Authors: David Leavitt
It’s easy to understand how he felt. Especially for those of us inured to more banal provinces, the immanence of the old, the beautiful and the historic in almost every facet of quotidian life takes some getting used to. For example, when Mark and I first moved to Florence in the early nineteen nineties, we rented an apartment in a
palazzo
on Via dei Neri with a statue of Mercury in its foyer; a plaque posted on the façade of this building announced that here, in 1594, Ottavio Rinuccini – ‘letterato illustre e gentile poeta’ – had written
La Dafne,
a ‘pastoral fable’ that Jacopo Corsi and Jacopo Peri would soon transform into the world’s first opera. Under such circumstances, reality can start to seem like a guidebook, just as a terrace view that includes, among innumerable rooftops and green copper domes, the church of San Miniato al Monte, the
Belvedere,
and the hills of Chianti
across the river, can start to seem like a postcard. It ceases to mean anything to you – or perhaps I should say that
you
cease to mean anything to
it.
Such views, we say, awe, they overwhelm … Every verb connected with Florentine views implies collapse, submission. There are moments, especially in the evening, when a walk through the Piazza della Signoria leaves me stunned; more often, however, when I walk through the piazza, I barely see the piazza, so focused am I on my own thoughts, or on the conversation I’m having, or on weaving a path among the many tour groups that crowd that part of the city in the spring, each moving with the singlemindedness of a school of fish, a flock of migrating birds, and led by a guide carrying a stick tied with a gaudy scarf to distinguish herself from all the other guides. On such occasions, I envy any newcomer his or her first glimpse of the piazza, especially if that glimpse takes place early in the morning, when the place is pretty much empty except for the pair of dozing
carabiniere
who, since the bombing at the Uffizi almost a decade ago, spend the night in their car by the Loggia dei Lanzi.
If the best time to look at the piazza is early, just after dawn, the best way to get there is from the river: you walk up the Lungarno Archibusieri, turn right, and suddenly, at the end of the long Uffizi corridor, opening like a pair of forceps, there it is: there you are. You stand, humbled, at the center of the world. The piazza looks you over. Like the Pensione Simi (where Forster first stayed in 1901), it has its permanent residents. Near the Palazzo Vecchio, Neptune soaks in a fountain that is as often as not turned off. The imitation
David
broods, eros dripping from his long fingers. Hercules hammers at the defeated Cacus. Few places in the world are so fraught with historical events. After all, in this piazza, Savonarola burned the vanities, and was burned himself. (A medallion embedded in the pavement marks the spot.) Cellini unveiled his bronze
Perseus.
Michelangelo’s
David
was erected, and then, a few hundred years later, moved to the Accademia, along a makeshift length of railroad track. Queen Victoria rode in a carriage through this piazza. Riots took place here, blood was spilled in quantity, and on the balcony of the Palazzo Vecchio, in 1938,
Hitler shook Mussolini’s hand while Blackshirts chanted.
Today green algae coats Neptune’s calves. The algae is history’s athlete’s foot. The piazza is the shower room of the ages, where gods and heroes parade naked, display outsize genitals, boast of conquests, show off trophies. It is not a place for women. What women lurk among the statuary do so as wraiths of male hysteria or desire. Polyxena and the Sabines, being raped, calcify sexual bragging. Judith, grappling Holofernes to slice off his head, calcifies sexual terror. Like the advice of mothers, a row of Virtues shrinks to the shadows of the loggia, ignored. A herm, half human, half tree, is the piazza’s pin-up girl. Her black fig leaf pulls all attentions toward it like a vanishing point, her flight from lust inciting what it seeks to repel.
At night the impression is even stronger. Torches along the zippered edges of the Palazzo Vecchio lend a glowing radiance to the stones, as if light has made them molten. At this hour the sight of Neptune, the slick white wetness of him, is enough to set the mouth watering. Looking at him, you finally
understand why sculptors fought over blocks of white Carrara marble. You want to take off your shoes, wade through the fountain, scrape at the green algae on his flanks with your nails.
