IN 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.
The Republic that fell to the Spaniards, who took it on behalf of Pope Clement, was not a democracy in the modern sense (the lowest class of workers had no vote and until the final days of the Siege were not allowed to bear arms), and off and on, from the time of Cosimo il Vecchio, it had in fact been governed by the Medici, even though the forms and institutions of a free state had been maintained. When the bastard Alessandro, installed by his supposed father, the pope, in the year following the Siege, received the anomalous title of Duke of the Florentine Republic, this might have appeared to be merely a new name for the same thing. But in reality it was not so. The name announced a changed state of affairs; the power of choice no longer rested with the electorate, which had done its epic utmost in defence of its liberties, causing the whole world to marvel, and had found that this utmost counted for nothing in the cynical world-balance; everyone—the French King, the Venetians, the Duke of Ferrara, Henry VIII of England—had watched, and no one had raised a hand to help. The popular will and its caprices, which had sometimes tolerated the Medici, sometimes chased them out, broken up their statues and effaced their emblems, no longer had sovereignty. It was a sheer waste for Lorenzino, six years after Alessandro’s entry, to assassinate the tyrant; no one knew how to use the opportunity, so inopportunely presented, for regaining the city’s freedom. The usual mood-swing that followed on such actions did not occur. It was a deed for History, conceived as a stage in the Renaissance fashion, not a political act. This point was clearly seen by Alfred de Musset in his play Lorenzaccio, where he has Lorenzino (‘accio’ is a derogatory ending) say: «Une statue qui descendrait de son piédestal pour marcher parmi les hommes sur la place publique serait peut-être semblable à ce que j’ étais le jour où j’ai commencé à vivre avec cette idée: il faut que je sois un Brutus.» (‘A statue coming down from its pedestal to mingle on the public square might be like me the day I began living with that idea: “I must be a Brutus.”’) When the marble deed was done, Cosimo I, then a young man of modest demeanour, quietly accepted the post left vacant by his distant relation. He himself proceeded to strike the pose of an absolute monarch, the ruler of a nation-state like France, England, Spain, and when he had defeated Siena (no hard job), he extracted from the pope the title of Grand Duke of Tuscany. Florence as a political entity thereupon ceased to exist.
But Cosimo’s conquering pose was more effective in statuary than in real life, where he must have appeared a poor player on a world stage occupied by Francis I, Henry VIII, and Charles V, whose viceroy’s daughter he married and who relentlessly bled him for money. The title that meant so much to him he secured by turning over to the pope the Protestant reformer Carnesecchi, a guest under his roof and at his table, who was then beheaded and burned, over Cosimo’s weak protests, on the Campo dei Fiori in Rome. By the time Cosimo took power, the real sovereignty of Tuscany and of most of the Italian peninsula had passed to foreigners. Until the unification of Italy, in 1860, the Grand Duchy was governed, not by consent of its subjects, but by consent of the rulers of Europe, who, when the Medici had died out, conferred it on the House of Lorraine, that is, on the Austrians.
The grand dukes who succeeded Cosimo were hardly worthy of being called tyrants. They were, rather, landlords, with the occasional virtues and manifold vices of the breed; under them was a vast and wretched tenantry, who supplied an audience for their monotonous, costly, and uninspired festivities. A few of the grand dukes were enlightened, but the majority were grasping, mean, dissolute, lazy, feeble, dull-witted, provincial, bigoted, or else absentee, like Francis of Lorraine, husband of the Empress Maria Theresa. The Austrians, when they stayed in Tuscany, were the best of the lot. They drained the Maremma, the marshy coastal region extending from Pisa to Grosseto, which had been barren, wild, and malaria-stricken since Roman times; they encouraged agriculture and made economic reforms. Under the Austrians, Tuscany began to revive a little from the torporous decadence it had sunk into. Marital quarrels, pious observances (under the hypocritical Cosimo III, the shops were closed half the year because of the numerous holy days decreed by the sovereign, who was also a great persecutor of the Jews), carousing, and a series of boy ‘favourites’ had marked the reigns of the later Medici grand dukes, whose principal redeeming characteristic (this was finally bred out of the last members of the family) had been the promotion of natural science. One grand duke, Ferdinand II, a pupil of Galileo’s, constructed a liquid thermometer, and his brother, Cardinal Leopold, also Galileo’s pupil, founded the Accademia del Cimento—which means ‘test’, ‘trial’, ‘risk’, in short, experiment—the first academy in Europe for research in experimental physics. Its collection, originally in Palazzo Pitti but now housed in the Museum of the History of Science, contains, not only Galileo’s telescope and the lens through which he first saw the planets of Jupiter—the ‘Medici planets’—but also, in a glass urn, the third finger of his right hand.
The late Medici taste ran to such curios. Their architects had remained true to the old way of building, so that even a fort like the Belvedere, a brown-and-cream sentry box with a clock set in its head and strongly accented windows, monitors the city in the style of a plain fortified farmhouse; but interiors and gardens reflected the real predilections of their owners and the grand-ducal society around them—predilections for the bizarre, the extravagant, coy monstrosities of Nature, metamorphoses, for colossal white statues resembling the huge cut-out milk bottles and ice-cream cones of American billboard display or the Michelin tyre man, for hideous fantasies in rocaille, simulated sea shells, and tortured topiary work, for life-size house dogs in stone set out on walls or patches of lawn, anticipating the Victorian stag, for grottoes and caverns with imitation stalagmites and stalactites, for ‘specimen’ trees and malachite, porphyry, alabaster, chalcedony. Eighteenth-century English travellers, like Addison and John Evelyn, were impressed by the grand-ducal zoos (there seem to have been two or possibly three, one near the ‘Belfry’, one near Palazzo Strozzi, and perhaps another near Santissima Annunziata), and the gardens of the grand dukes and their circle often had a zoomorphic character, rhinocerine or hippopotamus-like. The famous Orti Oricellari, for example, where the Platonic Academy had been transferred and where Machiavelli, it is said, read aloud his Discorsi, have a statue of the Cyclops, Polyphemus, nearly two hundred and fifty feet high, the one-eyed giant’s cave with a whole cyclops family and feigned stalactites, an enormous mock-Pantheon with imitation classic tombs of the Academicians, and an imitation necropolis. Laboured imitations of Nature’s curiosities, as well as abstract personifications, were introduced into the Tuscan hills: the Medici Villa della Petraia at Castello has in its garden a bronze fountain representing Florence, who is squeezing water out of her hair with her hands, while the Villa di Castello, another Medici property next door, has a grotto with stalactites, bronze animals, and a fishpond with a giant statue that used to be known as ‘The Apennine’. In the Accademia del Cimento’s collection, there are clinical thermometers made in the shape of turtles.
