Florence was one of the first cities I got to know in the course of my wandering. I lived there a good long time and in excellent company. Some of my friends were staying at the Pensione Balestri on Piazza Mentana on the Lung’Arno. Best friend of all was Lluís Llimona, younger than me, but as lively, sensitive, and intelligent as he is now.
Llimona introduced me to a strange character: a short, abrupt, olive-skinned Mexican painter with thick, frizzy hair who had fought in the civil war with the renowned Pancho Villa; once the revolution was victorious he was given a grant to travel to Europe to study what they call Arte in Latin America. The Mexican had lingered in bohemian, literary cafés across the continent and had now wound up in Florence by virtue of amorous pressure exerted by an imposing northern lady straight out of German mythology – plump and pink with glowing, rippling flesh like a Rubens. Conversely, he was small, bilious, and swarthy with purple lips and greenish teeth.
Another great friend of ours also stayed in the pensione (although only briefly), Ràfols the architect, who is one of the most inspired, serene men I have ever known. He depended on a meager grant he received – always late – from the Council for Further Study. Despite his extreme poverty, Ràfols never strayed from the routine of his daily life. He went to mass every day, wrote a daily letter to his close friend Enric C. Ricart, and had his personal beggar to whom he never failed to give a set amount day in day out – even in his direst impecunious moments.
I’m convinced Ràfols has always had a personal beggar, but something occurred with his Florentine beggar that became celebrated in the city’s intellectual circles and was so amusing it travelled the world. People still recount the anecdote though it dates back to 1921.
One early evening the architect left the church of Santa Croce and made for the band of beggars who had cornered the church’s front steps, to give the usual alms to his beggar. Ràfols was taken aback; he looked everywhere but the beggar was nowhere to be seen. Worried he might have suffered an upset, he spoke to a woman who belonged to the beggarly band and asked whether she knew what had happened to the absentee, namely, his beggar.
“Il cieco sta bene, taro commendatore …” replied the woman in a rather sarcastic, tipsy tone. “Il cieco sta benissimo, ma é uscito colla sua signora e sone andati al cinematografo.”
I hardly need add that, Llimona and Ràfols, like the Mexican and I, became wiser rather than richer in Florence, if I am candid. Our debates in the various cafés we visited and our endless conversations as we strolled along the prestigious banks of the Arno, were of an abundance and quality in inverse proportion to our meager fare. Our table was always bare, but our ideas and hopes had never flowed so effortlessly, boldly, or beautifully as they did then. We wouldn’t have been at all surprised to read in the newspaper one day that our Mexican painter had been appointed a minister or general in his country, because that man’s eagle eye justified the most optimistic of hypotheses. Nor would it have seemed at all peculiar if Lluís Llimona had made a fortune in commerce or painting, because his gifts as a painter were as evident as his talents as an entrepreneur. Nor that J.F. Ràfols, without shedding the luminous, palpable aura of grace that made him lighter than air, might have finally ended up having not one beggar in his charge but a whole army, for we’ve known greener fruit to ripen. None of that would be odd, but perfectly natural and possible. What would be odd, my beloved distant friends, would be for the scintillating ideas we floated on Florentine nights to resurface, for our ingenuousness to return or the pleasure with which we could stroll for an hour to read a text by Dante or a paragraph from Vasari on a stone house façade, or the enthusiasm that led us to one church after another, every day at any hour, even if we never attended mass. All that has gone never to return, however many years go by.
Ràfols was both the oldest and the tallest in the group. He was eclectic when it came to painting. His inclinations led him to seek out wistful eyes or a cheek able to inspire mystical tenderness and defend him from the morbid, erotic, digestive pomposity of the painters of the Bologna school. At the same time, nevertheless, he spoke of French impressionism and the humility of painters in that school so warmly, he revealed how far he had understood the state of grace which realism can attain – the fascinating beauty of reality.
In matters relating to life and politics the Mexican was an out-and-out revolutionary, but he had an academic taste in art that was fairly haphazard, if reasonably well grounded. He was no devotee of what he called academic prints and thus believed Rafael was cold and unfeeling. On the other hand, he was bowled over by Michelangelo. He liked to see art display the sweat and tautness produced by straining effort, tensed muscles and twisted mouths. He liked large symbolic figures, showy, dramatic foreshortening, and what he called social art. One of his idols was El Greco, not the familiar realist El Greco of the large portraits, but the restrained glow of El Greco suffused with purple incandescence. In any case, that gentleman reckoned that religion (what he called superstition) weighed too heavily in European art. He leant towards a lay, social Michelangelo.
Llimona and I always understood each other, although he is more Gothic and stylized and I’m more realist and plebeian. In Italy we always championed the champagne brut of the art of Umbria and Tuscany. When we arrived in Florence we immediately felt the connection and parallels that existed between our country’s past which peaked spiritually with the Gothic, and Tuscany’s culminating moment. When Barcelona and Florence reached their high point in art, they were two trading states able to give stone an unadorned, incisive elegance. So we were enthralled by the process we noted in the history of Italian painting: the process that Cimabue begins and Rafael d’Urbino concludes. We were fascinated by the initial stage, particularly as represented by the sequence of Cimabue, Giotto, Simone Martini, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Benozzo Gozzoli, Ghirlandaio, and Sandro Botticelli. We set out to recreate in situ, in our turn, the path that leads from the primitives of Umbria, hovering between discreet mystic fervor and the heat of local, feudal passion, to Benozzo Gozzoli’s pink, springtime, gracious youthfulness and Botticelli’s supremely elegant luminous sensuality. We spent hour after unforgettable hour refining our understanding of the landscapes and figures we met in the course of our explorations.
