The Stones of Florence (7 page)

This trail of tigerish architecture stopped short of Florence, where the classic tradition was proof against the exotic. The black-and-white (sometimes, as elsewhere, dark-green-and-white) marbles of the Baptistery and San Miniato and the Badia at San Domenico di Fiesole are not striped or banded but arranged in charming geometric patterns—in lozenges or diamonds, long wavy lines like the water pattern in hieroglyphics, squares, boxes, rosettes, suns and stars, wheels, semi-circles, semi-ellipses, tongues of flame. These delightful designs, fresh and gay, are associated with classic architectural elements: pure Corinthian columns, entablature, and pediments. Unlike the burly Lombard churches of their period, the Florentine Romanesque churches, though simple, are never rough; and unlike the Pisan Romanesque, which dealt in marvels and monsters (the leaning of the Tower of Pisa appears an ordained accident) and combined many foreign styles and influences, as Pisa mingled traffic in its port, the Florentine retained its own local innocence and ordered clarity. No column ever grossly twisted in medieval Florence; nor did stone snakes glide through the Eden into which Giotto was born, a shepherd boy. As early as the thirteenth century, the Florentines were straightening their streets and piazzas. Decrees were promulgated that new streets must be
‘pulchrae, amplae, et rectae’,
for the sake of the city’s decorum. A street that was not beautiful, straight, and broad, it was said, would be
‘turpis et inhonesta’.

There is something of the simple chapel in all the Florentine Romanesque churches—a chapel in the woods or at a crossing of roads. The Baptistery, dressed outside in black-and-white marble and inside in black-and-white marble and mosaics, a pure octagon topped by a pyramidal roof, with a dome inside and below it, formerly, a pool in which every year a communal baptism was performed on all the children born that year in Florence, was originally the Cathedral. San Miniato keeps the pure early-Christian basilica form, with the choir, however, raised very high, like an anthem, over the crypt and flanked by elegant flights of marble stairs. In the pavement is a remarkably beautiful mosaic design, in black on white, showing the signs of the zodiac, doves, and lions; at the end of the nave is a great triumphal arch, in black-and-white marble inlaid with doves and candelabra. San Miniato stands on what was once the cemetery in which the early Christians were buried; the simplicity of interment marks it, just as the simplicity of baptism marks the Baptistery. The Badia at San Domenico di Fiesole, which has a diminutive geometric dark-green-and-white marble façade set in its stone body like a jewel, was dictated by a vision accorded to a saintly hermit; redone by Brunelleschi in the Renaissance for Cosimo il Vecchio, it still has the air of a hermitage perched in the hills.

Innocent legends cling to these candid temples, with their black-and-white sign language of diamonds, circles, water, and fire. An elm outside the Baptistery is supposed to have burst into leaf in midwinter when the corpse of Saint Zenobius was carried past it; a pillar commemorates the flowering tree. Two porphyry columns on either side of the east Baptistery doors have a story of Pisan perfidy attached to them: they were magic columns, in whose polished surfaces treasons and machinations against the state could be seen; the Florentines had won them, as trophy, from the Saracens in the expedition against the Balearic Islands, but the Pisans, before turning them over to the Florentines, had passed them through a furnace which destroyed their lustre and their enchantment. Over the door of Santi Apostoli, the church of the Apostles, in the tiny Piazza del Limbo, where unbaptized infants were buried, there is a Latin inscription saying that the church was built by Charlemagne and consecrated by Archbishop Turpin, with Roland and Oliver as witnesses. This little church, where La Pira distributes bread to the poor on Sundays, possesses some chips of stone believed to have been brought back from the Holy Sepulchre by a certain Pazzino de’ Pazzi, who was the first to scale the wall of Jerusalem on the First Crusade; on Holy Saturday, the chips are carried to the Baptistery, where a spark struck from them lights the Easter Fire, which is carried in procession to the Duomo. At the intoning of the ‘Gloria’ at high mass in the Duomo, a mechanical dove with a fuse in it is lit in the apse with the sacred fire and sent out on an iron wire to the Carro, or Florentine war chariot, loaded with fireworks outside; if the dove makes a safe journey and explodes the fireworks, the harvest that year will be good. In such legends and rituals, the Florentine country heritage is evident. The archetypal model of the early Florentine churches, contrasting with the luxury of Pisa, Lucca, Venice, Siena, was perhaps the stable of Bethlehem—
before
the coming of the Kings. A still more rustic version of the Easter dove ceremony used to take place at Empoli, where the women today sit in their doorways weaving straw novelties for the Florentine Mercato Nuovo; out of the window of the principal church (which is faced with green-and-white marbles in the Florentine geometric patterns), a life-size mechanical donkey was sent shuttling down to the square; the last of these animals is preserved in the little Empoli museum.

