This volume is a scholarly and pictorial record of and companion to an exhibition mounted under the direction of the indefatigable priest, art historian, and museum director Timothy Verdon and the Florentine art historian Giovanni Serafini. The Library of Congress has appropriately assigned it an identity beginning with DG (Italian history). There is no special significator for important scholarly books that are also at home on the coffee table, as this one is. The quality of its opulent illustration is of the excellence that has characterized Brepols’s extraordinary contributions to its studies in the visual arts. In addition to an important introductory presentation by Verdon himself, who also makes other contributions, there are about twenty essays by other scholars covering a wide range of subjects. All essays are in English. Though they naturally vary in length and ambition, their quality is high, even if limitations of space forbid me in this review from dealing with them all on an individual basis.
I begin by drawing attention to two essays of particular importance to the larger scheme of the volume. Andrew Frisardi’s “Dante and Jerusalem” and Davide Baldi’s “Florence as New Jerusalem in the Documents of the Council (1439-1442).” That conclave, the seventeenth ecumenical council, is usually called “of Florence.” Its deliberations took place between 1431 and 1445. Baldi’s essay provides extensive documentation of the major phase of this protracted Council, which began in Ferrara but moved on to Florence to avoid the plague. As it devolved, one of its principal purposes became the effort to achieve a reconciliation of the Roman and Orthodox positions on disputed doctrinal points. This congress had the temporary success of repairing (on paper rather than in reality) the breach of the Great Schism of 1054. Still, it was in spirit a genuine ecumenical council that brought together long estranged and geographically insulated Christian polities. The episode of the Council thus stimulated in the Roman Church a kind of “ecumenicism”--half ecclesiastic and half imaginary--that was thus a prelude to the “Orientalism” dealt with by Francis Rogers’s The Quest for Eastern Christians: Travels and Rumor in the Age of Discovery (1962). One of the engaging essays (by Marcello Garzaniti) concerns the views of the Council’s Russian delegates, a group that must have seemed particularly exotic to the Florentines.
Dante is the cultural figure who for a general reader is perhaps most closely identified with the early history of Florence, the “hometown” from which he was exiled and which features in the Commedia in a far from complimentary light. Frisardi’s subtle essay does justice to the poet’s ambiguous attitudes toward the city. “Rejoice, O Florence, since thou art so great, that over sea and land thou beatest thy wings, and throughout Hell thy name is spread abroad!” And since the protracted deliberations of the mid-fifteenth century Council of Florence provide such a rich context for incidental discussions of our theme, there is a special relevance to Baldi’s learned essay.
The linguistic phenomenon of ceremonial memorial city names would seem to be universal. So also is the phenomenon of their legendary renomination. In the Virgilian epic tradition, Rome is a reborn or renewed Troy. An actual ceremonial name for medieval London was Troienovant, but London had no monopoly on the idea. And somewhat confusingly, Renaissance Florentines sometimes regarded their city as New Rome as well. The phenomenon of what might be called allegorically allusive city names perhaps deserves a synoptic study. There indeed may be one of which I am unaware. In other ways the figurative amplitude of “Jerusalem” in medieval thought is obvious, perhaps beginning in the textbook example memorialized in what later would be called the four-fold exegetical method as passed down over several centuries in the “Old Distich:” Littera gesta docet, Quid credas allegoria, / Moralis quid agas, Quo tendas anagogia. (The letter teaches events; allegory, what to believe; tropology teaches what we should do; anagogy, what we are aiming for.”) Jerusalem “was” (1) a city in Palestine; (2) the Church; (3) the individual soul in a state of sanctification; and (4) Paradise. At the civic level, I doubt that there was any city in Europe whose preachers failed to claim Jerusalem as a direct maternal ancestor, though Renaissance Florence was perhaps particularly keen on the idea. But it is important to remember that the civitas of Augustine’s De civitate Dei was an aspirational Jerusalem absolutely universal in its political, social, and individual claims.
Jerusalem was a place, but it was also the journey or pilgrimage to a place--in fact, the pilgrimage of human life. While there are definite if often fanciful geographical parallels to be drawn by medieval “Jerusalemists,” the spiritual Jerusalem was mainly a mental aspiration fundamental to the quest for perfection that was medieval asceticism. Chaucer’s preacher concludes theCanterbury Tales, a story about pilgrims and the stories told by pilgrims, with the following prayer:
And Jhesu, for his grace, wit me sende
To shewe yow the wey, on this viage,
Of thilke parfit glorious pilgrimage
That highte Jerusalem celestial.
One of the most magnificent of Renaissance poetic testimonies is the brilliant“Sobre os rios” (frequently called “Babel e Sião”) of Luis de Camões, a work based in an elaborate contrast of Zion and Babel. No less an expert than Lope de Vega called this work “the pearl of all poetry”.
