6
PASSIONS IN BLOOM
Drums beat. Trumpets blare. Hundreds of Florentines squeeze onto benches set up along Piazza Santa Croce; others crane from the windows of the surrounding buildings. On a crisp February day in 1468, the richest city-state in Europe hosts a celebratory joust in honor of a military victory and the engagement of their ruler’s son, Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–1492), to a noble Roman girl.
Young men from the town’s leading families canter slowly into the piazza on horses festooned with a king’s ransom of precious stones, silk, velvet, and ermine, a display so brilliant that the radiance seemed to one observer “enough to block out the sun.” A thick layer of white sand covers the great rectangle, divided lengthwise with wooden rails so galloping horsemen can thrust lances at each other at breakneck speed.
A white charger enters, bearing the unmistakable figure of nineteen-year-old Lorenzo, supremely yet seductively ugly, with a jutting chin and a massive, curiously upturned nose. The broad-shouldered athlete wears a white silk mantle bordered in scarlet. Atop his black locks perches a velvet cap encrusted with rubies and pearls. At the center of his shield gleams the famous Medici diamond known as Il Libro (the Book), reportedly valued at the equivalent of a million dollars. The red Medici palle (balls) wave on a banner from his lance, along with the standard of his married mistress. Unseating every opponent, Lorenzo wins the day.
Two years later, when the twenty-one-year-old succeeded his father, the citizens of Florence exultantly hailed Lorenzo as their prince of passions. This Renaissance ruler governed the state, negotiated a delicate international peace, managed the family business, composed love poems and lusty ballads, mingled easily with philosophers and peasants, and was hailed throughout Europe as the greatest and noblest Italian of his time. Throughout his life, he also remained, as Niccolò Machiavelli duly noted in his history of the family, “amazingly involved in sensual affairs.”
Although Magnifico was a title given to many lords in those days, Lorenzo became Il Magnifico, the most magnificent of all. In the seize-the-day spirit of his time, he raised celebration almost to the level of art with torchlit parades, masquerades, “lion-hunts” in the Piazza della Signoria, and high-speed horse races from one city gate to another.
“Who would be happy, let him be,” Lorenzo wrote in his most famous verse. “Of tomorrow we cannot be certain.”
In these Camelot years, Florentines, giddy with their own good fortune, reveled in the glorious moment. Besotted with beauty, they elevated everything in their lives—a shoe’s turned-up toe, a sleeve’s jewel-bright lining, a dagger’s hand-carved sheath—into an adornment. Like the ancient Romans, they seized the day and lived each moment with a gusto unseen in centuries.
FLORENTINES CALLED THE MOVEMENT that transformed the Western world La Rinascita (the Rebirth), a jubilant resurrection of classicism after a thousand years of darkness. Although historians differ on precise dates for its beginning and end, the Renaissance (from the French for “rebirth”) marked not so much a period of time as a revolutionary change in thinking, acting, and living in the world. With the discovery of Roman and Greek artifacts, extricated from crumbling ruins and remote monasteries, everything very old became new again. Italians felt their connection to their glorious past more strongly than ever before; ancient passions stirred back to life.
The scholars who translated and expounded on classical works came to be known as humanists, for their dedication to the man-made enterprises of art, literature, and language. “If we are to call any age golden,” the philosopher Marsilio Ficino wrote, “it must certainly be our age, which…has restored to life the liberal arts that were almost extinct: poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, music.”
All exalted the glory of the human body, the agility of the human mind, and the grandeur within the human spirit. Man (and to a much lesser extent woman) became the measure of all things, and the pursuit of beauty, a manifestation of love and virtue, the noblest goal.
Artists emerged as the rock stars of their day. Giorgio Vasari, the father of art history, hailed them as heroic artefici, creators of miracles like God himself, endowed with a unique capacity to stretch beyond the banal and touch the sublime. Overcoming seemingly impossible technical challenges, they defined the visual language of Western culture, forever changing our concepts of beauty. Their goal was to inspire meraviglia, a sense of marvel and extraordinary delight, and stupore, defined as “the state resulting from the perception of a thing that exceeded the limits of the senses.”
