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Original EssaysLosing My Religionby Robert Clark
But it was art that I promised to write about, specifically art and the spirit, the notion that we enter the transcendent through beauty. Which, on first glance (or at least second) sounded pretentious and boring, and which, when I began prowl the streets — to sense the grit and decay among which the masterpieces were born, living, and perhaps dying — seemed to miss the point. Frankly, my mixed feeling were souring into a kind of despair. Of course, sometimes what you need is right in front of your nose, and with luck you might even notice it. There are, everywhere on the buildings of Florence, markers set high up on the walls with a strong horizontal line — usually in red — drawn across them with a legend indicating that on one date or another the river Arno flooded to such-and-such a level, sometimes as high as 20 feet above street level. Most of them read "4 Novembre 1966." In fact, there was such a marker in the building I was living in, right above the mail box I checked every day. I can't say I didn't notice it, but it took me three months to understand it — I want to say see it — and what it meant. I dimly remembered the flood of 1966. I was 12 years old and I followed it via Life magazine, less through the text than the photos. It was a big story at the time. But what made it a big story was not the disaster itself, which was scarcely of Katrina proportions: There had been only 33 people killed, and although the city was suffocated in mud, it was functioning normally within a year. Rather, it was about art: its destruction, salvation, and restoration. It was said that when Florence — which arguably contains one quarter of the West's greatest art — was under threat, so was Western Civilization itself. Thousands of paintings and sculptures had been damaged or destroyed along with six million rare and historic books. And in response, thousands — mostly students — came to rescue them, not just from Italy and Europe, but from all over the world. It was a manifestation of idealism, self-sacrifice — life in the mud (composed of dirt, sewage, and heating oil) was miserable — and at times heroism. It was not unlike the Civil Rights, anti-nuclear, and anti-war movements, idealism directed not towards politics and social justice, but towards beauty. Mere beauty, you might say. And that gave me a way forward into the book that became Dark Water: Was saving all this art really worth it in comparison to other causes and needs people might devote themselves to? And why did people instantly and instinctively — hundreds came to Florence within a few days of the flood — believe that it was? The flood represented in visceral and dramatic terms the question I'd been posing to myself. So I would tell the story of the flood and, in showing what had happened, perhaps an answer would begin reveal itself. There was a lot of research to do, and what seemed to be an almost infinite number of tales to hear: Everyone seemed to have a story about the flood, or the story of someone they knew who'd been there. The mother of my son's best Italian friend recollected the water lapping the windowsills of her family's second-floor apartment. She was perhaps five years old and she put her goldfish into the floodwater, imagining how happy it would be to have the whole city to roam through in its own element. Another friend recounted watching antiques, floated free from the smashed-in windows of merchants, drifting down the streets, including a chest of drawers she'd coveted for months. She tried it snag it, but it slipped away downstream, washing up, she supposed, somewhere on the Mediterranean coast in Spain or — who knew? — Africa. For several weeks, people had no electricity or running water, no heat, and sometimes no food. What they had, above all, was mud, mold, and stench, the very antithesis, you could say, of beauty. Those were the locals. The international brigade of volunteers — the angeli del fango, the "mud angels" — had a different set of memories: of prizing loose artworks and books that had been cemented in mire; of washing thousands of books and manuscripts, page by page; of discovering a panel by Ghiberti from the Baptistry doors buried in the mud; of watching the flood lap at the feet of Giotto's frescoes; of water pouring into the tombs of Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Galileo. It would take decades and millions of dollars raised from around the globe to restore the art. In fact, the work is still continuing today, 42 years after the flood, underfunded and tangled in both organizational red-tape and in rivalries and quarrels among art historians, curators, and restorers. It's one of those dramatic stories in which humanity at its frailest and often worst struggles to save humanity at its best. I'd conceived Dark Water as a marriage of history and art history. History is supposed to stay in the past, but this history wouldn't: It had taken ahold of me, not simply as a compelling story, but in pressing me towards those questions that had preoccupied me from the start in ways I didn't always want to go. It was part of the job to visit artworks, both restored and unrestored, some radiant, some — languishing in store rooms and basements — decrepit. I'd staked my belief in the goodness and meaning of life — of, I suppose, a benevolent creation and Creator — on beauty, on art as a window into the meaning of everything. And I realized that I was losing my faith; that the art was no longer making the same impact; that I was still looking but I could no longer see. So the book insisted on being more than a history: It needed to go back to the roots of things, beyond appreciation and gallery going. I needed to try to imagine how these artworks were made and what their making meant at the time of their creation. I had to get a sense of how the role of the artist developed as well as the viewer and the critic. I had to learn how the idea of Florence as the cradle of the Renaissance and the city of masterpieces was invented, and invented not by Florentines but expatriates. I had to try to discern the difference between the devotion a contemporary of Giotto might bring to bear on an artwork and the analytic "looking" of the art historian; of how art, once understood as an image of the real and present, even the divine, had become a luxury consumer object. All of which boiled down to trying to find, if only for myself, what purpose art serves today; of whether art, as Nietzsche decreed of God, is dead. As I wrote, in my own heart, it often seemed to me that it might be true. In that way, Dark Water often reads as much like memoir as history. Sometimes it seems to me we ask too much of art and sometimes, as in 1966, art asks a great deal of us. Since then, massive flood-works have been built and precautionary measures established at museums and institutions. But there will be another major flood on the scale of 1966, probably sooner rather than later. More than once as I worked on Dark Water, people put a conundrum to me: The river is flooding and is carrying off both the greatest work of Leonardo and a baby. Which do you save? Which is more precious? It's a terrible vision, entirely hypothetical, of course: no one in 1966 ever had to make that choice. But it focuses the mind. You look and you see and you look again. You know less and, for not knowing, know more. Perhaps that kind of struggle — hope against death, aspiring to love — is what art demands from us even as it makes us, by beauty, whole. By saving it we save ourselves.
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Robert Clarkis the author of the novels In the Deep Midwinter, Mr. White’s Confession, and Love Among the Ruins as well as the nonfiction books My Grandfather’s House, River of the West, and The Solace of Food: A Life of James Beard.
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