The Stones of Florence (14 page)

The tyrant’s concern with power made a natural kinship between him and the Florentine engineers, who were also interested in power—the master-power of man over Nature. Michelangelo’s close relations with four different popes, starting with Julius II, the fighting Della Rovere, and the story that Leonardo died in the arms of Francis I of France testify to something deeper than patronage; these were cases of elective affinities. Pope Clement VII (Giulio de’ Medici) confessed that whenever Michelangelo came to see him, he, the pope, made haste to sit down and to invite the sculptor to do likewise, because, if he were not quick about it, Michelangelo would take a seat anyway, without asking permission.

This lack of deference to the pope did not proceed from insolence. Like most Florentines, today and in the past, Michelangelo had no ‘side’. The habit of equality with princes came out of a certain simplicity and rough, outspoken address, fostered by public assemblies, by commerce, and by the absence of a court. There was something of Benjamin Franklin in Michelangelo at the papal audiences. The boundless conceit and ambition of the Florentines was based on a feeling of ‘natural’ superiority, which required no outer polish, and Michelangelo, who liked to leave some roughness on a finished statue, to show the mark of the sharp tools he had used on it, in the same way left some roughness on his speech and manners, to show the mark of Nature, which had formed him in a certain mould. When Clement VII was still a cardinal, Michelangelo wrote him, dryly: ‘Now if the Pope is issuing Briefs licensing people to steal I beg your Most Reverend Lordship to get one for me, since I am more in need of it than they are.’ ‘They’ was the Chapter of the Duomo ,a group of clerics with whom Michelangelo was dickering for some land.

The Florentine attitude towards antiquity was the same as towards popes and princes. The Florentines felt themselves to be the equals of the ancients and were on democratic terms with them—that is, on terms of rivalry and competition. When Brunelleschi and Donatello took measurements in Rome of ancient temples and statuary, this was not for the purpose of copying them but to learn how the old artists had done it, what their principles had been. Imitation of the antique, such as Alberti proposed, was inconsonant with this kind of curiosity, as of one craftsman watching another to observe his method. In literature the Florentines,
e.g.
, Poliziano, succumbed quite early to the classicizing rage, but in art and architecture Florence, though intensely classical in its own way, never showed the reverence for antiquity that was felt elsewhere; that was why Alberti had such small success with his ‘orders’.

The position of frank rivalry and competition taken by the Florentines towards the ancient world was established remarkably early. When the Duomo was ordered, in 1296, from Arnolfo di Cambio, to replace the old church of Santa Reparata, a proclamation explained the citizens’ requirements. ‘The Florentine Republic, soaring ever above the conception of the most competent judges, desires that an edifice shall be constructed so magnificent in its height and beauty that it shall surpass anything of its kind produced in the times of their greatest power by the Greeks and the Romans.’ The intention of surpassing standards held to be fixed and eternal amounted almost to blasphemy or
hubris;
to modern ears, this very tall order has an ‘American’ twang: so a millionaire might command his architect to build him something bigger and better than the Parthenon.

The Florentine spirit was averse to any notion of a fixed hierarchy, whether imposed by pope or emperor or by force of habit. Even Dante had his own seating arrangements, so to speak, worked out for the next world, whereby, for instance, he put his old grammar teacher, Donato, in paradise, and he shows himself to be conscious, also, of the notion of progress and its corollary, obsolescence, in the arts. ‘Cimabue thought he had the field to himself,’ he says in the
Purgatorio,
‘but now the word is Giotto, who has put him in the shade.’ Each artist set himself to compete not only with his immediate rivals but with all previous standards of excellence. An absolute equality and simultaneity was presumed to exist, as it were, at the starting line, between the dead and the living, and no standard could impose itself except the standard revealed in each work as it unfolded its nature. None of the great artists of Florence, except the first Della Robbias and the two Lippis and Ghirlandaio, if he is considered great, belonged to one of those family firms like Bellini & Sons, the Vivarini Brothers, the Tintorettos, the Da Pontes from Bassano, which were common in Venice and the Veneto. In Florence, each man strove, if he had genius, to stand alone. Something of the same sort happened in fashion. In the fourteenth century, says Burckhardt, the Florentines stopped following the mode, and every man dressed to suit himself.

