After the Flood, a Descent of Angels. A Contrary review by Laura M. Browning  On November 4, 1966, the Arno River, plied with heavy rains, rose to a furious height. That night, a deluge overtook Florence, flooding basements and cellars, ground floors and streets, and the vaults and nooks containing thousands of her works of art. Living in Florence years later, Robert Clark noticed a plaque in the foyer of his apartment that he had glanced over for two months without reading. Placed on the wall above his head, it indicated the level to which the Arno had swollen nearly forty years before. He remembered seeing the pictures in Life magazine as a young teenager—mud lapping the hems of marble robes, half a dozen people carrying an enormous canvas across a wet piazza, and Cimabue’s massive Crocifisso, which became the symbol of the ruinous flood and the decades of conservation that followed. Clark is really a novelist, and so Dark Water is a procession of vignettes. It is a personal introduction to the artists, museum staff, and librarians whose drawings and papers were sucked into this violent eddy, and whose lives were newly defined in the flood’s soggy aftermath. But Clark is savvy enough to realize that the story of the flood began many centuries before 1966, and so the interlacing vignettes start sometime in the thirteenth century with the felling of a poplar tree for the Crocifisso. The evolution of the poor Santa Croce quarter, the centuries of irreplaceable art, the expatriate poets who settled Florence in the mid-1800s, Hitler’s exemption of the Ponte Vecchio when the Germans bombed nearly every other Florentine bridge—these are the myths and realities that made Florence legendary. Perhaps some of those legends once drew you to Florence, whether by plane or train or by book or painting. If not, Clark’s oft-meticulous vignettes will be less stirring and more of a trudge through history. To the right audience, though, Clark has performed what must have been some kind of genealogical miracle, tracking down an impressive network of characters from decades past. Clark not only finds relatives of photographers and museum staff whose lives were changed by the flood, but also tracks down many of the angeli del fango, or mud angels, who descended upon Florence in her hour of need. The mud angels, mostly art history students from Europe and the United States who showed up in Florence after the news of the flood’s devastation reached them, are perhaps the greatest testament to the primacy of art in Florence. Thirty-three people died in the flood—Florentines were always skeptical of such a low official casualty count—and the city had to dig itself out of mud, debris, and disease. And yet it was the thousands of pieces of damaged artwork that drew, without prior organization, the angeli. Many angeli del fango showed up eager to spend tireless days in dank, ersatz museum vaults simply to be in the presence of the art they had studied, to scrape mud from thousands of pages of books or spray anti-fungals on the back of crucifixes. The angeli del fango phenomenon—a proto-Woodstock of high visual culture—gave the appearance of being a miraculous and spontaneous expression of youthful benevolence, epitomized that same night in Botticelli’s Magdalene being transported from the Baptistry in a red Volkswagen Beetle (the archetypal student vehicle of the time), its harrowed face emerging from the sunroof. But for all the impromptu charm of the image—Procacci and Baldini would have been apoplectic (with good reason) had they known—the Magdalene arrived safely at the Palazzo Davanzati, where expert restorers of wood sculpture from Norway would join it in a few days. As Clark slowly lays character upon character, vignette upon vignette, he expands this dreadful day in Florentine history, taking us deep into museum vaults both ancient and modern, tracing the footsteps of the angeli, and into the lives of a dozen or more Florentines. Laura M. Browning is a sometime art critic who has spent many an hour in museum vaults. She is currently a senior conservation writer for The Nature Conservancy in Chicago. Index of Reviews...>Reviews.htmlshapeimage_1_link_0

Dark Water

Robert Clark

2008, Doubleday

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