Sample Pages: Florence and the Idea of Jerusalem

Florence and the Idea of Jerusalem

edited by timothy verdon and giovanni serafini

table of contents

Basilica of San Miniato al Monte, Florence.

foreword

Medieval and Renaissance Florence identified with the Jerusalem described in the Bible, and the biblical “idea” of the Holy City was for many centuries a basic component of Florentine cultural as well as religious selfawareness. The present volume, a collection of essays by authors from various humanistic fields, illustrates aspects of that ideal identity.

The volume makes available the papers read at a conference organized by the Archdiocese of Florence in 2018, the year that marked the millennial celebration of San Miniato al Monte, the Romanesque monastic church on a hill overlooking Florence. Sheathed in white marble, and with a mosaic of Christ on its façade, San Miniato is an icon of the “City on the Mount” of Judeo-Christian tradition: the Urbs beata Ierusalem

The proposal to invite scholars to reflect on this theme was made by Professor Alexei Lidov of Moscow State University and the Russian Academy of the Arts, who played a part in the event’s early organizational stage. One of the most important “Jerusalem moments” in Florentine history was the Ecumenical Council of 1439–1441, which saw the large-scale participation of Russian prelates, for most of whom the sojourn in Florence constituted a first experience of the West.

The essays published here have been arranged in chronological and thematic order. After my introduction and a florilegium of Jerusalem-related Bible texts with brief commentary, a paper by Andrew Frisardi explores the importance of Jerusalem in Dante; an essay by Franco Cardini narrates the experience of fourteenth-century Florentine pilgrims to the Holy Land; and Shulamit Furstenberg-Levi looks at the Temple of Solomon in the writings of Jewish humanists in Renaissance Florence. Alexei Lidov’s essay on the source of the Florentine Easter pyrotechnic display, the “scoppio del carro,” in the Jerusalem paschal-fire rite, offers new understanding of the design of the medieval

Baptistery of Florence, and Gerhard Wolf’s discursive “walk” through the city brings to light a series of Jerusalem associations today often forgotten.

A second group of papers treats the principal “Jerusalem event” in Florentine history: the 1439 Ecumenical Council, and its immediate and longer-term effects. Davide Baldi gives an overview of the available documentary information on the council; Marcello Garzaniti reflects on the reactions of Russian participants and on later Russian attitudes; Alessandro Diana situates the Jerusalem identity in relation to the new Florentine vision of Athens as a parallel source of cultural energy; and Luca Calzetta reconstructs the evidence in support of the seventeenth-century belief that Grand Duke Ferdinando I wanted to physically transfer the Holy Sepulchre from Jerusalem to Florence, locating it beneath the dome of the Medici mausoleum at San Lorenzo, in the so-called Cappella dei Principi.

A third section of our book is dedicated to the arts, opening with Ben Quash’s parallel study of the “new Jerusalem” realized in medieval England. Annette Hoffmann analyses aspects of the fourteenth-century fresco cycle in Santa Croce depicting the Legend of the Holy Cross; and Lorenzo Gnocchi reads one of the most influential structures of the early Florentine Renaissance, Brunelleschi’s Old Sacristy at San Lorenzo, in relation to the idea of “Heavenly Jerusalem.” Diane ApostolosCappadona looks at the Madonna and Child theme in Florentine art as a conduit between the earthly city and that in the heavens, and Maria Lidova situates a fragment of eighthcentury Roman mosaic venerated in Florence in the context of Byzantine evocations of the Holy City. A paper by Stefano Garzonio considers the image of Florence in Russian nineteenthand early twentieth-century poetry.

The book’s final academic section brings the Florence-Jerusalem relationship back to the

monastic context that was its point of departure. Martin Shannon reflects on monastic life and the idea of Jerusalem, and Giulio Conticelli on the saintly Mayor of Florence, Giorgio La Pira, a Dominican Tertiary and resident of the Friary of San Marco whose politics explicitly invoked the idea of Jerusalem. The last paper is by Father Bernardo Francesco Maria Gianni, Abbot of San Miniato al Monte, who sums up the perduring Jerusalem image that his monastic church on the mountain continues to project.

A second conclusion is then offered from the point of view of contemporary art, with images and texts from an exhibition staged at three venues in Florence in 2018 to accompany the conference. The works in the exhibition, by American artist Susan Kanaga and Florentine artist Filippo Rossi, suggest the still powerful creative impact of the idea of Jerusalem in today’s world.

The papers that, in the conference, were delivered in Italian have been translated into English for the present volume by Timothy Verdon.

This volume, like the 2018 conference and exhibition, has been made possible thanks to a generous grant from the USbased Fieldstead and Company Foundation, to which the Archdiocese expresses sincere gratitude. Other institutions that contributed to the 2018 event were the Chapter of Florence Cathedral, the Chapter of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, the Facoltà Teologica dell’Italia Centrale, the Mount Tabor Ecumenical Centre for Art & Spirituality (Barga, LU), the Gloriae Dei Cantores, and the Community of Jesus (Orleans, MA).

