At breakfast we met the terrazzo’s resident beggar-pigeon, a bird who has claimed the terrace as his turf and defends it vigorously from rivals pecking around for bits of bread tossed by the diners, despite the fact that instead of a tail he has only a gray stump. Angelo and the rest of the staff don’t know how he lost his tail, but they’re fond of him. He’s a clumsy flyer and his landings are painful to watch, but he’s a sly thief and something of a tough guy, and he generally gets the best of the morsels. He reminded me a little of one of Moravia’s antiheroes, un’ disperato numero uno, whose will to live and combative nature overcome his terrible disadvantages.
The Beacci is only a short walk from the Piazza del Duomo – indeed, indeed, the old city-center is blessedly compact compared to Rome’s – and we headed for it to begin our first day of dedicated tourism. I promptly made a remarkably bone-headed mistake. The Campanile, designed originally by Giotto in 1334 as the bell-tower for the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore almost 100 years before Brunelleschi beat out Ghiberti in the city’s competition to design the great church’s crowning cupola, was the first of the Piazza’s three most famous buildings which we encountered, and unlike the Duomo itself, or the older Baptistry which faces it, there was no line to get in. I was still time-sick, perhaps, certainly not thinking straight, and I thought, based on a memory of my boarding-school’s bell tower, that there must be an open space inside, where one could look up to the top without having to climb there. But the school bell tower had been built in the 1920s on an open plan, with an iron staircase going round the interior of its brick walls. The Campanile was built of stone blocks in the 14th century, and there is nothing inside most of it but steps, 414 of them. I had walked myself and Patsy into my worst fear about the trip. But we’d paid our damn Euros and we had to try the damn climb. Touristic pride, after all: it’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.
We got to the lower bell chamber, about 375 steps, high enough for glorious views of the Duomo and Baptistery through its four windows, with the roofs of the city tending away beyond. I sat down on a window ledge to enjoy my heart attack, rather surprised to find that the immense brackets and cradles which had once held the lower tier of bells were empty. And suddenly a Japanese camera crew burst in from below, at the trot. There were four of them, lean young athletes carrying serious gear. One back-packed an enormous wide-format movie camera, another a stack of strapped-together aluminum equipment boxes, a third bore a huge “portable” generator, and the last was encoiled in enough heavy electric cables to wire a military bivouac. They ignored us, stopped briefly to catch their collective breath, and galloped up the final steps to the upper chamber. Patsy and I exchanged a look and simultaneously shook our heads. We ambled around the lower chamber for awhile and Patsy took a few pictures. Then we made our way back down. Slowly.
I’d missed something while we were toiling up the stairs: there was a tiny square interior window giving onto a dark, dusty little room about halfway down, with no obvious way in, and I wondered what it was. It obviously wasn’t in use; possibly it had been a place for the bell-ringers to have a drink and catch their breath, back when the Campanile still had its bells. Florence seems to have almost as many bells as swallows, and at regular intervals they bing and bong and generally tintinnabulate all over the city. But they don’t ring on the usual hours, nor do they count them out. They just set up a pleasant commotion from time to time for about thirty seconds and stop, leaving a long, diminishing chromatic reverberation in the air. I realized finally that they mark the canonical hours, the ancient monastic prayer-summonses which punctuate the Church’s day and night: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Sext, Nones, Vespers and Compline. And it occurred to me that perhaps the reason the bells had been removed from the city’s most famous bell-tower was because of tourism.
I used to hang out in my school’s bell-tower. I knew the gifted student who played the tower’s carillon, and with a small group of friends I climbed regularly to the chamber below the racked, tuned bells to listen to him play. He wore cotton in his ears, but the rest of us didn’t, and after fifteen minutes of close-up exposure to the vast bronze music, we’d be temporarily deaf. I figured deafness wasn’t the kind of thrill the Florentine Tourist Board wanted to offer the intrepid visitors who climbed the Campanile, so its bells were removed along with its reason for existence. The biggest dick in the city belongs to a castrato.
