Florence Read online

  Another interesting character in The Flower Beneath the Foot is Count Cabinet, a ‘ “fallen” minister of the Crown exiled to the island of St Helena’. Though the nature of the scandal is never specified, nor his name included in the ‘who’s who’ of the novel that Firbank sent his mother, Count Cabinet’s banishment calls to mind strongly the fate of Lord Henry Somerset. When the righteous Countess of Tolga takes a boat to ‘intrude upon the flattered exile’, she brings as a gift ‘a pannier of well-grown, early pears, a small “heath” and the Erotic Poems, bound in half calf with tasteful tooling, of a Schoolboy poet, cherishable chiefly perhaps for the vignette frontispiece of the author’. Count Cabinet lives alone on his island except for his ‘useful’ secretary, Peter Passer, whom Firbank describes as ‘more valet perhaps than secretary, and more errand-boy than either’. According to his account, the ‘former chorister of the Blue Jesus’ volunteered to follow ‘the fallen statesman into exile at a moment when the Authorities of Pisuerga were making minute enquiries for sundry missing articles, from the Trésor of the Cathedral…’ (Perhaps some eighteenth-century vestments, in which young Peter went around dressed as Cardinal Richelieu?)

  Firbank’s account of the pair occasions some of his loveliest prose. While fishing from an open window, Count Cabinet, to his surprise, catches ‘a distinguished mauvish fish with vivid scarlet spots’, the sight of which provokes him to ponder ‘on the mysteries of the deep, and of the subtle variety that is in Nature … Among the more orthodox types that stocked the lake, such as carp, cod, tench, eels, sprats, shrimps, etc., this exceptional fish must have known its trials and persecutions … And the Count, with a stoic smile, recalled his own.’ Like Wilde, the ‘distinguished fish’ is both stoic and beautiful in the face of adversity and dislocation.

  Indeed, as Firbank describes it, the isle of the Count’s exile is almost Edenic in its tranquil (and Mediterranean) beauty. Here, when not ‘boating or reading or feeding his swans, to watch Peter’s fancy-diving off the terrace end was perhaps the favorite pastime of the veteran viveur.’

  To behold the lad trip along the riven breakwater, as naked as a statue, shoot out his arms and spring, the flying-head-leap or the Backsadilla, was a beautiful sight, looking up now and again – but more often now – from a volume of old Greek verse; while to hear him warbling in the water with his clear alto voice – of Kyries and Anthems he knew no end – would often stir the old man to the point of tears. Frequently the swans themselves would paddle up to listen, expressing by the charmed or rapturous motions of their necks (recalling to the exile the ecstasies of certain musical or ‘artistic’ dames at Concert-halls, or the Opera House, long ago) their mute appreciation, their touched delight …

  Among the ‘strangely gorgeous’ swans on whom the Count dotes, one pecks at Peter, ‘Jealous, doubtless of the lad’s grace.’ The boy, ‘naked as a statue’, is in his nudity the very paragon of the artificial. For the Count, as for Baron von Gloeden, Classicism justifies polite pornography, just as in The Garden God, the 1905 novel for which James refused a dedication, a boy called Graham poses his friend Harold in the attitudes of the faun, the spinario, the Adorante, and a youthful Dionysius with a face ‘like that of Leonardo’s Bacchus’. Once again, we are in Florence.

  Toward the end of The Flower Beneath the Foot, Firbank lapses into a Proustian meditation on dusk that is not without its elements of Wildean paradox. ‘In certain lands,’ he observes, ‘with what diplomacy falls the night, and how discreetly is the daylight gone.

  These dimmer-and-dimmer, darker-and-lighter twilights of the North, so disconcerting in their playfulness, were unknown altogether in Pisuerga. There, Night pursued Day as though she meant it. No lingering or arctic sentiment! No concertina-ishness … Hard on the sun’s heels pressed Night. And the wherefore of her haste; Sun-attraction? Impatience to inherit? An answer to such riddles as these may doubtless be found by turning to the scientist’s theories on Time and Relativity.

