In Piazza della Signoria, I’m unsure which way to turn. To the Loggia dei Lanzi with Giambologna’s statue The Rape of the Sabine, and Cellini’s bronze sculpture of Perseus with the Medusa’s head in his hand? To the elegant clientele at Café Rivoire, said to serve the best hot chocolate in Florence? Or to the fountain of Neptune? At the fountain, the water spills over the horses’ heads, the nymphs and fauns. A tantalising view, especially in summer when the temperature is high, and a semblance of refreshment is tempting.
I could turn to the massive structure of the Palazzo dei Priori, better known as Palazzo Vecchio, and the tower of Arnolfo, famous for its clock and a small cell, called ironically alberghetto (“little inn”). To the flagstones under my feet, perhaps, thinking of the millions of people who paused on this stone, and those who will pass by. To the open sky and decide whether it’s blue, cloudy, rainy, or even snowing, the latter a rarity but not an impossibility in Florence. Meteorology would change the experience of the Square. The sun will bring out the white marble of Neptune, looking to his left to the David and Hercules. I’d need to shade my eyes to make sense of this brightness, especially the strong blue of the sky against the brownish stones of Palazzo Vecchio.
Clouds will diffuse the colours and provide a more sober experience, an embrace rather than an explosion, a whisper of recognition instead of a cry of joy. If it rains, there will be swift movements of people skirting statues and puddles, the massive sculptures blocked by open umbrellas, their details highlighted: an arm, a shoulder, an eye, a head or just a leg. If I come at night, the strategically positioned spotlights will direct my gaze. If lucky, an improvised band will play. Luckier still if it’s late spring, the murmur of people floating around. Music and chatter accompany my visit like a choir of human engagement, proximity, and merriment.
Ideally, I position myself to the West of the Square. With my back to Via Calzaiuoli, I take in the Fountain of Neptune, Palazzo Vecchio, a section of the Uffizi Gallery and the Loggia dei Lanzi in a single sweep. It’s early evening, in summer, my favourite season. I sit on a bench in the warm breeze, and I see thousands of fireflies buzzing with their intermittent luminous flickers. I’m alone but not for long, enough to size my existence, unimpaired. It’s not the need to exchange thoughts or banal remarks that would spoil the moment. The presence of a biological world nearby, and the mystery of it, would conceal the depth of a fleeting proximity with myself, whose necessity is precious because it’s rare. This image is unoriginal, the accretion instead of vicarious pleasures of the literary nature. It originates in Canto XXVI of Dante’s Hell, in the circle reserved for those who committed fraud. Dante stands next to Virgil on top of a boulder, looking down at the sinners who are trapped in a deep gorge, each soul engulfed in flames. What he sees, Dante compares to the experience of a farmer on a late summer evening, watching thousands of bright lights burning in the distant fields. I find this image peaceful. Which makes me think that Dante’s Hell is not too horrific after all. But again, what’s the difference between horror and blissfulness? They are shocking and because of this revelatory. They turn life upside down by making the impossible possible. At the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Marlon Brando as Colonel Walter E. Kurtz whispers “horror” while Captain Benjamin L. Willard, aka Martin Sheen, hacks him to death. At the end of the first Blade Runner, the replicant Roy dies on the roof of a building as he holds a dove in his hands while recounting immense destruction and death. Revelation is heralded by transferring death from the realm of horror to that of grace and beauty. These stories, as well as Dante’s calming rendition of suffering, tell us that beauty without horror is unthinkable, and that life is the necessary mediation of pain and joy.
My ideal experience of Piazza della Signoria, to see the David pricked by fireflies, is the melancholic realisation that not only life in general, but my life is an unmitigated mixture of ugliness and beauty. Its synthesis is an evening made of little flashes that spark and vanish, leaving traces of fleeting presences.
