Dark Water_ Flood And Redemption In The City Of Masterpieces Part 4

Two nights later, on the evening of August 3, Ugo Procacci and his wife were outside taking the air at the Palazzo Pitti. After five days of occupation by thousands of refugees from all over the Oltrarno, food and water were running short and the sanitary facilities overwhelmed. The atmosphere was stuffy, humid, and, not least, foul.

A little before nine, there was a series of explosions, vastly louder than those either of artillery or Allied bombing runs on the Campo di Marte. Gla.s.s shattered throughout the palace and dust and smoke rained down. The Procaccis, seeking shelter, found themselves crushed among the panicked mob huddled between the courtyards. A second, fainter set of explosions thundered from the direction of the river, and then it was quiet.

The first group of detonations had in fact come from the area Procacci had secretly reconnoitered two days before. Now all the buildings on either side of the Oltrarno end of the Ponte Vecchio extending several blocks in every direction were reduced to rubble. The second set marked the same process at the other end of the bridge. Four hours pa.s.sed. Then, between two and four in the morning on August 4, the remaining charges were ignited. There were dozens of explosions and Florentines, whose telephones and electricity had been cut off at the same time, imagined that the entire city was being razed in some new and unparalleled kind of air and artillery attack. Pieces of the Ponte alla Carraia landed a quarter mile away from the river in the San Lorenzo market and segments of tram rail from the Oltrarno fell in front of the post office in the Piazza della Repubblica. It took the Wehrmacht engineers several attempts to destroy the Ponte Santa Trinita, so the explosions continued well into the morning, after which the Germans salted the debris with mines. Farther away, the percussion of the bombs shattered windows and sucked open doors. On each Lungarno, the twin avenues bordering either side of the river, landslides of shattered stone, brick, and debris had cascaded into the Arno. A miasmic inferno of dust and smoke, the afterglow of the Feuerzauber Feuerzauber, hung over the heart of the city until midday.

In the morning Ugo Procacci leaned out his window, straining for a view that might reveal what had transpired the previous night. He spotted two armed partisans of the Italian resistance coming toward the palace from the south. Where were the Germans? he called out. Gone, was the response, but they were still holding positions on the other side of the river. And the bridges? All blown up-except the Ponte Vecchio, answered one partisan, and then the other shouted Viva l'Italia! Viva l'Italia! Procacci responded with the same cry, a little weakly, he felt. He should be overjoyed that the Germans were in retreat, but his thoughts were on the demolition of the night before and of the destruction of the Ponte Santa Trinita in particular. He was stunned and near tears: he half feared that something in him-perhaps a little inhuman, a little too in thrall to beauty-loved a work of art more than the liberation of his own people. Then, that afternoon, the first British troops arrived, and, as he would recall later, "a sort of delerium seized me-the abjection of twenty years, the agony of the last months, were over. I was a free man again." Procacci responded with the same cry, a little weakly, he felt. He should be overjoyed that the Germans were in retreat, but his thoughts were on the demolition of the night before and of the destruction of the Ponte Santa Trinita in particular. He was stunned and near tears: he half feared that something in him-perhaps a little inhuman, a little too in thrall to beauty-loved a work of art more than the liberation of his own people. Then, that afternoon, the first British troops arrived, and, as he would recall later, "a sort of delerium seized me-the abjection of twenty years, the agony of the last months, were over. I was a free man again."

The view that met the Allies who reached the Arno later that day was bizarre: the Ponte Vecchio stood untouched, intact but surrounded by acres of rubble, an island of the picturesque in a sea of devastation. To Paolo Sica, an architect later involved in rebuilding the other bridges, this lone act of preservation seemed perverse, almost pathetic: the Ponte Vecchio was saved, he said, a little mystified, "by a romantic scrupulousness of an exquisitely German kind."

A few days earlier, on August 1, Frederick Hartt received a report that a cache of artworks had been discovered in an abandoned villa near the battle line south of Florence. The British soldiers who'd stumbled across it were scarcely versed in art but someone seemed to think, crazily enough, that they'd seen Botticelli's few days earlier, on August 1, Frederick Hartt received a report that a cache of artworks had been discovered in an abandoned villa near the battle line south of Florence. The British soldiers who'd stumbled across it were scarcely versed in art but someone seemed to think, crazily enough, that they'd seen Botticelli's Primavera Primavera among the stacks of paintings. among the stacks of paintings.

Dodging German sh.e.l.ls in a borrowed jeep, Hartt arrived at the Castello Montegufoni the next morning. Inside, he pa.s.sed through Baroque doors into a pitch-dark salone salone that had apparently not been entered for months, perhaps even years. He ordered the shutters swung open-there was, of course, no electricity-and in dust-spiraling light he slowly made out not only the rumored Botticelli but also dozens of other works evacuated from Florence at the beginning of the war, not least the Giotto that had apparently not been entered for months, perhaps even years. He ordered the shutters swung open-there was, of course, no electricity-and in dust-spiraling light he slowly made out not only the rumored Botticelli but also dozens of other works evacuated from Florence at the beginning of the war, not least the Giotto Madonna Madonna from the Ognissanti church, Cimabue's Santa Trinita from the Ognissanti church, Cimabue's Santa Trinita Madonna Madonna, and, alone and immense, the Rucellai Madonna Madonna, each slumped against the wall in this derelict ballroom in the Tuscan hills.

