The Stones of Florence (18 page)

In the city of Florence, the preoccupation with politics did not exclude the passion of love; if anything, it seems to have quickened it, as can be seen from that unique work
The Divine Comedy,
where the poet’s ardour for the Lady, for Paradise and the ideal city, is fed by indignation, sternness, and sorrow, and the progress upward is accompanied by maledictions and political curses cast backward at the actual city and all its neighbours. The only parallel to this curious omnium-gatherum of love, theology, and political pamphleteering is
War and Peace,
and Tolstoy, the passionate, puritan peasant count, would have made a good Florentine.
‘Donne ch’avete intelleto d’ amore’
—Dante in the
Vita Nuova
and Petrarch in his sonnets to Laura, these burning Florentines set a fashion in love poetry that lasted in Europe up through the sixteenth century. The grosser kind of love, in fecund variety, is found in Boccaccio, who again set a model—for light, licentious tales framed in an elaborate ensemble, almost like opera arias, with contralto, bass, soprano, and so on. Between Dante and Boccaccio, between Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo, love, like a high-tension wire, is stretched to its uttermost span. The Florentine experience left no form of the erotic untried.

This hypersensitized people, whose emotions were constantly being recharged by the oratory of the piazza and the sermon, was very strongly sexed. Here is the surprise that Florence holds behind the austere surface of its buildings and that begins to explain the mystery of the Florentines: their political fickleness, their proneness to conversion, their alternation between rationality and superstition, and, finally, most of all, those ‘tactile values’ Berenson discovered in Florentine painting and made the basis of his aesthetic. What distinguishes Florentine art is its extreme plasticity, and this is evidently the leading trait of Florence as a body politic, just as it was of Athens, plastic, too, ductile, malleable. In these two great, impressionable, disaster-prone cities, Eros was everywhere, or, to put it in the modern style, everything was erogenized, that is, it had assumed a shape that spoke directly to the body.

Florentine religious outbursts often had an Orphic character. Savonarola’s puritan mobs were not always bent on arson and image-breaking; sometimes they were carried away by joy. After one of the Frate’s sermons, the crowds would pour out into the squares, yelling
‘Viva Cristo!’
and singing hymns. In the squares, they would join hands to make a circle and dance, a citizen alternating with a friar. A favourite hymn for these occasions was written by one of Savonarola’s close followers. ‘Crazy for Jesus’, it might be called.

Non fu mai’l più bel solazzo,

Più giocondo ne maggiore,

Che per zelo e per amore

Di Gesù, diventar pazzo.

Ognun’ gridi com’ io grido,

Sempre pazzo, pazzo, pazzo.

This is hard to translate because of a shift in vocabulary that takes place in the middle, from the language of courtly love (‘Never was there greater solace, / Fairer or more jocund’) to the tone of the Bible meeting (‘Than from zeal and love / Of Jesus to go crazy. / Everybody shout with me, / Always crazy, crazy, crazy’). Savonarola himself had been brought to God after a severe disappointment in love. He was not a Florentine, the great Prior of San Marco, and Florence twice rejected him. As a young medical student in his native Ferrara, he fell in love with a Strozzi girl, whose family, like so many Florentine expatriates, was living there under the protection of Duke Borso d’Este. The Strozzis, from pride, forbade the marriage. It took him two years, they say, to get over his passion. The second rejection was more terrible. Florence, which had loved him, suddenly turned cold, under pressure of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI. Savonarola was challenged to an ordeal by fire by the Franciscans of Santa Croce. First he accepted, then refused. This vacillation made a bad impression. More than four hundred years before, in 1068, a humble Vallombrosan monk, San Pietro Igneo, encouraged by that other great reformer Saint Giovanni Gualberto had walked unscathed through the fire, before a huge crowd, to prove that his opponents were simonists. The signory, on papal instructions, seized Savonarola and tortured him to get a confession; one day, he was put to the rack fourteen times. The orders from the pope were ‘to put Savonarola to death were he even another John the Baptist’. These orders were carried out. Together with two of his disciples, he was hanged and then burned on the Piazza della Signoria, just where the false hair and profane pictures and lewd books had gone up in the Bonfire of Vanities.

