The Stones of Florence by Mary McCarthy

Author:Mary McCarthy [McCarthy, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Italy, Travel
ISBN: 9781480441248
Google: VVb6AAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00FEZ24HS
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

FLORENTINE HISTORY, IN ITS great period, is a history of innovations. The Florentines wrote the first important work in the vulgar tongue (the Divina Commedia); they raised the first massive dome since antiquity; they discovered perspective; they made the first nude of the Renaissance; they composed the first opera (Jacopo Peri’s Dafne). It is a question whether they or the Venetians were the first to collect statistics. The first humanist, Petrarch, was the son of Florentine Ghibellines, fuorusciti who had taken refuge in Arezzo at the time of his birth. Literary criticism, in the modern sense, was inaugurated by Boccaccio, who lectured in a little church next to the Badia on the Divine Comedy in the year 1373, the signory having decreed that ‘the work of the poet vulgarly called Dante’ should be read aloud to the public. Boccaccio’s clinical account of the plague symptoms in the Decameron was a pioneer contribution to descriptive medicine. Machiavelli is generally called the father of political science, and he was the first to study the mechanism of power in politics and government. The first modern art criticism was written by L. B. Alberti.

The first chair of Greek was set up here, in the fourteenth century. The first public library was founded by Cosimo il Vecchio in the convent of San Marco. The Italian literary language is exclusively the creation of the Tuscans, who formed it on their dialect as spoken in the city of Florence; Manzoni, the author of I Promessi Sposi, came here in the nineteenth century from Milan to ‘rinse his linen’, as he said, ‘in the water of the Arno’; Leopardi came from the Marche. Tuscany is the one province in Italy that does not have a dialect, the Tuscan dialect being, precisely, Italian—what is sometimes called Tuscan dialect (the substitution of ‘h’ for hard ‘c’, for example, ‘hasa’ for ‘casa’ among the poor people, is only a difference in pronunciation). In the same way, Italian painting spoke in the Tuscan idiom from the time of Giotto to the death of Michelangelo, that is, for nearly three centuries.

The Florentines, in fact, invented the Renaissance, which is the same as saying that they invented the modern world—not, of course, an unmixed good. Florence was a turning-point, and this is what often troubles the reflective sort of visitor today—the feeling that a terrible mistake was committed here, at some point between Giotto and Michelangelo, a mistake that had to do with power and megalomania, or gigantism of the human ego. You can see, if you wish, the handwriting on the walls of Palazzo Pitti or Palazzo Strozzi, those formidable creations in bristling prepotent stone, or in the cold, vain stare of Michelangelo’s ‘David’, in love with his own strength and beauty. This feeling that Florence was the scene of the original crime or error was hard to avoid just after the last World War, when power and technology had reduced so much to rubble. ‘You were responsible for this,’ chided a

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