Agatha, now in the Museum of the Works of the Duomo, was carried through the streets on her feast day to ensure a year’s protection against fire. Those colossal images of Saint Christopher that are frescoed on the walls of so many early Italian churches were supposed to ward off danger; anyone who looked at Saint Christopher was safe in his travels, and the saint, being a giant, was painted very big, so that no one could miss seeing him. A two-way relation between the painting, especially the portrait painting, and the spectator is often felt to exist: the spectator is looking at the painting, and the painting, he begins to think, is looking at him, boring into him, in fact, with its unwavering gaze. A gallery of portraits becomes a gallery of eyes. Certain paintings have eyes that are supposed to move, following the spectator about. The spectator can walk around a piece of sculpture (indeed, he is expected to do so), but a painting holds him arrested in its grip. The idea of a painting as an inescapable nemesis is behind Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray—
a story of a diabolical pact; and speaking in this same vein, a Florentine recently remarked that the pictures in the Uffizi had grown ugly from looking at the people who looked at them.

Painting, with its trickery, could master a class of subject that was forbidden ground to the sculptor; that is to say, dreams and visions—reality in its hallucinated and impalpable aspect. This class of subject had its greatest popularity in Florence and Tuscany, where the great fresco cycles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries drew chiefly on the Golden Legend of Jacopo della Voragine and the life of Saint Francis for dreams and visions that had ‘made history’: the Dream of Constantine, the Dream of Pope Sylvester, the Dream of the Emperor Heraclius, the Dream of Pope Honorius III, Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata (in which the Saviour appears as a winged creature or small half-human bird in the air), the Vision of Brother Augustine, and, from the Bible, the Dream of Joachim, the Vision of Saint John on Patmos. On the walls of Santa Croce’s chapels, in the upper church at Assisi, in the Arena Chapel at Padua, in the choir of San Francesco in Arezzo, the Florentine school of fresco painters, from Giotto through Taddeo and Agnolo Gaddi and Maso di Banco down to Piero della Francesca, had traced on walls and distempered the ghostly night visitants and daytime apparitions that flitted across the portals of consciousness with messages from the future and signs from the beyond. The Franciscan religious revival, with its inspirational character and its gospel of unearthly joy, was the power behind these cycles, which are found, almost exclusively, in Franciscan churches. Many of the most beautiful works of Tuscan fresco are these curiously moving ‘Dreams’, with their pathos of naturalness (such touches as the pope composed for sleep wearing his mitre and cope—Giotto; the soldier watching outside the tent while the Emperor sleeps—Piero) that makes them resemble Shakespearean night scenes (Brutus in his tent, Desdemona preparing for bed), in which a premonition or phantasm troubles the curtained stillness of the night.

Fra Angelico came out of the religious reform movement in Tuscany, and he was held, by Vasari, to have been divinely inspired, painting as an angel would, without recourse to the adroit deceptions of art. When not directly inspired by God, a painted image was often felt to be akin to deviltry. Machiavelli tells a horrible story of a certain Zanobi del Pino, governor of Galatea, who surrendered the fortress to the enemy without offering any resistance. The enemy commander (Agnolo della Pergola) turned him over to his attendants, who demonstrated their contempt by feeding him on a diet of paper painted with snakes. These snakes, they said, taunting, would turn him from a Guelph into a Ghibelline. ‘And thus fasting,’ concludes Machiavelli, ‘he died in a few days.’ The dissimulation practised by the traitor was here cruelly parodied by the snaky dissimulation felt to be inherent in a painted surface.

The habit of painting likenesses of condemned criminals on the walls of a prison, like posters, has already been mentioned. After the Pazzi Conspiracy, says Vasari, Andrea del Castagno was hired, at the public expense, to depict the conspirators on the walls of the Bargello; he showed them hanging by the feet ‘in the strangest attitudes, which were infinitely varied and exceedingly fine’. The work was pronounced ‘a perfect wonder’ and met with everyone’s approval for its artistic and lifelike qualities, so that Andrea, ever after, was called Andrea degli Impiccati (of the Hanged Men). On the other hand, three life-size figures of the intended victim, Lorenzo de’ Medici, were ordered sculpted in wax, to be put in various churches of Florence as votive offerings. This work was done by the great wax-modeller Orsini, in collaboration with the sculptor Verrocchio.