By the late fifteenth century, artists were pursuing this passion like a drug. Luca della Robbia, a goldsmith’s apprentice, became so engrossed in sculpting that he did nothing but chisel. When his feet grew cold, he warmed them in a basket of carpenters’ wood shavings so he could continue his work. Paolo Uccello labored through the night, searching for the vanishing points of perspective. When his wife would call him to bed, he protested that he couldn’t bear to leave his “sweet mistress.”
Yet the yearnings of the human heart remained the same. The painter Sandro Botticelli, for example, like Dante and Petrarch before him, became hopelessly enraptured with an unattainable woman. Simonetta Vespucci (1453–1476) charmed all of Florence with her strawberry blond curls and delicate features when she arrived from Liguria to wed a local banker. After winning a joust in her honor, the smitten Giuliano de’ Medici, brother of Il Magnifico, crowned her “Queen of Beauty.”
Simonetta’s reign was brief. She died, probably of tuberculosis, at age twenty-two. Devastated by her loss, Botticelli took to resurrecting her image again and again in paintings of unsurpassed elegance—as Venus rising from the sea, a springtime nymph dancing amid blossoms, a series of haunting Madonnas. The painter outlived his muse by thirty-four years. At his death, Florence honored his final request and buried him at the foot of Simonetta’s tomb in the Church of Ognissanti (All Saints). The two lie there still, united for eternity.
REGARDLESS OF THE PASSION and talent of its artists, the Renaissance would never have come into full bloom without money—a great deal of it. Fortunately, Florence, once a sleepy wool town on the Arno, had grown into the prosperous economic and cultural center of Europe, second only to Paris in population and prominence. Traders transporting silks, spices, salt, and other prized commodities from the Middle East brought currencies to be changed into florins, the coin that became the preeminent currency of Europe. Florentine banks loaned millions to kings and princes (at profitable interest rates). While many banking families grew rich, the Medici emerged as the most successful of these dynasties.
Called God’s bankers because they collected taxes from every country in Europe on behalf of the papacy, generations of Medici ruled Florence with the power, but not the title, of monarchs. With Cosimo, as historians record, the Renaissance lifted its head. Under his grandson Lorenzo, it reached its peak of excellence. Under his great-grandson, who became Pope Leo X, it conquered Rome and the Christian world.
I got to know Medici country, the neighborhood surrounding the Basilica of San Lorenzo, when I was researching the life of Mona (Madame) Lisa Gherardini. The merchant’s wife portrayed by Leonardo da Vinci lived with her family just a few blocks from the Medici palazzo, completed in 1484 after decades of construction. Deliberately choosing a relatively modest, fortresslike design, the family patriarch Cosimo de’ Medici filled his home with treasures from the past—coins, sculptures, maps, scrolls—and works by innovative local artists.
In the center of its garden he placed a sculpture that foreshadowed the Renaissance in all its sensual splendor: the shepherd boy David, the first freestanding nude since antiquity, sculpted by Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi (ca. 1386–1466), known as Donatello, his childhood nickname. Unlike medieval artists, who had wrapped angels in wings and saints in mantles, he carved an androgynous adolescent with long locks, delicate features, and a slim torso, garbed only in a rakish hat and boots, with a cocky swagger in his hips and Goliath’s head under his foot.
Prodigiously productive, Donatello didn’t differentiate between art and craft, lucrative commissions or whimsical projects. “Because he took delight in all things,” wrote Vasari, Donatello set his hand to doing everything “without considering whether it was insignificant or prestigious.” This was characteristic of Renaissance—and indeed continues to be a part of Italian—passion: the conviction that anything that human hands create should rise to the highest possible level of excellence.
Rivalries, sometimes jocular, sometimes savage, fanned by the outspoken Florentines, goaded artists’ ambition. The constant carping and competitiveness in his hometown, Donatello claimed, inspired him to ever greater accomplishments. The sculptor churned out so many fine works so quickly that a merchant once refused to pay the agreed-upon fee for a life-size bronze head completed in only a month. Outraged, Donatello declared that he would destroy in one moment what it had taken a month to make. He carried through on his threat: with a shove, he knocked the bust from a parapet, shattering it to bits.
