Dark Water_ Flood And Redemption In The City Of Masterpieces Part 1

Dark Water.

Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces.

by Robert Clark.

I grandi fiumi sono l'immagine del tempo, Crudele e impersonale. Osservati da un ponte Dichiarano la loro nullita inesorabile . . .The great rivers are the image of time, Cruel and impersonal. Observed from a bridge They declare their implacable nullity . . .

-EUGENIO MONTALE, "L'ARNO A ROVEZZANO"

Cimabue Crocifisso Crocifisso, c. 1288 (photographed before November 4, 1966) (ArtResource Inc.) (ArtResource Inc.) There is Florence and there is Firenze. Firenze is the place where the citizens of the capital of Tuscany live and work. Florence is the place where the rest of us come to look. Firenze goes back around two thousand years to the Romans and, at least in legend, the Etruscans. But Florence was founded in perhaps the early 1800s when expatriate French, English, Germans, and not a few Americans settled here to meditate on art and the locale-the genius of the place-that produced it. Over the next two centuries a considerable part of the rest of the world followed them for shorter visits-"visit" being derived from the Latin vistare vistare, "to go to see," and, further back, from videre videre, simply "to see"-in the form of what came to be called tourism. The Florentines are here, as they have always been, to live and work; to primp, boast, cajole, and make sardonic, acerbic asides; to count their money and h.o.a.rd their real estate, the stuff-la roba-in their attics and cellars, and their secrets. We are here for the view.

But it's so easy to miss so very much. The more you look, the less you see. If something is not after a fashion framed, hung on a wall, stood on a pedestal, monumentalized, encased by columns and architraves, boxed in marble, or dressed in architectural stone, it fizzles into background. If the conjunction of earth, water, and sky doesn't form a landscape-nature on exhibition-rather than mere land, they disappear, recede into the black hole, the gorga nera gorga nera, the underworld of the unseen.

For example, in late October 2005 I'd already been in Florence two months, gazing at art, gazing at the opaque screen of my laptop, before I noticed the plaque. I suppose we-Carrie, Andrew, and I-had settled into a routine. We were living on the Piazza del Carmine. At one end is the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, to which our elderly neighbor-known to us only as la Signora-shuffles off to ma.s.s each day. Within the church is the Brancacci Chapel and its frescoes by Masaccio. History's first art historian, a Florentine named Giorgio Vasari, called them la scuola del mondo la scuola del mondo, "the art school of the world," the essential work that every other Renaissance artist came to study, the spark that set off the fire. The image that most of us know best is the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the harrowed and weeping figures of Adam and Eve stoop-shouldered, clutching their genitals, the shame and the pity that launched the fallen world. You look at them and for a moment it seems that all that too began just here.

At the other end of the piazza is an enormous palazzo I'd heard belonged to the Ferragamo family, the shoe and fashion dynasty from Naples to whom it's said many things in Florence belong. Sometimes you can see into the central garden and its lemon grove through the gate. Once I saw a Labrador retriever gamboling among the trees. I've never seen anyone coming or going, but then Florence seemed to me very much about boundaries and privacy-secret and hidden things. That sense was abetted by the annoyingly narrow sidewalks upon which two people can scarcely pa.s.s each other without one of them having to step off the curb. The walls of the palazzi press right up against the street, fiercely rusticated, studded with ma.s.sive ring hitches and iron sconces for riders and torches that disappeared long ago. The walls ascend beyond your sight and inside the palazzi, I've heard, descend nearly as far in layers of cellars, tunnels, and strong rooms. You're not, of course, meant to see any of this. You're not even meant-so the unnavigable sidewalk seems to intend-to stop here, to consider it.

Between the church and the palazzo with the lemon grove-between the naked shame of Adam and Eve and the veiled upstart pride of the Ferragamos-is a cafe and bar called Dolce Vita. I'm told it was the chicest nightclub in Florence during the nineties and that, after a brief decline at the turn of the millennium, it's come back as il piu trendy il piu trendy place in the city. Unlike its unforthcoming neighbors, it spills outward into the piazza, past the jetty of the outdoor seating area, and, as the night ripens, onto the street, where the police are writing tickets for the double- and triple-parked Alfas, Mercedeses, Lamborghinis, and Ferraris. I've never stopped here-never mind gone inside-but I've pressed through the beautiful throng in the evenings and perhaps squeezed past an Italian celebrity, a soccer star, a Medici or Frescobaldi or, unbeknownst to me, a Ferragamo. place in the city. Unlike its unforthcoming neighbors, it spills outward into the piazza, past the jetty of the outdoor seating area, and, as the night ripens, onto the street, where the police are writing tickets for the double- and triple-parked Alfas, Mercedeses, Lamborghinis, and Ferraris. I've never stopped here-never mind gone inside-but I've pressed through the beautiful throng in the evenings and perhaps squeezed past an Italian celebrity, a soccer star, a Medici or Frescobaldi or, unbeknownst to me, a Ferragamo.