Mons. Timothy Verdon Canon, Florence Cathedral Director, Diocesan Office of Sacred Art Director, Florence Cathedral Museum

Michelangelo Buonarroti, David, 1501–1504, Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence.

Earthly City and “Coelestis urbs”. Florence and the Idea of Jerusalem

timothy verdon

Describing the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (Fig. 1), a sixteenth-century German writer, Johann Fichard, spontaneously invoked the image of the Jerusalem temple, affirming that “formam habet […] quod nobis referre videatur Salomonicum ”—“It has the form,” that is, “of Solomon’s temple,” realized in the tenth century before Christ, on the mount dominating Jerusalem.1 This allusion was not based on architectural similarities but on the general impression conveyed by the Florence duomo and its cupola, analogous in their magnificence and size to the building to which the Old Testament devotes many pages (e.g., 1 K 5,15–9,25; 1 Ch 22–29; 2 Ch 1–8). Perhaps Fichard was also referring to the spatial analogy between the Florentine complex, comprised of the basilica-plan cathedral and its centralplan baptistery, and the two churches built in Jerusalem by the emperor Constantine on the site of Christ’s sepulchre, the Basilica of the Apostles and the circular Church of the Anastasis.2

Whatever its specific sense, Fichard’s reference to Jerusalem would have seemed natural to Europeans of his day, since traditional liturgy had for centuries associated every Christian place of worship with the ancient City of David, as is clear in the hymn then (and now) used for the consecration of churches: “ Urbs Jerusalem beata, / dicta pacis visio, / quae construitur in coelis / Vivis ex lapidibus, / Angelisque coronata, / Sicut sponsa comite.”3 Composed between the sixth and seventh centuries, the hymn exalts the beauty of the city symbolized by its temple—“Plateae et muri

ejus, / ex auro purissimo”—and insists that the difficulties experienced by its human stones as they strive to live together is itself part of the plan, as the architect energetically shapes men and women to fit his construction: “Tunsionibus, pressuris / Expoliti lapides, / Suis coaptantur locis

/ Per manus artificis, / Disponuntur permansuri

/ Sacris aedificiis.” Clearly the architect is God and the city adorned by his “holy buildings” is not earthly but heavenly—“quae construitur in coelis ”: the new Jerusalem where “death will be no more, nor will there be mourning, or lamentation, or weariness” (Rv 21,1–4), and where the inhabitants are “fellow-citizens of the saints and God’s family members” (Ep 2,19)—the “city of the living God […]” with its “festive throng” (Heb 12,22).

In medieval and Renaissance Florence, as elsewhere in Europe, the passage from this idea of a future city to the real city where people lived was facilitated by the widespread presence of religious communities within the civil community: of monastic and conventual “families” whose way of life offered a model to cities often lacerated by discord (Fig. 2). It was no accident that Dominican preaching in Florence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries focused on the socio-political issues of that time, as Daniel Lesnick’s studies have suggested. 4 Richard Howard speaks of the “congruence between civic and religious purpose in an urban space which was still framed by religious faith,” noting that “preaching was more than ‘civic in spirit’” and “made a positive contribution to the ideals of the bonum commune […],”5 with the result that the fifteenth-century Dominican and Archbishop of Florence, St. Antoninus

1 Italy, 1536: see A. Schmarsow, “Johan Fichards ‘Itinerarium earum urbium et oppidorum …,” Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 14 (1891), p. 373; cited in H. Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi. The Cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore (London: Zwemmer, 1980), p. 12.

2 T. Verdon, “Il tempo, lo spazio, il sacro: il Duomo di Firenze tra memoria e prolessi,” Vivens Homo 8:2 (1997), pp. 221–234.

3 The Hymns of the Breviary and Missal, ed. by M. Britt, OSB (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1924), pp. 348–350.

4 D. R. Lesnick, Preaching in Medieval Florence. The Social World of Franciscan and Dominican Spirituality (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989).

5 P. F. Howard, Beyond the Written Word. Preaching and Theology in the Florence of Archbishop Antoninus 1427–1459 (Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, Quaderni di ‘Rinascimento’ XXVIII) (Florence: Olschki 1995), p. 198.

1 Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence.

