Part Three

                                    Gradually

The purple and transparent shadows slow

Had filled up the whole valley to the brim,

And flooded all the city, which you saw

As some drowned city in some enchanted sea . . .

The duomo bell

Strikes ten, as if it struck ten fathoms down,

So deep . . .

—ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING,

“AURORA LEIGH,” VIII

Bernard Berenson inspecting a Madonna by Giovanni Bellini, 1957 (Photograph by David Lees)

1                  

In 1799 Napoleon Bonaparte conquered Florence and began to strip the Uffizi of its artworks. Then, in 1808, in line with the Enlightenment principles in force in the rest of the French Empire, the city’s monasteries and convents were closed and their members and property dispersed. Among the objects to be disposed of at the Convento delle Murate was a painting of no great distinction, a cenacolo, The Last Supper by the sixteenth-century artist Giorgio Vasari.

Vasari was famous, but not, art historians would say, a great painter: he lacked imagination and his work was a little too studied and stiff. He was a better architect, as the Uffizi had proved. But the French couldn’t be bothered to loot his Last Supper from the Murate. It was hauled over to the church of Santa Croce and put in a chapel. The Murate became a jail and Vasari was remembered less as a painter or an architect than as a writer, as the author of The Lives of the Artists, the book that chronicled and codified the Renaissance, that established the reputations of the painters who, unlike Giorgio Vasari, were geniuses.

In October 1819, the novelist Mary Shelley, her husband, Percy, and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, settled in Florence in the Palazzo Marini near the Church of Santa Maria Novella. Mary was eight months pregnant and while she awaited her lying-in, day after day Percy walked the banks of the Arno and prowled the Uffizi. Claire meanwhile left for Venice in an attempt to gain visitation rights to her daughter by Lord Byron, Allegra. On October 25 “Percy took yet another river walk in a wood that skirts the Arno . . . when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions.” The flood season was in crescendo. Percy returned to the Palazzo Marini and wrote down the poem that had just then come to him and that he called “Ode to the West Wind.”

Claire returned from Venice. Byron had refused to allow her to see Allegra except under supervision. On November 12 Mary gave birth to a son named Percy Florence Shelley, named for his father and for the city of his birth, and perhaps too in homage to the epiphany that had befallen Percy on the bank of the Arno. After Mary’s confinement she and Claire went on almost daily excursions to the Uffizi, Percy leading them up and down the corridors, past work after work that had seized him, taken him over, like the rain and the flood wind.

That January was the coldest in seventy years. Claire took the Shelleys’ other children outside into the garden to throw snowballs, while Percy and Mary stayed inside reading The Tempest aloud to each other. Mary began a new novel, her first since Frankenstein. In it, she imagines Hell on the Arno, or rather the depiction of Hell mounted in 1304 on boats and scaffolds by the Ponte alla Carraia, a macabre pageant based on Dante. Her hero, Castruccio, watches in fascination, “the terrible effect of such a scene enhanced, by the circumstance of its being no more than an actual representation of what then existed in the imagination of the spectators.” But then

the Arno seemed a yawning gulph, where the earth had opened to display the mysteries of the infernal world; when suddenly a tremendous crash stamped with tenfold horror the terrific mockery. The bridge of Carraia, on which a countless multitude stood, one above the other, looking on the river, fell . . . with a report that was reverberated from the houses that lined the Arno; and even, to the hills which close the valley, it rebellowed along the sky, accompanied by fearful screams, and voices that called on the names of those whom they were never more to behold.

It seemed, Mary wrote, that the Arno had “rebuked them for having mimicked the dreadful mysteries of their religion.” It was the story of Icarus told on the scale of a whole, overweening city, the same story she had written in Frankenstein and would write again in The Last Man, a tale of “a fond, foolish Icarus.” It was, of course, Percy’s story, told again and again, until it claimed him entirely in the summer of 1822, when he drowned in the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Allegra too died, of typhus, in 1822, in the convent to which Byron had sent her. Mary returned to England, but Claire, perhaps possessed by the “Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere,” by the “Angels of rain and lightning” that her brother-in-law had found along the river, wandered through Austria, France, Germany, and Russia and, when she was an old woman, returned to Florence.

Between 1830 and 1835, a Scottish geologist named George Fair-holme explored the valley of the Arno upstream from Florence. In the course of his excavations he came across “a sandy matrix” in which “bones were found at every depth from that of a few feet to a hundred feet or more,” bones of every sort of creature, from rabbits, bears, and wolves still native to the Arno valley to rhinoceroses, elephants, and buffalo that no one had ever imagined dwelled here. The remains of all these creatures were jumbled together, not layered in separate strata, as though swept away all at once, all at the same moment. What had swept them away was not in doubt: elephant bones were encrusted with oyster shells. There had been water, a great deal of it, and it had lingered long enough, submerged everything long enough, that the whole world was sea.

In 1837 Fairholme published a book that revealed these findings, his thesis tidily summed up on the title page: New and Conclusive Physical Demonstrations both of the Fact and Period of the Mosaic Deluge, and of its having been the only event of the Kind that has ever occurred upon the Earth. How many might have died in the flood, Fairholme might wonder; how many could die in such a flood today; how many in all of history? I’ non averei creduto che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta, Dante had said: “I could not believe death had undone so many.” Twentieth-century demographers estimated that six billion people have died since the pyramids were built, the age that followed Fairholme’s flood. But going back forty thousand or so years since human beings first emerged they posit a total sum of perhaps sixty billion persons who have at one time or another lived on this planet. So if both Fairholme and the demographers are right, the deluge whose traces Fairholme found on the Arno washed away a world that had contained 54 billion people. That was what a flood could do.

Of course there were floods on the Arno: there was one in 1839, just two years after the publication of Fairholme’s book, and then a much larger one in 1844. That November 3, there had been no warning except that of frantically ringing church bells upstream, but it was a Sunday morning and what was more ordinary on a Sunday morning than the ringing of bells? The Arno runs southeast from its source on Monte Falterona in the Casentine Forests east of Florence, makes a hairpin turn above Arezzo, and bears straight northwest toward the city. Under normal conditions it would take eighteen hours for a drop of water to transit the river’s 150-mile course from Falterona to Ponte Vecchio, but on that day, the time would have been halved. At the bridges of Florence the Arno is capable of carrying about two thousand cubic yards of water per second: that morning the quantity would be nearly twice that. With both the amount and speed of the water almost doubled, the bridges and in particular the Ponte Vecchio acted as siphons, jetting the water with tremendous force and speed while—as debris began to plug the arches—simultaneously creating a backup behind the bridges that breached the riverbanks and poured into the low-lying eastern part of the city around Santa Croce. Underwater, in the channel of the river, the flow of sewers emptying into the Arno reversed direction. Geysers of floodwater spumed from drains and manholes.

The following year Giuseppe Aiazzi of Florence felt moved to write a chronicle of every recorded flood in the history of the city, some fifty-four since 1177. He’d watched as parishioners stood haplessly on top of the pews as the tide of water entered the churches where they sat at mass. He’d seen the slopes and escarpments of timber—tree trunks, stumps, whole hedges ripped and sucked from the ground—damming up streets and the heaped carcasses of livestock piled against walls and intersections. He was oddly struck by the color and smell of the effluents rising from the cellars and stores of merchants and provisioners, blends of wine, dye, olive oil, paint, spices, flour, and grease bound into a deep brown gesso by mud and, of course, excrement. Mattresses, picture frames, writing desks, and the corpses of household pets floated past. Rats paddled and stroked through the mire.

With a friend, a little before noon, Aiazzi climbed Giotto’s bell-tower, the Campanile, next to the Duomo. They looked out from the top and he saw the broadening strip of water widening between the hills to the east. From this height it looked silver: the sun had come out, as though to mock the city. To the west the river had become a lake, no, a sea, a procelloso, a word that Giacomo Leopardi had used once in a poem: i pesci si posar degli olmi in cima / e le damme sull’onde procellose, “the fish resting in the tops of elms / the does upon the tumultuous waves.”

In his book Aiazzi published calculations by the engineer Ferdinando Morozzi showing that, on average, there was a small to moderate flood every twenty-four years and, every one hundred, an extraordinary one; to use Fairholme’s word, a deluge. The Arno flooded, it seemed, with a kind of determination, willfully, because it could and therefore would. Florence wanted something done. Three hundred years earlier, Leonardo da Vinci had noted with alarm the consequences of deforesting the mountains and hills above the river, and those warnings had been repeated. But Florence couldn’t forgo wood for building, for burning, for painting upon: people wanted another solution. Leonardo himself had proposed diverting the river by canal for purposes of commerce, defense, and flood control, although nothing had come of it. In 1840 fresh projects were proposed and approved. The hydrologist and city engineer Alessandro Manetti began a program of deepening the river channel and building locks in 1840, but its completion coincided with the inundation of 1844. In the custom of Florence someone had to be blamed, on this occasion the blameless Manetti. He was laid low by nervous exhaustion, by a torrent of backbiting, and took to his bed.

John Ruskin, a young Englishman and heir to a sherry fortune, arrived in Florence the following year. Manic, melancholic, and obsessive, he would transform looking at pictures into a new discipline called art history and, with his gorgeous prose, turn aesthetics into social criticism, even into an art of its own. The flood and the accusations and calumnies in its wake were lost on him: everything, it might have been said, was lost on him except art.

You would have found Ruskin sprawled on the floor of the Bardi Chapel in Santa Croce at around ten o’clock in the morning—the only hour at which the light was right, when one could truly see—sketching segments of Giotto’s frescoes of St. Francis in his journal. A few months earlier water had been lapping within feet of Giotto’s friars arrayed in prayer around the saint’s deathbed, and even now there was the dull, sour stink of damp and sewage, the bands of mud and ordure that inscribed the high water mark on the walls.

That—the damage and persisting misery apparent anywhere around the city you might look—was real, but not as real as the art Ruskin had come to see. Or rather (so it seemed to him) it was the art that allowed you to see everything else. There was a carved sepulchral slab set into Santa Croce’s floor, overlooked by most people, no more than the image of an old man wearing a deeply folded cap. But Ruskin insisted that by this rather than by the city’s more famous masterpieces was the best way to understand Florence and its art. The slab’s unknown sculptor, if only in the carving of the folds of that cap, had genius, had the gift, and so “what is Florentine, and forever great—unless you can see also the beauty of this old man in his citizen’s cap,—you will see never.”

