"Drawings from the Uffizi' in New York

Our debt to the Florentines

ROBERT ZALLER

It’s well known, or should be, that the city of Florence reinvented the West. The Athenians were apparently the first people to realize that cities could serve a function other than selling sacks of corn and putting up sacrificial altars. They playfully experimented with drama, democracy, philosophy and other hazards of civilized life. They brought the human tribe out of its caves, and created something called the human race.

Rome came next, a distinct comedown in terms of wit but a signal improvement in plumbing and highway engineering. Then things fell apart for a good while. The sacrificial altars went up again, albeit with Gothic spires.

But sometime in the 13th Century a spark was rekindled along the Arno River, Dante finished off the Middle Ages with a poem, and Machiavelli celebrated the cutthroat commercial aristocracy that gave the West its second chance at glory.

Treasure lavished on beauty

The Florentines built themselves a splendid site of government, the Palazzo Vecchio, whose occupants were selected by blood rite but who all agreed on the furnishing and decoration of the palace. Ducal or republican, they heaped up treasure for their great civic vestibule. It was a wonderful time, when men paused in what had become an overly dutiful worship of God’s creation to praise their own creation, the city.

No one can bring the Palazzo Vecchio to America the way the real estate buccaneers carted London Bridge off to Lake Havasu City, but the show of 16th-Century drawings from the Uffizi Gallery currently at the Morgan Library is not only the next best thing, but an epitome of the Florentine esprit that in some sense mere brick, mortar and fresco cannot match.

The show begins with a pair of Michelangelos, one relatively obscure— multiple studies of a powerful male haunch, from one of which a testicle tenderly descends— and the other, world famous, the Bust of a Woman with headdress, one of the teste divine in which Michelangelo immortally glorified the human form. As if in a dream, the faint outline of a bearded male head appears to the right of this image, and that of a child below.

A part of the drawing? A forethought to it? An afterthought? Or simply disconnected doodling? The fascinating element in Renaissance drawing is its provisional, indeterminate and often quite Surrealist character, with ideas broken off and disjecta membra casually disposed. In the hands of a master, it is indeed genius dreaming, or at any rate musing. We don’t have Mozart’s improvisations at the pianoforte, but we do have Michelangelo’s on the sketch board, and they’re often more fascinating than the finished product.

The mysterious nude woman

Another case in point is Rosso Fiorentino’s Nude Woman with One Arm Above Her Head, a large standing figure with an alarmed expression and a protuberant belly, who seems to be watching or pointing to a disturbed scene or event, and who exists on a scimitar-like cut of paper sheared off from an original rectangle that may or may not have once provided some clue to her distress. Why is the woman nude? Is she pregnant (critics once thought so, but her breasts are not correspondingly enlarged)? Or does she simply carry an underslung belly in the style of Renaissance Flemish beauty? Why does the hint of idealized classical beauty in her pose and stature clash so disturbingly itself with the realism of her body?

Above all, what is she really looking at? It’s mystery, as it were, in midair, caught as only candid photo shots would do centuries later, yet buried in the most inaccessible of all places: the human imagination.

Unmatched dynamism

The most extraordinary work in the show, though, is Pontormo’s Study of Two Male Figures (above), which adorns the catalogue cover. The left figure, in black chalk, is a swirl of overlapping lines, almost in the style of a Francis Bacon; the right, done in red, keeps to its outline but is crested by a wave of ascending strokes, creating an effect of dynamism more intense than anything in Italian Futurism. Even in Pontormo’s exceptionally bold work there is nothing quite like it, and no illustration can do it justice.

But any number of masterpieces here could justify a visit by themselves: Bronzino’s Male Nude Seen From Behind, a chalk study for a minor figure in his Crossing the Red Sea that’s as perfectly balanced and articulated an image of the human body as one could wish; the candid, superbly detailed Portrait of a Gentlewoman that may or may not also be Bronzino’s; Salviati’s Allegory of Fortune, bestriding her wheel like a unicycle and strewing her favors where she will as the breeze tugs out her hair; Andrea del Sarto’s superbly composed Lamentation, set starkly against a mountain landscape.

The Medici court’s dorm father

The linchpin of the show, however, is Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), whose work is also showcased in an adjoining room of the Morgan’s own holdings. Vasari is best known for his Lives of the Painters, the first great biographical study of the Renaissance masters and still a mine of shrewd insight and invaluable information. Like Boswell, Vasari’s own virtues have been overshadowed by the tribute he paid to others, especially Michelangelo. But he was the dorm father of the Medici court during some of its greatest decades of artistic flowering, and, although it would be unfair to compare him to some of the talents he saluted and cultivated, he was no mean hand with pen and chalk himself, and his study for a ceiling celebrating Virtue Overcoming Fortune and Envy has a very fine dash to it.

Virtue might, indeed, have fared better on the walls and ceilings of the Palazzo Vecchio than in its broad corridors, but in the rooms where deals were cut and fates were sealed, beauty is what remains. Ars long, vita brevis: but see this show before it goes home.