My life, rather more circ.u.mscribed, was across the street. Our apartment was on the second floor of what is called a palazzo-as is any large edifice built around a central cortile-but the building is scarcely grand. I suppose it's four or five hundred years old, and the stonework is pitted and frayed. A family of emigrants from somewhere in the Philippine archipelago lives across the cortile, and adjacent to them the multifloored apartment of the aristocratic owners ranges upward to a series of terraces. There's a crest over the door and I've caught a glimpse of the gold-framed paintings inside and the fusty, once elegant furniture that signals the presence of minor n.o.bility or old money in ebb. Then there's la Signora and us. I've never seen anyone else who lives here. In the cortile there is a heap of rubble and broken stucco. Every three or four weeks someone turns up and, unseen, hauls away a fraction of it. I suppose it will all be gone in a year or so.

I worked in the mornings in our living room and I could see la Signora trudge by, a scarf pulled over her head, through the window that looks out onto the common corridor between our apartments. Inevitably she was looking for her cat, who had wandered into the hall. Amore, tesoro. Vieni qua a Mama, Amore, tesoro. Vieni qua a Mama, she'd call, pushing her lips out from the stumps of her teeth as though in a kiss. I went down to the vestibule for the mail each day around eleven, and sorted through the bills-gas, electricity, water, school lunches-each of which would have to be paid in cash at the post office, signed and countersigned, stamped and stamped again. It was on one of those trips that I noticed, above the rank of ten mailboxes, an inscription: she'd call, pushing her lips out from the stumps of her teeth as though in a kiss. I went down to the vestibule for the mail each day around eleven, and sorted through the bills-gas, electricity, water, school lunches-each of which would have to be paid in cash at the post office, signed and countersigned, stamped and stamped again. It was on one of those trips that I noticed, above the rank of ten mailboxes, an inscription:

IL IV NOVEMBRE 1966.

L'ACQUA DELL'ARNO ARRIVO A QUEST'ALTEZZA

and beneath it a long red line. The Arno, it said, had reached this height on November 4, 1966.

It was carved in the same squarish, Roman script you see in other inscriptions on walls around the city. They usually seem to be quotations from Dante marking places where he perhaps saw Beatrice; where an eminent family or personage that he later met in Purgatory or, more likely, h.e.l.l once lived; or a simple stanza of his heroic melancholy, connected to nothing more than Florence, the glory and pity of it.

The line was well above my head, a good seven or so feet from the floor. I didn't make much of it. I knew about the flood. In Minnesota, where I grew up, we'd heard about it at the time, for weeks, in issue after issue of Life Life magazine. But there were other such markers around the city, recording not just the crest of the great 1966 flood but those of 1177, 1333, 1557, 1740, 1844, and 1864. I supposed there would, of course, be more floods. Florence proved-in its squabbling and treacheries, its beauties arising miraculously from its corruptions; in all that Dante recorded and that drove him into exile as Adam and Eve went into exile; and in his descent to h.e.l.l, circuit of Purgatory, and return-that what goes around comes around. magazine. But there were other such markers around the city, recording not just the crest of the great 1966 flood but those of 1177, 1333, 1557, 1740, 1844, and 1864. I supposed there would, of course, be more floods. Florence proved-in its squabbling and treacheries, its beauties arising miraculously from its corruptions; in all that Dante recorded and that drove him into exile as Adam and Eve went into exile; and in his descent to h.e.l.l, circuit of Purgatory, and return-that what goes around comes around.

Most afternoons I worked a little more and then Carrie or I picked up Andrew from school. I generally took him to a park, a large walled expanse that was once the cloistered garden of the church of Santa Maria del Carmine. Andrew played soccer with the Italian kids, and had learned to negotiate his place in the game with relative ease despite his still very basic Italian. What took time was setting up the part.i.ta part.i.ta in the first place, even though there were only a half dozen players. Everything had to be discussed, argued, and arbitrated, and it often seemed to me that these arrangements took longer than the game that eventually got played; nearly as long as it takes the kids' fractious elders in Rome to form a government. in the first place, even though there were only a half dozen players. Everything had to be discussed, argued, and arbitrated, and it often seemed to me that these arrangements took longer than the game that eventually got played; nearly as long as it takes the kids' fractious elders in Rome to form a government.

So I pa.s.sed much of the autumn sitting on a park bench while Andrew played, and in that time I managed to work my way through Il Piacere Il Piacere, the masterwork of the self-styled decadent and protofascist Gabriele d'Annunzio. The novel's argument seemed to be that a surfeit of beauty, of the aesthetic, must end in moral and spiritual bankruptcy. But who could believe that, in this city of masterpieces where I had Masaccio's Adam and Eve at one end of my block and the secret lemon grove of the Ferragamos at the other; where the light and trees even then, close on the November anniversary of that terrible flood, had scarcely begun to color?

In the evening we often ate at the Trattoria del Carmine, which is perhaps a hundred feet up the street from our door. Under an awning there is a little terrazza terrazza that extends into the piazza and there or sometimes inside we were accustomed to eat our that extends into the piazza and there or sometimes inside we were accustomed to eat our crostini crostini, ribollita ribollita, pollo arrosto pollo arrosto, and tagliata di manzo tagliata di manzo, pa.s.sing an hour or so with a bottle of Morellino di Scanso. It was always pretty much the same-in the mode of la Signora and her cat, of the daily mail, of the debris in the courtyard-and I liked this. So perhaps it was habit that blinded me. In any case, for more than two months I didn't notice the photograph hanging at rafter height in the trattoria's side dining room.

