A Hobbling Tour of Florence and Rome, Part Four
Il Museo dell’Opere del Duomo isn’t exactly a secret, but it has been reconfigured so many times, complete with address-changes, that it’s a bit elusive. So despite the fact that it contains glories, you don’t have to stand in a long line to get in. In fact we almost missed its modest sign, in a block of 18th century palazzi across the street from the apse of the cathedral. Evidently the Japanese tour-group commanders don’t bother with it, perhaps because its contents might confuse their troops, who have been marching and clicking around the Duomo, Campanile and Baptistery assuming that all the wonderful decorations are original.
Nah. All the original stuff was removed decades ago, because of damage caused by natural disasters, auto exhaust and acid rain. The copies which replace them are good enough for tourist work, and I was amused that the bottom rows of the replicas of Ghiberti’s bronze Baptistery doors, which, unlike the originals, were never gilded, have been worn and polished down to a golden hue by the sweat of countless human hands cutting through the bronze’s green patina to the original reddish-yellow of the alloy. I was reminded that master restorers of old paintings often use spit and even a bit of sweat to clean tiny accumulations of darkening occlusions from the original pigments without damaging them. Your grandmother was right when she spat on a handkerchief to rub out the raspberry ice-cream stain on your new shirt. Human fluids contain enzymes in mild concentration, acidic enough to obliterate stains without damaging the pigments of the paintings. But sweaty hands touching metal sculpture can eat its surface layer away, given time.
So the real Ghiberti doors are in the Museo dell’ Opere del Duomo, and the tourist armies are polishing the fakes on the Baptistery down to entirely convincing “gilded” simulacra by stroking them. And the tour-guides just smile and nod. Of course you can’t touch the real doors. They’re glassed-in. But I couldn’t help thinking that in Ghiberti’s day, his astonishing use of perspective in bas-relief must have seemed such a wonder to people attending Mass in the Baptistery that the faithful must have run their hands over his doors. Humans have to touch amazing things to make sure they are real (think of Doubting Thomas poking his fingers into Jesus’s spear-wound). So the gold-leaf must have been replaced many times over the centuries, until the terrible Arno flood of 1966, when the panels ripped from their doors were recovered from the mud, cleaned, restored, given a final gilding and whisked off to the Museo, where they are preserved under glass for the ages. Pickled, so to speak.
They are emblematic of the essential paradox of sacred art preservation. The doors were made to enhance the numinous aspect of a holy building, but the destructive effects of the phenomenal world made it necessary to take them off the church and put them in a climate-controlled secular environment, truncated from their function. They are breathtakingly beautiful, certainly, and from Vasari’s time onward much ink has flowed to assert that Ghiberti’s victory over Brunelleschi in the competition to design the doors marked the beginning of the Florentine Renaissance in art. But today they are nothing but precious objects in an art museum, to be regarded with respect and even a measure of awe for their loveliness. They serve a vital teaching function in art history, but they aren’t doing their original jobs. Like all works of religious art which have been removed from their original contexts, they made me think of human beings in retirement, still alive but permanently disconnected from the passionate imperatives that made their lives seem worth living to begin with. If sculpture could talk, Ghiberti’s original doors might complain about their replacements, like old folks in a rest-home sitting around bitching about the inferior new generation which has taken over their work (for the Baptistry is still, first and foremost, a house of worship, even if it has to survive on tourist money). Yet if the original doors were set back in place, they would be destroyed sooner or later, one way or another. The replacements are expendable.
I’ll only mention two other marvels in the Museo dell’Opere del Duomo, because this isn’t a guidebook. First, there’s one of Michelangelo’s last sculptures, intended for his own tomb in Rome’s Santa Maria Maggiore, and left unfinished. It’s a Pietà, or more precisely a work depicting the moment before the Mother and her dead Son were left in the configuration the artist, much earlier in his career, had realized in perhaps his most beautiful sculpture. Nicodemus, by tradition a stone-cutter himself, is represented standing behind the dead Christ, helping to lower the body, with the aid of the Beloved Disciple John, into Mary’s lap. Scholars believe that Michelangelo gave Nicodemus’s face his own features, and that makes exquisite sense for an old man using the ancient iconography of the scene to anticipate his own inevitable descent into the tomb. But the only figure of the grouping which has been finished and polished is that of Jesus. Nicodemus’s face is craggy and harsh; the features and limbs of the Madonna and John are only beginning to emerge from the marble, and the back of the enormous sculpture is still a rough sketch in stone.
