Books: The Fifth Element

THE STONES OF FLORENCE (130 pp.)—Mary McCarthy—Harcourf, Brace ($15).

The opening words of this book—”How can you stand it?”—bear witness to Author McCarthy’s candor. She itemizes the disadvantages in which Florence is rich: the noise, the occasional rudeness, the oppressive summer heat, the lack of nighttime pleasures, the daytime drabness. It is true, she says, that because of the frightening traffic, “Many of the famous monuments have become, quite literally, invisible, for lack of a spot from which they can be viewed with safety.” And it is maddeningly true that “As for the museums, they are the worst-organized, the worst-hung in Italy—a scandal, as the Florentines say themselves, with a certain civic pride.” With these strictures out of the way, there begins a portrait of former glories and calamities that combines a meticulous observation of the past and the art that has outlived it with some of the year’s most readable prose.

Taste & Judgment. In Venice Observed, Author McCarthy dealt with a flashier subject, and it was the more fascinating book, but Florence supplies a lack that most visitors feel: it is an exercise in taste and judgment.

The McCarthy Florence bears almost no resemblance to that of the Brownings, of “Old maids of both sexes, retired librarians, governesses, ladies with reduced incomes,” who, in the Victorian era, gave it the tone of a genteel rest home. This is the city whose people “invented the Renaissance, which is the same as saying that they invented the modern world—not, of course, an unmixed good.” Its great artists—Michelangelo, Leonardo, Cellini—wrought wonders in a time of bloody political and family feuds such as history has seldom seen. Murders were committed at the very altar; homosexuality was a passion shared by artists and businessmen alike; the sins that Savonarola thundered against were as much a part of the city as its great sculpture and painting.

Turmoil & Toughness. But alongside the evil there was an artistic turmoil and a civic toughness that prompted Pope Boniface VIII to call the Florentines “the fifth element.” The McCarthy heroes are, of course, the artists. Her descriptions are sharp and unorthodox (of Il Rosso’s Moses Defending the Daughters of Jethro: “The half-carnival atmosphere of an insane asylum or of a brothel during a police raid”). Together with the book’s superb photographs, such comments have the effect of giving entirely fresh life to tourist memories. The Stones of Florence is in the end a solid tribute to the city and its people past and present, an estimate achieved without the least sentimentality, and free of solemn artiness. Some readers may say that this is not the Florence they saw, but Author McCarthy saw it thus, and her city is in the book.