Savonarola had written
canzoni,
not all of a pious nature, to be sung to the tunes of the ribald carnival songs. Earlier, during the fourteenth century, the Franciscan religious movement had filled the town with music. The mendicant friars sang in the streets and squares, like the itinerant minstrels and jugglers who collected in Pian de’ Giullari, or Merry Andrews’ Heights, just outside the city. In the Franciscan church of Santa Croce, there was a great music school, which also gave lessons in rhetoric, fencing, and dancing; both secular and sacred music were taught. Across the city, in Santa Maria Novella, the Dominicans had a rival school offering the same curriculum. The word
note (nota)
in music had been coined by Guido, a Florentine monk, in the eleventh century. The amorous songs of the Tuscans—
canzoni, ballate,
catches, and villanelles—which derived from the troubadour songs of Provence and from the minstrelsy of Frederick II’s Swabian court in Sicily, were condemned, as
ars nuova,
in a papal bull issued by John XXII in 1322. The most celebrated composer of
ars nuova
was the blind Florentine Francesco Landino, whom the Venetians crowned with laurel when he came to their city to play on his little hand organ with its eight gilded pipes. Lorenzo de’ Medici, at carnival time, used to go through the streets at the head of a throng of dancers, singing the licentious ballads he had written. And as early as 1283, a prosperous year for Florence, the Rossi family gave an entertainment for 1,000 people, all dressed in white, that lasted two months. The young Medicis, Giuliano and Lorenzo, gave famous jousts in Piazza Santa Croce.

According to Machiavelli, the youth, in Lorenzo’s period, spent its whole time on gambling and women, ‘their principal aim being how to appear splendid in apparel and attain a crafty shrewdness in discourse’. Such a
giovanotto,
though already thirty-two years old, must have seemed Francesco de’ Pazzi, one of the main figures in the Pazzi Conspiracy, still unmarried, a dandy, vain, supercilious, jealous, and passionate. The story of the conspiracy, or, rather, of Francesco’s odd behaviour, gives a glimpse of the ambivalent, almost amorous savagery that lay beneath a surface of studied craft. The plan was to murder the two young Medicis, Lorenzo and his brother, the beautiful Giuliano, one Sunday at high mass in the Duomo; the signal for the assassins to strike was to be the priest’s taking the Host. To make sure that Giuliano, who had not been feeling well, would go to mass that morning, Francesco de’ Pazzi and a fellow-conspirator went to the Medici Palace to get him, just as, today, two young Florentines, on their way to the Duomo, might stop to pick up a friend. Giuliano came along willingly, and all the way to the Cathedral, the two murderers, to allay any possible suspicion of them, diverted him with a flow of jokes and lively talk. Francesco kept pressing him to himself and fondling him, so as to be certain that he was not wearing a cuirass under his clothes. These endearments seem to have been rather excessive, since they were remarked on afterward. Then in the Duomo the plan went askew. The Pazzis and their friends succeeded in killing Giuliano, but Lorenzo they only wounded, and he fought his way to the Old Sacristy, on the right of the altar, where he secured himself behind barred doors. Meanwhile, the Pazzis left the Duomo and found that the city had turned against them. The others fled in all directions, but Francesco, instead, simply went home and was found lying on his bed, naked and bleeding from a deep wound in the leg that he had given himself in the Duomo, stabbing this way and that in a murderous ecstasy. Just as he was, stark naked, they took him to Palazzo Vecchio and hanged him. He could not be induced to speak a syllable, says Machiavelli, ‘but regarding those around him with a steady look, he silently sighed’. The Pazzis, adds Machiavelli, were notorious for their pride.

The conduct of Lorenzino (‘Brutus’) de’ Medici towards Alessandro, the distant cousin he assassinated, was also very queer. He had been the young duke’s companion in every kind of debauchery and viciousness. They had gone to whorehouses together and invaded convents; Lorenzino had acted as a procurer of respectable married women for Alessandro. They were often seen riding two on a horse through the streets of Florence. The Florentines, in fact, looked on them as two of a kind—two degenerate thugs. When the deed was finally committed, Lorenzino was obliged to leave a note, in Latin, on the tyrant’s corpse, to explain that the crime had had a political motive.
‘Vincit amor patriae’,
the note said, but there were many who, knowing Lorenzino, could not be got to believe it. Dissimulation may have carried Lorenzino to bizarre extremes—dissimulation as an art in itself, a flamboyant theatrical mimicry beyond the call of necessity. Here again the Florentine plasticity seems evident. For an artistic people, feigning is a perilous business; the actor loses himself or, worse, finds himself in the part he assumes.

Dissembling, however, was a general Renaissance accomplishment and not particularly characteristic of Florence, where the native temperament was blunt and tersely outspoken:
‘Cosa fatta, capo ha.’
‘A thing once done has an end’—so Mosca de’ Lamberti, met by Dante in the eighth circle of hell among the Sowers of Discord, called for the murder of young Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti at the foot of Mars’ statue. Craft
(astuzia)
was highly valued, but this was closer to the financier’s astuteness or the merchant’s shrewdness than to the diplomat’s guile. With one exception (Lorenzo de’ Medici), the Florentines were never strong on diplomacy.

