CATILINE, FLEEING FROM ROME, came to Etruria, to the ancient hill town of Fiesole, where he and his fellow-conspirators found a ready welcome among the dissatisfied townspeople. In the old Etruscan stronghold, he proclaimed himself consul and assumed the consular dress. A Roman expedition was sent against him and the people of Fiesole. It was a noble Roman warrior called Fiorino who led the attack against Fiesole, which was too well defended, however, to be taken by assault. Fiorino, perceiving this, built a camp at the ford on the Arno where Florence now is and where the Fiesole people used to come every week to market. Fiorino was killed during a surprise night sortie from Fiesole. Caesar arrived with reinforcements and started to build a city. Fiesole was taken and destroyed. Catiline and his partisans escaped into the Pistoiese hills, where they were hunted down by the legions and slain in the great battle of Pistoria.
This account of the founding of the city, given by the old chroniclers, is a curious mixture of myths and actual history. Caesar never fought in Tuscany, but Catiline was in Fiesole, and there was a famous battle of Pistoria in which he perished. Fiorino, the eponymous hero, was a literary invention, on the pattern of Romulus, but there was an Etruscan ford and market on the Arno, near Ponte Vecchio, at the narrowest point of the river, and Caesar, in a sense, was the founder of the city, which was resettled by his veterans, on the site of an Italic town, under the agrarian laws he sponsored. Even the date is not far off; the battle of Pistoria, which gives the time of the legendary foundation, took place in 62 B.C.; the agrarian laws were put into effect in 59 B.C.
Roman Florence had baths, temples, a forum, where the Piazza della Repubblica is now, a Capitol or a great temple to Jupiter with a marble staircase leading up to it, an aqueduct, and a theatre, all of which have vanished, leaving a few street names as markers: Via delle Terme or Street of the Baths, Via del Campidoglio or Street of the Capitol. Outside the city walls, there was an amphitheatre, seating fifteen thousand people; its outlines can still be seen on curving Via Torta, Via dei Bentaccordi, and Piazza dei Perruzzi, which transcribe half an oval near the church of Santa Croce. The back of Palazzo Vecchio occupies the site of the theatre, and the Baptistery, that of the praetorium or residence of the Roman governor. In the Baptistery, in the crypt of San Miniato (the first local Christian martyr; decapitated in the arena, he carried his head across the river and up the hill to what is now his church), there are Roman columns and frilled capitals which were put to use by Romanesque builders. The tradition of Rome is palpable in Florence to those who know that it is there, just as, to those who know of it, the plan of the Roman colony, laid out like a camp or castrum, becomes visible in the city’s old streets.
Florence was the ‘daughter’, Rome, the ‘mother’—this was the medieval notion. The Florentines of the Middle Ages boasted of the tradition, claiming descent from noble Roman families. The Uberti, for example, purported to descend from a supposed son of Catiline, pardoned by Caesar and adopted by him under the name of Uberto Cesare. In Dante’s day, it was believed that two races had settled Florence: the nobles or Blacks, who were descended from the soldiers of the Roman army; and the common people or Whites, who were descended from the primitive inhabitants of Fiesole. The incompatibility of these two stocks was held to be the explanation of the perpetual strife in the city. Another story told how Florence, destroyed by Totila, was rebuilt by Charlemagne, who restored it ‘come era, with its antique form of government—Roman law, consuls, and senators.
These legends and genealogical fantasies struck a core of truth. The sobriety and decorum of Florence is the gravitas of Rome—a pioneer, frontier Rome, set in the wild mountains, on a rushing river. This sense of an outpost, of a camp pitched in a military rectangle hard by the mountain of Fiesole, is still perceptible in the streets around the Duomo—Via Ricasoli, Via dei Servi, which run straight out towards the mountain barrier like streets in the raw towns of the old American Far West.
