The Stones of Florence (17 page)

Or you might say that Florentine painting, largely austere, impassive, and frugal, had a sweet tooth. Or that Florentine painting oscillated between two images, set at opposite poles: one, the Crucifixion and the clay-coloured body of Christ, and the other, the Annunciation. It is true that Fra Angelico painted Crucifixions, very moving ones, and that Leonardo painted Annunciations, that Giotto’s colour, with its silvery pinks, gold yellows, and radiant, glistening whites, glows more freshly and sweetly than the irons and rusts of his great successors, that Uccello is a mixed case (take his chivalric fantasy of ‘St George and the Dragon’ in the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris as an example of quaint ‘Ghibelline’ conceits), that Piero della Francesca (who did not, however, paint in Florence after his apprenticeship) cannot be accommodated to these categories at all. Still, all exceptions made, the contrast is palpable. A split runs through Florentine painting that grows wider throughout the
quattrocento
till it becomes a great fissure or cloven hoof. Nor is this a question of schools. Michelangelo, a stern painter, studied in the workshop of Ghirlandaio, a dulcet master of genre; Andrea del Castagno, who imposed a certain fashionable swagger on the brute, swarthy, primal matter of his figures, influenced Botticelli at one period; Fra Angelico learned from Masaccio.

The Guelphish works resemble the stony city of Florence, while the Ghibelline works resemble the countryside in May. Here is a perpetual dewy meadow of grasses and multicoloured flowers or an enclosed garden with rosebushes and orange trees and cypresses or a loggia with pink pillars and Easter lilies and the glimpse of a bordered walk behind. In the garden, or the meadow, sits a maiden—the Madonna with the Heavenly Child on her lap. The tiled loggia is the scene of an Annunciation brought by a glorious angel with snowy fire-tipped wings. The loggia may become a charming bedroom, furnished with books and a
prie-dieu
or lectern, potted plants, and a canopied bed with bolsters, and the maiden in the meadow may become a nymph or a newborn goddess. With the Blessed Angelico, the setting may shift to Paradise, where the maiden is being crowned by the Saviour and angels toot on gold trumpets. But the translation to Paradise is effected without a jar or a bump, for it was an earthly paradise the maiden dwelt in, and Heaven itself, with its angel choirs and oriental carpets, could not be brighter than the Tuscan spring.

Most of Tuscany today is cultivated and clipped; the spring countryside is laid out in delicate swatches of green: yellow-green of young corn and wheat, blue-green of rye, across which march, as if in spring manœuvres, files of silver-green olive trees, yellow-green figs, blue-green copper-sulphate-sprayed grapevines, wheeling, fanning in and out, deploying, while the blackish-green cypresses and parasol pines, always seen in profile, silhouetted along a hilltop or on a slope, stand at attention, a windbreak, against the pale-blue sky. But flowery meadows still exist, high in the uplands, in the Mugello and the Casentino, in the Chianti, near Arezzo, along back roads that pass through forests of oaks, beech, and chestnuts, and are lined with stacks of firewood, like logging trails in some pioneer country. These incredible meadows, in early May, are very much what the
quattrocento
painters represented them to be—thick carpets of grasses and wild flowers: red poppy and blue iris (a garden stray), deep-pink wild gladioli, pink and lavender anemones, hairy grape hyacinth, daisies, cornflowers, flax, primroses, columbines and harebells, the wild pink or carnation called Ragged Robin, strawberry flowers, wild orchids, the pretty green-white wild garlic. In early May, at any rate, the plough has not touched them; there is no one to be seen in this country and no sound but the call of the swallow and the distant crashing of waterfalls. The woodcutters have gone away. It is as if these teeming meadows were blooming for their own sake, remote from mankind, like the stars in the sky. Indeed, the effect is of a starry firmament spilled out onto the earth, as in Botticelli’s
‘Primavera’,
where Flora walks scattering blossoms, or in ‘The Birth of Venus’, where flowers resembling pink powder puffs are sifting down through the air onto a cat-tail-bordered seashore.

This world, then, of the Maytime painters, is not a fairy-tale world. It is perfectly real, but useless, and therefore fragile, always imperilled, fugitive, transitory. To use it, you would have to destroy it—turn in cattle to pasture or cut the flowery carpet with the plough. The useful Tuscan farmland, with its disciplined pattern of hedgerows, crops, conical hills, white roads, and milk-pale rivers, belongs to Piero and to Baldovinetti, surveyors and commanders of space; and in its greener, more velvety passages, with rich folds of valley and still glass of rivers, to Pollaiuolo and to Leonardo, who grew up in the corn country, near Empoli, on the way to Pisa. Fra Angelico, too, who knew felicity in all its aspects, furnished glimpses, on an exquisite dollhouse scale, of the order and solid geometry of Tuscan husbandry; Fra Angelico’s world, like any good monastery, is not all rapt devotion—on its borders are kitchen gardens and a stable domestic economy. Botticelli, who loved motion, was the master of the evanescent forest meadows, into which he turned a troop of nymphs, goddesses, winds, breezes, Graces—half-allegorical pagan spirits who were the quintessence of sweet uselessness since nobody believed in them any more.