In daily life, money meant so little to the sculptor that he kept his earnings in a basket suspended from the ceiling of his studio and invited workers and friends to take what they needed. When the lifelong bachelor fell into poverty in old age, the Medici family supported him. At his request, he was buried in the Basilica of San Lorenzo, near his patron Cosimo.
WHILE DONATELLO POURED all his energy into art, often-conflicting passions for painting and women consumed another Medici favorite. Filippo Lippi (ca. 1406–1469) was orphaned at age two. An impoverished aunt struggled to care for the boy, but she wearily consigned him to a monastery when he was eight.
An indifferent student, young Lippi spent all his time drawing in the margins of his books. When no punishment deterred him, a teacher sent him to the Brancacci Chapel in Florence’s Church of Santa Maria del Carmine. On my first visit, I understood why. The painter known as Masaccio (“messy” Tom for his disregard for everything but art) had frescoed the walls with paintings—including an anguished Adam and Eve, wailing their way from Paradise—that infused raw emotions into recognizable human figures. Soon the youth could duplicate Masaccio perfectly.
At eighteen, Lippi ran away—only to be kidnapped by pirates as he sailed the Adriatic. With no relative or patron to provide a ransom, he remained in chains on the Barbary Coast for two years. One day, grabbing a burnt coal from the fire, Lippi sketched the pirate leader in typical Moorish clothes full length on a white wall—a feat his amazed captors thought was magic. In time, he painted his way to freedom and back to Tuscany, where Cosimo de’ Medici recognized and rewarded his talent.
Much to Cosimo’s frustration, however, Lippi couldn’t resist pursuing love wherever he found beauty. When he spied an attractive woman, he single-mindedly wooed her, offering all he possessed for a night in her arms. If she refused, he cooled his ardor by talking to himself while painting her portrait, often as the Madonna. Then he would return to the chase.
Determined to curtail Lippi’s amorous wanderings, Cosimo locked him inside the Medici palazzo to finish a project. After two days his “animal desires,” as Vasari termed them, drove the painter “to seize a pair of scissors, make a rope from his bedsheets, and escape through a window to pursue his own pleasures for days on end.” When he finally returned, Cosimo, conceding that “rare geniuses are celestial forms” requiring freedom, granted him liberty to come and go, keeping him close with only “bonds of affection.”
While painting a fresco for a convent in Prato, Lippi spied yet another striking young woman, Lucrezia Buti, either a ward or a novice in the cloister. He entreated the nuns for permission to model his Virgin Mary on the lovely girl. Each sitting further inflamed his desire. One day, as Lucrezia traveled on a pilgrimage to a nearby shrine, he carried her off—without any known protest on her part. Defying the prioress and her father, Lucrezia remained with Lippi, modeled for several Madonnas, and gave birth to a son, who would gain his own renown as the painter Filippino Lippi.
At Cosimo’s behest, the pope released the senior Lippi from his vows so that he could marry Lucrezia, but to everyone’s surprise, the painter balked. Instead, Vasari reports, he continued “to spend lavish amounts on his love affairs.” In 1469, while working on frescoes in the Spoleto cathedral, Lippi died suddenly. According to local rumors, the relatives of a woman he had seduced poisoned him.
SUCH WAS THE PRICE of living, as the hypersexual humanists did, in the heat of seemingly perpetual erotic arousal, determined to suck all the marrow out of life. To them, sex seemed an imperative rather than an indulgence. Why else would nature have designed the body in such a way that touching the genitals triggered greater delight than any other stimulation? Yet theirs was not mere lust. The humanists pursued erotic passion as a way of expanding their experiences, stimulating their senses, and elevating their souls to a loftier plane.
