Dark Water_ Flood And Redemption In The City Of Masterpieces Part 2

Vasari's tomb of Michelangelo was finished a year later. More great men would find their way to Santa Croce, not all of them artists. Galileo Galilei, dead in 1642, was interred directly opposite Michelangelo. For all the pope's attempts to muzzle him, Galileo had been a man of considerable influence in Florence, and in addition to his astronomy took an interest in the Arno and its penchant for overrunning its banks. There'd been a serious flood in 1621 and a truly spectacular inundation in 1589, and once again various plans to channel, dam, or divert the river had been put forward. One of these-proposed by the engineer Alessandro Bartolotti in 1630-was quashed by Galileo, but the following year another project received his support and was approved by the Grand Duke Ferdinando II de' Medici. But that plan, too, was never carried out, at least in part on account of Galileo's condemnation by the Church.

One hundred years pa.s.sed, their course fragmented by serious floods in 1646, 1676 and 1677, 1687 and 1688, 1705, and 1715, and a major deluge in 1740. Three years earlier the last of Vasari's great patrons, the Medicis, also died, and the dukedom of Tuscany was transferred to the dukes of Lorraine. The Lorraines were modernizers and promoters of Enlightenment and the cult of reason. The Medici art collections were donated to the state and the Uffizi converted to a public museum in 1769. Medici-era laws were rescinded, among them bans on forest-cutting in the Casentine. And eight years later Niccolo Machiavelli at last got his due.

Machiavelli had died in 1527 and had been buried in the family chapel in Santa Croce. But two decades later the chapel was taken over by a confraternity, and Niccolo's name, or at least his bones, was obscured. But in 1787, at the duke's behest, Innocenzo Spinazzi carved a grand tomb for Machiavelli crowned not by any religious figure, not even a cross, but an allegorical G.o.ddess of politics.

They were all here together now, the great men in their tombs, even Dante, who (although he was, like Leonardo, buried elsewhere in exile) in 1818 had a monument of his own on the south wall, halfway between Michelangelo and Machiavelli, as well as a statue in the piazza in front of the church.

Firenze was ready to be reborn as Florence; the city of art was ready to be born. In 1854, like so much else, Vasari's ciborio ciborio was dismantled and would be interred in the largest tomb of all, oblivion, "the great sea"-as Florentines liked to call it-into which all things are finally emptied. was dismantled and would be interred in the largest tomb of all, oblivion, "the great sea"-as Florentines liked to call it-into which all things are finally emptied.

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Gradually The purple and transparent shadows slow Had filled up the whole valley to the brim, And flooded all the city, which you saw As some drowned city in some enchanted sea . . .

The duomo bell Strikes ten, as if it struck ten fathoms down, So deep . . .

-ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, "AURORA LEIGH," VIII

Bernard Berenson inspecting a Madonna by Giovanni Bellini, 1957 (Photograph by David Lees) (Photograph by David Lees)

1.

In 1799 Napoleon Bonaparte conquered Florence and began to strip the Uffizi of its artworks. Then, in 1808, in line with the Enlightenment principles in force in the rest of the French Empire, the city's monasteries and convents were closed and their members and property dispersed. Among the objects to be disposed of at the Convento delle Murate was a painting of no great distinction, a cenacolo cenacolo, The Last Supper The Last Supper by the sixteenth-century artist Giorgio Vasari. by the sixteenth-century artist Giorgio Vasari.

Vasari was famous, but not, art historians would say, a great painter: he lacked imagination and his work was a little too studied and stiff. He was a better architect, as the Uffizi had proved. But the French couldn't be bothered to loot his Last Supper Last Supper from the Murate. It was hauled over to the church of Santa Croce and put in a chapel. The Murate became a jail and Vasari was remembered less as a painter or an architect than as a writer, as the author of from the Murate. It was hauled over to the church of Santa Croce and put in a chapel. The Murate became a jail and Vasari was remembered less as a painter or an architect than as a writer, as the author of The Lives of the Artists The Lives of the Artists, the book that chronicled and codified the Renaissance, that established the reputations of the painters who, unlike Giorgio Vasari, were geniuses.

