Monday, January 20, 2020
606 - The Age of the Medici, Part 2, Italy, 1972. Dir. Roberto Rossellini.
Part 2: The Power of Cosimo.
Every frame a fresco.
Every other frame a tapestry.
Ten months have passed since Cosmo's exile, and the big banks have suffered no losses. In fact, they are doing better than ever.
The Pope has fled Rome for Florence by boat on the Tiber.
Leon Battista Alberti stands before the base, beholding the bronze statue.
David by Donatello.
A revelation. A Judeo-Christian subject designed and cast in a classical sculpture form.
David as a youth. With the shepherd's laurel wreath wrapping his hat, crowning his head. Holding Goliath's sword in his right hand. Standing in triumph on Goliath's severed, helmeted head.
In the nude. In the round. Carved and cast on all sides. To be seen from below.
Alberti stands with the apprentice. Donatello is not in. Alberti remarks that such works are not to be relegated to niches, as mere accents to service architecture. But to stand alone in full glory, in the open for the public to see. All sides. All angles. To see what Donatello has achieved.
The apprentice assures him. The work will indeed stand in the Palazzo. Commissioned by Cosimo himself.
Cosimo. The great banker. The great de Medici. Exiled for ten years. Settled in Venice. But he took his bank with him, and the money flowed out of Florence. To the magnet. The magnate.
Florence needs him. So after only one year of the ten years of exile, Cosimo returns. And the money flows again. And the power.
Back in Florence Cosimo de Medici pays off the debts of powerful men, and in doing so he gains allegiances and consolidates factions, drawing the power back to himself.
Meanwhile, Leon Battista Alberti continues to visit artists and artisans--to the neglect of his job at the curia--to marvel at their art and discuss philosophical ideas. Alberti is himself an artist, a sculptor, an architect, a mathematician, a poet, and an author. He has published two books on how to design buildings, which his detractors claim are based on mere mathematical theory devoid of actual experience.
Alberti visits the architect Pippo Brunelleschi. Cosimo visits Pippo at the same time.
Pippo is competing for the commission to design the dome for the Santa Maria del Fiore. Or at least the lantern that goes on top of the dome.
A man named Ghiberti is competing against him.
Pippo and Alberti show Cosimo a "perspective." An inverse woodcut which, seen through a small hole from the back of the wood, appears in three dimensions in a facing mirror.
Cosimo favors Pippo. He will help him. As if by divine intervention, Pippo wins the commission. But we know that Cosimo is behind it.
This second part of the Medici trilogy, among many made-for-television movies Rossellini filmed near the end of his life with the goal of education in mind, is not at first easy viewing. Instead of actors performing their roles, they speak their roles, explaining through exposition the ideas Rossellini wishes to convey.
Yet the film methodically rewards the patient viewer.
The production values are high. The colors are rich. The information appears well researched and generously delivered.
One can learn some of the minutiae of 15th-century Florentine government, economic, religious, and social life.
We hear a sermon on the nobility of the soul and salvation through faith in Christ.
We engage in a dialectical conversation on the benefits of high Latin versus the Vulgate.
We discover the process of coining florins from gold.
We witness political intrigue as Cosimo stays one step ahead of his enemies.
We ponder the efficacy of grace as a Christian man falsely renounces his faith in order to escape the Turks, and then seeks absolution upon returning home.
Along the way, Rossellini uses Alberti as his mouthpiece to showcase great ideas.
Particularly the usefulness of a universal liberal education for the development of the Renaissance man.
As Alberti maintains, "Each art contains parts of all the others."
And one may naturally draw parallels between this work and Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev. The devout artist. The casting of the lantern on top of this dome. The casting of the great bell on top of that one. With action occurring in front of the frescoes. The crucified Christ ever standing before our steady gaze.
* * * * *
Alberti - I want to arrive at the Opera del Duomo in time. Today they are choosing the architect for the construction of the lantern on the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore.
man - You must decide between the curia, sculpture, painting, or architecture. You spend more time in the workshops of the Florentine artisans than you do in the curia working for us.
Alberti - One cannot merely be a member of the curia, or merely a scholar of ancient texts, or merely a sculptor, merely a painter, merely a priest, or merely a merchant. Each art contains parts of all the others, because the arts of man live in the same reality of the world, in which all things, though appearing to be separate, live together with all others, and only together with the others can be known, possessed, and loved. You know that our fathers in Florence were not merely merchants or merely men of letters, merely priests or merely artisans.
Anyone who writes or speaks should aim to be understood. - Leon Battista Alberti
You have made robbery ethical. You have made greed reasonable. And to give nobility to this greed, you explain with scholarly knowledge that florins are a gift from God. You build monuments, churches, domes, statues, sacred frescoes so the world will see you as devout, humble, God-fearing men.
Between philosophy, knowledge, and commerce, one wonders what our world is
coming to.
* * * * *
The men of this century and of this city believe themselves to be the only masters and creators of everything. They seek knowledge in the writings of pagans and forget that living and reasoning are born of the spirit that God has given them. They forget that nobility of spirit is more beautiful than the sun, than the moon, than the stars and the sky, and that none of the things created by God is superior to it, because he created it in his image.
Let man, then, retire to his room and let no one come between him and God himself. Stand before the Lord God and think and think again, and leave every other matter or occupation by the wayside. Because matters of conscience are more important than those of the world. Earning money, providing for your families, protecting yourself from your enemies, all of these things are important.
But saving your soul is more important. The soul, in greatness and virtue, is above water, above fire, above air, above the entire earth, above the moon, Mercury and Venus, above the Sun and Mars, above Jupiter and Saturn, and all the signs among them. The soul is above all 72 constellations.
If there were as many empyreans as there are drops in the sea, as much sand in the desert or stars in the sky, all their beauty taken together could not be compared to the excellence of the human soul. But it is a most miserable thing when it strays from God.
Mothers, do you know who is the most miserable of men? Who is the poorest? A bird is born with feathers, a fish with scales. But man is by nature born naked. The puppy barks, the fish swims, the bird takes flight. Man, when he is born, knows only how to cry. We must all remember that man lives because he is mind incarnate, troubled soul, a container of brief duration, an ephemeral ghost of time. He is born, he scans the road ahead, consumes his life, is always on the move like a wanderer passing through, a guest where he is welcomed, a slave to death.
And where is his salvation? His salvation is in his faith in Christ, which he fulfills by being true to himself, to his family, to his city.
As for the faith that is our salvation, as an example I will tell you an ancient story. A man had left his young son under an oak tree, guarded by a dog called Bonino. Upon returning from the fields, he found his son dead, with his throat bitten, and next to the body was the trembling dog. In a fit of rage, the man killed the dog with an ax, and only then did he realize that under its belly the dog held in its paws a horrible snake, a snake it had killed to defend his son. In tears, the man regretted his ire and buried the dog with a stone on which he inscribed this saying: "Here lies Bonino, faithful champion to the end, killed by the ire of an unjust man."
The years went by and the pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem became accustomed to stopping to pray over this tomb, thinking it the resting place of a champion of their faith. One day, a man afflicted with a serious illness, after having prayed, was healed. Others prayed, and the miracles continued to multiply. The men of the area then erected a chapel in order to give a more seemly burial to the body of the man they considered a saint. But when they devoutly opened the tomb to move the bones, they saw that they were the bones of a dog and were scandalized.
An old and saintly monk then comforted them with these words: "Where there is faith, even by means of a dog, God can perform miracles and exhort men to repent. In prayer, our soul calls out to God, and God answers the soul and gives it what it needs without giving weight to the words themselves."
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