EXCURSIONS GERARD Wi NDSOR Encounters with religious Italy: Florence ON 2 FmRUARY, THt >CAST oc THo Pum•cAT,ON m THt V
humanity that were Fra Angelico's contemplative matter for his friars. The friars were caught by the paintings because the friars were in each painting. No scene of Christ's drama, from Annunciation to Resurrection, had ever taken place without a Dominican being present, tactfully at the edge, in the wings, watchful and meditative. They might have the cleft skull and the trickle of blood of Peter Martyr or the displayed text of Thomas Aquinas, but each had a different face-five o'clock shadow or sharp nose or rusty beard or high-coloured cheeks or a greying goatee. I could only imagine that Prior John of Fiesole, called The Angelic One, had depicted his brothers, his subjects, as these champions of belief, and had drawn them all as relentless witnesses to the mysteries of Christ's life. Those strong pastels, those stock-still tableaux of fierce emotional communion ... I could have left Florence happy then. L REE CELLS IN THE WESTERN coRNER are now dedicated to the memory of Girolamo Savonarola, prior of San Marco sixty years after Fra Angelico. There are none of the master's frescoes in these cells. The portraits there do not purport to be of Dominic or Peter Martyr or Thomas Aquinas. They are of Savonarola himself. The bodiliness of the image is disconcerting. The cowl is drawn so far forward that we see no trace of the tonsure. The black eyebrows cross the forehead in an unbroken line. Then the steep convex nose, and hollows rather than dimples in the long olive cheeks, and lips that are exceedingly fleshy but firm and authoritative. I was frightened by this man. Angelico's friars, Savonarola's predecessors and brothers, were homely, venturing no further than the edge of the stage for the crucial drama in their lives, yet adaptable to any role their prior chose for them. A few hundred metres away, other Dominicans care for the church of Santa Maria Novella. I was chilled by the wintry gloom of this place, and the higgledy-piggledy ostentation of its adornment-hardly very different of course from the tens of thousands of other Italian churches. The slot machines illuminate half an acre of Ghirlandaio for only one minute, and they are only activated by 500 lire coins. Yet no one-or certainly not !-could carry sufficient quantities of the right coinage, and in February there were too few visitors in transit for me to be able to profit from other activators. There was ecclesiastical activity in just two parts of the grim church. In the left transept was the sacristy. Massive baroque panelling lowered from four sides. A table in the centre was spread with books and cards and souvenirs. One clear weak naked bulb hung from a long cord illuminating just the central section of the table. At one end sat, or hovered, a young man who was occasionally visited and whispered to by other young men. I interrupted his laying out and hanging of vestments to buy some postcards. I asked for a receipt. He was surly and impatient. No. he couldn't do it. I looked at some books. The till rattled. 'Venga, venga,' shouted the young man. I had no idea whether the command was directed at the till or at me. He threw a scrap of paper down the table towards me. A N ELDERLY FRIAR appeared at the door, vested in a heavily embroidered Roman chasuble. My aesthete dropped his authority and slipped into place at the head of the procession of two, which made its way across the nave and into a chapel in the opposite transept-one enclosed and brilliantly lit. It was a beacon for visitors to the otherwise moribund church, and I too followed the procession. The service that began and was still in progress three quarters of an hour later is unknown to V OLUME 6 N UMBER 3 • EUREKA STREET 27
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