The Stones of Florence (16 page)

In the same way, the whole fearsome scheme of the universe is shown within a frame of Brunelleschian architecture in Masaccio’s wonderful fresco of the Trinity in Santa Maria Novella. Standing in a fictive arched chapel upheld by Tuscan pillars, God the Father, Himself a stern pillar of justice, upholds the Cross on which the Son is hanging with wide-outstretched arms; below are the kneeling Virgin and the young Saint John, and below, on a still-lower level, outside the arched chapel, and beneath two immense fictive Corinthian pilasters, kneel the two donors, husband and cheery, plump wife. The Virgin, a mature woman with a worldly face, like an abbess’s, turns towards the spectator and makes a peculiar gesture, almost like a shrug, with her extended palm, while the young Saint John, in a robe as pink as his cheeks, prays in profile, his face set harshly, like a Crusader knight’s. Here, as in the Pazzi Chapel, there can be no doubt that this is the great ordered plan of Nature embraced in a single design—in this case, of Justice and Redemption whose scaffolding is the Cross. This fresco, with its terrible logic, is like a proof in philosophy or mathematics: an equilateral triangle is inscribed within an arched figure which is inscribed within a rectangle; and the centre, the apex of the triangle, and the summit of all things is the head of God the Father, the
Padre Eterno,
with His grey beard and unrelenting grey eyes. In His midnight-blue cloak, He is the axiom, the self-evident central Proposition, from which everything else irrevocably follows and Who holds everything in its place and at its distance.

Socrates had a woman adviser, Diotima, a kind of seer, whom he consulted on difficult questions, such as the nature of love. Florence had a number of such wise women. A certain Sister Domenica, during the siege of 1530, had great influence with the Republic, which consulted her at every turn of events; she believed that the Medici were ‘fated’ to return and hence advised making peace with Pope Clement (since it was futile to oppose fate). During the time of the Medici Grand Dukes, there was a famous wise woman, Donna Maria Ciliego, who lived in the portico of Santissima Annunziata, which was a great resort for odd ‘characters’ of all descriptions, either because the wonder-working Madonna in the church attracted motley pilgrims or because the portico offered a certain amount of shelter from the weather. Like Diogenes, this female Philosopher, who came from the people, lived in the street, sleeping under a loggia or a portico; she received charity without begging, because she spoke in marvellous apothegms and enunciated dogmas of her own. She was extremely clean; she carried a broom with her to sweep out her ‘quarters’ (
i.e.,
the pavement she slept on). In her basket, she had a change of linen and a brush for her clothes; she toted a washtub about with her, for her laundry, and a little
caldanotte,
or stove, to do her cooking. Under her skirt, she kept saucepans and plates in sacks and whatever leftovers she had with her. When she wanted to change her clothes, she would go to the house she had once owned, where her sisters and nephew lived, but she would never consent to sleep there.
Nihil nimis:
at the end of the week what she had left from the alms that had been given her she would distribute to poor nuns.

This remarkable person evidently had reduced bodily life to its essentials without compromising her standards of propriety and decorum. She was a sage of the antique stamp, conducting her little affairs according to the tidy principles of reason, unlike the filthy anchorites of the Christian tradition. Even beauty received its due allowance; her clothes were full of patches, which were sewed on prettily, like ornaments.

Women of high and sometimes virile character played a considerable part in Florentine history, from the time of the Countess Matilda of Tuscany, who brought the Emperor Henry IV to his knees in penance at Canossa, her castle. There was Dante’s ‘good Guadralda’, with her sweet Tuscan speech, who was married to Guido Guerra and softened his native fierceness; she came away from the mirror, said the poet, without paint on her face. Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s mother, was a model of rational virtue, like Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi; such matrons gave lessons in government to their sons—starting with self-government, the control of the passions, which is where philosophy’s lesson, in the old school, begins. It is women like these that we see in the white busts of Mino, Desiderio, and Verrocchio, busts that are sometimes said to be copied from the antique manner, though more likely this was true of the sitter.