Giotto, the shepherd boy who was transfigured into the avatar of the new Florentine painting, also had the gift, immeasurably so. Ruskin imagined that you might read of what the gift consists—of what Giotto was given by his maker—on the wall of the Bardi Chapel:

You shall see things—as they Are.

And the least with the greatest, because God made them.

And the greatest with least, because God made you and gave you

eyes and a heart.

2                  

In 1847 Elizabeth and Robert Browning took an apartment in the Casa Guidi in Florence, south of the river, in the Oltrarno. They’d eloped, recklessly fled England by way of France and then Pisa. Robert made a studio for Elizabeth—“like a room in a novel,” she said—furnished with pieces he found in the San Lorenzo market, among them paintings sold off from suppressed monasteries such as the Murate.

Florence transfixed Elizabeth, enchanted and took possession of her, beginning with the “golden Arno as it shoots away / Straight through the heart of Florence,’neath the four / Bent bridges, seeming to strain off like bows, / And tremble . . .”

The city’s stories became tales she had to tell. There was, for example, the legend of Cimabue’s Rucellai Madonna. Outside Santa Croce there was a lane called Borgo Allegri—“the village of joy”—running north from the side of the church up to Cimabue’s studio, and the story had it that the street was given this name on account of this painting, a stunning virgin and child for the church of Santa Maria Novella. On its completion, so it was said, the painting was carried to its home in a procession headed by King Charles of Anjou from Cimabue’s studio through the city. Thus, Elizabeth wrote, did the street acquire its name:

The picture, not the king, and even the place

Containing such a miracle grew bold,

Named the Glad Borgo from that beauteous face

The city infused Elizabeth herself with joy. She had the freedom to live with the man she loved and, with it, a sense of utter liberty to write what and as she pleased. Outside, on the streets there was, briefly, freedom in the air. Italy seemed on the verge of casting off foreign and papal domination and of attaining nationhood. It was on her doorstep, in the Via Romana, where

I heard last night a little child go singing

’Neath Casa Guidi windows, by the church,

“O bella libertà, O bella!”

Seeking their own liberty, the Brownings, preceded by the Shelleys, formed the advance party for a new stream of Anglo-American artists and writers who in their turn fostered a wave of tourism centered on Florence’s art. Among their early visitors were Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Eliot, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and, not least, John Ruskin. The Brownings introduced him to the young artist Frederick Leighton. Taken by the same fervor that had seized Elizabeth, in 1855 Leighton painted a work he called Carrying Cimabue’s Madonna through the Borgo Allegri. It was purchased by Queen Victoria.

Italy’s liberty was not to be realized until 1865 and Florence would become its first capital. Elizabeth had died four years earlier, in 1861. Robert buried her in the Protestant cemetery in a tomb designed by Frederick Leighton, who would soon paint a portrait of Icarus, a portrait, it sometimes seemed, of every one of them.

There was another flood on November 5, 1864, an inundation that, according to the hydrometer at the Ponte Santa Trinità, briefly reached the level of 1844. A magazine illustration showed chest-high water behind the Uffizi and women with parasols floating down the street in skiffs. The caption celebrated “the self-denial and sacrifice” of the National Guard, the firefighters, and the police “in the supreme moments of peril” and claimed, perhaps for purposes of drama, that the river crested a foot higher than in 1844. In truth the flood lasted all of a night and a day, and damage was minimal.

There had been luck involved—the rain had stopped at a propitious moment—but also human ingenuity of a kind that the nineteenth century and the new Italy and its capital city gloried in. In the aftermath of 1844, Giuseppe Poggi and his engineers oversaw a vast array of civic improvements and expansions in the mode of Paris’s Baron Haussmann. Poggi built the Lungarni—the promenades formed by walling-in the river channel—on both banks of the Arno as well as a central storm drain and sluice gate system designed to prevent the sewers from being overwhelmed as they had been in 1844. The genius of Florence extended to engineering. The Arno might flood, but 1864 proved there need be no more devastation. By the time the seat of government moved permanently to Rome in 1870, Florence might claim to be capital of something almost as significant: art, history, beauty, or at the very least tourism.

When the twenty-six-year-old Henry James arrived from Venice in October 1869, it seemed to him that Florence was already a full-fledged international destination, filled with Americans of the wrong sort: “There is but one word to use in regard to them—vulgar, vulgar, vulgar.” But for all their ignorance—“their stingy, defiant, grudging attitude towards everything European”—they frequented the same sites and places Henry had come to see: the Uffizi, the Pitti Palace, the Duomo and Santa Croce, the piazzas of the Santissima Annuziata and Signoria, and the Caffé Doney. They were all there for the same reason: the art, the beauty, the ineffable “transparent shadows.” So during the month he stayed to study and sightsee he met them—the middle-class tourists, the rich expatriates, and the would-be sculptors and painters fleeing the stultification of America and Victorian Britain—and they became the material of his own art. He redefined their apparent stupidity and shallowness into a kind of willful innocence and stood it in opposition to European fatalism; to the tarnish and faded color of art too often sold, stolen, or left to gather dust.

The following year, home in Massachusetts, Henry wrote a story called “The Madonna of the Future.” The main character was an American painter living in Florence. For him, the apex of art is Raphael’s Madonna of the Chair in the Pitti Palace, and it is his deepest ambition to paint a work equal to it. He has a model, a canvas prepared, and a title: “The Madonna of the Future.” But he’s not sure an American can pull it off: “We are the disinherited of Art! . . . We lack the deeper sense.” So he never begins. His virginal model loses her youthful looks and the canvas remains blank but for a dusty layer of ground color. The artist catches a fever and as he dies, he explains, “I suppose we are a genus by ourselves in the providential scheme—we talents that can’t act, that can’t do nor dare!” He has believed in beauty—in what he imagines Florence to be—too devoutly, and it has paralyzed and then undone him.

As Vasari had created the artist/genius 250 years earlier, so the nineteenth century created the masterpiece: artworks whose own status exceeded anything they might represent, signify, or point to; the altarpiece that overwhelms the altar it was meant to adorn and itself becomes the altar. A painting or sculpture like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, or Michelangelo’s David that had begun its life as an aid to worship or prayer or to civic or familial memory was—enshrined in the Louvre or the Uffizi—now an object of worship, possessed of a mystery and power akin to the divine. Florence, full of masterpieces, was a masterpiece too.

In 1873–74 both Henry James and John Ruskin returned to Florence. Henry rendezvoused with his brother William. William—the psychologist and founder of the Pragmatist movement in philosophy—did not care for Florence as Henry did, failed perhaps to admire what his brother called “the deep stain of experience” that lay upon the city. After William left for America in February, Henry settled in an apartment on the Piazza Santa Maria Novella and stayed until the heat became unbearable in June.

He had launched himself into a novel, Roderick Hudson, set in Rome but full of the Florentine preoccupations of “The Madonna of the Future.” Roderick Hudson is a young New England–born sculptor of exceptional promise who goes to Rome to find himself as an artist. Instead, he squanders his talent and destroys himself, a contemporary Icarus who pursues the allures of art and Europe at too great a height. His lover, of half-American, half-Continental parentage, declares, “I am fond of luxury, I am fond of a great society, I am fond of being looked at. I am corrupt, corrupting, corruption.”

It might have been a cautionary tale: beware of art that is merely artificial, of beauty that is really vanity. But James’s point is not to avoid art and beauty, but, because they are essential—because life is itself pointless and untenable without them—to find a way to live with them; and, for James himself, in them. That, rather than a moral tale, is what James was working on above the Piazza Santa Maria Novella. That same spring he’d written, “The world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night: we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget nor deny it nor dispense with it.” The world insisted on being visible and palpable, on being seen and felt. The question was how to see without being blinded. It seemed to James that art was the only means, and that a city like Florence was the optimal lens.

As Henry James was finishing Roderick Hudson in Florence, John Ruskin was in Assisi studying Giotto’s frescoes. To immerse himself in the work, he’d arranged to lodge in a monk’s cell just across the cloister from the lower church. But as the days passed he found himself less struck by Giotto than by his master and teacher Cimabue, about whom Ruskin concluded, “He was a man of personal genius equal to Tintoretto, but with his mind entirely formed by the Gospels and the book of Genesis; his art [was] what he could receive from the Byzantine masters—and his main disposition, compassion.”

From Assisi Ruskin moved to Lucca and then to Florence, where he settled in the Hotel dell’Arno on the river. On a Sunday in September, Ruskin would return to Santa Croce. He would sit again—soon he’d be on the verge of lunacy, a lifelong virgin given to pedophile fantasies, a visionary frothing with manic schemes and utopias—in the Bardi Chapel at the hour in which the light would present itself. He saw two young Englishmen pass by, oblivious to Giotto, fixed on the nave’s preposterous and flaccid ranks of funeral monuments, and he decided—it came upon him like the sliver of daylight he’d been awaiting in order to draw—that Giotto’s gift had come to him not directly, but by way of Cimabue, his master.

“Before Cimabue, no beautiful rendering of human form was possible,” Ruskin began, but admitted, “nor could I in any of my former thinking understand how it was, till I saw Cimabue’s own work at Assisi . . . even more intense, capable of higher things than Giotto, though of none, perhaps, so keen or sweet.” But Cimabue, it seemed to Ruskin, had sacrificed himself—emptied out his own gifts—for Giotto: “Showed him all he knew; talked with him of many things he felt himself unable to paint; made him a workman and a gentleman—above all a Christian—yet left him a shepherd.”

As to the Rucellai Madonna and the Borgo Allegri, “recent critical writers, unable to comprehend how any street populace could take pleasure in painting, have ended by denying [Cimabue’s] triumph altogether.” But the truth of the story, like the truth of the Rucellai Madonna’s status as a masterpiece, was self-evident. Even illiterate medieval Florentines could see it and delight in the epiphany it contained. “That delight was not merely in the revelation of an art that they had not known how to practise,” Ruskin continued, “it was delight in the revelation of a Madonna whom they had not known how to love.”

So this was Cimabue’s—or anyone’s—genius; the ability to transform looking into loving. And that was what was lost on those who would not give Cimabue his due, who would not wait for the light to fall just so in his apprentice’s chapel, who refused to learn to see how one thing touches every other thing: “You will never love art well till you love what she mirrors better.”

