Sidney Chambers and The Forgiveness of Sins (42 page)

‘This tells you all you need to know about vanity and beauty in the Renaissance,’ she said. ‘At first sight, it’s all about volume and detail, poise and majesty.’

She pointed out the miniaturistic description of Sforza’s jewels; the wrinkles, moles and blemishes on Federico’s olive-coloured skin. ‘As in all portraits of the duke, the viewer only sees his left profile; a sword blow earlier in his life had cost him his right eye and the bridge of his nose.’

‘So he is only ever seen from the one side?’

‘In portraiture. Although, curiously, the duke was praised for his aquiline nose. Piero stresses this characteristic to give him an eagle-like appearance, because that’s the classical symbol of authority.’

‘That’s one way of explaining away a big nose,’ Sir William laughed.

Amanda ignored him. ‘There’s also something particularly moving about the portrait of his wife, Battista. It was painted after she died of pneumonia. If you look carefully, you can see that her blanched features and expressionless face are rather like a death mask. The strong flow of light almost diminishes her features. She is already absent.’

Sidney walked around the painting. ‘Extraordinary. Once you know something it changes the way in which you look at a work of art.’

‘And so these two paintings,’ Hildegard asked, ‘are a memorial to their marriage?’

‘They are both idealised portraits. Battista Sforza had nine children but here the white pearls symbolise purity and chastity, the blonde hair nobility. This is meant to be a portrait of a woman at her most magnificent. She is made permanent in paint. Her beauty will not fade, while her husband lives to fight another day; and he certainly battled on.’

She explained that there was a theory that Federico da Montefeltro had been behind the Pazzi conspiracy. He had six hundred troops waiting outside the city to move in as soon as the Medici brothers were killed. But they only managed to get rid of one of them, the crowd turned on them, and they bungled their escape, unable to get out of a room with a hidden latch.

‘The hidden latch!’ Hildegard smiled. ‘It makes me think of one of your escapades, Sidney.’

‘I am glad that the Church of England is a rather more peaceful institution. We tend not to go round murdering each other.’

‘That is not entirely true,’ Amanda interrupted, remembering the Patrick Harland murders that had taken place only four years previously.

‘These are double-sided portraits, I think?’ Hildegard asked, changing the subject. On the reverse of each painting were two paintings showing the protagonists ‘in triumph’.

‘This is a rare example of husband and wife being seen as partners in a joint endeavour to bring authority, art and culture to their subjects,’ Amanda explained.

‘Even if it takes murder to do so?’ Sir William asked.

‘As I think we have discussed, in the Renaissance death was considered a necessary correlative to beauty.’

‘Morality is often something of an afterthought,’ Sidney observed.

Amanda smiled. ‘Although sometimes the rich find it easier to afford than the poor.’

‘Which is why they should be better at it,’ Sidney snapped. He was puzzled by his mood. Despite the beauty of his surroundings, he found it curiously disconcerting. The art was almost too good to be true. What was it saying about humanity, and how much was the Renaissance culpable of creating the myth of individual rather than collective achievement? Was this the beginning of the desire for individual fame and recognition that contradicted Christian humility and shared responsibility; licensing the modern notion of ambition and selfish aspiration?

On the way out they met the small, and rather sweaty, Head of Security, Nico Tardelli. Francesca’s father greeted them all warmly. Sidney could not imagine how a man who looked as he did had produced such a beautiful daughter. It made him wonder all the more what her mother was like.

‘Do the family know everyone?’ he asked Timothy Jeffers.

‘I think they run their own little mafia. As a result, Francesca’s a very useful housekeeper to have.’

‘And beautiful too.’

‘I try not to think too much about that.’

‘That must be quite difficult.’

‘It isn’t easy, Sidney, but I have to acknowledge both that she’s out of my league and that she’s too young. Furthermore, she already has a boyfriend.’

‘And she’s keen on him?’

‘Actually, I don’t think so.’

‘There you are then.’

‘Her family will have to approve whoever she ends up with. In the meantime I will probably find a delightfully stout Englishwoman with an eccentric hobby. Something like beagling.’

‘Really, Tim. You don’t have to live up to expectations. You can always surprise people.’

‘I suppose you did.’

‘And I’m very happy. A foreign wife has its advantages.’

‘Oh, Sidney, don’t tempt me.’

Over the next few days the temperature dropped, the wind gusted in fits, the rain set about the city, and the waters of the Arno steadily began to rise. The tour party visited the Michelangelo sculptures in the Medici Chapel, the Fra Angelico murals in San Marco, and climbed the four hundred and sixty-three steps into Brunelleschi’s great cathedral dome, holding on to the handrails as staircase after staircase, their treads worn down at the centre by the footsteps of visitors over the centuries, opened up before them.

‘When will we get there?’ Anna asked, even though Sidney was carrying her up through the narrow passageways. ‘I’m frightened.’

They passed chambers full of old statuary, angels and medallions. They listened to the wind, looked out through the roundels in the drum that showed they were already higher than the rooftops, and finally emerged beneath the lantern to see the city stretch out before them: Giotto’s bell tower, the church of San Lorenzo with its similar dome, the Bargello, the Badia Fiorentina, and Santa Croce.

It was midday. The rain and wind picked up as church bells rang throughout the city and the family sheltered inside before the descent. Sidney reflected on the fact that they had found protection so close to danger; that at one moment a man could be inside, shielded from the elements, with half an orb of heaven above him; and yet, within a few paces, he could be on the precipice of suicide or murder.

