by Jo Walton
There were ways of sort-of faking perspective before. Massaccio was the first person to do a true perspective painting that survives, Leon Battista Alberti was the first person to write about perspective. But it was Brunelleschi, with his mathematical skill, who first figured it out. He stood in the doorway of the Duomo and painted a picture of what he saw, precisely: the Baptistery, and the space between, and the pillar where St Zenobius’s miraculous elm tree once stood, using perspective. It was a painting so wonderfully lifelike people actually confused it for reality and tried to walk into it. Ghiberti’s panel on the door has true linear perspective. Neither his competition panel nor Brunelleschi’s does. When you think of what it means to live in a golden age, think about that.
Brunelleschi’s perspective painting of the view from the steps of the Duomo, the very first painting with true linear perspective, doesn’t survive. There’s no trace of it, and no record of what happened to it. We just have awed descriptions of it. But we know what it must have looked like. The square is still there, the Baptistery, and the pillar. The clothes on the people have changed, and of course Ghiberti finished his doors. But the descriptions say it was as real as the real thing, and we can still stand where he stood and see the real thing. Standing where he stood, looking at the real thing, surely we can imaginatively re-create the painting?
Third Brunelleschi story: As well as his rival Ghiberti, he had a best friend (and sometime lover), the sculptor Donatello. Donatello made a painted wooden crucifix for the great church of Santa Maria Novella. Brunelleschi criticized it, saying that Donatello had made Christ look like a carpenter. Donatello challenged him to do better. Brunelleschi then carved his own crucifix, for the great church of Santa Croce. Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce were rival churches then; the first belonged to the Dominicans and the second to the Franciscans, rival monastic orders, founded in about 1200 by St Dominic and St Francis, respectively. They must have been very pleased to each get a comparable crucifix. They were always competing for art, wealth, and fame. In the way in which Firenze has divided up the functions of spirituality and human life between its different churches, Santa Maria Novella is where people get married, and Santa Croce is where prominent Florentines are buried. (Though of these three, only Ghiberti ended up in Santa Croce. Donatello is in San Lorenzo, the church of the soul, and, exceptionally, Brunelleschi lies under his own dome, in the Duomo.)
When Brunelleschi had completed his own crucifix, he knew that if he just openly showed it to Donatello, Donatello wouldn’t admit it was better than his. So he invited Donatello to dinner, without saying anything about the crucifix, and met him beforehand in the market, the old market that is called the new market, the Mercato Nuovo, down near the guild church of Orsanmichele. (The market is still in the same location, with the same open sides, stone supports, and covered portico, but now it sells leather bags and silk scarves and tapestries to tourists, and if you want food you have to go to the luscious markets of Sant Ambrogio or San Lorenzo.) They met there, among the food stalls, and Brunelleschi told Donatello he’d be along in a minute, and asked him to take the groceries home.
Don’t imagine paper or a shopping bag. He’d have had the groceries in his arms, or perhaps in a wicker basket. If there was a fish (as there very well might have been, nobody recorded the menu that day but they ate a lot of fish, fresh from the Arno or brought up from the sea at Pisa), it would be suspended by a thread through the gills, as we see in paintings of Tobias and the Angel. Or it might have been mostly prepared food from stalls that specialised in takeout. Lots of people in Firenze at that date lived in apartments that didn’t have anywhere to cook, and these stalls did a thriving business in ready-cooked food. We think of prepared food as a modern thing, but it was very common in Renaissance Firenze. Brunelleschi had his own house, which probably did have a kitchen, up under the roof as was usual in Italy at this time—the reason was to prevent fire damage. If the kitchen was up there, it would burn the roof but it wouldn’t take out the whole place. He probably had servants to cook and clean for him, though we know from this story that they didn’t normally do the grocery shopping. There was nothing unusual to Donatello that day in Brunelleschi being in the market choosing his own food for dinner.
