A walk through Florence
Florence is a manly town, and the cities of art that appeal to the current sensibility are feminine, like Venice and Siena. What irritates the modern tourist about Florence is that it makes no concession to the pleasure principle. It stands four-square and direct, with no air of mystery, no blandishments, no furbelows--almost no Gothic lace or baroque swirls. Against the green Arno, the ochre-and-dun file of hotels and palazzi has the spruce, spare look of a regiment drawn up in drill order. The deep shades of melon and of tangerine that you see in Rome, the pinks of Venice, the rose of Siena, the red of Bologna have been ruled out of Florence as if by municipal decree. The eye turns from mustard, buff, ecru, pale yellow, cream to the severe black-and-white marbles of the Baptistery and of Santa Maria Novella's facade or the dark-green and white flashing gold of San Miniato. On the Duomo and Giotto's bell tower and the Victorian facade of Santa Croce, there are touches of pink, which give these buildings acurious festive air, as if they alone were dressed up for a party. --Mary McCarthy, The Stones of Florence
McCarthy was correct, Florence is a city of stone and neutral palettes. You might expect this from a town of clothmakers, leather workers, and bankers, an austere pragmatism concerned with durability and authority. Hell, even the Tuscan bread is made without salt, tasting like paste with a crust. But then you look at the art and you read the history, and you realize that the Florentines were proud, romantic, and ambitious, those stones just an ascetic facade for a passionate people, like the monk's habit on Peter Abelard. Well, on day three of my vacation (second day in Florence), I got to know some of those stones with Original Florence Walks' three-hour overview tour.
Those tours, by the by, are a great way to get to know the city, whether or not you did your homework beforehand. All the guides I had were art students training in Florence, and they were quite knowledgeable about art and history (though I still prefer the guides on London Walks and Paris Walks, who are mostly middle-aged nerds deeply steeped in their cities' histories but also with funny anecdotes, gossip, and trivia to enliven the strolls).
For this first walk, we started in the Piazza della Repubblica (left), an unusually square square in this Renaissance city. That's because the original square was a forum built by the Romans, who had a fetish for straight roads and right angles (you can still tell which roads in Britain used to be Roman, because they cleave straight along for miles, no matter what hills or rivers might encourage diversion). There was a primitive settlement along the river and at Fiesole, but Florence got on the map in 59 B.C. when a group of retired Roman soldiers set up here. They came in spring, so they named the colony after Flora (Fiore), the goddess of spring, and thus the city became Florence (Firenze). Now, of course the Piazza is neoclassical rather than classical. The forum, that Roman meeting place and market, became the medieval market, the Mercato Vecchio, which became a ghetto and deteriorated badly. In the 19th century, the slums were cleared and the Piazza built, with this triumphal arch in honor of the old Roman arches. You probably can't make it out in the photo, but that plaque at the top boasts of giving the square new life after squalor: L'antico centro della citta da secolare squallore a vita nuovo restituito. I don't know whether the carousel is temporary, but it does contrast strangely with that massive Victorian arch.
From the Piazza, we proceeded to the Mercato Nuovo, the new market--"new" in this case meaning 16th century. Once upon a time, when bankers broke the law, they were brought here and hung up by their bootstraps for public ridicule (if only we'd kept that tradition during the S&L scandal and extended the courtesy to corporate accountants as well). These days, the Mercato Nuovo is your basic street market, with T-shirts and tchotchkes, and tourists come by to see the bronze statue of the boar, Il Porcellino. Legend has it that if you rub his snout and put a penny in his mouth, you'll come back to Florence.
Across the street is the Palazzo dell'Arte della Lana (left), a medieval tower built by the powerful wool guild. Those hooks on the wall were for flags, banners, and hanging laundry. The diagonal iron bars are like wingnuts, holding the ends of support beams that run all the way through the tower, keeping the walls vertical. And the square holes in the walls were for building walkways from building to building, for those who didn't want to soil their feet in the disgusting road. Why was the wool guild powerful? Florence was known in the medieval world for the quality of its wool and its cloth, which made the city wealthy, and this wealth led to a need for bankers, which led to the Medici. Banking was a necessary but not entirely respectable profession in that time, as usury was considered a sin. Thus, Florence's bankers and other wealthy merchants made a point of donating generously to churches, contributing to buildings and works of art, and they bought art for themselves as well, believing it a good investment. In a sense, then, you could say (or at least I'll say) that the Renaissance was born in Florence because of sheep and guilt.
