A fter a week in Florence, astonished all over again by
the unsurpassed beauty of its painting and architecture from 1350–1550, I wonder about the odd mixture of features which characterises a high civilisation. This includes: 1. A respect for what appears to be ‘useless’. Greek was barely known in the city until a teacher called Manuel Chrysoloras arrived at the university in the late 14th century, and even Latin was not commonplace. Someone somehow decided that learning what appeared to be dead would make people more alive. High learning was an innate good. This appears not to fit with ...
2. Vulgarity. The unbelievable effusion of artistic display in Florence at that period was, among other things, a colossal form of showing off. In a celestial version of buying a charity plate in New York to sit next to the President of the United States, you could get yourself placed next to the Virgin Mary in a great painting if you had the power and money. A rich merchant called Giovanni Rucellai got Alberti to complete the enormous façade of Santa Maria Novella for him. It is truly beautiful, but almost its most prominent feature is an inscription dedicated to Rucellai by name, as if, say, the largest words on the front of Westminster Abbey were ‘Philip Green’ (it may yet happen).
3. Freedom. Florence was no democracy, but it was, for much of its great period, a republic, and its artistic and literary productions did not enforce the power of a single Sun King, but expressed the liberties of competing oligarchs. This freedom appears not to fit with ...
4. Religious repression. The Inquisition existed, and heresy could be punished by death. Painters could be breathtakingly original in their treatment of religious subjects, but those were the subjects, in the main, which they had to treat, and their originality was strictly artistic, not theological.
So a great civilisation, it would seem, should be both exquisite and vulgar, both liberal and intolerant. It’s mysterious.
In the Bargello, I was looking at the less well-known of the two Donatello Davids, the marble one with the stone lodged in the brow of Goliath’s head. Three teenagers were standing next to me, collaborating in writing down what they had seen for some art history project. ‘That,’ they agreed, ‘is David killing Galileo.’ Considering the temper of Renaissance Florence noted above, it is perhaps not such a bizarre idea. One symptom of urban civilisation which probably hardly occurred to a 15thcentury Florentine is public transport. It was buses that got the civil rights movement going in the United States. Rosa Parks, who died last week, was a black woman who, in 1955, refused the bus driver’s order to comply with the segregationist law in Montgomery, Alabama, and give up her seat to a white man. By persisting in this small act of defiance, she started something that changed society so much that 50 years later the President lays a wreath by her coffin. Public transport, whether privately or state-run, is a good test of how rulers see their citizens.
It is a test which Ken Livingstone’s London fails. As the chairman of the think-tank Policy Exchange, I have been impressed by the huge response to our new pamphlet attacking the abolition of the Routemaster buses (Replacing the Routemaster, Policy Exchange, £10), with their lovely freedom to jump on and off and the reassuring presence of conductors. People do not like the ‘bendy’ buses which are replacing them. They resent the fact that these buses make it difficult to get a ticket, have too few seats, are horribly hot in summer and, being conductorless, offer no protection from criminals and nuisances. They particularly resent these changes being made in the name of the disabled — a wheelchair ramp is compulsory — since this is used as a way of intimidating criticism. With a characteristically modern inversion of meaning, Transport for London speaks of ‘accessible public transport’ as the Holy Grail, just as it produces what is, for most people, the most inaccessible form of transport the city has ever offered. So many arguments about transport, policing and the ‘respect agenda’ are about who is in charge (‘has ownership’) of public space. In an age when computers can provide numerous services which once required people — driverless trains, cash machines, timetables — there is more demand, not less, for actual human beings supervising other human beings. Just as the numbers in domestic service have, contrary to expectation, risen in the last 20 years as society has grown richer, so should the numbers of those visibly serving the public as police officers on the street or on a train, ticket collectors, station porters, etc. There shouldn’t be talk of banning drinking on public transport, but of having a public transport system where the aggressively drunk can be excluded. Conductors once were, and could be again, much-liked figures of mild authority. The Routemasters, I suspect, did more for racial integration and job opportunity in the Windrush generation than do Ken’s grievance policies today.
Can anyone in the West do anything right about Iran? Having correctly identified the country as part of the Axis of Evil, Mr Bush then permitted — and still today permits — its operators to move unmolested across the Iraqi border and make trouble. He subcontracted dealing with Iran’s secret development of nuclear weapons to Germany, France and Britain, who proved completely ineffective. Jack Straw, our Foreign Secretary, paid craven visits to Iraq in search of moderates, and put our eggs in the basket of the corrupt Rafsanjani, who promptly lost the presidential election to Islamism’s Ken Livingstone, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mayor of Tehran. Mr Straw repeatedly said that military action against Iran was ‘inconceivable’. Then Mr Ahmadinejad declared that Israel should be ‘wiped off the map’, prompting Tony Blair to try to unsay what Mr Straw had unwisely said. Ahmadinejad’s statement was not only horrible but frightening, because it was not a fantasy: if Iran had the Bomb it could wipe Israel off the map, and perhaps it would. But since the West resolutely refuses to encourage the stirrings of revolt within Iran and looks askance at Iranian exile groups, Ahmadinejad knows very well that he can set his country at the head of Muslim militancy with impunity. He believes that the Bush administration has run out of puff and that the Europeans never had it. Who can say that he is wrong? ‘Close the den of the old fox, Britain,’ shouted organised crowds, picturesquely, outside the British embassy in Tehran the other week. Old rabbit, more like.
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