The Stones of Florence (15 page)

In Brunelleschi himself, the Florentine tradition reached its highest point. Here—in Santo Spirito, for instance, or the Pazzi Chapel or the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo or the Badia at San Domenico di Fiesole—are the grave purity, simplicity, and peacefulness of the early Florentine churches. The germ of Brunelleschi can be found not in classical Rome but in the little church of Santi Apostoli that legend attributes to Charlemagne. All grey and white, the dark-grey stone that is called justly ‘serene’ against white
intonaco
; three long aisles, one of which forms a nave; two processions of pillars with lovely Corinthian capitals marching down the church and upholding a rhythmic train of round arches; vaults interlacing like fans opening and closing; decorative motifs, always in dark-grey stone, of leaves, egg-and-dart pattern, scallop shells, and sun rays—these, generally speaking, are the elements of Tuscan classicism that are found, over and over, in the great Brunelleschi churches, sometimes with friezes and roundels added in the more frivolous parts, like the sacristy, by Donatello or Desiderio or Luca della Robbia: cherubs with rays like flower petals round their necks or with crossed wings like starchy bibs, the four Evangelists, or scenes from the life of Saint John.

The big churches of Brunelleschi, particularly San Lorenzo, which was the parish church of the Medici family, have been somewhat botched by later additions. The Pazzi Chapel, which was built for the Pazzi family as a kind of private oratory just outside the Franciscan church of Santa Croce, has not been tampered with, however, since the fifteenth century, and here you find the quintessential Brunelleschi. It is a small, square, yellowish, discreet temple, with projecting eaves, almost like a little mausoleum, from the outside, or like one of those little brown Etruscan funeral urns in the shape of a house, one of which can be seen in the Archaeological Museum—the
‘aedes tuscanica.
It has an atrium or pronaos supported by slender Corinthian columns, above which runs a frieze of cherubs’ heads in little medallions, done by Desiderio. Under the eaves is an attic and above them a cupola with a very delicate tall lantern. A
tondo
in glazed terracotta by Luca della Robbia of Saint Andrew (the chapel was done for Andrea de’ Pazzi) stands over the door.

The interior is a simple rectangle with four high narrow windows and bare white walls and at the end a small apse. In the four corners tall closed arches are drawn in dark-grey
pietra serena
on the white walls, like the memory of windows. Fluted pilasters with Corinthian capitals, also in
pietra serena,
are spaced along the walls, marking the points of support, and in the same way, the lunettes and supporting arches of the chapel are outlined in dark ribbons of stone against the white plaster, and the binding arches have stone rosettes enclosed in rectangles drawn on the white background. Arch repeats arch; curve repeats curve; rosette repeats rosette. The rectangles of the lower section are topped by the semi-circles of the lunettes and arches, which, in turn, are topped by the hemisphere of the cupola. The continual play of these basic forms and their variations—of square against round, deep against flat—is like the greatest music: the music of the universe heard in a small space.

The twelve Apostles, by Luca della Robbia, in dark-blue-and-white roundels framed in
pietra serena,
are seated about the walls, just below a frieze of cherubs’ heads and lambs, in alternate blue-and-faded-pink terracotta. In the pendentives of the apse are wonderful immense grey scallop shells, and in the pendentives of the room itself, outranking the Apostles, sit the four Evangelists, cast in glazed terracotta by Luca della Robbia on Brunelleschi’s designs, each with his attendant symbol and companion: Saint Luke with the Bull, Saint Mark with the Lion, Saint John with the Bird, and Saint Matthew with the Angel in the form of a Man. The colours of the terracotta glazes are clear and intensely beautiful in the severe grey-and-white room. The Bird is raven-black, the Lion chocolate, the Bull brown; the robes of the Evangelists are glittering, glassy white or yellow or translucent green; and these four great Teachers with their books are placed in wavy blue backgrounds, as though they were sitting comfortably at the bottom of the sea. In the blue cupoletta, above the little apse, with its plain altar, like a table, there is a Creation of Man and the Animals. The chapel is not large, but it seems to hold the four corners of the earth and all the winds securely in its binding of
pietra serena.
No more exquisite microcosm than the Pazzi Chapel could be imagined, for everything is here, in just proportion and in order, as on the Seventh Day of Creation, when God rested from His labours, having found them, good.