Considered both the most creative and the most passionate of humans, artists pushed to the edge of what Vasari called “madness and wildness.” This dangerous tendency, besides rendering them “unmindful and eccentric,” revealed “the shadow and darkness of vices.” Like Lippi, the painter Raphael of Urbino (1483–1520), talented, affable, and drop-dead gorgeous, served as another case in point.
Capable of reproducing any master’s style, Raphael copied the innovations of his talented contemporaries, who didn’t always view imitation as a form of flattery. “All that Raphael knows of art, he got from me,” Michelangelo once groused. Raphael, for his part, described his temperamental critic as “lonely as a hangman.”
As a papal favorite and the toast of Rome, Raphael lived like a prince, showered with lucrative commissions. This “very amorous man,” as Vasari delicately puts it, “was fond of women…and always quick to serve them.” When an infatuation distracted Raphael from completing a commission in a cardinal’s home, his patron moved the painter’s mistress on-site.
Ultimately Raphael’s sexual indulgence—which he tried to conceal—proved his undoing. As Vasari records, exhausted by pursuing “his amorous pleasures beyond all moderation,” one night he happened to be “even more immoderate than usual” and returned home with a very high fever. The painter didn’t reveal “the excesses he had committed,” and doctors bled him in such a way that he became progressively weaker and died.
The thirty-seven-year-old was buried with sorrow and ceremony in the Pantheon. When I visit the temple-turned-church-turned-tourist-attraction, I never fail to pause at his tomb and read the poignant epitaph:
“Here lies Raphael, by whom nature herself feared to be outdone while he lived, and when he died, feared that she herself would die.”
WHILE ROME AND FLORENCE BOASTED Madonnas of great beauty, Venice, named for the goddess of love, inspired the most seductive genre of Renaissance art: the voluptuous nude, the embodiment of the city’s erotically charged atmosphere. Its unsurpassed master, Tiziano Vecellio, known as Titian (ca. 1490–1576), outshone all others as the brilliant “sun among smaller stars.”
Although Titian savored the pleasures of living alla veneziana (in Venetian style), we know little of his private life. He fathered two sons with a woman named Cecilia, possibly his housekeeper. When she became grievously ill in 1525, he married her to ensure the legitimacy of their children. Cecilia recovered and survived another five years. In the mid-1530s, Titian married again. We know little about his second wife other than that she gave birth to a daughter.
In a career that spanned more than six prolific decades, the indefatigable painter produced hundreds of works, including grand-scale religious paintings, massive mythological scenes, and portraits of Europe’s uppermost crust. None rivaled his tantalizing nudes—his poesie (poems), as he called them.
Titian wasn’t the first artist to paint naked women, observes his biographer Sheila Hale, but he pioneered the use of live models. With milk-white breasts, ample thighs, and honey-colored hair, these beauties often posed lying down, exuding “an overt sexuality that had never before been seen in painting.” The women, with faces recognizable to Venetians of the time, remain “as real to us today as when his contemporaries thought they saw the blood pulsing beneath their trembling flesh.”
Several of Titian’s paintings showcase the mythological beauty Danaë. After a prophet predicted his death at the hand of her son, Danaë’s father imprisoned his daughter in a bronze tower where no man could ever reach her. Wily Jupiter outsmarted him. In Titian’s depictions, a nearly naked Danaë reclines on an unmade bed in obvious sexual rapture as a shower of the god’s golden sperm falls in the form of coins between her parted legs. (The son she conceived did accidentally kill his grandfather.)
The goddess of love also appears in several Titian works, most famously the Venus of Urbino, which displays the fleshy charms of one of Venice’s highest-paid courtesans. In a lushly colored scene, this regal princess of passion reclines on a bed, her soft, rounded body naked except for a bracelet, pearl earrings, and a ring on her pinkie finger. What intrigued me the first time I saw this Venus in Florence’s Galleria degli Uffizi was not her fleshy form but her unabashed gaze inviting viewers to enjoy what she proudly revealed.
Compared to this succulent beauty, a writer of the time observed, every other woman who had ever appeared naked on canvas looked “like a nun.” A shocked Mark Twain decried the Venus of Urbino—“Titian’s beast,” in his words—as “the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses.”
