The Stones of Florence (11 page)

In Dante’s day, when armies were made up of citizens, battles were real. After the battle of Campaldino, 1,700 Ghibelline soldiers, it is said, ‘lay bleeding in the green woods and valleys of the Casentino’, very near where Uccello was born. Dante, who was twenty-four years old, fought, along with Corso Donati and Vieri de’ Cerchi, later chiefs of the Black and the White factions; he experienced, so he wrote, ‘much fear and then, at the end, tremendous happiness’. By Uccello’s time, mercenary foreign soldiers were fighting toy battles for which they could be paid by their employers without fear or risk. It was only the countryside and the villages that bled. When out of work, these bands of mercenaries hovered in the neighbourhood of the city that had been paying them and laid waste everything in sight. Such companies as the White Company must have appeared to the country people indeed as carapaced invaders from outer space or as a recurrent plague of beetles devouring the crops. The father of Cosimo I, Giovanni delle Bande Nere, was called that because his bands of fearsome mercenaries went into black armour in mourning for his death; a Sforza on his mother’s side, he was one of the few captains of the period who actually died from wounds.

Thus the statistics of Machiavelli, who was urging on the state the idea of a citizen army, paint the same picture, though without colour, as that given by the recluse-artist—a picture of unreal battles that were animated cartoons of war, bizarre and brilliant in their trappings, enacted against a backdrop of rural placidity. It was Machiavelli’s originality as a historian that he saw things ‘in perspective’.

The civil life of Florence was never much affected by external wars, until the great siege of 1530, which the citizens, finally united, withstood with great bravery but which ended with the entry of the Spaniards and the fall of the Republic. Slightly earlier, in 1494, the French king, Charles VIII, had marched into the city with his victorious troops and had withdrawn in fear when he saw the disposition of the people. A single succinct sentence, pronounced by a leading citizen, Piero Capponi, decided the king’s departure. ‘Then we shall sound our trumpets!’ the king had cried out, threatening, when the Florentine deputy refused the ultimatum presented to the defeated city. ‘If you sound your trumpets, we shall ring our bells,’ Capponi replied. Charles, who had seen Florence and the Florentines—the sombre rocky palaces, like fortresses, and the people, like tinder, who were already stoning his soldiers—knew what this meant: a general rush into the piazzas. Afraid of street fighting in those streets that had seen so much of it, he capitulated, and Capponi’s iron sentence still tolls, a warning, to invaders of republican communes—the bell answering the trumpet, the call to popular assembly retorting to the military clarion. When the Medici dynasty finally seized power, they had the bell of popular assembly destroyed.

No external defeat made as much impression on the Florentines as their civic disasters. From early times, the life of the city had been rendered precarious by its situation, at a confluence of rivers, between the Mugnone and the Mensola, where they flow into the Arno. It is hard to believe today, when the Arno itself, in summer, is not much more than a dry stony bed, over the middle of which a sluggish low current of muddy green water barely moves, but Florence, from the time of Tiberius, was repeatedly threatened by destruction in the form of terrible floods. The great flood of 1333 described by Villani was only one of many recorded by him. Floods, in fact, were virtually constant throughout the thirteenth century; in 1269, both the Carraia and the Trinita bridges went, and it appears no wonder that Villani, in telling the story of the city, traces its origin to Noah. These floods, naturally, were looked upon by many as a punishment for sin; the swollen river was God’s answer to the puffed-up pride of the turbulent citizens. The great flood of 1178, already mentioned, had been attended by two devastating fires and a famine, which was general throughout Tuscany. Earlier in that century, a Florentine bishop, Ranieri, had been preaching the end of the world; he based his prediction on a comet. The cataclysms of Nature, throughout the Middle Ages, were apocalyptic visions, for the Florentines, of what lay in store; prophecy was rampant.

In the year 1304 occurred a spectacular event which, again, was regarded as a ‘judgment’. A representation of hell had been advertised, to take place at the Carraia bridge, in a theatre that was set up on boats in the river; there were flames, naked souls shrieking for mercy, master demons, devils with pitchforks. Overloaded with spectators who had crowded to see the performance, the bridge collapsed, and all, supposedly, were drowned, so that it was said afterward in Florence that those who had gone to see hell got what they were looking for.

