Life Embitters (51 page)

Ràfols was both the oldest and the tallest in the group. He was eclectic when it came to painting. His inclinations led him to seek out wistful eyes or a cheek able to inspire mystical tenderness and defend him from the morbid, erotic, digestive pomposity of the painters of the Bologna school. At the same time, nevertheless, he spoke of French impressionism and the humility of painters in that school so warmly, he revealed how far he had understood the state of grace which realism can attain – the fascinating beauty of reality.

In matters relating to life and politics the Mexican was an out-and-out
revolutionary, but he had an academic taste in art that was fairly haphazard, if reasonably well grounded. He was no devotee of what he called academic prints and thus believed Rafael was cold and unfeeling. On the other hand, he was bowled over by Michelangelo. He liked to see art display the sweat and tautness produced by straining effort, tensed muscles and twisted mouths. He liked large symbolic figures, showy, dramatic foreshortening, and what he called social art. One of his idols was El Greco, not the familiar realist El Greco of the large portraits, but the restrained glow of El Greco suffused with purple incandescence. In any case, that gentleman reckoned that religion (what he called superstition) weighed too heavily in European art. He leant towards a lay, social Michelangelo.

Llimona and I always understood each other, although he is more Gothic and stylized and I’m more realist and plebeian. In Italy we always championed the
champagne brut
of the art of Umbria and Tuscany. When we arrived in Florence we immediately felt the connection and parallels that existed between our country’s past which peaked spiritually with the Gothic, and Tuscany’s culminating moment. When Barcelona and Florence reached their high point in art, they were two trading states able to give stone an unadorned, incisive elegance. So we were enthralled by the process we noted in the history of Italian painting: the process that Cimabue begins and Rafael d’Urbino concludes. We were fascinated by the initial stage, particularly as represented by the sequence of Cimabue, Giotto, Simone Martini, Paolo Uccello, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Benozzo Gozzoli, Ghirlandaio, and Sandro Botticelli. We set out to recreate
in situ
, in our turn, the path that leads from the primitives of Umbria, hovering between discreet mystic fervor and the heat of local, feudal passion, to Benozzo Gozzoli’s pink, springtime, gracious youthfulness and Botticelli’s supremely elegant luminous
sensuality. We spent hour after unforgettable hour refining our understanding of the landscapes and figures we met in the course of our explorations.

We found the second part of that path, from Botticelli to Rafael, much less interesting. Initially, painting shifts from south to north, from Siena to Florence, to be precise. Then follows an opposite path: moves from north to south, from Florence, via Arezzo, Siena, Orvieto, Perugia, to Rome, where it enjoys its stellar moment, enjoys a radiant solstice in Rafael and, subsequently, goes into ineluctable decline. As painting shifts down the peninsula, it becomes more perfect, but at the same time grows cold and icy. Consider Siena’s position in this to and fro. In Siena the source of Italian art, one sees the ascendant phase, the wonders of the Tuscan primitives, especially Simone Martini, who is simply unforgettable. However, two centuries later, one can also observe the decline in the work of Pinturicchio, housed in the cathedral sacristy, a painter who is colder and stiffer than ice. That doesn’t mean we don’t champion Signorelli from Orvieto, El Perugino from Perugia and Rafael. But in the second part of this process one discerns elements of conscious, elective affinity, elements that must be contrived, because they have lost the fascination and grace of our discoveries on the first part of our explorations. We thus followed the basic itinerary in the history of Italian painting: an itinerary that marches towards perfection and that perfection – lethally – leads to burnout and is killed off in clever formalism. Such seems to be the fate of the works created by the human mind.

We were much less intensely drawn to things after Rafael. There is a significant drop in temperature. Two great branches spread out from Rafael: the schools of Lombardy and Bologna. Our eager, petulant, melancholy youthfulness made it impossible for us to grasp the voluptuous treasures abounding at the solstice of Italian painting. Voluptuousness requires a degree of mature experience. Later, the Venetians – Titian’s realism – seemed
to bring us back to authenticity, to what our real tastes and inclinations favored.

