La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language

by Dianne Hales

  “If it were as simple to create something as to criticize, my Christ would look like Christ to you and not a peasant,” Donatello snapped. “Take some wood and try to make one yourself.” Brunelleschi, trained as a goldsmith and clock maker, did exactly that, bringing his crucifix to “the highest degree of perfection,” according to Vasari. When it was done, he positioned it carefully in optimal light on a wall in his home and instructed Donatello to take the fixings of a simple lunch there. The moment Donatello caught sight of the superbly crafted carving, he dropped his apron, filled with eggs, cheese, and bread, and stood before it in awe.

  “How can we have lunch if you have spilled everything?” Brunelleschi demanded when he arrived. Donatello begged off, saying, “I’ve had enough for this morning. It’s for you to make Christs and for me to make peasants.”

  Donatello, who later claimed that the constant carping of Florentines spurred him to greater accomplishments, traveled to Rome with Brunelleschi. The pair—often mistaken as grave robbers—spent years poking about the ruins to study the techniques of ancient artists. In the Pantheon, the architectural wonder of imperial Rome, Brunelleschi found the secrets to a puzzle that had baffled Florence’s finest minds for half a century: how to complete the mammoth dome for the city’s Basilica of Santa Maria del Fiore.

  Winning the commission for this task proved almost as challenging as the work itself. Brunelleschi argued so fervently and relentlessly for the job that at one point the “Great Council,” which consisted of guild leaders, appointed trustees, and consultants, had the volatile “ass and babbler,” as one called him, forcibly thrown into the street as if he were a lunatic. He complained that he was afraid to walk through Florence for fear of hearing people say, “Look! There goes the madman.”

  When the project trustees demanded that Brunelleschi reveal the technical details of his plans, he responded with an egg. Whoever could make it stand on end, he contended, should win the contract to build the dome. When all his rivals failed, Brunelleschi took the egg, cracked its bottom on a table, and made it stand upright. His competitors argued that they could have done the same thing because it was so obvious. That, Brunelleschi countered, was why he refused to show them his blueprints before the assignment was his. “By a vote taken with beans,” as Vasari describes it, the trustees named Brunelleschi the Duomo’s capomaestro, or principal master builder.

  Time and again, faced with a seemingly insurmountable challenge, the most extreme difficultà, Brunelleschi invented something entirely new: a hoist, a crane, even a way of installing stoves on the dome so his workers could eat well without wasting valuable time descending to the street. (He reportedly watered their wine to keep them sober.) The townspeople quoted a phrase from Dante’s Paradiso—de giro in giro, circle by circle—as they beheld the dome’s soul-stirring ascent into the Tuscan sky.

  After its completion in 1436, they began introducing themselves with the proud words “Io son fiorentino del Cupolone” (“I am a Florentine of the Big Dome”). To appreciate just how big Brunelleschi’s dome is—142 feet in diameter, 300 feet high—climb the 463 steep steps between its two vaults to the narrow gallery above the cathedral. But avoid the dizzying mistake I made: Don’t look down.

  The last creature I expected to come upon in Vasari’s tales was a Barbary ape, the cherished pet of the painter Fiorentino Rosso (1494–1540), nicknamed “Il Rosso” for his fiery complexion. The highly intelligent beast, who “possessed a spirit more human than animal,” became enamored with Batistino, Rosso’s handsome young apprentice, who communicated with the ape through gestures. He taught the ape to scramble down a trellis to pluck the plump San Colombano grapes growing in the adjacent garden of the friars of Santa Croce. When the ape’s paws were full, Batistino pulled him up with a rope sling.

  The prior, incensed by the theft, lay in wait and seized a rod to beat the robber. The terrified ape grabbed on to the trellis and shook it so mightily that the entire structure landed on the cleric. The irate prior, “muttering things that are not in the Mass and full of rage and animosity,” complained to the feared Office of the Eight. These Florentine judges ordered Rosso to attach a weight to his pet to restrict its movements.