Beneath the surface of Florence lies a sunken Rome. In the dim light, the crypt of San Miniato, with its pillars of odd sizes and shapes, resembles a petrified forest. Tradition used to say that the Baptistery was the old temple of Mars, the war god of Caesar’s veterans, who was the patron of the city. There is a modern theory that the Marzocco or Florentine heraldic lion was really the Martocus or a mutilated equestrian statue of Mars that was left on guard, superstitiously, at Ponte Vecchio, until 1333, when it was carried away by a flood. This statue played an ominous part in Florentine history. In the year 1215, on Easter Sunday, young Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti, riding his milk-white palfrey, in his wedding garment, with his marriage wreath on his head, was struck down at the north end of Ponte Vecchio, at the statue’s base, by the Amidei, because he had broken his marriage pledge to a member of their family. This was the fuse that set off the Guelph-Ghibelline chain reaction that continued for a century and a half and nearly consumed the city. In 1300, when the headless and ravaged torso of the god was replaced at its post on Ponte Vecchio, after some building improvements, it was set up facing north instead of east, as it had done in the past; this was considered to be a sinister portent for Florence, and, in fact, that year the Black and White division began. Dante, a White Guelph, who was driven into exile by that feud, identified the angry war god, who had been displaced as the city’s guardian by the Baptist, with the spirit of restless faction in Florence. Much earlier, according to the story, the statue, having been removed from its former temple, was stowed away in a tower near the Arno and fell into the river at the time of the mythical destruction by Totila; if it had not finally been retrieved and set up on Ponte Vecchio, Florence could not have been rebuilt. The flood of 1333, which swept away the bridges together with the statue, was an apocalyptic event. A strange storm began it, lasting ninety-six hours, as described by an eyewitness, the chronicler Villani. There were sheets of fire, thunder, and a continuous stream of water; men and women, crying for mercy, moved from roof to roof on slender planks; tiles fell, towers crashed, the walls gave way; the red columns of San Giovanni were half buried in water. Church and convent bells tolled to exorcise the spirit of the storm. It was not long after this fearful flood and the loss of the guardian statue that another great calamity befell Florence: in 1339, Edward III of England went bankrupt, toppling the two Florentine banking houses of the Bardi and the Peruzzi, which had backed him in his continental wars; this was the ruin of Florence as world banking power.
The war god on the bridge was replaced as the city’s portafortuna by the lion on the shield. The Florentine Marzocco, unlike the Venetian Lion of Saint Mark, had no church affiliations; it was a strictly political beast, repulsive to look at, even in Donatello’s stone carving. The pious emblem of Florence was the lily, and some writers who do not hold the Martocus theory believe that the Marzocco was the relic of a different superstition: during the Middle Ages, the signory used to keep lions in the dungeons of the city palace, and their behaviour was carefully watched throughout times of crisis for its bearing on the fortunes or the state. The ancient art or science of augury had been a specialty of the region long before Caesar or Catiline. Etruscan priests, renowned for their skill, practised divination on the mountain top of Fiesole, scanning the skies and the storms for portents, just as Galileo, later, condemned by the church, observed the heavenly bodies on the hills of Bellosguardo and Arcetri, under the protection of Cosimo II. In this river settlement, surrounded by natural observatories, science and prophecy flourished, together with odd religions. On the Piazza San Firenze, not far from the Bargello, there was a temple to Isis, the Egyptian goddess of floods and rivers, whose cult may have been brought home by Roman veterans; at Fiesole, there was a college of lay priests devoted to the Magna Mater, an Eastern importation. Isis weeping for Osiris, the Magna Mater weeping for Attis, who castrated himself under a pine tree—these sad cults from faraway places found votaries here in Tuscany, where they were purified of their licentious elements, so characteristic of them elsewhere in the Empire; they foreshadowed, says the historian Davidsohn, the special Florentine devotion to the Madonna. The Mourning Mother was, of course, linked to the calendar and to the seasons. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, the Florentines dated the beginning of the year ab incarnazione, that is, from the conception or incarnation of Christ, which meant that the new year started nine months before Christmas, on the twenty-fifth of March. This is the Day of the Annunciation—one of the most popular subjects of Tuscan painting. The angel of the new year, with his lily, announcing the planting of a Sacred Seed to a peasant maiden, is evidently spring. The old Roman calendar had started the new year with the spring equinox—the twenty-first of March.
