The Stones of Florence (23 page)

Softly idealized Holy Families, flanked by ecstatic friars, were hardly the best subject for a painter who was living with a baboon, and the horrible falsity of feeling that is evident in much of the post-Raphael painting of this period seems a product of a growing clerical demand for a specifically ‘Catholic’ art—an art of genuflections and bead-telling and family unity. Il Rosso was great once, when he painted his Volterra ‘Deposition’ and his own spatial horror coincided with the disequilibrium of the event to produce a kind of shrieking surrealism: white phantom figures are seen busily moving on a crazy pattern of ladders and crosses in a spatial void.

In Pontormo’s ‘Deposition’, in the church of Santa Felicita, the subject is treated in a totally different and even stranger fashion. Because of the darkness of the chapel he uses pale boudoir shades reminiscent of ribbon and silken coverlets; the pale soft lifeless body of Christ, carried by attendant nacreous figures, might almost be the centre of a chiffony Bacchanale. There is no sign of the Cross or of any solid object. A drift of pale-green chiffon is lying on the ground in the front of the picture, and the mourners are dressed in peppermint pink, orchid, gold-apricot, sky-blue, scarlet, pale peach, mauve-pink, pomegranate, iridescent salmon (orange-persimmon-yellow), and olive-green. All the figures are ethereally feminine, except for a tiny bearded old man whose head is seen in one corner. The two bearers of Christ’s drooping, supine cadaver are wide-eyed girlish pages with pearly, satin-smooth arms, silky short gold curls, and white shapely legs; one of them is wearing a bright blue scarf or ribbon. An utter detachment from what has happened characterizes this bizarre epicene ensemble; about to shoulder their burden, the bearers turn their curly heads, as it were, to pose for the picture, and the one on the left, with Cupid’s-bow lips parting, has assumed an expression of pathetic, pretty surprise. The choreographic grouping of harmonious candy tints, flowing gestures, and glistening white tempting flesh makes an eerie morbid impression, as though Cecil Beaton had done the costumes for a requiem ballet on Golgotha.

The faculty of eliciting inappropriate comparisons is always a mark of strain in art, and the early Florentine Mannerists possess this faculty to the highest degree. The detachment of their tapering figures from the action they are supposed to be performing and from any affective sentiment prompts the onlooker to associate this dissociated work with the realm of common things, and he is shocked, for example, to find that the cut of the dead Christ’s beard in Pontormo’s ‘Deposition’ reminds him of Cosimo I. The banished real world returns, in an unpleasant way, forcing itself in where it does not belong, carrying a bedraggled train of reminders and associations.

Still, it must be said for the Florentine Mannerists, that, again, they were the first—the first to feel the strain and hollowness of the
cinquecento.
Early Florentine Mannerism, is, above all, nervous painting, twitching, hag-ridden, agoraphobic, looking over its shoulder sidewise, emerging whitely from black shadows. The tics of Pontormo and Il Rosso signalled a breaking-point. The disturbance originating in Florence was eventually felt all over Italy—in Parma, Siena, Venice, and Rome. But the diverse painting and sculpture identified in art history as Mannerist—Beccafumi, Parmigianino, Michelangelo, Bronzino, Allori, Vasari, Cellini, Giambologna, Tintoretto—had only superficial similarities with the calamity-shrieking canvases of Pontormo and Il Rosso.

In Florence, under Cosimo I, the second Mannerism, cold and formal, became a semi-official style. The Florentine workshops were busier than ever, thanks to the grand duke’s Renaissance vanity, which was stronger, even, than his stinginess. He wished to leave behind him imperishable monuments to his reign and allotted the task of doing this to the artists who happened to be on hand: Vasari, Allori, Bronzino, the younger Ghirlandaios, Franciabigio, Cellini (back from his travels and buying Tuscan real estate), Bandinelli, Ammannati, Giambologna. Even the old Pontormo, though he was not in fashion, received a commission, and the grand duke and duchess paid a gracious visit to San Lorenzo to see his work progressing. Ammannati enlarged the Pitti Palace, and the Boboli Garden was laid out, with grottoes, caverns, stalactites, an artificial lake with an island on it, and avenues of ilex—all in the new foreign ‘landscape’ style. Sculptors and painters were employed to do likenesses of Cosimo himself, his wife, his descendants, and his remote ancestors, as well as his mother and father. He set Cellini to competing with Ammannati for the ‘Neptune’ on the Piazza della Signoria and let him work on his model in the Loggia dei Lanzi; unfortunately for the piazza, Ammannati won the commission because, explains Cellini, he himself was poisoned by a
scodellino
of sauce and was sick for nearly a year.