In October 1819, the novelist Mary Sh.e.l.ley, her husband, Percy, and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, settled in Florence in the Palazzo Marini near the Church of Santa Maria Novella. Mary was eight months pregnant and while she awaited her lying-in, day after day Percy walked the banks of the Arno and prowled the Uffizi. Claire meanwhile left for Venice in an attempt to gain visitation rights to her daughter by Lord Byron, Allegra. On October 25 "Percy took yet another river walk in a wood that skirts the Arno . . . when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions." The flood season was in crescendo. Percy returned to the Palazzo Marini and wrote down the poem that had just then come to him and that he called "Ode to the West Wind."

Claire returned from Venice. Byron had refused to allow her to see Allegra except under supervision. On November 12 Mary gave birth to a son named Percy Florence Sh.e.l.ley, named for his father and for the city of his birth, and perhaps too in homage to the epiphany that had befallen Percy on the bank of the Arno. After Mary's confinement she and Claire went on almost daily excursions to the Uffizi, Percy leading them up and down the corridors, past work after work that had seized him, taken him over, like the rain and the flood wind.

That January was the coldest in seventy years. Claire took the Sh.e.l.leys' other children outside into the garden to throw s...o...b..a.l.l.s, while Percy and Mary stayed inside reading The Tempest The Tempest aloud to each other. Mary began a new novel, her first since aloud to each other. Mary began a new novel, her first since Frankenstein. Frankenstein. In it, she imagines h.e.l.l on the Arno, or rather the depiction of h.e.l.l mounted in 1304 on boats and scaffolds by the Ponte alla Carraia, a macabre pageant based on Dante. Her hero, Castruccio, watches in fascination, "the terrible effect of such a scene enhanced, by the circ.u.mstance of its being no more than an actual representation of what then existed in the imagination of the spectators." But then In it, she imagines h.e.l.l on the Arno, or rather the depiction of h.e.l.l mounted in 1304 on boats and scaffolds by the Ponte alla Carraia, a macabre pageant based on Dante. Her hero, Castruccio, watches in fascination, "the terrible effect of such a scene enhanced, by the circ.u.mstance of its being no more than an actual representation of what then existed in the imagination of the spectators." But then

the Arno seemed a yawning gulph, where the earth had opened to display the mysteries of the infernal world; when suddenly a tremendous crash stamped with tenfold horror the terrific mockery. The bridge of Carraia, on which a countless mult.i.tude stood, one above the other, looking on the river, fell . . . with a report that was reverberated from the houses that lined the Arno; and even, to the hills which close the valley, it rebellowed along the sky, accompanied by fearful screams, and voices that called on the names of those whom they were never more to behold.

It seemed, Mary wrote, that the Arno had "rebuked them for having mimicked the dreadful mysteries of their religion." It was the story of Icarus told on the scale of a whole, overweening city, the same story she had written in Frankenstein Frankenstein and would write again in and would write again in The Last Man The Last Man, a tale of "a fond, foolish Icarus." It was, of course, Percy's story, told again and again, until it claimed him entirely in the summer of 1822, when he drowned in the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Allegra too died, of typhus, in 1822, in the convent to which Byron had sent her. Mary returned to England, but Claire, perhaps possessed by the "Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere," by the "Angels of rain and lightning" that her brother-in-law had found along the river, wandered through Austria, France, Germany, and Russia and, when she was an old woman, returned to Florence.

