gravel paths, whirling through colonnades of trees, but the strange feeling persists that we aren’t moving at all; that the city is rotating while we are standing still.
In the afternoon we wander the paved streets: we visit the Piazza dell’Anfiteatro, which stands on the site of a Roman amphitheatre and retains its cruel elliptical shape. It has vaulted sides with low archways that faintly suggest the introduction of victims, though there are cafes there now and souvenir shops. The children buy a souvenir each, a little china bell and a ceramic bowl with Lucca written on them. There are people here, people in the churches and the cafes, up the towers and on the streets. They seem perfectly satisfied with all this magnificence: they seem content. They look at the Roman remains and the Palazzo Pretorio. They lunch in the Piazza Napoleone, named after Napoleon’s sister Elisa, who once governed the principality of Lucca. What is it to them, I wonder, this place whose layers reach down sostrangely, so intricately into time like a crevasse into the frozen mystery of a glacier? What, in a personal sense, does it signify? They come to marvel at the sublimity and passion that human beings once were capable of: I wonder why its monuments fail to shake them out of their composure. Do they not want to be passionate themselves, and sublime? Why do they care so much for it, with their video cameras and guidebooks and long lenses, with their money belts and sensible shoes, when it cares so little for them?
In the Piazza San Martino is the duomo . Its tiered tower is slightly askew and its front with its three colonnaded layers has an ornamental severity, like the lace on an old lady’s mantilla. It seems a little reproachful, in its grey and delicate austerity. The bluestockings whirr by, ringing their bells. There is a sculpture above the porch, of a man with a cloak and a sword on horseback. Another man stands beside him: the cloaked rider is turned towards him, though not to smite him down. It is his own cloak his sword is directed at, for he is St Martin, who was asked for alms on a cold day by a wayside beggar and unexpectedly responded by sawing his garment into two. The beggar was presumably pleased: half a cloak, I suppose, is better than no cloak at all. The night after this event, St Martin is said to have seen a vision of Jesus in a dream, wearing the half he gave away. I am surprised by this: visions of Jesus rarely advocate the morality of fifty per cent. Inside the duomo we see the sculpture of St Martin again. The one outside is a copy: the original has been brought in, to protect it from the weather. It is more affecting, this ancient, eroded image, for its symbolism has become the unique form of its vulnerability. The rain and the wind have rubbed away at St Martin: he may as well not have kept his fifty per cent after all. He shields but he is unshielded, and were it not for the different kindness of our curatorial age he would be whittled down to a peg of stone.
Nearby there is a painting by Tintoretto of the Last Supper. It is small, or perhaps it is merely crowded, for it contains many figures. Generally Tintoretto’s human beings are large things: life is all, or seems to be. And indeed the figure of Jesus at the far end of the table is the painting’s furthest and smallest point, as though to express the remoteness of the conceptual, of self-sacrifice, in a busy room where a woman reclines breastfeeding her baby in the foreground and men are leaning across the table to talk, eager living men with brown skin and muscular arms, talking and gesticulating around a table laden with food and wine. The two men at the nearest end of the table are distinctively dressed: one wears a purple tailored coat, and the other has the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to the biceps. They are talking together: they possess a great reality, the reality of the living moment, of the chunks of bread and the half-drunk glasses of
In the afternoon we wander the paved streets: we visit the Piazza dell’Anfiteatro, which stands on the site of a Roman amphitheatre and retains its cruel elliptical shape. It has vaulted sides with low archways that faintly suggest the introduction of victims, though there are cafes there now and souvenir shops. The children buy a souvenir each, a little china bell and a ceramic bowl with Lucca written on them. There are people here, people in the churches and the cafes, up the towers and on the streets. They seem perfectly satisfied with all this magnificence: they seem content. They look at the Roman remains and the Palazzo Pretorio. They lunch in the Piazza Napoleone, named after Napoleon’s sister Elisa, who once governed the principality of Lucca. What is it to them, I wonder, this place whose layers reach down sostrangely, so intricately into time like a crevasse into the frozen mystery of a glacier? What, in a personal sense, does it signify? They come to marvel at the sublimity and passion that human beings once were capable of: I wonder why its monuments fail to shake them out of their composure. Do they not want to be passionate themselves, and sublime? Why do they care so much for it, with their video cameras and guidebooks and long lenses, with their money belts and sensible shoes, when it cares so little for them?
In the Piazza San Martino is the duomo . Its tiered tower is slightly askew and its front with its three colonnaded layers has an ornamental severity, like the lace on an old lady’s mantilla. It seems a little reproachful, in its grey and delicate austerity. The bluestockings whirr by, ringing their bells. There is a sculpture above the porch, of a man with a cloak and a sword on horseback. Another man stands beside him: the cloaked rider is turned towards him, though not to smite him down. It is his own cloak his sword is directed at, for he is St Martin, who was asked for alms on a cold day by a wayside beggar and unexpectedly responded by sawing his garment into two. The beggar was presumably pleased: half a cloak, I suppose, is better than no cloak at all. The night after this event, St Martin is said to have seen a vision of Jesus in a dream, wearing the half he gave away. I am surprised by this: visions of Jesus rarely advocate the morality of fifty per cent. Inside the duomo we see the sculpture of St Martin again. The one outside is a copy: the original has been brought in, to protect it from the weather. It is more affecting, this ancient, eroded image, for its symbolism has become the unique form of its vulnerability. The rain and the wind have rubbed away at St Martin: he may as well not have kept his fifty per cent after all. He shields but he is unshielded, and were it not for the different kindness of our curatorial age he would be whittled down to a peg of stone.
Nearby there is a painting by Tintoretto of the Last Supper. It is small, or perhaps it is merely crowded, for it contains many figures. Generally Tintoretto’s human beings are large things: life is all, or seems to be. And indeed the figure of Jesus at the far end of the table is the painting’s furthest and smallest point, as though to express the remoteness of the conceptual, of self-sacrifice, in a busy room where a woman reclines breastfeeding her baby in the foreground and men are leaning across the table to talk, eager living men with brown skin and muscular arms, talking and gesticulating around a table laden with food and wine. The two men at the nearest end of the table are distinctively dressed: one wears a purple tailored coat, and the other has the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to the biceps. They are talking together: they possess a great reality, the reality of the living moment, of the chunks of bread and the half-drunk glasses of
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