If Brunelleschi and Donatello (who lived with his mother) had managed their lives plainly and frugally according to what was thought to be Nature’s plan, Michelangelo defied Nature and men as well in his personal habits, which Symonds calls ‘repulsive’. His father had instructed him never to wash (‘Have yourself rubbed down but don’t wash’), and he seems to have overheeded this advice. He used to wear his long goatskin gaiters or boots to bed, never changing them from day today, so that when he finally came to remove them, his skin tore off with his boots. He must have smelled horribly, and his parsimonious ways doubtless affected his health. While he was working, he would eat only a crust of bread. Dry and short-spoken, he wrote curtly to his relations of money transactions. Though he was outdoors a great deal, opening new quarries in the mountains, riding back and forth on horseback from one project to another, he cared nothing for the country—only for real estate. As Symonds puts it, he had an ‘absolute insensibility’ to decorative details, to jewels, stuffs, natural objects, flowers, trees, landscape. Yet his indifference to pleasure did not make him, like the old Stoics, indifferent to pain.

He was intensely jealous of other artists, particularly of Leonardo, Raphael, and Bramante, and he blamed all his troubles with Pope Julius II on the machinations of his competitors, who had come, he thought, between him and the pope to prevent him from finishing the famous tomb. ‘All the dissensions between Pope Julius and me,’ he wrote in a letter, ‘arose from the envy of Bramante and Raffaello da Urbino; and this was the cause of my not finishing the tomb in his lifetime. They wanted to ruin me. Raffaello indeed had good reason, for all he had of art, he had from me.’

It is possible that he was right. This proud, outspoken man must have been much hated by his rivals and inferiors. Nevertheless, jealousy and irritable suspicion poisoned his life, which, from his own point of view, was nothing but a series of failures and botched attempts. They put breeches on his nudes in ‘The Last Judgment’; they put a gilded fig leaf on his ‘David’; they prevented him from finishing Pope Julius’s tomb; they (Bramante) spoiled St Peter’s; they melted down the colossal statue of Pope Julius that he had made in Bologna for the façade of San Petronio; they obstructed him in his quarrying at Pietrasanta and Serravezza; they stopped him from doing the façade of San Lorenzo, of which he had boasted, ‘Well then, I feel myself capable of carrying out this façade ... in such a way that it will be a mirror for architecture and sculpture for all Italy.’ And ‘they’ comprised not only Bramante and Raphael but popes, workmen, prelates, apprentices, the people of Bologna, the governors of Florence, Titian’s friend Aretino—in short, everyone, the whole world of others, which, unlike the inert matter of bronze and marble, would not obey his will. And it was all true, more or less; he was persecuted not only by the ‘natural’ inferiority of others but by relentless bad luck, which was only the personification of disobedient matter. The accidents that happened to his work (the arm of the ‘David’ was broken in 1527 during a tumult in the Piazza della Signoria when stones thrown in an assault on the Palazzo Vecchio hit the statue in the square) do indeed seem purposive, as if Nature itself, working through the passions of men, were showing its resistance to the tyranny of Michelangelo’s genius.

The Florentine passion for greatness, for being first, went beyond all human limits in Michelangelo, and his sufferings, on this account, were terrible. Among living competitors, he would accept only God for his rival, and his late, lumbering, unfinished works are all metaphors for the primal act of bringing shape out of chaos. Such a contest was really unequal; everything (
i.e.,
all creation) was against Michelangelo—the mountains, from which he tried to draw marble like a dentist savagely pulling a tooth, the rivers, human beings. This is why so many of his works, like Leonardo’s, are unfinished: no particular work could satisfy the magnitude of his ambition. Perfection can be achieved if a limit is accepted; without such a boundary line, the end is never in sight. Desiderio, say, or Mino could finish; Michelangelo could only stop.

As a boy in Ghirlandaio’s workshop, he had his nose broken by the sculptor Pietro Torrigiani in a fist fight that had started with an insult flung by Michelangelo. This disfigurement was a kind of portent—the mark of Cain. His likenesses show him looking like a broken statue. Almost the first thing we know of him is the story of this fist fight, and one of the last glimpses completes the circle. As a solitary old man in his bare house in Rome, he had fallen into the habit of working at night, wearing a kind of nightcap with a candle attached to it which Symonds compares to the candle stuck in the belly of a corpse during an anatomy lesson. By the light of this candle, he was engaged in making a
Pietà,
to serve, like Titian’s, for his own tomb. Before it was finished, he grew dissatisfied with it, and instead of simply abandoning work on it, as he had done with so many of his commissions, this time he took a hammer and began to smash it to pieces. It is this
Pietà
that, having been repaired, stands in a chapel of the tribune of the Duomo, near the dial of Toscanelli’s great gnomon (now covered with a bronze plaque) that used to mark the sun’s rays on the floor. The right arm of the Virgin is fractured, and her hand is cracked across; one of the dead Christ’s nipples has been mended, but His left arm is still badly scarred by the hammer blows. The figure of Nicodemus, an old man in a cowl who is supposed to represent Michelangelo, is barely sketched into the stone.

