The Stones of Florence (5 page)

The idea of infamy, curiously enough, was conveyed by the Florentines through painting. Important public malefactors had their likenesses painted on the outside walls of the Bargello, which was then the prison and place of execution, where they were left to fade and blister with time, like the rogues’ gallery in an American post office, though in the case of Florence the criminals were not ‘wanted’ but already in the grasp of the authorities. The flimsiness and destructibility of a painted image, corresponding to a tattered reputation, was also emphasized in the Bonfire of Vanities, when the Florentines, disapproving of the attitude of a Venetian merchant who was present, had his portrait painted and burned it with the rest of the pyre.

The sculpture galleries of the Bargello and of the Works of the Duomo create a somewhat mournful and eerie effect because a civic spirit, the ghost of the Republic, is imprisoned, like a living person, in the marble, bronze, and stone figures, which appear like isolated, lonely columns, props and pillars of a society whose roof has fallen in. As in the ancient city-states, the religious and the civic were identical or nearly so in republican Florence; the saints were the civic champions, under whose protection and example the city fought. This was general among the city-states of the Middle Ages, each of which had its own special protectors
(i.e.,
its own religion). The Venetians rallied to the yell of ‘San Marco’, and the Luccans to ‘San Martino’, as the Florentines did to ‘San Giovanni’. Having their own religion, their own patriotic saints, the Florentines, like the Venetians, had small fear of the pope and were repeatedly subjected to interdict and excommunication; at one point, Florence, acting through the bishops of Tuscany, turned around and excommunicated the pope. The inscription, put up on Palazzo Vecchio during the siege of Florence in 1529,
‘Jesus Christus, Rex Florentini Popoli S.P. Decreto electus’
(‘Jesus Christ, King of the Florentine People, elected by Popular Decree’) asserted an absolute independence, not only of worldly rulers, but of any other spiritual power but Christ’s. This claim to be the city of God, the new Jerusalem, had already been implicit in the multiplicity of durable patriotic images, telamons, caryatids, hammered out by Florentine sculptors. Florentine sculpture has a local character, the spirit of a small place and province, unknown elsewhere in the West after Attica and Ionia. ‘The small state,’ says Jacob Burckhardt, ‘exists so that there may be a spot on earth where the largest possible proportion of the inhabitants are citizens in the fullest sense of the word.’ He was thinking of the Greek polis or city-state, but he might also have been describing the Florentine Republic; in both cases, citizenship and sculpture, together, were developed to the highest point.

Florentine sculpture, like Greek, was capable of intimacy and of the delicate shades of private feeling, but this, for the most part, as in Greece, was expressed on tombs and in the form of bas-relief, which is between statuary and drawing. The exquisite tombs of Desiderio and of Mino da Fiesole and their many charming heads of children are full of a private and therefore half-fugitive emotion; the discreet grief of a mourning family has the finest veil drawn across it, like the transparent marble veils of the Madonna and the drapery of angels in which these refined sculptors excelled. The restraint and control of Florentine low relief is very close to the Greek stele, which was originally a simple tablet with an inscription; the evanescent is inscribed or imprinted on stone, and the modulations in depth, with a narrow compass, imply reserve and tact, as in Greek elegiac poetry.

What makes this art appear ‘classical’ has nothing to do with the imitation of classical models. The Greek work that is closest to Mino, to Desiderio, to some of Donatello, and to Agostino di Duccio was hardly known in Italy in their time. The affinity with fifth-century Athens may be due partly to geography, partly to political structure – to the clear outlines of landscape and to a tradition of sharp, clear thought. Distinction and definition reduce forms and ideas to their essentials—that is, to bedrock. ‘By sculpture,’ said Michelangelo, ‘I understand an art that takes away superfluous material; by painting, one that attains its result by laying on.’ The art that takes away superfluous material, to lay bare an innate form or idea, was the art practised by Socrates in eliciting a truth from his interlocutor, who ‘knew’ the truth already but could not perceive it until the surrounding rubbish was cut away. The Florentines ‘knew’ that a statue was, in essence, a pillar, a column, and that a funerary monument was, in essence, a tablet with writing on it. This knowing is the classic temper.

The line between public and private was strictly drawn in the days of the Republic. The Florentines were known for their extreme individuality, yet no statue of a
condottiere
was permitted in a public square or, for that matter, in a private chapel. Grandiose tombs were unheard of in Florence before Michelangelo. Mourning remained a family matter, as it had been with the Etruscans, who represented husband and wife sitting at ease on their tombs, as if at a last domestic feast. Florentine decorum did not permit apotheoses of dead persons, such as were common in Venice.