The musing led me into wondering about who rang the bells in the still-functional towers. There are a healthy number of priests and nuns in Florence, but the monastic orders which originally did the grunt-work for the many churches and abbeys are on the decline, and I didn’t think there was a lay Bellringers’ Guild any more. I guessed that the other bell-towers were equipped with mechanical rocker-arms connected to computerized timers which cue them to bong the bells at the canonical hours, electro-mechanical monks who don’t have to wake up to their duty to call the faithful to prayer every four hours. Members of the Order of St. Microsoft. Well, even Muslims are using recorded muezzim in their minarets nowadays.
We did wait in line to enter the Duomo itself. We’d already met the Japanese Special Forces- the scarily fit camera squad conquering the Campanile- and now we met the regular infantry. Of course regimented tour-groups aren’t peculiar to the Japanese any more, but the Japanese invented the controlled rank of camera-armed troops led by a commander carrying a colorful umbrella or a pennant on a short staff, like an old British Regimental Colour-Sergeant, and they are still the best keeping their rank-and-file in ranks and files. The goal is maximum seizure of Sights (with strictly-arranged photo-ops) in minimal time, and nowadays the bullhorns once carried by the Colour-Sergeants, which I remembered from past visits to Rome and Paris, are mercifully gone, replaced by little buds in each soldier’s ear through which the commander, wearing a wireless microphone headset, delivers concise orders about where to look and what to photograph. The Japanese troops even wear uniforms: the men in short-sleeved buttoned shirts tucked into neat trousers (if jeans, they are ironed), the women in modest summer blouse-and-skirt ensembles. They carry small back-packs containing their water-bottles, film, camera-batteries and guidebooks, and they all wear the same hats. These are floppy-brimmed light canvas affairs, usually beige, like fly-fishermen’s or amateur golfers’ Tilley hats, only not as sturdy. The nearest equivalents I can think of are the hats the old Lester Lanin society dance band used to give away at each of their engagements. Patsy used to have one: we ended up putting it on a scarecrow I built back in the early nineties in a vain attempt to keep the deer out of our vegetable garden in New Hampshire. But Lester Lanin hats were orange, a color far too frivolous for the Japanese paramilitary lemmings.
They are eerily silent, concentrating on what’s coming through their ear-buds, and their strolling is more like marching. Obedient to command, they advance, stop, fall out to shoot the designated targets, reform, and march on to capture the next item on the commander’s list of Tactical Objectives. The close-order drill comparison was obvious to me, from my time in the Army, but because of the silence, over the next several days of observing the Japanese tour-groups I began to compare them in my mind to the flocks of rondini. Like the birds, the Japanese tourists form up, scatter briefly, reform and wheel onward, following orders imperceptible and incomprehensible to an outside observer. Wingless bird-people.
The nave of the cathedral, the older part of the building, in contrast to the highly-decorated exterior, is a vast, somber Gothic space. Magnificent, but I was disappointed that we heathen gawkers couldn’t walk into the crossing and gaze upward at the Vasari/Zuccari “Last Judgment” fresco in Brunelleschi’s dome. The area in front of the high altar is reserved for Masses and silent prayer, altogether fitting and proper (thank you, Abe Lincoln) in a still-consecrated house of worship. But the staircases within the crossing’s piers, which lead up to the two balconies encircling the interior of the drum, are open to tourists. So the devout, raising their eyes to stare at the vision of Judgment, contemplating, perhaps, their own eternal fates after death, find themselves confronted with two concentric rings of thoroughly alive and mostly heathen heads staring right back down at them, the barrels of their cameras leveled and firing. Since the lower balcony runs around immediately beneath the fresco’s lowermost panels, which depict Hell, perhaps the believers can console themselves with the notion that the damned tourists, in the context of the fresco, are literally damned.