  Instead of calling attention to the frozenness of the North, or using its unyielding winters as a metaphor for moral intolerance, Firbank here emphasizes the ‘playfulness’ of Northern dusks; in his hands, even the cold becomes invested with ‘arctic sentiment’. In the South, on the other hand, sunset is as brusque, as brutal, as an Italian farmwoman efficiently slaughtering a chicken. Night pursues day ‘as if she meant it’ (just as Count Cabinet has been pursued), issuing a lights-out order on his island paradise, and reminding us that banishment, even to the loveliest Gulag, is never without its acrid flavor.

  All great writers are finally transformers, rather than scribes, of experience. Unlike Acton, who does little more than repeat the old gossip, or Sitwell, who makes of it a salon comedy, Firbank formulated from the Florentine penchant for arch humor and social spite a unique literary strategy. An acute historian of the expatriate English in southern Europe (and elsewhere), he was also the most important advocate of a literary style the influence of which is far-reaching, revealing itself not only in the subtle satire of Muriel Spark and David Lodge (both of whom live in Tuscany), but in a whole tradition of homosexually themed fiction the practitioners of which, from Alfred Chester to Edmund White, owe a debt (sometimes acknowledged) to his legacy. In this regard, he justifies the more trivial of the Anglo-Florentine writers, most of whom have fallen into an obscurity as complete as that of his own weed-choked grave in Rome. Though future generations of readers will probably not recognize his name, they will feel, in the pages of the writers to whom he mattered, and the writers to whom they mattered, the subtle pull and pressure of his wit.

  Chapter Four

  No image in the history of Western art, with the possible exception of the Mona Lisa, has been reproduced as frequently as Michelangelo’s David. In Florence especially, his doppelgangers proliferate – Luigi Arighetti’s marble copy on Piazza della Signoria, Clemente Papi’s bronze copy on Piazzale Michelangelo, not to mention the mass-produced replicas in plaster of Paris, plastic, brass, and even onyx (a black David) on sale in the city’s gift shops, one of which is called ‘David’s Shop’. A copy of the statue stands guard at the city’s gay sauna, as at many other gay saunas in Europe. Outside the Palazzo Vecchio, postcard vendors peddle every conceivable view of the David, as well as aprons printed with his torso, underwear printed with his crotch, postcards in which he and the fat Bacchus from the Boboli Gardens are juxtaposed under the heading ‘Before and After’, and perhaps most trashily, close-up shots of his genitals, some with cartoon sunglasses perched over the pubic hair and the words ‘WOW! FLORENCE!’ added near the top. Two years ago, for my birthday, my brother gave me a magnetized David paper doll whose varied wardrobe (speedos, dinner jacket, tank top and shorts) would have better suited an urban homosexual of the early nineteen–eighties than a Biblical hero or even an athletic Florentine boy at the end of the fifteenth century. Such vulgarizations, like Marcel Duchamp’s famous mustaching of the Mona Lisa, suggest a discomfort with the sublimity of great works of art, a desire to diminish their intensity through defacement or ridicule. At the same time, they attest to the statue’s carnal force, that physicality to which Pater gave voice when he wrote that Michelangelo ‘loved the very quarries of Carrara, those strange grey peaks which even at mid-day convey into any scene from which they are visible something of the solemnity and stillness of evening, sometimes wandering among them month after month, till at last their pale ashen colours seem to have passed into his painting; and on the crown of the head of the David there still remains a morsel of uncut stone, as if by one touch to maintain his connexion with the place from which it was hewn’.

  Now, examining the reproduction of the David’s face on a mousepad I purchased the other day at the Museum of the Opera del Duomo, I see the ‘morsel’ to which Pater refers. David’s expression is at once fretful and uncertain, as if he is questioning the very act of slingshot heroism for which he will be memorialized. In the reproductions, Mark notes, this look that dances on the edge of contriti
on hardens into something more like churlishness, and the face becomes pinched and mean. The real David, by contrast, has an odd delicacy about him, even a fragility, of which his very massiveness is the paradoxical source. What might be called the David’s pre-history is illustrative in this regard. The five-meter stone slab from which he was carved had originally been quarried in 1464 for the Opera del Duomo, but was never used because the sculptor who had blocked it out, to quote a contemporary of Michelangelo’s, was ‘insufficiently acquainted with his art’. Some years later, the sculptor Andrea Sansovino tried to persuade the board of the Opera del Duomo to let him have a go at it; only Michelangelo, however, offered a proposal that did not require the addition of other pieces of stone, and for this reason, the marble was given to him. (Indeed, it is because of the exactitude with which Michelangelo made use of this slab that the morsel of uncut stone on the David’s head remains.)