When we first set foot in Rome, it was a huge disappointment. Our spirits sagged. We felt removed from genuine life and surrounded by a formal art full of grandiose but indifferent rhetorical exercises that lacked a warm pulse. Everything seemed too solemn, rich, and spectacular. We understood someone had to do what Michelangelo did to make the world complete. However, the baroque, with the ghastly Bernini, gave us a dose of unbearable sweetness – a kind of saturation on sickly pastries and sticky, insoluble saccharine. Youth can be shortsighted and dismissive, but time has changed nothing in this respect: I have never been able to stomach the baroque that I consider to be the essence of all that is superfluous and clichéd, pretentious, over-blown and over-stretched. Its fake passion exasperates me. Its theatricality exhausts me. Its emptiness depresses me. Its cardboard
verismo
provokes hilarity and sarcasm. The baroque is the only form of artistic exploration that is indifferent to human feeling. If the baroque hadn’t existed, Europe would be more substantial, more serious; its spirit would be lighter. The baroque was a wrong turning that helped to distort and mystify the svelte, genuine grace of Mediterranean humanity.

Rome, that is, the superficial but oppressive Rome that hits you in a first impression, panicked us. We became immensely nostalgic for Florence. Of course, there was much to see in Rome, but where would we find Florence’s crystalline purity? When you are slightly familiar with Florence, that urban mass is what the spirit will always long for. So our first stay in Rome was short-lived: we fled to Naples, not for any intrinsically Neapolitan reason, but with the Greek museum in Naples in mind. We were fortunate: when you are familiar with Verrochio and Donatello, the Greeks and Greek sculpture dazzle most. Freed from the intolerable burden of Rome’s baroque, we
felt a delicious lightness of being in the Greek rooms in the Naples museum – though the wind in southern Italy creates an oppressive, obsessive melancholy with a pathetic pornographic flavor.

In the course of our first trip to Italy, the focus of which was Florence, we thus tried to concentrate on the primitives in Umbria and the school of Tuscany. We were especially interested in the artists we called the most western, the least troubled by the influence of the Etruscans, to follow Ruskin’s terminology in this regard. Llimona was very fond of Ruskin’s essays on Italy. Ràfol was too. I wasn’t so keen. I found him too much of an aesthete, too prone to explain things by their exterior, always trying to emphasize intentions that only existed in the subjective mind of the observer and that might be brilliant but were invented rather than based on reality. Such things deserve an explanation – if I could only find one.

We brought the usual mental baggage to Italy: I mean we had digested the limited number of ideas written in the European languages used to popularize the country. The bibliography on Italy in French, English, and German is quite remarkable.

The French have never felt been at all drawn to what they called in blanket fashion the Tuscan school. President de Brosses describes it as dry, worn out, and leathery, and all his sentiments are drawn towards the ample bosoms and hips of the Bologna school. Fair enough, there’s no shortage of them! Stendhal follows faithfully in the footsteps of the distinguished magistrate. Stendhal scorned “the modern burghers of Florence” and regretted that Florentines lacked passion. “They believe,” he wrote, “that passion is a failing.” They have always had the same criteria in the Villa Medicis in Rome: painting begins with Raphael. Before Raphael, painting is archaeological,
naturally, not excluding the existence of sporadic works, like the Uccellos and Ghirlandaios in the Louvre!

The English were never so radical. The English are never as narrow-minded and dogmatic as the French. They are freer and more open, more intuitive and broad-minded. The rationalist French often rub against real facts that can’t be dodged and have to reach slippery, tacky compromises.

Curiously enough, however, the painters of the Tuscan school that English travelers have most helped to popularize were precisely those that appealed least to us. The Etruscan element that Ruskin observed in their painting, about which he writes at length in his book
Mornings in Florence
, an element we considered perhaps rather too subjectively as some scholar’s antiquarian afterthought, distanced us rather from Fra Filippo Lippi the son of Fra Filippino, also a remarkable artist, and from part of the work of Ghirlandaio and Sandro Botticelli. In a way, Botticelli is the high point in this painting tradition, just as Raphael is both the general conclusion and beginning of a fatal decline.

When we noted an exaggerated penchant for decorative detail, for the coldly rhetorical, for overwrought arabesques, products of an effort of will rather than spontaneous wit, we imagined an oriental influence must be present. Oriental divans didn’t stop us from sleeping, and we weren’t of the opinion that Goethe’s poems written in that spirit had increased in charm. We liked them, but preferred the local beds, even though they were rather hard and perhaps too high. Goethe – if I’m allowed this parenthesis – only stayed in Florence for one night on his two-year tour of Italy. A fact one finds impossible to explain today. Botticelli has something that evokes the English liking for decoration, a liking that seems to refer back constantly to Botticelli.

