The Stones of Florence (13 page)

A peculiar tale of this period called
‘Il Grasso Legnaiuolo
gives the flavour of Florentine intellectualism. It is a story of a
beffa
or jest—a trick played by Brunelleschi and his friends on the fat woodworker of the title, who had offended them by not coming to supper one night when they were expecting him. They decide to persuade the woodworker that he does not exist, that is, to strip him of his identity, first, by not recognizing him and, second, by assuring him through an elaborate series of manœuvres that there is indeed a
‘Grasso’,
whom he claims to be, but that he is not that person. He is, instead, they convince him by their sleights, no one, nothing, a mere confused flux of consciousness that thinks it is a fat woodworker. The climax of the tale is reached when the quivering fat man is afraid to go home, to his own house, for fear that ‘He’—that is, himself—will be there. ‘If
he
is there,’ he says to himself, in a mixture of cunning and panic, ‘what will
I
do?’ This picture of self-alienation, which is more terrifying and cleverer than anything in Pirandello, is told as a true incident, well known in its own time, which befell a certain Manetti degli Ammannatini, who, unable to live down his experience, went off to Hungary, where he ended his days. The susceptible woodworker, in fact, must have been one of those ‘workers in intarsia’—mentioned disparagingly by Donatello—who specialized in illusionist perspective effects, of
mazzocchi,
spheres, points, and so on, artfully wrought in wood inlays. The genius of Brunelleschi is the real hero of the tale; this genius, which found the way to calculate the vanishing point, could make a bulky man vanish or seem to himself to vanish, like a ball juggled by a conjurer, while still in plain sight.

The strain of eccentricity, of queer, secretive habits, among Florentine painters crops up again in Piero di Cosimo, who was well known for his paintings of dragons and other hideous monsters in the time of Savonarola. Vasari says that Piero lived more like a beast than a man, not letting his rooms be swept or his gardens and vineyard be hoed or pruned. Unkempt and savage, he wished to see everything revert, like himself, to a wild state of Nature, and he had a passion for all Nature’s oddities and ‘mistakes’. He looked for the marvellous everywhere and could descry faces in the clouds and battles in filthy walls, where people had spat. One of his peculiarities was that he would not let anyone see him at work.

Leonardo had much in common with Piero di Cosimo and more with Uccello. Here were the same collections of birds and beasts; the same interest in freaks and aberrations; the same scientific and mathematical bent; the same perpetual experimentation, which made his studio resemble an alchemist’s laboratory, full of the new media he was trying out, often with unfortunate results, for the colours did not last always and a beautiful work, it is said, would turn brown and shrivelled, like an ugly old woman. In Leonardo, all the genius of the Florentine people—the genius for science, engineering, mapmaking, painting, architecture, sculpture—seemed to concentrate, and he was handsome to look at as well. Of all the gifts bestowed on him, it was painting he cared most for, unlike Michelangelo, who, almost equally gifted, despised all painting, except fresco, as childish work, unfit for a man. Yet Leonardo, too, like Uccello, was fascinated by mathematical puzzles to the point where he neglected his art. A monk who was acting as Isabella d’Este’s agent wrote her, to report on Leonardo’s progress: ‘In sum, his mathematical experiments have so distracted him from painting that he cannot abide the brush.’

With Leonardo, the element of sorcery in his favourite art declared itself finally without equivocation. The supposed self-portrait that he did when old shows him as a kind of ancient Merlin or druid mage, with long white hair, beard, and eyebrows—all the accessories of the Enchanter. The bluish caves and grottoes, the stalagmites and stalactites, the mirror pools and, shadowy rivers of his easel-painting beckon the viewer into a sly realm of sinister magic. The curving smiles of his Madonnas and Saint Annes are a serpentine temptation; Saint John the Baptist with his soft womanly breasts and white plump arm like a cocotte’s turns into a Bacchus, with a crown of grape leaves and a panther’s skin. Everything is in a state of slow metamorphosis or creeping transformation, and the subject of his most celebrated painting, the Mona Lisa, smiling her enigmatic smile, is certainly a witch. That is why people are tempted to slash her, to draw moustaches on her, to steal her; she is the most famous painting in the world, because all the deceptions and mystifications of painting are summed up in her, to produce a kind of fear.

