Florence 2

May 18, 2011

Traveling in a group leaves me with less time to record than I give myself with myself. DJ and I found our suite and visited the Baptistry before meeting with Jack and Leland. The Baptistry is delightfully, fancifully decorated. DJ remarked that it seems different from the other buildings of Florence because it was built when churches were meant to exude holiness rather than the pride of their founders in their wealth. Everything was then, and continues to be, brilliant with spring light, the blue of the sky exactly what was meant by the blue the painters put on Mary’s gown. When J and L arrived we walked the city for a time–everything was closed– and then we climbed the roof of the Grand Cavour and sat in the roof garden, drinking until we were quite incapacitated. A better view is inconceivable. The whole red roof of the reddish city spread out around us, the moon rising over Santa Croce. Met a couple from Toronto and a couple from Bury St. Edmunds. I was afraid we had disturbed their own rooftop experience, but they seemed to find us amusing, and we chatted merrily. The English couple tried not to say where they were from–assuming it too obscure for anyone to know-- but when I got it out of them, I was able to say not only had I been there last year, but that I am taking my students there this summer.

Deep, deep sleep, lullayed by the humming air shaft.

Rose in the azure morning and scampered into the line for the Uffizi. As ever, seeing that many works of art in the flesh which you had known from pictures was gratifying, enlightening, exhausting. The Bronzino Holy Family, Botticelli and Ghirlandaio were what stuck–and stick now–in my mind. The Renaissance was not afraid of silliness or absurdity, and was able to render them both as a conceptual necessity, like a scherzo in a symphony. Recovered from the Uffizi and pilgrimaged to Santa Croce. Before the ravages of time, flood, and ecclesiastical vandalism, when all the walls were covered by Giotto and Agnolo Gaudi, I believe this must have been the most beautifully decorated church in the world. It’s still the remnant of the most beautifully decorated church in the world, and, before the attendants hurried us out with more then necessary brusqueness, we venerated. We saw Galileo and Michelangelo where they lie in sleep forever. The cloisters are as beautiful as the church, with their harmony of flowers and sky. I think they should throw the Cimabue crucifix on a sacred bonfire and allow it to rest in peace, it being too horrible, too emblematic of mutability, to look upon.

In the evening we crossed the Arno on the Ponte Vecchio, where I bought a leather borsa and Leland lusted after a diamond ring. The whole bridge is a line of jewelry shops. We had been stopping to eat and drink, and I was so drunk I can’t be absolutely sure of what went on. Wandered the nighttime vastness of Palazzo Vecchio, came home, where I was copiously, if briefly, sick.

This morning it was the Academia, in line before a throng of incredibly well-behaved Swiss school kids. The paintings in the Academia are more harmonious with each other than those in the Uffizi, and the experience was somehow more digestible. What one must mention at last is the original David, replaced in the piazza by a noble copy. However noble the copy, it doesn’t prepare one for the original. Whatever has been said of the work falls short. Its impact is metaphysical, and not explicable from any combination of technique and subject matter. It is overpowering, brutal, annihilating. David has the aspect of a god, except no god could muster that arrogance. I could not take my eyes away. I walked around and around. I stood where he could not see me. The statue is not perfect. The head is too big. The hands are monstrously too big. The legs are the legs of a bicycle messenger. He is better than perfect. His imperfections are triumphs unforeseeable by the vision of perfection. This is difficult to explain unless you are standing before him. He is quite the most disturbing and challenging work of art I have ever seen. Also, in a city and in a country drowning in Christian art, he is the most un-Christian testament imaginable. He is far less Christian than Neptune standing in naked splendor before the Palazzo Vecchio. There is nothing of humility in him, none of the cowering self-effacement given to the saints as a sign of their sanctity. The whole ecclesiastical panoply makes you sick after you have a glimpse of him. When I said un-Christian I meant, of course, unlike the church as it became. Had this figure dared to be called “Christ,” the world would be changed.

Il Duomo was immense but not especially beautiful inside, except for containing that wonderful painting of Dante surrounded by his three worlds. DJ remarked that the kind of awe it was built to illicit is not religious. Three of us decided to climbed the 400 plus steps into the dome. There was a line for this, and behind us in line was a man and two daughters from Limerick. It was a joy to hear their voices. I have to say that I am waiting for the rigors of the clime to be equal to the reward in satisfaction. I needed to have been in training for a while before attempting it. Nevertheless, I did reach the top, and the view was spectacular. Florence is a city of red roofs punctured by graceful soaring towers, nestled in a gentle wall of green hills– not unlike Asheville, one might observe, at least in situation. The blazing clarity of the day made it an experience up to expectation in every way. The climb down was yet more harrowing, for my knee was giving out and the shadows were such that one could not see the next narrow stone step on the winding stair. But we are all on solid ground now, where I mean to remain for a while.

In the evening we taxied to the Piazza Michelangelo, from which an equally marvelous few is to be had, with less rigor of achievement. Arno flowed silver beneath his many bridges, and the whole of Florence spread out north and south. The piazza was lively and merry. We had a bite to eat before we came down, and then ate copiously when we did come down. I suppose it’s inevitable that one in every party will be more insistent in his desires than others, and we discovered that it was not profitable to do things other than the ones and the ways that individual had selected. That understood, it was a lovely evening, with photographs at the Piazza di Signori and ending at a fine pizzeria near our hotel, where my practice Italian was received with patience and approval.