Nostalgia

by Jonathan Buckley

  A different young woman, a little younger than the first, with a fuller face and longer hair and narrow-framed glasses, is perched on the edge of the desk, reading a magazine. ‘Thank you,’ she says when Claire puts the stapled pages back on the desk beside her, and gives her a glance that seems a little embarrassed for the tedium that the visitor has had to endure.

  7.4

  In The Man Who Knew Everything, his two-volume biography of the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1601/02–1680), the historian Maximilian Böhm cites the great Kircher’s description of Giovan Antonio Ridolfi as ‘a questioning man, of immense learning but most melancholy’. The biography has little more to say on the subject of Ridolfi: ‘the magus of Castelluccio’ has, Böhm notes, ‘almost disappeared from history’. Unlike many of the other pre-eminent collector-naturalists of his time, Ridolfi wrote no account of his own life – or none of which we are aware – and published no books. He is said to have delivered a series of lectures in Bologna, but no record of these has survived. He died before he could complete the catalogue of his collection, and the thousands of entries that he did have time to write have now disappeared, with the exception of five pages of the catalogue of his herbarium, which came to light in Turin in 2005. Letters written by Ridolfi have been found in various places, but most of what we know of him is derived from the writings of contemporaries.

  Born in Pisa on January 7th, 1570, he was the second son of Count Girolamo Ridolfi and the first son of Girolamo Ridolfi’s second wife, Agnese Donoratico. As a young man he was small of stature, strong, and a keen horseman. His most remarkable features, it would appear, were his eyes, which were ‘lynx-like’. His face, another writer records, was not handsome, yet ‘bespoke intelligence and audacity’. He was a studious youth. Botany was a particular interest, so much so that his mastery of the subject was held to be the equal of any professor’s. His memory was prodigious; to friends he was known as ‘our Mithridates’.

  In 1593 an incident occurred in the botanical gardens of the University of Pisa, involving Ridolfi and two other young noblemen. In one version of events, Ridolfi’s conduct towards a certain young woman was the occasion of the quarrel; in another, the argument arose from a point of botanical classification. Whatever the cause, offence was taken on both sides and, some days after, a second and more violent altercation ensued. In consequence, Ridolfi left Pisa in October of that year, perhaps expelled. Forty years would pass before he returned to his native city.

  A sentence in a letter sent in 1607 to the Veronese botanist-physician Giovanni Pona suggests that Ridolfi travelled widely after leaving Pisa. Where precisely he travelled is unknown. For the next five years, we have but a single trace of him: in 1594 he was in Bologna, where he met and was entranced by little Antonietta Gonsalvus, daughter of Petrus Gonsalvus, the celebrated monster of Tenerife. Antonietta’s manners were refined and her voice delightful, he wrote, though her face was ‘as hairy as a wolf’s’. While in Bologna, Ridolfi became closely acquainted with Ulisse Aldrovandi, in whose Catalogue of men who have visited our museum he is described as a ‘man very extraordinary’. Ridolfi in turn would extol Aldrovandi as ‘the most percipient reader of the book of Nature’.

  Ridolfi had a villa built outside the walls of Castelluccio, and by the end of 1599 he was in residence there. No image exists of the villa, which was demolished in the early years of the nineteenth century, but we know of some of its features. Above the portal was set a large relief in stone, depicting Sisyphus and his rock. A ‘speaking tube’ connected the hall to Ridolfi’s studio, enabling his manservant to announce the arrival of guests. Portraits of Aldrovandi and other scholars were the only paintings that Ridolfi owned. In addition to these portraits, the rooms were adorned with representations of Ridolfi’s personal emblem: an oak tree above the motto Descendo ut ascendam (I descend in order to rise). Whereas the museums of collectors such as Aldrovandi, Francesco Calzolari, Ferrante Imperato, Ole Worm and Manfredo Settala are recorded in numerous engravings, there is no such depiction of Ridolfi’s studio. From the accounts left by visitors, however, we can imagine a spacious room, windowless, in which thousands of specimens were arrayed in cabinets, ordered by type. A cabinet of shells and corals occupied much of one wall; butterflies and insects filled another. In the cabinet of birds, two parrots flanked a bird of paradise. The jaws of a colossal shark, found on a beach near Livorno, hung above the cabinet of fishes, in which was displayed a remora, a fish that, though no longer than a man’s leg, could attach itself to the hull of a ship and stop it in mid-ocean, more suddenly than any anchor, as had happened to the ship carrying Mark Antony at the battle of Actium. A skeleton of a siren was suspended from the ceiling; a cat with one head and two bodies could be seen beside a snake with two heads. Ridolfi kept a live chameleon, a creature that was as much a favourite as a specimen. ‘The admirable courtier-lizard, always at one with his place of habitation,’ is how Ridolfi described the animal. The most extensive part of Ridofi’s collection was the botanical section: he is said to have possessed a sample of every herb that had been known to Dioscorides and Pliny. In the centre of the room, armour and weapons were displayed, with astrolabes and armillary spheres and telescopes. A visitor from Germany stated that there were more than 15,000 ‘things’ in the museo of the esteemed Giovan Antonio Ridolfi. Others called it a teatro, a microcosmo, a cornucopia, a gazophylacium, a ‘forest of knowledge’.