Maybe it didn't bear noticing: at most eleven by fourteen inches, it was faded, off kilter, and muddy in tone. The first thing that caught my attention was a car in the upper left-hand corner. The car was leaning crazily on top of something, and that something was, I made out, an awning, and the awning upon which this car was poised was the awning of this restaurant, the awning I'd been eating under for some weeks.

Of course, you couldn't see the restaurant. What you saw were the upper stories of the surrounding palazzi, cars floating, and, everywhere, water. It was only because I was inside this restaurant and had realized that the photograph must be connected to it in some way that I was able to place its locale, to frame the image it contained within a context. It was a photograph of the Piazza del Carmine, probably taken from the top of the church. You couldn't see most of the piazza. In the lower left-hand corner the frame ended at what must be the tall double doors to our palazzo, only the lintel visible above the water. It was up to the second-floor windows in some of the more modest buildings at the very head of the piazza. In the middle, where the cobbled pavement should have been-where police were just now beginning to issue the evening's parking tickets to the patrons of Dolce Vita-a car floated, apparently in a circle, lazily spinning as though hovering over a clogged drain.

The next morning when I collected the mail I looked at the plaque again, now with much more curiosity, even with a sort of anxious urgency. I tried to imagine myself standing before these mailboxes with a foot of water over my head, paddling back to the landing just below our door while cars drifted by outside, water lapped the feet of Masaccio's Adam and Eve, and carp from the river swam among the lemon trees.

Rereading the inscription, it struck me as odd that this seemingly public monument should be placed in the unfrequented privacy of our unprepossessing vestibule, apparently for the sole benefit of the two dozen or so tenants and their guests. Was the water especially high here? It was easy to establish from a guidebook that the flood crest in this part of Florence had indeed been high, but not as high as in, say, Santa Croce, where Cimabue's crucifix was inundated along with scores of other artistic, architectural, and bibliographic masterworks. It was the fate of those objects that had brought the flood of 1966 to the world's attention. It took place in in Firenze, in streets and quotidian s.p.a.ces as ordinary as the vestibule where I got my mail, and left thirty-three Firenze, in streets and quotidian s.p.a.ces as ordinary as the vestibule where I got my mail, and left thirty-three fiorentini fiorentini dead and five thousand families homeless. But in the eyes of the world it happened to this other city, to Florence, this visible efflorescence of transcendent beauty, of humanity's rarely seen better self, and nowhere more than here. More was at stake than a city, human habitations and enterprises, or even thirty-three human bodies. dead and five thousand families homeless. But in the eyes of the world it happened to this other city, to Florence, this visible efflorescence of transcendent beauty, of humanity's rarely seen better self, and nowhere more than here. More was at stake than a city, human habitations and enterprises, or even thirty-three human bodies.

Where, exactly, did this place called Florence exist? Surely not just in the imagination. Yet you could say many more people had visited Florence than had ever set foot in Firenze, even if only in their mind's eye. What was its history? Who were its founders? Could a river wash it away?

I remembered a little more. Everything I'd known about the flood came from Life Life magazine in 1966, when I was fourteen years old. And now it almost seems that everything I knew about the larger world then had been contained in pictures on those pages. Color television and live news reports by satellite scarcely existed, so insofar as you saw things that existed or happened far way, you saw them through photographs, and preeminently so in magazine in 1966, when I was fourteen years old. And now it almost seems that everything I knew about the larger world then had been contained in pictures on those pages. Color television and live news reports by satellite scarcely existed, so insofar as you saw things that existed or happened far way, you saw them through photographs, and preeminently so in Life. Life.

Perhaps that is why those years between, say, 1962 and 1968 seem to me not so much a story as a gallery, a series of two-dimensional images set in a line. If they have a theme it seems to be human goodness-or at least the desire to be good-stymied by tragedy, a world a little more optimistic about its prospects than today seems wise.

So there are s.p.a.ce launches and supersaturated colors and youth; Selma, Carnaby Street, World's Fairs (Seattle, New York, Montreal), and the Ho Chi Minh Trail; and then the great funerals-Kennedy, King, and Kennedy. There 's also a great deal of Italy, Italy being important for its historic art; for its contemporary design, fashion, film directors, and stars; and as home to a Catholic church that just then seemed in the vanguard of the era's idealism. Among the superfluity of photographs I remember from Life Life are shots of the papacy of John XXIII, the Second Vatican Council, Fellini, Gucci, and Loren; the funeral of Pope John and the accession of Pope Paul; the new pope's travels to America and the Near East; and then this flood. After that for me there was more television and moving images, less print, and-as my childhood ended, my youth became larger than anything in are shots of the papacy of John XXIII, the Second Vatican Council, Fellini, Gucci, and Loren; the funeral of Pope John and the accession of Pope Paul; the new pope's travels to America and the Near East; and then this flood. After that for me there was more television and moving images, less print, and-as my childhood ended, my youth became larger than anything in Life- Life-much, much more me. So I stopped seeing things in that particular way, and perhaps that is why those images seem to form a unique strand-especially those from Italy-almost as if they were all by the same hand. Which, in large part, it turned out they were.

