Inferno Decoded

by Michael Haag

  To the left, Francesco Petrarch (1304–74), the poet and scholar who came up with the phrase ‘Dark Ages’ to describe the period that followed the light of classical antiquity, is attempting to catch Dante’s attention. Both in his person and in his poetry, he was a quieter and more inward-looking man than Dante, whose nature and writings could be violent and extreme. Between Petrarch and Dante, and standing somewhat behind them, is Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75), friend of Petrarch, author of the often erotic Decameron, who idolised Dante and was his first biographer. These four figures wear the laurel crown in recognition of their literary achievements.

  Vasari’s group portrait of six Tuscan humanists. Dante, at the centre, is holding the Divine Comedy.

  PAGANISM AND HERESY

  Somewhat further back in the painting, on the left, stand two commentators on the poets’ works – Cristoforo Landino (1424–98), a champion of vernacular Italian, and Marsilio Ficino (1433–99). In 1459, Ficino was chosen by the founder of the Medici political dynasty, Cosimo de Medici ‘the Elder’ (1389–1464), to establish the Platonic Academy in Florence, an attempt to recreate Plato’s original Academy in Athens. In this role, Ficino became the first translator of Plato’s known works into Latin, and he devoted himself to reviving Neoplatonism. In his philosophical masterpiece, the Theologia Platonica, Ficino adapted Pythagoras, the sixth-century BC Greek mathematician, philosopher and mystic, to Christian purposes. Hailing Pythagoras as the originator of the concept of the immortality of the soul, he used his mystical geometry to explain the soul as a circle, without beginning or end, an infinity.

  Ficino became mired in controversy when he translated a newly found trove of ancient Graeco-Egyptian hermetic works. These included the Corpus Hermeticum, attributed to the man-god Hermes Trismegistos, whom Ficino regarded as a pagan prophet who foresaw the coming of Christianity.

  Ficino, who was also a Catholic priest and an astrologer, was directly responsible for making hermeticism a component of Renaissance thought, in which it was associated with alchemy, magic and astrology. His activities ran him foul of the Vatican, however, and in 1489 he only narrowly escaped condemnation for heresy.

  VASARI AND THE MEDICIS

  As both architect and painter, Vasari was favoured by the Medicis, the illustrious family of financiers and patrons of the arts who followed in the footsteps of Cosimo the Elder and continued to rule Florence through much of the Renaissance. Like many other great Florentine families, they derived their fortunes from the textile trade.

  The need to finance their mercantile activities led the Medicis into banking, and soon the Medici Bank extended its services and influence throughout the merchant houses and governments of Europe, to the point that the Medicis themselves became Europe’s richest family.

  Vasari dedicated his Lives of the Artists to Cosimo de Medici I (1519–74), Grand Duke of Florence, who continued his family’s patronage of architecture and the arts. He commissioned Vasari to paint the fresco of The Last Judgement in Brunelleschi’s vast dome surmounting the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, better known simply as the Duomo. He also had Vasari construct the Uffizi, the ‘offices’ that once housed the city’s magistrates and now hold the world-famous art gallery; and commissioned him to finish off his private home, the Palazzo Pitti, across the River Arno.

  To enable Cosimo to move quickly and secretly between office and home – and safely too, as assassination in the streets was always a danger – he had Vasari build for him a remarkable aerial passageway from the Palazzo Vecchio, the Florence town hall, via the Uffizi to the Palazzo Pitti. Well over half a mile long, this is the Corridoio Vasariano, or the Vasari Corridor, which despite figuring in numerous postcard views of Florence somehow remains largely unnoticed; very few people are even aware of its existence. As Dan Brown has said, some of the greatest secrets are those hidden in plain sight.

  The Vasari Corridor crosses the Ponte Vecchio.

