To Transform Looking into Loving 4 comments

By Gregory Wolfe

There have been numerous studies in recent years about the decline of reading—such as those promulgated by Dana Gioia at the National Endowment for the Arts, backed by hard statistics and unassailable analysis. But nothing makes my heart sink more than when a great piece of writing is misunderstood by those who ought to be the very guardians of public understanding: the critics who inhabit the review pages of our major daily newspapers and magazines.

I found myself thinking this on reading two recent reviews of Robert Clark’s new book, Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces. [Full disclosure: the author is a friend of mine.]

Both reviews were largely appreciative of the book, but both missed the full dimensions of the story.

Like all of Clark’s books, Dark Water is difficult to summarize—difficult precisely because it is a multi-layered tale, packed with a large cast of characters, an easy command of huge swaths of history, culture, and thought, and a restrained but meditative style. The ostensible subject of the book is the devastating flood of 1966 in which the Arno River pour millions of gallons of water in the streets and buildings of Florence, killing 33 people and destroying untold numbers of books and works of art. But as the Seattle Times reviewer correctly noted, the book is ultimately “a meditation on art, religion, the power of nature to destroy man’s legacy on this Earth.”

Michael Dirda, in his otherwise positive review in the Post seems to think the book should have been nothing more than a fast-paced narrative of the flood and its immediate aftermath—The Perfect Flood, if you see what I mean. At the end of his review he grumpily notes that “Clark occasionally segues into strange, almost mystical passages about art and transcendence.” Dirda calls such passages “lapses.”

The truth is that such passages are rare, and gentle in their tentative conclusions—hard earned and necessary reflections on the human dramas experienced by the artists and writers who visited or worked in Florence along with the natives who have learned to co-exist with the hoards of tourists who have turned their city into a museum.

Clark’s supple and descriptive prose ought to have given Dirda a clue as to the type of book he was reviewing. The early sections of the book set the context, including brief treatments of some of Florence’s greatest artificers. Take this passage about Leonardo da Vinci:

“His artistic output consisted in large part of exquisite, meticulous drawings of maelstroms, deluges, and floods, less figurative images than abstractions on endlessly curving lines and whorls, the fabric of creation fraying, unwinding into the merest of threads—vortexes, mandalas, and fractals—before vanishing entirely into the liquid black.”

Or this passage about the immediate aftermath of the flood:

“At the Biblioteca, one of the nation’s preeminent cultural institutions, they’d cleared a path through the mud—where it wasn’t an impasto of sewage it was a sort of dense black antimatter, snow heavy as lead, dark as bile....”

The book teems with a large cast of characters, ancient and modern. Clark limns them with such care that you can’t help but love them.

If there are major protagonists in Dark Water, they are probably two artists—Cimabue and Giorgio Vasari. Both were overshadowed by their contemporaries: Cimabue by his apprentice Giotto and Vasari by his hero Michelangelo. And yet these apparently “minor” figures have stories that need to be told and beauties to convey. Each had works in the refectory of Santa Croce where the flooding was highest: Vasari’s The Last Supper (still unrestored) and Cimabue’s Crocifiso (Crucifix).

The restoration of Cimabue’s cross becomes a central strand of the post-flood story. Here is one of Clark’s “lapses”:

“So this was Cimabue’s—or anyone’s—genius; the ability to transform looking into loving. And that was what was lost on those who would not give Cimabue his due, who would not wait for the light to fall just so in his apprentice’s chapel, who refused to learn to see how one thing touches every other thing: ‘You will never love art well till you love what she mirrors better’ (Ruskin).”

Here we come close to the deepest themes of the book: the glories—and the limitations—of two great things: art and faith. Mary Ann Gwinn in the Seattle Times speaks of Clark having trouble finishing the narrative, but in the late sections his own changing perceptions of the story become not only vital but profoundly moving.

Moreover, Gwinn says simply that Clark confesses to losing his faith. This is a narrow reading of a nuanced passage. Clark does speak of his growing doubts about his Christian faith, but his story is also about his loss of faith in art as well.

Or perhaps it would be truer to say that Clark slowly comes to question both his aestheticized faith and his nearly religious devotion to art. One of the recurrent metaphors in the book is the fall of Icarus, the danger of overreaching, something that ought always to be a consideration wherever “genius” is celebrated and “masterpieces” are adored. In his passages about damaged artworks and the young “mud angels” who flocked to Florence to rescue them, Clark never forgets the suffering of the common people of the city. “Sometimes beauty can blind you to truth,” he writes near the end of the book.

In her review, Gwinn rightly complains that Clark is not more widely appreciated and read. His works of fiction and nonfiction, she notes, have been so diverse in subject and style that he hasn’t developed the kind of market niche that makes for a bankable author.

Well, thank God for that. Robert Clark’s books contain what all those studies on the decline of reading claim that our culture is losing: sensitivity of perception, precise language, and the kind of rich interiority that evokes complex emotional responses to the human condition. Perhaps in the rush of book reviewing even the critics miss these things. But I’m hoping that you will not.