I’m told that the views of the fresco from the balconies are astonishing, but after the misadventure in the Campanile, I couldn’t face the climb to them- and that’s the easy part of an ascent that continues in a spiral to the exterior balcony at the base of the lantern atop the cupola. The Blue Guide (2005 edition) says it isn’t as hard as it seems unless you’re claustrophobic. Or lame, I added to myself, with considerable regret.
There are some lovely early 15th century stained glass windows in the nave, and there’s an opening in the floor leading down to an ongoing excavation of Roman structures and the early Christian church of Santa Reparata. The Blue Guide said Brunelleschi’s tomb-slab had been discovered down there in 1972: “…the architect of the cupola was the only Florentine granted the privilege of burial in Santa Maria dei Fiore.” But the stairs down to the excavation were utterly clogged by the Japanese regiment we’d followed into the church, and we didn’t attempt to break their ranks. We wandered around for awhile, until I was delighted to recognize Uccello’s memorial image of Sir John Hawkwood.
The formidable 14th century English mercenary captain who spent the last half of his violent life fighting the Italians’ wars for them, has always fascinated me. He was the most successful of the condottieri, hard, cynical warriors-for-hire, who by the end of the Middle Ages had entirely supplanted the chivalric knights-errant, although it can be argued, from the example of Guillaume le Maréschal as early as the 12th century, that knights-errant never existed outside the romances of Chrétien de Troyes and Thomas Malory. Anyway, Hawkwood was certainly in it for the money. He was a commoner, the son of a tanner, fought with Edward the Black Prince at Crécy during the early period of the Hundred Years War, probably awarded himself his knightly title, and ended up leading Florentine troops in the endless inter-city wars of the 14th century, amassing glory, honor and of course riches. When he got too old to fight he was given a sumptuous villa by the Florentines, and he died in bed around 1390. He was buried in Florence with all due honors.
But a short time later the English King Richard II, who was having a spot of trouble holding onto his throne, needed a tough English warrior at his side even if the guy was dead. The Florentines were happy to sell the old condottiero’s bones to England. They didn’t do King Richard much good: he was deposed and murdered anyway, and the event eventually brought on the Wars of the Roses. I imagine Hawkwood’s grim shade was delighted: plenty of jobs for mercenaries in that long fight.
The Florentines were fully aware that without outside mercenary commanders paid handsomely to kick the local troops into battle, factionalism would have made it impossible to field efficient armies. So they were grateful to Hawkwood and the other condottieri and they had already proposed a memorial equestrian statue of Hawkwood to be done in bronze and displayed in the Duomo. But after King Richard snatched the body, the funding for the bronze statue dried up. Instead, Uccello was commissioned to paint an equestrian statue of the old fighter for his memorial in the cathedral. He did a hell of a job, promoting the material of the statue from bronze to marble. I had seen the work in photographs while I was studying art history, and initially I had thought it really was a marble statue: Hawkwood and his horse, both armored cap-a-pie, proceed at a fancy walk with the gigantic war-horse lifting his right forefoot in a pose indicating, in the iconography of heroic statuary since Greco-Roman times, that his rider had not been killed in combat (the images of heroes who died fighting, or at least on campaign, ride rearing horses, which is why in classical depictions Alexander the Great is shown having a bit of a fuss with Bucephalos).
But Uccello painted it on the wall, in 1436, and it still fools you even when you are right there gawking at it. Done entirely in gray marble tones except for accents like Hawkwood’s red helmet-crest and sash of office, its massive volume is realized so perfectly that it’s a good thing the fresco is high on the wall, or you might be tempted to touch it to make sure it really is flat. Grandiose as it is, it fully inhabits the human, imperfect, three-dimensional world; and at the same time it isn’t a portrait of the man himself, but of a statue of him which never existed. By the middle of the 15th century the Florentine masters were playing with what later became known as conceptual art, pushing the limits of their formidable skills beyond naturalistic depiction into witty deception. No wonder Savanarola got upset with them. They were free-thinkers, at least when they were working, and Uccello’s picture not only plays games with the difference between sculpture and painting, it depicts a man the artist had never seen, in the knightly panoply of Uccello’s own time, not Hawkwood’s.
