Thoughts on Florence, October 2013
These will be scattered and casual thoughts, at best, since so many know Florence so well.
· Florentine women know how to use shawls, and it’s a bit of a mystery to me. A poncho I understand; you put it over your head and it forms a tent. But a shawl, a big square of fabric? Somehow it seems to get wrapped or to fall so as to reach all the spots, quite distant from each other, that may be exposed to cold: neck, lower arms and wrists, midriff. It doesn’t seem to get tied, so how does it stay on, especially when it’s worn by a woman on bicycle? In any event, it looks wonderful, and the fringes flutter pleasingly merely from the breeze created by walking.
· Of course, both woman and men know how to tie scarves, so that they look casual but billow forth enchantingly. When I wear a scarf, it looks like I tried to strangle myself.
· On the downside: all Europeans, Western and Eastern, have worn for decades now the most disgusting jeans, made from a shiny metallic grey material whose color seems to have been inspired by the wings of a blow-fly. Why, I wonder? I know Europeans spend on clothes, so economy can’t be the reason.
· It dawned on me this trip that the Missoni fabrics, mostly for women, that I so admired 30 years ago, must have been inspired by the complex stacked arrays of gorgeous but muted colors – rose, yellow-beige, turquoise, etc. – that earlier Renaissance painters from Angelico down used to depict angel wings.
· This trip in Florence I noticed the number of older women, I mean 70 and beyond, who were tiny: not bent, not shaken down from spinal compaction, just small. Less than five feet, often much less. Not true of similarly aged men, in general. I wonder if it has something to do with the women having suffered some gender-related kind of malnutrition at the end of the war and in the years beyond. But they’re cute, these little ladies, and feisty as hell.
· As a generalization, young and early middle-aged men and women in Florence seem to me less physically beautiful than those in Rome. Is there a difference in genetic heritance? Stylish, charming, yes, but beautiful, no.
One of the great benefits from living in an apartment in a real neighborhood – and the Oltrarno is one of the realest, according to residents – is that people begin to connect with and around you. The woman at the cheese counter got to know Ken and his preferences. One woman at a satellite tourist office we used got to know what we liked, and would offer off-beat ideas. In the course of the month, we discovered and then ate lunch at, three times, a specially wonderful and inexpensive tiny trattoria near the San Nicoló tower, patronized by foreigners and natives alike, including working men stopping in for a delicious and inexpensive lunch. We also found what may be the best gelateria in Florence, steps from the apartment, where a charming 40-ish man delivered our ice cream mixture of the day with a flourish and a compliment. On our third visit to the restaurant, there he was: he too knew a good near where he lived. We saluted each other, and we told him that we would follow our meal with a last trip to his place for dessert.
Forty-five years ago Florence seemed to me physically dour, closed-in (it’s a small city in a bowl), heavy with masonry, severe. It seemed to speak of an extreme protective impulse, where princes, ecclesiastics, merchants all walled and gated themselves in. It still does. The palazzi are normally built of massive stone blocks, especially on the ground floors, out to the street. The Pitti is one of the ugliest dressed masonry buildings in the world, partly because of its ridiculous length, and it is set back from the street behind a boring pebbled slope. Some of the most important churches or monasteries -- San Lorenzo, Santo Spirito, San Marco, present featureless crude facades; Santa Croce, which does not, has a façade that looks made of plastic from the Disney purveyor. The central piazza is surely the ugliest in Italy. As you walk around historic Florence you do not come upon enchanting piazzettas, alleys with cascading flowers, nor do vistas open up to, as in Rome, where suddenly great architecture, a glimpse of ruins, a blending of eras coincide. Florence is not picturesque.
But step inside, and pass through and beyond, and there is elegance and perfect proportions – and aesthetic distinction. For example, for me, who does not much like formal gardens and finds the Boboli gardens boring, the gardens that are laid out, going steeply uphill, behind the Villa Bardini are the loveliest of their type anywhere. But you have to pass through a gatekeeper’s hall and take an elevator to find them. We found a rather upscale restaurant in the center of town where, it turned out, the owner, when he set about renovating the space some eight years ago, uncovered a vault and wall of quattrocento frescos: damaged, incomplete, not great artistically; but at least he had the wit to leave them. So we, unexpectedly, had lunch looking up at something beautiful and rare. (The lunch was so-so.)
