The disposal of exiles
Jonathan Keates
FLORENCE, A PORTRAIT by Michael Levey Jonathan Cape, £25.00, pp.498 If sophistication is a matter of keeping the simpler moral instincts well under control, then Florence is the paradise of the unsophisticated. For it is here, amid a litter of humanity's most refined creations, that we surrender to those basic impulses of gratitude and remorse which might elsewhere embarrass us by their banal simplicity. In the presence of Botticelli's `Birth of Venus' or the impacted Fra Angelicos at San Marco, thankfulness over- comes us that we have lived long enough to see these things, and we depart from them firmly resolved to lead better lives here- after. Art, in short, has done its job proper- ly.
Yet Florence itself is not a beautiful city. The Romans jammed down its urban grid at a permanently awkward angle to the Arno, the narrow streets are notoriously inimical to walkers and the interior of the Duomo possesses all the spiritual uplift of a bus garage. What seduces us in the town- scape is mostly confined to a single breath- taking eastward view of the river between lines of shuttered hotels, with green Tuscany magnificently obtrusive at the edges of the picture.
Its success, commercial and cultural, was based from the outset on an invincible Florentine conviction of civic uniqueness, transcending the citizens' inveterate tendency, deplored by Dante, never to accept good government where worse would do. Michael Levey, in his art-histori- cal biography of the place, is admirably cynical on this theme, noting, for instance, the republic's 'unusual adroitness and unusual cohesion' in welcoming the French to its gates in 1494.
Counterbalancing such political contrari- ness, this book continually reminds us, were innumerable art works aimed at urging the Florentines to make a better fist of governing their city and living up to the ideals implicit in their myth-making. Levey encourages us to read a whole range of painting and sculpture, much of it super- ficially familiar, as a series of coded messages. The so-called timelessness of such great pieces as Donatello's 'Judith and Holofernes', Ghiberti's bronze 'Doors of Paradise' or the 'David' of Michelangelo turn out to be much less interesting than the emblematic uses to which the age put them, whether as a morale-booster in Ghiberti's case or as a warning against tyrants in those of Donatello and Michelango.
Levey admires these works but is briskly practical in detaching each from the con- text of lingering Victorian sentimentalism with which we continue to idealise the creators. His critical viewpoint is enhanced by a roguish sense of humour — 15th- century humanism, for example, represent- ed as a bossy adult reproving the childlike exuberance of late mediaeval art — and is all the better for not being tied to the Renaissance as a specific historical field.
For Florence, A Portrait offers a wonder- fully heterodox perspective on the city we thought we all knew. The standard aesthetic encourages us to believe that after 1537, when Cosimo de'Medici became Tuscany's first Grand Duke, art in Florence ceased to exist. Levey rightly scorns this, inviting us instead to enjoy the Baroque allegories of Giovanni di San Giovanni on a Pitti ceiling, Giambattista Foggini's turbidly energetic sculpted apotheosis of Sant' Andrea Corsini in the Carmine and Bernardino Pocetti's graceful adornment of a San Marco side chapel.
Both these latter, ironically, are in place where earlier and better regarded artists exert a stronger claim on our attention. Levey's commendation, however, isn't sheer perversity, any more than is his eloquent defence of Masolino, who deco- rates his dust-jacket, against art history's denigration of him as Masaccio's plodding also-ran. For such consistent challenges to received opinion, for its handsome visual embrace of architectural nonesuches like the Boboli coffee house and the Maharajah of Kohlapur's monument in the Gasoine, and for its irreverent but accurate implica- tion that most of us enjoy Florence for its stolid bourgeois cosiness precisely because it isn't sexy or dangerous like Rome or Venice, this book will find its detractors. For myself, I can't remember having read a more imaginative, intelligent or compelling account of Florence's meaning and making, or one which so irresistibly urged me to look at the city and look again.
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