The forum or market place, later the Mercato Vecchio, had been framed by a triumphal arch (still remembered in the Middle Ages) and adorned with statues of emperors and magistrates. Those who complain of an absence of religious feeling in Florentine churches, finding them too plain, too sober, too, as it were, ‘Protestant’, will discover that feeling in the Bargello and in the Museum of the Works of the Duomo, which are dedicated to sculpture, like temples. These all-but-deserted sanctuaries are the holy places of the city. Much of the statuary in these two museums has been brought indoors, to protect it from the elements. Old Testament prophets from their high lookout posts on the Bell Tower; tall, ox-eyed Virgins from above the doorways of the Duomo; a group of three monumental figures—Saint Peter, Saint Paul, and the Virgin—from the Porta Romana; Saint George, lightly clad, with his shield, from Orsanmichele, that peculiar church that was half a grain depot to be used in case of emergency, siege or famine—they stood at key posts, coigns of vantage, in the city, like watchmen of the public weal. Battered by the weather, they have taken on some of the primordial character of the elements they endured as protectors of the people. In their bunched or draped garments, with wide-open, deep-socketed stone eyes, they have a curious look of pilgrims or wayfarers who are gathered together in these shelters to await the next stage on the journey; other figures, from inside the churches, have joined them: several Baptists; a mitred pope, blessing; the singing, dancing children of Luca della Robbia and Donatello. Some, like the Doctors of the Church from the Poggio Imperiale avenue who were transformed into poets by the addition of laurel wreaths, are in a pitiable condition, resembling Immortals in a drunken disguise. They are a strange mixed crew, these holy persons, but this attests their holiness and the fact that they are pilgrims. Saint George, in his commanding niche at the Bargello, is a Spartan athlete or young Roman Empire-builder, swordless, in a light cloak, tied in a becoming bow around his handsome neck, intrepid eyes forward to the future; near him stands a starveling San Giovannino, the boy Baptist, daunted by his mission, gasping, with parted lips and staring eyes. Queer companions, as far apart as Achilles and the tortoise, yet both are by Donatello; both are profoundly moving and beautiful; both are patterns of courage. The resolute Saint George, mailed at arms, legs, and feet, wears no halo on his short manly locks; San Giovannino, irresolute, in his ragged hair shirt, with his thin arms, bumpy shoulders, and shrunken legs, has an emaciated gold cross and a thin gold plate of a halo, like feeble sun glints, to accompany him in the scary desert. Behind San Giovannino is a bust in painted terracotta of Nicolò da Uzzano, leader of the Aristocratic party, looking like a Roman magistrate. Further down the room is the Marzocco.
The statuary of Florence is its genius or attendant spirit, compelling awe not only because it is better than any other statuary done since ancient Greece, a categorical statement, but because, good and bad alike, it is part of the very fabric of the city—the respublica or public thing. It belongs to a citizenry, stubborn and independent, and to a geography, like that of Athens, of towering rock and stone. The Florentine sculptors of the quattrocento sprang from the quarries of the neighbouring hills, where the macigno or grey pietra serena was cut. Desiderio da Settignano, Benedetto da Maiano, Mino da Fiesole, Benedetto da Rovezzano—these were village boys brought up among stone-cutters. Michelangelo was put out to nurse in Settignano, and he used to say that he imbibed his genius from his wet nurse’s limy milk. Green marble, used chiefly for facing churches in geometric designs, came from the hills near Prato; the famed white marble of Florentine sculpture came from Carrara, in that eerie mountain range, the Apuan Alps, that runs above the coast north of Pisa, near where Shelley drowned, at Viareggio, and where there is now an ugly string of beach resorts. Michelangelo, like some strange Ibsen hero, spent years in the Carrara mountains, quarrying marble for his statuary amid peaks that appear snow-streaked because of their gleaming white fissures. The great white blocks, ‘free from cracks and veins’, as the contracts promised, were loaded onto barges and floated, along green waterways, to Florence or Rome. This marble was already known in the days of Augustus, and the art of carving beautiful marbles was first mastered by the Pisans, as early as the duecento, three centuries before Michelangelo, in sculptures that were already Renaissance or still classical. Workmen from Pisa brought the art to Florence; the Florentine habit of casting in bronze is thought to go back to the Etruscans.