The fountains outside are nothing special as fountains; the Piazza della Signoria is a weird jumble, the Lanza loggia is dark and pigeon-befouled; the Vecchio is one of the oddest big civic buildings ever erected. The cathedral, so beautiful outside, has little to hold one’s attention in the interior. The buildings that are architecturally wonderful tend not to be free-standing, but attached to a church or palace: the perfect Pazzi chapel, the old Sacristy, the Brancacci chapel, the cloister at San Marco. There are important exceptions. San Miniato, up on the hill, is perhaps the most beautiful 1100-1200 church in Europe, with its wonderful raised-choir plan and its fine striped marble; being virtually intact qualifies it for this kind of categorical judgment. And surprises. On a little byway on the “correct” side of the river, in fact across a tiny piazzetta from the venerable Bercchielli Hotel, is the tiny church of Santi Apostoli, which too has not been spoiled and is everything that a small 900s Romanesque church should be.
But to restate the obvious, inside the forbidding structures everything changes. However obvious to art lovers, it makes a tremendous difference if you can look at paintings, sculptures, architecture over a sustained period of time and come back again two or three times. At least for me, I can feel sure immediately that a work of art is great, but if I see it once I can only remember the judgment, the occasion, not the work itself. But to go to San Marco and study the tremendous Fra Angelico Maesta at one end of the great hall, in all its formal complexity and tonal beauty, together with its sumptuously painted wings – well, if you do this three times, as we did, for half an hour at a time, it does become part of your memory forever. Repetition and slow looking are essential. I now understand why Botticelli is fundamentally different in attitude from the Lippi’s – the faces, even when religious, express an entirely different set of experiences -- though I confess I still can’t tell the Lippis apart. I remember the Masolini and Masaccio Adams and Eves in the Brancacci well, I suppose because I have seen them reproduced so often. But I had totally forgotten the Fillippino Lippi frescoes that fill in the walls and provide the context; and they are not something one wants to forget. The goal for me, with painting especially, is to hold the work in mind well enough so that I can scan it in memory: what was in the lower right? what was the baby holding? what was in the landscape beyond?
If you walk around a sculptural piece and study each curve, each plane, each chisel mark, if you have time to assume the stance of the figure in order to experience it kinaesthetically, it will always be in the same room with you, mentally, you will always be able to approach it. You can’t do this with the tomb figures in the Medici Chapel, but you can with the slave figures and with David at the Accademia. I find this matter of time and repetition especially true of architecture. You cannot perceive the formal relationships, the play of shapes and light, the variation of materials and their appropriateness each to the other, unless you spend time. I have never forgotten the vestibule and great stairs of the Laurentian Library, but this time I was able to sit quietly for two 20-minute periods, and just look at the details: the curves, the ovals, the volutes, the way the pilasters work, the caps by which the banisters are brought to termination. At the end of the first 20 minutes, I was in awe, I found it annoying to have to breathe. At the end of the second 20, I was in tears. Something of the same effect occurs when you sit really quietly in Santo Spirito and wait for Brunelleschi’s genius to take possession of your senses.
In a month you learn a lot – or re-learn or re-vise. I knew of Lorenzo Monaco; but having seen 20 of them at the Accademia, and others elsewhere, now I really know how good he was. I had never even (consciously) heard of Andrea del Castagno; but his Last Supper and related frescoes and synopie at the Cenacolo Appollonia are incomparably great. Domenico Ghirlandhaio? To be sure, one of the “great biographers” among painters, but he did too much and there is too much sameness. I had never been aware of the post-Giotto painter called Lo Specchia, but his work is remarkable, especially at the Palazzo Davanzati. I recalled that there was a grandson of Giotto, called Giottino, who was supposed to be good: there is a painting in the Uffizi that proves it. I had never known much about Mino da Fiesole, but he was top-rank. I’ve been interested in a late-Renaissance portraitist, Moroni, and have now seen four more examples of his work, and he was as good as Titian. Tintoretto is fabulous in his huge paintings and murals (especially those in Venice); in smaller work, mostly portraits, not so distinguished. I was able to come to judgment on the Mannerists Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, with their extreme distorted composition and acid colors: for me, Pontormo is great, his best work being a Deposition in a tiny church, Santa Felicitá, near the Ponte Vechhio and at the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano. Rosso is too weird for his, or my, good. Andrea del Sarto I had tended to dismiss. True, he did far too much, but his best work is truly beautiful in terms of faces, and I feel his sense of space and composition are notable, an aspect often overlooked. (Something of the sort can be said of Raphael, his master.) Bronzino? too cold - after much looking, too cold. The sculptor and architect Ammanati: new to me, very fine.