We found the second part of that path, from Botticelli to Rafael, much less interesting. Initially, painting shifts from south to north, from Siena to Florence, to be precise. Then follows an opposite path: moves from north to south, from Florence, via Arezzo, Siena, Orvieto, Perugia, to Rome, where it enjoys its stellar moment, enjoys a radiant solstice in Rafael and, subsequently, goes into ineluctable decline. As painting shifts down the peninsula, it becomes more perfect, but at the same time grows cold and icy. Consider Siena’s position in this to and fro. In Siena the source of Italian art, one sees the ascendant phase, the wonders of the Tuscan primitives, especially Simone Martini, who is simply unforgettable. However, two centuries later, one can also observe the decline in the work of Pinturicchio, housed in the cathedral sacristy, a painter who is colder and stiffer than ice. That doesn’t mean we don’t champion Signorelli from Orvieto, El Perugino from Perugia and Rafael. But in the second part of this process one discerns elements of conscious, elective affinity, elements that must be contrived, because they have lost the fascination and grace of our discoveries on the first part of our explorations. We thus followed the basic itinerary in the history of Italian painting: an itinerary that marches towards perfection and that perfection – lethally – leads to burnout and is killed off in clever formalism. Such seems to be the fate of the works created by the human mind.
We were much less intensely drawn to things after Rafael. There is a significant drop in temperature. Two great branches spread out from Rafael: the schools of Lombardy and Bologna. Our eager, petulant, melancholy youthfulness made it impossible for us to grasp the voluptuous treasures abounding at the solstice of Italian painting. Voluptuousness requires a degree of mature experience. Later, the Venetians – Titian’s realism – seemed to bring us back to authenticity, to what our real tastes and inclinations favored.
When we first set foot in Rome, it was a huge disappointment. Our spirits sagged. We felt removed from genuine life and surrounded by a formal art full of grandiose but indifferent rhetorical exercises that lacked a warm pulse. Everything seemed too solemn, rich, and spectacular. We understood someone had to do what Michelangelo did to make the world complete. However, the baroque, with the ghastly Bernini, gave us a dose of unbearable sweetness – a kind of saturation on sickly pastries and sticky, insoluble saccharine. Youth can be shortsighted and dismissive, but time has changed nothing in this respect: I have never been able to stomach the baroque that I consider to be the essence of all that is superfluous and clichéd, pretentious, over-blown and over-stretched. Its fake passion exasperates me. Its theatricality exhausts me. Its emptiness depresses me. Its cardboard verismo provokes hilarity and sarcasm. The baroque is the only form of artistic exploration that is indifferent to human feeling. If the baroque hadn’t existed, Europe would be more substantial, more serious; its spirit would be lighter. The baroque was a wrong turning that helped to distort and mystify the svelte, genuine grace of Mediterranean humanity.
Rome, that is, the superficial but oppressive Rome that hits you in a first impression, panicked us. We became immensely nostalgic for Florence. Of course, there was much to see in Rome, but where would we find Florence’s crystalline purity? When you are slightly familiar with Florence, that urban mass is what the spirit will always long for. So our first stay in Rome was short-lived: we fled to Naples, not for any intrinsically Neapolitan reason, but with the Greek museum in Naples in mind. We were fortunate: when you are familiar with Verrochio and Donatello, the Greeks and Greek sculpture dazzle most. Freed from the intolerable burden of Rome’s baroque, we felt a delicious lightness of being in the Greek rooms in the Naples museum – though the wind in southern Italy creates an oppressive, obsessive melancholy with a pathetic pornographic flavor.
In the course of our first trip to Italy, the focus of which was Florence, we thus tried to concentrate on the primitives in Umbria and the school of Tuscany. We were especially interested in the artists we called the most western, the least troubled by the influence of the Etruscans, to follow Ruskin’s terminology in this regard. Llimona was very fond of Ruskin’s essays on Italy. Ràfol was too. I wasn’t so keen. I found him too much of an aesthete, too prone to explain things by their exterior, always trying to emphasize intentions that only existed in the subjective mind of the observer and that might be brilliant but were invented rather than based on reality. Such things deserve an explanation – if I could only find one.
We brought the usual mental baggage to Italy: I mean we had digested the limited number of ideas written in the European languages used to popularize the country. The bibliography on Italy in French, English, and German is quite remarkable.
The French have never felt been at all drawn to what they called in blanket fashion the Tuscan school. President de Brosses describes it as dry, worn out, and leathery, and all his sentiments are drawn towards the ample bosoms and hips of the Bologna school. Fair enough, there’s no shortage of them! Stendhal follows faithfully in the footsteps of the distinguished magistrate. Stendhal scorned “the modern burghers of Florence” and regretted that Florentines lacked passion. “They believe,” he wrote, “that passion is a failing.” They have always had the same criteria in the Villa Medicis in Rome: painting begins with Raphael. Before Raphael, painting is archaeological, naturally, not excluding the existence of sporadic works, like the Uccellos and Ghirlandaios in the Louvre!
The English were never so radical. The English are never as narrow-minded and dogmatic as the French. They are freer and more open, more intuitive and broad-minded. The rationalist French often rub against real facts that can’t be dodged and have to reach slippery, tacky compromises.
Curiously enough, however, the painters of the Tuscan school that English travelers have most helped to popularize were precisely those that appealed least to us. The Etruscan element that Ruskin observed in their painting, about which he writes at length in his book Mornings in Florence, an element we considered perhaps rather too subjectively as some scholar’s antiquarian afterthought, distanced us rather from Fra Filippo Lippi the son of Fra Filippino, also a remarkable artist, and from part of the work of Ghirlandaio and Sandro Botticelli. In a way, Botticelli is the high point in this painting tradition, just as Raphael is both the general conclusion and beginning of a fatal decline.
When we noted an exaggerated penchant for decorative detail, for the coldly rhetorical, for overwrought arabesques, products of an effort of will rather than spontaneous wit, we imagined an oriental influence must be present. Oriental divans didn’t stop us from sleeping, and we weren’t of the opinion that Goethe’s poems written in that spirit had increased in charm. We liked them, but preferred the local beds, even though they were rather hard and perhaps too high. Goethe – if I’m allowed this parenthesis – only stayed in Florence for one night on his two-year tour of Italy. A fact one finds impossible to explain today. Botticelli has something that evokes the English liking for decoration, a liking that seems to refer back constantly to Botticelli.
