On my recent trip to Italy, I learned more about famous Italian philosophers, artists, and saints. Here's a look at three and why I think they're fabulous.
Dante
Dante isn't new to me. Likely, he's not new to you, either. Even if all you know is the image of a guy touring hell, Dante is one of those all-pervasive writers. Last time we were in Florence, I saw the reconstruction of his house. We visited the tiny square where it stands this time, as well. Images of him are all over Florence, and a statue of him stands tall outside the church of Santa Croce where his tomb is visited by tourists from all over the world.
He's the favorite son of Florence. Everybody seems to overlook the uncomfortable fact that once upon a time, Florence kicked him right out.
Dante has my heart for two reasons. First, the Divine Comedy is the first work to be written in the language of the common man. Dante chose "vulgar Italian" instead of Latin for his work because he believed in the beauty and value of his own language. This makes him brother to Chaucer, an educated man who elevated and celebrated his own dialect.
The second reason I love him is because he got the best of all possible revenges. He sent everyone who ticked him off or exiled him straight to hell, and they've been there ever since. He filled his Inferno with creative punishments for those who he found offensive. I can just imagine his satisfaction as he penned their torments. I imagine, or at least I hope, that it was highly therapeutic. This brings me to my second artist...
Michelangelo
Again, he's not new to anyone, but I think he gets caricatured or reduced. He's a famous name, one highly likely to be recalled if someone is looking for an artist. The thing about Michelangelo is that he lived according to the artistic vision in his head and was unwilling to compromise. He saw the human body as an expression of divine beauty. He broke the law to do secret dissections to understand the inner workings of muscle, bone, and tendon. He turned his knowledge into such grace and splendor, and he refused to see anything "dirty" in what he created.
This trip, I got to go to see the David at the Accademia del Arte. Everybody has seen images of the David. It's one of the great cliched pieces of world art, and I wasn't actually expecting that much. I spent about thirty minutes waiting to get in to the museum passing souvenir carts full of images of the statue, including boxer shorts depicting its groin, postcards of zoom shots of that same region, and various other tacky items. When we got in, I heard several people comment on just one aspect of the statue: his exposed genitals.
I couldn't help but be exasperated by that. The David is famous for a reason. It is, quite simply, astonishing. Forget the cheap imitations. Forget the touristy trinkets. Everybody should see it. While I didn't have the heart-stopping reaction my best friend did when she saw it after so many years of waiting, I did feel a catch in my breath, that little "Oh" reaction. Even on a cloudy Florentine day, the light spilling across the marble from the simple dome above was the only adornment it could possibly have needed. We walked forward slowly, sat down to take it all in. Every curve, every tendon, every delineation of vein or hollow of muscle was beautiful. The longer one looks at the David, the more spectacular it becomes. How can anyone be so crass as to reduce it to that one component, to make a dirty joke of something profoundly pure?
Unlike so many others, Michelangelo never perceived the body as a source of wickedness. If you look at his paintings, he celebrates the wonder that every person should feel when the intricacies of our bodies are considered. The body for him seems to have been its own form of art with nothing prurient implied in it. Too bad more people can't take that opinion. Too bad more people can't see the beauty that he did.
And his contemporaries missed it over and over, really. I didn't know until this trip that the figures in the Sistine Chapel had been painted as nudes. All of mankind was naked and perfect before its creator. He felt that this was perfection. Of course, people being what they are, he was accused of painting pornography on the walls of the Vatican by one of the cardinals, the official censor. He denied this and to get revenge for the criticism, he painted the man in hell in the great scene of the last judgment. Not only did he publicly condemn his critic, Michelangelo also stripped him down and had him tortured for eternity by having a giant serpent wrap around him and devour the very portion of his anatomy that seemed to lead the cardinal's thinking. Irony is a wonderful thing.
Of course, his critics got the last word. About three years after he died (while working on the mosaics of Saint Peter's), the powers that be forced one of his students to come in and add seco drapes to the original frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. That snake still buries his fangs into the cardinal though. I guess you can learn from this and from Dante that offending the artist is, to say the least, unwise....
Saint Francis of Assisi
As with the other two, I can't imagine many people haven't at least seen the image of St. Francis. The gentle brown-robed figure so often depicted with birds or beasts is common even outside the Catholic church. I have a concrete figure of him standing watch in a bed full of day lilies near my bird feeders.
We actually got to go to Assisi this time, and for the first time, that concrete icon became a real person. At the great basilica of Saint Francis, we met Brother Michael, a Franciscan priest. He was one of those rare people who just radiates that type of holy serenity. There was nothing rigid or formal about him. He was totally welcoming of us without knowing us at all. One of the things he said as we stood outside the doors of the lower basilica that I will probably never forget was that the basilica had been built with us in mind. Not that the people who started it some seven or eight centuries ago knew us personally, but that they knew travelers would come from all over the world to their doors, and they wanted us all, people from every place and in every time, to feel peace and hospitality when we arrived.
The great basilica itself has three levels. We started in the lower basilica, and I have never seen a place with such beautiful art. Most of it was done by or is in the school of Giotto, the "father of the Renaissance." The dark blue ceiling curves protectively overhead, and a sense of absolute serenity enfolded me as we entered. After looking at the features of the architecture, we were sent downstairs to the crypt. By this point, we had seen lots of "saints-in-a-box," as I have come to think of the displayed remains of the deceased holy. There was nothing ostentatious about Saint Francis's tomb. The sarcophagus wasn't showy marble or glass-sided. It was simple stone surrounded by the limestone foundations of the great church above. For all its lack of ornamentation, it was the most moving of all of such things I saw.
I think it was because of what we were told about Saint Francis himself. He had everything, wealth, privilege, the status of the oldest son which meant more property and power would come his way when his merchant father died. He tried to find meaning in excess, in reveling in the things his money could get him, but he found it hollow. He tried next to find it in service to his country, joining the military and winding up as a prisoner of war. When he came home, he turned to God after a spectacular conversion including a vision that ordered him to rebuild the church. He did this literally and with his own hands, but he came to understand that it wasn't physical labor that he was meant to do. His father tried to stop him, thought him insane, and after a massive and public confrontation, disowned him. Francis took this in stride, and went on to give up everything in order to do that which he felt he had been called to do.
I admire Francis because in his own way, he was every bit as misunderstood and rebellious as Michelangelo and Dante. While to the best of my knowledge, he was much more about the forgiveness than the eternal revenge, the austere life of service he chose was just as much against the grain of his society, the medieval church, as were the lives of the other two. The church of his day was full of greed, materialism, and politics. Everything in his past fitted him for pursuit of these things, but he knew just how little actual fulfillment was to be had from them, so he chose another way: putting the needs of others first. He had wisdom and dedication, and apparently, he also kept his humor. Today, he still inspires people to live with such tremendous care for others and kindness.
Even the symbols associated with Saint Francis are compelling to me. The Tau cross he chose as his personal emblem sums it up. According to what I was told, he picked it because it was the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, connecting to the idea of giving up the old and transitioning to the new, ending one life and starting another. I think no matter what your spiritual beliefs, there comes a time when the idea of leaving something broken behind in search of something else is important.
There are lessons to be taken from all three of these revolutionaries. I cannot help but feel that even though they were such different people, all of them were great because all of them were somehow able to transcend themselves, escape the narrow focus that enfolds so many of us. They are an inspiration to pursue the heart's great desire no matter what obstacles arise. They overcame banishment, censorship, and the disapproval of those closest to them to do the thing they knew they had to do, the thing they were meant to do. If in any way I can manage to emulate this, while I know any sort of eternal greatness is not portioned for me, perhaps I can avoid mediocrity.
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