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have claimed a mythic ancestor. Brunelleschi's architecture, more–
over, is a species of wisdom, like Socratic and Platonic philosophy,
in which forms are realized in their absolute integrity and essence:
the squareness of square, the slenderness of slender, the roundness
of round.... Brunelleschi's dome compels a kind of slow, surprised
recognition; it is the way a dome 'ought' to be, just as love, for a
young person, is at once a surprise and the way he knew it should
be, from books and hearsay."
Florence, too, one might remark, is to Mary MoCarthy "at
once a surprise and the way she knew it should be, from books and
hearsay." This is what gives her book, marvelously illustrated as it
is by Evelyn Hofer's photographs, its most captivating quality:
youthful enthusiasm. To many a reader, of course, Michelangelo's
Sacristy might seem the very opposite of "a brilliant rodomantade"
-that is, an awesome image of human solitude, an indoor plastic
space which has its perfect counterpart in that majestic public
space, the piazza del Campidoglio in Rome, possrbly the greatest
monument of Renaissance Utopia. But one does not feel like argu–
ing while reading this book. One just wants to listen to this intelli–
gent woman commenting on her discoveries. She is not giving us
art criticism, she is trying to make her acquaintance with Floren–
tine
art
and her knowledge of Florentine history into a story. Her
account of Paolo Uccello's fascination with perspective, her descrip–
tion of the Pazzi Chapel are attempts to evoke the characters and
their background. Thus she relates the famous fifteenth-century
tale of the trick played by Brunelleschi and his friends on the "fat
•
woodworker" by convincing him that he was not himself but "a
mere confused flux of consciousness that thinks it is a fat wood–
worker," and connects the story with the unsettling of the relation
between appearance and reality induced by Florentine intellectual–
ism. And this is what she achieves most completely in the outlining
of the figure of Donna Maria Ciliego, a Florentine beggar of the
seventeenth century: "Like Diogenes, this female philosopher, who
came from the people, lived in the street, sleeping under a loggia
or portico; she received charity without begging, because she spoke
in marvellous apothegms and enunciated dogmas of her own.
She was extremely clean; she carried a broom with her to sweep
out her 'quarters' (i.e., the pavement she slept on). In her basket,
