Sarah Dunant

She is on your right as you walk into the Capella Maggiore, the main altar of the church of Santa Maria Novella. She is demure, as befits a young woman of her time, but tasty nevertheless: fashionably pale skin, equally fashionable fair hair gathered in curls and plaits and her brocade dress heavy with its own sumptuousness. She is witnessing,  along with other women, the Visitation of Mary and Elizabeth in the cycle of frescoes, The Life of John the Baptist.  But instead of a shack in the Holy Land, this scene takes place in late 15th century Tuscany. Her clothes are cat walk fashion of the 1480’s and the houses in the cycle are all straight out of  Italian House and Garden: gilded columns, ornate ceilings, marbled walls. Everything about the frescoes are rich and modern to the age: Florence at the height of Renaissance fashion, brought to life by the hand of Domenico Ghirlandaio and paid for by her family, the Tornabuoni.  In case you didn’t know that, there they are at either side of the altar:  Mr and Mrs T kneeling devoutly, hands at prayer.

Six years ago, when I bought a tiny flat off the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence and spent a month immersed in Renaissance history, my original intention was pleasure rather than work. But the more I learnt,  the more the idea of a novel which brought alive one of the most vibrant moments in Western cultural history became irresistible. The past in Florence is everywhere, from the churches and the cobbled streets to the stubborn Tuscan jawline of a local shopkeeper recaptured on a fresco nearby. Five centuries ago in this city, a revolution in art was making the word of God look fleshier than it had ever been before, and perspective wasn’t just about understanding space and dimension but about intellectuals nudging God over a little to make room for Aristotle and Plato.  And while most successful businesses named The Lord as one of their founding shareholders, the art they financed glorified not only God but also the city and the men who commissioned it, the movers and shakers of the Medici court who appear as recognisable extras in the life of Christ and the saints.

Women, however, did not get such a good deal. While being from a wealthy family might have secured them a place in the odd fresco, getting their names into the history books was much harder.  That was where The Birth of Venus really started for me:  when my teenage daughters arrived and, as I tried to coax them into a little cultural appreciation, I realised that every single great name I was throwing at them was male.  By the end of the week, that young woman on the wall had been filtered through the alchemy of research and my imagination to become a character, through whose eyes I could tell the story of the city.

The life of Alessandra Cecchi, my fifteen-year-old cloth merchant’s daughter with a renaissance education and a yearning to paint, is of course a fiction, but the Florence in which she lived is fact. To create her I had to sink myself back into the city as it would have been then. It was more difficult then you might imagine. With centuries of art and architecture encrusted one on top of the other like the build-up of coral,  the Florence that the modern tourist experiences is deliciously old. But the Florence I wanted to write about was deliciously new. The streets then would have been full of construction and half-completed palazzos, churches would have been freshly built with gleaming stone, and all that fabulous flesh-and-blood art would have been challenging and oh so modern to a pair of 1490s eyes.  