Nearly two hundred years later, Savonarola, preaching in the Duomo, terrified his audiences with a series of realistic sermons on Noah’s Ark. Pico della Mirandola, the Platonic philosopher and poet, described the sermon on the Deluge, which he heard September 21, 1494. It began with the text: ‘And behold I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth.’ Savonarola cried this aloud in a terrible voice, like a thunderclap, as soon as he mounted the pulpit, while a cold shiver ran through Pico’s bones and the yellow hairs of his head stood on end. The same day, like a dark saying made lucid, the news reached Florence that a flood of foreign troops had inundated Italy. These were the troops of the French king, Charles VIII.

The subject of Uccello’s greatest work, which was done for the Green Cloister of Santa Maria Novella, is the Universal Deluge. In this extraordinary fresco, recently restored and put on show at the old Fort of the Belvedere, on the hill of San Giorgio, Uccello’s fantasy grips the mind like some graphic sermon, with examples drawn from common experience, and a Biblical event, belonging to remote times, is given the immediate, telling impact of a prophecy. Here is one of those great visions of judgment which the Florentines alone, from Dante to Michelangelo, were capable of seeing—visions which gain their clairvoyance from a unitary passion, the love of a city or a nation, like that of the ancient Hebrews, and from a ‘documentary’ or scientific wealth of description, Dante’s account of hell, for example, being the more alarming for the painstaking geography and geology of its reporting. Dante ‘explored’ hell and found it full of Florentines; when a prelate criticized the nude figures in ‘The Last Judgment’, Michelangelo at once added him to the fresco, showing him in hell, wearing horns, with a serpent twisted around his loins, and when the prelate complained to the pope (Paul III), the pope replied: ‘Had the painter sent you to Purgatory, I would have used my best efforts to get you released, but I exercise no influence in hell;
ubi nulla est redemptio.’
For these decisive Florentines, hell was as near as the Bargello. In the same way, Uccello’s ‘Deluge’ is a naturalistic picture, based, no doubt, on Florentine experience, of a Bible myth.

It is constructed in two parts, with the wooden ark, shown twice, in perspective, on either side of the picture, walling in the frenzied scene. On the left, the ark is floating on the waters, with desperate figures clinging to its side; on the right, it has turned and come to rest, the waters having started to recede. Both sections seem to have a common vanishing point, and there is no clear line of division between the two episodes, that is, between the ‘Before’ and the ‘After’. The compression of time, which blends the long months of the flood into a single, simultaneous event, adds to the sense of claustrophobia given by the converging walls of the two arks. God is absent from the spectacle, over which a lurid light plays, and man, hemmed in, shut out from salvation (which is the same word as ‘safety’, symbolized by the ark), reveals his damned nature, not once, but for all eternity. In the narrow space between the two arks, the water is clogged with a log jam of dead bodies, which impede the movement of the living. On the right, a crow is pecking out the eyes of a drowned boy, while, on the left, a naked man on a swimming horse (like a centaur) is raising his sword against a beautiful fair-haired youth with a club, around whose neck a
mazzocchio,
like a black-and-white coiled snake, has fallen. A brute, heavy-muscled oaf, in his pelt, has got hold of a barrel, through which he pulls himself up, wearing a stupid, sidelong leer; a naked figure on a raft is fighting off a bear with a club. Farther off, an oak tree is being struck by lightning, and fallen branches are smashed against the ark. In the left foreground, a man in drenched clothes, clinging to the boards of the ark, against which he has flattened himself, looks sideways, surreptitiously, like a person in hiding, at his fellow-creatures struggling in the water below.

Apart, on a small island of dry land, stands a majestic, clean-shaven, aristocratic figure, with a hand raised in dignified prayer; from the ample folds of his dress and the noble, rugged seams of his brow, there flows an elemental security. He appears a grey rock, a cliff, against which the flood laps, effecting no erosion of his massive, sculptured calm. Out of the water, a pair of hands extends clasping his ankles, and the lout in the barrel watches him, transfixed, but the austere man does not transfer his fearless eagle gaze from the point in space he is contemplating, the Light he sees which seems to fall on him, so that he appears almost phosphorescent, while above him (a part of the next scene), the outstretched hand of the bearded patriarch Noah, who is poking his head out of the ark to test the weather, suggests a blessing descending.