*****
Café Rivoire is associated with an enduring memory. One summer, I was in the company of three other people in the early hours of the morning. The café had closed but the tables and chairs were left, chained together, out in the square. With a friend we had approached earlier in the day two young women as they walked along Via Calzaiuoli. We started talking outside Orsanmichele, a few hundred meters from the Square. Orsanmichele is a strange case of architectural hybridity: a church that once upon a time was a granary. I find it interesting, and to a certain extent amusing, the assonance between “granary” and “rosary”. The marriage between the sacred and the profane is not a coincidence. From the outside, the Church looks like a display cabinet of saints, who look out from their niches to remind the crowd of biblical stories and sacrifices. On that evening, I hadn’t paid attention to the saints on Orsanmichele. I was trying to make sense of what the two young women were telling us through the little English my friend and I possessed. It was a miracle and a marvel, my friend and I thought, that the two women accepted our invitation to linger and sit in Piazza della Signoria. I’m still intrigued by that evening. Not because it was one of the first times I was in the company of tourists – their own definition of themselves – but because the tourists were beautiful and smiling. I could hear the water in the Fountain of Neptune, but didn’t see it. I followed the eyes of our guests wandering towards Palazzo Vecchio and the Loggia dei Lanzi, and still remember the elation when the two tourists agreed to meet up again the next day.
They didn’t come though. I was about to place their memory in that corner of nostalgic curiosity from which things like this can be rescued for a taste of melancholia or for banter, when I saw them a year or so later in the street speaking fluent Florentine. They were outside a secondary school, basking in the happiness of another day, done. I passed and didn’t stop, and I didn’t tell my friend that we had been duped. It didn’t occur to me that something like that could take place in Piazza della Signoria, a platform surely for great uplifting performances but not for salacious comedies.
I was probably eighteen or nineteen, with a romantic perception of love. Once, I dreamt I travelled with a young woman, with whom during the day I exchanged languid looks from opposite sides of a crowded bus, to the seaside on a vespa. In the dream, her arms were tightly wrapped around my waist, and her head rested in between my shoulder and the back of my head. I’m sure I felt the sensation of her short hair brushing on my neck. At the beach, we spread our picnic blanket on the sand and arranged the little food we brought. The unconsciousness of my eighteen-year-old self thought of love as a ride on a vespa to the seaside for a light lunch on the beach. I dreamt the same dream several times, but as far as I remember, we didn’t kiss, I didn’t touch her, didn’t feel the texture of her cotton dress, didn’t imagine, assuming that one can imagine while dreaming, what there was under her skirt. I left those images to my waking self, who, after ejaculating, regretted the abasement to which he had momentarily subjected the young woman on the bus. In the hours between of our farewell and the appointment that never materialised, I also imagined scenes of childish frenzy, running across fields, skipping stones on the surface of a river, laughing. But in the shadows of those images, the desire to uncover their bodies gained momentum.
*****
Piazza della Signoria has staged disparate events. Not surprising, since it’s the symbolic heart of Florence’s political and social life. At the height of the Florentine Republic in the early fifteenth century the Balìa, the emergency elected council, congregated in the Square to warn the citizens of Florence of imminent dangers, the approach of foreign armies, for instance. Here took place the highly choreographed burning at the stake of Giacomo Savonarola on May 1498. The friar was escorted from the alberghetto in Palazzo Vecchio to the place of execution at the centre of the Square on a specially built wooden walkway. An anonymous painting of the event shows an out of scale Piazza della Signoria, sparsely populated by a well-behaved crowd of elegant onlookers. Their bizarre harmonious disposition is only partly disrupted by a rearing horse and rider in the right end corner, close to the Loggia dei Lanzi. The only uncharacteristic moment of disorder in a properly edifying representation of violent death. Some of the people turn their back to the execution, possibly talking amiably about their daily affairs. The painting reassures the viewer, stressing serenity and peaceful cohabitation. I imagine Savonarola’s last moments differently. He arrives flanked by two lines of guards and a chanting and cursing crowd, possibly the same that filled the cathedral to listen to his incendiary sermons only months earlier. I see his profile, the famous hooked nose, the flashy bottom lip and the bushy eyebrow framed by the hood of the Dominica order. He looks down, possibly at his sandals or the planks made for his last walk on earth. The air returns the smell of burning wood and smoke and an indistinct sound, like a deep rumble, similar to an approaching yet still far way thunder. The last few days he prayed, and a part of him prays still. The other part scrutinises the small cracks in the wood, marvelling at the beauty and complexity of dead matter. In between the roar of the distant, and perhaps imagined storm, Savonarola hears the tiny splintering noises that announce the coming of his body on the wood, and the relationship between inert and alive atoms. In a moment, his body, like the plank he walks on, will relate differently with the world. His body will ooze liquid and release gases, it will boil, darken and shrivel. It will turn leathery, a black cinder from which no sound comes. Life and death, he thinks, mediate matter in an infinite cycle of regeneration at the end of which there’s beatitude. That’s what it means to have an immortal soul, Savonarola thinks as he’s about to be hanged. Upfront, he looks different than in profile. Two faces and one body, one body and a million of possibilities. He goes in an instant when I hear the neigh of the horse behind me, near the Loggia dei Lanzi.