Hartt made sure guards were posted and returned to his headquarters. Apparently, contrary to intelligence reports, the Superintendency had not been returning evacuated art to the city. Meanwhile, there were other country estates where refugee artworks had been hidden and Hartt wanted to secure them as quickly as possible. But in some cases the Germans had gotten there first and were now making off with a booty of masterpieces as they retreated. From another villa, the Montagnana, they'd removed some 297 paintings-by Botticelli, Lippi, Bellini, and Tintoretto among others-plus a set of Lorenzo Ghiberti's bronze doors from the Baptistry of Florence.

The Wehrmacht continued to sh.e.l.l Allied positions on the edge of Florence during its withdrawal north (bogged down in the Appenines, the Germans had to abandon the haul from the Villa Montagnana), so Hartt wasn't allowed to enter Florence for another week. He continued searching out caches of art in the hills, in churches, chapels, cellars, and villas. He found masterpiece after masterpiece incongruously set down in empty countryside, and, in counterpoint, the piles of human excrement the German soldiers habitually deposited on tables, sculptures, and altars. On August 9, in a bas.e.m.e.nt of an abandoned castle, he found an Annunciation Annunciation by Filippo Lippi, and a little farther down, in the darkness, an enormous by Filippo Lippi, and a little farther down, in the darkness, an enormous Crucifix Crucifix by Cimabue; not the Santa Croce crucifix, but its earlier cousin from Arezzo, now crazily inverted in a wine cellar, the dolorous Mary on the left-hand extreme of its horizontal gazing up tenderly from the damp floor. by Cimabue; not the Santa Croce crucifix, but its earlier cousin from Arezzo, now crazily inverted in a wine cellar, the dolorous Mary on the left-hand extreme of its horizontal gazing up tenderly from the damp floor.

Four days later, he finally reached Florence. He descended down the road from Siena past the placid monastery of Certosa that he'd first seen ten years before, innocent of everything but art and beauty. That was how all the world seemed then, but nowhere more than Florence.

But here, even at the edge of the city, there was the devastation and squalor caused by broken water and sewage lines, sh.e.l.ling, and bombing, the shuffling, tawdry misery of a hungry and homeless population. His first stop was the Allied Administrative Headquarters near the Porta Romana, where he had to obtain pa.s.ses for himself and, absurdly, he felt, for Ugo Procacci, this unknown native of Florence who'd spent the last five years imprisoned inside the city.

When Hartt reached the Pitti, among the six thousand displaced Florentines he found Procacci, tall, birdlike, formal, intense. Procacci hadn't been able to see any of the destruction except what was visible from the high places on the palace grounds and he felt strongly that this was what he and the American ought to inspect first. He and Hartt had to approach the Arno like mountain climbers, using a ladder to ascend to the Corrodoio Vasariano and then out through a window and down a thirty-foot talus of rubble to the Ponte Vecchio. From halfway across they could look up and down the Arno, at the devastation on the banks, the stumps of the piers that had once supported the bridges, and the temporary span the Allies had quickly erected near the site of the Ponte Santa Trinita. Stopping the Allied advance for scarcely a few days, Operation Feuerzauber Feuerzauber had been as pointless as it was destructive. had been as pointless as it was destructive.

As they reached the end of the bridge and turned right to the Uffizi, chalked below the statue of Dante in Vasari's colonnade was a typically Florentine graffito-unsentimental, wry, faintly bitter-of the kind that instantaneously appeared within days of any flood or disaster: In sul pa.s.so dell'Arno, I Tedeschi hanno lasciato il ricordo della loro civilita In sul pa.s.so dell'Arno, I Tedeschi hanno lasciato il ricordo della loro civilita, "On this stretch of the Arno the Germans have left a memento of their civilization."

Hartt and Procacci were perhaps softer-hearted. When Procacci let them inside the deserted Uffizi (there was scarcely any need for locks and keys) and they walked through the galleries-carpeted with dust, plaster, and broken gla.s.s-and up the stairs, each saw that the other was weeping. They went out into the loggia, where Hitler had taken his view of the Arno six years before, and gazed again at what seemed to sum up not the pity of war, or even the evil of war, but a dark mirrored a.n.a.log of beauty; not mere ugliness or desecration, but an urge that went beyond destruction; a furious negation, annihilation aimed at absenting altogether what was most fully-in beauty-present.

Hartt found a room on the shattered Lungarno by the ruins of the Ponte alla Carraia. He and Procacci took Lucky 13 back out into the countryside and checked and secured the remaining artworks Procacci had relocated in 1940. Then Hartt went looking for another missing monument, Bernard Berenson. Berenson had last been seen at I Tatti a year before, and since then the villa had been empty except for a caretaker. When Hartt arrived in Florence, I Tatti was still behind enemy lines and had sustained damage from sh.e.l.l fire. But Berenson was gone, as was most of his art.