In the Villa Ambrogiana, near Empoli, Cosimo III, according to another traveller’s report, had a special art collection painted for him by ‘one of the best artists in Florence’ that contained lifelike likenesses of one hundred rare animal specimens, ‘quadruped and flying’, among them two two-headed calves and a two-headed sheep, ‘together with a record of when and where they were born and how long they lived’; there were also ‘portraits’(‘ritratti’) of fruits of unusual and monstrous size and ‘portraits’ of colossal trees. This collection of monstrosities, which was intended to perpetuate the grand duke’s memory, seems to have disappeared, and the villa is now an asylum for the criminally insane.
The kind of vulgarity in decoration that is today thought of as middle-class seems to stem straight from Tuscany in the time of the Medici grand dukes. From the Florentine cinquecento and its highly developed craftsmanship, its skill in the inferior arts of imitation, flowed a torrent of bad taste that has not yet dried up. The interiors of the grand-ducal palaces and villas are sumptuously, stuffily ugly in a way that is hard to connect with a period that was contemporary, after all, with classic Palladio in the Veneto. By one of those peculiar time leaps so characteristic of Florence, one finds oneself, while visiting one of the grand-ducal villas, transported suddenly into the Victorian age or the time of President McKinley; if there had been Toby jugs and Swiss weather clocks available, the grand dukes would certainly have collected them.
The lifting of all restraints in the minor arts of decoration took place in the time of Cosimo I and no doubt had a political meaning—the rejection of the human scale (this was the same as refusing audiences) and the proclamation of complete license on the part of the ruling family and its sycophants. And just at this time, though not without warning, the major arts (excepting architecture) expired. The Florentine cinquecento, which had seemed at its beginning the most audacious century of all, suddenly declined into provincialism, and a glance sideward at Venice, where Titian, Veronese, Lotto, and Tintoretto were reigning, could only provoke mournful comparisons. There were many reasons for this. The accession of Cosimo could not have been the cause but was itself a symptom of the same exhaustion that was showing itself in Florentine painting and sculpture.
During the last years of the Republic there had begun the great Diaspora of Florentine artists. It was nothing new for Florentine artists to journey about Italy, studying or executing commissions. Giotto, Uccello, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Andrea del Castagno, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Verrocchio had all done it. Michelozzo had gone into exile with Cosimo il Vecchio; Masolino, after working in Rome and Venice, had been called to Hungary, like the Fat Woodworker. But these voyages were mere business trips, temporary absences from the centre, and the works undertaken by Florentine artists abroad were like the branches of the Florentine banks opened in France, England, Rome, Venice, Flanders; the main office was at home, in the workshops of the streets around the Duomo and the old Santa Croce quarter. Young foreign artists—Piero della Francesca from Borgo San Sepolcro in Arezzo territory, Raphael from Urbino, Jacopo Bellini, founder of the Venetian school, Perugino from Perugia—came here to purchase knowledge of the Florentine ‘way’. Luca Signorelli, from Cortona, leaping beyond the soft Umbrian influences that had formed him, became, in Florence, an epic painter of massive Demeter-like women and naked heroes, like Myrmidons—a titan in the noble Florentine tradition of contest and struggle. Florence learned from itself, reinvesting: the young Michelangelo made drawings of the Giottos in Santa Croce and the Masaccios in the Carmine; Leonardo, so it is thought, was inspired by Ghirlandaio’s ‘Last Supper’ in the Cenacolo of Ognissanti.
Yet the first warning of something different, of a new phenomenon—the genuine migration of talent elsewhere—came from Leonardo, a forerunner in this as in everything else. He appeared in Florence young, left it young, returned for a short stay, during which he painted the ‘Mona Lisa’, and then went off to France, to the court of the French king, who kept him in his château, a royal guest, till he died. One by one, other artists followed his example. Michelangelo went to Rome. Pietro Torrigiani and the Rovezzano sculptors went to England. Jacopo Sansovino went to Venice. The painter known as Il Rosso Fiorentino went to Fontainebleau. Abroad (and the point is stressed by Vasari in his life of Il Rosso), they lived like kings or like signori and abroad, therefore, they died. When Michelangelo quitted Florence for good in 1534, four years after the Siege, only one artist of any importance was left in the city—the crazy Jacopo Pontormo.
Vasari makes no bones about the reasons for Il Rosso’s decision to leave: ‘e tòrsi, come diceva egli, a una certa miseria e povertà, nella quale si stanno gli uomini che lavorano in Toscana e ne’ paesi dove sono nati’ (‘to raise himself, as he used to say, out of a certain wretchedness and poverty, which is the common lot of those who work in Tuscany and in their native places’). Again, the famous Tuscan avarice or grudging meanness, reluctant to give a decent living to a native painter. Just then, moreover, times were particularly hard. When Il Rosso left Italy to try his luck in France, the year was 1530. Shortly before, during the Siege, Cellini had deserted the Florentine militia and gone to Rome to work for Pope Clement; the hack Bandinelli had fled to Lucca, where the Medici refugees were, leaving an unfinished block of marble behind him. In the last years of the Republic, as the records show, the chief private commissions had been coming from the Medici and their dependents, including the Servite friars of Santissima Annunziata, Medici mouthpieces, who got their atrium frescoed by the painters then in fashion—Andrea del Sarto, Il Rosso, Pontormo, and Franciabigio—and a new porch begun by Antonio da Sangallo, with the crossed papal keys of Leo X over the entrance. (Owing to the Medici largesse, this church, with its tribune by L. B. Alberti and its baroque decoration, is so rich that it hardly looks Florentine; it is still the fashionable church of Florence, popular with the aristocracy for weddings and masses for the dead, social events to which invitations are issued.) When the Medici were driven out, for the last time, in 1527, their art patronage naturally ceased.