A plaque was put to mark the execution, should one wish to pause, consider, and reflect on history, rebellion, the ambiguous relation between religious fervour and secular society, and the violent nature of power, be it the power that is vanquished or the power that vanquishes.
*****
In his book The Rise and Fall of the House of the Medici, Christopher Hibbert tells us that on special occasions Piazza della Signoria turned “into a circus or a hunting-field; wild animals would let be loose; boars would be goaded by lances; and the Commune’s lions would be brought out of their cages behind the Palazzo and incited to set upon dogs.” Francesco Bocchi and Giovanni Cinelli write that the lions were kept in Piazza San Marco next to the church and the convent of the same name. On occasions like the ones described by Hibbert, they were carried through the city along Via Larga (now Via Cavour), Via del Proconsolo, the aptly named Via dei Leoni at the rear of Palazzo Vecchio. Possibly the journey happened early in the morning, not to unnecessarily excite the citizens. Or maybe the cortege didn’t take precautions, trusting the drowsy lions, famed for being fed enormous amounts of food by Cosimo I de’ Medici as part of his entertainment for selected guests.
The story of the lions of Florence is both ironic and telling. They reinforce the notion that Florence descends from Rome and the exploits of the Empire. In canto XIII of Inferno, for example, Dante intimates that the first patron of Florence was the god Mars. Only later was the pagan and Roman idol replaced by the Christian patron Saint John the Baptist. Dante informs us that the statue of Mars that stood where Ponte Vecchio now stands was tossed into the Arno. Mars was enraged by the sacrilegious act and placed a curse on Florence, which, since then, has been divided and rarely at peace.
The Colosseum-like entertainments that took place in Piazza della Signoria –Hibbert refers to them as circus-like performances – prove that Renaissance Florence was still nodding at Rome. It’s disquieting and astonishing to think of lions roaming Piazza della Signoria, encouraged to chase and devour stray dogs. The fact that the lions rarely succeeded in getting the dogs, as Hibbert confides, reassures our contemporary sensibility. It perhaps brought a slight smile to Cosimo I’s lips, convincing him that he might have spoiled his wild beasts too much. In Piazza della Signoria today, there is only one lion, not too far from Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes, smallish in size and resting its paw protectively on a shield with a lily.
Piazza della Signoria can stage parody, tragedy, comedy, vaudeville, drama, love, and death. Death is the favourite manner of representation in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, adapted for the cinema by Merchant-Ivory in 1985. The leading character, Lucy Honeychurch, witnesses the stabbing of a man in the Square. It happens at the beginning of the novel and in the first scenes of the film adaptation. Cinematically speaking, the scene is arresting. The young Lucy, played by Helena Bonham Carter, arrives in Piazza della Signoria in an immaculate white dress. Her enchanted expression is broken by a noisy commotion as a group of people gathers around two fighting men in dark and humble clothes. One of them collapses to the ground after being stabbed. Lucy faints. The high camera angle offers a panoramic view of the piazza in the splendour of a bright summer morning. It slowly closes in on the fight and the stabbing, creating at one and the same time closeness and distance between the viewers and the action. From an ethnographic point of view the distinction between Lucy in her white dress and naïve expression, and the violence of the Florentine crowd in their dark clothes is revealing. The unperturbed statues supervise it all, scanning the scene and relaying the same disdainful look to Lucy’s naivety and the sudden rage of the locals.