Arnolfo’s Duomo does not surpass the Parthenon; nevertheless, it is a very remarkable building. Bigness has always been one of the forms that beauty can take, and the Renaissance was more simply conscious of this than sophisticated people are today. ‘Let me tell you how beautiful the Duomo is,’ writes Vasari, and what follows is an account of its measurements. The scale of an effort was the measure of its sublimity; the public, running its eye over the sum of measurements, contemplated a feat of daring. In daring, the Florentines excelled; that is why their architecture and their sculpture and much of their painting have such a virile character.

The Duomo, outside, still astonishes by its bulk, which is altogether out of proportion with the narrow streets that lead up to it. It sits in the centre of Florence like a great hump of a snowy mountain deposited by some natural force, and it is, in fact, a kind of man-made mountain rising from the plain of the city and vying with the mountain of Fiesole, which can be seen in the distance. Unlike St Peter’s in Rome, which is cleverly prepared for by colonnades, fountains, and an obelisk, the Duomo of Florence is stumbled on like an irreducible fact in the midst of shops,
pasticcerie,
and a wild cat’s cradle of motor traffic. It startles by its size and also by its gaiety—the spread of its flouncing apse and tribune in their Tuscan marble dress, dark green from Prato, pure white from Carrara, pink from the Maremma. It is like a mountain but it is also like a bellying circus tent or festive marquee. Together with the Baptistery and Giotto’s pretty bell tower, it constitutes a joyous surprise in the severe, dun, civic city, and indeed, throughout Tuscany there is always that characteristic contrast between the stone dread of politics and the marbled gaiety of churches.

Inside, Arnolfo’s Duomo is very noble—sturdy, tall, grave, with great stone pillars rising like oaks from the floor to uphold massive arches so full they can hardly be called pointed. This splendid stone hall does not soar, like a Gothic cathedral; the upward thrust is broken by a strict, narrow iron gallery running around the whole interior, outlining the form. A few memorial busts; Uccello’s clock; the two caparisoned knights on horseback in trompe l’œil; round, deep eyes of windows, set with large-paned stained glass, high in the thick walls; a small, sculptured bishop, blessing; a few faded images on gold backgrounds; a worn fresco of Dante; two statues of the prophet Isaiah; a holy-water stoup—that is almost all there is in this quiet, long room until it swells out into the vast octagonal tribune, surrounded by dim, almost dark chapels and topped by Brunelleschi’s dome. There is nothing here but the essentials of shelter and support and the essentials of worship: pillars, arches, ribbing, walls, light, holy water, remembrance of the dead, a clock that still tells time.

The daring of Arnolfo, who was the first of the great Florentine master builders, lay not only in the scale of his undertaking but in the resolute stressing of essentials—what the Italians call the
membratura,
or frame of the building, a term that is drawn from anatomy
(i.e.,
from the human frame). Michelangelo, the last of the great builders in Arnolfo’s tradition, considered architecture to be related to anatomy, and the Florentine Duomo, with its pronounced
membratura,
is like a building in the nude, showing its muscles and sinews and the structure of bone underneath. On the outside, it is a dazzling mountain, cased in the native marbles of Tuscany, and, inside, it is a man, erect. Arnolfo was a sculptor, too, and the sculptures he made for the old façade (now replaced by a Victorian façade) and interior of the Cathedral (they can be seen in the Museum of the Works of the Duomo) have an odd family resemblance to the interior of the Duomo itself, as though saints, Madonnas, bishops, and building were all one breed of frontiersman—tall, sturdy, impassive.

Arnolfo had got as far as the tribune, as far, some think, as the drum of the cupola, when he died. In the magnitude of his ambition, he left a problem for those who followed him that remained insoluble for more than a hundred years. The problem was how to put a roof over the enormous expanse of the tribune. No precedent existed, for no dome of comparable size had been raised since ancient times and the methods used by the ancients were a mystery. Experts were invited to contribute ideas. Someone proposed that a great mound of earth stuffed with small coins
(quattrini)
should be piled up in the tribune; the dome could be constructed on this base. When it was finished, the people of Florence should be called in to hunt for the
quattrini
in the mound of earth, which in this way would be quickly demolished, leaving the dome standing. The principal merit of this bizarre plan was that it promised a supply of almost free labour—ant labour, one might say. The Republic, ever soaring but ever mindful of expenses, had got round the problem of paying Arnolfo by the expedient of simply remitting his taxes in return for his work.

