The Stones of Florence by Mary McCarthy Read Free Book Online

telamons, caryatids, hammered out by Florentine sculptors. Florentine sculpture has a local character, the spirit of a small place and province, unknown elsewhere in the West after Attica and Ionia. ‘The small state,’ says Jacob Burckhardt, ‘exists so that there may be a spot on earth where the largest possible proportion of the inhabitants are citizens in the fullest sense of the word.’ He was thinking of the Greek polis or city-state, but he might also have been describing the Florentine Republic; in both cases, citizenship and sculpture, together, were developed to the highest point.
    Florentine sculpture, like Greek, was capable of intimacy and of the delicate shades of private feeling, but this, for the most part, as in Greece, was expressed on tombs and in the form of bas-relief, which is between statuary and drawing. The exquisite tombs of Desiderio and of Mino da Fiesole and their many charming heads of children are full of a private and therefore half-fugitive emotion; the discreet grief of a mourning family has the finest veil drawn across it, like the transparent marble veils of the Madonna and the drapery of angels in which these refined sculptors excelled. The restraint and control of Florentine low relief is very close to the Greek stele, which was originally a simple tablet with an inscription; the evanescent is inscribed or imprinted on stone, and the modulations in depth, with a narrow compass, imply reserve and tact, as in Greek elegiac poetry.
    What makes this art appear ‘classical’ has nothing to do with the imitation of classical models. The Greek work that is closest to Mino, to Desiderio, to some of Donatello, and to Agostino di Duccio was hardly known in Italy in their time. The affinity with fifth-century Athens may be due partly to geography, partly to political structure – to the clear outlines of landscape and to a tradition of sharp, clear thought. Distinction and definition reduce forms and ideas to their essentials—that is, to bedrock. ‘By sculpture,’ said Michelangelo, ‘I understand an art that takes away superfluous material; by painting, one that attains its result by laying on.’ The art that takes away superfluous material, to lay bare an innate form or idea, was the art practised by Socrates in eliciting a truth from his interlocutor, who ‘knew’ the truth already but could not perceive it until the surrounding rubbish was cut away. The Florentines ‘knew’ that a statue was, in essence, a pillar, a column, and that a funerary monument was, in essence, a tablet with writing on it. This knowing is the classic temper.
    The line between public and private was strictly drawn in the days of the Republic. The Florentines were known for their extreme individuality, yet no statue of a condottiere was permitted in a public square or, for that matter, in a private chapel. Grandiose tombs were unheard of in Florence before Michelangelo. Mourning remained a family matter, as it had been with the Etruscans, who represented husband and wife sitting at ease on their tombs, as if at a last domestic feast. Florentine decorum did not permit apotheoses of dead persons, such as were common in Venice.
    The glorification of the individual was frowned on by the Republic; it was against public policy to encourage private show. Bifore windows, for example, so familiar in Sienese Gothic palaces, were allowed only in religious buildings in medieval Florence; the householder had to be content with a monofore. The severity of Florentine architecture owes a good deal to this prohibition. Cosimo il Vecchio, the founder of the Medici dynasty, was too cautious a politician to endanger his power by a pompous style of living; in his later days, he rejected titles and honours and declined the luxurious palace, in full Renaissance style, that Brunelleschi proposed to build him, commissioning Michelozzo instead to do him a plain, solid dwelling with a heavy cornice, in rusticated stone, where,