Josep Pla - Life Embitters

I also read Berenson’s books at the time, but as I was very slow on the uptake in my youthful years — always supposing other factors didn’t intervene — I didn’t understand a word. My reading of Berenson perhaps even deepened my state of confusion. Berenson’s lexis was so new and grating — decorators, illustrators … — that it was hard to digest. This short summary of the ideas of this historian is one I have made now; it would have been beyond me at the time. The truth is we never probed beneath the surface of such speculations, despite the fascination existing in the general milieu in Florence for a legendary figure, involved in the biggest deals of the time in terms of old works of art. The Italian art market was still focused on the great art collections owned by multi-millionaires in the United States. These deals were orchestrated by an extraordinary Englishman, the biggest contemporary art dealer, ennobled by MacDonald as Lord Duveen. Berenson was the undoubted connoisseur.

When all was said and done, we stayed faithful to our painters, no doubt as a result of some mysterious, longstanding affection. We stayed with those we considered to be the emblematic painters of the Tuscan school: Paolo Uccello and Masaccio, Piero della Francesca and Benozzo Gozzoli.

Llimona and I always professed undying admiration for the schools of Umbria and Florence. Cimabue, Giotto, and Simone Martini are the grandfathers of European painting. In the course of this last millennium Uccello is the continent’s first painter to paint movement. Massaccio and Piero della Francesca are two fierce, direct, unmediated, gory realists. Whether in San Gimignano or the Palazzo Ricardo, in Florence, Gozzoli is a spring without literary pretensions, a delightful, fresh, free breeze. When we thoughtfully argued these preferences, people were shocked. The Mexican had fits of uncontrollable anger. We tried to understand what we felt was positive and negative in the work of these painters.

“I sometimes get the impression, especially with Masaccio and Uccello, that they were men who suffered from stomach ulcers,” I’d say to Llimona. “They are tetchy. They scowl and aren’t averse to violence.”

“That’s how they are they, what can we can do about that?” replied my friend. “What’s important is that they are painters who aren’t devious; their work, in terms of their era, is entirely genuine. Vasari describes them as being studious, self-absorbed, melancholy, and misanthropic.”

Each age has its sensibility, and we believed we were personally engaging with the pictorial process I have tried to describe. The problems experienced by those remote individuals were perhaps ours too. What Stendhal called le beau idéal has little to offer the sensibility of our era. We would feel very happy if we succeeded in capturing the fleeting pulse of the reality of things. Eugeni d’Ors came up with one of the sharpest insights into Pau Picasso when he said that the usual — not Cubist — Picasso, is the last great Italian painter with an Italian perspective in the history of painting. One had to be bold to suggest such an insight in our day and age — I mean ever since Paris has become the center for artistic activity. It is a view that is absolutely right, perfectly judged.

It is quite mistaken to believe, as is often affirmed in so many artistic and literary circles that Italian painting is cold, dead, and academic. Calm down! Take it easy! The worst error by far is to visit this peninsula with preconceived ideas, with other people’s ideas, and not have sufficient strength of mind to cast them to the wind. One must have the strength of will to jettison at the frontier that burden of generally — and sardonically — adverse opinions, usually skillfully expressed to disguise the fact, and released from their burden, decide to see things as they are. Every autumn a host of thinkers and writers visit this country that aspire to have the last word on a world that is certainly small — small in terms of travel nowadays — but one that is incredibly vast and unfathomable as a concentration of the mind and the spirit. Italy is the European country with the least geography and the most spirit. That’s why even the greatest geniuses have been unable to embrace it and why I would advise everyone to stop reading those rash, pretentious books that Italy inspires, leave them for later, once you have had time to develop a direct, personal vision. Don’t drag clichés and prejudices in your wake when you come to Italy. This is useful advice. The country is so hugely diverse and so rich in surprises that no cliché can be applied generally. On arriving, in Genoa or any other town, buy a Vitruvius for ancient monuments and a Vasari for the painters and sculptors of the long process that was the Renaissance. Throw away the pamphlets that only distort your vision — however handy or abstruse they may be. Set out to see things firsthand, be curious: that’s the way to travel. With that light impedimenta and the information provided by city maps, a journey to Italy can be incalculably rewarding. What other country can you visit that offers the wonders that Italy possesses?

I didn’t live in the Pensione Balestri, but in the evening I’d go and look up my friends. I’d arrive when they’d just finished supper. The windows of the cold, rather dowdy dining room were open. It was summer and you could feel the delectably languid Florentine night beyond. The dining room was oppressive. We quickly went out. If Llimona said by way of farewell as we crossed the threshold, “ Buona sera, banditi! ” you knew dinner had been derisorily meager. We walked across the square and headed towards the Lung’Arno. The headquarters of Florence’s Fascio di Combatimento was in a single-storey house opposite the pensione . Shenanigans there were endless night and day. Black-shirted toughs entered the house through the front door carrying pistols, rifles, or iron bars. The fascists called these bars manganelli , and we saw so many we finally became used to them. The Mexican was the only one who couldn’t stand them. A simple, passionate man, he bared his teeth when he saw a fascist, snarled like a rabid dog and flashed his eyes. His reactions were so visible that, if he hadn’t had such an exotic face and figure, he might have had a bad time, because castor-oil purges and beatings were handed out with remarkable facility. When the fascist — or fascists — had gone the Mexican spat out a little gob of spit, and muttered nervously, “What this place needs is a Don Pancho, compadre! ”

I kept telling Llimona he should find a quieter place to live, because there was always such a row in that square, such a hustle and bustle, with a constant flurry of groups that came together and then broke up because they couldn’t pack into the headquarters; it was the place for so many conglomerations of city and country folk and so many speeches and adunates , so much singing and military music, that existence there could hardly have been pleasant. The place had seen fierce fighting and shoot-outs; the most punitive expeditions in Tuscany had been organized there; the most incendiary, mendacious harangues had been delivered there, and, if that wasn’t enough, the square acted as a permanent base for the wind section of the Florentine Fascio to rehearse. I imagined that whole political hue-and-cry and lunatic fanaticism was enough to make you want to eat your spaghetti elsewhere, but Llimona would have none of it. As an experienced hunter with sturdy, supple legs he was delighted by the noise of gunfire. My thoughts always pursued the same agenda: “ Andiamo a pigliare un caffè …! ” Llimona would sulk, striding along the Lung’ Arno pavement.

The Arno is a clean, beautiful river that wends elegantly and languidly through Florence. You can see the pink sand under the two feet of water the river carries in summer: its charming waters flow lethargically. At that time on a summer’s night, the luminous dark blue sky seemed to glitter and swarm on the slowly moving stream. Reflections from the city’s lights streaked the water with silver. A delicious light breeze seemed to pursue the river’s fleeting enchantments, barely ruffling the luminous flow. The banks of the Arno are not a place where townspeople like to go. They are mostly empty, though you sometimes find a loving couple. I’ve spent many hours leaning on the parapet, my mind a blank, devoid of desires or memories, gazing into its waters.