2 Santa Maria Novella complex, Florence.

Pierozzi, could claim that “[…] doctrina ecclesiae, quae praedicatur, est tota civilis”—“The church doctrine that we preach is entirely applicable to the city.”6 This overlay of the future Jerusalem and the city in which people actually lived also found expression in the “performed topographies” and “topomimetic piety” promoted by the Franciscans between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, encouraging believers to associate places in their city or its surrounding territory with Jerusalem pilgrim sites.7

It would be an error, however, to relegate these imaginative efforts to the devotional sphere alone. The same monastic and conventual communities that promoted the idea of a parallelism between the heavenly Jerusalem and earthly Florence also had a role in the city’s material life, as George Dameron has made clear when stressing that “between 1250 and 1330 ecclesiastical communities contributed to transforming the economy: they marketed grain to feed a growing population of industrial workers, paid taxes to support the military expenses of the commune, constructed some of the most impressive structures of fourteenth-century Europe, and consolidated property both in and around the city.” 8 Dameron further notes that many ecclesiastical institutions and religious communities acted to mitigate the deleterious effects of this economic transformation on the least fortunate members of Florentine society: “They provided charity to the increasing ranks of the indigent and offered shelter and food to newly arrived immigrants

and the recently unemployed.”9 The religious communities seemed, that is, to effectively realize the biblical promise of a city free from mourning, lamentation, and weariness.

The idea of Florence as a new Jerusalem is clear in the extraordinary text written by a pious goldsmith, Marco di Bartolomeo Rustici, who in the 1440s described an imaginary pilgrimage from his own city to that in which Christ died, introducing his account with a description of Florence in which he speaks mainly of churches and conventi, as if the city could be adequately represented only by the buildings in which its citizens gathered to pray and to live together according to the Gospel.10 Rustici clearly identifies Ecclesia and Civitas, and to describe large churches and monastic complexes uses the figure of the “castle” or “big castle,” suggesting a similarity between ecclesiastical structures and the castelli of fortified towns in the Tuscan countryside. For Rustici, that is, the network of grand urban churches was comparable to the system of fortifications strategically positioned in extraurban areas, as if Florence were the sum of its places of worship—a single great “temple” (Fig. 3).

This way of thinking must have seemed especially timely in early fifteenth-century Florence, where the city’s role in the resolution of the Great Schism, and the prolonged sojourns of contemporary popes (Martin V and Eugenius IV) with their respective courts persuaded the city that it occupied the centre of the European ecclesial stage (Fig. 4).11 If we

6 Summa theologiae, II, IX, XI, par. II, col. 1007d-e. See Howard, Beyond the Written Word, p. 198.

7 M. Bacci, “Performed Topographies and Topomimetic Piety,” in Spatial Icons. Performativity in Byzantium and Medieval Russia, ed. by A. Lidov (Moscow: Indrik, 2011), pp. 101–118. See also M. Piccirillo, OFM, “The Role of the Franciscans in the Translation of the Sacred Spaces from the Holy Land to Europe,” in New Jerusalems: Hierotopy and Iconography of Sacred Spaces, ed. by A. Lidov (Moscow: Indrik, 2009), pp. 363–380.

8 G. W. Dameron, Florence and Its Church in the Age of Dante (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), p. 137.

9 Ibid.

10 T. Verdon, “L’immagine della Chiesa nel Codice Rustici,” in Codice Rustici. Dimostrazione dell’andata o viaggio al Santo Sepolcro e al Monte Sinai di Marco di Bartolomeo Rustici, 2 vols., critical edition (I) ed. by K. Olive, Essays (II) ed. by E. Gurrieri (Florence: Olschki, 2015), vol. 2, pp. 35–40.

11 D. S. Peterson, “The Cathedral, the Florentine Church, and Ecclesiastical Government in the Early Quattrocento,” in AA.VV., Atti del VII Centenario del Duomo di Firenze, acts of the conference, Florence, 16–21 June 1997, ed. by T. Verdon and A. Innocenti, 3 vols. (Florence: Edifir, 2001), vol. 1: La Cattedrale e

3 Marco di Bartolomeo Rustici, Codex Rustici, 15th century, detail of San Marco complex, Florence, Library of the Archiepiscopal Seminary of Florence, f. 11v.

Feast of the Scoppio del Carro (Explosion of the Cart), Florence, 2019.

Three “Synoptic Journeys” to Jerusalem, 1384–1385

franco cardini

“F

lorence and Jerusalem”: a catchy phrase that needs explanation. Perhaps it would suffice to focus on the bridge stretching from Girolamo Savonarola to Giorgio La Pira: on the theme Florentia, nova Jerusalem, which is, at one and the same time, a powerful political argument and a moving apocalyptic appeal. This, however, would mean taking a leap beyond the End of Time toward metahistory and metaphysics. But in the Jerusalem coelestis as in the Jerusalem interior, in exegesis as in metaphor, in the primordial myth and in the utopia of True Justice, “Jerusalem” disappears—our Jerusalem, I mean: the city of stone and sand, of pain and sweat, of love and blood. Jerusalem miserabilis, quae est in Syria, as it was called by Pope Innocent III, who wanted to ransom it by the sword, since the princes of his time failed to do so.