‘Exiles’, Pater called them, these non-terrestrial creatures who always have the air of just debarking, of having just been deposited, and a modern critic speaks of figures isolated from true space in the ‘closed garden’ of Botticellian sentiment. The Tuscan villa, which was basically a fortified farmhouse, was becoming—briefly—a bower of bliss, a place of voluntary exile from the iron and stone of the counting house and the piazza, especially for rich, aggressive members of the middle class, the ‘fat
popolani’,
to whose estates succeeded, hundreds of years later, a new set of well-to-do refugees, the foreigners of the villas around Fiesole. The
‘Primavera’
and ‘The Birth of Venus’ were both painted for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici (the Medicis were not noble, being descended from pharmacists, and the balls on their shield were called ‘pills’ by their enemies) in his pleasure villa at Castello.

An abundant use of gold characterizes all the springtime painters, as though the florin had been melted into a ductile substance that could be looped in heavy coils and arabesques by Botticelli for the coiffures of his Madonnas and goddesses or spun into fine wire for the tresses of Fra Angelico’s maidens. Blond colours are predominant—pinks, mauves, pale greens, lavender, violet, and carmine, scented colours, one might say, flowery distillates. Fra Angelico’s palette, sharper than most and less odoriferous, sometimes suggests a field of yellow wheat mixed with poppies and cornflowers, and sometimes, as in the frescoes he painted for the monks’ cells in San Marco, it reverts, in its whites and browns, to the grave tonality of Giotto, There are few brunettes in the May realm of the Madonna, and the heavy underslung Tuscan jaw of early sculpture and painting, which survives in some Giotto Madonnas and angels, disappears, like a mark of peasant origin. Skin tones are pink and ivory—wonderfully transparent. In Bernardo Daddi’s Madonnas, still wearing the black robes of the
trecento
over their pink dresses, a vivid throbbing and pulsing of the blood imparts a juicy look to the full, plump neck and face; the cheeks are warmly flushed, and the long limpid eyes are brimming with moisture, like the sap of a young plant. Round spots of carmine, disks of excitement, stand out on the cheeks of Fra Angelico’s little Virgins, making them resemble pert rouged flappers of the twenties.

After Fra Angelico and Gozzoli, the blood ceases to course so actively, and as the
quattrocento
continues, the blond Virgins grow paler and paler, as if from exhaustion, till Botticelli’s young Madonnas appear positively greensick. Their flower heads, pallid and heavy, encumbered with veils, droop on the long stems of their necks. The ‘Madonna with the Pomegranate’ in the Uffizi looks like a wan Persephone needing a spring tonic after the winter in Hades. This pallor or greensickness, however, belongs to the springtime of life, which in those days was a particularly dangerous and susceptible period. Lorenzo de’ Medici was writing his
‘Quant’ è bella giovinezza, Che si fugge tuttavia
...,’ and many beautiful girls were dying young.

Youth and love are the themes of these painters, whether it is celestial love in Fra Angelico or carnal love in Fra Filippo Lippi, the scabrous monk who finally, after many escapades, capped it all by running away with a nun, the black-eyed sensual Madonna whom he found in a convent at Prato. Throughout the
quattrocento,
the central pillar of the Annunciation figures almost as a Maypole, around which ribbons might be wound by dancing youths and maidens in flower-spangled brocades. Botticelli’s figures, in whatever context, sacred or profane, are arranged two by two in a zigzag, interlacing pattern, as though they were meeting each other in the steps of a country dance. The flowing movement of thin drapery bellying about a bare, luscious form, was first shown by Fra Filippo in his tremendous fresco of ‘Herod’s Banquet’ in the choir of the Duomo at Prato, where Salome is doing her veiled dance, ingenuously, almost modestly, before a gigantic dark tetrarch and his tall, ominous soldiery, while the head of the Baptist is being brought in on a huge gleaming platter, like an ogre’s
pièce de résistance.

