The Stones of Florence (10 page)

The marble gnomon and the bronze armillary sphere or astrolabe that are fixed, like ornaments, at either end of the black-and-white voluted central façade of Santa Maria Novella belong to a later period; they were ordered by Cosimo I from his court astronomer, Ignazio Danti, a Dominican friar. Lorenzo de’ Medici had a clock that told the hours of the day, the motions of the sun and the planets, the eclipses, and the signs of the zodiac. The Florentines have a twin predilection for astronomy and the science of optics. The lantern of a dome, on which so much care was expended by the Florentine Renaissance architects, was known as the
‘oculus’,
or eye of the church. Legend says that eyeglasses were invented by a Florentine, Salvino degli Armati, and Florence is still a world centre of optical instruments. Armillary spheres, showing the rings of the planets, were very popular in Renaissance Florence, being valued both for beauty and usefulness. The Museum of the History of Science has a remarkable collection of them, as well as a fine collection of optical instruments. There are still three observatories in Florence, and the first solar tower in the world was built here in the nineteenth century.

In the early Renaissance, astronomical science, the observation of the heavenly bodies, linked this farsighted mountain people with the great navigators. Toscanelli, who taught Brunelleschi, also advised Columbus and the king of Portugal. For the Florentine artist in his studio, the charting of the rules of linear perspective made possible voyages of exploration in a fictive space that were not less marvellous than those voyages of discovery just being undertaken by navigators of real geography. Many of the landscapes of the
quattrocento,
especially Baldovinetti’s, have the character of aerial maps; the bare Tuscan hills once depicted by Giotto and his followers are now shown furrowed by husbandry. This maplike quality is what distinguishes Florentine landscape (Fra Angelico, Benozzo Gozzoli, Piero della Francesca) from the idealized Venetian work that followed it. The Florentine school was equipped, as it were, with a surveyor’s rod. These cartographers of the studio showed the same scientific bent, the same concern for accuracy in their conquest of space as the actual map-makers of the age. Later, Leonardo worked as a chief engineer for Cesare Borgia, and his maps are famous. The New World took its name, though somewhat fortuitously, from a Florentine traveller, Amerigo Vespucci, who was an agent of the Medici Bank.

Handy helps to the painter for achieving correctness were offered by Leon Battista Alberti, the
quattrocento
architect, in his little treatise
Della Pittura.
He recommended the use of a thin veil or net, to section the object to be painted, like transparent ruled paper. Leonardo used the net and so did Dürer. The invention of the camera obscura or a device resembling it is given by some writers to Alberti. Besides these scientific aids, Alberti also furnished prescriptions for subject matter, to be drawn from the antique: the Death of Meleager, for example, the Immolation of Iphigenia, the Calumny of Apelles. And he advised the use of a ‘commentator’ or chorus figure in a painting: ‘someone who admonishes and points out to us what is happening there or beckons with his hand for us to see’. A painting should have ‘copiousness and variety’, that is, it should contain ‘old, young, maidens, women, youths, young boys, fowls, small dogs, birds, horses, sheep, buildings, provinces.... There ought to be some nude and others part nude and part clothed in the painting. But always make use of shame and modesty. The parts of the body that are ugly to see and, in the same way, others that give little pleasure should be covered with draperies, a few fronds, or the hand.’

Alberti was a gentleman, descended from a powerful noble family of imperialists and enemies of Florence whose stronghold had been Prato, many centuries before his time. As a gentleman, he was a spokesman for ‘correctness’ and a well-bred neo-classicism which was incongruous, on the whole, with the place-spirit and genius of his native city. He tried, unsuccessfully, to introduce the classic orders into Florentine architecture, which resisted subjugation to a book of rules. The tyranny of form he sought to impose was more attractive to the rulers of Mantua and Rimini—the Gonzaga and the Malatesta—for whom he did his best architectural work, in a rich neoclassical style. As a literary man, he perpetrated a fraud—a Latin comedy called
Philodoxius,
which he passed off as the work of ‘Lepidus’, an ancient Roman poet.