The years between the execution of Savonarola and the Siege were uncertain, fearful years for all the Florentines—artists and citizens, popes and bankers. Leo X is supposed to have been haunted on his deathbed by the horrors of the Sack of Prato, which he himself had licensed. While the German soldiers, wild for ‘Gelt’, were pillaging Rome, Clement VII was a prisoner in Castel Sant’ Angelo and later had to escape to Orvieto; no such indignity had befallen the papal person since the Middle Ages. At the same time, Henry VIII of England was pestering him for a divorce. The ‘barbari’ were loose in Italy again, and, with them, there returned another medieval scourge, the plague, which in 1527–28 took the lives of 30,000 people in Florence and its suburbs (a quarter of the population) and double that in the contado. The gonfalonier Niccolò Capponi, son of the famous Capponi, having remained steadfastly in Florence throughout the plague, when nearly all the well-to-do had fled, was shortly afterward tried for treason, on the suspicion that he had been intriguing with the pope. Despair and the recurring hope of a miracle were the natural response to this incessant mutability of public affairs and private fortunes, and the resigned philosophy of the new dark ages that seemed to be beginning was well expressed by Guicciardini, who said that when he thought of the infinite vicissitudes to which human life was subject he marvelled to see an old man or a good crop.
This fearsome twilight was a time for historians, for summings up and bitter stocktaking. The Florentine literary genius turned in these years to history, as though there were a presentiment that all past deeds would vanish, together with the social structure, if a careful record were not compiled. The histories of Guicciardini, Machiavelli, and a little later Segni and Varchi have the air, often, of being written for a time capsule or to be cast to sea in a bottle: each writer retells the story, as though he would be the last to remember it, of the deeds and sayings of the Florentines, starting, usually, from the foundation of the city.
A kind of tyrannophobia had seized the Florentines after the last expulsion of the Medici. Bands of young political purists went about questioning the loyalty of venerable elected officials and attacking works of art. It was the custom to keep wax statues of outstanding citizens, living and dead, in the church of the Annunziata, for special feast days, when they would be dressed in rich costumes and hung on the convent walls; one morning, in 1528, a masked gang of roughs went into the church and broke up the images of the two Medici popes, of Lorenzo the Magnificent and other distinguished Medici; the broken bits were then treated as though the church were a public latrine. This had happened once before, in the interregnum after the Sack of Prato. By public decree, the Medici emblems were ordered to be removed from churches and private dwellings, and it was proposed to tear down Palazzo Medici. Old Cosimo’s epitaph in San Lorenzo was rewritten to say that he was not Pater Patriae but Tyrannus. Michelangelo offered to do a ‘Samson Overcoming a Philistine’ to stand as a republican symbol in a public square, but (a sign of the new times) he was too busy painting a ‘Leda’ for the Duke of Ferrara to keep his promise. And finally, during the Siege itself, painted likenesses of hanged criminals appeared, once more, on the walls of the Mercanzia in the Piazza della Signoria, painted by Andrea del Sarto, at night because of the shame attached to the work; these public enemies were not now, alas, in the grip of the Republic but had deserted to the enemy outside the gates. Throughout the Siege, this curious punitive species of fresco, always praised for being very lifelike, was persevered in, Andrea working at night and in his pupils’ names on the Bargello walls. A certain Ghiberti, descendant of the great sculptor who had done the ‘Gates of Paradise’, painted a placard for the military headquarters, the Golden Lion in Via Larga, showing Clement VII in his papal dress and mitre at the foot of the gallows.
Andrea del Sarto, who died in 1531, was the chief Florentine representative of the bella maniera of Raphael, that is, of an ideal ‘classicism’, already somewhat stereotyped and saccharine, that was being developed in Rome. His masterpiece, a ‘Last Supper’ in the monastery of San Salvi, near Campo di Arrigo, was spared during the Siege by a squadron of Florentine workmen sent to demolish all the buildings within a mile radius of the walls (so that they could not prove useful to the besieging enemy), spared, so it is said, from artistic sentiment that could not bear to destroy something so beautiful and so fresh from the artist’s hand. The ‘perfection’ of Andrea, which today seems boring and academic, still retained a saving element of Florentine naturalism, of that lifelike quality that was noted in the hanging figures on the Mercanzia and the Bargello. But just during the chaotic years preceding the Siege there began, in reaction to Andrea, the peculiar movement called Mannerism, which departed both from Nature and from ideal standards of perfection. The ‘unnaturalness’ of the first Mannerists—Pontormo and Il Rosso Fiorentino—was a subject for Cellini’s sarcasms and for Vasari’s worry. He speaks of ‘bizzarrie’ and funny (‘stravaganti’) poses, of ‘certi stravolgimenti ed attitudini molto strane’. Early Florentine Mannerism might be called the first modern art, in the sense that it was incomprehensible to the artists’ contemporaries, who in vain sought a rationale for what seemed a wilful violation of the accepted canons of beauty.