FROM REALITY TO SYMBOLISM

Yet it is precisely of the real, material Jerusalem that Florentines have long, perhaps always, thought—even today, with the live and concrete contribution of many scholars, archaeologists, doctors, volunteer humanitarian workers, religious women and men, and students. 1 And this relationship began a long time ago. The Museo Nazionale del Bargello exhibits a splendid fourteenth-century Syrian lamp of enameled and gilded crystal, on the surface of which there is an inscription from sura XXIV of the Koran, the sura called Al-Nur, “Light”: “God is the light of the heavens and of earth.” This remarkable object has always seemed to me to be a symbol of the Florentine search for Florence as a Search for Light. And we could begin with this: the light of a small flame that, flashing, animates an object we know and love,

the Easter “Dove” in the annual ceremony of the Scoppio del Carro—the “Explosion of the Cart” (frontispiece). Florentines and tourists all know what it is, although few are those who know that the “cart” that explodes in Catherine wheels of light and fire is the symbol of the chapel of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem: and that the light and thunder-claps stand for the Lumen Christi—the light of the Christ who rises from an empty tomb exactly as he has done every year, at the midnight between Holy Saturday and Easter, according to an ancient liturgical ceremony going back at least to the tenth century of the Christian era,2 perhaps related to a rite of the Ethiopian Coptic church. How this tradition reached Florence, and how it fused with the rite of “distributing the new fire” practiced in Jerusalem, is not known. A legend that claims to originate in the early twelfth century—right after the first Crusade, that is—, but that cannot in reality be older than the thirteenth or fourteenth century, offers an explanation. In an age when, in Italy as elsewhere, every aristocratic family claimed to have among its ancestors a special hero, the crusader who on the fateful day of 15 July 1099 had first breached the walls of the Holy City, the family in Florence to claim this particular glory was the Pazzi. According to the legend, a certain “Pazzo” (or “Pazzino”) had brought three stones back from the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher: the three stones that since then have been conserved in the church of Santi Apostoli and used to kindle the fire that serves to ignite the Dove’s tail (Fig. 1). A pity that these, obviously, are really flint chips, whereas the stone of the Jerusalem basilica of the Resurrection is limestone. The ceremony must in any case have been in use in 1478, when the Florentine government banned it in the context of a series of damnatio memoriae sanctions aimed

1 One example for all: the “testimonial” book by F. Bandini, Firenze e Gerusalemme. Speranze di pace nel tempo presente (Florence: Altralinea, 2018).

2 See C. K. Skarlakidis, La santa luce. Il miracolo della vigilia della Santa Pasqua nel Sepolcro di Cristo (Athens: Elea Publishing, 2012).

“SYNOPTIC JOURNEYS” TO JERUSALEM, 1384–1385

at the Pazzi themselves, leaders of the 26 April plot in which Giuliano de’ Medici, the brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, had been killed. What is certain, though, is that, since at least the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries, a religious ceremony dear to the Florentine Church is directly connected with Jerusalem.3

We thus begin the glorious sequence of Florentine “holy sepulchers,” chapels built ad instar dominici Sepulcri —, with a “Holy Sepulcher” sui generis : the symbolic cart allusive, on the one hand, to the Ark of the Covenant, and on the other to the bandwagon consecrated to Florentina Libertas, bearing a numinous link to the agricultural year and

the hope for its fecundity. Of these Florentine Sepulchers at least three are very famous: the first was constituted by one of the chapels of the Ponte alle Grazie, blown up in August 1944 (Fig. 2); the second, appropriately celebrated, is that which Leon Battista Alberti realized for a chapel in the church of San Pancrazio in 1467, on the basis of the authentic measurements of the Jerusalem Sepulcher, which the patron, the merchant Giovanni di Paolo Rucellai, had requested be taken exactly, sending an expedition to the Holy Land for that very purpose (Fig. 3);4 and the third is that of the Villa Salani at Fiesole. But the subject could be expanded if we move a few dozen kilometers south of the walls of Florence, to the Franciscan Convent of San Vivaldo near Montaione

3 See S. Raveggi, “Storia di una leggenda. Pazzo dei Pazzi e le pietre del Santo Sepolcro,” in Toscana e Terrasanta nel medioevo, ed. by F. Cardini (Florence: Alinea Editrice, 1982), pp. 299–315, later reprinted with the same title in I fiorentini alle crociate, ed. by S. Agnoletti and L. Mantelli (Florence: Edizioni della Meridiana, 2007), pp. 22–44. On the subject of Florentine folklore traditions and the history of the Diocese of Florence, see R. Gulino, Il rito dello scoppio del carro della Chiesa fiorentina nella solennità di Pasqua (Florence: Giampiero Pagnini Editore, 2018).