Discovering Alessandra’s Florence, walking her streets,  involved detective work as well as imagination. Take the main market, for instance. Now inside in the distinct of San Lorenzo, it was once in the open air; a square with four churches at either corner and four Brunelleschi loggias under which tradesman gathered to sell their stuff. You would have known where to go from the ceramic medallions on the arches. Bakers, Butcher, Fishmongers (I never found out the fourth.)  But that same main square is now a nineteenth- century monstrosity  born out of the triumph of reunification.  How could I possibly know what it had been like five centuries before? Yet there were clues. Something close to one of those exquisite loggias still exists. When the present square was rebuilt, one such loggia, this one designed later by Vasari,  was moved and reconstructed in a more domestic piazza to the east of the city.  Piazza Ciompe is now the home of a rather scruffy antiques market (though the whole area is currently undergoing controversial gentrification).  But standing underneath the signs of the fish in the early morning light it was easier to imagine that Alessandra herself might have been there too. All I had to add was the noise and the debris.  And the smell.
That market loggia was by no means the only thing to have moved home.  Fictionalisng the invasion of Florence by the French,  I created a solider from Toulouse and wanted to show him Donatello’s gilded statue of St Louis, his city’s patron saint. It is currently in the museum of Santa Croce. Originally it had been in a niche outside Orsan Michele, one of the oldest churches in the city.  My art historian, once my teacher, now a friend without whom the book would never have seen the light of day, told me that it had been moved some fifteen years before to the front of the lovely great Franciscan church of Santa Croce. Santa Croce, a rather trendy area now, was once one of the poorest parts of Florence, home to the dyers of the cloth trade who lived on the banks of the Arno and whose miserable lives were made more miserable by the city’s unpredictable floods. You can still see the marks on the walls of the square from the two worst disasters, the first in 1574 and the other as late as the 1960s. (My apartment off the square is on the third floor, but  risk is negligible now anyway due to work on the river Arno).  Piazza Santa Croce itself has changed too. In the 1490’s the statue of Dante, beak-nosed and fierce-eyed,  who looks down disapprovingly on the tourists and young Florentines who rest on the church steps didn’t exist, and neither did the ghastly wedding-cake marble church exterior, the misguided act of some megalomaniac nineteenth-century arty types.   Across the city however, Santa Maria Novella already had its - much more tasteful- marble front designed by the Renaissance architect, and true “renaissance man”, Leon Alberti.  So to experience something of the wonder of how Santa Croce would have looked with it’s more simple brick hewn façade you have to go to the church of San Lorenzo near the Medici chapel.

But all of this mental reconstruction is easy compared to the big architectural challenge. Walk into the wonderful civic space that is the Piazza della Signoria, and try and imagine the scale of my problem. This fantastic medieval square, the home of the old town hall and the seat of government, was so important to Renaissance Florence that it is virtually a character in the novel.  Festivals, riots, political meetings, executions . . . you name it, it  happened here. Only it didn’t look quite like it does today.  The first thing you see now when you arrive (after the town hall itself) is the copy of Michelangelo’s David (the original is in the Accademia). For many people David is Florence. A million minute versions of him litter the souvenir shops and his genitals are now decoration for aprons and mouse mats. Yet while Michaelangelo himself was around during the late 1480s and early ‘90s (indeed he might even have got his paintbrush on my young woman in the chapel of Santa Maria Novella – he was Ghirlandaio’s precocious young apprentice at the time),  David was some ten years away in his imagination, the block of marble still locked into the quarries of Carrera. Luckily  Donatello’s smaller, though equally intense, statue of Judith cutting off the head of Holofernes was there. In the mid-1490s it was bought by the state at an auction of the Medici collection (when the family was in disgrace and enforced exile from the city), and was put up in the square to remind Florence that it should never again accept tyranny.

Then there’s the square itself. This is the space where, when the fundamentalist monk Savonarola was in charge, they built the great pyre on which the citizens were ‘invited’ to put their luxuries and any indecent art. The Bonfire of the Vanities (Tom Wolfe’s novel takes its name from this event) took place in 1497. Two years later, the political wheel of fortune had turned and Savonarola himself was burned at the stake there. A painting in the monastery of San Marco shows him with two fellow Domenicans strung up at the centre of the square.  Just where that pyre would have been now stands a statue of Poseidon on his sea chariot, the horses, their muscles as big as their driver, stirring to get out of the fountain which flows all around them.  All that water and there would have no bonfires, for art or man, in the square. ?

The most powerful piece of architectural air-bushing however is yet to come.  Many visitors to Florence come upon the main square by way of the river, a route that takes you through one of the marvels of European architecture: the fabulous corridor of stone perspective that is the Uffizi. Now one of the world great art museum’s it is almost impossible to imagine the city without it. Yet that is what one has to do to recreate 15th Florence,  because the Uffizi – one of the greatest of all Florentine landmarks -  didn’t arrive until Vasari designed it halfway through the next century.  And while many of its now its most famous works of art did exist – some of them, most notably Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, Primavera and Venus and Mars, all painted in the 1480s, would never have been seen by the Florentine public at that time. Instead they were commissioned by a member of the Medici family (no one seems quite sure which one) and squirreled away in their country villa. It’s just as well. Given how affected Botticelli was by Savonarola’s hellfire-and-brimstone sermons on the indecency of the new art, it is possible that they might have ended up on the bonfire too.

