The Stones of Florence (20 page)

The painter has put everyone in, everyone who was or might in fancy have been present on the great occasion—pages and servants and dependents and animals, people who were not yet born or were already dead. The emperor, in a gold-figured dark surcoat, mounted on a beautiful white caparisoned horse, is a dark-browed, bearded, handsome, grave prince in a crown that has the look of a turban; facially, he has a strong resemblance to the King of Kings, as the Italian painters represented Him, and this evokes, though no doubt accidentally, quite another and more ‘popular’ scene: the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, riding an ass. Set apart from the rest of the train, in demi-profile, motionless, he strikes a note of absolute gravity in the pretty cavalcade. The Patriarch of Constantinople, who died in Florence during the Council and was buried in Santa Maria Novella, is not so conspicuous—almost a background figure, with a white wavy beard and a gold crown in points, looking like some old necromancer.

Among the Italians are Piero the Gouty, with the device of the diamond ring and the motto
‘Semper’
on his horse’s trappings; the three Medici girls, dressed as pages with feathers in their caps and mounted on prancing horses; Lorenzo, blond, winsome, and girlish in the costume he wore at the tilt of 1459; the
‘bel Giuliano’
with a leopard; Giangaleazzo Sforza of Milan, with a star in his horse’s forehead; Sigismondo Malatesta, tyrant of Rimini; Gozzoli himself, wearing a cap on which he has painted ‘
opus Benotii’
; and his teacher, the Blessed Angelico. Others supposedly present are Pico della Mirandola, Poliziano, members of the Tornabuoni family, Nicolò da Uzzano, the Filippo Strozzi who began the Strozzi Palace, and Castruccio Castracane (died 1328). Birds are flying about, among them a beautiful long-necked pheasant; some ducks can be seen in a stream. In the procession, there are a number of dogs, two leopards in all, and a monkey. In the distance, a greyhound is chasing a deer across mountain rocks. Farther along in the sequence, worshipping angels with peacock-feather wings are shown in ‘Paradise’, which is simply a bit of Florentine landscape, of needle-like cypresses, palm trees with heads like compact feather dusters, a village, and distant mountains which seem to be Monte Morello and Monte Ceceri.

Throughout the fashionable scene there appear the wonderfully turned, strong, sturdy legs of the young Florentines, dressed as pages and holding spears; the youth, pink-cheeked boys and girls alike, wear gold curls in neat rows that still have a damp look, as though the whole party of them had just come from the hairdresser. And the crowd of middle-aged men in red caps who are lined up behind the celebrities all have an intensely
shaven
look that again is peculiar to the Florentines. These sharp, shrewd, materialistic male faces, fat and jowly, or thin and lean-jawed, smelling almost of the barbershop, keep showing up, in a dense, serried group, at miracles and holy incidents, and the realism of these faces, intruding on a sacred event or, as here, on a fairytale pageant, produces a queer effect. In Masolino, Masaccio, Piero, Ghirlandaio, Gozzoli, Filippino Lippi, the same greyish faces reappear, like an eternal recurrence of prose. These faces belong to citizens who seem to have edged their way into the picture and stand craning their necks to be seen, as if in a modern newspaper photograph, where a head of state or a screen star is snapped in the midst of a pushing crowd. They wanted to go down into history, evidently, these serried Florentines, and this, in fact, they have done, though, being for the most part no longer identifiable, they represent for us the anonymous, everyday, banal part of history—the part that is always the same. And the truth is that it is these faces that, literally, have survived. The beautiful boys and girls, the dancing Graces, and the Madonna have disappeared from real life. In the streets of modern Florence, you will never see a living Donatello—a San Giorgio or a David—but middle-aged Gozzolis and Ghirlandaios are everywhere.

The citizens who appear on the periphery of
quattrocento
painting sometimes brought along their wives—pinch-faced, sharp-nosed dames in white coifs and severe black dresses who can be seen in the frescoes of Gozzoli and Ghirlandaio. The entry of these women, trenchant onlookers, signifies that painting has taken, here in Florence, the step into genre, which from then on becomes the alternative to the magic or sorcery of the brush. With Fra Filippo, Gozzoli, and Ghirlandaio, beds, pots and pans, pitchers and basins, chairs, tables, platters begin to tumble into stories of sacred history as if dumped by a firm of house-movers. A holy birth, for Ghirlandaio, becomes a lying-in, with maidservants and lady callers. Genre was implicit, no doubt, in Florentine painting from the time of Giotto, who liked to show a sleeper in bed with his effects neatly arranged about him, but the shower of household articles into a well-delineated, polished interior does not really commence until the painters of youth, love, springtime, dancing, and splendid entertainments moved on, by a logical necessity, into ordinary clock time.
‘Quant’ è bella giovinezza, Che si fugge tuttavia.’
Pots and pans, pitchers and basins are the sequitur to love and dancing.