Imitated by generations of artists, Titian’s zaftig beauties still spark debate over whether they are lascivious pornography or elevated art. When I ask a Venetian what she thinks, she grins like her city’s sly putti and says, “Maybe a bit of both.”
THE WOMEN PAINTED with consummate skill by Renaissance masters intrigue us, not just with their physical allure but with their elegance and dignity. However, even seemingly enlightened humanists, who applauded feminine wit and intelligence, believed that women should remain subservient to men. The philosopher Ficino, an inveterate romancer, relished female charms but dismissed women as “chamber pots,” meant “to be pissed in and thrown away.”
Despite daunting obstacles, a few women with singular passion did manage to create important works of art. Some were the daughters of artists who picked up skills in a father’s bottega. Others found the freedom for creative expression within convents, which mainly took in girls—as many as one in four of Florence’s daughters—whose families couldn’t afford bridal dowries. Those with lilting voices sang in choirs. Others, with a passion to glorify God with beautiful works, took up their brushes.
At age fourteen, Plautilla Nelli (1524–1588), a merchant’s daughter in Florence, entered a local convent and gained a reputation as, in Vasari’s description, “the nun who paints.” Winning the respect of prominent male painters of the time, she became Florence’s first recognized female artist.
“There were so many of her paintings in the houses of gentlemen in Florence,” Vasari reports, “that it would be tedious to mention them all.” One of the first artists of either gender to sign her works, Nelli set up a studio to train other nuns to paint.
Her most remarkable composition represents a first in the history of women’s art: a massive Last Supper, almost twenty-three feet long, for her convent’s dining hall. Thanks to a crowdfunding campaign by the Advancing Women Artists Foundation, a recent restoration has revealed rich colors and subtle details unseen for centuries.
WHEN ALL ELSE FAILED, female artists improvised. A sculptress in Bologna named Properzia de’ Rossi (ca. 1490–1530) carved intricately detailed scenes in an odd and challenging medium: the pits of peaches and apricots. Since marble quarries and sculptors’ workshops were male territory, off-limits to the “fair sex,” she may have had to employ the only material at hand: stone fruit.
On one pit, Properzia carved a detailed Passion of Christ that so impressed the city wardens that they commissioned a marble sculpture above a set of doors in Bologna’s Basilica of San Petronio. She chose a scene from the Old Testament in which the wife of the Egyptian pharaoh’s chamberlain, burning with lust for their Hebrew slave, strips off his tunic—depicted, as Vasari describes it, with “a womanly grace that defies description.”
Vasari interpreted the work as an expression of Properzia’s unrequited desire for “a handsome young man, who seemed to care but little for her.” This “most beautiful” work brought “great satisfaction” to Properzia, he asserted, by partly quenching “the raging fire of her own passion.” Although the Bolognese applauded Properzia’s achievement, the feckless nobleman she pined for “spoke ill” of her to the church wardens, and she received “a most beggarly price for her work.” Properzia died nearly penniless.
ANOTHER RENAISSANCE WOMAN attained greater success—professionally, financially, and personally. As a girl in Cremona, Sofonisba Anguissola (ca. 1532–1625) produced a drawing called Laughing Girl that her father sent to Michelangelo. It made the great maestro smile—and issue a challenge: try painting a more difficult emotion, like crying.
Sofonisba responded in a delightfully original way—with a little boy weeping over his bloodied finger after he plunged his hand into a tray of crayfish. Michelangelo praised its young creator and sent some of his drawings so she could continue honing her skills.
At age eleven, Sofonisba apprenticed herself to one of the few male artists in Cremona willing to accept female students. Vasari writes that she “worked with deeper study and greater grace than any woman of our times at problems of design.” At age twenty, Sofonisba completed a portrait of her three sisters playing chess, considered the first realistic depiction of domestic life—a significant departure from grand ceremonies, religious scenes, and mythological dramas.
