The Stones of Florence (9 page)

Giano himself became a victim of this atmosphere of suspicion and fear. Stories of a ‘Ghibelline danger’ were put into circulation by the Guelphs, and Giano was soon denounced as a ‘subverter’ through a subtle ruse of Corso Donati’s. Idealistically, he volunteered to go into exile for the sake of the public peace, but this did not prevent him from being condemned,
in absentia,
together (on his own principle) with all his family. His houses were wrecked, and he ended his life abroad, a
fuoruscito,
running a branch in France of the Pazzi family’s bank. ‘Giano was a wise man,’ says Villani, ‘albeit somewhat presumptuous.’

In another popular uprising, shortly after the fall of Giano, the nobles were forced to sell their great crossbows to the Republic, and in 1298 Palazzo Vecchio was started, to protect the signory from the attacks of the nobles. But the power of the magnates and the new-rich burghers (called the ‘fat’
popolani)
could not be curbed. Soon—in June, 1304—the Donati, Tosinghi, and Medici were throwing fire into each other’s palaces, and the heart of the city was again burned. The poor in the East End quarter, which became known as the Red City, repeatedly saw their wooden houses destroyed in these contests of the great. The strike was tried out, abortively, as a weapon of protest. Then, in 1378, came the revolt of the Ciompi, or wool-carders, in which a remarkable red-haired proletarian, Michele di Lando, a wool-carder whose wife sold vegetables, rose to power as gonfalonier of justice. He, too, though a man of sense and moderation, finished in exile. Donatello’s father, a wool-carder, figured in the Ciompi Revolt and, having been designated as a ‘ringleader’, fled to Lucca, where he stayed some time before he found it safe to return. The
popolo minuto
or working class of Florence, excluded from representation in the big middle-class guilds, was nevertheless highly developed politically. The people of Florence were, in fact, too articulate, politically, for government to be possible at all; the threat of direct democracy or piazza rule was always present, and no matter how short the period of elective office (sometimes six months), it generally seemed too long. Nearly every form of government was tried out in Florence. This makes Florentine history ‘transparent and typical’, as Burckhardt said of Athens. If the incorruptible Giano della Bella seems to prefigure the French Revolution and Saint-Just, Michele di Lando and his organized textile workers loom out of the fourteenth century, nearly a hundred years after Giano, as premonitory of the Lancashire spinners and weavers in the England of the Industrial Revolution, lit by a Dickensian chiaroscuro of black factory smoke, the torches of marching men, and the fire of oratory.

The Florentines were fond of listening to speeches. At the sound of the great bell, they congregated in the piazza to hear what was to be said. The
‘arringa’
or harangue was originally a special discourse prepared by the consuls and delivered to the people in assembly. An early account, set down at the beginning of the thirteenth century, describes the methods used by an orator of the day in working up the people to war or a vendetta. He would strike a tremendously bellicose attitude, make hideous faces, knit his brows, raise his arms in threatening gestures; these pantomimes, resembling the war dances of savages, were judged, apparently, as performances. The vividness of the mime’s acting determined the policy to be pursued by the state. Political meetings are still held in the Piazza della Signoria, and the public goes to measure them as performances: at night, a Communist orator stands thundering at a podium under the full arches of the Loggia, while hundreds of red flags wave and giant shadows of the ‘David’, the ‘Perseus’, and the ‘Hercules’ fall on him and the assembled, curious Florentines. This piazza seems made for politics, and its shape is only fully defined when it swells with a ‘sea’ of electors, washing up against the sides of the buildings and lapping against the tall statues’ bases. On such nights, oratory and statuary seem inseparably joined, and, indeed, it is possible that something of the realism of Florentine sculpture, particularly noticeable in Donatello’s wild Baptists, goes back to the early pantomimes or orations, so to speak, in the round. One of the treasures of the Archaeological Museum is a statue in the Etruscan style called the
‘Arringatore’
(third century
B.C.
), which is supposed to represent a certain Aulus Metellus in the act of speaking.