“Nevertheless,” we asked ourselves, “does a mythological-literary mentality necessarily help enrich an artistic tradition?” We thought not, despite the book by Bernard Berenson, who was living at the time on the outskirts of Florence and was then considered to be the most intelligent connoisseur, the high priest of these shifts in ancient Italian painting. Berenson was mentioned in intellectual circles in Florence as a man with a legendary halo. He had, I suspect, more defenders than detractors and was seen as a man who had re-valued Italian art that nationalists opposed to the increasingly decisive influence of Paris in such crucial matters. Berenson had introduced the notion of “tactile values” into the history of art – values that stimulate the imagination and encourage it to feel the volume of objects, to weigh them up and measure distances. Berenson was a contemporary of pragmatists Bergson and William James, who asserted that the discovery of nature is a practical operation performed by our minds. The artist reproduces the external world by giving shape to forms that are above all tactile values and which ideate imaginary sensations. In addition to these tactile values, movement is the essential element in a work of art. However, movement within a work of art doesn’t entail the reproduction of the movement of an object from one place to another, but the energy giving life to an arabesque, to the drawing of every detail and the whole, the overall dynamic; in a word, the creation of a style. One should add proportion, spatial composition, and spiritual meaning to these impulses within a work.

This is how Berenson provisionally separates the decorative from what he calls the illustrative. The decorative includes all of those first elements. Its purpose is not to represent but to present, it is indifferent to content, it strives to eliminate what is ugly, grotesque, incongruous, and distorting … On the other hand, the illustrative is representation. “As independent and autonomous art, illustration expresses in terms of a visual nature, the aspirations,
ecstasies, dreams from the heart, that become poetry if one translates them into musical words, if they are expressed in a melody of rhythmic sounds.” This “illustration” shouldn’t be confused with literary explanations or the artist. The art historian distrusts all commentaries as the artist’s intentions. The artist, as a creator, thinks only of his craft, of procedures and proportions.

A work of art is important inasmuch as it contains the decorative and the illustrative in parallel. Moreover, it must continue a spiritual meaning; otherwise, a work of art is a mere object. A decorator, in any case, can never outrival the illustrator. There exists a hierarchy of genres. It is that very spiritual meaning that gives a work of art its greatness allowing it to be released from matter and transformed into an exaltation of life.

In reality,
decoration
and
illustration
are words the historian uses to explain himself. That is, they are critical fictions. Form and color are inseparable, but very few are able to conceive of this unity. The public is mostly interested in the anecdotal, or else form, and form as such, has fewer admirers and generally leaves people cold. Total art is humanist art, the one that nurtures our every faculty.

These ideas of Bernard Berenson were being debated in intellectual circles in Florence in that year of 1921. My impression is that they influenced the so-called avant-garde art of the moment – with the exception, of course, of Marinetti and the futurists who only thought of taking Paris by storm and acted like a kind of demented, lunatic French mob. Berenson’s analysis had an undeniable impact on serious avant-garde artists like Chirico and Soffici and helped these artists to remain within a primitive, vulgar volumetric structuralism that was, in any case, incompatible with the unavoidable, deliquescent sirens of French art.

I also read Berenson’s books at the time, but as I was very slow on the uptake in my youthful years – always supposing other factors didn’t intervene – I didn’t understand a word. My reading of Berenson perhaps even deepened my state of confusion. Berenson’s lexis was so new and grating – decorators, illustrators … – that it was hard to digest. This short summary of the ideas of this historian is one I have made now; it would have been beyond me at the time. The truth is we never probed beneath the surface of such speculations, despite the fascination existing in the general milieu in Florence for a legendary figure, involved in the biggest deals of the time in terms of old works of art. The Italian art market was still focused on the great art collections owned by multi-millionaires in the United States. These deals were orchestrated by an extraordinary Englishman, the biggest contemporary art dealer, ennobled by MacDonald as Lord Duveen. Berenson was the undoubted connoisseur.