The Stones of Florence (19 page)

This, in all its details, is the puritan picture par excellence—cold, declamatory, programmatic, without any of the fantasy of the northern ‘temptations’ of Bosch, for example, where the devil, at least, is fertile. Botticelli was the pet painter of the Medici, a family in whose character puritanism combined or alternated with animal sensuality and coldness with geniality. Cosimo il Vecchio was cold, crafty, and ascetic; he knew how to wait, and this feline quality reappears in Cosimo I and the young Catherine de’ Medici, the power-stalkers of the family. Old Cosimo’s son, Giovanni, on the other hand, was a sybarite who lived for the moment and died of overeating. Lorenzo the Magnificent was ‘incredibly devoted to the indulgence of an amorous passion’, as Roscoe, his eighteenth-century biographer, puts it; his sexuality was uncontrollable, a perpetual bullish rut. Three Medici were attractive physically: the beautiful Giuliano and his son, handsome Pope Clement, and Cardinal Ippolito, who was painted by Titian in Hungarian dress. Lorenzo, with his straight black hair, long thin upper lip, hawk nose, and swarthy complexion, is a curious physical specimen, like some Sioux chief, even in his portraits, which are said to flatter him. He had very weak myopic eyes, a harsh unpleasant voice, and no sense of smell; like all the Medici, he suffered from gout. His father, called Piero the Gouty, was crippled all his life by the disease. Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, the father of Catherine de’ Medici, died of syphilis.

Gout, a long pawky upper lip, and a talent for arts and letters ran in the family. Lorenzo, Giuliano, Piero di Lorenzo, and Cardinal Ippolito all wrote verses. Ippolito did a translation of the second book of the
Aeneid
that went through several editions. Pope Leo X was a connoisseur and a patron of letters. Lorenzo was more than a dilettante. His love poems disclose a true poet, and his bucolics, already mentioned, have a note of exquisite freshness and delicate pathos that recalls Propertius and Tibullus. His poem on autumn, for example, describes a late bird hiding in the cypress of some sunny hill, where the olive tree shows now green, now white, according to the wind; and he goes on to picture, with that characteristic Florentine tenderness which smiles a little at what it sees, a pair of migratory birds travelling south, with their tired family—the parents pointing out Nereids, Tritons, and other monsters in the sea below to entertain the children on the long trip to Africa. The family remains the basic unit for the Florentines, who are a large family themselves, with many poor relations nesting in humble quarters. Lorenzo’s son, Piero, who was ignominiously chased out of the city, wrote a touching patriotic sonnet to Florence, in which he likens himself, a homesick exile, to a bird born with a native flight and call. This was poor Piero’s only achievement; his lack of political capacity is aptly symbolized by his ordering a statue made of snow from Michelangelo during one of the rare Florentine snowfalls. The melting snowman, as Roscoe notices, might have stood for the dissolving Medici power.

But Cosimo I, who restored the dynasty in its cadet branch after the fall of the Republic and the murder of Alessandro, had the coldness and catlike craft of the tribe. His father, Giovanni of the Black Bands, to judge by Bandinelli’s ugly statue outside San Lorenzo, resembled a blinking wildcat or mountain lion. Cosimo took after him physically but inherited none of his bravery and gallant rashness. A tame, cruel house-mouser (when he wanted to poison Piero Strozzi, he had the poisons tried out on the prisoners in the Bargello and he had Lorenzino murdered by his agents in Venice with a poisoned dagger), he was a relentless taxer and ferocious puritan. During his gloomy reign, harsh laws against sodomy and bestiality were passed; he insisted on a chaste court, setting himself up as an example by his chronic fidelity to his consort, Eleanor of Toledo. He did not trust the Florentines and relied on his wife’s Spanish train—her uncle, brother of the Viceroy of Naples, and various churchmen—for the backstairs work of administration. The historian Segni (not a Medici partisan) wrote of him: ‘It must be said of this prince, that though he was a great lover of Divine worship and temperate in the pleasures of Venus, to tell the truth, he was still more temperate in giving audiences and showing himself human and pleasant to any Florentine.’ He spent unparalleled sums, Segni continues, on ‘colonels, spies, Spaniards, and women to serve Madame’. And he kept increasing the number of guards on himself and spies on others.

It was this chaste and cautious ruler, nonetheless, who formed the collection of suggestive sculpture by Cellini and Bandinelli, now to be found on the third floor of the Bargello: a Leda, two Ganymedes, a Narcissus, and a Hyacinth. And a fearful story is told of a scene witnessed by the court painter Vasari, in a room in Palazzo Vecchio, which the Grand Duke had commissioned him to fresco. One hot summer day, Vasari was standing on a scaffold, painting the ceiling, when he saw Cosimo’s daughter, Isabella, come into the room, lie down on the bed, and finally go to sleep. While the girl was sleeping, Duke Cosimo suddenly entered the room, and, in a moment, Vasari heard a terrible cry come from the bed. After that, as the story puts it, ‘he looked no more’, but he was obliged to stay concealed on the scaffold, ‘feeling no more inclination to paint that day’.