White, black, grey, dun, and bronze are the colours of Florence—the colours of stone and metal, the primitive elements of Nature out of which the first civilizations were hammered—the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age. The hammer and the chisel strike the sombre music of Florentine art and architecture, of the Florentine character. Those huge iron gratings on the windows of Florentine palaces, the iron rings and the clamps for torches that are driven into the rough bosses of stone came from the gloomy iron mines of Elba, a Tuscan possession. You can still hear the sound of the forge in the workshops of the Oltrarno, and the biggest industry of modern Florence is a metallurgical works.
The Florentines of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when they went into battle, carried statuary with them. Savonarola, though he was supposedly an enemy of art, had a Donatello Infant Jesus borne in procession on the day of the Bonfire of Vanities, when so many secular paintings were burnt, including the studies from life of Fra Bartolomeo. Among the people, it was believed, as late as the present century, that spirits were imprisoned in statues. The statue of Neptune by Ammannati in the fountain of the Piazza della Signoria is called ‘Il Biancone’ or ‘The Great White Man’ by the poor people, who used to say that he was the mighty river god of the Arno turned into a statue because, like Michelangelo, he spurned the love of women. When the full moon shines on him, so the story goes, at midnight, he comes to life and walks about the Piazza conversing with the other statues. Michelangelo’s ‘David’, before it became a statue, used to be known as ‘The Giant’. It was a great block of marble eighteen feet high that had been spoiled by Agostino di Duccio; personified by popular fancy, it lay for forty years in the workshops of the Cathedral, until Michelangelo made the Giant into the Giant-Killer, that is, into a patriotic image of the small country defeating its larger foes. Giants, it was related, had built the great Etruscan stone wall of Fiesole, and many stories were told in Florence of beautiful maidens being turned into pure white marble statues.
More than any other piazza in Italy, the Piazza della Signoria evokes the antique world, not only in the colossal deified statues, the ‘David’, the ‘Neptune’ (of which Michelangelo said, ‘Ammannato, Ammannato, che bel marmo hai rovinato’ thinking, that is, of the damage to the marble wrought by the inept sculptor), the hideous ‘Hercules and Cacus’, but in the sober Loggia dei Lanzi, with its three lovely full arches and its serried statuary groups in bronze and marble. Some are antique Greek and Roman; some are Renaissance; some belong to the Mannerist epoch; one to the nineteenth century. Yet there is no disharmony among them; they seem all of a piece, one continuous experience, a coin periodically reminted. It is a sanguinary world they evoke. Nearly all these groups are fighting. The helmeted bronze Perseus, by Cellini, is holding up the dripping head of Medusa, while her revolting trunk lies at his feet; Hercules, by Giambologna, is battling with Nessus the Centaur; Ajax (after a Greek original of the fourth century B.C.) is supporting the corpse of Patroclus. There are also the Rape of the Sabine Women, by Giambologna, the Rape of Polixena, by Pio Fedi (1866), and ‘Germany Conquered’, a Roman female statue, one of a long line of Roman matronly figures that stand against the rear wall, like a chorus of mourners. Two lions—one Greek, one a sixteenth-century copy—flank these statuary groups, which are writhing, twisting, stabbing, falling, dying, on their stately pedestals. Nearby, at the entrance to Palazzo Vecchio, Judith, by Donatello, displays the head of Holofernes, and in the courtyard, Samson struggles with a Philistine. Down the square, Cosimo I rides a bronze horse.