The young artist, as Donna DiGiuseppe recounts in Lady in Ermine, a novel based on Sofonisba’s life, won a prestigious appointment to the Spanish court. King Philip II summoned Sofonisba to Madrid to serve as a lady-in-waiting, artist, and art teacher for his Italian wife. Working tirelessly over fourteen busy years, Sofonisba became the first woman to achieve international acclaim as a professional painter.
When she was in her late thirties, King Philip, deciding that Sofonisba should marry, provided a generous dowry and selected a Sicilian nobleman as a suitable husband. The couple settled in Paternò near Catania on the eastern side of the island. En route to Spain in 1579, her husband was killed in a pirate raid on his ship. Two years later Sofonisba, intending to return to her hometown of Bologna, sailed for the Italian mainland, but was shipwrecked on the Tuscan coast.
During this fateful journey, an unexpected passion stole her heart. The middle-aged painter fell in love with the ship’s dashing Genoan captain, Orazio Lomellino, and, according to gossip from the time, asked him to marry her. He readily consented. At age forty-five, Sofonisba wed the love of her life, settled in Genoa, and established a school for painters. They lived there until 1615, when, in her eightieth year, the couple moved to Palermo.
Although cataracts had dimmed her vision, Sofonisba continued to tutor young artists. One was the Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck, who painted the nonogenarian on her deathbed. For the rest of his career, the acclaimed portraitist would say that he had learned more from a sightless old woman in Sicily than from all the master painters of Italy.
IN ANY OTHER TIME, Sofonisba and dozens of her contemporaries would number among Italy’s greatest masters. But in the Renaissance, even the brightest stars were eclipsed by two blinding supernovas: Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564). Possessed and inspired by a passion to create works unlike any that came before, each left an indelible signature both as an artist and as a larger-than-life personality.
Even before the Florentines sensed the immensity of his genius, Leonardo won over everyone he met with his charm and remarkable good looks. Nothing about this artist and architect, musician and mathematician, scientist and sculptor, engineer and inventor, anatomist and author, geologist and botanist was ever ordinary.
The quintessential Renaissance man sketched, designed, painted, and sculpted like no one else. He looked like no one else, with carefully curled locks in his youth and a prophet’s chest-long beard in old age. He wrote like no one else, in an inimitable “mirror script” that filled thousands of pages in his makeshift notebooks. He rode like a champion, so strong that a biographer claimed he could bend a horseshoe with his hands.
Insatiably curious and brimming with passions, Leonardo delved deep into mathematics, physics, and astronomy; calculated the ideal proportions for a human figure; drew plans for gravity-defying “flying machines”; orchestrated breathtaking theatrical spectacles; and brought to painting such remarkable verisimilitude that Christ and his apostles seemed to breathe as they gathered for their last supper together.
I didn’t fully appreciate Leonardo’s passion for painting until I was researching Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered, my biography of the woman he immortalized. After beginning the painting around 1503, he continued to perfect this masterwork until shortly before his death sixteen years later.
Created with thousands upon thousands of tiny brushstrokes, La Gioconda, as Italians refer to the portrait, conveys the immediacy of a photograph centuries before the invention of the camera. Lisa’s eyes shimmer, one pupil ever so slightly more dilated, a split second behind the other in adjusting to a change in light. Leonardo’s sfumature (subtle shadings) blur ambiguously at the corners of her eyes. Her lips curve but stop on the very cusp of a smile that captivates us more than five hundred years after its creation.
“The portrait was painted in a way that would cause every brave artist to tremble and fear,” wrote Vasari. Except one: Leonardo’s archrival Michelangelo.
AFFABLE LEONARDO CHARMED even casual acquaintances so effortlessly, Vasari writes, “that he stole everyone’s heart.” No one ever accused Michelangelo of such larceny. Unlike fastidious Leonardo, who dressed in pinks and purples and scented his hands with lavender, Michelangelo wore paint-splattered tunics and often didn’t remove his dogskin underboots until they had reached such a state of disrepair that strips of flesh came off with them. His fearsome temper matched his grizzled looks.