4 See G. Petrini, “La cappella del Santo Sepolcro nella ex chiesa di S. Pancrazio in Firenze,” in Toscana e Terrasanta, ed. by Cardini, pp. 338–343; E. Latini, “La cappella del Santo Sepolcro nel complesso conventuale di San Pancrazio a Firenze,” in I fiorentini alle crociate, ed. by Agnoletti and Mantelli, pp. 267–291; and, in general, D. Neri, Il S. Sepolcro riprodotto in Occidente (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1971), pp. 88–93.

1 Gaetano Bianchi, St. Donato and Pazzino de’ Pazzi in Adoration, 1880, San Donato in Polverosa, Florence (detail).

di Valdelsa, to the forest where there is an authentic “Sacro Monte” (Holy mountain), a Jerusalem translata that the Friars Minor of the Franciscan Observance constructed at the end of the fifteenth century, in the same period as the more famous Sacro Monte of Varallo Sesia.5 We might even touch upon the semi-legendary theme (which no one has ever dared to treat fully) of the “mad” dream of Grand Dukes Ferdinando I and Cosimo II, supported by their friend the Druse Emir Fakhr ad-Din II: to perform a coup de main on Jerusalem itself and carry off the original chapel of the Holy Sepulcher, dismantling it and then reassembling it beneath the immense dome of the funerary chapel of the Medici dynasty in San Lorenzo.6

More than of the memory of Jerusalem— ever present, in any case, in the liturgy and iconography throughout Christendom—, for Florence we might go so far as to speak of a true and constant presence of the Holy City. We intuit it in filigree, even in the halo of Masaccio’s figure of the Virgin for San Giovenale at Cascia, near Reggello—in the inscribed Kufic letters in which some have read the shahàda, the Islamic profession of faith. This interpretation, never really disproven, is not as fanciful as it might

seem, if we bear in mind that Masaccio’s patron for the work was the same Felice Brancacci who had been Florence’s ambassador to the court of the Mameluke sultan of Cairo in 1422— a moment, that is, when Florence, which had already for some years held control over Pisa, launched its first galleons and, with them, a truly resolute/decisive oriental “policy.”7

FLORENTINE JOURNEYS TO JERUSALEM

Florence made a direct entry into the Via Francigena network only with the midthirteenth-century “road revolution,” even though the city’s not always easy relationship with the Tyrrhenian port of Pisa was vital to its economy, and Florence was at the center of a region dense with a series of shrines inviting pilgrimage: that of the “Holy Girdle” of the Madonna at Prato; that of St. James in Pistoia, with its strong bond to Santiago de Compostela; and that of Montevarchi, with its relic of the Holy Milk connecting it to Bethlehem and to the Guidi counts, who had taken part in the first two Crusades. And while there is no secure documentary evidence of a Florentine contribution to the crusader movement prior to the late twelfth century, the papal legate to the troops of the second Crusade, Guido di San Crisogono, was Florentine, and the third Crusade produced the memorial of the Florentine Monachus, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem and author of a poem on the taking of Acre.

Of Florentine merchants who frequented the Holy Land in the thirteenth century we are well informed, not to mention that great traveler and Islamist Riccoldo da Montecroce, a Dominican of Santa Maria Novella and

5 See F. Cardini, “La devozione a Gerusalemme in Occidente e il ‘caso’ sanvivaldino,” in idem, Gerusalemme d’oro, di rame, di luce (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1991), pp. 154–204.

6 See K. El Bibas, “Il sogno della Gerusalemme medicea,” in I fiorentini alle crociate, ed. by Agnoletti and Mantelli, pp. 323–340.

7 See L. Pandimiglio, Felice di Michele vir clarissimus e una consorteria. I Brancacci di Firenze (Ivrea: Edizioni Olivetti, 1989).

2 Ponte alle Grazie, before August 1944.

Leon Battista Alberti, Tomb of Giovanni Rucellai, Rucellai chapel, 1467, ex church of San Pancrazio (Marino Marini Museum), Florence.

Francesco Furini, Lorenzo the Magnificent among the Philosophers of the Platonic Academy of Careggi, 1638–1642, Salone di Giovanni da San Giovanni, Palazzo Pitti, Florence (detail).

Florence between Athens and Jerusalem: Myth, Image, Reality

alessandro diana chapter iii

However much the science of all cultures may protest its innocence of all preferences or evaluations, it fosters a specific moral posture.