  Rosso devised a roller that turned on a chain so the ape could lumber about the house but not climb into the garden. The clever animal, as if he had figured out the culprit behind this punishment, every day practiced jumping down the steps while holding the weight in his hands. One day when he was alone in the house and the prior was singing vespers, the ape leapt onto the friars’ cloister and made his way to the roof above the prior’s room. There he dropped the weight and romped about for half an hour, “leaving not a single tile or gutter unbroken.” Three days later it rained, and the prior’s outraged screams echoed through the neighborhood. Rosso and his ape retreated to Rome.

  In Florence, innovations such as prospettiva (perspective) and proporzione (proportion) changed the way artists thought, worked, talked—and sometimes lived. The painter Paolo Uccello (1397–1475), for example, became so engrossed by studies of perspective that he often would refuse his wife’s requests to join her in their bedchamber so he could linger with what he called his “odd mistress.” By the late fifteenth century, the period called the High Renaissance, artists were pursuing beauty like a drug, and their talents, combined with technical advances, lifted art to unparalleled levels of dolcezza (sweetness), leggiadria (gracefulness), and grazia (grace).

  The painter who achieved graziosissima grazia, the most graceful grace, was Raphael of Urbino (1483–1520), the epitome of the ideal gentleman his friend Baldassare Castiglione described in The Book of the Courtier. The doe-eyed painter was talented, affable, kind, and drop-dead gorgeous.

  Raphael’s artistic genius sprang from his uncanny ability to reproduce a master’s style so adroitly that he first equaled, then surpassed him. Criticized for a lack of majesty and grandeur in his pretty paintings, he knew the perfect tutor: the ferociously solitary Michelangelo, who had locked himself in the Sistine Chapel to paint scenes from the creation on its ceiling. When Michelangelo, squabbling with the pope, stalked off to Florence in 1511, the sculptor Bramante, who had the keys to the chapel, smuggled his friend Raphael in for a clandestine visit. After viewing the work in progress, Raphael immediately added a Michelangelesque figure (believed to be the master himself) to his current painting, The School of Athens. “All that Raphael knows of art, he got from me,” Michelangelo later thundered. (Raphael, for his part, described his tempermental critic as “lonely as a hangman.”)

  In Raphael’s defense, he did seek out his own inspiration—and in the process added new words to both Italian and English. While he was working in Rome, archaeologists were excavating the Domus Aurea, Nero’s golden house, near the Colosseum. In order to study firsthand the vividly colored decorations painted on its walls, Raphael had himself lowered into the cave, or grotta. The designs that he reproduced in his works came to be known in Italian as grottesca; their ornate, stylized forms gave rise to the English “grotesque.”

  As the toast of Rome, Raphael lived like a prince, showered with lucrative commissions, sought after by the rich and powerful, even offered a cardinal’s niece in marriage. This “very amorous man,” as Vasari delicately puts it, “was fond of women … and always quick to serve them.” When an infatuation distracted Raphael from a deadline, his patron moved his mistress into the palazzo where he was working. His pursuit of amore proved Raphael’s undoing. After a night of even more “immoderate” indulgence than usual, Vasari reports, he returned home with a very high fever. Because he didn’t tell his doctors of “the excesses he had committed,” they bled him in such a way that he grew progressively weaker and died. He was thirty-seven. All of Rome wept, except for Michelangelo, whose only comment was “My thief is dead.”

  Standing before a captivating Raphael in Florence’s Pitti Palace, I overhear an Italian guide speculate that a sexual infection killed the painter. “Did he die of AID
S?” a precocious young boy asks. The docent locks eyes with the lad’s flustered mother. “You can blame his death,” he says diplomatically, “on the orgy that was Rome.”

  Just as he had done with Michelangelo, Raphael devoted himself to appropriating some of Leonardo’s hallmarks, such as expressive faces, graceful figures, and delicate shading. He “came nearer to Leonardo than any other painter,” Vasari tells us, but he never equaled or surpassed him. Then again, no one did.

  Unlike artists who let their works speak for them, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) left a rich legacy of words—an ongoing conversation with himself that covered more than five thousand surviving manuscript pages gathered into libricini, combination sketch and notebooks, written in his idiosyncratic right-to-left “mirror script.” True to his mantra of saper vedere, to know how to see, Leonardo’s incomparable volumes crackle with a lifetime of astute observations, set down without punctuation or accents, often with several short words run together into a long one or a long word divided in half. “Dimmi” (“tell me”), Leonardo would doodle when breaking in a new pen nib. In the margins of his notebook, another phrase appears, “Tell me if anything was ever done,” scribbled time and again by an artist who left a legacy of largely unfinished projects.