Up to the time of Pontormo and Il Rosso, there had been a general agreement, not restricted to connoisseurs, as to what constituted beauty and what constituted ugliness, and the judgment of the citizens of Florence was regarded as supreme. Their quick applause for the new had kept this agreement from becoming a form of philistinism—nobody complained that Giotto was not like Cimabue or that Brunelleschi had violated the plan of Arnolfo. A lively faculty of recognition was the common denominator between the artist and the public. When Michelangelo spoke of ‘a cage for crickets’, everyone saw what he was talking about and what Cellini was talking about when he said that Bandinelli’s ‘Hercules and Cacus’ (made, after the Medici restoration, from the block of marble intended for Michelangelo’s ‘Samson’) was like a great ugly sack of melons stood up against a wall. A joke is a proof that everyone is capable of seeing with the same eyes. The Mannerists were the first to require a special vision, an act of willed understanding, on the part of the public. With Il Rosso and Pontormo, ‘What can anyone see in it?’ became, for the first time, a question propounded about a work of art. And even today, the visitor to the Uffizi who has not been prepared by a heavy reading course in art criticism and theory will find himself wondering, in the Mannerist rooms, what anyone ever saw or sees in this art, with its freakish figures arranged in ‘funny’ postures and dressed in vehemently coloured costumes.
In their personal lives, both Pontormo and Il Rosso were ‘disturbed’ cases, to use the psychiatric jargon of today. Pontormo was a recluse in the tradition of Uccello and Piero di Cosimo—a solitary hypochondriac who lived in a strange tall house he had had constructed for himself (‘cera di casamento da uomo fantastico e solitario’) with a top room, where he slept and sometimes worked, that was reached from the street by a ladder, which he would pull up after himself with a pulley, so that no one could get at him once he was safe inside. Often, he did not answer when friends knocked on the door in the street below. ‘Bronzino and Daniello knocked; I don’t know what they wanted.’ He had no wife, and in his old age he adopted a foundling from the Innocenti with whom he had a great deal of trouble, because the youth would not stay home with him or would shut himself in his room and refuse to eat. Pontormo’s diary, kept during the last three years of his life, records his minute attention to his stomach, kidneys, and bowels, and painstakingly itemizes his lonely, abstemious meals. ‘Dined on ten ounces of bread, cabbage, beet salad.’ ‘A bunch of grapes for dinner; nothing else.’ ‘A “fish” of eggs [a frittata made in the shape of a fish], six ounces of bread, and some dried figs.’ One writer, Bocchi, relates that Pontormo was ‘excessively melancholy and kept dead bodies in troughs of water to get them to swell up’, in order to study them for the ‘Deluge’ he was painting in San Lorenzo; the smell sickened the whole neighbourhood. Vasari says, on the contrary, that he had a morbid fear of death and could not bear to have it mentioned or to see a dead body carried through the streets. During the plague, he fled to the monks in the Certosa at Galluzzo. Il Rosso (so called because of his fiery complexion) used to dig up corpses in the graveyard of Arezzo in order to study the effects of decomposition. In Florence, on Borgo dei Tintori, he lived with a baboon, which he taught to perform services for him. According to Vasari, he committed suicide in Fontainebleau, but modern authorities deny this.
Of the two, Pontormo was decidedly the greater artist. His late-summer idyl, ‘Vertumnus and Pomona’, painted for the big sunny upper room of Poggio a Caiano, Lorenzo’s favourite villa, is one of the most convincing and freshest bucolics ever projected by a painter; it is as light and graceful as an eighteenth-century Venetian and as strong in its design as a Michelangelo. Above, two naked putti are riding on the central bull’s-eye window, perched on laurel branches, and two more, below, are sitting astride a wall. Branches and delicate leaves spray out, suggesting, in their movement, a swing or swings. A party of handsome country girls, a naked boy, an old man with a basket, a youth in a jerkin, and a dog have stopped to rest, as though by a roadside, and have disposed themselves on two stone walls, which provide a platform or stage for the painting, transecting the half-moon of the lunette. The country girls (goddesses, really) are wearing low-necked summer dresses, with white fichus or berthas and billowing sleeves. One has pulled up her red skirt and is dangling a white bare leg over the wall she sits on. One has a pale blue cap, like a Vermeer; she is turning her head over her shoulder, again Vermeer-like, towards the room; her sleeves are rolled up, her pretty hip is raised, and her bare foot and legs are stretching out from her pale lavender dress. One, the most beautiful of the three, with a violet bow in her dark piled-up hair, is reclining, propped up on an elbow, looking intently forward; she wears an olive-green dress with violet sleeves, and her free arm, somewhat tanned, is extended sideward, straight out, in a lovely taut gesture, as though she were maintaining her balance. On the other side of the bull’s eye, the naked sunburned boy on the wall has his arm thrown back and upward, as if he were playing at ball. The old god Vertumnus sits crouched by his basket like a brown peasant or beggar. The youth next to him wears a mauve tunic and a white shirt with full sleeves. Nothing could suggest better a warm, late-summer afternoon on a Tuscan roadside than these bare legs, white kerchiefs, slightly disarrayed gowns, tucked-up skirts and sleeves, the unself-conscious medley of dress and undress, the play of cool, precise colours against heated flesh in the semi-shade of the branching laurel. The fresco was commissioned by Pope Leo X to honour the memory of his father, Lorenzo, and from it transpires a breath of the natural farm life of the villa as described in Poliziano’s letters and Latin verses: family shopping trips to Pistoia, cheese-making, mulberries, peacocks, and geese. In a quite different vein, Pontormo’s ‘Crucifixion’ (now in the Belvedere), painted for a roadside chapel near Castello, is in its swelling volumes and austere tragic simplicity nearly as fine as a Masaccio.
From these extraordinary works, no one would be led to suspect the ‘derangement’ of Pontormo; nor would anyone guess that he, like Il Rosso, suffered from ‘l’orrore dello spazio’. Yet a horror of space, in fact, was the phobic obsession that dictated or drove most of his compositions, and those of Il Rosso, too, to an even more marked extent. The first reaction to a typical altarpiece by Pontormo or Il Rosso is one of sheer repulsion and bewilderment. There is no depth and no dimensionality, and the figures, uprooted like the corpses in the graveyard, stare out as though they were apparitions. Space has been dismembered, and anatomy, no longer obedient to spatial discipline, reverts to a kind of Gothic abandon. Arms have grown extraordinarily long; heads have shrunk; feet and hands have become gigantic or withered into claws; eyes are mere holes, blackened around the edges, or else they are rolling up, showing their whites, in ecstasy. Bodies are swivelled about in remarkable contortions. A screaming phantasmal colour jumps off the canvas—lurid greens and oranges, leprous whites, burning reds, and jarring violets.