Giovanni Bellini’s Lamentation over the Body of Christ is, for me, one of the half-dozen greatest masterpieces in art: it’s essentially pencil on wood panel, a kind of grisaille. The figures fill the frame so beautifully, in terms of how they relate to each other and to Christ, and each face is a masterpiece. Christ’s right knee protrudes from the picture plane, giving depth to a tableau. Nearby in the Uffizi is his Sacred Allegory, a very beautiful becalmed painting with the strangest iconography: there is Mary, there’s a classical philosopher, there St Sebastian, there a woman going to the river to wash clothes, there two men chatting about the day’s events. It’s almost as good as the Lamentation, and haunting. Isn’t it wonderful that Mantegna, who also has a fine canvas in the same room, and Bellini, two of the very greatest, were contemporaries and related by marriage?
So now, Giotto. I have tried, but I can’t respond the way others do. I see his greatness, and I admire the way he begins to model, in a painterly sense, the Madonna’s face. But there is a severity, almost a principled restraint that I can’t warm up to. Bernardo Daddi, definitely a different story. And Duccio: an entirely different story. I have never spent enough time in Siena, but find it wonderful. It is coherent and well shaped as a town, and wonderfully colorful – and not spoiled, because after a period of greatness the Florentines took it and everything ceased; and somehow the built city was not destroyed or even looted. The cathedral is marvelous, for me the equal of Florence externally (except in size), and internally far more satisfying. One has to assert: the big room in the museum of the Cathedral where Duccio’s masterprice, the enormous Maesta, together with most of the reverse panels and the predella pieces are displayed is one of the greatest art spaces in the world – and few casual travelers ever go there. In the same museum, a couple dozen of the great Pisano Biblical statues, and I think that in work that compares in size and subject to Michelangelo, Pisano was as just as good. In the nearby Baptistery there is an incomparable eight-sided font/tabernacle with low-relief panels and corner figures by Ghiberti and Donatello; few who enter the building take a look. I have wondered about my response to Donatello, sometimes feeling that his mastery was entirely technical, but
I‘ve been wrong; these panels, his carved Madonna and Child in stone downstairs, and his magnificent Annunciation at Santa Croce prove it. And there is a terra cotta plaque at Prato by Donatelo, showing God lifting Eve from Adam’s side, which is stupendous and touching.
But reverting to Giotto: at Santa Maria Novella, Ogni Santi, and at San Felice, there are big carved crucifixes that are incredibly moving; I wish he had done more three dimensional work.
It has been said that the reason Florentine art has been valued more than Sienese is simply that (a) Florence won, and Sienese work stopped, and (2) Vasari was Florentine, not even mentioning Pisano, for example. But Berenson and Kenneth Clark came to the rescue, bless them.
Other more or less random thoughts. In early Renaissance depictions of the Annunciation, it is not just that Mary looks stunned and fearful; Gabriel also looks uncomprehending and ill at ease. He has no idea of the meaning of the message he is bringing, and it throws him off. In most depictions of the Holy Family (extended), St John the Baptist is Christ’s age-mate, but sometimes he is an older boy, a kind of mentor of Christ, and sometimes he is an adult. By the way, Adam Gopnik claimed that in southern Europe, Gabriel enters from the left, while in northern Europe he enters from the right. Not true, except narrowly statistically, perhaps.
I’ve always been puzzled by how, in antiquity and in early Renaissance painting and sculpture, male genitals are tiny, almost cute. One never senses any prudish discomfort on the part of the artist, since, except for Christ and saints, they are not shrouded or gauzed over. So, okay, Herakles or Achilles with tiny dicks. After 1500, male genitals become larger, more obviously functional, and one sees that the artist often is using tricks to hide them – tricks that invite a viewer to see through the trick. Of course, by then, females nudes were becoming definitely, provocatively sexy -- though for centuries aesthetes refused to admit it, claiming that Titian’s Venus of Urbino, for example, was covering her pudenda when it’s obvious that she was pleasuring herself.
Finally (as regards art), art textbooks often insist that the artists of the Renaissance were simply superior craftsmen, technicians given comfortable berths at the courts of princes and prelates for the latter’s utilitarian benefit. There is something to this, but it doesn’t really hold up in terms of modern conceptions of individuality: there are too many examples, as the books themselves point out, of the artist’s painting himself at the edge of the work, looking directly outward to the viewers and even pointing to himself: Look, I did this, this is me.
Yes, as they say, all too irritatingly, serious travel changes one. I realized one day, in the garden of one of the Medici villas outside Florence, as I was looking with intense pleasure at a certain variety of Tuscan cypress – that my own mental prototype of “tree,” other than some specialty trees like eucalyptus, magnolia, or fruit trees, is an image of a moderately high tree that forms a perfect triangle from the ground diminishing upward, and has feathery branches all the way up, from bottom to top so that the trunk is intuited but hardly seen. It takes a long time to learn even basic things about your own mind! Travel helps.