Renoir also penetrates the labyrinth of Florence’s streets. He wanders along the pavements, breathes in the air, and peers at the blotches of light the gas lamps project on the walls. He walks at random, with nowhere in particular in mind. Suddenly he is in front of Santa Maria Novella. From the pavement opposite — the famous church is situated in one of the most central areas — he gazes at the vaguely visible façade of that slender building. The façade is covered in black and white marble dice that crisscross geometrically. Renoir feels a strange sensation, as if he isn’t breathing enough air. Initially he feels he is choking. He continues walking along the streets. The black and white marble blocks of Santa Maria become a kind of obsession. He doesn’t dare formulate an opinion. He feels that first choking sensation intensify. But tomorrow is another day. He goes back to his hotel and, worn out, goes to bed.
Early the next morning he is in front of the Galleria degli Uffizi, on the Piazza della Signoria. The museum opens after a while. Renoir is a morning man, a lover of morning light and fresh air. He is the first tourist to go into the museum that day. He doesn’t seem to be carrying any book or paper. But he’s ready to take long, leisurely looks. He scrutinizes the paintings hanging on the wall with the calm gaze of a vine-grower. He scrutinizes them one by one: he looks at them from close-up, from afar, from the right and the left. And walks through several rooms like that. With unexpected physical staying power — museums are tiring, create an unpleasant emptiness in the stomach and intolerable exhaustion — he scrutinizes the canvasses, the tables, the afreschi, as if he’d lost all notion of time. A guard informs him that they must shut for the colazione. It’s time for lunch. Everyone else has left the museum. Renoir is the last out, seems edgy and thoughtful. In the afternoon, he’s the first to go into the Uffizi. He’s eaten a quick plate of spaghetti in a nearby trattoria, drunk a coffee standing up and appeared opposite the entrance before opening time. He does exactly the same the following day, morning and afternoon. However, on that genuinely tragic day you notice he doesn’t linger long looking microscopically at the paintings, as on the previous day. He stops in front of a few paintings and looks more attentively. With others he takes a quick glance and walks on. Some produce a sense of revulsion and he turns his back with a flourish he tries to conceal, though it is obvious enough. By late afternoon on that second day, he’s had enough. He seems weary and on edge. Back in his hotel, he consults the train timetable, and asks for the bill. And starts packing his case.
That was when we bumped into him staring at a cup of coffee in that small bar in the vicinity of the Central Station. What ever happened? He himself will tell us later.
“My patience had run out,” he said. “My head kept colliding everywhere, even my elbows clashed with the style. What cold, icy, premeditated painting …! Those crisscross blocks of black and white marble made me dizzy. I was short of air, was choking. While I was in Florence, I felt I was walking over a chessboard, that I was living in a cage, that they’d shut me inside a prison cell. I can’t find the words to describe how I suffered in the Uffizi … I simply fled from Florence.”
Well, it seems a perfectly understandable position: it is a clear, honest position. One must choose in life. Renoir had chosen a path. As I see it, his choice is highly valuable. Degas would say: “They shoot us down and then turn our pockets out to see if they can find anything else.” Renoir felt choked by all the stasis and fled immediately. Others say they feel choked in a similar way but stay on and turn out their pockets. Renoir follows in the tradition of the great realist painters: Vermeer, Velázquez, and Titian. It is a difficult tradition precisely because it seems so free and energetic — in any case, it is the greatest freedom to which an artist can aspire.
That Business at the Pensione Florentina, in Rome
When I arrived in Rome, I went to live in the Pensione Fiorentina, on the recommendation of my friend Spadafora the journalist. The pensione was on the Via del Tritone and had an international clientele.
In any other major European city the place would have been a dreadful mistake from the point of view of comfort. It was located in one of the noisiest and most central areas in Rome. You couldn’t possibly imagine enjoying the slightest rest or tranquility there. However, appearances can be deceptive, even in Rome. The boarding house occupied part of the structure of an old palace with enormous rooms and the thickest of walls. The outer forms of that old bulwark had been removed when it was converted into a modern house, but the old walls survived and isolated the house from the urban hue and cry. It wasn’t the peace you find in provincial cities. A vague and distant singsong hum drifted through the house from nine A.M. to eleven P.M. But it wasn’t a strident, insoluble noise that attacked the nervous system. The bother was minimal.
A restaurant was on the ground floor and the boarding house occupied the first and fourth floors. A small, narrow cul-de-sac separated it from the house next door. When I arrived, I was allotted bedroom twelve on the first floor. It didn’t look over the street, but over the end of a passageway that led to the back of the building. Full of cheap furniture from the days of Cavour worn threadbare by constant use, it was a dark, gloomy spot. A disjointed gallery — the old palace loggia — meant the bedroom window had no access to the open space at the rear; if a sunbeam ever shone in, it looked like a stray sunbeam that had come from nowhere, of its own volition. The window’s location blocked my view of the bottom of the open area, though I could see the picturesque, very Italian upper reaches. I could see clotheslines strung from one balcony to the next, various chicken coops, huge amounts of old junk, and the branches of a vine the roots of which I never did track down. Decrepit and precariously balanced, everything seemed to hang by a thread, but kept up perfectly. In addition, there was a constant din that sometimes turned into a fierce war of words. An unhappy couple lived in the area — always open to the world — opposite my bedroom window and they engaged in shouting matches that followed on in quick succession. When they started shrieking, other neighbors leaned out of their windows to try to shut them up by bawling wildly. Once the contest had begun, all the children in the vicinity began to cry their hearts out, as if on cue; the dishwashers in the ground-floor restaurant, encouraged by the verbal jousting, clattered their buckets of dirty crockery, and a Latin teacher, a man with a long beard, wound up by the relentless screaming, and unable to work on his papers, leaned out of his window with a clarinet to his lips and blew at full blast for as long as was necessary. His method usually worked: when that crazy din peaked, the general din began to fade. It was the application of the similia similibus curantur of quack medicine to rowdy conjugal tiffs. When the teacher had achieved his aim, he smiled smugly and withdrew, placing his clarinet vertically on the most visible part of his window ledge, both to prompt a general sense of shame and indicate he was ready to repeat the method the moment the row recommenced.
Though these inner exchanges at the Pensione Fiorentina were perhaps not the politest, I found them very helpful in accustoming my ear to the various dialects of the peninsula.