  SEEK AND YOU WILL FIND

  Some secrets, however, are not in sight at all. Take for example the words uttered by the veiled woman in Robert Langdon’s vision as he awakens in hospital: ‘Time grows short. Seek and find’. This is a four-hundred-year-old Florentine clue, of which you would only make sense if you make the connection with Giorgio Vasari. ‘Cerca trova’, reads the tiny wording that’s effectively hidden from sight forty feet up the wall of the Salone dei Cinquecento, the Hall of the Five Hundred, an immense room built within the Palazzo Vecchio at the end of the fifteenth century to accommodate the meetings of the Florentine Council. Meaning ‘Seek and find’, the words are found on a minuscule green banner in the midst of the vast mural of the Battle of Marciano, one of six battle scenes that fill the room. All executed either by Vasari, or under his direction, they celebrate Florentine victories over Pisa and Siena.

  The enigmatic words were first noticed only in the 1970s, by Maurizio Seracini, a native Florentine expert in high-technology art analysis. He believes they are a deliberate message left by Vasari himself, pointing to the whereabouts of a famous lost fresco by Leonardo da Vinci. It seems extraordinary that Leonardo’s massive wall-sized fresco, the Battle of Anghiari, could ever be ‘lost’; some say the plaster dried too quickly and deteriorated beyond repair, but others argue that it’s impossible to imagine that Leonardo did not know the basic techniques of fresco painting.

  Seracini thinks Leonardo’s fresco still exists; that it’s exactly where it has always been; and that when Cosimo de Medici ordered the redecoration of the hall, Vasari simply built a false wall on which he painted his own fresco, leaving Leonardo’s intact just inches behind it.

  Seracini – who incidentally is the only real, living person to appear in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, where he is mentioned for his real-world discovery that Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi had been painted over and altered by another artist who totally misrepresented Leonardo’s original intentions, and who is also mentioned twice in Inferno – has since demonstrated the existence of this hidden wall and of a fresco upon it, the paints of which are the same as those used by Leonardo.

  Following outraged protests from conservative quarters in the Italian art bureaucracy, however, the exploratory work was stopped towards the end of 2012. Despite all Seracini’s seeking, the matter remains unsolved.

  RENAISSANCE MYSTERIES

  ‘Seek and find’ leads Langdon and Sienna, via the Vasari Corridor, into the Palazzo Vecchio – that same turreted building glowing in the Florence night skyline that Robert Langdon saw from his hospital window – in which lie deeper secrets still. Cosimo also had Vasari construct and decorate his private study, the Tesoretto, deep within the Palazzo Vecchio, where he could retreat to pursue his interest in alchemy. Vasari later performed a similar service for Cosimo’s son, the melancholic and introverted Francesco I, when he built the strangest feature of the Palazzo Vecchio, the secret Studiolo, a windowless chamber decorated under Vasari’s direction with scenes laden with alchemical symbolism.

  The overall theme of the Studiolo – you can follow in the footsteps of Langdon and Sienna and visit it today – is the magic of nature. It’s demonstrated in the celebration of mystical numbers whose symbolism unites the ancient past with the scientific present through alchemy and the manipulation of divine numerology. At the heart of the Renaissance, among men like Vasari, Ficino and the Medicis, sophisticated men of rational learning were at the same time exploring the mysteries of the pagan world.

  HUMANISM AND FANATICISM

  During the mid-1480s, at a time when Lorenzo de Medici, the Magnificent, was ruling Florence with a firm grip, Botticelli was commissioned to paint his Primavera and his Birth of Venus by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de Medici, the head of a younger branch of the Medici family. Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, who had been educated by some of the finest minds in Florence, including the humanist Marsilio Ficino, was patron of some of the leading artists of the time, including Botticelli and Michelangelo. Ficino also remained a close friend, and imparted his s
ophisticated pagan philosophical outlook to Botticelli, working with him to fill his Primavera with Neoplatonist and Pythagorean symbolism. In this way the teachings of Gemistus Plethon, the Byzantine scholar whom Ficino had met at the Council of Florence back in 1438, found their way through the generations, to emerge in the sensuous grace and beauty of Botticelli’s painting.