Back at the Hotel dell’Arno, Ruskin had been trying to sketch from memory the dove Cimabue had used in Assisi to portray a verse from Genesis: “And the Spirit of God moved on the face of the Waters.” But the effort frustrated Ruskin. “Goodness!—that I can’t draw it,” he recorded, and then, “That dove’s wrong after all. Cimabue’s wings go up. I confuse things now in a day, if I don’t put them down instantly.”

On March 19, 1879, Claire Clairmont, age eighty, died in Florence, the last member of the Shelley and Byron circle who had discovered Italy and Florence for a generation of expatriate artists and writers and the tourists who followed them. For the previous nine years she had been living near the Porta Romana in Oltrarno with her niece. It was said that Claire had grown progressively more eccentric with each passing year; that she prattled on about Byron, kept the windows curtained and shuttered, and, despite a lifelong and very vocal antipathy toward the faith, converted to Catholicism.

There had been, except Napoleon, no greater celebrity in nineteenth-century Europe than Byron and there were supposed to be a bundle of Byron’s love letters to Claire among her effects, papers of extraordinary interest, not to mention value.

Henry James heard about them in 1887, eight years after Claire’s decease, when he returned to Florence and took a villa above the city in Bellosguardo. He had become by now “someone on whom nothing is lost,” who saw everything, and by means of his art aimed to render it yet more visible.

James realized that he had walked by Claire Clairmont’s door, might have passed her in the street. The story he’d heard was an incident of what he called “the visitable past,” “the poetry of the thing outlived and lost and gone.” He put his thoughts on what he’d heard into his notebook:

Certainly there is a little subject there: the picture of the two faded, queer, poor and discredited old English women—living on into a strange generation, in their musty corner of a foreign town with these illustrious letters as their most precious possession.

What fascinated James most of all was the obsessive collector and connoisseur, another figure increasingly visible in Florence. James himself, accumulating anecdotes, characters, and museum-grade gossip at dinner parties, salons, and teas, was in the same mold. Having gathered the threads of Claire Clairmont’s story, he spun it into the tale called The Aspern Papers, the masterpiece of his shorter fiction. For purposes of atmosphere, he moved the locale to a damp and decaying Venetian palazzo, but contemporary Florence—the epitome of the “visitable past”—had provided him the specimen of the pursuer of beauty who, not content to visit the past in the manner of tourists, is compelled to possess it completely.

3                  

Bernard Berenson was another man on whom nothing was lost. He knew everyone and made everyone his supporter. Henry James’s brother William and Ruskin’s friend Charles Eliot Norton had been his teachers at Harvard; his budding career as a man of letters was being underwritten by Isabella Stewart Gardner, the Boston socialite and fanatic aesthete (known as “Mrs. Jack” after her millionaire husband); and he would have known Ruskin if Ruskin weren’t by then insane. Soon enough he would come to know the London art dealer Joseph Duveen, with whom he would become the great authenticator, the provider of the scholarship that underwrote Duveen’s hustling and his clients’ vanity and greed. No one could ever quite say if Berenson was culpable in anything: he was adept at covering his tracks going back to the moment when he had gotten himself baptized an Episcopalian and changed his name from Bernhard to Bernard to ease his passage into the beau monde, to stymie the snobs and, not least, the anti-Semites.

But in 1889, when he first came to Florence on a stipend from Harvard and Mrs. Gardner, Bernard Berenson was all of twenty-three years old, a very young man in a very old city. Just then, the city engineer Giuseppe Poggi’s improvements were reaching their climax with the gutting of the old central market at the city’s core and its reconstruction as the Piazza della Repubblica. Berenson arrived in March, in time to see the last remnants of the “complex of bulk and shape in free-stone, in marble, in bronze, in glazed terra-cotta the like of which Europe had never seen.”

He mourned that loss later—the impossibility of visiting that particular past—but he did the things people always did in Florence, that they still do, imagining themselves in the footsteps of Claire Clairmont, Ruskin, Elizabeth Browning, Henry James, or perhaps, today, Bernard Berenson: he took a room on the Piazza Santo Spirito, sat in the caffé, and watched the fountain spill and flood; walked to the Piazza del Carmine and the Brancacci Chapel and its Masaccios; bore down the Via San Agostino in the opposite direction to the Boboli Gardens and the Pitti Palace; then across the Ponte Santa Trinità and to the churches of Santa Maria Novella, San Lorenzo, Santissima Annuziata, and, not least, Santa Croce; and then, day after day, hour after hour, the Uffizi.

He was more than busy, he was inundated, swamped and overwhelmed by artworks and history, by the originals of the objects he had only heard about at Harvard. He felt he had no time to write his underwriters, who supposed he still planned to become a literary critic or novelist, but now there was nothing that interested him but art. Mrs. Gardner let her irritation be known—she wanted intelligence, information, news from abroad—and with that she cut off their correspondence. But within a few years she came back to him and, being Mrs. Jack, she would want much more.

Ruskin had pressed himself to the limit trying to “see things—as they Are.” He was a visionary, but Berenson had an “eye”: he didn’t see what Ruskin might see, but he looked with rare, dispassionate acuity. Where Ruskin couldn’t recollect whether Cimabue’s dove wings tended up or down, Berenson could soon claim to differentiate the merest stroke of one Florentine studio from another. He loved art, but perhaps not “what she mirrors better.” Just a painting, preferably a masterpiece, would do nicely.

Other people had an eye too. They scrutinized rather than contemplated. For example, the story of the Borgo Allegri and Cimabue’s Rucellai Madonna had always seemed suspect: Charles of Anjou came through Florence in 1267, when Cimabue was an unknown whose work would scarcely occasion a royal procession. Then in 1889, the year that Berenson arrived in Florence, Franz Wickhoff, an Austrian archeologist and historian, suggested that the Madonna wasn’t even by Cimabue. He’d found an archival document of 1285 showing that a painter from Siena named Duccio di Buoninsegna had been commissioned to paint an altarpiece for Santa Maria Novella that could only be the Rucellai Madonna. Cimabue’s masterpiece was, it seemed, no longer a Cimabue. Within a dozen years another art historian, R. Langton Douglas, concluded that, given extensive and dubious restorations, the poor state of the paintings, and the absence of documentation, there were no works at all that could be attributed to Cimabue: “to scientific criticism Cimabue as an artist is an unknown person.” He might be no more than a Florentine legend.

Bernard Berenson decided he must stay in Italy at any cost. Without quite intending to, he’d run away from Harvard and America and found himself in the Shangrila of art. Of course there would be no more support from Boston and Cambridge, so he went to London and more or less conquered it. His charm and brilliance brought him into contact with Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and, most intimately, with Frank and Mary Costelloe, a young couple nearly as witty and art-obsessed as Berenson. They traveled through Europe together (largely at Frank Costelloe’s expense) and let one masterpiece after another wash over them, and at some point Bernard and Mary fell in love. Being together would involve enormous pain, difficulty, and sacrifice, and the stakes were high: “I want you to realize that beauty is scarcely less than duty,” Bernard wrote Mary from Florence. “You do naturally, I am sure, otherwise I should scarcely have become your friend.” They would be lovers, perhaps even marry, but, most important, they would devote themselves to art. The Uffizi would be their “workshop,” the Pitti their “parlor.” Mary and Frank Costelloe’s children would remain with their father.

While Mary negotiated her separation and divorce in England, Bernard pursued his latest quarry, the work of Giovanni Bazzi (known as Sodoma), to the monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore near Siena. He took a room in the cloister and listened to the monks chant and pray as he read his Vasari. Four days passed and it came to him that he ought to become a Catholic: Mary had converted in order to marry Frank; he would convert in order to wed—or at least be closer to—Mary. A few months later, in February 1891, he made his first confession and was received into the Roman church.

Mary secured her separation from Frank the following year and joined Bernard in Florence, albeit in separate households to avoid further scandal. Still, there remained the question of how they would support themselves. Berenson had finished his first book, The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, but writing art history was scarcely lucrative. Then, in the spring of 1893, he was asked, almost by chance, to give some advice to a group of wealthy Americans looking for art to buy. “I made a lot of money out of them,” he wrote, and “they are likely to prove a pretty constant source of income.” The following year Isabella Stewart Gardner reentered Bernard’s life. Seeking to mend fences, he’d sent a copy of his Venetian book to her together with an apologetic, not to say fawning, letter. She replied and, after scolding him for his long absence, expressed an interest in acquiring a few paintings.

Unlike his first trip to Florence, this time Bernard now wrote back frequently and at length. But he got to the point quickly enough: “How much do you want a Botticelli? Lord Ashburnham has a great one.” It seemed that Mrs. Jack would like one very much, and so began Bernard’s thirty years of service to her as adviser and broker. She insisted on acquiring “only the greatest in the world” and he obliged. He had a knack for making her feel an insider of the highest order for whom he would sweep aside the mystic curtain of lost masterpieces and reveal finds and opportunities that only she was privy to and worthy of: “And now I want to propose to you one of the most precious works of art. It is a madonna by Giovanni Bellini, painted in his youth after his wife, as I have every reason to believe.” And after a sale was made he never forgot to congratulate her on her wisdom and good fortune: “Brava! a hundred times brava! I cannot tell you how happy it made me to think of your possessing the most glorious of all Guardis.”

Mrs. Jack and, increasingly, her other millionaire friends enabled Bernard and Mary to live on in Florence, to begin building their own collection of masterworks, and to research and write. In 1896, Bernard published his own magnum opus, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance. It was a capaciously authoritative work and an immediate classic whose success made him an even more sought-after adviser and broker. It also took his scholarship beyond history and connoisseurship into the realm of theory. Art does not transcend reality, but distills it to its visual essence, “giving tactile values to retinal impressions,” and it is this to which the viewer responds in a masterpiece: “It lends a higher coefficient of reality to the object represented, with the consequent enjoyment of accelerated psychical processes . . . hence the greater pleasure we take in the object painted than in itself.”

To illustrate his point, Berenson compared two Florentine paintings of roughly the same age and subject, an enthroned Madonna, or Maestà. The first Maestà was by Cimabue, the second by his pupil Giotto. “With what sense of relief, of rapidly rising vitality we turn to the Giotto,” Berenson opined, his disdain evident in writing Cimabue as “Cimabue,” shrouded in quotation marks, as though the artist’s existence were as dubious as his talent.