  ‘In the David Michelangelo first displayed that quality of terribilità, of spirit-quailing, awe-inspiring force, for which he afterwards became so famous,’ John Addington Symonds wrote in his biography of the artist:

  The statue imposes, not merely by its size and majesty and might, but by something vehement in the conception… . Wishing perhaps to adhere strictly to the Biblical story, Michelangelo studied a lad whose frame was not developed. The David, to state the matter frankly, is a colossal hobbledehoy. [Theophile Gautier wrote that he looked like ‘a market-porter’.] His body, in breadth of the thorax, depth of the abdomen, and general stoutness, has not grown up to the scale of the enormous hands and feet and heavy head. We feel that he wants at least two years to become a fully developed man, passing from adolescence to the maturity of strength and beauty. This close observance of the imperfections of the model at a certain stage of physical growth is very remarkable, and not altogether pleasing in a statue more than nine feet high. Both Donatello and Verrocchio had treated their Davids in the same realistic manner, but they were working on a small scale and in bronze. I insist upon this point, because students of Michelangelo have been apt to overlook his extreme sincerity and naturalism in the first stages of his career.

  When the statue was completed in 1504, Botticelli wanted to put it in the Loggia dei Lanzi; others argued for the Duomo itself. In the end, however, it was decided that the David should be placed in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. Getting him there was no easy task. First the walls of the Opera del Duomo had to be knocked down. The David ‘went very slowly’, Luca Landucci observed in his diary, ‘being bound in an erect position and suspended so that it did not touch the ground with its feet’. The move took four days, and required forty men.

  For almost four centuries, then, the David led a relatively peaceful life in the Piazza, except for a bad day in 1527 when a riot erupted and his left arm was broken. The incident testifies, once again, to the odd fact that heavy things can be exceptionally frail. Bad weather took its toll as well, and near the middle of the nineteenth century, as Italy was being unified and Florence was preparing for its brief moment of glory as its capital, art historians, restorers and politicians started lobbying for the necessity of finding the David a new home. In 1852, a commission convened to report ‘on the dangers threatening the David and on the systems to be adopted to avoid its crumbling to the ground’ voted unanimously to relocate the statue, but failed to agree on a place. The Loggia of the old market was proposed, as were the Loggia dei Lanzi (again) and the Loggia degli Uffizi, but for reasons ranging from lack of light to the fear that the statue would be subjected to the ‘ravages of the lower classes’, all three were rejected; so were the Medici chapel and the Bargello. Finally, in the late 1860s, another commission concluded that the only real means of providing ‘the most stupendous statue of the modern age’ with a place of ‘refuge’ was to build a temple for that exclusive purpose. This ‘tribune’ would be designed by the architect Antonio di Fabris as an annex to the Accademia di Belle Arti; remembering what had happened in 1504, the commission thought it prudent to move the statue to the site before construction began, so that no walls would have to be broken down.

  The move was planned carefully. First, in the summer of 1873, workmen laid a railroad track across the Piazza della Signoria. The track turned right on to Via de Calzaiuoli, rounded the Duomo and made a sharp left on to Via del Cocomero (Watermelon Street, later changed to Via Ricasoli) before reaching its terminus at the Accademia. Once the track was completed, the David was hoisted from his pedestal and lowered into a sort of tramcar, the wooden scaffolding of which held him aloft so that his feet did not touch the ground. Finally, on 30 July, he began the journey to his new home – a journey that would last seven days, though the distance involved could be covered on foot in ten or fifteen minutes. In one of the few illustrations to be made of the move, a print published in Nuova Illustrazione Universale of January 1874, only the upper half of the David’s torso is visible above the wooden walls of the cart. His famous posture – head turned, eyes glancing hesitantly over the left shoulder – takes on new pathos in this image, as if what he is regarding with such worry is actually the gradual disappearance of the only home he has ever known.