Leo Strauss

In the so-called Salone di Giovanni da San Giovanni, in the Summer Apartments of the grand dukes on the ground floor of Palazzo Pitti, there are two frescos scenes Lorenzo the Magnificent among the Philosophers of the Platonic Academy of Careggi and The Allegory of the Death of Lorenzo the Magnificent realized by Francesco Furini between 1638 and 1642 (Fig. 1).1 The decoration of this majestic hall originally foresaw a program different from the exclusive celebration of Lorenzo the Magnificent,2 which took shape after the death of Giovanni da San Giovanni (Giovanni Mannozzi) in 1636, when Cecco Bravo, Ottavio Vannini, and Furini completed the frescoes.3

Indeed, this cycle should have included a representation of The Rediscovery of the Golden Age, 4 a theme only apparently set aside, since it is substantially maintained and re-signified in Furini’s Lorenzo the Magnificent among the Philosophers of the Platonic Academy of Careggi, with its personifications of Philosophy, Reason, Science, History, and Poetry, 5 in which Laurentian Florence is identified as the Sedes Sapientiae and thus the New Athens,6 as confirmed in the following quartina inscribed in a simulated marble epigraph in the wall’s lower molding beneath the fresco (Fig. 2a):

MIRA QUÌ DI CAREGGI

ALL’AURE AMENE / MARSILIO, E L’PICO, E CENTO EGREGI SPIRTI / E DI’, S’ALL’OMBRE DEGLI

ELISI MIRTI / TANTI N’HEBBER GIÀ MAI TEBE, OD’ATENE

1 F. Baldinucci, Notizie de’ professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua, 6 vols. (Florence: per Santi Franchi, 1681–1728), vol. VI (1728), pp. 1–54 (Giovanni da San Giovanni): 38–48; 258–267; (Francesco Furini): 260–261. See also: O. H. Giglioli, Giovanni da San Giovanni (Giovanni Mannozzi, 1592–1636). Studi e ricerche (Florence: Edizioni S.T.E.T., 1949), pp. 122–135.

2 P. Castelli, “La fortuna del mito di Lorenzo in età moderna,” in Lorenzo il Magnifico, ed. by F. Cardini (Rome: Libreria dello Stato, Editalia, 1992), pp. 133–154; N. Rubinstein, “The Formation of the Posthumous Image of Lorenzo de’ Medici,” in Oxford, China and Italy. Writings in Honour of Sir Harold Acton on his Eightieth Birthday, ed. by E. Chaney and N. Ritchie (London: Thames & Hudson, 1984), pp. 94–106.

3 The Salone was begun by Giovanni Mannozzi in 1635, who completed the ceiling frescoes and those on the largest wall showing The Destruction of Classical Civilisation, The Expulsion of the Sages from Mount Parnassus, and The Virtues Leading the Poets to Tuscany. See: M. Campbell, “Medici Patronage and the Baroque: A Reappraisal,” The Art Bullettin 48:2 (1966), pp. 133–146; E. McGrath, “From Parnassus to Careggi: A SeventeenthCentury Celebration of Plato and Renaissance Florence,” in Sight & Insight. Essays on Art and Culture in Honour of E.H. Gombrich at 85, ed. by J. Onians (London: Phaidon Press, 1994), pp. 191–220; M. Mosco, L’appartamento d’estate dei Granduchi, in Palazzo Pitti. L’arte e la storia, ed. by M. Chiarini (Florence: Nardini Editore, 2000), pp. 90–104; E. Acanfora, “Palazzo Pitti, piano terreno, appartamento degli Argenti. Le decorazioni di Cecco Bravo, Francesco Furini e Ottavio Vannini,” in Fasto di Corte. La decorazione murale nelle residenze dei Medici e dei Lorena, ed. by M. Gregori, 4 vols. (Florence: Edifir, 2005–2009), vol. II: L’ età di Ferdinando II de’Medici (1628 - 1670) (2006), pp. 49–60:

53–55.

4 In a letter by Mannozzi addressed to the cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, the artist himself clarifies the erudite program prepared for the Great Hall, and, in reference to the wall on which Furini would work, declares: “[…] nella quarta [parete, n.d.a.] arno a diacere nel suo letto con l’urna e le ninfe d’arno cavando la terra cavin fuora una bella giovane rappresentante l’età del oro e la portino a la conduchino a far Reverenza al fiume”; see A. M. Fortuna, “Giovanni da San Giovanni nel Salone degli Argenti di Palazzo Pitti,” Firme nostre. Notiziario delle lettere e delle arti in Toscana 9:30–31 (1966), pp. 3, 10: 10. See also: M. Campbell, “The Original Program of the Salone di Giovanni da San Giovanni,” Antichità Viva: rassegna d’arte 15:4 (1976), pp. 3–25: 17. On the theme of the “Golden Age,” with reference to Furini’s frescoes, see E. H. Gombrich, “Renaissance and Golden Age,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 24:3–4 (1961), pp. 306–309: 306–307, republished in idem, Norm and Form. Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon Press, 1966), pp. 29–34.