For the pioneer artists, his contemporaries, the new spatial science was something more than a device for attaining academic propriety or correct proportions in a painting. It was an eerie marvel, a mystery, partaking of the uncanny; to a nature like Uccello’s, it had all the charm of magic. The vanishing point, towards which all the lines of a painting race to converge, as if bent on their own annihilation, exercised a spell like that of the ever-disappearing horizon towards which Columbus sailed with his mutinous crew—the brink of the world, as it was then thought to be. The vanishing point, if contemplated steadily, can induce a feeling of metaphysical giddiness, for this point is precisely the centre at which the picture ought to disappear, a zero exerting on the ‘solid’ realities of the canvas a potent attraction, as though it would suck the whole—old, young, maidens, women, small dogs, sheep, buildings, provinces—down the funnel of its own nothingness. That is, the very fulcrum on which the picture rests, the organizing principle of its apparent stability, is at the same time the site at which the picture dissolves. Uccello, fascinated by perspective, was the first ‘cracked’ artist of modern times.

He was born Paolo di Dono, and his people came from Pratovecchio, the seat of the fierce Guidi family high in the Casentino, and was called Uccello, Vasari says, which means ‘bird’, because of the birds and beasts that abounded in his paintings. Vasari describes him as ‘a shy man ... solitary, strange, melancholy, and poor’. His house was ‘always full of painted representations of birds, cats, dogs, and every sort of strange animal of which he could get drawings, as he was too poor to have the living creatures themselves’. His scientific studies, it was thought, had unhinged him. When he was engrossed in some difficult or impossible question of perspective, he would shut himself up for weeks and months in his house, not letting himself be seen. One of his few friends was the mathematician Manetti, with whom he liked to discuss Euclid. His other friend, Donatello, told him he was wasting his time making drawings of
mazzocchi
(tyres made of wood or straw, worn by men of the
quattrocento
as a sort of scaffolding for a cloth head-dress) with projecting points and bosses, and spheres with seventy-two facets, all shown in perspective, from different angles. ‘Such things,’ said Donatello, ‘are only useful for workers in intarsia.’ In his old age, Uccello, too crankish to get commissions, became utterly destitute and had to apply to the state for tax relief. ‘I am old and without means of livelihood,’ he wrote on his tax return. ‘My wife is sick and I am unable to work any more.’

The perspective lessons of Brunelleschi, which had inspired Masaccio to create figures and scenes of monumental majesty, larger than life and stiller, were taken to heart by Uccello in a quite different way. For him, perspective opened up vistas of haunted fantasy, and the vanishing point figured as the ‘eye’ of a storm or the centre of a whirlpool, in which forms were tossed about, pulled by hidden currents obeying mathematical laws. Two scientific strains oddly combine in Uccello, one mathematical, the other descriptive and classificatory. He was one of those solitary artists who delight in the minute particulars of botany and zoology, and for him the human parade appeared, as if under a magnifying glass, as a collection of specimens, comparable to the specimens of botany—leaves and flowers and grasses—or to those zoological curiosities that were collected in Books of Beasts.

A freak of Nature or ‘rare bird’ himself, he was drawn to the whimsicalities and aberrations of the natural world, which comprised man in its scope; the armour of a mounted knight appeared to him in the same light as the hard shell of an insect, and the plumes of a helmet like the waving tail or combed forelock of a horse. He seems to have been hypnotized by headgear, particularly by the
mazzocchi.
Curious shapes and outlines caught his attention, and he was fond of showing the human face in profile, with a hard bright eye like the alert eye of a bird. He was ‘simple’, says Vasari, and tells the story of how he produced a camel when a chameleon had been ordered, having been misled by the similarity of names. Bright ribbon attracted him, like a magpie, and one of his most charming works is simply a rosette of pleated ribbon in clear green, blue, and white, done in mosaic on a vault of St Mark’s atrium in Venice. The marvellous precision with which it is made, in perspective, like a dazzling coloured snow crystal overhead, creates a strange, joyous impression, as though the Florentine Renaissance, that glorious Nativity, had been announced to the backward oriental city in the epiphany of a star in the sky.

The series of long panels called ‘The Rout of San Romano’, which used to be framed together as a single extended scene in the bedroom of Lorenzo de’ Medici, in Cosimo’s palace on Via Cavour, and which is now divided—one part being in the Uffizi, one in the National Gallery of London, and one in the Louvre—has often been compared to a child’s fantasy of a chivalric battle, in which the horses are rocking horses and the visored knights are dolls. It is also rather like one of those modern science fantasies in which warriors from outer space, dressed in space suits, like weird deep-sea divers, for their interplanetary travel, invade the unsuspecting earth.