  An illegitimate son of a Florence notaio and a country-woman, Leonardo bounced back and forth between his father’s city home and his mother’s farmhouse. Largely self-taught, he described himself as an “omo senza lettere,” a “man without letters,” but he took pride in his independent thinking and nimble mind. “Why are we supposed to worship the Son,” he once asked caustically, “when all the churches are dedicated to the mother?” Although he admired the human body as a marvel of nature, he disdained its owners as “sacks for food” and “fillers-up of privies.”

  In Florence in the 1470s Leonardo hung out with a group of vernacular writers known as poets alla burchia (which translates as “in a hurry,” “piled up at random,” or “higgledy-piggledy”). These rap artists of their day improvised verses in a slangy, ribald, satirical style called burchiellesco (from burchia), the antithesis of Petrarch’s labored sonnets. His eclectic treatises include the memorably titled “Why Dogs Gladly Sniff One Another’s Bottom” (“Perché li cani odoran volentieri il culo l’uno all’altro”). The reason: the smell lets them know how well fed a dog is. A whiff of meat indicates a powerful and rich owner—and a need for deference.

  Leonardo delighted in puns, wordplay, complex codes, spoofs, and pictograms (sketches, for instance, of the letter o and the drawing of a pear—pera in Italian—to represent the word opera). He also jotted jokes in his notebooks. In one, a painter is asked how he depicted such beautiful images of dead things and yet produced such ugly children. The punch line: He made his paintings by day and his children by night. In a riddle, Leonardo asked which men walk on treetops and which on the backs of great beasts. The answer: It depends on whether they are wearing wooden clogs or ox-leather shoes.

  Perhaps Leonardo’s jokes were the secret behind his signature creation: Mona Lisa’s smile. To entertain this fetching young model, Vasari records, Leonardo brought in musicians who played or sang and clowns to make her merry. Italians refer to this most recognizable of portraits as “La Gioconda,” with its double meaning of “Signor Giocondo’s wife” and “a merry or joking girl.” The artist spent so much time in her company that gossips, such as Aretino, speculated about the reasons why. But the time and effort paid off. “The portrait was painted in a way that would cause every brave artist to tremble and fear,” wrote Vasari.

  Except one—Michelangelo Buonarroti. In a telling incident in Florence’s Piazza Santa Trinita in 1504, a group arguing over a passage in Dante asked the opinion of Leonardo, who was walking by. Spying Michelangelo, who had entered the piazza, Leonardo replied by calling out that the sculptor could advise them. Taking this as an insult, Michelangelo, in a scathing reference to Leonardo’s aborted project for the Milanesi (whom he refered to as caponi, big heads, insinuating stupidity or obstinacy), retorted, “Explain it yourself—you who designed a horse to cast in bronze, and couldn’t cast it, and abandoned it out of shame.” He then abruptly spun around—“turned his kidneys,” as an observer put it—and stomped off, while Leonardo’s face reddened.

  After stints in Milan and Rome, Leonardo moved to France and spent the last three years of his long life in the comfort of a Loire château. His patron, King Francis I, delighted in conversations with this extravagantly gifted thinker and talker. (Despite his fondness for the artist, the king did not—as Vasari reported—cradle his head as he died.) When Napoleon invaded Italy, he claimed Leonardo’s notebooks as the spoils of war and transferred them to the Bibliothèque Nationale. They’ve since scattered to libraries throughout Europe.

  Leonardo’s fellow genius and archrival, Michelangelo (1475–1564), who wrote his name as Michelagnolo, an old Tuscan spelling, in a defiantly bold script, left an indelible artistic and architectural signature on Florence and Rome. Born into a poor Florentine family, he told Vasari that he had imbibed an affinity for stone in the breast milk of his wet nurse, a mason’s wife. His father tried to beat artistic inclinations out of the boy but his obvious talent won him an invitation to live and study in the home of Lorenzo il Magnifico, his first and most beloved patron.