5 See the catalogue entries, nos. 26–28, 42–52, by R. Maffeis in Un’altra bellezza. Francesco Furini, catalogue of the exhibition, Museo degli Argenti, Palazzo Pitti, Florence, 22 December 2007–27 April 2008, ed. by M. Gregori and R. Maffeis (Florence: Mandragora, 2007), pp. 206–211.

6 See R. Maffeis, “La Camera della Luna. Storia di Francesco Furini,” in Un’altra bellezza, ed. by Gregori and Maffeis, pp. 20–63: 47ff.

1 Francesco Furini, Lorenzo the Magnificent among the Philosophers of the Platonic Academy of Careggi and Allegory of the Death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, 1638–1642, Salone di Giovanni da San Giovanni, Palazzo Pitti, Florence.

2a-b Francesco Furini, Lorenzo the Magnificent among the Philosophers of the Platonic Academy of Careggi, 1638–1642, Salone di Giovanni da San Giovanni, Palazzo Pitti, Florence (detail: inscriptions below the fresco).

3 Francesco Furini, Lorenzo the Magnificent among the Philosophers of the Platonic Academy of Careggi, 1638–1642, Salone di Giovanni da San Giovanni, Palazzo Pitti, Florence (detail: Villa of Careggi).

Behold here, in Careggi’s refined air / Marsilio and Pico and a hundred rare spirits / and say whether, in the shade of their elysian myrtles / Thebes ever had as many, or Athens

Against the backdrop of the Medici Villa of Careggi (Fig. 3), the seat of the mythical Florentine Platonic Academy, the secular hagiography of “rare spirits” is deployed with the presence, next to Lorenzo the Magnificent, of Cristoforo Landino, Angelo Poliziano, Demetrio Calcondila, Marsilio Ficino, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola7 (Fig. 4), near an imaginary marble monument dedicated to Plato (Fig. 5),8 the philosopher who more

than any other had sought to give new life to the Golden Age in which philosophers had governed. The presence of Ficino and Lorenzo de’ Medici at the foot of Plato’s simulacrum recalls Ficino’s own account of the events of 16 July 1464, when Cosimo the Elder, on his deathbed, summoned a young Marsilio to provide him the comfort of a bit of music and some platonic readings. In particular, he loved the reading from the dialogue on the De summo bono (the Philebus), to which Cosimo listened together with his young grandson Lorenzo, the future leader of Florence, called to his grandfather’s bedside, as well. 9 In the painted epigraph below Furini’s fresco we read the corollary of this ideological relationship between grandfather and grandson (Fig. 2b):

7 McGrath, “From Parnassus to Careggi,” pp. 203–206.

8 There is historical documentation of Lorenzo’s purchase of an ancient bust of Plato, supposed to have come from the ruins of the Athenian Academy, whose facial features did not correspond to those of the ancient philosopher, since it was a fraud—“certified” by a false Renaissance inscription— perpetrated against Lorenzo by the dishonest seller Girolamo Rossi da Pistoia. This famous episode is discussed, among others, by: A. Chastel, Arte e umanesimo a Firenze al tempo di Lorenzo il Magnifico. Studi sul Rinascimento e sull’umanesimo platonico (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), pp. 77–80 (original edition: Art et Humanism à Florence au temps de Laurent le Magnifique. Études sur la Renaissance et l’Humanisme platonicien [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959]); L. Beschi, “Le antichità di Lorenzo il Magnifico: caratteri e vicende,” in Gli Uffizi.

Quattro secoli di una galleria, acts of the conference, Florence, 20–24 September 1982, ed. by P. Barocchi and G. Ragionieri (Florence: Olschki, 1983), vol. I, pp. 161–176: 172; idem, “Le sculture antiche di Lorenzo il Magnifico,” in Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo mondo, acts of the conference, Florence, 9–13 June 1992, ed. by G. C. Garfagnini (Florence: Olschki, 1994), pp. 291–317; and, with abundant documentary material, G. Corti and L. Fusco, Lorenzo de’Medici Collector and Antiquarian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), ch. IV, pp. 29–107: 30. The statue of Plato in Furini’s fresco looks nothing like the ancient philosopher, nor like the “Medici Plato,” reproducing instead the face of the contemporary Piero Zaballi: see M. Rossi, “Furini poeta,” in Un’altra bellezza, ed. by Gregori and Maffeis, pp. 106–119: esp. 108ff.

9 See J. Hankins, La riscoperta di Platone nel Rinascimento italiano, trans. by S. U. Baldassarri and D. Downey (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 2009), pp. 375–419ff (original edition: Plato in the Italian Renaissance [New York: Brill, 1990]).

Francesco Furini, Lorenzo the Magnificent among the Philosophers of the Platonic Academy of Careggi, 1638–1642, Salone di Giovanni da San Giovanni, Palazzo Pitti, Florence (detail: portraits of Cristoforo Landino and Angelo Poliziano; Demetrio Calcondila; Marsilio Ficino; Lorenzo de’ Medici called “The Magnificent”; and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola).