This tale, which is recorded by a later diarist and may possibly be an invention, has the ring of truth in its very succinctness. The Florentine heat, the oppressive atmosphere of Palazzo Vecchio, with its stifling upper rooms and yards of dull fresco, the cry piercing the stillness of the after-lunch stupor, carry absolute conviction, especially to anyone familiar with the Florentine summers, and the final sentence echoes, in a morbid
cinquecento
way, the great line of Dante, telling of Paolo and Francesca and their fleshly sin:
‘Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante’
(‘That day we read no more’)—in the Book of Lancelot.

The spoor of the Grand Duke Cosimo can still be followed down the passageway that was made for him, possibly by Vasari, from the hot rooms and corridors of the Uffizi, across the top part of Ponte Vecchio, over the church of Santa Felicita and the housetops of Via Guicciardini, to Palazzo Pitti, which he bought and had enlarged for his wife, who disliked the Old Palace. This aerial version of an underground corridor (making it possible for Cosimo to go from his offices, the Uffizi, to Palazzo Pitti without descending into the streets) preserves a claustral image of the man and his reign—spies and Spaniards, secrecy, a catlike tread. It is in fact what we would call a cat-walk, royally roofed over.

Cosimo’s laws against sodomy and bestiality, so oddly violated, at least in spirit, by his sculpture collection, were aimed to correct a Florentine habit against which Savonarola had thundered. Homosexuality or bisexuality has always been very common in Florence. It seems to have run, like the gout, in the Medici family; the effeminacy of the last Medicis, in fact, their uncontrollable aversion to women, caused the extinction of the line; heirs grew fewer and weaker till finally none at all could be got from fat Gian Gastone. In France, it cropped out in Catherine’s son, Henry III, who appeared at the fête at Chenonceaux, in honour of his accession, dressed in women’s clothes. The
locus classicus,
however, was Lorenzo the Magnificent’s table, where the young Michelangelo met Poliziano and which was known for its ‘Greek’ tendencies; the love of boys must have been taken as much for granted there, in Palazzo Medici, as it was in the ‘Symposium’.

This proclivity was found everywhere in the Renaissance, but in Florence it was deeply ingrown and far from ‘unnatural’. The medieval hermits in the Casentino battled with flail and psalter against the ‘impure spirits’ that tempted them, in the shape of boys. As an old man, Saint Romualdo, founder of the white-robed Camaldolese order, had to do penance for sodomy at Styria, near Fonte Avellana, and, in the next generation, Saint Giovanni Gualberto was contending against the same sin in the Vallombrosan forest. These two virile reformers, Baptists of the forests and the mountain streams, were the local epic heroes. Saint Romualdo actually came from the Romagna, but he perched his hermitage high in the dark, thick beech woods of the Tuscan Apennines. The hermitage and the great Camaldolese monastery, which was once the seat of the Academy started by Lorenzo de’ Medici, Leon Battista Alberti, and Cristoforo Landino for Platonic philosophical discussions, are still pilgrimage centres, and near the hermitage is a chapel with a stone block inside that bears the imprint, so they say, of the saint’s body—the devil had given the saint a tremendous push, to cast him into a ravine, but the vigorous Romualdo had saved himself by clinging to the massy rock.

‘
Michelangelo non avrebbe potuto peccare di più col cesello,
’ remarked a Florentine, thoughtfully, contemplating the loose, soft white curves of the ‘Bacchus’ in the Bargello. ‘Michelangelo could not have sinned more with the chisel.’ In any virile society, boys become objects of desire, and the passionate, intellectual Florentines were nearly as susceptible as the Athenians. The ‘sin’ is found not only in Michelangelo and Leonardo, the most publicized instances, but in Donatello, too, and Verrocchio, not to mention Pontormo and the Mannerists. No scandal attaches to Donatello’s life (though a Freudian might find it suspicious that he lived with his mother), and his fearless San Giorgio is the acme of manly virtue. His ‘David’, on the other hand, wearing nothing but a pair of fancy polished tall boots and a girlish bonnet, is a transvestite’s and fetishist’s dream of alluring ambiguity. This brazen statue, indeed, is more enticing than anything conceived by Michelangelo or Leonardo, for this is not an androgyne, plump and flabby, but a provocative coquette of a boy. There is something of the same allure in Verrocchio’s bronze ‘David’, with its ambiguous, Leonardoesque smile.

