The Stones of Florence (6 page)

These tombs, nevertheless, recently re-entered Florentine public life in an unexpected way. One of Cosimo I’s building projects was the Santa Trinita bridge, which was rebuilt, after a flood, by Ammannati, who also extended the Pitti Palace for Cosimo, botching, in the enlargement, Brunelleschi’s original design. Ammannati’s bridge, the most beautiful in Florence, the most beautiful perhaps in the world, was destroyed by the Germans during the last war and has been rebuilt, as it was. The rebuilders, working from photographs and from Ammannati’s plans, became conscious of a mystery attaching to the full, swelling, looping curve of the three arches—the slender bridge’s most exquisite feature—which conforms to no line or figure in geometry and seems to have been drawn, free hand, by a linear genius, which Ammannati was not. Speculation spread, throughout the city, among professors and art critics, on the enigma of the curve. Some said it was a catenary curve, drawn, that is, from the looping or suspension of a chain; some guessed that it might have been modelled on the curve of a violin body. Just before the bridge’s opening, however, a new theory was offered and demonstrated, very convincingly, with photographs in the newspaper; this theory assigns the design of the bridge to Michelangelo, whom Cosimo I was consulting, through Vasari, at this period. The original of the curve was found, where no one had thought of looking for it, in the Medici Tombs, on the sarcophagi that support the figures of Night and Day, Twilight and Dawn. Thus, if this argument is correct (and it has been widely accepted), a detail of a work of sculpture, done for the glorification of a despotic line in their private chapel, was translated outdoors and became the property of the whole Florentine people. Sculpture returned to architecture, like a plant reverting to type, and a curve of beauty, thrice repeated, which was as mysterious in its final origin as though it came from a god and not from an architect’s drawing board, upholds the traffic of the city.

Every time, no doubt, a bridge has been rebuilt in Florence, from the day the statue of Mars was put back ‘the wrong way’ on Ponte Vecchio, dispute must have clouded the process. The dispute over Ponte Santa Trinita has lasted ever since the war’s end and is not finished yet. First came the question of whether the old bridge should be rebuilt at all. Why not a modern one? When this was settled, the old quarries in the Boboli Garden from which the golden stone had been cut were reopened; one-sixth of the original stone was retrieved from the Arno. Difficulties then followed with the masons, who had to be restrained from cutting the new stone ‘better’ (
i.e.
, with the clean edges made possible by modern machinery). Patience began to run out, as Michelangelo’s had when he wrote: ‘I have undertaken to raise the dead, to try and harness these mountains, and to introduce the art of quarrying into this neighbourhood.’ Once the stone had been cut, the matching of the colour was criticized; the flooring in the Arno was criticized. A sluice was opened up the river, inadvertently, and endangered the bridge’s underpinnings when it was almost finished, and had already been opened to foot traffic. The fall rains would do the rest, said the pessimists, scanning the sky, and indeed, for a few anxious days, it appeared that they might be right, that the whole frail lovely structure might be swept away if the sluice were not closed in time. Rebuilding the bridge as it was, was really a case of ‘undertaking to raise the dead’, and pride in this Florentine feat, unique in the modern world, made everyone apprehensive of a fall. And the more beautiful the resurrected bridge appeared, rising like an apparition from the green river, the more the population squabbled, warned, cavilled, lest it not be perfect.

The final and most acute disagreement, curiously enough, concerned a question of statuary. Four late sixteenth-century statues by the Frenchman Pietro Francavilla, representing the seasons, had stood at the four corners of the bridge. They were of no great value artistically, but they had ‘always’ been there, like the old sentry-statue of Mars on Ponte Vecchio. Three had been rescued intact—one, according to the story, by a local sculptor (others say a foreign sculptor) who had dived into the Arno to save it—but the fourth,
‘Primavera’
, had lost her head. Report circulated that an American Negro soldier had been seen carrying it away during the fighting and confusion; other testimony declared that it was a New Zealand soldier or an Australian. Advertisements were put in the New Zealand papers, asking for the return of the head, but nothing resulted from this. Meanwhile, all sorts of queer rumours persisted: the head had been seen in Harlem; it was buried in the Boboli Garden. The Florentine fantasy would not consent to the idea that it had simply been blown to pieces.

