Authors: Eric Weiner
What did Aristotle tell me back in Athens? “Archaeologists love mistakes. It reveals process.” He’s right. A perfectly crafted statue tells the archaeologists nothing about how it was made. Mistakes shine a light on the messy world of creative genius and give the lie to the myth of the immaculate artist: the writer who pounds out a perfect first draft, the painter who, wineglass in one hand, brush in the other, lobs some oil at the canvas and—voilà!—a masterpiece. Lies, all of them.
What the world needs, I decide, is a Museum of Crap. Or, if you prefer something
more PG, a Museum of Mistakes. Such an institution would provide a valuable public service. Visitors could see a life preserver from the
Titanic
, the actual sword that Napoléon carried into battle at Waterloo, a genuine can of New Coke, as well as a lovingly restored Betamax. The gift-shop possibilities are endless. T-shirts riddled with typos, eight-track tapes, a complete collection of Michael Bolton albums. Granted, I might be mistaken about the Museum of Mistakes, but my mistaken belief could itself become one of the exhibits. That is the beauty of the Museum of Mistakes. It’s all-inclusive.
Until my museum is built, I’ll have to settle for the Pitti Palace. It is garish but instructive. I look more closely at the paintings and notice something I hadn’t before. The portraits feature people, but also an awful lot of their stuff. I now see the art for what it is: a thinly veiled excuse to show off the owner’s possessions. The world’s first product placements.
A good example is Crivelli’s
The Annunciation with Saint Emidius.
Ostensibly, the painting depicts a religious ceremony, but as art historian Lisa Jardine points out, it’s really a celebration of treasured possessions from far-flung locales. “Here is a world which assembles with delight rugs from Istanbul, tapestry hangings from Islamic Spain, porcelain and silk from China, broadcloth from London.”
We think of the Renaissance as a lofty era marked by sublime art and deep thought. But it, unlike ancient Athens, was also an incredibly materialistic time. The Renaissance brought us not only the world’s first modern geniuses, but also the first modern consumers. These two facts are connected.
Florence was not an empire in the traditional sense—it had no standing army, no naval fleet. It was an “empire of things,” to borrow a phrase from Henry James. Beautiful things. “He who has no possessions is regarded as a mere animal” was a common Florentine expression. The Florentines were incredible materialists, but they were not—and this is a crucial distinction—crude materialists. They cherished their possessions in a way we don’t. As the philosopher Alan Watts points out, ours is not a genuine age of materialism because “it has no respect for material. And respect is in turn based on wonder.”
Florentines saw no conflict between their pursuit of possessions and their pursuit of knowledge and beauty, for they did not subscribe to our wrongheaded notions about the relationship between genius and the material world. We believe that geniuses are necessarily removed from the world around them, the absentminded professor being the personification of this trope. But geniuses are more, not less, attuned to their environment than the rest of us. They notice things the rest of us don’t.
Creativity does not happen when we withdraw from the material world but, rather, when we engage with that world, and all its messiness, more authentically and more deeply than we are accustomed. For creative people, it matters not whether their surroundings are good or bad; they derive inspiration from both, taste the salt in all things. Everything is a potential spark.
Florentines did not accumulate objects so much as celebrate them. They are still famously discriminating (or, picky, if you’re feeling less generous), possessing a finely tuned sensitivity for the distinctive and the exquisite, and a visceral disdain for the shoddy and the ordinary. Nothing offends their sensibilities more than something that is a little bit off. A Florentine would rather miss by a mile than an inch.
Surely, I think, something must have been in Florentine culture that nurtured their aesthetic sensibility. But what?
I find the answer on the walls. Every room of the Pitti Palace is lined with decorative wallpaper, rich maroons and turquoises imprinted with a subtle floral design. No one notices the wallpaper, and why would they? It’s just wallpaper, right?
Wrong. None of this would exist without the wallpaper. None of the luxuriant art packed into this palace, nor any of the other palaces and museums scattered across the city. No Leonardo or Michelangelo either. No Renaissance. Florence’s empire of beauty was built on a foundation of wallpaper. To be more precise, it was built on the cloth trade, the source of the city’s wealth.