“Nevertheless,” we asked ourselves, “does a mythological-literary mentality necessarily help enrich an artistic tradition?” We thought not, despite the book by Bernard Berenson, who was living at the time on the outskirts of Florence and was then considered to be the most intelligent connoisseur, the high priest of these shifts in ancient Italian painting. Berenson was mentioned in intellectual circles in Florence as a man with a legendary halo. He had, I suspect, more defenders than detractors and was seen as a man who had re-valued Italian art that nationalists opposed to the increasingly decisive influence of Paris in such crucial matters. Berenson had introduced the notion of “tactile values” into the history of art – values that stimulate the imagination and encourage it to feel the volume of objects, to weigh them up and measure distances. Berenson was a contemporary of pragmatists Bergson and William James, who asserted that the discovery of nature is a practical operation performed by our minds. The artist reproduces the external world by giving shape to forms that are above all tactile values and which ideate imaginary sensations. In addition to these tactile values, movement is the essential element in a work of art. However, movement within a work of art doesn’t entail the reproduction of the movement of an object from one place to another, but the energy giving life to an arabesque, to the drawing of every detail and the whole, the overall dynamic; in a word, the creation of a style. One should add proportion, spatial composition, and spiritual meaning to these impulses within a work.
This is how Berenson provisionally separates the decorative from what he calls the illustrative. The decorative includes all of those first elements. Its purpose is not to represent but to present, it is indifferent to content, it strives to eliminate what is ugly, grotesque, incongruous, and distorting … On the other hand, the illustrative is representation. “As independent and autonomous art, illustration expresses in terms of a visual nature, the aspirations, ecstasies, dreams from the heart, that become poetry if one translates them into musical words, if they are expressed in a melody of rhythmic sounds.” This “illustration” shouldn’t be confused with literary explanations or the artist. The art historian distrusts all commentaries as the artist’s intentions. The artist, as a creator, thinks only of his craft, of procedures and proportions.
A work of art is important inasmuch as it contains the decorative and the illustrative in parallel. Moreover, it must continue a spiritual meaning; otherwise, a work of art is a mere object. A decorator, in any case, can never outrival the illustrator. There exists a hierarchy of genres. It is that very spiritual meaning that gives a work of art its greatness allowing it to be released from matter and transformed into an exaltation of life.
In reality, decoration and illustration are words the historian uses to explain himself. That is, they are critical fictions. Form and color are inseparable, but very few are able to conceive of this unity. The public is mostly interested in the anecdotal, or else form, and form as such, has fewer admirers and generally leaves people cold. Total art is humanist art, the one that nurtures our every faculty.
These ideas of Bernard Berenson were being debated in intellectual circles in Florence in that year of 1921. My impression is that they influenced the so-called avant-garde art of the moment – with the exception, of course, of Marinetti and the futurists who only thought of taking Paris by storm and acted like a kind of demented, lunatic French mob. Berenson’s analysis had an undeniable impact on serious avant-garde artists like Chirico and Soffici and helped these artists to remain within a primitive, vulgar volumetric structuralism that was, in any case, incompatible with the unavoidable, deliquescent sirens of French art.
I also read Berenson’s books at the time, but as I was very slow on the uptake in my youthful years – always supposing other factors didn’t intervene – I didn’t understand a word. My reading of Berenson perhaps even deepened my state of confusion. Berenson’s lexis was so new and grating – decorators, illustrators … – that it was hard to digest. This short summary of the ideas of this historian is one I have made now; it would have been beyond me at the time. The truth is we never probed beneath the surface of such speculations, despite the fascination existing in the general milieu in Florence for a legendary figure, involved in the biggest deals of the time in terms of old works of art. The Italian art market was still focused on the great art collections owned by multi-millionaires in the United States. These deals were orchestrated by an extraordinary Englishman, the biggest contemporary art dealer, ennobled by MacDonald as Lord Duveen. Berenson was the undoubted connoisseur.
When all was said and done, we stayed faithful to our painters, no doubt as a result of some mysterious, longstanding affection. We stayed with those we considered to be the emblematic painters of the Tuscan school: Paolo Uccello and Masaccio, Piero della Francesca and Benozzo Gozzoli.
Llimona and I always professed undying admiration for the schools of Umbria and Florence. Cimabue, Giotto, and Simone Martini are the grandfathers of European painting. In the course of this last millennium Uccello is the continent’s first painter to paint movement. Massaccio and Piero della Francesca are two fierce, direct, unmediated, gory realists. Whether in San Gimignano or the Palazzo Ricardo, in Florence, Gozzoli is a spring without literary pretensions, a delightful, fresh, free breeze. When we thoughtfully argued these preferences, people were shocked. The Mexican had fits of uncontrollable anger. We tried to understand what we felt was positive and negative in the work of these painters.
“I sometimes get the impression, especially with Masaccio and Uccello, that they were men who suffered from stomach ulcers,” I’d say to Llimona. “They are tetchy. They scowl and aren’t averse to violence.”
“That’s how they are they, what can we can do about that?” replied my friend. “What’s important is that they are painters who aren’t devious; their work, in terms of their era, is entirely genuine. Vasari describes them as being studious, self-absorbed, melancholy, and misanthropic.”
Each age has its sensibility, and we believed we were personally engaging with the pictorial process I have tried to describe. The problems experienced by those remote individuals were perhaps ours too. What Stendhal called le beau idéal has little to offer the sensibility of our era. We would feel very happy if we succeeded in capturing the fleeting pulse of the reality of things. Eugeni d’Ors came up with one of the sharpest insights into Pau Picasso when he said that the usual – not Cubist – Picasso, is the last great Italian painter with an Italian perspective in the history of painting. One had to be bold to suggest such an insight in our day and age – I mean ever since Paris has become the center for artistic activity. It is a view that is absolutely right, perfectly judged.