At the very end of December 1900, Bernard Berenson and Mary Costelloe at last became man and wife. With marriage came a home, and not just a house but a villa worthy of masterpieces. The sixteenth-century I Tatti, on seventy acres outside Florence in Settignano, was vast and beautiful. The grounds spilled down the hill in the direction of the river and the light was like water and oil: Samuel Clemens, who met the Berensons at lunch, marveled “to see the sun sink down on his pink and purple and golden floods, and overwhelm Florence with tides of color that make all the sharp lines dim and faint and turn the solid city to a city of dreams.” Its rooms called out for beautiful artworks and decoration, which would require even more money than the considerable sums Bernard was now generating.

I Tatti also had its own chapel and it was there that Mary and Bernard were married—though both were now lapsed from Catholicism—by a priest. Their patience with Catholic morality had been exhausted during the almost decadelong scandal of their love affair and the Costelloe divorce. And once married Bernard’s view of his vows would be rather more elastic than the Church’s. He would collect sexual liaisons much as he did miniatures and objets. In that, he was culpable, but he came by his avarice innocently, for good and exalted reasons, because “beauty is scarcely less than duty.”

4                  

As the Berensons were settling at I Tatti, Edward Morgan Forster was finishing his last year at Cambridge. He was a diffident boy, a little oppressed by his mother Lily. What he would do with himself next was unclear, so in the mode of other such young men, he traveled, joined, of course, by Lily. They would go to Italy and they would go, naturally, to Florence. They spent their first three days in a hotel midway between the San Lorenzo market and Santa Maria Novella, but, as Edward wrote a friend, “my mother hankers after an Arno view,” so on the fourth day they transferred to the Pensione Simi on Lungarno delle Grazie, with the river before it and Santa Croce and the Biblioteca Nazionale just behind.

Lily was pleased by her view, but as far as Edward was concerned they might as well have been “in Tunbridge Wells” as in Florence. The landlady was English with a Cockney accent and the other guests were English ladies all of a piece with his mother, clutching identical editions of the Baedecker guide. At dinner they recounted their identical days spent trawling the Uffizi, the Academy, the Pitti, and the rest. Edward’s own days were filled with magnificence punctuated by squalor: “Yesterday I went to San Lorenzo. I had got ready all the appropriate sentiments for [Michelangelo’s] New Sacristy and they answered very well. More spontaneous perhaps were my feelings at seeing the cloisterful of starved and maimed cats.”

Florence, he supposed, was not exactly a disappointment: it did not fail him; rather, he failed it. He could not quite summon up a feeling commensurate with the city’s beauty and greatness, his own responses numbed and muffled as though by a thick and clumsy pair of gloves: by the accumulation of previous responses of renowned writers, critics, and culture heroes; by the guidebooks and their checklists; by the mob of women like his mother. Later, he would write up the experience in a novel from the point of view of a girl named Lucy Honeychurch on a visit to Santa Croce:

Of course, it must be a wonderful building. But how like a barn! And how very cold! Of course, it contained frescoes by Giotto, in the presence of whose tactile values she was capable of feeling what was proper. But who was to tell her which they were? She walked about disdainfully, unwilling to be enthusiastic over monuments of uncertain authorship or date. There was no one even to tell her which, of all the sepulchral slabs that paved the nave and transepts, was the one that was really beautiful, the one that had been most praised by Mr. Ruskin.

Edward and Lily were in Florence five weeks and at some point he did find a refuge from the legion of English ladies. The art historian R. H. Cust held a salon each Sunday—exclusively male—for young art historians. Cust was an expert on the art of Siena and a friend of Berenson’s, having recently served as his stalking horse in a feud with Langton Douglas (the erstwhile debunker of “Cimabue”) in an exchange of vituperative reviews and articles in The Burlington magazine. Cust appeared in the character of Mr. Rankin in an early draft of Edward’s Lucy Honeychurch novel:

“It is inconceivable,” concluded Mr. Rankin, “how Alesio Baldovinetti can have been so long neglected. This alone”—he pointed to the Botticelli-Rafellino-Baldovinetti-Lippi-Goudstinker Madonna, which hung behind them on the wall—“would be sufficient to make his reputation enduring.”

Like Lucy in Santa Croce, Cust and his young men were less interested in art and paintings than in reputations and attributions. And well they might be: at around the time Edward was in Florence, Berenson was in London concluding an arrangement with Joseph Duveen whereby he would receive an annual retainer of $50,000 plus a percentage of each sale he facilitated. One could, it seemed, reap a considerable income while simultaneously enjoying “accelerated psychical processes.”

But after a few afternoons at Cust’s, Edward came to feel that the art historians were but a more polished version of the English ladies; that their smart talk and handsome profiles were only another aspect of connoisseurship and collecting for Cust, who “delighted to fill his rooms with viewy young men and hear them talk on art.” The men were “viewy,” forever appraising and being appraised. His mother wanted a view of the Arno in order not so much to see Florence as to possess a postcard of it. The whole pathetic, frustrating, and comic business would become a novel called A Room with a View six years later, in 1907. And it would be misunderstood: perhaps people confused the title with a work of his friend Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, but the phrase came to represent not folly but a further piece of the legend of the epiphanies you might experience in Florence. And how could it be helped? Even Lucy was not so benumbed by her Baedecker and her provincialism to escape seeing it:

Evening approached while they chatted; the air became brighter; the colours on the trees and hills were purified, and the Arno lost its muddy solidity and began to twinkle. There were a few streaks of bluish-green among the clouds, a few patches of watery light upon the earth, and then the dripping facade of San Miniato shone brilliantly in the declining sun.

On November 4, 1903, more or less simultaneously with Forster and his heroine Lucy Honeychurch, a young Englishwoman named Dorothy Nevile Lees arrived by train in Florence:

It looked little like what my imagination had pictured, and yet the dull, badly-lit station, tumultuous with shouting porters and aggrieved tourists bewailing lost luggage, was indeed Florence, Florence the beautiful, the birthplace of Dante, the City of Flowers, the goal of a thousand precious hopes.

Dorothy was twenty-three years old, the daughter of a once-wealthy Staffordshire family now reduced to fending for herself. She was an Italophile on principle and a devotee of Shelley, Byron, and the Brownings in particular, and if she was forced to eke out a living why should she not indeed do it where they—the poets and the artists—had done it?

She took a room in a cold, damp, and dark palazzo and shivered through the long winter studying Italian. The following spring Dorothy found work as a governess to a wealthy Italian family with a palazzo on the Arno and a villa in the hills, tutoring three children in English and French and taking them on cultural walks in the city and strolls through the country. It was an agreeable position with time to spare for reading, writing poems, and cultivating vistas and views. She might, for example, rise at dawn and render what she saw into poetical language:

Towards four o’clock the thunder died away in the distance and, as I looked out from my window, the grey light was stealing, and torn masses of white cloud lay among the hills. The river was in flood, and the swirling torrents of brown water rushed down under the bridges, roaring like some tameless and infuriated beast. The mountains were purple, almost black, and the jagged clouds hung low above them, but in the midst, serene and unshaken, rose the great tower of the Palazzo Vecchio . . .

As she accumulated such impressions, she ceased to feel herself a tourist. But, unlike many artist/expatriates, neither did she become a snob in the mode of A Room with a View’s pretentious belletrist Miss Lavish, who proclaimed that “the narrowness and superficiality of the Anglo-Saxon tourist is nothing less than a menace.” Dorothy’s curiosity, energy, and independence of mind were inexhaustible. She wondered what it was that drove people to Florence, and especially, “what it is which brings the Americans, above other nations, in such numbers, to the Holy Land of Art?”

Sometimes, like other expatriates, Dorothy felt that the natives were not quite equal to their heritage. She jettisoned Shelley and Byron in favor of St. Francis as her patron and muse—“he who was the poet, not of the love of the women but of the love of God”—but lamented the “dirty and commonplace” monks she found in contemporary Franciscan monasteries. Instead, like Francis, she immersed herself in “the green cathedral” of the Casentine Forests, “the altar of the hills, the dwelling place of God,” among Dante’s “green angels.”

In the city, Dorothy haunted the churches, not from any religious impulse—she had an English aversion to the “errors” and superstition of the Roman church—but in search of art. A year and a half after her arrival in Florence, she spent an evening in Santa Maria Novella contemplating the Rucellai Madonna. She knew there was a controversy regarding its attribution, but she favored Cimabue and his studio in the Borgo Allegri: “For my part, I love the story of the Merry Suburb, the jubilant city, the triumphant painter, the glad procession . . .”

And although at one time she might have marked it a distraction, she liked to watch people pray before the Madonna, lighting their votives and leaving their gifts, and Dorothy imagined that the Madonna, too, liked it: “Ah, Madonna, how much happier are you, with your candles and flowers in your dim chapel, than your many sisters, torn from their seclusion and set in rows in the great bright galleries, where only the critical eyes of strangers rest upon them, and no one burns candles in their honor . . .”

That evening in May at Santa Maria Novella, she watched a young woman, bareheaded and dark-eyed, pray before the Madonna. Dorothy knew that “young girls came to pray for their lovers” but grief and trouble hung over this woman, the double solitude of a pregnant girl on her own. After some time “she rose at last, laid a bunch of violets below the picture, and, leaning forward, kissed the frame.” It seemed just then that Florence was infused—as much as by art and beauty—by prayer “articulate or inarticulate, and everywhere goes up, night and day, conscious or unconscious, the cry of the finite to the Infinite . . .” Or perhaps this was the art the Italians still excelled at, the seizing of expectation or at least hope, of the possibility of something rather than nothing as a form of beauty.

For that little time Dorothy, although not precisely a believer, became preoccupied with prayer, the least lucrative of occupations. She may have put her hand to it as she did to poetry. But then, like prayer, she wrote books no one seemed likely to read.

She sent off two rather similar manuscripts of her impressions of Italy to London, one called Scenes and Shrines in Tuscany and the other Tuscan Feasts and Friends. That autumn Dorothy went to work with another expatriate woman and set up the “Literary and Foreign Office,” which offered translation services as well as typing for the last survivors of Henry James’s old literary set in Bellosguardo. She also freelanced for the expatriate newspapers The Italian Gazette and The Florence Herald. Then, much to her surprise, she heard from London: both books had sold. Both would be published the following year.