In certain great medieval and Renaissance houses, both secular and religious, we may find the nomenclature of a sacred geography. Nicholas Lityngton, a late fourteenth-century abbot of Westminster, improved the abbatial residence with a grand room called the Jerusalem Chamber. Other rooms were called Jericho and Samaria.
Among the more important historical essays, as already mentioned, is Davide Badi’s (“Florence and the New Jerusalem in the Documents of the Council [1439-1442]”) which provides extensive documentation of important aspects of the major phase of the protracted Ecumenical Council that began in Ferrara, but moved on to Florence to avoid the plague, and had as its principal purpose the reconciliation of the Roman and Orthodox positions on disputed doctrinal points..
Though the principles of organization in the volume can hardly be said to be inexorable, the four broad themes into which the editor has distributed his materials offer a workable scheme. (A fifth and final section deals with the exhibition for which the volume is a guide.) These are “Biblical, Historical, and Cultural Background,” “The ‘Jerusalem Moment of the Florence Council,” “The Arts,” and “The Monastic Roots.” In this last important section we come to the explicit connections of the ascetic mind-set to the eschatological themes of so much medieval and Renaissance thought. The transformation of desert to city is one of the powerful metaphors of the Vita Antonii, a book unsurpassed in its influence on the artistic imagination of the religious life. The fraternal preachers tried to reverse this process, metaphorically. “What else is a city,” Erasmus asks rhetorically, “except a large monastery?” Late medieval Florence was replete with religious houses, but it was a “large monastery” only in the most strained of civic allegories. The heroic asceticism of the desert fathers became ever more popular as a literary topic as Italian cities became ever more prosperous and powerful. But great famous fraternal preachers like Berthold of Regensburg had “specialized” in urban audiences since the thirteenth century.In thefoundational text of medieval monastic biography, the Vita Antonii, the Greek biographer (Athanasius) had said that Anthony had so many followers as to transform the desert into a city. Savonarola appears to have sought to reverse the process by turning his city into a metaphoric desert of votive ascetism. The effort to literalize metaphor was for him a fatal one. And indeed, the attempt to transform metaphoric aspiration into literal reality is necessarily fraught with dangers. It is possible that Erasmus’s metaphor had a more pointed and radical meaning, one that anticipated Calvin’s reign of the saints in Geneva and, eventually, the Protestant rejection of votive religion altogether.
The history of the metaphorical, spiritual Jerusalem, in which this appealing book is but one significant chapter dealing with one unusually important city, is an important topic in the larger history of the pre-modern Christian allegorical mentality. Among the important medieval literary conduits of the idea is a scathing satire usually called De contemptu mundi by a French Benedictine monk of the early twelfth century, Bernard of Cluny (or Morlay). This work is so violent and scathing as to find favor (and publication) among the Protestant Reformers. [1] A more generous treatment of the monastic ascetic is an underappreciated book by the late Spanish abbot Garcia M. Colombás. [2]
Florence and the Idea of Jerusalem is a beautiful book in more than one sense. Even without its varied essays, all of which are replete with valuable expertise and some of which are important contributions to medieval conciliar history, to Dante studies, and above all to Florentine civic history, it would be a valuable contribution to the cultural history of medieval Florence.
Of course, it is inevitable that in a collection of essays by so many hands on so many subjects there will be variations in the importance of the topics addressed and the value of the results obtained. But just as there is an impressive breadth to the erudition on display in this sumptuous volume, there is a consistently high quality in the scholarship deployed. Though it is impossible in a short review to deal justly with so large a number of contributions, there are several which I should be derelict in failing at least to mention by title. Among the several other contributions of significant originality I should point out Shulamit Furstenberg-Levi’s “Solomon’s Temple in the Writing of Jewish Humanists in the Renaissance”; Luca Calzetta’s “‘That Most Holy Yet Immovable Relic’: Fernando I and the Holy Sepulcher”; Annette Hoffman’s “Wood, Water, and Earth: The Legend of the Holy Cross in Santa Croce in Florence”, and Martin Shannon’s “The New Jerusalem as Compelling Vision: Monasticism and the Liturgy of Hope.” Circumdate Sion et complectimini eam: narrate in turribus ejus (Ps. 47:13.)
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Notes:
1. See The Source of Jerusalem the Golden: Together with Other Pieces Attributed to Bernard of Cluny,with commentary by Samuel Macauley Jackson (Chicago, 1910).
2. Garcia M. Colombás, Paraíso y vida angélica: sentido escatológico de la vocación Cristiana (Montserrat, 1958).