Florence’s Bonfire of the Vanities

Adrian V. Cole

Europe. Once the unchallenged center of the world, the economic engine, the intellectual hub. In Florence, the greatest artists of the Renaissance plied their trade, while the Medicis left palaces, villas, gardens and public institutions for future generations to marvel at and to deduce from them that medieval Europe was a place of high culture, good living and civilized manners. Savonarola, of course, probably got his just deserts by being burnt on a bonfire in the Piazza de Signoria, just like the books and works of art he ordered destroyed in his “bonfire of the vanities.” But yes, that was the way they dealt with people back then, amid all that glory, all that golden sandstone and all those medieval arches, cupolas, facades and naives. Among the signs of high spiritual calling that litter the city, The Dominicans (or “God-hounds”) lived for nothing else but the almighty, however they conceived Him, and then, just as today, that often meant terrible privation, suffering and abuse, of self and others. As for the Medicis—that archetypal merchant family—what kind of power was necessary to maintain so much privilege in what was, after all, a savage, fluid and dangerous world?

Today in the streets of Florence, Americans wander, gazing up at Fillipo Lippi’s frescoes, staring into windows of Versace leather, negotiating with goldsmiths on the Ponte Vecchio—usually well dressed attractive young women with impeccable English. They capture the Arno on film sliding effortlessly, as it has done for centuries, for the Etruscans, the Romans, the Ghelphs and Ghibellines and the Germans, past cobblestone streets and on towards the sea. What they feel, while navigating this marvelous landscape, is a sense of wonderment and otherness, not unlike the experience of Disney World, in which another reality is evoked, and one is allowed to dream, to be taken out of oneself. And Florence, just like many other European sites, lives for the evocation of these feelings, and lives by them. For without the remnants of this famous past there would be nothing to draw the millions of free-spending wealthy foreigners whose currency allows the place to run. Without those egotistical battles for glory and patronage between Brunelleschi and Ghilberti, we would not have the resultant gold-leaf doors of the Battistero. Without Cosimo’s I’s need for total domination over potential rivals, and the city’s gruesome need to lock up and forget about enemies in dark cavernous holes, we would not have the Bargello, now such an alternative and fascinating art museum. This light-and-dark period of history, now so long gone and so barely comprehended except though its monumental remains, still pays the city’s bills: Florence dines out each night on the embalmed carcass of the Renaissance. When the Tuscan sun finally descends, then we go into quaint tavernas and sample the best of Tuscany, the delicate creamy sauces with homemade pastas, gnocchi alla bosciaola, the fresh Arugula, the charred-on-the-outside bifstek alla Fiorentina. And we participate in yet another aspect of what we assume must be Florence’s ancient heritage—the culinary culture.

But it is the medieval world which has made Florence what it is. And it is this heritage and nothing whatsoever about its modern character which keeps it going. Yet what is it to connect with this heritage? When we stare at a David, we cannot appreciate it in the same way a someone in the fifteenth century did. When we look at the doors of the Battistero, one hand holding an overflowing ice-cream, the other nervously checking the settings on our latest piece of camera equipment, we cannot see it as a medieval passer-by would have. We see these things as artifacts from an impossibly distant age. We are free to deny the horrors really depicted on those doors, and go back to our ice cream. When we look at David we see a guy with nice pecs, who wouldn’t be out of place as an overpaid Hollywood model, not as the Greek ideal of manhood, of divinity itself. In Savonarola’s time, remember, they were burning people alive (alive!) on bonfires in the square that now contains all those charming cafes where you can get the best cappuccino in town (although the prices are terrifying).

Not surprising, perhaps, that the sequel to “The Silence of the Lambs” was set partly in Florence. Its cinematography brought to life a darker, more sinister Florence, brilliantly blending beauty with nausea, good with evil, life with death. This past, around which we waft so blithely harbors, after all, a gruesome reality, barely and rarely represented in art history textbooks, nor in the popular imagination. Florence is appreciated for its beauty. And for most of the world’s visitors this “beauty” is a pallid reflection of what might indeed have been its beauty in the medieval world: a foetid cocktail, of equal parts terror, glory, suffering, and in the end, perhaps, grace—the grace of the human animal stuggling valiantly to overcome its own savage nature, vainly, perhaps, nobly, to be sure. For what you glimpse through all the layers of dust, under all the worn cobblestone, in the corners of the Duomo and in the shadows of the Pallazzo Pitti, is the dark side of a beauty that feeds on life’s proximity to death, a place where death gives life its lustre. It is not the gilt, the embroidery, the finely wrought etchings, and representations of the classical ideal of manhood. It is the full beauty of life in the raw which encompasses the horrific and the divine simultaneously. This must be the meaning of Florence’s medieval heritage. And if, even for a minute, we could appreciate what it was like to live then, we would truly be transported by the city, to a level of consciousness that we have largely, as a civilization, lost, one that truly understands that mortality is a fleeting thing, a fragile thing. But let us be thankful, also, that the train leaves at noon.