This battle, which takes place in a magical forest of perpendiculars made by lances, spears, trumpets, crossbows, halberds, waving plumes, has a curious wooden quality: a static effect is achieved in the midst of hyperactivity, and this calls into question the meaning of so much panache and slaughter. The fallen horses appear as hobbyhorses, dethroned and broken, or as beribboned, bejewelled stuffed chargers with the sawdust about to run out of them. A fallen knight in the London panel is only a small empty suit of armour lying, junked, on the ground. In the Uffizi panel, which shows the battle at its height, the knights are blind, armoured figures, plumed in black and red; piped on by puffing boy trumpeters, they go into combat looking like unseeing robots in their plating of steel. A pink horse is kicking furiously in the foreground, and a radiant white horse in brilliant blue trappings is rearing as its rider tumbles, speared by the long, horizontal thrust of a lance; behind the rearing horse is seen the intent, pale profile of a foot soldier. In contrast to the vivid colour of the horses, the fallen weapons on the ground make a lifeless lattice-pattern of crossed poles and staves. The foot soldiers, except for the pale one in profile, with their crossbows have loutish expressions painted on their dunce faces; the trumpeters blow themselves cross-eyed. Only the round eyes of the toy horses start with living fear. On a distant hill, which seems another world patterned with green hedgerows, rabbits, deer, and greyhounds are frisking about, and a hunt is evidently in progress, while, on the left, the trumpeters are stepping out of an arcadian grove of orange trees. These panels seem less like paintings than like cartoons for a tapestry of war.

In the Duomo, painted by Uccello in trompe l’œil perspective, is the feigned equestrian statue of Sir John Hawkwood, the famous English
condottiere,
leader of the White Company, who fought in the service of the Republic. The story of this fresco is usually cited as an example of Florentine avarice: the Florentines, they say, having promised Hawkwood a monument, diddled him after his death by ordering a mere painted imitation of a solid tomb. More likely it is an example of that Florentine hatred of private glory which grudged, so long as the Republic lasted, the marble symbol of an enduring fame to an individual citizen or foreign employee of the state. In any case, the original memorial, which was done by Agnolo Gaddi, a late Gothic painter of the school that followed Giotto, must have been in some way unsatisfactory, and Uccello was ordered to do a new one, which was at least intended to create the
illusion
of a three-dimensional tomb. Uccello, with his perspective obsession, gave more attention in this monument to imitating the effects of sculpture than to making a portrait of the dead knight, who appears as a sort of ghostly chessman, greenish pale and melancholy, on his greenish pale horse (which was copied, it is thought, from the great bronze horses of the Hellenistic period that the painter had seen on St Mark’s balcony in Venice). This too is a cartoon.

From Vasari’s account, Uccello would certainly seem to have been a zoophile, living in reclusion from men, absorbed in arcane studies, and surrounded by a litter of painted animals, like some crazy hermit—‘out of touch with reality’, as modern cant would phrase it. This might account for the queer, brilliant puppetry of ‘The Rout of San Romano’, the work for which he is best known outside Florence, and for the ghostly chessman on the wall of the Duomo. Yet the fact is that the battles of the Renaissance, as Machiavelli complained, were precisely sham battles between companies of mercenary troops, in which only the horses, panicking, suffered heavy casualties. The
Historie Fiorentine
of Machiavelli gives a close description of the battle of Anghiari, against Niccolò Piccinino and the Milanese (this was the battle in which the Florentines are recorded as carrying statuary and which Leonardo painted in an unfinished fresco, long ago ruined and frescoed over by Vasari, for the Palazzo della Signoria); in that ‘famous victory’, fighting lasted four hours and raged back and forth across a bridge near Borgo San Sepolcro, yet only one man was killed, ‘and he, not from wounds inflicted by hostile weapons or any honourable means, but, having fallen from his horse, was trampled to death’. The chief gain was in the capture of horses, banners, and carriages. Nor was this battle exceptional. ‘Combatants,’ says Machiavelli, ‘then engaged with little danger, being nearly all mounted, covered with armour and preserved from death whenever they chose to surrender. There was no need for risking their lives. While they continued to fight, their armour defended them, and when they could resist no longer, they surrendered and were safe.’