Perhaps it was also then that I began to get out of the habit of seeing. seeing. And it seemed just now that it was looking rather than seeing that had blinded me to the flood, this brief but deadly collision between Florence and Firenze at the sly hands of the Arno. But it was the desire to look at art and beauty, at And it seemed just now that it was looking rather than seeing that had blinded me to the flood, this brief but deadly collision between Florence and Firenze at the sly hands of the Arno. But it was the desire to look at art and beauty, at images- images-and what else is there to call it but imaginary?-that had brought me here, perhaps impelled by those photographs from Life. Life. It was Florence that had taken me to the threshold of Firenze. So first I would look some more. I would try to make out what or who had created this imaginary place, Florence. I would look for the source of the Arno. It was Florence that had taken me to the threshold of Firenze. So first I would look some more. I would try to make out what or who had created this imaginary place, Florence. I would look for the source of the Arno.

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Lo Corpo mio gelato in su la foce trovo l'Archian rubesto;e quel sospinse nell'Arno, e sciolse al mio petto la croce Ch'i'fe' di me quando 'l dolor mi vinse: Voltommi per le ripe e per lo fondo, poi di sua preda m coperse e cinse.At its mouth the swollen Archiano found my frozen body and swept it down the Arno, and loosened the cross on my chest that I'd made of myself when overcome by the pain. It spun me past the banks and to the bottom Then covered and buried me among its prey.

-DANTE, PURGATORIO PURGATORIO V, 124129 V, 124129

Death Mask of Dante Alighieri, 1965 (Photograph by David Lees) (Photograph by David Lees)

1.

Here is where it begins.

A man cuts down a tree, a poplar. A second saws it into boards. The last man paints another man-or perhaps he thinks it is G.o.d he is painting-on the planks, bound together to form a cross, another kind of tree. And then comes the river, the deluge, and the end of the world.

How can this be explained? Who, except G.o.d himself, could know how everything touches every other thing, or even how just one thing touches another? Perhaps only by vision, which is itself a kind of art. So look for the river and perhaps you will find the art.

Here is where it begins.

Deep in the Casentine Forests, about twenty-five miles east of Florence, you walk steadily up the mountain from a place called Fonte dei Borbotto, "grumbling spring." There's a cross-there is always a cross-at the head of the trail and halfway along the ascent you reach a small lake called Gorga Nera, "black throat." The story has it that the lake is bottomless and connects underground all the way to the Tyrrhenian Sea, beyond Pisa where the Arno ends. Thunderous sounds are supposed to issue from the Gorga Nera-explosive thundercracks, shudders, and rumbles audible one hundred miles distant-that signal or, it is said, cause earthquakes, landslides, and, not least, floods.

After a mile there's a crossroads. The trail to the left goes up to the summit of Monte Falterona. In the winter there would be snow here, a glaze on the beech trees and escarpments of sandstone. And once, ten million years ago, all this was underwater. If you go straight there's a slight descent of perhaps one hundred feet and, after three-quarters of a mile, a fall of rocks against a slope. Amid them a stream of water seeps out. This is the Capo d'Arno, the head of the Arno. A plaque set in the rocks tells you so.

Or rather, Dante tells you. The plaque doesn't so much name this place as refer you to the poet. Like most everything regarding Florence and Tuscany, Dante is your guide, just as Virgil was his guide downward into h.e.l.l and upward toward Purgatory and Paradise. The plaque incorporates lines from the fourteenth canto of Purgatorio. Purgatorio. Two spirits ask Dante where he's from, but Dante is evasive: his home, he allows, is somewhere along a river that rises on Monte Falterona. One of the shades deduces it's the Arno, and the other wonders why Dante should be hiding its name. No wonder, the first ghost responds: everyone who lives along that river is mired in vice and sin, "flee[ing] virtue like a snake." It's only right that the name of this "miserable valley" should perish. Upriver, he adds, dirty pigs and slinking dogs feed, and as it swells into Florence "the d.a.m.ned and accursed ditch" supports wolves and foxes, or rather, we're given to understand, their human equivalents. Dante might indeed be reluctant to disclose this place as home. The river, like the city it sustains, is an object not of local pride but of shame. Dante has met these two ghosts on the level in Purgatory inhabited by those guilty of the sin of envy. As Florentines, they know whereof they speak. Two spirits ask Dante where he's from, but Dante is evasive: his home, he allows, is somewhere along a river that rises on Monte Falterona. One of the shades deduces it's the Arno, and the other wonders why Dante should be hiding its name. No wonder, the first ghost responds: everyone who lives along that river is mired in vice and sin, "flee[ing] virtue like a snake." It's only right that the name of this "miserable valley" should perish. Upriver, he adds, dirty pigs and slinking dogs feed, and as it swells into Florence "the d.a.m.ned and accursed ditch" supports wolves and foxes, or rather, we're given to understand, their human equivalents. Dante might indeed be reluctant to disclose this place as home. The river, like the city it sustains, is an object not of local pride but of shame. Dante has met these two ghosts on the level in Purgatory inhabited by those guilty of the sin of envy. As Florentines, they know whereof they speak.

In Dante's poem the source of the Arno is scarcely less unsavory than the sewer it widens to downstream: the owners of the land it springs from, the Guidi family, are burning in h.e.l.l as Dante has already reported in his first volume, Inferno. Inferno. Their particular crime-one that both virtuous and less virtuous Florentines could join together in decrying-was minting short-weighted gold florins, the international currency Florence gave the whole of Europe, the very essence of her glory, avarice, and greed. Their particular crime-one that both virtuous and less virtuous Florentines could join together in decrying-was minting short-weighted gold florins, the international currency Florence gave the whole of Europe, the very essence of her glory, avarice, and greed.