And Michelangelo not only abandoned the work, but vandalized it, in a fit of dissatisfaction or perhaps existential despair: he was almost eighty when he began work on it, and as his private poems and correspondence indicate, acutely resentful of his impending death. In any case, he hacked off the arm and left leg of the finished Christ figure (the restored limbs are by Tiberio Calcagni, one of his students, done after his master died). The presence of the vast work in Florence is another instance of body-snatching: Michelangelo was working in Rome at the end of his life, and he’d never intended to return to Florence. But when he left it unfinished and savagely marred by his rage against the dying of the light (thank you, Dylan Thomas) it languished in obscurity until Cosimo III, the last of the Medici Grand Dukes, snagged it for Florence. It used to be in the Duomo, but like Ghiberti’s doors, it’s got its own climate-controlled room in the Museo dell’Opere now.
And there’s a double displacement of function here: the artist made the piece in Rome for his tomb, and rejected it; Cosimo III, a vainglorious idiot, grabbed it as a trophy for Florence. So Michelangelo, who had left his native city out of disgust for its nasty politics, and had never intended that anyone ever see a work he regarded as fundamentally unworthy of his talent, was twice co-opted after his death. The sculpture, which even may include a self-portrait, was preserved and hauled to Florence because of a princeling’s vanity. The survival of the sculpture raises the perennial question of the propriety of preserving the work of a dead artist who wished it destroyed when he was alive. In this instance, we have to be grateful for Cosimo’s egoism. Of course we’ll always wonder what this Pietà might have become if Michelangelo had finished it, and the exquisite modeling of Christ’s body gives us a tantalizing hint. But there is vast power in the piece’s unfinished state. Michelangelo famously remarked that he felt his task as a sculptor was simply to free the forms he saw in his blocks of stone, and this work shows him in the act of doing it. I had to restrain myself, as I walked behind the sculpture, from reaching up to touch the hand of Nicodemus, barely scratched into the stone, but already alive and straining to support the weight of the dead god. Despite its unfinished state and its divorce from its function, the Pietà is more alive in its sterile setting than Ghiberti’s doors, because it shows the actual chisel-marks and hatchings made by an artist in the process of his work. Touch the emerging hand of Nicodemus, or stroke the hacked-in folds of the Madonna’s veil, and you’re touching Michelangelo’s own hand. Of course you can’t. Or shouldn’t.
As to the second marvel in the museum, I referred above to my first trip to Paris. I had studied medieval art, music and architecture in college, and eventually I made my way to Nôtre Dame. It was a cold, dank winter day with rain turning to sleet, no tourists, and the cathedral was between masses when I arrived. An elderly sexton I approached didn’t object to my French as much as the snooty flic had, and we chatted for awhile until he realized that I’d learned a good deal about the glorious building he served, even though I’d never visited it. At one point he broke into my art-historical blather and said (in French) “But you are forgetting the people who made this holy building, my friend.” He fetched a flashlight from his little office and led me to a low door set into one of the great piers supporting the vaulting, unlocking it and telling me what to look for. I climbed the narrow spiral staircase inside the pillar – effortlessly, back then, ah, sweet bird of youth! (thank you, J. Keats and T. Williams) – which gave on to the tribune and triforium galleries of the enormous building, with extraordinary views. But the sexton had told me to play the flashlight over the backs of the stone blocks themselves. Here and there, scratched into the stone, were marks made by the masons who had built Nôtre Dame over the two centuries of its construction. There were Roman numerals, probably the identification numbers of blocks which had to be set according to a specific order. There were crude little geometric scratches, possibly showing how a certain stone should be aligned with others. And there were even a few words, barely discernable in the bad light. I hadn’t been a serious medievalist in college (and am not one today) so I hadn’t the Old French or the archaeological training to make out whether or not the words were names, or even brags, left behind by the masons: “Jannequin made this.” Perhaps.