Behind the wool guild's tower is the church of Orsanmichele. The name comes from a convent garden on that site, the Orto di San Michele, circa 700 A.D. By the 1200s, the building was a grain market, but then an icon of madonna and child was brought in, and there grew to be a conflict between merchants and worshipers. A fire settled the debate, and afterward the building was reconstructed with two additional stories, the ground floor for the church and the upper floors for the market. The city's guilds were invited to decorate the exterior and, of course, to try to outdo each other. At right, you can see Donatello's St. George (a copy--the original is secured in the Bargello museum), commissioned by the the armorer's guild, which explains the use of bronze and armor. It's said that Michelangelo used to walk by the church, and that this statue inspired his David.
On the other side of the church is another statue by Donatello, St. Mark (left photo, in the niche at center right), with flowing robes in honor of the linen guild that paid for it. Initially, the guild wasn't best pleased by the marble, with its outsized hands and feet and backward-leaning posture. Donatello asked for two months to "correct" the statue, which guild members granted. Now, Donatello had been to Rome with Brunelleschi, architect of the Duomo (subject of my next post), and they had studied perspective there, so Donatello understood perfectly well that the statue would look just fine when installed in its niche on the wall. However, the guild didn't know that. So, Donatello bunked off for two months, did absolutely nothing to the figure except to mount it at the end of that time, and re-presented it to a happy guild. Then, cheeky man, he argued that he should have a further two months' pay for all that extra work he did, and they did in fact fork over the florins.
From the Orsanmichele we proceeded to the Palazzo Strozzi. The Strozzi were a banking family, competitive with the Medici, who were exiled to Naples for a time. This massive palace was their announcement that they were back, and how. That architectural style is called Cyclopean, named after the myth of Cyclops, who threw boulders. However, this facade is not made of individual boulders arranged like brickwork; it's stone cut to look like slabs. If you zoom in on the photo, you can see above the windows the three crescent moons that were the family's crest. I also like the dragon
torch holders (left). In this building, servants and stables would have been on the bottom floor, with the family quarters on the piano nobile or top floor. But the kitchens and laundry were also up on top, because if their fires got out of control, only the top floor of the palazzo would be destroyed.
Across the street is a smaller family palace, the Palazzo Strozzino. Our guide pointed out the tiny, cat-flap-sized door on the ground level (right). For a long time, families made their own wine, and some sold it as well--this tiny door was a way to sell it without having to open the grand entrance. More importantly, the door was a bit of bankers' PR, a way of distributing food to the poor so that the family would be seen as charitable. Recipients of that charity would tell each other which families had the best kitchen, and from that word of mouth, we still use the expression, "I know a great little hole in the wall."
From there, we headed toward the river and the Santa Trinita church. Originally, it was Romanesque (11th to 13th centuries), with interior peaked arches inspired by round Roman arches. However, the church is known not for its architecture so much as for its frescoes. The word comes from "fresh," because the artists used fresh plaster. First, the artist would create a wall-sized drawing of his subject. Then he'd poke holes in the outlines, mount the drawing on the wall, and use charcoal to make marks through those holes. Then one day's worth of plaster would be spread on the wall, and only one day's worth, because the artist painted directly into the plaster, so that paint and plaster set together. As you might imagine, those materials were hell to work with--if the painter made a mistake, there was no way to correct it except to chip off the dried plaster and start over. Furthermore, the medium turned out to be fragile, subject to dampness and dryness and prone to fading and falling off the wall. Frescoes are also difficult to restore, so post-Renaissance, many churches simply whitewashed over them instead. But Santa Trinita has a fresco that's in very good condition, by Ghirlandaio (left), commissioned by a Medici bank manager named Sassetti. It depicts the life of St. Francis, but if you look over the altarpiece (in tempera, which is why it's brighter), you can see that the street scene is clearly Florentine, and the people are dressed in contemporary Renaissance clothing. Moreover, the figure at right in purple is Sassetti, talking to members of the Medici family, and the man in the blue tunic in the corner, looking out, is Ghirlandaio himself. (Apologies for the crummy photo--I didn't want to use flash on that fragile fresco.) Renaissance paintings typically did not bear an artist's signature, so they often "signed" their pieces by painting themselves into the scene and looking out at the viewers.
