PARTISAN REVIEW
other the Loggia dei Lanzi, crammed with statuary, set below the Palace
like a sideboard at a great feast of stone. There is about the Palace at
one side a curiously scalloped and rippling effect, as if the architect
had omitted some base to its rhythmic structure and then made it up-–
with what triumph and ease-in the upward leap of the tower, which
gives that exhilarating effect of humor
in
its own authority. (And in
fact something was omitted, for I learn that the architect was forbidden
to use any of the ground that had belonged to the hated Ghibelline
family of the Uberti.)
The speakers held forth from the Lokgia. We stood
in
the center of
the square, near the tablet that marks the place of Savonarola's execu–
tion.
If
one tired of Nenni or the meeting, one could always regale
oneself with the Palace, the centerpiece of Neptune, and the reproduc–
tion of Michelangelo's David which stands just before the door of the
Palace. Nenni must have felt as if he were discoursing from the Floren–
tine Acropolis; there were little compliments and expressions of pride
on addressing the citizenry from that celebrated place. He stood behind
a loud-speaker, his arms toiling furiously with the conventional Italian
vigor, but his face impassive as an owl's under his heavy spectacles.
A dumpy little man, bald and round, looking like a union boss at a
convention, sweating away, while behind him "The Rape of the Sabine
Women," "Hercules Slaying the Centaur Nessus," and Cellini's Perseus
-the bloody sword in one hand and with the other majestically holding
aloft, with his cool and savage gravity, the head of Medusa. Yet no
doubt even Lorenzo the Magnificent must have looked dwarfed and
a little mean in that mighty piazza, or Savonarola haranguing the Floren–
tines on their immoral ways-for the whole effect of the Piazza della
Signoria is to create in an instant the civic and aesthetic presence of
a great city-state. There is something in the ensemble formed by the
Palace, the Loggia, the Neptune and the David, the color and weight
of the stone, the very historical imagination embodied in a European
square, that makes the impervious surface of a fully completed thought.
With the imprint still on us of those cramped, functional cities created
purely out of commercial relationships, we enter into this piazza with
a disbelief almost stronger than our pleasure, as
if
we were of another
race from those who built
this;
as
if,
with its obvious indifference to any–
thing we might think of it, it could vanish the minute we turned our
backs on it.
Not the place, I would have said, for a tired old Social Democrat
leading a "popular front" rally. Certainly everything about Nenni him–
self is commonplace, and brings up thoughts of those battered but crafty
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