Before a war, the people listened to a warlike harangue, and it was the Florentine custom, after a victory, to circulate insulting verses about the enemy. This practice, very ancient in Florence, going back to the subjugation of Fiesole, was later copied by the other Tuscan towns. The insult was often acted out as well. After the battle of Campaldino, in which Dante fought, the Florentines came to the defeated town of Arezzo, which was ruled by a fighting bishop, and threw thirty dead asses with mitres on their heads over the walls. Such uncouth jests, regarded as typically Florentine, continued late into the Renaissance and were sometimes very barbarous. Savonarola’s mockers, the juvenile delinquents known as the ‘Bad Companions’, smeared the pulpit in the Duomo from which he preached with filth, hung it with a stinking ass’s skin, and drove great spikes in along the rim where he would hammer his hands for emphasis. Four or five centuries earlier, the statue of Mars on the Ponte Vecchio had been crowned with flowers every March if the season was good and daubed with mud if not. This ‘revenge’ on the god (who, Davidsohn thinks, was actually an equestrian statue of the Emperor Theodoric, though the Florentines did not know it) was again typical of Florentine extremism, of the attitude of either-or.

The orations on the piazza often ended in horrible tumults, in which people were torn to pieces. In 1343, after the fall of the Duke of Athens, a man was eaten on the Piazza della Signoria. Much later, after the thwarting of the Pazzi Conspiracy, portions of dead bodies, according to Machiavelli, were seen borne on spears and scattered throughout the streets, and the roads around Florence were covered with fragments of human flesh. The cruelties committed in Pistoia, during the struggles of the factions, are said to have surpassed those committed in Florence, and the practice of ‘planting’ traitors, that is, of burying them alive, upside down, in the soil, was general in medieval Tuscany.

The wars and insurrections and factional frays that occasioned these barbarities were often marked, too, by touches of poetic beauty and by a sense of fair play. Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, captain of Pisa, while besieging Genoa, the hereditary enemy, shot silver arrows over the walls of the city as a sign of contempt. (This man, nevertheless, was a traitor, whom Dante found freezing in ice in the lowest circle of hell: for his double-dealing, he and his sons and his young grandsons had been starved to death by the Pisans in the tower called, after their fate, the Tower of Hunger.) Arezzo, mourning for the Ghibellines, after the defeat of Henry VII, changed the horse on its shield from white to black. The Florentine
carroccio,
or war chariot, was drawn by four pairs of beautiful white oxen covered with scarlet cloth; it was ornamented with wood carvings of lions and painted vermilion; the driver was dressed in crimson. A red-and-white silk banner waved from the flagstaff, which was topped by a golden apple and decorated with branches of palm and olive. A bell and a priest went with the
carroccio
into battle; the tinkling of the bell, as the heavy car moved, told the combatants where the priest was, so that the dying could receive absolution and the last sacraments. The army was also accompanied by a great bell called the Martinella or the Campana degli Asini (Donkey’s Bell); for thirty days before fighting began the Martinella tolled from the great arch of Por Santa Maria, to let the enemy have fair warning.

Castruccio Castracane, lord of Lucca, celebrated his victory over the Florentines at Altopascio (1325) with a triumphal return to Lucca in the style of a Roman general. Wearing a laurel wreath and dressed in purple and gold, he stood in a chariot drawn by four white horses, while captives in chains were driven ahead of him, as in a Caesarean triumph, and the
carrocci
of Florence and her ally, Naples, were drawn backward, to signify humiliation. This medieval
condottiere,
the military genius of his place and day, who cultivated a Roman appearance, in robes of crimson silk, was greatly admired by Machiavelli, two centuries later. He appears on the Tuscan scene, during the lifetime of Giotto, like some vision or
tableau vivant
of the full Renaissance; Piero della Francesca, more than a century later, might have painted him in an exquisite Triumph with allegorical figures, like the one he did of Frederick of Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, which is now in the Uffizi. Fortunately for Florence, which could not have borne Castruccio’s thirst for glory and personal pageantry, he died of a common cold, after one of his victories, just as he was planning to attack the city.

Many witty sayings and cruel jests are attributed to Castruccio by Machiavelli in the fanciful life he wrote of him, after the manner of Plutarch. For example: Castruccio was invited to dinner by a wealthy Luccan, who had just had his house redone in the most showy and sumptuous manner, with rich hangings and a tessellated floor, varicoloured, having a flower-and-leaf motif; looking about him, Castruccio suddenly spat in his host’s face and explained himself by saying that he did not know where else to spit without damaging something. This blunt and malicious tale is full of Florentine pungency; it is a story that might be told today at the Bar Giacosa on Via Tornabuoni or at Gilli’s in the Piazza della Repubblica.

