The Stones of Florence (22 page)

This fearsome twilight was a time for historians, for summings up and bitter stocktaking. The Florentine literary genius turned in these years to history, as though there were a presentiment that all past deeds would vanish, together with the social structure, if a careful record were not compiled. The histories of Guicciardini, Machiavelli, and a little later Segni and Varchi have the air, often, of being written for a time capsule or to be cast to sea in a bottle: each writer retells the story, as though he would be the last to remember it, of the deeds and sayings of the Florentines, starting, usually, from the foundation of the city.

A kind of tyrannophobia had seized the Florentines after the last expulsion of the Medici. Bands of young political purists went about questioning the loyalty of venerable elected officials and attacking works of art. It was the custom to keep wax statues of outstanding citizens, living and dead, in the church of the Annunziata, for special feast days, when they would be dressed in rich costumes and hung on the convent walls; one morning, in 1528, a masked gang of roughs went into the church and broke up the images of the two Medici popes, of Lorenzo the Magnificent and other distinguished Medici; the broken bits were then treated as though the church were a public latrine. This had happened once before, in the interregnum after the Sack of Prato. By public decree, the Medici emblems were ordered to be removed from churches and private dwellings, and it was proposed to tear down Palazzo Medici. Old Cosimo’s epitaph in San Lorenzo was rewritten to say that he was not Pater Patriae but Tyrannus. Michelangelo offered to do a ‘Samson Overcoming a Philistine’ to stand as a republican symbol in a public square, but (a sign of the new times) he was too busy painting a ‘Leda’ for the Duke of Ferrara to keep his promise. And finally, during the Siege itself, painted likenesses of hanged criminals appeared, once more, on the walls of the Mercanzia in the Piazza della Signoria, painted by Andrea del Sarto, at night because of the shame attached to the work; these public enemies were not now, alas, in the grip of the Republic but had deserted to the enemy outside the gates. Throughout the Siege, this curious punitive species of fresco, always praised for being very lifelike, was persevered in, Andrea working at night and in his pupils’ names on the Bargello walls. A certain Ghiberti, descendant of the great sculptor who had done the ‘Gates of Paradise’, painted a placard for the military headquarters, the Golden Lion in Via Larga, showing Clement VII in his papal dress and mitre at the foot of the gallows.

Andrea del Sarto, who died in 1531, was the chief Florentine representative of the
bella maniera
of Raphael, that is, of an ideal ‘classicism’, already somewhat stereotyped and saccharine, that was being developed in Rome. His masterpiece, a ‘Last Supper’ in the monastery of San Salvi, near Campo di Arrigo, was spared during the Siege by a squadron of Florentine workmen sent to demolish all the buildings within a mile radius of the walls (so that they could not prove useful to the besieging enemy), spared, so it is said, from artistic sentiment that could not bear to destroy something so beautiful and so fresh from the artist’s hand. The ‘perfection’ of Andrea, which today seems boring and academic, still retained a saving element of Florentine naturalism, of that lifelike quality that was noted in the hanging figures on the Mercanzia and the Bargello. But just during the chaotic years preceding the Siege there began, in reaction to Andrea, the peculiar movement called Mannerism, which departed both from Nature and from ideal standards of perfection. The ‘unnaturalness’ of the first Mannerists—Pontormo and Il Rosso Fiorentino—was a subject for Cellini’s sarcasms and for Vasari’s worry. He speaks of
‘bizzarrie’
and funny (
‘stravaganti’)
poses, of
‘certi stravolgimenti ed attitudini molto strane’.
Early Florentine Mannerism might be called the first modern art, in the sense that it was incomprehensible to the artists’ contemporaries, who in vain sought a rationale for what seemed a wilful violation of the accepted canons of beauty.

Up to the time of Pontormo and Il Rosso, there had been a general agreement, not restricted to connoisseurs, as to what constituted beauty and what constituted ugliness, and the judgment of the citizens of Florence was regarded as supreme. Their quick applause for the new had kept this agreement from becoming a form of philistinism—nobody complained that Giotto was not like Cimabue or that Brunelleschi had violated the plan of Arnolfo. A lively faculty of recognition was the common denominator between the artist and the public. When Michelangelo spoke of ‘a cage for crickets’, everyone saw what he was talking about and what Cellini was talking about when he said that Bandinelli’s ‘Hercules and Cacus’ (made, after the Medici restoration, from the block of marble intended for Michelangelo’s ‘Samson’) was like a great ugly sack of melons stood up against a wall. A joke is a proof that everyone is capable of seeing with the same eyes. The Mannerists were the first to require a special vision, an act of willed understanding, on the part of the public. With Il Rosso and Pontormo, ‘What can anyone see in it?’ became, for the first time, a question propounded about a work of art. And even today, the visitor to the Uffizi who has not been prepared by a heavy reading course in art criticism and theory will find himself wondering, in the Mannerist rooms, what anyone ever saw or sees in this art, with its freakish figures arranged in ‘funny’ postures and dressed in vehemently coloured costumes.