This choreographed juxtaposition of visitors, locals and art, has become iconic. Visitors prefer a Florence without locals, locals a Florence without visitors, and art does well without them all. This is the greatness of art, its stubborn selfishness and egotism. It’s art’s ability to change people without being changed. The David won’t turn his head the other way, not even to watch a stabbing or a tourist fainting.
Florence is said to be “sinister”. This is the Florence of narrow and dark alleys, and the murky and muddy Arno. In Florence, A Delicate Case, David Leavitt cites Ronald Firbank, who called Florence “a rather sinister city”, and Countess Yvorra in Firbank’s The Flower Beneath the Foot, who went to Rome to regain serenity after a sojourn in Florence. Threat and treachery are key in Daphne Du Maurier My Cousin Rachel, a tale of poisoning and devilry with two chapters on Florence. This is because the mysterious Rachel is half Italian and lives in a villa near the city. Or rather, she lived in Florence before going back to England with the purpose to seduce, rob, and finally dispose of a young and naïve English bachelor. The text juxtaposes the simple and honest life of the English countryside to the corruption of Florence, and describes the Florentines as vampires and animals prowling the streets: “The men and women who thronged the piazzas and the narrow streets strolled with another purpose, as if all day they had lain hidden, sleeping, in their silent houses, and now came out like cats to prowl the town.” The protagonist is a “stranger”, as Du Maurier calls him, in the city of “cold beauty and spilt blood”.
The last image of Florence in My Cousin Rachel is of a dog carcass floating along the Arno with its four legs in the air: “…borne upon the current, stiff and slowly turning, with its four legs in the air, came the body of a dog. It passed under the bridge and went its way.”
*****
Leavitt notes that in 1873, Henry James referred to Piazza della Signoria as the “immemorial centre” of “the compact and belted mass” which, to his mind, was the city of Florence. What did he mean by “immemorial?” To me, Piazza della Signoria is, figuratively speaking, the memory of Florence. The art in the square pleases the eye, but also reminds of Florence’s past and what the city stands for. Michelangelo’s David, Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus, Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes, Giambologna’s The Rape of the Sabine, Cellini’s Perseus, Ammannati’s The Fountain of Neptune, Giambologna’s Equestrian Statue of Cosimo I de’ Medici, represent treasured civic traits. David stands for resilience and courage, Hercules for strength, Judith for liberty, The Rape of the Sabine for the quest for beauty, Perseus for justice, The Fountain of Neptune for mythology, The Equestrian Statue of Cosimo I for magnanimity and greatness. Nothing can be forgotten in Piazza della Signoria. Possibly that’s what James meant by the loss of memory. It’s the disappearance, even for a moment, of that individual temporal compass that enables to place things in time and order them chronologically. The “immemorial” is the temporal void of the individual and the celebration of history and the collective.
Unsurprisingly, Piazza della Signoria was identified as the ideal space for the interaction between Renaissance and contemporary art. In 2015 a three-meter-high gilded sculpture by American artist Jeff Koons (former companion of the porn star and once upon a time Italian MP Cicciolina), Pluto and Proserpina, was placed on the platform outside Palazzo Vecchio, also known as the arengario, next to Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes and not too far away from Michelangelo’s David and Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus. In 2016, an eight-meter-long bronze statue by Belgian artist Jan Fabre (famous for his crumpled look reminiscent of an incorruptible and psychologically damaged detective), Searching for Utopia, was put next to the Equestrian Statue of Cosimo I de’ Medici. In 2017, a twelve-meter-high aluminium structure by Swiss artist Urs Fisher (famous for making wax sculptures destined to melt away over the duration of an exhibition), Big Clay, was installed opposite the Loggia dei Lanzi, facing Giambologna’s The Rape of the Sabine.
The increasing size of the works indicated a growing confidence on the part of the commissioners, the Commune of Florence. It meant that surprise and elation, regardless of the original intention, was growing, possibly even out of control. The alien structures were taking more space, imposing their presence, and attracting – or perhaps distracting – viewers. They arrived as guests of honour and stayed several months, with the Piazza changing its look accordingly.