This square, dominated by Palazzo Vecchio, which was the seat of government, has an austere virile beauty, from which the grossness of some of the large marble groups does not at all detract. The cruel tower of Palazzo Vecchio pierces the sky like a stone hypodermic needle; in the statuary below, the passions are represented in their extremity, as if strife and discord could be brought to no further pitch. In any other piazza, in any other city, the line-up of murderous scenes in the Loggia dei Lanzi (named for Cosimo I’s Swiss lancers, who stood on guard there, to frighten the citizenry) would create an effect of terribilità or of voluptuous horror, but the Florentine classical spirit has ranged them under a porch of pure and refined arches (1376–81), which appear to set a ceiling or limit on woe.
This was the civic centre, distinct from the religious centre in the Piazza of the Duomo and the Baptistery and from the two market places. Donatello’s ‘Judith and Holofernes’ was brought here from Palazzo Medici, where it had been part of a fountain, and set up on the aringhiera or balustraded low terrace of Palazzo Vecchio as an emblem of public safety; an inscription on the base declares that this was done by the people in 1495—when the Medici had just been chased out and their treasures dispersed. The aringhiera was the platform from which political orations were delivered and decrees read by the signory to the people (this is the derivation of the word ‘harangue’), and the statue of Judith cutting off the tyrant’s head was intended to symbolize, more succinctly than words, popular liberty triumphing over despotism. The Medici were repeatedly chased out of Florence and always returned. When Cosimo I installed himself as dictator, he ordered from Cellini the ‘Perseus and Medusa’, to commemorate the triumph of a restored despotism over democracy. Meanwhile, Michelangelo’s ‘Brutus’ (now in the Bargello) had been commissioned, it is thought, by a private citizen, to honour the deed of Lorenzino de’ Medici, who had earned the name Brutus by assassinating his distant cousin, the repugnant tyrant Alessandro. This same Lorenzino was infatuated with the antique and had been blamed by his relation Pope Clement VII for knocking the heads off the statues in the Arch of Constantine in Rome—the meaning of this action remains mysterious. Another republican, Filippo Strozzi, of the great banking family, when imprisoned by Cosimo I, summoned up the resolution to kill himself by calling to mind the example of Cato at Utica.
The statues in the square were admonitory lessons or ‘examples’ in civics, and the durability of the material, marble or bronze, implied the conviction or the hope that the lesson would be permanent. The indestructibility of marble, stone, and bronze associates the arts of sculpture with governments, whose ideal is always stability and permanence. The statue, in Greek religion, is thought to have been originally a simple column, in which the trunk of a man or, rather, a god was eventually descried. Florentine sculpture, whether secular or religious, retained this classic and elemental notion of a pillar or support of the social edifice. Other Italians of the Renaissance, particularly the Lombards, were sometimes gifted in sculpture, but the Florentines were almost always called upon by other cities when it was a question of a public, that is, of a civic, work. The great equestrian statue of the condottiere Gattamelata that stands in the square at Padua was commissioned from Donatello; when the Venetians wanted to put up a statue along the same lines (the Colleone monument), they sent for Verrocchio. The state sculptor of the Venetian Republic was the Florentine, Sansovino.
The idea of infamy, curiously enough, was conveyed by the Florentines through painting. Important public malefactors had their likenesses painted on the outside walls of the Bargello, which was then the prison and place of execution, where they were left to fade and blister with time, like the rogues’ gallery in an American post office, though in the case of Florence the criminals were not ‘wanted’ but already in the grasp of the authorities. The flimsiness and destructibility of a painted image, corresponding to a tattered reputation, was also emphasized in the Bonfire of Vanities, when the Florentines, disapproving of the attitude of a Venetian merchant who was present, had his portrait painted and burned it with the rest of the pyre.