  Michelangelo’s genius exploded in youth and blazed into robust old age. Through almost a century of tumults—uprisings, assassinations, civil wars, sieges, conspiracies, and invasions—he battled with popes, broke with the Medici, and after the fall of the Florentine republic (for which he oversaw fortifications) railed against his fellow citizens. Yet he worked ceaselessly, producing unequaled masterpieces in painting, sculpture, and architecture and earning the accolade of Il Divino, the divine one.

  The word most associated with the brusque artist is terribi lità. Michelangelo’s temper was indeed so fierce that the Medici pope Leo X, who had known the artist since boyhood, called him “troppo terribile,” “too terrible to deal with.” But in the artistic language of the Renaissance, terribilità conveyed awesomeness, virtuosity, force, vehemence. The terribilità of Michelangelo’s figura serpentinata, such as the anguished, writhing, tormented souls in his Last Judgment over the altar of the Sistine Chapel, represented art at its most sublime. (Italians derided the artists who later added “corrections” to clothe these naked figures with the mocking word braghettoni, or “big underpants makers.”)

  The historian and poet Benedetto Varchi described Michelangelo’s works as “so new, so unusual, so unheard of [in-udita] in all cultures in all countries … that I for myself… not just admire, not just am stupified [stupisco], not just am astonished and amazed, and almost reborn; but my pulse trembles, all my blood turns to ice; all my spirits are shocked, my scalp tingles with a most sacred and never before felt horror to think of him.”

  Thousands of books, treatises, poems, dissertations, plays, and novels have dissected every dimension of Michelangelo and his art. Yet what intrigued me most was the sole regret this titan of titans expressed: that he had kissed only the hand and not the face or lips of the poet and noblewoman Vittoria Colonna as she lay dying.

  When I first read this anecdote, I did a mental double take, stunned that a woman had evoked such a tender sentiment from a man whom I had assumed was homosexual. Scholars still debate the unanswerable question of whether the artist’s well-documented infatuations with young men were platonic or physical. A contemporary, viewing his sensuous Bacchus, commented, “Buonarroti could not have sinned more with a chisel.”

  According to his pupil and biographer Ascanio Condivi, beauty in either sex of any age shot straight to Michelangelo’s heart. He himself wrote that Vittoria’s bel volto, or beautiful countenance, spurred him to rise “beyond all vain desire” so that he saw “death in every other beauty.”

  At age sixty-three, the most venerated artist of the day met the most acclaimed female poet of the Renaissance, then forty-eight, in Rome, after admi
ring her Petrarchian verses for years. A widow esteemed for her intelligence and saintly virtue, Vittoria attracted the liveliest intellectual and religious leaders to her circle. To Michelangelo, she became, as Michael Besdine writes in The Unknown Michelangelo, “the most important woman in his adult life, the dominant influence of his later years, the good mother, and intellectual companion for whom he had longed.”

  Francisco de Hollanda, a visiting Portuguese painter who spent several Sundays with Michelangelo and Vittoria in a church garden overlooking Rome, recorded almost verbatim transcripts of conversations between the two intellectual soul mates. During these spirited discussions, Vittoria, always affectionate but alternately provoking and cajoling, drew out the reticent genius on a variety of subjects. Words, I realized as I read these dialogues, were the gift she gave to, and inspired in, Michelangelo. Although he had written all his life, Michelangelo composed most of his muscularly energetic sonnets and madrigals between the ages of sixty and eighty and dedicated many to Vittoria. Historian’S rank him as one of the finest, if not the finest, of Italian Renaissance poets.

  “Those who do not know you,” Vittoria once wrote to him, “esteem only the least of you, which are the works of your hands.” To her he revealed something even more precious—a glimpse of his very soul. “Save me,” Michelangelo entreated Vittoria, “from that old me, self’s black abyss.”

  This is exactly what she did, in a relationship so intriguing that I considered writing a book about the aging artist and his middle-aged muse. As I accumulated research, Michelangelo and Vittoria became so real to me—and so realistic in my conversations about them—that my husband began irreverently referring to them as “Mickey B.” and “Vicky C.” I dropped the book idea once I realized that their involvement was nothing but reverent.