Between 1830 and 1835, a Scottish geologist named George Fair-holme explored the valley of the Arno upstream from Florence. In the course of his excavations he came across "a sandy matrix" in which "bones were found at every depth from that of a few feet to a hundred feet or more," bones of every sort of creature, from rabbits, bears, and wolves still native to the Arno valley to rhinoceroses, elephants, and buffalo that no one had ever imagined dwelled here. The remains of all these creatures were jumbled together, not layered in separate strata, as though swept away all at once, all at the same moment. What had swept them away was not in doubt: elephant bones were encrusted with oyster sh.e.l.ls. There had been water, a great deal of it, and it had lingered long enough, submerged everything long enough, that the whole world was sea.

In 1837 Fairholme published a book that revealed these findings, his thesis tidily summed up on the t.i.tle page: New and Conclusive Physical Demonstrations both of the Fact and Period of the Mosaic Deluge, and of its having been the only event of the Kind that has ever occurred upon the Earth. New and Conclusive Physical Demonstrations both of the Fact and Period of the Mosaic Deluge, and of its having been the only event of the Kind that has ever occurred upon the Earth. How many might have died in the flood, Fairholme might wonder; how many could die in such a flood today; how many in all of history? How many might have died in the flood, Fairholme might wonder; how many could die in such a flood today; how many in all of history? I' non averei creduto che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta I' non averei creduto che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta, Dante had said: "I could not believe death had undone so many." Twentieth-century demographers estimated that six billion people have died since the pyramids were built, the age that followed Fairholme's flood. But going back forty thousand or so years since human beings first emerged they posit a total sum of perhaps sixty billion persons who have at one time or another lived on this planet. So if both Fairholme and the demographers are right, the deluge whose traces Fairholme found on the Arno washed away a world that had contained 54 billion people. That was what a flood could do.

Of course there were floods on the Arno: there was one in 1839, just two years after the publication of Fairholme's book, and then a much larger one in 1844. That November 3, there had been no warning except that of frantically ringing church bells upstream, but it was a Sunday morning and what was more ordinary on a Sunday morning than the ringing of bells? The Arno runs southeast from its source on Monte Falterona in the Casentine Forests east of Florence, makes a hairpin turn above Arezzo, and bears straight northwest toward the city. Under normal conditions it would take eighteen hours for a drop of water to transit the river's 150-mile course from Falterona to Ponte Vecchio, but on that day, the time would have been halved. At the bridges of Florence the Arno is capable of carrying about two thousand cubic yards of water per second: that morning the quant.i.ty would be nearly twice that. With both the amount and speed of the water almost doubled, the bridges and in particular the Ponte Vecchio acted as siphons, jetting the water with tremendous force and speed while-as debris began to plug the arches-simultaneously creating a backup behind the bridges that breached the riverbanks and poured into the low-lying eastern part of the city around Santa Croce. Underwater, in the channel of the river, the flow of sewers emptying into the Arno reversed direction. Geysers of floodwater spumed from drains and manholes.

The following year Giuseppe Aiazzi of Florence felt moved to write a chronicle of every recorded flood in the history of the city, some fifty-four since 1177. He'd watched as paris.h.i.+oners stood haplessly on top of the pews as the tide of water entered the churches where they sat at ma.s.s. He'd seen the slopes and escarpments of timber-tree trunks, stumps, whole hedges ripped and sucked from the ground-damming up streets and the heaped carca.s.ses of livestock piled against walls and intersections. He was oddly struck by the color and smell of the effluents rising from the cellars and stores of merchants and provisioners, blends of wine, dye, olive oil, paint, spices, flour, and grease bound into a deep brown ges...o...b.. mud and, of course, excrement. Mattresses, picture frames, writing desks, and the corpses of household pets floated past. Rats paddled and stroked through the mire.

With a friend, a little before noon, Aiazzi climbed Giotto's bell-tower, the Campanile, next to the Duomo. They looked out from the top and he saw the broadening strip of water widening between the hills to the east. From this height it looked silver: the sun had come out, as though to mock the city. To the west the river had become a lake, no, a sea, a procelloso procelloso, a word that Giacomo Leopardi had used once in a poem: i pesci si posar degli olmi in cima / e le damme sull'onde procellose i pesci si posar degli olmi in cima / e le damme sull'onde procellose, "the fish resting in the tops of elms / the does upon the tumultuous waves."

