Authors: Eric Weiner
What does the story of Michelangelo and the cadavers of Santo Spirito tell us about the nature of genius? For starters, it reminds us that genius is messy. You have to be willing to get your hands dirty. There is no substitute for direct observation of nature, and this holds true not only for the beautiful bits but also the squishy ones.
As for Bichellini, he was, like Aspasia of Athens, an invisible helper. Again, these are people who, while not geniuses themselves, facilitate the work of those who are. A socialite who brings people of disparate interests together. An art-gallery owner who takes a chance on a new talent. And a respected priest willing to risk it all to help a young sculptor who was practically oozing
sprezzatura
.
Where there is money, competition is never far away, and Renaissance Florence was no exception. Yes, the artists collaborated on some projects, but amid fierce rivalry. Artists competed with artists, patrons with patrons. Most of all, Florence competed with its neighbors: Milan, Pisa, Siena, and others. Sometimes these rivalries erupted into conventional wars, but more often they expressed themselves off the battlefield. The Italian city-states duked it out for the title of “most cultured,” marking
one of the few times in human history when a benchmark other than military or economic muscle ruled the day.
One such cultural battle sparked the Renaissance itself. Pisa was outgunning Florence beautywise, and the Florentines were determined to do something about it. The Renaissance, one of the high points of Western civilization, a historic swerve that created all we consider modern and good, began with a world-class pissing contest.
The year was 1401, not a good year for Florence. The city had just emerged from another bout of bubonic plague. Milanese troops, meanwhile, had laid siege to the city and were massed a mere ten miles outside its walls. The city’s economy was in the doldrums. All told, you’d think this would be a good time to hunker down and, oh, stock up on canned goods.
But that’s not the way Florence rolled. No, they decided it was the perfect time to indulge in some serious art. Specifically, an intricate set of bronze doors on the Baptistery of Santa Maria del Fiore, the city’s most important church and a symbol of its cultural aspirations.
The city organized a contest to find the best artist for the job, spelling out the rules in great detail. Contestants were to depict a biblical scene—Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac—in bronze and within a quatrefoil, a square frame about the size of a place mat. The winning entry would receive the lucrative contract for the Baptistery doors, as well as the adoration of a grateful city.
Ponder for a moment the sheer moxie this required. Here was a city at its most vulnerable, beaten down by pestilence, threatened by foreign invaders, pummeled economically, and yet its citizens choose this very time to hold a Florence Has Got Talent contest. Not a contest to see who could create the best catapult or plague vaccine, but one whose stated goal was something as outlandishly impractical as beauty.
The contest came down to two finalists, Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi, two young men, both prematurely bald but who otherwise could not be more different in background and disposition. Brunelleschi was the son of a respected civil servant and a certified goldsmith whose early work showed great promise. Ghiberti had absolutely no political
connections and virtually no experience as an artist. It should have been a cakewalk for Brunelleschi, but it wasn’t.
The judges were split down the middle. So, Solomon-like, they proposed that Brunelleschi and Ghiberti work together on the project. Brunelleschi, in what was likely the world’s first case of an uppity artist determined to get his way, wouldn’t hear of it. He either worked alone or not at all. Fine, the commission replied, and handed the contract to Ghiberti. Thus began a lifelong rivalry, one that would drive both men to create some of the finest art and architecture the world has ever seen: in the case of Ghiberti, the Gates of Paradise, and for Brunelleschi, the Duomo.
Renaissance Florence was rife with rivalries and feuds. The two giants of the age, Leonardo and Michelangelo, couldn’t stand each other. Perhaps it was inevitable. Michelangelo, twenty-three years Leonardo’s junior, was a rising star, and in the minds of many Florentines now the superior artist. This new reality surely irked Leonardo.
One day, their simmering animosity boiled over. Leonardo was crossing the Piazza Santa Trinita when a group of men stopped him and asked his opinion of some obscure lines by Dante. Michelangelo happened to walk by. “Here comes Michelangelo,” said Leonardo. “He will explain it to you.”