Chapter Five

F
LORENTINE HISTORY, IN ITS
great period, is a history of innovations. The Florentines wrote the first important work in the vulgar tongue (the
Divina Commedia)
; they raised the first massive dome since antiquity; they discovered perspective; they made the first nude of the Renaissance; they composed the first opera (Jacopo Peri’s
Dafne).
It is a question whether they or the Venetians were the first to collect statistics. The first humanist, Petrarch, was the son of Florentine Ghibellines,
fuorusciti
who had taken refuge in Arezzo at the time of his birth. Literary criticism, in the modern sense, was inaugurated by Boccaccio, who lectured in a little church next to the Badia on the
Divine Comedy
in the year 1373, the signory having decreed that ‘the work of the poet vulgarly called Dante’ should be read aloud to the public. Boccaccio’s clinical account of the plague symptoms in the
Decameron
was a pioneer contribution to descriptive medicine. Machiavelli is generally called the father of political science, and he was the first to study the mechanism of power in politics and government. The first modern art criticism was written by L. B. Alberti.

The first chair of Greek was set up here, in the fourteenth century. The first public library was founded by Cosimo il Vecchio in the convent of San Marco. The Italian literary language is exclusively the creation of the Tuscans, who formed it on their dialect as spoken in the city of Florence; Manzoni, the author of
I Promessi Sposi,
came here in the nineteenth century from Milan to ‘rinse his linen’, as he said, ‘in the water of the Arno’; Leopardi came from the Marche. Tuscany is the one province in Italy that does not have a dialect, the Tuscan dialect being, precisely, Italian—what is sometimes called Tuscan dialect (the substitution of ‘h’ for hard ‘c’, for example,
‘hasa’
for
‘casa’
among the poor people, is only a difference in pronunciation). In the same way, Italian painting spoke in the Tuscan idiom from the time of Giotto to the death of Michelangelo, that is, for nearly three centuries.

The Florentines, in fact, invented the Renaissance, which is the same as saying that they invented the modern world—not, of course, an unmixed good. Florence was a turning-point, and this is what often troubles the reflective sort of visitor today—the feeling that a terrible mistake was committed here, at some point between Giotto and Michelangelo, a mistake that had to do with power and megalomania, or gigantism of the human ego. You can see, if you wish, the handwriting on the walls of Palazzo Pitti or Palazzo Strozzi, those formidable creations in bristling prepotent stone, or in the cold, vain stare of Michelangelo’s ‘David’, in love with his own strength and beauty. This feeling that Florence was the scene of the original crime or error was hard to avoid just after the last World War, when power and technology had reduced so much to rubble.
‘You
were responsible for this,’ chided a Florentine sadly, looking around the Michelangelo room of the Bargello after it was finally reopened. In contrast, Giotto’s bell tower appeared an innocent party.

But the invention of the modern world could not be halted, at Giotto’s bell tower or Donatello’s ‘San Giorgio’ or the Pazzi Chapel or Masaccio’s ‘Trinity’. The Florentines introduced dynamism into the arts, and this meant a continuous process of acceleration, a speed-up, which created obsolescence around it, as new methods do in industry. The
last word,
throughout the Renaissance, always came from Florence. When Cosimo il Vecchio, in 1433, arrived at Venice, an exile, with his architect, Michelozzo, and his court of painters and learned men, and was lodged, like a great prince, on the island of San Giorgio in the lagoon, the Venetians were amazed by these advanced persons, just as they were amazed, later, in Giorgione’s time, by the arrival of Leonardo. The Romans, seeing the two young Florentines, Brunelleschi and Donatello, directing workmen to dig among the ruins of the old temples and baths, assumed that they were looking for buried treasure, gold and precious stones, and the measurements the two shabby young men were taking seemed to confirm this; it was thought that they must be practising geomancy or the art of divination by lines and figures, to find where the treasure lay hidden. A century later, the Romans themselves, having caught on to the lesson of the ‘treasure-hunters’, were digging up the Laocoön.