In his book Aiazzi published calculations by the engineer Ferdinando Morozzi showing that, on average, there was a small to moderate flood every twenty-four years and, every one hundred, an extraordinary one; to use Fairholme's word, a deluge. The Arno flooded, it seemed, with a kind of determination, willfully, because it could and therefore would. Florence wanted something done. Three hundred years earlier, Leonardo da Vinci had noted with alarm the consequences of deforesting the mountains and hills above the river, and those warnings had been repeated. But Florence couldn't forgo wood for building, for burning, for painting upon: people wanted another solution. Leonardo himself had proposed diverting the river by ca.n.a.l for purposes of commerce, defense, and flood control, although nothing had come of it. In 1840 fresh projects were proposed and approved. The hydrologist and city engineer Alessandro Manetti began a program of deepening the river channel and building locks in 1840, but its completion coincided with the inundation of 1844. In the custom of Florence someone had to be blamed, on this occasion the blameless Manetti. He was laid low by nervous exhaustion, by a torrent of backbiting, and took to his bed.

John Ruskin, a young Englishman and heir to a sherry fortune, arrived in Florence the following year. Manic, melancholic, and obsessive, he would transform looking at pictures into a new discipline called art history and, with his gorgeous prose, turn aesthetics into social criticism, even into an art of its own. The flood and the accusations and calumnies in its wake were lost on him: everything, it might have been said, was lost on him except art.

You would have found Ruskin sprawled on the floor of the Bardi Chapel in Santa Croce at around ten o'clock in the morning-the only hour at which the light was right, when one could truly see- see-sketching segments of Giotto's frescoes of St. Francis in his journal. A few months earlier water had been lapping within feet of Giotto's friars arrayed in prayer around the saint's deathbed, and even now there was the dull, sour stink of damp and sewage, the bands of mud and ordure that inscribed the high water mark on the walls.

That-the damage and persisting misery apparent anywhere around the city you might look-was real, but not as real as the art Ruskin had come to see. Or rather (so it seemed to him) it was the art that allowed you to see everything else. There was a carved sepulchral slab set into Santa Croce's floor, overlooked by most people, no more than the image of an old man wearing a deeply folded cap. But Ruskin insisted that by this rather than by the city's more famous masterpieces was the best way to understand Florence and its art. The slab's unknown sculptor, if only in the carving of the folds of that cap, had genius, had the gift, and so "what is Florentine, and forever great-unless you can see also the beauty of this old man in his citizen's cap,-you will see never."

Giotto, the shepherd boy who was transfigured into the avatar of the new Florentine painting, also had the gift, immeasurably so. Ruskin imagined that you might read of what the gift consists-of what Giotto was given by his maker-on the wall of the Bardi Chapel:

You shall see things-as they Are.

And the least with the greatest, because G.o.d made them.

And the greatest with least, because G.o.d made you and gave you eyes and a heart.

2.

In 1847 Elizabeth and Robert Browning took an apartment in the Casa Guidi in Florence, south of the river, in the Oltrarno. They'd eloped, recklessly fled England by way of France and then Pisa. Robert made a studio for Elizabeth-"like a room in a novel," she said-furnished with pieces he found in the San Lorenzo market, among them paintings sold off from suppressed monasteries such as the Murate.

Florence transfixed Elizabeth, enchanted and took possession of her, beginning with the "golden Arno as it shoots away / Straight through the heart of Florence,'neath the four / Bent bridges, seeming to strain off like bows, / And tremble . . ."