The promise of a destiny, verging on the erotic on one side and the artistic on the other, seems always to have attached itself to Florence in the imagination of the foreigner, drawing him to the city not merely so that he can
see
but so that he can
be
or
become
something more than he is. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that in Florence he hopes to retrieve a quality endemic to himself the expression of which the atmosphere of home has stifled. As Pater wrote of the great German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, ‘In the fantastic plans of foreign travel continually passing through his mind … there seems always to be rather a wistful sense of something lost to be
regained, than the desire of discovering anything new.’
My use of ‘he’ in the above paragraph, by the way, is deliberate:
he
is not meant, in this case, to mean ‘he or she’ (or ‘he and she’) since, historically, men and women seem to have come to Florence seeking different things, and when they have left (if they have left) to have taken different things away. Consider the Lawrences, David and Frieda, sojourning here just after the Great War. Describing the Piazza della Signoria in his 1922 novel
Aaron’s Rod,
Lawrence’s hero observes that it is ‘packed with men: but all, all men … but Men! Men! A town of men, in spite of everything.’ He offers a Whitmanesque hymn to the
David,
‘white and stripped in the wet, white against the dark, warm-dark cliff of the building – and near, the heavy naked men of Bandinelli …’
As might be expected, Frieda had a different take on things; while concurring with her husband that Florence was ‘a men’s town’ (Mary McCarthy called it ‘a manly town’), she also complained that it struck her ‘as being like [Mrs Gaskell’s novel] “Cranford”, only it
was a man’s “Cranford”. And the wickedness there seemed like old maids’ secret rejoicing in wickedness. Corruption is not interesting to me, nor does it frighten me. I find it dull.’
That dullness, which persists to this day, is the antonym of Paterian longing, and often leads to vitriol and complaint, particularly at those expatriate dinner parties at which no Italian accent is heard, and the topic of conversation is inevitably Italian inefficiency, Italian bureaucracy, Italian inflexibility … all of which, up to a point, is understandable, given that the negotiation of a culture as elaborate and tradition-bound as Italy’s can be frustrating, and one derives natural comfort from the commiseration of a countryman. And yet at these dinners there often comes a moment when I want to throw up my hands and say, ‘Well, if you hate it here so much, why don’t you leave?’
It was the same toward the end of the nineteenth century, when Florence had a reputation (broadcast by its English residents) for being, in Walter Savage Landor’s words, ‘the filthiest capital in Europe’. Nazar Litrov, a Russian manservant who accompanied
Tchaikovsky to Florence in 1890, noted in his diary that ‘at almost every building one can urinate on the streets without any ceremony, ladies and girls don’t pay any attention …’ Litrov’s tone is refreshingly unjudgmental; on the other hand, the English painter William Holman Hunt expressed both disgust and affront at the city’s ‘stinks’:
What do you think of a boy of fifteen or sixteen in the blazing sunlight at one o’clock on Sunday, in Kensington Gore say, taking his breeches down for a necessary purpose which he performs while he still goes on with his game of pitch and toss with seven or eight companions some two years older who remain in a circle about two or three yards round him. Then again to an old gentleman of the utmost respectability … walking across the road at the Duke of York’s column and taking down his black cloth breeches for the same purpose.
The rhetorical flourish of relocating the offending scene to the home country begs the question of why Holman Hunt and thirty-thousand other Englishmen were living in
Florence in the first place. Also (the homosexual writer feels duty bound to note), when boys took down their breeches in the street, whether in the Piazza della Signoria or Kensington Gore, it was usually for a purpose quite different from the one that Holman Hunt ascribes. Florentine laxities had to have suited the English in some fundamental way, or they would never have gone there in such vast numbers.
Without doubt, the most hectoring and jingoistic English voice at the end of the nineteenth century was that of John Ruskin, for whom the establishment of an omnibus stand at the foot of the bell tower provided an excuse to rant against what he saw as Florence’s poor stewardship of its art treasures. Among many other things, Ruskin lamented that ‘the hackney coaches, with their more or less farmyard-like litter of occasional hay, and smell of variously mixed horse manure,’ made it ‘impossible to stand for a moment near the Campanile … not a soul in Florence ever caring for the sight of any piece of its old artists’ work’. It was probably of Ruskin that the young Henry James was thinking when in
the 1870s he addressed ‘the so terribly actual Florentine question … a battle-ground, today, in many journals, with all Italy practically pulling on one side and all England, America and Germany pulling on the other …’
The little treasure-city is, if there ever was one, a delicate case – more delicate perhaps than any other in the world save that of our taking on ourselves to persuade the Italians that they mayn’t do as they like with their own. They so absolutely may that I see no happy issue from the fight. It will take more tact than our combined tactful genius may at all probably muster to convince them that their own is, by an ingenious logic, much rather
ours.
