Under Florence, “Sunken Rome”
I have been living and studying in Florence on and off for the past four years, negotiating travel (and teaching) during the pandemic. When I traveled to Rome in August 2020, holding a file of documents to show I wasn’t a tourist, I found the trip intimidating, but thrilled to see the world still out there. Now, with vaccines and boosters, travel feels like an opportunity to connect, hear art and history whisper to you live while experiencing places in person, or as the Italians say, “in Presenza.”
In tune with art and history, McCarthy wrote in his Stones of Florence that “beneath the surface of Florence lies sunken Rome,” so if we look beyond Renaissance recreations of antiquity and back to the city’s classic origins, I went with I moved to San Miniato al Monte, a medieval cathedral built in the 11th century on the highest point of a hill overlooking the city. The views of Florence and the Duomo are more splendid than those of nearby Piazzale Michelangelo, and in the crypt, McCarthy promised, there was a “petrified forest” of assorted Roman columns and capitals incorporated into a basilica.
I let her take me to the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, to admire the facade, noting the scientific instruments included on either side, a scorpion and an astrolabe, and also another very important fresco by Masaccio. In the arrangement of figures and the cross in this fresco of the Trinity, McCarthy finds “the great orderly scheme of nature embodied in one design,” comparing the fresco with a proof in philosophy or mathematics: “An equilateral triangle inscribed within an arched figure inscribed within a rectangle; and the centre, the apex of the triangle, And the top of everything is the head of God the Father.”
McCarthy’s pre-Florence project was Memories of a Catholic Girl, betting her claim as a commentator on Catholicism, and discussing how religion offered mystery and beauty during a complex and often cruel childhood. I wish she could climb up the scaffolding at Brancacci Chapel, as I was particularly impressed by “Eve’s curvy body and wide mouth as she drove, howling, out of the garden,” which made McCarthy think of “all the horror and mouth mutilation in the human condition.”
Masaccio again makes you think about the relationships between Renaissance art and sculpture; His great innovations included the heavy sculptural presence of the bodies he painted, as well as the first use of the vanishing point perspective; Literary historian Stephen Greenblatt wrote in his book The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve: “Masaccio’s unforgettable characters … rely on their overwhelming sense of personification, an illusion of realism evoked by perspective and heightened by shadows …”
McCarthy found redemption in the similarly realistic detail that Masaccio painted in other characters in the church, the afflicted were healed, or the old woman received alms, “a universal truth showing the full extension of the world, both just and foul.”