In their personal lives, both Pontormo and Il Rosso were ‘disturbed’ cases, to use the psychiatric jargon of today. Pontormo was a recluse in the tradition of Uccello and Piero di Cosimo—a solitary hypochondriac who lived in a strange tall house he had had constructed for himself
(‘cera di casamento da uomo fantastico e solitario’)
with a top room, where he slept and sometimes worked, that was reached from the street by a ladder, which he would pull up after himself with a pulley, so that no one could get at him once he was safe inside. Often, he did not answer when friends knocked on the door in the street below. ‘Bronzino and Daniello knocked; I don’t know what they wanted.’ He had no wife, and in his old age he adopted a foundling from the Innocenti with whom he had a great deal of trouble, because the youth would not stay home with him or would shut himself in his room and refuse to eat. Pontormo’s diary, kept during the last three years of his life, records his minute attention to his stomach, kidneys, and bowels, and painstakingly itemizes his lonely, abstemious meals. ‘Dined on ten ounces of bread, cabbage, beet salad.’ ‘A bunch of grapes for dinner; nothing else.’ ‘A “fish” of eggs [a
frittata
made in the shape of a fish], six ounces of bread, and some dried figs.’ One writer, Bocchi, relates that Pontormo was ‘excessively melancholy and kept dead bodies in troughs of water to get them to swell up’, in order to study them for the ‘Deluge’ he was painting in San Lorenzo; the smell sickened the whole neighbourhood. Vasari says, on the contrary, that he had a morbid fear of death and could not bear to have it mentioned or to see a dead body carried through the streets. During the plague, he fled to the monks in the Certosa at Galluzzo. Il Rosso (so called because of his fiery complexion) used to dig up corpses in the graveyard of Arezzo in order to study the effects of decomposition. In Florence, on Borgo dei Tintori, he lived with a baboon, which he taught to perform services for him. According to Vasari, he committed suicide in Fontainebleau, but modern authorities deny this.

Of the two, Pontormo was decidedly the greater artist. His late-summer idyl, ‘Vertumnus and Pomona’, painted for the big sunny upper room of Poggio a Caiano, Lorenzo’s favourite villa, is one of the most convincing and freshest bucolics ever projected by a painter; it is as light and graceful as an eighteenth-century Venetian and as strong in its design as a Michelangelo. Above, two naked
putti
are riding on the central bull’s-eye window, perched on laurel branches, and two more, below, are sitting astride a wall. Branches and delicate leaves spray out, suggesting, in their movement, a swing or swings. A party of handsome country girls, a naked boy, an old man with a basket, a youth in a jerkin, and a dog have stopped to rest, as though by a roadside, and have disposed themselves on two stone walls, which provide a platform or stage for the painting, transecting the half-moon of the lunette. The country girls (goddesses, really) are wearing low-necked summer dresses, with white fichus or berthas and billowing sleeves. One has pulled up her red skirt and is dangling a white bare leg over the wall she sits on. One has a pale blue cap, like a Vermeer; she is turning her head over her shoulder, again Vermeer-like, towards the room; her sleeves are rolled up, her pretty hip is raised, and her bare foot and legs are stretching out from her pale lavender dress. One, the most beautiful of the three, with a violet bow in her dark piled-up hair, is reclining, propped up on an elbow, looking intently forward; she wears an olive-green dress with violet sleeves, and her free arm, somewhat tanned, is extended sideward, straight out, in a lovely taut gesture, as though she were maintaining her balance. On the other side of the bull’s eye, the naked sunburned boy on the wall has his arm thrown back and upward, as if he were playing at ball. The old god Vertumnus sits crouched by his basket like a brown peasant or beggar. The youth next to him wears a mauve tunic and a white shirt with full sleeves. Nothing could suggest better a warm, late-summer afternoon on a Tuscan roadside than these bare legs, white kerchiefs, slightly disarrayed gowns, tucked-up skirts and sleeves, the unself-conscious medley of dress and undress, the play of cool, precise colours against heated flesh in the semi-shade of the branching laurel. The fresco was commissioned by Pope Leo X to honour the memory of his father, Lorenzo, and from it transpires a breath of the natural farm life of the villa as described in Poliziano’s letters and Latin verses: family shopping trips to Pistoia, cheese-making, mulberries, peacocks, and geese. In a quite different vein, Pontormo’s ‘Crucifixion’ (now in the Belvedere), painted for a roadside chapel near Castello, is in its swelling volumes and austere tragic simplicity nearly as fine as a Masaccio.