Hartt made inquiries that led him to Giovanni Colacicchi, the director of the Accademia. Colacicchi had it on good authority that Berenson was still in Florence, but had been in hiding ever since the collapse of Mussolini's regime and the subsequent German occupation in September 1943. He'd been sheltered by friends in a villa in Careggi, on the northwest outskirts of the city then still technically under German control. During the first week of September Hartt finally reached the villa. Outside, there were two Wehrmacht corpses in the garden. He found Berenson upstairs, reclining on a chaise longue, sh.e.l.l holes in the wall above his head, surrounded by his paintings which he'd swaddled in blankets and cushions to protect them from shrapnel. He was seventy-nine years old, shaken, unsteady, and slow of speech, but his collection was unscathed.

Unhappily, Berenson had consigned about a quarter of his artworks to a friend's house on the Borgo San Jacopo ab.u.t.ting the Ponte Vecchio, and these were buried in the debris along the river. But Hartt took extraordinary pains to recover them-he found twenty-seven in all-and each week he came with one or two more, combed from the mud, dust, and rubble, and laid them before the old man as though an offering. And with that, Berenson seemed to come back to life, and with him the life of I Tatti, the guests and fine conversation, and then, with Hartt in the vanguard, an initiative was launched to restore the ruined parts of Florence in general and the bridges in particular. The mission statement insisted on both verisimilitude and art historical accuracy: Dov'era, com'era Dov'era, com'era, "Where it was, how it was."

The most important but most difficult restoration would be the Ponte Santa Trinita, which was less a construction of stone than a sculpture surmounted by statues. The Four Seasons were now in pieces among the debris of the Lungarno or deep in the Arno, not just underwater but buried beneath tons of other stone. The sculptor Giannetto Mannucci was put in charge and he personally undertook the recovery dives into the Arno. In the dark and mud of the river bottom corpses were mingled with pieces of the statues: diving in October in search of the head of Caccini's Autumn Autumn, Mannucci was shadowed by a decollated corpse spinning in an underwater eddy.

Through luck and persistence, most of the statue fragments had been found by the end of October. But on the second day of November-they always came during the first week of November, like a saint's day or a shift of constellations-the biggest flood since 1864 poured down the channel of the Arno. Hartt could hear the river from six blocks away. The tint of the water transited the spectrum from milky to ocher to brown to deep gray, and then came the tree trunks and "whole patches of earth with squashes growing on them" from farms upstream. Inside Hartt's apartment in the Palazzo Corsini on the Lungarno the noise was deafening, the gyre of black and gray that was the river and the downpour from the sky above it consuming all.

It would have been a minor flood, but the German demolition had rendered it something larger. Because of the debris under and along the river the channel was narrower and shallower, which raised the water level and increased the flood's velocity while decreasing the river's capacity. Water lashed and sprayed over parapets of the Lungarno like a ship's gunwales in a gale, and then the parapets were broken and breached. Water poured across the Lungarno and into the alleys perpendicular to it, the water pressing northward as though in pursuit of the retreating Wehrmacht. Four floors below his room, mud and water filled the cellars of the Palazzo Corsini as Hartt tried to read another inventory or to make out the details of an antique architectural plan.

Cleaning up after the flood became just another ch.o.r.e in the postwar recovery of Florence, which proceeded more quickly than anyone could have imagined. The city also began to regain much of its traditional social character, fomenting with complaint, blame, and backbiting as reconstruction of the Trinita and the other bridges stalled and seemed sometimes to languish altogether. As for the head of Spring Spring, the last unrecovered fragment of the Trinita statues, there had been persistent rumors going back to the end of the war that she wasn't in the river at all; that she'd been seen amid the rubble on the Lungarno and had been stolen and sold for a pretty sum to one or another collector or museum, doubtless with civic connivance. In the rush to placate public opinion, ill-considered projects-half modernist, half a melange of traditional elements-went up on the sites of the dynamited buildings adjacent to the Ponte Vecchio.

Certainly, it wasn't Berenson's Dov'era, com'era Dov'era, com'era approach: he abhorred modernism and some might have said that if he had his way, Firenze would be no more than a museum of itself, a replica of "Florence." Berenson-now universally known as "BB," the grand duke of Florence, if not of Firenze-was a monument that often seemed to overshadow the art he'd built his career and fortune upon. BB knew best, not only in his own opinion but in that of his successor art historians from America, Britain, and Germany. And both knew better than the Italians, who it sometimes seemed were not quite to be trusted with their own patrimony. Of course in some sense it belonged to the entire world, to all civilized peoples-Italians would be happy to concede that the art of their forefathers was that important-but didn't that mean that the world had some claim upon it in terms of rights and perhaps even control? In defeating Hitler the world (in the form of the Allies) had rescued Italy, and it had taken measures to ensure that Italy's art was protected as well, even if in the form of so humble and selfless a figure as Frederick Hartt. approach: he abhorred modernism and some might have said that if he had his way, Firenze would be no more than a museum of itself, a replica of "Florence." Berenson-now universally known as "BB," the grand duke of Florence, if not of Firenze-was a monument that often seemed to overshadow the art he'd built his career and fortune upon. BB knew best, not only in his own opinion but in that of his successor art historians from America, Britain, and Germany. And both knew better than the Italians, who it sometimes seemed were not quite to be trusted with their own patrimony. Of course in some sense it belonged to the entire world, to all civilized peoples-Italians would be happy to concede that the art of their forefathers was that important-but didn't that mean that the world had some claim upon it in terms of rights and perhaps even control? In defeating Hitler the world (in the form of the Allies) had rescued Italy, and it had taken measures to ensure that Italy's art was protected as well, even if in the form of so humble and selfless a figure as Frederick Hartt.