A great deal of hack work was done for Cosimo, with which he was immensely satisfied. He was not able to distinguish between the talents of his busy artists and artificers; the high value he put on Vasari seems to have been due to his speed. The perfected
‘bella maniera’
in which Vasari excelled could be applied, like a patent process, to any subject matter or medium, and Vasari was proud of the fact that the arts in his generation had reached a degree of efficiency or near-automation undreamed of in the past. Pain and difficulty in composition had been almost eliminated, and from the point of view of both artist and patron this appeared to be an advance of stupendous importance. The new efficiency permitted Vasari to exceed all previous norms: he frescoed the interior of Brunelleschi’s dome; he remodelled Palazzo Vecchio from top to bottom and frescoed the principal rooms; he built the Uffizi and even found time, in the midst of other commissions, to spoil the interiors of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, putting in new chapels and getting rid of many old works of art.

The Panglossian optimism with which Vasari attacked these jobs was a product of the age and of the sudden parochialism of Florence, now a backwater, though it did not yet know it. Vasari believed that he was living at a zenith while in fact he and the Florentines with whom he shared Cosimo’s patronage had arrived at a nadir; only Cellini, among them, was a world figure. The rest were ‘School of Florence’, as one might say a school of small fish.

This sad ending of the story of a great people has a curious epilogue. Florentine painting and sculpture never recovered from their collapse in the mid-sixteenth century, and it was not until the Risorgimento that Florence once again became a centre, if only a small one, of literary men, political figures, and historians, like Gino Capponi and Bettino Ricasoli of Brolio (called ‘the iron baron’), liberals of ancient blood, and the Swiss G. P. Vieusseux, who founded the reading room now called the Vieusseux Library. Yet the city did not die or petrify like Mantua, Ravenna, Rimini, Siena, or turn into a dream like Venice. The Florentine crafts, out of which the arts had grown, survived the era of bad taste that was inaugurated by the grand dukes, survived, too, the Victorian cult of tooled leather and glazed terracotta; the severe tradition of elegance that goes back to Brunelleschi, Michelozzo, Donatello, Pollaiuolo has been transmitted to the shoemaker and the seamstress, just as the wise government of space can still be found, not in Florentine modern architecture and city-planning, but in the Tuscan farmland with its enchanted economy, where every tree, every crop has its ‘task’, of screening, shading, supporting, upholding, and grapevines wind like friezes in a graceful rope pattern among the severed elm trunks, the figs, and silvery olives.

In Tuscan agriculture, everything not only has its task but its proper place; a garden, as Edith Wharton explains in her little book on Italian gardens, is treated in Tuscany as an outdoor ‘house’, which is divided into
‘stanzoni’
(big rooms), often on different levels: the lemon ‘room’, the orange ‘room’, the camellia ‘room’, and so on. In this perspicuity and distinctness, so characteristically Florentine, there is some residue, perhaps, of medieval scholasticism, something that recalls the architecture of Dante’s hell, with each group of sinners in their proper bulge and circle, as chickens in Florence are found at the
pollaiuolo,
meat at the
macellaio,
vegetables at the
ortolano,
milk at the
lattaio,
cheese at the
pizzicheria,
bread at the
panificio,
a system of division that has broken down in most Italian cities and in which modern products like toilet paper find it hard to discover their proper ‘house’.

Yet Florence is not backward, only extraordinarily rational. The Florentines consider themselves and are considered by other Italians the most civilized people in Italy, just as the Tuscan peasant is regarded as the most skilled and intelligent of Italian farmers.
‘Questi primitivi’,
the Tuscan poor people say pityingly of workers imported from the South and from the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, and they pity them not only for their unskilled hands but because these unfortunates, not having lived with the ‘Davidde’ (the Florentine pet name for the ‘David’ of Michelangelo) and the
‘cupolone’
(Brunelleschi’s dome), do not understand
‘le cose dell’arte’.
The literacy rate in Tuscany is by far the highest in Italy, and the poorest Florentine maidservant can be found in the kitchen spelling out the crimes and
‘le cose dell’ arte’
in the morning newspaper.