But even if these potential invisible servants (women, she says, women who don’t get into the history books or the stories people tell, there have been no women in these stories so far) even if they normally cooked, he still might have chosen takeout that day, for a special dinner with his beloved Donatello. What did they eat? We don’t know. We have Michelangelo’s shopping lists, with exquisite little drawings of anchovies and spinach, and Pontormo’s diaries, from a century later, record menus of half a kid’s head, fried, with soup, rosemary bread, and grapes, and on another day an egg and artichoke frittata, ricotta crepes, and fried fish. All these seem plausible guesses for Brunelleschi too, but we just don’t know and can’t find out. For Brunelleschi and Donatello’s time we have only records of the elaborate banquets of the rich.
There they were in the market, two artists among stalls selling fresh food and prepared food, workers and merchants from the city, and farmers come in from farms with their produce, milk and cheese and vegetables and fruit, people who had a personal relationship with those they bought from and sold to, often offering them lines of credit, which was easier for everyone in a literate society with very little small change. Donatello, suspecting nothing, accepted the groceries, which I see as a basket, and went with them to Brunelleschi’s house. He let himself in (had Brunelleschi given him the key, or did he have his own key?) and immediately saw the crucifix. It’s enormous, bigger than life-size; it looks big in the nave of a huge church, in a house, it would have been overwhelming. It’s hard to think where Brunelleschi would have even had room to put it. Donatello dropped the groceries in shock, breaking the eggs that Brunelleschi had deliberately put in there, not for a frittata but so that Donatello wouldn’t be able to pretend to indifference.
When Brunelleschi got home soon after, Donatello, with the witness of the broken eggs, generously affirmed that his lover had made Christ look like the Son of God. Did they laugh together then and make dinner out of the dropped groceries? History doesn’t record, but we can feel sure they did.
Like the competition panels, both these crucifixes survive and hang in the churches they were made for. You can go there now and compare them. She and I went to see them on two consecutive days, on purpose, and I can hardly see a lick of difference between them. They’re both huge, stylized, almost iconic, with gold backgrounds and great soulful eyes. We probably wouldn’t even have noticed them, and certainly wouldn’t have spent any time looking at them compared to the other treasures those churches hold, if it hadn’t been for this story. I love a lot of Donatello’s sculpture, his David, his St George. Brunelleschi’s dome inevitably makes me gasp with delight whenever I glimpse it. But these two crucifixes leave me cold. Carpenter? Son of God? Iconic clones.
All the same, when we recognise great art, let us, like Donatello, let those eggs drop and admit that we are moved, that we care, that this is important.
I need to tell you another story about Brunelleschi, but it should have its own section.
5
WHO WILL LAUGH, I WONDER?
What almost nobody says when they retell the story of the fat woodworker is how incredibly cruel it is. It’s a cruel joke that plays with making a man doubt his own self. This is a joke that goes far beyond making your friend drop the eggs. Brunelleschi was cruel, and everyone who helped and everyone who laughed were all cruel too. We can think of the two friends eating supper after the eggs and laughing together. This story doesn’t end so happily. Playing a joke on somebody isn’t funny unless the victim also agrees that it is.
Once upon a time, Brunelleschi invited a group of close friends to dinner. We don’t know the menu and, again, we don’t know who did the cooking. Women and servants invisible to history, doubtless, women who were t
here and had their own complex lives and stories but fade from the record. Even if Brunelleschi bought the food ready prepared from a stall, somebody cooked it. Let us observe the lacuna and move on.
His friends came for dinner, with wine and conversation, but one of his friends didn’t show up. This was Manetto Ammanatini, known as Grasso, which means “fatso,” and known to history as “the fat woodcarver” because this story got turned into a novella and published about fifty years later and that was the title. Shall we be respectful, unlike his friends, and call him Manetto Ammanatini, and not Grasso?
Brunelleschi and his friends decided to play a trick on Manetto to pay him out for not turning up for dinner. To do this, they persuaded very many people to participate, including the city jail, a family of labourers, and of course all of their friend group, people who knew each other well enough to meet for dinner parties.