In any case Italy could not afford to refuse the help, interest, or cash of the outside world and its art experts. When Berenson established (with funds from the Parker Pen Company) a reward of $3,000 for the return of the head of Spring Spring, Firenze could scarcely turn up its nose at Florence's largesse, however much it might catch an aroma of condescension. Firenze and Florence shared a mutual love of these masterpieces, but love could be jealous and possessive. Possession, after all, was the essence of connoisseurship and of museum curating and accession, an enterprise the Italians were now as deeply implicated in as anyone.

Frederick Hartt packed his bags for America in August 1945. Hostilities in both theaters of World War II had ended. Hartt had been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to study Michelangelo and then would complete his Ph.D. dissertation. He also wrote a memoir of his year recovering art in Tuscany and the devastation on the Arno. Of the Ponte Santa Trinita, he wrote, "The design for this masterpiece . . . has been revealed by a recently discovered letter to have been corrected by Michelangelo himself." It was still too soon to say-the wounds were too fresh-that the discovery was made by Friedrich Kriegbaum, a German and, like all Germans, complicit.

Like Hartt, all across Europe everyone was going home, or headed somewhere to make a new home. The continent teemed with human traffic, the unrelenting movements of refugees, displaced persons, veterans and freed POWs, camp survivors, collaborators, black marketers, political criminals, orphans, widows, and, everywhere and nowhere, the missing.

David Lees had been gone seven years. Now twenty-eight, he'd served with the Alpine regiment (he was a skier and mountaineer as well as a swimmer) in Albania and France. After the overthrow of Il Duce and the transfer of Italy's allegiance to the Allies in August 1943, he'd escaped from the Germans over the Alps into Switzerland, where he waited out the duration in an internment camp. He found his mother, Dorothy, living outside the city walls in Bellosguardo. Her tower adjacent to the Ponte Vecchio had been destroyed by the German demolitions on the Arno of August 3, 1944. And now, in this new state of things, it seemed wise that his own photos of the Uffizi in 1938, however innocent in motivation, should disappear too.

But photography would remain his metier. He photographed the ruins around his old home by the river. He also got a job a.s.sisting a Life Life magazine photographer who was in Italy shooting a story on the masterpieces of the Renaissance. David was the ideal a.s.sistant, perfectly bilingual, cognizant of Italian art, and happy to deal with the exigencies and lapses caused by his boss's excessive drinking. He knew, of course, a fair amount about photography and, more crucially, he had an "eye." He went to the south of France and at last photographed his father, still an outsized character in his seventies, given to large straw hats, elaborately knotted cravats, and vast gesticulations with both cigarettes and a pipe. In David's acute, black-and-white photographs, he plays the genius, the master, at leisure, effortlessly amused by himself and the world that pays him court. Or rather, the photographs seem to tell, he overplays it. David lets Craig, the double betrayer of lover and son, hang himself. But Dorothy's admiration remained indefatigable. Shortly after David's visit, she wrote Craig to tell him, in effect, that he needn't ever write her back: "Your time is too necessary, too precious to magazine photographer who was in Italy shooting a story on the masterpieces of the Renaissance. David was the ideal a.s.sistant, perfectly bilingual, cognizant of Italian art, and happy to deal with the exigencies and lapses caused by his boss's excessive drinking. He knew, of course, a fair amount about photography and, more crucially, he had an "eye." He went to the south of France and at last photographed his father, still an outsized character in his seventies, given to large straw hats, elaborately knotted cravats, and vast gesticulations with both cigarettes and a pipe. In David's acute, black-and-white photographs, he plays the genius, the master, at leisure, effortlessly amused by himself and the world that pays him court. Or rather, the photographs seem to tell, he overplays it. David lets Craig, the double betrayer of lover and son, hang himself. But Dorothy's admiration remained indefatigable. Shortly after David's visit, she wrote Craig to tell him, in effect, that he needn't ever write her back: "Your time is too necessary, too precious to yourself, yourself, to to EGC EGC [Edward Gordon Craig] [Edward Gordon Craig] ARTIST, ARTIST, to spend in many letters . . ." to spend in many letters . . ."

With his boss incapacitated by drinking, David increasingly found himself doing Life Life setups and shoots on his own. Over the next four years, he consolidated his position and, by 1950, he was setups and shoots on his own. Over the next four years, he consolidated his position and, by 1950, he was Life Life's chief photographer in Italy. His work-art, human interest stories, royalty, tyc.o.o.ns, and popes-was now appearing regularly in the preeminent photojournalism magazine in the world.

Nick Kraczyna, Polish by citizenship, Russian by blood, and in 1945 all of five years old, would reach Florence by a most circuitous route. His birthplace, Kamien-Koszyrski, had been under three different jurisdictions since his birth in 1940: prior to the war, it had been part of Poland, was ceded to Russia under the Hitler-Stalin pact, and was occupied by Germany in 1942 during Hitler's invasion of Russia. On August 10 the Germans rounded up every Jew in the town-Kamien-Koszyrski contained a substantial Jewish community in what is today Ukraine-marched them to the cemetery, and slaughtered them in one of the most notorious ma.s.sacres of the war.