But I certainly did put my hands over the faint impressions in the stones, and felt as if I were touching the living pulse of the cathedral. And the feeling welled up in me again (without the touching) when I saw the marks of Michelangelo’s chisels on the great unfinished sculpture. It peaked when Patsy and I reached a room in the Museo dell’Opere dedicated to the actual tools and gear Brunelleschi and his construction crew used when they were building the Duomo. The display replicates a construction site at some level of the great cupola. Rising from the dusty stone floor is a section of scaffolding made of heavy, rough timber lashed together with thick rope, and a table consisting simply of a wide plank laid across a couple of wooden sawhorses. Scattered across the table are drafting tools: a wooden T-square, iron calipers of various sizes, and writing instruments. On the planks laid across the scaffold’s beams are more tools, including what looks like a carpenter’s or mason’s level, wooden mallets of various sizes, chisels, augers and masons’ spatulas; and here and there on the floor are coils of rope, more planks and timbers, and an array of blocks-and-tackles ranging from massive two-wheel wooden blocks the size of a man’s torso, down to metal pulleys no more than a hand-span long, but with multiple wheels inset, giving an enormous mechanical advantage to the hauler. There are enormous iron brackets fixed to the rough wall of the simulated site, and sconces for torches. The effect is as if the carpenters, masons and laborers, with Brunelleschi himself, had just left the site for the night, leaving their tools in place to be picked up for the next day’s work.
And every tool, measuring instrument, bracket, coil of rope and length of timber is original. Of course you can’t touch them. Many of the objects, particularly the rope, are extremely fragile, and the reconstructed site is sealed behind glass. But the visitor has been prepared for it by a display outside the room of drawings and architectural renderings, most by Brunelleschi himself, along with several of his wooden models of the Duomo. It is unavoidable, as you look at the crude table, to keep from imagining Brunelleschi standing at it lining out the solution to a problem which has come up – maybe sketching one of the detail-renderings framed on the wall outside – and you want to step into the scene like a time-traveler, handle his pen, use his T-square and calipers, wield a mallet and chisel, or take up the purchase on a heavy length of hemp still threaded into a massive pulley suspended from a bracket above the scaffold, to help a master mason (not Jannequin here, but perhaps Luigi or Piero) lift another block into its necessary position along one of the steeply-arched ribs of the rising dome.
Brunelleschi might have visited the Pantheon in Rome during his preparation for building the Duomo, but the Roman dome’s design wouldn’t have helped him much. Nobody knows who came up with the Pantheon’s plan. The “Agrippa” whose brag is incised on the architrave of the portico came later, and the portico is all he built, awkwardly, for it doesn’t join gracefully with the Pantheon itself. But whoever came up with the great dome’s design – Hadrian himself? Appolodorus of Damascus, the most celebrated architect in Rome during the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian? – had plenty of space in which to work, which allowed him to solve the problem of building a vast, hollow hemisphere by using brute force. Yes, he used poured concrete, much lighter than blocks of stone, for the dome itself, and further lightened its weight by employing hollowed-out coffers. But the Pantheon’s dome is still massive, and it rises from stone-block walls which are a good three feet thick. And when construction began, the neighborhood was still thinly settled.
By contrast, the Florentine architect had an already cramped site to deal with, and he wanted to build something more audacious than the cupola of the Baptistery across the piazza, which, like that of the Pantheon, is a true dome, a spherical section. Though survey courses in art history convey the notion that the master builders of the Florentine Renaissance owed much of their skill to the rediscovery of classical treatises on architecture, the Romans never got beyond the round arch, whose height and span was limited, no matter how massively it was built, by its own weight.
But in the 12th century, architects in Northern France who had learned of Muslim innovations, either by visits to southern Spain, or through accounts by Crusaders returning from Palestine, began to build churches and cathedrals based on the astonishing load-bearing capacity of the ogive, or pointed, arch, which directs gravitational force not straight down, but outward, permitting higher, more open buildings built with less weighty material, the lateral force countered by buttressing on the outside walls of the structure. Welcome to Chartres.
Brunelleschi and his contemporaries were heirs to that “Gothic” revelation, of course (as mentioned, the nave of Santa Maria del Fiore, begun in the 13th century, is a Gothic structure whose roof is supported by ogive arches rising from its piers), and in fact the Duomo he built isn’t a dome at all. It’s a nose-cone aimed for the heavens. He extrapolated from the medieval ogive-arch construction in the church itself, and from other high-medieval churches in Florence and elsewhere. The cupola is composed of a ribbing of ogives rising from a massive circular drum, and it rises to a flattened point which supports its lantern. Brunelleschi had to make the design work as he went along, because no one before him had thought to project the principle of the two-dimensional ogive arch into three dimensions. But his Masters and Teachers weren’t ancient Romans. They were the great anonymous architects of the high middle ages. In fact Brunelleschi needed no help from the Pantheon’s design. It was obsolete. He built on the example of medieval masters.
