He returned to Perugia, where in the monastery of San Severino he painted a fresco and signed it, as Vasari says, in “big, very legible letters.” Then he went back to Florence and in the space of three years painted a large quantity of Madonnas and other works for Florentine patrons. He painted the Madonna of the Meadows and the Madonna of the Goldfinch. He painted a portrait of Angelo Doni, a wealthy Florentine wool merchant, and of Angelo’s wife Maddalena, in the style of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. Yet in spite of his popularity and his ceaseless flow of commissions, his artistic “awakening” and his newly declamatory signature, his good looks and his amiable personality, Raphael remained locked out of the reality his contemporaries were charting like a newly discovered continent. What were they seeing? What did they know? And how could he come to know it too? For Raphael’s Madonnas were just sweet, beautiful recollections of childhood, and his portrait of Maddalena, though he worked and worked on her hands and her clothing to make her human, lacked what is more human still, what is invisible to the naked eye. It lacked the very thing that makes the Mona Lisa seem to smile: mystery.
The train to Florence passes through tunnel after tunnel, long interludes of darkness that suddenly give way to bright, bleached passages of intricate daylight, just as dark tunnels of sleep seem to snake their way toward dreams, bursting into color and detail and then plunging back into a swift-running obscurity. The hot, dusty vineyards of Chianti flash past; here and there a house stands remotely in the hills. Then we are in a tunnel again, traveling without seeming to move, thundering at a black standstill with a clamor that might break open time itself. And indeed the time machine of popular imagination never actually stirs. It merely gathers in intensity, as though an effort of will is all that is required to enter the past. I don’t suppose this idea has anything to do with looking at paintings, but the procedure is the same. It is a matter of intensity, of will. It is possible to look at a painting and not see anything at all. There must be an offering of the self before the painting will open. There must be intensity, or the past will stay locked.
Florence station is slightly seedy, with the scummy froth of litter and souvenir stalls and fast-food places that is the residue left by tourist tides that sweep ceaselessly across its reef of treasures. In the city there are people everywhere: they form great winding queues, like roads whose destination lies out of sight. Several times I see people automatically joining them, apparently without knowing where they will lead. There are Japanese and German and French, Spanish and Dutch and American. They drift around the city in concertinaing herds, their guide at the front like a shepherd. The guides hold sticks raised in the air. Each one has a flag or a brightly colored ribbon tied at the top. Their flock wears the same ribbon, so as to be identifiable in the crowds. There is a group with yellow ribbons tied around their throats. There is a group with tartan caps. It is like a strange medieval pageant or festival. They flow and counterflow in the variegated spaces, each one drifting out and contracting like a single, liquid creature. They bunch up in alleyways and fan out over the piazzas; they wind like serpents along the crowded pavements. They congregate at Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise and the guides shout across one another in their different languages.
It is very hot in the city. The buildings stand in dusty chasms of shadow and light. The traffic crawls along the Via della Scala. The blue sky is far off and remote. The Piazza del Duomo is a crucible of glare, with its white marble tower and cathedral and baptistery. The crowds look half calcified in the bleaching light: in their individuation they seem to be helplessly disintegrating, breaking down into smaller and smaller units. We move along a congested alleyway toward the Piazza della Signoria, where a riot of café terraces and horse-drawn tourist carriages and pavement hawkers selling African jewelry is under way. People push and shove rudely, trying to get what they want: photographs, food, a tea towel bearing the cock and balls of Michelangelo’s David. There are so many people that the sculptures on their plinths in the Loggia dei Lanzi seem truly to be the gods they represent, gazing down on the awful spectacle of mortality. I have seen a fifteenth-century painting of the Piazza della Signoria, where children play and the burghers of Florence stroll and chat in its gracious spaces, while the monk Savonarola is burned at the stake in the background outside the Palazzo Vecchio. Here and there peasants carry bundles of twigs, to put on the fire. Now our violence is diffuse, generalized: it has been broken down until it covers everything in a fine film, like dust.
The long, colonnaded façade of the Galleria degli Uffizi stands in a side street, between the piazza and the river Arno. It is as shady and civilized as an arbor here, despite the queue that runs four or five people deep all down one side and up the other. The light from the water is soothing, mesmerizing, on the high-up windows. The people in the queue have an eternal look about them, for only a small number are admitted every hour. The gallery is visited by appointment: there is a separate door for people with tickets. A young man in a dark, immaculate suit stands there, bowing and ushering the ticket holders in without delay. The people in the queue look on from behind their ropes. They will be there forever. They are bound into a thick, hot cable of bodies that runs as far as the eye can see. There are people with children, people with large suitcases. Again and again, those with tickets arrive and are whisked into the cool interior before their eyes. We ourselves have tickets: we had to wait two weeks for our appointment. How sparse the world’s treasures are! And how hungry, devouring hour after hour of life! It is almost as if they wish nothing more to be created.
Inside, the building is deep and tenebrous and hushed. We go up a great stone staircase, rising through layers of light, past fragments of Roman sarcophagi leaping with mythical creatures, past cracked marble torsos and far-seeing Hellenistic faces, up and up as though we were rising through time itself. At the top there are long galleries like avenues, filled with an unearthly, watery light. Far below the river can be seen, broad and fertile and opaque. It is like a strange kind of heaven up here, where sculpted gods and goddesses stand along the walls as though milling in the halls of eternity. They are so well guarded, so secure in their possession, so superior to the dusty streets below, teeming with life. I remember the people queuing downstairs, held like waters at a dam. What pent-up force waits there? What do they want? Why do they accept the authority of this heaven, and their banishment from it? Yet it is true that all those people couldn’t fit up here comfortably. I don’t suppose we would worry about comfort if it were left up to us. The yearning for beauty has not surrendered entirely to the desire to be comfortable, that much is clear. An overgrown humanity trying to fit into the narrow, beautiful past, like a person in corpulent middle age trying to squeeze into a slender garment from their youth.