Travelogue 1209 – 15 September
The Eccentrics and Science

The Medici family collected artists and philosophers, and their fields of study flourished. The individuals fared as they fared, most living hand to mouth, lucky if they received some small stipend for their work, no artist so grotesquely rich as some artists have become in our time.

They had passion, and they had flair. Florence in its glory years was full of eccentrics. One of our fonder moments of eccentricity features Filippo Brunelleschi standing before the ancient Battistero with a painting and a hand mirror before his face. It was an experiment in perspective. And a public one, at that, a just tribute to the republican origins of art. “Come look,” he may have said, as people gathered. In the mirror was a tiny peephole, and also in the panel. The panel was likely a mirror itself, painted on one side with a likeness of the Battistero. “No, hold the back of the painting to your face,” he said, helping a citizen line up the panel, the mirror, and the background. “What do you see?” They answered with wonder, “San Giovanni!” The Battistero, the painting of the building lining up perfectly with the reality. Brunelleschi had already something of the reputation as a wonder-worker; the mirror stunt was only confirmation.

The likeness of the Battistero was crafted, of course, according to his new method of perspective, using a vanishing point, horizon and orthogonal lines. The trick was a psychological one, adopting one point of view, the human eye of one individual viewer. This was the art made by humanists. This contrasted with God’s viewpoint, in which all points in time and space were equal and accessible. The human viewpoint was individual and anchored to one privileged location.

The trick was a scientific one. Apply geometrical principles. Test and replicate. Does it look accurate? Can the bystanders in the Piazza del Duomo confirm the success of the technique. Then the principles were sound. Twenty years after his public experiment, the young Leon Battista Alberti codified Brunelleschi’s principles in his book, “De Pictura”, and the Renaissance project, as a broad-based phenomenon among artists, was born.

It makes sense that the artists of the day would be among the first scientists. They had to understand the chemistry and physical properties of their paints, boards, metals, plaster, and stone. Being more architect than artist in his later years, Brunelleschi concerned himself with space and dimension. There was no other recourse than mathematics. In Rome, he had assigned himself the task of documenting in sketches all the ancient buildings he could find, and tradition tells us that this is when he began thinking about perspective. How would he capture the essence of what he was seeing? Accuracy became important for the purposes of reconstruction and imitation. Replication was essential to the scientific project.

Travelogue 1208 – 8 September
The Busy Hive

Why can we never sit still? While we discuss history, while some people make history, the ceaseless activity of humanity, like the frenetic motion in a populous hive, carries on with its customary intensity. While Petrarch heralds a new age, standing on the Capitoline Hill as a representative of the renatae litterae (a Renaissance), the hive is abuzz with activity. It is only six years later that Cola di Rienzo rises to seize power in Rome. One of his acts during the roughly six months of his self-declared tribunate is to call for a united Italy – five hundred years before Garibaldi. He succeeds in calling representatives from electors and head of the Holy Roman Emperor to sit beside representatives from all principalities in Italy in an assembly as he announced a new Italian federation. Petrarch is surprised and delighted.

But Cola di Rienzo didn’t last. He was erratic, and he couldn’t stand against the forces of reaction arrayed against him. He was run out of town. Some years later, he was turned into a tool for the Avignon popes, smuggled back into Rome to sow chaos, and was turned on by his own mob.

Neither could King Robert of Naples last, the enlightened monarch who acted as patron to Petrarch being only mortal. His death in 1343, only two years after Petrarch’s laureate ceremony, was a blow to the poet, and one that may have led him to a humbler assessment of the state of cultural renewal. He thereafter spoke about the “Renaissance” project (his idea, but not his term) as one delayed, one destined for the future.

I think of Trump’s big project, written in sand by a petulant and greedy child. It seems unstoppable, and probably is, for the moment. But even in triumph, it is already being undermined. Locally, regionally, nationally, thousands of people are innovating in small ways that chew into the same tapestry that the Trumpistas are weaving, like the myriad, miniature forces of nature working on the greedy, little boy’s sandcastle. In a generation, the Trump “legacy” will be unrecognizable.

I think of a fresco by Bicci di Lorenzo that survives from 1420, the year that Pope Martin V departs Florence to begin his Rome project, and in that fresco the pope is consecrating a new church in Florence. The style of the painting is still medieval, the clergy and the nobility in attendance standing in tidy rows, and the perspective so flat and simplified that the scene is like pages in a book. The faces are serene and nearly indistinguishable. The protagonist of the fresco is the church itself, the old Sant’Egidio. And while the church is small and yellow, with red tile above, it signals some Gothic intention, with high arched windows beneath two high-peaked roofs. There is no symmetry; each door bears a different shape, and sparse, small windows are set by no plan. Small gargoyles guard the main door. The only hint of new aesthetics might be the round window above the doorway and what appears to be the terracotta piece in the tympanum. Old and new are simultaneous; people are busy with both, all the time.