It is quite mistaken to believe, as is often affirmed in so many artistic and literary circles that Italian painting is cold, dead, and academic. Calm down! Take it easy! The worst error by far is to visit this peninsula with preconceived ideas, with other people’s ideas, and not have sufficient strength of mind to cast them to the wind. One must have the strength of will to jettison at the frontier that burden of generally – and sardonically – adverse opinions, usually skillfully expressed to disguise the fact, and released from their burden, decide to see things as they are. Every autumn a host of thinkers and writers visit this country that aspire to have the last word on a world that is certainly small – small in terms of travel nowadays – but one that is incredibly vast and unfathomable as a concentration of the mind and the spirit. Italy is the European country with the least geography and the most spirit. That’s why even the greatest geniuses have been unable to embrace it and why I would advise everyone to stop reading those rash, pretentious books that Italy inspires, leave them for later, once you have had time to develop a direct, personal vision. Don’t drag clichés and prejudices in your wake when you come to Italy. This is useful advice. The country is so hugely diverse and so rich in surprises that no cliché can be applied generally. On arriving, in Genoa or any other town, buy a Vitruvius for ancient monuments and a Vasari for the painters and sculptors of the long process that was the Renaissance. Throw away the pamphlets that only distort your vision – however handy or abstruse they may be. Set out to see things firsthand, be curious: that’s the way to travel. With that light impedimenta and the information provided by city maps, a journey to Italy can be incalculably rewarding. What other country can you visit that offers the wonders that Italy possesses?
I didn’t live in the Pensione Balestri, but in the evening I’d go and look up my friends. I’d arrive when they’d just finished supper. The windows of the cold, rather dowdy dining room were open. It was summer and you could feel the delectably languid Florentine night beyond. The dining room was oppressive. We quickly went out. If Llimona said by way of farewell as we crossed the threshold, “Buona sera, banditi!” you knew dinner had been derisorily meager. We walked across the square and headed towards the Lung’Arno. The headquarters of Florence’s Fascio di Combatimento was in a single-storey house opposite the pensione. Shenanigans there were endless night and day. Black-shirted toughs entered the house through the front door carrying pistols, rifles, or iron bars. The fascists called these bars manganelli, and we saw so many we finally became used to them. The Mexican was the only one who couldn’t stand them. A simple, passionate man, he bared his teeth when he saw a fascist, snarled like a rabid dog and flashed his eyes. His reactions were so visible that, if he hadn’t had such an exotic face and figure, he might have had a bad time, because castor-oil purges and beatings were handed out with remarkable facility. When the fascist – or fascists – had gone the Mexican spat out a little gob of spit, and muttered nervously, “What this place needs is a Don Pancho, compadre!”
I kept telling Llimona he should find a quieter place to live, because there was always such a row in that square, such a hustle and bustle, with a constant flurry of groups that came together and then broke up because they couldn’t pack into the headquarters; it was the place for so many conglomerations of city and country folk and so many speeches and adunates, so much singing and military music, that existence there could hardly have been pleasant. The place had seen fierce fighting and shoot-outs; the most punitive expeditions in Tuscany had been organized there; the most incendiary, mendacious harangues had been delivered there, and, if that wasn’t enough, the square acted as a permanent base for the wind section of the Florentine Fascio to rehearse. I imagined that whole political hue-and-cry and lunatic fanaticism was enough to make you want to eat your spaghetti elsewhere, but Llimona would have none of it. As an experienced hunter with sturdy, supple legs he was delighted by the noise of gunfire. My thoughts always pursued the same agenda: “Andiamo a pigliare un caffè …!” Llimona would sulk, striding along the Lung’ Arno pavement.
The Arno is a clean, beautiful river that wends elegantly and languidly through Florence. You can see the pink sand under the two feet of water the river carries in summer: its charming waters flow lethargically. At that time on a summer’s night, the luminous dark blue sky seemed to glitter and swarm on the slowly moving stream. Reflections from the city’s lights streaked the water with silver. A delicious light breeze seemed to pursue the river’s fleeting enchantments, barely ruffling the luminous flow. The banks of the Arno are not a place where townspeople like to go. They are mostly empty, though you sometimes find a loving couple. I’ve spent many hours leaning on the parapet, my mind a blank, devoid of desires or memories, gazing into its waters.
We would walk towards the Ponte Vecchio and upon reaching the angle made by the bridge and the right bank we surveyed the invisible sea and stood in the same spot where Dante first saw Beatrice. It is an important place. The terzina from the Commedia that recalls the moment is inscribed on marble on the house now occupying that corner. It is the terzina that begins:
Sopra candido vel, cinto d’oliva
Donna m’apparve …
Vestita di color di fiamma viva.
It was quite late when we reached the bridge, but we’d always find a beggar on the steps leading up – a sight typical of the city at that time. He was a skinny old man who held himself stiff and silent, thought to be blind by many, while others affirmed he could see. The difficulty one had in Italy deciding whether blind beggars could see or not was always a dilemma that was too much for me, to the point that I always decided it was best to imagine it was nonexistent. After all, everyone has the right to make the best possible use of their eyes. A square of cardboard hung on a string over the beggar’s chest. It carried a very amusing inscription, the source of which was the following:
One day a lady walked passed the poor man and, as naturally as could be, gave him alms of two hundred lire. That was a fabulous amount of money at the time, and the shopkeepers in the small shops by the bridge decided only an American woman could afford to give away such an astonishing sum. Consequently, the poor man had a piece of card made to hang from his neck, where the scene of the elegant lady giving him the notes was painted. The drawing had been childishly colored and was very similar to scenes beggars draw on the pavement to please their customers in the more pleasant parts of London. There was an inscription under the scene that ran: “On December 10 1921, an American lady gave this poor little fellow – a questo poverello – alms of 200 lire. Tourists, ladies, gentlemen! Imitate that American lady’s gesture! Imitate her and you will be deemed worthy of being in the city of the great men of the Renaissance!”