With two books appearing in 1907—issued by major firms, Dent and Chatto & Windus—Dorothy suddenly found herself a professional writer. True, she’d managed to sneak only one of her poems into the books; and true, a reviewer had compared her prose style to that of Miss Lavish in A Room with a View, which had also been published earlier that year. But against that, in the new year she received an offer for a two-book contract from yet another prestigious publisher, Methuen. And she met and fell in love with Edward Gordon Craig.

Craig was entirely a creature of the theater, of acting, directing, and stage design, the last being the métier of his indubitable genius. His mother was Ellen Terry, the greatest English actress of the late Victorian age. He had just ended an affair with Isadora Duncan in Paris and was now collaborating with Eleonora Duse (herself the biggest star in Italy and the lover of the flamboyant writer and dramatist Gabriele d’Annunzio) for a production in Florence. He liked women: over his lifetime he would father ten children by five different mothers.

Craig was no mere craftsman: he was not only an artist but a philosopher, a theoretician, and a prophet. His aim was to set aside all the previous “Laws of Art . . . , to transform and make the already beautiful more beautiful.” To that end, he would found a journal called The Mask. Dorothy would be his largely anonymous collaborator—he was the genius—but Craig made a wood-block image of her as a rough-hewn Etruscan deity to adorn the cover.

The first issue of The Mask appeared in 1908, filled mostly with articles penned by Dorothy and Craig under an assortment of assumed names. Over the twenty years of its life The Mask would be much admired if not often purchased or subscribed to. Dorothy sold her jewelry to keep it afloat. As for her own work and royalties, she’d declined Methuen’s offer lest it interfere with Craig and their mission to transform beauty into still greater beauty.

They did not marry nor did they live together: as with Bernard Berenson and Mary Costelloe a few years earlier, that would have been a scandal neither expatriate bohemianism nor Italian tolerance could allow for. Instead, Dorothy took a room of her own—without heat or water and lit by candles—in a tower by Ponte Vecchio. There was a single chamber, a window and shutters, books and bookcases, a writing table with a vase of lilies upon it, and an Annunciation on the wall. It would be her home for the next thirty-five years.

Dorothy and Craig met at the office of The Mask and, otherwise, where and when they could—hotels and borrowed apartments and villas—usually away from Florence. In her diary she referred to Craig as “Signor,” and recorded their encounters—“magical,” “exquisite,” “precious”—in shorthand. Nine years into their collaboration, early in 1917, Craig proposed a rendezvous in Rome, specifying not only food but dress:

Dine first—dine well and have a good bottle of vino for the sake of me—capito?

You know I like things loose . . . Veiled is best.

That September, Dorothy’s son, David, was born. Several weeks before her due date she quietly left Florence and settled into a hotel room Craig had found for her in Pisa. On the page for the date of his birth in her diary she copied a line from Dante: Incipit Vita Nuova, “Here begins a new life.”

There being no father of record, David was given his mother’s last name and he also became, by default, an Italian citizen. There would be no ties to England: Dorothy’s family, shamed, cut her off and disowned her. Craig had meanwhile left Florence for France—for other veiled women, other transformations of the beautiful—and the mother and the boy lived together in the tower. She reported on Italian affairs for the better class of English and American newspapers and periodicals and resumed work on her own books, finished, titled, but ultimately unpublished: Life Goes On, Living in a Tower, and A Small Boy in Tuscany, the last a heroically fictionalized tale of her own David. In fact, they were both very brave. They lived alone in a foreign country on very little and at a very great altitude. David was strong and of stern enough stuff to swim in the Arno.

Dorothy tried to prevent David’s becoming estranged from his father. Perhaps, she wrote, “by-and-bye you may go and be with him a while. Papa is so wonderful and I love you both so much. All your life you can be proud of your father for he is one of the great artists of the world.”

When David was about twelve, Dorothy gave him a camera, a caterpillarish thing with bellows, and now he too was an artist. Dorothy herself took on a life of contented forbearance: the life of a secular St. Francis, of unconscious but perhaps not unheard prayer; of the Madonna, candles, and violets.

5                  

In 1926 The Last Supper of Giorgio Vasari was moved from its chapel at Santa Croce to the refectory. Its condition was recorded as being molto guasto—“very damaged”—but that was no one’s concern. The refectory was considered the backwater of Santa Croce’s artworks, and there Vasari’s painting joined a Crocifisso, reputed to be by the dubious “Cimabue,” that had once, in better days, hung over the high altar itself.

But regardless of the condition or reputation of particular paintings, connoisseurship flourished. At I Tatti Bernard Berenson was, as his biographer put it, “afloat on a golden flood.” His yearly income exceeded $100,000 and he had an additional $300,000 in investments. He began to give some consideration to his estate, and met with an official from Harvard, who agreed that the university would be pleased to take over I Tatti at Berenson’s death and operate it as an institute for the study of art history.

But then came the Great Depression. In 1932 Berenson’s dealer, Joseph Duveen, wrote to inform him that henceforth his annual retainer would be reduced to $10,000 and he would receive only a ten percent cut of sales. Under present circumstances, the millionaires they had both depended on no longer had the means or the inclination to expand their collections. Still, it was Duveen who kept Berenson afloat, who paid for I Tatti and its maids, cooks, and gardeners, its rare books, its motorcars and, of course, its paintings. And it was Berenson who provided the guarantees that made Duveen’s deals possible. They were in too deep together to part.

Five years later Duveen asked him to confirm an attribution of a Nativity generally believed to be by the Venetian master Giorgione. Berenson thought the painting was an early work by Giorgione’s compatriot and student Titian. But Duveen had already lined up the banker Andrew Mellon to buy it at a record price of $300,000 on the understanding that it was a Giorgione. Apprised of Berenson’s opinion, Mellon told Duveen, “I don’t want another Titian. Find me a Giorgione.”

But Berenson was unwilling to reconsider his attribution, or, rather, unwilling to do so without a return to his previous financial arrangement with Duveen. Negotiations stalled, Mellon died in the interim, and the painting was sold as a Titian to Samuel Kress, the department store magnate. Duveen and Berenson never spoke again. On Kress’s death the Nativity passed to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. It is today almost universally ascribed to Giorgione.

Berenson now felt pressed from every side: the art market was stagnant and the collectors that might have bypassed Duveen and come directly to him for advice had stopped traveling due to mounting global tensions. Moreover, he was an American citizen and a Jew living in a country increasingly allied with Germany. It seemed wise to transfer the deed for I Tatti now rather than at his death and to take an annuity from Harvard in exchange. He did not entirely trust Harvard. He feared they would turn I Tatti over to the academics and theorists who did not love painting as he did. But he trusted Mussolini less: Mussolini was a philistine. He didn’t care about art. He was said to like modern art, which was even worse.

By 1938, Dorothy Lees was, among her other literary endeavors, “our correspondent in Florence” for The Times of London. She was not exactly a reporter, but she sent the paper short features, anecdotes, and information and tips for tourists. She was also often able to arrange for David’s photographs—he’d begun entering photography competitions when he was still a high school student at Florence ’s Scuola d’Arte—alongside her own work, credited simply “David—Firenze.” Now twenty years old, he was serving in the Italian army but still billeted in Florence.

On May 8 one of her items appeared under the headline “Brilliant Display for Herr Hitler.” The German Führer was coming the next day to Florence, escorted by Benito Mussolini. Banners and decorations would be erected and a state apartment in the Palazzo Pitti redecorated for his stay. But above all, Dorothy wrote, “in Florence another side of Italian life will be displayed before Herr Hitler—the domain of art and culture.” David too was caught up in the Führer’s visit: with the permission of his superiors, he posted himself along the route of the motorcade and tried, unsuccessfully, to photograph the two great men.

Adolf Hitler was scarcely a passive dignitary being shown the highlights of the city: he had an appetite for art. At his specific request, Mussolini took him to the Uffizi. They went into Room 2, the new home of Giotto’s and Cimabue’s respective Ognissanti and Santa Trinità Madonnas, recently removed from their churches so that they might be better seen by the public. Here, as in the other galleries, it was clear that what people said was true: Mussolini gave not a fig for masterpieces. Journalists accompanying them noted Hitler’s scarcely disguised shock at this realization.

The Führer inspected every artwork microscopically and four hours passed inside the Uffizi. Mussolini grew bored and exasperated (Tutti questi quadri, “All these paintings,” sighed Il Duce). Hitler meanwhile listened contentedly to the explications of his guide and interpreter, Friedrich Kriegbaum, the Italophile (and secretly anti-Nazi) director of the German Art Historical Institute of Florence. When Hitler stopped for a long time before a Titian and expressed his admiration, Kriegbaum steered him on to another, lesser work, fearing that Mussolini, given to impulsiveness and looking to ease his boredom, might decide to offer it then and there as a gift to the Führer.

Kriegbaum was also an authority on the architecture of the bridges of the Arno, and in particular on the Ponte Santa Trinità, in which he’d proven Michelangelo had a role. He took Hitler to a window overlooking the river. But Hitler was less impressed with the Ponte Santa Trinità and its magnificent statues of the four seasons than by the Ponte Vecchio. When Hitler had been an art student in Vienna before the First World War, he’d specialized in illustrations of the most winsome and characteristic spots in the city. He hadn’t lost his eye for the picturesque. He’d toured Rome with King Victor Emmanuel III at his side, but later confided that “those moments of joy passed in front of the Arno exceeded anything in Rome.” He knew a view when he saw one.

Afterward, atop a hill in Fiesole overlooking the city, the Führer rhapsodized to the press corps: “The greatest wish I have would be to go incognito to Florence for ten days and, at leisure, study the unparalleled masterpieces of the Uffizi and Pitti galleries. I’d put on a false beard, dark glasses and an old suit, and comb my hair a different way. Then I’d spend that ten days in those art galleries of Florence worshiping as an artist at the feet of the old masters.”

As Hitler prowled the galleries and the loggia overlooking the Arno, Ugo Procacci was at work in the Gabinetto dei Restauri, the Uffizi’s restoration laboratory. The Gabinetto was Procacci’s own creation, then Italy’s first and only dedicated art conservation studio, founded four years before. He was scarcely twenty-nine then, and he might have been called a prodigy but for his evident humility. His brilliance took the form of curiosity, and that was unstoppable.

Only a year after he’d joined the Uffizi staff fresh from graduate school, he removed pieces of an altar in the Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine and uncovered two spectacular fragments of early fifteenth-century fresco by Masaccio and Masolino. These works along with the rest of the Brancacci Chapel were considered the bridge between the dawn of the Renaissance and its full flower in the later 1400s and the 1500s—from Cimabue and Giotto to Botticelli, Leonardo, and beyond—and Procacci’s discovery would lead to their full restoration over the next fifty years.