From these extraordinary works, no one would be led to suspect the ‘derangement’ of Pontormo; nor would anyone guess that he, like Il Rosso, suffered from
‘l’orrore dello spazio’.
Yet a horror of space, in fact, was the phobic obsession that dictated or drove most of his compositions, and those of Il Rosso, too, to an even more marked extent. The first reaction to a typical altarpiece by Pontormo or Il Rosso is one of sheer repulsion and bewilderment. There is no depth and no dimensionality, and the figures, uprooted like the corpses in the graveyard, stare out as though they were apparitions. Space has been dismembered, and anatomy, no longer obedient to spatial discipline, reverts to a kind of Gothic abandon. Arms have grown extraordinarily long; heads have shrunk; feet and hands have become gigantic or withered into claws; eyes are mere holes, blackened around the edges, or else they are rolling up, showing their whites, in ecstasy. Bodies are swivelled about in remarkable contortions. A screaming phantasmal colour jumps off the canvas—lurid greens and oranges, leprous whites, burning reds, and jarring violets.

What is most disturbing, however, in this
‘primo manierismo fiorentino’
is the presence of a kind of prettiness—a sugary, simpering prettiness which is already unpleasantly noticeable in Andrea del Sarto, whose rapt devotional groups are all too ‘seraphic’ often, in the style of the cheap holy cards with a prayer printed on the back that are distributed in churches. Iridescent or opaline colour, used by Andrea for religiose effects of light and shade, became the specialty of the Mannerists, who loved the two-tone effects now found chiefly in sleazy taffetas popular with home-dressmakers for an ungainly girl’s first ‘formal’—orange turning yellow, flame turning red, lavender turning rose. Il Rosso’s colour is more garish than Pontormo’s. In his ‘Madonna, Saints, and Two Angels’ in the Uffizi, the principal personages are all dressed in ‘shot’ textiles. The Madonna is wearing a two-toned pinky purple dress with peach-coloured sleeves; Saint John the Baptist has a Nile-green shoulder-throw and a mauve toga; Saint Jerome’s bare ancient shoulders, shrunken neck, and ferret-like head are emerging from what is best described as an evening stole, in dark grey iridescent taffeta. The mauves, peaches, and purples are reflected, like a stormy sunset, on the flesh of the holy group; clawlike hands have red transparent fingers as if they were being held up to the sun or to an infernal fire. A simpering, rouged, idiot Child sits on the Madonna’s lap. The eyeholes of the Child, the Madonna, and the red-winged Angels are circled by blackness, like melting mascara; their reddened, purpled features are smudged and blurred; and the whole party appears intensely dissipated or lunatic—a band of late roisterers found at dawn under a street lamp. Other sacred paintings of Il Rosso, like the ‘Moses Defending the Daughters of Jethro’, also in the Uffizi, suggest, again, the half-carnival atmosphere of an insane asylum or of a brothel during a police raid. In other toppling constructions of Il Rosso and Pontormo, the pyramid of the Holy Family and saints calls to mind a circus tableau, of a team of brightly costumed acrobats teeteringly balanced on the strong man at the base.

The hellish, freak-show impression made by many of these altarpieces was not accidental, at least in Il Rosso’s case. Vasari tells a story of how the painter was doing a picture for the superintendent of the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, and the superintendent, seeing the oil sketch and taking the saints for devils, drove Il Rosso off the premises. Vasari goes on to explain that Il Rosso, when making an oil sketch, had the habit of giving
‘certe arie crudeli e disperate’
to the figures, which he later sweetened and softened in the finished canvas. But those ‘cruel and desperate airs’ are not really dispelled by the orangeade colour or by the drooling smiles of the sticky Child and angels. ‘The Madonna of the Harpies’, the name given to a well-known painting by Andrea del Sarto, because it shows the Madonna standing on a pedestal carved with harpy forms, might serve as the over-all title for Il Rosso’s leering underworld.