If Ràfols the architect had been with us, he’d have been quick to give him alms. He’d gone to live in Fiesole to add a rustic, Franciscan touch to his general compassion, but occasionally came down to Florence and met up with us. It was amazing to see him acting charitably. He went to it with admirable conviction and energy. In this particular case, I don’t think he did so because he wanted to be deemed worthy of the city of the great men of the Renaissance. Not at all. The architect found satisfaction of a higher, ethereal, rarified order, in worldly detachment. If it had been in his power, he’d have given alms to everyone, including the rich and powerful.
On the corner of the Ponte Vecchio, we’d debate which café to head for. Llimona and I argued for a café that wasn’t noisy or particularly pretentious, that allowed you to talk in peace. At that time you could say coffee was higher quality in the whole of Italy, a wondrous miracle of mechanical distillation. The espresso-raccomandato coffee-making machines had triumphed, and the peninsula offered the best coffee on the continent. When I think back, I become gloomily nostalgic. However, the Mexican didn’t agree. His passage through central Europe had accustomed him to cafés with music, to establishments that had at least a quartet, if not a quintet. The beverage on offer was what least interested him – what he really wanted was culture, to grasp every opportunity to deepen his knowledge of culture; as a result, when it was time to drink coffee, he needed to be surrounded by what Latin Americans call Arte. Not a single moment could be allowed to pass when he wasn’t surrounded by Arte. It was his obsession, his angst. When we pointed out that the café ensembles playing in Florence were nothing out of the ordinary, he’d look at us with the woeful, imploring eyes of a beaten dog. He disarmed us. And the day he disarmed us most quickly was the day when he told us about an especially fraught quintet, an ensemble that included a harpist whose divine touch was so velvety she alone redeemed the fearful stutters and ignorance of her fellow players.
It would have been pleasant and easy from where we were to walk to the Palazzo Pitti and spend a couple of hours among the wonderful cypresses in the gardens of the Boboli palace. We only had to cross the Arno. The royal house of Italy had just given the gardens and palace to the city of Florence, and people were flocking there. On the other hand, it was hot. Il caldo di Firenze is humid and sticky and famed throughout Italy for being oppressive. If one place promised a degree of relief it was that concentration of plants and ample grassy slopes. Nevertheless the Mexican’s devilish passion for art, that we didn’t dare oppose, kept us far from such elegant nighttime delights.
So we turned up the Via di Porta Santa Maria, with its intense medieval resonances, walked past the Baptisteri, Campanile, and Santa Maria dei Fiori, namely the city cathedral, crowned by Brunelleschi’s dome, and headed towards the Palazzo Ricardo, where we spent many an hour gazing at the cavalcade of Lorenzo the Magnificent painted by Benozzo Gozzoli. Then we entered the Via Cavour, where there was the large café enhanced by the quintet that so fascinated the Mexican. It was a roomy establishment, dominated by an extensive terrace and a stage where four pale young men and a slightly hunch-backed young harpist trotted out their music. We could hear the distant scraping of strings in the oppressive heat on the street at that time of night when it was deserted.
The streets in the center of Florence are quite narrow – the widest are the size of Barcelona’s Carrer de Ferran. The general tone of the city is very severe unlike other Italian cities that seem easier going and more affable. There are few arches, porticoes, or columns. The dark, blackened walls of the huge old palaces look like the walls of a fortress. The stone is dense, of an astonishing volume and quality. Possibly no other city in Europe has monuments with such dramatic lines or explicit and dynamic presence as Florence. The city center is severe yet passionate, and enjoys a tension the centuries haven’t been able to tame. It is the place in Italy where longings still reach the highest temperatures.
“¡Vaya trozo de Mendelssohn!” exclaimed the Mexican, stirring his spoon in the coffee Ferruccio had just brought us, smirking gleefully under his nose. Ràfols looked at Llimona, Llimona looked at me, and I looked at Ràfols. It was a piece by Liszt that was one of the best known and hackneyed in his repertoire. Our friend never moved beyond the vaguest approximations in music, and always got it wrong. When they played Schubert, he thought he was listening to Schumann.
“¡Qué adorable y tierno es Schumann!” he’d remark softly, no doubt wanting to ensure we knew that a soldier who’d fought with wild Pancho Villa could be really sensitive once enlightened and nurtured by culture and art. But his errors eventually irritated, because they were so systematic. His mind was full of nonsense, musically speaking.
The café had an international clientele: a tourism that was sensitive rather than moneyed, with easy-going, liberal habits – the usual clientele one finds in literary cafés on the continent, people who tend to look like slightly odd fish. There were stiff, starchy, hard-faced English ladies in mauve dresses who looked like swordfish and Germans who were like scorpion fish. There was the occasional greasy hirsute fellow, who was short-sighted, apparently learned, and urbane. The great man in the café was Giovanni Papini, the most influential mind in Italy at the time. He always came with a retinue of other great young men – fatally destined, that is, to human greatness as soon as they were taller and less callow. Papini greeted everybody, shook hands, accompanied by a series of absolutely welcoming smiles. As he’d been anti-Austrian and anti-German during the war, the Germans adored him and the Walkyries’ eyes swallowed him whole. He seemed delighted by the feelings he aroused. In such a milieu, his extraordinary features seemed quite normal: extremely short-sighted, with lenses as thick as bottle bottoms, a prominent, protruding syphilis-inherited forehead, frizzy, wispy hair, a mouth that was both cynical and childish, an unbuttoned shirt, creased jacket, tight-lipped and edgy, he had all that was required to be à la page in that world of shipwrecked souls. He was coming to the end of his long poverty-stricken period and was really beginning to make his mark. He preened most when people told him he was the St George who had killed the dragon. The dragon was Benedetto Croce, the philosopher (a Hegelian), senator, and historian who had remained neutral in the war. I suspect, however, the dragon was too tough-skinned for that goldfish bowl, for St George to have speared him.