But Ugo Procacci was not simply an earnest young art historian but also a committed anti-Fascist. To have Mussolini plus Hitler inside the Uffizi seemed both an outrage and a sacrilege. Procacci’s mentor and teacher Gaetano Salvemini had been dismissed from his university post and sent into exile for his anti-Fascist activities two years into their collaboration. Procacci subsequently served in two other anti-Mussolini groups, but by a combination of luck and a grasp of the precise level at which to keep his head down—the authorities did not in any case consider art history a breeding ground for subversives—he clung on in his laboratory and the galleries and moldering churches Il Duce so disdained.

Despite that, when Mussolini declared war on the Allies in June 1940, Florence immediately began to pack away its art for the duration of hostilities. Among his other responsibilities, Procacci was now second in command in the Superintendency—the agency with overall responsibility for Florence’s museums and cultural monuments—and took charge of the evacuation of artworks to refuges in the countryside. With his customary energy, he emptied the Uffizi in ten days and then went to work securing the remainder of the city’s art. What could not be moved to rural villas and caves was covered up with timber and scaffolding, cushioned with sandbags, or barricaded in masonry. It was an impressive effort: each of Della Robbia’s tondi on the front of the Ospedale degli Innocenti sheltered in its own bombproof shed and in the Accademia Michelangelo’s David was enclosed in an enormous silo of bricks.

That autumn Hitler returned to Florence. He was angry with Il Duce, who had just then invaded Greece against his wishes. But the Führer had earlier expressed an interest in acquiring a painting by the nineteenth-century Austrian artist Hans Makart for a museum of art he was founding in his hometown of Linz. The current owners, relatives of the Rothschilds, had hung it in their villa in the Florentine hills. Mussolini had it confiscated as matériel essential to the war effort (in the possession of Jews no less). A whopping seven-foot-long triptych in the late Romantic style, it was presented to Hitler by Il Duce in the Piazza della Signoria. Its title was Die Pest in Florenz, “The Plague in Florence.”

To this and other travesties, indignities, and evils, Procacci could only resign himself and do what he could to keep the Gabinetto afloat: “Every day, another piece of good news,” he wrote a friend archly. Despite shortages of money, supplies, chemicals, and even paint, he managed over the next two years to restore works by both Botticelli and Titian.

In the autumn of 1943 Mussolini had been deposed and Tuscany and northern Italy were under direct German administration. The Allies commenced bomber missions against the occupiers, focusing on installations like the Campo di Marte railway yards not far from Procacci’s home while taking special care to avoid hitting the historic city center. They were by and large successful in this, although 217 Italians died, as did one German, Friedrich Kriegbaum, of whom Berenson would later remark, “He was one of the most thoroughly humanized and cultured individuals of my acquaintance, gentle, tender, incapable of evil.”

Kriegbaum was having a drink at a friend’s near San Domenico, the village of Fra Angelico, when the raid began. His host fled to the cellar, but Kriegbaum remained upstairs. He’d seen much, much worse on his trips back to Germany, and he was confident the Allies would continue to be careful with Florence: Chi potrebbe distruggere una tale bellezza? he’d asked recently. “Who could destroy such beauty?”

Eleven months later, in the summer of 1944, the Allies were closing in. Among them was a thirty-year-old American army lieutenant with a degree in art history from Columbia named Frederick Hartt, an owlishly intent young man rendered still more owlish by round spectacles. His eye landed him a posting as a reconnaissance photoanalyst and when victory approached he was assigned to the Allied Commission for Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives. Fluent in Italian and familiar with Tuscany and its art—he’d written his thesis on Michelangelo—he was charged with following just behind the troops to locate and secure artworks and other culturally important property.

Hartt had reached Siena on June 30 in a jeep called “Lucky 13,” ironically so in light of its shattered windshield, concussed body, leaking radiator, and lame shock absorbers. But his goal was Florence. Hitler had promised that Florence would be considered an “open city,” treated as a no-combat zone on account of its beauty, history, and art. But there had been no further confirmation from Berlin that Hitler would honor his previous assurances. On July 20, when the Allies were perhaps ten days away from Florence, a group of Hitler’s own generals had attempted to assassinate him and the Führer disappeared from public view.

Allied intelligence had in the meanwhile surmised that the Florentine museum authorities, believing Hitler’s assurances, had begun or were about to begin moving their artworks back into the city. But given the actual state of affairs in Germany and on the battlefront—now perhaps twenty-five miles from Florence—this would be disastrous.

On July 31 Hartt, moving forward with advance troops from the U.S. 8th Army, reached a hilltop several miles short of Florence. He could make out the city, the hills on either side lit by German and Allied artillery flashes, the Arno a dark swath between them. But his goal, although in sight, was still out of reach: it seemed unlikely the Allies could take control of Florence for at least another week. Meanwhile, there was no telling what damage might be done, particularly if the Italians naively began moving things back to the city.

For Hartt, who knew the art intimately, the worry and frustration were overwhelming. He could reconnoiter the countryside south of the city in Lucky 13, scour likely villas, castles, and farms, and perhaps locate and secure artworks in storage there, assuming there still were any. But the most crucial thing he most needed to do was, for now, impossible: to get inside Florence and locate Ugo Procacci.

Hartt would have found Procacci just then neither at the Gabinetto dei Restauri nor at his home (that had been bombed) but living and working in the Palazzo Pitti, now the headquarters of the Superintendency. During the last few days he’d received several inexplicable requests from the Wehrmacht: first, on July 29, the Germans asked for a detailed map of the Arno riverfront, and then an unidentified officer called him to ask if the four statues representing the seasons on the Ponte Santa Trinità could be removed on short notice. Procacci doubted it—not without damage, in any case—and the German hung up before he could ask why this might need to be done.

Later that day, a proclamation was issued ordering all persons living or working within three blocks of either side of the Arno to evacuate their homes and businesses by noon on July 30. With no place else to go, a significant portion of the Oltrarno moved into the staterooms, halls, courtyards, and gardens of the Pitti. Procacci assumed that at a minimum, the Germans wanted civilians out of the way while they made their retreat or, worse, that they planned to use the river as their battlefront and defensive line.

Two days later, August 1, Procacci sneaked through the Corridoio Vasariano, the elevated passageway designed by Giorgio Vasari to connect the Palazzo Pitti with the Uffizi by way of the Ponte Vecchio. From a window just short of the bridge he saw German soldiers kicking in the doors of abandoned houses and businesses, lobbing a hand grenade into each vestibule, presumably to flush out any stragglers. One of the soldiers glanced in the direction of the Corridoio and Procacci ducked down, fearing he’d been seen. When he was certain the patrol had moved on—when the sound of the grenades echoing out of the doorways began to fade—he looked out onto the deserted street again and now he noticed a series of rather elegant black, bell-shaped devices connected in succession by strands of cable fastened to the walls of every edifice standing near the Ponte Vecchio and those on the streets extending away from it.

Procacci realized these were charges of some kind, perhaps to stop an assault by the Allies by bringing the buildings bordering the riverbank down on their heads. Procacci’s guess was close, but the actual German plan—code-named Feuerzauber, “fire magic”—was to withdraw from Florence but make the Arno impassable to the Allies. To that end, the Wehrmacht was installing bombs on all six Florentine bridges, including the Ponte alla Carraia, Ponte Santa Trinità, and Ponte Vecchio in the historic center. But that same day, as the Allies pressed within twenty miles of Florence, a telegram arrived from Berlin. Someone—at the very highest levels—had revised Operation Feuerzauber in a very particular way:

By order of the Supreme Commander Southwest, no military measures are to be taken against the Ponte Vecchio, not even antipersonnel mines and the like. Measures already taken are to be immediately canceled. Confirm that this order has been executed.

Two nights later, on the evening of August 3, Ugo Procacci and his wife were outside taking the air at the Palazzo Pitti. After five days of occupation by thousands of refugees from all over the Oltrarno, food and water were running short and the sanitary facilities overwhelmed. The atmosphere was stuffy, humid, and, not least, foul.

A little before nine, there was a series of explosions, vastly louder than those either of artillery or Allied bombing runs on the Campo di Marte. Glass shattered throughout the palace and dust and smoke rained down. The Procaccis, seeking shelter, found themselves crushed among the panicked mob huddled between the courtyards. A second, fainter set of explosions thundered from the direction of the river, and then it was quiet.

The first group of detonations had in fact come from the area Procacci had secretly reconnoitered two days before. Now all the buildings on either side of the Oltrarno end of the Ponte Vecchio extending several blocks in every direction were reduced to rubble. The second set marked the same process at the other end of the bridge. Four hours passed. Then, between two and four in the morning on August 4, the remaining charges were ignited. There were dozens of explosions and Florentines, whose telephones and electricity had been cut off at the same time, imagined that the entire city was being razed in some new and unparalleled kind of air and artillery attack. Pieces of the Ponte alla Carraia landed a quarter mile away from the river in the San Lorenzo market and segments of tram rail from the Oltrarno fell in front of the post office in the Piazza della Repubblica. It took the Wehrmacht engineers several attempts to destroy the Ponte Santa Trinità, so the explosions continued well into the morning, after which the Germans salted the debris with mines. Farther away, the percussion of the bombs shattered windows and sucked open doors. On each Lungarno, the twin avenues bordering either side of the river, landslides of shattered stone, brick, and debris had cascaded into the Arno. A miasmic inferno of dust and smoke, the afterglow of the Feuerzauber, hung over the heart of the city until midday.

In the morning Ugo Procacci leaned out his window, straining for a view that might reveal what had transpired the previous night. He spotted two armed partisans of the Italian resistance coming toward the palace from the south. Where were the Germans? he called out. Gone, was the response, but they were still holding positions on the other side of the river. And the bridges? All blown up—except the Ponte Vecchio, answered one partisan, and then the other shouted Viva l’Italia! Procacci responded with the same cry, a little weakly, he felt. He should be overjoyed that the Germans were in retreat, but his thoughts were on the demolition of the night before and of the destruction of the Ponte Santa Trinità in particular. He was stunned and near tears: he half feared that something in him—perhaps a little inhuman, a little too in thrall to beauty—loved a work of art more than the liberation of his own people. Then, that afternoon, the first British troops arrived, and, as he would recall later, “a sort of delerium seized me—the abjection of twenty years, the agony of the last months, were over. I was a free man again.”