For by 1436, Florence was enjoying a rare peaceful interlude, but in England the Wars of the Roses were getting into full swing. The long, bloody struggle of the House of Lancaster and the House of York for the English crown was entirely medieval: feudal magnates fighting it out for the throne, jealous of their honor and lineage. The set-piece battles were generally fought in the countryside, and a good many powerful members of the knightly Second Estate got killed, along with thousands of their hapless peasant foot soldiers. It was a war over controlling agricultural lands, the true wealth of England at the time, as it had been since the days of King Alfred’s wars with the Saxons. London was barely a city in European terms, and although there was a rising middle-class of merchants and artisans, the Yorkist and Lancanstrian magnates ignored them except when they needed money.
By contrast, Florence, at the time when Uccello honored the English condottiero, had never gone through a totally feudal period in its long history. It began as a strategic camp for Roman legions to control traffic on the Arno, and in the middle ages it more or less cornered the market in Western European cloth manufacture, importing wool and linen and supplying finished goods. The lucrative trade led to money-lending, rather a problem for devout Catholics, but by the late 14th century, with the aid of Jews tolerated and more or less protected (though ghettoized) because, being hopelessly damned as Christ-killers anyway, they could practice usury, the Florentines had invented banks. The Medici family, from its outset, proved such canny financiers that they began to coin the florin, which became the most reliable currency in Europe. While the English were still fighting over feudal fealty, the Florentines were getting rich by supplying them with clothes and loaning them money at high interest. Of course they were also fighting off and on with rival city-states, with the Pope, and with the Holy Roman Emperor.
But the concept of a hereditary aristocracy didn’t catch hold in Florence until the beginning of the city’s decline. The Florentines were foxy merchants and bankers, and they formed themselves into a Republic. It was hardly a democracy: the trade, manufacturing and banking guilds, and the families which controlled them, dominated the Florentine Senate absolutely. And the powerful families fought murderously among themselves for precedence. But Florence, and the seafaring city Venice, were the first civic entities in medieval Europe run by go-getter businessmen who subscribed to a form of self-government.
I think it’s fair to say that the conceptual change in the arts we call the Renaissance, the extraordinary new way of seeing the world as it really is, was impossible in places where the medieval hieratic mind-set, from God through the priesthood and the military caste on down to the eternal underlings whose peonage supported the whole pyramid, still prevailed. The artistic revolution was only possible in a place where scrappy, ambitious urban hustlers flourished without interference from hereditary aristocrats who based their claim to power on the Church’s already-obsolete model of the Three Estates. They had their eye on the main chance, always looking for advantage in their dealings, comfortable with deception and temporary alliances in which both parties knew they couldn’t trust one another. They set up a Republic which was actually a wholly-owned subsidiary of the powerful guilds, and the Medici family which wound up at the top began as the controllers of the Bankers’ Guild. Of course people like Lorenzo de’ Medici ruled like princes and kings, but the family never formally admitted it until they were briefly kicked out of the city after its artistic glory days, returned in force some time later, and began buying whole armies instead of individual condottieri. Only then did they assume the trappings of royalty, like every other dynastic family in Europe.
But it’s really no wonder that a new way of seeing the real world evolved in Florence under the Republic of Hustle, or that masters like Uccello began playing with reality. Nor should it surprise us that Uccello put the dead English warrior in sophisticated armor which hadn’t been invented when Hawkwood was alive. During the living condottiero’s own time in the previous century, the early Florentine masters had already started dressing even sacred figures in clothes viewers of the paintings could recognize. After all, if the priests were right, the people of the Bible were real, and they lived and died in a real world, so they must have looked and dressed not unlike Florentines. Breaking the holy subjects out of the flat, abstract, golden Byzantine plane and giving them the features of real people, meant also changing their conventional Greco-Roman “Biblical” robes to look like clothes instead of iconography.