What is most disturbing, however, in this ‘primo manierismo fiorentino’ is the presence of a kind of prettiness—a sugary, simpering prettiness which is already unpleasantly noticeable in Andrea del Sarto, whose rapt devotional groups are all too ‘seraphic’ often, in the style of the cheap holy cards with a prayer printed on the back that are distributed in churches. Iridescent or opaline colour, used by Andrea for religiose effects of light and shade, became the specialty of the Mannerists, who loved the two-tone effects now found chiefly in sleazy taffetas popular with home-dressmakers for an ungainly girl’s first ‘formal’—orange turning yellow, flame turning red, lavender turning rose. Il Rosso’s colour is more garish than Pontormo’s. In his ‘Madonna, Saints, and Two Angels’ in the Uffizi, the principal personages are all dressed in ‘shot’ textiles. The Madonna is wearing a two-toned pinky purple dress with peach-coloured sleeves; Saint John the Baptist has a Nile-green shoulder-throw and a mauve toga; Saint Jerome’s bare ancient shoulders, shrunken neck, and ferret-like head are emerging from what is best described as an evening stole, in dark grey iridescent taffeta. The mauves, peaches, and purples are reflected, like a stormy sunset, on the flesh of the holy group; clawlike hands have red transparent fingers as if they were being held up to the sun or to an infernal fire. A simpering, rouged, idiot Child sits on the Madonna’s lap. The eyeholes of the Child, the Madonna, and the red-winged Angels are circled by blackness, like melting mascara; their reddened, purpled features are smudged and blurred; and the whole party appears intensely dissipated or lunatic—a band of late roisterers found at dawn under a street lamp. Other sacred paintings of Il Rosso, like the ‘Moses Defending the Daughters of Jethro’, also in the Uffizi, suggest, again, the half-carnival atmosphere of an insane asylum or of a brothel during a police raid. In other toppling constructions of Il Rosso and Pontormo, the pyramid of the Holy Family and saints calls to mind a circus tableau, of a team of brightly costumed acrobats teeteringly balanced on the strong man at the base.
The hellish, freak-show impression made by many of these altarpieces was not accidental, at least in Il Rosso’s case. Vasari tells a story of how the painter was doing a picture for the superintendent of the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, and the superintendent, seeing the oil sketch and taking the saints for devils, drove Il Rosso off the premises. Vasari goes on to explain that Il Rosso, when making an oil sketch, had the habit of giving ‘certe arie crudeli e disperate’ to the figures, which he later sweetened and softened in the finished canvas. But those ‘cruel and desperate airs’ are not really dispelled by the orangeade colour or by the drooling smiles of the sticky Child and angels. ‘The Madonna of the Harpies’, the name given to a well-known painting by Andrea del Sarto, because it shows the Madonna standing on a pedestal carved with harpy forms, might serve as the over-all title for Il Rosso’s leering underworld.
Softly idealized Holy Families, flanked by ecstatic friars, were hardly the best subject for a painter who was living with a baboon, and the horrible falsity of feeling that is evident in much of the post-Raphael painting of this period seems a product of a growing clerical demand for a specifically ‘Catholic’ art—an art of genuflections and bead-telling and family unity. Il Rosso was great once, when he painted his Volterra ‘Deposition’ and his own spatial horror coincided with the disequilibrium of the event to produce a kind of shrieking surrealism: white phantom figures are seen busily moving on a crazy pattern of ladders and crosses in a spatial void.
In Pontormo’s ‘Deposition’, in the church of Santa Felicita, the subject is treated in a totally different and even stranger fashion. Because of the darkness of the chapel he uses pale boudoir shades reminiscent of ribbon and silken coverlets; the pale soft lifeless body of Christ, carried by attendant nacreous figures, might almost be the centre of a chiffony Bacchanale. There is no sign of the Cross or of any solid object. A drift of pale-green chiffon is lying on the ground in the front of the picture, and the mourners are dressed in peppermint pink, orchid, gold-apricot, sky-blue, scarlet, pale peach, mauve-pink, pomegranate, iridescent salmon (orange-persimmon-yellow), and olive-green. All the figures are ethereally feminine, except for a tiny bearded old man whose head is seen in one corner. The two bearers of Christ’s drooping, supine cadaver are wide-eyed girlish pages with pearly, satin-smooth arms, silky short gold curls, and white shapely legs; one of them is wearing a bright blue scarf or ribbon. An utter detachment from what has happened characterizes this bizarre epicene ensemble; about to shoulder their burden, the bearers turn their curly heads, as it were, to pose for the picture, and the one on the left, with Cupid’s-bow lips parting, has assumed an expression of pathetic, pretty surprise. The choreographic grouping of harmonious candy tints, flowing gestures, and glistening white tempting flesh makes an eerie morbid impression, as though Cecil Beaton had done the costumes for a requiem ballet on Golgotha.
The faculty of eliciting inappropriate comparisons is always a mark of strain in art, and the early Florentine Mannerists possess this faculty to the highest degree. The detachment of their tapering figures from the action they are supposed to be performing and from any affective sentiment prompts the onlooker to associate this dissociated work with the realm of common things, and he is shocked, for example, to find that the cut of the dead Christ’s beard in Pontormo’s ‘Deposition’ reminds him of Cosimo I. The banished real world returns, in an unpleasant way, forcing itself in where it does not belong, carrying a bedraggled train of reminders and associations.