The harsh humour and realism of the Florentines have a long history. They are fond today of pinning names on each other (‘The Unmade Bed’, of a blowsy lady; ‘The Tired Horse’, of an ageing cavalier; ‘The Miracle of St Januarius’, of an old lady whose make-up runs); in the Middle Ages, such names stuck and became surnames. Davidsohn gives a list of nicknames that had been accepted as surnames in the twelfth century; among them: Deaf, Blind, Scabby, Stumpfoot, Monkeymouth, Beautiful
(Bella),
Horse, Cow, Mule, Liar, Sinner, Blockhead, Shit, Drunkard, Pharisee, Highway Robber, Evil Counsellor. And the streets around the Duomo, up to the present century, when many of the names were changed, were called Death, Hell, Purgatory, Crucifixion, Our Lady of Coughs, the Rest of Old Age, Gallows Lane, the Tombs, the Way of the Discontented, Dire Need, Small Rags, Skeleton Street.

According to Dante and Villani, Florence in the Middle Ages enjoyed only ten years of civil peace—the ten blessed years of the
Primo Popolo.
The same impression is left by later historians. Dante saw a fatal likeness between Florence and Thebes, that other city of the war god, whose founders were the crop of warriors sprung from the dragon’s teeth that Cadmus sowed. The chroniclers, indeed, appear to be surprised that Florence did not perish, like Thebes, as a result of her internal dissensions, which also weakened her to outward attack. Unlike the Venetians, the Pisans, the Genoese, the Milanese, the Florentine Republic, after its early successes in subjugating the nobles of the
contado
and the smaller towns roundabout, was not a military nation; the Florentines’ gift was for fighting with each other. In the field, they lost more battles than they won. Nor were they gifted in diplomacy. Time and again, Florence, weak and disunited, was saved from annihilation by a sheer accident, like the death of Castruccio Castracane or the death of Henry VII or of Manfred or of Giangalleazo Visconti or of Ladislaw, King of Naples, all of which happened providentially and just in the nick of time. Intellect and energy explain the pre-eminence of the Florentines and their wealth, which was reputed to be fabulous. But this wealth only offered another temptation to an enemy eager for plunder. The survival of the state under these circumstances has never been explained by an historian.

Chapter Four

‘H
OW FAIR A THING IS THIS PERSPECTIVE!
’ Paolo Uccello’s wife used to say that he would stay all night at his writing desk, worrying some perspective problem, and when she would call him to come to bed, he would tell her:
‘O che dolce cosa è questa prospettiva!’
A groan of admiration, one would think, for perspective was a hard mistress for the artist. The principles of an ordered recession to create an illusion of deep space had been discovered in Florence by the architect Brunelleschi while Uccello was still a boy in the workshop of the sculptor Ghiberti. These principles were based on geometry; Brunelleschi had studied under the great Florentine mathematician Toscanelli, and had even taken a
‘brevetto’
in mathematics. To demonstrate the laws of his discovery to the curious, he painted a little peep-show panel of the Baptistery as seen from the door of the Duomo; the spectator looked through a hole into a mirror and found the vanishing point. This was the precursor of the camera obscura, which was not invented till the sixteenth century.

Florence, in those early days of the Renaissance, was full of scientific excitement. Donatello had been in Rome taking measurements of Greek statues, while Brunelleschi, his friend, measured Roman temples. The ‘art’ of making something and the ‘science’ of making something were regarded as the same thing. Laws of measurement were sought everywhere, and statistics of every kind were collected. Toscanelli, in 1460, constructed a great gnomon in the cupola of the Duomo to determine the summer solstice, the movable feasts of the Church being reckoned by the sun’s path, according to the Golden Number. The sun rays, let into Santa Maria del Fiore by this prodigious calculator, called ‘the noblest astronomical instrument in the world’, fell 277 feet, onto a dial made of marble flags in the floor of the tribune. This gnomon, with its finger of shadow, was looked on as both a thing of wonder and an object of beauty, like the dome itself, which was considered the greatest engineering feat since antiquity.