Under Florence, ‘a sunken Rome’
I’ve lived and taught in Florence for the past four years, negotiated travel (and taught) during the pandemic. When I flew to Rome in August 2020, with a folder of documents in my hand to show that I was not a tourist, I found the flight scary, but I was overjoyed to see that the world was still there. Now, with vaccines and boosters, traveling feels like an opportunity to connect, to hear art and history whispered directly to you as you experience places in person, or as Italians say, “in presenza”.
Attuned to art and history, McCarthy writes in “The Stones of Florence” that “underneath the surface of Florence lies a sunken Rome”, so to look beyond the Renaissance recreations of antiquity and go back to the classical origins of the city, I went with her to San Miniato al Monte, a medieval basilica built in the 11th century on the highest point of a hill overlooking the city. The view over Florence and the Duomo is even more beautiful than that from nearby Piazzale Michelangelo, and in the church’s crypt, as McCarthy promised, was a “petrified forest” of the various Roman columns and capitals incorporated into the church.
I had her take me to the church of Santa Maria Novella, to admire the facade, pointing out the scientific instruments embedded on either side, a gnomon and an astrolabe, and also another very important Masaccio fresco. In the arrangement of the figures and the cross in this fresco of the Trinity, McCarthy finds “the great ordered plan of nature embraced in a single design”, comparing the fresco to a proof in philosophy or mathematics: ” an equilateral triangle is inscribed in a curved figure inscribed in a rectangle; and the center, the apex of the triangle, and the apex of all things is the head of God the Father.”
McCarthy’s project before Florence was the penetrating Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, in which she stakes her claim as a commentator on Catholicism and discusses how religion had offered mystery and beauty during a complex and often harsh childhood. I wish she could climb the scaffolding in the Brancacci Chapel, where she was especially moved by “the stubby body and gaping mouth of Eve as she is driven from the garden in tears”, which made McCarthy reflect on “all the horror and disfigurement of the human condition.”
Masaccio makes you think again about the relationships between Renaissance art and sculpture; his great innovations were the heavy sculptural presence of the bodies he painted, as well as the first use of vanishing point perspective; literary historian Stephen Greenblatt in “The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve,” writes, “Masaccio’s unforgettable figures depend… on their overwhelming sense of embodiment, an illusion of actuality evoked by perspective and enhanced by the shadows… “
McCarthy found redemption in the equally realistic details Masaccio painted in other figures in the chapel, the cripple being healed, or the old woman receiving alms, a “universal truth showing the whole expanse of the world, both fair and filthy.”