The music was still scraping away.
“¡Qué delicado minueto de Mozart!” the Mexican suddenly proclaimed. Ràfols looked at Llimona, Llimona looked at me, and I looked at Ràfols. It was a piece by Vivaldi that was extremely popular in Italy. The architect managed a sadly pleasant smile. The milieu wasn’t right for him. He finished his dish of pink ice cream and bid farewell, on the excuse that the last train to Fiesole was about to depart.
When the clientele began to thin out, Ferruccio came over to our table. He was an old waiter from the coffeepot era, who wearily dragged his enormous, battered shoes. He had a huge freckle on one cheek, with a beauty spot that hung from his gray hairs. He was a great fan of Florence – though he was born in Lucca – and a great fan of tourism, because, in his view, an Italy without tourism would be a camposanto. The species of tourist he preferred were artists. Ferruccio had rushed to take up the tessera of the Fascio to stop tourism being disrupted. The towns that reacted most favorably to fascism were those most directly dependent on tourism, Florence, Arezzo, Sierra, Assisi, and Perugia. They understood that tourists don’t want noise, that trams, in their kind of town, had to run on time and that reading guidebooks is incompatible with shoot-outs on street corners. Ferruccio had grasped that fascism was pro-tourist, and carried card number 2675 of the fascio. All hoteliers and barbers, guides, sacristans, tram drivers, civil servants, clerks, and courtesans in Florence thought the same. What would the city be like without tourism? A camposanto!
From the point of view of material self-interest, the old waiter was a typical representative of the most genuine Florentine spirit. He always knew the right thing to do and to think. He was obsequious towards visitors, especially if they weren’t Italian, he respected all ideas and beliefs, the more unintelligible he found a language the more he respected it. His only ambition was to be in agreement with Signor Paolo, who was the gentleman behind the counter. “If things go well for Sr Paolo,” he’d say, “I’ll be fine too.” Sr Paolo wanted what was best for tourists even though his ice cream contained too much saccharine; consequently, he was a man worthy of respect.
“Because,” he would wonder in our presence, “what use then would be the Duomo, the Campanile, the Battistero, the Palazzo Vecchio, or the Death of Fra Girolamo? (He meant Savonarola.) What would be the point of our big museums, of Ghirlandaio and Botticelli and the marvelous afreschi if no tourists ever came? We would starve to death amidst so much beauty, and the whole Renaissance wouldn’t give us the price of a cup of coffee.” Passion had to be banned from the land, and it was vital to imitate the Swiss – gli svizzeri – who are the people who treat tourists as they should be treated. No doubt about it: Ferruccio epitomized the spirit of Florence.
The waiter had thought profoundly about tourism, and the conclusions he’d drawn had led him to admire artists boundlessly. Ferrucchio was a man of statistics and down-to-earth realities. According to him, the painter who brought most profit to Florence and the state was Sandro Botticelli.
“Does Ghirlandaio bring it in?” I asked him.
“The Ghirlandaio in the Hospital of the Innocents brought in four hundred thousand lire to the nation in entrance money last year. We can know that for sure, because there’s nothing else to see at the Innocents.”
“What about Masaccio?”
“Masaccio is a painter who generates seasonal income. When the French come in spring and the autumn, he flourishes. At other times, he dips. Botticelli doesn’t oscillate so much because the English come by all the time.”
“Signor Ferruccio, be straight with me: who do you think brings more to the state coffers: the Renaissance or the Montecatini Company?”
“The Renaissance, s’immagini!” the waiter replied, astonishingly quickly.
At twelve the quintet stopped scraping. The Mexican seemed saddened and deflated, once their outpourings were at an end. He ordered his last coffee and shot of grappa.
We said goodbye to Ferruccio till the next day and started walking. By that time, the streets were deserted and ill-lit. Some dark, severe façades, their windows fronted by huge iron-barred grilles, lent our footsteps a funereal echo. The oppressive air lightened under the lively impact of the stone. The hoofs of a horse pulling a carriage rang out as it moved over the cobblestones into the distance. We walked along the Via dei Calzaiuoli, a commercial street, which, for that reason, appeared less severe than others; we reached the Piazza de la Signoria, where we went our different ways by the Loggia dei Lanzi in front of Donatello’s Judith. I walked through a labyrinth of narrow streets to reach the bedroom I was renting in a big house in Borgo degli Apostoli.
In Florence I tended to link the city with the slenderest forms in life and art. That’s why in my own private mythology I consider Donatello to be the quintessence of the Florentine spirit; in the terrain of writing, of style, I find Niccolò Machiavelli to be a fine representative of someone with the airiest, lightest language.
In that cool, ill-lit ramshackle house in Borgo degli Apostoli I read Machiavelli a lot. The more I read, the more he fascinated me as a writer and the less I felt drawn to the man who grasped that magnificent goose quill.
I found the following among my jottings from the year. It schematically outlines my reading and thoughts that lean towards childish naïveté rather than wisdom.