Still, it must be said for the Florentine Mannerists, that, again, they were the first—the first to feel the strain and hollowness of the cinquecento. Early Florentine Mannerism, is, above all, nervous painting, twitching, hag-ridden, agoraphobic, looking over its shoulder sidewise, emerging whitely from black shadows. The tics of Pontormo and Il Rosso signalled a breaking-point. The disturbance originating in Florence was eventually felt all over Italy—in Parma, Siena, Venice, and Rome. But the diverse painting and sculpture identified in art history as Mannerist—Beccafumi, Parmigianino, Michelangelo, Bronzino, Allori, Vasari, Cellini, Giambologna, Tintoretto—had only superficial similarities with the calamity-shrieking canvases of Pontormo and Il Rosso.
In Florence, under Cosimo I, the second Mannerism, cold and formal, became a semi-official style. The Florentine workshops were busier than ever, thanks to the grand duke’s Renaissance vanity, which was stronger, even, than his stinginess. He wished to leave behind him imperishable monuments to his reign and allotted the task of doing this to the artists who happened to be on hand: Vasari, Allori, Bronzino, the younger Ghirlandaios, Franciabigio, Cellini (back from his travels and buying Tuscan real estate), Bandinelli, Ammannati, Giambologna. Even the old Pontormo, though he was not in fashion, received a commission, and the grand duke and duchess paid a gracious visit to San Lorenzo to see his work progressing. Ammannati enlarged the Pitti Palace, and the Boboli Garden was laid out, with grottoes, caverns, stalactites, an artificial lake with an island on it, and avenues of ilex—all in the new foreign ‘landscape’ style. Sculptors and painters were employed to do likenesses of Cosimo himself, his wife, his descendants, and his remote ancestors, as well as his mother and father. He set Cellini to competing with Ammannati for the ‘Neptune’ on the Piazza della Signoria and let him work on his model in the Loggia dei Lanzi; unfortunately for the piazza, Ammannati won the commission because, explains Cellini, he himself was poisoned by a scodellino of sauce and was sick for nearly a year.
A great deal of hack work was done for Cosimo, with which he was immensely satisfied. He was not able to distinguish between the talents of his busy artists and artificers; the high value he put on Vasari seems to have been due to his speed. The perfected ‘bella maniera’ in which Vasari excelled could be applied, like a patent process, to any subject matter or medium, and Vasari was proud of the fact that the arts in his generation had reached a degree of efficiency or near-automation undreamed of in the past. Pain and difficulty in composition had been almost eliminated, and from the point of view of both artist and patron this appeared to be an advance of stupendous importance. The new efficiency permitted Vasari to exceed all previous norms: he frescoed the interior of Brunelleschi’s dome; he remodelled Palazzo Vecchio from top to bottom and frescoed the principal rooms; he built the Uffizi and even found time, in the midst of other commissions, to spoil the interiors of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, putting in new chapels and getting rid of many old works of art.
The Panglossian optimism with which Vasari attacked these jobs was a product of the age and of the sudden parochialism of Florence, now a backwater, though it did not yet know it. Vasari believed that he was living at a zenith while in fact he and the Florentines with whom he shared Cosimo’s patronage had arrived at a nadir; only Cellini, among them, was a world figure. The rest were ‘School of Florence’, as one might say a school of small fish.
This sad ending of the story of a great people has a curious epilogue. Florentine painting and sculpture never recovered from their collapse in the mid-sixteenth century, and it was not until the Risorgimento that Florence once again became a centre, if only a small one, of literary men, political figures, and historians, like Gino Capponi and Bettino Ricasoli of Brolio (called ‘the iron baron’), liberals of ancient blood, and the Swiss G. P. Vieusseux, who founded the reading room now called the Vieusseux Library. Yet the city did not die or petrify like Mantua, Ravenna, Rimini, Siena, or turn into a dream like Venice. The Florentine crafts, out of which the arts had grown, survived the era of bad taste that was inaugurated by the grand dukes, survived, too, the Victorian cult of tooled leather and glazed terracotta; the severe tradition of elegance that goes back to Brunelleschi, Michelozzo, Donatello, Pollaiuolo has been transmitted to the shoemaker and the seamstress, just as the wise government of space can still be found, not in Florentine modern architecture and city-planning, but in the Tuscan farmland with its enchanted economy, where every tree, every crop has its ‘task’, of screening, shading, supporting, upholding, and grapevines wind like friezes in a graceful rope pattern among the severed elm trunks, the figs, and silvery olives.
In Tuscan agriculture, everything not only has its task but its proper place; a garden, as Edith Wharton explains in her little book on Italian gardens, is treated in Tuscany as an outdoor ‘house’, which is divided into ‘stanzoni’ (big rooms), often on different levels: the lemon ‘room’, the orange ‘room’, the camellia ‘room’, and so on. In this perspicuity and distinctness, so characteristically Florentine, there is some residue, perhaps, of medieval scholasticism, something that recalls the architecture of Dante’s hell, with each group of sinners in their proper bulge and circle, as chickens in Florence are found at the pollaiuolo, meat at the macellaio, vegetables at the ortolano, milk at the lattaio, cheese at the pizzicheria, bread at the panificio, a system of division that has broken down in most Italian cities and in which modern products like toilet paper find it hard to discover their proper ‘house’.
Yet Florence is not backward, only extraordinarily rational. The Florentines consider themselves and are considered by other Italians the most civilized people in Italy, just as the Tuscan peasant is regarded as the most skilled and intelligent of Italian farmers. ‘Questi primitivi’, the Tuscan poor people say pityingly of workers imported from the South and from the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, and they pity them not only for their unskilled hands but because these unfortunates, not having lived with the ‘Davidde’ (the Florentine pet name for the ‘David’ of Michelangelo) and the ‘cupolone’ (Brunelleschi’s dome), do not understand ‘le cose dell’arte’. The literacy rate in Tuscany is by far the highest in Italy, and the poorest Florentine maidservant can be found in the kitchen spelling out the crimes and ‘le cose dell’ arte’ in the morning newspaper.
