The Stones of Florence by Mary McCarthy Read Free Book Online Page B

and a ‘Sleeping Cupid’ he had done as a young man actually passed for an antique. This was an early case of art forgery, whose victim was a Roman cardinal. Acting on the advice of a dealer, the young Michelangelo scarred his Cupid and stained it with earth, to make it look as if it had been dug up. The cardinal discovered the fraud and demanded his money back; eventually the statue, which belonged briefly to Cesare Borgia, who had looted it in Urbino, passed into the hands of Isabella d’Este, the Marchioness of Mantua, the greediest collector of her day. But the faking or imitation of antiquity (chiefly based on Hellenistic models) to suit a collector’s taste, like the flattering of tyrants and popes, had little in common with the natural and inbred classicism of Florence, whose sculpture died a painful and indeed a gruesome death with the extinction of the Republic.
    Cosimo I, like so many absolute sovereigns, had a neo-classic or pseudo-classic taste; he had himself sculptured in the costume of a Roman emperor and commissioned various Ledas and Ganymedes and other mythological subjects from the Mannerist and neo-classic sculptors who worked for him, the best of whom were Cellini and Giambologna, a Frenchman. Much of this sculpture was private in the worst sense, like the ‘Hermaphroditus’, a poem done much earlier for Cosimo il Vecchio and inscribed to him by the writer Beccadelli—a work so crudely indecent that even the most ribald humanists attacked it and the author was burned in effigy in Ferrara and Milan. While licentious marbles and bronzes were being sought by the private collector, the noble nudity of public sculpture grew, as it were, embarrassed before the general gaze. The people of Florence put a gilded fig leaf on Michelangelo’s ‘David’; later, in Cosimo I’s time, Ammannati violently attacked the nude in a letter to the Florentine Academy of Design and publicly ‘repented’ his ‘Neptune’ (not because it was ugly but because it was naked).
    Actually, Florentine humanism, which had been preying on the antique from the days of the old Cosimo, the passion of book collecting, art collecting, the appearance of the connoisseur, the whole notion, indeed, of ‘taste’, spelled the end of the heroic age of sculpture. The craze for the antique originated in Florence, under the patronage of the old Cosimo, who died while listening to a dialogue of Plato. It was, to start with, chiefly a literary movement, but the humanists quickly moved into the sphere of collecting art objects, trophies from the ancient world, competing with millionaires for these items, many of which were doubtless fakes. Poggio Bracciolini, the Florentine humanist, whose speciality was the recovery of classical manuscripts (Lucretius, Quintilian, Cicero, Manilius), which he gave to the world, collected for himself an array of marble busts—only one, he wrote, was ‘whole and elegant’; the rest were noseless. He sent a monk from Pistoia to Greece, antiquity-hunting for him, but this monk later cheated him and sold the items he had collected to Cosimo il Vecchio. Another Pistoiese delighted Lorenzo de’ Medici with a marble figure of Plato, said to have been found at Athens in the ruins of the Academy. Lorenzo accepted it, like any credulous American millionaire; he had been longing for a likeness of his ‘favourite philosopher’.
    Even in Poggio’s time, there were not enough real antiques to supply the demand; only six antique statues, he reported, five marble and one of brass, were left in Rome. Later, the excavation of the ‘Laocoön’ in Rome, which was witnessed by Michelangelo, excited great wonder throughout the cultivated world. The vogue for antiquity and for imitations of antiquity made Baccio Bandinelli the most popular sculptor in Florence, rivalling even Michelangelo, who at once despised him and was jealous of him. Bandinelli turned out a mass of degraded statuary, including the ‘Hercules and