The notion, mostly promoted in the 19th century by British and German scholars, that the Florentine Renaissance was a sudden artistic paradigm-shift arising from the rediscovery and proliferation of ancient Roman and Greek texts and art-works, reflects the British and German imperial mind-set of the time more than it does what was really going on in Florence. The Romans had a dandy Empire and it lasted for a thousand years, give or take a few embarrassing decades. The English and the Germans were working on their own empires, which they hoped would be even better, so everything Roman was cool, especially their engineering, architectural and artistic techniques. And the Greeks who briefly had their own empire, thanks to Alexander (who wasn’t Greek) were cool, too. On the other hand, everything went to hell when the Roman Empire fell apart, and a deadly combination of hairy barbarians and the Roman Catholic Church took over Europe. Eeek, the Dark Ages!
But the history of How Things Work is messier and far more interesting than official history, which is mostly a long brag written by conquerors. The accepted account of the Renaissance, cobbled up by visiting scholars with an imperial axe to grind, has been calcified in Art History 101 textbooks for the past two hundred years. It’s based on the notion of Progress, a chimaera which didn’t exist before the northern European industrial revolution. It’s machine-thinking applied to human affairs, based on the notion that technological improvements to gadgets invariably result in a general improvement in the human condition.
The entire 20th century bears bloody testimony to the fact that Progress hasn’t really made most people happier, though the maids at the Beacci are certainly grateful for the invention of the air conditioner, and editing this account with a few keystrokes on my computer is a lot easier than it would have been if I were still using a typewriter or a pen. But the European and American 19th century deified Progress and made florid statues of Her, modeled vaguely on Greco-Roman statues of Athena/Minerva. The titular protector of Athens was the Goddess of Wisdom in Warfare, unlike her brother Ares/Mars who was just responsible for infecting humans with blood-lust. Hence, she’s depicted in classical times wearing a helmet and carrying a spear, but the owl, symbol of smarts, was her totem animal, and she wears a mysterious collar, the aegis, which was given to her by her father Zeus to signify that she had the power to arbitrate between the gods and men.
Statues and paintings of Progress, Athena’s 19th century avatar, often show her with the helmet, but without the aegis or the owl, toting a cornucopia instead of a spear. But she’s still a pretty bellicose figure – in a famous 19th century American print, she’s shown flying above a wagon-train of doughty white Pioneers, leading them to the Conquest of the West and the extermination of the Plains Indians. The depiction is appropriate, since the poor Jane-Come-Lately Goddess’s gifts to humankind have mostly boiled down to more efficient ways to kill people. What came out of her horn of plenty turned out to be weapons rather than well-being. So nobody is raising new statues to Progress, and the idea that human ingenuity leads to human happiness has lost supporters among minimally sentient beings at least since Buchenwald and the atomic bombing of Japan. To be sure there are plenty of greedy idiots who still worship her avidly, because she seems to be in bed with Mammon these days; and unfortunately the idiots are running the world.
But the notion that human technological prowess, fostered by the Roman Empire, hit a wall when it fell, and got back on its rising track in the European 14th and 15th centuries only because of the rediscovery of the Greco-Roman legacy, is beginning to fray, and the innovations of the previously-despised Middle Ages are finally getting a fresh look by scholars. In future the very term “Renaissance” might arguably be retired, since the evidence suggests there never really was a death in art and architecture which required a rebirth. Instead, things just went on: ordinary – and extraordinary – people simply kept trying to make things work better, building not on theories but on daily trial-and-error. For the tourist, there is more information about the real history of Florence in a single multi-wheeled pulley left behind by the architect of the Duomo, than in any textbook about the Medici.
Of course there were politics involved in Brunelleschi’s victory over Ghiberti in the competition for building the cupola, and scholars have sifted endlessly through the factionalism and bribery involved. But once Brunelleschi was awarded the contract and began the physical work, we’re in the sphere of every-day history: the man must have been as terrified by his victory as Robert Redford’s Senate-aspiring character in “The Candidate,” who gives in to every dirty trick his campaign manager forces on him. On election night Redford’s character is told, “You’ve won!” “Now what do I do?” he asks.
It was even tougher for Brunelleschi, because he hadn’t been elected to a comfortable political office, but actually had to produce something tangible: the full-sized realization of the structure he’d made so seductive in his drawings and models. And he brought off the trick, without reference to Roman architecture, or even to the Goddess Progress. As an ambitious Florentine, he rejected the medieval Church’s model of the human condition, which didn’t permit men to rise above their pre-ordained stations. And as an engineer he certainly borrowed medieval architectural technology if it worked better than that of the Romans. Florentines never had much use for Romans, after all.