We left the museum and wandered into the Mercato Nuovo, so called because its current loggia only dates to the 16th century. It’s been a marketplace at least since the 11th century, when it served Florence’s fledgling trade in finished cloth. Nowadays, of course, it caters exclusively to tourists, since that’s the biggest game in town. The unspoken motto of the place is, “Ripping Off Suckers for a Thousand Years!”, and the people who run the stalls are good at it. Of course it’s full of kitsch, but there are some vendors who offer good stuff, such as fine leather goods, from jackets to purses and wallets, at eminently reasonably prices, if the tourist knows a hawk from a handsaw (thank you, W. Shakespeare). Patsy got a new wallet for a lot less than she would have paid for its equivalent in a New York City shop selling Italian leather goods. And yes, it helped that she spoke Italian.
It continues to trouble me that, as the southerners at the Beacci Tornabuoni demonstrated, most of my fellow Americans don’t feel it necessary to pick up even a primitive grasp of the languages in the countries they visit. Well, tourism, except for the strenuous grubby back-pack, youth-hostel version, is expensive, which means that only well-heeled Americans can afford to go on vacation to foreign parts, as opposed to a business-meeting paid for by the company, to a place like Florence, and since English is supposed to be the international language of money, why bother to spikka da lingo?
But that attitude may be changing, at last, as the dollar continues to sink against the Euro. At our Italian language school in New York the elementary levels are mostly filled by young corporate types whose firms have dealings with Italian companies. I suspect that the school’s crash-courses in basic Italian are paid for by these students’ employers, since it’s one thing to get suckered by a trinket-salesman in the Mercato Nuovo, and quite another to blow a deal because you used tu instead of Lei when addressing the presidente of UNICREDIT.
We had a pleasant light lunch at one of the trattorie flanking the Mercato Nuovo, which are also shaded by the roof of the loggia. My feet and knees were grateful for the smooth paving of the arcade as we walked back to the hotel for a rest, but in the afternoon it was cobblestones again as we walked to make our pre-booked entrance time at the Galleria dell’Accademia di Belle Arti. It was June, after all, the height of the tourist season in a tourist town, and unless you really enjoy standing in line for over an hour to visit the Galleria and the Uffizi, reserving tickets and a time in advance is essential. I’ve never visited any of the Disneylands in the States, but I’m told that the lines for the most popular rides and attractions are dreadful, but that if you stay at one of the Disney Corporation’s own hotels, at hilarious expense, your concièrge will pre-book tickets for a reasonable surcharge. Separates the patricians from the plebeians, as it were.
And the same holds true in what I was beginning to think of as “Renaissanceland.” Stand in line with the tour-group plebs for the most popular attractions, or pre-book and swan in through a special entrance, like a Medici prince visiting his own treasure-hoard. We got our tickets through our travel agent, and they were probably a skosh cheaper than what dear Signor Angelo at the Beacci might have demanded, but as an old lefty I felt like a hypocrite, especially when I remembered that I was only in Florence to begin with because my wife makes a tidy salary in the art business, hardly a socialistic enterprise, and because I was prepared to pay part of the expenses of our trip by drawing on my stock market portfolio, which began with a substantial inheritance. As we sauntered into the Galleria waving our tickets I thought, holy shit, I’m a Republican! Cancel the memberships in Greenpeace and the ACLU! Block all emails from MoveOn.com! Follow the Money!
The Galleria dell’Academia’s most famous resident is Michelangelo’s “David,” moved many years ago from his original place in the Piazza della Signoria and replaced by a pretty good copy. Let’s get this over with: the statue deserves every superlative it has accumulated over the centuries. Displayed in a high-ceilinged room of its own, it looks even taller than its fourteen feet, and it’s still alive, despite the fact that it has been reproduced and photographed, trivialized by plastic statuettes and postcards, so many times that it’s a wonder it hasn’t been worn away to nothing by the sheer attention it’s received. But David has survived his pickling. The perfect young athlete stands holding the sling draped over his shoulder with one hand, while the other, relaxed along his thigh, holds the stone he’s about to load into the sling’s pocket. His expression is not ferocious, but simply intent: no more than a few wrinkles break the smooth juncture between his nose and his forehead, and his eyes are focused but calm. He’s sizing up the giant he has to kill, balanced and concentrated, entirely at home in his splendid body. There is even the slightest suggestion of a smile on his lips: now that he’s finally met Goliath, he knows the big galoot with the spear is beatable.