Nick's family was gentile and survived. His father had been an officer in the suicidal Polish cavalry charge against the German invasion in 1939, but now he learned to live among the n.a.z.is. Perhaps he and his family lived well enough to be suspected of collaboration. In any case, when the Russian counterattack of 1943 neared Kamien-Koszyrski, Nick's family fled just ahead of the retreating German troops and continued westward to Brest, then Warsaw, and finally Berlin. At the end of the war, in 1945, they'd pressed on southwestward into Bavaria, finishing up ten miles inside the American zone of occupation. Had they been on the other side of the line, in the Russian zone, they would have been deported back to the east and, at a minimum, Nick's father executed: it was an ironclad law of Russian logic that if you had survived as a Pole-never mind a Pole of Russian extraction-in Germany, you were a collaborator.

Nick spent the next six years in refugee camps. In the barracks with his family he spoke Russian, at school Polish, and around the camp German. Otherwise, nearly always, he was drawing.

In 1951 a church group from New Haven, Connecticut, agreed to adopt a family from Nick's camp. The family was Nick's and on May 2 they arrived in New York. In New Haven, he was put into the fifth grade at the local elementary school. Nick spoke not a word of English, but when his cla.s.smates found out he spoke Russian at home-it was the era of Senator Joe McCarthy-he was named "the dirty Commie." He had been a Pole, a crypto-German, and now, although he was supposed to be an American, he was a Soviet. Of course for most of his life so far he had been a refugee, a stateless person, and he might as well have just flown away, for all anyone would notice. But he drew like an angel, or at least like Icarus. He threw himself headlong into his art.

Three years after the end of the war, the Uffizi was fully restored to its position as one of the world's two or three greatest museums of art. In 1947 Ugo Procacci staged an exhibition centered on the art that had been evacuated during the war, and a year later he added the Rucellai Madonna Madonna to Room 2, reunited with the Giotto and Cimabue to Room 2, reunited with the Giotto and Cimabue Madonnas Madonnas it had taken refuge with in the Castello Montegufoni where Frederick Hartt had found them. And to complete that ultimate proto-Renaissance collection he obtained the Cimabue it had taken refuge with in the Castello Montegufoni where Frederick Hartt had found them. And to complete that ultimate proto-Renaissance collection he obtained the Cimabue Crucifix Crucifix from Santa Croce. from Santa Croce.

Just then, it seemed that "Cimabue" might become simply Cimabue again and get some credit in the bargain. Roberto Longhi, perhaps the most eminent Italian art historian of the day, a.s.serted that "Duccio was not only the pupil of Cimabue but [was] almost created by Cimabue." Like Giotto, Duccio had been Cimabue's student and had worked with him on the a.s.sisi frescoes that had been Ruskin's epiphany. Cimabue had been the means, the inspiration, by which Duccio came to "see things-as they Are." Now, here they were again, almost touching, in Vasari's Uffizi. But, to Procacci's disappointment, the amalgamation was short-lived. The brothers of Santa Croce wanted the Crucifix Crucifix back. Truth be told, it was the least important work in Room 2, in art historical terms significant as a way station to greater things, more an emblem of Franciscan piety than a true masterpiece. back. Truth be told, it was the least important work in Room 2, in art historical terms significant as a way station to greater things, more an emblem of Franciscan piety than a true masterpiece.

Amid these triumphs, Procacci also acquired a protege the following year, 1949, the kind of apprentice a master can only pray for. Umberto Baldini was twenty-seven and had done his art history graduate work on Giotto under the brilliant Mario Salmi. After graduation, he'd worked as a volunteer for the Superintendency, and Baldini had so impressed Procacci that he made him director of his Gabinetto dei Restauro, leapfrogging him over other long-standing candidates.

Taking on Baldini was a sign of Procacci's power and position, but at heart he remained an art historian who still thrilled to the chase, the discovery, and the consolidation of knowledge. Shortly after his appointment, Procacci raced into the Gabinetto breathless and exclaimed to Baldini, Ho appena visto i morti Ho appena visto i morti, "I've just seen the dead." Collapsing into a chair, Procacci explained he'd been at Santa Maria Novella and had conclusively discovered the original location of Masaccio's Trinita Trinita, replaced by Vasari's Madonna of the Rosary Madonna of the Rosary four hundred years earlier. four hundred years earlier.

Baldini was, of course, also pleased, but he was of a more dispa.s.sionate, self-possessed nature, brilliant but efficient, his considerable ambition directed with remarkable accuracy and success to the objects and goals that appeared to him just then most needful. Unlike Procacci, he would have taken off his hat before sitting down.

On Baldini's first day on the job, he went to the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio to inspect one of the Gabinetto's current projects-now one of his his many projects-restoration work on Vasari's many projects-restoration work on Vasari's Battle of Marciano Battle of Marciano, said to be overpainted on Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari. Battle of Anghiari. Baldini might have regarded Vasari's tiny, cryptic inscription Baldini might have regarded Vasari's tiny, cryptic inscription cerca trova cerca trova, "seek and find," and seen the future before him: the beautiful acquisitions, prizes, promotions, boons, and women; reputation, fame, and glory, the accouterments of a great man.