The view that met the Allies who reached the Arno later that day was bizarre: the Ponte Vecchio stood untouched, intact but surrounded by acres of rubble, an island of the picturesque in a sea of devastation. To Paolo Sica, an architect later involved in rebuilding the other bridges, this lone act of preservation seemed perverse, almost pathetic: the Ponte Vecchio was saved, he said, a little mystified, “by a romantic scrupulousness of an exquisitely German kind.”

A few days earlier, on August 1, Frederick Hartt received a report that a cache of artworks had been discovered in an abandoned villa near the battle line south of Florence. The British soldiers who’d stumbled across it were scarcely versed in art but someone seemed to think, crazily enough, that they’d seen Botticelli’s Primavera among the stacks of paintings.

Dodging German shells in a borrowed jeep, Hartt arrived at the Castello Montegufoni the next morning. Inside, he passed through Baroque doors into a pitch-dark salone that had apparently not been entered for months, perhaps even years. He ordered the shutters swung open—there was, of course, no electricity—and in dust-spiraling light he slowly made out not only the rumored Botticelli but also dozens of other works evacuated from Florence at the beginning of the war, not least the Giotto Madonna from the Ognissanti church, Cimabue’s Santa Trinità Madonna, and, alone and immense, the Rucellai Madonna, each slumped against the wall in this derelict ballroom in the Tuscan hills.

Hartt made sure guards were posted and returned to his headquarters. Apparently, contrary to intelligence reports, the Superintendency had not been returning evacuated art to the city. Meanwhile, there were other country estates where refugee artworks had been hidden and Hartt wanted to secure them as quickly as possible. But in some cases the Germans had gotten there first and were now making off with a booty of masterpieces as they retreated. From another villa, the Montagnana, they’d removed some 297 paintings—by Botticelli, Lippi, Bellini, and Tintoretto among others—plus a set of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s bronze doors from the Baptistry of Florence.

The Wehrmacht continued to shell Allied positions on the edge of Florence during its withdrawal north (bogged down in the Appenines, the Germans had to abandon the haul from the Villa Montagnana), so Hartt wasn’t allowed to enter Florence for another week. He continued searching out caches of art in the hills, in churches, chapels, cellars, and villas. He found masterpiece after masterpiece incongruously set down in empty countryside, and, in counterpoint, the piles of human excrement the German soldiers habitually deposited on tables, sculptures, and altars. On August 9, in a basement of an abandoned castle, he found an Annunciation by Filippo Lippi, and a little farther down, in the darkness, an enormous Crucifix by Cimabue; not the Santa Croce crucifix, but its earlier cousin from Arezzo, now crazily inverted in a wine cellar, the dolorous Mary on the left-hand extreme of its horizontal gazing up tenderly from the damp floor.

Four days later, he finally reached Florence. He descended down the road from Siena past the placid monastery of Certosa that he’d first seen ten years before, innocent of everything but art and beauty. That was how all the world seemed then, but nowhere more than Florence.

But here, even at the edge of the city, there was the devastation and squalor caused by broken water and sewage lines, shelling, and bombing, the shuffling, tawdry misery of a hungry and homeless population. His first stop was the Allied Administrative Headquarters near the Porta Romana, where he had to obtain passes for himself and, absurdly, he felt, for Ugo Procacci, this unknown native of Florence who’d spent the last five years imprisoned inside the city.

When Hartt reached the Pitti, among the six thousand displaced Florentines he found Procacci, tall, birdlike, formal, intense. Procacci hadn’t been able to see any of the destruction except what was visible from the high places on the palace grounds and he felt strongly that this was what he and the American ought to inspect first. He and Hartt had to approach the Arno like mountain climbers, using a ladder to ascend to the Corrodoio Vasariano and then out through a window and down a thirty-foot talus of rubble to the Ponte Vecchio. From halfway across they could look up and down the Arno, at the devastation on the banks, the stumps of the piers that had once supported the bridges, and the temporary span the Allies had quickly erected near the site of the Ponte Santa Trinità. Stopping the Allied advance for scarcely a few days, Operation Feuerzauber had been as pointless as it was destructive.

As they reached the end of the bridge and turned right to the Uffizi, chalked below the statue of Dante in Vasari’s colonnade was a typically Florentine graffito—unsentimental, wry, faintly bitter—of the kind that instantaneously appeared within days of any flood or disaster: In sul passo dell’Arno, I Tedeschi hanno lasciato il ricordo della loro civilità, “On this stretch of the Arno the Germans have left a memento of their civilization.”

Hartt and Procacci were perhaps softer-hearted. When Procacci let them inside the deserted Uffizi (there was scarcely any need for locks and keys) and they walked through the galleries—carpeted with dust, plaster, and broken glass—and up the stairs, each saw that the other was weeping. They went out into the loggia, where Hitler had taken his view of the Arno six years before, and gazed again at what seemed to sum up not the pity of war, or even the evil of war, but a dark mirrored analog of beauty; not mere ugliness or desecration, but an urge that went beyond destruction; a furious negation, annihilation aimed at absenting altogether what was most fully—in beauty—present.

Hartt found a room on the shattered Lungarno by the ruins of the Ponte alla Carraia. He and Procacci took Lucky 13 back out into the countryside and checked and secured the remaining artworks Procacci had relocated in 1940. Then Hartt went looking for another missing monument, Bernard Berenson. Berenson had last been seen at I Tatti a year before, and since then the villa had been empty except for a caretaker. When Hartt arrived in Florence, I Tatti was still behind enemy lines and had sustained damage from shell fire. But Berenson was gone, as was most of his art.

Hartt made inquiries that led him to Giovanni Colacicchi, the director of the Accademia. Colacicchi had it on good authority that Berenson was still in Florence, but had been in hiding ever since the collapse of Mussolini’s regime and the subsequent German occupation in September 1943. He’d been sheltered by friends in a villa in Careggi, on the northwest outskirts of the city then still technically under German control. During the first week of September Hartt finally reached the villa. Outside, there were two Wehrmacht corpses in the garden. He found Berenson upstairs, reclining on a chaise longue, shell holes in the wall above his head, surrounded by his paintings which he’d swaddled in blankets and cushions to protect them from shrapnel. He was seventy-nine years old, shaken, unsteady, and slow of speech, but his collection was unscathed.

Unhappily, Berenson had consigned about a quarter of his artworks to a friend’s house on the Borgo San Jacopo abutting the Ponte Vecchio, and these were buried in the debris along the river. But Hartt took extraordinary pains to recover them—he found twenty-seven in all—and each week he came with one or two more, combed from the mud, dust, and rubble, and laid them before the old man as though an offering. And with that, Berenson seemed to come back to life, and with him the life of I Tatti, the guests and fine conversation, and then, with Hartt in the vanguard, an initiative was launched to restore the ruined parts of Florence in general and the bridges in particular. The mission statement insisted on both verisimilitude and art historical accuracy: Dov’era, com’era, “Where it was, how it was.”

The most important but most difficult restoration would be the Ponte Santa Trinità, which was less a construction of stone than a sculpture surmounted by statues. The Four Seasons were now in pieces among the debris of the Lungarno or deep in the Arno, not just underwater but buried beneath tons of other stone. The sculptor Giannetto Mannucci was put in charge and he personally undertook the recovery dives into the Arno. In the dark and mud of the river bottom corpses were mingled with pieces of the statues: diving in October in search of the head of Caccini’s Autumn, Mannucci was shadowed by a decollated corpse spinning in an underwater eddy.

Through luck and persistence, most of the statue fragments had been found by the end of October. But on the second day of November—they always came during the first week of November, like a saint’s day or a shift of constellations—the biggest flood since 1864 poured down the channel of the Arno. Hartt could hear the river from six blocks away. The tint of the water transited the spectrum from milky to ocher to brown to deep gray, and then came the tree trunks and “whole patches of earth with squashes growing on them” from farms upstream. Inside Hartt’s apartment in the Palazzo Corsini on the Lungarno the noise was deafening, the gyre of black and gray that was the river and the downpour from the sky above it consuming all.

It would have been a minor flood, but the German demolition had rendered it something larger. Because of the debris under and along the river the channel was narrower and shallower, which raised the water level and increased the flood’s velocity while decreasing the river’s capacity. Water lashed and sprayed over parapets of the Lungarno like a ship’s gunwales in a gale, and then the parapets were broken and breached. Water poured across the Lungarno and into the alleys perpendicular to it, the water pressing northward as though in pursuit of the retreating Wehrmacht. Four floors below his room, mud and water filled the cellars of the Palazzo Corsini as Hartt tried to read another inventory or to make out the details of an antique architectural plan.

Cleaning up after the flood became just another chore in the postwar recovery of Florence, which proceeded more quickly than anyone could have imagined. The city also began to regain much of its traditional social character, fomenting with complaint, blame, and backbiting as reconstruction of the Trinità and the other bridges stalled and seemed sometimes to languish altogether. As for the head of Spring, the last unrecovered fragment of the Trinità statues, there had been persistent rumors going back to the end of the war that she wasn’t in the river at all; that she’d been seen amid the rubble on the Lungarno and had been stolen and sold for a pretty sum to one or another collector or museum, doubtless with civic connivance. In the rush to placate public opinion, ill-considered projects—half modernist, half a melange of traditional elements—went up on the sites of the dynamited buildings adjacent to the Ponte Vecchio.

Certainly, it wasn’t Berenson’s Dov’era, com’era approach: he abhorred modernism and some might have said that if he had his way, Firenze would be no more than a museum of itself, a replica of “Florence.” Berenson—now universally known as “BB,” the grand duke of Florence, if not of Firenze—was a monument that often seemed to overshadow the art he’d built his career and fortune upon. BB knew best, not only in his own opinion but in that of his successor art historians from America, Britain, and Germany. And both knew better than the Italians, who it sometimes seemed were not quite to be trusted with their own patrimony. Of course in some sense it belonged to the entire world, to all civilized peoples—Italians would be happy to concede that the art of their forefathers was that important—but didn’t that mean that the world had some claim upon it in terms of rights and perhaps even control? In defeating Hitler the world (in the form of the Allies) had rescued Italy, and it had taken measures to ensure that Italy’s art was protected as well, even if in the form of so humble and selfless a figure as Frederick Hartt.