The visual experience must be translated into language. I’m aided by a short story, “La traduzione” (“The translation”), by Italian author Antonio Tabucchi. I met Tabucchi in the early 1990s at a cafe in Brunswick Street, Melbourne, called Da Mario’s. It resembled an American Diner, with laminated and steel tables and chairs, and a large display cabinet with convex glass. It had Bakelite floor lamps and black and white tiles floor. On the wall next to the display cabinet there were several multi-coloured bottles of alcohol on a shelf. The waiters dressed in impeccable black trousers, white shirts and black waistcoat, and spoke only Italian. I ranked their coffee as one of the best in Melbourne. Tabucchi arrived, sat down, ordered coffee, and predisposed himself to listening. A connection was struck when forty-five minutes into the discussion he asked for a glass of Ramazzotti. Politely, the waiter explained that the spirit was not for sale. Tabucchi pointed to the shelf next to the display cabinet and the brownish bottle of Ramazzotti. “Ah, yes,” the waiter said, “that’s for display only.” Tabucchi retorted that the idea of “pure display” is an anomaly. An absurdity, in fact, since what is shown is inevitably available. He said this while he played with his exotic packet of Gitanes cigarettes, which he had set on the table, on display, as a matter of fact. The waiter had never seen such packet. Tabucchi took a second one from his bag and placed it on the table. He said that an exchange of cigarettes for a glass or two of Ramazzotti was a possibility. We drank several glasses of Ramazzotti because of the cigarettes rather than the explanation about the anomaly of display. Yet I believe that Tabucchi’s mastery of translation, for which he was famous, played a significant part in his successful interaction with the waiter at Da Mario’s. He skilfully translated a desire into satisfaction by interpreting the meaning of display tangibly by way of physical matter.
In “La Traduzione”, a text two pages long, one of two characters describes a painting by Van Gogh, The Bridge at Langloise, to a blind friend. Like all translations this one, too, is personal, partial, biased, and incomplete. The translating character is not an art historian or a Van Gogh expert or scholar. As a result, the painting is not contextualised within Van Gogh’s opus, discussed chronologically and comparatively to other painters, or analysed according to the materials used or the strokes employed. The translation is improvised following the mood of the speaker, his or her temperament and the memory left by sensitive experiences, especially that of colours. So it happens that in the mind of the translator the strong yellow of Van Gogh’s painting relates to summer’s relentless heat and glare. Hence the umbrella protecting one of the figures in the painting, the shape and texture of the vegetation and plants, and the oppressive sense of suffocation.
It’s assumed that the translator looks at the image from a distance. In the case of this Van Gogh, he or she stands on the riverbank, slightly to the right of the picture. Wherever the position, the translator cannot see more than what Van Gogh painted. I, however, can choose to look at Piazza della Signoria and the contemporary artworks from whichever angle I choose. I can also mix temporalities. I could look as if it were the late ‘70s or indeed now, or between 2015 and 2018, the years of the cultural events. After all, Piazza della Signoria hasn’t changed apart from the arrival of contemporary art, but because of this I can visualise the work of Koons, Fabre and Fisher any time I choose. That’s the beauty of translating a square that was considered “immemorial” (James), unchanging and fixed in time. What James meant by “immemorial”, I think, is the crystallised image that doesn’t diverge from itself. It’s infinitude based on permanence. But in my mind the “immemorial” is synonymous of mutation and change. The threshold of time.
I’m at the barred window of the kitchen of the restaurant on the corner of Piazza della Signoria and Via delle Farine I worked in the late 1970s. Halfway between a prison window and a vent, square-shaped, measuring about 50 centimetres by 50 centimetres, it provides a good view of Piazza della Signoria. The iconic statues are arranged in receding order with the Equestrian Statue of Cosimo I close, the Fountain of Neptune further, and further still the Loggia dei Lanzi, Judith, David, and Hercules.
