In Florence
The arguments of German couples, conducted in increasingly sarcastic and unfelt laughter; the bright, practical English questions about where the Raphaels are and would anyone like a cake, concealing vast crashing waves of aggression; people of every nationality sitting on the benches, on their inevitable phones. The Uffizi is a depressing place, because no one cares about the art – they all look the same! – and unlike the Musée D’Orsay there are no excited shouts of ‘this was my grandmother’s favourite’ or ‘this was in Dr Who’, but everyone still knows they have to see everything. It is a betrayal of the sensuality that the place, with its famous ceilings, its famous windows, its famous views, was designed for, though these people are all at the mercy of their senses, their sense of fatigue, in their feet and on their brains, of anxiety, washed out by the screen, dispersed on the surface of a million op-eds and instagram pictures.
Something happens in the Renaissance and I naturally do not know what it is, but more than before I can see it as something, as a catastrophe. I have preferred those painters who came before Raphael whilst conventionally hating the Pre-Raphaelites; now my repulsion feels justified. The Victorians did not realise how much had been lost when the gradual exfoliation of pictorial space after Giotto, the ways it was coaxed into revealing its crevices and linkages, to create a fine painting of relation, of bodies and limbs suddenly coming into light, being brought to bear on one another, the holy ghost appearing in flames over the head of the apostles, Christ’s blessing hand between Mary’s breasts and her wrist lighter than the light shade on her cloak – when all this was collapsed by a hard flat colour, a pushing out into a world now with no careful architectural background behind it but a provocatively vague dream-landscape. The Doni Tondo is but a literalisation of the process with its obscure rhetoric of divine familial struggle of what the sweet Raphael is doing to his bland noblemen and noblewomen - forcing them into a new form of individuality, and of sexuality, which seem to suck attention into themselves, into an inward relationship with their own parts, rather than outward into a record of action or response to those around them. The decorations on the Uffizi ceiling – reminding the English viewer of Robert Adam – were not made for these paintings. Those decorations, in their combination of profusion of pattern and representation, implied a sensory ideal of controlled but ultimately full-bodied selection, of turning the senses easily from one graceful scene to another. The paintings inside inaugurate the reign of interpellation, of the rapturous coerciveness which would very swiftly become the signature of the aesthetic.
They are already performing that work of separation, to recuperate of some quality of the world already being lost. And they are thus already attempting the ‘labour of negation’ – the effort to take what is external, hostile within themselves and cancel it out briefly. But the difficulty we have in looking at them is their scandalous positivity; they seem so much larger than the world they look out on, so inconsequentially larger. The ‘utopian dimension’ of art so much insisted on can undermine itself with an awareness of not so much its practical feebleness as its disproportion to the world, the lack of relation to any available positive project. But there is, naturally, no way out of that through more art or more writing about it.