Giorgio La Pira and Florence.

giulio conticelli chapter ii

Florence and Jerusalem.

Giorgio La Pira: A 20th-century Witness for the Third Millennium

Born in 1904 in Pozzallo, Sicily, Giorgio La Pira came to study at Florence University, where he subsequently taught Roman Law for forty years. In 1948 he was one of the framers of the Constitution of the Italian Republic, and in 1951, after a brief period of government service as Under-Secretary of Labour, he became Mayor of Florence, holding that position almost uninterruptedly until 1965. After his death in 1977, La Pira was buried in the Dominican Basilica of San Marco (Fig. 1), in Florence, in whose Friary he had long resided, and on 3 July 2018 was declared Venerable by Pope Francis. His writings constitute an essential part of the cultural heritage of the Italian Nation, and the Republic has instituted a National Edition of his works, of which the first four volumes have been published both in print and an open access digital edition licensed in 2019 by Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International at www.fupress.com of the Florence University Press.

“JERUSALEM DESOLATED AND DESTROYED.” FLORENCE IN THE DRAMA OF ANTISEMITIC PERSECUTION AND THE SHOAH

Giorgio La Pira was one of the founders in Italy of the first Jewish-Christian Friendship Association, following the intuition of the Frenchman Jules Isaac, aimed at overcoming every form of antisemitism and racism. When Isaac’s death was commemorated in Palazzo Vecchio, the Florence Town Hall, on 3 May 1964, in the presence of hundreds of delegates from the Hebrew world and from the Christian churches, La Pira publicly recalled the drama of the Nazi and Fascist antisemitism that Florence had experienced, representing the city as “Jerusalem desolated and destroyed” in the years between the promulgation of the Fascist racial laws in 1938 and the city’s liberation on 11 August 1944, thanks both to

popular insurrection and to the arrival of the Anglo-American and French Allied Forces. The Fascist racial laws of 1938 expelled Florentine Jews from the workplace, from public office, from schools and universities, nullified their marriages to Aryans, and deprived them of their property. Florence is a city with a long tradition of Jewish presence, which explains why it became the seat of the Italian Rabbinical College, visited by great intellectuals such as Martin Buber; in Florence a splendid Synagogue had been erected in the nineteenth century. The 1938 antisemitic laws made Jews marginal in the life of the city, and many emigrated—some, like the musician Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, to the US.

Giorgio La Pira’s conscience forced him to rebel against this persecution, in which he saw Federico Cammeo, the illustrious Jewish law expert who had supported La Pira’s own admission to the Florentine law faculty, removed from university teaching. Cammeo’s authoritativeness was such that, after the Concordat and Lateran Treaty of 1929, Pope Pius XI had entrusted him with the task of formulating the administrative legal system of the new Vatican City State. The racial laws were a harsh blow for Cammeo, whose suffering led to premature death in 1939, followed by the suicide of his son, a young assistant professor at the university, and by the death of his wife and daughter, deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz.

La Pira expressed his resistance to all of this by publishing the review Principi (Principles) from January 1939 to January 1940: a moral and spiritual revolt meant to affirm the absolute value of the human person, a theme on which he would write a scholarly essay in 1942, later published,1 developing and interpreting St. Thomas Aquinas’s sources. For La Pira, the 1

expulsion and persecution of the Jews was comparable to the “destruction of Jerusalem.”

After 8 September 1943, Florence was occupied by Nazi and Fascist forces and the Jews were deported to death camps. The archbishop, Cardinal Elia Dalla Costa (1872–1961), whom Pope Francis has declared “Venerable,” organized an assistance network for Jews, with over forty-two venues in parishes, monasteries, and religious communities. Recent far-ranging research on the protection given Jews in Florence during the Nazi occupation following 8 September 1943, demonstrates that the city had become a “Jerusalem” in which Christians shared their food with Jews and provided places of concealment to prevent deportation

to the death camps.2

If in the first place Jerusalem represents the city of the persecuted Jewish people, for Christians it is also the city in which innocents suffered war and violence. Florence experienced at one and the same time the persecution of the Jews, the sufferings of war, and the violent destruction of homes and artistic monuments.

One of La Pira’s first acts as mayor, in 1951, was to commemorate the Shoah at the Florence Synagogue,3 recalling the citizen’s

3

2 F. Cavarocchi and E. Mazzini, La Chiesa fiorentina e il soccorso agli ebrei: luoghi, istituzioni, percorsi (1943–1944) (Rome: Viella, 2018).

G. Conticelli, “I due Testamenti sono un Testamento solo: laicità e valori religiosi nell’intervento di Giorgio La Pira Sindaco alla

1 Basilica (at right) and cloister of San Marco, Florence.