So what?
you say.
What difference does it make how Florence got rich? Money is money.
Actually, it’s not. How a nation accumulates wealth matters more
than how much it accumulates. Sierra Leone is rich in diamonds, but that has turned out to be more curse than blessing. Resource-rich nations aren’t innovative for a simple reason: they don’t have to be. Florence had no diamonds or oil, or much of anything else, so people had to rely on their wits and gumption. They had no money so they had to think.
The cloth trade was not a natural fit for Florence. It needed to import all of the raw materials—cloth from England, dye from Afghanistan. Florentine merchants traveled far and wide, searching for the finest materials, visiting warehouses and banks. Their travels exposed them to strange new ideas, and these ideas accompanied them home along with the cloth and the pigments.
A Tuscan named Leonardo Bonacci, working in the Asia Minor town of Bugia, was the first to catch wind of Arabic numerals (actually Indian in origin). Florentines, who, like most Europeans, were still using Roman numerals, quickly adopted the new system and mastered exact calculations. This passion for precision soon gathered steam. The Italian Renaissance brought the world not only masterpieces of art and literature, but also double-entry bookkeeping and maritime insurance. These innovations were not historical oddities, divorced from the world of art. They were as intertwined as the threads on a fine silk scarf.
The Florentines did not segregate the worlds of art and commerce. Skills acquired in one field spilled over into the other. Even something as pedestrian as a tax document was expressed in florid prose, with the auditor describing the rolling hills of a farm or the disagreeable temperament of a surly peasant. Shipping containers were not standardized, so the Florentine merchant, out of necessity, mastered the art of gauging—at first, gauging the capacity of a container; later, gauging the realism of a painting or the proportions of a statue. The bookkeeper’s penchant for accuracy morphed into the artist’s precise renderings.
Yet, despite this penchant for precision, Florentines were also great gamblers. They played games of chance in the street, openly defying both the Church and the lay authorities. Even the insurance business—not normally the sexiest of enterprises—was brimming with risk and intrigue.
Agents had no statistics or actuarial tables to rely on. It was gambling pure and simple.
This tradition of risk taking spilled over into the world of art. Wealthy patrons placed bets on unlikely horses. A good example is Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel. Some five hundred years later, he seems like the perfect man for the job. Not at the time, though. Michelangelo was best known as a sculptor, not a painter. Yes, he had done some painting, but primarily small pieces—little in the way of frescoes and nothing on this scale. Yet Pope Julius II chose Michelangelo for the job. The pope was adhering to the Medici philosophy of patronage: choose someone who is clearly talented, then assign him an impossible task—do so even if he seems like a bad fit,
especially
if he seems like a bad fit.
Think of how different that approach is from ours today. We only hire applicants for jobs once we’ve determined they are a perfect fit. We only assign tasks to those who have already demonstrated they can perform that same exact task. We treat risk not as a noble venture, a dance with the universe, but as something to be avoided at all costs, or at least reduced to a decimal point. And we wonder why we’re not living in another Renaissance?
Risk and creative genius are inseparable. Sometimes, the genius risks professional ridicule, and sometimes much more. Marie Curie worked with dangerous levels of radiation up until her death, and she was well aware of the risks. Genius always comes at a price. Some people, and some places, are more willing to pay that price than others.
I’m keen to explore this strange notion of prudent risk taking further, so I’ve asked Eugene to join me at the Bargello Museum. Soon, we find ourselves lost in a sea of beauty. It is a beauty, he assures me, with a definite purpose. I find this a difficult concept to swallow. Isn’t beauty purposeless, and isn’t it precisely that purposelessness that we find so compelling?
No, says Eugene. The art of the Renaissance, like that of Athens, was functional. It evolved into something more than that, but in the beginning it was commissioned for a definite purpose: to promote Christianity and,
more specifically, the Catholic Church. Okay. Makes sense. The Church was a powerful institution, and like all powerful institutions it secretly worried about its public image. But why art?
“Most people were illiterate, so how could the Church reach them? How could it, for instance, depict the birth of Jesus? Captions won’t work. You have to get your message across solely with visual symbols. That is, with paintings, jam-packed with symbolism.”