There would be no more floods, it was promised after the war. In 1956 construction began on a dam upriver on the Arno at Levane and the following year another was started at La Penna, works worthy of Leonardo. If the rains came as they had in 1844 or 1864 or 1944, the water could be held back, kept at bay in the mountains, in the high wastes of poplar and oak. That would be despite the simultaneous and "abrupt acceleration of sediment mining and channel bed intrusion" hydrologists would note looking back some years later. The Casentine Forests were indeed returning to health, but the Arno itself was now a tributary of postwar industry, agriculture, and modernization, more and more a greased sluice, a gun barrel bored for maximum velocity and capacity.

In the spring of the following year, 1958, the restored Ponte Santa Trinita was reopened, complete in all its parts except for the head of Spring Spring, unrecovered despite Berenson's reward. And in the autumn of 1959, at the age of ninety-four, Berenson himself died, the Jewish Yankee with an eye who had taught the world how to look at Florence.

Two years later, in 1961, a steam shovel dredging the Arno a little downstream from the Ponte Santa Trinita recovered, quite by accident, a lump, a stone skull that proved to be the head of Spring. Spring. No one had stolen it: it had been in the Arno all the while, buried within the collection of mud, rubble, and bones in the riverbed, the accretion of visions and views, of ambitions and l.u.s.ts, and of losses and betrayals all touching one another, the water touching them running by, tumbling them together. No one had stolen it: it had been in the Arno all the while, buried within the collection of mud, rubble, and bones in the riverbed, the accretion of visions and views, of ambitions and l.u.s.ts, and of losses and betrayals all touching one another, the water touching them running by, tumbling them together.

Vasari's Last Supper Last Supper remained in the refectory at Santa Croce, moldering: remained in the refectory at Santa Croce, moldering: Non ha mosso molto l'interesse, ne tanto meno l'entusiamo Non ha mosso molto l'interesse, ne tanto meno l'entusiamo, "It excited not much interest and even less enthusiasm," said one art historian. The same might have been said of the Cimabue nearby, the ma.s.sive and forlorn Crucifix. Crucifix. Forster's Lucy Honeychurch hadn't been to see it. It wasn't in the Baedeker or Ruskin or Berenson. Perhaps it wasn't so much a work of art as a ruin, a remnant of a previous world. Or it was simply a man hanging on a tree, dead or dying; a wingless Icarus waiting for the west wind, for the deluge to ferry him away with the 54 billion. Forster's Lucy Honeychurch hadn't been to see it. It wasn't in the Baedeker or Ruskin or Berenson. Perhaps it wasn't so much a work of art as a ruin, a remnant of a previous world. Or it was simply a man hanging on a tree, dead or dying; a wingless Icarus waiting for the west wind, for the deluge to ferry him away with the 54 billion.

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About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters . . .

-W. H. AUDEN, "MUSeE DES BEAUX ARTS"

Interior of the Basilica of Santa Croce, November 6, 1966 (Photograph by David Lees) (Photograph by David Lees)

1.

Nick Kraczyna had read W. H. Auden's poem "Musee des Beaux Arts." Now he was looking at the painting that had inspired it, Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Fall of Icarus. Fall of Icarus. It was a beautiful day, the plowman plowing, the shepherd shepherding his sheep, ships heading out or making for harbor, and in the middle distance the speck of Icarus, a plummeting teardrop, falling to his death. In the great world with its myriad preoccupations, Icarus is too small to notice, if not to see. The winged exemplar of the artist is lost in the vast and implacable beauty of the day, the disaster of his pa.s.sing swallowed without a trace. It was a beautiful day, the plowman plowing, the shepherd shepherding his sheep, ships heading out or making for harbor, and in the middle distance the speck of Icarus, a plummeting teardrop, falling to his death. In the great world with its myriad preoccupations, Icarus is too small to notice, if not to see. The winged exemplar of the artist is lost in the vast and implacable beauty of the day, the disaster of his pa.s.sing swallowed without a trace.

Nick was in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome. He was twenty-one years old and this is how far he had come from the nameless and temporary outposts of his childhood. He'd been given a place at the best art school in America and been sent abroad to study the Old Masters, to learn the things about which they were never wrong. Just now, in front of this painting with Auden's poem in his mind, he'd been given his metier, the overarching theme of his life's work. All he had to do from here on out was paint.

In the spring of 1962 he'd moved on to Florence, to a room near the church of Santo Spirito, the Oltrarno masterpiece of Filippo Brunelleschi. Nick decided he needed to spend the rest of his life here, to finish up as rooted in art and Florence as he'd been homeless and stateless in the camps, torn from Kamien-Koszyrski by Europe's self-immolation. His compa.s.s points would be the Masaccios in the Brancacci Chapel just west of Santo Spirito and the Pontormos at Santa Felicita to the east. He went to one or the other almost every day until his year abroad was over in June. Before he could come back to Florence he'd have to go back to the Rhode Island School of Design and then to one of the American graduate programs that were eager to have him, one last camp on the way home.