Patsy and I made the same analogy simultaneously: baseball fans both, although she can’t get over the Red Sox and I have pledged my sacred honor to the Yankees, we saw David as a rookie pitcher brought up from the minors only a day or so before, who is facing the most fearsome slugger in the Show during a crucial game. David’s pose, if you put a glove on the sling-hand resting on his shoulder near his face, and replace the rock he holds loosely on his thigh with a ball, is exactly the attitude of a pitcher preparing to throw. And his expression suggested to both of us that of a pitcher about to shake off his catcher’s first signal. The ghost of a smile says, “Forget the sinker- I’m goin’ high and inside. Hey, the team called me up here ’cause I throw heat, right?”
Let art-history purists howl about a crass comparison of Great Art to baseball. But I submit that Michelangelo’s breath-taking vision and skill as he captured the moment before David whirled the stone and killed the giant, is all the more extraordinary because fans of a sport the sculptor never dreamed of can still find a contemporary analogy in David’s pose, and poise. Makes me wonder if Michelangelo ever played a game of stick and ball when he was a kid.
And Patsy and I found ourselves talking about the difference between the moment in the David-Goliath fight which Michelangelo chose to depict, and the one chosen by Bernini. Bernini’s sculpture in Rome shows David in the act of throwing his bean-ball. His David’s face is contorted with rage, his muscles are strained to such an extent that the veins on his massive arms and legs stand out like tree-roots, where Michelangelo’s lethal pitcher is shown in taut, but concentrated repose. In both cases the unseen giant’s death is certain, but it seems to me that the difference between the two sculptures has volumes to say about the change art went through in Italy in the years that separate the two artists. Michelangelo depicts a man who is thinking about the consequences of his action. Bernini’s David has made his decision already. The thoughtful exploration of new ways of depicting the human condition in art which characterized the Florentine 15th and early 16th centuries have been replaced by blind faith in brutal action, during the later Counter-Reformation era which produced Bernini. Suggestion and nuance are gone, killed when the probing curiosity and fluid political conditions which characterized the Florentine flowering were replaced by hardened ideology and the growth of nationalism. Patsy and I both love Bernini’s work for its sheer over-the-top exuberance, but compared to Michelangelo’s “David,” Bernini’s is a great big marble GI Joe action-doll.
The Galleria dell’Academia displays four more of Michelangelo’s statues, all unfinished, like the Pièta in the Museo dell’Opera. They are variations on a figure usually called “The Bound Slave” by art historians, a first-century CE Roman copy of a lost Greek statue, generally attributed to Praxiteles. Of course the subject appealed to the sculptor who said his job was to free the figures he saw from their prisons of stone. Art historians maintain that Michelangelo abandoned the four statues because he found imperfections in the marble blocks as he worked, cracks or seams which made it impossible to realize his visions. Obviously if there’s a hidden fissure in the stone just where you want to shape an extended arm, you either change your design or give up on that particular chunk of stone. But enormous blocks of marble, quarried to order and pre-shaped by master stone-cutters, didn’t come cheap even in the early 16th century. It’s a mark of the extraordinarily high esteem Michelangelo had commanded among princes and Popes since he was barely out of his teens, that he was allowed to discard his first stone drafts like a writer crumpling up pieces of paper.
But the vast figures struggling to escape not just the sculpted ropes binding them, but the stone itself, made me wonder if Michelangelo hadn’t finished them to his own satisfaction, and to hell with the patrons who were expecting clean, polished statues. A heretical speculation, to be sure, but the man was a truculent son of a bitch by most accounts (even his own), and he was certainly obsessed by the idea of freedom from constraint. Perhaps he deliberately left his four Slaves still fighting their way out of the matrix which bound them. The official attitude toward homosexuality during his time, laid down by the Church, was draconian: sodomites caught in the act were condemned to particularly painful deaths. But unofficially the harsh punishments only applied to the lower orders. Popes and Princes buggered blissfully, and indeed in a world entirely governed by arranged marriages which amounted to corporate mergers, the powerful, in the middle ages and Renaissance, were probably more relaxed about gay sex than their equivalents in our time. Noblewomen were property, kept under close guard because if they were impregnated by the wrong cock, an entire dynasty might fall. So let the lords and princes get their rocks off with one another: at least there won’t be an inconvenient pretender to a throne to start a war.