The city's stories became tales she had to tell. There was, for example, the legend of Cimabue's Rucellai Madonna. Madonna. Outside Santa Croce there was a lane called Borgo Allegri-"the village of joy"-running north from the side of the church up to Cimabue's studio, and the story had it that the street was given this name on account of this painting, a stunning virgin and child for the church of Santa Maria Novella. On its completion, so it was said, the painting was carried to its home in a procession headed by King Charles of Anjou from Cimabue's studio through the city. Thus, Elizabeth wrote, did the street acquire its name: Outside Santa Croce there was a lane called Borgo Allegri-"the village of joy"-running north from the side of the church up to Cimabue's studio, and the story had it that the street was given this name on account of this painting, a stunning virgin and child for the church of Santa Maria Novella. On its completion, so it was said, the painting was carried to its home in a procession headed by King Charles of Anjou from Cimabue's studio through the city. Thus, Elizabeth wrote, did the street acquire its name:

The picture, not the king, and even the place Containing such a miracle grew bold, Named the Glad Borgo from that beauteous face

The city infused Elizabeth herself with joy. She had the freedom to live with the man she loved and, with it, a sense of utter liberty to write what and as she pleased. Outside, on the streets there was, briefly, freedom in the air. Italy seemed on the verge of casting off foreign and papal domination and of attaining nationhood. It was on her doorstep, in the Via Romana, where

I heard last night a little child go singing 'Neath Casa Guidi windows, by the church, "O bella liberta, O bella!"

Seeking their own liberty, the Brownings, preceded by the Sh.e.l.leys, formed the advance party for a new stream of Anglo-American artists and writers who in their turn fostered a wave of tourism centered on Florence's art. Among their early visitors were Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and, not least, John Ruskin. The Brownings introduced him to the young artist Frederick Leighton. Taken by the same fervor that had seized Elizabeth, in 1855 Leighton painted a work he called Carrying Cimabue's Madonna through the Borgo Allegri. Carrying Cimabue's Madonna through the Borgo Allegri. It was purchased by Queen Victoria. It was purchased by Queen Victoria.

Italy's liberty was not to be realized until 1865 and Florence would become its first capital. Elizabeth had died four years earlier, in 1861. Robert buried her in the Protestant cemetery in a tomb designed by Frederick Leighton, who would soon paint a portrait of Icarus, a portrait, it sometimes seemed, of every one of them.

There was another flood on November 5, 1864, an inundation that, according to the hydrometer at the Ponte Santa Trinita, briefly reached the level of 1844. A magazine ill.u.s.tration showed chest-high water behind the Uffizi and women with parasols floating down the street in skiffs. The caption celebrated "the self-denial and sacrifice" of the National Guard, the firefighters, and the police "in the supreme moments of peril" and claimed, perhaps for purposes of drama, that the river crested a foot higher than in 1844. In truth the flood lasted all of a night and a day, and damage was minimal.

There had been luck involved-the rain had stopped at a propitious moment-but also human ingenuity of a kind that the nineteenth century and the new Italy and its capital city gloried in. In the aftermath of 1844, Giuseppe Poggi and his engineers oversaw a vast array of civic improvements and expansions in the mode of Paris's Baron Haussmann. Poggi built the Lungarni-the promenades formed by walling-in the river channel-on both banks of the Arno as well as a central storm drain and sluice gate system designed to prevent the sewers from being overwhelmed as they had been in 1844. The genius of Florence extended to engineering. The Arno might flood, but 1864 proved there need be no more devastation. By the time the seat of government moved permanently to Rome in 1870, Florence might claim to be capital of something almost as significant: art, history, beauty, or at the very least tourism.

When the twenty-six-year-old Henry James arrived from Venice in October 1869, it seemed to him that Florence was already a full-fledged international destination, filled with Americans of the wrong sort: "There is but one word to use in regard to them-vulgar, vulgar, vulgar." But for all their ignorance-"their stingy, defiant, grudging att.i.tude towards everything European"-they frequented the same sites and places Henry had come to see: the Uffizi, the Pitti Palace, the Duomo and Santa Croce, the piazzas of the Santissima Annuziata and Signoria, and the Caffe Doney. They were all there for the same reason: the art, the beauty, the ineffable "transparent shadows." So during the month he stayed to study and sightsee he met them-the middle-cla.s.s tourists, the rich expatriates, and the would-be sculptors and painters fleeing the stultification of America and Victorian Britain-and they became the material of his own art. He redefined their apparent stupidity and shallowness into a kind of willful innocence and stood it in opposition to European fatalism; to the tarnish and faded color of art too often sold, stolen, or left to gather dust.