Manetto was a man in his twenties. He lived with his mother, and had a separate workshop where he carved picture frames and wooden figures for altars. So he was a guildsman, and doing well in his career. He wasn’t married yet—men would marry typically between twenty-eight to thirty-five; before that they were known as “youth,” giovane (from Latin juventes), allowed more sexual (especially homosexual) licence, and not expected to settle down. We don’t know why Manetto didn’t show up for dinner that day with Brunelleschi. Maybe he was busy. Or sick. Or in love. He was of an age where a little irresponsibility was usually allowed. But this time he didn’t get away with it.
After a great deal of preparation, they chose an occasion when they knew Manetto’s mother was away. Donatello delayed Manetto in his shop while Brunelleschi went to his house. His mother was expected home, so it was easy for Brunelleschi to let himself in, the report says. But maybe Brunelleschi jimmied the lock. He could have, he was capable of it, he had the skills. People usually locked their doors. There were thieves. Why wouldn’t Signora Ammanatini have had her own key? Where was she anyway? History is infuriating in what it leaves out, what it tells us and doesn’t tell us. But sometimes these gaping holes are everything, are the crack where the light gets in. Sometimes the lacuna is what makes space for a new story.
When Manetto got home from work, after his induced delay, his door was locked, and he heard Brunelleschi telling him, in an imitation of his own voice and his mother’s, that Grasso was already inside, and busy. This impersonation puzzled him, but he was much more puzzled to be addressed by the voices as “Matteo.” Then Donatello went by and greeted him as “Matteo” and asked if he was looking for Grasso, because he thought he was busy. Other people in on the joke also addressed him as Matteo, and soon the local guard came by to haul him off to jail for Matteo’s unpaid debts. He tried to tell everyone who he was, but everyone was in on it and appeared to recognise him as Matteo, an unskilled labourer with debts and a drinking problem, and refused to believe he was Manetto Ammanatini, known as Grasso. They knew Grasso, they said, and Grasso was at home with his mother.
After a night in jail, Matteo’s brothers came by to lecture him for his bad behaviour, pay his fine, and take Manetto home to Matteo’s house. All Matteo’s friends seemed to recognise him as Matteo and none of his own friends would recognise him as himself. So he gave up, accepting the role of Matteo. He got drunk on rich Tuscan red wine, and who wouldn’t, in his place? When he had fallen into a drunken sleep, Matteo’s brothers and his friends carried him home to his own house, where they put him to sleep in his own bed, but the wrong way up, with his feet on the pillow. When he woke up, everyone recognised him as his real self, addressing him as Grasso again, but wouldn’t admit that anything had happened.
Eventually they did admit to the joke, and roared with laughter, laughing at him, not with him. How could he laugh, who had been so profoundly shaken as to doubt his own identity? But everyone else found this whole event hilarious, and were talking about it even years later, when it was written down in the version that survives. Even today, many people can’t see how cruel it is, to take away a name and a self and work—though Manetto’s hands would still have had his skills, had he had any chance to test them. Brunelleschi, genius, creator of perspective and of the dome, conceived this, persuaded others it could work, carried it out, and laughed at it. Manetto had to live with the ridicule of the “joke” that had been played on him,
Except that he didn’t. He didn’t live with it, and he didn’t kill himself either. He left Firenze and went to Hungary. Or that’s what the story tells us. He went to Hungary, the thriving Renaissance realm of the Raven King, the humanist collector of books and art, Matthias Corvinus, who would have been delighted to get a real Florentine woodcarver at that date.
But maybe it wasn’t Hungary he went to. Maybe, having been dragged across the bounds of identity and singularity that way, when he left Firenze, he went further. Shall we follow Manetto, the fat woodcarver? Picture him, a tall plump young Florentine, a worker in wood, with his own shop even though he isn’t thirty yet. He packs up his tools and his clothes and his savings in gold, says goodbye to his mother (but where had she been? Was she, could she have been, in on the joke too?) and he walks through the streets where people are still sniggering when they see him pass. Shall we follow where Manetto went, when he walked away from his cruel genius friends and out of the story?