That same spring David Lees was following the path of Percy Sh.e.l.ley, the track through Italy of his foolish, glorious ascent toward martyrdom for art's sake. The events of the last few years-the death of Pope Pius XII, the election of John XXIII, and the start of the Second Vatican Council-had increased his prominence as Life Life's man at the Vatican as well as its specialist photographer for European art, royalty, and fashion. Closer to home, a series of his portraits of Bernard Berenson-still squinting hungrily through his magnifying gla.s.s in his nineties-formed Life Life's obituary when BB at last pa.s.sed away in 1959.

But the Sh.e.l.ley project was smaller and more impressionistic, a portfolio of quiet, elegiac landscapes, shadowed, languid villas, and mossy statuary. It was also more personal, a search for what Dorothy had sought in coming to Italy, lured by this very poet; and so, at bottom, a quest for the source of David's own ident.i.ty, the reasons and pa.s.sions that caused him to be born an Anglo-Florentine rather than an English boy, or-if you took away whatever it was that Italy set loose in Dorothy-that caused him to exist at all.

The photographs were exquisite but, in the opinion of Life Life's editors, neither newsworthy nor very compelling as a human interest story. David pushed for a year before Life Life agreed to run them in the international edition in 1963 and finally, the year after that, in the main American printing. The t.i.tle of the photoessay would be "The Fatal Gift of Beauty." agreed to run them in the international edition in 1963 and finally, the year after that, in the main American printing. The t.i.tle of the photoessay would be "The Fatal Gift of Beauty."

But Lees found himself more and more in the role of photojournalist rather than art photographer despite a moving series of portraits of Ezra Pound clinging to life and to poetry in his final Venetian exile. There was the death of John XXIII, the election of Paul VI, and-in a photograph that circulated around the world-the historic embrace of Paul and the Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church after a schism of nine hundred years.

In the autumn of 1963 Lees had to race to another breaking news story. On the night of October 9 the Vajont Dam in the mountains north of Venice was breached and two thousand inhabitants in the valley below it were killed. Vajont closed off a gorge nine hundred feet high, making it one of the tallest dams in the world, but for all the audacity of its construction, residents had been a.s.sured that both the engineering and the geology of the mountain behind it had been microscopically studied and found safe.

But that night 260 million cubic meters of mountainside sheared off in a landslide into the reservoir. It in turn displaced 50 million cubic meters of water in a wave that crested the top of the dam at seventy miles per hour. The force of 60 million tons of water fell on the valley below in a matter of minutes, wiping out the entire town of Longarone and four neighboring villages.

When David Lees arrived there was nothing to photograph. The dam, strangely, stood intact, towering over the valley. But everything in front of it was gone, scoured away. Even the water was gone. Lees took pictures of figures-an old woman, a priest clutching his rosary beads behind his back-gazing out onto the great empty plain delimited only by mountains in the distance.

Before a public inquiry could be launched, the chief dam engineer committed suicide, and perhaps, more than the actual official findings, that said all there was to say about the disaster. The ambitions of great men, ascending on pride, delusion, and lies, ended in tragedy for the many and, for the great men themselves, in the melted wax of their vain self-immolations. When the inquiry was concluded five years later, the surviving accused were sentenced to a collective twenty-one years, which was subsequently overturned on appeal for lack of evidence.

By the time of Vajont, Dorothy Lees was eighty-three years old and had left her house in Bellosguardo for a convent run as a casa di riposo casa di riposo, an old folks home, by Franciscan nuns. Dorothy liked to sit with the sisters as they prayed their novenas, and on St. Francis's feast day they brought her carnations. She in turn bought candles for the church and she confided to her diary that she would like the Mother Superior all "to myself."

David-now living in Rome where Life Life's bureau was located-came to see her as often as he could, and he came on St. Francis's day in 1964. He took her on a little tour of the city: "We went to Piazzale Michelangelo, where I had not been for years and looked down at the city, all lighted up." They came down the hill into Oltrarno, down to the Ponte Vecchio, and "I saw for the first first time the site of my old tower and what they have built up in its place." It was more charitable not to say what she thought of the postwar reconstruction, and so she wrote nothing more. time the site of my old tower and what they have built up in its place." It was more charitable not to say what she thought of the postwar reconstruction, and so she wrote nothing more.

She was to have one more St. Francis's Day, in 1965, with her David. He'd been in Florence for some time that year, shooting a color essay on Dante for Life Life: the editors had accepted his Sh.e.l.ley piece, and now one on the maestro himself, and wasn't that a fine and fitting thing? After all, the day she'd given birth to David, she'd written Dante's words, Incipit Vita Nuova Incipit Vita Nuova, in her diary.

The next winter, on February 19, 1966, Dorothy died. On the page for that day in his journal where he kept track of his expenses and travel mileage, his spools of Ektachrome and tips to porters and lighting men, David drew a cross in blue marker and beneath it wrote, "Mamma."

In Dorothy's own diary, another hand, not her own, wrote on the same page, "Santa Dorotea." And so perhaps she was: certainly her life seemed to have been devoted half to prayer, if only for David. It must have been one of the nuns who wrote it-one of those women you see at shrines with their candles and violets-sorting her things, her relics and billets-doux from Gordon Craig, after they'd buried her.