  Collecting was Ridolfi’s sole extravagance. His household staff never numbered more than two: he had a cook and a manservant, who was also his draughtsman, in which capacity he accompanied his master on his frequent excursions into the countryside around Castelluccio. Always in search of specimens, Ridolfi travelled extensively. In 1604 he journeyed to the Pyrenees, an expedition that lasted six months. On his way home he passed through Verona; from there, with Giovanni Pona, he climbed Monte Baldo, where they gathered orchids, rhododendrons, heliotropes, noli mi tangere and costo. The last of these was needed for the preparation of theriac, a universal antidote derived from the concoction with which Mithridates the Great, by means of frequent ingestion, had made himself invulnerable to poisons. Whereas many physicians strove to produce a compound that used the same sixty-four ingredients that Galen had used in his theriac, Ridolfi’s theriac was a mixture of no fewer than one hundred ingredients, and it was deplored by several other physicians for its inclusion of ‘inauthentic simples’. Matteo Picco of Siena condemned Ridolfi’s ‘stew of Africa, Asia, Europe and the New World.’ Ridolfi planned to sail to the Indies; there is no evidence that this ambition was fulfilled.

  Soon after his return from the Pyrenees he was called to Volterra to assist an apothecary in dissecting several vipers for their poison – the apothecary could not be certain of his ability to distinguish the barren vipers from the pregnant, a distinction that was of vital significance in the preparation of theriac. In the same year a dragon with bird’s feet and the head of a serpent was killed in an orchard near Certaldo, and Ridolfi was asked to inspect the corpse of the beast. His opinion is not recorded. After that, it appears that he rarely travelled further than a day’s walk from Castelluccio.

  He had, though, many visitors and many correspondents. A physician in Bergamo wrote to thank him for the balsamo orientale that Ridolfi had sent him. Another doctor expressed his gratitude for sticks of Portuguese cinnamon. He exchanged letters with Johann Faber, supervisor of the papal botanical gardens, and with Federico Cesi, founder of the Accademia dei Lincei, who in 1614 sent to Castelluccio a specimen of the luminescent lapis Bononiensis or ‘solar sponge’. From a correspondent in Florence he acquired a microscope (occhialino), with which he explicated to certain visitors the anatomies of flies and bees and all manner of insects. To a professor from Bari he demonstrated that the body of the lowly snail does indeed contain a heart. Another scholar, believing that birds could generate spontaneously from trees, and frogs from menses and dust, had a strong disagreement with Ridolfi and left the villa on bad t
erms. In 1616 the Jesuit linguist and mathematician Tommaso Casati, a friend of Athanasius Kircher, came to Castelluccio, where he and Ridolfi debated, to an audience of scholars, the qualities of the lodestone: for Casati the magnetism of the stone was a manifestation of God’s cohesive power, of the ‘golden chain’ that holds the world together; for Ridolfi it was proof of the wisdom of Galileo. At the debate’s conclusion the two views remained unreconciled; nonetheless, Casati and Ridolfi continued their discussions by letter, amicably. A letter from Ridolfi preserves his argument that the new species being discovered every year in distant parts of the world made it impossible for any reasonable man to believe that Noah’s Ark was anything other than a fable. In February 1617 he wrote to Casati: ‘I am a slave of no philosopher’. And: ‘Philosophy lives in the shops and the countryside’. Later that year, Casati drowned in China.