Meanwhile other buildings over time have changed their function, some of them quite dramatically. Now, the Bargella is the most ravishing sculpture museum,  its old fortress rooms opened up to offer airy spaces to house some of the greatest renaissance works of art. Originally it was a medieval palace for the head of Florence’s security forces, but a few years after my novel ends it became a prison.  Walking past it then on a summer day you might have heard the screams of people being tortured by the strapado (a form of the rack, which dropped you from a great height and eventually pulled your arms out of their sockets).  The inner courtyard, a miracle of late medieval architecture, now a picturesque and serene place for tourists to sit and catch their breath before moving on to take in more beauty,  was once where they executed people.  Somehow the beauty has triumphed  over the horror. Though, in contrast,  when I walk to my local market via the well-named Via Malcontenti which runs down the side of the Santa Croce church, it feels very easy to imagine the rumble of the carts which used this street to bring the condemned men out to the gallows attended by the order of penitent friars in back, who went along with them to offer give them comfort.

Which brings us to sound. What did Florence sound like five hundreds ago? The single greatest act of the imagination was to get rid of all those angry bee scooters that roar through the city day and night. Even without them Florence has its own form of strange acoustic. I noticed it the first night I ever spent in my flat. I had just signed the contract when I got to the airport to find my flight cancelled at the last minute. My little apartment had no running water, no electricity, no furniture, and just a couple of duvets to sleep on. The heat was so awful I had to have the window open. In the darkness of the night the first sound was that of a mosquito, honing its radar on me from halfway across the city and zooming in through the window ready for dinner. It was hotly followed by the booming laughter of some drunken young Florentines rolling home after a night on the town, their voices hitting the cobbles and bouncing off the walls till they sounded more like an army climbing up the side of my house.  Crawling to consciousness next morning with a face covered in bites, I knew how a sleepless night must have felt to one of the first inhabitants of the building.

I use those choruses of night sounds in the novel, when I take Alessandra out onto the streets in the dark. There was of course no street lighting at this time – though the bigger houses would have kept torches burning. Even the silence has substance though. Walk through deep gloom for long enough and the sound of your footsteps begins to feel as if someone else is following you. You move faster, so do they. In the fifteenth century all those black alleys you passed might well have had prostitutes of both sexes plying their trade in them. There was a security force called the Night Police whose job it was to clean up the streets. But since the names in their ledgers were often those of the most prominent families, it was lenient in its prosecutions.

All that remained was to try and recreate is the smell of fifteenth-century Florence. I’m happy to admit that I never quite experienced the real thing. An apothecary writing a diary at the time talked of the hell of the summer heat when the drought set in, or the plague, and the way that death could mean that bodies were left decomposing for weeks until somebody found them.  Not all the perfumes of Arabia could cleanse that kind of thing out of your nostrils.   If you were rich there was scented water, burning pomades of citronella to keep the mosquitoes away (I’ve tried it since, it’s very good) and heavier unguents such as ambergris and musk with which to scent your gloves and clothes. But nothing would totally have got rid of the stench.

Five hundred years later, the dominant smells of Florence are good coffee and pizza ovens, and, for me at least, the aroma of whatever my downstairs neighbour happens to be cooking as I climb the fifty-one – steep – stairs to my apartment. While there are certain disadvantages to living in a city whose economy is so dictated by tourism, twenty-first-century Florence is still a marvel: all the ease and comfort of modernity alongside the irresistible imaginative pull of the past.  For the women especially; confident, independent and with what feels like an almost innate sense of style, there could be no going back. Having said that, I’d still give my right arm to have been that young woman on the wall of Santa Maria Novella, even though  – as I later found out – she died in childbirth and so would never have seen her own shimmering portrait unveiled.