When any realistic hope of finding it again was finally given up, the authorities of the Belle Arti decided not to replace the statues. This produced an angry outcry; the people wanted the statues back. When the Belle Arti insisted, an opinion poll was taken, and the popular will said, overwhelmingly, that the statues must return. Then the Belle Arti yielded, or seemed to yield, and dispute moved on to the question of whether
‘Primavera’
should be set up in its mutilated state as a sort of war memorial or whether a new head should be made for her. Again the city was divided, almost irreconcilably this time, and the Belle Arti used this as a pretext for delaying the entire operation. Not seeing the pedestals put back in their former places, the people suddenly grew suspicious; the newspaper, demanding action, hinted that the head-or-no-head issue had been introduced by the Belle Arti itself disingenuously, as a dividing tactic, to avoid complying with the popular will. It wanted the pedestals produced at once, as evidence of good faith.

In no other city in the world could a controversy of this kind have embroiled all classes and generated such heat and bitterness. The fact is all the queerer because the Florentines, as has been said, are not sentimental about their past. There are no ruins in Florence, and the temperament that muses over ruins, the romantic (or Roman-ish) temperament, is inconceivable in this city. In the story of the statues, there is something deeper, more elemental, more obstinate, more, even, superstitious than aesthetic disagreement, than a ‘question of taste’. Machiavelli, writing of the love of liberty characteristic of small independent republics of the classic stamp (and in the back of his Florentine mind there is always the Roman Republic) associates it with ‘the public buildings, the halls of the magistracy, and the insignia of free institutions’, which remind the citizens of their liberty, even after they have lost it for generations. To eradicate this sentiment, you would have to destroy the city and all its emblems, stone by stone. This was exactly what the Ghibellines wanted to do after their decisive victory over the Florentine Guelphs at Montaperti in 1260 and what the great Ghibelline lord, Farinata degli Uberti, who traced his descent from Catiline, opposed
‘a viso aperto’
in the war council of Ghibelline chiefs. Catiline, driven from Rome, left, threatening to return and burn it, but Farinata, an authentic Florentine, would not consent to see his native city razed. He declared boldly and proudly—he was one of the proudest spirits that Dante met in hell, where he found him, not among the traitors, but among the heretics and Epicureans—that he had not taken up arms against Florence to see it destroyed but in order to come back to it. This plain-spoken and inalterable refusal was ill rewarded, typically, by the ungrateful Guelph city, which tore down the towers of his descendants in the old centre of the town, near where Palazzo Vecchio now stands. The reason, it is said, Palazzo Vecchio has such a peculiar shape is that the signory would not permit a stone of it to be built on land that had once belonged to the Uberti—Ghibelline-tainted soil.

In Florence, so concretely visual, even the shape of a building is a reminder and a political lesson, and the story of the statues is simply another example. ‘Spring’ did not get a new head, and she now stands on her pedestal, headless, like the old wasted statue of Mars—a reminder of the Nazi occupation. It was not the Belle Arti but the people who wanted her, the Tuscan goddess, back.
*

*
The head was found, after all, in the Arno, during some work on Ponte Vecchio. After its authenticity was thoroughly tested, it was carried in procession and put back on
Primavera.

Chapter Three

T
HE DISCONTENTED SHADE OF
Catiline, dressed in the consular toga, haunts Florentine history. It is not hard to imagine some of his cohorts surviving in the Pistoiese hills, fathering children from whose seed would spring the fierce factions of medieval Tuscany. Ancient Pistoria became Pistoia, a fitting den, said Dante, for the bestial church-robber, Vanni Fucci, who ‘rained from Tuscany’ into a gullet of hell, where Dante found him, in a coil of serpents, still unrepentant, cursing, and making an obscene gesture called ‘the figs’ at God. The poet invokes Pistoia and advises it to turn to ashes for having surpassed its seed (meaning Catiline and his conspirators) in evil-doing.