Wherever the Florentines went, they acted as disturbers, agents of the new. They congregated in Ferrara, as exiles, and the Duke’s own local court painting took on a fevered brilliance that reached a climax of almost sinister beauty in the frescoes of Palazzo Schifanoia (‘Chase Away Care’), allegories of the Seasons and the Signs of the Zodiac, done for the marriage of the young Borso d’Este to replace frescoes by Piero della Francesca that had been damaged by fire. The Florentines came to Urbino, to Rimini, to Mantua and left behind them in these petty duchies exquisite masterpieces of painting, architecture, sculpture, like dropped handkerchiefs of marvellous workmanship, to astonish the local schools. Giotto had worked in Padua, in the Arena Chapel, and the influence of his monumental style radiated throughout the Veneto; the great frescoes in Treviso, by Tomaso da Modena, and the Altichiero cycles in Verona proclaim, like colonies planted, the parenthood of Florence. More than a hundred years later, it was Padua, again, that felt the shock of a new revolution in Florence, when Donatello came and set up the huge equestrian statue of Gattamelata in the public square to stand as a fresh wonder in the world and inspire the young Mantegna and, in turn, through him, the Venetians, who had already been unsettled by Masolino, Uccello, and that wild mountaineer from the Tuscan Alps, Andrea del Castagno. (The Gattamelata monument is usually spoken of as ‘the first equestrian statue since antiquity’, though in fact many preceded it—the monument to Can Grande, Dante’s protector, in nearby Verona, for example. The
effect
of Donatello’s arrogant mounted
condottiere
was to make those who looked at it forget all the others and regard it as the parent of a species. Similarly, Donatello’s ‘David’ is not really ‘the first nude since antiquity’; it is the first
free-standing
nude.) During the next century, Leonardo’s travels again spread disquiet: in Venice, where he troubled Giorgione and the young Titian; in Milan, where a Milanese school hastily formed itself in his image. Shortly after this, Florentine tomb-sculptors carried the Renaissance, already declining, like a sick person, to Tudor England; Pietro Torrigiani carved the tomb of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey, and sculptors from the hills around Florence, from Maiano and Rovezzano, worked for Cardinal Wolsey. It is odd to think that Michelangelo, who you might think was a contemporary of Beethoven, died the year Shakespeare was born; this conjunction of dates measures the distance between Florence and the rest of the world. Even in Rome, many of the most astounding works (the Sistine Chapel, the tomb of Pope Julius II, the tomb of Innocent VIII, the dome of St Peter’s, the Masolino frescoes in San Clemente) are by Florentines.

The Florentines abroad, when they were not political exiles, conspiring among themselves, backbiting and trying to promote wars that would bring them home, were provokers of a different kind of disturbance, upsetting preconceptions of the mind and eye. Abroad and at home, they were independent, difficult to get on with, patronizing, quick in retort. ‘So this is the little person,’ said Pope Eugenius IV, sizing up Brunelleschi, ‘who would be brave enough to turn the world over on its axis.’ ‘Just give me a point, Your Holiness, where I can fix my lever, and I’ll show you what I can do.’ The little architect’s prompt reply summed up the Archimedean attitude of the Florentines: ‘Give me a place to stand, and I will move the universe.’ The story of Giotto and the circle, which gave rise to the expression ‘as round as Giotto’s
O
’, shows the same succinctness and confidence. Asked by the agent of an earlier pope for a sample of his work, Giotto simply drew a perfect circle, free hand, in red pencil, and sent it on to the vicar of Christ, who understood the point: the man who could do this had no need, like ordinary artists, to submit drawings.

On Giotto’s bell tower, there is a little relief of Daedalus, the hawk-man of antiquity, whose name means ‘cunning craftsman’. He is shown, all feathered, with the wings he fashioned on his back, after a design that may perhaps have been Giotto’s, and it can hardly be doubted that he, the great artificer and mechanic, who built Minos’s labyrinth and was a famous sculptor as well, was the real patron and mythic prototype of the Florentine builders and artisans; nor does it seem an accident that the flying machine was invented by the Florentine Leonardo, who tried, so they say, to fly off Mount Ceceri, the great cliff of Fiesole, where Milton locates Galileo with his ‘optic glass’ and where the Etruscan priest-astrologers used to study the skies. The ambition to move mountains, literally, was inherent in these hill dwellers. Leonardo, according to Vasari, not only conceived of boring tunnels through mountains but speculated on the possibility of moving mountains themselves from place to place.

Most of the great Florentine architects and sculptors were engineers as well. Brunelleschi tried to contrive the defeat of Lucca for the Florentines by an ingenious scheme for turning the course of the River Serchio and flooding the surroundings of the enemy city—a plan that miscarried, however. During the great siege of 1529–30, Michelangelo was invited to supervise the city’s defence, and, before he ran away, he built the walls that can still be seen near San Miniato as fortifications for the Republic. Leonardo’s engineering projects for the Duke of Milan are well known. The Florentine sculptor-architects, when not working for the Republic, were much in demand with neighbouring tyrants for the construction of public works: canals, arsenals, and chains of fortifications.