Occasionally, I stop by the central train station for a coffee. I travel west to east across the city every day; the station convenient. There is a café next to the roltrap for Spoor 3, where I can perch at a counter by the window and watch the people rush. I watch the hive. I listen to its buzz. Why does a writer with a strong misanthropic streak volunteer to stop the midst of it? There is a sort of wisdom that resides in the centre of the hive, a calm within the storm. I don’t walk away with much of it, meaning I am no wiser when I find it, but I do sense it, and find a kind of rest inside of it.

Travelogue 1207 – 5 September
Wild Rome

Rome had already provided the inspiration for the poets and philosophers. For them, the Renaissance was well under way. Since Petrarch had discovered the letters of Cicero, Roman language, literature, style and ideas had formed a guiding light for the writers. But not many had actually travelled to Rome.

Petrarch himself had gone to Rome in 1337. Inspired by the wild and magnificent ruins of the forum, he had started on his epic Latin poem, “Africa”. He returned in 1341 to be crowned on the Capitoline Hill with laurel wreath and proclaimed Poet Laureate, with the blessing of the Roman Colonna family and King Robert of Naples. It was an unorthodox choice of location. The papacy was in France, and Paris was the centre of academic culture in Christendom.

Rome was a bit untamed. A new pope was elected in 1417, and he lodged in Florence. Martin V may have been a familiar figure to Brunelleschi and his cohort. The architect was forty that year. He was completing his first commission, the drawings for the Ospedale degli Innocenti. He and his friend Donatello had taken their place as leading voices among the artists in Florence.

There is a story that Donatello and Brunelleschi travelled to Rome to study the buildings left by the empire. Perhaps they accompanied Martin V on his return to the city in 1420, when he brought home the papacy after its years of division and exile. It was his task to build the foundations of the Renaissance papacy. He brought to it the same intensity of purpose as the artists set on laying the foundations of a new classicism in art.

Did the sight of those ancient ruins provide the kind of inspiration to Brunelleschi that they did to Petrarch?

Travelogue 1206 – 2 September
A Dream in the Centre Square

Like Christopher Wren in London or Bernini in Rome, Filippo Brunelleschi left an indelible mark on Florence, a legacy you saw in every quarter of the old city, whether in the Medici’s Basilica of San Lorenzo, or the Ospedale degli Innocenti nearby, or Santa Felicita across the river, or in Santa Croce, in Santo Spirito, or, of course, in the great dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, his most remarkable achievement and the enduring symbol of Florence. The Duomo stood above the city old and new, and it became instantly and for centuries an element of Florentine identity, even human identity, something permanent and sublime, an object huge and intricate and yet immediately recognisable.

I have written about this before: years ago, while travelling to Perugia by train, I had a transfer in Florence at 4:00 in the morning. I had enough time to walk into the town centre. I stood before the Duomo all alone that morning, in silence, marvelling at the bulk and the beauty. It was like a dream. A six-hundred-year-old dream.

Imagine the labour involved in the manifestation of Brunelleschi’s design! It might be said that architecture, like theatre, is an art of collaboration, and that writers and architects are only the first in a chain of contributors to the final piece of art. His buildings took decades to finish, and the work incorporated the ingenuity and elaboration of other architects and artists, many of them happy to be a part of the legacy, as the master’s reputation grew. And then there were the hundreds of masons and labourers. I wonder how they all related.

Brunelleschi started humbly enough. He may have been the first of the architectural superstars in Europe, but he started in the way that most did, apprenticing as a goldsmith and sculptor, as Michelangelo did, and many others. His first job as architect was the Ospedale degli Innocenti, and he immediately set himself apart, drawing something we call classically Renaissance, something that was new then. What he drew was elegant, symmetrical and sparse in adornment, thin columns and arches and simple white. I can’t imagine how it struck the minds of those so accustomed to the Gothic. It might have provoked some objections: “Is this the drawing of a child? We are paying for grandeur.” But clearly he was the right mind for the time. Change swept through the Italy and then Europe. It was centuries before anyone looked back to rediscover the charms of the Gothic.

Travelogue 1205 – 27 August
Civil Acts

We have a poster on our wall from the last trip to Florence. It’s a sketch of Brunelleschi’s dome. It’s a reminder of the place. It’s a reminder of the spirit of the time. And it’s a reminder of the invigorating pace of civilization, once it’s been inspired.

I was listening to Heather Cox Richardson reading from Illinois Governor Pritzger’s statement after Trump threatened to send National Guard units into Chicago. It’s a momentous time, and a time of change. It’s not too unlike some of the periods in Florentine history, when the republic fought monarchs, when the republic fought itself. Perhaps America is not so exceptional after all.

Somehow men and women find the energy to stand against the chaos. I admire them. I might have had the reserves of energy once, or if I were young now. Perhaps I made one or two stands against chaos when I was younger, a few instances among the millions of unsung defences against chaos. Many people do it, you know.