The sculptor, thinking he was being mocked, responded angrily, “Explain it yourself, you who made a model of a horse you could never cast in bronze and which you gave up, to your shame.” Then he turned and left, but not before hurling one final insult over his shoulder: “And the stupid people of Milan had faith in you?”—a reference to Leonardo’s commissions for Florence’s rival city.
Michelangelo’s taunt surely stung. Leonardo da Vinci, despite his almost godlike reputation today, was a tremendous failure. His plan to render the Arno River navigable failed, as did his attempts to fly. The hours and days he spent working on mathematics and geometry amounted to nothing. He left many works unfinished, including the
Battle of Anghiari
, an important commission for the city of Florence, to which he had devoted three years of his life.
What strikes me most about their squabble is the pettiness, the insecurity uncloaked. Genius, apparently, does not inoculate us from such small-minded emotions. Goethe despised Newton, both as a scientist and as a man. Schopenhauer dismissed the work of fellow philosopher Hegel as “a colossal piece of mystification that will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter.” Ouch. I’m not sure if such mean-spiritedness makes me feel better about history’s geniuses or worse. On one hand, it reveals how very human they were. On the other, it reveals how very human they were.
One of the greatest mysteries of the Florentine Renaissance is the role that formal education played—or, rather, the role that it
didn’t
play. Florence, unlike, say, Bologna, had no decent university. How can this be? Isn’t education an essential ingredient of genius?
Let’s examine the evidence. Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Woody Allen. All college dropouts. (One of the courses Allen flunked at NYU was filmmaking.) Einstein’s PhD dissertation was rejected twice. Fellow physicist Michael Faraday never attended college. Thomas Edison dropped out of school at age fourteen. (He was later tutored by his mother at home. Many geniuses were either homeschooled or self-taught.) While some geniuses—Marie Curie, Sigmund Freud—were stellar students, most were not.
Dean Simonton, in a study of three hundred creative geniuses, found that the majority made it only halfway through what was considered a modern education at the time. Any more, or less, was detrimental. So some education is essential to creative genius, but beyond a certain point, more education does not increase the chances of genius and actually lowers it. The deadening effect of formal education manifests itself surprisingly early. Psychologists have identified the exact year when a child’s creative-thinking skills plateau: the fourth grade.
This brings us to a remarkable finding. While the number of degrees conferred and scientific papers published has grown exponentially in the past fifty years, the “rate at which truly creative work emerges has remained relatively constant,” says sociologist J. Rogers Hollingsworth,
writing in the journal
Nature.
We are experiencing a flood of expertise, and even talent, but no bump in creative breakthroughs.
One culprit, as I said, is specialization. We’ve carved the world into smaller and smaller bits. Then there is the sheer volume of information that exists in every field today. If genius requires first mastering the body of knowledge in your chosen field and then, and only then, making your own contribution, well, good luck. A physicist or a biologist could spend a lifetime reviewing the work of others and still not make a dent.
Leonardo da Vinci was a poor student. He was well into middle age before he learned passable Latin, the language of the elites and the intellectuals. Leonardo, though, had little patience for conventional wisdom and would no doubt have agreed with psychologist Edwin Boring who, some five hundred years later, said, “It is useful to be ignorant of bad knowledge.” In that sense, Florence’s lack of a university was a blessing. It saved the city from “a scholastic straitjacket,” as urbanist Peter Hall put it.
Which brings us back to Filippo Brunelleschi. Having lost the contest for the Baptistery doors, he decided to indulge his secret passion: architecture. He set off for Rome, with his friend Donatello in tow, to examine ancient ruins. It was not an easy journey, and Rome back then was nothing like the Rome of today. Much smaller than Florence, it was “a city full of huts, thieves, and vermin and wolves prowling the neighborhood of old St. Peter’s,” writes author Paul Walker.
The locals didn’t know what to make of these two young men gazing at arches and columns. “Treasure hunters,” they called them, and they were right, though it was a different sort of treasure they sought. The curious Florentines were searching for the booty of ancient knowledge. Brunelleschi painstakingly measured columns and archways. He was especially fascinated by the Pantheon; the dome, at 141 feet wide, was the largest of the ancient world. Inspiration struck. Why not cover the Church of Santa Maria del Fiore in his hometown with a similar dome? It had sat uncovered, exposed to the elements, for centuries. Other city-states were beginning to talk. It was embarrassing.