In general, the towns with the striped Pisan architecture were Ghibelline, like Pisa itself, which enjoyed the special favour of the Emperor on account of its navy, and the towns with the geometric patterns were Guelph, like Florence, Fiesole, and Empoli. An exception must be made for Lucca and another for Prato, a Guelph town long under Ghibelline domination. But whatever the style, Florentine or Pisan or Pisan-Lucchese, bichromatism was prevalent throughout Tuscany in the Romanesque period, and the blacks and whites, sun and shadow, sharps and flats, recurring on the old church fronts, evoke what has been called the checkerboard of Tuscan medieval politics, the alternation of Guelph and Ghibelline, Pope and Emperor, Black and White. These were the terms, the severe basic antinomies, in which the Tuscans thought and saw. The last of the geometric church façades, and one of the most beautiful, was completed by Leon Battista Alberti, the exponent of classicism in the Renaissance: this was for Santa Maria Novella, the Dominican preaching church of Florence.

Lucca was predominantly a Guelph city; Pisa, its natural enemy, was Ghibelline. Prato was Guelph; Pistoia, a few miles off, was Ghibelline. Florence was Guelph; Siena, Ghibelline. Each black square on the board had a white square adjoining it in sharp political contrast. The colours sometimes changed; if Pisa briefly became Guelph, Lucca briefly became Ghibelline. The nearest and most powerful neighbour was the ‘natural’ enemy. Each city, moreover, had within it a faction of the other side. The Florentine Ghibellines, led by the old noble families, supporters of the Emperor, were allied with Siena, and the Sienese Guelphs, merchants and citizens, with Florence.

The policy of the victorious faction, once it had seized the government of a city, was to burn the houses and towers of the defeated faction and drive their owners into exile, and Italy was full of these
fuorusciti,
scheming and planning, as exiles do, to come home. The
fuorusciti,
ready to foment war and to cement any alliance as the price of their return, represented a permanent external danger, while those who had been left behind, their friends and relations (since all could not be banished), represented a permanent internal danger, which grew more acute, naturally, in time of war.

Not only Pistoia, but nearly every Tuscan town has its story of a corrupted garrison or commander ready to open the gates to the besieging foe:
il traditore.
Life in these thriving commercial towns was fearfully insecure; betrayal was normal. Anyone—any discontented citizen, noble, or prelate—was a potential traitor, and, for this very reason, the traitor, the man of two faces, was held in horror and repulsion inconceivable to a non-Italian. The fact that treason was commonplace made it appear more terrible, a trap in the midst of the everyday, like those mines left by the Nazis during the last war in the country houses of Fiesole they had occupied—mines that were concealed in an armchair or a lemon tree in the garden or a book on the library shelf, to explode, often, months afterward, when life had returned to normal. The road to treason, moreover, was paved with good intentions, and the doubleness of treachery was made easier by a double standard. Dante, for example, put the traitors in the lowest circle of hell, yet he himself, an exiled White Guelph, living at the court of Can Grande in Verona, in a nest of Ghibelline
fuorusciti,
invited the Emperor to redeem fallen Italy and would have been glad, no doubt, to turn his native city over to the Imperial forces if he had been in a position to do so.

This curious double standard reappears in a new form in Machiavelli, that other Florentine genius, also condemned to exile, whose works have troubled the world like a tantalizing enigma; his advice to Lorenzo de’ Medici as the potential princely despot (not the great Lorenzo, but the contemptible Duke of Urbino, who sits in his helmet, thinking, on one of Michelangelo’s Medici Tombs) seems now straightforward cynical counsel and now a kind of double talk, to be understood almost in a reverse sense, as a masked and bitter criticism of politics as they are. As Pistoia became ‘pistol’, ‘Old Nick’ (Niccolò Machiavelli) became in English a synonym for the devil, that is, for the original traitor and
fuoruscito
from Heaven; yet it is hard to read Machiavelli himself without feeling that in his dry recipes for tyranny there is a hidden ingredient working, a passion for liberty, which comes out, like one of the slow-acting poisons of the period, in the
History of Florence
and the
Discorsi.
But if Machiavelli’s work is ‘suspicious’, not to be taken by a tyrant altogether at its smiling face-value, it is all the more a product of its treacherous place and time.