The strong drama of Florentine life seems to have resulted, with Brunelleschi, in an art of perfect balance. The terrible struggles that took place in this city and in which the Pazzi family, a little later, took such a part had their reward in equilibrium—a reconciliation of forms. This same sabbath stillness can be felt in the hillside Abbey church of San Domenico di Fiesole, done for the old Cosimo on Brunelleschi’s designs and in the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo, where Brunelleschi had Donatello for his collaborator—a square white room with four great lunettes marked in
pietra serena,
a hemispheric cupola with a lantern or ‘eye’, a dainty frieze of cherubs, four tablets in painted stucco of the life of Saint John the Evangelist, and four big roundels in coloured terracotta showing the four Evangelists deep in study at four classical desks. Above the altar in the tiny chapel at the back rises another cupola or playful cupoletta, painted a dark sky-blue in imitation of the heavens and sprinkled with the constellations in gilt, like a little planetarium. Santo Spirito, the Holy Ghost church in the big market square beyond the Arno, is grander in its orchestration of interior space, with its long lines of mighty grey pillars topped by Corinthian foliage treading down the church in solemn perspective recession like a vast forest (Birnam wood) on the move, but here, too, there is an elemental harmony and tranquil measure, as of an agon resolved. Michelangelo’s agitation proceeds from the stillness of Brunelleschi.

Brunelleschi was a very down-to-earth person—simple, short, bald, plain. He disliked imbalance and exaggeration, and the story is told that when his friend Donatello showed him the wooden Crucifix, of a peasant-like, harshly suffering Christ, he had made for Santa Croce, Brunelleschi said to him sharply: ‘You have put a clown on the Cross.’ Donatello then asked him whether he thought he could do better, and Brunelleschi made no reply but went away and secretly made a wooden crucifix of his own (it is in a chapel of Santa Maria Novella) which so astonished Donatello by its beauty, when he finally saw it in his friend’s studio, that he dropped some eggs he was carrying, in an apron, for their lunch.

The homely lives led by these artists, in which aprons and eggs figure as in the daily lives of ordinary workmen, are reflected in the character of their art, which is an art of essentials, of the bread-and-wine staples of the human construct. The big Brunelleschi churches—San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito—are almost free of tourists, as has been said; they belong, appropriately, to the people, and just outside them are the main Florentine markets, where the poor come to buy. Around Santo Spirito are the fruit and vegetable sellers of the Oltrarno quarter and old beggars, lame and halt, who sit in the sun, while across from San Lorenzo (the big covered market is just beyond) are the peddlers of cheap shoes, chiefly for men, hundreds and hundreds of rows of them, and displays of workmen’s aprons and coveralls, hanging from clothes-hangers, like votive offerings, in brown, blue, and white—the colours of Saint Francis and the Madonna. Work and rest, weekday and Sunday,
pietra forte
and
pietra serena
make up the Florentine chiaroscuro, and the sense of their interplay, as of sphere and square, explains the unique ability of the Florentines to create cosmic myths in the space of a small chapel or a long poem. The unitary genius of the Florentines, that power of binding expressed in Brunelleschi’s virile
membratura,
is evidently the product of a small world held in common and full of ‘common’ referents.

The lack of ceremony in Florentine intercourse was and still is apparent in all classes. Noblemen can still be seen in the markets, with shopping baskets, picking out vegetables for their lunch or trading some peaches from their property for oranges from Sicily; in this bachelor city, it seems to have been quite customary for the men to do the shopping. During the eighteenth century, the Grand Dukes sold wine in
fiaschi
from the back door of the Pitti Palace, and there are people alive now who remember how many of the palaces used to retail butter, from their ground-floor storerooms, that had been churned on their country estates. Some of the most charming poems of Lorenzo de’ Medici are unself-conscious country poems dealing with farm life. The typical Florentine villa was simply a farm, with olive trees and grapevines running straight up to the terrace on which the farmhouse stood. An idea of the useful still governs Florentine landscape architecture: the lemon trees in earthen tubs that flank the villas and then go into the
limonaia,
or lemon house, for the winter, the long lines of cypresses, which act as windbreaks, the pleached walks for shade. Big pots of bright geraniums and daisies, bunches of zinnias and dahlias—the quick-growing flowers of the poor and the peasants—are the chief flowers of the Tuscan villas. Cut-and-come-again; how to make a little go a long way: the best Florentine dishes are recipes for using leftovers. By a seeming paradox, a plain Florentine cook makes a ‘béchamel’, which would be considered a chef’s accomplishment in most Italian towns, to stretch the remains of a chicken into a chicken soufflé.

