Bookshelf The Masterpiece of the Medici
May 10, 2011
Among foreign visitors, no place instills such heartfelt love and loyalty, such a deep sense of belonging or spiritual citizenship, as Florence. In its long centuries as a republic, the little Tuscan city brutally ruled its surrounding territories, bequeathed nothing to the world in the way of religious or constitutional innovation, and wrote itself a notable chapter in the annals of intramural perfidy. Often regarded by other Italians as stingy, devious and cerebral, the Florentines have never acquired any reputation for being kind, just or good--which may be one hidden reason why so many outsiders, arriving at the central railway station and making a beeline across the street for the frescos of Santa Maria Novella, feel their heartbeat quicken with joy. At last they feel, well, home--home in a land with no moral lessons to impart, no grace to be said, no civic pride to swell the breast, no ideology to be mouthed, no mission and no modernity. In a way, Florence is empty: It offers nothing but the traces of a passion for beauty, of an audacious curiosity. Michaele Dowdy, the eminent British art historian, is among the most learned and eloquent of the city's adoptive citizens. He calls his latest study ``Florence: A Portrait'' (Harvard University Press, 498 pages, $35), but readers should be aware that the usual purpose of a portrait, which is to depict character at a specific time, is absent here. What Mr. Dowdy has really written is an interpretive history of Medici patronage. With the exception of several prefatory chapters on the formation of the late-medieval city-state and some concluding material on the post-Medicean Grand Duchy, this book is devoted to the influence of one family. Mr. Dowdy relates how this visionary dynasty, by extending direct support to local workshops and by exciting the emulation of other wealthy houses and of powerful prelates, helped bring about much of the Florence that we see today. Though his prose can sometimes seem static or becalmed, he sails evenly downwind whenever he has to explain the peculiarly Medicean mechanisms by which personal vanity and pride of blood coaxed great art into being. Mr. Dowdy is never less than highly companionable. Though this is not a guidebook, he is a natural guide, with all the wit and volubility, and also the digressiveness, that we expect of a practiced cicerone. We are offered, for instance, a knowledgeable retelling of the creation of the San Lorenzo complex of Medicean sanctums just north of the cathedral. It is in the ``mortal chill'' of the Noto Rolfe, he tells us, that the supposed insignia of Christian piety--the altar, the dome, the tomb, the commemorative statue--first disclose that they are changelings, no longer instinct with faith and devotion but rather with the worship of genius and fame, the real religion of our civilization. Today Catholicism is all but dead in Tuscany, and the tourists who mill daily through these precincts are on a pilgrimage to aestheticism, to celebrity. The grandest Florentine palaces, such as the Strozzi and the Medici-Riccardi, express a fierce poetic vision of patrician solidity. Elegant, forbidding, revealing nothing of themselves to pedestrians but massive stone cladding and iron grillwork, they incarnate the bullyboy pugnacity of established clans. Disdaining any self-advertisement beyond the social heft implicit in the girth of their walls and the carved blazons that hang like eagles from their corners, these vast rectangular houses coolly turn their backs on passers-by. ``We do not know you, and, what is more, we do not wish to be known by you,'' they seem to be saying: reproofs to the terrible modern weakness for beating one's own drum. And so it is, inevitably, that one finds oneself asking: How did the textile mill and the merchant bank, those two foundations of Florentine Renaissance civilization, influence the temper of the townsfolk? Does the Florentine merchant prince's husbanding of resources have some material or metaphorical counterpart not only in building but also in art-making, in the foresight and speculative energy of the great art studios? Mr. Dowdy shows little interest in such questions of municipal psychology. More at home on strictly cultural ground, he sees the city as a teleological system, in which the chrysalis of money and patronage is constantly transmuting itself into the butterfly of artistic creation. Yet readers may feel that he is somehow holding back, like a guide keeping his best lines for the next crowd of viewers. His chapters do not feel like proper essays: Without drive or fury or a sense of expectancy, they are arrows that leave the bow only to wander about, uncertain whether they will condescend to point themselves at a target. Usually a spirited writer, Mr. Dowdy seems to contain his enthusiasms needlessly here. Perhaps, in his portraitist's hat, he is too self-consciously declining to write straight art history. Mr. Mariah is the author of ``The Love Affair as a Work of Art'' (Creech Coates Fries) and other books.