The sculpture galleries of the Bargello and of the Works of the Duomo create a somewhat mournful and eerie effect because a civic spirit, the ghost of the Republic, is imprisoned, like a living person, in the marble, bronze, and stone figures, which appear like isolated, lonely columns, props and pillars of a society whose roof has fallen in. As in the ancient city-states, the religious and the civic were identical or nearly so in republican Florence; the saints were the civic champions, under whose protection and example the city fought. This was general among the city-states of the Middle Ages, each of which had its own special protectors (i.e., its own religion). The Venetians rallied to the yell of ‘San Marco’, and the Luccans to ‘San Martino’, as the Florentines did to ‘San Giovanni’. Having their own religion, their own patriotic saints, the Florentines, like the Venetians, had small fear of the pope and were repeatedly subjected to interdict and excommunication; at one point, Florence, acting through the bishops of Tuscany, turned around and excommunicated the pope. The inscription, put up on Palazzo Vecchio during the siege of Florence in 1529, ‘Jesus Christus, Rex Florentini Popoli S.P. Decreto electus’ (‘Jesus Christ, King of the Florentine People, elected by Popular Decree’) asserted an absolute independence, not only of worldly rulers, but of any other spiritual power but Christ’s. This claim to be the city of God, the new Jerusalem, had already been implicit in the multiplicity of durable patriotic images, telamons, caryatids, hammered out by Florentine sculptors. Florentine sculpture has a local character, the spirit of a small place and province, unknown elsewhere in the West after Attica and Ionia. ‘The small state,’ says Jacob Burckhardt, ‘exists so that there may be a spot on earth where the largest possible proportion of the inhabitants are citizens in the fullest sense of the word.’ He was thinking of the Greek polis or city-state, but he might also have been describing the Florentine Republic; in both cases, citizenship and sculpture, together, were developed to the highest point.
Florentine sculpture, like Greek, was capable of intimacy and of the delicate shades of private feeling, but this, for the most part, as in Greece, was expressed on tombs and in the form of bas-relief, which is between statuary and drawing. The exquisite tombs of Desiderio and of Mino da Fiesole and their many charming heads of children are full of a private and therefore half-fugitive emotion; the discreet grief of a mourning family has the finest veil drawn across it, like the transparent marble veils of the Madonna and the drapery of angels in which these refined sculptors excelled. The restraint and control of Florentine low relief is very close to the Greek stele, which was originally a simple tablet with an inscription; the evanescent is inscribed or imprinted on stone, and the modulations in depth, with a narrow compass, imply reserve and tact, as in Greek elegiac poetry.
What makes this art appear ‘classical’ has nothing to do with the imitation of classical models. The Greek work that is closest to Mino, to Desiderio, to some of Donatello, and to Agostino di Duccio was hardly known in Italy in their time. The affinity with fifth-century Athens may be due partly to geography, partly to political structure – to the clear outlines of landscape and to a tradition of sharp, clear thought. Distinction and definition reduce forms and ideas to their essentials—that is, to bedrock. ‘By sculpture,’ said Michelangelo, ‘I understand an art that takes away superfluous material; by painting, one that attains its result by laying on.’ The art that takes away superfluous material, to lay bare an innate form or idea, was the art practised by Socrates in eliciting a truth from his interlocutor, who ‘knew’ the truth already but could not perceive it until the surrounding rubbish was cut away. The Florentines ‘knew’ that a statue was, in essence, a pillar, a column, and that a funerary monument was, in essence, a tablet with writing on it. This knowing is the classic temper.
The line between public and private was strictly drawn in the days of the Republic. The Florentines were known for their extreme individuality, yet no statue of a condottiere was permitted in a public square or, for that matter, in a private chapel. Grandiose tombs were unheard of in Florence before Michelangelo. Mourning remained a family matter, as it had been with the Etruscans, who represented husband and wife sitting at ease on their tombs, as if at a last domestic feast. Florentine decorum did not permit apotheoses of dead persons, such as were common in Venice.
The glorification of the individual was frowned on by the Republic; it was against public policy to encourage private show. Bifore windows, for example, so familiar in Sienese Gothic palaces, were allowed only in religious buildings in medieval Florence; the householder had to be content with a monofore. The severity of Florentine architecture owes a good deal to this prohibition. Cosimo il Vecchio, the founder of the Medici dynasty, was too cautious a politician to endanger his power by a pompous style of living; in his later days, he rejected titles and honours and declined the luxurious palace, in full Renaissance style, that Brunelleschi proposed to build him, commissioning Michelozzo instead to do him a plain, solid dwelling with a heavy cornice, in rusticated stone, where, dissimulating his real sovereignty, he played the part of a retiring private citizen. ‘Too big a house for such a little family,’ he used to sigh, nevertheless, when he was a lonely pantaloon in the big silent rooms, and his children had disappointed him. He buried his parents in a plain marble box in the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo.