Once they were back in the nave, they sat down to rest. Sidney looked at Domenico di Michelino’s painting of Dante with the
Divina Commedia
and lit a candle for his family and his parishioners, thinking particularly of all those who had died that year. Hildegard and Anna took out their colouring pencils and began to copy a fresco of the English
condottiere
Sir John Hawkwood on horseback. As they did so, a couple stopped and smiled to observe the blonde hair and pale skin of both mother and daughter, quoting Pope Gregory:
non angli sed angeli
.

They were sheltered and at ease. One day they would look back on this moment as the happiest time of their holiday.

The flood arrived at three thirty on the Saturday morning when most people were asleep. By seven o’clock the situation was critical. The rising water had submerged the supporting arches of the Ponte Vecchio, spurting through leaks and crevices in the parapets flanking the river. Now at the full, the Arno carried a deluge of water, mud, rubbish and uprooted trees, pouring into the quarters of Bellariva and Gavinana, San Niccolò and Santa Croce: every part of the city that was not on a hill.

Electricity, gas, water and telephone supplies broke off in turn. The river poured into basements and swept into heating plants, releasing tanks of fuel oil that merged with the water to leave greasy black lines on the walls of buildings. By eight thirty the flood had reached the historical centre, overturning parked cars, ripping through the canvas-covered stalls in the flea market, and tore into the basement and conservation areas of the Uffizi Gallery.

Sidney, Hildegard and Anna awoke to find that the flood had carried away rubbish bins, empty crates and sections of doorways. Cars that had been parked in the streets below turned three hundred and sixty degrees and swirled off downstream, pulling down traffic signs in their wake. Couples kept to the sides of the road, holding on to walls for support against the torrent as they made their way towards higher ground.

On the south side, in the Oltrarno, water rushed past San Jacopo sopr’Arno, Palazzo Guicciardini, the Palazzo Pitti, Santo Spirito and Borgo San Frediano. The city had become an immense lake. The bridges connecting the two sides were impassable. Police in hooded raincoats directed people away from the danger areas without being able to predict when the waters would abate. A twelve-year-old boy gave his grandmother a piggyback. A No Through Road sign (
Permanente
) was torn from its holdings. Thousands of people were stranded on rooftops, waiting, often in vain, for rescue from helicopters. One elderly woman lost her grip and fell to her death.

In time, the floodwaters reached up to fifteen feet, into the arches of the cloisters in Santa Croce. The statue of Dante was still visible, the poet looking like he might be contemplating a swim on a chilly day. Sidney remembered the lines from
Inferno
:

Dost thou not hear the pity of his plaint?

Dost thou not see the death that combats him

Beside that flood, where ocean has no vaunt?

He went to help Timothy Jeffers protect the English Church, working with a queue of elderly volunteers, pumping out water, putting up new flood boards, and moving valuables into the organ loft.

Amanda had made her way to the Uffizi.

Hildegard and Anna spent the day in the top of the vicarage, unable to go out, hardly daring to look out of the window and down to the flooded streets below. They played
Topfschlagen
to pass the time, in which Anna was blindfolded and given a wooden spoon in order to find a cooking pot hidden in the room. Then they sang German folk songs and nursery rhymes:

Hoppe hoppe Reiter

wenn er fällt, dann schreit er,

fällt er in den Teich,

find’t ihn keiner gleich.

It only stopped raining towards evening, the flood abating in the night. Rescue and repair would have to wait until the following day when there was a chance to assess the wreckage, the first grey light revealing upturned cars, shattered buildings, breached bridges and roads blocked by uprooted trees. Buses and cars had been abandoned. The streets alongside the river were as muddy as a wartime battlefield.

Hundreds of artworks were damaged or destroyed: Paolo Uccello’s
Creation and Fall
at Santa Maria Novella, Sandro Botticelli’s
Saint Augustine
and Domenico Ghirlandaio’s
Saint Jerome
at the Church of Ognissanti. The greatest loss was the
Crucifixion
by Giovanni Cimabue in the Santa Croce Museum.

Once Sidney had helped with the clean-up of St Mark’s he made his way to the Uffizi to join Amanda, ferrying paintings to the Limonaia in the Boboli Gardens where they could dry out. The Piero double portrait they had seen only a few days before was mercifully intact. Sidney was instructed to put the paintings to one side ready for the conservator’s inspection.

Sir William and Lady Victoria Etherington were doing their bit too, with Lydia Huxley from the British Institute and a number of ex-patriates Sidney remembered from the church service he had taken the previous Sunday. The operation was methodical and surprisingly well organised given the scale of the calamity. It was similar to the preparations for a funeral, Sidney thought. As long as people were given something specific to do they were calm.

By the end of the day Sidney was exhausted. When he finally arrived home for supper he noticed Francesca helping Tim remove his wellington boots. They were laughing at how stuck they were, and if they would ever come off.

He could hear Hildegard singing once more to their daughter upstairs:

‘Hoppe hoppe, Reiter,

wenn er fällt, dann schreit er;

fällt er in den Sumpf,

dann macht der Reiter . . . Plumps!’

He had never paid much attention to this bedtime ritual but now he tried to follow the words, translating them as his wife sang.

Bumpety bump, rider,

If he falls, then he cries out;

If he falls in a swamp

The rider goes plop!

Sidney was silently grateful that none of them had fallen in the swamp. How fragile everything was.

After an early-morning inspection of his church, and satisfied that there was no further damage, the Reverend Tim Jeffers settled down to breakfast with his guests. It consisted of cornflakes (which his sister brought over in batches twice a year; the English vicar could no more do without them than he could live without Marmite), toast with apricot jam, and coffee with hot milk.

He read his newspaper,
II Giorno
, and observed how one writer, Carlo Coccioli, had lost his faith as a result of the flood.