The notion of the painter as a sort of boon companion to the hangman is carried on by Leonardo, who was fond of attending executions, perhaps to study the muscular contortions of the hanged. Actually, Vasari’s story is partly wrong. It was Botticelli who painted the Pazzi conspirators on the Bargello wall, submitting them to a final punishment; the body of Jacopo de’ Pazzi, a relatively innocent party, had already been dragged naked through the streets, thrust into a hole, dug up again, and finally flung, wearing its halter, into the Arno, as though the earth refused it grave room. Andrea del Castagno was dead by this time, but he had painted some other hanged persons, members of the Albizzi faction, in honour of the return of Cosimo, Father of his Country, from exile.

The eerie verisimilitude, amounting sometimes to malignity, of Andrea del Castagno’s work caused him to be regarded, at least after his death, as a devil. He had painted a wonderful speaking likeness of Judas in the dramatic ‘Last Supper’ of the Cenacolo of Sant’ Apollonia, and Vasari says that he resembled Judas, both in appearance and in his power of dissimulation. According to Vasari, he murdered his fellow-painter Domenico Veneziano, from whom he had learned the oil process, out of envy of his sweeter skill. This story cannot be true either, since Domenico Veneziano outlived Andrea by four years, but the important thing is that Vasari and his readers found it credible, so credible, in fact, that the authorities in Santissima Annunziata, following Vasari’s revelation, whitewashed over some of Andrea’s frescoes, in retributive justice, nearly a hundred years after his death. Andrea was a peasant, from a remote village in the mountains, and there is something wild and coarse in his work, a beetling, swarthy, almost brutal vitality that does indeed suggest a capacity for crime of the peasant sort—for the vendetta, long brooded on, or the sly murder for gain, for the possession of a secret treasure.

In any case, the idea of a secret, such as the oil process, which men would murder for, seems to connect painting even more closely with witchcraft. Conflicting accounts are still given of how the oil process came to Italy and was disseminated. Naïve authors write about it as if it were some magic concoction or philtre guaranteed to give charm or, better, fascination to a painting. Painters were enrolled in the guild of the Speziali, or Pharmacists; this was because, like the druggists, they compounded pigments or powders, according to secret formulas, out of imported ‘spices’. With the discovery of perspective, itself a wizard science of numbers, painting, especially in Florence, where everything was pushed to extremes, became more and more a black art. Geniuses like Uccello and Piero della Francesca, who abandoned themselves to perspective studies, neglected their work for the sake of this fata morgana. Piero, who was trained in Florence under Domenico Veneziano, gave the later years of his life to writing mathematical treatises. Like Uccello, he died obscure and neglected—in the little town of Borgo San Sepolcro, where he was born. He, too, had been bewitched by
mazzocchi,
by chalices, cups, and cones. A mystery attaches to one of his most striking works, the Urbino ‘Whipping of Christ’, like the mystery surrounding the man on dry land in Uccello’s ‘Deluge’. In the background of the picture and, as it were, far, far away and very small, Christ is being scourged by some soldiers before a still High Priest, in a frame of classic architecture, while in the front of the canvas, on the street, three figures in contemporary dress—a bearded man, a youth, and a bald man—stand conversing, with their backs turned towards the scene of the whipping. Christ is remote and unreal; they are very near, large, and almost dangerously real. The question arises: Who are they and what are they meant to signify? No one knows. Some say they are the Duke Oddantonio of Urbino, who was murdered in 1444, and his treacherous ministers; if so, this would be another memorial of infamy, like the hanged figures painted on the Bargello or the painted snakes. But there are other theories, and none is altogether satisfactory. Painting was becoming a secret language.

What happened during the fifteenth century, the age of discovery, in Florentine painting had the character sometimes of a Promethean, sometimes of a Faustian myth. Since the ancient Greeks, no people had been as speculative as the Florentines, and the price of this speculation was heavy. Continual experiments in politics had caused a breakdown of government, as in Athens, and artistic experiment had begun to unhinge the artists. ‘Ah, Paolo,’ Donatello is supposed to have remonstrated, ‘this perspective of yours is making you abandon the certain for the uncertain.’ The advances in knowledge gave rise to an increase in doubt. By a cunning legerdemain, it was found, a flat surface could be made to appear round; at the same time, paradoxically, the earth itself, which
appears
to be flat, was being shown to be round by scientific argument. The whole relation between appearance and reality was unsettled. ‘Doubting Thomas’, usually shown (by the Venetians, for instance) as a middle-aged person, became for the Florentines a beautiful, entrancing youth—the most charming of all the disciples, as he sits with his lovely chin tilted back on his hand in Andrea del Castagno’s ‘Last Supper’ or as he stands, with graceful curls, and his fair, sandalled foot extended in Verrocchio’s sculpture on Orsanmichele.