Chapter Seven

I
N 1786, GOETHE, WHO
was then thirty-seven, realized his wish of seeing Italy. In Florence, after ‘running rapidly over the city, the cathedral, the baptistery, and the Boboli Gardens’, he summed up his impressions: ‘In the city we see the proof of the prosperity of the generations that built it; the conviction is at once forced upon us that they must have enjoyed a long succession of wise rulers.’ Hearing that assured German pronouncement, the angels could have wept. Still, the poet’s perception, if not his inference, was right. Anyone coming to Florence and knowing nothing of its actual history would jump to the same conclusion. Only its intemperate climate betrays its inward character; on its ‘good’ days, in spring and throughout the autumn, it appears the spit and image of the ideally governed city, an architectural representation of justice, equity, proportion, order, and balance. One of the chief tasks of an ancient hero, like Theseus, was to be a city-builder, and Florence has the air of having been constructed by an ancient hero and lawgiver, to be the home of virtue and civil peace. Seen from a distance, in a bird’s eye view, the city, drawn up for inspection in parallel ranks on either side of its green river, radiates a sense of ‘good government’ in its orderly distribution of verticals and horizontals, in the planification of its surrounding hills and slopes, marked off by dark cypresses, measured by yellow villas, while Florentine painting, in its government of space, makes every masterpiece a little polis. On the Campanile, as Goethe must have noted, are small bas-reliefs, by Andrea da Pontedera, and others, of Agriculture, Metallurgy, Weaving, Law, Mechanics, and so on—an incised, exemplary system of political economy. Every aspect of Florence, from the largest to the most minute, affirms the immanence of law.

The Grand Duke Cosimo I, who was not a feeling man, burst into tears when he saw his beautiful city all buried in mud after the dreadful flood of 1557, the worst in two hundred years, which had swept away the old Trinita bridge and covered parts of the town seventeen feet deep in water. Up in the Mugello valley, the Sieve, suddenly rising, had broken into the Arno, which had been badly shored up by Cosimo’s engineers; taken by surprise, everyone on the Trinita bridge was drowned, except for two children, who were left standing on an isolated pier in the middle of the raging river and who were fed for two days by means of a cord sent out from the roof of Palazzo Strozzi carrying bread and wine to them. The pair of marooned children, fed from on high as if in a miracle, and the weeping tyrant compose together a touching picture of Florence, like some incident in an early fresco—a picture more imbued with the local pieties than the honorific ‘Victories’ that Cosimo had Vasari paint for the Salone dei Cinquecento, the great hall in Palazzo Vecchio, where, in Savonarola’s time of triumph, the General Council of the People had met. The tyrant’s grief as he confronts the spectacle left by the receding waters comports well with the resourceful civic-rescue action, and this, in turn, evokes still another image, classically, tenderly Florentine: of the Spedale degli Innocenti, the first architectural work of the Renaissance, that exquisite asylum designed by Brunelleschi for the city’s foundlings, with ten glazed terracotta roundels, by Andrea della Robbia, of babies, swaddled, each in a different position, aligned, as if in a nursery, over the graceful pale-yellow portico.

What the German poet saw in his rapid course over the city was the Republic, compact in public buildings, squares, churches, and statuary—that is, an ideal republic made of
pietra dura, pietra forte,
rough bosses, and geometric marbles. This republic never existed as a political fact but only as a longing, a poignant nostalgia for good government that broke out in poems and histories, architecture, painting, and sculpture. That view of a pink towered city in the background of early Florentine fresco (it soon became a white Renaissance city with classic architecture and sculpture) is the same as Dante’s vision and Machiavelli’s, the vision of an ideal city washed in the pure light of reason, even though Dante and Machiavelli, both moved by despair, looked to a Redeemer from above (an emperor or a prince) to come as a Messiah to save the actual city, just as Savonarola looked to Jesus and to a constitution modelled on that of Venice and the poor people of Florence looked to the angels. The evidence of wise rule that Goethe thought he perceived was the wise ruling of space—the only kind of government the Florentines ever mastered but one that was passed on to later generations, like a Magna Carta, by the great builders of the Republic. By 1786, the Florentines had been enduring two and a half centuries of conspicuous misrule, under the grand dukes, and the city Goethe visited was, to a considerable extent, a grand-ducal construction, but the Trinita bridge, the Uffizi, the extensions of the Pitti Palace, the Fort of the Belvedere, the strong, severe palaces of Via Maggio and Via de’ Ginori and Corso delgi Albizzi, with their frowning roof projections—all done under Cosimo I and his deplorable successors—still hold firm to the ‘old’ way of building, the republican tradition of lucidity, order, and plainness. Cosimo I could erect a column from the Baths of Caracalla (a present from a pope) to honour his own military glory in Piazza Santa Trinita, but the city’s personality was stronger than he; Florence refused to take on the aspect of a grand-ducal capital.