“It can help to place Machiavelli,” I comment, “if one always bears in mind that he was neither Ghibelline, Petrarch Guelph, or Boccaccio, and that all Leonardo is summed up in that declaration that rings so true: Io servo chi mi paga. The words “Guelph” and “Ghibelline” shouldn’t be interpreted in a simplistic, primary way, because they are hugely complex words when projected onto the politics of the time. On the Ghibelline side there is respect for Empire, the aristocracy in their castles, and the plebs – the populino. On the Guelph side stands the bourgeoisie, submission to the Church, and a longing for peace and quiet. When one scrutinizes this struggle, one acknowledges yet again how even the greatest of men are mere puppets driven by political passions that are always tied to individual self-interest. When glossing, for example, Dante’s line about “l’avara povertà dei catalani,” one shouldn’t forget that the poet supported the most fanatical wing of the Ghibellines and that the Catalan rulers in Sicily were stalwart self-confessed Guelphs. It is also extremely helpful to place Machiavelli against the background of contemporary politics and see him against the horizon of the savage internecine struggles that constituted Italian life in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: wars between factions of the citizenry and wars between cities, wars between cities and castles, Ghibellines and Guelphs, wars between tyrants, wars between the chiefs of different cities, of the condottieri … When Machiavelli appears, a contemporary of Signor Ludovico (in Ariosto), in the fifteenth century, passions seemed to have calmed down slightly. The formula of the principalities had been agreed. Violence, for the most part, had waned. Brute strength was no longer worthwhile. The courtier puts in an appearance, the nauseating courtier described by Castiglione.
“Macchiavelli is fully a courtier. However, there are different kinds of courtiers. The rich courtier knows when to bow, rides on horseback, is discreet, self-effacing, and simply aspires to occupy a place in society. The poor courtier, if he wants to advance himself, must have ideas, that is: he must be able to find suggestions to furnish the imagination, intellect, and feelings of the prince. Macchiavelli puts himself forward. Passionate by temperament, in amoral times – three centuries without morality in public life – he thinks of himself as a politician. He offers his services. He is no jester. He is a serious fellow – a man who worries away. It is completely wrong to minimize the role of jesters in politics. Jesters have been highly influential in the history of Europe. Jesting is one of the most practical instruments for wielding influence, the flattery of the man who entertains the man in power. Machiavelli wasn’t in their ranks. He was a poor, sharp-witted courtier, a powerful, elegant writer, ready to furnish the mind of his prince. He hired out his services to their Lordships, like a second-rate secretary.
“In order to furnish the mind of his prince, Machiavelli does what poor courtiers have always done, since the wealthy have no need ever to go beyond allegory: he describes with cold incisiveness, passionately, as if writing detective fiction, what his eyes see in the life of his times. A superficial summing up of Machiavelli: life and history are stripped of any transcendent meaning; they are but a struggle between forms, a struggle that is always, necessarily, won by the strongest. The world has no purpose or endpoint. Men have been the same in every era. The march of humanity through history is mainly expressed in the ebbs and eddies around the struggle for power, that many desire and few attain – the wiliest and the strongest. Man is simply a combination of passions and self-interest and the government of State is government over individual passions and interests. Family, Municipality, Principality, and State are forms emptied of content within which individuals give rein to their aggressive drives. Ancient history (the Discourses on Livy) is exactly the same as modern history, and one only has to recreate its victories and eliminate its failures to be right about everything and wield might and right over everyone. The Prince, the coda to his political science, is a selection of maxims to enable one to control all eventualities and fulfill all one’s aims, by manipulating, duping, subjecting, and killing individuals. He examines the facts by isolating them in a vacuum and as the product of man’s wiles or ineptitude. Morality doesn’t exist. It is a fantasy dreamed up by sensitive souls. The people do not believe, the prince thinks for everyone when he thinks on his own behalf. Government is the relationship between one lucid, egotistical consciousness and a universal lack of consciousness.
“What does Machiavelli’s conception of the world mean? It is a very complex issue. Is it a description of the world as it is, forged by the diktat of a steely observer’s eye, incisive and genuine for the same reasons that we now consider Dostoyevsky’s psychological observation to be infinitely more real and genuine than anything produced in this respect by previous literature? If that’s how things are, as they seem to be, something that is hardly in dispute in terms of the Italy of his time, what was he trying to do when he wrote his books? Did he do it to rid history and psychology of all the falsehoods, infantile nonsense, and conventional thinking scribes had poured into them over so many centuries? To replace the previous weight of paper fictions with a description of the free play of human passions, thus earning fame and glory time could never erase? Or perhaps in the name of patriotic duty was he trying to eliminate all futile, dangerous and impractical fantasies from the minds of princes? These questions have been answered, though very diversely. According to Burckhardt, apart from being a great writer, something nobody denies, Machiavelli was a discreet, sharp-witted adviser, and his conception of history is plausible. Conversely, Alfredo Oriani, in the first volume of his Political Struggle in Italy, reckons he is a complete idiot.
“Because it is a curious fact that Machiavelli, who established himself as the maestro of the cynic in politics, was one of the most gullible men of his age. He never understood, foresaw, or achieved any positive outcomes. His public life was a succession of disappointments and disasters. He always wanted to give the orders, and rarely managed to be obeyed by anyone. He always backed the wrong horse – I mean prince. He supported Soderini’s Republic, just before the Medicis were restored to power. He put himself forward as a strategist, worked out a battle plan and an army built along his lines was decisively destroyed in Prato. He advised the legate of Leo X to establish the Republic in Florence while simultaneously dedicating The Prince to Julian of Medicis in order to equip him as a despot. He joined Boscoli’s conspiracy and then abandoned him, thus losing all dignity and decency. Depressed by this catastrophe he crawled before the Medicis like the lowest of servants. He put all his hatred into his sardonic struggle against religion and the clergy. He never understood the spirit of religion or its latent or real strength. He appreciated Savonarola’s lunacy but not his reforms. Sent to Germany he didn’t see the reformation – the Reformation! – that was being born before his eyes. He didn’t see the beginning of Italy’s decline in the huge error made by Ludovico il Moro with the subsequent crossing of the Alps by Charles VIII and Louis XII of France. His ideas about Julius II, Venice, the League of Cambray make no sense. He died a lonely man, cursed by everyone and a mystery to himself.
“His Letters are total confirmation of his hopelessness as a man of government. Machiavelli’s politics consisted purely and simply in being anti-Machiavellian. Unless one interprets Machiavelli as a poor, ambitious courtier, his figure is a complete mystery.