  By now, a great change was already overcoming Florence. The voice of that change could be heard in the pulpit at San Marco, the Dominican church and monastery in the north of the city. In due course the numbers who gathered to hear that voice grew into so vast a crowd that San Marco became too small, so the voice spoke from the Duomo, the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore itself, where it drew such a terrible picture of the damned that his listeners’ hair was said to rise with fright. Among those who came to listen was Sandro Botticelli, and the change was working within him too. The voice belonged to a firebrand Dominican friar called Savonarola.

  CONTEMPT FOR THE WORLD

  Girolamo Savonarola (1452–98) was born in Ferrara, and became a Dominican friar in Bologna in 1475. Clearly troubled by his own desires of the flesh, he wrote a treatise called On Contempt for the World, in which he called upon his readers to reject this world of envy, adultery, sodomy and murder. Six years later he was sent as a teacher to the monastery of San Marco in Florence.

  There, where it was remarked that his intense green eyes flashed with fire (just as, in Dan Brown’s Inferno, Zobrist’s ‘green eyes flashed fire’), he wasted no time in thundering against the Florentines for their sinful ways, their passion for gambling, their perfumes and extravagant clothes, their dissolute carnivals and their sensual pleasures. All of which were destroying their souls and making it impossible for them to enter the Kingdom of God. Prostitutes must be beaten to make them virtuous; he thundered, homosexuals must be burned alive; the books of Plato and Aristotle must be kicked into the gutter; and all those paintings that make the Virgin Mary look like a whore must be destroyed. The Florentines must do what Savonarola would do himself – they must war against sin and live the austere and simple life of the Early Church. And they must replace the present tyranny of Medici rule with a true republic. They must repent.

  This was a full-scale reaction not only to Medici rule, but also, whether articulated or not, to everything that the Renaissance and humanism stood for. The voice spoke to the confused, the dispossessed, to all those who wanted power for themselves or power for their God. It took the form of a great popular movement against the rule of the Medicis and in the name of reform. And yet it spoke to Botticelli too, beloved and favoured by the Medicis, a man who knew the humanist circles first hand, an artist who was the Renaissance itself. Something was missing from the mix, and Savonarola seemed to have the answer.

  JESUS CHRIST, KING OF FLORENCE

  After Lorenzo the Magnificent died in 1492, he was succeeded by his arrogant, lazy and incompetent son Piero. Commonly known as Il Fatuo, Piero was hardly a man able to contend with the two great threats to Medici rule. One came from Savonarola, the other from Charles VIII, the young and ambitious king of France, who renewed old claims on the Kingdom of Naples and had designs on the whole of Italy. Weak and indecisive in the face of these challenges to his rule from within and without, Piero de Medici allowed his authority to slip away. Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco declared his support for the French king, who had pledged to unite Italy and make Florence the new Rome.

  By the time Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco entered Florence in the vanguard of Charles VIII’s army in November 1494, to the people’s welcoming cheers, Piero had made his escape. Throwing in his lot with the revolutionary movement, he dropped the name Medici and called himself Popolano, of the people. He refused any formal role in the governing of the city, preferring to promote cultural activities from the background. No sooner had the French departed, however, than Savonarola preached that:

  Florence will be more glorious, richer, more powerful than she has ever been. First, glorious in the sight of God as well as of men; and you, O Florence, will be the reformation of all Italy, and from here the renewal will begin and spread everywhere, because this is the navel of Italy. Your counsels will reform all by the light and grace that God will give you. Second, O Florence, you will have innumerable riches, and God will multiply all things for you. Third, you will spread your empire, and thus you will have power temporal and spiritual.

  Flattered by Savonarola, the populace made the friar the effective ruler of Florence. As a cleric and not a Florentine citizen, he was not entitled to assume formal office, but he ruled from the pulpit. His supporters, organising themselves into a political party, ensured that his measures passed through the Council of One Thousand, even as they declared that supreme power was invested in Jesus Christ and hung a great banner across the gate of the Palazzo Vecchio proclaiming ‘Jesus Christ is the King of Florence’.

  THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES

  To purify the city and impose his ascetic regime, Savonarola organised armies of children to march about the streets, even going into homes, inspecting and confiscating belongings. Scent bottles, mirrors, fans, necklaces, packs of cards, profane books such as the stories of Boccaccio, musical instruments, portraits of beautiful women, furniture too lavish, sculptures too bare – all such things were seized and burned. The most famous immolation took place in February 1497, when tens of thousands of objects were piled high in the Piazza della Signoria and set alight in what became infamous as the Bonfire of the Vanities.

  Among the objects blackening in the flames were paintings considered sensual by the artists themselves, including, it was said, works by Botticelli, who had become a true believer. Many artists, writers and scholars had been deeply impressed by Savonarola’s sermons, his sincerity, his vision of a City of God. Michelangelo, who left Florence after the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent and avoided the worst of what was to come, said in his old age that he could still hear the voice of Savonarola in his ears. The poor and middle class were among the preacher’s warmest supporters, but he had support among the wealthiest families too. ‘There was never such goodness and religion in Florence as in his day’, wrote a law student in the city at the time.

  BOTTICELLI’S DANTE

  In the early 1480s, Botticelli had already started to make a series of drawings for Dante’s Divine Comedy. Vasari writes that after finishing his work on the Sistine Chapel in Rome in 1482, Botticelli:

  Botticelli’s Beatrice and Dante in Paradise.

  … returned immediately to Florence, where, being a man of inquiring mind, he made a commentary on part of Dante, illustrated the Inferno, and printed it; on which he wasted much of his time, bringing infinite disorder into his life by neglecting his work. He also printed many of the drawings that he had made, but in a bad manner, for the engraving was poorly done. The best of these that is to be seen by his hand is the Triumph of the Faith effected by Fra Girolamo Savonarola of Ferrara, of whose sect he was so ardent a partisan that he was thereby induced to desert his painting, and, having no income to live on, fell into very great distress.

  The process that Vasari describes seems to have been a long one. Botticelli is known to have begun the drawings in the early 1480s, for an edition of Dante with commentary by the humanist Cristoforo Landino, successor to Marsilio Ficino at the Platonic Academy, and yet he was still hard at work as late as 1496 or 1497, during the heyday of Savonarola’s rule. Neglecting other work, he harmed himself financially, though that must have been due to his own obsessive nature, for just as Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco had commissioned the Birth of Venus and the Primavera, so too had he commissioned these Dante illustrations.

  While Botticelli drew Dante with a growing religious obsession, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco had his own reasons for backing the project. Dante was a cultural icon for the Guelf factions of Florentines, whose policy at the time was for an alliance with France, but there was also another angle. When Savonarola came to power, paintings like the Primavera fell out of favour. Dante, o
n the other hand, was one of the few authors that Savonarola was prepared to tolerate.

  In depicting the torments suffered in Dante’s Hell, Botticelli was able both to live up to Savonarola’s asceticism, and to explore a host of different ways of representing naked figures. At the same time he carried forward into Purgatory and Paradise the Venus of Primavera; as the illustrations show, she is always the same woman.

  Like Dante, Botticelli had his Beatrice too. He never married, suffering it seems from an unrequited love for Simonetta Vespucci, the wife of a relative of the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci who explored the coasts of the New World and gave his name to America. When she died in 1476, Botticelli asked that when his time came he be buried at her feet; and so he was, in the Church of Ognissanti in Florence in 1510.

  ORDEAL BY FIRE

  Slowly, things turned against Savonarola. Poor harvests were leading to hunger, several people died of starvation in the streets, and an outbreak of the plague soon followed. Under the circumstances, the Franciscans, already annoyed by the Dominicans’ claim to a special relationship with God, demanded that Savonarola should offer some proof of God’s favour.