In the Florentine
quattrocento,
the well-turned, sturdy male leg and buttock cased in the tight hose of the day is always painted with a flourish; this leg is seen from all angles, in profile, in demi-profile, full on, and, perhaps most often, from the rear or slightly turned, so that the beauty of the calf can be shown. Standing at rest, idly, or striding across a piazza, these elastic, boyish pairs of legs, from Masolino to Botticelli, are among the chief vaunts of Florentine painting; they belong, almost always, to bystanders, who pause conversing in the street while a sacred scene is being enacted, or to casual passers-by who cross the stage of a miracle, unknowing, with a quick, preoccupied step. All the springy vitality of the terrestrial is implicit in these buoyant legs; Mercury, god of travel and business, has them, bare and wonderfully drawn, in the
‘Primavera’.
The beauty of the hands in Florentine painting has often been remarked on; these lovely hands are generally feminine. The legs are the resilient male principle of action.

The boy of fashion was glorified here in Florence as nowhere else in the world, and for the ordinary, mundane Florentine, lust might light as well on a lovely boy as on a young woman. A businessman to whom Michelangelo complained of a servant he had sent him replied that, in Michelangelo’s place, he would at least have taken the boy to bed with him, since he was good-looking, if not good for anything else. The businessman was simply being practical. In the same common-sense way, Segni tells the story of Filippo Strozzi, the anti-Medicean banker, who was sent by the Republic to Pisa to stand guard over the two young Medici bastards, Ippolito and Alessandro, prisoners or hostages in the signory’s custody. Instead of doing his duty, Filippo Strozzi went off alone with Ippolito to a fort near Leghorn, and before long the two boys escaped. He was blamed, as Segni tells it, for showing too much indulgence to Ippolito, ‘some said out of a licentious love for him, who was beautiful to look at and in the bloom of youth’. But the censure was not severe, for the weakness was regarded as natural. Later, defeated by Cosimo I and imprisoned in the Fortezza da Basso (which he had been obliged to pay for building), the banker showed great firmness under torture; it was he who reminded himself of Cato’s example and committed suicide.

A very different type was the waspish, jealous Poliziano, tutor to Lorenzo’s children and resident humanist in the Medici household, who died, according to his enemies, of a fit of amorous fever while playing a love song on the lute in praise of one of his pupils. The humanists of this period, however, in Florence and elsewhere, were a special category of persons, whose disagreeable traits were due, no doubt, to the parasitic position they occupied in the households of the great and to the fact, also, that they were continually defending themselves against the attacks of the clergy. Backbiting and quarrelling were their main occupation; many, or most, were effete, and all were charged with being so. Poliziano was intensely jealous of Lorenzo’s wife, Clarice Orsini, whom he complained of over and over by letter to Lorenzo, saying that she interfered between him and his pupils; he finally left the house in a huff. The humanists of this generation, talented, envious, easily wounded, had something in them of the modern interior decorator; taste was their special province, and they were bent on doing over the whole house of Italian civilization from top to bottom in a uniform classic style. Poliziano was a real scholar and, from time to time, a poet, but the eternal
‘hic est’s
and
‘ut visum est’s
and
‘tandem’s
of his correspondence are ludicrous, and the sterility of his attitudes can be seen in his ecstasies over a popular preacher; he was enthralled by the ‘artistic grace’ of his gestures, the ‘music of his voice’, the ‘elegance of his diction’, and so on. He wrote a poem, in Italian, on Giuliano’s tournament in Santa Croce, and a Latin commentary on the Pazzi Conspiracy.

The youth and beauty of Florence were better served by Benozzo Gozzoli, the common workman-painter from San Gimignano, a lazy sort of fellow when not put on his mettle, who had studied with Fra Angelico and did some of his liveliest work for the chapel in Palazzo Medici. The pageant picture was very rare in Florence, and this series of frescoes by Benozzo is one of the few celebrations of an historical spectacle. Called ‘The Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem’, it represents the visit of the Emperor John Paleologus VII in 1439,on the occasion of the Council of Florence, which was the last attempt to heal the schism between the Eastern and the Western churches. This East-West summit meeting is converted by Benozzo into a species of delightful wallpaper, with a background pattern of Benozzo’s famous cypresses, palms, and parasol pines. Winding down the Apennines, on horses and mules, the Eastern cortège has arrived on a pleasant plain, where the tall stone-grey tree trunks, with their plumed or tufted tops, are standing like erect spears or flagstaffs on a parade ground to honour the potentates’ approach; meanwhile, the Medici have ridden out to meet them with a vast train of celebrities.