The following year, home in Ma.s.sachusetts, Henry wrote a story called "The Madonna of the Future." The main character was an American painter living in Florence. For him, the apex of art is Raphael's Madonna of the Chair Madonna of the Chair in the Pitti Palace, and it is his deepest ambition to paint a work equal to it. He has a model, a canvas prepared, and a t.i.tle: "The Madonna of the Future." But he's not sure an American can pull it off: "We are the disinherited of Art! . . . We lack the deeper sense." So he never begins. His virginal model loses her youthful looks and the canvas remains blank but for a dusty layer of ground color. The artist catches a fever and as he dies, he explains, "I suppose we are a genus by ourselves in the providential scheme-we talents that can't act, that can't do nor dare!" He has believed in beauty-in what he imagines Florence to be-too devoutly, and it has paralyzed and then undone him. in the Pitti Palace, and it is his deepest ambition to paint a work equal to it. He has a model, a canvas prepared, and a t.i.tle: "The Madonna of the Future." But he's not sure an American can pull it off: "We are the disinherited of Art! . . . We lack the deeper sense." So he never begins. His virginal model loses her youthful looks and the canvas remains blank but for a dusty layer of ground color. The artist catches a fever and as he dies, he explains, "I suppose we are a genus by ourselves in the providential scheme-we talents that can't act, that can't do nor dare!" He has believed in beauty-in what he imagines Florence to be-too devoutly, and it has paralyzed and then undone him.

As Vasari had created the artist/genius 250 years earlier, so the nineteenth century created the masterpiece: artworks whose own status exceeded anything they might represent, signify, or point to; the altarpiece that overwhelms the altar it was meant to adorn and itself becomes the altar. A painting or sculpture like Leonardo's Mona Lisa Mona Lisa, Raphael's Sistine Madonna Sistine Madonna, or Michelangelo's David David that had begun its life as an aid to wors.h.i.+p or prayer or to civic or familial memory was-enshrined in the Louvre or the Uffizi-now an object of wors.h.i.+p, possessed of a mystery and power akin to the divine. Florence, full of masterpieces, was a masterpiece too. that had begun its life as an aid to wors.h.i.+p or prayer or to civic or familial memory was-enshrined in the Louvre or the Uffizi-now an object of wors.h.i.+p, possessed of a mystery and power akin to the divine. Florence, full of masterpieces, was a masterpiece too.

In 187374 both Henry James and John Ruskin returned to Florence. Henry rendezvoused with his brother William. William-the psychologist and founder of the Pragmatist movement in philosophy-did not care for Florence as Henry did, failed perhaps to admire what his brother called "the deep stain of experience" that lay upon the city. After William left for America in February, Henry settled in an apartment on the Piazza Santa Maria Novella and stayed until the heat became unbearable in June.

He had launched himself into a novel, Roderick Hudson Roderick Hudson, set in Rome but full of the Florentine preoccupations of "The Madonna of the Future." Roderick Hudson is a young New Englandborn sculptor of exceptional promise who goes to Rome to find himself as an artist. Instead, he squanders his talent and destroys himself, a contemporary Icarus who pursues the allures of art and Europe at too great a height. His lover, of half-American, half-Continental parentage, declares, "I am fond of luxury, I am fond of a great society, I am fond of being looked at. I am corrupt, corrupting, corruption."