Michelangelo liked to say that he had imbibed his fervid passion for stone in the breast milk of his wet nurse, a mason’s wife. A short child who never grew tall, Michelangelo was squat and bony, with a low brow set on a large head, coarse curly hair, big ears that jutted from the sides of his skull, and small, searing eyes. His father tried to beat artistic passion out of the boy, but Michelangelo’s obvious talent won him an invitation to live and study in the palazzo of Lorenzo il Magnifico, his first and most beloved patron.
After the fall of the Medici, the Florentine Republic, eager to muster popular support, wanted a symbol of civic pride. At age twenty-eight, Michelangelo gave them a shepherd boy carved from a discarded marble slab more than sixteen feet tall.
When his gigantic David rolled slowly on a platform of greased logs through the streets in 1503, Florentines gaped in wonder. The statue flaunted the rules of conventional sculpture: head, hands, and feet too large; thighs too massive; chest too muscled. Yet every element united to embody the strength and nobility of the humanists’ ideal man.
Michelangelo’s David transformed the artist into both a celebrity and, with the receipt of a hefty commission, a rich young man. Not yet thirty, he would soon accumulate more money than Leonardo did in his entire lifetime. Through decades of tumult—uprisings, assassinations, civil wars, sieges, conspiracies, and invasions—Michelangelo worked ceaselessly, producing unequaled masterpieces in painting, sculpture, and architecture and earning the accolade of Il Divino, the divine one.
AFTER FIVE CENTURIES, the passion of these two geniuses still shines. Leonardo’s Mona Lisa remains the most recognized, analyzed, copied, and admired image on the planet—and beyond. In 2013, NASA, in its first test of a laser system for interplanetary communication, selected an image of the Mona Lisa to transmit to the moon and back. Why not? She’s been everywhere and done everything else, with her face reproduced in toast, yarn, pasta, jelly beans, jewels, cups, spools, and just about every other conceivable medium.
Michelangelo’s David also has emerged as a modern meme, toting a guitar or an automatic weapon, wearing swim trunks, jeans, a jock strap, or a Hawaiian shirt. His Creation of Adam and Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel draw tens of thousands of tourists a day.
On my most recent visit, I lingered after an evening tour simply to gaze upward at Michelangelo’s celestial ceiling. Then I began watching the people entering the chamber. Dressed in everything from saris to jeans, speaking in the tongues of dozens of nations, each stopped—even if just for a moment—to take in the paintings’ majesty.
The historian and poet Benedetto Varchi would have recognized the look on their faces. Writing five centuries ago, he described his reaction as he beheld Michelangelo’s works: “I am stupefied, not just astonished and amazed…but almost reborn. My pulse trembles, all my blood turns to ice; all my spirits are shocked, my scalp tingles.”
The French writer known as Stendhal described an equally intense physical reaction during his 1817 visit to Florence. Viewing the memorials to Michelangelo, Galileo, and Giotto in the Basilica of Santa Croce, he found himself as “in a sort of ecstasy from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty…I had palpitations of the heart….Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.”
Art lovers remain just as susceptible. In 1979, an Italian psychiatrist documented more than a hundred cases of tourists in Florence stricken by “Stendhal syndrome.” Symptoms include dizziness, fainting, panic, and bouts of “outright madness” that can last for several days. Its cause may lie in the brain. According to neuroscientists, artistic masterpieces target the same cerebral regions that trigger strong emotional reactions to intense or traumatic real-life events. With a majority of the world’s art treasures, Italy may be the most perilous place on the planet for art-sensitive souls.
Italians, after eons of exposure, seem to have acquired immunity. However, some still succumb to the aphrodisiac allure of great art. In a survey of two thousand Italians, one in five admitted to having an “erotic experience” in a museum. Why?
“People who like to go to museums feel love,” explained a junior cultural minister, who confessed to yielding to this impulse on at least one occasion. “Love for art and love for eroticism are completely compatible and transferable.”
Italy’s classic artists, who poured passion into their every work, would surely agree. Their creations don’t simply hang on walls or pose on pedestals. They reach through time to ignite a passion so intense that it cannot be denied—or, in some cases, even delayed.