Pistoia, now a nursery-garden centre, half an hour up the
austostrada
from Florence, was in fact a veritable lair of strife and dissension; it was the breeding ground of the Black and White division, which proved so ruinous for Florence, as though the witches’ brood of Catiline took an ancestral revenge on the city that arose from the Roman camp on the river. The division, they say, originated in a quarrel between two Pistoiese families that started with a children’s game. One child slightly wounded another while playing at swords; his father sent him to apologize, and the second father, in reply, had his servants chop the boy’s hand off on a meat block and sent him back with a message: ‘Tell your father that iron, not words, is the remedy for sword wounds.’ As if at a signal, the city split into factions, calling themselves Bianchi and Neri because the ancestress of one family had been named Bianca. The cancer quickly spread to Florence, where the two leading families, the Donati and Cerchi, using the Pistoiese names, leapt to arms against each other. Corso Donati, the leader of the Florentine Blacks, was described by Dino Compagni in his early fourteenth-century ‘Chronicle’ as a man who resembled Catiline except that he was more cruel. Like Catiline, he was ‘gentle in blood, polished in manners, beautiful in person, of pleasing intellect, and a mind ever intent on evil’. The people called him ‘the Baron’ because of his excessive pride.

The word ‘pistol’ means literally ‘Pistoian’; before the days of firearms, a
pistole
was a dagger, called after Pistoia, either, says one authority, because daggers were made there or because they were used there so commonly. The first pistols were made there in the sixteenth century. There are still many forges in Pistoia which give off a smell of hot iron. Of all the towns in Tuscany, it is Pistoia that most recalls the dark passages in medieval history. The old civic buildings are made of an iron-grey stone—
pietra bigia pistoiese.
Fastened to the front of Palazzo del Comune or Town Hall, in the main square, is an ominous head in black marble, with an iron mace or club above it, which the Pistoians say is the head of a traitor who betrayed the town to the Luccans. Scholars think that it is really a likeness of Musetto, the Moorish king of Majorca, who was conquered by a Pistoiese captain in the expedition against the Balearic Islands, led by the Pisans during the twelfth century. Some keys on the building are the papal emblem, put up to honour Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici, the son of Lorenzo), but the local people say that these are the keys of the city that the traitor gave away.

Across the square is the Palace of the Podestà or foreign governor, an office once held by Giano della Bella, the Florentine Gracchus; in its lofty grey porticoed court are a long stone table of justice, a long stone judges’ bench, and, opposite, the bench of the accused. The court that sat here, half in the open air, judging and receiving denunciations, was noted, even in Tuscany, for its iron severity, particularly during the period of the democracy, towards the beginning of the fourteenth century. The democrats, true Catilinarians, detested the nobility, who were deprived of all civic rights and reduced to a state worse than that of felons; if a commoner committed a crime in Pistoia, he was punished by being ennobled. Even in the full Renaissance, Pistoia was regarded by its neighbours as a fated and fateful place. Michelangelo wrote a sonnet against it; Machiavelli described a family called the Palandra, ‘which, though rustic, was very numerous, and like the rest of the Pistolesi, brought up to slaughter and war’. It was even believed that the Guelph—Ghibelline factions took their names from two rival brothers of Pistoia, called Guelph and Gibel.

To those who know its history, however, the most striking fact about Pistoia is that so much of it is, literally, black and white. The wealth of Pistoia was lavished on a series of Romanesque churches and a tall octagonal Baptistery which are faced in horizontal courses of black-and-white marble; the profusion of these churches, the black Moors’ heads (there is another mortised into the striped façade of Sant’ Andrea), the iron club, the dread grey of the civic halls, give the city a strange formidable appearance, at once luxurious and sectarian.

The style of dressing sacred buildings in horizontal stripes of alternating black and white came from Pisa, the mariner-city on the coast, whose sailors had fought the Saracens in Spain, defeated the Emir of Egypt, and gone on crusades; wherever the Pisan influence reached in Tuscany, the black-and-white stripes appear and, with them, a suggestion of the Orient, like the markings of an exotic beast. You find the gleaming stripes in rosy Siena, on the ferocious, tense Cathedral that sits in the Piazza exactly like a tiger poised to spring; you find them in Lucca, the silk town, where the Pisan style was enriched with decorative reliefs, polychrome marble inserts, stone lions on supporting columns, writhing stone serpents. The Pisan style, sometimes fusing with the Luccan, and rich itself in sculptures and tiers on tiers of graceful loggias, made its way into the remote parishes of rural Tuscany, like the spices from the East—to steep Volterra and Carrara, far south to the ancient mining town of Massa Maríttima, inland to Arezzo and the wool town of Prato, across the water to the islands of Corsica and Sardinia.