("The Stones of Florence")

[fiefoe]

Mary McCarthy (and the reader) really perked up when she talked about the Duomo.

• Bigness has always been on e of the forms that beauty can take, and the Renaissance was more simply conscious of this than sophisticated people are today. 'Let me tell you how beautiful the Duomo is,' writes Vasari, and what follows is an account of its measurements. The scale of an effort was the measure of its sublimity;
• The Duomo... is altogether, out of proportion with the narrow streets that lead up to it... The Duomo of Florence is stubled on like an irreducible fact in the midst of shops, pasticcerie, and a wild cat's cradle of motor traffic.
• This dome of Brunelleschi's, besides being a wonder, was extremely practical in all its details. It had gutters for rain, little ducts or openings to reduce wind pressure,.. While it was being built, it even had temporary restaurants and wineshops proviced by Brunelleschi for the masons, so that they could work all day.
• (Michelangelo's) architecture is always conscious of Brunelleschi,.. whom he could not surpass but only exceed: bigger, yes, but not more beautiful.
• The (Pazzi) chapel is not large, but it seems to hold the four corners of the earth and all the winds securely in its binding of peitra serena.
• Brunelleschi's crucifix.. so astonished Donatello that he dropped some eggs he was carrying, in an apron, for their lunch. <> The homely lives led by these artists, in which aprons and eggs figure as int he daily lives of ordinary workmen, are reflected in the character of their art.
• Work and rest, weekday and Sunday, peirtra forte and peirtra serena make up the Florentine chiaroscuro, and the sense of their interplay, as of sphere and square, explains the unique ability of the Florentines to create cosmic myths in the space of a small chapel or a long poem.
• Brunelleschi's windows... are a plain statement of the notion 'window', cut out of a wall with a terse finality that makes other windows appear haphazard accidents or bellicose rhetoric in comparison.
• Each object... is so intensely itself, so immersed in tis own being, that it gives a sort of pain along with its joy, as though this being-itself were a memory stirring of something other, of the lost realm of perfect, changeless shapes.
• Brunelleschi's dome compels a curious kind of slow, surprised recognition: it is the way a dome 'ought' to be, just as love, for a young person, is at once a surprise and the way he knew it should be, from books and hearsay.
• All great Florentine art, from Gritto (on).. has the faculty of amazing with its unexpected and absolute truthfulness.

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