What is manifest in these two strange stories is a profound nervous instability. Judith and Holofernes was a favourite subject for Florentine art, but tyrannicide in practice, plainly, gave rise to mixed emotions. In this oligarchical society, where democracy used to break out, like the plague, every hundred years or so, the shifts in attitude towards public men, tyrants or benefactors, were like the sudden shifts of the wind during a great forest fire. Dante’s image for the Florentine body politic and its incessant changes is that of a sick man moving his position in bed. The mutability of opinion could drive a sensitive official to madness. In the time of Cosimo il Vecchio, a gonfalonier of justice was so much ridiculed by his colleagues for an unpopular proposal that he lost his mind and had to resign. It was not only the masses that veered back and forth. The individual person was liable to shifts of passion or lapses into barbarism, as though he constituted a mob in himself. All this is related to the phenomenon of conversion, which was so common in Florence as to suggest a local pathology, like the prevalence of goitre among mountain people. Intellectuals and artists were particularly susceptible. Savonarola’s converts included Pico della Mirandola, Fra Bartolomeo, and Lorenzo di Credi, who contributed their works to the Bonfire of Vanities, and, according to legend, Lorenzo de’ Medici himself.

Botticelli, some writers think, became a ‘Weeper’ (‘Piagnone’ was the hostile name applied to a follower of the Frate), though not till Savonarola had been martyred. In the London National Gallery, there is a ‘mystery picture’ of Botticelli’s known as ‘The Mystic Adoration’, which can be interpreted as an enigmatic allusion to the martyrdom and prophecies of the monk. Savonarola’s prophecies, incidentally, were, so to speak, rediscovered during the Siege of Florence; not only Sister Domenica, the wise woman, but various friars were employed by the signory to draw auguries from the Frate’s dark utterances.
‘Gigli con gigli dover fiorire’—
this saying of his, suddenly recalled, was taken to mean that the French alliance must be clung to (lilies to lilies), a very poor idea, when the terror of the Spanish power had already showed itself in the Sack of Rome. The signory and the people also kept reminding themselves that he had said that Florence would lose everything and yet be saved. In the light of this utterance, every catastrophe was looked on as a portent of final victory—the loss of Empoli, for instance. Having burned the friar, the Republic put all its reliance on him. They proclaimed Jesus Christ king of the Florentines, and the people really believed that the Sacred City, which had been called by Pope Boniface VIII ‘the fifth element’ and by Cardinal Peter Damien ‘a new Bethlehem’, would be saved by angels, arriving in armed bands from the sky.

Whether or not Botticelli, like Fra Bartolomeo and Lorenzo di Credi, actually became a
Piagnone
and repented, as Ammannati did later, his pagan nudes, the atmosphere of his late works is tense with revulsion. An interior struggle of some kind, typically Florentine, must have taken place in the soul of this artist, who was evidently, in any case, a man of vast contradictions, since his workshop, from which so many languid, dreamy Virgins issued, was a famous centre for rough practical jokes and horseplay—the
burle
and
beffe fiorentine.
After the
‘Primavera’
and ‘The Birth of Venus’, a nervous, harsh, dry realism begins to tense his forms, still at first glance lissom and sweetly, voluptuously pensive in the Botticellian mode: the supple gold coils grow heavy and the drapery becomes burdensome, as though in a tedious charade. In 1480, for the church of Ognissanti, he painted a big angular fresco, in queer yellows and greys, of ‘St Augustine in His Study’, which reveals a dramatic sympathy with that proto-Calvinist saint. By the time of the little picture called ‘Calumny’ (1494; Savonarola was not burned till 1498), the metamorphosis is complete. A malign, cold ugliness stares out of the figures in this neo-classic composition, where an Unjust Judge, with ass’s ears, seated on a throne, is being advised by Ignorance and Suspicion, while Hatred leads on Calumny, who is bearing the torch of Truth and dragging along Innocence, a half-naked young man, by the hairs of his head. Calumny is attended by Fraud and Envy, who are twining roses in her brazen hair. Behind them comes Remorse, an old crone in black, and the Naked Truth, with long unbound fair locks, who, statue-like, raises her right hand, pointing to Heaven, in a gesture of faith. In the background, through the arches of a heavy frame of classic architecture, is seen a pale-green sea, recalling, like the figure of Truth, ‘The Birth of Venus’. This back reference is like a vindictive recoil on the earlier, arcadian Botticelli; ‘Calumny’ is Arcadia turned violent and paranoid.