  Not everyone was happy about the move. ‘Michelangelo’s David in Piazza della Signoria is no more!!’ an unnamed journalist lamented in the Giornale Artistico of 1 August, 1873. ‘It’s been embalmed and seen in a new contraption of wood and iron on its way to its burial in the Cemetery of Art vulgarly called the Accademia di Belle Arti.’ A cartoon from the same period shows the David bending down and leaning out of his crate in order to argue with the foppish, behatted men who have presumably orchestrated his removal. A letter written to the Minister of Public Education complained of the ‘degrading’ cart in which the David was enclosed – as if the rain and wind slowly eating away at his marble body were not, in a literal sense, far more degrading. And though the rhetoric died down once the David was safely ensconced at the Accademia, a lingering annoyance at the gap left in the piazza’s statuary remained, leading in 1910 (things move slowly in Florence) to the erection of the marble copy that today many tourists blithely confuse with the real thing.

  Those who are more astute, of course, brave the long lines outside the Accademia in order to see David in his authentic and inimitable glory. Living as he does now in a tribune, one might expect him to have taken on an expression of arrogance, yet in fact – and despite the change of circumstance – his look of vulnerability seems only to have intensified over the years. Perhaps this is due to old age, a lingering ache in his left arm, or in the second toe of his left foot, which a vandal broke in 1991. To invent such a motive, I know, is to assume that the statue has an identity distinct from that of the Biblical figure it represents, or even the marble from which it was hewn; indeed, it is to assume that the statue has a consciousness. And what might such a consciousness – at once freighted and fragile – possibly resemble? What kind of memory would stone possess? We can only imagine.

  Like most people, I first went to Florence for its art. That initial visit, in 1982, lasted four days and amounted to an almost complete submersion in the city’s artistic heritage, a giddy alternation between heat and cool, sun-parched piazzas and churches so dark it took minutes for my eyes to adjust to them. By the time the four days were over, I had seen pretty much everything my art history professor had told me to see; I had squinted up at dozens of frescoes and altarpieces, and spent hours in the long corridors of the Uffizi; I had climbed the steep paths of the Boboli Gardens, and the operatic staircase (designed by Michelangelo) that leads to the Laurentian Library, and the spiral staircase that leads to the roof of the Duomo. And how did I feel? Irritable, impatient, inadequate. Stendhal’s Syndrome: so completely did Florence’s superabundance of marvels throw off my equilibrium that at the end of my time there I decided to cut my summer vacation short and fly back to Palo Alto, drawn by a longing for those banal American things through which I hoped to restore some sense of who I was.

  Living in Florence,
of course, is an entirely different matter; then you almost never go to look at the art, unless a friend or relative happens to be visiting. One does not easily envision Ouida and Janet Ross and the other Anglo-Florentines making regular jaunts to the Pitti Palace; they were too busy squabbling and gossiping. By the same token, the contemporary foreigner’s life in Florence, though constantly impinged upon by a persistent if only half-articulate consciousness of art’s proximity, remains curiously remote from, one might even say immune to, the very patrimony that drew him in the first place. Not that the art disappears for him; it simply remains at the periphery of his imagination, awaiting the day when some unspecified incentive – the right weather, the absence of a line – induces him to make a spontaneous visit to Santa Maria del Carmine, or San Marco, or the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi …

  What he forgets, of course, is that works of art are not immortal. Nor are they immune to catastrophes, both human and natural. In 1993, a bomb ripped through part of the Uffizi. The April before, in Florence to look for an apartment, we had stayed at the Pensione Quisisana and Ponte Vecchio, where parts of A Room with a View were filmed. This was a very old-fashioned pension, located on the upper floors of a palazzo that gives on to the Arno, a few doors down from the Uffizi. There was a dilapidated, if somewhat grand, entrance hall in which an old woman, presumably the mother or grandmother of the owner, could usually be seen, paying little attention to the television, which was always on. To reach our room, we had to traverse several short staircases (going both up and down), three corridors of varying width, and a salone with a white floor and a piano; as Forster noted in his 1958 afterword to A Room with a View, after the war the houses along that part of the Lungarno were ‘renumbered and remodelled and, as it were, re-melted’, some of the façades extended and others shrunk so that it became ‘impossible to decide which room was romantic half a century ago’. I remember that we went to a recital in the church of Santo Stefano by the Russian pianist Bella Davidovich, and then ran into her the next morning at breakfast; she too was staying at the Quisisana and Ponte Vecchio, and when we congratulated her, she removed the glove from her right hand to shake ours: a reminder that until not very long ago, most women wore gloves.