The glorification of the individual was frowned on by the Republic; it was against public policy to encourage private show. Bifore windows, for example, so familiar in Sienese Gothic palaces, were allowed only in religious buildings in medieval Florence; the householder had to be content with a monofore. The severity of Florentine architecture owes a good deal to this prohibition. Cosimo il Vecchio, the founder of the Medici dynasty, was too cautious a politician to endanger his power by a pompous style of living; in his later days, he rejected titles and honours and declined the luxurious palace, in full Renaissance style, that Brunelleschi proposed to build him, commissioning Michelozzo instead to do him a plain, solid dwelling with a heavy cornice, in rusticated stone, where, dissimulating his real sovereignty, he played the part of a retiring private citizen. ‘Too big a house for such a little family,’ he used to sigh, nevertheless, when he was a lonely pantaloon in the big silent rooms, and his children had disappointed him. He buried his parents in a plain marble box in the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo.

It was a bastard Medici—Pope Clement VII, illegitimate son of that Giuliano who was killed by the Pazzi Conspirators while hearing mass at the Duomo—who breached the tradition, ordering the New Sacristy in San Lorenzo from Michelangelo to glorify two members of his family who would better have been forgotten. These celebrated Medici Tombs have a curious theatrical quality, as of a stage production in Caesarean costumes, complete with helmets, armour, plumes; the chapel that contains this brilliant rodomontade is more like a stage set than like architecture—a travesty or cynical exaggeration of the Brunelleschi sacristy, which it copies, just as the two dukes, posed like actors in a tableau, are a travesty of Renaissance
virtù.
Michelangelo, who, in any case, as Vasari says, ‘detested to imitate the living person unless it were one of incomparable beauty,’ made no attempt at portraiture, such as was customary in funerary statues; his two dukes are two handsome leading men, type-cast in Renaissance parts. The statue had become the statuesque—no longer a pillar of the community, but a form of marble flattery.

Michelangelo’s sculpture projects were expensive, and, as he grew older, only popes and tyrants could afford to patronize him. The gigantism of his later conceptions was out of scale, too, with the strict notions of measure and limit that governed his native city—notions peculiar to small, armed republics of the antique stamp. He himself lived in Rome, under the patronage of a series of papal princes, and even Cosimo I, the new Medici despot, could not entice him back to what then became the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. During the Siege of Florence, he had run away, briefly, to Venice, quitting his job as supervisor of the city’s fortifications in an access of panic, which he tried to justify afterward, when he wanted to return. He was no Cato or Brutus, yet in his way, like the embittered Dante in exile, he was a sour patriot. The four famous, somewhat rubbery symbolic figures of Night and Day, Twilight and Dawn, on the Medici Tombs are believed to express, in hidden language, his despair over the fall of the Republic and the triumph of the Medici dynasty. And in the statuary group called ‘Victory’ in Palazzo Vecchio, which shows an inane-looking young man crushing the back of an old man, who is bent double beneath him, the victim is supposed to have the features of Michelangelo. It is hard, however, to attribute Michelangelo’s personal sense of persecution (the other side of his megalomania) to patriotic motives. ‘I never had to do with a more ungrateful and arrogant people than the Florentines,’ he wrote in a letter.

In other respects, he himself was a true Florentine—dry, proud, terse, thrifty. The correspondence of his later years is almost wholly concerned with money matters. Miserly with himself, he was buying up Tuscan real estate for his brothers and his nephew. One by one, through his agents, he picked up farms at good prices, and he finally achieved his ambition of establishing the Buonarroti family in a solid, unostentatious dwelling, now the Casa Buonarroti or Michelangelo museum, on Via Ghibellina, in the Santa Croce quarter. All his private incentives, his planning for the future, centred on Florence. Though he refused to come himself, he advised Cosimo through Vasari about his building projects for the city, and he tried to accumulate merit in the next world by providing dowries for poor Florentine girls of good family, to permit them to marry or buy their entry into convents.