That quality called
‘fiorentinità’
(and Florence is the only Italian town whose name naturally turns into a substantive denoting an abstract quality) means taste and fine workmanship, as ‘Paris’ does in France. The world knows it in shoes, umbrellas, handbags, jewellery, trousseau linens, and the firms of Ferragamo, Gucci, Bucellati, Emilia Bellini, with their seats on Via Tornabuoni and Via della Vigna Nuova and branches in Rome, Milan, New York, awaken faint reminiscences of the old banking firms of the Peruzzi, the Bardi, the Pazzi.
Fiorentinità
is made by the Florentine workman in his coverall and by those firms of spinster sisters like the Sorelle Materassi of Aldo Palazzeschi’s novel with their needles, scissors, and embroidery hoops and their big maid called Niobe. If it is synonymous with civilization and refinement, it cannot be separated from the poor and their way of talking, thinking, and seeing, which is always realistic and equalizing. The Florentine speech is full of diminutives; everything is turned into a ‘little’ something or other, which has the curious effect of at once deprecating and dignifying it. Old-fashioned expletives
(‘Accidenti!’,
which means something like ‘I’ll be blowed’,
‘Diamine!’,
or ‘the dickens!’,
‘Per bacco!’,
or ‘You don’t say!’) give Florentine talk a countrified flavour.
‘Per cortesia’,
among the poor people, is the common preface to an inquiry. A
‘pisolino’
(somewhat humorous, meaning ‘a little nod’) is the common word for a nap; a drink of hot water and lemon is a
‘canarino’
(canary bird). Nature becomes human when the peasants look at her; around Florence they call the two kinds of cypresses, the tall male and the blowsy female, the ‘man’ and the ‘woman’.

Florence today is a city of craftsmen, farmers, and professors, and every Florentine has something in him of each of these. In a sense, there is no class of unskilled workers, for every occupation is treated as a skill, with its own refinement, dignity, and status—even unemployment. ‘What did your husband do?’
‘Era un disoccupato, signora.’
In the same way, upper-class idlers, such as are found in Rome and Venice, are extremely rare here, which explains the absence of night life. There is no
jeunesse dorée;
children of the upper classes are busy studying at the University: law, archaeology, architecture, political science.

The Florentines today are probably more like what they were in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance than were the Florentines of any intervening period; the revival of crafts and small industries and the restoration of free institutions after Fascism may have something to do with this. These eternal Florentines have no need to be sentimental about the past, which does not seem remote but as near and indifferently real as the clock on the tower of Palazzo Vecchio to the housewife who puts her head out the window to time her spaghetti by it. There have been many changes, of course, in these centuries, but they are like the changes a man sees in his own lifetime. The diet eaten by Pontormo in his crazy tall house is almost precisely the diet of the Florentine people today: boiled meat, a
frittata
of eggs, a fish from the Arno, cabbage,
minestra,
beet salad, capers, lettuce salad, three pennys’ worth of bread, the bitter green salad called
radicchio,
pea soup, two cooked apples, asparagus with eggs,
ricotta,
artichokes, cherries, melon
(popone
in Tuscan), the small sour plums called
susine,
grapes, a young pigeon, two pennyworth of almonds, dried figs, beet greens with butter, a chicken. If he were alive now, he might have eaten, besides, white haricot beans with tuna fish from Elba, the broad beans called
mangia-tutto,
Tuscan
ravioli
(little green
gnocchi
made with beet greens and
ricotta),
rabbit, and the long string beans called
serpenti.

The merit of this fare is that it is inexpensive and healthy. In Pontormo’s ‘Supper at Emmaus’, the bill, or what appears to be the bill—a scroll of paper with figures on it-is shown lying on the floor. This sardonic touch is as characteristically Florentine as
radicchio
and
popone.
The economy of the Florentines, reprehended as avarice by Dante, is an ingrained trait, which was made even more pronounced, doubtless, by the general misery during the Medici period. Farmers are naturally economical, and the farmer in every Florentine scrimps, saves, and stretches. When the capital was moved to Florence at the time of the unification of Italy, a Roman paper printed a cartoon showing three Florentines seated at a dinner table with a single boiled egg in the centre. ‘What shall we do with the leftover?’ was the caption. Such jokes are still told of the Florentines, and they tell them of themselves. At an expensive seaside resort, during a recent heat wave, all the Florentines checked out of the hotel one morning. ‘They must have heard that the heat wave was over in Florence; someone sent them a penny post card,’ observed a non-Florentine. A lady who lived in Fiesole was invited by a Florentine countess to drop in at her house ‘any time you feel like it; if you want to do p. p....’ To the countess, this invitation was the summit of hospitality.