In the year 1418 a competition for the dome was announced to which masters from all over Italy were invited. Such competitions for public works were a regular feature of Florentine life, and the young Filippo Brunelleschi, not long before, had lost a competition in sculpture to Lorenzo Ghiberti, whose model for the second set of bronze Baptistery doors had been accepted over his. Disappointed—so the story is told—he had gone off to Rome, with Donatello, and made himself an architect, knowing that in this field he could surpass everyone. He remained there several years, earning his living as a goldsmith, while he examined Roman buildings, with particular attention to the Pantheon and its dome. When the competition was announced, he came back to Florence, announcing that he had found a way of raising the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore without centring—a thing everyone believed to be impossible.

Faced, like Columbus, with an assembly of doubters, he anticipated Columbus with the egg trick. ‘He proposed,’ says Vasari’s version, ‘to all the masters, foreigners and compatriots, that he who could make an egg stand upright on a piece of smooth marble should be appointed to build the cupola, since, in doing that, his genius would be made manifest. They took an egg accordingly, and all those masters did their best to make it stand upright, but none discovered the method of doing so. Wherefore, Filippo, being told that he might make it stand himself, took it daintily into his hand, gave the end of it a blow on the plane of marble and made it stand upright.’ He vaulted the huge tribune by means of a double cupola, one shell resting on another inside it and thus distributing the weight—an idea he had probably got from the Pantheon.

This dome of Brunelleschi’s, besides being a wonder, was extremely practical in all its details. It had gutters for rain, little ducts or openings to reduce wind pressure, iron hooks inside for scaffolding so that frescoes could be painted if they were ever wanted, light in the
ballatoio,
or gallery, that goes up to the top so that no one would stumble in the dark, and iron treads to give a footing in the steeper parts of the climb. While it was being built, it even had temporary restaurants and wineshops provided by Brunelleschi for the masons, so that they could work all day without having to make the long trip down and up again at lunch time. Brunelleschi had thought of everything.

In short, the dome was a marvel in every respect, and Michelangelo, when he was called on to do the dome of St Peter’s, paid his respects to Brunelleschi’s in a rhyming couplet:

‘Io farò la sorella,

Già più gran ma non più bella.
’

(‘I am going to make its sister,

Bigger, yes, but not more beautiful.’)

Vasari said that it dared competition with the heavens. ‘This structure rears itself to such an elevation that the hills around Florence do not appear to equal it.’ Lightning frequently struck it, and this was taken as a sign that the heavens were envious. When the people of Florence learned that a lantern, on Brunelleschi’s design though not begun until after his death, was about to be loaded onto the cupola, they took alarm and called this ‘tempting God’.

Michelangelo was right, when he said that the dome of St Peter’s would not be more beautiful. Brunelleschi’s, moreover, was the
first.
Michelangelo could be blunt and sarcastic about his fellow-architects and sculptors. He dismissed Baccio d’Agnolo’s model for the façade of San Lorenzo as ‘a child’s plaything’, and of the same architect’s outside gallery on the Duomo he said that it was ‘a cage for crickets’ (crickets in little cages, like the ones he meant, are still sold in the Cascine on Ascension Day, a spring festival corresponding to the old Roman Calends of May and called in Florence the ‘Cricket’s Feast’). But he was very much aware of real greatness (he called Ghiberti’s second set of Baptistery doors the ‘Gates of Paradise’, and to Donatello’s ‘San Giorgio’ he said ‘March!’), and his architecture is always conscious of Brunelleschi, long dead before he was born, whom he could not surpass but only exceed: bigger, yes, but not more beautiful. The portentous staging of the Medici Tombs, the staircase of the Laurentian Library, the dome of St Peter’s are Brunelleschi, only more so. The heavy consoles and corbels of the Laurentian Library vestibule and staircase, with their strong, deep indentations, contrast of light and shade, their
pietra serena
and white plaster, are Brunelleschi, underscored or played
fortissimo.
Brunelleschi, like Arnolfo, had stressed the
membratura
of a building; in Michelangelo, there appears a false
membratura,
a fictive ensemble of windows, supporting pillars, brackets, and so on—in short, a display of muscle.