I arrived at the restaurant where I worked as a kitchen porter in the early evening. I changed into my work clothes, a mismatched assemblage of old and tatty trousers and a t-shirt protected by a large waterproof apron. The kitchen was a medium-sized room separated from the rest of the restaurant by a revolving wooden panel with a flat counter where we placed the orders. We had two hours to prepare the vegetables, the sauces, the cuts of meat, to clean the floor, and eat before diners arrived. After changing, I was sent to the large cellar to peel potatoes for the evening. I liked the musty and dark room. It was like a cave, with nooks and corners hardly lit by the single globe. It smelt of moss, mildew, vegetables, old wood, and stones. I sat on a short stool, the sack of potatoes on the floor to my left and the basket for the peeled potatoes on my right. I inhaled the odour of the peeled potatoes, watched the peel fall into the wastebasket, and held the shaved potato in my right hand.
Those moments in the cellar with peeled vegetables are associated with the feeling of satisfaction that came from having secured a job for a few months, enough to save the money I needed to reunite with my new love in France. I did it for her: the viler the occupation, the better the celebration of her beauty and my devotion. We met under the gallery of the Uffizi. With a friend, she looked at the items on display in one of those movable shops on wheels so popular in Italy. They are still in operation in the loggia of the Porcellino or in the market in San Lorenzo. She fiddled with a wallet, a keyring, or was it a leather case? I was in a relationship, but two years of passionate entanglement were denting my immunity to the presence of infinite possibilities. She was like sheer luminosity. I didn’t consider that the life I’d given myself to with some determination in the previous two years was fading away. I moved, touched the item she inspected, and remarked that the leather was good. She looked at me quizzically, her chestnut eyes on me, and inquired if I was an expert. “No,” I replied, “but it looks good in your hand”. She smiled and said something in French to her friend. Her Italian was fluent. She studied Italian literature at the university in Toulouse, the theatre works of Pirandello to be specific. I told her that I was to enrol in a literature degree at the University of Florence, and that Pirandello was one of my favourite authors. I found his ideas exceptionally innovative, I said, Six Characters in Search of an Author had made a great impression on me. “Imagine”, I said with enthusiasm, “a play that takes form on the stage as we watch. It’s pure genius”, I concluded. She looked puzzled. Did she admire me, deride me, weigh me up? I never understood the way she made up her mind. But she had. She invited me for a drink. Months later I went to France. She came to the railway station and welcomed me with these words: “Finally, here you’re, my Florentine sun”.
The staircase in the cellar, steep and narrow, made of solid stone, led to a small oval wooden door which, once opened, plunged me back into the world of action, its noise removing even her image from my mind. The stairs was the bridge between two worlds. One of the most famous proverbs of the Florentine vernacular compares stairs and ladders to life. It states that life is inevitably made of those who climb up and those who go down (c’è chi sale e c’è chi scende). Back then I was the age of those who climbed up. And even now, when I imagine the stairs, I see them from below.
As I opened the door to the cellar, the smell of cooking enveloped me. It was the simple fare that was served before the arrival of the customers. Usually, it was pasta with tomato sauce and slices of roast beef or pork with roasted potatoes. The roasted potatoes were crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, slightly covered with a film of extra virgin olive oil and garnished by a generous sprinkling of rosemary. I looked forward to a portion of roast potatoes, much to the delight of the chef Alfredo. He smiled and offered me a second one. Alfredo was in his fifties and considered all the others in the kitchen his family. I counted, given my age, as one of his children. Everybody in the restaurant thought of me as an oddity, somebody who would soon disappear from their life. But I was a committed oddity, I took my job seriously and excelled at washing plates and pots, peeling potatoes, and being altogether helpful and cheerful. They were stunned and amused by my youth and sincerity, and they knew I was in love. They could count on me.
At the window in the kitchen, I saw the giant shape of the golden turtle by Jan Fabre. The sun was still warm, and the rays were refracted by the smooth surface of the sculpture. They created small pools of intense gold, reflecting the light upwards. Fabre defined the turtle as a sentinel guarding against the negative forces of time. Art as a shield, then, and the artist, the small rider on the back, was Fabre’s self-portrait as the knight of light. A romantic metaphor, yet appropriate for the time I chose to imagine this scene.