It was a bastard Medici—Pope Clement VII, illegitimate son of that Giuliano who was killed by the Pazzi Conspirators while hearing mass at the Duomo—who breached the tradition, ordering the New Sacristy in San Lorenzo from Michelangelo to glorify two members of his family who would better have been forgotten. These celebrated Medici Tombs have a curious theatrical quality, as of a stage production in Caesarean costumes, complete with helmets, armour, plumes; the chapel that contains this brilliant rodomontade is more like a stage set than like architecture—a travesty or cynical exaggeration of the Brunelleschi sacristy, which it copies, just as the two dukes, posed like actors in a tableau, are a travesty of Renaissance virtù. Michelangelo, who, in any case, as Vasari says, ‘detested to imitate the living person unless it were one of incomparable beauty,’ made no attempt at portraiture, such as was customary in funerary statues; his two dukes are two handsome leading men, type-cast in Renaissance parts. The statue had become the statuesque—no longer a pillar of the community, but a form of marble flattery.
Michelangelo’s sculpture projects were expensive, and, as he grew older, only popes and tyrants could afford to patronize him. The gigantism of his later conceptions was out of scale, too, with the strict notions of measure and limit that governed his native city—notions peculiar to small, armed republics of the antique stamp. He himself lived in Rome, under the patronage of a series of papal princes, and even Cosimo I, the new Medici despot, could not entice him back to what then became the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. During the Siege of Florence, he had run away, briefly, to Venice, quitting his job as supervisor of the city’s fortifications in an access of panic, which he tried to justify afterward, when he wanted to return. He was no Cato or Brutus, yet in his way, like the embittered Dante in exile, he was a sour patriot. The four famous, somewhat rubbery symbolic figures of Night and Day, Twilight and Dawn, on the Medici Tombs are believed to express, in hidden language, his despair over the fall of the Republic and the triumph of the Medici dynasty. And in the statuary group called ‘Victory’ in Palazzo Vecchio, which shows an inane-looking young man crushing the back of an old man, who is bent double beneath him, the victim is supposed to have the features of Michelangelo. It is hard, however, to attribute Michelangelo’s personal sense of persecution (the other side of his megalomania) to patriotic motives. ‘I never had to do with a more ungrateful and arrogant people than the Florentines,’ he wrote in a letter.
In other respects, he himself was a true Florentine—dry, proud, terse, thrifty. The correspondence of his later years is almost wholly concerned with money matters. Miserly with himself, he was buying up Tuscan real estate for his brothers and his nephew. One by one, through his agents, he picked up farms at good prices, and he finally achieved his ambition of establishing the Buonarroti family in a solid, unostentatious dwelling, now the Casa Buonarroti or Michelangelo museum, on Via Ghibellina, in the Santa Croce quarter. All his private incentives, his planning for the future, centred on Florence. Though he refused to come himself, he advised Cosimo through Vasari about his building projects for the city, and he tried to accumulate merit in the next world by providing dowries for poor Florentine girls of good family, to permit them to marry or buy their entry into convents.
In his own day, he was often likened to the sculptors of antiquity, and a ‘Sleeping Cupid’ he had done as a young man actually passed for an antique. This was an early case of art forgery, whose victim was a Roman cardinal. Acting on the advice of a dealer, the young Michelangelo scarred his Cupid and stained it with earth, to make it look as if it had been dug up. The cardinal discovered the fraud and demanded his money back; eventually the statue, which belonged briefly to Cesare Borgia, who had looted it in Urbino, passed into the hands of Isabella d’Este, the Marchioness of Mantua, the greediest collector of her day. But the faking or imitation of antiquity (chiefly based on Hellenistic models) to suit a collector’s taste, like the flattering of tyrants and popes, had little in common with the natural and inbred classicism of Florence, whose sculpture died a painful and indeed a gruesome death with the extinction of the Republic.