It might have been a cautionary tale: beware of art that is merely artificial, of beauty that is really vanity. But James's point is not to avoid art and beauty, but, because they are essential-because life is itself pointless and untenable without them-to find a way to live with them; and, for James himself, in in them. That, rather than a moral tale, is what James was working on above the Piazza Santa Maria Novella. That same spring he'd written, "The world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night: we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget nor deny it nor dispense with it." The world insisted on being visible and palpable, on being seen and felt. The question was how to see without being blinded. It seemed to James that art was the only means, and that a city like Florence was the optimal lens. them. That, rather than a moral tale, is what James was working on above the Piazza Santa Maria Novella. That same spring he'd written, "The world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night: we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget nor deny it nor dispense with it." The world insisted on being visible and palpable, on being seen and felt. The question was how to see without being blinded. It seemed to James that art was the only means, and that a city like Florence was the optimal lens.

As Henry James was finis.h.i.+ng Roderick Hudson Roderick Hudson in Florence, John Ruskin was in a.s.sisi studying Giotto's frescoes. To immerse himself in the work, he'd arranged to lodge in a monk's cell just across the cloister from the lower church. But as the days pa.s.sed he found himself less struck by Giotto than by his master and teacher Cimabue, about whom Ruskin concluded, "He was a man of personal genius equal to Tintoretto, but with his mind entirely formed by the Gospels and the book of Genesis; his art [was] what he could receive from the Byzantine masters-and his main disposition, in Florence, John Ruskin was in a.s.sisi studying Giotto's frescoes. To immerse himself in the work, he'd arranged to lodge in a monk's cell just across the cloister from the lower church. But as the days pa.s.sed he found himself less struck by Giotto than by his master and teacher Cimabue, about whom Ruskin concluded, "He was a man of personal genius equal to Tintoretto, but with his mind entirely formed by the Gospels and the book of Genesis; his art [was] what he could receive from the Byzantine masters-and his main disposition, compa.s.sion. compa.s.sion."

From a.s.sisi Ruskin moved to Lucca and then to Florence, where he settled in the Hotel dell'Arno on the river. On a Sunday in September, Ruskin would return to Santa Croce. He would sit again-soon he'd be on the verge of lunacy, a lifelong virgin given to pedophile fantasies, a visionary frothing with manic schemes and utopias-in the Bardi Chapel at the hour in which the light would present itself. He saw two young Englishmen pa.s.s by, oblivious to Giotto, fixed on the nave's preposterous and flaccid ranks of funeral monuments, and he decided-it came upon him like the sliver of daylight he'd been awaiting in order to draw-that Giotto's gift had come to him not directly, but by way of Cimabue, his master.

"Before Cimabue, no beautiful rendering of human form was possible," Ruskin began, but admitted, "nor could I in any of my former thinking understand how it was, till I saw Cimabue's own work at a.s.sisi . . . even more intense, capable of higher things than Giotto, though of none, perhaps, so keen or sweet." But Cimabue, it seemed to Ruskin, had sacrificed himself-emptied out his own gifts-for Giotto: "Showed him all he knew; talked with him of many things he felt himself unable to paint; made him a workman and a gentleman-above all a Christian-yet left him a shepherd."

As to the Rucellai Madonna Madonna and the Borgo Allegri, "recent critical writers, unable to comprehend how any street populace could take pleasure in painting, have ended by denying [Cimabue's] triumph altogether." But the truth of the story, like the truth of the Rucellai and the Borgo Allegri, "recent critical writers, unable to comprehend how any street populace could take pleasure in painting, have ended by denying [Cimabue's] triumph altogether." But the truth of the story, like the truth of the Rucellai Madonna Madonna's status as a masterpiece, was self-evident. Even illiterate medieval Florentines could see it and delight in the epiphany it contained. "That delight was not merely in the revelation of an art that they had not known how to practise," Ruskin continued, "it was delight in the revelation of a Madonna whom they had not known how to love."

So this was Cimabue's-or anyone's-genius; the ability to transform looking into loving. And that was what was lost on those who would not give Cimabue his due, who would not wait for the light to fall just so in his apprentice's chapel, who refused to learn to see how one thing touches every other thing: "You will never love art well till you love what she mirrors better."