Simplicity of life Florence shared with Athens, and the great Florentines of the
quattrocento,
Donatello and Brunelleschi, lived like barefoot philosophers. Socrates traced his descent from Daedalus, the cunning craftsman, whom Brunelleschi, too, might have claimed as a mythic ancestor. Brunelleschi’s architecture, moreover, is a species of wisdom, like Socratic and Platonic philosophy, in which forms are realized in their absolute integrity and essence; the squareness of square, the slenderness of slender, the roundness of round. A window, say, cut out by Brunelleschi is, if that can be conceived, a Platonic
idea
of a window: not any particular window or the sum of existing windows in the aggregate but the eternal model itself. This is something different from the so-called ‘ideal forms’ of Michelangelo’s sculptures, where ‘ideal’ means ‘mental’, ‘imaginary’, ‘not true to life’, or, in other words, ‘idealized’, like the dukes on the Medici Tombs. Brunelleschi’s windows are not idealized in this sense at all; they are a plain statement of the notion ‘window’, cut out of a wall with a terse finality that makes other windows appear haphazard accidents or bellicose rhetoric in comparison. These framed openings in space recall in their uncompromising depth the remark of Leonardo, which is both profound and simple, that the eyes are the windows of the body’s prison. Florentine architecture became deep with Brunelleschi, deep in both senses; each object and kind of thing—corbels, capitals, arches, shafts, vaulting—is so intensely itself, so immersed in its own being, that it gives a sort of pain along with its joy, as though this being-itself were a memory stirring of something other, of the lost realm of perfect, changeless shapes. No better illustration of the old doctrine of universals and particulars and their mysterious consanguinity can be found than in the Pazzi Chapel or the Second Cloister of Santa Croce, with its poignant slender columns and its cruelly incised decorations of urns, wreaths, scallop shells, and strigil moulding.

Italian critics speak of the ‘sincerity’ of Brunelleschi’s architecture;
‘schietto’,
or ‘frank’, he is always called. ‘Truthful’ might be better, for he has the philosopher’s love of eternal, elemental truths. Brunelleschi’s dome compels a curious kind of slow, surprised recognition; it is the way a dome ‘ought’ to be, just as love, for a young person, is at once a surprise and the way he knew it should be, from books and hearsay.

All great Florentine art, from Giotto through the
quattrocento,
has the faculty of amazing with its unexpected and absolute truthfulness. This faculty was once called beauty. The immediate effect of a great Giotto or a Masaccio is to strike the beholder dumb. Coming into the first room of the Uffizi or the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine, he is conscious of a sensation he may not even associate with what is today called beauty (a voluptuary’s compound of allure and strangeness): the inadequacy of words to deal with what is in front of him. What is there to say? This art cannot be likened to anything but itself, and in this sense it resembles architecture—a solid fact obtruded into the world. It is easy enough to talk about a lovely Giorgione, a Titian, a Giovanni Bellini, even a Piero della Francesca; these paintings are, as it were, already coated with legend and literature so that they play on the fancy like fairy-tales. If there is nothing to say before a Giotto or a Masaccio, this, of course, is the sign that it continues to be a revelation, an event still so untoward and brusque that it results in a loss of speech, like the announcement of the conception of the Baptist to the old priest Zachary that deprived him of the use of his tongue.

It was Masolino who began the fresco series in the Carmine; the young Masaccio continued them, and they were finished by Filippino Lippi nearly sixty years after Masaccio’s early death. The Masolino sections are full of lissom grace and charm, and the Filippino Lippi sections show a skilful shrewdness in portraiture. But the Masaccio sections almost instantly distinguished themselves from the rest by their spatial immensity, deep, massive volumes, and implacable candour of vision, which sweeps across the panels in aerial perspective like the searching ray of a lighthouse. No matter how many times they have been seen, these ‘Stories of Saint Peter and Original Sin’, they produce in the beholder a kind of consternation. This is partly due, no doubt, to the realism of such details as that of the shivering naked boy about to be baptized or the hooded, world-sick eye of Saint Peter as he extends his old hand to give alms or the crouching figure of the cripple (who might come out of
Les Misérables)
or the stumpy body and gaping mouth of Eve as she is driven, howling, from the Garden—all the horror and deformity of the human condition. But this clinical realism is only an aspect of a universal truthfulness that shows the whole expanse of the world, fair and foul alike, as if in a flash of lightning or at the rending of the veil of the Temple, when Christ’s death shook the earth. In the stature and dignity of the figures, always arrested in a momentous tableau, is implicit a kind of recognition scene, the benign climax of the great drama of the Redemption.