That quality called ‘fiorentinità’ (and Florence is the only Italian town whose name naturally turns into a substantive denoting an abstract quality) means taste and fine workmanship, as ‘Paris’ does in France. The world knows it in shoes, umbrellas, handbags, jewellery, trousseau linens, and the firms of Ferragamo, Gucci, Bucellati, Emilia Bellini, with their seats on Via Tornabuoni and Via della Vigna Nuova and branches in Rome, Milan, New York, awaken faint reminiscences of the old banking firms of the Peruzzi, the Bardi, the Pazzi. Fiorentinità is made by the Florentine workman in his coverall and by those firms of spinster sisters like the Sorelle Materassi of Aldo Palazzeschi’s novel with their needles, scissors, and embroidery hoops and their big maid called Niobe. If it is synonymous with civilization and refinement, it cannot be separated from the poor and their way of talking, thinking, and seeing, which is always realistic and equalizing. The Florentine speech is full of diminutives; everything is turned into a ‘little’ something or other, which has the curious effect of at once deprecating and dignifying it. Old-fashioned expletives (‘Accidenti!’, which means something like ‘I’ll be blowed’, ‘Diamine!’, or ‘the dickens!’, ‘Per bacco!’, or ‘You don’t say!’) give Florentine talk a countrified flavour. ‘Per cortesia’, among the poor people, is the common preface to an inquiry. A ‘pisolino’ (somewhat humorous, meaning ‘a little nod’) is the common word for a nap; a drink of hot water and lemon is a ‘canarino’ (canary bird). Nature becomes human when the peasants look at her; around Florence they call the two kinds of cypresses, the tall male and the blowsy female, the ‘man’ and the ‘woman’.
Florence today is a city of craftsmen, farmers, and professors, and every Florentine has something in him of each of these. In a sense, there is no class of unskilled workers, for every occupation is treated as a skill, with its own refinement, dignity, and status—even unemployment. ‘What did your husband do?’ ‘Era un disoccupato, signora.’ In the same way, upper-class idlers, such as are found in Rome and Venice, are extremely rare here, which explains the absence of night life. There is no jeunesse dorée; children of the upper classes are busy studying at the University: law, archaeology, architecture, political science.
The Florentines today are probably more like what they were in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance than were the Florentines of any intervening period; the revival of crafts and small industries and the restoration of free institutions after Fascism may have something to do with this. These eternal Florentines have no need to be sentimental about the past, which does not seem remote but as near and indifferently real as the clock on the tower of Palazzo Vecchio to the housewife who puts her head out the window to time her spaghetti by it. There have been many changes, of course, in these centuries, but they are like the changes a man sees in his own lifetime. The diet eaten by Pontormo in his crazy tall house is almost precisely the diet of the Florentine people today: boiled meat, a frittata of eggs, a fish from the Arno, cabbage, minestra, beet salad, capers, lettuce salad, three pennys’ worth of bread, the bitter green salad called radicchio, pea soup, two cooked apples, asparagus with eggs, ricotta, artichokes, cherries, melon (popone in Tuscan), the small sour plums called susine, grapes, a young pigeon, two pennyworth of almonds, dried figs, beet greens with butter, a chicken. If he were alive now, he might have eaten, besides, white haricot beans with tuna fish from Elba, the broad beans called mangia-tutto, Tuscan ravioli (little green gnocchi made with beet greens and ricotta), rabbit, and the long string beans called serpenti.
The merit of this fare is that it is inexpensive and healthy. In Pontormo’s ‘Supper at Emmaus’, the bill, or what appears to be the bill—a scroll of paper with figures on it-is shown lying on the floor. This sardonic touch is as characteristically Florentine as radicchio and popone. The economy of the Florentines, reprehended as avarice by Dante, is an ingrained trait, which was made even more pronounced, doubtless, by the general misery during the Medici period. Farmers are naturally economical, and the farmer in every Florentine scrimps, saves, and stretches. When the capital was moved to Florence at the time of the unification of Italy, a Roman paper printed a cartoon showing three Florentines seated at a dinner table with a single boiled egg in the centre. ‘What shall we do with the leftover?’ was the caption. Such jokes are still told of the Florentines, and they tell them of themselves. At an expensive seaside resort, during a recent heat wave, all the Florentines checked out of the hotel one morning. ‘They must have heard that the heat wave was over in Florence; someone sent them a penny post card,’ observed a non-Florentine. A lady who lived in Fiesole was invited by a Florentine countess to drop in at her house ‘any time you feel like it; if you want to do p. p....’ To the countess, this invitation was the summit of hospitality.
Eggs, cigarettes, and postage stamps are still bought cautiously, one at a time, by the poorer Florentines, and a cabbage is sold by quarters. The habit of careful division, of slicing every whole into portions, is an instinct with the Tuscans that is confirmed by their very geography. Tuscany produces a ‘little of everything’, as the Florentines love to explain: iron, tin, copper, zinc, lead, marble, hides, oil, wheat, corn, sugar, milk, wool, flax, timber, fruit, fish, meat, fowl, and water. This little, if carefully distributed, meant self-sufficiency and independence; it was a kind of proof, from the Creator, that Tuscany was a ‘natural kingdom’ or completely furnished model world which could survive, as in some fairy-tale pact, so long as a principle of limit was recognized. The idea of rightful shares has been rooted literally in the soil here since the early Middle Ages. The mezzadria system of farming (half to the peasant and half to the landlord), which introduced an even division into agriculture, emancipated the Tuscan peasant from slavery centuries in advance of the rest of Italy and Europe. This no doubt explains the superiority of the Tuscan peasant and the sharpness of his intelligence. Similarly, in the thirteenth century, a then-revolutionary code governing mining and the rights to mineral deposits was enacted in Massa Maríttima, in the Maremma. The mezzadria, incidentally, which has become the general practice throughout Italy, now no longer satisfies either the landowner or the peasant; it is not as equal as it sounds. Nevertheless, it made the peasant a free man and instilled in him those qualities of foresightedness, thrift, and neatness that are not found in slaves or serfs.
The pride of the Florentines, as proverbial as their avarice, is particularly irritating to materialistic people because it appears to be based on nothing concrete, except the past, to which the Florentines themselves seem all but indifferent or wryly jesting. What have they got to be so proud of? No money, no film stars, no big business, no ‘top’ writers or painters, not even an opera company. A few critics and professors—‘sharp eyes and bad tongues’, which was a Renaissance summing up of the Florentines.