“Oh! Even so, the secretary’s goose quill ought to figure on Florence’s coat-of-arms!”
One day Llimona and I were roaming in the vicinity of Santa Maria Novella, very near the central station, when we saw a an old man we thought was Auguste Renoir sitting on the terrace of a small bar in the area. Strangely enough, it was really him. Many years have passed since – so many that when I try to recall the day precisely I see only a blur in a murky haze. Nevertheless it’s a fact that this slight, rather tired, little old man with a yellowing beard, exhausted, bloodshot eyes, and a straw boater was Renoir, the great Impressionist painter.
He’d arrived in Florence only a few days before. He’d fetched up in a cheap inn. He could have afforded something much better because his life of poverty was long past, but the painter maintained his modest habits from those lean times. He’s now come to Italy but he’s no ordinary tourist. A tourist inevitably likes whatever the guidebook recommends. That is: he must like everything. He must be so curious that finally he feels curious about nothing. It’s a path that leads nowhere. When one is lucky enough to have been born with a degree of passion, one must play a card, one must choose a path. Select! That’s the lesson of Florence.
Renoir is staying in Florence. I give him the occasional glance. He looks totally insignificant. He is the typical vine-grower from Languedoc: a rather short, thin, fairish, gray-haired, blue-eyed, pink-skinned fellow with the tired, lethargic ways of an old countryman. He wears a thick shirt and pale blue tie that’s carelessly knotted. He arrived in Florence late that evening at the end of the long summer twilight. He eats a snack and can’t resist the temptation. Who can resist the temptation of Florence?
Years ago, in the era of gas lamps and leg-of-mutton sleeves, an acquaintance of ours arrived in Florence from Paris: Don Santiago Russinyol. A friend of his walked by his side: Zuloaga. Like Renoir, these two painters arrived in Florence at dusk. But they too were unable to resist the temptation; after dinner, they penetrated the totally unknown labyrinth of the city. It was a dark, murky night, and lighting must have been deficient. What could they see? As soon as Russinyol returned to his tavern in the early hours, he nevertheless wrote a long, lyrical hymn of praise to Florence. He described a Florence by night you can read in one of his first books. Which Florence does Russinyol refer to in this piece? The one he couldn’t see because it was submerged in the shadows of night or the one that had been floating in his mind for some time? It doesn’t matter. Illusion is all in life. We could say it is almost everything. A dream is as objective a reality as the movement of a pendulum.
Renoir also penetrates the labyrinth of Florence’s streets. He wanders along the pavements, breathes in the air, and peers at the blotches of light the gas lamps project on the walls. He walks at random, with nowhere in particular in mind. Suddenly he is in front of Santa Maria Novella. From the pavement opposite – the famous church is situated in one of the most central areas – he gazes at the vaguely visible façade of that slender building. The façade is covered in black and white marble dice that crisscross geometrically. Renoir feels a strange sensation, as if he isn’t breathing enough air. Initially he feels he is choking. He continues walking along the streets. The black and white marble blocks of Santa Maria become a kind of obsession. He doesn’t dare formulate an opinion. He feels that first choking sensation intensify. But tomorrow is another day. He goes back to his hotel and, worn out, goes to bed.
Early the next morning he is in front of the Galleria degli Uffizi, on the Piazza della Signoria. The museum opens after a while. Renoir is a morning man, a lover of morning light and fresh air. He is the first tourist to go into the museum that day. He doesn’t seem to be carrying any book or paper. But he’s ready to take long, leisurely looks. He scrutinizes the paintings hanging on the wall with the calm gaze of a vine-grower. He scrutinizes them one by one: he looks at them from close-up, from afar, from the right and the left. And walks through several rooms like that. With unexpected physical staying power – museums are tiring, create an unpleasant emptiness in the stomach and intolerable exhaustion – he scrutinizes the canvasses, the tables, the afreschi, as if he’d lost all notion of time. A guard informs him that they must shut for the colazione. It’s time for lunch. Everyone else has left the museum. Renoir is the last out, seems edgy and thoughtful. In the afternoon, he’s the first to go into the Uffizi. He’s eaten a quick plate of spaghetti in a nearby trattoria, drunk a coffee standing up and appeared opposite the entrance before opening time. He does exactly the same the following day, morning and afternoon. However, on that genuinely tragic day you notice he doesn’t linger long looking microscopically at the paintings, as on the previous day. He stops in front of a few paintings and looks more attentively. With others he takes a quick glance and walks on. Some produce a sense of revulsion and he turns his back with a flourish he tries to conceal, though it is obvious enough. By late afternoon on that second day, he’s had enough. He seems weary and on edge. Back in his hotel, he consults the train timetable, and asks for the bill. And starts packing his case.
That was when we bumped into him staring at a cup of coffee in that small bar in the vicinity of the Central Station. What ever happened? He himself will tell us later.
“My patience had run out,” he said. “My head kept colliding everywhere, even my elbows clashed with the style. What cold, icy, premeditated painting …! Those crisscross blocks of black and white marble made me dizzy. I was short of air, was choking. While I was in Florence, I felt I was walking over a chessboard, that I was living in a cage, that they’d shut me inside a prison cell. I can’t find the words to describe how I suffered in the Uffizi … I simply fled from Florence.”
Well, it seems a perfectly understandable position: it is a clear, honest position. One must choose in life. Renoir had chosen a path. As I see it, his choice is highly valuable. Degas would say: “They shoot us down and then turn our pockets out to see if they can find anything else.” Renoir felt choked by all the stasis and fled immediately. Others say they feel choked in a similar way but stay on and turn out their pockets. Renoir follows in the tradition of the great realist painters: Vermeer, Velázquez, and Titian. It is a difficult tradition precisely because it seems so free and energetic – in any case, it is the greatest freedom to which an artist can aspire.