The swift changes of Italian politics in the Middle Ages and Renaissance make any general distinctions false at almost any particular moment of the period in question. The Guelph party, generally speaking, was the party of the pope and Italian business interests; the Ghibellines were attached to the Holy Roman Emperor, across the Alps in Germany, and represented the old feudal nobility. When the emperor crossed the Alps, the Ghibelline power became dominant and many towns changed colour, driving their Guelphs into exile; when he went home, it was the Ghibellines’ turn to go. A strong pope meant a strong Guelph party and vice versa. But these distinctions were blurred by local rivalries, by the intervention of the Normans or the Angevins, by religious issues, by the hatred felt for some particular tyrant or
condottiere,
by the buying and selling of conquered towns. And the crooked policies pursued by both pope and emperor, plus the creation of a throng of anti-popes and anti-emperors, confused the situation still further.

The distinction between Guelph (commercial) and Ghibelline (feudal) is still clear, however, to the eye if Florence is contrasted with Siena: Florence, low and solid on its river, with its (relatively) straight spokes of streets, its ochres and duns, its noble civic sculpture and stalwart plain architecture; Siena, like a vision of chivalry, flaming brick on its hilltops, girdled by walls, with flowering Gothic palaces and streets spiralling upward, as in a maze, to the fierce rich Cathedral at the centre, its mystic painting, gold and pink and black and red, and its painted wooden figures of announcing angels and Virgins. ‘We peasants could not have done that,’ said a Florentine at the opening of the Belvedere, pointing regretfully to an exquisite fresco of the Virgin in the Sienese Gothic manner. ‘We peasants,’ on the other hand, discovered volume, with Giotto, and planted painting, four-square and massive, on the earth. Between the two cities an opposition is still felt; tourists who ‘love’ Siena dislike Florence, and Siena’s leading aristocrat will not set foot in Florence. When he wants intellectual conversation, he invites professors from Florence up for an evening in his palace. The Palio of Siena, with its heraldry and costumes, is a race run round the principal square on horses; Florence has a game of football, or, rather, soccer, played in medieval costumes, on the Piazza della Signoria. It is the difference between the knight and the commoner.

Most of the Tuscan towns, like the Tuscan men and women of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, have a strongly marked individuality, as though the principle of individuation, of which the schoolmen talked, had asserted itself here with a mysterious force and every town and person had been bent on achieving its own entelechy. This is a process that has continued almost to the present day, with Siena becoming more ‘Sienese’ and Florence more ‘Florentine’. In the Middle Ages the two towns must have seemed more alike than they do today, since both were mercantile and banking centres with a strong civic life, a large class of highly skilled artisans, and a feudal nobility that had been constrained to live within the town walls.

It was these nobles who introduced the habit of faction, so especially disastrous for Florence, into the life of the towns. The insupportable pride of the nobility is mentioned by every historian of Florence. From their mountain castles in the Mugello and the Casentino, they had regularly laid waste the countryside, like fairy-tale ogres; a typical member of this caste was a man named Guido Bevisangue (Blood-drinker); another was Guido Guerra (War). When the merchants of Florence defeated such a noble in battle, they set fire to his castle and compelled him, by treaty, to live in the city for a part of every year. The same practice was followed by Lucca and Siena. The strange stillness of the Tuscan countryside, the almost Chinese loneliness and bareness of the hills between Florence and Siena are a product of these wars of pacification, which go back to the eleventh century, on the part of the towns against the nobles or magnates, as they were called in Florence. As the towns grew stronger, castle after castle, fortification after fortification, was dismantled, leaving the area, as it were, deforested and void of habitation. The towers of San Gimignano, silhouetted against the sky, like a mirage of skyscrapers, are all that remain to tell the modern traveller what this region looked like when every hill was crowned by a feudal castle, a village, and a thicket of towers, which belonged to a feudal lord who was really a sort of highwayman, levying customs duties or simply plundering the merchant caravans that passed through his territory. The crumpled grey-and-brown paper landscapes of
trecento
painting, the gaunt precipices and peaks and slabs of naked stone, though a stylistic convention, give a sense of medieval Tuscany as a wasteland or mountainous rocky desert, fit only for a hermit or a beggar saint in his brown robe and rope cincture to kneel down and pray to God.