The professor in every Florentine is a critic, and that critical spirit is the hidden source of Florentine pride. ‘O, signore, per noi tutti gli stranieri son ugualmente odiosi’, said a manicurist, bluntly, to Bernard Berenson, who was trying to enlist her against the Germans before the First World War. ‘Oh, sir, for us all foreigners are equally hateful.’ ‘Noi fiorentini’—this phrase, so often used, grates on the nerves of many strangers, who take it to be a boast. But it is only a definition or simple statement of identity, just as the manicurist’s remark was not rude but explanatory.
The manicurist was a poor girl and not ashamed of it. This is the distinction, the real originality, of the Florentines in the modern world, where poverty is a source of shame and true natural pride, as opposed to boastfulness, very rare. Florence is a town of poor people, and those who are not poor are embarrassed by the fact and try to hide it. Professors, farmers, and craftsmen have one thing in common; they are generally short of ready money. The Milanese-type industrialist with his bulging crocodile wallet and the Roman-type speculator hardly exist in Florence. The aristocracy here is a gentry preoccupied with crops and rainfall. Every Friday during the growing season, the counts and marchesi gather in Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of the agricultural administration, to trade and barter and exchange information, just as the peasants do who come in from the country with their samples to meet in the square below; on Wednesday, which is market day in Siena, the Florentine nobles who have vineyards in the Chianti or the Val d’Elsa gather there as well, in the Palazzo Comunale on the square. These men, whatever else they may be—erudite archivists, amateur historians, collectors of scientific instruments, pious sons of the Church, automobile salesmen—are, above all, farmers, and their wives, too, who set an excellent table, spend a good deal of time in conference with the fattore (land agent) and the accountant, having inherited estates themselves to manage.
On the whole, stocks and shares hold little interest for the Florentines, who care only for the land, that is, for ‘real’ property. Like Michelangelo and Cellini, Florentines of every station are absorbed in acquiring real estate: a little apartment that can be rented to foreigners; a farm that will supply the owner with oil, wine, fruit, and flowers for the house. Upper-class families return from a week-end on their country estates, their millecento packed with flowers wrapped in double thicknesses of damp newspaper to last the week in town, just as the poor people do who go by bus on Sunday to visit their relations in the country. The aristocracy is fond of shooting, and many a handsome old villa is furnished as a hunting lodge with a gamekeeper dressed in green; fishing in the Arno and the tributary mountain streams is a passion with the artisans and white-collar workers, whose bending rods make a Sunday pattern all along the river. Both sports rest on the same principle: taking something free from Nature.
Like the wise woman who lived in the portico of Santissima Annunziata and sewed pretty patches on her clothes, the modern Florentines are extremely gifted in repair work—mending and fixing old things to make them last. The restoration of works of art, which is mending at its most delicate and perilous, is one of the great crafts of modern Florence; to the workshops and laboratories of the Uffizi, spread out through the old quarters of the city, come pictures and frescoes, marbles and wooden polychromes from the Florentine churches and from remote parishes in the contado to be put back into condition by Florentine specialists and professors. The Florentine ‘way’ of restoration, less drastic than the German method as practised in London and New York, is one of the new wonders of the art world; art scholars and historians of English and American universities, critics and curators come to watch how it is done. To them, the workmen in white smocks, like doctors, operating on frescoes that have been detached from damp churches and cloisters, revive the old Florence and the workshops around the Duomo. Climbing up ladders onto shaky scaffolds in the Bardi Chapel of Santa Croce, where the Giottos are being restored, the foreign professors marvel over the work and over the new, ‘modern’ Giotto who is revealed by the removal of the nineteenth-century overpainting—a resplendent, transfigured Giotto, whom Ruskin never knew, having given nearly all his praises, it is now found, alas, to the œuvre of the nineteenth-century restorer, Bianchi, who painted, in toto, the figure of Saint Louis of Toulouse, considered by Ruskin the essential Giotto. Saint Louis of Toulouse has vanished; the Victorian age has vanished, its only relic being an ironic Franciscan friar, the plump head of the Belle Arti of Santa Croce, who paces up and down the trembling scaffold arguing, with Florentine pungency, that the missing figures be painted in again, ‘for devotional reasons’.
These Giottos of the Bardi Chapel have been brought back, almost, from the dead, and the other innovations of modern, post-war Florence—the new Museum of the Belvedere with its wonderful collection of detached frescoes restored to life and the new Trinita bridge standing come era—appear as veritable miracles. The redemption of a work of art is a kind of Second Creation. Yet what is involved is simply painstaking repair work, not essentially different from the housewife’s darning or the furniture-mending of the small workshops of the Oltrarno. Around the saving character of the Florentines, their historic vice, cluster the local virtues: the wise division of space, substantiality, simplicity, economy, and restraint. If high-flying Daedalus is their real patron, Poverty is their attendant virtue, the home-made cross of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini that guides him, the precursor, through the desert.
The two modern writers who have best caught the spirit of Florence are Aldo Palazzeschi whose Sorelle Materassi tells of two old-maid sisters who have a fine-linen and embroidery business specializing in trousseaux and hope-chests—putting away for the future—and whose own bureau drawers are stuffed with ancient trim for their own Sunday wear (tassels, fringe, scarves, veils, little collars forty or sixty years old, boleros, little jackets with dangles, Spanish combs and tortoise hairpins), and Vasco Pratolini whose Cronache di Poveri Amanti tells of the poor people of the Santa Croce quarter: artisans, pushcart vendors, prostitutes, and pairs and pairs of young lovers. In the back streets of the Santa Croce quarter, the farthest remove from the smart linen shops of Via Tornabuoni, two characteristic sounds can be heard, when the traffic is momentarily silent, two sounds that are modern Florence: the clack-clack of a sewing machine and the tinkle of a young girl practising on an old piano.