In his own day, he was often likened to the sculptors of antiquity, and a ‘Sleeping Cupid’ he had done as a young man actually passed for an antique. This was an early case of art forgery, whose victim was a Roman cardinal. Acting on the advice of a dealer, the young Michelangelo scarred his Cupid and stained it with earth, to make it look as if it had been dug up. The cardinal discovered the fraud and demanded his money back; eventually the statue, which belonged briefly to Cesare Borgia, who had looted it in Urbino, passed into the hands of Isabella d’Este, the Marchioness of Mantua, the greediest collector of her day. But the faking or imitation of antiquity (chiefly based on Hellenistic models) to suit a collector’s taste, like the flattering of tyrants and popes, had little in common with the natural and inbred classicism of Florence, whose sculpture died a painful and indeed a gruesome death with the extinction of the Republic.

Cosimo I, like so many absolute sovereigns, had a neo-classic or pseudo-classic taste; he had himself sculptured in the costume of a Roman emperor and commissioned various Ledas and Ganymedes and other mythological subjects from the Mannerist and neo-classic sculptors who worked for him, the best of whom were Cellini and Giambologna, a Frenchman. Much of this sculpture was private in the worst sense, like the ‘Hermaphroditus’, a poem done much earlier for Cosimo il Vecchio and inscribed to him by the writer Beccadelli—a work so crudely indecent that even the most ribald humanists attacked it and the author was burned in effigy in Ferrara and Milan. While licentious marbles and bronzes were being sought by the private collector, the noble nudity of public sculpture grew, as it were, embarrassed before the general gaze. The people of Florence put a gilded fig leaf on Michelangelo’s ‘David’; later, in Cosimo I’s time, Ammannati violently attacked the nude in a letter to the Florentine Academy of Design and publicly ‘repented’ his ‘Neptune’ (not because it was ugly but because it was naked).

Actually, Florentine humanism, which had been preying on the antique from the days of the old Cosimo, the passion of book collecting, art collecting, the appearance of the connoisseur, the whole notion, indeed, of ‘taste’, spelled the end of the heroic age of sculpture. The craze for the antique originated in Florence, under the patronage of the old Cosimo, who died while listening to a dialogue of Plato. It was, to start with, chiefly a literary movement, but the humanists quickly moved into the sphere of collecting art objects, trophies from the ancient world, competing with millionaires for these items, many of which were doubtless fakes. Poggio Bracciolini, the Florentine humanist, whose speciality was the recovery of classical manuscripts (Lucretius, Quintilian, Cicero, Manilius), which he gave to the world, collected for himself an array of marble busts—only one, he wrote, was ‘whole and elegant’; the rest were noseless. He sent a monk from Pistoia to Greece, antiquity-hunting for him, but this monk later cheated him and sold the items he had collected to Cosimo il Vecchio. Another Pistoiese delighted Lorenzo de’ Medici with a marble figure of Plato, said to have been found at Athens in the ruins of the Academy. Lorenzo accepted it, like any credulous American millionaire; he had been longing for a likeness of his ‘favourite philosopher’.

Even in Poggio’s time, there were not enough real antiques to supply the demand; only six antique statues, he reported, five marble and one of brass, were left in Rome. Later, the excavation of the ‘Laocoön’ in Rome, which was witnessed by Michelangelo, excited great wonder throughout the cultivated world. The vogue for antiquity and for imitations of antiquity made Baccio Bandinelli the most popular sculptor in Florence, rivalling even Michelangelo, who at once despised him and was jealous of him. Bandinelli turned out a mass of degraded statuary, including the ‘Hercules and Cacus’ in the Piazza, that frankly exploited the greed for ‘classic-type’ sculpture on the part of the new rulers and collectors.

Naturally, in none of this statuary, which was once à la mode (nor in the graceful Cellini either), is there a grain of that local tender piety, religious or civic, that appears in its purest, most intense concentration in Donatello’s figures. Donatello (‘little Donato’) was the most numinous of all the Florentine sculptors, and Michelangelo, though bigger, was not as fine. In the wiry tension of Pollaiuolo, working in bronze, the barbaric grace and luxury of the Etruscans reappears for a final time, as sheer fluid energy, but these works, even when they take the form of a papal tomb, like that of Innocent VIII in St Peter’s, have something of the private fetish about them, beautiful, strange, and secret. Michelangelo was the last truly public sculptor, and his works, so full of travail and labour, of knotted muscles and strained, suffering forms, are like a public death agony, prolonged and terrible to watch, of the art or craft of stonecutting. He anticipated the baroque, a style utterly un-Florentine, whose power centre was papal Rome. The Medici Tombs, in fact, make the impression of a papal enclave, an extraterritorial concession, within the Florentine city-state.