From one Romanesque church, we came to another, Santissimi Apostoli in the Piazza del Limbo, apparently so called because it was once a burial site for babies who died before baptism. Allegedly, Charlemagne founded the church in the 800s. The church has a gilded brazier of an eagle clutching a dragon and a dove, allegedly containing some pieces of flint from the holy sepulchre where Christ was laid out after the crucifixion. And allegedly again, these flints were a gift to a Florentine, Pazzino de' Pazzi, for being the first to scale the walls of Jerusalem during the First Crusade. The flints are still used for an Easter spectacle: the priests bring them to the Duomo, spark the flints to light a candle, use the candle to light coals, and use the coals to light a little rocket in a dove-shaped cage. The dove swoops down a steel cable, through the cathedral, out into the Duomo plaza, and into a cart full of fireworks. Traditionally, the city goes dark in mourning from Good Friday until Easter, so this display is meant to emphasize the return of light with the return of Jesus. But if you ask me, it's just an excuse for a big bang.
The Piazza del Limbo is right off the road that runs alongside the Arno--so close that in 1966, when the river flooded, the piazza was submerged and damaged. Nearby, the Ponte Vecchio (left) was also flooded, though fortunately it was the middle of the night, so no one was swept downriver. There has been a stone bridge there since the 1300s, built on the same site where the Romans had a wooden bridge. Originally, the shops on top were butchers and tanners, who sent their nasty offal and chemicals downstream to Pisa, perhaps contributing to the cities' rivalry. In 1560 Cosimo de Medici had built the Uffizi, then Medici bank offices, on the near side of the river and lived on the other side of the Arno in the Palazzo Pitti. Tired of commuting through the butchers' muck, he had Vasari build a corridor directly from the offices across the bridge. The corridor is lined with portraits, but you can only see it by appointment, and apparently the waiting list is two years long. During WWII, this was the only bridge not bombed, but the buildings on either end were, so that rubble would prevent armies from marching across.
Doubling back from the river, we went past the Uffizi Gallery to the Piazza della Signoria, site of city government and the Palazzo Vecchio (right), dating from the late 1200s. Though the Medici and other families wielded great influence in the city, Florence was an adamant republic for most of its history, a democracy led by a council (signoria) that served brief, three-month terms. And in times of crisis, the people were summoned to this piazza for public meetings, as well as for public executions. One of those executions--mob justice, really--occurred in 1478, when the Pazzi family (descendents of that Crusader awarded the flints) and others plotted to assassinate two members of the Medici family, right in the Duomo, during high mass, and to seize members of the signoria, thus taking control of the city. They succeeded in killing one Medici and wounding another, but the coup failed, and the infuriated mob killed the conspirators. One, a Pazzi, was hung from a window in the Palazzo Vecchio, flayed, and disembowelled. Pazzi possessions were seized, and they were driven from the city. In case that wasn't enough horror and humiliation, the Medici turned the name (pazzo) into slang for crazy--as in, you'd have to be crazy to knife one of us. Twenty years later, the monk Savanarola was executed in the piazza as well, burned as he'd burned books and paintings in that same square, in the Bonfire of the Vanities.
To the right of the Palazzo Vecchio is the Loggia di Lanzi, originally just a covered place where people could wait. Now it's full of wonderful sculpture, like Giambologna's Rape of the Sabine Women (left). Michelangelo's David stood in the Piazza della Signoria for 400 years, too, a symbol of the city, until concerns about its condition led Florentines to place it in the Accademia. There's still a copy of David in front of the palazzo, and lots of visitors take their pictures with it--wonder if they know it's a copy?
To the left of the palazzo is a massive fountain of Neptune (right), commissioned by--and featuring the face of--Cosimo de Medici. I guess it's good to be the grand duke; nobody's going to say boo if you put your head on a giant, mythological nude.
As you can possibly tell by the gray photos, it was starting to rain about then. This next picture is of the Piazza Santa Elisabetta, where you can see some of the few remains of medieval buildings. This tower (now part of a hotel) was built around 500 A.D. and used to be a women's prison. It also used to be much taller, as you might guess from the top windows' proximity to the roof. The city council got tired of citizens constructing ever-higher towers and blocking views, so they decreed that no building could be taller than the bell tower. Anything higher had to be whacked down to size.
Speaking of cropping, I am going to stop this post here, though the tour continued to the Duomo. That deserves its own blog.
