A Season of Giants!

Our book today is an oversized ‘coffee table’ treat, Vincenzo Labella’s lavishly illustrated 1990 tour of the Italian Renaissance, A Season of Giants, 1492-1508: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael. Labella claims right from the start that his book centers on three titanic artistic geniuses of the period, and when it comes to those three, our author never met a guide-book cliche he didn’t like:

This book is about that season and its protagonists. They were not supermen; to the contrary, even as they climbed to the highest peaks of excellence and fame, they retained their natural vulnerability. Far from being unassailable, they were hurt, and in turn, hurt others by envy, jealousy and pride. They were arrogant in the self-assurance of their talent, humble in the knowledge that beyond any finishing line there was another and yet another to be crossed. The threads of their lives were spun from different origins, yet were interwoven, and often entangled, in that unique loom of the Renaissance tapestry that was Florence.

Ordinarily, that kind of thing fairly quickly irritates me (no doubt because I’m prone to it myself), but there’s something about the unabashed, almost boyish enthusiasm with which Labella goes about the task of giving his (fairly good, fairly breathless) summary of the high Renaissance that wins me over every time I dip into this book. And of course Labella doesn’t confine himself to his central three artists – could anybody have that kind of self-control? No, we get all the other big names of time time: from Columbus and Machiavelli to those two opposite pole-stars that briefly pulled at Florence’s – and at Michelangelo’s – imagination, the vicious religious zealot Savonarola and the thinking man’s libertine, Lorenzo the Magnificent:

The two sides of the Florentine coin, the sacred and the profane, had always attracted Michelangelo with equally suggestive power, as did the classical greatness of the Magnificent’s new Athens and the religious revival of Savonarola. His first sculptures, the Madonna of the Stairs and the Battle of the Centaurs and the Lapithae, are perfect examples of this dichotomy; and the later Bacchus and his first Pieta executed in Rome would confirm it.

Labella comes by his easy penchant for scene-painting in the best way possible: he paid his dues as a hack journalist and thereby learned how to make virtually anything interesting – and how to make interesting things downright riveting. Time and again in A Season of Giants, he zeroes in on just the perfect human scene to offset the epic struggles of genius that are his main theme. Take for example the discovery of the Laocoon:

Rome awoke on the cold morning of January 14, 1506, to a sweeping tramontana wind that carried the icy breath of snow across the mountains into the Tiberina valley. In the vineyard of Felice de Freddis on the Esquiline hill, amid the ruins of the baths of Emperor Titus, a farmer was digging holes in the frozen ground to bury seedlings.

Suddenly, he stopped, reeling back and crying in horror. A hand had emerged from the earth, the pale whiteness of skin visible beneath the dirt. The man ran to the house of his master. Soon a small crowd gathered around the spot; someone dared to touch the hand, cold as marble. Indeed, marble it was: a mutilated arm, a head, then a tangle of arms and serpents and more heads emerged as the digging continued. Finally, a large statuary group, surprisingly well preserved, was unearthed.

I’m sure a big part of the allure of this particular book (there are, after all, many, many books on the Italian Renaissance) for me is the fact that it was the companion-volume to a long-gone TV mini-series that was such a frothy blend of crap and quality (often in the course of the same two-minute scene) that I fell in love with it instantly. The mini-series showed on TNT and starred a bunch of really good actors – F. Murray Abraham, Ian Holm, Jonathan Hyde, John Glover – doing some of the worst work of their entire careers (although even that was subject to maddening fluctuation; true, Hyde and Holm’s work can’t be salvaged, but Abraham is an at times very effective Pope Julius II, and there’s one fleeting moment of John Glover’s Leonardo that will absolutely break your heart). The mini-series also starred handsome Mark Frankel as Michelangelo in a stiff and studious performance that doesn’t really give you much inkling of what this actor was capable of (he died in a daredevil racing accident only a few years after this mini-series aired). The pacing and directing of the mini-series is just as problematic as the acting, alas: most of those four hours are, I can objectively look back and admit, pretty unwatchable no matter how prettily they’re filmed … and yet, there are moments – the nighttime journey of the David on rollers to its morning unveiling spot, for instance, and especially the surprisingly moving final moments of the show, when Michelangelo’s stern, carping father stares in gaping awe at the newly-finished Sistine Chapel ceiling and realizes – in a very smart bit of emphasis on the part of the show – that the whole staggering cycle of the thing is about the reconciliation of fathers and sons.

I got the oversized companion book back in 1991 mainly because I was taken with the mini-series, and I ended up liking the book on its own merits. I kept that original copy for years and years, packing it into boxes and moving it from apartment to apartment, until finally at some point I lost track of it. Just recently I found it again at (where else?) my beloved Brattle Bookshop – and I don’t just mean ‘found a copy’ – I mean, of course, ‘found my copy,’ complete with pages of dog-sketches tucked into the back. I’ll try a little harder to hold onto it this time.