‘The Florentine historians,’ wrote Roscoe, the very intelligent Liverpool attorney who was Goethe’s contemporary and Lorenzo de’ Medici’s biographer, ‘as if unwilling to perpetuate the record of their subjugation, have almost invariably closed their labours with the fall of the republic.’ This principle remains in force, imposing itself even on foreigners; the late Ferdinand Schevill of the University of Chicago closed his history of Florence with the fall of the Republic. Some interesting special studies, like Harold Acton’s
The Last Medici,
have been done of the later grand-ducal period; there are scattered works on the Risorgimento period and on the foreigners in Florence. But the story of Florence proper, by almost universal consent, ends with the extinction of its civic life; after this, there is no history (history and story are the same word in Italian)—only the gossip of diarists.

The Florentines still refer to the Siege with a capital S. The only ruins in Florence are the well-kept remains of the walls of 1300–25 that formed the ‘third circle’ or outermost line of defence, marked today by boulevards, and the remains of the fortifications built by Michelangelo along San Miniato’s mountain at the time of the Siege, which are described by Charles de Tolnay as having looked originally like crustaceans, with long claws, mandibles, and antennae stretching out to ward off the approach of the enemy to the city’s ring of walls.
‘Il nemico’,
having been the Sienese, the Pisans, the Luccans, the Milanese, became, during the eleven-month encirclement, finally and for all time the Spaniards.

Florence, as has been said, is not a town to prompt sentimental reflections, but on a summer night, looking out across the Arno from a terrace on the Lungarno Acciaiuoli or the Lungarno Vespucci, one can imagine, very easily, the troops of Charles V massed in the shadows on the other side of the river.
‘Son le truppe di Carlo Quinto’
The time is August, 1530; Francesco Ferrucci, the Republic’s great commander, has just been taken prisoner and killed at Gavinina, in the fateful Pistoiese hills, during a last brilliant action against immensely superior forces—‘You are killing a dead man,’ he murmured as he fell, already covered with battle wounds, to the enemy commander’s treacherous dagger. Inside the walls, no resource remains. The valuables have been stripped from the churches and convents to pay for the defence and the women’s rings have been taken; the doors and windows have been torn from the houses during the winter for firewood. The cabbages and other vegetables that have been planted on the rooftops have been eaten. There is only three days’ food left in the city. The horrible Sack of Prato, down the broad valley, by the soldiers of the Spaniard Cardona and Giovanni de’ Medici (later Pope Leo X) is still fresh in Tuscan memory, not to mention the Sack of Rome, by the Catholic Emperor’s Lutheran troops. The mercenary, Malatesta Baglioni from Perugia, at the head of the city’s garrison, has made a secret commitment to the Spaniards, and from his headquarters at Porta Romana has suddenly turned his artillery on the city. The dream of a last desperate resistance, of putting fire to the houses, killing the women and children, and perishing in a general holocaust so that ‘nothing would remain of the city but the memory of its greatness of soul, to be an immortal example to those who are born free and desire to live freely’, even this dream has had to be relinquished. Next day, the city will capitulate.

This was not the first time the Republic had been imperilled by a foreign power at the gates. Only a generation before, the French king had marched in and been frightened off by Piero Capponi. After the Sack of Prato in 1512, the gonfalonier elected for life, Pier Soderini, had fled in terror, and the Medici had come in, profiting from the fear inspired by their Spanish allies. Long before, in July, 1082, Florence, the only town in Italy to remain faithful to the pope, had been besieged by the Emperor Henry IV, warring with the pope’s defender, Matilda of Tuscany, and the city had been saved by its terrible heat, which caused the emperor to raise the siege after ten days. Again, in 1312, another emperor, Henry VII, had sat down to wait with his troops near the monastery of San Salvi, east of the walls, and had had to go away, disconcerted; the spot is still known as Harry’s Camp (Campo di Arrigo). But now, with the Spaniards and their vindictive Medici ally, Pope Clement, the real Day of Judgment had arrived. This was the last act, the long stored-up climax of Florentine history. The last coins struck by the Republic were a beautiful gold ducat and a silver half-ducat, minted during the Siege from the gold and silver ornaments and household utensils contributed by the citizens and from the sacred vessels of the churches. Instead of the usual figure of the Baptist, the gold coin bore, on one side, the Cross of the people, and, on the other, an inscription,
‘Jesus Rex Noster et Deus Noster’.
They were used for soldiers’ pay.