I ponder this, trying to fend off the inevitable, uncomfortable conclusion: Renaissance art—widely hailed as the peak of human accomplishment—began as pure propaganda.
“Um, yeah, of course,” says Eugene, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
I point out that Soviet art was also propaganda but you don’t see anyone standing in long queues to see it.
“That’s because it was ugly,” says Eugene.
Yes, of course. The genius of the Renaissance had nothing to do with content and everything to do with style, with form. Not a
what
but a
how
. The great artists of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florence did not stray from the predictable religious iconography—Saint Francis preaching to the birds, for instance—but they depicted those old standbys in a completely new way.
“They begin to stand and move the way real people do,” says Eugene, pointing out how Donatello’s
David
, naked and effeminate, strikes a perfectly natural pose, unlike the stiff, inhuman statuary of medieval times. “They still used chunks of rock, but suddenly the chunk of rock moved. It was alive,” says Eugene.
This was one of the greatest aesthetic leaps mankind has ever made. But how did it happen? Did sculptors such as Michelangelo suddenly wake up one day with an innate understanding of human anatomy? Mike was extremely talented, with a keen eye for the subtleties of the human form, but he was no superhero. He did not possess X-ray vision. No, there was only one way to understand the human body: by dissecting one. Yet the “mutilation” of corpses was strictly forbidden by the Church. Michelangelo had a problem. But this was Florence, where problems were greeted
not as unwelcome visitors but as long-lost friends. Solutions were in the air, provided you knew where to look.
A good place to start, Eugene had suggested, is the Church of Santo Spirito, and the next day I walk there. Located on the “wrong” side of the Arno, away from the main sites, its cream-colored facade exudes quiet simplicity. It is not too pretty.
I heave open a heavy wooden door and stare in awe at the vaulted ceiling, admiring the way it magically magnifies the sunlight streaming in, setting the entire building aglow. Renaissance architecture is, at its core, a giant fuck-you to the oppressive Gothic style that dominated the Middle Ages. Gothic buildings, heavy and dark, diminish us. Renaissance architecture, light and airy, uplifts.
A priest directs me to a small room, the sacristy. On the wall is a large wooden crucifix, nearly life-size. In Italy, crucifixes are as common as gelato, but this one is different. It is—and please forgive my use of a technical term—better. On most crucifixes, Jesus is facing frontward. On this one, though, the body appears to twist and turn, “as if in response to an inner spirit,” as one art historian put it.
The crucifix I’m admiring was nearly lost to history. Covered in a crude overcoat of paint, the work of an unknown artist, it languished in storage for decades. Then, in the 1960s, a German art historian named Margit Lisner saw something in the discarded crucifix that others had missed. Lisner realized the work was older than thought, and most likely that of a master. Further tests showed it was carved by the hands of a young Michelangelo.
What’s most fascinating about the crucifix is not its artistic merits but its intended purpose. It was a gift, a thank-you note. Young Michelangelo—he couldn’t have been more than twenty years old—wanted to express his gratitude to the Santo Spirito Church and, in particular, to its head, a priest named Nicholaio Bichellini. Why?
Cadavers. Michelangelo needed them. Santo Spirito had them. The priest, risking excommunication, or worse, allowed Michelangelo to do his dissections at night. It was unpleasant business. (“Squishy” was how Eugene had described these midnight dissections. “Very squishy.”)
Why did the priest allow it?
Why would a respected Church official risk so much? Like Florence’s fabled merchants, he must have made some calculations. He no doubt knew that Florentines, even in the best of times, practiced a tepid Christianity, and this was not the best of times. He also no doubt factored in the rise of the Humanists. These were secular intellectuals, freethinkers armed with ancient texts and dangerous new ideas.
Being a practical man, Bichellini also knew that Michelangelo was a protégé of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the most powerful man in Florence and a benefactor of Santo Spirito’s. That surely factored into his calculations. Finally, and perhaps most important, like many Florentines the priest had an eye for talent. He must have noticed something special about the young artist with the surly demeanor. Not necessarily genius, not yet, but something. In the end, he took a risk. A calculated one, yes, but a risk nonetheless.