The newcomer joined forces with the other sculpted guards scattered in the Piazza. Neptune, David and Hercules scanned the South, Perseus the North and Judith, Cosimo I and Fabre’s turtle the West. Nobody, I thought as I watched from the window in the kitchen, kept an eye out on the East. Unless Café Rivoire, its hot chocolate, and patrons, is also part of the army of light.
I saw that the statues exchanged information by way of a coded language to be deciphered only by the addressee. They took in the newcomer without difficulty. Searching for Utopia sent and received signals from Perseus and The Rape of the Sabine. It redirected them towards the David, the Neptune, Judith, and Hercules, with the poor Cacus at his feet. Cosimo I rode behind the turtle, in its wake, solemn and stately. He didn’t send signals but imparted orders. He positioned the troops, preparing them for battle. He looked assured and confident, certainly not hasty. He took his time and scanned the battlefield before he committed to a strategy.
Cosimo I delighted in this enormous turtle. He liked turtles. Festina lente was his favourite motto, “advance with caution”. The turtle, to him, represented the slow but stubborn and resilient march forward, and the reassurance that wherever he went, his home would be on his back. In fairness, I find the association between Cosimo I and turtles unpalatable. He had the sculpture of his favourite buffoon, Nano Morgante, astride a turtle placed in the Boboli Gardens. It’s towards the exit of the prescribed garden walk. A smallish, very different affair from the grandness of Fabre’s Searching for Utopia. The deformities of others were a source of delight to the Grand Duke, considering that Nano Morgante was also the subject of a famous painting commissioned in 1552 by Bronzino, now in the Galleria Palatina in Palazzo Pitti.
I don’t like Cosimo I, and back in my kitchen, I wished the army of light to be under a different command. I turned and peered through the bars of the window, but didn’t settle on anybody else. The David didn’t convince me as a leader. He was much into himself, alone and proud, with a single purpose in mind. He passed messages but did it begrudgingly. The others suppressed their disappointment, not to offend him. Only Searching for Utopia was intimidated and taken aback by David’s response. It was surprising that a hero could be selfish.
As I observed the army of knights, I wished I could describe their smell. I touched the surface of Fabre’s Searching for Utopia. Its shiny surface was warm from the late afternoon sun. My fingers moved across the surface in leaps and bounds, sticking at times on the surface of the bronze. It smelled of air and of something else like a sound that reverberates with other smells. They were mostly made of the perfumes and transpirations of the people around me, the gelato and the fruit sorbets that are sold near and far in Florence. I smelled a microcosm of Florence and its indefinite qualities, from the meat ragù to the chocolate flavoured ice cream to the blackberry sorbet to that unnameable essence of tanned skin and fresh shampoo in the hair of my French girlfriend. I saw her one last time at the railways station as I boarded the train back to Italy. She was sad. She didn’t want me to go. But her male friend was attentive, sensitive as he tried to soothe her adolescent grief. She, too, disappeared into the world.
David’s surface was textured and porous, so different from Searching for Utopia. I smelled the sun, the rain, the fog that penetrated his skin over the centuries. They created an inexhaustible pool of odours that rose to David’s surface and suggested droplets of rain, shafts of light, puffs of fog, flakes of snow. I smelled the millions of hands that touched his skin and left a semblance of their presence on his ankles and feet. If time and memory can be smelled, David would contain a fraction of their scent.
The kitchen behind me approached a frantic animation, the prelude to the beginning of the evening. Five people took their positions and moved quickly but with precision. The space was minimal and compressed, and each movement had purpose and balance. I observed the bodies speak of a long-learned habituation to one another, each gesture responded to an organised plan that although unwritten and unspoken was imprinted in the muscles and minds. Each movement produced an effect. The large stove came to life, the gas rings ignited, and the large pots and pans gave out clouds of steam and odours of fried vegetables; the chopping board tapped regularly like a muscular clock, one made of veins and nerves; the water rushed in the marble sink, splashing the raw vegetables lined up on the nearby crenelated surface, the green spinach and red onions, their shining purple matching the pastel green of celery and the opaque orange of carrots.