Later that year, in summer, David shot a photoessay on the Arno for Life. Life. He spent a lot of time in the Casentine Forests of the Arno headwaters among the monks at Camaldoli and still more at St. Francis's hermitage at La Verna. He couldn't stop photographing the monks and the pattern they made: dark, identical shafts against the huts and cloisters, the rocks and trees, anonymous persons, veiled in their habits, each one of whom was a lick of candlelight in the wilderness. He spent a lot of time in the Casentine Forests of the Arno headwaters among the monks at Camaldoli and still more at St. Francis's hermitage at La Verna. He couldn't stop photographing the monks and the pattern they made: dark, identical shafts against the huts and cloisters, the rocks and trees, anonymous persons, veiled in their habits, each one of whom was a lick of candlelight in the wilderness.

His attraction to these images sprang from no detectable religious impulse. He was no Santa Dorotea. In Rome he had a wife and two sons with whom he did not live. He had a separate apartment, a mistress, and other women besides. At some point David had become Gordon Craig, his father. He was, if not a genius, an artist. The photographs of Camaldoli and La Verna certainly proved that much. But the photoessay never ran. By the time it was ready to go to press the following winter, it was not what people wanted to know about the Arno.

2.

From Dante's celestial vantage point you might have seen it all: not Florence or Tuscany or even Europe, but the clouds, their peaks and chasms illuminated by starlight, turning endlessly like constellations and nebulae. Beginning in September and all through October the North Atlantic cyclone, the sun around which other weather systems spun, grew to immense size, in turn driving two high-pressure zones-one hot and one cold-like cogs and wheels. South of these, over the Mediterranean, trapped between the Alps and Africa, was a ma.s.s of cold air pressing down over an equally large concentration of warm, moist air. For six weeks, nothing moved, the clouds and gyres of vapor as fixed and motionless as Dante's Heaven: the sky shimmered down in streams of wind and gray water.

This did not seem remarkable: it rained as often as not in Tuscany this time of year. But the rain accreted, insinuated itself into the soil. Perhaps four inches fell in September and that much again in October, a little more each day. By the first of September, the ground in the Casentine was saturated and would begin, un.o.bserved, to slide. Higher up, Dante's plaque at the head of the Arno was buried in snow and then, as the stratum of warm air bore down on the mountaintops, the snow began to melt. Falterona and the Gorga Nera, or rather the waters they could no longer contain, were creeping toward Florence. On November 2 alone, it rained seven and a half inches in twenty-four hours, and seventeen inches in the mountains. But by then it did not seem like so much. At the Ponte Vecchio the Arno could accommodate 32,000 cubic feet of water per second, a veritable deluge. And what was that-an inch of rain here and an inch there-compared to a thousand years of history, of beauty, and of simply persisting so magnificently in one place?

Upstream thirty miles from the city there was a place called Valle dell'Inferno, "the valley of h.e.l.l." No one knows if this is a literary allusion to Dante, or simply a bald statement of circ.u.mstance. In any case, on November 3, Lorenzo Raffaelli had had it with the sirens. The rain was bad enough. He and his wife, Ida, lived in the village just below the La Penna and Levane dams, good enough neighbors as such modern installations went. But at seven that evening the siren started up and, just as you gathered your nerves, began to wail again like a penned dog.

There was a sequence-though no one could remember how it went-of wails that was supposed to precede the opening of the floodgates by the dams' operators, ENEL, the Italian state electrical utility. But tonight, nothing was happening, nothing but rain. The siren must be a test, or a piece of stupidity by a dam worker. Questa poggia e insopportibile. Vado a letto Questa poggia e insopportibile. Vado a letto, Lorenzo told Ida. "This rain is just too much. I'm going to bed."

Two hours later, the d.a.m.nable siren-no wonder they'd called this place h.e.l.l-started up again. Lorenzo dragged himself out of bed and went to the window. There was a roaring outside, or rather a roaring with the sound of a breeze laid over it. He opened the shutters. It was dark and he realized there were no lights anywhere. So it took a few moments for his vision to adjust, to see that water was racing by a few feet below his second-story window; that objects were being ferried past his house; his neighbors' things, pieces of their houses, tree trunks; then empty bottles and a chair, a chest full of gloves, and a piglet, its trotters bent skyward, masts on a white-and-black banded dory.

And strangest of all-ENEL must have opened the gates, or the whole thing had come down, all 500 million cubic feet's worth of it-were the stones. Rocks and boulders coursed by, big ones that might have fallen off the mountain. But stones couldn't float. Yet these rolled by, tumbled past, on the surface of the water a dozen feet above where the ground was supposed to be. So if they weren't floating, they must be flying. They were a flock of birds and the water was the sky.

Down in the city they had finished putting up the green, white, and red bunting for the next day's holiday, Armed Forces Day. There were Union Jack flags mixed in here and there: it had been "British Week," a merchandising celebration of swinging London. The 1960s were approaching their apogee: in neighborhood trattorias, the Beach Boys and the Beatles fizzed from the radio, and at the cinema Il Viaggio Allucinante Il Viaggio Allucinante, "Fantastic Voyage," was playing. There was a wet, lashing wind outside. In another movie theater John Huston's The Bible The Bible was playing with Huston himself in the role of Noah. was playing with Huston himself in the role of Noah.