  ‘The house of Ridolfi is a shambles,’ wrote the man who believed in the spontaneous generation of birds and frogs. He mentions a tub of entrails beside Ridolfi’s desk, a dog’s head on a windowsill, a flayed horse. ‘The air of the villa is noisome,’ he wrote, and ‘his studio is a pit of crawling things’. Ridolfi paid farmers to bring him specimens of unusual plants and insects; in this way he came to record five plants for which there was no name. He was in contact with fishermen all along the Tuscan coast, who would send him freakish fish and sea plants for his collection. At night he could be seen on the hills around the town: he had devised some sort of hat or helmet to which a small lantern was attached, and the light of it could be seen from the town walls, moving over the land like a tiny wandering star.

  In Castelluccio he seems to have associated with only three men: Antonio Manetti, a lawyer; Pietro Appiani, an apothecary; and Giuliano de Solis, a physician, who occasionally consulted Ridolfi on medical matters. One such consultation occurred in 1627, when the magistrate Jacopo dal Borgo presented himself to de Solis, complaining of abdominal pains. Theriac was administered, but the symptoms worsened. Other medicines were taken; quantities of blood were drained; the man rapidly declined. Unable to walk, he was carried to the resting place of Saint Zeno; such was his agony, he could not speak. He was on the threshold of death when Ridolfi was brought to him. A purgative of antimony was proposed, and taken. At once the magistrate’s body began to evacuate itself, expelling noxious matter so copiously that it did not seem possible that he could survive. But survive he did, and though many gave thanks for his recovery primarily to Saint Zeno, the potions of Giovan Antonio Ridolfi were sufficiently credited for Ridolfi’s aid to be more promptly sought when, a little over a year later, a friar at the convent of Sant’Agostino was struck down by an illness which, like the ailment of Jacopo dal Borgo, seemed certain to bring about his demise. The friar, Fra’ Pietro Negri, was passing a bloody flux; he could drink water but could take no food; he had a fire in his bowels; with each passing day his flesh was dwindling. Under Ridolfi’s guidance, Giuliano de Solis prepared a compound, which the priest consumed as a man would consume water in the desert. As had happened with Jacopo dal Borgo, the effects of the potion were swift, but in this instance they were terrible. Father Negri writhed as if wolves were gnawing at his bones; he screamed that his blood was burning, that he had become blind, that he was already among the damned. After many hours of atrocious suffering, Father Negri died, and it was said by those who had witnessed his death that it would have been better for all if Ridolfi had not interfered.

  It seems that Ridolfi, never a gregarious man, now became reclusive. He no longer attended Mass. At night his light could still be observed, moving slowly across the fields, but during the daylight hours he rarely left his villa. A letter written by Giuliano de Solis two years after the death of Father Negri states that he has not conversed with his friend for many months, and describes him as ‘a man lost in the labyrinth of phenomena’. He also records that it was said that Ridolfi could sometimes be seen wandering the streets of Castelluccio in the dead of night, weeping. ‘But this is to be greatly doubted,’ he adds. Because Ridolfi had correspondents in Germany, he was said to have become a Protestant, or worse. Some alleged that he was an alchemist. Others thought that he had simply become mad.

  To date, just three letters written by Ridolfi in his final five years have been identified. In one of these, a single page sent in 1631 to a Florentine lawyer by the name of Giuseppe Troilo, who evidently had been obliged to remain in the plague-ridden city, he wrote: ‘The treatments to which you refer are without merit. There is no herb known to me that might offer protection against this pestilence, and none that has any curative power. I can counsel only solitude and prayer.’ In January of the following year he sent another brief letter to Troilo, from Naples, after witnessing the eruption of Vesuvius from a fishing boat moored in the bay. The ‘terrible and magnificent’ explosions threw out ‘clouds that rushed to immense heights in an instant’, and ‘flung aloft great rocks as large as palaces’. He expresses his excitement at the spectacle of the ‘burning blood of the earth’, the ‘infinite power of nature’ and its ‘glorious disorder’. He also writes of suffering some ill effects, unspecified, of the ‘great exertions’ to which he had put himself in exploring the sulphur fields of Pozzuoli.

