Excitement, of course, is to be judged according to a sliding scale, but by what might be called the geriatric-pandemic index, the Flemings have had an exciting week. We escaped. We broke out. We found ourselves in New York City not once but twice, enjoying ourselves thoroughly on both occasions. The trips were of quite different kinds, but both were to upper Manhattan.
On Tuesday we went up to visit with an old and dear friend, Christine Stansell, and to have lunch with her and her companion at a place called the Café d’Alsace, on 2nd Avenue, a nice and airy space with what seemed like acres of “social distancing” in which to savor our large pots of delicious moules marinières. When I call Chris an old friend, I am going back to about 1970 when she was among the first class of Princeton women undergraduates. We knew even then that she was destined for greatness, which she went on to achieve as an historian at Bard College, then at her alma mater and finally at the University of Chicago. Among her admired books is City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789-1860. She was an Ohio girl, but she came to love the city she wrote about and wanted to live there in her retirement.
On Saturday we were in New York again, pretty much the same latitude but a tiny bit west in the longitude, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We went there to see the big Medici show—an extraordinary gathering of Renaissance portraits of, or relating to, members of the famous first family of Florence. This trip, too, came about because of a dear friend, another long-ago student and one-time colleague, Frank Ordiway. Frank lives in Princeton, where he operates a highly respected private educational consultancy. He is a classicist as well as a great expert on Italian culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and he has made a special study of the Florentine scene. So we could not have had a more competent guide or, to use a possibly yet more appropriate term, cicerone. And when you are driven from your back door to the Metropolitan’s parking garage in a spiffy blue Honda, you maximize gain while minimizing pain.
I am by no means an expert on Florence. But like anyone who has ever been there I love it. I feel a little disloyal to Dante in saying this, but there is a statute of limitations on vicarious grudges. The Medici have a rather lurid reputation among the general population. It may have something to do with all the torture chambers, false imprisonments, assassinations, papal copulations, and that sort of thing. I am reminded of Edward Arlington Robinson’s nifty stanza in “Miniver Cheevey”:
Miniver loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.
But to get to the exhibition within the Met, we had to go through some of the Sackler galleries. Joan made an excellent point and a masterful analogy. Just as it is necessary to distinguish between the Good Sacklers and the Oxycontin Sacklers, one must distinguish between the peccant and the pious Medici.
Pandemics have some slender silver linings. I can’t remember another major Met exhibition so sparsely attended that you could actually see and contemplate the exhibits. I learned a lot. Until very recently my knowledge of early Florence derived mainly from commentaries on Dante supplemented by a magnificent but eccentric book called The Makers of Florence (1876) by the prolific Victorian novelist and amateur historian Mrs. Oliphant (Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant, yes, married her cousin). Mrs. Oliphant ends with the late fifteenth century and Savonarola, while most of the “popular” Medici (popes, queens, etc.) came later. The materials in the Met show are sixteenth century. Yet Oliphant’s qualified view of Medici magnificence in general is perhaps sufficiently indicated by her judgement of Lorenzo (1449-1492): A man of superb health and physical power, who can give himself up to debauch all night without interfering with his power of working all day, and whose mind is so versatile that he can sack a town one morning and discourse upon the beauties of Plato the next, and weave joyous ballads through both occupations—gives flatterers reasons when they applaud him. Ah, if only I could have been one! The Medici were a large clan, and liked to name their males Cosimo, but the chief of these for art historians was called Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1519-1574). He is much on display in the Met.
A young friend of ours, Billy Magnuson, a brilliant law professor in Texas and a reader and speaker of Italian, is in the process of publishing a book about the development of the business corporation through history. One of his chapters is on the emergence of the Medici bank. He asked me to read through that chapter in manuscript and make any “medieval” comments that might be helpful. I was able for form’s sake to make one or two very minor suggestions, but mainly I was learning, appreciating in a new and revelatory way the extraordinary importance of the emergence of a money economy for modern cultural developments.
Historical “elites” are increasingly objects of discomfort and even scorn among historians, and especially of course elite historians. It may be disconcerting that rich people are disproportionately prominent in our social, cultural, and political histories, but the explanations are so easy and so obvious that it seems to be obtuse to fret about it. Holding a grudge against rich people of the Italian Renaissance is not particularly productive. It would be easy to walk through those museum galleries full of portraits of the high and mighty and see little more than the heedless hauteur, self-regard, and naked power of early robber-barons. That is, to be sure, one thing to be seen. I saw it and was rattled. But it is far from the only thing. In the current cultural climate, anachronistic virtue-signaling across the centuries is becoming a recognizable historical genre. The impulse to cancel, suppress, erase, abolish from mind and memory those things that we don’t like is a strange exhibition of the thirst for justice. A verse of the revolutionary anthem called the Internationale pleads thus: Let us make a blank slate of the past. That way of thinking has not had happy practical results. The impulse of the museum is quite the opposite, an impulse to conserve, rescue and display for study.
One of the stranger series of Medici portraits depicts aristocratic Italian youths in the personae of sacral figures—Saint Sebastian, protector against plague, John the Baptist, patron saint of Florence and harbinger of Christ. One that is particularly captivating imagines Cosimo as Orpheus. A lot is going on in what seems a rather spare painting. The mythological Orpheus, who harrowed hell to bring back from death his beloved Eurydice, had been a “Christ figure” in Christian art since late Antiquity. But no simple moral allegory fits the treatment here. Cosimo-Orpheus sprawls in an awkward position, holding the neck of his elaborate stringed instrument in his left hand while fingering its bow in auto-erotic suggestion with the right. The head of a large mastiff hound, emblematic I suppose of the whole animal kingdom charmed by Orpheus’s music, forces its way insistently into the scene. It is hard to know what all this may mean. The portrait is the work of the Duke’s court painter, Bronzino, creator of one of the most disputed, and certainly one of the most libidinous paintings of the Renaissance.* We may be mystified by the meanings and motives behind works of art that have come down to us from the remote past, but we must first marvel at the miracle of their survival. Visiting museums has been among our favorite pastimes. This was our first post-lockdown museum after well over a year of enforced recusal. I regard that as a little allegory of resurrection all on its own.
*See https://gladlylernegladlyteche.blogspot.com/2020/10/appalachian-baroque.html
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