Let’s watch him walking down the street, away from his house that he’d been locked out of and then woken up in, heading away from his own workshop, going to Brunelleschi’s workshop, over near the unfinished Duomo. There are a lot of things piled up in Brunelleschi’s workshop, as you’d expect: tools, and parts of machines, and paintings, and designs. There are blocks for carving, and sheets of calculations, and boxes of bricks, and coiled rope, and the head of a winch. There’s a crowd of people too, Brunelleschi’s apprentices, and servants, and friends, and creditors, and members of the committee dropping in to see how everything is going. When Manetto shows up, Brunelleschi would laugh and tease him as usual, for a little while.
Manetto has on his vermilion chaperon hat folded over his head, and his red cioppa around him, his bag of clothes over his shoulder and his box of tools for carving wood under his arm. It’s a hinged wooden box, freshly painted green. When Brunelleschi takes his eyes off him for an instant, Manetto takes another step, sideways, into a painting done on a wooden panel and left leaning on the wall, behind all the impedimenta of a busy genius who is building a dome, and a boat, and carving in wood and stone. It’s the perspective painting of the view from the door of the Duomo, life-size and as real as life, perhaps even more real, endowed with the mana of being the first.
Manetto isn’t a small man, and he isn’t thin, but he walks into the painting and shrinks. He turns and looks back, and for a moment there he is, painted, his face serious under his hat, red cloak and green box, painted in perfect perspective beside the column that marks the elm tree of St. Zenobius. Then he nods to his friends, and walks around the corner of the Baptistery and out of sight.
And Brunelleschi and all the inferiors and superiors and equals gathered around chattering in the little workshop where he’s trying to work just stare at the painting, and at the space where Manetto was, and isn’t any more, and then they stare at each other—asking themselves and each other what just happened? What could possibly have happened, because what they saw couldn’t be it. Hungary, one of them would have said, yes, he went to Hungary to start a new life without us laughing at him. He headed off to the furthest edge of civilization they could imagine, Hungary, because he couldn’t have just walked into the painting.
Did Brunelleschi wonder if Manetto was ever going to walk back out? And what happened to that painting? Where is it now?
6
DOLLY HAS A SECRET
Let’s start from the right place now. Let’s go back to those bastions Brunelleschi invented when he wasn’t tormenting his friends with eggs and identity crises. He didn’t build them, of course, not these particular ones. In his day, cannon weren’t stro
ng enough yet to bring down a city wall. The ones he built were all on battlefields, literal fields, when Italian war was an affair of condottieri fighting against other condottieri, campaigning only in the summers, with highly specified contracts. Though some people were killed or maimed, it was still almost a game. Most of Firenze’s bastions were built much later—a century later, when cannon were more powerful and the big countries from over the Alps were threatening and the peril was real. Some of these bastions were designed by Michelangelo, who came home in 1530 to help defend his city against the forces that poured over the Alps and sacked Rome. Let us make a circuit of Firenze, of the walls. We can’t do it now, of course, because they were pulled down during the Reunification of Italy—a ridiculous name, Italy had never before been unified. Oh, under the Romans, maybe, but then it was also united with all the other countries bordering the Mediterranean. Shall we reunite the Roman Empire? Some people thought that was the plan of the European Union, but they are so resolutely refusing Turkey membership that it seems they have forgotten how central Anatolia was to that earlier enterprise.
Italy—Metternich was correct in saying that Italy is not a country but a geographical expression. Italy has most often been, historically, a set of city states, frequently at war with each other, generally practicing many different forms of government, and where loyalty, patriotism, is to the city, not to any abstraction of country. And don’t even get me started on the so-called Italian language, an entirely artificial construction that doesn’t even attempt to reconcile the different languages and dialects of the different regions of the peninsula. A Piedmontese and a Neapolitan have little more in common than either of them does with a Swede or a Hungarian. Petrarch did feel a sense of being Italian, but that might have been because he mostly lived in France, near Avignon. Nobody defends Yugoslavia these days, that bold attempt to unify disparate states with disparate histories, but because the experiment of pushing the Italians together into an Italy to some extent worked, nobody questions it. The way we look at history is very strange, the places we draw lines, the things we remember and forget and take for granted, the series of improbabilities that become inevitabilities only after they have happened.
