Sunday 23 July 2006
7:35am
For the first time, I find myself desperately loving the idea of living here – for a while. I don’t know if the stuff I’ve read about the Florentine struggle for identity beyond that of the past is correct, but I know that there’s a life of the mind, of culture, here that isn’t just study, and isn’t the pretense of taking your spot with the giants of the past. That’s the real downside to our commercialization of art: to make the Greats different than they might have been in other ways. It’s the same thing that I’ve always said about music: just how recorded music makes us stop making music of our own. Families don’t make music so much anymore, and that used to be a commonplace, just a couple of generations ago.
There would be something about living here, in the light: you see so many more balconies and rooftop patios, chairs, sofas, beds…. People who enjoy living life on the rooftops with this view, this pulse or life of the city all open to them. The city itself is beautiful on a scale that I’ve never seen, maybe other than Rome. I suppose Venice had a different beauty, but there’s something that pulls me more to this.
Now, back in Milwaukee, months later, that moment still grabs my memory. It may seem nothing more than a daydream, but in that instant I made something of a resolution. Whether it's my first sabbatical as a professor somewhere, or even a summer break, I decided that I would come back to this city, to make up for the catastrophic error in judgment I made during my undergraduate by not doing any study abroad, that I would rent an apartment here for the summer and take in the city at its own pace. At least, at something approximating a native pace for someone who would still be some kind of tourist in disguise. That could be a lonely decision or resolution, but it's something I'd like to make happen.
I came downstairs after a time and rested a bit more and then, when Erik was up, I amused myself by shooting a little video of our room until we got ready for the day and rallied with a late breakfast in the airy dining room in the heart of our hotel, the Hotel Torre Guelfa. There we sat in the morning light coming through the broad windows that overlooked the courtyard of the old palazzo. We exchanged brief words of planning our day as we drank our coffee or juice, and shortly we left, saying a few brief words of farewell to Miss Sarojini, who I found had come in after us and was quietly eating by herself behind me.
So that was the surface reaction, or the reaction to the physical tomb itself. Beyond that, I don't know what to say I felt or thought, if I was feeling or thinking anything in particular. Mostly, I guess I was just actively being aware of what this man's life and work had come to mean to me over the years, and even across the centuries that separate his artistic environment from my own, although his is one of the many roots or foundations of mine. When Michael McGlinn and I were just getting to know one another, maybe actually in the process of the initial recording session for Life and Other Impossibilities, we discovered this mutual love for Michelangelo's work and talked about it at some point. In Christianity, the doctrines of Creation – that God is responsible for and the origin of everything in the universe, particularly humanity, and endows it all with His own fundamental Goodness – and of the Incarnation – that God became human in Jesus of Nazareth – both end up granting the most outrageously positive, even exalted, vision of humanity: greater, I think, than any other system of thought in human history. In Michelangelo's work there is an expression of this theology, especially in his earlier years (works like the Last Judgment I'm not so sure of in this regard), that gives the viewer a chance to step somewhat into this God's-eye vision of the glory of humanity. Or perhaps it's to recognize in humanity that vision of God's Glory that we call the imago Dei: the "image of God" in the human race. Michelangelo has thus been a key theologian for my theological anthropology since my undergraduate, well before I realized I had a "theological anthropology."
So, we continued up the via del Servio toward the statue of a mounted figure framed against the arched columns behind it, where it emptied suddenly out into a piazza in front of the university, I think: a large rectangular space partially littered with staging and dumpsters from some event that looked to have already happened. We veered off to the left and got a bit confused – my fault – about which building was the Accademia, walking all around the piazza in front of San Marco's church before we realized we'd walked right past it as we'd entered the square. We figured out where to enter, finally, and got in on time.
Was I ever wrong on that one.
We ended up walking around it, studying it from different angles, talking quietly about it, for at least an hour. Again, like what I wrote above about the effect of suddenly coming upon the Duomo, there was in the David a sense of scale that by itself could surprise and command respect. I hadn't really noticed this with the replica of the statue that stands in its original space in the Piazza Signoria in front of the Palazzo Vecchio when we stood there yesterday, but I wasn't really paying attention to it. Perhaps here, too, in this space designed for it and dominated entirely by it, the effect is calculated to achieve that overwhelming awareness. I knew it was a particularly large piece of marble, having read about it as I said before, but it was much larger than I'd imagined, and the picture here of Erik standing in front of it might convey that sense of scale better than any description I could attempt.
There were details I'd never quite seen before, like the way the sling curves all the way around his body and how the right hand is already armed with a rock in the cup of the weapon. We talked about the hands and the head, the way that they're slightly out of proportion and larger than the rest of the figure, and the understood symbolism of this: that it is these things the head and the hands, the mind and the creativity powers of humanity that are being emphasized in Michelangelo's giddy Renaissance, where for the first time the achievements of the Romans are being excelled and people begin to look toward the future rather than the past for humanity's potential. We checked on the proportions, just to make sure that we understood this correctly, and I had Erik surreptitiously stand briefly in similar pose so that I could compare their right hands.
Precisely. The outrage that David felt at the spiritual and national insult of Goliath – and the resolution to do something about it – was captured in that twist of the head and the glare that almost seemed focused on us, now.
David said to the Philistine, "You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the LORD Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the LORD will hand you over to me, and I'll strike you down and cut off your head. Today I will give the carcasses of the Philistine army to the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth, and the whole world will know that there is a God in Israel. All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the LORD saves; for the battle is the LORD's, and he will give all of you into our hands." (1 Samuel 17: 45-47)So, beyond the historical David himself, whether the work represents the human spirit, or perhaps the Florentine spirit more specifically, there was now a sense of the danger as well as achievement to the human being, too: what we do has consequences; it matters.
Go to: Florence: Day Two, Part Two