In any case Italy could not afford to refuse the help, interest, or cash of the outside world and its art experts. When Berenson established (with funds from the Parker Pen Company) a reward of $3,000 for the return of the head of Spring, Firenze could scarcely turn up its nose at Florence’s largesse, however much it might catch an aroma of condescension. Firenze and Florence shared a mutual love of these masterpieces, but love could be jealous and possessive. Possession, after all, was the essence of connoisseurship and of museum curating and accession, an enterprise the Italians were now as deeply implicated in as anyone.

Frederick Hartt packed his bags for America in August 1945. Hostilities in both theaters of World War II had ended. Hartt had been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to study Michelangelo and then would complete his Ph.D. dissertation. He also wrote a memoir of his year recovering art in Tuscany and the devastation on the Arno. Of the Ponte Santa Trinità, he wrote, “The design for this masterpiece . . . has been revealed by a recently discovered letter to have been corrected by Michelangelo himself.” It was still too soon to say—the wounds were too fresh—that the discovery was made by Friedrich Kriegbaum, a German and, like all Germans, complicit.

Like Hartt, all across Europe everyone was going home, or headed somewhere to make a new home. The continent teemed with human traffic, the unrelenting movements of refugees, displaced persons, veterans and freed POWs, camp survivors, collaborators, black marketers, political criminals, orphans, widows, and, everywhere and nowhere, the missing.

David Lees had been gone seven years. Now twenty-eight, he’d served with the Alpine regiment (he was a skier and mountaineer as well as a swimmer) in Albania and France. After the overthrow of Il Duce and the transfer of Italy’s allegiance to the Allies in August 1943, he’d escaped from the Germans over the Alps into Switzerland, where he waited out the duration in an internment camp. He found his mother, Dorothy, living outside the city walls in Bellosguardo. Her tower adjacent to the Ponte Vecchio had been destroyed by the German demolitions on the Arno of August 3, 1944. And now, in this new state of things, it seemed wise that his own photos of the Uffizi in 1938, however innocent in motivation, should disappear too.

But photography would remain his métier. He photographed the ruins around his old home by the river. He also got a job assisting a Life magazine photographer who was in Italy shooting a story on the masterpieces of the Renaissance. David was the ideal assistant, perfectly bilingual, cognizant of Italian art, and happy to deal with the exigencies and lapses caused by his boss’s excessive drinking. He knew, of course, a fair amount about photography and, more crucially, he had an “eye.” He went to the south of France and at last photographed his father, still an outsized character in his seventies, given to large straw hats, elaborately knotted cravats, and vast gesticulations with both cigarettes and a pipe. In David’s acute, black-and-white photographs, he plays the genius, the master, at leisure, effortlessly amused by himself and the world that pays him court. Or rather, the photographs seem to tell, he overplays it. David lets Craig, the double betrayer of lover and son, hang himself. But Dorothy’s admiration remained indefatigable. Shortly after David’s visit, she wrote Craig to tell him, in effect, that he needn’t ever write her back: “Your time is too necessary, too precious to yourself, to EGC [Edward Gordon Craig] ARTIST, to spend in many letters . . .”

With his boss incapacitated by drinking, David increasingly found himself doing Life setups and shoots on his own. Over the next four years, he consolidated his position and, by 1950, he was Life’s chief photographer in Italy. His work—art, human interest stories, royalty, tycoons, and popes—was now appearing regularly in the preeminent photojournalism magazine in the world.

Nick Kraczyna, Polish by citizenship, Russian by blood, and in 1945 all of five years old, would reach Florence by a most circuitous route. His birthplace, Kamien-Koszyrski, had been under three different jurisdictions since his birth in 1940: prior to the war, it had been part of Poland, was ceded to Russia under the Hitler-Stalin pact, and was occupied by Germany in 1942 during Hitler’s invasion of Russia. On August 10 the Germans rounded up every Jew in the town—Kamien-Koszyrski contained a substantial Jewish community in what is today Ukraine—marched them to the cemetery, and slaughtered them in one of the most notorious massacres of the war.

Nick’s family was gentile and survived. His father had been an officer in the suicidal Polish cavalry charge against the German invasion in 1939, but now he learned to live among the Nazis. Perhaps he and his family lived well enough to be suspected of collaboration. In any case, when the Russian counterattack of 1943 neared Kamien-Koszyrski, Nick’s family fled just ahead of the retreating German troops and continued westward to Brest, then Warsaw, and finally Berlin. At the end of the war, in 1945, they’d pressed on southwestward into Bavaria, finishing up ten miles inside the American zone of occupation. Had they been on the other side of the line, in the Russian zone, they would have been deported back to the east and, at a minimum, Nick’s father executed: it was an ironclad law of Russian logic that if you had survived as a Pole—never mind a Pole of Russian extraction—in Germany, you were a collaborator.

Nick spent the next six years in refugee camps. In the barracks with his family he spoke Russian, at school Polish, and around the camp German. Otherwise, nearly always, he was drawing.

In 1951 a church group from New Haven, Connecticut, agreed to adopt a family from Nick’s camp. The family was Nick’s and on May 2 they arrived in New York. In New Haven, he was put into the fifth grade at the local elementary school. Nick spoke not a word of English, but when his classmates found out he spoke Russian at home—it was the era of Senator Joe McCarthy—he was named “the dirty Commie.” He had been a Pole, a crypto-German, and now, although he was supposed to be an American, he was a Soviet. Of course for most of his life so far he had been a refugee, a stateless person, and he might as well have just flown away, for all anyone would notice. But he drew like an angel, or at least like Icarus. He threw himself headlong into his art.

Three years after the end of the war, the Uffizi was fully restored to its position as one of the world’s two or three greatest museums of art. In 1947 Ugo Procacci staged an exhibition centered on the art that had been evacuated during the war, and a year later he added the Rucellai Madonnato Room 2, reunited with the Giotto and Cimabue Madonnas it had taken refuge with in the Castello Montegufoni where Frederick Hartt had found them. And to complete that ultimate proto-Renaissance collection he obtained the Cimabue Crucifix from Santa Croce.

Just then, it seemed that “Cimabue” might become simply Cimabue again and get some credit in the bargain. Roberto Longhi, perhaps the most eminent Italian art historian of the day, asserted that “Duccio was not only the pupil of Cimabue but [was] almost created by Cimabue.” Like Giotto, Duccio had been Cimabue’s student and had worked with him on the Assisi frescoes that had been Ruskin’s epiphany. Cimabue had been the means, the inspiration, by which Duccio came to “see things—as they Are.” Now, here they were again, almost touching, in Vasari’s Uffizi. But, to Procacci’s disappointment, the amalgamation was short-lived. The brothers of Santa Croce wanted the Crucifix back. Truth be told, it was the least important work in Room 2, in art historical terms significant as a way station to greater things, more an emblem of Franciscan piety than a true masterpiece.

Amid these triumphs, Procacci also acquired a protégé the following year, 1949, the kind of apprentice a master can only pray for. Umberto Baldini was twenty-seven and had done his art history graduate work on Giotto under the brilliant Mario Salmi. After graduation, he’d worked as a volunteer for the Superintendency, and Baldini had so impressed Procacci that he made him director of his Gabinetto dei Restauro, leapfrogging him over other long-standing candidates.

Taking on Baldini was a sign of Procacci’s power and position, but at heart he remained an art historian who still thrilled to the chase, the discovery, and the consolidation of knowledge. Shortly after his appointment, Procacci raced into the Gabinetto breathless and exclaimed to Baldini, Ho appena visto i morti, “I’ve just seen the dead.” Collapsing into a chair, Procacci explained he’d been at Santa Maria Novella and had conclusively discovered the original location of Masaccio’s Trinità, replaced by Vasari’s Madonna of the Rosary four hundred years earlier.

Baldini was, of course, also pleased, but he was of a more dispassionate, self-possessed nature, brilliant but efficient, his considerable ambition directed with remarkable accuracy and success to the objects and goals that appeared to him just then most needful. Unlike Procacci, he would have taken off his hat before sitting down.

On Baldini’s first day on the job, he went to the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio to inspect one of the Gabinetto’s current projects—now one of his many projects—restoration work on Vasari’s Battle of Marciano, said to be overpainted on Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari.Baldini might have regarded Vasari’s tiny, cryptic inscription cerca trova, “seek and find,” and seen the future before him: the beautiful acquisitions, prizes, promotions, boons, and women; reputation, fame, and glory, the accouterments of a great man.

There would be no more floods, it was promised after the war. In 1956 construction began on a dam upriver on the Arno at Levane and the following year another was started at La Penna, works worthy of Leonardo. If the rains came as they had in 1844 or 1864 or 1944, the water could be held back, kept at bay in the mountains, in the high wastes of poplar and oak. That would be despite the simultaneous and “abrupt acceleration of sediment mining and channel bed intrusion” hydrologists would note looking back some years later. The Casentine Forests were indeed returning to health, but the Arno itself was now a tributary of postwar industry, agriculture, and modernization, more and more a greased sluice, a gun barrel bored for maximum velocity and capacity.

In the spring of the following year, 1958, the restored Ponte Santa Trinità was reopened, complete in all its parts except for the head of Spring, unrecovered despite Berenson’s reward. And in the autumn of 1959, at the age of ninety-four, Berenson himself died, the Jewish Yankee with an eye who had taught the world how to look at Florence.

Two years later, in 1961, a steam shovel dredging the Arno a little downstream from the Ponte Santa Trinità recovered, quite by accident, a lump, a stone skull that proved to be the head of Spring. No one had stolen it: it had been in the Arno all the while, buried within the collection of mud, rubble, and bones in the riverbed, the accretion of visions and views, of ambitions and lusts, and of losses and betrayals all touching one another, the water touching them running by, tumbling them together.

Vasari’s Last Supper remained in the refectory at Santa Croce, moldering: Non ha mosso molto l’interesse, né tanto meno l’entusiamo, “It excited not much interest and even less enthusiasm,” said one art historian. The same might have been said of the Cimabue nearby, the massive and forlorn Crucifix. Forster’s Lucy Honeychurch hadn’t been to see it. It wasn’t in the Baedeker or Ruskin or Berenson. Perhaps it wasn’t so much a work of art as a ruin, a remnant of a previous world. Or it was simply a man hanging on a tree, dead or dying; a wingless Icarus waiting for the west wind, for the deluge to ferry him away with the 54 billion.