No one knows, for certain, who this mysterious central figure is. Most critics think that he is Noah, in the prime of manhood, preparing to embark on the ark; others object that he does not resemble the bearded Noah looking out the ark window or the bearded Noah of the other frescoes in the cycle. Yet if he is not Noah, who is he? One of the sons of Noah? But he does not look like any of the sons in the ‘Drunkenness of Noah’ fresco, and his commanding dignity excludes the idea that he is anything less than the signorial first citizen of a great people. It would seem that he
must
be Noah, the legendary ancestor of the Italian people, who is sculptured in relief on Giotto’s bell tower. The bearded Noah might represent the patriarch, aged and wasted and sanctified by confinement in the ark, while the man on the dry island could be Noah at the height of his virility, one of the giants in the earth spoken of in the sixth chapter of Genesis, begotten by the sons of God on the daughters of men. The eye and the magnificent beaked nose are common to both figures. In any case, he is a Florentine, a quintessential Florentine
‘che discese di Fiesole ab antico e tiene ancor del monte e del macigno (Inferno,
xv, 62), ‘who came down from Fiesole in the old time and still smacks of the mountain and the hard rock’.

Uccello did a whole series of frescoes for the Green Cloister (called that because of the
terra verde,
or greenish grisaille, that was his favourite medium for fresco). There were a ‘Creation of Man’, and a ‘Creation of the Animals’, a ‘Creation of Eve’, a ‘Fall’, the ‘Deluge’, a ‘Sacrifice of Noah’, and the ‘Drunkenness of Noah’. The others, unfortunately, are more damaged than the ‘Universal Deluge’, so that only certain portraits—the sons of Noah, the Lamia or Female Serpent, blonde and pink—and one startling effect of foreshortening—God the Father flying head downward—are clearly visible. In Florence, there can also be seen the beautiful clock, surrounded by heads of prophets, that Paolo painted on the interior façade wall of the Duomo. Rows of prophets (Habakkuk, Jeremiah, Obadiah, Moses,
et al.)
by Paolo’s friend Donatello and others once stood in niches on the Bell Tower, like weathered criers, and in Uccello’s clock science and prophecy, the telling of time and foretelling, combine as though in a heraldic emblem of the Florentine character and genius.

With a sonorous poetic reverberation, Milton, in
Paradise Lost,
another cosmic myth, the only one that approaches the great myths that sprang from the Florentines twice invokes Florence and the surrounding hills and valleys for his famous description of Satan. He compares Satan’s shield to the moon, ‘whose orb through optic glass the Tuscan artist views / At evening from the top of Fesole [Fiesole], / Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, / Rivers, or mountains in her spotty globe.’ And a little further on, he speaks of Satan’s ‘legions, angel forms, who lay entranced / Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks / In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades/High overarched embower...’ Vallombrosa (Shady Vale), near the Consuma Pass, is a cool forest of beeches, oaks, chestnuts, and firs high in the mountains, where Florentines now go for the summer, to play canasta in the hotels, but which was once a retreat favoured by hermits; it was here that Saint Giovanni Gualberto founded the Vallombrosan order. Valdarno is the Arno valley, and ‘the Tuscan artist’ is Galileo. For Milton, in the seventeenth century, the astronomer with his glass was still an artist. An odd fact, too, not without relevance, is that Copernicus, a Pole, was trained as a painter. Fra Ignazio Danti, the Dominican from Perugia who was Cosimo I’s court astronomer and who made the gnomon and the astrolabe on Santa Maria Novella, was a painter too; fifty-three charming coloured geographical maps painted by him and another friar are in Palazzo Vecchio.

Science, magic, art, ‘inspiration’ were curiously bound together in the Florentine Renaissance. A ‘break-through’ occurred here, on all fronts simultaneously, which did not have a parallel for five centuries, when the French Impressionists, with their scientific theories of light, started a new revolution that quickly went beyond them and kept pace with, even anticipated, the new spatial discoveries in physics and mathematics and a new concept of time. The experiments of Cézanne and, following him, of the cubists again were based on geometry and again had an aspect of danger, as the visible world was broken down and reassembled on a floor plan of mathematics, of spheres, perpendiculars, orthogonals, cubes, and cones. Picasso’s later efforts to achieve, by juxtaposition, a simultaneous view of a face or form from all angles (that is, to compress time and space into a single Einsteinian dimension) are a dramatic repetition of the efforts of Uccello and Piero della Francesca to show complex forms, with all their facets, in the round. The violins, cups, bottles, fragments of newspaper that appear over and over in the cubist works of Juan Gris, Braque, and Picasso are the equivalents of the
mazzocchi,
ribbons, armour, and lances that mesmerized Uccello. In the geometric dance of such artifacts, a kind of alienation, in both cases, is depicted, and the materials of daily life are seen as a curio collection. Surrealism takes this a step further—into magic and hallucination.