Was Michelangelo gay? He was certainly more interested in depicting the male body that the female one: the Sibyls on the Sistine ceiling, as everyone notices, are basically muscular guys with tits. And does it matter? After all, the Athenians whose statuary, through Roman copies, inspired Michelangelo, actively encouraged physical love between men, because lovers side-by-side in a phalanx on the battlefield would defend one another to the death (Achilles and Patroclus, q.v.). But Michelangelo wasn’t an ancient Athenian, and he wasn’t a nobleman or a prince of the Church, either. He was admired, even revered, by his high-ranking patrons, but he was still a commoner, and sodomy was a deadly sin for hoi polloi, with horrible consequences both in the here-and-now and in the hereafter.
So as I looked at those four sculptures depicting prisoners of the stone hopelessly straining to escape it, I wondered if Michelangelo might not have been expressing a profound statement about his own condition. Already hailed by his contemporaries as the greatest artist of his time, but subject to brutal punishment and even death if he ever came out of the closet….well, I needn’t go on. David’s glorious, but the four unfinished “Slaves” can break your heart.
Three rooms of the Galleria dell’Academia display earlier examples of the artistic struggle against constraint. Here are Florentine paintings from the 13th and early 14th centuries, beginning with works by a contemporary of Cimabue, continuing through pieces by Andrea Orcagna and the brothers Jacopo and Nardo di Cione, ending with paintings by Taddeo Gaddi and Bernardo Daddi, contemporaries of Giotto. At first glance the works all appear Byzantine: icons depicting sages standing in God’s holy fire (thank you, W. B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium; the poet was actually referring to the 12th century mosaics in Ravenna, since he never visited Istanbul), the figures shown against a richly-worked gold-leaf background which represents the eternally blazing light of the presence of God. But we are in on the beginning of a new way of seeing. The forms are no longer flat, but fully-molded; the poses no longer strictly iconographic but relaxed at least somewhat into the way people really stand and sit; and the faces, though certainly not yet naturalistic, possess individuality and a modicum of expression, stern but recognizably human. The thrones of the holy figures crowd outward into the “holy fire,” almost becoming architecture, depicted in rough but unmistakable perspective. A thousand years of sacred praying-cards fold here.
When Patsy and I strolled (well, I gimped; I’d been on my sore legs for quite awhile) into a room full of fully-developed 15th century Florentine paintings by the likes of Filippino Lippi, Ghirlandaio and Uccello, I overheard an American lecturing his two companions in the confident tones of a village explainer. “The Renaissance begins here,” sez he. Woops, guy, wrong room. But I held my tongue. Never mind, everybody likes to sound smart about art, and any real art historian can spot holes in my own notions big enough for Sir John Hawkwood to ride his horse through.
As we were on our way out, the Galleria dell’Accademia gave us an unexpected lagniappe with a small exhibition of musical instruments. There was a Stradivari violin and an Amati viola, spinets and harpsichords, dulcimers, a wonderfully weird 19th century guitar-shaped autoharp, shawms, snake-horns and basset-horns, and a plectrum instrument that could either have been a small lute or an early mandolin. I used to play the lute, and I have always loved early music. Appropriately a pre-Baroque vocal arrangement was being softly piped in, and it was tantalizingly familiar. I finally recognized it: John Dowland’s lovely setting of the London street-song “Fine Knacks For Ladies.” And the impulse to touch the untouchable seized me again. Even though I sold my lute years ago and have fallen out of practice with my two guitars, due to arthritis in my hands, I wished I could grab the lute-mandolin, or maybe even the guitar-autoharp, and try to add an instrumental line to the music. But of course the fragile instruments were unstrung and pickled in their glass jars. Even the Amati and Strad had never been played, and never would be, although the placard on their case was unclear as to why not. Flaws in the wood, like the flaws in Michelangelo’s marble blocks? Still, mute as they were condemned to remain, the violin and viola from the two most accomplished luthiers of all time had a numinous aspect for me, the atheist music-lover’s equivalent to what the faithful feel in the presence of saintly relics preserved in monstrances.
In a state of light awe we left the room behind a young American woman whose boyfriend was waiting outside. “Any guitars in there?” he asked her. “No, just, like, fiddles. It’s BORING.”