Less disreputably, the monks of Camaldoli have owned much of the watershed to the east of here for almost a thousand years. Outside their hermitage they groomed the trees and cleared away the debris from the forest floor until the woods were less a wilderness than a cloister, light shafting down among the columns of beech. And in the fourteenth century the building and works department of the cathedral of Florence, the Opera del Duomo, would take over the Conti Guidi woods. They would harvest-some say strip-timber from the mountain and the Casentine Forests to build and maintain the architects Arnolfo di Cambio and Filippo Brunelleschi's Duomo, the majestic and pitiful heart at the core of Florence.

All that aside, this place is dark and spectral, like the selva oscura selva oscura, the dark wood, where Dante finds himself at the beginning of his poem. It's cloudy and ash gray. Just beyond the Capo d'Arno is another gorga gorga called Lago degli Idoli, where an enormous cache of Etruscan votive statues was found in 1830. Uncanny and weird in themselves, it was stranger still that they should be found so far from any known human habitation. Then, as now, mad pigs, wild boars with their tusks, prowled the ground. Vipers slithered up the oaks and beeches and fell on unsuspecting charcoal makers, hunters, and loggers. People have seen this happen, just as they've heard the Gorga Nera bellow and groan. It rains serpents here. called Lago degli Idoli, where an enormous cache of Etruscan votive statues was found in 1830. Uncanny and weird in themselves, it was stranger still that they should be found so far from any known human habitation. Then, as now, mad pigs, wild boars with their tusks, prowled the ground. Vipers slithered up the oaks and beeches and fell on unsuspecting charcoal makers, hunters, and loggers. People have seen this happen, just as they've heard the Gorga Nera bellow and groan. It rains serpents here.

Here is where it begins.

A little southeast of Monte Falterona and the Capo d'Arno there is another mountain in the Casentine Forests called Monte Penna. On its flank, upslope from the Arno, is a forest pierced by rock outcroppings, fissures, and chasms called La Verna. Around 1220 its owner, Count Orlando of Chiusi, donated it as a retreat to the itinerant preacher and mystic Francis of a.s.sisi. Head of a monastic order now numbering thousands and of a charismatic movement that was sweeping Europe, Francis needed to be alone merely to pray, to feel himself in the company of Lady Poverty, to become once more a holy fool, G.o.d's juggler, his clown.

At the end of the summer of 1224, Francis ascended to La Verna for the last time. On the way up he and the handful of brothers accompanying him met a peasant with a donkey. The peasant thought he recognized him-the whole world had heard about Francis-and asked him if he was indeed Francis of a.s.sisi. Francis admitted that he was, and the peasant told him, "Be as good as folk say you are that they may not be deceived-that's my advice."

The others were appalled at the peasant's presumption, but Francis prostrated himself on the ground before him. Francis had seen-as he was always seeing-Christ in human faces, in the least of them. Then he began to pray, and because the peasant was thirsty, a spring welled up out of a rock. They all drank, the donkey included, and the water ran down to the Arno.

Francis spent a month at La Verna. He meditated in the forest and prayed in a cave. No one could find him here except G.o.d. At dawn on September 14, after spending the night at the bottom of a gorge, he had a vision, or rather, something befell Francis: an angel hovered overhead and rained down ecstasies upon him. Then Francis saw that the angel was crucified, was pinioned on the sky like a b.u.t.terfly. He felt pain interleaved with joy, the sear of one shading into the other, and he looked down and saw wounds on his hands, his feet, and his side, the stigmata of the crucified Christ. Autumn came. The mists formed, the leaves fell, and the sky went gray. The beeches, spindly and bare, looked like lepers and cripples walking.

Two years later Francis was dead. From the day of his vision onward, he had declined. He weakened. The wounds throbbed and seeped. He'd swallowed suffering whole, drunk the Arno and all its cursed misery down. He'd given Christ a face people hadn't seen before, a human face, the peasant's face. Until then Christ had been the Redeemer as the judge and king of the universe: he was painted enthroned, stern and impa.s.sive. Now he was the Redeemer as the man of sorrows, the G.o.d who became human to the quick and the marrow in order to lay claim to human wretchedness.

All this and what happened over the next hundred years might have been called the Franciscan revolution, larger than anything since the Christianizing of the Roman Empire eight centuries before. Until now it had seemed that G.o.d had been up and man had been down. But now G.o.d, in the person of Christ, of Francis, of the poor, the hungry, and the afflicted, was down here. The foreground and the background, G.o.d and man, history and prophecy, were one horizontal flowing thing. Christ was most fully human in his suffering body; man was most fully Christ in Francis's suffering body. You could not quite pry them apart. People would need to learn to see this, to see G.o.d in the wounds Francis had received above the river.

Here's where we begin, the painter said. The apprentice boy stood nearby, across the expanse of the panel, about nine Florentine ells-fourteen feet-long and a little less broad, a chalk-white lowercase t. t. It had taken weeks to get this far: planing the planks smooth, laying down coat upon coat of size to attach the canvas to the wood, and then eight layers of gesso-gypsum from Volterra ground up and boiled-polished and rubbed to gla.s.siness. It had taken weeks to get this far: planing the planks smooth, laying down coat upon coat of size to attach the canvas to the wood, and then eight layers of gesso-gypsum from Volterra ground up and boiled-polished and rubbed to gla.s.siness.