The voices were soft, measured, restrained and spoke of families, friends, their faith in the local soccer team, fiancés, the texture of the sauce and the quality of the food. The common space of speech enabled the sharp and steady movements of the bodies. I positioned myself in front of the large dishwasher and turned it on. While I ventured my opinion on the benefit of cycling versus catching public transport, I heard it buzzing to life
The kitchen spins out into the thick world of the jumbled scents of different dishes, the calling of orders, the clicking and scraping of the returning dishes, and the large puffs of vapour lashing out from the dishwasher at the end of each cycle. I still don’t understand how such foul odours can be generated by a welcoming and homely space, small and contained, a microcosm of care and skills, a kind of blissful hell in which apparent chaos, disorder and dissonance are transformed into grace, amiability and harmony.
*****
I walk to Piazza della Signoria from Chiasso dei Baroncelli, a narrow alley flanked by high buildings. A tall person could touch the opposite walls of Chiasso dei Baroncelli with outstretched arms; touch and support the buildings that gravitate toward each other. Good shelter from the sun in summer and from the rain in autumn. The arrival from Chiasso dei Baroncelli revaluates the necessity of open spaces. The explosion of light rushes in like a broken sound barrier. It’s the assault of a myriad of colours, they enter and contract the pupils into tiny dots too small to order things into shapes and forms. I need time to regain my balance. It’s better if I stay still, wait, and turn around to take stock. To the right of the David, on the arengario, I see the three-meter-high structure Pluto and Proserpina by Jeff Koons.
It’s gold-plated and shining like a large chocolate bar wrapped in foil waiting to be peeled. Unlike Searching for Utopia, Pluto and Proserpina doesn’t protect or guard, its task is to provide entertainment for the other statues in the piazza. It’s chatty and irreverent, making jokes the Neptune is receptive to. But its chosen interlocutor is The Rape of the Sabine. The problem is that despite Pluto and Proserpina’s attempt to project the voice and raise the volume, The Rape of the Sabine remains unmoved and oblivious. Its serpentine rhythm of treachery and abduction, it’s all it’s interested in. These two sculptures are similar and yet different. While their movement is analogous, the sound of Pluto and Proserpina is high-pitched and that of The Rape of the Sabine a deep-bass. No wonder they cannot hear each other. There is the potential for a conversation, but what would they talk about should they be able to communicate remains a mystery.
The ability to anthropomorphise the inorganic and fill stones with feelings, emotions, and a sense of aesthetics is marvellous and pitiful. That’s possibly what art is about, create a storyline that provides meaning to what and who we are. At the time of Cellini’s unveiling of Perseus and Medusa in 1554, several commentators imagined an interaction amongst the various statues in the square. As John Sherman tells this story in Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance, the poets who succeeded in praising it compared the other statues in the piazza, such as Michelangelo’s David and Bandinelli’s Hercules, to people being turned into stone as they gaped at superior beauty. The beauty of Cellini’s work, the poets of the time wrote, is dangerously perilous to those who approach it with feigned calm and a hint of arrogance.
I follow this advice when I’m near the enormous twelve-meter-high aluminium structure Big Clay by Swiss artist Urs Fisher. Its four sections are amorphous and shapeless. The third section ends up in a flourish, like an elegant plume of smoke on top of a formless hip. The surface is rippled and dented, criss-crossed by tiny lines. I follow Big Clay to the top, to the sky and the silhouette of the roof of the Loggia dei Lanzi and the battlements of Palazzo Vecchio. It makes sense if I imagine it slowly taking off and turning into a giant cloud that hovers above the square. So big and yet so light, high above in the sky it throws a large shadow on the ground, exactly where I am, in the shape of a question mark. Communication doesn’t happen through language or action only. It takes place through shapes and maybe even through the weather. It can be as clear or as ambiguous as a question mark.
I leave Piazza della Signoria and take Via Dei Gondi in the direction of Piazza Santa Croce. When I picture the square in my mind, I see an assembly of statues tuning their instruments before a concert. I expect a tremendous symphony.
