Day 40 or so…Florence, Medicis and a Humble Monk

Florence is the cradle of the renaissance whose fruits were so magnificently born in the halls of the Vatican museum, and the next stop of our sojourn. The city of the Medicis, it had the great good fortune of emerging from the plagues of the late 14th century in relative health, and thanks to the banking genius and penchant for collecting the very best of anything they could, it became the locus for a cultural transformation that would alter the fabric of Western culture.

As Denise’s friend likes to say, you can’t swing a cat in Florence without hitting a fresco. Our first stop was the gorgeous baptistery that stands next to Florence’s famed Duomo, or Cathedral. Its immense dome is completely covered with golden mosaic that bears the obvious influence of the Eastern Church. As I sat beneath them, and then in our tour of the next day learned of the banking prowess of the Medicis, and the way in which tiled floors were made to look like Persian rugs, I was struck by the immense influence that what we would recognize as Eastern Orthodox traditions had on what came to be known as the Western renaissance. Many of the texts which were “recovered” in this time, which allowed science to flourish, had been kept in safe keeping by Muslims as well as monks. The moral of the story: the way in which we carve up our world is sometimes too convenient, and tells the tale of only one facet in a diamond. The richness of who we are owes a great deal to those whom we suppose to have conquered, and our debt is great to those who might otherwise be considered more “primitive” than us.

Making your way from one Medici palace to the next, one cathedral to another built by their patronage, you begin to wonder what it was that drove these people. Were they such pious folk that they simply couldn’t help but spend their next fortune on another church, or was the church one more of the things from antiquity they collected just to be able to say it was theirs? Did they have any idea as they were bringing together the incredible resources of Florence, they would create a treasury that would last long after their power had faded? The elder de Medici, in return for his patronage of San Marco, had the largest cell in the monastery, but there’s no particular reason to believe that it was ever used as a place of prayerful contemplation. It’s much more likely to have been the secure place in which the most sensitive of his business dealings might have been accomplished, sequestered from the public eye.

If the monks had their way, much of the collection people come from around the world to see today would have been consumed in Savanarola’s “bonfire of the vanities,” but power and piety being such as they were in the 15th Century, it was Savanarola who was consumed, instead, and his quiet brother, Fra Angelica’s mystical paintings are what endure.

I need to give more thought to what the implications are for the church and world in which we now live. Clearly, the arts have taken their own path, and no longer rely on the patronage of the church, nor in general use religious imagery as their major palate for subjects. The simplest observation is that if there still is something that can be talked about as Western Culture, its roots are firmly planted in the soil of the church, but it was a church very different from one we might recognize today, in that it was a central pillar in the power structures of the day. It WAS a matter of life or death as to how you stood in relation to the church, and not a matter of taking your family down the street to a church whose teachings were more amenable to your way of thinking.

It’s a double-edged sword. The institutional church clearly is less central to life in our times, and as a result plays a far smaller role in shaping the surrounding culture. We find ourselves, more often, shaping our culture to the world (as when the football schedules are the first thing on the church calendar, and we search for music forms that are “more attractive” or “accessible” to those who were not raised in the church. But does that more marginal role allow us to be truer to the central calling of Christianity? To be more “Christ-like”? If the church no longer needs to be the bearer of the entire cultural legacy of the surrounding world, might we instead be better placed to clothe the naked, feed the poor, bring justice and mercy to a world in deep pain?