They were going to make a man, a Christ on a cross. It was a sculpture in the sense it was a crocifisso crocifisso, a crucifix made of wood, but it was also a painting, the body rendered on the front-facing panels of the cross in two dimensions. The boy might eventually be made a painter: he could sketch rather well. In fact, the painter had found him sketching-so the story goes-while shepherding sheep and had been so impressed he'd persuaded the parents to let him take the boy to Florence as an apprentice. But they weren't going to sketch, not yet. First they were going to mark the panel with chalk lines and compa.s.ses, inscribing circles, triangles, and arcs. The painter, Bencivieni di Pepo, had made a painted panel crucifix before for the church of San Domenico in Arezzo. He knew the rules. The square of the cross contained an equilateral triangle that could in turn be bound by a circle in which you could then interpose a perfectly proportioned spread-eagled human body, h.o.m.o quadratus. h.o.m.o quadratus.

But of course this body wouldn't be perfectly proportioned: it would be bent, distended, suffering in every limb, expression, and gesture, dead or near dead. So Bencivieni made three points in relation to the arms and foot of the cross and, as the boy watched, began to mark out other circles and then from these, segments of arcs. Those lines would determine the curve and leftward slump of the body, the sag of the arms, the collapse and tilt of the head and neck: the exact magnitude and measure of the suffering, the pity, and the horror.

When all that was in place, Bencivieni would draw a figure in willow charcoal and then go over it with a squirrel-hair brush dipped in a wash of ink. Afterward they would lay down gold leaf and burnish it. You are supposed to burnish gold on a damp winter day, so let us say it is February 1288, in a studio in Florence on the street called Borgo Allegri. This painted cross will hang over the high altar of the new Franciscan church on the east side of the city, which will itself be named after the cross, Santa Croce. So it will need to be especially beautiful and therefore gilded for the honor and glory of G.o.d. But it also needs gold because when you mix the ground colors-white lead, cinnabar, lapis-with egg (use yolks from town hens: they're paler) to make tempera and brush them stroke by tiny stroke over the gold, something happens to them: the rivulets of blood catch fire; the pallid flesh seems always to be not quite cold, to be dying just now; the wounds refuse to close. The whole painting becomes luminous and palpable. It is not so much seen as seeing, pursuing and then laying hold of the viewer.

Bencivieni di Pepo knew all these things: his art consisted of his knowing them. It was not a matter of inspiration, never mind genius: a Christ was a Christ, a Madonna was a Madonna. The thing was to make them well. He'd made many. When he began this crucifix he was forty-seven years old. He'd worked in Rome, Bologna, and Pisa. He'd designed mosaics for the Florence Baptistry eight years earlier, and it was there-working in that most Byzantine of media-that his images became less eastern, his faces less hawklike and severe, the deep lines (almost carved like bas-relief ) replaced by a softer stroke, more rounded and modeled; bodies not set down on panels or tile but incarnated, pulled nascent and breathing from their ground.

The painted crucifix Bencivieni had painted for Arezzo fifteen years earlier was identical in almost every respect-size, composition, color-to the one he painted for Santa Croce, and yet the first was an icon and the second a presence: the Arezzo cross had a beautiful and grave power-we are moved to see a G.o.d brought so pitifully low-but the Santa Croce cross will, if you let it, make you weep; not just for Christ, but for anyone who has to suffer and die; for yourself; for everyone and anyone in particular.

Bencivieni had been laboring hard, even in middle age, and was now the most active and important painter in Florence. He'd also been given a nickname: "Cimabue," or "bull head," doubtless in recognition of his stubborn perfectionism. His colleague the sculptor and architect Arnolfo di Cambio was just then building the very church Cimabue's cross would occupy. He would follow that project with the ma.s.sive Palazzo Vecchio and then in 1300 he 'd be made capomaestro- capomaestro-head architect and builder-of the new Duomo. But it was Arnolfo's sculpture that excited the most interest among his fellow artists, not just other sculptors but painters too. His statues had the curves and chasms of real flesh, and even when he carved relief figures on a slab you felt you might walk around and see the people from the back. Cimabue and Arnolfo would have talked at length about their work and about the Santa Croce and Duomo projects. Some years later, Cimabue's apprentice boy, now himself known as Giotto, would get the commission for the Duomo's bell tower.

What Cimabue and Arnolfo were after was not something new or different but that same perennial image-human flesh and G.o.d's embrace of it-made deeper, more vividly, more completely themselves. It was Francis of a.s.sisi's doing: grasping the G.o.d who had entered us, the one who-crazily, heedlessly in love with humankind-took the form of a decrepit, heartsick man. How did you render that in tempera or stone, extending the notion outward into the whole creation like the Dominican Thomas Aquinas had, saying "G.o.d is in all things deeply"? How could you put that into words? How could you put skin on the bones of the world?