At the moment, I’m just trying to recover from our trip to the beach. It requires a certain fortitude to travel with your family to the beach by public transit. It’s a trade of stress and strain for a couple hours peace, and clearly the kind of peace one can’t find amid the mundane, or we wouldn’t exert such efforts. It might just be the persuasion of an eight-year-old. Little Ren is a beach-lover. Her enthusiasm is infectious.

I tend to linger somewhere between boredom and sincere appreciation when I am at the beach. I am restless, and then I am resting. I am happiest staring up at the clouds, and then out to the reaches of the sea, as far as the wind farm out there, as far as the big ships that seem to drift asleep, as far as the curve of the Earth and what I cannot see.

I watch the people. The crowds are exhausting. But they are there, and undeniably a part of the beach experience, the boisterous boys, the families ceaselessly moving, the old couples calm, the children squealing. The dogs. The motion swirls around us, rising and subsiding like the sea’s waves, and yet it has its codes and its lines, its prescribed limits, and people commit to the roughly drawn circles of their agitation, and their commotion becomes channelled. Centuries of repetition have encoded their manners. It’s a wonderful thing, and it’s no less foundational than a vote in Parliament. Every civil act, conscious and sub, is in fact a stand against the chaos, every normalcy a sort of kindness to the neighbour, in the face of the malignancy of the raiders running through the halls of our public buildings, shouting orders in our capitals’ streets, performing for each other like pirates who had forgotten how to behave, smug in their coarseness, donning fancy hats for each other.

Travelogue 1204 – 22 August
Travelling the Rivers

Little Ren needs a piano. Rotterdam has surprisingly few music stores with pianos in stock. It’s summer; we are free to travel and search. We decide on a music store in Sliedrecht, a small town upriver from Rotterdam.

I love water; I love being on water. I chose a watery place to live, and yet I find so few opportunities in the day-today to be on the water. We have to travel today, so I decide we’ll travel by water. It’s a direct way to travel in this case, from the west of Rotterdam to the eastern suburb, and yet not the most efficient. In a car, we would be there in half an hour. By train, it might take an hour. On the water bus, it takes an hour and a half. But it’s a beautiful summer day, and it’s an adventure of sorts, standing on the deck of a boat that is chugging against the river currents, watching the choppy water created in our wake. The girls are delighted.

On our journey of some 25-30 kilometres, we travelled on three rivers: the Nieuwe Maas, the Noord, and the Beneden Merwede. And each time, entering a new river meant literally entering a new river. In other words, the river ran no further. The waters changed their names. This is the magic of the delta.

There is a spot in Dordrecht, right where three rivers meet, the Noord, the Beneden Merwede, and the Oude Maas. There is a fifteenth-century brick gateway into the city, at the Groothoofdspoort, with a small, domed tower and seventeenth-century adornments, including a lovely relief of the Dordtse Stadsmaagd, the Maiden of Dordrecht, sitting in the “Garden of Holland, a palm of peace in one hand and the shield of the city in another, so delicate as to appear terracotta. It’s a cute little building. More importantly, there are a few modest eetcafes there by the water, where you can absorb the rare sun and feel like a witness of the convergence of waters.

Travelogue 1203 – 20 August
The Rivers They Come and They Go

It’s been a watery summer. We have celebrated August with many visits to the canals, rivers, lakes and sea that define this little country.

I’m still learning about the complexity of the river system here. In most European cities, one river runs through town. It was often the original raison d'être of the town. The river has a name; the name has roots deep in the past, some fun etymology, something comforting. There might be another river, a tributary.

In this part of the world, rivers come and go. Near Brugge, for example, the Zwin River was created by a storm in 1134. At one time, Bruges was close enough to the sea to be a port city. Then it wasn’t. Then the Zwin appeared, leading the sea almost to the walls of the city. It started silting up almost immediately. Canals were built, and the Zwin itself became unusable. Et cetera. But the Zwin played its part in history, enabling Bruges to become the medieval treasure that it was.

In this area, you can peacefully motor your way upstream on one waterway, never deviating, only to find several kilometres later that you are on a different waterway. Past the confluence with that smaller river, the larger river changed names. The Nieuwe Maas, for example, which runs through Rotterdam and connects it to the sea, actually only flows for 24 kilometres, and never makes it to the sea. Further, it has only existed since the thirteenth century, when, yes, a storm flooded the region, and river courses were changed.

It's a bit like the experience of an American trying to figure London out for the first time. The same street changes names every mile or so. “Why?” the innocent tourist asks. “It’s the same street!” Well, yes and no. It has everything to do with history, and with communities. Each village or borough had its own story about that thoroughfare, and the connection with other throughfares is a separate story.

Here, the rivers and canals are so many, and some are so recent. They form one huge network, like a web, and each strand much be identified for the purpose of navigation and planning. Some names are organic, some are quite dry, like the “New Waterway” that does finally connect the Nieuwe Maas – by way of the Scheur, mixing waters with the Oude Maas – connect it to the sea.