The three dancing Graces in Botticelli’s
‘Primavera’
repeat the dance of Salome in a forest meadow; sheer veils, caressing as breezes, play over rounded nude buttocks and slender waists and legs. But here, in the open air, on the flowery carpet, all is innocence; the shadow of the deed, the pressure of an interior, where passions are enclosed in space, cannot touch the Graces, and the veils that embrace them, transparent and clinging, are of the same immaculate fabric as the thin underveil of the Madonna. Sheer chiffon veils, sometimes drooping over the soft cheek of a Virgin, sometimes rippling across a dimpling naked body, became in the late
quattrocento
almost a signature of the Florentine school. They are often seen in low relief, particularly in the work of Agostino di Duccio, that most voluptuous of Florentine sculptors, who botched the block of marble known as ‘The Giant’, which Michelangelo, later, made into the ‘David’. His finest workmanship (in which marble seems to yield to the onrush of a strong wind) belongs not to Florence but to Urbino and Rimini, where cultivated tyrants had him embellish a palace and a private temple of worship.

The most wanton and luxurious expressions of Florentine art are found, for the most part, outside the city’s three tight circles of walls, though some, like the
‘Primavera’
and ‘The Birth of Venus’, have been removed from their natural setting. Fra Filippo’s masterpiece is in Prato, the prosperous, somewhat coarse and materialistic wool town where he was born. And there is nothing quite so rich in Florence as the
pergamo
of dancing
putti
that was made by Michelozzo and Donatello together for the Prato Duomo. This
pergamo
is a covered pulpit affixed to an outside corner of the black-and-white-striped Cathedral; from it, on certain feast days, a girdle, said to be the Madonna’s, is shown to the people in the piazza below. The story of how the girdle came to Prato is told in fresco inside the Duomo in a reliquary chapel painted by Agnolo Gaddi, one of the Gothic painters of the
trecento.
The Madonna, at the time of her Assumption, threw her girdle to Saint Thomas, who was standing, with the other Apostles, watching her disappear into the sky. The Apostle, when his time came, entrusted it to an old priest, whose daughter, Maria, fell in love with a Pratese, Michael Dagomari, who had come to the Holy Land as a crusader and remained as a merchant. After a fortunate sea voyage, the pair arrived in Prato, bringing the girdle as the girl’s dowry, locked in a little hamper of rushes. Michelozzo’s and Donatello’s balcony, constructed for the exposition of this relic, is an almost oriental fantasy; the tall nutmeg-coloured baldaquin, carved as if in supple leather, is sustained by a single central column, so that it looks like a graceful umbrella raised over some khan or shah; below is a marble frieze of revelling children, which, by contrast, seems a page from a classic epithalamium. This pure Renaissance work, by the very profusion and order of its details—pilasters, cornice, corbels, single bronze capital—harmonizes in an extraordinary way with the rich, half-oriental Pisan Romanesque of the façade and long-striped flank of the Cathedral, and harmonizes, too, with the fabulous tale of the girdle, the Prato trader in the Holy Land, and the Eastern priest’s daughter. The Florentines themselves, Burckhardt noted, were rather indifferent to relics; this no doubt was due less to scepticism than to a dislike of the atmosphere of costly ostentation that always surrounds the cult of old bones and bits of material. Nevertheless, in 1312, a Pratese had the idea of stealing the sacred girdle and selling it to the Florentines; he was put to death, and a reliquary chapel was built to protect it.

This is one of the rare Church legends that centres around a love story, in fact, around an elopement (for the pair ran away from the old priest, who disapproved of their love), and the cult of the Holy Girdle, perhaps for this reason, is very popular in Tuscany. The Tuscan ballads, or
stornelli
(refrains; those of the Pistoiese hills are said to be the most haunting), unlike other folk songs, contain no references to epic events—wars, invasions, generals, and rulers. This is a telling fact, especially when one considers how often the place names in the remote
contado
awaken the memory of battles (Montelungo, Montaperti, Altopascio, Campaldino, Gavinina, Montecatini Alto), and a wine made at Brolio, the last bastion of the Florentines against the Sienese, is named Arbia after the river which, as Dante said, turned red with blood on the terrible day of Montaperti, when a traitor in the ranks hacked the hands off the Florentine standard-bearer and 10,000 Florentines were slaughtered by Manfred’s German knights with their Ghibelline allies—the
fuorusciti,
the Sienese, the Luccans, and the men from Cortona. There is hardly a mountain pass, a hill, or a stream that does not evoke, at the very least, a siege or some act of treachery, yet none of this horror and infamy, which has not been forgotten, has passed into the plaintive songs of the peasants, as did the wars of Louis Quatorze, for example, into a love song like
‘Auprès de ma blonde’
or the Crusades into ‘Malbrouck’. Or if it did, it has been expunged, leaving fewer traces than the castles and walls of the nobles that were demolished in the wars of pacification. The accent of the
stornelli
is entirely personal, solitary, and passionate. A lover sings to his girl, and she replies from her window. Or he goes away, and she watches, pining. These simple refrains that deal only with poor people and with the simple elements of love—meeting, leave-taking, waiting, longing—contain nothing rustic or low. They are as pure and elegant, as dignified in feeling, as the Baptistery of Florence.