There was another young man around Florence then, Durante degli' Alighieri, or Dante for short. He knew everyone or at least knew about about everyone in town. He was in that sense a natural-born politician, if not a deft one. He had good friends and even better enemies: their treachery and the exile it sent him into were his making as a poet. In an exquisite act of creative revenge he put them and practically every other Florentine in their place-in h.e.l.l, Purgatory, or Heaven-and wrote the greatest poem in history. Its subject was not G.o.ds or heroes but mere persons and Dante's own befuddled, jerky pa.s.sage among them. He's lost his way in the world, or rather his longing had lost track of what it was it loved. He thought it was a person: Beatrice had died young and now he, middle-aged, had to seek her among the dead. everyone in town. He was in that sense a natural-born politician, if not a deft one. He had good friends and even better enemies: their treachery and the exile it sent him into were his making as a poet. In an exquisite act of creative revenge he put them and practically every other Florentine in their place-in h.e.l.l, Purgatory, or Heaven-and wrote the greatest poem in history. Its subject was not G.o.ds or heroes but mere persons and Dante's own befuddled, jerky pa.s.sage among them. He's lost his way in the world, or rather his longing had lost track of what it was it loved. He thought it was a person: Beatrice had died young and now he, middle-aged, had to seek her among the dead.

They'd met at the head of the Ponte Santa Trinita-or, rather, her presence, her living image, simply struck him, poured out and seized him, though she said not a word. The Arno and the city, the river and the world, rolled by, but it was only she that he saw. To find her, he has to visit every circle of the next world, to meet most everyone that he's known in Florence or their kin, to learn every evil they've ever done. And of course everyone here too had lost what they love: life, which is love breathing, speaking, walking. I' non averei creduto che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta I' non averei creduto che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta, he wrote: "I could not believe death had undone so many." It was this that Cimabue's crucifix contained: the unnumbered dead in one human yet divine person who, in his affliction, was love. It is that love, more even than Beatrice, that Dante has lost and now learns to long for again.

The Ponte Santa Trinita had been built by the Frescobaldi, the ancient aristocratic family of the Oltrarno, the other bank of the Arno. Their son Dino was Dante's collaborator in the group of young poets creating the dolce stil novo dolce stil novo, "the sweet new style" of verse. The bridge had been erected in 1252, destroyed in the flood of 1269 when Dante was four years old, but reconstructed in 1290, just in time for him to meet Beatrice there. But on the northern end of the bridge in 1300, a street fight between rival Florentine political factions, the "White" and "Black" Guelphs, precipitated a power struggle in the city that ended two years later with the exile of Dante, among others. It was said that afterward Dino Frescobaldi recovered Dante's notebooks for the Divine Comedy Divine Comedy and had them sent to the poet in his hiding place, thus making possible its composition. and had them sent to the poet in his hiding place, thus making possible its composition.

In that same year, 1302, Cimabue died. Giotto had continued as an apprentice and member of his studio for some years after the Santa Croce Crucifix Crucifix was finished. In the early 1290s they'd gone to a.s.sisi to paint frescoes in the new church dedicated to Saint Francis. It's sometimes unclear exactly who painted which ones: some are attributed to both master and apprentice, some to Giotto alone (perhaps executed later in the decade when Giotto began to work independently), and some entirely to Cimabue. was finished. In the early 1290s they'd gone to a.s.sisi to paint frescoes in the new church dedicated to Saint Francis. It's sometimes unclear exactly who painted which ones: some are attributed to both master and apprentice, some to Giotto alone (perhaps executed later in the decade when Giotto began to work independently), and some entirely to Cimabue.

Their names and careers were always entwined, albeit less and less to Cimabue's advantage. The story of Cimabue's discovery of the genius shepherd boy tending his flock became legendary in the telling of Lorenzo Ghiberti (creator of the Duomo's baptistry doors) in his Commentaries Commentaries and, later, in Vasari's and, later, in Vasari's Lives of the Artists. Lives of the Artists. In one of Vasari's anecdotes Giotto tricks his master by painting a tiny fly on a panel so realistically that Cimabue tries to brush it away; elsewhere, the master is portrayed as a vain and p.r.i.c.kly perfectionist who would rather burn a painting than let anyone criticize it. Giotto, by contrast, wears his talent lightly, has many friends, and is as devout as he is shrewd. In one of Vasari's anecdotes Giotto tricks his master by painting a tiny fly on a panel so realistically that Cimabue tries to brush it away; elsewhere, the master is portrayed as a vain and p.r.i.c.kly perfectionist who would rather burn a painting than let anyone criticize it. Giotto, by contrast, wears his talent lightly, has many friends, and is as devout as he is shrewd.

Dante knew how good Cimabue and Giotto were at their art, and-it goes without saying-how good he himself was: his great poem grapples with the problem of genius even as it manifests it. The ambitious new thing Dante created in the Commedia Commedia is cla.s.sical-colossal, Roman, panoramic-in scope but Christian in scale: no more than tales, the intimate rendering of frail and embarra.s.sed human persons from an overweening provincial town built on the insubstantial ruins of an outpost of a great empire. It was an epic of weak little men-"an ingrate, malign people . . . avaricious types, envious and proud"-who were nonetheless capable, like Cimabue, Giotto, and Dante, of making great things, human works of timeless consequence and beauty. is cla.s.sical-colossal, Roman, panoramic-in scope but Christian in scale: no more than tales, the intimate rendering of frail and embarra.s.sed human persons from an overweening provincial town built on the insubstantial ruins of an outpost of a great empire. It was an epic of weak little men-"an ingrate, malign people . . . avaricious types, envious and proud"-who were nonetheless capable, like Cimabue, Giotto, and Dante, of making great things, human works of timeless consequence and beauty.