While James agreed with Ruskin that ‘A cabstand is a very ugly and dirty thing, and Giotto’s Tower should have nothing in common with such conveniences,’ he considered that ‘discord for discord, there isn’t much to choose between the importunity of the author’s personal ill-humour and the incongruity of horse-pails and bundles of hay’.
What most troubled James about Ruskin’s
‘insidious and insane’ tract, however, was its preoccupation with the idea of error. ‘A truce to all rigidities is the law of the place,’ he noted in a Paterian moment. ‘Differences here are not iniquity and righteousness; they are simply variations of temperament, kinds of curiosity.’ For James, Ruskin is a kind of priggish deacon or schoolmaster, a forerunner of Forster’s Reverend Eager, leading his flock on a theological/art historical tour of the city. ‘Nothing in fact is more comical,’ James observed, ‘than the familiar asperity of the author’s style and the pedagogic fashion in which he pushes and pulls his unhappy pupils about, jerking their heads toward this, rapping their knuckles for that, sending them to stand in corners and giving them Scripture texts to copy.’
This is Reverend Eager to a tee: what he wants to teach his parishioners is ‘how to worship Giotto, not by tactile valuations, but by the standards of the spirit’. For Reverend Eager, the significance of Santa Croce lies not in its inherent beauty, nor in its status as the ‘pantheon’ of Florence’s illustrious dead (Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Rossini), but in
the fact that it was ‘built by faith in the full fervour of medievalism, before any taint of the Renaissance had appeared’. In this regard he typifies the English tendency to extol what Pater called the ‘rude strength’ of the Middle Ages at the expense of corrupting Renaissance innovations. Aesthetics, for Forster, encode politics, and behind Reverend Eager’s tedious encomia to Giotto one hears the parliamentarian Henry Labouchère decrying the ‘insufficiency of the severest sentence that the law allows’ in the case of Oscar Wilde. One also hears the critics and curates who attacked Pater’s
The Renaissance
on its publication, accusing its author of immorality and anti-religiosity, of leading ‘minds weaker than [his] own’ into the cave of error. Even as fine a mind as George Eliot dismissed the book as ‘quite poisonous in its false principles of criticism and false conception of life’, and Pater, in a gesture of cowardly back-pedalling, removed the famous ‘Conclusion’ from the second edition, restoring it only in 1888. (He had been concerned, he wrote, that ‘it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall. On the whole, I have
thought it best to reprint it here, with some slight changes which bring it closer to my original meaning.’)
The danger of
The Renaissance,
in the view of its critics, lay in Pater’s advocacy of sensory experience, which was seen by the Reverend John Wordsworth, among others, as suggesting ‘that no fixed principles either of religion or morality can be regarded as certain, that the only thing worth living for is momentary enjoyment and that probably or certainly the soul dissolves at death into elements which are destined never to reunite’. In fact, Pater had little interest in the afterlife; his primary concern was with apprehension itself, as evidenced by the credo: ‘Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.’ By contrast, progress, expansion and Empire were the watchwords of the Victorians, of whom he might have been speaking when he noted that in the Middle Ages, ‘the crushing of the sensuous, the shutting of the door upon it, the ascetic interest, is already traceable’.
It was against the Victorian creed of self-discipline and self-denial that Pater, knowingly
or otherwise, waged battle in
The Renaissance,
not directly, but rather by exalting its opposite: ‘any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend’. He writes approvingly of play, ‘the unexpected blessedness of what may seem our least important part of time; not merely because play is in many instances that to which people really apply their own best powers, but also because at such times, the stress of our servile, everyday attentiveness being relaxed, the happier powers in things without us are permitted free passage, and have their way with us’.