Back at the Hotel dell'Arno, Ruskin had been trying to sketch from memory the dove Cimabue had used in a.s.sisi to portray a verse from Genesis: "And the Spirit of G.o.d moved on the face of the Waters." But the effort frustrated Ruskin. "Goodness!-that I can't draw it," he recorded, and then, "That dove's wrong after all. Cimabue's wings go up. I confuse things now in a day, if I don't put them down instantly."

On March 19, 1879, Claire Clairmont, age eighty, died in Florence, the last member of the Sh.e.l.ley and Byron circle who had discovered Italy and Florence for a generation of expatriate artists and writers and the tourists who followed them. For the previous nine years she had been living near the Porta Romana in Oltrarno with her niece. It was said that Claire had grown progressively more eccentric with each pa.s.sing year; that she prattled on about Byron, kept the windows curtained and shuttered, and, despite a lifelong and very vocal antipathy toward the faith, converted to Catholicism.

There had been, except Napoleon, no greater celebrity in nineteenth-century Europe than Byron and there were supposed to be a bundle of Byron's love letters to Claire among her effects, papers of extraordinary interest, not to mention value.

Henry James heard about them in 1887, eight years after Claire's decease, when he returned to Florence and took a villa above the city in Bellosguardo. He had become by now "someone on whom nothing is lost," who saw everything, and by means of his art aimed to render it yet more visible.

James realized that he had walked by Claire Clairmont's door, might have pa.s.sed her in the street. The story he'd heard was an incident of what he called "the visitable past," "the poetry of the thing outlived and lost and gone." He put his thoughts on what he'd heard into his notebook:

Certainly there is a little subject there: the picture of the two faded, queer, poor and discredited old English women-living on into a strange generation, in their musty corner of a foreign town with these ill.u.s.trious letters as their most precious possession.

What fascinated James most of all was the obsessive collector and connoisseur, another figure increasingly visible in Florence. James himself, acc.u.mulating anecdotes, characters, and museum-grade gossip at dinner parties, salons, and teas, was in the same mold. Having gathered the threads of Claire Clairmont's story, he spun it into the tale called The Aspern Papers The Aspern Papers, the masterpiece of his shorter fiction. For purposes of atmosphere, he moved the locale to a damp and decaying Venetian palazzo, but contemporary Florence-the epitome of the "visitable past"-had provided him the specimen of the pursuer of beauty who, not content to visit the past in the manner of tourists, is compelled to possess it completely.

3.

Bernard Berenson was another man on whom nothing was lost. He knew everyone and made everyone his supporter. Henry James's brother William and Ruskin's friend Charles Eliot Norton had been his teachers at Harvard; his budding career as a man of letters was being underwritten by Isabella Stewart Gardner, the Boston socialite and fanatic aesthete (known as "Mrs. Jack" after her millionaire husband); and he would have known Ruskin if Ruskin weren't by then insane. Soon enough he would come to know the London art dealer Joseph Duveen, with whom he would become the great authenticator, the provider of the scholars.h.i.+p that underwrote Duveen's hustling and his clients' vanity and greed. No one could ever quite say if Berenson was culpable in anything: he was adept at covering his tracks going back to the moment when he had gotten himself baptized an Episcopalian and changed his name from Bernhard to Bernard to ease his pa.s.sage into the beau monde, to stymie the sn.o.bs and, not least, the anti-Semites.

But in 1889, when he first came to Florence on a stipend from Harvard and Mrs. Gardner, Bernard Berenson was all of twenty-three years old, a very young man in a very old city. Just then, the city engineer Giuseppe Poggi's improvements were reaching their climax with the gutting of the old central market at the city's core and its reconstruction as the Piazza della Repubblica. Berenson arrived in March, in time to see the last remnants of the "complex of bulk and shape in free-stone, in marble, in bronze, in glazed terra-cotta the like of which Europe had never seen."