In the seventeenth canto of the Inferno Inferno, in the midst of describing himself in an extravagantly imagined flight over h.e.l.l, Dante reminds himself of Icarus, the headstrong son of the patient artificer Daedelus:

. . . quando Icaro misero le reni senti spennar per la scaldata cera, gridando il padre a lui "Mala via tieni!"

. . . when poor Icarus felt his shoulders being plucked through the warming wax, his father crying to him, "You're going down a bad road!"

One of the themes of the canto is the misuse of art and here the young artist Icarus (as opposed to his father, the artisan Daedelus), drunk on inspiration and egoism, flies too high and destroys himself. Dante and his fellows already sense the pitfalls of being a self-acknowledged artist, the vain, mad, and self-destructive character that will emerge in their city in the Renaissance and peak in the Romantic era.

Dante was acquainted with Cimabue and knew Giotto well enough to model for him, or so the story goes. In the poem he uses their respective careers as an example of the already apparent slipperiness of celebrity and reputation: "where once Cimabue held the field, now the talk's of Giotto, such that the former's fame is obscured."

It doesn't seem that Cimabue resented his pupil, or perhaps he simply died too soon to realize he'd been eclipsed. In any case he either left Giotto his house in Via Ricasoli or Giotto took it over. The following year Giotto began painting the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua and with those frescoes made his own reputation. In the 1320s he would return to the place his life as an artist had begun, Santa Croce, to paint the great cycle of frescoes of the life of St. Francis in the Bardi and Peruzzi chapels. Then Giotto would design the lofty escarpment of the Campanile. The base was faced by a frieze of twenty-one relief sculptures by Andrea Pisano, the creator of the south doors of the Baptistry. Among these exemplars of crafts and professions-plowman, farmer, shepherd, carpenter, blacksmith, and architect-the architect and his sculptor placed an incongruous image on the southeast corner: Icarus, a sly footnote that seems to say be careful of art, of towers, and of great heights.

Cimabue's reputation, meanwhile, would increasingly be based on his having been his pupil's master rather than on his own art, a lesser talent who recognized and nurtured a greater one. Thus began a process that one art historian later referred to as "the curse of Cimabue": the decline in his historical and critical status, the damage to or deterioration of his existing works, and the removal of his name from important works once attributed to him. Except for a handful of "lesser" works, there would not be much left of Cimabue except his cross. But that, perhaps, was all there was anyway. Dante tried to tell Florence this: reputation turns to ruin, wealth to poverty, pride to disgrace, inspiration to despair. The cross, earthbound as Icarus's plucked back, is a monument to those facts, the picture of Dante's poem, the pierced flesh of Francis's wounds, the river cleaving Falterona and scouring Florence away.

2.

By 1302 what Vasari would call "the rebirth of painting in Florence"-the abandonment of the eastern, iconic tradition by Cimabue and the creation of a native style by Giotto-was under way and might well have continued without interruption. But over the next hundred years it seemed that the progress of art in Florence stalled as the city underwent one catastrophe after another.

In 1304 the Ponte alla Carraia (then built of wood) collapsed from the weight of the crowd during a dramatic pageant depicting h.e.l.l on the river. The Florentines had tempted fate, it was said-there was surely a kind of vain mockery of divine justice in attempting to recreate the Inferno on the Arno-or perhaps they were being punished for one of their myriad vices. The most likely candidate in the opinion of many was sodomy, for which Florence enjoyed an international reputation, a.n.a.l intercourse being known as "the Florentine vice" in French and simply Florenzen Florenzen in German. in German.

In subsequent years, fire followed famine and the standoff between the White and Black parties continued, punctuated by eruptions of violence. Alliances were formed and broken that brought the rest of Tuscany into play, control of Pisa, Lucca, and Siena changing hands with seasonal regularity. All these machinations, insurgencies, and intrigues would be studied and recorded in detail by Niccolo Machiavelli two centuries later. His interest in Florentine history was entirely political, but he halted his account long enough to note that "in 1333 the waters of the Arno had risen throughout Florence more than twelve braccia, and by its overflow had destroyed some of the bridges and many buildings."

In fact the flood of November 4, 1333, was the greatest yet seen on the Arno, cresting, by Machiavelli's estimation, twenty-four feet above normal. More detailed accounts report the four-day-long downpour; the thunder, lightning, and gales; then the scramble from rooftop to rooftop by means of planks and ladders as the torrent ran through the streets below; and the cries for divine mercy so loud and frequent that they drowned the thunder cracks and the seethe of water.

The death toll was said to exceed three thousand persons, and ten times as many animals. Certainly there was nothing to eat or even to drink. Every source of grain and therefore bread was spoiled or destroyed along with the mills in which it might have been ground. So too the pescaie- pescaie-the rock dams on the Arno above and below the city where fish were caught-washed away together with the Trinita and Carraia bridges. Water reached the top of the high altar in the Duomo and up to the second story of Arnolfo's recently completed Palazzo Vecchio. In the Oltrarno the palazzo of the Frescobaldi at the end of the Ponte Santa Trinita was devastated as were the humbler dwellings where Florence's artisans and shopkeepers lived. Coursing westward into the San Frediano quarter, the flood breached and undermined recently constructed defensive walls designed to withstand entire armies.