Here again the Florentines were first. This tragic, fractured group is the first known example of an artist’s vandalism directed against his own work. Other sculptures have been defaced by time or barbarian invasions or revolution or war, but here is a work slain, so to speak, by the author’s own hand, as though God, in one of His fits of irascibility, had elected to destroy the created world. Only a Florentine could have done this. Titian’s
Pietà
is unfinished because he died of the plague while working on it.

Chapter Six

T
HE PALETTE OF THE
great Florentine innovators is decidedly autumnal or frostbitten. The brown robes of Franciscan friars, the grey beards of patriarch saints, the ashy flesh of the hanging Christ, grey slabs of rock and desert-brown desolation of hermits penetrate the
trecento
with a chill that can still be felt in the rusts, greys, and sepias of Masaccio, the purply browns of Andrea del Castagno, the tawny oranges and russets of Michelangelo, just as, even in midsummer, the thick stone walls of the fortress-palaces remain, on certain narrow streets where the sun does not strike them, cold and damp to the touch. Iron and iron rust entered the souls of these masters; Masaccio’s shivering boy, waiting by the riverbank to be baptized; Adam and Eve, driven naked and howling from the Garden into the cold world, epitomize the forlorn exposed human creature, bare as a stripped tree. Fallen leaves, bare boughs, burnt sedge are evoked by all these masters’ tonality. Uccello’s favourite medium,
terra verde,
suggests greenish fields coated with rime. Leonardo’s brown-skinned witch-women sit in blue-green, northern grottoes, and the strong hues of the Pollaiuoli have a darkish, raisiny cast.

‘Pollaiuolo’, observed a Florentine, pointing to a dish of the small green shrunken second-crop figs that appear on local tables towards the end of September, and Pollaiuolo, too, are the last velvet pom-pom dahlias, in yellow, wine-red, and purple, that come into the florists’ shops, a fall harvest, just before the
vendemmia,
when the turning grapes are picked. ‘Yellow and black and pale and hectic red, pestilence-striken multitudes’—Shelley composed his ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in the Cascine, with the autumn leaves blowing sombrely about. Late September is the most beautiful time in Florence. San Miniato flashes the green and gold of its mosaic into the setting sun; deep-blue distance is framed sharply in the three honey-coloured arches of Ponte Vecchio. The compact dun and ochre city seems gold as an apple of the Hesperides against the cypresses and olives of its bowl of hills, and the tourists are leaving, like migratory birds.

May, too, is a favourite time, but uncertain; it may rain in May for days without stopping. A nasty wind blows, and winter clothes that have been put away are brought out again, often smelling of naphtha. May, nonetheless, is the classic Florentine ‘month’. To spend May in Florence is the foreigner’s dream; framed reproductions of Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus’ and
‘La Primavera’
compete, along the Arno, with linen and leather goods, for the foreign trade. The city co-operates with a
‘Maggio musicale’
—a season of concerts and opera which, in fact, continues into June and July. Flower shows are held, and the Thursday flower market in the arcades along the Piazza della Repubblica brightens that depressed area with potted plants for window boxes and gardens: begonias, gloxinias, gardenias, geraniums, and hydrangea. Azaleas are blooming in tubs outside the doors of villas, and nightingales sing in Fiesole and Settignano. Bagpipers appear from the Abruzzi at Porta San Niccolò, and mules from the Abruzzi come with their muleteers to work the timber in the Mugello.

This Maytime Florence had its set of painters: Bernardo Daddi, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Benozzo Gozzoli, Verrocchio, Botticelli—the flowery painters beloved by the Victorians. The popular idea of Florence, which, like most popular conceptions, derives from the Victorians, is based on their work. Nor is this idea altogether wrong. In Florentine painting, there were two distinct strains, just as there were Guelphs and Ghibellines, Blacks and Whites, in politics. One is stern, majestic, autumnal, sometimes harsh or livid—the Guelphish painting, you might say, that started with Giotto and continued with Orcagna, Masaccio, Uccello, Andrea del Castagno, Antonio Pollaiuolo, Leonardo, Michelangelo; the other is sweet, flowery, springlike—Ghibelline painting that seeded in from Siena and blossomed first in Bernardo Daddi, then in Fra Angelico and the little masters who followed him, next in Fra Filippo, Verrocchio, and, finally, Botticelli.