  In the Easter week of 1634 he began what was almost certainly his last excursion from Castelluccio. Having spent a week in Pisa, to conclude some business pertaining to the estate of his brother, who had recently died, he continued onward to Milan, where he visited Manfredo Settala, the ‘Archimedes of our century’, in Settala’s workshop in the cloister of San Nazaro. He presented Settala with one of the specimens of the wood-fossil-mineral that had been sent to him by Federico Cesi, and the two men debated at length the nature of this remarkable substance. Ridolfi was inclined to regard it as the relic of something that had once been growing from the soil, whereas Settala’s view was that the object was rather an example of nature’s mimicry: the ‘lapidifying juices’ of the earth had fashioned in stone an imitation of a living organism. Ridolfi brought a second gift: a stone that had fallen from the sky with such force that it had killed a horse. In return, Settala gave Ridolfi an object he had carved from an elephant’s tusk. They also discussed Settala’s design for a machine of perpetual motion, a brass contraption comprising twelve interlocking circles.

  Settala’s account of the visit makes reference to Ridolfi’s deafness. From the last known letter in Ridolfi’s hand, sent to Cesi on March 5th, 1635, it seems that he was suffering from tinnitus. He complains of a ringing in his ears, a sound so oppressive that his head has ‘become a bell tower’. He is also experiencing difficulties of digestion and excretion, and has had recurrent fevers. ‘I sweat like a glassblower’, he writes. In the morning his bedding is so wet, ‘I might have passed the night at sea.’ On the night of March 10th, 1636, Giovan Antonio Ridolfi died at the house of Pietro Appiani, in Piazzetta Bandelli, having been found unconscious at his door. He had no heirs, and so his collection – ‘My most dear studio, which has brought to me all the honour that my person has been accorded’ – was broken up, with most of his specimens being dispersed to museums in Milan, Bologna, Rome and Pisa. Other than the two examples of virtuosic carving held by the Museo Civico of Castelluccio, few items can now be traced with certainty to the Villa Ridolfi. However, five books in the library of the university of Pisa bear annotations in his hand: Fabio Colonna’s Ekphrasis, Francisco Hernandez’s Treasure of Medical Things from New Spain, Federico Cesi’s Apiarium, Caspar Bauhin’s Index to the Theatre of Botany and Pier Matteo Mattioli’s edition of Dioscorides’ Materials of Medicine. He is buried in Pisa, alongside others of his family.

  7.5

  The noisy Englishwomen from the Caffè del Corso have camped on the edge of Piazza del Mercato, each with an easel, some facing the loggia, others directing their attention to the Redentore or the Torre del Saraceno. Gideon often goes for days without speaking to anyone except Robert; the life of the artist is incompatible with an active social life, he has always
maintained, and he has never wished it were not so; nonetheless, the occasional episode of transient interaction is to be welcomed. He saunters past the easels, and initiates a conversation with the woman who is first to look up.

  They are from St Albans, he discovers, and have been attending the same art class for the past five years. Last year they went away for a week in Burgundy; this year it’s Tuscany. ‘We’ve left our husbands to fend for themselves,’ interjects a woman who’s wearing a blue smock that she evidently takes to be the appropriate garb for a plein air watercolourist. ‘So that’s a week’s worth of dirty clothes waiting for us when we get back,’ adds another, at forty-five or thereabouts the youngest of the crew. ‘And a binful of takeaway cartons,’ adds the most attractive of the crew, a flirtatious and intense-seeming woman of about sixty, doughy about the jowls but still pretty, with shapely hands and a thick bob of blazing silver hair. They are having a terrific time, they tell him: the weather is so nice, the town is so nice, the countryside is so nice. ‘And the men are so much better looking than in St Albans,’ chirps smock-lady, to which others assent with a quantity of twittering laughter.

  It turns out that they are staying on the Senesi farm, in the apartments in the old barn. A lovely place, is the consensus; very peaceful; but a lot of mosquitoes by the pool. And the owner is an odd little man – not as friendly as you’d expect from an Italian; and his wife seems to be a very nervous woman, but she’s more hospitable than her husband, and her breakfasts are terrific, all agree.

  While listening, Gideon has inspected the watercolours: they are clumsy and either vapid or lurid, and all are pointless except as a means of passing the time. The woman with the smock is unable to transpose proportions correctly; the silver-haired woman flattens everything out, and sees outbreaks of pink where there aren’t any; the youngest one, at work on the Redentore, is about to apply her brush to an area of paper that should be left to dry. ‘If I were you, I’d wait,’ he says. He advises her to use thinner washes. ‘Concentrate on the silhouette,’ he tells her.