Crown Jewel of the Italian Renaissance

...And thanks to the city's quality of endurance, she sees in the Florence of today the same love of the new, the same lack of interest in the past, the same live artisanry that marked medieval Florence—the same city "dangerous to live in," the same "city of din"—but with these features now translated into terms of our own time: the perils of streets unsuited for modern traffic and the mechanical Babel of unmuffled Vespas and Lambrettas added to what D. H. Lawrence once described as "that great stone rattle, the Via de'Bardi...

...As indicative of the Florentine character she takes the long-enduring wars between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the Cerchi and the Donati: one point of view black, one white, no middle ground with idealists on both sides...

...it is dense, full of information, suggestions, insights and personal prejudices...

...In adopting this anecdotal approach, Miss McCarthy has perhaps relied too consistently on Vasari, The Lives provide good stories, but can be seriously misleading...

...Through a generous sprinkling of associated anecdotes she carries the reader through an accumulation of observations which with less deft handling might become tedious to follow...

...Her text is not light...

...This city of extremes, hot in the summer, cold in the winter, traditionally committed to advance, to modernism—yet "containing backward elements narrow as its streets, cramped, stony and recalcitrant"—finally emerges in her depiction as truly "the fifth element...

...And a consistent recourse to them in art matters may tempt one to wonder about some of the author's other sources...

...And the photographs, principally by Evelyn Hofer, have a brilliance and definition in perfect keeping with the plastic clarity that is the signature of Florence...

...It makes no concession to the pleasure principle...

...the autumnal palette, on the one hand, of the great innovators Massacio, Andrea del Castagno, Uccello, Pollaiuolo, Michelangelo or Leonardo, and, on the other, the Maytime notes of Bernardo Daddi, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Benozzo Gozzi, Verocchio and Botticelli...

...It stands foursquare and direct, with no air of mystery, no blandishments, no furbelows—no Gothic lace or baroque swirls...

...But in spite of the "manly, bachelor" character of this city in whose monography even "women saints count for little," its portraitist has evidently a warmer affection for it than for any of its more ingratiating rivals...

...The last word throughout the Renaissance always came from Florence...

...On this thesis she bases a niello portrait of the city, its arbitrarily selected details lean, succinct and sharply drawn...

...But on the whole her portrait of Florence is a most stimulating and refreshing essay...

...Reviewed by James Johnson Sweeney Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York FLORENCE, in Miss McCarthy's view "is a manly town," "a city of endurance, a city of stone," "a terrible city, in many ways uncomfortable and dangerous to live in, a city of din, argument and struggle...

...But as a counter-balance to her interest in Vasari's gossip, it is clear from Miss McCarthy's essay that she has looked closely at what she liked in Florence and has not leaned too discreetly on the modestly favored view...

...Saint Giovanni Gualberto and Savonarola with Pope Clement VII and Lorenzo de Medici...

...She has a great and just admiration for Brunelleschi...

...Miss McCarthy herself is occasionally guilty of breaches of taste, most often wilfully for the purpose of mildly shocking the reader...

...In her first chapter, Miss McCarthy explains how different from other Italian cities Florence seems to her...

...Against the green Arno the ochre-and-dun file of hotels and palazzi has the spruce spare look of a regiment drawn up in drill order...

...The deep shades of melon and tangerine that you see in Rome, the pinks of Venice, the rose of Siena, the red of Bologna have been ruled out of Florence as if by municipal decree...

...The result is a legible, entertaining and provocative commentary on those features of Florence, its people, its culture and its history, which appeal most forcibly to Miss McCarthy, or which offer a most rewarding exercise to her caustic gifts...

...Wherever the Florentines went, they acted as disturbers, agents of the new...

...In this pattern Miss McCarthy weaves art history, social and political history deftly together into a ready legibility...

...And she makes an interesting point in indicating the source of that "kind of vulgarity in decoration that is today thought of as middle class": the taste of the time of the Medici Grand Dukes, with its frequent predilections for "hideous fantasies in rocaille, simulated sea shells, and tortured topiary work—for life-size house dogs in stone set out on walls or patches of lawn, anticipating the Victorian stag...

...But the form Miss McCarthy has given her treatment of the subject holds our attention to the main thesis while she embroiders her central argument very entertainingly...

...He stands probably at the head of her list of Florentine greats...

...It reconciles such diversities as the grim rustications of the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi or the Pitti, the simple austerity of the Pazzi Chapel and the gracious monumentality of Brunelleschi's dome...

...These are the two chords, that color which makes Florence what it is and has been, the contrasting motifs which the author constantly points up in her picture—the stern, majestic, sometimes harsh or livid Guelphish strain and the sweet, flowery Ghibel-line expression in the arts particularly "seeded from Siena...