So that was exactly what Brunelleschi aimed to do. People said it was impossible to build a dome of that size without any external means of
support, but such nay-saying only egged him on, and he succeeded gloriously.
One day, I decide to visit the Duomo and see firsthand what all the fuss is about. Climbing the circular stairs, marveling at the impossible genius of the design, I find myself thinking about the law of unintended consequences. We usually view unintended consequences negatively. Some new technology or scientific development doesn’t turn out as planned; it comes back to bite us. Air-conditioned subways raise platform temperatures by as much as ten degrees. Hospital patients are infected with microbes during their stay. Computer users develop carpal tunnel syndrome. “Revenge effects” is what science journalist Edward Tenner calls these phenomena. The law of unintended consequences cuts both ways, though. Sometimes, disaster has unexpected benefits, and sometimes what looks like defeat is actually victory in drag.
We can all be grateful that Brunelleschi didn’t win the contest for the Baptistery doors. Victory would have imprisoned him. He would have spent a lifetime on that project, as Ghiberti in fact did. Brunelleschi would never have traveled to Rome, would never have built the dome that is, to this day, Florence’s signature landmark. More than that, it inspired countless architects in Europe and beyond. The next time you visit a county courthouse or an old post office, or gaze in wonder at the majesty of the US Capitol dome, think of old Filippo Brunelleschi and the law of unintended consequences.
Consider, again, the state of affairs in Florence at the dawn of the Renaissance. The Church was weakened, not only financially but morally as well. The monks no longer had a monopoly on virtue. Nobody did. All golden ages, as we’ve seen in Athens and Hangzhou, contain an element of free-for-all, a chink in time when the old order has crumbled and a new one is not yet cemented. It’s a jump ball, and that’s when creative genius thrives, when everything is up for grabs. But how do such transitional times come to be?
Eugene assured me I would find the answer, or at least
an
answer, at a small museum called the Specola. It’s located, literally and figuratively,
in the shadow of the gaudy Pitti Palace. It takes some work to find. I hit a few dead ends—Italian dead ends so they’re stylish and interesting—before discovering the museum hiding between a café and a tobacco shop. Forsaken and sad looking, the Specola gets few visitors.
I am greeted by a giant statue of Evangelista Torricelli, inventor of the barometer and a son of Florence. I walk up the staircase, covered in dust, and the burgeoning excitement I feel catches me by surprise. I didn’t know they made museums like this anymore. Stuffed animals displayed behind grimy glass cases. Cheetahs and hyenas, walruses and zebras, all with the same frozen expression, a combination of shock and repose, as if they have no idea how they ended up here but are resigned to their fate nonetheless. It’s all very nineteenth century. I half expect Charles Darwin to pop up at any moment.
I am not here for the taxidermy, though. After a few detours, and a close encounter with a remarkably lifelike gorilla, I find myself face-to-face with the work of a little-known artist named Guilo Zumba. He pioneered the underappreciated art of plastic dioramas. Zumba’s oeuvre includes works with grim-sounding titles such as
Corruption of the Body
and
The Effects of Syphilis.
One piece, though, stands out. It’s titled simply
Le Peste
. The Plague. It’s a horrific tableau rendered in great detail: bodies of men, women, and children strewn like fallen timber. A skull rests on the ground like some sort of macabre ornament.
It’s hard for us to imagine the horror that was the plague. In months, the disease killed five out of every eight Florentines—as many as two hundred people a day. Corpses were piled high on the streets, and as Boccaccio, a writer living at the time, recalls, “A dead man was then of no more account than a dead goat would be today.” The disease is spread by contaminated fleas found on rats or gerbils. They didn’t know that then, though, so their attempts at preventative measures—spoonfuls of rose water sweetened with sugar, for instance—now seem pathetically futile. They also prayed, crowding into churches by the hundreds, which only accelerated the spread of the disease.