Cosimo I, like so many absolute sovereigns, had a neo-classic or pseudo-classic taste; he had himself sculptured in the costume of a Roman emperor and commissioned various Ledas and Ganymedes and other mythological subjects from the Mannerist and neo-classic sculptors who worked for him, the best of whom were Cellini and Giambologna, a Frenchman. Much of this sculpture was private in the worst sense, like the ‘Hermaphroditus’, a poem done much earlier for Cosimo il Vecchio and inscribed to him by the writer Beccadelli—a work so crudely indecent that even the most ribald humanists attacked it and the author was burned in effigy in Ferrara and Milan. While licentious marbles and bronzes were being sought by the private collector, the noble nudity of public sculpture grew, as it were, embarrassed before the general gaze. The people of Florence put a gilded fig leaf on Michelangelo’s ‘David’; later, in Cosimo I’s time, Ammannati violently attacked the nude in a letter to the Florentine Academy of Design and publicly ‘repented’ his ‘Neptune’ (not because it was ugly but because it was naked).
Actually, Florentine humanism, which had been preying on the antique from the days of the old Cosimo, the passion of book collecting, art collecting, the appearance of the connoisseur, the whole notion, indeed, of ‘taste’, spelled the end of the heroic age of sculpture. The craze for the antique originated in Florence, under the patronage of the old Cosimo, who died while listening to a dialogue of Plato. It was, to start with, chiefly a literary movement, but the humanists quickly moved into the sphere of collecting art objects, trophies from the ancient world, competing with millionaires for these items, many of which were doubtless fakes. Poggio Bracciolini, the Florentine humanist, whose speciality was the recovery of classical manuscripts (Lucretius, Quintilian, Cicero, Manilius), which he gave to the world, collected for himself an array of marble busts—only one, he wrote, was ‘whole and elegant’; the rest were noseless. He sent a monk from Pistoia to Greece, antiquity-hunting for him, but this monk later cheated him and sold the items he had collected to Cosimo il Vecchio. Another Pistoiese delighted Lorenzo de’ Medici with a marble figure of Plato, said to have been found at Athens in the ruins of the Academy. Lorenzo accepted it, like any credulous American millionaire; he had been longing for a likeness of his ‘favourite philosopher’.
Even in Poggio’s time, there were not enough real antiques to supply the demand; only six antique statues, he reported, five marble and one of brass, were left in Rome. Later, the excavation of the ‘Laocoön’ in Rome, which was witnessed by Michelangelo, excited great wonder throughout the cultivated world. The vogue for antiquity and for imitations of antiquity made Baccio Bandinelli the most popular sculptor in Florence, rivalling even Michelangelo, who at once despised him and was jealous of him. Bandinelli turned out a mass of degraded statuary, including the ‘Hercules and Cacus’ in the Piazza, that frankly exploited the greed for ‘classic-type’ sculpture on the part of the new rulers and collectors.
Naturally, in none of this statuary, which was once à la mode (nor in the graceful Cellini either), is there a grain of that local tender piety, religious or civic, that appears in its purest, most intense concentration in Donatello’s figures. Donatello (‘little Donato’) was the most numinous of all the Florentine sculptors, and Michelangelo, though bigger, was not as fine. In the wiry tension of Pollaiuolo, working in bronze, the barbaric grace and luxury of the Etruscans reappears for a final time, as sheer fluid energy, but these works, even when they take the form of a papal tomb, like that of Innocent VIII in St Peter’s, have something of the private fetish about them, beautiful, strange, and secret. Michelangelo was the last truly public sculptor, and his works, so full of travail and labour, of knotted muscles and strained, suffering forms, are like a public death agony, prolonged and terrible to watch, of the art or craft of stonecutting. He anticipated the baroque, a style utterly un-Florentine, whose power centre was papal Rome. The Medici Tombs, in fact, make the impression of a papal enclave, an extraterritorial concession, within the Florentine city-state.
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.