Letter from Florence: the long night of the humanities.
18 December 2022
As we feel the winter solstice and the change of seasons, when “both the year’s, and the day’s deep midnight is,” I record a few impressions from the historical heart of the humanities, the city of Florence.
Like other cities, Florence is struggling to re-enter normalcy after the pandemic. In this way, we may find a parallel to the return of Boccaccio’s narrators to Florence after the worst of the plague subsided in 1348. The parallel is simple, since the plague killed one-third of the city’s inhabitants within a few months, but it is all the more challenging and bracing for that: Boccaccio continued his humanist enterprise, the university grew in strength, and within a generation or two, humanists were engaged at the highest levels of public life, finding support from the wealthiest patrons, and advising artists and architects to enrich the city-scape and its common squares (including the churches).
Will the analogy hold for us today? That is the question and concern that greeted me throughout the visit. Doubts covered the streets like a mist, and beset my conversations like the December rain.
One observation, in recollection: a year ago, the streets were more crowded, despite the omicron wave and health restrictions. This year they were largely empty, particularly in the center, where the process of its hollowing out continues, as citizens move to the periphery and put their center apartments out to lease; the result, one senses, is a loss of energy, as you walk down streets bereft of bakeries, gastronomie (places serving fresh prepared dishes), and local vendors. English words become, in certain districts, more common than Italian; salespeople and waiters uphold a distance from their clients by addressing them in English (in Rome my experience has been much different in this respect, but that is a subject for another letter).
And to mark my melancholy, I called on Giovanni Latini at his restaurant, a man I have known for twenty-five years, of great warmth and humor, whose daughter I had taught and whose name has been justly equated with hospitality; and I discovered he had died a number of weeks ago. “September 25th,” the old waiter told me.
To pursue the analogy I suggested at the outset: if, in the historical heart of the humanities, one feels a cultural void, a hastening senescence, or a dissipation of energy, a general dispiritedness, what does this augur for the health of the humanities?
I came to talk in Florence about the nature of Renaissance dialogue, and this letter would leave my conversation incomplete, were I to remain silent about the resources and reply to this apparent, and obvious, cultural lassitude.
For my colleagues in Florence spoke often and openly about it. They live in Florence but work throughout Italy and Europe. They see the potential and power of the humanities, but also the emergent need to support them; they are committed to find ways to develop and draw upon the neglected cultural roots, though the task seems enormous.
We talked and traded thoughts on the means to foster a more humane practice of technology, more creative, dynamic public and political expression, and a more generous climate around industry and business. Most basically we exchanged ideas on how the humanities, so apparently useless, present a path to heal ourselves from the fragmentation that shows itself in emotional and social isolation.
Florence still, quietly, offers the resources to find our way forward through a dialogue with the past. In general this dialogue is ongoing, often secretly and unconsciously, for we are historical beings more than rational animals.
To enter into conversation with one of wellsprings of our humanist heritage is a continual delight, a lasting friendship, so to speak, and one can feel the warmth of Machiavelli’s letter to his friend Francesco Vettori when he wrote about speaking with the ancients and how “they, in their kindness — umanità– respond to me.”
I walked around in the Bargello, my favorite museum, and noticed the detailed, personal features of Florentines sculpted by Rossallino and Verrocchio.
I stood with the frescoes and paintings of Fra Angelico in San Marco, and attended to his play of angles and colors in his mysterious Gothic modernity.
In the New Sacristy, I found new messages in the interchange between Day and Night, Dawn and Dusk, messages conveyed by posture and glance, body language in the most profound sense, so that their enigma may still disclose, I am sure, inspiration and insight, should we have the patience and fortitude to listen.
This listening notices how often we seek to efface, rather than enhance, the development of personality, for example by using AI to write for us and answer our basic questions. The listening senses the ways we become blanketed by convention and by the most facile judgmentalism toward ourselves and others. And it notices that while we face the ineluctable passage of time and our mortality, we refrain from contemplating them.
But if Renaissance writers and artists developed their originality and found meaning by listening to their ancestors, how confident is our time, if it leaves these writers and artists in obscurity, as a cultural appendix, scarcely felt and easily removed?
Verrocchio, Fra Angelico, Michelangelo had patrons of the highest order, many of them Medici. These patrons — clever people, astute in business, keen in politics — drew advantage from this art; they also recognized the advantage of learning, and built public libraries in San Marco and elsewhere, in order to refine, sculpt, and polish their stature through language.
And the art and letters remain a cultural voice from which we can find counsel in our broken time. Who will strengthen this voice and chart its call? Broken time need not be wasted. If we waste time, one of Shakespeare’s fallen kings remarked, it will waste us.
